"You may not agree with saying that Religion is wrong, but there are a number of people who advance the scientific method and results, who do say that Religion is wrong."
Right, and those individual people have every right to say that (although I don't necessarily agree with them). However, the day scientific groups start actively opposing religion (eg, by requiring caveats be added to the bible or Koran) is the day I stand up and rail against them, just like I do against creationists. However, this doesn't really ever happen, does it?
"And many religous people see the mere advancement of scientific results as against religion."
Great, and if I view globes as "against" my belief the world is flat, does that mean I should be allowed to fight to prevent globes being used in geography? Or that I should be allowed to advance the theory that the world is flat (and all the seas stay on by magic) in geography lessons in school?
Science gives a viewpoint on how the world works. It's the "best" and "truest" viewpoint we know, that's all. This viewpoint isn't specifically attacking an alternative one (like Religion) - I'm very sorry if religious groups have a problem with the mere existance of alternative viewpoints, but that doesn't mean I don't think they should sit down and shut up.
The day the scientific establishment starts demanding evolution be taught in Sunday school or that caveats be inserted into the bible is the day religious groups have the slightest right to start demanding the equivalent. Not until then.
"Like it or not, you can't really have it your way, where everyone keeps their noses where they belong. Because humans just don't do that."
Scientists generally seem to do a pretty good job of not attacking religion. Many of them are religous, in one way or another. Science just tries to answer questions. If another group has a vested interest in keeping people dumb and ignorant (like it or not, that's the effect of attacking or preventing scientific advance), why should they be allowed to advance their agenda at the expense of the rest of humanity?
"I've read before that everything in matter is both particle and wave, much the same was as a photon. It's just not as readily apparent as it is in a photon. If you take it this way, then heck, the same explaination that I gave for the double-slit experiment for a photon would work for an electron, or any other individualized piece of matter. Without the need for a superstate of possibilities."
As I explained, your understanding of QM is flawed - a photon is a "wave-packet" of light, true, but it's an indivisible packet. Photons, by definition, can't be subdivided - hence they can't be in two places at once. The only way (according to mainstream scientific thinking) is if they exist in a superposition of states and interfere with themselves.
I'm not saying you can't come up with an alternative theory, but until you:
(i) Show you have even a basic understanding of the details of quantum mechanics (ii) Advance a theory with one hundredth the evidence in favour of it, or (iii) Advance a theory with one hundredth the support in the scientific community QM has,
I think I'll go with all the thousands of guys with the PhDs and who do this for a living. It always blows me away when people reject mainstream scientific theories, when they obviously don't even understand them fully. "It looks wrong at first glance" is not a valid assessment - remember, so does "the earth goes around the sun".
"There exists no reason to believe in Quantum Mechanics. It's an accurate model for representing the quantum world, and I take it as such. But that doesn't mean it's the Truth, any more than the Newtonian Model which is highly accurate for non-relativistic physics."
Right. So do you agree it's the best model or not? Are you changing your mind? Have I just been trolled? All I've ever said wa
I went to Essex (BSc and MSc), and while Owen Holland (who I was taught by for MSc) is great, and the CompSci and ESE departments churn out a lot of cool research, I wouldn't advise anyone to go there for undergrad work.
Why? Let's just say the university authorities haven't grasped why treating "undergraduate students" as "consumers" is inherently wrong. University should be about getting out, exploring life and extending your horizons. The UG CompSci programme has a distressing tendency to induct you, throw learning at you for three years, then chuck you out the other end - they seemed completely uninterested in you except as a statistic to push their yearly number of passes up.
I actually had lecturers who made themselves "available" for an hour a week outside of lectures (between maybe 200 students), when/if they could be bothered to attend, or who refused to explain badly-worded assignments, then knocked off marks if people mis-understood.
This is also a university with an unusually high proportion of foreign students (meaning the *majority* of people don't have english as a first language), so outside-lecture support is even more important.
Don't get me wrong - there are some very, very good, dedicated and caring lecturers there, but they tend to get drowned out by the general "corporate" culture.
As I said, I had a great time as a postgrad, but the undergrad scheme is basically high school over again, but with legal drinking.
Maybe in the US, but here in the UK we're refreshingly clear of unnecessary terrorist paranoia.
Might be because we don't currently have a large, powerful right-wing coalition bent on dominating the entire political process, who needs a constant state of paranoia and fear to create the climate in which they can fulfill their orwellian wet-dreams (it's our "left"-wing party now)...
Or possibly just that we sensibly got all that expansionist empire-building crap out of our systems a hundred years ago, before all the little brown people we were bombing, gassing and shooting had the technology to get back at us.
Because unfortunately all patent applications are full of mumbo-jumbo. And it takes a technically-skilled person to tell whether it makes no sense or not.
Mind you, that said, there must be scope for a simple unbiased jury-of-peers approach? Register to be a patent advisor (volunteer work or for a small stipend), and each time a patent comes in they randomly select five people off the list with expertise in the area and send them the application.
If three or more agree it's new, non-obvious and patentable then the application goes ahead for formal review, otherwise it's rejected with a good explanation why (like "Because it's functionally identical to X", or "Because we've had The Wheel for a number of years now", or "Because it's a Business Model not an Invention, you corrupt, IP-grabbing patent-subverting fuck-tard").
Obviously you've have to be careful to have safeguards the jury *were* unbiased (eg, drawn from different companies from the one applying for the patent, no registering of patents in the same area as one they've adjudicated on for a period of X years (etc), but surely it's possible?
"Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail.'""
Is this the normal "no user-serviceable parts inside" caveat, or does it suggest that they, in fact, haven't released all the modifications to GPLed code in their product?
Nah. For my money this is just a variation on the old "Slashdot sucks because X never used to happen in the old days" meme.;-)
The best bit is that "the old days" can be anywhere from "1997" to "last week". And people were calling the memes (and the idea of them) old hat in 1997, too (don't let the re-registered high UID fool you;-p).
But yeah, slashmemes are very self-conscious and a bit contrived, but that's what you get with an in-joke in an environment like this - either it dies on its arse or eventually everyone's heard it, and it becomes a bit of a cliche. Then everyone stops using it, and everyone forgets it. Then, occasionally, someone will re-use it, and it's funny again, sometimes prompting someone else to start using it again. Rinse and repeat.
Still, it doesn't stop me laughing when I see a particularly good one, as long as it's been long enough that it's truly unexpected. And isn't about F#£^ing Natalie Portman and hot grits.
The GP was responding to an AC post that got (slightly unfairly) modded down to 0 (Troll), so you (presumably) didn't see it. That post was questioning the value of selling DVDs, on the basis that Fox is a broadcasting network.
This is obviously bad reasoning (you can still make a shitload off DVDs regardless of your primary business method), so the GP post was correcting it.
Remember kids, check your comment-indentations and browsing karma limits before assuming anything about a conversation...
"But I still don't see any reason to tell a kid that his parents are wrong because they believe in creationism."
Nor do I, but when was that suggested in the conversation? This whole thing is about Religion impinging on Science's territory, not Science "disproving" Religion. As far as I'm concerned people can believe the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't start fucking with the education of a generation to further their (illogical, unproveable, minority) beliefs.
"Personally, I think that belief in religion is beyond a true/false mentality. There's just no point in attempting to prove it either way, since religion serves a purpose besides explaination of the universe to me."
Indeed. I consider myself a relatively spiritual person (just not of any particular denomination), and always try to respect beliefs I don't share (assuming they don't turn out to be completely insane). However, I also respect that Religion has a very definite "turf", and it should stick to it. Ethics, morality and the human condition? No problem. Advancing theories to explain how the real, physical universe works? No Fucking Way.
"Anyways. The description that I read myself of the double slit experiment is that in fact actually the photon is (as we will all agree) both a particle and a wave. This particle is such like a "wave packet". A grouping of waves that are restricted more or less together into a single particle group. "
Indeed - photons are both particle and waves, so they do exhibit properties of each. However, you seem to be working under a misaprehension - a quantum of light (a photon) is indivisible. That's basically the definition of a photon - an indivisible amount of light. This is why it exhibits particle-like qualities at all, because it's effectively a classical indivisible body, and why the double-slit experiment reinforces quantum mechanics - the photon is indivisible, so (classically) it should be impossible for it to pass through both slits at the same time (recall that the slits are separated by a gap many times the wavelength of the photon).
Also, if you read my post you'd see I specifically mention that it also works with single particles of matter (eg electrons), which are (supposedly) matter, not a wave.
The only way to explain this (or rather, the only way science currently can) is that the electron must also exhibit wave-like properties, and the only way it can do this is if it's in a quantum superposition of states. When it's superposed, the electron can be thought of as a wave, with a bell-curve-shaped hump in the middle. The height of the wave at any point represents the probability that the electron will be at that point when the state of superposition collapses.
It's important to notice that (as with a bell-curve) the wave's ends are asymptotic to zero, so it technically stretches the width of the universe. This means that when the wave collapses to a point, the electron could in fact be anywhere along that line. Although in practice the chances of this are so vanishingly small (the height of the wave is vanishingly close to zero for all but a tiny area) that it rarely "moves" far from where you expect it to be, it does allow for quantum tunneling, where the electron appears to tunnel through solid objects.
"Again, I believe quite similarly to Einstein. God doesn't play dice to the universe. The notion that the order and regularity that we experience can be built upon pure instability is ludacrous to me."
Ah, so you don't believe in quantum mechanics? Why? I'll admit it's counter-intuitive, but then so is the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Read up on it, understand it, and it
"Yet you support teaching children giraffes evolved to have long necks from reaching for high food"
The theory, yes. Evolution is our current best theory as to why Giraffe's have long necks. It's certainly heaps better than a fait-accompli Just-So story. "They're like that because God made them like that" basically boils down to "they're like that because that's what they're like" - it doesn't tell us a single thing about how, or really why.
As I said, I don't have a problem with the idea of Intelligent Design (as long as it doesn't pretend to be science), but it's starting to sound like you're arguing for proper Creationism here...
"embryos have gills"
No, but they do have precursor structures that, had we not evolved since then, would go on to form gills. If you don't buy the idea of embyonic development or evolutionary holdovers, why do we have a coccyx? Or an appendix? And why do men have nipples?
"amino acids can be produced in unnatural environments and magically be placed in a natural environment and live, the list is actually much bigger."
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here with "natural" and "unnatural", but I would note that, for example, small lumps of matter are individually uninteresting and well-understood, but get enough of them together and they "magically" clump into balls. Some even "magically" ignite into a billion-year nuclear furnaces, which attract and warm up other balls. With a large enough number of bodies, this simple set-up alone can give rise to systems so "magically" complex that we sometimes stillcan't accurately predict where or how they will move. "A large enough number" in this case is three.
Just because we don't understand it, doesn't make it magical.
"Wow, I really don't understand the standard used to preach macro evolution in schools when all the evidence being found in DNA research and the Genome project are refuting the possibility of macro evolution."
With the greatest respect, this indicates some incredibly selective reading on your part. You offered one paper in favour of ID (which, IIRC, "proved" nothing beyond "we don't (currently) know how X works"), and was based around a well-known logical fallacy. Read the overwhelming majority of mainstream, respected scientific literature and "all the evidence" is pointing quite the other way.
"Maybe what is happening is the people that are intimately involved with the latest research are saying enough is enough, let's get it strait and quit using our school system to attack people's personal belief systems with false science."
Indeed they are. Which is why so many people are up in arms about Creationists interfering with the teaching of Science. You'll note the relative paucity of major scientific figures pushing the ID (and certainly Creationist) agenda in this debate.
"BTW - I would say proving protocells cannot produce complex cells is pretty significant"
But he didn't - the entire paper relied on a logical fallacy, as I explained to you.
"If I understand what is happening in the Genome project, which I might not, they need to finish mapping all the various complex cell reproductions of bacteria and then they will actually have and answer as to the possibility or impossibility of macro evolution."
Again, with respect that's a complete non-sequiteur. The HGP won't prove or disprove evolution one way or the other. It might help us to understand evolution better, and it'll certainly provide additional evidence for sucessive development through generations, but it won't definitively answer the argument one way or the other.
I don't want to descend to the level of insults, but you do rather appear to be graphically demonstrating the assertion that the only people who believe in Creationism are those that don't understand evolution, or science.
Maybe, but looking over TFA, as a webmaster with experience in SEO (don't look at me - job description "evolved" drastically between interviews and starting, and I stay defiantly white-hat) this seems to do an awful lot to get rid of the scummier end of the SEO spectrum.
Link-swapping programs? Dead - Google now takes into account the trust level of the sites linking to you, as well as how quickly you garner links, so any sudden jumps in links from low-trust sites (like those run by SEO types) will impact against you. It also means that a site will have to link to you for a while before you'll get the full benefit of their "vote" - 1-week or 1-month link-swaps won't do anything anymore.
Disposable domains/gateway pages? Dead - Google now takes into account how long your domain's been registered when assigning trust scores. It also considers whether your domain (or even IP, IIRC) hosts other, known spammer sites. Oh, and apparently it even checks for frequent changes in your DNS contact details, again to weed out the disposable jack-in-the-box domains that unethical SEOs create, use to boost sites' in-bound links, then remove.
Re-tasking of existing high-PR pages? Dead - Google now watches for sudden "subject changes" on a page, and knocks the trust rank if it finds them. This prevents SEOs building up a useful, high-PR/trust page then retasking it as a source of high-PR links.
Obviously you'll have to read TFA for all the details, but after looking over it it strikes me that the only working techniques left are basically fresh content, accessible+validated markup, links from high-trust sites, steady growth and all the other things that basically make a site good for users (and rule out unethical SEO).
It might make my job slightly harder, but from a philosophical point of view, nice job Google!
Fair point on "Einstein believing in God", but that's a very different claim from "him not believing in Newtonian Mechanics". My point was that if you disparage scientific theory in favour of non-scientific ideas, you only do harm. Skepticism in science is good, but that's very different from rejecting well-supported scientific theories in favour of unproveable philosophical or religious arguments.
"Fact is that people can work on Evolution, and Physics and explainations to the creation of the universe, while still believing that God did it."
And I have no problem with that. I don't (well, only occasionally, in the heat of debate) dislike or even disapprove of the idea of Intelligent Design - as we both agree, it's Philosophy, not Science. My problem is when (as with the Creationists in this case) people knock Science in favour of Philosophy - this seems deeply wrong to me, since often the only difference between Science and Philosophy/Religion is that Science has the requirement that it be sanity-checked against observations, whereas Philosophy can (often) romp free of accountability.
If people want to teach ID in Religious Education, it's fine. But they shouldn't be allowed to push a pro-religious agenda in Science, at least not unless we apply the same caveats to the Bible - maybe stickers on the front of all Bibles, stating "This is merely the unsupported opinion of unknown authors, not educated in logic or the scientific method".
This is clearly an anti-religious step, and most people would view it as over-the-top. Why, then, is it ok for religious groups to require the same of science books?
"So, don't think that quantum mechanics has quasi-particles that are actually undefined in size and position until observed, we just can't actually know the size or position until observed, which damages the other."
Actually, that's not true. If you read the literature, the current theory is that the particle literally doesn't have a defined position or velocity until one is measured - see Young's Double-Slits Experiement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experime nt#The_thought_experiment) for more info. The write-up above talks about photons, but YDSE also works for quantum particles of "matter" (eg, it's been done with electrons), and the same results are observed - the particle travels through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself. Obviously, it can only do this in a quantum superposition of states, not as a classical particle.
There's also the Copenhagen Interpretation, which (IIRC) says that for any non-trivial quantum system interference with external stimuli very quickly collapses the waveform, but the principle still stands that if you can perfectly insulate a system from all external stimuli, it will persist in a state of indeterminacy forever.
This is also why we talk about "a state of indeterminacy", rather than "unknown state". The state is unknown, but only because the particle has no discrete, determinable state at that point, not even "one we just don't know".
"I'd rather be told, "this is the model we present, it explains a lot, but it doesn't explain a lot also. But for now, we're working within this model.""
That's a fair point, and as an adult I'd agree with you, but I still think you'll confuse kids. How old are you when you first hear about evolution? 6? 7? I don't think kids that age are capable of making that fine a distinction - young kids tend to view things in terms of black and white, and this kind of "good but not right" would just get interpreted as "wrong". Mix in Mum & Dad's "certainty" about the Creationist/Fundamentalist alternative, and you raise another generation of people who neither agree with nor understand evolution.
"Like, take the sticker that was ordered to be removed from those books... "This book presents evolution as fact, but it is important to realize that it is a theory and should be critically considered.""
Yes, evolution is a theory, and yes, it should always be considered critically, but do you really think that was the motive behind the campaign for the stickers, or do you think it was just to weaken the perception of evolution to make way for the alternative "explanation"?
People do tend to get hot-and-bothered over the issue, but to be fair you choose possibly the single allowable example of the creationist/ID camp. What about forcing science teachers to teach creationism alongside evolution? Hounding and harassing the same teachers? Agitating for political changes to further their agenda?
"Let's take us back 100 years, to before Einstein published his works on relativity... "This book presents the newtonian model of the universe as fact, but it is important to realize that it is a theory, and should be critically considered." The physicists would in general be up in arms, screaming and shouting, that the Newtonian Model is the best we have."
Yes, because if we teach Science, as opposed to whatever wishy-washy intellectually-fashionable, culturally-approved-of crap it's trendy to believe in today, the Best Model will win out. It may take time, and it might have to prove itself over and over, but that's the strength of science - if we have a good explanation, the next one to come along has to do as-good or better a job of explaning observed phenomena to be adopted.
Interfering with this process by means of political or educational manipulation slows the process and creates doubt where (reasonably) there shouldn't be any.
Obviously one should always keep an open mind about scientific theories, but we're talking about teaching kids here. When learning physics, do you start off with full-strength quantum mechanics and probability-graphs of particle-position theory? No, you start off with the "atoms as marbles" explanation, then refine it to "atoms as tiny solar systems". It's only once you've got the basic idea that you start getting the actual, important, detailed, confusing version (atoms as collections of particles too small to see, which in fact don't have defined positions until you look at them, at which point they retroactively decide on a position which is probably here, but may be as far away as the other side of the universe, which, BTW, is both infinite and expanding).
You start off with the full-on perfectly "true" explanation and you'll never learn anything. Terry Pratchett calls this "Lies-to-children" - simplified explanations you know to be incomplete, but which lead you towards the correct and full explanation.
Likewise (to bring this back to the topic at hand), if the first fact kids learn about evolution is "this may all be bullshit", you've got a generation of kids who'll (i) pay even less attention in class than before (and so be less likely to ever understand it, just the way ID proponents often don't), and (ii) be primed to accept ID as an alternative explanation, "because Mum & Dad are certain it's right, and even teacher told us how evolution might be rubbish".
"Einstein is known to have been highly critical of theories and explainations for the world. He didn't take anything on a "because I said so" basis. He considered everything critically and came to accurate beliefs."
And do you think Einstein:
Never learned Newtonian mechanics first?
Learned from books that had a big "Newtonian mechanics may be incorrect" sticker on it?
Had parents at home constantly pushing a bogus religious non-explanation on him?
No, clearly he was raised believing the dominant model, then decided to investigate on his own and produced a better one. Imagine he'd never learned the Best Model first - he's been told effectively "Shut up, God did it all, go and read your bible/Torah/whatever". Would he still have got become fascinated with science and still got into physics, or would he still be a patent clerk, who believed a big beard in the sky made the whole world in six days?
I dispute that - I think it'll be a great example of evolution.
The rest of the educated world will carry on learning evolution and other current best scientific theories. Our society and culture will advance, our technology will progress and we and our children will prosper in an atmosphere of rationality and freedom.
Kansas will devolve into a state where new ideas are banned, technology regresses and anything that contradicts the "Big Beard In The Sky" theory is first repressed, then outlawed. The people will grow up stupid and ignorant, to raise even more stupid and ignorant kids. Eventually the vicious cycle will spiral on down, until the populace is exclusively composed of barely-intelligent hominids, eventually losing the powers of speech and fire.
At this point we'll stop recognising them as human, and we can hunt and kill them for food. Eventually Homo Kansasians will effectively die out in the wild, out-competed by more intellectual wild animals or hunted into extinction by Homo Sapiens. Oh, alright, some small bedraggled breeding colonies might survive in zoos, and may eventually be Uplifted to normal human cognition again, but as a wild species they'll be extinct.
It may seem odd, but to my mind the new definition is actually a step forward for evolution:
Old "seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us,"
"Seeking explanations" says nothing about how probably or sensible they have to be, or how you go about the seeking. "I threw yarrow stalks ito the air, and they indicated the universe was sneezed into being by the Great Green Arkleseizure" is covered under this definition. Hey, I'm seeking, and "natural" is a terribly wishy-washy cop-out word.
New "continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena"
This more or less explicitely lays out the Scientific Method (thus neatly ruling out faith-based beliefs). Note also that it specifies "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building..." - to my mind, this means that any approach which excludes one of more of these isn't Science. Were this not the case, it would be "... logical argument or theory building".
In addition, the new definition of science contains the word "hypothesis". To be a hypothesis an idea must be falsifiable - otherwise it's "just" a theory.
Creationism and Intelligent design moves ultimate responsibility for the creation of the universe completely outside of human ken, and as such is impossible to falsify (just like you can't prove the door behind you exists without directly or indirectly observing it. Given this, ID or creationism can't ever advance hypotheses, and so are unavoidably excluded from "Science", by this definition.
Of course, this definition will doubtless be abused by creationist fuckwits who don't understand the precise meaning of "hypothesis", but for anyone who properly understands the language they're speaking, it's pretty cut-and-dried, no?
If this is true, it soothes my paranoia hugely. Unless, of course, you believe www.googlewatch.com about Google's ties to the NSA, etc;-)
However, I can't help but doubt it - wouldn't this unusual step have disasterously affected Google's share price in their IPO? I know nothing about stocks and shares, but surely non-voting shares are only worth a fraction of voting stock? And Google still seemed to be fighting potential buyers off with a stick, in spite of Wall St's best efforts.
"Not you elemental23, but someone also mentioned Google has complete access to people's email with gmail. And you don't think Yahoo, HotMail, LinuxMail, etc., etc. don't have this same access, come on."
Granted, and I can deal with a company being able to read my mail. I can also deal with another separate company knowing what I search on, etc, etc.
But when it's one company that can read my e-mail, knows what I search on, knows what I search my local machine for, knows what I shop for, knows what map areas I look at (highly likely to be places I live/I'm visiting), and knows every page I browse on the net (and that's all they know currently), that makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
Here in the UK your mother's maiden name is a relatively useless piece of information, as is your National Insurance Number (SSN) or bank account number, but get any two of those pieces of information together, and identity-theft is relatively trivial.
In data-mining, the value of the information rises exponentially with the quantity of data, not linearly. It's all in the cross-referencing between separate data sources, not the data itself.
But the key thing here, you might say, is that God hasn't ever sent me 250 spam messages advertising "V1AGR4!!!!1!!!11!!! 4 J00!!!!!1!" in a single day.
Companies have.
(Nice attempt at a troll, BTW, but faaaar too obvious).
Much as I hate to come off as a member of the tinfoil hat brigade, Google is making me increasingly uneasy with the way they present and implement a lot of their offerings...
So far at least, Google has arguably successfully Done No Evil - they've offered a great search site, extended their great search system to the desktop, embedded it into browsers for convenience, offered webmail with unprecedented storage space and lovely features, and even revitalised the online advertising industry away from obnoxious graphical banners and popups towards relevant, discrete and unobtrusive text ads.
However, against this background of saintly behaviour, the potential for great evil lurks. Take the Google Search cookie not expiring until 2038 - there is no reason whatsoever for this, apart from to make it easy to track your searching habits. Of course, they could just do this by aggregating all queries that hit their servers, but that wouldn't uniquely identify you down to your specific machine, would it?
Take GMail - it's a lovely idea, and a lovely system, but it does mean that (theoretically), Google now has unfettered access to your entire inbox, and all the personal information therein. They also make a big deal of how you "never have to delete anything ever again" - handy for users maybe, but definitely handy if you're interested in data-mining vast volumes of personal information.
Google Desktop Search is a lovely tool (and very handy), but it does have an annoying (and downplayed) habit (IIRC) of by default echoing any local searches you make to Google, so it can return lists of "web" and "desktop" matches. Not such a big deal, unless you're searching your local machine for, oh, I dunno... company credit card details? Passwords? Rarely-used logins? Where you left the downloaded "Hot XXX teen sluts.mpeg"? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now look at the Google Web Accelerator - not only your searches, but now every single page you visit (and even some you don't - are these differentiated between?) passes through Google's systems. Fair play to them for excluding HTTPS requests, but in all fairness they couldn't ever have got away with caching those as well anyway.
At this point, (assuming you use Google and don't take regular tinfoil-hat precautions like clearing cookies/deleting old mail/never searching your local machine for anything private/etc), Google potentially has access to:
Your e-mail, including headers, full text and all your contacts.
The text of every search you ever made, both on the web and on your local machine.
The address and full text of every web page you ever visit.
Hmmm.
I have to stress here that I severely doubt there's any kind of deliberate conspiracy going on. For my money this is just a case of a bunch of overenthusiastic geeks with access to a huge database to mine, who are too busy having fun to write privacy policies because "we'd never do anything bad anyway, and people know that".
However, this still doesn't mean that it's a good thing - power corrupts, and Google now has one hell of a lot of power. Even if Larry, Serge et al stay true to their vision, Google's a public company now - it only takes the board to fire L&S and replace them with a marketing puppet and all of a sudden your trust in Google isn't worth shit - they hold all the cards, and they've got your entire life written on them.
In addition, this getting carried away with where they're going, and not listening to user-opinion is exactly the kind of attitude that is most publicly (and damagingly) exhibited by Microsoft. It's a small step from not taking five minutes to assuage people's concerns to not taking five seconds to even consider them. Both attitudes exhibit a certain "I know better than you" arrogance, one which tends to only get worse with time, and the more people start complaining about it, the worse it tends to get.
This seem like a giant leap backward to me. Everything I've ever read seems to suggest that micropayments are the way forward (pay for what you use - hell, I'd certainly like it), and here the NYT are moving to a less granular pricing model.
Subscriptions are stupid, because unless you're going to use $50/year you aren't going to bother taking out a subscription, and will instead go elsewhere. Subscriptions force you to make a choice: am I "A NYT Subscriber" or not? If I'm just dropping by the NYT site (eg, from a random newsblog link), I'm not going to fork out a $50.00 subscription to view a single article. Could I view that same single article for, say, $0.25, I'd happily pay it.
Affordable (and truly micro) micropayments allow you to use what you want, when you want, so you can "impulse-buy" information however you want. Subscriptions force you to enter into a long-term commitment, and as such will be avoided liek the plague by everyone apart from those who likely *already* have a NYT subscription (a much smaller subset of users).
Ok, $3.00 per article is hardly micropayments, but if I were NYT I'd be looking to move towards MPs, rather than away from them. It does look like they're confusing "overpricing their content" with "the failure of their whole approach".
"Corporations in the real world don't tolerate unsecure boxen, why should the school? Students will learn VERY quick not to cross you."
Hmmm. Either my university (and those of most of my colleagues) were unusually lax, or you haven't been on a campus network much.
The overwhelming majority of uni accommodation networks I've seen/heard of have been incredibly lax on security. I'm not sure if it's a funding problem (can't afford decent kit/sysadmins), or if its a fundamental campus-culture issue, but I have yet to even hear about a properly-secured network.
TBH, after four years at my old university, I pretty much assumed the will wasn't there - you can either lock down every box and every setting and hound insecure users until they conform, or you can not have to deal with a permenent 300-person queue in the computing service dept, and get away by 16:00 every evening.
Fundamentally, I think uni sysadmins can't be bothered with the hassle. If student users can't be bothered to clean up their own shit, I think they leave them to it - just whack a massive firewall between uni and accommodation networks, and leave them to stew in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, I forgot that bit. "If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you're a terrorist", eh GW?
. php/t-7305.html
http://www.whistlestopper.com/forum/archive/index
"You may not agree with saying that Religion is wrong, but there are a number of people who advance the scientific method and results, who do say that Religion is wrong."
Right, and those individual people have every right to say that (although I don't necessarily agree with them). However, the day scientific groups start actively opposing religion (eg, by requiring caveats be added to the bible or Koran) is the day I stand up and rail against them, just like I do against creationists. However, this doesn't really ever happen, does it?
"And many religous people see the mere advancement of scientific results as against religion."
Great, and if I view globes as "against" my belief the world is flat, does that mean I should be allowed to fight to prevent globes being used in geography? Or that I should be allowed to advance the theory that the world is flat (and all the seas stay on by magic) in geography lessons in school?
Science gives a viewpoint on how the world works. It's the "best" and "truest" viewpoint we know, that's all. This viewpoint isn't specifically attacking an alternative one (like Religion) - I'm very sorry if religious groups have a problem with the mere existance of alternative viewpoints, but that doesn't mean I don't think they should sit down and shut up.
The day the scientific establishment starts demanding evolution be taught in Sunday school or that caveats be inserted into the bible is the day religious groups have the slightest right to start demanding the equivalent. Not until then.
"Like it or not, you can't really have it your way, where everyone keeps their noses where they belong. Because humans just don't do that."
Scientists generally seem to do a pretty good job of not attacking religion. Many of them are religous, in one way or another. Science just tries to answer questions. If another group has a vested interest in keeping people dumb and ignorant (like it or not, that's the effect of attacking or preventing scientific advance), why should they be allowed to advance their agenda at the expense of the rest of humanity?
"I've read before that everything in matter is both particle and wave, much the same was as a photon. It's just not as readily apparent as it is in a photon. If you take it this way, then heck, the same explaination that I gave for the double-slit experiment for a photon would work for an electron, or any other individualized piece of matter. Without the need for a superstate of possibilities."
As I explained, your understanding of QM is flawed - a photon is a "wave-packet" of light, true, but it's an indivisible packet. Photons, by definition, can't be subdivided - hence they can't be in two places at once. The only way (according to mainstream scientific thinking) is if they exist in a superposition of states and interfere with themselves.
I'm not saying you can't come up with an alternative theory, but until you:
(i) Show you have even a basic understanding of the details of quantum mechanics
(ii) Advance a theory with one hundredth the evidence in favour of it, or
(iii) Advance a theory with one hundredth the support in the scientific community QM has,
I think I'll go with all the thousands of guys with the PhDs and who do this for a living. It always blows me away when people reject mainstream scientific theories, when they obviously don't even understand them fully. "It looks wrong at first glance" is not a valid assessment - remember, so does "the earth goes around the sun".
"There exists no reason to believe in Quantum Mechanics. It's an accurate model for representing the quantum world, and I take it as such. But that doesn't mean it's the Truth, any more than the Newtonian Model which is highly accurate for non-relativistic physics."
Right. So do you agree it's the best model or not? Are you changing your mind? Have I just been trolled? All I've ever said wa
Nah, you don't.
I went to Essex (BSc and MSc), and while Owen Holland (who I was taught by for MSc) is great, and the CompSci and ESE departments churn out a lot of cool research, I wouldn't advise anyone to go there for undergrad work.
Why? Let's just say the university authorities haven't grasped why treating "undergraduate students" as "consumers" is inherently wrong. University should be about getting out, exploring life and extending your horizons. The UG CompSci programme has a distressing tendency to induct you, throw learning at you for three years, then chuck you out the other end - they seemed completely uninterested in you except as a statistic to push their yearly number of passes up.
I actually had lecturers who made themselves "available" for an hour a week outside of lectures (between maybe 200 students), when/if they could be bothered to attend, or who refused to explain badly-worded assignments, then knocked off marks if people mis-understood.
This is also a university with an unusually high proportion of foreign students (meaning the *majority* of people don't have english as a first language), so outside-lecture support is even more important.
Don't get me wrong - there are some very, very good, dedicated and caring lecturers there, but they tend to get drowned out by the general "corporate" culture.
As I said, I had a great time as a postgrad, but the undergrad scheme is basically high school over again, but with legal drinking.
Maybe in the US, but here in the UK we're refreshingly clear of unnecessary terrorist paranoia.
Might be because we don't currently have a large, powerful right-wing coalition bent on dominating the entire political process, who needs a constant state of paranoia and fear to create the climate in which they can fulfill their orwellian wet-dreams (it's our "left"-wing party now)...
Or possibly just that we sensibly got all that expansionist empire-building crap out of our systems a hundred years ago, before all the little brown people we were bombing, gassing and shooting had the technology to get back at us.
Now? Oh, you know... bygones.
Because unfortunately all patent applications are full of mumbo-jumbo. And it takes a technically-skilled person to tell whether it makes no sense or not.
Mind you, that said, there must be scope for a simple unbiased jury-of-peers approach? Register to be a patent advisor (volunteer work or for a small stipend), and each time a patent comes in they randomly select five people off the list with expertise in the area and send them the application.
If three or more agree it's new, non-obvious and patentable then the application goes ahead for formal review, otherwise it's rejected with a good explanation why (like "Because it's functionally identical to X", or "Because we've had The Wheel for a number of years now", or "Because it's a Business Model not an Invention, you corrupt, IP-grabbing patent-subverting fuck-tard").
Obviously you've have to be careful to have safeguards the jury *were* unbiased (eg, drawn from different companies from the one applying for the patent, no registering of patents in the same area as one they've adjudicated on for a period of X years (etc), but surely it's possible?
Any takers?
"Do not replace or add any software to the DISH 921 DVR with items compiled from these source trees. Doing so will void all warranties and cause the unit to fail.'""
Is this the normal "no user-serviceable parts inside" caveat, or does it suggest that they, in fact, haven't released all the modifications to GPLed code in their product?
No danger of that here though, eh? ;-p
Nah. For my money this is just a variation on the old "Slashdot sucks because X never used to happen in the old days" meme. ;-)
;-p).
The best bit is that "the old days" can be anywhere from "1997" to "last week". And people were calling the memes (and the idea of them) old hat in 1997, too (don't let the re-registered high UID fool you
But yeah, slashmemes are very self-conscious and a bit contrived, but that's what you get with an in-joke in an environment like this - either it dies on its arse or eventually everyone's heard it, and it becomes a bit of a cliche. Then everyone stops using it, and everyone forgets it. Then, occasionally, someone will re-use it, and it's funny again, sometimes prompting someone else to start using it again. Rinse and repeat.
Still, it doesn't stop me laughing when I see a particularly good one, as long as it's been long enough that it's truly unexpected. And isn't about F#£^ing Natalie Portman and hot grits.
The GP was responding to an AC post that got (slightly unfairly) modded down to 0 (Troll), so you (presumably) didn't see it. That post was questioning the value of selling DVDs, on the basis that Fox is a broadcasting network.
This is obviously bad reasoning (you can still make a shitload off DVDs regardless of your primary business method), so the GP post was correcting it.
Remember kids, check your comment-indentations and browsing karma limits before assuming anything about a conversation...
"Joss Whedon wrote Alien: Resurrection"
:-p
Way to recommend it, dude...
James
I don't know why, but I read this an another slashmeme-in-the-making:
In Soviet Russia, X Ys YOU!
In Korea, only old people X!
In Kansas, X is illegal!
"But I still don't see any reason to tell a kid that his parents are wrong because they believe in creationism."
Nor do I, but when was that suggested in the conversation? This whole thing is about Religion impinging on Science's territory, not Science "disproving" Religion. As far as I'm concerned people can believe the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure, as long as they keep it to themselves and don't start fucking with the education of a generation to further their (illogical, unproveable, minority) beliefs.
"Personally, I think that belief in religion is beyond a true/false mentality. There's just no point in attempting to prove it either way, since religion serves a purpose besides explaination of the universe to me."
Indeed. I consider myself a relatively spiritual person (just not of any particular denomination), and always try to respect beliefs I don't share (assuming they don't turn out to be completely insane). However, I also respect that Religion has a very definite "turf", and it should stick to it. Ethics, morality and the human condition? No problem. Advancing theories to explain how the real, physical universe works? No Fucking Way.
"Anyways. The description that I read myself of the double slit experiment is that in fact actually the photon is (as we will all agree) both a particle and a wave. This particle is such like a "wave packet". A grouping of waves that are restricted more or less together into a single particle group.
"
Indeed - photons are both particle and waves, so they do exhibit properties of each. However, you seem to be working under a misaprehension - a quantum of light (a photon) is indivisible. That's basically the definition of a photon - an indivisible amount of light. This is why it exhibits particle-like qualities at all, because it's effectively a classical indivisible body, and why the double-slit experiment reinforces quantum mechanics - the photon is indivisible, so (classically) it should be impossible for it to pass through both slits at the same time (recall that the slits are separated by a gap many times the wavelength of the photon).
Also, if you read my post you'd see I specifically mention that it also works with single particles of matter (eg electrons), which are (supposedly) matter, not a wave.
The only way to explain this (or rather, the only way science currently can) is that the electron must also exhibit wave-like properties, and the only way it can do this is if it's in a quantum superposition of states. When it's superposed, the electron can be thought of as a wave, with a bell-curve-shaped hump in the middle. The height of the wave at any point represents the probability that the electron will be at that point when the state of superposition collapses.
It's important to notice that (as with a bell-curve) the wave's ends are asymptotic to zero, so it technically stretches the width of the universe. This means that when the wave collapses to a point, the electron could in fact be anywhere along that line. Although in practice the chances of this are so vanishingly small (the height of the wave is vanishingly close to zero for all but a tiny area) that it rarely "moves" far from where you expect it to be, it does allow for quantum tunneling, where the electron appears to tunnel through solid objects.
"Again, I believe quite similarly to Einstein. God doesn't play dice to the universe. The notion that the order and regularity that we experience can be built upon pure instability is ludacrous to me."
Ah, so you don't believe in quantum mechanics? Why? I'll admit it's counter-intuitive, but then so is the idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Read up on it, understand it, and it
"Yet you support teaching children giraffes evolved to have long necks from reaching for high food"
The theory, yes. Evolution is our current best theory as to why Giraffe's have long necks. It's certainly heaps better than a fait-accompli Just-So story. "They're like that because God made them like that" basically boils down to "they're like that because that's what they're like" - it doesn't tell us a single thing about how, or really why.
As I said, I don't have a problem with the idea of Intelligent Design (as long as it doesn't pretend to be science), but it's starting to sound like you're arguing for proper Creationism here...
"embryos have gills"
No, but they do have precursor structures that, had we not evolved since then, would go on to form gills. If you don't buy the idea of embyonic development or evolutionary holdovers, why do we have a coccyx? Or an appendix? And why do men have nipples?
"amino acids can be produced in unnatural environments and magically be placed in a natural environment and live, the list is actually much bigger."
I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here with "natural" and "unnatural", but I would note that, for example, small lumps of matter are individually uninteresting and well-understood, but get enough of them together and they "magically" clump into balls. Some even "magically" ignite into a billion-year nuclear furnaces, which attract and warm up other balls. With a large enough number of bodies, this simple set-up alone can give rise to systems so "magically" complex that we sometimes still can't accurately predict where or how they will move. "A large enough number" in this case is three.
Just because we don't understand it, doesn't make it magical.
"Wow, I really don't understand the standard used to preach macro evolution in schools when all the evidence being found in DNA research and the Genome project are refuting the possibility of macro evolution."
With the greatest respect, this indicates some incredibly selective reading on your part. You offered one paper in favour of ID (which, IIRC, "proved" nothing beyond "we don't (currently) know how X works"), and was based around a well-known logical fallacy. Read the overwhelming majority of mainstream, respected scientific literature and "all the evidence" is pointing quite the other way.
"Maybe what is happening is the people that are intimately involved with the latest research are saying enough is enough, let's get it strait and quit using our school system to attack people's personal belief systems with false science."
Indeed they are. Which is why so many people are up in arms about Creationists interfering with the teaching of Science. You'll note the relative paucity of major scientific figures pushing the ID (and certainly Creationist) agenda in this debate.
"BTW - I would say proving protocells cannot produce complex cells is pretty significant"
But he didn't - the entire paper relied on a logical fallacy, as I explained to you.
"If I understand what is happening in the Genome project, which I might not, they need to finish mapping all the various complex cell reproductions of bacteria and then they will actually have and answer as to the possibility or impossibility of macro evolution."
Again, with respect that's a complete non-sequiteur. The HGP won't prove or disprove evolution one way or the other. It might help us to understand evolution better, and it'll certainly provide additional evidence for sucessive development through generations, but it won't definitively answer the argument one way or the other.
I don't want to descend to the level of insults, but you do rather appear to be graphically demonstrating the assertion that the only people who believe in Creationism are those that don't understand evolution, or science.
As a part of Science, once it achieves even close to mainstream acceptance (or is even an adequate explanation). Once it progresses beyond a simple argument from ignorance, and offers a single falsifiable prediction.
Until then it's unsubstantiated opinion or kook pseudoscience, and as such has no place in schools at all, let alone Science as a discipline.
Maybe, but looking over TFA, as a webmaster with experience in SEO (don't look at me - job description "evolved" drastically between interviews and starting, and I stay defiantly white-hat) this seems to do an awful lot to get rid of the scummier end of the SEO spectrum.
Link-swapping programs? Dead - Google now takes into account the trust level of the sites linking to you, as well as how quickly you garner links, so any sudden jumps in links from low-trust sites (like those run by SEO types) will impact against you. It also means that a site will have to link to you for a while before you'll get the full benefit of their "vote" - 1-week or 1-month link-swaps won't do anything anymore.
Disposable domains/gateway pages? Dead - Google now takes into account how long your domain's been registered when assigning trust scores. It also considers whether your domain (or even IP, IIRC) hosts other, known spammer sites. Oh, and apparently it even checks for frequent changes in your DNS contact details, again to weed out the disposable jack-in-the-box domains that unethical SEOs create, use to boost sites' in-bound links, then remove.
Re-tasking of existing high-PR pages? Dead - Google now watches for sudden "subject changes" on a page, and knocks the trust rank if it finds them. This prevents SEOs building up a useful, high-PR/trust page then retasking it as a source of high-PR links.
Obviously you'll have to read TFA for all the details, but after looking over it it strikes me that the only working techniques left are basically fresh content, accessible+validated markup, links from high-trust sites, steady growth and all the other things that basically make a site good for users (and rule out unethical SEO).
It might make my job slightly harder, but from a philosophical point of view, nice job Google!
Fair point on "Einstein believing in God", but that's a very different claim from "him not believing in Newtonian Mechanics". My point was that if you disparage scientific theory in favour of non-scientific ideas, you only do harm. Skepticism in science is good, but that's very different from rejecting well-supported scientific theories in favour of unproveable philosophical or religious arguments.
e nt#The_thought_experiment) for more info. The write-up above talks about photons, but YDSE also works for quantum particles of "matter" (eg, it's been done with electrons), and the same results are observed - the particle travels through both slits simultaneously and interferes with itself. Obviously, it can only do this in a quantum superposition of states, not as a classical particle.
"Fact is that people can work on Evolution, and Physics and explainations to the creation of the universe, while still believing that God did it."
And I have no problem with that. I don't (well, only occasionally, in the heat of debate) dislike or even disapprove of the idea of Intelligent Design - as we both agree, it's Philosophy, not Science. My problem is when (as with the Creationists in this case) people knock Science in favour of Philosophy - this seems deeply wrong to me, since often the only difference between Science and Philosophy/Religion is that Science has the requirement that it be sanity-checked against observations, whereas Philosophy can (often) romp free of accountability.
If people want to teach ID in Religious Education, it's fine. But they shouldn't be allowed to push a pro-religious agenda in Science, at least not unless we apply the same caveats to the Bible - maybe stickers on the front of all Bibles, stating "This is merely the unsupported opinion of unknown authors, not educated in logic or the scientific method".
This is clearly an anti-religious step, and most people would view it as over-the-top. Why, then, is it ok for religious groups to require the same of science books?
"So, don't think that quantum mechanics has quasi-particles that are actually undefined in size and position until observed, we just can't actually know the size or position until observed, which damages the other."
Actually, that's not true. If you read the literature, the current theory is that the particle literally doesn't have a defined position or velocity until one is measured - see Young's Double-Slits Experiement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experim
A slightly more succinct (but spacey) version was given by Heisenberg himself: http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm
There's also the Copenhagen Interpretation, which (IIRC) says that for any non-trivial quantum system interference with external stimuli very quickly collapses the waveform, but the principle still stands that if you can perfectly insulate a system from all external stimuli, it will persist in a state of indeterminacy forever.
This is also why we talk about "a state of indeterminacy", rather than "unknown state". The state is unknown, but only because the particle has no discrete, determinable state at that point, not even "one we just don't know".
"I'd rather be told, "this is the model we present, it explains a lot, but it doesn't explain a lot also. But for now, we're working within this model.""
That's a fair point, and as an adult I'd agree with you, but I still think you'll confuse kids. How old are you when you first hear about evolution? 6? 7? I don't think kids that age are capable of making that fine a distinction - young kids tend to view things in terms of black and white, and this kind of "good but not right" would just get interpreted as "wrong". Mix in Mum & Dad's "certainty" about the Creationist/Fundamentalist alternative, and you raise another generation of people who neither agree with nor understand evolution.
Yes, evolution is a theory, and yes, it should always be considered critically, but do you really think that was the motive behind the campaign for the stickers, or do you think it was just to weaken the perception of evolution to make way for the alternative "explanation"?
People do tend to get hot-and-bothered over the issue, but to be fair you choose possibly the single allowable example of the creationist/ID camp. What about forcing science teachers to teach creationism alongside evolution? Hounding and harassing the same teachers? Agitating for political changes to further their agenda?
"Let's take us back 100 years, to before Einstein published his works on relativity... "This book presents the newtonian model of the universe as fact, but it is important to realize that it is a theory, and should be critically considered." The physicists would in general be up in arms, screaming and shouting, that the Newtonian Model is the best we have."
Yes, because if we teach Science, as opposed to whatever wishy-washy intellectually-fashionable, culturally-approved-of crap it's trendy to believe in today, the Best Model will win out. It may take time, and it might have to prove itself over and over, but that's the strength of science - if we have a good explanation, the next one to come along has to do as-good or better a job of explaning observed phenomena to be adopted.
Interfering with this process by means of political or educational manipulation slows the process and creates doubt where (reasonably) there shouldn't be any.
Obviously one should always keep an open mind about scientific theories, but we're talking about teaching kids here. When learning physics, do you start off with full-strength quantum mechanics and probability-graphs of particle-position theory? No, you start off with the "atoms as marbles" explanation, then refine it to "atoms as tiny solar systems". It's only once you've got the basic idea that you start getting the actual, important, detailed, confusing version (atoms as collections of particles too small to see, which in fact don't have defined positions until you look at them, at which point they retroactively decide on a position which is probably here, but may be as far away as the other side of the universe, which, BTW, is both infinite and expanding).
You start off with the full-on perfectly "true" explanation and you'll never learn anything. Terry Pratchett calls this "Lies-to-children" - simplified explanations you know to be incomplete, but which lead you towards the correct and full explanation.
Likewise (to bring this back to the topic at hand), if the first fact kids learn about evolution is "this may all be bullshit", you've got a generation of kids who'll (i) pay even less attention in class than before (and so be less likely to ever understand it, just the way ID proponents often don't), and (ii) be primed to accept ID as an alternative explanation, "because Mum & Dad are certain it's right, and even teacher told us how evolution might be rubbish".
"Einstein is known to have been highly critical of theories and explainations for the world. He didn't take anything on a "because I said so" basis. He considered everything critically and came to accurate beliefs."
And do you think Einstein:
No, clearly he was raised believing the dominant model, then decided to investigate on his own and produced a better one. Imagine he'd never learned the Best Model first - he's been told effectively "Shut up, God did it all, go and read your bible/Torah/whatever". Would he still have got become fascinated with science and still got into physics, or would he still be a patent clerk, who believed a big beard in the sky made the whole world in six days?
I dispute that - I think it'll be a great example of evolution.
The rest of the educated world will carry on learning evolution and other current best scientific theories. Our society and culture will advance, our technology will progress and we and our children will prosper in an atmosphere of rationality and freedom.
Kansas will devolve into a state where new ideas are banned, technology regresses and anything that contradicts the "Big Beard In The Sky" theory is first repressed, then outlawed. The people will grow up stupid and ignorant, to raise even more stupid and ignorant kids. Eventually the vicious cycle will spiral on down, until the populace is exclusively composed of barely-intelligent hominids, eventually losing the powers of speech and fire.
At this point we'll stop recognising them as human, and we can hunt and kill them for food. Eventually Homo Kansasians will effectively die out in the wild, out-competed by more intellectual wild animals or hunted into extinction by Homo Sapiens. Oh, alright, some small bedraggled breeding colonies might survive in zoos, and may eventually be Uplifted to normal human cognition again, but as a wild species they'll be extinct.
Voilá. Evolution in action.
It may seem odd, but to my mind the new definition is actually a step forward for evolution:
Old
"seeking natural explanations for what we observe around us,"
"Seeking explanations" says nothing about how probably or sensible they have to be, or how you go about the seeking. "I threw yarrow stalks ito the air, and they indicated the universe was sneezed into being by the Great Green Arkleseizure" is covered under this definition. Hey, I'm seeking, and "natural" is a terribly wishy-washy cop-out word.
New
"continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena"
This more or less explicitely lays out the Scientific Method (thus neatly ruling out faith-based beliefs). Note also that it specifies "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building..." - to my mind, this means that any approach which excludes one of more of these isn't Science. Were this not the case, it would be "... logical argument or theory building".
In addition, the new definition of science contains the word "hypothesis". To be a hypothesis an idea must be falsifiable - otherwise it's "just" a theory.
Creationism and Intelligent design moves ultimate responsibility for the creation of the universe completely outside of human ken, and as such is impossible to falsify (just like you can't prove the door behind you exists without directly or indirectly observing it. Given this, ID or creationism can't ever advance hypotheses, and so are unavoidably excluded from "Science", by this definition.
Of course, this definition will doubtless be abused by creationist fuckwits who don't understand the precise meaning of "hypothesis", but for anyone who properly understands the language they're speaking, it's pretty cut-and-dried, no?
If this is true, it soothes my paranoia hugely. Unless, of course, you believe www.googlewatch.com about Google's ties to the NSA, etc ;-)
However, I can't help but doubt it - wouldn't this unusual step have disasterously affected Google's share price in their IPO? I know nothing about stocks and shares, but surely non-voting shares are only worth a fraction of voting stock? And Google still seemed to be fighting potential buyers off with a stick, in spite of Wall St's best efforts.
"Not you elemental23, but someone also mentioned Google has complete access to people's email with gmail. And you don't think Yahoo, HotMail, LinuxMail, etc., etc. don't have this same access, come on."
Granted, and I can deal with a company being able to read my mail. I can also deal with another separate company knowing what I search on, etc, etc.
But when it's one company that can read my e-mail, knows what I search on, knows what I search my local machine for, knows what I shop for, knows what map areas I look at (highly likely to be places I live/I'm visiting), and knows every page I browse on the net (and that's all they know currently), that makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
Here in the UK your mother's maiden name is a relatively useless piece of information, as is your National Insurance Number (SSN) or bank account number, but get any two of those pieces of information together, and identity-theft is relatively trivial.
In data-mining, the value of the information rises exponentially with the quantity of data, not linearly. It's all in the cross-referencing between separate data sources, not the data itself.
But the key thing here, you might say, is that God hasn't ever sent me 250 spam messages advertising "V1AGR4!!!!1!!!11!!! 4 J00!!!!!1!" in a single day.
Companies have.
(Nice attempt at a troll, BTW, but faaaar too obvious).
So far at least, Google has arguably successfully Done No Evil - they've offered a great search site, extended their great search system to the desktop, embedded it into browsers for convenience, offered webmail with unprecedented storage space and lovely features, and even revitalised the online advertising industry away from obnoxious graphical banners and popups towards relevant, discrete and unobtrusive text ads.
However, against this background of saintly behaviour, the potential for great evil lurks. Take the Google Search cookie not expiring until 2038 - there is no reason whatsoever for this, apart from to make it easy to track your searching habits. Of course, they could just do this by aggregating all queries that hit their servers, but that wouldn't uniquely identify you down to your specific machine, would it?
Take GMail - it's a lovely idea, and a lovely system, but it does mean that (theoretically), Google now has unfettered access to your entire inbox, and all the personal information therein. They also make a big deal of how you "never have to delete anything ever again" - handy for users maybe, but definitely handy if you're interested in data-mining vast volumes of personal information.
Google Desktop Search is a lovely tool (and very handy), but it does have an annoying (and downplayed) habit (IIRC) of by default echoing any local searches you make to Google, so it can return lists of "web" and "desktop" matches. Not such a big deal, unless you're searching your local machine for, oh, I dunno... company credit card details? Passwords? Rarely-used logins? Where you left the downloaded "Hot XXX teen sluts.mpeg"? Etc. Etc. Etc.
Now look at the Google Web Accelerator - not only your searches, but now every single page you visit (and even some you don't - are these differentiated between?) passes through Google's systems. Fair play to them for excluding HTTPS requests, but in all fairness they couldn't ever have got away with caching those as well anyway.
At this point, (assuming you use Google and don't take regular tinfoil-hat precautions like clearing cookies/deleting old mail/never searching your local machine for anything private/etc), Google potentially has access to:
Hmmm.
I have to stress here that I severely doubt there's any kind of deliberate conspiracy going on. For my money this is just a case of a bunch of overenthusiastic geeks with access to a huge database to mine, who are too busy having fun to write privacy policies because "we'd never do anything bad anyway, and people know that".
However, this still doesn't mean that it's a good thing - power corrupts, and Google now has one hell of a lot of power. Even if Larry, Serge et al stay true to their vision, Google's a public company now - it only takes the board to fire L&S and replace them with a marketing puppet and all of a sudden your trust in Google isn't worth shit - they hold all the cards, and they've got your entire life written on them.
In addition, this getting carried away with where they're going, and not listening to user-opinion is exactly the kind of attitude that is most publicly (and damagingly) exhibited by Microsoft. It's a small step from not taking five minutes to assuage people's concerns to not taking five seconds to even consider them. Both attitudes exhibit a certain "I know better than you" arrogance, one which tends to only get worse with time, and the more people start complaining about it, the worse it tends to get.
As I said, I severely doubt Google
This seem like a giant leap backward to me. Everything I've ever read seems to suggest that micropayments are the way forward (pay for what you use - hell, I'd certainly like it), and here the NYT are moving to a less granular pricing model.
Subscriptions are stupid, because unless you're going to use $50/year you aren't going to bother taking out a subscription, and will instead go elsewhere. Subscriptions force you to make a choice: am I "A NYT Subscriber" or not? If I'm just dropping by the NYT site (eg, from a random newsblog link), I'm not going to fork out a $50.00 subscription to view a single article. Could I view that same single article for, say, $0.25, I'd happily pay it.
Affordable (and truly micro) micropayments allow you to use what you want, when you want, so you can "impulse-buy" information however you want. Subscriptions force you to enter into a long-term commitment, and as such will be avoided liek the plague by everyone apart from those who likely *already* have a NYT subscription (a much smaller subset of users).
Ok, $3.00 per article is hardly micropayments, but if I were NYT I'd be looking to move towards MPs, rather than away from them. It does look like they're confusing "overpricing their content" with "the failure of their whole approach".
"Corporations in the real world don't tolerate unsecure boxen, why should the school? Students will learn VERY quick not to cross you."
Hmmm. Either my university (and those of most of my colleagues) were unusually lax, or you haven't been on a campus network much.
The overwhelming majority of uni accommodation networks I've seen/heard of have been incredibly lax on security. I'm not sure if it's a funding problem (can't afford decent kit/sysadmins), or if its a fundamental campus-culture issue, but I have yet to even hear about a properly-secured network.
TBH, after four years at my old university, I pretty much assumed the will wasn't there - you can either lock down every box and every setting and hound insecure users until they conform, or you can not have to deal with a permenent 300-person queue in the computing service dept, and get away by 16:00 every evening.
Fundamentally, I think uni sysadmins can't be bothered with the hassle. If student users can't be bothered to clean up their own shit, I think they leave them to it - just whack a massive firewall between uni and accommodation networks, and leave them to stew in it.