UK ISPs have responded to culture minister Ed Vaisey's comments regarding pervasive, opt-out only porn filtering
Well, at least they recognize porn as a matter of culture!
Unfortunately, it's technically not possible to completely block this stuff. You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind.
C.f. "War on Drugs". But then, nobody in the US Congress or DoJ is going to agree with him on the porn, either.
There is actually nothing in the biblical text that precludes evolution all all the prior lifeforms.
The truth is, there's nothing in "literal" interpretation of the Bible that precludes anything. For example, some biblical literalists reject the big bang because it is so obviously in conflict with Genesis; others say that the recent discovery of the big bang proves that the writers of Genesis had an inside source of information, since the science so obviously confirms the text.
The nicest thing about literal interpretations of the text is that you have so many to choose from.
The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
a) How long should we have expected that first billion years of evolution to take?
b) You should rephrase "not gaining new and more complex capabilities" to say "at the cellular level". At higher levels, progress has been phenomenal. (How much smarter are you than a single-cell organism?)
The origin of cellular machinery is indeed impressive, but unfortunately "I can't believe it could happen by natural causes in a billion years" tells us a little about the speaker's beliefs, and nothing at all about what actually happened.
As to why not much new has been added to that machinery since, maybe we have more basis for speculation. Competition from all-new "designs" is probably impossible, because the necessary building blocks would probably be oxidized, or digested by current organisms, before it could bootstrap itself into a new cell type. For variants on what we have, evolution is not a reversible process, so we can't expect cells to undo part of their history and try something else, any more than birds would evolve back into dinosaurs and go then forward again down a different path.
So we're probably stuck with consideration of add-ons to the current machinery. But there's no guarantee that something nifty would happen in that regard within any bounded period of time. Evolution doesn't provide organisms with things just because they are needed or would be useful. Possibly cellular evolution has reached a "local maximum" on the fitness landscape, from which there is no easy jump to something better.
And who knows... some of the past jumps may not have been particularly easy either, but merely fortuitous one-time events.
And evolution of macroscopic organisms has certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of the existing cellular machinery. Maybe it's good enough?
The overwhelming majority of human progress has come from people who were or are highly religious.
Ignoring the dubious use of "highly" in that claim, we can also point out that all the foundations of human society and technology were created by polytheists.
I enjoyed the Serenity movie thoroughly, but there was so much more to be done with this show.
I didn't much care for it, because IMO it tried to wrap up too many story lines in one outing, and because the kickboxing-babe-saves-the-day stereotype was stale long before the series started.
I suspect that the writers didn't actually have answers to most of the questions the GP asks, to provide mystery and leave flexibility to grow in whatever direction inspiration took them.
I think what the producers/writers don't understand is that we loved SG-I because it was mostly about some lovable characters. The sequels put unlovable characters into some of the major roles, and frankly I don't enjoy watching shows about assholes.
Since TV news is how most people become informed, I would argue that on the correlation to causation scale, this would lean towards the causation side.
OTOH, since FOX apparently deliberately tries to appeal to a certain demographic, the causation might be in the other direction.
It's not that the viewers have no information, they have wrong information. And if people claim to get their information from that particular source it stands to reason, that there is causation.
Utterly unsurprising, if you occasionally skim the liberal sites that are all-too-happy to keep a running log of FOX's misrepresentations. There are a *lot* of them.
One of their best tricks is, every time a politician gets involved in a scandal, FOX will list them as (D) for the first couple of days, even if they're actually (R).
Joe Scarborough is a host on MSNBC. Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, is rabidly right wing.
For those who don't know, Scarborough is PD right wing. And he keeps a harem of rightwingers around his table. But he does occasionally say something really sensible.
MSNBC also has Chris Matthews, who is a Democrat, but goes with the right wing pretty often, and provides Pat Buchannan with a regular soapbox. (I think Matthews' problem is not so much his orientation, but the fact that he buys in to the Beltway Narrative.)
Guess what? We're going to be seeing this sort of thing a whole lot more.
International law will have to address this within a few years.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with. I can't imagine that they'll just say it's all OK. Probably they'll forbid it, and everyone will still do it anyway.
Spooks also discussed how Israel was preparing to take down Iran's nuclear program and how to stay relevant when so much information that was classified was now open source and available to anyone.
...our growth is almost entirely based on the use of oil for transportation, new materials, pesticides, fertilizers, construction equipment, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be messy when it starts to run dry.
For the first half of that period it would have been coal rather than oil.
Well here's my explanation (read: theory) that you will not necessarily believe in. The Tigris and Euphrates of today are not the same ones from the Garden of Eden. There are two reasons. 1: the Flood drastically rearranged the earth's surface, and those rivers would be non-existent. They saw rivers that reminded them of the old ones, and gave them the same name. 2: the Tigris and Euphrates (and other 2) of the Garden of Eden were fed out of the ground by a single spring, further suggesting that they are not the same, but rather just have the same name.
As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own reality.
So, no, the account is not explicitly described as fictional -- but, the dialogue itself, in which the story is given, is fictional, and Plato describes the story's origins as obscure and its transmission as winding.
And the Athens of 9000 years earlier kicked Atlantis's ass.
People should understand that when reading Plato they're reading yarns he constructed to convey his philosophical views (if you can call them that). Instead of rushing out to look for Atlantis, they should be asking what role it plays in the construction of his message.
4.5 billion years is the same number that was coined long before dating techniques were developed.
Actually that date is rather recent. In the 19th Century Lord Kelvin determined that the earth was a mere hundred million years old. (Way off because he based it on cooling, and he didn't know about radioactive heating.)
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"+1, negative"
UK ISPs have responded to culture minister Ed Vaisey's comments regarding pervasive, opt-out only porn filtering
Well, at least they recognize porn as a matter of culture!
Unfortunately, it's technically not possible to completely block this stuff. You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind.
C.f. "War on Drugs". But then, nobody in the US Congress or DoJ is going to agree with him on the porn, either.
There is actually nothing in the biblical text that precludes evolution all all the prior lifeforms.
The truth is, there's nothing in "literal" interpretation of the Bible that precludes anything. For example, some biblical literalists reject the big bang because it is so obviously in conflict with Genesis; others say that the recent discovery of the big bang proves that the writers of Genesis had an inside source of information, since the science so obviously confirms the text.
The nicest thing about literal interpretations of the text is that you have so many to choose from.
The bigger question is how this complex machinery of life developed in the first billion years of Earth amidst massive meteor impacts. People can call it what they want, but knowing that all life that has ever existed has existed essentially unchanged from three billion years ago defies explanation of "evolving" in first one to two billion years to the amazing complexity of how cells work and then staying pat for almost three billion years and only losing capabilities, not gaining new and more complex capabilities as one assumes from casual science study and reading.
a) How long should we have expected that first billion years of evolution to take?
b) You should rephrase "not gaining new and more complex capabilities" to say "at the cellular level". At higher levels, progress has been phenomenal. (How much smarter are you than a single-cell organism?)
The origin of cellular machinery is indeed impressive, but unfortunately "I can't believe it could happen by natural causes in a billion years" tells us a little about the speaker's beliefs, and nothing at all about what actually happened.
As to why not much new has been added to that machinery since, maybe we have more basis for speculation. Competition from all-new "designs" is probably impossible, because the necessary building blocks would probably be oxidized, or digested by current organisms, before it could bootstrap itself into a new cell type. For variants on what we have, evolution is not a reversible process, so we can't expect cells to undo part of their history and try something else, any more than birds would evolve back into dinosaurs and go then forward again down a different path.
So we're probably stuck with consideration of add-ons to the current machinery. But there's no guarantee that something nifty would happen in that regard within any bounded period of time. Evolution doesn't provide organisms with things just because they are needed or would be useful. Possibly cellular evolution has reached a "local maximum" on the fitness landscape, from which there is no easy jump to something better.
And who knows... some of the past jumps may not have been particularly easy either, but merely fortuitous one-time events.
And evolution of macroscopic organisms has certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of the existing cellular machinery. Maybe it's good enough?
The overwhelming majority of human progress has come from people who were or are highly religious.
Ignoring the dubious use of "highly" in that claim, we can also point out that all the foundations of human society and technology were created by polytheists.
I'm confused. So they were on the Ark or what?
Why do you think they call them 'Archean'?
I rely on magic pixie dust found on top of the space elevator. It's easier to get than a useful quantum computer and will be for quite some time.
And if you do get cracked, you just snort some of the dust and then you don't care anyway.
If you want real security, go with a one-time pad and read up on the mistakes the Kriegsmarine made that let their nifty device get cracked.
That kind of behavior, burglarizing houses, committing a crime to stop other crimes, is destructive to the rest of the nation.
I don't find it such a bad thing, if they have a warrant from a non-corrupt judicial system.
You can hardly say fighting espionage is inherently corrupt.
I enjoyed the Serenity movie thoroughly, but there was so much more to be done with this show.
I didn't much care for it, because IMO it tried to wrap up too many story lines in one outing, and because the kickboxing-babe-saves-the-day stereotype was stale long before the series started.
I suspect that the writers didn't actually have answers to most of the questions the GP asks, to provide mystery and leave flexibility to grow in whatever direction inspiration took them.
I enjoy Eureka. It has been several years since I watched more than four episodes of any of their other new shows.
We'll be seeing him on Futurama now?
I think what the producers/writers don't understand is that we loved SG-I because it was mostly about some lovable characters. The sequels put unlovable characters into some of the major roles, and frankly I don't enjoy watching shows about assholes.
2D photos of a 3D printer? Please...
Then in contrast Stephen Hawking's facebook page: 35, 45, 18
harvard.edu : 3, 10, 85
Since TV news is how most people become informed, I would argue that on the correlation to causation scale, this would lean towards the causation side.
OTOH, since FOX apparently deliberately tries to appeal to a certain demographic, the causation might be in the other direction.
It's not that the viewers have no information, they have wrong information. And if people claim to get their information from that particular source it stands to reason, that there is causation.
Utterly unsurprising, if you occasionally skim the liberal sites that are all-too-happy to keep a running log of FOX's misrepresentations. There are a *lot* of them.
One of their best tricks is, every time a politician gets involved in a scandal, FOX will list them as (D) for the first couple of days, even if they're actually (R).
Joe Scarborough is a host on MSNBC. Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, is rabidly right wing.
For those who don't know, Scarborough is PD right wing. And he keeps a harem of rightwingers around his table. But he does occasionally say something really sensible.
MSNBC also has Chris Matthews, who is a Democrat, but goes with the right wing pretty often, and provides Pat Buchannan with a regular soapbox. (I think Matthews' problem is not so much his orientation, but the fact that he buys in to the Beltway Narrative.)
Guess what? We're going to be seeing this sort of thing a whole lot more.
International law will have to address this within a few years.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with. I can't imagine that they'll just say it's all OK. Probably they'll forbid it, and everyone will still do it anyway.
Spooks also discussed how Israel was preparing to take down Iran's nuclear program and how to stay relevant when so much information that was classified was now open source and available to anyone.
Well, they got *that* part right.
...our growth is almost entirely based on the use of oil for transportation, new materials, pesticides, fertilizers, construction equipment, etc, etc, etc. It's going to be messy when it starts to run dry.
For the first half of that period it would have been coal rather than oil.
Didn't they recently announce discovery of the primary cause for the bee-deaths?
Well here's my explanation (read: theory) that you will not necessarily believe in. The Tigris and Euphrates of today are not the same ones from the Garden of Eden. There are two reasons. 1: the Flood drastically rearranged the earth's surface, and those rivers would be non-existent. They saw rivers that reminded them of the old ones, and gave them the same name. 2: the Tigris and Euphrates (and other 2) of the Garden of Eden were fed out of the ground by a single spring, further suggesting that they are not the same, but rather just have the same name.
As the saying goes, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own reality.
So, no, the account is not explicitly described as fictional -- but, the dialogue itself, in which the story is given, is fictional, and Plato describes the story's origins as obscure and its transmission as winding.
And the Athens of 9000 years earlier kicked Atlantis's ass.
People should understand that when reading Plato they're reading yarns he constructed to convey his philosophical views (if you can call them that). Instead of rushing out to look for Atlantis, they should be asking what role it plays in the construction of his message.
4.5 billion years is the same number that was coined long before dating techniques were developed.
Actually that date is rather recent. In the 19th Century Lord Kelvin determined that the earth was a mere hundred million years old. (Way off because he based it on cooling, and he didn't know about radioactive heating.)