> computers, cars, etc, all cost about the same no matter where you live.
Not so at all. Don't you recall the Levi's commercial, where there's this guy tooling around in a little car, and then he gets out, and he's not wearing pants. The caption reads, "In Prague, you can trade them for a car." The funny part of that is that it's still true.
> There is something wrong when a "U.S. company" can actively discriminate against Americans in its hiring practices (how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?) while circumventing OSHA, FLSA, and other labor regulations.
Here's the fatal flaw in your argument, pointed up by the simple question, "how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?" In response, how many of those jobs were offered to British, or German, or Japanese citizens? The answer is "none", and for exactly the same reason. They aren't discriminating against Americans, they're discriminating against expensive programmers. Yes, it sucks that they can take a job offshore and get it done for less money, but that's not a new practice by any means, and it's a short-term problem anyway. Your solution has an abvious flaw as well. If the U.S. government forces U.S. companies to use U.S. talent only, they're going to have to charge more for the finished product. That means that they can't compete as well with U.S. companies who use offshore talent (which your solution will fix), but it also means they can't compete as well with Russian companies who use Russian programmers. It's easy to say that that's not a problem, since the U.S. software is better, but that's just pro-U.S. bias, and besides, what if U.S. companies want to sell their software to the rest of the world?
> How would you like to go to a job interview and be told "you have to work 55 hours per week for $12,000 per year or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev"?
Again, this argument doesn't make any sense, on two levels. Firstly, to compare apples to apples (we'll use year 2000-value apples), you'd have to say, "you have to work 55 hours per week for $134,000 a year in purchasing power, or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev" which is the equivalent earning power. Conversely, as companies compete in the world market, these nests of underpaid resources will rise to levels more in line with the U.S. and other countries. For now, there are lots of programmers willing to work for peanuts in Russia and India, but the talent pool is going to get tapped eventually to the point where salaries will have to rise, as companies battle for the talent in these locations. For now, there is a wild discrepancy between the developed world and the developing world, and because of that the U.S. job market is going to suffer. While it seems to make sense on the surface, your solution is historically referred to as "economic isolationism", and our country's history shows that it simply does not work in the long term. See the automotive industry for a pointed example, or the garment industry, wherein government protections drove prices so far out of line with reality that, instead of forcing U.S. companies to hire US-ians, it forced many of the companies to move to other countries entirely, which, of course, did not help the U.S. workers who now had no company from which to demand a job. The only way to solve such an imbalance is to adjust prices, and again, historically prices don't fall on the whole. What will end up happening is that prices for good programmers outside the U.S. will rise as local demand exceeds local supply.
In short, while it's a very feel-good gesture, government protection of U.S. jobs will not be worth the stunting of the U.S. programming industry that such sanctions will engender.
...and genocide is genocide, even if the ones you would kill are repugnant to you. You sound like a racist of the lowest stripe, to lump all Germans (and indeed all Teutonic people) in with white supremacists. Secondly, you've got a lot of nerve talking about how the Germans will sink to mass murder again if unchecked, while at the same time you push for exactly the act for which you damn them. Apparently it is you who is blind to history, because you don't realize that your argument is disturbingly close to the very argument Hitler himself used to justify the Holocaust in the first place. His argument was, to wit, "we need to eliminate the Jewish threat to our well being, because if we don't they'll run us all into servitude and death, just like they've done all through history." Your argument requires only that I replace "Jewish" with "German", and if that doesn't disturb you then I must assume that you are not to be reasoned with.
> The computer got everything right in that case,
> it was just the stupid woman who screwed up.
And an innocent man still spent a day in jail because he was being watched. The fact that there was a human error does not excuse the fact that he was scoped without his knowledge or consent, nor that he was held because of the results.
You make a good point that there are businesses with local power generation, but the second point is less strong. If you have a system to which others want always-on access, you're going to want to use something other than this power-line access anyway, most likely. If I were running a business and thought to have a generator, I'd likely already have considered the possibility that a power outage (of any kind, not just intentional) could cause trouble, and would therefore want some form of 'Net access that's not sensitive to a blackout.
You nitwit, AE didn't invent the atom bomb. His great contribution to science was his ideas, which others then (and still do) convert into stuff. Also, last I checked, "Jewish" was a religious designation. Your statement implies that there can be no such thing as a German Jew, which point many German Jews will find offensive. And last, but not least, the atomic bomb wasn't used in a racist attack on the Japanese, it was used in a nationalist attack on the Japanese, as a scare tactic for the Soviet Union. The reason it wasn't used on the Germans was that by the time they were ready for prime time, the war in Europe was done.
Virg
P.S. A. Einstein did most of his writings while working in a Viennese patent office, not in the U.S., and was already a revered scientist by the time he came to America. You should check your facts before you use them.
P.P.S. Your advocacy of the extermination of the German people is different from Hitler's advocacy of the extermination of the Jews in what way, exactly?
> It is a sad commentary on our society that we place such a high value on athletes, actors, and others, who collectively contribute very little to the moral fabric of our society (and many who significantly detract from it), and yet place such a low value on our teachers.
You sound like you're from the older generation, with the usual "These kids today!" rhetoric. Societies from the dawn of time have placed high value on celebrities and entertainers, and (historically speaking) a low value on teachers. Even the vaunted Greeks, who are generally considered to have placed high value on learning, celebrated their actors, and relegated teaching duties to slaves. And for every Socrates, we have an Albert Einstein who brought science to the masses.
>...our society would be full of uneducated menaces (ahem, like it is today...)
"Uneducated menaces"? Your elitism astounds me. Firstly, your assumption that everyone who isn't as well educated as you is a "menace" merely shows your lack of contact with the general public, and not only are crime rates lower per capita today than ever before in history, the average high school dropout today has a better educational background than the average person in the U.S. one hundred years ago. Did you forget that more than half of the population back then was functionally illiterate? That number is somewhat lower these days.
>...and would be coming apart at the seams (like it is today...)
My guess is that you feel this way because fewer people today subscribe to your moral code than did when you were younger, but then fifty years ago it was acceptable to prevent someone from sitting on a particular park bench because of the color of their skin, which I find appalling. Or did you gloss over that part of your rosy past as well?
>...and we would lose our culture and identity (ahem, surprise, surpise, which we are...)
I think you mean "losing your culture and identity". We're not losing our collective identity, we're changing it because attitudes about what society is are changing. You can weep about how great community and patriotism was "back when", but these days the whole idea of community is different and culture needs to change to allow for this.
> For the most part, teachers are under-paid, under-trained, and have their hands tied with outdated technology and miniscule budgets...(snip)..., and waste money as if it were free.
Hate to point it out, but a lot of the waste is in the schools' own bureaucracies.
> Yeah, we can blame it on the government, but we just watch it happen and get on with our lives, too busy coding to care.
Perhaps you do, but I have been actively working for changes in the governments of every place I've lived to change what's wrong with the educational system.
> Shame on us. Shame on all of us.
Shame on you, sir or madam, for thinking you can speak for me. You sound like a rather jaded and bitter old man/woman, longing for a past that never really existed. I for one am happy with how far we've come.
> All Germany has ever produced is hatred, oppression, war and genocide.
> Name me one positive thing a German ever has done.
Well, geez, what nationality was Albert Einstein? Oh, never mind.
Try this on for size:
"All (insert country here) has ever produced is hatred, oppression, war and genocide.
Name me one positive thing a (insert country personal identifier here) ever has done." Now, just about the only country that doesn't fit this formula is Canada, because they're frankly not very good at war. The U.S., Russia, China, The U.K., Japan and a myriad of others all certainly do fit well.
Okay, if you don't have an email to use, I'll just do it here.
> Sig: Science is a religion.
It's not. I think you're confusing science with Scientism (or scientific humanism). Science isn't a belief system. It's a method of inquiry.
> You place your faith in what you can sense and in the words of those
> you respect, e.g. the scientific comunity.
Placing faith in anything, including scientists, isn't science. It's faith.
> I also place my faith in what I can sense and in those I respect.
Good to know, but that's also not science.
> Things that are literally inexplicable by science have happened
> to those who are close to me.
Nothing is inexplicable to science, because science allows "I don't know" as an answer. Scientists generally don't _like_ that answer, but there's nothing in the scientific method that requires an answer to any question. Since you can't explain the things that happened to those people by any currently known scientific laws, you can say "I can't explain what happened by any currently known scientific laws" and still be within the scientific method.
> That is enough evidence for me to have faith that my religion and
> science are equally legitimate.
Evidence and faith are contradictory. By definition, faith is belief in something, in the absence of proof one way or the other. This statement does, however, point up an issue that I suspect is causing much of your confusion. See below for more on science and religion, and their relationship to each other.
> >...science is not based on, or even really concerned with, truths.
>
> Then what is the point? AFAIK, scientist base their theories on
> facts. Darn! What was that expression...the facts don't lie? Science
> is a bunch of statements that are true or false. If they are true,
> it is sound science. If they are false, it is quackery or
> pseudo-science (if somewhere in between).
The point is specifically that truth is a relative term. Science isn't a bunch of statements that are true or false, it's a method of determining the truth or falsehood of a bunch of statements (scientists call 'em "hypotheses"). Sound science is hypotheses that are consistent with observation. Quackery is the use of scientific jargon to deceive. Pseudoscience is the use of the scientific method backwards; that is, trying to bend facts to suit theories instead of the other way around.
> >...they must be testable and repeatable...
>
> So what is the "Big Bang" theory? How is that either testable or
> repeatable? Sure you can make similar astronomical observations and
> recalucalate the results to formulas, but you can neither really test
> it or repeat it.
You're badly misinterpreting this idea. The "testable/repeatable" idea applies to experiments. The Big Bang (if it ocurred) is an event, not an experiment. One does not need to repeat the Big Bang to investigate the validity of the theory. It works like this:
Theory: The universe started with a big explosion.
Corollary: This explosion (to be consistent with known physics) would have left an EM signature.
Experiment: test for the presence of postulated EM signature.
The test for a background signature is testable (either the EM field will be detected or it won't) and repeatable (anyone with the necessary equipment can repeat the test at any time). If the field is found (it was), this evidence can be used to bolster the case for the Big Bang theory of universal origin, and it weakens the steady-state theory of the universe, because the steady-state theory (again, to be consistent with known physics) would not reasonably contain said field. Now, all of this said, the scientific method also allows that if something new in the field of physics comes up that would reasonably explain the field better than the Big Bang theory, BB would be rejected in favor of that new idea. But, as you see, the theory does not require direct observation or repetition of the event, only of the tests.
> IMHO, the "Big Bang" theory, archeology in general, and any other
> branch of science that deals with events distant in the past are very
> hard to test or repeat. They attempt to explain how things came to
> be. How did the universe really start? Did Neanderthal die out or
> merge with Crowmagnon (sp?) man? What event occured that caused so
> many religions to have a story of a great flood? Where does the
> personality of a person reside?
Again, the events don't need to be tested. The hypotheses are the attempted explanations, and the tests that prove or disprove those hypotheses are what need to be falsifiable/repeatable. To take an extreme example, I'll use your last hypothesis. I propose that the personality of a human resides in the left foot. My test is to find people who have lost their left foot, and see if personlity changes ensue. This is both falsifiable (either I will observe changes or I won't) and repeatable (any researcher can find someone who lost their left foot and repeat the experiment). Therefore my hypothesis is a scientific one. However, as you can well guess, my experiments will show that it's erroneous. As a good scientist, I must therefore say that this theory fails the consistency test (my hypothesis is inconsistent with observation), and therefore I must discard it.
> Most religions also have an explanation of how things came to be.
> Scientists are researchers who try to uncover and support scientific
> "laws". Theologins are researchers of who try to uncover relgious
> "truths".
You must be careful not to confuse these two ideals, especially because scientific laws must stand up to direct experimentation, and religious beliefs do not (and cannot) have such constraints, because they are not quantitative by nature.
> What is the difference? What you believe is a fact. That is what
> seperates religions from each other and religion from science. Hence
> my.sig.
Not by any quantitative definition of the word "fact" is a belief a fact. Facts, as defined by the scientific method, are phenomena that are consistent with any experiment that can be run against them. More important, no "fact" is accepted as perfectly immutable in science. Newton's laws of motion spring to mind, which were considered "laws of nature" until that Einstein troublemaker came along. What separates religions from science is the type of questions they try to answer. Too many people try to use religion to answer questions about scientific theory, or the scientific method to try to answer religious or philosophical questions. Each method is ill-suited to address the other's issues, as science deals in quantitative methods, and religion (and by its extension philosophy) deal in nonquantitative methods, which is why I can say at last that science is not a religion.
Well, perhaps the wording should have been virtually no progress. One vaccine in several decades does after all put them somewhat behind the curve in medical research.
...but you only addressed one of many points the parent poster made. What about the other points? Keep trying, and in the meantime, make an effort to remember that AIDS is a disease, and not just a social issue.
> I honestly am hard pressed to believe the people at
> the top could be 'this' stupid.
I'm not so sure it's stupidity so much as an astonishing amount of hubris. For example, shortly after Judge Jackson's remedy was thrown out, Mr. Gates himself held a news conference in which he explicitly said that the event was proof that Microsoft did not illegally tie its browser to it OS. Since several courts since then have not overturned the conviction (only the punishment), this statement was either an horrific mistake on his part, or a bald-faced lie. In either case, with this episode (and the falsified benchmark video) in mind, it does not strike me as out of character for the top brass at Microsoft to try something like this.
>...get "enormous benefits" compared to regular people
...from the government. While it's true that farmers need these benefits more than the general populace, the governmental assistance is enviable. For example, imagine I'm a small computer maker. Can you imagine the government paying CompUSA not to sell more than X computers in my area, so that there's enough demand for my machines so I don't go out of business? This is an overextension of the idea, but you get the point. And, the original poster's point is valid, in that corporations that can get favorable legislation passed reap huge rewards for it. If you don't like using farmers as an example, use the Baby Bells instead.
> I mean we all know you'd have ot be brain dead to use windows
> anyway - this just takes it a stpe further.
Hey, this is just mean. Maybe you should say, "...brain dead to use Windows by choice" instead, since I'm required to use Windows by my employer, and I manage to keep some brain cells alive with regular Linux injections at home.
The thing that amazes me is that of all of the people to whom to send an obviously fake letter campaign, they choose Mike Hatch. What the heck were they thinking?!?
Virg
P.S. Science is not a religion. I read your user comment, and I have a rebuttal, but it's offtopic to post it here and you don't provide an address.
Asked about the relationship between the telephone calls to citizens and the subsequent letters, ATL Executive Director Jim Prendergast initially said those who agreed the prosecution was misguided merely were given suggestions
about what to use in drafting their own letters.
"We gave them a few bullet points, but that's about the extent of it," he said.
Asked why some phrases were identical, Prendergast then conceded the letters were written by his operation. "We'd write the letter and then send it to them," he said. "That's fairly common practice."
I'd say that qualifies as good enough to cast stones.
> They did afford the hardware that costs atleast 20
> times as much in my experience.
This argument comes up time and again, and every time, the failure of logic astounds me. But, I'll go through it again. The school has to buy the system hardware no matter what OS they run on it. The licensing for Windows sits on top of the hardware, but last I checked, if the school's going to run Windows they still need to buy the computer. So, if the computer costs $X and Windows costs $Y, the following equation applies:
$X is less than $X + $Y (eq.1)
So, the school saves money by using Linux, no matter how cheap Windows is.
> Privatize all schools! Get the tax thing out of the way,
> and funding problems disappear! It's called "free market",
> and it works for everything else, doesn't it?
No, it doesn't. There are some thing for which the free market is ideal, and some where it is a very bad fit. Schools are one such area. There are several reasons:
1.) Privatizing schools assumes that everyone can afford to pay for an education. This is an extremely dangerous road to tread, as it holds the very real risk that poorer kids will fall behind scholastically, starting a cycle of "can't get a good job because of lack of education/can't educate the kids properly because it costs too much". This already happens in the public system, and there's evidence in history to support that it just gets worse if there are private schools but no public alternatives.
2.) Privatizing schools completely changes the goal of the school. The idea behind a not-for-profit venture is to maximize services given a certain budget. The idea behind a for-profit venture is to maximize profit. By completely privatizing the system, you run into some of the same problems that you encounter in hospitals, where monetary considerations can affect the quality of care.
3.) Privatizing schools can (but does not always) lead to excessive commercialism, as schools accept funds from corporations in exchange for considerations like advertising or exclusive product contracts (there are many schools that get paid money by distributors, for example, to sell only certain brands of soft drinks or snacks from the vending machines). Although public funds certainly don't eliminate this sort of thing, they do help take the pressure off somewhat.
There are some services where government oversight is necessary (think of what the roads would look like if taxes weren't allocated for maintenance, or consider that the only alternative would be toll booths everywhere to support it). Since quality education is the backbone of any advanced (or advancing) society, it must remain available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
> computers, cars, etc, all cost about the same no matter where you live.
Not so at all. Don't you recall the Levi's commercial, where there's this guy tooling around in a little car, and then he gets out, and he's not wearing pants. The caption reads, "In Prague, you can trade them for a car." The funny part of that is that it's still true.
Virg
> There is something wrong when a "U.S. company" can actively discriminate against Americans in its hiring practices (how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?) while circumventing OSHA, FLSA, and other labor regulations.
Here's the fatal flaw in your argument, pointed up by the simple question, "how many of those jobs were offered to U.S. citizens?" In response, how many of those jobs were offered to British, or German, or Japanese citizens? The answer is "none", and for exactly the same reason. They aren't discriminating against Americans, they're discriminating against expensive programmers. Yes, it sucks that they can take a job offshore and get it done for less money, but that's not a new practice by any means, and it's a short-term problem anyway. Your solution has an abvious flaw as well. If the U.S. government forces U.S. companies to use U.S. talent only, they're going to have to charge more for the finished product. That means that they can't compete as well with U.S. companies who use offshore talent (which your solution will fix), but it also means they can't compete as well with Russian companies who use Russian programmers. It's easy to say that that's not a problem, since the U.S. software is better, but that's just pro-U.S. bias, and besides, what if U.S. companies want to sell their software to the rest of the world?
> How would you like to go to a job interview and be told "you have to work 55 hours per week for $12,000 per year or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev"?
Again, this argument doesn't make any sense, on two levels. Firstly, to compare apples to apples (we'll use year 2000-value apples), you'd have to say, "you have to work 55 hours per week for $134,000 a year in purchasing power, or we'll give this job to some guy in Kiev" which is the equivalent earning power. Conversely, as companies compete in the world market, these nests of underpaid resources will rise to levels more in line with the U.S. and other countries. For now, there are lots of programmers willing to work for peanuts in Russia and India, but the talent pool is going to get tapped eventually to the point where salaries will have to rise, as companies battle for the talent in these locations. For now, there is a wild discrepancy between the developed world and the developing world, and because of that the U.S. job market is going to suffer. While it seems to make sense on the surface, your solution is historically referred to as "economic isolationism", and our country's history shows that it simply does not work in the long term. See the automotive industry for a pointed example, or the garment industry, wherein government protections drove prices so far out of line with reality that, instead of forcing U.S. companies to hire US-ians, it forced many of the companies to move to other countries entirely, which, of course, did not help the U.S. workers who now had no company from which to demand a job. The only way to solve such an imbalance is to adjust prices, and again, historically prices don't fall on the whole. What will end up happening is that prices for good programmers outside the U.S. will rise as local demand exceeds local supply.
In short, while it's a very feel-good gesture, government protection of U.S. jobs will not be worth the stunting of the U.S. programming industry that such sanctions will engender.
Virg
Think "teenaged" in chicken years.
Virg
...and genocide is genocide, even if the ones you would kill are repugnant to you. You sound like a racist of the lowest stripe, to lump all Germans (and indeed all Teutonic people) in with white supremacists. Secondly, you've got a lot of nerve talking about how the Germans will sink to mass murder again if unchecked, while at the same time you push for exactly the act for which you damn them. Apparently it is you who is blind to history, because you don't realize that your argument is disturbingly close to the very argument Hitler himself used to justify the Holocaust in the first place. His argument was, to wit, "we need to eliminate the Jewish threat to our well being, because if we don't they'll run us all into servitude and death, just like they've done all through history." Your argument requires only that I replace "Jewish" with "German", and if that doesn't disturb you then I must assume that you are not to be reasoned with.
Virg
> The computer got everything right in that case,
> it was just the stupid woman who screwed up.
And an innocent man still spent a day in jail because he was being watched. The fact that there was a human error does not excuse the fact that he was scoped without his knowledge or consent, nor that he was held because of the results.
Virg
> Also note that having sex with a dozen teenage chicks at a time is part of my religion.
Actually, by the time they're teenaged, they're not "chicks" any more. They're just "chickens" at that point.
Virg
Your message would have more weight if you'd used a spell checker, or even a dictionary. Try "puerile" next time.
You do realize this article is humor, right?
Virg
You make a good point that there are businesses with local power generation, but the second point is less strong. If you have a system to which others want always-on access, you're going to want to use something other than this power-line access anyway, most likely. If I were running a business and thought to have a generator, I'd likely already have considered the possibility that a power outage (of any kind, not just intentional) could cause trouble, and would therefore want some form of 'Net access that's not sensitive to a blackout.
Virg
You nitwit, AE didn't invent the atom bomb. His great contribution to science was his ideas, which others then (and still do) convert into stuff. Also, last I checked, "Jewish" was a religious designation. Your statement implies that there can be no such thing as a German Jew, which point many German Jews will find offensive. And last, but not least, the atomic bomb wasn't used in a racist attack on the Japanese, it was used in a nationalist attack on the Japanese, as a scare tactic for the Soviet Union. The reason it wasn't used on the Germans was that by the time they were ready for prime time, the war in Europe was done.
Virg
P.S. A. Einstein did most of his writings while working in a Viennese patent office, not in the U.S., and was already a revered scientist by the time he came to America. You should check your facts before you use them.
P.P.S. Your advocacy of the extermination of the German people is different from Hitler's advocacy of the extermination of the Jews in what way, exactly?
> It is a sad commentary on our society that we place such a high value on athletes, actors, and others, who collectively contribute very little to the moral fabric of our society (and many who significantly detract from it), and yet place such a low value on our teachers.
...our society would be full of uneducated menaces (ahem, like it is today...)
...and would be coming apart at the seams (like it is today...)
...and we would lose our culture and identity (ahem, surprise, surpise, which we are...)
You sound like you're from the older generation, with the usual "These kids today!" rhetoric. Societies from the dawn of time have placed high value on celebrities and entertainers, and (historically speaking) a low value on teachers. Even the vaunted Greeks, who are generally considered to have placed high value on learning, celebrated their actors, and relegated teaching duties to slaves. And for every Socrates, we have an Albert Einstein who brought science to the masses.
>
"Uneducated menaces"? Your elitism astounds me. Firstly, your assumption that everyone who isn't as well educated as you is a "menace" merely shows your lack of contact with the general public, and not only are crime rates lower per capita today than ever before in history, the average high school dropout today has a better educational background than the average person in the U.S. one hundred years ago. Did you forget that more than half of the population back then was functionally illiterate? That number is somewhat lower these days.
>
My guess is that you feel this way because fewer people today subscribe to your moral code than did when you were younger, but then fifty years ago it was acceptable to prevent someone from sitting on a particular park bench because of the color of their skin, which I find appalling. Or did you gloss over that part of your rosy past as well?
>
I think you mean "losing your culture and identity". We're not losing our collective identity, we're changing it because attitudes about what society is are changing. You can weep about how great community and patriotism was "back when", but these days the whole idea of community is different and culture needs to change to allow for this.
> For the most part, teachers are under-paid, under-trained, and have their hands tied with outdated technology and miniscule budgets...(snip)..., and waste money as if it were free.
Hate to point it out, but a lot of the waste is in the schools' own bureaucracies.
> Yeah, we can blame it on the government, but we just watch it happen and get on with our lives, too busy coding to care.
Perhaps you do, but I have been actively working for changes in the governments of every place I've lived to change what's wrong with the educational system.
> Shame on us. Shame on all of us.
Shame on you, sir or madam, for thinking you can speak for me. You sound like a rather jaded and bitter old man/woman, longing for a past that never really existed. I for one am happy with how far we've come.
Virg
(SLAP!) That's "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", dammit! And is "doctorite" the stuff that makes doctors weak?
Virg
> When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said, "To know one's self."
> And what was easy, "To advise another."
Who gives a thit what Thales thaid? Tell uth what Thupport thaid!
Virg
> ...while teacher's (my father teaches at a local high school)
> are almost always required...
I hope he doesn't teach English. "Teachers" shouldn't have an apostrophe.
Virg
IHBT, but...
> All Germany has ever produced is hatred, oppression, war and genocide.
> Name me one positive thing a German ever has done.
Well, geez, what nationality was Albert Einstein? Oh, never mind.
Try this on for size:
"All (insert country here) has ever produced is hatred, oppression, war and genocide.
Name me one positive thing a (insert country personal identifier here) ever has done." Now, just about the only country that doesn't fit this formula is Canada, because they're frankly not very good at war. The U.S., Russia, China, The U.K., Japan and a myriad of others all certainly do fit well.
So, shoo, troll, don't bother us.
Virg
Okay, if you don't have an email to use, I'll just do it here.
...science is not based on, or even really concerned with, truths.
...they must be testable and repeatable...
.sig.
> Sig: Science is a religion.
It's not. I think you're confusing science with Scientism (or scientific humanism). Science isn't a belief system. It's a method of inquiry.
> You place your faith in what you can sense and in the words of those
> you respect, e.g. the scientific comunity.
Placing faith in anything, including scientists, isn't science. It's faith.
> I also place my faith in what I can sense and in those I respect.
Good to know, but that's also not science.
> Things that are literally inexplicable by science have happened
> to those who are close to me.
Nothing is inexplicable to science, because science allows "I don't know" as an answer. Scientists generally don't _like_ that answer, but there's nothing in the scientific method that requires an answer to any question. Since you can't explain the things that happened to those people by any currently known scientific laws, you can say "I can't explain what happened by any currently known scientific laws" and still be within the scientific method.
> That is enough evidence for me to have faith that my religion and
> science are equally legitimate.
Evidence and faith are contradictory. By definition, faith is belief in something, in the absence of proof one way or the other. This statement does, however, point up an issue that I suspect is causing much of your confusion. See below for more on science and religion, and their relationship to each other.
> >
>
> Then what is the point? AFAIK, scientist base their theories on
> facts. Darn! What was that expression...the facts don't lie? Science
> is a bunch of statements that are true or false. If they are true,
> it is sound science. If they are false, it is quackery or
> pseudo-science (if somewhere in between).
The point is specifically that truth is a relative term. Science isn't a bunch of statements that are true or false, it's a method of determining the truth or falsehood of a bunch of statements (scientists call 'em "hypotheses"). Sound science is hypotheses that are consistent with observation. Quackery is the use of scientific jargon to deceive. Pseudoscience is the use of the scientific method backwards; that is, trying to bend facts to suit theories instead of the other way around.
> >
>
> So what is the "Big Bang" theory? How is that either testable or
> repeatable? Sure you can make similar astronomical observations and
> recalucalate the results to formulas, but you can neither really test
> it or repeat it.
You're badly misinterpreting this idea. The "testable/repeatable" idea applies to experiments. The Big Bang (if it ocurred) is an event, not an experiment. One does not need to repeat the Big Bang to investigate the validity of the theory. It works like this:
Theory: The universe started with a big explosion.
Corollary: This explosion (to be consistent with known physics) would have left an EM signature.
Experiment: test for the presence of postulated EM signature.
The test for a background signature is testable (either the EM field will be detected or it won't) and repeatable (anyone with the necessary equipment can repeat the test at any time). If the field is found (it was), this evidence can be used to bolster the case for the Big Bang theory of universal origin, and it weakens the steady-state theory of the universe, because the steady-state theory (again, to be consistent with known physics) would not reasonably contain said field. Now, all of this said, the scientific method also allows that if something new in the field of physics comes up that would reasonably explain the field better than the Big Bang theory, BB would be rejected in favor of that new idea. But, as you see, the theory does not require direct observation or repetition of the event, only of the tests.
> IMHO, the "Big Bang" theory, archeology in general, and any other
> branch of science that deals with events distant in the past are very
> hard to test or repeat. They attempt to explain how things came to
> be. How did the universe really start? Did Neanderthal die out or
> merge with Crowmagnon (sp?) man? What event occured that caused so
> many religions to have a story of a great flood? Where does the
> personality of a person reside?
Again, the events don't need to be tested. The hypotheses are the attempted explanations, and the tests that prove or disprove those hypotheses are what need to be falsifiable/repeatable. To take an extreme example, I'll use your last hypothesis. I propose that the personality of a human resides in the left foot. My test is to find people who have lost their left foot, and see if personlity changes ensue. This is both falsifiable (either I will observe changes or I won't) and repeatable (any researcher can find someone who lost their left foot and repeat the experiment). Therefore my hypothesis is a scientific one. However, as you can well guess, my experiments will show that it's erroneous. As a good scientist, I must therefore say that this theory fails the consistency test (my hypothesis is inconsistent with observation), and therefore I must discard it.
> Most religions also have an explanation of how things came to be.
> Scientists are researchers who try to uncover and support scientific
> "laws". Theologins are researchers of who try to uncover relgious
> "truths".
You must be careful not to confuse these two ideals, especially because scientific laws must stand up to direct experimentation, and religious beliefs do not (and cannot) have such constraints, because they are not quantitative by nature.
> What is the difference? What you believe is a fact. That is what
> seperates religions from each other and religion from science. Hence
> my
Not by any quantitative definition of the word "fact" is a belief a fact. Facts, as defined by the scientific method, are phenomena that are consistent with any experiment that can be run against them. More important, no "fact" is accepted as perfectly immutable in science. Newton's laws of motion spring to mind, which were considered "laws of nature" until that Einstein troublemaker came along. What separates religions from science is the type of questions they try to answer. Too many people try to use religion to answer questions about scientific theory, or the scientific method to try to answer religious or philosophical questions. Each method is ill-suited to address the other's issues, as science deals in quantitative methods, and religion (and by its extension philosophy) deal in nonquantitative methods, which is why I can say at last that science is not a religion.
Virg
My comment was to indicate that I'd read the comments in your user info. Do you have a crash account (Yahoo or Hotmail or such)?
Virg
Well, perhaps the wording should have been virtually no progress. One vaccine in several decades does after all put them somewhat behind the curve in medical research.
Bully on them for that vaccine, tho'.
Virg
...but you only addressed one of many points the parent poster made. What about the other points? Keep trying, and in the meantime, make an effort to remember that AIDS is a disease, and not just a social issue.
Virg
> I honestly am hard pressed to believe the people at
> the top could be 'this' stupid.
I'm not so sure it's stupidity so much as an astonishing amount of hubris. For example, shortly after Judge Jackson's remedy was thrown out, Mr. Gates himself held a news conference in which he explicitly said that the event was proof that Microsoft did not illegally tie its browser to it OS. Since several courts since then have not overturned the conviction (only the punishment), this statement was either an horrific mistake on his part, or a bald-faced lie. In either case, with this episode (and the falsified benchmark video) in mind, it does not strike me as out of character for the top brass at Microsoft to try something like this.
Virg
...farmers do indeed...
...from the government. While it's true that farmers need these benefits more than the general populace, the governmental assistance is enviable. For example, imagine I'm a small computer maker. Can you imagine the government paying CompUSA not to sell more than X computers in my area, so that there's enough demand for my machines so I don't go out of business? This is an overextension of the idea, but you get the point. And, the original poster's point is valid, in that corporations that can get favorable legislation passed reap huge rewards for it. If you don't like using farmers as an example, use the Baby Bells instead.
>...get "enormous benefits" compared to regular people
Virg
> I mean we all know you'd have ot be brain dead to use windows
> anyway - this just takes it a stpe further.
Hey, this is just mean. Maybe you should say, "...brain dead to use Windows by choice" instead, since I'm required to use Windows by my employer, and I manage to keep some brain cells alive with regular Linux injections at home.
Virg
The thing that amazes me is that of all of the people to whom to send an obviously fake letter campaign, they choose Mike Hatch. What the heck were they thinking?!?
Virg
P.S. Science is not a religion. I read your user comment, and I have a rebuttal, but it's offtopic to post it here and you don't provide an address.
I'd say that qualifies as good enough to cast stones.
VIrg
> They did afford the hardware that costs atleast 20
> times as much in my experience.
This argument comes up time and again, and every time, the failure of logic astounds me. But, I'll go through it again. The school has to buy the system hardware no matter what OS they run on it. The licensing for Windows sits on top of the hardware, but last I checked, if the school's going to run Windows they still need to buy the computer. So, if the computer costs $X and Windows costs $Y, the following equation applies:
$X is less than $X + $Y (eq.1)
So, the school saves money by using Linux, no matter how cheap Windows is.
Did you finally get it this time?
Virg
> Privatize all schools! Get the tax thing out of the way,
> and funding problems disappear! It's called "free market",
> and it works for everything else, doesn't it?
No, it doesn't. There are some thing for which the free market is ideal, and some where it is a very bad fit. Schools are one such area. There are several reasons:
1.) Privatizing schools assumes that everyone can afford to pay for an education. This is an extremely dangerous road to tread, as it holds the very real risk that poorer kids will fall behind scholastically, starting a cycle of "can't get a good job because of lack of education/can't educate the kids properly because it costs too much". This already happens in the public system, and there's evidence in history to support that it just gets worse if there are private schools but no public alternatives.
2.) Privatizing schools completely changes the goal of the school. The idea behind a not-for-profit venture is to maximize services given a certain budget. The idea behind a for-profit venture is to maximize profit. By completely privatizing the system, you run into some of the same problems that you encounter in hospitals, where monetary considerations can affect the quality of care.
3.) Privatizing schools can (but does not always) lead to excessive commercialism, as schools accept funds from corporations in exchange for considerations like advertising or exclusive product contracts (there are many schools that get paid money by distributors, for example, to sell only certain brands of soft drinks or snacks from the vending machines). Although public funds certainly don't eliminate this sort of thing, they do help take the pressure off somewhat.
There are some services where government oversight is necessary (think of what the roads would look like if taxes weren't allocated for maintenance, or consider that the only alternative would be toll booths everywhere to support it). Since quality education is the backbone of any advanced (or advancing) society, it must remain available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay for it.
Virg