The fact you called MWI "scientifically plausible" should be the first sign you don't have the first clue what you're going on about.
For MWI to be "scientifically plausible" it would have to make predictions which could be confirmed or falsified via experiment. That is, in essence, what science is: the subjecting of ideas to experimental test. (Go ask Zombie Feynman if you don't believe me.)
I've yet to hear any testable predictions MWI makes that would allow us to differentiate it from, say, Copenhagen. Maybe that's changed since I last dove into things (and if it has changed, I hope you'll tell me so), but I kind of doubt it.
David Deutsch is famous for saying that MWI is the only interpretation that gives any kind of sense to quantum computation. And, you know, I'm inclined to agree with him. That doesn't mean MWI is correct, though: it just means that the other interpretations do not satisfactorily explain those phenomena, not that MWI is the only possible interpretation that could give sense to quantum computation.
Also, given Copenhagen was first developed by Werner Heisenberg, it's kind of crazy to claim that Copenhagen is a "superstitious and completely nonsensical" interpretation. If I have to choose between exa on Slashdot being right when he says Copenhagen is superstitious and completely nonsensical, and Zombie Werner Heisenberg being right when he says that exa on Slashdot is misunderstanding Copenhagen, well... I'm going to side with Zombie Werner Heisenberg, you know?
Oh, sure. My own personal rule is "prefer the reference frame that makes the math easiest." However, my complaint was using Occam's Razor to decide which was more likely to be true: Ptolemy's or Copernicus's view of the heavens. This is a misuse of Occam: it overlooks the fairly deep truth that they are both equally true from within their given frames of reference.
Please, don't misunderstand me: I love making the math easier.:)
Copernican theory was picked up fairly quickly because it offered a simpler view of the cosmos. Astronomers bought into it largely because of its simplicity -- in effect, following Occam's Razor. It took until the early twentieth century for Einstein to say "you're all a bunch of doofuses: Ptolemaic theory is just as valid as Copernican, it all depends on your frame of reference." Thanks to relativity we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Ptolemaic epicycles are equally valid: they're just more complex. There is no privileged frame of reference. It is as true to say the Earth circles the Sun as it is to say the Sun circles the Earth -- it's just that the equations are neater in one frame of reference, not that they are correct. This bears repeating: according to special relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference.
Naively applying Occam's Razor to the question leads people to a false sense of certainty: they tend to think, "I've applied Occam's Razor, therefore I am likely choosing the better answer," without ever thinking, "did I formulate the question correctly in the first place?"
Don't get me wrong, I like Occam's Razor. But when people use Copernican-versus-Ptolemaic theories as an example of Occam's success, well... that tells me a quick lesson needs to be given on how Occam's Razor utterly fails in that case.
Years ago I had some serious back trouble that could have been addressed quickly with some painful surgery, or slowly with painful therapy. My surgeon (Dr. Charles Grado, and if you're reading this, thank you) was adamant that he wouldn't touch a scalpel until we'd exhausted all other possibilities. I thought that was weird and told him so. He told me that he took an oath to first do no harm, and that surgery stood in opposition to this. You can't claim you're "doing no harm" while you're cutting into flesh: you're clearly, obviously, doing harm. The only question is whether your actions are the least harmful way of restoring health. Doc Grado is one of the best doctors I've ever known.
My father and cousin are both judges. Despite their polar-opposite political views, they're agreed that any lawyer who starts off by saying, "well, let's file some legal papers" is an incompetent. A lawyer's job is to solve your problems, and jumping straight to court is a great way to multiply them instead.
My gunsmith is a career soldier who characterizes his experience in Vietnam as "99% boredom I don't mind remembering and 1% terror I'm trying to forget." Per him, only fools try to solve problems with firearms. You see, if you do that, they might try to solve you right on back with one, and you won't like that at all.
Finally, I'm an ivory-tower academic who left a Ph.D. program because I was convinced I could do better work, more meaningful work, in the private sector. My job nowadays involves taking cutting-edge research and integrating it into real-world production systems. So, "never" a connection to ground level? My own career says otherwise.
tl;dr version: Maslow said when all you have's a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. This is true only until you find nails that explode into shrapnel and maim you horribly when you hit them. Once you hit one of those nails, you get real careful before you swing that hammer again.
If I lived in a community where there were a great many murders and only occasionally one was solved, I wouldn't ask, "gee, why is this particular murderer being singled out?" The answer there is obvious: because he murdered someone. The question I'd ask instead is, "gee, why is everyone else getting away with it?"
I don't wonder at all why Clinton was impeached. I wonder why other Presidents haven't been.
Clinton was impeached for an act that was of no consequence to the nation.
President Clinton took an oath of office. In that oath of office, he swore that he would see to it each and every American received the full protections of law without respect to position or privilege. It was his job to respect the civil rights of the mentally ill homeless guy who lives under the bridge, the schoolteacher, the dockworker, the farmer, the banker, the lawyer, and the priest. It was his job to do this without the slightest regard for who they were.
Gennifer Flowers had the right to the due process of law. The President deliberately and willfully subverted this.
If you say that's "of no consequence to the nation," that's your lookout. As for me, if he'll throw Gennifer Flowers' civil rights under the bus in order to avoid telling his wife he's having an affair then he'll do the same thing to me the instant I become inconvenient. I find that to be of immense consequence, and his conduct to be worthy of impeachment.
YMMV, and apparently does. Welcome to America, where we have the right to hold different opinions -- but only so long as we're wise enough to elect administrations that will defend our rights.
My roommate insists on doing things that might create expensive legal nightmares for me. I've asked him to stop, but he won't. What should I do?
The answer is, "Get a new roommate. Your current one is not respecting you, as evidenced by his disregard for your wishes and the way he's exposing you to potentially massive legal fees. You need to be able to trust your roommate, and you apparently can't trust your current one. Finding a new roommate might be hard, but it's necessary. Good luck!"
With respect to the legal question you've raised, the only answer here is "talk to a real lawyer." Trusting Slashdot to give you legal counsel is, TBH, just flat-out crazy.
Until recently (moved to a new city), I was a volunteer at my old elementary school. Their gifted and talented math program had been shut down due to budget cuts: the teachers tried to compensate by getting professional mathematicians in to talk to the kids who should've been in gifted math programs. My role was simple: get fourth graders involved in math.
Each year on our first day together I'd use the LISP notation. I'd ask them, "if I told you to add the numbers one to ten together and multiply the result by fifteen, how would you write that down? Not the answer, but what I told you to do?"
They usually came up with 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10*15. This got us into talking about precedence and order of operations and everything else. Their eyes would spin. So, multiply before add, but divide and multiply are co-equal operators and you do them in linear left-to-right order, unless grouped by parenthesis, and...
"You know, this is pretty stupid, isn't it?" I'd ask them. "It's too hard. How are we supposed to keep track of all that? Who came up with this, anyway?"
I'd then write, (* 15 (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)).
Not once, not ever, did it take a class of fourth graders more than five minutes of using this syntax to realize it was so much better than the 'traditional' syntax. It let us communicate clearly about what we were doing and in what order. On top of it, it looks kind of weird and exotic, and kids love writing in codes -- the fourth graders took to it like ducks to water. It was something that neither their classmates nor their teacher understood, and a professional mathematician told them, "yes, this really is how a lot of us in the field prefer to write things."
This is pretty close, but not quite accurate. SCOTUS takes cases principally according to:
Issues of original jurisdiction (cases involving diplomats or ambassadors, or in which a state is a party). For these cases, SCOTUS is allowed, but not required, to be the trial court. In practice, only cases involving two states get this expedited original-jurisdiction treatment: everything else gets to go through normal federal channels.
Statutes which expressly state they may be only heard by the Supreme Court (yes, there are a few)
Cases in which two different appellate courts, applying the same SCOTUS precedents to similar cases, have reached different decisions
The first category is really astonishingly rare. The second is almost as much so. The third accounts for the overwhelming majority of SCOTUS's workload.
Note that SCOTUS really doesn't care if your case "has merit." No judge really does. A judge's job isn't to decide if your case has merit: that's the jury's job. A judge's job is to make sure the laws are applied fairly and without bias to both parties.
At the SCOTUS level, SCOTUS cares whether their precedents are creating confusion among the appellate courts. If two appellate courts come to two different readings of SCOTUS's precedents, then SCOTUS will generally hear a case so that their opinion can help bring clarity to the courts.
With respect to the number of cases heard per year, approximately 1 in 200 cases appealed to SCOTUS will be heard by the Court. The buck stops at the appellate level 99.5% of the time.
(Source: David R. Hansen, former Chief Judge of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. IANAL: I'm just reporting what he's said.)
The short version is that just because it uses runtime typing doesn't mean you can't make really accurate guesses about what types will be active at any given point. Consider a really short Python program (consisting of something like "x=MyObject()" and "print x.method()"): it's easy to infer the type of x at its declaration, recognize there is no code path that rebinds x to a different type, and when accessing x later on pop up code completion that shows MyObject methods.
Stephen Jay Gould had a Ph.D. student who disbelieved evolution. Gould was once asked how he could be the doctoral advisor to a biology Ph.D. candidate who didn't believe in evolution. Gould answered that science didn't demand anyone have a particular set of beliefs, only that practitioners understand and can rationally discuss theories — both the prevailing ones and minority ones. So long as this Ph.D. candidate could intelligently discuss evolution, that was all Gould had any right to expect.
I hold Dr. Gould in the utmost respect. I don't hold much respect for people who believe that scientists must always hold the One True Set of beliefs or else they're not scientists at all. Good grief: if we thought like you we wouldn't have Newton or Linus Pauling.
For God's sake, Kary Mullis -- inventor of polymerase DNA replication, recipient of a Nobel Prize, and a world-class biochemist -- is an HIV/AIDS denialist: he openly advocates that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. So, sure: let's throw PCR replication out the window and all the medical advances that go along with it. Who should believe a biochemist who doesn't believe HIV causes AIDS?
So, sure. Let's discount all the scientists who have wacky ideas. By the time we're done, humanity's progress will be completely stunted, we'll be forever locked into our current level of technology, and we'll never reach the stars. That's the future you're hawking, and I want nothing of it.
If Dr. Spencer is wrong, well, hell, that'd be reason to disregard his opinions. But so far your only argument against him is, "he holds thoroughly silly opinions in another field," which is absolutely true and puts him in excellent company among scientists.
Given Newton's involvement in alchemy, I'm pretty sure if he were born in the late 20th century he'd be calling up J.Z. Knight and asking her to channel the ancient Atlantean warrior Ramtha to get his advice on things.
Yeah, but we've already established that in the OP's anecdote the DHS agents did respect the Fourth Amendment. They had neither a warrant nor his consent, so he wasn't searched. Where's the 'screw you and the Fourth Amendment' you're talking about?
First, calling them the "Homeland SA" is kind of like referring to "Bushitler." It's both historically ignorant and profoundly offensive to a lot of people. The Sturmabteilung had a career of evil the likes of which I hope to never again see. If you sincerely believe the DHS merits comparison to the SA, then your only choice is to take up arms against your government.
Second, unless the DHS agents said "screw you and the Fourth Amendment, we're going to search you anyway!", then it sounds as if they obeyed the law just fine. They're allowed to ask you for permission to search your vehicle, and you have the right to say no. Where's the illegality?
So, 3000+ people of all nationalities are violently murdered in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable...
... and it's our fault? Seriously, that's what you just said there: while innocent people are leaping off the top of the World Trade Center because a quick suicide is preferable to death in a fire, while you're watching those bodies fall, on that very day, you said "you know what, it's our fault"?
You are not evil. You are sick. You need help, and I hope you get it.
You know, I feel a little dirty responding to what is so obviously a troll, but what the hell:
When you say, This guy was on the CIA payroll, well, there you're saying things that just aren't true. Bin Laden's group was never funded by the CIA (check the bottom of page three at that link, going on to page four). Why would they need CIA funding? Bin Laden himself was wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of any mujahideen. And given the money to the Afghan mujahideen was all routed through Pakistan, why would they give money to a Saudi? Etc., etc. The meme of "the CIA funded bin Laden!" is one of these things that's just so idiotic it doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny and yet the folk myth simply will not die.
If you want your political views to be taken seriously by people, I would suggest revising your evangelism. This kind of talk will not convince people to listen to you: it will convince people you should not be listened to.
All of us like to think that the latest ten-core Xeon or whatever is the neatest thing since sliced bread, but stories like this remind us of what we often forget: the human spirit is the greatest hack of all time.
The family is in grief right now, and my sympathies are with them: but I hope they also understand the beyond-epic level of respect we have for Adrian Hands, and how he demonstrated right until the very end what the hacker ethos is all about. May we all live up to that standard.
If I insult some thug's girlfriend in a bar, he takes a swing at me and a brawl ensues, who is legally responsible for the fight and the property damages? Answer: the guy who took a swing at me. I may have been offensive and insulting, but I was not asking the guy to start a fight.
Likewise, Jones' proposed book-burning is not an incitement to violence. It is provocative and will likely get a violent response somewhere in the world, but Jones is not responsible for the illegal actions people freely choose to do in response to his legal actions.
What, are the world's Muslims such infantilized, brainwashed children that we're absolving them responsibility for their actions? What you're saying equates to, "if Muslims riot and violence ensues, it's Jones's fault for provoking them." I'll buy that as soon as you also say, "if a woman gets raped, it's because she was wearing immodest clothing: she knew that it would incite an attack."
As a free hint, that last bit is something the Taliban says. It's not what Americans say. Americans put the blame for illegal violence on, y'know, the people who are actually committing the violence.
I am a little bit of an authority on Robert Hansen, since I am Robert Hansen.
I am not Robert Hanssen, the treacherous FBI agent.
Hanssen also never took a polygraph. He avoided them like the plague. It was Hanssen's arrest that led to the FBI requiring polygraph of virtually all its agents.
But hey, I suppose factual accuracy is a bit much to ask from someone who can't even spell the guy's name right.
Originally, the First Amendment only prohibited Congress from getting involved in religion. State legislatures were free to do so, and many did. For instance, Massachusetts had a state church well into the 1800s.
After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. Through the Fourteenth Amendment, the First Amendment was applied throughout the entirety of the United States government and all state and municipal governments.
So yes, the First (plus the Fourteenth) unquestionably does separate church and state. If you want to claim they don't, you're going to need to present some pretty compelling proof.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact you called MWI "scientifically plausible" should be the first sign you don't have the first clue what you're going on about.
For MWI to be "scientifically plausible" it would have to make predictions which could be confirmed or falsified via experiment. That is, in essence, what science is: the subjecting of ideas to experimental test. (Go ask Zombie Feynman if you don't believe me.)
I've yet to hear any testable predictions MWI makes that would allow us to differentiate it from, say, Copenhagen. Maybe that's changed since I last dove into things (and if it has changed, I hope you'll tell me so), but I kind of doubt it.
David Deutsch is famous for saying that MWI is the only interpretation that gives any kind of sense to quantum computation. And, you know, I'm inclined to agree with him. That doesn't mean MWI is correct, though: it just means that the other interpretations do not satisfactorily explain those phenomena, not that MWI is the only possible interpretation that could give sense to quantum computation.
Also, given Copenhagen was first developed by Werner Heisenberg, it's kind of crazy to claim that Copenhagen is a "superstitious and completely nonsensical" interpretation. If I have to choose between exa on Slashdot being right when he says Copenhagen is superstitious and completely nonsensical, and Zombie Werner Heisenberg being right when he says that exa on Slashdot is misunderstanding Copenhagen, well... I'm going to side with Zombie Werner Heisenberg, you know?
Oh, sure. My own personal rule is "prefer the reference frame that makes the math easiest." However, my complaint was using Occam's Razor to decide which was more likely to be true: Ptolemy's or Copernicus's view of the heavens. This is a misuse of Occam: it overlooks the fairly deep truth that they are both equally true from within their given frames of reference.
Please, don't misunderstand me: I love making the math easier. :)
Copernican theory was picked up fairly quickly because it offered a simpler view of the cosmos. Astronomers bought into it largely because of its simplicity -- in effect, following Occam's Razor. It took until the early twentieth century for Einstein to say "you're all a bunch of doofuses: Ptolemaic theory is just as valid as Copernican, it all depends on your frame of reference." Thanks to relativity we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that Ptolemaic epicycles are equally valid: they're just more complex. There is no privileged frame of reference. It is as true to say the Earth circles the Sun as it is to say the Sun circles the Earth -- it's just that the equations are neater in one frame of reference, not that they are correct. This bears repeating: according to special relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference.
Naively applying Occam's Razor to the question leads people to a false sense of certainty: they tend to think, "I've applied Occam's Razor, therefore I am likely choosing the better answer," without ever thinking, "did I formulate the question correctly in the first place?"
Don't get me wrong, I like Occam's Razor. But when people use Copernican-versus-Ptolemaic theories as an example of Occam's success, well... that tells me a quick lesson needs to be given on how Occam's Razor utterly fails in that case.
Welcome! We're happy to have you. :)
Guy's an NRA life member, actually.
Years ago I had some serious back trouble that could have been addressed quickly with some painful surgery, or slowly with painful therapy. My surgeon (Dr. Charles Grado, and if you're reading this, thank you) was adamant that he wouldn't touch a scalpel until we'd exhausted all other possibilities. I thought that was weird and told him so. He told me that he took an oath to first do no harm, and that surgery stood in opposition to this. You can't claim you're "doing no harm" while you're cutting into flesh: you're clearly, obviously, doing harm. The only question is whether your actions are the least harmful way of restoring health. Doc Grado is one of the best doctors I've ever known.
My father and cousin are both judges. Despite their polar-opposite political views, they're agreed that any lawyer who starts off by saying, "well, let's file some legal papers" is an incompetent. A lawyer's job is to solve your problems, and jumping straight to court is a great way to multiply them instead.
My gunsmith is a career soldier who characterizes his experience in Vietnam as "99% boredom I don't mind remembering and 1% terror I'm trying to forget." Per him, only fools try to solve problems with firearms. You see, if you do that, they might try to solve you right on back with one, and you won't like that at all.
Finally, I'm an ivory-tower academic who left a Ph.D. program because I was convinced I could do better work, more meaningful work, in the private sector. My job nowadays involves taking cutting-edge research and integrating it into real-world production systems. So, "never" a connection to ground level? My own career says otherwise.
tl;dr version: Maslow said when all you have's a hammer the whole world looks like a nail. This is true only until you find nails that explode into shrapnel and maim you horribly when you hit them. Once you hit one of those nails, you get real careful before you swing that hammer again.
I usually don't respond to ACs, but in this case: yes, I was yelling and screaming for Bush to be impeached.
If I lived in a community where there were a great many murders and only occasionally one was solved, I wouldn't ask, "gee, why is this particular murderer being singled out?" The answer there is obvious: because he murdered someone. The question I'd ask instead is, "gee, why is everyone else getting away with it?"
I don't wonder at all why Clinton was impeached. I wonder why other Presidents haven't been.
President Clinton took an oath of office. In that oath of office, he swore that he would see to it each and every American received the full protections of law without respect to position or privilege. It was his job to respect the civil rights of the mentally ill homeless guy who lives under the bridge, the schoolteacher, the dockworker, the farmer, the banker, the lawyer, and the priest. It was his job to do this without the slightest regard for who they were.
Gennifer Flowers had the right to the due process of law. The President deliberately and willfully subverted this.
If you say that's "of no consequence to the nation," that's your lookout. As for me, if he'll throw Gennifer Flowers' civil rights under the bus in order to avoid telling his wife he's having an affair then he'll do the same thing to me the instant I become inconvenient. I find that to be of immense consequence, and his conduct to be worthy of impeachment.
YMMV, and apparently does. Welcome to America, where we have the right to hold different opinions -- but only so long as we're wise enough to elect administrations that will defend our rights.
Let's rephrase the question.
The answer is, "Get a new roommate. Your current one is not respecting you, as evidenced by his disregard for your wishes and the way he's exposing you to potentially massive legal fees. You need to be able to trust your roommate, and you apparently can't trust your current one. Finding a new roommate might be hard, but it's necessary. Good luck!"
With respect to the legal question you've raised, the only answer here is "talk to a real lawyer." Trusting Slashdot to give you legal counsel is, TBH, just flat-out crazy.
Until recently (moved to a new city), I was a volunteer at my old elementary school. Their gifted and talented math program had been shut down due to budget cuts: the teachers tried to compensate by getting professional mathematicians in to talk to the kids who should've been in gifted math programs. My role was simple: get fourth graders involved in math.
Each year on our first day together I'd use the LISP notation. I'd ask them, "if I told you to add the numbers one to ten together and multiply the result by fifteen, how would you write that down? Not the answer, but what I told you to do?"
They usually came up with 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10*15. This got us into talking about precedence and order of operations and everything else. Their eyes would spin. So, multiply before add, but divide and multiply are co-equal operators and you do them in linear left-to-right order, unless grouped by parenthesis, and...
"You know, this is pretty stupid, isn't it?" I'd ask them. "It's too hard. How are we supposed to keep track of all that? Who came up with this, anyway?"
I'd then write, (* 15 (+ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10)).
Not once, not ever, did it take a class of fourth graders more than five minutes of using this syntax to realize it was so much better than the 'traditional' syntax. It let us communicate clearly about what we were doing and in what order. On top of it, it looks kind of weird and exotic, and kids love writing in codes -- the fourth graders took to it like ducks to water. It was something that neither their classmates nor their teacher understood, and a professional mathematician told them, "yes, this really is how a lot of us in the field prefer to write things."
This is pretty close, but not quite accurate. SCOTUS takes cases principally according to:
The first category is really astonishingly rare. The second is almost as much so. The third accounts for the overwhelming majority of SCOTUS's workload.
Note that SCOTUS really doesn't care if your case "has merit." No judge really does. A judge's job isn't to decide if your case has merit: that's the jury's job. A judge's job is to make sure the laws are applied fairly and without bias to both parties.
At the SCOTUS level, SCOTUS cares whether their precedents are creating confusion among the appellate courts. If two appellate courts come to two different readings of SCOTUS's precedents, then SCOTUS will generally hear a case so that their opinion can help bring clarity to the courts.
With respect to the number of cases heard per year, approximately 1 in 200 cases appealed to SCOTUS will be heard by the Court. The buck stops at the appellate level 99.5% of the time.
(Source: David R. Hansen, former Chief Judge of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. IANAL: I'm just reporting what he's said.)
The short version is that just because it uses runtime typing doesn't mean you can't make really accurate guesses about what types will be active at any given point. Consider a really short Python program (consisting of something like "x=MyObject()" and "print x.method()"): it's easy to infer the type of x at its declaration, recognize there is no code path that rebinds x to a different type, and when accessing x later on pop up code completion that shows MyObject methods.
I'm not a Windows guy, mostly. Can't avoid it completely, but I try to whenever I can. Most of my work is done in various UNIXes. That said:
Thank you.
Seriously. Please ignore the haters. Me, I'm tickled pink y'all are doing this work: anything that helps the Python community is A-OK in my book. :)
(goes off to his Windows 7/64 desktop to install PTVS...)
It's been a hell of a ride, friend. Thanks for sharing it with us.
(Loyal reader since Chips and Dips.)
Stephen Jay Gould had a Ph.D. student who disbelieved evolution. Gould was once asked how he could be the doctoral advisor to a biology Ph.D. candidate who didn't believe in evolution. Gould answered that science didn't demand anyone have a particular set of beliefs, only that practitioners understand and can rationally discuss theories — both the prevailing ones and minority ones. So long as this Ph.D. candidate could intelligently discuss evolution, that was all Gould had any right to expect.
I hold Dr. Gould in the utmost respect. I don't hold much respect for people who believe that scientists must always hold the One True Set of beliefs or else they're not scientists at all. Good grief: if we thought like you we wouldn't have Newton or Linus Pauling.
For God's sake, Kary Mullis -- inventor of polymerase DNA replication, recipient of a Nobel Prize, and a world-class biochemist -- is an HIV/AIDS denialist: he openly advocates that the HIV virus does not cause AIDS. So, sure: let's throw PCR replication out the window and all the medical advances that go along with it. Who should believe a biochemist who doesn't believe HIV causes AIDS?
So, sure. Let's discount all the scientists who have wacky ideas. By the time we're done, humanity's progress will be completely stunted, we'll be forever locked into our current level of technology, and we'll never reach the stars. That's the future you're hawking, and I want nothing of it.
If Dr. Spencer is wrong, well, hell, that'd be reason to disregard his opinions. But so far your only argument against him is, "he holds thoroughly silly opinions in another field," which is absolutely true and puts him in excellent company among scientists.
Given Newton's involvement in alchemy, I'm pretty sure if he were born in the late 20th century he'd be calling up J.Z. Knight and asking her to channel the ancient Atlantean warrior Ramtha to get his advice on things.
Seriously.
Newton was a fine mathematician, a fine physicist, and a grade-A first-class believer in all the woo-woo the 17th century had to offer him.
Yeah, but we've already established that in the OP's anecdote the DHS agents did respect the Fourth Amendment. They had neither a warrant nor his consent, so he wasn't searched. Where's the 'screw you and the Fourth Amendment' you're talking about?
First, calling them the "Homeland SA" is kind of like referring to "Bushitler." It's both historically ignorant and profoundly offensive to a lot of people. The Sturmabteilung had a career of evil the likes of which I hope to never again see. If you sincerely believe the DHS merits comparison to the SA, then your only choice is to take up arms against your government.
Second, unless the DHS agents said "screw you and the Fourth Amendment, we're going to search you anyway!", then it sounds as if they obeyed the law just fine. They're allowed to ask you for permission to search your vehicle, and you have the right to say no. Where's the illegality?
So, 3000+ people of all nationalities are violently murdered in one of the most horrifying ways imaginable...
... and it's our fault? Seriously, that's what you just said there: while innocent people are leaping off the top of the World Trade Center because a quick suicide is preferable to death in a fire, while you're watching those bodies fall, on that very day, you said "you know what, it's our fault"?
You are not evil. You are sick. You need help, and I hope you get it.
You know, I feel a little dirty responding to what is so obviously a troll, but what the hell:
When you say, This guy was on the CIA payroll, well, there you're saying things that just aren't true. Bin Laden's group was never funded by the CIA (check the bottom of page three at that link, going on to page four). Why would they need CIA funding? Bin Laden himself was wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of any mujahideen. And given the money to the Afghan mujahideen was all routed through Pakistan, why would they give money to a Saudi? Etc., etc. The meme of "the CIA funded bin Laden!" is one of these things that's just so idiotic it doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny and yet the folk myth simply will not die.
If you want your political views to be taken seriously by people, I would suggest revising your evangelism. This kind of talk will not convince people to listen to you: it will convince people you should not be listened to.
How you got modded +5, I have no idea.
All of us like to think that the latest ten-core Xeon or whatever is the neatest thing since sliced bread, but stories like this remind us of what we often forget: the human spirit is the greatest hack of all time.
The family is in grief right now, and my sympathies are with them: but I hope they also understand the beyond-epic level of respect we have for Adrian Hands, and how he demonstrated right until the very end what the hacker ethos is all about. May we all live up to that standard.
If I insult some thug's girlfriend in a bar, he takes a swing at me and a brawl ensues, who is legally responsible for the fight and the property damages? Answer: the guy who took a swing at me. I may have been offensive and insulting, but I was not asking the guy to start a fight.
Likewise, Jones' proposed book-burning is not an incitement to violence. It is provocative and will likely get a violent response somewhere in the world, but Jones is not responsible for the illegal actions people freely choose to do in response to his legal actions.
What, are the world's Muslims such infantilized, brainwashed children that we're absolving them responsibility for their actions? What you're saying equates to, "if Muslims riot and violence ensues, it's Jones's fault for provoking them." I'll buy that as soon as you also say, "if a woman gets raped, it's because she was wearing immodest clothing: she knew that it would incite an attack."
As a free hint, that last bit is something the Taliban says. It's not what Americans say. Americans put the blame for illegal violence on, y'know, the people who are actually committing the violence.
I am a little bit of an authority on Robert Hansen, since I am Robert Hansen.
I am not Robert Hanssen, the treacherous FBI agent.
Hanssen also never took a polygraph. He avoided them like the plague. It was Hanssen's arrest that led to the FBI requiring polygraph of virtually all its agents.
But hey, I suppose factual accuracy is a bit much to ask from someone who can't even spell the guy's name right.
You're about 150 years out of date.
Originally, the First Amendment only prohibited Congress from getting involved in religion. State legislatures were free to do so, and many did. For instance, Massachusetts had a state church well into the 1800s.
After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted. Through the Fourteenth Amendment, the First Amendment was applied throughout the entirety of the United States government and all state and municipal governments.
So yes, the First (plus the Fourteenth) unquestionably does separate church and state. If you want to claim they don't, you're going to need to present some pretty compelling proof.