"In general, the tone of the article seems to be that many people should not be allowed on the web because they can't follow standards"
And that would include, I think, the article's authors. Using DOCTYPE HTML is a non-standard DTD, they haven't specified any character encoding, and whilst they've cottoned on to the HTML entity for an opening right-angle bracket they haven't yet to the HTML entity for a closing bracket. This last isn't invalid I don't think, just stupid.
Also, check out the source for google.com for some awful, non-standards HTML:
This is the sort of markup muck that they generally spit out. So with respect to "I wonder how much HTML coding the authors do" I'd say slightly more than the google web devs.
> Probably because bisexual people are confused, and thus can't tell the > difference between a sexual attraction and a nonsexual one.
Let me put it this way: if I look at someone and I want to fuck them, it means I want to fuck them, not that I am horribly deluded in some way, and is usually referred to as sexual attraction. I find I have this response to some men and some women and am quite unconfused about it.
The "everyone is bisexual" meme comes from:
a) an understanding that nothing is either/or; b) observing the amount of same-sex sexual activity committed by self-proclaimed heterosexuals; c) listening to what people say about their desires when they're horribly drunk and unmindful of the social restrictions they normaly place upon themselves.
It is more true than the "most people are heterosexual" meme and the "non-heterosexuality is an abnormality" meme.
None of these memes have anything to do with what turns me on and what doesn't.
> I am only willing to give credit to an idea if it can demonstrate a base in > objective fact.
A philosophy which precludes itself, since you can't "demonstrate a base [for it] in objective fact". Maybe you should spend a bit more reading books, and discovering how observation and theory are inexorably intertwined in the human mind, instead of spouting 200 year old nonsense. Then we can start arguing as to whether your philosophy of a putative objective reality is a reasonable one.
Scotland and England agreed to be a United Kingdom several hundred years back, Wales asked to be ruled by England over a 1000 years ago due to viking invasions and Northern Ireland is substantially less than half of Ireland (so "bit" would be appropriate), and a slight majority of people there consider themselves to be loyal subjects of the crown.
"Totally control" ignores the ever-increasing devolution of power from Westminster, although it could certainly happen at a much faster rate for my tastes. Although the locals are wont to vote against the nationalist parties in the countries you mention.
And by "the English", I think you mean Westminster, because most people I know have no control over their own local council, let alone three other nations. Perhaps when we all voted for Labour the devolution of power issue was the one we were voting for.
As for "they violently put down resistance from the locals", governments do that to locals as a general rule, whether those locals have agreed to be ruled by that government or not.
No, it's one of many fantastic directives, as older sibling states.
But with things like the CAP, and corrupt fuckheads like Mandelson tugging Paul Allen's patent-spaffing holiday-cock, it's all too easy to forget the good they do.
Making an established male lead character called Starbuck (that's "buck", as in a male) a female who likes to hit men that annoy her, that wouldn't be the ubiquitous millenial misandrist chic now would it?
Correct me if I'm wrong (I did spend the one epsiode that someone forced me to watch trying to claw out my own sensory organs) but wasn't she an attractive "blonde chick" with curves, pert boobs, more hair than acting talent and a costume that retained all the figure-hugging properties of spandex if not the dubious tradename?
Fairly typical pseudo-empowerment for women. The sort that goes quite nicely with teenage boys.
Me, I hate BSG because it's the most god-awful, insipid SHIT I've seen in years.
This is a semantic game playing on the fact that as you get to "simpler" and smaller forms of life, the distinction between what is "life" and what is "non-life" becomes unclear.
What is semantic game-playing? What does "this" refer to?
My stating that there is more than one school of thought on the theory of evolution and that people should therefore clarify what they mean by "evolution"?
Or the theory of replicators?
Defining what you mean and understanding the limits of those definitions is not "semantic game-playing", it's the basis of rational discourse.
But look, if one thinks the theory of the evolution describes speciation, from humans continuously down to simpler and simpler entities until one has clearly moved from the domain of biology to the domain of chemistry, then one is using the theory of evolution to explain the origins of life.
To pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Ultimately you have a point where you do not have chains of molecules making imperfect copies of themselves (the chains, not the individual molecules). When you have that, you get evolution
You are saying:
"When you have [a point where you do not have chains of molecules making
imperfect copies of themselves], you get evolution"
which you later contradict:
"If there are no imperfect replicators, then there's no evolution".
and describing what caused those molecular chains to come into existence is not in any way a part of the theory of evolution.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the genesis of molecular chains is part of the theory, apart from a bunch of Watchtower propagandists.
But whilst their genesis might not be, the existence of molecular replicators _is_ included into the evolutionary model by people like Dawkins, and he then applies imperfect replication and the directive force of Malthusian competition continuously up from the molecular chains into the domain of complex living organisms. So in Dawkins world, evolution does talk about the origins of life. That's my contention.
If there are no imperfect replicators, then there's no evolution, so evolution cannot formally address the entirety of the origin of life.
However, in this model, at the point of the origin of life there is replication and there is therefore evolution.
To be honest, I'm struggling to understand your argument, largely because you contradict yourself, use pronouns that don't refer to anything obvious, and keep begging the question.
> The point here being that we can at least theorize and then try to create > experiments to understand this stuff.
Well we can't perform experiments in a perfect vacuum can we, except as abstract, unreal thought experiments.
Just like we can't perform experiments on the creation of space and time.
We can approximate, but we shouldn't then rush into ontological assertions: the map is not the territory, the model is not the reality. If there is a reality. Einstein's belief that there is such a thing was proven to be wrong according to the canon.
I think the point is that scientists are much freer to make this sort of speculation than most of their religious counterparts, although there is still an orthodoxy in science, and dissent from that orthodoxy is basically treated as heresy.
Look at the recent treatment on these pages of Randell Mills. A stream of invective and name-calling, but how many people had actually looked at his CQM and criticised it on scientific grounds, and how many people just yelled crank without any technical knowldege of the errors he may be making?
None of this is directed at the parent, by the way, I'm just using it as a foil to further my rant.
> Unless of course, you happen to believe that your God has a rather sick and > twisted sense of humor
Well let's not mistake Abrahamic Creationism for creationist theories in general, of which there are probably thousands. Many of them do include joker gods who take the piss out of humankind and the planet in general.
The de facto standard for terrorist communication is couriers, dead letter boxes and the like. The sort od old-fashioned spycraft that CIA/MI6/etc were busy teaching to a variety of groups in the last half of the last century for whatever dubious motive.
After many years of only fancying women I suddenly found that shagging men was fun too. There is a qualitative and quantitative difference in my appreciation of each gender, so although I am bi, that's not the end of the story.
The change in my sexuality occurred out of the blue many years after being born (insert joke about age limit here) and having suffered no psychological trauma or change in circumstances. No one brainwashed me, or drugged me, no gene suddenly started gay protein production (okay so that just sounds like a euphemism); after many years of the fiction that "I am straight" slowly eroding away, I just changed my mind one day.
I think the point is that whilst Goddess worship is reckoned to be older than God worship and whilst druidic and pagan practices (to use two very inadequate terms) have been around for tens of thousands of years, Wicca as a system was invented by people like Gerald Gardner Doreen Valiente.
Also, shouldn't you be changing your name from JHVH?;op
The big bang and evolution are indeed facts as they are observations.
The Big Bang is an observation? The process of evolution is an observation?
We can observe that all matter diverges from a single point.
No we deduce that from a set of observations. In the case of evolution, as many biologists admit, that set is painfully thin.
You are very naively ignoring half of science, which is the theory part. And as an observation gets more complex, the theory becomes a greater part of the observation.
I've apparently done single photon interference, but I've never observed a single photon interfering. I've allegedly measured the speed of light, but never actually observed the speed of light, or even observed light to be travelling in any way.
The world doesn't cut up into little tiny rational observation quanta like you seem to think. Your presentation of scientific empiricism is crass and infantile.
Plus, evolution makes no comment on the origin of life. It is a theory on the origin of new species, which is a different thing entirely.
Whose theory of evolution are we talking about? The Continental School? Neo-Darwinists? Darwin may have shied away from that problem, but the neo-Darwinists seem to think they've got the origin of life all wrapped up. How? By applying the ideas of evolution and competition to chemicals. Sic.
So saying that evolutionary theory posits a mechanism for the origin of life is not as incorrect as you lot are trying to make out.
Scientists acknowledge that, for example, we don't know what was around prior to the Big Bang.
Who are these "scientists" that you all keep referring to? What the turd in Turkey would a paleobotanist know about cosmology?
Most physicist regard it as a non-question. The Big Bang was the beginning of everything and the phrase "prior to the big bang" is semantically null.
Which is just as much of a cop-out as "God made it all" although presented as being self-evident truth and therefore intellectually superior.
Whether these physicists know what the hell they're talking about outside their narrow fields of specialisation is another matter, but a pertinent one and even inside their field of specialisation they can easily make mistakes. Thinking that you know the answer can lead you into horrendous gaffes, the Monty-Hall problem and Einstein's adherence to the Steady State Theory and an Objective Universe being two memorable examples.
Paul Feyerabend makes the point that someone who has invested their life in proving a small set of facts to be true often has a more rigid world-view than your average schizophrenic. I have met many such people over the years, some are religios, some are politicians, some are scientists. Most are Daily Mail reading rightwing scum-fucks, but that's another argument.
Scientists acknowledge that we're not sure of the exact mechanism of the beginning of biological life. Scientists acknowledge that we're still learning bits about how evolution works.
Yet still run around using words like "fact", "truth", "we know" and "certainty" with a blinkered hubris that is worthy of the fundamentalist mindset.
In case you missed the current model, it is that scientific theories have domains of applicability. Sometimes the theories turn out to have larger or smaller domains than previously thought. Some theories don't agree with each other, and some have serious philosophical incompatibilities with other theories. Some scientists believe a given theory to be true and others don't. A corollary is that some theories get more support than others.
An example of this is that there are many interpretations of Quantum Theory which all predict the same results, yet the Copenhagen Interpretation is considered to be the offical version of reality. This is not about crackpot science or flawed or irreproducible data, just politics. And as I think we are learning, politics seldom leads to the truth.
Intelligent design is being surpressed, but that's a different story alltogether. ID is just saying "we don't know how this works yet, so LET'S MAKE SHIT UP!"
Like a hypothesis for example.
Personally I think that ID is unintersting, intellectually worthless and purely political in motivation, and I like the belief systems and constructs of most sciences; but you people really need to stop worshipping at the Church of Absolute Truth of All Science and get yourselves some more enquiring minds.
Of course, it'd probably be best if fundmentalists actually talked to, say, the rabbis who wrote the whole thing down.
And it might be better still if they talk to the generations of jewish hill tribes whose oral traditions eventually became the old testament.
Or maybe they should talk to the babylonians and sumerians from whose myths the jewish tribal traditions were formed.
This is the thing that really gets me about Abrahamic fundamentalists: they have no conception of where there "truth" of the old testament comes from, and no conception of the new testament as the political (and therefore distorted) document that it actually was.
(i) because you enjoy it; (ii) to earn money and buy pretty things; (iii) to produce something of quality that other people will appreciate.
I don't see that any of these are mutually exclusive; I don't see that number three has anything to do with altruism, and I don't see how anyone sensible would claim that it does.
I think most of us who like gmail think that the engineers who designed did so with all three criteria in mind. Unlike some other software projects.
Well they might do it without western countires forcing them to open their markets up to heavily subsidised western products so as to qualify for "development aid".
Actually this may finally be changing if France can stop demanding protectionist policies towards every gallic peasant with half a field, two sheep and a "cheese" "business".
Slashdot Mirror
"In general, the tone of the article seems to be that many people should not be allowed on the web because they can't follow standards"
/ /www.google.co.uk/
And that would include, I think, the article's authors. Using DOCTYPE HTML is a non-standard DTD, they haven't specified any character encoding, and whilst they've cottoned on to the HTML entity for an opening right-angle bracket they haven't yet to the HTML entity for a closing bracket. This last isn't invalid I don't think, just stupid.
Also, check out the source for google.com for some awful, non-standards HTML:
http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http:
This is the sort of markup muck that they generally spit out. So with respect to "I wonder how much HTML coding the authors do" I'd say slightly more than the google web devs.
No I didn't patent tedious repitition. I do have a patent on being needlessly annoyed though.
... all your utterly fucking repetitive tedious non-jokes are belong to us.
> I'll have to *** some things out.
I'll have to ass some things out?
I'll have to tit some things out?
I'll have to kok some things out?
Nope, I give up.
> When not burbling about how affects house prices, the Daily Mail has been ...
:)
And like the Daily Mail, you are seeing "immigration" where it isn't.
> Probably because bisexual people are confused, and thus can't tell the
> difference between a sexual attraction and a nonsexual one.
Let me put it this way: if I look at someone and I want to fuck them, it means I want to fuck them, not that I am horribly deluded in some way, and is usually referred to as sexual attraction. I find I have this response to some men and some women and am quite unconfused about it.
The "everyone is bisexual" meme comes from:
a) an understanding that nothing is either/or;
b) observing the amount of same-sex sexual activity committed by self-proclaimed heterosexuals;
c) listening to what people say about their desires when they're horribly drunk and unmindful of the social restrictions they normaly place upon themselves.
It is more true than the "most people are heterosexual" meme and the "non-heterosexuality is an abnormality" meme.
None of these memes have anything to do with what turns me on and what doesn't.
We clear?
> I am only willing to give credit to an idea if it can demonstrate a base in
> objective fact.
A philosophy which precludes itself, since you can't "demonstrate a base [for it] in objective fact". Maybe you should spend a bit more reading books, and discovering how observation and theory are inexorably intertwined in the human mind, instead of spouting 200 year old nonsense. Then we can start arguing as to whether your philosophy of a putative objective reality is a reasonable one.
Is that philosophy even falsifiable? Discuss.
My Dad listens to music in his dental surgery and has been told by the BDA to pay a similar royalty.
Seeing as you're running in tetrapyloctomy mode:
Scotland and England agreed to be a United Kingdom several hundred years back, Wales asked to be ruled by England over a 1000 years ago due to viking invasions and Northern Ireland is substantially less than half of Ireland (so "bit" would be appropriate), and a slight majority of people there consider themselves to be loyal subjects of the crown.
"Totally control" ignores the ever-increasing devolution of power from Westminster, although it could certainly happen at a much faster rate for my tastes. Although the locals are wont to vote against the nationalist parties in the countries you mention.
And by "the English", I think you mean Westminster, because most people I know have no control over their own local council, let alone three other nations. Perhaps when we all voted for Labour the devolution of power issue was the one we were voting for.
As for "they violently put down resistance from the locals", governments do that to locals as a general rule, whether those locals have agreed to be ruled by that government or not.
So am I a troll becuase I don't like shit sci-fi or shit gender politics?
No, it's one of many fantastic directives, as older sibling states.
But with things like the CAP, and corrupt fuckheads like Mandelson tugging Paul Allen's patent-spaffing holiday-cock, it's all too easy to forget the good they do.
Making an established male lead character called Starbuck (that's "buck", as in a male) a female who likes to hit men that annoy her, that wouldn't be the ubiquitous millenial misandrist chic now would it?
Correct me if I'm wrong (I did spend the one epsiode that someone forced me to watch trying to claw out my own sensory organs) but wasn't she an attractive "blonde chick" with curves, pert boobs, more hair than acting talent and a costume that retained all the figure-hugging properties of spandex if not the dubious tradename?
Fairly typical pseudo-empowerment for women. The sort that goes quite nicely with teenage boys.
Me, I hate BSG because it's the most god-awful, insipid SHIT I've seen in years.
Too bad for you, you could save some money and help your grocer better serve you
Next time I want my grocer to serve me, I'll buy my carrots from a BDSM party.
This is a semantic game playing on the fact that as you get to "simpler" and smaller forms of life, the distinction between what is "life" and what is "non-life" becomes unclear.
What is semantic game-playing? What does "this" refer to?
My stating that there is more than one school of thought on the theory of evolution and that people should therefore clarify what they mean by "evolution"?
Or the theory of replicators?
Defining what you mean and understanding the limits of those definitions is not "semantic game-playing", it's the basis of rational discourse.
But look, if one thinks the theory of the evolution describes speciation, from humans continuously down to simpler and simpler entities until one has clearly moved from the domain of biology to the domain of chemistry, then one is using the theory of evolution to explain the origins of life.
To pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Ultimately you have a point where you do not have chains of molecules making imperfect copies of themselves (the chains, not the individual molecules). When you have that, you get evolution
You are saying:
"When you have [a point where you do not have chains of molecules making imperfect copies of themselves], you get evolution"
which you later contradict:
"If there are no imperfect replicators, then there's no evolution".
and describing what caused those molecular chains to come into existence is not in any way a part of the theory of evolution.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the genesis of molecular chains is part of the theory, apart from a bunch of Watchtower propagandists.
But whilst their genesis might not be, the existence of molecular replicators _is_ included into the evolutionary model by people like Dawkins, and he then applies imperfect replication and the directive force of Malthusian competition continuously up from the molecular chains into the domain of complex living organisms. So in Dawkins world, evolution does talk about the origins of life. That's my contention.
If there are no imperfect replicators, then there's no evolution, so evolution cannot formally address the entirety of the origin of life.
However, in this model, at the point of the origin of life there is replication and there is therefore evolution.
To be honest, I'm struggling to understand your argument, largely because you contradict yourself, use pronouns that don't refer to anything obvious, and keep begging the question.
> The point here being that we can at least theorize and then try to create
> experiments to understand this stuff.
Well we can't perform experiments in a perfect vacuum can we, except as abstract, unreal thought experiments.
Just like we can't perform experiments on the creation of space and time.
We can approximate, but we shouldn't then rush into ontological assertions: the map is not the territory, the model is not the reality. If there is a reality. Einstein's belief that there is such a thing was proven to be wrong according to the canon.
I think the point is that scientists are much freer to make this sort of speculation than most of their religious counterparts, although there is still an orthodoxy in science, and dissent from that orthodoxy is basically treated as heresy.
Look at the recent treatment on these pages of Randell Mills. A stream of invective and name-calling, but how many people had actually looked at his CQM and criticised it on scientific grounds, and how many people just yelled crank without any technical knowldege of the errors he may be making?
None of this is directed at the parent, by the way, I'm just using it as a foil to further my rant.
> Unless of course, you happen to believe that your God has a rather sick and
> twisted sense of humor
Well let's not mistake Abrahamic Creationism for creationist theories in general, of which there are probably thousands. Many of them do include joker gods who take the piss out of humankind and the planet in general.
The de facto standard for terrorist communication is couriers, dead letter boxes and the like. The sort od old-fashioned spycraft that CIA/MI6/etc were busy teaching to a variety of groups in the last half of the last century for whatever dubious motive.
After many years of only fancying women I suddenly found that shagging men was fun too. There is a qualitative and quantitative difference in my appreciation of each gender, so although I am bi, that's not the end of the story.
The change in my sexuality occurred out of the blue many years after being born (insert joke about age limit here) and having suffered no psychological trauma or change in circumstances. No one brainwashed me, or drugged me, no gene suddenly started gay protein production (okay so that just sounds like a euphemism); after many years of the fiction that "I am straight" slowly eroding away, I just changed my mind one day.
Genes?
Bollocks.
I think the point is that whilst Goddess worship is reckoned to be older than God worship and whilst druidic and pagan practices (to use two very inadequate terms) have been around for tens of thousands of years, Wicca as a system was invented by people like Gerald Gardner Doreen Valiente.
;op
Also, shouldn't you be changing your name from JHVH?
The big bang and evolution are indeed facts as they are observations.
The Big Bang is an observation? The process of evolution is an observation?
We can observe that all matter diverges from a single point.
No we deduce that from a set of observations. In the case of evolution, as many biologists admit, that set is painfully thin.
You are very naively ignoring half of science, which is the theory part. And as an observation gets more complex, the theory becomes a greater part of the observation.
I've apparently done single photon interference, but I've never observed a single photon interfering. I've allegedly measured the speed of light, but never actually observed the speed of light, or even observed light to be travelling in any way.
The world doesn't cut up into little tiny rational observation quanta like you seem to think. Your presentation of scientific empiricism is crass and infantile.
Plus, evolution makes no comment on the origin of life. It is a theory on the origin of new species, which is a different thing entirely.
Whose theory of evolution are we talking about? The Continental School? Neo-Darwinists? Darwin may have shied away from that problem, but the neo-Darwinists seem to think they've got the origin of life all wrapped up. How? By applying the ideas of evolution and competition to chemicals. Sic.
So saying that evolutionary theory posits a mechanism for the origin of life is not as incorrect as you lot are trying to make out.
Scientists acknowledge that, for example, we don't know what was around prior to the Big Bang.
Who are these "scientists" that you all keep referring to? What the turd in Turkey would a paleobotanist know about cosmology?
Most physicist regard it as a non-question. The Big Bang was the beginning of everything and the phrase "prior to the big bang" is semantically null.
Which is just as much of a cop-out as "God made it all" although presented as being self-evident truth and therefore intellectually superior.
Whether these physicists know what the hell they're talking about outside their narrow fields of specialisation is another matter, but a pertinent one and even inside their field of specialisation they can easily make mistakes. Thinking that you know the answer can lead you into horrendous gaffes, the Monty-Hall problem and Einstein's adherence to the Steady State Theory and an Objective Universe being two memorable examples.
Paul Feyerabend makes the point that someone who has invested their life in proving a small set of facts to be true often has a more rigid world-view than your average schizophrenic. I have met many such people over the years, some are religios, some are politicians, some are scientists. Most are Daily Mail reading rightwing scum-fucks, but that's another argument.
Scientists acknowledge that we're not sure of the exact mechanism of the beginning of biological life. Scientists acknowledge that we're still learning bits about how evolution works.
Yet still run around using words like "fact", "truth", "we know" and "certainty" with a blinkered hubris that is worthy of the fundamentalist mindset.
In case you missed the current model, it is that scientific theories have domains of applicability. Sometimes the theories turn out to have larger or smaller domains than previously thought. Some theories don't agree with each other, and some have serious philosophical incompatibilities with other theories. Some scientists believe a given theory to be true and others don't. A corollary is that some theories get more support than others.
An example of this is that there are many interpretations of Quantum Theory which all predict the same results, yet the Copenhagen Interpretation is considered to be the offical version of reality. This is not about crackpot science or flawed or irreproducible data, just politics. And as I think we are learning, politics seldom leads to the truth.
Intelligent design is being surpressed, but that's a different story alltogether. ID is just saying "we don't know how this works yet, so LET'S MAKE SHIT UP!"
Like a hypothesis for example.
Personally I think that ID is unintersting, intellectually worthless and purely political in motivation, and I like the belief systems and constructs of most sciences; but you people really need to stop worshipping at the Church of Absolute Truth of All Science and get yourselves some more enquiring minds.
Of course, it'd probably be best if fundmentalists actually talked to, say, the rabbis who wrote the whole thing down.
And it might be better still if they talk to the generations of jewish hill tribes whose oral traditions eventually became the old testament.
Or maybe they should talk to the babylonians and sumerians from whose myths the jewish tribal traditions were formed.
This is the thing that really gets me about Abrahamic fundamentalists: they have no conception of where there "truth" of the old testament comes from, and no conception of the new testament as the political (and therefore distorted) document that it actually was.
Where does fate fit into your example?
And: Ahahahahahahaha I got you to spend time reading the loathsome socialist wikipedia. Ahahahahahahaha.
No, that would be hypocrisy.
Try this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony for more information; which sentence you might find ironic but I don't.
Three reasons to work hard at what you do:
(i) because you enjoy it;
(ii) to earn money and buy pretty things;
(iii) to produce something of quality that other people will appreciate.
I don't see that any of these are mutually exclusive; I don't see that number three has anything to do with altruism, and I don't see how anyone sensible would claim that it does.
I think most of us who like gmail think that the engineers who designed did so with all three criteria in mind. Unlike some other software projects.
Well they might do it without western countires forcing them to open their markets up to heavily subsidised western products so as to qualify for "development aid".
Actually this may finally be changing if France can stop demanding protectionist policies towards every gallic peasant with half a field, two sheep and a "cheese" "business".