Funny that when I upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the video stopped working, as did the accelerometer, and the bluetooth controller. Fixing the drivers required completely uninstalling all video drivers and reinstalling them. Even now, I've been unable to upgrade the video drivers in that computer past that one version I have working because new drivers cause it to BSOD.

And then, masochist that I am, I upgraded my desktop computer. The sound didn't work anymore. Popped the sound card out and plugged it into my Linux desktop. Wouldn't you know, it worked fine. Reinstalled the driver. No go. Some people claim it's a problem with SoundBlaster sound card drivers on a machine that has a flash hard drive. But apparently it worked fine in Windows 7. I ended up having to use the built-in sound on that computer.

None of this is to say that Linux is perfect and Windows is horrible. All in all, I've had more weird-ass hardware problems on Linux. But Windows is definitely not the panacea you make it out to be. I remember even as far back as upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP, the video card I had at the time didn't work at all on the new OS. There's a reason Microsoft publishes tools for checking if new versions of Windows will work with your hardware and software. It's because their shit stinks, too.

Basic logic fail. Go look up the fallacy, "Denying the antecedent."

pendantically childish

I don't know if that was intentional, but I choose to believe it was for the hilarity.

It's an organization dedicated to subverting the law and what made you not trust them was an absurd prank about moving their servers to North Korea?

Aside from the plethora of religions with NO deity, Christianity (one of the biggest religions) see the problem as being oneself-- that is, the responsibility is being shifted nowhere but inward.

You say he's the ignorant one? Tell me again who, in Christianity, forgives sins? The person who was the victim of whatever sin was committed? No?

Who is it who "paid for all our sins"? That was me, I guess? My responsibility again?

And by what means is it that I'm saved? Salvation is through the self, right? No?

Where is this responsibility, again? Perhaps you might want to look into the difference between responsibility and submission. All Christianity teaches is that you can do nothing by yourself and you have to rely on Jesus for everything - forgiveness, salvation, knowledge. It is the opposite of taking responsibility. Perhaps if you weren't so steeped in your own bullshit, you'd understand that.

Scientology is unlike accepted religions because its core practices seem intended not to stifle sociopathic behavior, but to exacerbate it.

You seem to give an awful lot of credit to established religion. Almost like most of them don't encourage poor treatment of women, persecution of gays, owning of slaves, and so on. Intended to stifle sociopathic behavior, my ass.

Yeah, except that when it comes to truly precise measurements in the imperial system, they typically end up using thousandths of an inch, so it still ends up being base 10.

None of this seems like a particularly good argument to for a system of measurement. The occasional time when 32nds of an inch is useful are far outweighed by the ease of other conversions.

Whether your conclusion is correct has nothing to do with whether you're a quack. It could very well be that acupuncture helps, but that doesn't make Qi a real thing. It could be that cold fusion is possible, but that doesn't mean that the guys who claimed to do it last time were right. Many things could be, and what makes one a quack is how you get to your answers, not whether you got to the right answer. Put another way, homeopaths aren't quacks just because it's possible to cure many of the diseases they treat. They're quacks because the methods they use to treat those diseases have no proven efficacy but they continue to believe in them.

I see you can copy and paste.

"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."

Who says science has to be understandable to an "untrained outsider?" Just because something requires specialized knowledge to do successfully doesn't make it wrong or biased.

But for many scientists, this is a cruel myth. They know from bitter experience that disagreeing with the dominant view is dangerous - especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups.

I've heard this before from creationists when they claim that scientists who disagree with them are ostracized. This has generally been debunked in this particular case. They are fired for other reasons. Creationists scientists generally are incompetent biologists. Who woulda thought? Maybe that's not what's going on here, but claims of scientists being silenced for working outside the box are a common cry by those who really just want to promote their own pseudoscience. Also, the site you link to doesn't exist anymore, so it's hard to get more info. Perhaps it's time to update your copy and paste bin?

In any case, it's also hard to believe this is true in general when nobel prizes are given to scientists who manage to come up with groundbreaking new ideas that are outside the norm. While some governments and corporations do try to suppress science (e.g. even Canada last year was guilty of this), I've not seen actual scientists doing it. And even it's not an indictment of the scientific method, but rather those who practice it.

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."

And that article goes on to say how the medical community has been very interested in what this Ioannidis has to say and he's quite well published. So what does that tell you about these scientists who want to suppress things?

Now, all that said, you raise some valid points. When money and science go together hand in hand, it's easy to bias results, even with the most well meaning scientists. The pressure to publish can do so as well, and so can selective publication that we see today. Basically, what you can do as a layman is to trust the consensus of scientists and be wary of new drugs and procedures until medical scientists have had time to fully appreciate all the consequences of them.

None of this contradicts anything I've said above, though. I realize you were just tacking this onto what the other guy who attacked some bizarre strawman of my argument said. Getting back to vaccines, the science for vaccines is well established, and we know they're safe and effective. So your points about politics and money skewing science, while interesting and generally worrisome, have little to do with the present discussion.

Wow, that's some industrial grade ignorance. Let me try to correct some of it.

So are you now making the claim that medical science has never been wrong?

See cross thread where I point out that all knowledge is provisional. If you get your news from pop science writers, or you read every paper as if it's been handed down by god on stone tablets, then you're going to be wrong a lot of the time. Stick with the scientific consensus and you're in a much better position.

How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_misuse [wikipedia.org] or how about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide [wikipedia.org] ? Just because a drug is effective doesn't make its application or use for a particular purpose correct. And yes, vaccines are drugs.

And who, exactly, was it that figured out that Thalidomide was unsafe, and that antibiotic overuse leads to resistant strains of bacteria? Not the scientists, right? That was divined by new-age thinkers? Or the anti-vaxxers?

And like all drugs big pharma has an interest in seeing as much use (=sales) of those drugs as it possibly can. In the case of Thalidomide it took years for the effects to be revealed then many more to be corrected.

You realize that Thalidomide was never allowed to be sold in the United States by the FDA specifically because it did not have enough scientific evidence behind it proving it was safe?

Meanwhile I don't see you calling the doctors who applied it as directed or the pharma company pushing it "killers with blood on their hands" like is being said here about those that choose to disbelieve a particular claim.

This style of argumentation is very common on Slashdot. Your position is weak, so you pretend I've taken positions I haven't. I've said nothing about thalidomide up to this point, so please don't make shit up.

But since we're on the topic. I'd call any doctor that pushed thalidomide after the science was known to be directly responsible for the effects of having recommended it, even more so than Jenny McCarthy, since doctors are in a much more trusted position than Jenny McCarthy. That's the position the anti-vaxxers find themselves in today. Their conclusions have been shown conclusively to be incorrect, dangerous, and based on fraud. And yet they continue to push their agenda. This would be like doctors trying to prescribe Thalidomide today.

Also, the Thalidomide topic is much more complex than this. At the time, the regulatory framework simply wasn't in place. Did doctors jump the gun prescribing Thalidomide? Perhaps. And perhaps they should have read more into the studies and questioned more things about it. Some did, in fact. That's exactly why the FDA didn't approve it. But can we expect all doctors to do that? These days, the FDA is meant to serve this role, so doctors can rely on the FDA to ensure drugs are safe, but at the time, Thalidomide was really the first high profile example that showed that government regulation was capable of preventing these sorts of problems.

Skepticism of scientific claims is a good thing. It forces those making those claims to look deeper into them. Not too long ago it was scientifically accepted that the Earth was the center of the universe. It took skeptics and a large amount of time to disprove that claim.

Again, who was it who disproved that claim? Early scientists, obviously. And then the antiscience community railed against it for decades, if not centuries. Science makes progress with more science, not by saying, "Hey, I'm going to reject these conclusions because I don't like them." We have never made progress by choosing to believe what we prefer to believe over what the data tell us is true. Even Einstein in his famous "God does not play dice with the universe" falls victim to preferring what he wanted to be true aesthetically about the universe over what the data were telling us.

This false equivalence is common among laymen, however, who wish to present themselves as sophisticated through cynicism. Their hue and cry is that some science has been proven wrong in the past, so all science is potentially suspect. Nevermind that science is what proves science wrong and this is exactly how it is supposed to work.

The reason that the earth was considered to be the center of the world was because there were data based on star and planet movements that suggested it was. When Copernicus came up with the heliocentric version of the solar system, it actually explained some data less well than the earth-centric version because elliptical orbits were not yet known. It wasn't until Newton that we really understood how orbital mechanics work. Does this mean that Copernicus was wrong or that the people before? Not really. Their data were correct, and they were making the best decisions they could with that data. The data still haven't changed and new theories have simply fit that same data (and new data besides) better than before.

And this is how science works. We get closer to the truth the more we investigate. Newtonian mechanics weren't thrown out with relativity. Instead, they were refined. Planets didn't suddenly start falling into the sun because gravity had changed. The data that Newton based his conclusions on were still valid when Einstein figured out his theories, and we knew that any replacement for Newton's laws had to very closely match with what Newton said. The currently known things constrain the set of explanations to the point that even big revolutions in scientific thinking are not going to significantly change the predictive power of the models at this point.

Put another way, no theory of gravity is going to tell us that apples fall up from a tree. No theory of medicine is going to ignore the immune system. No biological theory is going to overturn the fact that we have all descended from a common ancestor. And we can be almost equally confident at this point that there's no chance that vaccines cause autism on the scale that Jenny McCarthy and her ilk claim they do.

Yeah, those you listed are basically opinions and not really anti-science or science.

These are opinions that are in direct conflict with well established scientific knowledge and they aren't antiscience? Um, right. The article makes clear that polemics such as the anti-vaxxer crap count as antiscience. As a description of what antiscience is, it's the closest I've seen to what they mean and what others mean by it, and what I mean when I use the term. I frankly don't care if you define the term some other way. It's what the article means, it's what I mean, people generally understand it, and that's all that matters.

It's not a rejection of science

Of course it's a rejection of science. A small piece of it, but it is a rejection nonetheless.

but an acceptance or denial to do anything about it based on something they deem more important

One might argue that if they deem this so important, they might bother to try to figure out what the facts are.

Could you imagine the state of science if no one was ever skeptical of the science put in front of them and never redid the testing or validated the numbers or whatever to see if it was accurate.

That's one of the stranger things you've said. In what world does science lack skepticism? Skepticism is built into science. The entire scientific method is about attempting to disprove things. You never prove anything in science - you just fail to disprove it. All knowledge is provisional. If you want to be educated, read some Carl Sagan. He goes on about the two-pronged approach of openness and skepticism needed to be a good scientist. You need openness to generate and consider novel hypotheses, but then you need skepticism to design good experiments to test them. Scientists generally aren't the kinds of people who need to be reminded to be skeptics.

The article also goes on to list many examples of anti-science. While not calling out anti-vaxxers explicitly, it does list some very similar antiscience beliefs:

Primary among the latter are the polemics about embryonic stem cell research, evolutionary theory[21] and modern cosmology teaching in high schools, contraception, and environmental issues related to global warming[22][23] and energy crisis.

Again, it's how people use the term - i.e. to reject well established scientific knowledge. You are welcome to believe what you want about the term, but at this point, I can only assume you're being deliberately obtuse now that you have been informed what people really mean by it when they use it.

Adults don't resort to calling people names because they can't make a case for their position.

Which position do you claim is unjustified? And what names have I called you, exactly?

No, she isn't. I agree, she's stupid and useless

Let me ask you something. If you think what you say is so unimportant, why is free speech so important to protect? Either speech is important or it's not. You can't have it both ways. This is where the childishness comes in. You want to be able to say what you want and not have to worry about the consequences. Adults take responsibility for their actions, including their own words. People who don't take responsibility for their actions are children.

In fact, this is getting absurd. It is obvious to all but the most idiotic that speech has implications and you are responsible for it. The law recognizes this. There are libel laws precisely because speech can be damaging and because you are responsible for what you say. The people who spread misinformation about vaccines are responsible for the results of spreading that misinformation. If you disagree, I'm sorry, but you're just wrong.

I never said vaccines don't work. They do work, most of the time.

You called them half-assed. What does that mean, exactly, if it you say they work? Make up your bloody mind.

They aren't abused yet, but they will be soon. It's too easy a vector with today's advances in micro sized technology.

More unjustified bullshit. If you pull any more of this shit out of your ass, you're going to be a qualified proctologist.

Your username is apt. You may attempt to redefine what antiscience means just by saying what the individual components mean and you can pretend that other people care about your definition, too. But that's not how English works and nobody gives a shit what your definition of the word is if it doesn't match with how it's used. I think this thread is basically over. I'll go argue with someone smarter.

well because people who think like you do are often the ones demanding that the law should force artificial 'responsibility' for speech instead of holding the people who took the action accountable instead.

Speak for your own bloody self. I think people who think like I do are called "adults".

speech is just words. Action is different. jenny mccarthy doesn't kill kids with her words.

She sure as hell is responsible. Maybe not as responsible as the parents who refuse to vaccinate, but she's still responsible for lying to people and misleading them.

guardians not giving some kids vaccines may cause some to die. Then again, giving them half baked vaccines shoved out the door by big pharma can also kill. If you want to blame mccarthy for it, then you also have to blame the relevant state agencies and big pharma.

Again, what in the fuck are you talking about? There's nothing wrong with the current vaccines. They work and complaining about "big pharma" is just so much bullshit. Or did you have some actual scientific data behind your paranoia?