There could be just one of them and they would still feel that they are a big enough percentage to do that. There's a difference between how they feel and what actual effects that their actions have on scientific progress. My take is that they have little effect on scientific research.
Instead, I'd say that environmentalists and animal rights people have had a more significant effect on research and science than the few creationists and I.D. people.
Scientific progress? In that, you may be correct, but I'm still not certain.
They got their money from the entire world, not just USA. They export to every country. Not just products but raw materials as well.
You take them out you'll have to re-open closed mines, upgrade processing facilities, build new factories, train all your workers. That wont even bring you back to where you were. You'll still be short.
Yes, they get money from the rest of the world, other than the US. I don't have huge confidence in US allies, but I doubt they'll want to continue to trade with China after a bunch of killing and nuking.
I don't have a Lord or Saviour (not yet, at least), so hugging is not in the cards. I'm also not going to spend a lot of time wistfully imagining infinite dimensions. Whatever we may discover in the future will be of great interest to me - whether it agrees with theists or atheists.
My apologies, don't mean to make it personal. I was just using your post for rhetorical effect.
Did TFA or TFS ever mention how the varied Arab cultures were the kings of science for around eight hundred years that (from what I understand) ran concurrently with religion? Library of Alexandria, anyone? Mathematics? Astronomy?
If it wasn't mentioned, then why not? Anyone have a guess?
I sincerely hope that the anti-religious folks keep pushing harder and harder against people that have faith. Eventually, you are going to push people to the point where they start speaking up for themselves.
When 'theist' takes the place currently held by 'atheist' as the least trusted kind of individual on the planet (ranked below that of 'child molester' or 'terrorist'), then I think you will have a point.
Until then, I'm thinking you're trying to say that the minority is walking roughshod over the vast majority, which is faintly ridiculous.
So what? They're not blocking the science. You aren't less rational or scientific in your thinking just because someone out there believes crazy things.
So what?
The fact is that these crazy people are still a big enough percentage of the US population that they feel they can wield their crazy as a club to beat people over the head with oppressive, idiotic legislation.
Hear, hear. The GP seems to be compelled to expend quite a bit of energy trying to prove that in no way can religion ever be anything but bad. Perhaps someday science will lead us to profound answers that point to a true religion. But some will keep kicking and screaming.
The only kicking and screaming that will be done is by theists that refuse to see that no evidence has ever led to their personal god. Hug the Lord Your Savior close to your bosom and pray every minute that you're alive. Nobody cares.
It's because OP's own paradigm is threatened by information and a perspective which puts his own at risk of being wrong. And he doesn't have the strength of self and capability to admit doubt and ambiguity, and allow such a threat to his personal fundamentalist philosophy of atheism to exist without rebuttal.
You display an amusing lack of understanding of science as both a body of knowledge and as a process. Hint: science is all about doubt and ambiguity and the importance of testing it. There are of course exceptions, but the scientific method is all about questioning one's own theories, processes and conclusions. It's also allowed to say that one is wrong, or to say one is right and continue past that or build upon that success to reach other wrong things in search of the right one. By "right" in this instance, I mean "what matches closest to the reality we experience and see."
Where does the evidence lead? Not to any god or gods. The god of the bible has been trivially disproven as has all the others that have some coherent, rational definition.
But please, continue. I apologize for interrupting your equivocating, and I'm interested in what other fallacies you'll trot out.
Thanks to whose money, again? Certainly not their own. You mean their potential enemies? Doesn't that make them kinda less as enemies that you'd want to nuke and more as people you can't stand but can tolerate enough to continue taking their money?
While we're at it, let's also make sure he has to be nice to the defendant, and tell him he's a pretty defendant, and a good defendant. Gimmie a break, it's his job to be a hard-ass.
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
But, I find it odd that you think that being sappy polite is a reasonable alternative to piling 50 years' worth of crimes -- all of which are questionable at best -- just in order to force a defendant to cave under severe emotional distress just so your hard-ass can add another star to his little report card.
If you think you can win on the merits of your case, then tell him to eat a bag of dicks, and have your public defender loaded for bear.
Or how about the prosecutor take the best charge s/he can think of and go into court as a neutral party. A prosecutor doesn't have a dog in this fight; why give them one with the only metric they are measured by is simply the number of convictions they get?
Nobody's saying you can't have your day in court...
Technically, no. Realistically, hell yes. The prosecutors put heavy, heavy pressure on all the defendants to take a deal when they have a weak case. Everyone knows it, including the defendant, who knows his/her only choice is which end of the shit sandwich to eat first.
...and nobody says the prosecutor has to offer you anything but that.
And the only reason they offer it is when they know they're case is weak. Or maybe you can tell me of all the slam-dunk cases against drug kingpins or serial killers prosecutors take and make a lowly plea bargain.
Everyone needs to face the fact that the only reason that plea bargains are offered is to try and deal with the overwhelming amount of cases. Why are there so many cases? Because there are way too many arrests for way to many stupid laws.
Bargaining before the trial is optional -- you have no right to it.
There should be severe limitations to the prosecutors bringing charges -- besides the severely compromised grand jury system -- in the first place.
People have funny ideas about how the justice system works. As if offering someone a bad deal is somehow a crime! Hey, I wanna sell my crappy car for one billion dollars, arrest me! Or you know, just don't buy my car for a billion dollars. That's how bargaining works -- you start high and work your way down. Admittedly, most people start off a less than 10,000% above the actual value, but there's nothing against you or I making ludicrious demands at the bargaining table, so why them?
Equating a car deal with potentially spending your entire fucking life in prison is ridiculous. Maybe in the history of slashdot, this was the worst time to use a car analogy.
You have no right to a plea bargain, but you do have the right to a jury of your peers. If you think 12 other people are going to call bullshit on the prosecution, then rock on with your socks on. But don't bitch that you didn't get a sweet deal from the prosecutor... he doesn't have to offer it.
This isn't bitching about not getting a "sweet deal from the prosecutor."
It's about exposing a broken part of the criminal justice system.
One of the reasons they were more outspoken back then was because there was a draft. When your number might randomly come up, and you might be shipped over to fight that war you disagree with yourself, you are a lot more motivated to protest then when only volunteers are going over.
Well, seems like this could be were you get bombed in your own country.
Best Buy is headquartered in Minnesota, an at-will employment state. They can eliminate anyone at any time for any reason, and don't need a bogus excuse to do so.
They do not need a bogus excuse to do so (as long as it's legal), but there's this little thing called "public relations". This thing is something they cannot afford to piss away and I guarantee you that BB was watching like a hawk what the potential fallout would be when Yahoo pulled this earlier.
It's one thing to tell the public "hey, we're firing all these people just because fuck you, that's why" and "we're sorry to all involved, but we need to cut back on our distance working infrastructure due to fiscal flow calculations."
FYI: "Guilty till proven innocent" is a concept of Criminal Case Law and has no role in Civil Litigation, where you must only show "probable cause". And even then, this is not a Civil Action, this is a wholly private action by a Private Enterprise to terminate your service agrement with them for supposedly braking that service agreement.
In the US, you don't "show probable cause [sic]". In civil court, it's called a 'preponderance of evidence' as opposed to criminal court which then the prosecution has to show 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Also, in the US, a private action is civil court; there is no distinction as you seem to be maintaining. What you might be thinking of is a break in the terms of service under which you say you'll abide by.
Finally, a breach of contract is exactly what a company (or individual) can go to a civil court and sue for, so again, I'm not sure why you're trying to differentiate between the two when there isn't any differentiation.
If I were wrongfully terminated from my contract, I might easily be able to show damages, if I lost out on a down payment for example or if I were hit with an early cancellation fee; no "nerd rage" need apply. Even then, I could theoretically sue Time Warner under a breach if they canceled my service with no prior notification; I don't think I'd win, but only because such stipulations are usually made in the blatantly one-sided nature of the contract before signing up.
My gods, they probably read slashdot. WHICH MEANS...
...we've traced the call... it's coming from inside the house. Now a squad car's coming over there right now, just get out of that house! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!
I believe the OP was referring to standardized tests. If memory serves, when I took the ACT graphing calculators were forbidden since you could easily store all manner of cheat sheets onboard.
If that's the case, it wasn't clear to me. So, yeah, I guess that's reasonable.
My other comment was to bring back use of a slide-rule and all of these particular technological issues regarding cheating all go away.
Oh, I totally agree. I can sort of understand the requirement for having some sort of calculating device that isn't also a smart phone, even though I think that cheaters eventually are going to suffer for the cheating.
I think that slide-rules should be brought back into the high school level. Some can be expensive, but not as much as a graphing calc and it's probably best to learn how to do the math with paper and pencil to really get the deeper understanding rather than "learn how to use the damn calculator first before you try and learn the damn math."
And atheists are different? Big bang was the atheist answer to God for nearly a century. Now it's the expanding vacuum. Those theories don't answer the question of "is there a creator?" any better than a theology.
You're asking the wrong question. The correct question is not "is there a creator?" but, "where does the evidence lead?"
So far, the evidence doesn't lead to a creator (i.e., a god).
I run Tasker on my Android and it's seriously the handiest app I've ever gotten. I have wifi turned off all the time unless I'm within 30 meters of my house, for example, and then it automatically turns on and connects to my home internet (then shutting off the 3G service). When I leave that radius in the morning, like when I go to work, then it reverses itself.
Slashdot Mirror
There could be just one of them and they would still feel that they are a big enough percentage to do that. There's a difference between how they feel and what actual effects that their actions have on scientific progress. My take is that they have little effect on scientific research.
Instead, I'd say that environmentalists and animal rights people have had a more significant effect on research and science than the few creationists and I.D. people.
Scientific progress? In that, you may be correct, but I'm still not certain.
They got their money from the entire world, not just USA. They export to every country. Not just products but raw materials as well.
You take them out you'll have to re-open closed mines, upgrade processing facilities, build new factories, train all your workers. That wont even bring you back to where you were. You'll still be short.
Yes, they get money from the rest of the world, other than the US. I don't have huge confidence in US allies, but I doubt they'll want to continue to trade with China after a bunch of killing and nuking.
I don't have a Lord or Saviour (not yet, at least), so hugging is not in the cards. I'm also not going to spend a lot of time wistfully imagining infinite dimensions. Whatever we may discover in the future will be of great interest to me - whether it agrees with theists or atheists.
My apologies, don't mean to make it personal. I was just using your post for rhetorical effect.
Did TFA or TFS ever mention how the varied Arab cultures were the kings of science for around eight hundred years that (from what I understand) ran concurrently with religion? Library of Alexandria, anyone? Mathematics? Astronomy?
If it wasn't mentioned, then why not? Anyone have a guess?
I sincerely hope that the anti-religious folks keep pushing harder and harder against people that have faith. Eventually, you are going to push people to the point where they start speaking up for themselves.
When 'theist' takes the place currently held by 'atheist' as the least trusted kind of individual on the planet (ranked below that of 'child molester' or 'terrorist'), then I think you will have a point.
Until then, I'm thinking you're trying to say that the minority is walking roughshod over the vast majority, which is faintly ridiculous.
So what? They're not blocking the science. You aren't less rational or scientific in your thinking just because someone out there believes crazy things.
So what?
The fact is that these crazy people are still a big enough percentage of the US population that they feel they can wield their crazy as a club to beat people over the head with oppressive, idiotic legislation.
Hear, hear. The GP seems to be compelled to expend quite a bit of energy trying to prove that in no way can religion ever be anything but bad. Perhaps someday science will lead us to profound answers that point to a true religion. But some will keep kicking and screaming.
The only kicking and screaming that will be done is by theists that refuse to see that no evidence has ever led to their personal god. Hug the Lord Your Savior close to your bosom and pray every minute that you're alive. Nobody cares.
It's because OP's own paradigm is threatened by information and a perspective which puts his own at risk of being wrong. And he doesn't have the strength of self and capability to admit doubt and ambiguity, and allow such a threat to his personal fundamentalist philosophy of atheism to exist without rebuttal.
You display an amusing lack of understanding of science as both a body of knowledge and as a process. Hint: science is all about doubt and ambiguity and the importance of testing it. There are of course exceptions, but the scientific method is all about questioning one's own theories, processes and conclusions. It's also allowed to say that one is wrong, or to say one is right and continue past that or build upon that success to reach other wrong things in search of the right one. By "right" in this instance, I mean "what matches closest to the reality we experience and see."
Where does the evidence lead? Not to any god or gods. The god of the bible has been trivially disproven as has all the others that have some coherent, rational definition.
But please, continue. I apologize for interrupting your equivocating, and I'm interested in what other fallacies you'll trot out.
Thanks to whose money, again? Certainly not their own. You mean their potential enemies? Doesn't that make them kinda less as enemies that you'd want to nuke and more as people you can't stand but can tolerate enough to continue taking their money?
While we're at it, let's also make sure he has to be nice to the defendant, and tell him he's a pretty defendant, and a good defendant. Gimmie a break, it's his job to be a hard-ass.
Fallacy of the excluded middle.
But, I find it odd that you think that being sappy polite is a reasonable alternative to piling 50 years' worth of crimes -- all of which are questionable at best -- just in order to force a defendant to cave under severe emotional distress just so your hard-ass can add another star to his little report card.
If you think you can win on the merits of your case, then tell him to eat a bag of dicks, and have your public defender loaded for bear.
Or how about the prosecutor take the best charge s/he can think of and go into court as a neutral party. A prosecutor doesn't have a dog in this fight; why give them one with the only metric they are measured by is simply the number of convictions they get?
Nobody's saying you can't have your day in court...
Technically, no. Realistically, hell yes. The prosecutors put heavy, heavy pressure on all the defendants to take a deal when they have a weak case. Everyone knows it, including the defendant, who knows his/her only choice is which end of the shit sandwich to eat first.
And the only reason they offer it is when they know they're case is weak. Or maybe you can tell me of all the slam-dunk cases against drug kingpins or serial killers prosecutors take and make a lowly plea bargain.
Everyone needs to face the fact that the only reason that plea bargains are offered is to try and deal with the overwhelming amount of cases. Why are there so many cases? Because there are way too many arrests for way to many stupid laws.
Bargaining before the trial is optional -- you have no right to it.
There should be severe limitations to the prosecutors bringing charges -- besides the severely compromised grand jury system -- in the first place.
People have funny ideas about how the justice system works. As if offering someone a bad deal is somehow a crime! Hey, I wanna sell my crappy car for one billion dollars, arrest me! Or you know, just don't buy my car for a billion dollars. That's how bargaining works -- you start high and work your way down. Admittedly, most people start off a less than 10,000% above the actual value, but there's nothing against you or I making ludicrious demands at the bargaining table, so why them?
Equating a car deal with potentially spending your entire fucking life in prison is ridiculous. Maybe in the history of slashdot, this was the worst time to use a car analogy.
You have no right to a plea bargain, but you do have the right to a jury of your peers. If you think 12 other people are going to call bullshit on the prosecution, then rock on with your socks on. But don't bitch that you didn't get a sweet deal from the prosecutor... he doesn't have to offer it.
This isn't bitching about not getting a "sweet deal from the prosecutor."
It's about exposing a broken part of the criminal justice system.
One of the reasons they were more outspoken back then was because there was a draft. When your number might randomly come up, and you might be shipped over to fight that war you disagree with yourself, you are a lot more motivated to protest then when only volunteers are going over.
Well, seems like this could be were you get bombed in your own country.
Wonder if that's clear to people yet.
Best Buy is headquartered in Minnesota, an at-will employment state. They can eliminate anyone at any time for any reason, and don't need a bogus excuse to do so.
They do not need a bogus excuse to do so (as long as it's legal), but there's this little thing called "public relations". This thing is something they cannot afford to piss away and I guarantee you that BB was watching like a hawk what the potential fallout would be when Yahoo pulled this earlier.
It's one thing to tell the public "hey, we're firing all these people just because fuck you, that's why" and "we're sorry to all involved, but we need to cut back on our distance working infrastructure due to fiscal flow calculations."
Blaming the John makes sense: Without demand, the rest of the supply chain dries up.
Dry supply chain? Maybe the invisible hand needs to use a little more lubricant.
You never tickle a dragon's tail.
You forgot to close your [inscrutable] tag.
FYI: "Guilty till proven innocent" is a concept of Criminal Case Law and has no role in Civil Litigation, where you must only show "probable cause". And even then, this is not a Civil Action, this is a wholly private action by a Private Enterprise to terminate your service agrement with them for supposedly braking that service agreement.
In the US, you don't "show probable cause [sic]". In civil court, it's called a 'preponderance of evidence' as opposed to criminal court which then the prosecution has to show 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'
Also, in the US, a private action is civil court; there is no distinction as you seem to be maintaining. What you might be thinking of is a break in the terms of service under which you say you'll abide by.
Finally, a breach of contract is exactly what a company (or individual) can go to a civil court and sue for, so again, I'm not sure why you're trying to differentiate between the two when there isn't any differentiation.
If I were wrongfully terminated from my contract, I might easily be able to show damages, if I lost out on a down payment for example or if I were hit with an early cancellation fee; no "nerd rage" need apply. Even then, I could theoretically sue Time Warner under a breach if they canceled my service with no prior notification; I don't think I'd win, but only because such stipulations are usually made in the blatantly one-sided nature of the contract before signing up.
My gods, they probably read slashdot. WHICH MEANS...
...we've traced the call... it's coming from inside the house. Now a squad car's coming over there right now, just get out of that house! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!
I believe the OP was referring to standardized tests. If memory serves, when I took the ACT graphing calculators were forbidden since you could easily store all manner of cheat sheets onboard.
If that's the case, it wasn't clear to me. So, yeah, I guess that's reasonable.
My other comment was to bring back use of a slide-rule and all of these particular technological issues regarding cheating all go away.
Oh, I totally agree. I can sort of understand the requirement for having some sort of calculating device that isn't also a smart phone, even though I think that cheaters eventually are going to suffer for the cheating.
I think that slide-rules should be brought back into the high school level. Some can be expensive, but not as much as a graphing calc and it's probably best to learn how to do the math with paper and pencil to really get the deeper understanding rather than "learn how to use the damn calculator first before you try and learn the damn math."
Graphing calculators are typically banned anyway.
What evidence do you have for this statement?
The most you'll be taking a test with is a TI-30.
I guess my daughter's math classes (AP math and AP statistics) are outliers then. They're all required to use a TI-84/85.
Sometimes justice is expensive; and sometimes it makes mistakes - but if you can get a definitive answer from a reliable, available test; do it.
Once you can find a test that produces a definitive answer, then great! But a DNA test isn't it.
Might want to check your sarcasm detector there, buddy
I got mine from SarcasiScan and it works 100% guaranteed! And now, with less cancer than the leading brands of sarcasm detectors!
And atheists are different? Big bang was the atheist answer to God for nearly a century. Now it's the expanding vacuum. Those theories don't answer the question of "is there a creator?" any better than a theology.
You're asking the wrong question. The correct question is not "is there a creator?" but, "where does the evidence lead?"
So far, the evidence doesn't lead to a creator (i.e., a god).
I run Tasker on my Android and it's seriously the handiest app I've ever gotten. I have wifi turned off all the time unless I'm within 30 meters of my house, for example, and then it automatically turns on and connects to my home internet (then shutting off the 3G service). When I leave that radius in the morning, like when I go to work, then it reverses itself.
That's quite possible considering the temperatures the xbox can get up to.
Yup, that's an Xbox burger, but if you're in the mood for a true flame-broiled burger, you're eatin' at Dell's!
Just don't make the pod bay doors voice-activated.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.