The solution is to have TrueCrypt and then encrypt your entire drive. If the police seize it, give them the key without any hassle, explaining that you encrypted it just in case someone stole it, because it has personal and/or work data on it.
If that ever ends up in court, with a claim you must be hiding something because of you have encryption software installed, pull out some stats about the sheer number of security breaches from stolen computers and repurposed-without-wiping hard drives. Point out that TrueCrypt is one of the few free and trusted pieces of software to transparently encrypt a hard drive, and you had no problem with giving the police the password to look at your files, it's other people you're hiding stuff from.
For some jobs, in fact, you can be required by law to protect specific data. For example, my job grants me access to the programming of an ecommerce store, which in theory means I need to protect my login under the law or someone could get in and change the files to capture credit card numbers. I'm very confused as to how this following the law should, in any way, imply I am a criminal...I'm trying to protect people's credit cards. Isn't that right, members-of-the-jury-who-have-credit-cards?
The fact that they have some files on that volume that they assert is some another truecrypt volume that you can somehow open up at the same time is, well, silly. That's just a DVD you tried to rip or something, which didn't work, because they're apparently encrypted. Of course you don't know the password, ask the DVD people.
That is a very good point. In fact, I can't count the number of times I've ended up on the wrong side of an argument, because some crazy Christians came in raring for a fight and assuming people who responded to them in a critical manner were 'hostile' 'atheists', often making them doubly wrong.
Look, fellow Christians: Stop the persecution bullshit. You live in a country where 80% of the citizens are at least nominally Christian. You can argue they aren't very good Christians, or are Christians in name only, but they certainly aren't running around persecuting you, and, at the majority of 80%, certainly aren't letting others do it either.
The fact someone stopped some taxpayer funded school somewhere from singing worship songs does not make us 'persecuted'. Neither does the fact people will argue with you on the internet. People will argue about anything on the internet. People will call people names over the damn text editor they use.
You want to have a serious and courteous discussion about religion on the internet, head to a site that does that. Like BeliefNet. A whole site dedicated to talking about whatever religion you want.
Stop the persecution claims. Stop it. Just...stop it. You're turning people away, and making Christians look like idiots who can't tell 'People disagree with me, and the Constitution says governments shouldn't support a religion' from death and torture like actual persecuted Christians are subject to.
Nope, sorry, it was interesting at first, and almost a successful troll, but it was too many insults.
Tone it back a bit, and also put in some biblical and historical cites.
Also, it's a bit silly to tell me what I'm 'sprouting' when I have not, in fact, sprouted anything at all. In fact, what you needed to do here was lure me into stating my beliefs clearly, as it is entirely possible the part of Christianity I believe is just the existence of Paul or something. You can't really mock my beliefs until you know them a bit more.
Also, don't state that I'm 'desperate' somehow, when my post doesn't really sound desperate. Considering that I'm responding to a post that is itself complaining about a strawman, and I'm agreeing with that post. To be 'desperate', I'd, at least, have to be disagreeing with someone, not agreeing with someone that 'my side' has, itself, put up a strawman. It's rather hard to be desperate about that. (WE'RE FIGHTING A STRAWMAN! AAARGGH! RUN FOR THE HILLS!) You can exaggerate what I say in trolls, but ascribing things to me that others won't see at all is a dangerous game, and can reveal you're trolling.
And it repeated a lot, especially in that huge paragraph near the end. Be sure to work on editing, and use a thesaurus....there's a lot of 'idiotic' and 'imaginary friends' and 'fairy tale'. How about 'stupid' and 'voice in your head' and 'myth', offhand? Use multiple ways of saying the same thing.
And think about where each paragraph is going, start off reasonable-ish with a premise most people will agree with, and then say something partially wrong, insult someone, and come to a bogus conclusion. And then, next paragraph, do the same thing on another topic. I know people don't like to follow a format, but it's tried and tested for trolling.
For topics, I recommend, as an example for my post if you want to try again. In a reasonable order:
Stupidity of Christians in general (Throw in politics here. Presume all Christians are right-wing loons.)
History of Christianity and how that makes Christians bad people (Here's where the historic cites come in.)
Stupidity of me in accepting part of the bible.(You did this paragraph basically correct, with the 'I mean, you know most of the bible stories are bullshit.' paragraph. Use that as an example.)
Wondering how I know which part to accept (Don't go too far here, that one's easy to overextend on. Trust me on this even if you don't know what I mean.)
Delusions of all religious people, with implied insanity (Scientific cites are useful.)
And finish up with the big topper: Evil of God in allowing evil to exist, and how you wouldn't want to worship him if he did exist
I'll give you a B- on what you have. Solid effort, needs getter style. Seriously, you're doing pretty good. Try again and see if you can incorporate my ideas.
Dude, attempting to get judge what people think here based on trolls and asshats is not a very good plan.
Slashdot has holy wars all the time, and trolls and asshats always show up and stir up people as much as possible.
The fact that most asshats here are atheists is just random distribution, the same way most asshats here promote Linux, or the way most political asshats here are Democratic. (Although there's a large Libertarian group too, which means, tada, Libertarians asshats.)
The trolls, of course, are just pretending and saying whatever comes to their mind.
Even if you take Genesis literally, it still doesn't, in any logical way, lead to ID.
You can read 'created' as in 'made out of thin air', in which case that's not ID.
You can read 'created' as in 'caused to exist', which doesn't require ID either. (As you said, perhaps God just bowled a strike.)
You can even read the entire thing as metaphor, which obviously doesn't require ID. Or like I do, the Jewish Creation story, which is interesting but not really relevant to anything that happened at all.
There is no part of the Bible whatsoever that even slightly hints at intelligent design.
Young earth creationism, sure. You want to take certain Bible passages literally and assert the Earth is only 6000 years old and God literally blinks his eyes and created each animal species...well, I think that's silly and wrong, but the Bible can, indeed, be read that way.
But there's not any passage in the Bible that implies, or can be read as implying, that animals were created mostly naturally with God sometimes creating the genes for parts he couldn't evolve naturally.
Well, yes, but there aren't that many people well-versed at all in religion, regardless of their own beliefs. In fact, there are a lot of people who aren't very well-versed in their own supposed beliefs.
While not a lot of atheists are 'well-versed' in any meaningful sense, I'd be amazed if less than 10% in the US were unable to explain the basic tenets of Christianity.
Which, proportionally, means atheists is a lot better versed than a lot of Christians. They are a lot more likely to be able to tell you where their beliefs differ from, say, Methodists (They don't believe in God) and the basis for this difference (They don't believe the Bible.) a lot better than Southern Baptist could explain how his beliefs differ, and the basis for that difference.
I.e., atheists grasp the fundamental difference between their beliefs and any other religions a lot better than other religion believers grasp the fundamental difference between each other.
The reason no amputees were healed is that amputees were a lot less common in previous eras than currently. Almost all amputees are due to one of two things: Either explosives, or surgery.
The first was unheard of back then, and the second, even if they realized you needed a part of your body amputated (Aka, because of gangrene.), you were unlikely to survive it, or any resulting infections.
More to the point, there's only half a dozen people whose aliments are actually described before they are healed, so asserting that absence of any particular problem is relevant is rather idiotic. No one with bad hearing got healed either.
But that's what they want. A straw-man the students can knock down. A particularly stupid straw-man, in fact, as it's likely that anyone arguing against Jesus' miracles would just be asserting they are lies and half-remembered myths recorded decades after his death, assuming that he lived at all and was one person instead of a bunch of prophets mixed together. And hence anyone could have invented any miracles they wanted.
As opposed to the straw-man they've set up, where people think Jesus actually existed, but wandered around defrauding people with fake miracles and, I dunno, smuggling in wine and bread and fish to pull magic tricks, capping off with people stealing his body and someone impersonating him. Which no one even slightly believes is a reasonable theory, but for some reason 'persecuted' Christians always thinks is what others believe.
The knowledge that typical 'I must argue with you' Christians have of other people's positions is always rather...odd, and here we're seeing an example of the source of some of that.
It's the same thing with the argument that 'Jesus was either the Son of God or a crazy person'. Well, no, he could have simply not said half the things he was supposed to have said, or he could be a combination of an actual loon and a rebel Rabbi preaching against the establishment. It's Bible inerrancy taken to the next level...it's crazily assuming the people who don't believe in the Bible at all, for reason, accept it as a correct record of events. Um....no.
And, incidentally, I am a Christian, but I'm knowledgeable to see the actual objections people might have to Jesus and other Bible stories. (And I believe many of them to be outright myth.)
Heck, you don't even need perfect starting conditions to have God 'meddling' in evolution. Perhaps he sometimes divinely prevented something with genes he wanted form getting killed, or killed things he didn't like. (I.e, changing the windspeed during the golf ball flight.)
Saying that he was 'required' to step in and actually create genes out of nothing, and that we can identify such genes because it was 'impossible' for them to show up on their own, is just stupid.
God set out the laws for the universe, and, knowing what he wanted to end up with when he started, presumably set up the laws in such a way that he could get what he wanted.
But, hell, I'll be the first to say he could have tampered with anything he wanted...the problem is the ID guys have a theory in search of an example, and are standing there yelling about how things we barely understand, like how genes works, and latching on to random examples as 'proof' of their made-up theory.
Science finds theories to explain known facts, it does not wander around with theories looking for facts. It uses Occam's Razor to attempt to explain new facts, not immediately inventing new entities to explain things that no one's even gotten around to trying to explain using existing theories.
That's like 'How does a bumblebee fly?' 'It uses antigravity!'. No, it uses some weird turbulence we didn't understand until recently. The fact no one knew the math doesn't mean that 'antigravity' was an equally valid theory.
As others have pointed out, and always seems to be missed by 'inventors', but is very important...
...invention is not science. Science is the making and testing of hypothesis.
If you want to invent a hypothesis that allows the creation of more energy than is used via some process, and design an experiment to test that, and show others said experiment, by all means, you'll get a fair hearing. Others will try taht experiment,and succeed or fail.
But scientists aren't obligated to look at any 'machine' of yours whatso-fucking-ever. At all. That is not damn science, that's a machine. It's a machine that you claim violates current scientific theory, but if you want scientists to look at it, you'll need to do science, which is publishing it as some sort of minimal experiment they can do, not showing up with some mysterious black box that you claim creates energy. That's a fucking magic trick, not science.
That does seem to be what it is deliberately designed to do.
Going to a message board and having an actual discussion might, indeed, be an interesting thing to do.
But, no, they have to go somewhere 'hostile' and 'make posts'. Not have a discussion on neutral ground, which does, in fact, exist on the internet. they have to show up in a forum where they aren't welcome, and make posts that are going to get nasty responses.
There is no purpose to this except to get nasty responses, and there is no purpose to nasty responses except to make the students feel like they are persecuted, which is a ridiculously common theme in fundamentalist Christianity.
Mine checks before accepting the mail at all, which is also a safety feature...if for some reason the email can't be delivered, we need to be able to bounce it somewhere, otherwise, it will just disappear into a void. We'd attempt to bounce it back to them, which wouldn't work, so we'd attempt to bounce it to postmaster@theirmisspelleddomain, which won't work either. So it will end up in our postmaster box, but don't have time to figure out where the hell things should be from that have invalid domains.
If we SMTP reject it, however, it will probably end up back with them, with an error message about an invalid sending domain they can figure out.
If not, it will at least end up in the sending machine's postmaster box, at which point those guys do, indeed, have a chance to see who's got the wrong address set up in their client. (As they can figure out which of their own domains it should have come from. If they have dsgoaw.com, they can figure out what blah@dsgaow.com is supposed to be a lot better than I, a random other person, can.)
Yeah, they hopefully will be giving experience to everyone involved in a play after that play. Catch the ball, throw it to first, you get XP even if you didn't get them out.
The thing about MMORGs is that you can keep from having to fight off better players, and run around killing rats or whatever until you get enough XP to actually compete in PvP. (Or, even, not do that at all.)
A game that is only PvP is going to have to do something else. There needs to be a way to earn XP that doesn't require winning, or it is going to be very frustrating experience.
Of course, there's no reason, if they're having people on a team, not to let them have practices where they can earn XP. That would work too. (And even have a few public fields where non-grouped people can practice with random people.)
Only now, when you try to debug something like that it looks like the server does exist, it's just ignoring SMTP connections.
And, those of us running mail servers set up often set them up so we don't accept mail, from our own users, addressed to invalid domains. Which means they get immediate feedback, in their email client, that they made a typo in the domain name and the message wasn't sent and is still up on their screen to be edited, instead of having the mail happily go off and a few hours later noticing it bounced, and having to fish it out of the Sent folder and remail it.
Return an actual result to a computer that isn't running a mail server, and not only does the 'bogus submitted domain' blocker not work, but it also results in the damn email sitting there for 72 hours as the mail server repeatedly tries to connect to a mail server that is not running on that IP.
Granted, ISPs doing this interception aren't going to bother people, people don't normally run mail servers over cable connections, but when Network Solutions decided to do it for.com, it indeed broke everything.
I read the Daily WTF, which sometimes talks about how people behave in interviews....like they're total loons.
And I know the point is to think those people are crazy, but it always makes me wonder just how many crazies get through the interview just fine because they're consciously repressing their crazy...just for the interview.
It's worse in computers than in other fields, because a lot of people fall back on computers because they are crazy and can't make friends. (Computers are the new taxidermy.)
Ten years of a computer as their only friend, and they think they're qualified to be computer programmers. Whereas anyone with knowledge of computer programming will be aware that programming requires a certain type of thinking, and simply 'liking computers' isn't enough to do it. (Neither is, incidentally, any amount of schooling. Either you grasp computer programming, or you do not.)
And teaching Personal Finance is hardly going to make graduates more appealing to business. It, in fact, will make them less, because said graduates will be looking for higher pay because they want to pay off their loans and save up money, whereas people without such knowledge will be happy with lower wages.
But, yes, Personal Finance should be taught in high school, along with two other things. The first is basic cooking skills.
By basic cooking skills I don't mean how to bake a damn tray of cupcakes like they teach in home ec, but how to cook 50 cents of pasta and tomato sauce and have a meal. Or turn ground beef into a hamburger. (Health should be a required class before this, so you can use concept of carbohydrates and the food pyramid and whatnot. As health is usually taught in middle school, that would work out fine.)
Boys might grumble about this, but, OTOH, girls would probably grumble about the other thing this class should teach: Basic car and house maintenance.
People should be taught the basic systems of a car, like how gasoline gets to the engine, how the engine is cooled and lubricated, and how that gets to the wheels. No specifics, no 'repair', but an 'intro to cars' class. (This class might actually be part of driver's ed instead, as driver's ed is amazingly wasteful of time otherwise, and there's only so much times you can spend teaching people the rules of the road.)
And the same with houses. Here is what the inside of walls look like, here is how electrical wires attach to outlets, etc. At the end of the class people should be knowledgeable enough to change out a light switch (following safety protocols) for a dimmer switch, and voltage test their outlets, and stuff like that, along with knowing how to change their air filter.
Home economics, ironically, was supposed to be this class, at leas the economics and cooking, but for some reason it turned into a pure cooking class, and eventually into a baking class, which then got eliminated in most places because that was rightly seen as a rather dumb class. (Real human beings do not generally bake bread and pies...they buy them at the store.)
I am one of few people that still go to RadHack for cables and rare items that would be marked up 200% at Best Buy or impossible to find. I don't know why anyone else goes there -- and I think that's their problem.
Yes....the cheaper prices at Radio Shack. You know. The prices at Radio Shack. Being cheaper than other places. Where other places are more expensive than them. With the costs of goods.
Other things I like about RS is that the staff usually only ask if you need help once, and aren't impossible to find when you DO need help finding something, and usually there is someone there who has a clue as to the arcane thing you are looking for.
Yes, the incredibly helpful staff at Radio Shack. The knowledgeable and informative people who work at Radio Shack who can help you with electronic stuff. Because they know things. And aren't just trying to sell you a cellphone and satellite TV.
The real difference between the Radio Shack you go to, and the one everyone else goes to, is that apparently yours sells some sort of inter-dimensional network router, so you can post from a parallel universe.
A universe where Radio Shack veered into a confusing mash of angles like prebuilt computers, TVs and video players, and cell phones (just like the one in our universe!), but somehow continued to have knowledgeable people work there like they did in the 80s, instead of hiring high school students. And they somehow now have lower prices than Best Buy, which they've never had here.
I don't know about the LCD TVs, but their idiocy in the 90s stopped them from being a leader in the custom-built PC area.
Seriously, can you imagine if Radio Shack had transitioned from electronic components, not to idiotic radio-controlled-cars and cellphones, but to computer components?
Yeah, the stores were sorta small for that, but they could have pulled it off.
The only thing I can get at Radio Shack that I can't get anywhere else is... OK I give up, what is it now?
Cellphones. Lots and lots and lots of cellphones. Can't buy those anywhere else.
Oh, wait. I'm being told you can get those elsewhere, my bad.
In fact, it appears cellphone companies actually have dedicated stores just to sell cell phones and services, with actual knowledgeable employees of said cellphone company, instead of Radio Shack employees who don't actually work for that cellphone company and don't know anything and have no ability to do anything except sell you new service.
Apparently, in these stores, you can actually talk to real employees and find out all the plans that would be offered. You can change existing plans, you can add lines, you can do all sorts of stuff, whereas at Radio Shack you'll have trouble trying to do anything that isn't covered by their forms when buying a new plan...and don't even think of trying to change one.
Oh, and I'm being that additionally said stores have a wider selection of cell phones than at Radio Shack, all of which are for that specific provider. And they carry a bunch of accessories, just like Radio Shack.
But, and this is the really important thing...a Radio Shack might be slightly closer. You know, if you're one of those people who sign contracts for hundreds of dollars over multiple years...but are not willing to drive an extra ten miles to do so.
Hell, I've see Radio Shacks with worse computer hardware selections than a Walmart I know.
And worse TV selections, and worse toy selections, and, well, worse selections of everything. (Well, they had identical selection in electronic components, e.g., none at all.)
But they make up having half the selection with prices that were twice as high, so that all works out.
And about an hundred square feet of empty space around the ten square feet of cell phone displays at the front of the store. You
could play tag football in the front of some Radio Shacks.
Seriously, it's like morons have designed their stores. I want to forcible walk them through other stores. and say 'You guys see these other stores? With shoulder high shelves running from front to back, with occasional variations and gaps in them?'
Yeah, see, what happens is that different people want to buy different things, and if you actually have those things, people will buy them. In smaller and mall stores, people have mostly settled on rows of shelving, low enough that people can see over them, organized in some logical grouping. This lets you have maximum selection without overwhelming people. Bigger stores have taller, but wider, aisles, and you could try that instead. But some manner of 'shelving' would allow you to actually sell a lot of different things.
Whereas when you, OTOH, have decided to have tiny pillars holding cell phones, surrounded by a bunch of empty space so that people can see your cell phone displays from thirty fucking feet away.
See, the flaw in that logic is it fails utterly if, for example, they don't want to buy a cell phone. They aren't going to decide to buy a cell phone instead of your stuff, because they cannot use a cell phone instead of a wall-mounted network jack, which is what they were intending to buy, but have already left to go to Home Depot to get one.
I know you understand shelves, because you usually cram a few in the back 25% of the store, but, you see, that's really too little, because the cell phone thing is only useful if people want to buy a cell phone anyway. And, believe it or not, almost no one goes to Radio Shack to buy a fucking cell phone...we go to the cell phone store, you idiots. You know, those things in the middle of the aisle in the mall? Or two doors down from you at the strip mall?
as Circuit City proved, we don't want another Best Buy
We don't even want the first Best Buy, which is only staying alive because they've been scamming people with extended warranties and ripping people off in other ways for a decade.
Meanwhile, the cables and whatnot that they *do* still have are all overpriced too, because they have decided to "gold plate" everything in an effort to make their stuff seem more "premium" than it is.
No shit. I went to Radio Shack to buy AV cables. They only had Monster Cables. Um, right. Goodbye, I'll go head over to WalMart. (I try not to shop at WalMart on general principles, but I'm not supporting scammer Monster Cables.)
replaced it with crap you can get at Best Buy for less hassle
Hell, even that might have worked. Small towns don't have Best Buy.
Where it blows up in their face is that they're full of crap you can now get at Walmart for less hassle. (Except their cellphone stuff, which you can get at cell phone store and kiosks, which small towns are just now starting to get.)
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The answer is, of course, 'yes'.
The solution is to have TrueCrypt and then encrypt your entire drive. If the police seize it, give them the key without any hassle, explaining that you encrypted it just in case someone stole it, because it has personal and/or work data on it.
If that ever ends up in court, with a claim you must be hiding something because of you have encryption software installed, pull out some stats about the sheer number of security breaches from stolen computers and repurposed-without-wiping hard drives. Point out that TrueCrypt is one of the few free and trusted pieces of software to transparently encrypt a hard drive, and you had no problem with giving the police the password to look at your files, it's other people you're hiding stuff from.
For some jobs, in fact, you can be required by law to protect specific data. For example, my job grants me access to the programming of an ecommerce store, which in theory means I need to protect my login under the law or someone could get in and change the files to capture credit card numbers. I'm very confused as to how this following the law should, in any way, imply I am a criminal...I'm trying to protect people's credit cards. Isn't that right, members-of-the-jury-who-have-credit-cards?
The fact that they have some files on that volume that they assert is some another truecrypt volume that you can somehow open up at the same time is, well, silly. That's just a DVD you tried to rip or something, which didn't work, because they're apparently encrypted. Of course you don't know the password, ask the DVD people.
Nonono. If you want me to rate you again, you're going to have to go back to my original comment and start over, not post a response to my grading.
You know, all this monitoring stuff is crap.
Wake me up when they invent a way to charge my damn pacemaker so they don't have to replace it every six years or so.
That is a very good point. In fact, I can't count the number of times I've ended up on the wrong side of an argument, because some crazy Christians came in raring for a fight and assuming people who responded to them in a critical manner were 'hostile' 'atheists', often making them doubly wrong.
Look, fellow Christians: Stop the persecution bullshit. You live in a country where 80% of the citizens are at least nominally Christian. You can argue they aren't very good Christians, or are Christians in name only, but they certainly aren't running around persecuting you, and, at the majority of 80%, certainly aren't letting others do it either.
The fact someone stopped some taxpayer funded school somewhere from singing worship songs does not make us 'persecuted'. Neither does the fact people will argue with you on the internet. People will argue about anything on the internet. People will call people names over the damn text editor they use.
You want to have a serious and courteous discussion about religion on the internet, head to a site that does that. Like BeliefNet. A whole site dedicated to talking about whatever religion you want.
Stop the persecution claims. Stop it. Just...stop it. You're turning people away, and making Christians look like idiots who can't tell 'People disagree with me, and the Constitution says governments shouldn't support a religion' from death and torture like actual persecuted Christians are subject to.
Nope, sorry, it was interesting at first, and almost a successful troll, but it was too many insults.
Tone it back a bit, and also put in some biblical and historical cites.
Also, it's a bit silly to tell me what I'm 'sprouting' when I have not, in fact, sprouted anything at all. In fact, what you needed to do here was lure me into stating my beliefs clearly, as it is entirely possible the part of Christianity I believe is just the existence of Paul or something. You can't really mock my beliefs until you know them a bit more.
Also, don't state that I'm 'desperate' somehow, when my post doesn't really sound desperate. Considering that I'm responding to a post that is itself complaining about a strawman, and I'm agreeing with that post. To be 'desperate', I'd, at least, have to be disagreeing with someone, not agreeing with someone that 'my side' has, itself, put up a strawman. It's rather hard to be desperate about that. (WE'RE FIGHTING A STRAWMAN! AAARGGH! RUN FOR THE HILLS!) You can exaggerate what I say in trolls, but ascribing things to me that others won't see at all is a dangerous game, and can reveal you're trolling.
And it repeated a lot, especially in that huge paragraph near the end. Be sure to work on editing, and use a thesaurus....there's a lot of 'idiotic' and 'imaginary friends' and 'fairy tale'. How about 'stupid' and 'voice in your head' and 'myth', offhand? Use multiple ways of saying the same thing.
And think about where each paragraph is going, start off reasonable-ish with a premise most people will agree with, and then say something partially wrong, insult someone, and come to a bogus conclusion. And then, next paragraph, do the same thing on another topic. I know people don't like to follow a format, but it's tried and tested for trolling.
For topics, I recommend, as an example for my post if you want to try again. In a reasonable order:
Stupidity of Christians in general (Throw in politics here. Presume all Christians are right-wing loons.)
History of Christianity and how that makes Christians bad people (Here's where the historic cites come in.)
Stupidity of me in accepting part of the bible.(You did this paragraph basically correct, with the 'I mean, you know most of the bible stories are bullshit.' paragraph. Use that as an example.)
Wondering how I know which part to accept (Don't go too far here, that one's easy to overextend on. Trust me on this even if you don't know what I mean.)
Delusions of all religious people, with implied insanity (Scientific cites are useful.)
And finish up with the big topper: Evil of God in allowing evil to exist, and how you wouldn't want to worship him if he did exist
I'll give you a B- on what you have. Solid effort, needs getter style. Seriously, you're doing pretty good. Try again and see if you can incorporate my ideas.
Dude, attempting to get judge what people think here based on trolls and asshats is not a very good plan.
Slashdot has holy wars all the time, and trolls and asshats always show up and stir up people as much as possible.
The fact that most asshats here are atheists is just random distribution, the same way most asshats here promote Linux, or the way most political asshats here are Democratic. (Although there's a large Libertarian group too, which means, tada, Libertarians asshats.)
The trolls, of course, are just pretending and saying whatever comes to their mind.
Most actual debate here is pretty respectful.
Even if you take Genesis literally, it still doesn't, in any logical way, lead to ID.
You can read 'created' as in 'made out of thin air', in which case that's not ID.
You can read 'created' as in 'caused to exist', which doesn't require ID either. (As you said, perhaps God just bowled a strike.)
You can even read the entire thing as metaphor, which obviously doesn't require ID. Or like I do, the Jewish Creation story, which is interesting but not really relevant to anything that happened at all.
There is no part of the Bible whatsoever that even slightly hints at intelligent design.
Young earth creationism, sure. You want to take certain Bible passages literally and assert the Earth is only 6000 years old and God literally blinks his eyes and created each animal species...well, I think that's silly and wrong, but the Bible can, indeed, be read that way.
But there's not any passage in the Bible that implies, or can be read as implying, that animals were created mostly naturally with God sometimes creating the genes for parts he couldn't evolve naturally.
Well, yes, but there aren't that many people well-versed at all in religion, regardless of their own beliefs. In fact, there are a lot of people who aren't very well-versed in their own supposed beliefs.
While not a lot of atheists are 'well-versed' in any meaningful sense, I'd be amazed if less than 10% in the US were unable to explain the basic tenets of Christianity.
Which, proportionally, means atheists is a lot better versed than a lot of Christians. They are a lot more likely to be able to tell you where their beliefs differ from, say, Methodists (They don't believe in God) and the basis for this difference (They don't believe the Bible.) a lot better than Southern Baptist could explain how his beliefs differ, and the basis for that difference.
I.e., atheists grasp the fundamental difference between their beliefs and any other religions a lot better than other religion believers grasp the fundamental difference between each other.
The reason no amputees were healed is that amputees were a lot less common in previous eras than currently. Almost all amputees are due to one of two things: Either explosives, or surgery.
The first was unheard of back then, and the second, even if they realized you needed a part of your body amputated (Aka, because of gangrene.), you were unlikely to survive it, or any resulting infections.
More to the point, there's only half a dozen people whose aliments are actually described before they are healed, so asserting that absence of any particular problem is relevant is rather idiotic. No one with bad hearing got healed either.
But that's what they want. A straw-man the students can knock down. A particularly stupid straw-man, in fact, as it's likely that anyone arguing against Jesus' miracles would just be asserting they are lies and half-remembered myths recorded decades after his death, assuming that he lived at all and was one person instead of a bunch of prophets mixed together. And hence anyone could have invented any miracles they wanted.
As opposed to the straw-man they've set up, where people think Jesus actually existed, but wandered around defrauding people with fake miracles and, I dunno, smuggling in wine and bread and fish to pull magic tricks, capping off with people stealing his body and someone impersonating him. Which no one even slightly believes is a reasonable theory, but for some reason 'persecuted' Christians always thinks is what others believe.
The knowledge that typical 'I must argue with you' Christians have of other people's positions is always rather...odd, and here we're seeing an example of the source of some of that.
It's the same thing with the argument that 'Jesus was either the Son of God or a crazy person'. Well, no, he could have simply not said half the things he was supposed to have said, or he could be a combination of an actual loon and a rebel Rabbi preaching against the establishment. It's Bible inerrancy taken to the next level...it's crazily assuming the people who don't believe in the Bible at all, for reason, accept it as a correct record of events. Um....no.
And, incidentally, I am a Christian, but I'm knowledgeable to see the actual objections people might have to Jesus and other Bible stories. (And I believe many of them to be outright myth.)
Exactly.
Heck, you don't even need perfect starting conditions to have God 'meddling' in evolution. Perhaps he sometimes divinely prevented something with genes he wanted form getting killed, or killed things he didn't like. (I.e, changing the windspeed during the golf ball flight.)
Saying that he was 'required' to step in and actually create genes out of nothing, and that we can identify such genes because it was 'impossible' for them to show up on their own, is just stupid.
God set out the laws for the universe, and, knowing what he wanted to end up with when he started, presumably set up the laws in such a way that he could get what he wanted.
But, hell, I'll be the first to say he could have tampered with anything he wanted...the problem is the ID guys have a theory in search of an example, and are standing there yelling about how things we barely understand, like how genes works, and latching on to random examples as 'proof' of their made-up theory.
Science finds theories to explain known facts, it does not wander around with theories looking for facts. It uses Occam's Razor to attempt to explain new facts, not immediately inventing new entities to explain things that no one's even gotten around to trying to explain using existing theories.
That's like 'How does a bumblebee fly?' 'It uses antigravity!'. No, it uses some weird turbulence we didn't understand until recently. The fact no one knew the math doesn't mean that 'antigravity' was an equally valid theory.
As others have pointed out, and always seems to be missed by 'inventors', but is very important...
If you want to invent a hypothesis that allows the creation of more energy than is used via some process, and design an experiment to test that, and show others said experiment, by all means, you'll get a fair hearing. Others will try taht experiment,and succeed or fail.
But scientists aren't obligated to look at any 'machine' of yours whatso-fucking-ever. At all. That is not damn science, that's a machine. It's a machine that you claim violates current scientific theory, but if you want scientists to look at it, you'll need to do science, which is publishing it as some sort of minimal experiment they can do, not showing up with some mysterious black box that you claim creates energy. That's a fucking magic trick, not science.
That does seem to be what it is deliberately designed to do.
Going to a message board and having an actual discussion might, indeed, be an interesting thing to do.
But, no, they have to go somewhere 'hostile' and 'make posts'. Not have a discussion on neutral ground, which does, in fact, exist on the internet. they have to show up in a forum where they aren't welcome, and make posts that are going to get nasty responses.
There is no purpose to this except to get nasty responses, and there is no purpose to nasty responses except to make the students feel like they are persecuted, which is a ridiculously common theme in fundamentalist Christianity.
Yeah, many server antispam filters do that also.
Mine checks before accepting the mail at all, which is also a safety feature...if for some reason the email can't be delivered, we need to be able to bounce it somewhere, otherwise, it will just disappear into a void. We'd attempt to bounce it back to them, which wouldn't work, so we'd attempt to bounce it to postmaster@theirmisspelleddomain, which won't work either. So it will end up in our postmaster box, but don't have time to figure out where the hell things should be from that have invalid domains.
If we SMTP reject it, however, it will probably end up back with them, with an error message about an invalid sending domain they can figure out.
If not, it will at least end up in the sending machine's postmaster box, at which point those guys do, indeed, have a chance to see who's got the wrong address set up in their client. (As they can figure out which of their own domains it should have come from. If they have dsgoaw.com, they can figure out what blah@dsgaow.com is supposed to be a lot better than I, a random other person, can.)
I don't know about you, but I'm pretty certain we didn't invent GTA to give all the hooker-killers a safe outlet.
Yeah, they hopefully will be giving experience to everyone involved in a play after that play. Catch the ball, throw it to first, you get XP even if you didn't get them out.
The thing about MMORGs is that you can keep from having to fight off better players, and run around killing rats or whatever until you get enough XP to actually compete in PvP. (Or, even, not do that at all.)
A game that is only PvP is going to have to do something else. There needs to be a way to earn XP that doesn't require winning, or it is going to be very frustrating experience.
Of course, there's no reason, if they're having people on a team, not to let them have practices where they can earn XP. That would work too. (And even have a few public fields where non-grouped people can practice with random people.)
Only now, when you try to debug something like that it looks like the server does exist, it's just ignoring SMTP connections.
And, those of us running mail servers set up often set them up so we don't accept mail, from our own users, addressed to invalid domains. Which means they get immediate feedback, in their email client, that they made a typo in the domain name and the message wasn't sent and is still up on their screen to be edited, instead of having the mail happily go off and a few hours later noticing it bounced, and having to fish it out of the Sent folder and remail it.
Return an actual result to a computer that isn't running a mail server, and not only does the 'bogus submitted domain' blocker not work, but it also results in the damn email sitting there for 72 hours as the mail server repeatedly tries to connect to a mail server that is not running on that IP.
Granted, ISPs doing this interception aren't going to bother people, people don't normally run mail servers over cable connections, but when Network Solutions decided to do it for .com, it indeed broke everything.
No shit.
I read the Daily WTF, which sometimes talks about how people behave in interviews....like they're total loons.
And I know the point is to think those people are crazy, but it always makes me wonder just how many crazies get through the interview just fine because they're consciously repressing their crazy...just for the interview.
It's worse in computers than in other fields, because a lot of people fall back on computers because they are crazy and can't make friends. (Computers are the new taxidermy.)
Ten years of a computer as their only friend, and they think they're qualified to be computer programmers. Whereas anyone with knowledge of computer programming will be aware that programming requires a certain type of thinking, and simply 'liking computers' isn't enough to do it. (Neither is, incidentally, any amount of schooling. Either you grasp computer programming, or you do not.)
And teaching Personal Finance is hardly going to make graduates more appealing to business. It, in fact, will make them less, because said graduates will be looking for higher pay because they want to pay off their loans and save up money, whereas people without such knowledge will be happy with lower wages.
But, yes, Personal Finance should be taught in high school, along with two other things. The first is basic cooking skills.
By basic cooking skills I don't mean how to bake a damn tray of cupcakes like they teach in home ec, but how to cook 50 cents of pasta and tomato sauce and have a meal. Or turn ground beef into a hamburger. (Health should be a required class before this, so you can use concept of carbohydrates and the food pyramid and whatnot. As health is usually taught in middle school, that would work out fine.)
Boys might grumble about this, but, OTOH, girls would probably grumble about the other thing this class should teach: Basic car and house maintenance.
People should be taught the basic systems of a car, like how gasoline gets to the engine, how the engine is cooled and lubricated, and how that gets to the wheels. No specifics, no 'repair', but an 'intro to cars' class. (This class might actually be part of driver's ed instead, as driver's ed is amazingly wasteful of time otherwise, and there's only so much times you can spend teaching people the rules of the road.)
And the same with houses. Here is what the inside of walls look like, here is how electrical wires attach to outlets, etc. At the end of the class people should be knowledgeable enough to change out a light switch (following safety protocols) for a dimmer switch, and voltage test their outlets, and stuff like that, along with knowing how to change their air filter.
Home economics, ironically, was supposed to be this class, at leas the economics and cooking, but for some reason it turned into a pure cooking class, and eventually into a baking class, which then got eliminated in most places because that was rightly seen as a rather dumb class. (Real human beings do not generally bake bread and pies...they buy them at the store.)
I am one of few people that still go to RadHack for cables and rare items that would be marked up 200% at Best Buy or impossible to find. I don't know why anyone else goes there -- and I think that's their problem.
Yes....the cheaper prices at Radio Shack. You know. The prices at Radio Shack. Being cheaper than other places. Where other places are more expensive than them. With the costs of goods.
Other things I like about RS is that the staff usually only ask if you need help once, and aren't impossible to find when you DO need help finding something, and usually there is someone there who has a clue as to the arcane thing you are looking for.
Yes, the incredibly helpful staff at Radio Shack. The knowledgeable and informative people who work at Radio Shack who can help you with electronic stuff. Because they know things. And aren't just trying to sell you a cellphone and satellite TV.
The real difference between the Radio Shack you go to, and the one everyone else goes to, is that apparently yours sells some sort of inter-dimensional network router, so you can post from a parallel universe.
A universe where Radio Shack veered into a confusing mash of angles like prebuilt computers, TVs and video players, and cell phones (just like the one in our universe!), but somehow continued to have knowledgeable people work there like they did in the 80s, instead of hiring high school students. And they somehow now have lower prices than Best Buy, which they've never had here.
I don't know about the LCD TVs, but their idiocy in the 90s stopped them from being a leader in the custom-built PC area.
Seriously, can you imagine if Radio Shack had transitioned from electronic components, not to idiotic radio-controlled-cars and cellphones, but to computer components?
Yeah, the stores were sorta small for that, but they could have pulled it off.
The only thing I can get at Radio Shack that I can't get anywhere else is ... OK I give up, what is it now?
Cellphones. Lots and lots and lots of cellphones. Can't buy those anywhere else.
Oh, wait. I'm being told you can get those elsewhere, my bad.
In fact, it appears cellphone companies actually have dedicated stores just to sell cell phones and services, with actual knowledgeable employees of said cellphone company, instead of Radio Shack employees who don't actually work for that cellphone company and don't know anything and have no ability to do anything except sell you new service.
Apparently, in these stores, you can actually talk to real employees and find out all the plans that would be offered. You can change existing plans, you can add lines, you can do all sorts of stuff, whereas at Radio Shack you'll have trouble trying to do anything that isn't covered by their forms when buying a new plan...and don't even think of trying to change one.
Oh, and I'm being that additionally said stores have a wider selection of cell phones than at Radio Shack, all of which are for that specific provider. And they carry a bunch of accessories, just like Radio Shack.
But, and this is the really important thing...a Radio Shack might be slightly closer. You know, if you're one of those people who sign contracts for hundreds of dollars over multiple years...but are not willing to drive an extra ten miles to do so.
Hell, I've see Radio Shacks with worse computer hardware selections than a Walmart I know.
And worse TV selections, and worse toy selections, and, well, worse selections of everything. (Well, they had identical selection in electronic components, e.g., none at all.)
But they make up having half the selection with prices that were twice as high, so that all works out.
And about an hundred square feet of empty space around the ten square feet of cell phone displays at the front of the store. You could play tag football in the front of some Radio Shacks.
Seriously, it's like morons have designed their stores. I want to forcible walk them through other stores. and say 'You guys see these other stores? With shoulder high shelves running from front to back, with occasional variations and gaps in them?'
Yeah, see, what happens is that different people want to buy different things, and if you actually have those things, people will buy them. In smaller and mall stores, people have mostly settled on rows of shelving, low enough that people can see over them, organized in some logical grouping. This lets you have maximum selection without overwhelming people. Bigger stores have taller, but wider, aisles, and you could try that instead. But some manner of 'shelving' would allow you to actually sell a lot of different things.
Whereas when you, OTOH, have decided to have tiny pillars holding cell phones, surrounded by a bunch of empty space so that people can see your cell phone displays from thirty fucking feet away. See, the flaw in that logic is it fails utterly if, for example, they don't want to buy a cell phone. They aren't going to decide to buy a cell phone instead of your stuff, because they cannot use a cell phone instead of a wall-mounted network jack, which is what they were intending to buy, but have already left to go to Home Depot to get one.
I know you understand shelves, because you usually cram a few in the back 25% of the store, but, you see, that's really too little, because the cell phone thing is only useful if people want to buy a cell phone anyway. And, believe it or not, almost no one goes to Radio Shack to buy a fucking cell phone...we go to the cell phone store, you idiots. You know, those things in the middle of the aisle in the mall? Or two doors down from you at the strip mall?
as Circuit City proved, we don't want another Best Buy
We don't even want the first Best Buy, which is only staying alive because they've been scamming people with extended warranties and ripping people off in other ways for a decade.
Meanwhile, the cables and whatnot that they *do* still have are all overpriced too, because they have decided to "gold plate" everything in an effort to make their stuff seem more "premium" than it is.
No shit. I went to Radio Shack to buy AV cables. They only had Monster Cables. Um, right. Goodbye, I'll go head over to WalMart. (I try not to shop at WalMart on general principles, but I'm not supporting scammer Monster Cables.)
replaced it with crap you can get at Best Buy for less hassle
Hell, even that might have worked. Small towns don't have Best Buy.
Where it blows up in their face is that they're full of crap you can now get at Walmart for less hassle. (Except their cellphone stuff, which you can get at cell phone store and kiosks, which small towns are just now starting to get.)