Hey! I had a bag of pot. I turned my back for a second and it went missing. Anyone seen my pot? I'm getting pretty desper...
So what is truth? Does an objective truth exist at all? How would we know it, assuming it even existed?
Found it!
Uhm, no.
Pi is not 3. Putting a striped stick in front of a pregnant horse will not get you a zebra. There is no evidence of a worldwide flood, Noah's ark couldn't've been built as described and still float, and there's no way to get two of every species on a boat like that (let alone seven of every "clean" animal).
Bats aren't birds.
As for history:
There was no census under the conditions described in the New Testament, and no Roman census required people to return to the town in which they were born. There was no exodus of slaves from Egypt. There is no evidence for a 40-year sojourn in the desert. There is no historic evidence for Jesus. And so on. Many of the stories are taken from other cultures (such as the flood, which appears to be based on the tale of Gilgamesh).
The Bible is neither scientifically nor historically accurate. The morals it presents are generally abhorrent. (Stoning your child for disobedience? Very specific rules for slavery? Hardly a basis for a sound morality.)
It was established in Katzmiller v Dover that Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in new packaging. This was concluded based on testimony by Behe himself, when he admitted that, if you assumed intelligent design were scientific, you'd have to conclude that astrology was also scientific.
There is no distinction between intelligent design and creationism. ID is an attempt by creationists to hide behind a facade of scientism.
The problem is that a scientific theory can only be displaced by another scientific theory. Creationism has been demonstrated to make no testable predictions. Therefore, it's not a scientific proposition.
And after a theory has been proven correct as often and as firmly as evolution, it becomes more and more likely it is the correct proposition.
More tellingly, though, is the reason people propose creationism. It's almost invariably because of their religious belief. That's not a good reason to challenge the validity of evolution. In fact, it's the stupidest reason there is.
So basically what we have here is the schools mandating teachers only teach the official State religion.
You have a sad, strange definition of religion, my friend.
Faith is belief without evidence. Religion is based on faith. Religion can't answer the great questions about life, the universe, and everything, because religion is indistinguishable from making shit up.
Evolution is an area of scientific study, with much experimental support. Next to gravity, it is the best-supported theory in science. And, it is understood to a greater degree than gravity.
The teaching of evolution is not the teaching of religion, but the teaching of science. Attempting to conflate the two is just plain silly. Any argument based on the conflation of the two (such as your weird rant about "Political correctness," which is just code for, "I want to be racist/sexist/homophobic without feeling guilty") is therefore unsupported, and quite likely just plain wrong.
Yeah all this cheap, ubiquitous, amazingly capable computing is terrible for users. We really lost.
I think you are confusing cause and effect.
Now, there's no choice but to go to DigiKey and Mouser, and figure out how I'm going to meet their minimum order requirements, when all I wanted was $5 worth of stuff
Um... what's DigiKey's minimum order again? I regularly buy small quantities of stuff from them. AFAIK, they have no minimum order. And they're fast and reliable.
Not really. Scripting engines are often limited. Consider the difference between an MS-DOS batch file and Java or C or LISP. Then compare Python or Perl.
If all they've done is present a scripting language that binds some common functions (which would allow a 4-line "program" that accesses your music collection), then you really don't have a fully programmable system. You have a customizable system, but not one that is fully programmable.
There is definitely a non-arbitrary distinction between scripting languages and "programming languages." It's just that many scripting languages are *also* programming languages.
A tool alone is useless; but the knowledge of how to leverage and utilize that tool is invaluable.
Wow! Two content-less marketing terms in one sentence. But they look so sad and lonely without "synergy" there beside them.
"Agnosticism" is a statement of epistemology. It merely states that there is no way to prove or disprove the existence of God. "Theism" and "atheism" are declarations of belief. The express an acceptance of an ontology.
You can be an agnostic theist, or an agnostic atheist. While the epistemological question of our knowledge of God may be inaccessible, it is difficult to remain completely neutral with respect to personal belief.
Do you think God exists? You are a theist. Do you think God most likely does not exist? You are an atheist. As it turns out, most atheists are agnostic, and are more than willing to admit there is a certain probability that some form of god exists. That probability is simply vanishingly small.
Atheism is not as un-scientific as being religious. In fact, as the lack of god is the null hypothesis, atheism is the default scientific proposition. Until there is a testable, positive hypothesis concerning the existence of god, theism is entirely in the realm of wish-fulfilling fantasy and philosophical self-gratification.
Agnosticism, meanwhile, is not a "third option." As you use it, as a state of superposition between theism and atheism, it isn't even coherent.
Why is this making the news now?
Because this not only debunks the study (which has been debunked for a few years now), it proves Wakefield manufactured the entire thing. He altered data, misrepresenting each case -- for instance, while Wakefield claimed none of the subjects exhibited signs of autism, medical records show that 5 of the 12 had already been shown to have autism. Further investigation shows that all twelve cases had been misrepresented to various degrees.
Also, Wakefield misrepresented the study to the doctors from whom he received referrals. He called it a "clinical trial," not a study.
Basically, this investigation proves that Wakefield was not simply careless; he intentionally fictionalized the entire study.
We can no longer attribute to incompetency that which is demonstrably malicious.
No fucking way. The XBox 360 interface fucking sucks. I like my 360, don't get me wrong. Gears of War is one of the best games ever. (I don't get the appeal of Halo, but Gears is a lot of fun.) I fucking hate the XBox Live interface, with its advertisements and cheesy avatars. If I wanted a cartoonish avatar living in a land of advertisements, I would've bought a Wii and moved into a mall.
Take the XBox hardware, rev it to newer processors so it doesn't need a fan, update the interface so it looks less like the old Harvey Comics adds for Little Debbies snacks (you know the ones, with Caspar and L'il Devil and Wendy the Witch), and give it a decent way to browse your music and DVD rips which you have stored on your old PC in the den, the one that's piled under your unread year's worth of Maxim and Handyman magazines. Then it might be OK. But if they just used the current XBox interface, I'd never buy it, even if they gave it the ability to modify Sarah Palin's and Fran Drescher's voices so they weren't so fucking annoying.
Usually when people say xbox isn't profitable they are using a deviant definition of profitability that counts sunk costs from years previous.
Yeah, because everyone knows if you spend $5B on something in the first year, and it makes back $3B over the next five years, you can call that $3B profit.
Microsoft might be able to break even with the 360. If their next generation is any good (and there's no reason it shouldn't be decent -- the 360 is a fairly decent platform, though XBox Live is like living in a mall), they might actually turn a profit on the whole enterprise.
Microsoft has proven it has the tenacity to buy its way into a market over the course of several years. It'll be interesting to see if they have what it takes to move into the set-top box market.
Who do they charge? Or do they charge all the electrical companies for access to their grid, thereby adding one more layer of profit for which the consumer must pay?
And all of the handguns are replaced with walkie-talkies.
I mean, all the alcoholic drinks are replaced with kleenexes, or phones, or pens.
I, for one, resist our pablum-spewing Hollywood overlords.
One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.
