I have this argument oh so often... Analog is not better. The reason why digital can be sucky is due to the resolution. If you want super quality digital audio it will not be a song that needs 10 MB of room. It will be a digital file that probably needs about 500 MB per song. That is the problem, not the underlying technology.
Oh come on. I live in Switzerland and we have great Internet and 3G. Sure we have a small population, but we have OODLES of mountains. And mountains are a royal pain in the arse for Internet and cell phone reception. Actually mountains make everything very very expensive. Yet our subscriptions and costs are much lower than in the states...
I have a house in the pre-alps at 1,000 meters. There are about 10 houses, with most being vacation and it is a steep mountain area. YET I have 10 Mbps Internet, and 3G telephone. So tell me, how is this population density thing?
Actually... Infrastructure should be built by a private non-profit entity comprised of various private corporations. For example GSM was managed that way and it proved to be a huge success. This approach ensures that there is a profit motive but a minimal monopoly motive. An example of where this did not work out worth a darn is 3G. That was a complete clusterf**k. They overpaid, created incompatible standards and the rollout was delayed for years.
IMO the way it would work is that there would be only a single cell tower in a region, a single cable line in a region, etc. However, those towers and cables would be owned by the non-profit entity and it would be leased out to each user. The terms would be non-discriminatory, and reflect a usage charge. That way each can provide their own service.
So your answer to this is to finger point at people who did worse things? Let me equate this, ok. The US committed a crime like robbing a bank without violence. In defence of your actions you are saying, "oh oh but look those people murdered many people and I am good!" Just because your crime is less worse does not make it better. A crime is a crime is a crime! Or are you saying that there are good crimes and bad crimes? And if there are who is to judge? Are you not starting down the slippery slope of dictatorism and authoritarian rule.
Just because some dictators don't kill people as mass crimes does not mean that they are not dictators. I will give you a really simple example, what about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Do you consider him a good guy or bad guy? My issue with the current American administration is its blatant disregard of basic civil rights. Like the recent Slashdot article about the guy who was a Hindu and flew at the wrong time. IMO this is not what America is about...
No abuse will happen here, No way that the forgeries will become too good... No way that no computer will be hacked for a forgery!!!
I understand what they are trying to get at. BUT this is like 3d printed guns all over. Granted it relates to overpriced pieces of paint, but hey to each their own.
actually you are the moron. I actually trade the market and know the market. When change happens the market does not always react the way that it does. Often if the CEO leaves in this manner the stock DROPS! The stock market does not like change in a winning company. The reason why Microsoft went up is because Microsoft is a value trap and the stock market has determined that Ballmer is indeed a dud! In fact look at the stock price during Ballmer's reign, its neither up nor down. It just sucks. Thus the GP is right.
How many plastic bags do you have? And when you do use those plastic bags where do they go afterwards? Point is that just because you use them does not mean they are properly disposed. And I truly do doubt that you keep all plastic bags to your deathbed. Again I know because I run into the same issue when we were living in North America.
"In return, Kansas City got a fiber network it couldn’t possibly afford to build on its own — or maintain. Municipalities like Provo, Utah that thought they could afford to build their own public fiber network found they couldn’t afford to run it. That’s why Provo, Utah sold their fiber network to Google for just $1."
Ok, so the tax payer funds it, and then gives it to somebody else to run for one dollar! Yeah that is the problem! Wow, if we all just did that, fund the thing we want and then give it for free to some private enterprise! Sounds like a bargain to me!
While local government has a role to play, no doubt there, having one company after another dig up the same piece of ground is actually quite silly! Here in Switzerland where we are ranked pretty high the solution has been to allow access to the underlying networks. Competition here is the ability of a competitor to have access to the fiber, or wire that another company has put into the ground. Force the AT&T's to allow anybody to use their pipes for a reasonable fee and very quickly you will get higher speeds and lower costs.
Yes and Buffet is blowing air up people's arses! Just because you can't find value does not mean that value does not exist! Value exists, but it requires an understanding of business without resorting to biases... This is why people don't make money on the stock market.
And this is why people lose money in the stock market. Just because Microsoft is down 11% does not make it a good buy. Remember that Apple was at one point down 11%, and I am guessing people like yourself would say, "oh this is a market overreaction and Apple is stronger than ever".
heh? Surface RT was a failure plain and simple. The fact that users are happy does not prove anything. People will jump into cacti because they are happy to do it. Don't believe me? Head over to youtube and search for cacti guy jump. My point is that everybody loves products that other people hate, that is called statistics. Whether or not it is successful depends on adoption rate.
Case in point, desktop linux, not happening. I like desktop linux and use it all the time, but that don't make it a success even though I am happy. On the other hand server side Linux is a huge success and now getting to the point where people only release for Linux. EG Redis... Sure I can use it on Windows, sort of, kind of, maybe.
WTF? How is this Apple marketing? This is a guy rebutting the "tablets are fads" argument with real life use cases. And all you can say, "oh look apple marketing".
Want to know why Apple is so friggen successful? Because they actually solve problems! Not geek problems, end user problems. Microsoft to this day does not understand that, and many linux people fall in that same camp.
While I would like to agree with you my practical experience has shown otherwise. BTW I am an ME, wife is EE, and 60% of my family is in technical field.
1) Teachers are too often humanities teachers. This means the route of memorization is used, instead of the logic approach.
2) Math and Science are way too abstract. They are taught without any relation to reality. As one of the other commentators posted, "you see something come in, then go out and it makes sense in business school." Where is that in the math's and sciences? Take for example the Pythagorean Theorem. It was use in the past to build straight buildings. Maybe that is how it should be taught now! Games should be created with Math.
3) In the end either you have it or you don't. Sure you can tune and try to make it work, but that is like asking me to become a musician or a singer. Or worse my wife! My wife loves to sing, and when we were first dating we drove from University to her house during the night. I decided to take a nap in the car while my then girlfriend now wife decided to sing. I woke up right away and thought, "did we run something over!" Since then my wife has never sung in front of me. But damm, she can out do me in math.
You are making a buggered up assumption here!!! You are assuming that the protocol is binary encoded alpha. I am thinking it will be warped such that using something like tshark will not work worth a darn! To be able to parse binary you need a protocol analyzer, and one that does not have bugs. This is why text is so useful, because if things go wrong you can actually figure it out. With a protocol analyzer you are wondering, if it is my app, or the protocol analyzer, etc...
Silicon Valley used to be an awesome place, but now it sucks...
Silicon Valley's business model used to be creating jobs, and environments. Now it is about selling businesses that have no real business value. Look at Google, Facebook, and so on. They rely on free products with advertisements. With privacy and the new addon's like the one where it screws with your cookies that business model is going to go down the crapper like SPAM. Yes Oracle, and Apple do create real jobs, but they are the "dinosaurs" and how many jobs does Apple have outside of Silicon Valley?
My point is that I actually don't look at Silicon Valley anymore as the creme de la creme of talent and ideas. I look at Open Source! Case in point NoSQL. Who had it first? Open Source! NodeJS, who had it first? Open Source! Technologies like PHP, Ruby, etc all open source. Open Source is where it is at folks! Even if you have all of the nay sayers that ask, "so where is the money?" Not in software, but in business's created by that software. Silicon Valley is IMO not a driver of Open Source, they are a consumer of Open Source.
Sure some shops in Silicon Valley add open source to their "portfolio", but let's be real, is Google opensourcing the stuff that is runs their busines? Eff NO! Facebook is a bit better, but again I go back that Silicon Valley is a consumer of Open source, not producer.
Completely wrong IMO. Ballmer is a sales person plain and simple. He can sell anything to anybody. I agree he has no vision, and therein lies the problem. He takes ideas from others and tries to add them to Microsoft. Here are examples under Ballmer's watch:
1) Oh oh shiny toy called Java, must have ->.NET 2) Oh oh shiny toy called Flash, must have -> Silverlight 3) Oh oh shiny toy called Mobile, must have -> Windows 8 4) Oh oh shiny toy called Objective C, must have -> "refocusing on C++, and throwing.NET under the bus" 5) Oh oh shiny toy called Search Engine, must have -> Bing 6) Oh oh shiny toy called Online docs, must have -> Office 365 7) Oh oh shiny toy called JavaScript HTML, must have -> WinRT 8) Oh oh shiny toy called cloud computing (AWS), must have -> Azure
I know there are more, but Ballmer sees a shiny toy and like a pin the tail on the donkey game adds it to Microsoft products. Yet the problem is that it is second rate and people just don't use it. Microsoft has become a massive laggard in new ideas and new technologies. Granted they were not that innovative to begin with, but at least back then they did do something interesting things like Office (it used to be individual apps that did not work together), COM/OLE, or even Windows NT, and drivers. Ironically people don't give Microsoft credit for making the driver architecture work. Before Windows, drivers were a bleeding pain in the arse. Sure there were ideas on unifying, but Windows actually made it work effeciently.
here is what I think happened. Don did the unveil and everybody saw the drm and thought woa... Though remember that Microsoft is only one of many who have doing this pain in the arse drm. Sony sensing a market opportunity decided on a 180 and said, "we are good and will do no DRM". Don't think Sony is the innocent party as Sony has shown often enough that they are friends of DRM. Sony just did a fake out and Microsoft had to follow suit.
Don seeing this 180 is thrown under the bus and he decides to seek his fortunes elswhere. What folks on Slashdot fail to realize is that no decision at Microsoft is made in isolation. There are ALWAYS teams and committees, etc that make these decisions. Personally I would have done the same thing.
Since you are a Microsoft developer you are probably earning money right now. (Don't diss me as saying that with other stuff you can't earn money.) This means you want to get into something that probably has an established marketplace and established income.
1) Java, or anything related to Java. This is the little engine that could. Whether you are doing Scala, Java, Groovy, or Spring, etc. This little environment just keeps on going. I program these days for the most part in Groovy and Java and can't complain.
2) Javascript. I am not just talking about HTML, but things like nodejs. Javascript is pretty cool and there is a market for developers.
3) PHP: People write quite a bit of code in this.
The rest are niche. I am not saying that they are not profitable. But they are niche and hence you need to find what you want to do. Many of these niche programming languages are rather enjoyable to write code in. Java VM stuff is very much production coding and at times can be very boring. Whereas things like Ruby, Python, etc, etc have very interesting frameworks and are not as tedious at times.
In all of these yes, look at the no-sql databases.
I would like to call BS... For here is my question, what else are you buying from Microsoft? Can we get a list of that, and how much you are paying? My point is that Microsoft gets you one way or the other. They don't give you MSDN for 400/year/developer without you giving a good blood letting somewhere else.
"Unfortunately, the days of a cheap, unlimited Microsoft development stack are coming to an end."
First, Visual Studio Express is not a development environment. It is a toy environment to attempt to learn how to program. Yes yes I can write some "sophisticated" code. However, let's compare this to other IDE's like Eclipse, NetBeans or Idea Community edition. I am not trying to start an IDE war. I am pointing out regardless of the mentioned IDE's their base functionality is pretty darn impressive.
Visual Studio is a great product? Sure it is, but heck so is a Ferrari, but I am not going to drive that car near my house as it would fall off the cliff due to the rough roads. I need tools that are affordable, and Visual Studio ain't that anymore.
MSDN subscription, heck let's go for broke shall we? This is an expensive development environment. Even the base edition on a per yearly basis is pretty darn expensive.
The article poster is right, "cheap umlimited" Microsoft development has come to an end.
Science is about experiments and replication. Rational Thinking or Critical Thinking is the ability to dissect the topic and apply a rational thought behind it. This is not about repeatability or being lead by the facts. This is about being able to make decisions when the facts are too fuzzy to come to a real conclusion.
Take the theory of evolution. It sounds good, but outside of a few simple examples (real life encounters replicated) it has not been proven. Yes we see the bones, but for all purposes this could be creationism. Before you yell, that is BS, the question is how do you know it is BS? This is where critical thinking comes it. It allows you to accept the theory of creationism and then build arguments against it using rational arguments. For all we know it might be possible that there is a god that did this, though the probability is quite small. BTW don't believe I am for creationism. I am not, but I also understand in this case it is critical thinking that needs to stand up, not science, since the science is still incomplete.
Don't believe me in this? Look back at the theory of tectonics. Until about 60 years science believed A, and kept on believing A. Even when presented with other facts science believed A. Then somebody came along and said B in a very strong manner, and people had to admit that A was wrong even though their science said it was right. This is an example where we need more critical and rational thinking skills.
I agree and this is why we have Fox News. People questioning everything and putting a tin foil hat on everything. It is utterly amazing these days that no matter what the fact presented there is somebody there saying, "no wait this is wrong it is X". And this effen X is so out in never never land that you have to ask yourself WTF! As another poster wrote we need to get back some Critical Thinking classes not humanity classes.
Here is what this guy said:
"We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. "
BULLSHIT! Going back to my original point, people are asking all sorts of stupid science questions. Take the example of man made global warming. This is a huge debate and I understand what is going on. BUT NO... we must continue to debate! We must continue to do nothing, nada, zip, zilch! Here is the irony, IMO climate change is one of the first things in my mind that we humans on a global scale have decided to stick our heads in the sand and chant "kumbaya". I am not saying use only electrical vehicles. I am saying are we prepared against floods, hurricanes, and so on. Looking at the world I would say, "no we are not." That is the irony in this entire debate. We are not dominated by science, but irrationality and because we feel it in our gut.
Slashdot Mirror
I have this argument oh so often... Analog is not better. The reason why digital can be sucky is due to the resolution. If you want super quality digital audio it will not be a song that needs 10 MB of room. It will be a digital file that probably needs about 500 MB per song. That is the problem, not the underlying technology.
Oh come on. I live in Switzerland and we have great Internet and 3G. Sure we have a small population, but we have OODLES of mountains. And mountains are a royal pain in the arse for Internet and cell phone reception. Actually mountains make everything very very expensive. Yet our subscriptions and costs are much lower than in the states...
*cough* BS!
I have a house in the pre-alps at 1,000 meters. There are about 10 houses, with most being vacation and it is a steep mountain area. YET I have 10 Mbps Internet, and 3G telephone. So tell me, how is this population density thing?
Actually... Infrastructure should be built by a private non-profit entity comprised of various private corporations. For example GSM was managed that way and it proved to be a huge success. This approach ensures that there is a profit motive but a minimal monopoly motive. An example of where this did not work out worth a darn is 3G. That was a complete clusterf**k. They overpaid, created incompatible standards and the rollout was delayed for years.
IMO the way it would work is that there would be only a single cell tower in a region, a single cable line in a region, etc. However, those towers and cables would be owned by the non-profit entity and it would be leased out to each user. The terms would be non-discriminatory, and reflect a usage charge. That way each can provide their own service.
So your answer to this is to finger point at people who did worse things? Let me equate this, ok. The US committed a crime like robbing a bank without violence. In defence of your actions you are saying, "oh oh but look those people murdered many people and I am good!" Just because your crime is less worse does not make it better. A crime is a crime is a crime! Or are you saying that there are good crimes and bad crimes? And if there are who is to judge? Are you not starting down the slippery slope of dictatorism and authoritarian rule.
Just because some dictators don't kill people as mass crimes does not mean that they are not dictators. I will give you a really simple example, what about Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Do you consider him a good guy or bad guy? My issue with the current American administration is its blatant disregard of basic civil rights. Like the recent Slashdot article about the guy who was a Hindu and flew at the wrong time. IMO this is not what America is about...
No abuse will happen here, No way that the forgeries will become too good... No way that no computer will be hacked for a forgery!!!
I understand what they are trying to get at. BUT this is like 3d printed guns all over. Granted it relates to overpriced pieces of paint, but hey to each their own.
actually you are the moron. I actually trade the market and know the market. When change happens the market does not always react the way that it does. Often if the CEO leaves in this manner the stock DROPS! The stock market does not like change in a winning company. The reason why Microsoft went up is because Microsoft is a value trap and the stock market has determined that Ballmer is indeed a dud! In fact look at the stock price during Ballmer's reign, its neither up nor down. It just sucks. Thus the GP is right.
How many plastic bags do you have? And when you do use those plastic bags where do they go afterwards? Point is that just because you use them does not mean they are properly disposed. And I truly do doubt that you keep all plastic bags to your deathbed. Again I know because I run into the same issue when we were living in North America.
Sorry, but that is BS...
"In return, Kansas City got a fiber network it couldn’t possibly afford to build on its own — or maintain. Municipalities like Provo, Utah that thought they could afford to build their own public fiber network found they couldn’t afford to run it. That’s why Provo, Utah sold their fiber network to Google for just $1."
Ok, so the tax payer funds it, and then gives it to somebody else to run for one dollar! Yeah that is the problem! Wow, if we all just did that, fund the thing we want and then give it for free to some private enterprise! Sounds like a bargain to me!
While local government has a role to play, no doubt there, having one company after another dig up the same piece of ground is actually quite silly! Here in Switzerland where we are ranked pretty high the solution has been to allow access to the underlying networks. Competition here is the ability of a competitor to have access to the fiber, or wire that another company has put into the ground. Force the AT&T's to allow anybody to use their pipes for a reasonable fee and very quickly you will get higher speeds and lower costs.
Yes and Buffet is blowing air up people's arses! Just because you can't find value does not mean that value does not exist! Value exists, but it requires an understanding of business without resorting to biases... This is why people don't make money on the stock market.
And this is why people lose money in the stock market. Just because Microsoft is down 11% does not make it a good buy. Remember that Apple was at one point down 11%, and I am guessing people like yourself would say, "oh this is a market overreaction and Apple is stronger than ever".
Hint, hint, until its not!
Ok, let me get this straight... You would use Outlook in a nightclub? Really? Somehow I don't see that as a killer feature...
heh? Surface RT was a failure plain and simple. The fact that users are happy does not prove anything. People will jump into cacti because they are happy to do it. Don't believe me? Head over to youtube and search for cacti guy jump. My point is that everybody loves products that other people hate, that is called statistics. Whether or not it is successful depends on adoption rate.
Case in point, desktop linux, not happening. I like desktop linux and use it all the time, but that don't make it a success even though I am happy. On the other hand server side Linux is a huge success and now getting to the point where people only release for Linux. EG Redis... Sure I can use it on Windows, sort of, kind of, maybe.
WTF? How is this Apple marketing? This is a guy rebutting the "tablets are fads" argument with real life use cases. And all you can say, "oh look apple marketing".
Want to know why Apple is so friggen successful? Because they actually solve problems! Not geek problems, end user problems. Microsoft to this day does not understand that, and many linux people fall in that same camp.
While I would like to agree with you my practical experience has shown otherwise. BTW I am an ME, wife is EE, and 60% of my family is in technical field.
1) Teachers are too often humanities teachers. This means the route of memorization is used, instead of the logic approach.
2) Math and Science are way too abstract. They are taught without any relation to reality. As one of the other commentators posted, "you see something come in, then go out and it makes sense in business school." Where is that in the math's and sciences? Take for example the Pythagorean Theorem. It was use in the past to build straight buildings. Maybe that is how it should be taught now! Games should be created with Math.
3) In the end either you have it or you don't. Sure you can tune and try to make it work, but that is like asking me to become a musician or a singer. Or worse my wife! My wife loves to sing, and when we were first dating we drove from University to her house during the night. I decided to take a nap in the car while my then girlfriend now wife decided to sing. I woke up right away and thought, "did we run something over!" Since then my wife has never sung in front of me. But damm, she can out do me in math.
You are making a buggered up assumption here!!! You are assuming that the protocol is binary encoded alpha. I am thinking it will be warped such that using something like tshark will not work worth a darn! To be able to parse binary you need a protocol analyzer, and one that does not have bugs. This is why text is so useful, because if things go wrong you can actually figure it out. With a protocol analyzer you are wondering, if it is my app, or the protocol analyzer, etc...
So sorry, disagree here...
Silicon Valley used to be an awesome place, but now it sucks...
Silicon Valley's business model used to be creating jobs, and environments. Now it is about selling businesses that have no real business value. Look at Google, Facebook, and so on. They rely on free products with advertisements. With privacy and the new addon's like the one where it screws with your cookies that business model is going to go down the crapper like SPAM. Yes Oracle, and Apple do create real jobs, but they are the "dinosaurs" and how many jobs does Apple have outside of Silicon Valley?
My point is that I actually don't look at Silicon Valley anymore as the creme de la creme of talent and ideas. I look at Open Source! Case in point NoSQL. Who had it first? Open Source! NodeJS, who had it first? Open Source! Technologies like PHP, Ruby, etc all open source. Open Source is where it is at folks! Even if you have all of the nay sayers that ask, "so where is the money?" Not in software, but in business's created by that software. Silicon Valley is IMO not a driver of Open Source, they are a consumer of Open Source.
Sure some shops in Silicon Valley add open source to their "portfolio", but let's be real, is Google opensourcing the stuff that is runs their busines? Eff NO! Facebook is a bit better, but again I go back that Silicon Valley is a consumer of Open source, not producer.
Completely wrong IMO. Ballmer is a sales person plain and simple. He can sell anything to anybody. I agree he has no vision, and therein lies the problem. He takes ideas from others and tries to add them to Microsoft. Here are examples under Ballmer's watch:
1) Oh oh shiny toy called Java, must have -> .NET .NET under the bus"
2) Oh oh shiny toy called Flash, must have -> Silverlight
3) Oh oh shiny toy called Mobile, must have -> Windows 8
4) Oh oh shiny toy called Objective C, must have -> "refocusing on C++, and throwing
5) Oh oh shiny toy called Search Engine, must have -> Bing
6) Oh oh shiny toy called Online docs, must have -> Office 365
7) Oh oh shiny toy called JavaScript HTML, must have -> WinRT
8) Oh oh shiny toy called cloud computing (AWS), must have -> Azure
I know there are more, but Ballmer sees a shiny toy and like a pin the tail on the donkey game adds it to Microsoft products. Yet the problem is that it is second rate and people just don't use it. Microsoft has become a massive laggard in new ideas and new technologies. Granted they were not that innovative to begin with, but at least back then they did do something interesting things like Office (it used to be individual apps that did not work together), COM/OLE, or even Windows NT, and drivers. Ironically people don't give Microsoft credit for making the driver architecture work. Before Windows, drivers were a bleeding pain in the arse. Sure there were ideas on unifying, but Windows actually made it work effeciently.
here is what I think happened. Don did the unveil and everybody saw the drm and thought woa... Though remember that Microsoft is only one of many who have doing this pain in the arse drm. Sony sensing a market opportunity decided on a 180 and said, "we are good and will do no DRM". Don't think Sony is the innocent party as Sony has shown often enough that they are friends of DRM. Sony just did a fake out and Microsoft had to follow suit.
Don seeing this 180 is thrown under the bus and he decides to seek his fortunes elswhere. What folks on Slashdot fail to realize is that no decision at Microsoft is made in isolation. There are ALWAYS teams and committees, etc that make these decisions. Personally I would have done the same thing.
Been there, done that, and got the new IDE...
Since you are a Microsoft developer you are probably earning money right now. (Don't diss me as saying that with other stuff you can't earn money.) This means you want to get into something that probably has an established marketplace and established income.
1) Java, or anything related to Java. This is the little engine that could. Whether you are doing Scala, Java, Groovy, or Spring, etc. This little environment just keeps on going. I program these days for the most part in Groovy and Java and can't complain.
2) Javascript. I am not just talking about HTML, but things like nodejs. Javascript is pretty cool and there is a market for developers.
3) PHP: People write quite a bit of code in this.
The rest are niche. I am not saying that they are not profitable. But they are niche and hence you need to find what you want to do. Many of these niche programming languages are rather enjoyable to write code in. Java VM stuff is very much production coding and at times can be very boring. Whereas things like Ruby, Python, etc, etc have very interesting frameworks and are not as tedious at times.
In all of these yes, look at the no-sql databases.
I would like to call BS... For here is my question, what else are you buying from Microsoft? Can we get a list of that, and how much you are paying? My point is that Microsoft gets you one way or the other. They don't give you MSDN for 400/year/developer without you giving a good blood letting somewhere else.
Did you read the article? Here is what was said:
"Unfortunately, the days of a cheap, unlimited Microsoft development stack are coming to an end."
First, Visual Studio Express is not a development environment. It is a toy environment to attempt to learn how to program. Yes yes I can write some "sophisticated" code. However, let's compare this to other IDE's like Eclipse, NetBeans or Idea Community edition. I am not trying to start an IDE war. I am pointing out regardless of the mentioned IDE's their base functionality is pretty darn impressive.
Visual Studio is a great product? Sure it is, but heck so is a Ferrari, but I am not going to drive that car near my house as it would fall off the cliff due to the rough roads. I need tools that are affordable, and Visual Studio ain't that anymore.
MSDN subscription, heck let's go for broke shall we? This is an expensive development environment. Even the base edition on a per yearly basis is pretty darn expensive.
The article poster is right, "cheap umlimited" Microsoft development has come to an end.
No, that is not correct.
Science is about experiments and replication. Rational Thinking or Critical Thinking is the ability to dissect the topic and apply a rational thought behind it. This is not about repeatability or being lead by the facts. This is about being able to make decisions when the facts are too fuzzy to come to a real conclusion.
Take the theory of evolution. It sounds good, but outside of a few simple examples (real life encounters replicated) it has not been proven. Yes we see the bones, but for all purposes this could be creationism. Before you yell, that is BS, the question is how do you know it is BS? This is where critical thinking comes it. It allows you to accept the theory of creationism and then build arguments against it using rational arguments. For all we know it might be possible that there is a god that did this, though the probability is quite small. BTW don't believe I am for creationism. I am not, but I also understand in this case it is critical thinking that needs to stand up, not science, since the science is still incomplete.
Don't believe me in this? Look back at the theory of tectonics. Until about 60 years science believed A, and kept on believing A. Even when presented with other facts science believed A. Then somebody came along and said B in a very strong manner, and people had to admit that A was wrong even though their science said it was right. This is an example where we need more critical and rational thinking skills.
I agree and this is why we have Fox News. People questioning everything and putting a tin foil hat on everything. It is utterly amazing these days that no matter what the fact presented there is somebody there saying, "no wait this is wrong it is X". And this effen X is so out in never never land that you have to ask yourself WTF! As another poster wrote we need to get back some Critical Thinking classes not humanity classes.
Here is what this guy said:
"We live in a world increasingly dominated by science. "
BULLSHIT! Going back to my original point, people are asking all sorts of stupid science questions. Take the example of man made global warming. This is a huge debate and I understand what is going on. BUT NO... we must continue to debate! We must continue to do nothing, nada, zip, zilch! Here is the irony, IMO climate change is one of the first things in my mind that we humans on a global scale have decided to stick our heads in the sand and chant "kumbaya". I am not saying use only electrical vehicles. I am saying are we prepared against floods, hurricanes, and so on. Looking at the world I would say, "no we are not." That is the irony in this entire debate. We are not dominated by science, but irrationality and because we feel it in our gut.
We do in Canada. Granted the course was a simple introduction, but it sure helped me understand the legal system and its underpinnings.