At the risk of violating/. best practices as defined in the FAQ:
Me, too.
Creationists and other bible-thumping fundamentalist types frustrate and anger me more than just about any other group I can think of. I'm a life long Catholic, and the bitter crusade being carried out by some people against all religion is beyond offensive to me...and it's primarily caused by those groups of people.
Well, for that matter, so does Evolution, which is based entirely on observations, hypothesis and conclusions.
That's flagrantly untrue.
I, personally, did experiments in college that yielded data relevant to evolution. While my personal observations only lent support to one portion of evolution (natural selection), that's still testing portions of the theory.
Moreover, I am aware of experimental research that has yielded results supporting speciation, another portion of evolution theory.
Don't confuse a lack of direct observation with a lack of science. Indirect observation and logical extrapolation, combined with measuring those extrapolations against observed data, is science as well, and it's there that ID falls down.
ID does not explain observed data as well as evolution (or, when someone twiddles it until it does, its conclusions become indistinguishable from evolution), and, therefore, even were it science, it would be bad science. The best theory is always the one that comes closes to exactly predicting empirical results.
Because some people have been murdered in the name of religion, religion should be abolished? Does that mean because some people have been murdered in the name of freedom, freedom should be abolished? Slaves were kept in the name of cotton, so cotton should be eliminated? Maybe we should talk about eugenics, which was accepted science at the beginning of the 20th century.
Your claim that indoctrinating children is always wrong is even more ludicrous. What do you think I'll be doing when I teach my children that stealing is wrong, or that driving on the right side of the road is right, or that all men are created equal? That's flat out indoctrination. Of course, so would be teaching them that stealing is right, or that driving on the right side of the road is wrong, or that some men are worth less because they've got more melanin.
What do you think you're doing to your kids when you teach them to stamp out religion everywhere they find it? What's up next, you're going to start burning bibles?
More importantly, you haven't addressed the central point: atheism is a belief system, just like theism is. You can't prove there is no god. So all you're trying to do is make sure everyone agrees with your belief system. Explain to me again how this is better than some theist trying to make sure you agree with his?
And don't give me the "because I'm right and he's wrong" argument until you can prove that there is no god.
This is why much of the world these days either enjoys or is moving towards religious tolerance. Which means I can be Catholic, and you can be atheist, and we no one has to get nailed to anything.
Then religion doesn't need to muddy the waters around unrelated issues. We can discuss, say, heliocentrism without me dismissing you because you're atheist or you dismissing me because I'm not. You, on the other hand, are going to press on with religious intolerance. The only reason people like you aren't just as damaging now as the Roman Catholic Church was centuries ago is because there aren't enough of you in charge.
Are you deliberately feeding the fire, or are you genuinely that close-minded?
Why is it scary to you that so many geeks might actually believe religion? An awful lot of brilliant math and science has been performed by people who firmly believed religion...does that terrify you, too?
Or do you just assume that, if someone believes in religion, they're supporters of ID and incapable of rational thought?
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
If you want to talk about testable hypotheses, we can do that. You produce evidence contrary to my understanding of the universe, and I'll change my understanding. I'd hope you could do the same thing.
But if you want to get into a contest of faiths, don't even bother. And don't think that atheism isn't a faith: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove to me that we as a species evolved, ultimately, from a tiny pile of organic slime clinging to a rock in some antediluvian sea. Check. You can't prove to me that no god exists, any more than I can prove to you one does.
Your railing against religion (and everyone else's) as a whole (as opposed to railing against statements made based on religion that are demonstrably false, which is, of course, appropriate) is no better than any other zealot demanding that his religion is right and everyone else's is wrong.
Is the mainstream market not yet ready for portable video?
That's the perfect inverse of the real question: is portable video not yet ready for the mainstream market?
We know people love their mobile phones, and love having them perform a wide variety of functions. We know people love TV. We know people love having control of their TV via electronic gadgets. It seems silly, then, to blame lack of adoption on people being unready rather than the technology being unready.
I'd like to receive TV portably and controllably, but not when I have to watch it on microscopic screen. The TV I like to watch - things like football, Modern Marvels, and Forensic Files just won't come across well on a 3" screen.
This may or may not be an insurmountable hurdle for the technology - having a huge screen defeats the mobility of the device, after all - but blaming me for being "unready" for the technology isn't going to hurry adoption. The technology isn't ready for me.
Hello, Zimbra? Yeah, 1999 called and it wants its hype back.
Okay, that wasn't funny, but this feels like someone just reversed the polarity on the main deflector dish and I got beamed back into the pre-dot bomb days. They've raised a bunch of VC money, they're buzzword compliant, they're going to "change the face" of something...come on.
Though they do seem to have a product, so perhaps I'm being too harsh.
Or, alternatively, the powers that be don't want to buy all-new hardware every 18 months because Moore's so-called law told them to. Maybe it's often more cost effective to add another server in parallel to the existing ones than to buy new servers, move everything off the old ones onto the new ones, then throw the old servers out.
Until the "man on the street" who's a lifelong member of one of the two parties realizes that he has been fundamentally and completely betrayed by not just the opposition, not just his own party, but also by the very nature of the two-party system, nothing's going to change.
But as long as we have our bread and circuses - excuse me, I mean our 'mocha latte whipped soy skinny with a shot of espresso's and our reality TV - that's not going to happen.
I have seen the enemy, and he is us. Not that anyone wants to hear that when they complain about politics and I tell them it's our own damn fault.
Yep. Your choices now are for The Party of Big Government or The Big Government Party.
Of course, this isn't surprising. No political ideology based on removing power from those who hold it is going to gain traction amongst those in power. In some ways, the R's have a tougher row to hoe, because they have to pretend they want to limit government power while simultaneously managing to increase their own power.
(Which, of course, is what leads to appeals to morality, because they can't win voters based on what their party's core principles should be)
This sounds good, but it's misleading. It's the kind of thinking that always leads to removal of rights to no net benefit. Turn the scenario around, and see what it does. What if the first blogger is right? In your example, the spread of false information affects the outcome of the election. In the opposite example, the spread of true information affects the outcome of the election.
You, instead, want to prevent this from happening. Now, in your example, there is no spread of false information, and an innocent person is justly elected. Flip it around, and there is no spread of true information, and a date rapist has been elected.
Either way, there's the potential for abuse. But that's the problem with all rights - having a right includes being able to abuse it. Preventing abuse can only be accomplished by denying the right in the first place. Me, I'm in favor of free speech, so I choose to risk your scenario rather than mine. You, of course, may well disagree. But if free speech isn't about the right to talk about candidates for public office, it isn't about anything whatsoever.
Look at your post on a different topic, and see if you still like what it says:
Ultimately, the PATRIOT act would probably limit privacy among citizens to a certain extent. The problem has to deal with the speed of terrorists, where an agency has a limited amount of time to make an arrest or a search of private property based on evidence that they have no ability to verify. [...snip...] While almost no citizens are suicide bombers, it seems silly - I think - to give them a complete immunity from warrantless search & seizure when it is very possible (if not inevitable) that such an immunity would create a haven of this kind of attack.
Of course, this bill isn't actually about free speech, it's about who can pay whom to spread political opinion, and whether they have to disclose that someone was paid...but the point remains.
The most important speech that must be protected is the vote.
Every major politician in East Germany was voted for by the people.
I would argue this is still less durable. Picture a Lucifer's Hammer scenario (or an all-out nuclear war, if you prefer). What good is that digital archive to you? You need the information in the archive to figure out how to reconstruct the power grid in order to access the archive. Even if you can break into the archive and physically retrieve the media containing the information, you can't read it without a certain degree of infrastructure.
Books don't suffer from this limitation. The only equipment needed to read a book is a pair of eyes and either a knowledge of the language, a sufficient sample size to deduce the language, or a Rosetta Stone. As compared to digital media, where you need all of the above plus the equipment, plus a knowledge of the meta language (file format, protocol, whatever) used to define the language encoding the information.
I'm thinking in terms of civilizations, here, not decades. Paper can, and has, lasted through the complete collapse of various civilizations, cultures, and languages. Digital information is much more ephemeral (though you're right, encrypted information is even more volatile).
I'm in favor of Google's work, here, but this argument is just plain ridiculous.
We have pieces of paper whose age can be best measured in millenia. Do you honestly think that Google's hard drives will be readable in AD 3005?
The information is more copyable once digitized, which makes it potentially durable, as long as someone is interested enough to keep copying it. But that's a far cry from the real durability afforded by books.
What you'd really like to do is move all the data processing off the gamer's PC, so that the PC never needs to receive any more information than the person behind the KB "deserves" according to game logic.
The biggest problem with this, of course, is that you're shifting the computational burden from the client PC to the server, which means you need more horsepower on the server side while simultaneously failing to utilize the computing power on the client side.
So here's my back-of-the-napkin concept: have the gamer's PC doing the processing for a different gamer's PC. You'll have far fewer cheaters if the cheats only benefit a randomly-selected person somewhere else on the server.
Obviously, you can't just have a one-to-one exchange like that for a variety of reasons, but if you think about it sort of like a massive distributed computing project, I think it could be reasonably implemented.
As I'm sitting here thinking about it, several problems leap to mind. For example, video processing, in many cases, has to be done client-side. Also, you're comparatively penalizing owners of powerhouse systems relative to owners of low-end boxes. You'd have to have a way of ensuring that critical data don't get lost because someone drops off the net. And a few other problems, also.
But everything I'm coming up with seems to me like a technical limitation that could be addressed by people cleverer than me, rather than fundamental flaws with the idea.
If SBC starts regulating content on their wires, then they open up a huge legal can of worms regarding liability. VOIP is just content. It's conceptually no different than a video stream or an.iso download. The only difference is that the specific content is perceived as a threat to SBC's business model.
But that doesn't change the fact that it's content.
I sincerely doubt SBC wants to be responsible for all the content that crosses their wires. The last thing any company needs, even one as big as Ma Bell, is an endless stream of lawsuits about kiddie porn, bomb making tutorials, warez downloads, DVD rips, mp3 streams, so on and so forth.
Common carrier means common carrier, and changing the definition of common carrier would cost an asinine amount of money, even by the standards of corporate fund-slinging on Capitol Hill.
If he starts regulating the content of data on his wires, he loses common carrier status. Now he becomes liable for every snuff/rape/bestiality site that crosses his wires in the US. He's liable for every pipe bomb HOWTO, every warez download, every mp3 stream, every alt.bin.illegal.stuff post, every pedophile in an IRC channel, et cetera, et cetera.
At that point, SBC either goes out of business or spends truly profligate amounts of money - even in comparison to current business spending on Capitol Hill - to try and get common carrier redefined.
IANAL, but I don't believe entrapment is even an issue. This is akin to the police stings that leave a valuable, unlocked car parked on the street, wired for video and sound. Perp tries to steal the car, hotwires it, drives off, and a mile later the doors lock, the car dies, and the perp gets picked up.
I know that's done, and the criminals are convicted. This setup seems essentially identical to me.
Continental drift, after all, presupposes a time line about four orders of magnitude greater than that of young earth "theory." Hence, if you believe continental drift, you have a very hard time simultaneously buying into young earth.
Not to mention: when was the last time you saw one of the Bugs Bunny WWII-era cartoons? Or a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon?
Yes, the Japanese soldier with his Coke-bottle glasses and buck teeth is insensitive and horribly inappropriate in today's world. But that doesn't mean that it's not a) funny, and b) a valid, and arguably important, insight into the world at the time it was drawn.
Slashdot Mirror
At the risk of violating /. best practices as defined in the FAQ:
Me, too.
Creationists and other bible-thumping fundamentalist types frustrate and anger me more than just about any other group I can think of. I'm a life long Catholic, and the bitter crusade being carried out by some people against all religion is beyond offensive to me...and it's primarily caused by those groups of people.
GRR. ARGH.
Well, for that matter, so does Evolution, which is based entirely on observations, hypothesis and conclusions.
That's flagrantly untrue.
I, personally, did experiments in college that yielded data relevant to evolution. While my personal observations only lent support to one portion of evolution (natural selection), that's still testing portions of the theory.
Moreover, I am aware of experimental research that has yielded results supporting speciation, another portion of evolution theory.
Don't confuse a lack of direct observation with a lack of science. Indirect observation and logical extrapolation, combined with measuring those extrapolations against observed data, is science as well, and it's there that ID falls down.
ID does not explain observed data as well as evolution (or, when someone twiddles it until it does, its conclusions become indistinguishable from evolution), and, therefore, even were it science, it would be bad science. The best theory is always the one that comes closes to exactly predicting empirical results.
You've got to be kidding.
Because some people have been murdered in the name of religion, religion should be abolished? Does that mean because some people have been murdered in the name of freedom, freedom should be abolished? Slaves were kept in the name of cotton, so cotton should be eliminated? Maybe we should talk about eugenics, which was accepted science at the beginning of the 20th century.
Your claim that indoctrinating children is always wrong is even more ludicrous. What do you think I'll be doing when I teach my children that stealing is wrong, or that driving on the right side of the road is right, or that all men are created equal? That's flat out indoctrination. Of course, so would be teaching them that stealing is right, or that driving on the right side of the road is wrong, or that some men are worth less because they've got more melanin.
What do you think you're doing to your kids when you teach them to stamp out religion everywhere they find it? What's up next, you're going to start burning bibles?
More importantly, you haven't addressed the central point: atheism is a belief system, just like theism is. You can't prove there is no god. So all you're trying to do is make sure everyone agrees with your belief system. Explain to me again how this is better than some theist trying to make sure you agree with his?
And don't give me the "because I'm right and he's wrong" argument until you can prove that there is no god.
This is why much of the world these days either enjoys or is moving towards religious tolerance. Which means I can be Catholic, and you can be atheist, and we no one has to get nailed to anything.
Then religion doesn't need to muddy the waters around unrelated issues. We can discuss, say, heliocentrism without me dismissing you because you're atheist or you dismissing me because I'm not. You, on the other hand, are going to press on with religious intolerance. The only reason people like you aren't just as damaging now as the Roman Catholic Church was centuries ago is because there aren't enough of you in charge.
And thank God for that.
Are you deliberately feeding the fire, or are you genuinely that close-minded?
Why is it scary to you that so many geeks might actually believe religion? An awful lot of brilliant math and science has been performed by people who firmly believed religion...does that terrify you, too?
Or do you just assume that, if someone believes in religion, they're supporters of ID and incapable of rational thought?
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
If you want to talk about testable hypotheses, we can do that. You produce evidence contrary to my understanding of the universe, and I'll change my understanding. I'd hope you could do the same thing.
But if you want to get into a contest of faiths, don't even bother. And don't think that atheism isn't a faith: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove to me that we as a species evolved, ultimately, from a tiny pile of organic slime clinging to a rock in some antediluvian sea. Check. You can't prove to me that no god exists, any more than I can prove to you one does.
Your railing against religion (and everyone else's) as a whole (as opposed to railing against statements made based on religion that are demonstrably false, which is, of course, appropriate) is no better than any other zealot demanding that his religion is right and everyone else's is wrong.
Is the mainstream market not yet ready for portable video?
That's the perfect inverse of the real question: is portable video not yet ready for the mainstream market?
We know people love their mobile phones, and love having them perform a wide variety of functions. We know people love TV. We know people love having control of their TV via electronic gadgets. It seems silly, then, to blame lack of adoption on people being unready rather than the technology being unready.
I'd like to receive TV portably and controllably, but not when I have to watch it on microscopic screen. The TV I like to watch - things like football, Modern Marvels, and Forensic Files just won't come across well on a 3" screen.
This may or may not be an insurmountable hurdle for the technology - having a huge screen defeats the mobility of the device, after all - but blaming me for being "unready" for the technology isn't going to hurry adoption. The technology isn't ready for me.
since it was at the top of an 850ft mast
Anyone know where they held this demo that they could put the transmitter on top of a seventy-storey building??
Hello, Zimbra? Yeah, 1999 called and it wants its hype back.
Okay, that wasn't funny, but this feels like someone just reversed the polarity on the main deflector dish and I got beamed back into the pre-dot bomb days. They've raised a bunch of VC money, they're buzzword compliant, they're going to "change the face" of something...come on.
Though they do seem to have a product, so perhaps I'm being too harsh.
Or, alternatively, the powers that be don't want to buy all-new hardware every 18 months because Moore's so-called law told them to. Maybe it's often more cost effective to add another server in parallel to the existing ones than to buy new servers, move everything off the old ones onto the new ones, then throw the old servers out.
EXACTLY
Until the "man on the street" who's a lifelong member of one of the two parties realizes that he has been fundamentally and completely betrayed by not just the opposition, not just his own party, but also by the very nature of the two-party system, nothing's going to change.
But as long as we have our bread and circuses - excuse me, I mean our 'mocha latte whipped soy skinny with a shot of espresso's and our reality TV - that's not going to happen.
I have seen the enemy, and he is us. Not that anyone wants to hear that when they complain about politics and I tell them it's our own damn fault.
Yep. Your choices now are for The Party of Big Government or The Big Government Party.
Of course, this isn't surprising. No political ideology based on removing power from those who hold it is going to gain traction amongst those in power. In some ways, the R's have a tougher row to hoe, because they have to pretend they want to limit government power while simultaneously managing to increase their own power.
(Which, of course, is what leads to appeals to morality, because they can't win voters based on what their party's core principles should be)
This sounds good, but it's misleading. It's the kind of thinking that always leads to removal of rights to no net benefit. Turn the scenario around, and see what it does. What if the first blogger is right? In your example, the spread of false information affects the outcome of the election. In the opposite example, the spread of true information affects the outcome of the election.
You, instead, want to prevent this from happening. Now, in your example, there is no spread of false information, and an innocent person is justly elected. Flip it around, and there is no spread of true information, and a date rapist has been elected.
Either way, there's the potential for abuse. But that's the problem with all rights - having a right includes being able to abuse it. Preventing abuse can only be accomplished by denying the right in the first place. Me, I'm in favor of free speech, so I choose to risk your scenario rather than mine. You, of course, may well disagree. But if free speech isn't about the right to talk about candidates for public office, it isn't about anything whatsoever.
Look at your post on a different topic, and see if you still like what it says:
Ultimately, the PATRIOT act would probably limit privacy among citizens to a certain extent. The problem has to deal with the speed of terrorists, where an agency has a limited amount of time to make an arrest or a search of private property based on evidence that they have no ability to verify.
[...snip...]
While almost no citizens are suicide bombers, it seems silly - I think - to give them a complete immunity from warrantless search & seizure when it is very possible (if not inevitable) that such an immunity would create a haven of this kind of attack.
Of course, this bill isn't actually about free speech, it's about who can pay whom to spread political opinion, and whether they have to disclose that someone was paid...but the point remains.
The most important speech that must be protected is the vote.
Every major politician in East Germany was voted for by the people.
That might be the worst pun I've ever seen on slashdot.
Nicely done.
But neighbors selling to neighbors aren't engaged in Interstate Commerce
As though Filburn and Raich were?
we are about to have a majority on the Supreme Court who can actually read
I would love to think the SCOTUS would overturn Wickard, but I haven't done anything like enough [insert hallucinogenic drug here] today.
I would argue this is still less durable. Picture a Lucifer's Hammer scenario (or an all-out nuclear war, if you prefer). What good is that digital archive to you? You need the information in the archive to figure out how to reconstruct the power grid in order to access the archive. Even if you can break into the archive and physically retrieve the media containing the information, you can't read it without a certain degree of infrastructure.
Books don't suffer from this limitation. The only equipment needed to read a book is a pair of eyes and either a knowledge of the language, a sufficient sample size to deduce the language, or a Rosetta Stone. As compared to digital media, where you need all of the above plus the equipment, plus a knowledge of the meta language (file format, protocol, whatever) used to define the language encoding the information.
I'm thinking in terms of civilizations, here, not decades. Paper can, and has, lasted through the complete collapse of various civilizations, cultures, and languages. Digital information is much more ephemeral (though you're right, encrypted information is even more volatile).
I'm in favor of Google's work, here, but this argument is just plain ridiculous.
We have pieces of paper whose age can be best measured in millenia. Do you honestly think that Google's hard drives will be readable in AD 3005?
The information is more copyable once digitized, which makes it potentially durable, as long as someone is interested enough to keep copying it. But that's a far cry from the real durability afforded by books.
What you'd really like to do is move all the data processing off the gamer's PC, so that the PC never needs to receive any more information than the person behind the KB "deserves" according to game logic.
The biggest problem with this, of course, is that you're shifting the computational burden from the client PC to the server, which means you need more horsepower on the server side while simultaneously failing to utilize the computing power on the client side.
So here's my back-of-the-napkin concept: have the gamer's PC doing the processing for a different gamer's PC. You'll have far fewer cheaters if the cheats only benefit a randomly-selected person somewhere else on the server.
Obviously, you can't just have a one-to-one exchange like that for a variety of reasons, but if you think about it sort of like a massive distributed computing project, I think it could be reasonably implemented.
As I'm sitting here thinking about it, several problems leap to mind. For example, video processing, in many cases, has to be done client-side. Also, you're comparatively penalizing owners of powerhouse systems relative to owners of low-end boxes. You'd have to have a way of ensuring that critical data don't get lost because someone drops off the net. And a few other problems, also.
But everything I'm coming up with seems to me like a technical limitation that could be addressed by people cleverer than me, rather than fundamental flaws with the idea.
I can't be the only person whose first thought was of Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, can I?
Not that this has anything to do with music...but it's certainly a step in the direction of Doctorow's future.
Outsource!
I'm sure there are people in India happy to blog for $1.73/hr.
He doesn't want what he says he wants, at all.
.iso download. The only difference is that the specific content is perceived as a threat to SBC's business model.
If SBC starts regulating content on their wires, then they open up a huge legal can of worms regarding liability. VOIP is just content. It's conceptually no different than a video stream or an
But that doesn't change the fact that it's content.
I sincerely doubt SBC wants to be responsible for all the content that crosses their wires. The last thing any company needs, even one as big as Ma Bell, is an endless stream of lawsuits about kiddie porn, bomb making tutorials, warez downloads, DVD rips, mp3 streams, so on and so forth.
Common carrier means common carrier, and changing the definition of common carrier would cost an asinine amount of money, even by the standards of corporate fund-slinging on Capitol Hill.
He may think he'd like that, but he's wrong.
If he starts regulating the content of data on his wires, he loses common carrier status. Now he becomes liable for every snuff/rape/bestiality site that crosses his wires in the US. He's liable for every pipe bomb HOWTO, every warez download, every mp3 stream, every alt.bin.illegal.stuff post, every pedophile in an IRC channel, et cetera, et cetera.
At that point, SBC either goes out of business or spends truly profligate amounts of money - even in comparison to current business spending on Capitol Hill - to try and get common carrier redefined.
IANAL, but I don't believe entrapment is even an issue. This is akin to the police stings that leave a valuable, unlocked car parked on the street, wired for video and sound. Perp tries to steal the car, hotwires it, drives off, and a mile later the doors lock, the car dies, and the perp gets picked up.
I know that's done, and the criminals are convicted. This setup seems essentially identical to me.
Anybody who wants to cling to a young earth.
Continental drift, after all, presupposes a time line about four orders of magnitude greater than that of young earth "theory." Hence, if you believe continental drift, you have a very hard time simultaneously buying into young earth.
Not to mention: when was the last time you saw one of the Bugs Bunny WWII-era cartoons? Or a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon?
Yes, the Japanese soldier with his Coke-bottle glasses and buck teeth is insensitive and horribly inappropriate in today's world. But that doesn't mean that it's not a) funny, and b) a valid, and arguably important, insight into the world at the time it was drawn.
either a fundamentalist...or delusional
This post brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ah, thank you!
/. doesn't have an edit feature, so I could go back and revise what I wrote so no one would know I had made a mistake...
I knew it had been there, and I even knew I was misremembering it.
Too bad