THe whole "ID doesn't mean God, it could be aliens" dodge is so weak. Who designed the aliens? Or are undesigned, reducibly complex things capable of designing irreducibly complex things? Kind of throws a wrench in whatever logic ireducible complexity had, not that it had any beyond "Shucks, I can't figure it out; musta been God. Whew, that was close, almost hada think!"
It's not that there is no known proof/disproof. It's that it's easy to see that proof or disproof is impossible. To anything that appears to disprove God, one can simply say "Maybe God made it that way" (to test your faith, if you're curious, but the why is really irrelevant.) Any apparent proof of God could in turn be the work of some being that is not god but powerful enough to fool us.
Not going to happen. I can make up other unfalsefiable hypotheses several times a minute.
Here's one : the universe was barfed into existence 500 years ago, complete with all evidence that it apears to be older, by George the Giant Space Emu. George is capable of vomiting absolutely anything, but is not particularly inteligent, and has no concious control over what he barfs in any case.
So now we have the wonderfully vauge ID, and George the Space Emu. You'll note they contradict each other, yet neither can be proven false. No evidence can possibly support or undercut either, or for that matter explain why I should take ID more seriously than George.
I disagree. The difference between a theory and a law is that a law was named by it's arrogant discoverer, probably Newton. It's all theories. Even bad, wrong theories are theories. It's a theory if it expresses some meaningful explanation for observed phenomena. They never get proved in science the way they do in math. Whether you do an experiment to cause some evidence to appear, or whether you have to go out in the world and find some evidence, all you have is more evidence that supports your theory, or doesn't. The advantage that experimental sciences have is that you can carefully devise an experiment whose result will go one way if the prevailing theory is correct, and another if your up and coming one is, which can lead to drama. Diciplines that are not as subject to experiment usually have to rely on the slow accretion of many tiny bits of data. When you've got stupendously huge piles of evidence that supports your theory, and nobody can really imagine another theory that would explain it all, you can be pretty sure of yourself, and reasonably treat it as established fact. This is the case for evolution.
The thing to understand is the difference between theories and non-theories, if you will. A non-theory is compatible with any evidence. It can't be supported by any evidence, it can't be undercut by any evidence; evidence is simply irrelevant to it.
Your hypothetical detective has a perfectly good theory for why the guy with no shirt is dead. If we examine the guy with spike hair's backpack, and find it full of money, that will tend to support the theory. If there isn't any money in the room at all, that will tend to undercut it. If the detective says "I think an all-powerful wizard cast a spell, that caused all the contents of the room to come into being exactly as they are, including any memories in the heads of living occupants" that's not a theory in the scientific sense. It doesn't matter if we find any money or where. There is no point in looking at anything in the room in judging this idea, because nothing you find could help ddecide if it is right.
"God made everything the way it is, last Tuesday" could be absolutely true, and in that case evolution would be one tiny footnote in the number of things people think that are wrong. I hope it is not surprising that I do not propose to spend much time contemplating this proposition. Absolutely nothing I could find, think or say would add any support, or in any way refute it. I am in fact going to blindly assume it is false, because I'd prefer there be some point to thinking about the world. Nor do I see how it makes any difference if we say 6000 years ago instead of last tuesday as the interview subject would have us do.
It's not particularly strong to call something a theory, but there are some requirements, and creationism doesn't cut it.
Gravity is a theory, and provably wrong to boot. Still a good theory to know, since it makes all sorts of useful predictions. We still can't produce anything I'd call "artificial gravity", as far as I'm aware. It is a "law" becuse some theories got called "Laws" by arrogant 18th century scientists, mostly Newton. In modern usage, calling something a "Law" is pretty much an admission that it's just an observed relation (like Newtons inverse square) and you don't understand any of the why behind it (or in Newtons case, intend to). Modern scientists hopefully asspire to greater humility, and so we have no desire to call it the law of evolution, or the law of relativity. We'd prefer to keep reaching for a more perfect understanding.
Not all theories are suceptable to testing in an experiment. That doesn't mean these topics are utterly off limits to human understanding; it just means you have to go find the evidence instead of forcing it to manifest itself in your lab. Hey, let's pretend your example didn't display a total lack of understanding what evolution says, and go ahead and use it anyway: that single celled organism, a human being, and Paris Hiltons poodle all use the same protein structures in their DNA. If the single celled thing is an animal, they all use the same chemical reactions in their mitochondria to metabolize oxygen, even though others are available. The human being and the poodle both have the same number of chromosomes, and are similar in countless ways where there are other alternatives that appear in non-mammals.
Does any of this prove evolution? No. But evolution explains it all quite nicely. If you have another theory that also explains it, I would truly love to hear it. Please note however, that I am not interested in "theories" that would explain things equally well if, for example, the single celled animal and the human used one set of proteins, and the poodle used a different one. We're interested in explaining the world as it is. Possible explanations for absolutely anything are not science, and I can make several of them up per minute in any case.
"the only time I ever come close to looking at a manual in linux is when I am at the command line..."
Command line interfaces are inherently manual/help file driven; you need to look up what the available commands are, and then what their options are. I understand many people love command lines, and find them faster and more efficient. Back in the day, I was a 733t command line whiz on 4 differnt OSes, so even though I have avoided them like the plague for quite some time now, I do not speak from ignorance when I say I hate the command line.
I do a lot of fairly advanced stuff, and I wish to do it without ever using a command line, or editing a configuration file by hand. For several years now, I have in fact not needed to use a command line or edit a config file/registry by hand, other than for software I was in the process of developing.
Friends whose opinions I trust have told me this is still not a reasonable expectation on Linux.
Please stop smearing the name of all the nice Christians; you do not speak for the vast majority of them, and you do not get to decide that they are not Christians. Please adjust your terminology to reflect the considerably smaller, more tightly defined grouping whose beleifs you are actually discussing, like so:
People don't usually become fundamentalist whack-jobs, and then learn that they must turn off their brain. Most people become fundamentalist whack-jobs after realizing they are disatisfied with how they are living their life, and that they'd like to feel superior to others for no good reason. Turning off their brain is merely a helpful pre-requisite.
"Intelectual suicide" sounds like a good way of describing any time you let a belief formed in the absence of evidence ("faith") overide honest evaluation of evidence based beleifs.
Terribly sorry to put all this so rudely, but you really tick me off. Presbyterians (to pick a random example) have no problem with Lutherans being fellow Christians, even if their beleifs aren't exactly the same, and hence they have no problem with identifying themselves as Presbyterians. Those who insist on identifying themselves only as Christians because obviously the exact details of their beleif are the only true Christianity are inherently elitist un-christian a-holes. But it would be impolite to call them that. Yet they refuse to supply a term they'd prefer. What to do? Guess I'll stick with "fundamentalist whack-job".
I can't imagine poking around for more that 10 or 20 seconds; I'm not a patient person. Might help if you didn't click them randomly...
"Ever try to find the security tab in a default install of WinXP? You won't find it until you uncheck "simple file sharing" in the windows explorer properties. Wow, that makes a whole lot of sense to me."
Exactly what security tab you were talking about didn't make any sense to me, yet I found it in a few seconds once you mentioned file sharing. Still don't see the checkbox you're talking about. Perhaps it's not there in Pro? Which would make sense: what does a n00b-type user need with file sharing beyond "simple"?
Whatever. I'm not trying to claim Windows is utterly free of quirks or annoying bits. But you asked where people got the impression windows was easy to use. Well, I've also observed people who are total techno-phobes getting basic stuff done on Windows without any problem. As a fairly tech-savvy type doing some fairly advanced stuff, I've also found it easy to use. Perhaps we're just different sorts of people; I like guis. If at all possible, it should just be blindingly obvious how to do what I want. If it's not, I'm going to guess, and if I can find it on the first or second guess, that's good too. If not, and I have to look up how to do it in a book/help file/man page, I consider that a failure of UI design. This aproach is quite succesful for me on windows, where I'm fairly advanced, and on Macs, where I am the n00b, but still have no problem doing basic stuff. Using Linux without ever reading any docs is not feasible from my admitedly limited and slightly out-of-date experience.
"Atheism and Evolution seem to go hand in hand on a great many points, and as such, they often get lumped together."
Atheism cannot go hand in hand on a great many points, as it only has one point. Atheists do not beleive that God exists. That's all. Not only is it impossible to prove it either way, but anyone who even claims to have compelling evidence either way is full of it, and doesn't understand what evidence is. Atheism vs. Theism is not a scientific debate, nor, if you ask me, a very interesting one: "Does Too!" "Does Not!" "This other guy agrees with me!" "Doesn't matter" "Does too!", see what I mean?
Evolution, or not, is a scientific debate. As such, it is impossible to prove anything one way or another. Science doesn't do that. Science looks at available evidence and decides whether it supports a conclusion; it finds testable consequences of a theory, and sees if they pan out. There are vast mountains of evidence that seem to support evolution. Jonathan correctly points out that it is mostly taught by arguments from authority, which is too bad. But it's not at all difficult to think about what evolution should imply, and look around. Critics like to pick out tiny details, and hold them up like they were great revelations. Radio carbon dating is a statisticaly based technique who's error margin increases rapidly with the age of the sample? Yeah, thanks, we knew that. Most experts would put the useful date for RC dating back further than he has, to maybe 50,000 years, but either way, WTF does that have to do with evolution? RC dating is for anthropologists. RC dating could not exist at all, and it wouldn't impact the support for evolution in the slightest.
Oh, wait, I get it: he's a young-earth creationist?!? Sorry, I won't bother. If you've thought about it at all, and still beleive the Earth is 6000 years old, you're just not succeptable to logic.
In any case, Evolution or not is a scientific debate, and while I'm pretty sure which way I think it should go, the real point is we can talk about it based on evidence and implications. But the scientific debate is "Evolution or not" not "Evolution or creationism". Creationism isn't a scientific theory; it cannot be supported by evidence and it doesn't have any implications. Even if it were, it wouldn't be the automatic alternative to evolution. So I really wish creationists would get off their inept critiques of evolution.
"how many 'n00b users' you know that use features in Microsoft products like mail filters in Outlook or change tracking in Word or can install programs in Windows by themselves."
'n00b users' don't generally need mail filters or change tracking. Heck, I don't need change tracking; though I'll bet I could figure out how to set it up without reading any docs. My father is as noob as they come and he set up some mail filters without any problem. As for installing software, I've been known to let my 4 year old handle it; she knows the word "next", and anything else, she spells and asks me. I haven't felt any need to read an Windows manual or help file in a decade; I just poke at stuff and figure it out.
Where does your perception that Windows is hard possibly come from?
Hey man, sorry you work somewhere lame. Maybe you should try working for a smaller company. Product development where I work is done by developers. Executives help identify the business problems products should help to solve. Marketers know how to sell stuff. Why should they know how to build it or what it is even possible to build? Why should this be different than any other industry? Do the people that make ads for cars design the traction-control system? Do they have anything to do with it before it's done?
I didn't mean you were a marketer, but rather Alfredo Romeo, who's seems to elsewhere be named Alfredo Romeo Molina; but I can't tell if the difference is Spanish last name conventions which I don't fully understand, or a concious effort to make his name sound like Alpha-Romeo when connected to cars. In any case, he seems to not have developed any of the tech involved, but just markets it. He also writes books that look to me like Spanish language re-hashings of English language open source boosterism. Basically, he's got "huckster" written all over him.
In any case, though I dig at marketers, I've worked at a company that had technically savvy people moonlighting as the marketing department, and at one that had proper, competent marketers, who were technical idiots. I can only conclude that knowing what is shiny is both harder and more important than it seems.
He does not accuse the developers of being arrogant pricks. The developers make araingements with someone to take a look at how the usability of the GIMP might be improved, and slashdot posts a story on this. In a comment connected to this story, he says "Well, here's how I think it could be improved..." Someone else says, "How dare you complain, code it yourself!" It is this person who is accused of being an arrogant prick. I see no indication that he is one of the GIMPs developers. Were he, he would realize that sugesting one just re-organize the entire gui oneself if you don't like it is in fact an arrogant, pricky thing to say.
Many people can and do write a check to a developer who produces what they want. That developer is Adobe. I could write a check to some developer, and pay them to improve the GIMP. For the amount it would cost, I could instead buy several hundred copies of Photoshop. Now what I really need to do is get several thousand GIMP users together and get them all to contribute some smaller amount. To get them to contribute I'll have to balance what improvements to pay the developers make so as to please as many of them as possible. You know, this would be a lot easier if everyone who benefited from the improvements paid. But to do that, I'd need a proprietary product. Then I could have a company to run the whole thing; maybe I could call it "Adobe". Point being, saying, if you can't code it, just write a check! is equally naive. I can't write the check for the same reason I can't code it: it's a massive undertaking.
If some people want to write some program and give it away free, good for them. If that's as far as it goes, I still feel free to say I don't think it's very good, biut it would indeed be obnoxious to really go on and on hammering on it. But if they, or others, go on and on about how it's just the coolest thing ever and there is nothing wrong about it at all, the fact that it is free does not make it off limits for criticism. If they, in fact, go looking for how to improve it's usability....
Marketers may or may not know anything at all. The person quoted certainly doesn't know what they're talking about. I write proprietary software, and marketers are not the drivers of any design or technical decisions whatsoever. They just ask questions about the software after it's done, and promote it based on features that strike me as trivial or irrelevant. For example, it's no doubt a marketer who decided they should push the "open-source" nature of this car. The engineers would know that 99% of the tech in this car is proprietary, including all the fun parts. It's the dopey little tour-guide box that's open source. Ask for IP-unencumbered schematics for their electronic speed controllers and see if the car itself is "open source".
Frankly, a disparagement of marketers is kind of funny coming from a guy who is one; as far as I can tell, fairly exclusively.
The earth has warmed and cooled may times in it's history. This recent warming trend is no doubt just another example of the same thing, no reason to think humans are responsible. The fact that this warm up is thousands of times faster than the previous ones, and that it's start coincides with the industrial revolution? Mere coincidence.
No scientists ever claimed the sun rotated around the earth. The rotation of the earth around the sun was established well before science as we know it came to be. Certainly some otherwise skilled pre-scientific thinkers might have asserted this, but not because of any scientific examination of the situation. Those who, despite living in a time before the approach we call science was even a concept to be considered, looked at the question scientifically anyway, concluded that the earth orbited the Sun. "Those pesky scientists" do not come back later saying well established supported theories are just dead wrong; they wouldn't be well supported if they were. They don't say, "oops, Newton's gravity is just wrong, actually, bodies repell each other with randomly varying force". They say, "Newton's gravity is not quite correct; it is merely a fantastically good aproximation of the situation at all scales humans can observe without extreme efforts, but in fact, you can see that it is wrong if you measure the position of a star whose light is passing very close to the sun during an eclipse and notice that it appears to be out of position by a tiny fraction of a degree."
OK, so I was a contractor working as a tech support drone for a large government agency's legal department, which has a big office in DC and various satelite offices around the country. I get sent out to the Salt Lake City office to fix a bunch of stuff. Obviously, my first priority is to figure out what's wrong with the backup system, because they haven't done one sucessfully in a month (you can see it coming can't you). So I go look at the server, and it's monitor has entirely lost v-synch, everything is just scrolling up too fast to read. No problem, I grab a spare monitor. But the server is pushed all the way against the wall, so I can't unhook the old one with out sliding it out a couple inches. Which I do (very gently even!), and immediately hear a ping-pong sound coming from the HD. Something had come loose in there, and was just waiting for any movement to fall apart entirely. It's toast.
There is nothing like going into a conference room full of lawyers who had no problems before, and explain that, five minutes after you walked in the door, their server is down and all their work from the last month is gone forever. They seemed singularly uninterested in the fact that it was not my fault...
I honestly cannot determine what that sentence is supposed to mean. Your original assertions, (that the median income of 55K for san fran households was deceptive because it didn't include property apreciation) is just wrong though. Only about a third of SF households are homeowners, and it's almost entirely the higher income third. The median San Francisco resident makes around 55K and rents.
Right. And even more recently, several people were killed opening their mailbox, so you'd better never do that. And of course you already don't fly in airplanes, let alone ride in automobiles, god forbid.
Frankly, if you walk out your front door in the morning to find an unexpected package, might as well open it. You're already clearly planning a vastly more risky day than that anyway by walking out the door in the first place.
I'm all for funding research, and I'd certainly agree many of the best products of research are not exactly whatever the original intent of that research was, but...
"All areas of research must be funded"
In the absence of infinite funds, this is impossible. If there is a dollar being spent on research, someone, somewhere has to decide to spend it on one thing and not another. Better to spend that dollar on an area of research that seems most likely to produce a sought for benefit; that area is just as likely to yield interesting stuff not sought for.
"Anyone who capitalizes "Global Warming" isn't exactly going to be a font of scientific dispassion and empiricism"
I agree. The original poster (who I merely cut-and-pasted that part from) is certainly not a font of scientific anything.
"A great many people dispute the cause, the projected trends... and what, if anything, can be done about it" Not so many really. Amongst independent scientists, there is a strong consensus that human action is a significant contribution to the cause, that the projected trends are unapealing, and that drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would most likely soften the effect, though not prevent it.
"You have zip in empirical evidence to indicate that 'we're fucked', however you define it" I myself have zip evidence about anything; the use of the first person was for purely rhetorical purposes. I was stating the consensus amongst independent scientists as best I have been able to understand it.
Re:Contrast the responses (Score:1, Troll) by maxpublic (450413) on Friday August 12, @03:46AM (#13301787) (http://slashdot.org/) Anyone who capitalizes "Global Warming" isn't exactly going to be a font of scientific dispassion and empiricism.
Nobody possessed of a modicum of reason disputes that the globe seems to be heating up, at least a bit. A great many people dispute the cause, the projected trends (which vary wildly, depending on the agenda of the people involved), and what, if anything, can be done about it. Only the loony extremists on either end of the political spectrum are absolutely certain they possess The Truth(TM).
If we act now to drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions and other man-made greenhouse gasses, we're still mostly fucked.
You don't know that, either way. You have zip in empirical evidence to indicate that "we're fucked", however you define it.
"'We can't help pristine environments like the Siberian taiga'
But if things continue we might be able to sell summer condos there. Me, I think that's a good thing"
Then you're an idiot. Your flippant answers to Siberias perma-frost melting, and Florida getting flooded may be amusing; but that doesn't change the fact that drastic climatic changes world-wide will cause all sorts of problems.
"Not a single person on Earth - you included - can say with any certainty if ANY action will have an effect, yet you're more than willing to bet the future of everyone on the planet (and a good deal of our present, as well)"
No one can ever say with certainty what the future holds, yet we bet the future of everyone on the planet on what we're doing whether we like it or not. Basically everyone who's put real study into it says we should bet one way. You want to bet the other, not because you have any evidence it's the right way, but because you don't feel like changing your lifestyle any.
"Well, I like the theory that we're long overdue for another ice age... and global warming may be responsible for the delay."
Nice theory. No contact with reality though. "Long overdue for another ice age" would be a matter of ten-thousand years or so. With global warming we're talkig about the last hundred or two.
As the global-warming denyers love to point out, the Earth's climate is constantly changing; and we and other species have adapted in the past. This is true. But now it's changing something like a thousand times as fast.
If we could stop global warming (which we can't), we wouldn't need to build igloos. Our distant decendants might need to.
I know you're just trying to be funny, but you're depressingly off base about how balanced the debate is. More acurately:
Person receiving large amounts of cash from an oil company: (what you had "American Right scientist" say)
Anyone else with enough knowledge of the issue be called "scientist" regardless of nationality or political affiliation: We didn't need any more proof Global Warming is occuring, we already knew that. If we act now to drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions and other man-made greenhouse gasses, we're still mostly fucked. We can't help pristine environments like the Siberian taiga, or prevent most of Florida from going under-water; that's already inevitable in the fairly near term. We should probably take drastic action now anyway, because it seems like being mostly fucked would be preferable to being just entirely, completely fucked.
Diversification of energy production is definitely a good thing. But I don't understand why you think wind power will "probably never be cost effective". It is cost effective right now. It's not quite as good as coal (for example) in cost per kilowatt, but it's close enough to make up the difference in reduced transmission costs (because many are willing to live closer to a turbine than to a coal plant). For many areas, wind is the cheapest thing going.
Nuclear is almost as cheap the way the nuclear plant industry figures it. i.e. ignore the massive costs being covered by federal tax money: long term waste storage and liability insurance. If you figure either of those, much less both, nuclear isn't in the running. Plant design standardization won't help much there.
Even being the eco-freak I am, I don't oppose nuclear power on safety grounds; I assume those issues can be handled. But it just isn't free energy. It's not even very cheap energy. We probably need some nuclear power in our power generation mix. But building a ton of new nuke plants isn't the "universal solution".
Slashdot Mirror
THe whole "ID doesn't mean God, it could be aliens" dodge is so weak. Who designed the aliens? Or are undesigned, reducibly complex things capable of designing irreducibly complex things? Kind of throws a wrench in whatever logic ireducible complexity had, not that it had any beyond "Shucks, I can't figure it out; musta been God. Whew, that was close, almost hada think!"
It's not that there is no known proof/disproof. It's that it's easy to see that proof or disproof is impossible. To anything that appears to disprove God, one can simply say "Maybe God made it that way" (to test your faith, if you're curious, but the why is really irrelevant.) Any apparent proof of God could in turn be the work of some being that is not god but powerful enough to fool us.
Not going to happen. I can make up other unfalsefiable hypotheses several times a minute.
Here's one : the universe was barfed into existence 500 years ago, complete with all evidence that it apears to be older, by George the Giant Space Emu. George is capable of vomiting absolutely anything, but is not particularly inteligent, and has no concious control over what he barfs in any case.
So now we have the wonderfully vauge ID, and George the Space Emu. You'll note they contradict each other, yet neither can be proven false. No evidence can possibly support or undercut either, or for that matter explain why I should take ID more seriously than George.
I disagree. The difference between a theory and a law is that a law was named by it's arrogant discoverer, probably Newton. It's all theories. Even bad, wrong theories are theories. It's a theory if it expresses some meaningful explanation for observed phenomena. They never get proved in science the way they do in math. Whether you do an experiment to cause some evidence to appear, or whether you have to go out in the world and find some evidence, all you have is more evidence that supports your theory, or doesn't. The advantage that experimental sciences have is that you can carefully devise an experiment whose result will go one way if the prevailing theory is correct, and another if your up and coming one is, which can lead to drama. Diciplines that are not as subject to experiment usually have to rely on the slow accretion of many tiny bits of data. When you've got stupendously huge piles of evidence that supports your theory, and nobody can really imagine another theory that would explain it all, you can be pretty sure of yourself, and reasonably treat it as established fact. This is the case for evolution.
The thing to understand is the difference between theories and non-theories, if you will. A non-theory is compatible with any evidence. It can't be supported by any evidence, it can't be undercut by any evidence; evidence is simply irrelevant to it.
Your hypothetical detective has a perfectly good theory for why the guy with no shirt is dead. If we examine the guy with spike hair's backpack, and find it full of money, that will tend to support the theory. If there isn't any money in the room at all, that will tend to undercut it. If the detective says "I think an all-powerful wizard cast a spell, that caused all the contents of the room to come into being exactly as they are, including any memories in the heads of living occupants" that's not a theory in the scientific sense. It doesn't matter if we find any money or where. There is no point in looking at anything in the room in judging this idea, because nothing you find could help ddecide if it is right.
"God made everything the way it is, last Tuesday" could be absolutely true, and in that case evolution would be one tiny footnote in the number of things people think that are wrong. I hope it is not surprising that I do not propose to spend much time contemplating this proposition. Absolutely nothing I could find, think or say would add any support, or in any way refute it. I am in fact going to blindly assume it is false, because I'd prefer there be some point to thinking about the world. Nor do I see how it makes any difference if we say 6000 years ago instead of last tuesday as the interview subject would have us do.
It's not particularly strong to call something a theory, but there are some requirements, and creationism doesn't cut it.
"Gravity is a law, not a theory"
Gravity is a theory, and provably wrong to boot. Still a good theory to know, since it makes all sorts of useful predictions. We still can't produce anything I'd call "artificial gravity", as far as I'm aware.
It is a "law" becuse some theories got called "Laws" by arrogant 18th century scientists, mostly Newton. In modern usage, calling something a "Law" is pretty much an admission that it's just an observed relation (like Newtons inverse square) and you don't understand any of the why behind it (or in Newtons case, intend to). Modern scientists hopefully asspire to greater humility, and so we have no desire to call it the law of evolution, or the law of relativity. We'd prefer to keep reaching for a more perfect understanding.
Not all theories are suceptable to testing in an experiment. That doesn't mean these topics are utterly off limits to human understanding; it just means you have to go find the evidence instead of forcing it to manifest itself in your lab. Hey, let's pretend your example didn't display a total lack of understanding what evolution says, and go ahead and use it anyway: that single celled organism, a human being, and Paris Hiltons poodle all use the same protein structures in their DNA. If the single celled thing is an animal, they all use the same chemical reactions in their mitochondria to metabolize oxygen, even though others are available. The human being and the poodle both have the same number of chromosomes, and are similar in countless ways where there are other alternatives that appear in non-mammals.
Does any of this prove evolution? No. But evolution explains it all quite nicely. If you have another theory that also explains it, I would truly love to hear it. Please note however, that I am not interested in "theories" that would explain things equally well if, for example, the single celled animal and the human used one set of proteins, and the poodle used a different one. We're interested in explaining the world as it is. Possible explanations for absolutely anything are not science, and I can make several of them up per minute in any case.
"Linux isn't hard, Windows isn't easy"
Well, we disagree.
"the only time I ever come close to looking at a manual in linux is when I am at the command line..."
Command line interfaces are inherently manual/help file driven; you need to look up what the available commands are, and then what their options are. I understand many people love command lines, and find them faster and more efficient. Back in the day, I was a 733t command line whiz on 4 differnt OSes, so even though I have avoided them like the plague for quite some time now, I do not speak from ignorance when I say I hate the command line.
I do a lot of fairly advanced stuff, and I wish to do it without ever using a command line, or editing a configuration file by hand. For several years now, I have in fact not needed to use a command line or edit a config file/registry by hand, other than for software I was in the process of developing.
Friends whose opinions I trust have told me this is still not a reasonable expectation on Linux.
I do a lot of non-basic things,
Please stop smearing the name of all the nice Christians; you do not speak for the vast majority of them, and you do not get to decide that they are not Christians. Please adjust your terminology to reflect the considerably smaller, more tightly defined grouping whose beleifs you are actually discussing, like so:
People don't usually become fundamentalist whack-jobs, and then learn that they must turn off their brain. Most people become fundamentalist whack-jobs after realizing they are disatisfied with how they are living their life, and that they'd like to feel superior to others for no good reason. Turning off their brain is merely a helpful pre-requisite.
"Intelectual suicide" sounds like a good way of describing any time you let a belief formed in the absence of evidence ("faith") overide honest evaluation of evidence based beleifs.
Terribly sorry to put all this so rudely, but you really tick me off. Presbyterians (to pick a random example) have no problem with Lutherans being fellow Christians, even if their beleifs aren't exactly the same, and hence they have no problem with identifying themselves as Presbyterians. Those who insist on identifying themselves only as Christians because obviously the exact details of their beleif are the only true Christianity are inherently elitist un-christian a-holes. But it would be impolite to call them that. Yet they refuse to supply a term they'd prefer. What to do? Guess I'll stick with "fundamentalist whack-job".
I can't imagine poking around for more that 10 or 20 seconds; I'm not a patient person. Might help if you didn't click them randomly...
"Ever try to find the security tab in a default install of WinXP? You won't find it until you uncheck "simple file sharing" in the windows explorer properties. Wow, that makes a whole lot of sense to me."
Exactly what security tab you were talking about didn't make any sense to me, yet I found it in a few seconds once you mentioned file sharing. Still don't see the checkbox you're talking about. Perhaps it's not there in Pro? Which would make sense: what does a n00b-type user need with file sharing beyond "simple"?
Whatever. I'm not trying to claim Windows is utterly free of quirks or annoying bits. But you asked where people got the impression windows was easy to use. Well, I've also observed people who are total techno-phobes getting basic stuff done on Windows without any problem. As a fairly tech-savvy type doing some fairly advanced stuff, I've also found it easy to use. Perhaps we're just different sorts of people; I like guis. If at all possible, it should just be blindingly obvious how to do what I want. If it's not, I'm going to guess, and if I can find it on the first or second guess, that's good too. If not, and I have to look up how to do it in a book/help file/man page, I consider that a failure of UI design. This aproach is quite succesful for me on windows, where I'm fairly advanced, and on Macs, where I am the n00b, but still have no problem doing basic stuff. Using Linux without ever reading any docs is not feasible from my admitedly limited and slightly out-of-date experience.
"Atheism and Evolution seem to go hand in hand on a great many points, and as such, they often get lumped together."
Atheism cannot go hand in hand on a great many points, as it only has one point. Atheists do not beleive that God exists. That's all. Not only is it impossible to prove it either way, but anyone who even claims to have compelling evidence either way is full of it, and doesn't understand what evidence is. Atheism vs. Theism is not a scientific debate, nor, if you ask me, a very interesting one: "Does Too!" "Does Not!" "This other guy agrees with me!" "Doesn't matter" "Does too!", see what I mean?
Evolution, or not, is a scientific debate. As such, it is impossible to prove anything one way or another. Science doesn't do that. Science looks at available evidence and decides whether it supports a conclusion; it finds testable consequences of a theory, and sees if they pan out. There are vast mountains of evidence that seem to support evolution. Jonathan correctly points out that it is mostly taught by arguments from authority, which is too bad. But it's not at all difficult to think about what evolution should imply, and look around. Critics like to pick out tiny details, and hold them up like they were great revelations. Radio carbon dating is a statisticaly based technique who's error margin increases rapidly with the age of the sample? Yeah, thanks, we knew that. Most experts would put the useful date for RC dating back further than he has, to maybe 50,000 years, but either way, WTF does that have to do with evolution? RC dating is for anthropologists. RC dating could not exist at all, and it wouldn't impact the support for evolution in the slightest.
Oh, wait, I get it: he's a young-earth creationist?!? Sorry, I won't bother. If you've thought about it at all, and still beleive the Earth is 6000 years old, you're just not succeptable to logic.
In any case, Evolution or not is a scientific debate, and while I'm pretty sure which way I think it should go, the real point is we can talk about it based on evidence and implications. But the scientific debate is "Evolution or not" not "Evolution or creationism". Creationism isn't a scientific theory; it cannot be supported by evidence and it doesn't have any implications. Even if it were, it wouldn't be the automatic alternative to evolution. So I really wish creationists would get off their inept critiques of evolution.
"how many 'n00b users' you know that use features in Microsoft products like mail filters in Outlook or change tracking in Word or can install programs in Windows by themselves."
'n00b users' don't generally need mail filters or change tracking. Heck, I don't need change tracking; though I'll bet I could figure out how to set it up without reading any docs. My father is as noob as they come and he set up some mail filters without any problem.
As for installing software, I've been known to let my 4 year old handle it; she knows the word "next", and anything else, she spells and asks me.
I haven't felt any need to read an Windows manual or help file in a decade; I just poke at stuff and figure it out.
Where does your perception that Windows is hard possibly come from?
Hey man, sorry you work somewhere lame. Maybe you should try working for a smaller company. Product development where I work is done by developers. Executives help identify the business problems products should help to solve. Marketers know how to sell stuff. Why should they know how to build it or what it is even possible to build? Why should this be different than any other industry? Do the people that make ads for cars design the traction-control system? Do they have anything to do with it before it's done?
I didn't mean you were a marketer, but rather Alfredo Romeo, who's seems to elsewhere be named Alfredo Romeo Molina; but I can't tell if the difference is Spanish last name conventions which I don't fully understand, or a concious effort to make his name sound like Alpha-Romeo when connected to cars. In any case, he seems to not have developed any of the tech involved, but just markets it. He also writes books that look to me like Spanish language re-hashings of English language open source boosterism. Basically, he's got "huckster" written all over him.
In any case, though I dig at marketers, I've worked at a company that had technically savvy people moonlighting as the marketing department, and at one that had proper, competent marketers, who were technical idiots. I can only conclude that knowing what is shiny is both harder and more important than it seems.
He does not accuse the developers of being arrogant pricks. The developers make araingements with someone to take a look at how the usability of the GIMP might be improved, and slashdot posts a story on this. In a comment connected to this story, he says "Well, here's how I think it could be improved..." Someone else says, "How dare you complain, code it yourself!" It is this person who is accused of being an arrogant prick. I see no indication that he is one of the GIMPs developers. Were he, he would realize that sugesting one just re-organize the entire gui oneself if you don't like it is in fact an arrogant, pricky thing to say.
Many people can and do write a check to a developer who produces what they want. That developer is Adobe.
I could write a check to some developer, and pay them to improve the GIMP. For the amount it would cost, I could instead buy several hundred copies of Photoshop. Now what I really need to do is get several thousand GIMP users together and get them all to contribute some smaller amount. To get them to contribute I'll have to balance what improvements to pay the developers make so as to please as many of them as possible. You know, this would be a lot easier if everyone who benefited from the improvements paid. But to do that, I'd need a proprietary product. Then I could have a company to run the whole thing; maybe I could call it "Adobe". Point being, saying, if you can't code it, just write a check! is equally naive. I can't write the check for the same reason I can't code it: it's a massive undertaking.
If some people want to write some program and give it away free, good for them. If that's as far as it goes, I still feel free to say I don't think it's very good, biut it would indeed be obnoxious to really go on and on hammering on it. But if they, or others, go on and on about how it's just the coolest thing ever and there is nothing wrong about it at all, the fact that it is free does not make it off limits for criticism. If they, in fact, go looking for how to improve it's usability....
Marketers may or may not know anything at all. The person quoted certainly doesn't know what they're talking about. I write proprietary software, and marketers are not the drivers of any design or technical decisions whatsoever. They just ask questions about the software after it's done, and promote it based on features that strike me as trivial or irrelevant. For example, it's no doubt a marketer who decided they should push the "open-source" nature of this car. The engineers would know that 99% of the tech in this car is proprietary, including all the fun parts. It's the dopey little tour-guide box that's open source. Ask for IP-unencumbered schematics for their electronic speed controllers and see if the car itself is "open source".
Frankly, a disparagement of marketers is kind of funny coming from a guy who is one; as far as I can tell, fairly exclusively.
The earth has warmed and cooled may times in it's history. This recent warming trend is no doubt just another example of the same thing, no reason to think humans are responsible. The fact that this warm up is thousands of times faster than the previous ones, and that it's start coincides with the industrial revolution? Mere coincidence.
No scientists ever claimed the sun rotated around the earth. The rotation of the earth around the sun was established well before science as we know it came to be. Certainly some otherwise skilled pre-scientific thinkers might have asserted this, but not because of any scientific examination of the situation. Those who, despite living in a time before the approach we call science was even a concept to be considered, looked at the question scientifically anyway, concluded that the earth orbited the Sun. "Those pesky scientists" do not come back later saying well established supported theories are just dead wrong; they wouldn't be well supported if they were. They don't say, "oops, Newton's gravity is just wrong, actually, bodies repell each other with randomly varying force". They say, "Newton's gravity is not quite correct; it is merely a fantastically good aproximation of the situation at all scales humans can observe without extreme efforts, but in fact, you can see that it is wrong if you measure the position of a star whose light is passing very close to the sun during an eclipse and notice that it appears to be out of position by a tiny fraction of a degree."
OK, so I was a contractor working as a tech support drone for a large government agency's legal department, which has a big office in DC and various satelite offices around the country. I get sent out to the Salt Lake City office to fix a bunch of stuff. Obviously, my first priority is to figure out what's wrong with the backup system, because they haven't done one sucessfully in a month (you can see it coming can't you). So I go look at the server, and it's monitor has entirely lost v-synch, everything is just scrolling up too fast to read. No problem, I grab a spare monitor. But the server is pushed all the way against the wall, so I can't unhook the old one with out sliding it out a couple inches. Which I do (very gently even!), and immediately hear a ping-pong sound coming from the HD. Something had come loose in there, and was just waiting for any movement to fall apart entirely. It's toast.
There is nothing like going into a conference room full of lawyers who had no problems before, and explain that, five minutes after you walked in the door, their server is down and all their work from the last month is gone forever. They seemed singularly uninterested in the fact that it was not my fault...
I honestly cannot determine what that sentence is supposed to mean. Your original assertions, (that the median income of 55K for san fran households was deceptive because it didn't include property apreciation) is just wrong though. Only about a third of SF households are homeowners, and it's almost entirely the higher income third.
The median San Francisco resident makes around 55K and rents.
"If you only made $125k a year you'd have a tough time living in SF proper."
Roughly 82% of people living in SF proper have Household incomes lower than 125K. More than half of them have incomes less than 56K.
Nice try, but that already counts as income too.
Right. And even more recently, several people were killed opening their mailbox, so you'd better never do that. And of course you already don't fly in airplanes, let alone ride in automobiles, god forbid.
Frankly, if you walk out your front door in the morning to find an unexpected package, might as well open it. You're already clearly planning a vastly more risky day than that anyway by walking out the door in the first place.
I'm all for funding research, and I'd certainly agree many of the best products of research are not exactly whatever the original intent of that research was, but...
"All areas of research must be funded"
In the absence of infinite funds, this is impossible. If there is a dollar being spent on research, someone, somewhere has to decide to spend it on one thing and not another. Better to spend that dollar on an area of research that seems most likely to produce a sought for benefit; that area is just as likely to yield interesting stuff not sought for.
"Anyone who capitalizes "Global Warming" isn't exactly going to be a font of scientific dispassion and empiricism"
... and what, if anything, can be done about it"
I agree. The original poster (who I merely cut-and-pasted that part from) is certainly not a font of scientific anything.
"A great many people dispute the cause, the projected trends
Not so many really. Amongst independent scientists, there is a strong consensus that human action is a significant contribution to the cause, that the projected trends are unapealing, and that drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would most likely soften the effect, though not prevent it.
"You have zip in empirical evidence to indicate that 'we're fucked', however you define it"
I myself have zip evidence about anything; the use of the first person was for purely rhetorical purposes. I was stating the consensus amongst independent scientists as best I have been able to understand it.
Re:Contrast the responses (Score:1, Troll)
by maxpublic (450413) on Friday August 12, @03:46AM (#13301787)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Anyone who capitalizes "Global Warming" isn't exactly going to be a font of scientific dispassion and empiricism.
Nobody possessed of a modicum of reason disputes that the globe seems to be heating up, at least a bit. A great many people dispute the cause, the projected trends (which vary wildly, depending on the agenda of the people involved), and what, if anything, can be done about it. Only the loony extremists on either end of the political spectrum are absolutely certain they possess The Truth(TM).
If we act now to drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions and other man-made greenhouse gasses, we're still mostly fucked.
You don't know that, either way. You have zip in empirical evidence to indicate that "we're fucked", however you define it.
"'We can't help pristine environments like the Siberian taiga'
But if things continue we might be able to sell summer condos there. Me, I think that's a good thing"
Then you're an idiot. Your flippant answers to Siberias perma-frost melting, and Florida getting flooded may be amusing; but that doesn't change the fact that drastic climatic changes world-wide will cause all sorts of problems.
"Not a single person on Earth - you included - can say with any certainty if ANY action will have an effect, yet you're more than willing to bet the future of everyone on the planet (and a good deal of our present, as well)"
No one can ever say with certainty what the future holds, yet we bet the future of everyone on the planet on what we're doing whether we like it or not. Basically everyone who's put real study into it says we should bet one way. You want to bet the other, not because you have any evidence it's the right way, but because you don't feel like changing your lifestyle any.
"Well, I like the theory that we're long overdue for another ice age... and global warming may be responsible for the delay."
Nice theory. No contact with reality though. "Long overdue for another ice age" would be a matter of ten-thousand years or so. With global warming we're talkig about the last hundred or two.
As the global-warming denyers love to point out, the Earth's climate is constantly changing; and we and other species have adapted in the past. This is true. But now it's changing something like a thousand times as fast.
If we could stop global warming (which we can't), we wouldn't need to build igloos. Our distant decendants might need to.
I know you're just trying to be funny, but you're depressingly off base about how balanced the debate is. More acurately:
Person receiving large amounts of cash from an oil company: (what you had "American Right scientist" say)
Anyone else with enough knowledge of the issue be called "scientist" regardless of nationality or political affiliation: We didn't need any more proof Global Warming is occuring, we already knew that. If we act now to drastically reduce our fossil fuel emissions and other man-made greenhouse gasses, we're still mostly fucked. We can't help pristine environments like the Siberian taiga, or prevent most of Florida from going under-water; that's already inevitable in the fairly near term. We should probably take drastic action now anyway, because it seems like being mostly fucked would be preferable to being just entirely, completely fucked.
Diversification of energy production is definitely a good thing. But I don't understand why you think wind power will "probably never be cost effective". It is cost effective right now. It's not quite as good as coal (for example) in cost per kilowatt, but it's close enough to make up the difference in reduced transmission costs (because many are willing to live closer to a turbine than to a coal plant). For many areas, wind is the cheapest thing going.
Nuclear is almost as cheap the way the nuclear plant industry figures it. i.e. ignore the massive costs being covered by federal tax money: long term waste storage and liability insurance. If you figure either of those, much less both, nuclear isn't in the running. Plant design standardization won't help much there.
Even being the eco-freak I am, I don't oppose nuclear power on safety grounds; I assume those issues can be handled. But it just isn't free energy. It's not even very cheap energy. We probably need some nuclear power in our power generation mix. But building a ton of new nuke plants isn't the "universal solution".