There's a very significant difference between accurate prediction of the outcome of a random variable vs. measuring the statistical properties of said random variable.

Try this analogy to help you understand this...

Let's play a simple game, called "Pick a Marble". You reach into a bag and pick a marble.

Today, we'll play with the following conditions... There are 1000 marbles in that bag. 100 of those are red. 900 of those are white. I'm going to "predict" that your marble is white. It ought to pretty clear that I'll be correct 90% of the time.

Now, let's play every day. But we'll swap a white marble for red each day. It should be clear enough that in a couple of years I my predictions will change because the nature of the random variable changes. After two years, I'll say your choice will be red and I'll be right more often than wrong.

Weather (i.e. temps two months from now) is far, FAR more difficult than this trivial game. With the most powerful computers imaginable, we cannot predict the outcome of billiard balls past a small number of collisions because the uncertainties in our measurements compound so much over each successive, iterative calculation. Trying to predict weather is far more difficult than that. Even if we had sensors giving us temp, wind speed/direction, humidity, particulates, etc., at every point one-foot apart in a 3D grid of our entire atmosphere, we STILL would not be able to predict WEATHER accurately past about a week... to say nothing of two months.

HOWEVER, it's far easier to treat the weather as a random variable and categorize the statistical nature of such. In laymen's terms, you may not be able to predict the temperature on Christmas Day six months in advance. But you can be fairly confident in suggesting a range.

THIS is why it's fairly straightforward to "predict" the temp (CLIMATE, not WEATHER) 100 years from now while not being able to predict the temp (WEATHER, not CLIMATE) two months hence. And like the changing distribution of red/white marbles, what feeds into the calculations of determining climate is known to be changing over time.

And, though it's a bit harder to understand, this is also why Climate Change doesn't lead to even temp increases all across the planet. The extra energy in the system is monkeying with things a lot turning these nice Guassian variables into weirdness which results in more frequent extremes.

Umm... speaking of absolutes...

A theory doesn't often get proven "completely wrong". Much more often it gets replaced with something that works better in fringe cases. For many practical purposes, the theory that the world is flat works just fine. It won't work for large distances, of course. But quite often I really don't need to worry too much that a triangle on a sphere actually summing up to more than 180 degrees. Again, Newtonian physics works just fine, indeed very well, for many purposes. It wasn't/isn't "completely wrong" as much as it isn't accurate for certain cases. Even if we ever rule out either General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics, both will still be incredibly powerful tools in their respective domain.

To suggest we'll wake up one day and find Evolution is "completely wrong" is a bit silly. First of all, "Evolution" here is an umbrella covering many theories. Second, anything that replaces it will have to address/answer all of the same currently available data. It's much more likely that whatever may replace it will be a superset of it (eg. the recent work on viewing Abiogenisis as a subset of a larger scheme of complex systems) or a refinement.

And especially in the context of the Evolution vs. Creation debate, we're not going to find out that Evolution is "wrong" therefore Creation must be right. Not at all. Again, whatever would replace Evolution would look a lot like it. And Creationists have yet to put forward anything that would function as a Scientific Theory that could address currently available data.

In order to properly appreciate the Evolution vs. Creation debate, you need to step back... way back.

You need to realize this is NOT truly (or solely) a debate about or within Science. If you cannot or will not believe this is fundamentally a war over mindshare directly stimulated by and fostered by religious worldviews, you're not going to be able to see past the propaganda techniques often used.

The suggestion that one can contrast the "Law" of Gravity vs. the Theory of Evolution is only useful in preaching to the choir. It demonstrates an incredible depth of ignorance of Science in general and specifically philosophy of Science. It will not "win" over an "Evolutionist" because it's inherently and fundamentally false in their eyes.

There are many ways Creationists embarrass themselves by listening to themselves tell each other that somehow they know more about Science than Scientists.

The danger isn't so much what they'll end up believing.

In all honesty, nobody needs to BELIEVE Common Descent. They need to UNDERSTAND it. It quite literally is the underpinning of most of modern biology.

The real danger here isn't the confusion over Biology or the danger of blurring the lines between Church and State. No, the real problem is that the only way folk can conflate Evolutionary Theories with "alternatives" is to ACTIVELY teach against basic skills of Critical Thinking. This is further compounded by purposeful distortion of redefinition of Science and the Scientific Method.

These practices ripple out to all fields of Science and set yet another generation up to be complete suckers for marketing, propaganda and political manipulation.

Nah. You should not take your individual experience and extrapolate it onto all Christian experience throughout time, even despite the Catholic church's history.

As others have stated, there were Jewish scholars, probably prior to Jesus even and definitely prior to the Enlightenment, who believed the Earth was millions of years old. And there has been and will be quite a variety amongst Christian scholars.

I am curious regarding your information. Got source?

Last I'd heard, the expected sum of lawsuits, settlements, fines, etc. would be WELL over $100mil (as in several times that). Apparently, for reference, a similar breach, TJ Maxx, ended up being closer to $200mil.

Furthermore, it seems Target was self-insured for this. So it isn't quite correct to think they will glibly had this bill to an insurer - they ARE their own insurer.

I have a question regarding this idea that probably has a simple answer.

If we have these bubbles popping up/out of the surrounding eternally inflating multiverse, and we're supposedly in one of these bubbles, then our bubble must have edges relative to the surrounding geometry of the multiverse. We're causally separated as long as the speed of light is so much less than the ever increasing pace of surrounding inflation. Any light/information we generate may as well fall off a cliff once it passes this edge. However, wouldn't the complete absence of anything coming back from this edge make it quite noticeable? If so, what constraints are there which would make it (im)probable that our light-cone, or observable universe, is nowhere near these edges? I mean, we don't have a patch of the sky where the CMB is non-existent. What gives?

Umm... I'm not entirely certain what your definition of "human" or "humanity" might be.

The last major eruption at 640k years back would predate what is usually used as the timeframe of the start of Homo Sapiens as a species (500k years ago).

Of course, you are correct whatever was around in the Homo genus did indeed lack any of our modern tech.

Good Science tends to be rather aware of its limitations.

Bad Science Journalism tends towards dogmatic assertions of absolutism just as much as many religious folk.

"Error bars", "p-values", "uncertainty values/ranges" are the norm in Science, not the exception.

Here you're juxtaposing two separate issues. First "the science is settled" appears to be a remark or jab at the idea that the overwhelming consensus among relevant Scientists and relevant peer-reviewed studies is that global average temps are increasing and that human activity has played a measurable, significant part of that. Second, the projections for how much temp increase by 2100 and 2200 are not exact at all. They're given as a range with a corresponding uncertainty. Supposedly, this latest study/model serves to narrow that range. It's just like the difference between someone telling you it will snow tomorrow and you'll get between 1 and 47 inches vs. another person saying between 4 to 5 inches. Both predictions are somewhat uncertain but one is less so.

I don't believe we need to ponder conspiracy theories to understand why the top executive in any government would be rather hesitant to constrain the reach of his spymaster(s).

Indeed, I would consider it bizarrely foolish to expect any President to gleefully rein in the long arm of the NSA. Any top executive simply depends on information (real or otherwise) in order to make their decisions. Granted, sometimes (most times?) it appears they prefer to use/create information to provide backing to decisions already made. But in any case, they NEED intel. Everyone spies. Let me repeat that. ALL governments with the resources to do so will employ people to do intelligence gathering, including (or especially) information that others would prefer remain private or hidden.

An opportunistic politician may decry the NSA in order ride populism into office. But once they're actually doing the work of the top executive, they will change their tune.

If anything is going to change here it would seem more appropriate to look to the Judicial branch (which has been mixed lately) or the Legislative (which would likely require a lot more public focus/support).

Here, Here!!

I started communicating this idea to the rugrats early on. Namely, that at age of emancipation, not only are they free to go, they will be booted out pending only a couple of rather explicit exceptions: 1) clear medical/psychological needs; 2) progression towards college degree.

Different cultures work differently. In many cultures it is indeed the norm for the children to stay at home until they are married - and this seems to be later and later for recent generations. I am concerned that when mine are old enough it really may be quite tough economically to head out. But I managed with a variety of single roommates during and after college. I imagine they can do the same.

It may seem heartless to toss the young-uns out. But kids seem to gain responsibility very quickly when they have to. And I always wonder how these very late bloomers handle things when/if their parents pass on before they've every managed on their own.

As a Christian, I would strongly prefer to have NO Politics in my Religion and NO Religion in my Politics. And I CERTAINLY do not appreciate when others attempt to judge my civic or spiritual status based on my religious or political views.

I understand fully that one's personal political views may be strongly influenced by their personal religious views. How could this not be so? Furthermore, in any Democracy I would somewhat expect to see majority views end up as policy. But politics has become nauseatingly divisive in the US in the last few decades. Christians should put that in check. Last major election cycle, our lead minister chastised our church overall to remind us we should not at all let these divisions of men (politics) create ill will or disharmony among those in the church.

Regarding this current fracas, I prefer the solution that involves removing the Ten Commandments monument. If this silly effort by the Satanists results in such, I will be pleased.

I desire complete separation of Church and State. I have NO patience or tolerance of efforts/goals/policies that attempt to chip away at this. I do not want any church trying to control how Science is taught in the schools. But even more importantly, I do not want the Government telling me how to practice Christianity. And if you don't understand the danger of that, you need to brush up on your History.

The entirely surreal thing is that in the first century or so of Christianity, the Romans basically viewed Christians as Atheists. If you're Polytheistic with many gods, Monotheists are preciously close to Atheists in your view. The idea is one is really not too far from zero.

Even more similar, is that Roman religion and Roman civic/business life were rather heavily intertwined. So eschewing one was interpreted as a slight against the other. Christians were often somewhat outcast because they wouldn't participate in the social/civic/business norms of Roman sacrifices, etc. So most certainly back then Christians were viewed as "not REAL Romans" because of this.

A gross, high-level summary would be that jDownloader automates "interesting" data file extraction and retention from the World Wide Web. In essence, a file ripper from websites. But it automates a lot of the "nonsense" you have to go through (click-thru this, wait for that timer, etc., etc.). It's this automation that makes this advantageous over wget, for example.

But, there are TONS of websites that all work slightly differently. So there are literally hundreds or thousands of modules customized for a slew of different websites.

Almost certainly this offending code is in one of these specific modules. The article/summary states "3rd party". It might be more appropriate to think of it is as User-Community provided. The main developers maintain the base code and a host of players are creating/adding the modules.

Not sure how this actually affects the statistics these days...

But HOW it causes discrepancies is incredibly straightforward.

The issue is not counting lives at all if they don't reach a particular point. If country A and B have identical birth rates and identical death rates (not just rates - the full blown distributions of such, etc.) but country A counts lives from birth and country B starts lives from 3 weeks after birth, this means country B has completely removed from consideration every infant that died prior to age 3 weeks. You can imagine this would lead to different "life expectancies".

Indeed, this works in different ways. This is one reason the ancient world had life expectancies that were really low and yet had quite a few old geezers around. The fact was that it was HARD to live to ten. But for those who did, living as long as fold do today wasn't so strange.