Last I was told, Dropbox encrypted everything with AES-256 and kept the keys organizationally separate from access to the data. It isn't perfect for security, but it's easy and has some value. If you want real security, you have to do your own key management anyway, and you DON'T want to type your key into any software provided by a storage vendor, so it's no extra burden to do your own encryption and decryption.
unless you make yourself a target by being black or Native American or refusing to comply...
Fixed that for you.
In the vanishingly few instances where an officer makes a mistake in judgment, most departments are quick to correct the failure.
You don't follow the news much, do you? When an officer shoots and kills someone without provocation, the officer usually gets off. This is changing, partly because of the prevalence of cameras that objectively record what's going on.
My advice is to choose to live, don't get yourself shot by getting crosswise with the police today, so you can complain and get the problem addressed when it's all over.
What that seems to amount to in practice is that trained police officers are allowed to act on impulse, up to and including shooting people dead, but untrained civilians under all conditions are required to stay calm and quiet despite provocation. My advice for people in the US: See if the ACLU in your state has a program whereby, when you record something on your phone, it's automatically uploaded to the state ACLU.
The real problem with the Catholic church was that they protected their child abusers, including moving them around and in some cases putting them in roles where they had more children to abuse.
Politicians have rational fears. If they help loosen some unproductive security measure, and something bad happens that can be blamed on the lack of the security measure, their opponents will use that as campaign material, and they're less likely to be elected. If they enact an unproductive security measure, they're not going to get the same level of blame.
The problem is the US electorate. If politicians got credit for removing or not adding onerous and unproductive security measures, and weren't blamed for things that happen anyway, the TSA would be a lot more bearable. The same is true in other areas. We spend more money on checking welfare recipients than we save, but if politicians try backing off on that their opponent will find a welfare queen (or fake one up) and exploit that in the campaign.
The first book I ordered from Amazon was in my hands less than 24 hours after the order, although I'd picked lowest-cost shipping. Amazon took a loss on that order just to impress a new customer. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Amazon's two-day service wasn't really sustainable on a large scale.
In the meantime, my wife has Amazon Prime and I don't, and I don't notice any great delay in getting stuff compared to her.
You cite one example of a scientific article in which under certain extreme conditions a certain model includes an extreme of 82% loss in food production. I missed that in the typical Slashdot non-Unicode character soup. In that case, only 80% of your cites fail to support your claim, and 20% says that in extreme conditions your claim might be close to reality. I'm still not impressed.
I don't know all scientists, I've met a few, and I've read stuff, including numerous scientific papers. They are definitely fallible, but they tend to make certain kinds of mistakes more than other kinds.
Would you like to give me something to try to comprehend other than binary thinking and the rejection of rational analysis?
Court cases are normally not certain. Nobody goes into them knowing everything, and the verdict will be influenced and actually determined by other human beings, who are fallible. They can make mistakes. Some mistakes can be appealed, and some can't be. Therefore, it's reasonable to think that the courts usually deliver reasonably just verdicts, but that they get it wrong sometimes. It is usually worthwhile involving the court if you have a legitimate case that's significant enough, but that doesn't mean the court won't get it wrong, or that you're not making a mistake.
Any rational consideration about filing a lawsuit needs to consider what happens if the plaintiff loses.
It's stupid to insult people based on their having religious beliefs. Neither theism nor atheism is falsifiable, so what you're saying is that you believe certain unprovable things and anyone disagreeing with you is delusional. In fact, those friends are some of the best human beings I know.
More interestingly, you seem to believe that religions are delusion, which would mean you aren't Christian. You don't seem to realize the variety in Christianity. However, you're willing to tell Christians what Christianity is, and how they should be interpreting the Bible, and why they should be doing it in a stupid way, and how irrational Christians are when they do what you ignorantly think they should.
Religion is just part of the gold standard in stupidity. Ideology is more general. There's lots of rigid ideologues on Slashdot, and they say stupid things because they let their ideology substitute for actually seeing what's going on, and most of them don't appear to be very religious.
So the Bible is vague enough to interpret in a sense that it's compatible with evolution, and therefore it contradicts evolution? Some theologians think there is a contradiction and (probably more) think there isn't, so there's a clear contradiction? I'm not convinced.
I skipped over that key point because I agree with it, and wasn't arguing against it. The problem of web advertising is real, and I don't have a solution. If an artist releases a product, and only three people buy it and the rest copy it illegally, the artist is unlikely to release another product.
That doesn't mean that illicit copying is the same as theft. It also doesn't mean that illicit copying is necessarily bad, because in some cases passing around stuff for free has been shown to improve sales.
The important point about the artist in my first paragraph is not the number of illegal copies, but the number of sales. If enough people pay for the creation, it's worthwhile for the artist to continue creating, polishing, and releasing, no matter what else happens.
Um, comparing a control with an experimental group and doing statistical analysis on the results is doing science. The 5% is not a difference between metrics, but the generally accepted limit of how improbable a result might be before it's worth publishing. It is arbitrary, but it's not just in psychology. Physics requires a much higher standard, but physics is a whole lot simpler than psychology.
I don't know which psychology experiments you've seen, but the ones I've read about seem fairly rigorous. It's possible that they missed something, but, even so, randomly dividing people into two groups, treating them differently, and noting a significant difference in responses is science.
In which case, me beating the crap out of you would be practicing philosophy. I have an ethical framework, which is inherently philosophical, and beating the crap out of you would involve ethical thinking. (It's strongly against my ethical framework, which is one reason I wouldn't do it.) Reading a book about something is nothing but applied epistemology. Talking about nothing important to someone would be practicing philosophy (consider the problem of joint perception of the world). You're stretching the word all out of any useful meaning.
There is a philosophy of science, which includes the scientific method. There is a philosophy of ethics, which includes (somewhere at the end of a long and complicated chain of reasoning) how I should treat people I meet. There is a philosophy of epistemology, which includes interpreting what I see (consider Plato's cave or Descartes and his malicious deceptive demon). There is nothing in my everyday life that is not related to philosophy.
So, either everything is philosophy, or you have presented no support for your claim that science is.
We'll find out how much gravity people need to stay healthy. Clearly 1G is adequate and about 0G isn't, but we really don't have experience with long stays in anything in between.
One of the hard parts about manned missions to Mars is landing the spacecraft safely. There's not enough atmosphere for parachutes to do any good, but enough to give normal rocket landings problems. Space-X is demonstrating the ability to land on rocket power in an atmosphere.
Please tell me how many people were killed in the Space-X failures. You seem to think the answer is something like "a lot". Rockets are known to be potentially dangerous, so people take precautions. If a booster blows up on the pad, that's a lot of damage, and no one gets hurt.
"Our results show that medical factors cannot account for occurrence of NDE"
Putting that quote into context, what it means is that they could not predict who would have an NDE based on medical factors. It's the first sentence of the "Discussion" section, and the rest of the paragraph makes it clear what is meant. It does not mean that NDEs are inexplicable by medical factors, although it does cite some puzzling events (such as apparent knowledge of what was around the patient when the patient had a flat EEG).
I could not find any reference to any theological model in either of the cited article. The New Scientist one wasn't impressive; for example, it said that all patients could be expected to have NDE, with no support.
In other words, you're making up that crap about some hypothetical "theological model". There are tons of theological models, and while they generally have some common elements they vary wildly in other ways. The personality changes, if they exist (I wasn't keen on the methodology there, which was primarily self-reporting) can happen with things like heart attacks, and I haven't heard anyone waxing eloquent about the religious and/or metaphysical nature of heart attacks.
The Mind-Body problem is very likely an illusion. There's no problem with the idea that the mind is a function of the body, particularly since we've gotten to know something of the incredible complexity of the brain, and seen what software on computer hardware can do. The soul would then be no different form the mind, and it would end at physical death.
That's how science got started. Currently, it's its own thing, and philosophy has been largely redefined. There is a philosophy of science, but the practice of science is not normally considered the practice of philosophy, and the scientific method is largely absent from most modern philosophy.
I don't think the Luminiferous Aether or the Steady State theory were considered proven. Both had puzzling aspects, and the Luminiferous Aether was the best explanation they had. I'm not even sure what is meant by "scientifically proven".
I do know something about the philosophy of science. Science is a process of falsification. Something isn't science if it isn't falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable, science really has nothing to say about it. QM is science. The many-worlds interpretation isn't. Unless and until someone comes up with a way to falsify QM interpretations, science isn't going to work on them.
Science does favor a certain sort of metaphysics, which is basically physics without the "meta". It's possible to have other metaphysics as a scientist, shown by the fact that many scientists are religious, but they keep their extra metaphysics out of their work.
Philosophy does include logic, which is mathematically rigorous. The other branches you list are not rigorous. Ethics could be rigorous if we could agree on what it should be based on, which we can't. I have no idea what a rigorous theory of aesthetics or politics could be.
I don't know about anyone else, but my whole reason for excluding untestable QM "science" as science is because the scientific method is completely inapplicable. It has nothing to do with my, or anyone else's, religious beliefs or lack of same.
My understanding is of course incomplete, but it's pretty sound in some places.
Experimental psychology is a legitimate science. There's been a lot of non-scientific psychology, but there's been good experiments and statistical analysis of results for a long time now.
Stealing physical media deprives someone of something. Suppose I steal a CD from a store. The store paid for that individual thing, and was hoping to make money by selling it. I've deprived them of the money I would have paid if I'd bought it, or the money an actual customer would have paid had I not stolen the thing. That's direct harm.
If I copy digital music without permission, I've deprived them of the money I would have paid if I'd bought it, assuming I'd have bought it. I haven't deprived the vendor of any money from actual customers. The vendor paid for the music in a way that doesn't increase with illicit copying. The effect is exactly the same as if I hadn't bought or copied the music. Illicit copying does not cause any direct harm.
In the case of CDs, it's worthwhile to try to stop shoplifting. In the case of digital music, the dynamics are different, and illicit copying is irrelevant to revenue. What is relevant is actual sales (or ad displays, or whatever). In some situations, having free copies around will increase sales; presumably, there are cases where that isn't the case and illicit copies reduce sales.
The cost to produce music is independent of the number of copies made by whatever methods. The cost to distribute physically is significant, but the cost to distribute digitally is, to a reasonable approximation, zero. The cost to the vendor when I make an illicit copy is indeed zero.
I'm not endorsing illegal copying, but, frankly, your arguments are bad.
It's not Einstein's Theory of Relativity because he worked out the math first, since Poincare did that before him. It's Einstein's theory because he actually paid attention to what the math told him, and ditched fundamental ideas like time and space in favor of spacetime, a more inclusive concept that had very interesting interactions between time and space, so that the Lorentz equations are not stand-alone oddities but are consequences of how spacetime works. I believe Poincare still believed in absolute time when Einstein was working on his theory.
Arguing against math is rather pointless, you know.
Sure, and GP appears to agree with you on the math. The GP is claiming that there are problems with the stuff we use to convert the mathematically adequate sound into actual sound, and that going with quality that would not make any difference with perfect equipment works better with what we have.
IIRC, that passage took years, and included two winters frozen in. That's not an actual passage. That's occasional gaps in the ice. The first time there was a possible real passage was in 1944. After that, any actual use of the passage required icebreakers and special ships until 1977 or so. Being closed from the dawn of history, millennia ago, through the late Twentieth Century, doesn't really count as "open and closed all throughout history". It's "closed throughout almost all of history".
If a lot of theologians believe A, then A is clearly not clearly against their religion. I'm not saying which theologians are correct (and have some trouble figuring what that means), and I really don't care, but the fact that there's a lot who believe the scientific truth shows that it's possible.
Genesis says nothing about twenty-four hour days. I don't even know for sure that the Hebrew word used means "solar day" and nothing but. However, there was a day before there could be a solar day, according to Genesis. Even so, people don't always read the Bible that literally. US coins do not have images of the current ruler, and we don't have Caesars, so "render unto Caesar" taken literally is irrelevant here and now. Saying that God did something in such and such a way is not denying God's creative power, no matter how you try to interpret that. God does not have to do things in ways you find acceptable.
You're practicing a textbook No True Scotsman by accusing theologians who disagree with your interpretation of twisting their own beliefs. A Christian theologian is a Christian theologian, regardless of whether you like their conclusions or not. Lots of them agree that evolution was God's way of creating species. As far as "reading the Bible intelligently" goes, I rely heavily on the interpretations of my priest friend and her husband, so you're casually dismissing the most devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians I know.
Evolution deniers are irrational, in that they believe things in defiance of evidence and rational thought. I don't see why I should just figure that irrational people must be correct.
If a large number of Christian theologians say that the Bible doesn't contradict evolution, and they do (it's the position of the Catholic Church, for example), then obviously there isn't a clear contradiction. This means it's possible to interpret the words of the Bible in ways that do not contradict evolution, and hence the Bible itself doesn't contradict evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I was told, Dropbox encrypted everything with AES-256 and kept the keys organizationally separate from access to the data. It isn't perfect for security, but it's easy and has some value. If you want real security, you have to do your own key management anyway, and you DON'T want to type your key into any software provided by a storage vendor, so it's no extra burden to do your own encryption and decryption.
Fixed that for you.
You don't follow the news much, do you? When an officer shoots and kills someone without provocation, the officer usually gets off. This is changing, partly because of the prevalence of cameras that objectively record what's going on.
What that seems to amount to in practice is that trained police officers are allowed to act on impulse, up to and including shooting people dead, but untrained civilians under all conditions are required to stay calm and quiet despite provocation. My advice for people in the US: See if the ACLU in your state has a program whereby, when you record something on your phone, it's automatically uploaded to the state ACLU.
The real problem with the Catholic church was that they protected their child abusers, including moving them around and in some cases putting them in roles where they had more children to abuse.
You're getting the blame wrong.
Politicians have rational fears. If they help loosen some unproductive security measure, and something bad happens that can be blamed on the lack of the security measure, their opponents will use that as campaign material, and they're less likely to be elected. If they enact an unproductive security measure, they're not going to get the same level of blame.
The problem is the US electorate. If politicians got credit for removing or not adding onerous and unproductive security measures, and weren't blamed for things that happen anyway, the TSA would be a lot more bearable. The same is true in other areas. We spend more money on checking welfare recipients than we save, but if politicians try backing off on that their opponent will find a welfare queen (or fake one up) and exploit that in the campaign.
Artificially broken?
The first book I ordered from Amazon was in my hands less than 24 hours after the order, although I'd picked lowest-cost shipping. Amazon took a loss on that order just to impress a new customer. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Amazon's two-day service wasn't really sustainable on a large scale.
In the meantime, my wife has Amazon Prime and I don't, and I don't notice any great delay in getting stuff compared to her.
So, since everyone does illegal stuff, the only grounds for going after lawbreakers is politics or ideology? That's what your claims sound like to me.
You cite one example of a scientific article in which under certain extreme conditions a certain model includes an extreme of 82% loss in food production. I missed that in the typical Slashdot non-Unicode character soup. In that case, only 80% of your cites fail to support your claim, and 20% says that in extreme conditions your claim might be close to reality. I'm still not impressed.
I don't know all scientists, I've met a few, and I've read stuff, including numerous scientific papers. They are definitely fallible, but they tend to make certain kinds of mistakes more than other kinds.
Would you like to give me something to try to comprehend other than binary thinking and the rejection of rational analysis?
Court cases are normally not certain. Nobody goes into them knowing everything, and the verdict will be influenced and actually determined by other human beings, who are fallible. They can make mistakes. Some mistakes can be appealed, and some can't be. Therefore, it's reasonable to think that the courts usually deliver reasonably just verdicts, but that they get it wrong sometimes. It is usually worthwhile involving the court if you have a legitimate case that's significant enough, but that doesn't mean the court won't get it wrong, or that you're not making a mistake.
Any rational consideration about filing a lawsuit needs to consider what happens if the plaintiff loses.
It's stupid to insult people based on their having religious beliefs. Neither theism nor atheism is falsifiable, so what you're saying is that you believe certain unprovable things and anyone disagreeing with you is delusional. In fact, those friends are some of the best human beings I know.
More interestingly, you seem to believe that religions are delusion, which would mean you aren't Christian. You don't seem to realize the variety in Christianity. However, you're willing to tell Christians what Christianity is, and how they should be interpreting the Bible, and why they should be doing it in a stupid way, and how irrational Christians are when they do what you ignorantly think they should.
Religion is just part of the gold standard in stupidity. Ideology is more general. There's lots of rigid ideologues on Slashdot, and they say stupid things because they let their ideology substitute for actually seeing what's going on, and most of them don't appear to be very religious.
So the Bible is vague enough to interpret in a sense that it's compatible with evolution, and therefore it contradicts evolution? Some theologians think there is a contradiction and (probably more) think there isn't, so there's a clear contradiction? I'm not convinced.
I skipped over that key point because I agree with it, and wasn't arguing against it. The problem of web advertising is real, and I don't have a solution. If an artist releases a product, and only three people buy it and the rest copy it illegally, the artist is unlikely to release another product.
That doesn't mean that illicit copying is the same as theft. It also doesn't mean that illicit copying is necessarily bad, because in some cases passing around stuff for free has been shown to improve sales.
The important point about the artist in my first paragraph is not the number of illegal copies, but the number of sales. If enough people pay for the creation, it's worthwhile for the artist to continue creating, polishing, and releasing, no matter what else happens.
Um, comparing a control with an experimental group and doing statistical analysis on the results is doing science. The 5% is not a difference between metrics, but the generally accepted limit of how improbable a result might be before it's worth publishing. It is arbitrary, but it's not just in psychology. Physics requires a much higher standard, but physics is a whole lot simpler than psychology.
I don't know which psychology experiments you've seen, but the ones I've read about seem fairly rigorous. It's possible that they missed something, but, even so, randomly dividing people into two groups, treating them differently, and noting a significant difference in responses is science.
In which case, me beating the crap out of you would be practicing philosophy. I have an ethical framework, which is inherently philosophical, and beating the crap out of you would involve ethical thinking. (It's strongly against my ethical framework, which is one reason I wouldn't do it.) Reading a book about something is nothing but applied epistemology. Talking about nothing important to someone would be practicing philosophy (consider the problem of joint perception of the world). You're stretching the word all out of any useful meaning.
There is a philosophy of science, which includes the scientific method. There is a philosophy of ethics, which includes (somewhere at the end of a long and complicated chain of reasoning) how I should treat people I meet. There is a philosophy of epistemology, which includes interpreting what I see (consider Plato's cave or Descartes and his malicious deceptive demon). There is nothing in my everyday life that is not related to philosophy.
So, either everything is philosophy, or you have presented no support for your claim that science is.
We'll find out how much gravity people need to stay healthy. Clearly 1G is adequate and about 0G isn't, but we really don't have experience with long stays in anything in between.
One of the hard parts about manned missions to Mars is landing the spacecraft safely. There's not enough atmosphere for parachutes to do any good, but enough to give normal rocket landings problems. Space-X is demonstrating the ability to land on rocket power in an atmosphere.
Please tell me how many people were killed in the Space-X failures. You seem to think the answer is something like "a lot". Rockets are known to be potentially dangerous, so people take precautions. If a booster blows up on the pad, that's a lot of damage, and no one gets hurt.
Putting that quote into context, what it means is that they could not predict who would have an NDE based on medical factors. It's the first sentence of the "Discussion" section, and the rest of the paragraph makes it clear what is meant. It does not mean that NDEs are inexplicable by medical factors, although it does cite some puzzling events (such as apparent knowledge of what was around the patient when the patient had a flat EEG).
I could not find any reference to any theological model in either of the cited article. The New Scientist one wasn't impressive; for example, it said that all patients could be expected to have NDE, with no support.
In other words, you're making up that crap about some hypothetical "theological model". There are tons of theological models, and while they generally have some common elements they vary wildly in other ways. The personality changes, if they exist (I wasn't keen on the methodology there, which was primarily self-reporting) can happen with things like heart attacks, and I haven't heard anyone waxing eloquent about the religious and/or metaphysical nature of heart attacks.
The Mind-Body problem is very likely an illusion. There's no problem with the idea that the mind is a function of the body, particularly since we've gotten to know something of the incredible complexity of the brain, and seen what software on computer hardware can do. The soul would then be no different form the mind, and it would end at physical death.
That's how science got started. Currently, it's its own thing, and philosophy has been largely redefined. There is a philosophy of science, but the practice of science is not normally considered the practice of philosophy, and the scientific method is largely absent from most modern philosophy.
I don't think the Luminiferous Aether or the Steady State theory were considered proven. Both had puzzling aspects, and the Luminiferous Aether was the best explanation they had. I'm not even sure what is meant by "scientifically proven".
I do know something about the philosophy of science. Science is a process of falsification. Something isn't science if it isn't falsifiable. If it's not falsifiable, science really has nothing to say about it. QM is science. The many-worlds interpretation isn't. Unless and until someone comes up with a way to falsify QM interpretations, science isn't going to work on them.
Science does favor a certain sort of metaphysics, which is basically physics without the "meta". It's possible to have other metaphysics as a scientist, shown by the fact that many scientists are religious, but they keep their extra metaphysics out of their work.
Philosophy does include logic, which is mathematically rigorous. The other branches you list are not rigorous. Ethics could be rigorous if we could agree on what it should be based on, which we can't. I have no idea what a rigorous theory of aesthetics or politics could be.
I don't know about anyone else, but my whole reason for excluding untestable QM "science" as science is because the scientific method is completely inapplicable. It has nothing to do with my, or anyone else's, religious beliefs or lack of same.
My understanding is of course incomplete, but it's pretty sound in some places.
Experimental psychology is a legitimate science. There's been a lot of non-scientific psychology, but there's been good experiments and statistical analysis of results for a long time now.
Stealing physical media deprives someone of something. Suppose I steal a CD from a store. The store paid for that individual thing, and was hoping to make money by selling it. I've deprived them of the money I would have paid if I'd bought it, or the money an actual customer would have paid had I not stolen the thing. That's direct harm.
If I copy digital music without permission, I've deprived them of the money I would have paid if I'd bought it, assuming I'd have bought it. I haven't deprived the vendor of any money from actual customers. The vendor paid for the music in a way that doesn't increase with illicit copying. The effect is exactly the same as if I hadn't bought or copied the music. Illicit copying does not cause any direct harm.
In the case of CDs, it's worthwhile to try to stop shoplifting. In the case of digital music, the dynamics are different, and illicit copying is irrelevant to revenue. What is relevant is actual sales (or ad displays, or whatever). In some situations, having free copies around will increase sales; presumably, there are cases where that isn't the case and illicit copies reduce sales.
The cost to produce music is independent of the number of copies made by whatever methods. The cost to distribute physically is significant, but the cost to distribute digitally is, to a reasonable approximation, zero. The cost to the vendor when I make an illicit copy is indeed zero.
I'm not endorsing illegal copying, but, frankly, your arguments are bad.
It's not Einstein's Theory of Relativity because he worked out the math first, since Poincare did that before him. It's Einstein's theory because he actually paid attention to what the math told him, and ditched fundamental ideas like time and space in favor of spacetime, a more inclusive concept that had very interesting interactions between time and space, so that the Lorentz equations are not stand-alone oddities but are consequences of how spacetime works. I believe Poincare still believed in absolute time when Einstein was working on his theory.
Sure, and GP appears to agree with you on the math. The GP is claiming that there are problems with the stuff we use to convert the mathematically adequate sound into actual sound, and that going with quality that would not make any difference with perfect equipment works better with what we have.
IIRC, that passage took years, and included two winters frozen in. That's not an actual passage. That's occasional gaps in the ice. The first time there was a possible real passage was in 1944. After that, any actual use of the passage required icebreakers and special ships until 1977 or so. Being closed from the dawn of history, millennia ago, through the late Twentieth Century, doesn't really count as "open and closed all throughout history". It's "closed throughout almost all of history".
If a lot of theologians believe A, then A is clearly not clearly against their religion. I'm not saying which theologians are correct (and have some trouble figuring what that means), and I really don't care, but the fact that there's a lot who believe the scientific truth shows that it's possible.
Genesis says nothing about twenty-four hour days. I don't even know for sure that the Hebrew word used means "solar day" and nothing but. However, there was a day before there could be a solar day, according to Genesis. Even so, people don't always read the Bible that literally. US coins do not have images of the current ruler, and we don't have Caesars, so "render unto Caesar" taken literally is irrelevant here and now. Saying that God did something in such and such a way is not denying God's creative power, no matter how you try to interpret that. God does not have to do things in ways you find acceptable.
You're practicing a textbook No True Scotsman by accusing theologians who disagree with your interpretation of twisting their own beliefs. A Christian theologian is a Christian theologian, regardless of whether you like their conclusions or not. Lots of them agree that evolution was God's way of creating species. As far as "reading the Bible intelligently" goes, I rely heavily on the interpretations of my priest friend and her husband, so you're casually dismissing the most devout and theologically knowledgeable Christians I know.
Evolution deniers are irrational, in that they believe things in defiance of evidence and rational thought. I don't see why I should just figure that irrational people must be correct.
If a large number of Christian theologians say that the Bible doesn't contradict evolution, and they do (it's the position of the Catholic Church, for example), then obviously there isn't a clear contradiction. This means it's possible to interpret the words of the Bible in ways that do not contradict evolution, and hence the Bible itself doesn't contradict evolution.