I know jack shit about those groups you mention. And I don't really care to. As for educated, I have a master's in math, so presumably I'm not "against the educated in general".
Believe it or not, for me this discussion is not about group A against group B, it is simply about what's right. I like to think (but I don't have that many illusions left) that social groups don't matter in science. I know that's not true, but I ignore that. I'm still employed so I guess I'm good enough to get away with it too. For me an argument is about right versus wrong. Right as in 1+1=2 right. This argument, about what "proof" constitutes, is part of logic theory, part of math. And, frankly, you have some very strange ideas about that.
What is your argument for what is right ? Is it simply what a few scientists tell you ? Because it sure looks like that. That's why I said that for you science is not much different from religion, and you're outright intolerant about it too. I have to admit the university is filling up with people like that, that are very intolerant about their ideas of what constitutes science. Sadly, their ideas often don't match the equations on paper. Few let that stop them.
And humans do ? I must say that while a certain form of organisation is present in cities, only very few cities looked like any global design was done at all in them. When it comes to organisation essentially done by individual humans : animals have plenty of "local" organisation like humans... take the tunnel structure below molehills for example. This is aside from huge projects like the hoover dam. But most things humans build are much more like the massive organic changes animals cause just as much as humans do.
Besides, humans are not unique in having big infrastructure projects. Ants is the most common example of an animal that organises itself into building huge structures on cue. So do apes. Nothing quite the scale of Hoover dam of course, but the difference is a scale difference, not intent or organisation or even intelligence.
Wow. Someone's real mad I stepped on his holy cow.
I stand by that statement btw. The scientific method is hypothesis -> repeatable experiments -> theory. Ever since physics experiments started costing millions or billions it is very fair to say that.
But I guess for you science is just a different religion. With no buts and ifs and essentially no explanations, just a number of statements one must be punished for disobeying. And that you do such a thing immediately after making an obviously wrong statement is telling. I wonder if someone like you actually pretends he's helping science move ahead ?
Random deviations in a chaotic system (like weather) are not bound to any duration. All you know is that random deviations have a finite duration, it can be arbitrarily long (including effectively infinite, meaning until the end of the earth).
It is saddening that people are even arguing this. You don't grasp the complexity of the problem. The reason we believe global warming occurs is that many different readings -not all- point in the same direction. All measurements, regardless of their duration are subject to random deviations, which by definition have random durations. Some probably have durations measured in millions of years.
I think your numbers are skewed. Wikipedia says the top 1% of household earnings earn $350k and up, which is only a third of that million you claim. Furthermore the same page claims the vast majority of the top 1% are married and have both partners working (and both earning nontrivial amounts), so it's much less.
So for top 1%, averaged over male/female an average wage is only a little bit over $175k.
I'm not saying wikipedia is right, quite the opposite usually. In my opinion wikipedia has tons of "inconvenient" truths covered up and blatantly lies about just about any politically sensitive topic, always preferring the popular opinion over the real one (e.g. look at the pages on radiation sickness after Fukushima, or simply their description of the disaster itself). And correcting anything on there to the truth while pointing out the popular opinion is bullshit scaremongering quickly results in shouting matches, and the admins invariably choose the mob over reason. So I'm quite ashamed about using wikipedia numbers here, this tax topic is certainly politically sensitive. So I'd love to know where your numbers come from.
Why would that number matter ? A quick google search would put the average money "the average American", male or female, brings home, at $43000k give or take 1000 for the last 2-3 years.
My point was that when it comes to "the rich" (> $1m, which are more like the 0.01%), not having them pay any taxes is financially indistinguishable from having them pay 100% taxes. Even if we grow that to the > $200k which roughly corresponds to 0.1% of the population, not having them pay any taxes makes no difference from the government's point of view. Why because the absolute amounts of even 100% of their total wealth (not just income) are simply not significant compared to government expenditure (which is presumably why so many of them have government jobs).
So the reason to make the rich pay taxes cannot possibly be financial. The smart amount of taxes to demand from "the rich", frankly, is whatever amount they feel happiest with. It doesn't matter. So the reason to have big taxes on the rich must be something like "social justice", otherwise known as jealousy and revenge. And frankly, I remember what happened to me and a few others for "social justice" in high school. Not because I was anywhere near rich, sadly rather the opposite, but because I was smarter than they were (or at least, I performed better at pretty much any school subject. Heh, getting excluded was probably the most significant reason for that in the first place). So I for one find the idea of basing any policy, never mind tax policy on "social justice" disgusting (helping people, perhaps... punishing people for social justice, fuck you no).
The people who are going to pay for government expenditures, like it or not, are the people making $30k - $100k. Why ? For no other reasons than that's where the taxable pie is biggest ( number of people * avg_income ). There is not a politician in the world who can change this. There is nobody on this planet who can collect 4000 billion from any other group in American society. If you prefer something else, I'd say your best bet it to go to church and pray for the second coming.
So why do we fight over this at all ? The economically rational thing to do, as unpopular as it is, is to let the rich pay whatever they want (in the present situation). It doesn't matter at all, and so any effort on collecting taxes from them is a waste, and sadly only costs the rest of us more in the end.
Total federal budget = 4 trillion, or 4 tr / 300 mil = 13k per american. If you bring 80% of 10 people making average half a billion dollars that makes it... a rounding error.
I know this is not going to be popular here, but really, from a financial point of view : any group smaller than tenthousand members (which would already make will pay for government. Why ? Because nobody else can. The only alternative is no government. And any attention paid to denying that fact is just wasted effort and misdirection, on par with hour long discussions about puppies that look real innocent, even when sitting next to a pile of poo.
And whether you include big theatrics cutting a few "rich" down to size (while the very rich working in politics "somehow" go unnoticed)... in reality that sadly is a waste of taxpayer money. Personally, I get my theatrics from the idiot box.
I do not claim the position I'm defending is socially or morally just (in fact I could care less), I'm just saying it's pragmatic, and it's the truth. As to why I'm defending accepting reality on a site like this, that I cannot fathom at all. Heh maybe there's hope for me yet.
I seriously don't see the problem. We as a society have laws that people cannot kill for money. You want to live in a society where killing for money is allowed, go visit the arab countries. Several of them actually still allow it (google "blood money" as long as you have money, or the target is alone (no legal heirs, no wife/kids/parents), you can kill anyone. BTW: don't think this is a blanket permission to kill, it's not, you don't get to "cause mischief in the land", which is punishable by death, so ymmv. Don't try it on the prime minister's nephew)
Here, it is a crime to kill for money (which is a good thing, despite what some prophet's opinion on the subject is) and frankly... what is wrong with offering that deal to people, and then arresting them ? It is also a crime to (seriously) plan and prepare for any other crime, regardless of the success of the endeavour, regardless of motivation (with the exception of duress, although even duress is no excuse for committing/planning murder, never mind mass-murder).
You can flip the question around : strictly speaking, a thwarted suicide bomber has not committed anything you would intuitively consider crime (resisting arrest, possession of chemicals, conspiracy to murder, terrorism all rather complex and difficult to prove crimes, all more based on intent than on actual acts. All are proved, not by actual proof, but by police officers testifying. I mean considering that everybody has wood + mr. proper in their house, the basic ingredients for a bomb if you know what you're doing, and when it comes to expressing plans to kill a person, if loosely defined, we all do that daily. Resisting arrest... well everybody knows the problem with that one).
Everybody would consider a thwarted suicide bomber guilty, for obvious reasons (with the more extreme elements of a certain religion excepted).
Btw : it *is* legal to take whatever toys the FBI gives you, and any money, and just walk away. They don't even get to take back their money.
In other words there about as innocent as someone who pulled the trigger on a gun while it was aimed at someone's head. The FBI just makes sure there's no bullet in the chamber.
That's a good thing.
And it doesn't catch innocents, they even let people go who buy the stuff and then chicken out.
Here's the concrete cases they're worried about : 1) guy buys bomb vest, which he thinks works. He gets arrested just before he's about to enter a crowded public area intending to detonate it. 2) guy buys planes and explosives. Builds the actual "bombs", and goes off to actually launch them. Gets arrested while unloading the flying bombs. 3) guy buys a missile, gets arrested after he's pushed the "fire" button which did not work
Which exactly is the innocent here ? Just wondering.
Actually most are victims of other muslims. People convicted to death under sharia,... that's the first big group. People who's family is under threat from other muslims. A form of honor killing that doesn't actually involve killing your close family, but only strangers. Mentally handicapped (which are sentenced to death in a way... in sharia parents have the right to murder their own children). The second big group are (mostly very non-devout) muslims who've been educated and have isolated themselves from society (both the one they were born into, and their new one at their job or whatever). Devout muslims, if they're involved, are the commanders, they glorify these terrorist massacres. But they don't risk their own lives at all (which of course also proves just how much faith they actually have in their "allah").
Of course it's not wrong. If someone is motivated enough to kill randomly to fork over a significant amount of actual money and effort for the means, it's perfectly plain they will at some point attack.
Is anyone seriously arguing that somebody spends a significant amount of their own money to buy a bomb with the stated intention to set it off... won't actually set it off ?
Entrapment is if the FBI provides the motivation for the attack. They're not printing qurans yet, are they ?
So wait, your argument is that regular people should accurately perform the Cavendish experiment when they read about G in a book, and because it will pan out they should believe in science ?
Where did you get the required equipment for the Cavendish experiment ? Because you sure as hell didn't pay for that. Frankly I find it hard to believe you actually did that experiment, as opposed to looking it up on wikipedia and just lying. Because let's face it, in the last 50 years, people redid the Cavendish experiment maybe 10 times... are you one of those 10, or is there simply something big I'm missing here ? I'm not saying you *are* lying, I'm just saying... this seems unlikely in the extreme.
And in general, if this is your example of an experiment people should complete to convince themselves of the accuracy of science. I don't even know what to say... are you joking ? Weren't you the one defending that trivial experiments can confirm advanced science ? Is this your illustration of that ? Dear God.
And the (first, imho) issue about measuring G is that the direct approach (throw a heavy ball into the air, measure it's speed and acceleration coming back down) will fail to produce the correct equation. It will actually lead you to believe that there is some constant velocity, depending on mass, that an object will accelerate to and then remain at that constant speed, because that's what happens in an atmosphere. Effectively humans live in an environment where objects moving the way gravity predicts them to move is extremely rare (also known as the atmosphere).
People read about G in a book, presented to them from a position of authority, and so they believe it. That's it. They even get punished (very hard imho) if they fail to correctly remember it. The difference between that and religious texts for 99.5% of the population ? Zero. And this is a trivially simple piece of physics, easy to verify
Let's see you answer a simple question. There's moronically simple things that you could verify - have you ?
Let's take a simple thing - have you ever verified G (the gravitic acceleration constant) ? For the large majority of people I know in university, inside the physics department, the answer is "no". Outside of physics I have yet to find the first. Would you even know how to verify it ? By hard I mean, because if you don't know this by hard, you won't be doing the experiment to prove the existence of electrons this year (it's april, it'll take you more than 8 months to learn the necessary math to understand why the experiment works).
And specifically, can you tell me the problem with measuring G ? Surely if you've done the experiment you know where the naive (but correct) measurement fails, and why. So let's see you answer these simple questions.
What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap).
Which of course means that for nearly all nontrivial claims, it can't be done unless you're a government.
It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers.
You mean like all claims of any human science ?
This sort of thing sounds real good... until you actually contrast testing "evil begets evil" with, oh a humanities claim... let's say "gay people are smarter". How would you test either ? What evidence would be considered sufficient, and how will you account for random variance. Especially given the fact loads of studies have reported random positives without any stimulation (in this case that would mean that just because you're testing >50% of your test subjects become smarter for no identifiable reason).
Once you do figure out how hard this is, note that renewing funding with a long list of "this effect doesn't exist" results is utterly impossible... and you'll have a new appreciation for scientific accuracy.
Oh and for a last gasp, talk to a medical research assistant about an F-test and specifically about the assumptions that need to be satisfied for the results to be valid (in case you don't know, this is a trivial question that a highschooler might know the answer to. Nobody who's had a university education in anything relating to science has not had the theory on this topic). Oh... strange... he doesn't know, but you will be able to find one that does know. Those that do know have a strong tendency to start complaining about papers they've read. Now try the same in psychology, or ethics, all sciences that attempt to use statistical reasoning. Can you find one ? Oh... nope. So the scientists doing the actual verification don't understand the methods they're using (yeah, yeah, they're mostly switching away from the F-test to one of it's derivatives, but you'd still expect them to know the F-test).
Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.
The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method.
The scientific method ? You mean reproducible experiments ? So that means that you don't think science that isn't based on reproducible experiments (essentially everything outside of math, physics and chemistry) is valid ?
None of the other sciences actually use the scientific method. Medical operations aren't reproducible, they're pretty unique on a per-patient basis. The same goes for the large majority of treatments. Nor do they even use things like Occam's razor (which is sparingly applied even in exact sciences : nobody's ever seen anything other than a wave on a piece of equipment, yet electrons exist don't they ?)
If that's your standard, for one thing, you'd be a climate change denialist. It's after all, not possible to test climate series : we can't replay the weather, nor can it be scaled down for experiments.
So I would say that your standard is horribly broken. The scientific method is a nice
Don't. If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims.
And even that only applies as long as you stay within physics. When it comes to to chemistry, it's worse than in physics. Still pretty good evidence, but it doesn't go nearly as far as advertised. Beyond trivial chemistry, when it actually comes to more than a few dozen atoms in a molecule, all formulas fail because all datacenters in the world couldn't calculate what happens without making wrong assumptions, and experiments are essentially impossible because of outrageous purity requirements completely out of our reach for non-trivial molecules. The only exception to that is huge biological molecules, which can usually be acquired in large quantities and pure state, though not without large funding. Even if chemistry is more easy to verify than physics. But chemistry mostly works.
The sciences beyond those exact sciences are full of serious screwups that they simply accept for lack of better options. Medicine, for example, is at best -badly- statistically verified. And frankly, how exactly do atheists explain away the elephant of elephants in the room ? The placebo effect ? I'm not talking about whether or not it exists, but what CAUSES it ? If you don't have a biological (or better, chemical or physical) explanation for such a massive number of healed patients,... how accurate are you prepared to bet your science is ? It doesn't matter, for lack of alternatives, but...
The humanities, like the paper talked about here, are much worse. Many theorems exist despite boatloads of contradicting data, or because of massively limited scope. Today's publications are full of papers claiming how people are naturally tolerant of differences, despite the fact that we have 5000 years of history and 80% of the worlds population contradicting it. And when there is strong proof for something, it is often rejected on political grounds. For example, it is obvious from experiment that violent video games do make people (a little) more violent. Note I'm not saying you turn into a murderer when playing quake, far from it. But after the game, you will be more aggressive in your responses to others, or so dozens of studies say, some measuring the effect over decades. As if that wasn't bad enough, the humanities are filled with studies that are known to be fabrications (but not known at the time of publication). This started with the soviet union and their thousands of "people living under socialists are hte only happy people anywhere" papers, but has only increased with time.
Besides, where does science actually disagree with the bible ? The bible is used as an accurate historical source for tons of historical events.
What I wonder is that if you're truly interested in development, how come you don't know 10 languages ? If you were in the last 10 years, surely you know C/C++/Java/perl/python and have projects to show for each of them, no ?
There's a certain truth to this. It really depends on the job.
In the "hip" tech scene it is hard for programmers to "survive" to old age. It doesn't usually happen. The saving grace is that their interest in the "hip" scene also doesn't survive to old age.
In most programming jobs, age is still an advantage. Besides, I know 3 places that are still urgently looking for COBOL programmers. I'm betting they won't be filling those jobs with 25 year olds.
You know if you want to be reassured about this, just learn about the state of the art in machine translation and NLP in an actual university. And best throw in machine transcription (spoken word->written text). You'll realize how this would work if it exists, and what it's limitations are. And those limitations are pretty fucking serious.
A quick calculation together with AT&T's bragging statistics learns that if they did it with humans, the chance that any individual conversation you have on the phone is actually monitored by a group of 1 million humans is a little over 1 in a billion. And I seriously doubt the government is employing 1 million people for this. That'd be 0.3% of the total population, or more than all university dropouts and graduates combined. And AT&T is not even the only big telco in the US.
If you intend for something to leave earth orbit in the outbound direction, that's pretty much your only option. Both voyager missions and most other planet flybys are nuclear powered.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, that's probably cheaper than an iPad.
I know jack shit about those groups you mention. And I don't really care to. As for educated, I have a master's in math, so presumably I'm not "against the educated in general".
Believe it or not, for me this discussion is not about group A against group B, it is simply about what's right. I like to think (but I don't have that many illusions left) that social groups don't matter in science. I know that's not true, but I ignore that. I'm still employed so I guess I'm good enough to get away with it too. For me an argument is about right versus wrong. Right as in 1+1=2 right. This argument, about what "proof" constitutes, is part of logic theory, part of math. And, frankly, you have some very strange ideas about that.
What is your argument for what is right ? Is it simply what a few scientists tell you ? Because it sure looks like that. That's why I said that for you science is not much different from religion, and you're outright intolerant about it too. I have to admit the university is filling up with people like that, that are very intolerant about their ideas of what constitutes science. Sadly, their ideas often don't match the equations on paper. Few let that stop them.
So ? Humans use animals to help them build things. Or at least we did for a long while.
And humans do ? I must say that while a certain form of organisation is present in cities, only very few cities looked like any global design was done at all in them. When it comes to organisation essentially done by individual humans : animals have plenty of "local" organisation like humans ... take the tunnel structure below molehills for example. This is aside from huge projects like the hoover dam. But most things humans build are much more like the massive organic changes animals cause just as much as humans do.
Besides, humans are not unique in having big infrastructure projects. Ants is the most common example of an animal that organises itself into building huge structures on cue. So do apes. Nothing quite the scale of Hoover dam of course, but the difference is a scale difference, not intent or organisation or even intelligence.
Wow. Someone's real mad I stepped on his holy cow.
I stand by that statement btw. The scientific method is hypothesis -> repeatable experiments -> theory. Ever since physics experiments started costing millions or billions it is very fair to say that.
But I guess for you science is just a different religion. With no buts and ifs and essentially no explanations, just a number of statements one must be punished for disobeying. And that you do such a thing immediately after making an obviously wrong statement is telling. I wonder if someone like you actually pretends he's helping science move ahead ?
How are they not ?
Random deviations in a chaotic system (like weather) are not bound to any duration. All you know is that random deviations have a finite duration, it can be arbitrarily long (including effectively infinite, meaning until the end of the earth).
It is saddening that people are even arguing this. You don't grasp the complexity of the problem. The reason we believe global warming occurs is that many different readings -not all- point in the same direction. All measurements, regardless of their duration are subject to random deviations, which by definition have random durations. Some probably have durations measured in millions of years.
I think your numbers are skewed. Wikipedia says the top 1% of household earnings earn $350k and up, which is only a third of that million you claim. Furthermore the same page claims the vast majority of the top 1% are married and have both partners working (and both earning nontrivial amounts), so it's much less.
So for top 1%, averaged over male/female an average wage is only a little bit over $175k.
I'm not saying wikipedia is right, quite the opposite usually. In my opinion wikipedia has tons of "inconvenient" truths covered up and blatantly lies about just about any politically sensitive topic, always preferring the popular opinion over the real one (e.g. look at the pages on radiation sickness after Fukushima, or simply their description of the disaster itself). And correcting anything on there to the truth while pointing out the popular opinion is bullshit scaremongering quickly results in shouting matches, and the admins invariably choose the mob over reason. So I'm quite ashamed about using wikipedia numbers here, this tax topic is certainly politically sensitive. So I'd love to know where your numbers come from.
Why would that number matter ? A quick google search would put the average money "the average American", male or female, brings home, at $43000k give or take 1000 for the last 2-3 years.
My point was that when it comes to "the rich" (> $1m, which are more like the 0.01%), not having them pay any taxes is financially indistinguishable from having them pay 100% taxes. Even if we grow that to the > $200k which roughly corresponds to 0.1% of the population, not having them pay any taxes makes no difference from the government's point of view. Why because the absolute amounts of even 100% of their total wealth (not just income) are simply not significant compared to government expenditure (which is presumably why so many of them have government jobs).
So the reason to make the rich pay taxes cannot possibly be financial. The smart amount of taxes to demand from "the rich", frankly, is whatever amount they feel happiest with. It doesn't matter. So the reason to have big taxes on the rich must be something like "social justice", otherwise known as jealousy and revenge. And frankly, I remember what happened to me and a few others for "social justice" in high school. Not because I was anywhere near rich, sadly rather the opposite, but because I was smarter than they were (or at least, I performed better at pretty much any school subject. Heh, getting excluded was probably the most significant reason for that in the first place). So I for one find the idea of basing any policy, never mind tax policy on "social justice" disgusting (helping people, perhaps ... punishing people for social justice, fuck you no).
The people who are going to pay for government expenditures, like it or not, are the people making $30k - $100k. Why ? For no other reasons than that's where the taxable pie is biggest ( number of people * avg_income ). There is not a politician in the world who can change this. There is nobody on this planet who can collect 4000 billion from any other group in American society. If you prefer something else, I'd say your best bet it to go to church and pray for the second coming.
So why do we fight over this at all ? The economically rational thing to do, as unpopular as it is, is to let the rich pay whatever they want (in the present situation). It doesn't matter at all, and so any effort on collecting taxes from them is a waste, and sadly only costs the rest of us more in the end.
Then what's the point of such taxes ?
Total federal budget = 4 trillion, or 4 tr / 300 mil = 13k per american. If you bring 80% of 10 people making average half a billion dollars that makes it ... a rounding error.
I know this is not going to be popular here, but really, from a financial point of view : any group smaller than tenthousand members (which would already make will pay for government. Why ? Because nobody else can. The only alternative is no government. And any attention paid to denying that fact is just wasted effort and misdirection, on par with hour long discussions about puppies that look real innocent, even when sitting next to a pile of poo.
And whether you include big theatrics cutting a few "rich" down to size (while the very rich working in politics "somehow" go unnoticed) ... in reality that sadly is a waste of taxpayer money. Personally, I get my theatrics from the idiot box.
I do not claim the position I'm defending is socially or morally just (in fact I could care less), I'm just saying it's pragmatic, and it's the truth. As to why I'm defending accepting reality on a site like this, that I cannot fathom at all. Heh maybe there's hope for me yet.
I seriously don't see the problem. We as a society have laws that people cannot kill for money. You want to live in a society where killing for money is allowed, go visit the arab countries. Several of them actually still allow it (google "blood money" as long as you have money, or the target is alone (no legal heirs, no wife/kids/parents), you can kill anyone. BTW: don't think this is a blanket permission to kill, it's not, you don't get to "cause mischief in the land", which is punishable by death, so ymmv. Don't try it on the prime minister's nephew)
Here, it is a crime to kill for money (which is a good thing, despite what some prophet's opinion on the subject is) and frankly ... what is wrong with offering that deal to people, and then arresting them ? It is also a crime to (seriously) plan and prepare for any other crime, regardless of the success of the endeavour, regardless of motivation (with the exception of duress, although even duress is no excuse for committing/planning murder, never mind mass-murder).
You can flip the question around : strictly speaking, a thwarted suicide bomber has not committed anything you would intuitively consider crime (resisting arrest, possession of chemicals, conspiracy to murder, terrorism all rather complex and difficult to prove crimes, all more based on intent than on actual acts. All are proved, not by actual proof, but by police officers testifying. I mean considering that everybody has wood + mr. proper in their house, the basic ingredients for a bomb if you know what you're doing, and when it comes to expressing plans to kill a person, if loosely defined, we all do that daily. Resisting arrest ... well everybody knows the problem with that one).
Everybody would consider a thwarted suicide bomber guilty, for obvious reasons (with the more extreme elements of a certain religion excepted).
Btw : it *is* legal to take whatever toys the FBI gives you, and any money, and just walk away. They don't even get to take back their money.
They only provided the means ... unless by providing the opportunity you mean not arresting them at the first sign of trouble.
And providing motive ? How do you even do that ? They weren't exactly brainwashing these people.
By providing sabotaged means to commit the crime ?
In other words there about as innocent as someone who pulled the trigger on a gun while it was aimed at someone's head. The FBI just makes sure there's no bullet in the chamber.
That's a good thing.
And it doesn't catch innocents, they even let people go who buy the stuff and then chicken out.
Here's the concrete cases they're worried about :
1) guy buys bomb vest, which he thinks works. He gets arrested just before he's about to enter a crowded public area intending to detonate it.
2) guy buys planes and explosives. Builds the actual "bombs", and goes off to actually launch them. Gets arrested while unloading the flying bombs.
3) guy buys a missile, gets arrested after he's pushed the "fire" button which did not work
Which exactly is the innocent here ? Just wondering.
Actually most are victims of other muslims. People convicted to death under sharia, ... that's the first big group. People who's family is under threat from other muslims. A form of honor killing that doesn't actually involve killing your close family, but only strangers. Mentally handicapped (which are sentenced to death in a way ... in sharia parents have the right to murder their own children). The second big group are (mostly very non-devout) muslims who've been educated and have isolated themselves from society (both the one they were born into, and their new one at their job or whatever). Devout muslims, if they're involved, are the commanders, they glorify these terrorist massacres. But they don't risk their own lives at all (which of course also proves just how much faith they actually have in their "allah").
Of course it's not wrong. If someone is motivated enough to kill randomly to fork over a significant amount of actual money and effort for the means, it's perfectly plain they will at some point attack.
Is anyone seriously arguing that somebody spends a significant amount of their own money to buy a bomb with the stated intention to set it off ... won't actually set it off ?
Entrapment is if the FBI provides the motivation for the attack. They're not printing qurans yet, are they ?
So wait, your argument is that regular people should accurately perform the Cavendish experiment when they read about G in a book, and because it will pan out they should believe in science ?
Where did you get the required equipment for the Cavendish experiment ? Because you sure as hell didn't pay for that. Frankly I find it hard to believe you actually did that experiment, as opposed to looking it up on wikipedia and just lying. Because let's face it, in the last 50 years, people redid the Cavendish experiment maybe 10 times ... are you one of those 10, or is there simply something big I'm missing here ? I'm not saying you *are* lying, I'm just saying ... this seems unlikely in the extreme.
And in general, if this is your example of an experiment people should complete to convince themselves of the accuracy of science. I don't even know what to say ... are you joking ? Weren't you the one defending that trivial experiments can confirm advanced science ? Is this your illustration of that ? Dear God.
And the (first, imho) issue about measuring G is that the direct approach (throw a heavy ball into the air, measure it's speed and acceleration coming back down) will fail to produce the correct equation. It will actually lead you to believe that there is some constant velocity, depending on mass, that an object will accelerate to and then remain at that constant speed, because that's what happens in an atmosphere. Effectively humans live in an environment where objects moving the way gravity predicts them to move is extremely rare (also known as the atmosphere).
People read about G in a book, presented to them from a position of authority, and so they believe it. That's it. They even get punished (very hard imho) if they fail to correctly remember it. The difference between that and religious texts for 99.5% of the population ? Zero. And this is a trivially simple piece of physics, easy to verify
Let's see you answer a simple question. There's moronically simple things that you could verify - have you ?
Let's take a simple thing - have you ever verified G (the gravitic acceleration constant) ? For the large majority of people I know in university, inside the physics department, the answer is "no". Outside of physics I have yet to find the first. Would you even know how to verify it ? By hard I mean, because if you don't know this by hard, you won't be doing the experiment to prove the existence of electrons this year (it's april, it'll take you more than 8 months to learn the necessary math to understand why the experiment works).
And specifically, can you tell me the problem with measuring G ? Surely if you've done the experiment you know where the naive (but correct) measurement fails, and why. So let's see you answer these simple questions.
What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap).
Which of course means that for nearly all nontrivial claims, it can't be done unless you're a government.
It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers.
You mean like all claims of any human science ?
This sort of thing sounds real good ... until you actually contrast testing "evil begets evil" with, oh a humanities claim ... let's say "gay people are smarter". How would you test either ? What evidence would be considered sufficient, and how will you account for random variance. Especially given the fact loads of studies have reported random positives without any stimulation (in this case that would mean that just because you're testing >50% of your test subjects become smarter for no identifiable reason).
Once you do figure out how hard this is, note that renewing funding with a long list of "this effect doesn't exist" results is utterly impossible ... and you'll have a new appreciation for scientific accuracy.
Oh and for a last gasp, talk to a medical research assistant about an F-test and specifically about the assumptions that need to be satisfied for the results to be valid (in case you don't know, this is a trivial question that a highschooler might know the answer to. Nobody who's had a university education in anything relating to science has not had the theory on this topic). Oh ... strange ... he doesn't know, but you will be able to find one that does know. Those that do know have a strong tendency to start complaining about papers they've read. Now try the same in psychology, or ethics, all sciences that attempt to use statistical reasoning. Can you find one ? Oh ... nope. So the scientists doing the actual verification don't understand the methods they're using (yeah, yeah, they're mostly switching away from the F-test to one of it's derivatives, but you'd still expect them to know the F-test).
Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.
The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method.
The scientific method ? You mean reproducible experiments ? So that means that you don't think science that isn't based on reproducible experiments (essentially everything outside of math, physics and chemistry) is valid ?
None of the other sciences actually use the scientific method. Medical operations aren't reproducible, they're pretty unique on a per-patient basis. The same goes for the large majority of treatments. Nor do they even use things like Occam's razor (which is sparingly applied even in exact sciences : nobody's ever seen anything other than a wave on a piece of equipment, yet electrons exist don't they ?)
If that's your standard, for one thing, you'd be a climate change denialist. It's after all, not possible to test climate series : we can't replay the weather, nor can it be scaled down for experiments.
So I would say that your standard is horribly broken. The scientific method is a nice
Don't. If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims.
And even that only applies as long as you stay within physics. When it comes to to chemistry, it's worse than in physics. Still pretty good evidence, but it doesn't go nearly as far as advertised. Beyond trivial chemistry, when it actually comes to more than a few dozen atoms in a molecule, all formulas fail because all datacenters in the world couldn't calculate what happens without making wrong assumptions, and experiments are essentially impossible because of outrageous purity requirements completely out of our reach for non-trivial molecules. The only exception to that is huge biological molecules, which can usually be acquired in large quantities and pure state, though not without large funding. Even if chemistry is more easy to verify than physics. But chemistry mostly works.
The sciences beyond those exact sciences are full of serious screwups that they simply accept for lack of better options. Medicine, for example, is at best -badly- statistically verified. And frankly, how exactly do atheists explain away the elephant of elephants in the room ? The placebo effect ? I'm not talking about whether or not it exists, but what CAUSES it ? If you don't have a biological (or better, chemical or physical) explanation for such a massive number of healed patients, ... how accurate are you prepared to bet your science is ? It doesn't matter, for lack of alternatives, but ...
The humanities, like the paper talked about here, are much worse. Many theorems exist despite boatloads of contradicting data, or because of massively limited scope. Today's publications are full of papers claiming how people are naturally tolerant of differences, despite the fact that we have 5000 years of history and 80% of the worlds population contradicting it. And when there is strong proof for something, it is often rejected on political grounds. For example, it is obvious from experiment that violent video games do make people (a little) more violent. Note I'm not saying you turn into a murderer when playing quake, far from it. But after the game, you will be more aggressive in your responses to others, or so dozens of studies say, some measuring the effect over decades. As if that wasn't bad enough, the humanities are filled with studies that are known to be fabrications (but not known at the time of publication). This started with the soviet union and their thousands of "people living under socialists are hte only happy people anywhere" papers, but has only increased with time.
Besides, where does science actually disagree with the bible ? The bible is used as an accurate historical source for tons of historical events.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehm_garbage_collector#Uses_and_ports
-l boehm is even becoming popular
What I wonder is that if you're truly interested in development, how come you don't know 10 languages ? If you were in the last 10 years, surely you know C/C++/Java/perl/python and have projects to show for each of them, no ?
There's a certain truth to this. It really depends on the job.
In the "hip" tech scene it is hard for programmers to "survive" to old age. It doesn't usually happen. The saving grace is that their interest in the "hip" scene also doesn't survive to old age.
In most programming jobs, age is still an advantage. Besides, I know 3 places that are still urgently looking for COBOL programmers. I'm betting they won't be filling those jobs with 25 year olds.
You know if you want to be reassured about this, just learn about the state of the art in machine translation and NLP in an actual university. And best throw in machine transcription (spoken word->written text). You'll realize how this would work if it exists, and what it's limitations are. And those limitations are pretty fucking serious.
A quick calculation together with AT&T's bragging statistics learns that if they did it with humans, the chance that any individual conversation you have on the phone is actually monitored by a group of 1 million humans is a little over 1 in a billion. And I seriously doubt the government is employing 1 million people for this. That'd be 0.3% of the total population, or more than all university dropouts and graduates combined. And AT&T is not even the only big telco in the US.
If you intend for something to leave earth orbit in the outbound direction, that's pretty much your only option. Both voyager missions and most other planet flybys are nuclear powered.