Correct.

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. As such, proof is simply not relevant to what it does, which is produce knowledge. Knowledge--unlike faith--is inherently uncertain.

It'll take a few hundred years for the popular science press to catch up to this. What is being presented here is evidence that the idea p-p fusion powers the sun is correct, so the posterior pluasibility of that idea goes up, although not to 1 (which would be a certainty, and therefore an error: an idea that was immune to additional evidence.)

If neutrinos had not been detected, the plausibility would have gone down, although not to 0 because that would be the same error. Science never disproves anything any more than it proves anything. Proof and certainty are like the philosopher's stone sought by alchemists: a fundamentally mistaken goal.

Philosophers are the alchemists of epistemology, discovering all kinds of cool things while on a hiding to no-where.

But falsification is at best marginally relevant to science, which is the discipline (not method) of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference.

Falsification simply never comes into it, outside of outlandishly models of science promoted by ignorant philosophers. Promoters of "scientific method" and falsification are almost never scientists, and most scientists will quietly ridicule the ideas if you give them a couple of beer.

Bayesian logic is established by mathematical deduction using an argument from invariance of a kind that originated within mathematical physics (Einstein's arguments for relatively are the most famous of the kind).

Philosophers don't even have the right goal--they are always running after "certainty", which we now know to be a epistemic error. Knowledge is not certain and cannot be certain, because only Bayesian reasoning can produce knowledge, and Bayesian reasoning is not capable of producing a posterior plausibility of 1 or 0 (ie certainty).

This has been my experience as well. I would go so far as to say that statisticians understand probability less well than most working experimental scientists. They are overly-enamoured of abstract models and rarely dig down to the raw probability distributions underneath, which is what working scientists actually care about.

That's not a problem. Selective enforcement, or IOW cops letting people off the hook for minor violations, leads to a lack of respect for the law, and the proliferation of bad laws which always end up used to punish some classes and not others on the basis of prejudice.

If rich mofos were prosecuted for bullshit crimes, you'd see those crimes fall off the books.

You don't get to insult me and then bitch, piss and moan when I return the favor.

I usually only encounter people willing to act like as much of a lame as you have been in this conversation on slashdot, so it's pretty much just here.

No, including "you are only a uniformed officer while the feed is live. If it stops, you are a regular private citizen until it's restarted".

Then it's not police brutality. It's armed citizen brutality, without all the protections of the badge.

That is all.

Cars are a red Herring for carbon emissions. It is Electricity that is the big issue.
The simple solution is to replace coal with nuclear, and wind backed by natural gas peaking plants.
 

Can we please put an end to replies which solely contain corrections like these? They've already waned considerably. Provide a little meaningful information. People make mistakes.

You had me until you got here, and totally failed. Science is about exploring possibilities. There is a very good reason to attempt to turn theories into facts: they might be useful.

Yeah, nobody buys PC's, that's why there were 76M shipped in Q2...
Granted, it's less than the 240M smartphones sold in the same quarter, but PC's have never shipped in much higher quantity then they did last quarter.

My first computer with a hard drive was an Amiga 2000 that came with a 120MB Maxtor. I was gleeful at its blinding speed and unfathomable capacity compared to my older floppy-based system. So much so, in fact, that I spent quite a few hours brilliantly doing the AmigaDOS equivalent of cp -R /media/floppy / so that I'd never have to bother with those slow things again.

That was perhaps my first introduction to the importance of namespaces, a lesson which I carry with me unto this day.

Are you really this stupid, or does it just switch on when you hit slashdot?

Right back you.