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User: Theswager

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Comments · 12

  1. Re:Gotta love... on Extremists Warn South Park Creators Over Muhammad In a Bear Suit · · Score: 1

    Tim McVeigh was heavily involved in many extreme right wing Christian enclaves in the central united states. What he did was not 'in the name of Christianity' so to speak, but the political ideology to which he ascribed was heavily motivated by Christian religious views. Some of the militia-type enclaves with which he associated were led by Christian pastors and they encouraged his violent political views explicitly.

  2. Re:I knew it on James Lovelock Suggests Suspending Democracy To Save the World · · Score: 1

    the trick is to be one of those politicians or scientists

  3. Re:Good News! on Details Emerge On Futurama's "Rebirth" (and Return) · · Score: -1, Troll

    he says everybody not everyone.

  4. Re:Patience! on SETI Is 50 Years Old; No Sign of ET · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Language allows humans to communicate effectively, the Neanderthals had larger brains and more advanced tools than the Homo Sapiens at the time, but the Homo Sapiens had a more advanced ability to vocalize made possible by a more complex Larynx. Humans out-competed these smarter hominid species in no small part due to communication, so I do accept your premise that intelligence is more than technology. Intelligence is a purely human concept, because of this the human notion of intelligence ought to be what humans value (ya know, because where all human and such). Just having a large capacity for cognitive processing is not enough to constitute the intelligence that humans value. Our intelligence is all about intellectual evolution made possible by infrastructure. Writing allows people to solidify their ideas for the next generation so that knowledge is not lost when the brain dies. Farming allows for humans to have a small minority provide food for an entire society to survive and have surplus, thus allowing other members of society to focus on improving other parts of society for themselves and the next generation. You can sit in the comfort of your home with plentiful food and a controlled temperature at your computer tying out asinine comments on the good ol' global communications network because of the infrastructure of knowledge and technology built by countless human lives before you. All while the dolphins that people are so irrationally fond for (don't get me wrong dolphins are cute and there is no reason that we need to be killing them) spend every day of their lives searching for their next meal in a harsh environment . Do you think that dolphins ponder their existence? Or even have cognitive processes which extend beyond survival and mating? They don't have time to because they need to search for their next meal or die. This is because no matter how intelligent dolphins get their body lacks the ability to build anything significant. Even if Dolphins had more advanced brains than we do (which they do not) it would not matter because humans can write and build. In the realm of humans biological evolution is irrelevant because our intellectual evolution moves at a much quicker pace and has enabled fantastic progress in a short time life expectancy has more than tripled from 20 in the Neolithic to about 67 today. Dolphins on the other hand have been doing pretty much the same things for a very long time and they will most likely keep doing that for a while.

  5. Re:"I reject notion of separation of church and st on Texas Approves Conservative Curriculum · · Score: 2, Informative

    if you read the first amendment in a historical vacuum then yes is forbids an establishment and does not explicitly speak about 'separation'. However if you read what almost all of the major 'founding father' figures were writing at the time, and what they said about it afterwards it is obvious that they intended to separate church and state affairs. Of the major 'founding fathers' that everyone hears about (Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Madison, Adams, etc.) they were all secularists at the very least but many of them were outspoken Deists who were nothing if not hateful of organized religion both philosophically and as it relates to governance. Furthermore 'separation' is an arbitrary distinction from a lack of establishment, both of those words have different meanings depending on who is arguing at a given moment and those meanings always meld to fit whatever agenda they are pushing.

  6. Re:No you're a dick on Ubisoft's New DRM Cracked In One Day · · Score: 1

    trillions?

  7. Re:EP 3 W00T W00T! on Portal Update Hints At New Game · · Score: 1

    quite funny, I laughed out loud irl

  8. Thorium on US To Build Nuclear Power Plants · · Score: 1
  9. Re:Wonder if "MiFi" would be cheaper tho? on Apple's "iPad" Out In the Open · · Score: 1

    Who is going to have 2 or 3 iPads? I family might have multiple ones but they would either be at home where they could use regular WiFi, or separated during the day where MiFi would be useless for all of them. Now that would make sense for someone who had an iPod Touch and a Laptop that they wanted to use when they were out of the house rather than buy an iPhone+Data-plan and Laptop+3G adapter.

  10. Re:Have any of you ever seen the SAS Language and on SAS Named Best Company To Work For In 2010 · · Score: 1

    Their JMP Statistical software is nice despite the the annoying scripting syntax. For a piece of software which is so full of features it is very lightweight and bug free. great for analyzing large amounts of data.

  11. Culture of SAS on SAS Named Best Company To Work For In 2010 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As someone who lives about 1 mile away from SAS, knows lots of people who work there, and has talked to a lot of local business owners about SAS, and has eaten in their 'cafeteria'(gourmet restaurant for employees). SAS is an amazing place to work. At the same time many of the people who work there are not motivated like people in places like Google or other silicon valley type companies. SAS has a few cash cow products that they maintain and beyond that there is not much innovation. Jim Goodnight is a control freak about what the company does and is surrounded by 'yes men' executives. Many people who start to work there never leave and it functions as a self sustaining source of money with low work hours for all involved. That being said I do like the statistics software from them that I have used(JMP)

  12. Re:PFref on GIMP Dropped From Ubuntu 10.04 · · Score: 1

    I always think about that movie when talking/hearing/reading about the GIMP and the last line...lol