Our higher education system is being destroyed by keeping dissenting viewpoints out when science has the intent of examining everything.
Your very premise is faulty. The word "viewpoint" is just another word for opinion. Science isn't about opinions. It is about evidence, experiments, and a rigorous commitment to setting presumptions aside.
The areas where scientists tend to disagree are those where there is not yet sufficient evident to establish a widely accepted, verifiable conclusion. Evolution is not one of them.
The evidence for Evolution is vast and well defined. If you want to falsify Evolution, you need more than a dissenting viewpoint. You need to provide some clear, repeatable, and scientifically testable evidence.
Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason. And yes, I know about most of the evidence, and yes I buy that (more than anything else right now). I also understand that we might possibly be all wrong at any moment.
We still call gravity a "Theory" as well. You are making the common mistake about the scientific use of the word.
According to the United States National Academy of Sciences:
Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.
I think he is missing the point because I do not think anyone is making that argument.
The standard Christian Nationalist argument is that the Founding Fathers were Christians and thus they must have used Christian principals in creating the government and thus it is imperative that we return the US to its Christian roots by adopting Christian principals in current laws (and that their God has a special Christian plan for America and that non-Christians are not really citizens).
While undoubtedly some of the Founding Fathers were Christians, the validity of the above stops there. The writings of the Founding Fathers make it clear to anyone who bothers to read them: They did not want any religious influence to inform government policy. They specifically warned against the dangers of such.
It is worth noting that prior to the formation of the USA, many of the colonies had official religions. While the new Federal government did not prohibit this until 1868, all states had disetablished religion long before that. The last being Massachusetts in 1833.
It's about making laws that do not punish the children or families of criminals directly when didn't participate in the crime, it's the entire all men are created equal and have been endowed with certain inalienable rights by their creator as the declaration of independence states.
Actually, these are well documented as Masonic principals, which is not surprising as many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons.
The common Christian mistake is to assume that any mention of a God or Creator means the Christian God. It can just as easily be attributed the Deist beliefs, which were common at the time (and widely held by Freemasons).
In short, everything about the Christian Nationalist movement flies in the face of the goals and principals of the Founding Fathers of the USA. To suggest otherwise is to deny history.
Of course, don't take my word for any of this, do some historical research of your own.
The point of Sarcasm is that the words, the text itself, convey a literal meaning, while the actual intent (which must be deduced by the reader knowing certain things about the writer; sometimes just tone of voice is enough) is the polar opposite.
Actually, you have just given a definition of irony. To be sarcasm, it must also be insulting, taunting, or express contempt for the subject.
You seem to be missing the point, perhaps willfully. The point is not whether or not the Founders believed in the Christian God, fairies, witches, unicorns, or any magical thinking.
The point here is whether or not the Founders intended for Christianity to be the basis of the government. From their writings, they clearly wanted a government based on reason, not religion.
To pretend the Founders were not Christians is anti-truth and makes you no better than the Texan book-writers.
That's a straw man argument.
This issue is not whether or not some or all of the Founding Fathers were Christians. The issue is the claim that the United States was founded according to Christian biblical precepts and thus its laws should reflect these beliefs. This claim is an outright history denying lie perpetrated by Christian Nationalists. This lie is easily revealed by reading what our Founding Fathers had to say about religion and government.
Some examples:
Benjamin Franklin: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
John Adams: "It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
James Maddison: "Because Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body. The latter are but the creatures and vicegerents of the former. Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited: it is limited with regard to the co-ordinate departments, more necessarily is it limited with regard to the constituents. The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves."
Do some research and you'll find more of the same. Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about the subject as well.
Here is another way to look back. In 1797 the Treaty of Tripoli was signed and unanimously ratified by the Senate. It contains the words "As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion..." and you would think that a "Christian Nation" would be upset by this clear statement. The complete text of this treaty and the news of its signing was published in several newspapers of the day and yet there is no evidence of any public outcry or backlash.
This nonsense about America being a Christian nation is revisionist history perpetrated by Christian Nationalists in an attempt to subvert the constitution and the clearly articulated intentions of the Founders of the United States. Of course, don't take my word for it, do some research of your own.
That's a scary thought, how quickly you could conceivably go from productive member of society to homeless.
This is apparently what keeps church attendance up.
Curiously enough, in countries where there is no fear of becoming destitute because of socialized medicine, food, housing, and even college education, what little popular interest there is in attending church is on the steady decline.
But what's the proportion of profitable open source companies to the total of all software companies?
That's irrelevant as to the question of whether or not open source can be profitable. I'll bet there are far more failed closed source software companies than failed open source software companies, and that is also irrelevant to the issue being discussed.
Just admit you don't know what you are talking about and move on...
Feel free to name two other companies that make significant money on Open Source.
How about Google? They run more open source than just about anyone on all their servers and Chrome, Android, and Chrome OS are all Open Source.
How about Yahoo? They reported $153 million in profit back in January according to the WSJ. They runs tons of open source and give away open source tools like YUI.
Amazon is built on, and contributes back to open source.
You want more? How about SugarCRM, Zimbra, Acquia, SnapLogic, and Untangle?
The point is, the open source business model is different than just selling software, but it is plenty profitable when you do it right.
I'm curious how you can to that conclusion. I just read the study you referenced and that is not at all what it says.
What is actually says (emphasis mine):
We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed.
Nowhere in that study do the authors claim that there is no such thing as the placebo effect.
Used to be I couldn't lie face-down for more than 10 minutes before my back would start hurting. And I couldn't carry my kids much. One day the pain got so bad I went to a chiro, and the guy did manage to straighten out my back. Hurt like heck when he "realigned" my spine, but that 13-year-injury is no longer there. So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont.
Except that while you may have seen a Chiropractor, I am willing to bet that he was also a licensed physical therapist. What you have described is a physical therapy treatment, not a chiropractic treatment.
This is the reason that a lot of people think that chiropractic treatments are legitimate: They are receiving physical therapy treatments from so called "mixed" chiropractors.
Strict, or so called "straight" chiropractors claim they can fix any problem in the body (heart disease, cancer, whatever) by manipulating your bones and muscles. That kind of nonsense is right up there with balancing the humors to restore the body's vitality.
I find it amusing that they think they have inventing something new here: Ads at the top of search results.
Regardless, as I rarely if ever search for anything on Twitter, I don't expect I'll ever see any ads. The day they start spamming ads into the tweets I'm following is the day I kiss Twitter goodbye.
Why not just do what we did? Create some udev rules so that anytime someone inserts a USB, instead of mounting it, the system silently logs the event and sends an alert. As far as the user can tell, the USB key just won't mount. And no, the users do not have root access to change this.
With some clever udev rules and a shell script, you can even record the make, model, and serial number of the USB key that was inserted.
Is it just me, or do the marketing folks at Microsoft have some serious deficiencies when it comes to naming products? Lets not forget The Monad Shell.
I guess this is what happens when they try to be creative. Otherwise everything is called either Windows, Business, or Office Something.
What this really means is that Microsoft is scared shitless. Anyone who really cares about security and privacy left Windows and Microsoft behind a long time ago.
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it.
Nonsense.
Allow me to call your attention to Fair use, a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.
Of course, none of that is actually relevant as Facebook is not making a copyright claim. They are claiming he violated their terms of use. I just scanned it and the only seemingly relevant text I can find is
If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
I don't think that work means what you think it means.
It would be great if this could somehow be used against telemarketers. I guess it will depend on the specific details of how the law is written. Not to mention that its difficult to track down the company that called when they are faking their outbound number.
Slashdot Mirror
Our higher education system is being destroyed by keeping dissenting viewpoints out when science has the intent of examining everything.
Your very premise is faulty. The word "viewpoint" is just another word for opinion. Science isn't about opinions. It is about evidence, experiments, and a rigorous commitment to setting presumptions aside.
The areas where scientists tend to disagree are those where there is not yet sufficient evident to establish a widely accepted, verifiable conclusion. Evolution is not one of them.
The evidence for Evolution is vast and well defined. If you want to falsify Evolution, you need more than a dissenting viewpoint. You need to provide some clear, repeatable, and scientifically testable evidence.
Yet, we still call it a "Theory" for some reason. And yes, I know about most of the evidence, and yes I buy that (more than anything else right now). I also understand that we might possibly be all wrong at any moment.
We still call gravity a "Theory" as well. You are making the common mistake about the scientific use of the word.
According to the United States National Academy of Sciences: Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.
I think he is missing the point because I do not think anyone is making that argument.
The standard Christian Nationalist argument is that the Founding Fathers were Christians and thus they must have used Christian principals in creating the government and thus it is imperative that we return the US to its Christian roots by adopting Christian principals in current laws (and that their God has a special Christian plan for America and that non-Christians are not really citizens).
While undoubtedly some of the Founding Fathers were Christians, the validity of the above stops there. The writings of the Founding Fathers make it clear to anyone who bothers to read them: They did not want any religious influence to inform government policy. They specifically warned against the dangers of such.
It is worth noting that prior to the formation of the USA, many of the colonies had official religions. While the new Federal government did not prohibit this until 1868, all states had disetablished religion long before that. The last being Massachusetts in 1833.
It's about making laws that do not punish the children or families of criminals directly when didn't participate in the crime, it's the entire all men are created equal and have been endowed with certain inalienable rights by their creator as the declaration of independence states.
Actually, these are well documented as Masonic principals, which is not surprising as many of the Founding Fathers were Freemasons.
The common Christian mistake is to assume that any mention of a God or Creator means the Christian God. It can just as easily be attributed the Deist beliefs, which were common at the time (and widely held by Freemasons).
In short, everything about the Christian Nationalist movement flies in the face of the goals and principals of the Founding Fathers of the USA. To suggest otherwise is to deny history.
Of course, don't take my word for any of this, do some historical research of your own.
The point of Sarcasm is that the words, the text itself, convey a literal meaning, while the actual intent (which must be deduced by the reader knowing certain things about the writer; sometimes just tone of voice is enough) is the polar opposite.
Actually, you have just given a definition of irony. To be sarcasm, it must also be insulting, taunting, or express contempt for the subject.
You seem to be missing the point, perhaps willfully. The point is not whether or not the Founders believed in the Christian God, fairies, witches, unicorns, or any magical thinking.
The point here is whether or not the Founders intended for Christianity to be the basis of the government. From their writings, they clearly wanted a government based on reason, not religion.
To pretend the Founders were not Christians is anti-truth and makes you no better than the Texan book-writers.
That's a straw man argument.
This issue is not whether or not some or all of the Founding Fathers were Christians. The issue is the claim that the United States was founded according to Christian biblical precepts and thus its laws should reflect these beliefs. This claim is an outright history denying lie perpetrated by Christian Nationalists. This lie is easily revealed by reading what our Founding Fathers had to say about religion and government.
Some examples:
Benjamin Franklin: "When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ‘tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
John Adams: "It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses."
James Maddison: "Because Religion be exempt from the authority of the Society at large, still less can it be subject to that of the Legislative Body. The latter are but the creatures and vicegerents of the former. Their jurisdiction is both derivative and limited: it is limited with regard to the co-ordinate departments, more necessarily is it limited with regard to the constituents. The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people. The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants. The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves."
Do some research and you'll find more of the same. Thomas Jefferson had a lot to say about the subject as well.
Here is another way to look back. In 1797 the Treaty of Tripoli was signed and unanimously ratified by the Senate. It contains the words "As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion..." and you would think that a "Christian Nation" would be upset by this clear statement. The complete text of this treaty and the news of its signing was published in several newspapers of the day and yet there is no evidence of any public outcry or backlash.
This nonsense about America being a Christian nation is revisionist history perpetrated by Christian Nationalists in an attempt to subvert the constitution and the clearly articulated intentions of the Founders of the United States. Of course, don't take my word for it, do some research of your own.
But, yeah, claiming to cure cancer by doing an adjustment is off in oogy-boogy land, and gives the competent bone manipulation folks a bad name.
Actually, you've got that backwards. Claiming to cure whatever ails you by adjustment is exactly what Chiropractic is all about.
That some practitioners also practice physical therapy (with good results) lends undue credence to an otherwise completely bogus profession.
There is absolutely nothing good from this.
It is a hoax.
Need proof? Try to actually place an order.
That's a scary thought, how quickly you could conceivably go from productive member of society to homeless.
This is apparently what keeps church attendance up.
Curiously enough, in countries where there is no fear of becoming destitute because of socialized medicine, food, housing, and even college education, what little popular interest there is in attending church is on the steady decline.
But what's the proportion of profitable open source companies to the total of all software companies?
That's irrelevant as to the question of whether or not open source can be profitable. I'll bet there are far more failed closed source software companies than failed open source software companies, and that is also irrelevant to the issue being discussed.
Just admit you don't know what you are talking about and move on...
Feel free to name two other companies that make significant money on Open Source.
How about Google? They run more open source than just about anyone on all their servers and Chrome, Android, and Chrome OS are all Open Source.
How about Yahoo? They reported $153 million in profit back in January according to the WSJ. They runs tons of open source and give away open source tools like YUI.
Amazon is built on, and contributes back to open source.
You want more? How about SugarCRM, Zimbra, Acquia, SnapLogic, and Untangle?
The point is, the open source business model is different than just selling software, but it is plenty profitable when you do it right.
So the ALA has a pretty valid point that E-cigs are still bad, even if they are less bad.
So we should ban E-Cigs, but not the "more" bad regular kind?
There's no such thing as the Placebo effect!
I'm curious how you can to that conclusion. I just read the study you referenced and that is not at all what it says.
What is actually says (emphasis mine):
We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed.
Nowhere in that study do the authors claim that there is no such thing as the placebo effect.
Used to be I couldn't lie face-down for more than 10 minutes before my back would start hurting. And I couldn't carry my kids much. One day the pain got so bad I went to a chiro, and the guy did manage to straighten out my back. Hurt like heck when he "realigned" my spine, but that 13-year-injury is no longer there. So yeah, I used to think they're bogus. But now I dont.
Except that while you may have seen a Chiropractor, I am willing to bet that he was also a licensed physical therapist. What you have described is a physical therapy treatment, not a chiropractic treatment.
This is the reason that a lot of people think that chiropractic treatments are legitimate: They are receiving physical therapy treatments from so called "mixed" chiropractors.
Strict, or so called "straight" chiropractors claim they can fix any problem in the body (heart disease, cancer, whatever) by manipulating your bones and muscles. That kind of nonsense is right up there with balancing the humors to restore the body's vitality.
I find it amusing that they think they have inventing something new here: Ads at the top of search results.
Regardless, as I rarely if ever search for anything on Twitter, I don't expect I'll ever see any ads. The day they start spamming ads into the tweets I'm following is the day I kiss Twitter goodbye.
Why not just do what we did? Create some udev rules so that anytime someone inserts a USB, instead of mounting it, the system silently logs the event and sends an alert. As far as the user can tell, the USB key just won't mount. And no, the users do not have root access to change this.
With some clever udev rules and a shell script, you can even record the make, model, and serial number of the USB key that was inserted.
Is it just me, or do the marketing folks at Microsoft have some serious deficiencies when it comes to naming products? Lets not forget The Monad Shell.
I guess this is what happens when they try to be creative. Otherwise everything is called either Windows, Business, or Office Something.
You think Google couldn't try the same thing with Microsoft's employees?
Right, because what Google needs is to dip into a clutch of programmers who still haven't figured out the first thing about software security..
Thanks for the laugh!
This is what the little "-" button is for, people. Lets subtract this crap until it goes negative.
What this really means is that Microsoft is scared shitless. Anyone who really cares about security and privacy left Windows and Microsoft behind a long time ago.
Finding something on the web does not give you the legal authority to publish and redistribute it.
Nonsense.
Allow me to call your attention to Fair use, a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as for commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.
Of course, none of that is actually relevant as Facebook is not making a copyright claim. They are claiming he violated their terms of use. I just scanned it and the only seemingly relevant text I can find is
If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.
This is one of those cases where the Microsoft engineers who wrote their particular extension of DOM were *much better* at writing the standard than the W3C was, since they anticipated and compensated for a use case the W3C apparently didn't even bother thinking about.
I don't think that work means what you think it means.
I think not, as the law is pretty clear about requiring
...THE INTENT TO DECEIVE, DEFRAUD OR MISLEAD;
and since your Google Voice number is still a number belonging to you, I doubt it would be a crime to use it as your caller id.
...all telemarketing firms in Mississippi are relocating to other states.
It would be great if this could somehow be used against telemarketers. I guess it will depend on the specific details of how the law is written. Not to mention that its difficult to track down the company that called when they are faking their outbound number.