This betrays are rather huge ignorance of what is meant by "testing" in science. Testing doesn't just mean having pictures or video of events. It means making predictions about what we ought to find if we go looking, and evolutionary theory makes predictions about what we should find in the fossil and molecular data.
And fuck, pal, even Darwin himself came up with a perfectly utilitarian theory of sexual selection. Read a fucking book by a fucking biologist and quit aping long debunked Creationist crap. It only makes you look like an ignorant fucktard.
To some extent I agree with you. I even feel that, for all its flaws, the US is probably a more reliable steward of the Internet than just about any other nation or international body I can think of.
At the same time, if we allow the Internet to be fractured even more than it already is, we will lose one of the great technological innovations of the latter half of the 20th century.
So I sit on the fence over the whole thing, not really all the keen that some international body, some of whose members will be nations highly toxic to a free Internet (which seems to be a growing number of nations, sadly), but wanting to see the whole thing busted in to pieces of various degrees of interoperability.
I tend to disagree here. Specific Creationist claims certainly can be tested, and most have been. The kinds of Creationist claims that can't be tested are the ones that either amount to "God did it" (which immediately moves the claim beyond any kind of empirical treatment), or even more amusing "God is fooling us" (omphalism), which also moves a claim beyond the realm of the physical and testable.
In my younger years, when I thought debating Creationists for several hours a week was an amusing and productive exercise, these two twin claims (which both amount to variants of divine intervention) were the normal redoubt of a Creationist who had been cornered when it turned out "lazy light" or Paluxy footprint claims were utter rubbish. It didn't seem to bother them that what they were really advocating epistemological nihilism, and that that view undermined their own beliefs as much as science. What mattered is that they had walled off their religious beliefs; compartmentalized them so that no evidence could ever undermine their world view.
Good thing all those scientists love nothing better than to wipe out consensus whenever they can.
Oh, I get it, the idea is that a theory that is well-supported must somehow be wrong. That way whatever bullshit worldview you want to support but which has been wiped out by actual science can somehow be viewed as true, because, you know, having the majority of researchers in a discipline find that your worldview is utter bollocks makes them wrong.
Ham makes a reasonably good living off of Creationism, so I posit that Ham is eminently rational; but completely immoral. You may call a con man a lot of things, but generally irrational isn't one of them.
We put all sorts of limits on democracy. You can't democratically decide to enslave all red haired people. Even if the popular will is that red haired people are subhumans who can be treated like cattle, there are constitutional protections against this kind of an abuse. In other words, in most Western countries, and most certainly in the United States, the constitutional framers were all to aware that pure democracy; or mobocracy if you will, is as vulnerable to abuses against individual liberties as are governments.
The same applies to public education. As public schools are a branch of the government, the Establishment Clause applies to them, and thus teaching Creationism, even in the watered down form of Intelligent Design, is a blatant attempt to use the organs of state to push a specific set of religious beliefs. That was the finding of the Kitzmiller v. Dover, and while the trial sadly doesn't apply universally, it, coupled with judgments like Edwards v. Aguillard create a compelling set of case law that will likely demolish just about every attempt to sneak Creationism into the class, or to somehow earmark evolution as being controversial.
But really, particularly at the state level, politicians don't give a flying fuck about constitutionality. They probably know in most cases that any pro-Creationism law they try to pass will ultimately get tossed, but that makes vote-getting legislation even better, as when it gets tossed, they can make a lot of noise about meddling activist courts, and the deluded idiots who lap this kind of performance up nod their heads in agreement. It's a win win for these politicians, although it does become a tragic waste of taxpayer money.
You come up with potential theories of how organic molecules could become self replicating, and you test those theories. You may very well never find out how precisely abiogenesis happened on Earth, but you do come up with possible explanations that make predictions. Science is satisfied at times with "we don't know", even if scientists themselves are never satisfied.
An equivalent in forensics might be that we can't find out who killed Subject C, even if Subject A and B's murderers are identified. That we can't find Subject C's murderer doesn't mean we can say "angels killed Subject C".
I doubt they taught you very much about alchemy or astrology, other than skimming over some basic claims. In reality, while both systems are utterly absurd, they both had a considerable body of literature behind them, and to actually *TEACH* you alchemy or astrology would require a considerable amount of time. What they likely taught you was simply that these non-scientific theories existed, were once prevalent and that most of their claims were supplanted by actual scientific disciplines like chemistry and astronomy, cosmology and physics.
When you see a book like Pandas and People, you are seeing Creationists attempting to foist a rather thick pseudo-scientific set of claims on school children that would be effectively no different than someone slapping down the Emerald Tablet in a chemistry class and going in some detail through its claims as if it actually was a legitimate theory of materials.
It's one thing to mention some falsified claims like Ptolomaic cosmology or phlogiston, as examples of theories that simply failed to actually explain observations. It would be quite another to treat them as legitimate alternative explanations. Creationists (and yes, Intelligent Design advocates are Creationists, simply Creationists with an extra layer of dishonesty and duplicity in the hopes of getting past the Establishment Clause) want Creationism taught much like a flat Earther might want Ptolomaic cosmology, as an actual competing theory.
There are not enough hours in the day to teach children the scientific method to the degree that they could, say, adequately test neutral genetic drift. You can teach children basic scientific concepts, but at some point, if you're going to teach them any actual science at all, you're going to have to teach them what scientists actually say.
Unfortunately for you, no one is under any obligation to debate you using your private definitions of words. Science and scientific theory have well understood definitions, and what you're demonstrating is either an unwillingness or an incapacity to accept them.
First of all, evolution is simply the observation that the genetic makeup of a population changes over time. It is not an attempt to explain the origins of life, any more than geology attempts to explain the origin of planets or astronomy attempts to explain the Big Bang.
Second of all, evolution is testable by every meaningful scientific definition of test, and so is abiogenesis for that matter.
Christ man! Keep your voice down, lest Torvalds and Tenenbaum waken from their uneasy slumber and the Kernel Wars arise anew.
That being said, I tend to agree, and with the speed of processors and RAM these days, microkernels should have a better chance than they did in the past.
Being against beta doesn't mean I approve of this constant railing against it. You're doing more damage to Slashdot than beta ever could, rendering it pretty much unreadable.
"Hide behind a server"? Wikimedia is a US-based non-profit. By the nature of the web, people in Finland can read this site (you know, what we tend to call the good thing about the Internet). Nobody is hiding behind anything.
It is getting a little annoying. We made our point (in spades I'd say). Dice knows full well if they pull a stunt like that again, they'll have another revolt. I'd say, for now, it's time to back off a little bit.
I think the community has made it pretty clear that the beta is unwanted and will lead to Slashdot's demise. Toss it, bugfix the classic version and make slow incremental improvements. Maybe we'll end up where the Beta team wanted us to go (though I doubt it), but at least it's not like "At some unspecified time in the near future we're going to stick a flaming bag of shit in your mouth. Get Ready!!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
This betrays are rather huge ignorance of what is meant by "testing" in science. Testing doesn't just mean having pictures or video of events. It means making predictions about what we ought to find if we go looking, and evolutionary theory makes predictions about what we should find in the fossil and molecular data.
And fuck, pal, even Darwin himself came up with a perfectly utilitarian theory of sexual selection. Read a fucking book by a fucking biologist and quit aping long debunked Creationist crap. It only makes you look like an ignorant fucktard.
To some extent I agree with you. I even feel that, for all its flaws, the US is probably a more reliable steward of the Internet than just about any other nation or international body I can think of.
At the same time, if we allow the Internet to be fractured even more than it already is, we will lose one of the great technological innovations of the latter half of the 20th century.
So I sit on the fence over the whole thing, not really all the keen that some international body, some of whose members will be nations highly toxic to a free Internet (which seems to be a growing number of nations, sadly), but wanting to see the whole thing busted in to pieces of various degrees of interoperability.
I tend to disagree here. Specific Creationist claims certainly can be tested, and most have been. The kinds of Creationist claims that can't be tested are the ones that either amount to "God did it" (which immediately moves the claim beyond any kind of empirical treatment), or even more amusing "God is fooling us" (omphalism), which also moves a claim beyond the realm of the physical and testable.
In my younger years, when I thought debating Creationists for several hours a week was an amusing and productive exercise, these two twin claims (which both amount to variants of divine intervention) were the normal redoubt of a Creationist who had been cornered when it turned out "lazy light" or Paluxy footprint claims were utter rubbish. It didn't seem to bother them that what they were really advocating epistemological nihilism, and that that view undermined their own beliefs as much as science. What mattered is that they had walled off their religious beliefs; compartmentalized them so that no evidence could ever undermine their world view.
Good thing all those scientists love nothing better than to wipe out consensus whenever they can.
Oh, I get it, the idea is that a theory that is well-supported must somehow be wrong. That way whatever bullshit worldview you want to support but which has been wiped out by actual science can somehow be viewed as true, because, you know, having the majority of researchers in a discipline find that your worldview is utter bollocks makes them wrong.
Next step; pass law forcing airlines to duct tape the mouths of anyone not in first class, you know, for "safety" reasons.
Ham makes a reasonably good living off of Creationism, so I posit that Ham is eminently rational; but completely immoral. You may call a con man a lot of things, but generally irrational isn't one of them.
We put all sorts of limits on democracy. You can't democratically decide to enslave all red haired people. Even if the popular will is that red haired people are subhumans who can be treated like cattle, there are constitutional protections against this kind of an abuse. In other words, in most Western countries, and most certainly in the United States, the constitutional framers were all to aware that pure democracy; or mobocracy if you will, is as vulnerable to abuses against individual liberties as are governments.
The same applies to public education. As public schools are a branch of the government, the Establishment Clause applies to them, and thus teaching Creationism, even in the watered down form of Intelligent Design, is a blatant attempt to use the organs of state to push a specific set of religious beliefs. That was the finding of the Kitzmiller v. Dover, and while the trial sadly doesn't apply universally, it, coupled with judgments like Edwards v. Aguillard create a compelling set of case law that will likely demolish just about every attempt to sneak Creationism into the class, or to somehow earmark evolution as being controversial.
But really, particularly at the state level, politicians don't give a flying fuck about constitutionality. They probably know in most cases that any pro-Creationism law they try to pass will ultimately get tossed, but that makes vote-getting legislation even better, as when it gets tossed, they can make a lot of noise about meddling activist courts, and the deluded idiots who lap this kind of performance up nod their heads in agreement. It's a win win for these politicians, although it does become a tragic waste of taxpayer money.
You come up with potential theories of how organic molecules could become self replicating, and you test those theories. You may very well never find out how precisely abiogenesis happened on Earth, but you do come up with possible explanations that make predictions. Science is satisfied at times with "we don't know", even if scientists themselves are never satisfied.
An equivalent in forensics might be that we can't find out who killed Subject C, even if Subject A and B's murderers are identified. That we can't find Subject C's murderer doesn't mean we can say "angels killed Subject C".
I doubt they taught you very much about alchemy or astrology, other than skimming over some basic claims. In reality, while both systems are utterly absurd, they both had a considerable body of literature behind them, and to actually *TEACH* you alchemy or astrology would require a considerable amount of time. What they likely taught you was simply that these non-scientific theories existed, were once prevalent and that most of their claims were supplanted by actual scientific disciplines like chemistry and astronomy, cosmology and physics.
When you see a book like Pandas and People, you are seeing Creationists attempting to foist a rather thick pseudo-scientific set of claims on school children that would be effectively no different than someone slapping down the Emerald Tablet in a chemistry class and going in some detail through its claims as if it actually was a legitimate theory of materials.
It's one thing to mention some falsified claims like Ptolomaic cosmology or phlogiston, as examples of theories that simply failed to actually explain observations. It would be quite another to treat them as legitimate alternative explanations. Creationists (and yes, Intelligent Design advocates are Creationists, simply Creationists with an extra layer of dishonesty and duplicity in the hopes of getting past the Establishment Clause) want Creationism taught much like a flat Earther might want Ptolomaic cosmology, as an actual competing theory.
There are not enough hours in the day to teach children the scientific method to the degree that they could, say, adequately test neutral genetic drift. You can teach children basic scientific concepts, but at some point, if you're going to teach them any actual science at all, you're going to have to teach them what scientists actually say.
Unfortunately for you, no one is under any obligation to debate you using your private definitions of words. Science and scientific theory have well understood definitions, and what you're demonstrating is either an unwillingness or an incapacity to accept them.
First of all, evolution is simply the observation that the genetic makeup of a population changes over time. It is not an attempt to explain the origins of life, any more than geology attempts to explain the origin of planets or astronomy attempts to explain the Big Bang.
Second of all, evolution is testable by every meaningful scientific definition of test, and so is abiogenesis for that matter.
And natural selection isn't a philosophy, any more than the inverse square law is a philosophy.
It goes to show you that just because you can pronounce a word does not bequeath upon you any understanding.
As with most revolutionaties you make worse what you claim you wish to make better.
Christ man! Keep your voice down, lest Torvalds and Tenenbaum waken from their uneasy slumber and the Kernel Wars arise anew.
That being said, I tend to agree, and with the speed of processors and RAM these days, microkernels should have a better chance than they did in the past.
And what if some commercial storage vendor can't or won't handle the NSA's metadata archiving requirements?
An android compatibility layer didn't do Blackberry much good.
Being against beta doesn't mean I approve of this constant railing against it. You're doing more damage to Slashdot than beta ever could, rendering it pretty much unreadable.
It would have been H. erectus, and since we view them,as members of genus Homo, it doesn't seem a huge stretch to call them humans.
"Hide behind a server"? Wikimedia is a US-based non-profit. By the nature of the web, people in Finland can read this site (you know, what we tend to call the good thing about the Internet). Nobody is hiding behind anything.
In other words, Finnish police, like police all over the world, are ignorant morons.
It is getting a little annoying. We made our point (in spades I'd say). Dice knows full well if they pull a stunt like that again, they'll have another revolt. I'd say, for now, it's time to back off a little bit.
es
How about not implementing anything at all, and just keep fixing the existing site?
I think the community has made it pretty clear that the beta is unwanted and will lead to Slashdot's demise. Toss it, bugfix the classic version and make slow incremental improvements. Maybe we'll end up where the Beta team wanted us to go (though I doubt it), but at least it's not like "At some unspecified time in the near future we're going to stick a flaming bag of shit in your mouth. Get Ready!!!!"