Bullshit. Cable quality is important for just about anything -- ESPECIALLY video. If you are using dollar-store RCA cables that barely work for audio, they will not work at all for video or digital audio. Audio requires frequencies of less than 20KHz, video requires several megahertz. If you don't believe me, go run gigabit ethernet over Cat 3 and tell me how well your setup works.
You are perpetrating another myth. There is a very good reason to use thick cable for 12 volts. As you decrease the voltage, you need to transmit more current to get the same amount of power. An amplifier that draws 10 amps from a 120V outlet will have to draw 100 amps if run from 12V. Thus, the cable needs to have 10x the cross-sectional area. As far as gold plating: it prevents corrosion and has low electrical resistance, which is important at those amperages.
Please, if you don't know what you are talking about, shut up. You are spreading misinformation.
First, there is no such thing as a digital signal. You can't send numbers through a wire, you can only send voltage levels. This is an example of an analog signal. Poor quality cabling or interference can and will cause errors in transmission.
Second, nobody uses 0/+5V signaling for anything modern. This is not compatible with high bitrates. For example, USB 2 high speed uses 400mV differential signaling at 480Mbps. Cable and connector quality is critical, and poor quality cable will not work at all.
Third, most digital interfaces have no error correction capability. Digital audio (SPDIF, which is what you were talking about) has no error correction OR detection capability. If you have bad cable, it will cause sound glitches, crackling, and other nastiness. Also, SPDIF transmits the master clock over that cable. If the cable is of poor quality, it will cause excessive clock jitter, which reduces sound quality and causes distortion.
By the way, you can't use audio cable for SPDIF. SPDIF requires coaxial video cable (75 ohm impedance). It will not work well with anything else.
Actually, it is much easier for many developing nations to give everyone broadband. The US is burdened with lots of slow, legacy networks that were installed many years ago and are still in use. They are obsolete, but they are a huge investment nevertheless, so nobody wants to rip them out and replace them.
If a developing country gets the idea to build some communications infrastructure, they could easily and cheaply put in wireless or fiber connectivity, since there is usually no problem getting spectrum or right of way. After all, running regular phone service costs almost as much as running fiber. In my opinion, 20 years down the road the US will still be using cable and DSL while developing countries will have fiber to the premises.
Different cards on that site have different rounding. Sure, it's a rip-off if you don't read the fine print. It saves you money if you do. Three minute rounding is not bad if you make many long calls and the per-minute rate is lower.
Many phonecards don't have any extra charges. Unless you talk for hours on end, it's usually a better deal, too. Look around, there are lots of good links in this thread.
The best way to get cheap international rates is with a phone card. Try this place, I've had good experience with them. The rates are usually way cheaper than what any VOIP provider offers. Plus, it's convenient in that you can use any phone as long as it can call 1-800 numbers. If you have free long distance, you can use the "local access" (non-toll-free) numbers and save some more. The main things to watch out for with phone cards are connection fees, rounding, and expiration. Unlike a long distance provider, there are no hidden taxes and USF fees.
Go read the articles and you'll appreciate what a tremendous amount of work this was -- a hell of an achievement of the variety that makes most PhD applications look like a 3rd grade book report.
Unfortunately, it's an achievement akin to digging a large hole in the ground with a spoon. Someone wasted a lot of their time to do something useless in the most inefficient way possible.
You take a yogi up into the mountains next to naked, pile snow on him as he meditates, and he melts it. If you did this to a normal person, he would quite obviously freeze to death.
This was actually quite interesting, but I don't see any need for supernatural explanations. Given the assumptions that it's not bullshit and the effect is real, I don't see anything supernatural about it. Reading this, it says the guy was able to sit in the snow for a few hours.
I honestly don't see anything supernatural about it. Humans are quite adaptable creatures, and they will survive in cold weather quite well assuming the weather isn't too cold (it may have been well above freezing in that case).
Using self-induced hypnosis, a person can very well endure a few hours of sitting in cold weather (especially since I got the impression that he was making rapid muscle movements). Heat loss isn't that fast, and the body can produce heat very well. If you ever swam in the ocean, the temperatures are usually around 40-50 degrees F and it's possible to spend hours in the water (where heat loss is many times faster than in air).
First, IE has nothing to do with the kernel. It runs in userspace. It's integrated with the shell (explorer.exe), but that runs in userspace and there have been no holes that resulted in privilege escalation.
The main problem with IE is that it hasn't been designed with security in mind. Firefox is a little better, but there's not much a browser can do about the general stupidity of users. Even if the browser is bulletproof, people will download and install trojans and spyware. After all, the most common thing that gets exploited is the fact that users always click "yes" to every activex warning box.
Firefox doesn't have activex, but it has software installation, which isn't that far removed. It can definitely be used to install spyware given a stupid enough user.
I don't want to get involved in the first argument; I'll let the physicists sort out the 27-dimensional manifolds. You are missing the big picture. Why the hell does there have to be a first event? Thinking in terms of our current physics knowledge leads nowhere, because we know about as much about this stuff as the ancient Greeks did about quantum mechanics. The point is, when you have multiple explanations that are all plausible, you choose the simplest one.
I could come up with lots of plausible explanations that are a lot simpler than a god. Here's a really simple one: the universe could run in cycles. When all the energy turns into heat, it collapses upon itself and starts over. Very simple; no omniscient being required.
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
Look at what you wrote again. You just replaced a big question with an infinitely bigger question. The original question was: "Where does matter come from". The new question is "Where did the omnipotent being come from". Tell me what's simpler: a bunch of atoms that follow simple rule or an omnipotent being?
The bible. Doesn't seem to be entirely historically accurate (eg, location of the city of Ai), but it's not too far off on stuff that can be tested.
The bible is just a book. There is nothing special about it other than the fact that it is really old and nobody is quite sure who wrote what and when. How can a book written by humans be evidence of anything? Do you think a sci-fi novel is evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization?
Scores of prophets, most of which had pretty good prediction rates of specific events.
First, if you make a large enough number of vague predictions, many will come true. Second, most of the historical records we have came from priests, monks, and other religious people. What makes you think facts are reported accurately and weren't just changed to fit the storyline better?
Thousands of saints, and associated miracles (many with shady evidence surrounding them, eg the virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but some are fairly well-documented, eg Joan of Arc).
What miracles?
Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
Do you have anything except anecdotes to support that point? Usually, these phenomena are not reproducible, which means that they don't exist as far as science is concerned. As far as I am concerned, roughly 60% of the "miracles" I heard of were hallucinations, misunderstandings, or urban legends. The other 40% are hoaxes.
Nobody knows a natural explanation for tumo (Buddhist spiritual heating), although it is reasonable to believe that one exists.
Assuming that "heating" is supposed to be "healing," I would say they are full of it. If it really does work, it should be reproducible in large, well-controlled trials. If it's just an occasional "miracle," I would attribute it to the human immune system and the fact that our brain sees correlation just about anywhere even when there isn't any.
But as I stated above, religion is not a scientific theory, and so has different standards of evidence.
You can't just handwave this away. It is very much possible to test many miracles. For instance, it is not difficult to design an experiment which tests if prayer has any effect on the probability of curing a terminal disease. The thing is, these experiments never show any significant results (when they are properly conducted). This just causes religious fanatics to come up with more obscure miracles that are more difficult to test. This quickly causes scientists to lose interest.
If you actually have links to any actual studies you think disprove my point, I'd love to read them. All of the ones I have seen were more like urban legends.
How about the green hairly alien theory then? It's perfectly disprovable -- if you manage to travel there and back, which is most certainly possible. Are you saying that's a legitimate theory? Because it sure as hell isn't.
There is an infinite number of theories that are disprovable. But none of them would ever be considered valid unless you have at least some data that supports it. Basically, you are saying that the following "theories" are valid until someone disproves them: - Fish farts are a major contributor to global warming - Whistling loudly all day causes cancer - Heating a diamond to 200000 degrees kelvin causes it to be a superconductor
Note that all of these are testable. None of these are easy to disprove. By your definition, they are theories until someone disproves them. Are you sure about that? If you are right, I'd make a great scientist. I could come up with weird shit all day and let someone else disprove it. Fortunately, that's not how science works.
[physics laws] govern the behavior of the entire universe.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Physics laws provide a useful approximation. They are not exact, and they don't govern anything. The best they can do is tell you what will happen in a certain situation. And even then it only does it approximately.
That's not to say that we have stated the laws correctly, but the whole of science is founded on the assumption that there are real, rational, understandable physical laws.
If something is too complex for us to predict, we won't do it. There are plenty of things which are completely unpredictable. Some of them we can predict statistically (weather), others not at all. There are also things which we can predict very accurately.
Yes, these laws are simply the properties of matter, but that does nothing to tell us how they could come to be.
Agreed. However, you are making a fundamental assumption. That is, that matter has been created by someone for some purpose. Matter is simple enough that it doesn't need to have been created; as you put it, it just is.
However, the concept of a "God" is enormously complex. It's not like the concept of "matter". Matter doesn't do anything; it just has certain properties which cause it to do certain very simple things. Most of the time, lots of simple things abiding by simple rules can form very complex systems, which is what our world is.
Now let's look at the concept of "God". Is a god made of regular matter -- protons, neutrons, and so on? Where is it located? Why can it just arbitrarily break rules that everything else follows? Furthermore, how do we know about it? Do we just believe someone is out there somewhere? Why not believe in ghosts then?
Why would an omniscient being care what we do any more than a scientist cares what bacteria do in a petri dish? Why do religious norms seem to exactly correlate with the rules one would want people to follow to more easily control them? The problem with the god concept is that it just doesn't make any sense; people have just been successfully brainwashed for centuries.
I'm not so sure. Most of the exploits in IE don't involve any privilege escalation -- it's simply misleading the user. I think Firefox definitely has many of the same problems IE does, since solving them is more than just reworking the interface slightly or having "tighter code".
Are you so sure it's impossible to spoof URL bars in Firefox? Or mislead the user into installing software? Firefox also has stuff like semi-automatic plugin installation, and I'm sure there are plenty of holes to be found. Also, there are most likely dozens of possible exploits using the XUL interface.
I'm not saying Firefox sucks (I'm using it right now), but I wouldn't tout it as bulletproof. It's not.
Looks like someone needs to take a reading comprehension class. Read meaning #1 again. Repeat until you understand what it is saying. Then read it again just to be sure. Then tell me why you think it doesn't say you draw hypotheses from empirical observations.
Besides, since when is "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language" the authority on all matters of human knowledge? A dictionary is a convenient way to learn approximate meanings of words you don't know, but it's by no means authoritative.
First, laws of physics are not all-powerful. The only place they exist is the human brain, and they don't do anything other than telling humans many aspects of how matter has been seen behave. As far as "creating" them: they were created by scientists who lived in the last few hundred years. The things they describe are simply observed properties of matter.
The green alien proposition might be testable. But it cannot be a valid scientific theory until I come across some evidence that implies they are there. You can't pull ideas out of your ass and call them theories, even if they are testable. You need to have some kind of empirical evidence.
With evolution, there is lots of evidence. There are fossils. There is artificial selection (which is a form of evolution). Bacteria can be seen evolving. There is DNA evidence. At this point, it's more a question of how the first self-replicating cell came to be rather than a question of who created humans and animals.
If you had bothered to read the next sentence of my post, you would have noticed that my description of science is a slightly more concise version of yours.
My point is that you do not assume something without empirical data that logically implies that assumption. This is a common fallacy used by creationism proponents. As in, "my theory is just as good as yours because there is no evidence that disproves it." Even if the theory is potentially testable (say, when time travel is developed), it cannot be a scientific theory until there is some empirical data that strongly implies it.
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
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You failed science class, didn't you? You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge. Just because it's impossible to disprove the existence of green hairy aliens on Alpha Centauri doesn't imply that you can claim they are there.
If you still want to argue, how about some classic mind-twisters: if some intelligent being created life, who created the intelligent being? How the hell did he become all-powerful? Does this not violate the basic laws of physics as well as produce logical contradictions? What evidence do you have for the existence of such a being?
Re:how about "creationism" crap?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Since creationism is not scientific, it should not be called an alternative theory. They should not be put side-by-side, since they are not on the same footing.
Burglary is not considered a violent crime as far as I know. Burglars try to do their deed when the owner is not home. Otherwise, it's called robbery. In any case, burglars get sent to jail for stealing stuff, not because they cause violent confrontations.
I don't see why incompetent criminals should get a significantly lesser sentence. I mean, seriously. If you attempt to rob a bank but don't succeed at it, how is that a lesser crime?
I don't know of any murder cases that got 4 years. Usually it's at least life in prison. The only time someone would get off that easy is if it's an accident with a negligence component.
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Bullshit. Cable quality is important for just about anything -- ESPECIALLY video. If you are using dollar-store RCA cables that barely work for audio, they will not work at all for video or digital audio. Audio requires frequencies of less than 20KHz, video requires several megahertz. If you don't believe me, go run gigabit ethernet over Cat 3 and tell me how well your setup works.
Short of a faraday cage (around each cable) there isn't any way to prevent ALL cross talk
It's called a shielded cable. They are used quite often, though not for networking (due to their higher cost).
You are perpetrating another myth. There is a very good reason to use thick cable for 12 volts. As you decrease the voltage, you need to transmit more current to get the same amount of power. An amplifier that draws 10 amps from a 120V outlet will have to draw 100 amps if run from 12V. Thus, the cable needs to have 10x the cross-sectional area. As far as gold plating: it prevents corrosion and has low electrical resistance, which is important at those amperages.
Please, if you don't know what you are talking about, shut up. You are spreading misinformation.
First, there is no such thing as a digital signal. You can't send numbers through a wire, you can only send voltage levels. This is an example of an analog signal. Poor quality cabling or interference can and will cause errors in transmission.
Second, nobody uses 0/+5V signaling for anything modern. This is not compatible with high bitrates. For example, USB 2 high speed uses 400mV differential signaling at 480Mbps. Cable and connector quality is critical, and poor quality cable will not work at all.
Third, most digital interfaces have no error correction capability. Digital audio (SPDIF, which is what you were talking about) has no error correction OR detection capability. If you have bad cable, it will cause sound glitches, crackling, and other nastiness. Also, SPDIF transmits the master clock over that cable. If the cable is of poor quality, it will cause excessive clock jitter, which reduces sound quality and causes distortion.
By the way, you can't use audio cable for SPDIF. SPDIF requires coaxial video cable (75 ohm impedance). It will not work well with anything else.
Actually, it is much easier for many developing nations to give everyone broadband. The US is burdened with lots of slow, legacy networks that were installed many years ago and are still in use. They are obsolete, but they are a huge investment nevertheless, so nobody wants to rip them out and replace them.
If a developing country gets the idea to build some communications infrastructure, they could easily and cheaply put in wireless or fiber connectivity, since there is usually no problem getting spectrum or right of way. After all, running regular phone service costs almost as much as running fiber. In my opinion, 20 years down the road the US will still be using cable and DSL while developing countries will have fiber to the premises.
Different cards on that site have different rounding. Sure, it's a rip-off if you don't read the fine print. It saves you money if you do. Three minute rounding is not bad if you make many long calls and the per-minute rate is lower.
Many phonecards don't have any extra charges. Unless you talk for hours on end, it's usually a better deal, too. Look around, there are lots of good links in this thread.
The best way to get cheap international rates is with a phone card. Try this place, I've had good experience with them. The rates are usually way cheaper than what any VOIP provider offers. Plus, it's convenient in that you can use any phone as long as it can call 1-800 numbers. If you have free long distance, you can use the "local access" (non-toll-free) numbers and save some more. The main things to watch out for with phone cards are connection fees, rounding, and expiration. Unlike a long distance provider, there are no hidden taxes and USF fees.
Laser pointer versus the sun.
Go read the articles and you'll appreciate what a tremendous amount of work this was -- a hell of an achievement of the variety that makes most PhD applications look like a 3rd grade book report.
Unfortunately, it's an achievement akin to digging a large hole in the ground with a spoon. Someone wasted a lot of their time to do something useless in the most inefficient way possible.
You take a yogi up into the mountains next to naked, pile snow on him as he meditates, and he melts it. If you did this to a normal person, he would quite obviously freeze to death.
This was actually quite interesting, but I don't see any need for supernatural explanations. Given the assumptions that it's not bullshit and the effect is real, I don't see anything supernatural about it. Reading this, it says the guy was able to sit in the snow for a few hours.
I honestly don't see anything supernatural about it. Humans are quite adaptable creatures, and they will survive in cold weather quite well assuming the weather isn't too cold (it may have been well above freezing in that case).
Using self-induced hypnosis, a person can very well endure a few hours of sitting in cold weather (especially since I got the impression that he was making rapid muscle movements). Heat loss isn't that fast, and the body can produce heat very well. If you ever swam in the ocean, the temperatures are usually around 40-50 degrees F and it's possible to spend hours in the water (where heat loss is many times faster than in air).
First, IE has nothing to do with the kernel. It runs in userspace. It's integrated with the shell (explorer.exe), but that runs in userspace and there have been no holes that resulted in privilege escalation.
The main problem with IE is that it hasn't been designed with security in mind. Firefox is a little better, but there's not much a browser can do about the general stupidity of users. Even if the browser is bulletproof, people will download and install trojans and spyware. After all, the most common thing that gets exploited is the fact that users always click "yes" to every activex warning box.
Firefox doesn't have activex, but it has software installation, which isn't that far removed. It can definitely be used to install spyware given a stupid enough user.
I don't want to get involved in the first argument; I'll let the physicists sort out the 27-dimensional manifolds. You are missing the big picture. Why the hell does there have to be a first event? Thinking in terms of our current physics knowledge leads nowhere, because we know about as much about this stuff as the ancient Greeks did about quantum mechanics. The point is, when you have multiple explanations that are all plausible, you choose the simplest one.
I could come up with lots of plausible explanations that are a lot simpler than a god. Here's a really simple one: the universe could run in cycles. When all the energy turns into heat, it collapses upon itself and starts over. Very simple; no omniscient being required.
Are you suggesting that an omnipotent being would be bound by the laws of physics (or logic, for that matter) in a world it created?
Look at what you wrote again. You just replaced a big question with an infinitely bigger question. The original question was: "Where does matter come from". The new question is "Where did the omnipotent being come from". Tell me what's simpler: a bunch of atoms that follow simple rule or an omnipotent being?
The bible. Doesn't seem to be entirely historically accurate (eg, location of the city of Ai), but it's not too far off on stuff that can be tested.
The bible is just a book. There is nothing special about it other than the fact that it is really old and nobody is quite sure who wrote what and when. How can a book written by humans be evidence of anything? Do you think a sci-fi novel is evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization?
Scores of prophets, most of which had pretty good prediction rates of specific events.
First, if you make a large enough number of vague predictions, many will come true. Second, most of the historical records we have came from priests, monks, and other religious people. What makes you think facts are reported accurately and weren't just changed to fit the storyline better?
Thousands of saints, and associated miracles (many with shady evidence surrounding them, eg the virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, but some are fairly well-documented, eg Joan of Arc).
What miracles?
Many miracles have been submitted for testing to scientific groups, who are unable to explain the events within the bounds of science, and were convinced that something strange was going on (strange meaning supernatural, or natural but previously undocumented, as opposed to faked).
Do you have anything except anecdotes to support that point? Usually, these phenomena are not reproducible, which means that they don't exist as far as science is concerned. As far as I am concerned, roughly 60% of the "miracles" I heard of were hallucinations, misunderstandings, or urban legends. The other 40% are hoaxes.
Nobody knows a natural explanation for tumo (Buddhist spiritual heating), although it is reasonable to believe that one exists.
Assuming that "heating" is supposed to be "healing," I would say they are full of it. If it really does work, it should be reproducible in large, well-controlled trials. If it's just an occasional "miracle," I would attribute it to the human immune system and the fact that our brain sees correlation just about anywhere even when there isn't any.
But as I stated above, religion is not a scientific theory, and so has different standards of evidence.
You can't just handwave this away. It is very much possible to test many miracles. For instance, it is not difficult to design an experiment which tests if prayer has any effect on the probability of curing a terminal disease. The thing is, these experiments never show any significant results (when they are properly conducted). This just causes religious fanatics to come up with more obscure miracles that are more difficult to test. This quickly causes scientists to lose interest.
If you actually have links to any actual studies you think disprove my point, I'd love to read them. All of the ones I have seen were more like urban legends.
How about the green hairly alien theory then? It's perfectly disprovable -- if you manage to travel there and back, which is most certainly possible. Are you saying that's a legitimate theory? Because it sure as hell isn't.
There is an infinite number of theories that are disprovable. But none of them would ever be considered valid unless you have at least some data that supports it. Basically, you are saying that the following "theories" are valid until someone disproves them:
- Fish farts are a major contributor to global warming
- Whistling loudly all day causes cancer
- Heating a diamond to 200000 degrees kelvin causes it to be a superconductor
Note that all of these are testable. None of these are easy to disprove. By your definition, they are theories until someone disproves them. Are you sure about that? If you are right, I'd make a great scientist. I could come up with weird shit all day and let someone else disprove it. Fortunately, that's not how science works.
[physics laws] govern the behavior of the entire universe.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Physics laws provide a useful approximation. They are not exact, and they don't govern anything. The best they can do is tell you what will happen in a certain situation. And even then it only does it approximately.
That's not to say that we have stated the laws correctly, but the whole of science is founded on the assumption that there are real, rational, understandable physical laws.
If something is too complex for us to predict, we won't do it. There are plenty of things which are completely unpredictable. Some of them we can predict statistically (weather), others not at all. There are also things which we can predict very accurately.
Yes, these laws are simply the properties of matter, but that does nothing to tell us how they could come to be.
Agreed. However, you are making a fundamental assumption. That is, that matter has been created by someone for some purpose. Matter is simple enough that it doesn't need to have been created; as you put it, it just is.
However, the concept of a "God" is enormously complex. It's not like the concept of "matter". Matter doesn't do anything; it just has certain properties which cause it to do certain very simple things. Most of the time, lots of simple things abiding by simple rules can form very complex systems, which is what our world is.
Now let's look at the concept of "God". Is a god made of regular matter -- protons, neutrons, and so on? Where is it located? Why can it just arbitrarily break rules that everything else follows? Furthermore, how do we know about it? Do we just believe someone is out there somewhere? Why not believe in ghosts then?
Why would an omniscient being care what we do any more than a scientist cares what bacteria do in a petri dish? Why do religious norms seem to exactly correlate with the rules one would want people to follow to more easily control them? The problem with the god concept is that it just doesn't make any sense; people have just been successfully brainwashed for centuries.
I'm not so sure. Most of the exploits in IE don't involve any privilege escalation -- it's simply misleading the user. I think Firefox definitely has many of the same problems IE does, since solving them is more than just reworking the interface slightly or having "tighter code".
Are you so sure it's impossible to spoof URL bars in Firefox? Or mislead the user into installing software? Firefox also has stuff like semi-automatic plugin installation, and I'm sure there are plenty of holes to be found. Also, there are most likely dozens of possible exploits using the XUL interface.
I'm not saying Firefox sucks (I'm using it right now), but I wouldn't tout it as bulletproof. It's not.
Looks like someone needs to take a reading comprehension class. Read meaning #1 again. Repeat until you understand what it is saying. Then read it again just to be sure. Then tell me why you think it doesn't say you draw hypotheses from empirical observations.
Besides, since when is "The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language" the authority on all matters of human knowledge? A dictionary is a convenient way to learn approximate meanings of words you don't know, but it's by no means authoritative.
First, laws of physics are not all-powerful. The only place they exist is the human brain, and they don't do anything other than telling humans many aspects of how matter has been seen behave. As far as "creating" them: they were created by scientists who lived in the last few hundred years. The things they describe are simply observed properties of matter.
Did that answer your question?
The green alien proposition might be testable. But it cannot be a valid scientific theory until I come across some evidence that implies they are there. You can't pull ideas out of your ass and call them theories, even if they are testable. You need to have some kind of empirical evidence.
With evolution, there is lots of evidence. There are fossils. There is artificial selection (which is a form of evolution). Bacteria can be seen evolving. There is DNA evidence. At this point, it's more a question of how the first self-replicating cell came to be rather than a question of who created humans and animals.
If you had bothered to read the next sentence of my post, you would have noticed that my description of science is a slightly more concise version of yours.
My point is that you do not assume something without empirical data that logically implies that assumption. This is a common fallacy used by creationism proponents. As in, "my theory is just as good as yours because there is no evidence that disproves it." Even if the theory is potentially testable (say, when time travel is developed), it cannot be a scientific theory until there is some empirical data that strongly implies it.
You failed science class, didn't you? You don't assume things and then try to disprove them. You take the knowledge you have, produce a hypothesis that logically follows from that knowledge, and test it, thereby acquiring new knowledge. Just because it's impossible to disprove the existence of green hairy aliens on Alpha Centauri doesn't imply that you can claim they are there.
If you still want to argue, how about some classic mind-twisters: if some intelligent being created life, who created the intelligent being? How the hell did he become all-powerful? Does this not violate the basic laws of physics as well as produce logical contradictions? What evidence do you have for the existence of such a being?
Since creationism is not scientific, it should not be called an alternative theory. They should not be put side-by-side, since they are not on the same footing.
Burglary is not considered a violent crime as far as I know. Burglars try to do their deed when the owner is not home. Otherwise, it's called robbery. In any case, burglars get sent to jail for stealing stuff, not because they cause violent confrontations.
I don't see why incompetent criminals should get a significantly lesser sentence. I mean, seriously. If you attempt to rob a bank but don't succeed at it, how is that a lesser crime?
I don't know of any murder cases that got 4 years. Usually it's at least life in prison. The only time someone would get off that easy is if it's an accident with a negligence component.