This is the main reason I bought a zodiac. I have always used palm machines since the PalmPilot Pro and like the interface and the fact that it isn't windows. The form factor of the zodiac was the selling point for me - it has a nice big screen and an analog joystick on the side, as well as lots of extra buttons. Its perfect for playing old arcade and console games, which look great on the 480x320 screen. It's also perfect for reading ebooks as the hi-res screen is very sharp and easy on the eyes. Unfortunately Tapwave went under cos they couldn't figure out who to market the machine for and tried to put it up against the portable gaming consoles, gameboys etc - it flopped since it didn't have the developer support necesary to create the games it needed to succeed. The PSP being anounced shortly after it went on sale didn't help either. Unfortuantely it is eventually going to die and I can't see anything to replace it at the moment. I welcome the idea of PDA's being marketed at the professional user who needs the PDA functions but also plays the occasional game, bring it on.
got one right here. a usb device that can be used to control stuff on a pc, yup.;-) seriously tho - most of these things come with extra buttons that you can re-program with the bundled software to control winamp/wmp/itunes whatever. I guess someone could write some drivers for linux to pickup the extra signals and translate them.
Well I had shit like Cancer and was seen within a month. So don't believe everything you hear. Our healthcare system is fantastic, it is slowly being erroded by decades of mismanagement but it is still fantastic. And it's free. That's right, I don't get refused treatment because by insurance company decided that I'm a bad risk. Yup uk healthcare blows right enough.
It's interesting to note that other people's counties look worse than yours while your own country is being devoured from within by unscrupulous bastards. It almost makes you think it is a deliberate media policy to distract the consumers, sorry citizens, from what is happening by saying: look, at least you don't live in the oppresive state of Britain, they can't even walk down the street without being photographed by the state. Just ignore these huge cameras, they're to catch terrorists...
We tried playing pacman and frogger and a few other old arcade games in mame, it was bloody hard (but good fun in a goofy, look how much I suck at this, sort of a way).
I work for a bank and would say exactly the opposite applies. I am personally responsibly for the admin of about 2000 NT Desktops which are locked down as tightly as we can get them. Nobody installs any software themselves at all. Any software that gets installed is done via a software distribution system and only after I have checked it first to ensure that it won't break anything. The same applies for MS patches (not that there are many of them these days for NT). The reason for these draconian policies? If anything breaks, ultimately I am the one who needs to fix it, or the bank loses money. So I don't let anybody do anything which might break something. However, if anything does break, I know exactly what is on the machines and can quickly work out what has broken and how to fix it. If the system weren't locked down and homogenous, I wouldn't have a hope of identifying the problem quickly, the bank would lose a shitload of money and I might lose my job.
like one of these Having permanent storage for a pda by sticking a hdd on the back sounds like a great idea but the problem is that if you want the device to have any battery life at all then you need to power down the hdd. This means that you get terrible lag every time the device powers up the hdd to access your data. It's easier for ipods and the like cos you can predict what data is going to be required (the next track in the playlist is usually a safe bet) and pull the data into a local cache well in advance. That's harder to do on a pda as the data access pattern is largely random. The lifedrive is a lovely looking device tho, and you can get caching software such as sharkcache which improves it greatly. But then you are back to the start as your data isn't on the hdd any more. bummer.
They were pretty popular in the 80's. A lot of their music was used for TV shows and documentaries. It had a sort of futuristic, electronic feel to it, even though they were all classically trained musicians. They did a great tocatta on the electric guitar.
Ah, the good old irregular verb, as popularised by Bernard in Yes Minister.
"I give informal briefings, you 'leak', he's been charged under the Official Secrets Act".
If you are not famliiar with Yes Minister then I would highly recommend it - Very funny stuff and just as topical now as it was 30 years ago.
A few of my favourite quotes:
"The Opposition aren't really the opposition. They are only the Government in exile. The Civil Service are the opposition in residence."
"The Prime Minister doesn't want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament."
"The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials."
"There was nothing wrong with appeasement. All that World War Two achieved after six years was to leave Eastern Europe under a Communist dictatorship instead of a Fascist dictatorship. That's what comes of not listening to the Foreign Office."
I agree with you that in this case the phrase could be interperted as "think [of doing or being something] different". So it's maybe not the best example of adverb ignorance from our transpondian cousins.
However the vast majority of cases of bad grammar usage are not about bending the rules to create subtlety, they are just demonstrations of ignorance of what the rules are in the first place.
I have been reading an interesting book called "Language Myths" (yeah yeah, amazon are evil, whatever). They argue in one chapter that we shouldn't cling onto gramatical rules and spelling like they are somehow sacrosanct since languages evolve all the time and shouldn't be considered as static things to be preserved. I agree with this to an extent but I still think there is a difference between knowing what the rules are and bending them for effect, and just not knowing what the rules are in the first place. Getting the rules wrong might not make a huge difference to the conveyed meaning but it just looks ugly.
I'm not getting at you specifically, I just wince every time I see that fecking apple slogan. Were the pages in the grammar textbook stuck together at the adverb bit when you guys were at school then or what?
(but I liked the NAPalm idea, needs an "i" somewhere tho).
It's not so much that these mechanisms have an evolutionary advantage, rather they are the basic mechanisms in cell manufacture and control within most living organisms. It's just that the DNA has been damaged in such a way that the cell still looks normal but key processes, such as the ability to self destroy, don't work any more. As somebody mentioned elsewhere in this topic, it seems that fibronectin is also used to hold cells together in the creation of specialised cell clusters such as organs and the like. Presumably this process would get triggered by a healthy cell during gestation to allow for organ growth but cancer cells can also trigger it.
Note IANAB(iologist) so the above explaination is probably a little simplistic. I have a slight obsession with cancer at the moment as I had it a few months ago (now cured, yipee!).
I think the point is that it's the same identifier for every website. At least an ssl certificate is unique to the website you generated it for; You have to generate a new one if you go elsewhere. If you think that spyware profiling tools like doubleclick cookies and claria are bad, this is much worse. The other problem is the same as in biometric security; what happens when your ID gets compromised, how easily can you change it? According to TFA you can't change it. It will probably be compromised (I think that is a given; the data is being routed over a public network, somebody will figure out a way to spoof it) once your machine is compromised you may as well throw it out, you won't be able to do anything useful with it anymore (other that surf slashdot, but I did say useful).
I think this has been adequately answered elsewhere in the discussion but almost all but the nastiest cancers happen after breeding age, ie there is no selective genetic pressure which might weed out people who are predisposed to cancer, unless you consider the lack of grandparents to be an evolutionary disadvantage. You might as well ask about the evolutionary advantage of Down's Syndrome or Multiple Sclerosis; there is none, they just happen when normal processes go wrong. If you assume that cancers do evolve, each individual human must be a "tabula rasa" as far as cancerous cells are concerned. That is to say that cancer would need to evolve independantly within each human being as there is no way that a successful cancer can reproduce outside of that human. More importantly, it can't pass on any successful traits to the next generation. You could formulate a theory about cancer being some sort of genetic superparasite which can pass it's own genes though human genes, but I think it is easier to accept that cancer is probably just a simple subversion of normal body functions, probably because we now live a lot longer.
I had cancer a few months ago and am now effectively "cured" in that I no longer have a cancerous tumour inside me. I must have missed the major headlines saying that cancer had been cured! In mine and most cases where the patient can be cured, the main factor is time; can we remove the original tumour before it starts to metastase? Failing that, can we disrupt the metastase process if we can't get at the tumour (it's somewhere tricky like a lung or a bowel). This research seems to be one step closer to disrupting the metastase process. In my case that would mean that I wouldn't need to go through unpleasant radiotherapy treatments "just in case" there is some metastasis, even though they haven't found any. I could just take whatever drug comes out of this research to disrupt any remaining metastasis sites and that would be that.
The biggest problem with cancer, and this is where the time factor is most significant, is not so much curing the disease; it's reversing all the damage it has done in the body even if you manage to destroy/remove the tumour(s). That however takes us into an entirely different branch of medical research; stem cell research and organ regrowth, and look how much fuss is being made about that at the moment!
You can also run Personal Communications or SNA Server on a Wintel box (or OS/2 if you are feeling particularly brave) and get it to emulate an IBM mainframe print terminal. You can then chuck the output to your printer of choice via the normal OS print subsystem. In the last place I worked, we used to have servers whose sole job was to redirect print jobs from the mainframe to the LAN printers.
...your free will is reducible to equations and rules. This statement is a cute bit of triteness which is often used to "prove" the existence of a soul or god. At the moment we understand reasonably well how the individual parts of the brain work on a mechanical level but have no real idea how the property of consciousness emerges from connecting them all together. Consider the fact that we don't really have a decent solution for describing the motion of more than two gravitational objects (source) where gravitiational motion is fairly well understood, I don't think we will ever get to the point of being able to cut someone's head open and determine their personality. You don't need god to have free-will, there are enough complex, chaotic and downright random processes happening within the human brain to free you of the determinism you seem to abhor so much.
Actually most religions pay lip-service to the idea of tolerance of others but that bit tends to be ignored by the sort of fundamentalist nutjobs we are talking about.
Hypocrisy here is not limited to the religious. How many secular societies could survive without telling their members that killing others was wrong and yet how many would still endorse the persecution of people with different values? If you think you're particular philosophy is so high and mighty, you need to concentrate harder on imaging what it would be like if it was popular enough for people to only pay lip-service to.
This is a good point, however I think that blind faith and the idea that "my ideology is the only true ideology" are the culprits here. If your philosphy has room for the views of others then there is less chance that it can be used as the justification for killing others. In the secular world, I'd say that Fascism and Nazism fall under the category of "one true faith", or "one true race" in the case of Nazism. If your philosphy allows you dismiss others as worthless subhumans then it becomes much easier to justify killing them. Personally I think we got into this mess as soon as the idea of monotheism was developed; If there can only be one god then everybody else is, by definition, worshiping the wrong one and is therefore a heretic. The sooner we develop a secular philosophy which can replace the flawed morality of religion the better as far as I'm concerned.
I've been away for a few days, did I miss anything?
ad hominem attack..same argument repeated..bizarre attempt to equate verses of exodus with a scientific theory..same statement about science being founded on something called The Scientific Method without any furthering of the argument..some nonsense about theories being invalid without The Scientific Method..same argument about no proof, despite arguing that you understood that proof was impossible.
Science has an aweful lot resting on the shoulders of the scientific method
Now you're just not listening. The scientific method is entirely separate from the models it produces. You don't need to believe in "The Scientific Method" in order to make use of a theory to predict something. If the scientific method were proven to be complete nonsense tomorrow, and all the people who had used it to generate theories had apparently just got lucky, the usefulness of those theories would not change at all. The scientific community might baulk at the example of the metal spike which you seem so hung up on, however if the theory was shown to be a valid, useful one then it would be accepted soon enough. Remember that the scientific community, much like the church, is made up of a lot of people who have a vested interest in the status-quo. Einstein was considered crazy by many members of said community before observations started to give credence to his relativity model.
...or the assumption that the things which are true now, will be true tomorrow (e.g. chemical reactions won't suddenly 'change' for no observable reason, momentum will continue to be conserved into the unforseen future). Assumptions like the reality of causality are what make Science possible.
If you're going to argue that the assumption that observable facts are not going to change is an article of faith then I don't think there is much point in continuing this discussion.
The point about not being able to prove a theory is an important one tho, however defensive you feel about it. It means that nobody can argue that a scientific theory is absolute truth, there is always some doubt. This is a good thing as it allows new ideas, however it is a point which is frequently exploited by people who are absolutely certain that they know the truth; I'm absolutely certain and you are not therefore I must be correct.
Just to be clear, blind faith in the words of the bible is not the same as reading and understanding the formulae in a chemistry textbook. One requires critical thinking, the other does not.
These are theories used to describe the universe within the belief structure of Science. You BELIEVE that the scientific method is the best way to deal with and extract information from your surroundings. From this BELIEF you get your theories.
No I don't. These theories are valid models regardless of how you got them. It doesn't matter how the model was made, as long as the parameters and limitations of the model are understood by anyone using it to model anything. Belief has nothing to so with it.
If someone does not subscribe to the belief that the scientific method is correct (And you can deride that all you want, but there is no proof whatsoever that the method is simply FACT. It's an assumption that all of science is built on. A well founded assumption, but an assumption none the less.)
Nope, this is not a belief structure; it's simply a method of modelling and measuring the natural world which has been shown to get results as far as the previously described theories are concerned. If somebody comes up with a better method for determining how the world works, and by better I mean more able to model the world usefully, it won't shake my belief system because I don't have one.
...all of the scientific proof in the world is worthless to them.
There is no such thing as scientific proof. A theory can never be proven, only disproven when it fails to accurately describe real-world observations. Sure you can validate a theory by using it to accurately predict something, but as soon as the theory doesn't fit the observable facts, it will be replaced by something which does. If the new theory is developed by a team of budhist monks meditating for 10 years on the top of a metal spike, it doesn't matter. As long as I can use it to model the world and make predictions.
Getting back on topic, ID and religious doctrines are not theories in any normal sense of the word; you can't do anything useful with them in the real world. They are just stories to make you feel better in the middle of the night.
Remember that natural selection and theories on speciation are simply hypotheses trying to explain the observable fact that organisms mutate and evolve all the time. Darwin's original hypothesis (survival of the fittest) was shown to be incomplete but it didn't detract from his fundamental observation that evolution was taking place.
As the grandparent said, almost everybody does agree that evolution is an observable fact. Opinions vary on the mechanism for getting from single-celled organisms to the wide variety of species we have now.
I'm sick of arguing this one with people who don't understand the difference between a theory and a belief. A theory is simply a model for explaining the behaviour of a natural process which fits the available observed data. Nobody is saying that it is irrefutable fact (cf belief). I don't believe that a big bang started the universe. I don't believe in subatomic particles. I don't believe that white light is made up of all other colours of light in something called the visible spectrum. However, I find that all of the examples above seem to model the natural world to the extent that these theories can be usefully used as models. That's it.
Anybody who tries to pass off scientific theories as fact doesn't understand what a scientific theory is for, or is trying to sell you something.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the main reason I bought a zodiac. I have always used palm machines since the PalmPilot Pro and like the interface and the fact that it isn't windows.
The form factor of the zodiac was the selling point for me - it has a nice big screen and an analog joystick on the side, as well as lots of extra buttons. Its perfect for playing old arcade and console games, which look great on the 480x320 screen. It's also perfect for reading ebooks as the hi-res screen is very sharp and easy on the eyes.
Unfortunately Tapwave went under cos they couldn't figure out who to market the machine for and tried to put it up against the portable gaming consoles, gameboys etc - it flopped since it didn't have the developer support necesary to create the games it needed to succeed. The PSP being anounced shortly after it went on sale didn't help either.
Unfortuantely it is eventually going to die and I can't see anything to replace it at the moment. I welcome the idea of PDA's being marketed at the professional user who needs the PDA functions but also plays the occasional game, bring it on.
got one right here. ;-)
a usb device that can be used to control stuff on a pc, yup.
seriously tho - most of these things come with extra buttons that you can re-program with the bundled software to control winamp/wmp/itunes whatever. I guess someone could write some drivers for linux to pickup the extra signals and translate them.
Well I had shit like Cancer and was seen within a month. So don't believe everything you hear.
Our healthcare system is fantastic, it is slowly being erroded by decades of mismanagement but it is still fantastic. And it's free. That's right, I don't get refused treatment because by insurance company decided that I'm a bad risk. Yup uk healthcare blows right enough.
It's interesting to note that other people's counties look worse than yours while your own country is being devoured from within by unscrupulous bastards. It almost makes you think it is a deliberate media policy to distract the consumers, sorry citizens, from what is happening by saying: look, at least you don't live in the oppresive state of Britain, they can't even walk down the street without being photographed by the state. Just ignore these huge cameras, they're to catch terrorists...
We tried playing pacman and frogger and a few other old arcade games in mame, it was bloody hard (but good fun in a goofy, look how much I suck at this, sort of a way).
I work for a bank and would say exactly the opposite applies.
I am personally responsibly for the admin of about 2000 NT Desktops which are locked down as tightly as we can get them.
Nobody installs any software themselves at all. Any software that gets installed is done via a software distribution system and only after I have checked it first to ensure that it won't break anything. The same applies for MS patches (not that there are many of them these days for NT).
The reason for these draconian policies? If anything breaks, ultimately I am the one who needs to fix it, or the bank loses money. So I don't let anybody do anything which might break something. However, if anything does break, I know exactly what is on the machines and can quickly work out what has broken and how to fix it. If the system weren't locked down and homogenous, I wouldn't have a hope of identifying the problem quickly, the bank would lose a shitload of money and I might lose my job.
like one of these
Having permanent storage for a pda by sticking a hdd on the back sounds like a great idea but the problem is that if you want the device to have any battery life at all then you need to power down the hdd. This means that you get terrible lag every time the device powers up the hdd to access your data.
It's easier for ipods and the like cos you can predict what data is going to be required (the next track in the playlist is usually a safe bet) and pull the data into a local cache well in advance. That's harder to do on a pda as the data access pattern is largely random.
The lifedrive is a lovely looking device tho, and you can get caching software such as sharkcache which improves it greatly. But then you are back to the start as your data isn't on the hdd any more.
bummer.
there was this lot.
They were pretty popular in the 80's. A lot of their music was used for TV shows and documentaries. It had a sort of futuristic, electronic feel to it, even though they were all classically trained musicians. They did a great tocatta on the electric guitar.
Ah, the good old irregular verb, as popularised by Bernard in Yes Minister.
"I give informal briefings, you 'leak', he's been charged under the Official Secrets Act".
If you are not famliiar with Yes Minister then I would highly recommend it - Very funny stuff and just as topical now as it was 30 years ago.
A few of my favourite quotes:
"The Opposition aren't really the opposition. They are only the Government in exile. The Civil Service are the opposition in residence."
"The Prime Minister doesn't want the truth, he wants something he can tell Parliament."
"The Official Secrets Act is not to protect secrets, it is to protect officials."
"There was nothing wrong with appeasement. All that World War Two achieved after six years was to leave Eastern Europe under a Communist dictatorship instead of a Fascist dictatorship. That's what comes of not listening to the Foreign Office."
I agree with you that in this case the phrase could be interperted as "think [of doing or being something] different". So it's maybe not the best example of adverb ignorance from our transpondian cousins.
;-p)
However the vast majority of cases of bad grammar usage are not about bending the rules to create subtlety, they are just demonstrations of ignorance of what the rules are in the first place.
I have been reading an interesting book called "Language Myths" (yeah yeah, amazon are evil, whatever). They argue in one chapter that we shouldn't cling onto gramatical rules and spelling like they are somehow sacrosanct since languages evolve all the time and shouldn't be considered as static things to be preserved. I agree with this to an extent but I still think there is a difference between knowing what the rules are and bending them for effect, and just not knowing what the rules are in the first place. Getting the rules wrong might not make a huge difference to the conveyed meaning but it just looks ugly.
(btw - I was reading it wrongly
differently, dammit!
what is it with merkins and adverbs?
I'm not getting at you specifically, I just wince every time I see that fecking apple slogan. Were the pages in the grammar textbook stuck together at the adverb bit when you guys were at school then or what?
(but I liked the NAPalm idea, needs an "i" somewhere tho).
I think I see what you mean.
It's not so much that these mechanisms have an evolutionary advantage, rather they are the basic mechanisms in cell manufacture and control within most living organisms. It's just that the DNA has been damaged in such a way that the cell still looks normal but key processes, such as the ability to self destroy, don't work any more. As somebody mentioned elsewhere in this topic, it seems that fibronectin is also used to hold cells together in the creation of specialised cell clusters such as organs and the like. Presumably this process would get triggered by a healthy cell during gestation to allow for organ growth but cancer cells can also trigger it.
Note IANAB(iologist) so the above explaination is probably a little simplistic. I have a slight obsession with cancer at the moment as I had it a few months ago (now cured, yipee!).
Not sure I know that one.
How about Church of the Super Spiral Architect.
Should please the goatshaggers too.
Church of the super Wizard, surely!
I think the point is that it's the same identifier for every website.
At least an ssl certificate is unique to the website you generated it for; You have to generate a new one if you go elsewhere.
If you think that spyware profiling tools like doubleclick cookies and claria are bad, this is much worse.
The other problem is the same as in biometric security; what happens when your ID gets compromised, how easily can you change it? According to TFA you can't change it. It will probably be compromised (I think that is a given; the data is being routed over a public network, somebody will figure out a way to spoof it) once your machine is compromised you may as well throw it out, you won't be able to do anything useful with it anymore (other that surf slashdot, but I did say useful).
I think this has been adequately answered elsewhere in the discussion but almost all but the nastiest cancers happen after breeding age, ie there is no selective genetic pressure which might weed out people who are predisposed to cancer, unless you consider the lack of grandparents to be an evolutionary disadvantage. You might as well ask about the evolutionary advantage of Down's Syndrome or Multiple Sclerosis; there is none, they just happen when normal processes go wrong.
If you assume that cancers do evolve, each individual human must be a "tabula rasa" as far as cancerous cells are concerned. That is to say that cancer would need to evolve independantly within each human being as there is no way that a successful cancer can reproduce outside of that human. More importantly, it can't pass on any successful traits to the next generation. You could formulate a theory about cancer being some sort of genetic superparasite which can pass it's own genes though human genes, but I think it is easier to accept that cancer is probably just a simple subversion of normal body functions, probably because we now live a lot longer.
I had cancer a few months ago and am now effectively "cured" in that I no longer have a cancerous tumour inside me. I must have missed the major headlines saying that cancer had been cured!
In mine and most cases where the patient can be cured, the main factor is time; can we remove the original tumour before it starts to metastase? Failing that, can we disrupt the metastase process if we can't get at the tumour (it's somewhere tricky like a lung or a bowel).
This research seems to be one step closer to disrupting the metastase process. In my case that would mean that I wouldn't need to go through unpleasant radiotherapy treatments "just in case" there is some metastasis, even though they haven't found any. I could just take whatever drug comes out of this research to disrupt any remaining metastasis sites and that would be that.
The biggest problem with cancer, and this is where the time factor is most significant, is not so much curing the disease; it's reversing all the damage it has done in the body even if you manage to destroy/remove the tumour(s). That however takes us into an entirely different branch of medical research; stem cell research and organ regrowth, and look how much fuss is being made about that at the moment!
You can also run Personal Communications or SNA Server on a Wintel box (or OS/2 if you are feeling particularly brave) and get it to emulate an IBM mainframe print terminal. You can then chuck the output to your printer of choice via the normal OS print subsystem.
In the last place I worked, we used to have servers whose sole job was to redirect print jobs from the mainframe to the LAN printers.
...your free will is reducible to equations and rules.
This statement is a cute bit of triteness which is often used to "prove" the existence of a soul or god.
At the moment we understand reasonably well how the individual parts of the brain work on a mechanical level but have no real idea how the property of consciousness emerges from connecting them all together.
Consider the fact that we don't really have a decent solution for describing the motion of more than two gravitational objects (source) where gravitiational motion is fairly well understood, I don't think we will ever get to the point of being able to cut someone's head open and determine their personality.
You don't need god to have free-will, there are enough complex, chaotic and downright random processes happening within the human brain to free you of the determinism you seem to abhor so much.
This is a good point, however I think that blind faith and the idea that "my ideology is the only true ideology" are the culprits here. If your philosphy has room for the views of others then there is less chance that it can be used as the justification for killing others. In the secular world, I'd say that Fascism and Nazism fall under the category of "one true faith", or "one true race" in the case of Nazism. If your philosphy allows you dismiss others as worthless subhumans then it becomes much easier to justify killing them.
Personally I think we got into this mess as soon as the idea of monotheism was developed; If there can only be one god then everybody else is, by definition, worshiping the wrong one and is therefore a heretic.
The sooner we develop a secular philosophy which can replace the flawed morality of religion the better as far as I'm concerned.
apparently not.
Now you're just not listening. The scientific method is entirely separate from the models it produces. You don't need to believe in "The Scientific Method" in order to make use of a theory to predict something. If the scientific method were proven to be complete nonsense tomorrow, and all the people who had used it to generate theories had apparently just got lucky, the usefulness of those theories would not change at all. The scientific community might baulk at the example of the metal spike which you seem so hung up on, however if the theory was shown to be a valid, useful one then it would be accepted soon enough. Remember that the scientific community, much like the church, is made up of a lot of people who have a vested interest in the status-quo. Einstein was considered crazy by many members of said community before observations started to give credence to his relativity model.
If you're going to argue that the assumption that observable facts are not going to change is an article of faith then I don't think there is much point in continuing this discussion.
The point about not being able to prove a theory is an important one tho, however defensive you feel about it. It means that nobody can argue that a scientific theory is absolute truth, there is always some doubt. This is a good thing as it allows new ideas, however it is a point which is frequently exploited by people who are absolutely certain that they know the truth; I'm absolutely certain and you are not therefore I must be correct.
Just to be clear, blind faith in the words of the bible is not the same as reading and understanding the formulae in a chemistry textbook. One requires critical thinking, the other does not.
No I don't. These theories are valid models regardless of how you got them. It doesn't matter how the model was made, as long as the parameters and limitations of the model are understood by anyone using it to model anything. Belief has nothing to so with it.
Nope, this is not a belief structure; it's simply a method of modelling and measuring the natural world which has been shown to get results as far as the previously described theories are concerned. If somebody comes up with a better method for determining how the world works, and by better I mean more able to model the world usefully, it won't shake my belief system because I don't have one.
There is no such thing as scientific proof. A theory can never be proven, only disproven when it fails to accurately describe real-world observations. Sure you can validate a theory by using it to accurately predict something, but as soon as the theory doesn't fit the observable facts, it will be replaced by something which does. If the new theory is developed by a team of budhist monks meditating for 10 years on the top of a metal spike, it doesn't matter. As long as I can use it to model the world and make predictions.
Getting back on topic, ID and religious doctrines are not theories in any normal sense of the word; you can't do anything useful with them in the real world. They are just stories to make you feel better in the middle of the night.
Remember that natural selection and theories on speciation are simply hypotheses trying to explain the observable fact that organisms mutate and evolve all the time.
Darwin's original hypothesis (survival of the fittest) was shown to be incomplete but it didn't detract from his fundamental observation that evolution was taking place.
As the grandparent said, almost everybody does agree that evolution is an observable fact. Opinions vary on the mechanism for getting from single-celled organisms to the wide variety of species we have now.
I'm sick of arguing this one with people who don't understand the difference between a theory and a belief.
A theory is simply a model for explaining the behaviour of a natural process which fits the available observed data. Nobody is saying that it is irrefutable fact (cf belief).
I don't believe that a big bang started the universe. I don't believe in subatomic particles. I don't believe that white light is made up of all other colours of light in something called the visible spectrum. However, I find that all of the examples above seem to model the natural world to the extent that these theories can be usefully used as models. That's it.
Anybody who tries to pass off scientific theories as fact doesn't understand what a scientific theory is for, or is trying to sell you something.
That's -1, Flamebait where I come from pal.
;-)
and anyway, we only wear skirts for special occasions, and I can tell you the things are babe magnets