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Comment Re:Please debate William Lane Craig (Score 1) 1142

by jt_04 (#41819083) Attached to: Ask Richard Dawkins About Evolution, Religion, and Science Education
you've got his first premise all wrong, btw. it's not "everything has a cause...." or "anything humans can imagine must have a cause", it is "everything that begins to exist has a cause". there's a big difference. current scientific evidence shows the universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause. since time and space came into existence with the universe, the cause must be beyond time and space.

Comment Re:Answered already... (Score 1) 1142

by jt_04 (#41705445) Attached to: Ask Richard Dawkins About Evolution, Religion, and Science Education

No, he is saying religion is evil and since it is impossible to prove a negative the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim

It's possible to prove a negative. For example, I can prove that there is not a elephant in the room with me right now.

Religion is an evil that preys on the willfully ignorant. Once we outgrow religion only then will the human race truly advance at a more rapid pace.

You can't judge the truth of a viewpoint based on the behavior of its adherents. The issue is not "how much evil has been done by people in the name of religion", the issue is "which system of beliefs is true?". Atheism is simply another system of beliefs which should be judged against the evidence to determine its truthfulness.

Comment Re:Please debate William Lane Craig (Score 1) 1142

by jt_04 (#41704851) Attached to: Ask Richard Dawkins About Evolution, Religion, and Science Education
This is an extreme mischaracterization of william lane craig. can you point me to a representative sample of his debates on youtube where he "doesn't obey any of the rules" and "flaunts" it? Dawkins' continued avoidance of william lane craig just makes it look like he doesn't want to try to defend his arguments against the tough logical and scientific scrutiny that would result.

Comment I would never buy an HTC phone again b/c of Sense (Score 2) 209

by jt_04 (#41607307) Attached to: HTC Profits Drop By 79%
My wife had an HTC phone and I found the Sense UI to be terrible. It slowed down her phone because it was so resource hungry and most of the changes in Sense didn't really add any value, they were just flashy changes meant to impress people. I flashed cyanogenmod and she loved it. I love HTC's hardware, but would never buy one of the phones again unless they improve their awful UI.
Botnet

Submission + - Grum Botnet: Down One Month, No Impact on Spam (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: It's been over a month since spam-spewing Grum botnet has been shut down, but spam experts say there hasn't been a noticeable impact on global spam volume.

Symantec researchers at the time estimated that Grum was responsible for one-third of all spam being sent worldwide, and its takedown led to an immediate drop in global spam email volumes by as much as 15 to 20 percent.

However, the drop was only temporary. While Grum had an estimated hundred thousand zombies sending spam, the machines were likely blocked for sending emails too frequently, or wound up on IP blacklists, said Andrew Conway, Cloudmark researcher. IP filtering is fast and cheap, and is a good first line of defense against spam, Conway said. Grum spam was easy to blacklist, and despite its size, most spam messages from the botnet probably never reached user inboxes.

Considering that users never saw Grum-delivered spam to begin with, the lack of an impact is not surprising, security researcher Mary Landesman said.

"The 'Takedown' was ineffectual," Gunter Ollmann said, as it shut down servers but did nothing to stop the techniques the operators had used to infect victims and build the botnet in the first place, nor did it result in the arrests of the actual criminals.
Science

Submission + - Inflammatory response linked to autism. (nytimes.com)

Submitted by infodragon
infodragon writes: A few interesting quotes

"At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease."

"These findings are important for many reasons, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that they provide evidence of an abnormal, continuing biological process. That means that there is finally a therapeutic target for a disorder defined by behavioral criteria like social impairments, difficulty communicating and repetitive behaviors. "

"One large Danish study, which included nearly 700,000 births over a decade, found that a mother’s rheumatoid arthritis, a degenerative disease of the joints, elevated a child’s risk of autism by 80 percent. Her celiac disease, an inflammatory disease prompted by proteins in wheat and other grains, increased it 350 percent. Genetic studies tell a similar tale. Gene variants associated with autoimmune disease — genes of the immune system — also increase the risk of autism, especially when they occur in the mother. "

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