Seeing as the US is not at war (a declaration of war requires an act of congress), this is moot.
No matter how manytime Bush calls it a war, it is not. A declaration of war has significant legal ramifications, exactly to give the executive the powers needed to handle the special situations of warfare.
And the broad powers granted in those circumstances is exactly why the president isn't allowed to declare war by himself.
It gets you a unified system designed to work as a cohesive hole, and that is easy to maintain and operate.
That's generally what you pay a fortune for when you buy these big beasts.
It all boils down to what is most important for you - the money or the hassle of managing less integrated systems. The big filers are by no means the right choice for everybody, but they are nice to work with if you can justify the cost.
Features in high end storage systems like this typically include things like redundant-everything (multiple controllers with automatic failover, multiple sets of write cache, RAID, multiple power supplies), up to and including systems where you can pull out entire packs of drives while the system is running without noticing more than a reduced IO rate.
Many of them also have extensive built in health checks, and some will "call home" and the first you might know about a potential problem may be the engineer showing up at your office to fix it before it does become a problem (of course, you pay accordingly....)
Other features usually involve snapshot support (get a second virtual "drive" that is "frozen" at a point in time - makes doing backups a breeze because you can quiet database updates etc., make a snapshot, and then go on with your business and not have to deal with complex hot backup solutions), and often remote synchronisation (get a second box at a second location, put up a fibre link between them, and let the boxes handle the rest)
Of course you can do most/all of this with cheaper hardware too, but then you have to build it yourself. If you're, for instance a bank, and are dealing with huge sums of money, it's often far easier to buy stuff like this and pay for the maintenance contracts and just not have to deal with it any more.
For mere mortals they are usually just outrageously overprised compared to the features we actually need.
Though I must say I have always had a weakness for hardware that comes with cases big enough to live in and requires forklifts to move...:)
You mean just like "upgrading" to a newer version of Office then?
More than once I've had more luck opening old Word document with OpenOffice than with a newer Word version...
Besides, if you'd bothered checking what they're actually planning to do, they've specifically made it clear that keeping current software around to handle legacy documents is ok, and that no document conversion is required.
The press release goes on to highlight the fact that earlier in his career, Gutierrez was chief information officer for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest state secretariat with 23,000 staff and more than $12 billion in annual spending. In that capacity, Gutierrez:
[L]ed the development and implementation of the state's Virtual Gateway, an online portal that integrated the web presence of 16 agencies into a user-friendly format that improved service delivery and reduced costs. "The Virtual Gateway is an example of how state government computing can be transformed through the application of open standards that interoperate with many kinds of technology and vendors," said Gutierrez. "s technology continues to evolve there remain substantial opportunities to transform services and a need to plan for the long-term future of technology-infused operations."
So, in other words, it's referring to the fact that he's a) overseen large deployments and large budgets, and b) that he's carried out a cost saving project relying on open standards.
He's good for this job because he's enough of a heavyweight and has had successfull enough projects that he and the Governor can respond to further attempts at power grabs from the senate by pointing out that Gutierrez has done similar stuff before, AND saved money doing it, so any politicians going against this project can much easier be painted as trying to waste taxpayer money to protect out of state corporate interests (Microsoft). It's a smart move...
1) you can always choose to travel by other means. Airlines are not run by the government, therefore they are not "public" entities. They are private businesses who may set their policies however they like. If their policies are draconian and restrictive (as I'm sure all the Chicken Littles crying here believe), choose a different mode of transport.
This completely misses the point - it isn't the airlines that set these requirements, but the US government.
You are correct. However long standing absence of proof in the face of search from proof gives a good indication of absence.
Otherwise we should all believe in santa claus and the tooth fairy because we can't prove their absence.
Presumably most of us don't. Not because we can somehow prove they don't exist, but because we make the reasonable assumption that some proof would have been found for their existence by now if they were more than childrens stories, as well as because it is easy to prove that many things that are attributed to them doesn't match reality.
The latter doesn't prove they don't exist, merely that the childrens stories can't be accurate.
The exact same argument can be applied to the existence of god.
However, if you keep not finding proof for the existence of something but keep finding places where the theory of the supposed entity doesn't match observed fact, the natural choice is to believe that entity does not exist.
To turn things on it's head: Until there is proof for the existence of something, it is natural to not believe. Otherwise we would all be believing in an infinite number of imaginary things just because there's no proof against it.
Now, often it is fair to withhold judgement, or alternatively to believe that something could possibly exist, because you believe the idea of something matches reality sufficiently to be plausible, even if there is no direct evidence. But there is a vast difference between believing something exist, and accepting that it might be possible for it to exist (and the latter is not inconsistent with not believing).
Personally I don't believe in any god. However I will gladly concede that it could be possible, in the same way as it could be possible that we all live in a Matrix style simulation, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world out of pasta.
I've yet to see any proof making god any more likely than the alternatives. On the contrary - a Matrix like simulation seems plausible because it is only a matter of extrapolating current technological innovation, and if the technology eventually exists, then it is likely, given humans strong interest in history, that more than one such simulation of will be run based on human history, in which case the odds of being in one is higher than the odds of not being in one (simply as a result of there being more simulation than realities). Tthis is known as the "simulation argument", by the way.
So in other words, you consider the evolution of relatively speaking simple organisms less likely than the existence of a supernatural entity with the power to create all we have seen and sensed, with no proof.
How do you know you aren't just a computer program in a simulation in some kids room? It would "solve" all the same problems, and all the same arguments you try to use to defend your idea of a creator works just as well.
Or we could all be in a dream had by some sleeping alien.
Or.. (insert random crackpot theory here)...
However it is a pointless exercise, because a) it doesn't explain anything, b) it can't be proven unless whatever "power" you invent decides to interfere directly.
It is also a complete strawman attack on evolution (thought you'd sneak that past me? Please... It's a classic creationist argument)
Evolution seeks to explain the workings of a certain aspect of the world we live in, namely the evolution of life. It is NOT a creation theory - it does not explain how the universe came into existence, or even necessarily how life came into existence. It merely seeks to describe the mechanism by which living organisms change character through the generations, based on observations of the natural world.
This is based on the assumption that our observations are valid. If you are not willing to accept that assumption, you can always invent any theory you like, and it will not be falsifiable simply because any mechanism interfering with our observations could do so in a systematic and consistent manner.
I could state that gravity is caused by small undetectable demons holding us down, and you can't refute it, because I can meet any claim you make by claiming that it's the result of how the gravity demons work.
However, any such statement is faith, and any such statement of faith has no more validity than any other - there is no way for you to test any of them in the absence of direct intervention, and at most very limited ways in which you can assess their relative probabilities.
That also makes them pointless. It's like going to the beach, pick a single grain of sand and claiming it is somehow "special" because you picked it up.
Anyone who is truly well educated would not call themselves an athiest. Or if they did call themselves one, they would concede that this belief is as much a matter of religious faith as anything anyone from any other religion believes. The existence of God is not falsifiable. The belief that there is no God is as much a matter of faith as the belief that there is a God.
Bullshit.
This is a logical fallacy. You are trying to equate believing something with religious faith based on the assumption that the choices requires equal proof.
Do you hold a religious belief that we aren't surrounded at all times by invisible pink unicorns?
I think not (and I am making the assumption that you don't believe we are surrounded by invisible pink unicorns)
Atheism is the same: To most atheists, it is to not have faith or believe in a god because we have not seen any evidence to indicate the existence of a god.
That is not to say that there aren't atheists who does not hold stronger opinions, such that the belief that there can't be a god, which is a claim that could perhaps be considered faith unless backed up with evidence.
However, for my part, my standpoint is that I haven't seen any evidence that in any way suggests there is a god, so there is no reason for me to consider the existence of one any more than the existence of santa claus, the tooth fairy or the flying spaghetti monster. Show me credible evidence of any of them, and I'll happily change my mind.
Life forming from a "goo" over millions of years, no I don't believe in it. One thing non-believers ask about is Dinosaurs. We have their bones and carbon dating says they are x number of years old. But God can create not only new things, but old things.
So can the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by the way, can you please prove that you are not living in the Matrix?
Point being, your argument is pointless. It has no more logical validity than a claim that you are living in the Matrix, or any other argument that is not testable and falsifiable.
Yes, your view could be true, but so could the idea of us all living in a computer simulation, or any other randomly contorted "explanation". However positing either of them (or any other similar idea), contributes nothing of value - all the time we have no way of observing such influence, we have no meaningful choice but to trust our observations.
The problem most atheists have with religion is exactly the above. You choose to believe in something that is not backed up with evidence, while ignoring the infinite number of alternative unproven hypotheses that are just as likely.
I could easily claim the existence of the tooth fairy and santa claus the same way, by inventing intricate explanations to make the ideas fit the facts. Would that make you believe in them?
I think not. So why do you choose to believe in your particular idea of God over any other random idea?
You have a lot of good points, though I don't agree with all the details. I used to be quite politically active, but stopped for many of the reasons you cite: It's very easy to resort to trying to tell people what they should think, and it doesn't work.
You can convince people to change their mind about subjects they are unsure about, or that they can see clearly demonstrated in ways dear to their hearts.
You can't convince them of things where they have truly made up their mind and where their decision isn't challenged by seeing the effects of their decision, feeling it on their body, or by being slowly, step by step, pulled closer by people they know and trust.
That means that barring events that majorly disrupt the life of a lot of people in ways that makes them susceptible to your ideas (such as steady streams of dead from a war, or a crisis like 9/11 that induces mass hysteria, and opens up opportunities to reach people), any major change in peoples conceptions takes place at a glacial pace, and often with temporary setbacks.
I fully expect evolution, for instance, to become near universally supported eventually, but as the poll indicated it will be more likely to happen gradually over 2-3 generations as older people more likely to believe in ID/Creationism die off.
I'd like to see you define what you mean by "Creation".
People who just hold deist beliefs along the lines of a creator that set things in motion, I usually find to be quite reasonable - I don't see why they need their beliefs, but at least they accept science, and what they believe doesn't have to contradict current scientific theories, though they add nothing either (nothing more than a belief in the tooth fairy or santa claus in any case).
Believing in that kind of "Creation" is rather harmless, and not something I really find worth debating unless someone claim they can prove it. I don't believe because I find it too improbable, but there's nothing inherently impossible in the idea that a deity might have "set things in motion". I can respect people like that.
However that does not contradict evolution.
Real ID people and Creationists, however, are usually either plain dumb or just misinformed both about evolution and ID/Creationism.
I just can't respect most people like that, as I have yet to meet or discuss evolution with a single one that have been able to coherently state his/her arguments and debate them without resorting to repeated logical fallacies, outright dishonest debating techniques (citing "research" that is hard to verify the quality of and turns out to be deeply flawed is a popular one), or just plain mistaken claims reeking of ignorance.
If you're one of those people, and from your snide remark about evolution it sounds like you might be, who believe that species were created as is or near their current forms, or worse, that the world was created a few thousand years ago, then I'd expect you to fall in that category too.
I'm not going to pretend I have any kind of respect for a view like that, because I don't.
If you fall in that camp, I challenge you to prove me wrong: Give me a coherent description of your belief and how it fits current data better than evolution - if you succeed in coming up with something that has even a shred of evidence behind it, I'll happily change my mind about the intellectual capacity of ID believers... I won't hold my breath, though.
"Educated people" tends to stick with evolution exactly because most of them see through the silly chains of broken arguments, vague statements, obvious logical fallacies and other bullshit. That doesn't stop a lot of educated people from at the same time being religious or believing in some form of creation event, though - that is an entirely separate issue.
Perhaps they like to have carpet there because the bathroom floor is soo full of gaps that having a carpet to soak up any spills to reduce the odds of nasty surprises for the downstairs neighbours... Given the quality of many of the bathroom floors I've seen (wooden floors with huge gaps and open space straight down to the plastering in the floor below under the bathtub/shower, for instance), it wouldn't surprise me one bit.
I've only seen carpets in 2-3 bathrooms here, but that's 2-3 more than I'd ever seen before I moved here...
And I might be mistaken, but I seem to remember that the low number of mixer taps is due to old plumbing regulations that required that there was no chance of getting hot water flowing back into the cold water system if the cold water pressure drops unexpectedly (possibly scalding anyone else using the cold water, as the hot water supply is typically 60 degrees celsius).
Of course, these days most people would just use non-return valves to prevent this problem, but given that updating your home seems to have been an idea that didn't really take off here before we got inundated with property TV shows on every channel, it's probably going to take a while before most people have mixer taps.
I remember people telling me before moving to the UK that you can tell how far north you are in the UK by how blue the girls waiting outside the clubs are... And it seems to be true.
The most hilarious thing about it the increasing number of completely non-functional fireplaces, or fireplaces using a fake electric "fire" with silly led patterns etc. trying to simulate fire. It looks about as "authentic" as those fibre optic "christmas trees" you can get.
Offtopic - What amazes me as a Swede is that all Anglo-saxon countries I've been to build so incredibly flimsy and energy-inefficient houses. England, Australia, and from what I've heard, the US as well. I mean, you are rich countries, why build like third world?
As a Norwegian living in England, I have to agree... Here in the UK I think it's largely down to mild winters. Insulation is practically non-existent in older buildings here (most new builds seems to be better, thankfully) - just a thin wooden floor with huge cracks and 20 cm or so of air separating you from the ground is quite common. And hollow wooden floors with cracks, only sealed with plaster plates for the ceiling in the floor below is pretty normal within residential houses.
Before I'd moved to the UK I hadn't even seen buildings built like that except in museums.
The lofts are usually equally bad - huge parts of the building mass still have completely uninsulated lofts (though admittedly there is a push to change that, with government grants often available to offset the cost of insulation) and huge cracks everywhere.
But my pet peeve is the British builders approach to leaks. Just fill the cracks with some silicone or other filler, and paint over whatever stains there are, wait until the next crack develops and try again, instead of ensuring bathroom floors are properly sealed.
I guess it's a cost thing combined with the fact that the climate lets them get away with it (for those who haven't lived anywhere COLD: Imagine having your walls full of moisture. Then imagine that water freezing and expanding. Now imagine the cracks developing after a few years of that happening on a regular basis...). But it annoys the hell out of me when I see bathrooms built in a way that'll give the people on the floor below a nice shower if you get the floor a little bit wet.
British builders, though, seems to be in a league of their own, and that is not a compliment. I've never ever had to deal with such a bunch of incompetent twits. Just got to love how they think that it's perfectly fine to just keep pumping more silicone into a flat roof if it's leaking, instead of actually trying to find a fix the massive leaks in the top coating of the roof. Because apparently that's too much work for them.
The lack of a proper certification system and a proper education is really a problem - to the point where it's not uncommon for people here to hire in German builders to get things done properly even with the extra costs (for larger jobs they'll easily pay for themselves by actually doing things properly, and without the massive delays British builders seems to take great pride in...).
It's human love of patterns. They look at a graph, and see a dip coinciding roughly with the event, and assume a correlation.
I believe (though I can't point to references) that someone actually wrote a paper researching these claimed correlations in terms of market changes and showed that the correlations people "found" weren't much better than random guesses.
Give people a random graph and claim it represents the stock value of a company, and they will still claim there are correlations to news events.
And if you did, you'd have a high likelihood of ending up in prison. Destroying material you know is the subject of a subpoena or know may be of relevance to ongoing court proceeding is an offense in most jurisdictions.
It is something judges certainly don't take lightly..
It clearly says 1200x4800 optical and 19200 interpolated. In fact all the scanners I looked at did clearly state on the box that the resolution given was the optical resolution, though a handful also stated ridiculous interpolated or "enhanced" resolutions prominently.
Apparently these people keep doing this kind of crap when they join the workforce too.
Last time I was hiring people I passed four sets of CV's and test results back to the recruiters with detailed notes on where the candidates had plagiarised their test results from... The asswipes hadn't even bothered changing formatting or changing the language or even attempted to rewrite the answers to fit the questions better, so whenever I saw a slightly suspicious answer I just cut and pasted a line into a search engine, and up popped the answer.
The worst ones included a question that most people answered correctly in two lines, but which one candidate decided required him to cut and paste two full pages of text from an Oracle manual - and the pages weren't even particularly relevant.
Another one cut and pasted an answer to a similar question from a discussion forum. However - apart from not noticing the question was slightly different - he apparently hadn't bothered reading the full discussion. A few posts further down, someone had corrected the long list of fatal mistakes made in the answer he'd "borrowed".
It was such a disgustingly bad answer that he'd been much more likely to have been invited in for a full interview if he'd skipped that question instead, and then I might not have noticed his how dishonest he was either... Instead I went over the rest of his test, and it turned out that in addition to the pathetic answer, every single one of the questions he'd actually delivered reasonable answers to were plagiarised.
He must have spent more time plagiarising assorted online sources than most people spent on doing the test the honest way (it was just a dozen or so questions meant to take 20-30 minutes at most in total, as a pre-screening of interesting candidates before we set up interviews).
INTERCAL all the way... If they are crafty enough to find someone who can complete their homework for them in INTERCAL they deserve a good grade just for that...
No programming language is truly complete without "PLEASE GIVE UP" and "DO COME FROM" (you think ordinary goto's are evil? Try reverse goto...) commands.
I just bought a combined one with 1200x4800 dpi scanner resolution that costs abou $140 at Amazon. At my local store, all but the very cheapest scanner have at least 1200x2400, and most 2400x2400dpi or above...
I don't doubt that many film scanners may not have much higher resolution, though - quality often counts far more than the resolution. My now 5yo 1.something megapixel camera still competes very favorably with most new low end 5-6 megapixel cameras, for instance.
I guess the mistake is looking at the high end professional products and assuming consumer hardware can't have higher resolution at a lower price. The consumer products is far more about pushing numbers the average consumer may have heard about than actually improving quality.
Boosting the number of pixels is trivial. Boosting it AND giving a meaningful increase in picture quality/detail the real issue.
RTFA. The article explicitly mention that this has nothing to do with forgetting an event, but with reducing the physical/emotional response to recall of the event. If anything, reducing the trauma of remembering something could very well make it possible for people to remember more detail.
So create an override of sorts to the mechanical failsafe (like _manually_ having to force the brakes to retract and lock them in place). That way you have the best of both, and don't end up slowly sliding into a fire etc. with no way of stopping the car.
You could even design mechanical failsafes that will only completely stop the car at the first floor it passes: Just make the brakes spring into a track in the wall and push against the sides of the track strongly enough to be guaranteed to maintain a low speed, then just have blocks for each floor so a car can never pass a floor with the mechanical failsafe brakes on. Combined with a way of mechanically retracting the failsafe brakes sufficiently to continue, you'd then have a way of getting down in a controlled manner.
Slashdot Mirror
No matter how manytime Bush calls it a war, it is not. A declaration of war has significant legal ramifications, exactly to give the executive the powers needed to handle the special situations of warfare.
And the broad powers granted in those circumstances is exactly why the president isn't allowed to declare war by himself.
That's for a court to decide, not you.
That's generally what you pay a fortune for when you buy these big beasts.
It all boils down to what is most important for you - the money or the hassle of managing less integrated systems. The big filers are by no means the right choice for everybody, but they are nice to work with if you can justify the cost.
Features in high end storage systems like this typically include things like redundant-everything (multiple controllers with automatic failover, multiple sets of write cache, RAID, multiple power supplies), up to and including systems where you can pull out entire packs of drives while the system is running without noticing more than a reduced IO rate.
Many of them also have extensive built in health checks, and some will "call home" and the first you might know about a potential problem may be the engineer showing up at your office to fix it before it does become a problem (of course, you pay accordingly....)
Other features usually involve snapshot support (get a second virtual "drive" that is "frozen" at a point in time - makes doing backups a breeze because you can quiet database updates etc., make a snapshot, and then go on with your business and not have to deal with complex hot backup solutions), and often remote synchronisation (get a second box at a second location, put up a fibre link between them, and let the boxes handle the rest)
Of course you can do most/all of this with cheaper hardware too, but then you have to build it yourself. If you're, for instance a bank, and are dealing with huge sums of money, it's often far easier to buy stuff like this and pay for the maintenance contracts and just not have to deal with it any more.
For mere mortals they are usually just outrageously overprised compared to the features we actually need.
Though I must say I have always had a weakness for hardware that comes with cases big enough to live in and requires forklifts to move... :)
More than once I've had more luck opening old Word document with OpenOffice than with a newer Word version...
Besides, if you'd bothered checking what they're actually planning to do, they've specifically made it clear that keeping current software around to handle legacy documents is ok, and that no document conversion is required.
The press release goes on to highlight the fact that earlier in his career, Gutierrez was chief information officer for the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (HHS), the largest state secretariat with 23,000 staff and more than $12 billion in annual spending. In that capacity, Gutierrez:
So, in other words, it's referring to the fact that he's a) overseen large deployments and large budgets, and b) that he's carried out a cost saving project relying on open standards.
He's good for this job because he's enough of a heavyweight and has had successfull enough projects that he and the Governor can respond to further attempts at power grabs from the senate by pointing out that Gutierrez has done similar stuff before, AND saved money doing it, so any politicians going against this project can much easier be painted as trying to waste taxpayer money to protect out of state corporate interests (Microsoft). It's a smart move...
This completely misses the point - it isn't the airlines that set these requirements, but the US government.
Otherwise we should all believe in santa claus and the tooth fairy because we can't prove their absence.
Presumably most of us don't. Not because we can somehow prove they don't exist, but because we make the reasonable assumption that some proof would have been found for their existence by now if they were more than childrens stories, as well as because it is easy to prove that many things that are attributed to them doesn't match reality.
The latter doesn't prove they don't exist, merely that the childrens stories can't be accurate.
The exact same argument can be applied to the existence of god.
However, if you keep not finding proof for the existence of something but keep finding places where the theory of the supposed entity doesn't match observed fact, the natural choice is to believe that entity does not exist.
To turn things on it's head: Until there is proof for the existence of something, it is natural to not believe. Otherwise we would all be believing in an infinite number of imaginary things just because there's no proof against it.
Now, often it is fair to withhold judgement, or alternatively to believe that something could possibly exist, because you believe the idea of something matches reality sufficiently to be plausible, even if there is no direct evidence. But there is a vast difference between believing something exist, and accepting that it might be possible for it to exist (and the latter is not inconsistent with not believing).
Personally I don't believe in any god. However I will gladly concede that it could be possible, in the same way as it could be possible that we all live in a Matrix style simulation, or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world out of pasta.
I've yet to see any proof making god any more likely than the alternatives. On the contrary - a Matrix like simulation seems plausible because it is only a matter of extrapolating current technological innovation, and if the technology eventually exists, then it is likely, given humans strong interest in history, that more than one such simulation of will be run based on human history, in which case the odds of being in one is higher than the odds of not being in one (simply as a result of there being more simulation than realities). Tthis is known as the "simulation argument", by the way.
How do you know you aren't just a computer program in a simulation in some kids room? It would "solve" all the same problems, and all the same arguments you try to use to defend your idea of a creator works just as well.
Or we could all be in a dream had by some sleeping alien.
Or .. (insert random crackpot theory here)...
However it is a pointless exercise, because a) it doesn't explain anything, b) it can't be proven unless whatever "power" you invent decides to interfere directly.
It is also a complete strawman attack on evolution (thought you'd sneak that past me? Please... It's a classic creationist argument)
Evolution seeks to explain the workings of a certain aspect of the world we live in, namely the evolution of life. It is NOT a creation theory - it does not explain how the universe came into existence, or even necessarily how life came into existence. It merely seeks to describe the mechanism by which living organisms change character through the generations, based on observations of the natural world.
This is based on the assumption that our observations are valid. If you are not willing to accept that assumption, you can always invent any theory you like, and it will not be falsifiable simply because any mechanism interfering with our observations could do so in a systematic and consistent manner.
I could state that gravity is caused by small undetectable demons holding us down, and you can't refute it, because I can meet any claim you make by claiming that it's the result of how the gravity demons work.
However, any such statement is faith, and any such statement of faith has no more validity than any other - there is no way for you to test any of them in the absence of direct intervention, and at most very limited ways in which you can assess their relative probabilities.
That also makes them pointless. It's like going to the beach, pick a single grain of sand and claiming it is somehow "special" because you picked it up.
Bullshit.
This is a logical fallacy. You are trying to equate believing something with religious faith based on the assumption that the choices requires equal proof.
Do you hold a religious belief that we aren't surrounded at all times by invisible pink unicorns?
I think not (and I am making the assumption that you don't believe we are surrounded by invisible pink unicorns)
Atheism is the same: To most atheists, it is to not have faith or believe in a god because we have not seen any evidence to indicate the existence of a god.
That is not to say that there aren't atheists who does not hold stronger opinions, such that the belief that there can't be a god, which is a claim that could perhaps be considered faith unless backed up with evidence.
However, for my part, my standpoint is that I haven't seen any evidence that in any way suggests there is a god, so there is no reason for me to consider the existence of one any more than the existence of santa claus, the tooth fairy or the flying spaghetti monster. Show me credible evidence of any of them, and I'll happily change my mind.
The pressure of natural selection is very demonstrably ensuring that it's nowhere near random.
All you achieve by mischaracterising evolution that way is to demonstrate your ignorance, and the lack of a proper basis for your beliefs.
So can the almighty Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by the way, can you please prove that you are not living in the Matrix?
Point being, your argument is pointless. It has no more logical validity than a claim that you are living in the Matrix, or any other argument that is not testable and falsifiable.
Yes, your view could be true, but so could the idea of us all living in a computer simulation, or any other randomly contorted "explanation". However positing either of them (or any other similar idea), contributes nothing of value - all the time we have no way of observing such influence, we have no meaningful choice but to trust our observations.
The problem most atheists have with religion is exactly the above. You choose to believe in something that is not backed up with evidence, while ignoring the infinite number of alternative unproven hypotheses that are just as likely.
I could easily claim the existence of the tooth fairy and santa claus the same way, by inventing intricate explanations to make the ideas fit the facts. Would that make you believe in them?
I think not. So why do you choose to believe in your particular idea of God over any other random idea?
You can convince people to change their mind about subjects they are unsure about, or that they can see clearly demonstrated in ways dear to their hearts.
You can't convince them of things where they have truly made up their mind and where their decision isn't challenged by seeing the effects of their decision, feeling it on their body, or by being slowly, step by step, pulled closer by people they know and trust.
That means that barring events that majorly disrupt the life of a lot of people in ways that makes them susceptible to your ideas (such as steady streams of dead from a war, or a crisis like 9/11 that induces mass hysteria, and opens up opportunities to reach people), any major change in peoples conceptions takes place at a glacial pace, and often with temporary setbacks.
I fully expect evolution, for instance, to become near universally supported eventually, but as the poll indicated it will be more likely to happen gradually over 2-3 generations as older people more likely to believe in ID/Creationism die off.
People who just hold deist beliefs along the lines of a creator that set things in motion, I usually find to be quite reasonable - I don't see why they need their beliefs, but at least they accept science, and what they believe doesn't have to contradict current scientific theories, though they add nothing either (nothing more than a belief in the tooth fairy or santa claus in any case).
Believing in that kind of "Creation" is rather harmless, and not something I really find worth debating unless someone claim they can prove it. I don't believe because I find it too improbable, but there's nothing inherently impossible in the idea that a deity might have "set things in motion". I can respect people like that.
However that does not contradict evolution.
Real ID people and Creationists, however, are usually either plain dumb or just misinformed both about evolution and ID/Creationism.
I just can't respect most people like that, as I have yet to meet or discuss evolution with a single one that have been able to coherently state his/her arguments and debate them without resorting to repeated logical fallacies, outright dishonest debating techniques (citing "research" that is hard to verify the quality of and turns out to be deeply flawed is a popular one), or just plain mistaken claims reeking of ignorance.
If you're one of those people, and from your snide remark about evolution it sounds like you might be, who believe that species were created as is or near their current forms, or worse, that the world was created a few thousand years ago, then I'd expect you to fall in that category too.
I'm not going to pretend I have any kind of respect for a view like that, because I don't.
If you fall in that camp, I challenge you to prove me wrong: Give me a coherent description of your belief and how it fits current data better than evolution - if you succeed in coming up with something that has even a shred of evidence behind it, I'll happily change my mind about the intellectual capacity of ID believers... I won't hold my breath, though.
"Educated people" tends to stick with evolution exactly because most of them see through the silly chains of broken arguments, vague statements, obvious logical fallacies and other bullshit. That doesn't stop a lot of educated people from at the same time being religious or believing in some form of creation event, though - that is an entirely separate issue.
I've only seen carpets in 2-3 bathrooms here, but that's 2-3 more than I'd ever seen before I moved here...
And I might be mistaken, but I seem to remember that the low number of mixer taps is due to old plumbing regulations that required that there was no chance of getting hot water flowing back into the cold water system if the cold water pressure drops unexpectedly (possibly scalding anyone else using the cold water, as the hot water supply is typically 60 degrees celsius).
Of course, these days most people would just use non-return valves to prevent this problem, but given that updating your home seems to have been an idea that didn't really take off here before we got inundated with property TV shows on every channel, it's probably going to take a while before most people have mixer taps.
I remember people telling me before moving to the UK that you can tell how far north you are in the UK by how blue the girls waiting outside the clubs are... And it seems to be true.
The most hilarious thing about it the increasing number of completely non-functional fireplaces, or fireplaces using a fake electric "fire" with silly led patterns etc. trying to simulate fire. It looks about as "authentic" as those fibre optic "christmas trees" you can get.
As a Norwegian living in England, I have to agree... Here in the UK I think it's largely down to mild winters. Insulation is practically non-existent in older buildings here (most new builds seems to be better, thankfully) - just a thin wooden floor with huge cracks and 20 cm or so of air separating you from the ground is quite common. And hollow wooden floors with cracks, only sealed with plaster plates for the ceiling in the floor below is pretty normal within residential houses.
Before I'd moved to the UK I hadn't even seen buildings built like that except in museums.
The lofts are usually equally bad - huge parts of the building mass still have completely uninsulated lofts (though admittedly there is a push to change that, with government grants often available to offset the cost of insulation) and huge cracks everywhere.
But my pet peeve is the British builders approach to leaks. Just fill the cracks with some silicone or other filler, and paint over whatever stains there are, wait until the next crack develops and try again, instead of ensuring bathroom floors are properly sealed.
I guess it's a cost thing combined with the fact that the climate lets them get away with it (for those who haven't lived anywhere COLD: Imagine having your walls full of moisture. Then imagine that water freezing and expanding. Now imagine the cracks developing after a few years of that happening on a regular basis...). But it annoys the hell out of me when I see bathrooms built in a way that'll give the people on the floor below a nice shower if you get the floor a little bit wet.
British builders, though, seems to be in a league of their own, and that is not a compliment. I've never ever had to deal with such a bunch of incompetent twits. Just got to love how they think that it's perfectly fine to just keep pumping more silicone into a flat roof if it's leaking, instead of actually trying to find a fix the massive leaks in the top coating of the roof. Because apparently that's too much work for them.
The lack of a proper certification system and a proper education is really a problem - to the point where it's not uncommon for people here to hire in German builders to get things done properly even with the extra costs (for larger jobs they'll easily pay for themselves by actually doing things properly, and without the massive delays British builders seems to take great pride in...).
I believe (though I can't point to references) that someone actually wrote a paper researching these claimed correlations in terms of market changes and showed that the correlations people "found" weren't much better than random guesses.
Give people a random graph and claim it represents the stock value of a company, and they will still claim there are correlations to news events.
It is something judges certainly don't take lightly..
It clearly says 1200x4800 optical and 19200 interpolated. In fact all the scanners I looked at did clearly state on the box that the resolution given was the optical resolution, though a handful also stated ridiculous interpolated or "enhanced" resolutions prominently.
Last time I was hiring people I passed four sets of CV's and test results back to the recruiters with detailed notes on where the candidates had plagiarised their test results from... The asswipes hadn't even bothered changing formatting or changing the language or even attempted to rewrite the answers to fit the questions better, so whenever I saw a slightly suspicious answer I just cut and pasted a line into a search engine, and up popped the answer.
The worst ones included a question that most people answered correctly in two lines, but which one candidate decided required him to cut and paste two full pages of text from an Oracle manual - and the pages weren't even particularly relevant.
Another one cut and pasted an answer to a similar question from a discussion forum. However - apart from not noticing the question was slightly different - he apparently hadn't bothered reading the full discussion. A few posts further down, someone had corrected the long list of fatal mistakes made in the answer he'd "borrowed".
It was such a disgustingly bad answer that he'd been much more likely to have been invited in for a full interview if he'd skipped that question instead, and then I might not have noticed his how dishonest he was either... Instead I went over the rest of his test, and it turned out that in addition to the pathetic answer, every single one of the questions he'd actually delivered reasonable answers to were plagiarised.
He must have spent more time plagiarising assorted online sources than most people spent on doing the test the honest way (it was just a dozen or so questions meant to take 20-30 minutes at most in total, as a pre-screening of interesting candidates before we set up interviews).
No programming language is truly complete without "PLEASE GIVE UP" and "DO COME FROM" (you think ordinary goto's are evil? Try reverse goto...) commands.
I don't doubt that many film scanners may not have much higher resolution, though - quality often counts far more than the resolution. My now 5yo 1.something megapixel camera still competes very favorably with most new low end 5-6 megapixel cameras, for instance.
I guess the mistake is looking at the high end professional products and assuming consumer hardware can't have higher resolution at a lower price. The consumer products is far more about pushing numbers the average consumer may have heard about than actually improving quality.
Boosting the number of pixels is trivial. Boosting it AND giving a meaningful increase in picture quality/detail the real issue.
RTFA. The article explicitly mention that this has nothing to do with forgetting an event, but with reducing the physical/emotional response to recall of the event. If anything, reducing the trauma of remembering something could very well make it possible for people to remember more detail.
You could even design mechanical failsafes that will only completely stop the car at the first floor it passes: Just make the brakes spring into a track in the wall and push against the sides of the track strongly enough to be guaranteed to maintain a low speed, then just have blocks for each floor so a car can never pass a floor with the mechanical failsafe brakes on. Combined with a way of mechanically retracting the failsafe brakes sufficiently to continue, you'd then have a way of getting down in a controlled manner.