This may not be your experience but it's the daily & lifelong experience of MILLIONS.
And you quote one example to support that statement.
I'm not saying every cop is perfect (many sure aren't) or there is never an innocent man in jail (there sure are). What I'm saying is that largely the system works, at least much better than any other we've tried in the history of mankind.
Can it be improved? Absolutely. Does it have issues? Certainly. Should we be totally paranoid about it? Uh, no.
As for your story - they plan to bring a case against the police after four years? I would've sued them after they jailed me the 2nd time. You know, once can be an honest mistake and all that. And I would've sued them again for every single time after that.
Because you are right that we didn't get this system I'm defending for free, and that people died to give us rights and liberty, and that we need to fight to keep them. Fortunately, we largely don't have to fight with weapons.
All said, yes maybe I speak like that because I'm a white man living in Europe and not a black man living in the USA. If it really is that horrible over there, I pity you. Why don't you move someplace else? You know, most people immigrated to america to get away from oppression and prosecution in their original countries. If it has became as bad as everyone here claims it to be - maybe it's time to reverse the direction of immigration?
Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.
Hire from a better university. Good universities teach not just formal algorithms and language structures, but also programming methods and require practical applications to be submitted to pass the subject.
The real problem with university and other formal education is that the setting is artificial and the task always has a solution. When I was teaching assistant back in university days, I took some perverse pleasure from breaking students applications, typically because they didn't do proper input validation or didn't check boundary conditions. I don't think they liked me very much, but if you look at some of the exploits out there you see this exact kinds of mistakes being made in the real world by people who never had to deal with someone intentionally trying to break their precious baby.
So we shouldn't have easy-to-use tools for people to LEARN how to program?
We have that, it's called Pascal.
But no, we shouldn't give pseudo-programming tools into the hands of non-programmers for the same reason we don't put handgrenades with half the amount of explosives into the hands of non-soldiers so they can play around and learn a bit - it's dangerous.
Get off your high-and-mighty "professionals are the only ones who can do things" box.
Sorry, when it comes to software with real-world impact, professionals are the only ones who should be doing it. You wouldn't fly by plane if the aviation industries approach to piloting were like what you demand for software, would you?
VB with Access did one job and did it VERY well which was allowing anybody to build single function programs quickly and easily.
As they say: To every problem, there's a solution that is obvious, simple, easy and wrong.
I wrote in another post what a disaster Excel is, exactly because it allows every manager to create a business-logic spreadsheet - most of which are never checked for errors or boundary conditions and may fail you without even telling you that something is wrong.
I've argued here many times against this meme of "teach everyone to code a little" for the same reason that we don't teach everyone to build houses a little - because there are things in this world that need to be done either right or not at all.
With VB 6 plus Access one can whip off a program in a few hours to do anything from store and retrieve a customer's order history
With no transactional security, no protection against unintentionally changing or overwriting data, no checking for referential integrity or validity. Yes. You can absolutely create a ticking timebomb for your business to crash and burn one day.
If you're doing your home DVD collection on it - be my guest. The worst that can happen is that you'll have to actually search for a movie by hand.
But please don't advise people to run business logic on VB and Access and write the code themselves.
It's fairly trivial to learn a language at a decent level.
I assume you're already fluent in several. That's the trick why it appears easy. I know about a dozen programming languages, and for some bullshit reason needed to learn some Racket recently. Even though I never heard about it before, and have never written code in Scheme or LISP before, it took me one hour to have the first non-trivial program running and a day to do useful stuff.
But, I've also seen how people struggle with simple, friendly, idiot-proof things like Java when it's their first or second programming language. It really isn't that easy if you don't have all the experience from other languages that you can transfer. People who are learning Java, even after one or two weeks they need an hour or so to write code that will probably take you and me roughly the time it takes to type it in.
Programming is difficult, if you're not a programmer already.
The real gap is something that will empower users without putting them into danger.
Excel is an example of this approach gone wrong. If you've never been in a company that runs important business processes on spreadsheets, raise your hand. Kids and students, drop your hands. Not many left, are there?
And yet, studies have shown that a large percentage of non-trivial spreadsheets contain errors.
The difficult part in making tools is to make them so that users realize at which point they should call a professional. It's good if you can put a screw into the wall yourself or hang a picture on your own. But it's likewise clear to you that building a house is something you leave to experts, or at least get their advise on wall and floor strengths. Computers, sadly, are not so transparent. Unless the task involves higher math, too many people think they can program a quick sales database themselves in Access or something. Only when the ceiling does fall down do they realize there's an IT equivalent of structural analysis.
So how many people in Guantanamo have had their day in court yet?
That's a good point. Let me think about it for a moment. Oh wait, my mistake. That's absolute bullshit.
Gitmo is a violation of everything that's right and proper and the fact that western countries don't embargo the USA for it, but embargo Russia for what it's doing in Ukraine speaks volumes about their moral standards or rather, lack of such.
But Gitmo has nothing to do with this discussion.
If you have discussed things in sms or email that are critical of the government, you're a suspect.
Strangely, I've been critical of my government for 20 years. Where are the black vans and why am I not in jail, if your paranoia is correct?
You want to take a punt on whether or not you can be declared an unlawful enemy combatant?
As I said, Gitmo is an abomination, but unless you're in Afghanistan or Iraq, the chance of ending up there is about equal to being struck by lightning. Twice. The same day.
GP and some commentators were closer. It's not about the extremes of the police state, it's about the small basic rights being taken away. Gitmo is less of a personal concern to any of us than, say, whether or not we can refuse to show ID to a policeman stopping us on the street for no reason.
The ruling is not phone-specific; the purpose was to search for a video that may show the defendant trying to strangle his girlfriend.
Yes, that is the particular case that started this discussion, but the GP (or GGGP or something) said that basically everyone has something on their phone that police can use against them.
I don't have videos on my phone showing me trying to strangle my girlfriend, and I'm still waiting for other examples that would support the GPs point, and they haven't been coming.
Like I would use those exact words in an actual trial. Strawman.
The legal argument would point out that it's the prosecutions job to prove that John (let's give him a name) is on my friends list because he's a drug dealer and not, as I claim and can prove, because we're both in the same club and share a hobby.
If you think people haven't been sent up on cases that flimsy, you're not part of the reality-based community.
Strangely, I trust the system. Not 100%, but largely. Everyone with three working brain cells knows that innocent people get convicted sometimes and it's a scandal. However, I understand enough statistics to see not just the mistakes, but the system as a whole. Every system has mistakes. What is important is how the false positive and false negative rates are. If I am innocent, is my chance to be falsely convicted 50%, or 5%, or 0.5% ? People posting here seem to thing it's closer to 50% than to 0.5%.
Well, it turns out we're both wrong, but you more than me. This study came up with a 3.3% (or 5% depending on how you crunch the numbers) false conviction rate.
invoke you legal rights at every opportunity and keep the so-called "criminal justice" system as far away from you as possible.
Oh, absolutely. This is not a joke and if you get into trouble with the law, you should understand that it's an adversial system and from the moment they mark you as a suspect, the police is not your friend anymore.
But no need for this ridiculous paranoia, either.
Sit in court sometime and see the flimsy cases that ordinary citizens are convicted under. Judges don't laugh at cops or prosecutes -- they're all colleagues, with the same government signing their checks.
I've been to court, mostly as part of my previous job, the rest as a visitor.
You forget a detail: Yes, the judges and prosecutors are colleagues - and so is the defense lawyer. If you have sharp eyes and ears you can spot the inofficial conversation going on between these three parties. A conversation you're excluded from because you are not "one of them". But one of those players is on your team. If you need to put words into the judges mouth, make them come through your lawyer.
We were talking about mobile phones, so let's stay on topic.
I'm quite sure there's nothing on there that would pass a giggle test. Sure, maybe I've sent some joke emails to friends that contain FBI key words, or something like that. But something that would make a prosecutor think he can make it stick, maybe? As I said: Give me ideas and I'll check. So far, the suggestions (speeding via GPS records, etc.) are just ridiculous.
And that's enough, to make your life a living hell for a certain amount of time (be it brief or long, doesn't matter).
You know this from first-hand experience or from anecdotes and hear-say?
I've had dealings with police, courts and lawyers, both professionally and privately, on both sides (though not very often as defendant). In all my life there was one event that was really stressful and that was professionally.
Maybe we life in different countries or societies, but by and large, I've not seen this "ruin your life" part actually happen in cases on the level of "they ask you if they can check your phone". They happen, but mostly in the "they break down your door and arrest you for child porn" cases. Yeah, innocent people have been convicted of the highest crimes, and that does ruin your life. That is living hell, not having to deal with the justice system over some phone records.
Again, maybe we have different experiences and backgrounds, but most of the times I've dealt with police and judges, they were professional and while the results were not always what I wanted them to be, I cannot seriously complain about their behaviour. Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe my own behaviour influences what I get back, or maybe the USA really has become this horrible police state.
You'd be surprised how many felonies and misdemeanors they could find on your phone.
In fact, I would. Tell me more. What makes you so sure of this?
Sure they can find something that with enough creative interpretation someone could see as hinting to a crime, if they only squint strongly enough. But something that passes the giggle test? Share your wisdom.
Actually, yes. I occasionally go on weekend trips and having to bring a charger quite sucks. Even at home, my girlfriend runs out of charge almost once a week. It really is a hassle.
I've been using Google Wallet for online payments for my online game (below). Adoption is minimal, PayPal beats Google Wallet payments out 10:1 or more. But more importantly, support from Google is minimal as well. Their website is a mess, their integration guides unreliable and the whole thing looks very much like something that never left beta.
Which is a big strawman and there are plenty of good books out there that you can read that deal with it quite nicely. "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life" by Cairns-Smith is the first one that came to my mind and has the advantage of being very short.
when they found the fossil record doesn't show the gradual progression they predicted
You are aware of what fossils are and how astonishing it is that we manage to find so many in such good condition at all, yes? Complaining about gaps in fossil records is a little like whining that there are holes in the walls of the ruins of Pompeii.
(DNA contains lots and lots of highly organized information that doesn't just happen - if you find an encyclopedia you can safely assume someone wrote it)
If you equate DNA to an encyclopedia, you have just created an impossible-to-ever-beat world record holder for the most disorganized and messy encyclopedia. All we know points to DNA being an amazing information storage, but also one of the strongest evidences of evolution we have, because if DNA had been designed for humans, or even for mammals or heck even for species living today, the designer was incredibly drunk.
Too many hardcore Darwin supporters aren't familiar with these ideas, don't have answers for them, and get angry (instead of scientifically curious) when you ask about them.
There are stupid people everywhere, but if you bring up a valid point, you have pretty good chances that someone will check them out. However, practicioners in a field get upset when the 500th troll comes with the same stupid pseudo-argument they've already debunked hundreds of times and thinks he is entitled to being listened to.
Don't confuse becoming angry about being bothered with the same bullshit over and over again with becoming angry about the content of it.
There's actually a lot of potentional scientific correct stuff in the Bible.
If you read between the lines too much, you forget that what's written is actually the stuff on the lines.
There are many funny examples in philosophy of how you can interpret a text to mean the opposite of what the author intended, or whatever else you want.
But evidence is against you. Linguistic analysis holds strong evidence that old texts are largely literal and not metaphorical - and certainly not metaphorical in the sense of requiring twenty jumps to conclusion to arrive at a meaning. Text comparison shows that as far as we can ascertain, at that time, place and culture, if they wrote "heaven", they meant the blue thing above them with the clouds, not a parallel dimension.
Your eric-van-daeniken-esque interpretations are close to funny, but I fear you didn't mean them as satire, which a) makes me feel sad and b) proves your 2nd point wrong because it clearly demonstrates that our brains aren't really all that evolved. Or at least yours.;-)
While it's a big step forward, it's also a step in the wrong direction.
Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator â" arguing instead that they "require it."
Nothing could be further from the truth. In this point, even the most foaming-at-the-mouth, ridiculous pathetic idiot fanatic bible-thumping young-earth creationist is intellectually ahead of the pope. The fanatics fully understand how destructive evolution is to their core ideas and that it is the ultimate destroyer of religion because it explains exactly how life including sentient life like us humans can evolve from simple chemistry, with no other influence, guidance or creation required.
His withdrawl to "initial creation" is a parlor trick at best, because it requires at least one of two things to be true, both of which we already have strong evidence of being false. The first option would be continued "guidance" like intelligent design postulates, but on a more indirect path. Not only is there no evidence whatsoever to any of that, but at the required level of indirection, complexity theory tells us that either god can supersede quantum fluctuations and entropy, or the guidance was basically on the scale "some galaxies would be nice, and organic molecules so life can begin" - nothing even remotely resembling the god personally interested in humanity (or rather: a random small desert tribe somewhere in the middle of nowhere) that the bible paints. The second option is determinism - that setting the proper initial conditions has to lead to the current state of affairs and that's what the dude did. There's an excellent argument made by Darwin that tears this idea apart based on complexity - basically it would require the initial state to be many orders of magnitude more complex than the current one, an inversion of entropy.
But all those are scientific arguments. The stronger argument in this case is from philosophy: Taken the church's past history of arguments and official positions, it is clear that it has never won a single argument against science. All arguments that are resolved (and not still in dispute) have always been resolved in favor of science. Throughout history, the church had to admit more and more that its previous positions were wrong and accept the scientific position. Galileo (Feyerabends argument notwithstanding) was just the most popular example. From this history, there is little reason to put any trust into the arguments where the church maintains its position. If someone had to admit being wrong again and again in the past and has never been demonstrably right, it is safe to assume the trend will continue.
And women's studies, and bunch of other "studies".
Way to do a 180 on my point.
There's a massive difference between empirical studies of "how do these strange beings we call humans work" and political pseudo-sciences (though I will gladly admit that a small part of gender studies is worth the title, unfortunately it has largely been occupied by ideologists).
Knowing at least some basics about group dynamics, cognitive bias and such things can be very useful to avoid unnecessary conflict within a group, for example. When you're barely surviving, turning your potentially random group into a functioning team is about the most important knowledge you can have.
But this is not just a survivor book. It also deals with what happens after you manage to survive.
So much is obvious just from the list of titles. It still makes no sense. Embalming has never in human history been used in a society struggling with survival. It's a luxury technique.
Also, I'm investing in a ebook reader with a eink display and a hand-cranked dynamo usb charger. Hopefully this will work long enough.
It will not. One generation is th other of magnitude of lifetime for pretty much all our current electronics. Do you think a scenario that requires this kind of library will bring society back to a state where it'll be able to have functioning printers and USB readers again? If so, the library desperately needs the specifications for USB, the ebook file format and a ton more that'll be necessary to preserve your ebook for longer than the lifetime of your setup.
Ah, what you want is a simple survival guidebook.
No, you misunderstood completely what I meant. Good editing doesn't mean short and simple. It means accessible and organized.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly speaking, Racket is a steaming pile of horse manure, and the sooner I don't have to ever touch it again, the better.
And I say that as someone who likes the concept of LISP.
This may not be your experience but it's the daily & lifelong experience of MILLIONS.
And you quote one example to support that statement.
I'm not saying every cop is perfect (many sure aren't) or there is never an innocent man in jail (there sure are). What I'm saying is that largely the system works, at least much better than any other we've tried in the history of mankind.
Can it be improved? Absolutely.
Does it have issues? Certainly.
Should we be totally paranoid about it? Uh, no.
As for your story - they plan to bring a case against the police after four years? I would've sued them after they jailed me the 2nd time. You know, once can be an honest mistake and all that. And I would've sued them again for every single time after that.
Because you are right that we didn't get this system I'm defending for free, and that people died to give us rights and liberty, and that we need to fight to keep them. Fortunately, we largely don't have to fight with weapons.
All said, yes maybe I speak like that because I'm a white man living in Europe and not a black man living in the USA. If it really is that horrible over there, I pity you. Why don't you move someplace else? You know, most people immigrated to america to get away from oppression and prosecution in their original countries. If it has became as bad as everyone here claims it to be - maybe it's time to reverse the direction of immigration?
Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.
Hire from a better university. Good universities teach not just formal algorithms and language structures, but also programming methods and require practical applications to be submitted to pass the subject.
The real problem with university and other formal education is that the setting is artificial and the task always has a solution. When I was teaching assistant back in university days, I took some perverse pleasure from breaking students applications, typically because they didn't do proper input validation or didn't check boundary conditions. I don't think they liked me very much, but if you look at some of the exploits out there you see this exact kinds of mistakes being made in the real world by people who never had to deal with someone intentionally trying to break their precious baby.
So we shouldn't have easy-to-use tools for people to LEARN how to program?
We have that, it's called Pascal.
But no, we shouldn't give pseudo-programming tools into the hands of non-programmers for the same reason we don't put handgrenades with half the amount of explosives into the hands of non-soldiers so they can play around and learn a bit - it's dangerous.
Get off your high-and-mighty "professionals are the only ones who can do things" box.
Sorry, when it comes to software with real-world impact, professionals are the only ones who should be doing it. You wouldn't fly by plane if the aviation industries approach to piloting were like what you demand for software, would you?
VB with Access did one job and did it VERY well which was allowing anybody to build single function programs quickly and easily.
As they say: To every problem, there's a solution that is obvious, simple, easy and wrong.
I wrote in another post what a disaster Excel is, exactly because it allows every manager to create a business-logic spreadsheet - most of which are never checked for errors or boundary conditions and may fail you without even telling you that something is wrong.
I've argued here many times against this meme of "teach everyone to code a little" for the same reason that we don't teach everyone to build houses a little - because there are things in this world that need to be done either right or not at all.
With VB 6 plus Access one can whip off a program in a few hours to do anything from store and retrieve a customer's order history
With no transactional security, no protection against unintentionally changing or overwriting data, no checking for referential integrity or validity. Yes. You can absolutely create a ticking timebomb for your business to crash and burn one day.
If you're doing your home DVD collection on it - be my guest. The worst that can happen is that you'll have to actually search for a movie by hand.
But please don't advise people to run business logic on VB and Access and write the code themselves.
It's fairly trivial to learn a language at a decent level.
I assume you're already fluent in several. That's the trick why it appears easy. I know about a dozen programming languages, and for some bullshit reason needed to learn some Racket recently. Even though I never heard about it before, and have never written code in Scheme or LISP before, it took me one hour to have the first non-trivial program running and a day to do useful stuff.
But, I've also seen how people struggle with simple, friendly, idiot-proof things like Java when it's their first or second programming language. It really isn't that easy if you don't have all the experience from other languages that you can transfer. People who are learning Java, even after one or two weeks they need an hour or so to write code that will probably take you and me roughly the time it takes to type it in.
Programming is difficult, if you're not a programmer already.
The real gap is something that will empower users without putting them into danger.
Excel is an example of this approach gone wrong. If you've never been in a company that runs important business processes on spreadsheets, raise your hand. Kids and students, drop your hands. Not many left, are there?
And yet, studies have shown that a large percentage of non-trivial spreadsheets contain errors.
The difficult part in making tools is to make them so that users realize at which point they should call a professional. It's good if you can put a screw into the wall yourself or hang a picture on your own. But it's likewise clear to you that building a house is something you leave to experts, or at least get their advise on wall and floor strengths.
Computers, sadly, are not so transparent. Unless the task involves higher math, too many people think they can program a quick sales database themselves in Access or something. Only when the ceiling does fall down do they realize there's an IT equivalent of structural analysis.
So how many people in Guantanamo have had their day in court yet?
That's a good point. Let me think about it for a moment. Oh wait, my mistake. That's absolute bullshit.
Gitmo is a violation of everything that's right and proper and the fact that western countries don't embargo the USA for it, but embargo Russia for what it's doing in Ukraine speaks volumes about their moral standards or rather, lack of such.
But Gitmo has nothing to do with this discussion.
If you have discussed things in sms or email that are critical of the government, you're a suspect.
Strangely, I've been critical of my government for 20 years. Where are the black vans and why am I not in jail, if your paranoia is correct?
You want to take a punt on whether or not you can be declared an unlawful enemy combatant?
As I said, Gitmo is an abomination, but unless you're in Afghanistan or Iraq, the chance of ending up there is about equal to being struck by lightning. Twice. The same day.
GP and some commentators were closer. It's not about the extremes of the police state, it's about the small basic rights being taken away. Gitmo is less of a personal concern to any of us than, say, whether or not we can refuse to show ID to a policeman stopping us on the street for no reason.
The ruling is not phone-specific; the purpose was to search for a video that may show the defendant trying to strangle his girlfriend.
Yes, that is the particular case that started this discussion, but the GP (or GGGP or something) said that basically everyone has something on their phone that police can use against them.
I don't have videos on my phone showing me trying to strangle my girlfriend, and I'm still waiting for other examples that would support the GPs point, and they haven't been coming.
Tell me how. I've been asking for that since the first post. So far nothing but generalities and fear stories.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
Like I would use those exact words in an actual trial. Strawman.
The legal argument would point out that it's the prosecutions job to prove that John (let's give him a name) is on my friends list because he's a drug dealer and not, as I claim and can prove, because we're both in the same club and share a hobby.
If you think people haven't been sent up on cases that flimsy, you're not part of the reality-based community.
Strangely, I trust the system. Not 100%, but largely. Everyone with three working brain cells knows that innocent people get convicted sometimes and it's a scandal. However, I understand enough statistics to see not just the mistakes, but the system as a whole. Every system has mistakes. What is important is how the false positive and false negative rates are. If I am innocent, is my chance to be falsely convicted 50%, or 5%, or 0.5% ? People posting here seem to thing it's closer to 50% than to 0.5%.
Well, it turns out we're both wrong, but you more than me. This study came up with a 3.3% (or 5% depending on how you crunch the numbers) false conviction rate.
invoke you legal rights at every opportunity and keep the so-called "criminal justice" system as far away from you as possible.
Oh, absolutely. This is not a joke and if you get into trouble with the law, you should understand that it's an adversial system and from the moment they mark you as a suspect, the police is not your friend anymore.
But no need for this ridiculous paranoia, either.
Sit in court sometime and see the flimsy cases that ordinary citizens are convicted under. Judges don't laugh at cops or prosecutes -- they're all colleagues, with the same government signing their checks.
I've been to court, mostly as part of my previous job, the rest as a visitor.
You forget a detail: Yes, the judges and prosecutors are colleagues - and so is the defense lawyer. If you have sharp eyes and ears you can spot the inofficial conversation going on between these three parties. A conversation you're excluded from because you are not "one of them".
But one of those players is on your team. If you need to put words into the judges mouth, make them come through your lawyer.
We were talking about mobile phones, so let's stay on topic.
I'm quite sure there's nothing on there that would pass a giggle test. Sure, maybe I've sent some joke emails to friends that contain FBI key words, or something like that. But something that would make a prosecutor think he can make it stick, maybe? As I said: Give me ideas and I'll check. So far, the suggestions (speeding via GPS records, etc.) are just ridiculous.
And that's enough, to make your life a living hell for a certain amount of time (be it brief or long, doesn't matter).
You know this from first-hand experience or from anecdotes and hear-say?
I've had dealings with police, courts and lawyers, both professionally and privately, on both sides (though not very often as defendant). In all my life there was one event that was really stressful and that was professionally.
Maybe we life in different countries or societies, but by and large, I've not seen this "ruin your life" part actually happen in cases on the level of "they ask you if they can check your phone". They happen, but mostly in the "they break down your door and arrest you for child porn" cases. Yeah, innocent people have been convicted of the highest crimes, and that does ruin your life. That is living hell, not having to deal with the justice system over some phone records.
Again, maybe we have different experiences and backgrounds, but most of the times I've dealt with police and judges, they were professional and while the results were not always what I wanted them to be, I cannot seriously complain about their behaviour. Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe my own behaviour influences what I get back, or maybe the USA really has become this horrible police state.
At that point, if they don't find any evidence they'll just plant some.
That is a possibility, yes. But then we're talking a different game and it was not what the GP claimed.
Sure. GPS data. You sped on the way to the office. Misdemeanor.
I take public transport, and from GPS data they can't prove I was driving, I could've been a passenger. Next.
Oops, one of the guys you have in your contacts deals weed.
Not illegal to know people. I'm not responsible for what my friends do. Next.
Shit, it's easy enough to find something they can get you into the court system with. That's where the giggles end.
Sure, it's trivial to get into court. It's not so trivial to not be laughed at by the judge if you try it with approaches like yours above.
You'd be surprised how many felonies and misdemeanors they could find on your phone.
In fact, I would. Tell me more. What makes you so sure of this?
Sure they can find something that with enough creative interpretation someone could see as hinting to a crime, if they only squint strongly enough. But something that passes the giggle test? Share your wisdom.
What about the knowledge of which finger to use? Can they just try them all?
Actually, yes. I occasionally go on weekend trips and having to bring a charger quite sucks. Even at home, my girlfriend runs out of charge almost once a week. It really is a hassle.
They largely have, though maybe they wake up now.
I've been using Google Wallet for online payments for my online game (below). Adoption is minimal, PayPal beats Google Wallet payments out 10:1 or more. But more importantly, support from Google is minimal as well. Their website is a mess, their integration guides unreliable and the whole thing looks very much like something that never left beta.
Or the whole irreducible complexity deal
Which is a big strawman and there are plenty of good books out there that you can read that deal with it quite nicely. "Seven Clues to the Origin of Life" by Cairns-Smith is the first one that came to my mind and has the advantage of being very short.
when they found the fossil record doesn't show the gradual progression they predicted
You are aware of what fossils are and how astonishing it is that we manage to find so many in such good condition at all, yes? Complaining about gaps in fossil records is a little like whining that there are holes in the walls of the ruins of Pompeii.
(DNA contains lots and lots of highly organized information that doesn't just happen - if you find an encyclopedia you can safely assume someone wrote it)
If you equate DNA to an encyclopedia, you have just created an impossible-to-ever-beat world record holder for the most disorganized and messy encyclopedia. All we know points to DNA being an amazing information storage, but also one of the strongest evidences of evolution we have, because if DNA had been designed for humans, or even for mammals or heck even for species living today, the designer was incredibly drunk.
Too many hardcore Darwin supporters aren't familiar with these ideas, don't have answers for them, and get angry (instead of scientifically curious) when you ask about them.
There are stupid people everywhere, but if you bring up a valid point, you have pretty good chances that someone will check them out. However, practicioners in a field get upset when the 500th troll comes with the same stupid pseudo-argument they've already debunked hundreds of times and thinks he is entitled to being listened to.
Don't confuse becoming angry about being bothered with the same bullshit over and over again with becoming angry about the content of it.
There's actually a lot of potentional scientific correct stuff in the Bible.
If you read between the lines too much, you forget that what's written is actually the stuff on the lines.
There are many funny examples in philosophy of how you can interpret a text to mean the opposite of what the author intended, or whatever else you want.
But evidence is against you. Linguistic analysis holds strong evidence that old texts are largely literal and not metaphorical - and certainly not metaphorical in the sense of requiring twenty jumps to conclusion to arrive at a meaning. Text comparison shows that as far as we can ascertain, at that time, place and culture, if they wrote "heaven", they meant the blue thing above them with the clouds, not a parallel dimension.
Your eric-van-daeniken-esque interpretations are close to funny, but I fear you didn't mean them as satire, which a) makes me feel sad and b) proves your 2nd point wrong because it clearly demonstrates that our brains aren't really all that evolved. Or at least yours. ;-)
While it's a big step forward, it's also a step in the wrong direction.
Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator â" arguing instead that they "require it."
Nothing could be further from the truth. In this point, even the most foaming-at-the-mouth, ridiculous pathetic idiot fanatic bible-thumping young-earth creationist is intellectually ahead of the pope. The fanatics fully understand how destructive evolution is to their core ideas and that it is the ultimate destroyer of religion because it explains exactly how life including sentient life like us humans can evolve from simple chemistry, with no other influence, guidance or creation required.
His withdrawl to "initial creation" is a parlor trick at best, because it requires at least one of two things to be true, both of which we already have strong evidence of being false.
The first option would be continued "guidance" like intelligent design postulates, but on a more indirect path. Not only is there no evidence whatsoever to any of that, but at the required level of indirection, complexity theory tells us that either god can supersede quantum fluctuations and entropy, or the guidance was basically on the scale "some galaxies would be nice, and organic molecules so life can begin" - nothing even remotely resembling the god personally interested in humanity (or rather: a random small desert tribe somewhere in the middle of nowhere) that the bible paints.
The second option is determinism - that setting the proper initial conditions has to lead to the current state of affairs and that's what the dude did. There's an excellent argument made by Darwin that tears this idea apart based on complexity - basically it would require the initial state to be many orders of magnitude more complex than the current one, an inversion of entropy.
But all those are scientific arguments. The stronger argument in this case is from philosophy: Taken the church's past history of arguments and official positions, it is clear that it has never won a single argument against science. All arguments that are resolved (and not still in dispute) have always been resolved in favor of science. Throughout history, the church had to admit more and more that its previous positions were wrong and accept the scientific position. Galileo (Feyerabends argument notwithstanding) was just the most popular example. From this history, there is little reason to put any trust into the arguments where the church maintains its position. If someone had to admit being wrong again and again in the past and has never been demonstrably right, it is safe to assume the trend will continue.
And women's studies, and bunch of other "studies".
Way to do a 180 on my point.
There's a massive difference between empirical studies of "how do these strange beings we call humans work" and political pseudo-sciences (though I will gladly admit that a small part of gender studies is worth the title, unfortunately it has largely been occupied by ideologists).
Knowing at least some basics about group dynamics, cognitive bias and such things can be very useful to avoid unnecessary conflict within a group, for example. When you're barely surviving, turning your potentially random group into a functioning team is about the most important knowledge you can have.
But this is not just a survivor book. It also deals with what happens after you manage to survive.
So much is obvious just from the list of titles. It still makes no sense. Embalming has never in human history been used in a society struggling with survival. It's a luxury technique.
Also, I'm investing in a ebook reader with a eink display and a hand-cranked dynamo usb charger. Hopefully this will work long enough.
It will not. One generation is th other of magnitude of lifetime for pretty much all our current electronics. Do you think a scenario that requires this kind of library will bring society back to a state where it'll be able to have functioning printers and USB readers again? If so, the library desperately needs the specifications for USB, the ebook file format and a ton more that'll be necessary to preserve your ebook for longer than the lifetime of your setup.
Ah, what you want is a simple survival guidebook.
No, you misunderstood completely what I meant. Good editing doesn't mean short and simple. It means accessible and organized.