And what, exactly, makes you think you have any privacy, or expectation of any privacy, on public roads?
I think the answer has already been given by the SCOTUS in the warrantless GPS tracking case: see here for details. The SCOTUS decided that, even though drivers used public roads, the amount of tracking the police was doing was orders of magnitude above the normal expectation for a public place, both in individual tracking and in the sheer number of trackers that could be active simultaneously. Of course, the decision in this case applies to governments, but I believe the same arguments work identically for the Google car.
Eh? On the contrary, they sold better than the Mac did. And it was a better deal for the consumer too - you could get a high end UMAX or Tatung Mac clone significantly cheaper than the equivalent Macintosh. That was Jobs' problem, that the Mac was getting commodized, like PCs had, and that would kill his comparably enormous margins, not that the clones sold badly. It even says so in the link you posted: "high-end clones were cannibalizing sales of their own high-end computers, where profit margins were highest"
It's a Darwinian system that insures that those that reach high leadership positions are at least as smart and dedicated as the people trying to find them, if not more so.
Heh, it's just simple selection - not Darwinian unless the people reaching those leadership positions mate with each other and have superior offspring. On the other hand, I've been told it's lonely at the top:).
This is stupid. Units ALWAYS must be labeled, even with the SI system
Maybe in technical documents, but that's not true in many cases. It all depends on having the proper context. If somebody asks "how old are you", answering "35" is quite unambiguous, because of the shared context. You don't need to explain what units you're using - nobody would suspect you mean 35 weeks or hours (or if you're Han Solo, parsecs). The Lockheed problem was caused by the existence of 2 different contexts, Imperial and metric, close enough to be easily confused. If the Imperial units weren't ever used, there would have been no problem.
How do you know whether you're dealing with mm, cm, m, dm, Mm, etc? Or V, mV, uV, etc.?
Duh, from the context! If you have any knowledge of a particular field you should understand what units there are, to a precision of at least an order of magnitude. If your technical drawing represents a car, nobody with a brain would suspect the length of "5" may mean 5 kilometers or electronVolts. Ambiguity only arises in parts of the world that still use Imperial, because the difference between comparable units isn't large enough for automatic unit checking to kick in - in my example, both 5 meters and 5 yards are acceptable for a car length.
Consider the technical documents from Lockheed - they did not have units, but were accepted and used, and surprise, surprise, nobody created a pocket-sized rocket because they thought the units were actually millimeters (cue Bloody Stupid Johnson). The resulting product did fly, even if not exactly where Lockheed intended:) If the Imperial system hadn't still hung around, the thing would have worked well, labels or no labels.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a case of someone not labeling their units. The unit system wasn't the problem.
But units wouldn't need to be labeled if everybody used the same system. The continued existence of the zombie Imperial system is the root cause of the problem.
Secondly SI isn't always the best unit of measurement for performing calculations. In plasma physics we use eV in stead of joules for energy because it simplifies our work. In astro physics measuring distances in the SI unit of length, the meter, is impractical
Which is why SI has a number of accepted units. You'll note that both the eV and the astronomical unit are there, but not the feet or yards used by Lockheed to send a rocket past Mars.
What exactly is the point of a single crApp that functions exactly like a web browser but is limited to a single site, when you could just use the system web browser to do the same thing?
Better performance, much more efficient, and complete control over the app's behavior, which in most cases means a much better user experience. Add not having to deal with the various browser quirks, and it's often a compelling case - as Apple, Google and many others have proven.
I know, right? We could all just sit in the middle of an empty living-room and meditate on the mysteries of pocket lint. Silly humans, wanting entertainment when we have paint drying and grass growing all around us!
So true, because, as everybody knows, TV is the only possible form of entertainment. One feels so sorry about all the people who lived before TV was invented the invention of TV, and had to watch pocket lint competitions LIVE!.
I doubt the state would miss the ~1000 job loss out of millions of jobs.....
I think it's a lot more than 1000 jobs: a quick duckduckgo search gets me this link, where the number of employees in the Puget Sound area is quoted to be 40,686. You also need to add the employees in other WA locations, like Quincy, and you end up with a lot of people directly employed by MS. I expect many of those get paid over medium wage too, so they probably provide a considerable percentage of the business of other local companies as well.
My problem with a tax on wealth is that it essentially eliminates ownership. I already feel that way about my house--I'm taxed on something I own, merely because I own it.
One could argue that your property rights are recognized, attested, and enforced by society (usually via the government), so you're getting a service which should be paid for. This means the tax you pay doesn't eliminate your ownership - on the contrary, it's part of what ownership is. It makes sense that the payment should be more or less proportional to the value of the property.
Sorry friend, but you are simply ignorant. When I talked about metaphysics, you started to talk about some nonsense like planet orbits and such. It's obvious you are way over your head in this discussion. You don't know what physicalism is about and you aren't intellectually prepared to have a productive discussion on this topic
If I had misunderstood your point, you may have tried to explain it better, maybe pointing me to the concepts you think I was wrong about. Instead you decided to get back to the old ad hominem, so I think in reality you just ran out of arguments. This conclusion is verified (see what I did here?) by the empty verbiage in your last paragraph - especially since I specifically asked for "no truthiness", and all you could come up with are subjective experiences and anecdotes. I'll agree however that further discussion would be pointless and a waste of my time, so HAND.
The claims of science that are verifiable are of this sort "if you do this, this happens, and if you do that, that happens as a result." Those are the things you can verify.
Of course, that's what verifiable means - what else do you expect? But I'd like to point out one very important fact: sometimes the "if you do this" statements aren't just a repetition from previous experience but they come from models, hypoteses and theories; they're predictive statements, expressing the results of things never tried before. The fact that sometimes what happens when somebody actually manages to perform the experiment is actually what was predicted, is, IMO, one of the most powerful and beautiful arguments in favor of science and the scientific method. I personally see beauty in the recent discovery of a new boson, theoretically predicted years ago, but impossible to find at the time because the necessary tool (the LHC) didn't exist yet.
What you cannot verify is the physicalist metaphysics that are tacitcly accepted as true by most scientists.
Uhh, yes, you can. Even more, this happens all the time. Whole world models, accepted by most scientists at the time have been repeteadly verified, and if necessary, modified or discarded and replaced. For example the geocentric model was considered natural and obvious, and it was the accepted scientific paradigm. As instruments become more precise and powerful and more and better data was collected, contradictions were found between the model and reality, and the model was discarded. This happened many times in all areas of science. We don't believe we live on a flat earth anymore, we don't believe the world is 6000 years anymore (ok, ok, let's ignore some Americans for now), we don't believe sickness is caused by an defficiency in humors, and so on.
Also what you cannot verify is that the cause effect relationship is eternal, or otherwise underpinned by an eternal rule or law. So while you can verify that if you do this, this happens today and perhaps reasonably next year, can you verify that it's what eternally happens? No, of course not. Science may well be a study of local phenomena rather than universal phenomena. And by local I mean restricted by time and not only by space.
Uhh, no, you're wrong again. Science does expand it's observations over both time and space. We know dinosaurs existed, because we found their fossils, we know the laws of physics were the same millions of years ago because the ratio of isotopes we find in nature matches what we compute using current data, because tidal rhythmites in ancient estuaries shows us Earth rotated faster then, again matching our calculations, and so on. The same applies to space: we can look at distant galaxies and note how light behaves, how it bends in gravitational fields, and how it shifts, all, again, matching our local observations. We can "peek" into the past and into space in many different ways, and we can infer the laws then or there, based on our observations.
Science often presents itself as the only valid way of knowing something, and that's simply not true.
Ok, what other valid ways are there? And by valid, I mean they provide robust truth, that resists verification, as opposed to "truthiness"?
If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims
What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap). It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers. Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.
The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method. And the way you dismiss medicine, is just dishonest. You can't expect the crispness of physics in medicine, because the domain it works in is simply much more complex, but you're blithely ignoring the huge advances and successes imedicine had in the last few hundred years, successes which were based on huge numbers of observations and experiments, creation and testing of hypotesis, and so on. Do you think Pasteur or Salk read about their vaccines in books and took them by faith? Think again.
Got puts the trees of knowledge and life into the Garden Eden. As an omniscient god, he had to know that man would eat from them.
It gets even worse: since Adam and Eve had not yet eaten of the fruit, they had no knowledge of the concepts of "good" and "evil". They couldn't be aware that disobeying God would be an evil act, so expecting them not to eat the apple is logically inconsistent, and punishing them for it is an act of injustice.
Omnibenevolent ??? Have you actually READ any of the "prevalent" religious texts?
Hey, don't ask me - I'm just quoting what religious people say; I'm not a believer myself. FWIW, I have read some of the religious texts of major religions, including the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads, even the Tao Te Ching. I also read a bunch of theological texts from various traditions, and some books on the history and philosophy of religion, so I'm not completely ignorant of the addiction to smiting most of the gods seem to show:).
To bring the thread back to the subject, I personally think the existence of evil directly contradicts the hypotesis of a omnipotent etcetera God. I'm aware of the existence of many theodicies (like Augustin's free will argument, or the concept of heavenly post-mortem rewards), but none I read managed to convince me.
I thought there was a circle of hell reserved for virtuous pagans? (not sure if that's Dante or actual official theology any more).
That would be Limbo. It's not officialy recognized, but the idea was pretty prevalent in catholic theology during the Middle Ages, and Dante used it, setting Limbo in the first circle of hell. Other branches of Christianity (like the Eastern Orthodox or some forms of protestantism) don't accept this concept, and state that all pagans, virtuous or not, and basically anybody who wasn't baptized (even infants that die before baptism) go straight to hell, no excuses.
It would be similar to a hurricane bearing down on your and your house. You know 2 days in advance that it will be a level 5 hurricane. You can take precautions or not. It isn't the hurricane's fault.
If you believe in that God, he just does his things. He can't be blamed. He is "Mother Nature".
Your comparison fails though, because you're describing an indifferent god, which is emphatically not what the prevalent religions tell us. The religious representation of God is someone omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, attributes nobody attaches to a hurricane. You'd expect such a God to make a moral and loving choice. You wouldn't ask that of a hurricane.
Mutatis mutandis, it's like excusing some guy that beats his wife by saying "hey, she knew he'll beat her up if she talked to her mother, it's like sticking your hand in a candle flame. She could take precautions or not. It isn't the candle's fault." Doesn't work.
If you could incorporate this in vehicles windshields, you'd have the same benefits
I don't know - windshields are made of tempered and laminated glass, which doesn't shatter on impact (it contains a layer of plastic bonded between two sheets of glass; this layer keeps pieces together so you get spider web cracking instead of pieces falling off) and which breaks in small chunks (as opposed to sharp shards flying all over the place). To temper glass you have to treat it with heat, which may destroy the surface cones the MIT process describes.
How about I simply mark you uninformed? Profiling (racial or otherwise) shouldn't be used, not because it's racist (though that doesn't help), but because it doesn't work. See for example what Bruce Schneier says here or here. And if you don't want to take the time to dig through those blogs here are a couple of short quotes:
The trick [for profiling to be effective] is to make sure perceptions of risk match the actual risks. If those responsible for security profile based on superstition and wrong-headed intuition, or by blindly following a computerized profiling system, profiling won't work at all. And even worse, it actually can reduce security by blinding people to the real threats. Institutionalized profiling can ossify a mind, and a person's mind is the most important security countermeasure we have.
Whenever you design a security system with two ways through -- an easy way and a hard way -- you invite the attacker to take the easy way. Profile for young Arab males, and you'll get terrorists that are old non-Arab females.
Well, see the difference pointed here. I like SkyDrive's statement: Microsoft is granted rights
solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.
This is nice, clear and limited, and exactly matches my understanding of the relationship with the company. In contrast, Google's ToS is more vague and completely unlimited, in that that it applies not only to the services I signed for but to any new ones Google may want to develop. I have no control or knowledge what those new services may be or whether I want my data used that way. Moreover, by agreeing to Google's ToS I also have to give access to my data to any company Google decides to work with, again without my control or knowledge.
You note some people "imply" that Google may sell your data without your consent. I'd say it's a pretty reasonable suspicion, given Google's business model. You rightly point that the IP remains yours, but I think you're missing an important point: "selling your data" isn't limited to the data itself, but also to all facts that can be inferred from your files. Google can analyse your data and extract a lot of things, and that information can be valuable to all kinds of third parties you know nothing about and maybe wouldn't want to know facts about you. For example, Google may check your list of e-books and find out you're interested in science fiction, or maybe dieting, or have a penchant for fetish erotica. This is very much the type of data Google's advertising arm is interested in, and their ToS allows them to extract and sell it, while Microsoft's doesn't.
Weren't they actually underclock switches to maintain compatibility with older software that relied on the processor's clock for timing,
Yup, that's what they were. The original PC had a hardware timer (an 8253 IIRC), but all available counters were used for timekeeping interrupts, sound generation and the like. Many programs (especially games) used software loops to generate timing, assuming the clock ran at the original IBM PC's 4.77 MHz. When the 80286-based/AT was introduced, those programs become unusable. To preserve some compatibility, manufacturers introduced the "turbo" button, whose purpose was actually to slow down the machine close to the original PC speed. This button remained a feature on cases for years, even though it often wasn't even connected to anything anymore.
What do you do against people willing to do anything in their drive for power?
Hmmm... Make the drive for power irrelevant? For example, provide powerful mechanisms for negative feedback (allow lawsuits against leaders, or make sure people can relatively easily remove a bad leader), but no mechanism for positive selection (which is the thing currently abused by those sociopaths you mention). This way nobody can vote for a certain candidate - instead assign leadership positions randomly from a large non self-selecting pool (for example, all adult population). Also, make the leadership service mandatory for whoever gets selected (kind of like jury duty).
you still see loads of people going "trololol, vegan diets are nto natural"
Hehe, you see extremists on both sides; as far as I'm concerned, veganism is a mild form of religion, and as such, everybody is welcome to embrace it as long as they don't try to force it on me and they don't preach too insistently.
This said, I had a few vegetarians try to convert me, and I found a good approach is to accuse them of hating chickens and wanting them all dead. Confusion inevitably ensues, and I explain that the domestic chicken is one of the most successful species on the planet - there are more chickens alive than any other flightless bird they may have competed with, and that's due entirely to people like me who enjoy a spicy wing from time to time. If vegetarians had their way and humans stopped eating chicken, the species would collapse and probably go extinct in a few generations (just look at their wild ancestor, the red junglefowl, hovering on the edge of extinction).
For the humor impaired out there, I'm just winding them up - I really don't think vegetarianism is inspired by hatred towards living things, even though an immediate consequence of everybody becoming a vegetarian would be mass collapse or even extinction of many of the domesticated species.
Real life frogger is an every day reality in every third world country.
Hehe, yes. I went to see the Pyramids a number of years ago, and did a bit of solo sightseeing in Cairo too. Crossing streets was a real challenge - pedestrian crossings, street signs or red lights were completely ignored by locals. The best strategy I came up with was to either close my eyes or keep them firmly on the other side of the street while crossing, moving at a steady pace and making a point NOT to watch for incoming cars. The point was that incoming drivers estimated my speed and aimed their cars either in front or behind me (I honestly don't think any of them ever stopped or slowed down to let me pass). Keeping a constant speed helped their estimation, while sudden changes like slowing down (or jumping away in terror:) ) would probably have caused an accident.
Slashdot Mirror
And what, exactly, makes you think you have any privacy, or expectation of any privacy, on public roads?
I think the answer has already been given by the SCOTUS in the warrantless GPS tracking case: see here for details. The SCOTUS decided that, even though drivers used public roads, the amount of tracking the police was doing was orders of magnitude above the normal expectation for a public place, both in individual tracking and in the sheer number of trackers that could be active simultaneously. Of course, the decision in this case applies to governments, but I believe the same arguments work identically for the Google car.
bach would still have been a genius, even if he'd been an atheist.
Yeah, but who'd want to listen to a cantata named "A Mighty Fortress is Our Random Fluctuation of the Continuum"?
[Mac clones] just sold worse than the mac did
Eh? On the contrary, they sold better than the Mac did. And it was a better deal for the consumer too - you could get a high end UMAX or Tatung Mac clone significantly cheaper than the equivalent Macintosh. That was Jobs' problem, that the Mac was getting commodized, like PCs had, and that would kill his comparably enormous margins, not that the clones sold badly. It even says so in the link you posted: "high-end clones were cannibalizing sales of their own high-end computers, where profit margins were highest"
It's a Darwinian system that insures that those that reach high leadership positions are at least as smart and dedicated as the people trying to find them, if not more so.
Heh, it's just simple selection - not Darwinian unless the people reaching those leadership positions mate with each other and have superior offspring. On the other hand, I've been told it's lonely at the top :).
This is stupid. Units ALWAYS must be labeled, even with the SI system
Maybe in technical documents, but that's not true in many cases. It all depends on having the proper context. If somebody asks "how old are you", answering "35" is quite unambiguous, because of the shared context. You don't need to explain what units you're using - nobody would suspect you mean 35 weeks or hours (or if you're Han Solo, parsecs). The Lockheed problem was caused by the existence of 2 different contexts, Imperial and metric, close enough to be easily confused. If the Imperial units weren't ever used, there would have been no problem.
How do you know whether you're dealing with mm, cm, m, dm, Mm, etc? Or V, mV, uV, etc.?
Duh, from the context! If you have any knowledge of a particular field you should understand what units there are, to a precision of at least an order of magnitude. If your technical drawing represents a car, nobody with a brain would suspect the length of "5" may mean 5 kilometers or electronVolts. Ambiguity only arises in parts of the world that still use Imperial, because the difference between comparable units isn't large enough for automatic unit checking to kick in - in my example, both 5 meters and 5 yards are acceptable for a car length.
Consider the technical documents from Lockheed - they did not have units, but were accepted and used, and surprise, surprise, nobody created a pocket-sized rocket because they thought the units were actually millimeters (cue Bloody Stupid Johnson). The resulting product did fly, even if not exactly where Lockheed intended :) If the Imperial system hadn't still hung around, the thing would have worked well, labels or no labels.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a case of someone not labeling their units. The unit system wasn't the problem.
But units wouldn't need to be labeled if everybody used the same system. The continued existence of the zombie Imperial system is the root cause of the problem.
Secondly SI isn't always the best unit of measurement for performing calculations. In plasma physics we use eV in stead of joules for energy because it simplifies our work. In astro physics measuring distances in the SI unit of length, the meter, is impractical
Which is why SI has a number of accepted units. You'll note that both the eV and the astronomical unit are there, but not the feet or yards used by Lockheed to send a rocket past Mars.
What exactly is the point of a single crApp that functions exactly like a web browser but is limited to a single site, when you could just use the system web browser to do the same thing?
Better performance, much more efficient, and complete control over the app's behavior, which in most cases means a much better user experience. Add not having to deal with the various browser quirks, and it's often a compelling case - as Apple, Google and many others have proven.
I know, right? We could all just sit in the middle of an empty living-room and meditate on the mysteries of pocket lint. Silly humans, wanting entertainment when we have paint drying and grass growing all around us!
So true, because, as everybody knows, TV is the only possible form of entertainment. One feels so sorry about all the people who lived before TV was invented the invention of TV, and had to watch pocket lint competitions LIVE!.
I doubt the state would miss the ~1000 job loss out of millions of jobs.....
I think it's a lot more than 1000 jobs: a quick duckduckgo search gets me this link, where the number of employees in the Puget Sound area is quoted to be 40,686. You also need to add the employees in other WA locations, like Quincy, and you end up with a lot of people directly employed by MS. I expect many of those get paid over medium wage too, so they probably provide a considerable percentage of the business of other local companies as well.
My problem with a tax on wealth is that it essentially eliminates ownership. I already feel that way about my house--I'm taxed on something I own, merely because I own it.
One could argue that your property rights are recognized, attested, and enforced by society (usually via the government), so you're getting a service which should be paid for. This means the tax you pay doesn't eliminate your ownership - on the contrary, it's part of what ownership is. It makes sense that the payment should be more or less proportional to the value of the property.
Sorry friend, but you are simply ignorant. When I talked about metaphysics, you started to talk about some nonsense like planet orbits and such. It's obvious you are way over your head in this discussion. You don't know what physicalism is about and you aren't intellectually prepared to have a productive discussion on this topic
If I had misunderstood your point, you may have tried to explain it better, maybe pointing me to the concepts you think I was wrong about. Instead you decided to get back to the old ad hominem, so I think in reality you just ran out of arguments. This conclusion is verified (see what I did here?) by the empty verbiage in your last paragraph - especially since I specifically asked for "no truthiness", and all you could come up with are subjective experiences and anecdotes. I'll agree however that further discussion would be pointless and a waste of my time, so HAND.
The claims of science that are verifiable are of this sort "if you do this, this happens, and if you do that, that happens as a result." Those are the things you can verify.
Of course, that's what verifiable means - what else do you expect? But I'd like to point out one very important fact: sometimes the "if you do this" statements aren't just a repetition from previous experience but they come from models, hypoteses and theories; they're predictive statements, expressing the results of things never tried before. The fact that sometimes what happens when somebody actually manages to perform the experiment is actually what was predicted, is, IMO, one of the most powerful and beautiful arguments in favor of science and the scientific method. I personally see beauty in the recent discovery of a new boson, theoretically predicted years ago, but impossible to find at the time because the necessary tool (the LHC) didn't exist yet.
What you cannot verify is the physicalist metaphysics that are tacitcly accepted as true by most scientists.
Uhh, yes, you can. Even more, this happens all the time. Whole world models, accepted by most scientists at the time have been repeteadly verified, and if necessary, modified or discarded and replaced. For example the geocentric model was considered natural and obvious, and it was the accepted scientific paradigm. As instruments become more precise and powerful and more and better data was collected, contradictions were found between the model and reality, and the model was discarded. This happened many times in all areas of science. We don't believe we live on a flat earth anymore, we don't believe the world is 6000 years anymore (ok, ok, let's ignore some Americans for now), we don't believe sickness is caused by an defficiency in humors, and so on.
Also what you cannot verify is that the cause effect relationship is eternal, or otherwise underpinned by an eternal rule or law. So while you can verify that if you do this, this happens today and perhaps reasonably next year, can you verify that it's what eternally happens? No, of course not. Science may well be a study of local phenomena rather than universal phenomena. And by local I mean restricted by time and not only by space.
Uhh, no, you're wrong again. Science does expand it's observations over both time and space. We know dinosaurs existed, because we found their fossils, we know the laws of physics were the same millions of years ago because the ratio of isotopes we find in nature matches what we compute using current data, because tidal rhythmites in ancient estuaries shows us Earth rotated faster then, again matching our calculations, and so on. The same applies to space: we can look at distant galaxies and note how light behaves, how it bends in gravitational fields, and how it shifts, all, again, matching our local observations. We can "peek" into the past and into space in many different ways, and we can infer the laws then or there, based on our observations.
Science often presents itself as the only valid way of knowing something, and that's simply not true.
Ok, what other valid ways are there? And by valid, I mean they provide robust truth, that resists verification, as opposed to "truthiness"?
If you deeply analyse you'll soon come to the point that the evidence for science is exactly the same as evidence for God : some book's claims. Science's claims are grand and utterly unverifiable by anyone who doesn't have millions to throw at it, once you go beyond Newton's claims
What a lot of ignorant claptrap. First, the important thing is that those claims are verifiable in a finite way with finite resources. Checking some scientific claim may cost a bit, but in most cases it can be done (and I don't understand where you got this notion about truth needing to be cheap). It's a qualitative difference from religion whose claim are essentially unverifiable, no matter how many resources you may pump into churches or TV preachers. Second, lots of science beyond Newton can be easily tested by yourself, at home, without spending much. Just off the top of my head, the basics of electromagnetism up to Maxwell's equations don't need more than a battery or two, a few magnets and some wire; you can even experience some quantum physics, or some advanced optics (holography), if you buy a small laser pointer or a couple of phototransistors.
The rest of your post is just as bad; it's true that science isn't omniscient, and that the more complex the domain the fuzzier the answers will get, but this is only to be expected, and in no way invalidates the scientific method. And the way you dismiss medicine, is just dishonest. You can't expect the crispness of physics in medicine, because the domain it works in is simply much more complex, but you're blithely ignoring the huge advances and successes imedicine had in the last few hundred years, successes which were based on huge numbers of observations and experiments, creation and testing of hypotesis, and so on. Do you think Pasteur or Salk read about their vaccines in books and took them by faith? Think again.
Got puts the trees of knowledge and life into the Garden Eden. As an omniscient god, he had to know that man would eat from them.
It gets even worse: since Adam and Eve had not yet eaten of the fruit, they had no knowledge of the concepts of "good" and "evil". They couldn't be aware that disobeying God would be an evil act, so expecting them not to eat the apple is logically inconsistent, and punishing them for it is an act of injustice.
Omnibenevolent ??? Have you actually READ any of the "prevalent" religious texts?
Hey, don't ask me - I'm just quoting what religious people say; I'm not a believer myself. FWIW, I have read some of the religious texts of major religions, including the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, the Upanishads, even the Tao Te Ching. I also read a bunch of theological texts from various traditions, and some books on the history and philosophy of religion, so I'm not completely ignorant of the addiction to smiting most of the gods seem to show :).
To bring the thread back to the subject, I personally think the existence of evil directly contradicts the hypotesis of a omnipotent etcetera God. I'm aware of the existence of many theodicies (like Augustin's free will argument, or the concept of heavenly post-mortem rewards), but none I read managed to convince me.
I thought there was a circle of hell reserved for virtuous pagans? (not sure if that's Dante or actual official theology any more).
That would be Limbo. It's not officialy recognized, but the idea was pretty prevalent in catholic theology during the Middle Ages, and Dante used it, setting Limbo in the first circle of hell. Other branches of Christianity (like the Eastern Orthodox or some forms of protestantism) don't accept this concept, and state that all pagans, virtuous or not, and basically anybody who wasn't baptized (even infants that die before baptism) go straight to hell, no excuses.
It would be similar to a hurricane bearing down on your and your house. You know 2 days in advance that it will be a level 5 hurricane. You can take precautions or not. It isn't the hurricane's fault.
If you believe in that God, he just does his things. He can't be blamed. He is "Mother Nature".
Your comparison fails though, because you're describing an indifferent god, which is emphatically not what the prevalent religions tell us. The religious representation of God is someone omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, attributes nobody attaches to a hurricane. You'd expect such a God to make a moral and loving choice. You wouldn't ask that of a hurricane.
Mutatis mutandis, it's like excusing some guy that beats his wife by saying "hey, she knew he'll beat her up if she talked to her mother, it's like sticking your hand in a candle flame. She could take precautions or not. It isn't the candle's fault." Doesn't work.
If you could incorporate this in vehicles windshields, you'd have the same benefits
I don't know - windshields are made of tempered and laminated glass, which doesn't shatter on impact (it contains a layer of plastic bonded between two sheets of glass; this layer keeps pieces together so you get spider web cracking instead of pieces falling off) and which breaks in small chunks (as opposed to sharp shards flying all over the place). To temper glass you have to treat it with heat, which may destroy the surface cones the MIT process describes.
Mark me troll and flamebait all you want
How about I simply mark you uninformed? Profiling (racial or otherwise) shouldn't be used, not because it's racist (though that doesn't help), but because it doesn't work. See for example what Bruce Schneier says here or here. And if you don't want to take the time to dig through those blogs here are a couple of short quotes:
The trick [for profiling to be effective] is to make sure perceptions of risk match the actual risks. If those responsible for security profile based on superstition and wrong-headed intuition, or by blindly following a computerized profiling system, profiling won't work at all. And even worse, it actually can reduce security by blinding people to the real threats. Institutionalized profiling can ossify a mind, and a person's mind is the most important security countermeasure we have.
Whenever you design a security system with two ways through -- an easy way and a hard way -- you invite the attacker to take the easy way. Profile for young Arab males, and you'll get terrorists that are old non-Arab females.
Well, see the difference pointed here. I like SkyDrive's statement: Microsoft is granted rights
solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.
This is nice, clear and limited, and exactly matches my understanding of the relationship with the company. In contrast, Google's ToS is more vague and completely unlimited, in that that it applies not only to the services I signed for but to any new ones Google may want to develop. I have no control or knowledge what those new services may be or whether I want my data used that way. Moreover, by agreeing to Google's ToS I also have to give access to my data to any company Google decides to work with, again without my control or knowledge.
You note some people "imply" that Google may sell your data without your consent. I'd say it's a pretty reasonable suspicion, given Google's business model. You rightly point that the IP remains yours, but I think you're missing an important point: "selling your data" isn't limited to the data itself, but also to all facts that can be inferred from your files. Google can analyse your data and extract a lot of things, and that information can be valuable to all kinds of third parties you know nothing about and maybe wouldn't want to know facts about you. For example, Google may check your list of e-books and find out you're interested in science fiction, or maybe dieting, or have a penchant for fetish erotica. This is very much the type of data Google's advertising arm is interested in, and their ToS allows them to extract and sell it, while Microsoft's doesn't.
I'm sure he understand what's going on a lot better than anyone on Slashdot
Shouldn't that be "he doesn't understand what's going on a lot better than anyone on Slashdot"?
Weren't they actually underclock switches to maintain compatibility with older software that relied on the processor's clock for timing,
Yup, that's what they were. The original PC had a hardware timer (an 8253 IIRC), but all available counters were used for timekeeping interrupts, sound generation and the like. Many programs (especially games) used software loops to generate timing, assuming the clock ran at the original IBM PC's 4.77 MHz. When the 80286-based /AT was introduced, those programs become unusable. To preserve some compatibility, manufacturers introduced the "turbo" button, whose purpose was actually to slow down the machine close to the original PC speed. This button remained a feature on cases for years, even though it often wasn't even connected to anything anymore.
What do you do against people willing to do anything in their drive for power?
Hmmm... Make the drive for power irrelevant? For example, provide powerful mechanisms for negative feedback (allow lawsuits against leaders, or make sure people can relatively easily remove a bad leader), but no mechanism for positive selection (which is the thing currently abused by those sociopaths you mention). This way nobody can vote for a certain candidate - instead assign leadership positions randomly from a large non self-selecting pool (for example, all adult population). Also, make the leadership service mandatory for whoever gets selected (kind of like jury duty).
you still see loads of people going "trololol, vegan diets are nto natural"
Hehe, you see extremists on both sides; as far as I'm concerned, veganism is a mild form of religion, and as such, everybody is welcome to embrace it as long as they don't try to force it on me and they don't preach too insistently.
This said, I had a few vegetarians try to convert me, and I found a good approach is to accuse them of hating chickens and wanting them all dead. Confusion inevitably ensues, and I explain that the domestic chicken is one of the most successful species on the planet - there are more chickens alive than any other flightless bird they may have competed with, and that's due entirely to people like me who enjoy a spicy wing from time to time. If vegetarians had their way and humans stopped eating chicken, the species would collapse and probably go extinct in a few generations (just look at their wild ancestor, the red junglefowl, hovering on the edge of extinction).
For the humor impaired out there, I'm just winding them up - I really don't think vegetarianism is inspired by hatred towards living things, even though an immediate consequence of everybody becoming a vegetarian would be mass collapse or even extinction of many of the domesticated species.
Real life frogger is an every day reality in every third world country.
Hehe, yes. I went to see the Pyramids a number of years ago, and did a bit of solo sightseeing in Cairo too. Crossing streets was a real challenge - pedestrian crossings, street signs or red lights were completely ignored by locals. The best strategy I came up with was to either close my eyes or keep them firmly on the other side of the street while crossing, moving at a steady pace and making a point NOT to watch for incoming cars. The point was that incoming drivers estimated my speed and aimed their cars either in front or behind me (I honestly don't think any of them ever stopped or slowed down to let me pass). Keeping a constant speed helped their estimation, while sudden changes like slowing down (or jumping away in terror :) ) would probably have caused an accident.