"But do you honestly, deep down so to speak, believe that science is only a tool to make predictions?"
Yes and no. As far as what I require others to believe about science, it is only a predictive tool. If a Christian says to me "As far as I am concerned the Earth is only 6000 years old", I have no problem with this. If he does not think that science is providing the truth, I don't care. If however he says "The science is bad, these real scientists have prooved that the Earth is 6000 years old", then I get very upset. There is an important distinction to be made between those who don't believe the scientific method is a means of obtaining truth, and those who believe that scientists are a cabal of evil liars. Most of these idiots fall into the latter catagory.
Your next point contains a subtle logical error. That is the fallacy of division. Because the whole is a destructive cancer of society, does not make it's parts destructive. The campaign against evolution is part of a greater campaign against the authority of science and the concept of a secular state. In the US that makes it part of an attack against the very constitution, and I believe that (inspite of not being a US citizen) that the constitution represents the very high of civilisation to this date. That is not to say it cannot be improved, but one would hardly call abandoning the concept of a secular state an improvement.
You point contains a number of excuses for those who aid the enemies of scientific progress, they lack "the knowledge, intellect, or intellectual courage" to understand the issue. You consider these flaws to be pitied. I consider them crimes in and of themselves when acted upon. If people are as you describe them then to not know it and to act on thier beliefs is wrong.
Finally just anger can be very helpful. Science and scientific progress has an enemy. And we have to fight it. We cannot sit in our ivory towers surronded by our grant proposals and concerntrating on our next publication when nothing short of a cultural war against us is being fought. We have to fight back. If we don't, it isn't just science and scientists who will suffer.
Look, I want to agree with you, but I have some bad news. These barsteds are legitimised whatever scientists do. It is time to bombard the public with the message "ID is wrong, science have proove it for the 400th time". Until the public is sick and tired of hearing how utterly wrong ID is, we have to fight them. You cant pretend like ignoring these people will make them go away. It's time to turn the entire scientific establishment on the antiscience that is ID and obliterate it.
The public will think there is a legitimate scientific conflict whatever we do. So our best bet is to make every result, every piece printed in the paper, every section of programming on TV, every portion of the media, every address by a scientist would can make a relevant contribution about the subject into an attack on ID. The foundation of science itself is at stake, and it is time that the scientific establishment fought at least as dirtily, if not dirtier than these idiots.
No, you are simply wrong about the need for faith as far as evolution goes. Because science doesn't deal in truth, it doesn't require faith. Science deals in likelihoods. Given X what is the chance of Y assuming Z. As a professional scientist I don't believe that the scientific method unviels truth. I don't have to. It isn't my job to get truth. I get scientific facts, and model them with scientific theories. They don't have to be true because I don't care about them being true. I care about the uncertainty of my facts and my theories predictive power.
So there is no similarity what so ever between a theory arrived at by scientific method and one arrived at by religious inspiration. In many ways the scientific one has less value on a personal level. The point is that the scientific method is fair. So we use it when deciding things between people. Guilt in criminal cases, structuring our economy. It has also proved to be more sucessful than applying theistic methods to these problems, when you measure sucess in a scientific way. So to be fair to people we use science within a secular state to detirmine things. Not because it is true, but because it is fair, and useful.
The problem is very simple. Some religious folk, in their mad desire to propagate their faith to all corners of the Earth want scientific authority behind them. Many people believe scientific results because they are used to them being right. It is hard not to in the modern age when every electronic device is dependent on scientific advances of the past. Having a home full of proof of concepts can be very convincing that scientific ideas have at least some truth to them. So what do these folk do when their religious belief and science collide? The sensible thing and say "Religion does not require consistency with science"? Hell no. That isn't the optimal method for getting recruits and keeping the faithful. Instead they attack science in the vague hope of converting a few more people, and retaining a few more of those they have already ensnared.
The problem with certain religious folk is that they don't realise that they can, if they so choose, ignore what scientific method tells them. What they cant do is change the results of the scientific method. And that is what they desperately want to do. We are now experiencing a backlash against this, and individuals of religious persuasion want to be careful. They have lost every culture war since the turn of the 20th century and if they were sensible would hide in their churches and mosques instead of starting a fight they cant win.
Evolution is an established set of facts, and an excellent theory. And if Christian Churches want a fight on this one, I and many others with a distate for their religion relish the thought, because it will add to the long history of Christain failures and crimes against humanity, which will be used against them again and again in the future.
Once again in with the Ad Hominem attacks. This is why people wont debate with people like you. If you couldn't understand my explanation, how could you tell if it was rational or not? Here is an idea, get a physics degree, then come back and debate the virtues and vices of the Big Bang Theory.
Actually his answer to 1 is dead on. I'm guessing you aren't a physicist. And that you have no training what so ever in general relativity, so let me see if I can enlighten you. Imagine the universe as a surface, parameterised by some co-ordinates. This surface is 4D and the forth dimension is time. The Big Bang represents a boundary on the t co-ordinate. That is the co-ordinate associated with time. No experiment can be affected by what structure we put at negative t. Our theory is pretty precise about what could go there, but it is supremely irrelevant since not experiment could tell the difference. Now there are some modern attempts to extrapolate back beyound t=0. One method what one does is one assumes that the universe has such a configuration that it cycles through big crunch->Big Bang->big crunch. Then at the big crunch on calculates the transition probability using an approximation to your favourite string theory. As it turns out this idea is rather crude and so far doesn't work, since so far the predictions are that the universe doesn't oscillate like the researchers would like. The singluarity is seen as a problem. But certainly not in the way you suggest. It is perfectly rational to suggest that at the Big Bang had no cause, because the question is as meaningless as asking what on a sphere is more north than the north pole. You might want to ask the more valid question "why is the universe here at all". That would be a valid question. But you are confusing temporal ordering with cause and effect. The fact that the universe has a cusp at t=0 is no more a problem that the fact there is a universe here today at all. The theory has told us that these two questions are equivilant because these are both just points on the same manifold. As for 2, you are simply dismissing evidence because you don't like it. Your combination of Ad Hominem Attack, Argumentum ad ignorantiam, and from the looks of things a Non-sequitur and borderline Straw Man, are not impressive. Not to mention your false dichotomy "If evolution cant explain everything, it cant explain anything". I'm guessing where you come from logical fallacies are considered good debate (are you a politician?). For 3, see 2.
Sounds fair enough, I've only ever had experience of OS/2 out of the list you provided there, and my experience was little better than "This is how you run an app".
Most of my experience is with Windows or the different Unix type environments. Hence the lack of exposure to capability based systems. I will yield to experience and accept that Microsoft can be held to blame for having a system which should have prevented the installation of a rootkit. But that doesn't take away from the fact that Sony actually installed one. Your excuse that Sony is in different divisions and that Sony corporate didn't know about what Sony media was doing doesn't impress me. Sony is as far as I'm concerned a single entity/brand. Sony released software which installed a dangerous piece of software on many peoples computers, breaking existing anti-cracking laws.
I can live with Microsoft making a bad decision as far as the design of thier OS goes. The only reason that is bad at the moment is because of their desktop monopoly. If their monopoly was removed they would not have the luxury of bad decisions. I cant live with a flagrant violation of the law by Sony and if it were up to me, fines would be levelled at Sony in the tens or hundreds of millions in a punitive measure to ensure that Sony corporate paid more attention to computer laws designed to protect individuals genuine right to privacy. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. You seem to be suggesting that because Sony media didn't know any better that makes their actions acceptable. I'm sorry but unless you know what you are doing, you higher excelent technicians and legal technical staff to go over what you are doing in technical matters. Perhaps if the law acknowledged that ignorance is not an excuse there would be more higher paying jobs for techies and lawyers with technical qualifications.
Your next point hits the nail on the head as far as the point I was trying to make goes. It is pretty clear that my failing device driver is definately not Microsofts fault, but in fact a little bit of nVidia and Intels fault. Mostly nVidia, come on guys, you don't execute a function which could throw an exception without checking to see if it does. But you know that most people see that blue sceen and immediately blame Microsoft.
Good points, I pretty much agree with most of them. Although I do wonder what Microsoft is supposed to do about a device driver that throws uncaught exceptions, maybe I'm not being imaginitive enough.
Crappy apps on the other hand, they should just fail. And boy did they used to bring down the whole system with them. But on the whole now, on Windows XP, they do just fail. Apples device drivers are better for a reason, Apple only has to get it right on a subset of the available hardware.
No doubt about the security model, but since no one uses it, and none of the major competitors that I know of use it, maybe Microsoft not using it isn't such a good criticism.
Engineers engaging in bad practices. No doubt. I've heard proported Microsofties talking about all night coding sessions to get a product out and while Microsoft can afford to hire the best, even the best are no use if you ask the unreasonable, then manage them poorly and completely loose sight of the overal vision.
All your criticisms are pretty valid, although I don't think some apply to the current version of Windows. Especially the criticism of a nieve user being unable to install a rootkit. However, I know this software would have fooled me. I would have expected a piece of media playing software to need root access when installing, and I would have trusted the source of the program, so on any current platform this root kit would have beaten me.
So if anything Microsoft gets a C, maybe a C- because they have the technology to prevent that. But thats because they are average, instead of above average. Now Sony, for actually installing rootkits on peoples boxes definately get an F.
I'm not saying Microsoft's OS is great, it's not, compared with GNU/Linux or for that matter any modern UNIX style kernel with the a suitable user environment on top, it is very average. But that doesn't take away from the fact that users blame Microsoft for things that aren't directly at least Microsofts fault. I think the message is that in the Sony rootkit fiasco the reaction shouldn't be "Microsoft let someone else install a rootkit on my system!". It should be "Sony installed a rootkit on my system, and why did my OS let them?". In the case of my device driver the reaction of Joe Sixpack is... "Microsoft Windows just crash, those guys at Microsoft are idiots", when it should be... "Some idiot wrote a device driver that throws an unhandled exception! Why is this device driver so poorly written. And why should problems at the hardware level cause the system to restart?"
I'm all for valid criticism of Microsoft, but I think they do more than enough wrong without going after them for things that really are not their fault.
Parents point was that often users blame Microsoft when it isn't there fault. For example, bad device drivers, bad 3rd party software, or people installing rootkits on their system. Often they do this when the problem isn't even related to Windows but to the end user, or hardware over which Microsoft has control. Now you might say that much of this is Microsofts fault. Not going with a monolithic kernel, oversimplifying tasks that are hard for a reason. Training users to always accept default behaviour, having API's that are hard to write for. Some of this criticism is valid. But it doesn't take away from the fact that, as an example, the computer am writing this on keeps crashing not because of Windows, but because of a crappy driver from nVidia which keeps throwing unhandled exceptions. Moral of the story, Microsoft has done some pretty crappy stuff over the years, but blaming them for Sony being crap isn't a good idea.
"You just don't get it!" - The phrase every arts major who couldn't do math uses to justify that thier subject takes 4 years and produces no quantifiable results.
Have to say I agree with this post. Because the second house is unelected, it stands up for both the majority and the minority, often against the aforementioned majority. With the removal of hereditary peers it is recieving necessary reform which I hope will continue without removing the traditional role of the Lords.
You are missing the point. THe point is that the first house provides the fear of the electorate, and second house provides the defence against special interest groups. Look at the disaster the American system is becoming because senators are terrified of elections. All the calls to pass legislation to protect children from violent video games crap and the like.
Actually the House of Lords is an excelent component of the British system of government. Our life peers have no fear of not being elected, will not cave in to short term fear mongering, and defend the freedom of this state. I wholly expect this bill to narrowly pass through the commons, then be shot to pieces in the Lords. This would not happen if we had a wholly elected second chamber. You are placing democracy ahead of the defence of rights. Democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The British system is incredibly complicated and paradoxical. We have an established church, yet our Prime Minister cant even say the G word without it causing an uproar. We have an unelected second chamber that since the first Parlaiment Act has done more to protect democracy and liberty than the elected first chamber. We have an unwritten constitution which somehow manages to provide better checks and balances than most written ones designed specifically to limit the power of government. We have what is little short of an elected dictatorship, and yet our system still somehow dilutes power to the point that our government is consistenly frustrated. I admit reform of our system is needed, and to outsiders who is used to a more formulaic system of government the system looks broken. But inspite of, or perhaps because of how broken our system is, we have probably got the best system of government in the world. It is a shame that it isn't perfect, otherwise Acts like this one wouldn't even be considered. It is amounts to establishing powers for the government equivilant to those handed to the executive branch of the United States.
Ministers don't. But the Prime Minister is appointed by the Quen using her royal perogative. Which extends only to appointing members of Parlaiment to the post. Of course she could use her royal perogative to make Joe average a Lord, then ask him or her to form a government, but only if she wanted to invite a coup followed by her forced abdication.
It's even sader than that. Technically they could, for want of a better word, annex Canada. Since Canada has it's independence through an act of Parlaiment, on paper at least a government minister could use this legislation to repeal the act.
Britains system of government is incredibly complicated (and I might add one of the best in the world, paradoxically). The Parlaiment Act should only be used to bypass the Lords in the event that there is imminent need to get the legislation passed. However by not passing the Hunting Act the Lords could be argued to have violated the Salisbury convention, which is an agreement that the Lords would only amend legislation that is a manifesto commitment in order to improve the legislation not change the spirit. In some sense what the labour government did to get the bill passed is equivilant to what was done to get the original Parlaiment Act passed. There an election (basically a referendum) was held with the Parlaiment Act as a manifesto commitment and the King at the time promised to appoint as many Liberal peers as needed to get the legislation passed if the Liberals won. This is using the technicalities of the system to beat it failures. Since the Lords violated the Salisbury convention by essentially blocking the Hunting Act, the government used the Parlaiment Act to reaffirm the supremacy of the elected chamber. While not in the letter of the Parlaiment Act this was certainly in the spirit of the act, and like much of modern British constitutional law, it uses two 'wrongs' to make a 'right'. This legislation they are proposing is a travesty that goes against hundreds of years of tradition and against the liberal (as in the British meaning of the word) underpinning of our country which extends back to the Magna Carta. I've written to my MP and I would advise anyone else to as well. I would hope that the Lords shoot this one down, but there is no certainty of that. Note I'm not a British constitutional scholar, and am certainly not an expert on this matter. As I say our system is complicated and centuries old. I therefore welcome corrections to the above.
Since you seem convincable, I advise you to hunt down a physicists and a biologist to explain to you why, from a scientific stand point, you are wrong. Dating via radioactive isotopes and the distribution of the elements indicate clearly that the universe is much much older than 6000 years. These are not pseudoscience. Your religious friends who ridicule these facts, are wrong. The mainstream scientists are right. The Earth is billions of years old. I'm a professional physicist, and I've seen the evidence for the Earth being more than 6000 years old with my own eyes, and calculated the age of things with pen and paper (and a mass spectrometer) myself. I'm sorry, but you are just wrong about the age of the Earth.
"Say I design the holy grail of automotive technology. I spend years researching optimal mix ratios, air flow diagrams, doing computer modelling to increase burn efficiency. End result, it doubles the mileage of your average gas guzzler.
Now, with a patent, I stand to recover my money invested at very least, if only by selling it to Conoco-Phillips for them to bury."
That's just it, you don't. Because you infringe on 27 trivial patents Ford has which are necessary for your engine to work. And if you try to produce your engine or sell it to someone else you can be your arse Ford are going to sue. Making your invention worthless. Unless you are a big company with a massive portfolio of otherwise worthless patents that Ford is infringing on so that you can cancel out thier worthless patents.
Patents don't help the little guy as you claim. If you invent something clever you will not get rich. You will get skrewed. Unless you have a multibillion dollar corporation behind you, kiss your invention good bye. We need a system which punishes anyone who files for a trivial patent with harsh economic sanctions. A system which says "no physical invention is attached to this, pleasse pay one quarter of a million dollars for every day you wasted of the patent office". And we need to impose it retroactively.
Hey if your discipline was under constant attack by people who want to undermine you and the society you live in, you would take every chance you get to point out what utter barsteds they are too.
The thing that bugs me? That this was put forward in the first place and that 28 retards voted for it? I mean come on is this supposed to be an badge of honour or something. "Geee we only made ourselves look like 28 of our representatives are morons, instead of over half".
Here's an idea, I will be celebrating when places like these wont even consider legislation like this because it violates the first amendment, and then passes bills that protect science from the threats it faces. They could start by locking up terrorists like the members of the ALF instead of coming after hard working scientists.
If you had real checks and balances another arm of government would be demanding that this information be published. Unless of course you think the media is basically another arm of government... maybe you are on to something there.
Yeah, this is much worse than toxic dumping, it's disenfranchisement. The right to liberty is more important than the right to health because the right to liberty is what protects all the other rights.
The confidential information that Diebold sent was thier plans to disenfranchise thousands of people. Given that we have established that this is worse than toxic dumping, say that you are in a firm and they reveal that they plan (not that they have, but that they plan) to poison the water supply making thousands sick.
What would you do? If I were in that position what would you want me to do?
Yeah because it situations where the government is being potentially manipulated by a big powerful corporation you can trust the police. Whistle-blowing should not depend on who you go to first.
As for the examples you list, I totally disagree.
If I want to live in a house with a poorly maintained bannister, I have the right to. If it can be shown I negligently allowed or failed to disallow someone using that bannister I am liable. But if I close the door to my house, people shouldn't go in there, I have taken reasonable measures to prevent people hurting themselves.
If I want to set up a trap in my basement, I'm allowed to. I should prevent access to my basement and if one is going to maintain something intended to cause harm on ones property further measures are needed to prevent people entering the property (you should take action to reasonably prevent a child retrieving thier ball from entering the property). But I have every right to experiment with traps in my basement and no one has any right to tell make me do otherwise.
If some chump them hurts themself on my property, and I've taken reasonable steps to prevent them, then I have no responsibility for thier safety. Reasonable steps means I consider what people can be reasonably expected to do then plan for it. Entering my property illegally is unreasonable and I have no responsibility for such people.
I question the law on this one if it is as you say.
In matters where government might be fradulently elected you cant trust the police or any other arm of government. It should be recognised in law that a whistle-blowers first port of call is irrelevant and that they have a moral obligation to go to the source that will most readily dispense the information the public has a right to know to the public, whatever that might be.
The whole point is to guard against conspiracy, you cant do that if your only legal recourse if an arm of the very thing you are trying to counteract.
As much as I admire the American system, and feel it is the best on paper, I must say what we have over here in Britain is pretty good.
In theory Britian is a Christian Constitutional Monarch. In practice it is a Modern Democratic Liberal Secular State. In theory the United States is a Federal Constitutionally-Limited Democratic Republic. In practice it is a Centralised Christian Constrained Corporate Republic.
You only have to look at the difference between how Tony Blair answers a question on religion entering politics and how George Bush Jr answers one to realise that Britain is the more secular.
In some sense I feel it is precisely because the US Constitution is so good on paper that it is now failing so badly. You cant help but marvel at how perfect the US Constitution is, and that really is the problem. In Britain we know the foundings of our state are crap. We know it is run by pompous arses, and we know that the state religion has it's claws everywhere. But they are all answerable to the people because those rights implicitly retained by the people are in actuality retained by the people.
In the US those rights which are not granted to the legislature by the constitution are either supposed to go to the states, or to the people. But they don't because the 'limited' rights that the central government has are used continually to justify greater and greater expansion of centralised power. And of course, since peoples rights are protected by the constitution people feel safer.
I think one of the reasons Britian does better in practice at maintaining a Liberal Democracy is that our system is so inherently badly designed that the implicit powers automatically overide the constitutional ones, because the constitutional ones are just tradition. Sadly in recent times our current administration seems detirmined to proove my hypothesis wrong.
America needs to redistribute the power back to the people, and stop thier central government from taking over every aspect of thier life.
I think the lesson third world countries need to learn is that once you have a liberal democracy, writing on a piece of paper does not guarentee you rights, even if that piece of paper should be the most sacred in the land...
As to who are the best. I like the French system. That's a real modern secular state. Even if the French themselves can be pompous arses.
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"But do you honestly, deep down so to speak, believe that science is only a tool to make predictions?"
Yes and no. As far as what I require others to believe about science, it is only a predictive tool. If a Christian says to me "As far as I am concerned the Earth is only 6000 years old", I have no problem with this. If he does not think that science is providing the truth, I don't care. If however he says "The science is bad, these real scientists have prooved that the Earth is 6000 years old", then I get very upset. There is an important distinction to be made between those who don't believe the scientific method is a means of obtaining truth, and those who believe that scientists are a cabal of evil liars. Most of these idiots fall into the latter catagory.
Your next point contains a subtle logical error. That is the fallacy of division. Because the whole is a destructive cancer of society, does not make it's parts destructive. The campaign against evolution is part of a greater campaign against the authority of science and the concept of a secular state. In the US that makes it part of an attack against the very constitution, and I believe that (inspite of not being a US citizen) that the constitution represents the very high of civilisation to this date. That is not to say it cannot be improved, but one would hardly call abandoning the concept of a secular state an improvement.
You point contains a number of excuses for those who aid the enemies of scientific progress, they lack "the knowledge, intellect, or intellectual courage" to understand the issue. You consider these flaws to be pitied. I consider them crimes in and of themselves when acted upon. If people are as you describe them then to not know it and to act on thier beliefs is wrong.
Finally just anger can be very helpful. Science and scientific progress has an enemy. And we have to fight it. We cannot sit in our ivory towers surronded by our grant proposals and concerntrating on our next publication when nothing short of a cultural war against us is being fought. We have to fight back. If we don't, it isn't just science and scientists who will suffer.
Look, I want to agree with you, but I have some bad news. These barsteds are legitimised whatever scientists do. It is time to bombard the public with the message "ID is wrong, science have proove it for the 400th time". Until the public is sick and tired of hearing how utterly wrong ID is, we have to fight them. You cant pretend like ignoring these people will make them go away. It's time to turn the entire scientific establishment on the antiscience that is ID and obliterate it.
The public will think there is a legitimate scientific conflict whatever we do. So our best bet is to make every result, every piece printed in the paper, every section of programming on TV, every portion of the media, every address by a scientist would can make a relevant contribution about the subject into an attack on ID. The foundation of science itself is at stake, and it is time that the scientific establishment fought at least as dirtily, if not dirtier than these idiots.
No, you are simply wrong about the need for faith as far as evolution goes. Because science doesn't deal in truth, it doesn't require faith. Science deals in likelihoods. Given X what is the chance of Y assuming Z. As a professional scientist I don't believe that the scientific method unviels truth. I don't have to. It isn't my job to get truth. I get scientific facts, and model them with scientific theories. They don't have to be true because I don't care about them being true. I care about the uncertainty of my facts and my theories predictive power.
So there is no similarity what so ever between a theory arrived at by scientific method and one arrived at by religious inspiration. In many ways the scientific one has less value on a personal level. The point is that the scientific method is fair. So we use it when deciding things between people. Guilt in criminal cases, structuring our economy. It has also proved to be more sucessful than applying theistic methods to these problems, when you measure sucess in a scientific way. So to be fair to people we use science within a secular state to detirmine things. Not because it is true, but because it is fair, and useful.
The problem is very simple. Some religious folk, in their mad desire to propagate their faith to all corners of the Earth want scientific authority behind them. Many people believe scientific results because they are used to them being right. It is hard not to in the modern age when every electronic device is dependent on scientific advances of the past. Having a home full of proof of concepts can be very convincing that scientific ideas have at least some truth to them. So what do these folk do when their religious belief and science collide? The sensible thing and say "Religion does not require consistency with science"? Hell no. That isn't the optimal method for getting recruits and keeping the faithful. Instead they attack science in the vague hope of converting a few more people, and retaining a few more of those they have already ensnared.
The problem with certain religious folk is that they don't realise that they can, if they so choose, ignore what scientific method tells them. What they cant do is change the results of the scientific method. And that is what they desperately want to do. We are now experiencing a backlash against this, and individuals of religious persuasion want to be careful. They have lost every culture war since the turn of the 20th century and if they were sensible would hide in their churches and mosques instead of starting a fight they cant win.
Evolution is an established set of facts, and an excellent theory. And if Christian Churches want a fight on this one, I and many others with a distate for their religion relish the thought, because it will add to the long history of Christain failures and crimes against humanity, which will be used against them again and again in the future.
Once again in with the Ad Hominem attacks. This is why people wont debate with people like you. If you couldn't understand my explanation, how could you tell if it was rational or not? Here is an idea, get a physics degree, then come back and debate the virtues and vices of the Big Bang Theory.
Actually his answer to 1 is dead on. I'm guessing you aren't a physicist. And that you have no training what so ever in general relativity, so let me see if I can enlighten you. Imagine the universe as a surface, parameterised by some co-ordinates. This surface is 4D and the forth dimension is time. The Big Bang represents a boundary on the t co-ordinate. That is the co-ordinate associated with time. No experiment can be affected by what structure we put at negative t. Our theory is pretty precise about what could go there, but it is supremely irrelevant since not experiment could tell the difference.
Now there are some modern attempts to extrapolate back beyound t=0. One method what one does is one assumes that the universe has such a configuration that it cycles through big crunch->Big Bang->big crunch. Then at the big crunch on calculates the transition probability using an approximation to your favourite string theory. As it turns out this idea is rather crude and so far doesn't work, since so far the predictions are that the universe doesn't oscillate like the researchers would like.
The singluarity is seen as a problem. But certainly not in the way you suggest. It is perfectly rational to suggest that at the Big Bang had no cause, because the question is as meaningless as asking what on a sphere is more north than the north pole. You might want to ask the more valid question "why is the universe here at all". That would be a valid question. But you are confusing temporal ordering with cause and effect. The fact that the universe has a cusp at t=0 is no more a problem that the fact there is a universe here today at all. The theory has told us that these two questions are equivilant because these are both just points on the same manifold.
As for 2, you are simply dismissing evidence because you don't like it. Your combination of Ad Hominem Attack, Argumentum ad ignorantiam, and from the looks of things a Non-sequitur and borderline Straw Man, are not impressive. Not to mention your false dichotomy "If evolution cant explain everything, it cant explain anything". I'm guessing where you come from logical fallacies are considered good debate (are you a politician?).
For 3, see 2.
Sounds fair enough, I've only ever had experience of OS/2 out of the list you provided there, and my experience was little better than "This is how you run an app".
Most of my experience is with Windows or the different Unix type environments. Hence the lack of exposure to capability based systems. I will yield to experience and accept that Microsoft can be held to blame for having a system which should have prevented the installation of a rootkit. But that doesn't take away from the fact that Sony actually installed one. Your excuse that Sony is in different divisions and that Sony corporate didn't know about what Sony media was doing doesn't impress me. Sony is as far as I'm concerned a single entity/brand. Sony released software which installed a dangerous piece of software on many peoples computers, breaking existing anti-cracking laws.
I can live with Microsoft making a bad decision as far as the design of thier OS goes. The only reason that is bad at the moment is because of their desktop monopoly. If their monopoly was removed they would not have the luxury of bad decisions. I cant live with a flagrant violation of the law by Sony and if it were up to me, fines would be levelled at Sony in the tens or hundreds of millions in a punitive measure to ensure that Sony corporate paid more attention to computer laws designed to protect individuals genuine right to privacy. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. You seem to be suggesting that because Sony media didn't know any better that makes their actions acceptable. I'm sorry but unless you know what you are doing, you higher excelent technicians and legal technical staff to go over what you are doing in technical matters. Perhaps if the law acknowledged that ignorance is not an excuse there would be more higher paying jobs for techies and lawyers with technical qualifications.
Your next point hits the nail on the head as far as the point I was trying to make goes. It is pretty clear that my failing device driver is definately not Microsofts fault, but in fact a little bit of nVidia and Intels fault. Mostly nVidia, come on guys, you don't execute a function which could throw an exception without checking to see if it does. But you know that most people see that blue sceen and immediately blame Microsoft.
Good points, I pretty much agree with most of them. Although I do wonder what Microsoft is supposed to do about a device driver that throws uncaught exceptions, maybe I'm not being imaginitive enough.
Crappy apps on the other hand, they should just fail. And boy did they used to bring down the whole system with them. But on the whole now, on Windows XP, they do just fail. Apples device drivers are better for a reason, Apple only has to get it right on a subset of the available hardware.
No doubt about the security model, but since no one uses it, and none of the major competitors that I know of use it, maybe Microsoft not using it isn't such a good criticism.
Engineers engaging in bad practices. No doubt. I've heard proported Microsofties talking about all night coding sessions to get a product out and while Microsoft can afford to hire the best, even the best are no use if you ask the unreasonable, then manage them poorly and completely loose sight of the overal vision.
All your criticisms are pretty valid, although I don't think some apply to the current version of Windows. Especially the criticism of a nieve user being unable to install a rootkit. However, I know this software would have fooled me. I would have expected a piece of media playing software to need root access when installing, and I would have trusted the source of the program, so on any current platform this root kit would have beaten me.
So if anything Microsoft gets a C, maybe a C- because they have the technology to prevent that. But thats because they are average, instead of above average. Now Sony, for actually installing rootkits on peoples boxes definately get an F.
I'm not saying Microsoft's OS is great, it's not, compared with GNU/Linux or for that matter any modern UNIX style kernel with the a suitable user environment on top, it is very average. But that doesn't take away from the fact that users blame Microsoft for things that aren't directly at least Microsofts fault. I think the message is that in the Sony rootkit fiasco the reaction shouldn't be "Microsoft let someone else install a rootkit on my system!". It should be "Sony installed a rootkit on my system, and why did my OS let them?". In the case of my device driver the reaction of Joe Sixpack is... "Microsoft Windows just crash, those guys at Microsoft are idiots", when it should be... "Some idiot wrote a device driver that throws an unhandled exception! Why is this device driver so poorly written. And why should problems at the hardware level cause the system to restart?"
I'm all for valid criticism of Microsoft, but I think they do more than enough wrong without going after them for things that really are not their fault.
Parents point was that often users blame Microsoft when it isn't there fault. For example, bad device drivers, bad 3rd party software, or people installing rootkits on their system. Often they do this when the problem isn't even related to Windows but to the end user, or hardware over which Microsoft has control.
Now you might say that much of this is Microsofts fault. Not going with a monolithic kernel, oversimplifying tasks that are hard for a reason. Training users to always accept default behaviour, having API's that are hard to write for. Some of this criticism is valid. But it doesn't take away from the fact that, as an example, the computer am writing this on keeps crashing not because of Windows, but because of a crappy driver from nVidia which keeps throwing unhandled exceptions.
Moral of the story, Microsoft has done some pretty crappy stuff over the years, but blaming them for Sony being crap isn't a good idea.
"You just don't get it!" - The phrase every arts major who couldn't do math uses to justify that thier subject takes 4 years and produces no quantifiable results.
Have to say I agree with this post. Because the second house is unelected, it stands up for both the majority and the minority, often against the aforementioned majority. With the removal of hereditary peers it is recieving necessary reform which I hope will continue without removing the traditional role of the Lords.
Erm, you know that heriditary peers are in the process of being abolished right? Sounds to me like you want to throw the baby out with the bath water.
You are missing the point. THe point is that the first house provides the fear of the electorate, and second house provides the defence against special interest groups. Look at the disaster the American system is becoming because senators are terrified of elections. All the calls to pass legislation to protect children from violent video games crap and the like.
Actually the House of Lords is an excelent component of the British system of government. Our life peers have no fear of not being elected, will not cave in to short term fear mongering, and defend the freedom of this state. I wholly expect this bill to narrowly pass through the commons, then be shot to pieces in the Lords. This would not happen if we had a wholly elected second chamber.
You are placing democracy ahead of the defence of rights. Democracy is a means to an end, not an end in itself.
The British system is incredibly complicated and paradoxical. We have an established church, yet our Prime Minister cant even say the G word without it causing an uproar. We have an unelected second chamber that since the first Parlaiment Act has done more to protect democracy and liberty than the elected first chamber. We have an unwritten constitution which somehow manages to provide better checks and balances than most written ones designed specifically to limit the power of government. We have what is little short of an elected dictatorship, and yet our system still somehow dilutes power to the point that our government is consistenly frustrated.
I admit reform of our system is needed, and to outsiders who is used to a more formulaic system of government the system looks broken. But inspite of, or perhaps because of how broken our system is, we have probably got the best system of government in the world. It is a shame that it isn't perfect, otherwise Acts like this one wouldn't even be considered. It is amounts to establishing powers for the government equivilant to those handed to the executive branch of the United States.
Ministers don't. But the Prime Minister is appointed by the Quen using her royal perogative. Which extends only to appointing members of Parlaiment to the post. Of course she could use her royal perogative to make Joe average a Lord, then ask him or her to form a government, but only if she wanted to invite a coup followed by her forced abdication.
It's even sader than that. Technically they could, for want of a better word, annex Canada. Since Canada has it's independence through an act of Parlaiment, on paper at least a government minister could use this legislation to repeal the act.
Britains system of government is incredibly complicated (and I might add one of the best in the world, paradoxically). The Parlaiment Act should only be used to bypass the Lords in the event that there is imminent need to get the legislation passed. However by not passing the Hunting Act the Lords could be argued to have violated the Salisbury convention, which is an agreement that the Lords would only amend legislation that is a manifesto commitment in order to improve the legislation not change the spirit.
In some sense what the labour government did to get the bill passed is equivilant to what was done to get the original Parlaiment Act passed. There an election (basically a referendum) was held with the Parlaiment Act as a manifesto commitment and the King at the time promised to appoint as many Liberal peers as needed to get the legislation passed if the Liberals won. This is using the technicalities of the system to beat it failures. Since the Lords violated the Salisbury convention by essentially blocking the Hunting Act, the government used the Parlaiment Act to reaffirm the supremacy of the elected chamber. While not in the letter of the Parlaiment Act this was certainly in the spirit of the act, and like much of modern British constitutional law, it uses two 'wrongs' to make a 'right'.
This legislation they are proposing is a travesty that goes against hundreds of years of tradition and against the liberal (as in the British meaning of the word) underpinning of our country which extends back to the Magna Carta. I've written to my MP and I would advise anyone else to as well. I would hope that the Lords shoot this one down, but there is no certainty of that.
Note I'm not a British constitutional scholar, and am certainly not an expert on this matter. As I say our system is complicated and centuries old. I therefore welcome corrections to the above.
Since you seem convincable, I advise you to hunt down a physicists and a biologist to explain to you why, from a scientific stand point, you are wrong. Dating via radioactive isotopes and the distribution of the elements indicate clearly that the universe is much much older than 6000 years. These are not pseudoscience. Your religious friends who ridicule these facts, are wrong. The mainstream scientists are right. The Earth is billions of years old.
I'm a professional physicist, and I've seen the evidence for the Earth being more than 6000 years old with my own eyes, and calculated the age of things with pen and paper (and a mass spectrometer) myself. I'm sorry, but you are just wrong about the age of the Earth.
"Say I design the holy grail of automotive technology. I spend years researching optimal mix ratios, air flow diagrams, doing computer modelling to increase burn efficiency. End result, it doubles the mileage of your average gas guzzler.
Now, with a patent, I stand to recover my money invested at very least, if only by selling it to Conoco-Phillips for them to bury."
That's just it, you don't. Because you infringe on 27 trivial patents Ford has which are necessary for your engine to work. And if you try to produce your engine or sell it to someone else you can be your arse Ford are going to sue. Making your invention worthless. Unless you are a big company with a massive portfolio of otherwise worthless patents that Ford is infringing on so that you can cancel out thier worthless patents.
Patents don't help the little guy as you claim. If you invent something clever you will not get rich. You will get skrewed. Unless you have a multibillion dollar corporation behind you, kiss your invention good bye. We need a system which punishes anyone who files for a trivial patent with harsh economic sanctions. A system which says "no physical invention is attached to this, pleasse pay one quarter of a million dollars for every day you wasted of the patent office". And we need to impose it retroactively.
Hey if your discipline was under constant attack by people who want to undermine you and the society you live in, you would take every chance you get to point out what utter barsteds they are too.
The thing that bugs me? That this was put forward in the first place and that 28 retards voted for it? I mean come on is this supposed to be an badge of honour or something. "Geee we only made ourselves look like 28 of our representatives are morons, instead of over half".
Here's an idea, I will be celebrating when places like these wont even consider legislation like this because it violates the first amendment, and then passes bills that protect science from the threats it faces. They could start by locking up terrorists like the members of the ALF instead of coming after hard working scientists.
If you had real checks and balances another arm of government would be demanding that this information be published. Unless of course you think the media is basically another arm of government... maybe you are on to something there.
Yeah, this is much worse than toxic dumping, it's disenfranchisement. The right to liberty is more important than the right to health because the right to liberty is what protects all the other rights.
The confidential information that Diebold sent was thier plans to disenfranchise thousands of people. Given that we have established that this is worse than toxic dumping, say that you are in a firm and they reveal that they plan (not that they have, but that they plan) to poison the water supply making thousands sick.
What would you do? If I were in that position what would you want me to do?
Yeah because it situations where the government is being potentially manipulated by a big powerful corporation you can trust the police. Whistle-blowing should not depend on who you go to first.
As for the examples you list, I totally disagree.
If I want to live in a house with a poorly maintained bannister, I have the right to. If it can be shown I negligently allowed or failed to disallow someone using that bannister I am liable. But if I close the door to my house, people shouldn't go in there, I have taken reasonable measures to prevent people hurting themselves.
If I want to set up a trap in my basement, I'm allowed to. I should prevent access to my basement and if one is going to maintain something intended to cause harm on ones property further measures are needed to prevent people entering the property (you should take action to reasonably prevent a child retrieving thier ball from entering the property). But I have every right to experiment with traps in my basement and no one has any right to tell make me do otherwise.
If some chump them hurts themself on my property, and I've taken reasonable steps to prevent them, then I have no responsibility for thier safety. Reasonable steps means I consider what people can be reasonably expected to do then plan for it. Entering my property illegally is unreasonable and I have no responsibility for such people.
I question the law on this one if it is as you say.
In matters where government might be fradulently elected you cant trust the police or any other arm of government. It should be recognised in law that a whistle-blowers first port of call is irrelevant and that they have a moral obligation to go to the source that will most readily dispense the information the public has a right to know to the public, whatever that might be.
The whole point is to guard against conspiracy, you cant do that if your only legal recourse if an arm of the very thing you are trying to counteract.
As much as I admire the American system, and feel it is the best on paper, I must say what we have over here in Britain is pretty good.
In theory Britian is a Christian Constitutional Monarch. In practice it is a Modern Democratic Liberal Secular State. In theory the United States is a Federal Constitutionally-Limited Democratic Republic. In practice it is a Centralised Christian Constrained Corporate Republic.
You only have to look at the difference between how Tony Blair answers a question on religion entering politics and how George Bush Jr answers one to realise that Britain is the more secular.
In some sense I feel it is precisely because the US Constitution is so good on paper that it is now failing so badly. You cant help but marvel at how perfect the US Constitution is, and that really is the problem. In Britain we know the foundings of our state are crap. We know it is run by pompous arses, and we know that the state religion has it's claws everywhere. But they are all answerable to the people because those rights implicitly retained by the people are in actuality retained by the people.
In the US those rights which are not granted to the legislature by the constitution are either supposed to go to the states, or to the people. But they don't because the 'limited' rights that the central government has are used continually to justify greater and greater expansion of centralised power. And of course, since peoples rights are protected by the constitution people feel safer.
I think one of the reasons Britian does better in practice at maintaining a Liberal Democracy is that our system is so inherently badly designed that the implicit powers automatically overide the constitutional ones, because the constitutional ones are just tradition. Sadly in recent times our current administration seems detirmined to proove my hypothesis wrong.
America needs to redistribute the power back to the people, and stop thier central government from taking over every aspect of thier life.
I think the lesson third world countries need to learn is that once you have a liberal democracy, writing on a piece of paper does not guarentee you rights, even if that piece of paper should be the most sacred in the land...
As to who are the best. I like the French system. That's a real modern secular state. Even if the French themselves can be pompous arses.