What's particularly galling is that their statement turns the fundamental purpose of free speech on its head -- they're annoyed by the fact that mere PEOPLE might have the ability to be heard at the same scale as their illustrious multi-million dollar marketing department.
Well, I live my life as if I wasn't going to be hit by a bus in 10 seconds, but that doesn't make my belief in not getting hit by a bus in ten seconds some kind of religious faith. I could very well get hit by a bus in ten seconds, and am well aware of that possibility, even though I'm not going to live as if it weren't true.
I really don't think it's equally an act of faith to not believe something as it is to believe it. There is both a qualitative and quantitative difference in how much you care about the issue, and how much it impacts your life (if at all). Believe it or not, most atheists/agnostics genuinely don't give a shit. They aren't out protesting churches or telling other people what to believe, they're just living their life as if there were no God and it isn't a function of belief, it's a function of not caring.
Science has no explanation for how everthing began
First of all, you like many other IDers are confusing evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, the beginnings of life. Evolutionary theory says nothing about "how everything began", it only says how organisms change over time in reactions to external forces. Nothing more, nothing less.
Those teachers now can't decide on their own, or even use their own freedom of speech to teach
Of course they can decide on their own, nobody is mandating that science teachers be required to renounce belief in God or intelligent design or even young-Earth creationism. They can believe whatever they want. And nobody is abridging their freedom of speech -- they can put up a web site, protest outside the school, even teach ID classes for the same students outside of school hours (I knew several teachers who would see the same students in Sunday school classes). But their job from 7-3 is to teach science, and if they aren't doing their job, they'll get in trouble. That's no different than you or me.
would then like a question like "what are most people hypothosis on this subject?" The answer now will have to be "Well, it is illegal for me to tell you that".
And of course you're completely wrong yet again. The correct answer to that question would be "Well, there are many theories, though none really have a significant weight of evidence behind them, which is part of why it is such an interesting question. Of course, there are lots of religious explanations for the creation of life that differ from culture to culture, and some interesting experiments have been done to try and create simple organic materials from inorganic materials by simulating early Earth environments, but nobody has been able to say for sure."
That's a completely accurate answer, and doesn't require teaching religion or condemning it. I've seen many times where students ask about creationism in science classes, and teachers have always been respectful in basically saying "yes, many people do believe that, but it's not really something we cover here since there's no way to prove or disprove it."
God comes first because he gave us the best possible present
Yeah, but Santa's presents aren't booby-traps in disguise.
God's present was "I'll give you free will, but if you choose anything other than what I want you to choose, I will send you to Hell for all eternity!". Gosh, thanks, God!
I actually just found out about the Dublin Dr Pepper from this thread, and I'm ecstatic. i recently moved back to Texas, so I'm already planning a road trip up there to pick up a few cases. Dr Pepper beats Coke any day of the week, I don't know how they kept this secret from me for so long!
Oh, yeah, I do stock up around Passover when I think about it. It was just much more convenient to live in a city where I didn't have to plan ahead and could count on local groceries having the real deal 365 days a year. It was also great to have a choice of good stores open on Sundays and Christmas (but closed on Fridays, of course).
I've read the book, both it and your statements are wonderfully appropriate for a 19th century economy.
Ultimately all monetary systems when scaled to large systems (as they were in the 20th century) hit a point where they become more a matter of contract law than of exchanging some tangible asset. The underlying unit of measure is meaningless, since nobody is physically transporting currency from continent to continent as business transactions take place. We're swapping bits and bytes, making promises using a completely arbitrary yet mutually agreed upon unit of measure.
It's meaningless to say that gold has held its value for 6000 years. How is that even possible, if everything else has changed? Is there some unchanging unit of measure that we compare gold against to see if its value has changed? Can you buy the same number of goats today that you could 6000 years ago? Will you sell a day's labor for the same amount of gold as someone would 6000 years ago?
In all times where government currencies have failed, people turn to portable goods as units of trade. There is nothing inherently special about gold and silver jewelry in this regard -- people in emergencies also barter fine artworks, housewares, and mink coats. Even diamonds, which would be (relatively) worthless if not for artificial scarcity! That doesn't mean we would somehow have a stronger or more predictable economy if we changed our unit of currency to represent weights of mink, it means that our most basic form of economic activity is barter and we revert to it when more elaborate systems stop being useful.
If you wish to invest all your money in gold, there is certainly nothing stopping you. If you believe the dollar will fall in value, then you can buy foreign currencies, or even sell short! Widely used currencies don't exist by fiat, they interact daily with each other and with multinational banking systems, all of which operate to regulate each other based on the market.
My money has value in times of crises and in great times. Your money is only valuable when people have faith in it.
I don't think you understand money half as well as you pretend to. Gold and silver only have as much value as people believe it has based on scarcity, no different than scarce pieces of paper printed by a government or a bank. For such an apparently ardent capitalist you seem to miss the fundamental point of capitalism -- that a thing is "worth" exactly what someone else is willing to pay for it.
Gold has no inherent value to human beings -- you can't eat it or drink it, and in a time of crisis it will do you no more good than a wad of currency.
The complete lack of scientific evidence to support the premise that God even exists, let alone created the universe ?
But faith has nothing to do with evidence or science. There's nothing inherently contradictory about believing, for example, that evolution occurred, and that God created man. God can obviously control evolution, he's God! I personally don't believe that's what happened, but the majority of American scientists do believe it.
What's the difference between FLAC and APE (Monkey Audio)?
basically, FLAC is open-source. They achieve pretty similar compression, though APE can be a bit better, which is why it was so widely adopted. FLAC is more supported on non-windows platforms because of the source code issues.
That is why a materialist philosophy should not be taught alongside science.
You're talking about an overarching philosophy, I'm talking about the definition of science. Science about immeasurable and unknowable things is a contradiction in terms. Yes, scientists look for natural causes for natural phenomena, that's what science is, by definition. The scientific method simply doesn't work for supernatural phenomena, so science really says nothing about it one way or the other. I don't know what you mean by "regardless of evidence to the contrary", because evidence would be material and any scientist would be happy to find evidence to the contrary of an accepted theory -- instant fame!
if materialism should be taught, leave it outside of the science class
Materialism as an all-encompassing worldview isn't taught in any science classes I know of. I have yet to see a high-school biology teacher stand up and proclaim "There is nothing that exists outside of what we can measure and see, the soul does not exist, when we die there is no afterlife, God is a figment of your imagination. This will all be on the final exam."
The vast majority of scientists in America today are Christians, they believe in God and don't see any contradiction between studying the natural world and accepting that He created it. Why should they?
Why must materialist philosophy be taught in science class?...Gould contended that scientists have an 'a priori commitment to naturalism' which in my view prevents scientists from considering whether something supernatural might be the primary cause.
I'm not sure how anything non-material COULD be taught in a science class. Science is the study of nature and the material world, it says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of supernatural forces or entities. Supernatural explanations might well be correct, but they aren't measurable or testable, so in the context of science there simply isn't much to discuss. The alternative is that every measurement you take and experiment you perform has to be disclaimed as possibly supernatural in result, which again may be correct but doesn't add anything to the discussion.
Arguments over the validity of our senses, the possibility of being deceived by the material world and other existentialist dilemmas are certainly good for students to have, but they belong in the category of formal logic and philosophy, not science.
It strikes me as someone complaining that their physical education class doesn't also cover mental health topics -- that isn't the subject of the class! There is no judgement being placed on the value of mental health simply because your gym teacher doesn't discuss it -- indeed, most gym teachers and mental health professionals would agree that a healthy body and mind complement each other. Trying to shoehorn a discussion about depression into the rules of baseball would be as pointless as discussing supernatural forces in a science class.
Re:How they handle it at Harvard (Business School)
on
Is Wi-Fi Ruining College?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Great, yet more evidence that business schools don't know anything about motivating employees or customers. Thank God someone is there to teach the MBAs of the future that the internet is useless except for marketing and DRM verification!
Yes. And in 150 years, it has been changed somewhat by data that comes in -- but surprisingly not as much as you'd think, given our poor state of biological knowledge in the 19th century. We barely understood the concept of the cell when the theory was first published, yet now even our ability to sequence the entire genome of a species and design our own custom lifeforms has not provided any information that contradicts evolution.
Evolution predicts many things, such as what fossil forms will exist at certain layers and in certain areas, it predicts that certain organisms must exist and what their specific characteristics are, even though nobody has ever seen one (and later, such organisms have been found exactly where they were predicted to be!). It also states that many combinations of things will NOT EVER be found, and if any organism with that combination was ever found the theory would have to be completely discarded.
Evolution predicted that there would be some fundamental but durable biological mechanism for inhereting traits, but also some way in which those passed-on traits would be unpredictably changed from time to time. 75 years later, we discovered DNA and found all about the variety of things that can cause mutations.
There is nothing in ID that is predictive, and nothing that can disprove it. It just says "and this place where we aren't sure what happened, it was an intelligent supernatural force". It uses scientific-sounding phrases like "irreducable complexity", but it all boils down to the God of the Gaps.
Oh my God, when you turn 18 and go to college, I highly recommend that you take philosophy 101. In the first semester you'll learn about 100 different reasons why everything you just wrote is so much nonsense. Your tautological "problems" were solved several millennia before Christ was even born.
The solar cells used in the field are not the fragile glass units people think of. We use two flexible, folding solar arrays for our field work that are MILSPEC and they can be run over by trucks, take 7.62mm rounds, and fold down to about the size and weight of a laptop computer. Less efficient than the glass panels, but that's the tradeoff.
And being able to set up a self-supporting field communications center with a small backpack full of gear can make a LOT more difference in war than an extra piece of body armor. But the power output is not great for the surface area, while ultimately I'm sure the DoD would love to be able to make the backpacks out of solar cloth and charge everything during normal activity.
Yes, let's look at how many new refineries have been constructed in the US in the last 30 years.
Yeah, those pesky environmentalists in control of all the oil companies decided that it made more sense to use old, grandfathered refineries than actually make new ones that complied with modern air regulations. The fact that it chokes off supply occassionally and raises the profits is a horrible side-effect for the poor companies.
And how many nuclear plants have been constructed in the same timeframe.
There are certainly many people who have an irrational fear of nuclear power, but I think the nail in the coffin of that particular enterprise was that nuclear wound up being no cheaper than anything else, and every plant would have been losing money if it weren't for the huge government subsidies.
The fact is, if the US had been continuing to build out its nuclear power capacity we may not be discussing energy strains the way we are today.
Indeed, and had we been continuing to build out wind and solar power, we would be even better off than with nuclear! But of course nobody is protesting wind and solar power, I wonder why we haven't invested in those with half the gusto we've spent trying to find a few million nonreplaceable barrels of oil off the coast of Florida? I've never heard of anyone getting sick from living next to a windmill.
Conservation will only take you so far. After that, you have to develop new sources.
Indeed -- and building more oil refineries is not "new sources". Drilling in Alaska, drilling off Florida, drilling anywhere is not "new sources". Call me when ConocoPhilips builds their first tidal generator in the Gulf of Mexico, and then I'll shed a tear for the Cato institute bravely fighting the environmental lobby that has been holding us back from any "new sources" of energy. I mean, it's not like we've had over 30 years to work on this stuff.
Yes, it's a shame that fringe reactionary groups have such a strong hold on our nation's energy policy. Why, just the other day ConocoPhilips was asking congress to allow them to use some of their tens of billions of recent windfall profits to research and provide clean, renewable energy. Wouldn't you know it, that huge Earth First! lobby managed to block any progress, just as they have for years and years!
I remember back in the 70s when Chevron's big solar arrays in Oklahoma were being continuously sabotaged by Greenpeace activists. The National Guard couldn't even hold off those lunatics long enough for Dick Cheney to finish cleaning the baby seals!
When will the insanity stop? When will the multinational megacorporations ever have a chance to be heard?
Just take a look at the list of the most commmon drugs and tell me how many of those were developed even partially as a result of university research.
100%, without a doubt. No drug company starts from scratch in their research, and no drug company anywhere on Earth has 100,000 chemists following their own ideas on basic research. Drug companies dole out research grants only AFTER there is already some promise shown with a new compound, and that only comes after some assistant professor spends 20 years in the university lab using taxpayer dollars to follow his pet theory.
The private money is spent on marketing and drug trials, not research, and the money that is spent on research is not spent in-house in any significant amounts, except to find new formulations for the purposes of getting new patents. Why would private companies fund research in-house at 100% cost, when they can just buy the patent rights for 50% of a few years' worth of grant money on a project that looks promising already? Good 'ol Uncle Sam will pick up the tab for the other 50%, and the years of work that led up to it, and not expect any of the patent income -- a pretty sweet deal for everyone except the taxpayers.
the problem is that if the practice spreads to say, Europe and USA commercial AIDS R&D will be paralysed.
What commercial AIDS R&D? AIDS research is done by universities with grants from groups like the CDC and WHO. There is some private money that comes into specific projects only AFTER they already show promise (and of course they take patent rights in exchange for that funding -- even if 99% of that research was funded from taxpayer dollars!)
The research that happens at pharmecutical companies is marketing research, and chemistry to come up with clever new ways to extend existing patents by juggling electrons around. The place where private companies have to shell out tons of cash is in getting government approval to go to market with a new drug and dealing with the paperwork and clinical trials for years on end. Needless to say, that's all stuff that can be done by anybody (including the government itself if it wanted), there's no special skill involved and it would certainly be no big loss if commercial interests were removed. AIDS research in particular already has lots of public money funding even the drug trials because we're in such a hurry to try and test every idea at once.
you'd risk losing one of the prime reasons to use x86: compatibility. hell, motherboards still come with floppy connectors. why? because some ancient or niche programs still require a floppy to use. winxp still only accepts drivers for hd's on a floppy only.
Compatability is an illusion -- you can't install WinXP on a 16-bit processor, much less an 8-bit one. So why are the hardware limitations of XP systems still being driven by compatibility with 8-bit processors?
You actually point out a key difference in why the boot time is so screwed up on the PC. An ancient floppy connector and controller on the motherboard? Why? You can buy a $29.99 USB floppy drive and it will work perfectly on any modern PC motherboard. That technology is 10 years old. I mean, if you really want a 720k floppy drive hooked up, there's nothing in the MacOS hardware or software architecture that will stop you, Apple just recognizes that it's a waste of time to devote any of their own engineering effort or motherboard space to an obsolete technology. But if you install Darwin on an i386 system, it will quite happily find your 1987-era floppy and boot from it.
and frankly, the bios or initialization hardware shouldn't be doing much more than just probing the hardware and passing control to an OS
That's exactly what the Mac does, and exactly what the PC doesn't do. The PC hardware is still based around the 1980s notion that you would have certain predictable and limited peices of hardware that meet certain outdated specifications and the BIOS would control them all. We've been building workarounds for that assumption and it's arbitrary limitations (640k of memory? Boot past a certain cylinder on the hard drive?) ever since.
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What's particularly galling is that their statement turns the fundamental purpose of free speech on its head -- they're annoyed by the fact that mere PEOPLE might have the ability to be heard at the same scale as their illustrious multi-million dollar marketing department.
Well, I live my life as if I wasn't going to be hit by a bus in 10 seconds, but that doesn't make my belief in not getting hit by a bus in ten seconds some kind of religious faith. I could very well get hit by a bus in ten seconds, and am well aware of that possibility, even though I'm not going to live as if it weren't true.
I really don't think it's equally an act of faith to not believe something as it is to believe it. There is both a qualitative and quantitative difference in how much you care about the issue, and how much it impacts your life (if at all). Believe it or not, most atheists/agnostics genuinely don't give a shit. They aren't out protesting churches or telling other people what to believe, they're just living their life as if there were no God and it isn't a function of belief, it's a function of not caring.
Science has no explanation for how everthing began
First of all, you like many other IDers are confusing evolutionary theory with abiogenesis, the beginnings of life. Evolutionary theory says nothing about "how everything began", it only says how organisms change over time in reactions to external forces. Nothing more, nothing less.
Those teachers now can't decide on their own, or even use their own freedom of speech to teach
Of course they can decide on their own, nobody is mandating that science teachers be required to renounce belief in God or intelligent design or even young-Earth creationism. They can believe whatever they want. And nobody is abridging their freedom of speech -- they can put up a web site, protest outside the school, even teach ID classes for the same students outside of school hours (I knew several teachers who would see the same students in Sunday school classes). But their job from 7-3 is to teach science, and if they aren't doing their job, they'll get in trouble. That's no different than you or me.
would then like a question like "what are most people hypothosis on this subject?" The answer now will have to be "Well, it is illegal for me to tell you that".
And of course you're completely wrong yet again. The correct answer to that question would be "Well, there are many theories, though none really have a significant weight of evidence behind them, which is part of why it is such an interesting question. Of course, there are lots of religious explanations for the creation of life that differ from culture to culture, and some interesting experiments have been done to try and create simple organic materials from inorganic materials by simulating early Earth environments, but nobody has been able to say for sure."
That's a completely accurate answer, and doesn't require teaching religion or condemning it. I've seen many times where students ask about creationism in science classes, and teachers have always been respectful in basically saying "yes, many people do believe that, but it's not really something we cover here since there's no way to prove or disprove it."
God comes first because he gave us the best possible present
Yeah, but Santa's presents aren't booby-traps in disguise.
God's present was "I'll give you free will, but if you choose anything other than what I want you to choose, I will send you to Hell for all eternity!". Gosh, thanks, God!
I actually just found out about the Dublin Dr Pepper from this thread, and I'm ecstatic. i recently moved back to Texas, so I'm already planning a road trip up there to pick up a few cases. Dr Pepper beats Coke any day of the week, I don't know how they kept this secret from me for so long!
Oh, yeah, I do stock up around Passover when I think about it. It was just much more convenient to live in a city where I didn't have to plan ahead and could count on local groceries having the real deal 365 days a year. It was also great to have a choice of good stores open on Sundays and Christmas (but closed on Fridays, of course).
Exactly. One of the things I miss about living in NYC was that it was easy to buy Kosher Coke any time of the year. Pure cane sugar, baby!
I've read the book, both it and your statements are wonderfully appropriate for a 19th century economy.
Ultimately all monetary systems when scaled to large systems (as they were in the 20th century) hit a point where they become more a matter of contract law than of exchanging some tangible asset. The underlying unit of measure is meaningless, since nobody is physically transporting currency from continent to continent as business transactions take place. We're swapping bits and bytes, making promises using a completely arbitrary yet mutually agreed upon unit of measure.
It's meaningless to say that gold has held its value for 6000 years. How is that even possible, if everything else has changed? Is there some unchanging unit of measure that we compare gold against to see if its value has changed? Can you buy the same number of goats today that you could 6000 years ago? Will you sell a day's labor for the same amount of gold as someone would 6000 years ago?
In all times where government currencies have failed, people turn to portable goods as units of trade. There is nothing inherently special about gold and silver jewelry in this regard -- people in emergencies also barter fine artworks, housewares, and mink coats. Even diamonds, which would be (relatively) worthless if not for artificial scarcity! That doesn't mean we would somehow have a stronger or more predictable economy if we changed our unit of currency to represent weights of mink, it means that our most basic form of economic activity is barter and we revert to it when more elaborate systems stop being useful.
If you wish to invest all your money in gold, there is certainly nothing stopping you. If you believe the dollar will fall in value, then you can buy foreign currencies, or even sell short! Widely used currencies don't exist by fiat, they interact daily with each other and with multinational banking systems, all of which operate to regulate each other based on the market.
My money has value in times of crises and in great times. Your money is only valuable when people have faith in it.
I don't think you understand money half as well as you pretend to. Gold and silver only have as much value as people believe it has based on scarcity, no different than scarce pieces of paper printed by a government or a bank. For such an apparently ardent capitalist you seem to miss the fundamental point of capitalism -- that a thing is "worth" exactly what someone else is willing to pay for it.
Gold has no inherent value to human beings -- you can't eat it or drink it, and in a time of crisis it will do you no more good than a wad of currency.
The complete lack of scientific evidence to support the premise that God even exists, let alone created the universe ?
But faith has nothing to do with evidence or science. There's nothing inherently contradictory about believing, for example, that evolution occurred, and that God created man. God can obviously control evolution, he's God! I personally don't believe that's what happened, but the majority of American scientists do believe it.
What's the difference between FLAC and APE (Monkey Audio)?
basically, FLAC is open-source. They achieve pretty similar compression, though APE can be a bit better, which is why it was so widely adopted. FLAC is more supported on non-windows platforms because of the source code issues.
That is why a materialist philosophy should not be taught alongside science.
You're talking about an overarching philosophy, I'm talking about the definition of science. Science about immeasurable and unknowable things is a contradiction in terms. Yes, scientists look for natural causes for natural phenomena, that's what science is, by definition. The scientific method simply doesn't work for supernatural phenomena, so science really says nothing about it one way or the other. I don't know what you mean by "regardless of evidence to the contrary", because evidence would be material and any scientist would be happy to find evidence to the contrary of an accepted theory -- instant fame!
if materialism should be taught, leave it outside of the science class
Materialism as an all-encompassing worldview isn't taught in any science classes I know of. I have yet to see a high-school biology teacher stand up and proclaim "There is nothing that exists outside of what we can measure and see, the soul does not exist, when we die there is no afterlife, God is a figment of your imagination. This will all be on the final exam."
The vast majority of scientists in America today are Christians, they believe in God and don't see any contradiction between studying the natural world and accepting that He created it. Why should they?
Why must materialist philosophy be taught in science class?...Gould contended that scientists have an 'a priori commitment to naturalism' which in my view prevents scientists from considering whether something supernatural might be the primary cause.
I'm not sure how anything non-material COULD be taught in a science class. Science is the study of nature and the material world, it says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of supernatural forces or entities. Supernatural explanations might well be correct, but they aren't measurable or testable, so in the context of science there simply isn't much to discuss. The alternative is that every measurement you take and experiment you perform has to be disclaimed as possibly supernatural in result, which again may be correct but doesn't add anything to the discussion.
Arguments over the validity of our senses, the possibility of being deceived by the material world and other existentialist dilemmas are certainly good for students to have, but they belong in the category of formal logic and philosophy, not science.
It strikes me as someone complaining that their physical education class doesn't also cover mental health topics -- that isn't the subject of the class! There is no judgement being placed on the value of mental health simply because your gym teacher doesn't discuss it -- indeed, most gym teachers and mental health professionals would agree that a healthy body and mind complement each other. Trying to shoehorn a discussion about depression into the rules of baseball would be as pointless as discussing supernatural forces in a science class.
Great, yet more evidence that business schools don't know anything about motivating employees or customers. Thank God someone is there to teach the MBAs of the future that the internet is useless except for marketing and DRM verification!
Yes, but as any New Yorker will be happy to tell you, NYC is the center of the universe, so of COURSE you've heard of those places.
I still think that Kamchatka doesn't exist, and that mapmakers just put it there because everyone KNOWS that's where it is supposed to be.
Is Evolution testable? Is it falsifiable?
Yes. And in 150 years, it has been changed somewhat by data that comes in -- but surprisingly not as much as you'd think, given our poor state of biological knowledge in the 19th century. We barely understood the concept of the cell when the theory was first published, yet now even our ability to sequence the entire genome of a species and design our own custom lifeforms has not provided any information that contradicts evolution.
Evolution predicts many things, such as what fossil forms will exist at certain layers and in certain areas, it predicts that certain organisms must exist and what their specific characteristics are, even though nobody has ever seen one (and later, such organisms have been found exactly where they were predicted to be!). It also states that many combinations of things will NOT EVER be found, and if any organism with that combination was ever found the theory would have to be completely discarded.
Evolution predicted that there would be some fundamental but durable biological mechanism for inhereting traits, but also some way in which those passed-on traits would be unpredictably changed from time to time. 75 years later, we discovered DNA and found all about the variety of things that can cause mutations.
There is nothing in ID that is predictive, and nothing that can disprove it. It just says "and this place where we aren't sure what happened, it was an intelligent supernatural force". It uses scientific-sounding phrases like "irreducable complexity", but it all boils down to the God of the Gaps.
Oh my God, when you turn 18 and go to college, I highly recommend that you take philosophy 101. In the first semester you'll learn about 100 different reasons why everything you just wrote is so much nonsense. Your tautological "problems" were solved several millennia before Christ was even born.
The solar cells used in the field are not the fragile glass units people think of. We use two flexible, folding solar arrays for our field work that are MILSPEC and they can be run over by trucks, take 7.62mm rounds, and fold down to about the size and weight of a laptop computer. Less efficient than the glass panels, but that's the tradeoff.
And being able to set up a self-supporting field communications center with a small backpack full of gear can make a LOT more difference in war than an extra piece of body armor. But the power output is not great for the surface area, while ultimately I'm sure the DoD would love to be able to make the backpacks out of solar cloth and charge everything during normal activity.
Yes, let's look at how many new refineries have been constructed in the US in the last 30 years.
Yeah, those pesky environmentalists in control of all the oil companies decided that it made more sense to use old, grandfathered refineries than actually make new ones that complied with modern air regulations. The fact that it chokes off supply occassionally and raises the profits is a horrible side-effect for the poor companies.
And how many nuclear plants have been constructed in the same timeframe.
There are certainly many people who have an irrational fear of nuclear power, but I think the nail in the coffin of that particular enterprise was that nuclear wound up being no cheaper than anything else, and every plant would have been losing money if it weren't for the huge government subsidies.
The fact is, if the US had been continuing to build out its nuclear power capacity we may not be discussing energy strains the way we are today.
Indeed, and had we been continuing to build out wind and solar power, we would be even better off than with nuclear! But of course nobody is protesting wind and solar power, I wonder why we haven't invested in those with half the gusto we've spent trying to find a few million nonreplaceable barrels of oil off the coast of Florida? I've never heard of anyone getting sick from living next to a windmill.
Conservation will only take you so far. After that, you have to develop new sources.
Indeed -- and building more oil refineries is not "new sources". Drilling in Alaska, drilling off Florida, drilling anywhere is not "new sources". Call me when ConocoPhilips builds their first tidal generator in the Gulf of Mexico, and then I'll shed a tear for the Cato institute bravely fighting the environmental lobby that has been holding us back from any "new sources" of energy. I mean, it's not like we've had over 30 years to work on this stuff.
Yes, it's a shame that fringe reactionary groups have such a strong hold on our nation's energy policy. Why, just the other day ConocoPhilips was asking congress to allow them to use some of their tens of billions of recent windfall profits to research and provide clean, renewable energy. Wouldn't you know it, that huge Earth First! lobby managed to block any progress, just as they have for years and years!
I remember back in the 70s when Chevron's big solar arrays in Oklahoma were being continuously sabotaged by Greenpeace activists. The National Guard couldn't even hold off those lunatics long enough for Dick Cheney to finish cleaning the baby seals!
When will the insanity stop? When will the multinational megacorporations ever have a chance to be heard?
Just take a look at the list of the most commmon drugs and tell me how many of those were developed even partially as a result of university research.
100%, without a doubt. No drug company starts from scratch in their research, and no drug company anywhere on Earth has 100,000 chemists following their own ideas on basic research. Drug companies dole out research grants only AFTER there is already some promise shown with a new compound, and that only comes after some assistant professor spends 20 years in the university lab using taxpayer dollars to follow his pet theory.
The private money is spent on marketing and drug trials, not research, and the money that is spent on research is not spent in-house in any significant amounts, except to find new formulations for the purposes of getting new patents. Why would private companies fund research in-house at 100% cost, when they can just buy the patent rights for 50% of a few years' worth of grant money on a project that looks promising already? Good 'ol Uncle Sam will pick up the tab for the other 50%, and the years of work that led up to it, and not expect any of the patent income -- a pretty sweet deal for everyone except the taxpayers.
the problem is that if the practice spreads to say, Europe and USA commercial AIDS R&D will be paralysed.
What commercial AIDS R&D? AIDS research is done by universities with grants from groups like the CDC and WHO. There is some private money that comes into specific projects only AFTER they already show promise (and of course they take patent rights in exchange for that funding -- even if 99% of that research was funded from taxpayer dollars!)
The research that happens at pharmecutical companies is marketing research, and chemistry to come up with clever new ways to extend existing patents by juggling electrons around. The place where private companies have to shell out tons of cash is in getting government approval to go to market with a new drug and dealing with the paperwork and clinical trials for years on end. Needless to say, that's all stuff that can be done by anybody (including the government itself if it wanted), there's no special skill involved and it would certainly be no big loss if commercial interests were removed. AIDS research in particular already has lots of public money funding even the drug trials because we're in such a hurry to try and test every idea at once.
What gave you the right to use the copper verizon bought fair and square on the open market?
You mean the copper that was subsidized by taxpayer dollars?
you'd risk losing one of the prime reasons to use x86: compatibility. hell, motherboards still come with floppy connectors. why? because some ancient or niche programs still require a floppy to use. winxp still only accepts drivers for hd's on a floppy only.
Compatability is an illusion -- you can't install WinXP on a 16-bit processor, much less an 8-bit one. So why are the hardware limitations of XP systems still being driven by compatibility with 8-bit processors?
You actually point out a key difference in why the boot time is so screwed up on the PC. An ancient floppy connector and controller on the motherboard? Why? You can buy a $29.99 USB floppy drive and it will work perfectly on any modern PC motherboard. That technology is 10 years old. I mean, if you really want a 720k floppy drive hooked up, there's nothing in the MacOS hardware or software architecture that will stop you, Apple just recognizes that it's a waste of time to devote any of their own engineering effort or motherboard space to an obsolete technology. But if you install Darwin on an i386 system, it will quite happily find your 1987-era floppy and boot from it.
and frankly, the bios or initialization hardware shouldn't be doing much more than just probing the hardware and passing control to an OS
That's exactly what the Mac does, and exactly what the PC doesn't do. The PC hardware is still based around the 1980s notion that you would have certain predictable and limited peices of hardware that meet certain outdated specifications and the BIOS would control them all. We've been building workarounds for that assumption and it's arbitrary limitations (640k of memory? Boot past a certain cylinder on the hard drive?) ever since.