The PC is a modular product made to be upgraded. If they don't want you tampering with stuff inside of it, they need to put a tamper seal on each thing they don't want you touching.
Well, they certainly can do so, but AFAIK, there's no legal reason they have to do so. However, if they deny the warranty, the burden of proof is on them to show that the changes you made caused the failure, at least in theory. In practice, if you aren't willing to sue them, they can deny the warranty all they want to, and they probably won't ever get in trouble for it.
It's not greed, just survival. For some unknown reason antibiotics have a synergistic growth effect on animals that are not sick so antibiotics are feed to healthy animals. In the real world most businesses are barely profitable so any action that can increase profits is used to avoid bankruptcy.
Horses**t. The first farmers who did this did it because of greed, trying to make a bigger profit. Later farmers might have felt that it was the only way to survive, but only because the first farmers did what they did.
If your business isn't making a profit, you raise prices until it does. If you can't do that, it means either that you're doing something inefficiently or that somebody else is cutting corners. If it is the former, you need to fix the inefficiency. If it is the latter, you need to clearly differentiate your products from those others in the marketplace so that your customers know why your products cost more. Either way, cutting the same corners that everybody else does invariably results in a race to the bottom, not just in terms of cost, but also in terms of profit margins and quality. Once your business goes down that path, you might as well close the business and give the money back to the shareholders, because it is a hopeless cause, and your business is no longer contributing anything of value to the world as a whole that could not be contributed just as easily (and more efficiently) by your competitors in your absence.
Yes, this isn't all that unusual at all. It's pretty consistent with the unsolicited ideas submission policies of most major companies.
With that said, if these terms scare you, and if you don't care about submitting to Amazon, but just want a web-based script writing platform, check out WebScripted TV. It's kind of preliminary (translation: I'm the only developer, only user, and only tester), and I had to work around dozens of really bad bugs and misbehavior in various browsers' HTML editing functionality (to such an extent that MSIE isn't even supported, because it was just too broken to be even halfway functional last time I tried), so don't expect God's greatest gift to his people, but it is free to use, and lets you save copies of your content locally for backup purposes (or at least I think I enabled that feature).
And if you're an aspiring director, camera operator, etc., it offers the potential for creating groups of reviewers who can accept submissions from outside writers, collaboration on an online forum, peer editing, etc. Of course, I don't have the connections needed to actually get folks to start using it, but the potential is there.
I've never seen any/29 blocks for sale, and even if you could, you'd still have to get the ISP to route it, which they won't do, because they aren't willing to set up static routes, which is why they demand that you use their equipment so that they can use authenticated RIP without giving you the credentials.
It's the tragedy of the commons. You have a group of sociopathic businesspeople who consider their profits more important than the survival of the human race, so they give prophylactic antibiotics to animals that aren't even sick. The downfall of humanity will be greed.
t throws away all the timing information, so "c"onsonants aren't, and the difference between "p", "b" and "v" are completely lost, even though they're acoustically quite distinct.
That sounds like every cell phone call I ever heard. If you ever want to drive yourself to commit homicide on a bunch of audio codec engineers, try driving a car down the freeway and having someone on the other end of the line feed you crossword puzzle questions. They'll be saying "d as in dog", and half the time you'll still hear "p as in paul".
This makes me wonder how much of it is the software, and how much of it is the horrific microphone hidden behind a single tiny hole that is anything but acoustically transparent....
Exactly this - what's to stop your own equipment from being the static IP?
I think you both misread what I said.
Comcast requires their business-class DSL customers with more than one static IP to use rented equipment.
They'll let you have a single static IP with your own CPE. They might even allow you two (not certain). They won't let you have a block of eight IPs, which is what I currently have from Covad or Megapath or whatever their name is this week (Global something-or-other).
This genetic modification involves adding genes that produce additional fish growth hormones. If they added growth hormones to the meat after they killed the fish, that would be an additive. How is modifying the organism to produce that same chemical somehow magically different?
More to the point, how certain are we that fish growth hormones have no effect on human biology? Twenty years ago, nobody would have thought twice about plant estrogen, bovine growth hormone, antibiotics in meat, etc. What will we know twenty years from now that we don't know today, and how certain are we that none of those genetic changes will turn out to be a mistake?
The whole point of requiring labeling for genetically modified foods is to ensure that if someone buys atlantic salmon, he or she gets atlantic salmon, not chinook salmon. Whether it matters in this particular case—whether there's a noticeable difference between the health benefits of chinook salmon and atlantic salmon—is largely immaterial. As soon as you allow genetically modified organisms to be sold without labeling, you can't put that genie back in the bottle, and other companies are going to expect similar treatment. Sooner or later, one of those changes is going to make a material difference in terms of how healthy the food is, and nobody will have any way to know that they're not really getting what they paid for.
Mostly done by the industry and by an agency that has repeatedly failed to regulate that industry. The very same organization that is saying that these foods are safe also approved all those fun food additives that are believed to cause cancer and other issues. They're the same folks who were talking about allowing a rebranding of high fructose corn syrup as something else (I forget what, maybe corn sugar) to let the industry hide from consumer backlash over excessive fructose consumption that has been linked to diabetes and heart disease. And the list goes on and on. If we can't trust the FDA—and I maintain that we cannot—then we also can't trust its testing.
And even if we can trust its testing, the harsh reality is that although we know roughly what spliced genes will do in the first generation, under typical circumstances, we can't be certain how these changes could affect naturally suppressed genes over the course of hundreds of generations of breeding, variable environmental conditions, etc. Given enough unrestricted genetic modification, there's a nonzero chance that a previously safe plant or animal could spontaneously stop being so, without warning. Now to be fair, there's a nonzero chance of that happening without genetic modification, but my gut says that the chance is greater in a newly created genetic hybrid than in an organism that evolved over millions of years to be suited to its environment without any of those latent genes getting turned on throughout all of known history.
For those reasons, I feel that people who wish to minimize their exposure to genetically modified foods should have a legal right to know whether a given food product is likely to contain genetically modified foods, even if the additional risk posed by those foods is extremely low, in much the same way that they have the right to know whether pesticide was used, whether the milk was pasteurized, etc. The fact that it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that foods don't contain any genetically modified organisms is mostly irrelevant, because the risk of GMO foods is likely to be extremely small to begin with, so I think the FDA is being disingenuous when they use that excuse to block product labeling. Besides, there's a tiny possibility of pesticide blowing in from the next field and contaminating an organic crop, but the FDA doesn't ban farmers from calling their crops organic. So the FDA is treating this subject differently from other similar issues. That alone is reason to doubt whether they are truly functioning as an independent organization in this regard, or merely bowing to political pressure from big agribusiness.
... problem solved. The only reason this attack vector exists in the first place is that people are too lazy to install their own equipment.
Unfortunately, Comcast requires their business-class DSL customers with more than one static IP to use rented equipment, even if you are using it in a residential setting. So power-user customers don't have the option to install their own equipment. This is the main reason I'm still on DSL. They quoted me a price for service, then upped it by twenty or thirty bucks a month for equipment rental that wasn't in their original price. I told them I wasn't renting. They told me that it wasn't an option. I stayed with slow-but-largely-under-my-control DSL.
It is labeled properly. There is no evidence whatsoever that it is unsafe...
Nor is there any real evidence that it is safe. History is littered with food additives that were assumed to be safe because there was no evidence that they were unsafe, only to find out later, after those products were broadly distributed, that they were causing harm. The difference is that in the rest of the world, the governments protect people from that by demanding safety testing, whereas here, the FDA just adds them to the "generally recognized as safe" list and hopes for the best.
Case in point, sodium benzoate is on the GRAS list, despite breaking down in the presence of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) into benzene, a known carcinogen. And several soft drink brands were pulled from the shelves for this very reason.
For another example, red dye #2 was legal for 70 years before a Russian study and a subsequent FDA follow-up both tied it to cancer risk.
The burden of proof should be on the food industry to show beyond reasonable doubt that all food additives, including genetic modifications, result in food that is sa
If that were true, they would require submission of RAW files, which are exceptionally hard to doctor, rather than requiring you to submit only JPEGs, which are exceptionally easy to doctor.
You would have to be a pretty big idiot to think that JPEG files are harder to doctor than RAW files. Any photo format can be used when exporting a doctored image... has nothing to do with how it is saved.
It is actually the other way around. Other than in-camera, although you can write image metadata to RAW files, it isn't possible to write modified image data (or at least libraries for doing so don't exist to the best of my knowledge). And even if that were not true, the format of RAW files is specific to a given camera model, and because the RAW files are not pre-demosaiced, the positions of the colors aren't even on top of one another, so editing a RAW file would be almost like editing a color image after you convert it into a set of three halftone screens for printing.
JPEG files are orders of magnitude easier to doctor than RAW files.
Biotech isn't tech? That's news to me. Somebody call Reuters.
Okay, here's one:
Q: You're standing near a railroad track. A train is heading towards a group of blind people. You do not have time to run and get them off the tracks. You're standing near a switch, however, and can redirect the train to a different track. Unfortunately, on that second track lies a small child, strapped into a car seat. Do you pull the switch and kill the person who would not have died otherwise, or leave the switch and allow all those other people to die?
A: Neither. You pull out your cell phone or train radio, call dispatch, and tell them to stop the d**n train.
There. That's an example of tech solving an ethical problem.
More to the point, you can't readily doctor RAWs. So if their goal is ethics, they should require a RAW file to be submitted with every JPEG, so that they can later verify that it really is possible to get that JPEG from that RAW file. If their goal is to doctor reality and distort the truth, then by all means, require photographers to submit only JPEG images that can be readily faked.
No, AFP doesn't want your 20 MB RAW images that have been "enhanced" with filters either.
Considering that no software exists for writing RAW images other than the software built into the cameras, it is safe to say that you cannot submit a RAW image that has been "enhanced". You can either submit a JPEG rendition of the RAW file with enhancements or you can submit a RAW file. Sane people would say, "Submit both, and let the end consumer decide whether they want to accept the original photographer's vision of what the image should look like or grab the RAW file and adjust the levels themselves."
I would suspect that "often" is really "always". A typical Canon RAW file, for example, has 14 bits per pixel. Because of the extra precision, the effective dynamic range of a RAW file is dramatically wider than the dynamic range of a JPEG image. For example, if you have the following samples in the RAW image:
65500, 65532, 65515, 65533, 65473, 65535
And you convert that to JPEG, you'll get:
255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255
Iff you later need to pull the highs down to make them less blown out, if you're starting with the RAW image, you'll get a fairly accurate rendition of those values (up to the limits of the sensor), whereas if you start with the JPEG image, you'll get white blotches, because there's no detail there to recover. For recovering highlights and/or shadows, JPEG doesn't even come close to RAW, and can't. There's just too much data lost.
Not particularly surprising. Anyone who has actually studied recidivism knows that when people do time in prison, it requires a lot of effort on the part of the government to reintegrate them into society, and if that doesn't happen properly, they are much more likely to commit further crimes because they feel that they have no other means to get the things they want. We also have known for a long time that people who feel isolated from society are more likely to get drawn into a terrorist organization. Put these two together, and it should be pretty obvious that the people in western society who are most likely to become terrorists are former convicts.
This is one of the reasons that people on the left have been begging and screaming for many years, demanding better reintegration programs for former convicts that guarantee them a stable job and help them feel accepted back into society. Those reintegration programs are the weak point in western society, and it seems as though the powers that be like it that way, preferring that people go back to a life of crime so that they can keep them locked up. The terrorists are taking advantage of that, and anyone who didn't see it coming hasn't been paying attention. We have to get recidivism rates down to zero, because ensuring everyone feels accepted is the best tool at our disposal for fighting terrorism.
That's plainly wrong in light of what happened. These people didn't fight for, nor did they achieve, religious liberty in general; what they achieved was a Catholic France, and a patchwork of Catholic and protestant German states.
They didn't fight for religious liberty in general, but rather for the right to exercise their particular religion. That's hardly a material difference except in terms of the number of religious groups involved.
Really? And what dogmatic differences made them "not modern"?
Half the Protestant religions didn't even exist yet, because people like Calvin and Wesley hadn't even been born yet. Over time, many aspects of those new denominations had significant impact on other denominations, and even on Catholicism. For example, Luther might have seriously pissed off the Catholic Church, but over the centuries that followed, the Catholic Church saw significant reform (e.g. no more sale of indulgences) resulting from both them and Luther's other writings. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is that Catholics now typically say Mass in the native language of the region (the vernacular) instead of Latin. That change didn't happen until the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s.
But the bigger impact was the formation of America itself. The Protestant Reformation caused various groups to spring up, all demanding their right to worship as they chose. This basically forced the U.S. to become the secular society that we live in today. As a result, both Catholics and Protestants have come to accept differences in religious beliefs, and to agree to disagree. This is, of course, a journey rather than a destination, and there are still groups of Christians who discriminate against other groups of Christians, but not nearly to the same degree.
All of these things had a very real impact on what we think of as a "modern Christian". It isn't all about dogma and theology, though that is part of it. Any such definition must also include the societal evolution brought about by the Protestant Reformation—a change that has taken hundreds of years to reach fruition.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, they made a number of firmware changes to improve things.
Well, they certainly can do so, but AFAIK, there's no legal reason they have to do so. However, if they deny the warranty, the burden of proof is on them to show that the changes you made caused the failure, at least in theory. In practice, if you aren't willing to sue them, they can deny the warranty all they want to, and they probably won't ever get in trouble for it.
Horses**t. The first farmers who did this did it because of greed, trying to make a bigger profit. Later farmers might have felt that it was the only way to survive, but only because the first farmers did what they did.
If your business isn't making a profit, you raise prices until it does. If you can't do that, it means either that you're doing something inefficiently or that somebody else is cutting corners. If it is the former, you need to fix the inefficiency. If it is the latter, you need to clearly differentiate your products from those others in the marketplace so that your customers know why your products cost more. Either way, cutting the same corners that everybody else does invariably results in a race to the bottom, not just in terms of cost, but also in terms of profit margins and quality. Once your business goes down that path, you might as well close the business and give the money back to the shareholders, because it is a hopeless cause, and your business is no longer contributing anything of value to the world as a whole that could not be contributed just as easily (and more efficiently) by your competitors in your absence.
Yes, this isn't all that unusual at all. It's pretty consistent with the unsolicited ideas submission policies of most major companies.
With that said, if these terms scare you, and if you don't care about submitting to Amazon, but just want a web-based script writing platform, check out WebScripted TV. It's kind of preliminary (translation: I'm the only developer, only user, and only tester), and I had to work around dozens of really bad bugs and misbehavior in various browsers' HTML editing functionality (to such an extent that MSIE isn't even supported, because it was just too broken to be even halfway functional last time I tried), so don't expect God's greatest gift to his people, but it is free to use, and lets you save copies of your content locally for backup purposes (or at least I think I enabled that feature).
And if you're an aspiring director, camera operator, etc., it offers the potential for creating groups of reviewers who can accept submissions from outside writers, collaboration on an online forum, peer editing, etc. Of course, I don't have the connections needed to actually get folks to start using it, but the potential is there.
I've never seen any /29 blocks for sale, and even if you could, you'd still have to get the ISP to route it, which they won't do, because they aren't willing to set up static routes, which is why they demand that you use their equipment so that they can use authenticated RIP without giving you the credentials.
It's the tragedy of the commons. You have a group of sociopathic businesspeople who consider their profits more important than the survival of the human race, so they give prophylactic antibiotics to animals that aren't even sick. The downfall of humanity will be greed.
That sounds like every cell phone call I ever heard. If you ever want to drive yourself to commit homicide on a bunch of audio codec engineers, try driving a car down the freeway and having someone on the other end of the line feed you crossword puzzle questions. They'll be saying "d as in dog", and half the time you'll still hear "p as in paul".
This makes me wonder how much of it is the software, and how much of it is the horrific microphone hidden behind a single tiny hole that is anything but acoustically transparent....
If you think that's difficult, wait 'til they reach an actual person and have to Morse out everything they want to say like in that Star Trek episode.
But seriously, I'm assuming those folks have to use TDD and an operator anyway.
Because 640 kilobits upstream is miserable for folks who upload gigabytes of photos to a remote server on a regular basis.
I think you both misread what I said.
They'll let you have a single static IP with your own CPE. They might even allow you two (not certain). They won't let you have a block of eight IPs, which is what I currently have from Covad or Megapath or whatever their name is this week (Global something-or-other).
This genetic modification involves adding genes that produce additional fish growth hormones. If they added growth hormones to the meat after they killed the fish, that would be an additive. How is modifying the organism to produce that same chemical somehow magically different?
More to the point, how certain are we that fish growth hormones have no effect on human biology? Twenty years ago, nobody would have thought twice about plant estrogen, bovine growth hormone, antibiotics in meat, etc. What will we know twenty years from now that we don't know today, and how certain are we that none of those genetic changes will turn out to be a mistake?
The whole point of requiring labeling for genetically modified foods is to ensure that if someone buys atlantic salmon, he or she gets atlantic salmon, not chinook salmon. Whether it matters in this particular case—whether there's a noticeable difference between the health benefits of chinook salmon and atlantic salmon—is largely immaterial. As soon as you allow genetically modified organisms to be sold without labeling, you can't put that genie back in the bottle, and other companies are going to expect similar treatment. Sooner or later, one of those changes is going to make a material difference in terms of how healthy the food is, and nobody will have any way to know that they're not really getting what they paid for.
Mostly done by the industry and by an agency that has repeatedly failed to regulate that industry. The very same organization that is saying that these foods are safe also approved all those fun food additives that are believed to cause cancer and other issues. They're the same folks who were talking about allowing a rebranding of high fructose corn syrup as something else (I forget what, maybe corn sugar) to let the industry hide from consumer backlash over excessive fructose consumption that has been linked to diabetes and heart disease. And the list goes on and on. If we can't trust the FDA—and I maintain that we cannot—then we also can't trust its testing.
And even if we can trust its testing, the harsh reality is that although we know roughly what spliced genes will do in the first generation, under typical circumstances, we can't be certain how these changes could affect naturally suppressed genes over the course of hundreds of generations of breeding, variable environmental conditions, etc. Given enough unrestricted genetic modification, there's a nonzero chance that a previously safe plant or animal could spontaneously stop being so, without warning. Now to be fair, there's a nonzero chance of that happening without genetic modification, but my gut says that the chance is greater in a newly created genetic hybrid than in an organism that evolved over millions of years to be suited to its environment without any of those latent genes getting turned on throughout all of known history.
For those reasons, I feel that people who wish to minimize their exposure to genetically modified foods should have a legal right to know whether a given food product is likely to contain genetically modified foods, even if the additional risk posed by those foods is extremely low, in much the same way that they have the right to know whether pesticide was used, whether the milk was pasteurized, etc. The fact that it is impossible to say with absolute certainty that foods don't contain any genetically modified organisms is mostly irrelevant, because the risk of GMO foods is likely to be extremely small to begin with, so I think the FDA is being disingenuous when they use that excuse to block product labeling. Besides, there's a tiny possibility of pesticide blowing in from the next field and contaminating an organic crop, but the FDA doesn't ban farmers from calling their crops organic. So the FDA is treating this subject differently from other similar issues. That alone is reason to doubt whether they are truly functioning as an independent organization in this regard, or merely bowing to political pressure from big agribusiness.
Unfortunately, Comcast requires their business-class DSL customers with more than one static IP to use rented equipment, even if you are using it in a residential setting. So power-user customers don't have the option to install their own equipment. This is the main reason I'm still on DSL. They quoted me a price for service, then upped it by twenty or thirty bucks a month for equipment rental that wasn't in their original price. I told them I wasn't renting. They told me that it wasn't an option. I stayed with slow-but-largely-under-my-control DSL.
Nor is there any real evidence that it is safe. History is littered with food additives that were assumed to be safe because there was no evidence that they were unsafe, only to find out later, after those products were broadly distributed, that they were causing harm. The difference is that in the rest of the world, the governments protect people from that by demanding safety testing, whereas here, the FDA just adds them to the "generally recognized as safe" list and hopes for the best.
Case in point, sodium benzoate is on the GRAS list, despite breaking down in the presence of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) into benzene, a known carcinogen. And several soft drink brands were pulled from the shelves for this very reason.
For another example, red dye #2 was legal for 70 years before a Russian study and a subsequent FDA follow-up both tied it to cancer risk.
The burden of proof should be on the food industry to show beyond reasonable doubt that all food additives, including genetic modifications, result in food that is sa
If that were true, they would require submission of RAW files, which are exceptionally hard to doctor, rather than requiring you to submit only JPEGs, which are exceptionally easy to doctor.
It is actually the other way around. Other than in-camera, although you can write image metadata to RAW files, it isn't possible to write modified image data (or at least libraries for doing so don't exist to the best of my knowledge). And even if that were not true, the format of RAW files is specific to a given camera model, and because the RAW files are not pre-demosaiced, the positions of the colors aren't even on top of one another, so editing a RAW file would be almost like editing a color image after you convert it into a set of three halftone screens for printing.
JPEG files are orders of magnitude easier to doctor than RAW files.
Biotech isn't tech? That's news to me. Somebody call Reuters.
Okay, here's one:
Q: You're standing near a railroad track. A train is heading towards a group of blind people. You do not have time to run and get them off the tracks. You're standing near a switch, however, and can redirect the train to a different track. Unfortunately, on that second track lies a small child, strapped into a car seat. Do you pull the switch and kill the person who would not have died otherwise, or leave the switch and allow all those other people to die?
A: Neither. You pull out your cell phone or train radio, call dispatch, and tell them to stop the d**n train.
There. That's an example of tech solving an ethical problem.
More to the point, you can't readily doctor RAWs. So if their goal is ethics, they should require a RAW file to be submitted with every JPEG, so that they can later verify that it really is possible to get that JPEG from that RAW file. If their goal is to doctor reality and distort the truth, then by all means, require photographers to submit only JPEG images that can be readily faked.
Considering that no software exists for writing RAW images other than the software built into the cameras, it is safe to say that you cannot submit a RAW image that has been "enhanced". You can either submit a JPEG rendition of the RAW file with enhancements or you can submit a RAW file. Sane people would say, "Submit both, and let the end consumer decide whether they want to accept the original photographer's vision of what the image should look like or grab the RAW file and adjust the levels themselves."
Step 1: Create a large blob of irrelevant code and instructions.
Step 2: Store it in an EXIF tag.
I would suspect that "often" is really "always". A typical Canon RAW file, for example, has 14 bits per pixel. Because of the extra precision, the effective dynamic range of a RAW file is dramatically wider than the dynamic range of a JPEG image. For example, if you have the following samples in the RAW image:
65500, 65532, 65515, 65533, 65473, 65535
And you convert that to JPEG, you'll get:
255, 255, 255, 255, 255, 255
Iff you later need to pull the highs down to make them less blown out, if you're starting with the RAW image, you'll get a fairly accurate rendition of those values (up to the limits of the sensor), whereas if you start with the JPEG image, you'll get white blotches, because there's no detail there to recover. For recovering highlights and/or shadows, JPEG doesn't even come close to RAW, and can't. There's just too much data lost.
The correct term is end-to-end encryption.
Not particularly surprising. Anyone who has actually studied recidivism knows that when people do time in prison, it requires a lot of effort on the part of the government to reintegrate them into society, and if that doesn't happen properly, they are much more likely to commit further crimes because they feel that they have no other means to get the things they want. We also have known for a long time that people who feel isolated from society are more likely to get drawn into a terrorist organization. Put these two together, and it should be pretty obvious that the people in western society who are most likely to become terrorists are former convicts.
This is one of the reasons that people on the left have been begging and screaming for many years, demanding better reintegration programs for former convicts that guarantee them a stable job and help them feel accepted back into society. Those reintegration programs are the weak point in western society, and it seems as though the powers that be like it that way, preferring that people go back to a life of crime so that they can keep them locked up. The terrorists are taking advantage of that, and anyone who didn't see it coming hasn't been paying attention. We have to get recidivism rates down to zero, because ensuring everyone feels accepted is the best tool at our disposal for fighting terrorism.
Don't forget Oakland!
They didn't fight for religious liberty in general, but rather for the right to exercise their particular religion. That's hardly a material difference except in terms of the number of religious groups involved.
Half the Protestant religions didn't even exist yet, because people like Calvin and Wesley hadn't even been born yet. Over time, many aspects of those new denominations had significant impact on other denominations, and even on Catholicism. For example, Luther might have seriously pissed off the Catholic Church, but over the centuries that followed, the Catholic Church saw significant reform (e.g. no more sale of indulgences) resulting from both them and Luther's other writings. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is that Catholics now typically say Mass in the native language of the region (the vernacular) instead of Latin. That change didn't happen until the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s.
But the bigger impact was the formation of America itself. The Protestant Reformation caused various groups to spring up, all demanding their right to worship as they chose. This basically forced the U.S. to become the secular society that we live in today. As a result, both Catholics and Protestants have come to accept differences in religious beliefs, and to agree to disagree. This is, of course, a journey rather than a destination, and there are still groups of Christians who discriminate against other groups of Christians, but not nearly to the same degree.
All of these things had a very real impact on what we think of as a "modern Christian". It isn't all about dogma and theology, though that is part of it. Any such definition must also include the societal evolution brought about by the Protestant Reformation—a change that has taken hundreds of years to reach fruition.