The best evidence I've seen that there is a God is that people think there is, and there are many books that say there is. The same could be said of atheism, dualism, triplism, and polytheism. According to your notion of evidence, they must all be true as well.
evolution doesn't care about the individual, only the species. Neither. Evolution "cares" most of all about genes. An extremely interesting view of "altruism" from evolution's point of view can be found on Richard Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". Actually evolution doesn't care about anything. It's just that if organisms develop a behavior or other trait that makes it less likely for their species to go extinct, that makes it more likely that the species will still be around when we come along and notice the trait.
That would be a great argument if altruism was limited to one's family. But what drives people to perform selfless work for non-relatives? These same people may someday be in competition with you for resources of some sort. That is the exact opposite strategy to natural selection. We sexually reproducing types have to participate in a species in order to avoid extinction of our line, and it works best if we do our reproducing with people who aren't near relatives.
And of course, the altruism isn't universal. We haven't been living in big city populations long enough to be evolved to it one way or the other. I personally don't like being solicited by strangers, but I'll quietly provide some help to someone I know even without being asked.
Is why useful tweaks are hidden behind and obscure and risky-to-use interface like about:config. If the tweaks are worth doing, shouldn't they have first-class support in the main configuration GUI? One philosophy is to nanny the unwashed masses away from "advanced" options. A second is that there's not a lot of reasons to support every possible option in a UI, especially if some of them are rarely used.
FWIW, I used to change some stuff and it would be back to the default next time I started the broweser. Ditto if I changed it in the config file. It finally took when I changed it in the GNOME configuration manager; I guess it was masking the application-specific configs.
Specifically, I've been getting a bit tired of hearing the old "science disproves the existence of a higher being" B.S. that's constantly thrown around. I recall it starting with the baseless Human Genome Confirms Evolution (archive) story a few years back. The author of the article was quick to jump to the conclusion that finding fewer genes than expected *proved* that man must have evolved. What has evolution got to do with a higher being? Science has disproved lots of specific myths about the nature of the universe, which means lots of people's religious beliefs are partly wrong, but that hardly disproves the existence of a higher being.
If we are in a Universe put in motion by an extra-universal being, then the laws of nature are *His* laws of nature. They work according to how He says they should work. Ergo, anything we find is evidence of god, 'cause that's how he implemented it?
It seems to me that if man is hardwired with an sense of altruism and a desire to believe in a super-being, there can be no other answer to this question than the existence of a Creator. That's an absurd claim.
BTW, why did your god give the other apes a sense of altruism, but no desire to believe in a super-being?
For that matter, how many people have a built-in desire to believe in a super-being? Most people believe it for the same reason they believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The only difference is, the people who encourage the beliefs never own up that it's a fantasy.
The lessons were learned in WW1. When that war started, the British officer corps was incompetent. They were in charge of the empire's troops and there were massacres of Canadian, Australian, Newfoundland etc. troops. The colonies weren't about to put up with that. In fact there is a story that the Canadian prime minister hauled the British prime minister out of his chair by his lapels and made it very clear that, if there was another such massacre, the Canadians were going home. The incompetent British officers were replaced by competent colonials. I don't think it was primarily a matter of competence. The Great Powers simply wanted to use the colonials for cannon fodder rather than sapping their own populations. The French wanted to use the US reinforcements the same way, but the US insisted on having its own unified command.
IIRC, after that tragedy the Canadians amended their constitution to say that only volunteers could be sent overseas.
Re: The original hardware store experiment
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MacGyver Physics
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...or at least I tried to, and the link even appeared in the preview, but somehow it got eaten Probably it was in a superposition of existing and not-existing, until you looked at it in the previewer.
I remember my Historical Geology teacher telling us about how when he was in school nearly all of his professors ridiculed the idea of plate tectonics. However (according to him), he dismissed them as fools since the theory seemed to fit in so nicely with the available evidence. Possibly the perfect example of Kuhn's view that sometimes the Old Guard just has to die off.
But I don't think things are usually that bad. (Am I naive?)
God says man's sin created death. Right, and what was man's sin again? Oh yeah, it was eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God got mad and said, since you now know good and evil, I shall punish you and all of your descendants. But, ummm, if man didn't know good and evil prior to eating from the tree - how was he supposed to know it was wrong? Sure, God told him not to, but he didn't know that doing something he was told not to do was wrong. Oh, that one's easy. They should have obeyed him anyway, because he threatened them with death if they didn't.
Modern religious people seem to have no problem with God being a flat-out liar doing things like making light from stars a billion light years away already be "on the way", and showing events that never actually happened. And curiously, they won't consider for a moment that maybe their sacred writings are just another one of his pranks.
Of course, creationists will say whatever crosses their mind if they think it dismisses the evidence for reality. It's not like they have some kind of theory that motivates all this stuff.
sorry, but that won't do. When 'they' claim that the earth was created some thousands of years ago, they mean that the universe was created some thousand years ago. With the oil in place for us to find, and light bending around a black hole for us to see and marvel at the ingenious of the creator for including the sight of earth as if it existed before creation. Just like all those cute dinosaur bones One creationist crank tries to explain cosmology by claiming that the speed of light is infinite when coming toward you and half the real speed of light going away (or vice versa), but other rules apply off the radial axis.
It's actually a falsifiable claim, but no one takes it seriously enough to test it.
it is in many ways an intersection of philosophy, and math, and astronomy, and even religion/quote. Re those working at the intersection of philosophy and math, do we need to buy them pencils?
IBM (which also runs a private, no public access Second Life island as a development lab) I wonder how long until pranksters start breaking into these systems to put in an appearance as a merry prankster.
They're talking about snowmelt there, which is when the fresh snow melts during a brief high temperature, and refreezes to create an ice layer. The same article also states:
No further melting has been detected through March 2007. It sure does.
Were you trying to refute my point, or reinforce it?
That happened in January 2005, during the SUMMER in Antarctica. Guess what? IT HAPPENS EVERY FUCKING YEAR!!!!!! What part of "Satellite data collected by the scientists between July 1999 and July 2005 showed clear signs that melting had occurred in multiple distinct regions, including far inland and at high latitudes and elevations, where melt had been considered unlikely" did you fail to understand?
Guess what? IT HAPPENS EVERY FUCKING YEAR!!!!!! Got a citation for that?
If you actually read the article you'd know that it's even worse than the liberal atheistic socialist liberal conspirators were expecting.
Eastern Canada is currently experiencing its thickest strongest ice in 30 years. Meanwhile, Antartica is melting.
Sounds like NS neglected to debunk the biggest myth of them all, namely that global warming means a uniform increase in temperature everywhere on the planet.
But they didn't say the myth was "Mars and Pluto are warming to, showing humans play an insignificant part in global warming". I'm frankly sick of skeptics and myth busters who can't get their own facts right. The link is a headline-style reference to the myth, not the complete myth. The actual myth in this case is that the warming of other planets proves that planetary warming is caused by the sun rather than by some effect local to the planet. They chop the legs out from under that by pointing out that the sun's output hasn't increased since we started tracking the temperature rises on those planets.
Then they follow up with a discussion that indicates that there is actually still some doubt as to whether those planets are experiencing "global" warming.
Maybe you'd like to read it again to see what it actually says, rather than merely trying to twist it into something you can dismiss out of hand. If you feel a need to dismiss it, find something in it that's wrong. For example, is the claim about solar output since 1978 correct?
I rather go to church and pray to the Lord for less terrorists than being part in this smear campain against the blessed world leader of IT. Surely it's not too much trouble to pray that your Windows box will be secure too, while you're at it.
From TFA:
However, Microsoft said that for BITS to be exploited, machines first had to become infected with the trojan that Mr Boldewin discovered. That makes me feel so much safer.
I mean, anything in the last 40 years as a result of writing chess programs and building chess playing hardware? Deep Blue is completely uninteresting so far as AI is concerned. It used ancient game-tree search technology with pruning, rules for evaluating board positions (since full-depth search is still impossible, and you have to cut off at some point), and lots of hardware.
A few board games are still challenges for AI, but I'll wager that they'll eventually be solved in almost identical fashion, i.e. by throwing lots of money at a rather dull search algorithm.
Methinks video games will replace board games as a driver for the next generation of AI research. But even those may prove not to require much by way of "real" intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
And of course, the altruism isn't universal. We haven't been living in big city populations long enough to be evolved to it one way or the other. I personally don't like being solicited by strangers, but I'll quietly provide some help to someone I know even without being asked.
FWIW, I used to change some stuff and it would be back to the default next time I started the broweser. Ditto if I changed it in the config file. It finally took when I changed it in the GNOME configuration manager; I guess it was masking the application-specific configs.
BTW, why did your god give the other apes a sense of altruism, but no desire to believe in a super-being?
For that matter, how many people have a built-in desire to believe in a super-being? Most people believe it for the same reason they believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The only difference is, the people who encourage the beliefs never own up that it's a fantasy.
IIRC, after that tragedy the Canadians amended their constitution to say that only volunteers could be sent overseas.
...or at least I tried to, and the link even appeared in the preview, but somehow it got eaten Probably it was in a superposition of existing and not-existing, until you looked at it in the previewer."Ain't paying taxes anymore!" Tell them not to carve it until after April 15.
So, do any of you Libertarians who put such high faith in the free market's invisible hand have any comments on this?
But I don't think things are usually that bad. (Am I naive?)
Whatever that is...
Of course, creationists will say whatever crosses their mind if they think it dismisses the evidence for reality. It's not like they have some kind of theory that motivates all this stuff.
It's actually a falsifiable claim, but no one takes it seriously enough to test it.
Re those working at the intersection of philosophy and math, do we need to buy them pencils?
If it's free will, how come it matches a mathematical distribution?
What theory of free will predicted this?
Were you trying to refute my point, or reinforce it?
If you actually read the article you'd know that it's even worse than the liberal atheistic socialist liberal conspirators were expecting.
Sounds like NS neglected to debunk the biggest myth of them all, namely that global warming means a uniform increase in temperature everywhere on the planet.
Then they follow up with a discussion that indicates that there is actually still some doubt as to whether those planets are experiencing "global" warming.
Maybe you'd like to read it again to see what it actually says, rather than merely trying to twist it into something you can dismiss out of hand. If you feel a need to dismiss it, find something in it that's wrong. For example, is the claim about solar output since 1978 correct?
A few board games are still challenges for AI, but I'll wager that they'll eventually be solved in almost identical fashion, i.e. by throwing lots of money at a rather dull search algorithm.
Methinks video games will replace board games as a driver for the next generation of AI research. But even those may prove not to require much by way of "real" intelligence.