I did read it. What, you believe everything you read just because it sounds "scientific" and has pages and pages of "data"? I certainly don't, or I would have fallen for that whole "Cold Fusion" crap years ago.
I think the authors took an obvious phenomenon -- that LEDs flashing for every bit transmitted could be read by some device -- then exaggerated the danger of such an attack to get some publicity for their paper.
Sure, flashing LEDs can be read, and in some bizarre equipment configurations, you could actually read the data over this method. Is this a danger to anyone's data? No, it's a toy, and not a problem -- aka "bullshit".
This is crap. I worked for a router/hub manufacturer, and those guys don't flash the LED every time a bit passes by. They usually flash it every so often, if a packet has gone by. Note the word "packet". There's no conceivable reason why you'd want to waste your very valuable embedded processor time breaking down packets into bytes and bits to make the LED flash more accurately.
What do you learn by even seeing a flash every time a packet goes by?
I'd really doubt that any HW manufacturer is stupid enough to flash an LED every time a bit passes.
Then, you also need to be able to consider the response characteristics of LEDs. Most IR transmissions systems are decidedly limited in the bandwidth that they can pump through, and that's in a system dedicated to pumping it through. I'd highly doubt that the lower-quality LEDs used for displaying packet movement would be capable of keeping up with your average 100Mbps router.
This thing must be an early April Fool's joke.
You can now take the little aluminum hat off your hub.
(not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view)
Sheesh... hardly. I lived in India for a few months working in Hyderabad, so I can tell you: That country is a complete hole. While there, I traveled from New Delhi to Bombay to Goa, and everywhere I went, it was the same: abject povery.
Hell, while there, we lived in a nice house in a decent neighborhood, but we still had a couple of grass shacks in the lot right next door to us. Garbage was everywhere, little kids were running around naked and hungry through the piles of garbage (often burning).
When you breathe in the air, you count yourself lucky if you only inhale a cloud of diesel fumes. More often than not, you have to breathe old piss and sewage fumes. Where does that come from? Well let me tell you, my friends -- when the average person living in an Indian city needs to relieve himself, he just whips it out and pisses on the side of the nearest building. Playing "Dodge the Piss Puddle" is no fun while you're walking down the sidewalk.
The reason why everything is so crappy can be summed up in one word: "corruption". Even most Indian friends that I know agree that it's a huge problem, although when they talk about it, it's always some government agency that they blame. Little do they realize that corruption pervades their entire society -- from the Prime Minister down to the little guy on the street. Everywhere you go, you have to be ready to pay bribes or grease someone's palm. You *always* ALWAYS have to count your change when you buy something, or you'll get ripped off. India's only hope to become the super power that they so desperately want to be is to undertake a massive cultural ethical shift. If Indians had the ethics of the Japanese, they'd be unstoppable as a world economic power... but they don't, so they won't ever be.
Spending that time in India was the greatest learning experience in my life. Every time I think about it (like now), I truly appreciate what we have in this country.
You could try to make the same analogy between books and television -- but as you can tell, books are still fairly popular.
Text based isn't better than graphics.
The original poster didn't say that they were. He just said that he thought that there was a still a decent market for them, and I think that he's probably right.
That's one way to look at it... a shitty way, but one way.
Alternatively, why not look at it like a sporting contest, such as tennis. When you go out to play tennis (or raquetball, or whatever) with someone, is your goal to bend the rules and win at all costs? Or is the goal to have fun competing within the mutually agreed upon ruleset?
Admittedly, Blu-ray isn't on the market yet, but the only real technological step being taken is the use of a higher-frequency laser. The rest of the technology is built upon proven DVD reader/burner techniques.
FMD is still total vapor. Those guys have been hyping that vapor for over two years now, but they still have nothing two show or sell. I smell a rat. I think that they've hit some technical hurdles that will keep them from producing anything.
Re:Actually, the problem is still the apps.
on
Cringely: OS X on Intel
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Speaking as a long-time Macintosh software developer, I literally drool at the possibility of selling my apps to an intel-sized audience with a simple recompile. Apple uses gcc, so setting a compile switch to generate the right binary will work without any hassles. BeOS had a similar PowePC to Intel transition, and building either binary couldn't have been easier. Well, okay, you had to install some extra libraries to build, but Apple would sort that out. Oh, and endian issues on the BeOS were rarely a problem (htonl() and its friends work quite nicely).
Trust me. Standard application developers won't be worried about shipping two binaries if it means doubling (tripling, quadrupling?) the market for their products.
Seems that politicians still don't have a clue, despite indications that video games don't cause violence.
Well, that's not really even what the GameSpot article says, and can you guess the slant that the GameSpot article takes on the original Surgeon General's report?
The Surgeon General's report states that violent video games can be a factor, but is not a sole motivator for violent behavior.
If it's a factor, then further studies should be done to determine how much of a factor it is. Put some numbers on it.
I certainly don't have reservations about preventing the very young from having too-easy access to harmful things. I'm a big freedoms-type Libertarian, but young people often don't have the maturity to be able to handle a full set of freedoms. It's why we restrict driving, voting, and other rights that we grant freely to adults. It's also the reason why minors' criminal records are sealed and they're given special sentencing considerations when they commit crimes.
repeating those things to each other, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
Isn't it curious that those who study ancient writings outside of Biblical scholars never attribute any super ability to the people of those times wrt their retention of facts? Only Biblical scholars do it, and they do it because if they didn't, they'd lose the grounds of many of the Bible's claims. The fact is that there's no reason to suspect that the people of ages past retained knowledge any better than we do today.
From what we've been able to dig up archaeologically, the biblical authors were pretty much dead-on.
Not really. There is an astounding number of archaelogical/historical inaccuracies in the Bible. If you think you can support the claim that the Bible is "dead-on" about anything, you should get your unique insights over to The Internet Infidels and join the Biblical Errancy list. There are experts there who will make sure you are well acquainted with the many errors in the Bible until your eyes bleed.
Since, however, the Bible is such an extraordinarily accurate document that you could believe accounts of a God-like man rising from the dead: Could you clear up some problems that I've had with it?
Could you construct for me the exact events leading to the discovery of Christ's empty tomb? Who went, what time did they leave, what time did they get there, who saw what and said what to whom? I mean, I wouldn't believe a bunch of people telling me about my missing car, if they all had different and conflicting stories. How am I supposed to believe that those people actually witnessed a man/god risen from the dead?
While you're at it, could you give me the exact lineage of Christ? There are multiple conflicting accounts in the New Testament, and I'd like to have that resolved before I'd even begin to believe that the Bible is the word of God.
Whether you choose to believe them or not, people observed Jesus walking around after he died.
Correction: The authors of portions of the Bible claim that there were people who observed Jesus walking around after he died.
However, from our best understanding of the New Testament, the earliest books were those of Paul, who *admittedly* didn't even know Jesus personally (outside of "visions"), and who wrote about Christianity a good 30 years after the supposed date of Christ's death. Some of the Gospels are pegged as having been written over a hundred years after Christ's death.
Imagine writing about someone who died thirty years ago. Imagine not having the online and print resources available to you - but instead relying upon word of mouth. Imagine further, that you're writing about someone living in another country who spoke another language. Most of the New Testament books were written in Greek, remember. It's easy to see why the account of Christ looks so manufactured from fantasy and cobbled together from previous myths. It's a level of journalism that the National Enquirer wouldn't even aspire to, so don't presume that I'm discounting the rational claims of first-hand witnesses when I disbelieve the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Evolutionists still have to answer that question by hiding behind millions of years
"hiding behind", that's funny.
The Talk Origins Misconceptions is a good place to begin learning about the typical and willfully ignorant misunderstanding of creationists.
The changes witnessed in the labs are actual genetic changes. Genes changed. The way Creationists try to classify Evolution into Micro and Macro Evolution shows that they don't understand what genes are and how they can (and do) change.
Hiding behind millions of years. That really cracks me up. You just go ahead and whip out your millions of years to prove me wrong, buddy!
My millions of years can kick your millions of years' ass!
God may well have done so anyways, but he set up all the evidence to indicate otherwise...
Then God set up a deliberate falsehood to deceive us? But the Bible emphatically states that God is the source of all truth and that Satan is the father of lies.
If the Bible is wrong about this, then maybe it's wrong about Moses's parting of the Red Sea (when Egyptian history indicates nothing of the sort). Maybe it's wrong about the birth, life, and promise of resurrection of Jesus Christ. I mean, really. A man rising from the dead three days after he really died?
True, the most zealous Creationists are the most likely to be online debating, but the moderate Creationists are there too, as well as the neutral, and the moderate "Evolutionists".
Not everyone is online in mailing lists to debate. Many are just trying to learn. More and more, the Internet is made up of all walks of life.
Can you prove the Earth is older than 6 or 7 thousand years? I still maintain my personal theory that the world was created last Tuesday, and seeing as you cannot prove me wrong (though lets face is, you can easily prove it highly unlikely).
Sure, it's possible that the world was created last Tuesday. It's possible that I'm imagining that I'm typing this post. However, if we're doing our best to objectively evaluate reality, the evidence abounds for an Earth that's significantly older than 7,000 years.
A recent example that I came across: Every year, the polar ice caps go through alternating periods of partial melting, then substantial growth. This is caused by the change of the seasons, and produces very definite lines in extracted samples. Gases and particles become trapped in the ice, so scientists have been eagerly studying the makeup of these layers to determine lots of things about the Earth's past and present atmospheric and meteorological makeup. Calibration testing has shown that each line accurately represents one year. Look down at the lines following the industrial revolution, and you can find increased amounts of industrial byproducts in the ice! There are many additional calibration techniques that they've used to increase the weight of believing that each line is in fact representative of one year.
So, we have a way to count years for us like counting rings in a tree trunk. Would it be surprising for you to learn that from ice core drills, they've been able to pull out samples containing over 100,000 lines?
Then, once you've grasped that idea, move on to the methods for dating samples through analysis of isotopes. They're even more accurate (although harder for lay people to understand), and have shown that the Earth is more than five billion years old. Sure, maybe they're off a few million years here or there - but off to the point where the earth is only 7k years old?
If you believe that, I urge you. Stop using your computer. It was invented by Scientists who using the same methods have proved that your Bible can't be literally true. Your computer is a tool of Satan, and should be destroyed.
I don't disagree with the basics of your statements. The Creationist's argument is mostly emotional, so he uses the tactics of throwing out numerous nice-sounding but false claims, in the hope of staying ahead of a rigorous analysis of those claims.
However, it's ironic that you still have this in your sig:
The court ruled it legal to fuck the voters by running out the clock, and demonstrated how to do it.
A rigorous analysis has shown that in some ways of counting votes, Bush won. In some ways of counting votes, Gore won. From a more neutral perspective, the Florida Supreme Sourt screwed up by not taking control of the process when they had the opportunity to create the perception of an honest vote count. Instead, they allowed numerous abuses by the counting methods of Democrat operatives to go unchallenged. So, the US Supreme Court kept them from allowing a legally conducted election to be overthrown by questionable vote-counting methods.
In the end, it was just a power struggle between two political parties, and had nothing to do with the voters getting "fucked".
Viewing it in some slanted light isn't about facts, it's about religion.
Being Scientific often means forgetting the fact that you have a horse in the race for a bit, and instead evaluating the evidence from a neutral perspective. It's the reason why Science has brought us so far in the past few hundred years, whereas Religion accomplished nothing of the sort in the hundred thousand years before the Scientific Method was even postulated.
To the contrary. I've been debating the subject for years online, and I'd say that most Creationists are defending the literal "truth" of the Christian Bible.
According to lineages and events in the Bible, the Earth couldn't be more than 6,000 or 7,000 years old.
That one fact is in direct contradiction with the theory of Evolution and our understanding of Archaeology that posits an Earth that is 5 Billion years old, with life forms that have been in gradual development over much of that time.
The whole monkey or no monkey thing is just a side-aggravation to some Creationists who feel insulted by the implication that they descended from apes/monkeys.
Ugh, logged in anonymously without my filters
on
Heart of the Net
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
This will probably be modded down out of existence, since I'd guess that those with mod points who dislike Katz already have their filters set up. But as an attempted service to those of you who are astounded at the stupidity of this guy to the point of its decreasing the value of/., I present these simple instructions for removing JonKatz from your/. experience.
Select your handle link at the top of the main page. The one that talks about the page being generated by flocks of monkeys, gaggles of toasters, etc.
Then select the "homepage" link in your preferences area.
Scroll down a little ways, and you'll see an "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section.
Click on the check box labeled "JonKatz".
Click the "save" button at the bottom of the page.
"Our first potential OEM (original equipment manufacturer) customers are already holding their first units in their hands," said Manfred Stefener, CEO of Smart Fuel Cell.
Space is like the Internet. It was really only accessible to government types for a long time because of the costs involved - but once commercial entities were allowed to join, the whole thing blew wide open. Yes, this was a good thing.
NASA should be doing everything it can to help commercial enterprises gain a foothold in space. When that happens, the cost of getting into space will begin to drop dramatically. In another 30 years, commercial trips to the moon could become a reality.
As a data point, I'd have to say that my personal experiences with OSX are different. I've been running OSX since late August, and have yet to witness a system crash.
Having frequented the Mac boards since installing OSX, I've seen a number of complaints: dislike of the stripes, lack of application support, etc. Instability hasn't really come up too often, though, so I think that you're having some type of relatively unique problem.
You seem to be trying to point out some kind of hypocrisy in Rush's position - that he has no right to complain because a business is trying to make money.
His complaining is no hypocrisy. Now if he sought the creation of some kind of government program to remedy a free market assault on the quality of his show - that would be hypocrisy.
Ok why are children always being tried as adults then?
"always" seems to be a rather strong description of what has happened in just a few cases over the past couple of years in the entire nation.
Look, as I alluded to in my previous post, this isn't an exact science. 18 isn't some magical age where everything clicks and you get all your privileges and responsibilities. It's a "good enough" point for society, though. Juveniles get some privileges (like driving) before then, and are expected to gradually accept responsibility for their actions. It's hard to say, "Well, if I can't watch porn, I'm not responsible for my actions and I can kill without repercussions."
As far as trying kids as adults, there are certain crimes that are just so beyond the pale that they demand severe action. Take that Florida boy who obtained a gun, bragged to his friends that he was going to kill his teacher, took the gun into the classrom, and shot his teacher dead. That kid is just a useless piece of crap whose life is a severe negative weight on our society. Screw him and let him rot in jail as an adult, he used up his "let me go, I'm a kid" coupon with that one. My sympathy lies only with the teacher and the teacher's family, not with that little animal that we call "human" in error.
If you are gonna put anyone in jail it should be the parents of these children.
I agree with you there, to an extent. Parents should share some of the blame for raising a sociopath - but as a parent, I also know that your children are largely a product of their genes. No matter how well you parent, sometimes your kids are going to do things to hurt themselves and others. I sympathize with parents who try their hardest and do a good job, but still fail because they've produced a monster.
Slashdot Mirror
I did read it. What, you believe everything you read just because it sounds "scientific" and has pages and pages of "data"? I certainly don't, or I would have fallen for that whole "Cold Fusion" crap years ago.
I think the authors took an obvious phenomenon -- that LEDs flashing for every bit transmitted could be read by some device -- then exaggerated the danger of such an attack to get some publicity for their paper.
Sure, flashing LEDs can be read, and in some bizarre equipment configurations, you could actually read the data over this method. Is this a danger to anyone's data? No, it's a toy, and not a problem -- aka "bullshit".
This is crap. I worked for a router/hub manufacturer, and those guys don't flash the LED every time a bit passes by. They usually flash it every so often, if a packet has gone by. Note the word "packet". There's no conceivable reason why you'd want to waste your very valuable embedded processor time breaking down packets into bytes and bits to make the LED flash more accurately.
What do you learn by even seeing a flash every time a packet goes by?
I'd really doubt that any HW manufacturer is stupid enough to flash an LED every time a bit passes.
Then, you also need to be able to consider the response characteristics of LEDs. Most IR transmissions systems are decidedly limited in the bandwidth that they can pump through, and that's in a system dedicated to pumping it through. I'd highly doubt that the lower-quality LEDs used for displaying packet movement would be capable of keeping up with your average 100Mbps router.
This thing must be an early April Fool's joke.
You can now take the little aluminum hat off your hub.
(not that all people in India are in poverty - another rather myopic view)
Sheesh... hardly. I lived in India for a few months working in Hyderabad, so I can tell you: That country is a complete hole. While there, I traveled from New Delhi to Bombay to Goa, and everywhere I went, it was the same: abject povery.
Hell, while there, we lived in a nice house in a decent neighborhood, but we still had a couple of grass shacks in the lot right next door to us. Garbage was everywhere, little kids were running around naked and hungry through the piles of garbage (often burning).
When you breathe in the air, you count yourself lucky if you only inhale a cloud of diesel fumes. More often than not, you have to breathe old piss and sewage fumes. Where does that come from? Well let me tell you, my friends -- when the average person living in an Indian city needs to relieve himself, he just whips it out and pisses on the side of the nearest building. Playing "Dodge the Piss Puddle" is no fun while you're walking down the sidewalk.
The reason why everything is so crappy can be summed up in one word: "corruption". Even most Indian friends that I know agree that it's a huge problem, although when they talk about it, it's always some government agency that they blame. Little do they realize that corruption pervades their entire society -- from the Prime Minister down to the little guy on the street. Everywhere you go, you have to be ready to pay bribes or grease someone's palm. You *always* ALWAYS have to count your change when you buy something, or you'll get ripped off. India's only hope to become the super power that they so desperately want to be is to undertake a massive cultural ethical shift. If Indians had the ethics of the Japanese, they'd be unstoppable as a world economic power... but they don't, so they won't ever be.
Spending that time in India was the greatest learning experience in my life. Every time I think about it (like now), I truly appreciate what we have in this country.
According to an article in Popular Science
/. be a little above that?
Does anyone really need to read further than that to know that the technology is all pie-in-the-sky bullshit?
Quoting from Popular Science is like quoting from The Enquirer. Shouldn't
It seems like betting on long-term strength of a particular type of cryptography is about as useful as predicting the imminent demise of Moore's law.
The ones with stock options that spend 14 hours a day doing what they do, and hoping to get paid for it?
You could try to make the same analogy between books and television -- but as you can tell, books are still fairly popular.
Text based isn't better than graphics.
The original poster didn't say that they were. He just said that he thought that there was a still a decent market for them, and I think that he's probably right.
That's one way to look at it... a shitty way, but one way.
Alternatively, why not look at it like a sporting contest, such as tennis. When you go out to play tennis (or raquetball, or whatever) with someone, is your goal to bend the rules and win at all costs? Or is the goal to have fun competing within the mutually agreed upon ruleset?
In the end, it all comes down to ethics.
Admittedly, Blu-ray isn't on the market yet, but the only real technological step being taken is the use of a higher-frequency laser. The rest of the technology is built upon proven DVD reader/burner techniques.
FMD is still total vapor. Those guys have been hyping that vapor for over two years now, but they still have nothing two show or sell. I smell a rat. I think that they've hit some technical hurdles that will keep them from producing anything.
Speaking as a long-time Macintosh software developer, I literally drool at the possibility of selling my apps to an intel-sized audience with a simple recompile. Apple uses gcc, so setting a compile switch to generate the right binary will work without any hassles. BeOS had a similar PowePC to Intel transition, and building either binary couldn't have been easier. Well, okay, you had to install some extra libraries to build, but Apple would sort that out. Oh, and endian issues on the BeOS were rarely a problem (htonl() and its friends work quite nicely).
Trust me. Standard application developers won't be worried about shipping two binaries if it means doubling (tripling, quadrupling?) the market for their products.
Seems that politicians still don't have a clue, despite indications that video games don't cause violence.
Well, that's not really even what the GameSpot article says, and can you guess the slant that the GameSpot article takes on the original Surgeon General's report?
The Surgeon General's report states that violent video games can be a factor, but is not a sole motivator for violent behavior.
If it's a factor, then further studies should be done to determine how much of a factor it is. Put some numbers on it.
I certainly don't have reservations about preventing the very young from having too-easy access to harmful things. I'm a big freedoms-type Libertarian, but young people often don't have the maturity to be able to handle a full set of freedoms. It's why we restrict driving, voting, and other rights that we grant freely to adults. It's also the reason why minors' criminal records are sealed and they're given special sentencing considerations when they commit crimes.
repeating those things to each other, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
Isn't it curious that those who study ancient writings outside of Biblical scholars never attribute any super ability to the people of those times wrt their retention of facts? Only Biblical scholars do it, and they do it because if they didn't, they'd lose the grounds of many of the Bible's claims. The fact is that there's no reason to suspect that the people of ages past retained knowledge any better than we do today.
From what we've been able to dig up archaeologically, the biblical authors were pretty much dead-on.
Not really. There is an astounding number of archaelogical/historical inaccuracies in the Bible. If you think you can support the claim that the Bible is "dead-on" about anything, you should get your unique insights over to The Internet Infidels and join the Biblical Errancy list. There are experts there who will make sure you are well acquainted with the many errors in the Bible until your eyes bleed.
Since, however, the Bible is such an extraordinarily accurate document that you could believe accounts of a God-like man rising from the dead: Could you clear up some problems that I've had with it?
Could you construct for me the exact events leading to the discovery of Christ's empty tomb? Who went, what time did they leave, what time did they get there, who saw what and said what to whom? I mean, I wouldn't believe a bunch of people telling me about my missing car, if they all had different and conflicting stories. How am I supposed to believe that those people actually witnessed a man/god risen from the dead?
While you're at it, could you give me the exact lineage of Christ? There are multiple conflicting accounts in the New Testament, and I'd like to have that resolved before I'd even begin to believe that the Bible is the word of God.
Whether you choose to believe them or not, people observed Jesus walking around after he died.
Correction: The authors of portions of the Bible claim that there were people who observed Jesus walking around after he died.
However, from our best understanding of the New Testament, the earliest books were those of Paul, who *admittedly* didn't even know Jesus personally (outside of "visions"), and who wrote about Christianity a good 30 years after the supposed date of Christ's death. Some of the Gospels are pegged as having been written over a hundred years after Christ's death.
Imagine writing about someone who died thirty years ago. Imagine not having the online and print resources available to you - but instead relying upon word of mouth. Imagine further, that you're writing about someone living in another country who spoke another language. Most of the New Testament books were written in Greek, remember. It's easy to see why the account of Christ looks so manufactured from fantasy and cobbled together from previous myths. It's a level of journalism that the National Enquirer wouldn't even aspire to, so don't presume that I'm discounting the rational claims of first-hand witnesses when I disbelieve the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Evolutionists still have to answer that question by hiding behind millions of years
"hiding behind", that's funny.
The Talk Origins Misconceptions is a good place to begin learning about the typical and willfully ignorant misunderstanding of creationists.
The changes witnessed in the labs are actual genetic changes. Genes changed. The way Creationists try to classify Evolution into Micro and Macro Evolution shows that they don't understand what genes are and how they can (and do) change.
Hiding behind millions of years. That really cracks me up. You just go ahead and whip out your millions of years to prove me wrong, buddy!
My millions of years can kick your millions of years' ass!
God may well have done so anyways, but he set up all the evidence to indicate otherwise...
Then God set up a deliberate falsehood to deceive us? But the Bible emphatically states that God is the source of all truth and that Satan is the father of lies.
If the Bible is wrong about this, then maybe it's wrong about Moses's parting of the Red Sea (when Egyptian history indicates nothing of the sort). Maybe it's wrong about the birth, life, and promise of resurrection of Jesus Christ. I mean, really. A man rising from the dead three days after he really died?
Nasty can of worms you opened there.
True, the most zealous Creationists are the most likely to be online debating, but the moderate Creationists are there too, as well as the neutral, and the moderate "Evolutionists".
Not everyone is online in mailing lists to debate. Many are just trying to learn. More and more, the Internet is made up of all walks of life.
Can you prove the Earth is older than 6 or 7 thousand years? I still maintain my personal theory that the world was created last Tuesday, and seeing as you cannot prove me wrong (though lets face is, you can easily prove it highly unlikely).
Sure, it's possible that the world was created last Tuesday. It's possible that I'm imagining that I'm typing this post. However, if we're doing our best to objectively evaluate reality, the evidence abounds for an Earth that's significantly older than 7,000 years.
A recent example that I came across: Every year, the polar ice caps go through alternating periods of partial melting, then substantial growth. This is caused by the change of the seasons, and produces very definite lines in extracted samples. Gases and particles become trapped in the ice, so scientists have been eagerly studying the makeup of these layers to determine lots of things about the Earth's past and present atmospheric and meteorological makeup. Calibration testing has shown that each line accurately represents one year. Look down at the lines following the industrial revolution, and you can find increased amounts of industrial byproducts in the ice! There are many additional calibration techniques that they've used to increase the weight of believing that each line is in fact representative of one year.
So, we have a way to count years for us like counting rings in a tree trunk. Would it be surprising for you to learn that from ice core drills, they've been able to pull out samples containing over 100,000 lines?
Then, once you've grasped that idea, move on to the methods for dating samples through analysis of isotopes. They're even more accurate (although harder for lay people to understand), and have shown that the Earth is more than five billion years old. Sure, maybe they're off a few million years here or there - but off to the point where the earth is only 7k years old?
If you believe that, I urge you. Stop using your computer. It was invented by Scientists who using the same methods have proved that your Bible can't be literally true. Your computer is a tool of Satan, and should be destroyed.
I don't disagree with the basics of your statements. The Creationist's argument is mostly emotional, so he uses the tactics of throwing out numerous nice-sounding but false claims, in the hope of staying ahead of a rigorous analysis of those claims.
However, it's ironic that you still have this in your sig:
The court ruled it legal to fuck the voters by running out the clock, and demonstrated how to do it.
A rigorous analysis has shown that in some ways of counting votes, Bush won. In some ways of counting votes, Gore won. From a more neutral perspective, the Florida Supreme Sourt screwed up by not taking control of the process when they had the opportunity to create the perception of an honest vote count. Instead, they allowed numerous abuses by the counting methods of Democrat operatives to go unchallenged. So, the US Supreme Court kept them from allowing a legally conducted election to be overthrown by questionable vote-counting methods.
In the end, it was just a power struggle between two political parties, and had nothing to do with the voters getting "fucked".
Viewing it in some slanted light isn't about facts, it's about religion.
Being Scientific often means forgetting the fact that you have a horse in the race for a bit, and instead evaluating the evidence from a neutral perspective. It's the reason why Science has brought us so far in the past few hundred years, whereas Religion accomplished nothing of the sort in the hundred thousand years before the Scientific Method was even postulated.
To the contrary. I've been debating the subject for years online, and I'd say that most Creationists are defending the literal "truth" of the Christian Bible.
According to lineages and events in the Bible, the Earth couldn't be more than 6,000 or 7,000 years old.
That one fact is in direct contradiction with the theory of Evolution and our understanding of Archaeology that posits an Earth that is 5 Billion years old, with life forms that have been in gradual development over much of that time.
The whole monkey or no monkey thing is just a side-aggravation to some Creationists who feel insulted by the implication that they descended from apes/monkeys.
- Select your handle link at the top of the main page. The one that talks about the page being generated by flocks of monkeys, gaggles of toasters, etc.
- Then select the "homepage" link in your preferences area.
- Scroll down a little ways, and you'll see an "Exclude Stories from the Homepage" section.
- Click on the check box labeled "JonKatz".
Click the "save" button at the bottom of the page.
Yay, you'll enjoy a Katz-free life."Our first potential OEM (original equipment manufacturer) customers are already holding their first units in their hands," said Manfred Stefener, CEO of Smart Fuel Cell.
That's sick. What's he talking about?
Space is like the Internet. It was really only accessible to government types for a long time because of the costs involved - but once commercial entities were allowed to join, the whole thing blew wide open. Yes, this was a good thing.
NASA should be doing everything it can to help commercial enterprises gain a foothold in space. When that happens, the cost of getting into space will begin to drop dramatically. In another 30 years, commercial trips to the moon could become a reality.
As a data point, I'd have to say that my personal experiences with OSX are different. I've been running OSX since late August, and have yet to witness a system crash.
Having frequented the Mac boards since installing OSX, I've seen a number of complaints: dislike of the stripes, lack of application support, etc. Instability hasn't really come up too often, though, so I think that you're having some type of relatively unique problem.
You seem to be trying to point out some kind of hypocrisy in Rush's position - that he has no right to complain because a business is trying to make money.
His complaining is no hypocrisy. Now if he sought the creation of some kind of government program to remedy a free market assault on the quality of his show - that would be hypocrisy.
Ok why are children always being tried as adults then?
"always" seems to be a rather strong description of what has happened in just a few cases over the past couple of years in the entire nation.
Look, as I alluded to in my previous post, this isn't an exact science. 18 isn't some magical age where everything clicks and you get all your privileges and responsibilities. It's a "good enough" point for society, though. Juveniles get some privileges (like driving) before then, and are expected to gradually accept responsibility for their actions. It's hard to say, "Well, if I can't watch porn, I'm not responsible for my actions and I can kill without repercussions."
As far as trying kids as adults, there are certain crimes that are just so beyond the pale that they demand severe action. Take that Florida boy who obtained a gun, bragged to his friends that he was going to kill his teacher, took the gun into the classrom, and shot his teacher dead. That kid is just a useless piece of crap whose life is a severe negative weight on our society. Screw him and let him rot in jail as an adult, he used up his "let me go, I'm a kid" coupon with that one. My sympathy lies only with the teacher and the teacher's family, not with that little animal that we call "human" in error.
If you are gonna put anyone in jail it should be the parents of these children.
I agree with you there, to an extent. Parents should share some of the blame for raising a sociopath - but as a parent, I also know that your children are largely a product of their genes. No matter how well you parent, sometimes your kids are going to do things to hurt themselves and others. I sympathize with parents who try their hardest and do a good job, but still fail because they've produced a monster.