A. Someone's ALWAYS got the time. (these are geeks) B. Someone's ALWAYS got the money. (not all the geeks lost all their $ in the dot-bomb implosion.)
In theory it would be possible to "hack-proof" a product in such a manner that a brute-force attack would take longer than any individual or entity's lifetime, or cost more $$$ than any individual or entity's net worth.
Furthermore, even if someone has the time and the money, they may not find the hack job worth that time or money---because a) at that point they can afford to just buy the darn thing instead of stealing it, or b) because once they've got that much $$$ they pursure more expensive (but not necessarily more stimulating) pursuits than hacking.
So you are wrong---in theory. That you may be right in practice is due only to the inability of the relevant designers to accomplish such hack-proofing.
The man who conducted these tests, a regular on the Hydrogen Audio forum, knows darn well that 64kbps is not high fidelity. He wouldn't dare archive his CD collection at that bitrate. But 64kbps is a decent streaming audio rate, first of all; and secondly, it exposes weaknesses in higher-frequency reproduction---weaknesses which, if corrected, benefit higher bit-rate encoding as well.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that the power is put back into the third rail. The article does not, in fact, say that the resistance in the third rail is always too high. Rather, it says that the resistance is too high if there are no trains close by. After all, resistance is proportional to distance.
So basically, the plan will be to distribute these flywheel batteries throughout the subway system so that there is always one close by when a car is generating power through its regenerative braking system.
The author's attempt to simplify the description of the system probably made this hard to see.
If the new scheduler is O(1), it should be faster in all cases, and under no circumstances slow things down.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what asymptotic complexity statements like O(1), O(n), etc. mean.
An O(1) algorithm is not guaranteed to be faster than an O(n) algorithm for all values of n, only for values of n that are "large". (Yes, it's meant to be vague.)
Consider two algorithms that accept an input n bytes long. One takes 20 seconds to run, the other takes 2n seconds to run. The first is O(1), the second is O(n), but the first is slower than the second for n 10.
The publishing industry makes its living off of two things: --The back list --The books that they think will stick around on the back-list as thus justify the investment.
And this is precisely why electronic distribution is going to be so important.
Just like with paper-bound books, plastic-bound music requires a certain predicted popularity level just to justify the cost of publishing. With electronic distribution, that cost is so darn low that just about every title ever digitized could remain on sale in perpituity.
I recently demoed a JVC G150CL front projector (1365x1024 resolution) fed by a D-VHS player playing a Yes concert. The video was in widescreen 1080-line format, so the projector displayed it in the center 768 lines of its display area for moderate loss of resolution.
Despite this handicap, the detail was fantastic---make sure you're not self conscious about your complexion if you ever get shot on high-def video. As long as they're not too aggressive with MPEG2 compression, movies released in this format will truly be spectacular.
And folks, I know it's expensive, but there is one reason you might want to get one of the first models anyway. Right now, D-VHS players have analog component outputs to feed to your favorite high-definition display device. In a couple of years, they may have to remove those outputs and replace them with an encrypted digital output that may not be back-compatible with supposedly "HDTV-ready" sets.
If that happens, those unprotected players they're currently selling are going to be significantly more valuable.
...as soon as you've visited MeetingMaker [meetingmaker.com]'s web site. Real-time scheduling, planning, organising. Scalable, cross-platform, web-enabled.
As its name implies, limited to scheduling only (both people and resources, though). No less a massive pain in the butt to work with, either. But hey, at least it works for what it was designed for.
... and so can the FBI, the SEC, and the Attorney General. Using Exchange should not be an excuse to also repeat Bill's other mistakes;-)
I know you went off-topic just to be funny, but at the same time you're missing the point. The poster was suggesting a way to provide users with the ability to restore emails that they have inadvertently deleted. No matter how you slice it, that means you have to back up pretty much every email for at least a fixed amount of time...
...and any such system is going to be "vulnerable" to this kind of government search. Exchange is not unique in this regard.
You will note that Mr. Jefferson referred to such inalienable rights as endowed by the Creator. That's because in order for rights to truly be inalienable, they must be handed down by an Authority higher than humans themselves.
If humans are the final authority, then there is no such thing as an inalienable right. Instead, the notion of a "right" goes only so far as the governing powers of a given society decide to enforce it.
So take your pick!
Re:That's flat wrong about the GPL!
on
Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: 1
Hey Coward, His point is not that you can't do those kinds of things to GPL'ed work; it's that the GPL relies on the force of copyright law in order to insure that you can do this legally, in perpetuity.
You can't, for example, take a GPL'ed work and incorporate it into a closed-source application, free or proprietary. If it weren't for the legal weight of copyright law, there would be nothing preventing you from doing that.
If a company like HP wanted to preserve its "Way" forever, then it should have never gone public.
The moment it did, it surrendered any right to completely control its destiny---trading it instead for a duty to preserve and enhance shareholder value. At that point, The HP Way survived only to the extent that it didn't conflict with that new, higher-priority goal.
The problem is that the value of a stock is in its growth potential, not in its current value. Therefore the shareholders rightly demand not just that the company is profitable and maintains that, but that it becomes more profitable over time. A private company has no such requirement. If its owners are content with slow growth and rock-solid profit, it has no need to alter its strategy.
Furthermore, even if the HP Way may have provided genuine long-term growth, most shareholders simply aren't that patient. And it's not the company's job dictacte how much "long term" is acceptable; it's the shareholder's job to dictate that to the company. Again, another vote in favor of private status---if the owners are willing to swallow some lean years, it is their prerogative.
The HP Way, therefore, took its first step towards the grave at HP's IPO.
Saying that Mathworks doesn't need to care about the educational segment is like saying NASA should ignore rockets and concentrate exclusively on the space station.
That's not what the poster is saying at all, and you know it. The poster said that Mathworks doesn't care if a couple of university folks want to run their software on a Macintosh.
First of all, the vast majority of Matlab users in university settings still use Unix or Linux systems. This is in part due to inertia, and part due to licensing issues---due to central network-wide installation, it is still more practical to implement carefully controlled site-license software on Unix than it is on a PC or Mac.
Secondly, even if there were a few Mac users in university settings who might like to have Matlab on their machines, what do you think happens when those people graduate and head to industry settings? They use whatever their company makes them use, that's what. And that will either be a PC or a Unix/Linux box, more often than not.
So I'd say Mathworks decision was unfortunate for Mac users but justifiable in the Mac OS 9 days. Now that Mac OS X seems to be changing the landscape it will be interesting to see what develops.
I personally will pay for a Matlab license on Mac OS X if it comes out---it's the one thing that keeps me from ditching my PC for a Mac.
Thanks for the thread, cp99, you have given me a lot to think about. I've seen discussions of hemoglobin/myoglobin before.
Consider the following revised approach to defining IC (from Behe):
"An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway."
Under this definition, a challenge to the notion of IC looks quite a bit like what you have done: propose methods by which a given system can be produced by a series of naturally selected steps. I think the goal of the Darwinist has to be to reduce the number of unselected steps, since he's only got a few million generations of us more advanced animals to draw from...
The problem is, that if someone believes an embryo is a human being worthy of protection, then it's incumbent upon them to protect it, no matter who it belongs to.
I'm sure you don't have a problem if someone intervenes in child abuse case, after all. A parent may have quite a bit of latitude in how to raise a child, but intervention to prevent that parent from injuring or killing that child is entirely justified.
If you believe, then, that embryos deserve the same rights as a child, what else can you do but "force your beliefs" on those who are killing them?
you just know that's what they're going to say because they are opposed to science in general.
Oh for crying out loud, this is the biggest case of exaggeration I've seen on/. in awhile.
Fundamentalists have never been against medical research. You must be confusing them with that Mary Baker Eddy cult. Their objections to embryonic stem cell research come from the belief that life begins at conception, and nothing more. You may find their position objectionable, but it's consistent and contained.
They are going to trumpet this new reserach into stem cell harvesting as proof that there is no need to use embryos for medical study.
Just to follow up on my own comment, that's why the best approach to attacking the IC argument is, in my opinion, to demonstrate that a previously-thought IC system is not IC.
We are both agreeing that IC systems can occur in an evolutionary context, but since natural selection can't come into play until an entire IC system has been constructed, then the probability of it happening drops precipitously. (If natural selection comes into play beforehand, then the system is not IC.)
IC is a sound principle that transcends the evolutionary context, so an evolutionist's best bet is to show that it is irrelevant to it.
I didn't forget natural selection at all. The point of irreducible complexity is that it defines the minimum step that must be taken before natural selection is even an issue.
If you build just a part of an IC system by random chance, then it imparts no advantage to the organism to have it, because it doesn't work yet. Therefore, natural selection is irrelevant until the entire IC system has been randomly produced. (Behe goes further to argue that it presents a disadvantage for a partially-built IC system to exist in an organism, because it will be expending energy to produce it that it could spend somehwere else. I don't find that particularly convincing.)
Behe's theory of irreducible complexity has been completely disproved
No, it hasn't. Perhaps what you're referring to are the attempts, some more successful than others, to challenge Behe's specific examples of irreducibly complex systems.
That's a perfectly valid way to address irreducible complexity. In fact, Behe even admits and encourages that. In that sense, Behe's book is a challenge to evolutionists to get off their butt and start studying biochemistry.
The problem is that Behe only has to be right once, as another poster pointed out. Though I suspect he is right more than once myself.
evolution can explain irreducible complexity as well
Well, no, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. It is fair to say that irreducibly complex systems can result by random chance. However, the claim is that the probability of such occurrences is so staggeringly small that alternatives to neo-Darwinism must be considered as more plausible.
It's kind of like when you first learn about quantum mechanics, and realize that there is a non-zero probability that, if you're lucky, you can get a baseball to tunnel through a brick wall. It's a neat thought, but you're not going to bother trying.
I found Behe's work to be intellectualy honest in this sense: that he accepts that science should not assume supernatural influence if valid naturalistic explanations can be given. By complexity arguments, some biochemical systems are more likely to be explained in terms of naturalistic process than others; and somewhere in the middle is a grey area where nature should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, there are examples whose naturalistic explanations seem so far from probable that they need to be addressed honesty as such. This isn't a "God of the gaps" exercise, it is deference to science.
I'd say that scientists are still far from demonstrating that biochemistry does not exhibit irreducible complexity; and while that does not prove intelligent design, I believe that it does make it a valid rational hypothesis.
Religion cannot be tested by science. After that little dustup with Copernicus, most religions are carefully designed to be untestable.
It's a horrible conspiracy! Thanks to Copernicus, the Church had to head back to the drawing board and rewrite the entire Bible so that it would now be untestable.
Umm, no.
There is plenty that can be tested about every religion. And if the stuff you can test doesn't pan out, there's no sense in believing the larger stuff. In fact, that idea is espoused in the Bible: "Test everything. Hold on to the good." "Now if there is no resurrection... why do we endanger ourselves every hour?" (Sounds like a logical question to me.) I do hope that every supposed scientist has taken their logic---not personal philosophy or notions about morality, but true scientific objectivity---to the spiritual realm to see if there's anything verifiable there.
Unfortunately, just as many people use their religious beliefs to cloud their scientific judgement---such as those who hold fast to a literal 6 24-hour day interpretation of Genesis 1---I would argue that many people use their anti-religious beliefs to color their scientific interpretation as well.
Here's a conspiracy for you: many scientists vehemently opposed and fought the notion of the Big Bang theory precisely of its theological connotations, precisely because of its ability to provide just the tiniest validation to a belief in a transcendent creative force. British cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington said: "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant... I should like to find a genuine loophole." Like many scientists, Eddington's bias was not scientific but philosophical, and it damaged his objectivity.
I'd say that the acceptance of neo-Darwinism as a complete explanation for the origins of life, despite its complete inability to explain the only recently understood complexities of biochemistry, reflects a similar bias. (Consult Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe---a believer in both intelligent design and evolutionary processes---for more information.)
Science and religion are not as easy to separate as people might like to believe.
Who cares? Who cares? Are you kidding me? Of course it matters if it produces results---or more importantly, if we have any real reason to believe that it will.
Vast sums of money are being spent to search for extraterrestrials whose existence we have absolutely no evidence of, short of the rantings of a few conspiracy theorists.
Furthermore, what did you say the objective was again? "...to discover whether we are truly alone in the universe." The problem is that, not only does SETI have an incredibly small probability of verifying that the answer is "no", it has absolutely zero probability of verifying that it is "yes". The deafining silence in space can never be exhaustively serached, and even if it could it would only establish that there is no intelligent life sending information in a manner we can detect using SETI devices.
On the other hand, the same money we now spend on SETI could instead be used for goals which we more readily believe are achievable, and whose benefit upon success is readily understandable. Finding cures for cancer and/or AIDS spring to mind immediately. There's no reason that these kinds of searches shouldn't elicit the same kind of excitement from geeks like us.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 1
"cost of manufacture" and "cost of development" are two different things. You can't just ignore the cost of research, the amortized costs of failed drug trials, and so forth.
I'm not completely against circumventing traditional intellectual property laws in case like this, but if you don't provide a means for drug companies to profit from their research, or at least recoup their costs, then the drugs will never get developed in the first place. And frankly I think that people who make exaggerated statements like "1000% markup" don't seem to appreciate this fact.
So fine, start giving away AZT for free. But since that isn't a cure, and you haven't provided for any drug company to spend the money that must be spent to develop one, don't go whining if those people still die.
I'll grant you that there's an alternative: provide significant sums of money to major drug companies to perform research on such drugs, under the condition that they sell them at, say, only twice the cost of manufacture. But we're talking a truly large percentage of the R&D budgets of the major worldwide drug companies here. I'd be interested to see exactly how much that would be.
Re:Today, the WTO pulled the trigger on another 2.
on
Wipout Essay Results
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What the general public calls "safe sex" is laughable. And thanks to our collective denial instict, the more honest term "safer sex" never caught on---not to mention the even better choices, "safer-but-not-totally-risk-free sex," or "safer-but-still-don't-complain-if-he-doesn't-call -you-afterwards sex".
Slashdot Mirror
A. Someone's ALWAYS got the time. (these are geeks)
B. Someone's ALWAYS got the money. (not all the geeks lost all their $ in the dot-bomb implosion.)
In theory it would be possible to "hack-proof" a product in such a manner that a brute-force attack would take longer than any individual or entity's lifetime, or cost more $$$ than any individual or entity's net worth.
Furthermore, even if someone has the time and the money, they may not find the hack job worth that time or money---because a) at that point they can afford to just buy the darn thing instead of stealing it, or b) because once they've got that much $$$ they pursure more expensive (but not necessarily more stimulating) pursuits than hacking.
So you are wrong---in theory. That you may be right in practice is due only to the inability of the relevant designers to accomplish such hack-proofing.
The man who conducted these tests, a regular on the Hydrogen Audio forum, knows darn well that 64kbps is not high fidelity. He wouldn't dare archive his CD collection at that bitrate. But 64kbps is a decent streaming audio rate, first of all; and secondly, it exposes weaknesses in higher-frequency reproduction---weaknesses which, if corrected, benefit higher bit-rate encoding as well.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that the power is put back into the third rail. The article does not, in fact, say that the resistance in the third rail is always too high. Rather, it says that the resistance is too high if there are no trains close by. After all, resistance is proportional to distance.
So basically, the plan will be to distribute these flywheel batteries throughout the subway system so that there is always one close by when a car is generating power through its regenerative braking system.
The author's attempt to simplify the description of the system probably made this hard to see.
I have a Thinkpad A31p with a 15.1" screen. It's a hefty beast but it's worth it---it completely replaces my desktop, including the monitor.
I don't mind the weight.
One man's brick is another man's feather I guess.
If the new scheduler is O(1), it should be faster in all cases, and under no circumstances slow things down.
This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what asymptotic complexity statements like O(1), O(n), etc. mean.
An O(1) algorithm is not guaranteed to be faster than an O(n) algorithm for all values of n, only for values of n that are "large". (Yes, it's meant to be vague.)
Consider two algorithms that accept an input n bytes long. One takes 20 seconds to run, the other takes 2n seconds to run. The first is O(1), the second is O(n), but the first is slower than the second for n 10.
The publishing industry makes its living off of two things:
--The back list
--The books that they think will stick around on the back-list as thus justify the investment.
And this is precisely why electronic distribution is going to be so important.
Just like with paper-bound books, plastic-bound music requires a certain predicted popularity level just to justify the cost of publishing. With electronic distribution, that cost is so darn low that just about every title ever digitized could remain on sale in perpituity.
it kicks MAJOR booty.
I recently demoed a JVC G150CL front projector (1365x1024 resolution) fed by a D-VHS player playing a Yes concert. The video was in widescreen 1080-line format, so the projector displayed it in the center 768 lines of its display area for moderate loss of resolution.
Despite this handicap, the detail was fantastic---make sure you're not self conscious about your complexion if you ever get shot on high-def video. As long as they're not too aggressive with MPEG2 compression, movies released in this format will truly be spectacular.
And folks, I know it's expensive, but there is one reason you might want to get one of the first models anyway. Right now, D-VHS players have analog component outputs to feed to your favorite high-definition display device. In a couple of years, they may have to remove those outputs and replace them with an encrypted digital output that may not be back-compatible with supposedly "HDTV-ready" sets.
If that happens, those unprotected players they're currently selling are going to be significantly more valuable.
...as soon as you've visited MeetingMaker [meetingmaker.com]'s web site. Real-time scheduling, planning, organising. Scalable, cross-platform, web-enabled.
As its name implies, limited to scheduling only (both people and resources, though). No less a massive pain in the butt to work with, either. But hey, at least it works for what it was designed for.
... and so can the FBI, the SEC, and the Attorney General. Using Exchange should not be an excuse to also repeat Bill's other mistakes ;-)
I know you went off-topic just to be funny, but at the same time you're missing the point. The poster was suggesting a way to provide users with the ability to restore emails that they have inadvertently deleted. No matter how you slice it, that means you have to back up pretty much every email for at least a fixed amount of time...
...and any such system is going to be "vulnerable" to this kind of government search. Exchange is not unique in this regard.
And my friends wonder why i think religion is such a big joke...
Oh, yes, and thanks to Alex Chiu and Zeosync, I've stopped believing in science, too.
You will note that Mr. Jefferson referred to such inalienable rights as endowed by the Creator. That's because in order for rights to truly be inalienable, they must be handed down by an Authority higher than humans themselves.
If humans are the final authority, then there is no such thing as an inalienable right. Instead, the notion of a "right" goes only so far as the governing powers of a given society decide to enforce it.
So take your pick!
Hey Coward,
His point is not that you can't do those kinds of things to GPL'ed work; it's that the GPL relies on the force of copyright law in order to insure that you can do this legally, in perpetuity.
You can't, for example, take a GPL'ed work and incorporate it into a closed-source application, free or proprietary. If it weren't for the legal weight of copyright law, there would be nothing preventing you from doing that.
If a company like HP wanted to preserve its "Way" forever, then it should have never gone public.
The moment it did, it surrendered any right to completely control its destiny---trading it instead for a duty to preserve and enhance shareholder value. At that point, The HP Way survived only to the extent that it didn't conflict with that new, higher-priority goal.
The problem is that the value of a stock is in its growth potential, not in its current value. Therefore the shareholders rightly demand not just that the company is profitable and maintains that, but that it becomes more profitable over time. A private company has no such requirement. If its owners are content with slow growth and rock-solid profit, it has no need to alter its strategy.
Furthermore, even if the HP Way may have provided genuine long-term growth, most shareholders simply aren't that patient. And it's not the company's job dictacte how much "long term" is acceptable; it's the shareholder's job to dictate that to the company. Again, another vote in favor of private status---if the owners are willing to swallow some lean years, it is their prerogative.
The HP Way, therefore, took its first step towards the grave at HP's IPO.
Saying that Mathworks doesn't need to care about the educational segment is like saying NASA should ignore rockets and concentrate exclusively on the space station.
That's not what the poster is saying at all, and you know it. The poster said that Mathworks doesn't care if a couple of university folks want to run their software on a Macintosh.
First of all, the vast majority of Matlab users in university settings still use Unix or Linux systems. This is in part due to inertia, and part due to licensing issues---due to central network-wide installation, it is still more practical to implement carefully controlled site-license software on Unix than it is on a PC or Mac.
Secondly, even if there were a few Mac users in university settings who might like to have Matlab on their machines, what do you think happens when those people graduate and head to industry settings? They use whatever their company makes them use, that's what. And that will either be a PC or a Unix/Linux box, more often than not.
So I'd say Mathworks decision was unfortunate for Mac users but justifiable in the Mac OS 9 days. Now that Mac OS X seems to be changing the landscape it will be interesting to see what develops.
I personally will pay for a Matlab license on Mac OS X if it comes out---it's the one thing that keeps me from ditching my PC for a Mac.
Thanks for the thread, cp99, you have given me a lot to think about. I've seen discussions of hemoglobin/myoglobin before.
Consider the following revised approach to defining IC (from Behe):
"An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway."
Under this definition, a challenge to the notion of IC looks quite a bit like what you have done: propose methods by which a given system can be produced by a series of naturally selected steps. I think the goal of the Darwinist has to be to reduce the number of unselected steps, since he's only got a few million generations of us more advanced animals to draw from...
Cloning theoretically makes men unnecessary.
Once human cloning has been perfected, and once women figure out how to change the oil in their own cars (*), men are toast.
(*) Not that all men do; but if you look at the gender breakdown of your average Jiffy Lube you'll know what I mean.
The problem is, that if someone believes an embryo is a human being worthy of protection, then it's incumbent upon them to protect it, no matter who it belongs to.
I'm sure you don't have a problem if someone intervenes in child abuse case, after all. A parent may have quite a bit of latitude in how to raise a child, but intervention to prevent that parent from injuring or killing that child is entirely justified.
If you believe, then, that embryos deserve the same rights as a child, what else can you do but "force your beliefs" on those who are killing them?
you just know that's what they're going to say because they are opposed to science in general.
/. in awhile.
Oh for crying out loud, this is the biggest case of exaggeration I've seen on
Fundamentalists have never been against medical research. You must be confusing them with that Mary Baker Eddy cult. Their objections to embryonic stem cell research come from the belief that life begins at conception, and nothing more. You may find their position objectionable, but it's consistent and contained.
They are going to trumpet this new reserach into stem cell harvesting as proof that there is no need to use embryos for medical study.
Just to follow up on my own comment, that's why the best approach to attacking the IC argument is, in my opinion, to demonstrate that a previously-thought IC system is not IC.
We are both agreeing that IC systems can occur in an evolutionary context, but since natural selection can't come into play until an entire IC system has been constructed, then the probability of it happening drops precipitously. (If natural selection comes into play beforehand, then the system is not IC.)
IC is a sound principle that transcends the evolutionary context, so an evolutionist's best bet is to show that it is irrelevant to it.
I didn't forget natural selection at all. The point of irreducible complexity is that it defines the minimum step that must be taken before natural selection is even an issue.
If you build just a part of an IC system by random chance, then it imparts no advantage to the organism to have it, because it doesn't work yet. Therefore, natural selection is irrelevant until the entire IC system has been randomly produced. (Behe goes further to argue that it presents a disadvantage for a partially-built IC system to exist in an organism, because it will be expending energy to produce it that it could spend somehwere else. I don't find that particularly convincing.)
As for your sources, I'll check them out, thanks!
Behe's theory of irreducible complexity has been completely disproved
No, it hasn't. Perhaps what you're referring to are the attempts, some more successful than others, to challenge Behe's specific examples of irreducibly complex systems.
That's a perfectly valid way to address irreducible complexity. In fact, Behe even admits and encourages that. In that sense, Behe's book is a challenge to evolutionists to get off their butt and start studying biochemistry.
The problem is that Behe only has to be right once, as another poster pointed out. Though I suspect he is right more than once myself.
evolution can explain irreducible complexity as well
Well, no, I don't think that's a fair way to put it. It is fair to say that irreducibly complex systems can result by random chance. However, the claim is that the probability of such occurrences is so staggeringly small that alternatives to neo-Darwinism must be considered as more plausible.
It's kind of like when you first learn about quantum mechanics, and realize that there is a non-zero probability that, if you're lucky, you can get a baseball to tunnel through a brick wall. It's a neat thought, but you're not going to bother trying.
I found Behe's work to be intellectualy honest in this sense: that he accepts that science should not assume supernatural influence if valid naturalistic explanations can be given. By complexity arguments, some biochemical systems are more likely to be explained in terms of naturalistic process than others; and somewhere in the middle is a grey area where nature should be given the benefit of the doubt. However, there are examples whose naturalistic explanations seem so far from probable that they need to be addressed honesty as such. This isn't a "God of the gaps" exercise, it is deference to science.
I'd say that scientists are still far from demonstrating that biochemistry does not exhibit irreducible complexity; and while that does not prove intelligent design, I believe that it does make it a valid rational hypothesis.
Religion cannot be tested by science. After that little dustup with Copernicus, most religions are carefully designed to be untestable.
It's a horrible conspiracy! Thanks to Copernicus, the Church had to head back to the drawing board and rewrite the entire Bible so that it would now be untestable.
Umm, no.
There is plenty that can be tested about every religion. And if the stuff you can test doesn't pan out, there's no sense in believing the larger stuff. In fact, that idea is espoused in the Bible: "Test everything. Hold on to the good." "Now if there is no resurrection... why do we endanger ourselves every hour?" (Sounds like a logical question to me.) I do hope that every supposed scientist has taken their logic---not personal philosophy or notions about morality, but true scientific objectivity---to the spiritual realm to see if there's anything verifiable there.
Unfortunately, just as many people use their religious beliefs to cloud their scientific judgement---such as those who hold fast to a literal 6 24-hour day interpretation of Genesis 1---I would argue that many people use their anti-religious beliefs to color their scientific interpretation as well.
Here's a conspiracy for you: many scientists vehemently opposed and fought the notion of the Big Bang theory precisely of its theological connotations, precisely because of its ability to provide just the tiniest validation to a belief in a transcendent creative force. British cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington said: "Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant... I should like to find a genuine loophole." Like many scientists, Eddington's bias was not scientific but philosophical, and it damaged his objectivity.
I'd say that the acceptance of neo-Darwinism as a complete explanation for the origins of life, despite its complete inability to explain the only recently understood complexities of biochemistry, reflects a similar bias. (Consult Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe---a believer in both intelligent design and evolutionary processes---for more information.)
Science and religion are not as easy to separate as people might like to believe.
Who cares? Who cares? Are you kidding me? Of course it matters if it produces results---or more importantly, if we have any real reason to believe that it will.
Vast sums of money are being spent to search for extraterrestrials whose existence we have absolutely no evidence of, short of the rantings of a few conspiracy theorists.
Furthermore, what did you say the objective was again? "...to discover whether we are truly alone in the universe." The problem is that, not only does SETI have an incredibly small probability of verifying that the answer is "no", it has absolutely zero probability of verifying that it is "yes". The deafining silence in space can never be exhaustively serached, and even if it could it would only establish that there is no intelligent life sending information in a manner we can detect using SETI devices.
On the other hand, the same money we now spend on SETI could instead be used for goals which we more readily believe are achievable, and whose benefit upon success is readily understandable. Finding cures for cancer and/or AIDS spring to mind immediately. There's no reason that these kinds of searches shouldn't elicit the same kind of excitement from geeks like us.
"cost of manufacture" and "cost of development" are two different things. You can't just ignore the cost of research, the amortized costs of failed drug trials, and so forth.
I'm not completely against circumventing traditional intellectual property laws in case like this, but if you don't provide a means for drug companies to profit from their research, or at least recoup their costs, then the drugs will never get developed in the first place. And frankly I think that people who make exaggerated statements like "1000% markup" don't seem to appreciate this fact.
So fine, start giving away AZT for free. But since that isn't a cure, and you haven't provided for any drug company to spend the money that must be spent to develop one, don't go whining if those people still die.
I'll grant you that there's an alternative: provide significant sums of money to major drug companies to perform research on such drugs, under the condition that they sell them at, say, only twice the cost of manufacture. But we're talking a truly large percentage of the R&D budgets of the major worldwide drug companies here. I'd be interested to see exactly how much that would be.
What the general public calls "safe sex" is laughable. And thanks to our collective denial instict, the more honest term "safer sex" never caught on---not to mention the even better choices, "safer-but-not-totally-risk-free sex," or "safer-but-still-don't-complain-if-he-doesn't-call -you-afterwards sex".