Let's see databases that truly store any data, and enforce the integrity of their sets.
Postgres has the ability to CREATE TYPE. Not only can you create any type you want, you can specify the input/output representation, and any arbitrary operators or functions of that type. It can even store the data of that type in variable width, up to about 1GB for a single value, stored out-of-line (not in the original table) transparently. You can even make indexes on non-trivial types, such as full text indexes (implemented on two different generalized index access methods) or indexes over arrays or multi-dimensional types (points in 3D, etc). Indexes aren't limited to equality and ranges, by the way, but can also do more sophisticated things with these more sophisticated types (contains, overlaps, consistent, etc).
What more could you ask for?
I may have misunderstood your post, but you seem to be confusing object classes (types, domains) and relation variables (table definitions).
If your in a situation where you're mostly reading with (likely) only one infrequent writer, wouldn't eliminating the overhead of a database service entirely be desirable?
RDBMSs provide many services (good ones do, anyway):
* resource management for all the queries that happen to be running at that particular time
* sophisticated query optimization, based on your actual data, not just "rules of thumb," but statistics on your actual data
* a relational query language, which is good for asking questions which you might never have considered at the time you stored the data
* useful operators on useful types
* much more...
SQLite doesn't even provide real data types. If you need an index on a non-text type, you will have a problem. If you need to sort non-text data, you have a problem. If you want to do any real manipulation before returning to the client, you will have a problem.
SQLite essentially assumes that you will pull all the data into the application and then process it from there. That's a non-starter performance-wise, for many applications.
Probably a better policy is to have a DBMS that supports a variety of table store formats. MySQL wins that point, and would probably run away with it if it supported a column store format.
I disagree. Changing the storage engine in MySQL changes the semantic behavior -- enough to introduce and eliminate major features.
I support the idea of being able to store relational data in a variety of ways. Not just "store this table in this engine, that table in that engine" but also more sophisticated storage schemes, like storing one table in many files (perhaps to improve UPDATE performance) or many tables in one file (perhaps to improve join performance on those tables). However this should not change semantic behavior, only performance. The whole point is achieving performance without sacrificing your logical design or constraints.
MySQL is a step backwards when it comes to that goal.
How many desktop users care what filesystem they have?
No ZFS: 1. start with working system 2. install a bunch of packages that replace all kinds of libraries and do major upgrades to your system 3. everything breaks 4. ?
ZFS: 1. start with working system 2. install a bunch of packages that replace all kinds of libraries and do major upgrades to your system 3. everything breaks 4. rollback to a previous snapshot 5. wait for packages to stabilize
Can society afford to butt out and ignore the risk that his reactor could explode
This is only an argument for restricting very dangerous freedoms. Most libertarians don't mind laws restricting the use of nuclear materials. Libertarians would be happy if they were just allowed to perform basic economic transactions without interference, and have important freedoms secured (like those in the Bill of Rights).
Additionally, a future that forever will have one less gallon of gas is a cost that isn't paid at transaction time either.
The world will never run out of oil. It will just get more and more expensive, and people will buy less and less. You can get oil from tar sands in Canada or shale in Colorado. And there's a lot of it. It's just more expensive to extract.
You said you like nuclear power, but Uranium is a finite resource, and actually more finite than oil (oil may be produced very slowly, Uranium is only produced in large stars going supernova). We are mining the cheap sources of Uranium now, and as the cheap reserves are depleted, we find more Uranium in more expensive places (like recycling the waste to get back some of the unspent Uranium). The Earth will never be "out" of Uranium, or oil, or coal.
The environmental damage caused by burning a gallon of gas is not paid by anyone that is a party to the transaction.
We pay taxes on every gallon of gas, and there are legal requirements for the content of gasoline for environmental reasons. If you think this number is too low to pay for the true costs, you need to back that up with numbers. We do pay, why do you think that we don't pay enough?
In the aggregate our wealth is diminishing, and because these losses aren't appearing on any individual's balance sheet is exactly why the Libertarian argument has to be rejected.
In contrast to the rest of your post, this is a far-out claim that came from nowhere. Our wealth is diminishing? Both capital and technology are increasing very rapidly, and that will have much more effect on the world's wealth than natural resources.
So what he's basically saying is that he'd like modifications to the code to remain in the open.
These are the points that I took away from his statements:
(1) That people were breaking the law, and encouraging others to break the law. (2) He feels that building code on top of BSD code, and then licensing the improvements with GPL, is unethical. He didn't say it should be forbidden.
The first point is much more serious. If we do have high-up linux developers breaking the law and encouraging others to do so, there is a problem.
What are international legal standards? And are they standard between the US and China?
Either we allow a US business to operate in China -- and follow their laws -- or we don't. If it's too damaging to human rights to allow a search business to operate in China, we can forbid it.
what you get in wealth creation is TAKEN from another segment of the population
If you work from the basic assumption that a combination of labor and capital create wealth, then the above statement must mean that capital is not created, but only transferred. But capital is not a zero sum game either, and can be created in many forms.
That means that one person's ability to create wealth can increase without another person's ability to create wealth decreasing.
The market is not a perpetual motion machine. Economies can grow radically, however, and I think that's obvious. As a civilization we went from agricultural (supporting a small population) to modern (supporting 6+ billion people). There is a vast difference between the amount of wealth produced by farmers in 2000 BC and the 6 billion people alive today. That ability to create wealth was created by increased labor AND capital AND technology, and it didn't defy the laws of physics in the process.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: what policies encourage more wealth to be created? And what policies encourage more capital to be created, so that more wealth is created in the long term?
Wealth transfer and wealth creation are not mutually exclusive.
You said "wealth is just transferred". That statement -- the word "just" in particular -- leaves no room for wealth creation, which is clearly a fact of our economy. That makes your statement false, and I stand by my correction of your statement.
If you play fast and loose with words by exaggerating and making claims that you can't substantiate, and someone corrects you on a factual basis, own up to it.
When someone like me -- and I lean toward free markets, to be sure -- reads statements like "wealth is just transferred," it's difficult for me to read further because your statements don't flow into a coherent conclusion. It has no meaning to say something like that.
Even if it's just an exaggeration, you never really imply what you actually do mean by it. If we don't take your statement as an absolute (as the word "just" implies), it carries no meaning at all other than "trade happens".
their use would already be a much worse problem than a couple of odd murders.
But making it easier to murder and get away with it is worse than a few accidental deaths. The reason is that accidental deaths can't be used for extortion. If it's easier to murder people and get away with it, then you can bet that for every actual murder, many more people are being implicitly threatened.
Cars, planes and boats are very dangerous things, yet they are legal. Small swallowable objects are very dangerous things, yet they are legal. There are very few things in this world that are safe. Do we need to police everything that is tangible?
You completely missed the point. I am arguing that there are very good reasons that drugs are illegal, and one of those is that, when people die, it is very difficult to determine who was consenting after the fact. Drugs may be used for murder or to make someone unable to resist rape, etc., and they need not be a willing participant. With alcohol, in all practical cases, someone must consent to get drunk. That's not the case with drugs that you can put in someone's drink.
Alcohol people can control their own intake. Drugs people can't control their own intake when someone else is trying to poison them with that drug. And after the drug is consumed, it's very difficult to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that it was non-consensual.
If guns were legal, it would be very hard to prove every murder committed with them wasn't a suicide.
Shooting oneself in the head is not a recreational activity, and therefore (in many cases) does not constitute "reasonable doubt". Also, that's why I pointed out that suicide is illegal, so that a murderer can't claim that they were just assisting suicide.
Drugs, on the other hand, are used recreationally and sometimes dangerously. The idea that the person did ask for too high of a dose is "reasonable doubt", so we say that drugs are illegal so that we can still throw the killer in jail.
You would have to chug a bottle of Liquid LSD to even possibly OD, which more than likely won't happen.
Ok, then a potential murderer could lace something with a sedative, and when they are compliant, inject a lot of heroine, and then claim that it was consensual. Right now that doesn't work, because drugs are illegal and the person could still be convicted of some kind of manslaughter at least.
Sure it does, you still nail the guy for (at least) some kind of manslaughter if they are giving someone else LSD and the person dies. If LSD were legal, the person might get off completely.
In practice, it's fairly difficult to poison someone else with alcohol to the point of killing them, without a substantial amount of consent on their part, or a lot of evidence that the consumption was not consensual.
Or sleeping pills ?
Any sleeping pill that is very lethal would be available by prescription only. That means, if you kill someone with those pills, and they don't have a prescription, you can't claim "Oh, they just like sleeping pills and I happened to have some".
This is entirely different from what would take place with hard drugs easily available without prescription. Your victim might occasionally dabble in recreational drugs, all you need to do is heavily lace something, or up the concentration, or make it look like they found a new drug they like. It would be very hard to prove that kind of murder, and the murderer could have a fairly wide selection of victims.
I'm not saying we catch 100% of murderers now, nor that it's impossible to come up with some other plausible routes to murder. I'm just extrapolating consequences of pure legalization. People will murder other people with drugs, and say "we were all having fun, and it just went horribly wrong".
I am not arguing for a war on drugs. But I do think that things like LSD should be illegal. It's too easy to lace anything with LSD, and would be impossible to prove that the person didn't want the LSD, even if they survive.
To think ahead about the implications of drug legalization, playing the devil's advocate:
If (hard) drugs were legal, it would be very hard to prove murder by overdose, etc. You could kill pretty much anyone you want: just lace something with a drug and say "Oh, he liked LSD on his cereal in the morning. It was a horrible accident." (I don't really know how lethal LSD is, but you get the idea).
I'm not saying they should go crazy trying to enforce the anti-drug laws. However, there are valid reasons why very dangerous things are illegal.
Most live quarter-by-quarter trying to pump up their share price.
Even if that's true, that only applies to companies trying to sell growth stock. Your analysis excluded all private companies (with no public stock) and all companies that issue dividends.
Maybe many investors are to blame for buying into the "quarter-by-quarter" mentality. Maybe investors should ask for more dividends and less growth.
So, what this does, is increase supply, which will lower demand and thus labor costs! Having more people compete in a labor market is not good for the people who are already in it, you know...
Why do you think demand will lower?
1. Supply will increase (supply curve shifts right) 2. Demand curve will (for the time being) stay where it is 3. quantity supplied will increase (more engineers will be employed at any one time) 4. price (salary) will fall
Having more engineers/scientists around will probably increase the demand for engineers/scientists over time, which will then increase price again. It depends on the field of course, but you can make some simple observations that might indicate how much cooperation exists. For instance, you can get answers from experts to a wide range of computer science questions simply by asking in a mailing list or IRC chat. Why do those people answer? Because the person answering the question learns, too, and it's much more likely that the person answering the question will get a new opportunity than lose an opportunity because the person who asked the question took a prospective job. That's a big reason why open source happens.
Nope. I'm not defending. The post to which I replied tried to "disprove" God by confusing religious stories in specific with the spiritual world in general. I'm merely trying to separate the two.
So, how do you know that anyone other than you has a soul?
That's an interesting existential question. I don't really see how it matters how many people have a soul: as long as it's one or more (and I know at least that I do), there is some kind of spiritual aspect to this world.
the most militantly bible-thumping Christian types
I have no idea who you're referring to here.
Interesting, too, that no real mainstream religion has started up since the Enlightenment
Philosophy and spirituality have continued, however.
There are some questions that simply cannot be asked, let alone answered by, objective reasoning. Spirituality is entirely subjective, but many people clearly find it important. And society as a whole finds it important for important reasons. Objectively, there is no clear answer to the question: "should society encourage freedom or slavery?". That's an important question, and I can't think of an entirely objective way to analyze it.
It is impossible to entirely disprove God, since before one concept of God is disproved, someone has already pulled 10 more out their arse.
Again, you're looking at specific stories and trying to disprove those. You should think about what the reason is that those stories exist, and what is common among them, and what is different between stories of a religious nature and fantastic stories (there is overlap, of course).
God is that, whatever he is like, he has absolute moral authority
If one derives moral guidance from God, one should not take someone else's word about what God finds moral.
You don't do things because they are right, you do things because God says they are right.
It's only the three Abrahamic religions that revolve around the notion of a singular God.
Many philosophical ideas can arguably be represented by some kind of higher being. If you move away from the specific stories people tell and the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, you see a general thread common among all religions that is more philosophical or spiritual in nature than any one story. The word "God" can represent a part of those spiritual or philosophical concepts.
As it is, you don't, since almost everything we find fits into categories pre-defined by evolution.
You can take any set of somewhat related items and say they "fit into pre-defined categories". How about furniture? We can fit almost any ancient piece of furniture we find into a modern furniture classification hierarchy. That doesn't prove anything.
Genetic theory, on the other hand, makes much more specific, testable predictions. That is a good theory.
I am not saying that there is no evidence of evolution. There is a lot of evidence upon which you can make a very reasonable conclusion that evolution characterizes past events. But that would not be a scientific conclusion, it would just be an informed conclusion, similar to a conclusion made by a jury about a crime.
Thermodynamics does pretty much stand on its own as it actually predates statistical mechanics.
Right. Thermodynamics is a theory, and it stands on its own. I think you misunderstood me. Theories are still theories even if they are based on another theory.
As I said in the post to which you replied: "There is a difference between theories based on other theories on the one hand; and conclusions based on theories on the other. Thermodynamics is a theory [based on other theories]; global warming is a conclusion [based on theories].". You can replace "global warming" with "evolution" and it would still hold true.
can you think of an alternative theory that would have predicted the discoveries that have been made since Darwin's version of evolution was first postulated
Any theory based on the idea that an offspring is mostly like its parents, but a little different. For instance, genetic theory.
Global warming does make predictions that can be measured by independent scientists.
As I said, "Global Warming" is a term loosely thrown around that usually means a conclusion. When talking about a specific model for global climate, that may indeed be a theory. Those are possible to test, although usually very difficult to control for other variables (like daily weather, natural cycles, solar output, etc.). They make a good attempt to control for these variables using statistics, and these models are useful to make some conclusions, albeit with a large margin of error.
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Let's see databases that truly store any data, and enforce the integrity of their sets.
Postgres has the ability to CREATE TYPE. Not only can you create any type you want, you can specify the input/output representation, and any arbitrary operators or functions of that type. It can even store the data of that type in variable width, up to about 1GB for a single value, stored out-of-line (not in the original table) transparently. You can even make indexes on non-trivial types, such as full text indexes (implemented on two different generalized index access methods) or indexes over arrays or multi-dimensional types (points in 3D, etc). Indexes aren't limited to equality and ranges, by the way, but can also do more sophisticated things with these more sophisticated types (contains, overlaps, consistent, etc).
What more could you ask for?
I may have misunderstood your post, but you seem to be confusing object classes (types, domains) and relation variables (table definitions).
If your in a situation where you're mostly reading with (likely) only one infrequent writer, wouldn't eliminating the overhead of a database service entirely be desirable?
RDBMSs provide many services (good ones do, anyway):
* resource management for all the queries that happen to be running at that particular time
* sophisticated query optimization, based on your actual data, not just "rules of thumb," but statistics on your actual data
* a relational query language, which is good for asking questions which you might never have considered at the time you stored the data
* useful operators on useful types
* much more...
SQLite doesn't even provide real data types. If you need an index on a non-text type, you will have a problem. If you need to sort non-text data, you have a problem. If you want to do any real manipulation before returning to the client, you will have a problem.
SQLite essentially assumes that you will pull all the data into the application and then process it from there. That's a non-starter performance-wise, for many applications.
Probably a better policy is to have a DBMS that supports a variety of table store formats. MySQL wins that point, and would probably run away with it if it supported a column store format.
I disagree. Changing the storage engine in MySQL changes the semantic behavior -- enough to introduce and eliminate major features.
I support the idea of being able to store relational data in a variety of ways. Not just "store this table in this engine, that table in that engine" but also more sophisticated storage schemes, like storing one table in many files (perhaps to improve UPDATE performance) or many tables in one file (perhaps to improve join performance on those tables). However this should not change semantic behavior, only performance. The whole point is achieving performance without sacrificing your logical design or constraints.
MySQL is a step backwards when it comes to that goal.
How many desktop users care what filesystem they have?
No ZFS:
1. start with working system
2. install a bunch of packages that replace all kinds of libraries and do major upgrades to your system
3. everything breaks
4. ?
ZFS:
1. start with working system
2. install a bunch of packages that replace all kinds of libraries and do major upgrades to your system
3. everything breaks
4. rollback to a previous snapshot
5. wait for packages to stabilize
Can society afford to butt out and ignore the risk that his reactor could explode
This is only an argument for restricting very dangerous freedoms. Most libertarians don't mind laws restricting the use of nuclear materials. Libertarians would be happy if they were just allowed to perform basic economic transactions without interference, and have important freedoms secured (like those in the Bill of Rights).
Additionally, a future that forever will have one less gallon of gas is a cost that isn't paid at transaction time either.
The world will never run out of oil. It will just get more and more expensive, and people will buy less and less. You can get oil from tar sands in Canada or shale in Colorado. And there's a lot of it. It's just more expensive to extract.
You said you like nuclear power, but Uranium is a finite resource, and actually more finite than oil (oil may be produced very slowly, Uranium is only produced in large stars going supernova). We are mining the cheap sources of Uranium now, and as the cheap reserves are depleted, we find more Uranium in more expensive places (like recycling the waste to get back some of the unspent Uranium). The Earth will never be "out" of Uranium, or oil, or coal.
The environmental damage caused by burning a gallon of gas is not paid by anyone that is a party to the transaction.
We pay taxes on every gallon of gas, and there are legal requirements for the content of gasoline for environmental reasons. If you think this number is too low to pay for the true costs, you need to back that up with numbers. We do pay, why do you think that we don't pay enough?
In the aggregate our wealth is diminishing, and because these losses aren't appearing on any individual's balance sheet is exactly why the Libertarian argument has to be rejected.
In contrast to the rest of your post, this is a far-out claim that came from nowhere. Our wealth is diminishing? Both capital and technology are increasing very rapidly, and that will have much more effect on the world's wealth than natural resources.
So what he's basically saying is that he'd like modifications to the code to remain in the open.
These are the points that I took away from his statements:
(1) That people were breaking the law, and encouraging others to break the law.
(2) He feels that building code on top of BSD code, and then licensing the improvements with GPL, is unethical. He didn't say it should be forbidden.
The first point is much more serious. If we do have high-up linux developers breaking the law and encouraging others to do so, there is a problem.
What are international legal standards? And are they standard between the US and China?
Either we allow a US business to operate in China -- and follow their laws -- or we don't. If it's too damaging to human rights to allow a search business to operate in China, we can forbid it.
what you get in wealth creation is TAKEN from another segment of the population
If you work from the basic assumption that a combination of labor and capital create wealth, then the above statement must mean that capital is not created, but only transferred. But capital is not a zero sum game either, and can be created in many forms.
That means that one person's ability to create wealth can increase without another person's ability to create wealth decreasing.
The market is not a perpetual motion machine. Economies can grow radically, however, and I think that's obvious. As a civilization we went from agricultural (supporting a small population) to modern (supporting 6+ billion people). There is a vast difference between the amount of wealth produced by farmers in 2000 BC and the 6 billion people alive today. That ability to create wealth was created by increased labor AND capital AND technology, and it didn't defy the laws of physics in the process.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: what policies encourage more wealth to be created? And what policies encourage more capital to be created, so that more wealth is created in the long term?
Wealth transfer and wealth creation are not mutually exclusive.
You said "wealth is just transferred". That statement -- the word "just" in particular -- leaves no room for wealth creation, which is clearly a fact of our economy. That makes your statement false, and I stand by my correction of your statement.
If you play fast and loose with words by exaggerating and making claims that you can't substantiate, and someone corrects you on a factual basis, own up to it.
When someone like me -- and I lean toward free markets, to be sure -- reads statements like "wealth is just transferred," it's difficult for me to read further because your statements don't flow into a coherent conclusion. It has no meaning to say something like that.
Even if it's just an exaggeration, you never really imply what you actually do mean by it. If we don't take your statement as an absolute (as the word "just" implies), it carries no meaning at all other than "trade happens".
So, what did you mean?
Most modern economic liberals forget that wealth is just transferred
Economics is not a zero-sum game.
their use would already be a much worse problem than a couple of odd murders.
But making it easier to murder and get away with it is worse than a few accidental deaths. The reason is that accidental deaths can't be used for extortion. If it's easier to murder people and get away with it, then you can bet that for every actual murder, many more people are being implicitly threatened.
Cars, planes and boats are very dangerous things, yet they are legal. Small swallowable objects are very dangerous things, yet they are legal. There are very few things in this world that are safe. Do we need to police everything that is tangible?
You completely missed the point. I am arguing that there are very good reasons that drugs are illegal, and one of those is that, when people die, it is very difficult to determine who was consenting after the fact. Drugs may be used for murder or to make someone unable to resist rape, etc., and they need not be a willing participant. With alcohol, in all practical cases, someone must consent to get drunk. That's not the case with drugs that you can put in someone's drink.
Alcohol people can control their own intake. Drugs people can't control their own intake when someone else is trying to poison them with that drug. And after the drug is consumed, it's very difficult to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that it was non-consensual.
If guns were legal, it would be very hard to prove every murder committed with them wasn't a suicide.
Shooting oneself in the head is not a recreational activity, and therefore (in many cases) does not constitute "reasonable doubt". Also, that's why I pointed out that suicide is illegal, so that a murderer can't claim that they were just assisting suicide.
Drugs, on the other hand, are used recreationally and sometimes dangerously. The idea that the person did ask for too high of a dose is "reasonable doubt", so we say that drugs are illegal so that we can still throw the killer in jail.
You would have to chug a bottle of Liquid LSD to even possibly OD, which more than likely won't happen.
Ok, then a potential murderer could lace something with a sedative, and when they are compliant, inject a lot of heroine, and then claim that it was consensual. Right now that doesn't work, because drugs are illegal and the person could still be convicted of some kind of manslaughter at least.
Sure it does, you still nail the guy for (at least) some kind of manslaughter if they are giving someone else LSD and the person dies. If LSD were legal, the person might get off completely.
Because the cops might, during their investigation, be able to prove:
1. The cause of death was LSD
2. The murderer put the LSD on the cereal
If LSD is illegal, case closed, you have a murderer and he's going to jail (on manslaughter at least).
But if LSD is legal it's very hard to prove that the LSD was not consumed consensually as recreation by the victim.
Like, oh, I don't know, alcohol ?
In practice, it's fairly difficult to poison someone else with alcohol to the point of killing them, without a substantial amount of consent on their part, or a lot of evidence that the consumption was not consensual.
Or sleeping pills ?
Any sleeping pill that is very lethal would be available by prescription only. That means, if you kill someone with those pills, and they don't have a prescription, you can't claim "Oh, they just like sleeping pills and I happened to have some".
This is entirely different from what would take place with hard drugs easily available without prescription. Your victim might occasionally dabble in recreational drugs, all you need to do is heavily lace something, or up the concentration, or make it look like they found a new drug they like. It would be very hard to prove that kind of murder, and the murderer could have a fairly wide selection of victims.
I'm not saying we catch 100% of murderers now, nor that it's impossible to come up with some other plausible routes to murder. I'm just extrapolating consequences of pure legalization. People will murder other people with drugs, and say "we were all having fun, and it just went horribly wrong".
I am not arguing for a war on drugs. But I do think that things like LSD should be illegal. It's too easy to lace anything with LSD, and would be impossible to prove that the person didn't want the LSD, even if they survive.
To think ahead about the implications of drug legalization, playing the devil's advocate:
If (hard) drugs were legal, it would be very hard to prove murder by overdose, etc. You could kill pretty much anyone you want: just lace something with a drug and say "Oh, he liked LSD on his cereal in the morning. It was a horrible accident." (I don't really know how lethal LSD is, but you get the idea).
I'm not saying they should go crazy trying to enforce the anti-drug laws. However, there are valid reasons why very dangerous things are illegal.
Most live quarter-by-quarter trying to pump up their share price.
Even if that's true, that only applies to companies trying to sell growth stock. Your analysis excluded all private companies (with no public stock) and all companies that issue dividends.
Maybe many investors are to blame for buying into the "quarter-by-quarter" mentality. Maybe investors should ask for more dividends and less growth.
So, what this does, is increase supply, which will lower demand and thus labor costs! Having more people compete in a labor market is not good for the people who are already in it, you know...
Why do you think demand will lower?
1. Supply will increase (supply curve shifts right)
2. Demand curve will (for the time being) stay where it is
3. quantity supplied will increase (more engineers will be employed at any one time)
4. price (salary) will fall
Having more engineers/scientists around will probably increase the demand for engineers/scientists over time, which will then increase price again. It depends on the field of course, but you can make some simple observations that might indicate how much cooperation exists. For instance, you can get answers from experts to a wide range of computer science questions simply by asking in a mailing list or IRC chat. Why do those people answer? Because the person answering the question learns, too, and it's much more likely that the person answering the question will get a new opportunity than lose an opportunity because the person who asked the question took a prospective job. That's a big reason why open source happens.
That's your defense?
Nope. I'm not defending. The post to which I replied tried to "disprove" God by confusing religious stories in specific with the spiritual world in general. I'm merely trying to separate the two.
So, how do you know that anyone other than you has a soul?
That's an interesting existential question. I don't really see how it matters how many people have a soul: as long as it's one or more (and I know at least that I do), there is some kind of spiritual aspect to this world.
the most militantly bible-thumping Christian types
I have no idea who you're referring to here.
Interesting, too, that no real mainstream religion has started up since the Enlightenment
Philosophy and spirituality have continued, however.
There are some questions that simply cannot be asked, let alone answered by, objective reasoning. Spirituality is entirely subjective, but many people clearly find it important. And society as a whole finds it important for important reasons. Objectively, there is no clear answer to the question: "should society encourage freedom or slavery?". That's an important question, and I can't think of an entirely objective way to analyze it.
It is impossible to entirely disprove God, since before one concept of God is disproved, someone has already pulled 10 more out their arse.
Again, you're looking at specific stories and trying to disprove those. You should think about what the reason is that those stories exist, and what is common among them, and what is different between stories of a religious nature and fantastic stories (there is overlap, of course).
God is that, whatever he is like, he has absolute moral authority
If one derives moral guidance from God, one should not take someone else's word about what God finds moral.
You don't do things because they are right, you do things because God says they are right.
I do whatever I want.
It's only the three Abrahamic religions that revolve around the notion of a singular God.
Many philosophical ideas can arguably be represented by some kind of higher being. If you move away from the specific stories people tell and the distinction between monotheism and polytheism, you see a general thread common among all religions that is more philosophical or spiritual in nature than any one story. The word "God" can represent a part of those spiritual or philosophical concepts.
As it is, you don't, since almost everything we find fits into categories pre-defined by evolution.
You can take any set of somewhat related items and say they "fit into pre-defined categories". How about furniture? We can fit almost any ancient piece of furniture we find into a modern furniture classification hierarchy. That doesn't prove anything.
Genetic theory, on the other hand, makes much more specific, testable predictions. That is a good theory.
I am not saying that there is no evidence of evolution. There is a lot of evidence upon which you can make a very reasonable conclusion that evolution characterizes past events. But that would not be a scientific conclusion, it would just be an informed conclusion, similar to a conclusion made by a jury about a crime.
Thermodynamics does pretty much stand on its own as it actually predates statistical mechanics.
Right. Thermodynamics is a theory, and it stands on its own. I think you misunderstood me. Theories are still theories even if they are based on another theory.
As I said in the post to which you replied: "There is a difference between theories based on other theories on the one hand; and conclusions based on theories on the other. Thermodynamics is a theory [based on other theories]; global warming is a conclusion [based on theories].". You can replace "global warming" with "evolution" and it would still hold true.
can you think of an alternative theory that would have predicted the discoveries that have been made since Darwin's version of evolution was first postulated
Any theory based on the idea that an offspring is mostly like its parents, but a little different. For instance, genetic theory.
Global warming does make predictions that can be measured by independent scientists.
As I said, "Global Warming" is a term loosely thrown around that usually means a conclusion. When talking about a specific model for global climate, that may indeed be a theory. Those are possible to test, although usually very difficult to control for other variables (like daily weather, natural cycles, solar output, etc.). They make a good attempt to control for these variables using statistics, and these models are useful to make some conclusions, albeit with a large margin of error.