I think it's interesting that aside from the complaint that OOo is slow and bloated (possibly from being a Windows/UNIX hybrid), the only two complaints are:
1) no word wrap in comment boxes 2) spaces don't show up at the end of a line
Number 2 I see often in word processors in order to perform word wrap properly, so I'm not sure what he's talking about. Number 1 seems minor in comparison to the enormous bugs in Office on things as simple as page numbering and wrapping text around a picture.
Also, he doesn't consider that the restrictions on OOo code may be keeping some programmers away since they have to sign everything over to Sun.
Also, to be fair, an office suite is a giant, unweildy, unUNIXy type of program. Digging through the monsterous codebase is a high barrier to fixing a bug that may just be a minor annoyance. An office suite would have to be broken into much smaller parts in order to encourage more people to develop the software.
If you simply don't believe in a god/gods, then you are not Atheist. If you believe that there definitely is no god/gods and that all religions are wrong, then you are passing a judgement on religions using a religious belief.
Atheism is more than saying "I believe...", it is stating that "this is truth about the supernatural, and everyone else is wrong". The second is definitely a religious belief.
Atheism is a belief about something, otherwise it wouldn't have anything at all to say about God. There are really several categories of Atheist/Agnostic:
Functional Atheism: There may be a god/gods, but nothing about what I say or do changes if there is or isn't. Don't care about religions.
Evangelistic Atheism: Everyone should know there is not a god/gods, and I'm going to push it in everyone's face. All religions should be disbanded.
Weak Agnosticism: There may or may not be a god/gods, all religions sound nice and I'm not making a judgement.
Strong Agnosticism: No one can know whether there is a god/gods or not. Religions should assert no authority over any other religion.
Militant Agnosticism: No one can know whether there is a god/gods or not. All religions should be disbanded.
If your beliefs include the idea that all religions should be disbanded, then there is a strong enough religious belief to put you in the category of religion. Remember that many religions, including Christianity, are put forth by their proponents as not being a religion. We may be living in a world where everyone believes what they believe is not a religion (just the truth), and what everyone else believes is religion (or supersition, etc.).
I was thinking the exact same thing. I suppose that would be different than the terminator-style future army, or the universal-soldier style army. You instead just have the military equipment with organic brains and simple enough organs to sustain it.
Haven't you been paying attention to the Bird Flu? Just what do you think it's doing, if not evolving?
Possibly using some mechanism we haven't discovered that allowed within its particular genetic makeup to modify its genes within certain limits to adapt to different environments. Maybe it is a complex built-in mechanism we just blindly attribute to evolution. Or it could be evolution, but not in the evolved from another lower species version. I'm pretty sure we knew about inheritance and recessive traits before Darwin, and that probably would have gotten us pretty far in medical theory even if evolution never came along, or scientific discovery went a different direction.
All in all, evolution is a very tiny idea in biology, blown out of proportion for political and anti-religious purposes.
Just go back a couple of centuries, and you'll see that science today is very different from the science of the past--and not just because of the march of technology, but underlying ideas of science have been significantly altered as of late. Even today many junk science claims like homeopathic therapy get popular.
Technically both evolution and ID are dreamed up theories to replace creationism. It's just one happens to also replace a supernatural being with--something. Random mutation? Natural Selection? Panspermia? Punctuated Equilibrium? Spontaneous generation? Is there a decided-on mechanism for evolution?
Fortunately for the ToE's scientific status, there are a large number of other ways it could be falsified
Please state these ways. Every time I see a discussion on slashdot about evolution being falsifiable, it ends with really no falsification being good enough for the adherents to evolution. You just said intricately designed organisms and exquisitely balanced ecosystems could well have come through mutation and natural selection. There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record. The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period. Even the length of DNA for a small bacterium is far greater than for a human being. If none of those falsify evolution, then what would?
Each theory, evolution and intelligent design, try to predict what we will find in the realm of biology. While evolution predicts similarities between species and a general regression of complexity as one looks further into the past, it also predicts a certain lack of design.
Things like leftover parts, strange and overly complex systems, and imbalances in ecosystems should come along with a system of random mutation culled by natural selection. Anything that appears to have a design just happens to by chance--an exception to the rule. ID states that biological organisms have a design, so there is necessarily a well-engineered purpose for all organs within the body, all microstructures within a cell, all ecosystems, and even all biomolecular structures. Anything that appears to have been not-designed is the exception to the rule.
So ID and Evolution are polar opposites, but only in evolution's underlying philosophy of non-design.
In a lot of areas, all it takes is a cheap roof antenna or even rabbit ears to bring in perfect HD, so why pay for cable, anyway?
I know quite a few families who have cable only because over the air reception is fuzzy for the local stations. When I tell them that they can get a $200 box at wal-mart that gets crystal clear over the air stations, plus up to 3 extra channels per station built into the signal, they can't believe it. I'm really surprised that there are no commercials on the regular stations for ATSC set-top boxes. The only thing I hear about is satellite and cable. In fact, most people who I talk to believe that HD is *only* available on cable and satellite. I suppose those companies like it that way.
It's almost like "Atlas Shrugged", where the enemies use the main character's own virtue against them.
I would be interested in seeing a combination where Hank Rearden's character was Lex Luthor, and another "villain" was introduced, breaking Lex Luthor's traditional business sensibilities using primarily political power to muscle over Lex's business empire (This ignores Lex's later political ambitions). Now Superman has a choice: Does he side with the gov't out of a sense of patriotism even though the gov't is now changed to something more villianous? Or does he side with Lex Luthor, and the relatively less evil business world? Of course, the new villian needs Superman's image to sway public opinion, which I would imagine is naively given at first, possibly even making Lex and Superman enemies in this story for the first time.
But siding with Lex to restore the US gov't to a democratic and fair one would have Superman disavow to, or at least revise, his original ideals. I think doing so would do a lot to bring Superman to a new audience.
To clarify what I mean by "unnatural" then - it is such that by its stated nature cannot be researched by application of scientific method
ID then is science by your postulate, because you can study how well a biological organism is designed and quantify that through information theory and DNA. Just because you cannot study the cause, does not mean you cannot scientifically analyze the effects, which is why I brought up gravity earlier. Very often science sets the bar high for new theories, and for good reason, because most new theories don't hold up to scrutiny. ID is in the early stages of having new supporting evidence and reworking the older Creation philosophy to something more scientifically distinguishable. If it weren't so politically charged, I think a more mature ID theory would have quietly come about in a decade or so.
Scientists used to be primarily theistic, and discoveries in science were "exploring God's creation".
Now ID posits that life has non-evolutionary components put in place not because they are left over from past evolution, but because life is engineered precisely. Therefore, while the evolutionist stops exploring at: "this organ looks like something that served a different purpose on another creature, therefore it must be just left over from evolution". The IDer looks at the organ and says "I don't know what it does, but there must be some purpose for it." and explores further.
A little more complex than your "God works in mysterious ways" straw-man.
All origin theories, whether from evolution or ID, should be in philosophy class. That was the point the original poster wanted to make. Either they both (being philosophies) get taught in science class, or both in philosophy class. Until some final proof comes about, then one can be taught in science.
If you notice, several things that were formerly philosophies are now science. Most notably the static or dynamic nature of the universe. Whether the universe had a beginning or went on forever in the past and the future was up to whatever philosophical/religious beliefs you had. Until the redshift and CBR settled the issue.
But this is still a philosophy, and not necessarily a method. Defining science as something that should not postulate certain causes (as with methodological naturalism) is a problem because as we understand more, the "unnatural" or "supernatural" becomes accepted scientific fact.
When Faraday described the electric field as traveling in a circle, it was seen as crazy because all forces should act in straight lines--or so was believed. Also, while Gravity has been defined behaviorally, what causes it has not.
The name Intelligent Design was probably ill-chosen. It would probably be better accepted as Bio-Information Theory or some such thing that tried to quantify the complexity and signal-to-noise ratio of molecular biology. I think certain groups postulating god as the cause for ID are getting ahead of themselves. ID needs to be defined in information theory, matured, applied to things like SETI identifying a signal from background noise, and then applied to life.
If you think that's bad, look at the statistics for how many people believe aliens have visited earth in UFOs, Bigfoot roams the Pacific Northwest, and ghosts roam around in the spirit world and can talk to mediums. I think some people believing God created the world is relatively harmless compared to these.
Actually, I think the debate is more along the lines of a sort of evolution metaphilosophy, which states something like:
1) We can observe changes over generations to the point of speciation. 2) Therefore all life came about through natural observable chemical processes. 3) Therefore life needs no creator. 4) Therfore God doesn't exist.
While the first point is observable and valid, the second three veer off into philosophy-land. Point 1 isn't what is being debated in courts and schoolboards, points 2-4 are. However, not separating points 1-4 and calling it all "evolution" has served both to promote Atheism, and muddy the debate by switching meanings whenever it is expedient to do so. You get all the usual false arguments that Creationists shouldn't use medicine because it came about using Part 1. Creationists don't care about Part 1. They are fine with part 1 (except maybe the semi-arbitrary classification of a species), but proponents of the whole evolution metaphilosophy seem to always want to make the argument that Creationists deny Part 1, making them scientifically backward, dangerous, stupid, etc.
The belief of how anything outside of the universe behaves, whether it is a theoretical quantum metauniverse, God, a giant bowl of pasta, etc. is an untestable belief. Since the universe had a beginning at the Big Bang, something had to start it, and that something, being necessarily outside of the universe, cannot be tested.
The usefulness of an underlying philosophy to science is undoubtable though. The philosophy that the universe is ordered has helped aid scientific discovery (until quantum physics). The philosophy that the universe has a beginning and is constantly changing was fought against hard by the majority of the scientific community who believed in the philosophy of a relatively static universe until the data was too much for it to stand. The philosophy that evolution governs all biology has worked for quite some time, but it is a philosophy, and it is possible, like Newtonian physics, that it governs only a part of the full field. ID proposes more uniqueness and order to living organisms than evolution currently allows. As a guiding philosophy, it lives or dies on the biological discoveries in the future.
A governing philosophy to part of science should be taught, but not as a scientific fact, and a historical view of the different philosophies that have been successful and discarded would be as useful as teaching the current scientific understanding of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I was hoping it meant that the X applications survived on their own so that if the X server ever died, it wouldn't take all the apps with it.
I think it's interesting that aside from the complaint that OOo is slow and bloated (possibly from being a Windows/UNIX hybrid), the only two complaints are:
1) no word wrap in comment boxes
2) spaces don't show up at the end of a line
Number 2 I see often in word processors in order to perform word wrap properly, so I'm not sure what he's talking about. Number 1 seems minor in comparison to the enormous bugs in Office on things as simple as page numbering and wrapping text around a picture.
Also, he doesn't consider that the restrictions on OOo code may be keeping some programmers away since they have to sign everything over to Sun.
Also, to be fair, an office suite is a giant, unweildy, unUNIXy type of program. Digging through the monsterous codebase is a high barrier to fixing a bug that may just be a minor annoyance. An office suite would have to be broken into much smaller parts in order to encourage more people to develop the software.
Fill in the blank: _____ is the truth about the supernatural realm, and other beliefs are wrong.
If Atheism can fill that, (unlike agnosticism, capitalism, or optimism) then it is a religious belief.
If you simply don't believe in a god/gods, then you are not Atheist. If you believe that there definitely is no god/gods and that all religions are wrong, then you are passing a judgement on religions using a religious belief. Atheism is more than saying "I believe...", it is stating that "this is truth about the supernatural, and everyone else is wrong". The second is definitely a religious belief.
Atheism is a belief about something, otherwise it wouldn't have anything at all to say about God. There are really several categories of Atheist/Agnostic:
Functional Atheism: There may be a god/gods, but nothing about what I say or do changes if there is or isn't. Don't care about religions.
Evangelistic Atheism: Everyone should know there is not a god/gods, and I'm going to push it in everyone's face. All religions should be disbanded.
Weak Agnosticism: There may or may not be a god/gods, all religions sound nice and I'm not making a judgement.
Strong Agnosticism: No one can know whether there is a god/gods or not. Religions should assert no authority over any other religion.
Militant Agnosticism: No one can know whether there is a god/gods or not. All religions should be disbanded.
If your beliefs include the idea that all religions should be disbanded, then there is a strong enough religious belief to put you in the category of religion. Remember that many religions, including Christianity, are put forth by their proponents as not being a religion. We may be living in a world where everyone believes what they believe is not a religion (just the truth), and what everyone else believes is religion (or supersition, etc.).
I was thinking the exact same thing. I suppose that would be different than the terminator-style future army, or the universal-soldier style army. You instead just have the military equipment with organic brains and simple enough organs to sustain it.
I thought of AppleBS, but only from Jobs' keynotes
Haven't you been paying attention to the Bird Flu? Just what do you think it's doing, if not evolving?
Possibly using some mechanism we haven't discovered that allowed within its particular genetic makeup to modify its genes within certain limits to adapt to different environments. Maybe it is a complex built-in mechanism we just blindly attribute to evolution. Or it could be evolution, but not in the evolved from another lower species version. I'm pretty sure we knew about inheritance and recessive traits before Darwin, and that probably would have gotten us pretty far in medical theory even if evolution never came along, or scientific discovery went a different direction.
All in all, evolution is a very tiny idea in biology, blown out of proportion for political and anti-religious purposes.
Just go back a couple of centuries, and you'll see that science today is very different from the science of the past--and not just because of the march of technology, but underlying ideas of science have been significantly altered as of late. Even today many junk science claims like homeopathic therapy get popular.
Technically both evolution and ID are dreamed up theories to replace creationism. It's just one happens to also replace a supernatural being with--something. Random mutation? Natural Selection? Panspermia? Punctuated Equilibrium? Spontaneous generation? Is there a decided-on mechanism for evolution?
Fortunately for the ToE's scientific status, there are a large number of other ways it could be falsified
Please state these ways. Every time I see a discussion on slashdot about evolution being falsifiable, it ends with really no falsification being good enough for the adherents to evolution. You just said intricately designed organisms and exquisitely balanced ecosystems could well have come through mutation and natural selection. There are already tons of examples of complex organisms appearing out of nowhere in the fossil record. The largest animals today are smaller than in the Jurassic period. Even the length of DNA for a small bacterium is far greater than for a human being. If none of those falsify evolution, then what would?
Each theory, evolution and intelligent design, try to predict what we will find in the realm of biology. While evolution predicts similarities between species and a general regression of complexity as one looks further into the past, it also predicts a certain lack of design.
Things like leftover parts, strange and overly complex systems, and imbalances in ecosystems should come along with a system of random mutation culled by natural selection. Anything that appears to have a design just happens to by chance--an exception to the rule. ID states that biological organisms have a design, so there is necessarily a well-engineered purpose for all organs within the body, all microstructures within a cell, all ecosystems, and even all biomolecular structures. Anything that appears to have been not-designed is the exception to the rule.
So ID and Evolution are polar opposites, but only in evolution's underlying philosophy of non-design.
In a lot of areas, all it takes is a cheap roof antenna or even rabbit ears to bring in perfect HD, so why pay for cable, anyway?
I know quite a few families who have cable only because over the air reception is fuzzy for the local stations. When I tell them that they can get a $200 box at wal-mart that gets crystal clear over the air stations, plus up to 3 extra channels per station built into the signal, they can't believe it. I'm really surprised that there are no commercials on the regular stations for ATSC set-top boxes. The only thing I hear about is satellite and cable. In fact, most people who I talk to believe that HD is *only* available on cable and satellite. I suppose those companies like it that way.
It's almost like "Atlas Shrugged", where the enemies use the main character's own virtue against them.
I would be interested in seeing a combination where Hank Rearden's character was Lex Luthor, and another "villain" was introduced, breaking Lex Luthor's traditional business sensibilities using primarily political power to muscle over Lex's business empire (This ignores Lex's later political ambitions). Now Superman has a choice: Does he side with the gov't out of a sense of patriotism even though the gov't is now changed to something more villianous? Or does he side with Lex Luthor, and the relatively less evil business world? Of course, the new villian needs Superman's image to sway public opinion, which I would imagine is naively given at first, possibly even making Lex and Superman enemies in this story for the first time.
But siding with Lex to restore the US gov't to a democratic and fair one would have Superman disavow to, or at least revise, his original ideals. I think doing so would do a lot to bring Superman to a new audience.
To clarify what I mean by "unnatural" then - it is such that by its stated nature cannot be researched by application of scientific method
ID then is science by your postulate, because you can study how well a biological organism is designed and quantify that through information theory and DNA. Just because you cannot study the cause, does not mean you cannot scientifically analyze the effects, which is why I brought up gravity earlier. Very often science sets the bar high for new theories, and for good reason, because most new theories don't hold up to scrutiny. ID is in the early stages of having new supporting evidence and reworking the older Creation philosophy to something more scientifically distinguishable. If it weren't so politically charged, I think a more mature ID theory would have quietly come about in a decade or so.
Scientists used to be primarily theistic, and discoveries in science were "exploring God's creation".
Now ID posits that life has non-evolutionary components put in place not because they are left over from past evolution, but because life is engineered precisely. Therefore, while the evolutionist stops exploring at: "this organ looks like something that served a different purpose on another creature, therefore it must be just left over from evolution". The IDer looks at the organ and says "I don't know what it does, but there must be some purpose for it." and explores further.
A little more complex than your "God works in mysterious ways" straw-man.
Nah, I think in 200 years, evolution will be added to this page.
As far a staying power goes, Christianity has 2,000 years while Evolution is only up to 200.
All origin theories, whether from evolution or ID, should be in philosophy class. That was the point the original poster wanted to make. Either they both (being philosophies) get taught in science class, or both in philosophy class. Until some final proof comes about, then one can be taught in science.
If you notice, several things that were formerly philosophies are now science. Most notably the static or dynamic nature of the universe. Whether the universe had a beginning or went on forever in the past and the future was up to whatever philosophical/religious beliefs you had. Until the redshift and CBR settled the issue.
zygote ==> blastocyte.
It is exactly parallel to some essential evolutionary steps, and it happens to everyone!
Sorry to break it to you, but Recapitulation Theory has long since been discredited.
But this is still a philosophy, and not necessarily a method. Defining science as something that should not postulate certain causes (as with methodological naturalism) is a problem because as we understand more, the "unnatural" or "supernatural" becomes accepted scientific fact.
When Faraday described the electric field as traveling in a circle, it was seen as crazy because all forces should act in straight lines--or so was believed. Also, while Gravity has been defined behaviorally, what causes it has not.
The name Intelligent Design was probably ill-chosen. It would probably be better accepted as Bio-Information Theory or some such thing that tried to quantify the complexity and signal-to-noise ratio of molecular biology. I think certain groups postulating god as the cause for ID are getting ahead of themselves. ID needs to be defined in information theory, matured, applied to things like SETI identifying a signal from background noise, and then applied to life.
If you think that's bad, look at the statistics for how many people believe aliens have visited earth in UFOs, Bigfoot roams the Pacific Northwest, and ghosts roam around in the spirit world and can talk to mediums. I think some people believing God created the world is relatively harmless compared to these.
Actually, I think the debate is more along the lines of a sort of evolution metaphilosophy, which states something like:
1) We can observe changes over generations to the point of speciation.
2) Therefore all life came about through natural observable chemical processes.
3) Therefore life needs no creator.
4) Therfore God doesn't exist.
While the first point is observable and valid, the second three veer off into philosophy-land. Point 1 isn't what is being debated in courts and schoolboards, points 2-4 are. However, not separating points 1-4 and calling it all "evolution" has served both to promote Atheism, and muddy the debate by switching meanings whenever it is expedient to do so. You get all the usual false arguments that Creationists shouldn't use medicine because it came about using Part 1. Creationists don't care about Part 1. They are fine with part 1 (except maybe the semi-arbitrary classification of a species), but proponents of the whole evolution metaphilosophy seem to always want to make the argument that Creationists deny Part 1, making them scientifically backward, dangerous, stupid, etc.
The belief of how anything outside of the universe behaves, whether it is a theoretical quantum metauniverse, God, a giant bowl of pasta, etc. is an untestable belief. Since the universe had a beginning at the Big Bang, something had to start it, and that something, being necessarily outside of the universe, cannot be tested.
The usefulness of an underlying philosophy to science is undoubtable though. The philosophy that the universe is ordered has helped aid scientific discovery (until quantum physics). The philosophy that the universe has a beginning and is constantly changing was fought against hard by the majority of the scientific community who believed in the philosophy of a relatively static universe until the data was too much for it to stand. The philosophy that evolution governs all biology has worked for quite some time, but it is a philosophy, and it is possible, like Newtonian physics, that it governs only a part of the full field. ID proposes more uniqueness and order to living organisms than evolution currently allows. As a guiding philosophy, it lives or dies on the biological discoveries in the future.
A governing philosophy to part of science should be taught, but not as a scientific fact, and a historical view of the different philosophies that have been successful and discarded would be as useful as teaching the current scientific understanding of reality.
Please explain how "naturalism" can be interpreted as a method.
Doom3 Engine: ??
Well, there's Prey...