It doesn't explain anything. If you respond to any question you can't answer by saying "God did it", all you are doing is using the word "God" instead of admitting you don't know the answer.
It's not supported by any evidence. From DNA to the fossil record to disease outbreaks, there is overwhelming evidence everywhere that natural selection is happening all the time, and that over time it leads to speciation and evolution. You can walk into any hospital and watch new species of bacteria evolve every week. You can compare DNA of various creatures over time and actually see where and when the changes occurred. The only evidence for creationism, on the other hand, is what? A book? If that's the only criteria, then there is equally "valid" evidence that humans are haunted by the ghosts of ancient deceased aliens. So clearly relying solely on ancient books and "because some guy said so" is an insufficient standard of evidence.
We all know Evolution's flaws
We do? The only "flaws" I'm aware of is that evolution isn't an intuitive concept to people who aren't used to thinking on geological timescales, and that it contradicts the fairy stories that their religious traditions tell them, which angers those who still think those stories should be taken literally.
Not believing in evolution doesn't mean believing in creationism.
True. Are you now arguing that Huckabee is not a creationist? If you are, say so... if not, the point is irrelevant.
You won't be able to learn anything if you refuse to admit Darwin might be wrong too.
Certainly, it's conceivable that the entire basis of modern biology is wrong. It's conceivable that the framework that led to the discovery of many of the vaccines and medicines that keep you and I alive from day to day is completely off-base, and that the resulting medicines and vaccines only work because of an incredible coincidence. I certainly can't prove otherwise. But then it's also conceivable that the entire world was created 5 seconds ago out of whole cloth, complete with fake implanted memories of my childhood and what I ate for breakfast this morning. I can't rule that out either.
But I can make a considered judgement about which is more likely, and my judgement is that the consensus scientific view is overwhelmingly likely to be the correct one, and the people who reject evolution are doing so mainly because they feel it contradicts their intuition and/or religious superstitions, and not on any rational grounds. People can quibble about the details, but to anyone with an open mind, the facts are plain.
I dunno...60% of Iraqis voted in their first election. I don't know if we've ever done that in the US.
Hell, that's nothing... before the fall of Saddam, nearly 100% of Iraqis voted in their elections. Furthermore, exit polling showed near-unanimous support for the incumbent, with the nearest competitor, "bullet to the head", languishing at less than 1%.
Ron Paul being a creationist is completely irrelevant to his ability to be a good president.
Really? To me it says something very relevant about his ability to reason from facts.
Religious views have no bearing on one's ability to run the country.
But creationism isn't just a religious belief, it's also a (fallacious) scientific position. How can a president deal rationally with issues such as biotechnology or global warming when he can't bring himself to accept evolution? It's like hiring an accountant who doesn't believe in negative numbers, and expecting him to do your taxes correctly. Not going to happen.
If not, let me interpret it for you. It shows that military spending as a percent of GDP has dropped over 100% in the last 50 years. [...] Any fool half paying attention would easily notice that our military even in the last 20 years has shrunk dramatically.
I suppose I am a fool, but I notice you had to include the qualification "as a percentage of GDP" in your claim. That suggests that the military has in fact been growing, just not as fast as the country's GDP has. Is that what you meant? Because if so, growing != shrinking.
I fail to see why the police, who are reasonably competent at catching criminals with only a vague physical description, should not be able to track down a car based on a similar description.
It may have something to do with the fact that cars are mass-produced, with millions of them exactly alike, whereas people (identical twins excepted) are all genetically and phenotypically unique.
That would solve the problem rather easily, wouldn't it?
It sounds like it would be easy... until you have your laptop stolen, or get infected with malware that gives other people access to your files, or email a file to your friend (who emails it to his friend, who happens to run a p2p client), etc. Then it's a little bit harder.
Put them on a Mac, and watch them FUBAR that system as well.
Not so likely... the number one way to FUBAR your Windows box is to open a file that turns out to have malware in it. Since almost all malware is written for Windows and almost none is written for MacOS/X, even the stupidest Mac user will at worst, try to open a.exe file and call you up complaining that the cool screen-saver their Nigerian friend emailed them won't run.
Just keep it in perspective. We're not going to die. We're going to adapt. All species that don't adapt, die. Species that adapt, live. I believe we're going to live and adapt. I think you're wrong for believing otherwise.
I agree that homo sapiens won't go extinct. However, we'll be lucky if our "adapting" doesn't include the loss of a few billion no-longer-sustainable human lives. In that scenario, life will ultimately go on, but things will get pretty ugly for quite a while.
I don't give a rip about the environment because I don't think man could destroy it even if he tried.
You're absolutely right. However the question isn't whether mankind can "destroy" the environment, but whether mankind can/will degrade it enough that it can no longer support the human population. All signs indicate that our current course is unsustainable -- that is, that we are using up the planet's natural resources faster than the planet can regenerate them. Given that, it's a matter of common sense that something will have to give -- once the planet's natural resources are largely used up, we will either have to learn to live without them, or a significant percentage of us will die.
The doomsday people have been wrong for decades, but the earth just keeps on healing itself no matter what the going wisdom is at the time.
Earth can heal itself, given time. But our current activities deplete it much faster than the rate it which it can recover. That isn't speculation, that's cold fact, and those who deny it are merely whistling past the graveyard.
Have you not been reading all the bitches about Vista? Many, many of the programs that run fine under XP do not run under Vista! There are a lot of reasons, but it sure puts the lie to simultaneously retaining backwards compatibility with every buggy program and half-broken API they've ever released all the way back to Windows 3.1.
I never said they succeeded -- only that that was their design goal. Just because your backwards-compatible design doesn't end up providing 100% backwards-compatibility doesn't mean it can't still hog resources relative to a design that didn't have that requirement.
How can Microsoft need SO much more resources to do essentially the same thing?
My guess is that they had to add in the new shiny features while simultaneously retaining backwards compatibility with every buggy program and half-broken API they've ever released all the way back to Windows 3.1. That sort of requirement can really complicate things, and you end up having to code everything as conservatively as possible and never take any shortcuts for fear of breaking something.
If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up, and commission VMWare or someone to include functionality for running "legacy/XP" programs in a VM. Then Microsoft's legions of good programmers might be free to come out with something good, as opposed to spending all their brain cycles trying not to break old software (and still sometimes failing, I might add)
I don't understand why he has to use so much energy.
It's a home plus an office. If he had located his office in a separate building, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Buying green power is great and all, but he sure isn't reducing his footprint.
There is a point to be made here also: stopping global warming doesn't have to be done by reducing energy consumption. It can also be done by producing energy in carbon-neutral ways. If you can produce your electricity without generating CO2, then there isn't much harm in using a lot of it (other than providing an opportunity for your political opponents to take jabs at you, of course)
That said, if I were Gore I would try to reduce my energy usage also, or perhaps just sell the building and move to a more energy-efficient one; if only to cut down on the political attacks.
Think about it. Has he made any concessions for living a more frugal life besides buying "carbon credits" from his own company? I haven't heard of any.
You haven't looked, either. Guilty until proven innocent, eh? Anyway, 30 seconds on Google turns up this link. Make of that what you will.
Unfortunately, the places where wind energy is a great resource generally aren't great places for pumped hydro storage - geographically speaking. Wind energy is most available and steady in large flat expanses
Of course, if you've got a pumped-hydro storage facility right there, you no longer need the wind to be that steady, since you've decoupled the energy production from the energy consumption with your giant water buffer. And a lot of wind farms are built along mountain passes since there's a lot of wind there too. A third idea, however, would be to store the water underground, perhaps in a cave or abandoned mine? Pump it up to level one, let it drain back down to level two...
Yeah, but the problem is that you need to build thousands and thousands of wind turbines to match a single nuclear plant, and even when you do that they're not nearly as good. This article is actually talking about base power, which wind simply can not provide, or at least not guarantee.
Agreed, those are both real limitations, which is why wind power won't be a 100% (or even 50%) solution. We'll need to develop many forms of renewable power (probably including nuclear, when it's appropriate) with aggressive energy conservation to get where we want to go.
Unfortunately, the magical elf wind farms are also subject to NIMBY idiots. Many of them environmentalists who claim that the turbines "kill birds." They don't kill more birds than the average freeway or office block, and we already have millions of those, but that argument doesn't phase the environmentalist idiots.
This, on the other hand, is less of a real problem. The "kills too many birds" claim has been refuted, and fewer and fewer people are going to be swayed by that particular argument. I'd be more worried about the "don't mess up my million dollar vacation home's view of the ocean" NIMBYs than the few idiots out there who still think that wind power will cause catastrophic bird kills.
Al Gore is trying to save the planet but not at an inconvenience to him, he uses far more energy than the average person does.
Some questions for you: (1) is the extra energy Al Gore uses coming from renewable/carbon-neutral sources? and (2) when you balance that extra energy he uses against the benefit he's provided by promoting climate change as an issue that ought to be taken seriously, do you find it to be a net positive?
Because I'm sure Mr. Gore could well have reduced his carbon footprint to zero, perhaps by spending the rest of his life as a hermit in a cave; it's just not clear how that would have helped people realize that global warming was a serious problem that needs to be dealt with.
And wind turbines are built and maintained for free by magical elves!
Well yeah, the magical elves are a nice feature, but the thing that really makes wind-farm maintenance less of a hassle than nuclear-plant maintenance is the fact that no radioactive materials are involved. That means that you don't have to give every employee a six-month security screening to make sure they won't start passing out free uranium samples to al-quaeda, and you don't have to make your wind farm 150% earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, and hijacked-airliner-proof. You don't have to surround your wind farm with maximum-security fencing and a legion of armed guards, either. Nor do you have to deal with all of the health and safety protocols required by OSHA to keep your employees from getting cancer, and finally you don't have to figure out which group of NIMBYs to send off your spent nuclear waste to, how to settle the resulting lawsuits, or how to deliver that waste safely to the disposal site.
No one can hack into a classified (Secret or above) network from the outside by sending them emails or anything else - *because classified networks are not connected to the outside world*.
Of course it takes just one wise guy to bring his laptop home, hook it up to the Internet, get pwned, then re-attach it to the classified network again, and presto -- your malware has access to the classified network! Now it can collect "interesting" information to its heart's content, and the next time the guy brings his laptop home, it can surreptitiously send it back to you:^)
It's not the idea. The idea was "everyone contributes, and everyone is equal." If that was still the idea, we wouldn't be hearing all these stories of editorial abuse,
It's still the idea, it's just that now some people are more equal than others.
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Except that he says he doesn't believe in evolution. The view you suggest is one that does believe in evolution.
We all know Evolution's flaws
We do? The only "flaws" I'm aware of is that evolution isn't an intuitive concept to people who aren't used to thinking on geological timescales, and that it contradicts the fairy stories that their religious traditions tell them, which angers those who still think those stories should be taken literally.
Not believing in evolution doesn't mean believing in creationism.
True. Are you now arguing that Huckabee is not a creationist? If you are, say so... if not, the point is irrelevant.
You won't be able to learn anything if you refuse to admit Darwin might be wrong too.
Certainly, it's conceivable that the entire basis of modern biology is wrong. It's conceivable that the framework that led to the discovery of many of the vaccines and medicines that keep you and I alive from day to day is completely off-base, and that the resulting medicines and vaccines only work because of an incredible coincidence. I certainly can't prove otherwise. But then it's also conceivable that the entire world was created 5 seconds ago out of whole cloth, complete with fake implanted memories of my childhood and what I ate for breakfast this morning. I can't rule that out either.
But I can make a considered judgement about which is more likely, and my judgement is that the consensus scientific view is overwhelmingly likely to be the correct one, and the people who reject evolution are doing so mainly because they feel it contradicts their intuition and/or religious superstitions, and not on any rational grounds. People can quibble about the details, but to anyone with an open mind, the facts are plain.
Hell, that's nothing... before the fall of Saddam, nearly 100% of Iraqis voted in their elections. Furthermore, exit polling showed near-unanimous support for the incumbent, with the nearest competitor, "bullet to the head", languishing at less than 1%.
Really? To me it says something very relevant about his ability to reason from facts.
Religious views have no bearing on one's ability to run the country.
But creationism isn't just a religious belief, it's also a (fallacious) scientific position. How can a president deal rationally with issues such as biotechnology or global warming when he can't bring himself to accept evolution? It's like hiring an accountant who doesn't believe in negative numbers, and expecting him to do your taxes correctly. Not going to happen.
I suppose I am a fool, but I notice you had to include the qualification "as a percentage of GDP" in your claim. That suggests that the military has in fact been growing, just not as fast as the country's GDP has. Is that what you meant? Because if so, growing != shrinking.
It may have something to do with the fact that cars are mass-produced, with millions of them exactly alike, whereas people (identical twins excepted) are all genetically and phenotypically unique.
It sounds like it would be easy... until you have your laptop stolen, or get infected with malware that gives other people access to your files, or email a file to your friend (who emails it to his friend, who happens to run a p2p client), etc. Then it's a little bit harder.
Not so likely... the number one way to FUBAR your Windows box is to open a file that turns out to have malware in it. Since almost all malware is written for Windows and almost none is written for MacOS/X, even the stupidest Mac user will at worst, try to open a
I agree that homo sapiens won't go extinct. However, we'll be lucky if our "adapting" doesn't include the loss of a few billion no-longer-sustainable human lives. In that scenario, life will ultimately go on, but things will get pretty ugly for quite a while.
You're absolutely right. However the question isn't whether mankind can "destroy" the environment, but whether mankind can/will degrade it enough that it can no longer support the human population. All signs indicate that our current course is unsustainable -- that is, that we are using up the planet's natural resources faster than the planet can regenerate them. Given that, it's a matter of common sense that something will have to give -- once the planet's natural resources are largely used up, we will either have to learn to live without them, or a significant percentage of us will die.
The doomsday people have been wrong for decades, but the earth just keeps on healing itself no matter what the going wisdom is at the time.
Earth can heal itself, given time. But our current activities deplete it much faster than the rate it which it can recover. That isn't speculation, that's cold fact, and those who deny it are merely whistling past the graveyard.
I never said they succeeded -- only that that was their design goal. Just because your backwards-compatible design doesn't end up providing 100% backwards-compatibility doesn't mean it can't still hog resources relative to a design that didn't have that requirement.
My guess is that they had to add in the new shiny features while simultaneously retaining backwards compatibility with every buggy program and half-broken API they've ever released all the way back to Windows 3.1. That sort of requirement can really complicate things, and you end up having to code everything as conservatively as possible and never take any shortcuts for fear of breaking something.
If I was Microsoft, I would design a new OS from the ground up, and commission VMWare or someone to include functionality for running "legacy/XP" programs in a VM. Then Microsoft's legions of good programmers might be free to come out with something good, as opposed to spending all their brain cycles trying not to break old software (and still sometimes failing, I might add)
My ints have only 16 bits, you insensitive clod!
It's a home plus an office. If he had located his office in a separate building, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Buying green power is great and all, but he sure isn't reducing his footprint.
There is a point to be made here also: stopping global warming doesn't have to be done by reducing energy consumption. It can also be done by producing energy in carbon-neutral ways. If you can produce your electricity without generating CO2, then there isn't much harm in using a lot of it (other than providing an opportunity for your political opponents to take jabs at you, of course)
That said, if I were Gore I would try to reduce my energy usage also, or perhaps just sell the building and move to a more energy-efficient one; if only to cut down on the political attacks.
Since we're being pedantic, I'd like to point out that there can be more than one "best" if multiple people are tied for first place.
You haven't looked, either. Guilty until proven innocent, eh? Anyway, 30 seconds on Google turns up this link. Make of that what you will.
No, because terrorists haven't figured out how to make destroying a couple of windmills, you know, terrifying.
Of course, if you've got a pumped-hydro storage facility right there, you no longer need the wind to be that steady, since you've decoupled the energy production from the energy consumption with your giant water buffer. And a lot of wind farms are built along mountain passes since there's a lot of wind there too. A third idea, however, would be to store the water underground, perhaps in a cave or abandoned mine? Pump it up to level one, let it drain back down to level two...
Big tank in the roof, big tank in the basement.
Just make sure your flood insurance is paid up....
Agreed, those are both real limitations, which is why wind power won't be a 100% (or even 50%) solution. We'll need to develop many forms of renewable power (probably including nuclear, when it's appropriate) with aggressive energy conservation to get where we want to go.
Unfortunately, the magical elf wind farms are also subject to NIMBY idiots. Many of them environmentalists who claim that the turbines "kill birds." They don't kill more birds than the average freeway or office block, and we already have millions of those, but that argument doesn't phase the environmentalist idiots.
This, on the other hand, is less of a real problem. The "kills too many birds" claim has been refuted, and fewer and fewer people are going to be swayed by that particular argument. I'd be more worried about the "don't mess up my million dollar vacation home's view of the ocean" NIMBYs than the few idiots out there who still think that wind power will cause catastrophic bird kills.
Some questions for you: (1) is the extra energy Al Gore uses coming from renewable/carbon-neutral sources? and (2) when you balance that extra energy he uses against the benefit he's provided by promoting climate change as an issue that ought to be taken seriously, do you find it to be a net positive?
Because I'm sure Mr. Gore could well have reduced his carbon footprint to zero, perhaps by spending the rest of his life as a hermit in a cave; it's just not clear how that would have helped people realize that global warming was a serious problem that needs to be dealt with.
Well yeah, the magical elves are a nice feature, but the thing that really makes wind-farm maintenance less of a hassle than nuclear-plant maintenance is the fact that no radioactive materials are involved. That means that you don't have to give every employee a six-month security screening to make sure they won't start passing out free uranium samples to al-quaeda, and you don't have to make your wind farm 150% earthquake-proof, hurricane-proof, and hijacked-airliner-proof. You don't have to surround your wind farm with maximum-security fencing and a legion of armed guards, either. Nor do you have to deal with all of the health and safety protocols required by OSHA to keep your employees from getting cancer, and finally you don't have to figure out which group of NIMBYs to send off your spent nuclear waste to, how to settle the resulting lawsuits, or how to deliver that waste safely to the disposal site.
Of course it takes just one wise guy to bring his laptop home, hook it up to the Internet, get pwned, then re-attach it to the classified network again, and presto -- your malware has access to the classified network! Now it can collect "interesting" information to its heart's content, and the next time the guy brings his laptop home, it can surreptitiously send it back to you
It's still the idea, it's just that now some people are more equal than others.