There is a large and vocal Ruby community of behavior-driven design. Tools like RSpec in particular show just how well this works in Ruby, compared to other languages, and all the major projects (including Rails) use and encourage tests -- basically, if you want a change in Rails, you're going to need to write a test which describes the change, which fails on the current trunk and passes with your patch.
But there's also a large and nearly silent community of people who just throw up a gem (because of how absurdly easy it is) without much in the way of docs or tests. And that's cool, too -- even if your project sucks and is in ridiculously early alpha, even if you're still learning the language (or learning to program), it means it's easy to get at your code.
I haven't used CPAN enough to know how it compares, but there are very good gems, and very bad gems, and very unorthodox gems. I think you have to allow the bad ones to also allow the unorthodox ones, and I think it's a strong community overall, but CPAN was pretty damned good, so we might have a ways to go.
What I think we need more of is a way to rank and rate gems, so you don't have to be on the mailing list for months just so you know offhand that Nokogiri has replaced Hpricot (and certainly rexml) as the best html/xml parsing suite.
This whole thing between us started because you jumped on me for asking whether we were even talking specifically about scientific theories or theories in general, calling my usage "colloquial".
Your usage of "scientific theory", specifically.
I don't know if you realize, but "colloquial" tends to have a connotation of being improper, and is not simply "common usage" as opposed to "technical definition".
When you qualify your "common usage" with "scientific", it becomes incorrect. But I will keep that in mind, though when I look up the word "colloquial", all I can find is "informal", which is more what I expected.
Or just wrong. People are often wrong about their own motivations...
And yet, I'd think I would be in a better position to know my motivations than you.
Doesn't make a sane discussion any more likely. You've not only got this funny idea of what my motivations are, you're not only dismissing my own direct claims to the contrary, but you've also started attacking my motivations instead of my argument. That basically reduces this to a "Yes it is!" "No it isn't" shouting match about what might be going on inside my own head, and sorry, I'm just not interested.
What's more, the fact that you took it there makes me much less interested in having any sort of discussion with you.
If someone were posting on a discussion site about how physicists trying to prove string theory "have a lot of work ahead of them," and you responded, "No! They'll be engaged in thought and not moving a lot of mass, and therefore they'll be doing hardly any work!" then that's rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded.
How is this analogous to what I did?
though you won't admit it outright,
In fact, I denied it outright. You're basically calling me a liar, which makes it difficult to have any sort of rational discussion. Rather than apologize, you've changed your opinion about what my motivation is:
You just want to win your argument.
Don't really care at this point, as it's clear how little your opinion is worth. Oh, and I explicitly stated what my motivation was, still not this.
Your new definition of "theory" is not the one that people use in general,
The question isn't whether "people" use it, it's whether people use it in this context.
Aside from that, "correcting" people in normal conversation when they use the word in the supposed "colloquial" definition, which is certainly no less correct a definition, is generally rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded.
If someone tried to tell me W=0 for some children playing tag because "tag isn't work, it's play", it'd be "rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded" of me to correct them?
The point is that you (and some others) are trying to manipulate language in a cynical attempt to push a political agenda.
Yeah, we're done.
I've told you my motives several times, not that they're relevant in the first place. You started out suggesting that whoever told me must have had a political agenda, and now it's me. You also seem to have ignored the part where I can make a successful "political" argument no matter which definition ends up being true, despite quoting and responding to that.
Despite accusing me of making this political, you've made it personal, and that's just not worth getting into.
This is what public-key cryptography is for. Someone insists on a password?
makepasswd --minchars 8 --maxchars 64
If that doesn't work, replace maxchars with whatever's relevant for the site. That's already fairly secure, but if a site insists you use non-alphanumeric characters,
And that's assuming they don't allow Unicode. Most websites will let my browser save the password, and a few others, I can copy it from a text file. On the very rare occasions a website insists I type the password every time, and I'm too lazy to work around it, I do this:
gpw
Then, just add some numbers that mean something to me, though after a week or so, I'll have memorized them -- so the next time I need one, there'll be other relevant numbers.
At this point, I never sign up for a new service with the same password I use anywhere else. I don't want to make it easy for someone else to crack my Slashdot account, for instance, but that's no reason to trust Slashdot with my PayPal password, or vice versa. TFA is moronic -- it's not about "lousy" passwords, it's about limiting the scope of passwords, and this isn't new. This time, the site in question didn't use salt. What if they'd actually been malicious?
Yeah, and saying something "is more or less" is not the same as saying "is".
Also something I never implied.
Now this is important. This is the key point: What is your intention is saying that in order to be a "theory" is must be testable, tested, verified, and established?
My intention? Because that is the definition of the word in this context. My intention is to reduce confusion, not increase it.
I mean, let's cut through the bullshit here. Your intention is nothing more or less than being able to say to creationists, "You aren't allowed to doubt evolution because it's 'just a theory', since when we call it a 'theory' we're saying it's true."
First, that's not what I say to creationists. "Probably true" is different than "true", just as "more or less" is different than "is", and I don't make that mistake.
Second, as I've pointed out before, this isn't essential to winning an argument against a creationist -- I frequently point out how they could disprove evolution, if it were false. But even evolution isn't essential -- if evolution were disproved tomorrow, it still wouldn't take much effort to show that "Intelligent Design" doesn't even count as a hypothesis.
Third, telling me what my own intentions are is a bit rude, don't you think?
Let me say this again, in case you missed it the first time: My only intent is to have a clear and consistent definition. When the NAS, Wikipedia, and several dictionaries suggests one interpretation, I'd rather be consistent with them than consistent with you and a bunch of creationists, as you are the only person other than a creationist I've heard misuse "theory" in this way.
Science is not a set of verified and undoubtable facts that you aren't allowed to question. In fact, when you stop the questioning and the doubting, the science stops.
I agree. When have I ever suggested otherwise? This is the fundamental strength of science, and it's another thing I routinely have to explain to creationists. "Evolution isn't proven!" Neither is gravity -- nothing in science is proven.
You're trying to take scientific theories and turn them into objects of faith.
Are you really saying you can't understand the difference between "more or less" true, or "probably" true, and absolutely, unquestionably true?
The truth is that there is a reason why we call it "the theory of evolution" and not "the fact of evolution".
I'm not looking forward to this, but there is, in fact, a "fact of evolution" as well, distinct from the theory. A scientific fact is defined as a repeated observation -- the fact of Gravity is that stuff falls. A theory is a well-established explanation for these facts.
In this case, the fact is that things evolved, and the theory is the mechanism by which they evolved.
Before you start, facts, too, can be disputed by counterexamples, or by showing flaws in the original data. Evolution, both fact and theory, would likely be disproved overnight if someone found, say, a bunny in the Cambrian.
The reason is, the theory is probably not correct.
Also true. It is, however, probably more correct than not.
I like to use "the earth is flat" as an example here, borrowing from Isaac Asimov -- we used to think the earth was flat, and then we thought it was spherical. Now we know it's more pear-shaped, and even that is likely not the best approximation. However, anyone who thinks "the earth is spherical" is just as wrong as "the earth is flat" is, as Asimov said, "wronger than the both of them put together."
Our current understanding of evolution may be as far off as the Newtonian or Ptolemiac theories of the planets.
Maybe. But the same applies -- both of those were still more accurate than the vi
Windows has its issues but it works and there are no formatting issues when you open a word document.
That's it? That's your reason for running Windows?
Office runs under Wine, OpenOffice does decently well with Word documents, and guess what? If you use actually standard formats, like PDF or ODT, you don't get formatting issues either!
I mean, this is a bit like complaining Linux sucks because it has issues running EXEs.
Market failure is a concept within economic theory wherein the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where market participants' overall gains from that outcome would outweigh their losses (even if some participants lose under the new arrangement).
Not a word in there about "price-forming function" -- however, it does mention some obvious causes, such as monopoly.
I apologize if I've misused terms. However, I do contend that in this sense, "market failure" is prevalent, unavoidable, but undesirable, and can be somewhat mitigated by regulation. This is true no matter what you want to call it.
Boom and bust cycles are not market failures,
Nor was I claiming for a second that they were.
As to the rest of your comment - grow a penis.
What an incredibly sexist thing to say. What makes you think I'm male to begin with?
And one of those "other uses" is the "Scientific Theory" that I linked to in the first place, which is why I'm puzzled you linked to Wikipedia's definition in the first place.
So it's more verified or established or less verified or established. Right.
Really?
Are you really suggesting that whoever wrote that meant to imply that theories don't need to be verified at all to be called theories? You're the one telling me that I should accept the definition "we both know" -- well, we both know what "more or less" means.
No, I'm asking for great thinkers and you're giving me bureaucrats.
And I asked you for what a "great thinker" is, and you gave me "great, good, medocre, poor..."
So: What about the NAS book makes it irrelevant? Is the NAS actually irrelevant enough in the scientific community that no one but you has ever bothered to correct them?
people *do* use words in different (often metaphorical) senses on a regular basis. So if you want to say that "work" in the scientific sense is unconnected to "work" in the general sense, that's fine. It doesn't hurt my argument either way.
The entire point of bringing up "work" was to illustrate that sometimes, words have different, confusing meanings, and somehow the world keeps turning. This is directly addressing your argument that this was a "nonsensical" definition of "theory" and that it's needlessly confusing. If so, "work" is also "needlessly confusing" and arguably "nonsensical", but it somehow doesn't seem to cause problems.
It may be that it doesn't hurt your argument that you now can't make a case for why we should accept your definition and reject mine, and you're now reduced to making a case for that "theory" already does have your definition and not mine. In fact, if you could back that claim up at all, your argument would be in fine shape.
So far, you haven't been able to back that up -- which means that as of right now, your only remaining argument is to dismiss my sources. Your dismissal isn't very convincing when I can find the definition I want in two of the three sources you brought up when you finally gave me any sources at all.
Well theory does not mean what you thought it did. Now you know.
Apparently not.
I don't think it would work. I think it's a stupid approach, which is why I called it "poor argumentation".
Then let me rephrase. Why would you expect an attempt to redefine "creationism" to be more successful than an attempt to redefine "theory", assuming such tactics worked at all?
I'm not convinced redefining language is an altogether ineffective approach, but I don't think that's what's happening.
This is exactly my point. Science is under attack from "intelligent design" and it doesn't need you attacking it from the other side by trying to imply that all "theories" must be true.
Where did I ever imply all theories must be true?
People being stupid isn't caused by the definition of the word "theory".
Which has no relevance to what you were quoting. This was a response to your implication that science shouldn't be held captive to political motives.
And while it's true that this isn't the cause, one way in which people are stupid is to claim that evolution is "just a theory" as opposed to fact. Whatever the definition of theory, it's possible to make a claim that evolution is one of the most well-supported theories in science. But it's even dumber when you consider the weight the word "theory" carries in science.
the prices were falling, the production was increasing, the wealth was growing,
And market failures were frequent.
I don't pay attention to such inconsequential things, I am secure enough in my view of the world,
You mean, you're secure in your own little world.
If you want to be taken seriously, you might want to start caring at least a little bit about the opinions of others. It's true that someone calling you a troll doesn't make you a troll, but when an entire community is essentially telling you "don't be a dick", you might want to consider that just maybe, it's not them, it's you.
If you don't want to be taken seriously, why post at all?
I'm not criticizing the pencil pusher, I'm criticizing the rules. Doesn't matter whose decision it ultimately was, calling publicly-known information "classified" is moronic.
The point is, once it's actually been published in the NYT, what's the point of considering it classified anymore? What damage could possibly be done that hasn't already?
Wikipedia: "For other uses, see Theory (disambiguation)."
dictionary.reference.com: "A theory in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena: the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serves as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth: This idea is only a hypothesis."
Mirriam-Webster, definition 5: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena "
Of those, only Mirriam-Webster is at all ambiguous or would tend to suggest your interpretation.
Way to prove that you're not one of those pedantic douchebags I was complaining about.
Now that was an ad-hom attack.
I actually did have a point, whether you saw it or not: If you can't back up your claim, I can only assume you're operating from your own arbitrary, circular definitions of what's "nonsensical" and of what a "great thinker" is.
There are plenty of good ideas that aren't theories, and there are theories which aren't good ideas. The definition of theory, whether talking in science or colloquial, is something along the lines of "a speculative explanation" generally including the connotation that it has not been proven.
Way to prove you're not one of those pedantic douchebags you keep complaining about.
But thank you -- in the colloquial sense, that's right, and my "good idea" was an oversimplification. Like I said, I'd rather be proven wrong than forever be wrong. (Full disclosure: That's not my line.)
And the difference is, when we talk about "work" in physics, we're talking about a specific measurement which was derived in order to be able to quantify work. When I move a heavy box from point A to point B, I have done some "work". The physics definition is essentially trying to quantify that work.
That's the origin of it, I would assume.
Regardless, there are other metaphorical uses of words that are very different from the original meaning...
Really?
When I work on a computer all day, you mean to tell me that the work I'm doing is merely "metaphorical"?
I suppose it's possible that the origin was a metaphor, but I'm sure I'm not paid in metaphorical dollars.
The problem is when you arbitrarily try to make up a new conflicting definition because you don't know how else to win your arguments and you're too petty to say "I don't know".
Neither of which applies here. When trying to prove me wrong, two of the three sources you found actually confirmed my position. However, I'm in no way dependent on this definition to win arguments, other than arguments about this definition.
What I am dependent on is a consistent definition, one way or another, which is why I care about this to begin with. If "theory" doesn't mean what I thought it did, I had better be sure to use other words instead. If "theory" means exactly what I thought it did, then you're just adding confusion to the conversation.
And this is the whole problem. In a stunning misuse of words, Creationists dubbed their theory "science". You apparently can't figure out a useful response...
The word "theory" is entirely irrelevant to whether or not creationism can be defined as "science" or not. The concept is important, but calling it something else wouldn't cause problems.
It would be inconvenient, however, to have to redefine a word just because some people can't handle that words have different meanings in different contexts.
If such poor argumentation works, then we'd be better off redefining "creationism" as "wrong" and being done with it.
That's fair. I'm not saying you have to watch it in order to say you don't like it. For example, Jersey Shore really doesn't interest me at all.
But I'm also not going to come out and say "Every Jersey Shore episode is just strippers in catfights and spiky-haired guys getting thrown out of bars."
While Stargate is somewhat repetitive, there are plenty of episodes (including some of the best) which don't follow the pattern CookieForYou identified at all. It would be like dismissing Star Trek because of the particle of the week -- sure, technobabble is a weak point, but the show is still worth watching.
Look, you asked for citations of people using the word "theory" in the way that people normally use it,
No, I didn't. I asked for a citation to show that the word "theory" in the colloquial sense applies, that there is no standard of evidence required for something to be called a scientific theory.
That's just silly. I can waste my time trying to find some dumb citations...
If you can show what I asked you to show, I would back down immediately.
...or you can just admit...
See, that's a bit of a problem. You're already wasting time trying to convince me by your assertion of what is and isn't "pedantic", "fake", "nonsensical", and "crazy" (which is why you dismiss the possibility of any "good" or "great" thinkers being relevant unless they said it at least 70 years ago). Three out of those four are subjective, and you've backed none of them up.
Basically, what you're saying is that you can present an actually good argument, or I can just give up and save you the trouble. Why should I?
It's not as an ad-hominem attack, but more that I'm asserting they're probably a poor thinker for coming up with such a bad attempt at redefinition.
So, when you said, "I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of a poor thinker," the "poor thinker" bit was redundant, because you infer that from the fact that it's a "nonsensical redefinition."
If we remove that redundancy, your statement becomes, "I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of anyone." (Why? Because anyone who proposes such a redefinition, you'd infer is a poor thinker.)
So, unless you can show that it's "nonsensical," and I don't think you can, what have you really said here?
Or are you saying that you're not misinformed, but that *you* came up with this new definition?
No. I think this new definition has value, but I didn't invent it.
"Work" and "power" in a strict physics standpoint is more particular than the general usage, but in my mind, at least, they're not contradictory.
This is exactly the same as the two definitions of "theory" we're considering. Colloquially, a theory is "a good idea." The other is "a good idea which has evidence." It's not a complete inversion of meaning, it's more particular.
While every scientific theory (no matter whose definition we use) is also a "theory" in the sense of "a good idea," it is not the case that every instance of "work" as in F dot dr is also an instance of "work" in the colloquial sense, or vice versa. For instance, we would like to say that holding up a weight without moving is hard work, whereas we can find all sorts of recreational activities which we'd consider to be the opposite of work, but actually involve physical work.
Worse, if we try to reconcile some of these by appealing to what's actually going on inside our body (what a muscle is actually doing when you're using it to support a weight), we might conclude that everything a person does while alive involves some work.
So it seems to me that "work" is in worse shape.
"Power" might be even worse -- pushing a stalled car to start it certainly requires work, but we probably wouldn't want to say the act involved power. Aside from electric power, in everyday life, we tend to think of "power" as a thing, not a process -- a person is "powerful" if they have a lot of wealth and influence, if they are capable of a lot of things, and we would say they "have power." I'm sure I'm not alone in saying my laptop has "low power" (or worse, "low battery").
It almost seems like when we say "power", we sometimes mean it in the physics sense, but sometimes we mean "potential energy."
Slashdot Mirror
That's tricky.
There is a large and vocal Ruby community of behavior-driven design. Tools like RSpec in particular show just how well this works in Ruby, compared to other languages, and all the major projects (including Rails) use and encourage tests -- basically, if you want a change in Rails, you're going to need to write a test which describes the change, which fails on the current trunk and passes with your patch.
But there's also a large and nearly silent community of people who just throw up a gem (because of how absurdly easy it is) without much in the way of docs or tests. And that's cool, too -- even if your project sucks and is in ridiculously early alpha, even if you're still learning the language (or learning to program), it means it's easy to get at your code.
I haven't used CPAN enough to know how it compares, but there are very good gems, and very bad gems, and very unorthodox gems. I think you have to allow the bad ones to also allow the unorthodox ones, and I think it's a strong community overall, but CPAN was pretty damned good, so we might have a ways to go.
What I think we need more of is a way to rank and rate gems, so you don't have to be on the mailing list for months just so you know offhand that Nokogiri has replaced Hpricot (and certainly rexml) as the best html/xml parsing suite.
Alan Fucking Turing.
Sorry, not interested in arguing with you about my mental state. Thought I made that clear.
This whole thing between us started because you jumped on me for asking whether we were even talking specifically about scientific theories or theories in general, calling my usage "colloquial".
Your usage of "scientific theory", specifically.
I don't know if you realize, but "colloquial" tends to have a connotation of being improper, and is not simply "common usage" as opposed to "technical definition".
When you qualify your "common usage" with "scientific", it becomes incorrect. But I will keep that in mind, though when I look up the word "colloquial", all I can find is "informal", which is more what I expected.
Or just wrong. People are often wrong about their own motivations...
And yet, I'd think I would be in a better position to know my motivations than you.
Doesn't make a sane discussion any more likely. You've not only got this funny idea of what my motivations are, you're not only dismissing my own direct claims to the contrary, but you've also started attacking my motivations instead of my argument. That basically reduces this to a "Yes it is!" "No it isn't" shouting match about what might be going on inside my own head, and sorry, I'm just not interested.
What's more, the fact that you took it there makes me much less interested in having any sort of discussion with you.
If someone were posting on a discussion site about how physicists trying to prove string theory "have a lot of work ahead of them," and you responded, "No! They'll be engaged in thought and not moving a lot of mass, and therefore they'll be doing hardly any work!" then that's rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded.
How is this analogous to what I did?
though you won't admit it outright,
In fact, I denied it outright. You're basically calling me a liar, which makes it difficult to have any sort of rational discussion. Rather than apologize, you've changed your opinion about what my motivation is:
You just want to win your argument.
Don't really care at this point, as it's clear how little your opinion is worth. Oh, and I explicitly stated what my motivation was, still not this.
Your new definition of "theory" is not the one that people use in general,
The question isn't whether "people" use it, it's whether people use it in this context.
Aside from that, "correcting" people in normal conversation when they use the word in the supposed "colloquial" definition, which is certainly no less correct a definition, is generally rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded.
If someone tried to tell me W=0 for some children playing tag because "tag isn't work, it's play", it'd be "rude, pedantic, and wrongheaded" of me to correct them?
The point is that you (and some others) are trying to manipulate language in a cynical attempt to push a political agenda.
Yeah, we're done.
I've told you my motives several times, not that they're relevant in the first place. You started out suggesting that whoever told me must have had a political agenda, and now it's me. You also seem to have ignored the part where I can make a successful "political" argument no matter which definition ends up being true, despite quoting and responding to that.
Despite accusing me of making this political, you've made it personal, and that's just not worth getting into.
Where's a "-1 Wrong" option when you need it?
Yes, it does. It doesn't support Firefox-compatible addons. It does support Firefox-compatible plugins. There is a difference.
I agree! Plus the latency...
This is what public-key cryptography is for. Someone insists on a password?
makepasswd --minchars 8 --maxchars 64
If that doesn't work, replace maxchars with whatever's relevant for the site. That's already fairly secure, but if a site insists you use non-alphanumeric characters,
makepasswd --minchars 8 --maxchars 64 --string 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ123456789!@#$%^&*(){}?+[]/=;,.:'
And that's assuming they don't allow Unicode. Most websites will let my browser save the password, and a few others, I can copy it from a text file. On the very rare occasions a website insists I type the password every time, and I'm too lazy to work around it, I do this:
gpw
Then, just add some numbers that mean something to me, though after a week or so, I'll have memorized them -- so the next time I need one, there'll be other relevant numbers.
At this point, I never sign up for a new service with the same password I use anywhere else. I don't want to make it easy for someone else to crack my Slashdot account, for instance, but that's no reason to trust Slashdot with my PayPal password, or vice versa. TFA is moronic -- it's not about "lousy" passwords, it's about limiting the scope of passwords, and this isn't new. This time, the site in question didn't use salt. What if they'd actually been malicious?
Yeah, and saying something "is more or less" is not the same as saying "is".
Also something I never implied.
Now this is important. This is the key point: What is your intention is saying that in order to be a "theory" is must be testable, tested, verified, and established?
My intention? Because that is the definition of the word in this context. My intention is to reduce confusion, not increase it.
I mean, let's cut through the bullshit here. Your intention is nothing more or less than being able to say to creationists, "You aren't allowed to doubt evolution because it's 'just a theory', since when we call it a 'theory' we're saying it's true."
First, that's not what I say to creationists. "Probably true" is different than "true", just as "more or less" is different than "is", and I don't make that mistake.
Second, as I've pointed out before, this isn't essential to winning an argument against a creationist -- I frequently point out how they could disprove evolution, if it were false. But even evolution isn't essential -- if evolution were disproved tomorrow, it still wouldn't take much effort to show that "Intelligent Design" doesn't even count as a hypothesis.
Third, telling me what my own intentions are is a bit rude, don't you think?
Let me say this again, in case you missed it the first time: My only intent is to have a clear and consistent definition. When the NAS, Wikipedia, and several dictionaries suggests one interpretation, I'd rather be consistent with them than consistent with you and a bunch of creationists, as you are the only person other than a creationist I've heard misuse "theory" in this way.
Science is not a set of verified and undoubtable facts that you aren't allowed to question. In fact, when you stop the questioning and the doubting, the science stops.
I agree. When have I ever suggested otherwise? This is the fundamental strength of science, and it's another thing I routinely have to explain to creationists. "Evolution isn't proven!" Neither is gravity -- nothing in science is proven.
You're trying to take scientific theories and turn them into objects of faith.
Are you really saying you can't understand the difference between "more or less" true, or "probably" true, and absolutely, unquestionably true?
The truth is that there is a reason why we call it "the theory of evolution" and not "the fact of evolution".
I'm not looking forward to this, but there is, in fact, a "fact of evolution" as well, distinct from the theory. A scientific fact is defined as a repeated observation -- the fact of Gravity is that stuff falls. A theory is a well-established explanation for these facts.
In this case, the fact is that things evolved, and the theory is the mechanism by which they evolved.
Before you start, facts, too, can be disputed by counterexamples, or by showing flaws in the original data. Evolution, both fact and theory, would likely be disproved overnight if someone found, say, a bunny in the Cambrian.
The reason is, the theory is probably not correct.
Also true. It is, however, probably more correct than not.
I like to use "the earth is flat" as an example here, borrowing from Isaac Asimov -- we used to think the earth was flat, and then we thought it was spherical. Now we know it's more pear-shaped, and even that is likely not the best approximation. However, anyone who thinks "the earth is spherical" is just as wrong as "the earth is flat" is, as Asimov said, "wronger than the both of them put together."
Our current understanding of evolution may be as far off as the Newtonian or Ptolemiac theories of the planets.
Maybe. But the same applies -- both of those were still more accurate than the vi
Point is, you don't represent all Linux users, any more than people using GNewSense represent all Linux users. Netflix could do this.
Now, if they did, I'd be the first to argue that they should lose the DRM, and I certainly wouldn't use it...
Windows has its issues but it works and there are no formatting issues when you open a word document.
That's it? That's your reason for running Windows?
Office runs under Wine, OpenOffice does decently well with Word documents, and guess what? If you use actually standard formats, like PDF or ODT, you don't get formatting issues either!
I mean, this is a bit like complaining Linux sucks because it has issues running EXEs.
Can you give me an example of a user base which doesn't?
We all know why, it is because of DRM. Linux guys hate DRM with a purple passion
This is about as sane as saying Linux people will never use proprietary software -- yet there are plenty of successful, proprietary Linux games.
Except Netflix isn't supporting desktop Linux. That's the whole point.
not a natural monopoly
I'm going to guess you'll say utilities aren't natural monopolies?
As to market failures, are you calling what is observed today a success of any kind?
Nope. Poor regulation is worse than no regulation, certainly.
- exactly. Grow a penis if you want to argue here.
Well, looks like you're not worth arguing with. My fault for giving it this much time.
From Wikipedia:
Market failure is a concept within economic theory wherein the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not efficient. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where market participants' overall gains from that outcome would outweigh their losses (even if some participants lose under the new arrangement).
Not a word in there about "price-forming function" -- however, it does mention some obvious causes, such as monopoly.
I apologize if I've misused terms. However, I do contend that in this sense, "market failure" is prevalent, unavoidable, but undesirable, and can be somewhat mitigated by regulation. This is true no matter what you want to call it.
Boom and bust cycles are not market failures,
Nor was I claiming for a second that they were.
As to the rest of your comment - grow a penis.
What an incredibly sexist thing to say. What makes you think I'm male to begin with?
Grow up.
And one of those "other uses" is the "Scientific Theory" that I linked to in the first place, which is why I'm puzzled you linked to Wikipedia's definition in the first place.
So it's more verified or established or less verified or established. Right.
Really?
Are you really suggesting that whoever wrote that meant to imply that theories don't need to be verified at all to be called theories? You're the one telling me that I should accept the definition "we both know" -- well, we both know what "more or less" means.
No, I'm asking for great thinkers and you're giving me bureaucrats.
And I asked you for what a "great thinker" is, and you gave me "great, good, medocre, poor..."
So: What about the NAS book makes it irrelevant? Is the NAS actually irrelevant enough in the scientific community that no one but you has ever bothered to correct them?
people *do* use words in different (often metaphorical) senses on a regular basis. So if you want to say that "work" in the scientific sense is unconnected to "work" in the general sense, that's fine. It doesn't hurt my argument either way.
The entire point of bringing up "work" was to illustrate that sometimes, words have different, confusing meanings, and somehow the world keeps turning. This is directly addressing your argument that this was a "nonsensical" definition of "theory" and that it's needlessly confusing. If so, "work" is also "needlessly confusing" and arguably "nonsensical", but it somehow doesn't seem to cause problems.
It may be that it doesn't hurt your argument that you now can't make a case for why we should accept your definition and reject mine, and you're now reduced to making a case for that "theory" already does have your definition and not mine. In fact, if you could back that claim up at all, your argument would be in fine shape.
So far, you haven't been able to back that up -- which means that as of right now, your only remaining argument is to dismiss my sources. Your dismissal isn't very convincing when I can find the definition I want in two of the three sources you brought up when you finally gave me any sources at all.
Well theory does not mean what you thought it did. Now you know.
Apparently not.
I don't think it would work. I think it's a stupid approach, which is why I called it "poor argumentation".
Then let me rephrase. Why would you expect an attempt to redefine "creationism" to be more successful than an attempt to redefine "theory", assuming such tactics worked at all?
I'm not convinced redefining language is an altogether ineffective approach, but I don't think that's what's happening.
This is exactly my point. Science is under attack from "intelligent design" and it doesn't need you attacking it from the other side by trying to imply that all "theories" must be true.
Where did I ever imply all theories must be true?
People being stupid isn't caused by the definition of the word "theory".
Which has no relevance to what you were quoting. This was a response to your implication that science shouldn't be held captive to political motives.
And while it's true that this isn't the cause, one way in which people are stupid is to claim that evolution is "just a theory" as opposed to fact. Whatever the definition of theory, it's possible to make a claim that evolution is one of the most well-supported theories in science. But it's even dumber when you consider the weight the word "theory" carries in science.
the prices were falling, the production was increasing, the wealth was growing,
And market failures were frequent.
I don't pay attention to such inconsequential things, I am secure enough in my view of the world,
You mean, you're secure in your own little world.
If you want to be taken seriously, you might want to start caring at least a little bit about the opinions of others. It's true that someone calling you a troll doesn't make you a troll, but when an entire community is essentially telling you "don't be a dick", you might want to consider that just maybe, it's not them, it's you.
If you don't want to be taken seriously, why post at all?
I'm not criticizing the pencil pusher, I'm criticizing the rules. Doesn't matter whose decision it ultimately was, calling publicly-known information "classified" is moronic.
The point is, once it's actually been published in the NYT, what's the point of considering it classified anymore? What damage could possibly be done that hasn't already?
Fine, you really want citations? Here are some.
Wikipedia: "For other uses, see Theory (disambiguation)."
dictionary.reference.com: "A theory in technical use is a more or less verified or established explanation accounting for known facts or phenomena: the theory of relativity. A hypothesis is a conjecture put forth as a possible explanation of phenomena or relations, which serves as a basis of argument or experimentation to reach the truth: This idea is only a hypothesis."
Mirriam-Webster, definition 5: "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena "
Of those, only Mirriam-Webster is at all ambiguous or would tend to suggest your interpretation.
Way to prove that you're not one of those pedantic douchebags I was complaining about.
Now that was an ad-hom attack.
I actually did have a point, whether you saw it or not: If you can't back up your claim, I can only assume you're operating from your own arbitrary, circular definitions of what's "nonsensical" and of what a "great thinker" is.
There are plenty of good ideas that aren't theories, and there are theories which aren't good ideas. The definition of theory, whether talking in science or colloquial, is something along the lines of "a speculative explanation" generally including the connotation that it has not been proven.
Way to prove you're not one of those pedantic douchebags you keep complaining about.
But thank you -- in the colloquial sense, that's right, and my "good idea" was an oversimplification. Like I said, I'd rather be proven wrong than forever be wrong. (Full disclosure: That's not my line.)
And the difference is, when we talk about "work" in physics, we're talking about a specific measurement which was derived in order to be able to quantify work. When I move a heavy box from point A to point B, I have done some "work". The physics definition is essentially trying to quantify that work.
That's the origin of it, I would assume.
Regardless, there are other metaphorical uses of words that are very different from the original meaning...
Really?
When I work on a computer all day, you mean to tell me that the work I'm doing is merely "metaphorical"?
I suppose it's possible that the origin was a metaphor, but I'm sure I'm not paid in metaphorical dollars.
The problem is when you arbitrarily try to make up a new conflicting definition because you don't know how else to win your arguments and you're too petty to say "I don't know".
Neither of which applies here. When trying to prove me wrong, two of the three sources you found actually confirmed my position. However, I'm in no way dependent on this definition to win arguments, other than arguments about this definition.
What I am dependent on is a consistent definition, one way or another, which is why I care about this to begin with. If "theory" doesn't mean what I thought it did, I had better be sure to use other words instead. If "theory" means exactly what I thought it did, then you're just adding confusion to the conversation.
And this is the whole problem. In a stunning misuse of words, Creationists dubbed their theory "science". You apparently can't figure out a useful response...
The word "theory" is entirely irrelevant to whether or not creationism can be defined as "science" or not. The concept is important, but calling it something else wouldn't cause problems.
It would be inconvenient, however, to have to redefine a word just because some people can't handle that words have different meanings in different contexts.
If such poor argumentation works, then we'd be better off redefining "creationism" as "wrong" and being done with it.
Assuming fo
That's fair. I'm not saying you have to watch it in order to say you don't like it. For example, Jersey Shore really doesn't interest me at all.
But I'm also not going to come out and say "Every Jersey Shore episode is just strippers in catfights and spiky-haired guys getting thrown out of bars."
While Stargate is somewhat repetitive, there are plenty of episodes (including some of the best) which don't follow the pattern CookieForYou identified at all. It would be like dismissing Star Trek because of the particle of the week -- sure, technobabble is a weak point, but the show is still worth watching.
Look, you asked for citations of people using the word "theory" in the way that people normally use it,
No, I didn't. I asked for a citation to show that the word "theory" in the colloquial sense applies, that there is no standard of evidence required for something to be called a scientific theory.
That's just silly. I can waste my time trying to find some dumb citations...
If you can show what I asked you to show, I would back down immediately.
...or you can just admit...
See, that's a bit of a problem. You're already wasting time trying to convince me by your assertion of what is and isn't "pedantic", "fake", "nonsensical", and "crazy" (which is why you dismiss the possibility of any "good" or "great" thinkers being relevant unless they said it at least 70 years ago). Three out of those four are subjective, and you've backed none of them up.
Basically, what you're saying is that you can present an actually good argument, or I can just give up and save you the trouble. Why should I?
It's not as an ad-hominem attack, but more that I'm asserting they're probably a poor thinker for coming up with such a bad attempt at redefinition.
So, when you said, "I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of a poor thinker," the "poor thinker" bit was redundant, because you infer that from the fact that it's a "nonsensical redefinition."
If we remove that redundancy, your statement becomes, "I'm not going to readily accept a drastic and nonsensical redefinition of well-established words on the insistence of anyone." (Why? Because anyone who proposes such a redefinition, you'd infer is a poor thinker.)
So, unless you can show that it's "nonsensical," and I don't think you can, what have you really said here?
Or are you saying that you're not misinformed, but that *you* came up with this new definition?
No. I think this new definition has value, but I didn't invent it.
"Work" and "power" in a strict physics standpoint is more particular than the general usage, but in my mind, at least, they're not contradictory.
This is exactly the same as the two definitions of "theory" we're considering. Colloquially, a theory is "a good idea." The other is "a good idea which has evidence." It's not a complete inversion of meaning, it's more particular.
While every scientific theory (no matter whose definition we use) is also a "theory" in the sense of "a good idea," it is not the case that every instance of "work" as in F dot dr is also an instance of "work" in the colloquial sense, or vice versa. For instance, we would like to say that holding up a weight without moving is hard work, whereas we can find all sorts of recreational activities which we'd consider to be the opposite of work, but actually involve physical work.
Worse, if we try to reconcile some of these by appealing to what's actually going on inside our body (what a muscle is actually doing when you're using it to support a weight), we might conclude that everything a person does while alive involves some work.
So it seems to me that "work" is in worse shape.
"Power" might be even worse -- pushing a stalled car to start it certainly requires work, but we probably wouldn't want to say the act involved power. Aside from electric power, in everyday life, we tend to think of "power" as a thing, not a process -- a person is "powerful" if they have a lot of wealth and influence, if they are capable of a lot of things, and we would say they "have power." I'm sure I'm not alone in saying my laptop has "low power" (or worse, "low battery").
It almost seems like when we say "power", we sometimes mean it in the physics sense, but sometimes we mean "potential energy."
I'
seriously.... I've seen like 5 episodes
So... what's your opinion worth, having seen five episodes out of ten seasons?