OK, then, it's on you: prove whether or not the supernatural exists.
I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
There are no skills found in theology or philosophy which make the undetectable, detectable.
Are you asserting that the supernatural is undetectable? If so, prove it. Note that lack of detection is not proof of undetectability, or proof of lack of existence, or proof of lack of influence in day to day life.
--- These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Faith is a fallacy.
On the contrary: you appear to use it to believe the three assertions above. Faith is nothing more than the axioms of a person's belief system. What do you or I believe without proof? That's faith. Here's something that I believe through faith: the scientific method is a valid way to determine how things work. It can't be proven, but I believe it anyway.
The point of science it to discovery what our universe does and why. If something doesn't do something in our universe, only then does it avoid science.
This is very close. The point of science is to discover what our universe ("nature") does and why. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside of our universe; it is not natural. That doesn't preclude it, in theory, if it exists, from affecting our universe; the concept of "supernatural" is not bound by natural laws.
Everything credited to the supernatural, to date, has been anything but. Start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain, order of the planets, structure of the atom.
You have quite a bit of faith. Investigate further and you will find that scientists studying the start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain etc. have more questions than answers.
The idea that there are different subject areas is amusing but false. Staking claim on everything non-science doesn't help you very much when everything that interacts or exists in this universe is subjected to it.
Others disagree. That's why they call it "natural science". If the supernatural does not exist, then the domain of natural science is all that there is, but we can't prove that scientifically one way or the other.
It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
You can't just declare something supernatural and make it immune to being questioned.
I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
If the supernatural exists, it would easily be subject to the same processes of experimentation. The reason we seek natural explanations rather than supernatural ones, is that supernatural ones have thus far never existed. Each thing we check has a reasonable natural explanation
These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
You are telling me that a magical guy who created everything in the universe is outside the realm of the science?
Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations, and nature does not include magic (again because of definition: magic is by definition supernatural.)
Are you telling me that there is a realm which cannot and does not have any effect on the material/natural realm and has no effect on our lives?
No, I make no such claim.
Basically anything more than talking about a nothing with no effect on us at all, is within the scientific realm.
Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists. That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
As far as science can tell, religion is absolutely false.
Not true: the domain of science is the natural, and the domain of religion is the supernatural. Science doesn't make claims about things outside of its domain (though scientists, being fallible, sometimes do).
There are really two definitions of the terms atheist and agnostic. The textbook definitions above are correct, but they are not the definitions in common use. In the vernacular, "atheist" is used to mean what a textbook defines as "anti-theist" and "agnostic" is used to mean what a textbook defines as "atheist". Unfortunately, language changes, and so what appears to be incorrect use is not necessarily so.
Windows Vista uses the same boot-time prefetching as Windows XP did if the system has less than 512MB of memory, but if the system has 700MB or more of RAM, it uses an in-RAM cache to optimize the boot process.
Okay, so I just wanted to nitpick a sentence here. What happens between 512 and 700.
If you have between 512 and 700 MB of memory, Vista tears a rift in the space-time continuum. IMPORTANT: whatever you do, DO NOT install Vista on a computer with between 512 and 700 MB of RAM.
I don't agree that "logic is valid" is an unproven assumption. It's actually proven every day. We arrive at conclusions in a logical manner and when those conclusions are verified, our logic is shown to be valid.
It's reaffirmed, shown to be consistent with our experiences, but does that prove something? How can one prove something without logic?
However, faith in an unproven thing... is irrational.
Yes, absolutely. Irrational is not always bad (unless one axiomatically believes it is); human beings are at our core irrational. Do you deny that we have axioms in our belief systems? The next paragraph provides some great examples:
There is no experiment that provides evidence of God or heaven or hell or ghosts or goblins or angels or psychic friends. All of these things are, currently anyway, supernatural.
Some people have this axiom in their belief systems: there is no such thing as the supernatural. Other people believe the opposite: the supernatural does in fact exist. How can one prove it, one way or the other? One is forced to decide with insufficient evidence (or to say "I don't know," which is perfectly reasonable.) Maybe one chooses to disbelieve in the supernatural because of lack of evidence, but logic tells us that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, and I believe in logic. Maybe one chooses to believe in the supernatural because of stories written down in a book thousands of years ago; again, unscientific -- irrational -- human.
Many people claim to live according to scientific principles, to only believe things that science supports, but I don't think they have fully thought out their position. To fully follow such a philosophy would require being agnostic about a great many things that we all take for granted. The fundamental nature of science is to disprove, not to prove.
In fact, the fundamental accuracy of the scientific method -- the claim that correlation leads to accurate predictions -- is something that must be taken on faith. Why does the repetition of an experiment show something meaningful? If it gave random results, maybe it would give the predicted result a thousand times and then on the 1001st attempt fail. How many repetitions are necessary to convince a true skeptic? An infinite number. Fortunately, human beings are not true skeptics. The true skeptic, the true scientist knows that correlation does not always equal causation, but we have evolved to behave as if it does, because that behavior provides a meaningful survival advantage. When there might be a saber-toothed tiger about, better safe than sorry.
Faith in things that cannot be or have not been proven is destructive at worst and counter-productive at best.
It's not really Church vs. State, it's State vs. Ignorance.
It's worse than that: it's Ignorance vs Ignorance. Both sides talk past one another, and the only thing they seem to agree on is false: the belief that science and religion are incompatible.
I argue orthogonally: everybody has a belief system, which is a system of logical rules that build upon one another. The axioms (initial assumptions, unproven by definition) of a person's belief system is what we call faith, or religious belief if you will. Attacking faith itself isn't useful because everybody has it about something.
An axiom of my belief system that I have identified: logic is valid.
Attacking an axiom of someone else's belief system can only be successful if you can prove to their satisfaction that it contradicts some other axiom they hold; this is made easier by the fact that human belief systems tend to be internally inconsistent (thus enabling people to change their minds.)
Convincing someone to discard a particular position is much easier if you can agree with them about the axioms underlying the belief. The reason so many people in internet discussions talk past each other is because they ignore this fundamental fact.
And both have the same number of vowels as Chicago. I sense a pattern forming.
In fact, if you graph it out, you'll see that Vista actually has *fewer* vowels than those three. It's like Microsoft is acknowledging that Vista is a step down (at least in vowel count), and they're hoping that Vienna will bring back the good ol' days.
Not only that but it also raises the question of what faction gets the seeds first. If my group, The Crazy Dragon Killers, gets the seeds first we control the populations food source. (possibly only food source)
In a post-apocalyptic scenario, the population *is* the food source.
A polluted planet means man is not free to breath air, drink water, procreate. And those who have the knowledge to make food water air or babies in that polluted world, rule it.
Widespread use of Tor could be a huge headache for network-security administrators, particularly in higher education. My university alone has more than 21,000 students. Imagine what would happen if even a tenth of them and a similar percentage of faculty and staff members started using Tor regularly. With all the spam scams, phishing scams, identity theft, and related criminal enterprises going on around the world many of which involve remotely hijacking university-owned computers we could approach technological anarchy on the campus.
How does Tor enable those things, and how would more people using Tor make those things worse than they already are?
"When Freespire 2.0 arrives in April, it will use Ubuntu as its base, moving off of the current Debian."
Um, last time I checked, Ubuntu was itself a Debian based distro which would mean that even if Freespire were to base itself on Ubuntu, it's roots would still be in Debian.
Um, last time I checked, nobody claimed that Freespire's roots would not be in Debian. Everybody knows that Ubuntu is based on Debian; the quote above does not dispute that. What exactly are you trying to say?
Not everything that has ever been touched by socialism is bad.
Please point out in my post where I made judgement.
I don't claim you did; I do claim that we have at least two examples of "socialist work structures" in the US. The last sentence was to preempt responses claiming that I was criticizing unions or socialism. I could, but I chose to stick to the point.
No; unions and the 40 hour work week resemble socialist work structures in the US.
Whether or not a particular union or 40 hour work week is bad depends on the details of the situation. Simply being related to socialism historically doesn't make all unions always bad or all 40 hour work weeks always bad.
we don't automatically vote for a politician that promises say, huge tax cuts or free money for everyone
Lots of politicians campaign on a platform of "bringing home the bacon" (sending Federal dollars back to pork projects in their home state) and it works -- they're elected. It's distressing but true.
Other common desktop apps could benefit too. A web browser ideally should open different tabs and run different plugins in different threads, so that a page with a java applet doesn't slow other pages to a crawl. Giving fancy gui widgets their own threads speeds up any nontrivial program, and modern word processors and spreadsheets often have things that can be parallelized to one extent or another.
So we've covered music players, email, web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheets. It's true that vi might not benefit directly from multiple processors, but its cpu impact is minimal anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, then, it's on you: prove whether or not the supernatural exists.
Are you asserting that the supernatural is undetectable? If so, prove it. Note that lack of detection is not proof of undetectability, or proof of lack of existence, or proof of lack of influence in day to day life.
On the contrary: you appear to use it to believe the three assertions above. Faith is nothing more than the axioms of a person's belief system. What do you or I believe without proof? That's faith. Here's something that I believe through faith: the scientific method is a valid way to determine how things work. It can't be proven, but I believe it anyway.
This is very close. The point of science is to discover what our universe ("nature") does and why. The supernatural, by definition, exists outside of our universe; it is not natural. That doesn't preclude it, in theory, if it exists, from affecting our universe; the concept of "supernatural" is not bound by natural laws.
You have quite a bit of faith. Investigate further and you will find that scientists studying the start of life, existence of life, start of the universe, function of the brain etc. have more questions than answers.
Others disagree. That's why they call it "natural science". If the supernatural does not exist, then the domain of natural science is all that there is, but we can't prove that scientifically one way or the other.
It is impossible to prove, using science, whether or not the supernatural exists. The supernatural, if it exists, might or might not be limited to the laws of cause and effect that govern natural processes. Cause and effect is necessary for science; without it, predictions are meaningless.
I don't. You can certainly question the supernatural, debate its existence, discuss it, etc. You can't examine it using science, though: you have to use theology and philosophy (which, fortunately, includes logic).
These three assertions cannot be scientifically proven, though lots of people believe them through faith.
Any such being, if it exists, is outside the realm of science. Science by definition limits itself to natural explanations, and nature does not include magic (again because of definition: magic is by definition supernatural.)
No, I make no such claim.
Science is the process of hypothesis and experimentation through which we seek natural explanations for our observations. The supernatural, if it exists, is the concern of philosophers and theologians, not scientists. That's why Intelligent Design is not science: it allows supernatural explanations alongside natural ones.
Not true: the domain of science is the natural, and the domain of religion is the supernatural. Science doesn't make claims about things outside of its domain (though scientists, being fallible, sometimes do).
There are really two definitions of the terms atheist and agnostic. The textbook definitions above are correct, but they are not the definitions in common use. In the vernacular, "atheist" is used to mean what a textbook defines as "anti-theist" and "agnostic" is used to mean what a textbook defines as "atheist". Unfortunately, language changes, and so what appears to be incorrect use is not necessarily so.
Exactly, just as using spreadsheets as databases, calculators and word processing applications is a way of life too.
To your parent poster's credit, though, it's a bad way of life.
If you have between 512 and 700 MB of memory, Vista tears a rift in the space-time continuum. IMPORTANT: whatever you do, DO NOT install Vista on a computer with between 512 and 700 MB of RAM.
It's reaffirmed, shown to be consistent with our experiences, but does that prove something? How can one prove something without logic?
Yes, absolutely. Irrational is not always bad (unless one axiomatically believes it is); human beings are at our core irrational. Do you deny that we have axioms in our belief systems? The next paragraph provides some great examples:
Some people have this axiom in their belief systems: there is no such thing as the supernatural. Other people believe the opposite: the supernatural does in fact exist. How can one prove it, one way or the other? One is forced to decide with insufficient evidence (or to say "I don't know," which is perfectly reasonable.) Maybe one chooses to disbelieve in the supernatural because of lack of evidence, but logic tells us that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, and I believe in logic. Maybe one chooses to believe in the supernatural because of stories written down in a book thousands of years ago; again, unscientific -- irrational -- human.
Many people claim to live according to scientific principles, to only believe things that science supports, but I don't think they have fully thought out their position. To fully follow such a philosophy would require being agnostic about a great many things that we all take for granted. The fundamental nature of science is to disprove, not to prove.
In fact, the fundamental accuracy of the scientific method -- the claim that correlation leads to accurate predictions -- is something that must be taken on faith. Why does the repetition of an experiment show something meaningful? If it gave random results, maybe it would give the predicted result a thousand times and then on the 1001st attempt fail. How many repetitions are necessary to convince a true skeptic? An infinite number. Fortunately, human beings are not true skeptics. The true skeptic, the true scientist knows that correlation does not always equal causation, but we have evolved to behave as if it does, because that behavior provides a meaningful survival advantage. When there might be a saber-toothed tiger about, better safe than sorry.
How would one go about proving that?
It's worse than that: it's Ignorance vs Ignorance. Both sides talk past one another, and the only thing they seem to agree on is false: the belief that science and religion are incompatible.
I argue orthogonally: everybody has a belief system, which is a system of logical rules that build upon one another. The axioms (initial assumptions, unproven by definition) of a person's belief system is what we call faith, or religious belief if you will. Attacking faith itself isn't useful because everybody has it about something.
An axiom of my belief system that I have identified: logic is valid.
Attacking an axiom of someone else's belief system can only be successful if you can prove to their satisfaction that it contradicts some other axiom they hold; this is made easier by the fact that human belief systems tend to be internally inconsistent (thus enabling people to change their minds.)
Convincing someone to discard a particular position is much easier if you can agree with them about the axioms underlying the belief. The reason so many people in internet discussions talk past each other is because they ignore this fundamental fact.
Except, as your parent poster says, that they suck so much? Re-read that list of complaints. Logging out crashes the system. Yikes.
They're not called the Evil Store Of Death for nothing.
And both have the same number of vowels as Chicago. I sense a pattern forming.
In fact, if you graph it out, you'll see that Vista actually has *fewer* vowels than those three. It's like Microsoft is acknowledging that Vista is a step down (at least in vowel count), and they're hoping that Vienna will bring back the good ol' days.
In a post-apocalyptic scenario, the population *is* the food source.
...or are the slaves of those who rule it.
Unfortunately, those policies have failed.
How does Tor enable those things, and how would more people using Tor make those things worse than they already are?
Um, last time I checked, nobody claimed that Freespire's roots would not be in Debian. Everybody knows that Ubuntu is based on Debian; the quote above does not dispute that. What exactly are you trying to say?
I don't claim you did; I do claim that we have at least two examples of "socialist work structures" in the US. The last sentence was to preempt responses claiming that I was criticizing unions or socialism. I could, but I chose to stick to the point.
No; unions and the 40 hour work week resemble socialist work structures in the US.
Whether or not a particular union or 40 hour work week is bad depends on the details of the situation. Simply being related to socialism historically doesn't make all unions always bad or all 40 hour work weeks always bad.
Lots of politicians campaign on a platform of "bringing home the bacon" (sending Federal dollars back to pork projects in their home state) and it works -- they're elected. It's distressing but true.
Ever hear of unions? Some definitely resemble socialist work structures.
Ever hear of a 40 hour work week?
Not everything that has ever been touched by socialism is bad.
Under an ideal government, reform would be unnecessary.
You misplaced the invisible parenthesis: "all (users who have broadband connections with IP changing...)"
"with" must refer to "connections" and cannot refer to "users' in that sentence.
Other common desktop apps could benefit too. A web browser ideally should open different tabs and run different plugins in different threads, so that a page with a java applet doesn't slow other pages to a crawl. Giving fancy gui widgets their own threads speeds up any nontrivial program, and modern word processors and spreadsheets often have things that can be parallelized to one extent or another.
So we've covered music players, email, web browsers, word processors, and spreadsheets. It's true that vi might not benefit directly from multiple processors, but its cpu impact is minimal anyway.