Do athiests go on missions from their atheist church to convert people - to nothing?
You've nearly hit the nail on the head, there - though I suspect perhaps not in the way you had intended. A lot of people who embrace the term "atheist" today do go and try to convert people. This in reality means that they are not atheists in the classic definition of the word as they are expressing a faith and a drive for that faith.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god. At that point they are not truly atheists as the term means "without faith". They have instead hijacked the term to now mean "anyone who believes there to not be a god"; indeed it takes just as much faith to believe there to not be a god as it does to believe there to be one.
This is why while I am classically an atheist, I use the term agnostic to describe myself in the modern world.
There should be a Dell tech support joke attached to this somehow... how long would it take for a Dell support tech to pay for a $100 phone at the rate Dell pays?
For certain very lucky values of "safely", sure. Taking your eyes completely off the road to do something is, quite simply, never a good idea.
Nonesense. You take your eyes off the road all the time in order to specifically drive safely. You take your eyes off the road when you check your speedometer, tack, warning gauges, mirrors, to read road signs and look for crossing traffic, and so on as a function of driving safely.
Every one of those functions take less time than writing a text message. Furthermore all those functions are designed to be easy and safe to do while driving. Text messaging was never designed with that in mind.
I really only know about locally... The only place here it is illegal is in school zones.. otherwise, talk and text away while driving...
Texting while driving in most places can be classified as distracted driving. It doesn't need a special classification; if you were reading the newspaper while driving you could be pulled over and fined for that, texting is often handled the same way.
Some places have additional statutes and fines on the matter, but that is just to try to raise awareness - or revenue.
Fines and public education work better than a technical solution to stupidity.
Unfortunately it appears that fines and education have been completely ineffective on the matter. I lived in a place for several years that would have annual campaigns to discourage drivers from texting while driving, followed by announced enhanced enforcement of the offense.
So what happened? Were people at least smart enough to send fewer messages during the enhanced enforcement period? No. Not even close. Every year the tallies went up.
People understand when it hits their wallet directly
For one, most of the people doing this are young and their insurance - and phone bill - are paid by the parents. So nothing is hitting their own wallets directly.
and when their phones are confiscated.
I have yet to hear of anyone having their phones confiscated. Although again as the offenders far more often than not are getting everything they need from their parents, confiscation won't do much but prevent them from sending messages for the next 24 hours or so.
For certain very lucky values of "safely", sure. Taking your eyes completely off the road to do something is, quite simply, never a good idea.
Well, in a technical sense it is less safe than not texting while driving but so many people do it without incident each and every day that they consider it safe enough for them to do it.
A lot of people drive drunk and don't cause accidents (or only harm themselves) yet we don't consider it to be safe.
It is a lot like driving with one hand verses two at the ten and two positions.
No, it is far much more like driving drunk.
Many people can safely drive with one hand but it is safer to be in the ten and two positions with two hands which is why we need to do it to pass most driving tests.
Generally only the case if your car has an automatic transmission. Rather hard to do that if you are taking a test with a standard transmission.
How about we just put lights on top of cars that light up brightly when a text message is being sent from anyone in the car? Then the rest of the drivers on the road can avoid those idiots, as the ones who have texting passengers in the car (aside from taxis and such) are generally no better than the ones who are attempting to text while driving.
The bright light would also make it easier for cops to know who to pull over when they are doing enhanced patrols for these shit-heads as well.
If someone has so little self-control as to be unable to avoid talking or texting while driving, why are we allowing them to drive in the first place?
It is against the law pretty much everywhere. However that law is enforced pretty much nowhere. It is just simply too difficult to enforce it, as a police officer has to catch the person in the act to even write a ticket. And then the ticket is so laughably small in terms of the monetary penalty as to be pointless to even write.
In other words, people do it because they (wrongly) think they can do it safely, and then (unfortunately correctly) believe that they have nearly a zero chance of getting busted for it.
That actually disproves the point more than it proves it. If you look at the author affiliations on that page, there is exactly one American researcher on there, and he is named with a large number of international researchers for the same work. On top of that, he is not solely an American, suggesting his funding contribution (which we cannot ascertain from this, other than to say it was almost certainly less than 100%) was likely not all from US funding.
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
The problem though is that a lot of the big scientific problems require more capital than any ordinary person would ever be able to amass on their own. My PhD project consumed supplies at the rate of tens of thousands of dollars per year, and that is ignoring the cost of time, utilities, physical space, and standard lab supplies that our lab kept around for general consumption. That also is ignoring the cost of the instrumentation that we used to do the work.
If someone did fund something like it independently, then they would run in to the cost of publishing the results; the main paper from my graduate work cost somewhere around $1,500 to publish in an open access journal. Without budgets set up for that purpose, why would someone do this on their own?
Sure, there are interesting projects that can be self-funded, but not many of them. And the two people described in the NPR story were both working on projects that were way beyond that level of resource requirements.
There are a few points along the way where development of life on earth had to go one way, or the other, and was not able to sustain both directions. For example, the chirality of amino acids where the overwhelming majority of them are L forms even though there is no physical restriction on the creation of the D form. Similarly the DNA double helix is right-handed in almost all cases.
One interesting thing about this is that if we were to find a planet filled with plants made up of D amino acids and left-handed DNA we may find ourselves unable to consume those plants for nutritional value.
By sales volume Lexus cars are contenders for the least interesting on the road. The ES and RX are the top selling lines by a long shot and neither have more personality than a box of generic wheaties.
They also never built the LFA
The LFA might as well not exist, it is not only extraordinarily low in volume to the point where >>99% of the world's population will never see one in person, but it also shares no parts with any other car made by Toyota. It is an exercise in what they can do when they commit enough engineers to a case.
They aren't currently building the RC-F
Again, who cares.
Or the IS350.
The IS350 is a cold and dull attempt to compete with the BMW 3 series.
Tesla likes to go for flashy and exciting vehicles. Toyota likes to build boring economy cars for the masses. I bet Toyota is eying the gigafactory as a source for batteries for a new all-electric Camry (or similarly bland family sedan). They should be able to use scale to bring down the cost of an all-electric Camry, the question then will be if sucking all the fun out of it will make a notable difference in battery life or not.
While what you say is true, you fail to consider the number of protons in a baseball.
Sure, but if you don't live in a country where baseball is commonly played then it is hard to have a frame of reference for how large a baseball is. Conversely if you do live in a country where baseball is commonly played then you likely don't use the metric system in daily life.
The Cadillac ATS sedan is trying to compete directly with the BMW 3 and 5 series (as well as the Mercedes C and E class sedans). I would expect this feature to go in there.
To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour
Isn't particularly valuable as baseball is mostly played the US, and in international competition we still tend to use the imperial units of measurement. This is important here as 10d0 km ~= 62 miles. While a 62mph pitch would certainly hurt if it hit you, that is considered to be a rather pedestrian speed for major league baseball.
Our last huge internet-related IPO pulled in several craptons of money for a company that has no product and only functions to waste time and sell users' private data.
Because if it's Facebook (FB), its product is space on its users' screens
That is not a particularly valuable product, particularly considering how many people use adblock and other similar browser plug-ins (coupled with the general failure of selling ad space on mobile phones).
nd it sells only aggregate data, not personally identifying information, to its advertisers.
To its lower-tiered advertisers, possibly. Don't fool yourself into thinking they aren't selling personally identifying information elsewhere.
... and before someone says "if you don't like it, don't use it" - I'm not using facebook. I've never had an account there. However I know they have information on me based on what my wife has posted and shown me over the years. There is no effective opt-out for it, the fact I don't have an account is rather meaningless to their empire.
Our last huge internet-related IPO pulled in several craptons of money for a company that has no product and only functions to waste time and sell users' private data. Alibaba at least has a product and does a useful service. Apparently having an actual business plan is no longer important to having a successful IPO if you're an online company?
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
I think many or even most of us here agree with that view, even if a small minority vigorously disagrees.
Considering how far to the right slashdot leans with their selection of front page stories, I must disagree with you. The distribution of moderations here further supports my claim.
First of all, his regime was already falling apart due to mismanagement; his days were numbered. All we did was accelerate his demise.
Second of all, we spared - temporarily - the lives of the people he would have likely killed and instead killed a bunch of others from his country. We still to this day do not know how many Iraqis we killed in this little endeavor of ours. And then the quagmire that we created led to the killing of thousands more afterwards, including some of the people who we thought we were going there to save.
Who is killing people?
The Americans, the Iraqis, and many more.
Who are being killed?
Same groups, mostly.
Why are they being killed?
If you were actually communicating with Iraqis you wouldn't need me to answer that for you.
What is the history of the region?
That is complicated, but one of the biggest factors is the fact that the nation of "Iraq" is a European construct that did not exist under the current borders until the days of imperialism. We put several groups of people who did not want to live with each other and pretended that they were magically a homogeneous state.
What is the culture of the region?
There are many cultures in the region. If you knew that you would be much better off.
What you call "FUD" is everyday life in some parts of the world
What you seem to have conveniently overlooked is that he claims it will take hold here in the US by lunchtime tomorrow, unless we go and bomb the shit out of a long list of remote corners of the world. Furthermore he is pushing the fact-free notion that ISIS and others actually have an interest in harming the US directly in the US.
would you be open to someone, with the biggest guns on the planet, to step in and give you a chance to vote for a different regime?
This isn't about voting, and never was. The wars we have started over the past decades were never intended to bring "freedom" to anyone.
Just because it's not going to happen to your Utopian San Francisco doesn't mean shit's not raining on this planet and people aren't hoping that help is on the way.
I live about 2,000 miles from SF by car. Oddly enough that is twice the bizzaro number you pulled out of your nether regions when you were making shit up about striking enemies militarily.
Terrorism and nation-building or nation-conquering are not the same (at least, not when conducted by anyone other than the US government). You are treating them as if they are interchangeable. There has never been meaningful evidence that the terrorists who have struck so much terror into your paranoid heart have any interest in taking over our country. Indeed if we learned anything from our Iraqi misadventure it should be that they have become more pissed off at us for doing so; terrorist acts against Americans went up, not down, once the occupation began.
Seriously, try reading the news before you try to lecture on it.
Slashdot Mirror
... can you run multiplayer doom if you have several of these printers? Maybe make the printer print out red when you're hit?
Do athiests go on missions from their atheist church to convert people - to nothing?
You've nearly hit the nail on the head, there - though I suspect perhaps not in the way you had intended. A lot of people who embrace the term "atheist" today do go and try to convert people. This in reality means that they are not atheists in the classic definition of the word as they are expressing a faith and a drive for that faith.
The bigger failure, from my vantage point, is that people who call themselves "atheists" today often have faith in there not being a god. At that point they are not truly atheists as the term means "without faith". They have instead hijacked the term to now mean "anyone who believes there to not be a god"; indeed it takes just as much faith to believe there to not be a god as it does to believe there to be one.
This is why while I am classically an atheist, I use the term agnostic to describe myself in the modern world.
There should be a Dell tech support joke attached to this somehow... how long would it take for a Dell support tech to pay for a $100 phone at the rate Dell pays?
For certain very lucky values of "safely", sure. Taking your eyes completely off the road to do something is, quite simply, never a good idea.
Nonesense. You take your eyes off the road all the time in order to specifically drive safely. You take your eyes off the road when you check your speedometer, tack, warning gauges, mirrors, to read road signs and look for crossing traffic, and so on as a function of driving safely.
Every one of those functions take less time than writing a text message. Furthermore all those functions are designed to be easy and safe to do while driving. Text messaging was never designed with that in mind.
Is it against the law almost everywhere?
I really only know about locally... The only place here it is illegal is in school zones.. otherwise, talk and text away while driving...
Texting while driving in most places can be classified as distracted driving. It doesn't need a special classification; if you were reading the newspaper while driving you could be pulled over and fined for that, texting is often handled the same way.
Some places have additional statutes and fines on the matter, but that is just to try to raise awareness - or revenue.
Fines and public education work better than a technical solution to stupidity.
Unfortunately it appears that fines and education have been completely ineffective on the matter. I lived in a place for several years that would have annual campaigns to discourage drivers from texting while driving, followed by announced enhanced enforcement of the offense.
So what happened? Were people at least smart enough to send fewer messages during the enhanced enforcement period? No. Not even close. Every year the tallies went up.
People understand when it hits their wallet directly
For one, most of the people doing this are young and their insurance - and phone bill - are paid by the parents. So nothing is hitting their own wallets directly.
and when their phones are confiscated.
I have yet to hear of anyone having their phones confiscated. Although again as the offenders far more often than not are getting everything they need from their parents, confiscation won't do much but prevent them from sending messages for the next 24 hours or so.
For the most part, people can safely do it.
For certain very lucky values of "safely", sure. Taking your eyes completely off the road to do something is, quite simply, never a good idea.
Well, in a technical sense it is less safe than not texting while driving but so many people do it without incident each and every day that they consider it safe enough for them to do it.
A lot of people drive drunk and don't cause accidents (or only harm themselves) yet we don't consider it to be safe.
It is a lot like driving with one hand verses two at the ten and two positions.
No, it is far much more like driving drunk.
Many people can safely drive with one hand but it is safer to be in the ten and two positions with two hands which is why we need to do it to pass most driving tests.
Generally only the case if your car has an automatic transmission. Rather hard to do that if you are taking a test with a standard transmission.
How about we just put lights on top of cars that light up brightly when a text message is being sent from anyone in the car? Then the rest of the drivers on the road can avoid those idiots, as the ones who have texting passengers in the car (aside from taxis and such) are generally no better than the ones who are attempting to text while driving.
The bright light would also make it easier for cops to know who to pull over when they are doing enhanced patrols for these shit-heads as well.
If someone has so little self-control as to be unable to avoid talking or texting while driving, why are we allowing them to drive in the first place?
It is against the law pretty much everywhere. However that law is enforced pretty much nowhere. It is just simply too difficult to enforce it, as a police officer has to catch the person in the act to even write a ticket. And then the ticket is so laughably small in terms of the monetary penalty as to be pointless to even write.
In other words, people do it because they (wrongly) think they can do it safely, and then (unfortunately correctly) believe that they have nearly a zero chance of getting busted for it.
Sure, but can we assume that the other researchers didn't receive grant money from *their* governments?
What difference does that make? Why should we care what kind of research the government of Japan wants to fund?
for every stupid project they come up with
Do you have any examples for this?
A few gems, sorted by year.
That actually disproves the point more than it proves it. If you look at the author affiliations on that page, there is exactly one American researcher on there, and he is named with a large number of international researchers for the same work. On top of that, he is not solely an American, suggesting his funding contribution (which we cannot ascertain from this, other than to say it was almost certainly less than 100%) was likely not all from US funding.
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
The problem though is that a lot of the big scientific problems require more capital than any ordinary person would ever be able to amass on their own. My PhD project consumed supplies at the rate of tens of thousands of dollars per year, and that is ignoring the cost of time, utilities, physical space, and standard lab supplies that our lab kept around for general consumption. That also is ignoring the cost of the instrumentation that we used to do the work.
If someone did fund something like it independently, then they would run in to the cost of publishing the results; the main paper from my graduate work cost somewhere around $1,500 to publish in an open access journal. Without budgets set up for that purpose, why would someone do this on their own?
Sure, there are interesting projects that can be self-funded, but not many of them. And the two people described in the NPR story were both working on projects that were way beyond that level of resource requirements.
There are a few points along the way where development of life on earth had to go one way, or the other, and was not able to sustain both directions. For example, the chirality of amino acids where the overwhelming majority of them are L forms even though there is no physical restriction on the creation of the D form. Similarly the DNA double helix is right-handed in almost all cases.
One interesting thing about this is that if we were to find a planet filled with plants made up of D amino acids and left-handed DNA we may find ourselves unable to consume those plants for nutritional value.
Yeah, because Toyota never built a Lexus
By sales volume Lexus cars are contenders for the least interesting on the road. The ES and RX are the top selling lines by a long shot and neither have more personality than a box of generic wheaties.
They also never built the LFA
The LFA might as well not exist, it is not only extraordinarily low in volume to the point where >>99% of the world's population will never see one in person, but it also shares no parts with any other car made by Toyota. It is an exercise in what they can do when they commit enough engineers to a case.
They aren't currently building the RC-F
Again, who cares.
Or the IS350.
The IS350 is a cold and dull attempt to compete with the BMW 3 series.
Tesla likes to go for flashy and exciting vehicles. Toyota likes to build boring economy cars for the masses. I bet Toyota is eying the gigafactory as a source for batteries for a new all-electric Camry (or similarly bland family sedan). They should be able to use scale to bring down the cost of an all-electric Camry, the question then will be if sucking all the fun out of it will make a notable difference in battery life or not.
While what you say is true, you fail to consider the number of protons in a baseball.
Sure, but if you don't live in a country where baseball is commonly played then it is hard to have a frame of reference for how large a baseball is. Conversely if you do live in a country where baseball is commonly played then you likely don't use the metric system in daily life.
That would mean that a company notorious for lousy customer service is about to buy a company whose greatest assets are irrelevant.
Yeah, that sounds about right. Carry on.
The Cadillac ATS sedan is trying to compete directly with the BMW 3 and 5 series (as well as the Mercedes C and E class sedans). I would expect this feature to go in there.
To put that in context, that's a single proton with the same energy as a baseball flying at 100 kilometers per hour
Isn't particularly valuable as baseball is mostly played the US, and in international competition we still tend to use the imperial units of measurement. This is important here as 10d0 km ~= 62 miles. While a 62mph pitch would certainly hurt if it hit you, that is considered to be a rather pedestrian speed for major league baseball.
Our last huge internet-related IPO pulled in several craptons of money for a company that has no product and only functions to waste time and sell users' private data.
Because if it's Facebook (FB), its product is space on its users' screens
That is not a particularly valuable product, particularly considering how many people use adblock and other similar browser plug-ins (coupled with the general failure of selling ad space on mobile phones).
nd it sells only aggregate data, not personally identifying information, to its advertisers.
To its lower-tiered advertisers, possibly. Don't fool yourself into thinking they aren't selling personally identifying information elsewhere.
... and before someone says "if you don't like it, don't use it" - I'm not using facebook. I've never had an account there. However I know they have information on me based on what my wife has posted and shown me over the years. There is no effective opt-out for it, the fact I don't have an account is rather meaningless to their empire.
Our last huge internet-related IPO pulled in several craptons of money for a company that has no product and only functions to waste time and sell users' private data. Alibaba at least has a product and does a useful service. Apparently having an actual business plan is no longer important to having a successful IPO if you're an online company?
I know that is not a popular opinion here, but it is the truth.
I think many or even most of us here agree with that view, even if a small minority vigorously disagrees.
Considering how far to the right slashdot leans with their selection of front page stories, I must disagree with you. The distribution of moderations here further supports my claim.
We didn't accomplish anything with that war.
Except depose a genocidal dictator
First of all, his regime was already falling apart due to mismanagement; his days were numbered. All we did was accelerate his demise.
Second of all, we spared - temporarily - the lives of the people he would have likely killed and instead killed a bunch of others from his country. We still to this day do not know how many Iraqis we killed in this little endeavor of ours. And then the quagmire that we created led to the killing of thousands more afterwards, including some of the people who we thought we were going there to save.
Who is killing people?
The Americans, the Iraqis, and many more.
Who are being killed?
Same groups, mostly.
Why are they being killed?
If you were actually communicating with Iraqis you wouldn't need me to answer that for you.
What is the history of the region?
That is complicated, but one of the biggest factors is the fact that the nation of "Iraq" is a European construct that did not exist under the current borders until the days of imperialism. We put several groups of people who did not want to live with each other and pretended that they were magically a homogeneous state.
What is the culture of the region?
There are many cultures in the region. If you knew that you would be much better off.
What you call "FUD" is everyday life in some parts of the world
What you seem to have conveniently overlooked is that he claims it will take hold here in the US by lunchtime tomorrow, unless we go and bomb the shit out of a long list of remote corners of the world. Furthermore he is pushing the fact-free notion that ISIS and others actually have an interest in harming the US directly in the US.
would you be open to someone, with the biggest guns on the planet, to step in and give you a chance to vote for a different regime?
This isn't about voting, and never was. The wars we have started over the past decades were never intended to bring "freedom" to anyone.
Just because it's not going to happen to your Utopian San Francisco doesn't mean shit's not raining on this planet and people aren't hoping that help is on the way.
I live about 2,000 miles from SF by car. Oddly enough that is twice the bizzaro number you pulled out of your nether regions when you were making shit up about striking enemies militarily.
Terrorism and nation-building or nation-conquering are not the same (at least, not when conducted by anyone other than the US government). You are treating them as if they are interchangeable. There has never been meaningful evidence that the terrorists who have struck so much terror into your paranoid heart have any interest in taking over our country. Indeed if we learned anything from our Iraqi misadventure it should be that they have become more pissed off at us for doing so; terrorist acts against Americans went up, not down, once the occupation began.
Seriously, try reading the news before you try to lecture on it.