They may not be the smartest in the room in the specific things a standard IQ test measures, but modern theories of intelligence have evolved to better reflect the human experience.
On the other hand, I haven't yet met a MENSA member I didn't find to be a moron, so maybe IQ isn't that meaningful to begin with.
Big Crooks giving away a lot of money to fix their image is nothing new. You've heard of Carnegie Hall?
Indeed, I have. I also wiled away many a happy hour in my youth in the beautiful little library he built in my home town. I know on an intellectual level what an evil bastard he was, but when I hear the name Carnegie it's that library that comes to mind first.
And really, I think that's the point of TFA. Gates will be successful in cleaning up his image, because he has the money, the will, and the time to do so. Who knows what Jobs would have done if he'd had more time, but it's kind of a moot point. It wouldn't surprise me if both Microsoft and Apple are little more than memories in 50 or 100 years, but I'm pretty sure the Gates Foundation will still be humming along nicely. Without Apple, there's little reason to remember Jobs. Gates has hedged his bets quite well in the legacy department.
There are also plenty of good free/open source text books out there. For example, this guy's stuff is pretty good, and quite readable: http://lightandmatter.com/
Free software is generally developed to fulfill some need of the original developer, and they then decide to share it for free because it costs negligible time/effort/money to do so. The time/effort/money required to share a graduate-level education and verify that the student has actually learned a sufficient amount to warrant a degree is not negligible. The economics are very different.
The point of playing an RPG is not to play someone who can do all the things I can do. I already do that every day in real life.
The point of playing an RPG is to take on the persona of someone who can do things I can't do, and that list might include convincing others to do things they really don't want to do. My own personal social skills (or lack thereof) should not prevent me from playing a social character any more than my own physique prevents me from playing a muscle-bound warrior. That's the entire point of an RPG!
I didn't like the negotiating aspect. I believe that there should be certain parts of negotiating that are random, just for fun. However, by default, negotiating shouldn't rely on the character abilities or any die rolls. Your ability to gauge deceit and to negotiate should be based on your real life skills. The social aspects should be entirely based on real life skills, as much as possible.
So, what you're saying is that only people with strong social skills should play tabletop RPGs? I think you've missed the point.
In your arrogance you assume that I'm unfamiliar with the basis of your argument, but in fact I happen to live in the real world, where your argument is bullshit of the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" variety. Again, there is only one correct answer for the expression we're discussing, and it is the same in all of the number systems and algebras at play in this scenario. Any other answer is wrong. It might be "close enough" for our purposes, but that doesn't magically make it correct.
More importantly, it's only "close enough" if the user recognizes it as such, which the vast majority of Windows Calculator users won't. Hell, I'm not even sure I would recognize it as being "close enough" when I'm checking my daughter's homework after a 10 hour day of, say, trying to get more than the most basic functionality out of the unholy abomination that is Microsoft's WPF WebBrowser control. God forbid my daughter should be using it to try and check her own answers (or her mom, now that I think about it). Sure, it could be an excellent "teachable moment", but only if she happens to actually mention it to me, which at 12 years old is pretty unlikely. I typically use MatLab to check her homework, because that's what I'm most comfortable with and it happens to be on the "recent programs" list on my start menu (and it gives the correct answer in this case, btw, as does Maxima).
Even worse; Windows Calculator isn't wrong all the time, even in this case. If you enter sqrt(4) you get 2, and it even displays 2 as the intermediate result if you enter the expression as sqrt(4)-2. It obviously doesn't store that intermediate result, because even if you hit enter after the sqrt(4) you still get the same garbage. Windows Calculator is literally telling the user that 2 - 2 != 0. Not all the time, though. In my playing around with it, it did manage to give the correct answer a couple of times, but I couldn't find a way to reliably repeat that.
And yes, any consumer calculator should round a result that's less than machine precision to zero rather than pretend that it's an actual answer. Any other behavior is nothing but trouble in the vast majority of use cases. 10^39 is about four orders of magnitude less than 128-bit machine precision, so there's really no excuse here.
I double majored in applied math and computer science, so I feel quite confident that I am not speaking from a position of ignorance when I agree BasilBrush: The Windows calculator is wrong!
The correct answer is zero, in all of the number systems involved, and no amount of pure math hand waving will change that basic fact. There is no other correct answer for the expression 4^(1/2) - 2 in base-10, binary integers, or any of the standard binary representations of floating point. Fortunately, it's easy to determine the magnitude of the error in this case: it's the answer the calculator gave.
Now, I will agree that an error on the order of 10^-39 is probably not worth worrying about, but it does make me question the algorithm they chose for calculating the root, and I'm going to be leery of using Windows Calculator in the future, especially given Microsoft's less than stellar history with math algorithms. If nothing else, the existence of this bug exposes an ignorance of machine precision, which is a pretty fundamental topic in applied math. After all, if they can't even account for machine precision in such a simple case, how can they determine if their algorithms are numerically stable? Indeed, I seriously doubt the programmers responsible have any idea that numeric stability is even a thing!
There's a lot of value in starting from the (very) basics, I think. I started out in an Electronics Technician course, and my first programming class was Assembly on an 8080A. The semester before that my final project was building a 4-bit processor. When I later decided that Computer Science was the right path for me, I had no trouble picking up on how things worked in C++. Pointers were pretty intuitive, since I'd already had to deal with memory addresses by hand. Same with Boolean logic (including Fuzzy Expert Systems) since, again, it was all stuff I'd dealt with in hardware.
Anyway, the beginning programming book I usually recommend is K&R. It's fairly compact and very well written, with clear examples (in fact, I haven't seen an introductory C book yet that actually had any examples that weren't directly out of K&R, they generally just add a bunch of unnecessary verbiage around them).
Also, tell your daughter she's awesome! Sadly, my daughter was infected with the "knowing stuff is so uncool" meme around that age.
Part of being an educated adult in a computerized world is understanding how to write a computer program
No, it really isn't. The vast majority of people really don't need to know how to write a computer program. We have people that specialize in that, just as we have electricians, plumbers, car mechanics, truck drivers... all of which are arguably much more important to modern life than programmers. How qualified are you to do any of those jobs? Specialization is what makes the modern world possible, and let me also point out that none of the professions I listed require any level of programming knowledge (and yes, I am actually familiar enough with all of them to say that with some authority).
The fact that students pull out pencils and paper is not strictly a bad thing. What is bad is when they pull out pencils and paper to do things like multiply numbers, when sitting in front of them is a computer that can be programmed to multiply. Why are we giving students assignments that ask them to multiply 4-column numbers, when we could be asking them to write a program that multiplies numbers with arbitrarily many columns? We might as well teach students how to use slide-rules, and then have a computer tell them if their answer is correct.
I see you're too young to be familiar with the term GIGO, since I already addressed issue this by using it. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. Any monkey can push buttons on a calculator and get an "answer", but is it the right answer? How do you know? Probably by developing an intuitive sense of what the right answer should roughly look like. Based on my ten years experience as a college-level math tutor, that intuitive sense is only developed by working out problems by hand, with pencil and paper. Or are you claiming that you have some magical process by which a person who doesn't know how to multiply can write a program to multiply two numbers and verify that it does, in fact, give the correct answer? We don't teach the use of log tables anymore because calculators are more accurate and there's no additional educational benefit to using the table. Same with the slide rule (although I had a physics professor who would argue the point, and no, he wasn't old enough to have been taught to use a slide rule in school).
And yes, as it turns out, there are bits of knowledge that simply need to be memorized, and that pretty much includes all the basics of the Three Rs: arithmetic, spelling, vocabulary, etc. Rote memorization really is the most effective way to teach those (and good luck writing any kind of program if you haven't learned them). Now, if you want to argue that we need a different approach to teaching algebra, I agree, but in order for the average student to understand the properties of algebra well enough to design algorithms around them still requires a lot of pencil and paper work.
software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but in fact that's one of the few things that makes most educational software even moderately useful. There is real educational value to working things out by hand with pencil and paper; educational value that is lost when you move to a computer based system unless you artificially force the user to do it. Pure, unfettered use of computers in education would be an absolute disaster. There's a whole raft of issues that come with it, and the root of most of them is GIGO. I don't know about you, but I'd like my daughter to become an educated, thinking adult, not a member of a cargo cult.
You own a PC anyway, don't you? As long as you didn't buy a netbook in a desktop package, it was capable of playing current games when you bought it, and likely didn't cost you more than an XBox 360. If you took the $300-$500 you're also spending on the console, and spent it instead on upgrades to that PC over the course of the 5-6 years you expect from a console (a little more RAM, a not-quite-bleeding-edge GPU after 2-3 years), you'd be able to maintain a reasonable gaming experience for the same amount of cash. A better gaming experience, actually, since you wouldn't be stuck with crappy 5-6 year old hardware towards the end like you are with the console.
The man's clearly an idiot, since he's saying he would "aggressively support" HP or Dell in developing something that has existed for years. I mean really, is it that hard to buy a DVI-HDMI cable to hook up to your TV instead of a DVI-DVI cable to hook up to your monitor (assuming your TV doesn't have a DVI connector already)?
Re:NASA shutting down manned exploration doesn't h
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 1
Robots aren't boring to the right kind of person, and science doesn't need the other sort.
Can you provide any examples of medicines directly attributable to the Theory of Evolution, instead of chemistry and/or genetics?
Congratulations, you've just disproven the old saw that there's no such thing as a stupid question.
Evolution is inseparable from genetics, since genetics is the mechanism by which evolution happens. Similarly, genetics is inseparable from chemistry, since chemistry is the mechanism by which genetics works.
Honestly, if you didn't learn this in your high school biology class you should go find your teacher and punch them in the face for screwing you out of a proper basic eduction.
Yes, you have adapted. If you are able to pass that adaptation on as part of your genetic contribution to your as-yet-unconceived children, then it is evolution. Evolution does not exist until the trait is inherited by your descendants.
I'll finish off by saying if you think the sciences have it bad, you should see what has happened to the humanities.
Yeah, big surprise that all the rich white guys who who are the source of most funding aren't falling all over themselves to pay people to tell them how evil they are.
Where's the "wireless data sniffing" going on here? Is there some evidence that Google is hacking people's networks or sniffing their packets? You'll need to provide some evidence if you're making that claim.
From what I see, they don't need your consent at all. Why? Because they're only collecting data that YOU have already chosen to make publicly available. If they can see your wifi network from the street, then it's no different than if they were collecting data on what colors people painted their houses: zero consent required.
If Google is breaking the law here, then so are you every time you turn on a wireless enabled device and it scans for available networks.
How ironic that you devote so much energy to pointing out the GP's logical inconsistencies while you ignore the glaring fallacy that is the basis of your own argument.
athiest != amoral
Most "Christian" morals* can be arrived at logically by examining the effects human behaviors have on society, and essentially doing a moral cost-benefit analysis. Moral codes exist to promote social stability, and as such you find certain mores in pretty much every human society, such as prohibitions on murder and stealing, marriage and corresponding prohibitions against adultery, prohibitions against incest, etc. The details of how a given culture defines those terms may vary, but the basic ideas are largely the same. It is common for societies to use religion as a way to encourage moral behavior, but religion is by no means necessary.
* the exceptions being those that deal with specific religious practices (idolatry, "false" gods, etc)
Asian societies in general are very conservative when it comes to sex. The Japanese are an exception with regards to porn, but when it comes down to actually doing the nasty they're pretty conservative, at least by American standards.
If you were to do an item-by-item comparison of Chinese traditional morals vs. American traditional morals, you'd find more similarities than differences, and a lot of those difference would come down to the Chinese being more strict.
To give an example, I've been seeing a Chinese woman who was raised in one of China's more rural cities. When I first started hanging out with her it not only had to be in a public place, but there had to be another woman there with us to make sure nothing happened. She's relaxed on that point by now, but I'm still not allowed to touch her since she hasn't decided if she wants to marry me yet. She's a 36 year old divorcee, so it's not like she's an untouched virgin, but that's just how she was raised.
I don't know anyone who goes to church or temple, and I know a lot of people.
What does that have to do with anything? You can only have religious beliefs if you go to a special building?
Who are these religious folk? Buddhists? Ancestor worship? Those aren't exactly 'religions' in the way that you or I would consider the term, they're more like traditions.
As a Buddhist, allow me to say that right there is some ignorant bullshit.
As for erroneous presumptions, it may be that your own presumptions could merely be one interpretation of the subjective reality that you live in, and you're denying that any other interpretation could exist. This is much closer to the real definition of ignorance.
Indeed it is. While we're on the subject, how about if you explain why you think Buddhism and Ancestor Worship aren't religions. I strongly suspect your argument is going to boil down to "it doesn't fit the mould of Judeo-Christian religions."
Chinese propaganda was loud and strong against Tibetans and their religion.
Wait, so the Tibetans have a religion then? You do realize the Tibetans are Buddhists, right?
It was the excuse that China used to march in and take over: we're liberating the workers from the chains of superstitious belief. It continues today with tirades against the Dalai Lama.
They also claimed national security (and still do), despite the fact that Tibet hadn't had a military force of any significance in roughly 800 years (ironically, since they converted to Buddhism).
A little learning goes a long way in curing ignorance.
Slashdot Mirror
They may not be the smartest in the room in the specific things a standard IQ test measures, but modern theories of intelligence have evolved to better reflect the human experience.
On the other hand, I haven't yet met a MENSA member I didn't find to be a moron, so maybe IQ isn't that meaningful to begin with.
Big Crooks giving away a lot of money to fix their image is nothing new. You've heard of Carnegie Hall?
Indeed, I have. I also wiled away many a happy hour in my youth in the beautiful little library he built in my home town. I know on an intellectual level what an evil bastard he was, but when I hear the name Carnegie it's that library that comes to mind first.
And really, I think that's the point of TFA. Gates will be successful in cleaning up his image, because he has the money, the will, and the time to do so. Who knows what Jobs would have done if he'd had more time, but it's kind of a moot point. It wouldn't surprise me if both Microsoft and Apple are little more than memories in 50 or 100 years, but I'm pretty sure the Gates Foundation will still be humming along nicely. Without Apple, there's little reason to remember Jobs. Gates has hedged his bets quite well in the legacy department.
If he wants the literal comic book version, I'd start here: http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+manga+guide+to&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=5776752567&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13913853472143733238&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=e&ref=pd_sl_59fmehhy56_e
There are also plenty of good free/open source text books out there. For example, this guy's stuff is pretty good, and quite readable: http://lightandmatter.com/
Free software is generally developed to fulfill some need of the original developer, and they then decide to share it for free because it costs negligible time/effort/money to do so. The time/effort/money required to share a graduate-level education and verify that the student has actually learned a sufficient amount to warrant a degree is not negligible. The economics are very different.
The point of playing an RPG is not to play someone who can do all the things I can do. I already do that every day in real life.
The point of playing an RPG is to take on the persona of someone who can do things I can't do, and that list might include convincing others to do things they really don't want to do. My own personal social skills (or lack thereof) should not prevent me from playing a social character any more than my own physique prevents me from playing a muscle-bound warrior. That's the entire point of an RPG!
I didn't like the negotiating aspect. I believe that there should be certain parts of negotiating that are random, just for fun. However, by default, negotiating shouldn't rely on the character abilities or any die rolls. Your ability to gauge deceit and to negotiate should be based on your real life skills. The social aspects should be entirely based on real life skills, as much as possible.
So, what you're saying is that only people with strong social skills should play tabletop RPGs? I think you've missed the point.
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech ... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble"
I believe that answers your question.
Also, how many of Oracle's products are written in Java? This seems like a really stupid precedent for them to want to set.
In your arrogance you assume that I'm unfamiliar with the basis of your argument, but in fact I happen to live in the real world, where your argument is bullshit of the "it's not a bug, it's a feature" variety. Again, there is only one correct answer for the expression we're discussing, and it is the same in all of the number systems and algebras at play in this scenario. Any other answer is wrong. It might be "close enough" for our purposes, but that doesn't magically make it correct.
More importantly, it's only "close enough" if the user recognizes it as such, which the vast majority of Windows Calculator users won't. Hell, I'm not even sure I would recognize it as being "close enough" when I'm checking my daughter's homework after a 10 hour day of, say, trying to get more than the most basic functionality out of the unholy abomination that is Microsoft's WPF WebBrowser control. God forbid my daughter should be using it to try and check her own answers (or her mom, now that I think about it). Sure, it could be an excellent "teachable moment", but only if she happens to actually mention it to me, which at 12 years old is pretty unlikely. I typically use MatLab to check her homework, because that's what I'm most comfortable with and it happens to be on the "recent programs" list on my start menu (and it gives the correct answer in this case, btw, as does Maxima).
Even worse; Windows Calculator isn't wrong all the time, even in this case. If you enter sqrt(4) you get 2, and it even displays 2 as the intermediate result if you enter the expression as sqrt(4)-2. It obviously doesn't store that intermediate result, because even if you hit enter after the sqrt(4) you still get the same garbage. Windows Calculator is literally telling the user that 2 - 2 != 0. Not all the time, though. In my playing around with it, it did manage to give the correct answer a couple of times, but I couldn't find a way to reliably repeat that.
And yes, any consumer calculator should round a result that's less than machine precision to zero rather than pretend that it's an actual answer. Any other behavior is nothing but trouble in the vast majority of use cases. 10^39 is about four orders of magnitude less than 128-bit machine precision, so there's really no excuse here.
I double majored in applied math and computer science, so I feel quite confident that I am not speaking from a position of ignorance when I agree BasilBrush: The Windows calculator is wrong!
The correct answer is zero, in all of the number systems involved, and no amount of pure math hand waving will change that basic fact. There is no other correct answer for the expression 4^(1/2) - 2 in base-10, binary integers, or any of the standard binary representations of floating point. Fortunately, it's easy to determine the magnitude of the error in this case: it's the answer the calculator gave.
Now, I will agree that an error on the order of 10^-39 is probably not worth worrying about, but it does make me question the algorithm they chose for calculating the root, and I'm going to be leery of using Windows Calculator in the future, especially given Microsoft's less than stellar history with math algorithms. If nothing else, the existence of this bug exposes an ignorance of machine precision, which is a pretty fundamental topic in applied math. After all, if they can't even account for machine precision in such a simple case, how can they determine if their algorithms are numerically stable? Indeed, I seriously doubt the programmers responsible have any idea that numeric stability is even a thing!
There's a lot of value in starting from the (very) basics, I think. I started out in an Electronics Technician course, and my first programming class was Assembly on an 8080A. The semester before that my final project was building a 4-bit processor. When I later decided that Computer Science was the right path for me, I had no trouble picking up on how things worked in C++. Pointers were pretty intuitive, since I'd already had to deal with memory addresses by hand. Same with Boolean logic (including Fuzzy Expert Systems) since, again, it was all stuff I'd dealt with in hardware.
Anyway, the beginning programming book I usually recommend is K&R. It's fairly compact and very well written, with clear examples (in fact, I haven't seen an introductory C book yet that actually had any examples that weren't directly out of K&R, they generally just add a bunch of unnecessary verbiage around them).
Also, tell your daughter she's awesome! Sadly, my daughter was infected with the "knowing stuff is so uncool" meme around that age.
Part of being an educated adult in a computerized world is understanding how to write a computer program
No, it really isn't. The vast majority of people really don't need to know how to write a computer program. We have people that specialize in that, just as we have electricians, plumbers, car mechanics, truck drivers... all of which are arguably much more important to modern life than programmers. How qualified are you to do any of those jobs? Specialization is what makes the modern world possible, and let me also point out that none of the professions I listed require any level of programming knowledge (and yes, I am actually familiar enough with all of them to say that with some authority).
The fact that students pull out pencils and paper is not strictly a bad thing. What is bad is when they pull out pencils and paper to do things like multiply numbers, when sitting in front of them is a computer that can be programmed to multiply. Why are we giving students assignments that ask them to multiply 4-column numbers, when we could be asking them to write a program that multiplies numbers with arbitrarily many columns? We might as well teach students how to use slide-rules, and then have a computer tell them if their answer is correct.
I see you're too young to be familiar with the term GIGO, since I already addressed issue this by using it. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. Any monkey can push buttons on a calculator and get an "answer", but is it the right answer? How do you know? Probably by developing an intuitive sense of what the right answer should roughly look like. Based on my ten years experience as a college-level math tutor, that intuitive sense is only developed by working out problems by hand, with pencil and paper. Or are you claiming that you have some magical process by which a person who doesn't know how to multiply can write a program to multiply two numbers and verify that it does, in fact, give the correct answer? We don't teach the use of log tables anymore because calculators are more accurate and there's no additional educational benefit to using the table. Same with the slide rule (although I had a physics professor who would argue the point, and no, he wasn't old enough to have been taught to use a slide rule in school).
And yes, as it turns out, there are bits of knowledge that simply need to be memorized, and that pretty much includes all the basics of the Three Rs: arithmetic, spelling, vocabulary, etc. Rote memorization really is the most effective way to teach those (and good luck writing any kind of program if you haven't learned them). Now, if you want to argue that we need a different approach to teaching algebra, I agree, but in order for the average student to understand the properties of algebra well enough to design algorithms around them still requires a lot of pencil and paper work.
software that is designed to be impossible to hack and which encourages students to pull out pencils and paper to solve their problems.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but in fact that's one of the few things that makes most educational software even moderately useful. There is real educational value to working things out by hand with pencil and paper; educational value that is lost when you move to a computer based system unless you artificially force the user to do it. Pure, unfettered use of computers in education would be an absolute disaster. There's a whole raft of issues that come with it, and the root of most of them is GIGO. I don't know about you, but I'd like my daughter to become an educated, thinking adult, not a member of a cargo cult.
You own a PC anyway, don't you? As long as you didn't buy a netbook in a desktop package, it was capable of playing current games when you bought it, and likely didn't cost you more than an XBox 360. If you took the $300-$500 you're also spending on the console, and spent it instead on upgrades to that PC over the course of the 5-6 years you expect from a console (a little more RAM, a not-quite-bleeding-edge GPU after 2-3 years), you'd be able to maintain a reasonable gaming experience for the same amount of cash. A better gaming experience, actually, since you wouldn't be stuck with crappy 5-6 year old hardware towards the end like you are with the console.
The man's clearly an idiot, since he's saying he would "aggressively support" HP or Dell in developing something that has existed for years. I mean really, is it that hard to buy a DVI-HDMI cable to hook up to your TV instead of a DVI-DVI cable to hook up to your monitor (assuming your TV doesn't have a DVI connector already)?
Robots aren't boring to the right kind of person, and science doesn't need the other sort.
Oh really? Where does the funding come from?
As you point out, there's no room for religion in scientific discovery, so why do you assholes insist on bringing it up?
Because those other assholes keep trying to cram their religion into my science, where, as you so accurately point out, there is no room for it.
Can you provide any examples of medicines directly attributable to the Theory of Evolution, instead of chemistry and/or genetics?
Congratulations, you've just disproven the old saw that there's no such thing as a stupid question.
Evolution is inseparable from genetics, since genetics is the mechanism by which evolution happens. Similarly, genetics is inseparable from chemistry, since chemistry is the mechanism by which genetics works.
Honestly, if you didn't learn this in your high school biology class you should go find your teacher and punch them in the face for screwing you out of a proper basic eduction.
Yes, you have adapted. If you are able to pass that adaptation on as part of your genetic contribution to your as-yet-unconceived children, then it is evolution. Evolution does not exist until the trait is inherited by your descendants.
I'll finish off by saying if you think the sciences have it bad, you should see what has happened to the humanities.
Yeah, big surprise that all the rich white guys who who are the source of most funding aren't falling all over themselves to pay people to tell them how evil they are.
I bet the CxOs and managers who orchestrated this farce got some massive, massive bonuses.
Before bailing to do it to another company.
But they have MBAs, so we know for certain that (a) those decisions were best for the company, and (b) they totally deserved those bonuses.
Unless you're implying that every MBA I've ever met is a greedy, self-serving, company-destroying liar...
Where's the "wireless data sniffing" going on here? Is there some evidence that Google is hacking people's networks or sniffing their packets? You'll need to provide some evidence if you're making that claim.
From what I see, they don't need your consent at all. Why? Because they're only collecting data that YOU have already chosen to make publicly available. If they can see your wifi network from the street, then it's no different than if they were collecting data on what colors people painted their houses: zero consent required.
If Google is breaking the law here, then so are you every time you turn on a wireless enabled device and it scans for available networks.
How ironic that you devote so much energy to pointing out the GP's logical inconsistencies while you ignore the glaring fallacy that is the basis of your own argument.
athiest != amoral
Most "Christian" morals* can be arrived at logically by examining the effects human behaviors have on society, and essentially doing a moral cost-benefit analysis. Moral codes exist to promote social stability, and as such you find certain mores in pretty much every human society, such as prohibitions on murder and stealing, marriage and corresponding prohibitions against adultery, prohibitions against incest, etc. The details of how a given culture defines those terms may vary, but the basic ideas are largely the same. It is common for societies to use religion as a way to encourage moral behavior, but religion is by no means necessary.
* the exceptions being those that deal with specific religious practices (idolatry, "false" gods, etc)
Asian societies in general are very conservative when it comes to sex. The Japanese are an exception with regards to porn, but when it comes down to actually doing the nasty they're pretty conservative, at least by American standards.
If you were to do an item-by-item comparison of Chinese traditional morals vs. American traditional morals, you'd find more similarities than differences, and a lot of those difference would come down to the Chinese being more strict.
To give an example, I've been seeing a Chinese woman who was raised in one of China's more rural cities. When I first started hanging out with her it not only had to be in a public place, but there had to be another woman there with us to make sure nothing happened. She's relaxed on that point by now, but I'm still not allowed to touch her since she hasn't decided if she wants to marry me yet. She's a 36 year old divorcee, so it's not like she's an untouched virgin, but that's just how she was raised.
I don't know anyone who goes to church or temple, and I know a lot of people.
What does that have to do with anything? You can only have religious beliefs if you go to a special building?
Who are these religious folk? Buddhists? Ancestor worship? Those aren't exactly 'religions' in the way that you or I would consider the term, they're more like traditions.
As a Buddhist, allow me to say that right there is some ignorant bullshit.
As for erroneous presumptions, it may be that your own presumptions could merely be one interpretation of the subjective reality that you live in, and you're denying that any other interpretation could exist. This is much closer to the real definition of ignorance.
Indeed it is. While we're on the subject, how about if you explain why you think Buddhism and Ancestor Worship aren't religions. I strongly suspect your argument is going to boil down to "it doesn't fit the mould of Judeo-Christian religions."
Chinese propaganda was loud and strong against Tibetans and their religion.
Wait, so the Tibetans have a religion then? You do realize the Tibetans are Buddhists, right?
It was the excuse that China used to march in and take over: we're liberating the workers from the chains of superstitious belief. It continues today with tirades against the Dalai Lama.
They also claimed national security (and still do), despite the fact that Tibet hadn't had a military force of any significance in roughly 800 years (ironically, since they converted to Buddhism).
A little learning goes a long way in curing ignorance.
Indeed it does. You should give it a try.