The evidence that God exists is that anything exists at all. Nothing could exist without Him.
This is circular logic; you're assuming the conclusion. Basically, you're saying that the only way the world can exist is if God exists, therefore, God must exist. The problem is that your assumption is not based on any evidence; it is pure supposition. I sure hope you don't use this kind of logic in your other affairs.
I can't make sense of existence itself without believing in the God who created all things and makes sentient, soulful beings out of inanimate matter. I don't have enough faith to believe in utter meaninglessness and purposelessness of life and the universe. I see great meaning and purpose in the events of history, whether turbulent or pleasant.
So because you're incapable of comprehending a universe that doesn't contain a God, and therefore, God must exist? Well, how about this for logic: I am capable of comprehending a universe that doesn't contain a God, and therefore, God cannot exist. Which of us is right? (Before you waste time, the answer is, neither of us is right: God's existence must be taken purely on faith. There, by definition, cannot be evidence for or against his existence. And unless there's evidence for something, why would you believe it exists?)
The bottom line is that we don't (shouldn't) claim something to be true that isn't
So it's not okay to claim as true something which is demonstrably false -- but it IS okay to claim as true something which can never be proved true or false. Why?
I'm a programmer for neopets.com, and we (the programmers, artists, monitors, and even some of the manager and executive types) all use AIM (although most of the other programmers use Trillian and I use gaim). Mostly I talk to the other programmers and friends outside the office (as well as my wife, when she's online). Aside from misc. personal chat and bitching about employees we don't like, we use IM for sending URLs to each other, bits of code, pathnames, other misc. data that's easier typed than said, as well as discussing work issues. Most of us programmers have our headphones on all the time, so we can have conversations without having to yap out loud.
IM has *plenty* of non-personal uses, and I'd say that at least half of my IMs at work are work-related. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what I'm doing and who's around, or how much work I have to do.
Since evolution is a family of theories, I'll choose one - abiogenesis.
You should have chosen one that's actually *from* the evolution family. Abiogenesis is not generally considered an aspect of evolution, not by evolutionary biologists, geneticists, or anyone else in the field. But as long as we're talking about abiogenesis...
Given that there are 4 bases, the odds of a single DNA molecule forming the smallest useful chain are about 1 in 4^4000. Since it's been a long time since I've heard this argument, my numbers may be wrong.
It's not that your numbers are wrong; it's your premise that's wrong. This isn't how scientists propose that abiogenesis occurred, so attacking it as if it somehow disproves that abiogenesis *could have occurred* is pointless.
Michael Behe has covered similar problems in his writings.
Behe's big stick is irreducible complexity. He basically looks at a system, and says, "I can't think of any way this system could be less complex and still be of any use. Therefore, the system could not have evolved." The problem with this is that simply because *he* is incapable of figuring it out, doesn't mean that it's impossible to figure out (many of his examples have been refuted by others -- search about on talkorigins.org for a bit).
Science doesn't prove anything!. It explains.
Yes, and scientists know this. They *try* to explain it to laypersons, but inevitably people take science as gospel. (Of course, even scientists are only human: changing the ideas that you've spent a lifetime refining is difficult, no matter who you are.) Is it a problem with the scientific method itself, that most people simply aren't smart enough to understand it?
Witness the manner in which evolution has been used by atheists to justify their lack of belief in God.
I don't think this is prevalent among atheists. Most atheists (like myself) look at God the same way we look at any other claim: You want me to believe something? Fine. Show me some evidence. It's no different than wanting evidence for the effect a new freeway will have on urban traffic patterns, or wanting evidence for how physical processes in a star can cause it to collapse into a white dwarf.
Few atheists, if any, will claim that proof of evolution is somehow proof *against* the existence of God. (Most atheists are aware of the fact that you can't prove or disprove the existence of supernatural entities like God, for whom there cannot, by definition, be any evidence.)
And of course, the real problem is that because science has become so credible, it is often sought as an authority for legislative or social changes. Thus, the otherwise objective nature of science becomes soured when funding becomes contingent on the political ramifications of the results.
This is a problem with people, not with the scientific method. If you can suggest a better method for accurately determining the nature of the universe, I'm sure everyone would be glad to hear it -- but right now, science is the best method we have.
I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with.
The problem is, there is no one "practice" of political correctness. What I consider being politically correct, someone else may well consider being racist or sexist, and vice versa.
The obvious response is to say, well, political correctness is whenever you use a different term for something so that you don't offend somebody. Yes, that is what it being P.C. means... nigger. Oh, I'm sorry, you don't like it when I call you a nigger? Well, you don't want me to be politically correct, so I'll use whatever term I like, and you'll sit there and take it without complaint, you kike/wop/kraut/spic/slant-eye/limey/frog.
(In a world where everyone was reasonably intelligent, I wouldn't need to have this disclaimer here, which explains that, no, I don't really condone the use of any of those ethnic slurs: I'm just trying to make a point. Get a grip.)
onsidering Gates is responsible for BILLIONS of dollars going toward schools, scholarships, charitible work, health care improvements, etc, I highly doubt that.
Um, they're not your friends if you have to pay them to like you.
But who is "we"? As I pointed out before, the overwhelming majority of "society" is not even informed about the realities of issues like these, much less qualified to make a decision.
The type of discussion I refer to is among those A) who are well-informed about the subject, and B) with the authority to make decisions about the future of the subject. Ideally, we should be encouraging everyone to be in group A for as many topics as is feasible.
Furthermore, even among those who are experts in the field you have no guarantee of a consensus.
That's exactly *why* you encourage debate on the subject -- to try and reach a consensus:) If we already have a complete consensus, nobody's going to think we need debate.
I agree that biological research can have nasty consequences, but I don't think that any sort of non-obvious ethical guidelines are going to come out of waiting.
I don't know if you've ever taken an ethics course, or read any books specifically about professional ethics, but there are a lot of elements to ethical systems that are emphatically nonobvious.
Take, for instance, everyone's favorite example -- the atomic bomb. Aside from the obvious "hey, this can kill people" point, what new ethical principles would have come out of delaying atomic research?
Well, you're unfairly simplifying the issue by assuming that atomic bombs are the only thing that came out of atomic research.:) Nuclear medicine and nuclear power are two entire other fields that stem from it, and both fields are fraught with issues of how nuclear energy can affect people, both positively and negatively. E.g., what do we do with the waste that results from nuclear power plants? That's an issue that's still not decided, 49 years after the first nuclear power plant went online -- and the waste continues to mount while we figure out a solution. In this particular case, it turns out that we probably will come to a solution well before the waste starts being a severe problem -- but in retrospect, did we really spend enough time looking at that fact before we decided to start building nuclear power plants? It's not just ethical specifics that need working out -- it's practical decisions, as well.
Ethics basically boils down to one principle: hurt other people as little as possible. I'm at a loss to think how something like creating an artificial virus complicates that issue.
It's obvious that the goal (well, if you want to oversimplify) is to avoid hurting people -- but the questions I'm talking about are things like, "Given this new technology, and all the wondrous things it can do, in what ways can it be used safely, without hurting people? In what ways should we allow ourselves to use it, so as to avoid hurting people?" THAT'S what we're trying to figure out. How the technology will interact with the real world is not always obvious, despite your insistence that it is.
If you want to reduce risk, it is often better to worry about social problems rather than technological problems. Which will create less risk of terrorism? Taking away the terrorist's weapons, or removing their desire to become terrorists?
That's exactly what I'm talking about! The discussion at hand is one of societal responsibility, not technological or engineering challenges. If I, as a private individual, can genetically engineer a new kind of plant and start selling it without any outside testing to make sure it doesn't have hidden, long-term harmful effects, should I start doing so? What responsibility do I have to society to undertake that testing of my own accord, without being forced to by the government? Given that most corporate entities are inherently amoral, how much should the government interfere in their operations? These are the ki
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen.
It does happen, you're just apparently incapable of visualizing how it really happens.:) What he's referring to is the society-wide process of discussion, information dissemination, more discussion, controlled experimentation, etc. In other words, the general social development of an ethical system regarding the topic. Instead of coming up with a new technology, throwing it out into society and saying "let the chips fall where they may," instead we're saying something like, "Hey, this new technology could be incredibly dangerous if mishandled -- maybe we should take it slowly and try to avoid the worst of the problems that could come out of it."
You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do.
That's approximately what they should do -- more along the lines of what I said above: "Genetic engineering can be very, very dangerous with long-term, widespread repercussions. We should take this slowly and think about it a lot before we do anything drastic. Yes, that may slow down progress, but let's keep in mind how many really, really bad things might happen if we move forward too quickly." The trick is in figuring out how much discussion you really need before you're just treading water and blocking progress to no good end.
Nothing personal in this, but you're really acting like someone who's never considered that maybe other people have thought about all this before.:)
The big problem, of course, is that there are so many short-sighted people out there, that it's nearly impossible to convince everyone that we should take it a little slower. My wife's fond of pointing out that virtually every bad decision or ill-informed belief that people have stems from not thinking far enough ahead. It behooves us, as a society, to encourage long-term thinking as much as possible.
If usage defines the language, then a quick Googlefight shows how well "virii" fares:
viruses (5 800 000 results)
versus
virii ( 123 000 results)
The reason that "virii" is so scorned by those of us interested in grammatical correctness is because its usage is almost invariably due to ignorance of how the common rules of English are applied. When a hacker says "boxen" instead of "boxes" it's usually a playful overapplication of the "ox" -> "oxen" rule -- the hacker knows that what he's doing is "wrong," but does it anyway for the entertainment value (even if he's the only one who's entertained). As a matter of practice, people use the word "virii" because they think that it's the actual common plural of "virus".
I don't think I'd personally object to the use of "virii" to mean "computer viruses", but then we end up in a situation where we have a specific jargon word for "computer viruses" but no specific jargon word for the singular form, "computer virus". The asymmetry bothers me, and since the context usually is adequate to determine which kind of virus we're talking about, there's not really need for the word.
And writing off "virii" as "just another evolution of English, deal with it" is also a bad idea because it encourages people to misapply grammatical rules, which is not going to improve the level of our communications. Some things are worth fighting for, such as clarity of language. English could use a lot more of it, but muddying the waters by misapplying rules from other languages isn't going to help.
Of course, there's always the fact that I can use someone's usage of "virii" as an indicator that they're probably not worth listening to:)
You must think that Shakespeare was a severe retard, then. After all, he spelled plenty of words differently. Shit, he flat-out invented several hundred words.
It's good to know that I'd spend more time in jail for pirating a movie than I would for beating Jack Valenti with a lead pipe. I think I'll head over to the MPAA's offices right now!
The record companies are only "hurt" if I download the music but would have bought it if I couldn't have downloaded it. If I can't download the music, and STILL have no intention of buying it, they haven't even lost out on a potential sale.
The difference with a movie theater is that there are only a finite number of seats in the theater; even if most shows don't sell out, there's always the potential. There's no limit to the number of copies of a piece of music that can be created. (There's another issue with theaters: Kids sneaking into the theaters and using the seats are causing actual physical wear on the theater itself. Sure, no more than the average person, I suppose, but it's still a cost I have to take into account that I'm not being compensated for.)
Wow, facts with no source. This is a traditional liberal tactic.
Yeah, 'cause, you know, conservatives certainly never do that. Nope. Never.
Not that it justifies either side doing it, of course, but it's incredibly stupid to call that a "liberal" tactic, when it's an age-old debating tactic from before the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" even existed.
Someone else already mentioned that they're trespassing, and there's also the fact that there's only a finite number of seats in the theatre. Every seat that a sneaking-in kid takes is one less ticket that I can sell. Every copy that a downloading kid makes of a CD is NOT one less copy I can sell -- I still have all the CDs I pressed.
Copyright infringement is NOT physically or morally equivalent to theft and the two should not be treated identically.
It's fine if they want to leave us with a philosophical thought like "Life is just a dream" (and it was really the first movie that left us with that thought, not this one), but if they're going to do it by ranting drunkenly for two hours and then vomiting on my shoes, I'm not going to enjoy it.
There was a show called Star Wars in 30 Minutes that played here in Los Angeles for a few months last year. Hysterical, and they run through the entire original trilogy in, yes, 30 minutes. I saw it twice and it was great. More than just one guy, but most of the cast plays multiple roles -- Threepio is also Yoda, Chewie is also Vader, Ackbar is also Jabba, Luke's tauntaun, and several other characters.
The props were hilarious -- folding chairs with lights on the feet were X-wings (held up in front of the actors' faces), Artoo was a trash can, and the aerial on the bottom of Cloud City that Luke catches onto was... a TV aerial. Ha!
As for you playa-haters out there: This trilogy is excellent.
Maybe the ideas therein are excellent, but the storytelling in the third movie is pretty bad. The dialogue is bad, the pacing is bad, they end up sticking us with scenes that don't really relate to the good ideas the trilogy is about (like most of the Battle of Zion, which just went on and on and was pretty but didn't really have anything to do with the trilogy's themes). I liked the ending, but there's lots of little problems I have with it, like how exactly did Neo kill all the Smiths? What was that he was doing with the energy and the glowing and the glaiven m'hay? How the hell did he get superpowers in the real world in the first place? I don't want it spelled out for me, I just want the narrative to make some damn sense!
Slashdot Mirror
There was an article about the anti-spam law yesterday. Yeah, a front-page article with 556 comments is "hushing it up." Owned, bitch!
(Oddly, this is only the second weirdest thing I've written today.)
mozilla.com points to the Mozilla website at mozilla.org, so renaming Mozilla to Mozilla.org would be pointless.
Anyway, most products would sound silly if named after domains. "Would you like a large Coca-Cola.com with that?"
Coming soon to Broadway: The Cylon King.
I'm a programmer for neopets.com, and we (the programmers, artists, monitors, and even some of the manager and executive types) all use AIM (although most of the other programmers use Trillian and I use gaim). Mostly I talk to the other programmers and friends outside the office (as well as my wife, when she's online). Aside from misc. personal chat and bitching about employees we don't like, we use IM for sending URLs to each other, bits of code, pathnames, other misc. data that's easier typed than said, as well as discussing work issues. Most of us programmers have our headphones on all the time, so we can have conversations without having to yap out loud.
IM has *plenty* of non-personal uses, and I'd say that at least half of my IMs at work are work-related. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what I'm doing and who's around, or how much work I have to do.
Few atheists, if any, will claim that proof of evolution is somehow proof *against* the existence of God. (Most atheists are aware of the fact that you can't prove or disprove the existence of supernatural entities like God, for whom there cannot, by definition, be any evidence.)
This is a problem with people, not with the scientific method. If you can suggest a better method for accurately determining the nature of the universe, I'm sure everyone would be glad to hear it -- but right now, science is the best method we have.The obvious response is to say, well, political correctness is whenever you use a different term for something so that you don't offend somebody. Yes, that is what it being P.C. means... nigger. Oh, I'm sorry, you don't like it when I call you a nigger? Well, you don't want me to be politically correct, so I'll use whatever term I like, and you'll sit there and take it without complaint, you kike/wop/kraut/spic/slant-eye/limey/frog.
(In a world where everyone was reasonably intelligent, I wouldn't need to have this disclaimer here, which explains that, no, I don't really condone the use of any of those ethnic slurs: I'm just trying to make a point. Get a grip.)
The type of discussion I refer to is among those A) who are well-informed about the subject, and B) with the authority to make decisions about the future of the subject. Ideally, we should be encouraging everyone to be in group A for as many topics as is feasible.
That's exactly *why* you encourage debate on the subject -- to try and reach a consensus :) If we already have a complete consensus, nobody's going to think we need debate.
I don't know if you've ever taken an ethics course, or read any books specifically about professional ethics, but there are a lot of elements to ethical systems that are emphatically nonobvious.
Well, you're unfairly simplifying the issue by assuming that atomic bombs are the only thing that came out of atomic research. :) Nuclear medicine and nuclear power are two entire other fields that stem from it, and both fields are fraught with issues of how nuclear energy can affect people, both positively and negatively. E.g., what do we do with the waste that results from nuclear power plants? That's an issue that's still not decided, 49 years after the first nuclear power plant went online -- and the waste continues to mount while we figure out a solution. In this particular case, it turns out that we probably will come to a solution well before the waste starts being a severe problem -- but in retrospect, did we really spend enough time looking at that fact before we decided to start building nuclear power plants? It's not just ethical specifics that need working out -- it's practical decisions, as well.
It's obvious that the goal (well, if you want to oversimplify) is to avoid hurting people -- but the questions I'm talking about are things like, "Given this new technology, and all the wondrous things it can do, in what ways can it be used safely, without hurting people? In what ways should we allow ourselves to use it, so as to avoid hurting people?" THAT'S what we're trying to figure out. How the technology will interact with the real world is not always obvious, despite your insistence that it is.
That's exactly what I'm talking about! The discussion at hand is one of societal responsibility, not technological or engineering challenges. If I, as a private individual, can genetically engineer a new kind of plant and start selling it without any outside testing to make sure it doesn't have hidden, long-term harmful effects, should I start doing so? What responsibility do I have to society to undertake that testing of my own accord, without being forced to by the government? Given that most corporate entities are inherently amoral, how much should the government interfere in their operations? These are the ki
Nothing personal in this, but you're really acting like someone who's never considered that maybe other people have thought about all this before. :)
The big problem, of course, is that there are so many short-sighted people out there, that it's nearly impossible to convince everyone that we should take it a little slower. My wife's fond of pointing out that virtually every bad decision or ill-informed belief that people have stems from not thinking far enough ahead. It behooves us, as a society, to encourage long-term thinking as much as possible.
If usage defines the language, then a quick Googlefight shows how well "virii" fares:
:)
viruses
(5 800 000 results)
versus
virii
( 123 000 results)
The reason that "virii" is so scorned by those of us interested in grammatical correctness is because its usage is almost invariably due to ignorance of how the common rules of English are applied. When a hacker says "boxen" instead of "boxes" it's usually a playful overapplication of the "ox" -> "oxen" rule -- the hacker knows that what he's doing is "wrong," but does it anyway for the entertainment value (even if he's the only one who's entertained). As a matter of practice, people use the word "virii" because they think that it's the actual common plural of "virus".
I don't think I'd personally object to the use of "virii" to mean "computer viruses", but then we end up in a situation where we have a specific jargon word for "computer viruses" but no specific jargon word for the singular form, "computer virus". The asymmetry bothers me, and since the context usually is adequate to determine which kind of virus we're talking about, there's not really need for the word.
And writing off "virii" as "just another evolution of English, deal with it" is also a bad idea because it encourages people to misapply grammatical rules, which is not going to improve the level of our communications. Some things are worth fighting for, such as clarity of language. English could use a lot more of it, but muddying the waters by misapplying rules from other languages isn't going to help.
Of course, there's always the fact that I can use someone's usage of "virii" as an indicator that they're probably not worth listening to
You must think that Shakespeare was a severe retard, then. After all, he spelled plenty of words differently. Shit, he flat-out invented several hundred words.
It's good to know that I'd spend more time in jail for pirating a movie than I would for beating Jack Valenti with a lead pipe. I think I'll head over to the MPAA's offices right now!
The record companies are only "hurt" if I download the music but would have bought it if I couldn't have downloaded it. If I can't download the music, and STILL have no intention of buying it, they haven't even lost out on a potential sale.
The difference with a movie theater is that there are only a finite number of seats in the theater; even if most shows don't sell out, there's always the potential. There's no limit to the number of copies of a piece of music that can be created. (There's another issue with theaters: Kids sneaking into the theaters and using the seats are causing actual physical wear on the theater itself. Sure, no more than the average person, I suppose, but it's still a cost I have to take into account that I'm not being compensated for.)
I saw a better one:
BUSH ORWELL 2004
Not that it justifies either side doing it, of course, but it's incredibly stupid to call that a "liberal" tactic, when it's an age-old debating tactic from before the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" even existed.
Copyright infringement is NOT physically or morally equivalent to theft and the two should not be treated identically.
It's fine if they want to leave us with a philosophical thought like "Life is just a dream" (and it was really the first movie that left us with that thought, not this one), but if they're going to do it by ranting drunkenly for two hours and then vomiting on my shoes, I'm not going to enjoy it.
There was a show called Star Wars in 30 Minutes that played here in Los Angeles for a few months last year. Hysterical, and they run through the entire original trilogy in, yes, 30 minutes. I saw it twice and it was great. More than just one guy, but most of the cast plays multiple roles -- Threepio is also Yoda, Chewie is also Vader, Ackbar is also Jabba, Luke's tauntaun, and several other characters.
The props were hilarious -- folding chairs with lights on the feet were X-wings (held up in front of the actors' faces), Artoo was a trash can, and the aerial on the bottom of Cloud City that Luke catches onto was... a TV aerial. Ha!