The government may indeed do alot that we don't know about, and shouldn't. Read "The Dead Past" by Isaac Asimov?
That was a good story, but I thought they were much better off at the end of the story than the beginning. For a good counterpoint to that story, you should read "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
However, if you are overdue the record will stay on your account until the fine is paid. If you check a book out and never return it, the record will stay on your account forever.
That's what I like about my library, they don't fine for overdue, only for lost, and the fine goes away once you return the book. However, recently they have started sending fines to collections agencies if you have a lost book out for too long without paying for it.
The only saving grace was that the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was re-united under a free-er (compared to the east) government.
Maybe with some luck the US people will put a stop to this thing.
The Berlin Wall was the product of the *Soviets*, not Hitler. It wasn't even built until the late 60's.
But every time we try to replace a backward-looking theocracy with one promoting freedom, capitalism, and high technology, someone (not you - you didn't raise this point, but many who oppose the War on Terror have) comes back with the "Big Lie" propaganda technique that smears this effort as cultural imperialism.
The promoting freedom bit is the propaganda, not the cultural imperialism. If you look at America's track record for the governments we set up, you will see that we have absolutely no interest in promoting freedom, but rather only have interest in promoting stability so we can have our cheap oil. We have supported some of the worst civil rights violating governments in the Middle East, and its coming back to bite us in the ass.
Who was it that put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan? We did, in order to curb the threat of Soviet invasion. Who supplied Iraq with arms even though we knew that they had used chemical weapons on their own civilians? We did, in an attempt to curb the threat of Iran. Who still supports the corrupt Saudi Arabian dictatorship? We do, so we can have a convient place to pick up oil.
Do you know which Middle Eastern country had the only spontaneous memorials for the Americans who died on September 11? Iran. The reason is that even though Iran blames us for a lot of things, they don't blame us for their government like all the other countries in that area.
Lets face it. We suck at deposing dictators, we suck at setting up governments, and we need to stop thinking that we can manipulate global politics for our own gain.
Check this out for information on the global flood [apologeticspress.org]. It was real.
That link didn't address a single one of my questions. Those three questions, among many others, stand as incontrovertible evidence against the existence of a global flood. When you can explain to me how we can find many sedimentary layers in places when a flood of that magnitude would have destroyed them, or how any sea life could survive the silt a global flood would have caused, get back to me.
I don't understand you reference to Genesis 30. This is the story of Jacob (Israel), his wifes, and 12 sons. Yes Jacob had 4 wifes (well two wifes and two handmaidens as wifes) and yes the culture of the day allowed a wife to claim the children of her handmaiden as her children, if they were fathered by her husband. This in no way claims that they are genetically related to the wife, she just claimed them as the fathers genetics were of the most important of the time.
Read verses 31-43. You will find the ridiculous assertion that placing striped branches in the water troughs that sheep drink out of while they are mating will make them produce striped offspring.
Scroll down to section four where it talks about Kolmogorov complexity.
Then, going back to your first premise that they produced these random numbers using this system, how did they know?
Just because a generalized test is impossible doesn't mean a specific one is. All you have to do is limit the number bitlength and it's easy to make a randomness tester.
My Bible doesn't mention geocentric theory, that was a scientific theory.
It was a theory supported by the church through force.
The global flood happened whether you believe it or not.
No, it very obviously did not happen, as the fact that we are not currently covered with water, or the fact that there is still life in the sea, or the fact that we see sedimentary layers clearly shows. I don't care how many stories you hear, these observations make a global flood impossible.
We have seen adaptation and try to make it look like evolution.
Adaptation *IS* evolution. Evolution is defined as a change in the allele frequency of a popluation. This has been observed many times. For example, the emergence of penecillin-resistant strains of bacteria is an example of evolution. The fact that the average human height has gained almost a foot in the past hundred years is another example.
As for the "finger in your ears" part, the same could be said of scientist. If they uncover something that proves something in the Bible, they immediate start looking for ways to disprove that it really happened or attempt to explain it away in some way.
Yes, that is their job! I'm sorry that not everyone will just automatically believe everything you tell them no matter how ludicrous it is. Not everyone is happy being sheep, although you certainly seem to be.
The prophesies of the Old Testament concerning the coming of Christ should be enough to prove scientifically that the Bible is correct.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but every single prophecy made in the old testament about the new testament was either a mistranslation (as in the case of the prophecy of a virgin birth), taken out of context, or fulfilled with deliberate foreknowledge. If you want a good treatment of it, read Thomas Paine's "The Age Of Reason".
And if you really want to get down to it the Bible proves many scientific things itself.
Right. Things like rabbits chew their cud and pi = 3. Quite amazing.
And if you really want to get down to it the Bible proves many scientific things itself. Look at Job 36:27-28 and learn about rain. Now there is question as to when this book was actually written, but it was written before 1000 B.C. and it tells how rain comes from water vapour.
That was common knowledge long before 1000 B.C. The egyptians and the greeks knew the basics of the water cycle.
If you look into "religions" from around the world, a large number of them have stories of a great flood. Couldn't it be that this is all the same great flood, and that the stories have come down from the 8 people that survived that flood (see the book of Genesis in the Bible), as they would be the starting point of all mankind?
If you actually look into it, only religions that originated near the fertile crescent in the middle east have flood myths. The most logical explanation for the flood myth is the flooding of the plain that is now the Black Sea. Approx. 10,000 years ago the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporous Strait and flooded the Black Sea. There is some evidence that prehistoric people were living on that plain when it happened. From then on, the story was passed down through oral tradition until it was incorporated into the religions of the area. This would also explain how religions that originated earlier than Judaism have flood myths.
This is a good writeup, but I'm not sure I understand the logic behind the backhanded comment directed at Creationists.
The reason for the comment is that although its rude, its funny and true.
Aren't we the ones who prefer Linux to Windows because it doesn't break as often? As rational and intelligent people, many of us professionals and experts in industry and academia, we pride ourselves on choosing the tool that gives us the best results.
A much better analogy would be Linux is like science because anyone can develop a bugfix, and so is more likely to fix bugs faster.
Surely, while the discovery of a species of rabbit that no longer walks this Earth may surprise the evolutionists and Science-worshippers, it's plain to see that it fits right in to the Creationist worldview. Extinct species don't have to be our "ancestors." They were just creations that didn't make it through the flood.
First of all, it is *NOT* a species of rabbit!! It is a species of dinosaur that happens to look like a rabbit in one small way. It has buck teeth. Secondly, there are plenty of extinct species of rabbit, but they are all ancestors or relatives in some way. Thirdly, the idea of a global flood is ludicrous for several reasons. One, where did all the water go? Enough water to raise sea level to the summit of Mt. Ararat doesn't just disappear. Two, why is there still sea life? A flood of that magnitude would have stired up enough silt and sediment to kill every living creature in the sea. Three, why do we see layers of sediment in things like the grand canyon? If there was a flood like that, we should see one single huge layer of sediment. There are tons more flaws with a great flood hypothesis, I'm sure you can find them online.
So once again, we see Scientists scurrying about, trying to revise their fragile theories so that new information doesn't destroy them. Remember the great Scientist Aristotle? How about Newton? Those guys were the best Science had to offer, and now we know how wrong they were.
Yes, that is how science works. Everytime that an inconsistency is pointed out, the ideas are revised so they are more correct. We know that not every single one of our ideas are completely correct, but we are pretty close and getting closer all the time.
Religion on the other hand just ignores all the new evidence and just says its not true, unless you're Catholic, in which case it only says its not true until 300 years after its been accepted by the general populous of scientists.
Meanwhile, the Bible has been through, count 'em, one revision in the same time period. New discoveries poke holes in Scientific theories, while supporting Biblical ones, almost without fail.
Without fail?! LOLOL, that is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. You seem to have conviently forgotten about the geocentric theory, the global flood (see my reasons above for discounting it), evolution (we *have* observed evolution many many times, the only question is how it happens), and the myriad armageddon predictions. The only reason you think no evidence contrary to the bible exists is because you stick your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" whenever it pops up.
If you really want to find some good evidence for creationism or any other biblical hypothesis, find something those hypotheses actually predict, and then do an experiment to test the prediction. Fitting the data to your theory after the fact is dishonest research.
The problem with that is any test that can determine wether or not a number of n bits is random must be longer than n bits. So you haven't really compressed anything, just moved the size to the decoder.
It qualifies as an algorithm as it's a simple piece of hardware that could be put on a card.
I don't think you know what an algorithm is. This fails the first qualification of being an algorithm, namely that it is computable on all universal turing machines.
If your random number generator is incapable of generating a string of 256 0's in a row, there is something wrong with it.
That is true for the first kind of random number generator that I talked about, not for the second kind.
Maybe I can describe what I'm talking about better. There are two different types of random number generators. One kind is a generator that randomly produces numbers, which is what you are talking about. The other kind produces *random numbers*, which is something completely different. It is the difference between the generator being random, or the number itself being random no matter how it is generated.
Randomly produced numbers are equidistributed along the range of the generator, usually from 0 to 1. Random numbers are numbers that are impossible to compress. A number is random no matter what the next result is, but is only randomly produced with respect to the numbers produced before and after it with the same algorithm.
There are two different meanings of the phrase "random number". One is the coin-flipping variety, where any number within the range is possible, but is only as likely as every other number in the range. AFAICT, this isn't the kind of random numbers the article is talking about.
The other kind of random number is a number that is entirely entropy. In other words, an uncompressible number. This type of number is extremely hard to generate, and by definition, cannot be generated by an algorithm shorter than the number because this would be a form of compression.
Really? Office v.X is one of the easier things to find in the Mac scene. Where are you looking? All I had to do was a couple searches on www.tracker-tracker.com to find a hotline server I could trade something to for it.
Except that "seperation of church and state" was originally intended to protect "the church" (whomever it may be) from "the state".
Far from it. It was intended to prevent the development of theocracys, which is what the majority of the settlers in the colonies were escaping. So yes, it was intended to protect the state from the church, which in the process protects the other churches from the state.
Re:Why is the American economy not doing better?
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Politicizing Science
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Hmm, isn't it strange how when there are administrations that are friendly to corporations in power, the economy goes into a slump, then after a while, the administration either starts, or escalates a war to get us out of it? Look at the pattern. Look at GHW Bush, look at Reagan, look at Nixon, etc. The fact is that being friendly to corporations isn't good for the economy because it keeps the money circulating in smaller circles and not letting it get out to the general public.
Re:Gov is owned by Corporate America so...its WRON
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Politicizing Science
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One thousand votes are useless when the only people who get onto the ballot are owned by the corporations due to the amount of money they got for their campaigns. Either way you vote, you are still putting the people with money into power.
Re:Gov is owned by Corporate America so...its WRON
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Politicizing Science
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Capitalism is an *economic system*, not a political one. You can be capitalist and still have any political system in place.
You actually have that backwards. It is an aristocracy (rule by the aristocrats) that is the government of the few for their own good, usually the rich, but in older countries can include the "noble", or relatives and friends of the royal.
An oligarchy is the government of a few chosen for their virtue, usually based on their age. Oligarchys have been very rare in Western governments, but were more common in Native American tribes, where it was usually implemented as rule by a council of elders.
The "democracy" you speak of is in fact a representative democracy, which in practice usually develops into a republic. The difference between a representative democracy and a republic is that in a representative democracy, the elected officials are supposed to have opinions that are representative of the majority of the citizens that official represents. In a republic, all that matters is popularity, and popularity among the upper class being more important (but not all important) than the middle and lower classes. There is no true nobility in a republic because the influence of the lower classes still exists, although there may be a minority slave class that has no influence.
The difference between a republic and a aristocracy (which is the comparison you were trying to make between an oligarchy and a democracy) is that in a republic there is that gradient of influence, and the majority of people have at least some, but not necessarily an equal, say in the government of the country. In an aristocracy, the majority of the people have no say in the government.
Let's see, how are we addressing this issue this week? Isn't this the way that we *want* piracy to be addressed? By going after the *pirates* instead of the *technology?
Yes, this is the way we want piracy to be addressed, but its being addressed by the *wrong people*. It is not USC's responsibility to stop illegal activities over their lines any more than it is AT&T's responsibility to stop fraud over the phone lines, unless a warrant is involved. It is law enforcement's responsibility to stop activities of this sort. Imagine your local phone company started tapping your lines for no reason and overheard you talking about how fast you just went in your car and sent a police officer to go give you a ticket? This is exactly what's going on at USC. If they are served a warrant, then by all means, monitor the network, but only if they are served a warrant.
But unfortunately Keanu is a lousy actor IMO -- he did okay in Matrix, but he stunk in just about everything else (his "performance" in Much Ado About Nothing was embarrassing).
Oh come on, what about Bill & Ted or Johnny Mnemonic?:)
Of the sites that you posted that actually had a definition, they all had the same one, namely an orbit is the path an object takes around a star, planet, or moon. The definition says nothing about being unpowered.
Slashdot Mirror
That was a good story, but I thought they were much better off at the end of the story than the beginning. For a good counterpoint to that story, you should read "The Light of Other Days" by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
That's what I like about my library, they don't fine for overdue, only for lost, and the fine goes away once you return the book. However, recently they have started sending fines to collections agencies if you have a lost book out for too long without paying for it.
The only saving grace was that the Berlin Wall fell and Germany was re-united under a free-er (compared to the east) government. Maybe with some luck the US people will put a stop to this thing.
The Berlin Wall was the product of the *Soviets*, not Hitler. It wasn't even built until the late 60's.
The promoting freedom bit is the propaganda, not the cultural imperialism. If you look at America's track record for the governments we set up, you will see that we have absolutely no interest in promoting freedom, but rather only have interest in promoting stability so we can have our cheap oil. We have supported some of the worst civil rights violating governments in the Middle East, and its coming back to bite us in the ass.
Who was it that put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan? We did, in order to curb the threat of Soviet invasion. Who supplied Iraq with arms even though we knew that they had used chemical weapons on their own civilians? We did, in an attempt to curb the threat of Iran. Who still supports the corrupt Saudi Arabian dictatorship? We do, so we can have a convient place to pick up oil.
Do you know which Middle Eastern country had the only spontaneous memorials for the Americans who died on September 11? Iran. The reason is that even though Iran blames us for a lot of things, they don't blame us for their government like all the other countries in that area.
Lets face it. We suck at deposing dictators, we suck at setting up governments, and we need to stop thinking that we can manipulate global politics for our own gain.
That link didn't address a single one of my questions. Those three questions, among many others, stand as incontrovertible evidence against the existence of a global flood. When you can explain to me how we can find many sedimentary layers in places when a flood of that magnitude would have destroyed them, or how any sea life could survive the silt a global flood would have caused, get back to me.
Read verses 31-43. You will find the ridiculous assertion that placing striped branches in the water troughs that sheep drink out of while they are mating will make them produce striped offspring.
http://db.uwaterloo.ca/~alopez-o/comp-faq/faq.html
Scroll down to section four where it talks about Kolmogorov complexity.
Then, going back to your first premise that they produced these random numbers using this system, how did they know?
Just because a generalized test is impossible doesn't mean a specific one is. All you have to do is limit the number bitlength and it's easy to make a randomness tester.
It was a theory supported by the church through force.
The global flood happened whether you believe it or not.
No, it very obviously did not happen, as the fact that we are not currently covered with water, or the fact that there is still life in the sea, or the fact that we see sedimentary layers clearly shows. I don't care how many stories you hear, these observations make a global flood impossible.
We have seen adaptation and try to make it look like evolution.
Adaptation *IS* evolution. Evolution is defined as a change in the allele frequency of a popluation. This has been observed many times. For example, the emergence of penecillin-resistant strains of bacteria is an example of evolution. The fact that the average human height has gained almost a foot in the past hundred years is another example.
As for the "finger in your ears" part, the same could be said of scientist. If they uncover something that proves something in the Bible, they immediate start looking for ways to disprove that it really happened or attempt to explain it away in some way.
Yes, that is their job! I'm sorry that not everyone will just automatically believe everything you tell them no matter how ludicrous it is. Not everyone is happy being sheep, although you certainly seem to be.
The prophesies of the Old Testament concerning the coming of Christ should be enough to prove scientifically that the Bible is correct.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but every single prophecy made in the old testament about the new testament was either a mistranslation (as in the case of the prophecy of a virgin birth), taken out of context, or fulfilled with deliberate foreknowledge. If you want a good treatment of it, read Thomas Paine's "The Age Of Reason".
And if you really want to get down to it the Bible proves many scientific things itself.
Right. Things like rabbits chew their cud and pi = 3. Quite amazing.
And if you really want to get down to it the Bible proves many scientific things itself. Look at Job 36:27-28 and learn about rain. Now there is question as to when this book was actually written, but it was written before 1000 B.C. and it tells how rain comes from water vapour.
That was common knowledge long before 1000 B.C. The egyptians and the greeks knew the basics of the water cycle.
What? Carbon-14 decays at the same rate no matter what enviromental conditions it is in. It will *always* have the same half life.
If you actually look into it, only religions that originated near the fertile crescent in the middle east have flood myths. The most logical explanation for the flood myth is the flooding of the plain that is now the Black Sea. Approx. 10,000 years ago the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporous Strait and flooded the Black Sea. There is some evidence that prehistoric people were living on that plain when it happened. From then on, the story was passed down through oral tradition until it was incorporated into the religions of the area. This would also explain how religions that originated earlier than Judaism have flood myths.
The reason for the comment is that although its rude, its funny and true.
Aren't we the ones who prefer Linux to Windows because it doesn't break as often? As rational and intelligent people, many of us professionals and experts in industry and academia, we pride ourselves on choosing the tool that gives us the best results.
A much better analogy would be Linux is like science because anyone can develop a bugfix, and so is more likely to fix bugs faster.
Surely, while the discovery of a species of rabbit that no longer walks this Earth may surprise the evolutionists and Science-worshippers, it's plain to see that it fits right in to the Creationist worldview. Extinct species don't have to be our "ancestors." They were just creations that didn't make it through the flood.
First of all, it is *NOT* a species of rabbit!! It is a species of dinosaur that happens to look like a rabbit in one small way. It has buck teeth. Secondly, there are plenty of extinct species of rabbit, but they are all ancestors or relatives in some way. Thirdly, the idea of a global flood is ludicrous for several reasons. One, where did all the water go? Enough water to raise sea level to the summit of Mt. Ararat doesn't just disappear. Two, why is there still sea life? A flood of that magnitude would have stired up enough silt and sediment to kill every living creature in the sea. Three, why do we see layers of sediment in things like the grand canyon? If there was a flood like that, we should see one single huge layer of sediment. There are tons more flaws with a great flood hypothesis, I'm sure you can find them online.
So once again, we see Scientists scurrying about, trying to revise their fragile theories so that new information doesn't destroy them. Remember the great Scientist Aristotle? How about Newton? Those guys were the best Science had to offer, and now we know how wrong they were.
Yes, that is how science works. Everytime that an inconsistency is pointed out, the ideas are revised so they are more correct. We know that not every single one of our ideas are completely correct, but we are pretty close and getting closer all the time.
Religion on the other hand just ignores all the new evidence and just says its not true, unless you're Catholic, in which case it only says its not true until 300 years after its been accepted by the general populous of scientists.
Meanwhile, the Bible has been through, count 'em, one revision in the same time period. New discoveries poke holes in Scientific theories, while supporting Biblical ones, almost without fail.
Without fail?! LOLOL, that is the funniest thing I've read in a long time. You seem to have conviently forgotten about the geocentric theory, the global flood (see my reasons above for discounting it), evolution (we *have* observed evolution many many times, the only question is how it happens), and the myriad armageddon predictions. The only reason you think no evidence contrary to the bible exists is because you stick your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" whenever it pops up.
If you really want to find some good evidence for creationism or any other biblical hypothesis, find something those hypotheses actually predict, and then do an experiment to test the prediction. Fitting the data to your theory after the fact is dishonest research.
The problem with that is any test that can determine wether or not a number of n bits is random must be longer than n bits. So you haven't really compressed anything, just moved the size to the decoder.
I don't think you know what an algorithm is. This fails the first qualification of being an algorithm, namely that it is computable on all universal turing machines.
That is true for the first kind of random number generator that I talked about, not for the second kind.
Maybe I can describe what I'm talking about better. There are two different types of random number generators. One kind is a generator that randomly produces numbers, which is what you are talking about. The other kind produces *random numbers*, which is something completely different. It is the difference between the generator being random, or the number itself being random no matter how it is generated.
Randomly produced numbers are equidistributed along the range of the generator, usually from 0 to 1. Random numbers are numbers that are impossible to compress. A number is random no matter what the next result is, but is only randomly produced with respect to the numbers produced before and after it with the same algorithm.
The other kind of random number is a number that is entirely entropy. In other words, an uncompressible number. This type of number is extremely hard to generate, and by definition, cannot be generated by an algorithm shorter than the number because this would be a form of compression.
Really? Office v.X is one of the easier things to find in the Mac scene. Where are you looking? All I had to do was a couple searches on www.tracker-tracker.com to find a hotline server I could trade something to for it.
Far from it. It was intended to prevent the development of theocracys, which is what the majority of the settlers in the colonies were escaping. So yes, it was intended to protect the state from the church, which in the process protects the other churches from the state.
Hmm, isn't it strange how when there are administrations that are friendly to corporations in power, the economy goes into a slump, then after a while, the administration either starts, or escalates a war to get us out of it? Look at the pattern. Look at GHW Bush, look at Reagan, look at Nixon, etc. The fact is that being friendly to corporations isn't good for the economy because it keeps the money circulating in smaller circles and not letting it get out to the general public.
One thousand votes are useless when the only people who get onto the ballot are owned by the corporations due to the amount of money they got for their campaigns. Either way you vote, you are still putting the people with money into power.
Capitalism is an *economic system*, not a political one. You can be capitalist and still have any political system in place.
An oligarchy is the government of a few chosen for their virtue, usually based on their age. Oligarchys have been very rare in Western governments, but were more common in Native American tribes, where it was usually implemented as rule by a council of elders.
The "democracy" you speak of is in fact a representative democracy, which in practice usually develops into a republic. The difference between a representative democracy and a republic is that in a representative democracy, the elected officials are supposed to have opinions that are representative of the majority of the citizens that official represents. In a republic, all that matters is popularity, and popularity among the upper class being more important (but not all important) than the middle and lower classes. There is no true nobility in a republic because the influence of the lower classes still exists, although there may be a minority slave class that has no influence.
The difference between a republic and a aristocracy (which is the comparison you were trying to make between an oligarchy and a democracy) is that in a republic there is that gradient of influence, and the majority of people have at least some, but not necessarily an equal, say in the government of the country. In an aristocracy, the majority of the people have no say in the government.
Yes, this is the way we want piracy to be addressed, but its being addressed by the *wrong people*. It is not USC's responsibility to stop illegal activities over their lines any more than it is AT&T's responsibility to stop fraud over the phone lines, unless a warrant is involved. It is law enforcement's responsibility to stop activities of this sort. Imagine your local phone company started tapping your lines for no reason and overheard you talking about how fast you just went in your car and sent a police officer to go give you a ticket? This is exactly what's going on at USC. If they are served a warrant, then by all means, monitor the network, but only if they are served a warrant.
Oh come on, what about Bill & Ted or Johnny Mnemonic? :)
He put just the title of the whole series because he wasn't sure he was going to be able to do the rest of the series.
Of the sites that you posted that actually had a definition, they all had the same one, namely an orbit is the path an object takes around a star, planet, or moon. The definition says nothing about being unpowered.