For clarity, your straw man was your definition of falsifiability.
Likelihood/statistical probability can only be assessed through empirical observation such that a subset of the total observations support the theory, and thus you get your fraction which gets your probability.
Philosophical theories that are not (yet) scientific theories can have great explanatory powers. That is why people study philosophy. You use reason/logic to explain the world. Philosophy itself is not probabilistic in nature. In philosophy you would determine the likelihood of theory A to be more true than theory B by enumerating each one's claims, weighting them by importance, and determining how many of the claims made in each theory have sound logic out of the total number of claims. Again, this turns a philosophical theory into a set of empirical observations, which is the only way to get probability.
In the framework of the scientific method, a scientific theory is never falsified as a whole. Specific claims made by the theory are falsified by the scientific method. If a majority of its claims are falsified repeatably, then the theory becomes, you could say, "disfavored" by scientists. It becomes disfavored and another theory whose claims have not been falsified is "favored". It may change back in the future if better measurement methods for instance show the older theory to be confirmed moreso than the alternative theory.
Scientists would like to keep repeating experiments as many times as they can, but eventually manpower, money, time, and interest constrain that. So a reasonable number of experiments are done to establish that a claim is reliably confirmed or falsified, and then the conclusions are taken as "the favored explanation" until someone else comes along and shows another theory to predict more things better, or simply shows the old theory to be the less likely explanation because of faulty measurement techniques, experiment design, or analysis. No theory is ever taken to be definitively *true* or *false*. The "accepted theories" are the ones for which currently scientists have had the hardest time falsifying, and for which there are no good alternatives that have stood up to the scientific process. In most every field, and evolutionary biology included, there are many competing theories, and no one theory has a monopoly. Presumably, if "evolution" as a claim is accepted among biologists, then there are no other empirically falsifiable theories that come close to the same power of explanation.
If you can make a set of falsifiable positive empirical experiments to support ID, then go for it. Then ID would be a scientific theory. But, as I hear, there are a number of organizations holding out a ton of money to anyone who can do so, or even attempt to do so, and no one's taking the money...
Macro-evolution has been supported (semi-)scientifically through the logical extrapolations from the fossil record. The extrapolations are not themselves scientific evidence. So, you are right that there is not a direct falsifiable test for macro-evolution. But, it's sort of an indirect observation method, which is the best we have to go on now, until a better observation method can be contrived(and there will be). So it's sort of in a gray area as regards the scientific method. So what you *can* do is observe the fossil record, make an extrapolation, and those results can falsify or confirm claims about macro-evolution you're testing. Then other people can observe some part of the fossil record, make their extrapolations, and falsify the extrapolations you just made.
Evolution is not science! It is a scientific theory, or in other words a philosophical theory that can be submitted to the scientific process.
Your argument is rather flawed from the beginning. You're setting up a straw man. What is meant by 'falsifiable' is not that there can be observed a non-disputable falsification of a theory. Of course there are many possible confounding factors of the falsification of your litmus paper test, for instance. How you come to take the falsification more seriously is when you can repeat the test many times, in many conditions, to account for those confounding factors such as the ones you mentioned. It never becomes indisputable though. Nothing is ever 'proven' in science, only shown to be more likely.
Also, the theory of evolution is not all science. So, you're right, "evolution" as a concept is not falsifiable at present. That hardly matters to the present discussion. What matters is that many claims made in the various evolution theories are very much falsifiable. That's what must be falsifiable. There were especially initially many unobservable extrapolations made by Darwin and his successors. Some cannot be falsified, even at the present time, because our abilities to observe things about the past have not developed adequately. Many claims by evolutionist theories though can and have been falsified or confirmed. The claims made by Darwin's theory were muchly incorrect, and was shown so by repeated scientific experiments. The things not tested in the theories of evolution are conceivably testable with more innovation in observation and testing methods.
This is the pattern that must be present in all scientific theories. A philosophical theory about the natural world is made. A number of observational positive falsifiable tests are thought up in order to falsify the various claims posed in the theory. The experiments are done and published using the peer review process. From the results the various claims of the philosophical theory are either ruled out or made deemed more likely to be true. Rinse and repeat. The process never ends.
ID can never follow this process because there is no set of observational positive falsifiable tests that you can come up with relating to an supernatural creator, given our current available methods. Therefore ID is not a scientific theory.
Einstein certainly did a lot of philosophical and mathematical reasoning about phenomena that were not directly observed by him, which is not science. To that point, you are correct. Every scientist must start out with a general philosophical approach to formulate theories that can be falsified using the scientific method. Einstein based his work on completely observable phenomena and used mathematical reasoning to extrapolate his theorems. This is essentially how theoretical physics works, as I understand it. And in fact that mathematical extrapolation is not science once it predicts phenomena that are not observed, as he did. Same deal with string theory, which is why it is just a philosophical theory at the moment.
However, his E=MC^2 AFAIK his formulation has been directly and repeatably observed to be a valid approximation of the interaction of matter and energy. So that is a scientific theory. The reason people think Einstein was great is because his mathematical extrapolations made many predictions about the world that came out to be true when directly observed by his peers. He challenged astronomers and physicists to come up with scientific tests. Some of what Einstein reasoned has been disproven by those peers and later scientists. A lot of his work was confirmed to be true. Some is still controversial. All of it is disprovable, eventually, once we have the ability to observe the phenomena he predicted(using larger telescopes or long range space travel, for instance). This shows that what he was working on was a philosophical/mathematical theory useful to science, and thus a sort of scientific theory, because people were able to come up with an observable method to show that his theorems didn't work.
In conclusion, Einstein was a physicist, but he often left the science to others.
That Einstein's belief in God increased with his increased understanding of the universe is simply him making a theological connection between the complexity of the phenomena he observed and predicted mathematically with a belief that it was an intelligently created system. The more he understood(and he understood more than anyone at the time), the more he was convinced that it was intelligently created. That's fine, but it's just a hunch, in the end. He didn't even make any mathematical extrapolations about the likelihood of the intelligence or existance of the creator. That's because it was just a hunch of his, a religious theological belief, not quantifiable in any way that he could even reason through systematically, much less observe scientifically.
In conclusion, Einstein's assertion about his belief in God does not even reach the status of a philosophical theory, but was just an intuitive religious belief. It was not even close to a scientific conclusion.
It's fine to take your assertion as a starting point, but then you need a number of positive falsifiable experiments to test your hypothesis. That is science. What you have now is a philosophical theory. It has not become a scientific hypothesis yet, and this is why it must not be taught in science classes as an equal to evolutionary theory, which does have many falsifiable experiments that have supported it. Even for evolution theory's so-called Achilles' Heel, the fossil records are at least an observational test of organisms of the past, for which people have a reasonable repeatable measure of their age(whether it is ultimately the right measure is not the issue). You cannot create such a falsifiable test for a theory that has an extra-systemic creator as its basis.
All you can do ever with ID theory is try to falsify evolution theory, and then propose ID as the alternative. You can never go further than that. It can never be "science", because you can't repeatably and reliably test a being that exists and acts outside the system of the universe. ID theory is only philosophy. I'm not saying ID is right or wrong. I actually believe in an old Earth ID theory, but that's part of my religious belief. What I'm just saying is that if you have a philosophical theory, then it should be taught in a philosophy class, along with string theory.
There's at least one Indie label doing something like this. They sell some vinyls as well as CDs. The problem with selling a vinyl is of course that you can't easily make a digital copy of it. Here's how they sell the music of Page France:
However, whether or not you consider a cell phone to be a life essential, the effect is still the same. People in our society are increasingly using cell phones as their sole mode of remote voice communication, and there is an extent to which having a cell phone is like any other utility charge you pay(rent, electric, internet). If people are going to get cell phone service *no matter what*, which is what the mindset is for anyone at least in the middle class, then the phone companies have effectively the same leverage in setting whatever price pleases them. There is a limit to this, as there is a limit to the price of bread before people start buying rice, but they obviously have not reached this limit, as cell phone use is certainly still gaining adoption and not losing any but in the margins.
One key to this trend is to note that Microsoft is not natively European. This means that Microsoft will naturally have less control over there than they do in the US. There is also less brand loyalty to a company based in the US as the reputation of the US takes a dive. I'm not sure, but it seems like a good portion of the world population internationally would like to stick it to the US any way they can, and sticking it to Microsoft could be seen as one way to accomplish that.
Since Mozilla is open source, it will have less of this perception of being bound to one country or another.
Henson-style puppetry is no trivial feat. Even though he became famous doing puppetry programs for children, he was(he's dead) an amazingly accomplished artist besides, in the realms of painting and sculpture.
If you don't know of Jim Henson's more serious work, I recommend you watch The Dark Crystal which is an excellent serious fantasy film.
The thing you find in the Evangelical world, and most of the Christian world in the USA, is that the Torah is read, Hebrew is learned by the scripture scholars, they are politically pro-Israeli, somewhat pro-Jewish by natural alignment, but have *absolutely* no clue about the Jewish culture and religion as it is practiced today.
It makes me sad.
How can a religion so completely based on Judaism be so far removed from it? It's a total disconnect from history. Jesus was a practicing Jew. How can people have their "WWJD" bumperstickers and not go to a Jewish synagogue or a Shabbat dinner every now and then?::sigh::
Perhaps then a solution would be to have a "basic"/"minimal"/"essential" coverage(intentionally ambiguous and open to political wrangling) for all citizens paid for by the government, while leaving open the treatment outside of this category for extra health insurance. It seems to me that if a motivation for having a free market healthcare system is to promote innovation, not too much is gained by promoting innovation for basic treatments that work pretty well all the time.
Not a new idea, but one to be re-iterated when appropriate.
Are these are the same climatologists who's models can't even accurately predict the weather in a few days time? And yet I'm supposed to except that they have a clear and unequivocal understanding of our environment and GW ?
This is a completely bogus argument, and it makes me sad that someone on Slashdot would use it. It goes against very basic data analysis constraints. First of all, it's meteorologists who try to predict weather in a few days' time. Climatologists study climate, which are weather trends over long periods of time. The distinction is important, because they are trying to figure out very different things. It's actually much harder to predict weather short term. Think about it for just a little bit, and you'll figure it out. Predicting what the weather is going to be in a few days is like predicting what I'm going to say or do in a few minutes. An extremely difficult thing to do. You not only have to get the trends in my behavior right, but exactly what I'll do. My exact brain algorithm and all the parameters of my brain and every condition around me. But predicting climate hundreds of years from now is like predicting that I'm going to have a wife and kids and a decent job, and retire at 65 or 70. It's much easier to predict this because it's not predicting my exact behavior at a point in my life, but only likely trends. In the same way, it's easier to predict where the climate is going to go, since you're not tracking current weather patterns individually, like meteorologists do, but looking at storm data, temperature data, derived atmospheric data, etc. over millenia of the past to infer what the overarching trends will be in the future.
Another thing that happens is parents ending up having homework themselves, since they have to help their kids every night. In fact, parents are often given by way of their children calendars and instructions for things they *must* do, as is stated in the "expectations" link in TFS. Parents and kids should be spending time with each other without the constant tension of parents being the homework police.
Over the summer, my girlfriend actually worked at the Creationism Museum, and I actually went there to see it. Of course, it was on a Saturday and closed for a tour of wealthy prospective donors, and despite the fact that my girlfriend worked there, she was unable to enter. They have VERY tight security there. A huge fenced-off estate with security guards and the whole deal. She's no creationist. It was just a summer job doing a sort of thing she likes, set painting.
So here's a slightly more serious guided tour, for those interested.
She was painting some of the models and the walls and such. She was impressed and disgusted at the same time. On the one hand, when beautiful art is created with millions of dollars in funding, it's hard not to find it impressive. The disgusting part was that the people in charge were so overly obsessed with appearances. Whenever there was a tour of the latest Mennonite family of 8 walking through, she always had to clean up her work area completely, even the paint room, which is unheard of anywhere else, because it by defnition is supposed to be messy. This frequently caused the whole place to lose hours of work time, because after the tour finished, you had to set up all your work equipment again. It seemed to her these people were only concerned with the money they could get from the contributors, and not getting the work done in a timely, efficient manner. The designers were unorganized, and the working conditions provided were unprofessional in many ways. Overall the administration she felt didn't have a full understanding of what it takes to make a successful attraction like this. Also, they gave her a dress code which disallowed any revealing clothing, which she didn't like.
Creationism is just a "feeling-good-because-we-are-so-many-so-stupid" way of confirming that we are not wrong. That everything Bible says is true, because priest said so...and if they are wrong, religion and my belief should be wrong too, right? So it simply can't be.
No Christian denomination with a clergy position called "priest" would today condone Creationism.
I'm no astronomy buff either, but I think I can answer this. Yes, Mars' thinner atmosphere contributes to it having a significant amount of craters. What also contributes(when compared to Earth) is the lack of liquid water and biological life on the surface. On Earth these are not only major erosion factors, but they also just cover a lot of the surface, so that craters formed on Earth just aren't visible, or aren't visible for very long.
Actually, many good professors will set a paper length upper limit. This saves the professor time reading fluff papers and forces students to balance verbosity with content. I had this even in high school, although of course was/is one of the best publics in the country.
Either way, we know what Microsoft means when they use the word "genuine". The linguists are simply pointing to a way Microsoft is using this particular word, and the social ramifications of using it in a particular context in which it may not be used often. Whether they're actually changing the definition according to the dictionary usage or not is beside the point. If they are, Dictionary.com will add another definition if this one becomes a standard. Otherwise, we know what Microsoft is saying, and we can act with appropriate amounts of docile submission or violent rebellion as we all prefer. It's enough that we simply take away from this an understanding of the social effects resulting from companies choosing particular words in their marketing campaigns.
I'm not sure how much this has increased since the Do Not Call registry was put in place, but what I notice is that companies that have customer service lines will often use calls by customers or potential customers to make VERY aggressive sales pitches. I've experienced this in most recent memory with Earthlink and Citi Credit Cards. They seem to have exactly the same sort of telemarketing script in front of them, and they'll keep repeating their sales pitch until you blow up at them or hang up. The Earthlink one was the worst. It was clearly some guy in India and he didn't know at all how to relate to a customer outside his script, which made for a horrible customer service experience. With Citi, the customer service agent cursorily answered my question and then proceded to pitch some added service, and then when I declined, made the same pitch a second time. On the positive, side when I emailed their customer service line asking to not be sold anything when I'm calling for help, they granted my request. I haven't tested this to see if they've really done it though.
All I want is for an intelligent customer service rep to answer my specific question and then let me get on with my day.
Actually, this going on outtings to find mushrooms is something I'm not surprised by. I have a friend from Russia who tells me stories of his father and a friend taking a long train trip to some wilderness with a couple of huge baskets, and their sole purpose in taking the trip was to collect mushrooms. I believe these are for normal food consumption. Evidently Russia has a good mushroom environment.
In any case your conclusion is exactly what my conclusion was -_-
Except I don't see how you wouldn't know exactly what the machine did. Of course you can! If you made it, you can analyze very precisely every single computation down to the bitwise level. You will know exactly why the computer made every action that it did. That's what makes computational mimickery so useful. The hardest part about linguistics is that we can't analyze our brain activity precisely or accurately yet. That's why theoretical linguists have jobs. If we can get a computer/robot to do exactly what we do, then we have a computationally and procedurally adequate system, but as I said, not the exact implementation in the natural world, probably.
All linguists from Chomsky onward recognize language as being a computational system. Just read Chomsky's first book publication, Syntactic Structures. That said, computational systems that generate sentences primarily by traditional syntactic analysis are a dead-end, because they don't take into acccount the probabilistic nature of human grammars.
I've gone through the computational approach that would be required for this type of learning mechanism in quite a bit of detail. It's a link-up of various Hidden Markov Models that correspond to the various sensory information. They are combined in a single HMM to classify how the real world corresponds to the language the bots are hearing. This allows for an associative memory in the system to store a semantic representation of the real world.
Humans are not predestined to learn language. If someone is not exposed to language, they do not learn it, and will never, after a certain age. Humans may learn language in a similar way as these robots, at least initially. The languages generated by the robots are much(like, orders of magnitude) simpler than human language, and so take shorter to learn. It actually takes human children a very short time to learn grammar as far as these robots have learned. If we could eventually code a system in which robots learned language exactly as children do, it would take a few years for them to learn as well, methinks.
And ID does not depend on a perfect design, just an intelligent one. And if you want to take the Christian tack to ID, then we would actually expect our language learning system to be imperfect since we're fallen(read:not completely optimized) beings. Considering how difficult it is to make these kinds of systems in robots, and the difficulty of the maths involved to even approach the problem, I'd consider it a pretty intelligent design.
Slashdot Mirror
For clarity, your straw man was your definition of falsifiability.
Likelihood/statistical probability can only be assessed through empirical observation such that a subset of the total observations support the theory, and thus you get your fraction which gets your probability.
Philosophical theories that are not (yet) scientific theories can have great explanatory powers. That is why people study philosophy. You use reason/logic to explain the world. Philosophy itself is not probabilistic in nature. In philosophy you would determine the likelihood of theory A to be more true than theory B by enumerating each one's claims, weighting them by importance, and determining how many of the claims made in each theory have sound logic out of the total number of claims. Again, this turns a philosophical theory into a set of empirical observations, which is the only way to get probability.
In the framework of the scientific method, a scientific theory is never falsified as a whole. Specific claims made by the theory are falsified by the scientific method. If a majority of its claims are falsified repeatably, then the theory becomes, you could say, "disfavored" by scientists. It becomes disfavored and another theory whose claims have not been falsified is "favored". It may change back in the future if better measurement methods for instance show the older theory to be confirmed moreso than the alternative theory.
Scientists would like to keep repeating experiments as many times as they can, but eventually manpower, money, time, and interest constrain that. So a reasonable number of experiments are done to establish that a claim is reliably confirmed or falsified, and then the conclusions are taken as "the favored explanation" until someone else comes along and shows another theory to predict more things better, or simply shows the old theory to be the less likely explanation because of faulty measurement techniques, experiment design, or analysis. No theory is ever taken to be definitively *true* or *false*. The "accepted theories" are the ones for which currently scientists have had the hardest time falsifying, and for which there are no good alternatives that have stood up to the scientific process. In most every field, and evolutionary biology included, there are many competing theories, and no one theory has a monopoly. Presumably, if "evolution" as a claim is accepted among biologists, then there are no other empirically falsifiable theories that come close to the same power of explanation.
If you can make a set of falsifiable positive empirical experiments to support ID, then go for it. Then ID would be a scientific theory. But, as I hear, there are a number of organizations holding out a ton of money to anyone who can do so, or even attempt to do so, and no one's taking the money...
Macro-evolution has been supported (semi-)scientifically through the logical extrapolations from the fossil record. The extrapolations are not themselves scientific evidence. So, you are right that there is not a direct falsifiable test for macro-evolution. But, it's sort of an indirect observation method, which is the best we have to go on now, until a better observation method can be contrived(and there will be). So it's sort of in a gray area as regards the scientific method. So what you *can* do is observe the fossil record, make an extrapolation, and those results can falsify or confirm claims about macro-evolution you're testing. Then other people can observe some part of the fossil record, make their extrapolations, and falsify the extrapolations you just made.
"Science, or evolution in this case"
Evolution is not science! It is a scientific theory, or in other words a philosophical theory that can be submitted to the scientific process.
Your argument is rather flawed from the beginning. You're setting up a straw man. What is meant by 'falsifiable' is not that there can be observed a non-disputable falsification of a theory. Of course there are many possible confounding factors of the falsification of your litmus paper test, for instance. How you come to take the falsification more seriously is when you can repeat the test many times, in many conditions, to account for those confounding factors such as the ones you mentioned. It never becomes indisputable though. Nothing is ever 'proven' in science, only shown to be more likely.
Also, the theory of evolution is not all science. So, you're right, "evolution" as a concept is not falsifiable at present. That hardly matters to the present discussion. What matters is that many claims made in the various evolution theories are very much falsifiable. That's what must be falsifiable. There were especially initially many unobservable extrapolations made by Darwin and his successors. Some cannot be falsified, even at the present time, because our abilities to observe things about the past have not developed adequately. Many claims by evolutionist theories though can and have been falsified or confirmed. The claims made by Darwin's theory were muchly incorrect, and was shown so by repeated scientific experiments. The things not tested in the theories of evolution are conceivably testable with more innovation in observation and testing methods.
This is the pattern that must be present in all scientific theories. A philosophical theory about the natural world is made. A number of observational positive falsifiable tests are thought up in order to falsify the various claims posed in the theory. The experiments are done and published using the peer review process. From the results the various claims of the philosophical theory are either ruled out or made deemed more likely to be true. Rinse and repeat. The process never ends.
ID can never follow this process because there is no set of observational positive falsifiable tests that you can come up with relating to an supernatural creator, given our current available methods. Therefore ID is not a scientific theory.
Einstein certainly did a lot of philosophical and mathematical reasoning about phenomena that were not directly observed by him, which is not science. To that point, you are correct. Every scientist must start out with a general philosophical approach to formulate theories that can be falsified using the scientific method. Einstein based his work on completely observable phenomena and used mathematical reasoning to extrapolate his theorems. This is essentially how theoretical physics works, as I understand it. And in fact that mathematical extrapolation is not science once it predicts phenomena that are not observed, as he did. Same deal with string theory, which is why it is just a philosophical theory at the moment.
However, his E=MC^2 AFAIK his formulation has been directly and repeatably observed to be a valid approximation of the interaction of matter and energy. So that is a scientific theory. The reason people think Einstein was great is because his mathematical extrapolations made many predictions about the world that came out to be true when directly observed by his peers. He challenged astronomers and physicists to come up with scientific tests. Some of what Einstein reasoned has been disproven by those peers and later scientists. A lot of his work was confirmed to be true. Some is still controversial. All of it is disprovable, eventually, once we have the ability to observe the phenomena he predicted(using larger telescopes or long range space travel, for instance). This shows that what he was working on was a philosophical/mathematical theory useful to science, and thus a sort of scientific theory, because people were able to come up with an observable method to show that his theorems didn't work.
In conclusion, Einstein was a physicist, but he often left the science to others.
That Einstein's belief in God increased with his increased understanding of the universe is simply him making a theological connection between the complexity of the phenomena he observed and predicted mathematically with a belief that it was an intelligently created system. The more he understood(and he understood more than anyone at the time), the more he was convinced that it was intelligently created. That's fine, but it's just a hunch, in the end. He didn't even make any mathematical extrapolations about the likelihood of the intelligence or existance of the creator. That's because it was just a hunch of his, a religious theological belief, not quantifiable in any way that he could even reason through systematically, much less observe scientifically.
In conclusion, Einstein's assertion about his belief in God does not even reach the status of a philosophical theory, but was just an intuitive religious belief. It was not even close to a scientific conclusion.
It's fine to take your assertion as a starting point, but then you need a number of positive falsifiable experiments to test your hypothesis. That is science. What you have now is a philosophical theory. It has not become a scientific hypothesis yet, and this is why it must not be taught in science classes as an equal to evolutionary theory, which does have many falsifiable experiments that have supported it. Even for evolution theory's so-called Achilles' Heel, the fossil records are at least an observational test of organisms of the past, for which people have a reasonable repeatable measure of their age(whether it is ultimately the right measure is not the issue). You cannot create such a falsifiable test for a theory that has an extra-systemic creator as its basis.
All you can do ever with ID theory is try to falsify evolution theory, and then propose ID as the alternative. You can never go further than that. It can never be "science", because you can't repeatably and reliably test a being that exists and acts outside the system of the universe. ID theory is only philosophy. I'm not saying ID is right or wrong. I actually believe in an old Earth ID theory, but that's part of my religious belief. What I'm just saying is that if you have a philosophical theory, then it should be taught in a philosophy class, along with string theory.
Actually, if you go to Best Buy, they have quite a selection. I was surprised myself, but there it is. Apparently there's a market for it.
There's at least one Indie label doing something like this. They sell some vinyls as well as CDs. The problem with selling a vinyl is of course that you can't easily make a digital copy of it. Here's how they sell the music of Page France:
http://www.suicidesqueeze.net/order.html
"Page France
and the Family Telephone CD/LP...
CD Price: $12.00
LP Price: $10.00 (Limited edition! Comes with a coupon for a free download of the entire album in MP3 format.)"
So basically, you pay less for the vinyl and get to download MP3s as well. Pretty good deal there.
However, whether or not you consider a cell phone to be a life essential, the effect is still the same. People in our society are increasingly using cell phones as their sole mode of remote voice communication, and there is an extent to which having a cell phone is like any other utility charge you pay(rent, electric, internet). If people are going to get cell phone service *no matter what*, which is what the mindset is for anyone at least in the middle class, then the phone companies have effectively the same leverage in setting whatever price pleases them. There is a limit to this, as there is a limit to the price of bread before people start buying rice, but they obviously have not reached this limit, as cell phone use is certainly still gaining adoption and not losing any but in the margins.
One key to this trend is to note that Microsoft is not natively European. This means that Microsoft will naturally have less control over there than they do in the US. There is also less brand loyalty to a company based in the US as the reputation of the US takes a dive. I'm not sure, but it seems like a good portion of the world population internationally would like to stick it to the US any way they can, and sticking it to Microsoft could be seen as one way to accomplish that.
Since Mozilla is open source, it will have less of this perception of being bound to one country or another.
Henson-style puppetry is no trivial feat. Even though he became famous doing puppetry programs for children, he was(he's dead) an amazingly accomplished artist besides, in the realms of painting and sculpture.
If you don't know of Jim Henson's more serious work, I recommend you watch The Dark Crystal which is an excellent serious fantasy film.
The thing you find in the Evangelical world, and most of the Christian world in the USA, is that the Torah is read, Hebrew is learned by the scripture scholars, they are politically pro-Israeli, somewhat pro-Jewish by natural alignment, but have *absolutely* no clue about the Jewish culture and religion as it is practiced today.
::sigh::
It makes me sad.
How can a religion so completely based on Judaism be so far removed from it? It's a total disconnect from history. Jesus was a practicing Jew. How can people have their "WWJD" bumperstickers and not go to a Jewish synagogue or a Shabbat dinner every now and then?
Perhaps then a solution would be to have a "basic"/"minimal"/"essential" coverage(intentionally ambiguous and open to political wrangling) for all citizens paid for by the government, while leaving open the treatment outside of this category for extra health insurance. It seems to me that if a motivation for having a free market healthcare system is to promote innovation, not too much is gained by promoting innovation for basic treatments that work pretty well all the time.
Not a new idea, but one to be re-iterated when appropriate.
Not that it would do much good, but for anyone caring to see what the Greenpeace fans think of this story and to interact witht them, go here:
f =12
http://forum.greenpeace.org/int/forumdisplay.php?
After a little Googling, it seems this would be a good place to start.
It seems to have a patent repository, a prior art voting system, and ways to figure out if your idea if patentable.
This is a completely bogus argument, and it makes me sad that someone on Slashdot would use it. It goes against very basic data analysis constraints. First of all, it's meteorologists who try to predict weather in a few days' time. Climatologists study climate, which are weather trends over long periods of time. The distinction is important, because they are trying to figure out very different things. It's actually much harder to predict weather short term. Think about it for just a little bit, and you'll figure it out. Predicting what the weather is going to be in a few days is like predicting what I'm going to say or do in a few minutes. An extremely difficult thing to do. You not only have to get the trends in my behavior right, but exactly what I'll do. My exact brain algorithm and all the parameters of my brain and every condition around me. But predicting climate hundreds of years from now is like predicting that I'm going to have a wife and kids and a decent job, and retire at 65 or 70. It's much easier to predict this because it's not predicting my exact behavior at a point in my life, but only likely trends. In the same way, it's easier to predict where the climate is going to go, since you're not tracking current weather patterns individually, like meteorologists do, but looking at storm data, temperature data, derived atmospheric data, etc. over millenia of the past to infer what the overarching trends will be in the future.
Another thing that happens is parents ending up having homework themselves, since they have to help their kids every night. In fact, parents are often given by way of their children calendars and instructions for things they *must* do, as is stated in the "expectations" link in TFS. Parents and kids should be spending time with each other without the constant tension of parents being the homework police.
Over the summer, my girlfriend actually worked at the Creationism Museum, and I actually went there to see it. Of course, it was on a Saturday and closed for a tour of wealthy prospective donors, and despite the fact that my girlfriend worked there, she was unable to enter. They have VERY tight security there. A huge fenced-off estate with security guards and the whole deal. She's no creationist. It was just a summer job doing a sort of thing she likes, set painting.
So here's a slightly more serious guided tour, for those interested.
She was painting some of the models and the walls and such. She was impressed and disgusted at the same time. On the one hand, when beautiful art is created with millions of dollars in funding, it's hard not to find it impressive. The disgusting part was that the people in charge were so overly obsessed with appearances. Whenever there was a tour of the latest Mennonite family of 8 walking through, she always had to clean up her work area completely, even the paint room, which is unheard of anywhere else, because it by defnition is supposed to be messy. This frequently caused the whole place to lose hours of work time, because after the tour finished, you had to set up all your work equipment again. It seemed to her these people were only concerned with the money they could get from the contributors, and not getting the work done in a timely, efficient manner. The designers were unorganized, and the working conditions provided were unprofessional in many ways. Overall the administration she felt didn't have a full understanding of what it takes to make a successful attraction like this. Also, they gave her a dress code which disallowed any revealing clothing, which she didn't like.
http://www.vote-smart.org/ That's about all you need.
I'm no astronomy buff either, but I think I can answer this. Yes, Mars' thinner atmosphere contributes to it having a significant amount of craters. What also contributes(when compared to Earth) is the lack of liquid water and biological life on the surface. On Earth these are not only major erosion factors, but they also just cover a lot of the surface, so that craters formed on Earth just aren't visible, or aren't visible for very long.
Actually, many good professors will set a paper length upper limit. This saves the professor time reading fluff papers and forces students to balance verbosity with content. I had this even in high school, although of course was/is one of the best publics in the country.
Either way, we know what Microsoft means when they use the word "genuine". The linguists are simply pointing to a way Microsoft is using this particular word, and the social ramifications of using it in a particular context in which it may not be used often. Whether they're actually changing the definition according to the dictionary usage or not is beside the point. If they are, Dictionary.com will add another definition if this one becomes a standard. Otherwise, we know what Microsoft is saying, and we can act with appropriate amounts of docile submission or violent rebellion as we all prefer. It's enough that we simply take away from this an understanding of the social effects resulting from companies choosing particular words in their marketing campaigns.
I'm not sure how much this has increased since the Do Not Call registry was put in place, but what I notice is that companies that have customer service lines will often use calls by customers or potential customers to make VERY aggressive sales pitches. I've experienced this in most recent memory with Earthlink and Citi Credit Cards. They seem to have exactly the same sort of telemarketing script in front of them, and they'll keep repeating their sales pitch until you blow up at them or hang up. The Earthlink one was the worst. It was clearly some guy in India and he didn't know at all how to relate to a customer outside his script, which made for a horrible customer service experience. With Citi, the customer service agent cursorily answered my question and then proceded to pitch some added service, and then when I declined, made the same pitch a second time. On the positive, side when I emailed their customer service line asking to not be sold anything when I'm calling for help, they granted my request. I haven't tested this to see if they've really done it though.
All I want is for an intelligent customer service rep to answer my specific question and then let me get on with my day.
Actually, this going on outtings to find mushrooms is something I'm not surprised by. I have a friend from Russia who tells me stories of his father and a friend taking a long train trip to some wilderness with a couple of huge baskets, and their sole purpose in taking the trip was to collect mushrooms. I believe these are for normal food consumption. Evidently Russia has a good mushroom environment.
Seems to be a rather armchair explanation...
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In any case your conclusion is exactly what my conclusion was -_-
Except I don't see how you wouldn't know exactly what the machine did. Of course you can! If you made it, you can analyze very precisely every single computation down to the bitwise level. You will know exactly why the computer made every action that it did. That's what makes computational mimickery so useful. The hardest part about linguistics is that we can't analyze our brain activity precisely or accurately yet. That's why theoretical linguists have jobs. If we can get a computer/robot to do exactly what we do, then we have a computationally and procedurally adequate system, but as I said, not the exact implementation in the natural world, probably.
All linguists from Chomsky onward recognize language as being a computational system. Just read Chomsky's first book publication, Syntactic Structures. That said, computational systems that generate sentences primarily by traditional syntactic analysis are a dead-end, because they don't take into acccount the probabilistic nature of human grammars.
I've gone through the computational approach that would be required for this type of learning mechanism in quite a bit of detail. It's a link-up of various Hidden Markov Models that correspond to the various sensory information. They are combined in a single HMM to classify how the real world corresponds to the language the bots are hearing. This allows for an associative memory in the system to store a semantic representation of the real world.
Check out my professor's webpage, basically the same sort of thing the dudes from Italy are doing:
http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/speech/acquisition/acquis
Humans are not predestined to learn language. If someone is not exposed to language, they do not learn it, and will never, after a certain age. Humans may learn language in a similar way as these robots, at least initially. The languages generated by the robots are much(like, orders of magnitude) simpler than human language, and so take shorter to learn. It actually takes human children a very short time to learn grammar as far as these robots have learned. If we could eventually code a system in which robots learned language exactly as children do, it would take a few years for them to learn as well, methinks.
And ID does not depend on a perfect design, just an intelligent one. And if you want to take the Christian tack to ID, then we would actually expect our language learning system to be imperfect since we're fallen(read:not completely optimized) beings. Considering how difficult it is to make these kinds of systems in robots, and the difficulty of the maths involved to even approach the problem, I'd consider it a pretty intelligent design.