Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens. Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
I absolutely believe that science can inform the creation of a code of ethics, don't get me wrong. But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge. It's a false generalization, based on the assumption that humans are no different from the non-human animals being studied (and also ignoring the fact that science *can* in fact distinguish between humans and non-human animals very easily via simple tests).
>>Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
That's why I used Mengele as my example, as it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals". When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
>>You cant be selective with your rational thinking and the application of the scientific method.
I agree. But there's also no contradiction between being rational, a Christian, and a scientist. Science can never answer questions about natural rights, or how to set tax policy, or if we should love our enemies or not. It can answer questions about if animals "love their neighbors", but has no normative power (though logicial positivists often try to shoehorn it into science).
>>Doesn't atheist bigotry pisses you off? I mean really! The nerve of those people stepping on religion's territory.
While you get +1 internets for being the first non-anonymous coward to respond to me (I mean, seriously, people - it doesn't take a lot of courage to post as an atheist on/.), really it's just a show of ignorance when atheists intentionally (or unintentionally) confuse religion and cult, or conflate fundamentalists with mainstream Christians. It's like making a joke about "all those Indian suicide bombers" - not only is it not especially funny, because it misses the mark, it just reveals you don't know the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim.
Likewise, it's not funny when atheists say that Jesus was a zombie Jew. It just reveals their utter ignorance about the difference between Animate Dead (3rd level) and Resurrection (7th level spell). Although it could arguably be a True Res (9th level) as well, depending on if you think Jesus lost a level or not.
Wrong. A scientist who is a theist is someone who says, "I believe that the universe is rational and can best be understood through observation and careful examination of the facts at hand....except when it comes to God of course." It makes absolutely no sense and is cognitive dissonance to the highest degree.
Wrong. A logical person says, "There's lot of things that can't be studied for science, which is why we have other fields, like history and religion or ethics."
Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter.
>>Exactly. The thing that makes them _very_ different is that a religion is a cult with a _very_ large following.
As I said, you can't use your atheist bigotry as the definition. Cults and religions are different not in the number of followers they have, but how they conduct their activities.
Do research on the subject. You might just learn something outside of your narrow band of prejudices.
>> Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
You make it sound like they are 190 different books. They're not.
Your statement was a common claim among atheists... until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Your argument is now 60 years out of date. The Isaiah scroll from Qumran was over 95% word-for-word identical to our modern texts (the earliest dating from 980AD), with the remaining 5% obvious typos or slips of the pen.
When people create a new English translation, they don't look at older English translations (except by way of comparison), as that would introduce a copy-of-a-copy problem. They look at the oldest available sources and retranslate it anew into contemporary language.
You are free to believe it is a book of fairy tales, but as an atheist you shouldn't believe such obvious factual falsehoods.
>>We haven't given up, but more than 75% of the population are such cultists.
Don't confuse fundamentalists (your cultists) with mainstream religions. There's no contradiction between being a Christian and a scientist, though there certainly are problems when fundies try to become scientists.
Don't confuse cults with religions either - atheist bigotry aside, they're two very different things.
>>"Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Religion is... not that. Primitive religions, maybe, or people primitive in their thinking. (Which, to be fair, includes a lot of fundamentalist Christians.)
Atheists often try to reduce God to the God of the Gaps, which entirely ignores the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
Religion is not the empirical study of the world is. That's science. Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
Confusing the two, on either side, leads to issues. Mengele, or Theocracy.
>>I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.
Fallout 3 was very dry, brown and unappealing. Fallout New Vegas at least had a little bit of color and water in New Vegas itself, and mixed it up with the Biology Vault, and some snowy areas.
>>It's just that it isn't enough to get people to buy at the price you were hoping for.
There's a concept called "time on the market", which is why my friend was brought in to do the web site on it, as it wasn't selling, even at below fair market value.
Since maybe you're not from San Diego, in the late 90s properties in San Diego were very hot, and selling like hotcakes.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. What I said was that the Heavens Gate suicide reduced the value of the house.
You said deaths don't reduce the value of the house.
I said it sold for half market value.
You responded with a meaningless tautology (the market value is whatever it sold for) ignoring the entire concept of appraisal, comps, and fair market value.
Anandtech provided a convenient online reference, but SiSoft Sandra is what I use for benchmarking my machines, and the 2600K really does blow anything AMD has out of the water, and this is from someone who is kinda adam of AMD.
To be fair the options we have are: Sony: Evil, and incompetent. Microsoft: Evil and you get to pay for premium "internet access" for your games. Nintendo: Ugly + Shovelware PC: Rootkit your computer to play games. Not games: Heh. Right.
Well, AMD is better about keeping sockets around longer than Intel, that seems to go through new ones every six weeks.
My last machine was built in Dec 2004, upgraded the CPU (to an AMD X2 4800+) in Jan 2007, which it gave it enough life to make it to April 2011 before I upgraded to Sandy Bridge.
Was easily the longest I've ever used the same motherboard, though admittedly it was on the leading edge of PCI-E and other features.
The i5 2500K is in the same price range, but is substantially faster. Bulldozer ought to even out the field a bit, but then Intel will strike back with their shark-fin Boba FETs or whatever (I didn't pay much attention to the earlier article on 3D transistors.)
And then on the high-ish end, AMD has nothing to compete against the i7 2600K. And it's not really that much more expensive (+$100) for the 15% extra gain in performance. It's not like their traditional $1000 high end offerings.
Hmm, well that makes me feel vaguely better about the whole thing. Do you know if the passwords stolen were easily guessed ones, or if PSN used a weak hashing algorithm which allowed recovery of the passwords? I heard reports that people's WoW accounts were being hacked via their PSN passwords.
>>At some point, someone will have to determine what's costlier: a little extra money up front to recruit knowledgeable and capable people to safeguard the company's and customers' valuable information... or a public relations disaster such as Sony is experiencing.
That was my thought on the matter. How expensive would it have been to have hired one of these data protection firm's people to work for Sony part-time? Or, hell, full time?
How much money did Sony lose from not only getting hacked, having the PSN network taken down, but also from the fact that people have found out that they didn't even go to the trivial effort of using crypt() on the passwords, and held it all in plaintext?
I had some friends over last weekend and we were going to buy a game on the PSN to play and oh wait. Sorry, Sony, no sale for you. Hope the $100k or so you saved was worth it.
>>Generally, that is not the case. It is far more likely that the realtor set the asking price too high
Generally what is not that case? Houses where people died often reduce the value of a house, and IIRC, realitors have to disclose anything like this when they sell it.
When my friend built the website, I think it was listing at $700k, or about half the value of the mansion. Lemme see if I can dig up a link...
I'm talking about divided roads. I've never seen 65 on a two-lane. The reason that raising speed limits on many smaller roads can be unsafe is that they are sometimes set correctly based on turn radius, based on the number of road entrances, based on pedestrian counts, etc., whereas highway speed limits are almost invariably set by bureaucrats.
That said, I can think of plenty of roads where the speed limits are ridiculously low.
Can't say I disagree with you. =)
We set road speeds here in California based on speed surveys taken every 5/7/10 years (depending on if any new construction has happened), with the safe speed set to the 85th or 90th percentile. (Assuming about 10% of people drive too fast.) Except, of course, interstates.
Some places are still set at 55MPH (like the loop interstate around Indianapolis), which drives me crazy.
>>There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
That's why when I have kids, they'll get to sleep in a bedroom that screams "RED ALERT! RED ALERT!" randomly at them all night long, until they can solve the Rubik's Cube that emerges from the ceiling. Strobe lights will be added for difficulty when they get older.
Can't have too much stimulation these days, you know.
>>Besides, the safety issues for the users have been dramatically improved since the 1970s, to such an extent that if 65 MPH roads were safe in the 1970s, a 100 MPH road is safe by that safe standard today. Yet speed limits have not increased. Thus, the position that speed limits are set based on safety simply cannot be justified in light of the evidence at hand.
Are you talking about a divided roadway or a rural two lane road, where the passing lane for people going one way is incoming traffic for people going the other?
In the first case, we could probably eliminate speed limits or set them to a rather high speed limit. In the latter, speed limits make a lot of sense. The research backs this up: raising speed limits on divided interstates makes no (or a trivial) difference in fatalities, but raising speed limits on rural roads is actually dangerous.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
I absolutely believe that science can inform the creation of a code of ethics, don't get me wrong. But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge. It's a false generalization, based on the assumption that humans are no different from the non-human animals being studied (and also ignoring the fact that science *can* in fact distinguish between humans and non-human animals very easily via simple tests).
>>Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
That's why I used Mengele as my example, as it is a very common, and very incorrect reduction that some scientists apply - "humans are animals, therefore humans are no different from other animals". When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
>>You cant be selective with your rational thinking and the application of the scientific method.
I agree. But there's also no contradiction between being rational, a Christian, and a scientist. Science can never answer questions about natural rights, or how to set tax policy, or if we should love our enemies or not. It can answer questions about if animals "love their neighbors", but has no normative power (though logicial positivists often try to shoehorn it into science).
You can read Stephen Jay Gould's take on it here, which is relatively close to my own position on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria
>>Doesn't atheist bigotry pisses you off? I mean really! The nerve of those people stepping on religion's territory.
While you get +1 internets for being the first non-anonymous coward to respond to me (I mean, seriously, people - it doesn't take a lot of courage to post as an atheist on /.), really it's just a show of ignorance when atheists intentionally (or unintentionally) confuse religion and cult, or conflate fundamentalists with mainstream Christians. It's like making a joke about "all those Indian suicide bombers" - not only is it not especially funny, because it misses the mark, it just reveals you don't know the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim.
Likewise, it's not funny when atheists say that Jesus was a zombie Jew. It just reveals their utter ignorance about the difference between Animate Dead (3rd level) and Resurrection (7th level spell). Although it could arguably be a True Res (9th level) as well, depending on if you think Jesus lost a level or not.
Wrong. A logical person says, "There's lot of things that can't be studied for science, which is why we have other fields, like history and religion or ethics."
Only a fool (or a logical positivist, which is the same thing) thinks that science can study anything, and only scientifically proven things can matter.
>>Exactly. The thing that makes them _very_ different is that a religion is a cult with a _very_ large following.
As I said, you can't use your atheist bigotry as the definition. Cults and religions are different not in the number of followers they have, but how they conduct their activities.
Do research on the subject. You might just learn something outside of your narrow band of prejudices.
>> Use of a book, commonly referenced to as "The Bible", which there are currently 190 modern versions of that I'm aware of, which all rooted from various oral traditions handed down over years, noted down, translated, re-translated (repeat ad nauseum), to which ever of the 190 modern versions you may have read an ancient fairy tale in.
You make it sound like they are 190 different books. They're not.
Your statement was a common claim among atheists... until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Your argument is now 60 years out of date. The Isaiah scroll from Qumran was over 95% word-for-word identical to our modern texts (the earliest dating from 980AD), with the remaining 5% obvious typos or slips of the pen.
When people create a new English translation, they don't look at older English translations (except by way of comparison), as that would introduce a copy-of-a-copy problem. They look at the oldest available sources and retranslate it anew into contemporary language.
You are free to believe it is a book of fairy tales, but as an atheist you shouldn't believe such obvious factual falsehoods.
>>We haven't given up, but more than 75% of the population are such cultists.
Don't confuse fundamentalists (your cultists) with mainstream religions. There's no contradiction between being a Christian and a scientist, though there certainly are problems when fundies try to become scientists.
Don't confuse cults with religions either - atheist bigotry aside, they're two very different things.
>>"Religion is simple mans way of explaining what he doesn't understand".
Religion is... not that. Primitive religions, maybe, or people primitive in their thinking. (Which, to be fair, includes a lot of fundamentalist Christians.)
Atheists often try to reduce God to the God of the Gaps, which entirely ignores the code-of-ethics, -behavior, and -worship that actually makes up a religion.
Religion is not the empirical study of the world is. That's science.
Science is not the normative study of how the world should be. That's religion.
Confusing the two, on either side, leads to issues. Mengele, or Theocracy.
The Potomac was pretty brown in Fallout 3. You wouldn't want to swim in it.
>>I blame the recent Fallout games. I love them, but they seem to have kicked us into a heavy steampunk-rust-brown fad.
Fallout 3 was very dry, brown and unappealing. Fallout New Vegas at least had a little bit of color and water in New Vegas itself, and mixed it up with the Biology Vault, and some snowy areas.
"idstudiokfa"
FTFY
>>It's just that it isn't enough to get people to buy at the price you were hoping for.
There's a concept called "time on the market", which is why my friend was brought in to do the web site on it, as it wasn't selling, even at below fair market value.
Since maybe you're not from San Diego, in the late 90s properties in San Diego were very hot, and selling like hotcakes.
I'm afraid you are mistaken. What I said was that the Heavens Gate suicide reduced the value of the house.
You said deaths don't reduce the value of the house.
I said it sold for half market value.
You responded with a meaningless tautology (the market value is whatever it sold for) ignoring the entire concept of appraisal, comps, and fair market value.
Anandtech provided a convenient online reference, but SiSoft Sandra is what I use for benchmarking my machines, and the 2600K really does blow anything AMD has out of the water, and this is from someone who is kinda adam of AMD.
To be fair the options we have are:
Sony: Evil, and incompetent.
Microsoft: Evil and you get to pay for premium "internet access" for your games.
Nintendo: Ugly + Shovelware
PC: Rootkit your computer to play games.
Not games: Heh. Right.
>>Who does a CPU-only upgrade these days?
Well, AMD is better about keeping sockets around longer than Intel, that seems to go through new ones every six weeks.
My last machine was built in Dec 2004, upgraded the CPU (to an AMD X2 4800+) in Jan 2007, which it gave it enough life to make it to April 2011 before I upgraded to Sandy Bridge.
Was easily the longest I've ever used the same motherboard, though admittedly it was on the leading edge of PCI-E and other features.
>>I'll be waiting for the dust to clear with Bulldozer before I make a commitment for my next build.
I agree. The Phenom II line is just grossly underpowered compared to Sandy Bridge:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=362
The i5 2500K is in the same price range, but is substantially faster. Bulldozer ought to even out the field a bit, but then Intel will strike back with their shark-fin Boba FETs or whatever (I didn't pay much attention to the earlier article on 3D transistors.)
And then on the high-ish end, AMD has nothing to compete against the i7 2600K. And it's not really that much more expensive (+$100) for the 15% extra gain in performance. It's not like their traditional $1000 high end offerings.
Hmm, well that makes me feel vaguely better about the whole thing. Do you know if the passwords stolen were easily guessed ones, or if PSN used a weak hashing algorithm which allowed recovery of the passwords? I heard reports that people's WoW accounts were being hacked via their PSN passwords.
>>At some point, someone will have to determine what's costlier: a little extra money up front to recruit knowledgeable and capable people to safeguard the company's and customers' valuable information ... or a public relations disaster such as Sony is experiencing.
That was my thought on the matter. How expensive would it have been to have hired one of these data protection firm's people to work for Sony part-time? Or, hell, full time?
How much money did Sony lose from not only getting hacked, having the PSN network taken down, but also from the fact that people have found out that they didn't even go to the trivial effort of using crypt() on the passwords, and held it all in plaintext?
I had some friends over last weekend and we were going to buy a game on the PSN to play and oh wait. Sorry, Sony, no sale for you. Hope the $100k or so you saved was worth it.
>>Generally, that is not the case. It is far more likely that the realtor set the asking price too high
Generally what is not that case? Houses where people died often reduce the value of a house, and IIRC, realitors have to disclose anything like this when they sell it.
When my friend built the website, I think it was listing at $700k, or about half the value of the mansion. Lemme see if I can dig up a link...
Ok, so I guess it sold for $668k, and was worth 1.6M. http://www.rickross.com/reference/heavensgate/gate34.html
>>Was this pre- or post- bubble?
This was 1997.
>>Was the realtor trying to capitalize on the celebrity of the location to extract a premium?
It doesn't work that way.
Yeah. A friend of mine did the website for the realtor selling the property.
Apparently even being a hilltop mansion isn't enough to get people to buy a place where a bunch of cultists in matching shoes all killed themselves.
Can't say I disagree with you. =)
We set road speeds here in California based on speed surveys taken every 5/7/10 years (depending on if any new construction has happened), with the safe speed set to the 85th or 90th percentile. (Assuming about 10% of people drive too fast.) Except, of course, interstates.
Some places are still set at 55MPH (like the loop interstate around Indianapolis), which drives me crazy.
>>There is no substitute for raw talent nurtured by a stimulating and engaging environment.
That's why when I have kids, they'll get to sleep in a bedroom that screams "RED ALERT! RED ALERT!" randomly at them all night long, until they can solve the Rubik's Cube that emerges from the ceiling. Strobe lights will be added for difficulty when they get older.
Can't have too much stimulation these days, you know.
>>I know that some towns in the US really rely on income generated from tickets and fines
They do.
Why they haven't been sued for conflict of interest in law enforcement is beyond me.
>>Besides, the safety issues for the users have been dramatically improved since the 1970s, to such an extent that if 65 MPH roads were safe in the 1970s, a 100 MPH road is safe by that safe standard today. Yet speed limits have not increased. Thus, the position that speed limits are set based on safety simply cannot be justified in light of the evidence at hand.
Are you talking about a divided roadway or a rural two lane road, where the passing lane for people going one way is incoming traffic for people going the other?
In the first case, we could probably eliminate speed limits or set them to a rather high speed limit. In the latter, speed limits make a lot of sense. The research backs this up: raising speed limits on divided interstates makes no (or a trivial) difference in fatalities, but raising speed limits on rural roads is actually dangerous.