Speciation has been observed in some plants (specifically, mutation doubling the number of chromosomes for some plants has created seperate species that cannot interbreed with the parents, but interbreed with each other). Insects, plants, and even other animals have been observed to go through natural selection processes - not necessarily complete new species, but significant changes as expected in evolutionary theory. Your definition of evolution is meaningless anyway. The key is, the processes have (mostly) been observed.
Stating that the Genesis story is history is ridiculous - why is that particular story historical, and every other religions creation story not? They are not the same. I assume Native Americans or Hindus just didn't know what they were talking about? Even if it is historical, if all the *observable* evidence contradicts the story, then the burden of proof falls on the storytellers/ "historians".
The burden of proof for science is to prove (well, gather evidence for, they never prove anything) thing to other people who understand science and the theories. Unfortunately you don't really seem to fit in that camp. Of course you can't think of a single case where it has been reported, you haven't even looked. Instead you make up things like "it would have to happen very frequently" which you have no basis for.
What are you talking about? Of course it is worthwhile if they get the whole $1.99. Look at the chart. They don't even get $300k for 30 seconds for the #10 show. Even if we assumed that every one of these shows we're talking about here did pull in $300k/30 seconds an episode, here's what we get:
Half hour show - 8 minutes of commercials - 4.8 million dollars. We'll double that for the hour shows.
2 million geeks...$1.99 each...even if they only get half of that they're increasing their revenue by 10 or 20%. The only way this could be bad for them is if their advertising revenue goes down at the same time (due to lower ratings).
Anyway, the most likely explanation of all of this isn't that it isn't worthwhile, it's that they've got their own distribution system coming down the pipe.
This sounds like the school equivalent of all those patents that take something common and add "on a computer". I was able to buy lecture notes for most of my classes in 1996. Admittedly, those notes were taken by someone paid to take the notes, and sold by the school not the professor, but still this doesn't seem particularly exciting or novel, just a natural progression. I do remember back then they printed the notes on this annoying red paper to make it more difficult to photocopy the notes, something tells me any measures on the web to prevent copying and sharing of these notes will be even less effective.
you're misunderstanding the post and the device. It does not limit speeds, it only reports. It is designed to only report when they go over "speed X". The idea being that speed X would be 65 or 75 or whatever speed the parents considered to be report-worthy. If they set it 5mph, they would always know where the kid is, as it would report nearly constantly. So the post is pretty insightful, and I don't see how it would be dangerous to know that information.
Here's one quick link indicating that Twain was not for simple spelling:
http:\\www.twainquotes.com\19071210.html
It's a NYTimes article from 1907, with Twain commenting on Andrew Carnegie, who was for spelling reform. A snippet:
"The trouble with him is that he attacked orthography at the wrong end. He attacked the symptoms and not the cause of the disease. He ought to have gone to work on the alphabet. There's not a vowel in it with a definite value, and not a consonant that you can hitch anything to. Look at the 'h's' distributed all around. There's 'Gherkin.' What are you going to do with the 'h' in that? It's one thing I admire the English for; they just don't mind anything about them at all.
"But look at the 'pneumatics' and the 'pneumonias' and the rest of them. A real reform would settle them once and for all, and wind up by giving us an alphabet that we wouldn't have to spell with at all, instead of this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken thief. Why, there isn't a man who doesn't have to throw out about fifteen hundred words a day when he writes his letters because he can't spell them! It's like trying to do a St. Vitus's dance with wooden legs.
"Now I'll bet there isn't a man here who can spell 'pterodactyl,' not even the prisoner at the bar. I'd like to hear him try once - but not in public, for it's too near Sunday when all extravagant histrionic entertainments are barred. I'd like to hear him try in private, and when he got through trying to spell 'pterodactyl' you wouldn't know whether it was a fish or a beast or a bird, and whether it flew on its legs or walked with its wings.
"Let's get Mr. Carnegie to reform the alphabet, and we'll pray for him if he'll take the risk."
Uh, how hard is it to change to to Big98Boob$-312, then 313, etc. Forced password changes are not in themselves causing people to use simple passwords. Now, if it forces password changes, and complains if it's too similar to the previous password, then you have a valid complaint, but I've yet to use a system that does that.
You're right that we tend to fail at it, but I don't know if we suck at doing, it...or just suck at funding it correctly/getting the political will to follow through with a plan.
This is a man who has posted reviews of his own book on Amazon.com, pretending to be one of his students. A man who's own co-author admits to huge flaws in their study. A man who used a study that he supposedly funded himself, and then lost when his computer crashed, as the lynchpin of his argument.
You or I could want an armed populace to be justified by something like crime deterrance - but fake studies aren't going to do us any good. Plus, if you really believe the populace should be armed, for defense of liberty, or because it's wrong to restrict their rights, or whatever other reason you have, that should be enough in itself.
The conclusion that abiogenesis through unplanned (unintelligent) processes is the only testable theory comes from the fact that there are no tests involved in saying "It was intelligently designed, look we solved it!". If there was any evidence to support that conclusion, and any test to disprove that, then I'd accept that as another scientific theory. I know you don't care to hear it, but there is nothing scientific about intelligent design as a theory. It's just hand waving and saying "woah, this looks really unlikely, musta been a creator". I understand that you feel that you actually do have evidence for intelligent design, but every bit of it is a logical fallacy. This is not some scientific conspiracy, or some anti-religious conspiracy, or a bunch of close mindedness. It's just the way it is. I wish I could tell you otherwise, it would be fascinating to have a way to test what is implicitly a "supernatural" phenomenon, but it just doesn't exist. Accepting intelligent design as a scientific theory is impossible.
Physicists aren't necessarily falling all over themselves to "disprove" relativity. They're finding ways to test predictions that come from relativity (particles that should exist, etc) and applying those tests. If they end up disproving relativity, well that'll be something. Sometimes things are found that don't fit exactly with a theory, and it has to be modified, sometimes a theory is completely found to be wrong, even though it had worked for many other cases beforehand - the best example being Newton/Relativity, since Newton works great for most cases, but turned out to not be the way the whole universe worked.
The fact that these Theorys make predicitons is the entire reason that they can be disproved. Not only do they attempt to explain what is known already, but the Theory itself can be used to determine what should or shouldn't be found in the future. This is what makes them testible. Evolution is testible in this way, as we can look for fossils that don't fit with predictions, or look at some natural selection mechanisims as they happen (fly and bacteria studies, some historical examples of animals adapting to quick changes, etc).
There is a distinct lack of falsifiable predictions made by Intelligent Design. A statement like "these forces, if they were different, would cause the universe to collapse, so therefore they were intelligently chosen" is absurd. A theory that stated "if they weren't that way, we wouldn't have had anyplace to evolve on" is just as useful for the same case, but both are neither testable nor falsifiable, so they're useless in a scientific senseIntelligent Design needs to make some predictions that are not tautologys, affirmation of the consequent arguments, predictions that are testible, and predictions that are not answered by other theories.
I wanted to address one other part of your other posts. Evolution is a theory of change over time in species. It is not a theory of abiogenesis. The beginnings of life are seperate theories, and while they are obviously linked with evolution one is not required for the other to be correct. Perhaps it is intelligent design that started evolution, perhaps it was abiogenesis, perhaps it was something else. Scientifically, it still does not matter - abiogenesis, until disproved with something other than "well, that seems convienent, so it had to be a creator", will be the only testable theory, and therefor the only useful one to science.
Plenty of people publish books, perform music and create movies that believe in the current copyright scheme and it's enforcement, no matter what you or I think of it. Whether or not they are slashdot readers is meaningless, but I'd bet a heap of money your statement is untrue. Regardless, saying that freeing your information for copying is the best way to get speaking or performing engagements assumes that is what people would want. Sure, you don't believe that we can enforce the laws, or that they should even exist, but you're making a strange assumption that people who create things should only have protection by their own ability to personally perform their works live. A good example of a person who would be eliminated by this is the non-singer songwriter. They don't (can't?) perform their own songs, but they sell them to someone else. Maybe they don't deserve to exist in your world order, ok. But the assumption that a non-copyright environment is always better for a content creator is flawed, and assumes people want to, and can, perform their works publically.
One thing did just dawn on me that makes your statement even stranger - you're saying that the people who defend copyrights don't create copywritten works. If this is the case, these are the people who have the most to gain by the elimination of copyrights, yet they defend them? If they were content creators, and really believed in your personal system for getting speaking engagements or selling tickets, they could exercise it right now in our current environment, and do even better due to the lack of competition from others using this same system! Maybe your whole stance is only against the RIAA-type cartels, but these do not force anyone to join them, and it's just getting easier to publish/produce without them.
Please. There are tons of observed instances of speciation, listed here. Experiments involving fly populations, bacteria, antigen development, etc etc have all been used as experimental proof of various mechanisims of evolution (mutation, genetic drift, etc). To say that evolution is guessory because we can't see the past is like saying we couldn't know how a civil war cannonball would have flown because sure, all this physics seems to predict the future, but why assume it has anything to do with the past?
I think the point is that they're both villains. Just because someone knows to chew some indigenous bark or eat a potato to cure some ill doesn't mean they should get some rights to the cures created from knowledge they already had - something tells me that knowledge is kind of old. But the issue is whether or not some company that comes in and extracts the compound and either synthesizes it or has an efficient means of extraction should be able to patent the compound itself either. And the answer is no, no one should have a patent on the compound, not peru or the company. They can have a patent on their extraction or synthesis process, assuming it is novel, but anyone who wants to come up with a different way to make this compound should be able to.
There is no reason it couldn't be in the middle, or some Intelligent Designer started evolution, etc. The whole ID vs Evolution problem is that ID isn't an actual scientific theory, it's just "well...god did it". Not testable, not provable, makes no predictions, etc. So the debate isn't whether or not people can go and believe in ID all they want, or if the two are compatible...but whether or not ID should be taught in science class with all the actual science.
So while people taking theories as gospel is a problem sometimes, a bigger problem is people not understanding what *theory* means, and assuming it's just a guess to be tested. No, thats a hypothesis. Most of these theories are pretty well tested. And as for taking it as gospel...the whole point is that not only are they tested, but we continue to test them and modify them if we need to. People don't come up with discoveries that blow away well-tested theories very often.
You're missing an advantage - you also get to burn the fossil fuels somewhere else, away from where all the people live, as opposed to in their cars. And perhaps you can develop economies of scale for pollution reduction by doing it all in one place (underground, etc). Getting the air pollution out of the cities/roads is probably a good thing in itself, even with some loss of efficiency.
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
----
And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
----
You are completely wrong. If anything, most of the founding fathers were Deists, believing in at most whatever form of "Natures God" they personally had. Paine was definitely in sync with the founding fathers and their opinion on christianity in relation to government, i.e. there should be nothing but separation. Look it up. You need to do better on a large public forum such as/., like maybe actually citing something.
I'm not going to give any spoilers, but I will say that it is not good. It has slow, terrible dialogue similar to episode II, boring action scenes, probably the worst lightsaber battle I've ever seen, and a few scenes that are so amazingly cheesy they caused the audience to laugh - and this was FOX employees on the FOX lot.
This is not to say it is a complete loss. They've thrown in a lot of stuff to tie ep III and IV together, most of it unnecessary, some of it comical, but at least it is a resolution to some minor questions. Some of the action scenes are very good, and people have had different reactions at work to scenes that left me cold, so to each his own.
After I saw it and came home that night, I dreaded going into work because I thought my co-workers enjoyed the movie and I thought I'd have an annoying morning of being called a 'hater' and generally abused for being too picky. Much to my surprise, 85% of the people at work who saw it spent the morning bashing scenes, mocking dialogue and generally panning the movie. Only a few people (mostly old ladies, surprisingly) actually seemed enthusiastic, while a couple others said it was "pretty good".
To twist the knife: one person, who actually enjoyed episode I and II, thought this movie was boring and stupid. Multiple people fell asleep, at a 6pm showing.
Also false, there are many examples of new species arising due to evolutionary mechanisims.
First, your definition is completely false. Evolution is not "a series of mutations which results in a new species". There are a lot of mechanisims other than mutation involved in evolution, such as natural selection, genetic drift, diploidy, etc.
As for new species arising due to to evolutionary mechanisims, this has been observed in nature. here is a complete article about it. A simple example of this would be, from the article:
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Differen't chromosomes, can't interbreed - sounds like a new species to me. Admittedly none of them meet your personal definition of evolution, which requires mutation to be the only mechanisim, but luckily you just don't know what you're talking about.
Natural Selection is not the only mechanisim of evolution. Some other examples would be Mutation, diploidy, genetic drift, and genetic recombination during meiosis.
Behe's entire argument can be reduced to "So far as I know, science cannot explain these structures, so I'm guessing someone must have designed it". It isn't hard to look for rebuttals to that argument and his whole book. Sure, it's well written, and has a lot of good information, but Behe's lack of imagination is not a rebuttal of evolution. Quick googles for information about what Behe cannot explain will show you that a) a lot of it can be explained, and b) people actually are trying to figure out answers to what cannot, instead of waving their hands and saying god did it. Part b) is really the most important one, because it gets to the crux of the problem with ID - it isn't science. It isn't falsifiable or testable in any way. It's hand waving and assumption making. It's fine if you don't really care to find the real answer, or if you came up with actual evidence of a creator, but the evidence is always "well, no one can answer X question to my personal satisfaction, so it was made". I'm sorry, but that doesn't fly. Even if God or something did make it all, until someone finds actual evidence of this, there is no reason to postulate it in a SCIENCE class because it is not science.
You're completely misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics. It only applies to a closed system (meaning there is no external source of energy).
The Universe as a whole is probably a closed system, so on average for the whole universe at once, entropy is increasing. But that does not keep individual areas of the universe to have decreasing entropy, or increasing complexity. The earth is one such system, because we have a huge burning energy source beaming down on us, the sun. Someday yes the sun will burn out, and perhaps the whole universe will die a whimpering heat death. But in the meantime the sun still shines, and we still get a lot more energy than we need to increase complexity on this small planet.
Here is an interesting article about how corporations became 'Persons'
Perhaps you won't agree with some of the conclusions the author has drawn, but the basic point that corporations have a lot more rights/powers than what is needed to allow for limited liability is pretty obvious. And comparing them to psychopaths really isn't absurd. They are treated, legally, as another person like you and me, but they don't act like normal people. Perhaps you don't want to say they act like psychopaths, but I'd like to hear a better description of why they act how they do, and and explanation why their behavior would be ok for a person with the same rights.
The short answer: for the children. We DID switch to always DST in the 70's for a couple years, but people complained their kids were going to school in the dark in the winter, so it was changed back.
Your sig is correct, but it misses something important. If marginal cost goes below average cost, a company cannot charge the marginal cost and still make money. These situations are normally refered to as a "natural monopoly". Something has to give - either the company has to operate in an inefficent manner, or someone has to subsidize the companies initial costs some other way.
Slashdot Mirror
Speciation has been observed in some plants (specifically, mutation doubling the number of chromosomes for some plants has created seperate species that cannot interbreed with the parents, but interbreed with each other). Insects, plants, and even other animals have been observed to go through natural selection processes - not necessarily complete new species, but significant changes as expected in evolutionary theory. Your definition of evolution is meaningless anyway. The key is, the processes have (mostly) been observed.
Stating that the Genesis story is history is ridiculous - why is that particular story historical, and every other religions creation story not? They are not the same. I assume Native Americans or Hindus just didn't know what they were talking about? Even if it is historical, if all the *observable* evidence contradicts the story, then the burden of proof falls on the storytellers/ "historians".
The burden of proof for science is to prove (well, gather evidence for, they never prove anything) thing to other people who understand science and the theories. Unfortunately you don't really seem to fit in that camp. Of course you can't think of a single case where it has been reported, you haven't even looked. Instead you make up things like "it would have to happen very frequently" which you have no basis for.
What are you talking about? Of course it is worthwhile if they get the whole $1.99. Look at the chart. They don't even get $300k for 30 seconds for the #10 show. Even if we assumed that every one of these shows we're talking about here did pull in $300k/30 seconds an episode, here's what we get:
Half hour show - 8 minutes of commercials - 4.8 million dollars. We'll double that for the hour shows.
2 million geeks...$1.99 each...even if they only get half of that they're increasing their revenue by 10 or 20%. The only way this could be bad for them is if their advertising revenue goes down at the same time (due to lower ratings).
Anyway, the most likely explanation of all of this isn't that it isn't worthwhile, it's that they've got their own distribution system coming down the pipe.
This sounds like the school equivalent of all those patents that take something common and add "on a computer". I was able to buy lecture notes for most of my classes in 1996. Admittedly, those notes were taken by someone paid to take the notes, and sold by the school not the professor, but still this doesn't seem particularly exciting or novel, just a natural progression. I do remember back then they printed the notes on this annoying red paper to make it more difficult to photocopy the notes, something tells me any measures on the web to prevent copying and sharing of these notes will be even less effective.
you're misunderstanding the post and the device. It does not limit speeds, it only reports. It is designed to only report when they go over "speed X". The idea being that speed X would be 65 or 75 or whatever speed the parents considered to be report-worthy. If they set it 5mph, they would always know where the kid is, as it would report nearly constantly. So the post is pretty insightful, and I don't see how it would be dangerous to know that information.
http:\\www.twainquotes.com\19071210.html
It's a NYTimes article from 1907, with Twain commenting on Andrew Carnegie, who was for spelling reform. A snippet:
Uh, how hard is it to change to to Big98Boob$-312, then 313, etc. Forced password changes are not in themselves causing people to use simple passwords. Now, if it forces password changes, and complains if it's too similar to the previous password, then you have a valid complaint, but I've yet to use a system that does that.
You're right that we tend to fail at it, but I don't know if we suck at doing, it...or just suck at funding it correctly/getting the political will to follow through with a plan.
As much as I wish he had, John Lott didn't prove anything, and all of his work has been largely debunked
o tt
http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/issues/?page=l
This is a man who has posted reviews of his own book on Amazon.com, pretending to be one of his students. A man who's own co-author admits to huge flaws in their study. A man who used a study that he supposedly funded himself, and then lost when his computer crashed, as the lynchpin of his argument.
You or I could want an armed populace to be justified by something like crime deterrance - but fake studies aren't going to do us any good. Plus, if you really believe the populace should be armed, for defense of liberty, or because it's wrong to restrict their rights, or whatever other reason you have, that should be enough in itself.
You're right, I'm using abiogenesis incorrectly.
The conclusion that abiogenesis through unplanned (unintelligent) processes is the only testable theory comes from the fact that there are no tests involved in saying "It was intelligently designed, look we solved it!". If there was any evidence to support that conclusion, and any test to disprove that, then I'd accept that as another scientific theory. I know you don't care to hear it, but there is nothing scientific about intelligent design as a theory. It's just hand waving and saying "woah, this looks really unlikely, musta been a creator". I understand that you feel that you actually do have evidence for intelligent design, but every bit of it is a logical fallacy. This is not some scientific conspiracy, or some anti-religious conspiracy, or a bunch of close mindedness. It's just the way it is. I wish I could tell you otherwise, it would be fascinating to have a way to test what is implicitly a "supernatural" phenomenon, but it just doesn't exist. Accepting intelligent design as a scientific theory is impossible.
Physicists aren't necessarily falling all over themselves to "disprove" relativity. They're finding ways to test predictions that come from relativity (particles that should exist, etc) and applying those tests. If they end up disproving relativity, well that'll be something. Sometimes things are found that don't fit exactly with a theory, and it has to be modified, sometimes a theory is completely found to be wrong, even though it had worked for many other cases beforehand - the best example being Newton/Relativity, since Newton works great for most cases, but turned out to not be the way the whole universe worked.
The fact that these Theorys make predicitons is the entire reason that they can be disproved. Not only do they attempt to explain what is known already, but the Theory itself can be used to determine what should or shouldn't be found in the future. This is what makes them testible. Evolution is testible in this way, as we can look for fossils that don't fit with predictions, or look at some natural selection mechanisims as they happen (fly and bacteria studies, some historical examples of animals adapting to quick changes, etc).
There is a distinct lack of falsifiable predictions made by Intelligent Design. A statement like "these forces, if they were different, would cause the universe to collapse, so therefore they were intelligently chosen" is absurd. A theory that stated "if they weren't that way, we wouldn't have had anyplace to evolve on" is just as useful for the same case, but both are neither testable nor falsifiable, so they're useless in a scientific senseIntelligent Design needs to make some predictions that are not tautologys, affirmation of the consequent arguments, predictions that are testible, and predictions that are not answered by other theories.
I wanted to address one other part of your other posts. Evolution is a theory of change over time in species. It is not a theory of abiogenesis. The beginnings of life are seperate theories, and while they are obviously linked with evolution one is not required for the other to be correct. Perhaps it is intelligent design that started evolution, perhaps it was abiogenesis, perhaps it was something else. Scientifically, it still does not matter - abiogenesis, until disproved with something other than "well, that seems convienent, so it had to be a creator", will be the only testable theory, and therefor the only useful one to science.
Plenty of people publish books, perform music and create movies that believe in the current copyright scheme and it's enforcement, no matter what you or I think of it. Whether or not they are slashdot readers is meaningless, but I'd bet a heap of money your statement is untrue. Regardless, saying that freeing your information for copying is the best way to get speaking or performing engagements assumes that is what people would want. Sure, you don't believe that we can enforce the laws, or that they should even exist, but you're making a strange assumption that people who create things should only have protection by their own ability to personally perform their works live. A good example of a person who would be eliminated by this is the non-singer songwriter. They don't (can't?) perform their own songs, but they sell them to someone else. Maybe they don't deserve to exist in your world order, ok. But the assumption that a non-copyright environment is always better for a content creator is flawed, and assumes people want to, and can, perform their works publically.
One thing did just dawn on me that makes your statement even stranger - you're saying that the people who defend copyrights don't create copywritten works. If this is the case, these are the people who have the most to gain by the elimination of copyrights, yet they defend them? If they were content creators, and really believed in your personal system for getting speaking engagements or selling tickets, they could exercise it right now in our current environment, and do even better due to the lack of competition from others using this same system! Maybe your whole stance is only against the RIAA-type cartels, but these do not force anyone to join them, and it's just getting easier to publish/produce without them.
Please. There are tons of observed instances of speciation, listed here. Experiments involving fly populations, bacteria, antigen development, etc etc have all been used as experimental proof of various mechanisims of evolution (mutation, genetic drift, etc). To say that evolution is guessory because we can't see the past is like saying we couldn't know how a civil war cannonball would have flown because sure, all this physics seems to predict the future, but why assume it has anything to do with the past?
I think the point is that they're both villains. Just because someone knows to chew some indigenous bark or eat a potato to cure some ill doesn't mean they should get some rights to the cures created from knowledge they already had - something tells me that knowledge is kind of old. But the issue is whether or not some company that comes in and extracts the compound and either synthesizes it or has an efficient means of extraction should be able to patent the compound itself either. And the answer is no, no one should have a patent on the compound, not peru or the company. They can have a patent on their extraction or synthesis process, assuming it is novel, but anyone who wants to come up with a different way to make this compound should be able to.
There is no reason it couldn't be in the middle, or some Intelligent Designer started evolution, etc. The whole ID vs Evolution problem is that ID isn't an actual scientific theory, it's just "well...god did it". Not testable, not provable, makes no predictions, etc. So the debate isn't whether or not people can go and believe in ID all they want, or if the two are compatible...but whether or not ID should be taught in science class with all the actual science.
So while people taking theories as gospel is a problem sometimes, a bigger problem is people not understanding what *theory* means, and assuming it's just a guess to be tested. No, thats a hypothesis. Most of these theories are pretty well tested. And as for taking it as gospel...the whole point is that not only are they tested, but we continue to test them and modify them if we need to. People don't come up with discoveries that blow away well-tested theories very often.
You're missing an advantage - you also get to burn the fossil fuels somewhere else, away from where all the people live, as opposed to in their cars. And perhaps you can develop economies of scale for pollution reduction by doing it all in one place (underground, etc). Getting the air pollution out of the cities/roads is probably a good thing in itself, even with some loss of efficiency.
Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.
/., like maybe actually citing something.
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
----
And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
----
You are completely wrong. If anything, most of the founding fathers were Deists, believing in at most whatever form of "Natures God" they personally had. Paine was definitely in sync with the founding fathers and their opinion on christianity in relation to government, i.e. there should be nothing but separation. Look it up. You need to do better on a large public forum such as
I'm not going to give any spoilers, but I will say that it is not good. It has slow, terrible dialogue similar to episode II, boring action scenes, probably the worst lightsaber battle I've ever seen, and a few scenes that are so amazingly cheesy they caused the audience to laugh - and this was FOX employees on the FOX lot.
This is not to say it is a complete loss. They've thrown in a lot of stuff to tie ep III and IV together, most of it unnecessary, some of it comical, but at least it is a resolution to some minor questions. Some of the action scenes are very good, and people have had different reactions at work to scenes that left me cold, so to each his own.
After I saw it and came home that night, I dreaded going into work because I thought my co-workers enjoyed the movie and I thought I'd have an annoying morning of being called a 'hater' and generally abused for being too picky. Much to my surprise, 85% of the people at work who saw it spent the morning bashing scenes, mocking dialogue and generally panning the movie. Only a few people (mostly old ladies, surprisingly) actually seemed enthusiastic, while a couple others said it was "pretty good".
To twist the knife: one person, who actually enjoyed episode I and II, thought this movie was boring and stupid. Multiple people fell asleep, at a 6pm showing.
Also false, there are many examples of new species arising due to evolutionary mechanisims.
First, your definition is completely false. Evolution is not "a series of mutations which results in a new species". There are a lot of mechanisims other than mutation involved in evolution, such as natural selection, genetic drift, diploidy, etc.
As for new species arising due to to evolutionary mechanisims, this has been observed in nature. here is a complete article about it. A simple example of this would be, from the article:
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Differen't chromosomes, can't interbreed - sounds like a new species to me. Admittedly none of them meet your personal definition of evolution, which requires mutation to be the only mechanisim, but luckily you just don't know what you're talking about.
Real quick...
Natural Selection is not the only mechanisim of evolution. Some other examples would be Mutation, diploidy, genetic drift, and genetic recombination during meiosis.
Behe's entire argument can be reduced to "So far as I know, science cannot explain these structures, so I'm guessing someone must have designed it". It isn't hard to look for rebuttals to that argument and his whole book. Sure, it's well written, and has a lot of good information, but Behe's lack of imagination is not a rebuttal of evolution. Quick googles for information about what Behe cannot explain will show you that a) a lot of it can be explained, and b) people actually are trying to figure out answers to what cannot, instead of waving their hands and saying god did it. Part b) is really the most important one, because it gets to the crux of the problem with ID - it isn't science. It isn't falsifiable or testable in any way. It's hand waving and assumption making. It's fine if you don't really care to find the real answer, or if you came up with actual evidence of a creator, but the evidence is always "well, no one can answer X question to my personal satisfaction, so it was made". I'm sorry, but that doesn't fly. Even if God or something did make it all, until someone finds actual evidence of this, there is no reason to postulate it in a SCIENCE class because it is not science.
You're completely misunderstanding the second law of thermodynamics. It only applies to a closed system (meaning there is no external source of energy).
The Universe as a whole is probably a closed system, so on average for the whole universe at once, entropy is increasing. But that does not keep individual areas of the universe to have decreasing entropy, or increasing complexity. The earth is one such system, because we have a huge burning energy source beaming down on us, the sun. Someday yes the sun will burn out, and perhaps the whole universe will die a whimpering heat death. But in the meantime the sun still shines, and we still get a lot more energy than we need to increase complexity on this small planet.
Here is an interesting article about how corporations became 'Persons'
Perhaps you won't agree with some of the conclusions the author has drawn, but the basic point that corporations have a lot more rights/powers than what is needed to allow for limited liability is pretty obvious. And comparing them to psychopaths really isn't absurd. They are treated, legally, as another person like you and me, but they don't act like normal people. Perhaps you don't want to say they act like psychopaths, but I'd like to hear a better description of why they act how they do, and and explanation why their behavior would be ok for a person with the same rights.
The short answer: for the children. We DID switch to always DST in the 70's for a couple years, but people complained their kids were going to school in the dark in the winter, so it was changed back.
Or my friend at work, who the native spanish speakers call "Esteve"
Your sig is correct, but it misses something important. If marginal cost goes below average cost, a company cannot charge the marginal cost and still make money. These situations are normally refered to as a "natural monopoly". Something has to give - either the company has to operate in an inefficent manner, or someone has to subsidize the companies initial costs some other way.
Two different meanings of liberal here
Economist = Economically Liberal (Libre, Free)
Democrats = Socially Liberal / Economically not so much
Of course your democrat teachers wouldn't like it