ID as pushed by Behe (he is one of the main proponents of ID) is not a scientific theory by definition because it cannot be tested. Therefore its hardly likely that he's 'demolished' his critics because his arguments have no scientific merit, he's a religious theologian masquerading as a scientist for political purposes.
I think you need to understand what a search engine does - when it can't find your exact result it suggests something similar. If you actually look at that page there is no dictionary entry is there? No. Now go into the defintion for the word 'kernel', scroll down and see that it quit clearly says 'Not Kernal'.
I agree ID shouldn't be taught in the public education system. Neither should evolution. Both take faith to believe.
Well that must be a relief for you. Since you don't have faith in evolution you won't be affected by infections resistant to antibiotics. It must be so relieving to know that because you don't believe in evolution you can use any anti-biotic ever made, while us 'faithful' evolutionsists would have to stick only to those to which no resistance has evolved. Even worse we are subject to antibiotic resistant strains such as MRSA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRSA), but of course evolution is merely another 'faith' so if you don't have faith you can't be affected by such nasties.
It depends what you mean by 'ghetto' but we do have a few high-poverty/high-crime areas. However they are only a small fraction of our inner cities so its not crime or anything like that that would drive people away from the inner city.
No all that article says is that Commodore named one of their products 'KERNAL'. There is no such word as KERNAL in any dictionary, even an American one: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kernel "(Note: NOT "kernal")"
I don't know about the US but I live in Australia and houses are definately more expensive than apartments. Yes there are a few pockets of very expensive apartments in the cities/inner city, but these are inhabited by fairly wealthy people who make up only a small proportion of the population. The vast majority still prefer to live in houses out in the suburbs despite the fact that they are more expensive and their location means most people face a significant commute to work everyday.
No, this is not philosophy. You can discover things about the origin of life through scientific exploration. Philosophy only serves as a basis for arguement for or against religion, in particular.
I never said you couldn't discover things through scientific exploration - I was pointing out that when you include ID and things like that it is no longer science but philosophy.
Well shit, I guess we should scrap the NASA Origins program because it will explain nothing. Humans being "designed" IS falsifiable. The religious fundamentalists may skirt that issue also because it conflicts with their genesis theory, taken in the literal. In order to falsify it you have to prove that life CAN happen at random, that's the first step anyways. I'm sorry you feel that area of science is such a waste. If they find something other than DNA evolving on some other planet, that would probably explain how life on earth came about. Finding humans on other planets may not be as groundbreaking. After all, we may have put ourselves here and then forgotten about how we got here in the first place. It's still the most significant part of our history and is definately worth investigating.
Again you're trying to twist my words. I was pointing out that the idea that life on earth came from somewhere else in the universe does not prove anything in relation to ID vs evolution/abiogenesis. Personally I'm very interested in anything to do with space research and I'd love to seem them sending more probes to other planets, even trying to send them to other star systems although that may be a little difficult with current technology.
That's great, but that's not what we're talking about here. I'm trying to show you that ID is a valid theory when presented the right way, not using any supernatural events.
And in what way can it be presented without using anything supernatural? Think about it - if you're saying life came from or was designed by people/aliens/whatever from some other planet then how did they come about? Its just a recursive argument - it certainly doesn't prove that ID is falsifiable because at some point your back to how that original life came about and ID can only say it was through something supernatural. Ie. If the designers were aliens who designed the designers?
But you see, going back to the parent, evolution is presented incorrectly just as often, as an explanation for the origin of man, we came from monkeys, which came from the ocean, where life spontaneously erupted billions of years ago. You can try to say that this debate is not proper, and just ignore the question of where life initially started, but this debate takes place everywhere, all the time, and that is how it goes. You place a wall between abiogenesis and evolution, while the two are directly linked to each other.
Evolution does not explain how life 'erupted' out of the oceans billions of years ago, that is abiogenesis. I don't see how this is such a hard concept to grasp - they are 2 seperate groups of scientific theories because they deal with different things, and there is no wall between them, and I have never tried to pretend there is. The only improper part of the debate is creationists trying to pretend their theories are scientific, when they clearly are not.
If you have something against fundamentalists, then you'd better just be careful who you label a fundamentalist. If someone came up with a biology book for students that instead of dedicating an entire section to "Evolution" they dedicated it to "origins" and sub-sections called evolution, abiogenesis, creationism, it would throw the Atheist political activists into an uproar. They're just as guilty of imposing their beliefs on others, and they fit the description of a fundamentalist.
If someone had a 'biology' book with a section dedicated to creationism then it wouldn't be a biology book anymore - it'd be a religious text. That's what normal rational people get so upset about - religious dogma being written i
If you want to pit ID against evolution, then you have to take origins into account. If you want to say that both can coexist, that is fine, it's probably true, but that's not what I'm talking about here
No you can't pit ID against evolution and abiogenesis theories (ie. science) because they are completely different things. The theories of evolution and abiogenesis are testable, falsifiable scientific theories based on observable evidence and experimentation. ID is a religious belief that is not testable in any scientific way. The conflict comes about because the disingenuous supporters of ID have started a political campaign to wrongly convince people that ID is another form of science, when in reality it is pure religion.
The debate I'm participating in is about the origin of life, our significance in the universe, not the validity of ID or evolution
That's a philosophical debate, but even then you should understand the difference between valid scientific theories such as evolution versus religious faith.
Your idea of god, the one you're argueing against, may be Jesus Christ, but I have yet to decide that. God could be other humans on another planet. If you prove that DNA exists in other parts of the solar system, you've come a long way to understanding the origin of man
'Other humans on another planet' explains nothing and is irrelevant to ID vs science. If that's true then those other humans had to come from somewhere, which brings us back to the same point we started at - if you say they were designed then its still not falsifiable and therefore ID is still totally unscientific.
You see, you're participating in a turf war because you've pit yourself against all religious peoples, at least that's what I take from your "The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested." comment
I don't see how you come to that conclusion from that comment. Far from being an attack on religious peoples as you seem to want it to be its simply pointing out a fact - theories proposing a supernatural god or gods of any kind are not testable. Therefore they have no place in science. I don't have anything against religion or religious people, I do have something against fundamentalists who try to impose their beliefs on others through promoting their beliefs as literal fact. In short I hate scammers and fraudsters.
My question is, have there been any experiments done with induced mutation, combined with natural selection, to establish benchmarks for the end-to-end evolutionary process under controlled conditions?
For example, has anyone bombarded bacteria with cosmic rays in a laboratory, and made a note of how long it takes for speciation to occur? (For that matter, has anybody been able to trigger speciation in a lab at all?)
And then where did it come before that? Uh oh, now we're getting into some serious shit, I think it scares some people. Evolution! That's the answer to everything! Bah.
You're knocking down straw-men here. Evolution does not say anything about how life originally came about, only how it has evolved since then. No one is saying that evolution is the 'answer to everything'. What your talking about are the theories and hypotheses of abiogenesis, and yes there is still quite a bit of work to do on this area of science and nowhere is that more aparent and readily acknowleged than amongst the scientific community itself.
So I agree with you; the religious fundamentalists and the evolutionists have a lot in common. It's a turf war, an embarassing turf war. They both have something seriously wrong with their brains! I'm glad to know that there are still some sane people that are waiting this one out. I think (hope?) more and more people come to this conclusion, that there is no conclusion to be made yet!
You seriously misunderstand the whole debate. Science does not pretend to know the truth or draw definate conclusions. It can only seek to find the most likely explanation through the available objective evidence. The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested. So in short there will never be a 'win' or an end to this debate because its not something that can ever be resolved - religion and science are 2 different things.
- Still have to go to easyurpmi to get plf-nonfree and the win32-codecs and stuff. A new user wouldnt know about this.
A new user wouldn't know they have to goto divx.com and real.com and apple.com to get things called 'Divx' and 'Realplayer' and 'Quicktime' to be able to play most video files on Windows either.
In the menus there is entry named 'Install Software', you click on that, type the root password and then type in 'OpenOffice' in the search box. It comes back with openoffice.org or whatever the package is called, you select it and click install.
These experiments you describe have been done many, many times over the past 100 years or so. Google around for things like 'fruit fly experiments + evolution' and things like that.
There aren't already reasonable restrictions to seperate smokers from non-smokers - you just have to walk out onto the street to see that. Anyway none of these silly 'only smoke within 30 feet of a door' rules work indoors - its like saying we'll only allow people to piss at one end of the pool. Even if the people obey the rules the smoke/piss doesn't.
I don't see how walking in a bar gives someone the right to blow smoke in my face. And for the record I've never avoided bars or concerts or anything like that on principle of allowing smoking or not.
The problem with this is we'd all live in shoebox apartments. The majority of people want to live in decent sized houses with front and back yards in suburbs with abundant open space. Most major cities in developed world nations have inner-city areas where what you're talking about (densly populated, good public transport, walking/cycling are actually useful forms of transport etc.) is already present. The fact that the majority of the rest of most cities aren't like this shows that the majority of people don't want to live like that.
1.) In a free society, you should be able to be free to put anything you want into your own body. Period.
So how does that give smokers the right to put their poisons into other people's bodies? The basic principle of all individual freedoms is that they stop where you start interfering with other people's freedoms and rights. Eg. Even though I have freedom of movemement I can't just walk into your house if I feel like it because that would compromise your right to your private property.
These 'KDE is dying' trolls that keep getting modded up on slashdot are about as annoying as the infamous 'BSD is dying' trolls. KDE has a very large and active community of developers and doesn't need bucketloads of money poured into it to survive. Despite predictions of impending demise KDE has made progress in leaps and bounds over the last few years and is well ahead of GNOME in many areas - GNOME still lacks simple things like a menu editor (although I heard this may have changed in recent releases). Besides KDE isn't exactly out in the cold when it comes to funding - Trolltech is committed to funding it and major distros like Mandriva and (Open)Suse still use it by default and show no sign of changing.
Personally I've never understood why there was a need to have just one desktop. Most of the other major desktop-oriented distros (eg. Suse and Mandriva) have both GNOME and KDE on fairly equal standing and the default application set is a mixture of GTK and QT -based apps. Eg. having GIMP for photo editing and K3b for cd burning. That means you can have the best application for each job (K3b is the best app for cd/dvd burning by far on Linux and none of the KDE image editors are even close to The GIMP's functionality).
I'd never want to use a distro that tries to force me into using one desktop and that makes decisions on which apps to include and install by default based on what GUI toolkit its built with.
I was under the impression that Novell/SUSE was using Gnome only for SLES(Their server-operating system) and KDE for "regular" SUSE, can anyone confirm if I'm wrong or right?
The Aussies have some uranium, but otherwise they're a net importer of energy.
Actually we have massive supplies of coal and natural gas and most of our electricity is generated using these two fuels, as well as 'fueling' a significant export industry. We also have around 40% of the world's known uranium reserves. Unfortunately we are only exporting the uranium - not using it for our own nuclear power (we have one nuclear reactor in Sydney that's used for scientific and medical research). Even more unfortunately because we have so much coal and natural gas electricity we generate is very cheap and there hasn't been much effort to setup wave, wind, solar or geothermal power stations. We are a net importer of oil though.
Anyway this whole macroevolution as seperate from microevolution (where one's provable and one's supposedly not) is an invention of creationists. Macroevolution relies on the exact same processes as microevolution, the only requirement is some (usually environmental) factor to create seperate breeding groups of a species. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB902.html
You can remain in your blissful ignorance by convincing yourself that evolution is a religion and that it cannot be observed for all I care. Just don't try and force your beliefs on other people by arguing for it not to be taught in a science classroom, where it belongs.
It is possible to reconstruct a car crash from skid marks and other evidence, but nothing beats a witness who saw it happen
And that's what science is all about - reconstructing the car crash from the skid marks and broken glass. This 'witness' you claim is nothing more than your personal religious belief and is no use to any kind of objective or scientific study. I could claim that our old friend the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe using his noodly appendages and I would be as correct as your are in saying that you think it was the christian god. Science seeks to be objective and produce evidence beyond subjective religious beliefs like these.
Also far from being engaged in producing nothing but 'conjecture' over the origins of things science actively seeks (and finds) real verifiable evidence to support hypotheses. Theories which are supported by nothing more than conjecture are left to religions to produce, as evidenced by their promotion of ID.
These things have always been observable for all of human existence - just look around you, you are seeing electromagnetic radiation, you are seeing electrons and electricity (lightning) and you experience gravity all the time. None of this requires any technology to detect and all these things are part of the physical universe. They are not and never were supernatural, it just took us a long time to develop a scientific understanding of these things.
God is, by definition, supernatural since he/she/it created the univserse. Therefore god is outside the physical univserse and outside the scope of science and any theory concerned with the existence or not of god, or wether god created life or not is a religious theology that doesn't belong in a science classroom. Science says nothing about wether god does or does not exist, nor about wether god created life.
Macroevolution does not qualify under the scientific method, however it is being taught in classrooms, exclusively, as the only valid scientific reasoning behind how things came about.
Why is there not an equal uproar against this unscientific educational disaster?
The answer to that question is simple: some people have a political stance against anything remotely related to religion, and wish to shelter their little darlings from anything as damaging to their brainwashing as questioning and testing things such as by the introduction of alternative thought on a subject.
No the problem is that some religious people have a political stance against anything remotely related to evolution and wish to brainwash everyone's little darlings into thinking like they do. In order to do this they try to hold up their religious beliefs as science, even when they clearly and irrefutably are not.
The whole 'alternate viewpoints' argument is bogus. Science says nothing about wether there is or is not a god, such questions are simply out of scope to science. Teachers and students are free to discuss theological philosophies like intelligent design in religion lessons and sunday schools. There is no campaign of any kind from 'science' or scientists to interfere with or exclude religion from people's lives. Scientists just don't want science debased, twisted and misused by religious fundamentalists who seek to instate religious dogma into the science classroom.
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ID as pushed by Behe (he is one of the main proponents of ID) is not a scientific theory by definition because it cannot be tested. Therefore its hardly likely that he's 'demolished' his critics because his arguments have no scientific merit, he's a religious theologian masquerading as a scientist for political purposes.
I think you need to understand what a search engine does - when it can't find your exact result it suggests something similar. If you actually look at that page there is no dictionary entry is there? No. Now go into the defintion for the word 'kernel', scroll down and see that it quit clearly says 'Not Kernal'.
I agree ID shouldn't be taught in the public education system. Neither should evolution. Both take faith to believe.
Well that must be a relief for you. Since you don't have faith in evolution you won't be affected by infections resistant to antibiotics. It must be so relieving to know that because you don't believe in evolution you can use any anti-biotic ever made, while us 'faithful' evolutionsists would have to stick only to those to which no resistance has evolved. Even worse we are subject to antibiotic resistant strains such as MRSA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRSA), but of course evolution is merely another 'faith' so if you don't have faith you can't be affected by such nasties.
Do you have ghettos in Australia?
n -house-price-505000/2005/02/21/1108834709151.html
It depends what you mean by 'ghetto' but we do have a few high-poverty/high-crime areas. However they are only a small fraction of our inner cities so its not crime or anything like that that would drive people away from the inner city.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Sydneys-media
2) Do the suburban houses appreciate in value?
Yes, in Sydney we've just been through a huge property boom which affected apartment prices as much as houses.
No all that article says is that Commodore named one of their products 'KERNAL'. There is no such word as KERNAL in any dictionary, even an American one: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=kernel "(Note: NOT "kernal")"
I don't know about the US but I live in Australia and houses are definately more expensive than apartments. Yes there are a few pockets of very expensive apartments in the cities/inner city, but these are inhabited by fairly wealthy people who make up only a small proportion of the population. The vast majority still prefer to live in houses out in the suburbs despite the fact that they are more expensive and their location means most people face a significant commute to work everyday.
No, this is not philosophy. You can discover things about the origin of life through scientific exploration. Philosophy only serves as a basis for arguement for or against religion, in particular.
I never said you couldn't discover things through scientific exploration - I was pointing out that when you include ID and things like that it is no longer science but philosophy.
Well shit, I guess we should scrap the NASA Origins program because it will explain nothing. Humans being "designed" IS falsifiable. The religious fundamentalists may skirt that issue also because it conflicts with their genesis theory, taken in the literal. In order to falsify it you have to prove that life CAN happen at random, that's the first step anyways. I'm sorry you feel that area of science is such a waste. If they find something other than DNA evolving on some other planet, that would probably explain how life on earth came about. Finding humans on other planets may not be as groundbreaking. After all, we may have put ourselves here and then forgotten about how we got here in the first place. It's still the most significant part of our history and is definately worth investigating.
Again you're trying to twist my words. I was pointing out that the idea that life on earth came from somewhere else in the universe does not prove anything in relation to ID vs evolution/abiogenesis. Personally I'm very interested in anything to do with space research and I'd love to seem them sending more probes to other planets, even trying to send them to other star systems although that may be a little difficult with current technology.
That's great, but that's not what we're talking about here. I'm trying to show you that ID is a valid theory when presented the right way, not using any supernatural events.
And in what way can it be presented without using anything supernatural? Think about it - if you're saying life came from or was designed by people/aliens/whatever from some other planet then how did they come about? Its just a recursive argument - it certainly doesn't prove that ID is falsifiable because at some point your back to how that original life came about and ID can only say it was through something supernatural. Ie. If the designers were aliens who designed the designers?
But you see, going back to the parent, evolution is presented incorrectly just as often, as an explanation for the origin of man, we came from monkeys, which came from the ocean, where life spontaneously erupted billions of years ago. You can try to say that this debate is not proper, and just ignore the question of where life initially started, but this debate takes place everywhere, all the time, and that is how it goes. You place a wall between abiogenesis and evolution, while the two are directly linked to each other.
Evolution does not explain how life 'erupted' out of the oceans billions of years ago, that is abiogenesis. I don't see how this is such a hard concept to grasp - they are 2 seperate groups of scientific theories because they deal with different things, and there is no wall between them, and I have never tried to pretend there is. The only improper part of the debate is creationists trying to pretend their theories are scientific, when they clearly are not.
If you have something against fundamentalists, then you'd better just be careful who you label a fundamentalist. If someone came up with a biology book for students that instead of dedicating an entire section to "Evolution" they dedicated it to "origins" and sub-sections called evolution, abiogenesis, creationism, it would throw the Atheist political activists into an uproar. They're just as guilty of imposing their beliefs on others, and they fit the description of a fundamentalist.
If someone had a 'biology' book with a section dedicated to creationism then it wouldn't be a biology book anymore - it'd be a religious text. That's what normal rational people get so upset about - religious dogma being written i
If you want to pit ID against evolution, then you have to take origins into account. If you want to say that both can coexist, that is fine, it's probably true, but that's not what I'm talking about here
No you can't pit ID against evolution and abiogenesis theories (ie. science) because they are completely different things. The theories of evolution and abiogenesis are testable, falsifiable scientific theories based on observable evidence and experimentation. ID is a religious belief that is not testable in any scientific way. The conflict comes about because the disingenuous supporters of ID have started a political campaign to wrongly convince people that ID is another form of science, when in reality it is pure religion.
The debate I'm participating in is about the origin of life, our significance in the universe, not the validity of ID or evolution
That's a philosophical debate, but even then you should understand the difference between valid scientific theories such as evolution versus religious faith.
Your idea of god, the one you're argueing against, may be Jesus Christ, but I have yet to decide that. God could be other humans on another planet. If you prove that DNA exists in other parts of the solar system, you've come a long way to understanding the origin of man
'Other humans on another planet' explains nothing and is irrelevant to ID vs science. If that's true then those other humans had to come from somewhere, which brings us back to the same point we started at - if you say they were designed then its still not falsifiable and therefore ID is still totally unscientific.
You see, you're participating in a turf war because you've pit yourself against all religious peoples, at least that's what I take from your "The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested." comment
I don't see how you come to that conclusion from that comment. Far from being an attack on religious peoples as you seem to want it to be its simply pointing out a fact - theories proposing a supernatural god or gods of any kind are not testable. Therefore they have no place in science. I don't have anything against religion or religious people, I do have something against fundamentalists who try to impose their beliefs on others through promoting their beliefs as literal fact. In short I hate scammers and fraudsters.
My question is, have there been any experiments done with induced mutation, combined with natural selection, to establish benchmarks for the end-to-end evolutionary process under controlled conditions?
For example, has anyone bombarded bacteria with cosmic rays in a laboratory, and made a note of how long it takes for speciation to occur? (For that matter, has anybody been able to trigger speciation in a lab at all?)
The work of Herman Muller who was a pioneer in these radation bombardment experiments:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/muller.htm
http://www.aboutnuclear.org/view.cgi?fC=History,H
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1946/ (he received the Nobel prize for inducing mutations through radiation bombardment)
Another example of mutation inducing experiments:
http://www.ansinet.org/fulltext/jbs/jbs14269-271.
Some more general links:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/evolution5.htm
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.ht
Google and ye shall find
And then where did it come before that? Uh oh, now we're getting into some serious shit, I think it scares some people. Evolution! That's the answer to everything! Bah.
You're knocking down straw-men here. Evolution does not say anything about how life originally came about, only how it has evolved since then. No one is saying that evolution is the 'answer to everything'. What your talking about are the theories and hypotheses of abiogenesis, and yes there is still quite a bit of work to do on this area of science and nowhere is that more aparent and readily acknowleged than amongst the scientific community itself.
So I agree with you; the religious fundamentalists and the evolutionists have a lot in common. It's a turf war, an embarassing turf war. They both have something seriously wrong with their brains! I'm glad to know that there are still some sane people that are waiting this one out. I think (hope?) more and more people come to this conclusion, that there is no conclusion to be made yet!
You seriously misunderstand the whole debate. Science does not pretend to know the truth or draw definate conclusions. It can only seek to find the most likely explanation through the available objective evidence. The ID side of this debate is proposing something that can never be tested. So in short there will never be a 'win' or an end to this debate because its not something that can ever be resolved - religion and science are 2 different things.
- Still have to go to easyurpmi to get plf-nonfree and the win32-codecs and stuff. A new user wouldnt know about this.
A new user wouldn't know they have to goto divx.com and real.com and apple.com to get things called 'Divx' and 'Realplayer' and 'Quicktime' to be able to play most video files on Windows either.
In the menus there is entry named 'Install Software', you click on that, type the root password and then type in 'OpenOffice' in the search box. It comes back with openoffice.org or whatever the package is called, you select it and click install.
These experiments you describe have been done many, many times over the past 100 years or so. Google around for things like 'fruit fly experiments + evolution' and things like that.
There aren't already reasonable restrictions to seperate smokers from non-smokers - you just have to walk out onto the street to see that. Anyway none of these silly 'only smoke within 30 feet of a door' rules work indoors - its like saying we'll only allow people to piss at one end of the pool. Even if the people obey the rules the smoke/piss doesn't.
I don't see how walking in a bar gives someone the right to blow smoke in my face. And for the record I've never avoided bars or concerts or anything like that on principle of allowing smoking or not.
The problem with this is we'd all live in shoebox apartments. The majority of people want to live in decent sized houses with front and back yards in suburbs with abundant open space. Most major cities in developed world nations have inner-city areas where what you're talking about (densly populated, good public transport, walking/cycling are actually useful forms of transport etc.) is already present. The fact that the majority of the rest of most cities aren't like this shows that the majority of people don't want to live like that.
Ummm.. what personal freedoms? They're already in China.
1.) In a free society, you should be able to be free to put anything you want into your own body. Period.
So how does that give smokers the right to put their poisons into other people's bodies? The basic principle of all individual freedoms is that they stop where you start interfering with other people's freedoms and rights. Eg. Even though I have freedom of movemement I can't just walk into your house if I feel like it because that would compromise your right to your private property.
These 'KDE is dying' trolls that keep getting modded up on slashdot are about as annoying as the infamous 'BSD is dying' trolls. KDE has a very large and active community of developers and doesn't need bucketloads of money poured into it to survive. Despite predictions of impending demise KDE has made progress in leaps and bounds over the last few years and is well ahead of GNOME in many areas - GNOME still lacks simple things like a menu editor (although I heard this may have changed in recent releases). Besides KDE isn't exactly out in the cold when it comes to funding - Trolltech is committed to funding it and major distros like Mandriva and (Open)Suse still use it by default and show no sign of changing.
Personally I've never understood why there was a need to have just one desktop. Most of the other major desktop-oriented distros (eg. Suse and Mandriva) have both GNOME and KDE on fairly equal standing and the default application set is a mixture of GTK and QT -based apps. Eg. having GIMP for photo editing and K3b for cd burning. That means you can have the best application for each job (K3b is the best app for cd/dvd burning by far on Linux and none of the KDE image editors are even close to The GIMP's functionality).
I'd never want to use a distro that tries to force me into using one desktop and that makes decisions on which apps to include and install by default based on what GUI toolkit its built with.
I was under the impression that Novell/SUSE was using Gnome only for SLES(Their server-operating system) and KDE for "regular" SUSE, can anyone confirm if I'm wrong or right?
You are right.
The Aussies have some uranium, but otherwise they're a net importer of energy.
Actually we have massive supplies of coal and natural gas and most of our electricity is generated using these two fuels, as well as 'fueling' a significant export industry. We also have around 40% of the world's known uranium reserves. Unfortunately we are only exporting the uranium - not using it for our own nuclear power (we have one nuclear reactor in Sydney that's used for scientific and medical research). Even more unfortunately because we have so much coal and natural gas electricity we generate is very cheap and there hasn't been much effort to setup wave, wind, solar or geothermal power stations. We are a net importer of oil though.
Talkorigins is quite open that it exists to debunk the lies and distortions of creationists by pointing out the misunderstandings of the science involved. The fact is that speciation has been observed both in the wild and in the lab. For example lab experiments involving fruitflies (a favourite of scientists because of its short reproductive cycle) have shown that when subjected to different food supplies for an extended period that flies were 'speciated', ie. they didn't repoduce with members of the other group even when together http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VC1fE videnceSpeciation.shtml.0 52_05.htmlt mlh tml#morphological_intermediates_ex3
Some examples from outside the lab:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/05/2/l_
http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/irwin.h
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section1.
Anyway this whole macroevolution as seperate from microevolution (where one's provable and one's supposedly not) is an invention of creationists. Macroevolution relies on the exact same processes as microevolution, the only requirement is some (usually environmental) factor to create seperate breeding groups of a species. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB902.html
You can remain in your blissful ignorance by convincing yourself that evolution is a religion and that it cannot be observed for all I care. Just don't try and force your beliefs on other people by arguing for it not to be taught in a science classroom, where it belongs.
It is possible to reconstruct a car crash from skid marks and other evidence, but nothing beats a witness who saw it happen
And that's what science is all about - reconstructing the car crash from the skid marks and broken glass. This 'witness' you claim is nothing more than your personal religious belief and is no use to any kind of objective or scientific study. I could claim that our old friend the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe using his noodly appendages and I would be as correct as your are in saying that you think it was the christian god. Science seeks to be objective and produce evidence beyond subjective religious beliefs like these.
Also far from being engaged in producing nothing but 'conjecture' over the origins of things science actively seeks (and finds) real verifiable evidence to support hypotheses. Theories which are supported by nothing more than conjecture are left to religions to produce, as evidenced by their promotion of ID.
These things have always been observable for all of human existence - just look around you, you are seeing electromagnetic radiation, you are seeing electrons and electricity (lightning) and you experience gravity all the time. None of this requires any technology to detect and all these things are part of the physical universe. They are not and never were supernatural, it just took us a long time to develop a scientific understanding of these things.
God is, by definition, supernatural since he/she/it created the univserse. Therefore god is outside the physical univserse and outside the scope of science and any theory concerned with the existence or not of god, or wether god created life or not is a religious theology that doesn't belong in a science classroom. Science says nothing about wether god does or does not exist, nor about wether god created life.
Macroevolution does not qualify under the scientific method, however it is being taught in classrooms, exclusively, as the only valid scientific reasoning behind how things came about.
Why is there not an equal uproar against this unscientific educational disaster?
Macroevolution does indeed qualify as a scientific theory. It is testable and falsifiable and has significant evidence to back it up. http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB901.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
The answer to that question is simple: some people have a political stance against anything remotely related to religion, and wish to shelter their little darlings from anything as damaging to their brainwashing as questioning and testing things such as by the introduction of alternative thought on a subject.
No the problem is that some religious people have a political stance against anything remotely related to evolution and wish to brainwash everyone's little darlings into thinking like they do. In order to do this they try to hold up their religious beliefs as science, even when they clearly and irrefutably are not.
The whole 'alternate viewpoints' argument is bogus. Science says nothing about wether there is or is not a god, such questions are simply out of scope to science. Teachers and students are free to discuss theological philosophies like intelligent design in religion lessons and sunday schools. There is no campaign of any kind from 'science' or scientists to interfere with or exclude religion from people's lives. Scientists just don't want science debased, twisted and misused by religious fundamentalists who seek to instate religious dogma into the science classroom.