Yes, there is almost no correlation between how well a browser does on Acid tests and how well it renders pages on the web. The purpose of the Acid tests is to break the chicken-and-egg problem of web development. The web developers tend not to use features unless all popular browsers support them. On the other hand, the developers of the web browsers tend not to add features that are not used by web developers. Without anyone willing to go first, the implementation and use of new web standards stalls.
The purpose of the Acid tests is to break this logjam by using these new standards in a very public way so that web developers will be motivated to implement them. The "my browser does better than your browser" posturing is a bit immature, but as a side effect it popularizes the faults of browsers and motivates the browser developers to fix them. Then, the web developers use the new features after they are well supported.
The test consists largely of 100 JavaScript tests designed to throw an assertion on failure and return a certain value on pass. The score is how many of the tests out of 100 pass. You can see which tests failed by clicking or shift-clicking the A in Acid3 after the test completes. In the sense that each test can relatively independently pass or fail (although some tests depend on previous tests), yes, it is a quantitative test.
The other part of the test is rendering the Acid3 text with shadow and the colored rectangles. By seeing how the Acid3 test fails in many other browsers, you can see that it can also render X, Fail, and a picture of a cat on failure of some rendering tests, typically in red so they stand out.
I said nothing about whether anyone should be believed or disbelieved. I'm merely saying that disagreeing is not the same thing as a controversy. A controversy requires some sort of active debate or argument. Standing up and saying "I don't believe in evolution" is neither. It is a simple statement of disagreement. There have been a few debates about evolution vs. intelligent design (and even a court case), but again, these seem to be mainly the work of the Discovery Institute trying to make it look like evolution is controversial.
But the Discovery Institute does not say that they disagree. They say that scientific community disagrees. That's the controversy they made up. Many people get confused and think there's also a religious controversy, and that many major churches disagree with evolution. That controversy is also made up.
It seems to be your assertion that there exists a legitimate scientific controversy over how the species of life that exist today came into being. What is the hypothesis that is proposed as the serious scientific alternative to evolution? What predictions does it make? How would we test whether that hypothesis is incorrect? What sort of evidence would prove that the hypothesis is wrong?
Well, certainly there are lots of people who individually take issue with evolution. There are also lots of people who individually believe they've been abducted by aliens. That doesn't mean there's any controversy over alien abductions.
You are correct. In fact, it seems that the vast majority of Christian institutions, and institutions of other religions, do not take issue with evolution. It's the Discovery Institute who takes issue with the notion of evolution. They've manufactured the idea a controversy over evolution, when no such controversy exists.
No, evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with God or religion. Evolution is about science, that is, making objective statements about what we can observe in the natural world. Religion is a completely separate domain, having to do with beliefs about what is right and wrong and the explaining supernatural world. Even the Pope doesn't see evolution as fighting religious beliefs.
I agree with most of what you say, except for that bit about a law coming closer to the definition of truth. A law is a belief about an observation, and a theory is a belief about explanation. A law is as close to the truth about what events occur as theory is to why they occur. It is this difference that causes laws to be able to predict better that theories do. We can directly observe what happens, and quantify to many decimal places exactly what happens. We cannot directly observe why things happen, only infer why.
As someone who has had this very tiring argument with several IDers, I will say that they always come back with "what predictions does evolution make, and how do you test them?"
Evolution predicts that the rate of genetic mutations will determine the amount of genetic difference between two species that share a common ancestor given the time the two species split, and also predict the time when two species split from each other given the amount of genetic difference between the two species. That is, by measuring the amount of genetic difference between two species, we can determine when their common ancestor lived. When we look in the fossil record and date the fossils, we see many of these predicted common ancestors and the species that are intermediate between the common ancestor and the modern species.
To make it even simpler, imagine that we found a human skull that was dated to be 100 million years old. That would instantly disprove evolution, because according to evolution, humans must have evolved after the common ancestor to humans and other apes.
Science students are all taught current scientific theories as fact, even though it is agreed that they may in fact be wrong. Why point out this fact specifically when teaching evolution? We know for a fact that our understanding of relativity is incomplete and that our understanding of quantum physics is incomplete, but when we teach students these ideas, we teach them as fact. In fact, I was taught Newtonian physics as if is was fact, when we know not only that it is incorrect, but exactly how to correct its problems. Later, we were taught relativistic physics as fact, and no one seemed disturbed that this contradicted what we had learned earlier. We all seemed comfortable that we were learning theories, and that at any time they can be disproven or improved upon. The theory of evolution is no different in that regard. On the other hand, evolution seems to explain our observations quite well, and no one seems to have a scientifically valid alternative theory. Therefore, there are no difference "sides" to teach in a science class.
Laws are not "higher truths" than theories. Laws are statements about what we can observe and theories are explanations for what we can observe. In essence, laws are the what and theories are the why. Both can be proven wrong. In fact, a law can be proven wrong instantly by one single counterexample where is fails to hold true.
If anything replaces religion, I would say it's mathematics. We are handed axioms that we must believe in without proof. In other words, we must take them on faith. Mathematics: it's the new religion. Perhaps we should stop being so dogmatic about mathematics and instead teach all the various potential axiomatic systems to our schoolchildren, and let them decide for themselves which they would choose to believe. That couldn't possibly be confusing, could it?
I don't understand why you think you'd be flamed for merely expressing your beliefs. The argument is not about whether evolution is correct or ID is correct. It's about what should be taught in schools and what constitutes good science. Whether the ideas in ID are correct or not is beside the point. ID is not science, as it is does not offer hypotheses that are testable, and therefore does not have a place in science classrooms. If we want to teach scientific controversies in school, we should teach actual scientific controversies, not made-up ones like evolution vs. ID.
No, you've got it backwards. Acceleration is a change in velocity. If the Earth is orbiting the sun, it is changing velocity (because it is constantly changing direction and not traveling in a straight line), and therefore is experiencing acceleration.
The general theory of relativity follows from the idea that you cannot distinguish between the force due to acceleration and the force due to gravity. If you are standing up in a closed elevator experiencing 1 G, is that because the Earth is pulling on you, or is it because the elevator is accelerating "up" at 10 m/s? It doesn't matter: if you shine a light beam across the elevator, it will bend "down" no matter what is causing the "downward" force. From this thought experiment, it follows that matter warps space-time, thus causing the effects we feel as gravity.
The way to challenge an accepted scientific theory is not to "critique" it. The way is to come up with alternative theories that make testable predictions, and then use the predictions to falsify the incorrect theories. What predictions does the "theory" of ID make, and how do we test them?
Sorry, a web page claiming that a conjecture is science is not good enough for me. How about a research paper published in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal? That's the way new scientific ideas are usually presented to the world. I'm leery of any textbook, web page, or press release announcing a new scientific breakthrough unless it has met with a considerable amount of objective scrutiny. Even many properly executed and peer-reviewed papers come to incorrect conclusions. The real test is in repeatability, so I would demand multiple papers independently verifying any new theory before I would want it taught to high schoolers or even undergraduates.
Additionally, science generally consists of hypotheses that make testable predictions. What sort of predictions does ID make, and how do we test them?
Scientifically speaking, there are no "two sides". The "teach the controversy" idea is just another tactic for trying to get religion and morals taught in schools under the guise of science. No one is asking to block the teaching of ID simply because they do not agree with it. They are asking to block the teaching of ID in science classes because it isn't science.
Mozilla has offered nightly builds of Firefox 3 for almost three years, in addition to numerous alpha releases and three betas so far. To my knowledge, no builds of Internet Explorer 8 have been made available to the public yet. Frankly, we have yet to see IE8 for ourselves, and we certainly have no idea how close it is to release.
If it's Acid tests you're concerned about, you'll be glad to know that Firefox 3 passes Acid2. Firefox 3 beta 3 performs about as well on Acid3 as Opera 9.5 beta 1, although both are beat by Safari development builds. Safari doesn't seem to do quite as well as Firefox on real-world pages, however.
My firefox jumps to about 400 MB after about 2 weeks of being open.
That's fantastic. I've never run any browser for more than about a week. I've never even been able to keep Windows running for more than about two weeks. Firefox 3 should use even less memory after long periods of time, and I can only hope it will be stable enough to run for weeks at a time.
No, first of all IE7 will be popular for many years to come, so you will still need to deal with its quirks. Also, IE8 will also probably not be nearly as standards compliant as Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.5. It will simply now do the best it can at rendering web pages by default, instead of rendering web pages with all the IE7 quirks by default. That means you'll still be coding to IE8's quirks just like we're still coding for IE7's quirks now. The only difference this announcement makes is that we don't have to put a silly "render this page according to standards, you dope" tag in all our web pages for IE8.
No, it's not "impressive" nor did I mean it to be. It's about as standards compliant as the other popular browsers (excepting IE), that is, Safari and Opera. That's why I'm wondering why the OP is complaining about Firefox's standards compliance. It seems as good as the other decent browsers, so what's the problem with Firefox?
One thing you should do if you've had problems with Firefox 2 is create a new profile, whether you decide to stick with Firefox 2 or update to Firefox 3. In my experience in the MozillaZine forums, that one simple suggestion seems to fix most problems. There's lots of other advice for fixing problems in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.
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Yes, there is almost no correlation between how well a browser does on Acid tests and how well it renders pages on the web. The purpose of the Acid tests is to break the chicken-and-egg problem of web development. The web developers tend not to use features unless all popular browsers support them. On the other hand, the developers of the web browsers tend not to add features that are not used by web developers. Without anyone willing to go first, the implementation and use of new web standards stalls.
The purpose of the Acid tests is to break this logjam by using these new standards in a very public way so that web developers will be motivated to implement them. The "my browser does better than your browser" posturing is a bit immature, but as a side effect it popularizes the faults of browsers and motivates the browser developers to fix them. Then, the web developers use the new features after they are well supported.
The test consists largely of 100 JavaScript tests designed to throw an assertion on failure and return a certain value on pass. The score is how many of the tests out of 100 pass. You can see which tests failed by clicking or shift-clicking the A in Acid3 after the test completes. In the sense that each test can relatively independently pass or fail (although some tests depend on previous tests), yes, it is a quantitative test.
The other part of the test is rendering the Acid3 text with shadow and the colored rectangles. By seeing how the Acid3 test fails in many other browsers, you can see that it can also render X, Fail, and a picture of a cat on failure of some rendering tests, typically in red so they stand out.
I said nothing about whether anyone should be believed or disbelieved. I'm merely saying that disagreeing is not the same thing as a controversy. A controversy requires some sort of active debate or argument. Standing up and saying "I don't believe in evolution" is neither. It is a simple statement of disagreement. There have been a few debates about evolution vs. intelligent design (and even a court case), but again, these seem to be mainly the work of the Discovery Institute trying to make it look like evolution is controversial.
Sadly, the current Pope seems to favor "intelligent design" over evolution.
But the Discovery Institute does not say that they disagree. They say that scientific community disagrees. That's the controversy they made up. Many people get confused and think there's also a religious controversy, and that many major churches disagree with evolution. That controversy is also made up.
It seems to be your assertion that there exists a legitimate scientific controversy over how the species of life that exist today came into being. What is the hypothesis that is proposed as the serious scientific alternative to evolution? What predictions does it make? How would we test whether that hypothesis is incorrect? What sort of evidence would prove that the hypothesis is wrong?
Well, certainly there are lots of people who individually take issue with evolution. There are also lots of people who individually believe they've been abducted by aliens. That doesn't mean there's any controversy over alien abductions.
You are correct. In fact, it seems that the vast majority of Christian institutions, and institutions of other religions, do not take issue with evolution. It's the Discovery Institute who takes issue with the notion of evolution. They've manufactured the idea a controversy over evolution, when no such controversy exists.
No, evolution has nothing whatsoever to do with God or religion. Evolution is about science, that is, making objective statements about what we can observe in the natural world. Religion is a completely separate domain, having to do with beliefs about what is right and wrong and the explaining supernatural world. Even the Pope doesn't see evolution as fighting religious beliefs.
I agree with most of what you say, except for that bit about a law coming closer to the definition of truth. A law is a belief about an observation, and a theory is a belief about explanation. A law is as close to the truth about what events occur as theory is to why they occur. It is this difference that causes laws to be able to predict better that theories do. We can directly observe what happens, and quantify to many decimal places exactly what happens. We cannot directly observe why things happen, only infer why.
Evolution predicts that the rate of genetic mutations will determine the amount of genetic difference between two species that share a common ancestor given the time the two species split, and also predict the time when two species split from each other given the amount of genetic difference between the two species. That is, by measuring the amount of genetic difference between two species, we can determine when their common ancestor lived. When we look in the fossil record and date the fossils, we see many of these predicted common ancestors and the species that are intermediate between the common ancestor and the modern species.
To make it even simpler, imagine that we found a human skull that was dated to be 100 million years old. That would instantly disprove evolution, because according to evolution, humans must have evolved after the common ancestor to humans and other apes.
Science students are all taught current scientific theories as fact, even though it is agreed that they may in fact be wrong. Why point out this fact specifically when teaching evolution? We know for a fact that our understanding of relativity is incomplete and that our understanding of quantum physics is incomplete, but when we teach students these ideas, we teach them as fact. In fact, I was taught Newtonian physics as if is was fact, when we know not only that it is incorrect, but exactly how to correct its problems. Later, we were taught relativistic physics as fact, and no one seemed disturbed that this contradicted what we had learned earlier. We all seemed comfortable that we were learning theories, and that at any time they can be disproven or improved upon. The theory of evolution is no different in that regard. On the other hand, evolution seems to explain our observations quite well, and no one seems to have a scientifically valid alternative theory. Therefore, there are no difference "sides" to teach in a science class.
Laws are not "higher truths" than theories. Laws are statements about what we can observe and theories are explanations for what we can observe. In essence, laws are the what and theories are the why. Both can be proven wrong. In fact, a law can be proven wrong instantly by one single counterexample where is fails to hold true.
If anything replaces religion, I would say it's mathematics. We are handed axioms that we must believe in without proof. In other words, we must take them on faith. Mathematics: it's the new religion. Perhaps we should stop being so dogmatic about mathematics and instead teach all the various potential axiomatic systems to our schoolchildren, and let them decide for themselves which they would choose to believe. That couldn't possibly be confusing, could it?
I don't understand why you think you'd be flamed for merely expressing your beliefs. The argument is not about whether evolution is correct or ID is correct. It's about what should be taught in schools and what constitutes good science. Whether the ideas in ID are correct or not is beside the point. ID is not science, as it is does not offer hypotheses that are testable, and therefore does not have a place in science classrooms. If we want to teach scientific controversies in school, we should teach actual scientific controversies, not made-up ones like evolution vs. ID.
No, you've got it backwards. Acceleration is a change in velocity. If the Earth is orbiting the sun, it is changing velocity (because it is constantly changing direction and not traveling in a straight line), and therefore is experiencing acceleration.
The general theory of relativity follows from the idea that you cannot distinguish between the force due to acceleration and the force due to gravity. If you are standing up in a closed elevator experiencing 1 G, is that because the Earth is pulling on you, or is it because the elevator is accelerating "up" at 10 m/s? It doesn't matter: if you shine a light beam across the elevator, it will bend "down" no matter what is causing the "downward" force. From this thought experiment, it follows that matter warps space-time, thus causing the effects we feel as gravity.
The way to challenge an accepted scientific theory is not to "critique" it. The way is to come up with alternative theories that make testable predictions, and then use the predictions to falsify the incorrect theories. What predictions does the "theory" of ID make, and how do we test them?
Sorry, a web page claiming that a conjecture is science is not good enough for me. How about a research paper published in a respected, peer-reviewed scientific journal? That's the way new scientific ideas are usually presented to the world. I'm leery of any textbook, web page, or press release announcing a new scientific breakthrough unless it has met with a considerable amount of objective scrutiny. Even many properly executed and peer-reviewed papers come to incorrect conclusions. The real test is in repeatability, so I would demand multiple papers independently verifying any new theory before I would want it taught to high schoolers or even undergraduates.
Additionally, science generally consists of hypotheses that make testable predictions. What sort of predictions does ID make, and how do we test them?
Scientifically speaking, there are no "two sides". The "teach the controversy" idea is just another tactic for trying to get religion and morals taught in schools under the guise of science. No one is asking to block the teaching of ID simply because they do not agree with it. They are asking to block the teaching of ID in science classes because it isn't science.
Mozilla has offered nightly builds of Firefox 3 for almost three years, in addition to numerous alpha releases and three betas so far. To my knowledge, no builds of Internet Explorer 8 have been made available to the public yet. Frankly, we have yet to see IE8 for ourselves, and we certainly have no idea how close it is to release.
If it's Acid tests you're concerned about, you'll be glad to know that Firefox 3 passes Acid2. Firefox 3 beta 3 performs about as well on Acid3 as Opera 9.5 beta 1, although both are beat by Safari development builds. Safari doesn't seem to do quite as well as Firefox on real-world pages, however.
No, first of all IE7 will be popular for many years to come, so you will still need to deal with its quirks. Also, IE8 will also probably not be nearly as standards compliant as Firefox 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9.5. It will simply now do the best it can at rendering web pages by default, instead of rendering web pages with all the IE7 quirks by default. That means you'll still be coding to IE8's quirks just like we're still coding for IE7's quirks now. The only difference this announcement makes is that we don't have to put a silly "render this page according to standards, you dope" tag in all our web pages for IE8.
No, it's not "impressive" nor did I mean it to be. It's about as standards compliant as the other popular browsers (excepting IE), that is, Safari and Opera. That's why I'm wondering why the OP is complaining about Firefox's standards compliance. It seems as good as the other decent browsers, so what's the problem with Firefox?
One thing you should do if you've had problems with Firefox 2 is create a new profile, whether you decide to stick with Firefox 2 or update to Firefox 3. In my experience in the MozillaZine forums, that one simple suggestion seems to fix most problems. There's lots of other advice for fixing problems in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.