Then again, if I were to pick a presidential candidate to be an expert at ONE thing, it would probably be constitutional law.
Unfortunately, that means you get an expert on the *law* regarding the constitution, and it's the lawyers that have done a lot of the damage to the constitution. The whole function of a lawyer is to bend the law to fit the desires of whoever is paying them.
I think what you really want is an expert on constitutional *history*, if that's what your priority really is. It's the first principles and idealism of the constitution that's really important.
The GP is asking for grade school, not graduate school. It's not a very high standard.
That's what the GP asked for, but it's not what the GP meant. There are no fundamental policy issues that can be understood with a "grade school" science education. The issues of our day are extremely complex, and actually one of the things that drives me crazy, particularly on Slashdot, is the arrogant oversimplification of issues.
I want to know if the candidate himself could pass a grade school science exam before he gets to make calls on science policy.
It would be nice if our leaders were superhuman and were experts on every facet of policy, but the reality is that no one can be an expert on everything. The point of politicians is *not* for them to personally write laws. You want them be to able to surround themselves with the right experts who will do the dirty work of creating policy.
So, particularly in this case, having an underling write the policy is probably closer to the reality of what you'll get than if the candidate was giving some off-the-cuff answers on what they don't understand to any level of depth.
Or to put it another way, do you also insist your candidates to be expert artists so they can evaluate the NEA? Or experts in education so they can *personally* get involved in writing standards? I could go on and on.
Care to define the overwhelmingly convincing evidence? All I have seen is diatribes about how Christianity is frequently hyporcitical or uses logical fallicies to describe God.
Sorry, I've loooooonnnggggg since stopped trying to talk people out of supernaturalism. Wikipedia seems to have a rundown of various arguments. Personally, the sheer absurdity of the concept of god(s), much less the absurdity of Christianity or other religions, goes a long way in my own mind.
Actually, I like the succinctness of this one teenage atheist in a news story of how they had been persecuted by the wacko religious fundamentalists in their Bible Belt town: "I don't believe in God because they can't bring him forth." How perfectly rational is that?
Or to put it another way, it's not up to me to disprove god. It's up to others to prove god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And there's no more extraordinary claim than having knowledge of how the universe "really" works.
Which amuses me that they would waste so much of their lives dedicated to proving a negative that, according to them, has absolutely no impact on their lives anyways.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but in my world, the existence of religion has a *very* significant effect on *everyone's* life, whether they want it to or not. If only we had a world where belief in religion only affected that individual, and their actions were completely independent of whatever superstitions they wanted to embrace.
But I agree with the other poster. I've never seen any atheist or agnostic claim to "prove" God didn't exist, which is logically impossible. Overwhelmingly convincing evidence, yes. Proof, no.
I'd b impressed if they could just come up with a floor where I could walk/run in any direction and it would keep me in place. Do that, and then we're talking about something.
If you skip DNA and just look at RNA it all gets easy:
With all respect, you know what all that reminds me of? The people back in the 50s who used to wave their hands saying artificial intelligence was 5-10 years away.:) Easy? Better call the Nobel Prize committee, I'm sure they'll be interested in your paper on "easily" solving the whole abiogenesis question.
If it were that simple, we'd have demonstrated abiogenesis by now, or at least written a computer simulation that caused a self-reproducing machine to spontaneously erupt.
The fact that the universe looks the same no matter what direction you look tells us that the earth is nothing special and, as such, if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.
Sorry, but that's simply illogical. We *do* *not* *know* how probable life is or isn't. You're making a fundamental reasoning mistake: it's called the Anthropic Principle. The Earth is the way it is exactly because we're here to perceive it... if it wasn't the way it was, we wouldn't be here. Our very existence colors our perception.
Let's say the odds on any particular planet having intelligent life are 1e159 to 1 against. And then let's say it 2 to 1 against. How is our perception of our world any different between those two extremes? We don't perceive when it doesn't happen.
Just because the universe looks very similar in all directions doesn't mean that everything happens everywhere. I could create a machine to spit out random numbers (using a Geiger counter, for example), and given enough length, the sequence of numbers that I generate would be totally unique in the universe. It's entirely possible (and probable, in my opinion) that life represents another sequence of random chance that happened to create something that can analyze itself.
You look around and see something that is everywhere and you conclude that it much be very unlikely. [...] Makes perfect sense.
Life is a complete, closed system. To get to intelligent life, the world has to start with lower forms, and thus you're going to have a huge amount of other life as offshoots with one finally making it.
Or to put it another way, there's really only one lifeform on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of it break off now and then and die, but it continue on.
The fact that life is common on Earth tells us absolutely nothing about anywhere else.
Whenever I start contemplating DNA (!), self-reproduction and the utter insanity of how complex the machinery of a single cell is, much less multicellular life, much less an animal, much less a self-aware brain, I just shake my head in wonder. There can only be one conclusion, really.
No, not God, that's utterly absurd. No, the conclusion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY unlikely. That's the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We are utterly unique, and I suspect that intelligent life is so improbable, that it requires 1e85th power cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen *once*. Of course, we have no idea how much "time" has passed since the last time it happened. We just wake up as a species and assume it must be happening everywhere.
Really, just contemplating the whole idea of DNA when it's really just a wet, sloppy pile of chemicals blows my mind.
First of all, do data recovery firms ever *claim* they can recover from a zeroed drive? No, they don't. The claim is that government-level forensic analysis *might* be able to recover data with only a single overwrite, with very sensitive expensive equipment. Not terribly surprising the FBI wouldn't take them up on this challenge.
Second of all, someone is supposed to waste a lot of time and money for just a cheap drive and a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of?
And they're doing this to "prove" that this type of data recovery can't be done?
This has to be the lamest challenge that's ever been issued.
Pity she doesn't support *those*, favoring abstinence instead. That really worked out well for her daughter...
Yeah, because daughters of liberals who get as much birth control as they want never get pregnant.
Not saying I favor abstinence-only education (though I do support it being a central theme), but it's absurd to argue that her daughter getting pregnant saying anything about the effectiveness of that education program.
I now want a delicious churro. Clearly they're coming out with Microsoft Churros. It's a logical step up from the X-Box... who doesn't snack while they play?
What? That wasn't the point of the ad? I can't imagine what else it would be.
At the price they're charging, they should be offering something on the order of 1 megabit H.264 or the equivalent. Yet I opened one of the free episodes they had up and the quality was almost as bad as Youtube.
I opened up a couple of movies, and I thought the quality was excellent. Of course, I'm also on a 24 megabit (measured speed) cable connection. The service appears to measure your connection speed and adjusts the quality accordingly. It's possible either your connection is slow or the service measured it that way.
Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs.
That's like giving someone a book, and complaining that it doesn't come with full instructions on how to construct a printing press and bind a book.
Newsflash: A *very* small minority of people want to know what's going on inside a computer. Most people want to use it as the appliance that it is -- an information terminal. And that's *okay*. I just want to wear my shirt, I'm not interested in being a tailor. I just want to drink my wine, I don't need all the details of wine production.
I just had my boss have a meltdown on me this monday (yes, labor day) because he came into my office asking me to do something that is impossible, and I informed him that it was impossibe.
Impossible? You couldn't get a video camera and record the screen for purposes of the video presentation? Maybe you just didn't think of this, but I get annoyed, too, when people use the word "impossible" as a substitute for thinking of alternatives.
Let's note that American Honda builds all their cars using non-union labor, and we know how Honda is doing. Honda is also one of the best companies to work for.
What did we do to our industry? How bad have we fucked it up? Can we change it by unionizing? I'll do anything at this point.
Anything except find another job, apparently. Sheesh, quit whining. NO! Not every job is like that, and if you think every job requires 24/7, then you're simply myopic. Come out of your cave and do some research.
Or to put it another way, employers will stop taking advantage of you when they don't have the opportunity to take advantage of you. Why should they turn down someone who is willing to work 24/7? Apparently you're happy, since you're willing to do it.
Sure, some people are going to keep working because they need the money, but that's hardly proof of the fundamental reason for the trend. I think it's much more likely that it's related to the fact that people are living longer and healthier, and a lot of people (most?) don't want to just lie around the house.
In the "old days", 65 was one foot in the grave. These days, there are a lot more healthy 65 year olds that aren't content to believe that life is over and you might as well start waiting to die.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, if I were to pick a presidential candidate to be an expert at ONE thing, it would probably be constitutional law.
Unfortunately, that means you get an expert on the *law* regarding the constitution, and it's the lawyers that have done a lot of the damage to the constitution. The whole function of a lawyer is to bend the law to fit the desires of whoever is paying them.
I think what you really want is an expert on constitutional *history*, if that's what your priority really is. It's the first principles and idealism of the constitution that's really important.
And make sure you can name the four layers of the Rain Forest! After all, that's critical knowledge if we're to save the Rain Forest.
The GP is asking for grade school, not graduate school. It's not a very high standard.
That's what the GP asked for, but it's not what the GP meant. There are no fundamental policy issues that can be understood with a "grade school" science education. The issues of our day are extremely complex, and actually one of the things that drives me crazy, particularly on Slashdot, is the arrogant oversimplification of issues.
I want to know if the candidate himself could pass a grade school science exam before he gets to make calls on science policy.
It would be nice if our leaders were superhuman and were experts on every facet of policy, but the reality is that no one can be an expert on everything. The point of politicians is *not* for them to personally write laws. You want them be to able to surround themselves with the right experts who will do the dirty work of creating policy.
So, particularly in this case, having an underling write the policy is probably closer to the reality of what you'll get than if the candidate was giving some off-the-cuff answers on what they don't understand to any level of depth.
Or to put it another way, do you also insist your candidates to be expert artists so they can evaluate the NEA? Or experts in education so they can *personally* get involved in writing standards? I could go on and on.
Palin is a Creationist. McCain is a fossil.
So is Ron Paul (and Ron Paul fans *hate* to have this brought up). Does that automatically make him unsuitable to be elected?/p
Care to define the overwhelmingly convincing evidence? All I have seen is diatribes about how Christianity is frequently hyporcitical or uses logical fallicies to describe God.
Sorry, I've loooooonnnggggg since stopped trying to talk people out of supernaturalism. Wikipedia seems to have a rundown of various arguments. Personally, the sheer absurdity of the concept of god(s), much less the absurdity of Christianity or other religions, goes a long way in my own mind.
Actually, I like the succinctness of this one teenage atheist in a news story of how they had been persecuted by the wacko religious fundamentalists in their Bible Belt town: "I don't believe in God because they can't bring him forth." How perfectly rational is that?
Or to put it another way, it's not up to me to disprove god. It's up to others to prove god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And there's no more extraordinary claim than having knowledge of how the universe "really" works.
Which amuses me that they would waste so much of their lives dedicated to proving a negative that, according to them, has absolutely no impact on their lives anyways.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but in my world, the existence of religion has a *very* significant effect on *everyone's* life, whether they want it to or not. If only we had a world where belief in religion only affected that individual, and their actions were completely independent of whatever superstitions they wanted to embrace.
But I agree with the other poster. I've never seen any atheist or agnostic claim to "prove" God didn't exist, which is logically impossible. Overwhelmingly convincing evidence, yes. Proof, no.
I'd b impressed if they could just come up with a floor where I could walk/run in any direction and it would keep me in place. Do that, and then we're talking about something.
If you skip DNA and just look at RNA it all gets easy:
With all respect, you know what all that reminds me of? The people back in the 50s who used to wave their hands saying artificial intelligence was 5-10 years away. :) Easy? Better call the Nobel Prize committee, I'm sure they'll be interested in your paper on "easily" solving the whole abiogenesis question.
If it were that simple, we'd have demonstrated abiogenesis by now, or at least written a computer simulation that caused a self-reproducing machine to spontaneously erupt.
The fact that the universe looks the same no matter what direction you look tells us that the earth is nothing special and, as such, if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.
Sorry, but that's simply illogical. We *do* *not* *know* how probable life is or isn't. You're making a fundamental reasoning mistake: it's called the Anthropic Principle. The Earth is the way it is exactly because we're here to perceive it... if it wasn't the way it was, we wouldn't be here. Our very existence colors our perception.
Let's say the odds on any particular planet having intelligent life are 1e159 to 1 against. And then let's say it 2 to 1 against. How is our perception of our world any different between those two extremes? We don't perceive when it doesn't happen.
Just because the universe looks very similar in all directions doesn't mean that everything happens everywhere. I could create a machine to spit out random numbers (using a Geiger counter, for example), and given enough length, the sequence of numbers that I generate would be totally unique in the universe. It's entirely possible (and probable, in my opinion) that life represents another sequence of random chance that happened to create something that can analyze itself.
You look around and see something that is everywhere and you conclude that it much be very unlikely. [...] Makes perfect sense.
Life is a complete, closed system. To get to intelligent life, the world has to start with lower forms, and thus you're going to have a huge amount of other life as offshoots with one finally making it.
Or to put it another way, there's really only one lifeform on earth, and it's billions of years old. Pieces of it break off now and then and die, but it continue on.
The fact that life is common on Earth tells us absolutely nothing about anywhere else.
Whenever I start contemplating DNA (!), self-reproduction and the utter insanity of how complex the machinery of a single cell is, much less multicellular life, much less an animal, much less a self-aware brain, I just shake my head in wonder. There can only be one conclusion, really.
No, not God, that's utterly absurd. No, the conclusion is that life is really, really, really, REALLY unlikely. That's the answer to the Fermi Paradox. We are utterly unique, and I suspect that intelligent life is so improbable, that it requires 1e85th power cycles of the universe(s) for it to happen *once*. Of course, we have no idea how much "time" has passed since the last time it happened. We just wake up as a species and assume it must be happening everywhere.
Really, just contemplating the whole idea of DNA when it's really just a wet, sloppy pile of chemicals blows my mind.
I think their problem is with understanding the concept of "zero", rather than "percent". Either that, or your understanding of hyperbole is flawed. :)
First of all, do data recovery firms ever *claim* they can recover from a zeroed drive? No, they don't. The claim is that government-level forensic analysis *might* be able to recover data with only a single overwrite, with very sensitive expensive equipment. Not terribly surprising the FBI wouldn't take them up on this challenge.
Second of all, someone is supposed to waste a lot of time and money for just a cheap drive and a piece of paper from some entity no one has ever heard of?
And they're doing this to "prove" that this type of data recovery can't be done?
This has to be the lamest challenge that's ever been issued.
Pity she doesn't support *those*, favoring abstinence instead. That really worked out well for her daughter...
Yeah, because daughters of liberals who get as much birth control as they want never get pregnant.
Not saying I favor abstinence-only education (though I do support it being a central theme), but it's absurd to argue that her daughter getting pregnant saying anything about the effectiveness of that education program.
Palin is a creationist and you need to read other posts in this thread about her sneaking about trying to ban books.
Ron Paul is a creationist as well, and he's rumored to be a bit libertarian.
I now want a delicious churro. Clearly they're coming out with Microsoft Churros. It's a logical step up from the X-Box... who doesn't snack while they play?
What? That wasn't the point of the ad? I can't imagine what else it would be.
At the price they're charging, they should be offering something on the order of 1 megabit H.264 or the equivalent. Yet I opened one of the free episodes they had up and the quality was almost as bad as Youtube.
I opened up a couple of movies, and I thought the quality was excellent. Of course, I'm also on a 24 megabit (measured speed) cable connection. The service appears to measure your connection speed and adjusts the quality accordingly. It's possible either your connection is slow or the service measured it that way.
Switching to proprietary software means placing barriers on that education by telling the user that there are some things you weren't meant to know and shall be forbidden from learning, sharing, or changing to suit your needs.
That's like giving someone a book, and complaining that it doesn't come with full instructions on how to construct a printing press and bind a book.
Newsflash: A *very* small minority of people want to know what's going on inside a computer. Most people want to use it as the appliance that it is -- an information terminal. And that's *okay*. I just want to wear my shirt, I'm not interested in being a tailor. I just want to drink my wine, I don't need all the details of wine production.
No precompiled apps to download, since no one has download links for MIPS and no proprietary company would bother with such a tiny market.
Are you kidding? What are you planning to do with this, have it as your main desktop?
At $98, I'll buy 2 or 3 of them to throw around the house for quick browsing. If they can get Flash, it'll be full-blown awesome.
I'm hoping this was sarcasm. [...] I guess i didn't explain it well enough. Impossible = "impossible within the realm of practicality"
Impractical to set up a video camera? Sheesh, no wonder your boss is grouchy. Are you always this helpful?
I just had my boss have a meltdown on me this monday (yes, labor day) because he came into my office asking me to do something that is impossible, and I informed him that it was impossibe.
Impossible? You couldn't get a video camera and record the screen for purposes of the video presentation? Maybe you just didn't think of this, but I get annoyed, too, when people use the word "impossible" as a substitute for thinking of alternatives.
Let's note that American Honda builds all their cars using non-union labor, and we know how Honda is doing. Honda is also one of the best companies to work for.
What did we do to our industry? How bad have we fucked it up? Can we change it by unionizing? I'll do anything at this point.
Anything except find another job, apparently. Sheesh, quit whining. NO! Not every job is like that, and if you think every job requires 24/7, then you're simply myopic. Come out of your cave and do some research.
Or to put it another way, employers will stop taking advantage of you when they don't have the opportunity to take advantage of you. Why should they turn down someone who is willing to work 24/7? Apparently you're happy, since you're willing to do it.
Sure, some people are going to keep working because they need the money, but that's hardly proof of the fundamental reason for the trend. I think it's much more likely that it's related to the fact that people are living longer and healthier, and a lot of people (most?) don't want to just lie around the house.
In the "old days", 65 was one foot in the grave. These days, there are a lot more healthy 65 year olds that aren't content to believe that life is over and you might as well start waiting to die.