In the future where everything is recorded on the internet forever, you will count yourself lucky if you find a single job applicant who ONLY has pictures of them drinking beer on the internet. Who do you think you're going to hire instead? There is no "Microsoft product" for you to buy in this analogy.
A lot of people have ridiculous magical beliefs about the power of the "free market" that just aren't true, but nobody can just stop obeying the ACTUAL law of supply and demand any more than they could just stop obeying the law of gravity.
Let's say you're throwing a concert in an amphitheater with a thousand seats, and thus you're selling a thousand tickets. That's your supply, and you'll note that at least in this case it isn't an abstract metaphor. You have an actual "supply" of stuff you're selling, and you can't sell more of it than you have.
Now let's say that you want to make these tickets affordable, so you set the price at ten dollars, just like concert tickets used to cost in the good old days. Furthermore, let's pretend you have some magical way to stop scalpers from buying the tickets and re-selling them for profit. What happens?
Well, let's say a hundred thousand people are ready, willing, and able to buy those tickets for ten dollars, for the simple, honest purpose of actually seeing the show. That's your demand for the tickets... and it vastly outstrips your supply. One way or the other, no matter what you do, only one thousand people can sit in your amphitheater and watch the show, leaving the other ninety-nine percent disappointed. There is no way for the supply to meet the demand at this price.
How do you intend to resolve this? You can't blame it on the scalpers. They have been magically banished from the picture, and yet you STILL end up with the vast majority of potential customers feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.
The real problem here was created by you, when you decided to sell your tickets at such a ridiculously low price. I can understand feeling sorry for "real fans" who barely have two pennies to rub together, but there are just too many people who want to buy ten dollar tickets for you to find them all an actual PHYSICAL place to sit at the concert.
That's the actual law of supply and demand in action, and pretending you're somehow above such worldly mercantile concerns won't make your amphitheater any bigger.
Yes, you can't just assume from the correlation that people must get more viruses because they install windows. You have to also consider the alternative explanation... that people install more windows because they get viruses!
No, what it's REALLY about is the amount of space it takes up on an install CD, and the fact that even your proverbial Grandmother could figure out how to install it off the internet with one mouse click using Ubuntu's amazingly slick package management interface.
This story should have been titled "Ubuntu speeds up install process for people who don't select Gimp", except that would make it too obvious that there is no story worth writing about here.
Nah, all the attention he grabbed by whining doesn't count. If google hadn't picked this name, we STILL would never have heard of him. So exactly how much attention is Google "stealing" from his project, when he had essentially none to begin with?
The original article was talking specifically about developer tools, such as source code editors.
I use emacs to edit code. That's not to say I use every feature of emacs, just enough to get the job done. This works fine for me, and it's free. Why should I pay actual real-world MONEY for a text editor that I will never actually getting around to using half the features of, when I already have a source code editor I'm comfortable with that has more features that I need, and is completely free?
Maybe there are nooks and crannies of the computer industry where commercial software still has a genuine edge on free software, but NOT developer tools.
Another robot brought to the exhibition was an experimental prototype of the mark 3 travel machine, recently renamed as the "Dalek" by it's creator Davros. Mass production of these travel machines will begin shortly.
Pork bellies are a real, physical commodity: the people who make it truly are "bringing home the bacon" for the rest of us. So is electricity. To expect the federal government to treat a made up currency in an imaginary world inside a computer game as being just as important as pork bellies and electricity is demeaning to pork bellies and electricity.
Creating plat out of thin air does not devalue legitimate money, it only "devalues" plat, and if you think that has any real value in the first place you have a problem. If you buy 1000 plat for 1000 dollars, and then the EverQuest administrators create 5000 plat and give it away for free, you will end up looking like an idiot, but those of us who are REALLY not "in on the deal" in the sense that we don't even play EverCrack will just point at you and laugh for taking a mere game so seriously. At no point is actual real-world currency ever created, destroyed, or devalued by this process.
Buying plat is like buying video game tokens: when a sensible person does it, they understand that they are basically just throwing their money away, but they expect to at least have a little bit of fun doing it.
We can see natural selection at work withen a species before our eyes in a matter of generations, but have yet to see any dramatic jump that evolutionary theory supports.
You can also watch an iceberg travel a few yards over the same amount of time, without ever seeing it carve out a fijord. We are talking about processes that work over the course of millions and millions of years: a change that "only" takes ten thousand years would qualify as dramatic.
Yes, but so could firing guided missiles into a random chemical plant in order to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal. America has done a lot of awful things to the people of the middle east, since at least the 1960s if not earlier... looking back on it all, I find it amazing that it took them this long to hit us back on our home territory.
What I don't understand is the people who reacted to 9/11 by saying "clearly we have not bombed the shit out of the middle east ENOUGH! Bombing them even more must be the solution to all of our problems!" Duh, Bombing the middle east every alternate thursday is what got us into this mess in the first place! Bombing them more will create MORE PROBLEMS!
I only see two ways to bring a permanent end to this mess: pull all military forces out of the middle east, stop meddling in their politics, and leave them with only themselves to blame for their problems... or escalate the conflict to it's logical conclusion, and ruthlessly exterminate every man, woman, and child in the middle east with hydrogen bombs.
I prefer the first method, but even the second method is better than a wishy-washy comprimise where we kill just enough of them to piss them off even more, ensuring that they will hit us back sooner or later. If we are going to kill them, let's at least do a proper job of it!
Assuming the MPAA actually did notice the miniscule drop in ticket sales, and assuming they could track it down to geeky, MPAA-hating people like us... the MPAA would just accuse us of piracy, and use the statistics in Washington as proof that they need more legal power.
O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's "switch" campaign.
As a Linux user, I agree, at least partly: Linux users are the most likely people to switch from Windows to Macintosh. I was never able to live with just Linux, I always used to have at least one Windows partition somewhere. Now I find that having a Macintosh around the house helps me sever my last ties with Microsoft. I'm still not giving up Linux, but Macintosh is a nice compliment to it.
My wife and I got married in the back yard of a justice of the peace with two plain silver wedding rings. The most expensive part of the wedding was taking everyone out to the 99 resteraunt after the ceremony. But despite these humble beginnings, our marriage has lasted longer than many I know of that cost hundreds or thousands of times as much. In fact, I find that it is often the most spectacular weddings that end in the most spectacular failures.
If your woman won't marry you without a big shiny rock to entice her, is she marrying you, or the diamond?
I don't see why the poster does not remember libertarianism applies to individuals as well! The companies have already rigged the games with rules and regulations that take away individual rights. Where does he get off that this is a totally natural process. If you scrap the current copyright laws, and (somehow) manage to design them fairly, than I could appreciate a "let the market take care of it" stance. Meanwhile, I'm glad Rep Boucher is not waiting for this mythical time and is taking steps to close loopholes that rob the citizenry!
I think we should repeal ALL copyright laws, and THEN let the market take care of it. If that means that the RIAA and MPAA (and Microsoft, but that's another rant) go out of business, so be it. Music could be supported by the companies that make computers and CD players: the more freedom people have to use these devices to their full potential, the more they will buy them, giving the companies that make the devices more money to support the music that enhances the attractiveness of their products. It would be cheaper and more effective than conventional advertising.
When you have people who want something and have money to pay for it, you don't need any special laws to make sure they get what they want.
Of course, I'm not using my computer to do so, so I guess there's no feeling of "losing control" of my computer.
For the record, I was not using my computer when this happened. It was a standalone consumer-grade DVD player. When I pressed fast-forward and nothing happened, I realized that my DVD player was not just a digitized VHS player: it was more like a retarded computer without a debugger or even a keyboard. Now I watch DVDs on my linux machine, where at least I have the tools to work around these "features".
By the way, it would be simple enough to add all that extra material at the end of a DVD without giving the DVD author complete control of the machine in the process. VHS cassets have had previews and extra scenes for years without any special hardware support.
When I couldn't fast-forward through it, or skip to the next chapter, I was genuinely disturbed. I eventually did find the button it wanted me to press, but I could not ignore the larger issues the problem had exposed to me. Joke or not, the DVD should not have held me captive like that. I don't like the fact that every DVD has it's own special user interface that demands to be paid attention to. VHS, with all it's limitations, still has a better interface: every tape responds the same way to fast forward, rewind, and play. The interface should be designed to help me watch the movie, not to help the DVD author show off how clever he is.
Price is based solely on supply and demand. It has nothing to do with production cost.
That's like saying "light is made of electromagnetic waves, it has nothing to do with electricity or magnetism." Clearly, your understanding of the subject has not progressed past rote learning of simple catch-phrases. If that was all there was to economics, they wouldn't need calculus to describe it.
For most manufactured goods, the supply of a product based on the production cost of the product. Do you think CDs grow on trees? No, they must be stamped out of plastic and aluminum... thus, the supply (or price) of CDs is limited by the price (or supply) of plastic and aluminum. If CDs were made of solid gold they would be more expensive because gold is expensive: or you could say that the supply of gold CDs would be small because the supply of gold is small. The phrases "production cost" and "supply" are just two slightly different ways of talking about the same thing, which you would already know if you had a clue what you were talking about.
I never understood why people make DivX rips of their DVDs for backup purposes. The loss of features and quality (as you're are technically transcoding) in the conversion process seems to far out weigh the convenience of not getting out of your chair to find that DVD disc.
What "features" are you talking about? The FBI warnings and other crap you are not allowed to fast forward through? The menu systems that freeze if you click the wrong sequence of buttons? The Foreign language soundracks I don't understand? "Special" features that are not compatable with my machine?
I specifically remember the moment I knew I would have problems with DVDs. I wanted to watch the DVD of "office space", but when I put it in my machine, I saw a screen that looked exactly like a computer desktop with a download progress-bar.
Annoyed, I tried to fast-forward, but I couldn't. The bar inched across the screen, making disk-drive noises, but just before it was finished the computer "crashed" and displayed a message that said "press enter to continue". After freaking out for a minute, I realized there was actually an enter button on my remote, so I pushed it. That took me to the main menu.
A harmless joke, right? Well, in this case, yes. But it made me realize that when I put a DVD in my machine, I am giving up control to the author of the DVD. He can tell me when I can fast forward or not, and he can put any other arbitrary barriers to watching the movie he wants. Once I became sensitive to the issue, I have noticed hundreds of little examples of this phenomenon. The possibilities are endless, and I shudder to think what will happen when the big corporations really start taking advantage of them.
When I rip a DVD, I am taking back control. I choose the track, I rip it, and then I can do anything the hell I want with it, just like I could with VHS. If the makers of DVDs were not so fixated on taking control of my "viewing experience", maybe I would just go with the flow... but they have already gone too far, and they are only planning on going farther.
How many times do you listen to an album? I've listened to some of mine over a thousand.
Why should I have to pay more for something just because I get more use or enjoyment out of it? In a healthy, competitive market, the price of a product approaches the minimum cost of manufacturing the item, not the maximum cost the consumer is willing to pay. In this case, the cost of manufacturing a CD is less than a dollar, and the cost of distributing music over the internet is basically free. The only reason to pay more than that is to put money into the pockets of big corporations. That is not what Adam Smith had in mind when he laid down the philisophical foundations of Capitalism.
So many people run around in circles trying to increase how much money they make, that they forget that they could improve their lives just as dramatically by finding ways to decrease the cost of doing the things they really want to do.
Re:interesting
on
Built For Use
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· Score: 2, Insightful
By the principles put forth in this book, Linux would not exist!
It would be difficult to articulate the full magnitude of how wrong you are.
Linux does not depend on the sort of "frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks" the book is complaining about. Linux owes it's existence to the sort of hard-core geeks who think that hunting down kernel thread synchronization bugs is fun. Without all the tedious, non-sexy details like a stable kernel and a good compiler suite, there would be nothing to linux for the more traditionally "artistic" types to cover with a candy-coated shell. At best, those artistic types only make an operating system that was already exellent accessable to a wider audience: more often, they are useless parasites that take more credit than they deserve for the fruits of real geek's labor. I consider your post to be an excellent example of the latter case.
If you believe every human being is given life by a divine Creator and He has said that murder is wrong, then you MUST believe that murder is wrong.
Yes, and if you believe that you were given life by a divine Creator and He put you on this earth to slay infidels and unbelievers, then you MUST believe that killing is GOOD.
Some of the most horrifying events in the history of mankind were directly caused by religeon. Athiests tend not to indulge in the sort of cold-blooded acts of mass brutality that can be inspired by those chilling words, "God told me to do it."
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In the future where everything is recorded on the internet forever, you will count yourself lucky if you find a single job applicant who ONLY has pictures of them drinking beer on the internet. Who do you think you're going to hire instead? There is no "Microsoft product" for you to buy in this analogy.
A lot of people have ridiculous magical beliefs about the power of the "free market" that just aren't true, but nobody can just stop obeying the ACTUAL law of supply and demand any more than they could just stop obeying the law of gravity.
Let's say you're throwing a concert in an amphitheater with a thousand seats, and thus you're selling a thousand tickets. That's your supply, and you'll note that at least in this case it isn't an abstract metaphor. You have an actual "supply" of stuff you're selling, and you can't sell more of it than you have.
Now let's say that you want to make these tickets affordable, so you set the price at ten dollars, just like concert tickets used to cost in the good old days. Furthermore, let's pretend you have some magical way to stop scalpers from buying the tickets and re-selling them for profit. What happens?
Well, let's say a hundred thousand people are ready, willing, and able to buy those tickets for ten dollars, for the simple, honest purpose of actually seeing the show. That's your demand for the tickets... and it vastly outstrips your supply. One way or the other, no matter what you do, only one thousand people can sit in your amphitheater and watch the show, leaving the other ninety-nine percent disappointed. There is no way for the supply to meet the demand at this price.
How do you intend to resolve this? You can't blame it on the scalpers. They have been magically banished from the picture, and yet you STILL end up with the vast majority of potential customers feeling frustrated and unsatisfied.
The real problem here was created by you, when you decided to sell your tickets at such a ridiculously low price. I can understand feeling sorry for "real fans" who barely have two pennies to rub together, but there are just too many people who want to buy ten dollar tickets for you to find them all an actual PHYSICAL place to sit at the concert.
That's the actual law of supply and demand in action, and pretending you're somehow above such worldly mercantile concerns won't make your amphitheater any bigger.
Yes, you can't just assume from the correlation that people must get more viruses because they install windows. You have to also consider the alternative explanation... that people install more windows because they get viruses!
Hmmm, and the man who took the place of Bela Lagosi in plan 9 from outer space was... a chiropractor! Coincidence?
No, what it's REALLY about is the amount of space it takes up on an install CD, and the fact that even your proverbial Grandmother could figure out how to install it off the internet with one mouse click using Ubuntu's amazingly slick package management interface.
This story should have been titled "Ubuntu speeds up install process for people who don't select Gimp", except that would make it too obvious that there is no story worth writing about here.
Nah, all the attention he grabbed by whining doesn't count. If google hadn't picked this name, we STILL would never have heard of him. So exactly how much attention is Google "stealing" from his project, when he had essentially none to begin with?
The original article was talking specifically about developer tools, such as source code editors.
I use emacs to edit code. That's not to say I use every feature of emacs, just enough to get the job done. This works fine for me, and it's free. Why should I pay actual real-world MONEY for a text editor that I will never actually getting around to using half the features of, when I already have a source code editor I'm comfortable with that has more features that I need, and is completely free?
Maybe there are nooks and crannies of the computer industry where commercial software still has a genuine edge on free software, but NOT developer tools.
"It's never cool to brag about an unwillingness to learn something new."
Do you really think there is something "new" about whitespace dependancy? I don't want to learn new ways to make very, very old mistakes.
Another robot brought to the exhibition was an experimental prototype of the mark 3 travel machine, recently renamed as the "Dalek" by it's creator Davros. Mass production of these travel machines will begin shortly.
Pork bellies are a real, physical commodity: the people who make it truly are "bringing home the bacon" for the rest of us. So is electricity. To expect the federal government to treat a made up currency in an imaginary world inside a computer game as being just as important as pork bellies and electricity is demeaning to pork bellies and electricity.
Creating plat out of thin air does not devalue legitimate money, it only "devalues" plat, and if you think that has any real value in the first place you have a problem. If you buy 1000 plat for 1000 dollars, and then the EverQuest administrators create 5000 plat and give it away for free, you will end up looking like an idiot, but those of us who are REALLY not "in on the deal" in the sense that we don't even play EverCrack will just point at you and laugh for taking a mere game so seriously. At no point is actual real-world currency ever created, destroyed, or devalued by this process.
Buying plat is like buying video game tokens: when a sensible person does it, they understand that they are basically just throwing their money away, but they expect to at least have a little bit of fun doing it.
We can see natural selection at work withen a species before our eyes in a matter of generations, but have yet to see any dramatic jump that evolutionary theory supports.
You can also watch an iceberg travel a few yards over the same amount of time, without ever seeing it carve out a fijord. We are talking about processes that work over the course of millions and millions of years: a change that "only" takes ten thousand years would qualify as dramatic.
An improvement in technology that makes computers FASTER? Who could have imagined THAT would ever happen?
Yes, but so could firing guided missiles into a random chemical plant in order to divert attention from a presidential sex scandal. America has done a lot of awful things to the people of the middle east, since at least the 1960s if not earlier... looking back on it all, I find it amazing that it took them this long to hit us back on our home territory.
What I don't understand is the people who reacted to 9/11 by saying "clearly we have not bombed the shit out of the middle east ENOUGH! Bombing them even more must be the solution to all of our problems!" Duh, Bombing the middle east every alternate thursday is what got us into this mess in the first place! Bombing them more will create MORE PROBLEMS!
I only see two ways to bring a permanent end to this mess: pull all military forces out of the middle east, stop meddling in their politics, and leave them with only themselves to blame for their problems... or escalate the conflict to it's logical conclusion, and ruthlessly exterminate every man, woman, and child in the middle east with hydrogen bombs.
I prefer the first method, but even the second method is better than a wishy-washy comprimise where we kill just enough of them to piss them off even more, ensuring that they will hit us back sooner or later. If we are going to kill them, let's at least do a proper job of it!
1. Write a brilliant game.
2. Exclude a tiny minority of greedy profiteers.
3. Play it!!
Assuming the MPAA actually did notice the miniscule drop in ticket sales, and assuming they could track it down to geeky, MPAA-hating people like us... the MPAA would just accuse us of piracy, and use the statistics in Washington as proof that they need more legal power.
O'Reilly also makes an interesting point that UNIX/Linux users, rather than Windows users, would be the best target niche for Apple's "switch" campaign.
As a Linux user, I agree, at least partly: Linux users are the most likely people to switch from Windows to Macintosh. I was never able to live with just Linux, I always used to have at least one Windows partition somewhere. Now I find that having a Macintosh around the house helps me sever my last ties with Microsoft. I'm still not giving up Linux, but Macintosh is a nice compliment to it.
My wife and I got married in the back yard of a justice of the peace with two plain silver wedding rings. The most expensive part of the wedding was taking everyone out to the 99 resteraunt after the ceremony. But despite these humble beginnings, our marriage has lasted longer than many I know of that cost hundreds or thousands of times as much. In fact, I find that it is often the most spectacular weddings that end in the most spectacular failures.
If your woman won't marry you without a big shiny rock to entice her, is she marrying you, or the diamond?
I don't see why the poster does not remember libertarianism applies to individuals as well! The companies have already rigged the games with rules and regulations that take away individual rights. Where does he get off that this is a totally natural process. If you scrap the current copyright laws, and (somehow) manage to design them fairly, than I could appreciate a "let the market take care of it" stance. Meanwhile, I'm glad Rep Boucher is not waiting for this mythical time and is taking steps to close loopholes that rob the citizenry!
I think we should repeal ALL copyright laws, and THEN let the market take care of it. If that means that the RIAA and MPAA (and Microsoft, but that's another rant) go out of business, so be it. Music could be supported by the companies that make computers and CD players: the more freedom people have to use these devices to their full potential, the more they will buy them, giving the companies that make the devices more money to support the music that enhances the attractiveness of their products. It would be cheaper and more effective than conventional advertising.
When you have people who want something and have money to pay for it, you don't need any special laws to make sure they get what they want.
Of course, I'm not using my computer to do so, so I guess there's no feeling of "losing control" of my computer.
For the record, I was not using my computer when this happened. It was a standalone consumer-grade DVD player. When I pressed fast-forward and nothing happened, I realized that my DVD player was not just a digitized VHS player: it was more like a retarded computer without a debugger or even a keyboard. Now I watch DVDs on my linux machine, where at least I have the tools to work around these "features".
By the way, it would be simple enough to add all that extra material at the end of a DVD without giving the DVD author complete control of the machine in the process. VHS cassets have had previews and extra scenes for years without any special hardware support.
You fell for the joke in Office Space?
When I couldn't fast-forward through it, or skip to the next chapter, I was genuinely disturbed. I eventually did find the button it wanted me to press, but I could not ignore the larger issues the problem had exposed to me. Joke or not, the DVD should not have held me captive like that. I don't like the fact that every DVD has it's own special user interface that demands to be paid attention to. VHS, with all it's limitations, still has a better interface: every tape responds the same way to fast forward, rewind, and play. The interface should be designed to help me watch the movie, not to help the DVD author show off how clever he is.
Price is based solely on supply and demand. It has nothing to do with production cost.
That's like saying "light is made of electromagnetic waves, it has nothing to do with electricity or magnetism." Clearly, your understanding of the subject has not progressed past rote learning of simple catch-phrases. If that was all there was to economics, they wouldn't need calculus to describe it.
For most manufactured goods, the supply of a product based on the production cost of the product. Do you think CDs grow on trees? No, they must be stamped out of plastic and aluminum... thus, the supply (or price) of CDs is limited by the price (or supply) of plastic and aluminum. If CDs were made of solid gold they would be more expensive because gold is expensive: or you could say that the supply of gold CDs would be small because the supply of gold is small. The phrases "production cost" and "supply" are just two slightly different ways of talking about the same thing, which you would already know if you had a clue what you were talking about.
I never understood why people make DivX rips of their DVDs for backup purposes. The loss of features and quality (as you're are technically transcoding) in the conversion process seems to far out weigh the convenience of not getting out of your chair to find that DVD disc.
What "features" are you talking about? The FBI warnings and other crap you are not allowed to fast forward through? The menu systems that freeze if you click the wrong sequence of buttons? The Foreign language soundracks I don't understand? "Special" features that are not compatable with my machine?
I specifically remember the moment I knew I would have problems with DVDs. I wanted to watch the DVD of "office space", but when I put it in my machine, I saw a screen that looked exactly like a computer desktop with a download progress-bar.
Annoyed, I tried to fast-forward, but I couldn't. The bar inched across the screen, making disk-drive noises, but just before it was finished the computer "crashed" and displayed a message that said "press enter to continue". After freaking out for a minute, I realized there was actually an enter button on my remote, so I pushed it. That took me to the main menu.
A harmless joke, right? Well, in this case, yes. But it made me realize that when I put a DVD in my machine, I am giving up control to the author of the DVD. He can tell me when I can fast forward or not, and he can put any other arbitrary barriers to watching the movie he wants. Once I became sensitive to the issue, I have noticed hundreds of little examples of this phenomenon. The possibilities are endless, and I shudder to think what will happen when the big corporations really start taking advantage of them.
When I rip a DVD, I am taking back control. I choose the track, I rip it, and then I can do anything the hell I want with it, just like I could with VHS. If the makers of DVDs were not so fixated on taking control of my "viewing experience", maybe I would just go with the flow... but they have already gone too far, and they are only planning on going farther.
How many times do you listen to an album? I've listened to some of mine over a thousand.
Why should I have to pay more for something just because I get more use or enjoyment out of it? In a healthy, competitive market, the price of a product approaches the minimum cost of manufacturing the item, not the maximum cost the consumer is willing to pay. In this case, the cost of manufacturing a CD is less than a dollar, and the cost of distributing music over the internet is basically free. The only reason to pay more than that is to put money into the pockets of big corporations. That is not what Adam Smith had in mind when he laid down the philisophical foundations of Capitalism.
So many people run around in circles trying to increase how much money they make, that they forget that they could improve their lives just as dramatically by finding ways to decrease the cost of doing the things they really want to do.
By the principles put forth in this book, Linux would not exist!
It would be difficult to articulate the full magnitude of how wrong you are.
Linux does not depend on the sort of "frustrated artists with nose rings and black turtlenecks" the book is complaining about. Linux owes it's existence to the sort of hard-core geeks who think that hunting down kernel thread synchronization bugs is fun. Without all the tedious, non-sexy details like a stable kernel and a good compiler suite, there would be nothing to linux for the more traditionally "artistic" types to cover with a candy-coated shell. At best, those artistic types only make an operating system that was already exellent accessable to a wider audience: more often, they are useless parasites that take more credit than they deserve for the fruits of real geek's labor. I consider your post to be an excellent example of the latter case.
If you believe every human being is given life by a divine Creator and He has said that murder is wrong, then you MUST believe that murder is wrong.
Yes, and if you believe that you were given life by a divine Creator and He put you on this earth to slay infidels and unbelievers, then you MUST believe that killing is GOOD.
Some of the most horrifying events in the history of mankind were directly caused by religeon. Athiests tend not to indulge in the sort of cold-blooded acts of mass brutality that can be inspired by those chilling words, "God told me to do it."