The machines in question had a wossname, programmable chip (EPROM and EEPROM).
The people of wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl (=wedonottrustvotingmachines.nl) showed how (http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/images/9/91/Es3b-en.pdf/) you can reprogram the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting toy in such a way that it is really hard to detect (physical checks were amateurous anyway).
First by having a test whether the test is genuine. For instance, lasting at least 8 hours with a certain randomness in the voting pattern.
Only then it would start the 'fraud routine', also with several precautions against discovery.
"You've obviously never seen the work of a bad programmer or a good biohacker. " However good the biohacker, they have to do with faulty techniques, lack of funding for proper checking of insertion errors, and a limited understanding of the genome. Need i say 'junk DNA' ?
Yeah terrible. And I do not know who to blame but if I take the ferry to the UK, with their great choice in real ciders, the boat serves me some sweet sugary bubbly muck. The onboard taxfree seems to only sell shitty stuff on purpose, to force you to buy the cafe's nastiness.
Hop over to our organic food coop, we have (EOS) Bitter Lemon based on lemon grass, a refreshening delight. Not too sweet either. We have (Naturfrisk) 'ginger ale', (alas, based on apple juice) with real ginger in it: orgasmic. Then the (Loverendale or Beutelsbacher?) 100% mango juice, creamy soft. Easily distinguishable from the 100% cranberry juice, pear juice, etc.
Back on topic: Haven't really tried American chocolate since 1972 and I wasn't a critical consumer then. The organic chocolate we sell is from Vivani, I guess between B+ and C-. (the so-called chocolate in Romania (eastern Europe) in the 1990-ies was a clear 'E+'). Some Fair Trade bars (cappucino) top that. And many Belgian pattisserie chocolates obviously.
The um.. stuff available UK shops fooled me once with the packaging, with them oranges on the package and some fake 'pure' and 'natural' phrases, then the smack in the face when drinking it learned me Skinner-style to avoid that sort of packages forever. Later I had to learn it again in the Czech republic.
In the early 20th century Dutch government passed a law to forbid calling margarine butter (even the Dutch word for peanutbutter translates to 'peanutcheese' because of that law!). So why not keeping 'chocolate' real and invent something new for these industrial bullies. Like we can buy have 'Cocoa fantasy' flakes for on the bread.
"And this my friend is why I will always be a skeptic of all environmentalist causes. This is almost always the tact that environmentalists take."
I read your comment and I fear your skepticism is biased. This is based on the terms 'all', 'allways', 'more than anything else'. And the use of the word 'skeptic', probably means you've read Lomborgs never-changing half~empty~glass opinions.
Actually when you study the literature on climate, you will find the other camp is acting the way you accuse the scientists of that are warning about climate change. Funny how they manage to turn the public opinion around. I have been wondering how they do it for almost twenty years now and might write a book about it soon.
Could the local newspaper be true if the graph was for 'this country' and the print said 'in the world'? Quite often you have to check real close on graphs and statistics. And sources for reliability.
On polarization. It is remarkable how many discussions on Slashdot end up in the same controversies: Microsoft/Linux Firefox/Opera(/IE) Christianity/Atheism(/other religions) Republicans/Liberals.
Actually this topic made me increase the number of friends&enemies I have here, just to be able to filter shortsighted opinions so I don't have to spend time on them. Of course i am veeeery neutral and unbiased:P;).
Not only in the US of A. Now the EU is also attacking the right of people to choose what they eat. Check this: a proposal to weaken the organic food lable ('eko'), which wasn't even set up by 'Europe', au contraire, and at the same time forbid people to make a new, clean organic type of food lable (but everything happens first in the USA, your organic lable has been ruined before hasn't it?).
Can anyone find related comments on Schwann cells (jumping), the function of myeline in the brain when not as an insulator, and how synapses are excited when not through the Na+/K+
Further, I've read this Max Planck Institute story before, has it never been responded to in the medical journals?
Re:Does Vista have anything we need?
on
Is Vista a Trap?
·
· Score: 1
o generatio incredula quamdiu apud vos ero quamdiu vos patiar
"If you choose not to follow the rules" commonly voiced opinion but I disagree. Every person has some right to privacy. I find paying by creditcard no valid reason to invade that.
Your sandbox observer reminds me of Plato's allegory of the cave, I'm sure you heard of it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave ). In that case we would be the prisoners and you would say the shadows are caused by an intelligent being and I would be thinking they were independent beings. I would have meticously explored the lower part of the cave and did not see the puppetplayers up there. But I'm stubborn and say: "Show me the puppetplayer! You've been looking in to the flickering flames for too long." Hopefully you can show me were to look to find the players.
I'm not entirely sure what role you say God plays in evolution. Is He the hidden motivator who started it and nudges it subtly? How much does he interfere, before and after the flood (the rainbow promise)?
The examples you gave of complex structures were summarised in this line: > In other words, knowing how a thing works doesn't mean > it wasn't designed to work that way.
You can never ever rule out a designer, but is it the most likely? Are we like the robot you describe? If we were designed, would our females have birth channels that are often too small for our big heads? Would one of our human chromosomes look exactly like a fusion of two ape chromosomes, complete with telomeres in the middle? Don't you agree that imperfections like that confirm a chaotic process of trial and error, that was at least not totaly steered by the hand of God? If God was just nudging us in the direction of His image, how did we ever get as far from the apes as we feel we are?
About complexity, which is one of the major arguments of ID: biologists have a pretty complete story from Ur-cell to humans. If you take evolution step by step and assume the selection optimizes things enough to make an individual the 'fittest', it is easy to see why we are well adapted to the circumstances on earth, and how enzymes in circumstances be very efficient. It also explains why we have inefficient eyes even though the octopus has a better designed eye: that was a different path in the evolution. (Ok, one can say our eyes are good enough for us...)
My next step is, if accepting intelligence, were did that intelligence then come from? Did that evolve, or was it created? Why did you pick the Christian God, is it because you were brought up with it? What will happen to you in the afterlife if the muslims were right, or the pagans?
In a cartoon with a serious undertone Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes) refuses to eat chicken. His parents demand him to say why. Calvin: "What if God is a giant chicken? Eternal consequences! That's why!"
> Again, I assume that thought patterns can be explained by millions of electrical impulses > filtered through some sort of Bayesian-esque statistical models,
I read about such explanations of consciousness, it is favourite among the most reductionists among scientists, but at this point it is no less a black box than a soul is. It lacks the same mechanism as the soul-brain interface you propose. As I said, this is the big remaining question for me.
> Your linked article notes that the probability of randomly forming a simple peptide is > 1 chance in 4.29 x 10^40, which is "still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely" unless done > in a massive number of parallel trials, which was likely the case, so (a) it is. "
I'm afraid that's not the best quote to support your viewpoint. If you reread that paragraph you will see it starts with 'So the calculation goes that...' and ends with 'However, this is completely incorrect.' I.e. this paragraph paraphrases the creationist argumentation, and the author proceeds to explain why he thinks this is incorrect.
"...I see now that primordial Earth (and really, modern Earth) are "God's Beowulf cluster"." lol:)
>> The part of a balanced situation that even God should not meddle too much in is a >> very
1. I know no indication that this word is written by non-humans, on the contrary.
3. And there are those with faith who claim that their supreme being approves or even stimulates disrespect to those who don't share the same faith in the same being. That's what turns some of those into intolerant people willing to start wars, justified by their respective supreme being.
Anyway I'ld rather continue the more intelligent branch with CrazedWalrus.
hi CrazedWalrus, I must say, your response is very coherent for somebody with a baby at 04:15 AM:). And I think you have thought more about these things than many other people. I cannot poke holes in the coherency but i do disagree with you at several vital points. I too feel some things are not explained, to be specific, science has provided some nice details on how our brains work, but no full explanation of why we are conscious. But neither does the explanation of the soul and God give a full explanation: it only adds a mystery. I want to be convinced that that added mystery is really necessary as well as likely.
"...it's difficult for the scientific mind to consider the possibility of a being that is outside the normal cause and effect of the universe. " I was brought up as a christian, though in a very liberal church (http://www.remonstranten.org/introduction/index.h tml). So in my life i first learned about what the bible says, and science had the disadvantage of having to try to change what was already put in my mind. Especially the very reductionistic views failed to change my mind, like the Selfish Gene theory, and I remember being very angry about a science class poster claiming that being in love was nothing more than chemistry (literally). It makes life seem so cold, mechanical. It does not add to a happy and meaningful life. So my formerly believing brain took some time to turn into the cynical wannabe-rational bastard i am now.
"At first glance, Occam's Razor implies that this is just too much of a leap, and that there must be a more simple explanation. Try as I might, though, I can't bring myself to believe that. Spontaneous biogenesis caused by random cosmic chemicals that all happened to be in the right place at the right time, for me, is as much a leap of faith as creation."
There's no way we can ever find out what really happened to start life on earth, but I can live with that. There are several proposals that sound plausible to me, and cosmic chemicals are not necessary, but hey, how many of these enter our atmosphere in a century? Loads. The external force you propose, on the contrary, can be falsified nor proven AND adds nothing to the explanation of life, it just adds another mystery.
"The odds against such a thing happening seem to me to be insurmountable."
The first reproducable precursor of life, theoretically, only had to happen once. One tiny cluster of molecules that could somehow replicate. Once it was there it could reproduce and thus spread and evolve. Maybe it looked totally different than what we now know as the most primitive life-forms. Others have written better about this than I can, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob. html#Intro See, once the basis was there, there it was, and as you accept natural selection, the only thing you were missing is some plausible starting point. So I want to turn the odds around. What you call 'being there at the right time and in the right place' only had to happen at one time at one place. Give a huge ocean full of likely starting material during many million years, and make a calculation of the chance it does NOT happen at least once!
"Given that, I actually read Occam's Razor the other way: something I don't know about must have caused it on purpose." I think that is exactly what i oppose to, that's what made people propose a homunculus. Solving a mystery by proposing a black box does not solve the mystery, it only adds to it.
""God is in the probabilities". In other words, I see the universe as being a set of rules that God has defined and decided to work with. If you've done that, you can't just go sticking your hands in there and shove things around -- it upsets the balance of things. Rather, you give it a bit of a nudge in just the right places to make things go the way you want them to."
Oh you mean that ingenious device shunned by creationists and therefore causing positive selection pressure on the gullible part of the human population?
"Natural selection happens, yes. Anyone with eyes can see it. But what was first? Where did it come from? How did it start? Nobody knows.
The Big Bang happened, yes. But what was before that? Where did the particles come from? Nobody knows.
That's the stuff of religion."
I get the impression that you are trying to get some middle path between science and your belief in God. This you share with many people in history who, like you, accepted what their eyes saw rather than the strict words of the Bible. And in certain eras and/or parts of the world such an attitude is brave, especially were people are very strict about His Word. But such pressure does not help in truth-finding, and neither does the attribution of the unknown to any sort of unexplainable Being. Remember the homunculi? People did not understand how life started. With the microscope they watched sperm. There was a discussion whether the start of a baby, a tiny tiny little person, was in the semen or in the egg. Some people were convinced they saw it sitting there. Now it is generally accepted that these are singular cells which fuse and grow into a human shape. People seem to have a tendency to explain the part they do not understand yet by projecting something like that. I think you are doing the same with using God for explaining what you judge science has no full and tested explanation for.
And I also observe that many of the things people were totally convinced were caused by an active God in the past, are now explained in natural laws. Thunder. Vulcanoes. The sun 'going up'.
For me the most likely explanation of religion is that people have some natural tendency to invent stories to explain things, and especially in need are trying to put the cause of things outside of their control. I see no reason why the things you are now showing as some sort of proof of some sort of God are in any way more special than what people used to say. You might be able to help me by pointing to indications that they are.
Religions give a very strong story that survived for a long time. I think this is not caused by God, if he could he would have made sure there was only one version of religion, and not different religions and quite some types of Christians. I think the story is helping people face the inexplicable things of life, and the unfairness of what is happening in their life or that of others. And somehow they are very flexible in wht they claim is caused by God.
"Maybe the creation story in Genesis exists to give us the basic idea of the creation, and to make us curious about it, or to satisfy our natural curiosity with a story that even a child can understand. Maybe science exists to fill in the blanks, to write the real story of the creation."
You might like the book 'Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life' by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, he was also trying find a way to have both science and religion. He said something like they are two seperate magistra's and should not overlap, but both have their place. But however much i liked Gould's other books, and however much i also want to believe in some wise superbeing, I don't like this, i think it is running away from reality.
That's the whole power of a near-monopoly. When people you are introduced to computers they will probably be shown windows and ms office, it will take them some time to learn to use it, but once they are used to it's idiosyncracies they can be productive on it.
First thing on a new OS, they'll be lost: how to connect to the internet, what's that funny apple key doing there, why can't this editor do a regexp search in multiple files...
A primitive but human reaction when you cannot do something immediately is trying to lay the blame on whatever is available.
That's probably why some software products with a low market share are trying to mimic the bigger brother. Word 2 had a WordPerfect imitation option. OpenOffice Calc is having very limited graph functionality probably because they tried too much to be MS Excel compatible.
Something else, people find Macs easy, they can quickly find their way, but I feel limited on a Mac (have to say, i never tried OS X).
25% is quite disappointing, i hoped they could do better. Mayhaps the fuel cell can deliver more Watts?
A guy in Wageningen University (NL) says they should try to store the energy in something more dense than hydrogen, so the fuel will be more compact and it might leak less. Hydrogen (H2) is a pretty small molecule.
Allegedly (http://www.omninerd.com/2006/08/09/news/867) Hitler wrote his own bible. Nothing new, many leaders wrote their own version of christianity (or other religion).
Firefox is far from paranoid, if you as a simple enduser do not know where to set a master password for the password manager, any person able to use your firefox can see all passwords you gave to it, simply by clicking Tools - Options - 'security' - Show Passwords.
The reason for the international trade and the US interventions in the name of "'free trade'", that is it is the wages are always lower in some other country, so closing the borders means major price increases to about everything, including the all american Nike sneakers.
Slashdot Mirror
The machines in question had a wossname, programmable chip (EPROM and EEPROM).
The people of wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl (=wedonottrustvotingmachines.nl) showed how (http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/images/9/91/Es3b-en.pdf/) you can reprogram the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting toy in such a way that it is really hard to detect (physical checks were amateurous anyway).
First by having a test whether the test is genuine. For instance, lasting at least 8 hours with a certain randomness in the voting pattern.
Only then it would start the 'fraud routine', also with several precautions against discovery.
"You've obviously never seen the work of a bad programmer or a good biohacker. "
However good the biohacker, they have to do with faulty techniques, lack of funding for proper checking of insertion errors, and a limited understanding of the genome. Need i say 'junk DNA' ?
Yeah terrible. And I do not know who to blame but if I take the ferry to the UK, with their great choice in real ciders, the boat serves me some sweet sugary bubbly muck. The onboard taxfree seems to only sell shitty stuff on purpose, to force you to buy the cafe's nastiness.
Hop over to our organic food coop, we have (EOS) Bitter Lemon based on lemon grass, a refreshening delight. Not too sweet either. We have (Naturfrisk) 'ginger ale', (alas, based on apple juice) with real ginger in it: orgasmic. Then the (Loverendale or Beutelsbacher?) 100% mango juice, creamy soft. Easily distinguishable from the 100% cranberry juice, pear juice, etc.
Back on topic: Haven't really tried American chocolate since 1972 and I wasn't a critical consumer then. The organic chocolate we sell is from Vivani, I guess between B+ and C-. (the so-called chocolate in Romania (eastern Europe) in the 1990-ies was a clear 'E+'). Some Fair Trade bars (cappucino) top that. And many Belgian pattisserie chocolates obviously.
The um.. stuff available UK shops fooled me once with the packaging, with them oranges on the package and some fake 'pure' and 'natural' phrases, then the smack in the face when drinking it learned me Skinner-style to avoid that sort of packages forever. Later I had to learn it again in the Czech republic.
In the early 20th century Dutch government passed a law to forbid calling margarine butter (even the Dutch word for peanutbutter translates to 'peanutcheese' because of that law!). So why not keeping 'chocolate' real and invent something new for these industrial bullies. Like we can buy have 'Cocoa fantasy' flakes for on the bread.
"And this my friend is why I will always be a skeptic of all environmentalist causes. This is almost always the tact that environmentalists take."
I read your comment and I fear your skepticism is biased. This is based on the terms 'all', 'allways', 'more than anything else'. And the use of the word 'skeptic', probably means you've read Lomborgs never-changing half~empty~glass opinions.
Actually when you study the literature on climate, you will find the other camp is acting the way you accuse the scientists of that are warning about climate change. Funny how they manage to turn the public opinion around. I have been wondering how they do it for almost twenty years now and might write a book about it soon.
Could the local newspaper be true if the graph was for 'this country' and the print said 'in the world'? Quite often you have to check real close on graphs and statistics. And sources for reliability.
:P ;).
On polarization. It is remarkable how many discussions on Slashdot end up in the same controversies: Microsoft/Linux Firefox/Opera(/IE) Christianity/Atheism(/other religions) Republicans/Liberals.
Actually this topic made me increase the number of friends&enemies I have here, just to be able to filter shortsighted opinions so I don't have to spend time on them. Of course i am veeeery neutral and unbiased
Not only in the US of A. Now the EU is also attacking the right of people to choose what they eat. Check this: a proposal to weaken the organic food lable ('eko'), which wasn't even set up by 'Europe', au contraire, and at the same time forbid people to make a new, clean organic type of food lable (but everything happens first in the USA, your organic lable has been ruined before hasn't it?).
Would you be offended if I suggest you to follow a Communications 101 course ?
Can anyone find related comments on Schwann cells (jumping), the function of myeline in the brain when not as an insulator, and how synapses are excited when not through the Na+/K+
Further, I've read this Max Planck Institute story before, has it never been responded to in the medical journals?
o generatio incredula
quamdiu apud vos ero
quamdiu vos patiar
"If you choose not to follow the rules"
commonly voiced opinion but I disagree. Every person has some right to privacy. I find paying by creditcard no valid reason to invade that.
Whoever modded me troll, follow and read the link.
Some hoaxes getting published all over, including Amazon involvement.
See http://search.wikia.com/wiki/search:News
I'm not entirely sure what role you say God plays in evolution. Is He the hidden motivator who started it and nudges it subtly? How much does he interfere, before and after the flood (the rainbow promise)?
The examples you gave of complex structures were summarised in this line:
> In other words, knowing how a thing works doesn't mean
> it wasn't designed to work that way.
You can never ever rule out a designer, but is it the most likely?
Are we like the robot you describe? If we were designed, would our females have birth channels that are often too small for our big heads? Would one of our human chromosomes look exactly like a fusion of two ape chromosomes, complete with telomeres in the middle? Don't you agree that imperfections like that confirm a chaotic process of trial and error, that was at least not totaly steered by the hand of God? If God was just nudging us in the direction of His image, how did we ever get as far from the apes as we feel we are?
About complexity, which is one of the major arguments of ID: biologists have a pretty complete story from Ur-cell to humans. If you take evolution step by step and assume the selection optimizes things enough to make an individual the 'fittest', it is easy to see why we are well adapted to the circumstances on earth, and how enzymes in circumstances be very efficient. It also explains why we have inefficient eyes even though the octopus has a better designed eye: that was a different path in the evolution.
(Ok, one can say our eyes are good enough for us...)
My next step is, if accepting intelligence, were did that intelligence then come from? Did that evolve, or was it created? Why did you pick the Christian God, is it because you were brought up with it? What will happen to you in the afterlife if the muslims were right, or the pagans?
> Again, I assume that thought patterns can be explained by millions of electrical impulses
:)
> filtered through some sort of Bayesian-esque statistical models,
I read about such explanations of consciousness, it is favourite among the most reductionists among scientists, but at this point it is no less a black box than a soul is. It lacks the same mechanism as the soul-brain interface you propose.
As I said, this is the big remaining question for me.
> Your linked article notes that the probability of randomly forming a simple peptide is
> 1 chance in 4.29 x 10^40, which is "still orgulously, gobsmackingly unlikely" unless done
> in a massive number of parallel trials, which was likely the case, so (a) it is. "
I'm afraid that's not the best quote to support your viewpoint. If you reread that paragraph you will see it starts with 'So the calculation goes that...'
and ends with 'However, this is completely incorrect.'
I.e. this paragraph paraphrases the creationist argumentation, and the author proceeds to explain why he thinks this is incorrect.
"...I see now that primordial Earth (and really, modern Earth) are "God's Beowulf cluster"."
lol
>> The part of a balanced situation that even God should not meddle too much in is a
>> very
Someone with mod points tries to make a point by modding me overrated twice. Hope it makes you feel good.
1. I know no indication that this word is written by non-humans, on the contrary.
3. And there are those with faith who claim that their supreme being approves or even stimulates disrespect to those who don't share the same faith in the same being. That's what turns some of those into intolerant people willing to start wars, justified by their respective supreme being.
Anyway I'ld rather continue the more intelligent branch with CrazedWalrus.
hi CrazedWalrus, :). And I think you have thought more about these things than many other people. I cannot poke holes in the coherency but i do disagree with you at several vital points.
I must say, your response is very coherent for somebody with a baby at 04:15 AM
I too feel some things are not explained, to be specific, science has provided some nice details on how our brains work, but no full explanation of why we are conscious. But neither does the explanation of the soul and God give a full explanation: it only adds a mystery. I want to be convinced that that added mystery is really necessary as well as likely.
"...it's difficult for the scientific mind to consider the possibility of a being that is outside the normal cause and effect of the universe. "
I was brought up as a christian, though in a very liberal church (http://www.remonstranten.org/introduction/index.h tml). So in my life i first learned about what the bible says, and science had the disadvantage of having to try to change what was already put in my mind. Especially the very reductionistic views failed to change my mind, like the Selfish Gene theory, and I remember being very angry about a science class poster claiming that being in love was nothing more than chemistry (literally). It makes life seem so cold, mechanical. It does not add to a happy and meaningful life. So my formerly believing brain took some time to turn into the cynical wannabe-rational bastard i am now.
"At first glance, Occam's Razor implies that this is just too much of a leap, and that there must be a more simple explanation. Try as I might, though, I can't bring myself to believe that. Spontaneous biogenesis caused by random cosmic chemicals that all happened to be in the right place at the right time, for me, is as much a leap of faith as creation."
There's no way we can ever find out what really happened to start life on earth, but I can live with that. There are several proposals that sound plausible to me, and cosmic chemicals are not necessary, but hey, how many of these enter our atmosphere in a century? Loads.
The external force you propose, on the contrary, can be falsified nor proven AND adds nothing to the explanation of life, it just adds another mystery.
"The odds against such a thing happening seem to me to be insurmountable."
The first reproducable precursor of life, theoretically, only had to happen once. One tiny cluster of molecules that could somehow replicate. Once it was there it could reproduce and thus spread and evolve. Maybe it looked totally different than what we now know as the most primitive life-forms. Others have written better about this than I can, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob. html#Intro
See, once the basis was there, there it was, and as you accept natural selection, the only thing you were missing is some plausible starting point.
So I want to turn the odds around. What you call 'being there at the right time and in the right place' only had to happen at one time at one place. Give a huge ocean full of likely starting material during many million years, and make a calculation of the chance it does NOT happen at least once!
"Given that, I actually read Occam's Razor the other way: something I don't know about must have caused it on purpose."
I think that is exactly what i oppose to, that's what made people propose a homunculus.
Solving a mystery by proposing a black box does not solve the mystery, it only adds to it.
""God is in the probabilities". In other words, I see the universe as being a set of rules that God has defined and decided to work with. If you've done that, you can't just go sticking your hands in there and shove things around -- it upsets the balance of things. Rather, you give it a bit of a nudge in just the right places to make things go the way you want them to."
The part of a balanced situati
Oh you mean that ingenious device shunned by creationists and therefore causing positive selection pressure on the gullible part of the human population?
"Natural selection happens, yes. Anyone with eyes can see it. But what was first? Where did it come from? How did it start? Nobody knows.
The Big Bang happened, yes. But what was before that? Where did the particles come from? Nobody knows.
That's the stuff of religion."
I get the impression that you are trying to get some middle path between science and your belief in God. This you share with many people in history who, like you, accepted what their eyes saw rather than the strict words of the Bible. And in certain eras and/or parts of the world such an attitude is brave, especially were people are very strict about His Word.
But such pressure does not help in truth-finding, and neither does the attribution of the unknown to any sort of unexplainable Being.
Remember the homunculi? People did not understand how life started. With the microscope they watched sperm. There was a discussion whether the start of a baby, a tiny tiny little person, was in the semen or in the egg. Some people were convinced they saw it sitting there. Now it is generally accepted that these are singular cells which fuse and grow into a human shape.
People seem to have a tendency to explain the part they do not understand yet by projecting something like that. I think you are doing the same with using God for explaining what you judge science has no full and tested explanation for.
And I also observe that many of the things people were totally convinced were caused by an active God in the past, are now explained in natural laws. Thunder. Vulcanoes. The sun 'going up'.
For me the most likely explanation of religion is that people have some natural tendency to invent stories to explain things, and especially in need are trying to put the cause of things outside of their control.
I see no reason why the things you are now showing as some sort of proof of some sort of God are in any way more special than what people used to say. You might be able to help me by pointing to indications that they are.
Religions give a very strong story that survived for a long time. I think this is not caused by God, if he could he would have made sure there was only one version of religion, and not different religions and quite some types of Christians. I think the story is helping people face the inexplicable things of life, and the unfairness of what is happening in their life or that of others. And somehow they are very flexible in wht they claim is caused by God.
"Maybe the creation story in Genesis exists to give us the basic idea of the creation, and to make us curious about it, or to satisfy our natural curiosity with a story that even a child can understand. Maybe science exists to fill in the blanks, to write the real story of the creation."
You might like the book 'Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life' by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, he was also trying find a way to have both science and religion. He said something like they are two seperate magistra's and should not overlap, but both have their place.
But however much i liked Gould's other books, and however much i also want to believe in some wise superbeing, I don't like this, i think it is running away from reality.
That's the whole power of a near-monopoly. When people you are introduced to computers they will probably be shown windows and ms office, it will take them some time to learn to use it, but once they are used to it's idiosyncracies they can be productive on it.
First thing on a new OS, they'll be lost: how to connect to the internet, what's that funny apple key doing there, why can't this editor do a regexp search in multiple files...
A primitive but human reaction when you cannot do something immediately is trying to lay the blame on whatever is available.
That's probably why some software products with a low market share are trying to mimic the bigger brother. Word 2 had a WordPerfect imitation option. OpenOffice Calc is having very limited graph functionality probably because they tried too much to be MS Excel compatible.
Something else, people find Macs easy, they can quickly find their way, but I feel limited on a Mac (have to say, i never tried OS X).
25% is quite disappointing, i hoped they could do better.
Mayhaps the fuel cell can deliver more Watts?
A guy in Wageningen University (NL) says they should try to store the energy in something more dense than hydrogen, so the fuel will be more compact and it might leak less. Hydrogen (H2) is a pretty small molecule.
Allegedly (http://www.omninerd.com/2006/08/09/news/867) Hitler wrote his own bible.
:P
Nothing new, many leaders wrote their own version of christianity (or other religion).
"May God continue to bless US."
Firefox is far from paranoid, if you as a simple enduser do not know where to set a master password for the password manager, any person able to use your firefox can see all passwords you gave to it, simply by clicking Tools - Options - 'security' - Show Passwords.
Sticking your head in the sand may be great pr and landslide elections, but the climate nor the oil stocks are impressed by your bullshit.
The reason for the international trade and the US interventions in the name of "'free trade'", that is it is the wages are always lower in some other country, so closing the borders means major price increases to about everything, including the all american Nike sneakers.