This isn't censoring. This isn't the government. That word is going to stop meaning something if people can't use it in some sort of rational context.
Do you know what the word means? Because I don't think you do.
Censorship, noun: the practice of examining for and suppressing unacceptable parts.
"Government" does not show up in the definition of the word. There is such a thing as "government censorship" in which case you must actually qualify "censorship" by preceding it with the word "government." You can even qualify it with the word self, as in "self-censorship," the practice of examining and suppressing your own unacceptable behavior.
Never mind that Dropbox is just trying to prevent their system from being turned into a big anonymous piracy farm - a very real concern, and one that they have every reason (and latitude within their TOS) to fight.
That's a fair argument to be made. I would most certainly agree they have the authority to block such a program for the reasons you've mentioned.
But... "censoring?" Why not just call them fascists, while we're at it? Idiots.
Although they are within their rights to block the usage of the program in their servers, and ban any accounts which make use of it, they are not within their rights to prevent a program they do not own the copyrights to from being disseminated (which would be the 'censorship' part). That said:
This article it inaccurate, alarmist trolling.
The article is perfectly accurate and points out that dropbox's founder politely requested the removal of the program from the repositories, and the author voluntarily took it down. I don't see any wrongdoing on the part of dropbox (the DMCA request was a mistake they apologized for, as is also accurately noted in the article). The word censorship still applies: dropbox examined content and deemed it inappropriate, the author removed the content on request, thus applying self-censorship of his work.
MST3K left the Mad Max franchise alone for two reasons: Mad Mel and the attendant price he brings, and the fact that they're well made films. They did cover films of that ilk, some of them being eye-poppingly awful. Agree that the 2nd MM movie was woefully short on details of how people are surviving - food sources depicted amounted to that tin of dog food and chickens in the refinery camp's yard. Wasn't an issue in the 1st, was better detailed in the 3rd.
Yeah, you were able to catch on that I was mostly referencing the second one. Thunderdome wasn't quite as ridiculous, but that's only because road warrior set such a high bar for ridiculous plot lines. The first movie was actually good, but still not a realistic post-apocalyptic future.
They are well done films, in terms of the execution: excellent cinematography, really well directed movies. Not really comparable to the production values you usually see in MST3K stuff. I don't know that I'd say that about the writing, though. In my opinion, that part would fit in just fine among all the other B-movies.
In 10-20 years, we'll be lucky if we're not living in the world of Mad Max.
The world in which oil is an incredibly rare and precious resource, but in which people roam around deserts in vehicle caravans with one person per vehicle, doing donuts in the sand, and killing each other with flame throwers?
I love Mad Max. It's the exact opposite of what a "world without oil" apocalyptic future would look like, which makes it hilarious, worthy of MST3K appearance, but unfortunately not old enough to have been picked. It also makes it a very unlikely future, 20 years from now or ever.
That said, yeah. SpaceX is doing fantastic work and catching up to government-based capabilities fast. They still haven't caught up though, and that's a first step before you can start claiming that you'll be able to surpass what the space agencies have done.
Also, their interview process try to cover a vast area, to make an analogy: you pick 10 numbers on a lotto ticket with 20 numbers, and they also pick 10 numbers. And then because you matched '8/10' numbers they think you're not good enough.
It's a function of your competition. You're trying to get a job at Google. So is a significant percentage of everybody else in the field. That means that you can be an exceedingly well-qualified person, but they can still give you an overly broad test because even though you got 8/10 of what they were testing for, they still found quite a few other people applying for the same position that got 10/10.
I think it's a given that they're turning away extremely well-qualified people, but I'm not sure that they're not turning them away in favor of even better qualified people. In which case, their process isn't broken.
Disclaimer: I never interviewed at Google. I've heard of the type of tests they give though. My friends who work at small companies are always complaining that their co-workers don't know things that should be basic knowledge to a college freshman, but they can't get rid of them because not enough people apply to the positions to be sufficiently selective. I just figured Google is on the other side of the coin and then they have to make up new ways of selecting between 50 different really good options for the one position.
Not particularly, no. That's because I was raised in a society that values equality. In this particular case, if I had been born in the alternate universe where the Nazis took over the world, chances are I'd still be against it, since I'd be one of the inferior races being subjugated, sterilized, or altogether killed. If I lived in an alternate world in which I had all the advantages and everybody else was being oppressed for my benefit, I'd like to think I'd be one of the few who would fight against the system, but I like to think that because that's what I've grown up to value. The truth is that I have no idea what kind of person I'd actually be under such a system, and the odds are stacked against me being a "good person" by our definition.
Either way, my point isn't that we should be accepting of behavior which we severely disapprove of. My point is that "good guys vs. bad guys" philosophy is dangerous. When you fight for something you believe is right, understand that you're fighting for exactly that: your beliefs. The other side is fighting for their beliefs. Avoid demonizing the enemy as unquestionably evil, because there's no such thing and that way leads to fighting of such intensity that both sides even forget what it is that they're fighting for, other than their hatred for one another.
That seems like a rather shallow interpretation of it. There may not be an absolute answer for every dilemma, but I'd sure hope that morality is grounded on something deeper then the "whims of society". Just because the government or society says something is moral does not make it so.
What would be the grounds for this morality? Why doesn't everybody agree on just what is right and what is wrong if there's a fundamental absolute moral code? These things tend to be pretty culture specific.
Things like universal rights should matter regardless of what the people in power are saying.
Universal rights are one of those things that, like laws against indiscriminate murder, are bound to be shared across more cultures, especially as we become more interconnected. That's not because of some universal source of morality, but simply because it's the most stable condition. A society that doesn't value universal rights for everyone is prone to revolts by those being oppressed. A society that restricts you from killing others is also a society that is expanding resources to protect you from being killed, so people generally approve of it. It's all about a social contract.
Nope, sorry. Just because Hitler and the Third Reich could rationalize themselves as good guys didn't make them so.
Are you sure? If they could convince themselves that they were in the right and you were in the wrong, how do you know that you're not the one rationalizing your behavior? If they managed to, what makes you immune to that psychological effect?
There's always somebody on the wrong side of history. It's only a moral dilemma when it is unclear who the bad guy is.
Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds and killing and torturing political opponents made him a bad guy, not G.W.'s botched foreign policy.
Maniacal Islamic fundamentalist psychopaths who behead western journalists make them bad guys, not the US's opulent prosperity.
Hording illegal weapons and killing women and children made Koresh evil, not the overly zealous tactics of the ATF.
Shall I continue?
Please do. But let's add a few that are more controversial to the culture in which you live in, instead of just the ones that are clearly outside of the norm from the time and place where you born.
"Capital Punishment makes the state the bad guys, because one murder can't solve another?" Or is it, "the murderers are the bad guys, not the government who provides a deterrent for their behavior." Or maybe it's not a deterrent, maybe it's "protecting society from dangerous individuals." You could also phrase it as more humane than life imprisonment if you did went the protecting society route. Where do you fall on this debate?
If we're talking about military action, where are you on collateral damage? Sure, you're absolutely sure that the people gassing the Kurds were evil men, but what about innocents who died in the bombing? Acceptable casualties for a greater cause? What does the death toll need to be before it becomes unacceptable? Where do you draw that line?
You see, you're performing the same justifications that those other "bad guys" have made in order to decide who is worth killing. First you convince yourself and that the other side are bad guys. Nazi propaganda was designed to convince people that the Jews were determined to dominate the world and subjugate the obviously superior (to a bigoted person of german blood anyway) aryan good guys. They were blamed for all the economic difficulties they were having at the time. It's not like the west has never been subject to the idea of superior races. Back in the day, slavery was justified by saying that blacks simply weren't as intelligent and plantation owners were really being kind to them by giving them food and a place to live in a civilized form, which they clearly would be unable to sustain by themselves. Sure, you don't believe that today, but what would you have believed if you were born in the south in the early 1800's, and your parents had been big plantation owners, with lots of slaves? It's easy to subjugate other people when you start having the concept of "bad guys" or otherwise place yourself in a superior position.
Your morality is determined by your surroundings. Who is right? How do you determine in absolute terms what is right? You can't. I'm from a western society, and so I believe in equal rights to everyone. I agree with that, but in the end it's only a valid position because we have the might to defend what we consider to be right against those that disagree. Really, that's all there is to it. The Nazis are evil because we won. If they had won, history would label them as heroes for liberating the Aryans from racial oppression by the inferior races.
Sometimes the bad guys are exactly that..bad guys. In these cases, there is no moral dilemma.
That's interesting, because almost no 'bad guys' see themselves as the bad guys. They almost always have an internal rationalization for what they're doing that makes them one of the 'good guys'.
Morality is relative. There's always a moral dilemma.
You can't "justify" the robber pointing a gun at her. You just can't. But she could have done some things differently. She is the victim, but she also put herself out there. Some would blame her, and that is perhaps where the "just" part comes in. I try not to pass judgment until I know all of the facts. Maybe she didn't know, but then she was still careless in not making it a point to know. And some therefore might not "feel sorry" for her. I do, she was ignorant more than likely. I mean really, who likes to play with fire unless they don't "really" understand how bad they can get burnt? Only the mentally ill, or someone who wants to get burnt...
Fuck that. I don't care what she was doing, 100% of the blame goes with the robber. By being careful in our day to day lives we can minimize our chances for being hurt (either by someone else, or by being burned in an accident), but assignment of blame requires intention.
When you see someone purposefully setting themselves on fire, they are to blame. When you see someone playing carelessly with fire getting burned, they were stupid, but it's still ridiculous for you to say they were to blame and therefore 'deserved it'. That's a damn expensive way to learn a lesson about life, and even though some people only learn after being hurt in that way, if the only choice is learning the hard way or not learning at all, I would much rather that they go their entire life without learning that lesson and just being lucky enough not to be burned.
Follow the criminal, let the clerk die. If the criminal gets away, there's a high probability that many more (not just the one) will die. There's a snap decision. From a member of Mensa.
Mensa must be slipping...
The clerk is somebody who is 100% sure to die if you don't help him. The criminal could be caught before he kills again. You radio in the description of the car, as another poster mentioned. Even if they don't catch him then, there's always the possibility that when he tries to rob another store, somebody overpowers him, and he's arrested. Yes, other people might die if he escapes, and that might even be likely. The only thing you know for certain is that the clerk will die if you don't help. You help the fucking clerk.
That said, all of this is irrelevant anyway and proves the Sheriff's reasoning for not hiring high-intelligence people is bullshit. Nobody would sit there thinking, "oh, what do I do now?" without moving. We've all come to snap decisions. We've come to different snap decisions, and we can sit here discussing the pros and cons between ourselves for a long time because there's nothing at stake. If we were faced with that decision, I'd save the clerk, you'd go after the criminal, and we'd make the decision in less a second. The other reason this scenario is stupid is that if we were cops, we'd arrive at the scene with a partner (at least). One of us would stay, the other would go after the criminal and call for an ambulance to the store and backup on the way.
You might be surprised at how extremely controversial this one is in polite society...A lot of murderers murdered a lot of other murderers to give us our freedom, you know. You do support our murderers, don't you?
I know, and I used the word 'murder' because it has a different connotation to the word kill and I wanted to avoid having that discussion. Everyone agrees that you shouldn't murder other people, even though they disagree on whether a particular type of killing is a murder. Again, it goes to show there's not such thing as absolute morality.
I would guess you're an extreme pacifist, and I respect that. I don't agree with you though, and I personally don't equate what soldiers do with murder. What I was talking about requiring resources to enforce your society's rules apply here: you can't have a society without the means to defend it. Somebody else who believes in a different set of rules is bound to try to force you to follow their ideals and unless you're prepared to kill to defend yours, they will likely succeed. That said, if your particular morals say that killing anyone for any reason is unjustified, then your only option is something similar to what Ghandi did. It does take a hell of a lot more courage to go that route, and it might not work in every situation, but it's certainly worthy of much respect and admiration.
Positive rights are "more fun" than negative rights, which is why I think most people gravitate to them. This is how we get arguments about how great Cuban healthcare is, while completely ignoring the fact that if you own an unlicensed cell phone in Cuba you will quite literally be facing "reeducation through hard labor" or worse. The left has almost completely abandoned negative rights except when someone does something to a protected group that is bad enough to make a liberal say "there ought to be a law..." (and by coincidence, there was, in the Constitution).
5. The right to a public, honest and open trial with legal defense.
How is that not a positive right? You are forcing people to give up their time to be part of a jury. You are forcing people to pay for the legal defense of a public defender through their taxes!
There's really no difference between 'positive' and 'negative' rights unless you have some weird view of absolute morality. When you say that you have the right to property, what you're saying is that I can't take your stuff from you, even though I'm stronger and better armed. You're really putting a constraint on me, and enforcing that constraint with police paid for by taxpayers. That's a positive right! What entitles you to keep me from using my might to get what I want? What entitles you to police protection?
Society is all about a social contract. The people living in a society have a common morality and decide the rules this society will be based upon. Enforcing these rules (from the uncontroversial 'people can't murder each other' to the more controversial, 'everyone will have free internet') requires resources, so the people must be taxed (or forced to serve, such as with military drafting or jury duty). The only valid question is, "do we agree this is necessary and are we willing to fund it?" If so, that may become a right in that society. I doubt most people in the US would view internet access as a right, so it won't be a right here. There's nothing wrong with it being a right in a more liberal country where people do agree on its importance.
Or enough life experience to practice her singing voice by that logic. I was writing music at 13, and I had enough taste at the time to realise it would take more years of practice to release any of it
I wasn't referring to just lack of writing ability. Very few teenagers have anything interesting to talk about. The song she bought is about the arrival of the weekend so she can hang out with her friends (and done through a hilarious event-by-event description. Which seat do I choose??). Honestly, that pretty much describes the life of someone her age. That is what you do. You go to school. You hang out. If everything went alright with your life, you've had no big life disappointments and unless you've been extremely lucky (in either events that happened to you or in being somehow gifted), no big triumphs. What could you possibly write that is in any way interesting?
I mean, I don't doubt that what you wrote at 13 was better than Friday, because...how could it not be? But I can hardly blame her for not realizing the song sucked when she had her parents buy it. She was going after the rhythm, something she felt she could bob her head to. The lyrics at that age are pretty much irrelevant, and she probably felt, "yeah, that describes my life!" Once you grow up, your tastes mature.
Her parents tried to buy her a shortcut to fame. Its the parents that need kicking.
Eh...her parents had the means to try to help their daughter achieve one of her dreams. I don't have anything against shortcuts. I wouldn't listen to the stuff she puts out, but of enough people did, then good for her, I guess. If not, her parents will have paid the price and lost their "investment".
Hmm, lets see. Doesn't write music. Pays someone else to do it.
I didn't say she would grow up to be brilliant, I said could. I'm just not willing to judge someone's work at 13 years of age as definitive for what they can accomplish as an adult. You may have been gifted when you were young, but I can tell you right now that I sure as hell wouldn't want to be judged by my abilities back then. I'm good at what I do now, though. If she's still buying songs when she's in her 20's, she's a lost cause. Right now, she just needs to buy songs from better songwriters.
Voice sounds like a hornet stuck in a tin can. With all the practice in the world, she'll need a larynx transplant to do something about that.
Well, it was autotuned to hell. I certainly couldn't tell what her actual voice was like. Again, lack of data to make any judgements.
The death metal remix on the other hand. Now that was awesome.
I'll have to check it out. That does sound hilarious.
Honestly, I'm not saying she shows promise or anything like that. Friday was the most horrible thing I've ever listened to. I'm just saying that people are overly hostile against the girl. Good taste is developed and learned, it's rarely something you just have.
On a completely unrelated note: your sig is awesome, I share the feeling.
if she had talent, she would've written the damn song herself. Or at least if she had any respect for music, she would've chosen something which doesn't appear to be configured to play at frequencies designed to interfere with your bowel movements.
She's a fucking teenager. Teenagers don't have the life experience to write a good song. Reading the wikipedia article on the thing, she got the chance to buy that song, or a song about love, and had the common sense to choose the one which most applied to her experiences. "I look forward to friday, I'm going to go with that."
Yes, the song is fucking stupid, but everyone really should be bashing the songwriter. Before you accumulate enough life experience, all a child artist should be expected to do is to be a voice for somebody else's words, either literally by singing them, or through acting by reading something from an adult scriptwriter. Sure, there are exceptions to this, and some people's talents blossom early, but that's not the norm. She could grow up to be brilliant.
If I had stuck it out in math class and learned how to do the Laplace transform and other manipulations of the s-domain, it would have saved me a phone call or two to other people who stuck it out in math class.
So what you're saying is that somebody needs to take the class, which makes it pretty clear why we need it. Not to mention that I'm not entirely clear on how you would even know whether you would need to use a Laplace transform unless somebody who took all those classes informed you about it. Or somebody who took all those classes wrote the wikipedia page that you found. There are always people behind the knowledge you are searching, and these people need to learn it.
I'd also like to figure out the structure of the electromagnetic field in our measurement product, but none of the people I know who stuck it out in math/physics class can do it any better than I can. If we're determined to know the answer, we're going to have to use an electromagnetic field simulator.
People who stuck it out in physics will be able to look at the result of the simulation and be able to tell 'hey, this is obviously wrong.' Not only are those things not bug-free, but often the operator isn't, and might not have set the geometry or the values for the material correctly. Also, the people writing that software need to know something about the physics. You can't just stop teaching this stuff.
There's an awful lot wrong with the education system, but skipping it altogether is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to revise the system, not tell people that it's ok to drop out. It's not, and the more advanced we become the more that will be true.
Genesis predicts that life will reproduce, each after their own kind.
That's the same prediction as standard evolution, except it requires and additional variable (a designer). Once again, in a scientific theory, you don't introduce new variables unless you need them to explain observations.
We might share large portions of our DNA with other organisms because we have the same designer. (and we do).
But we don't find anything that does not share DNA with us. Have you never created two things that are completely different from one another?
Genesis depicts a world in which many creatures died in a world-wide flood, so we will find fossils.
First, my fossil link was important not just because it's a fossil...because it's a transitional fossil between species adapted to swim in water and walk on land. You know, those things creationists claim to not exist.
Second, if you assume that a flood killed all life on the planet except for the animals present in the Ark (the Ark being an impossible proposition to begin with, but I won't tackle that one), you would expect to find that all (non-aquatic, I suppose) life currently existing spread from a single point on earth (the point where they disembarked from the Ark) from a relatively recent point in history (thousands of years). Definitely no evidence of that, plenty of evidence against that. Failed prediction.
Since God is more creative than we are, we should not be surprised to find creatures we did not think of.
And yet we don't find a single creature on the planet that is truly original. Every single Earth-based life uses ATP for energy storage. Earth-based life is based on the same elements, and even the recently discovered arsenic-based life is essentially the exact same thing as their phosphorous counterparts, except they replaced most of the phosphorous with arsenic, an adaptation to an arsenic-rich environment.
Since we are not what we were before sin entered the world, you would expect to find organs that we do not understand.
It's not a matter of not understanding, it's a matter of not needing them. You can have you appendix removed, and it won't affect your life at all.
We can demonstrate the ability to remove information from the Genome. We can demonstrate the ability to select a set of traits. That does not tell us where the information originated.
In other words, we can find combinations of existing traits that make for better design? We can actually improve on the existing design, which you wouldn't expect to be the case if everything had been created by a more intelligent designer.
Micro-evolution is not the same as Macro-evolution.
Actually, yes it is. What you call macro-evolution is just micro-evolution over a long period of time. You make enough small, incremental changes over millions of years, and those small changes add up to very big changes. Besides, you can't draw a line on what you mean by "macro-evolution." The original poster I was replying to used speciation as that line, and we've certainly witnessed that happening.
Genetic algorithms (I assume you are referring to software here) require design input in the selection of rules for genetic selection, so while the manipulation of variables may be random, the selection is not.
Right...exactly like real evolution, which is why I said, "evolution is not random." Selection is most certainly not random, if it were, you wouldn't see things adapting to their environment. That was my point.
Your support of evolution here is just a design argument with 'God' replaced with 'the environment'.
Yep. But if you can replace God with the environment while explaining every observation, why do you need God?
So since we know that the relativistic time-frame has an effect on radioactive decay, on what basis do you assume that radimetric decay does not change (the unspoken assumption in your example above)? Genesis describes a period in which God is 'stretching out the heavens' Why does that not fit into your example?
First, as long as you are within the same frame of reference as the object you are trying to date, it doesn't matter. For radiometric dating, we're talking about dating objects on Earth, after the Earth was formed. We can date man-made objects to before 6,000 years old. For the age of the universe, we don't use radioactive decay.
Is it possible that your scepticism has blurred you understanding of what is written in Genesis?
I spent the entire last paragraph explaining that it doesn't bother me in the least if you can find an interpretation of your religion that fits scientific fact. I even said your interpretation could well be true. The entire point of the post was simply to say what the difference between faith and science is: it's only science if your assumption can be put to the test. It could be that your assumption is the correct one, but it's not science unless it can be put to the test. Your faith can be right, but it's not science.
ID predicts that we will find that life is rife with design.
That's a tautology. Life was designed if we can prove that it was designed? No shit. How do you determine that something was designed?
and that there was an original working order to life that can be discovered and possibly recovered.
So until you find evidence of such a thing, it's indistinguishable from random evolution, but adds the unnecessary variable of a designer. When doing science, you don't make any assumptions that are not necessary to fit the currently available evidence. You are free to have faith in it though (and again, I say you could be correct), but it's not science.
It is evolution that makes no prediction that can be tested
Evolution makes several predictions. For example, evolution predicts that of a mechanism for transfer of traits from parents to offspring must exist. We've since discovered DNA. Evolution predicts we must share large portions of our DNA with other organisms because we share a common ancestry (and we do). Evolution predicts transitional fossils such a that of the Tiktaalik. Evolution predicts that you can expect things such as vestigial organs. Of course, we can actually see evolution happening and drive it by manipulating the environment.
since if life is really random in origin than there is nothing to discover within it, nor is there any reason for you (a member of Life) to even ask questions, since it is all a random biochemical event anyway)
Evolution is not random. Mutations can be random, but evolution as a whole is very much driven by the environment. Not only that, but the solutions arrived at by nature over the course of millions of years can be of incredible interest. That's like saying, "genetic algorithms are of no interest because there's an aspect of randomness involved."
So - can you reproduce the Big Bang and verify that is indeed how the universe was created?
Big Bang theory makes certain predictions about what the universe should be like. We can and do verify those predictions. In the case of the Big Bang in particular, this xkcd comes to mind. The picture in question is the cosmic microwave background radiation where the error bars from our measurements are so small and match the theoretical result so well that when plotted together with the theoretical curve for the black body spectrum, the theoretical curve obscures the error bars.
As for additional theories of what the universe was like shortly after the big bang, we reproduce those energies in small spaces with a small number of particles all the time and try to learn and adapt our current theories to fit those observations. That's what particle accelerators are for.
Can you reproduce evolution to the point of speciation in a laboratory?
The point I'm making here is that you're always starting with an assumption. If you're a creationist, you assume that the revealed knowledge from the bible is correct, the earth must be 6000 years old, and therefore scientific methodology that indicates it's much older must be incorrect.
You start off with an assumption, sure. Then you make predictions from it that you can test. What predictions can you make from the assumption that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and how can you test them? Well, one way to test that is through radiometric dating: you would predict that you would not be able to find anything older than 6,000 years old. That's not true, so you now assume that the methodology is incorrect. If you make the assumption that radiometric dating gives the wrong result, what prediction does that make? The only reasonable prediction is that the half-life for isotopes somehow changed over time. Have we ever observed that to happen? No, so another prediction failed. That leaves you with God is deliberately trying to fool you and is planting false evidence around. Well, if you assume that, why wouldn't you assume He also lied in the Bible?
I don't mind that people choose to have faith. I do mind when their faith trumps evidence. For anything in which science doesn't have an explanation for, you are free to believe whatever you want to believe (as long as you call it a belief, and not 'truth' or worse, 'science'). If you choose to believe that the stories in the Bible are metaphors, and that God had a hand in the Big Bang, and that God created humans through the process of evolution, I can't tell you that you are wrong (and you can't tell me that you are right). You are free to take that on faith. You are not free to call it scientific theory like the Intelligent Design guys are doing, because you don't have predictions that can be tested. You are not free to have it taught on science classrooms, because it's not science. You are free to believe in it with absolutely no evidence (that's called faith), and it might even be true (science only deals with testable, but it does not imply that if it's not testable it doesn't exist), but it's not science and science is not faith.
I think, by allowing us to seek out the ideal people with our exact interests at the moment, the internet allows us to get into the mindset to discount the people around us as less worthwhile to interact with.
Well, we've always discounted strangers you're being forced to talk to as less worthwhile to interact with. As adults, it's something we have to do all the time, so we get used to it. As a child, I remember being placed in a similar situation as the one you described. I didn't have a phone or the internet, but when my parents said, "this kid about your age is visiting, hang out with him" I felt that to be a chore, equivalent with mowing the lawn. "I don't want to hang out with a new kid I've never met. I have my own friends and he's not one of them." At 16, I would have had more tolerance for it, but it would still have been something I would do because of a sense of duty, and I'd be polite, but try to get it over with as soon as possible.
Kids and teenagers don't deal well with forced social situations. They have cliques. They try hard to get in the ones they want to get in, and they try hard to keep people out of them that they don't think are deserving of it. It's not the technology, and they grow out of it as this type of social interaction becomes a bigger part of their lives.
The company called "AT&T" is not, was not, and has only a tenuous relationship with the entity "Ma Bell," American Telephone a Telegraph. The company called AT&T is actually the old SBC, Southwestern Bell Communications, one of the RBOCs, that took over AT&Ts name and trademarks after buying the AT&T Corporation in 2005.
Yeah. tenuous relationship indeed. The old SBC was made up of several mergers from companies that split up from the old Ma Bell. The new AT&T is working it's way back up to becoming the old AT&T, and they're already reasonably close.
Foolish? why? because you fail to read? Have you honestly never run across all the people claiming to have Aspergers, or being accused of Aspergers because they're weird? Perhaps you are the foolish one and believe its true. I on the other hand think its relatively rare that the person actually has the disorder and is not looking for a way to feel better ("I'm wicked smart!") and have an excuse ("But I'm awkward cause this disorder.").
Foolish because you think "being awkward" or "weird" is something that needs an excuse. That mentality, very prevalent in society, is what causes people to self-diagnose themselves as having some form of autism. "Well, everyone is telling me that I'm not normal, I see online that people with my characteristics appear to have this disorder, so I must have it." Foolish because you implied these people need something to "feel ok...because they were too busy thinking instead of experiencing" as if they're missing out, and just need to fix themselves by conforming to what you believe they should be.
I can play your game. I could be as ridiculous as you, and turn it around. I could say that you make those statements because you're jealous of people with the ability to get totally lost in their own thoughts. People who can have as much fun solving problems alone in their room as you do when you have a night out on the town. I won't, though, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that most people, you included, like to think the way that they live their lives is the best way to live, and that everyone who doesn't agree is "missing out." The highly intelligent people who "don't understand humans" think that about you. They think you're missing out, unable to see the wonder of the world that they can. You think they're missing out, because you don't understand them. If you stopped trying to tell each other that there's something wrong with the other group (they're awkward and you're unintelligent), then we'd stop trying to find something to explain our behavior, whatever that behavior is. We'd simply be able to say, "this is what I like to do" and that would be explanation enough.
But you know, the Japanese plant "shut itself down safely the second power was lost"...Turns out, you need to do far more than "safely shut down" since the fuel stays really fucking hot even after a shutdown. In fact, the fuel stays really fucking hot and keeps generating heat even after it is depleted and removed from the reactor, and has to be stored under water for a long time before anything can be done with it.
The Japanese plant is an older design. New designs have passive cooling, which don't require any power.
The thing is, even Fukushima, which is being touted as a disaster, should instead be hailed as a success. What's going on there is bad, but the amount of radiation leaked doesn't qualify as environmental disaster. The levels are far below those considered harmful, and that's for a tsunami and earthquake of a magnitude above what the thing was designed to withstand.
As for your Titanic reference: nobody is saying Nuclear power plants are 100% safe. We're saying the risk is manageable. The titanic sunk, other ships continued to sink, but people didn't stop traveling by boat as a reaction to the disaster.
Cancer doesn't tend to kill you the moment the first neutron damages your DNA. It takes a while.
This isn't exactly the type of source that I would cite in an argument, but the presentation is so well-done, that I just have to. In particular, you should look for the sections in the chart concerning Fukushima, the section containing "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk," and sections for common medical procedures such as mammograms: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
If you don't believe something in the chart, feel free to look it up in a more reputable source, and post it. If you send it to Randall, I'm sure he'd correct the chart too.
What would happen if ghost was replaced with "sentient alien life?" There is no evidence but "science" minded people still spend resources to find it. The fact is that most people hold out hope (or faith) that some unseen thing is out there, whether it is ghosts, God or aliens. If they choose to believe and spend money and time trying to prove it, who are we to judge?
The evidence is that we exist, indicating the probability of evolution of sentient life is greater than 0. We don't know how much greater than 0, but the universe is a pretty big place, so small probabilities don't mean that much.
The claim that requires extraordinary evidence is that we're the only ones that evolved. The default assumption that we're not alone is the only logical stance until you can show exactly what is special about this particular location. It's not like stars of the same type of our Sun are rare.
la had half Edison's ability for self-promotion and half of George Westinghouse's business sense and some say, crookedness, we might have had "Telsa Electric" and the "Telsa Genius" prize.
And if I had half Einstein's intelligence and was born two hundred years earlier, my name would be the one in all the physics books.
"If" being the most significant word in both my scenario and yours.
I could be wrong, but I believe his point is that it is unfortunate that self-promotion skills and business sense are necessary qualities to guarantee success. In an ideal world, the merit of the work would be all that matters, not how well you can convince other people that your inferior product is actually better. It's not that he wishes Tesla would have those abilities, he wishes that those abilities were less important than they are.
I know, "ideal world" is far from the one we live in...
From that wikipedia list: 12 of the largest quakes on record occurred between December and March, 4 in November, and only 8 were between May and October. So... What's so important about the winter months?
Nothing. You've offered a 4 month window out of 12 months, and showed us 12 of the largest quakes out of the top 24 landed in that period. You'd expect the mean to be eight, if quakes are completely random. I ran a t-test separating the quakes listed on your wikipedia page by 4-month groups, making your december-march one group, may-july another, and august-november the third one. Assuming the null hypothesis that quakes are completely random, the two-tailed P value for that sample was 0.5242. ie, Not statistically significant at all.
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This isn't censoring. This isn't the government. That word is going to stop meaning something if people can't use it in some sort of rational context.
Do you know what the word means? Because I don't think you do.
Censorship, noun: the practice of examining for and suppressing unacceptable parts.
"Government" does not show up in the definition of the word. There is such a thing as "government censorship" in which case you must actually qualify "censorship" by preceding it with the word "government." You can even qualify it with the word self, as in "self-censorship," the practice of examining and suppressing your own unacceptable behavior.
Never mind that Dropbox is just trying to prevent their system from being turned into a big anonymous piracy farm - a very real concern, and one that they have every reason (and latitude within their TOS) to fight.
That's a fair argument to be made. I would most certainly agree they have the authority to block such a program for the reasons you've mentioned.
But ... "censoring?" Why not just call them fascists, while we're at it? Idiots.
Although they are within their rights to block the usage of the program in their servers, and ban any accounts which make use of it, they are not within their rights to prevent a program they do not own the copyrights to from being disseminated (which would be the 'censorship' part). That said:
This article it inaccurate, alarmist trolling.
The article is perfectly accurate and points out that dropbox's founder politely requested the removal of the program from the repositories, and the author voluntarily took it down. I don't see any wrongdoing on the part of dropbox (the DMCA request was a mistake they apologized for, as is also accurately noted in the article). The word censorship still applies: dropbox examined content and deemed it inappropriate, the author removed the content on request, thus applying self-censorship of his work.
MST3K left the Mad Max franchise alone for two reasons: Mad Mel and the attendant price he brings, and the fact that they're well made films. They did cover films of that ilk, some of them being eye-poppingly awful. Agree that the 2nd MM movie was woefully short on details of how people are surviving - food sources depicted amounted to that tin of dog food and chickens in the refinery camp's yard. Wasn't an issue in the 1st, was better detailed in the 3rd.
Yeah, you were able to catch on that I was mostly referencing the second one. Thunderdome wasn't quite as ridiculous, but that's only because road warrior set such a high bar for ridiculous plot lines. The first movie was actually good, but still not a realistic post-apocalyptic future.
They are well done films, in terms of the execution: excellent cinematography, really well directed movies. Not really comparable to the production values you usually see in MST3K stuff. I don't know that I'd say that about the writing, though. In my opinion, that part would fit in just fine among all the other B-movies.
In 10-20 years, we'll be lucky if we're not living in the world of Mad Max.
The world in which oil is an incredibly rare and precious resource, but in which people roam around deserts in vehicle caravans with one person per vehicle, doing donuts in the sand, and killing each other with flame throwers?
I love Mad Max. It's the exact opposite of what a "world without oil" apocalyptic future would look like, which makes it hilarious, worthy of MST3K appearance, but unfortunately not old enough to have been picked. It also makes it a very unlikely future, 20 years from now or ever.
That said, yeah. SpaceX is doing fantastic work and catching up to government-based capabilities fast. They still haven't caught up though, and that's a first step before you can start claiming that you'll be able to surpass what the space agencies have done.
Also, their interview process try to cover a vast area, to make an analogy: you pick 10 numbers on a lotto ticket with 20 numbers, and they also pick 10 numbers. And then because you matched '8/10' numbers they think you're not good enough.
It's a function of your competition. You're trying to get a job at Google. So is a significant percentage of everybody else in the field. That means that you can be an exceedingly well-qualified person, but they can still give you an overly broad test because even though you got 8/10 of what they were testing for, they still found quite a few other people applying for the same position that got 10/10.
I think it's a given that they're turning away extremely well-qualified people, but I'm not sure that they're not turning them away in favor of even better qualified people. In which case, their process isn't broken.
Disclaimer: I never interviewed at Google. I've heard of the type of tests they give though. My friends who work at small companies are always complaining that their co-workers don't know things that should be basic knowledge to a college freshman, but they can't get rid of them because not enough people apply to the positions to be sufficiently selective. I just figured Google is on the other side of the coin and then they have to make up new ways of selecting between 50 different really good options for the one position.
You'd be OK with that?
Not particularly, no. That's because I was raised in a society that values equality. In this particular case, if I had been born in the alternate universe where the Nazis took over the world, chances are I'd still be against it, since I'd be one of the inferior races being subjugated, sterilized, or altogether killed. If I lived in an alternate world in which I had all the advantages and everybody else was being oppressed for my benefit, I'd like to think I'd be one of the few who would fight against the system, but I like to think that because that's what I've grown up to value. The truth is that I have no idea what kind of person I'd actually be under such a system, and the odds are stacked against me being a "good person" by our definition.
Either way, my point isn't that we should be accepting of behavior which we severely disapprove of. My point is that "good guys vs. bad guys" philosophy is dangerous. When you fight for something you believe is right, understand that you're fighting for exactly that: your beliefs. The other side is fighting for their beliefs. Avoid demonizing the enemy as unquestionably evil, because there's no such thing and that way leads to fighting of such intensity that both sides even forget what it is that they're fighting for, other than their hatred for one another.
That seems like a rather shallow interpretation of it. There may not be an absolute answer for every dilemma, but I'd sure hope that morality is grounded on something deeper then the "whims of society". Just because the government or society says something is moral does not make it so.
What would be the grounds for this morality? Why doesn't everybody agree on just what is right and what is wrong if there's a fundamental absolute moral code? These things tend to be pretty culture specific.
Things like universal rights should matter regardless of what the people in power are saying.
Universal rights are one of those things that, like laws against indiscriminate murder, are bound to be shared across more cultures, especially as we become more interconnected. That's not because of some universal source of morality, but simply because it's the most stable condition. A society that doesn't value universal rights for everyone is prone to revolts by those being oppressed. A society that restricts you from killing others is also a society that is expanding resources to protect you from being killed, so people generally approve of it. It's all about a social contract.
Nope, sorry. Just because Hitler and the Third Reich could rationalize themselves as good guys didn't make them so.
Are you sure? If they could convince themselves that they were in the right and you were in the wrong, how do you know that you're not the one rationalizing your behavior? If they managed to, what makes you immune to that psychological effect?
There's always somebody on the wrong side of history. It's only a moral dilemma when it is unclear who the bad guy is.
Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds and killing and torturing political opponents made him a bad guy, not G.W.'s botched foreign policy.
Maniacal Islamic fundamentalist psychopaths who behead western journalists make them bad guys, not the US's opulent prosperity.
Hording illegal weapons and killing women and children made Koresh evil, not the overly zealous tactics of the ATF.
Shall I continue?
Please do. But let's add a few that are more controversial to the culture in which you live in, instead of just the ones that are clearly outside of the norm from the time and place where you born.
"Capital Punishment makes the state the bad guys, because one murder can't solve another?" Or is it, "the murderers are the bad guys, not the government who provides a deterrent for their behavior." Or maybe it's not a deterrent, maybe it's "protecting society from dangerous individuals." You could also phrase it as more humane than life imprisonment if you did went the protecting society route. Where do you fall on this debate?
If we're talking about military action, where are you on collateral damage? Sure, you're absolutely sure that the people gassing the Kurds were evil men, but what about innocents who died in the bombing? Acceptable casualties for a greater cause? What does the death toll need to be before it becomes unacceptable? Where do you draw that line?
You see, you're performing the same justifications that those other "bad guys" have made in order to decide who is worth killing. First you convince yourself and that the other side are bad guys. Nazi propaganda was designed to convince people that the Jews were determined to dominate the world and subjugate the obviously superior (to a bigoted person of german blood anyway) aryan good guys. They were blamed for all the economic difficulties they were having at the time. It's not like the west has never been subject to the idea of superior races. Back in the day, slavery was justified by saying that blacks simply weren't as intelligent and plantation owners were really being kind to them by giving them food and a place to live in a civilized form, which they clearly would be unable to sustain by themselves. Sure, you don't believe that today, but what would you have believed if you were born in the south in the early 1800's, and your parents had been big plantation owners, with lots of slaves? It's easy to subjugate other people when you start having the concept of "bad guys" or otherwise place yourself in a superior position.
Your morality is determined by your surroundings. Who is right? How do you determine in absolute terms what is right? You can't. I'm from a western society, and so I believe in equal rights to everyone. I agree with that, but in the end it's only a valid position because we have the might to defend what we consider to be right against those that disagree. Really, that's all there is to it. The Nazis are evil because we won. If they had won, history would label them as heroes for liberating the Aryans from racial oppression by the inferior races.
Sometimes the bad guys are exactly that..bad guys. In these cases, there is no moral dilemma.
That's interesting, because almost no 'bad guys' see themselves as the bad guys. They almost always have an internal rationalization for what they're doing that makes them one of the 'good guys'.
Morality is relative. There's always a moral dilemma.
You can't "justify" the robber pointing a gun at her. You just can't. But she could have done some things differently. She is the victim, but she also put herself out there. Some would blame her, and that is perhaps where the "just" part comes in. I try not to pass judgment until I know all of the facts. Maybe she didn't know, but then she was still careless in not making it a point to know. And some therefore might not "feel sorry" for her. I do, she was ignorant more than likely. I mean really, who likes to play with fire unless they don't "really" understand how bad they can get burnt? Only the mentally ill, or someone who wants to get burnt...
Fuck that. I don't care what she was doing, 100% of the blame goes with the robber. By being careful in our day to day lives we can minimize our chances for being hurt (either by someone else, or by being burned in an accident), but assignment of blame requires intention.
When you see someone purposefully setting themselves on fire, they are to blame. When you see someone playing carelessly with fire getting burned, they were stupid, but it's still ridiculous for you to say they were to blame and therefore 'deserved it'. That's a damn expensive way to learn a lesson about life, and even though some people only learn after being hurt in that way, if the only choice is learning the hard way or not learning at all, I would much rather that they go their entire life without learning that lesson and just being lucky enough not to be burned.
Follow the criminal, let the clerk die. If the criminal gets away, there's a high probability that many more (not just the one) will die. There's a snap decision. From a member of Mensa.
Mensa must be slipping...
The clerk is somebody who is 100% sure to die if you don't help him. The criminal could be caught before he kills again. You radio in the description of the car, as another poster mentioned. Even if they don't catch him then, there's always the possibility that when he tries to rob another store, somebody overpowers him, and he's arrested. Yes, other people might die if he escapes, and that might even be likely. The only thing you know for certain is that the clerk will die if you don't help. You help the fucking clerk.
That said, all of this is irrelevant anyway and proves the Sheriff's reasoning for not hiring high-intelligence people is bullshit. Nobody would sit there thinking, "oh, what do I do now?" without moving. We've all come to snap decisions. We've come to different snap decisions, and we can sit here discussing the pros and cons between ourselves for a long time because there's nothing at stake. If we were faced with that decision, I'd save the clerk, you'd go after the criminal, and we'd make the decision in less a second. The other reason this scenario is stupid is that if we were cops, we'd arrive at the scene with a partner (at least). One of us would stay, the other would go after the criminal and call for an ambulance to the store and backup on the way.
You might be surprised at how extremely controversial this one is in polite society...A lot of murderers murdered a lot of other murderers to give us our freedom, you know. You do support our murderers, don't you?
I know, and I used the word 'murder' because it has a different connotation to the word kill and I wanted to avoid having that discussion. Everyone agrees that you shouldn't murder other people, even though they disagree on whether a particular type of killing is a murder. Again, it goes to show there's not such thing as absolute morality.
I would guess you're an extreme pacifist, and I respect that. I don't agree with you though, and I personally don't equate what soldiers do with murder. What I was talking about requiring resources to enforce your society's rules apply here: you can't have a society without the means to defend it. Somebody else who believes in a different set of rules is bound to try to force you to follow their ideals and unless you're prepared to kill to defend yours, they will likely succeed. That said, if your particular morals say that killing anyone for any reason is unjustified, then your only option is something similar to what Ghandi did. It does take a hell of a lot more courage to go that route, and it might not work in every situation, but it's certainly worthy of much respect and admiration.
Positive rights are "more fun" than negative rights, which is why I think most people gravitate to them. This is how we get arguments about how great Cuban healthcare is, while completely ignoring the fact that if you own an unlicensed cell phone in Cuba you will quite literally be facing "reeducation through hard labor" or worse. The left has almost completely abandoned negative rights except when someone does something to a protected group that is bad enough to make a liberal say "there ought to be a law..." (and by coincidence, there was, in the Constitution).
5. The right to a public, honest and open trial with legal defense.
How is that not a positive right? You are forcing people to give up their time to be part of a jury. You are forcing people to pay for the legal defense of a public defender through their taxes!
There's really no difference between 'positive' and 'negative' rights unless you have some weird view of absolute morality. When you say that you have the right to property, what you're saying is that I can't take your stuff from you, even though I'm stronger and better armed. You're really putting a constraint on me, and enforcing that constraint with police paid for by taxpayers. That's a positive right! What entitles you to keep me from using my might to get what I want? What entitles you to police protection?
Society is all about a social contract. The people living in a society have a common morality and decide the rules this society will be based upon. Enforcing these rules (from the uncontroversial 'people can't murder each other' to the more controversial, 'everyone will have free internet') requires resources, so the people must be taxed (or forced to serve, such as with military drafting or jury duty). The only valid question is, "do we agree this is necessary and are we willing to fund it?" If so, that may become a right in that society. I doubt most people in the US would view internet access as a right, so it won't be a right here. There's nothing wrong with it being a right in a more liberal country where people do agree on its importance.
Or enough life experience to practice her singing voice by that logic. I was writing music at 13, and I had enough taste at the time to realise it would take more years of practice to release any of it
I wasn't referring to just lack of writing ability. Very few teenagers have anything interesting to talk about. The song she bought is about the arrival of the weekend so she can hang out with her friends (and done through a hilarious event-by-event description. Which seat do I choose??). Honestly, that pretty much describes the life of someone her age. That is what you do. You go to school. You hang out. If everything went alright with your life, you've had no big life disappointments and unless you've been extremely lucky (in either events that happened to you or in being somehow gifted), no big triumphs. What could you possibly write that is in any way interesting?
I mean, I don't doubt that what you wrote at 13 was better than Friday, because...how could it not be? But I can hardly blame her for not realizing the song sucked when she had her parents buy it. She was going after the rhythm, something she felt she could bob her head to. The lyrics at that age are pretty much irrelevant, and she probably felt, "yeah, that describes my life!" Once you grow up, your tastes mature.
Her parents tried to buy her a shortcut to fame. Its the parents that need kicking.
Eh...her parents had the means to try to help their daughter achieve one of her dreams. I don't have anything against shortcuts. I wouldn't listen to the stuff she puts out, but of enough people did, then good for her, I guess. If not, her parents will have paid the price and lost their "investment".
Hmm, lets see. Doesn't write music. Pays someone else to do it.
I didn't say she would grow up to be brilliant, I said could. I'm just not willing to judge someone's work at 13 years of age as definitive for what they can accomplish as an adult. You may have been gifted when you were young, but I can tell you right now that I sure as hell wouldn't want to be judged by my abilities back then. I'm good at what I do now, though. If she's still buying songs when she's in her 20's, she's a lost cause. Right now, she just needs to buy songs from better songwriters.
Voice sounds like a hornet stuck in a tin can. With all the practice in the world, she'll need a larynx transplant to do something about that.
Well, it was autotuned to hell. I certainly couldn't tell what her actual voice was like. Again, lack of data to make any judgements.
The death metal remix on the other hand. Now that was awesome.
I'll have to check it out. That does sound hilarious.
Honestly, I'm not saying she shows promise or anything like that. Friday was the most horrible thing I've ever listened to. I'm just saying that people are overly hostile against the girl. Good taste is developed and learned, it's rarely something you just have.
On a completely unrelated note: your sig is awesome, I share the feeling.
if she had talent, she would've written the damn song herself. Or at least if she had any respect for music, she would've chosen something which doesn't appear to be configured to play at frequencies designed to interfere with your bowel movements.
She's a fucking teenager. Teenagers don't have the life experience to write a good song. Reading the wikipedia article on the thing, she got the chance to buy that song, or a song about love, and had the common sense to choose the one which most applied to her experiences. "I look forward to friday, I'm going to go with that."
Yes, the song is fucking stupid, but everyone really should be bashing the songwriter. Before you accumulate enough life experience, all a child artist should be expected to do is to be a voice for somebody else's words, either literally by singing them, or through acting by reading something from an adult scriptwriter. Sure, there are exceptions to this, and some people's talents blossom early, but that's not the norm. She could grow up to be brilliant.
If I had stuck it out in math class and learned how to do the Laplace transform and other manipulations of the s-domain, it would have saved me a phone call or two to other people who stuck it out in math class.
So what you're saying is that somebody needs to take the class, which makes it pretty clear why we need it. Not to mention that I'm not entirely clear on how you would even know whether you would need to use a Laplace transform unless somebody who took all those classes informed you about it. Or somebody who took all those classes wrote the wikipedia page that you found. There are always people behind the knowledge you are searching, and these people need to learn it.
I'd also like to figure out the structure of the electromagnetic field in our measurement product, but none of the people I know who stuck it out in math/physics class can do it any better than I can. If we're determined to know the answer, we're going to have to use an electromagnetic field simulator.
People who stuck it out in physics will be able to look at the result of the simulation and be able to tell 'hey, this is obviously wrong.' Not only are those things not bug-free, but often the operator isn't, and might not have set the geometry or the values for the material correctly. Also, the people writing that software need to know something about the physics. You can't just stop teaching this stuff.
There's an awful lot wrong with the education system, but skipping it altogether is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We need to revise the system, not tell people that it's ok to drop out. It's not, and the more advanced we become the more that will be true.
Genesis predicts that life will reproduce, each after their own kind.
That's the same prediction as standard evolution, except it requires and additional variable (a designer). Once again, in a scientific theory, you don't introduce new variables unless you need them to explain observations.
We might share large portions of our DNA with other organisms because we have the same designer. (and we do).
But we don't find anything that does not share DNA with us. Have you never created two things that are completely different from one another?
Genesis depicts a world in which many creatures died in a world-wide flood, so we will find fossils.
First, my fossil link was important not just because it's a fossil...because it's a transitional fossil between species adapted to swim in water and walk on land. You know, those things creationists claim to not exist.
Second, if you assume that a flood killed all life on the planet except for the animals present in the Ark (the Ark being an impossible proposition to begin with, but I won't tackle that one), you would expect to find that all (non-aquatic, I suppose) life currently existing spread from a single point on earth (the point where they disembarked from the Ark) from a relatively recent point in history (thousands of years). Definitely no evidence of that, plenty of evidence against that. Failed prediction.
Since God is more creative than we are, we should not be surprised to find creatures we did not think of.
And yet we don't find a single creature on the planet that is truly original. Every single Earth-based life uses ATP for energy storage. Earth-based life is based on the same elements, and even the recently discovered arsenic-based life is essentially the exact same thing as their phosphorous counterparts, except they replaced most of the phosphorous with arsenic, an adaptation to an arsenic-rich environment.
Since we are not what we were before sin entered the world, you would expect to find organs that we do not understand.
It's not a matter of not understanding, it's a matter of not needing them. You can have you appendix removed, and it won't affect your life at all.
We can demonstrate the ability to remove information from the Genome. We can demonstrate the ability to select a set of traits. That does not tell us where the information originated.
In other words, we can find combinations of existing traits that make for better design? We can actually improve on the existing design, which you wouldn't expect to be the case if everything had been created by a more intelligent designer.
Micro-evolution is not the same as Macro-evolution.
Actually, yes it is. What you call macro-evolution is just micro-evolution over a long period of time. You make enough small, incremental changes over millions of years, and those small changes add up to very big changes. Besides, you can't draw a line on what you mean by "macro-evolution." The original poster I was replying to used speciation as that line, and we've certainly witnessed that happening.
Genetic algorithms (I assume you are referring to software here) require design input in the selection of rules for genetic selection, so while the manipulation of variables may be random, the selection is not.
Right...exactly like real evolution, which is why I said, "evolution is not random." Selection is most certainly not random, if it were, you wouldn't see things adapting to their environment. That was my point.
Your support of evolution here is just a design argument with 'God' replaced with 'the environment'.
Yep. But if you can replace God with the environment while explaining every observation, why do you need God?
So since we know that the relativistic time-frame has an effect on radioactive decay, on what basis do you assume that radimetric decay does not change (the unspoken assumption in your example above)? Genesis describes a period in which God is 'stretching out the heavens' Why does that not fit into your example?
First, as long as you are within the same frame of reference as the object you are trying to date, it doesn't matter. For radiometric dating, we're talking about dating objects on Earth, after the Earth was formed. We can date man-made objects to before 6,000 years old. For the age of the universe, we don't use radioactive decay.
Is it possible that your scepticism has blurred you understanding of what is written in Genesis?
I spent the entire last paragraph explaining that it doesn't bother me in the least if you can find an interpretation of your religion that fits scientific fact. I even said your interpretation could well be true. The entire point of the post was simply to say what the difference between faith and science is: it's only science if your assumption can be put to the test. It could be that your assumption is the correct one, but it's not science unless it can be put to the test. Your faith can be right, but it's not science.
ID predicts that we will find that life is rife with design.
That's a tautology. Life was designed if we can prove that it was designed? No shit. How do you determine that something was designed?
and that there was an original working order to life that can be discovered and possibly recovered.
So until you find evidence of such a thing, it's indistinguishable from random evolution, but adds the unnecessary variable of a designer. When doing science, you don't make any assumptions that are not necessary to fit the currently available evidence. You are free to have faith in it though (and again, I say you could be correct), but it's not science.
It is evolution that makes no prediction that can be tested
Evolution makes several predictions. For example, evolution predicts that of a mechanism for transfer of traits from parents to offspring must exist. We've since discovered DNA. Evolution predicts we must share large portions of our DNA with other organisms because we share a common ancestry (and we do). Evolution predicts transitional fossils such a that of the Tiktaalik. Evolution predicts that you can expect things such as vestigial organs. Of course, we can actually see evolution happening and drive it by manipulating the environment.
since if life is really random in origin than there is nothing to discover within it, nor is there any reason for you (a member of Life) to even ask questions, since it is all a random biochemical event anyway)
Evolution is not random. Mutations can be random, but evolution as a whole is very much driven by the environment. Not only that, but the solutions arrived at by nature over the course of millions of years can be of incredible interest. That's like saying, "genetic algorithms are of no interest because there's an aspect of randomness involved."
So - can you reproduce the Big Bang and verify that is indeed how the universe was created?
Big Bang theory makes certain predictions about what the universe should be like. We can and do verify those predictions. In the case of the Big Bang in particular, this xkcd comes to mind. The picture in question is the cosmic microwave background radiation where the error bars from our measurements are so small and match the theoretical result so well that when plotted together with the theoretical curve for the black body spectrum, the theoretical curve obscures the error bars.
As for additional theories of what the universe was like shortly after the big bang, we reproduce those energies in small spaces with a small number of particles all the time and try to learn and adapt our current theories to fit those observations. That's what particle accelerators are for.
Can you reproduce evolution to the point of speciation in a laboratory?
Yes.
The point I'm making here is that you're always starting with an assumption. If you're a creationist, you assume that the revealed knowledge from the bible is correct, the earth must be 6000 years old, and therefore scientific methodology that indicates it's much older must be incorrect.
You start off with an assumption, sure. Then you make predictions from it that you can test. What predictions can you make from the assumption that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, and how can you test them? Well, one way to test that is through radiometric dating: you would predict that you would not be able to find anything older than 6,000 years old. That's not true, so you now assume that the methodology is incorrect. If you make the assumption that radiometric dating gives the wrong result, what prediction does that make? The only reasonable prediction is that the half-life for isotopes somehow changed over time. Have we ever observed that to happen? No, so another prediction failed. That leaves you with God is deliberately trying to fool you and is planting false evidence around. Well, if you assume that, why wouldn't you assume He also lied in the Bible?
I don't mind that people choose to have faith. I do mind when their faith trumps evidence. For anything in which science doesn't have an explanation for, you are free to believe whatever you want to believe (as long as you call it a belief, and not 'truth' or worse, 'science'). If you choose to believe that the stories in the Bible are metaphors, and that God had a hand in the Big Bang, and that God created humans through the process of evolution, I can't tell you that you are wrong (and you can't tell me that you are right). You are free to take that on faith. You are not free to call it scientific theory like the Intelligent Design guys are doing, because you don't have predictions that can be tested. You are not free to have it taught on science classrooms, because it's not science. You are free to believe in it with absolutely no evidence (that's called faith), and it might even be true (science only deals with testable, but it does not imply that if it's not testable it doesn't exist), but it's not science and science is not faith.
I think, by allowing us to seek out the ideal people with our exact interests at the moment, the internet allows us to get into the mindset to discount the people around us as less worthwhile to interact with.
Well, we've always discounted strangers you're being forced to talk to as less worthwhile to interact with. As adults, it's something we have to do all the time, so we get used to it. As a child, I remember being placed in a similar situation as the one you described. I didn't have a phone or the internet, but when my parents said, "this kid about your age is visiting, hang out with him" I felt that to be a chore, equivalent with mowing the lawn. "I don't want to hang out with a new kid I've never met. I have my own friends and he's not one of them." At 16, I would have had more tolerance for it, but it would still have been something I would do because of a sense of duty, and I'd be polite, but try to get it over with as soon as possible.
Kids and teenagers don't deal well with forced social situations. They have cliques. They try hard to get in the ones they want to get in, and they try hard to keep people out of them that they don't think are deserving of it. It's not the technology, and they grow out of it as this type of social interaction becomes a bigger part of their lives.
The company called "AT&T" is not, was not, and has only a tenuous relationship with the entity "Ma Bell," American Telephone a Telegraph. The company called AT&T is actually the old SBC, Southwestern Bell Communications, one of the RBOCs, that took over AT&Ts name and trademarks after buying the AT&T Corporation in 2005.
Yeah. tenuous relationship indeed. The old SBC was made up of several mergers from companies that split up from the old Ma Bell. The new AT&T is working it's way back up to becoming the old AT&T, and they're already reasonably close.
Foolish? why? because you fail to read? Have you honestly never run across all the people claiming to have Aspergers, or being accused of Aspergers because they're weird? Perhaps you are the foolish one and believe its true. I on the other hand think its relatively rare that the person actually has the disorder and is not looking for a way to feel better ("I'm wicked smart!") and have an excuse ("But I'm awkward cause this disorder.").
Foolish because you think "being awkward" or "weird" is something that needs an excuse. That mentality, very prevalent in society, is what causes people to self-diagnose themselves as having some form of autism. "Well, everyone is telling me that I'm not normal, I see online that people with my characteristics appear to have this disorder, so I must have it." Foolish because you implied these people need something to "feel ok...because they were too busy thinking instead of experiencing" as if they're missing out, and just need to fix themselves by conforming to what you believe they should be.
I can play your game. I could be as ridiculous as you, and turn it around. I could say that you make those statements because you're jealous of people with the ability to get totally lost in their own thoughts. People who can have as much fun solving problems alone in their room as you do when you have a night out on the town. I won't, though, because I don't believe that. What I do believe is that most people, you included, like to think the way that they live their lives is the best way to live, and that everyone who doesn't agree is "missing out." The highly intelligent people who "don't understand humans" think that about you. They think you're missing out, unable to see the wonder of the world that they can. You think they're missing out, because you don't understand them. If you stopped trying to tell each other that there's something wrong with the other group (they're awkward and you're unintelligent), then we'd stop trying to find something to explain our behavior, whatever that behavior is. We'd simply be able to say, "this is what I like to do" and that would be explanation enough.
But you know, the Japanese plant "shut itself down safely the second power was lost"...Turns out, you need to do far more than "safely shut down" since the fuel stays really fucking hot even after a shutdown. In fact, the fuel stays really fucking hot and keeps generating heat even after it is depleted and removed from the reactor, and has to be stored under water for a long time before anything can be done with it.
The Japanese plant is an older design. New designs have passive cooling, which don't require any power.
The thing is, even Fukushima, which is being touted as a disaster, should instead be hailed as a success. What's going on there is bad, but the amount of radiation leaked doesn't qualify as environmental disaster. The levels are far below those considered harmful, and that's for a tsunami and earthquake of a magnitude above what the thing was designed to withstand.
As for your Titanic reference: nobody is saying Nuclear power plants are 100% safe. We're saying the risk is manageable. The titanic sunk, other ships continued to sink, but people didn't stop traveling by boat as a reaction to the disaster.
Cancer doesn't tend to kill you the moment the first neutron damages your DNA. It takes a while.
This isn't exactly the type of source that I would cite in an argument, but the presentation is so well-done, that I just have to. In particular, you should look for the sections in the chart concerning Fukushima, the section containing "lowest one-year dose clearly linked to increased cancer risk," and sections for common medical procedures such as mammograms: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
If you don't believe something in the chart, feel free to look it up in a more reputable source, and post it. If you send it to Randall, I'm sure he'd correct the chart too.
What would happen if ghost was replaced with "sentient alien life?" There is no evidence but "science" minded people still spend resources to find it. The fact is that most people hold out hope (or faith) that some unseen thing is out there, whether it is ghosts, God or aliens. If they choose to believe and spend money and time trying to prove it, who are we to judge?
The evidence is that we exist, indicating the probability of evolution of sentient life is greater than 0. We don't know how much greater than 0, but the universe is a pretty big place, so small probabilities don't mean that much.
The claim that requires extraordinary evidence is that we're the only ones that evolved. The default assumption that we're not alone is the only logical stance until you can show exactly what is special about this particular location. It's not like stars of the same type of our Sun are rare.
la had half Edison's ability for self-promotion and half of George Westinghouse's business sense and some say, crookedness, we might have had "Telsa Electric" and the "Telsa Genius" prize.
And if I had half Einstein's intelligence and was born two hundred years earlier, my name would be the one in all the physics books.
"If" being the most significant word in both my scenario and yours.
I could be wrong, but I believe his point is that it is unfortunate that self-promotion skills and business sense are necessary qualities to guarantee success. In an ideal world, the merit of the work would be all that matters, not how well you can convince other people that your inferior product is actually better. It's not that he wishes Tesla would have those abilities, he wishes that those abilities were less important than they are.
I know, "ideal world" is far from the one we live in...
From that wikipedia list: 12 of the largest quakes on record occurred between December and March, 4 in November, and only 8 were between May and October. So... What's so important about the winter months?
Nothing. You've offered a 4 month window out of 12 months, and showed us 12 of the largest quakes out of the top 24 landed in that period. You'd expect the mean to be eight, if quakes are completely random. I ran a t-test separating the quakes listed on your wikipedia page by 4-month groups, making your december-march one group, may-july another, and august-november the third one. Assuming the null hypothesis that quakes are completely random, the two-tailed P value for that sample was 0.5242. ie, Not statistically significant at all.