Is the City of London Police paid now by ProMusic, Music Matters, FindAnyFilm, TheContentMap, and by BPI, ifpi, and Publisher Association? I always think the first country to have a private police force would be the USA and not the UK, but here you have it.
We have clearly a different opinion of what rights are. If I have a right to make a copy and I have a perfectly working computer to exercise my right and then because I bought a DVD or Blu-Ray that feature is removed, the manufacture of those DVD/Blu-Ray clearly violates my rights. It doesn't matter if I agreed for that, I right stays a right. That is the same principle of why slavery is illegal, even if you sign a contract that makes you a slave.
That is also the reason why all contracts have a clause that if some passages of the contract is in contradiction of the current law, that passage becomes void. So, even if I agreed in a EULA like contract to disable my rights, my rights still are valid. For example, the first sale right is still valid even if you agreed to a EULA that disallows resale.[1,2]
I don't have to argue the need to exercise my rights.
I'm no a lawyer, but I think that fair-use rights still hold up even for streaming and renting. If not, that is why I donate to the FSF to push legislation to extend my rights to paid content.
That's a slippery slope that would have people arguing that they are only recording the movie in the theater on their cell phone so that they can review it using a few short clips.
I'm not arguing for DRM, but that's an awful analogy. No better than saying having a lock on your front door assumes all of your houseguests are criminals. And the latter that you KNEW exactly what you were buying when you did it so nothing was "removed".
I have a computer that can copy videos and convert them to different formats. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray that feature of my computer is removed. It is nonsensical to say "that you KNEW exactly what you were buying". A feature *was* removed, you can't deny that. Why was this feature removed? Because the provider assuming you are a pirate and want to copy and share the video with your friends and others, or even sell it for profit.
And HDMI has nothing to do with Blu-Ray.
Technical you are correct, I meant HDCP, but in practice nobody heart anything about that and only knows about HDMI.
Q: I'm starting to build an HDMI home theater system, what should I keep in mind? [...] Insure all devices are on the most recent firmware [...] Try to buy all the HDMI devices and HDMI cables from one vendor as they have probably all been tested with each other assuring a system that will work. [...] Q: Everything was working and now I don't see video on my TV, what do I do? A: You may have lost your HDCP handshake so power cycle all devices by resetting them or pulling the AC plug
I don't think a DRM should be opposed because then you can't pirate anymore.
Sure, everyone is a pirate. YT videos are free and everyone can watch them, why would I pirate them?
His point (hopefully) is that you don't need flash to play flash videos. Will EME videos play in VLC, MPlayer, FFmpeg?
That is exactly my point. I hate to use the build-in video player in FF (and the build-in Pdf viewer is horrible, too). Also I want the advantages of a computer: that I can save the video and watch again later. Why should I degrade my computer to a TV (streaming only)? I know that Netflix and Hollywood wants to kill the computer model, I don't need Mozilla to help them with that.
How so? I am able to download videos from any site that uses Flash with a Firefox addon for ages now. The video file I can convert to any other video format using ffmeg or other video tools. Will I still be able to do that with EME and a proprietary CDM? If the content providers says No, there is no way I will be able to download the video file any more.
Because any DRM system must at least do two things: a) assume that you are a criminal and b) remove rights from you to use your own property. For example video playback with Blu-ray discs. You buy a Blu-ray player and a sound setup and hi-definition TV and you go to a shop and buy the newest Blu-Ray movie, you come back and you are not able to watch. Why? Because they assume you are a criminal and prevent your $1000+ equipment from playing your bought Blu-Ray disc because of some incompatibility with HDMI. Or maybe because your TV don't have HDMI but analogue cable.
Also DRM prevents fair-use rights, for example the right for a backup copy, the right to use short clips from the video, and DRM prevents that the work goes into the public domain.
The last presidential candidate was a Mormon. And the last president was voted two times in the office, being a right wing Christian. If we talking about the USA the "intelligent Christians" are clearly a tiny minority. The Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, got about 254,074 visitors in 2011 and I don't know of any Christian group that was actively opposing it. Where are the Christian supporter of, for example, the Reason Rally[1]?
I also find it odd that you expect other people to bother to change your mind. You obviously haven't done any research into Christianity yourself, and seem to have very strong opinions about it. I like my strong opinions to be based on fact, if possible, not whoever is advertising louder.
I experienced a lot of those blanked statement like that from Christians that I debated. You can ask my facts, or you can point out my errors. The scripture is not rocket science, almost any historic text have more depth then the Bible. If you could weight the "insightfulness" of texts, Socrates Apology can easily outweigh it.
I personally never called a Christian ignorant, I called out their beliefs. I always ask a Christian what she believes, because the term "Christian" is very ambiguous. But are those "allies" actual useful in any way? I never saw any Christian defend a more rational position against those other Christian, who, for example, believe that Jesus comes back in 40 years. In religion it's just one opinion against another opinion and nobody can show the other side wrong.
I'm suggesting that you don't call people things like that either, unless you can bring positive evidence.
Do you talk now about to bring evidence of their ignorance? Earlier you were talking to bring positive evidence for the non-existence of god.
Calling Christians in general deeply ignorant is another thing. The ones I know tend to realize that there is no objective evidence of Christianity, and since you agree with that I wouldn't call it ignorance if I were you.
Then those Christians should do something about their fellow Christians, for example, call to the Pope and demand more education of his "flock", or call out to evangelical pastors that preach young earth creationism and a literal bible. If you are not opposing something wicked, then you are supporting it. It's up to your Christian friends to change my perception of Christianity. Of course it's bias, but it is supported by facts. That goes the same for Muslims.
For example, if you call yourself a KKK member, I will perceive you as a racists homophobic evangelical white Christian. It doesn't matter if some of the KKK are very moderate and are members for "subjective reasons".
PS: I find the core ideas of religion asinine to human kind. The idea of an afterlife and the idea of an all powerful god is asinine to long term and short term planning and development and progress in general.
On a recent poll about 1/3 in the USA believe in a young earth (10,000 years or less) and do not believe in natural evolution[1]. About half of the Christian believe that Jesus will come back in the next 40 years[2]. This is pure asinine to any reasonable long term policy and if not tamed could very well doom us all, especially because those believes comes from a first world country, that is military and economically superior. In addition, you have millions of delusional Christians that think WWIII will speed up the second coming of Jesus[3][4].
Moreover, if being religious is deeply ignorant, you should be able to provide strong evidence against the existence of a God. Not just point to a lack of evidence you like, but evidence against it.
First, that proves for me your ignorance of logic. You demand to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy. Second, absence of evidence is evidence for absence. For example, if I make the claim that I have a cat in my house and you come over and look everywhere for my cat and you don't find anything, that is strong evidence that I lied and that I have no cats. The same is for God or for gods.
The Internet works fine for 99% of the users and stakeholders. Good enough is better than perfect[1] and the Internet is good enough. What we need is legal protection, because the current problems of the Internet are not technological, but political. Privacy is a political goal, for example. Do-Not-Track Header[2], I was laughing when I first heard of that and of course it's a failed concept.
The new Internet must be 200% better then the current Internet. You can see how slow and reluctant new (and even necessary) technologies are adopted (IPv6) because the current tech (IPv4) is "Good Enough". If you want that 1 billion websites[3] to switch to Internet2 your new Internet must have a lot of incentives.
Why do you need that to prove the heliocentric model? You just need to look at the planetary movement of one of the outer planets, like Mars. The outer planets appear to make a loop if watched from earth[1]. The apparent retrograde motion could also be explained with deferent and epicycle[2] but then you already left the geocentric model. And the retrograde motion was already understood as an illusion since Copernicus[1].
Free speech is the right to voice your opinion, and not to induce panic and harm people. There are no white/black lists, each country have just different understanding of what is covered by free speech rights. If you shout "Fire" in a theatre where is no fire, it is not free speech, but you want to harm people. You want that people panic and rush out of the theatre. How is that free speech? Likewise, slander is not free speech because you want to harm people. Your rights end where it starts to infringe on other people rights.
That being said, it have nothing to do with the Blogger-Law in Russia. Putin have a long history of jailing opposing voices to his politics. I really worried for Russia, maybe it looks to China to get inspiration to solidify power.
You do a Naturalistic fallacy[1]. Only because it is natural for something, it does not mean that it's a valid excuse. By the same argument you could argue that racial discrimination is natural and therefore it's not a problem. What you described is exactly why we have laws against discrimination of minorities, i.e. precisely because minorities are perceived as something different and get a different treatment for no valid reason.
Now there are valid reasons to have a special treatment for woman, for example, in the field of sport, or in case of the workspace, in heavy lifting. There is an anatomical difference between woman and man's bodies, that's why it's perfectly reasonable to have woman and man compete separate or to hire male workers. But there is no such difference in mental capabilities.
Is condition not limit. You used the word "limit", but wrongly.
O.k. if you say so.
So no, you cannot always quantify the unknown unknowns so easily as you're implying.
A model will never "quantify the unknown unknowns", it will quantify the uncertainty of the knowns. What is an "environment" for you? I think every scientific theory's environment is the Universe.
Actually, I wrote "limits" and not "conditions", and also you must take into account the uncertainty. The more precise you want to calculate the trajectory, the bigger the uncertainty gets. So if the uncertainty gets too big, you must switch to a better model.
I think you have bigger problems if in fact it is true that "For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang, acceptance was below 30 percent." I can imagine how it works: pupil learned from geology class about strata and tectonic plates and how mountains are formed and the fact that the Earth is 4.5 billion year old. Then the pupil go to the parents and asks about it and gets a reply from the parents that their pastor said the Earth is 6,000 years old and that mountains were formed in Noah's flood. America is really ruled by an oligarchy[1], because poll after poll shows the scientific illiteracy of the general American population.
These are mathematical constructs that explain differences between our hypothetical starting at a unified point and the differences from the hypothesis that we observe in reality.
I don't get what where you getting with that. Scientific theories are using math to describe nature.
Inflation is a way to reconcile theory with observation.
Yes, and one of the observation is the flatness of the universe.
You only "need" these things to make the Big Bang theory work. That you "need" inflation to make the Big Bang possible is putting the horse before the cart. Normally theory follows observation, not vice versa as in the case with Inflation.
You don't need Inflation for the Big Bang. If the universe would not be flat, then Inflation would not be needed. But observations shows that the universe is flat.
Indeed the Big Bang theory may still be correct even if the Inflationary theory is proven to be incorrect.
We cannot observe the first 10^-31 seconds directly, so we need to deduce in a theory. But we can see the results of the first 10^-31 seconds of the Big Bang, the flatness of the Universe. We need to explain that, hence the Inflation theory.
Inflation theory is not a fact in the same way that we accept gravity or evolution as a fact, and really still stands to be verified. There are several competing theories to Inflation that aim to address the complications that Inflation introduces, which may in time be proven to provide a better explanation.
I never stated that. I wrote that the Big Bang is a fact.
I have news for you: we are in the Big Bang. We can see down in time to the first 380,000 years of the Universe, by a telescope. You do know that the speed of light is a constant and if you look at a star, for example, 30 light years away, you see how the star was 30 years ego. Then we look at a galaxy, say, a billion light years away, that means we see the light that was send a billion years ego. Now we look at the CMBR and we see the Universe like it was when it was just 380,000 years old. We cannot look further back in time because the CMBR is obscuring our view. So we can see the Big Bang from 380,000 years to today (13.7 billion years).
Look at the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... We can see (with a telescope) everything that is the "Big Bang Expansion". The only thing we cannot see is beyond the CMBR, the first 380,000 years.
A theory is either correct or not. If it's making correct predictions than it's correct, if not, it's wrong. I still don't understand what you mean by "true uncertainty". If we find ever that the speed of light is in fact variable, then the current models must be dropped as wrong.
Only because there is a theoretical (or rather philosophical) possibility that the speed of light is in fact variable, you can't say that our current models are uncertain or have a higher "true uncertainty". Those models are still correct and valid because for a constant speed of light they do make correct predictions. It's like Newton's theory of universal attraction (aka gravitation) is still a valid theory, despite the fact that it does not work if v approaches the speed of light, or if one object have a very big mass (like the orbit of Mercury around the Sun).
Scientific theories not only can quantity the uncertainty but have clear defined limits. A Scientific theory says: if a, b, c, then z, with the uncertainty w (a, b, and c being the limits, z is the prediction). If the limits are not met then the scientific theory makes no prediction, and if no prediction is made then you can't say the theory is correct or wrong.
You have to know certain facts, you could also ask for what it is good to know where Europe is (the continent), if you don't know anything about the movement of the tectonic plates. Facts are the basics on which you can advance your scientific understanding and not everyone is interested in science. But facts are helping in a democracy to come to a correct conclusion and create good policies. If you know that the earth is round then your are more likely to support funding for satellites, if you know that the Sun is the centre and not the Earth, you are more likely to support funding for NASA's space exploration, and so on.
Not everyone have an interest in science and how theories are formed. But like the ability to read and write, you need a scientific literate public to make policies that correspond to the real world.
I'm stop discussing here with you about the Big Bang theory because obviously you should inform yourself more what the theory is all about. Quite ironic, since you are arguing that the scientific concepts are more important.
The fact that if you have an expanding universe that if you back track everything then you will arrive at a point. If everything started as a point then well it must have expanded from a point. The cosmic microwave radiation background was supporting evidence that came about much later. The evidence being if the background radiation is uniform then perhaps everything did start from a unified point.
Yes, that is what the Big Bang theory is about. That if you go back in time everything did start from a singular point. Then if you go even more back in time you need the Inflation theory and then later the quantum fluctuation theory. And the Big Bang is a fact and a theory, like biological evolution is a theory and a fact, because we can observe the Big Bang right now (the expansion), like we can observe the evolution of species right now. What we can't do is to observe the Big Bang further in time because the CMBR is obfuscating our view. But from the CMBR we can pretty much deduce what should be happened before, because it is a cooling down plasma.
Once again, the Big Bang explosion is a metaphor. And it is a cooling down plasma, because pressure and density are equal to temperature. The more dense, the hotter the temperature. We even use the model of a black body temperature to predict the mass of the universe from the CMBR. Sure, there is no outside from which you could observe it, but the laws of a gas apply here nevertheless.
Sure, and I could be a brain in a jar and none of that is real. The scientific method is the only method that can actually quantify the uncertainty and comes up with testable predictions. How do you propose to calculate the uncertainty? The models can be assumed to be correct, since they do make correct predictions.
The modern cosmology can predict everything in the universe up from the first 10^-31 seconds. For example, the cosmic background radiation, the distribution of matter (and dark matter, and dark energy), the distribution of the heavy elements, the formation of stars, planets and galaxies. The only unknown frontiers of modern cosmology are the details, like inflation.
What other knowledge? All the evidence points to a 13.7 billion year old universe and a 4.5 billion year old earth. Appear? Do you mean that all tests and all our understanding of physics and chemistry and geology show that those bones are million of years old? Do you really weight the claims of some primitive, illiterate people from 2000 years ego the same as the current consensus of the scientific community? Those people who wrote the bible had even less understanding of the world then the ancient Greek people that lived 500 years before Jesus. If you really weight the claims of the bible of a global flood, and dirt people, and talking snakes as the current science, then the survey was really accurate.
There is a difference between being ignorant of science as you are, and being a sceptic. Vaccines killed exactly zero people. That is zero as in 0 or none at all. But vaccines helped literally billions of people, including millions of children that before vaccines died horrible of, for example, polio.
The further I read the comments here on Slashdot, the more I believe that the USA is really an illiterate third world country.
He did not wrote about inductive and deductive reasoning. He wrote "... different types of science. One is experimental [...] Then there's the science that says...". Science is a method of gaining knowledge, and there is only one scientific method. What he wrote was very familiar to Ken Ham's "observational" and "historical science". That shows his ignorance of science.
I think you should inform yourself what the Big Bang theory actually is. The Big Bang theory is not about the creation of the universe, but what happened after the universe was created (or came into existence or whatever, because we don't know what before the Big Bang was), see [1]. The most obvious evidence of the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave radiation. The term Big Bang is a good metaphor, because if you were an observer outside the universe you would see a hot ball of plasma expanding very fast, like in an explosion, for a very short time (about 380,000 years), until the ball of plasma cooled down and became transparent. The second evidence is the expanding universe.
Maybe you are confusing the Big Bang theory with the Inflation theory[2], that predicts that the universe expanded exponentially in the first 10^-31 seconds, to explain the flatness of the universe? Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1927 and is based on the observation of the expanding universe and Einstein's equations and is currently accepted as fact. The Inflation theory is a recent model to explain the flatness of the universe and is in dispute. There are models that explain the flatness without the Inflation.
You can't expect from everyone to have a scientific education, but you can expect from everyone to know agreed upon facts. For example, do you really expect from everyone to explain why the earth is round, why the earth is rotating in an elliptic orbit around the sun, or why the orbit of Mercury is irregular? But you can expect that people know that the earth is round, that the orbits are elliptic and that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.
Should we also teach flat Earth and Geocentric cosmology? No, because it would just waste time and it would just be confusing. It's hard enough to teach some basic facts and an argument from authority is sometimes a valid argument. If someone have a scientific interest she could open a book and learn for herself why those theories were proven wrong.
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Is the City of London Police paid now by ProMusic, Music Matters, FindAnyFilm, TheContentMap, and by BPI, ifpi, and Publisher Association?
I always think the first country to have a private police force would be the USA and not the UK, but here you have it.
We have clearly a different opinion of what rights are. If I have a right to make a copy and I have a perfectly working computer to exercise my right and then because I bought a DVD or Blu-Ray that feature is removed, the manufacture of those DVD/Blu-Ray clearly violates my rights. It doesn't matter if I agreed for that, I right stays a right. That is the same principle of why slavery is illegal, even if you sign a contract that makes you a slave.
That is also the reason why all contracts have a clause that if some passages of the contract is in contradiction of the current law, that passage becomes void. So, even if I agreed in a EULA like contract to disable my rights, my rights still are valid. For example, the first sale right is still valid even if you agreed to a EULA that disallows resale.[1,2]
[1] http://toc.oreilly.com/2013/03...
[2] http://www.dw.de/oracle-loses-...
I don't have to argue the need to exercise my rights.
I'm no a lawyer, but I think that fair-use rights still hold up even for streaming and renting. If not, that is why I donate to the FSF to push legislation to extend my rights to paid content.
That's a slippery slope that would have people arguing that they are only recording the movie in the theater on their cell phone so that they can review it using a few short clips.
Yes, why not?
I'm not arguing for DRM, but that's an awful analogy. No better than saying having a lock on your front door assumes all of your houseguests are criminals. And the latter that you KNEW exactly what you were buying when you did it so nothing was "removed".
I have a computer that can copy videos and convert them to different formats. If I want to watch a Blu-Ray that feature of my computer is removed. It is nonsensical to say "that you KNEW exactly what you were buying". A feature *was* removed, you can't deny that. Why was this feature removed? Because the provider assuming you are a pirate and want to copy and share the video with your friends and others, or even sell it for profit.
And HDMI has nothing to do with Blu-Ray.
Technical you are correct, I meant HDCP, but in practice nobody heart anything about that and only knows about HDMI.
http://www.geekosystem.com/hdc...
HDCP is currently the DRM standard for, among other means of HD transmission, HDMI, DVI, and Blu-Ray.
http://www.hdtvsupply.com/hdmi...
Q: I'm starting to build an HDMI home theater system, what should I keep in mind? [...] Insure all devices are on the most recent firmware [...] Try to buy all the HDMI devices and HDMI cables from one vendor as they have probably all been tested with each other assuring a system that will work. [...] Q: Everything was working and now I don't see video on my TV, what do I do? A: You may have lost your HDCP handshake so power cycle all devices by resetting them or pulling the AC plug
I don't think a DRM should be opposed because then you can't pirate anymore.
Sure, everyone is a pirate. YT videos are free and everyone can watch them, why would I pirate them?
His point (hopefully) is that you don't need flash to play flash videos. Will EME videos play in VLC, MPlayer, FFmpeg?
That is exactly my point. I hate to use the build-in video player in FF (and the build-in Pdf viewer is horrible, too). Also I want the advantages of a computer: that I can save the video and watch again later. Why should I degrade my computer to a TV (streaming only)? I know that Netflix and Hollywood wants to kill the computer model, I don't need Mozilla to help them with that.
Flash is worse than any CDM.
How so? I am able to download videos from any site that uses Flash with a Firefox addon for ages now. The video file I can convert to any other video format using ffmeg or other video tools. Will I still be able to do that with EME and a proprietary CDM? If the content providers says No, there is no way I will be able to download the video file any more.
Because any DRM system must at least do two things: a) assume that you are a criminal and b) remove rights from you to use your own property. For example video playback with Blu-ray discs. You buy a Blu-ray player and a sound setup and hi-definition TV and you go to a shop and buy the newest Blu-Ray movie, you come back and you are not able to watch. Why? Because they assume you are a criminal and prevent your $1000+ equipment from playing your bought Blu-Ray disc because of some incompatibility with HDMI. Or maybe because your TV don't have HDMI but analogue cable.
Also DRM prevents fair-use rights, for example the right for a backup copy, the right to use short clips from the video, and DRM prevents that the work goes into the public domain.
The last presidential candidate was a Mormon. And the last president was voted two times in the office, being a right wing Christian. If we talking about the USA the "intelligent Christians" are clearly a tiny minority. The Creationist Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, got about 254,074 visitors in 2011 and I don't know of any Christian group that was actively opposing it. Where are the Christian supporter of, for example, the Reason Rally[1]?
I also find it odd that you expect other people to bother to change your mind. You obviously haven't done any research into Christianity yourself, and seem to have very strong opinions about it. I like my strong opinions to be based on fact, if possible, not whoever is advertising louder.
I experienced a lot of those blanked statement like that from Christians that I debated. You can ask my facts, or you can point out my errors. The scripture is not rocket science, almost any historic text have more depth then the Bible. If you could weight the "insightfulness" of texts, Socrates Apology can easily outweigh it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
I personally never called a Christian ignorant, I called out their beliefs. I always ask a Christian what she believes, because the term "Christian" is very ambiguous. But are those "allies" actual useful in any way? I never saw any Christian defend a more rational position against those other Christian, who, for example, believe that Jesus comes back in 40 years. In religion it's just one opinion against another opinion and nobody can show the other side wrong.
I'm suggesting that you don't call people things like that either, unless you can bring positive evidence.
Do you talk now about to bring evidence of their ignorance? Earlier you were talking to bring positive evidence for the non-existence of god.
Calling Christians in general deeply ignorant is another thing. The ones I know tend to realize that there is no objective evidence of Christianity, and since you agree with that I wouldn't call it ignorance if I were you.
Then those Christians should do something about their fellow Christians, for example, call to the Pope and demand more education of his "flock", or call out to evangelical pastors that preach young earth creationism and a literal bible. If you are not opposing something wicked, then you are supporting it. It's up to your Christian friends to change my perception of Christianity. Of course it's bias, but it is supported by facts. That goes the same for Muslims.
For example, if you call yourself a KKK member, I will perceive you as a racists homophobic evangelical white Christian. It doesn't matter if some of the KKK are very moderate and are members for "subjective reasons".
PS: I find the core ideas of religion asinine to human kind. The idea of an afterlife and the idea of an all powerful god is asinine to long term and short term planning and development and progress in general.
On a recent poll about 1/3 in the USA believe in a young earth (10,000 years or less) and do not believe in natural evolution[1]. About half of the Christian believe that Jesus will come back in the next 40 years[2]. This is pure asinine to any reasonable long term policy and if not tamed could very well doom us all, especially because those believes comes from a first world country, that is military and economically superior. In addition, you have millions of delusional Christians that think WWIII will speed up the second coming of Jesus[3][4].
Moreover, if being religious is deeply ignorant, you should be able to provide strong evidence against the existence of a God. Not just point to a lack of evidence you like, but evidence against it.
First, that proves for me your ignorance of logic. You demand to prove a negative, which is a logical fallacy. Second, absence of evidence is evidence for absence. For example, if I make the claim that I have a cat in my house and you come over and look everywhere for my cat and you don't find anything, that is strong evidence that I lied and that I have no cats. The same is for God or for gods.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article...
[2] http://www.alternet.org/survey...
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ame...
[4] http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
Interesting. Thank you for the new information.
The Internet works fine for 99% of the users and stakeholders. Good enough is better than perfect[1] and the Internet is good enough. What we need is legal protection, because the current problems of the Internet are not technological, but political. Privacy is a political goal, for example. Do-Not-Track Header[2], I was laughing when I first heard of that and of course it's a failed concept.
The new Internet must be 200% better then the current Internet. You can see how slow and reluctant new (and even necessary) technologies are adopted (IPv6) because the current tech (IPv4) is "Good Enough". If you want that 1 billion websites[3] to switch to Internet2 your new Internet must have a lot of incentives.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
[3] http://www.internetlivestats.c...
Why do you need that to prove the heliocentric model? You just need to look at the planetary movement of one of the outer planets, like Mars. The outer planets appear to make a loop if watched from earth[1]. The apparent retrograde motion could also be explained with deferent and epicycle[2] but then you already left the geocentric model. And the retrograde motion was already understood as an illusion since Copernicus[1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Free speech is the right to voice your opinion, and not to induce panic and harm people. There are no white/black lists, each country have just different understanding of what is covered by free speech rights. If you shout "Fire" in a theatre where is no fire, it is not free speech, but you want to harm people. You want that people panic and rush out of the theatre. How is that free speech? Likewise, slander is not free speech because you want to harm people. Your rights end where it starts to infringe on other people rights.
That being said, it have nothing to do with the Blogger-Law in Russia. Putin have a long history of jailing opposing voices to his politics. I really worried for Russia, maybe it looks to China to get inspiration to solidify power.
You do a Naturalistic fallacy[1]. Only because it is natural for something, it does not mean that it's a valid excuse. By the same argument you could argue that racial discrimination is natural and therefore it's not a problem. What you described is exactly why we have laws against discrimination of minorities, i.e. precisely because minorities are perceived as something different and get a different treatment for no valid reason.
Now there are valid reasons to have a special treatment for woman, for example, in the field of sport, or in case of the workspace, in heavy lifting. There is an anatomical difference between woman and man's bodies, that's why it's perfectly reasonable to have woman and man compete separate or to hire male workers. But there is no such difference in mental capabilities.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Is condition not limit. You used the word "limit", but wrongly.
O.k. if you say so.
So no, you cannot always quantify the unknown unknowns so easily as you're implying.
A model will never "quantify the unknown unknowns", it will quantify the uncertainty of the knowns.
What is an "environment" for you? I think every scientific theory's environment is the Universe.
Actually, I wrote "limits" and not "conditions", and also you must take into account the uncertainty. The more precise you want to calculate the trajectory, the bigger the uncertainty gets. So if the uncertainty gets too big, you must switch to a better model.
Yes, I did wrote exactly that in the next two paragraphs. Good to see that somebody else got an understanding of scientific theories.
I think you have bigger problems if in fact it is true that "For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang, acceptance was below 30 percent." I can imagine how it works: pupil learned from geology class about strata and tectonic plates and how mountains are formed and the fact that the Earth is 4.5 billion year old. Then the pupil go to the parents and asks about it and gets a reply from the parents that their pastor said the Earth is 6,000 years old and that mountains were formed in Noah's flood. America is really ruled by an oligarchy[1], because poll after poll shows the scientific illiteracy of the general American population.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
These are mathematical constructs that explain differences between our hypothetical starting at a unified point and the differences from the hypothesis that we observe in reality.
I don't get what where you getting with that. Scientific theories are using math to describe nature.
Inflation is a way to reconcile theory with observation.
Yes, and one of the observation is the flatness of the universe.
You only "need" these things to make the Big Bang theory work. That you "need" inflation to make the Big Bang possible is putting the horse before the cart. Normally theory follows observation, not vice versa as in the case with Inflation.
You don't need Inflation for the Big Bang. If the universe would not be flat, then Inflation would not be needed. But observations shows that the universe is flat.
Indeed the Big Bang theory may still be correct even if the Inflationary theory is proven to be incorrect.
We cannot observe the first 10^-31 seconds directly, so we need to deduce in a theory. But we can see the results of the first 10^-31 seconds of the Big Bang, the flatness of the Universe. We need to explain that, hence the Inflation theory.
Inflation theory is not a fact in the same way that we accept gravity or evolution as a fact, and really still stands to be verified. There are several competing theories to Inflation that aim to address the complications that Inflation introduces, which may in time be proven to provide a better explanation.
I never stated that. I wrote that the Big Bang is a fact.
I have news for you: we are in the Big Bang. We can see down in time to the first 380,000 years of the Universe, by a telescope. You do know that the speed of light is a constant and if you look at a star, for example, 30 light years away, you see how the star was 30 years ego. Then we look at a galaxy, say, a billion light years away, that means we see the light that was send a billion years ego. Now we look at the CMBR and we see the Universe like it was when it was just 380,000 years old. We cannot look further back in time because the CMBR is obscuring our view. So we can see the Big Bang from 380,000 years to today (13.7 billion years).
Look at the image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
We can see (with a telescope) everything that is the "Big Bang Expansion". The only thing we cannot see is beyond the CMBR, the first 380,000 years.
A theory is either correct or not. If it's making correct predictions than it's correct, if not, it's wrong. I still don't understand what you mean by "true uncertainty". If we find ever that the speed of light is in fact variable, then the current models must be dropped as wrong.
Only because there is a theoretical (or rather philosophical) possibility that the speed of light is in fact variable, you can't say that our current models are uncertain or have a higher "true uncertainty". Those models are still correct and valid because for a constant speed of light they do make correct predictions. It's like Newton's theory of universal attraction (aka gravitation) is still a valid theory, despite the fact that it does not work if v approaches the speed of light, or if one object have a very big mass (like the orbit of Mercury around the Sun).
Scientific theories not only can quantity the uncertainty but have clear defined limits. A Scientific theory says: if a, b, c, then z, with the uncertainty w (a, b, and c being the limits, z is the prediction). If the limits are not met then the scientific theory makes no prediction, and if no prediction is made then you can't say the theory is correct or wrong.
You have to know certain facts, you could also ask for what it is good to know where Europe is (the continent), if you don't know anything about the movement of the tectonic plates. Facts are the basics on which you can advance your scientific understanding and not everyone is interested in science. But facts are helping in a democracy to come to a correct conclusion and create good policies. If you know that the earth is round then your are more likely to support funding for satellites, if you know that the Sun is the centre and not the Earth, you are more likely to support funding for NASA's space exploration, and so on.
Not everyone have an interest in science and how theories are formed. But like the ability to read and write, you need a scientific literate public to make policies that correspond to the real world.
I'm stop discussing here with you about the Big Bang theory because obviously you should inform yourself more what the theory is all about. Quite ironic, since you are arguing that the scientific concepts are more important.
The fact that if you have an expanding universe that if you back track everything then you will arrive at a point. If everything started as a point then well it must have expanded from a point. The cosmic microwave radiation background was supporting evidence that came about much later. The evidence being if the background radiation is uniform then perhaps everything did start from a unified point.
Yes, that is what the Big Bang theory is about. That if you go back in time everything did start from a singular point. Then if you go even more back in time you need the Inflation theory and then later the quantum fluctuation theory. And the Big Bang is a fact and a theory, like biological evolution is a theory and a fact, because we can observe the Big Bang right now (the expansion), like we can observe the evolution of species right now. What we can't do is to observe the Big Bang further in time because the CMBR is obfuscating our view. But from the CMBR we can pretty much deduce what should be happened before, because it is a cooling down plasma.
Once again, the Big Bang explosion is a metaphor. And it is a cooling down plasma, because pressure and density are equal to temperature. The more dense, the hotter the temperature. We even use the model of a black body temperature to predict the mass of the universe from the CMBR. Sure, there is no outside from which you could observe it, but the laws of a gas apply here nevertheless.
Sure, and I could be a brain in a jar and none of that is real. The scientific method is the only method that can actually quantify the uncertainty and comes up with testable predictions. How do you propose to calculate the uncertainty? The models can be assumed to be correct, since they do make correct predictions.
The modern cosmology can predict everything in the universe up from the first 10^-31 seconds. For example, the cosmic background radiation, the distribution of matter (and dark matter, and dark energy), the distribution of the heavy elements, the formation of stars, planets and galaxies. The only unknown frontiers of modern cosmology are the details, like inflation.
What other knowledge? All the evidence points to a 13.7 billion year old universe and a 4.5 billion year old earth. Appear? Do you mean that all tests and all our understanding of physics and chemistry and geology show that those bones are million of years old? Do you really weight the claims of some primitive, illiterate people from 2000 years ego the same as the current consensus of the scientific community? Those people who wrote the bible had even less understanding of the world then the ancient Greek people that lived 500 years before Jesus. If you really weight the claims of the bible of a global flood, and dirt people, and talking snakes as the current science, then the survey was really accurate.
There is a difference between being ignorant of science as you are, and being a sceptic. Vaccines killed exactly zero people. That is zero as in 0 or none at all. But vaccines helped literally billions of people, including millions of children that before vaccines died horrible of, for example, polio.
The further I read the comments here on Slashdot, the more I believe that the USA is really an illiterate third world country.
He did not wrote about inductive and deductive reasoning. He wrote "... different types of science. One is experimental [...] Then there's the science that says ...". Science is a method of gaining knowledge, and there is only one scientific method. What he wrote was very familiar to Ken Ham's "observational" and "historical science". That shows his ignorance of science.
I think you should inform yourself what the Big Bang theory actually is. The Big Bang theory is not about the creation of the universe, but what happened after the universe was created (or came into existence or whatever, because we don't know what before the Big Bang was), see [1]. The most obvious evidence of the Big Bang is the cosmic microwave radiation. The term Big Bang is a good metaphor, because if you were an observer outside the universe you would see a hot ball of plasma expanding very fast, like in an explosion, for a very short time (about 380,000 years), until the ball of plasma cooled down and became transparent. The second evidence is the expanding universe.
Maybe you are confusing the Big Bang theory with the Inflation theory[2], that predicts that the universe expanded exponentially in the first 10^-31 seconds, to explain the flatness of the universe? Big Bang theory was proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1927 and is based on the observation of the expanding universe and Einstein's equations and is currently accepted as fact. The Inflation theory is a recent model to explain the flatness of the universe and is in dispute. There are models that explain the flatness without the Inflation.
You can't expect from everyone to have a scientific education, but you can expect from everyone to know agreed upon facts. For example, do you really expect from everyone to explain why the earth is round, why the earth is rotating in an elliptic orbit around the sun, or why the orbit of Mercury is irregular? But you can expect that people know that the earth is round, that the orbits are elliptic and that Mercury is the closest planet to the sun.
Should we also teach flat Earth and Geocentric cosmology? No, because it would just waste time and it would just be confusing. It's hard enough to teach some basic facts and an argument from authority is sometimes a valid argument. If someone have a scientific interest she could open a book and learn for herself why those theories were proven wrong.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...