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Comment Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting (Score 1) 915

.. and, in particular, god is not falsifiable.

And that was precisely my point; your original question asked the OP to test God as an hypothesis, which you recognize is absurd.

God is an axiom, exactly like the idea that science can work at all. You can collect evidence supporting them, but not disproving them.

Comment Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting (Score 1) 915

What? You are assuming science and religion are the same kinds of things.

Not exactly. I'm assuming "the belief that science can describe an objective, external world" and "the belief that an objective, external world exists at all" are the same kind of "the belief that God exist".

True, science is a method to study the external world; but you can also see religion as a method to study emotions and human relations. You can use religion to make assertions about reality in the same way that you can use science to make moral judgements - which is, by stretching the method outside of their area of validity.

Being beliefs, neither can be proven nor disproven merely by logic alone; beliefs are ultimately based on emotion, not reason. In that level, yes, they're the same kind of thing. I may believe that science is a better method to learn about existence, and I may even believe that it's incompatible with religion, but I can't prove it scientifically; that would be an infinite recursion.

Comment Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting (Score 1) 915

Solipsism. We're talking metaphysics here, you're not even playing the right game.

Do you realize that science relies on logic, logic relies on sets of axioms, and axioms can't be disproved by empirical evidence, only by inconsistencies in the formal system? The existence of $DEITY$ can't be proven nor disproven by empiric data, because it's a logically consistent system. How would you disprove that the COBE prediction is proof of the Will of God?

(FYI I'm an atheist, but in my day I did my duty learning a bit about philosophy of science. I know science's limits, and while I know where my axioms lay, I recognize what happens when you change your axioms starting from a different belief system).

Comment Re:Can't agree (Score 1) 384

The only thing stopping people from using LaTeX for business documents is the lack of template libraries

Which proves my point. Building new LaTeX templates from scratch is nightmarishly difficult, so "just having someone to write them up" is something only 0.001 companies in the world could afford.

Meanwhile, having a graphics designer to build a few templates in MS Word is quite straightforward, so the in-house locked-down template approach is much more practical.

KDE

Submission + - KDE Akademy and Qt Contributor Summit Join Forces (kde.org)

jrepin writes: "In July 2013, Akademy — the KDE community summit — will host the Qt Contributor Summit (QtCS) in Bilbao, Spain. QtCS is THE gathering of the Qt Project contributor community. It will take place July 15th and 16th in the middle of the KDE Akademy conference week (13-19 July). By co-hosting, KDE and the Qt Project will increase their existing collaboration even further. Holding their annual conferences at the same time and the same place will foster interaction, knowledge transfer and technical progress.

More than 500 upstream and downstream developers will participate in this combined event. This includes key maintainers and top contributors of both projects. The conference will cover many areas of computing, ranging from core library functionality in Qt and KDE to popular user applications used by hundreds of millions of users, integrated with cloud services. All this takes place in a highly productive atmosphere where we combine forces, exchange knowledge, and meet new contributors."

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