I am not an American, but it's clear that the difference in US and Chinese censorship is much more than one of degree. There is almost no political speech which is censored in the US, and almost no political speech which is allowed in China.
Yes, let's ignore the science, ignore the math, and rely on what your intuition screams at you. Very scientific.
And we can add basic biology textbooks to the long list of stuff you haven't read. Do you really think that randomly typing on a computer keyboard is a good model for evolution?
How about you go away, get a basic understanding of information theory and evolution, come back, and we can resume the argument when you have a clue?
You plainly don't read the math - when you claim that random processes can't produce information you show a complete ignorance of information theory.
Going through the bible and cherry-picking references that appear to match modern science is unimpresive. What you're doing is the same kind of predictions-after-the-event that people pull out of Nostradamus' writings.
There is no place for the bible, or any other religious work, when assessing a scientific theory. It is impossible to reconcile the literal account in Genesis with the physical evidence of the earth's past: the order is wrong and the timeframe is woefully wrong. Hand-waving references to Einstein may fool your bible class, but won't impress anyone who's actually studied relativity.
So don't read the papers, don't study the math, just rely on your intuition about design.
St Augustine, Maimonedes, John Paul II: religious thinkers for hundreds of years have struggled to reconcile faith with science - it's a pity that you don't even bother to try.
I think the phrase "experimental proofs" is the give-away that you don't actually have a clue. Perhaps you didn't understand - science is provisional and not absolute. This is as true of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as it is of evolution. Indeed we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity cannot both be correct. So your initial comparison of the uncertainty of a biology textbook with the certainty of the bible was just dumb.
There are plenty of mathematical models of evolution if you're interested - Nilsson and Pelger's paper modeling the evolution of the eye is probably the most famous example. Asking to see an equation is silly - there's no equation or accurate model of the weather, but nobody doubts that the weather is governed by simple physical laws.
I gather from your comments about "information" that you have never studied information theory: a string of random digits has the highest possible information content, using both Shannon and Chaitin-Kolmogorov's concepts of information. No mind required. But of course you must be using your own special definition of information, and you're not bothered by the fact that you're ignoring 50 years of information theory.
The biblical quotes are all very fascinating, but since scientists don't let the bible influence their analysis of string theory, I'm not clear why it should influence an analysis of evolution.
Evolution, like the rest of science, is provisional - it trys to describe the world as best it can, but does not and cannot make absolute statements about anything. The same is true for relativity, quantum theory, and every other branch of science.
Comparing a science textbook with the bible shows an embarassing ignorance of theology and science.
I think you'll find that's an artifact of the length of the study. Longer term studies are difficult because comparatively few people have been using mobile phones for longer than 10 years.
I think we have progress - you're conceding that something as simple as an amoeba could evolve into the diversity of organisms we see today. Isn't it equally possible that an amoeba could evolve from a simpler organism, and so on?
But where did you get the idea that evolution is a conspiracy to disprove the existence of God? It's simply about studying the origin of species in the same way as we study any other scientific question. If you want to subscribe to a literal (and, I would say, unsophisticated) interpretation of Genesis then you will have a problem with evolutionary biology, but you will equally have a problem with geology, cosmology, linguistics and all the other historical sciences.
Most theologians from St Augustine onwards didn't think Genesis was a literal account of the creation. I'm guessing you have a depressingly narrow religious education.
Re:Dual boot? How about virtualization, too!
on
Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
Not a troll, just curious: given those figures, how do you justify developing an OS X version from a business point of view?
I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Satan, Thor, Rama or Quetzalcoatl because, whilst it's not something I've ever thought about very much, I've never seen any plausible evidence these entities exist, and there are good reasons to think they don't exist.
It is dumb in the extreme to compare airliners with amoebas. Amoebas reproduce imperfectly, and are therefore evolve. Airliners don't.
You have no understanding of evolution. It plainly does not assert that there is no God. There are plenty of religious evolutionary biologists, and many (or even most) of the world's religions believe evolution to be compatible with belief in God.
Blogs making assertions without citing any legal authority are not particularly persuasive. The constitutional position is clear - see paragraphs 20 to 23 of ex parte Jackson (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2005/94 .html).
Your Blair/Hitler statement is too laughable to deserve a response.
You are straightforwardly wrong on the LRRB. It is a basic constitutional principle that a delegated power cannot be used to expand the scope of the delegating authority (as is the case with the common law rules of delegation/agency). The point is mentioned in passing in ex parte Jackson (the Hunting Act case).
You'll forgive me if I don't take your other legal views particularly seriously. And mentioning Blair in the same sentence as Hitler is just childish.
Silly and paranoid. And if you knew anything at all about the history of civil liberties in this country, you'd know why Thatcher didn't "derogate from Human Rights laws".
SOCPA only expands police arrest powers where certain conditions are met. In your example, you could perhaps be arrested for littering if you refused to give your name and address, but it's difficult to see how else the conditions would be satisfied.
The old rules under which a police officer without an officer could arrest for a "breach of the peace" were hopelessly confused and arbitrary. The new regime is an improvement.
It was a law, enacted by ministerial fiat under one of the Broadcasting Acts (I can't remember which one) which banned broadcasting the words of terrorists or terrorist sympathisers. Lasted from 88 to 94, although towards the end it had become farcical, as broadcasters would film an interview with (say) Adams and replace his voice with an actor saying the same words.
Comparisons with Hitler's Enabling Bill? I really feel a sense of proportion is being lost here. And the LRRB is restricted by the preconditions in Clause 3 - it would not be constitutionally possible for the LRRB to itself be used to remove these preconditions.
The 80s were quite different. There was a real atmosphere of elective dictatorship: Greenham Common, the Miners' Strike, Wapping... it felt as though legitimate dissent was being crushed by government fiat. Never mind a fairly tortuous argument that Blair condones torture - there was real torture going on in Northern Ireland, and quite possibly a "shoot to kill" policy in effect.
You also fail to take account of the credit side: the Human Rights Act in particular.
I'm against ID cards on grounds of cost/practicality, but it's a bit rich to claim that they represent a slippery slope towards dictatorship when they've had them on most of the continent for years (and even in the US the driving licence has become a de-facto ID card in many ways). As for SOCPA, you try demonstrating for months outside the White House or the Elysee Palace and see what happens to you. A power to make deregulatory secondary legislation is not going to keep me up at night, and it's paranoia to think the Civil Contingencies Act would be used in anything other than a catastrophe.
So I think your list is verging on the paranoid. Compare Thatcher's legacy: Clause 28, the ban on broadcasting Sinn Fein supporters voices to name the two worst examples. And these provisions affected real people, rather than just upsetting wearers of tin foil hats.
Conventions are stronger than just customs - the British constitution, like the common law, relies upon history and precedent as much as it does anything written down. In this case, there would, in practice, be political uproar from all parties if a member of the House of Lords became Prime Minister.
You are quite right that Blair could be removed in a heartbeat by the House of Commons or, more likely, by his own Party making clear he no longer had his MP's support. No Prime Minister would survive the equivalent of Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair. Whether this is less democratic or more democratic than the US system is arguable.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an American, but it's clear that the difference in US and Chinese censorship is much more than one of degree. There is almost no political speech which is censored in the US, and almost no political speech which is allowed in China.
Yes, let's ignore the science, ignore the math, and rely on what your intuition screams at you. Very scientific.
And we can add basic biology textbooks to the long list of stuff you haven't read. Do you really think that randomly typing on a computer keyboard is a good model for evolution?
How about you go away, get a basic understanding of information theory and evolution, come back, and we can resume the argument when you have a clue?
You plainly don't read the math - when you claim that random processes can't produce information you show a complete ignorance of information theory.
Going through the bible and cherry-picking references that appear to match modern science is unimpresive. What you're doing is the same kind of predictions-after-the-event that people pull out of Nostradamus' writings.
There is no place for the bible, or any other religious work, when assessing a scientific theory. It is impossible to reconcile the literal account in Genesis with the physical evidence of the earth's past: the order is wrong and the timeframe is woefully wrong. Hand-waving references to Einstein may fool your bible class, but won't impress anyone who's actually studied relativity.
Won't work - the Anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria, will only survive in tropical regions.
So don't read the papers, don't study the math, just rely on your intuition about design.
St Augustine, Maimonedes, John Paul II: religious thinkers for hundreds of years have struggled to reconcile faith with science - it's a pity that you don't even bother to try.
I think the phrase "experimental proofs" is the give-away that you don't actually have a clue. Perhaps you didn't understand - science is provisional and not absolute. This is as true of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as it is of evolution. Indeed we know that quantum mechanics and general relativity cannot both be correct. So your initial comparison of the uncertainty of a biology textbook with the certainty of the bible was just dumb.
There are plenty of mathematical models of evolution if you're interested - Nilsson and Pelger's paper modeling the evolution of the eye is probably the most famous example. Asking to see an equation is silly - there's no equation or accurate model of the weather, but nobody doubts that the weather is governed by simple physical laws.
I gather from your comments about "information" that you have never studied information theory: a string of random digits has the highest possible information content, using both Shannon and Chaitin-Kolmogorov's concepts of information. No mind required. But of course you must be using your own special definition of information, and you're not bothered by the fact that you're ignoring 50 years of information theory.
The biblical quotes are all very fascinating, but since scientists don't let the bible influence their analysis of string theory, I'm not clear why it should influence an analysis of evolution.
Evolution, like the rest of science, is provisional - it trys to describe the world as best it can, but does not and cannot make absolute statements about anything. The same is true for relativity, quantum theory, and every other branch of science.
Comparing a science textbook with the bible shows an embarassing ignorance of theology and science.
I think you'll find that's an artifact of the length of the study. Longer term studies are difficult because comparatively few people have been using mobile phones for longer than 10 years.
I think we have progress - you're conceding that something as simple as an amoeba could evolve into the diversity of organisms we see today. Isn't it equally possible that an amoeba could evolve from a simpler organism, and so on?
But where did you get the idea that evolution is a conspiracy to disprove the existence of God? It's simply about studying the origin of species in the same way as we study any other scientific question. If you want to subscribe to a literal (and, I would say, unsophisticated) interpretation of Genesis then you will have a problem with evolutionary biology, but you will equally have a problem with geology, cosmology, linguistics and all the other historical sciences.
Most theologians from St Augustine onwards didn't think Genesis was a literal account of the creation. I'm guessing you have a depressingly narrow religious education.
Not a troll, just curious: given those figures, how do you justify developing an OS X version from a business point of view?
I don't believe in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, Satan, Thor, Rama or Quetzalcoatl because, whilst it's not something I've ever thought about very much, I've never seen any plausible evidence these entities exist, and there are good reasons to think they don't exist.
Am I starting from an unreasonable presumption?
It is dumb in the extreme to compare airliners with amoebas. Amoebas reproduce imperfectly, and are therefore evolve. Airliners don't.
You have no understanding of evolution. It plainly does not assert that there is no God. There are plenty of religious evolutionary biologists, and many (or even most) of the world's religions believe evolution to be compatible with belief in God.
The last Pope didn't think there was a contradiction between evolution and belief in God. Why do you?
Out of interest, why is it deadly to have 100% humidity in very cold weather?
Blogs making assertions without citing any legal authority are not particularly persuasive. The constitutional position is clear - see paragraphs 20 to 23 of ex parte Jackson (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2005/94 .html).
Your Blair/Hitler statement is too laughable to deserve a response.
Wrong. Read section 110.
You are straightforwardly wrong on the LRRB. It is a basic constitutional principle that a delegated power cannot be used to expand the scope of the delegating authority (as is the case with the common law rules of delegation/agency). The point is mentioned in passing in ex parte Jackson (the Hunting Act case).
You'll forgive me if I don't take your other legal views particularly seriously. And mentioning Blair in the same sentence as Hitler is just childish.
Why on earth has the rule of law got to do with the intrinsic ability of MPs in a Parliamentary system to depose the Prime Minister?
Silly and paranoid. And if you knew anything at all about the history of civil liberties in this country, you'd know why Thatcher didn't "derogate from Human Rights laws".
SOCPA only expands police arrest powers where certain conditions are met. In your example, you could perhaps be arrested for littering if you refused to give your name and address, but it's difficult to see how else the conditions would be satisfied.
The old rules under which a police officer without an officer could arrest for a "breach of the peace" were hopelessly confused and arbitrary. The new regime is an improvement.
It was a law, enacted by ministerial fiat under one of the Broadcasting Acts (I can't remember which one) which banned broadcasting the words of terrorists or terrorist sympathisers. Lasted from 88 to 94, although towards the end it had become farcical, as broadcasters would film an interview with (say) Adams and replace his voice with an actor saying the same words.
Comparisons with Hitler's Enabling Bill? I really feel a sense of proportion is being lost here. And the LRRB is restricted by the preconditions in Clause 3 - it would not be constitutionally possible for the LRRB to itself be used to remove these preconditions.
The 80s were quite different. There was a real atmosphere of elective dictatorship: Greenham Common, the Miners' Strike, Wapping... it felt as though legitimate dissent was being crushed by government fiat. Never mind a fairly tortuous argument that Blair condones torture - there was real torture going on in Northern Ireland, and quite possibly a "shoot to kill" policy in effect.
You also fail to take account of the credit side: the Human Rights Act in particular.
I'm against ID cards on grounds of cost/practicality, but it's a bit rich to claim that they represent a slippery slope towards dictatorship when they've had them on most of the continent for years (and even in the US the driving licence has become a de-facto ID card in many ways). As for SOCPA, you try demonstrating for months outside the White House or the Elysee Palace and see what happens to you. A power to make deregulatory secondary legislation is not going to keep me up at night, and it's paranoia to think the Civil Contingencies Act would be used in anything other than a catastrophe.
So I think your list is verging on the paranoid. Compare Thatcher's legacy: Clause 28, the ban on broadcasting Sinn Fein supporters voices to name the two worst examples. And these provisions affected real people, rather than just upsetting wearers of tin foil hats.
Conventions are stronger than just customs - the British constitution, like the common law, relies upon history and precedent as much as it does anything written down. In this case, there would, in practice, be political uproar from all parties if a member of the House of Lords became Prime Minister.
You are quite right that Blair could be removed in a heartbeat by the House of Commons or, more likely, by his own Party making clear he no longer had his MP's support. No Prime Minister would survive the equivalent of Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair. Whether this is less democratic or more democratic than the US system is arguable.
You really think Labour has been more hostile to civil liberties than Thatcher? How odd.