But I have accidentally OC'ed my PC and gotten a BSOD. What happens to humans when you do that?
You start agreeing with Rush Limbaugh / Shawn Hannity / Al Gore / Bill Maher. (Take your pick, according to your personal preference, and whom you wish to demonize...)
Interesting discussion! (Nonetheless, it's filled with mis-assumptions about Christian belief; moreover, it's pretty much a point-for-point rehash of Medieval Islamic Philsophy -- see, back then, Islamic philosophers were dealing with the implications of Ancient Greek philosophy, and had a hard time reconciling it with their belief in an omnipotent Allah. They, too, posited that, since God could do everything, that everything that happened wasn't really our own free will -- or even action -- but rather, just the act of a puppet.)
For example, one famous argument was that, since God was omnipotent, the idea that we actually act runs counter to that argument. Therefore, if we put a lit match up to some cotton, the resulting fire couldn't be anything that we caused, or else it would nullify God's omnipotence. Instead, there was just the illusion that the fire that we thought we initiated actually caused the fire in the cotton; rather, God simply put the fire there, ex nihilo, in order to keep up the illusion he created. You can see what this does to free will, and how it dovetails with your argument.
As another has noted in this thread, "God works through us" doesn't mean "God directs our actions"; rather, it simply means that we work, and in doing so -- out of our own volition -- we may do the will of God.
The implication is that, although God knows the result of the soccer game, he doesn't take any action to influence that outcome. He's outside of the space/time construct; therefore, for him, it's "preknowledge", although to us, it appears as "predestination".
Calvinists would disagree with this argument -- they would argue for strict predestination. However, to argue that this is what Christianity teaches -- or moreover, that this is what it implies -- is to make an overly broad and reaching assertion...
This is Slashdot; it is 2010-10-10.
Right -- we don't have a reason to get excited until 2020-20-20
Umm... when you go to a service station, you pay both for materials (new oil, plugs, filters) and labor. With the Geek Squad model, you get "materials" which are available for free otherwise... and you pay them $30 for labor? Hmm...
Here we were, blaming undergrads for those couches pulled off of porches and set ablaze after WVU football games... and all along, it was just spontaneous combustion as hot spots poked through the surface...!
no, no, no! 35 billion is exactly the appropriate number! Didn't you think security issues would be the downfall of this idea? Well... what better a way to get around the possibility of being attacked after buying gold... than to place one in every home in North America?!?!?!
So what's the point? Blame (ban?) the Segway?
Absolutely! And they should totally sue the pants off of whoever... umm... yeah.
A lot of funerals I've been to seem to treat it entirely as a chance to prattle on about God and Jesus
You went to a Catholic service, and they talked about God and Jesus? Huh... what a surprise! Who would've expected that?
The last funeral I went to was for my Gran, and it was a secular funeral. It was [i]all about[/i] a celebration of her life
Um... and at a secular funeral, what else could it possibly have been about?
In conclusion, get a clue.
The thing is, only one of those sides is supported by scientific consensus.
... and this consensus happens to be being provided by those who stand to gain by increased spending in climate science. If AGW predictions are untrue, then these same folks who are providing "consensus" take a serious hit in the wallet, and to their careers. (If this logic can be applied to the "big oil" lobby, why not equally to the scientific community? Are we so enamored of our priesthood of the scientific elite that we think they can do no wrong?)
"Climategate" is a lightning rod precisely because it purports to demonstrate that fears over the integrity of the scientists at the helm of the AGW doctrinal push are, in fact, warranted. Moreover, it provides an explanation of exactly why there is such a consensus, in the face of a science that still smacks more of chaos theory than of settled scientific conclusion -- and that explanation is that there is more "consensus" than "science" here...!
After all, you assumed the code (far from random if you took the time to look) was NOT used to make a graph on which the fortunes of whole economies may rise and fall.
So wait. Your standard is:
A) Find some piece of code that you know nothing of what it does, who made it, and what it was ever used for, if anything (i.e., college student assignment).
What's really funny about this "rebuttal" is that it's, essentially, the complaints aired by the maintenance programmer who had to cobble together these programs in order to update the data -- he couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do, or why it wasn't doing it, or where it fit into the grand scheme of things... but he did know that it was part of what had created the earlier "value-added" data set!
Moreover, his notes document source code file names, output statements, and bugs -- which are verifiable, if one takes the time to read through the code base -- that allow one to recognize the really sad state of affairs in that shop; in addition, his notes assert that his work was meant to produce an updated set of data. Therefore, we have a direct link between code, runs of that code, and the uses that output was meant to have. So no, this wasn't Joe Undergrad's implementation of a bubble sort that someone just happened to run across...
B) Assume that it is something on which "economies may rise and fall"?
Wow, what a standard. So if I found a random piece of code somewhere designed to calculate pi, that I had no clue where it came from or what it did, and there was a bug in it, I should conclude that the foundations of mathematics are bogus?
If "the foundations of mathematics" were strictly based on observational data and statistical analysis thereof... and if one who was responsible for the analysis/processing of that data were found to have kept notes showing what a complete cluster-fsck was made of this processing, then yeah, it'd be sufficient to show that, at the very least, the conclusions of the group(s) using this data were questionable at best!
The point was that to British ears it sounds like "scalps", since the context is concert tickets.
Although I'll give you that "touts" sounds like "scalps" to folks who don't speak proper American English...
Ticket issuers Ticketmaster and Veritix tout paperless tickets as a way to eliminate worries about lost, stolen, or counterfeit tickets, and to banish long will-call lines.
Note for the British English impaired - a tout is what you on the other side of the pond call a scalper.
Soooo... "Ticketmaster scalps paperless tickets"? Umm... ever hear of a thing called "context"? It's what helps a person decide between various meanings of a word. (Which, in this case, means "promote" or "recommend"...)
How will the Infinite Improbability Drive work now? It depended on Brownian motion. Now probability can never come off 1:1 and it'll never work!
On the other hand, perhaps now that extra-terrestrial nice cup of tea is possible...
#7 says:
Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain over- simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined
In other words, as has been noted, the numbers from the tree rings don't match the numbers from the stations over a given period of time. (As it turns out, in this period of time, the tree rings show a markedly lower temperature than their data sets of instrument readings show.) The issue isn't whether they've "highlighted this issue" in "presentations of this work" -- they have; they're more than willing to say "yeah, the tree rings don't support global warming trends over period of time X". The issue is that they've unceremoniously dumped these tree ring data from their data sets, for no apparent better reason than that it doesn't fit their preconceived conclusions! That's what you should be looking into! Not whether they say "tree ring data and instrument data diverge", but whether they're justified in dumping the data that diverges from their pet theories!!!
Damn... I really need to read through this whole thing before commenting. Oh, hell...
Anyway, #2 continues:
The Panel worked by examining representative publications by members of the Unit and subsequently by making two visits to the University and interviewing and questioning members of the Unit. Not all the panel were present on both occasions but two members were present on both occasions to maintain continuity. About fifteen person/days were spent at the University discussing the Unit’s work.
Seven people were on the panel. Two were there on both days, implying that the other five were only there once. That's nine people-visits. fifteen person/days = 15 * 8 person-hours.
120 person-hours / 9 person-visits = 40/3 hours/visit.
Wait -- WTF? Given the volume of data, the amount of research publications, the type and severity of allegations against them... the panel members spent an average of only 3 hours each , looking into this issue? Oh, yeah, you're really gonna find the truth in that amount of time! Hell, that's barely enough for introductions, small talk about the state of your research, and having a donut and cup a coffee!
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
