How could it be anything else? We don't have a single example of alien life to consider. Until someone sees an alien do something sinful, no one could rationally claim the aliens need saved from sin. So "I don't know if the aliens need saved or not" is the only rational answer. If someone wants to know what God is going to do to save them, that question presupposes that something definitely must be true which we have no way of actually knowing at present.
Tell me, if someone invents a time machine, and murders their own great-great-grandfather during the battle of Gettysburg, what happens next? You can't? I don't see how physical scientists can justify saying 'I don't know' to this and numerous other scientific questions.
A lot of the angels on pinheads type arguments started as math problems. Since angels were spiritual beings without physical limitations, you could treat them as abstract items. So if one angel took up half the pinhead, and the next angel was 1/2 the first's size (thus taking up a quarter of the pinhead), and the next 1/4 size, and so on, was their any limit to the number of angels that could fit on the pinhead?
It's theory of limits as a precondition of developing the calculus, but with 'numbered somethings' instead of pure numbers. In a time where most things were still measured with barleycorns or king's arm-spans, and such things didn't come in infinitely divisible sizes, it was necessary for most philosophers to couch their arguements with something less abstract than pure numbers, at least as a teaching tool, and if they had started off speculating about something like little men, each smaller than the last, most people would have locked up mentally at the very idea of such small men. People could believe angels could do things more physically mundane objects couldn't, at least enough to somewhat follow the logical argument that underlay them.
Angels were also used to theorize about Zeno's paradox and other such classical logic problems. No one quite got to developing the calculus of infinitesimals, but they got pretty close sometimes.
The thing is, Galileo got the exact same punishment we still use today for his crime, no worse. The only difference is, he committed his crime against Religious authorities and not Secular ones.
G. was asked to write a defense of his position, in the proper Latin, and submit it to the church. Instead he wrote the defense in Italian so that the average guy could read it, and attempted to make it available to the public before the trial was over. What do we do to people today when a judge gives them some interogatives and they release their answers to the press in an attempt to influence the trial? Right, we find them in contempt and lock them up.
G. used a character named Simplicio in his dialog, and put words that had been used by some of the church authorities in that character's mouth. He picked quotes that were easy to abuse or make fun of, left out a lot of points that were harder to deal with, and the whole work arguably became a straw man attack. What do most modern judges do if you misquote what they say in court? And what if you said the name you gave a character representing them was only because they claimed their view was simple, but the name you used actually best translated to "simpleton"? What would most judges do today to somebody who publicly called them simpletons and then tried to feed them a line of BS about why? Right, they take people like that, and lock them up.
It's called contempt of court, and it can have an unlimited sentence right now in the present day, as in telling a reporter they will stay locked up until they name their source, however long it takes. You can argue, and I would, that a spiritual institution shouldn't have the power to be conducting courts or censoring publications at all, but the response the church gave snowballed into serious consequences because Galileo made it into a pissing contest first.
The whole 'God of the Gaps' argument presumes that the gaps are actually getting smaller. That's actually very hard to prove in many of the cases where it has been assumed, and is definitely contrary to fact in some.
Conventional Evolutionary theory shows how some events are much more probable over geologic time than once believed - for example the development of a biological feature such as an eye. It's happened independently in different families several times, perhaps as many as a dozen. At the same time, fitting all the predecessor developments needed before we even got to DNA based life, into the time available since the planet cooled enough for life means some major early steps had to happen in very brief timeframes, possibly even periods of mere years or even less.
The probability of eyes developing from simple structures once you get life started goes up, the probability of the first precursor molecules used to code for heredity evolving into the much more sophisticated form of DNA goes down, the overall probability you can start from Hadean Earth, 4.1 billion years ago, and end up with Giraffes or Orchids remains unchanged, or by some molecular biology experiments actually decreases.
Shuffling all the extremely low probability steps towards the beginning of life and then saying that they don't need to be explained is a confidence trick. Where evolutionary theory makes some necessary events in the history of life look wildly improbable, much less explicable than before we developed the theory, this needs to be acknowledged, even if some Creationist types may try to use it to justify their theories.
I don't know if anything analogous exists in UK law, but in the US, there's a real right or two involved. Spending so much money to see enforcement gains for such a minor crime at least probably violates the principle of cruel and unusual punishment. It's not the cruel part, mind you, but if in effect, one rather trivial crime suddenly has a much higher enforcement effort devoted to it, the state is punishing in an unusual way.
Note: recent supreme court rulings, that class some punishing things such as appearing on public offender lists as not actually punishments, mean the U.S. government probably wouldn't agree with this interpretation. That said, does anybody in the US want the UK to resort to the same sort of 'loop-hole'ease interpretations that seem to reflect us at our worst?
By itself, spending a whole heap of money in an ineffectual manner isn't a rights issue, but you could also ask, since these cameras have been 'justified' to the tax-payer by the claim that they have some sort of anti-terrorist function, does the same tax-payer get real figures on how the initiative has failed, so that they can vote the incompetent idiots which wasted their funds out of office?
Because it seems to me that those same cameras just might discourage political speech against the people who wasted the money. I'm not even a UK citizen, just some yobbo who's sticking his nose in, but on the other hand, I haven't wasted millions of the people's pounds either, so my opinion that there's a chilling effect might be worth more than all the officials conveniently self-serving opinions that there is no such chilling effect put together.
What matters isn't how I deal with the 10,000 people that include 9,999 false positives. It's how a government that mostly doesn't understand statistics deals with them, while under pressure to act from a public that can substitute the word 'overwhelmingly' for 'mostly'.
The politicians have promised a solution. That sounds like they have a test that won't wreck the economy to narrow the million down to 10,000, and another test that is economical with that base to keep narrowing down the test subjects, until by one or more additional stages we get a small enough group that it has a significant impact overall to to take step X against them. So, what are these intermediate stages if step X is, say, a luggage search? What if it's a strip search? What if step x is unlimited duration detention? What if step x is unlimited detention with no right to counsel or speedy trial or due process?
You've said it yourself "an algorithm that works, but doesn't scale". If we don't have the intermediate steps to get to the total solution, implementing the first step accomplishes nothing.
This is why the flamebait mod is fundamentally crocked. There are some subjects that almost anything relevant posted is going to make somebody on one side or another angry, very angry. The editors have already added all the fuel needed to the fire simply by choosing to post on those topics. That's part of what many of us come to Slashdot for - serious topics that have an inherent risk of making somebody mad, so I'm not knocking the presence of these articles.
But, when the subject is something as important to many as, say, the coming U. S. elections, the USAPATRIOT act, or the War in Iraq, the chance a genuinely relevant post will be modded down with 'flamebait' before anyone mods it up starts approaching pure randomness.
Metamoderation has difficulty correcting this, as it's usually at least arguable that the poster added a tiny bit more fuel to the already blazing conflagration. It's 'technically' fair to call a great many posts in a thread such as this flamebait, but there's no way for a mod to point out that it's a case where the article headline and first few paragraphs already took the issue 98% of the way to a full scale flamewar, and any mod using 'flamebait' after that is assigning most of the blame to the people involved in the last 2% of the process.
I'm perfectly trasmodic with antipipulation over 'frivious' myself. For a definition, how about "Frivious (Adj.): Any condition both frivolous and trivial.". Since those two words already have substantial but not complete overlap, frivious is very useful for excluding the borderline cases. Now if we just had a word, as the Germans do, for the overlap between sarcasm and irony. (Harlanellisonkeit).
I really don't see the basic concept as 'bizarre'. There's certainly some cognitive dissonance there, but if it counts as mental illness, then the society has about 50 million people who should be forcibly institutionalized, and no, I'm not being hyperbolic.
Yes, there's something internally contradictory about trying to hold certain people who have been adults for quite a few years responsible in court, and simultaneously thinking that also supports bitching to their mommies on them like the parents were still responsible. No, that's not enough to signal mental illness.
Now some of the details, such as the esoteric reference to red and green for merit badge colors, that's genuinely odd, non-linear thinking.
Much better to name one Bun-Bun of course, but that one has already been discovered. In mass quantities it is incredibly soft but far more reactive than similar quantities of U-235, and all alfalfa related reactions proceed with extreme rapidity in its presence. http://www.sluggy.com/
No, my logic is that there are costs to clean up any mess. Your 'logic' seems to rely on a little blue capitalism fairy who will automagically keep one class from paying the costs and defer them to another class, without simultaneously making the mess into a Marxist style class struggle.
Here's a hint - you can't lump whole classes into monolithic imperatives ("Poor people STILL spread disease and crime") without fundamentally being a Marxist. You've just bought 100% into the Marxian paradigm but then chosen to support the side Marx said ultimately loses.
The opposition probably shouldn't automatically win, but secrets need to be interpreted by the court as existing in the worst reasonable light. Note that that's worst reasonable, not worst possible. In some cases, we are definitely facing the opposition pretty much winning a point regardless of how that affects the whole court case.
I don't mean the judge simply declaring an automatic worst case interpretation to the jury either, but there are things that just about any jury will take into consideration once they are said, even if the judge orders them to disregard those bits, and if that tips the whole judgment of the jury, than that's the risk the prosecution takes.
Note that the government takes that sort of risk with perfectly normal, non-secret testimony too. That's why they should still face the risk if they use secret testimony.
If the government wants to file a case against someone for espionage for example, and declares that some of their evidence is secret to protect the identity of an agent in place, it would probably be reasonable for the court to accept as a given that if said agent really exists then there is a real need to protect that agent's identity from disclosure. This still means we have testimony that would normally fall under hearsay rules, i.e. someone else has to testify, in court where he faces the possible penalties for lying under oath, that he heard the agent say something (or read or otherwise acquired the information that is now second hand). Even if the court were to accept that this situation is an exception to normal hearsay rules, in the same way as a deathbed confession can be, it's still reasonable to limit what can be used in the case, to make somebody be accountable for swearing that the reason for secrecy actually exists as stated, and all classification is based on that reason.
If the source can't reveal even the cloudiest details about the location where the testimony originated, or the time it occurred, then the Defense should, at the very least, get to ask for something definite enough to be cross examined as a precondition of the evidence being admitted at all, and somebody to direct the cross examination at.
For a protecting an agent's identity based claim, someone highly and publicly placed in the related intelligence agency should have to testify under oath that the information originated in their agency, from sources who were active agents at the time. We probably should have a lot more than that, but it's a necessary start for any kind of fair trial. Evidence that cannot be disproved is just like a scientific theory that can't be falsified - there is no such thing. If there is no ability to challenge, it's not evidence.
If the government can't somehow offer evidence that has some testability or potential to be challenged, and limit the effects on the trial to ones relating to those parts of the testimony that can be examined, then they are in the position of asking the judicial system and the public to take any and all executive branch testimony on sheer, blind faith. At that point, what the executive branch is really violating is the principle of separation of church and state.
What really bothers me aren't even the idiots who don't realize that some of that medical care they are bitching about helps keep them too from being exposed to a plague or whatever. It's not even the supra-idiots that think they could continue to buy for the same prices at stores when no clerk could afford to work for them at the wages some pay without government assistance. It's the supra-ne-plus-ultra-idiots who think that if all these pesky poor people get near simultaniously Darwined as fast as political action could do it, nature will make the starving, diseased, homeless automagically disappear neatly, none of them will starve slowly enough to rampage about, and the rich wouldn't have to pay any extra bills to keep society functioning, or even to cremate the dead. My ghod, even the Nazis knew you had to pay your camp guards something. Even nutcase survivalists know that if you shoot the masses when they cross the edge of your property, the corpses will soon start to stink.
1. I never said I was shocked about it or anything else. 2. The 'lower% but a higher amount taken' is a whineing leech's special arguement. The only way to take less total cash from richer people than poor and not just similar overall amounts based on a lower overall percentage, is to selectively tax the poor at a higher base rate than the wealthy. Now you're argueing for a tax on poverty itself, which is so vicious I can well agree with your assessment that you hate people. "Whaaaahhh! I'm so wealthy I shouldn't have to pay anything at all. It's not good enough that I should pay the same rate, I should pay less than those lousy poor people." Don't you see how tragic, how ultimately sub-human the philosophy you are supporting is? 3. Are the poor supposed to support the rich then? You've been making it an either/or issue. Great red herring. If you are not a communist, why are you insisting that there's a class structure and one class must parasitize the other, either way?
I've been pointing out what taxes everyone pays, including very poor people. A self employed contract roofer pays that 12.4% SSA and Medicare B, even if he makes only 4,000 or 5,000 a year. Any person below the poverty level is probably spending very close to 100% of net income on items that have a sales tax, with the possible exception of doctor bills, so that's typically at least 5% more. A certain percent, the ones with minor children, get some of that back or even more when they file their income tax. The rest don't.
So, we have typically at least 18% tax on the lowest paid working people out there before we even get to the income tax itself, all that comes from what nobody here has defied as a progressive tax, I've pointed out how all those other taxes have their regressive aspects, and you want to argue that one group is being abused by the system and another isn't?
You don't want to support the poor? I don't want to support Iraq, the Justice Dept. putting drapes on statues, or higher education grants for Art-History majors that can't get work afterwards anyways. So what's the logical justification for saying you are taking responsibility and anyone else is not? Oh, that's right, its a gratuitous insult, either to all the poor you're lumping into that category or to me because you just lost the debate on its merits.
Now before anyone flames me, personally, I am of the opinion the man was guilty, based on overall evidence. Read what follows in that light.
One thing the jury was told about was hair samples. The DA asked for a number of these, first wanting 6 hairs from O J, then a second larger sample, and finally a sample of over 200 hairs. Whether these were for DNA or fiber evidence is not entirely clear from the jury transcripts.
Some person testifying for the prosecution team claimed that the odds anyone but O J did it were 1 in 6 Billion or so based on that evidence. When defense asked if the larger than usual sample had any effect on the accuracy of the data, that same person said the odds remained exactly the same. Aside fron the Furman testemony that most people heard about, this is another thing the jury balked at accepting - why after all go back for multiple larger and larger samples at all if it didn't affect accuracy? - why claim the same exact accuracy whether the match was for DNA tests or fiber matching?
So no, we can't be sure it's infallible. We can't even trust the odds are what the DA's office says they are. If they can do this in a high profile case, then for the average case, they can sweep out the kennel where the suspect works, take samples that may not include any human DNA at all, and claim the same sample was sent off simultaniously to a DNA lab on one coast and a fiber lab on the other, and both prove the odds are precisely 1 in lebenty-leben trizillion to one that it's anyone else.
First, the "top 5% paying over half" quote has already been debunked above, so stop spreading it please.
Second, social security and medicare taxes total around 15% of income, until you earn more than 95,000 a year, then they go down, not up. Social Security goes all the way to zero on the additional income, and a very wealthy individual, even one that is describable as employed, may have social security taxes equal to something like 0.03% of his income. Just try calculating Warren Buffet's social security tax % some time.
Since the government borrows out of the Social Security fund to cover general fund debts it's certainly fair to count it.
Sales taxes vary from state to state, but go as high as 10% some places. Sales taxes on large single purchases are generally reduced (for example, my state stops charging local taxes after the first $3200 of a single large item, and takes only the statewide rate. So again, sales taxes usually go down (at least somewhat) for the wealthy.
Even for the income tax, actual rate payed counts for a whole lot more than the raw bracket. While the overall tax rate climbs fairly consistently with income, there are eddies, at least for anyone still making little enough to benefit from schedule "A". That extends all the way into the top quintile.
There are several 'credits' that the government has extended to extremely low income portions of the populace, and these in theory reduce projected tax rates from those people, but are in practice almost never significant. These numbers get widely (miss)quoted in some people's economic distribution tables and so are worth mentioning. I'm seeing some of those 'missunderestimations' in the thread above.
The 50% rate saver's credit lets people who are typically making 10,000 dollars less than the local poverty rate get a very nice deduction for starting a 401K at work, but of course most poor people don't have a job with a 401K available, nor can they throw 1,000 to 3,000 into an IRA. (Yes, some people live in areas where you literally can't start an IRA with any of the local banks without at least 3,000 initial, and some investment firms start at 5K.).
If you are really poor, and are willing to set up and manage your account in a distant location from a public library computer, and can save that first 1,000 in a conventional savings account over a couple of years while inflation is eating it at a faster rate than it grows from interest, and trust congress to extend the credit every year until you can actually buy in, then you too can take advantage of the 50% saver's credit.
The low capital gains tax (0% for really low income people), has similarly not induced them to put much into stock ownership.
Some tax advocacy groups have published adjusted figures that assume even the poorest people own stock with at least 25% of the frequency of the wealthy, or that conversely don't treat capital gains at all and assume that even the super rich are actually paying all tax at rates based on their salaries.
Third, government is all about making everyone think someone else will pay more of the costs while taking too much from everybody. Of course the middle class isn't paying for 'everything'. Everybody is paying more than their fair share simultanionsly. Inflation itself is a tax!
Corporate taxation is always voluntary. Any company that doesn't like its taxation level can simply disolve as a standard corporation and become any of a number of pass through entites that don't pay corporate taxes but pass all taxes on to the people who were once their shareholders.
For a huge company like Exxon, with many, many foreign investors, corporate investors, etc, this would admittedly take about three to five years to fully transition, as it couldn't just remain monolithic and declare itself a single S-Corp or LLC . There would have to be a number of staged pass through entities which separated stockholders ineligible to join S-corps from ones who were, for example, until all stockholders ended up members of an S-Corp, partnership, LLC, or even a sole propritorship that had contracts with other parts as needed. But, the corporation itself would avoid more and more taxes every year of the transition.
So why not? Corporate immunity. Whatever taxes Exxon pays, it thinks are worth it to reduce its shareholder's liability for 'incidents' such as the Exxon Valdez. If those taxes were ever too high, as determined solely in Exxon's own opinion, they could pick from several of the many alternatives and transition.
This doesn't stop corporations from complaining that their voluntary taxes are too high just like an individuals non-voluntary ones.
Type 1 is the sort of thing you describe, with a neutral state that dampens competitive or aggressive acts by larger powers on either side in at least a relatively equal fashion. As you point out, the total amount of violence occurring depends on both powers deciding it's in their best interests not to ramp up violence - playing tit for tat can either make the 'other side' go back to its old levels of intervention in the buffer or further escalate, but seldom goes without a response. Because the situation is inherently dynamic, such buffers are actually rare over historical timeframes.
Type 2 is what's sometimes called a 'defensive' buffer, where a smaller state serves the interests of one side predominately or exclusively. Soviet control of states such as Poland and Yugoslavia is an example. Just about ALL Soviet decision making with regards to their buffer states was dominated by one concern - whether an action would create more delay for invading Western or PRC troops trying to cross the buffers. Meanwhile the West's interests changed frequently and irregularly but the 'single-mindedness' of the USSR still kept the overall situation very static, and internal ethnic strife, economic development of the regions, and normal political transitions all stayed as static. This shows why a one sided buffer tends to actually be more common.
So, if China desires a 'defensive' buffer in Tibet, and if India can fairly be characterized as at least normally non-aggressive towards China, then for China to destabilize Tibet's internal political structure and ramp up violence towards civilians is paradoxically aggressive. (There's at least one 'if' there that is seriously arguable). For India to take actions that ramp up violence (in the short term and on internal Tibetian scales only), counts as merely trying to restore the status quo if Tibet is Type 1, or to convert a Type 2 to a Type 1 buffer at worst. For China to be the one which elects to destablize Tibet is for China to throw away its defensive shield - which is as much as to say China thinks it doesn't need defenses there, i.e. because it is going on the offensive re. India!
In other words, if one nation desires a buffer state much more than the other, then that nation will be judged as intending aggression by the rest of the international community if it does just about anything that destabilizes that buffer internally. I only say "just about", because actually helping a buffer state modernize and industrialize or hold what the UN would consider genuinely free elections are sometimes exceptions.
The major charge in this case seems to be that he defrauded a bunch of other spammers. For that, he faces serious time - conning a bunch of nasty people who had every intent to spam a lot of genuinely innocent people if they could. He faces only much more minor time and fines for not paying his fair share of taxes or for spamming anybody who wasn't themselves out to con people. The guy's pond scum, and a few years in medium security looks reasonable, but isn't this all sort of like arresting Clyde Barrow and threatening him with 30 days for each murder, 180 days each for the robberies, and 20 years+ for shortening shotguns?
While some modern copyright violators compare themselves to Robin Hood, the comparison isn't really very close at all. However, the legendary Robin really could claim that he was being treated as a criminal before he did anything. That is, the Norman rulers of England at the time those legends began really did treat existing Saxons as an ethnic group with massive, inbred, automatic criminal tendencies. A summary judgment by the Sheriff of Nottingham against Robin Hood's father, supposedly based on a claim that he was doubtless guilty merely because he was a Saxon, is where the legend begins, not with Robin's first robbery or giving to the poor.
In more recent times, being seen as a 'Robin Hood' in some circles meant people such as Bonnie & Clyde or Jesse James could still get support even after having committed cold blooded murders. What percentage of the public would secretly support people who were seen as Robin Hood types, and had done nothing worse than CV? I'm betting it would be pretty damned high.
It follows as a strict interpretation of formal logic, but that has a hidden presumption. (Which is, 'work for' in case 1 is identical to 'work for' in case 2).
In fact, there's lots of degrees of 'work for': The municipal sanitation people work for me by carrying off my trash. I have a certain, but generally quite limited, right to observe them. The local cop works for me by bearing arms and providing testimony in court that has more weight than the sanitation guy's, as well as doing many other things that are more on a level with the sanitation guy's. Maybe I shouldn't have any more right to supervise the policeman's break times than I do the sanitation worker's, but I might still claim with some justice to have a much greater right to make sure my local government checked that cop's history of domestic violence. The congressman works for me by passing laws which could become a source for literally millions of dollars in bribes, far, far more than the cop or the trash hauler, or even my doctor. Those same laws could wreck my life and/or the lives of many others, with less consequence as is than any action 'my' doctor, 'my ' lawyer, or even 'my' commercial pilot might take.
So, it follows just how much 'snooping' I should be able to do into who's life may depend on just what kind of work. More, just what areas I should be able to snoop into would seem to depend on this as well. Both the general job title and specific facts influence rights.
This goes for my employer as well. If he expects me to regularly drive a potentially dangerous vehicle, he has different rights than if my job entails no dangerous machinery. If he is giving me control over customer's financial records, he may well have the right to check my own financial history, but does he have a corresponding right to check my medical or sexual history? What rights a day care employer has and an airline has may be, should be, in fact doubtless are, very different.
They act very public, every member of a mob feels proud to be a member,
Actually, they don't. This was just about universally assumed to be the case, and most police courses still teach this idea, but a number of recent studies (1990's and up) have shown that only about 25% of a given mob really want to be there. Larger percentages try to move towards the fringes and hang back, but are afraid that if they make a sudden break, the mob will turn on them. If the small percent that organize a mob make good choices in direction and pick up new people on the leading edge fast enough, the mob tends to hang together, whereas if it stays in one place, or avoids routes that let it pick up lots of new members, it dissipates.
Mob organizers can make people more afraid of leaving by appointing assistants to watch the edges and challenge hangers-back, or by announcing sudden changes of plan so that people caught up are more afraid to risk leaving, but these techniques may backfire. Most, probably all, mobs have an organizational core member set which has mastered at least some techniques to keep the mob going, has a plan to trigger a mob event before hand, and is willing to manipulate people in an at least semi-skilled fashion.
I'll be happy to provide some links on this if needed, but if you doubt it, try watching some mob video footage that captures the mob still en route to the location where it begins to destroy property or clash with the police, and see how easy it is to spot people herding stragglers, encouraging the reluctant and organizing the overall behavior. Also, count the numbers of these who are equipped with gear, such as handkerchiefs tied over their faces, disguising masks, or even gas masks, and figure these people came prepared to form a mob in advance.
The reason Darwin titled his seminal work "On The Origin of Species" and not "On The Origin of Life" was because he himself thought that he had explained why life grouped itself into broad types, why types were made up of anatomically related smaller groups until you got to a level where there might be two or more very similar subtypes with only a few distinguishing features, and why those sub-types always still had distinguishable but somewhat fuzzy edges (especially viewed over the longer term by looking at the fossil record). Darwin still felt he hadn't really explained anything significant about the 'older' origin problem, of life itself, and as his own notes reveal, he carefully chose the title to avoid claiming he had. Unfortunately, there have been people ever since who have simply claimed that Darwin's work explained all the real questions about life's origin.
Examined in the full modern interpretation, Darwin's work actually makes it harder to explain Ultimate Origin, not easier. Unfortunately, the pre-Darwinian explanation was usually "God did it", and many people found that a bit of a dodge even before Evolutionary theory came along. Accepting that Darwin's work even might make the "God did it" idea look more promising, even if that may well be just the result of a superficial spin on the situation, even if there may well be a natural explanation for that too and we just don't have all the evidence yet, has made researching life's own origin hugely unpopular. Anyone who explores the theoretical implications of life having possibly used simpler and simpler encoding schemes, and the encoding schemes themselves having evolved, for example, soon finds their material being quoted (and often misquoted) by Young Earth Creationists, and yet 'political' movements in the scientific community immediately turn on them and lump them in with the very people misquoting them. Trying to bring some rigor to the rather abstract existing models of RNA being a predecessor of DNA as an heredity mechanism, for example, is a good way to see grant money dry up and end a promising career.
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How could it be anything else? We don't have a single example of alien life to consider. Until someone sees an alien do something sinful, no one could rationally claim the aliens need saved from sin. So "I don't know if the aliens need saved or not" is the only rational answer. If someone wants to know what God is going to do to save them, that question presupposes that something definitely must be true which we have no way of actually knowing at present.
Tell me, if someone invents a time machine, and murders their own great-great-grandfather during the battle of Gettysburg, what happens next? You can't? I don't see how physical scientists can justify saying 'I don't know' to this and numerous other scientific questions.
A lot of the angels on pinheads type arguments started as math problems. Since angels were spiritual beings without physical limitations, you could treat them as abstract items. So if one angel took up half the pinhead, and the next angel was 1/2 the first's size (thus taking up a quarter of the pinhead), and the next 1/4 size, and so on, was their any limit to the number of angels that could fit on the pinhead?
It's theory of limits as a precondition of developing the calculus, but with 'numbered somethings' instead of pure numbers. In a time where most things were still measured with barleycorns or king's arm-spans, and such things didn't come in infinitely divisible sizes, it was necessary for most philosophers to couch their arguements with something less abstract than pure numbers, at least as a teaching tool, and if they had started off speculating about something like little men, each smaller than the last, most people would have locked up mentally at the very idea of such small men. People could believe angels could do things more physically mundane objects couldn't, at least enough to somewhat follow the logical argument that underlay them.
Angels were also used to theorize about Zeno's paradox and other such classical logic problems. No one quite got to developing the calculus of infinitesimals, but they got pretty close sometimes.
The thing is, Galileo got the exact same punishment we still use today for his crime, no worse. The only difference is, he committed his crime against Religious authorities and not Secular ones.
G. was asked to write a defense of his position, in the proper Latin, and submit it to the church. Instead he wrote the defense in Italian so that the average guy could read it, and attempted to make it available to the public before the trial was over. What do we do to people today when a judge gives them some interogatives and they release their answers to the press in an attempt to influence the trial? Right, we find them in contempt and lock them up.
G. used a character named Simplicio in his dialog, and put words that had been used by some of the church authorities in that character's mouth. He picked quotes that were easy to abuse or make fun of, left out a lot of points that were harder to deal with, and the whole work arguably became a straw man attack. What do most modern judges do if you misquote what they say in court? And what if you said the name you gave a character representing them was only because they claimed their view was simple, but the name you used actually best translated to "simpleton"? What would most judges do today to somebody who publicly called them simpletons and then tried to feed them a line of BS about why? Right, they take people like that, and lock them up.
It's called contempt of court, and it can have an unlimited sentence right now in the present day, as in telling a reporter they will stay locked up until they name their source, however long it takes. You can argue, and I would, that a spiritual institution shouldn't have the power to be conducting courts or censoring publications at all, but the response the church gave snowballed into serious consequences because Galileo made it into a pissing contest first.
The whole 'God of the Gaps' argument presumes that the gaps are actually getting smaller. That's actually very hard to prove in many of the cases where it has been assumed, and is definitely contrary to fact in some.
Conventional Evolutionary theory shows how some events are much more probable over geologic time than once believed - for example the development of a biological feature such as an eye. It's happened independently in different families several times, perhaps as many as a dozen. At the same time, fitting all the predecessor developments needed before we even got to DNA based life, into the time available since the planet cooled enough for life means some major early steps had to happen in very brief timeframes, possibly even periods of mere years or even less.
The probability of eyes developing from simple structures once you get life started goes up, the probability of the first precursor molecules used to code for heredity evolving into the much more sophisticated form of DNA goes down, the overall probability you can start from Hadean Earth, 4.1 billion years ago, and end up with Giraffes or Orchids remains unchanged, or by some molecular biology experiments actually decreases.
Shuffling all the extremely low probability steps towards the beginning of life and then saying that they don't need to be explained is a confidence trick. Where evolutionary theory makes some necessary events in the history of life look wildly improbable, much less explicable than before we developed the theory, this needs to be acknowledged, even if some Creationist types may try to use it to justify their theories.
I don't know if anything analogous exists in UK law, but in the US, there's a real right or two involved. Spending so much money to see enforcement gains for such a minor crime at least probably violates the principle of cruel and unusual punishment. It's not the cruel part, mind you, but if in effect, one rather trivial crime suddenly has a much higher enforcement effort devoted to it, the state is punishing in an unusual way.
Note: recent supreme court rulings, that class some punishing things such as appearing on public offender lists as not actually punishments, mean the U.S. government probably wouldn't agree with this interpretation. That said, does anybody in the US want the UK to resort to the same sort of 'loop-hole'ease interpretations that seem to reflect us at our worst?
By itself, spending a whole heap of money in an ineffectual manner isn't a rights issue, but you could also ask, since these cameras have been 'justified' to the tax-payer by the claim that they have some sort of anti-terrorist function, does the same tax-payer get real figures on how the initiative has failed, so that they can vote the incompetent idiots which wasted their funds out of office?
Because it seems to me that those same cameras just might discourage political speech against the people who wasted the money. I'm not even a UK citizen, just some yobbo who's sticking his nose in, but on the other hand, I haven't wasted millions of the people's pounds either, so my opinion that there's a chilling effect might be worth more than all the officials conveniently self-serving opinions that there is no such chilling effect put together.
What matters isn't how I deal with the 10,000 people that include 9,999 false positives. It's how a government that mostly doesn't understand statistics deals with them, while under pressure to act from a public that can substitute the word 'overwhelmingly' for 'mostly'.
The politicians have promised a solution. That sounds like they have a test that won't wreck the economy to narrow the million down to 10,000, and another test that is economical with that base to keep narrowing down the test subjects, until by one or more additional stages we get a small enough group that it has a significant impact overall to to take step X against them. So, what are these intermediate stages if step X is, say, a luggage search? What if it's a strip search? What if step x is unlimited duration detention? What if step x is unlimited detention with no right to counsel or speedy trial or due process?
You've said it yourself "an algorithm that works, but doesn't scale". If we don't have the intermediate steps to get to the total solution, implementing the first step accomplishes nothing.
This is why the flamebait mod is fundamentally crocked. There are some subjects that almost anything relevant posted is going to make somebody on one side or another angry, very angry. The editors have already added all the fuel needed to the fire simply by choosing to post on those topics. That's part of what many of us come to Slashdot for - serious topics that have an inherent risk of making somebody mad, so I'm not knocking the presence of these articles.
But, when the subject is something as important to many as, say, the coming U. S. elections, the USAPATRIOT act, or the War in Iraq, the chance a genuinely relevant post will be modded down with 'flamebait' before anyone mods it up starts approaching pure randomness.
Metamoderation has difficulty correcting this, as it's usually at least arguable that the poster added a tiny bit more fuel to the already blazing conflagration. It's 'technically' fair to call a great many posts in a thread such as this flamebait, but there's no way for a mod to point out that it's a case where the article headline and first few paragraphs already took the issue 98% of the way to a full scale flamewar, and any mod using 'flamebait' after that is assigning most of the blame to the people involved in the last 2% of the process.
I'm perfectly trasmodic with antipipulation over 'frivious' myself. For a definition, how about "Frivious (Adj.): Any condition both frivolous and trivial.". Since those two words already have substantial but not complete overlap, frivious is very useful for excluding the borderline cases. Now if we just had a word, as the Germans do, for the overlap between sarcasm and irony. (Harlanellisonkeit).
I really don't see the basic concept as 'bizarre'. There's certainly some cognitive dissonance there, but if it counts as mental illness, then the society has about 50 million people who should be forcibly institutionalized, and no, I'm not being hyperbolic.
Yes, there's something internally contradictory about trying to hold certain people who have been adults for quite a few years responsible in court, and simultaneously thinking that also supports bitching to their mommies on them like the parents were still responsible. No, that's not enough to signal mental illness.
Now some of the details, such as the esoteric reference to red and green for merit badge colors, that's genuinely odd, non-linear thinking.
So did this Person Found Wolf Clan guy have an Enormous... personality or something?
Much better to name one Bun-Bun of course, but that one has already been discovered. In mass quantities it is incredibly soft but far more reactive than similar quantities of U-235, and all alfalfa related reactions proceed with extreme rapidity in its presence.
http://www.sluggy.com/
No, my logic is that there are costs to clean up any mess. Your 'logic' seems to rely on a little blue capitalism fairy who will automagically keep one class from paying the costs and defer them to another class, without simultaneously making the mess into a Marxist style class struggle.
Here's a hint - you can't lump whole classes into monolithic imperatives ("Poor people STILL spread disease and crime") without fundamentally being a Marxist. You've just bought 100% into the Marxian paradigm but then chosen to support the side Marx said ultimately loses.
The opposition probably shouldn't automatically win, but secrets need to be interpreted by the court as existing in the worst reasonable light. Note that that's worst reasonable, not worst possible. In some cases, we are definitely facing the opposition pretty much winning a point regardless of how that affects the whole court case.
I don't mean the judge simply declaring an automatic worst case interpretation to the jury either, but there are things that just about any jury will take into consideration once they are said, even if the judge orders them to disregard those bits, and if that tips the whole judgment of the jury, than that's the risk the prosecution takes.
Note that the government takes that sort of risk with perfectly normal, non-secret testimony too. That's why they should still face the risk if they use secret testimony.
If the government wants to file a case against someone for espionage for example, and declares that some of their evidence is secret to protect the identity of an agent in place, it would probably be reasonable for the court to accept as a given that if said agent really exists then there is a real need to protect that agent's identity from disclosure. This still means we have testimony that would normally fall under hearsay rules, i.e. someone else has to testify, in court where he faces the possible penalties for lying under oath, that he heard the agent say something (or read or otherwise acquired the information that is now second hand). Even if the court were to accept that this situation is an exception to normal hearsay rules, in the same way as a deathbed confession can be, it's still reasonable to limit what can be used in the case, to make somebody be accountable for swearing that the reason for secrecy actually exists as stated, and all classification is based on that reason.
If the source can't reveal even the cloudiest details about the location where the testimony originated, or the time it occurred, then the Defense should, at the very least, get to ask for something definite enough to be cross examined as a precondition of the evidence being admitted at all, and somebody to direct the cross examination at.
For a protecting an agent's identity based claim, someone highly and publicly placed in the related intelligence agency should have to testify under oath that the information originated in their agency, from sources who were active agents at the time. We probably should have a lot more than that, but it's a necessary start for any kind of fair trial. Evidence that cannot be disproved is just like a scientific theory that can't be falsified - there is no such thing. If there is no ability to challenge, it's not evidence.
If the government can't somehow offer evidence that has some testability or potential to be challenged, and limit the effects on the trial to ones relating to those parts of the testimony that can be examined, then they are in the position of asking the judicial system and the public to take any and all executive branch testimony on sheer, blind faith. At that point, what the executive branch is really violating is the principle of separation of church and state.
What really bothers me aren't even the idiots who don't realize that some of that medical care they are bitching about helps keep them too from being exposed to a plague or whatever. It's not even the supra-idiots that think they could continue to buy for the same prices at stores when no clerk could afford to work for them at the wages some pay without government assistance. It's the supra-ne-plus-ultra-idiots who think that if all these pesky poor people get near simultaniously Darwined as fast as political action could do it, nature will make the starving, diseased, homeless automagically disappear neatly, none of them will starve slowly enough to rampage about, and the rich wouldn't have to pay any extra bills to keep society functioning, or even to cremate the dead. My ghod, even the Nazis knew you had to pay your camp guards something. Even nutcase survivalists know that if you shoot the masses when they cross the edge of your property, the corpses will soon start to stink.
1. I never said I was shocked about it or anything else.
2. The 'lower% but a higher amount taken' is a whineing leech's special arguement. The only way to take less total cash from richer people than poor and not just similar overall amounts based on a lower overall percentage, is to selectively tax the poor at a higher base rate than the wealthy. Now you're argueing for a tax on poverty itself, which is so vicious I can well agree with your assessment that you hate people.
"Whaaaahhh! I'm so wealthy I shouldn't have to pay anything at all. It's not good enough that I should pay the same rate, I should pay less than those lousy poor people." Don't you see how tragic, how ultimately sub-human the philosophy you are supporting is?
3. Are the poor supposed to support the rich then? You've been making it an either/or issue. Great red herring. If you are not a communist, why are you insisting that there's a class structure and one class must parasitize the other, either way?
I've been pointing out what taxes everyone pays, including very poor people. A self employed contract roofer pays that 12.4% SSA and Medicare B, even if he makes only 4,000 or 5,000 a year. Any person below the poverty level is probably spending very close to 100% of net income on items that have a sales tax, with the possible exception of doctor bills, so that's typically at least 5% more. A certain percent, the ones with minor children, get some of that back or even more when they file their income tax. The rest don't.
So, we have typically at least 18% tax on the lowest paid working people out there before we even get to the income tax itself, all that comes from what nobody here has defied as a progressive tax, I've pointed out how all those other taxes have their regressive aspects, and you want to argue that one group is being abused by the system and another isn't?
You don't want to support the poor? I don't want to support Iraq, the Justice Dept. putting drapes on statues, or higher education grants for Art-History majors that can't get work afterwards anyways. So what's the logical justification for saying you are taking responsibility and anyone else is not? Oh, that's right, its a gratuitous insult, either to all the poor you're lumping into that category or to me because you just lost the debate on its merits.
Remember O J Simpson?
Now before anyone flames me, personally, I am of the opinion the man was guilty, based on overall evidence. Read what follows in that light.
One thing the jury was told about was hair samples. The DA asked for a number of these, first wanting 6 hairs from O J, then a second larger sample, and finally a sample of over 200 hairs. Whether these were for DNA or fiber evidence is not entirely clear from the jury transcripts.
Some person testifying for the prosecution team claimed that the odds anyone but O J did it were 1 in 6 Billion or so based on that evidence. When defense asked if the larger than usual sample had any effect on the accuracy of the data, that same person said the odds remained exactly the same. Aside fron the Furman testemony that most people heard about, this is another thing the jury balked at accepting - why after all go back for multiple larger and larger samples at all if it didn't affect accuracy? - why claim the same exact accuracy whether the match was for DNA tests or fiber matching?
So no, we can't be sure it's infallible. We can't even trust the odds are what the DA's office says they are. If they can do this in a high profile case, then for the average case, they can sweep out the kennel where the suspect works, take samples that may not include any human DNA at all, and claim the same sample was sent off simultaniously to a DNA lab on one coast and a fiber lab on the other, and both prove the odds are precisely 1 in lebenty-leben trizillion to one that it's anyone else.
First, the "top 5% paying over half" quote has already been debunked above, so stop spreading it please.
Second, social security and medicare taxes total around 15% of income, until you earn more than 95,000 a year, then they go down, not up. Social Security goes all the way to zero on the additional income, and a very wealthy individual, even one that is describable as employed, may have social security taxes equal to something like 0.03% of his income. Just try calculating Warren Buffet's social security tax % some time.
Since the government borrows out of the Social Security fund to cover general fund debts it's certainly fair to count it.
Sales taxes vary from state to state, but go as high as 10% some places. Sales taxes on large single purchases are generally reduced (for example, my state stops charging local taxes after the first $3200 of a single large item, and takes only the statewide rate. So again, sales taxes usually go down (at least somewhat) for the wealthy.
Even for the income tax, actual rate payed counts for a whole lot more than the raw bracket. While the overall tax rate climbs fairly consistently with income, there are eddies, at least for anyone still making little enough to benefit from schedule "A". That extends all the way into the top quintile.
There are several 'credits' that the government has extended to extremely low income portions of the populace, and these in theory reduce projected tax rates from those people, but are in practice almost never significant. These numbers get widely (miss)quoted in some people's economic distribution tables and so are worth mentioning. I'm seeing some of those 'missunderestimations' in the thread above.
The 50% rate saver's credit lets people who are typically making 10,000 dollars less than the local poverty rate get a very nice deduction for starting a 401K at work, but of course most poor people don't have a job with a 401K available, nor can they throw 1,000 to 3,000 into an IRA. (Yes, some people live in areas where you literally can't start an IRA with any of the local banks without at least 3,000 initial, and some investment firms start at 5K.).
If you are really poor, and are willing to set up and manage your account in a distant location from a public library computer, and can save that first 1,000 in a conventional savings account over a couple of years while inflation is eating it at a faster rate than it grows from interest, and trust congress to extend the credit every year until you can actually buy in, then you too can take advantage of the 50% saver's credit.
The low capital gains tax (0% for really low income people), has similarly not induced them to put much into stock ownership.
Some tax advocacy groups have published adjusted figures that assume even the poorest people own stock with at least 25% of the frequency of the wealthy, or that conversely don't treat capital gains at all and assume that even the super rich are actually paying all tax at rates based on their salaries.
Third, government is all about making everyone think someone else will pay more of the costs while taking too much from everybody. Of course the middle class isn't paying for 'everything'. Everybody is paying more than their fair share simultanionsly. Inflation itself is a tax!
Corporate taxation is always voluntary. Any company that doesn't like its taxation level can simply disolve as a standard corporation and become any of a number of pass through entites that don't pay corporate taxes but pass all taxes on to the people who were once their shareholders.
For a huge company like Exxon, with many, many foreign investors, corporate investors, etc, this would admittedly take about three to five years to fully transition, as it couldn't just remain monolithic and declare itself a single S-Corp or LLC . There would have to be a number of staged pass through entities which separated stockholders ineligible to join S-corps from ones who were, for example, until all stockholders ended up members of an S-Corp, partnership, LLC, or even a sole propritorship that had contracts with other parts as needed. But, the corporation itself would avoid more and more taxes every year of the transition.
So why not? Corporate immunity. Whatever taxes Exxon pays, it thinks are worth it to reduce its shareholder's liability for 'incidents' such as the Exxon Valdez. If those taxes were ever too high, as determined solely in Exxon's own opinion, they could pick from several of the many alternatives and transition.
This doesn't stop corporations from complaining that their voluntary taxes are too high just like an individuals non-voluntary ones.
There are two common cases of buffer states:
Type 1 is the sort of thing you describe, with a neutral state that dampens competitive or aggressive acts by larger powers on either side in at least a relatively equal fashion. As you point out, the total amount of violence occurring depends on both powers deciding it's in their best interests not to ramp up violence - playing tit for tat can either make the 'other side' go back to its old levels of intervention in the buffer or further escalate, but seldom goes without a response. Because the situation is inherently dynamic, such buffers are actually rare over historical timeframes.
Type 2 is what's sometimes called a 'defensive' buffer, where a smaller state serves the interests of one side predominately or exclusively. Soviet control of states such as Poland and Yugoslavia is an example. Just about ALL Soviet decision making with regards to their buffer states was dominated by one concern - whether an action would create more delay for invading Western or PRC troops trying to cross the buffers. Meanwhile the West's interests changed frequently and irregularly but the 'single-mindedness' of the USSR still kept the overall situation very static, and internal ethnic strife, economic development of the regions, and normal political transitions all stayed as static. This shows why a one sided buffer tends to actually be more common.
So, if China desires a 'defensive' buffer in Tibet, and if India can fairly be characterized as at least normally non-aggressive towards China, then for China to destabilize Tibet's internal political structure and ramp up violence towards civilians is paradoxically aggressive. (There's at least one 'if' there that is seriously arguable).
For India to take actions that ramp up violence (in the short term and on internal Tibetian scales only), counts as merely trying to restore the status quo if Tibet is Type 1, or to convert a Type 2 to a Type 1 buffer at worst. For China to be the one which elects to destablize Tibet is for China to throw away its defensive shield - which is as much as to say China thinks it doesn't need defenses there, i.e. because it is going on the offensive re. India!
In other words, if one nation desires a buffer state much more than the other, then that nation will be judged as intending aggression by the rest of the international community if it does just about anything that destabilizes that buffer internally. I only say "just about", because actually helping a buffer state modernize and industrialize or hold what the UN would consider genuinely free elections are sometimes exceptions.
At least you didn't misuse 'Whom'...
The major charge in this case seems to be that he defrauded a bunch of other spammers. For that, he faces serious time - conning a bunch of nasty people who had every intent to spam a lot of genuinely innocent people if they could. He faces only much more minor time and fines for not paying his fair share of taxes or for spamming anybody who wasn't themselves out to con people. The guy's pond scum, and a few years in medium security looks reasonable, but isn't this all sort of like arresting Clyde Barrow and threatening him with 30 days for each murder, 180 days each for the robberies, and 20 years+ for shortening shotguns?
While some modern copyright violators compare themselves to Robin Hood, the comparison isn't really very close at all. However, the legendary Robin really could claim that he was being treated as a criminal before he did anything. That is, the Norman rulers of England at the time those legends began really did treat existing Saxons as an ethnic group with massive, inbred, automatic criminal tendencies. A summary judgment by the Sheriff of Nottingham against Robin Hood's father, supposedly based on a claim that he was doubtless guilty merely because he was a Saxon, is where the legend begins, not with Robin's first robbery or giving to the poor.
In more recent times, being seen as a 'Robin Hood' in some circles meant people such as Bonnie & Clyde or Jesse James could still get support even after having committed cold blooded murders. What percentage of the public would secretly support people who were seen as Robin Hood types, and had done nothing worse than CV? I'm betting it would be pretty damned high.
It follows as a strict interpretation of formal logic, but that has a hidden presumption. (Which is, 'work for' in case 1 is identical to 'work for' in case 2).
In fact, there's lots of degrees of 'work for': The municipal sanitation people work for me by carrying off my trash. I have a certain, but generally quite limited, right to observe them. The local cop works for me by bearing arms and providing testimony in court that has more weight than the sanitation guy's, as well as doing many other things that are more on a level with the sanitation guy's. Maybe I shouldn't have any more right to supervise the policeman's break times than I do the sanitation worker's, but I might still claim with some justice to have a much greater right to make sure my local government checked that cop's history of domestic violence. The congressman works for me by passing laws which could become a source for literally millions of dollars in bribes, far, far more than the cop or the trash hauler, or even my doctor. Those same laws could wreck my life and/or the lives of many others, with less consequence as is than any action 'my' doctor, 'my ' lawyer, or even 'my' commercial pilot might take.
So, it follows just how much 'snooping' I should be able to do into who's life may depend on just what kind of work. More, just what areas I should be able to snoop into would seem to depend on this as well. Both the general job title and specific facts influence rights.
This goes for my employer as well. If he expects me to regularly drive a potentially dangerous vehicle, he has different rights than if my job entails no dangerous machinery. If he is giving me control over customer's financial records, he may well have the right to check my own financial history, but does he have a corresponding right to check my medical or sexual history? What rights a day care employer has and an airline has may be, should be, in fact doubtless are, very different.
They act very public, every member of a mob feels proud to be a member,
Actually, they don't. This was just about universally assumed to be the case, and most police courses still teach this idea, but a number of recent studies (1990's and up) have shown that only about 25% of a given mob really want to be there. Larger percentages try to move towards the fringes and hang back, but are afraid that if they make a sudden break, the mob will turn on them. If the small percent that organize a mob make good choices in direction and pick up new people on the leading edge fast enough, the mob tends to hang together, whereas if it stays in one place, or avoids routes that let it pick up lots of new members, it dissipates.
Mob organizers can make people more afraid of leaving by appointing assistants to watch the edges and challenge hangers-back, or by announcing sudden changes of plan so that people caught up are more afraid to risk leaving, but these techniques may backfire. Most, probably all, mobs have an organizational core member set which has mastered at least some techniques to keep the mob going, has a plan to trigger a mob event before hand, and is willing to manipulate people in an at least semi-skilled fashion.
I'll be happy to provide some links on this if needed, but if you doubt it, try watching some mob video footage that captures the mob still en route to the location where it begins to destroy property or clash with the police, and see how easy it is to spot people herding stragglers, encouraging the reluctant and organizing the overall behavior. Also, count the numbers of these who are equipped with gear, such as handkerchiefs tied over their faces, disguising masks, or even gas masks, and figure these people came prepared to form a mob in advance.
The reason Darwin titled his seminal work "On The Origin of Species" and not "On The Origin of Life" was because he himself thought that he had explained why life grouped itself into broad types, why types were made up of anatomically related smaller groups until you got to a level where there might be two or more very similar subtypes with only a few distinguishing features, and why those sub-types always still had distinguishable but somewhat fuzzy edges (especially viewed over the longer term by looking at the fossil record). Darwin still felt he hadn't really explained anything significant about the 'older' origin problem, of life itself, and as his own notes reveal, he carefully chose the title to avoid claiming he had. Unfortunately, there have been people ever since who have simply claimed that Darwin's work explained all the real questions about life's origin.
Examined in the full modern interpretation, Darwin's work actually makes it harder to explain Ultimate Origin, not easier. Unfortunately, the pre-Darwinian explanation was usually "God did it", and many people found that a bit of a dodge even before Evolutionary theory came along. Accepting that Darwin's work even might make the "God did it" idea look more promising, even if that may well be just the result of a superficial spin on the situation, even if there may well be a natural explanation for that too and we just don't have all the evidence yet, has made researching life's own origin hugely unpopular. Anyone who explores the theoretical implications of life having possibly used simpler and simpler encoding schemes, and the encoding schemes themselves having evolved, for example, soon finds their material being quoted (and often misquoted) by Young Earth Creationists, and yet 'political' movements in the scientific community immediately turn on them and lump them in with the very people misquoting them. Trying to bring some rigor to the rather abstract existing models of RNA being a predecessor of DNA as an heredity mechanism, for example, is a good way to see grant money dry up and end a promising career.