guess you haven't seen any of the rips of 3d movies....cough Jackass 3d cough..... yeah the rip is kinda funky looking, but people are most definitely pirating it!

At nearly every stage of perception from the actual impingement of the environment on our perceptual apparatus all the way through to our actual experience of the worlds, there occurs some level of "processing" or rather transformation.

Point is, what you experience is very removed from the 'reality of the world' if you will. The most obvious visual examples relate to color processing or motion processing (i.e. how different shades of gray can appear the same, or how you can look at those spirals and see motion in your peripheral vision)...but this happens for all of the ways that we perceive and experience.

Yay for philosphy :)

but how do we know if the methods of education have improved? currently tests are considered one of the most useful metrics of measuring the success of those methods. Unfortunately, as we all know, this has led to teachers "teaching the test" and little else.

Consequently, the solution, is to reduce the emphasis on the test and place more emphasis on the judgement of teachers.

You're going to have to present a stronger case than "if you read the paper that they publish, they talk about error margins."

Error margins are introduced because they do not have the computing power (nor models of sufficiently good quality) to compute every molecule in the atmosphere. Instead they have to divide the planet into a grid of cells, then model the cells as the smallest unit in the simulation. The processes that occur within these cells are only approximated and not actually computed, therefore there is some margin of error. This is typical practice for simulations and doesn't prevent them from being highly accurate.

Furthermore, scientific theories yield predictions, "which then turn out to be false" ALL THE TIME. In fact it too is standard practice for the field of science. Science never establishes certainty, it just hopes to paint the most accurate picture possible (nevermind the specifics of what accurate means (to save me from writing a philosophy of science essay to inform you some more)).

At the end of the day your argument that the simulations outstrip the predictory power of the data is refuted. Not only don't they exceed the data, but they've been increasing the quality of their data on a daily basis.

PS- you may be interested to note that some climate models have refuted existing data, which initially was taken as evidence against the model, until scientists figured out that the model was more accurate than the data! Turns out the weather balloons they were using were sensitive to atmospheric conditions which influenced the readings they generated. Sometimes models are more accurate than the data!

nah, that'd be government meddling in the private market. regulation forces people out of business!

/end of sarcasm :(

yeah it's going to be very useless when I use my iPod touch while waiting for hours in line :(

You cannot defend the inequality in wealth and/or income distribution by saying that all boats have risen. Maybe poor people have it slightly better off, but at the expense of rich people have it ridiculously better off.

It's also a myth that income is proportional to productivity. The market, via the participants, does not work rationally, nor appropriately in a ton of situations. The invisible hand is no match for irrational behavior of the masses, especially behavior instigated though advertising.

You may have been able to argue better for the market in the past, but when you have one group, producers, actively manipulating consumers, through the application of psychology and focus groups, you're going to end up with insane wealth inequalities.

The simple fact is that no person, regardless of any factor, should be able to and/or need to make more than, say, a million per year. it's DESPICABLE that one person could want and justify having so much wealth at the DIRECT expense of others, regardless of whether those others "deserve" it or not.

Simply put your an idiot for believing that more than a small group of people choose to be poor. For every millionaire there are 10 people who work twice as hard and yet live in poverty.

wow d00d, never expected anyone to cite Somalia here, but you fucking rule for doing so. Somalia is insanity (done in the 'this is sparta voice'). And people need to be reminded that Somalia is ongoing :(

You may want to look into the area of semiotics, ecology, and philsophy of the self. While it may initially seem odd to speak of "intention" and "control" when talking about bacteria, or plants, etc. But there is definitely a way of understanding these things which makes sense of these terms. Basically, the guide (that control the) of evolution is a process which is in a relationship with the environment where each contributes and as time advances something is produced (change). Many of the processes, for example bacteria, work on what amounts to an information processing organization. The information are "affordances", which are relationships between an organism, loosely defined, and the environment as it relates to abilities of the organism. So, for instance, a snake has the ability to slither, and is situated in an environment such that at a given moment the snake is aware that (or concious of) it's ability to slither forward, and perhaps chooses to do so. At a simpler level, bacteria operate similarly. Taking in the information afforded by the environment, and making responses.

In any case, the area of ecology in philosophy and semiotic approaches to "the self" might interest you. Plenty of authors have said it far better than I can here!

Maybe success needs to be punished sometimes. And perhaps the state should have a hand in insuring that all people have fire coverage, whether they want it or not. Therefore this could be about state income tax.

Really, the vast majority of people cannot treat water the same way that most bottling companies do. You surely aren't going to lime treat the water, and very few people have a reverse osmosis setup at home. I call bullshit on Bullshit.

did you catch the episode of Bullshit where they said that all bottled water is just tap water? Where they completely ignored the fact that while the water does indeed come from "the tap" (typically the county water supply where the bottling plant is located), but it's not put straight into bottles as received. For example Pepsi treats their water with lime, then runs it through reverse osmosis before bottling it.

Point is that Bullshit isn't exactly a good source of information.

Indeed, NoScript is a constant reminder of how much a) ad related b) tracking related c) who knows what related (obscure domains) javascript out on the web. I've been on sites that had 10 external domains trying to run javascript. The sad part is that on the vast majority of sites that have external javascript, I can leave that javascript disabled with no detriment. Typically, enabling javascript for the domain of the site I'm visiting, and maybe a CDN domain makes everything work (menus, videos automatically, what have you).

Ad to this redirects which you can't do anything about? Talk about hell! At least you can block ads and control javascript (to a large degree, including running your own (GreaseMonkey, etc)), but you can't un-redirect a link. Sure you could use javascript to try and resolve all the links on a page, but all you gain is having your browser do it in the background instead of pre-click. But that's a helluva kludge.

Down with tracking. Fuck you if you want to spend your time watching me. The horror of the digital revolution is that now you don't have to have an actual person to spy on people :( Which is exactly why it's very much different for a police officer to stand on a corner watching out for crime and having a camera mounted there recording all the time. But I digress.

All we can do is voice our opinion against this trash practice, and try to avoid it as much as possible.......so FUCK YOU TWITTER, stop acting for your own interests and respect mine!

its not just the road to hell that is paved with compromises

it may be true that yelp isn't unbiased, but it's still an excellent source of reviews in San Francisco. I see tons of places with low ratings