A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers argued that since some schools already take pupils' fingerprints, the collection and permanent storage of DNA samples was the logical next step.
Every time people complain about things like collecting fingerprints from innocent civilians, some idiot comes along and argues that it's perfectly fine and doesn't represent a slippery slope at all. The sad part is that now that it's spelled out (very nearly) entirely, most people are probably still just going to shrug and ignore it.
The boiling frog analogy kind of breaks down when the frog is quadriplegic.
So let the courts deal with slander cases as they appear, rather than shutting down this website because it could hypothetically be used to post slanderous matierial.
I can assure you that right now, regardless of where you are on Earth, my personal gravitational field is influencing you considerably more strongly than Proxima Centauri's, which is the star closest to the Sun. Seeing as how astrology tends to talk about stars many, many times further away, yes, it's fair to say it's complete rubbish.
As for whether the universe can be explained, consider this: science gets reproducible results. All of human civilisation is a testament to that. Once astrology (or any other supernaturalistic system of beliefs, including religion) starts doing that, we can start talking about whether it might not be bullshit after all.
Evolution is not a trend towards interestingness, diversity, or complexity. Most life is still very, very simple, it's just that that life tends to be too small to see.
Isaac Newton spent most of his life working on alchemy (and feuding with Leibniz, though arguably that was more of a hobby), so no, not really. He managed to stick to the scientific method quite admirably while he was working on Newtonian physics, but even most fundamentalists manage to stick to the scientific method most of the time (very few of them will walk out of tenth-storey windows believing Jesus will save them, for instance). It does not make them scientists.
Is it? Belief in astrology implies that the person is incapable of critically examining evidence. It's a symptom of deeper issues, though perhaps by itself it's not as harmful as said issues (sort of like religion in general). However, astrology specifically exists to give people advice about life decisions. If people believe it to be effective and treat its advice as valid, I'm not too sure you can call that harmless.
Not that many species of cat purr. Domesticated cats and wildcats do, and so do a handful of larger cat species, but most big cats don't. Depends on what you're willing to call ``cat'', I suppose. If you mean domesticated cats, then yes, every species of cat purrs (and there's only one).
The Singularity's been here since 1991, when the Internet became available to the world at large. This breakthrough doesn't have anything to do with it, though.
The value of a network is proportional to the size of it, so the more users a network has, the more new users will sign up. Even if 90% of those new users don't use AOL's ad-riddled client (and of course most still will, since it's ``official''), they'll still experience growth. Of course, whether it's enough growth to pay for the servers is another question, but presumably someone at AOL has done the math.
If I had mod point I'd mod you up. All teaching "both sides" does is make kids believe there's a genuine controvery, when there really, really isn't.
Not to mention that kids just aren't in a position to fully evaluate the arguments for and against evolution and creationism anyway, especially not given the necessarily limited time they spend dealing with it in a typical high school curriculum; time that would be cut in half if creationism were also taught. Best to deal with it the way other sciences are dealt with in high school: "For the most part, accept that this is true, as people more knowledgeable than you have worked out (and if you do not wish to just accept it, you can check the facts for yourself, but there isn't enough time to deal with it to that level of detail in class)."
The crap security on someone's private house only endangers the possessions of the owner of the house. The crap security on the phone system endangers innocent people who have SWAT teams called on them. If you don't see the difference, maybe you shouldn't be in this discussion.
Remember the old saying that what's good for GM is good for the country?
When did that become an old saying rather than a slip of the tongue by a corrupt politician? Fifty years from now, will people be pointing to the series of tubes as being an old saying as well?
Physical fitness does not reduce the incidence of psychological addiction, and "well-adjusted" isn't exactly easy to quantify. Even if you did have a standard for that, raising people to meet it is far from feasible.
(...) this would be inscientific but that wouldn't prevent it from being a pretty accurate description of what is actually happening.
Why would it be unscientific? It's a falsifiable hypothesis like any other.
I do not think that religion tells us how the natural world physically works-- religion works in metaphores and so can only provide some guidance as to how to get along in life, and how to appriciate the fullness of human experience.
That's nice. However, that's not what (nearly all of) the rest of the world understands religion to be. If it were, this wouldn't even be an issue.
Your solution to conflicts between science and religion is basically to redefine one of the words. That's not a solution, it's a cop-out.
As you say strictly speaking, science is agnostic.
Strictly speaking, science is agnostic about literally everything. That doesn't put questions of the existence or non-existence of God outside of its scope. Like the existence or non-existence of anything else, it's very clearly a scientific question.
You can redefine ``God'' to be strictly metaphorical if you like, but if you do, you're placing yourself outside of this discussion entirely, since that's not the god either side of this debate is discussing.
I'd say the topic of this book is just where hacking (in the traditional sense) and cracking overlap. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a term for that that doesn't piss at least one group of people off. I personally tend to stick to ``(white|black|gray) hat hacking'' for this overlap, and ``script kiddie cracking'' for all the cracking that falls outside it. It may not please everyone, but at least it's less ambiguous.
High-level languages make it much easier to write bug-free programs. While knowledge of assembly is always necessary to produce beautiful code, actually writing said code in assembly is a horrible idea for nearly every decent-sized project.
Maybe the quality of the applications as designed would be higher, but I'd be willing to bet they'd have considerably more bugs than the same applications written in a high-level language, even if the programmers of the latter are less skilled.
Rendering web pages ceased to be "one thing" many years ago. Given that Firefox isn't just a rendering engine capable of dealing with a zillion different (X)HTML specifications, but also a Javascript interpreter, a spelling checker, and (with plugins and extensions) pretty much anything you can imagine, I'm actually surprised it starts up as quickly as it does.
If you start comparing features, Eclipse probably comes out ahead, but not by as much as you might think. Certainly not by a factor of twenty, as the start-up times seem to reflect. Eclipse's slowness isn't just a result of the large number of features, but also of the fact it just doesn't manage memory well. How much of that is a result of the fact that it's (mostly) written in Java, of course, you can argue over.
"Postulating" the lack of existence of a creator isn't a positive claim; it's the default when the reverse position doesn't have any evidence for it. Strictly speaking science may be agnostic about it, but strictly speaking, it's agnostic about everything. It's agnostic about ghosts and unicorns as well, but that doesn't mean it's not reasonable to say, within a scientific context, that they pretty much certainly don't exist.
I wonder what percentage of scientists believe in a higher power.
Me too. I'm not aware of any real studies with regards to scientists specifically, but there have been a number that investigated the correlation between religiosity and education, and pretty much all of them found a negative correlation. I don't remember if any of them dared to offer any hypotheses to explain this.
Is your position that they are either nuts or hypocrits?
My position is that they're very good at partitioning, and keep their religious beliefs carefully shielded from scientific questioning; that those beliefs exist in a blind spot, as it were. For those that actually are religious, that is. A lot of people will identify as one religion or another without actually believing any of it, and in my experience, highly educated religious people are much more likely to view the whole God thing as purely metaphoric.
And there are always people like Einstein, who confuse people on both sides by using very religious language at times, while also maintaining they don't believe in anything like a personal god.
It is my position that their belief is just outside the domain of their work.
NOMA has been taken apart quite thoroughly by a lot of other people, so I won't even try addressing it here.
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Every time people complain about things like collecting fingerprints from innocent civilians, some idiot comes along and argues that it's perfectly fine and doesn't represent a slippery slope at all. The sad part is that now that it's spelled out (very nearly) entirely, most people are probably still just going to shrug and ignore it.
The boiling frog analogy kind of breaks down when the frog is quadriplegic.
Cows don't lay eggs!
Something similar would actually have been a useful certification for furniture likely to support an X-Box.
So let the courts deal with slander cases as they appear, rather than shutting down this website because it could hypothetically be used to post slanderous matierial.
I can assure you that right now, regardless of where you are on Earth, my personal gravitational field is influencing you considerably more strongly than Proxima Centauri's, which is the star closest to the Sun. Seeing as how astrology tends to talk about stars many, many times further away, yes, it's fair to say it's complete rubbish.
As for whether the universe can be explained, consider this: science gets reproducible results. All of human civilisation is a testament to that.
Once astrology (or any other supernaturalistic system of beliefs, including religion) starts doing that, we can start talking about whether it might not be bullshit after all.
The same can be said of prayer, really. The line between superstition and religion isn't nearly as clear as religious people make it out to be.
Evolution is not a trend towards interestingness, diversity, or complexity. Most life is still very, very simple, it's just that that life tends to be too small to see.
Isaac Newton spent most of his life working on alchemy (and feuding with Leibniz, though arguably that was more of a hobby), so no, not really. He managed to stick to the scientific method quite admirably while he was working on Newtonian physics, but even most fundamentalists manage to stick to the scientific method most of the time (very few of them will walk out of tenth-storey windows believing Jesus will save them, for instance). It does not make them scientists.
The fact that female hormonal cycles are roughly a month long does not mean they're influenced by the moon, and certainly not by its gravity.
Is it?
Belief in astrology implies that the person is incapable of critically examining evidence. It's a symptom of deeper issues, though perhaps by itself it's not as harmful as said issues (sort of like religion in general). However, astrology specifically exists to give people advice about life decisions. If people believe it to be effective and treat its advice as valid, I'm not too sure you can call that harmless.
Not that many species of cat purr. Domesticated cats and wildcats do, and so do a handful of larger cat species, but most big cats don't.
Depends on what you're willing to call ``cat'', I suppose. If you mean domesticated cats, then yes, every species of cat purrs (and there's only one).
The Singularity's been here since 1991, when the Internet became available to the world at large. This breakthrough doesn't have anything to do with it, though.
http://www.news.com/8301-13578_3-9834495-38.html
So yes, case law does back it up.
You never had a flash plugin installed back when you were still on dial-up? I know I did.
Teaches people patience, too.
The value of a network is proportional to the size of it, so the more users a network has, the more new users will sign up. Even if 90% of those new users don't use AOL's ad-riddled client (and of course most still will, since it's ``official''), they'll still experience growth.
Of course, whether it's enough growth to pay for the servers is another question, but presumably someone at AOL has done the math.
The kernel loads ndiswrapper as a module too.
If I had mod point I'd mod you up.
All teaching "both sides" does is make kids believe there's a genuine controvery, when there really, really isn't.
Not to mention that kids just aren't in a position to fully evaluate the arguments for and against evolution and creationism anyway, especially not given the necessarily limited time they spend dealing with it in a typical high school curriculum; time that would be cut in half if creationism were also taught.
Best to deal with it the way other sciences are dealt with in high school: "For the most part, accept that this is true, as people more knowledgeable than you have worked out (and if you do not wish to just accept it, you can check the facts for yourself, but there isn't enough time to deal with it to that level of detail in class)."
The crap security on someone's private house only endangers the possessions of the owner of the house. The crap security on the phone system endangers innocent people who have SWAT teams called on them.
If you don't see the difference, maybe you shouldn't be in this discussion.
Remember the old saying that what's good for GM is good for the country?
When did that become an old saying rather than a slip of the tongue by a corrupt politician?
Fifty years from now, will people be pointing to the series of tubes as being an old saying as well?
Physical fitness does not reduce the incidence of psychological addiction, and "well-adjusted" isn't exactly easy to quantify. Even if you did have a standard for that, raising people to meet it is far from feasible.
Why would it be unscientific? It's a falsifiable hypothesis like any other.
That's nice. However, that's not what (nearly all of) the rest of the world understands religion to be. If it were, this wouldn't even be an issue.
Your solution to conflicts between science and religion is basically to redefine one of the words. That's not a solution, it's a cop-out.
Strictly speaking, science is agnostic about literally everything. That doesn't put questions of the existence or non-existence of God outside of its scope. Like the existence or non-existence of anything else, it's very clearly a scientific question.
You can redefine ``God'' to be strictly metaphorical if you like, but if you do, you're placing yourself outside of this discussion entirely, since that's not the god either side of this debate is discussing.
I'd say the topic of this book is just where hacking (in the traditional sense) and cracking overlap. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a term for that that doesn't piss at least one group of people off.
I personally tend to stick to ``(white|black|gray) hat hacking'' for this overlap, and ``script kiddie cracking'' for all the cracking that falls outside it. It may not please everyone, but at least it's less ambiguous.
High-level languages make it much easier to write bug-free programs. While knowledge of assembly is always necessary to produce beautiful code, actually writing said code in assembly is a horrible idea for nearly every decent-sized project.
Maybe the quality of the applications as designed would be higher, but I'd be willing to bet they'd have considerably more bugs than the same applications written in a high-level language, even if the programmers of the latter are less skilled.
Rendering web pages ceased to be "one thing" many years ago. Given that Firefox isn't just a rendering engine capable of dealing with a zillion different (X)HTML specifications, but also a Javascript interpreter, a spelling checker, and (with plugins and extensions) pretty much anything you can imagine, I'm actually surprised it starts up as quickly as it does.
If you start comparing features, Eclipse probably comes out ahead, but not by as much as you might think. Certainly not by a factor of twenty, as the start-up times seem to reflect. Eclipse's slowness isn't just a result of the large number of features, but also of the fact it just doesn't manage memory well.
How much of that is a result of the fact that it's (mostly) written in Java, of course, you can argue over.
"Postulating" the lack of existence of a creator isn't a positive claim; it's the default when the reverse position doesn't have any evidence for it. Strictly speaking science may be agnostic about it, but strictly speaking, it's agnostic about everything. It's agnostic about ghosts and unicorns as well, but that doesn't mean it's not reasonable to say, within a scientific context, that they pretty much certainly don't exist.
Me too. I'm not aware of any real studies with regards to scientists specifically, but there have been a number that investigated the correlation between religiosity and education, and pretty much all of them found a negative correlation. I don't remember if any of them dared to offer any hypotheses to explain this.
My position is that they're very good at partitioning, and keep their religious beliefs carefully shielded from scientific questioning; that those beliefs exist in a blind spot, as it were.
For those that actually are religious, that is. A lot of people will identify as one religion or another without actually believing any of it, and in my experience, highly educated religious people are much more likely to view the whole God thing as purely metaphoric.
And there are always people like Einstein, who confuse people on both sides by using very religious language at times, while also maintaining they don't believe in anything like a personal god.
NOMA has been taken apart quite thoroughly by a lot of other people, so I won't even try addressing it here.