You can thank Google for pushing for Open Access rules during bidding for the spectrum:
"(e) Handset locking prohibited. No licensee may disable features on handsets it provides to customers, to the extent such features are compliant with the licensee's standards pursuant to paragraph (b)of this section, nor configure handsets it provides to prohibit use of such handsets on other providers' networks." [bold mine]
Verizon recently got smacked down according to these rules and had to permit tethering without a fee.
"Most people wouldn't say New York and tornado in the same breath.
But two twisters that touched down in the nation's biggest city on Saturday are the latest of about 60 small tornadoes that have hit the area in the past half-century, the years for which complete data are available. Saturday's pair brings to 10 the total number of tornadoes since 2007 in New York City, according to the National Weather Service.
To some, the tornadoes of the past few years might appear to be an uptick in the trend. Not so fast, said meteorologist David Stark of the weather service.
"In the past five years, there's been a slight increase in the number of tornadoes in the area, but it's too short a period of time to say it's a growing trend," said Stark."
"We currently do not know how tornadoes and severe thunderstorms may be changing due to changes in the climate, nor is there hope that we will be able to do so in the foreseeable future. Preliminary research using climate models suggests that we may see an increase in the number of severe storms capable of producing tornadoes late this century. However, this research is just beginning, and much more study is needed to confirm these findings. The lack of an increase in violent EF4 and EF5 tornadoes in recent decades implies that climate change has not yet increased tornado activity."
No. His crass nature led to his success. Any programming on his part had very little to do with it.
This is an assertion in direct contradiction of the evidence I gave, and it's obviously based on emotion and not facts.
This is more about being at the right place at the right time due to family money and connections and a willingness to act more crass than the next guy.
He was already the head of a successful company by the time IBM came knocking, and it was based on ambition and programming skill.
He's the kind of guy that would sell you something he doesn't have and then manage to find some 3rd party supplier to take advantage of.
He actually referred IBM to Gary Kildall and CP/M for the operating system. IBM came back to Gates because they ran into static. You're going to blame Gates for taking advantage of this?
This "post factum meritocracy" is a myth that a lot of Lemmings try to push to hide the fact that they chose to eat dirt and buy it from monopolistic scum.
It's actually the opposite. The "post factum lucky-evil-no-talent" myth is driven by people who hate Microsoft. And the thing is, you're completely wrong in your depiction of the category I belong to.
I don't like Microsoft precisely because they have/had a monopoly on the desktop OS, and it's one of the reasons my primary OS is Debian Linux. I fully agree that Gates was in general a ruthless businessman with a limited sense of ethics. Yet I can still acknowledge what actually happened in the early history of desktop computing.
Gates' ambition was to become a great engineer and programmer, and he could easily see that he is a failure
He's a failure because his direct programming efforts led to a successful company that he parlayed into the dominant computer company for about 20 years?
On his ambitions: "His parents subscribed to Fortune, and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine's special annual issue and asked me, "What do you think it's like to run a Fortune 500 company?" I said I had no idea. And Bill said, "Maybe we'll have our own company someday." He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur."
His greatest engineering achievement was a BASIC interpreter
He had to write it for an extremely limited platform in assembly, the kind of optimization that Woz gets accolades for on his early work for Apple. Gates, along with his two partners, was also the first to do it for the Altair. He recognized the opportunity and succeeded first. By the time IBM came knocking, he was already the head of a successful company.
And calling Gates dumb just proves your ignorance and hate: "When Bill got the news that he'd been accepted at Harvard University, he wasn't surprised; he'd been riding high since scoring near the top in the Putnam Competition, where he'd tested his math skills against college undergraduates around the country."
The article goes on to point out that he was humbled at Harvard with regards to math, but calling him "the dumbest person in Harvard" is just hateful assertion on your part.
He said he would be willing to kill to get some shoes.
From the article: "A California man accused of posting comments on ESPN's website saying he was watching kids and wouldn't mind killing them [..] The online post on ESPN said that a shooting would be like the one in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed and 58 were injured in July, authorities said."
Don't you ever get tired of spouting off bullshit? I suppose you got confused by this: "Some of the nearly 3,000 reader comments on the story talked about children possibly getting killed over the sneakers because of how expensive they are", but that doesn't refer explicitly to the accused.
That's an incorrect assumption on your part. I've been on the 'Net since 1992.
The probably best part of the Internet - the fantastic, well functioning global conversation that was Usenet - is gone. It's been replaced with a shopping mall.
I liked Usenet, but it had its problems, too. It's been replaced with web forums. While I might complain about the interface, or the fragmentation, or the routine heavy moderation, or any number of things, web forums still serve the purpose, as can be proven by the global conversations occurring on this very forum and elsewhere.
Besides Usenet and forums, there's so much more, especially the informational Web. Gone are the days of ftp and Gopher. There's so much stuff out there, so much access to just about anything at your fingertips, that you have to be a pessimist who thinks the grass is always greener on the other side not to appreciate it.
The complaint from the original AC seems to be about the US - where the political system has been replaced, anywhere there is a tipping point, with organised corruption in the form of lobbying and campaign contributions.
The complaint from the original AC was a whiney, immature post all over the map about how the world isn't perfect. As for the US, same old, same old. Lobbying and corruption is nothing new. Yet things carry on and life isn't so bad.
We watched you vote for suffering -- for berlin, for tiannamen and tibet.
Not even sure what this means. Could you explain precisely what was voted for and what suffering occured as a result of those votes?
I watched you sell out my education -- giving me 30 year old textbooks
Take some personal responsibility and go to a library if you think your textbooks aren't adequate. Education is generally a local matter, anyways. Some kids have newer books, some older.
I watched your generation ruin and sell out the internet before I could even lawfully purchase access to it
The Internet is awesome. It's actually way better than it was in the early days because there's more stuff and more bandwidth.
Oh, I had scholarships, funds, state subsidized loans... they came in exchange for not entering the job market for years
You weren't forced to take them. You even got to goof off in college on somebody else's dime. Boo hoo.
finish killing off all semblance of pensions, unions, and suck social security so hard we'll have to deal with historically high inflation rates to pay for it.
Pensions and unions still exist. They don't always win, but they don't always lose, either, and they've been the cause of problems too. Social security was always a money-losing pyramid scheme. It's just that now that the chickens are coming home to roost. At the end of the day the question is what do you want to do about all the old people.
It isn't anarchy to reject institutionalized serfdom.
It's called society, and any society will define roles and have imperfections.
But I guess I'm free to move to Somalia if I don't like law right?
You could move to all kinds of places, including striking out on your own in the wilderness, but it's obvious you'd rather just complain that the world around you isn't Utopia and take no responsibility for it.
then wait and automatically win in every possible practical sense
Thanks for the laugh.
Even a single one of the ones "cherry picked" or of the 2500, is sufficient in itself to counter your claim.
Not quite, since even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Make enough predictions and ignore all the failures doesn't mean when you are right it was by actually knowing in advance.
Also, I note you are willing to accept his listed predictions with his assigned probabilities, but not willing to accept his statements about what the Bible says with regards to 100% accuracy required versus prophets who are occasionally right but are instead the work of Satan.
No, the very definition of randomness that the specific outcome cannot be predicted in advance. [..] That we observe by default a given distribution of that randomness
All I'm talking about is the distribution. To deviate significantly from that distribution becomes more and more unlikely. If somebody won a 1 in million lottery every week for a year, we would conclude that he either gamed the system through some kind of deception, or something supernatural is happening that science could not explain.
That we observe by default a given distribution of that randomness, does not mean the causality is specifiable, nor that the effects are not manipulable
Science hasn't shown a mechanism to manipulate them in the manner of miracles you are talking about. Doing so would either require technology beyond anything we know about or supernatural intervention. And here's the big point you keep on ignoring: a divine being has no need to respect the physical laws anyways, so the only point of your sophistry is to drape mythology in quantum science.
If my interpretation does not correspond to scientific understanding, you complain. If it does correspond to scientific understanding, you complain. What exactly do you want?
I want a consistent answer for what a supposedly inerrant document based on divine revelation says, so that I don't throw it in the dustbin with all the other mythologies.
Again, if I ask a 1,000 people a question they can't answer with the evidence at hand, and they make up a bunch of fantastical stories that differs from the answer when better evidence comes along, I'm not going to bend over backwards to lend credence to their explanations.
I don't like the argument because it doesn't work.
Of course you think it doesn't. You're wearing Bible-prism glasses and suffering massive cognitive dissonance.
You are assuming that the information conveyance proposed by Genesis is -intended to be- the information of a specific ordering. This is your assertion, and it is highly-debatable within the context of theism itself
Ah, good timing. Here's another example of said massive cognitive dissonance. If I said, "On day one I did this, and on day two I did that," you'd sound like a raving lunatic to claim I didn't intend a precise ordering.
not for the least reason that this cannot be the expectation based on the content of the book--it would, on the face of it, be internally inconsistent on a basic level given the accounts of those seven days, taken on the literal, specific level you are taking it.
The Bible is full of inconsistent drivel, as would be expected of a mythology pulled together from various sources, which requires all sorts of pretzel twisting from the believers. However, in this case I don't believe it is inconsistent in the exact manner you specify.
For instance, we have animals being described as created on multiple days.
Day 5 was birds and sea creatures. Day 6 was land animals and man.
it is possible that -a literal timeline is not being presented-
If you assert by category while earlier arguing for a specific claim (not category), then my refutation will be that you didn't meet the earlier claim.
Except, as a matter of basic fact, adults factually do believe in them.
I was referring to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, hence "concede that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is less likely to be true then the Biblical god" and "the lie is revealed and rational, grown adults don't believe in them [Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy]".
Waving your hand at a sentence that says there are more
I didn't "wave my hand", I asked where they were specified, to which you waved your hand.
still destroys your notion of equivalence between theism and Santa, as previously stated
No, it doesn't, since going by his figure of 2500 prophecies, showing only 13 means he likely cherry-picked the best examples, but furthermore, he explicitly stated that the Bible itself claims that there were "2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter--no errors" and "God's prophets, as distinct from Satan's spokesmen, are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error."
If I asked a children about evidence for Santa Claus and documented it all, I'd get similar results. But I've already conceded the Biblical god is more likely to exist than Santa Claus in my previous post, however remotely, if only because the lie is revealed. Though, again, the main reason I stepped in was because you claimed quantum mechanics provided believability.
Don't worry about it. This thread will be quite over, and judging your degree of motivation, you'll be well along toward the point of you getting naturally deselected by then--at which point you and this discussion will be irrelevant.
*shrug* If you don't want to back it as the paper I was looking for, then fine.
I'm not contending the event isn't improbable.
Well that's the entire point. When we do experiments the particles follow a random distribution, which can be predicted in advance. To claim outlandish miracles are allowed in physics is to claim observation of things you wouldn't expect to see in the lifetime of the universe.
No, I'm appealing to it as it properly is, as a matter of science.
I haven't seen any quantum science out of you, other than an appeal to a magic box to drape your mythology in respectability.
For those rare events, you are wholly assuming that the probabilities aren't manipulable, simply because you haven't seen it, and in the face of the fact you do not understand the "why" of the causality here, to be able to exclude anything.
That isn't science, as the science shows random distributions. If you want to claim they can be manipulated by a divine origin, then that's a mythical assertion on your part, which is besides the point, since a divine being has no need to respect the physical laws anyways.
I -noted- it is wholly supportable under hard physics, correctly.
It absolutely isn't. Please cite the science that demonstrates it.
Are you saying that this may have decreased the efficiency of the DNA propagation of members of the Catholic Church
This discussion is already tedious and bizarro world enough as it is: I don't know where you got that interpretation from, so I'm going to ignore the whole "Galileo was a Christian" sidetrack. The main point is that Church doctrine based on a plain reading of the Bible caused controversy around Galileo's work.
It's not a goalpost shift to refute what you stated. In comparing the believability of the Biblical god versus Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, you made a reference to a survey regarding "eyewitness reports". The survey says nothing about eyewitness reports for the Biblical god.
Referring to your original statement, though, note the degree to which the experiences described in the second table correspond better or worse to the test results (i.e. effects of death) predicted by proposing Santa or the Tooth girl.
The Biblical god is a specific creation myth. Having a near-death experience that hints at something beyond this mortal coil can be evidence for any supernatural explanation of our origins, like, for example, Buddhism.
[where is this list of approximately 2000/2500?] Somewhere entirely unnecessary for it to be to refute your statement.
If you're going to link to "evidence", then I'm going to critique it, especially when it makes ridiculously strong claims. If you want me to concede that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is less likely to be true then the Biblical god, I will be happy to do so, as the lie is revealed and rational, grown adults don't believe in them.
Yet if you were to ask children about them, and evidence for them, you would get results similar to the answers you get for why people believe in the Biblical god. They've "seen" Santa Claus, or they've had first-hand experience of the miracles of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and they've been told from a reliable source about their existence. The Biblical god is Santa Claus for adults.
Now if you told a child it was physically impossible for Santa Claus to exist, if he had knowledge of quantum physics he could say it was possible. And that is what introduced my analogy to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, as you started out this thread trying to drape your mythology in the respectability of quantum science.
Zeus is in fact not true, but that has nothing to do with its origins as a belief or its age, or your characterization as (untrue) "mythology".
Oh really? So let's hear your explanation why the Zeus mythology isn't true. By the way, it's standard to reference Zeus as part of a mythology, so no need for the scare quotes.
I assure you there is at least one scientist in existence that believes in Roman polytheism.
My claim was along the lines of applying science and reason to these kinds of beliefs, not merely having them, which is why I asked for a paper that looked at these beliefs critically under the scientific and rational lens.
[many primitive beliefs have been dispelled with our advancements in science and reason] True, it's just fallacious to say that this is relevant or determinative.
How is it not relevant? If you ask 1,000 people a question they don't have answer to, but they make up fantastical explanations that differ from each other, and then new evidence comes along and the answers they gave don't fit, doesn't it make sense to say those 1,000 people were making up shit based on poor evidence?
I only questioned where this language comes from, as it seems a direct parroting of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.
Funny how rational people can look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusion, isn't it? Maybe if you weren't so steeped in dogmatic adherence to a particular creation myth this wouldn't be so surprising.
And one could as easily say that whenever is something is obviously wrong in science, it becomes a problem with an experiment, and it is changed to fit the facts.
You're making the same old stupid, tired arguments that are obviously wrong. Science doesn't claim to be dogmatically correct, unlike the Bible. It's whole methodology is evidence-based reasoning. Whe
In part, because there's no peer-reviewed studies (written by multiple PhD's and published in a journal of worldwide reknown, incidentally) which quantifies eyewitness reports of them, in the context where we would expect to find them, like this one:
"Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter--no errors. "
Ok, so where is this list of approximately 2000/2500?
"The acid test for identifying a prophet of God is recorded by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. According to this Bible passage (and others), God's prophets, as distinct from Satan's spokesmen, are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error. [..] Given that the Bible proves so reliable a document"
What a joke. The Bible doesn't even get the most basic of cosmology right, that the Earth was created after the heavens. Also, there's a Wikipedia page on prophecies, and you can see plenty of questionable accuracy with the usual variation of apologists who take different tacks to explain them.
At minimum, it's an Appeal to Authority and an Ad Hominem. You are projecting a group of "rational people", lacking any definition, and asserting that a position is correct or incorrect based on whether they correspond to the supposed views your constructed group
It's no different than if I said rational and scientific people don't believe in Zeus or any number of primitive mythologies.
That one can be called a Bare Assertion Fallacy. There is, in fact, nothing about the belief that is in the least ridiculous
I listed several in my post, which you have attempted to address in your reply.
and you tying it's truth-status to its age is called the Genetic Fallacy.
It's not a fallacy to note that many primitive beliefs have been dispelled with our advancements in science and reason.
Many on that list are published theologians as well. So... if you want to see one, try reading one.
Try naming the paper that critically looks at the issue as I asked. It's not my responsibility to uphold your side of the argument.
Allegory, it says it is figuratively unmoving
Ah yes, whenever something is obviously wrong in the Bible it becomes an allegory, a problem in translation, or in some other way re-interpreted to fit the facts.
(you do realize in physics we now know there is no privileged frame of reference frame, correct?)
If that was what the Bible was saying, then there would be no need to make special mention of the Earth, and poor Galileo could have been left alone to do his science in peace. Furthermore, the Earth's rotation means that it cannot be chosen as an inertial frame.
local flood
What kind of warped reading to you have to do to turn a story about wiping out all the earth's animals and mankind into a "local flood" story? More re-interpretation.
And I can't tell, did you address the fact that the Bible has the Earth being created before the heavens as an allegory? That was given in a precise ordering of events. No allegory is going to save you from that bit of mythology.
In other, more accurate words, "not zero". More on the order of what one might call a miracle.
The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus might be real too, but you don't believe in them.
I'm not even going to list the number of formal logical fallacies this sentence violates.
Go ahead, list them. I didn't substantiate it with a treatise, but it doesn't violate logical fallacies. It's the summary of the ridiculous belief in primitive mythology that people hold. If I was talking about a scientist who believed in Zeus instead you wouldn't be arguing with me.
That there is a minority of scientists who manage to compartmentalize there religious beliefs from their scientific and rational scrutiny means little. You'll find many papers from these scientists on their science with scientific justification. Very few, if any, will ever write a justification for their religious belief using a rational and scientific lens. I'd like to see one such paper from a scientist in that list that justified their belief in a Biblical god, and not just a feel-good justification, but a critical look at the evidence and conflicts between science and religion.
You can start at the very beginning, where the Earth is created before the heavenly bodies, to an Earth that doesn't move, and on to ridiculous Noah's Ark stories. The Christian faith is nothing but an offshoot of ancient Hebrew mythology.
Are you saying there's anything that the biblical god is said to have done that physics does not agree can happen as a matter of quantum probability? Because, well, if you're saying that, you aren't among those who "understand the physics of it".
I'm not the original poster, but I thought he was pretty clear in his very next sentence:
"They have the intellectual ability - more than I - to dispute on rational and logical grounds why the Biblical God is as likely to exist as the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and yet they do." [bold added]
The key words there being "as likely". It's quantumly possibly that you could "tunnel" through a wall, yet the odds of that happening are essentially zero for practical purposes, and you would never claim for it to have actually happened.
Religion = accepted mythology, as anybody with a rational brain and understanding of science would come to the conclusion to if they actually applied those skills to their religious belief.
So because the GGP or whoever that didn't even know what they were talking about said that, your risk analysis is limited to those types of events despite the probabilities you used not even lining up?
No, I responded to both arguments, the more frequent "city killers" that we see, and the once-in-tens-of-millions-of-years extinction events that we see.
No, in other words, instead of relying on the odds that the cards turned down are favorable to us, we should actually try to look at the cards and see what the reality is.
We have, and the odds are extremely low, so low that we have bigger things to prioritize.
But hey if you just meant "token" as a % of resources, then a fully-funded, vastly more effective effort would be such, like I was saying we could do that and address many other problems to.
The point is how much %, where you want a "fully-funded, vastly more effective effort". If it's cheap, then fine, but if it's extremely expensive, then it isn't.
And the simple facts are that if we decided to make these things priorities we could easily do both and many other things.
That's true of anything, and if you took that approach with everything you'd be back to square one due to lack of resources.
So, do you think we shouldn't, or do you agree that we should have an effective object discovery program?
The problem with Windows slowing down is its registry, which grows over time and consumes more and more memory.
I don't buy this. The registry is just a big configuration file. It may get a bunch of junk in it over time, but it isn't that big. Windows slows down when a bunch of auto-start crap gets installed with lots of software these days, whether it's some plugin, toolbar, or browser, or just about anything. The other big problem is machines that have malware and our part of a botnet.
The "even" refers to the impact, not the number, as "city killers" were used as the scary threat. They aren't scary. Maybe if they were landing on the order of once a year instead of something like every 100.
You can't just look at the odds,. You also have to look at the impact.
Yes, that's what I did.
while the odds of an impact in any given year are terribly low, we don't know if that means we're not going to see one for a million years, or if we're going to get hit and then not see one for a million years.
In other words, probability is random. Thanks for the update.
A token effort is a useless effort.
No, it isn't. By token I mean as a percentage of our resources. It really depends on how much bang you can get for the buck. As it is, even finding 1% of the threats is better than nothing and not useless.
And what does the ramping up of civilization have to do with it? We're just as screwed regardless of our civilization level. The relevant benchmarks are 1) are we capable of detecting them and 2) are we capable of doing something about it, and we're past both.
Wow, you live in a very binary world. Technology in astronomy has improved a lot over the past decades. I expect more improvements in the future.
And studying solar weather to try to predict such events necessarily means our asteroid detection effort must be token, eh? Prioritization doesn't mean ignoring other problems.
It was an example of something that was more important, much more of an immediate threat that is being mostly ignored. And it goes way beyond prediction into hardening our infrastructure. The simple facts are that resources are limited, and should be prioritized accordingly.
Solar flares are more common but less likely to cause major damage not counting communication satellites but rather human death, and are tougher to actually mitigate the effects of if one is dangerous.
Our whole society revolves around electricity. If the 1859 flare happened now, the disruption would be massive.
As for his comment, well, let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users. That's not an easy task.
It doesn't matter how hard the task is. All he said was that it wasn't ready, and it was a mistake for Facebook to use it on mobile. Hate Zuckerberg all you want, but you are arguing a strawman. His position is correct.
Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?).
What? I run a full system update on a monthly basis (I run Arch), and have been for years, and have NEVER had an update break anything. Let me guess -- your experience is with Ubuntu? Don't blame Linux; blame the crap distro.
I run Debian, which Ubuntu is based on. I wouldn't call it a "crap" distro, and I wonder how Arch can prevent things from breaking given all the 3rd party software that tends to break from time to time. Maybe you've just had good luck, a selective memory, or somehow Arch is amazingly good at preventing the occasional breaks.
Of course, I can't count the number of times I've had crap break because of Windows updates. Remember XP SP2?
I've had very good results with updating XP, so no, I don't share your experience.
I _can_ tell you that her previous XP desktop never got a single update in its life -- she doesn't know how to do it, and I had to turn them off after they kept breaking shit.
Better to put up with things breaking than leaving XP unsecured.
And I'd trust an unpatched old Linux system over an unpatched Windows XP ANY day...
I'd agree with this, but only because Linux isn't targeted much.
My mother has a Linux netbook. Other than getting her email set up with Thunderbird when she got it (she couldn't do that herself in Outlook Express either,) I haven't ever touched the thing. It's just never had an issue.
So I take it then that she never updates or installs software? That's where all the trouble starts. I wonder what version of Thunderbird she's running and how many security bugs it has.
Slashdot Mirror
You can thank Google for pushing for Open Access rules during bidding for the spectrum:
"(e) Handset locking prohibited. No licensee may disable features on handsets it provides to customers, to the extent such features are compliant with the licensee's standards pursuant to paragraph (b)of this section, nor configure handsets it provides to prohibit use of such handsets on other providers' networks." [bold mine]
Verizon recently got smacked down according to these rules and had to permit tethering without a fee.
[The "post factum lucky-evil-no-talent" myth] Those are facts.
It's a hate-driven assertion. You haven't presented a single fact to support it, while I've given evidence to show the opposite.
Gates never shown any kind of engineering talent
Except for building a Basic interpreter on an extremely limited platform in assembly, the direct efforts of which led to a successful company.
his prominence is based on him being referred by a relative to IBM
He was already the head of a successful business by the time IBM came knocking. Sure, connections help, but that's not the only reason.
and his behavior was consistently unethical
Like when he referred IBM to Gary Kildall for the OS?
No, it isn't, unless by "primary desktop" you mean a VM you run
This is where you repeat your pattern of making hateful, bullshit assertions without any evidence. Have you stopped watching child porn yet?
Until a few years ago, tornadoes were a rare event in New York City, something that happened once in a while and made big news.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/images-frequency-make-nyc-twisters-notable-17195890 :
"Most people wouldn't say New York and tornado in the same breath.
But two twisters that touched down in the nation's biggest city on Saturday are the latest of about 60 small tornadoes that have hit the area in the past half-century, the years for which complete data are available. Saturday's pair brings to 10 the total number of tornadoes since 2007 in New York City, according to the National Weather Service.
To some, the tornadoes of the past few years might appear to be an uptick in the trend. Not so fast, said meteorologist David Stark of the weather service.
"In the past five years, there's been a slight increase in the number of tornadoes in the area, but it's too short a period of time to say it's a growing trend," said Stark."
http://www.wunderground.com/climate/extreme.asp :
"We currently do not know how tornadoes and severe thunderstorms may be changing due to changes in the climate, nor is there hope that we will be able to do so in the foreseeable future. Preliminary research using climate models suggests that we may see an increase in the number of severe storms capable of producing tornadoes late this century. However, this research is just beginning, and much more study is needed to confirm these findings. The lack of an increase in violent EF4 and EF5 tornadoes in recent decades implies that climate change has not yet increased tornado activity."
There's not a whole lot of money to be saved by making things dirtier.
Then tell that to countries like China and India and see what they say in response.
No. His crass nature led to his success. Any programming on his part had very little to do with it.
This is an assertion in direct contradiction of the evidence I gave, and it's obviously based on emotion and not facts.
This is more about being at the right place at the right time due to family money and connections and a willingness to act more crass than the next guy.
He was already the head of a successful company by the time IBM came knocking, and it was based on ambition and programming skill.
He's the kind of guy that would sell you something he doesn't have and then manage to find some 3rd party supplier to take advantage of.
He actually referred IBM to Gary Kildall and CP/M for the operating system. IBM came back to Gates because they ran into static. You're going to blame Gates for taking advantage of this?
This "post factum meritocracy" is a myth that a lot of Lemmings try to push to hide the fact that they chose to eat dirt and buy it from monopolistic scum.
It's actually the opposite. The "post factum lucky-evil-no-talent" myth is driven by people who hate Microsoft. And the thing is, you're completely wrong in your depiction of the category I belong to.
I don't like Microsoft precisely because they have/had a monopoly on the desktop OS, and it's one of the reasons my primary OS is Debian Linux. I fully agree that Gates was in general a ruthless businessman with a limited sense of ethics. Yet I can still acknowledge what actually happened in the early history of desktop computing.
You're really full of shit and hate.
Gates' ambition was to become a great engineer and programmer, and he could easily see that he is a failure
He's a failure because his direct programming efforts led to a successful company that he parlayed into the dominant computer company for about 20 years?
On his ambitions: "His parents subscribed to Fortune, and Bill read it religiously. One day he showed me the magazine's special annual issue and asked me, "What do you think it's like to run a Fortune 500 company?" I said I had no idea. And Bill said, "Maybe we'll have our own company someday." He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur."
His greatest engineering achievement was a BASIC interpreter
He had to write it for an extremely limited platform in assembly, the kind of optimization that Woz gets accolades for on his early work for Apple. Gates, along with his two partners, was also the first to do it for the Altair. He recognized the opportunity and succeeded first. By the time IBM came knocking, he was already the head of a successful company.
And calling Gates dumb just proves your ignorance and hate: "When Bill got the news that he'd been accepted at Harvard University, he wasn't surprised; he'd been riding high since scoring near the top in the Putnam Competition, where he'd tested his math skills against college undergraduates around the country."
The article goes on to point out that he was humbled at Harvard with regards to math, but calling him "the dumbest person in Harvard" is just hateful assertion on your part.
He said he would be willing to kill to get some shoes.
From the article: "A California man accused of posting comments on ESPN's website saying he was watching kids and wouldn't mind killing them [..] The online post on ESPN said that a shooting would be like the one in Aurora, Colo., where 12 people were killed and 58 were injured in July, authorities said."
Don't you ever get tired of spouting off bullshit? I suppose you got confused by this: "Some of the nearly 3,000 reader comments on the story talked about children possibly getting killed over the sneakers because of how expensive they are", but that doesn't refer explicitly to the accused.
Unfortunately, newcomer
That's an incorrect assumption on your part. I've been on the 'Net since 1992.
The probably best part of the Internet - the fantastic, well functioning global conversation that was Usenet - is gone. It's been replaced with a shopping mall.
I liked Usenet, but it had its problems, too. It's been replaced with web forums. While I might complain about the interface, or the fragmentation, or the routine heavy moderation, or any number of things, web forums still serve the purpose, as can be proven by the global conversations occurring on this very forum and elsewhere.
Besides Usenet and forums, there's so much more, especially the informational Web. Gone are the days of ftp and Gopher. There's so much stuff out there, so much access to just about anything at your fingertips, that you have to be a pessimist who thinks the grass is always greener on the other side not to appreciate it.
The complaint from the original AC seems to be about the US - where the political system has been replaced, anywhere there is a tipping point, with organised corruption in the form of lobbying and campaign contributions.
The complaint from the original AC was a whiney, immature post all over the map about how the world isn't perfect. As for the US, same old, same old. Lobbying and corruption is nothing new. Yet things carry on and life isn't so bad.
I frankly find it hard to believe that spoofing a MAC address to keep from being banned from a network rises to the level of "hacking".
From 1030(a)(4): "knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access [..]".
For the record, all the articles he "stole" are public domain.
Do you have a source that every article was public domain? Not everything in JSTOR is.
We watched you vote for suffering -- for berlin, for tiannamen and tibet.
Not even sure what this means. Could you explain precisely what was voted for and what suffering occured as a result of those votes?
I watched you sell out my education -- giving me 30 year old textbooks
Take some personal responsibility and go to a library if you think your textbooks aren't adequate. Education is generally a local matter, anyways. Some kids have newer books, some older.
I watched your generation ruin and sell out the internet before I could even lawfully purchase access to it
The Internet is awesome. It's actually way better than it was in the early days because there's more stuff and more bandwidth.
Oh, I had scholarships, funds, state subsidized loans... they came in exchange for not entering the job market for years
You weren't forced to take them. You even got to goof off in college on somebody else's dime. Boo hoo.
finish killing off all semblance of pensions, unions, and suck social security so hard we'll have to deal with historically high inflation rates to pay for it.
Pensions and unions still exist. They don't always win, but they don't always lose, either, and they've been the cause of problems too. Social security was always a money-losing pyramid scheme. It's just that now that the chickens are coming home to roost. At the end of the day the question is what do you want to do about all the old people.
It isn't anarchy to reject institutionalized serfdom.
It's called society, and any society will define roles and have imperfections.
But I guess I'm free to move to Somalia if I don't like law right?
You could move to all kinds of places, including striking out on your own in the wilderness, but it's obvious you'd rather just complain that the world around you isn't Utopia and take no responsibility for it.
then wait and automatically win in every possible practical sense
Thanks for the laugh.
Even a single one of the ones "cherry picked" or of the 2500, is sufficient in itself to counter your claim.
Not quite, since even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Make enough predictions and ignore all the failures doesn't mean when you are right it was by actually knowing in advance.
Also, I note you are willing to accept his listed predictions with his assigned probabilities, but not willing to accept his statements about what the Bible says with regards to 100% accuracy required versus prophets who are occasionally right but are instead the work of Satan.
No, the very definition of randomness that the specific outcome cannot be predicted in advance. [..] That we observe by default a given distribution of that randomness
All I'm talking about is the distribution. To deviate significantly from that distribution becomes more and more unlikely. If somebody won a 1 in million lottery every week for a year, we would conclude that he either gamed the system through some kind of deception, or something supernatural is happening that science could not explain.
That we observe by default a given distribution of that randomness, does not mean the causality is specifiable, nor that the effects are not manipulable
Science hasn't shown a mechanism to manipulate them in the manner of miracles you are talking about. Doing so would either require technology beyond anything we know about or supernatural intervention. And here's the big point you keep on ignoring: a divine being has no need to respect the physical laws anyways, so the only point of your sophistry is to drape mythology in quantum science.
If my interpretation does not correspond to scientific understanding, you complain. If it does correspond to scientific understanding, you complain. What exactly do you want?
I want a consistent answer for what a supposedly inerrant document based on divine revelation says, so that I don't throw it in the dustbin with all the other mythologies.
Again, if I ask a 1,000 people a question they can't answer with the evidence at hand, and they make up a bunch of fantastical stories that differs from the answer when better evidence comes along, I'm not going to bend over backwards to lend credence to their explanations.
I don't like the argument because it doesn't work.
Of course you think it doesn't. You're wearing Bible-prism glasses and suffering massive cognitive dissonance.
You are assuming that the information conveyance proposed by Genesis is -intended to be- the information of a specific ordering. This is your assertion, and it is highly-debatable within the context of theism itself
Ah, good timing. Here's another example of said massive cognitive dissonance. If I said, "On day one I did this, and on day two I did that," you'd sound like a raving lunatic to claim I didn't intend a precise ordering.
not for the least reason that this cannot be the expectation based on the content of the book--it would, on the face of it, be internally inconsistent on a basic level given the accounts of those seven days, taken on the literal, specific level you are taking it.
The Bible is full of inconsistent drivel, as would be expected of a mythology pulled together from various sources, which requires all sorts of pretzel twisting from the believers. However, in this case I don't believe it is inconsistent in the exact manner you specify.
For instance, we have animals being described as created on multiple days.
Day 5 was birds and sea creatures. Day 6 was land animals and man.
it is possible that -a literal timeline is not being presented-
Even if
What is this, refutation-by-asserted-category?
If you assert by category while earlier arguing for a specific claim (not category), then my refutation will be that you didn't meet the earlier claim.
Except, as a matter of basic fact, adults factually do believe in them.
I was referring to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, hence "concede that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is less likely to be true then the Biblical god" and "the lie is revealed and rational, grown adults don't believe in them [Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy]".
Waving your hand at a sentence that says there are more
I didn't "wave my hand", I asked where they were specified, to which you waved your hand.
still destroys your notion of equivalence between theism and Santa, as previously stated
No, it doesn't, since going by his figure of 2500 prophecies, showing only 13 means he likely cherry-picked the best examples, but furthermore, he explicitly stated that the Bible itself claims that there were "2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter--no errors" and "God's prophets, as distinct from Satan's spokesmen, are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error."
If I asked a children about evidence for Santa Claus and documented it all, I'd get similar results. But I've already conceded the Biblical god is more likely to exist than Santa Claus in my previous post, however remotely, if only because the lie is revealed. Though, again, the main reason I stepped in was because you claimed quantum mechanics provided believability.
Don't worry about it. This thread will be quite over, and judging your degree of motivation, you'll be well along toward the point of you getting naturally deselected by then--at which point you and this discussion will be irrelevant.
*shrug* If you don't want to back it as the paper I was looking for, then fine.
I'm not contending the event isn't improbable.
Well that's the entire point. When we do experiments the particles follow a random distribution, which can be predicted in advance. To claim outlandish miracles are allowed in physics is to claim observation of things you wouldn't expect to see in the lifetime of the universe.
No, I'm appealing to it as it properly is, as a matter of science.
I haven't seen any quantum science out of you, other than an appeal to a magic box to drape your mythology in respectability.
For those rare events, you are wholly assuming that the probabilities aren't manipulable, simply because you haven't seen it, and in the face of the fact you do not understand the "why" of the causality here, to be able to exclude anything.
That isn't science, as the science shows random distributions. If you want to claim they can be manipulated by a divine origin, then that's a mythical assertion on your part, which is besides the point, since a divine being has no need to respect the physical laws anyways.
I -noted- it is wholly supportable under hard physics, correctly.
It absolutely isn't. Please cite the science that demonstrates it.
Are you saying that this may have decreased the efficiency of the DNA propagation of members of the Catholic Church
This discussion is already tedious and bizarro world enough as it is: I don't know where you got that interpretation from, so I'm going to ignore the whole "Galileo was a Christian" sidetrack. The main point is that Church doctrine based on a plain reading of the Bible caused controversy around Galileo's work.
Cite away.
http://bible.cc/psalms/104-5.htm : "He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."
Ah, nice goalpost shift
It's not a goalpost shift to refute what you stated. In comparing the believability of the Biblical god versus Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, you made a reference to a survey regarding "eyewitness reports". The survey says nothing about eyewitness reports for the Biblical god.
Referring to your original statement, though, note the degree to which the experiences described in the second table correspond better or worse to the test results (i.e. effects of death) predicted by proposing Santa or the Tooth girl.
The Biblical god is a specific creation myth. Having a near-death experience that hints at something beyond this mortal coil can be evidence for any supernatural explanation of our origins, like, for example, Buddhism.
[where is this list of approximately 2000/2500?] Somewhere entirely unnecessary for it to be to refute your statement.
If you're going to link to "evidence", then I'm going to critique it, especially when it makes ridiculously strong claims. If you want me to concede that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy is less likely to be true then the Biblical god, I will be happy to do so, as the lie is revealed and rational, grown adults don't believe in them.
Yet if you were to ask children about them, and evidence for them, you would get results similar to the answers you get for why people believe in the Biblical god. They've "seen" Santa Claus, or they've had first-hand experience of the miracles of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and they've been told from a reliable source about their existence. The Biblical god is Santa Claus for adults.
Now if you told a child it was physically impossible for Santa Claus to exist, if he had knowledge of quantum physics he could say it was possible. And that is what introduced my analogy to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, as you started out this thread trying to drape your mythology in the respectability of quantum science.
Zeus is in fact not true, but that has nothing to do with its origins as a belief or its age, or your characterization as (untrue) "mythology".
Oh really? So let's hear your explanation why the Zeus mythology isn't true. By the way, it's standard to reference Zeus as part of a mythology, so no need for the scare quotes.
I assure you there is at least one scientist in existence that believes in Roman polytheism.
My claim was along the lines of applying science and reason to these kinds of beliefs, not merely having them, which is why I asked for a paper that looked at these beliefs critically under the scientific and rational lens.
[many primitive beliefs have been dispelled with our advancements in science and reason] True, it's just fallacious to say that this is relevant or determinative.
How is it not relevant? If you ask 1,000 people a question they don't have answer to, but they make up fantastical explanations that differ from each other, and then new evidence comes along and the answers they gave don't fit, doesn't it make sense to say those 1,000 people were making up shit based on poor evidence?
I only questioned where this language comes from, as it seems a direct parroting of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.
Funny how rational people can look at the same evidence and come to the same conclusion, isn't it? Maybe if you weren't so steeped in dogmatic adherence to a particular creation myth this wouldn't be so surprising.
And one could as easily say that whenever is something is obviously wrong in science, it becomes a problem with an experiment, and it is changed to fit the facts.
You're making the same old stupid, tired arguments that are obviously wrong. Science doesn't claim to be dogmatically correct, unlike the Bible. It's whole methodology is evidence-based reasoning. Whe
In part, because there's no peer-reviewed studies (written by multiple PhD's and published in a journal of worldwide reknown, incidentally) which quantifies eyewitness reports of them, in the context where we would expect to find them, like this one:
http://profezie3m.altervista.org/archivio/TheLancet_NDE.htm
You cite a survey of near-death experiences that in no way whatsoever quantifies eyewitness reports of the Biblical god or Jesus.
http://www.reasons.org/articles/articles/fulfilled-prophecy-evidence-for-the-reliability-of-the-bible
"Approximately 2500 prophecies appear in the pages of the Bible, about 2000 of which already have been fulfilled to the letter--no errors. "
Ok, so where is this list of approximately 2000/2500?
"The acid test for identifying a prophet of God is recorded by Moses in Deuteronomy 18:21-22. According to this Bible passage (and others), God's prophets, as distinct from Satan's spokesmen, are 100 percent accurate in their predictions. There is no room for error. [..] Given that the Bible proves so reliable a document"
What a joke. The Bible doesn't even get the most basic of cosmology right, that the Earth was created after the heavens. Also, there's a Wikipedia page on prophecies, and you can see plenty of questionable accuracy with the usual variation of apologists who take different tacks to explain them.
At minimum, it's an Appeal to Authority and an Ad Hominem. You are projecting a group of "rational people", lacking any definition, and asserting that a position is correct or incorrect based on whether they correspond to the supposed views your constructed group
It's no different than if I said rational and scientific people don't believe in Zeus or any number of primitive mythologies.
That one can be called a Bare Assertion Fallacy. There is, in fact, nothing about the belief that is in the least ridiculous
I listed several in my post, which you have attempted to address in your reply.
and you tying it's truth-status to its age is called the Genetic Fallacy.
It's not a fallacy to note that many primitive beliefs have been dispelled with our advancements in science and reason.
Many on that list are published theologians as well. So... if you want to see one, try reading one.
Try naming the paper that critically looks at the issue as I asked. It's not my responsibility to uphold your side of the argument.
Allegory, it says it is figuratively unmoving
Ah yes, whenever something is obviously wrong in the Bible it becomes an allegory, a problem in translation, or in some other way re-interpreted to fit the facts.
(you do realize in physics we now know there is no privileged frame of reference frame, correct?)
If that was what the Bible was saying, then there would be no need to make special mention of the Earth, and poor Galileo could have been left alone to do his science in peace. Furthermore, the Earth's rotation means that it cannot be chosen as an inertial frame.
local flood
What kind of warped reading to you have to do to turn a story about wiping out all the earth's animals and mankind into a "local flood" story? More re-interpretation.
And I can't tell, did you address the fact that the Bible has the Earth being created before the heavens as an allegory? That was given in a precise ordering of events. No allegory is going to save you from that bit of mythology.
I suggest less Dawkins parrot-training books
In other, more accurate words, "not zero". More on the order of what one might call a miracle.
The Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus might be real too, but you don't believe in them.
I'm not even going to list the number of formal logical fallacies this sentence violates.
Go ahead, list them. I didn't substantiate it with a treatise, but it doesn't violate logical fallacies. It's the summary of the ridiculous belief in primitive mythology that people hold. If I was talking about a scientist who believed in Zeus instead you wouldn't be arguing with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_thinkers_in_science
That there is a minority of scientists who manage to compartmentalize there religious beliefs from their scientific and rational scrutiny means little. You'll find many papers from these scientists on their science with scientific justification. Very few, if any, will ever write a justification for their religious belief using a rational and scientific lens. I'd like to see one such paper from a scientist in that list that justified their belief in a Biblical god, and not just a feel-good justification, but a critical look at the evidence and conflicts between science and religion.
You can start at the very beginning, where the Earth is created before the heavenly bodies, to an Earth that doesn't move, and on to ridiculous Noah's Ark stories. The Christian faith is nothing but an offshoot of ancient Hebrew mythology.
Are you saying there's anything that the biblical god is said to have done that physics does not agree can happen as a matter of quantum probability?
Because, well, if you're saying that, you aren't among those who "understand the physics of it".
I'm not the original poster, but I thought he was pretty clear in his very next sentence:
"They have the intellectual ability - more than I - to dispute on rational and logical grounds why the Biblical God is as likely to exist as the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, and yet they do." [bold added]
The key words there being "as likely". It's quantumly possibly that you could "tunnel" through a wall, yet the odds of that happening are essentially zero for practical purposes, and you would never claim for it to have actually happened.
Religion = accepted mythology, as anybody with a rational brain and understanding of science would come to the conclusion to if they actually applied those skills to their religious belief.
Apple lost the last desktop war because they were too nice and gave MSFT access to early prototypes of the Lisa and Macintosh.
Apple didn't give Microsoft access because they were "nice". They did it so that Microsoft could write software for it.
So because the GGP or whoever that didn't even know what they were talking about said that, your risk analysis is limited to those types of events despite the probabilities you used not even lining up?
No, I responded to both arguments, the more frequent "city killers" that we see, and the once-in-tens-of-millions-of-years extinction events that we see.
No, in other words, instead of relying on the odds that the cards turned down are favorable to us, we should actually try to look at the cards and see what the reality is.
We have, and the odds are extremely low, so low that we have bigger things to prioritize.
But hey if you just meant "token" as a % of resources, then a fully-funded, vastly more effective effort would be such, like I was saying we could do that and address many other problems to.
The point is how much %, where you want a "fully-funded, vastly more effective effort". If it's cheap, then fine, but if it's extremely expensive, then it isn't.
And the simple facts are that if we decided to make these things priorities we could easily do both and many other things.
That's true of anything, and if you took that approach with everything you'd be back to square one due to lack of resources.
So, do you think we shouldn't, or do you agree that we should have an effective object discovery program?
Depends on the cost effectiveness.
The problem with Windows slowing down is its registry, which grows over time and consumes more and more memory.
I don't buy this. The registry is just a big configuration file. It may get a bunch of junk in it over time, but it isn't that big. Windows slows down when a bunch of auto-start crap gets installed with lots of software these days, whether it's some plugin, toolbar, or browser, or just about anything. The other big problem is machines that have malware and our part of a botnet.
"Even"? Objects like ['city killers'] are common.
The "even" refers to the impact, not the number, as "city killers" were used as the scary threat. They aren't scary. Maybe if they were landing on the order of once a year instead of something like every 100.
You can't just look at the odds,. You also have to look at the impact.
Yes, that's what I did.
while the odds of an impact in any given year are terribly low, we don't know if that means we're not going to see one for a million years, or if we're going to get hit and then not see one for a million years.
In other words, probability is random. Thanks for the update.
A token effort is a useless effort.
No, it isn't. By token I mean as a percentage of our resources. It really depends on how much bang you can get for the buck. As it is, even finding 1% of the threats is better than nothing and not useless.
And what does the ramping up of civilization have to do with it? We're just as screwed regardless of our civilization level. The relevant benchmarks are 1) are we capable of detecting them and 2) are we capable of doing something about it, and we're past both.
Wow, you live in a very binary world. Technology in astronomy has improved a lot over the past decades. I expect more improvements in the future.
And studying solar weather to try to predict such events necessarily means our asteroid detection effort must be token, eh? Prioritization doesn't mean ignoring other problems.
It was an example of something that was more important, much more of an immediate threat that is being mostly ignored. And it goes way beyond prediction into hardening our infrastructure. The simple facts are that resources are limited, and should be prioritized accordingly.
Solar flares are more common but less likely to cause major damage not counting communication satellites but rather human death, and are tougher to actually mitigate the effects of if one is dangerous.
Our whole society revolves around electricity. If the 1859 flare happened now, the disruption would be massive.
As for his comment, well, let's see him come up with a markup language standard that appeases every vendor while supporting every aspect of media delivery for users. That's not an easy task.
It doesn't matter how hard the task is. All he said was that it wasn't ready, and it was a mistake for Facebook to use it on mobile. Hate Zuckerberg all you want, but you are arguing a strawman. His position is correct.
Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?).
Interesting, I didn't know this. Very shrewd.
What? I run a full system update on a monthly basis (I run Arch), and have been for years, and have NEVER had an update break anything. Let me guess -- your experience is with Ubuntu? Don't blame Linux; blame the crap distro.
I run Debian, which Ubuntu is based on. I wouldn't call it a "crap" distro, and I wonder how Arch can prevent things from breaking given all the 3rd party software that tends to break from time to time. Maybe you've just had good luck, a selective memory, or somehow Arch is amazingly good at preventing the occasional breaks.
Of course, I can't count the number of times I've had crap break because of Windows updates. Remember XP SP2?
I've had very good results with updating XP, so no, I don't share your experience.
I _can_ tell you that her previous XP desktop never got a single update in its life -- she doesn't know how to do it, and I had to turn them off after they kept breaking shit.
Better to put up with things breaking than leaving XP unsecured.
And I'd trust an unpatched old Linux system over an unpatched Windows XP ANY day...
I'd agree with this, but only because Linux isn't targeted much.
Don't be a troll.
Don't be the typical Internet jackass that throws around the word troll.
Dist-upgrades I have had problems with in the past, not unrepairable ones. Package updates on an LTS, never.
I'm glad to hear it. Note, though, that nobody in this thread has specifically mentioned Ubuntu or what version.
My mother has a Linux netbook. Other than getting her email set up with Thunderbird when she got it (she couldn't do that herself in Outlook Express either,) I haven't ever touched the thing. It's just never had an issue.
So I take it then that she never updates or installs software? That's where all the trouble starts. I wonder what version of Thunderbird she's running and how many security bugs it has.