The symmetry is broken by examining the nature of inquiry that allows the proof or disproof of the theories. The belief in the existence of something can only be verified (simply by showing that the thing exists). However, it is impossible to falsify the statement.
The belief in the non-existence of something is -- for the same reason -- not verifiable, only falsifiable (again by showing that the thing exists).
Your statement 'If there can be no proof of God, there can be no proof of Godlessness' is thus false. The logically correct statement is '... there can be no disproof of God, and there can be no proof of Godlessness', or alternatively, getting rid of a couple of negations: the existence of God can be proven, not disproven, the absence of God can only be disproven, not proven.
I think your depiction of the hunter-gatherer society is hopelessly romantic. One thing that the hunter-gatherers do, and do frequently, is to wage war against nearby tribes. If they don't, they would need good defences as nearby tribes will definitely attack them. Be it for lack of space, an insult, or just to quell some dissent against the tribe elders: war is an easy way to close the ranks. In such a situation, you'd better have one or two psychopaths in your midst that will make sure that when you overcome the fellow tribe, that they will never do that again. Just leave them be for a couple of hours, that's enough.
As for the growth of brain. Trying to outfox the one animal that has an equally sized brain in the struggle for resources surely puts a tremendous selection force towards brain building. Cooperation in hunting just doesn't cut it, as you only need a big enough brain to be competent. In warfare, competent is not enough. You simply need to be better.
The trick is to let her (and her idiot husband) do the K part, while I (the psychopath) concentrate on R. This leads to the win-win situation where I get laid a lot and she gets to take care of little psychopaths.
I'm sorry, but the complete annahilation of a complete populace does have the side-effect of changing the genetic make-up of the species as a whole. Evolution in action, but this time man-made. War is a great evolutionary force and one that has bred ruthlessness in our species. Without the ability to wage all-out war (a thing psychopaths excel at), you'll be wiped off the face of the earth.
We really don't know enough about the genetic makeup of emotions, but given the human history, it's pretty straightforward that a peacefullness gene will have a very hard time surviving.
... corporatism. I don't think that term means what you think it means. If you did use it with this intension: you'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!
Yeah, in hindsight it really seems that Microsoft was so shocked by the fact that they actually released a solid OS, that they quickly tried to make up for it with XP.
Basically NCSA's method assumes that if a search engine indexes twice the number of pages, than it will return twice the number of results for a given search.
Not exactly true. Please note that when using the two search engines for regular (common) queries, Yahoo explicitly claims that it finds twice the matches of Google. Try it. This seems to rule out the mandarin option.
I don't think NCSA's methodology is conclusive, but I do think the conclusion is true that Yahoo's advertisement on its search front page is suspicious.
I'm sorry, but according to your logic *not* having something is equivalent to having something (in this case a base assumption). That's simply not true.
And how does the studying of patentese further the progression of technology? If a patent cannot be understood by a person skilled in the art, it is 100% useless as a means of disclosure of an invention. As disclosure is the reason we have patent law in the first place, this argument seems to contradict the existence of patents.
Ouch, that hurts. The Amsterdam football team 'Ajax', founded in 1900, four times winner of the Eurocup and after Real Madrid, Milan and Liverpool the most successful European football club has nothing whatsoever to do with cleaning products in any way. The mere thought alone provokes a mild rage and some desire to bash in skulls (much in line with the more fanatical supporters) starts appearing.
No, Ajax is a perfectly legitimate name taken from Greek history/mythology, which was very popular in the late 19th, early 20th century. Ajax was named after 'Ajax the great', one of the heroes in the Trojan war. The team's logo still shows a Greek guy. The Netherlands also has clubs named 'Sparta', 'Heracles' and 'Excelsior', to name a few.
Given evolution and that there's a common ancestry for all that are living, find a species for which the double helix turns right instead of left (or the other way around, can't remember), and at the very least you have disproven the common ancestry argument.
Find an animal, or simply a bacteria, and show that there is no correlation between the offspring's DNA (or a significant set of phenotypic traits) and the parent's. If you find such a beast, you have disproven heriditary. Without heriditation (is this a word?), no evolution can take place.
Take a soup of RNA in which at least one strand can self-replicate. See if diversification takes place. If it doesn't you have disproven universality of evolution (i.e., evolution of species will just happen).
This latter experiment has been performed and has actually disproven the thesis that evolution just happens. Pure RNA-worlds are thus not a sufficient condition for evolution to happen, and thus leaves the origin of life outside of the scope of evolutionary theory at this moment.
Yeah, probability and limits have never been the strong point of philosophers. A bit of Bayesianism wouldn't hurt formal philosophy at this point me thinks.
You're a funny guy. How on earth do you know that God said such a thing about creating the universe? Because some book says so? How do you know God wrote that book? Because people say so? Let's try to teach kids a little independent thinking together with questioning of authority and hope they turn out to become sensible human beings. Bad things happen when dogma is taught.
Being from the Netherlands (one of those countries that seeded the US with the puritan wackos that wreak havoc today), I really can attest that here in my country we have a sizeable minority of fundamentalist christians that take the bible literately. None of this this liberal 'accept Jesus as your saviour, and you do fine' kind of religion, but the true Calvinist 'you are born evil, and when you die God has decided before you were born if you go to heaven or hell' kind of madness.
Save to say that these wackos (about 100,000 of them, one seat in Parliament) do take the OT literally, and strive for the reenactment of the 10 commendments in the constitution. Did I mention that women are not allowed to be voted in office as far as they are concerned? These people are true fundamentalists, and although the US so-called Christians are in general slightly more relaxed, I don't think our fundies don't have their US counterparts. Stock of the same breed.
So I can definetely attest that people taking the Bible literally exist in abundance, and maybe shockingly, inside a country that is considered one of the more liberal around.
You lose on Occam's Razor. Theory (A) presupposes an entity, theory (B) doesn't presuppose an entity. All other things being equal (equal predictive power etc.), (B) is preferred over (A).
Not really, if you say above the tricky algorithm that 'this a tricky algorithm that needs time to understand but achieves the following things: [list of things]', people will usually scroll further without examining the intricacies of the algorithm right away.
All very valid points, but I'm sure the recipe has a plethora of command line options that allows you to specify all this and possibly more. Some combination of options might not really work and could potentially explode the mixture.
The US has determined that they're above any convention, be it Genevian, or about an international court of law. Even it's own laws don't apply (gitmo). Go figure.
The really horrifying thing is that it's not even as innocent as what you sketch. What happens is that 3+2 gets patented by A, 2+3 by B and 3-(-2) by C, and whenever you compute 5 in any way, A, B, as well as C will come pounding on your door for money because it's a trivial permutation of *their* idea.
And about birthdays, why the hell did you bring up that idea? Now it surely will be patented.
For debates you have this "Freedom to express your opinion", or equivalently, but characteristically sloppily worded, the American "Freedom of speech", while for the general case you seem to advocate the less established mantra "Freedom to exchange any bits I like". You are probably equating the two with eachother, potentially because of the sloppiness of the "Freedom of speech" phrase, but historically this freedom is all about opinions, not about bits. All opinions might be bits, but it doesn't follow that all bits are opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
A joker, a pedant and a fool came into a bar ...
Your statement 'If there can be no proof of God, there can be no proof of Godlessness' is thus false. The logically correct statement is '... there can be no disproof of God, and there can be no proof of Godlessness', or alternatively, getting rid of a couple of negations: the existence of God can be proven, not disproven, the absence of God can only be disproven, not proven.
I hope the asymmetry is clear.
As for the growth of brain. Trying to outfox the one animal that has an equally sized brain in the struggle for resources surely puts a tremendous selection force towards brain building. Cooperation in hunting just doesn't cut it, as you only need a big enough brain to be competent. In warfare, competent is not enough. You simply need to be better.
The trick is to let her (and her idiot husband) do the K part, while I (the psychopath) concentrate on R. This leads to the win-win situation where I get laid a lot and she gets to take care of little psychopaths.
We really don't know enough about the genetic makeup of emotions, but given the human history, it's pretty straightforward that a peacefullness gene will have a very hard time surviving.
... corporatism. I don't think that term means what you think it means. If you did use it with this intension: you'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!
Yeah, in hindsight it really seems that Microsoft was so shocked by the fact that they actually released a solid OS, that they quickly tried to make up for it with XP.
Not exactly true. Please note that when using the two search engines for regular (common) queries, Yahoo explicitly claims that it finds twice the matches of Google. Try it. This seems to rule out the mandarin option.
I don't think NCSA's methodology is conclusive, but I do think the conclusion is true that Yahoo's advertisement on its search front page is suspicious.
Linux 1 - SCO 0
And how does the studying of patentese further the progression of technology? If a patent cannot be understood by a person skilled in the art, it is 100% useless as a means of disclosure of an invention. As disclosure is the reason we have patent law in the first place, this argument seems to contradict the existence of patents.
No, Ajax is a perfectly legitimate name taken from Greek history/mythology, which was very popular in the late 19th, early 20th century. Ajax was named after 'Ajax the great', one of the heroes in the Trojan war. The team's logo still shows a Greek guy. The Netherlands also has clubs named 'Sparta', 'Heracles' and 'Excelsior', to name a few.
So now take that back or I'll become violent.
Interesting, these words 'information' and 'intelligence'. So what's the actual experiment that you're proposing?
Find an animal, or simply a bacteria, and show that there is no correlation between the offspring's DNA (or a significant set of phenotypic traits) and the parent's. If you find such a beast, you have disproven heriditary. Without heriditation (is this a word?), no evolution can take place.
Take a soup of RNA in which at least one strand can self-replicate. See if diversification takes place. If it doesn't you have disproven universality of evolution (i.e., evolution of species will just happen).
This latter experiment has been performed and has actually disproven the thesis that evolution just happens. Pure RNA-worlds are thus not a sufficient condition for evolution to happen, and thus leaves the origin of life outside of the scope of evolutionary theory at this moment.
Need more?
Yeah, probability and limits have never been the strong point of philosophers. A bit of Bayesianism wouldn't hurt formal philosophy at this point me thinks.
You're a funny guy. How on earth do you know that God said such a thing about creating the universe? Because some book says so? How do you know God wrote that book? Because people say so? Let's try to teach kids a little independent thinking together with questioning of authority and hope they turn out to become sensible human beings. Bad things happen when dogma is taught.
Save to say that these wackos (about 100,000 of them, one seat in Parliament) do take the OT literally, and strive for the reenactment of the 10 commendments in the constitution. Did I mention that women are not allowed to be voted in office as far as they are concerned? These people are true fundamentalists, and although the US so-called Christians are in general slightly more relaxed, I don't think our fundies don't have their US counterparts. Stock of the same breed.
So I can definetely attest that people taking the Bible literally exist in abundance, and maybe shockingly, inside a country that is considered one of the more liberal around.
Not really, if you say above the tricky algorithm that 'this a tricky algorithm that needs time to understand but achieves the following things: [list of things]', people will usually scroll further without examining the intricacies of the algorithm right away.
Type
to get an overview of the options.The US has determined that they're above any convention, be it Genevian, or about an international court of law. Even it's own laws don't apply (gitmo). Go figure.
Increasing.
And about birthdays, why the hell did you bring up that idea? Now it surely will be patented.
I personally loath that particular state where 17 bits are off and the next is on. I guess we should restrict that one.