"Please enlighten me as to what constitutes proper [evidence]?"
Can be reproduced by others. Eye-wittness accounts are neither evidence nor extordinary.
"Frankly, it sounds like the same kind of tripe as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; as if the standards of proof change for what some people consider "extraordinary"."
The correct quote is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and you have failed to comprehend it's meaning, science is not in the bussiness of proof.
"The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible"...[snip]...I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one. "
Poppycock, "extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence". Eye-witness reports are NOT extrodinary evidence, if they were then "institutional science" would be spending way too much time investigating pink elephants.
"Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature."
Again, if someone makes a claim that is unsupported by the evidence then it is the claimant that should STFU not those who are pointing out the lack of evidence.
"Institutional science" is exactly how it should be, skeptical.
"I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?)."
"as [the scientist] pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
He can see the theologians who have taken that final leap to the top of the rock but the force of logic seperates his real world rock from where the theologians of inumerable religions have been sitting for centuries arguing about who's imaginary friend has the bigus dickus.
Like a glass ceiling the force of logic stops him from pulling himself up the last rock, so he sits down with his back against the rock admiring the view. He muses to himself that his mind is but a tool by which the universe can observe itself. He wonders about the quantam mechanics in the rock that is countering the force of gravity and holding him and the theologians up.
Every now and then the scientist tries to show the theologians the virtue and fruits of critical thinking that surrounds us in the modern world but all such attempts at enlightenment have resulted in the theologians shouting "my god did it" and tossing feaces at the scientist and each another.
The existing filter is only mandatory for government owned computers (schools, libraries, etc), it's OPT-IN for private citizens. Note that there are a minority of people who do want to use it, ~5% of users have opted in.
The last case of genuine censorship I can recall was when they took down the web site of an MP because it had broken anti-right-to-die legislation. The servers were unplugged because they boke Australian law, the site shifted to a NZ host and was up again the next day. At no time was the site blocked by filtering.
However just because they are not blocking sites does not mean they don't have a warrant to monitor/modify/disrupt the traffic to and from particular sites. Maybe they temporarily block a site if they think it will expose a bust/investigation. Not that I agree with the war on drugs but organised drug/peodophile rings have freinds in important places, obviously secrecy must be a priority for the cops.
Yet another slashdotter who has "misunderstood" Australia's political system. There has never been a mandatory filter nor will there ever be one, it's simply a political game the two major parties play in order to castrate independent senators.
If talking to a kid, the simple answer to both is that the atmosphere bends, reflects and splits sunlight according to colour (frequency), if talking to a teenager then let them take the next step and find the different types of bending, spliting and reflecting. You can continue down that path until you have explained the phenomena in terms of the four forces but then you are still stuck with explaining "what are the four forces?".
IMHO A HS educated parent should be able to give the child answer and understand it's a simplyfied model. However the teenage answer is much harder, that sort of detail is why my well-educated parents owned a set of encyclopedia when I was a kid, combined with a dictionary and atlas, they were the google of the 60's.
There's nothing wrong with the parent saying "I don't know" or "nobody knows" but if the parent fails to show any intellectual curiosity (god did it), makes up answers (god did it because...), or simply recites the text book (the bible says god did it), then the child will probably grow up the same.
"Women as adults (legally and biologically) should be expected to act
as such and be expected to look after their own interests. They should
be no more or less responsible for their actions than a man."
What does this mom and apple pie quote have to do with anything? Are you suggesting women invite rape by the way the look/act?
That info MIGHT be pertinent to a job application but TFS indicates people were also fired from an existing job because of their credit rating. Personally I would be fucked-off to the point of quiting if my employer started ordering regular credit checks on me AFTER I already had the job.
I say "might" but really I can't see it being much use other than a crude process for HR to filter out obvious morons, a first class thief/fraudster will have impecable records and refrences.
Disclaimer: The option of spitting the dummy and quitting is relative to one's circumatances. As a vetran proffesional I have amassed a large fuck-off fund that would last me several years, I also have an excellent credit rating (now that my "sins" are too old to be on the records). I can afford to tell a petty-minded employer to go jump, the vast majority of people (such as my adult children) don't have that luxury.
"Most likely, though, they told him afterward because they thought that they could do whatever they wanted with this information and not bother to get his permission or provide notification."
I agree, if someone has the arrogance to do this to existing employees then they will also have the arrogance to tell the person exactly why they are being sacked and act as if they are doing the person a favour, throw in a dash of self-righteousness and they will also update the persons contact details for the reporting company.
"And whatever - when there are TLD:s on the net for political groups then you may want to have.fascism.nazism.liberalism.g-marxism.communism and.capitalism just to name a few to add to the pot."
It would make a great anti skynet technique, the moment it becomes self aware it will start censoring itself into oblivion.
I call myself a greenie and have done since the 70's but I am also literate enough in science to understand that "green groups" are political movements and like all political movements pander to psuedo-science and spiritualisim to attract voters who have not aquired the skill of critical thinking and/or the knowledge base required to make that skill useful. Having said that - science can only tell you the options, it can't tell you how to choose wisely.
"anti-gaia-hypothesis"
Gaia gets a bad wrap, it is the victim of said spititual pandering (plus some deliberate anti-enviro conflation), Gaia is basically an alternate term for what we now call the biosphere. The author of the theory is James Lovelock who has been called the farther of Earth Science. Spiritualists picked up on the greek god reference and gave Gaia a "soul" and the Giai name fell into disrepute. Earth science went on to divide everything into overlapping spheres, biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc. Each sphere represents a planet wide system. The biosphere behaves LIKE an organisim in the same way an entire ants nest can be considered to behave LIKE an organisim. This does not imply either the ants nest or the biosphere IS an organisim/god.
BTW: Lovelock was also founding member of GreenPeace but like the other scientifically literate founders he resigned long ago. He also made headlines a few years ago for a wonderfull rant contradicting greenpeace's no-nuke policy.
I am a "baby boomer" when I was a kid there were still plenty of people with a dozen kids due to religious reasons but then in the 60's someone invented the pill and triggered the sexual revolution, just around the time I hit puberty.:)
I don't think you can really compare post-WW2 attitudes to a hypothetical post WW3 because I'm pretty sure the survivors of WW3 will not forget the recipe for the pill.
"You're completely wrong. Our planet could sustain 8 billion people, 9-10 billion if we really tried...[snip]...The Earth will find its own equilibrium, we don't need to do it for it. That's terribly Arrogant and Elitist."
That's some mighty twisted logic there. First you define an arbritrary equilibrim point and insist it's more correct than the GP's arbritrary equilibrim point, then you attack all such arbritrary equlibrium points as "Arrogant and Elitist".
Rationing is never the solution.
It's always the solution when a fixed quantity of resources R must supply X number of people for Y length of time but the average DESIRED consumption is greater than R/X per Y, in such a situation where the resource is essential to life the only alternative to rationing is violence. Violence is more or less mandatory if the REQUIRED individual consumption is greater that R/X per Y.
As evidence of the social effectiveness of rationing, try watering your garden with a mains water hose/sprinkler in Melbourne Australia, most people (including me) would dob you in before the water even hit the ground. This is in a culture were the label "dobber" is a serious insult.
Note: The first link blames the government, this is way too simple minded. Nobody saw the permenent drought coming so fast, even the climate change people thought it was 50yrs away (studies of why they failed to see it coming, show that runoff drops at 3X the rate of rainfall, so a 10% drop in rainfall equates to 30% less runoff to the dam). When it was obvious the drought was more than a normal cyclical drought the govenment fast tracked a $3.5b desal plant that will be one of the largest in the world (Melbourne is the largest project but most Aussie cities are building similar desal plants), none of which will resurect Australia's terminally ill breadbasket. If there is an obvious flaw in the government's plans/actions it's the fact they decided to power the desal plant with 100% coal even though it sits on the edge of the "roaring fourties".
Re:The rest of the world is making fun of America
on
The Outing of Pranknet
·
· Score: 1
"All western societies are based upon implicit trust."
Actually all societies are based on trust. Language would not have evolved if what was being communicated was not trustworthy.
Re:The rest of the world is making fun of America
on
The Outing of Pranknet
·
· Score: 1
"but how much perceived threat can a caller on a phone generate to cause people to act out of fear rather than stupidity?"
Do the words "bomb threat" mean anything to you?
Re:The rest of the world is making fun of America
on
The Outing of Pranknet
·
· Score: 1
"I notice the nanny lovers at/. modded me down."
Nah it was the "mouth breather's", the "nanny lover's" would have asked nanny to do it for them. BTW: I tend to agree with the "mouth breather's" since I have no idea how you can correlate a blocked sinus with intelligence.
Yes you do need to search and I don't believe Apple when they say they have done this.
Anecdote: When my daughter was in HS she came home one day and said her teacher told her that swear words are not in the dictonary. I grabed the family dictionary (a large 1980's Macquarie hardback). We looked up the word "fuckwit" and found it had a one word definition of "nincompoop". From that day forward my brother-in-law has been known to my kids as uncle nincompoop.
Slashdot Mirror
"Please enlighten me as to what constitutes proper [evidence]?"
Can be reproduced by others. Eye-wittness accounts are neither evidence nor extordinary.
"Frankly, it sounds like the same kind of tripe as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof"; as if the standards of proof change for what some people consider "extraordinary"."
The correct quote is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and you have failed to comprehend it's meaning, science is not in the bussiness of proof.
"The funny thing about that is that the many eyewitness reports of sprites were routinely disregarded because we "knew that wasn't possible"...[snip]...I just wanted to mention that because the biggest obstacle to new discoveries seems to be the unwillingness to question those things that we "know" to be "impossible." If there's one lesson that institutional science should have learned from its history it's that one. "
Poppycock, "extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence". Eye-witness reports are NOT extrodinary evidence, if they were then "institutional science" would be spending way too much time investigating pink elephants.
"Rather than shouting down or marginalizing the minority who disagree, we should be promoting their dissent so long as it's scientific in nature."
Again, if someone makes a claim that is unsupported by the evidence then it is the claimant that should STFU not those who are pointing out the lack of evidence.
"Institutional science" is exactly how it should be, skeptical.
"I am seeing more and more surprises like this that are not really surprising from alternative viewpoints, such as the Electric Universe (I said those two words, so I guess that makes me automatically Flamebait eh?)."
No, just scientifically illiterate.
"as [the scientist] pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
He can see the theologians who have taken that final leap to the top of the rock but the force of logic seperates his real world rock from where the theologians of inumerable religions have been sitting for centuries arguing about who's imaginary friend has the bigus dickus.
Like a glass ceiling the force of logic stops him from pulling himself up the last rock, so he sits down with his back against the rock admiring the view. He muses to himself that his mind is but a tool by which the universe can observe itself. He wonders about the quantam mechanics in the rock that is countering the force of gravity and holding him and the theologians up.
Every now and then the scientist tries to show the theologians the virtue and fruits of critical thinking that surrounds us in the modern world but all such attempts at enlightenment have resulted in the theologians shouting "my god did it" and tossing feaces at the scientist and each another.
"Gravity waves should follow the same paths as light waves, and we get plenty of light waves in out gravity well."
Which always made me wonder, how do gravity waves escape a black hole?
The existing filter is only mandatory for government owned computers (schools, libraries, etc), it's OPT-IN for private citizens. Note that there are a minority of people who do want to use it, ~5% of users have opted in.
The last case of genuine censorship I can recall was when they took down the web site of an MP because it had broken anti-right-to-die legislation. The servers were unplugged because they boke Australian law, the site shifted to a NZ host and was up again the next day. At no time was the site blocked by filtering.
However just because they are not blocking sites does not mean they don't have a warrant to monitor/modify/disrupt the traffic to and from particular sites. Maybe they temporarily block a site if they think it will expose a bust/investigation. Not that I agree with the war on drugs but organised drug/peodophile rings have freinds in important places, obviously secrecy must be a priority for the cops.
Yet another slashdotter who has "misunderstood" Australia's political system. There has never been a mandatory filter nor will there ever be one, it's simply a political game the two major parties play in order to castrate independent senators.
For gods sake, stop thinking about your light sabre!
Incomplete != incorrect.
If talking to a kid, the simple answer to both is that the atmosphere bends, reflects and splits sunlight according to colour (frequency), if talking to a teenager then let them take the next step and find the different types of bending, spliting and reflecting. You can continue down that path until you have explained the phenomena in terms of the four forces but then you are still stuck with explaining "what are the four forces?".
IMHO A HS educated parent should be able to give the child answer and understand it's a simplyfied model. However the teenage answer is much harder, that sort of detail is why my well-educated parents owned a set of encyclopedia when I was a kid, combined with a dictionary and atlas, they were the google of the 60's.
There's nothing wrong with the parent saying "I don't know" or "nobody knows" but if the parent fails to show any intellectual curiosity (god did it), makes up answers (god did it because...), or simply recites the text book (the bible says god did it), then the child will probably grow up the same.
"Women as adults (legally and biologically) should be expected to act as such and be expected to look after their own interests. They should be no more or less responsible for their actions than a man."
What does this mom and apple pie quote have to do with anything? Are you suggesting women invite rape by the way the look/act?
That info MIGHT be pertinent to a job application but TFS indicates people were also fired from an existing job because of their credit rating. Personally I would be fucked-off to the point of quiting if my employer started ordering regular credit checks on me AFTER I already had the job.
I say "might" but really I can't see it being much use other than a crude process for HR to filter out obvious morons, a first class thief/fraudster will have impecable records and refrences.
Disclaimer: The option of spitting the dummy and quitting is relative to one's circumatances. As a vetran proffesional I have amassed a large fuck-off fund that would last me several years, I also have an excellent credit rating (now that my "sins" are too old to be on the records). I can afford to tell a petty-minded employer to go jump, the vast majority of people (such as my adult children) don't have that luxury.
"Most likely, though, they told him afterward because they thought that they could do whatever they wanted with this information and not bother to get his permission or provide notification."
I agree, if someone has the arrogance to do this to existing employees then they will also have the arrogance to tell the person exactly why they are being sacked and act as if they are doing the person a favour, throw in a dash of self-righteousness and they will also update the persons contact details for the reporting company.
"And whatever - when there are TLD:s on the net for political groups then you may want to have .fascism .nazism .liberalism .g-marxism .communism and .capitalism just to name a few to add to the pot."
It would make a great anti skynet technique, the moment it becomes self aware it will start censoring itself into oblivion.
Well, nice troll, but can you work the illuminati into it next time, how can I be expected to believe a conspiracy theory if there's no illuminati?
I call myself a greenie and have done since the 70's but I am also literate enough in science to understand that "green groups" are political movements and like all political movements pander to psuedo-science and spiritualisim to attract voters who have not aquired the skill of critical thinking and/or the knowledge base required to make that skill useful. Having said that - science can only tell you the options, it can't tell you how to choose wisely.
"anti-gaia-hypothesis"
Gaia gets a bad wrap, it is the victim of said spititual pandering (plus some deliberate anti-enviro conflation), Gaia is basically an alternate term for what we now call the biosphere. The author of the theory is James Lovelock who has been called the farther of Earth Science. Spiritualists picked up on the greek god reference and gave Gaia a "soul" and the Giai name fell into disrepute. Earth science went on to divide everything into overlapping spheres, biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc. Each sphere represents a planet wide system. The biosphere behaves LIKE an organisim in the same way an entire ants nest can be considered to behave LIKE an organisim. This does not imply either the ants nest or the biosphere IS an organisim/god.
BTW: Lovelock was also founding member of GreenPeace but like the other scientifically literate founders he resigned long ago. He also made headlines a few years ago for a wonderfull rant contradicting greenpeace's no-nuke policy.
Might take a bit longer but we could keep the costs down by getting everyone to stand on the new Krakatoa and wait for the bang.
I am a "baby boomer" when I was a kid there were still plenty of people with a dozen kids due to religious reasons but then in the 60's someone invented the pill and triggered the sexual revolution, just around the time I hit puberty. :)
I don't think you can really compare post-WW2 attitudes to a hypothetical post WW3 because I'm pretty sure the survivors of WW3 will not forget the recipe for the pill.
"only families with sufficiently few children would be eligible"
People in the "first world" have pensions, everyone else has children, except China, who are just starting to realise they have neither.
"You're completely wrong. Our planet could sustain 8 billion people, 9-10 billion if we really tried...[snip]...The Earth will find its own equilibrium, we don't need to do it for it. That's terribly Arrogant and Elitist."
That's some mighty twisted logic there. First you define an arbritrary equilibrim point and insist it's more correct than the GP's arbritrary equilibrim point, then you attack all such arbritrary equlibrium points as "Arrogant and Elitist".
Rationing is never the solution.
It's always the solution when a fixed quantity of resources R must supply X number of people for Y length of time but the average DESIRED consumption is greater than R/X per Y, in such a situation where the resource is essential to life the only alternative to rationing is violence. Violence is more or less mandatory if the REQUIRED individual consumption is greater that R/X per Y.
As evidence of the social effectiveness of rationing, try watering your garden with a mains water hose/sprinkler in Melbourne Australia, most people (including me) would dob you in before the water even hit the ground. This is in a culture were the label "dobber" is a serious insult.
Note: The first link blames the government, this is way too simple minded. Nobody saw the permenent drought coming so fast, even the climate change people thought it was 50yrs away (studies of why they failed to see it coming, show that runoff drops at 3X the rate of rainfall, so a 10% drop in rainfall equates to 30% less runoff to the dam). When it was obvious the drought was more than a normal cyclical drought the govenment fast tracked a $3.5b desal plant that will be one of the largest in the world (Melbourne is the largest project but most Aussie cities are building similar desal plants), none of which will resurect Australia's terminally ill breadbasket. If there is an obvious flaw in the government's plans/actions it's the fact they decided to power the desal plant with 100% coal even though it sits on the edge of the "roaring fourties".
"All western societies are based upon implicit trust."
Actually all societies are based on trust. Language would not have evolved if what was being communicated was not trustworthy.
"but how much perceived threat can a caller on a phone generate to cause people to act out of fear rather than stupidity?"
Do the words "bomb threat" mean anything to you?
"I notice the nanny lovers at /. modded me down."
Nah it was the "mouth breather's", the "nanny lover's" would have asked nanny to do it for them. BTW: I tend to agree with the "mouth breather's" since I have no idea how you can correlate a blocked sinus with intelligence.
Morals?
Yes you do need to search and I don't believe Apple when they say they have done this.
Anecdote: When my daughter was in HS she came home one day and said her teacher told her that swear words are not in the dictonary. I grabed the family dictionary (a large 1980's Macquarie hardback). We looked up the word "fuckwit" and found it had a one word definition of "nincompoop". From that day forward my brother-in-law has been known to my kids as uncle nincompoop.
Over here in Australia Murdoch will happily tell you his worldview is expressed through his media, why not it's his media?