To people who wanted every mystery tied up nice and neat, I hate to break it to you but it was never that kind of show. Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
There are good ways of leaving a mystery and bad ones; I think this was a bad one.
"You are ineligible, because we have no record that you earned money during 2007 or 2008."
Did you or your employer pay your unemployment insurance? If not, you aren't eligible for unemployment benefits, no matter how much you earned.
If I earned no money, why'd you tax me almost 40,000 dollars these last two years???
Those were federal and state taxes; they don't pay for your unemployment benefits.
Now imagine that same idiot bureaucracy running my healthcare
No need to imagine, just look at US government health care (military, Congress, etc.), as well as other nations: government-run health care is cost effective and actually works.
The ending made it look like living in Africa was going to be one big camping trip. These people don't stand a chance against carnivores, disease, or spear-wielding natives. I seriously doubt this was a realistic voluntary choice.
Japan already has mandatory diets for those with BMI>30. When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life.
Well, I can't find anything corroborating those claims. But assuming they are true, most likely, there aren't "mandatory diets" but simply either/or choices: either you go on a diet or you lose your government health care. And that's something I'd fully support: if you refuse reasonable treatments, then your health insurance shouldn't be required to pay for your further treatments. It's just like your car insurance isn't required to pay if you deliberately crash your car.
Pre-emptive monitoring for signs of heart attacks and strokes are no joking matter and detecting these early on mean the difference between mild and serious, life-altering damage or death.
There is already pre-emptive monitoring: the annual physical, plus pacemakers and similar devices for people with identifiable heart problems.
Where is the evidence that any additional monitoring does any good?
I can monitor my laptop's fan speed all day long, but cant do so for my heart, which is/much/ more important than a replaceable gadget.
And when you detect problems, what are you going to do? The same thing you should already be doing: eat healthy and exercise regularly. There's little else a hospital can do for you.
Yes why dont we all stop using hospitals as well.
Hospitals are good for obvious, acute problems: broken bones, appendicitis, problem births, etc. You don't need monitoring to detect those, they are self-evident.
Hospitals are mostly useless for the kinds of problems detected by these sensors: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Exclusivity is what they used to open the door to their design decisions
Sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about.
AT&T and T-Mobile both allow unlocked phones on their networks. You don't need carrier support for visual voicemail, OTA firmware updates, feature updates, or software sales; other manufacturers have been offering that for years.
In Europe, unlimited data plans are low cost and universally available ($30/month at several Mbps with full tethering).
In the US, the effect of Apple's deal with the carriers is that unlimited data plans remain overpriced and limited.
The effect of Apple's deals with the carriers is to perpetuate lock-in in the US, and bring the consumer-hostile US business model to Europe.
and the fact that the iPhone has to bypass the carriers all together
Apple is selling the most strongly carrier-locked phone ever, and that is Apple's choice. They could have offered the iPhone unlocked. Instead, Apple went out of their way of setting up exclusive contracts with carriers in every country they offer the iPhone in.
What Apple managed to do is to divert some of the revenue stream from carriers to themselves, by offering for-pay add-on services with the phone, but that is hardly a win for consumers.
This "bypassing the carrier" meme is Apple marketing fiction; in reality, Apple has done enormous harm to the US phone market by perpetuating a model built on carrier-specific phones and carrier lock-in.
Jobs practically had to ram the iPhone up ATT's ass before they would allow it on their network. Funny how profitable it turned out to be for them.
That's total bullshit. Apple could have released an unlocked GSM iPhone and it would have worked on both T-Mobile and AT&T in the US, and most carriers world-wide. The fact that the iPhone is carrier-locked is solely Apple's responsibility, and they have gone to court in order to try to keep it that way.
The real problem is that Dell even needs to go to the carriers and that the US mobile phone market is so fragmented. Most phones are carrier locked, many carries don't use SIM cards, and the ones that do and that allow unlocked phones (T-Mobile and AT&T) still use weird frequencies.
There are at least two GSM carries in the US, T-Mobile and AT&T. Dell should produce low-cost, high quality unlocked phones for these carriers, and maybe even a dual GSM/CDMA phone that could be used with most carriers; maybe that would finally kick-start the US mobile phone market.
Dell might be able to do what Apple had promised but has completely failed to achieve: remove the stranglehold of carriers on the mobile phone market.
Dont even try evolution, "the strongest" are most of the time those who have no qualms abandoning their morality.
For social species (like humans), evolution doesn't operate at the level of the individual, it operates at the level of the group. Evolution favors parental care, altruism, and cooperation, which is why humans and human societies have those behaviors. The fact that evolution favors those traits isn't just empirical, it's mathematical.
At least Christians have a hypothesis, provable or not.
It's not a hypothesis at all if it's not falsifiable.
It's also unnecessary; it's trying to supply a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon (altruism) that already has a simple, logical mathematical and physical explanation.
The descriptions of God as not good in the Bible are almost entirely Old Testament, and that reflects the tribal loyalties and cultural biases of many old testament authors.
One can argue that the rules laid down in the Old Testament reflect cultural biases and that they have been superseded by the New Testament. But whether God (for example) wiped out most of humanity or asked men to sacrifice their sons is a factual statement about God, a factual statement that all major Christian denominations believe to be true. If you don't believe in those statements about God, you are not a Christian; the factual statements in the Old and the New Testament is what defines the Christian God.
Another note on morality: Jesus summarised the law as "love God" and "love your neighbour" (i.e. everyone).
Yes, and the fact that you think that those two slogans constitute a basis for morality illustrates just how lacking in morality Christians are. Those slogans can be used to justify just about anything, and have been. Churches have tortured people because of the "love thy neighbor" rule, arguing that it is better to make people suffer in this life than to have them face eternal damnation.
Oh, please, don't try to obfuscate the reality of the situation: Christian churches preach that in order to be a moral person, you need to follow their rules, based on divine revelation, and laid down in various writings. Christian churches object to abortion and homosexuality by pointing at biblical writings, not by asking God.
As for God's moral character, have you actually read the Bible objectively? The God of the Bible is an irascible, volatile mass murderer.
If God was not good, He would not be worthy of worshipping just because He is all powerful.
It's good that you realize that; many Christians don't.
To see whether the Christian God is "good" just look at the Bible. The God described in there is not "good": he is not compassionate, merciful, forgiving, or just--he simply fails to meet the basic criteria that one needs to meet to be described in that way.
So, maybe a "perfectly good and omnipotent being can guide us", but that is not the being that is described in the Bible or that organized Christianity worships.
First of all, that's just a "promise"; they can change that whenever they want and it's not enforceable.
Second, they don't even list the Apache license as one of their "approved" licenses; under their definition of "open source", Apache is not an open source project.
If they want to have credibility on this, they need to do a whole lot better.
They could go after proprietary vendors I suppose but I find it far more likely that these are defensive patents.
RedHat could go after anybody, we just don't know.
When was the last time Microsoft asserted a patent directly against a FOSS project? Yet, Microsoft is apparently busily using their patent portfolio to try to force business deals from open source vendors. What makes you think RedHat isn't going to do the same?
If these were "defensive patents", then RedHat could set up a legal structure that would allow them to be used purely for defensive purposes; in fact, they could set up a legal structure that would allow all FOSS projects to use them for defensive purposes. But they haven't done that; they simply maintain these patents as their exclusive property, to be used for whatever business purposes they want.
If RedHat wanted to build a useful patent portfolio to protect open source, this is not the way to do it. Instead, they should create a separate foundation with a charter that would allow its patent portfolio to be used only in case Red Hat (or other open source developers) are being sued.
The way it is set up right now, if Microsoft or Apple buys Red Hat, all of RedHat's promises go out the window. In fact, RedHat itself can change its mind if it feels wronged by some other open source project.
RedHat's promise is worthless, and I think it's likely made in bad faith (i.e., RedHat knows that it's wortheless).
I think the real question is not who is right or wrong, the real question is whether the morality that Christianity teaches is even remotely defensible. While it's nice that Christians agree with the rest of us that murder and theft are bad things, the core of their morality is that moral behavior is based on rules handed down from a higher authority.
I find that unacceptable as a basis for morality, and so do many other religions. In fact, both gnostics and Satanists view the Christian God as either confused or evil, and they are making a reasonable case for that view.
"The ironic thing is the scientific method ultimately brings one back to the same sorts of mysteries that Creationism want to jump straight to. Parallel universes, etc. The "god story" doesn't sound so wierd once you get to the advanced levels of stuff."
You're confusing scientific speculation with scientific theory. Parallel universes right now are merely speculation. But if they existed and could be demonstrated experimentally, they would be neither weird nor mysterious. Furthermore, for these speculative corners of physics, we know why they are hard to observe.
"God" is in a completely different category. God is supposed to be a being that is everywhere, all-knowing, all powerful, and in personal communication with every human being. You aren't supposed to need a particle accelerator or black hole to interact with God, just everyday thought. Yet, there is no physical evidence, no reproducible experiment, of his existence at all. That is not reasonable.
Thus, teaching Evolution exclusively is essentially forcing their children to admin that the 7-day universe is false
The literal "7-day creation" is a fringe view even within Christianity. The vast majority of Christians and Christian denominations (foremost, the Catholic church) have no problem with evolutionary theory. Furthermore, the fact that creation took longer than seven days is established in physics as well, quite independently from biology.
So, please don't buy into the bullshit of these "creation scientists": first, they do not represent Christianity or a Christian point of view, and second, this isn't evolution vs creationism, it's all of science vs creationism.
There is no contractual agreement between the add-on developer and Blizzard; what legal basis would Blizzard have for imposing any conditions?
Note that FOSS licenses do not restrict what kinds of add-ons you can write for a piece of software or how you distribute your own code, they only impose conditions on you when you distribute someone else's code.
I'm sorry, but the thought of a terrorist hiding a real bomb in a replica of the Holy Handgrenade of Antioch is just totally bizarre.
I mean, as this story shows, you shouldn't pick something that causes head scratching, but instead pick something that even the most uneducated would consider harmless: a dead gerbil, a water soaked book, a breadbox, whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
To people who wanted every mystery tied up nice and neat, I hate to break it to you but it was never that kind of show. Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
There are good ways of leaving a mystery and bad ones; I think this was a bad one.
"You are ineligible, because we have no record that you earned money during 2007 or 2008."
Did you or your employer pay your unemployment insurance? If not, you aren't eligible for unemployment benefits, no matter how much you earned.
If I earned no money, why'd you tax me almost 40,000 dollars these last two years???
Those were federal and state taxes; they don't pay for your unemployment benefits.
Now imagine that same idiot bureaucracy running my healthcare
No need to imagine, just look at US government health care (military, Congress, etc.), as well as other nations: government-run health care is cost effective and actually works.
The ending made it look like living in Africa was going to be one big camping trip. These people don't stand a chance against carnivores, disease, or spear-wielding natives. I seriously doubt this was a realistic voluntary choice.
Japan already has mandatory diets for those with BMI>30. When the government gives you taxpayer-supported healthcare, the government also has the right to run your life.
Well, I can't find anything corroborating those claims. But assuming they are true, most likely, there aren't "mandatory diets" but simply either/or choices: either you go on a diet or you lose your government health care. And that's something I'd fully support: if you refuse reasonable treatments, then your health insurance shouldn't be required to pay for your further treatments. It's just like your car insurance isn't required to pay if you deliberately crash your car.
Pre-emptive monitoring for signs of heart attacks and strokes are no joking matter and detecting these early on mean the difference between mild and serious, life-altering damage or death.
There is already pre-emptive monitoring: the annual physical, plus pacemakers and similar devices for people with identifiable heart problems.
Where is the evidence that any additional monitoring does any good?
I can monitor my laptop's fan speed all day long, but cant do so for my heart, which is /much/ more important than a replaceable gadget.
And when you detect problems, what are you going to do? The same thing you should already be doing: eat healthy and exercise regularly. There's little else a hospital can do for you.
Yes why dont we all stop using hospitals as well.
Hospitals are good for obvious, acute problems: broken bones, appendicitis, problem births, etc. You don't need monitoring to detect those, they are self-evident.
Hospitals are mostly useless for the kinds of problems detected by these sensors: obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
Exclusivity is what they used to open the door to their design decisions
Sorry, but you really don't know what you're talking about.
AT&T and T-Mobile both allow unlocked phones on their networks. You don't need carrier support for visual voicemail, OTA firmware updates, feature updates, or software sales; other manufacturers have been offering that for years.
In Europe, unlimited data plans are low cost and universally available ($30/month at several Mbps with full tethering).
In the US, the effect of Apple's deal with the carriers is that unlimited data plans remain overpriced and limited.
The effect of Apple's deals with the carriers is to perpetuate lock-in in the US, and bring the consumer-hostile US business model to Europe.
A portion of that monthly service payment to the carrier either goes to pay off the cost of the phone subsidy or directly to the carriers profit line.
What "monthly service payment" would that be?
Just get a prepaid plan.
and the fact that the iPhone has to bypass the carriers all together
Apple is selling the most strongly carrier-locked phone ever, and that is Apple's choice. They could have offered the iPhone unlocked. Instead, Apple went out of their way of setting up exclusive contracts with carriers in every country they offer the iPhone in.
What Apple managed to do is to divert some of the revenue stream from carriers to themselves, by offering for-pay add-on services with the phone, but that is hardly a win for consumers.
This "bypassing the carrier" meme is Apple marketing fiction; in reality, Apple has done enormous harm to the US phone market by perpetuating a model built on carrier-specific phones and carrier lock-in.
Jobs practically had to ram the iPhone up ATT's ass before they would allow it on their network. Funny how profitable it turned out to be for them.
That's total bullshit. Apple could have released an unlocked GSM iPhone and it would have worked on both T-Mobile and AT&T in the US, and most carriers world-wide. The fact that the iPhone is carrier-locked is solely Apple's responsibility, and they have gone to court in order to try to keep it that way.
The real problem is that Dell even needs to go to the carriers and that the US mobile phone market is so fragmented. Most phones are carrier locked, many carries don't use SIM cards, and the ones that do and that allow unlocked phones (T-Mobile and AT&T) still use weird frequencies.
There are at least two GSM carries in the US, T-Mobile and AT&T. Dell should produce low-cost, high quality unlocked phones for these carriers, and maybe even a dual GSM/CDMA phone that could be used with most carriers; maybe that would finally kick-start the US mobile phone market.
Dell might be able to do what Apple had promised but has completely failed to achieve: remove the stranglehold of carriers on the mobile phone market.
Dont even try evolution, "the strongest" are most of the time those who have no qualms abandoning their morality.
For social species (like humans), evolution doesn't operate at the level of the individual, it operates at the level of the group. Evolution favors parental care, altruism, and cooperation, which is why humans and human societies have those behaviors. The fact that evolution favors those traits isn't just empirical, it's mathematical.
At least Christians have a hypothesis, provable or not.
It's not a hypothesis at all if it's not falsifiable.
It's also unnecessary; it's trying to supply a supernatural explanation for a physical phenomenon (altruism) that already has a simple, logical mathematical and physical explanation.
The descriptions of God as not good in the Bible are almost entirely Old Testament, and that reflects the tribal loyalties and cultural biases of many old testament authors.
One can argue that the rules laid down in the Old Testament reflect cultural biases and that they have been superseded by the New Testament. But whether God (for example) wiped out most of humanity or asked men to sacrifice their sons is a factual statement about God, a factual statement that all major Christian denominations believe to be true. If you don't believe in those statements about God, you are not a Christian; the factual statements in the Old and the New Testament is what defines the Christian God.
Another note on morality: Jesus summarised the law as "love God" and "love your neighbour" (i.e. everyone).
Yes, and the fact that you think that those two slogans constitute a basis for morality illustrates just how lacking in morality Christians are. Those slogans can be used to justify just about anything, and have been. Churches have tortured people because of the "love thy neighbor" rule, arguing that it is better to make people suffer in this life than to have them face eternal damnation.
Oh, please, don't try to obfuscate the reality of the situation: Christian churches preach that in order to be a moral person, you need to follow their rules, based on divine revelation, and laid down in various writings. Christian churches object to abortion and homosexuality by pointing at biblical writings, not by asking God.
As for God's moral character, have you actually read the Bible objectively? The God of the Bible is an irascible, volatile mass murderer.
If God was not good, He would not be worthy of worshipping just because He is all powerful.
It's good that you realize that; many Christians don't.
To see whether the Christian God is "good" just look at the Bible. The God described in there is not "good": he is not compassionate, merciful, forgiving, or just--he simply fails to meet the basic criteria that one needs to meet to be described in that way.
So, maybe a "perfectly good and omnipotent being can guide us", but that is not the being that is described in the Bible or that organized Christianity worships.
First of all, that's just a "promise"; they can change that whenever they want and it's not enforceable.
Second, they don't even list the Apache license as one of their "approved" licenses; under their definition of "open source", Apache is not an open source project.
If they want to have credibility on this, they need to do a whole lot better.
They could go after proprietary vendors I suppose but I find it far more likely that these are defensive patents.
RedHat could go after anybody, we just don't know.
When was the last time Microsoft asserted a patent directly against a FOSS project? Yet, Microsoft is apparently busily using their patent portfolio to try to force business deals from open source vendors. What makes you think RedHat isn't going to do the same?
If these were "defensive patents", then RedHat could set up a legal structure that would allow them to be used purely for defensive purposes; in fact, they could set up a legal structure that would allow all FOSS projects to use them for defensive purposes. But they haven't done that; they simply maintain these patents as their exclusive property, to be used for whatever business purposes they want.
If RedHat wanted to build a useful patent portfolio to protect open source, this is not the way to do it. Instead, they should create a separate foundation with a charter that would allow its patent portfolio to be used only in case Red Hat (or other open source developers) are being sued.
The way it is set up right now, if Microsoft or Apple buys Red Hat, all of RedHat's promises go out the window. In fact, RedHat itself can change its mind if it feels wronged by some other open source project.
RedHat's promise is worthless, and I think it's likely made in bad faith (i.e., RedHat knows that it's wortheless).
So... it's kind of like a skateboard or snowboard?
I think the real question is not who is right or wrong, the real question is whether the morality that Christianity teaches is even remotely defensible. While it's nice that Christians agree with the rest of us that murder and theft are bad things, the core of their morality is that moral behavior is based on rules handed down from a higher authority.
I find that unacceptable as a basis for morality, and so do many other religions. In fact, both gnostics and Satanists view the Christian God as either confused or evil, and they are making a reasonable case for that view.
"The ironic thing is the scientific method ultimately brings one back to the same sorts of mysteries that Creationism want to jump straight to. Parallel universes, etc. The "god story" doesn't sound so wierd once you get to the advanced levels of stuff."
You're confusing scientific speculation with scientific theory. Parallel universes right now are merely speculation. But if they existed and could be demonstrated experimentally, they would be neither weird nor mysterious. Furthermore, for these speculative corners of physics, we know why they are hard to observe.
"God" is in a completely different category. God is supposed to be a being that is everywhere, all-knowing, all powerful, and in personal communication with every human being. You aren't supposed to need a particle accelerator or black hole to interact with God, just everyday thought. Yet, there is no physical evidence, no reproducible experiment, of his existence at all. That is not reasonable.
Thus, teaching Evolution exclusively is essentially forcing their children to admin that the 7-day universe is false
The literal "7-day creation" is a fringe view even within Christianity. The vast majority of Christians and Christian denominations (foremost, the Catholic church) have no problem with evolutionary theory. Furthermore, the fact that creation took longer than seven days is established in physics as well, quite independently from biology.
So, please don't buy into the bullshit of these "creation scientists": first, they do not represent Christianity or a Christian point of view, and second, this isn't evolution vs creationism, it's all of science vs creationism.
There is no contractual agreement between the add-on developer and Blizzard; what legal basis would Blizzard have for imposing any conditions?
Note that FOSS licenses do not restrict what kinds of add-ons you can write for a piece of software or how you distribute your own code, they only impose conditions on you when you distribute someone else's code.
I'm sorry, but the thought of a terrorist hiding a real bomb in a replica of the Holy Handgrenade of Antioch is just totally bizarre.
I mean, as this story shows, you shouldn't pick something that causes head scratching, but instead pick something that even the most uneducated would consider harmless: a dead gerbil, a water soaked book, a breadbox, whatever.
Amazing, tethering AND cut-and-paste. At this rate, the iPhone may actually support most industry standard features is, oh, less than a decade.