"If only Apple had another example of a company that tried this, i.e., just selling their operating system, but without proprietary hardware, to see if this crazy strategy of making profit from software would work!"
Like for example DR DOS, BeOS, OS/2?
"Nah, you're right. There's NO WAY a software-only company can make any money."
Software-only companies can make money. There is however only _one_ operating system company that makes money, and it does not tolerate competitors, as Digital Research, Be Inc., and IBM (to name but three!) found to their cost. While the only way you can get OS X is by buying a Mac, the Eye Of Ballron will only settle on them for short periods, and move on, but change that, and Apple will find themselves locked in a battle against an entrenched and massively powerful monopoly with enough money in the bank to give Windows away for several years without going bust, and dwindling Mac sales because hey, you can get OS X for a Dell, so why pay Apple's higher prices? As for the iPod, iTV, and iPhone, how long would they last if every Windows service pack "accidentally" broke any software required to use them with all those hundreds of millions of Windows PCs?
"artificial or not, human vision is heavily based on pre-defined brain structures that take care of most of the filtering and pre-processing and has very little to do with being intelligent or not either"
Agreed in full. The most sophisticated and powerful vision system we know of is that of mantis shrimps, creatures which are not renowned for their intellectual achievements.
The following is a partial list of some other things that supposedly fall under the aegis of AI without having anything whatsoever to do with "intelligence":
1) Walking without falling over.
2) Not bumping into things while moving about. Quite simple creatures are capable of this feat.
3) Tracking a moving object. insect predators such as dragonflies do this very effectively while also avoiding bumping into things. Dragonflies are not intelligent.
4) Picking up something fragile without completely destroying it. Earwigs and ants (to name but two) have jaws designed for cutting and crushing, yet they can pick up and carry their own (or in the case of ants, the queen's) fragile eggs and larvae around while also ably performing (2) and (3) above. Crocodiles and alligators (not rated as being bright, even among the low standards applied to reptiles) are also capable of using the most powerful set of jaws in the animal kingdom to pick up newly hatched young without damaging them.
"A Christian cannot question the existence of God or Jesus."
Because those are what define a Christian. If you don't believe in both of those, the you aren't a Christian, just as people who don't believe that there is one god and Mohammed was His prophet aren't Muslims. However, Christians can and have questioned the nature of their god (the gentle, loving, and tolerant god Jesus describes isn't much like the vengeful and often petty one in the Old Testament, for example), the nature of Jesus (some Christian sects had sets of Gospels that were very from those Constantine selected for current versions of the Bible), how his message should be interpreted, who it was intended for (the dichotomy between Peter and Paul was the first example of this), etc., etc., etc.
"Arguing that everything is faith based brings us to a terrible question. What's the point of doing anything?"
I will answer this with a counter question. My intention isn't to set up a straw man, and I don't expect an answer -- it's just something to think about. Why do we feel compelled to "do things" in the entirely imaginary worlds of dreams where all the images, sounds, tactile impressions, tastes, and smells are generated by our brains rather than coming from our sensory apparatus?
"There is certainly a difference between believing that gravity will cause a cup to fall to the ground if dropped, or that a man called Jesus died, rose from the grave and ascended in to heaven."
We "believe" that a cup falls to the ground when released because we've been programmed from a very young age to assume that there is a causal relationship between certain sequences of events. It is this fundamental belief that first led to animism (such-and-such occurred because the spirit that controls this class of things willed it to be so, therefore I can make it happen again whenever I want / prevent it from happening again if I can find a way of placating the spirit), and ultimately to modern religions which claim for example that the universe and everything in it (including us) exist because a god or gods willed it to be so. However, we can only logically prove that there is a statistical correspondence between sets of events (and actually not even that -- see blow), and this does not imply any causal relationship between them. Did the cup fall _because_ you opened your hand; did your hand open because the universe "wanted" it to fall and you, being part of that universe, had no choice but to comply; or was the opening of your hand and the cup falling two completely unrelated events?
To make things even more tenuous, research into things such as false memory syndrome indicates that we don't actually remember what has occurred, but only what we _believe_ to have occurred (no hypnosis is necessary to produce this phenomenon). With this in mind, how can we actually know that our memory of having opened our hand and dropping the cup was a real event rather than a fantasy that our brains devised to explain the phenomenon of a broken cup on the floor?
"Although we can't be absolutely certain that anything really exists, we need to trust our senses to a reasonable level."
I agree in a practical sense. I'm not trying to suggest that we live our lives based on a philosophy of relativism, but rather to show that science advocates who accuse religions of being based on unprovable assumptions are being hypocrites, because some branches of the science that they claim to support indicate that _everything_ is based on a set of assumptions that are no more falsifiable than the existence of a god or set of gods.
"If measure the temperature of room, I trust my eyes and those of my colleagues to confirm that the thermometer is providing a figure."
it is indeed providing "a figure", but it isn't measuring "temperature", because "temperature", like distance, time, etc. is an entirely invented concept that is expressed in terms of some other invented concepts. It's simply a word we use to describe comparing arbitrarily selected ene
"We have observed quite a few speciation events in plants and insects (included links)."
Thanks for the interesting links. I must admit to being unimpressed by a good many of the insect examples, a fair number of which seem to be experiments performed by one researcher or group of researchers that have not been duplicated by others (the only one that stated anyone had even tried said that 18 independent laboratories had repeated it without seeing anything remotely resembling what had being claimed). The things that have been observed in the natural world were IMO a lot more convincing, and therefore provide far better ammunition to use against the ID / creationist lobby. I'd heard about the "Pharoah mice" before, but thought the jury was still out on whether they are actually a separate mouse species, although the fact that I haven't looked at them again for 20 years or so could well mean things have changed.
"Are [dogs all one species]? Or do we just continue to refer them as such out of convenience? Consider the fact that, for example, the size difference between smallest and largest dog breeds is such that they are physiologically incapable of breeding with each other, a Great Dane and chihuahua can't get on with it."
Dogs are considered to be a single species because each specific breed depends on humans to perpetuate it by ensuring that mating only ever occurs with another dog of the same type. The dogs themselves don't have any preferences for their own breed over any other, and as any breeder will attest, will often mate with a dog of a distinctly different type even when there are several "eligible" members of their own breed at hand (actually sensible from a genetic viewpoint, because diversity is beneficial to a species). And while your observation about the size differences between very large and very small breeds causing physiologically incompatible is correct, the fact that both can successfully interbreed with a wide variety of intermediately sized dogs and produce puppies that will also be capable of doing the same proves that they are the same species, just like the tiniest adult human (22.5 inches, 20 pounds) and biggest (8'11, 491lbs) are the same species.
NB: zoologists who study canids reckon that an arbitrary mix of dog breeds left in a feral state would revert to an ancestral form much like that of a grey wolf in as little as six generations (i.e. about 20 years). However, observations of actual feral dogs indicate that they end up being dingo-like rather than wolf-like, and this has led some to question the commonly accepted wolf ancestry theory.
"it was a long time ago (we got it when it was still new and shiny) and I doubt they would help now. We're a pretty minor customer."
Probably not. Mine was a new machine, and although it was the first Mac I've ever owned, long experience with Windows and Linux boxes meant that I recognised dodgy RAM symptoms immediately, so I took the stick back (easier than taking the whole machine) and walked out with a new one.
NB: I currently live in Spain, so this Mac dealer wouldn't be one that people elsewhere are familiar with.
A bad RAM stick in my REV. 1 iMac G5 also came with the system. Symptom: complete system lock-ups with certain pieces of software, but not others. Memory tester said everything was fine, but I tried pulling the sticks and swapping them anyway. Turned out one was bad, but the place I bought the system from changed it for another with no questions asked, and things have been fine for the last 2 years.
And the Catholic English, and the Anglican English, and a whole bunch of others, because Ollie believed in equal opportunities massacring where everybody had the inalienable right to be killed irrespective of nationality, gender, or creed.
NB: I did say I was providing a few examples, and also that there were many more.
Although I did use this term, I'd like to point out that religion doesn't have a monopoly on fanatical nuts who want to tell everyone else how to live. The Western world for example is increasingly falling prey to "nanny states" where politicians have been spurred by fanatical nut lobbies into banning people from doing things that are fun but bad for them, and then whine that everyone's living longer (albeit less enjoyably!), and therefore bankrupting their state pension schemes.
"scientific theories can't really be given much credence unless they can be tested independently and most importantly, they must be disprovable."
Agreed.
"Religion, at least the big three, are incompatible with science in the same way that a car and a hamburger are incompatible. They are two different areas of study that can rarely overlap. This doesn't mean that you can't have both though, the problem is in keeping them separate."
This was something the Einstein had problems with in his later life. His faith prevented him from accepting Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (the famous "God doesn't throw dice"), and therefore quantum physics, because he believed that God had intended man to understand the universe, and would therefore have created it to embody a few simple (to someone like Einstein) rules from which everything else was derived.
"Christianity and Islam are not meant to be questioned"
History would refute that statement, because both religions have had more than a few theologians and philosophers who have questioned many aspects of both faiths, and each also has a number of distinct sects that disagree with each-other on the way various holy books should be interpreted, what role religion should have in politics, and a host of other things. Sufi Muslims (which are themselves divided into a whole bunch of sects that are usually specific to a particular geographic region) for example are mystics who believe that the Koran should be interpreted allegorically rather than literally, and are therefore opposed to the idea of basing governments or legal systems on it.
"the scientific community cannot hide from evidence. The same cannot be said of Islam, for example, as it's faith-based and so does not rely on facts."
_Everything_ is ultimately faith-based, even science, because it's impossible to prove that our perception of the universe is actually a reasonabe representation of it, and thus also impossible to prove that anything in science has any relationship whatsoever to reality (if indeed there is such a thing).
No, what you said is perfectly clear: "A religion, or faith to be more precise, is belief in the absence of facts. Science is fact based." This statement implies that science and religions are incompatible, hence my post.
"There is no reason why a scientist can't be religious, as long as they don't allow their religious views or bias to influence their results. Mendel was certainly religious yet on to something when he started playing around with those peas."
One can however say exactly the same thing substituting different words for "religion" and be equally true, e.g.:
There is no reason why a scientist can't be political as long as they don't allow their political views to influence their results. There is no reason why a scientist can't be paid by a company as long as they don't allow it to influence their results.
It is thus simply a case of good scientists going where the evidence leads them, and bad scientists filtering or manipulating "evidence" to suit their own personal agendas, irrespective of whether their motives are religious, financial, political, or a desire for attention / fame.
"Can you suggest any scientific breakthroughs that have come as a direct result of a religion?"
I call straw man, as I have not said religion _causes_ science, only that they aren't as incompatible as (some, but not all) atheists like to claim. However, as you brought the point up, please provide some examples of scientific breakthroughs that can directly be attributed to atheism rather than simply having been made _by_ atheists.
"Not everyone is capable of this though - look at pseudo-scientists like Behe and Gish who clearly allow religious belief to override science."
Charlatans have always been around, and probably always will be, but religion hasn't anything approaching a monopoly on them. Note also that for every Gish or Behe there are tens or hundreds like Dr. Robert Bakker, a well-known palaeontologist who also happens to be a Pentecostal preacher (he's the big bearded guy with a cowboy hat often seen on documentaries about dinosaurs who very obviously has no problems accepting the theory of evolution) that nobody would know were devout Christians, Jews, Muslims etc. from their work, public appearances, or lectures.
"Seriously, most of this crazy "Christian" crap comes from the Catholics."
What rubbish. I currently live in a predominantly Catholic country, and despite not being a Christian myself, am married to a woman who goes to mass twice a week, has a grandfather who was beatified by the last pope, and an uncle who is likely to be beatified by this one. Yet strangely, neither she nor her priest have mentioned the Wii (which is constantly sold out over here), or the Internet (massively popular), or for that matter porn (also incredibly popular). They also have far less in the way of silly prudishness than most protestant countries: nearly all women go topless on the beach, TV adverts have full-frontal topless shots, explicit sex scenes don't have watershed hours, and movie ratings are advisory rather than enforced by law, for example (one also sees a lot more blood and gore on news reports, which aren't censored for fear of possibly scaring a child. The attitude here seems to be that it's a parent's job to control what their children watch, not everyone else's).
Thus, a far more accurate statement would be: most of this crazy "Christian" crap comes from US-based right wing fundamentalist religious nuts.
"Look at the history of the Catholic church. Murder. Rape. Molestation. Lies."
All of which are true of Protestants when they've had the power to do so. Here are a few examples (there are many, many more):
- John Calvin's followers burned 58 "heretics".
- Lutherans in Germany instituted the death penalty for heresy, i.e. the crime of not interpreting Biblical scriptures in the same way as them.
- Elizabeth 1 of England outlawed Catholicism and executed at least 200 Catholics; Quakers and other non-Anglicans were also persecuted.
- John Knox et. al. made it illegal to say Mass in Scotland. Punishment for the first offence was flogging and confiscation of all good, second offence banishment, third offence death.
- Matthew Hopkins, the notorious "Witch Finder General", was a Protestant.
- Puritan settlers of Massachusetts instituted what can best be described as a religious police state where even minor doctrinal differences were punished by flogging, pillorying, hanging, cutting off ears and / or noses, and boring holes in tongues with hot irons. Quakerism was a capital offence, and four Quakers were hanged for it, while the famous Salem witch trials resulted in 20 executions and around 150 people being imprisoned.
Protestants who happily lambast Catholics for their church's past atrocities are thus akin to Nigerians condemning Uganda for being full of black people.
"The fact that the average is 3 million years doesn't mean that you can't test it with something that reproduces much more quickly, like bacteria. (Or maybe the next higher organism than bacteria, since "speciation" is the point at which members of the two groups can't breed with each other, which requires sexual reproduction.) "
I used the term "macro-evolution" deliberately. Micro-evolution (small changes in fast breeding species) has been observed and proven, but this hasn't as yet produced a speciation event (or more correctly, we haven't observed one -- they may well be happening all the time in bacteria and viruses without us knowing about it). The problem here from a debating viewpoint is that the creationist lobby would argue that micro-evolution can be explained by the obvious fact that no two individuals are identical, so selective breeding (possibly due to environmental factors such as a small population that becomes geographically isolated) will favour certain traits above others, as is the case with (for example) Pygmies and Masai in Africa, or the vast range of selectively bred domestic animals and plants that humans have produced. However, despite the fact that we've (for example) been breeding dogs for 80,000 years or more, they're _still the same species_, even though there's more variance in physical characteristics between a huskies and bulldogs than some distinct species such as cougars and jaguars.
NB: some animals of different but similar species can interbreed, e.g. lions and tigers, horses and donkeys.
"That's why string theory is called a theory, rather than a law."
You obviously don't actually know the difference between a law and a theory in the scientific sense, and attempting to use the Internet as a source will likely dredge up some often painstakingly written, but notably incorrect articles. The current consensus among scientific philosophers goes thus:
- Laws are generalisations about what has happened based on observational data that allow us to generalise about what we expect to happen. There doesn't need to be a valid scientific theory to explain these generalisations -- astrologers for example have known how to predict the movements of planets by calculation for millennia without having any real idea of what they were or why they move as they do. A more modern example is Ohm's law, which merely stated that V=IR without attempting to explain _why_ this should be the case.
- Theories explain observations (or for that matter, laws). We have for example some pretty good theories about why earthquakes happen, but haven't managed to formulate a set of "laws" that allow us to predict them with any degree of reliability.
"Presumably they plan to test it eventually (since we might not have the necessary technology now). But it is (theoretically) testable, because it can be used to make predictions."
Testing its predictions does not however prove that a theory is correct, only that it isn't demonstrably incorrect. The old geocentric model of the universe that had the heavens on a series of rotating glass spheres was so good at predicting things that it's still used for navigation nowadays ("great circle" navigation), but that doesn't mean it was an accurate representation of reality. Testing predictions thus allows one to falsify a theory, but not prove it, because all of those same phenomena could also be due to something that's completely unknown to both the theorists and testers at that time.
"Similarly, evolution is a valid scientific theory while "intelligent design" is not, because even though it may not be fully proven (if it were, it would be called "the law of evolution" instead)"
A "law of evolution" would be a rule or formula that allowed one to calculate precisely what (for example) an evolved seal would be like in 35 million years, or what that seal's ancestors would have been like 35 million years ago without any need for finding fossils. This is _not_ the same as a proven theory, which can be demonstrably correct without allowing us to derive any laws from it, just as people have been able to derive laws without having what we'd regard as a valid (or in some cases any) theoretical foundation for them.
"intelligent design" is not and cannot ever be a valid theory because it makes no predictions and is not testable."
Macro-evolution isn't testable either, because the time scales are too long (an average of around around 3 million years for a full speciation event). And I would say that ID does make one very important, and therefore testable prediction, i.e. that there will be structures in nature that are too complex to be explained by evolution alone. I've yet to see any convincing evidence for such things, so my feet are still firmly planted on the evolution side of the fence, but it's interesting to speculate about what the effect of somebody discovering something like that would be!
"Bullplop. All of these disciplines, while indeed speculative, are focused ON trying to amass facts and reasoning"
They are actually based on what science is really about, i.e. _modelling_ the universe, not (as you claim) amassing "facts". Scientists deal with probabilities, not "facts".
"hungrily bound their speculations based on facts and seek more to resolve disputes"
What "facts" are string theory and xenobiology based on? I am starting to doubt that you actually know what (a) a fact is, or (b) what science is.
"Speculation is part of the scientific method"
No, it isn't. The "scientific method" consists of four steps:
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations (not speculation, but logical deduction of the form "if X is true then we can predict that Y should also be true).
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
Xenobiology for example cannot conform to the scientific method because we have no extraterrestrial life to observe in step 1.
"String theory, in fact, is about to undergo a partial test when the new collider comes online."
What they will be actually be testing are a few of the _predictions_ that string theory has made, not String Theory itself. If those predictions aren't borne out by experimentation, then String Theory will have to be re-thought, just as the types of matter that exist in interstellar space had to be rethought when the "Big Bang" theory's predicted levels of cosmic background radiation weren't supported by experimental data. Actually testing String Theory as a concept is beyond our current levels of technology.
First a disclaimer: I am an agnostic / "soft" atheist, and therefore do not follow any religion or believe in any gods. However, I must take issue with some of your points:
"A religion, or faith to be more precise, is belief in the absence of facts"
This is true of some followers of some religions, but there's nothing inherent in religion or faith itself that makes either incompatible with the scientific method. I suggest you Google for (among many others) Donald Knuth, Charles Tard Townes, Michael Heller, Robert T. Bakker, and Lawrence Doyle (all of whom are still living) if you believe that science is incompatible with faith.
"Science is fact based"
Is it? Then please explain branches of science such as theoretical physics, cosmology, life origins, xenobiology, and various others that are by their nature largely or even totally speculative -- string theory for example is isn't backed up by any experimental data, so those who support it are currently doing so entirely as a matter of faith.
"Don't mistake a passionate belief in the scientific method with blind faith in the supernatural."
Check up on the names I listed above. These are scientists of renown (including a Nobel Prize winner) who obviously believe in the scientific method whilst also being (often devout) Christians.
"I wouldn't exactly call them ancient. Islam is practically brand spanking new compared to the arc of civilizations."
I wasn't referring to Islam in particular, but rather the public's view of past peoples in general, especially when they weren't white (note that I am white, so this isn't a case of a non-white railing against "the establishment").
"At any rate, I feel pretty confident that they in fact did not have a deep understanding of the math, for the simple fact that despite this skill being known by many thousands, they didn't write the math down."
The fact that we don't know of any written works doesn't mean there weren't any, only that we haven't got any surviving examples. Archaeologists regularly discover artefacts and practices we didn't know existed from relatively recent and excellently documented periods such as Victorian England because nobody bothered to write about them in published works, and most of the non-published stuff tended to get thrown out. Thus, the fact that we don't know of any works describing something doesn't mean that there weren't any, especially in cultures that didn't have the printing press and therefore had to make copies by hand (the Muslim world didn't accept Caxton's printing technology for a century after it had become relatively common in Europe).
"Creating these tilings was almost demonstrably a valuable trade skill, probably a trade secret"
I often see this claim used to try and explain the absence of written descriptions of common trade practices from the past. However, a far simpler (and IMO better) reason is the fact that literacy wasn't particularly common in most societies until fairly recently, so craft practices weren't written down because the people who knew about them weren't capable of doing it, and those who had enough education to read and write tended to be fairly wealthy consumers of goods with no interest in how they were made. Knowledge was thus handed down from master to apprentice because that was the only way a master had of transferring it rather than due to any desire for secrecy, because secrecy wasn't necessary in a society where everything was made by specialist artisans (a mason didn't have the desire, equipment, or time to compete with a glassmaker, jeweller, or armourer).
"and craftsmen aren't usually big on theoretical topology"
Craftsmen aren't, but architects are a different matter, and it's far more likely that they were responsible for the design on those tiles than the artisans who made them or the builders who cemented them on to the walls. Architects from pre-industrial societies didn't make some drawings and specify which pre-fabricated construction materials should be used -- they and their apprentices were involved with the entire building process, including both internal and external decoration. And if you doubt the mathematical ability of ancient architects, than consider Hagia Sofia in Istanbul (originally a Christian church), which was recently discovered to been to have been designed to resist earthquakes that are fairly common in that area, hence the fact that it's still standing after 1500 years of shocks that regularly bring down much more modern buildings. But hey, if it floats your boat, then by all means believe that the two Greek architects who specified special flexible mortar, designed a system that transfers shocks from the dome outwards and then back into the ground, and used light construction materials with pumice mixed in with them for the upper portions were just repeating what they'd learned from centuries of trial-and-error, because people at that time can't have known enough about mathematics to have worked all that stuff out before-hand.
"Any idiot can see that the tiling is aperiodic by simply drawing it out"
"Any idiot" can't do anything of the sort. 99.999% of people wouldn't know that those patterns were aperiodic, hence the fact that they've been know of for at least 800 years, yet nobody noticed anything unusual about them until the 1990s.
"I guess we (Americans) just have cars on the brain"
The use of car analogies isn't just an American thing -- everyone seems to do it, and not only on Slashdot.
"I'd love to make up an analogy with a dwelling"
Entering somebody's home without their permission, even though you don't steal anything.
"stereo"
Recording radio broadcasts.
"TV"
"Pirate" cable or satellite decoders.
"or camera"
Taking photos or videos of womens' bedrooms, or store changing rooms / toilets without their knowledge (people have been prosecuted for all of these).
"Sorry you didn't like my analogy"
It wasn't your analogy in particular, but the fact that car analogies inevitably seem to crop up in any discussion of IP as a general thing, which is IMO playing into the hands of the recording and movie industries, who are doing their best to equate IP infringement with crimes against physical property in the collective public mind. That's why I think that (for example) the cameras in womens' changing rooms is a better analogy, because the only thing this damages are somebody's dignity and privacy, which like IP, are completely ephemeral concepts that are nonetheless protected by laws in some parts of the world.
"We all have cars (well actually I don't currently), so it is one common reference point"
Most of us also live in dwellings, and I'm pretty sure that nearly everyone on Slashdot has at least one computer, at least one sound system, at least one TV, and at least one camera.
"In my case, I was using speeding because 10 years ago the speed limit was apparently arbitrarily set to 55MPH nationwide"
OK, fair enough. You do however have to remember that (a) not everybody's from the US, and we have no way of knowing you are, and (b) "speeding" without any qualification covers everything from "pushing it a bit" on a deserted motorway at night with good visibility (you call them freeways, I believe) to doing 120mph in a town centre full of people at lunch time. Thus, while some "speeding" may be morally justifiable, this is not the case for speeding in general, because excess speed has been shown rather conclusively to increase both the likelihood of an accident, and the severity of any injures that are sustained.
NB: I believe that the 55mpg limit in the US was put there during the "oil crisis" in the 1970s in an attempt to reduce fuel consumption because car manufacturers told your government that 55 was the most efficient speed for most vehicles. However, I thought it had been repealed some time ago; I know Wikipedia isn't a particularly reliable source, but this article seems to indicate that rural inter-states have speed limits ranging from 65 in Delaware to 80 in Texas, with the average being about 70 for that type of road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_ United_States).
"And while we are waxing poetically for the peaceful and enlightened Muslim society built up in Spain"
Where precisely in "Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture" is there anything whatsoever about them being peaceful? Your obvious bitterness and hatred is leading you to build straw men!
"let's not forget how they built it up. By the imperial expansion and subjugation of Visigothic Spain (who in turn took it from the imperialistic Romans who in turn took it from the imperialistic Carthaginians)."
Again, where did I say anything to the contrary? You're ranting rather than answering anything I said.
"The Muslim invasion of Spain was a VERY violent and traumatic affair"
Most invasions tend to be like that.
"and featured just as much repression and atrocities as the Reconquista did 400 years later (the Reconquista started in earnest in the 11th century)"
The Spanish Reconquista (Portugal had one as well) actually began in the 8th century, about a decade after the Moorish invasion, when Pelayo The Visigoth (not to be confused with Saint Pelagius!) re-took Asturias at the Battle of Covadonga, and established what would later be called the Kingdom Of Asturias.
"As far as inevitability, nothing was inevitable"
This certainly was. Christian Europe could not tolerate the idea of Islamic kingdoms so close to home, so by the early 13th century, troops and monastic warrior orders from various nations were fighting what was in all respects a crusade (i.e. popes were declaring it as such) against them. The huge Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa for example had French and Portuguese soldiers and knights fighting alongside those from Navarro, Castille, and Aragon (the latter three of which had previously been rivals), and various military orders such as the Knights Templar were present.
"The "Spanish" Christians were as disorganized (and probably more so) than the Muslims were"
During what historical period? The aforementioned Battle Of Las Navas De Tolosa had _at least_ 200,000 men on each side from various countries (the Islamic forces were also multi-national), which were gigantic armies by the standards of the early 1200s, and not therefore something that a bunch of disorganised bozos could have put together, commanded, or supported logistically. We're talking about a period of seven hundred years here, during which each or both was sometimes disorganised and sometimes not, so blanket statements like your are quite simply rubbish.
"El Cid, that great Christian warrior, fought on the side of Muslims as often as he did against them."
As did everyone at that time in Spain, because there were Muslim provinces that were vassals of Christian rulers, and Christian provinces and cities which were vassals of Muslim rulers, so it was quite common for a Muslim emir and his army to be part of a Christian force that was fighting another Christian force, or vice versa. The religious aspects of the Reconquista seem to have been important for outsiders and some of the later Spanish rulers, but most of the people involved in it for the bulk of its history were really motivated by what underlies most wars, i.e. give me all your stuff or else.
"I still don't see what the GP post was referring to. Perhaps Europeans demolished Spanish Islam, but the vast majority of Islam was not in Spain"
I thought I'd explained the fact that he seemed to be referring to the Spanish Islamic civilisation getting destroyed by Europeans, not Islam in general, which was a set of distinct cultures with a shared religion rather than a single civilisation (as indeed is the case today: Riyadh and Jakarta are for example both the capitals of Muslim countries, but their cultures don't have many similarities beyond this).
"I don't see how Europe can be blamed for the decline of Islam. What I am really curious about are the reasons for that decline, and I have never really read a good explanation."
What most people mean by "the decline of Islam" is actually the stagnation and later decline in the Ottoman Empire, because Islam the religion has grown over the years rather than declined. There aren't any good explanations because so many factors contributed to it that nobody can say "well, it was because of these three things that went wrong", so historians who dedicate themselves to studying its history still debate whether its period of stagnation and later decline began with the Battle Of Lepanto, the devaluing of currency and rampant inflation caused by the massive influx of silver from Spanish South America, a loss of military technological supremacy due to growing religious and intellectual conservatism, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
And yes, it can safely be said that Europeans played a big part in the fall of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century onwards, but this had nothing to do with culture or religion, and was instead a matter of economics and politics. Note though that there were various internal factors which also caused significant problems at various times, so nobody can really say whether it would have survived in some form to the present day without European influences, or whether the growing nationalism of various member nations that was becoming evident in the 19th century together with movements such as pan-Arabism would have made it fall apart from within.
"If we generalize this to the field of anthropology, it might explain our modern astonishment at finding more evidence of intelligence and intention in our ancestors the closer we look... The Ice-Man's tattoo of acupuncture therapy is one example."
It's not so much astonishment, but an ingrained prejudice that renders many people incapable of accepting the fact that ancient peoples were _not_ less intelligent than us. It's therefore easier for them to believe that Atlanteans (who are inevitably portrayed as being white!) or aliens were responsible for gigantic and impressive structures from thousands of years ago than what they think of as "a bunch of ignorant wogs who didn't have TV and cars". Furthermore, the fact that (for example) the ruins of ancient Zimbabwe were attributed to Phoenicians, Hebrews, lost tribes of white men, etc., etc., because "darkies" were incapable of such architectural feats shows that archaeologists and anthropologists haven't always been immune to cultural prejudices.
I think he was referring to Islam in Spain as the civilisation that got destroyed, because Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture. Unfortunately for them this meant that they were basically caught between a rock and a hard place, with Catholic Europe on one side who regarded them as enemies, and a stricter, more fundamentalist Islamic culture in Africa (i.e. the other side of Spain) that had also regarded them as enemies since at least the 11th century. What's surprising therefore is not that they ended up getting destroyed, as that was obviously inevitable, but rather that they lasted as long as they did when surrounded by such powerful and fanatical opponents.
NB: although it ended up being Christian rulers who destroyed the Spanish Muslim civilisation, the original poster's claim that this was done "under the Aegis of the Catholic Church" is unjust. As has often been the case, the Catholic Kings used religion as a political and propaganda tool very effectively, but the conquest of the Muslim kingdoms in Spain was really about territory, and their subsequent persecution of Jews and Muslims had a lot more to do with eliminating possible sources of dissent together with jealousy (jews in particular occupied important administrative positions that Spanish nobles wanted for themselves) than real religious differences. There's no better evidence of this than the fact that many Spanish Jews fled to Catholic Italy, home of The Vatican, where they not only managed to live without many problems (i.e. some people had personal prejudices against them, but there was ittle if any persecution by either the Italian political authorities or the Church), but were also able to obtain important administrative posts and teach in universities, where their translation of ancient Greek works that had been preserved by Spanish Muslims into Latin became a key factor in the subsequent European Renaissance.
"I was arguing that violating copyright is no more of a moral offense than say, speeding."
As holder of a number of copyrights, I would argue that speeding is significantly worse in a moral sense than copyright infringement, because people who drive too fast for the type of road or conditions _have_ injured or killed others, and the degree of injury to both pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles is directly related to the speed of the collision. Non-commercial copyright infringement on the other hand only does _potential_ damage to a copyright holder's income (it is potential rather than actual because neither I nor any other copyright holder can conclusively demonstrate that an infringer would actually have bought our works if they weren't able to obtain them without paying), which is rather different from a moral viewpoint than acting in a way that has conclusively been shown to both increase the risk of injuring another, and make those injuries more severe.
I must admit to being puzzled by the fact that people need to define ludicrous moral or actual relationships between purely abstract concepts such copyright infringement and usually car-related acts with a real effect on the physical world. We don't attempt to describe other abstracts such as philosophy in terms of cars, or for that matter other crimes that don't involve or affect cars, so why then does every discussion of IP eventually end up with people swapping absurd car analogies?
Slashdot Mirror
"If only Apple had another example of a company that tried this, i.e., just selling their operating system, but without proprietary hardware, to see if this crazy strategy of making profit from software would work!"
Like for example DR DOS, BeOS, OS/2?
"Nah, you're right. There's NO WAY a software-only company can make any money."
Software-only companies can make money. There is however only _one_ operating system company that makes money, and it does not tolerate competitors, as Digital Research, Be Inc., and IBM (to name but three!) found to their cost. While the only way you can get OS X is by buying a Mac, the Eye Of Ballron will only settle on them for short periods, and move on, but change that, and Apple will find themselves locked in a battle against an entrenched and massively powerful monopoly with enough money in the bank to give Windows away for several years without going bust, and dwindling Mac sales because hey, you can get OS X for a Dell, so why pay Apple's higher prices? As for the iPod, iTV, and iPhone, how long would they last if every Windows service pack "accidentally" broke any software required to use them with all those hundreds of millions of Windows PCs?
"artificial or not, human vision is heavily based on pre-defined brain structures that take care of most of the filtering and pre-processing and has very little to do with being intelligent or not either"
Agreed in full. The most sophisticated and powerful vision system we know of is that of mantis shrimps, creatures which are not renowned for their intellectual achievements.
The following is a partial list of some other things that supposedly fall under the aegis of AI without having anything whatsoever to do with "intelligence":
1) Walking without falling over.
2) Not bumping into things while moving about. Quite simple creatures are capable of this feat.
3) Tracking a moving object. insect predators such as dragonflies do this very effectively while also avoiding bumping into things. Dragonflies are not intelligent.
4) Picking up something fragile without completely destroying it. Earwigs and ants (to name but two) have jaws designed for cutting and crushing, yet they can pick up and carry their own (or in the case of ants, the queen's) fragile eggs and larvae around while also ably performing (2) and (3) above. Crocodiles and alligators (not rated as being bright, even among the low standards applied to reptiles) are also capable of using the most powerful set of jaws in the animal kingdom to pick up newly hatched young without damaging them.
5) Anything Kevin Warwick does or says.
"A Christian cannot question the existence of God or Jesus."
Because those are what define a Christian. If you don't believe in both of those, the you aren't a Christian, just as people who don't believe that there is one god and Mohammed was His prophet aren't Muslims. However, Christians can and have questioned the nature of their god (the gentle, loving, and tolerant god Jesus describes isn't much like the vengeful and often petty one in the Old Testament, for example), the nature of Jesus (some Christian sects had sets of Gospels that were very from those Constantine selected for current versions of the Bible), how his message should be interpreted, who it was intended for (the dichotomy between Peter and Paul was the first example of this), etc., etc., etc.
"Arguing that everything is faith based brings us to a terrible question. What's the point of doing anything?"
I will answer this with a counter question. My intention isn't to set up a straw man, and I don't expect an answer -- it's just something to think about. Why do we feel compelled to "do things" in the entirely imaginary worlds of dreams where all the images, sounds, tactile impressions, tastes, and smells are generated by our brains rather than coming from our sensory apparatus?
"There is certainly a difference between believing that gravity will cause a cup to fall to the ground if dropped, or that a man called Jesus died, rose from the grave and ascended in to heaven."
We "believe" that a cup falls to the ground when released because we've been programmed from a very young age to assume that there is a causal relationship between certain sequences of events. It is this fundamental belief that first led to animism (such-and-such occurred because the spirit that controls this class of things willed it to be so, therefore I can make it happen again whenever I want / prevent it from happening again if I can find a way of placating the spirit), and ultimately to modern religions which claim for example that the universe and everything in it (including us) exist because a god or gods willed it to be so. However, we can only logically prove that there is a statistical correspondence between sets of events (and actually not even that -- see blow), and this does not imply any causal relationship between them. Did the cup fall _because_ you opened your hand; did your hand open because the universe "wanted" it to fall and you, being part of that universe, had no choice but to comply; or was the opening of your hand and the cup falling two completely unrelated events?
To make things even more tenuous, research into things such as false memory syndrome indicates that we don't actually remember what has occurred, but only what we _believe_ to have occurred (no hypnosis is necessary to produce this phenomenon). With this in mind, how can we actually know that our memory of having opened our hand and dropping the cup was a real event rather than a fantasy that our brains devised to explain the phenomenon of a broken cup on the floor?
"Although we can't be absolutely certain that anything really exists, we need to trust our senses to a reasonable level."
I agree in a practical sense. I'm not trying to suggest that we live our lives based on a philosophy of relativism, but rather to show that science advocates who accuse religions of being based on unprovable assumptions are being hypocrites, because some branches of the science that they claim to support indicate that _everything_ is based on a set of assumptions that are no more falsifiable than the existence of a god or set of gods.
"If measure the temperature of room, I trust my eyes and those of my colleagues to confirm that the thermometer is providing a figure."
it is indeed providing "a figure", but it isn't measuring "temperature", because "temperature", like distance, time, etc. is an entirely invented concept that is expressed in terms of some other invented concepts. It's simply a word we use to describe comparing arbitrarily selected ene
"We have observed quite a few speciation events in plants and insects (included links)."
Thanks for the interesting links. I must admit to being unimpressed by a good many of the insect examples, a fair number of which seem to be experiments performed by one researcher or group of researchers that have not been duplicated by others (the only one that stated anyone had even tried said that 18 independent laboratories had repeated it without seeing anything remotely resembling what had being claimed). The things that have been observed in the natural world were IMO a lot more convincing, and therefore provide far better ammunition to use against the ID / creationist lobby. I'd heard about the "Pharoah mice" before, but thought the jury was still out on whether they are actually a separate mouse species, although the fact that I haven't looked at them again for 20 years or so could well mean things have changed.
"Are [dogs all one species]? Or do we just continue to refer them as such out of convenience? Consider the fact that, for example, the size difference between smallest and largest dog breeds is such that they are physiologically incapable of breeding with each other, a Great Dane and chihuahua can't get on with it."
Dogs are considered to be a single species because each specific breed depends on humans to perpetuate it by ensuring that mating only ever occurs with another dog of the same type. The dogs themselves don't have any preferences for their own breed over any other, and as any breeder will attest, will often mate with a dog of a distinctly different type even when there are several "eligible" members of their own breed at hand (actually sensible from a genetic viewpoint, because diversity is beneficial to a species). And while your observation about the size differences between very large and very small breeds causing physiologically incompatible is correct, the fact that both can successfully interbreed with a wide variety of intermediately sized dogs and produce puppies that will also be capable of doing the same proves that they are the same species, just like the tiniest adult human (22.5 inches, 20 pounds) and biggest (8'11, 491lbs) are the same species.
NB: zoologists who study canids reckon that an arbitrary mix of dog breeds left in a feral state would revert to an ancestral form much like that of a grey wolf in as little as six generations (i.e. about 20 years). However, observations of actual feral dogs indicate that they end up being dingo-like rather than wolf-like, and this has led some to question the commonly accepted wolf ancestry theory.
"it was a long time ago (we got it when it was still new and shiny) and I doubt they would help now. We're a pretty minor customer."
Probably not. Mine was a new machine, and although it was the first Mac I've ever owned, long experience with Windows and Linux boxes meant that I recognised dodgy RAM symptoms immediately, so I took the stick back (easier than taking the whole machine) and walked out with a new one.
NB: I currently live in Spain, so this Mac dealer wouldn't be one that people elsewhere are familiar with.
"All the RAM came with the system."
A bad RAM stick in my REV. 1 iMac G5 also came with the system. Symptom: complete system lock-ups with certain pieces of software, but not others. Memory tester said everything was fine, but I tried pulling the sticks and swapping them anyway. Turned out one was bad, but the place I bought the system from changed it for another with no questions asked, and things have been fine for the last 2 years.
"The bad news is that means they'll replace the user interface with Keanu Reeves"
Which Microsoft's developers have code-named "WoodPlank".
And the Catholic English, and the Anglican English, and a whole bunch of others, because Ollie believed in equal opportunities massacring where everybody had the inalienable right to be killed irrespective of nationality, gender, or creed.
NB: I did say I was providing a few examples, and also that there were many more.
"Key to Weedlekin's post is "religious nuts"
Although I did use this term, I'd like to point out that religion doesn't have a monopoly on fanatical nuts who want to tell everyone else how to live. The Western world for example is increasingly falling prey to "nanny states" where politicians have been spurred by fanatical nut lobbies into banning people from doing things that are fun but bad for them, and then whine that everyone's living longer (albeit less enjoyably!), and therefore bankrupting their state pension schemes.
"scientific theories can't really be given much credence unless they can be tested independently and most importantly, they must be disprovable."
Agreed.
"Religion, at least the big three, are incompatible with science in the same way that a car and a hamburger are incompatible. They are two different areas of study that can rarely overlap. This doesn't mean that you can't have both though, the problem is in keeping them separate."
This was something the Einstein had problems with in his later life. His faith prevented him from accepting Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (the famous "God doesn't throw dice"), and therefore quantum physics, because he believed that God had intended man to understand the universe, and would therefore have created it to embody a few simple (to someone like Einstein) rules from which everything else was derived.
"Christianity and Islam are not meant to be questioned"
History would refute that statement, because both religions have had more than a few theologians and philosophers who have questioned many aspects of both faiths, and each also has a number of distinct sects that disagree with each-other on the way various holy books should be interpreted, what role religion should have in politics, and a host of other things. Sufi Muslims (which are themselves divided into a whole bunch of sects that are usually specific to a particular geographic region) for example are mystics who believe that the Koran should be interpreted allegorically rather than literally, and are therefore opposed to the idea of basing governments or legal systems on it.
"the scientific community cannot hide from evidence. The same cannot be said of Islam, for example, as it's faith-based and so does not rely on facts."
_Everything_ is ultimately faith-based, even science, because it's impossible to prove that our perception of the universe is actually a reasonabe representation of it, and thus also impossible to prove that anything in science has any relationship whatsoever to reality (if indeed there is such a thing).
"I think you've misunderstood what I said."
No, what you said is perfectly clear: "A religion, or faith to be more precise, is belief in the absence of facts. Science is fact based." This statement implies that science and religions are incompatible, hence my post.
"There is no reason why a scientist can't be religious, as long as they don't allow their religious views or bias to influence their results. Mendel was certainly religious yet on to something when he started playing around with those peas."
One can however say exactly the same thing substituting different words for "religion" and be equally true, e.g.:
There is no reason why a scientist can't be political as long as they don't allow their political views to influence their results.
There is no reason why a scientist can't be paid by a company as long as they don't allow it to influence their results.
It is thus simply a case of good scientists going where the evidence leads them, and bad scientists filtering or manipulating "evidence" to suit their own personal agendas, irrespective of whether their motives are religious, financial, political, or a desire for attention / fame.
"Can you suggest any scientific breakthroughs that have come as a direct result of a religion?"
I call straw man, as I have not said religion _causes_ science, only that they aren't as incompatible as (some, but not all) atheists like to claim. However, as you brought the point up, please provide some examples of scientific breakthroughs that can directly be attributed to atheism rather than simply having been made _by_ atheists.
"Not everyone is capable of this though - look at pseudo-scientists like Behe and Gish who clearly allow religious belief to override science."
Charlatans have always been around, and probably always will be, but religion hasn't anything approaching a monopoly on them. Note also that for every Gish or Behe there are tens or hundreds like Dr. Robert Bakker, a well-known palaeontologist who also happens to be a Pentecostal preacher (he's the big bearded guy with a cowboy hat often seen on documentaries about dinosaurs who very obviously has no problems accepting the theory of evolution) that nobody would know were devout Christians, Jews, Muslims etc. from their work, public appearances, or lectures.
"Seriously, most of this crazy "Christian" crap comes from the Catholics."
What rubbish. I currently live in a predominantly Catholic country, and despite not being a Christian myself, am married to a woman who goes to mass twice a week, has a grandfather who was beatified by the last pope, and an uncle who is likely to be beatified by this one. Yet strangely, neither she nor her priest have mentioned the Wii (which is constantly sold out over here), or the Internet (massively popular), or for that matter porn (also incredibly popular). They also have far less in the way of silly prudishness than most protestant countries: nearly all women go topless on the beach, TV adverts have full-frontal topless shots, explicit sex scenes don't have watershed hours, and movie ratings are advisory rather than enforced by law, for example (one also sees a lot more blood and gore on news reports, which aren't censored for fear of possibly scaring a child. The attitude here seems to be that it's a parent's job to control what their children watch, not everyone else's).
Thus, a far more accurate statement would be: most of this crazy "Christian" crap comes from US-based right wing fundamentalist religious nuts.
"Look at the history of the Catholic church. Murder. Rape. Molestation. Lies."
All of which are true of Protestants when they've had the power to do so. Here are a few examples (there are many, many more):
- John Calvin's followers burned 58 "heretics".
- Lutherans in Germany instituted the death penalty for heresy, i.e. the crime of not interpreting Biblical scriptures in the same way as them.
- Elizabeth 1 of England outlawed Catholicism and executed at least 200 Catholics; Quakers and other non-Anglicans were also persecuted.
- John Knox et. al. made it illegal to say Mass in Scotland. Punishment for the first offence was flogging and confiscation of all good, second offence banishment, third offence death.
- Matthew Hopkins, the notorious "Witch Finder General", was a Protestant.
- Puritan settlers of Massachusetts instituted what can best be described as a religious police state where even minor doctrinal differences were punished by flogging, pillorying, hanging, cutting off ears and / or noses, and boring holes in tongues with hot irons. Quakerism was a capital offence, and four Quakers were hanged for it, while the famous Salem witch trials resulted in 20 executions and around 150 people being imprisoned.
Protestants who happily lambast Catholics for their church's past atrocities are thus akin to Nigerians condemning Uganda for being full of black people.
"The fact that the average is 3 million years doesn't mean that you can't test it with something that reproduces much more quickly, like bacteria. (Or maybe the next higher organism than bacteria, since "speciation" is the point at which members of the two groups can't breed with each other, which requires sexual reproduction.) "
I used the term "macro-evolution" deliberately. Micro-evolution (small changes in fast breeding species) has been observed and proven, but this hasn't as yet produced a speciation event (or more correctly, we haven't observed one -- they may well be happening all the time in bacteria and viruses without us knowing about it). The problem here from a debating viewpoint is that the creationist lobby would argue that micro-evolution can be explained by the obvious fact that no two individuals are identical, so selective breeding (possibly due to environmental factors such as a small population that becomes geographically isolated) will favour certain traits above others, as is the case with (for example) Pygmies and Masai in Africa, or the vast range of selectively bred domestic animals and plants that humans have produced. However, despite the fact that we've (for example) been breeding dogs for 80,000 years or more, they're _still the same species_, even though there's more variance in physical characteristics between a huskies and bulldogs than some distinct species such as cougars and jaguars.
NB: some animals of different but similar species can interbreed, e.g. lions and tigers, horses and donkeys.
"That's why string theory is called a theory, rather than a law."
You obviously don't actually know the difference between a law and a theory in the scientific sense, and attempting to use the Internet as a source will likely dredge up some often painstakingly written, but notably incorrect articles. The current consensus among scientific philosophers goes thus:
- Laws are generalisations about what has happened based on observational data that allow us to generalise about what we expect to happen. There doesn't need to be a valid scientific theory to explain these generalisations -- astrologers for example have known how to predict the movements of planets by calculation for millennia without having any real idea of what they were or why they move as they do. A more modern example is Ohm's law, which merely stated that V=IR without attempting to explain _why_ this should be the case.
- Theories explain observations (or for that matter, laws). We have for example some pretty good theories about why earthquakes happen, but haven't managed to formulate a set of "laws" that allow us to predict them with any degree of reliability.
"Presumably they plan to test it eventually (since we might not have the necessary technology now). But it is (theoretically) testable, because it can be used to make predictions."
Testing its predictions does not however prove that a theory is correct, only that it isn't demonstrably incorrect. The old geocentric model of the universe that had the heavens on a series of rotating glass spheres was so good at predicting things that it's still used for navigation nowadays ("great circle" navigation), but that doesn't mean it was an accurate representation of reality. Testing predictions thus allows one to falsify a theory, but not prove it, because all of those same phenomena could also be due to something that's completely unknown to both the theorists and testers at that time.
"Similarly, evolution is a valid scientific theory while "intelligent design" is not, because even though it may not be fully proven (if it were, it would be called "the law of evolution" instead)"
A "law of evolution" would be a rule or formula that allowed one to calculate precisely what (for example) an evolved seal would be like in 35 million years, or what that seal's ancestors would have been like 35 million years ago without any need for finding fossils. This is _not_ the same as a proven theory, which can be demonstrably correct without allowing us to derive any laws from it, just as people have been able to derive laws without having what we'd regard as a valid (or in some cases any) theoretical foundation for them.
"intelligent design" is not and cannot ever be a valid theory because it makes no predictions and is not testable."
Macro-evolution isn't testable either, because the time scales are too long (an average of around around 3 million years for a full speciation event). And I would say that ID does make one very important, and therefore testable prediction, i.e. that there will be structures in nature that are too complex to be explained by evolution alone. I've yet to see any convincing evidence for such things, so my feet are still firmly planted on the evolution side of the fence, but it's interesting to speculate about what the effect of somebody discovering something like that would be!
"Bullplop. All of these disciplines, while indeed speculative, are focused ON trying to amass facts and reasoning"
They are actually based on what science is really about, i.e. _modelling_ the universe, not (as you claim) amassing "facts". Scientists deal with probabilities, not "facts".
"hungrily bound their speculations based on facts and seek more to resolve disputes"
What "facts" are string theory and xenobiology based on? I am starting to doubt that you actually know what (a) a fact is, or (b) what science is.
"Speculation is part of the scientific method"
No, it isn't. The "scientific method" consists of four steps:
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations (not speculation, but logical deduction of the form "if X is true then we can predict that Y should also be true).
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
Xenobiology for example cannot conform to the scientific method because we have no extraterrestrial life to observe in step 1.
"String theory, in fact, is about to undergo a partial test when the new collider comes online."
What they will be actually be testing are a few of the _predictions_ that string theory has made, not String Theory itself. If those predictions aren't borne out by experimentation, then String Theory will have to be re-thought, just as the types of matter that exist in interstellar space had to be rethought when the "Big Bang" theory's predicted levels of cosmic background radiation weren't supported by experimental data. Actually testing String Theory as a concept is beyond our current levels of technology.
First a disclaimer: I am an agnostic / "soft" atheist, and therefore do not follow any religion or believe in any gods. However, I must take issue with some of your points:
"A religion, or faith to be more precise, is belief in the absence of facts"
This is true of some followers of some religions, but there's nothing inherent in religion or faith itself that makes either incompatible with the scientific method. I suggest you Google for (among many others) Donald Knuth, Charles Tard Townes, Michael Heller, Robert T. Bakker, and Lawrence Doyle (all of whom are still living) if you believe that science is incompatible with faith.
"Science is fact based"
Is it? Then please explain branches of science such as theoretical physics, cosmology, life origins, xenobiology, and various others that are by their nature largely or even totally speculative -- string theory for example is isn't backed up by any experimental data, so those who support it are currently doing so entirely as a matter of faith.
"Don't mistake a passionate belief in the scientific method with blind faith in the supernatural."
Check up on the names I listed above. These are scientists of renown (including a Nobel Prize winner) who obviously believe in the scientific method whilst also being (often devout) Christians.
"A funny thing about the atheist liberal leftist types"
Not all atheists are liberals.
"I wouldn't exactly call them ancient. Islam is practically brand spanking new compared to the arc of civilizations."
I wasn't referring to Islam in particular, but rather the public's view of past peoples in general, especially when they weren't white (note that I am white, so this isn't a case of a non-white railing against "the establishment").
"At any rate, I feel pretty confident that they in fact did not have a deep understanding of the math, for the simple fact that despite this skill being known by many thousands, they didn't write the math down."
The fact that we don't know of any written works doesn't mean there weren't any, only that we haven't got any surviving examples. Archaeologists regularly discover artefacts and practices we didn't know existed from relatively recent and excellently documented periods such as Victorian England because nobody bothered to write about them in published works, and most of the non-published stuff tended to get thrown out. Thus, the fact that we don't know of any works describing something doesn't mean that there weren't any, especially in cultures that didn't have the printing press and therefore had to make copies by hand (the Muslim world didn't accept Caxton's printing technology for a century after it had become relatively common in Europe).
"Creating these tilings was almost demonstrably a valuable trade skill, probably a trade secret"
I often see this claim used to try and explain the absence of written descriptions of common trade practices from the past. However, a far simpler (and IMO better) reason is the fact that literacy wasn't particularly common in most societies until fairly recently, so craft practices weren't written down because the people who knew about them weren't capable of doing it, and those who had enough education to read and write tended to be fairly wealthy consumers of goods with no interest in how they were made. Knowledge was thus handed down from master to apprentice because that was the only way a master had of transferring it rather than due to any desire for secrecy, because secrecy wasn't necessary in a society where everything was made by specialist artisans (a mason didn't have the desire, equipment, or time to compete with a glassmaker, jeweller, or armourer).
"and craftsmen aren't usually big on theoretical topology"
Craftsmen aren't, but architects are a different matter, and it's far more likely that they were responsible for the design on those tiles than the artisans who made them or the builders who cemented them on to the walls. Architects from pre-industrial societies didn't make some drawings and specify which pre-fabricated construction materials should be used -- they and their apprentices were involved with the entire building process, including both internal and external decoration. And if you doubt the mathematical ability of ancient architects, than consider Hagia Sofia in Istanbul (originally a Christian church), which was recently discovered to been to have been designed to resist earthquakes that are fairly common in that area, hence the fact that it's still standing after 1500 years of shocks that regularly bring down much more modern buildings. But hey, if it floats your boat, then by all means believe that the two Greek architects who specified special flexible mortar, designed a system that transfers shocks from the dome outwards and then back into the ground, and used light construction materials with pumice mixed in with them for the upper portions were just repeating what they'd learned from centuries of trial-and-error, because people at that time can't have known enough about mathematics to have worked all that stuff out before-hand.
"Any idiot can see that the tiling is aperiodic by simply drawing it out"
"Any idiot" can't do anything of the sort. 99.999% of people wouldn't know that those patterns were aperiodic, hence the fact that they've been know of for at least 800 years, yet nobody noticed anything unusual about them until the 1990s.
"I guess we (Americans) just have cars on the brain"
The use of car analogies isn't just an American thing -- everyone seems to do it, and not only on Slashdot.
"I'd love to make up an analogy with a dwelling"
Entering somebody's home without their permission, even though you don't steal anything.
"stereo"
Recording radio broadcasts.
"TV"
"Pirate" cable or satellite decoders.
"or camera"
Taking photos or videos of womens' bedrooms, or store changing rooms / toilets without their knowledge (people have been prosecuted for all of these).
"Sorry you didn't like my analogy"
It wasn't your analogy in particular, but the fact that car analogies inevitably seem to crop up in any discussion of IP as a general thing, which is IMO playing into the hands of the recording and movie industries, who are doing their best to equate IP infringement with crimes against physical property in the collective public mind. That's why I think that (for example) the cameras in womens' changing rooms is a better analogy, because the only thing this damages are somebody's dignity and privacy, which like IP, are completely ephemeral concepts that are nonetheless protected by laws in some parts of the world.
"We all have cars (well actually I don't currently), so it is one common reference point"
_ United_States).
Most of us also live in dwellings, and I'm pretty sure that nearly everyone on Slashdot has at least one computer, at least one sound system, at least one TV, and at least one camera.
"In my case, I was using speeding because 10 years ago the speed limit was apparently arbitrarily set to 55MPH nationwide"
OK, fair enough. You do however have to remember that (a) not everybody's from the US, and we have no way of knowing you are, and (b) "speeding" without any qualification covers everything from "pushing it a bit" on a deserted motorway at night with good visibility (you call them freeways, I believe) to doing 120mph in a town centre full of people at lunch time. Thus, while some "speeding" may be morally justifiable, this is not the case for speeding in general, because excess speed has been shown rather conclusively to increase both the likelihood of an accident, and the severity of any injures that are sustained.
NB: I believe that the 55mpg limit in the US was put there during the "oil crisis" in the 1970s in an attempt to reduce fuel consumption because car manufacturers told your government that 55 was the most efficient speed for most vehicles. However, I thought it had been repealed some time ago; I know Wikipedia isn't a particularly reliable source, but this article seems to indicate that rural inter-states have speed limits ranging from 65 in Delaware to 80 in Texas, with the average being about 70 for that type of road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the
"Hardly."
Hardly what? You're not making any sense.
"And while we are waxing poetically for the peaceful and enlightened Muslim society built up in Spain"
Where precisely in "Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture" is there anything whatsoever about them being peaceful? Your obvious bitterness and hatred is leading you to build straw men!
"let's not forget how they built it up. By the imperial expansion and subjugation of Visigothic Spain (who in turn took it from the imperialistic Romans who in turn took it from the imperialistic Carthaginians)."
Again, where did I say anything to the contrary? You're ranting rather than answering anything I said.
"The Muslim invasion of Spain was a VERY violent and traumatic affair"
Most invasions tend to be like that.
"and featured just as much repression and atrocities as the Reconquista did 400 years later (the Reconquista started in earnest in the 11th century)"
The Spanish Reconquista (Portugal had one as well) actually began in the 8th century, about a decade after the Moorish invasion, when Pelayo The Visigoth (not to be confused with Saint Pelagius!) re-took Asturias at the Battle of Covadonga, and established what would later be called the Kingdom Of Asturias.
"As far as inevitability, nothing was inevitable"
This certainly was. Christian Europe could not tolerate the idea of Islamic kingdoms so close to home, so by the early 13th century, troops and monastic warrior orders from various nations were fighting what was in all respects a crusade (i.e. popes were declaring it as such) against them. The huge Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa for example had French and Portuguese soldiers and knights fighting alongside those from Navarro, Castille, and Aragon (the latter three of which had previously been rivals), and various military orders such as the Knights Templar were present.
"The "Spanish" Christians were as disorganized (and probably more so) than the Muslims were"
During what historical period? The aforementioned Battle Of Las Navas De Tolosa had _at least_ 200,000 men on each side from various countries (the Islamic forces were also multi-national), which were gigantic armies by the standards of the early 1200s, and not therefore something that a bunch of disorganised bozos could have put together, commanded, or supported logistically. We're talking about a period of seven hundred years here, during which each or both was sometimes disorganised and sometimes not, so blanket statements like your are quite simply rubbish.
"El Cid, that great Christian warrior, fought on the side of Muslims as often as he did against them."
As did everyone at that time in Spain, because there were Muslim provinces that were vassals of Christian rulers, and Christian provinces and cities which were vassals of Muslim rulers, so it was quite common for a Muslim emir and his army to be part of a Christian force that was fighting another Christian force, or vice versa. The religious aspects of the Reconquista seem to have been important for outsiders and some of the later Spanish rulers, but most of the people involved in it for the bulk of its history were really motivated by what underlies most wars, i.e. give me all your stuff or else.
"I still don't see what the GP post was referring to. Perhaps Europeans demolished Spanish Islam, but the vast majority of Islam was not in Spain"
I thought I'd explained the fact that he seemed to be referring to the Spanish Islamic civilisation getting destroyed by Europeans, not Islam in general, which was a set of distinct cultures with a shared religion rather than a single civilisation (as indeed is the case today: Riyadh and Jakarta are for example both the capitals of Muslim countries, but their cultures don't have many similarities beyond this).
"I don't see how Europe can be blamed for the decline of Islam. What I am really curious about are the reasons for that decline, and I have never really read a good explanation."
What most people mean by "the decline of Islam" is actually the stagnation and later decline in the Ottoman Empire, because Islam the religion has grown over the years rather than declined. There aren't any good explanations because so many factors contributed to it that nobody can say "well, it was because of these three things that went wrong", so historians who dedicate themselves to studying its history still debate whether its period of stagnation and later decline began with the Battle Of Lepanto, the devaluing of currency and rampant inflation caused by the massive influx of silver from Spanish South America, a loss of military technological supremacy due to growing religious and intellectual conservatism, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
And yes, it can safely be said that Europeans played a big part in the fall of the Ottoman Empire from the 16th century onwards, but this had nothing to do with culture or religion, and was instead a matter of economics and politics. Note though that there were various internal factors which also caused significant problems at various times, so nobody can really say whether it would have survived in some form to the present day without European influences, or whether the growing nationalism of various member nations that was becoming evident in the 19th century together with movements such as pan-Arabism would have made it fall apart from within.
"If we generalize this to the field of anthropology, it might explain our modern astonishment at finding more evidence of intelligence and intention in our ancestors the closer we look... The Ice-Man's tattoo of acupuncture therapy is one example."
It's not so much astonishment, but an ingrained prejudice that renders many people incapable of accepting the fact that ancient peoples were _not_ less intelligent than us. It's therefore easier for them to believe that Atlanteans (who are inevitably portrayed as being white!) or aliens were responsible for gigantic and impressive structures from thousands of years ago than what they think of as "a bunch of ignorant wogs who didn't have TV and cars". Furthermore, the fact that (for example) the ruins of ancient Zimbabwe were attributed to Phoenicians, Hebrews, lost tribes of white men, etc., etc., because "darkies" were incapable of such architectural feats shows that archaeologists and anthropologists haven't always been immune to cultural prejudices.
I think he was referring to Islam in Spain as the civilisation that got destroyed, because Spanish Muslims had diverged significantly from those in Africa and the Middle East (or more correctly, African and Middle Eastern Muslims had diverged from them), so they can justifiably be regarded as a distinct civilisation with a unique culture. Unfortunately for them this meant that they were basically caught between a rock and a hard place, with Catholic Europe on one side who regarded them as enemies, and a stricter, more fundamentalist Islamic culture in Africa (i.e. the other side of Spain) that had also regarded them as enemies since at least the 11th century. What's surprising therefore is not that they ended up getting destroyed, as that was obviously inevitable, but rather that they lasted as long as they did when surrounded by such powerful and fanatical opponents.
NB: although it ended up being Christian rulers who destroyed the Spanish Muslim civilisation, the original poster's claim that this was done "under the Aegis of the Catholic Church" is unjust. As has often been the case, the Catholic Kings used religion as a political and propaganda tool very effectively, but the conquest of the Muslim kingdoms in Spain was really about territory, and their subsequent persecution of Jews and Muslims had a lot more to do with eliminating possible sources of dissent together with jealousy (jews in particular occupied important administrative positions that Spanish nobles wanted for themselves) than real religious differences. There's no better evidence of this than the fact that many Spanish Jews fled to Catholic Italy, home of The Vatican, where they not only managed to live without many problems (i.e. some people had personal prejudices against them, but there was ittle if any persecution by either the Italian political authorities or the Church), but were also able to obtain important administrative posts and teach in universities, where their translation of ancient Greek works that had been preserved by Spanish Muslims into Latin became a key factor in the subsequent European Renaissance.
"I was arguing that violating copyright is no more of a moral offense than say, speeding."
As holder of a number of copyrights, I would argue that speeding is significantly worse in a moral sense than copyright infringement, because people who drive too fast for the type of road or conditions _have_ injured or killed others, and the degree of injury to both pedestrians and passengers in other vehicles is directly related to the speed of the collision. Non-commercial copyright infringement on the other hand only does _potential_ damage to a copyright holder's income (it is potential rather than actual because neither I nor any other copyright holder can conclusively demonstrate that an infringer would actually have bought our works if they weren't able to obtain them without paying), which is rather different from a moral viewpoint than acting in a way that has conclusively been shown to both increase the risk of injuring another, and make those injuries more severe.
I must admit to being puzzled by the fact that people need to define ludicrous moral or actual relationships between purely abstract concepts such copyright infringement and usually car-related acts with a real effect on the physical world. We don't attempt to describe other abstracts such as philosophy in terms of cars, or for that matter other crimes that don't involve or affect cars, so why then does every discussion of IP eventually end up with people swapping absurd car analogies?