Forensic teams can pry a trunk open if they need to, just like they can brute force your passphrase (probably using clues about possible passphrases that they gathered in your home). The problem with requiring defendants to assist the prosecution in evidence gathering is that you are requiring defendants to work against their own defense. Worse still, a defendant can be punished for failing to work against the defense.
If the government has a copy of a letter you sent, and it is destroyed in a fire, do you think they should be able to force you to reproduce that letter for them? Failing to copy a disc image is a failure to follow the DOJ's own recommendations on evidence gathering -- if the police do not even follow their own guidelines, why are we even talking about having defendants help correct their mistakes?
They could throw you in jail, but if you know that the penalty for refusing to cooperate is less than the penalty for whatever crime your data might provide proof of
You might not know that. The current record for longest time served for contempt of court is H. Beatty Chadwick, who spent 14 years in prison for failing to surrender money his wife claimed he was hiding during a divorce case. He could not have been imprisoned at all had he "cooperated," which in this case meant producing money that he did not have. Now, suppose you are accused of possession of child pornography, and you refuse to decrypt; if convicted, you might spend 5 years in prison, but you might be held indefinitely for failing to decrypt -- it is up to a judge to decide whether or not you have been held long enough. How do you even make a decision in that situation?
Now, deniable encryption systems might help somewhat in these cases, because in the United States the prosecution would have to prove that there is a second secret key that you failed to produce, which in a good system should be a hard thing to prove. Unfortunately, this could also mean being held in contempt if the police claim that they saw incriminating evidence on your computer, so clearly the passphrase you provided is not the one they are looking for.
14 years in prison because his wife claimed he was hiding money which the judge demanded that he produce for the court. In a child pornography case, you might spend more time in prison for refusing to decrypt your hard drive than you would have spent if you had been convicted.
Except that the cops believing someone is guilty is not the same as the cops actually knowing that a hard drive contains evidence. If all we cared about was whether or not the cops believed someone to be guilty, we would not even bother holding trials.
The only case I am aware of that could be a precedent for this was the man who showed a border guard the child pornography on his laptop, but the guard shut down the laptop without first making a copy of the hard drive. That defendant was forced to decrypt the laptop; I disagree with that ruling, I think that if the government screws up like that then it should not be the defendant's job to fix their mistake, but the courts disagree with me.
I don't understand why people get so upset when content makers try to control their content.
Probably because regardless of whether or not we actually watch their "content," we are forbidden from publishing any information about weaknesses in their copy restriction systems. In fact, we are forbidden even publishing hyperlinks to such information, as per the 2600 decss ruling. These people are not only unfriendly, they are actively attacking important and fundamental rights in my country, at my expense, for their benefit.
The word "enemy" is appropriate. The copyright lobby should be considered an enemy, especially to anyone who is a fan of free speech, free-libre computing, and a free and open Internet. We are upset because every time our enemy tries to assert more control, we wind up suffering for it.
Except that in order to decrypt the information and let me enjoy it, they need to hide the decryption key somewhere. Somewhere that they are going to try to program my computer to make inaccessible to me, and should I find a way to defeat that, I cannot tell anyone else about without facing lawsuits.
Taking over my entire computer? No, it will not do that. Making some part of my computer work against me is what they want to do here, and I am not going to allow such a thing. They are free to encrypt the information they send me, so long as I am free to decrypt it how and when I choose, and to tell others about the decryption process.
The fact that if I publish a method of decrypting that stream, or even publish links to descriptions of such methods, I can be sued. No thank you, I may not have any say over blatantly unconstitutional laws but I can refuse to pay for my rights to be trampled.
Which is why they will never see a penny from me. Unfortunately, nobody else has the backbone needed to stand up to them and say, "No, you are not going to take control of my computer in exchange for entertaining me for a few hours."
The ironic thing is that do not track actually makes it easier for unscrupulous companies to track you, by distinguishing you from those users who are too lazy to enable it (which is the majority).
That really depends on the field you are talking about. 4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion.
Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.
Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers. The PI might ask them to "tweak" their work while a paper is in submission, so that they can publish "new work" elsewhere.
Researcher applies for a grant, specifying the goals of the project, previous work in the field, students who will be funded, equipment costs, and various other things.
If the funding agency likes the line of work -- and this is usually a politically motivated decision -- the researcher gets the grant.
The university gets a large chunk of that grant money just because the researcher is working at the university.
The researcher then publishes lots of papers, which can be referenced during the next grant application.
That, in a nutshell, is what this is all about. Researchers whose work is difficult, not mainstream, or hard to publish for any reason are not bringing in any money. Universities have no time for researchers who do not bring large sums of grant money in, and these universities are working to get rid of such professors. The result will be even more politically motivated research, more researchers grabbing the easy, low hanging fruit, and less innovative, groundbreaking research.
I'm sorry, the waiter and warehouse worker doesn't work 10 hour days for minimum wage to pay taxes, so that some academic can sit around and think.
Nor do we turn to waiters and warehouse workers when we need answers to hard problems.
I certainly don't grind away at my engineering job dealing with deadlines, customers... so that some academic can sit around and think.
Yet if academics had not sat around and thought about things, there would be no engineering discipline. What do you think mathematicians did, so that you could use mathematics with confidence in your work? What do you think physicists spent their time doing, so that you could apply models of physical phenomena in your work? Society needs people to think, just like it needs people to design useful things or to pack useful things in boxes.
Wait, let me guess -- you make special exceptions for mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, etc., because their work is useful to what you do for your own day to day job?
Not unlike sitting around and doing jack squat after building a fortune. At the very least, one can say that tenured professors contribute more to society than, say, trust fund babies -- at least one has to put in some amount of work to get tenure. It is also pretty rare for a tenured professor to stop working entirely; even those whose output is diminished frequently serve as advisers to graduate students and undergrads, publish textbooks, etc.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. Yet if professors did not get tenure, their research would be at the mercy of the institution they work at, which might decide that their work is a waste of time, that it does not align with the school's politics or public image, etc. Tenure provides some protection for researchers whose work might not be approved of by their employers, which is an important aspect of academic freedom.
I agree that the number of citations per year should be a factor, but not the only one. Some fields have long-running experiments that might not yield publishing results for several years, and researchers should not be punished for that sort of work.
Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want?
That is the idea behind tenure: you work hard, publish lots of papers, and so forth to get tenure, and then you are free to work on whatever problems you want. Unfortunately, yes, that means that some professors basically do nothing, but it also allows professors to spend ten years working on a hard problem and not have to worry about being fired for not publishing anything during that period of time. It is also unfortunate in that it basically forces young researchers to chase easy problems before they can really devote much energy to hard problems, and may make young researchers nervous about collaborating or even discussing their work with anyone else (the classic, "Don't tell so-and-so about what we are working on, he is working on something similar and we want to publish first!").
I agree, we need a better way to evaluate research. We need to weigh things -- weigh the number of papers, the number of citations the papers are getting (one paper that is cited hundreds of times is probably better than a hundred papers that are each cited once), what sort of things a research is currently doing that have not been published (if someone is running a 30 year experiment in biology, that should count, it should not count against them), etc.
Apart from any other argument, you do a fair job of deifying the Scientific Method.
It is not so much deifying the scientific method as it is:
Pointing out that religious faith is based on a very different sort of philosophy than science
Pointing out that religious faith frequently makes no attempt at justification, and sometimes even ignores available evidence. It is not that science is necessarily the only way to discover truths about the universe, as that religious faith is not a way to discover such truths. Religious faith opens the door to various claims that were simply invented for convenience (like the "trinity," which was just a convenient way to get monotheists and polytheists to cooperate at a time when they frequently slaughtered each other).
Kurt Godel did everyone a favor by rigorously proving that truths exist in any system which cannot be proven within that system -- that there are unprovable truths
That is not what the incompleteness theorems say. The incompleteness theorems are statements about the limits of axiomatic systems, not about the scientific method. Science employs math, but science is not math in and of itself, and scientific results frequently fail to meet the rigorous requirements of mathematics (mathematical proofs must show that statements are always true, which usually cannot be done by simply repeating an experiment many times). Scientists make observations, and try to develop theories based on those observations; some level of science can be done on anything that can be observed.
One might easily argue that this distinction means these things are "not science".
If it cannot be reproduced, tested, or verified, or if observations depend on the mindset of the observer, then no, it is not something that the scientific method can be applied to. I cannot confirm that your walk in the woods was interesting, calming, or pleasurable for you; I might not like it at all, or maybe I do not like the particular woods you took your walk in, etc. On the other hand, I could make an observation about the relationship between walking in the woods and the moods that people report -- maybe I can ask a hundred volunteers to walk through the woods, and then have them tell me how it made them feel, and all of a sudden it starts to sound like we are performing a scientific experiment of some kind.
I'm OK with that point of view -- but it does not follow that they are "incompatible with the philosophy that underlies science". They're just something that science is not intended to address.
That does not mean they are compatible with science, it just means that the philosophy behind science cannot be extended to certain intellectual pursuits. This is not generally problematic -- I like the experience of hiking up a stream and fishing for trout, and I would like it even if study after study found that most people find the experience to be dull. Where it becomes a problem is when people start applying non-scientific philosophies and thought processes to the sorts of questions that the scientific method is very good at answering. How old is the Earth? Why is there such a diversity of life on this planet?
Sometimes the questions can be very important; for example, what causes AIDS to spread? This is a question that needs to be answered accurately, so that leaders of all sorts can properly advise people on how not to contract AIDS. A faith-based answer is just as likely to be something that is almost accurate like, "sinful premarital sex," as something totally outlandish like, "you can get it if you have sex with your wife when she is menstruating." On the other hand, scientists have done a pretty good job of not only determining how AIDS is spread (sex or other exchanges of certain bodily fluids with an infected person) but also in revealing details about how AIDS is spread (the HIV virus), which ha
That said, there have always been _just enough_ headaches around not having flash to make it worth the bother.
Really? I have found that not having Flash installed is one of the better choices I made. Licensing aside (do you really feel comfortable agreeing not to develop any competing software?), the only thing I seem to be missing without Flash are annoying, CPU and memory consuming advertisements. Youtube videos can be downloaded with relative ease, Flash games add nothing to my life, and if my bank ever tried to make their website require Flash I would ditch them immediately. What compelling reason is there for me to have Flash installed on my computer?
No, the problem is that people are equating the acceptance of scientific results with religious faith. You can hold whatever religious beliefs you want, but faith is not scientific, and you are not acting as a scientist when you start bringing faith into the picture. The original post that I responded to tried to reconcile biblical stories with scientific results -- which is not how science works. Then people responded about how the point is that you can be a creationist while also being a scientist, which is diplomatic but untrue.
What people are afraid of is admitting that biblical stories are just stories and that the bible is the wrong place to look for answers to questions about the natural world. Take off your religion hat and put on your scientist hat when you want to answer questions about the age of the Earth, the origin of the Earth, and so forth.
OK, so what is your point? That people who believe in the "God of the bible" agree with scientists that the universe is logical and that physical rules do not change? Cool, now can we get back to the part where we evaluate the claim that deities of any sort really do exist like scientists, and immediately stop at "there is no evidence?"
Faith is not compatible with science -- science is built on evidence gathered in a reproducible manner, and faith is about accepting that things are true regardless of the availability of evidence. Indeed, we should be very suspicious of claims like yours: God exists, but is totally disconnected from the universe, and cannot be measured by any of the means that are or ever will be available to us. What if it was just made up on the spot? How could we even tell the difference between your claim and one that was just invented (assuming that your claim is indeed true)? What would it even mean for some entity or phenomenon to be disconnected from the universe, in the sense of never interacting with the universe in any observable way?
The point is not that faith is bad, but that it is incompatible with the philosophy that underlies science. Sorry, but it is true -- the philosophy that science is built upon does not leave room for faith, and trying to reconcile the bible with scientific results is plainly unscientific.
You seem very simple-minded. It has to be true or false. Right or wrong.
Did this stop being a discussion about science? That is what science is about -- determining what is true, distinguishing truth from falsehood, and so forth.
All of the scriptures from all religions have nuggets of wisdom
Maybe so, but when it comes to determining what is true or false about the world around us, religion and especially religious faith offers pretty poor explanations compared to the scientific method. That is what this discussion is about: how we determine what is true and what is not true. If you want to find "nuggets of wisdom" to help you live your life, that's fine, but those nuggets will not be very helpful when you need to answer questions about the natural world.
You can make any claim you want. I make my own choices based upon my experiences as to how much weight I give to your claims
Which is not how the scientific method would be used to evaluate claims. That is why we are able to accept things like quantum mechanics, which makes all sorts of bizarre and counter-intuitive claims, while rejecting equally bizarre claims about space aliens.
I acquire knowledge wherever I can and accept nothing, not even science, on blind faith.
The great thing about science is that you can verify scientific claims on your own. You can get a telescope and observe Jupiter and its moons, you can get a prism and a thermometer and confirm the existence of infrared light, you can breed plants and animals and observe heredity, you can perform chemistry experiments, etc. Some experiments are expensive and hard to reproduce, which may present a problem for you, but scientists do publish their methods along with their claims. Reproducing experiments is crucial in science: it is how scientists can verify each other's results (and anyone can be a scientist, even for a short period of time, if they are following the scientific method).
Now, if you would rather discuss morality, or philosophical views, or any number of other subjects that cannot be subjected to scientific rigor or scrutiny, that is fine -- but let us at least be clear that we are doing so. I happen to study the torah on a weekly basis, but I would not delude myself into thinking that the torah will provide answers to questions about nature, or that the torah can help me distinguish between truth and falsehood (no, not even the sections about dealing with "false prophets").
If there is an entity that can and does affect results in an intelligent way (let's call it god) it is impossible to reproduce any conditions completely.
Thus rendering the scientific process meaningless, because we may be at the mercy of a trickster who is carefully guiding the results of our experiments to ensure that we see what we are supposed to see, and nothing different.
Which only brings us back to the discussion about science and religion being incompatible with each other.
Slashdot Mirror
Forensic teams can pry a trunk open if they need to, just like they can brute force your passphrase (probably using clues about possible passphrases that they gathered in your home). The problem with requiring defendants to assist the prosecution in evidence gathering is that you are requiring defendants to work against their own defense. Worse still, a defendant can be punished for failing to work against the defense.
If the government has a copy of a letter you sent, and it is destroyed in a fire, do you think they should be able to force you to reproduce that letter for them? Failing to copy a disc image is a failure to follow the DOJ's own recommendations on evidence gathering -- if the police do not even follow their own guidelines, why are we even talking about having defendants help correct their mistakes?
They could throw you in jail, but if you know that the penalty for refusing to cooperate is less than the penalty for whatever crime your data might provide proof of
You might not know that. The current record for longest time served for contempt of court is H. Beatty Chadwick, who spent 14 years in prison for failing to surrender money his wife claimed he was hiding during a divorce case. He could not have been imprisoned at all had he "cooperated," which in this case meant producing money that he did not have. Now, suppose you are accused of possession of child pornography, and you refuse to decrypt; if convicted, you might spend 5 years in prison, but you might be held indefinitely for failing to decrypt -- it is up to a judge to decide whether or not you have been held long enough. How do you even make a decision in that situation?
Now, deniable encryption systems might help somewhat in these cases, because in the United States the prosecution would have to prove that there is a second secret key that you failed to produce, which in a good system should be a hard thing to prove. Unfortunately, this could also mean being held in contempt if the police claim that they saw incriminating evidence on your computer, so clearly the passphrase you provided is not the one they are looking for.
Unfortunately, you might be held for many years before they finally stop harassing you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
14 years in prison because his wife claimed he was hiding money which the judge demanded that he produce for the court. In a child pornography case, you might spend more time in prison for refusing to decrypt your hard drive than you would have spent if you had been convicted.
Except that the cops believing someone is guilty is not the same as the cops actually knowing that a hard drive contains evidence. If all we cared about was whether or not the cops believed someone to be guilty, we would not even bother holding trials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Boucher
The only case I am aware of that could be a precedent for this was the man who showed a border guard the child pornography on his laptop, but the guard shut down the laptop without first making a copy of the hard drive. That defendant was forced to decrypt the laptop; I disagree with that ruling, I think that if the government screws up like that then it should not be the defendant's job to fix their mistake, but the courts disagree with me.
If he did invent email, then he could not have gotten a patent, since there were no software patents when email was invented.
I don't understand why people get so upset when content makers try to control their content.
Probably because regardless of whether or not we actually watch their "content," we are forbidden from publishing any information about weaknesses in their copy restriction systems. In fact, we are forbidden even publishing hyperlinks to such information, as per the 2600 decss ruling. These people are not only unfriendly, they are actively attacking important and fundamental rights in my country, at my expense, for their benefit.
The word "enemy" is appropriate. The copyright lobby should be considered an enemy, especially to anyone who is a fan of free speech, free-libre computing, and a free and open Internet. We are upset because every time our enemy tries to assert more control, we wind up suffering for it.
Except that in order to decrypt the information and let me enjoy it, they need to hide the decryption key somewhere. Somewhere that they are going to try to program my computer to make inaccessible to me, and should I find a way to defeat that, I cannot tell anyone else about without facing lawsuits.
Taking over my entire computer? No, it will not do that. Making some part of my computer work against me is what they want to do here, and I am not going to allow such a thing. They are free to encrypt the information they send me, so long as I am free to decrypt it how and when I choose, and to tell others about the decryption process.
The fact that if I publish a method of decrypting that stream, or even publish links to descriptions of such methods, I can be sued. No thank you, I may not have any say over blatantly unconstitutional laws but I can refuse to pay for my rights to be trampled.
DRM will be required by content providers
Which is why they will never see a penny from me. Unfortunately, nobody else has the backbone needed to stand up to them and say, "No, you are not going to take control of my computer in exchange for entertaining me for a few hours."
The ironic thing is that do not track actually makes it easier for unscrupulous companies to track you, by distinguishing you from those users who are too lazy to enable it (which is the majority).
An incredibly low threshold
That really depends on the field you are talking about. 4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion.
Don't forget that grad students and post docs are the ones actually writing the papers and their careers suffer immensely if the professor is unable or unwilling to break big projects into frequently publishable chunks.
Grad students and postdocs are at the mercy of the PI. If a professor is under pressure to get more papers published, his students and postdocs will be under pressure to get more papers published, and they will do what they have to: they will seek easy problems that generate papers. The PI might ask them to "tweak" their work while a paper is in submission, so that they can publish "new work" elsewhere.
That, in a nutshell, is what this is all about. Researchers whose work is difficult, not mainstream, or hard to publish for any reason are not bringing in any money. Universities have no time for researchers who do not bring large sums of grant money in, and these universities are working to get rid of such professors. The result will be even more politically motivated research, more researchers grabbing the easy, low hanging fruit, and less innovative, groundbreaking research.
I'm sorry, the waiter and warehouse worker doesn't work 10 hour days for minimum wage to pay taxes, so that some academic can sit around and think.
Nor do we turn to waiters and warehouse workers when we need answers to hard problems.
I certainly don't grind away at my engineering job dealing with deadlines, customers... so that some academic can sit around and think.
Yet if academics had not sat around and thought about things, there would be no engineering discipline. What do you think mathematicians did, so that you could use mathematics with confidence in your work? What do you think physicists spent their time doing, so that you could apply models of physical phenomena in your work? Society needs people to think, just like it needs people to design useful things or to pack useful things in boxes.
Well you can research on your own dime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan
Wait, let me guess -- you make special exceptions for mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, etc., because their work is useful to what you do for your own day to day job?
Not unlike sitting around and doing jack squat after building a fortune. At the very least, one can say that tenured professors contribute more to society than, say, trust fund babies -- at least one has to put in some amount of work to get tenure. It is also pretty rare for a tenured professor to stop working entirely; even those whose output is diminished frequently serve as advisers to graduate students and undergrads, publish textbooks, etc.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. Yet if professors did not get tenure, their research would be at the mercy of the institution they work at, which might decide that their work is a waste of time, that it does not align with the school's politics or public image, etc. Tenure provides some protection for researchers whose work might not be approved of by their employers, which is an important aspect of academic freedom.
I agree that the number of citations per year should be a factor, but not the only one. Some fields have long-running experiments that might not yield publishing results for several years, and researchers should not be punished for that sort of work.
Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want?
That is the idea behind tenure: you work hard, publish lots of papers, and so forth to get tenure, and then you are free to work on whatever problems you want. Unfortunately, yes, that means that some professors basically do nothing, but it also allows professors to spend ten years working on a hard problem and not have to worry about being fired for not publishing anything during that period of time. It is also unfortunate in that it basically forces young researchers to chase easy problems before they can really devote much energy to hard problems, and may make young researchers nervous about collaborating or even discussing their work with anyone else (the classic, "Don't tell so-and-so about what we are working on, he is working on something similar and we want to publish first!").
I agree, we need a better way to evaluate research. We need to weigh things -- weigh the number of papers, the number of citations the papers are getting (one paper that is cited hundreds of times is probably better than a hundred papers that are each cited once), what sort of things a research is currently doing that have not been published (if someone is running a 30 year experiment in biology, that should count, it should not count against them), etc.
Research is not about the quantity of results that are published, it is about the quality and importance of those results.
Apart from any other argument, you do a fair job of deifying the Scientific Method.
It is not so much deifying the scientific method as it is:
Kurt Godel did everyone a favor by rigorously proving that truths exist in any system which cannot be proven within that system -- that there are unprovable truths
That is not what the incompleteness theorems say. The incompleteness theorems are statements about the limits of axiomatic systems, not about the scientific method. Science employs math, but science is not math in and of itself, and scientific results frequently fail to meet the rigorous requirements of mathematics (mathematical proofs must show that statements are always true, which usually cannot be done by simply repeating an experiment many times). Scientists make observations, and try to develop theories based on those observations; some level of science can be done on anything that can be observed.
One might easily argue that this distinction means these things are "not science".
If it cannot be reproduced, tested, or verified, or if observations depend on the mindset of the observer, then no, it is not something that the scientific method can be applied to. I cannot confirm that your walk in the woods was interesting, calming, or pleasurable for you; I might not like it at all, or maybe I do not like the particular woods you took your walk in, etc. On the other hand, I could make an observation about the relationship between walking in the woods and the moods that people report -- maybe I can ask a hundred volunteers to walk through the woods, and then have them tell me how it made them feel, and all of a sudden it starts to sound like we are performing a scientific experiment of some kind.
I'm OK with that point of view -- but it does not follow that they are "incompatible with the philosophy that underlies science". They're just something that science is not intended to address.
That does not mean they are compatible with science, it just means that the philosophy behind science cannot be extended to certain intellectual pursuits. This is not generally problematic -- I like the experience of hiking up a stream and fishing for trout, and I would like it even if study after study found that most people find the experience to be dull. Where it becomes a problem is when people start applying non-scientific philosophies and thought processes to the sorts of questions that the scientific method is very good at answering. How old is the Earth? Why is there such a diversity of life on this planet?
Sometimes the questions can be very important; for example, what causes AIDS to spread? This is a question that needs to be answered accurately, so that leaders of all sorts can properly advise people on how not to contract AIDS. A faith-based answer is just as likely to be something that is almost accurate like, "sinful premarital sex," as something totally outlandish like, "you can get it if you have sex with your wife when she is menstruating." On the other hand, scientists have done a pretty good job of not only determining how AIDS is spread (sex or other exchanges of certain bodily fluids with an infected person) but also in revealing details about how AIDS is spread (the HIV virus), which ha
That said, there have always been _just enough_ headaches around not having flash to make it worth the bother.
Really? I have found that not having Flash installed is one of the better choices I made. Licensing aside (do you really feel comfortable agreeing not to develop any competing software?), the only thing I seem to be missing without Flash are annoying, CPU and memory consuming advertisements. Youtube videos can be downloaded with relative ease, Flash games add nothing to my life, and if my bank ever tried to make their website require Flash I would ditch them immediately. What compelling reason is there for me to have Flash installed on my computer?
No, the problem is that people are equating the acceptance of scientific results with religious faith. You can hold whatever religious beliefs you want, but faith is not scientific, and you are not acting as a scientist when you start bringing faith into the picture. The original post that I responded to tried to reconcile biblical stories with scientific results -- which is not how science works. Then people responded about how the point is that you can be a creationist while also being a scientist, which is diplomatic but untrue.
What people are afraid of is admitting that biblical stories are just stories and that the bible is the wrong place to look for answers to questions about the natural world. Take off your religion hat and put on your scientist hat when you want to answer questions about the age of the Earth, the origin of the Earth, and so forth.
OK, so what is your point? That people who believe in the "God of the bible" agree with scientists that the universe is logical and that physical rules do not change? Cool, now can we get back to the part where we evaluate the claim that deities of any sort really do exist like scientists, and immediately stop at "there is no evidence?"
Faith is not compatible with science -- science is built on evidence gathered in a reproducible manner, and faith is about accepting that things are true regardless of the availability of evidence. Indeed, we should be very suspicious of claims like yours: God exists, but is totally disconnected from the universe, and cannot be measured by any of the means that are or ever will be available to us. What if it was just made up on the spot? How could we even tell the difference between your claim and one that was just invented (assuming that your claim is indeed true)? What would it even mean for some entity or phenomenon to be disconnected from the universe, in the sense of never interacting with the universe in any observable way?
The point is not that faith is bad, but that it is incompatible with the philosophy that underlies science. Sorry, but it is true -- the philosophy that science is built upon does not leave room for faith, and trying to reconcile the bible with scientific results is plainly unscientific.
You seem very simple-minded. It has to be true or false. Right or wrong.
Did this stop being a discussion about science? That is what science is about -- determining what is true, distinguishing truth from falsehood, and so forth.
All of the scriptures from all religions have nuggets of wisdom
Maybe so, but when it comes to determining what is true or false about the world around us, religion and especially religious faith offers pretty poor explanations compared to the scientific method. That is what this discussion is about: how we determine what is true and what is not true. If you want to find "nuggets of wisdom" to help you live your life, that's fine, but those nuggets will not be very helpful when you need to answer questions about the natural world.
You can make any claim you want. I make my own choices based upon my experiences as to how much weight I give to your claims
Which is not how the scientific method would be used to evaluate claims. That is why we are able to accept things like quantum mechanics, which makes all sorts of bizarre and counter-intuitive claims, while rejecting equally bizarre claims about space aliens.
I acquire knowledge wherever I can and accept nothing, not even science, on blind faith.
The great thing about science is that you can verify scientific claims on your own. You can get a telescope and observe Jupiter and its moons, you can get a prism and a thermometer and confirm the existence of infrared light, you can breed plants and animals and observe heredity, you can perform chemistry experiments, etc. Some experiments are expensive and hard to reproduce, which may present a problem for you, but scientists do publish their methods along with their claims. Reproducing experiments is crucial in science: it is how scientists can verify each other's results (and anyone can be a scientist, even for a short period of time, if they are following the scientific method).
Now, if you would rather discuss morality, or philosophical views, or any number of other subjects that cannot be subjected to scientific rigor or scrutiny, that is fine -- but let us at least be clear that we are doing so. I happen to study the torah on a weekly basis, but I would not delude myself into thinking that the torah will provide answers to questions about nature, or that the torah can help me distinguish between truth and falsehood (no, not even the sections about dealing with "false prophets").
If there is an entity that can and does affect results in an intelligent way (let's call it god) it is impossible to reproduce any conditions completely.
Thus rendering the scientific process meaningless, because we may be at the mercy of a trickster who is carefully guiding the results of our experiments to ensure that we see what we are supposed to see, and nothing different.
Which only brings us back to the discussion about science and religion being incompatible with each other.