Perhaps the world appears bizarro because you misunderstand what's going on?
"Don't track me" is itself a complete misnomer. This is a request to advertisers not to correlate information to serve relevant advertisements. By checking this checkbox, the user is given no privacy guarantees whatsoever, because nobody is required to honor this flag, and even if they were, there's no technical way to enforce it. So telling users "click this checkbox to prevent tracking of your online activity" is essentially lying to them about the promises of clicking that checkbox.
Further, since it's simply an informational flag (a request), advertisers have to want to honor it. If you set it on by default for everyone on all browsers, do you think that's likely? If you set it on only if users explicitly turn it on, but you tell them "click this checkbox to prevent tracking of your online activity", do you think advertisers are going to count that as an informed choice, and respect that decision on that web browser?
For this to work (with the "legitimate" advertisers who are interested in honoring it in the first place), you need to fully inform every interested user and get their preference recorded in a way that those advertisers agree with. This isn't it.
Advertisers: This is not the "wrong choice for consumers." It's the right choice for PEOPLE. It just happens to be negative for advertisers
Why do you believe this is negative for advertisers? Because they'd make less money, right?
Why do you think they'd make less money? Because people would find ads less relevant, and therefore would click on them less, right?
Why do people click on advertisements? Because they see something they're interested in and want to pursue it, right?
Please don't pretend advertisements have zero value to consumers. Most of the advertising on the web is participatory: advertisers don't get paid unless the consumer actually clicks through the ad. People should have the ability to trade their own privacy for the benefit of having relevant advertisements. But that trade-off requires an informed decision. "Click here to prevent people from tracking your movements online!" is a flat out lie. Turning it on by default isn't that much better. Either way, you don't actually know what the user's intent was when you see this flag is set in a request.
If you can come up with a scheme to communicate a user's explicit desire to ask advertisers to respect this flag, knowing the costs to advertisement relevancy, advertisers should try to honor that. But this move is a step in the wrong direction (AIUI).
This doesn't necessarily solve the whole problem. The issue is that, for this to make sense, users have to make a fully informed choice. If you phrase this question in Slashdot simpleton terms, and ask, "Do you want every move you make on the Internet to be tracked?" and users say "no", that implies they now have some privacy guarantees, when they don't (this standard is not binding).
If you instead say something like: "Some advertisers target advertising based upon [some factors]. Advertisers may, if they choose, honor your choice to opt-out of this targeting. This may not change what these advertisers collect about you, but may change how that information is used, and will result in less relevant ads as you browse the web. Do you want to opt out?"
This probably isn't perfect, but it explains more fully what's going on (AIUI) and what new privacy guarantees the user has (none) or protection from "tracking" they have (none).
The problem is that since this is now a default in IE, you can't be sure that you're seeing it because the user specified a clear intent to turn it on, or if it's just on because it's a default. And even if they were asked if they wanted it on, how informed are they about that decision? If you were an advertiser trying to decide whether to respect such a standard, would this move make you more or less likely to respect it?
I have no idea if the OP's statements are accurate or not, but just because you consume something that has "100 calories" does not mean your body will metabolize 100 calories of energy. If the food is incompletely digested (perhaps because the food is hard to break down), you will excrete undigested food energy. The method used to determine caloric energy does not resemble the human digestive system, and it is indeed possible for only a portion of the measured food energy to actually be absorbed by the organism consuming it.
HFT is mainly about taking data (orders, and information derived from order fulfillments) and creating or modifying orders according to some set of rules that are maintained outside of the trading system. I'm not convinced that the people hurt by poor HFT rules deserve assistance when their rules result in something unexpected.
So, if faster is better, what if we just moved those rules into the trading system itself? Let the system evaluate everyone's rules in parallel (perhaps massively so), and execute the resulting orders simultaneously.
Here is your problem. A parent does not teach a child to discover everything the parent thinks they should know. Can you imagine how insanely stupid it would be for a parent to say what happens when you touch that hot stove instead of don't touch that, it is hot and will hurt you?
That's interesting, and I think this highlights a fundamental difference between us that might explain why communicating is so difficult.
I actually believe strongly that you should teach the child this way. You shouldn't actually allow your child to get burned, but if you let them touch the stove before it's actually dangerous, or quickly enough that they can feel the heat without getting burned, they'll learn much better than if you just tell them not to do something.
Teaching a child to simply accept what you tell them, without allowing the child to understand why, through their own curiosity, experimentation, and their own thought processes, creates a child that is dependent upon other people telling them what's true. And that's how they'll live the rest of their life. No curiosity, and no ability to actually reason through what they're experiencing and draw their own conclusions, because they never learned to do it.
Children need to learn facts and behavior. Teaching them religion is not in any way detrimental to thinking critically or logic and reason.
It is when you tell them not to think critically or apply logic and reason to the things you're teaching them. Telling a child to accept something simply because you've told them it's true actually precludes critical thinking, right?
However, I totally accept that it is possible to teach a child about a religion's creation stories, provided the storytelling doesn't come with any "you must accept this as literal truth without questioning it" baggage. Children should learn to question things. That's really the crux of the issue, isn't it? You can tell them the creation stories, just like you can tell them the facts that underpin evolutionary theory. Teach them never to accept things blindly, whether the ideas come from religion or science. Teach them to think, not simply accept.
Everything in religion that conflicts with science can be rationally explained as God created all of science
This is irrational when you consider that: 1. Other religions proclaim things in direct contradiction to each other, and your own religion. Since the same argument could be applied to every religion, that means each religion's claims about creation are equally rational and (presumably) all equally on the same footing as scientific consensus. With no rational differentiation between them, adherence to one at the exclusion of all others is inherently irrational. 2. I could just make shit up that meets your requirements. I can claim that we are all elements of the imagination of a giant space lizard. This magic space lizard just made the entire universe to look like what it is, invented science and Al Gore. We can't see the lizard or test that he exists because he's outside our universe, thinking all of this up. You can't prove he doesn't exist, therefore I am rational believing he does.
"But I have this book!" is an argument rooted firmly in a logical fallacy. By definition, logical fallacies cannot contribute to a rational argument.
All your objections claimed to date can be rationally explained away and it is your own irrational thoughts clinging onto your insistence that you are somehow right and everyone else is wrong.
Here is where I think we really do just disagree on what it means to be rational. Naturally we aren't going to come to any sort of agreement if we don't agree on the thing we're even talking about.
You are worse then a jehovas witness with this shit.
When you teach them that logic and reason sometimes "don't work" because they lead you to conclusions that disagree with a religion's holy book, the child grows up believing in logical fallacies (most importantly, appeal to authority and appeal to majority), and their education (and future ability to succeed in one of these roles) is impacted negatively.
Why do you not pay attention?
You're not answering my question, and I feel like I'm talking to a wall that responds with ad hominems.
You seem to think that kids can grow up safely isolating their "sciency" sides from their "religious" sides. I don't feel the two are so easily separated. A parent can't teach their child to think critically while simultaneously smacking them on the head when they think critically about their religion. The child isn't going to learn to trust in reason when you have a minder following up and saying, "Good job thinking rationally. Unfortunately you're wrong because a bunch of people believe something different, and they are many and you are one, so you must be the one that's wrong. Also, please don't look up 'appeal to majority' or 'appeal to authority' on the Internet." The child will be less effective trying to understand the world around him if he's been raised to accept "God did it" as an acceptable and satisfying conclusion for anything he doesn't understand. The child will be less successful in a research role, where the strictest application of logic and reason is needed, if he doesn't trust that logic and reason will work, because it's clearly wrong for things that his religion teaches him.
Note that I never said the child will be ineffective, or will fail completely, just that this belief system will undermine his education.
There are really two ways I think to fully reconcile a belief in both science and religion. Either someone must redefine logic and reason so as to accept religion as a rational belief, or they accept that their religions beliefs are irrational. Nobody has to stop believing something, just because it's irrational, but this delusion that a religious mythology (again, at the exclusion of all other religions) must be correct, for logical reasons that have been considered critically, suggests to me that logic, reason, and critical thinking mean something very different to this person than it does to me. And how can you have a meaningful conversation about something if you can't even agree on what it is that you're talking about?
If you agree that a religious belief is irrational, the rest of the discussion falls into place: If faith in the irrational in any way compromises faith in the rational, teaching the irrational is at the expense of the rational, and in a world where performance of the rational is more important to success and progress, this child will be less successful.
The two can coexist even when they contradict and children are completely capable of doing it. Your problem seems to be that you do not want them to know their religion.
The two concepts can coexist, for some definition of coexist.
For children to be successful in a field that requires the correct application of logic, reason, or even the scientific method, they must trust logic, reason and possibly the scientific method. When you teach them that logic and reason sometimes "don't work" because they lead you to conclusions that disagree with a religion's holy book, the child grows up believing in logical fallacies (most importantly, appeal to authority and appeal to majority), and their education (and future ability to succeed in one of these roles) is impacted negatively.
Do you disagree with this, or just that it's appropriate for someone to point it out as something we should stop doing?
I disagree; I think it's exactly the point. To teach your children facts (that evolution occurs), and that the logical inference from those facts (a scientific theory of our evolutionary origins) is wrong only because it disagrees with your religion's holy book, which must be correct for all sorts of reasons logical fallacies, prevents your children from understanding, utilizing and trusting the scientific method.
lol.. I never said teaching kids about evolution was wrong, I said denying them creation or anything else because you insist evolution is the only true way was wrong.
Where did I say that you said teaching kids about evolution was wrong? I'm talking about taking facts, and using critical thinking, logic and reason to arrive at theory. These are the skills that we need to teach our children. When you subvert the "critical thinking" part and tell children that their reasoning is wrong because it disagrees with a special book, they don't learn this lesson. They don't learn to think critically ("don't ask why this book is special, just accept that it is") and they don't learn to trust logic and reason (it's wrong here, so it's not trustworthy), and by extension, the scientific method.
These children will be at an enormous disadvantage in fields that require correct application of the scientific method, because they will accept things as dogma, and will confuse dogma with science.
The evolution debate is just the classic example of this. You may feel you have a good handle on the limits of science and the limits of religion, but kids aren't learning about the evolution debate that way.
So you are saying that if a supernatural being existed that was capable of doing something to impact our universe, he would have to do it in some spectacular way that is directly obvious
You say spectacularly obvious, and I say observable. Advances in technology and our ability to model physics in computers allows us to "spy" on realms of the universe we couldn't even imagine a few generations ago. The wiggle room for a god to mess with us in a way we can't detect gets smaller and smaller with every advance.
To be honest, this sounds like the earlier argument: you can never rule out that gods are just being craftier than we are at trying to observe their actions, no matter how good we get at observing the universe. They're gods, right? We'll never be able to perfectly model the entire universe (the simulation would be larger than the universe itself, which obviously can't happen), so we'll never be able to rule this out.
Your strawman is bordering a false dichotomy. Burning witches and claiming the earth is flat is not something directly or even indirectly supported by scripture.
You're right, sorry.
But the scripture does say very specific things about the act of creation that are provably false. A few hundred years ago, most people would claim those things were factual. Today, those things are now considered allegories.
I'm calling bullshit. What science has prevailed against was early dogma or otherwise known as mans attempt to understand and explain the universe.... it has addressed where man has taken figurative language as literal and shown it not to be practical or possible but it has never proved anything to be wrong in it.
I think you and I have different ideas about what it means to prove something wrong. If a group of people say X is true, and you demonstrate that X can't really be true, you've proved it wrong. The fact is that there are many stories in the Christian bible that were accepted as absolute truth just a few generations ago, and now they are commonly held to be allegories. The Christian bible is changing in the sense that what we accept and take from it is changing. For someone to say that it is an inviolate source of literal truth, except for the parts that w
Whether it is appropriate to believe something or not is sort of beside the point.
I disagree; I think it's exactly the point. To teach your children facts (that evolution occurs), and that the logical inference from those facts (a scientific theory of our evolutionary origins) is wrong only because it disagrees with your religion's holy book, which must be correct for all sorts of reasons logical fallacies, prevents your children from understanding, utilizing and trusting the scientific method.
The point is that it is inappropriate categorically deny something because you didn't see it or do not understanding how it could happen.
Perhaps there is a fine line between categorically denying something, and categorically refusing to accept something. I feel I'm doing the latter, not the former.
What if the divine intervention was making someone pause and check their pockets
Between the time a god considers intervening, and the time someone decides to pause and check their pockets, something must have happened to the person's mind to make them change their behavior. Absent intervention, they wouldn't have paused and checked their pockets, right? The mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is a physical system bound by exactly the same laws of physics everything else appears to be bound by. So something physical must have happened in the brain of this person to cause them to change their behavior.
Or would you turn around and say that the mind is magical and, like gods, not bound by the physical universe?
But you do not get to tell others they can't believe something, or they have to think like you, or they have to dismiss their religion and supplant it with what you feel is better
If this were the right attitude, we'd still be burning witches and imprisoning anyone that suggested the earth was round, or that the sun doesn't revolve around it. At some point you have to take a stand and call ignorance what it is. Thinking about the last few hundred years, are you really of the opinion that the world would be a better place if religion were always allowed to trump science?
Historically, science has always ultimately prevailed, and what once were absolute religious truths are now fables and moral tales. "We know better now." Do you believe that that trend has somehow stopped in 2012? Surely by now we've figured out what parts of the bible are just bedtime stories, and which parts were historically accurate? In 2112, everything that people believe is historically accurate in the Christian bible will continue to be considered historically accurate?
Religion and science can coexist perfectly well together and even conflict with each other as long as people understand one is religion and one is science.
I think I agree with this. The trick is in how you handle the situation where they contradict each other. You can either apply critical thinking skills, and maybe learn something, or you can be ignorant. One of these advances mankind's understanding of the universe and improves the standard of living across the globe. The other makes you feel warm and fuzzy and occasionally results in your neighbor being persecuted.
The historocity of the bible is well founded.
The "historocity" of the bible is changing all the time.
But you ask why believe in it,- because you can.
Sorry, but that is unconvincing. There are many things that I could choose to believe in simply because I can. There are many other religions that are far older than Christianity that I could choose to believe in, just because I can. There are things that I can make up and start believing in. I see nothing about any one of these fantasies and mythologies that encourage me to "believe".
And yet they call that a fallacy because all of what you know is not the entirety of what exists.
Basically this argument boils down to the assertion that because something could exist outside of the observable universe, it's appropriate to believe something exists outside of the observable universe. I don't subscribe to that notion. If it's outside of the observable universe, it cannot interact with the observable universe. Once it interacts with the observable universe, it becomes observable and we can learn something about it. Until then it's just mental masturbation and I have more interesting things to do with my life.
As soon as entity is classified as divine, its abilities would be beyond any limitation you would arbitrarily place on it.
I'm not quite sure I'm following. If I'm on the top of a building with a large rock in hand, and I'm intent on dropping it on someone's head, but a god is intent on preventing me, somehow, when I release that rock, something has to prevent it from reaching its target. Either His Divine Hand would knock the rock aside, or maybe the god will be sneaky about it and poof into existence a penny that causes a child to stop and pick it up, which causes my target to pause for a moment after I released the rock. But what if I plastered the city block with a million cameras and sensors? Surely I would observe the penny poofing into existence. Oh but gods are craftier than that, right? They'll just go back in time and create the penny before I put up all of my cameras. There's no way to win this argument. Either gods interact with the universe in ways that we can observe, or for some reason they want to be sneaky and avoid anyone claiming to be a scientist from ever seeing them.
Well, first, when did science decide it knew everything and we couldn't know more?
I think maybe this comes from my suggestion that if it ain't observable, it ain't knowable? I don't know how much that has to do with science per se, but for me, it's common sense. What's the point in trying to figure something out that's impossible to ever figure out? Either gods interact with the universe in ways we can study, or they don't. If they don't, they can never influence our lives, and so they essentially don't exist. "But you'll see!" implies that they'll interact with our universe sometime in the future. We can talk again when that happens.
You are the one insisting a set of rules exist that can never be broken despite it happening all around you on a quantum level.
I don't believe I'm insisting on anything of the kind. I suspect we have simply misunderstood each other. I agree that our understanding of the universe is incomplete. But I do know that the model we do have has no gods in it, and no evidence of gods exists that would invalidate those theories, so the theories stand as the most likely and most complete model of the universe. If you want to add some observations that disprove any of those models and point us in the direction of gods, please do so.
lol.. You where just saying the opposite.
Do you think it is more likely that I believe inconsistent things, or that I've failed to communicate my (internally consistent) position to you?
but you cannot say it "shuts down" any account of a creation.
I didn't say that. I suspect you're trying to argue with me about something an earlier poster said. Some literal accounts of creationism (which you've acknowledge were non-literal fables mixed in with the apparently otherwise historical records) can be easily disproven ("shut down") by observations (facts) of evolution. But of course you can't say that it's impossible. The difference is that I see no reason to believe something simply because it isn't impossible. There are effectively an infinite number of other possible explanations for the orig
There is a story about a guy who gets on a train. He looks out the window and see sheep. They are all white so he declares all sheep are white- none can be black or blue because he has never saw any like that. Are you saying that this guy is correct or something in his declaration simply because you too have only seen white sheep?
This guy is "correct" in the sense that Newton was correct about gravity. Both created a model of the universe that accurately allows them the ability to predict something, like the color of sheep. If this man never sees a sheep that isn't white, his model is sufficiently accurate and might as well be absolute truth.
On the other hand, if this man ever came across wool that came from a sheep that wasn't white, he would have to decide between (a) theorizing the existence of sheep of other colors, possibly resulting in a quest to confirm his theory and advance his knowledge of the universe; or (b) he can shrug his shoulders and say "God did it," and never be the wiser.
Why are you insisting that a divine intervention would have to deviate from the laws of physics as we know it?
Because no known mechanism exists for a divine being to affect our universe. If the deity appeared before someone, and spoke to them, somehow the deity is affecting our universe, by creating the perception of the deity's image and voice in the mind of an observer. If the deity is actually creating audible pressure waves in the air, and emitting photons that can be picked up by the observer's eyes, those are things that can be measured by other processes. The spontaneous creation of photons and sound would be an interesting event, and if they can't be explained, would require some theories as to where they came from.
At the very least, these observations would register as evidence that our theories are incomplete, and any model/theory that outright forbids the events that were observed would be immediately suspicious.
But your rules of physics
My rules of physics? Your bias is showing.
seem to not be hard set rules when we look at quantum applications so again, you have perpetuated the myth that everything has to be how you know it.
I disagree. Nobody ever said we have a complete understanding of the universe. But we do know a great deal about it, and the theories that we've devised are consistent with all of our observations, including the fact that we observe people that believe in gods, and we observe literature that makes claims about gods. All it takes is one reliable observation to destroy a scientific theory (or at least spur a refinement to it). If you want to replace theories of evolution with something based on a religion, start with finding that observation that disproves evolution.
How can an eye witness confirm anything happen? How can any history be recorded and told after it happened?
WIth respect to the American Revolution, on one side we have thousands of independent accounts, self-described as historical records, on the winning side and losing side, in agreement about events, and attesting to the validity of formal written records, with ample physical evidence of the events. On the other side, we have a small number of accounts written thousands of years ago, with many claims that are provably false. Totally the same thing.
Why is it that you insist that there is only way to show something and that is through science?
Science doesn't "show something". Science is how some of us attempt to explain that which we have been shown. If you show us something that is inconsistent with our theories of the universe, our theories will be disproven
Because a population is effective at something despite a handicap does not mean the handicap does not exist. It should be fairly obvious that, in a role that requires rigid rational and critical thinking, someone that exhibits an inability to think critically and rationally about something fundamental to their life would be less effective in that role than someone that does not. That does not mean a religious person can't be effective, but it does imply that the average religious person will be less effective than the average atheist, in some roles.
You are stuck in a fallacy trying to state that only what you can see exists.
By definition, if I cannot observe something, it cannot affect me. If something, such as a god, were capable of having any effect whatsoever in the universe, by definition, that effect would be observable by us. We would perceive that effect as a deviation from our understanding of the laws of physics, and we would have to throw away all of our theories that do not explain that observation, and try to find a new theory that incorporated it. If this happens often enough, the scientific theories about the nature of the universe would begin to describe a universe guided by a deity, and science would confirm (presumably your) religion.
including eye witness accounts of it.
How can an eyewitness account confirm a god? How did these eyewitness accounts come to you? In a book written by a person? What makes you think the thing the eyewitness observed was actually a god? What makes you think that the written account of that story was even truthful, or translated correctly?
that is not exactly empirical evidence but it is far from zero evidence.
From a scientific standpoint, it is exactly zero evidence. From a faith-based perspective, people tend to believe what they want to believe, and so I completely understand and appreciate that things written in a book that all of your peers believe is true and accurate means that you're likely to believe it's true and accurate. I don't suffer from your groupthink and confirmation bias, and so written 3rd-party anecdotes such as this don't sway me.
Another way to think about "evidence" in situations like this: if these observations happened today, and were written down by someone in the same manner (i.e., we can't talk to the person making the observation, or the person that recorded the observation), would a courtroom in the US admit that account as evidence?
Creating is an idea put forth in the Bible, and it has been thoroughly shut down.
Hahaha.. you are so funny. Tell me, where has it been shut down. Where exactly has science proved that supernatural events never- ever- happened at all.
I think the other poster was talking about the literal creation stories, where earth was created 6000 years ago, life was created exactly as it appears today, etc. None of that is consistent with our observations of the world around us and there are no plausible theories that incorporate both the creationist account and those observations.
I agree that it's ridiculous to suggest that science test supernatural events, but I don't think that's what the parent poster was suggesting.
Creation simply is not testable.. period.
The question of whether a deity created the universe can't be tested. That the universe was created 6000 years ago can be. It's possible to whittle away pretty much everything in the creation myth that doesn't involve a god doing something. What we're left with is something indistinguishable from the thing that science explains with evolution and abiogenesis, plus some supernatural component that by definition we can't test, because we can't observe. And if we can't observe it, it can't affect us, and so what's the point in thinking about it?
A "species" is not even a well-defined term. It is a convenience term that we use to label things. Nothing about evolution requires speciation. Generally speciation occurs when two populations mutate/evolve to the point where they don't interbreed much, but there are always exceptions, and some populations "between" the two can interbreed with the others. It's all a huge gray area. There's no one moment where there's a clap of thunder from the sky and a voice proclaims the first member of a new species is born.
Evolution is simply change/adaptation over time. There are facts of evolution, which we observe (moth experiments, antibiotic resistance), and there are theories about how humans evolved from our ancestors, our place in the tree of life, etc., and there are theories about how the first organisms arose. The theories of evolution and abiogensis seem completely consistent with our observations of the world, are entirely plausible and do not require us to invoke magic or deities. Those theories, consequently, prevail. Other theories are easily refutable, or make no attempt to explain the mountain of observations that the prevailing evolutionary theories explain, until they invoke "well a god must have just done it that way". And at that point there's just no point.
It is unlikely that you will ever see irrefutable proof of anything resembling this. A computer simulation of the evolution of life at the scale of the planet earth would be impractical. Further, mutations are essentially random. Even if you could get a computer simulation that accurately modeled how live evolves, and you ran that simulation repeatedly, it is unlikely that the resulting intelligent species would resemble humans.
You say "neither side" as though there are two competing scientific theories. I would advise you to check your assumptions there.
The fact that evolution works does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a creator.
People should not confuse the facts of evolution, the theory of evolution, and abiogenesis. This is part of the reason it's so frustrating trying to have a productive conversation about these topics, because some people seem to think that accepting the fact that bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance means they have to accept that life evolved from a lifeless confluence of chemicals and energy, and so we end up with a completely inappropriate distrust of science and medicine when it comes to the things that matter.
TFA says "valid" notices only. AIUI, a site's ranking wouldn't be affected if Google doesn't comply with the requests. Spamming Google with bogus notices wouldn't change anything.
The costs of lax safety standards could include injury or death. In many cases, the risks can't be adequately assessed, or they can be, but a lot of people don't believe them. In these situations, fear influences our perception of risk, and that perception of risk factors into the costs. We get benefits from lax safety standards too. Products are cheaper to make. Sometimes technologies are easier to design and implement.
On the flip side, excessively conservative safety standards means that everything is more expensive. Some technologies are deemed impractical or too costly to implement and bring to market. We lose out on useful products and (more importantly) technological advancements and investments that could result from it. The benefits of conservative safety standards amount to, in some cases, fewer injuries or deaths. In many cases, though, the benefits are simply psychological: we "feel" safer.
Do it on hard evidence.
This we agree on. I think I'm a little more cynical here, though, in that I believe the more democratic a government is (ignoring corruption for a moment), the more their safety standards will bend toward the fearful and irrational than to hard evidence. A corrupt government with a big industry lobby around that has skin in the game would obviously change that, but I don't really see a Big EMR industry lobby around, so I am automatically suspicious that our safety standards are indeed too conservative for our own good.
1. It affects employees of the company, because employees of a company tend to hold a disproportionate share of their long-term savings in company stock and options.
2. A public company's board of directors is usually elected by the shareholders. If the shareholders view a falling share price as a sign that the company has problems, they may work through the board (or replace the board) to change the leadership of the company. This is less of a concern with companies like Google and Facebook since the founders own enough shares that they can withstand that sort of pressure.
While you can think of marriage as a legal contract, you do not receive marriage benefits as a consequence of anything written in the "contract", but because the state provides special recognition for marriage per se. In fact, some types of marriage do not require any explicit act for it to be recognized as such (common law marriage). You cannot bestow status granted as a matter of a law by way of a private contract.
This is really the heart of the debate. If this were simply a matter of contract law, there would be no issue here. Contracts valid in one state are valid in all states (though if you need the state to enforce the contract, the state may decline to do so if it doesn't like the terms, such as non-competes), and states will make an attempt to interpret contracts according to the conventions of the state the contract was entered into. But the recognition issues with same-sex marriage have nothing to do with contract law, and everything to do with the state granting benefits to people that have entered into marriage (regardless of how it's entered into). Each state defines marriage differently, and bestows legal benefits based upon that definition. Nothing in the law or constitution says those definitions or benefits have to be consistent from state to state, just that state benefits cannot favor one protected class over another.
I somehow doubt that the typical "muslim" suicide bomber had anything whatsoever to do with the planning or execution of the bombing that killed them. They "agree" to do it for reasons mostly unrelated to the goals of the bombing. IMO, the real bombers here aren't the ones blowing up.
In other words, you support tax breaks for behaviors you consider moral (heterosexual marriage)? If so, your morals are almost certainly inherently religious, which IMO makes this wrong as a matter of public policy. All marriage benefits should be retracted, and where we have legitimate rational needs for benefits that favor people engaged in some sort of union, those benefits should be rationally defensible and should apply to any type of union that applies for the situation. If we want to encourage multi-parent households for the good of our children, for instance, we should walk into that with hard data that shows what types of households allow children to thrive most, and make our benefit match. This is unlikely to result in something defined in terms of a heterosexual pair, and would certainly apply to homosexual couples as well as extended families (who says siblings can't raise a child just as well as a traditional mother/father? what about a single parent plus grandparents? why should any of these types of households refuse to get benefits we grant today to married couples that are ostensibly there to promote a healthy household within which to raise a child?).
Personally, I think that marriage should be redefined as between any two consenting adults.
Why two? Seriously, once we separate the legal concept of "marriage" from the religious concept, you might as well keep taking things away, and redefine "marriage benefits" in more specific terms, until you can actually rationally defend what you have left. IMO, this will probably be easier to get everyone to accept because the final result will probably resemble marriage in no way whatsoever, which means there's no reason for the "OMG marriage is under attack" crowd to feel under attack.
I think part of the confusion here is that you seem to think that things like deciding "next of kin" are things that we can change through private contracts. These are things that are decided as a matter of law, not contracts. If one marries in California, but moves to Texas and lives there until they die, do you think that Texas is going to defer to California's definition of "next of kin" to decide how to handle the estate (presumably without a will that would have made the matter moot by making it explicit)?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the world appears bizarro because you misunderstand what's going on?
"Don't track me" is itself a complete misnomer. This is a request to advertisers not to correlate information to serve relevant advertisements. By checking this checkbox, the user is given no privacy guarantees whatsoever, because nobody is required to honor this flag, and even if they were, there's no technical way to enforce it. So telling users "click this checkbox to prevent tracking of your online activity" is essentially lying to them about the promises of clicking that checkbox.
Further, since it's simply an informational flag (a request), advertisers have to want to honor it. If you set it on by default for everyone on all browsers, do you think that's likely? If you set it on only if users explicitly turn it on, but you tell them "click this checkbox to prevent tracking of your online activity", do you think advertisers are going to count that as an informed choice, and respect that decision on that web browser?
For this to work (with the "legitimate" advertisers who are interested in honoring it in the first place), you need to fully inform every interested user and get their preference recorded in a way that those advertisers agree with. This isn't it.
Advertisers: This is not the "wrong choice for consumers." It's the right choice for PEOPLE. It just happens to be negative for advertisers
Why do you believe this is negative for advertisers? Because they'd make less money, right?
Why do you think they'd make less money? Because people would find ads less relevant, and therefore would click on them less, right?
Why do people click on advertisements? Because they see something they're interested in and want to pursue it, right?
Please don't pretend advertisements have zero value to consumers. Most of the advertising on the web is participatory: advertisers don't get paid unless the consumer actually clicks through the ad. People should have the ability to trade their own privacy for the benefit of having relevant advertisements. But that trade-off requires an informed decision. "Click here to prevent people from tracking your movements online!" is a flat out lie. Turning it on by default isn't that much better. Either way, you don't actually know what the user's intent was when you see this flag is set in a request.
If you can come up with a scheme to communicate a user's explicit desire to ask advertisers to respect this flag, knowing the costs to advertisement relevancy, advertisers should try to honor that. But this move is a step in the wrong direction (AIUI).
This doesn't necessarily solve the whole problem. The issue is that, for this to make sense, users have to make a fully informed choice. If you phrase this question in Slashdot simpleton terms, and ask, "Do you want every move you make on the Internet to be tracked?" and users say "no", that implies they now have some privacy guarantees, when they don't (this standard is not binding).
If you instead say something like: "Some advertisers target advertising based upon [some factors]. Advertisers may, if they choose, honor your choice to opt-out of this targeting. This may not change what these advertisers collect about you, but may change how that information is used, and will result in less relevant ads as you browse the web. Do you want to opt out?"
This probably isn't perfect, but it explains more fully what's going on (AIUI) and what new privacy guarantees the user has (none) or protection from "tracking" they have (none).
The problem is that since this is now a default in IE, you can't be sure that you're seeing it because the user specified a clear intent to turn it on, or if it's just on because it's a default. And even if they were asked if they wanted it on, how informed are they about that decision? If you were an advertiser trying to decide whether to respect such a standard, would this move make you more or less likely to respect it?
I have no idea if the OP's statements are accurate or not, but just because you consume something that has "100 calories" does not mean your body will metabolize 100 calories of energy. If the food is incompletely digested (perhaps because the food is hard to break down), you will excrete undigested food energy. The method used to determine caloric energy does not resemble the human digestive system, and it is indeed possible for only a portion of the measured food energy to actually be absorbed by the organism consuming it.
HFT is mainly about taking data (orders, and information derived from order fulfillments) and creating or modifying orders according to some set of rules that are maintained outside of the trading system. I'm not convinced that the people hurt by poor HFT rules deserve assistance when their rules result in something unexpected.
So, if faster is better, what if we just moved those rules into the trading system itself? Let the system evaluate everyone's rules in parallel (perhaps massively so), and execute the resulting orders simultaneously.
Here is your problem. A parent does not teach a child to discover everything the parent thinks they should know. Can you imagine how insanely stupid it would be for a parent to say what happens when you touch that hot stove instead of don't touch that, it is hot and will hurt you?
That's interesting, and I think this highlights a fundamental difference between us that might explain why communicating is so difficult.
I actually believe strongly that you should teach the child this way. You shouldn't actually allow your child to get burned, but if you let them touch the stove before it's actually dangerous, or quickly enough that they can feel the heat without getting burned, they'll learn much better than if you just tell them not to do something.
Teaching a child to simply accept what you tell them, without allowing the child to understand why, through their own curiosity, experimentation, and their own thought processes, creates a child that is dependent upon other people telling them what's true. And that's how they'll live the rest of their life. No curiosity, and no ability to actually reason through what they're experiencing and draw their own conclusions, because they never learned to do it.
Children need to learn facts and behavior. Teaching them religion is not in any way detrimental to thinking critically or logic and reason.
It is when you tell them not to think critically or apply logic and reason to the things you're teaching them. Telling a child to accept something simply because you've told them it's true actually precludes critical thinking, right?
However, I totally accept that it is possible to teach a child about a religion's creation stories, provided the storytelling doesn't come with any "you must accept this as literal truth without questioning it" baggage. Children should learn to question things. That's really the crux of the issue, isn't it? You can tell them the creation stories, just like you can tell them the facts that underpin evolutionary theory. Teach them never to accept things blindly, whether the ideas come from religion or science. Teach them to think, not simply accept.
Everything in religion that conflicts with science can be rationally explained as God created all of science
This is irrational when you consider that:
1. Other religions proclaim things in direct contradiction to each other, and your own religion. Since the same argument could be applied to every religion, that means each religion's claims about creation are equally rational and (presumably) all equally on the same footing as scientific consensus. With no rational differentiation between them, adherence to one at the exclusion of all others is inherently irrational.
2. I could just make shit up that meets your requirements. I can claim that we are all elements of the imagination of a giant space lizard. This magic space lizard just made the entire universe to look like what it is, invented science and Al Gore. We can't see the lizard or test that he exists because he's outside our universe, thinking all of this up. You can't prove he doesn't exist, therefore I am rational believing he does.
"But I have this book!" is an argument rooted firmly in a logical fallacy. By definition, logical fallacies cannot contribute to a rational argument.
All your objections claimed to date can be rationally explained away and it is your own irrational thoughts clinging onto your insistence that you are somehow right and everyone else is wrong.
Here is where I think we really do just disagree on what it means to be rational. Naturally we aren't going to come to any sort of agreement if we don't agree on the thing we're even talking about.
You are worse then a jehovas witness with this shit.
...and, this will be my last response.
Why do you not pay attention?
You're not answering my question, and I feel like I'm talking to a wall that responds with ad hominems.
You seem to think that kids can grow up safely isolating their "sciency" sides from their "religious" sides. I don't feel the two are so easily separated. A parent can't teach their child to think critically while simultaneously smacking them on the head when they think critically about their religion. The child isn't going to learn to trust in reason when you have a minder following up and saying, "Good job thinking rationally. Unfortunately you're wrong because a bunch of people believe something different, and they are many and you are one, so you must be the one that's wrong. Also, please don't look up 'appeal to majority' or 'appeal to authority' on the Internet." The child will be less effective trying to understand the world around him if he's been raised to accept "God did it" as an acceptable and satisfying conclusion for anything he doesn't understand. The child will be less successful in a research role, where the strictest application of logic and reason is needed, if he doesn't trust that logic and reason will work, because it's clearly wrong for things that his religion teaches him.
Note that I never said the child will be ineffective, or will fail completely, just that this belief system will undermine his education.
There are really two ways I think to fully reconcile a belief in both science and religion. Either someone must redefine logic and reason so as to accept religion as a rational belief, or they accept that their religions beliefs are irrational. Nobody has to stop believing something, just because it's irrational, but this delusion that a religious mythology (again, at the exclusion of all other religions) must be correct, for logical reasons that have been considered critically, suggests to me that logic, reason, and critical thinking mean something very different to this person than it does to me. And how can you have a meaningful conversation about something if you can't even agree on what it is that you're talking about?
If you agree that a religious belief is irrational, the rest of the discussion falls into place: If faith in the irrational in any way compromises faith in the rational, teaching the irrational is at the expense of the rational, and in a world where performance of the rational is more important to success and progress, this child will be less successful.
The two can coexist even when they contradict and children are completely capable of doing it. Your problem seems to be that you do not want them to know their religion.
The two concepts can coexist, for some definition of coexist.
For children to be successful in a field that requires the correct application of logic, reason, or even the scientific method, they must trust logic, reason and possibly the scientific method. When you teach them that logic and reason sometimes "don't work" because they lead you to conclusions that disagree with a religion's holy book, the child grows up believing in logical fallacies (most importantly, appeal to authority and appeal to majority), and their education (and future ability to succeed in one of these roles) is impacted negatively.
Do you disagree with this, or just that it's appropriate for someone to point it out as something we should stop doing?
lol.. I never said teaching kids about evolution was wrong, I said denying them creation or anything else because you insist evolution is the only true way was wrong.
Where did I say that you said teaching kids about evolution was wrong? I'm talking about taking facts, and using critical thinking, logic and reason to arrive at theory. These are the skills that we need to teach our children. When you subvert the "critical thinking" part and tell children that their reasoning is wrong because it disagrees with a special book, they don't learn this lesson. They don't learn to think critically ("don't ask why this book is special, just accept that it is") and they don't learn to trust logic and reason (it's wrong here, so it's not trustworthy), and by extension, the scientific method.
These children will be at an enormous disadvantage in fields that require correct application of the scientific method, because they will accept things as dogma, and will confuse dogma with science.
The evolution debate is just the classic example of this. You may feel you have a good handle on the limits of science and the limits of religion, but kids aren't learning about the evolution debate that way.
So you are saying that if a supernatural being existed that was capable of doing something to impact our universe, he would have to do it in some spectacular way that is directly obvious
You say spectacularly obvious, and I say observable. Advances in technology and our ability to model physics in computers allows us to "spy" on realms of the universe we couldn't even imagine a few generations ago. The wiggle room for a god to mess with us in a way we can't detect gets smaller and smaller with every advance.
To be honest, this sounds like the earlier argument: you can never rule out that gods are just being craftier than we are at trying to observe their actions, no matter how good we get at observing the universe. They're gods, right? We'll never be able to perfectly model the entire universe (the simulation would be larger than the universe itself, which obviously can't happen), so we'll never be able to rule this out.
Your strawman is bordering a false dichotomy. Burning witches and claiming the earth is flat is not something directly or even indirectly supported by scripture.
You're right, sorry.
But the scripture does say very specific things about the act of creation that are provably false. A few hundred years ago, most people would claim those things were factual. Today, those things are now considered allegories.
I'm calling bullshit. What science has prevailed against was early dogma or otherwise known as mans attempt to understand and explain the universe. ... it has addressed where man has taken figurative language as literal and shown it not to be practical or possible but it has never proved anything to be wrong in it.
I think you and I have different ideas about what it means to prove something wrong. If a group of people say X is true, and you demonstrate that X can't really be true, you've proved it wrong. The fact is that there are many stories in the Christian bible that were accepted as absolute truth just a few generations ago, and now they are commonly held to be allegories. The Christian bible is changing in the sense that what we accept and take from it is changing. For someone to say that it is an inviolate source of literal truth, except for the parts that w
Whether it is appropriate to believe something or not is sort of beside the point.
I disagree; I think it's exactly the point. To teach your children facts (that evolution occurs), and that the logical inference from those facts (a scientific theory of our evolutionary origins) is wrong only because it disagrees with your religion's holy book, which must be correct for all sorts of reasons logical fallacies, prevents your children from understanding, utilizing and trusting the scientific method.
The point is that it is inappropriate categorically deny something because you didn't see it or do not understanding how it could happen.
Perhaps there is a fine line between categorically denying something, and categorically refusing to accept something. I feel I'm doing the latter, not the former.
What if the divine intervention was making someone pause and check their pockets
Between the time a god considers intervening, and the time someone decides to pause and check their pockets, something must have happened to the person's mind to make them change their behavior. Absent intervention, they wouldn't have paused and checked their pockets, right? The mind is a product of the brain, and the brain is a physical system bound by exactly the same laws of physics everything else appears to be bound by. So something physical must have happened in the brain of this person to cause them to change their behavior.
Or would you turn around and say that the mind is magical and, like gods, not bound by the physical universe?
But you do not get to tell others they can't believe something, or they have to think like you, or they have to dismiss their religion and supplant it with what you feel is better
If this were the right attitude, we'd still be burning witches and imprisoning anyone that suggested the earth was round, or that the sun doesn't revolve around it. At some point you have to take a stand and call ignorance what it is. Thinking about the last few hundred years, are you really of the opinion that the world would be a better place if religion were always allowed to trump science?
Historically, science has always ultimately prevailed, and what once were absolute religious truths are now fables and moral tales. "We know better now." Do you believe that that trend has somehow stopped in 2012? Surely by now we've figured out what parts of the bible are just bedtime stories, and which parts were historically accurate? In 2112, everything that people believe is historically accurate in the Christian bible will continue to be considered historically accurate?
Religion and science can coexist perfectly well together and even conflict with each other as long as people understand one is religion and one is science.
I think I agree with this. The trick is in how you handle the situation where they contradict each other. You can either apply critical thinking skills, and maybe learn something, or you can be ignorant. One of these advances mankind's understanding of the universe and improves the standard of living across the globe. The other makes you feel warm and fuzzy and occasionally results in your neighbor being persecuted.
The historocity of the bible is well founded.
The "historocity" of the bible is changing all the time.
But you ask why believe in it,- because you can.
Sorry, but that is unconvincing. There are many things that I could choose to believe in simply because I can. There are many other religions that are far older than Christianity that I could choose to believe in, just because I can. There are things that I can make up and start believing in. I see nothing about any one of these fantasies and mythologies that encourage me to "believe".
just that religion has a r
And yet they call that a fallacy because all of what you know is not the entirety of what exists.
Basically this argument boils down to the assertion that because something could exist outside of the observable universe, it's appropriate to believe something exists outside of the observable universe. I don't subscribe to that notion. If it's outside of the observable universe, it cannot interact with the observable universe. Once it interacts with the observable universe, it becomes observable and we can learn something about it. Until then it's just mental masturbation and I have more interesting things to do with my life.
As soon as entity is classified as divine, its abilities would be beyond any limitation you would arbitrarily place on it.
I'm not quite sure I'm following. If I'm on the top of a building with a large rock in hand, and I'm intent on dropping it on someone's head, but a god is intent on preventing me, somehow, when I release that rock, something has to prevent it from reaching its target. Either His Divine Hand would knock the rock aside, or maybe the god will be sneaky about it and poof into existence a penny that causes a child to stop and pick it up, which causes my target to pause for a moment after I released the rock. But what if I plastered the city block with a million cameras and sensors? Surely I would observe the penny poofing into existence. Oh but gods are craftier than that, right? They'll just go back in time and create the penny before I put up all of my cameras. There's no way to win this argument. Either gods interact with the universe in ways that we can observe, or for some reason they want to be sneaky and avoid anyone claiming to be a scientist from ever seeing them.
Well, first, when did science decide it knew everything and we couldn't know more?
I think maybe this comes from my suggestion that if it ain't observable, it ain't knowable? I don't know how much that has to do with science per se, but for me, it's common sense. What's the point in trying to figure something out that's impossible to ever figure out? Either gods interact with the universe in ways we can study, or they don't. If they don't, they can never influence our lives, and so they essentially don't exist. "But you'll see!" implies that they'll interact with our universe sometime in the future. We can talk again when that happens.
You are the one insisting a set of rules exist that can never be broken despite it happening all around you on a quantum level.
I don't believe I'm insisting on anything of the kind. I suspect we have simply misunderstood each other. I agree that our understanding of the universe is incomplete. But I do know that the model we do have has no gods in it, and no evidence of gods exists that would invalidate those theories, so the theories stand as the most likely and most complete model of the universe. If you want to add some observations that disprove any of those models and point us in the direction of gods, please do so.
lol.. You where just saying the opposite.
Do you think it is more likely that I believe inconsistent things, or that I've failed to communicate my (internally consistent) position to you?
but you cannot say it "shuts down" any account of a creation.
I didn't say that. I suspect you're trying to argue with me about something an earlier poster said. Some literal accounts of creationism (which you've acknowledge were non-literal fables mixed in with the apparently otherwise historical records) can be easily disproven ("shut down") by observations (facts) of evolution. But of course you can't say that it's impossible. The difference is that I see no reason to believe something simply because it isn't impossible. There are effectively an infinite number of other possible explanations for the orig
There is a story about a guy who gets on a train. He looks out the window and see sheep. They are all white so he declares all sheep are white- none can be black or blue because he has never saw any like that. Are you saying that this guy is correct or something in his declaration simply because you too have only seen white sheep?
This guy is "correct" in the sense that Newton was correct about gravity. Both created a model of the universe that accurately allows them the ability to predict something, like the color of sheep. If this man never sees a sheep that isn't white, his model is sufficiently accurate and might as well be absolute truth.
On the other hand, if this man ever came across wool that came from a sheep that wasn't white, he would have to decide between (a) theorizing the existence of sheep of other colors, possibly resulting in a quest to confirm his theory and advance his knowledge of the universe; or (b) he can shrug his shoulders and say "God did it," and never be the wiser.
Why are you insisting that a divine intervention would have to deviate from the laws of physics as we know it?
Because no known mechanism exists for a divine being to affect our universe. If the deity appeared before someone, and spoke to them, somehow the deity is affecting our universe, by creating the perception of the deity's image and voice in the mind of an observer. If the deity is actually creating audible pressure waves in the air, and emitting photons that can be picked up by the observer's eyes, those are things that can be measured by other processes. The spontaneous creation of photons and sound would be an interesting event, and if they can't be explained, would require some theories as to where they came from.
At the very least, these observations would register as evidence that our theories are incomplete, and any model/theory that outright forbids the events that were observed would be immediately suspicious.
But your rules of physics
My rules of physics? Your bias is showing.
seem to not be hard set rules when we look at quantum applications so again, you have perpetuated the myth that everything has to be how you know it.
I disagree. Nobody ever said we have a complete understanding of the universe. But we do know a great deal about it, and the theories that we've devised are consistent with all of our observations, including the fact that we observe people that believe in gods, and we observe literature that makes claims about gods. All it takes is one reliable observation to destroy a scientific theory (or at least spur a refinement to it). If you want to replace theories of evolution with something based on a religion, start with finding that observation that disproves evolution.
How can an eye witness confirm anything happen? How can any history be recorded and told after it happened?
All of these are excellent questions, and there's an entire field devoted to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method
WIth respect to the American Revolution, on one side we have thousands of independent accounts, self-described as historical records, on the winning side and losing side, in agreement about events, and attesting to the validity of formal written records, with ample physical evidence of the events. On the other side, we have a small number of accounts written thousands of years ago, with many claims that are provably false. Totally the same thing.
Why is it that you insist that there is only way to show something and that is through science?
Science doesn't "show something". Science is how some of us attempt to explain that which we have been shown. If you show us something that is inconsistent with our theories of the universe, our theories will be disproven
Because a population is effective at something despite a handicap does not mean the handicap does not exist. It should be fairly obvious that, in a role that requires rigid rational and critical thinking, someone that exhibits an inability to think critically and rationally about something fundamental to their life would be less effective in that role than someone that does not. That does not mean a religious person can't be effective, but it does imply that the average religious person will be less effective than the average atheist, in some roles.
You are stuck in a fallacy trying to state that only what you can see exists.
By definition, if I cannot observe something, it cannot affect me. If something, such as a god, were capable of having any effect whatsoever in the universe, by definition, that effect would be observable by us. We would perceive that effect as a deviation from our understanding of the laws of physics, and we would have to throw away all of our theories that do not explain that observation, and try to find a new theory that incorporated it. If this happens often enough, the scientific theories about the nature of the universe would begin to describe a universe guided by a deity, and science would confirm (presumably your) religion.
including eye witness accounts of it.
How can an eyewitness account confirm a god? How did these eyewitness accounts come to you? In a book written by a person? What makes you think the thing the eyewitness observed was actually a god? What makes you think that the written account of that story was even truthful, or translated correctly?
that is not exactly empirical evidence but it is far from zero evidence.
From a scientific standpoint, it is exactly zero evidence. From a faith-based perspective, people tend to believe what they want to believe, and so I completely understand and appreciate that things written in a book that all of your peers believe is true and accurate means that you're likely to believe it's true and accurate. I don't suffer from your groupthink and confirmation bias, and so written 3rd-party anecdotes such as this don't sway me.
Another way to think about "evidence" in situations like this: if these observations happened today, and were written down by someone in the same manner (i.e., we can't talk to the person making the observation, or the person that recorded the observation), would a courtroom in the US admit that account as evidence?
Creating is an idea put forth in the Bible, and it has been thoroughly shut down.
Hahaha.. you are so funny. Tell me, where has it been shut down. Where exactly has science proved that supernatural events never- ever- happened at all.
I think the other poster was talking about the literal creation stories, where earth was created 6000 years ago, life was created exactly as it appears today, etc. None of that is consistent with our observations of the world around us and there are no plausible theories that incorporate both the creationist account and those observations.
I agree that it's ridiculous to suggest that science test supernatural events, but I don't think that's what the parent poster was suggesting.
Creation simply is not testable.. period.
The question of whether a deity created the universe can't be tested. That the universe was created 6000 years ago can be. It's possible to whittle away pretty much everything in the creation myth that doesn't involve a god doing something. What we're left with is something indistinguishable from the thing that science explains with evolution and abiogenesis, plus some supernatural component that by definition we can't test, because we can't observe. And if we can't observe it, it can't affect us, and so what's the point in thinking about it?
A "species" is not even a well-defined term. It is a convenience term that we use to label things. Nothing about evolution requires speciation. Generally speciation occurs when two populations mutate/evolve to the point where they don't interbreed much, but there are always exceptions, and some populations "between" the two can interbreed with the others. It's all a huge gray area. There's no one moment where there's a clap of thunder from the sky and a voice proclaims the first member of a new species is born.
Evolution is simply change/adaptation over time. There are facts of evolution, which we observe (moth experiments, antibiotic resistance), and there are theories about how humans evolved from our ancestors, our place in the tree of life, etc., and there are theories about how the first organisms arose. The theories of evolution and abiogensis seem completely consistent with our observations of the world, are entirely plausible and do not require us to invoke magic or deities. Those theories, consequently, prevail. Other theories are easily refutable, or make no attempt to explain the mountain of observations that the prevailing evolutionary theories explain, until they invoke "well a god must have just done it that way". And at that point there's just no point.
It is unlikely that you will ever see irrefutable proof of anything resembling this. A computer simulation of the evolution of life at the scale of the planet earth would be impractical. Further, mutations are essentially random. Even if you could get a computer simulation that accurately modeled how live evolves, and you ran that simulation repeatedly, it is unlikely that the resulting intelligent species would resemble humans.
You say "neither side" as though there are two competing scientific theories. I would advise you to check your assumptions there.
The fact that evolution works does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a creator.
People should not confuse the facts of evolution, the theory of evolution, and abiogenesis. This is part of the reason it's so frustrating trying to have a productive conversation about these topics, because some people seem to think that accepting the fact that bacteria evolve antibiotic resistance means they have to accept that life evolved from a lifeless confluence of chemicals and energy, and so we end up with a completely inappropriate distrust of science and medicine when it comes to the things that matter.
TFA says "valid" notices only. AIUI, a site's ranking wouldn't be affected if Google doesn't comply with the requests. Spamming Google with bogus notices wouldn't change anything.
This is all about cost vs. benefit, right?
The costs of lax safety standards could include injury or death. In many cases, the risks can't be adequately assessed, or they can be, but a lot of people don't believe them. In these situations, fear influences our perception of risk, and that perception of risk factors into the costs. We get benefits from lax safety standards too. Products are cheaper to make. Sometimes technologies are easier to design and implement.
On the flip side, excessively conservative safety standards means that everything is more expensive. Some technologies are deemed impractical or too costly to implement and bring to market. We lose out on useful products and (more importantly) technological advancements and investments that could result from it. The benefits of conservative safety standards amount to, in some cases, fewer injuries or deaths. In many cases, though, the benefits are simply psychological: we "feel" safer.
Do it on hard evidence.
This we agree on. I think I'm a little more cynical here, though, in that I believe the more democratic a government is (ignoring corruption for a moment), the more their safety standards will bend toward the fearful and irrational than to hard evidence. A corrupt government with a big industry lobby around that has skin in the game would obviously change that, but I don't really see a Big EMR industry lobby around, so I am automatically suspicious that our safety standards are indeed too conservative for our own good.
It doesn't directly impact the company. However:
1. It affects employees of the company, because employees of a company tend to hold a disproportionate share of their long-term savings in company stock and options.
2. A public company's board of directors is usually elected by the shareholders. If the shareholders view a falling share price as a sign that the company has problems, they may work through the board (or replace the board) to change the leadership of the company. This is less of a concern with companies like Google and Facebook since the founders own enough shares that they can withstand that sort of pressure.
While you can think of marriage as a legal contract, you do not receive marriage benefits as a consequence of anything written in the "contract", but because the state provides special recognition for marriage per se. In fact, some types of marriage do not require any explicit act for it to be recognized as such (common law marriage). You cannot bestow status granted as a matter of a law by way of a private contract.
This is really the heart of the debate. If this were simply a matter of contract law, there would be no issue here. Contracts valid in one state are valid in all states (though if you need the state to enforce the contract, the state may decline to do so if it doesn't like the terms, such as non-competes), and states will make an attempt to interpret contracts according to the conventions of the state the contract was entered into. But the recognition issues with same-sex marriage have nothing to do with contract law, and everything to do with the state granting benefits to people that have entered into marriage (regardless of how it's entered into). Each state defines marriage differently, and bestows legal benefits based upon that definition. Nothing in the law or constitution says those definitions or benefits have to be consistent from state to state, just that state benefits cannot favor one protected class over another.
I somehow doubt that the typical "muslim" suicide bomber had anything whatsoever to do with the planning or execution of the bombing that killed them. They "agree" to do it for reasons mostly unrelated to the goals of the bombing. IMO, the real bombers here aren't the ones blowing up.
In other words, you support tax breaks for behaviors you consider moral (heterosexual marriage)? If so, your morals are almost certainly inherently religious, which IMO makes this wrong as a matter of public policy. All marriage benefits should be retracted, and where we have legitimate rational needs for benefits that favor people engaged in some sort of union, those benefits should be rationally defensible and should apply to any type of union that applies for the situation. If we want to encourage multi-parent households for the good of our children, for instance, we should walk into that with hard data that shows what types of households allow children to thrive most, and make our benefit match. This is unlikely to result in something defined in terms of a heterosexual pair, and would certainly apply to homosexual couples as well as extended families (who says siblings can't raise a child just as well as a traditional mother/father? what about a single parent plus grandparents? why should any of these types of households refuse to get benefits we grant today to married couples that are ostensibly there to promote a healthy household within which to raise a child?).
Personally, I think that marriage should be redefined as between any two consenting adults.
Why two? Seriously, once we separate the legal concept of "marriage" from the religious concept, you might as well keep taking things away, and redefine "marriage benefits" in more specific terms, until you can actually rationally defend what you have left. IMO, this will probably be easier to get everyone to accept because the final result will probably resemble marriage in no way whatsoever, which means there's no reason for the "OMG marriage is under attack" crowd to feel under attack.
States absolutely do have different ideas about what is legally enforceable in a contract, and you can, in fact, move to another state and enjoy that state's views on how your contact should be enforced. See, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Out_of_state_agreements_are_not_enforceable
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Faith_and_Credit_Clause
I think part of the confusion here is that you seem to think that things like deciding "next of kin" are things that we can change through private contracts. These are things that are decided as a matter of law, not contracts. If one marries in California, but moves to Texas and lives there until they die, do you think that Texas is going to defer to California's definition of "next of kin" to decide how to handle the estate (presumably without a will that would have made the matter moot by making it explicit)?