Man. Citation needed. Badly. You obviously don't know what you are talking about, and electronixtar proves it.
> Freedom may come to china, but only if the citizens push it. Sadly, that will mean more 6-4's. > But sometimes that is needed. It's easy for you, as a westerner (I presume, and at any rate not living in China) to tell other people to endure a period of political apocalypse, followed most likely by a breakdown of the Chinese economy, probably significant amounts of bloodshed, revolts and perhaps even civil war, just because you think "freedoms" are great things to have. You're asking the Chinese to basically risk tearing apart their country to hopefully build up something more democratic. (I know that's what the Americans did with Afghanistan and Iraq, but that doesn't make it right)
What have you done in YOUR country to protect you and your fellow citizen's freedoms and rights? What have you done to earn that privilege to tell others to sacrifice themselves, their country and their nation, for a measly *hope* of a more "free" government? (which, as we've seen, the chances aren't really that good)
And yes, the mod(s) who gave parent "Interesting", I mean you too.
My (limited) understanding of DaLai Lama's recent conciliatory stance towards China is that he's losing the "battle" with Beijing...
China is getting more powerful these days, not the "next superpower" but rapidly actually becoming one. I've seen enough people who were totally hostile to the communist party and then recently saying "hmm maybe we should give them a break..."
I don't think it was actually a "blip". People seem to focus on the number of deaths rather than the real issue at hand. Not that I think that number is "insignificant", but you miss the point by saying "X was worse than Y because he killed more people".
I do think the Tienanmen Square is a historically significant event even in context of Chinese history and from the Chinese perspective. Firstly, tanks in front of Tienanment Square isn't something you'd see every day. Secondly, and more importantly, the Chinese government said "no" to the protesters arguing for immediate government reform (which, among other things, include democratization reforms).
I think I know the reason why the kid in GP's story didn't know about the event. He probably wasn't old enough in 1989 to understand what happened, and his parents knew better than to chatter afterwards about it.
Revolutions in China are in *much* larger scale (if only because it's a huge country compared to European counterparts [USA never had much of history to speak of]), and definitely much more bloody.
> When you aren't free and don't own yourself how can you possibly own anything else? > When the fruits of your labour are stolen from you..
I might be quoting you a bit out of context, but if you read Marx's communist manifesto he speaks of the vices of capitalism being that you don't own the fruits of your labour but the corporation does, and you're just a slave to the priviledged burgueois (?) class.
Pretty ironic really. And if you take a look at China the only thing restraining them from being 100% capitalistic is not the lack of civil rights and freedoms, but rather the name of the ruling party and the lip service they give to communist ideals...
Better examples of capitalist states without much "freedoms" would be Singapore (their freedom of press is quite "substandard" I've heard, at least regarding anti-government things), and Taiwan (was under martial law until late 80's).
> Those mentally defective individuals who derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives, > lording it over the, making them suffer, do not take other countries boundaries at all seriously, > ah yeah being emperor of the world whilst it is a joke for us, it is a seriously sick desire for them.
Debating whether Chinese (or more generally) can run a "free and democratic society" is actually quite an academic debate. Most people more or less have a similar view as yours, but there are people who have see it differently, and support their views by arguments which are beyond "nearly as bad as a lie".
> That silly stuff about the Chinese being incapable of running a free and democratic country, > now that is nasty racist stuff Two points I'd like to note here: first, I don't think (mainland) China is ready for full democratization right now, nor in the foreseeable decade or so. I'm Chinese, ethnically and technically I do live in China.
Second, I seriously doubt ANYBODY, whether Chinese or not, could effectively manage a country as huge as China if it were fully democratic. I note that the USA uses a federal system where the theory is that the individual states are sovereign but gave up some of their powers according to the constitution to form the USA -- which basically reduces the strain of the federal system quite a bit.
You'll have to be Chinese (or at least versed in Chinese history and culture) to understand why power has to be centralized. A federal system will not work in China, if only due to cultural and historical stigma (that has gone on for centuries if not millenia [i.e. not a recent communist construct]). So here you have a mind boggling huge country that you have to manage, and despite the "efficiency" of authoritarianism it still isn't "efficient" enough. Now you want to further include these uncertainties you call "elections"?
> Those mentally defective individuals who derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives, > lording it over the, making them suffer, do not take other countries boundaries at all seriously, > ah yeah being emperor of the world whilst it is a joke for us, it is a seriously sick desire for them.
The GP was asking specifically why you'd be so interested in China's democratization, so I think I'd be justified in assuming you're talking in the China context. Now, I don't really see any high officials in China being *that* sick. Or even remotely close. You seriously underestimate the intelligence (and the painful experiences learnt in recent history) of 1.x billion Chinese people. Of course 99.99%+ of them didn't vote for our leaders but there's always this option (or *threat*) of some bloody revolution -- the Chinese way of replacing bad governments. These days it seems to be a rather uncivilized system of check and balances, but sickos we do have ways of removing sickos...
> the Taiwanese and the Tibetans from being able to run their own free and democratic societies.
The democratic system in Taiwan looks OK from the recent presidential elections. Kudos for them. There are a few rough edges but you really can't hope for a lot more. Now I'd like to corroborate my point above by noting that Taiwan is a much smaller "country" than mainland China, with much lower population. You may have noticed that Taiwanese politics is not really without its turmoils, and I dread to imagine what chaos would ensue if similar things happened in mainland China... and still Taiwanese democracy is considered a "success", so hopefully you'd have an idea of why implementing democracy in China is such an overwhelming thing.
As for Tibetans... those people, uh, you know, the legitimacy of their leaders are based on INCARNATION? I mean, maybe they could do it... but that's pure speculation. By western "democratic" value judgements they are no better than China itself, and arguably worse, since at least the leaders in China are #1 elected (though through a tightly "controlled" manner) and #2 are cho
> I don't think the Chinese people want freedom and democracy. I think they're > too busy making money and improving their lives
I hate to put it this way, but do you even know why the Tienanmen Square event happened? Why there were protests in the first place, and why the leaders felt the need to suppress the protests by military force? (hint: Wikipedia is a good enough source for those two questions)
It's only because there are substantial political, cultural, and ideological hurdles that most have settled for other worldly things. And then there are people who are testing the waters by subtly pushing the limits -- you just won't see mention in Western media.
In all fairness I agree that most Chinese won't be interested in the event. Most people are old enough to know what happened (roughly), and it's not like it's shocking news that the Chinese government have an iron fist policy when their authority is challenged...
Maybe you're even right that "Chinese don't want democracy and freedom". But that's more like saying I don't want to be a billionaire because I waste time posting on slashdot instead of starting the next Google -- of course I would like to, but what's the chances of that? Might as well settle for something else...
Another reason might be because of licensing issues. KDE is based on Qt, which is GPL'ed. Some commercial distros might not want to GPL everything in which case GNOME might be a better choice.
I'll give one. Not long ago using the Gimp crop tool involves selecting an area, and when you begin selecting the area a window pops up, sometimes obscuring your view of the image, and thus you have no idea what you are selecting.
To be fair they finally replaced that interface with a new one that's so much better. I have no idea how they do crop in photoshop though....
I thought factoring was known not to be NP complete. To be fair I sometimes make this mistake too:)
You may be right that unordered dictionary lookup is not an NP complete problem. I can't find any references for it either way, and certainly don't know a proof myself. I think that "unordered dictionary lookup" simply refers to a typical linear search, like how you normally loop through an array to find a specific element. The run time complexity is O(n) which is linear (this is obvious), and hence the problem is in P. It is therefore NP-complete iff P = NP (which is speculated to be highly unlikely). Not a "proof that it isn't NPC" per se, but that's as close as you could get to a proof.
The way it can be "used" to solve NP complete problems is that most NPC problems involve finding something from an array. You could speed up that part with Grover's algorithm. Maybe other speedups are possible, but AFAIK it reduces an NPC problem from something like O(2^N) to O(2^(N/2)). Helps a bit but the best solutions still require exponential time.
The disclaimer is that I know absolutely nothing about quantum computing... I have absolutely no idea how Shor and Grover's work. I don't even have formal training in CS, so stuff might be way off the mark.
Again, though, remember that FACTORING IS NOT NP COMPLETE, only NP hard. Wrong (emphasis mine). Factoring is in NP but not (known to be) NP complete. Which means that factoring is not (known to be) NP-Hard. (The only NP-hard problems in NP are NP-Complete problems) A more colloquial way to explain it is that NP-hard problems are at least as hard as NP-complete problems, yet factoring is "easier" than NP-complete problems.
Also read about Grover's algorithm, which is a general algorithm to solve NP complete problems, and which HAS BEEN PROVEN TO BE THE FASTEST way to solve the NP complete problem of lookup in an unordered dictionary. Grover's algorithm finds the answer in n^1/2. Obviously if the fastest algorithm to solve a specific NP complete problem is n^1/2, you cannot have a way to solve all NP complete problems in log(n). Do you even know what you are talking about? Grover's algorithm is not used to solve NP complete problems!! You've already said it -- it's a way to look up an unordered dictionary. Which is not an NP complete problem AT ALL. In addition, it's nowhere proven to be the fastest way to solve NP complete problems. If you could prove an algorithm is the fastest way to solve NP complete problems, you win a million bucks. Do you even know what NP complete problems look like?
Look up Grover's algorithm and Schor's algorithm on Wikipedia, and you'll see that the GP is speaking beyond his knowledge. And you are too. (And I think I am too;-p)
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I never thought I knew anything about theoretical computer science until topics like this come up and people who have no idea what they are talking about gets modded up...
I mean, the GP's reaction is pretty much what I was thinking. I never wrote anything useful enough to be released to the world, but the fact that the guy claims some "GPL app is coming soon" isn't remotely enough for consideration of a scholarship from the FOSS people. Just look at sf.net and there are thousands of OSS apps, some are probably done by high schoolers. What's so special about this one that he deserves a scholarship before even releasing something?
That's essentially my original point. Why should the government be excused from something that they were supposed to do (maybe they don't have a strict legal responsibility, but nonetheless that's a social responsibility) simply because they had a contract telling them not to do those things?
well I wasn't exactly trying to troll:-/
That is the heart of the problem: they can understand it alright, but why should they believe it??? Why should they believe you or any other one man? Should they go and repeat the experiments? That would take lifetimes. Should they study the scientific literature? That is the way we all do it, and it takes years. The same reason why people should believe that 1+1=2. You don't need empirical evidence to understand the mechanisms of evolution. It's basically an "algorithm" that acts on self reproducing life forms which has an effect that can be analyzed rationally with a logical mind.
Of course, this doesn't address the problem of whether evolution is in fact the actual mechanism where species evolved, but as with everything else you don't really to be 100.00000% sure of something before you believe in it. Compared with the theory that a guy with a grey beard in the sky created all species, evolution even without solid empirical evidence support, is a better theory.
In my personal experience, the most effective way to handle religion is to simply not discuss it, and to bring the discussion back onto the side of science Ah. This is what I intended to say (somewhat). I have this habit of saying things the long and convoluted way:)
In order to get a search warrant, a police officer or Special Agent needs to state the facts that support that warrant in an affidavit sworn to under oath. They may also have to testify under oath before a judge or magistrate in order to get the warrant approved. Lying under oath is perjury. When's the last time you heard of police officers being charged with perjury? It's hard to prove that somebody's lying. Especially when they are closely related to those who prosecute crimes.
If your rand() function is really random, then it's not a subject for analysis with the classical Turing halting argument.
If your rand() is merely a pseudo RNG, and one that's used in practice, you probably could prove that it halts. The difficulty of proving a pseudo random generator halts is nowhere close to (dis)proving that the "finding counter examples to Goldbach conjecture" program halts -- if only because of the fact that pseudo random generators will usually produce every number in its range within a small number of steps.
Oh, then I'll just contract with my dad that no third party will be allowed to log my internet connection, wiretap my phone conversations, and track my physical and "cyberspace" habits...
My point is that doing something wrong, and pointing to a contract doesn't make it a moral excuse. If your argument is right then by similar lines I could contract with a friend to piss off every person I see on the street, and when reprimanded I could point to the contract to say that "hey, I didn't do anything wrong I have a contractual duty to piss you off!"...
when a doctor says "carbohydrates are responsible for weight gain" and other doctors say "no, fat is!" it reduces trust by the public in all doctors. Actually I feel that these things are almost mysticism. Anybody with a slight clue in science/biology knows that our body weight gain[1] is directly proportional to body energy intake minus body energy output. It's that simple... any claims to the contrary is a violation of physical laws and the conservation of mass/energy.
The most that those elaborate theories on weight reduction diet is to either encourage your body to eat less, or to burn more energy (or both). Any further claims is simply fraud.
[1]: that is, if we disregard water, since you can gain a kg if you gobble a litre of water. But water's temporary.
Using experiments to test theory is exactly what scientists do. Maybe scientists should prioritize in doing experiments which have a higher chance of working, but the worst a scientist can do is to sit on their ass scoffing at an experiment and not trying it out even if they have the time and resources.
Scientists don't say "your theory doesn't agree with Einstein's theory so it must be wrong". Scientists say "I can't reproduce your experimental results so something must be wrong". Luckily you don't claim to be a scientist since from what I understand you seem to be leaning on the former type of mindset than the latter.
I think the deeper problem is that science subtly asserts its own correctness -- because we're scientific, we're correct!
But the state of art scientific knowledge is simply stuff that people couldn't grasp without a PhD. Things that get trickled down to the public are necessarily approximations, and approximations are not "truth" as touted. In fact, the state of art scientific knowledge is not anywhere close to the "truth" either...
What the public lack, though, is an understanding of how science works in the philosophical level. When asked "why do apples fall to the ground?", it's tempting to answer "because of gravity", and without further explanation. Now, if you have no idea what gravity is, and the scientific process and scrutiny the theory went through, how is this different from the answer of "because of God"? Both concepts are equally mysterious, if not "gravity" being more so than "God".
This is why people don't "believe" in science. Because scientists aren't philosophers and talk within the scientific framework where it is ASSUMED that the audience knows and accepts the scientific method (since their science journal reviewers do).
A philosopher would explain an apple falling in this way: Apple falls to the ground because of gravity. But the fact is we don't really know how gravity works, and why things with masses are attracted to each other. All we can say is that scientists have tested and observed a lot of objects and they all seem to be attracted to each other. We don't ultimately know why it is "supposed" to be the case, we don't rule out the possibility that this is ultimately due to a "God", but science is not concerned with this question. However, science can give you these equations if you ever need to calculate the force of a falling apple -- and they can tell you to be cautious of an apple falling from a 100 foot tall tree, since the impact onto your head will probably kill you.
The basis of evolution is extremely simple. You can communicate the idea to people and have them understand it within minutes.
The idea could be summed up in a sentence: each generation is a little different from the previous generation, and those which are different for the worse die off, leaving the fitter ones to survive to reproduce again. You gotta be kidding me to say that this requires a year of study to understand. The intricate details of evolution is a bit more complex and we still aren't sure how some apparently complex structures have evolved... but that doesn't preclude people from understanding the basic concept.
It's the same way farmers grow better crops by selecting a better strain, how animal owners improve their breed, etc. It's ONLY because of the religious and philosophical crap that people tend to associate with evolution that makes it so bloody difficult to understand. You don't have to be a scientist to grow crops or breed dogs...
Science by its very nature is an extremely elitist kind of human activity Why??? Unless you think that intellectualism is elitist, and that "normal" people shouldn't be allowed to think for themselves.
I thought one of science's goals was to further human knowledge of the empirical world and to make it available to mankind. Not so that scientists could sit in their ivory towers laughing at the stupidity of the unwashed masses...
The problem with honest scientific reporting is that there would be MUCH MUCH less to write about.
In other words, those journalists will be out of business!
Besides, I think sometimes the scientists themselves will be struggling to know what they have or have not discovered...
I agree with your general point though, it's just that there are practical problems with honesty and my point is that we won't be seeing it soon if ever:-/
Slashdot Mirror
Man. Citation needed. Badly.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about, and electronixtar proves it.
> Freedom may come to china, but only if the citizens push it. Sadly, that will mean more 6-4's.
> But sometimes that is needed.
It's easy for you, as a westerner (I presume, and at any rate not living in China) to tell other people to endure a period of political apocalypse, followed most likely by a breakdown of the Chinese economy, probably significant amounts of bloodshed, revolts and perhaps even civil war, just because you think "freedoms" are great things to have. You're asking the Chinese to basically risk tearing apart their country to hopefully build up something more democratic. (I know that's what the Americans did with Afghanistan and Iraq, but that doesn't make it right)
What have you done in YOUR country to protect you and your fellow citizen's freedoms and rights? What have you done to earn that privilege to tell others to sacrifice themselves, their country and their nation, for a measly *hope* of a more "free" government? (which, as we've seen, the chances aren't really that good)
And yes, the mod(s) who gave parent "Interesting", I mean you too.
My (limited) understanding of DaLai Lama's recent conciliatory stance towards China is that he's losing the "battle" with Beijing...
China is getting more powerful these days, not the "next superpower" but rapidly actually becoming one. I've seen enough people who were totally hostile to the communist party and then recently saying "hmm maybe we should give them a break..."
I don't think it was actually a "blip". People seem to focus on the number of deaths rather than the real issue at hand. Not that I think that number is "insignificant", but you miss the point by saying "X was worse than Y because he killed more people".
I do think the Tienanmen Square is a historically significant event even in context of Chinese history and from the Chinese perspective. Firstly, tanks in front of Tienanment Square isn't something you'd see every day. Secondly, and more importantly, the Chinese government said "no" to the protesters arguing for immediate government reform (which, among other things, include democratization reforms).
I think I know the reason why the kid in GP's story didn't know about the event. He probably wasn't old enough in 1989 to understand what happened, and his parents knew better than to chatter afterwards about it.
Similar, but not the same.
Revolutions in China are in *much* larger scale (if only because it's a huge country compared to European counterparts [USA never had much of history to speak of]), and definitely much more bloody.
> When you aren't free and don't own yourself how can you possibly own anything else?
> When the fruits of your labour are stolen from you..
I might be quoting you a bit out of context, but if you read Marx's communist manifesto he speaks of the vices of capitalism being that you don't own the fruits of your labour but the corporation does, and you're just a slave to the priviledged burgueois (?) class.
Pretty ironic really. And if you take a look at China the only thing restraining them from being 100% capitalistic is not the lack of civil rights and freedoms, but rather the name of the ruling party and the lip service they give to communist ideals...
Better examples of capitalist states without much "freedoms" would be Singapore (their freedom of press is quite "substandard" I've heard, at least regarding anti-government things), and Taiwan (was under martial law until late 80's).
> Those mentally defective individuals who derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives,
> lording it over the, making them suffer, do not take other countries boundaries at all seriously,
> ah yeah being emperor of the world whilst it is a joke for us, it is a seriously sick desire for them.
Debating whether Chinese (or more generally) can run a "free and democratic society" is actually quite an academic debate. Most people more or less have a similar view as yours, but there are people who have see it differently, and support their views by arguments which are beyond "nearly as bad as a lie".
> That silly stuff about the Chinese being incapable of running a free and democratic country,
> now that is nasty racist stuff
Two points I'd like to note here: first, I don't think (mainland) China is ready for full democratization right now, nor in the foreseeable decade or so. I'm Chinese, ethnically and technically I do live in China.
Second, I seriously doubt ANYBODY, whether Chinese or not, could effectively manage a country as huge as China if it were fully democratic. I note that the USA uses a federal system where the theory is that the individual states are sovereign but gave up some of their powers according to the constitution to form the USA -- which basically reduces the strain of the federal system quite a bit.
You'll have to be Chinese (or at least versed in Chinese history and culture) to understand why power has to be centralized. A federal system will not work in China, if only due to cultural and historical stigma (that has gone on for centuries if not millenia [i.e. not a recent communist construct]). So here you have a mind boggling huge country that you have to manage, and despite the "efficiency" of authoritarianism it still isn't "efficient" enough. Now you want to further include these uncertainties you call "elections"?
> Those mentally defective individuals who derive pleasure from controlling other peoples lives,
> lording it over the, making them suffer, do not take other countries boundaries at all seriously,
> ah yeah being emperor of the world whilst it is a joke for us, it is a seriously sick desire for them.
The GP was asking specifically why you'd be so interested in China's democratization, so I think I'd be justified in assuming you're talking in the China context. Now, I don't really see any high officials in China being *that* sick. Or even remotely close. You seriously underestimate the intelligence (and the painful experiences learnt in recent history) of 1.x billion Chinese people. Of course 99.99%+ of them didn't vote for our leaders but there's always this option (or *threat*) of some bloody revolution -- the Chinese way of replacing bad governments. These days it seems to be a rather uncivilized system of check and balances, but sickos we do have ways of removing sickos...
> the Taiwanese and the Tibetans from being able to run their own free and democratic societies.
The democratic system in Taiwan looks OK from the recent presidential elections. Kudos for them. There are a few rough edges but you really can't hope for a lot more. Now I'd like to corroborate my point above by noting that Taiwan is a much smaller "country" than mainland China, with much lower population. You may have noticed that Taiwanese politics is not really without its turmoils, and I dread to imagine what chaos would ensue if similar things happened in mainland China... and still Taiwanese democracy is considered a "success", so hopefully you'd have an idea of why implementing democracy in China is such an overwhelming thing.
As for Tibetans... those people, uh, you know, the legitimacy of their leaders are based on INCARNATION? I mean, maybe they could do it... but that's pure speculation. By western "democratic" value judgements they are no better than China itself, and arguably worse, since at least the leaders in China are #1 elected (though through a tightly "controlled" manner) and #2 are cho
> I don't think the Chinese people want freedom and democracy. I think they're
> too busy making money and improving their lives
I hate to put it this way, but do you even know why the Tienanmen Square event happened? Why there were protests in the first place, and why the leaders felt the need to suppress the protests by military force? (hint: Wikipedia is a good enough source for those two questions)
It's only because there are substantial political, cultural, and ideological hurdles that most have settled for other worldly things. And then there are people who are testing the waters by subtly pushing the limits -- you just won't see mention in Western media.
In all fairness I agree that most Chinese won't be interested in the event. Most people are old enough to know what happened (roughly), and it's not like it's shocking news that the Chinese government have an iron fist policy when their authority is challenged...
Maybe you're even right that "Chinese don't want democracy and freedom". But that's more like saying I don't want to be a billionaire because I waste time posting on slashdot instead of starting the next Google -- of course I would like to, but what's the chances of that? Might as well settle for something else...
That's the joke.
Because GNOME is comparable?
Another reason might be because of licensing issues. KDE is based on Qt, which is GPL'ed. Some commercial distros might not want to GPL everything in which case GNOME might be a better choice.
I'll give one. Not long ago using the Gimp crop tool involves selecting an area, and when you begin selecting the area a window pops up, sometimes obscuring your view of the image, and thus you have no idea what you are selecting.
To be fair they finally replaced that interface with a new one that's so much better. I have no idea how they do crop in photoshop though....
The way it can be "used" to solve NP complete problems is that most NPC problems involve finding something from an array. You could speed up that part with Grover's algorithm. Maybe other speedups are possible, but AFAIK it reduces an NPC problem from something like O(2^N) to O(2^(N/2)). Helps a bit but the best solutions still require exponential time.
The disclaimer is that I know absolutely nothing about quantum computing... I have absolutely no idea how Shor and Grover's work. I don't even have formal training in CS, so stuff might be way off the mark.
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I never thought I knew anything about theoretical computer science until topics like this come up and people who have no idea what they are talking about gets modded up...
I think his answer is "no"?
I mean, the GP's reaction is pretty much what I was thinking. I never wrote anything useful enough to be released to the world, but the fact that the guy claims some "GPL app is coming soon" isn't remotely enough for consideration of a scholarship from the FOSS people. Just look at sf.net and there are thousands of OSS apps, some are probably done by high schoolers. What's so special about this one that he deserves a scholarship before even releasing something?
That's essentially my original point. Why should the government be excused from something that they were supposed to do (maybe they don't have a strict legal responsibility, but nonetheless that's a social responsibility) simply because they had a contract telling them not to do those things?
Of course, this doesn't address the problem of whether evolution is in fact the actual mechanism where species evolved, but as with everything else you don't really to be 100.00000% sure of something before you believe in it. Compared with the theory that a guy with a grey beard in the sky created all species, evolution even without solid empirical evidence support, is a better theory.
It's hard to prove that somebody's lying. Especially when they are closely related to those who prosecute crimes.
If your rand() function is really random, then it's not a subject for analysis with the classical Turing halting argument.
If your rand() is merely a pseudo RNG, and one that's used in practice, you probably could prove that it halts. The difficulty of proving a pseudo random generator halts is nowhere close to (dis)proving that the "finding counter examples to Goldbach conjecture" program halts -- if only because of the fact that pseudo random generators will usually produce every number in its range within a small number of steps.
Oh, then I'll just contract with my dad that no third party will be allowed to log my internet connection, wiretap my phone conversations, and track my physical and "cyberspace" habits...
My point is that doing something wrong, and pointing to a contract doesn't make it a moral excuse. If your argument is right then by similar lines I could contract with a friend to piss off every person I see on the street, and when reprimanded I could point to the contract to say that "hey, I didn't do anything wrong I have a contractual duty to piss you off!"...
The most that those elaborate theories on weight reduction diet is to either encourage your body to eat less, or to burn more energy (or both). Any further claims is simply fraud.
[1]: that is, if we disregard water, since you can gain a kg if you gobble a litre of water. But water's temporary.
The joke is on you maybe?
Using experiments to test theory is exactly what scientists do.
Maybe scientists should prioritize in doing experiments which have a higher chance of working, but the worst a scientist can do is to sit on their ass scoffing at an experiment and not trying it out even if they have the time and resources.
Scientists don't say "your theory doesn't agree with Einstein's theory so it must be wrong". Scientists say "I can't reproduce your experimental results so something must be wrong". Luckily you don't claim to be a scientist since from what I understand you seem to be leaning on the former type of mindset than the latter.
I think the deeper problem is that science subtly asserts its own correctness -- because we're scientific, we're correct!
But the state of art scientific knowledge is simply stuff that people couldn't grasp without a PhD. Things that get trickled down to the public are necessarily approximations, and approximations are not "truth" as touted. In fact, the state of art scientific knowledge is not anywhere close to the "truth" either...
What the public lack, though, is an understanding of how science works in the philosophical level. When asked "why do apples fall to the ground?", it's tempting to answer "because of gravity", and without further explanation. Now, if you have no idea what gravity is, and the scientific process and scrutiny the theory went through, how is this different from the answer of "because of God"? Both concepts are equally mysterious, if not "gravity" being more so than "God".
This is why people don't "believe" in science. Because scientists aren't philosophers and talk within the scientific framework where it is ASSUMED that the audience knows and accepts the scientific method (since their science journal reviewers do).
A philosopher would explain an apple falling in this way: Apple falls to the ground because of gravity. But the fact is we don't really know how gravity works, and why things with masses are attracted to each other. All we can say is that scientists have tested and observed a lot of objects and they all seem to be attracted to each other. We don't ultimately know why it is "supposed" to be the case, we don't rule out the possibility that this is ultimately due to a "God", but science is not concerned with this question. However, science can give you these equations if you ever need to calculate the force of a falling apple -- and they can tell you to be cautious of an apple falling from a 100 foot tall tree, since the impact onto your head will probably kill you.
The basis of evolution is extremely simple. You can communicate the idea to people and have them understand it within minutes.
The idea could be summed up in a sentence: each generation is a little different from the previous generation, and those which are different for the worse die off, leaving the fitter ones to survive to reproduce again. You gotta be kidding me to say that this requires a year of study to understand. The intricate details of evolution is a bit more complex and we still aren't sure how some apparently complex structures have evolved... but that doesn't preclude people from understanding the basic concept.
It's the same way farmers grow better crops by selecting a better strain, how animal owners improve their breed, etc. It's ONLY because of the religious and philosophical crap that people tend to associate with evolution that makes it so bloody difficult to understand. You don't have to be a scientist to grow crops or breed dogs...
I thought one of science's goals was to further human knowledge of the empirical world and to make it available to mankind. Not so that scientists could sit in their ivory towers laughing at the stupidity of the unwashed masses...
The problem with honest scientific reporting is that there would be MUCH MUCH less to write about.
:-/
In other words, those journalists will be out of business!
Besides, I think sometimes the scientists themselves will be struggling to know what they have or have not discovered...
I agree with your general point though, it's just that there are practical problems with honesty and my point is that we won't be seeing it soon if ever