How about simply having a computer that has nothing stored on it that anybody else can use for something nefarious? The reason that hackers want to break into people's computers is to obtain information that can be used for personal gain or to hurt someone else. If there is nothing worth stealing, then it won't be stolen.
We are talking about real life, little boy, not science fiction. In the real world, everything has to obey the laws of physics and the derivative sciences. There are limits to how fast things can evolve.
A basic assumption in this and most other posts on this subject is that we know ALL laws of physics. That is an incredibly arrogant assumption. It is quite likely that there are other laws of physics which we haven't even imagined yet. There are hints of this in a collection of books called the Bible. The central tenet of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This resurrection from the dead violates all KNOWN laws of physics, but that does not mean it is impossible and that it did not indeed happen.
Just because we are limited to time, space and death, does not mean that there could not be eternal entities in other places that are immortal, have no such temporal limitations and have never learned evil. Right now, good and evil are inextricably mixed up together. Every human being has a choice between good and evil. A terrible act of evil was just perpetrated in Connecticut. It appears right now that the earth is a prison planet, isolated by the immensity of time and space. This is to prevent the spread of evil to other places in the universe. For thousands of years and for all the foreseeable future, death is the only way to escape from this prison planet. In the book of Hebrews, part of the Bible, it is written:...it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,... (Hebrews 9:27)
Nobody here even on/. will deny the truth of the first part of the sentence, but many if not most modern “enlightened” western people try to negate the truth of the second half, namely that there is a judgment coming after death. It is at this judgment, that good and evil will be separated, so that there are henceforth two locations. The location where only good will exist is commonly called Heaven in our culture and the bad place is called Hell.
Don't be angry with Google for following laws that allow them to pay less in taxes than you think they should, be angry at the lawmakers that craft the laws that allow them to do so.
There is plenty of anger for them both and then some. Your argument is specious because those same corporations are buying those same politicians specifically to favor them with laws written by the corporation lobbyists. Of course the tax system favors them since they wrote the tax loopholes this dumb ass CEO is espousing as virtuous.
Do corporations vote and elect these dishonest people's office? Is there such a thing as “an honest politician”? Are ALL politicians corruptible? Since such laws and loopholes exist, why get upset when large companies or anyone else follows the laws made by corrupt politicians? As someone once said: “we have found the enemy and he is us”.
Giving something a fancy name such as “symmetry breaking” does not really define what it is. Why is this “symmetry” breaking in the first place? What broke it? In our normal everyday world, something that is “broken” usually has a cause that is considered bad by most of us. Only in the Bible are we given the root cause for all the brokenness in this creation.
According to Einstein, time and space are relative, being affected by among other things the velocity frame of the observer and the gravitational field the observer is subject to. Why is it assumed (believed), when the conditions in the early universe were vastly different than today, such as an immense gravity from all the matter concentrated in a very small volume, is it then not likely that time itself proceeded at a different rate, than it does today? The Bible reveals that this thing scientists label “entropy”, the essence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics did not always exist and will someday be repealed.
Most information comes to us from other people. This is especially true of the past. If a video had been made of Jesus Christ walking on the water, there would be many people if not most, who would say that the video is fake, because they do not WANT to believe “miracles” are possible at all. In the end, it matters not so much what to believe, but whom you believe. For some people, no amount of evidence will suffice for them to believe what they do not want to believe. There are people that will deny that the Holocaust ever happened and that humans ever walked on the moon. If you or anybody else does not want to believe what 40 witnesses have recorded in 66 books, now called the Bible, that is your prerogative. If you do not want to believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful God has the capability to truthfully communicate to humanity, that's OK, he gives you that freedom to choose. However, from experience we know that our choices do have consequences.
"...CO2 being a greenhouse gas, why would it not cause warming?
It definitely would and does cause warming. But why is it uniformly assumed that warming would ONLY be bad? Living things generally do better when it is warm rather than when it is cold. There are large land areas today that are too cold for much of the life on earth including people. If these large land areas became habitable and productive, that would most likely outweigh any negative effects such as a slightly higher sea level. Any sea level rise would be offset by the fact that a warmer atmosphere can contain more water. More water in the atmosphere would mean more average rainfall, which would make formerly dry areas productive as well. Water vapor is also a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Because water has such a large heat capacity, temperature differences from night to day and in various parts of the earth would be evened out. The average water vapor content of the East Coast especially in summertime is much higher than here in the West. Therefore the day/night temperature variations are much smaller in the East than in the West. A more even tempered earth, also would be producing fewer hurricanes, tornadoes and other violent weather. Overall, I think global warming is a good thing, as long as it happens over many generations, giving living things and people time to adapt.
What mechanism that scientists think they know about the working of the sun accounts for 30% less output than today? Since nobody was there to observe this, how does anybody know that the sun produced less energy back millions of years ago than it does today?
How do you classify people who definitely believe the earth is getting warmer, but not because of the activity of people? How do you classify people who believe that a warmer Earth would be beneficial overall to all living things including human beings? Where do fossil fuels come from and why do we call them that? Where was all that carbon that we humans are now so lustily burning, before the fossil fuels existed?
I will give you my answers. Yes, there is evidence that the earth is getting warmer, but there is no evidence YET that human activity is to blame. Living things generally do much better when it is warmer than when it is cold. There are large land areas on earth, which are too cold to grow much food for any creature, including people. Fossil fuels come from things that were once alive, both plants and animals. In order for plants to take in carbon to make hydrocarbons with, they get it from the atmosphere.
Consequently, before fossil fuels were formed, all the carbon we have already burned plus all that is still in the ground must have been in the atmosphere, where plants could take it and water, in combination with sunlight to make hydrocarbons, which later were buried. Now we dig up and pump some of these hydrocarbons and put the carbon back in the atmosphere. If living creatures, before they became fossils were able to live in a much warmer climate due to the abundant carbon dioxide, then it is quite likely that humans would also be able to not only survive, but thrive on a uniformly warm Earth.
I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.
First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.
Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.
And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.
$140 billion? That's chicken feed. The federal government deficit is $4.5 billion a day. Simple arithmetic yields that the whole country could be wired for what the government borrows every month.
What I was talking about was large jumps in rapidly reproducing organisms, rather than subtle changes such as in the “hawthorn fly”. No fruit fly has ever successfully been made into a housefly and even less so into a kind of wasp or grasshopper. This is so, even though they are all still insects. The same is true of bacteria and other much more rapidly multiplying organisms, where it is possible to observe many generations in a relatively short time. Even in the world of viruses, where the reproduction rate can be phenomenally huge, there are groupings that are never crossed. A cold virus never “evolves” into an HIV virus. It does not really matter what word you apply to such distinct groups of living organisms.
Dogs may have “evolved” from one ancestral dog or wolf, but never a cat of any kind. Dogs, cats, cows and goats etc. are distinct groups, no matter what scientific names may be assigned to them, even though they are all classified as mammals.
The point is that certain groupings of creatures remain distinct and separate and never change from one group into another distinct group, either naturally or with the help of human ingenuity. This is true of even the most rapidly multiplying kinds of living things, such as bacteria and viruses.
Has any scientist even by the most strenuous effort been able to turn fruit flies into any other kind of fly? Has anyone ever mutated an E. coli into a spirochete or any other kind of bacteria? No? If the best efforts of man can't accomplish this, why do you think it can happen by any other mechanism?
because a warmer Earth would be more habitable than the one we have now. After all, the internal blood temperature of mammals is in the neighborhood of 100 F or a little less or little more, which is the temperature for which biological processes are optimized. Hurrah for global warming, bring it on!
Your “running backwards experiment” is only hypothetical and has never been observed in nature. Nobody was there to observe this happen, thus it is pure conjecture. Dogs have always been dogs. It has never been demonstrated by fossils or any other means that there were transitional creatures between dogs, cats, bears or other animals. Your example of great danes and chihuahuas requires the intelligent intervention of people, in order for these breeds to exist at all. Evolutionary theory precludes the application of intelligence and intelligent design. The fundamental underlying purpose of the theory of evolution is to try to explain the complexity and diversity of the universe, especially life, without reference to a supremely intelligent Creator that has been consistently called God for thousands of years of human history.
When you get a gift, such as a computer or appliance, is your first concern how or when it came into existence? Is it not much more important to find out why it was given to you and how you can make good use of it? Is it not possible to study biology or other sciences without asking questions of origins? Do we really have to know where the laws of electricity came from in order to build an electric generator? Can science not be taught without the controversy of origins? Why even study what happened millions or billions of years ago? Nobody was there to actually see what really went on. What happened in history is often controversial and some events, such as the Holocaust are denied by some to have ever taken place. I think that science education and science in general should concentrate on discovering the secrets of the universe as we observe it TODAY and then using those discoveries to help mankind.
I still use windows XP to control some legacy hardware. However that old computer is not ever connected to the Internet, so it is not going to show up on surveys of net connections. It is likely that there are still quite a few computers using XP that are used to control specialized hardware which the manufacturers thereof have never updated to a more recent version of Windows or who have long gone out of business. Therefore, the number of copies of Windows XP in use could still be considerably higher than stated in the article.
I agree that this might work if you have access to the person who gave that “revelation”. Even then, it would depend on exactly what the “revelation” was about. If someone told you that an angel appeared to them and gave them some golden plates that had the strange writing on them to translate, you could not test this scientifically, unless you had access to said golden plates. You could only believe or disbelieve.
It would also fail to work if that person were a historical figure like George Washington or Jesus Christ. In that case you would also be still confined to believing or disbelieving anything that is written about what they have said or not said. There are people today that refuse to believe that any human being ever stepped on the moon as well as others who solemnly assert that the Holocaust never happened. Anybody who does not WANT to believe, won't believe, no matter how much evidence is presented. Most information in life comes to us from other people, usually from those we trust. In the end therefore, it is much more important whom you believe than what you believe.
If people just evolved, without there being any God, who and on what basis can anyone decide what is moral and immoral, right and wrong? Right and wrong then becomes the collective decision of the majority or those who are most fit to survive. For a short time, the Nazis decided it was morally permissible to exterminate Jews and others they did not like. They could put the decision into practice, because they were more fit than the Jews for the Nazis had the bigger weapons. It took the more fit allies with their even bigger weapons and a world war to forcefully persuade the less fit Nazis that their decisions to kill and enslave others were wrong and immoral. Bottom line: What evolutionary mechanism comes into play, that tells us certain things are wrong or immoral?
How is religion explained by evolution? More people have been killed for religious reasons than just about any other reason. A central dogma of evolutionary theory is the priciple of survival of the fittest. The creatures with the sharpest claws or best weapons survives and reproduces. Evolution therefore essentially promotes violence. Eat or be eaten. Most religions however, especially Christianity, teaches us to be peaceful and “turn the other cheek”, not returning evil for evil as Jesus Christ taught. It seems to me that this kind of philosophy is disadvantageous from a survival of the fittest evolutionary standpoint.
No supernatural theory has ever been proven NOT to be true either. In reality, nothing can be “proven” except perhaps a theorem of geometry. The theory of evolution must be believed or disbelieved. In this respect it is no different than any religion. Someone who does not want to believe, won't believe, no matter how much evidence they are confronted with. There are people today who say that the Holocaust never happened and that no human being ever set foot on the moon. They will not believe the evidence no matter how overwhelming it may be. Believing or disbelieving is an act of the human will. A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
Of course, lots of kids can grow up to carry lots of guns, so the survival of the fittest still applies. As far as morality goes, if there is no God, then the morality of those with the best weapons and lots of them decides what is moral and what is not. The Nazis for a time, had lots of guns and decided it was perfectly moral to kill the Jews and others they did not like.
Getting a USB stick from Russia or who knows where else physically plugged into a SCADA system somewhere in the USA is quite a bit more difficult than some hacker sitting in a basement in some distant land breaking in over the Internet.
The Bible teaches that God created all things. That includes time. This does not contradict modern scientific theories, such as the Big Bang. Modern scientific assumptions are that time itself has always proceeded uniformly as we observe it today. Another assumption is that the speed of light, a relationship between time and space has never changed since the beginning. Nobody even still today knows exactly what this thing we call “time” really is and why it proceeds in one direction only, namely from past through the present into the future.
An assumption is merely a scientific way of saying “I believe”. There is no way to prove or disprove this basic assumption about the constancy of time. Textbooks on evolution are filled with the phrase “it is believed”, it is “thought to be” and other uncertainties. The Bible on the other hand is filled with thousands of certain phrases, such as “thus says the Lord” or “the word of God came unto me”. Therefore it comes down basically to a choice whether a person wants to believe uncertain statements in science textbooks or the certain pronouncements in the Bible. In the end, it boils down to WHOM you want to believe, some author of a science textbook or the Bible as the word of God.
FYI Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, a high honor reserved for the few
Actually, Darwin isn't there, only the earthly house he once occupied, but has left behind. It is highly likely that Darwin himself has met God by now. We may read in the Bible:
Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,
There is no way to dispute the first part of this verse because we all die, but there are many, especially here on/. that will dispute the last part of the sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
We should just outlaw malware. Then we wouldn't have to worry about it anymore! >_>
which of course will work just as well as outlawing drugs or assault weapons.
How about simply having a computer that has nothing stored on it that anybody else can use for something nefarious? The reason that hackers want to break into people's computers is to obtain information that can be used for personal gain or to hurt someone else. If there is nothing worth stealing, then it won't be stolen.
We are talking about real life, little boy, not science fiction. In the real world, everything has to obey the laws of physics and the derivative sciences. There are limits to how fast things can evolve.
A basic assumption in this and most other posts on this subject is that we know ALL laws of physics. That is an incredibly arrogant assumption. It is quite likely that there are other laws of physics which we haven't even imagined yet. There are hints of this in a collection of books called the Bible. The central tenet of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This resurrection from the dead violates all KNOWN laws of physics, but that does not mean it is impossible and that it did not indeed happen.
Just because we are limited to time, space and death, does not mean that there could not be eternal entities in other places that are immortal, have no such temporal limitations and have never learned evil. Right now, good and evil are inextricably mixed up together. Every human being has a choice between good and evil. A terrible act of evil was just perpetrated in Connecticut. It appears right now that the earth is a prison planet, isolated by the immensity of time and space. This is to prevent the spread of evil to other places in the universe. For thousands of years and for all the foreseeable future, death is the only way to escape from this prison planet. In the book of Hebrews, part of the Bible, it is written: ...it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,... (Hebrews 9:27)
Nobody here even on /. will deny the truth of the first part of the sentence, but many if not most modern “enlightened” western people try to negate the truth of the second half, namely that there is a judgment coming after death. It is at this judgment, that good and evil will be separated, so that there are henceforth two locations. The location where only good will exist is commonly called Heaven in our culture and the bad place is called Hell.
There is plenty of anger for them both and then some. Your argument is specious because those same corporations are buying those same politicians specifically to favor them with laws written by the corporation lobbyists. Of course the tax system favors them since they wrote the tax loopholes this dumb ass CEO is espousing as virtuous.
Do corporations vote and elect these dishonest people's office? Is there such a thing as “an honest politician”? Are ALL politicians corruptible? Since such laws and loopholes exist, why get upset when large companies or anyone else follows the laws made by corrupt politicians? As someone once said: “we have found the enemy and he is us”.
Giving something a fancy name such as “symmetry breaking” does not really define what it is. Why is this “symmetry” breaking in the first place? What broke it? In our normal everyday world, something that is “broken” usually has a cause that is considered bad by most of us. Only in the Bible are we given the root cause for all the brokenness in this creation.
According to Einstein, time and space are relative, being affected by among other things the velocity frame of the observer and the gravitational field the observer is subject to. Why is it assumed (believed), when the conditions in the early universe were vastly different than today, such as an immense gravity from all the matter concentrated in a very small volume, is it then not likely that time itself proceeded at a different rate, than it does today? The Bible reveals that this thing scientists label “entropy”, the essence of the 2nd law of thermodynamics did not always exist and will someday be repealed.
Most information comes to us from other people. This is especially true of the past. If a video had been made of Jesus Christ walking on the water, there would be many people if not most, who would say that the video is fake, because they do not WANT to believe “miracles” are possible at all. In the end, it matters not so much what to believe, but whom you believe. For some people, no amount of evidence will suffice for them to believe what they do not want to believe. There are people that will deny that the Holocaust ever happened and that humans ever walked on the moon. If you or anybody else does not want to believe what 40 witnesses have recorded in 66 books, now called the Bible, that is your prerogative. If you do not want to believe that an all-knowing, all-powerful God has the capability to truthfully communicate to humanity, that's OK, he gives you that freedom to choose. However, from experience we know that our choices do have consequences.
"...CO2 being a greenhouse gas, why would it not cause warming?
It definitely would and does cause warming. But why is it uniformly assumed that warming would ONLY be bad? Living things generally do better when it is warm rather than when it is cold. There are large land areas today that are too cold for much of the life on earth including people. If these large land areas became habitable and productive, that would most likely outweigh any negative effects such as a slightly higher sea level. Any sea level rise would be offset by the fact that a warmer atmosphere can contain more water. More water in the atmosphere would mean more average rainfall, which would make formerly dry areas productive as well. Water vapor is also a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. Because water has such a large heat capacity, temperature differences from night to day and in various parts of the earth would be evened out. The average water vapor content of the East Coast especially in summertime is much higher than here in the West. Therefore the day/night temperature variations are much smaller in the East than in the West. A more even tempered earth, also would be producing fewer hurricanes, tornadoes and other violent weather. Overall, I think global warming is a good thing, as long as it happens over many generations, giving living things and people time to adapt.
What mechanism that scientists think they know about the working of the sun accounts for 30% less output than today? Since nobody was there to observe this, how does anybody know that the sun produced less energy back millions of years ago than it does today?
How do you classify people who definitely believe the earth is getting warmer, but not because of the activity of people? How do you classify people who believe that a warmer Earth would be beneficial overall to all living things including human beings? Where do fossil fuels come from and why do we call them that? Where was all that carbon that we humans are now so lustily burning, before the fossil fuels existed?
I will give you my answers. Yes, there is evidence that the earth is getting warmer, but there is no evidence YET that human activity is to blame. Living things generally do much better when it is warmer than when it is cold. There are large land areas on earth, which are too cold to grow much food for any creature, including people. Fossil fuels come from things that were once alive, both plants and animals. In order for plants to take in carbon to make hydrocarbons with, they get it from the atmosphere.
Consequently, before fossil fuels were formed, all the carbon we have already burned plus all that is still in the ground must have been in the atmosphere, where plants could take it and water, in combination with sunlight to make hydrocarbons, which later were buried. Now we dig up and pump some of these hydrocarbons and put the carbon back in the atmosphere. If living creatures, before they became fossils were able to live in a much warmer climate due to the abundant carbon dioxide, then it is quite likely that humans would also be able to not only survive, but thrive on a uniformly warm Earth.
I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.
First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.
Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.
And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.
$140 billion? That's chicken feed. The federal government deficit is $4.5 billion a day. Simple arithmetic yields that the whole country could be wired for what the government borrows every month.
What I was talking about was large jumps in rapidly reproducing organisms, rather than subtle changes such as in the “hawthorn fly”. No fruit fly has ever successfully been made into a housefly and even less so into a kind of wasp or grasshopper. This is so, even though they are all still insects. The same is true of bacteria and other much more rapidly multiplying organisms, where it is possible to observe many generations in a relatively short time. Even in the world of viruses, where the reproduction rate can be phenomenally huge, there are groupings that are never crossed. A cold virus never “evolves” into an HIV virus. It does not really matter what word you apply to such distinct groups of living organisms.
Dogs may have “evolved” from one ancestral dog or wolf, but never a cat of any kind. Dogs, cats, cows and goats etc. are distinct groups, no matter what scientific names may be assigned to them, even though they are all classified as mammals.
The point is that certain groupings of creatures remain distinct and separate and never change from one group into another distinct group, either naturally or with the help of human ingenuity. This is true of even the most rapidly multiplying kinds of living things, such as bacteria and viruses.
Has any scientist even by the most strenuous effort been able to turn fruit flies into any other kind of fly? Has anyone ever mutated an E. coli into a spirochete or any other kind of bacteria? No? If the best efforts of man can't accomplish this, why do you think it can happen by any other mechanism?
because a warmer Earth would be more habitable than the one we have now. After all, the internal blood temperature of mammals is in the neighborhood of 100 F or a little less or little more, which is the temperature for which biological processes are optimized. Hurrah for global warming, bring it on!
Your “running backwards experiment” is only hypothetical and has never been observed in nature. Nobody was there to observe this happen, thus it is pure conjecture. Dogs have always been dogs. It has never been demonstrated by fossils or any other means that there were transitional creatures between dogs, cats, bears or other animals. Your example of great danes and chihuahuas requires the intelligent intervention of people, in order for these breeds to exist at all. Evolutionary theory precludes the application of intelligence and intelligent design. The fundamental underlying purpose of the theory of evolution is to try to explain the complexity and diversity of the universe, especially life, without reference to a supremely intelligent Creator that has been consistently called God for thousands of years of human history.
When you get a gift, such as a computer or appliance, is your first concern how or when it came into existence? Is it not much more important to find out why it was given to you and how you can make good use of it? Is it not possible to study biology or other sciences without asking questions of origins? Do we really have to know where the laws of electricity came from in order to build an electric generator? Can science not be taught without the controversy of origins? Why even study what happened millions or billions of years ago? Nobody was there to actually see what really went on. What happened in history is often controversial and some events, such as the Holocaust are denied by some to have ever taken place. I think that science education and science in general should concentrate on discovering the secrets of the universe as we observe it TODAY and then using those discoveries to help mankind.
I still use windows XP to control some legacy hardware. However that old computer is not ever connected to the Internet, so it is not going to show up on surveys of net connections. It is likely that there are still quite a few computers using XP that are used to control specialized hardware which the manufacturers thereof have never updated to a more recent version of Windows or who have long gone out of business. Therefore, the number of copies of Windows XP in use could still be considerably higher than stated in the article.
It depends on the where. I like the color blue on my clothes or the sky, but not bruises on my skin. :)
I agree that this might work if you have access to the person who gave that “revelation”. Even then, it would depend on exactly what the “revelation” was about. If someone told you that an angel appeared to them and gave them some golden plates that had the strange writing on them to translate, you could not test this scientifically, unless you had access to said golden plates. You could only believe or disbelieve.
It would also fail to work if that person were a historical figure like George Washington or Jesus Christ. In that case you would also be still confined to believing or disbelieving anything that is written about what they have said or not said. There are people today that refuse to believe that any human being ever stepped on the moon as well as others who solemnly assert that the Holocaust never happened. Anybody who does not WANT to believe, won't believe, no matter how much evidence is presented. Most information in life comes to us from other people, usually from those we trust. In the end therefore, it is much more important whom you believe than what you believe.
If people just evolved, without there being any God, who and on what basis can anyone decide what is moral and immoral, right and wrong? Right and wrong then becomes the collective decision of the majority or those who are most fit to survive. For a short time, the Nazis decided it was morally permissible to exterminate Jews and others they did not like. They could put the decision into practice, because they were more fit than the Jews for the Nazis had the bigger weapons. It took the more fit allies with their even bigger weapons and a world war to forcefully persuade the less fit Nazis that their decisions to kill and enslave others were wrong and immoral. Bottom line: What evolutionary mechanism comes into play, that tells us certain things are wrong or immoral?
How is religion explained by evolution? More people have been killed for religious reasons than just about any other reason. A central dogma of evolutionary theory is the priciple of survival of the fittest. The creatures with the sharpest claws or best weapons survives and reproduces. Evolution therefore essentially promotes violence. Eat or be eaten. Most religions however, especially Christianity, teaches us to be peaceful and “turn the other cheek”, not returning evil for evil as Jesus Christ taught. It seems to me that this kind of philosophy is disadvantageous from a survival of the fittest evolutionary standpoint.
...no supernatural theory has ever proven true...
No supernatural theory has ever been proven NOT to be true either. In reality, nothing can be “proven” except perhaps a theorem of geometry. The theory of evolution must be believed or disbelieved. In this respect it is no different than any religion. Someone who does not want to believe, won't believe, no matter how much evidence they are confronted with. There are people today who say that the Holocaust never happened and that no human being ever set foot on the moon. They will not believe the evidence no matter how overwhelming it may be. Believing or disbelieving is an act of the human will. A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced still.
Of course, lots of kids can grow up to carry lots of guns, so the survival of the fittest still applies. As far as morality goes, if there is no God, then the morality of those with the best weapons and lots of them decides what is moral and what is not. The Nazis for a time, had lots of guns and decided it was perfectly moral to kill the Jews and others they did not like.
Yes yes, convenience and saving a few dollars is more important to the bean counters than security.
Getting a USB stick from Russia or who knows where else physically plugged into a SCADA system somewhere in the USA is quite a bit more difficult than some hacker sitting in a basement in some distant land breaking in over the Internet.
With all money comes control. If the religious nutters want to fund a school they will demand it teaches to their liking.
Yes, but religious nutters can't force you to pay taxes, so their schools can be funded.
The Bible teaches that God created all things. That includes time. This does not contradict modern scientific theories, such as the Big Bang. Modern scientific assumptions are that time itself has always proceeded uniformly as we observe it today. Another assumption is that the speed of light, a relationship between time and space has never changed since the beginning. Nobody even still today knows exactly what this thing we call “time” really is and why it proceeds in one direction only, namely from past through the present into the future.
An assumption is merely a scientific way of saying “I believe”. There is no way to prove or disprove this basic assumption about the constancy of time. Textbooks on evolution are filled with the phrase “it is believed”, it is “thought to be” and other uncertainties. The Bible on the other hand is filled with thousands of certain phrases, such as “thus says the Lord” or “the word of God came unto me”. Therefore it comes down basically to a choice whether a person wants to believe uncertain statements in science textbooks or the certain pronouncements in the Bible. In the end, it boils down to WHOM you want to believe, some author of a science textbook or the Bible as the word of God.
FYI Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey, a high honor reserved for the few
Actually, Darwin isn't there, only the earthly house he once occupied, but has left behind. It is highly likely that Darwin himself has met God by now. We may read in the Bible:
Hebrews 9:27 And as it is appointed to men once to die, but after this the judgment,
There is no way to dispute the first part of this verse because we all die, but there are many, especially here on /. that will dispute the last part of the sentence.