DonRamsay

I'm not a fan of climate change theory. I can think of many reasons to argue against it. But, when the preponderance of scientific understanding says it is likely, it is the best advice we have and can be ignored only by those who do not wish to see. Climate science may turn out to be wrong and it may be a few hundred years before it can be proven true or false but for now, it is the best advice available. It is a bit like particle physics, I don't really understand it, I don't really like what it says but I accept that it is based on sound logic, peer reviewed and is the best information that we can have in 2014. I feel I'm in good company to the extent that Einstein didn't like it either but at least he understood it.

Again, Brian Cox said that there are speculative theories that there are multiple universes and that in each universe the speed of light and gravity may have different values from the universes we know. Science is the literal opposite of dogma. Dogma is for those who crave certainty and will sacrifice intelligent reason to attain it.

Old K, I have trouble taking anyone seriously who turns up in bare feet and a suit. That just put my b/s radar on full power but has nothing to do with an analysis of what he is propounding. His main thesis that he repeated many times is to me completely false and based on claim of fact that cannot be sustained. He says that most educated people believe in the ten dogmas of Science and yet I can't think of a single scientist worthy of the title who would accept that. If any scientist thought anything was fixed in the universe for all time, we would never had made the progress that has been made. Einstein is a classic case. Totally original thinking that couldn't be validated until decades after he proposed his theories. I heard Professor Brian Cox (Manchester U) say, just a couple of days ago, that Science is a a discipline that freely admits its own fallibility. It is only the dogmatic who claim infallibility based on zero credible evidence. It is the dogmatic who go looking for "facts" that fit their ideology whereas Science looks at the evidence and draws logical conclusions. Science, by definitions, is always open to new ideas. Over the millennia, science has frequently got it wrong but at any time you want to consider, it had the best idea that man could come up with at the time based on evidence and peer review. Often Science has been severely constrained by religious dogma. And the Intelligent Design b/s is another feeble attempt to deny science in favour of dogma. It is in only our lifetime that the Catholic Church finally apologised for its treatment of that great genius Galileo. It has never to this day apologised for burning Bruno at the stake in the Campo di Fiori in front of St Peters. Not very Christian of them was it? Rupert Shelldrake strikes me as an intellectual fraud. Again, adopting the trappings of Science and Philosophy to promote some lunatic theory. "Complimentary" medicine has never been able to be proven efficacious. If a particular aspect were found to be kosher, it wouldn't be alternative medicine any more it would be mainstream. What Science would say about most things like Morphic Resonance and Chiropractic and all the pathies (homo, osteo, etc.) is not that it is utterly impossible and stupid but that it is simply unproven. Do the studies, have them peer reviewed and accepted and they are no longer old wives tales.

Fellow aviation enthusiasts, I'd like to suggest that we shut down this discussion about now. Personally, I love a discussion like this and find others views fascinating. I especially enjoy philosophical discussions if red wine is involved, and perhaps an open fire in winter. Sadly all it does is to raise the issues that divide us when we are all here to share the thing that unites us - aviation. Atheists like to use reason, logic, science even and resort to evidence to explain why they are happy to love a life without reference to any of the 1,400+ gods. But it is, ironically, a bit like "preaching to the converted" but nobody is ever converted back to religion or gives up their faith for atheism - not that anyone was attempting that in putting forward personal views. All of which is wasted on a person who is prepared to accept a totally illogical proposition as a fact without any evidence offered or sought. If I were to ask the question, which is a better fighter - Spitfire or ME109? We would have a spirited discussion but not fall out over it or lower our value for people who disagree with us. Arguing religion (or political economics) changes nothing other than possibly reducing level of regard for opponents. This thread started with a great joke and perhaps we can finish with a p!ssweak one? By way of explaining the term, can you give an example of an agnostic dyslectic insomniac? * * * * * * * * * * A person who lays awake at night, wondering if there really is a Dog . . .

I haven't read it all to be honest but a slightly more informative criticism than "load of crap" would be helpful in understanding where we all went wrong.

" Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war." E. D. Morel "History is written by the victors." Winston S Churchill. Why would this not have always been so?

I resent the gratuitous insult "smug" - if you can't argue logic, resort to insult? Is that the Christian way? I have no problems with getting rid of the theists (ISIL) who believe in your God (Allah - Arabic word for the God of the Bible) and call themselves ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). Sodom and Gomorrah may have practised customs that the Jews found abhorrent but that doesn't necessarily make the Canaanites evil - just different. Remember, the people who wrote the Bible would think your custom of eating pork pretty repulsive as well. Should you be killed by a Jew for that? History, in the case of the destruction of Jericho was written by the oppressor Jewish forces. How do we know that the Jews didn't make this stuff up about the Canaanites to make them a legitimate target for genocide? If the Jews tried that again today, the UN would be down on them like a ton of hot bricks. Sadly for the Canaanites, their was no peacekeeping force to defend them against the fundamentalist Jewish extremists. Point is that nobody on this planet should be excused for killing a human being because that human being doesn't respect the killer's religious beliefs. Jews killed Canaanites because Jews wanted the " land of milk and honey " allegedly promised to them by their God to his "chosen people" - all sounds very convenient to me and in breach of Commandments 5, 7 and 8.

The Hunter Valley is currently highly disturbed between Singleton and Cessnock with a bit to the West of Muswellbrook towards Denman. Nev, I don't know of any vineyards that were pulled out to make way for Open Cut mines. Could have been but I don't know of any. I worked for a Company that bought Edinglassie, the home of the then owners of Rosemount Estate. The house came with three small vineyards. At least one of the vineyards the Otleys said was beyond repair. They had given up on it. We couldn't face doing what the Oatleys suggested . . . bulldoze it and ended up spending around $500,000 bringing it back into full production. In the end, Rosemount were so impressed with the quality of fruit we were growing that they started buying grapes from us. Also, all the mines are not only obliged to rehabilitate the disturbed land back to grazing land or farming land (whatever it was before being mined) but they have to provide the State Government with massive bank guarantees to ensure that the rehab happens even if the mining company goes broke. So, short term (20 to 30 years) ugly for billions of dollars of revenue for State and Federal Governments, billions of dollars for very highly paid mining employees and contractors and industry supplying the coal industry will have been generated. No question that means short term the Valley is ripped apart. Short term here could be 20 to 30 years but not very long in the great scheme of things. Not arguing coal is great for the environment but the environment can survive and will be restored. And, let's face it, Coal Mining will end in our lifetime either because it gets to be so on the nose or because, hopefully, it is replaced by nuclear fusion (not filthy fission).

Hard to generalise on line losses but it is more likely less than 10% .

FT, I am sure he is busy reading about the rape of Jericho right now.

You are certainly right that a woman tried to become Pope. Even now there is a public ritual inspection of genitals as a part of new Popes being inducted. Quite funny to watch. Not that I get a vote but the new Pope is the brightest move by the Catholic Church since they shut down the Inquisition. He is a credit to Francis of Assisi that he chose to be named after and wants to emulate. A genuine humanist. Ratzinger was a bit too close to the child molesting scandal and had to excuse himself before he was exposed for crimes against children that went unreported to the Polizei. Not that he was personally involved but may have been another Bishop who covered up these awful crimes. I thought it was Limbo that the last or one before declared was no longer "real". Limbo was a place where unbaptised babies went. Not quite heaven but not hell. Gnarly, wtf has ISIS got to do with the people of Jericho slaughtered by God's chosen people who wrote your bible? There they were minding there own business when a bunch of wandering goat herders surrounded their city and played such bad trumpet that their walls fell down. And then the Jews proudly slaughtered them all and wrote about it in the Bible. What a wonderful example for us all to follow. What happened to the 5th and 7th Commandments? And tell me which of the 613 Commandments in the Bible do you adhere to?

Gnarly, you need to get out more. Cuba was founded by his Catholic Majesty, King of Spain and is very Catholic despite years of Communism. Have a look at Russia and see if 75 years of Communism made that country any less preponderantly Christian Orthodox. Communism saw religion as the "opiate of the masses" and needed to replace one religion, christianity, with another religion Stalinism. It had everything to do with power and nothing to do with atheism. The followers of Mohammed are usually know as Muslims. And they are as far from atheism as you can possibly get. They are fervent followers of the same God as Christians and Jews. All three religions adhere to the Bible and recognise the same prophets. Their claim is that Mohammed was the last prophet and that there will be no other prophets after him. The "moral" code of Muslims is the Bible. If you think about the siege of Jericho, was that not a genocidal attack by the "chosen people" on a people who had done nothing wrong but to have lived at Jericho over the generations since 8,000 BC. Jericho is thought to be the first city in the world. Islam has two principal tenets that I find abhorrent. The first is Apostasy that requires the murder of any muslim who walks away from Islam. The second is that all persons who do not accept conversion to Islam are infidels the punishment for which is death. Issues like modest dressing (hijab, niqab and burqa) are trivial compared with that. OldK,, you are right that some of what I wrote above could be confronting. I regret some of my colourful language but the principal intent is to show that being atheist does not make you anti anything. It can make you open to evidence, scientific method and the pure logic that all entails. It does make it difficult, at times, not to be depressed that so many people prefer mysticism to science. The one thing in all this I am for is separation of Church and State. Few Australians would want Shariah law but plenty of fundamentalist Christians insist on Christian Law as if it were somehow different. All I require is to be able to live my life free of Religion. No Scientologists, no Jehovah's Witnesses or any other mob banging on about what I should believe or that I am somehow without purpose because I don't believe in one of the thousands of Gods that other humans subscribe allegiance to whatever they call their particular God or Gods. I have grave reservations of the ABC's particularly left leaning bias so ingrained that they don't even realise they do tilt to the left. But, to be honest I've not noticed them espousing atheism as a way of life.

Thanks RT, I think. That was more boring than Marine Todd was appalling. I think I left the :-) off my post before but I knew you are smart enough to see the irony of somebody objecting to a violent redneck and promising violence as the answer to violent text.

Sometimes I think we need a "that is really beyond stupid" button when I read about evolution being a "belief" and that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together. Firstly though we all need to get a grip on what the "A" means in front of the word "Atheist". The "A" indicates "without reference to". It does not stand for "Anti"or against. Some Atheists are anti religion because they are intellectually offended by people who chose to believe rather than think. Or they just want freedom *from* religion. Why should a Muslim have to close his business on Christmas Day because Christians are offended by people working on the biggest Christian holiday? Why should a Christian have to fast during Ramadan? Why should a Jew have to comply with Christian laws over Easter? So there is, e.g., Moral, IMmoral and Amoral. A Moral person follows certain generally accepted "good" behaviours (not necessarily dictated by a supernatural being). An Immoral person acts contrary to certain generally accepted behaviours. An Amoral person would act without regard to generally accepted behaviours. By the same logic, there are Theists who are people who have been told by people they trust that there is a God and they better follow certain practices or they will burn in hell for all eternity. And then there are Atheists who have no regard whatever for matters supernatural and base their behaviour on other principles like ethics, logic and even common sense and consideration for their fellow man. You don't have to be a theist to see that murder and theft are not acceptable practices. Richard Dawkins would scoff if I were to say "we are all born atheists" even though that is a 24 carat fact. Nobody is actually born a Christian Muslim or Jew all are acquired prejudices, usually during infancy as a "gift" from those who have power over us. Richard Dawkins would argue that "being born atheists" has no validity because we are all also born non-skiers, and illiterate. But what is true is unarguable is that every Christian, Muslim and Jew, every buddhist, Daoist and Scientologist is one because, usually, at an early age they were brainwashed. No Christian is allowed to reach the age of reason and work out for themselves what makes sense. They may, on reaching the age of reason, chose not to continue to believe but for many it is too late because the prejudices are so ingrained they don't even suspect that their life may be based on a superstition. FT, if you put another one of those marine stories up I am going to come around to your place and break all your fingers. It's not that I find them offensive, I do, but it reminds me that there are people on this planet who believe every word of that appalling crap and that shatters my belief that mankind is overwhelmingly good and sensible.

Great story. My Apple II+ was, as I said a clone from Taiwan and clearly never went near an Apple quality control process. Very impressive performance from your Macintosh. For work, I bought one of the first IBM PCs. 128k RAM with 2 x 360k 5.25" floppies. Bought a hard disk (tallgrass) for it which had built in tape drive for backup. The PC couldn't run for 12 hours without shutting down. It was rubbish.

CDC 1700, I'll see that and raise you 2 x CDC 3300. When I got back from NS at the beginning of 1970 BHP were in the process of phasing in the 3300s. We worked 7 days. Week for months operating two separate installations - the old and the new. Over a 6 week period I remember I averaged $100 per week - I thought I was rolling in it. These were scientific machines bought by engineers to do mainly commercial work. They had to write the operating system so it could run COBOL. We had CDC engineers on site full time. If we wanted to power the machines down, they had to be there.

This is sounding like the four Yorkshire men . . . and if you told them . . . they wouldn't believe you. Around 1964 BHP Newcastle purchased an IBM 1401 for around 250,000 Aussie pounds. Guess that would be something more than $5 million now. So, it came with 8k of ferrite core RAM and was optioned up with an additional 8k that filled a box about the size of 3 or 4 three-drawer filing cabinets. It had two 10" multi layer disk drives, four tape drives, punch card and paper tape readers. It could do the name and address update for their then 110,000 shareholders in around 3 hours. It could do the payroll for 11,000 employees in a similar time. Not bad for 16k! Some bright spark wrote a program that printed masses of characters in such an order that it sounded pitch perfect "She'll be comin round the mountain when she comes" and "Anchors Away". Next purchase was a Honeywell 200 that came with 20k of transistor RAM. Somebody tried to tell me that if it had a bit more RAM, it could run several programs at the same time. I was sure they were pulling my leg as how could it possibly do two things at the same time? Operating the H200 meant keying in programs on the console in Octal. This was necessary to clear memory after running each program. Ah, those were the days . . . real computing! In 1983 I bought my first computer an Apple II+ (clone) in bits from Taiwan. It had 48k on the motherboard and I bought an extra 16k on a pcb that plugged into the motherboard. I also had another board with a Z80 chip so I could run dBase II. The damn thing ran so hot I used to have to have the lid off with a 10" desk fan directing cooling air in. Never bought another Apple product until OzRunways forced me into an iPad - which also gets hot and has to be watched to ensure it doesn't power itself down.

Well, he needn't worry, because I like him.

Malcolm is the only politician (on either side) who has the slightest clue about the interweb but he will be having trouble getting the dough from his ex BFF Joe Hockey and I doubt he gets much support from (not so) Fat Tony.

Very interesting Andy, thanks for the tip. In Newcastle East Telstra is a marginal winner with TPG and iiNet pretty close with, as you would expect DoDo dragging its butt. All come up assessed as SD. Personal experience is that SD run in realtime, 720p usually OK but sometimes a delay in buffering and 1080p HD almost always buffering. Running catch up TV (via internet) on my Samsung TV is usually OK with no buffering delays.

The NBN was approved by ALP without any idea how it was to be paid for. Costs, as expected, are way beyond anything suggested by Kevin or Julia. If that happened in business the CEO would be out the door. If you are gong to spend $100+ billion on a "nation building" project it would be nice to know in advance how it was to be funded. Instead we are going to have a massive debt dumped on our children and grandchildren leaving them to to pay the interest on the debt and to repay the debt. I am not opposed to an NBN at all. There is no question that Australia has to run a world class internet and communications network. But, with limited funds there needs to be some intelligent rationing of those funds and some honesty up front about how much it will cost and what has to be left behind so that the NBN can be paid for. What hospitals will not be upgraded or built, what schools, tech colleges and universities will be underfunded, what R&D (CSIRO) will be starved of funds? The FTTN is a quick, affordable alternative to FTT dwelling and in no way limits FTT dwelling happening in future. The last link from the node to the dwelling could be met commercially by business responding to households who feel 100+Mbps is essential. Governments in times gone by recognised that a telephone network was no good unless complete. No point having a phone if you can't ring grandad down on the farm. The same view needs to be taken in regard to the NBN. No point having email if you can't send it to people who live in the bush. This requires a level of cross-subsidy and that is something I normally dislike intensely but in the case of a National network, guess what? It should be National!

Bushcaddy, Bernie, FV, you have my sympathy. I guess the only NBN access will be via satellite? You'll probably get that before we get NBN in the heart of the biggest non-capital city in Australia. I fear I'll have to pay more to get the speeds I already get. I don't need anything quicker than I currently get but more speed is always better unless you are on two wheels and the bend is tightening .

Ran this one this morning: Test run on 12/08/2014 @ 11:00 AM Mirror: iiNet Data: 14 MB Test Time: 10 secs Your line speed is 11.62 Mbps (11623 kbps). Your download speed is 1.42 MB/s (1453 KB/s). Only 400 metres from the Newcastle exchange and 800 metres if you follow the wires. We used to be more than 5km and could only get ADSL 1 and speeds up to 3 Mbps in the middle of the night. And to think I was chuffed when my dial up speeded up from around 25kbps to 33kbps! Back in the late eighties, we used to run a big mini in Brisbane with the terminals in the Hunter Valley - all on two 9600 baud lines. Varies through the day/night. Ran this one just now: Test run on 12/08/2014 @ 01:55 PM Mirror: iiNet Data: 15 MB Test Time: 10.01 secs Your line speed is 12.89 Mbps (12892 kbps). Your download speed is 1.57 MB/s (1612 KB/s). Will the cable NBN consistently deliver high speeds or will it slow down as congestion increases?