Yes, but we never had a globalised information economy before. I can see the argument that getting the best of the non-U.S. citizens in the same place, having them work intensively on startups, and having access to Silicon Valley investors and resources, would potentially work. Think of it as Y Combinator for people who can't get a visa. Their estimated low price point is $1200/person/month; at that price there are investors who would be willing to finance small startup teams in exchange for equity. Let's say total cost is $2k/person/month, that's $18k for 3 people for 3 months, which is equal to the average amount that Y Combinator invests in their "3 month move to California" development program. And for the top graduates from Africa, India, China etc. this would look like a good opportunity given the huge potential rewards at the end.
The real question here, is whether proximity to Silicon Valley offers any real advantage to startups anymore? This place will be competing against startup accelerators in India and elsewhere, so why would a top Indian graduate choose to use this accelerator rather than one based in India?
It looks like this is just the GPL software. Nothing terribly exciting but maybe it has kernel drivers for the e-ink display. AFAIK the Kindle uses a locked bootloader so there is no way to actually get your ROM image running anyway. The Fire is a bit more promising, and the source release does seem to have kicked off a bit of interest in hacking it a bit, it's been rooted and Android market runs. I'll save you the 148MB download; here's the contents of Kindle_src_3.3_611680021.tar.gz:
They aren't the same. The psychological barrier to sending an email is lower. With an instant chat, there is a realisation that you are going to interrupt someone, and in effect force them to pay attention to you. With email, the sender rarely considers the imposition that receiving the email time will have on the recipient. People think nothing of forwarding around joke emails, some people several per day, cc'd to most of their co-workers, and yet the same person is unlikely to start a group chat, invite all of their co-workers, and then post a sequence of jokes. The co-workers would be like, "What do you want? Why do you want to talk to me?" For email, co-worker reaction is mostly passively ignore.
For a company based non-instant chat system, the big difference is that the chat is public, and this forces people to moderate what they do. The sender with their jokes is unlikely to post several jokes a day to a company-wide discussion board, because it will be visible to non-friends and upper-management. Users self-moderate their own behaviour when they know that people outside their friend circle are observing. You could argue that making all emails public within a company would have a similar effect.
Not done. That is Ubuntu running in a chroot environment. And it makes phone calls fine, because Android is still present. Personally, I would love to see a real Linux distribution running on an Android device. Android has so many limitations: the bionic C library, Dalvik apps only (yeah, I know about NDK, but "real Linux" has Python, Perl, C++, OpenJDK Java etc.)
The limitations of Android stem from being targetted at 2005 phone hardware, so they created a cut-down Linux. With 2012 tablets, dual-core 1.2GHz+ CPU and 1GB+ memory, there is absolutely no reason for these artificial software limitations. I want to see Gnome on a tablet. And KDE. And other GUI environments. And I want Android to be relegated to an app-compatibility environment in the same way that Java and Mono exist today - not because that's a bad thing, but because Android is just one application environment of the many that exist on Linux. Why shouldn't tablet programmers use Python+PyQT to build their apps, deployed on Debian-style apt-get repositories? Why shouldn't we have Ubuntu for Tablets? The hardware is powerful enough now, and it is only going to get more powerful, we don't need to be hobbled by the design choices of what was (8 years ago) a small startup in California.
They are precise enough to target the things that their deployers want to target. The IRA were notorious users of car bombs, over a period of decades. Did they ever car bomb a Republican stronghold? No, never. Clearly it is possible to target geographical areas, and therefore the populations that inhabit those areas, with such a device. The logical extension of your argument would be that no bomb can ever be 100% precise, therefore no bomb can ever be used to target specific sub-populations. Obviously that is incorrect. Target does not mean being 100% accurate; for a terrorist, they must only be accurate enough to be able to justify the attack to their followers.
Or while the human being is cheaper. Until we can manufacture robots that can do everything that humans can do, and do it cheaper, then some humans will have employment. And if we ever reach the point where robots can do everything humans can do, and do it more efficiently (cheaper), then our species will finally have become obsolete.
Infection rate would be likely be higher now, because we have jet planes and cars and the "remote areas" that were geographically isolated don't exist any more. (Having said that, the 1918 flu spread to the Arctic, so being remote may not have helped as much as would be imagined). As for the mortality rate, Wikipedia says,
"The reported mortality rate of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in a human is high; WHO data indicate 60% of cases classified as H5N1 resulted in death. However, there is some evidence the actual mortality rate of avian flu could be much lower, as there may be many people with milder symptoms who do not seek treatment and are not counted.[20][21]
The medical industry can not be prepared for H5N1 with human seasonal flu contagion rates, and the majority of the world does not have access to the emergency wards of the first world. Hospitals are just not resourced to be able to provide critical care to 20% of the population. A typical hospital covers a population of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people, and is resourced to be able to provide critical care to one ward of tens of people. A virus with contagion rates of human seasonal flu, combined with 50% mortality, would kill hundreds of millions of people in the first year alone.
There is no herd immunity to this. That is the whole point. It's actually surprising that this work finally got done; I remember reading at least 5 years ago about the debate raging over whether to engineer H5N1 to be contagious like human flu. The "for" argument was basically:
Humans infected with H5N1 have high mortality, H5N1 was appearing in third world countries, in those countries animals and humans live in close physical proximity, All it would take was the transfer of a few genes coding for cell surface proteins to be transferred from human flu to H5N1 and it would become highly contagious, This transfer was highly likely to happen if a human was infected with human flu and H5N1 at the same time, Which is highly likely given the conditions in third world countries Therefore it is highly likely that this will happen at some point in the near future, Therefore we should do it in the lab now and research the resulting virus before the outbreak happens.
The "against" argument was obviously that the resulting virus could potentially wipe out our species. Interesting debate!
It is a question of how you define "strong". A more accurate saying would be, "What kills people but spares those with certain characteristics, increases the ratio of people with those characteristics in the general population." H5N1 kills the young and healthy, and spares the weak and elderly, just like the Spanish Flu:
"Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old. wiki).
Increased mortality in young and healthy people is attributed to a stronger cytokine response from the immune system wiki:
"It is believed that cytokine storms were responsible for many of the deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed a disproportionate number of young adults.[1] In this case, a healthy immune system may have been a liability rather than an asset. Preliminary research results from Hong Kong also indicated this as the probable reason for many deaths during the SARS epidemic in 2003.[8] Human deaths from the bird flu H5N1 usually involve cytokine storms as well."
A modified version of the flu isn't much use to the military, for the same reasons that bio-weapons in general aren't much use: they are unreliable in war, attack an overly-broad segment of the population, and liable to spread contagion amongst friend and foe alike. They aren't much use for terrorists either: the majority of terrorism is geo-political in nature ("we want our land", "we want a different government", "stop hurting our friends" etc.). Terrorists generally want to target specific sub-populations of the human species, whether that sub-population be defined by nationality, ethnicity, wealth etc. Weapons that attack everybody equally are not really useful for that purpose. The exception here is Doomsday cults, who do exist, but represent a very small percentage of the world's population. We can only hope that they do not get the resources necessary to genetically engineer a high-lethality virus.
"Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[4][5][6][7][8] Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time[9]) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27% (1/4), were infected."
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." You can't disprove something that you already know to be wrong. Also see Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong.
That was the argument of the original Luddites, but here we are 200 years later and it still isn't true. I'm not discounting that it may be true someday, but it seems that, as the world became more mechanised, people found that there were other jobs that they wanted doing. Assuming that we were to suddenly have robots with all the human abilities, the cost of maintaining a society would drop massively. Food would be almost free. Taxes would be low. Would anyone still be employed? It's an interesting question. People would still be employed to do the tasks that robots couldn't do, and where there was value in the end product due to scarcity of resources. Maybe there would be a lot of artists and web designers? Maybe people would earn a living writing books?
Our entire economy will need to be reworked if the vast majority are not to starve.
Most (all?) first world countries already give unemployed people benefits so that people can survive. I don't see why it would be different if we could produce everything that we need (food, housing, etc.) even more cheaply using robots.
Indeed, in the UK it is hard to legally throw nutjobs out of medical school because of their religious beliefs. One of my associates had to deal with a case involving a Christian student who argued repeatedly in tutorials that he would never provide medical assistance to a homosexual because it offended his "religious beliefs". He explicitly stated that, in an emergency situation, e.g. car crash, he would let a homosexual bleed to death rather than provide assistance. Even though his stance meant he could never practice as a doctor in the UK, it was a difficult situation to deal with as he could potentially play the "discriminated Christian" card, and try to damage the university in the media.
He said that if a soldier prays before going into battle he is going into battle with the wrong mind set. A soldier should take charge, not leave it up the fate/beard in the sky.
Anecdotal evidence. You base your conclusions about Christianity on the quote of a single man. In reality, there are many Christian soldiers who have prayed before battle, and even entire armies that have associated themselves with God. The phrase "God with us" / Gott mit uns has been used by the Germany military for centuries, including the Third Reich; survivors of WWII Nazi concentration camps reported that the guards had "Gott mit uns" written on their belt buckles. One might wonder how soldiers guilty of such atrocities could see themselves as actually acting with the favor of God.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."
"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."
"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
"I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of an humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!"
"Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it."
"The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events — provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is
Doesn't a nation state have the right to determine its own economic policy? If the government of a nation state decides to devalue its currency, thus reducing unemployment but also decreasing spending power, doesn't it have the right to do so? If it is so unfair, why doesn't the U.S. do the same? The average person would be poorer, but this would be balanced by higher employment, so maybe voters would approve. Would it also be wrong if the U.S. government chose this route, or is it only wrong when the Chinese do it?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but we never had a globalised information economy before. I can see the argument that getting the best of the non-U.S. citizens in the same place, having them work intensively on startups, and having access to Silicon Valley investors and resources, would potentially work. Think of it as Y Combinator for people who can't get a visa. Their estimated low price point is $1200/person/month; at that price there are investors who would be willing to finance small startup teams in exchange for equity. Let's say total cost is $2k/person/month, that's $18k for 3 people for 3 months, which is equal to the average amount that Y Combinator invests in their "3 month move to California" development program. And for the top graduates from Africa, India, China etc. this would look like a good opportunity given the huge potential rewards at the end.
The real question here, is whether proximity to Silicon Valley offers any real advantage to startups anymore? This place will be competing against startup accelerators in India and elsewhere, so why would a top Indian graduate choose to use this accelerator rather than one based in India?
And Kindle_src_6.1_11185402.tar.gz contains:
android-2.6.35 kernel
Some Android stuff (mainly webkit)
Some stuff from Texas Instruments (u-boot, x-loader)
The kernel source might be useful for drivers? The other stuff is already open-source projects.
It looks like this is just the GPL software. Nothing terribly exciting but maybe it has kernel drivers for the e-ink display. AFAIK the Kindle uses a locked bootloader so there is no way to actually get your ROM image running anyway. The Fire is a bit more promising, and the source release does seem to have kicked off a bit of interest in hacking it a bit, it's been rooted and Android market runs. I'll save you the 148MB download; here's the contents of Kindle_src_3.3_611680021.tar.gz:
gplrelease/
gplrelease/picocom-1.4.tar.gz
gplrelease/util-linux-2.12r.tar.bz2
gplrelease/atk-1.26.0.tar.bz2
gplrelease/uboot-1.3.0-rc3.tar.bz2
gplrelease/pango-1.24.5.tar.bz2
gplrelease/gstreamer-0.10.17.tar.bz2
gplrelease/taglib-1.5.tar.bz2
gplrelease/e2fsprogs-1.38_patch.tar.gz
gplrelease/fuse-2.7.1.tar.gz
gplrelease/libltdl-1.2.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libol-0.3.18.tar.gz
gplrelease/syslog-ng-1.6.11.tar.gz
gplrelease/busybox-1.7.2.tar.bz2
gplrelease/webkit-1.1.7.tar.bz2
gplrelease/e2fsprogs-1.38.tar.gz
gplrelease/wireless_tools.29.tar.gz
gplrelease/mtd-utils-1.0.0.tar.gz
gplrelease/pango-1.6.0.tar.bz2
gplrelease/lrzsz-0.12.20.tar.gz
gplrelease/gst-plugins-base-0.10.17.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libvolume-id_092.ipk
gplrelease/ifupdown_0.6.8.tar.gz
gplrelease/gst-plugins-good-0.10.6.tar.bz2
gplrelease/gst-plugins-base-0.10.6.tar.bz2
gplrelease/linux-2.6.26-lab126.tar.bz2
gplrelease/gnutls-2.8.4.tar.bz2
gplrelease/module-init-tools-3.2.2.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libgpg-error-1.4.tar.bz2
gplrelease/DirectFB-1.2.0.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libproxy-0.2.3.tar.bz2
gplrelease/module-init-tools-3.2.2_patch.tar.gz
gplrelease/glib-2.22.2.tar.bz2
gplrelease/udev-112.tar.bz2
gplrelease/alsa-lib-1.0.13_patch.tar.gz
gplrelease/enchant-1.4.2.tar.bz2
gplrelease/gtk+-2.16.5.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libgcrypt-1.4.4.tar.bz2
gplrelease/base-files_3.0.14.ipk
gplrelease/alsa-lib-1.0.13.tar.bz2
gplrelease/fuse-2.7.1_link.tar
gplrelease/dosfstools-2.11.tar.bz2
gplrelease/libsoup-2.30.0.tar.bz2
gplrelease/procps-3.2.7.tar.gz
gplrelease/procps-3.2.7_patch.tar.gz
gplrelease/base-passwd_3.5.9.tar.gz
gplrelease/powertop-1.10.tar.gz
gplrelease/iptables-1.3.3.tar.bz2
gplrelease/glibc-2.5.tar.bz2
gplrelease/alsa-utils-1.0.13_patch.tar.gz
gplrelease/alsa-utils-1.0.13.tar.bz2
gplrelease/gdb-6.6.tar.bz2
gplrelease/sysvinit-2.86.tar.gz
gplrelease/cairo-1.8.6.tar.bz2
They aren't the same. The psychological barrier to sending an email is lower. With an instant chat, there is a realisation that you are going to interrupt someone, and in effect force them to pay attention to you. With email, the sender rarely considers the imposition that receiving the email time will have on the recipient. People think nothing of forwarding around joke emails, some people several per day, cc'd to most of their co-workers, and yet the same person is unlikely to start a group chat, invite all of their co-workers, and then post a sequence of jokes. The co-workers would be like, "What do you want? Why do you want to talk to me?" For email, co-worker reaction is mostly passively ignore.
For a company based non-instant chat system, the big difference is that the chat is public, and this forces people to moderate what they do. The sender with their jokes is unlikely to post several jokes a day to a company-wide discussion board, because it will be visible to non-friends and upper-management. Users self-moderate their own behaviour when they know that people outside their friend circle are observing. You could argue that making all emails public within a company would have a similar effect.
Yeah, it turned out phones with keyboards are bulkier and people don't buy them. Use a bluetooth mini keyboard instead.
Not done. That is Ubuntu running in a chroot environment. And it makes phone calls fine, because Android is still present. Personally, I would love to see a real Linux distribution running on an Android device. Android has so many limitations: the bionic C library, Dalvik apps only (yeah, I know about NDK, but "real Linux" has Python, Perl, C++, OpenJDK Java etc.)
The limitations of Android stem from being targetted at 2005 phone hardware, so they created a cut-down Linux. With 2012 tablets, dual-core 1.2GHz+ CPU and 1GB+ memory, there is absolutely no reason for these artificial software limitations. I want to see Gnome on a tablet. And KDE. And other GUI environments. And I want Android to be relegated to an app-compatibility environment in the same way that Java and Mono exist today - not because that's a bad thing, but because Android is just one application environment of the many that exist on Linux. Why shouldn't tablet programmers use Python+PyQT to build their apps, deployed on Debian-style apt-get repositories? Why shouldn't we have Ubuntu for Tablets? The hardware is powerful enough now, and it is only going to get more powerful, we don't need to be hobbled by the design choices of what was (8 years ago) a small startup in California.
They are precise enough to target the things that their deployers want to target. The IRA were notorious users of car bombs, over a period of decades. Did they ever car bomb a Republican stronghold? No, never. Clearly it is possible to target geographical areas, and therefore the populations that inhabit those areas, with such a device. The logical extension of your argument would be that no bomb can ever be 100% precise, therefore no bomb can ever be used to target specific sub-populations. Obviously that is incorrect. Target does not mean being 100% accurate; for a terrorist, they must only be accurate enough to be able to justify the attack to their followers.
Or while the human being is cheaper. Until we can manufacture robots that can do everything that humans can do, and do it cheaper, then some humans will have employment. And if we ever reach the point where robots can do everything humans can do, and do it more efficiently (cheaper), then our species will finally have become obsolete.
Infection rate would be likely be higher now, because we have jet planes and cars and the "remote areas" that were geographically isolated don't exist any more. (Having said that, the 1918 flu spread to the Arctic, so being remote may not have helped as much as would be imagined). As for the mortality rate, Wikipedia says,
"The reported mortality rate of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in a human is high; WHO data indicate 60% of cases classified as H5N1 resulted in death. However, there is some evidence the actual mortality rate of avian flu could be much lower, as there may be many people with milder symptoms who do not seek treatment and are not counted.[20][21]
The medical industry can not be prepared for H5N1 with human seasonal flu contagion rates, and the majority of the world does not have access to the emergency wards of the first world. Hospitals are just not resourced to be able to provide critical care to 20% of the population. A typical hospital covers a population of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of people, and is resourced to be able to provide critical care to one ward of tens of people. A virus with contagion rates of human seasonal flu, combined with 50% mortality, would kill hundreds of millions of people in the first year alone.
Also, this is not the first research to create genetically engineered flu with higher virulence, see wired Virulent Bird-Human Flu Hybrid Made in Lab
There is no herd immunity to this. That is the whole point. It's actually surprising that this work finally got done; I remember reading at least 5 years ago about the debate raging over whether to engineer H5N1 to be contagious like human flu. The "for" argument was basically:
Humans infected with H5N1 have high mortality,
H5N1 was appearing in third world countries,
in those countries animals and humans live in close physical proximity,
All it would take was the transfer of a few genes coding for cell surface proteins to be transferred from human flu to H5N1 and it would become highly contagious,
This transfer was highly likely to happen if a human was infected with human flu and H5N1 at the same time,
Which is highly likely given the conditions in third world countries
Therefore it is highly likely that this will happen at some point in the near future,
Therefore we should do it in the lab now and research the resulting virus before the outbreak happens.
The "against" argument was obviously that the resulting virus could potentially wipe out our species. Interesting debate!
It is a question of how you define "strong". A more accurate saying would be, "What kills people but spares those with certain characteristics, increases the ratio of people with those characteristics in the general population." H5N1 kills the young and healthy, and spares the weak and elderly, just like the Spanish Flu:
"Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old. wiki).
Increased mortality in young and healthy people is attributed to a stronger cytokine response from the immune system wiki:
"It is believed that cytokine storms were responsible for many of the deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed a disproportionate number of young adults.[1] In this case, a healthy immune system may have been a liability rather than an asset. Preliminary research results from Hong Kong also indicated this as the probable reason for many deaths during the SARS epidemic in 2003.[8] Human deaths from the bird flu H5N1 usually involve cytokine storms as well."
A modified version of the flu isn't much use to the military, for the same reasons that bio-weapons in general aren't much use: they are unreliable in war, attack an overly-broad segment of the population, and liable to spread contagion amongst friend and foe alike. They aren't much use for terrorists either: the majority of terrorism is geo-political in nature ("we want our land", "we want a different government", "stop hurting our friends" etc.). Terrorists generally want to target specific sub-populations of the human species, whether that sub-population be defined by nationality, ethnicity, wealth etc. Weapons that attack everybody equally are not really useful for that purpose. The exception here is Doomsday cults, who do exist, but represent a very small percentage of the world's population. We can only hope that they do not get the resources necessary to genetically engineer a high-lethality virus.
disease like swine or bird flu that kills like 5 people
You might want to read some history. 1918 flu pandemic:
"Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.[4][5][6][7][8] Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time[9]) died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27% (1/4), were infected."
American soil? Facebook's international HQ is in Dublin. That makes its international operations subject to E.U. law.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful." You can't disprove something that you already know to be wrong. Also see Isaac Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong.
Our entire economy will need to be reworked if the vast majority are not to starve.
Most (all?) first world countries already give unemployed people benefits so that people can survive. I don't see why it would be different if we could produce everything that we need (food, housing, etc.) even more cheaply using robots.
Religious courts do not form any part of the official judicial system in the law of either Australia or Germany.
Indeed, in the UK it is hard to legally throw nutjobs out of medical school because of their religious beliefs. One of my associates had to deal with a case involving a Christian student who argued repeatedly in tutorials that he would never provide medical assistance to a homosexual because it offended his "religious beliefs". He explicitly stated that, in an emergency situation, e.g. car crash, he would let a homosexual bleed to death rather than provide assistance. Even though his stance meant he could never practice as a doctor in the UK, it was a difficult situation to deal with as he could potentially play the "discriminated Christian" card, and try to damage the university in the media.
He said that if a soldier prays before going into battle he is going into battle with the wrong mind set. A soldier should take charge, not leave it up the fate/beard in the sky.
Anecdotal evidence. You base your conclusions about Christianity on the quote of a single man. In reality, there are many Christian soldiers who have prayed before battle, and even entire armies that have associated themselves with God. The phrase "God with us" / Gott mit uns has been used by the Germany military for centuries, including the Third Reich; survivors of WWII Nazi concentration camps reported that the guards had "Gott mit uns" written on their belt buckles. One might wonder how soldiers guilty of such atrocities could see themselves as actually acting with the favor of God.
No, you are wrong, the OP is correct: there have been Jewish religious courts in England for centuries. Religious courts already in use. A London woman this week expressed shock at the prospect of being divorced by a rabbinical court against her will — in part because she allegedly wore clothes it deemed “provocative”.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
"The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
"In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views."
"I'm not an atheist and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God."
"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
"I do not believe in a God who maliciously or arbitrarily interferes in the personal affairs of mankind. My religion consists of an humble admiration for the vast power which manifests itself in that small part of the universe which our poor, weak minds can grasp!"
"Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it."
"The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events — provided, of course, that he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it undergoes. Science has therefore been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is
Doesn't a nation state have the right to determine its own economic policy? If the government of a nation state decides to devalue its currency, thus reducing unemployment but also decreasing spending power, doesn't it have the right to do so? If it is so unfair, why doesn't the U.S. do the same? The average person would be poorer, but this would be balanced by higher employment, so maybe voters would approve. Would it also be wrong if the U.S. government chose this route, or is it only wrong when the Chinese do it?
And the Chinese government did extend credit to the US specifically to better its own economy without any concern for the legality of doing so.
Why would it be illegal? There are no international laws that govern managing the economy of a nation state.