I'm a Christian, and I have no problem with creationism as science, if you do, you probably don't understand the term "science"
Mind explaining for us "ignorant" folks how a supernatural supposition is compatable with a methodology that can only make meaningful statements and conclusions about the natural universe?
This, of course, goes against the Laws of Biogenesis [wikipedia.org], and is a fundamental tenet of Atheism.
Atheism is simply the lack of theism. It is the abscence of god-belief. It has no "fundamental tenents", and you sound like you have some kind of agenda when you make false claims like that. Well, that and making one claim about the "Law of Biogenesis" and linking to a Wikipedia article that directly contradicts you (see "They did not show that life cannot arise once, and then evolve.")
The OP said that the banning of GTA:SA was a breach of First Amendment rights, thus while unstated the context of my question was limited to locales within the United States of America.
The recent banning of GTA San Andreas was a breach of those rights (even though it was subsequently allowed to be re-released with a warning on the box).
I'm eagerly awaiting the release after completing The Longest Journey (which I personally found to be a good adventure game, though not quite as good as the hype around it would lead some to believe), but I would hardly call the released screenshots revealing anything close to photorealism. Keep in mind that the backgrounds that you might think are photorealistic are likely prerendered.
I was able to spoof the OS identity with Konqueror (unfortunately Opera lacks that ability currently), but it wouldn't load the video player for some reason.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route. HBO is not restricting your right to make copies at home, they are not restricting your archiving of those copies, or even sharing them with your family/close friends. They are not suing BitTorrent, they are not demanding that all P2P software be banned, they are pro-actively preventing the illegal distribution of their material in an incredibly low impact manner. Bravo, HBO.
Exactly. They found a simple and elegant solution to discourage filesharing that does not involve turning litigation into a lucrative business model. They could be collecting hundreds of thousands or more through legal action, but instead someone had the bright idea to combat P2P in an unprofitable fashion. Damn right someone is going to get fired.
...well, not with light bulbs, but sometimes we end up using LEDs.
I'm a computer engineering student (and likely will be for decades to come). One of the senior-level courses has us design a 68000-based microcomputer board with a breadboard, individual RAM and ROM chips, TTL logic gates, an ACIA controller, a line driver/line receiver (for serial output to a terminal) and various other components. And, of course, we have to write the software (in 68000 assembly) to run on this microcomputer.
Now, we're not building the processor itself from scratch, but I'd say that it's pretty low-level.
I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.
I am a "student worker" at the university that I attend, doing tech support. One day my BOSS, the coordinator of tech support for the majority of the departments on campus told me that a computer was reporting a "stack error", which was pretty sure indicated a hard drive fault.
Those inclined to believe the Bible and feel skeptical when science apparently contradicts it, should take comfort in the fact that science's story has changed over the century whereas (relatively) the Bible's has not.
As the old saying goes: "Science may be wrong today, tomorrow or ten years from now, but the Bible is wrong forever."
Which means that, as a "universal" law, Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation is wrong. That it works on some scales means that it's a decent approximation, but approximations are not 'correct', they're just 'good enough' for the scales in which they're used.
i.e. they lost their reliability on extremely fine scales.
They break down both at the microscopic and the macroscopic levels, in part because of general relativity.
Now, since we don't have a time machine, we CANNOT falsify historical evolution.
But we can. Find a series of precambrian rabbit fossils, and everything we've constructed regarding the history of life comes tumbling down. A transposon found in whales and cows but not in hippos? That's a real problem with the way things are set up now.
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit.
And I say that if you're going to use the term "theory" to mean something other than what scientists mean and then claim that the theory of evolution is on shaky grounds because it is a "theory" by your definition then you're not arguing based upon facts, but upon dishonest semantics.
Which isn't surprising. I've observed that creationists are, in general, shameless liars. You're either one of them, or you're trolling. Your posts are more over the top than most creationists, but I do know that people have seriously expressed the insane and willfully ignorant sentiments that you preach in all seriousness, so it's hard to tell.
...this is just changing the selection pressures. Ultimately, advances in medical technology alter the environment in such a way that it is less hostile to the reprodutive success to a given genetic range.
A theory is the guess of a person with many letters behind their name.:p
Wrong. If you don't understand the definition of "theory" in a scientific context, including the criteria that a given explanation must meet in order to be labelled a "theory", then you have no credibility when discussing science.
Creationists say this like it means that it's somehow on shaky ground. It isn't. "Theory" is the highest level that any explanation reaches in science. There is no higher label. The dismissing of evolution as "nothing but a theory" only demonstrates that the one making the dismissal is fundamentally ignorant of scientific terminology.
Ask any REAL biologist (like those with Ph.D.'s or those who work in colleges), and they will admit evolution is a theory.
And theories never get any higher in rank.
It is not fact.
"Facts" are simply statements about single observations, nothing more. "Facts" really don't mean anything in the long run in science.
It is not a scientific law.
And it never will be. Despite the ignorant rantings of creationists, theories do not ever become laws. Theories and laws are two different types of statements. Laws are general statements about collections of previous observations by which future observations are predicted. Theories are an attempt to explain the underlying causes of the observation. Example: the "Law of gravity" is a model of the resultant force caused by gravitational attraction between two masses. The theory of gravity -- more commonly known as "relativity theory" -- is an attempt to explain why that force occurs.
Laws are no more certain than theories. Theores do not "graduate" into laws. Laws can just as easily be falsified -- in fact, the "Law of Gravity" as we know it from Newton is false. Saying that "evolution is a theory, not a law" as if this casts some doubt on the validity of evolution again only demonstrates that you are fundamentally ignorant of how science works.
The cool thing Intelligent Design is we know God made us.
No, Intelligent Design postulates -- based upon faulty premises -- that certain features in biological systems are too "complex" to have come about through evolution, and therefore must have been "designed" by some unnamed designer. "God" doesn't enter into "Intelligent Design" as it is presented by the shysters who try to shove it into school cirriculums.
That you think that it directly refers to a god -- especially the God that you happen to worship -- only further demonstrates that ID is nothing but a sham to try to sneak religion into schools.
As for "know", I'm sorry but claiming that you "know" something isn't valid justification for scientific consideration. If you have no evidence, then you have no case.
Think about how the world was made. Science has a theory called "Big Bang". It is a theory which states that in the start the mass was so dense, it exploded and everything flew away randomly, making stars and planets, and life.
The Big Bang doesn't cover abiogenesis. Please actually learn the science behind it before attempting to discuss it.
For any people who know statistics, what is the probability of that happening? How many times would I have to flip a quarter and get heads in a row? 100,000,000,000 times? 100,000,000,000,000 times?
You know the statistical likelyhood? Please present the math. Show all of your work. If you can't then you don't have a case. Please avoid the fallacy of pointing to the "likelyhood" of the universe appearing in its exact configuration as it is and pretending that the universe couldn't have just as easily supported life had it come about in a somewhat different configuration unless you can demonstrate that it is the case.
You would have a better chance at taking a watch, hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into 1000 peices, and then putting it in a bag, shaking the bag, and having the watch come back together out of the random movements.
False analogy, demonstrating a fundamental ignorance of cosmology. Try to understand why physicists say what they say about universal origins before thinking that
Evolution is not attempting to attain a certain "goal" at which it stops. Evolution is simply the result of certain genetic traits being selected based upon environmental pressures. It shouldn't be too surprising that evolution still occurs in humans so long as there is a situation where some genetic traits are more likely to be passed on through reproduction than others.
I guess this could be news to people who don't actually understand evolution -- which, given the popularity of pseudoscience like "Intelligent Design" and non-science like "Creation Science" -- probably is quite a bit. Unfortunately, experience shows that they don't really care to learn anything about evolution anyway, so chances are they'll do little but mock the findings without even trying to understand them.
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I'm a Christian, and I have no problem with creationism as science, if you do, you probably don't understand the term "science"
Mind explaining for us "ignorant" folks how a supernatural supposition is compatable with a methodology that can only make meaningful statements and conclusions about the natural universe?
My personal theory is that these advancement were the result of design,
How would this "theory" be falsified?
This, of course, goes against the Laws of Biogenesis [wikipedia.org], and is a fundamental tenet of Atheism.
Atheism is simply the lack of theism. It is the abscence of god-belief. It has no "fundamental tenents", and you sound like you have some kind of agenda when you make false claims like that. Well, that and making one claim about the "Law of Biogenesis" and linking to a Wikipedia article that directly contradicts you (see "They did not show that life cannot arise once, and then evolve.")
The OP said that the banning of GTA:SA was a breach of First Amendment rights, thus while unstated the context of my question was limited to locales within the United States of America.
The recent banning of GTA San Andreas was a breach of those rights (even though it was subsequently allowed to be re-released with a warning on the box).
Who banned GTA:SA and when?
I'm eagerly awaiting the release after completing The Longest Journey (which I personally found to be a good adventure game, though not quite as good as the hype around it would lead some to believe), but I would hardly call the released screenshots revealing anything close to photorealism. Keep in mind that the backgrounds that you might think are photorealistic are likely prerendered.
I was able to spoof the OS identity with Konqueror (unfortunately Opera lacks that ability currently), but it wouldn't load the video player for some reason.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route. HBO is not restricting your right to make copies at home, they are not restricting your archiving of those copies, or even sharing them with your family/close friends. They are not suing BitTorrent, they are not demanding that all P2P software be banned, they are pro-actively preventing the illegal distribution of their material in an incredibly low impact manner. Bravo, HBO.
Exactly. They found a simple and elegant solution to discourage filesharing that does not involve turning litigation into a lucrative business model. They could be collecting hundreds of thousands or more through legal action, but instead someone had the bright idea to combat P2P in an unprofitable fashion. Damn right someone is going to get fired.
For example, hard disk makes strange sounds, something that normally succeeds now results in a "stack error" message.
I know this guy. He was going on nothing more than "stack error".
...well, not with light bulbs, but sometimes we end up using LEDs.
I'm a computer engineering student (and likely will be for decades to come). One of the senior-level courses has us design a 68000-based microcomputer board with a breadboard, individual RAM and ROM chips, TTL logic gates, an ACIA controller, a line driver/line receiver (for serial output to a terminal) and various other components. And, of course, we have to write the software (in 68000 assembly) to run on this microcomputer.
Now, we're not building the processor itself from scratch, but I'd say that it's pretty low-level.
I'm often unpleasantly surprised with some of my supposedly technical colleagues' ignorance as to how computers work.
I am a "student worker" at the university that I attend, doing tech support. One day my BOSS, the coordinator of tech support for the majority of the departments on campus told me that a computer was reporting a "stack error", which was pretty sure indicated a hard drive fault.
Uggh.
That function that returns a higher version number than the last release seems really popular.
That one's been bypassable through a third-party app for awhile.
Er, I thought that the prospective replacement was Jake Gyllenhaal.
Those inclined to believe the Bible and feel skeptical when science apparently contradicts it, should take comfort in the fact that science's story has changed over the century whereas (relatively) the Bible's has not.
As the old saying goes: "Science may be wrong today, tomorrow or ten years from now, but the Bible is wrong forever."
All complicit parties belong in jail. The person who hired the hit and the person who carried it out.
Can evolutionary discriptions make correct quantitative predictions in-the-large?
Yes, and it has done this.
They are inexact,
Which means that, as a "universal" law, Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation is wrong. That it works on some scales means that it's a decent approximation, but approximations are not 'correct', they're just 'good enough' for the scales in which they're used.
i.e. they lost their reliability on extremely fine scales.
They break down both at the microscopic and the macroscopic levels, in part because of general relativity.
Stop equivocating evolution with atheism. Evolution is not atheism. It is fundamentally dishonest to suggest as much.
Now, since we don't have a time machine, we CANNOT falsify historical evolution.
But we can. Find a series of precambrian rabbit fossils, and everything we've constructed regarding the history of life comes tumbling down. A transposon found in whales and cows but not in hippos? That's a real problem with the way things are set up now.
So you say that for anyone to have a discussion of evolution they must use your conventions of naming? I say bullshit.
And I say that if you're going to use the term "theory" to mean something other than what scientists mean and then claim that the theory of evolution is on shaky grounds because it is a "theory" by your definition then you're not arguing based upon facts, but upon dishonest semantics.
Which isn't surprising. I've observed that creationists are, in general, shameless liars. You're either one of them, or you're trolling. Your posts are more over the top than most creationists, but I do know that people have seriously expressed the insane and willfully ignorant sentiments that you preach in all seriousness, so it's hard to tell.
...this is just changing the selection pressures. Ultimately, advances in medical technology alter the environment in such a way that it is less hostile to the reprodutive success to a given genetic range.
A theory is the guess of a person with many letters behind their name. :p
Wrong. If you don't understand the definition of "theory" in a scientific context, including the criteria that a given explanation must meet in order to be labelled a "theory", then you have no credibility when discussing science.
Now that is a loaded statement.
No, it isn't.
Evolution is nothing but a theory.
Creationists say this like it means that it's somehow on shaky ground. It isn't. "Theory" is the highest level that any explanation reaches in science. There is no higher label. The dismissing of evolution as "nothing but a theory" only demonstrates that the one making the dismissal is fundamentally ignorant of scientific terminology.
Ask any REAL biologist (like those with Ph.D.'s or those who work in colleges), and they will admit evolution is a theory.
And theories never get any higher in rank.
It is not fact.
"Facts" are simply statements about single observations, nothing more. "Facts" really don't mean anything in the long run in science.
It is not a scientific law.
And it never will be. Despite the ignorant rantings of creationists, theories do not ever become laws. Theories and laws are two different types of statements. Laws are general statements about collections of previous observations by which future observations are predicted. Theories are an attempt to explain the underlying causes of the observation. Example: the "Law of gravity" is a model of the resultant force caused by gravitational attraction between two masses. The theory of gravity -- more commonly known as "relativity theory" -- is an attempt to explain why that force occurs.
Laws are no more certain than theories. Theores do not "graduate" into laws. Laws can just as easily be falsified -- in fact, the "Law of Gravity" as we know it from Newton is false. Saying that "evolution is a theory, not a law" as if this casts some doubt on the validity of evolution again only demonstrates that you are fundamentally ignorant of how science works.
The cool thing Intelligent Design is we know God made us.
No, Intelligent Design postulates -- based upon faulty premises -- that certain features in biological systems are too "complex" to have come about through evolution, and therefore must have been "designed" by some unnamed designer. "God" doesn't enter into "Intelligent Design" as it is presented by the shysters who try to shove it into school cirriculums.
That you think that it directly refers to a god -- especially the God that you happen to worship -- only further demonstrates that ID is nothing but a sham to try to sneak religion into schools.
As for "know", I'm sorry but claiming that you "know" something isn't valid justification for scientific consideration. If you have no evidence, then you have no case.
Think about how the world was made. Science has a theory called "Big Bang". It is a theory which states that in the start the mass was so dense, it exploded and everything flew away randomly, making stars and planets, and life.
The Big Bang doesn't cover abiogenesis. Please actually learn the science behind it before attempting to discuss it.
For any people who know statistics, what is the probability of that happening? How many times would I have to flip a quarter and get heads in a row? 100,000,000,000 times? 100,000,000,000,000 times?
You know the statistical likelyhood? Please present the math. Show all of your work. If you can't then you don't have a case. Please avoid the fallacy of pointing to the "likelyhood" of the universe appearing in its exact configuration as it is and pretending that the universe couldn't have just as easily supported life had it come about in a somewhat different configuration unless you can demonstrate that it is the case.
You would have a better chance at taking a watch, hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into 1000 peices, and then putting it in a bag, shaking the bag, and having the watch come back together out of the random movements.
False analogy, demonstrating a fundamental ignorance of cosmology. Try to understand why physicists say what they say about universal origins before thinking that
Every living thing is evolving.
Living things don't evolve. Populations of living things either evolve, remain stagnant (which is very , very rare) or die out.
Evolution is not attempting to attain a certain "goal" at which it stops. Evolution is simply the result of certain genetic traits being selected based upon environmental pressures. It shouldn't be too surprising that evolution still occurs in humans so long as there is a situation where some genetic traits are more likely to be passed on through reproduction than others.
I guess this could be news to people who don't actually understand evolution -- which, given the popularity of pseudoscience like "Intelligent Design" and non-science like "Creation Science" -- probably is quite a bit. Unfortunately, experience shows that they don't really care to learn anything about evolution anyway, so chances are they'll do little but mock the findings without even trying to understand them.