I still have a vague recollection of the analog signal processing homework problem sets we had to do. And we sure as hell did them in groups. They sucked. You needed a group just to face the horror of Fourier transforms. If I still even remember how to spell Fourier right.
The real problem here is that the policy sucks. It's like college classes with an attendance policy - if students are not showing up, and attending the class is worthwhile, they're either brilliant and will pass the exams anyway, or they are not brilliant, and will fail the exams because they did not avail themselves of the opportunities presented by class. In those circumstances, an attendance policy is not necessary. So when a class HAS an attendance policy anyway, then you know that attending class is probably a waste of your time, because if it wasn't, the professor wouldn't need to hold your grade hostage to get you to show up and listen to them drivel 3 hours a week.
Same goes with homework. If people want to copy each other's homework, who cares - they'll fail the exam anyway. And if they copy homework and don't fail the exam, then the problem is that the homework was a waste of their time, and you shouldn't be blaming the students for not wanting to waste their time, especially when they're paying for an education, not the assignment of useless busy work.
Because I HAVE had instances where the performance of the seller was sub-par, but it wasn't worth leaving a neutral or negative feedback with the risk I would get one myself, especially since while my feedback rating doesn't really matter for buying, it is important for selling.
I actually sell more than I buy. I've never had anyone leave negative feedback and I've never had anyone even threaten to leave negative feedback. I have had some items get 'lost' (delivered but the recipient claims they didn't get them) and once presented with proof of delivery I've never heard anything back.
So really, I have not seen any scamming at all - I've never scammed as a buyer, but if scamming were as rampant as you say it is, I'd have expected to be scammed as a seller by now, but I have not.
He's not childish. He's presenting an accurate summary of your comments.
You're either a complete idiot or a liar. I'm leaning towards complete idiot.
Retaliatory feedback is NEVER a good thing - by definition. It's feedback that does not accurately reflect the performance of the buyer, and only left because the buyer left negative feedback that the seller deserved.
Now, NEGATIVE feedback MIGHT be a good thing. But any positive attributes of negative feedback are strongly outweighed by the drawbacks.
- Honest buyers, who care about their own feedback rating, will leave honest feedback regardless. So the ability of the seller to leave negative feedback does not keep the honest buyer honest (they're already honest), and only serves to prevent the honest buyer from leaving honest feedback.
- Dishonest buyers don't care about their feedback, because if they get negative feedback, they'll just create a new account. So again, negative feedback from the seller serves no real practical purpose.
- Under the new system, eBay will AUTOMATICALLY remove all negative feedback left by non-paying bidders.
So, with this change, buyers can leave honest feedback without retaliation, many dishonest buyers lose their ability to leave negative feedback entirely (they have to at least pay), and sellers will get some negative feedback that they deserve (good) and some that they don't (not so good).
Over the long term, bad sellers will get a lot of negative feedback (the negative feedback they deserve and the negative feedback they don't) and everyone else will get a little negative feedback that they don't deserve and the marketplace will simply adjust to the fact that the typical feedback rating of a good seller is 97-98% instead of 99-100%.
The feedback change is a good one - for everyone except scamming sellers.
Don't you see that creates a huge conflict of interest for the company?
No?
The company's interest is to remain profitable. This interest is helped by firing people who use company funds on personal expenses. Not having to pay the pension is a bonus.
It's not like they wouldn't have fired him if he got to keep the pension.
It's not ethical. No part of Wikipedia's mission is providing expensive dinners to donors and administrators. The donor is essentially getting a kickback and the administrator is misappropriating funds.
I run a non-profit. When I'm eating on the non-profit tab, it's when I'm traveling on non-profit business and done in an economical manner - no cocktails for sure! If a potential donor/sponsor wants to talk about it over dinner, they pay for the dinner. They don't expect a non-profit to be paying for their dinner, and frankly, I think our donors/sponsors would find it a little bit odd were the non-profit they were supporting spending money on such things.
But I guess I must just deal with ethical people, not a bunch of white-collar cronies setting up ways to write off expensive dinners on their taxes.
Nobody wants to be the project manager who has to explain that your mission failed because you forgot to convert feet into meters.
But that's nothing compared to being the project manager who has to explain that your mission failed because your one astronaut went bat-shit crazy on day 187 and removed his helmet to end it all.
The problem is the ethics of sending the volunteer. Too much of the public would find something inherently 'wrong' with sending a person on a known, one-way mission with no chance of coming back, and that lack of support would pretty much doom the effort.
That tweak only works if you're willing to accept a 60-90 day lag time before feedback posts.
With eBay's new system, buyers can leave negative feedback, and that feedback is available to other buyers immediately. If you 'escrow' the feedback, a seller has 2-3 months with which to screw over buyers before the first negative feedback starts to be public.
The problem here is not eBay. The problem here is that:
- You are not smart enough to realize that your ability to leave negative feedback made no difference (the bad buyer couldn't give a rats ass if you left him negative feedback, he'd just open a new account)
- You are not smart enough to realize that your 100% feedback rating IDENTIFIES YOU AS A SUCKER TARGET!
Scammers LOOK for those 100% feedback ratings, because they know the people who have the 100% ratings are the same people who are illogically emotionally attached to their feedback rating and will appease scammers just to keep their rating.
Do yourself a favor - get a couple negative feedbacks so your rating drops to 99%. Bidders won't care, and the scammers will realize you're not a suckeer and stop trying to scam you.
* *some* buyers are scammers (it never arrived!)
* *some* buyers are hyper-critical (it's not new (duh, it said that in the listing))
* *some* buyers abuse the system (I've changed my mind, don't want it any more)
* *some* buyers apparently don't know how to use email to see if the seller can satisfy them
But a seller's ability to leave negative feedback stops NONE of that.
Dishonest buyers don't care about negative feedback. If they get it, they just ditch that account and create a new one. So the ability of the sellers to leave negative feedback serves NO LEGITIMATE PURPOSE other than to intimidate honest buyers who have a legitimate gripe with the seller.
Some buyers suck. That's true in any marketplace. Part of being a seller in any market place is dealing with buyers.
When was the last time you walked into Wendy's, and they wouldn't sell you a burger because you got negative feedback the last time you bought something at McD's?
Maybe because some of the moderators understand the point?
The point wasn't that the achievements of the time were not enormous.
The point was that 'back in the day', since there was so little existing scientific knowledge, it was easy to be come an expert in a particular area. So after what is the modern-day equivalent of a 3rd-grader education, you were 'at the edge' of existing scientific knowledge and making new discoveries.
That's not the case anymore. There is so much scientific knowledge that most people have to pick up PhD's before they're anywhere near the 'edge' of scientific knowledge. When you have to spend 20 years just catching up on everything that is already known, that makes it a bit harder to make new discoveries in multiple specialties than it was in the old days, when there just wasn't much existing scientific knowledge to learn.
At this point, there is pretty much no way that Clinton gets more pledged delegates (the ones voters select) than Obama. So the only way she gets the nomination is if the super delegates override the pledged delegates.
That means there are only three options here. Clinton quits before the convention, and the Democrats have a chance at winning with Obama, the super delegates honor the pledged delegate count and Obama gets the nomination and the Democrats have a chance at winning with Obama, or Clinton gets the nomination based on super delegates and gets killed in the general election.
So Hillary can't be President. She can't be President because so many people hate her so much that Republicans who will stay home in an Obama-McCain election will come out for a Clinton-McCain election. She can't be President because she, and the Democrats, will have no credibility running a candidate who was selected instead of elected. She can't win because the one advantage she claims on Obama - experience - she gets KILLED on by McCain. She doesn't even have more experience than Obama! Obama has been in public office since 1997, Clinton only since 2002. Clinton's experience is that she is MARRIED to someone with experience!
There is absolutely no way that Clinton becomes President. The fact that she is unwilling to put the party or the country before her own personal ambition just shows why she shouldn't be President.
Actually, I take that back. Clinton might become President if:
- Nader drops out and Ron Paul runs as an independent. - She is Obama's running mate and Air Force One crashes after Jan 23, 2009.
I guess it is the party - if the super delegates all came to their senses and got behind Obama now, Clinton would be forced to drop out. I'm hoping that once the Texas Caucus results come in it'll be pretty obvious how the math works out and somebody will come to their senses.
In the old days, scientists were more versatile because each area of science was only at the elementary level. If you were wealthy enough to not need to spend all day making sure you had enough food to eat, knew how to read, had access to books, and had the means to travel, congratulations, you had all the necessary qualifications for 'Renaissance Scientist'.
I suppose you also had to be willing to focus on scientific pursuits instead of eating, drinking, music, building obscenely large residences, invasion of thine neighbor, and/or peasant subjugation.
Hell, those scientists didn't even start figuring out basic laws of motion until the 1500's. Electricity? Not until Ben Franklin! And now any 3rd grader learns about electric circuits.
I think every Slashdot reader understands pretty much all science through the 1700's at least. Anybody here understand string theory? I'm sure a few people do, but I ain't one of them. Old school scientists we more versatile because in the 1600's, science was easy!
I've driven in both the US and in Germany on all widths of roads, and passing on the right in Germany is not necessary. You couldn't do it even if you wanted to, as drivers there are not morons and get back into the right lane when they are not passing.
Probably helps that the people coming up at 200 kph behind you are pretty intimidating.
They're meant for breakdowns and emergency vehicles. You won't want people driving on shoulders especially on expressways where they think they can go 60 MPH when it's quite likely they might encounter a completely stopped car and have difficulty stopping.
One, it saves you 20-30 minutes of waiting around for your bags to get off the plane. (And in rare circumstances, it can save you an hour or more when, for example, your bags can't come off the plane because of lightning.)
Two, and more important to business travelers, is it preserves flexibility. If you've carried on your luggage, and something odd happens to your flight, you can take your bag, get off, and get on another plane. If your bag has been checked, you then have to figure out how you're going to get your bags that are coming in on a different flight.
One of the things most Internet Service Provider customers are paying for is... well, service. While I'm sure most of the Slashdot audience finds this service annoying, for MOST people on the internet, the resulting page is probably better for them than a blank error page.
And, opt-in is a lousy way to institute change. If you make the change, and let people opt out, everyone who the change helps will get it and everyone who doesn't like the change will opt-out, at the cost of the inconvenience of opting out once for the people who don't like the change. If the change is opt-in, then you have to communicate the change, and only some people are going to make it, even if it would be a good change for them, at the cost of everyone who wants to make the change having to specifically opt-in. Which is better - trying to get ignorant users to opt-in to something they don't understand, or allowing power users to opt-out of something they do understand?
The only exceptions to this is when the change is 'destructive', or you don't expect the change to be good for most people.
But if you're changing the default behavior (new users would have the new behavior) and the change is not destructive, there's nothing malicious about opt-out.
My computer is less than a year old. My keyboard is 15 years old. It's so old I have an AT->PS2->USB adapter just to get it to work with my present computer.
You have to be careful when talking about resistance. Old skool keyboards are considered good because there is a significant difference in force from before the key has activated to after it has been activated. So if you just nudge a key, it has some firm resistance, then when it clicks, it has almost no resistance at all (at least until you hit bottom). But since the portion of the key press where resistance is firm is so short, it still doesn't take much effort to press keys, and it's also very easy to tell by touch whether or not you were successful in a key activation.
The problem with most modern keyboards is they're light, AND they're light for the whole press - so it's very easy to accidentally press a key to the point that it moves, and then very hard to tell whether it moved far enough that you got a keypress you didn't want. Now, if instead of a modern LIGHT keyboard you just have a modern HEAVY keyboard (more resistance), it may be harder to accidentally press a key, but you still don't have good tactile feedback as to whether you've actually pressed a key or not (you've traded not knowing if you accidentally pressed a key for not knowing if you successfully pressed one) and have just made your fingers work harder.
The trick is a short, firm press to activation, then a click to long light press after that.
the believer switches to talking about the little-E version and insults the non-believer for ignoring the "facts" of little-e evolution.
and is quite accurate in claiming that it is, indeed, only a theory
Kinda like how a believer in Creationism (or 'intelligent design') switches from talking about the scientific definition of Theory to talking about the common definition of theory?
In science, there is no 'just a' Theory. Theory is a testable, provable, FALSIFIABLE explanation of natural behavior. You can't do 'better' than a Theory. Anyone who says 'just a theory' is flagging themselves as not understanding scientific words in the first place and not qualified to make any further comment.
It is possible to prove Big-E evolution. All you have to do is start with some non-living stuff, and produce living stuff, and then produce more complex living stuff. No one has done it yet, but that's not to say it isn't possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I still have a vague recollection of the analog signal processing homework problem sets we had to do. And we sure as hell did them in groups. They sucked. You needed a group just to face the horror of Fourier transforms. If I still even remember how to spell Fourier right.
The real problem here is that the policy sucks. It's like college classes with an attendance policy - if students are not showing up, and attending the class is worthwhile, they're either brilliant and will pass the exams anyway, or they are not brilliant, and will fail the exams because they did not avail themselves of the opportunities presented by class. In those circumstances, an attendance policy is not necessary. So when a class HAS an attendance policy anyway, then you know that attending class is probably a waste of your time, because if it wasn't, the professor wouldn't need to hold your grade hostage to get you to show up and listen to them drivel 3 hours a week.
Same goes with homework. If people want to copy each other's homework, who cares - they'll fail the exam anyway. And if they copy homework and don't fail the exam, then the problem is that the homework was a waste of their time, and you shouldn't be blaming the students for not wanting to waste their time, especially when they're paying for an education, not the assignment of useless busy work.
Because I HAVE had instances where the performance of the seller was sub-par, but it wasn't worth leaving a neutral or negative feedback with the risk I would get one myself, especially since while my feedback rating doesn't really matter for buying, it is important for selling.
I actually sell more than I buy. I've never had anyone leave negative feedback and I've never had anyone even threaten to leave negative feedback. I have had some items get 'lost' (delivered but the recipient claims they didn't get them) and once presented with proof of delivery I've never heard anything back.
So really, I have not seen any scamming at all - I've never scammed as a buyer, but if scamming were as rampant as you say it is, I'd have expected to be scammed as a seller by now, but I have not.
He's not childish. He's presenting an accurate summary of your comments.
You're either a complete idiot or a liar. I'm leaning towards complete idiot.
Retaliatory feedback is NEVER a good thing - by definition. It's feedback that does not accurately reflect the performance of the buyer, and only left because the buyer left negative feedback that the seller deserved.
Now, NEGATIVE feedback MIGHT be a good thing. But any positive attributes of negative feedback are strongly outweighed by the drawbacks.
- Honest buyers, who care about their own feedback rating, will leave honest feedback regardless. So the ability of the seller to leave negative feedback does not keep the honest buyer honest (they're already honest), and only serves to prevent the honest buyer from leaving honest feedback.
- Dishonest buyers don't care about their feedback, because if they get negative feedback, they'll just create a new account. So again, negative feedback from the seller serves no real practical purpose.
- Under the new system, eBay will AUTOMATICALLY remove all negative feedback left by non-paying bidders.
So, with this change, buyers can leave honest feedback without retaliation, many dishonest buyers lose their ability to leave negative feedback entirely (they have to at least pay), and sellers will get some negative feedback that they deserve (good) and some that they don't (not so good).
Over the long term, bad sellers will get a lot of negative feedback (the negative feedback they deserve and the negative feedback they don't) and everyone else will get a little negative feedback that they don't deserve and the marketplace will simply adjust to the fact that the typical feedback rating of a good seller is 97-98% instead of 99-100%.
The feedback change is a good one - for everyone except scamming sellers.
It just so happens that I am that ethical.
Don't you see that creates a huge conflict of interest for the company?
No?
The company's interest is to remain profitable. This interest is helped by firing people who use company funds on personal expenses. Not having to pay the pension is a bonus.
It's not like they wouldn't have fired him if he got to keep the pension.
Spending $100 to save $35 on taxes does not leave you with more money to do anything.
Whether it's common or not is irrelevant.
It's not ethical. No part of Wikipedia's mission is providing expensive dinners to donors and administrators. The donor is essentially getting a kickback and the administrator is misappropriating funds.
I run a non-profit. When I'm eating on the non-profit tab, it's when I'm traveling on non-profit business and done in an economical manner - no cocktails for sure! If a potential donor/sponsor wants to talk about it over dinner, they pay for the dinner. They don't expect a non-profit to be paying for their dinner, and frankly, I think our donors/sponsors would find it a little bit odd were the non-profit they were supporting spending money on such things.
But I guess I must just deal with ethical people, not a bunch of white-collar cronies setting up ways to write off expensive dinners on their taxes.
Nobody wants to be the project manager who has to explain that your mission failed because you forgot to convert feet into meters.
But that's nothing compared to being the project manager who has to explain that your mission failed because your one astronaut went bat-shit crazy on day 187 and removed his helmet to end it all.
The problem is the ethics of sending the volunteer. Too much of the public would find something inherently 'wrong' with sending a person on a known, one-way mission with no chance of coming back, and that lack of support would pretty much doom the effort.
That tweak only works if you're willing to accept a 60-90 day lag time before feedback posts.
With eBay's new system, buyers can leave negative feedback, and that feedback is available to other buyers immediately. If you 'escrow' the feedback, a seller has 2-3 months with which to screw over buyers before the first negative feedback starts to be public.
...NOTHING!
The problem here is not eBay. The problem here is that:
- You are not smart enough to realize that your ability to leave negative feedback made no difference (the bad buyer couldn't give a rats ass if you left him negative feedback, he'd just open a new account)
- You are not smart enough to realize that your 100% feedback rating IDENTIFIES YOU AS A SUCKER TARGET!
Scammers LOOK for those 100% feedback ratings, because they know the people who have the 100% ratings are the same people who are illogically emotionally attached to their feedback rating and will appease scammers just to keep their rating.
Do yourself a favor - get a couple negative feedbacks so your rating drops to 99%. Bidders won't care, and the scammers will realize you're not a suckeer and stop trying to scam you.
* *some* buyers are scammers (it never arrived!)
* *some* buyers are hyper-critical (it's not new (duh, it said that in the listing))
* *some* buyers abuse the system (I've changed my mind, don't want it any more)
* *some* buyers apparently don't know how to use email to see if the seller can satisfy them
But a seller's ability to leave negative feedback stops NONE of that.
Dishonest buyers don't care about negative feedback. If they get it, they just ditch that account and create a new one. So the ability of the sellers to leave negative feedback serves NO LEGITIMATE PURPOSE other than to intimidate honest buyers who have a legitimate gripe with the seller.
Some buyers suck. That's true in any marketplace. Part of being a seller in any market place is dealing with buyers.
When was the last time you walked into Wendy's, and they wouldn't sell you a burger because you got negative feedback the last time you bought something at McD's?
Maybe because some of the moderators understand the point?
The point wasn't that the achievements of the time were not enormous.
The point was that 'back in the day', since there was so little existing scientific knowledge, it was easy to be come an expert in a particular area. So after what is the modern-day equivalent of a 3rd-grader education, you were 'at the edge' of existing scientific knowledge and making new discoveries.
That's not the case anymore. There is so much scientific knowledge that most people have to pick up PhD's before they're anywhere near the 'edge' of scientific knowledge. When you have to spend 20 years just catching up on everything that is already known, that makes it a bit harder to make new discoveries in multiple specialties than it was in the old days, when there just wasn't much existing scientific knowledge to learn.
At this point, there is pretty much no way that Clinton gets more pledged delegates (the ones voters select) than Obama. So the only way she gets the nomination is if the super delegates override the pledged delegates.
That means there are only three options here. Clinton quits before the convention, and the Democrats have a chance at winning with Obama, the super delegates honor the pledged delegate count and Obama gets the nomination and the Democrats have a chance at winning with Obama, or Clinton gets the nomination based on super delegates and gets killed in the general election.
So Hillary can't be President. She can't be President because so many people hate her so much that Republicans who will stay home in an Obama-McCain election will come out for a Clinton-McCain election. She can't be President because she, and the Democrats, will have no credibility running a candidate who was selected instead of elected. She can't win because the one advantage she claims on Obama - experience - she gets KILLED on by McCain. She doesn't even have more experience than Obama! Obama has been in public office since 1997, Clinton only since 2002. Clinton's experience is that she is MARRIED to someone with experience!
There is absolutely no way that Clinton becomes President. The fact that she is unwilling to put the party or the country before her own personal ambition just shows why she shouldn't be President.
Actually, I take that back. Clinton might become President if:
- Nader drops out and Ron Paul runs as an independent.
- She is Obama's running mate and Air Force One crashes after Jan 23, 2009.
I guess it is the party - if the super delegates all came to their senses and got behind Obama now, Clinton would be forced to drop out. I'm hoping that once the Texas Caucus results come in it'll be pretty obvious how the math works out and somebody will come to their senses.
*ESTABLISHED* artists should charge large amounts for their music.
The problem with all these experiments is they involve artists who at some point had the backing of a record company.
We've yet to see any artist make big bucks without, at some point, the benefit of the record company marketing machine.
In the old days, scientists were more versatile because each area of science was only at the elementary level. If you were wealthy enough to not need to spend all day making sure you had enough food to eat, knew how to read, had access to books, and had the means to travel, congratulations, you had all the necessary qualifications for 'Renaissance Scientist'.
I suppose you also had to be willing to focus on scientific pursuits instead of eating, drinking, music, building obscenely large residences, invasion of thine neighbor, and/or peasant subjugation.
Hell, those scientists didn't even start figuring out basic laws of motion until the 1500's. Electricity? Not until Ben Franklin! And now any 3rd grader learns about electric circuits.
I think every Slashdot reader understands pretty much all science through the 1700's at least. Anybody here understand string theory? I'm sure a few people do, but I ain't one of them. Old school scientists we more versatile because in the 1600's, science was easy!
I've driven in both the US and in Germany on all widths of roads, and passing on the right in Germany is not necessary. You couldn't do it even if you wanted to, as drivers there are not morons and get back into the right lane when they are not passing.
Probably helps that the people coming up at 200 kph behind you are pretty intimidating.
They're meant for breakdowns and emergency vehicles. You won't want people driving on shoulders especially on expressways where they think they can go 60 MPH when it's quite likely they might encounter a completely stopped car and have difficulty stopping.
There are two big reasons to carry on luggage.
One, it saves you 20-30 minutes of waiting around for your bags to get off the plane. (And in rare circumstances, it can save you an hour or more when, for example, your bags can't come off the plane because of lightning.)
Two, and more important to business travelers, is it preserves flexibility. If you've carried on your luggage, and something odd happens to your flight, you can take your bag, get off, and get on another plane. If your bag has been checked, you then have to figure out how you're going to get your bags that are coming in on a different flight.
and a President that's hell-bent on cutting any tax he can pronounce the name of
If that were true, there would not have been any tax cuts in the past 7 years.
The user base is dumb.
One of the things most Internet Service Provider customers are paying for is... well, service. While I'm sure most of the Slashdot audience finds this service annoying, for MOST people on the internet, the resulting page is probably better for them than a blank error page.
And, opt-in is a lousy way to institute change. If you make the change, and let people opt out, everyone who the change helps will get it and everyone who doesn't like the change will opt-out, at the cost of the inconvenience of opting out once for the people who don't like the change. If the change is opt-in, then you have to communicate the change, and only some people are going to make it, even if it would be a good change for them, at the cost of everyone who wants to make the change having to specifically opt-in. Which is better - trying to get ignorant users to opt-in to something they don't understand, or allowing power users to opt-out of something they do understand?
The only exceptions to this is when the change is 'destructive', or you don't expect the change to be good for most people.
But if you're changing the default behavior (new users would have the new behavior) and the change is not destructive, there's nothing malicious about opt-out.
My computer is less than a year old. My keyboard is 15 years old. It's so old I have an AT->PS2->USB adapter just to get it to work with my present computer.
You have to be careful when talking about resistance. Old skool keyboards are considered good because there is a significant difference in force from before the key has activated to after it has been activated. So if you just nudge a key, it has some firm resistance, then when it clicks, it has almost no resistance at all (at least until you hit bottom). But since the portion of the key press where resistance is firm is so short, it still doesn't take much effort to press keys, and it's also very easy to tell by touch whether or not you were successful in a key activation.
The problem with most modern keyboards is they're light, AND they're light for the whole press - so it's very easy to accidentally press a key to the point that it moves, and then very hard to tell whether it moved far enough that you got a keypress you didn't want. Now, if instead of a modern LIGHT keyboard you just have a modern HEAVY keyboard (more resistance), it may be harder to accidentally press a key, but you still don't have good tactile feedback as to whether you've actually pressed a key or not (you've traded not knowing if you accidentally pressed a key for not knowing if you successfully pressed one) and have just made your fingers work harder.
The trick is a short, firm press to activation, then a click to long light press after that.
the believer switches to talking about the little-E version and insults the non-believer for ignoring the "facts" of little-e evolution.
and is quite accurate in claiming that it is, indeed, only a theory
Kinda like how a believer in Creationism (or 'intelligent design') switches from talking about the scientific definition of Theory to talking about the common definition of theory?
In science, there is no 'just a' Theory. Theory is a testable, provable, FALSIFIABLE explanation of natural behavior. You can't do 'better' than a Theory. Anyone who says 'just a theory' is flagging themselves as not understanding scientific words in the first place and not qualified to make any further comment.
It is possible to prove Big-E evolution. All you have to do is start with some non-living stuff, and produce living stuff, and then produce more complex living stuff. No one has done it yet, but that's not to say it isn't possible.
Ideal for taking over very small universes. ... that happen to have addresses ending in "Ann Arbor MI".