If 100% of everything anyone ever did and said were preserved for all of history, it would be the best thing that could happen for privacy.
Sure everyone could find any information they wanted, but that information would be less exploitable.
For example, a company you applied for a job to finds a picture of you getting wasted on New Years. Should they not hire you because you are a drunk? Well it turns out that they can also find drunk pictures of just about every applicant so you are no different.
Every single "bad" thing about you will either turn out to be something that is not really that bad in light of the fact that almost everyone does it, or actually bad (in which case you might need to go to jail).
Another example: Your girlfriend finds out you cheated on her using google. You are an asshole. It also turns out that 70% of the people she knows have cheated. It also turns out she cheated on you too. This sucks. Well yes, but was it worse than when we all successfully hid our cheating? At least now cheating doesn't seem as bad. In fact it may not even be considered cheating anymore since everyone knows about it immediately after it happens.
The real reason for wanting privacy is to not be able to be singled out. If everyone is able to be singled out, then nobody is able to be singled out. When a regular polygon gets infinite sides, it becomes a circle with 0 sides.
I'm an atheist (with respect to Christianity), and I've never even heard of the Skeptics Bible. If this book had in fact had good insights into proving the Bible wrong, then great. If it doesn't as you suggest), then we can just ignore it. The fact that it may be filled with poor arguments does nothing to diminish the arguments against the truth of the bible. There are plenty of good polemics of the bible, why focus on a bad one?
I have read the Bible. While it may have been extremely clever in it's day, in the light of modernity, it looks ridiculous to me. I must admit that it's possible that I might not be reading it in a way that reveals it's true genius, but the same could be said for you and the Skeptics Bible.
The bible is a history book. It's not an accurate of account of history, but an accurate account of the history of what Jews and Christians believed (or were told to believe). It is the same level of historicity as Star Trek. It is a cultural artifact. It's metahistory.
The fact that you study Hebrew and Aramaic, does nothing to convince me that the Bible is true, just like the fact that some people learn Klingon does nothing to convince me that Sar Trek is and accurate account of history. I could probably even find a very poorly written argument attempting to debunk Star Trek. What would this prove?
I am sure atheism lacks many things. The question is whether Christianity provides any of the things atheism lacks. It gives people false comfort, which may also be a good thing to those able to delude themselves, but beyond that, I can't think of a single thing that is denied to atheists specifically.
The evidence supporting string theory is the same as the evidence supporting many other hypotheses. They provide an explanation that has not been contradicted by experimental evidence (yet). This is not a sufficient amount of evidence required to elevate string "theory" to be a scientific theory, but it is enough to keep it as a valid scientific hypothesis.
The reason I said "theoretically" was because the only reason websites should be able to know what OS you are using is because your computer volunteers this information.
What I was asking the OP was whether he had tried changing his user agent, because I was curious if there was some other method I was unaware of that the website was using to determine his OS. Based on his comments, it seems like he didn't change it, so that's more than likely how the website knows.
You cant have the universe without G-d
You cant have G-d without people
You cant have people without the universe....
simple enough, no?
You can't have God without people? Do you mean the concept of God? Any sort of real God I would imagine would be perfectly capable of existing and creating things without people if he saw fit. It sure is simple but it also seems wrong regardless of whether you think god is real.
I think boils down to which of these seems more likely.
People <--- Universe <--- God (prime mover) <--- nothing
I would say the interpretation can provide a useful rationale for further investigation.
If it's angels doing the pushing for gravity, what other things might angels be likely to push? Hmm... I can;t think of anything, maybe this interpretation sucks.
Lavoisier came up with the (now disproven) caloric theory of heat, but before the (correct) kinetic theory of heat was proposed, Carnot developed the Carnot cycle which is the basis of heat engine theory, based on the caloric interpretation of heat.
I think human beings just like analogies as a way of helping them to understand things. This is not strictly required for determining the truth of various hypotheses, but it seems to be good for driving the epiphanies that lead to the hypotheses. Although I suppose bad interpretations might stifle epiphanies as much as good interpretations drive them.
I think you mean "evolution by natural selection occurs" and "only evolution by natural selection". The opposite of "evolution occurs" is "evolution does not occur" (i.e. everything stays the same), which we (most of us anyway) already know is not true.
Is there another method of evolution aside from natural selection (the selection of adaptive traits)? Sure there is. The most obvious one is sexual selection, also described by Darwin as an explanation of maladaptive traits. Maybe there are even more explanations of other forms of selections (e.g. God selection). No one (AFAIK) is suggesting evolution by natural selection is the only mechanism of evolution. We can however ignore any of the unfalsifiable claims (e.g. God selection) as a matter of applying the scientific method. This doesn't prove it's false, it just means that it is in the same category with invisible purple unicorns.
Edison was an inventor. To my knowledge he didn't discover any scientific theories, but rather applied existing scientific theories to make new inventions.
Darwin was a much more notable scientist (i.e. someone who figures out how the world works), than Edison. Edison was a much more notable "applied scientist" (i.e. someone who figures out how to build things using science).
I can't think of a single scientific discovery made by Edison. Please let me know if you can think of one.
Evolution does exactly tell you the conditions you need. You need random mutations, selection pressure, and lots of time. The fact that it requires more time for rats to evolve into something unrecognizable as a rat than the time we are willing to do a full test, does not mean it isn't true.
How long will it take a space ship going 0.9 the speed of light to go to the next galaxy and come back? How much time will the pilot experience? Relativity does not give us an answer that is testable in a human lifetime. So what? We just test smaller examples and assume the bigger ones work the same way unless proven otherwise. This is the whole reason we make scientific predictions, because we can't test everything. We can only test a subset, and from that subset we devise a model to apply everywhere it seems to fit, until it stops working.
The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts organisms that gradually change to become more well adapted to their environment over time provided that there is a source of random mutations and selection pressure.
String theory certainly qualifies as science, just not a scientific theory. It makes falsifiable claims (hypotheses or conjectures) that are not possible to test at the current time, but are testable in principle. This is quite common in theoretical physics.
we could just rename string-theory and m-theory to string-hypothesis and m-hypothesis and then reclaim theories as those ideas with overwhelming evidence, rather than chopping down "theory" to the level of "hypothesis" just because of a few misnomers.
Also we could just infer "accepted theory" from "theory" unless it is preceded by "rejected" (e.g. Rejected caloric theory of heat). Afterall we do need a word for the well accepted bits of scientific information. Theory seems to fit the bill pretty perfectly with a few corrections and clarifications.
"a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance". Bigotry may be based on real or perceived characteristics, including age, disability, dissension from popular opinions, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender identity, language, nationality, political alignment, race, region, religious or spiritual belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
Some people care more about being right than abstinence from hating people. I don't think calling someone a "godtard" necessarily means that you hate them or are intolerant of them. Well, at least, not any morso than calling anyone stupid does. I think it is only when one is lobbying for reduced legal rights does it cross over into bigotry. I don't care when anti-gay activists say gay people are going to hell, that's just ignorance (because they don't). When they oppose equal rights for gays is when I consider it to be bigotry.
If Scycraft is a bigot for calling people "godtards", then wouldn't that make you a bigot for calling people who call people "godtards") bigots, and me a bigot for calling you a bigot for calling Psycraft a bigot for calling other people godtards?
"We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second. So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that."
I have been saying for years that doing things with ones and zeroes hundreds of millions of times a second is fine. Things like hacking into bank servers and changing ones and zeroes so that they think you have lots of money, and changing the ones and zeroes on your own harddrive in such a way to allow you to watch the latest movies in HD without paying for them is fine. It's just ones and zeroes.
I am pretty sure this congressman's email account password and home address are only ones and zeroes somewhere too.
I'll start off by saying that I am 100% pro science, and that I don't think intelligent design has any place in the biology classroom.
Given that ideas only reach the status of theory if they have overwhelming evidence supporting them, it isn't at all clear what "all sides" would involve.
I don't think this is strictly true, even though I believe it should be. We have ideas like string-theory and m-theory which, while promising ideas in the field of science, currently clearly fall under the category of a scientific hypothesis or conjecture. There is not overwhelming evidence supporting them, there s some evidence supporting them.
If we are going to criticize creationists for calling things like evolution "just a theory" we should do our best to uphold our own standard of calling only scientific theories "theories". It might be hard to get everyone to start calling it "string hypotheses" until further notice, but if we want to be consistent, I feel this is necessary.
I also want to make it clear that I don't think string-hypothesis (I have already started) is on the same level as intelligent design. While maybe not a theory, it is still a scientific claim in that it is falsifiable. Depending on the specifics, in the best case, if intelligent design cam be considered falsifiable, I believe it has already been falsified, and in the worst case, I think it's unfalsifiable religion masquerading as falsifiable science.
Also I would like to point out that just because and idea has attained the status of a theory, does not mean that we shouldn't teach competing scientifically falsifiable hypotheses. This seems to be a good way to show science in action. For example, the theory of gravity has overwhelming evidence. There is some evidence that seems not to be consistent with the Newtonian theory of gravity. This has lead to some new hypothesis as explanations, the most widely accepted of which is the existence of Dark matter. Another is MOND (modified Newtonian Dynamics) which suggests that the equation described in the Newtonian theory of gravity is wrong and needs to be modified.
I don't have a problem with competing ideas being taught. This is a vital part of science, and a true example a good way to teach the controversy. The difference between MOND and intelligent design is either a unfalsifiable claim, or one that has already been trivially falsified.
One key component of intelligent design is the idea of irreducible complexity. A common example of an irreducibly complex item is the human eye. This is my opinion has already been shown to be false. There are numerous of examples of different photoreceptors at all stages of development in many different organisms clearly showing that even the simplest eyes are useful with incremental improvements all along the way adding utility, no single step of which seems "unsteppable" by evolution.
The idea that intelligent design must be correct if science can't prove how every single biological mechanism evolved is unfalsifiable.
I am open to competition to the Darwinian Theories of evolution by natural selection, but intelligent design just isn't good enough to warrant mention in a biology classroom.
I'm still interested to know how they knew you were using linux.
What is interesting is that they require java considering it is basically unsafe to use java at this point. Mozilla disables it by default. Flash is also a total disaster, but I guess we are stuck with it until some better standardized technology comes along to replace it.
I am not an expert on supersymmetry or particle physics by any stretch. What I do know is that they are doing a bunch of experiments. If the outcomes of the experiments matter, then the theory is falsifiable. I am presuming that the purpose of those experiments is to know the answers to questions that can help support or deny various supersymmetry possibilities. If it wasn't then what is the point of doing them?
There is a whole section in wikipedia on the current status of supersymmetry in relation to recent experiments and whether they are consistent with various supersymmetry models. I am just an amateur particle phsyics and general science enthusiaist I can't claim to understand the math behind a lot of modern particle physics. I do know that what I read about it looks and sounds like falsifiable science to me. The alternative is that it is all just a massive conspiracy and the scientists conducting these experiments are just con artists, and everyone else is either too stupid to realize (like me) or in on it. I place very low probability on this scenario, especially considering the track record of science on the parts that I do understand.
I don't have any idea what you are talking about when you say very few scientific theories are falsifiable. Please give at least a few examples of unfalsifiable scientific theories.
Theoretically, a website shouldn't even know what OS you are using. It is more likely to be looking at which browser you are using via the user agent, and sometimes this can be a giveaway as to which OS you are using (e.g. you are probably running Linux if you are running iceweasel). This user agent field is changeable to whatever you want, it is usually there to help web servers send you stuff that is going to work in your browser. Usually websites either give you a version of their website that is customized for your browser or some generic default if they don't recognize the browser you are using. Maybe the McGraw Hill Connect website is just written sloppily and it is rejecting your user agent. Depending on your browser, there is probably a way to change it. There may even be a way to change it for just that one web site.
There is also a possibility that you are using a browser that is blocking popups by default. Some websites assume you are using IE and therefore likely have popups enabled. This is kind of dumb, because I am not even sure IE allows them anymore.
I don't like LibreOffice because using it brings back horrible memories of flunking English class with a fancy new open source word processor back in 1999.
You would be effectively saying of this God "it doesn't exist because it is said to do things I don't agree with". Hmmm. I'm not seeing a good argument here.
I don;t think that's a good argument either, which is why I said:
Whether these ideas are true or not has nothing to do with whether they are abhorrent. But I think the Bible does not provide a good moral framework, if we assume it is not true.
Obviously if there is a God, then the argument for moral absolutism becomes much more feasible, and judging the morality of the creator of the universe by my own standards seems less significant. All the things that I said I found abhorrent were in the context of a world where God does not exist and humans influence the evolution of their own moral standards.
God could have provided a general amnesty by clicking his fingers. However, God chose the better way which was to make compensation for our sins himself (in Christianity, Christ is God, by the way, in case you didn't know that; some don't) and to demonstrate his love for us even while we were still sinful and selfish
Why does sacrificing a human being demonstrate love? If I kill my own son in the name of God, does it demonstrate how much I love him? I am not allowed to decide what constitutes a morally absolute demonstration of love, but God is, and he chose death to be the ultimate demonstration of love. This is ignoring the fact that if Jesus is God, then there was no sacrifice at all, just something that appeared to regular humans to be a sacrifice at the time. What kind of sacrifice is a death where you are resurrected again?
If a free being rejects God, who is infinitely good, then what does that make them? And what would they (logically) deserve? Additionally, no one is forced to reject God.
God decides what people deserve. He could have decided that even Hitler doesn't deserve eternal punishment. Afterall what did Hitler do that was even so terrible? All he did was kill people, which is not even that bad because it sends good people to heaven and bad people to hell, all as part of Gods plan. But no, God decided to create people with free will that could choose to fall into the trap of hell, and knowing with omniscient certainty exactly which people would choose which outcome before he ever created them.
On top of all that, God provides every grace and help to each created soul to avoid going to hell. There is no need for anyone to go to hell. So while it may be a horrible idea, it doesn't follow that a God that necessitated such a place could not exist; rather it means that such a god would be infinitely good. The only way to abolish hell would be to reduce the goodness of the god.
Well, it sure does help to know God personally in order to start reconciling oneself to the tough stuff in the Bible. If you don't know God ('to know God' is effectively the definition of faith, and not the atheist redefinition "Belief without knowledge" that makes believers look irrational) then it's understandable that you wouldn't go along with what is written in it.
Belief already implies a lack of knowledge. If you know something you don't need to believe it anymore. Faith is not belief without knowledge, it is belief without evidence. This is not an atheist redefinition. This was the accepted definition even from religious people not too long ago. It is the Christians who have decided the word faith needed a makeover. I personally don't enjoy arguing semantics. The real question is whether people claim to believe without the need for evidence or not. If you have evidence, let's hear it, if not that's fine too. It doesn't matter what the definitions are, we just need to know the meaning of what people are saying.
Really? So now forgiving people reduces how good you are? Jesus/God will forgive you for anything except not believi
I don't disagree that financial cost can serve as a disincentive. I just think it is counterproductive to artificially force police to do things inefficiently, especially when they get their money from tax payers. If drones are 1/10th the price for the same spying capability, then we should give 1/10th the money and encourage them to use drones.
Furthermore, given that we don't have control over prices of various technology in the free market, rather than trying to predict the market, why not just create legal barriers like "You can't do any kind of spying without a court issued warrant, but once you get that warrant, do it is cheaply and effectively as you can".
I get that being tracked by a human was legal because it wasn't seen as a problem. Now that we see that something (GPS tracking) which is essentially the same thing is apparently a problem, I don't see why we can't now re-evaluate our position on manual tracking. How expensive these things are shouldn't matter, because the costs of things change with new technologies.
If you want to stop X, then you should make a law prohibiting X. When you make a law prohibiting Y because Y is how people do X today, you set yourself up for failure when people figure out a new way to do X with Z.
I had hoped that North Korea was spending a large percentage of it's budget on original computer graphics propaganda rather than it's actual weapons, but unfortunately I was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
If 100% of everything anyone ever did and said were preserved for all of history, it would be the best thing that could happen for privacy.
Sure everyone could find any information they wanted, but that information would be less exploitable.
For example, a company you applied for a job to finds a picture of you getting wasted on New Years. Should they not hire you because you are a drunk? Well it turns out that they can also find drunk pictures of just about every applicant so you are no different.
Every single "bad" thing about you will either turn out to be something that is not really that bad in light of the fact that almost everyone does it, or actually bad (in which case you might need to go to jail).
Another example: Your girlfriend finds out you cheated on her using google. You are an asshole. It also turns out that 70% of the people she knows have cheated. It also turns out she cheated on you too. This sucks. Well yes, but was it worse than when we all successfully hid our cheating? At least now cheating doesn't seem as bad. In fact it may not even be considered cheating anymore since everyone knows about it immediately after it happens.
The real reason for wanting privacy is to not be able to be singled out. If everyone is able to be singled out, then nobody is able to be singled out. When a regular polygon gets infinite sides, it becomes a circle with 0 sides.
I'm an atheist (with respect to Christianity), and I've never even heard of the Skeptics Bible. If this book had in fact had good insights into proving the Bible wrong, then great. If it doesn't as you suggest), then we can just ignore it. The fact that it may be filled with poor arguments does nothing to diminish the arguments against the truth of the bible. There are plenty of good polemics of the bible, why focus on a bad one?
I have read the Bible. While it may have been extremely clever in it's day, in the light of modernity, it looks ridiculous to me. I must admit that it's possible that I might not be reading it in a way that reveals it's true genius, but the same could be said for you and the Skeptics Bible.
The bible is a history book. It's not an accurate of account of history, but an accurate account of the history of what Jews and Christians believed (or were told to believe). It is the same level of historicity as Star Trek. It is a cultural artifact. It's metahistory.
The fact that you study Hebrew and Aramaic, does nothing to convince me that the Bible is true, just like the fact that some people learn Klingon does nothing to convince me that Sar Trek is and accurate account of history. I could probably even find a very poorly written argument attempting to debunk Star Trek. What would this prove?
I am sure atheism lacks many things. The question is whether Christianity provides any of the things atheism lacks. It gives people false comfort, which may also be a good thing to those able to delude themselves, but beyond that, I can't think of a single thing that is denied to atheists specifically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory#Testability_and_experimental_predictions
The reason I said "theoretically" was because the only reason websites should be able to know what OS you are using is because your computer volunteers this information. What I was asking the OP was whether he had tried changing his user agent, because I was curious if there was some other method I was unaware of that the website was using to determine his OS. Based on his comments, it seems like he didn't change it, so that's more than likely how the website knows.
You cant have the universe without G-d You cant have G-d without people You cant have people without the universe.... simple enough, no?
You can't have God without people? Do you mean the concept of God? Any sort of real God I would imagine would be perfectly capable of existing and creating things without people if he saw fit. It sure is simple but it also seems wrong regardless of whether you think god is real.
I think boils down to which of these seems more likely.
People <--- Universe <--- God (prime mover) <--- nothing
People <--- Universe (prime mover) <--- nothing
People <--- Universe <--- God? <--- God's God? <--- God's God's God?
I am not 100% convinced by any of them. I think of those I listed I am least convinced by the suggestion of one and only one God.
I would say the interpretation can provide a useful rationale for further investigation.
If it's angels doing the pushing for gravity, what other things might angels be likely to push? Hmm... I can;t think of anything, maybe this interpretation sucks.
Lavoisier came up with the (now disproven) caloric theory of heat, but before the (correct) kinetic theory of heat was proposed, Carnot developed the Carnot cycle which is the basis of heat engine theory, based on the caloric interpretation of heat.
I think human beings just like analogies as a way of helping them to understand things. This is not strictly required for determining the truth of various hypotheses, but it seems to be good for driving the epiphanies that lead to the hypotheses. Although I suppose bad interpretations might stifle epiphanies as much as good interpretations drive them.
I think you mean "evolution by natural selection occurs" and "only evolution by natural selection". The opposite of "evolution occurs" is "evolution does not occur" (i.e. everything stays the same), which we (most of us anyway) already know is not true.
Is there another method of evolution aside from natural selection (the selection of adaptive traits)? Sure there is. The most obvious one is sexual selection, also described by Darwin as an explanation of maladaptive traits. Maybe there are even more explanations of other forms of selections (e.g. God selection). No one (AFAIK) is suggesting evolution by natural selection is the only mechanism of evolution. We can however ignore any of the unfalsifiable claims (e.g. God selection) as a matter of applying the scientific method. This doesn't prove it's false, it just means that it is in the same category with invisible purple unicorns.
Edison was an inventor. To my knowledge he didn't discover any scientific theories, but rather applied existing scientific theories to make new inventions.
Darwin was a much more notable scientist (i.e. someone who figures out how the world works), than Edison. Edison was a much more notable "applied scientist" (i.e. someone who figures out how to build things using science).
I can't think of a single scientific discovery made by Edison. Please let me know if you can think of one.
Evolution does exactly tell you the conditions you need. You need random mutations, selection pressure, and lots of time. The fact that it requires more time for rats to evolve into something unrecognizable as a rat than the time we are willing to do a full test, does not mean it isn't true.
How long will it take a space ship going 0.9 the speed of light to go to the next galaxy and come back? How much time will the pilot experience? Relativity does not give us an answer that is testable in a human lifetime. So what? We just test smaller examples and assume the bigger ones work the same way unless proven otherwise. This is the whole reason we make scientific predictions, because we can't test everything. We can only test a subset, and from that subset we devise a model to apply everywhere it seems to fit, until it stops working.
The theory of evolution by natural selection predicts organisms that gradually change to become more well adapted to their environment over time provided that there is a source of random mutations and selection pressure.
String theory certainly qualifies as science, just not a scientific theory. It makes falsifiable claims (hypotheses or conjectures) that are not possible to test at the current time, but are testable in principle. This is quite common in theoretical physics.
we could just rename string-theory and m-theory to string-hypothesis and m-hypothesis and then reclaim theories as those ideas with overwhelming evidence, rather than chopping down "theory" to the level of "hypothesis" just because of a few misnomers.
Also we could just infer "accepted theory" from "theory" unless it is preceded by "rejected" (e.g. Rejected caloric theory of heat). Afterall we do need a word for the well accepted bits of scientific information. Theory seems to fit the bill pretty perfectly with a few corrections and clarifications.
"a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance". Bigotry may be based on real or perceived characteristics, including age, disability, dissension from popular opinions, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender identity, language, nationality, political alignment, race, region, religious or spiritual belief, sex, or sexual orientation.
Some people care more about being right than abstinence from hating people. I don't think calling someone a "godtard" necessarily means that you hate them or are intolerant of them. Well, at least, not any morso than calling anyone stupid does. I think it is only when one is lobbying for reduced legal rights does it cross over into bigotry. I don't care when anti-gay activists say gay people are going to hell, that's just ignorance (because they don't). When they oppose equal rights for gays is when I consider it to be bigotry.
If Scycraft is a bigot for calling people "godtards", then wouldn't that make you a bigot for calling people who call people "godtards") bigots, and me a bigot for calling you a bigot for calling Psycraft a bigot for calling other people godtards?
"We're talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second. So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that."
I have been saying for years that doing things with ones and zeroes hundreds of millions of times a second is fine. Things like hacking into bank servers and changing ones and zeroes so that they think you have lots of money, and changing the ones and zeroes on your own harddrive in such a way to allow you to watch the latest movies in HD without paying for them is fine. It's just ones and zeroes.
I am pretty sure this congressman's email account password and home address are only ones and zeroes somewhere too.
Given that ideas only reach the status of theory if they have overwhelming evidence supporting them, it isn't at all clear what "all sides" would involve.
I don't think this is strictly true, even though I believe it should be. We have ideas like string-theory and m-theory which, while promising ideas in the field of science, currently clearly fall under the category of a scientific hypothesis or conjecture. There is not overwhelming evidence supporting them, there s some evidence supporting them.
If we are going to criticize creationists for calling things like evolution "just a theory" we should do our best to uphold our own standard of calling only scientific theories "theories". It might be hard to get everyone to start calling it "string hypotheses" until further notice, but if we want to be consistent, I feel this is necessary.
I also want to make it clear that I don't think string-hypothesis (I have already started) is on the same level as intelligent design. While maybe not a theory, it is still a scientific claim in that it is falsifiable. Depending on the specifics, in the best case, if intelligent design cam be considered falsifiable, I believe it has already been falsified, and in the worst case, I think it's unfalsifiable religion masquerading as falsifiable science.
Also I would like to point out that just because and idea has attained the status of a theory, does not mean that we shouldn't teach competing scientifically falsifiable hypotheses. This seems to be a good way to show science in action. For example, the theory of gravity has overwhelming evidence. There is some evidence that seems not to be consistent with the Newtonian theory of gravity. This has lead to some new hypothesis as explanations, the most widely accepted of which is the existence of Dark matter. Another is MOND (modified Newtonian Dynamics) which suggests that the equation described in the Newtonian theory of gravity is wrong and needs to be modified.
I don't have a problem with competing ideas being taught. This is a vital part of science, and a true example a good way to teach the controversy. The difference between MOND and intelligent design is either a unfalsifiable claim, or one that has already been trivially falsified.
One key component of intelligent design is the idea of irreducible complexity. A common example of an irreducibly complex item is the human eye. This is my opinion has already been shown to be false. There are numerous of examples of different photoreceptors at all stages of development in many different organisms clearly showing that even the simplest eyes are useful with incremental improvements all along the way adding utility, no single step of which seems "unsteppable" by evolution.
The idea that intelligent design must be correct if science can't prove how every single biological mechanism evolved is unfalsifiable.
I am open to competition to the Darwinian Theories of evolution by natural selection, but intelligent design just isn't good enough to warrant mention in a biology classroom.
I'm still interested to know how they knew you were using linux.
What is interesting is that they require java considering it is basically unsafe to use java at this point. Mozilla disables it by default. Flash is also a total disaster, but I guess we are stuck with it until some better standardized technology comes along to replace it.
I am not an expert on supersymmetry or particle physics by any stretch. What I do know is that they are doing a bunch of experiments. If the outcomes of the experiments matter, then the theory is falsifiable. I am presuming that the purpose of those experiments is to know the answers to questions that can help support or deny various supersymmetry possibilities. If it wasn't then what is the point of doing them?
There is a whole section in wikipedia on the current status of supersymmetry in relation to recent experiments and whether they are consistent with various supersymmetry models. I am just an amateur particle phsyics and general science enthusiaist I can't claim to understand the math behind a lot of modern particle physics. I do know that what I read about it looks and sounds like falsifiable science to me. The alternative is that it is all just a massive conspiracy and the scientists conducting these experiments are just con artists, and everyone else is either too stupid to realize (like me) or in on it. I place very low probability on this scenario, especially considering the track record of science on the parts that I do understand.
I don't have any idea what you are talking about when you say very few scientific theories are falsifiable. Please give at least a few examples of unfalsifiable scientific theories.
Theoretically, a website shouldn't even know what OS you are using. It is more likely to be looking at which browser you are using via the user agent, and sometimes this can be a giveaway as to which OS you are using (e.g. you are probably running Linux if you are running iceweasel). This user agent field is changeable to whatever you want, it is usually there to help web servers send you stuff that is going to work in your browser. Usually websites either give you a version of their website that is customized for your browser or some generic default if they don't recognize the browser you are using. Maybe the McGraw Hill Connect website is just written sloppily and it is rejecting your user agent. Depending on your browser, there is probably a way to change it. There may even be a way to change it for just that one web site.
There is also a possibility that you are using a browser that is blocking popups by default. Some websites assume you are using IE and therefore likely have popups enabled. This is kind of dumb, because I am not even sure IE allows them anymore.
What's an email client?
I don't like LibreOffice because using it brings back horrible memories of flunking English class with a fancy new open source word processor back in 1999.
They probably had a surplus of parentheses that they needed to stash somewhere.
BIll just schooled you.
Why make hardware when you can just run the algorithms in your mind?
You would be effectively saying of this God "it doesn't exist because it is said to do things I don't agree with". Hmmm. I'm not seeing a good argument here.
I don;t think that's a good argument either, which is why I said:
Whether these ideas are true or not has nothing to do with whether they are abhorrent. But I think the Bible does not provide a good moral framework, if we assume it is not true.
Obviously if there is a God, then the argument for moral absolutism becomes much more feasible, and judging the morality of the creator of the universe by my own standards seems less significant. All the things that I said I found abhorrent were in the context of a world where God does not exist and humans influence the evolution of their own moral standards.
God could have provided a general amnesty by clicking his fingers. However, God chose the better way which was to make compensation for our sins himself (in Christianity, Christ is God, by the way, in case you didn't know that; some don't) and to demonstrate his love for us even while we were still sinful and selfish
Why does sacrificing a human being demonstrate love? If I kill my own son in the name of God, does it demonstrate how much I love him? I am not allowed to decide what constitutes a morally absolute demonstration of love, but God is, and he chose death to be the ultimate demonstration of love. This is ignoring the fact that if Jesus is God, then there was no sacrifice at all, just something that appeared to regular humans to be a sacrifice at the time. What kind of sacrifice is a death where you are resurrected again?
If a free being rejects God, who is infinitely good, then what does that make them? And what would they (logically) deserve? Additionally, no one is forced to reject God.
God decides what people deserve. He could have decided that even Hitler doesn't deserve eternal punishment. Afterall what did Hitler do that was even so terrible? All he did was kill people, which is not even that bad because it sends good people to heaven and bad people to hell, all as part of Gods plan. But no, God decided to create people with free will that could choose to fall into the trap of hell, and knowing with omniscient certainty exactly which people would choose which outcome before he ever created them.
On top of all that, God provides every grace and help to each created soul to avoid going to hell. There is no need for anyone to go to hell. So while it may be a horrible idea, it doesn't follow that a God that necessitated such a place could not exist; rather it means that such a god would be infinitely good. The only way to abolish hell would be to reduce the goodness of the god.
Well, it sure does help to know God personally in order to start reconciling oneself to the tough stuff in the Bible. If you don't know God ('to know God' is effectively the definition of faith, and not the atheist redefinition "Belief without knowledge" that makes believers look irrational) then it's understandable that you wouldn't go along with what is written in it.
Belief already implies a lack of knowledge. If you know something you don't need to believe it anymore. Faith is not belief without knowledge, it is belief without evidence. This is not an atheist redefinition. This was the accepted definition even from religious people not too long ago. It is the Christians who have decided the word faith needed a makeover. I personally don't enjoy arguing semantics. The real question is whether people claim to believe without the need for evidence or not. If you have evidence, let's hear it, if not that's fine too. It doesn't matter what the definitions are, we just need to know the meaning of what people are saying.
Really? So now forgiving people reduces how good you are? Jesus/God will forgive you for anything except not believi
I don't disagree that financial cost can serve as a disincentive. I just think it is counterproductive to artificially force police to do things inefficiently, especially when they get their money from tax payers. If drones are 1/10th the price for the same spying capability, then we should give 1/10th the money and encourage them to use drones.
Furthermore, given that we don't have control over prices of various technology in the free market, rather than trying to predict the market, why not just create legal barriers like "You can't do any kind of spying without a court issued warrant, but once you get that warrant, do it is cheaply and effectively as you can".
I get that being tracked by a human was legal because it wasn't seen as a problem. Now that we see that something (GPS tracking) which is essentially the same thing is apparently a problem, I don't see why we can't now re-evaluate our position on manual tracking. How expensive these things are shouldn't matter, because the costs of things change with new technologies.
If you want to stop X, then you should make a law prohibiting X. When you make a law prohibiting Y because Y is how people do X today, you set yourself up for failure when people figure out a new way to do X with Z.
I had hoped that North Korea was spending a large percentage of it's budget on original computer graphics propaganda rather than it's actual weapons, but unfortunately I was wrong.