Just list all stories posted as simple one line text. This being from left to right the title, section and total comments at 0. List all stories posted in the past 72 hours by most recent first. The order should be user sortable like comments are. Here comes the cool feature, the more comments a story generates the brighter the text line appears. You can use simple color(r,g,b) attributes for a spectrum from not popular to very popular. I guess the default would be light grey to black, but also have it user defined. But the key is you will have visual cues which pick out the most popular stories. Then when you click the text you get an ajax type dropdown of the full story summary and "Read More" link. Then have a critical mass type visual cue for very popular stories, these stories go right to the top of the list. But also can be used for Slashdot News and the like. So stories like this one don't get lost in the front page.
I think the best solution is to replace html tags with "<" and ">" in all user input. If you want users to format their output use a markup language you define or something pre-existing like Textile
Bottom line is, the only thing I trust is personal experience, and I don't see this bias towards minorities in the workplace.
And yet anecdotal observations filtered through selective perception is one of the weakest forms of evidence. Not only that but you assume that a random sampling group of one is somehow satisfactory.
"For the three months ended Dec. 25, AMD earned $95.6 million, or 21 cents per share, on sales of $1.84 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2004, it lost $30 million, or 8 cents per share, on sales of $1.26 billion."
"For all of 2005, AMD earned $165.5 million, or 40 cents per share, on sales of $5.85 billion. That compares with a 2004 profit of $91.2 million, 25 cents per share, on sales of $5 billion."
So AMD earned more money in the recent 4th quarter than all of 2004. And a 125.6 million increase for 4th quarter earnings from last year. No wonder AMD stocks are up so much today.
I know you have always stated that this will never happen but certain economic pressures might cause you to rethink the issue. Slashdot is still #1 but for how long? Really Slashdot is no longer a news site but like you said a community board. Before I could get all my geek news in some timely fashion from Slashdot but now your competitors do it better. You remain a popular site because of the large following you have accumulated over the years. Mainly because you were the first and the only site of this nature for some time. I think you need to realize this is why you continue to have success. There are other sites that have better features and are better designed. You can only run on your legacy for so long. So in summary when we will see new features?
An article yesterday claimed that there was little gained from this widespread spying campaign. The overwhelmingly majority of these tips handed down from the NSA lead to innocent Americans.
The only thing that could possibly justify such an overreaching program is hard evidence that the program actually delivered information that prevented an attack. You would think that if such evidence existed the Bush administration would release it. However the most likely scenario is that no such evidence exists or it is so indirectly tied to the spying program there might be no real way to prove that this information alone actually resulted in a capture or arrest.
Also I mean real threats, not some whacko who is going to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch. Also a case where you can say, "Yes without the information from the NSA program we would have never have known". So far many suspects have already been identified through man-on-the-ground intelligence.
The history of science is littered with ideas and theories that at the time were ad hoc or kludge factors. Planck himself was unimpressed with his quantization hypothesis and so were many of his contemporaries. It was Einstein who took it seriously and applied it to phenomena. Then afterwards Bohr applied it to his atomic model. Eventually in 1918 Bohr was given a Nobel Prize for his discovery 18 years earlier. Yet at this time quantum theory was still not fully developed. There was no actual theory in place to justify quantization itself. It took another 7 years with the developement of wave-particle duality and later the Schrödinger equation.
My point is science is what is, a human endeavor. It's not going to be perfect. Sometimes you have to make leaps of faith or accept for a time questionable assumptions. But don't reject valid scientific ideas just because it doesn't fall within your narrow view of science. Thankfully scientists themselves are more lenient or else nothing would ever get accomplished.
Dark matter is detectable because it interacts with other particles via gravity. The reason we do not "see" it is because it does not interact or very weakly with other particles via eletromagnetism. The photon is the gauge boson in EM theory. We call dark matter* "dark" because there are no photons interacting with this matter. Be it visible light or the entire EM spectrum.
However we detect dark matter indirectly through its gravitional pressence. These calculations are done with GR which has been pretty accurate for all macroscopic cases. The gravitational signature shows there is more matter than we can detect via photons. The simple conclusion is that there exists particles that interact(or very weakly) with photons.
I do not see how this is irrational or even on par with some theories you suggested. Also String Theory includes many dark matter candidates, like the axion which is considered essential to ST.
The whole reason perhaps we have been unable to detect dark matter particles directly is because we have no quantum theory of gravity. These particles may be all over the place but we have no experimental devices that can detect gravity at the quantum level. But also we have no real theory of quantum gravity. So in the mean time scientists just label it all dark matter.
It's not bad math. It's just science. If you have no real theoretical model for something you put it aside until you can get more empirical data. Then try to fit this data into a model. Right now there is very little data because of what I mentioned previously. It's not a magical term to fix calculations, it's an unknown variable.
Actually dark matter can be proved or disproved... it just hasn't been yet. Also there is indirect evidence for dark matter. Do you believe in String Theory? Dark matter has more evidence and theoretical weight than string theory.
Might want to do some actual research on the subject. From that list there are no articles in support of the Cooperstock-Tieu model other than a response by the orginal authors. The theoretical arguments and evidence against the model are quite convincing.
Dark matter is just the best model we have right now. It also amazes me how much Slashdot is against the dark matter model. Why is that?
But that means we can have different axiomatic systems such that the answer to a statement can be "true" in one and "false" in another. Then if someone wants to ask, "But what is the real answer?" all we can do is shrug our shoulders and reply, "Mu." This can be disconcerting to some who believe in the certainty of mathematics.
What it means is we can have multiple deductive systems to describe different domains. I see this as an expressive power. We not only have Euclidean geometry but also non-Euclidean geometries which proved to be crucial in the theory of relativity. If someone asks "what is the real answer?" it depends on the question itself. It depends on what domain you are talking about. This idea of "global" mathematics is what Gödel defeated.
Wrong. It has nothing to do with the limited abilities of human beings but the limitations of pure logic itself. It doesn't matter if the beings trying to figure shit out is us, some advanced alien race or God Almighty Himself. There are limitations to the set of things that can be known.
What Gödel's incompleteness theorem states can also be said for every human endeavor. As for God, I'm not going to try to figure out what are the limits of an infinite being. Because partly Gödel showed those things to be inaccessible to us.
What "reality is" or the ultimate nature of the universe is inaccessible to us. All we have is our varieties of languages that describe this reality. If the description(model, language,..) produces the same informational content as the empirical perception (we assume the perception is true and not distorted) of the domain being investigated, it is safe to assume their respective structures are isomorphic.
However mathematics recursively defines and creates its own structures which have informational contents which appear to map to itself. There is no empirical perception or content. I think mathematics is a way to move information around like memory functions in computers. We shift around structures and information until we are ready to apply it to some empirical content. However my own feeling that the operations in mathematics have some real physical existence. That without some physical laws in place, mathematics itself would be impossible. But also that all mathematical operations have some dual in the physical world.
1. The class of axioms and the rules of inference (i.e. the relation "immediate consequence of") are recursively definable (as soon as basic signs are replaced in any fashion by natural numbers). 2. Every recursive relation is definable in the system P (in the sense of Proposition V). Hence in every formal system that satisifies assumptions 1 and 2 and is omega-consistent, undecidable propositions exist of the form (x)F(x), where F is a recursively defined property of natural numbers, and so too in every extenstion of such a system made by adding recursively definable omega-consistent class of axioms. As can be easily confirmed, the systems which satisfy assumptions 1 and 2 include Zermelo-Fraenkel and the v. Neumann axiom systems of set theory, and also the axiom system of number theory which consists of the Peano axioms, the operation of recursive definition [according to schema ] and the logical rules.
This is normally referred to as Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. Which you incorrectly summarized as Yet, there are statements in math that we know we can neither prove nor disprove
Provablity is rather a quality possesed by a proposition within a formal system. If a proposition cannot be proved or disproved within a system we call it independent (or undecidable). An example is the continuum hypothesis, c=aleph 1. This statement can not be proved or disproved within Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with(out) the Axiom of Choice. Also it must be noted not all axiom systems are strong enough to include undecidable statements.
What Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states is that we will never have a finite list of axioms which constitutes a consistent system that can prove or disprove every mathematical statement. It means we will have a plurality of deductive systems which cover many different domains. However there will always be some statement, known or not, out of our reach. In other words, knowledge is limitless.
I don't think this in any way takes away from the power of mathematics. But shows the limited abilities of human beings or rather the immensity of the universe.
[1] Gödel, Kurt. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Dover Publications, New York. pg 62
Re:Google also announced a partnership with DivX
on
A Look at Google DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Too bad there is no way to play DRM DivX on Linux. Currently if you want to "buy" a video and you are on a non-windows system you get a Sorry, purchasing this video requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP message. Will the Google Video Player be available for Linux or Apple?
Anyway, my whole problem with DRM is that take away the whole "transfer of ownership" when you buy something. In reality you never own DRM material, you rent it or buy the ability to play it. The defense is that publishers and artists have the right to protect their copyright. Yes of course they do. But if we buy something don't you waive all rights to ownership to us? Shouldn't we be allowed to play it on whatever we want. This DRM stuff is to prevent us from distributing their works illegally. But why treat every person who pays for something as a potential criminal? If you treat someone like a criminal they quickly become one.
As a 25 year old with a 3 digit/. id and without a MySpace account let me be the first to say... stfu n00b! God, I'm so lonely.
Anyway I never thought of the Internet as a place to meet new people. I always believed that there was a vast pool of new people to meet in my daily life such as at work, class, and just being outside. That even though my social skills were lacking it would be better to work on them with face to face interaction rather than admitting defeat and just trying to meet people on the Internet. I mean I have friends from the Internet, but I never met any of them. Maybe one day I will but for some reason I've always seperated Internet from Real-Life. Maybe the Internet is some place to escape for me...
However if a company like Novell did pick up the project
Anyway, it would have been nice if someone gave credit to Jon Smirl instead of revoking his CVS access and basically making him an outcast. I guess he did it to himself though, one major flaw of open source is the bullshit politics. Thats why I favor a closed-source developement process for the time being. Honestly if Novell is paying developers to work on XGL, they will do 10x the work than unpaid ones. In the long run I just want the thing out there and working, if it means paying people to finish the project at the cost of open development... so be it.
XGL was started by Dave Reveman. Actually all XGL code including Xegl starts with, "Copyright 2004 David Reveman". Also it might have been true XGL was a 'toy' in August but alot has changed. However it is true you still need an X server to run XGL on top of it, this might be changing.
However I do agree Xegl is probably the better solution but the project has had little work on it done since Jon Smirl left.
Does the source open during development matter? Look how much David Reveman got done by himself "behind closed doors". Really what matters is the source is available upon release to the public. Before that it doesn't really matter. The truth is the majority of the Xorg community doesn't believe in an OpenGL accelerated desktop. Look at the mailing list. The only people who do are a small group of coders who most likely do not have the time to actually achieve something worth using.
However if a company like Novell did pick up the project and paid developers to work on it full time but the source would be closed until release... well tough luck. In reality the only reason David released the code now was to get it into the Xorg tree. That way they can continue to "code-drop" to a tree that can be used by everyone, instead of kdrive which is for developers.
Also the Xorg developers seem to be concerned with Xegl which David isn't even working on. I dont care either way. Just get it done.
I'm not a cryptanalyst nor do I know much about cryptography however the logical choice for the NSA would be to sniff out heavily encrypted messages between domestic and foreign sources. The idea of plain-text dictionary search just seems too obvious. Rather look for encrypted traffic between say Saudi Arabia and some location inside the US. Then either attack the sources and compromise their machines or brute-force their encryption to see what they are talking about. I mean these people use cellphone detonator bombs so I would assume they are smart enough to at least PGP their emails.
I'm sure 99% of what they break is not relevant to "terrorism" but they keep it anyway.
It depends on what you mean. In mathematics provable means a statement can be proved within a system. Normally in mathematics they say undecidable. In physics when they say provable they normally mean falsifiable. This means the theory has the potential to be false or it makes some empirical observation that could be false. As far as testable is concerned, it is along the same lines but not exactly.
My main concern is this idea that only theories that are scientific are falsifiable is itself not falsifiable. When you make this claim you in a sense use the same class of argument as those who support Intelligent Design.
Again String Theory as it stands now is not falsifiable, but no one screams about people teaching it. However that doesn't mean it will not be proven one day. As the theory grows it might be able to make claims that could be observed. Couldn't the same be said for Intelligent Design?
"The theory that scientific theories can be labeled provable" is one of those theories that is not provable.
should read
"The theory that scientific theories can be preemptively labeled provable" is...
My main point was that classifying theories as provable is meaningless. We do not know whether or not a theory is provable until someone proves it. Saying a theory is false/true but provable is redundant. Also claiming a theory is unprovable is in itself unprovable.
"The theory that scientific theories can be labeled provable" is one of those theories that is not provable.
Actually we do not know whether or not a specific scientific theory is indeed provable until it is indeed proven. Statements about provability are vacuous and meaningless. Is String Theory provable? We don't know. One day someone might come up with a proof saying String Theory is unverifiable. Or String Theory could one say be proved. Yet there is no argument over teaching String Theory.
Scientists aren't concerned with provability. They normally just work on whatever they are interested in. The only reason ID is so frowned upon is because it attached to the creationists. It is more political than scientific. Then again, the two at times are inseparable.
Slashdot Mirror
Just list all stories posted as simple one line text. This being from left to right the title, section and total comments at 0. List all stories posted in the past 72 hours by most recent first. The order should be user sortable like comments are. Here comes the cool feature, the more comments a story generates the brighter the text line appears. You can use simple color(r,g,b) attributes for a spectrum from not popular to very popular. I guess the default would be light grey to black, but also have it user defined. But the key is you will have visual cues which pick out the most popular stories. Then when you click the text you get an ajax type dropdown of the full story summary and "Read More" link. Then have a critical mass type visual cue for very popular stories, these stories go right to the top of the list. But also can be used for Slashdot News and the like. So stories like this one don't get lost in the front page.
I think the best solution is to replace html tags with "<" and ">" in all user input. If you want users to format their output use a markup language you define or something pre-existing like Textile
Bottom line is, the only thing I trust is personal experience, and I don't see this bias towards minorities in the workplace.
And yet anecdotal observations filtered through selective perception is one of the weakest forms of evidence. Not only that but you assume that a random sampling group of one is somehow satisfactory.
"For the three months ended Dec. 25, AMD earned $95.6 million, or 21 cents per share, on sales of $1.84 billion. In the fourth quarter of 2004, it lost $30 million, or 8 cents per share, on sales of $1.26 billion."
"For all of 2005, AMD earned $165.5 million, or 40 cents per share, on sales of $5.85 billion. That compares with a 2004 profit of $91.2 million, 25 cents per share, on sales of $5 billion."
So AMD earned more money in the recent 4th quarter than all of 2004. And a 125.6 million increase for 4th quarter earnings from last year. No wonder AMD stocks are up so much today.
I know you have always stated that this will never happen but certain economic pressures might cause you to rethink the issue. Slashdot is still #1 but for how long? Really Slashdot is no longer a news site but like you said a community board. Before I could get all my geek news in some timely fashion from Slashdot but now your competitors do it better. You remain a popular site because of the large following you have accumulated over the years. Mainly because you were the first and the only site of this nature for some time. I think you need to realize this is why you continue to have success. There are other sites that have better features and are better designed. You can only run on your legacy for so long. So in summary when we will see new features?
An article yesterday claimed that there was little gained from this widespread spying campaign. The overwhelmingly majority of these tips handed down from the NSA lead to innocent Americans.
The only thing that could possibly justify such an overreaching program is hard evidence that the program actually delivered information that prevented an attack. You would think that if such evidence existed the Bush administration would release it. However the most likely scenario is that no such evidence exists or it is so indirectly tied to the spying program there might be no real way to prove that this information alone actually resulted in a capture or arrest.
Also I mean real threats, not some whacko who is going to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch. Also a case where you can say, "Yes without the information from the NSA program we would have never have known". So far many suspects have already been identified through man-on-the-ground intelligence.
s/1918 Bohr/1918 Planck
I meant Planck but for some reason typed Bohr.
The history of science is littered with ideas and theories that at the time were ad hoc or kludge factors. Planck himself was unimpressed with his quantization hypothesis and so were many of his contemporaries. It was Einstein who took it seriously and applied it to phenomena. Then afterwards Bohr applied it to his atomic model. Eventually in 1918 Bohr was given a Nobel Prize for his discovery 18 years earlier. Yet at this time quantum theory was still not fully developed. There was no actual theory in place to justify quantization itself. It took another 7 years with the developement of wave-particle duality and later the Schrödinger equation.
My point is science is what is, a human endeavor. It's not going to be perfect. Sometimes you have to make leaps of faith or accept for a time questionable assumptions. But don't reject valid scientific ideas just because it doesn't fall within your narrow view of science. Thankfully scientists themselves are more lenient or else nothing would ever get accomplished.
Dark matter is detectable because it interacts with other particles via gravity. The reason we do not "see" it is because it does not interact or very weakly with other particles via eletromagnetism. The photon is the gauge boson in EM theory. We call dark matter* "dark" because there are no photons interacting with this matter. Be it visible light or the entire EM spectrum.
However we detect dark matter indirectly through its gravitional pressence. These calculations are done with GR which has been pretty accurate for all macroscopic cases. The gravitational signature shows there is more matter than we can detect via photons. The simple conclusion is that there exists particles that interact(or very weakly) with photons.
I do not see how this is irrational or even on par with some theories you suggested. Also String Theory includes many dark matter candidates, like the axion which is considered essential to ST.
The whole reason perhaps we have been unable to detect dark matter particles directly is because we have no quantum theory of gravity. These particles may be all over the place but we have no experimental devices that can detect gravity at the quantum level. But also we have no real theory of quantum gravity. So in the mean time scientists just label it all dark matter.
It's not bad math. It's just science. If you have no real theoretical model for something you put it aside until you can get more empirical data. Then try to fit this data into a model. Right now there is very little data because of what I mentioned previously. It's not a magical term to fix calculations, it's an unknown variable.
*cold dark matter
Actually dark matter can be proved or disproved... it just hasn't been yet. Also there is indirect evidence for dark matter. Do you believe in String Theory? Dark matter has more evidence and theoretical weight than string theory.
Might want to do some actual research on the subject. From that list there are no articles in support of the Cooperstock-Tieu model other than a response by the orginal authors. The theoretical arguments and evidence against the model are quite convincing.
Dark matter is just the best model we have right now. It also amazes me how much Slashdot is against the dark matter model. Why is that?
But that means we can have different axiomatic systems such that the answer to a statement can be "true" in one and "false" in another. Then if someone wants to ask, "But what is the real answer?" all we can do is shrug our shoulders and reply, "Mu." This can be disconcerting to some who believe in the certainty of mathematics.
What it means is we can have multiple deductive systems to describe different domains. I see this as an expressive power. We not only have Euclidean geometry but also non-Euclidean geometries which proved to be crucial in the theory of relativity. If someone asks "what is the real answer?" it depends on the question itself. It depends on what domain you are talking about. This idea of "global" mathematics is what Gödel defeated.
Wrong. It has nothing to do with the limited abilities of human beings but the limitations of pure logic itself. It doesn't matter if the beings trying to figure shit out is us, some advanced alien race or God Almighty Himself. There are limitations to the set of things that can be known.
What Gödel's incompleteness theorem states can also be said for every human endeavor. As for God, I'm not going to try to figure out what are the limits of an infinite being. Because partly Gödel showed those things to be inaccessible to us.
What "reality is" or the ultimate nature of the universe is inaccessible to us. All we have is our varieties of languages that describe this reality. If the description(model, language, ..) produces the same informational content as the empirical perception (we assume the perception is true and not distorted) of the domain being investigated, it is safe to assume their respective structures are isomorphic.
However mathematics recursively defines and creates its own structures which have informational contents which appear to map to itself. There is no empirical perception or content. I think mathematics is a way to move information around like memory functions in computers. We shift around structures and information until we are ready to apply it to some empirical content. However my own feeling that the operations in mathematics have some real physical existence. That without some physical laws in place, mathematics itself would be impossible. But also that all mathematical operations have some dual in the physical world.
This is normally referred to as Gödel's first incompleteness theorem. Which you incorrectly summarized as Yet, there are statements in math that we know we can neither prove nor disprove
Provablity is rather a quality possesed by a proposition within a formal system. If a proposition cannot be proved or disproved within a system we call it independent (or undecidable). An example is the continuum hypothesis, c=aleph 1. This statement can not be proved or disproved within Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with(out) the Axiom of Choice. Also it must be noted not all axiom systems are strong enough to include undecidable statements.
What Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states is that we will never have a finite list of axioms which constitutes a consistent system that can prove or disprove every mathematical statement. It means we will have a plurality of deductive systems which cover many different domains. However there will always be some statement, known or not, out of our reach. In other words, knowledge is limitless.
I don't think this in any way takes away from the power of mathematics. But shows the limited abilities of human beings or rather the immensity of the universe.
[1] Gödel, Kurt. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Dover Publications, New York. pg 62
Too bad there is no way to play DRM DivX on Linux. Currently if you want to "buy" a video and you are on a non-windows system you get a Sorry, purchasing this video requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP message. Will the Google Video Player be available for Linux or Apple?
Anyway, my whole problem with DRM is that take away the whole "transfer of ownership" when you buy something. In reality you never own DRM material, you rent it or buy the ability to play it. The defense is that publishers and artists have the right to protect their copyright. Yes of course they do. But if we buy something don't you waive all rights to ownership to us? Shouldn't we be allowed to play it on whatever we want. This DRM stuff is to prevent us from distributing their works illegally. But why treat every person who pays for something as a potential criminal? If you treat someone like a criminal they quickly become one.
As a 25 year old with a 3 digit /. id and without a MySpace account let me be the first to say... stfu n00b! God, I'm so lonely.
Anyway I never thought of the Internet as a place to meet new people. I always believed that there was a vast pool of new people to meet in my daily life such as at work, class, and just being outside. That even though my social skills were lacking it would be better to work on them with face to face interaction rather than admitting defeat and just trying to meet people on the Internet. I mean I have friends from the Internet, but I never met any of them. Maybe one day I will but for some reason I've always seperated Internet from Real-Life. Maybe the Internet is some place to escape for me...
I never said Novell created XGL.
However if a company like Novell did pick up the project
Anyway, it would have been nice if someone gave credit to Jon Smirl instead of revoking his CVS access and basically making him an outcast. I guess he did it to himself though, one major flaw of open source is the bullshit politics. Thats why I favor a closed-source developement process for the time being. Honestly if Novell is paying developers to work on XGL, they will do 10x the work than unpaid ones. In the long run I just want the thing out there and working, if it means paying people to finish the project at the cost of open development... so be it.
XGL was started by Dave Reveman. Actually all XGL code including Xegl starts with, "Copyright 2004 David Reveman". Also it might have been true XGL was a 'toy' in August but alot has changed. However it is true you still need an X server to run XGL on top of it, this might be changing.
However I do agree Xegl is probably the better solution but the project has had little work on it done since Jon Smirl left.
Does the source open during development matter? Look how much David Reveman got done by himself "behind closed doors". Really what matters is the source is available upon release to the public. Before that it doesn't really matter. The truth is the majority of the Xorg community doesn't believe in an OpenGL accelerated desktop. Look at the mailing list. The only people who do are a small group of coders who most likely do not have the time to actually achieve something worth using.
However if a company like Novell did pick up the project and paid developers to work on it full time but the source would be closed until release... well tough luck. In reality the only reason David released the code now was to get it into the Xorg tree. That way they can continue to "code-drop" to a tree that can be used by everyone, instead of kdrive which is for developers.
Also the Xorg developers seem to be concerned with Xegl which David isn't even working on. I dont care either way. Just get it done.
you totally missed the point of king kong
Was it...
a. No more dupes.
b. Use Google more.
c. More commentary in story submissions.
no, sorry the answer was CowboyNeal.
I'm not a cryptanalyst nor do I know much about cryptography however the logical choice for the NSA would be to sniff out heavily encrypted messages between domestic and foreign sources. The idea of plain-text dictionary search just seems too obvious. Rather look for encrypted traffic between say Saudi Arabia and some location inside the US. Then either attack the sources and compromise their machines or brute-force their encryption to see what they are talking about. I mean these people use cellphone detonator bombs so I would assume they are smart enough to at least PGP their emails.
I'm sure 99% of what they break is not relevant to "terrorism" but they keep it anyway.
It depends on what you mean. In mathematics provable means a statement can be proved within a system. Normally in mathematics they say undecidable. In physics when they say provable they normally mean falsifiable. This means the theory has the potential to be false or it makes some empirical observation that could be false. As far as testable is concerned, it is along the same lines but not exactly.
My main concern is this idea that only theories that are scientific are falsifiable is itself not falsifiable. When you make this claim you in a sense use the same class of argument as those who support Intelligent Design.
Again String Theory as it stands now is not falsifiable, but no one screams about people teaching it. However that doesn't mean it will not be proven one day. As the theory grows it might be able to make claims that could be observed. Couldn't the same be said for Intelligent Design?
Ah, the first line I made a mistake.
"The theory that scientific theories can be labeled provable" is one of those theories that is not provable.
should read
"The theory that scientific theories can be preemptively labeled provable" is...
My main point was that classifying theories as provable is meaningless. We do not know whether or not a theory is provable until someone proves it. Saying a theory is false/true but provable is redundant. Also claiming a theory is unprovable is in itself unprovable.
"The theory that scientific theories can be labeled provable" is one of those theories that is not provable.
Actually we do not know whether or not a specific scientific theory is indeed provable until it is indeed proven. Statements about provability are vacuous and meaningless. Is String Theory provable? We don't know. One day someone might come up with a proof saying String Theory is unverifiable. Or String Theory could one say be proved. Yet there is no argument over teaching String Theory.
Scientists aren't concerned with provability. They normally just work on whatever they are interested in. The only reason ID is so frowned upon is because it attached to the creationists. It is more political than scientific. Then again, the two at times are inseparable.