In fact, it's a branch of Christianity, and was once called "natural philosophy".
It may have derived from Christianity, but it is hardly anymore a "branch" of Christianity. This is because Christianity requires the recognition of Jesus Christ as a divine being.
Also, "natural philosophy" was around before Christ, like in the days of Aristotle.
2 (uncommon): Any system of beliefs. Note: this usage is uncommon, see Usage note, below.
Generally speaking, systems of belief that do not involve the existence of one or more deities, such as Buddhism, can be considered a religion, though some people prefer a stricter definition that excludes the possibility of a non-theistic religion. Others are in favor of a very general definition of religion: that any belief or system of beliefs is a religion or part of a religion, including science and atheism.
It's hard to argue a point when two people have a fundamentally different understanding of the word.
I thank you for your explanation and clarrification of how you see religion and science. Other people disagree on your definition. (In particular MH42)
But that's NOT the way it's presented when you go to court to exclude other explainations from the classroom.
This actually reminds me of the text that was put in the biology textbooks that were required to be removed because they equated to the "teaching of religion." The text of the stickers on the books were:
"This book teaches Evolution as fact. It is in fact a theory, and should be considered with critical thought."
The point occured to me when I read this sticker... shouldn't all of science be labeled this way? And why would a scientist be upset that we're telling children to critically think about the information contained in their books?
Uh, actually, no. Science is based on some very basic assumptions we have a lot of faith in, but which cannot be proved. Occam's razor for instance.
Well, to be fair, the scientific use of Occam's razor is typically: "The simplest explanation is most likely the correction one."
Of course as with many things in science, this is actually a PHILOSOPHICAL point, and the "razor" part comes in, because it is actually: "Do not multiply entities unnecessarily."
Typically, if you don't need an intelligent designer to have evolution, then there is no reason to persume one to be there.
Call me a cinic, but I just can't read that and believe that the decriminized word "hacker" were the intentions of the author. Also, I am highly sceptical that most people reading the text would not immediately assume "black hat" hacker.
science is based on observation and experimentation, science is NOT based on faith. certain aspects of science are observed but not explained, but that doesn't mean they are taken on faith, they are accepted as probably correct on current observation.
Except for the thing that you take on faith that what you are observing is reality.
This is a point of philosophy that we cannot truely trust our senses. From a practical standpoint, this point is a tauntology, completely uninteresting and useless. Science is studying our observations, and using it to model predictions for the future behavior of our observations.
This doesn't mean that you're examing reality. To make that assumption, you have to take it on faith, that our perceptions aren't falsified.
OTOH religion goes out of it's way to suppress and subvert new information which contradicts accepted beliefs.
As does science. If new information is presented which contradicts accepted belief, then it must first be proven, and validated to the community before it is accepted.
In the same way, the same position is taken by religion. Martin Luther challenged The Church within the bases of the scripture. Eventually, the issues which Martin Luther was so vehemently opposed to where abolished, or changed, and Martin Luther would have little reason today to have doubted The Church as he did. Because while they were resistant to the ideas, there was just no arguing that The Bible has to be accepted as the fundamental source of Christian belief.
If you cannot find a single, solitary religion that has as its fundamental tenet that it must assume it is false, then you have no basis for equating science with religion or vice versa because that IS the basis of science.
Awesome thanks providing me the example that I needed. Since, science takes as a fundamental tenent that it must assume itself to be false, I now have a religion that satisfies your criterium.
I don't find this calling science a religion thing upsetting. I just find it tiresomely solipsistic.
How would this have anything to do with the assertion that one is the only thing in true existence?
I don't know what "real" means apart from "what can be percieved".
This is the very point expressed by the veil of perception. Basically, we observe the world through our senses, but we have no guarentee that those senses are faithfully representing the "real world". We could be brains in a jar being electrically simulated.
Science doesn't need to assume anything, other than if I do the same thing twice in the same conditions, the same results will occur. That's pretty darn solid as assumptions go.
And this works from a practical standpoint, but it does not guarentee anything of the world. I would like you to consider The Matrix. I'm certain that there would be scientists exploring "reality" in in The Matrix, but fundamentally their studies are flawed, because it's not a "real" science. Yet, from a practical standpoint, their studies are still concerning predicting future events that occur reliably.
Thus, they are studying the physics of The Matrix. Which in fact doesn't truely "exist", nor was it "reality."
How many diseases have been cured by the philosophy of assuming that we can't really know anything? How many bridges can you build by just thinking really hard that the gap you're trying to span doesn't exist?
I don't ask you pass up the practical need for science, I ask you only to not get pissed when someone calls science a religion.
Which religions teach that their god[s] most likely do not exist at all and that all of its explanations of the world are most likely totally wrong?
None, and neither do I expect science to say that they are most likely wrong. In fact, science is very well justified, and deserves to be taught in schools.
The issue here is that Christians, Buddhists, and Shinto don't get upset when you call their beliefs a "religion". Only Atheists and Scientists do.
But science does make statements such as 'if I can observe a certain thing occuring consistently, I can make predictions about my future observations'. Which I think neatly gets around the issue of a 'true reality'.
From a practical stand-point, this is 100% correct. There is no reason to doubt that our accurate predictions are based on a "fake" reality, because we deal with the reality that is presented by our perceptions, and practical science need not dig any deeper than that. It would mostly be a waste of their time to do so.
That seems to me a tautology, as long as it's applied to a single observation and not as forward knowledge.
And I agree, from a practical standpoint of science, this is a tautology. Of course, this presents a biased, and irrational negative view in most scientists, and atheists of religion and philosphy. Most often expressed that "philosophy has no place in science", while philosophy is the very FOUNDATION of science.
Practical science indeed has no reason to discuss these issues, but in the same way, the Church never had a reason to study further into its doctrine, because it was accepted as true. Each operates in its own logical reference frame.
Science is founded on the totally testable assumption that performing experiments with repeatable results that substantiate theories that produce accurate predictions is a useful way to solve problems.
As a point of nitpicking, you don't test assumptions. You assume them.
"Science is founded on the totally testable principle that performing experiements with repeatable results that substantiate theories that produce accurate predictions is a useful way to solve problems." Anything you'd like to make up about "true reality" belongs in the domain of philosophy or metaphysics, neither of which have anything to do with science.
Just because you don't care to acknowledge that you've assumed something here and that you take on faith that our perceptions are real, doesn't make this problem go away. Yes, it is philosphy and meta-physics, but you know what? The whole discussion of "science is a religion" is a philosophical argument.
And you'd do well to remember that the principles and foundations of philosphy are what have led us to science. If you say that philosophy has nothing to do with science, then you say that logic has nothing to do with science.
If you're refering to the entirely theoretical ideas espoused mostly by philosophers then, yeah, that doesn't have a place in practical study of science, and neither does the point that science makes a critical assumption that our perceptions are real belong in the practical study of science.
But on the topic of "is science a religion?" then you're wrong, this is absolutely and fundamentally a point of philosophy, and not of science.
That philosophically, your beliefs are still a faith, and a religion. It may be the best choice out there, but it's still a religion, and it must still be taken on faith.
I've tried hard to make it clear that I'm not attempting to use "religion" or "faith" as an insult against science. The problem is that these words have such negative tones for most atheists, that they refuse to be associated with them. This arbitrary hatred of a word or semantic grouping is blinding.
Science is not a religion, though. Science is based on observations of nature. Religion is based on faith in something that you cannot detect. Why is that so difficult to understand?
Because science is based on the untestable assumption that what you're observing is relevent to the true reality.
Also, Atheists take it upon faith that there is no God, assuming that just because you cannot detect something that it must not be there. This is a faith based assumption, it cannot be proven.
The "fact" is that everything is based on something that cannot be proven.
The lack of a religion is a religion in itself. (which I realize is a contradiction)
If you read the post on the security mailing list it sounds like someone trying to get this vulnerability out in the open so it can be fixed. Unless they mean a "white hat" hacker or a hacker in the real sense of the word but I doubt it. This is one of those words that should be used carefully, especially by "journalists".
This is a good point. A "black hat" hacker does not disclose bugs, but rather keeps them quiet or shares them with select friends, and peers.
A person releasing this information to a security list is either a concerned "citizen", or a security person.
A citizen posting information to a newspaper editorial about lack of security at the courthouse, for instance "I was at the courthouse, and there was a side door that wasn't being watched at all by anyone!" wouldn't get immediately marked as a terrorist.
Why should we automatically mark a person disclosing computer-security information to the public as a whole, as a hacker?
Just calling science "another religion" is silly. Correct, science cannot explain everything. However, what it does attempt to explain is not based on faith that what we believe is right. Rather the opposite, it is based on the perpetual pessimism that everything we believe, no mattern how many times we have "proven" it, is WRONG.
No, what science explains *is* based on a small subset of faith taken assumptions that cannot be proven. Such as that our perceptions are of the true reality.
If after I die, and I wake up from my VR console in a 42 dimensional universe that's based on entirely different physics than what I've just experienced, then I have just proven science wrong.
If I die, and am lifed upto Heaven, and God says he made us and the world imperfectly so that we would doubt his existence, then I've just proven evolution wrong.
All of these things cannot be proven though. The more finer points that perceptions of reality are the true reality cannot be proven at all. This assumption must be taken on faith. It doesn't mean that this is wrong, or not justified. In fact, it is the most logical choice to pick considering that our world is regular and rule-following!
Just people get so "hot and bothered" over this whole "science is religion" thing, because they feel that their beliefs are justified. Well, The Church was justified in their beliefs for hundreds of years, but that doesn't lend them any more credit today. It's possible that in a hundred some years, science will be viewed with the same distain, replaced with something more justified, and we will look back and laugh at the funny "scientist" that we today laugh at the alchemist.
I'm a religious person, and I don't understand this false conflict that you seem so intent on creating between religion and science.
MH42 instigates people. In the short time I've watched him, and argued with him on Slashdot, it's become apparent that this topic gets raised often around him.
Fact is that atheists and atheistic scientists in particular get really pissed when you call their beliefs a religion. Somehow to them their lack of belief in a God is more justified than belief in a God, and they would rather argue that their beliefs are not a religion, because they are logically justified, than admit that fundamentally, it's all based on presumptions, and assumptions.
Science does claim to explain and predict a lot of things - and without it we wouldn't post here on Slashdot, we would still sit in cold caves worshipping sungod and moongod.
Or more accurately, we'd still be sitting in castles, and homes of wood eating food cooked over an open flame.
Seriously man, we were a lot farther along than cavemen when we picked up science. Unless, you want to credit science will all knowledge, but then it would include religion, unless you only credit it with all advancements of technology, but then it would not include much of linguists.
Science is founded upon a philosophical argument that the world we observe has some reasonable attachment to "reality." Or that what we perceive is reality.
Do many scientists not like admitting that their position is founded upon a philosophical point? No, because they like to assert that they're not making arbitrary choices, and to them a philosophy or religion is an arbitrary choice.
It's not. The mere belief that a God doesn't exist, is a religion, and the mere belief that your perceptions are of a true reality, is a belief and a philosophical assertion. That doesn't make them wrong, nor does it even make them unjustified.
It's just something you're better off admitting, rather than exposing your ideas to attack.
The only value wikipedia could have is as a starting point to look for material, or perhaps to select a topic of interest. It's unusable as a source; the format, anonymous nature, and lack of qualified peer review are fatal. The concept is right but the rigor and accountability necessary to give an article credibility are absent.
Wikipedia also lends weight of credibility upon validation of the information it contains.
Interestingly, as far as everyone faults Wikipedia for containing "lies" and "damned lies", it's surprising that Wikipedia is as accurate as it is.
For informal research, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource.
I can see that someone hasn't heard of the Xeon. You know, the high-end chip in thePentium line, which holds its own against the G5 just fine.
Well, I'll admit that I have no comparison of the Xeon vs G5. I wasn't talking about the Xeon though, I was talking about the Pentium 4, the consumer product. While the average public person can still get their hands on a G5 without any difficulty, or pain, getting a Xeon generally takes a lot more money than the G5 takes.
I mean, hell, the Alpha beats out most of the other architectures... if you want expensive and esoteric, but powerful go Alpha.
Only an Apple or AMD fanboy would call the most successful PC processor over the last five years a "mistake". Northwood was - and still is - one of the most competitive processors ever released. For over two years, P4 was absolutely killing Athlon XP - it's only with Athlon 64 that AMD caught up (and with Prescott that they moved ahead).
Only an Intel fanboi would not recognize the fact that since the Pentium 4 took choices to increase processor speed over performance, that this were not a mistake. Also, this is just my opinion.
You're completely free to disagree with me, that chosing clockspeed over performance was a good idea.
I evaluate processors more on the merit of their design rather than any real-world performance. Feel free to call me a snob for doing so.
You can call Prescott a "mistake", in that it had power issues and didn't scale as Intel anticipated, but even then you're on shaky ground - while Prescott may not be appropriate for notebooks, it still makes a fine workstation/desktop CPU, and on Intel's 65nm process, it has little trouble reaching clocks in the 4.4-5.0GHz range.
That's the whole point. It's reaching clockspeeds of 4.0GHz, when this has entirely nothing to do with speed. Intel was playing so hardcore to the publics misperception that more MHz meant more power that they went and crafted a processor just to show us how stupid that idea was.
Of course, the Pentium 4 made them a lot of money, it was a capable chip (just not as capable as it could have been), and in many ways was a very good thing for Intel to come out with. It also held the public away from AMD (Why buy a 1.0GHz Athlon, when the Pentium 4 is at 2.0GHz?)
It all depends on your point of view if the Pentium 4 was a mistake or not. From my point of view, every x86 designed after the PowerPC was a mistake. And the Pentium 4 more so, because it is the walking incarnate of the myth that more MHz == more power even across designs. To me, it feels like a CPU that was design first and foremost around a marketting concept.
This in no way is an evaluation of its performance characteristics, and cannot be backed up with benchmarks. To me, it's just the stupidest idea that Intel ever came up with.
I have nothing that would be contributory to his other statement.
For example, Big Bang cosmology dominates science and dictates a lot of our decisions one way or another, yet relies upon many unproven (in some cases disprovable, such as the matter of the highly redshifted quasar sitting between us and NGC 7319 in Stephan's Quintet [nasa.gov] [innermost of the pair at 3 o'clock]) assumptions.
If his evidence is true, and given the position and rules of relevance, it would seem to imply that the Big Bang is wrong.
I accept that the Big Bang may be right, or wrong, but I have no evidence to the matter, nor have I reviewed enough to determine if it is or not.
When I have discussions with people, I pick up a number of things as axiomatic to me just so that I can work from their frame of logic, and understand their position, or assert the problems of their position.
Here, I have nothing to say, other than, "you might be right."
No, I'm really not; again, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, you'll see that I'm very careful to use phrases like "tend to" when I'm talking about personality types and beliefs, on both sides of the argument. I make no claims to absolutes.
This is what I generally mean why I say "hedge your bets".
You are occationally using vague language.
If you're possibly wondering why I'm occationally responding to posts that are only vaguely similar to yours, it's because generally you're being so vague, that many times I cannot give a reasonable reply to them.
I'm sick of discussing this point. You use vague language then get mad at me for collapsing it into a possible interpretation of what you said. Pick a point and make it. There's nothing to be gained by lack of assertiveness.
Go out, say confidently what you believe. If you're wrong, then you admit it, and amend your statements, and beliefs. Talking in vague abstractions is useless.
You know... some people like to kill people who piss them off.
Heh. You guys all miss the point. The subtext is "scientists claim that further research should be funded".
Practicing scientists pretty much never say "we know everything there is to know about my specialty". If someone is feeling particularly ornery they might say that after they retire.
I unfortunately never expected my intended to be funny post would be taken on such a tangent...
*sigh*
I guess that's the problem with joking about anything having to do with science or religion... someone is bound to get upset and start a flame war.
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years.
Not that long.
Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC.
Only now.
So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs.
No, because it was faster than a 2.6 GHz P4. The Pentium 4 was a mistake (sacrificing power for clock speed on Intel's part) they've come to their senses now.
Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger.
Because it was during the time that Apple was hyping it. Especially in the later days of the G4, and the early days of the G5. Apple mysteriously stopped updating any of their benchmarks before the announced switch to Intel, and even if they did update their benchmarks, it was only ever against older model Pentium 4's.
That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
It's a hard thing to truely measure. As far as "scientific" and advanced math go, the G5 is still a better CPU, you can push much more high pressure data through it, but for the consumer the better choice is the new cores from Intel.
In all cases, every G5 beats out any Pentium 4, those things were just stupid.
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In fact, it's a branch of Christianity, and was once called "natural philosophy".
It may have derived from Christianity, but it is hardly anymore a "branch" of Christianity. This is because Christianity requires the recognition of Jesus Christ as a divine being.
Also, "natural philosophy" was around before Christ, like in the days of Aristotle.
It's hard to argue a point when two people have a fundamentally different understanding of the word.
I thank you for your explanation and clarrification of how you see religion and science. Other people disagree on your definition. (In particular MH42)
But that's NOT the way it's presented when you go to court to exclude other explainations from the classroom.
This actually reminds me of the text that was put in the biology textbooks that were required to be removed because they equated to the "teaching of religion." The text of the stickers on the books were:
"This book teaches Evolution as fact. It is in fact a theory, and should be considered with critical thought."
The point occured to me when I read this sticker... shouldn't all of science be labeled this way? And why would a scientist be upset that we're telling children to critically think about the information contained in their books?
Uh, actually, no. Science is based on some very basic assumptions we have a lot of faith in, but which cannot be proved. Occam's razor for instance.
Well, to be fair, the scientific use of Occam's razor is typically: "The simplest explanation is most likely the correction one."
Of course as with many things in science, this is actually a PHILOSOPHICAL point, and the "razor" part comes in, because it is actually: "Do not multiply entities unnecessarily."
Typically, if you don't need an intelligent designer to have evolution, then there is no reason to persume one to be there.
Call me a cinic, but I just can't read that and believe that the decriminized word "hacker" were the intentions of the author. Also, I am highly sceptical that most people reading the text would not immediately assume "black hat" hacker.
I even read it that way.
science is based on observation and experimentation, science is NOT based on faith. certain aspects of science are observed but not explained, but that doesn't mean they are taken on faith, they are accepted as probably correct on current observation.
Except for the thing that you take on faith that what you are observing is reality.
This is a point of philosophy that we cannot truely trust our senses. From a practical standpoint, this point is a tauntology, completely uninteresting and useless. Science is studying our observations, and using it to model predictions for the future behavior of our observations.
This doesn't mean that you're examing reality. To make that assumption, you have to take it on faith, that our perceptions aren't falsified.
OTOH religion goes out of it's way to suppress and subvert new information which contradicts accepted beliefs.
As does science. If new information is presented which contradicts accepted belief, then it must first be proven, and validated to the community before it is accepted.
In the same way, the same position is taken by religion. Martin Luther challenged The Church within the bases of the scripture. Eventually, the issues which Martin Luther was so vehemently opposed to where abolished, or changed, and Martin Luther would have little reason today to have doubted The Church as he did. Because while they were resistant to the ideas, there was just no arguing that The Bible has to be accepted as the fundamental source of Christian belief.
If you cannot find a single, solitary religion that has as its fundamental tenet that it must assume it is false, then you have no basis for equating science with religion or vice versa because that IS the basis of science.
Awesome thanks providing me the example that I needed. Since, science takes as a fundamental tenent that it must assume itself to be false, I now have a religion that satisfies your criterium.
I don't find this calling science a religion thing upsetting. I just find it tiresomely solipsistic.
How would this have anything to do with the assertion that one is the only thing in true existence?
I don't know what "real" means apart from "what can be percieved".
This is the very point expressed by the veil of perception. Basically, we observe the world through our senses, but we have no guarentee that those senses are faithfully representing the "real world". We could be brains in a jar being electrically simulated.
Science doesn't need to assume anything, other than if I do the same thing twice in the same conditions, the same results will occur. That's pretty darn solid as assumptions go.
And this works from a practical standpoint, but it does not guarentee anything of the world. I would like you to consider The Matrix. I'm certain that there would be scientists exploring "reality" in in The Matrix, but fundamentally their studies are flawed, because it's not a "real" science. Yet, from a practical standpoint, their studies are still concerning predicting future events that occur reliably.
Thus, they are studying the physics of The Matrix. Which in fact doesn't truely "exist", nor was it "reality."
How many diseases have been cured by the philosophy of assuming that we can't really know anything? How many bridges can you build by just thinking really hard that the gap you're trying to span doesn't exist?
I don't ask you pass up the practical need for science, I ask you only to not get pissed when someone calls science a religion.
Which religions teach that their god[s] most likely do not exist at all and that all of its explanations of the world are most likely totally wrong?
None, and neither do I expect science to say that they are most likely wrong. In fact, science is very well justified, and deserves to be taught in schools.
The issue here is that Christians, Buddhists, and Shinto don't get upset when you call their beliefs a "religion". Only Atheists and Scientists do.
But science does make statements such as 'if I can observe a certain thing occuring consistently, I can make predictions about my future observations'. Which I think neatly gets around the issue of a 'true reality'.
From a practical stand-point, this is 100% correct. There is no reason to doubt that our accurate predictions are based on a "fake" reality, because we deal with the reality that is presented by our perceptions, and practical science need not dig any deeper than that. It would mostly be a waste of their time to do so.
That seems to me a tautology, as long as it's applied to a single observation and not as forward knowledge.
And I agree, from a practical standpoint of science, this is a tautology. Of course, this presents a biased, and irrational negative view in most scientists, and atheists of religion and philosphy. Most often expressed that "philosophy has no place in science", while philosophy is the very FOUNDATION of science.
Practical science indeed has no reason to discuss these issues, but in the same way, the Church never had a reason to study further into its doctrine, because it was accepted as true. Each operates in its own logical reference frame.
You posit the existence of a "true reality" that cannot be observed.
I don't posit it. Philosophy does that for me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_perception
Science is founded on the totally testable assumption that performing experiments with repeatable results that substantiate theories that produce accurate predictions is a useful way to solve problems.
As a point of nitpicking, you don't test assumptions. You assume them.
"Science is founded on the totally testable principle that performing experiements with repeatable results that substantiate theories that produce accurate predictions is a useful way to solve problems." Anything you'd like to make up about "true reality" belongs in the domain of philosophy or metaphysics, neither of which have anything to do with science.
Just because you don't care to acknowledge that you've assumed something here and that you take on faith that our perceptions are real, doesn't make this problem go away. Yes, it is philosphy and meta-physics, but you know what? The whole discussion of "science is a religion" is a philosophical argument.
And you'd do well to remember that the principles and foundations of philosphy are what have led us to science. If you say that philosophy has nothing to do with science, then you say that logic has nothing to do with science.
If you're refering to the entirely theoretical ideas espoused mostly by philosophers then, yeah, that doesn't have a place in practical study of science, and neither does the point that science makes a critical assumption that our perceptions are real belong in the practical study of science.
But on the topic of "is science a religion?" then you're wrong, this is absolutely and fundamentally a point of philosophy, and not of science.
Right, that's all we're asking you to realize.
That philosophically, your beliefs are still a faith, and a religion. It may be the best choice out there, but it's still a religion, and it must still be taken on faith.
I've tried hard to make it clear that I'm not attempting to use "religion" or "faith" as an insult against science. The problem is that these words have such negative tones for most atheists, that they refuse to be associated with them. This arbitrary hatred of a word or semantic grouping is blinding.
Science is not a religion, though. Science is based on observations of nature. Religion is based on faith in something that you cannot detect. Why is that so difficult to understand?
Because science is based on the untestable assumption that what you're observing is relevent to the true reality.
Also, Atheists take it upon faith that there is no God, assuming that just because you cannot detect something that it must not be there. This is a faith based assumption, it cannot be proven.
The "fact" is that everything is based on something that cannot be proven.
The lack of a religion is a religion in itself. (which I realize is a contradiction)
If you read the post on the security mailing list it sounds like someone trying to get this vulnerability out in the open so it can be fixed. Unless they mean a "white hat" hacker or a hacker in the real sense of the word but I doubt it. This is one of those words that should be used carefully, especially by "journalists".
This is a good point. A "black hat" hacker does not disclose bugs, but rather keeps them quiet or shares them with select friends, and peers.
A person releasing this information to a security list is either a concerned "citizen", or a security person.
A citizen posting information to a newspaper editorial about lack of security at the courthouse, for instance "I was at the courthouse, and there was a side door that wasn't being watched at all by anyone!" wouldn't get immediately marked as a terrorist.
Why should we automatically mark a person disclosing computer-security information to the public as a whole, as a hacker?
Just calling science "another religion" is silly. Correct, science cannot explain everything. However, what it does attempt to explain is not based on faith that what we believe is right. Rather the opposite, it is based on the perpetual pessimism that everything we believe, no mattern how many times we have "proven" it, is WRONG.
No, what science explains *is* based on a small subset of faith taken assumptions that cannot be proven. Such as that our perceptions are of the true reality.
If after I die, and I wake up from my VR console in a 42 dimensional universe that's based on entirely different physics than what I've just experienced, then I have just proven science wrong.
If I die, and am lifed upto Heaven, and God says he made us and the world imperfectly so that we would doubt his existence, then I've just proven evolution wrong.
All of these things cannot be proven though. The more finer points that perceptions of reality are the true reality cannot be proven at all. This assumption must be taken on faith. It doesn't mean that this is wrong, or not justified. In fact, it is the most logical choice to pick considering that our world is regular and rule-following!
Just people get so "hot and bothered" over this whole "science is religion" thing, because they feel that their beliefs are justified. Well, The Church was justified in their beliefs for hundreds of years, but that doesn't lend them any more credit today. It's possible that in a hundred some years, science will be viewed with the same distain, replaced with something more justified, and we will look back and laugh at the funny "scientist" that we today laugh at the alchemist.
I'm a religious person, and I don't understand this false conflict that you seem so intent on creating between religion and science.
MH42 instigates people. In the short time I've watched him, and argued with him on Slashdot, it's become apparent that this topic gets raised often around him.
Fact is that atheists and atheistic scientists in particular get really pissed when you call their beliefs a religion. Somehow to them their lack of belief in a God is more justified than belief in a God, and they would rather argue that their beliefs are not a religion, because they are logically justified, than admit that fundamentally, it's all based on presumptions, and assumptions.
Which doesn't make it wrong!
Science does claim to explain and predict a lot of things - and without it we wouldn't post here on Slashdot, we would still sit in cold caves worshipping sungod and moongod.
Or more accurately, we'd still be sitting in castles, and homes of wood eating food cooked over an open flame.
Seriously man, we were a lot farther along than cavemen when we picked up science. Unless, you want to credit science will all knowledge, but then it would include religion, unless you only credit it with all advancements of technology, but then it would not include much of linguists.
Science is founded upon a philosophical argument that the world we observe has some reasonable attachment to "reality." Or that what we perceive is reality.
Do many scientists not like admitting that their position is founded upon a philosophical point? No, because they like to assert that they're not making arbitrary choices, and to them a philosophy or religion is an arbitrary choice.
It's not. The mere belief that a God doesn't exist, is a religion, and the mere belief that your perceptions are of a true reality, is a belief and a philosophical assertion. That doesn't make them wrong, nor does it even make them unjustified.
It's just something you're better off admitting, rather than exposing your ideas to attack.
The only value wikipedia could have is as a starting point to look for material, or perhaps to select a topic of interest. It's unusable as a source; the format, anonymous nature, and lack of qualified peer review are fatal. The concept is right but the rigor and accountability necessary to give an article credibility are absent.
Wikipedia also lends weight of credibility upon validation of the information it contains.
Interestingly, as far as everyone faults Wikipedia for containing "lies" and "damned lies", it's surprising that Wikipedia is as accurate as it is.
For informal research, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource.
I can see that someone hasn't heard of the Xeon. You know, the high-end chip in thePentium line, which holds its own against the G5 just fine.
Well, I'll admit that I have no comparison of the Xeon vs G5. I wasn't talking about the Xeon though, I was talking about the Pentium 4, the consumer product. While the average public person can still get their hands on a G5 without any difficulty, or pain, getting a Xeon generally takes a lot more money than the G5 takes.
I mean, hell, the Alpha beats out most of the other architectures... if you want expensive and esoteric, but powerful go Alpha.
Only an Apple or AMD fanboy would call the most successful PC processor over the last five years a "mistake". Northwood was - and still is - one of the most competitive processors ever released. For over two years, P4 was absolutely killing Athlon XP - it's only with Athlon 64 that AMD caught up (and with Prescott that they moved ahead).
Only an Intel fanboi would not recognize the fact that since the Pentium 4 took choices to increase processor speed over performance, that this were not a mistake. Also, this is just my opinion.
You're completely free to disagree with me, that chosing clockspeed over performance was a good idea.
I evaluate processors more on the merit of their design rather than any real-world performance. Feel free to call me a snob for doing so.
You can call Prescott a "mistake", in that it had power issues and didn't scale as Intel anticipated, but even then you're on shaky ground - while Prescott may not be appropriate for notebooks, it still makes a fine workstation/desktop CPU, and on Intel's 65nm process, it has little trouble reaching clocks in the 4.4-5.0GHz range.
That's the whole point. It's reaching clockspeeds of 4.0GHz, when this has entirely nothing to do with speed. Intel was playing so hardcore to the publics misperception that more MHz meant more power that they went and crafted a processor just to show us how stupid that idea was.
Of course, the Pentium 4 made them a lot of money, it was a capable chip (just not as capable as it could have been), and in many ways was a very good thing for Intel to come out with. It also held the public away from AMD (Why buy a 1.0GHz Athlon, when the Pentium 4 is at 2.0GHz?)
It all depends on your point of view if the Pentium 4 was a mistake or not. From my point of view, every x86 designed after the PowerPC was a mistake. And the Pentium 4 more so, because it is the walking incarnate of the myth that more MHz == more power even across designs. To me, it feels like a CPU that was design first and foremost around a marketting concept.
This in no way is an evaluation of its performance characteristics, and cannot be backed up with benchmarks. To me, it's just the stupidest idea that Intel ever came up with.
No, I'm really not; again, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, you'll see that I'm very careful to use phrases like "tend to" when I'm talking about personality types and beliefs, on both sides of the argument. I make no claims to absolutes.
This is what I generally mean why I say "hedge your bets".
You are occationally using vague language.
If you're possibly wondering why I'm occationally responding to posts that are only vaguely similar to yours, it's because generally you're being so vague, that many times I cannot give a reasonable reply to them.
I'm sick of discussing this point. You use vague language then get mad at me for collapsing it into a possible interpretation of what you said. Pick a point and make it. There's nothing to be gained by lack of assertiveness.
Go out, say confidently what you believe. If you're wrong, then you admit it, and amend your statements, and beliefs. Talking in vague abstractions is useless.
You know... some people like to kill people who piss them off.
I don't think you're going to get anywhere taking a Eukerist, maybe you ought to try taking the Eucharist instead ?
/x/ noise and turns it into an IPA /k/ noise.
It's hard to remember the spelling when English regularly takes an IPA
You are correct though, thank you for correcting my spelling.
Heh. You guys all miss the point. The subtext is "scientists claim that further research should be funded".
Practicing scientists pretty much never say "we know everything there is to know about my specialty". If someone is feeling particularly ornery they might say that after they retire.
I unfortunately never expected my intended to be funny post would be taken on such a tangent...
*sigh*
I guess that's the problem with joking about anything having to do with science or religion... someone is bound to get upset and start a flame war.
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years.
Not that long.
Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC.
Only now.
So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs.
No, because it was faster than a 2.6 GHz P4. The Pentium 4 was a mistake (sacrificing power for clock speed on Intel's part) they've come to their senses now.
Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger.
Because it was during the time that Apple was hyping it. Especially in the later days of the G4, and the early days of the G5. Apple mysteriously stopped updating any of their benchmarks before the announced switch to Intel, and even if they did update their benchmarks, it was only ever against older model Pentium 4's.
That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
It's a hard thing to truely measure. As far as "scientific" and advanced math go, the G5 is still a better CPU, you can push much more high pressure data through it, but for the consumer the better choice is the new cores from Intel.
In all cases, every G5 beats out any Pentium 4, those things were just stupid.