This is not the kind of "evolution" needed to evolve lower-order organisms into higher-order ones. In fact, a better description for this particular case is "develution"
If you look close enough at any of these examples of evolution we keep hearing about, they're never the kind that molecules-to-man evolution requires.
It's so slow on the Wii! I recently upgraded from an ancient installation on the wii and was surprised to find out it was less buggy but much slower. They must have gone from native code to web-based. Bleh.
I'm sticking with CentOS 5 + KDE 3.5 until I can stomach KDE 4 or I force myself onto something else. Just can't beat a plain jane, straight up multitasking desktop for raw productivity.
Same here. I've been using CentOS w/KDE 3.5 simply because I couldn't yet get used to new distros with KDE 4. CentOS 5 is getting a little long in the tooth (can't run Firefox 4) but you'd be surprised how usable it is (and it still gets security updates).
To be honest, I think people like you and I really need to investigate the alternative WMs. Some of them have never changed from their core presentation as far as I can see. Maybe that's the kind of stability we want.
I uninstalled Flash 10 on my android a few days back. I can't remember what I used it for and it just ended up slowing down the whole browsing experience. Mobile sites these days know they can't use flash so most sites I visit just don't have it. It's great. And the ones that do end up going faster.
I wouldn't call it the "awesome bar", myself, but I have to say the quickest way for me to get to a website I've already visited is to type it (even a few letters) in the URL bar, press down, press enter. I haven't seen Firefox's equal in any other browser as far as the URL bar is concerned. I even find Chrome's URL bar slow even while everything else about Chrome is faster.
I'm now in the habit of using a `srm` (safe rm) which moves things to/tmp/ using `mktemp -d`. I know not all systems automatically clean/tmp on boot but that's the way I think of that command. When I remove files, I'm aware they're still around but not forever. It gives me time to think if I want it back but also to know it will be removed permanently without further intervention.
You might argue the "myth" of rebooting windows servers but I've never heard anyone with sufficient *nix experience saying that rebooting is a solution to anything except certain cases.
On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.
What actually does happen, though, is that the ISP provides ludicrous plans (too much money, too little bandwidth) AND the ISP does everything in their power to encourage excess usage. They have their cake and eat it, too, because we lack proper, level playing-field competition.
Many people, including myself, don't understand what you're seeing. The small size of lasers, the distance between the points, shakiness of human hands, etc., How is it even possible for more than a split second? Could you be confusing it with something else?
I have to agree. I've heard reports of this for a long time but how is this even possible? Scattering on the windows? They're pointed upwards as well from what I've seen of big planes. Maybe they're talking about small aircraft. I just can't see 1500 incidences a year, though. Maybe the pilots are confusing the phenomena with something else.
So, you're ok that someone has that much information about your online habits and is able to instantly mine that data to show you targeted ads like that?
I'm interested in the nuances of your story. You're so candid about being caught and reforming. Would you have kept on pirating if you knew you wouldn't have been caught? For what reasons? For what reasons have you now stopped pirating? Was stopping simply about realizing it could hurt you? Was there no part of your reform that realized your actions hurt others?
You sound like the people you criticize. You're so entrenched in your own beliefs that you're not willing to rationally consider any other position. You appear even to have acted out what you criticize of others: You've rationalized that everyone else has rationalized their own belief without study of your own.
Your ideas of rationalization seem a little skewed, as if others contorted reality in the extreme in order to make sense of things. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, many intelligent people have tackled these problems and the resolutions are always relatively simple and even elegant. There's no bending up in a pretzel to answer these supposed problems. Take your four corners example. The first two results should put that to rest: bible "four corners". To me, "four corners of the earth" is just one of those popular sayings that many people might use even today in reference to a certain geographic area. It likely results from viewing geography on a map, usually on a square/rectangular piece of paper which really does have four corners. This is certainly a case where I would give it the benefit of the doubt. If the writers had any intention of implying a flat earth, they would have said so much more explicitly and without doubt.
I don't have time to go over each of your examples, other than to say that the least trustworthy person to ask about what the Bible means is a Christian.
Well this is why I'm providing you with google links and not directly to Christian resources. By providing a search, you see that some of the top results are answers to these common questions: They've already been satisfactorily dealt with. It's like the claim of a faked moon landing. It's been dealt with already. Searches also provide you with the counter view, usually on the first page of the results, so you can research the view and the counter-view.
You can't have it both ways, if the Bible is literally true then the Earth has four corners, snakes eat dust, and grasshoppers have four legs.
You make a very observant, literal statement. If Christians keep on saying "we take the bible literally," according to English language semantics, it must mean we do not think about the words on the page. The truth is, however, that when one says they take the bible literally they are many assumptions implied there as well. By and large, people are giving you the benefit of the doubt in understanding that, when the bible says "the Lord is my rock and my fortress," in no way does the Christian think that God is literally a stone or a building. What is meant by taking the bible literally is that Christians take the bible for what it says unless it is obvious that it shouldn't be taken literally, and you can identify which it is by the context. How? By studying the language used, the constructs used, the presentation style, the paragraph housing the sentence, the chapter, the book, etc.
God made us in His image. We have the brain between our ears to think about these things. And we'd be doing a dishonour to Him in not trying to understand how a truth-telling God was actually telling the truth in some of the things we don't have any experience with.
If the earth is an oblate spheroid, snakes are carnivorous, and grasshoppers have six legs, then the Bible is not literally true.
The bible doesn't contradict any of these things. Again, try simple googling for the answers. Remember to review both sides of the issue. Many are rabidly anti-Christian and, by nature, pro-materialism: They will not know, will not have the expertise, and will not have the patience to investigate and present how the bible actually records the truth. Ironically, such people tend to take the bible as dogmatically literal compared to those who believe the bible. Those with a vested interest, however, will certainly provide the in-depth research and understanding to answer those questions.
You are so far out in left field. Where are you getting these ideas? I'm not sure I've ever even seen atheists make such statements.
Flat earth, Jesus not believing in a literal Genesis account, Christian church existing long before the bible was "made" (I'll assume you meant compiled), 150 year old creationism belief? All of these have been dealt with many times over.
I won't dig them up now because you've read it, and know them, and ignore them.
Yes, I know of many supposed flaws and, no, I do not ignore them. I research them and answer whoever I've been discussing it with. One of the great periods of life in which my confidence in the bible was solidified was answering a multitude of people who presented supposed flaws, errors or contradictions in the bible. The great thing, in this day and age, is that finding somebody who has already studied and resolved the supposed flaw is just a google away.
If you're an American conservative Christian, most of what is preached in your church as dogma (Creationism, the Rapture, Christian Capitalism) didn't exist 150 years ago.
Well, I think you know that's false because, only up until the last few hundred years, people took the scriptures at their word. If Genesis said a 6 day creation, and genealogies indicated a 6,000 year age, they believed that. See Creation Scientists for a list of just some present and past.
The bible doesn't mention a lot of things. It does mention the necessary things, though, that allow us to figure out everything else using the brain that God gave us.
The article was an example of one person going from a belief in evolution to a belief in biblical creation. That path presented many problems with evolution, that were resolved from a creation perspective, which ultimately led Safarti to reject evolution.
That is only one article of thousands on Creation.com. I recommend checking back with them daily for a few weeks to get a handle on what they're covering over the long term. Many articles cover many topics, some more in-depth than others.
The bible was written to be understood by the average person. Read it for what it says, and the implications of what is said, not what you want to bring in to it, and you'll see its integrity which necessitates, from beginning to end, that it is the truth. Either the entire bible is the truth or it's just another man made book.
Because the evidence fits much better when viewed from what the Bible records as history. I don't know how much evolution you've studied but if you've studied any, study the alternatives, as well. I wouldn't consider myself well informed, as a Christian, if I hadn't been reading up on alternatives.
Does this concept, if proven true, contradict something in the bible so directly that it would prove Christianity is false?
Yes. Here's one example of many but perhaps the most crucial: Jesus quoted Genesis as literal history. If Genesis is not literal history, than Jesus is ignorant or lying: Either of which denies his deity. That is important because the bible is one, single story about the fall and redemption of mankind. There was a plan from the beginning for Jesus. Jesus had to be a perfect sacrifice. There is none perfect but God. The entire bible and its message relies on its truthfulness.
Therefore climate change alarmists and other environmental loudmouths moaning about species loss and soil degradation should just shut the fuck up.
Seriously? You need to think it through a little more. This is not a rational position.
The main flaw of your argument is scale. You bet we can screw with nature and it will repair itself - to a certain critical mass of damage. Certainly, the scale of our activity dwarfs anything past even 100 years ago. Remember, in 1800 there were only 1B people on earth. All of that time just to get to 1B? Within 200 years we're at 2B. What people are talking about now is the concern of the scale. A system only has so much tolerance.
In some cases, visible morphological and behavioural changes have resulted. If that ain't evolution I don't know what is...
What you're seeing is a weeding or culling of the existing population based on members who already had resistance. If they didn't have resistance to begin with, you wouldn't have the initial problem you're dealing with. Evolution, meaning the theory of evolution which posits evolving you from amino acids, requires creation of new information.
It's the same case with this story. Study any case deep enough and you'll always find natural selection acting on existing information.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been reading the biblical creationist perspective on this since Feb 2011: Rapid tomcod ‘evolution by pollution’? Yeah, right and wrong.
This is not the kind of "evolution" needed to evolve lower-order organisms into higher-order ones. In fact, a better description for this particular case is "develution"
If you look close enough at any of these examples of evolution we keep hearing about, they're never the kind that molecules-to-man evolution requires.
Try again
It's so slow on the Wii! I recently upgraded from an ancient installation on the wii and was surprised to find out it was less buggy but much slower. They must have gone from native code to web-based. Bleh.
I'm sticking with CentOS 5 + KDE 3.5 until I can stomach KDE 4 or I force myself onto something else. Just can't beat a plain jane, straight up multitasking desktop for raw productivity.
Same here. I've been using CentOS w/KDE 3.5 simply because I couldn't yet get used to new distros with KDE 4. CentOS 5 is getting a little long in the tooth (can't run Firefox 4) but you'd be surprised how usable it is (and it still gets security updates).
To be honest, I think people like you and I really need to investigate the alternative WMs. Some of them have never changed from their core presentation as far as I can see. Maybe that's the kind of stability we want.
I uninstalled Flash 10 on my android a few days back. I can't remember what I used it for and it just ended up slowing down the whole browsing experience. Mobile sites these days know they can't use flash so most sites I visit just don't have it. It's great. And the ones that do end up going faster.
I wouldn't call it the "awesome bar", myself, but I have to say the quickest way for me to get to a website I've already visited is to type it (even a few letters) in the URL bar, press down, press enter. I haven't seen Firefox's equal in any other browser as far as the URL bar is concerned. I even find Chrome's URL bar slow even while everything else about Chrome is faster.
I'm now in the habit of using a `srm` (safe rm) which moves things to /tmp/ using `mktemp -d`. I know not all systems automatically clean /tmp on boot but that's the way I think of that command. When I remove files, I'm aware they're still around but not forever. It gives me time to think if I want it back but also to know it will be removed permanently without further intervention.
You might argue the "myth" of rebooting windows servers but I've never heard anyone with sufficient *nix experience saying that rebooting is a solution to anything except certain cases.
On the consumer side, you can pick an appropriate plan that allows for only the amount of bandwidth that you need, resulting in more effective market segregation. This means low-use consumers don't need to subsidize high-use consumers. On the ISP side, the incentive is to provide as fast a connection as possible to encourage usage and excess usage.
What actually does happen, though, is that the ISP provides ludicrous plans (too much money, too little bandwidth) AND the ISP does everything in their power to encourage excess usage. They have their cake and eat it, too, because we lack proper, level playing-field competition.
restored!
Many people, including myself, don't understand what you're seeing. The small size of lasers, the distance between the points, shakiness of human hands, etc., How is it even possible for more than a split second? Could you be confusing it with something else?
I have to agree. I've heard reports of this for a long time but how is this even possible? Scattering on the windows? They're pointed upwards as well from what I've seen of big planes. Maybe they're talking about small aircraft. I just can't see 1500 incidences a year, though. Maybe the pilots are confusing the phenomena with something else.
This should be on an episode of mythbusters.
So, you're ok that someone has that much information about your online habits and is able to instantly mine that data to show you targeted ads like that?
Something it wasn't meant to be.
It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. If your model isn't working out for you, try another.
I'm interested in the nuances of your story. You're so candid about being caught and reforming. Would you have kept on pirating if you knew you wouldn't have been caught? For what reasons? For what reasons have you now stopped pirating? Was stopping simply about realizing it could hurt you? Was there no part of your reform that realized your actions hurt others?
You sound like the people you criticize. You're so entrenched in your own beliefs that you're not willing to rationally consider any other position. You appear even to have acted out what you criticize of others: You've rationalized that everyone else has rationalized their own belief without study of your own.
Your ideas of rationalization seem a little skewed, as if others contorted reality in the extreme in order to make sense of things. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, many intelligent people have tackled these problems and the resolutions are always relatively simple and even elegant. There's no bending up in a pretzel to answer these supposed problems. Take your four corners example. The first two results should put that to rest: bible "four corners". To me, "four corners of the earth" is just one of those popular sayings that many people might use even today in reference to a certain geographic area. It likely results from viewing geography on a map, usually on a square/rectangular piece of paper which really does have four corners. This is certainly a case where I would give it the benefit of the doubt. If the writers had any intention of implying a flat earth, they would have said so much more explicitly and without doubt.
I don't have time to go over each of your examples, other than to say that the least trustworthy person to ask about what the Bible means is a Christian.
Well this is why I'm providing you with google links and not directly to Christian resources. By providing a search, you see that some of the top results are answers to these common questions: They've already been satisfactorily dealt with. It's like the claim of a faked moon landing. It's been dealt with already. Searches also provide you with the counter view, usually on the first page of the results, so you can research the view and the counter-view.
You can't have it both ways, if the Bible is literally true then the Earth has four corners, snakes eat dust, and grasshoppers have four legs.
You make a very observant, literal statement. If Christians keep on saying "we take the bible literally," according to English language semantics, it must mean we do not think about the words on the page. The truth is, however, that when one says they take the bible literally they are many assumptions implied there as well. By and large, people are giving you the benefit of the doubt in understanding that, when the bible says "the Lord is my rock and my fortress," in no way does the Christian think that God is literally a stone or a building. What is meant by taking the bible literally is that Christians take the bible for what it says unless it is obvious that it shouldn't be taken literally, and you can identify which it is by the context. How? By studying the language used, the constructs used, the presentation style, the paragraph housing the sentence, the chapter, the book, etc.
God made us in His image. We have the brain between our ears to think about these things. And we'd be doing a dishonour to Him in not trying to understand how a truth-telling God was actually telling the truth in some of the things we don't have any experience with.
If the earth is an oblate spheroid, snakes are carnivorous, and grasshoppers have six legs, then the Bible is not literally true.
The bible doesn't contradict any of these things. Again, try simple googling for the answers. Remember to review both sides of the issue. Many are rabidly anti-Christian and, by nature, pro-materialism: They will not know, will not have the expertise, and will not have the patience to investigate and present how the bible actually records the truth. Ironically, such people tend to take the bible as dogmatically literal compared to those who believe the bible. Those with a vested interest, however, will certainly provide the in-depth research and understanding to answer those questions.
You are so far out in left field. Where are you getting these ideas? I'm not sure I've ever even seen atheists make such statements.
Flat earth, Jesus not believing in a literal Genesis account, Christian church existing long before the bible was "made" (I'll assume you meant compiled), 150 year old creationism belief? All of these have been dealt with many times over.
Come again? I'm not particularly sure what you're referring to.
I won't dig them up now because you've read it, and know them, and ignore them.
Yes, I know of many supposed flaws and, no, I do not ignore them. I research them and answer whoever I've been discussing it with. One of the great periods of life in which my confidence in the bible was solidified was answering a multitude of people who presented supposed flaws, errors or contradictions in the bible. The great thing, in this day and age, is that finding somebody who has already studied and resolved the supposed flaw is just a google away.
If you're an American conservative Christian, most of what is preached in your church as dogma (Creationism, the Rapture, Christian Capitalism) didn't exist 150 years ago.
Well, I think you know that's false because, only up until the last few hundred years, people took the scriptures at their word. If Genesis said a 6 day creation, and genealogies indicated a 6,000 year age, they believed that. See Creation Scientists for a list of just some present and past.
The bible doesn't mention a lot of things. It does mention the necessary things, though, that allow us to figure out everything else using the brain that God gave us.
The article was an example of one person going from a belief in evolution to a belief in biblical creation. That path presented many problems with evolution, that were resolved from a creation perspective, which ultimately led Safarti to reject evolution.
That is only one article of thousands on Creation.com. I recommend checking back with them daily for a few weeks to get a handle on what they're covering over the long term. Many articles cover many topics, some more in-depth than others.
The bible was written to be understood by the average person. Read it for what it says, and the implications of what is said, not what you want to bring in to it, and you'll see its integrity which necessitates, from beginning to end, that it is the truth. Either the entire bible is the truth or it's just another man made book.
...why Christians deny evolution?
Because the evidence fits much better when viewed from what the Bible records as history. I don't know how much evolution you've studied but if you've studied any, study the alternatives, as well. I wouldn't consider myself well informed, as a Christian, if I hadn't been reading up on alternatives.
For further reading on what I meant about evidence fitting the bible better: http://creation.com/an-awesome-mind-creation-magazine-jonathan-sarfati-interview
Does this concept, if proven true, contradict something in the bible so directly that it would prove Christianity is false?
Yes. Here's one example of many but perhaps the most crucial: Jesus quoted Genesis as literal history. If Genesis is not literal history, than Jesus is ignorant or lying: Either of which denies his deity. That is important because the bible is one, single story about the fall and redemption of mankind. There was a plan from the beginning for Jesus. Jesus had to be a perfect sacrifice. There is none perfect but God. The entire bible and its message relies on its truthfulness.
This is a much more thorough look at it: http://creation.com/should-genesis-be-taken-literally
Therefore climate change alarmists and other environmental loudmouths moaning about species loss and soil degradation should just shut the fuck up.
Seriously? You need to think it through a little more. This is not a rational position.
The main flaw of your argument is scale. You bet we can screw with nature and it will repair itself - to a certain critical mass of damage. Certainly, the scale of our activity dwarfs anything past even 100 years ago. Remember, in 1800 there were only 1B people on earth. All of that time just to get to 1B? Within 200 years we're at 2B. What people are talking about now is the concern of the scale. A system only has so much tolerance.
In some cases, visible morphological and behavioural changes have resulted. If that ain't evolution I don't know what is...
What you're seeing is a weeding or culling of the existing population based on members who already had resistance. If they didn't have resistance to begin with, you wouldn't have the initial problem you're dealing with. Evolution, meaning the theory of evolution which posits evolving you from amino acids, requires creation of new information.
It's the same case with this story. Study any case deep enough and you'll always find natural selection acting on existing information.
Er, I was replying mainly to the OP's point about caps. It is the caps that prevent what you're talking about.