instead of simply using satellites orbiting the earth we write programs on these phones that request to be triangulated by surrounding phones in order to develop a cellular sense of location, like a layer of atmospheric nerves relaying locational awareness data constantly? then as pictures are taken the location can be stored in a database and a digital reconstruction of reality can be created. why drive a car with a camera on top when you can get humanity to do all the work for free by providing a service?!
congress has also been looking into a way to install triggers in newborn brains that will sound an audible click each time a person sees and remembers something.
i'm a femele and i have to say that abortion is right, because god created the concept of it and has a plan for the women who do it. certainly god's plan for women who abort babies is not for them to go to hell, but for god to have lots of little babies in heaven that he can play with.
who are you? juvenile? stop telling me to back things up. you are not the keeper of proper argumentation, and you're certainly not going to dictate how or why i express myself. what i'm saying is a self-evident truth. you cannot prove the existence of god, and as such believing in something you cannot have evidence for or even argue logically is ILLOGICAL. you cannot argue for the existence of a god logically without making unverifiable claims. there is a HUGE amount of documented thinking about this subject. you can pick up any given richard dawkins book to see how somebody who's actually intelligent would approach the subject. you talk about me acting like i have a 'higher level of understanding' than you, but i really don't know where this is coming from. i'm pretty self-deprecating in general. you seem to paint a lot of straw men in your responses to me.
unless you're willing to argue that pascal's wager is some deep and meaningful insight into the religious mind, i really don't have anything else to add the the conversation. i cited dawkins, because i think he's the leading authority (at least in presence) on opening up the fallacious nature of religion (personal opinions of his aside). if you don't want to read what dawkins has to say, you surely don't want to read what i have to say. if you've already read what dawkins has to say, there is absolutely nothing i can say to contribute to this conversation. you keep demanding i 'back up' my 'claim,' but it's not 'my' claim, and a hardcore web 2.0 programmer of the future such as yourself should understand that it's bad enough i'm wasting my time talking to you this much, let alone the time i would waste confusing the issue further by applying my limited capacity for reason to subjects that have already been thoroughly discussed by men of greater magnitudes of intelligence than myself.
as i've said before, and you've chosen to ignore: the information is freely available in copious amounts. i'm just curious, though, have you asked god to back up his claims lately?
i suppose i'll go ahead and fulfill godwin's law here just to point at that the little slashdot next to your name sure does remind me a lot of a swastika arm band. it's slightly terrifying. slightly. do you know any blackhat seo hackers i can hire to get my site to the third page of google for hacker tips?? it's actually a collection of mega man pictures, but i know how people like to hack.
you call kayditty a liar, and i'm sure kayditty is more than capable of speaking for kayditty's very own self, but since when is an observation an attack? just because you're sensitive about the subject doesn't mean you're being attacked. you're not a victim. this is a conversation, and people are speaking freely. get a grip.
you really are a troll, and normally i'm just like 'eh' and try not to respond (like i said in another reply to you), but dammit if you aren't good at being a troll, because i feel so damned damningly dammit damn damn damn compelled to respond. you bug me, congratulations. i really hope you feel good about yourself, and that is not sarcasm. i want you to feel good.
and you talk of excuses, but who needs excuses to respond when 'integrity demands' rational response filled with evidence and intricate statements well backed by reason and explanation such as yours? (that one is sarcasm)
you got me, i'm a sucker for responding. and i used to do the whole quote by quote thing, too. i'm going to pass on that now, though. i'll try to address them in order, though, because i'm so great.
you say i'm wrong (and later talk about maintaining integrity, or something. i'll climb that hill when i get there), but offer no evidence or argument to the contrary. that sounds sort of like uh, something...i can't really think of what it's called. i heard about it a long time ago on a coke commercial. relugia?? that's not right. religation?????? RELIGIOINZZZ!!!!111 i am so clever!
like i said before, i don't want to get into a conversation about the basics of the philosophical or scientific methods. there are better sources for that information than me (as i'm pretty sure you're convincend, anyway). i'm certainly not capable of convincing you, so all that i can do is suggest you read more (i think it's needless to say in most instances, but for you'll i'll point out that i always take my suggestions, as well, and will continue to study up on the subject. i'll be the first to feel stupid if i find out just how wrong i was [have fun proving it. signed, kafka]).
i'm not convinced of it, i'm trying to construct an argument based on logic. i'm not espousing my beliefs, i'm trying to refine my argumentation through practice. i'm not here to change your mind. that's not my goal. if i do, that's your fault for not having the same ideas as me in the first place.
an appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy? the idea that a god none of us can possibly prove the existence of dictates to them how to regulate the activities of men on earth? come on, that one is on the FIRST PAGE of the bible.
i may be a poor thinker. i don't know. that's a pretty mean thing to say to me.:(
i guess it's kind of obvious that i'm not refusing to back anything up. i just don't understand how somebody who is so obviously a troll is actually in a position of some form of authority on this site (or does that slashdot.org next to your name mean you paid for the premium account?). i just don't want to talk to you about it any more, but i feel compelled to because i like to argue and you're the only person up right now who wants to at least provoke me into saying things. once again, don't get the wrong idea (despite seeing how poorly this statement has worked with you before). i'm not replying because you called me out on saying i don't want to, i'm replying because that's what i do. i'm a replier to things people say to me. i can't help it.
i don't think integrity demands anything from me. i don't have to back up anything i say, and i think it's a pretty fortunate luxury for you that i'm actually giving you the time of...night. i normally make a conscious effort to avoid posting on slashdot (one glance at the comments is usually enough to reinforce this), but since you have some stake in the site i'm giving you special treatment, because that's what authorities like god and the president of the united states and the pope deserve and the administrators of a web site named slashdot deserve. or whatever.
i'm not saying believing in science is true and believing in religion is not. i'm saying believing in anything is philosophically unsound. i don't believe that believing in things is philosophically unsound, philsophy is an abstract process that offers us abstract boundaries in which we can state that with logical surity. you don't have to believe in god or believe in logic or believe in philosophy to make statements about god or philosophy or logic, but philosophy (unlike religion) gives us standards for judging the worth of arguments that have been refined over thousands of years of thinking and debate (both internal and external). religion gives us the refinement and precision of logical fallacies crafted to appear logically sound, and even uses sound philosophy to contribute to an appearance of logical credibility. i think all of this stuff is pretty obvious. i really don't want to have a conversation with you about it anymore. seeya.
oh, and please don't respond with 'but you believe what you said,' or something equally passe. i don't believe what i said, i'm just working within the abstract confines of philosophy, and i recognize that there's a good chance i'm wrong. i'm totally willing to update my understanding of religion and belief and all of those things. information exists, and i like the principles that allow for information to be propagated for mass pondering. it's sort of like distributed computing: why limit the scope of dissemination of information? 6 billion minds are certainly incalculably (to me, at least) more powerful than any single mind. i don't simply trust in individual ingenuity to provoke human progress, but the collective digression, regression and progression of individuals and the spread of those actions to people of utterly different viewpoints and observational bases for alternative computation.
i'm just arguing for the sake of argument (it's great fun, and i wish more people would do it. practice may not make perfect, but it certainly helps you to improve, and i know there are a lot of complaints about people's abilities to reason out complex arguments), and i think you've done a lot of assuming in your responses to kayditty, which is really what prompted me to reply to you. it's funny how people who proclaim belief in some deity tend to make really baseless assumptions about the motivations of others.
religious people DON'T have any good, rational arguments for things they believe. that's a pillar of philosophical significance that is demonstrated in introductory philosophy courses across this planet. it's a question that has been asked by outcast 12 year olds for who knows how long. science is inherently modular in nature due to the recognition of the irresolute nature of information. one of the largest problems confronting us in quantum mechanics is related to the nature of the requirements for making observations of matter on that sub-planck scale. if we cannot establish the integrity of reality at the very smallest level of the universe we can observe, how can we establish it at the idea of the very greatest (by that i mean a 'supreme' being, or personified uncased first cause, if you will).
don't get the wrong idea. i'm not assuming the validity of the premise of my argument (that you can't logically believe in religion based on the illogical nature of belief) by citing quantum mechanics, but am simply giving what i consider to be a really obvious example of the extremely biased nature of our perceptive and cognitive reaches. we are not capable of knowing that we know anything, and my definition of 'know' in this case would be to have a proper understanding of some aspect of reality. we CAN know, we just can't know we know. we can know we know, but we just can't know we know we know. it's an infinite regress, just like the assumption of a supreme being bringing up the question of something so intricate as a supreme being bearing the necessity for a creator in turn!
there are a host of actual reasons that theology is not philosophical, but there aren't any reasons i know of that theology is. we can apply the principles of philosophy (logic, reason, argumentation, etc.) to religion, but we cannot consider belief in religion itself philosophically sound because the very act of 'belief' is irrational on a philosophical level. like i stated before, belief is a huge logical black hole, and i'm not going to even begin to want to explain that to you. search for 'logical fallacies' on your web-ruining search engine of choice. i'm sure a smart guy like you can figure it out yourself just by educating yourself on logical fallacies. you really don't have to read about what anybody thinks about it to reason it out for yourself, so long as you allow yourself the freedom to actually educate yourself on the topic. you know, by suspending belief.
http://www.php.net/nl2br. seriously, it's 2008. and what's up with the 2 minute+ wait between posting? i don't even see an option for editing my post (i haven't looked very hard, so if somebody wants to just chime in if that option exists i'll be really grateful for saving me the time i might have to spend finding it, what a pointless pursuit that would be]). for a site written by people capable of understanding how to...create a site, this one sure is a pain in the ass to use.
why is this bias being injected into submissions? 'online marketers' aren't necessarily 'ethic-less,' even if their ethical standpoints don't necessarily coincide with their own. i would guess they do share ethical ideas with everybody using slashdot, though. they certainly utilize facebook to spread their ideals, which is what a lot of facebook users do on a regular basis (and what every living, thinking, non-hermit person who has any effect on the world does, consciously or unconsciously). this idea that it's ok to use false proclamations simply because you're discussing a subject your general audience will likely have similar feelings toward is ludicrous. i think spyware and spam and things like that are stupid and annoying, but practicing the distribution of those things does not make a person anything other than distributors of those things. if they do not have ethics, then they do not have ethics, but that's another situation entirely (and i would guess everything we know about human psychology and evolution pretty much rules that possibility out anyway), and certainly not the end result of their actions. their actions are the end result of their ethics, certainly, so i guess by stating otherwise you are begging the question? my knowledge of that fallacy is pretty lame, though. i'm not really smart enough to understand it, or something (something probably being i haven't learned enough to understand it [i remember reading that people who don't think they can do things tend to not try hard enough to find out if they can, so i'm trying to break that habit {because obviously if i read it on the internet it's true}]).
another issue i have is with that article terming this as 'social engineering.' how exactly is a completely scripted process using absolutely no human interaction social engineering? if i write a program to represent a prompt for a passkey that stores the inputted information into a flat file, and a user ignorantly inputs their log in credentials to it, am i socially engineering them into doing so? just because it's a social networking site doesn't mean everything done on it is social. i understand that it's written to appear to be social, but i wouldn't call a full grown bear dressed in a diaper a human baby. i wouldn't call smarterchild a human being or consider a converssation with it a social event. why is completing a scripted process social on any level? just because you are compelled into action by a perceived social obligation does not mean you are participating in a social activity.
i still pee standing up.
this is an obvious risk that's taken any time you give something freely to other people. what, it's free only as long as they do what you want them to do with it? that doesn't sound free at all. i'd suggest anybody who has an issue with opportunists taking advantage of an...opportunity to take a quick second to realize that nobody cares except the people who think like you, and if you want to force other people to act the same way the you and the group that supports you wants, you are simply bullying people into certain behavior.
use your powers of 'communication' (foreign phrase, i know. i'm a sucker for obscure terms) to talk to the people who do things you don't want them to do. have an argument and see if anybody walks away with a change of opinion. these guys who are selling this software aren't going to be making critical updates to it. they won't be offering technical support or bug tracking, or anything else. if you concentrate on these issues you are taking away from time that could have been better spent on something else.
i never mentioned anything about cult practices or tools. you said you use halo 3 to get kids to join your church. i'm glad you're glad you 'provide' people with such information to make informed decisions as uh, how to strafe jump or whatever.
i don't think YOU get it. are you telling me that all i had to do to find out how the universe came to be in its current state is ASK YOU? whether or not somebody knows what you believe and whether they'd like to 'believe that too' has nothing to do with ANYTHING i said. in fact, it only serves to support what i said more fully. the sad fact is that you don't know what you're talking about. you inject all of these negative connotations into your responses to me, as though i had a bad experience with religion and that's what keeps me from respecting the 'fact' that 'your' church (rofl?) gives people all the 'information' up front.
notice the inclusion of quotes around those keywords? that's because i'm being sarcastic. i think your first mistake in responding to me is that you do so under the assumption that the severity and classification of my feelings in regard to religion somehow sway my opinion of it. they don't, but even if they did you would be wrong because i never had a 'bad' experience when i attended church. i'd say it was rather boring and uninteresting, but whatever.
how is this any different from a pedophile using candy to lure in children, or some freak spiked fish using a light to lure other freaky spiked fish into its mouth? i guess the perpetrator of such violences against the perceived victims would possess the justification by default, else he'd have to be considered mad to have ever violated a person(or fish)'s rights so horribly.
the whole 'hypocrite' side of things is stupid and superficial. this isn't about whether or not people will be people and do things that go against whatever strict doctrine they claim to adhere to. it's impossible to be a human being and follow every rule you want to follow from a 2000 page book.
the problem here is that we can't just assume the means are justified by the end simply because we are participators in the end itself. people should want to be christians because they identify with the reasoning for being christian, whether that reasoning be fear, love, togetherness, or what have you.
i'm not interested in getting into a debate about what christianity is worth, but seriously, using halo to get people to identify church with fun? do these kids even know the stories of abraham or that the bible would have them stoned to death for telling their mom to wait because they have just one more flag to cap before the game is over?
ignorance is only bliss when you ignore the harsh realities of a subject. it's so easy to get people to believe in your cause when you've got halo parties and you can pick and choose the parts of a religious text that you 'feel' apply to your life. there are 5 billion people on this planet who are actually convinced some form of a god would actually side with them on issues others feel the complete opposite about and also feel god would side with them on.
what the hell are you thinking? do you really feel entitled to let people 'know' things that you 'feel' are true? i know it seems harmless to use video games to get people to 'join your club,' because neither of those things (the video game or the club) seem threatening to you, but that's only because you have no competing understanding and the people you lure in aren't given the proper information or argumentation/logic skills to properly assess the situation they're being lured into!
maybe they're working on testing a system for installing software to processors. why build a machine to do it when you can test it in theory on tons of free machines? maybe microsoft and intel are working on the next big shift in our software and processors. modern processors are gaining cores rapidly, why not have these cores programmed to execute specific operations?
i've owned the wii for a while, and i have to say that it is the best console i've had since the super nintendo. i'm 23 years old and i've got friends and family coming over and having a good time, and we still play wii sports. i haven't played the playstation 3, and i'm not going to pretend to have an opinion on the quality of it, but to say the wii is a good model because of its price is a little silly. it has a good price because it's a good model!
Slashdot Mirror
instead of simply using satellites orbiting the earth we write programs on these phones that request to be triangulated by surrounding phones in order to develop a cellular sense of location, like a layer of atmospheric nerves relaying locational awareness data constantly? then as pictures are taken the location can be stored in a database and a digital reconstruction of reality can be created. why drive a car with a camera on top when you can get humanity to do all the work for free by providing a service?!
congress has also been looking into a way to install triggers in newborn brains that will sound an audible click each time a person sees and remembers something.
i'm a femele and i have to say that abortion is right, because god created the concept of it and has a plan for the women who do it. certainly god's plan for women who abort babies is not for them to go to hell, but for god to have lots of little babies in heaven that he can play with.
so by your logic i'm not an adult? geez, your statements are completely vacuous. seeya4eel!
who are you? juvenile? stop telling me to back things up. you are not the keeper of proper argumentation, and you're certainly not going to dictate how or why i express myself. what i'm saying is a self-evident truth. you cannot prove the existence of god, and as such believing in something you cannot have evidence for or even argue logically is ILLOGICAL. you cannot argue for the existence of a god logically without making unverifiable claims. there is a HUGE amount of documented thinking about this subject. you can pick up any given richard dawkins book to see how somebody who's actually intelligent would approach the subject. you talk about me acting like i have a 'higher level of understanding' than you, but i really don't know where this is coming from. i'm pretty self-deprecating in general. you seem to paint a lot of straw men in your responses to me.
unless you're willing to argue that pascal's wager is some deep and meaningful insight into the religious mind, i really don't have anything else to add the the conversation. i cited dawkins, because i think he's the leading authority (at least in presence) on opening up the fallacious nature of religion (personal opinions of his aside). if you don't want to read what dawkins has to say, you surely don't want to read what i have to say. if you've already read what dawkins has to say, there is absolutely nothing i can say to contribute to this conversation. you keep demanding i 'back up' my 'claim,' but it's not 'my' claim, and a hardcore web 2.0 programmer of the future such as yourself should understand that it's bad enough i'm wasting my time talking to you this much, let alone the time i would waste confusing the issue further by applying my limited capacity for reason to subjects that have already been thoroughly discussed by men of greater magnitudes of intelligence than myself.
as i've said before, and you've chosen to ignore: the information is freely available in copious amounts. i'm just curious, though, have you asked god to back up his claims lately?
i suppose i'll go ahead and fulfill godwin's law here just to point at that the little slashdot next to your name sure does remind me a lot of a swastika arm band. it's slightly terrifying. slightly. do you know any blackhat seo hackers i can hire to get my site to the third page of google for hacker tips?? it's actually a collection of mega man pictures, but i know how people like to hack. you call kayditty a liar, and i'm sure kayditty is more than capable of speaking for kayditty's very own self, but since when is an observation an attack? just because you're sensitive about the subject doesn't mean you're being attacked. you're not a victim. this is a conversation, and people are speaking freely. get a grip. you really are a troll, and normally i'm just like 'eh' and try not to respond (like i said in another reply to you), but dammit if you aren't good at being a troll, because i feel so damned damningly dammit damn damn damn compelled to respond. you bug me, congratulations. i really hope you feel good about yourself, and that is not sarcasm. i want you to feel good. and you talk of excuses, but who needs excuses to respond when 'integrity demands' rational response filled with evidence and intricate statements well backed by reason and explanation such as yours? (that one is sarcasm)
you got me, i'm a sucker for responding. and i used to do the whole quote by quote thing, too. i'm going to pass on that now, though. i'll try to address them in order, though, because i'm so great. you say i'm wrong (and later talk about maintaining integrity, or something. i'll climb that hill when i get there), but offer no evidence or argument to the contrary. that sounds sort of like uh, something...i can't really think of what it's called. i heard about it a long time ago on a coke commercial. relugia?? that's not right. religation?????? RELIGIOINZZZ!!!!111 i am so clever! like i said before, i don't want to get into a conversation about the basics of the philosophical or scientific methods. there are better sources for that information than me (as i'm pretty sure you're convincend, anyway). i'm certainly not capable of convincing you, so all that i can do is suggest you read more (i think it's needless to say in most instances, but for you'll i'll point out that i always take my suggestions, as well, and will continue to study up on the subject. i'll be the first to feel stupid if i find out just how wrong i was [have fun proving it. signed, kafka]). i'm not convinced of it, i'm trying to construct an argument based on logic. i'm not espousing my beliefs, i'm trying to refine my argumentation through practice. i'm not here to change your mind. that's not my goal. if i do, that's your fault for not having the same ideas as me in the first place. an appeal to authority isn't a logical fallacy? the idea that a god none of us can possibly prove the existence of dictates to them how to regulate the activities of men on earth? come on, that one is on the FIRST PAGE of the bible. i may be a poor thinker. i don't know. that's a pretty mean thing to say to me. :(
i guess it's kind of obvious that i'm not refusing to back anything up. i just don't understand how somebody who is so obviously a troll is actually in a position of some form of authority on this site (or does that slashdot.org next to your name mean you paid for the premium account?). i just don't want to talk to you about it any more, but i feel compelled to because i like to argue and you're the only person up right now who wants to at least provoke me into saying things. once again, don't get the wrong idea (despite seeing how poorly this statement has worked with you before). i'm not replying because you called me out on saying i don't want to, i'm replying because that's what i do. i'm a replier to things people say to me. i can't help it.
i don't think integrity demands anything from me. i don't have to back up anything i say, and i think it's a pretty fortunate luxury for you that i'm actually giving you the time of...night. i normally make a conscious effort to avoid posting on slashdot (one glance at the comments is usually enough to reinforce this), but since you have some stake in the site i'm giving you special treatment, because that's what authorities like god and the president of the united states and the pope deserve and the administrators of a web site named slashdot deserve. or whatever.
i'm not saying believing in science is true and believing in religion is not. i'm saying believing in anything is philosophically unsound. i don't believe that believing in things is philosophically unsound, philsophy is an abstract process that offers us abstract boundaries in which we can state that with logical surity. you don't have to believe in god or believe in logic or believe in philosophy to make statements about god or philosophy or logic, but philosophy (unlike religion) gives us standards for judging the worth of arguments that have been refined over thousands of years of thinking and debate (both internal and external). religion gives us the refinement and precision of logical fallacies crafted to appear logically sound, and even uses sound philosophy to contribute to an appearance of logical credibility. i think all of this stuff is pretty obvious. i really don't want to have a conversation with you about it anymore. seeya.
oh, and please don't respond with 'but you believe what you said,' or something equally passe. i don't believe what i said, i'm just working within the abstract confines of philosophy, and i recognize that there's a good chance i'm wrong. i'm totally willing to update my understanding of religion and belief and all of those things. information exists, and i like the principles that allow for information to be propagated for mass pondering. it's sort of like distributed computing: why limit the scope of dissemination of information? 6 billion minds are certainly incalculably (to me, at least) more powerful than any single mind. i don't simply trust in individual ingenuity to provoke human progress, but the collective digression, regression and progression of individuals and the spread of those actions to people of utterly different viewpoints and observational bases for alternative computation.
i'm just arguing for the sake of argument (it's great fun, and i wish more people would do it. practice may not make perfect, but it certainly helps you to improve, and i know there are a lot of complaints about people's abilities to reason out complex arguments), and i think you've done a lot of assuming in your responses to kayditty, which is really what prompted me to reply to you. it's funny how people who proclaim belief in some deity tend to make really baseless assumptions about the motivations of others.
religious people DON'T have any good, rational arguments for things they believe. that's a pillar of philosophical significance that is demonstrated in introductory philosophy courses across this planet. it's a question that has been asked by outcast 12 year olds for who knows how long. science is inherently modular in nature due to the recognition of the irresolute nature of information. one of the largest problems confronting us in quantum mechanics is related to the nature of the requirements for making observations of matter on that sub-planck scale. if we cannot establish the integrity of reality at the very smallest level of the universe we can observe, how can we establish it at the idea of the very greatest (by that i mean a 'supreme' being, or personified uncased first cause, if you will).
don't get the wrong idea. i'm not assuming the validity of the premise of my argument (that you can't logically believe in religion based on the illogical nature of belief) by citing quantum mechanics, but am simply giving what i consider to be a really obvious example of the extremely biased nature of our perceptive and cognitive reaches. we are not capable of knowing that we know anything, and my definition of 'know' in this case would be to have a proper understanding of some aspect of reality. we CAN know, we just can't know we know. we can know we know, but we just can't know we know we know. it's an infinite regress, just like the assumption of a supreme being bringing up the question of something so intricate as a supreme being bearing the necessity for a creator in turn!
there are a host of actual reasons that theology is not philosophical, but there aren't any reasons i know of that theology is. we can apply the principles of philosophy (logic, reason, argumentation, etc.) to religion, but we cannot consider belief in religion itself philosophically sound because the very act of 'belief' is irrational on a philosophical level. like i stated before, belief is a huge logical black hole, and i'm not going to even begin to want to explain that to you. search for 'logical fallacies' on your web-ruining search engine of choice. i'm sure a smart guy like you can figure it out yourself just by educating yourself on logical fallacies. you really don't have to read about what anybody thinks about it to reason it out for yourself, so long as you allow yourself the freedom to actually educate yourself on the topic. you know, by suspending belief.
http://www.php.net/nl2br. seriously, it's 2008. and what's up with the 2 minute+ wait between posting? i don't even see an option for editing my post (i haven't looked very hard, so if somebody wants to just chime in if that option exists i'll be really grateful for saving me the time i might have to spend finding it, what a pointless pursuit that would be]). for a site written by people capable of understanding how to...create a site, this one sure is a pain in the ass to use.
why is this bias being injected into submissions? 'online marketers' aren't necessarily 'ethic-less,' even if their ethical standpoints don't necessarily coincide with their own. i would guess they do share ethical ideas with everybody using slashdot, though. they certainly utilize facebook to spread their ideals, which is what a lot of facebook users do on a regular basis (and what every living, thinking, non-hermit person who has any effect on the world does, consciously or unconsciously). this idea that it's ok to use false proclamations simply because you're discussing a subject your general audience will likely have similar feelings toward is ludicrous. i think spyware and spam and things like that are stupid and annoying, but practicing the distribution of those things does not make a person anything other than distributors of those things. if they do not have ethics, then they do not have ethics, but that's another situation entirely (and i would guess everything we know about human psychology and evolution pretty much rules that possibility out anyway), and certainly not the end result of their actions. their actions are the end result of their ethics, certainly, so i guess by stating otherwise you are begging the question? my knowledge of that fallacy is pretty lame, though. i'm not really smart enough to understand it, or something (something probably being i haven't learned enough to understand it [i remember reading that people who don't think they can do things tend to not try hard enough to find out if they can, so i'm trying to break that habit {because obviously if i read it on the internet it's true}]). another issue i have is with that article terming this as 'social engineering.' how exactly is a completely scripted process using absolutely no human interaction social engineering? if i write a program to represent a prompt for a passkey that stores the inputted information into a flat file, and a user ignorantly inputs their log in credentials to it, am i socially engineering them into doing so? just because it's a social networking site doesn't mean everything done on it is social. i understand that it's written to appear to be social, but i wouldn't call a full grown bear dressed in a diaper a human baby. i wouldn't call smarterchild a human being or consider a converssation with it a social event. why is completing a scripted process social on any level? just because you are compelled into action by a perceived social obligation does not mean you are participating in a social activity. i still pee standing up.
this is an obvious risk that's taken any time you give something freely to other people. what, it's free only as long as they do what you want them to do with it? that doesn't sound free at all. i'd suggest anybody who has an issue with opportunists taking advantage of an...opportunity to take a quick second to realize that nobody cares except the people who think like you, and if you want to force other people to act the same way the you and the group that supports you wants, you are simply bullying people into certain behavior. use your powers of 'communication' (foreign phrase, i know. i'm a sucker for obscure terms) to talk to the people who do things you don't want them to do. have an argument and see if anybody walks away with a change of opinion. these guys who are selling this software aren't going to be making critical updates to it. they won't be offering technical support or bug tracking, or anything else. if you concentrate on these issues you are taking away from time that could have been better spent on something else.
commander taco works countless hours to bring this site to you, and this is all you have to say?
this is especially useful for unconventional web developers who don't actually have access to the internet.
hey, thanks man!
i never mentioned anything about cult practices or tools. you said you use halo 3 to get kids to join your church. i'm glad you're glad you 'provide' people with such information to make informed decisions as uh, how to strafe jump or whatever.
i don't think YOU get it. are you telling me that all i had to do to find out how the universe came to be in its current state is ASK YOU? whether or not somebody knows what you believe and whether they'd like to 'believe that too' has nothing to do with ANYTHING i said. in fact, it only serves to support what i said more fully. the sad fact is that you don't know what you're talking about. you inject all of these negative connotations into your responses to me, as though i had a bad experience with religion and that's what keeps me from respecting the 'fact' that 'your' church (rofl?) gives people all the 'information' up front.
notice the inclusion of quotes around those keywords? that's because i'm being sarcastic. i think your first mistake in responding to me is that you do so under the assumption that the severity and classification of my feelings in regard to religion somehow sway my opinion of it. they don't, but even if they did you would be wrong because i never had a 'bad' experience when i attended church. i'd say it was rather boring and uninteresting, but whatever.
well, you said it, so it must be true. where do i sign up?
how is this any different from a pedophile using candy to lure in children, or some freak spiked fish using a light to lure other freaky spiked fish into its mouth? i guess the perpetrator of such violences against the perceived victims would possess the justification by default, else he'd have to be considered mad to have ever violated a person(or fish)'s rights so horribly. the whole 'hypocrite' side of things is stupid and superficial. this isn't about whether or not people will be people and do things that go against whatever strict doctrine they claim to adhere to. it's impossible to be a human being and follow every rule you want to follow from a 2000 page book. the problem here is that we can't just assume the means are justified by the end simply because we are participators in the end itself. people should want to be christians because they identify with the reasoning for being christian, whether that reasoning be fear, love, togetherness, or what have you. i'm not interested in getting into a debate about what christianity is worth, but seriously, using halo to get people to identify church with fun? do these kids even know the stories of abraham or that the bible would have them stoned to death for telling their mom to wait because they have just one more flag to cap before the game is over? ignorance is only bliss when you ignore the harsh realities of a subject. it's so easy to get people to believe in your cause when you've got halo parties and you can pick and choose the parts of a religious text that you 'feel' apply to your life. there are 5 billion people on this planet who are actually convinced some form of a god would actually side with them on issues others feel the complete opposite about and also feel god would side with them on. what the hell are you thinking? do you really feel entitled to let people 'know' things that you 'feel' are true? i know it seems harmless to use video games to get people to 'join your club,' because neither of those things (the video game or the club) seem threatening to you, but that's only because you have no competing understanding and the people you lure in aren't given the proper information or argumentation/logic skills to properly assess the situation they're being lured into!
what is strangest to me is that rock star makes such an effort to parody old movies, culture and such.
maybe they're working on testing a system for installing software to processors. why build a machine to do it when you can test it in theory on tons of free machines? maybe microsoft and intel are working on the next big shift in our software and processors. modern processors are gaining cores rapidly, why not have these cores programmed to execute specific operations?
i've owned the wii for a while, and i have to say that it is the best console i've had since the super nintendo. i'm 23 years old and i've got friends and family coming over and having a good time, and we still play wii sports. i haven't played the playstation 3, and i'm not going to pretend to have an opinion on the quality of it, but to say the wii is a good model because of its price is a little silly. it has a good price because it's a good model!
is slashdot advertising advertisements?
i guess we're headed that'a way.