Its not really authentication - its a number that identifies your name at your address with a database entry. You still need real ID to prove you are you. What it means is that everything can be centralised, so that you don't, for example, have different records scattered around different dentists and doctors you've been to (like i have all over the uk). You don't need a passport, 3 utility bills and a letter from your grandma to open a bank account. You do need to be in the system though, or you can't do anything.
From an ID theft perspective, i think it would be very hard to open two bank accounts at different addresses, because your address is held alongside your number (if you move house you are legally obliged to tell them). So if someone changed my address in the register and got a credit card in my name, i'd know the moment someone asked for my folk number and asked to confirm my address. So yes, you can try to impersonate me (and i suspect my number is probably public knowledge anyway) but i don't think you'd get far.
Now i know this whole system is offensive to privacy advocates at a very core level, but it just works here. And it means you can walk into any doctor or dentist and they have instant access to your records. If you are taken into hospital, they can just open your wallet, type in your number and they have your full medical records immediately.
The difference is that in the nordic countries people trust their government a bit more. I'm British living in Norway, and i have to say the two places are incomparable. I have an ID number (technically a "folk register number") which i just give to banks, dentists, doctors etc and they immediately know who i am and i am authenticated into the "system". It works here, and makes life so much simpler.
For the UK though, i'd resist such a system. The government has a long history of ignoring the desires of the public (which kind of undermines my understanding of democracy) and enacting laws under spurious premises. Basically, i don't trust them.
> I have seen one cop going to jail for 4 years for refusing to testify
> against a police officer he witnessed assault a prisoner
This is one of those areas where the public has to trust police to exercise their powers responsibly. The sentence here reflects both the crime AND the abuse of power. And this is how it should be for serious crimes. For more minor crimes, like speeding on personal time (as opposed to speeding on duty, which is again different), i think they should just be treated like the normal citizens they are.
Radar gun - yes i agree. They are extremely technical to use (especially the hand held ones) and require regular calibration. The general public should not be let loose with them.
Arrogance - Power corrupts, and jobs with power sometimes attract the wrong sort of person. Course, if you want to see true distilled arrogance, go work in a university.
I tend to agree with you about the police bashing - 95% of cops get bad rep because of the other 5%. However, from my (thankfully limited) personal experience of police i have to say i've seen a certain arrogance emanating from most of them.
I would point out that your criticism of the methods of evidence gathering do rather sound like the excuses that lawyers present to have their clients acquitted on "technicalities". You're right of course, but unfortunately that argument can be easily adapted to cover other situations, which "protects" the police against any petty crime they commit that wasn't witnessed by another officer. And as its well accepted (and i have personal knowledge of examples) that police don't book each other for offences like speeding, that pretty much means you need Internal Affairs to be monitoring the speed of passing police to get a conviction.
As thats never going to happen, we have to trust the police not to abuse their authority and not habitually break certain minor laws. That trust is not always honoured, and this annoys the public who (rightly) believe that police should be held to the same laws as everyone else. As to the eternal argument that police should be treated more leniently as "thanks" for the dangers they endure every day, i don't know. However, if they are to get preferential treatment, then so should a lot of others, starting with the Army, Ambulance services and Fire departments.
I also can't help feeling that the stalking thing is not directly correlated to the speeding complaint. Theres a lot more going on here.
> If I had the cash to buy a Mac Pro, I'd pay a couple a hundred bucks extra for an x1900 gfx
> card if I was going to be gaming on it.
Thats a fair point, and I'd do the same. I would note from the specs that it looks like he was buying a workstation, with games as a secondary consideration. So from his perspective, and using the car analogy again, he *did* buy the higher capacity engine - 3Gb of RAM. He just didn't want the bucket seats and leather steering wheel - the GFX upgrade.
I'm not sure i'd ever accuse a MacPro buyer of "penny-pinching", but i do agree with your points.
I do think you're wrong about the "consumer electronics" tag, cos thats *exactly* how Apple sell their products. At the core of their advertising is the idea of stylish and integrated "lifestyle products" which just work. Thats "consumer electronics" they are selling, irrespective of the astronomical price-tag.
> In a nutshell, pay less money, expect more issues.
Typical geek attitude, and one which is endemic across the whole sector:
Bought XP home? Ahh, you should have got XP Pro if you wanted stability. Bought a PC? Ahh you should have bought a Mac if you want it to work right. You bought an IBM hard disk? EVERYONE knows you should buy a Seagate or Western Digital.
But this is all bullshit. If you extrapolate this thinking to any other industry it looks ridiculous: What would you say if the car salesman told you to buy the next car up the range cos the steering only works 90% of the time on the bottom of the range model. Or if a cheap shirt only came with one arm? How about a chair with two legs and a "stability upgrade" to 3 or 4 legs? Its crap and we wouldn't accept it. But we seem to think this sort of problem is normal from a computer.
The computer suppliers claim to be serious about supplying "consumer electronics", so they should start delivering products which do what they say on the packet. If they are willing to sell you a computer with 3Gb of RAM, it should damn well work that way. If they are selling you a computer with an Nvidia GFX card, it should work reliably OR they should simply not sell it. Unfortunately, as long as the consumer is resigned to this industry attitude i doubt progress will be fast.
Its all about leverage. The iPod release was the same, they deliberately kept the 1st gen units Mac-only compatible in order to leverage people into buying Macs. Some did, but not many, so the iPod revolution only really took off a couple of years later when they sorted out proper Windows capability and it became a device in its own right, not a Mac accessory.
They are obviously trying to do the same with the iPhone - using a sexy device to leverage people into buying something they don't really want. Considering that the iPod really was a revolution and people still wouldn't be leveraged, i don't think this ploy will work with the iPhone.
I'm guessing there is a business reason why they tied themselves to one carrier, but i can't help wondering why they didn't just design a phone and market it the same way as everyone else - through all carriers with the carrier charging according to service plan. Apple stuff sells cos its stylish, decently made and its easy to use (due to good design), so consumers would look at the Nokia's, Sony's and iPhone's side by side in the shop and probably pay a bit extra to buy the iPhone. They've really undermined their core strengths by not allowing their customers this choice and it will show in their sales figures. Maybe they'll see the light in a year or two and release the phone to the masses, assuming they haven't tied themselves too strongly to Cingular.
The article clearly states that "The police are not allowed to ask credit-card companies or banks to run a very broad database search". However, the search criteria "a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account" reads to me as "we know the subscription fee, bank account number and the date the website went up. Could you tell us about all the germans who paid that subscription amount to that bank account please". That sounds like a pretty broad search criteria to me.
A specific search would be "We have sound suspicions that a bloke called Wolfgang has been accessing this list of kiddie porn websites. Could you provide us with a list of transactions Wolfgang has made to them please."
I'll confess i thought you were at least half joking, but you actually do advocate the issuing of all passengers with (presumably "airplane safe") handguns?
I think its quite important at this point to put the 9/11 hijackings into context. Hijackings in the western world have never been common events (in terms of percentage flights), though in the 1970's and 1980's they did pop up on the news. During the 1990's they became pretty rare. The power of 9/11 was the sheer audacity of the plan - before, hijackings were usually carried out by people who wanted some news for their cause, or wanted to leave their country and couldn't do it any other way. In all cases the hijackers wanted to live, but were prepared to risk their lives to obtain an objective. For 9/11 this was not the case, but the success of the plan hinged on EVERYONE on those planes believing it was a "normal" hijacking. The passengers on Flight 93 rebelled AFTER they were told by mobile phone about the other flights, and so that hijacking failed in its objective.
So, in context - only once in history has anyone actually hijacked commercial airplanes and used them as physical weapons. The vast majority of hijackings have used passengers as bargaining chips, and accordingly the passengers had a decent chance of survival. However, you are willing to "assume" the worst and happily start shooting anyone who gets in the way, regardless of the situation and with no knowledge whatsoever of context.
There is a small error in your argument relating to Lockerbie - that was a bomb in the cargo hold, but i still understand what you are trying to say. However, issuing handguns to untrained (and unknown) people is a recipe for disaster. There are already plenty of documented cases of "air rage", brought on by either drink, drugs or simple fear of flying. How much worse would those be if you'd issued the passengers with guns? How about some kid playing with a gun while daddy is asleep for the flight over the atlantic (maybe junior has just been watching Die Hard on the entertainment system and wants to be Bruce Willis)? The examples are endless.
So lets assume someone does hijack the plane you are on. Things will be tense, people will be edgy, there will be a lot of shouting. Everyone will draw a gun, regardless of whether they are actually willing to fire. Someone with a bit of sense (probably the airmarshal) will stand up and tell everyone to be calm. People will relax perhaps. Then (and this IS inevitable) someone will get too wound-up and will shoot the hijacker. And probably his hostage. When a gunshot goes off in such a confined space, EVERYONE will flinch (probably jump) meaning that anyone still with their finger on the trigger will shoot, hitting their neighbours, their own kids etc. The casualties will be huge, and i'm only assuming one hijacker. In the event of several hijackers the confused crossfire will kill almost everyone on the plane. This is why your plan won't work.
>Armored and completely isolated - audio, video, access - the cockpits on commercial aircraft (requires new and separate external >entry doors for the pilots)
And what happens in the event of a medical emergency? Say someone has a heart attack 10 mins after takeoff on a transatlantic flight.
>Armored the skins and ports of commercial aircraft against small arms
Probably feasible, though perhaps expensive.
>Issued small arms to any adult passenger that didn't have same at boarding
The hijackers will then grab the nearest kids and use them as hostages. "Do what we say or the kid gets it". No-one will shoot cos they might hit the hostage, and would then be guilty of murder themselves.
Err, Fortran is updated. See Fortran 95, and i believe also Fortran 2003. Large numbers of scientific programs (like molecular dynamics/weather forecasting/quantum mechanics etc) are still written in fortran cos it does maths very fast. There is a great deal of multithreading expertise in the fortran coding community. Indeed, buy a supercomputer (or supercomputing cluster) and one of the first things they'll ask is if you want a Fortran compiler with it.
He should just ignore the guy. His site is more popular than the business one for a reason. So he should just register another domain, make it clear on his blog that he'll be transferring across in the event that he's sued, sit back, and do nothing. The business guy can go to all the trouble and effort of suing, pay the money and inherit the domain after wasting his time and effort. Within 2 months the blog will be back at the top of the google rankings and Stupid won't be able to go back to court to claim the new domain because he'll look like an idiot.
The fuel cells guys like to call it an "Energy Vector". i.e. just a transport medium.
You don't have to go too far in the research world to find people who are sceptical about the H2 economy ever becoming feasible. You can do the maths in a few different ways, but it requires some fairly serious fudging to make H2 look good in comparison to the competition, simply because it is energy-expensive to make and transport. Couple that with the engineering problems holding back fuel cells (water management in Nafion systems is hilariously complex, molten electrolyte cells are inherently limited in application and solid oxide systems are still very young) and i think its going to be more than a little while before you see the H2 economy take off, if it ever does.
The academics don't talk about it publicly because they get their research money by writing "Clean Hydrogen Technologies" all over the grant proposal. The engineering and business guys don't talk about it because they also get their startup money for "Clean Hydrogen Technologies". The problem is thus one of politics - the politicians are paying for "Hydrogen Economy" research now. Nothing new here, though: Not too long ago you needed to write "Nano" in the proposal (and still do, to some extent), before that "Superconductors"....
Obviously having anything installed on your computer without your consent is a problem, but i'm fascinated as to how this service (with consent) exists. In many countries you have a core set of "Rights" that the law explicitly says you are not allowed to sign away, no matter how much someone pays you or how charming the salesman is. They are there to save stupid people from clever and dishonest ones (and occasionally to save you from yourself). Now I don't like the nanny state any more than the next person, but this looks to me like a magnificent poster case for why you shouldn't be allowed to just sign up for anything you like. You simply should not be allowed to sign up for something this intrusive and surreptitious.
"These new provisions have the potential to make everyday Australians in homes and businesses across the country into criminals on a scale that we have not witnessed before."
Now come on guys, that just not true - only 200 hundred years ago you were ALL criminals....
>I cannot fathom why scientific community did not go back to the drawing board to create
>a model that fit the known universe rather than inventing fanciful things such as dark
>matter and dark energy.
>Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age
>philosophy combined with pseudo-science.
>....trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.
Now the rebuttal:
I shall start at the bottom, as this is where you are going wrong. Most important i feel is the term "observable proof". What is an "observable proof"? Does this mean you only trust things you can see? If so, simple concepts such as soap and disinfectant are beyond the science you wish to grasp. All modern medicine depends on things you can't see. The computer with which you wrote this opinion depends on utilises many phenomena you can't see, most imortantly electricity, semi-conduction and magnetism. These also require some of your "assumptions" in their explanation.
So what does "observable proof" mean? I hope it doesn't mean "something which can be explained to ME in a way that I understand".
Modern science is not "new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science". This is simply plain wrong. Modern science builds on the work that has gone before, and modern scientists go to great lengths to ensure that the work they do extends this (this can include the evolution/rejection of previous theories as well as the development of new ones). And this means being aware of, and understanding, the work which has gone before and the concepts on which it is based. You don't learn this by magic - it's damn hard work. Throwing out a previous theory and starting again is unimaginably difficult, which is why it is rarely done (as it may take a lifetime) and is generally achieved by those we term "genius".
The confusion you have on this point can probably be placed (at least in part) on the desire for science to be more accessible to the general public. We are increasingly surrounded by a lot of stuff we don't understand, and we want to know more about it. The problem is, by the time the scientists have come up with an approximate explanation that YOU can understand, and then the media has turned it into a 30 second piece that the blonde reporter can understand, it starts to look a bit shabby. But believe me, if the real science was anything like the stuff you see in the media, you'll be lucky if the sun comes up tomorrow.
And on to the final (or first, by your order) point. "I cannot fathom why scientific community....". I think the first three words of this explain the problem. There is no shame in not understanding something, but you should be careful in the dissemination of your ignorance - you would not want your work criticised by someone who knows nothing about it, and nor do the scientists that you are accusing of charlatanism.
Exactly. Buying a program to play a game for me seems to render the game pointless - i buy a game for personal entertainment, not to keep my computer busy when i'm not there.
....the pollution we'll cause getting all those cute little spacecraft up there? Electromagnetism may be better than rockets, but you can't get away from the fundamental truth that it costs a lot of energy to put stuff into orbit. Or maybe it'll solar-powered...
I can't imagine the astronomers will be too pleased with this either.
Slashdot Mirror
From an ID theft perspective, i think it would be very hard to open two bank accounts at different addresses, because your address is held alongside your number (if you move house you are legally obliged to tell them). So if someone changed my address in the register and got a credit card in my name, i'd know the moment someone asked for my folk number and asked to confirm my address. So yes, you can try to impersonate me (and i suspect my number is probably public knowledge anyway) but i don't think you'd get far.
Now i know this whole system is offensive to privacy advocates at a very core level, but it just works here. And it means you can walk into any doctor or dentist and they have instant access to your records. If you are taken into hospital, they can just open your wallet, type in your number and they have your full medical records immediately.
For the UK though, i'd resist such a system. The government has a long history of ignoring the desires of the public (which kind of undermines my understanding of democracy) and enacting laws under spurious premises. Basically, i don't trust them.
> against a police officer he witnessed assault a prisoner
This is one of those areas where the public has to trust police to exercise their powers responsibly. The sentence here reflects both the crime AND the abuse of power. And this is how it should be for serious crimes. For more minor crimes, like speeding on personal time (as opposed to speeding on duty, which is again different), i think they should just be treated like the normal citizens they are.
Radar gun - yes i agree. They are extremely technical to use (especially the hand held ones) and require regular calibration. The general public should not be let loose with them.
Arrogance - Power corrupts, and jobs with power sometimes attract the wrong sort of person. Course, if you want to see true distilled arrogance, go work in a university.
The linking mechanism adds a space in "shropshire" for some reason ( i just tried again, and its not my fault ). Remove that and it works.
I would point out that your criticism of the methods of evidence gathering do rather sound like the excuses that lawyers present to have their clients acquitted on "technicalities". You're right of course, but unfortunately that argument can be easily adapted to cover other situations, which "protects" the police against any petty crime they commit that wasn't witnessed by another officer. And as its well accepted (and i have personal knowledge of examples) that police don't book each other for offences like speeding, that pretty much means you need Internal Affairs to be monitoring the speed of passing police to get a conviction.
As thats never going to happen, we have to trust the police not to abuse their authority and not habitually break certain minor laws. That trust is not always honoured, and this annoys the public who (rightly) believe that police should be held to the same laws as everyone else. As to the eternal argument that police should be treated more leniently as "thanks" for the dangers they endure every day, i don't know. However, if they are to get preferential treatment, then so should a lot of others, starting with the Army, Ambulance services and Fire departments.
I also can't help feeling that the stalking thing is not directly correlated to the speeding complaint. Theres a lot more going on here.
As a slight aside, this case is also very interesting - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/shropsh ire/4559173.stm/
Stupidity sometimes gets what it deserves...
....is in the eating. Until we see benchmarks everything is just ignorant speculation.
Shit, and i thought i played a bit too much X3.
> card if I was going to be gaming on it.
Thats a fair point, and I'd do the same. I would note from the specs that it looks like he was buying a workstation, with games as a secondary consideration. So from his perspective, and using the car analogy again, he *did* buy the higher capacity engine - 3Gb of RAM. He just didn't want the bucket seats and leather steering wheel - the GFX upgrade.
I'm not sure i'd ever accuse a MacPro buyer of "penny-pinching", but i do agree with your points.
I do think you're wrong about the "consumer electronics" tag, cos thats *exactly* how Apple sell their products. At the core of their advertising is the idea of stylish and integrated "lifestyle products" which just work. Thats "consumer electronics" they are selling, irrespective of the astronomical price-tag.
Typical geek attitude, and one which is endemic across the whole sector:
Bought XP home? Ahh, you should have got XP Pro if you wanted stability.
Bought a PC? Ahh you should have bought a Mac if you want it to work right.
You bought an IBM hard disk? EVERYONE knows you should buy a Seagate or Western Digital.
But this is all bullshit. If you extrapolate this thinking to any other industry it looks ridiculous: What would you say if the car salesman told you to buy the next car up the range cos the steering only works 90% of the time on the bottom of the range model. Or if a cheap shirt only came with one arm? How about a chair with two legs and a "stability upgrade" to 3 or 4 legs? Its crap and we wouldn't accept it. But we seem to think this sort of problem is normal from a computer.
The computer suppliers claim to be serious about supplying "consumer electronics", so they should start delivering products which do what they say on the packet. If they are willing to sell you a computer with 3Gb of RAM, it should damn well work that way. If they are selling you a computer with an Nvidia GFX card, it should work reliably OR they should simply not sell it. Unfortunately, as long as the consumer is resigned to this industry attitude i doubt progress will be fast.
They are obviously trying to do the same with the iPhone - using a sexy device to leverage people into buying something they don't really want. Considering that the iPod really was a revolution and people still wouldn't be leveraged, i don't think this ploy will work with the iPhone.
I'm guessing there is a business reason why they tied themselves to one carrier, but i can't help wondering why they didn't just design a phone and market it the same way as everyone else - through all carriers with the carrier charging according to service plan. Apple stuff sells cos its stylish, decently made and its easy to use (due to good design), so consumers would look at the Nokia's, Sony's and iPhone's side by side in the shop and probably pay a bit extra to buy the iPhone. They've really undermined their core strengths by not allowing their customers this choice and it will show in their sales figures. Maybe they'll see the light in a year or two and release the phone to the masses, assuming they haven't tied themselves too strongly to Cingular.
A specific search would be "We have sound suspicions that a bloke called Wolfgang has been accessing this list of kiddie porn websites. Could you provide us with a list of transactions Wolfgang has made to them please."
I think its quite important at this point to put the 9/11 hijackings into context. Hijackings in the western world have never been common events (in terms of percentage flights), though in the 1970's and 1980's they did pop up on the news. During the 1990's they became pretty rare. The power of 9/11 was the sheer audacity of the plan - before, hijackings were usually carried out by people who wanted some news for their cause, or wanted to leave their country and couldn't do it any other way. In all cases the hijackers wanted to live, but were prepared to risk their lives to obtain an objective. For 9/11 this was not the case, but the success of the plan hinged on EVERYONE on those planes believing it was a "normal" hijacking. The passengers on Flight 93 rebelled AFTER they were told by mobile phone about the other flights, and so that hijacking failed in its objective.
So, in context - only once in history has anyone actually hijacked commercial airplanes and used them as physical weapons. The vast majority of hijackings have used passengers as bargaining chips, and accordingly the passengers had a decent chance of survival. However, you are willing to "assume" the worst and happily start shooting anyone who gets in the way, regardless of the situation and with no knowledge whatsoever of context.
There is a small error in your argument relating to Lockerbie - that was a bomb in the cargo hold, but i still understand what you are trying to say. However, issuing handguns to untrained (and unknown) people is a recipe for disaster. There are already plenty of documented cases of "air rage", brought on by either drink, drugs or simple fear of flying. How much worse would those be if you'd issued the passengers with guns? How about some kid playing with a gun while daddy is asleep for the flight over the atlantic (maybe junior has just been watching Die Hard on the entertainment system and wants to be Bruce Willis)? The examples are endless.
So lets assume someone does hijack the plane you are on. Things will be tense, people will be edgy, there will be a lot of shouting. Everyone will draw a gun, regardless of whether they are actually willing to fire. Someone with a bit of sense (probably the airmarshal) will stand up and tell everyone to be calm. People will relax perhaps. Then (and this IS inevitable) someone will get too wound-up and will shoot the hijacker. And probably his hostage. When a gunshot goes off in such a confined space, EVERYONE will flinch (probably jump) meaning that anyone still with their finger on the trigger will shoot, hitting their neighbours, their own kids etc. The casualties will be huge, and i'm only assuming one hijacker. In the event of several hijackers the confused crossfire will kill almost everyone on the plane. This is why your plan won't work.
>entry doors for the pilots)
And what happens in the event of a medical emergency? Say someone has a heart attack 10 mins after takeoff on a transatlantic flight.
>Armored the skins and ports of commercial aircraft against small arms
Probably feasible, though perhaps expensive.
>Issued small arms to any adult passenger that didn't have same at boarding
The hijackers will then grab the nearest kids and use them as hostages. "Do what we say or the kid gets it". No-one will shoot cos they might hit the hostage, and would then be guilty of murder themselves.
>Because this would actually work
No, it wouldn't.
Err, Fortran is updated. See Fortran 95, and i believe also Fortran 2003. Large numbers of scientific programs (like molecular dynamics/weather forecasting/quantum mechanics etc) are still written in fortran cos it does maths very fast. There is a great deal of multithreading expertise in the fortran coding community. Indeed, buy a supercomputer (or supercomputing cluster) and one of the first things they'll ask is if you want a Fortran compiler with it.
No, it is Digital Rights Management. Its just not YOUR "rights" they're managing...
He should just ignore the guy. His site is more popular than the business one for a reason. So he should just register another domain, make it clear on his blog that he'll be transferring across in the event that he's sued, sit back, and do nothing. The business guy can go to all the trouble and effort of suing, pay the money and inherit the domain after wasting his time and effort. Within 2 months the blog will be back at the top of the google rankings and Stupid won't be able to go back to court to claim the new domain because he'll look like an idiot.
You don't have to go too far in the research world to find people who are sceptical about the H2 economy ever becoming feasible. You can do the maths in a few different ways, but it requires some fairly serious fudging to make H2 look good in comparison to the competition, simply because it is energy-expensive to make and transport. Couple that with the engineering problems holding back fuel cells (water management in Nafion systems is hilariously complex, molten electrolyte cells are inherently limited in application and solid oxide systems are still very young) and i think its going to be more than a little while before you see the H2 economy take off, if it ever does.
The academics don't talk about it publicly because they get their research money by writing "Clean Hydrogen Technologies" all over the grant proposal. The engineering and business guys don't talk about it because they also get their startup money for "Clean Hydrogen Technologies". The problem is thus one of politics - the politicians are paying for "Hydrogen Economy" research now. Nothing new here, though: Not too long ago you needed to write "Nano" in the proposal (and still do, to some extent), before that "Superconductors"....
Now come on guys, that just not true - only 200 hundred years ago you were ALL criminals....
>I cannot fathom why scientific community did not go back to the drawing board to create
>a model that fit the known universe rather than inventing fanciful things such as dark
>matter and dark energy.
>Too much of the so-called "science" we see today is nothing more than new age
>philosophy combined with pseudo-science.
>....trusts theories which have observable proofs that do no depend upon other assumptions.
Now the rebuttal:
I shall start at the bottom, as this is where you are going wrong. Most important i feel is the term "observable proof". What is an "observable proof"? Does this mean you only trust things you can see? If so, simple concepts such as soap and disinfectant are beyond the science you wish to grasp. All modern medicine depends on things you can't see. The computer with which you wrote this opinion depends on utilises many phenomena you can't see, most imortantly electricity, semi-conduction and magnetism. These also require some of your "assumptions" in their explanation.
So what does "observable proof" mean? I hope it doesn't mean "something which can be explained to ME in a way that I understand".
Modern science is not "new age philosophy combined with pseudo-science". This is simply plain wrong. Modern science builds on the work that has gone before, and modern scientists go to great lengths to ensure that the work they do extends this (this can include the evolution/rejection of previous theories as well as the development of new ones). And this means being aware of, and understanding, the work which has gone before and the concepts on which it is based. You don't learn this by magic - it's damn hard work. Throwing out a previous theory and starting again is unimaginably difficult, which is why it is rarely done (as it may take a lifetime) and is generally achieved by those we term "genius".
The confusion you have on this point can probably be placed (at least in part) on the desire for science to be more accessible to the general public. We are increasingly surrounded by a lot of stuff we don't understand, and we want to know more about it. The problem is, by the time the scientists have come up with an approximate explanation that YOU can understand, and then the media has turned it into a 30 second piece that the blonde reporter can understand, it starts to look a bit shabby. But believe me, if the real science was anything like the stuff you see in the media, you'll be lucky if the sun comes up tomorrow.
And on to the final (or first, by your order) point. "I cannot fathom why scientific community....". I think the first three words of this explain the problem. There is no shame in not understanding something, but you should be careful in the dissemination of your ignorance - you would not want your work criticised by someone who knows nothing about it, and nor do the scientists that you are accusing of charlatanism.
Hell, Norway is actually very nice. Great views of the Fjord, and walking distance from an international airport. Bit cold in the winter though...
The Book of Jobs? I think he's talking about Steve Ballmer...
Exactly. Buying a program to play a game for me seems to render the game pointless - i buy a game for personal entertainment, not to keep my computer busy when i'm not there.
I can't imagine the astronomers will be too pleased with this either.