SPOILER ALERT: Yeah, if I recall correctly didn't Hammond die in the book cursing his own grandchildren for playing around with the PA system? It was ironic considering that the Tyrannosaurus sound they'd played through it had temporarily saved his life just long enough for him to say what rotten kids he thought they were.
I think you need to actually read some Jane Austen. The typical Jane Austen heroine was not "a humble penniless girl". Liz Bennet was from a wealthy, landed family whose financial problems were due to the fact that the women wouldn't inherit the father's estate due to the structure of the inheritance. They had a big house and servants and the actual approximate amounts Mr. Bennett spent on each of his daughters based on various statements about money in the book was more than a typical family lived on in that era. Emma Woodhouse was filthy, stinking rich. Anne Elliot was from a rich family with debt problems, but rich nonetheless, by renting out their estate and living in Bath, they were handling the debt problem and extremely comfortable. The Dashwood sisters are living in drastically reduced circumstances and are relying on support from family, but are a long way from being actually poor. Catherine Morland, as the daughter of a clergyman is quite comfortably in the middle class. Lady Susan is an atypical Jane Austen heroine but you may notice that she has a title and is well to do. Fanny Price is the only one of the lot who could really be considered poor, except of course that she grows up with family in a large mansion.
Yeah, poor widdle confused managers getting these changing stories from those evil engineers. Except that it's a load of nonsense. They didn't suddenly change their story. It was already known that the o-rings hadn't been tested in such extreme cold and that there was a danger. The engineers were _not_ changing their story. Going from "it's probably safe to launch in normal conditions although there's a real concern about the design" to "it's not safe to launch in these unusually cold conditions since there's a concern about the design, no testing has ever been done in these conditions, and we think the design is probably going to fail".
Even if the fantasy scenario you're painting were true, it still has managers ignoring engineers saying that the launch will be unsafe. If the managers rationale for concluding that the launch will be safe is because "the engineers said so", it's a logical fail to conclude that the launch is still safe by discounting the professional opinion of the engineers. Either they know what they're talking about, and you shouldn't launch, or they have no idea what they're talking about so you shouldn't launch. Unless the managers somehow believe that they've known what they were talking about in the past and just suddenly stopped. If the managers believe that, then they aren't qualified to do their jobs.
When it comes to the "causes" of war, the definition needs to be broad. They're almost always so hard to pin down to just one thing. The definition of religion itself is so fuzzy to begin with. I've seen some pretty fierce philosophical debates over whether Maoism is a religion with no fundamental agreement reached. Korea was certainly one of the stronger examples from the original poster of wars that didn't have much of a religious component. Some of the other examples were absolutely ridiculous, such as the war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban, a theocratic revolutionary group grown out of religious schools. Half of the examples the poster gave were completely ridiculous, but all of them included at least some factor based in religion. I mean, after all, if you're going to say that the history of the Korean war is based on the Sino-Japanese wars, you can't ignore Japan's history with Korea. One of the traditional cultural divides between Japan and Korea was over the prevalence of Confucianism in Korea. Now, Confucianism is more philosophy and mysticism than pure religion, but it's still indicative of a clear religious divide between the Japanese and Korean people which was one of the direct causes of their traditional conflicts.
Yes, the US does have a pretty good history of working with, arming, rigging elections in favor of, and generally aiding any ruthless dictator who happens to align with their goals.
They already committed the crimes involved in hacking in to get the code. That is a crime that they already committed. Extortion doesn't necessarily go along with that. It may well have been the intent, but that's something that has to be proven. If it isn't proven, then offering them money to comply with not releasing the code, then charging them with extortion after would be entrapment. Just using it as a trick to catch them, then just charging them with the crimes they had committed without it being suggested by law enforcement first would not be entrapment.
I don't know if they actually use a potentiometer, that was just the language of the actual patent. I'm sure that, as holder of the patent, Honeywell feels that their patent covers the specific language of the patent and anything vaguely like it. A potentiometer is just the first circular motion control device that springs to mind. As I said, there are probably literally hundreds of off the shelf control devices that can be used simply to provide a circular control to digitally select a temperature in the range of a typical home thermostat.Using any of them to implement a thermostat control doesn't qualify as an invention in any sensible person's eyes, nor does it by the literal terms of the non-obviousness clause.
I have a round thermostat on my wall. It's been there since the 1970's or earlier as far as I can tell. Clearly longer than any patents last. It uses a coiled bi-metallic strip and a mercury switch to operate. I am not an Electrical Engineer (I have some experience with it as a hobby and from where it overlapped with the Computer Science courses I took at University and even a small amount of professional experience doing such work) and don't really qualify as someone "skilled in the art". Nevertheless, if someone came to me and said "we want to adapt this familiar, no-longer patented design to modern off-the-shelf technology using a digital thermometer" I would say put a micro-controller in it and hook up a calibrated potentiometer to figure out where the dial is turned to and throw a screen in the target price range into the thing to display the current temperature and target temperature and maybe other things like humidity if desired. Now, the method of detecting where the dial is turned doesn't have to be a potentiometer, it's just the easiest off the shelf way to do it. It could also be a magnetic sensor, or an optical sensor like in an opto-mechanical mouse or a modern optical mouse. Or it could even be a custom circular set of contacts, 1 for each degree of temperature in the devices range, otherwise, I'm sure there are dozens or even hundreds and thousands of pre-existing, off the shelf devices for telling you the position of a rotary dial. Tying one of those into a classic thermostat design is not worthy of a patent. It's just not an invention. Neither are any of these other inventions listed. Time to reach desired temperature is not an invention, it's an item off a wishlist, the obstacle to developing it as a commercial product is availability of the paltry computing power and long-term storage needed for it in a simple device like a thermostat. How to actually accomplish it with those computing resources is trivial. Any eighth-grader of reasonable intelligence (and without some sort of antipathy towards thinking) has the knowledge of statistics to figure out an algorithm to do it.
As for the other patents involved, such as the "natural language" patent, they're garbage. The hard parts are interpreting the language in the first place, and those parts surely aren't Honeywell's invention. It's well understood that, once you have such technology, you can give instructions to home automation devices: "vacuum the floors tomorrow while no-one is home or by five P.M. even if someone is home", "Turn the lights on in the front hallway at six pm tomorrow", "turn on the heat every day by six or when the garage door is opened, whichever comes first", etc., etc. This stuff has been going on in science fiction for longer than there have even been electronic computers that might be able to interpret the commands. That part of the "invention" is already invented and has just been waiting for the computers to get good enough at following along with basic language.
It is a legitimate tactic to find them. Whether or not it's entrapment depends on whether or not they would be charged with extortion on top of the other crimes afterwards and, if they were, whether or not there was any evidence that they actually intended extortion before being offered money (likely they would have to prove that they didn't intend it rather than the prosecution proving they did).
If the source code was stolen for reasons other than extortion and the people who stole it are genuinely unlikely to commit extortion, then offering them money then turning around and claiming they're committing extortion is entrapment. Whether it is or isn't entrapment depends a lot on details that are currently secret, so all we can do is speculate.
The question there is, if Saddam Hussein was at fault in the Iran-Iraq war (and I'm not saying he wasn't, he wasn't exactly a very nice guy), why was the US on his side at the time?
Wars certainly can occur without religion. I never claimed that they couldn't. I was simply refuting a poster who was claiming that those wars, as they happened, did not involve religion. They most certainly did. Without the religious hooks, it would have been much harder for the US to justify its involvement in these wars to its people. You can't just imagine a world where everything is the same, but there's no religion, because things wouldn't be the same without religion. It's one of the factors that sets all the pieces in place before the war begins.
It was on some currency during the Civil war, not all of it. It was adopted as the official motto in the 50's and the pledge of allegiance was modified to include "under god", etc. as part of the reaction of the US to the spread of communism, of which the Korean war was a part. Religion had its part in those wars. It wasn't the primary cause, but to say it had no role would be incorrect. Not to mention that the Korean war was direct fallout from World War 2 which really did have a lot of religious causes.
As a primary cause, or merely a yoke for the masses, religion certainly played a role in those wars. The post I was replying to was seriously suggesting that the war in Afghanistan had no religious motivation. How do you not reply to something like that?
Which ones are strained connections? The Nazi flag was a religious symbol and their crazy racial superiority ideology was heavily tied into religion/mysticism/mythology. WW1 was based on _everything_ that the nations of the time had against each other and religious differences were a big chunk of that. It did not entirely consist of British, French and German troops conducting trench warfare in France over possession of the Rhineland no matter what old war movies focus on. And seriously, claiming that religion played no part in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a ridiculous joke.
I never claimed that religion was the only cause of all, or any of these wars, but it did play a part. The post I was replying to was implying that religion played no role at all in a list of wars, half of which were obviously religiously motivated and the other half had some pretty deep religious roots if you dug under the surface a little.
So, since the same event never happens twice, then by your reasoning, no science is empirical. You can never perform the same chemical experiment twice. You'll never get the exact quantities the same, or the temperature or the actual motion and position of the individual molecules, nor can you isolate it from local magnetic and gravitational conditions or from unknown and possibly unknowable factors. Nothing is repeatable, therefore, if evidence is empirical only if it's repeatable, no evidence is empirical. You can't use absolutes, you have to draw the line somewhere on what's acceptable evidence and what isn't, usually by means of statistics.
Your statement that "if 12 people all saw the same accident you would get 12 conflicting eyewitness accounts", if you truly believe it applies in all cases and not just for spontaneous observations of crimes and accidents, means that you don't believe in empirical science at all. After all, if you truly believe it, then you just blew peer review out of the water. Of course, you've previously done that anyway, since you believe that all appeal to authority is fallacious argument. The fact that peer review is a form of appeal to authority is right there in the name.
Oops, accidentally cut out the bit where I noted that one one of the chief complaints of the Serbians was being taxed to pay for non-orthodox churches.
You may have missed the bit in WW2 where Jews and Gypsies were being rounded up and burned in big ovens and the fact that the Nazi leader followed a mix of Christianity and pan-german mysticism and came to power partly because a group of well connected secret society/cultist types thought he was their prophesized leader. Oh, you might have missed the symbol that Nazi Germany used for its flag.
You may have also missed the bit from WW1 where Archduke Ferdinand was killed by a Serbian Orthodox Christian and that one of their chief complaints against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then there's the whole bit with the Ottoman Empire.
Religion was not the only factor in these wars, clearly, but neither did it play no role. As for Korea and Vietnam? Did you miss the bit where the US was getting so worked up about the "godless commies" that they changed their national motto to "in god we trust". Iraq 1 was heavily based in fallout from the religious war between Iraq and Iran. In Iraq 2, the born-again Christian of the United States, who claimed to have mystical powers and to receive direct instruction from his god, referred to the war as a crusade. It was also frequently justified on the basis of the Sept 11th terrorist attacks, which had a firm basis in religion, and, when people pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with those, the alternative reason given was that Saddam Hussein had brutally gassed Kurds to death in a religiously motivated civil war.
Now, I will agree that bacteria becoming resistant to drugs does not necessarily demonstrate evolution through new traits derived from genetic mutation. On the other hand, your statement "if its still bacteria then it has not evolved (certain traits have shifted but its still bacteria)" is absolutely ridiculous. At one point, there were only prokaryotic bacteria, and they developed cellular nuclei, membrane-covered organelles and mitosis to become eukaryotes. The process took a long time and surely did involve traits evolving in isolation and shifting, but the resulting eukaryotes, while still bacteria, were also clearly evolved.
But ultimately, unless you're doing the experiment yourself, you're considering the evidence to be empirical because it "conforms to the definition of the damn word" because "a scientists [sic] says so". You believe Dr. (PHD from the University of Hamburg) Hans A working on the big, multi-national physics experiment that you've heard about when he releases last month's instrument data. You do this, even though all arguments that the experiment even exists are fallacious by your definition. Even if you've toured the facility, it's pretty difficult to tell if it isn't just a fake without taking someone's word for it. I seriously doubt that you believe Dr. (PHD, MD, DDS, MBA, DVM from the University of Cereal Boxtop) Hans B from the Electric Universe Research Institute when he presents the data collected from the instruments on the Institutes orbital research station that their website assures you exists. Both researchers are reporting empirical data gathered through a well described experimental process. Anyone can replicate (or fail to replicate, as the case may be) the results by repeating the experiments. Based on your definition of appeal to authority, the arguments for whether or not it's even worthwhile trying to replicate either experiment are equal, since they're both equally fallacious.
You also didn't address at all my point about empirical evidence. Is an observed event from the past that can never be witnessed again or repeated not empirical evidence?
I think there might be a little confusion here. You do realize that the "I'm too cool for school" attitude you're talking about is an unwillingness to go through a humiliating singing ritual, right?
Good. Good engineers are not necessarily good team members. I can teach people to be good engineers a lot more readily than I can teach them to be good team players.
You're either an amazing, incredible teacher, or you're delusional and have messed up priorities.
"When they are scientists, that evidence is emperical" Let me rephrase that: "X is a scientist and claims that evidence Y is emperical, therefore evidence Y is emperical" See, this is the problem I have. You keep using arguments like this, and I don't have a problem with these arguments as arguments, I do have a problem with the fact that you insist that you're correct in your definition of fallacious appeal to authority, but you still keep using a type of argument you're claiming is always fallacious to argue for your definition. You have me pulling my hair out. When a scientist presents their experiments, they're generally presenting their conclusions, not the raw data. Are scientific papers acceptable arguments for you? They shouldn't be, because of the way you've defined appeal to authority as always fallacious. A scientific paper is just "x says y". A peer reviewed paper is just "w says z, where z is 'x is correct when they say y'". You've tried to define appeal to authority as an absolute fallacy always, but all forms of knowledge not from direct personal experience (and even then you can argue about your senses being unreliable reporters) are logically equivalent in some way to an authority you're appealing to when you use them for the sake of argument.
Wikipedia doesn't offer proof, it only offers links to what it is based on. It's not a research source and rightfully any decent school will fail you for citing it. It relies on the authority of external sources. As I said that is not fallacious in itself- unless you accept a wikipedia page "as is". If you however investigate those sources and evaluate them independently on the basis of the empirical evidence they present then THAT is NOT a fallacy.
Wikipedia specifically has a policy against original research. Despite that, in many cases, it presents empirical evidence right in the article and provides a cite to where it came from. I think you seriously overreached in painting the entirety of Wikidpedia as fallacious appeal to authority, especially since the whole point of the citations is that wikipedia pages aren't meant to be taken "as is". Still, ultimately, the empirical evidence you'll find if you follow the links comes is still often second or third hand. Even when it's direct from the primary researchers, it's still their interpretations. Even if it's a direct data dump from their instruments, who calibrated them? Who are you believing about what the experimental set up actually was. Who are you trusting that it really _is_a data dump from their instruments and not doctored?
Empirical evidence is never an appeal to authority - even if quoted since by definition ANYBODY could replicate the results - if not, then it isn't empirical evidence.
Ok then. Replicate the results of of the Hubble telescope for the last week for me then. Or how about from the Large Hadron Collider? Better yet replicate the results of the SN 2003fg supernova (by the way, if you can actually do that, can I have a ride in your time machine?). The first one, virtually no-one can afford. The second two, no-one from earth can do again because they were observations of unique events in time. In order to observe them again, you'd need FTL travel or a time machine (seriously though, I'll agree to any definitions you want about anything for a ride). I'm going to claim though that those observations are still empirical evidence.
Yeah, but even building a farnsworth fusor as a neutron source for experiments in their nuclear program would be "fusion related to this". A country with a nuclear weapons program experimenting with fusion is completely unsurprising. As has been pointed out in other posts, boosted fission weapons that use limited fusion as a neutron source are pretty much standard for nuclear weapons these days.
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SPOILER ALERT: Yeah, if I recall correctly didn't Hammond die in the book cursing his own grandchildren for playing around with the PA system? It was ironic considering that the Tyrannosaurus sound they'd played through it had temporarily saved his life just long enough for him to say what rotten kids he thought they were.
Sometimes these planes actually are used on the front lines. Sometimes they're even used as bombers.
I think you need to actually read some Jane Austen. The typical Jane Austen heroine was not "a humble penniless girl". Liz Bennet was from a wealthy, landed family whose financial problems were due to the fact that the women wouldn't inherit the father's estate due to the structure of the inheritance. They had a big house and servants and the actual approximate amounts Mr. Bennett spent on each of his daughters based on various statements about money in the book was more than a typical family lived on in that era. Emma Woodhouse was filthy, stinking rich. Anne Elliot was from a rich family with debt problems, but rich nonetheless, by renting out their estate and living in Bath, they were handling the debt problem and extremely comfortable. The Dashwood sisters are living in drastically reduced circumstances and are relying on support from family, but are a long way from being actually poor. Catherine Morland, as the daughter of a clergyman is quite comfortably in the middle class. Lady Susan is an atypical Jane Austen heroine but you may notice that she has a title and is well to do. Fanny Price is the only one of the lot who could really be considered poor, except of course that she grows up with family in a large mansion.
Yeah, poor widdle confused managers getting these changing stories from those evil engineers. Except that it's a load of nonsense. They didn't suddenly change their story. It was already known that the o-rings hadn't been tested in such extreme cold and that there was a danger. The engineers were _not_ changing their story. Going from "it's probably safe to launch in normal conditions although there's a real concern about the design" to "it's not safe to launch in these unusually cold conditions since there's a concern about the design, no testing has ever been done in these conditions, and we think the design is probably going to fail".
Even if the fantasy scenario you're painting were true, it still has managers ignoring engineers saying that the launch will be unsafe. If the managers rationale for concluding that the launch will be safe is because "the engineers said so", it's a logical fail to conclude that the launch is still safe by discounting the professional opinion of the engineers. Either they know what they're talking about, and you shouldn't launch, or they have no idea what they're talking about so you shouldn't launch. Unless the managers somehow believe that they've known what they were talking about in the past and just suddenly stopped. If the managers believe that, then they aren't qualified to do their jobs.
When it comes to the "causes" of war, the definition needs to be broad. They're almost always so hard to pin down to just one thing. The definition of religion itself is so fuzzy to begin with. I've seen some pretty fierce philosophical debates over whether Maoism is a religion with no fundamental agreement reached. Korea was certainly one of the stronger examples from the original poster of wars that didn't have much of a religious component. Some of the other examples were absolutely ridiculous, such as the war in Afghanistan, against the Taliban, a theocratic revolutionary group grown out of religious schools. Half of the examples the poster gave were completely ridiculous, but all of them included at least some factor based in religion. I mean, after all, if you're going to say that the history of the Korean war is based on the Sino-Japanese wars, you can't ignore Japan's history with Korea. One of the traditional cultural divides between Japan and Korea was over the prevalence of Confucianism in Korea. Now, Confucianism is more philosophy and mysticism than pure religion, but it's still indicative of a clear religious divide between the Japanese and Korean people which was one of the direct causes of their traditional conflicts.
Yes, the US does have a pretty good history of working with, arming, rigging elections in favor of, and generally aiding any ruthless dictator who happens to align with their goals.
They already committed the crimes involved in hacking in to get the code. That is a crime that they already committed. Extortion doesn't necessarily go along with that. It may well have been the intent, but that's something that has to be proven. If it isn't proven, then offering them money to comply with not releasing the code, then charging them with extortion after would be entrapment. Just using it as a trick to catch them, then just charging them with the crimes they had committed without it being suggested by law enforcement first would not be entrapment.
I don't know if they actually use a potentiometer, that was just the language of the actual patent. I'm sure that, as holder of the patent, Honeywell feels that their patent covers the specific language of the patent and anything vaguely like it. A potentiometer is just the first circular motion control device that springs to mind. As I said, there are probably literally hundreds of off the shelf control devices that can be used simply to provide a circular control to digitally select a temperature in the range of a typical home thermostat.Using any of them to implement a thermostat control doesn't qualify as an invention in any sensible person's eyes, nor does it by the literal terms of the non-obviousness clause.
I have a round thermostat on my wall. It's been there since the 1970's or earlier as far as I can tell. Clearly longer than any patents last. It uses a coiled bi-metallic strip and a mercury switch to operate. I am not an Electrical Engineer (I have some experience with it as a hobby and from where it overlapped with the Computer Science courses I took at University and even a small amount of professional experience doing such work) and don't really qualify as someone "skilled in the art". Nevertheless, if someone came to me and said "we want to adapt this familiar, no-longer patented design to modern off-the-shelf technology using a digital thermometer" I would say put a micro-controller in it and hook up a calibrated potentiometer to figure out where the dial is turned to and throw a screen in the target price range into the thing to display the current temperature and target temperature and maybe other things like humidity if desired. Now, the method of detecting where the dial is turned doesn't have to be a potentiometer, it's just the easiest off the shelf way to do it. It could also be a magnetic sensor, or an optical sensor like in an opto-mechanical mouse or a modern optical mouse. Or it could even be a custom circular set of contacts, 1 for each degree of temperature in the devices range, otherwise, I'm sure there are dozens or even hundreds and thousands of pre-existing, off the shelf devices for telling you the position of a rotary dial. Tying one of those into a classic thermostat design is not worthy of a patent. It's just not an invention. Neither are any of these other inventions listed. Time to reach desired temperature is not an invention, it's an item off a wishlist, the obstacle to developing it as a commercial product is availability of the paltry computing power and long-term storage needed for it in a simple device like a thermostat. How to actually accomplish it with those computing resources is trivial. Any eighth-grader of reasonable intelligence (and without some sort of antipathy towards thinking) has the knowledge of statistics to figure out an algorithm to do it.
As for the other patents involved, such as the "natural language" patent, they're garbage. The hard parts are interpreting the language in the first place, and those parts surely aren't Honeywell's invention. It's well understood that, once you have such technology, you can give instructions to home automation devices: "vacuum the floors tomorrow while no-one is home or by five P.M. even if someone is home", "Turn the lights on in the front hallway at six pm tomorrow", "turn on the heat every day by six or when the garage door is opened, whichever comes first", etc., etc. This stuff has been going on in science fiction for longer than there have even been electronic computers that might be able to interpret the commands. That part of the "invention" is already invented and has just been waiting for the computers to get good enough at following along with basic language.
It is a legitimate tactic to find them. Whether or not it's entrapment depends on whether or not they would be charged with extortion on top of the other crimes afterwards and, if they were, whether or not there was any evidence that they actually intended extortion before being offered money (likely they would have to prove that they didn't intend it rather than the prosecution proving they did).
If the source code was stolen for reasons other than extortion and the people who stole it are genuinely unlikely to commit extortion, then offering them money then turning around and claiming they're committing extortion is entrapment. Whether it is or isn't entrapment depends a lot on details that are currently secret, so all we can do is speculate.
The question there is, if Saddam Hussein was at fault in the Iran-Iraq war (and I'm not saying he wasn't, he wasn't exactly a very nice guy), why was the US on his side at the time?
Wars certainly can occur without religion. I never claimed that they couldn't. I was simply refuting a poster who was claiming that those wars, as they happened, did not involve religion. They most certainly did. Without the religious hooks, it would have been much harder for the US to justify its involvement in these wars to its people. You can't just imagine a world where everything is the same, but there's no religion, because things wouldn't be the same without religion. It's one of the factors that sets all the pieces in place before the war begins.
It was on some currency during the Civil war, not all of it. It was adopted as the official motto in the 50's and the pledge of allegiance was modified to include "under god", etc. as part of the reaction of the US to the spread of communism, of which the Korean war was a part. Religion had its part in those wars. It wasn't the primary cause, but to say it had no role would be incorrect. Not to mention that the Korean war was direct fallout from World War 2 which really did have a lot of religious causes.
As a primary cause, or merely a yoke for the masses, religion certainly played a role in those wars. The post I was replying to was seriously suggesting that the war in Afghanistan had no religious motivation. How do you not reply to something like that?
Which ones are strained connections? The Nazi flag was a religious symbol and their crazy racial superiority ideology was heavily tied into religion/mysticism/mythology. WW1 was based on _everything_ that the nations of the time had against each other and religious differences were a big chunk of that. It did not entirely consist of British, French and German troops conducting trench warfare in France over possession of the Rhineland no matter what old war movies focus on. And seriously, claiming that religion played no part in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a ridiculous joke.
I never claimed that religion was the only cause of all, or any of these wars, but it did play a part. The post I was replying to was implying that religion played no role at all in a list of wars, half of which were obviously religiously motivated and the other half had some pretty deep religious roots if you dug under the surface a little.
So, since the same event never happens twice, then by your reasoning, no science is empirical. You can never perform the same chemical experiment twice. You'll never get the exact quantities the same, or the temperature or the actual motion and position of the individual molecules, nor can you isolate it from local magnetic and gravitational conditions or from unknown and possibly unknowable factors. Nothing is repeatable, therefore, if evidence is empirical only if it's repeatable, no evidence is empirical. You can't use absolutes, you have to draw the line somewhere on what's acceptable evidence and what isn't, usually by means of statistics.
Your statement that "if 12 people all saw the same accident you would get 12 conflicting eyewitness accounts", if you truly believe it applies in all cases and not just for spontaneous observations of crimes and accidents, means that you don't believe in empirical science at all. After all, if you truly believe it, then you just blew peer review out of the water. Of course, you've previously done that anyway, since you believe that all appeal to authority is fallacious argument. The fact that peer review is a form of appeal to authority is right there in the name.
Oops, accidentally cut out the bit where I noted that one one of the chief complaints of the Serbians was being taxed to pay for non-orthodox churches.
WW1 and WW2 were religious?
You may have missed the bit in WW2 where Jews and Gypsies were being rounded up and burned in big ovens and the fact that the Nazi leader followed a mix of Christianity and pan-german mysticism and came to power partly because a group of well connected secret society/cultist types thought he was their prophesized leader. Oh, you might have missed the symbol that Nazi Germany used for its flag.
You may have also missed the bit from WW1 where Archduke Ferdinand was killed by a Serbian Orthodox Christian and that one of their chief complaints against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then there's the whole bit with the Ottoman Empire.
Religion was not the only factor in these wars, clearly, but neither did it play no role. As for Korea and Vietnam? Did you miss the bit where the US was getting so worked up about the "godless commies" that they changed their national motto to "in god we trust". Iraq 1 was heavily based in fallout from the religious war between Iraq and Iran. In Iraq 2, the born-again Christian of the United States, who claimed to have mystical powers and to receive direct instruction from his god, referred to the war as a crusade. It was also frequently justified on the basis of the Sept 11th terrorist attacks, which had a firm basis in religion, and, when people pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with those, the alternative reason given was that Saddam Hussein had brutally gassed Kurds to death in a religiously motivated civil war.
Now, I will agree that bacteria becoming resistant to drugs does not necessarily demonstrate evolution through new traits derived from genetic mutation. On the other hand, your statement "if its still bacteria then it has not evolved (certain traits have shifted but its still bacteria)" is absolutely ridiculous. At one point, there were only prokaryotic bacteria, and they developed cellular nuclei, membrane-covered organelles and mitosis to become eukaryotes. The process took a long time and surely did involve traits evolving in isolation and shifting, but the resulting eukaryotes, while still bacteria, were also clearly evolved.
But ultimately, unless you're doing the experiment yourself, you're considering the evidence to be empirical because it "conforms to the definition of the damn word" because "a scientists [sic] says so". You believe Dr. (PHD from the University of Hamburg) Hans A working on the big, multi-national physics experiment that you've heard about when he releases last month's instrument data. You do this, even though all arguments that the experiment even exists are fallacious by your definition. Even if you've toured the facility, it's pretty difficult to tell if it isn't just a fake without taking someone's word for it. I seriously doubt that you believe Dr. (PHD, MD, DDS, MBA, DVM from the University of Cereal Boxtop) Hans B from the Electric Universe Research Institute when he presents the data collected from the instruments on the Institutes orbital research station that their website assures you exists. Both researchers are reporting empirical data gathered through a well described experimental process. Anyone can replicate (or fail to replicate, as the case may be) the results by repeating the experiments. Based on your definition of appeal to authority, the arguments for whether or not it's even worthwhile trying to replicate either experiment are equal, since they're both equally fallacious.
You also didn't address at all my point about empirical evidence. Is an observed event from the past that can never be witnessed again or repeated not empirical evidence?
I think there might be a little confusion here. You do realize that the "I'm too cool for school" attitude you're talking about is an unwillingness to go through a humiliating singing ritual, right?
Good. Good engineers are not necessarily good team members. I can teach people to be good engineers a lot more readily than I can teach them to be good team players.
You're either an amazing, incredible teacher, or you're delusional and have messed up priorities.
"When they are scientists, that evidence is emperical" Let me rephrase that:
"X is a scientist and claims that evidence Y is emperical, therefore evidence Y is emperical"
See, this is the problem I have. You keep using arguments like this, and I don't have a problem with these arguments as arguments, I do have a problem with the fact that you insist that you're correct in your definition of fallacious appeal to authority, but you still keep using a type of argument you're claiming is always fallacious to argue for your definition. You have me pulling my hair out. When a scientist presents their experiments, they're generally presenting their conclusions, not the raw data. Are scientific papers acceptable arguments for you? They shouldn't be, because of the way you've defined appeal to authority as always fallacious. A scientific paper is just "x says y". A peer reviewed paper is just "w says z, where z is 'x is correct when they say y'". You've tried to define appeal to authority as an absolute fallacy always, but all forms of knowledge not from direct personal experience (and even then you can argue about your senses being unreliable reporters) are logically equivalent in some way to an authority you're appealing to when you use them for the sake of argument.
Wikipedia doesn't offer proof, it only offers links to what it is based on. It's not a research source and rightfully any decent school will fail you for citing it. It relies on the authority of external sources. As I said that is not fallacious in itself- unless you accept a wikipedia page "as is". If you however investigate those sources and evaluate them independently on the basis of the empirical evidence they present then THAT is NOT a fallacy.
Wikipedia specifically has a policy against original research. Despite that, in many cases, it presents empirical evidence right in the article and provides a cite to where it came from. I think you seriously overreached in painting the entirety of Wikidpedia as fallacious appeal to authority, especially since the whole point of the citations is that wikipedia pages aren't meant to be taken "as is". Still, ultimately, the empirical evidence you'll find if you follow the links comes is still often second or third hand. Even when it's direct from the primary researchers, it's still their interpretations. Even if it's a direct data dump from their instruments, who calibrated them? Who are you believing about what the experimental set up actually was. Who are you trusting that it really _is_a data dump from their instruments and not doctored?
Empirical evidence is never an appeal to authority - even if quoted since by definition ANYBODY could replicate the results - if not, then it isn't empirical evidence.
Ok then. Replicate the results of of the Hubble telescope for the last week for me then. Or how about from the Large Hadron Collider? Better yet replicate the results of the SN 2003fg supernova (by the way, if you can actually do that, can I have a ride in your time machine?). The first one, virtually no-one can afford. The second two, no-one from earth can do again because they were observations of unique events in time. In order to observe them again, you'd need FTL travel or a time machine (seriously though, I'll agree to any definitions you want about anything for a ride). I'm going to claim though that those observations are still empirical evidence.
Yeah, but even building a farnsworth fusor as a neutron source for experiments in their nuclear program would be "fusion related to this". A country with a nuclear weapons program experimenting with fusion is completely unsurprising. As has been pointed out in other posts, boosted fission weapons that use limited fusion as a neutron source are pretty much standard for nuclear weapons these days.