We just need to point out to a few prominent musicians, actors, and directors that their work currently exists in a legal black hole. Society will escape the event horizon in 95 years (if nothing else changes), but the films, music, and books will not. If the MPAA and RIAA win out, once the audience of an author, filmmaker, or songwriter goes away, no new copies of those works will be made. No old copies will survive because even if the media format wasn't indestructible the media itself is. Lost DVD's will be discovered by our grandchildren, who will have no players available, and even if they do they won't know who Steven Spielberg was, or the Beatles, or Stephen King. They won't have much of an incentive not to consign those arcane things to a landfill.
These people no doubt view themselves has having a place in history. Film, music, and literature are their legacy, and they all probably expect to be read about in history books in 100 years. It needs to be demonstrated to them how they won't, and how in 100 years we will be living in frightening, Orwellian culture where we cannot remember our past, or prove that it even happened (not to mention that we won't even know it's Orwellian).
You could prove God exists, if he would step down here, wave hi to everyone, work some incredible god-like voodoo magic, and then disappear. That'd be proof that he exists. However, there is NO way to prove that he doesn't exist.
I don't like to nitpick an otherwise great argument (but I'm going to). That's not quite a valid analogy. In the case of E.T. life, we already have an instance of life that is known to exist on a planet. Ours. Since there are many similar stars, and we can presume many similar planets (and soon we may be able to prove their existence), it is therefore at least within the realm of possibility that E.T. life can exist. There is a theoretical mechanism for planetary formation, and a theoretical mechanism for the formation of life, and their validity can and has been tested.
On the other hand, God currently holds the status of an imaginary abstraction, and no known observable example of this type of entity is available. No theoretical model exists of a supreme being, and no test can be made nor conclusion drawn from his existence or lack thereof. It's not possible to prove his nonexistence, but it's really not necessary either. It would be more likely if someone could prove that an intelligent creator was required to exist as an antecedent to the existence of the universe, but as yet no one has done that to my knowledge.
As usual, it's the fault of the people in charge. What's the shock there? I know the tech support system where I work sucks. I'm the third level of it. The grunts are not encouraged to learn their trade, they are not given more than a few minutes to handle a call. They are given financial rewards based on how fast they move calls through their queue -- not on whether they know how to handle them or not. So the calls are punted to me and the three other people I work with. We then do all the work that the tech support desk was either not allowed to or not qualified to do. Some forty help desk people feed our group with calls, and of course callers get pissed because they are left hanging sometimes for days.
The answer to all of this is to use sharp objects to get managers' eyes off of the "metrics" they're using and get their minds wrapped around the idea that the people answering the phone must first sound knowledgable, and second be knowledgable, and be capable of fixing the problem. That is all someone calling tech support wants. They do not want to hear that industry standard metrics are being applied to their problem, they want to hear that it's quick and easy to fix.
How would they do this? Well maybe they could start by training the help desk personnel to be an IQ point smarter than a bucket of mud. Then they could try giving them an encouraging environment to work in, where they are mentored by 3rd level techs who already know how it works. Then they could try paying them more than slave's wages. Then they could try giving them a path for advancement if they do well. All of this would require effort and investment on the corporations' and managments' parts, and until they're willing to do that help desks will always suck.
would presume that people need to prove the theory so as to disprove other theories based in theology.
You could use a refresher in inductive reasoning. A theory is a model. It cannot ever be proven. The only way to test it is to use its underpinnings to make a prediction of a phenomenon that is not currently observed, and then find a way to observe that phenomenon. A theory derived from theological meanderings, on the other hand, has no testable consequences, and therefore is not even a theory, just a highly speculative story that doesn't mean anything.
wonder what if this find didn't prove the theory. In fact, what if it slightly disproved it.
If a specific prediction of the Big Bang theory had fallen down completely on its face, someone certainly would have announced it. If not on CNN, somewhere else. There are all sorts of people (who the mainstream establishment no doubt refers to as crackpots) who would jump on an issue like that, and run out and do their own exhaustive experiments to add volume to the disproof.
There are official publications which have the actual tabs used by the bands during their recordings.
The band doesn't need tablature, Zico. They already know the song because they created it. Once you've learned the verse chorus and maybe an intro riff, if you can't play it from memory you will probably be kicked out of the band. "Writing" it usually refers to charting the lyrics out. The guitar solo is usually, like, improvised. Most rock bands don't read music, so they likely won't have a nice score.
The site is created by listeners who pick the part out by ear and write it down. Don't be such an uninformed tool.
I like your "official publications" line. It plays right into the idea that there is only one source anyone can have for music and culture. The "official" one. Do I have to get a license to be an "official" musician, too?
and if they really are illusions they are some of the most impressively beautiful ones I've seen!:)
You can buy a $500 telescope and look at them yourself. Or attend a local star party. Ground-based amateur instruments aren't as clear, but you'd be surprised what a good 20" Dobsonian will reveal.
A day as defined as one rotation of the earth is, really, pretty short. If each planet defines its own day from one rotation.. you can draw your own conclusions from there.
Such as?
The Big Bang has not happened and yet ALL Big Bangs are happening NOW.
That must make a lot of noise.
As for the existance of God - Yup. Call -it- what you will . . . Pretty much all the same.
The supernatural beings you mention all share one notable attribute: their existence is beyond our ability to test. As for Science, I don't ever confuse it with God.
Lets reduce everything we know to the simplest common item: Atoms. Lets reduce that down the the simplest: Hydrogen- The smallest atom/thing that we currently can identify. One Proton, One Electron. Proportionatly, the distance from that proton the the ever spinning and whirling electron is greater than that of the Earth to the Sun. So lets look at that electron.. Ah, hell... we can't. Why? Because it is constantly shimming in and out of existance: "Blinking" if you will. Just as we have movies that move at 48 frames per second (too fast for the human eye to see) we have the entire Universe constantly "winking" in and out of existance Millions of times per second.
What exactly is this meant to demonstrate? Electrons are routinely recorded in the cloud chambers of particle accelerators. If the universe is winking in and out of existence too fast for anyone to see, then what difference does that make vs. a universe that is always there? A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
My point: Everything you think you know is wrong.
Your point is really quite obscure. If I were to gather anything at all from your argument, it's that haven't spent more than a few cursory minutes actually researching your subject matter, and quite a lot of time reading corny science fiction from the '50's. You might pick up some Asimov or Clifford Simak novels -- or better yet, pick up some of Asimov's very well researched and factual tomes about practically every facet of science in existence. He's an excellent writer and presents the fundamental concepts of science in an easy to read, chatty fashion that still is highly organized and informative.
I don't think that the evolutionism and creationism are mutually exclusive.
Trust me, they are. One is a theory. It postulates testable conditions. The other explicitly avoids being tested or questioned.
For something as fundamental as the difference between the big bang and "poof, in 6 days it all just showed up," all that matters is what your definition of a day is
The expansion of the universe is demonstrable fact. It's happening right now. Anyone with a spectrometer and a telescope can check it out. The '6 days' of creation theory doesn't posit a lot of testable consequences, on the other hand.
A valid bit of symbolism (assuming that God is all powerful and has control of silly things like days as well as space,) blow every scientific theory against all religion out of the water.
Indeed. First demonstrate a reason for God. I don't even ask theists to prove that God exists. I know it's impossible. It's more important to me to see them fumble to prove that the universe needs a God to exist. Because if it doesn't (and so far, it doesn't), then the whickering blades of Occam's razor triumph once again.
but if we all apply those "scientific" minds we value and think about deeper meanings, I think we'll all find more correlations between the Bible and what we find with tools like Hubble in nature than we'd like to believe.
If you are willing to completely ditch your standards of what "evidence" is and what constitutes a fact, and accept correlations and coincidences in more or less a state of whimsy, I guess you could get away with that. But it's a lot of work, it's entirely subjective, and reveals nothing. Simpler just to cut the God theory loose and forget about it.
what exactly is a rib?
It's a bone that depends off the sternum. Screwing with semantics is again subjective and will get you nowhere except lost.
Does the Bible explictly say Adam and Eve are people?
Does it say they are hermit crabs? If you are willing to abandon objective reality, anything could be true. So what?
Doesn't "let there be light" sound an awful lot like one of the bigger explosions you could think of?
If you can't be bothered to put any more thought into your assertion than this, tell me why then I should believe it. This isn't just misguided thinking: it's sloppy and lazy. You haven't bothered to probe your fundamental assertions beyond the 1cm depth. How do you expect to convince a hardened skeptic who's spent years looking through eyepieces, and river beds, for the reality? The real world is often stranger than we can imagine. But it's there 24 hours, 7 days a week, ready to be examined. Those who take the trouble to do so make real advances. Those who surround themselves with fairy tales get what they are looking for -- nothing. In the end your view of the universe is irrelevant because it doesn't conclude anything of substance. God may or may not exist. People in the bible may or may not be real. For crying out loud you sound like Majikthise and Vroomfondel from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Evolution cannot be observed. Since we can never observe the event, it is impossible to prove that man evolved from apes. Scientists must accept it on faith.
However, the by-products and remnants of evolution can be observed, and notably they have been. This is a feeble attempt to make evolution as unobservable, and therefore as unlikely, as creationism. However, because a process cannot be directly observed in action does not mean it is not real. The evidence of a process is another way of observing it. The evidence of the evolutionary process is contained in fossils. The major complaint is that there are not enough of them. "Sample too small" is a subjective judgement. I was looking at some fossils this weekend, in fact. If I am to to take their existence in my hand as a subjective reality, I might as well assume that everything I see and touch is some sort of simulation, and therefore not believe that anything is real -- including the Bible and the words which it contains.
Science relies on assuming that conditions are identical everywhere throughout the universe. But this is not necessarily true!
Aside from the obvious absurdity of your argument relativity demands that it is true. Einstein's insistence that there is no special frame of reference was key to the theory of relativity. Relativity has been tested time and time again. To my knowledge no one has been able to make it fail.
What if light slowed down away from the earth?
What if monkeys flew out of my butt? If you can get away from the earth and test this presumption, that would be one thing. But you're simply talking nonsense until then. All that aside, assuming that special frames of reference exist is an invitation to an imaginary fantasy land. If the rules the universe appears to abide by can change at any given moment, we may as well not bother trying to learn anything about it at all. However, so far history has proven time and again that science works and produces tangible results. What time/life/labor saving invention can we attribute to the fruits of religious scholars?
This has been theorized by F. M. Hayes and S. Rhodes among other Creation Scientists, and they have presented preliminary evidence to challenge this assumption.
Where is their preliminary evidence? What is their reasoning. You are again talking right out of your ass.
Thus the universe's age is in reality not established AT ALL, not that scientists can agree on that either!
Boy, talk about a case of missing the point. The universe's age has been revised many times as new evidence has been turned up to change our perception of it. In other words, scientists are changing their models to conform to reality! What a concept! Change your opinion when you're proven wrong! "Creationists" could use a little of that methodology
Scientists use circular logic.
The bible is true because you believe its true, becuase the words of the bible are the words of god, because you believe that god wrote the bible, because the bible is true, because . . . Because you are calling the pot black, mr. kettle.
How do biologists know what level of carbon dating is how old?
I don't know. Ask the nuclear phsysicst who built the functioning atomic bomb based on the exact same radioactive decay period how he knew that the bomb would explode. Again, there are clear cases where science and technology are doing things for us that would simply not work if the functional premises of those technologies are wrong. What creationists like you want to do is take with one hand the technological fruits of these discoveries while denying with the other the implications behind them. It's not just hypocritical. It's infantile.
What is clear is that "faith" can stand up to "science" in its present state, and that "science" should not be left to just "Scientists".
Science is a free game. Anyone may play. The perception that only ivory tower drones make science is one that persons such as yourself seem to enjoy fostering, because it makes 'plain folk' immediately resentful. But that's only because you're painfully ignorant. If you want to play the game of science, and contribute, you have to play by some simple rules. Rule 1 is that you may not argue from authority. Rule 2 is that any statement you make must be subject to verification by anyone who wishes to independently check. Rule 3 is that you will be wrong, and you will be wrong a lot. If you cannot accept the possibility that you may be wrong, you will never be able to play the game. Rule 4 is that as soon as you think you are right, you must immediately begin theorizing as if you are wrong, and test your "right" theory against every available "wrong" theory.
Faith can pass none of these tests. Faith is assumption of rightness, oblivious to opposing viewpoints, vehemently denying the potential of error, vigorously avoiding verification. Faith proves nothing and reveals nothing -- except the depth or lack thereof of the intellect of the faithful. You will learn nothing worth learning about the universe with faith. You may learn much that is useful about yourself, but there is no guarantee.
Is it my imagination, or is/. being heavily trolled by religious wackos these days?
Re:proof that homosexuality isn't genetic?
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while it may not be proof, the most recent claim of Science that genes cannot be mapped directly to proteins suggests that the assertion "homosexuality is genetic" to be dubious, if not entirely false.
Really? Is homosexuality defined by the presence of a protien? I was unaware of that.
If you want to discredit him then do it with facts
No, just do it with logic. His argument is hackneyed nonsense. He commits major fallacies. His major premise is appeal to a complex argument. The basic form of this fallacy is: "well, this is just too difficult for me to imagine any other way than X", without bothering to explain how X fits the explanation better than the straw-man explanations he throws up as its opponents.
I don't know (or particularly care) if gods, jesuses, devils, spooks, bunnies, or fairies are behind them, but I am at least honest enough to admit they can't be ruled out
They can. I rule them out with Occam's Razor. Works every time. Appealing to an invisible hand to operate the world is piss-poor logic. The invisible hand, or djinn or demon, because its existence cannot be subjected to experiment, is immediately beyond any chance of refute. One cannot argue about the motivations, composition, size, weight or mass of gods or devils, because they only exist as products of the imagination. Therefore they are beyond the realm of exploration, and their existence by the very definition of their being cannot be proved or disproved. Why bother with them, then?
Using gods and demons as logical quantities proves nothing and ultimately satisfies no one. Witness the proliferation of competing "one true religions" for proof of this. From my perspective, if the Catholics got it wrong from the perspective of the Presbyterians who got it wrong from the perspective of the Episcopelians, who surely got it wrong from the perspective of the Baptists, who definitely do not share the views of the Muslims, who cannot reconcile their beliefs with those of the Jews, who differ wildly in their conceptions from those of the Hindus, who have a different conception than those of the Bhuddists -- well you see where that leaves me. To an atheist, all religions are just wacky cults. And all gods are far more likely the products of fertile human imagination than anything else.
Why isn't the rest of Slashdot like this?
What exactly do you know about the rest of Slashdot? Can you imagine that you know the opinions of everyone else who posts here? That assertion aside, the specific reason I am not like that is because I discredit absurd arguments by pointing out their demonstrable flaws, and by making sure any counter-arguments I put forth do not contain the same flaws.
Re:So where does the information come from?
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Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of Windows 2000?
Obviously, it is.
Where is this obvious? How do you define the complexity of the human body? Is it a mathematical definition? How does complexity of a set of data relate to quantity. You could also say that the human body is no more complex than a Bee Gees' album, which also happens to fit on a CD. So does Beeethoven's Ninth Symphony. Complexity != size.
Obviously, it is. So where is this extra information located? It is obvious that there must be some other mechanism at work . . . There really is no other explanation.
Appealing to the complex argument doesn't help you explain your case, and is in fact a readily-identified logical fallacy. And again I would like to ask you what is so obvious about this. You use the word so frequently. I think you need to buy a thesarus.
The Church has known this for many thousands of years, and now the scientists are realising it too. The missing information must be supplied by the Holy Spirit
The difference between, say a scientific explanation and yours is that a mechanism is posited that we can study. In your argument, there is nothing to study. How does this information get to us? Where does it come from? How can we catch it in mid-stream? Your explanation answers none of these questions, and instead puts the answer on the other side of an unbridgable gap -- and people simply fill in whatever is convenient for them. But your answer is not science. And scientists are not "realizing" this, either. A scientist who "realized" this would no doubt give up science and start preaching. And what he would be doing would then no longer be called science
At least, this is what we were told in school. In actual fact, it breathes information in, and gives it a soul.
That's not what I was told in school, but whether I was told it in school or not is irrelevant. Just because it came from a school does not make it correct. That's known as an argument from authority. Here's a question I have for you: what is a soul? What is it made of? How big is it? What color is it? Is it observable in visible light? Does it have mass? Does it radiate energy? If so, in what frequency?
I know I will be labeled a troll for this, and am saddened. But really, the Church has known this for thousands of years, and now we are being proved correct.
You're actually being labeled as offtopic. And I'm confirming it in metamod. But I thought it important to respond to your ridiculous, ill-concieved assertions just to show you that not everyone in this world swallows this kind of hogwash whole.
As for what the Church has "known" -- well the Church has failed to acknowledge almost every significant advance in human knowledge for the last 500 years. It took the Catholic Church over 300 years to admit that Galileo was right, and their track record since then hasn't been any better. The unexpected complexity of the gene map is not "proof" that the Church's point of view is right. This is not a political contest between two opposing points of view. Science is the exploration of reality. When one pathway of exploration comes to a dead end, it simply means that pathway is not valid. It does not mean we all say, "OK, I guess they were wrong, and we can go back to what we believed in the 18th century!"
Sorry, Robert Silverberg beat 'em to it by about eleven years. His conception of this was called an Urban Monad and was basically exactly the building described in the article. Hundreds of stories tall, everything self-contained. I read the book in the late seventies and it was quite captivating. I no longer remember the title of the book, and when I do a Google search on Urban Monad I see that there was a whole series. I am guessing I read The World Inside but I can't remember for sure. Time to warm up the library card and see if it's still in circulation. And yes, at the end of the book as I recall someone commits suicide from the top of the building. A little too good an opportunity to pass up. . .
Re:SEE FOLKS? THIS IS WHY COPYRIGHTS MUST EXPIRE!
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When do the works of George Gershwin attain the same status as "classical music" so schools can use the music to teach without being sued for royalties left and right?
It will become interesting when composers and artists start to realize that nobody will bother studying their stuff in school until a LONG LONG time after its popularity has completely faded away.
This raises the possibility that much of the culture of the 20th century will simply disappear into a legal black hole.
This means that, some day, the last recordings of the big popular groups will simply grind themselves into dust and no one will remember who they were? Elton who? Britney what? Did Disney make movies way back then? Since the works, no longer legally copyable, will have no current fans, no one will care about preserving them. Want to be remembered as long as Beethoven or Shakespeare? Good luck. The copyright system is working against you.
I'm not a mathematician. But I'm considered fairly adept at programming, because I have a strong background in that other often-overlooked area of expertise, logic. One of the things I learned when I was studying logic was not to make fucking overbroad generalizations. Such statements are easily spotted -- they include phrases like "vast majority" and "it has been my experience".
If you were to list each programmer you've met by their name, and provide an accurate index of their mathematical abilities, and a gauge of their "script-kiddie"-ness (is there a qualitative measure of that, by the way?), and then compare it against the unstated but probably large number of programmers whom you know nothing about, then we would have a valid basis for whether or not your argument was anything but a total canard.
Or we could just dismiss your argument on the basis of its specious generalizations. Which I usually do.
People do not get the fucking bends from moving up 3700 feet in the air. I was born and raised in high altitudes -- 5,280 feet in Denver, CO. I routinely took trips that took me up to 8 and 12,000 feet above sea level. Never a problem. Now I live at about 300 ft. above sea level.
Ask someone who knows what the bleeding hell they're talking about -- maybe a small airplane pilot, for example? They would also routinely shift their elevation by several thousand feet with no ill effects. Pressurization only becomes an issue at around 14,000 ft. and above.
Well before you start, make sure you read, in addition to the Larry Niven and Issac Asimov books listed in the other two replies, this book, which also encompasses this very similar premise. When I first saw this news story I thought "urban monad." I read Silverberg's book over twenty years ago and have been generally fascinated with the concept ever since. It's a pity that as an adult I developed such a fear of heights, or I would be clamoring to live in one of these.
It's not a joke. I'm using it right now. It rocks. It's the intuitive extension to using a mouse -- like having a real one-click menu that's always right beneath the cursor. I'm sure Opera is going to get a place in that hall of fame for human interface design that I saw a few weeks ago. The only thing they need to do to make it better is add some sort of help screen that quickly and easily details what the available gestures are. I think a lot of people won't know it's there and may possibly be confused when it happens accidentally.
Sharing movies is illegal. If someone shares a movie, they aren't going to buy it.
Who said I was going to buy it anyway? Maybe after I watched it once, I decided it was crap and never watched it again. Maybe, instead, I went and found all the other movies that the director created and watched them as well. And by sharing, do you also mean loaning a copy of the movie? I do that all the time. Is it taking money out of the rental store's pocket if I loan my copy of Clerks around? At what point do we draw the line?
You don't get front-page articles on slashdot about people putting locks in shops to stop people to stealing the merchandise, so why should it be any different when try and stop other kinds of crime that costs money?
I would like to see research that proves that this costs money. See point above. At what point is the hypothetical pirate or casual copier removing money from someone's pocket. How, in fact, does the industry even know when casual copying occurs?
I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates.
Let me tell you something. I don't know a single person with whom I interact who hasn't at one time or another casually copied something, whether it be a videotape or a whole software program. I'm talking about anyone from my middle-aged law-and-order churchgoing Republican father-in-law to the six-year-old down the street. Every single person I know has casually copied something in the past. And it's been going on for YEARS. 30 or 60 million Napster users didn't just start casually copying CD's overnight. They were doing it ALL ALONG. Why is the industry panicking now? I suspect it's because the issue isn't casual copying at all. It's a distribution system that is not under the control of the big fish.
Moreover, it's not simply a 'white-collar', victimless crime. Piracy does hurt people.
How? Again refer to my first point. I buy plenty of CD's and DVDS and software. I think the value of my DVD / CD collection likely exceeds that of the players and viewing equipment in my house by several times, including my surround-sound stereo and my 27" tv. If I am given a casual copy by a friend, it's usually a "check this out" affair. If I like what I see or hear I go get more. Who is hurting?
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
I do it all the time, pal. I give away programs, and music of my own creation. Do a little research into the gift economy, and realize I get an intellectual payback that's worth far more than cash. I get credibility.
can't see how people can object to actions that stop piracy - people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
Read this article before you decide who's really getting hurt. Especially, go to the bottom and absorb this quote: "Ironically, the Tainan District Prosecutor and his band of cops could hardly have helped stumbling over carts and tables laden to the point of collapse with pirated CDs as they marched onto the NCKU campus to wage war against 'illegal' MP3s." The real pirates, the ones who actually go out and sell product in place of the valid stuff, are not in the picture right now. No one seems to be mentioning that actual pirates, who substitute the valid product that I would go buy, are the ones that can be demonstrated to have cost money. That's because again I think this isn't about real piracy at all. It's about distribution, and controlling the means whereby people get the product.
It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
This is either totally ignorant or totally insightful. Judging from the other points in your post, I'd choose ignorant. It would be insightful if you realized that alternate distribution methods do threaten to put the $8/hour guy out of business. But I have a hard time seeing the pimply kid at Blockbuster as a poster boy for the MPAA. I think they'd probably hire Mel Gibson instead.
I feel horrified that slashdot can condone it.
I am horrified when genocide goes down in Serbia. I am horrified that the IMF will bankrupt a Third World economy for their short-term interest rates. I am horrified when a small child is crushed under the bumper of a drunk driver. Widespread piracy of the latest Britney Spears glurge somehow fails to horrify me. Maybe it's just my perspective.
Dude, I think you may have been had. There is a pretty common urban myth regarding a legislated value for pi. I don't see that this dumblaws site has done a lot of research to back up their claims, and frankly about 90% of what I saw for the state of Indiana looked highly suspicious. Since they don't document in any way where their claim comes from, or how to check up on it, I'm willing to bet that it was just a 'helpful submission' from someone perpetuating a silly myth.
This seems to be the pervailing attitude among those at Microsoft and elsewhere: users are stupid, so stupid that we must make all their decisions for them.
But, omigod, like, they are. Y'know?
The mentality of a helpdesk operator is that all users are probably pretty stupid people. With a very few exceptions, almost all of the people I've ever provided phone support to were in some basic fashion not capable of operating a computer without assistance. And the best way to fend them off was to reduce their options until there was only one way to do things. This would prevent them from either guessing wrong and fucking the system up, or panicking and just sitting there doing nothing until the help desk came along.
This sounds like I've made a broad generalization, and indeed I have. Based on the only available evidence, I have to assume that most of the people using my systems (I now design the stuff so I have an even keener need to prevent operator headspace) are relegated to that sub-human class end user. Or, operatus stupidus, to use the Wile E. Coyote Latin term.
However, what other conclusion could I draw? The people who know how the system works, and go along all day without stumbling over themselves, and even when they have a problem they intuitively work around it -- those people never call the help desk! So I will never know they exist unless a systemwide error occurs that simply must be dealt with by me. Put yourself in the shoes of a major software company, and you can see where this leads. The only customer comments you recieve at all are complaints from people who by and large don't know what they're doing. Your primary goal becomes to make sure they can't do it wrong next time.
So yes it's arrogant, but it's the only choice you can make when you've got millions of users. Gotta go for the lowest common denominator.
"God Did It" does not qualify as an answer. Because then the first question after that is "Where did God come from?". It doesn't make things clearer, and it only serves to stop those who accept authoritative arguments from asking any further questions -- curious and insightful though they may be. "God" is not a premise that can be tested or disproven.
While I find current cosmological theories extremely fascinating, I think making sweeping generalizations at this juncture is really premature. We can only observe a tiny corner of the Universe, and we have only observed a tiny slice of time, though that slice does expand backwards into time through distance. I am of the opinion that our current theories on how the universe works, as brilliant and revealing as they are, will only be the cornerstone for a further generation of theories which we cannot even imagine at this point. What we define as the observable universe may change in one hundred years, in ways that we cannot imagine at this point. That by itself would void almost all current cosmology.
Slashdot Mirror
These people no doubt view themselves has having a place in history. Film, music, and literature are their legacy, and they all probably expect to be read about in history books in 100 years. It needs to be demonstrated to them how they won't, and how in 100 years we will be living in frightening, Orwellian culture where we cannot remember our past, or prove that it even happened (not to mention that we won't even know it's Orwellian).
I don't like to nitpick an otherwise great argument (but I'm going to). That's not quite a valid analogy. In the case of E.T. life, we already have an instance of life that is known to exist on a planet. Ours. Since there are many similar stars, and we can presume many similar planets (and soon we may be able to prove their existence), it is therefore at least within the realm of possibility that E.T. life can exist. There is a theoretical mechanism for planetary formation, and a theoretical mechanism for the formation of life, and their validity can and has been tested.
On the other hand, God currently holds the status of an imaginary abstraction, and no known observable example of this type of entity is available. No theoretical model exists of a supreme being, and no test can be made nor conclusion drawn from his existence or lack thereof. It's not possible to prove his nonexistence, but it's really not necessary either. It would be more likely if someone could prove that an intelligent creator was required to exist as an antecedent to the existence of the universe, but as yet no one has done that to my knowledge.
The answer to all of this is to use sharp objects to get managers' eyes off of the "metrics" they're using and get their minds wrapped around the idea that the people answering the phone must first sound knowledgable, and second be knowledgable, and be capable of fixing the problem. That is all someone calling tech support wants. They do not want to hear that industry standard metrics are being applied to their problem, they want to hear that it's quick and easy to fix.
How would they do this? Well maybe they could start by training the help desk personnel to be an IQ point smarter than a bucket of mud. Then they could try giving them an encouraging environment to work in, where they are mentored by 3rd level techs who already know how it works. Then they could try paying them more than slave's wages. Then they could try giving them a path for advancement if they do well. All of this would require effort and investment on the corporations' and managments' parts, and until they're willing to do that help desks will always suck.
You could use a refresher in inductive reasoning. A theory is a model. It cannot ever be proven. The only way to test it is to use its underpinnings to make a prediction of a phenomenon that is not currently observed, and then find a way to observe that phenomenon. A theory derived from theological meanderings, on the other hand, has no testable consequences, and therefore is not even a theory, just a highly speculative story that doesn't mean anything.
wonder what if this find didn't prove the theory. In fact, what if it slightly disproved it.
If a specific prediction of the Big Bang theory had fallen down completely on its face, someone certainly would have announced it. If not on CNN, somewhere else. There are all sorts of people (who the mainstream establishment no doubt refers to as crackpots) who would jump on an issue like that, and run out and do their own exhaustive experiments to add volume to the disproof.
The band doesn't need tablature, Zico. They already know the song because they created it. Once you've learned the verse chorus and maybe an intro riff, if you can't play it from memory you will probably be kicked out of the band. "Writing" it usually refers to charting the lyrics out. The guitar solo is usually, like, improvised. Most rock bands don't read music, so they likely won't have a nice score.
The site is created by listeners who pick the part out by ear and write it down. Don't be such an uninformed tool.
I like your "official publications" line. It plays right into the idea that there is only one source anyone can have for music and culture. The "official" one. Do I have to get a license to be an "official" musician, too?
You can buy a $500 telescope and look at them yourself. Or attend a local star party. Ground-based amateur instruments aren't as clear, but you'd be surprised what a good 20" Dobsonian will reveal.
Such as?
The Big Bang has not happened and yet ALL Big Bangs are happening NOW.
That must make a lot of noise.
As for the existance of God - Yup. Call -it- what you will . . . Pretty much all the same.
The supernatural beings you mention all share one notable attribute: their existence is beyond our ability to test. As for Science, I don't ever confuse it with God.
Lets reduce everything we know to the simplest common item: Atoms. Lets reduce that down the the simplest: Hydrogen- The smallest atom/thing that we currently can identify. One Proton, One Electron. Proportionatly, the distance from that proton the the ever spinning and whirling electron is greater than that of the Earth to the Sun. So lets look at that electron.. Ah, hell... we can't. Why? Because it is constantly shimming in and out of existance: "Blinking" if you will. Just as we have movies that move at 48 frames per second (too fast for the human eye to see) we have the entire Universe constantly "winking" in and out of existance Millions of times per second.
What exactly is this meant to demonstrate? Electrons are routinely recorded in the cloud chambers of particle accelerators. If the universe is winking in and out of existence too fast for anyone to see, then what difference does that make vs. a universe that is always there? A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
My point: Everything you think you know is wrong.
Your point is really quite obscure. If I were to gather anything at all from your argument, it's that haven't spent more than a few cursory minutes actually researching your subject matter, and quite a lot of time reading corny science fiction from the '50's. You might pick up some Asimov or Clifford Simak novels -- or better yet, pick up some of Asimov's very well researched and factual tomes about practically every facet of science in existence. He's an excellent writer and presents the fundamental concepts of science in an easy to read, chatty fashion that still is highly organized and informative.
Trust me, they are. One is a theory. It postulates testable conditions. The other explicitly avoids being tested or questioned.
For something as fundamental as the difference between the big bang and "poof, in 6 days it all just showed up," all that matters is what your definition of a day is
The expansion of the universe is demonstrable fact. It's happening right now. Anyone with a spectrometer and a telescope can check it out. The '6 days' of creation theory doesn't posit a lot of testable consequences, on the other hand.
A valid bit of symbolism (assuming that God is all powerful and has control of silly things like days as well as space,) blow every scientific theory against all religion out of the water.
Indeed. First demonstrate a reason for God. I don't even ask theists to prove that God exists. I know it's impossible. It's more important to me to see them fumble to prove that the universe needs a God to exist. Because if it doesn't (and so far, it doesn't), then the whickering blades of Occam's razor triumph once again.
but if we all apply those "scientific" minds we value and think about deeper meanings, I think we'll all find more correlations between the Bible and what we find with tools like Hubble in nature than we'd like to believe.
If you are willing to completely ditch your standards of what "evidence" is and what constitutes a fact, and accept correlations and coincidences in more or less a state of whimsy, I guess you could get away with that. But it's a lot of work, it's entirely subjective, and reveals nothing. Simpler just to cut the God theory loose and forget about it.
what exactly is a rib?
It's a bone that depends off the sternum. Screwing with semantics is again subjective and will get you nowhere except lost.
Does the Bible explictly say Adam and Eve are people?
Does it say they are hermit crabs? If you are willing to abandon objective reality, anything could be true. So what?
Doesn't "let there be light" sound an awful lot like one of the bigger explosions you could think of?
If you can't be bothered to put any more thought into your assertion than this, tell me why then I should believe it. This isn't just misguided thinking: it's sloppy and lazy. You haven't bothered to probe your fundamental assertions beyond the 1cm depth. How do you expect to convince a hardened skeptic who's spent years looking through eyepieces, and river beds, for the reality? The real world is often stranger than we can imagine. But it's there 24 hours, 7 days a week, ready to be examined. Those who take the trouble to do so make real advances. Those who surround themselves with fairy tales get what they are looking for -- nothing. In the end your view of the universe is irrelevant because it doesn't conclude anything of substance. God may or may not exist. People in the bible may or may not be real. For crying out loud you sound like Majikthise and Vroomfondel from The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
C'mon! I dare you! Touch my monkey!!!!! Touuuch it!!!
However, the by-products and remnants of evolution can be observed, and notably they have been. This is a feeble attempt to make evolution as unobservable, and therefore as unlikely, as creationism. However, because a process cannot be directly observed in action does not mean it is not real. The evidence of a process is another way of observing it. The evidence of the evolutionary process is contained in fossils. The major complaint is that there are not enough of them. "Sample too small" is a subjective judgement. I was looking at some fossils this weekend, in fact. If I am to to take their existence in my hand as a subjective reality, I might as well assume that everything I see and touch is some sort of simulation, and therefore not believe that anything is real -- including the Bible and the words which it contains.
Science relies on assuming that conditions are identical everywhere throughout the universe. But this is not necessarily true!
Aside from the obvious absurdity of your argument relativity demands that it is true. Einstein's insistence that there is no special frame of reference was key to the theory of relativity. Relativity has been tested time and time again. To my knowledge no one has been able to make it fail.
What if light slowed down away from the earth?
What if monkeys flew out of my butt? If you can get away from the earth and test this presumption, that would be one thing. But you're simply talking nonsense until then. All that aside, assuming that special frames of reference exist is an invitation to an imaginary fantasy land. If the rules the universe appears to abide by can change at any given moment, we may as well not bother trying to learn anything about it at all. However, so far history has proven time and again that science works and produces tangible results. What time/life/labor saving invention can we attribute to the fruits of religious scholars?
This has been theorized by F. M. Hayes and S. Rhodes among other Creation Scientists, and they have presented preliminary evidence to challenge this assumption.
Where is their preliminary evidence? What is their reasoning. You are again talking right out of your ass.
Thus the universe's age is in reality not established AT ALL, not that scientists can agree on that either!
Boy, talk about a case of missing the point. The universe's age has been revised many times as new evidence has been turned up to change our perception of it. In other words, scientists are changing their models to conform to reality! What a concept! Change your opinion when you're proven wrong! "Creationists" could use a little of that methodology
Scientists use circular logic.
The bible is true because you believe its true, becuase the words of the bible are the words of god, because you believe that god wrote the bible, because the bible is true, because . . . Because you are calling the pot black, mr. kettle.
How do biologists know what level of carbon dating is how old?
I don't know. Ask the nuclear phsysicst who built the functioning atomic bomb based on the exact same radioactive decay period how he knew that the bomb would explode. Again, there are clear cases where science and technology are doing things for us that would simply not work if the functional premises of those technologies are wrong. What creationists like you want to do is take with one hand the technological fruits of these discoveries while denying with the other the implications behind them. It's not just hypocritical. It's infantile.
What is clear is that "faith" can stand up to "science" in its present state, and that "science" should not be left to just "Scientists".
Science is a free game. Anyone may play. The perception that only ivory tower drones make science is one that persons such as yourself seem to enjoy fostering, because it makes 'plain folk' immediately resentful. But that's only because you're painfully ignorant. If you want to play the game of science, and contribute, you have to play by some simple rules. Rule 1 is that you may not argue from authority. Rule 2 is that any statement you make must be subject to verification by anyone who wishes to independently check. Rule 3 is that you will be wrong, and you will be wrong a lot. If you cannot accept the possibility that you may be wrong, you will never be able to play the game. Rule 4 is that as soon as you think you are right, you must immediately begin theorizing as if you are wrong, and test your "right" theory against every available "wrong" theory.
Faith can pass none of these tests. Faith is assumption of rightness, oblivious to opposing viewpoints, vehemently denying the potential of error, vigorously avoiding verification. Faith proves nothing and reveals nothing -- except the depth or lack thereof of the intellect of the faithful. You will learn nothing worth learning about the universe with faith. You may learn much that is useful about yourself, but there is no guarantee.
Is it my imagination, or is
Really? Is homosexuality defined by the presence of a protien? I was unaware of that.
No, just do it with logic. His argument is hackneyed nonsense. He commits major fallacies. His major premise is appeal to a complex argument. The basic form of this fallacy is: "well, this is just too difficult for me to imagine any other way than X", without bothering to explain how X fits the explanation better than the straw-man explanations he throws up as its opponents.
I don't know (or particularly care) if gods, jesuses, devils, spooks, bunnies, or fairies are behind them, but I am at least honest enough to admit they can't be ruled out
They can. I rule them out with Occam's Razor. Works every time. Appealing to an invisible hand to operate the world is piss-poor logic. The invisible hand, or djinn or demon, because its existence cannot be subjected to experiment, is immediately beyond any chance of refute. One cannot argue about the motivations, composition, size, weight or mass of gods or devils, because they only exist as products of the imagination. Therefore they are beyond the realm of exploration, and their existence by the very definition of their being cannot be proved or disproved. Why bother with them, then?
Using gods and demons as logical quantities proves nothing and ultimately satisfies no one. Witness the proliferation of competing "one true religions" for proof of this. From my perspective, if the Catholics got it wrong from the perspective of the Presbyterians who got it wrong from the perspective of the Episcopelians, who surely got it wrong from the perspective of the Baptists, who definitely do not share the views of the Muslims, who cannot reconcile their beliefs with those of the Jews, who differ wildly in their conceptions from those of the Hindus, who have a different conception than those of the Bhuddists -- well you see where that leaves me. To an atheist, all religions are just wacky cults. And all gods are far more likely the products of fertile human imagination than anything else.
Why isn't the rest of Slashdot like this?
What exactly do you know about the rest of Slashdot? Can you imagine that you know the opinions of everyone else who posts here? That assertion aside, the specific reason I am not like that is because I discredit absurd arguments by pointing out their demonstrable flaws, and by making sure any counter-arguments I put forth do not contain the same flaws.
Obviously, it is.
Where is this obvious? How do you define the complexity of the human body? Is it a mathematical definition? How does complexity of a set of data relate to quantity. You could also say that the human body is no more complex than a Bee Gees' album, which also happens to fit on a CD. So does Beeethoven's Ninth Symphony. Complexity != size.
Obviously, it is. So where is this extra information located? It is obvious that there must be some other mechanism at work . . . There really is no other explanation.
Appealing to the complex argument doesn't help you explain your case, and is in fact a readily-identified logical fallacy. And again I would like to ask you what is so obvious about this. You use the word so frequently. I think you need to buy a thesarus.
The Church has known this for many thousands of years, and now the scientists are realising it too. The missing information must be supplied by the Holy Spirit
The difference between, say a scientific explanation and yours is that a mechanism is posited that we can study. In your argument, there is nothing to study. How does this information get to us? Where does it come from? How can we catch it in mid-stream? Your explanation answers none of these questions, and instead puts the answer on the other side of an unbridgable gap -- and people simply fill in whatever is convenient for them. But your answer is not science. And scientists are not "realizing" this, either. A scientist who "realized" this would no doubt give up science and start preaching. And what he would be doing would then no longer be called science
At least, this is what we were told in school. In actual fact, it breathes information in, and gives it a soul.
That's not what I was told in school, but whether I was told it in school or not is irrelevant. Just because it came from a school does not make it correct. That's known as an argument from authority. Here's a question I have for you: what is a soul? What is it made of? How big is it? What color is it? Is it observable in visible light? Does it have mass? Does it radiate energy? If so, in what frequency?
I know I will be labeled a troll for this, and am saddened. But really, the Church has known this for thousands of years, and now we are being proved correct.
You're actually being labeled as offtopic. And I'm confirming it in metamod. But I thought it important to respond to your ridiculous, ill-concieved assertions just to show you that not everyone in this world swallows this kind of hogwash whole.
As for what the Church has "known" -- well the Church has failed to acknowledge almost every significant advance in human knowledge for the last 500 years. It took the Catholic Church over 300 years to admit that Galileo was right, and their track record since then hasn't been any better. The unexpected complexity of the gene map is not "proof" that the Church's point of view is right. This is not a political contest between two opposing points of view. Science is the exploration of reality. When one pathway of exploration comes to a dead end, it simply means that pathway is not valid. It does not mean we all say, "OK, I guess they were wrong, and we can go back to what we believed in the 18th century!"
Sorry, Robert Silverberg beat 'em to it by about eleven years. His conception of this was called an Urban Monad and was basically exactly the building described in the article. Hundreds of stories tall, everything self-contained. I read the book in the late seventies and it was quite captivating. I no longer remember the title of the book, and when I do a Google search on Urban Monad I see that there was a whole series. I am guessing I read The World Inside but I can't remember for sure. Time to warm up the library card and see if it's still in circulation. And yes, at the end of the book as I recall someone commits suicide from the top of the building. A little too good an opportunity to pass up. . .
It will become interesting when composers and artists start to realize that nobody will bother studying their stuff in school until a LONG LONG time after its popularity has completely faded away.
This raises the possibility that much of the culture of the 20th century will simply disappear into a legal black hole.
This means that, some day, the last recordings of the big popular groups will simply grind themselves into dust and no one will remember who they were? Elton who? Britney what? Did Disney make movies way back then? Since the works, no longer legally copyable, will have no current fans, no one will care about preserving them. Want to be remembered as long as Beethoven or Shakespeare? Good luck. The copyright system is working against you.
I'm not a mathematician. But I'm considered fairly adept at programming, because I have a strong background in that other often-overlooked area of expertise, logic. One of the things I learned when I was studying logic was not to make fucking overbroad generalizations. Such statements are easily spotted -- they include phrases like "vast majority" and "it has been my experience".
If you were to list each programmer you've met by their name, and provide an accurate index of their mathematical abilities, and a gauge of their "script-kiddie"-ness (is there a qualitative measure of that, by the way?), and then compare it against the unstated but probably large number of programmers whom you know nothing about, then we would have a valid basis for whether or not your argument was anything but a total canard.
Or we could just dismiss your argument on the basis of its specious generalizations. Which I usually do.
. . . . or logical, or demonstrable, or true, but you went ahead and said it anyway.
People do not get the fucking bends from moving up 3700 feet in the air. I was born and raised in high altitudes -- 5,280 feet in Denver, CO. I routinely took trips that took me up to 8 and 12,000 feet above sea level. Never a problem. Now I live at about 300 ft. above sea level.
Ask someone who knows what the bleeding hell they're talking about -- maybe a small airplane pilot, for example? They would also routinely shift their elevation by several thousand feet with no ill effects. Pressurization only becomes an issue at around 14,000 ft. and above.
Well before you start, make sure you read, in addition to the Larry Niven and Issac Asimov books listed in the other two replies, this book, which also encompasses this very similar premise. When I first saw this news story I thought "urban monad." I read Silverberg's book over twenty years ago and have been generally fascinated with the concept ever since. It's a pity that as an adult I developed such a fear of heights, or I would be clamoring to live in one of these.
I think you answered your own question. Killing the goose that laid the golden egg is usually done by the greedy owner.
It's not a joke. I'm using it right now. It rocks. It's the intuitive extension to using a mouse -- like having a real one-click menu that's always right beneath the cursor. I'm sure Opera is going to get a place in that hall of fame for human interface design that I saw a few weeks ago. The only thing they need to do to make it better is add some sort of help screen that quickly and easily details what the available gestures are. I think a lot of people won't know it's there and may possibly be confused when it happens accidentally.
Who said I was going to buy it anyway? Maybe after I watched it once, I decided it was crap and never watched it again. Maybe, instead, I went and found all the other movies that the director created and watched them as well. And by sharing, do you also mean loaning a copy of the movie? I do that all the time. Is it taking money out of the rental store's pocket if I loan my copy of Clerks around? At what point do we draw the line?
You don't get front-page articles on slashdot about people putting locks in shops to stop people to stealing the merchandise, so why should it be any different when try and stop other kinds of crime that costs money?
I would like to see research that proves that this costs money. See point above. At what point is the hypothetical pirate or casual copier removing money from someone's pocket. How, in fact, does the industry even know when casual copying occurs?
I don't understand why people are so defensive of pirates.
Let me tell you something. I don't know a single person with whom I interact who hasn't at one time or another casually copied something, whether it be a videotape or a whole software program. I'm talking about anyone from my middle-aged law-and-order churchgoing Republican father-in-law to the six-year-old down the street. Every single person I know has casually copied something in the past. And it's been going on for YEARS. 30 or 60 million Napster users didn't just start casually copying CD's overnight. They were doing it ALL ALONG. Why is the industry panicking now? I suspect it's because the issue isn't casual copying at all. It's a distribution system that is not under the control of the big fish.
Moreover, it's not simply a 'white-collar', victimless crime. Piracy does hurt people.
How? Again refer to my first point. I buy plenty of CD's and DVDS and software. I think the value of my DVD / CD collection likely exceeds that of the players and viewing equipment in my house by several times, including my surround-sound stereo and my 27" tv. If I am given a casual copy by a friend, it's usually a "check this out" affair. If I like what I see or hear I go get more. Who is hurting?
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
I do it all the time, pal. I give away programs, and music of my own creation. Do a little research into the gift economy, and realize I get an intellectual payback that's worth far more than cash. I get credibility.
can't see how people can object to actions that stop piracy - people seem to think no-one gets hurt by these things.
Read this article before you decide who's really getting hurt. Especially, go to the bottom and absorb this quote: "Ironically, the Tainan District Prosecutor and his band of cops could hardly have helped stumbling over carts and tables laden to the point of collapse with pirated CDs as they marched onto the NCKU campus to wage war against 'illegal' MP3s." The real pirates, the ones who actually go out and sell product in place of the valid stuff, are not in the picture right now. No one seems to be mentioning that actual pirates, who substitute the valid product that I would go buy, are the ones that can be demonstrated to have cost money. That's because again I think this isn't about real piracy at all. It's about distribution, and controlling the means whereby people get the product.
It's never the big boss that gets hurt. Not Julia Roberts or Leonardo Di Caprio. It's the man who's packing the videos for $8/hour. It's the guy making them. He's the one losing the money.
This is either totally ignorant or totally insightful. Judging from the other points in your post, I'd choose ignorant. It would be insightful if you realized that alternate distribution methods do threaten to put the $8/hour guy out of business. But I have a hard time seeing the pimply kid at Blockbuster as a poster boy for the MPAA. I think they'd probably hire Mel Gibson instead.
I feel horrified that slashdot can condone it.
I am horrified when genocide goes down in Serbia. I am horrified that the IMF will bankrupt a Third World economy for their short-term interest rates. I am horrified when a small child is crushed under the bumper of a drunk driver. Widespread piracy of the latest Britney Spears glurge somehow fails to horrify me. Maybe it's just my perspective.
Dude, I think you may have been had. There is a pretty common urban myth regarding a legislated value for pi. I don't see that this dumblaws site has done a lot of research to back up their claims, and frankly about 90% of what I saw for the state of Indiana looked highly suspicious. Since they don't document in any way where their claim comes from, or how to check up on it, I'm willing to bet that it was just a 'helpful submission' from someone perpetuating a silly myth.
But, omigod, like, they are. Y'know?
The mentality of a helpdesk operator is that all users are probably pretty stupid people. With a very few exceptions, almost all of the people I've ever provided phone support to were in some basic fashion not capable of operating a computer without assistance. And the best way to fend them off was to reduce their options until there was only one way to do things. This would prevent them from either guessing wrong and fucking the system up, or panicking and just sitting there doing nothing until the help desk came along.
This sounds like I've made a broad generalization, and indeed I have. Based on the only available evidence, I have to assume that most of the people using my systems (I now design the stuff so I have an even keener need to prevent operator headspace) are relegated to that sub-human class end user. Or, operatus stupidus, to use the Wile E. Coyote Latin term.
However, what other conclusion could I draw? The people who know how the system works, and go along all day without stumbling over themselves, and even when they have a problem they intuitively work around it -- those people never call the help desk! So I will never know they exist unless a systemwide error occurs that simply must be dealt with by me. Put yourself in the shoes of a major software company, and you can see where this leads. The only customer comments you recieve at all are complaints from people who by and large don't know what they're doing. Your primary goal becomes to make sure they can't do it wrong next time.
So yes it's arrogant, but it's the only choice you can make when you've got millions of users. Gotta go for the lowest common denominator.
"God Did It" does not qualify as an answer. Because then the first question after that is "Where did God come from?". It doesn't make things clearer, and it only serves to stop those who accept authoritative arguments from asking any further questions -- curious and insightful though they may be. "God" is not a premise that can be tested or disproven.
While I find current cosmological theories extremely fascinating, I think making sweeping generalizations at this juncture is really premature. We can only observe a tiny corner of the Universe, and we have only observed a tiny slice of time, though that slice does expand backwards into time through distance. I am of the opinion that our current theories on how the universe works, as brilliant and revealing as they are, will only be the cornerstone for a further generation of theories which we cannot even imagine at this point. What we define as the observable universe may change in one hundred years, in ways that we cannot imagine at this point. That by itself would void almost all current cosmology.