How he gets away with his nonsense when all his followers are (admittedly, self-described) skeptics is beyond me.

Nonsense? Followers?

These are a bunch of people who debunk claims of supernatural phenomenon which are either:

1) Magic undocumented things, which nobody has been able to prove yet, and for which no physical laws would apply
2) Active scams and hoaxes

Are you suggesting there is some dishonesty in Randi's willingness to give you $10 million dollars if you can give repeatable evidence under controlled circumstances that you can do something amazing?

Because I'm afraid you're going to need to provide some evidence for that claim. That nobody has claimed that prize means that so far anybody who claims to have supernatural powers is full of shit.

Which is the expected outcome.

Karma's a bitch

Let's not forget that The Day After was shameless propaganda of an order that would make Leni Reifenstahl blush.

The Hollywood establishment despised Reagan and was willing to do anything to portray him as a crazy warmonger and highlight public terror of nuclear weapons.

The movie, btw, full length: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
 

You seem to be having a hard time with this. I explicitly said I have and do participate in debates in where I don't care about the eventual outcome. Scientific debates are often like this. I might not actually care what the outcome is and I often don't have a position of my own (I'm neutral) but I do have an interest in the debate based in curiosity and an interest in the truth. I don't really care if dinosaurs had feathers or not and I am neutral on the subject but I am interested in whatever the answer turns out to be. Even when the issue at hand is solely a matter of opinion then sometimes people will debate the issue because they like to debate - not because they actually have a position of their own. Hang around law school students sometime. They LOVE to debate and don't really give a shit about whatever is being debated all the time.

Yes it is. A neutral one. The argument was that you cannot be simultaneously neutral on an issue and debate it. I'm explaining (for the last time) that that is demonstrably not true. I understand plenty of issues well enough to argue one position or the other while my own opinion on the matter at hand is neutral. I don't care if emacs is better than vi or vice-versa but on occasion in years far past I have taken one side or the other just to point out that someone isn't being factual. I don't actually have a preference between the two and use both but the debate itself I find rather pointless and annoying hence my "position" of "a pox on both your houses".

Very true. Most of the time it is something tribal. You see our "leaders" in washington holding or disputing opinions based solely on whether the other side holds that opinion.

Not necessarily in the position being argued. Sometimes my only interest is in promoting a factual discussion. That means I am neutral on the issue. Scientific debate is often like this. I don't really care about what the outcome of scientific issues actually is (because the nature of the world doesn't care about my opinion of it) and I often don't understand the nuances well enough to have a well formed opinion of my own. But I do care that the debate happens, that it is accurate and that whatever is being debated gets sorted out.

And... so?

Wherever you think this means that "the vocabulary used" invalidates the experiences quantified by the paper, you are wrong.

Everything is described through cultural linguistic constructs. That's irrelevant to the reality of any given experience, and if your assertion as to what the sentence implies were what it in fact implied, there would be no reason to continue with the presentation of the study. Since they did in fact continue, we can fairly conclude that this wasn't the assertion--as we can also infer from the absence of your conclusion actually being anywhere in the statement.

See, this is where I feel fundamentally required to respond to the statement not as an argument, not as a perception I consider incorrect, but as an outright deliberate lie. My basis for this is that you could not actually live as long as you have while generally believing what you assert to be true, is true, but rather you apply an entirely different set of criteria to religious concepts as you do every single day to every other subject, and you could not do otherwise.

I'm glad in this case I didn't have to revisit the different commonplace forms of that here, and you, surprisingly, didn't make the claim that because there is an alternate scenario that is also supported by the evidence, it then becomes the case the evidence no longer supports the original interpretation that it in fact supports. As always, for everything, every day, you then have evidence for -both- scenarios. If you find the prime suspect in a bank robbery with a bag of cash with the bank's logo and a gun on his coffee table, noting he has a roommate who could have done it does not make that suddenly not evidence for the prime suspect's culpability. It is simply not, in itself, -proof- (the standard goalpost-shift here to an infinite-regress of expectation, as well as tantamount to demanding forced conversion, proof provided, the requester's choices now irrelevant). Nor is this, because it is -a- line of support (of the particular peer-reviewed sort commonly demanded), therefore the -only- line of support. I could go on at length regarding other lines of support (i.e. improbability of future prediction happening "by chance", historical notations of secular historians, martyrdom of contemporaries, etc.), but this is a waste of time if I don't perceive basic willingness to consider information on the same terms as every other topic in the requester's existence, and as basic reason calls for. Some don't have that. Maybe that's because they're simply lying hypocrites. Maybe you have an alternate explanation.

True....and false.
An unarmed missile IS barely a dirty bomb, but a wave of missile launches, say from 1962 to 1989 or so, would likely have prompted the other side to launch their counterstrike (the point was to get them launched and in a high ballistic arc before the other guy's landed as the fear was that successive EMPs might deactivate crucial circuitry in your outgoing warheads).

So yes, your unauthorized launch in and of itself was not even a V1-level explosion.
What it would have likely started might have been armageddon.

Retroreflection is accomplished by having three mutually perpendicular reflective surfaces forming a hollow corner. Natural cubic crystal formations can easily develop hollow corner retroreflectivity. So, to show that it was the Apollo lunar ranging experiment, and not a natural crystal formation, you'd at least have to have before and after shots showing the difference.

Wake up, you're already there.

There's a wealth of material there as to how the paper came about; no Philosophy of Science is needed. But keep whining about the philosophical process for coming up with a hypothesis, I'd prefer to spend my time on the science.

Okay, continue handwaving. Feel free to read "The Introduction" yourself, and see if this entire process, in any given case, represents entirely rigorously-definable and validatable processes. It won't, because none of them do. Again, if you can define "insight" rigorously, and/or the entirely of mental and historical processes that lead to the formation of the paper, feel free to do so.

But, this is largely beside the point by now, since you have abandoned the scoping of "scientific method" to processes involving hypotheses, contrary to, say:

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."
...this.

And that's fine, I have no issue with expansion of the notion of "scientific method" to include aspects of pure inference from axioms, untestable "knowns", etc. But, since your response started specifically in response to my addressing a claim by reference to hypotheses, with some kind of (apparently, now, irrelevant) unbacked commentary stating that I broadly don't know what I'm talking about, your sequence of thoughts here seems a bit... irrationally off-topic.

Spend your time on "the science", enjoy. And every time you advance your work by thinking "well, this seems plausible", and don't know the precise attributes that make it so -at that original point in time of conceptualization- (and nobody does, or I would have had you coded out of a job by now) you'll be validating the relevance of Philosophy of Science.

No, my beliefs being real is what makes my beliefs real.

The link is peer-reviewed, authored-by-multiple-PhD's, published by probably the most prestigious medical journal in Europe, eyewitness accounts of direct correspondence between "religion's" claims and reality, as perceived precisely at the point when said "religion" predicts these. Note, -those in particular-, rather than random hallucinatory phenomena one might expect as a consequence of brain failure. You'll handwave this as coincidence, or have some twisted pseudo-logic as to how these aren't eyewitness reports in this particular context. It doesn't matter. Your opinion, as a soon-to-be-eliminated irrelevancy, by -your- worldview, also matters no more on this than anywhere else.

Dodge and goalpost-shift as you will, imposing your maximum potential relevance, according to -you-, of a random internet guy whose positions have no potential weight or consequence (that is, no importance whatsoever). It is unquestionably "grounding" (i.e. evidence, no matter how intellectually-dishonest your criteria for "evidence" becomes in the follow-on post you will make).

It may even have been me that linked the article previously, and if so, it was just as relevant then as now (feel free to directly lie again)--not sure, you've been a tedious goalless waste of Slashdot's time for quite a while now. Eh, could be.

looks useful, but could do with being expanded to cover other countries as well that are forcing their ISPs to block websites... e.g. UK...

I'm just wondering if when a society has conspiracy theorists speaking out freely, the 'tin hat' crowd, is that the sign of a healthy society or not.

It's bad I suppose when conspiracy theorists are flat out wrong, but would a repressive government try to silence them or do repressive governments only bother suppressing people who are telling the Truth?

Does it do harm in that when somebody really finds something bad going on people will tend to disbelieve them because of all the flakos (sort of like crying wolf too many times)?

There's a subtle distinction here that gets lost in our modern society (mainly by the media) which tends to look only at results while ignoring the process to get those results.

Skepticism is healthy. If you're skeptical that NASA landed on the moon, then by all means you should be free to ask questions, do tests and experiments to determine the truth of the matter to your satisfaction. Implicit in this is keeping an open mind that your skepticism may be wrong.

Where it crosses the line into conspiracy theory is when you assume a certain conclusion, and only accept supporting evidence, while ignoring evidence to the contrary, That's unhealthy.

Unfortunately, pure skepticism is impractical and an evolutionary dead-end. If you were skeptical about everything, you wouldn't be able to function. You'd second-guess every decision you made, every thing you thought you saw, anything you were told. Is the news really broadcasting the Presidential debate, or are they slyly editing it to make their preferred candidate sound better? Is it really safe to change lanes, or did you miss a car in the other lane somehow? Did you read what I just wrote accurately, or did you misread and so you should go back and re-read it to make sure? At some point you have to make the leap from 90%-99% certainty to assuming it's 100% just so you can make a decision and choose an action. That's why engineers tend to be more religious than scientists - engineers are forced to make design decisions in the face of incomplete data all the time, while scientists by the nature of their work are expressly forbidden from doing so. So engineers are more comfortable making that "leap of faith." But as long as you understand you're making that "leap of faith" for the purpose of making a timely decision, you're not into conspiracy theory territory yet. You only cross that line when you refuse to revisit your conclusion in the face of contrary evidence.

And no, conspiracy theorists are not always wrong. They were right about global warming. I'd estimate that probably a third to half the people who believe in global warming do so because they want it to be true for environmental protection reasons. The data had nothing to do with it aside from affirming a conclusion that they'd already reached and were going to stick to no matter what the data said. i.e. They are conspiracy theorists. In that respect I don't consider many global warming proponents to be any different from global warming deniers. The time just happened to match up with the hands of their broken clock. If it had turned out that the Earth was cooling and we needed to pump industrial quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere to forestall another ice age, they would've been the deniers, not the other way around.

tl;dr - Skepticism is better, but you need some conspiracy theory-like tendencies in order to function.

Those were the PAL codes, basically a safety. On top of that, you've got the two-man rule and the authorization codes (the ones the President carries), plus dozens of safeties against accidents. The PALs were really there to secure it when on loan to other countries - like the nukes positioned in Europe.

Yes, it was dumb. They've remedied that now. However, the British didn't even have that, and to this day there is no similar safety on British nuclear weapons.

Further, we can only hope that some other countries like China and India are being honest with the numbers they claim. The US and Russia may be completely outpaced and not know it.

That's the folly of the Cold War and the Cold Warrior mentality - WE MUST HAVE MORE THAN THE OTHER GUY. Weapons piled on weapons piled on weapons neither increases security nor improves the chances of "winning" a nuclear exchange. Once you have enough to dismember the Other Guy (or to at least put him in the national equivalent of an ICU), more weapons just means you have more weapons - you can only destroy him once no matter how many weapons you have. That's the essential philosophy of Minimal Deterrence.

Do you want high-risk open-heart surgery, with a fifteen-per-cent risk of dying during the operation, or would you rather continue as you are, with a fifty-per-cent chance you will be dead in two years?

Open-heart surgery, please. You can actually feel your heartbeat, and thinking there's a problem means every irregularity, real or imagined, is going to give you a start. This gets especially fun when you're trying to sleep because that, after all, involves heartbeat slowing down.