It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race.
In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.
It could be a typo. A quick google for "Dark Friday" shows that it's not in common use at all, so as far as I can tell there's no reason to make any assumptions for why Roblimo used it.
But that's just it, they don't show ads down the sides when showing you snippets.
Go search for a quote from any book, and look at the snippets.
You will see links to places you can buy the book, as well as libraries that have it.
I'd say the link to buy the book is essentially an ad, no? I assume that Google gets some sort of click through payment or compensation when a purchase is made. And I'm totally cool with it, it's a valuable service and it's awesome that they proved the links to libraries, etc.
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. It would be awesome if there was a meal replacement for those purely functional meals. I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried, it's all too sweet and usually has a strange aftertaste (presumably because of artificial sweeteners or flavors.) If I could replace about 50% of my meals with something like Soylent and still be healthy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if Soylent is a viable meal replacement, nor if it's any better than what's already on the market. But I hope it is.
I only listened the first time I played it, so I missed it. So if a brief flash of Playboy model Deanna Brooks nude is offensive to you or those around you, don't click on it. Sorry about that... Or, your welcome.
The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.
FWIW - maps.google.com still works in OS 6 on Safari, complete with driving, public transport, and walking directions as well as street view. The response lags a bit with zoom and drag gestures, but it some ways it's nicer than the old app which reinforces how out of date it was. Check it out, you may decide to upgrade if it works for you.
Their licensing prices were a bit high. The hardware a bit weak.
Well here's my prediction. The licensing fees are going to get much higher. The hardware will stagnate as Cisco spends time "Ciscoizing" it and then milking it for every last cent. One other thin, Meraki's engineers are about to get a taste of what happens when a company run by engineers (as Cisco once was) turns into a company run by MBAs (as Cisco is).
The instant you liken a political system to Stalinists and Nazis that is not actively slaughtering millions of it's own people, you loose all credibility.
As to the US being a Christian nation, I don't see how anyone can believe that....
One can accurately claim that based on the principles underlying the US, as well as the history and tradition of the US people.
No, the US was explicitly created as a secular nation founded on religious freedom. No mention of God or Jesus Christ in the Constitution nor the original "bill of rights." It has nothing to do with what percentage of the population is Christian, it is not a Christian government. If it were, that would be establishing a religion and the 1st amendment explicitly forbids that. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, they saw the abuses of mixing Governance and religion and wanted no part of it.
A secular government is the only way to truly have freedom of religion. So while the US population is 80% Christian, it is not a Christian nation. There is a big difference.
Fear, Wars, Hatred, all results of religion. Take away all religions and everyone has common goals - we all get along.
I might be missing the sarcasm, but clearly this is not true. There will be all sorts of struggles for resources, land, governmental ideologies, etc. But the passing of "magical thinking" and the related beliefs that people should be shunned, jailed, tortured, or murdered because of what they wear, eat, think, believe, say, or love seems like a good thing to me.
Thank you for saying this. I am a Christian.... However, what makes me remain a Christian is... the moral code that Jesus taught. It's an ideal to strive towards.... "Turn the other cheek." If more people lived life to that moral code, the world would be a better place....
Anyway, that's my belief. I try not to force it on anyone, but Atheists who attempt to force their beliefs on the world irritate me.
I'm an Atheist and I agree with you almost 100%, though I get pretty strident at times.
The reason is that some Christians are being very successful in the US at forcing their beliefs on others through the legal system. Abstinence only sex-ed, restricting access to birth control, denying gay marriage, trying to redefine the US as a Christian nation, removing Thomas Jefferson from text books, putting disclaimer labels on text books or even adding "Intelligent Design" as an alternative theory (that has never made a single verifiable claim, nor led to a single discovery.) As an Atheist, the influence that fundamentalists have over people's day to day lives is appalling.
Right now, in parts of Africa that are suffering an AIDS epidemic, Christians and Catholics from around the world are promoting abstinence only "education" and spreading lies and misinformation about condom usage. Again, that is appalling and will result in much more spreading of AIDS, and much more suffering. I know that it is not representative of all Christians, but in the US the moderates all seem to be giving the fundamentalist a pass.
So what your left with is a bunch of pissed off Atheist because apparently no one religious wants to question the effectiveness our morality of other sects of their religion.
You know what I notice? People try to order the fundamentalists around with the same authoritarian attitude the fundamentalists try to use on their teenagers and women and gays and any others they regard as insufficiently subservient. Why expect better results? Seems to me we've forgotten we're all human here.
I'm not sure I follow your point. It could be my bias, but I don't see anybody trying order around the fundamentalist. It looks to me like the right-wing has embraced the fundamentalists. I see fundamentalists getting disclaimer labels about evolution and "intelligent design" in text books. I see fundamentalists passing laws forbidding gay marriage (funding efforts in states they don't even live in). I see fundamentalists restricting women's access to contraception and abortion.
Who's telling the fundamentalists to be subservient? They are forcing their beliefs into over people's day to day lives. No one is trying to force them to use contraceptives. No one is forcing them to have abortions. No one is forcing them into homosexual marriages. No one is forcing them to swear allegiance to a God they don't believe in, nor deny them their belief in their God.
Review the defined worldview of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a political entity, and the millions of people killed, internally and externally, by it, to correct your error.
This is a ridiculous claim. Stalin and friends were not motivated by there lack of belief in a God, they were psychopathic bastards following an ideological dogma. They had the writings of Karl Marx as their sacred books. They were killing everyone that they thought threatened their dogmatic truth, or they didn't like, because of their interpretation on Communism [1]. Their beliefs in Communism where a replacement for religion and in competition with religion. Atheism itself is not a replacement for religion, it makes no claims except "I don't believe there is a God." No sacred texts saying who goes to Heaven, who goes to Hell, who gets to live and who we must kill because of what they eat, love, say, wear, do, or believe.
And to preempt the whole Hitler thing, he was raised Catholic, alluded to God and a higher power all the time and seemed to believe all sorts of mystical stuff. He may not have been a "true" Christian, but he was no Atheist. And his foot solders were all Catholic and Lutherans. Again, all the killing was in the name of the Fatherland and patriotism fueled by ideology and dogma.
[1] I have no idea how close Stalin and friends actions were aligned with Marx's writings. It doesn't matter, all that matters is a group of people intent on enforcing their will on others through violence, in support of an unquestionable dogma.
In other words, it isn't a scientific text, and shouldn't be read as one. It isn't even trying to describe science, and it's a serious misreading of it to think it is.
That's all well and good, now how do we get my fellow citizens to stop voting for idiots that believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, that the US is a Christian nation, and that Satan (or God) created the earth with fossils in place to confuse (or test) people's faith?
... And let's not forget that the driving force behind several other amendments like the 14th (abolition of slavery, etc) were also driven by "stupid religious people."
The 14th Amendment was driven by smart religious and non-religous people. The laws against interracial marriage, Gay marriage, and the good old-KKK are driven by stupid religious people. Maybe by some non-religous people as well, but none of them are supporting their messed up believes with their non-religon.
You owe most of your current freedoms to "stupid religious people."
Nope, I owe my current freedoms to smart people. Some of whom overcame the literal interpretation of their religious texts, some who were not religious.
Yeah, those stupid religious people developed these crazy ideas like human rights and liberty.
There was a time when everyone was at least outwardly religious. To be otherwise was not an option as it led to things like being stoned, tortured, exiled or shunned. I think virtually every "reformer" in Christianity was a borderline (or outright) heretic and they were always resisted until after the Enlightenment. Those wonderful Puritans that came to the US had the nasty habit of burning witches and hanging Quakers. Yup big believers in their liberty and right to persecute. You forgot the Civil War, religious apologists love to point to the Christian movement in the North. Of course they never mention that the South is just as Christian (actually more so.) Same book, different interpretation. Yay religion for it's unambiguous goodness!
They even started a country that used those concepts and grounded all of those concepts in a God so that it was outside of the reach of government. I think they use some silly word like "inalienable," or such, to describe the connection.
And yet God, Christ, and the Ten Commandments are exactly nowhere in the Constitution. The only mention of religion is that the Congress shall make no law respecting establishing a religion or prohibiting people's free exercising of religion.
And then there is the fact that the founding father's had a range of beliefs from Diest to Christian, Jefferson was explicit about the separation of Church and State and even made his own non-mystical Bible by cutting out all the silly bits, the The Treaty of Tripoli, etc...
Yeah, those stupid religious people...
Agreed, they keep bearing false witness, lying about everything from the founding of the US to the validity of modern science. Idiots indeed.
Two things come to mind. The factories are already in place and possibly environmental considerations (or the ability to ignore environmental considerations.)
From what I understand it was only one single experiment that showed us something that we think is where/what the Higgs Boson would look like.
Has it been reproduced or confirmed?
...
That's not very definitive. Can anybody else around well versed in particle physics tell us if the Higgs has really been found or not?
I think that the announcement is based on a couple of years of data collected by two different teams using different methods, so calling it a single experiment seems a bit of an over simplification. See Higgs Discovery: The Data blog entry by Matt Strassler.
I'm no fan of abortion for controlling overpopulation, so birth control is the lesser of two evils....
How is birth control in any way, shape or form evil? Should we mourn every unfertilized egg? Is ejaculating, even when it results in pregnancy, to be viewed as a tragic massacre?
Birth control is only evil to people that want more brainwashed followers.
I assume that when they say "challenging the student's fixed beliefs", they also mean something else entirely instead of insinuating that challenging beliefs is somehow fundamentally wrong?
Of course they mean something different. They mean challenging party-line Christian conservative, anti-evolution, anti-AGW group think is immoral and will not be tolerated. Challenging lefty-commie-pinko beliefs is mandatory, especially those that are backed by actual science. Thank God Texas has a huge influence on school text books across the nation...
Exactly my thoughts. Presumably there are tons of people who are not going to doctors because they don't have insurance. If, say, 30% more people suddenly have health insurance, there could conceivably be 25% more people seeing doctors. The number of doctors has not gone up. What is the result when this happens? you will see doctors charging more for the same service. which means that insurance companies will have to pay more for every visit. which will translate back into higher premiums. there is nowhere to go here but up.
What makes you think uninsured people don't get sick or get in accidents and therefore go to the doctor?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not dark Friday, it's black Friday you politically correct wander. It has NOTHING to do with race. In fact in the context "dark" Friday didn't even make euphemistic sense.
It could be a typo. A quick google for "Dark Friday" shows that it's not in common use at all, so as far as I can tell there's no reason to make any assumptions for why Roblimo used it.
But that's just it, they don't show ads down the sides when showing you snippets.
Go search for a quote from any book, and look at the snippets. You will see links to places you can buy the book, as well as libraries that have it.
I'd say the link to buy the book is essentially an ad, no? I assume that Google gets some sort of click through payment or compensation when a purchase is made. And I'm totally cool with it, it's a valuable service and it's awesome that they proved the links to libraries, etc.
I love food, and I love sharing meals with friends. But many of my meals are purely functional. It would be awesome if there was a meal replacement for those purely functional meals. I hate everything currently on the market that I've tried, it's all too sweet and usually has a strange aftertaste (presumably because of artificial sweeteners or flavors.) If I could replace about 50% of my meals with something like Soylent and still be healthy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I have no idea if Soylent is a viable meal replacement, nor if it's any better than what's already on the market. But I hope it is.
I only listened the first time I played it, so I missed it. So if a brief flash of Playboy model Deanna Brooks nude is offensive to you or those around you, don't click on it. Sorry about that... Or, your welcome.
...
We'll have to get a team of older movie stars (like Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, John Travolta and William Shatner) to intercept it
William Shatner is flattered, but respectfully suggests you find someone more qualified.
He was polygraphed? That's nothing. I was Etch A Sketched!
EOM
The major loss with Apple Maps is the lack of public transport directions and for that reason alone, Google Maps needs to return. Until then, my phone is staying on iOS 5.
FWIW - maps.google.com still works in OS 6 on Safari, complete with driving, public transport, and walking directions as well as street view. The response lags a bit with zoom and drag gestures, but it some ways it's nicer than the old app which reinforces how out of date it was. Check it out, you may decide to upgrade if it works for you.
One other thing. Would it kill Slashdot to let me edit my posts?
Their licensing prices were a bit high. The hardware a bit weak.
Well here's my prediction. The licensing fees are going to get much higher. The hardware will stagnate as Cisco spends time "Ciscoizing" it and then milking it for every last cent. One other thin, Meraki's engineers are about to get a taste of what happens when a company run by engineers (as Cisco once was) turns into a company run by MBAs (as Cisco is).
The instant you liken a political system to Stalinists and Nazis that is not actively slaughtering millions of it's own people, you loose all credibility.
tr;dr - Too ridiculous, didn't read.
As to the US being a Christian nation, I don't see how anyone can believe that. ...
One can accurately claim that based on the principles underlying the US, as well as the history and tradition of the US people.
No, the US was explicitly created as a secular nation founded on religious freedom. No mention of God or Jesus Christ in the Constitution nor the original "bill of rights." It has nothing to do with what percentage of the population is Christian, it is not a Christian government. If it were, that would be establishing a religion and the 1st amendment explicitly forbids that. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, they saw the abuses of mixing Governance and religion and wanted no part of it.
A secular government is the only way to truly have freedom of religion. So while the US population is 80% Christian, it is not a Christian nation. There is a big difference.
Fear, Wars, Hatred, all results of religion. Take away all religions and everyone has common goals - we all get along.
I might be missing the sarcasm, but clearly this is not true. There will be all sorts of struggles for resources, land, governmental ideologies, etc. But the passing of "magical thinking" and the related beliefs that people should be shunned, jailed, tortured, or murdered because of what they wear, eat, think, believe, say, or love seems like a good thing to me.
Thank you for saying this. I am a Christian. ... However, what makes me remain a Christian is ... the moral code that Jesus taught. It's an ideal to strive towards. ... "Turn the other cheek." If more people lived life to that moral code, the world would be a better place. ...
Anyway, that's my belief. I try not to force it on anyone, but Atheists who attempt to force their beliefs on the world irritate me.
I'm an Atheist and I agree with you almost 100%, though I get pretty strident at times.
The reason is that some Christians are being very successful in the US at forcing their beliefs on others through the legal system. Abstinence only sex-ed, restricting access to birth control, denying gay marriage, trying to redefine the US as a Christian nation, removing Thomas Jefferson from text books, putting disclaimer labels on text books or even adding "Intelligent Design" as an alternative theory (that has never made a single verifiable claim, nor led to a single discovery.) As an Atheist, the influence that fundamentalists have over people's day to day lives is appalling.
Right now, in parts of Africa that are suffering an AIDS epidemic, Christians and Catholics from around the world are promoting abstinence only "education" and spreading lies and misinformation about condom usage. Again, that is appalling and will result in much more spreading of AIDS, and much more suffering. I know that it is not representative of all Christians, but in the US the moderates all seem to be giving the fundamentalist a pass.
So what your left with is a bunch of pissed off Atheist because apparently no one religious wants to question the effectiveness our morality of other sects of their religion.
You know what I notice? People try to order the fundamentalists around with the same authoritarian attitude the fundamentalists try to use on their teenagers and women and gays and any others they regard as insufficiently subservient. Why expect better results? Seems to me we've forgotten we're all human here.
I'm not sure I follow your point. It could be my bias, but I don't see anybody trying order around the fundamentalist. It looks to me like the right-wing has embraced the fundamentalists. I see fundamentalists getting disclaimer labels about evolution and "intelligent design" in text books. I see fundamentalists passing laws forbidding gay marriage (funding efforts in states they don't even live in). I see fundamentalists restricting women's access to contraception and abortion.
Who's telling the fundamentalists to be subservient? They are forcing their beliefs into over people's day to day lives. No one is trying to force them to use contraceptives. No one is forcing them to have abortions. No one is forcing them into homosexual marriages. No one is forcing them to swear allegiance to a God they don't believe in, nor deny them their belief in their God.
Review the defined worldview of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a political entity, and the millions of people killed, internally and externally, by it, to correct your error.
This is a ridiculous claim. Stalin and friends were not motivated by there lack of belief in a God, they were psychopathic bastards following an ideological dogma. They had the writings of Karl Marx as their sacred books. They were killing everyone that they thought threatened their dogmatic truth, or they didn't like, because of their interpretation on Communism [1]. Their beliefs in Communism where a replacement for religion and in competition with religion. Atheism itself is not a replacement for religion, it makes no claims except "I don't believe there is a God." No sacred texts saying who goes to Heaven, who goes to Hell, who gets to live and who we must kill because of what they eat, love, say, wear, do, or believe.
And to preempt the whole Hitler thing, he was raised Catholic, alluded to God and a higher power all the time and seemed to believe all sorts of mystical stuff. He may not have been a "true" Christian, but he was no Atheist. And his foot solders were all Catholic and Lutherans. Again, all the killing was in the name of the Fatherland and patriotism fueled by ideology and dogma.
[1] I have no idea how close Stalin and friends actions were aligned with Marx's writings. It doesn't matter, all that matters is a group of people intent on enforcing their will on others through violence, in support of an unquestionable dogma.
In other words, it isn't a scientific text, and shouldn't be read as one. It isn't even trying to describe science, and it's a serious misreading of it to think it is.
That's all well and good, now how do we get my fellow citizens to stop voting for idiots that believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, that the US is a Christian nation, and that Satan (or God) created the earth with fossils in place to confuse (or test) people's faith?
... And let's not forget that the driving force behind several other amendments like the 14th (abolition of slavery, etc) were also driven by "stupid religious people."
The 14th Amendment was driven by smart religious and non-religous people. The laws against interracial marriage, Gay marriage, and the good old-KKK are driven by stupid religious people. Maybe by some non-religous people as well, but none of them are supporting their messed up believes with their non-religon.
You owe most of your current freedoms to "stupid religious people."
Nope, I owe my current freedoms to smart people. Some of whom overcame the literal interpretation of their religious texts, some who were not religious.
Yeah, those stupid religious people developed these crazy ideas like human rights and liberty.
There was a time when everyone was at least outwardly religious. To be otherwise was not an option as it led to things like being stoned, tortured, exiled or shunned. I think virtually every "reformer" in Christianity was a borderline (or outright) heretic and they were always resisted until after the Enlightenment. Those wonderful Puritans that came to the US had the nasty habit of burning witches and hanging Quakers. Yup big believers in their liberty and right to persecute. You forgot the Civil War, religious apologists love to point to the Christian movement in the North. Of course they never mention that the South is just as Christian (actually more so.) Same book, different interpretation. Yay religion for it's unambiguous goodness!
They even started a country that used those concepts and grounded all of those concepts in a God so that it was outside of the reach of government. I think they use some silly word like "inalienable," or such, to describe the connection.
And yet God, Christ, and the Ten Commandments are exactly nowhere in the Constitution. The only mention of religion is that the Congress shall make no law respecting establishing a religion or prohibiting people's free exercising of religion.
And then there is the fact that the founding father's had a range of beliefs from Diest to Christian, Jefferson was explicit about the separation of Church and State and even made his own non-mystical Bible by cutting out all the silly bits, the The Treaty of Tripoli, etc...
Yeah, those stupid religious people...
Agreed, they keep bearing false witness, lying about everything from the founding of the US to the validity of modern science. Idiots indeed.
Two things come to mind. The factories are already in place and possibly environmental considerations (or the ability to ignore environmental considerations.)
Its close enough to the 10.8 launch to be suspicious.
I think you're tinfoil hat is on too tight.
From what I understand it was only one single experiment that showed us something that we think is where/what the Higgs Boson would look like.
Has it been reproduced or confirmed?
That's not very definitive. Can anybody else around well versed in particle physics tell us if the Higgs has really been found or not?
I think that the announcement is based on a couple of years of data collected by two different teams using different methods, so calling it a single experiment seems a bit of an over simplification. See Higgs Discovery: The Data blog entry by Matt Strassler.
I'm no fan of abortion for controlling overpopulation, so birth control is the lesser of two evils. ...
How is birth control in any way, shape or form evil? Should we mourn every unfertilized egg? Is ejaculating, even when it results in pregnancy, to be viewed as a tragic massacre?
Birth control is only evil to people that want more brainwashed followers.
I assume that when they say "challenging the student's fixed beliefs", they also mean something else entirely instead of insinuating that challenging beliefs is somehow fundamentally wrong?
Of course they mean something different. They mean challenging party-line Christian conservative, anti-evolution, anti-AGW group think is immoral and will not be tolerated. Challenging lefty-commie-pinko beliefs is mandatory, especially those that are backed by actual science. Thank God Texas has a huge influence on school text books across the nation...
Exactly my thoughts. Presumably there are tons of people who are not going to doctors because they don't have insurance. If, say, 30% more people suddenly have health insurance, there could conceivably be 25% more people seeing doctors. The number of doctors has not gone up. What is the result when this happens? you will see doctors charging more for the same service. which means that insurance companies will have to pay more for every visit. which will translate back into higher premiums. there is nowhere to go here but up.
What makes you think uninsured people don't get sick or get in accidents and therefore go to the doctor?