Britan may not have the Anti-Evolutionist ID proponents, but it does have a rampant case of Homeopathy which is compounded by the growing belief that Vaccinations cause Autism.
However, there's an important difference between these and ID: both of them make predictions and can thus be proven (beyond reasonable doubt, of course not with absolute certainty) or disproven. Of course that doesn't mean that the people who believe in either would actually heed the evidence, but the claims themselves are within the realm of science.
In fact, geological science gets a lot of fanatical opposition in some places because it disproves stories of ancient bridge-building army of monkeys http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6990847.stm
The story you linked to reports about fanatical opposition to a canal because it would destroy said bridge, and has nothing to do with geology or opposition to it. The only things it says about science is that scientists don't think that the bridge in question was built by an army of monkeys, and that some of them think it's a natural formation. Nor does it state that scientists have disproved this presumed feat of monkey engineering corps; and indeed, how could anyone possibly disprove something like that?
Not to let Firefox off the hook, but the link in that bug loads a tag list, which the page writer geniusly decided to non-breaking space the entire thing. It's essentially treating almost 1 Mbyte of text as a single word 90,000 letters long (850,000 including font sizing tags). I replaced one of the non-breaking spaces with a normal space and the page loads instantly and type ahead search works perfect.
While this is certainly idiotic, it also means that there's a serious bug in Firefox, possibly even more serious than I thought. After all, if you replace just one of the nbsp-entities with a normal space, you end up with two words both 45,000 letters long; hardly enough to make such a dramatic difference if the word length if the problem.
What happens if you feed Firefox a page with a single, short word? I don't have FF3 installed at the moment so I can't test.
You can't necessarily blame Firefox every time a web designer makes a bad choice.
True. I wouldn't blame Firefox if the page was rendered badly, or if it was slow to scroll, or slow to render. However, the problem is that Firefox locks up when loading or searching that page, and for a network-facing program to do that for any input is always a serious bug.
It's a bit like those SQL injection attacks that keep on popping up: sure, the user shouldn't input "drop table", but it's still a bug if the application obeys.
I'm not a "FairTax" supporter by any means, but your first point has been answered a number of times already. Yes, everyone would pay a 30% markup on new goods -- but everyone would also get a yearly refund amounting to 30% of whatever the government deems to be a base level of spending. Essentially, if you spend exactly that amount you'd pay no net taxes; if you spend less than that amount you'd get an automatic handout. (Talk about not paying their fair share!). The lower class actually does extremely well under the "FairTax" proposal.
That's actually a pretty interesting idea. If you'd make the rebate high enough to live on, you could eliminate the whole social security system and associated bureaucracy and opportunities for abuse.
On the other hand, if you mean "would the 'FairTax' be as effective as current income taxes at confiscating and redistributing wealth from the materially rich to the materially poor", then I certainly hope not.
In a system with a natural tendency towards concentrating wealth and power, you need a wealth redistribution mechanism to prevent it from turning into an outright feudalism with a de facto slave class. Get over it.
Yes, because the way to get out of a 10 foot deep hole that is filling with water is to dig deeper.
Well, yes. If you have tools to dig, just start digging a nice ramp for yourself from one of the walls. Or, if you know that the thing is really going to fill to the brink, just float and wait.
But seriously, it's always stuck as somewhat perverse to me: if there's more production than consumption, shouldn't that help economy - after all, wealth is being accumulated, assuming that what's being produced is worth anything? There's something very fundamentally wrong with economy that's based on selling and reselling crap.
I just today saw a pretty new TV on a flea market for a price I could easily afford, but didn't buy it simply because I figure that if it's seen any use at all it'll break down soon, and in fact even if it hadn't seen any use it would break down soon. Meanwhile, the one I have now, an old piece of crap just plain keeps working, despite having cracks on the screen. I haven't bought an X-Box 360 because, by all accounts, they are noisy and have a tendency to break (and break game disks while at it). I don't buy computer games because they come with DRM which has a pretty good chance of breaking my computer. Hell, nowadays I try to avoid buying stuff at all not because I couldn't afford it, but simply because dealing with the inevitable problems is just too much pain.
The whole purpose of government was to ensure that certain inalienable rights were protected. It shouldn't have to provide for us economically. If we can't manage to feed and clothe ourselves on our own merits than we deserve to die.
And if you can't protect your rights, you deserve to lose them. Why do you think that right to life is less deserving of protection than other rights?
Still, at least you deserve credit for being honest about what libertarian ideology means: the poor should just die. Not that it wouldn't be obvious to anyone anyway, which is why libertarians get so few votes; but at least you aren't trying to hide behind "voluntary charity" or other bullshit.
Notice that the right to live is not an inalienable right, being that everyone dies in the end.
Since death prevents you from exercising any rights, it logically follows that you lose all of them in the end, and thus none of them are inalienable.
Government protects us from other governments, and from people who would deny us liberty.
And since we've already established that death strips your rights, it follows that people who would deny me the resources I need to live are included in that list. Not that that matters; I value my life higher than liberty, since without life I can't have anything, including liberty.
But more and more it's the creature which denies us our own essential liberty.
Government and companies both. That's why you need to play them against one another; use government to limit corporate power.
If you don't like the way a company does something, you should have both the liberty and the inclination to do something about it.
I am. I'm voting for politicians who are for regulating companies, thus forcing them to behave.
This is what we have become because of big government, sheep afraid to step up and provide reasonable service at a reasonable price. If you don't like the way something is being done, perhaps its you who should be doing something about it.
Like I said above, voting for more regulation is doing something about it.
And yet in other countries, as TFA also points out, it is competition and NOT regulation which has delivered high speeds at low prices or 13 cents in Japan and 33 cents in France as opposed to $3 in the United States per million bits/second.
Dunno about those countries, but here in Finland we have regulation which forces the company which owns my telephone line to let other companies offer Internet connectivity over it. That has led to healthy competition and drop in prices.
For good study on the difference between "doing good as required" and "doing good as a conscious choice", I refer you to "A Clockwork Orange", A. Burgess, ISBN-13: 978-0393312836
Fascinating debate as that might be, this story (and the book you referred to) is not about doing good but about not doing evil. There's a huge difference between being forced to do good and being forced to not do evil.
You are equivocating on the word faith. This is a common error, please don't perpetuate it.
I'm not equivocating. I'm using the word "faith" with the meaning of "believing something", which is the exact same meaning the post I was replied to used it in. This was perfectly clear from the context and was also specifically written in the text I quoted.
If you still claim I was equivocating, then tell me: what other meaning did I or the text I quoted use it in? Can you quote the specific part I did this in?
Incorrect. As DrYak says, no faith required. The people using the Hadron Collider don't have faith in hadrons, they have a theory that they exist and are using the Collider to either confirm or disprove that theory.
Two common examples of hadrons include protons and neutrons. I think that the existence of both has been proven beyond reasonable doubt a long time ago. Besides, as the name implies, the Large Hadron Collider works by accelerating and smashing together hadrons to release energy to form other particles. Hadrons are functional parts there, rather than the objects under examination.
Not that any of this has anything to do with the grandparent's post or my disagreement with it. He implied that science's purpose is to come up with a (mathematical) model that predicts what the instruments will read in any given situation; while I argue that science's purpose is to explain what is actually happening and exact mathematical models are actually less important.
Or, to put it even shorter: grandparent emphasizes correlation, I emphasize causation.
The Big Bang theory has been refined over the years and various elements have either been supported or disproved, and even now some of the finer details are still debated.
Again, that is not relevant. The scientists working on it consider it a real event that once happened, rather than just a neat model that allows them to make predictions.
And evolution has been pretty comprehensively proved now.
The basic principles of evolution were presumably already known by whoever first began breeding animals or plants on purpose.
And you don't have faith in your logic or observations, you have confidence in them.
I guess religious people don't have faith in Bible either, just confidence. But thank you for proving my point about people avoiding the word "faith", even when it's clearly the exact right one.
Through innumerable people having faith in wildly random theories, inevitably through happenstance a small percentage of these will be right. Usually though they go nuts and/or bankrupt. This is because faith has no place in science.
But dear horza, don't you see? They don't have faith in those crackpot theories, they have confidence in them. That's a completely different thing, no? Or so you implied above anyway.
Oh, but it will. It will change you into someone willing to call himself "Mr Fuckwit".
Actually, no. It simply makes that fact obvious to everyone. You were someone willing to call yourself "Mr. Fuckwit" before you changed your name to that; people simply didn't know that.
Gravity is simply too weak to overcome the strong nuclear and electrical forces that would have to be present in such a thermonuclear reaction furnace.
Which is a good thing for us, since if it did, the Sun would collapse.
There is also radar evidence that the sun is not a big gas ball, but actually has a solid iron core, similar to the earth, surrounded by an atmosphere of seething plasma kept hot by an as yet unknown external electrical power grid, in the same way as a metal arc lamp here on earth.
That is quite impressive, seeing how plasma is electrically conductive and thus blocks radar waves.
It's not just a straight copy paste, every time this is posted it's slightly different. After a few thousand posts, it may turn into a cogent argument!
You mean a more convincing argument. After all, the version which best inspires the reader to copypaste it will spread fastest.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 is the fastest Firefox browser yet.
So, has it fixed bug 453964 yet? Or are the developers too busy with themes to bother?
Besides, the biggest speed-related problem with Firefox isn't actual speed, it's that the browser tends to block when loading Slashdot pages in another tab, for example. I wouldn't know if version 3 fixes this, since the bug mentioned makes it useless to me.
The Brit Richard Dawkins seems to waste a fair bit of time fighting something which doesn't concern him, then.
Isn't that typical of fundamentalists? The obsessive need to convert everyone and complete inability to simply mind your own business?
Fact is, there are a whole bunch of creationist nutjobs in England as well, and they use pretty much the same tools as their American counterparts, just not as vocally -- perhaps due to the stronger democratic traditions in the U.S.
Since the tool most used by ID believers in the US is making lots of noise, your statement seems to contradict itself.
Usually the phrase *believe in* implies some form of faith.
Whereas scientist *just pick up* a model they consider the best for the situation, based on how much usable it is for making accurate predictions.
No faith required.
This is utter rubbish. The people running the Large Hadron Collider believe that hadrons really exist as actual tangible particles rather than mere mathematical models and really collide inside the collider (or would if the darn thing worked). The astronomers believe that there really was an Earth-shattering kaboom at the beginning. And biologists believe that species really evolved from slime sitting on ocean waves to slime sitting on corporate boards.
There's a difference between healthy scepticism and insane paranoia. Confusing the two and implying the latter is some kind of scientific ideal will do nothing but make the general populace see scientists as lunatics. And making patently absurd claims like "no faith required" - Really? Then how do you build those models if you have no faith in logic or your observations? - might make for nice soundbites but will make you sound like an arrogant megalomaniac as soon as someone starts analyzing them a little deeper.
The basic problem seems to be that "faith" has become associated with religion, despite being a necessary and unavoidable component of everything a non-omniscient being does, and religion has for whatever reason been painted as the antithesis of science, from which a conclusion that they can't have anything in common has been drawn. Consequently, some people feel the need to defend the "purity" of science against such horrible accusations as scientists having faith; in extreme cases not even religious faith but faith in anything, even the reality of whatever they're examining. This whole thing is slowly but surely becoming a farce.
Overdramatized situations (if I'm the last best hope of humanity, you're fucked.);
You might be the last hope for humanity, and we're all rooting for you, but that doesn't mean that we'll give you a discount on healing potions. Death is an acceptable alternative to communism.
Yes, although with the caveat of not allowing them for convicted felons or mental cases. Law-abiding citizens carrying firearms harms no one.
How do you propose to enforce this? Require everyone to show papers when asked?
Furthermore, I've often heard it said that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns." Given this, what does it help to forbid felons from carrying guns - either they are still criminals and will carry a gun anyway, or they've gone clean and are being punished forever for no reason?
Finally, you do realize that "felon" is a completely arbitrary label? A felon is someone who has broken a law where said breach has been labelled "felony" by the government. Why would such an arbitrary label disqualify one from carrying weapons, if carrying weapons is such an important freedom?
You see, literally millions of people have died in real police states. Not been inconvenienced, or had some privacy stripped from them (though that of course happened to). I am talking about actual lives lost.
I think it's closer to a billion, now. I mean, Stalin alone killed tens of millions, and was nowhere near the worst of the lot.
That said, do you think that police states just pop up overnight? No, they require careful cultivation, especially if you're starting from a liberal democracy. They require the building up of surveillance systems and draconian laws - both of which Britain is doing, along with seemingly every other Western democracy.
I know people die in real police states. I wish we could stop the slide towards them before I become one of them. We can't, of course; WW2 is too distant, and the majority of people don't remember what it was like to live in dictatorships of the time. Those from the former Soviet Block do remember, but they're rightfully afraid of Russia's rekindled ambitions, and flock to NATO for protection.
Oh well. We'll have another few dictatorships, a world war or two acting as a really rude wake-up call for everyone, and then the cycle begins again. That's how it goes.
I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for people who choose to insist on trying to maintain out-of-tree closed-source drivers in the face of the fact that it is the Wrong Thing from both a technical and legal point of view.
Unfortunately, there are no decent 3D cards with in-kernel open-source drivers, so it's the users who get the shaft here. In fact this situation might even be advantageous to 3D card manufacturers: if a kernel update breaks the old driver, and the card is no longer supported by the manufacturer, you either have to roll back the kernel update - and risk security vulnerabilities - or buy a newer card.
as soon as you will agree to pay me monthly for that ONE oil change.. for the rest of my life
Hey, that's a bargain! If you were a musician, your children's children's children would keep getting paid for 80 years after your death. Or so the current law says, I'm sure that Mickey Mouse will get some more protection before time's up.
Backroom deals do not imply understanding of cause and effect. Sorry.
Lack of knowledge of what the deal entails implies lack of crucial knowledge about cause and effect.
And it's unlikely that unofficial information sources do either.
It is, however, likely that not having access to those will severely limit your ability to make accurate predictions.
In other words, you place a great deal more trust in politicians than I do. The Law of Unintended Consequences seems to rule almost all that ALL politicians do.
I don't place any trust on politicians. In fact I stated in my original message that they can't be trusted. Nor have I claimed them to be competent; I've simply claimed that they're the only ones who can be competent in politics, since non-politicians do not have the time nor access to information needed to develop a clear picture of what's going on.
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However, there's an important difference between these and ID: both of them make predictions and can thus be proven (beyond reasonable doubt, of course not with absolute certainty) or disproven. Of course that doesn't mean that the people who believe in either would actually heed the evidence, but the claims themselves are within the realm of science.
The story you linked to reports about fanatical opposition to a canal because it would destroy said bridge, and has nothing to do with geology or opposition to it. The only things it says about science is that scientists don't think that the bridge in question was built by an army of monkeys, and that some of them think it's a natural formation. Nor does it state that scientists have disproved this presumed feat of monkey engineering corps; and indeed, how could anyone possibly disprove something like that?
While this is certainly idiotic, it also means that there's a serious bug in Firefox, possibly even more serious than I thought. After all, if you replace just one of the nbsp-entities with a normal space, you end up with two words both 45,000 letters long; hardly enough to make such a dramatic difference if the word length if the problem.
What happens if you feed Firefox a page with a single, short word? I don't have FF3 installed at the moment so I can't test.
True. I wouldn't blame Firefox if the page was rendered badly, or if it was slow to scroll, or slow to render. However, the problem is that Firefox locks up when loading or searching that page, and for a network-facing program to do that for any input is always a serious bug.
It's a bit like those SQL injection attacks that keep on popping up: sure, the user shouldn't input "drop table", but it's still a bug if the application obeys.
That's actually a pretty interesting idea. If you'd make the rebate high enough to live on, you could eliminate the whole social security system and associated bureaucracy and opportunities for abuse.
In a system with a natural tendency towards concentrating wealth and power, you need a wealth redistribution mechanism to prevent it from turning into an outright feudalism with a de facto slave class. Get over it.
Well, yes. If you have tools to dig, just start digging a nice ramp for yourself from one of the walls. Or, if you know that the thing is really going to fill to the brink, just float and wait.
But seriously, it's always stuck as somewhat perverse to me: if there's more production than consumption, shouldn't that help economy - after all, wealth is being accumulated, assuming that what's being produced is worth anything? There's something very fundamentally wrong with economy that's based on selling and reselling crap.
I just today saw a pretty new TV on a flea market for a price I could easily afford, but didn't buy it simply because I figure that if it's seen any use at all it'll break down soon, and in fact even if it hadn't seen any use it would break down soon. Meanwhile, the one I have now, an old piece of crap just plain keeps working, despite having cracks on the screen. I haven't bought an X-Box 360 because, by all accounts, they are noisy and have a tendency to break (and break game disks while at it). I don't buy computer games because they come with DRM which has a pretty good chance of breaking my computer. Hell, nowadays I try to avoid buying stuff at all not because I couldn't afford it, but simply because dealing with the inevitable problems is just too much pain.
Hooray for crap.
And if you can't protect your rights, you deserve to lose them. Why do you think that right to life is less deserving of protection than other rights?
Still, at least you deserve credit for being honest about what libertarian ideology means: the poor should just die. Not that it wouldn't be obvious to anyone anyway, which is why libertarians get so few votes; but at least you aren't trying to hide behind "voluntary charity" or other bullshit.
Since death prevents you from exercising any rights, it logically follows that you lose all of them in the end, and thus none of them are inalienable.
And since we've already established that death strips your rights, it follows that people who would deny me the resources I need to live are included in that list. Not that that matters; I value my life higher than liberty, since without life I can't have anything, including liberty.
Government and companies both. That's why you need to play them against one another; use government to limit corporate power.
I am. I'm voting for politicians who are for regulating companies, thus forcing them to behave.
Like I said above, voting for more regulation is doing something about it.
Dunno about those countries, but here in Finland we have regulation which forces the company which owns my telephone line to let other companies offer Internet connectivity over it. That has led to healthy competition and drop in prices.
Fascinating debate as that might be, this story (and the book you referred to) is not about doing good but about not doing evil. There's a huge difference between being forced to do good and being forced to not do evil.
An atheist Japanese-descended president who funds her campaign by making lesbian porn with her daughters ?-)
I'm not equivocating. I'm using the word "faith" with the meaning of "believing something", which is the exact same meaning the post I was replied to used it in. This was perfectly clear from the context and was also specifically written in the text I quoted.
If you still claim I was equivocating, then tell me: what other meaning did I or the text I quoted use it in? Can you quote the specific part I did this in?
Two common examples of hadrons include protons and neutrons. I think that the existence of both has been proven beyond reasonable doubt a long time ago. Besides, as the name implies, the Large Hadron Collider works by accelerating and smashing together hadrons to release energy to form other particles. Hadrons are functional parts there, rather than the objects under examination.
Not that any of this has anything to do with the grandparent's post or my disagreement with it. He implied that science's purpose is to come up with a (mathematical) model that predicts what the instruments will read in any given situation; while I argue that science's purpose is to explain what is actually happening and exact mathematical models are actually less important.
Or, to put it even shorter: grandparent emphasizes correlation, I emphasize causation.
Again, that is not relevant. The scientists working on it consider it a real event that once happened, rather than just a neat model that allows them to make predictions.
The basic principles of evolution were presumably already known by whoever first began breeding animals or plants on purpose.
I guess religious people don't have faith in Bible either, just confidence. But thank you for proving my point about people avoiding the word "faith", even when it's clearly the exact right one.
But dear horza, don't you see? They don't have faith in those crackpot theories, they have confidence in them. That's a completely different thing, no? Or so you implied above anyway.
Actually, no. It simply makes that fact obvious to everyone. You were someone willing to call yourself "Mr. Fuckwit" before you changed your name to that; people simply didn't know that.
Which is a good thing for us, since if it did, the Sun would collapse.
That is quite impressive, seeing how plasma is electrically conductive and thus blocks radar waves.
You mean a more convincing argument. After all, the version which best inspires the reader to copypaste it will spread fastest.
So, has it fixed bug 453964 yet? Or are the developers too busy with themes to bother?
Besides, the biggest speed-related problem with Firefox isn't actual speed, it's that the browser tends to block when loading Slashdot pages in another tab, for example. I wouldn't know if version 3 fixes this, since the bug mentioned makes it useless to me.
Isn't that typical of fundamentalists? The obsessive need to convert everyone and complete inability to simply mind your own business?
Since the tool most used by ID believers in the US is making lots of noise, your statement seems to contradict itself.
This is utter rubbish. The people running the Large Hadron Collider believe that hadrons really exist as actual tangible particles rather than mere mathematical models and really collide inside the collider (or would if the darn thing worked). The astronomers believe that there really was an Earth-shattering kaboom at the beginning. And biologists believe that species really evolved from slime sitting on ocean waves to slime sitting on corporate boards.
There's a difference between healthy scepticism and insane paranoia. Confusing the two and implying the latter is some kind of scientific ideal will do nothing but make the general populace see scientists as lunatics. And making patently absurd claims like "no faith required" - Really? Then how do you build those models if you have no faith in logic or your observations? - might make for nice soundbites but will make you sound like an arrogant megalomaniac as soon as someone starts analyzing them a little deeper.
The basic problem seems to be that "faith" has become associated with religion, despite being a necessary and unavoidable component of everything a non-omniscient being does, and religion has for whatever reason been painted as the antithesis of science, from which a conclusion that they can't have anything in common has been drawn. Consequently, some people feel the need to defend the "purity" of science against such horrible accusations as scientists having faith; in extreme cases not even religious faith but faith in anything, even the reality of whatever they're examining. This whole thing is slowly but surely becoming a farce.
You might be the last hope for humanity, and we're all rooting for you, but that doesn't mean that we'll give you a discount on healing potions. Death is an acceptable alternative to communism.
How do you propose to enforce this? Require everyone to show papers when asked?
Furthermore, I've often heard it said that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws have guns." Given this, what does it help to forbid felons from carrying guns - either they are still criminals and will carry a gun anyway, or they've gone clean and are being punished forever for no reason?
Finally, you do realize that "felon" is a completely arbitrary label? A felon is someone who has broken a law where said breach has been labelled "felony" by the government. Why would such an arbitrary label disqualify one from carrying weapons, if carrying weapons is such an important freedom?
I think it's closer to a billion, now. I mean, Stalin alone killed tens of millions, and was nowhere near the worst of the lot.
That said, do you think that police states just pop up overnight? No, they require careful cultivation, especially if you're starting from a liberal democracy. They require the building up of surveillance systems and draconian laws - both of which Britain is doing, along with seemingly every other Western democracy.
I know people die in real police states. I wish we could stop the slide towards them before I become one of them. We can't, of course; WW2 is too distant, and the majority of people don't remember what it was like to live in dictatorships of the time. Those from the former Soviet Block do remember, but they're rightfully afraid of Russia's rekindled ambitions, and flock to NATO for protection.
Oh well. We'll have another few dictatorships, a world war or two acting as a really rude wake-up call for everyone, and then the cycle begins again. That's how it goes.
So, this is the WindowSS division ? Do their caps Death Head's have their skulls replaced with computers displaying the Blue Screen of Death ?
Oh, I can smell the burning karma... at least I hope it's just karma.
Or more generally: use parametrized queries exclusively.
Unfortunately, there are no decent 3D cards with in-kernel open-source drivers, so it's the users who get the shaft here. In fact this situation might even be advantageous to 3D card manufacturers: if a kernel update breaks the old driver, and the card is no longer supported by the manufacturer, you either have to roll back the kernel update - and risk security vulnerabilities - or buy a newer card.
Hey, that's a bargain! If you were a musician, your children's children's children would keep getting paid for 80 years after your death. Or so the current law says, I'm sure that Mickey Mouse will get some more protection before time's up.
Lack of knowledge of what the deal entails implies lack of crucial knowledge about cause and effect.
It is, however, likely that not having access to those will severely limit your ability to make accurate predictions.
I don't place any trust on politicians. In fact I stated in my original message that they can't be trusted. Nor have I claimed them to be competent; I've simply claimed that they're the only ones who can be competent in politics, since non-politicians do not have the time nor access to information needed to develop a clear picture of what's going on.