No, my argument is that creationism isn't in the top 5 theories of abiogenesis.

And along the way, I didn't say Judaism is not important. I pointed out that people erroneously believe it's "big". You know, when they call it one of the "big 3".

It's about as reasonable as trying to argue that there are more Buddhists(376 million) than there are Baptists (100 million), Lutherans (75 million), or Methodists (75 million). It also about as reasonable as calling Judaism a branch/sect/offshoot of the Cannaanite's religion. (The dudes with Yahweh)

Yeah, that's kind of my point. The worldview of a lot of people out there doesn't jive with reality.

You uh... realize that the alternative to sideing with the EU is being eaten by Russia again?
You don't think that Russia has any ability to sway politics and policy in Ukraine?

Have you been listening to nothing but Russian news? Are they still claiming it's a few thousand gay protestors?

They could kick out Yanukovitch and show the future leaders that they have to respect the rights of their citizens.

They could die.

//The way someone says something is often just as important as what they said.
Yo homie, der ain't no shit as fly as the motherfuckin' STYLE. When you step up you gotta step with some flair.

//It's called subtext
This phenomena has been long been studied in the field of literature as a method of imparting implied meaning surrounding a character, book, movie, play, etc, without explicitly stating the intended message. See also: Subtext.

//Like whistling dixey or a fist-bump, it's a subtle political message
(I can't actually think of a different tone to write this one out in, so you'll just have to make up your own. #1 Write out a statement. #2 Think of a stereotype. #3 think about how they would convey that message. )

//Bitch
mmmmm'k, Boy?

Agree completely. This is being helped along by the erosion of the true middle class. Now it is the "Poor" vs. "So poor they can't cannot even afford to eat."

Both categories suck to be in, and both are hard to climb out of. People that deny class warfare are simply ignorant of the situation, willfully or otherwise.

I can see how that could sound confusing. I meant that to mean that the propaganda wing of the republican party would want to block organizations that are doing real research like NOAA.

Cars? Depending on the resolution (and they are using nanoparticles, while film used grains of silver) we're looking towards having holographic computer displays in the near (?) future.

The way a hologram (that uses film) works is, you take a laser and a dark room and unexposed film. IIRC (and it's been almost four decades since I took that class) you split the beam, and illuminate the film with one half of the beam (focused IIRC) and the subject with the other.

When you develop the film there's nothing recognizable on it at all, just refraction patterns. Shine a laser at it and it changes to a grainy 3D, but a true 3d. Focus your eye at the foreground and the background gets fuzzy, move from side to side and see different views.

A holographic computer display would need a freakishly high resolution LCD panel backlit by three lasers, each tuned to a primary color. Maybe these silver nanoparticles are the ticket?

Crap, I could have saved a lot of writing with a link to wikipedia, which is most likely more accurate and surely more detailed. Hell, google if you're interested.

Yes, I agree that every distro of Linux I've tried was incredibly easy to install (and every version of Windows a PITA), but my point is that Joe is ignorant. You can't install something you've never heard of, and Joe's never heard of Linux or has a clue what an "operating system" or a "botnet" is. If he's heard of Linux he probably sees it as "some kind of hacker thing, my buddy reset my XP admin password for me with it."

Right, but decoding is just the translation from one symbology into another, it doesn't create a semantic relationship

When I read a novel I don't hear the words in my head or even notice them on the paper. I see, hear, and feel the characters and what they do and say. The abstract symbols on the paper are decoded to concrete events and ideas.

only humans will be able to give the effect of the loop final meaning. All the program can do is keep juggling symbols back and forth according to what can be reduced to automatic production rules.

That's because humans can read and computers can't. Even a text to speech program can't read, it can only juggle the written symbols and the auditory symbols. A human can not only read the code, a human can understand out what that code does when it runs. A computer can't.

Kurzweil is a damned fine engineer, but he doesn't have a clue about the brain. He's obviously never heard of the Chinese Room (it appears you in fact have).

People like him who think computers will be sentient are dangerous.

It was a movie, written by two guys who learned everything they know about computers from AKIRA and 2001 A Space Odyssey

True, it was only an illustration. But think of an incredibly simple program, like an analog clock on your computer screen. Depending on the language and your expertise you could little more than glance at it and imagine the clock it would draw. When you write a program you certainly have to envision what the output will be.

And HAL is bothersome because HAL isn't, in fact, any more sentient than Watson. It's just a Chinese room that does a good job of fooling a sentient being that it is, when it isn't. People are going to push for equal rights for computers... Frank Herbert touched on this in Dune, when "intelligent machines" were used by unscrupulous men to enslave others (leading to the jihad and outlawing of intelligent machines).

They were calling computers "electronic brains" when a building-sized machine was less powerful than a musical Hallmark card. It worries me, because they're not brains. They're tools and toys.

It's happened to me a few times but never hurt my karma.

From the Illinois Times:

Flip a coin and pick a side. Repeat 50 times. Chances are, youâ(TM)ll guess the coin toss more often than drug-sniffing police dogs in Springfield found contraband during traffic stops in 2012.
        Traffic stop data reported by the Springfield Police Department shows the police found contraband in 25 percent of searches prompted by a drug dogâ(TM)s alert. By comparison, guessing a coin toss has a theoretical 50 percent chance of being correct. Despite a 2011 state law that mandated training for drug-sniffing police dogs, Springfieldâ(TM)s canines continue to come up empty in most searches. One Springfield defense attorney believes the dogs represent an erosion of freedom, but the police who work with the dogs say the numbers donâ(TM)t tell the whole story.
        According to data collected from the Springfield Police Department by the Illinois Department of Transportation, Springfield police searched 51 vehicles following alerts from drug-sniffing dogs in 2012. The officers found contraband in only 13 of those searches, a hit rate of just 25 percent. Before 2012, state law didnâ(TM)t mandate IDOT to collect statistics on drug-sniff searches from police agencies, so data from prior years may be inconsistent and may not contain every use of drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops. Still, the searches that were reported by the Springfield Police Department for past years show the hit rate has never reached 40 percent, and is often much lower.