Almost. A Creationist would say that and then scoff at the unliklihood of having something useful. And given that statement, they'd be right.
The critical difference is that the only 'random' electronics that ever got recombined actually managed to do something useful already. Maybe not operate a VCR, but _something_. All the evolved boards that did nothing but release magic smoke got dumped on the scrap heap.
If you so called liberals were really liberal then you would favor the civil liberties of the majority not the minority
That leads to what is called "The Tyranny of the Majority". If you can get 51% of the population to agree to reduce the other 49% to abject slavery, then by your logic, that's a-OK.
The Legislative and Executive branches are there to represent the will of the majority. The Judicial branch in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, is there to make sure that no matter how many people want something, they cannot have it if it violates any of a few fundamental principles. Freedom of speech is one. Separation of church and state is another, which these religiously-grounded stickers violate.
The government of the US is based on majority rule with protection of rights even for the minority. It's kind of a sad state of affairs when those not interested in a theocracy actually constitute a minority, but that does not give Christians any special power to put their delusions into public schools.
The disbelief of an all powerful being requires as much faith as the belief in one
Says who? You? Why? More specifically, why can merely mundane beings (like unicorns, leprechauns, ghosts, Loch Ness monsters, souls, angels, demons, fire-breathing dragons, etc, etc, etc) be dismissed in the standard fashion with Occam's Razor and that pesky 'lack of evidence' thing, but disbelief in an all-powerful being requires active proof of nonexistence?
Given that A) the only way to prove that something _doesn't_ exist is to find a contradiction in its definition and B) you religious types take such joy in defining your deities with so many nonsensical terms that they defy any sort of logical analysis, it sounds to me like you're trying to change the rules of the deductive process just to allow your favorite fantasy through.
Arguably evolution is even _better_ supported than gravity/general relativity.
After all, we know the mechanisms underlying evolution and while it's not exactly a deterministic process, we can still make reasonably accurate predictions. Whereas the best we can do for gravity is a idealized 2-body mathematical approximation. We still don't really know for sure why two masses fall towards each other.
Ok, there is a world of difference between mathematical axioms and any religion.
The axioms are accepted as true, not because they can't be tested, but because they can't be proven. Testing them is easy! Let's see, there's the identity axiom; namely that for any value of x, x = x. It's worked for every value ever tested, and while it cannot be rigorously proven, the evidence for it is astoundingly convincing.
Then there's axioms of self-awareness. We assume that, barring identifiable exceptions like hallucinations or mental illness, our mental perceptions more or less correspond to physical reality. We assume it because without it, every single piece of knowledge, no matter how insignificant or apparently true, becomes suspect and useless.
Or maybe legal assumptions. We assume that killing and stealing are bad and ought tno be punished, not because there's a proof for it, but for pragmatic reasons. Lots of history (real world case studies) have shown that the net benefit to a large group of people is higher with such restrictions than without.
Now, let's compare that to distinct religious assumptions, i.e., ones that cannot logically be derived from one another. God exists. God created the universe. God loves everyone. God wants you to worship him. God wants you to not work on weekends. If you obey all his rules, God rewards you, otherwise, he tortures you forever. God has always existed, God will always exist. God wrote the bible. God hates unbelievers. God cares who you have sex with. God doesn't like pictures. God has a plan. God gave us free will. And on, and on, and on. Half of them are contradictory, all are untestable.
I'm an atheist, but if you could please convey this line of reasoning to anyone who has ever used the phrase "God needs" in a sentence, it would be greatly appreciated. "God wants you to" has been used as justification for some of the most heinous acts ever committed.
But as for me, even if I believed in god, I wouldn't waste a moment of my life trying to second-guess him, so I'd end of living exactly the same way I do now.
Oh, and the problem with the 'lesser of two evils' earthquake hypothesis is that there's no reason why the tectonic stress couldn't also have been let out through hundreds of itty-bitty tremors over a period of years. That it was instead 'saved up' for centuries and released via one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history suggests either apathy, malevolence, or nonexistence.
So, they make up an entity and then spend centuries trying to figure out why it never ever makes any sense when applied to the real world? Gee, that's productive.
One of ID's other tenets is that speciation and significant morphological changes by evolution alone is impossible, and that instead magic underpants gnomes have been running around making modifications to the DNA of millions of species for 3 or 4 billion years.
Gee, I don't see any problems with that idea at all!
That bit of the article is completely wrong. H2 has a gravimetric energy density 3 times that of gasoline. The problem is that even in liquid form, it's still only 1/10th as dense (mass/volume) as gasoline, so it has a net volumetric energy density of about a third of gasoline. Source: http://xtronics.com/reference/energy_density.htm
The twin technological Holy Grails of H2 energy economy: H2 storage density on par with gasoline and high-efficiency production from water. And for people to stop thinking "Hindenberg!" anytime someone mentions H2.
You seem like someone who understands the subtle motivations of governments waging unwinnable wars. So it's kind of surprising to hear Reefer Madness propganda from the same source.
I mean, do you have any idea how many cultures historically not only survived in spite of drug use but actually made it into a central theme? LSD would probably have been a big hit amongst many pre-Judeo-Christian tribes and civilizations. They were all about the externally induced visions, whether from pharmacopia or physical stress.
When some actually manages to say "Atheism is a religion", I can pretty safely ignore anything else they have to offer, since it's likely to be incomprehensible nonsense. (Reads the rest of your post) Yup.
The courts are quite atheistic, true. They are _supposed_ to be that way. They are not supposed to consider matters of religion. They are not supposed to care if you are christian, muslim, pagan, whatever. They are _supposed_ to be based on facts and evidence, not faith or belief; i.e., atheist. Theoretically, as far as the US government is concerned, religious beliefs do not matter one whit.
Of course, it doesn't always work out. Churches demand and get tax-free status for billions of dollars of income and property. Religious groups railroad through legislation legitimizing their fantasies (e.g., creationism, the pledge and motto). Bush Sr. said that he thought atheists ought to be stripped of their citizenship. Did you know that there are 7 states in the union whose constitutions explicitly forbid atheists from holding public office?
So go on, tell me about how you poor, poor christians are being oppressed. Tell me about how you'd be totally understanding and not worried at all if a judge had "Allahu Ackbar" embroidered on his robes and declared that he would dispense Sharia law.
That's because the universe needs balance. We have a 5-book Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, clearly we need some 2-movie trilogies like The Godfather to even it out. How many years was Star Wars a 3-movie sextilogy (yeesh, that sounds like a porno), and how many fans think it was better that way?
I stand corrected. Point is, trying to make it illegal is stupid beyond compare. If a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody around, who do we arrest?
Crack, heroin, gambling, the big three right now--they all have the very real potential to take every dime a person owns without ever looking back, and for this reason they are legislated against.
Lemme see here. Someone doesn't like XYZ, so we'll make it illegal, thus driving it onto the black market, where the cost will rise by a factor of 100 and quality control will drop to null, and trade in the product will fall entirely into the domain of criminals. And when all that's done, and we're arresting 800,000 people a year for being caught holding a plant, then we'll pat ourselves on the back on what a kindly service we're doing making these expensive, dangerous, criminal drugs illegal. Do you really think heroin is illegal because it's expensive, or is it perhaps the other way around? May I remind you that hemp and marijuana at one time could be found growing in road-side ditches along half of all US roads? it's not called 'weed' for nothing.
Have you ever read some of the claims early proponents of prohibition made about drugs? They are farcical beyond the limits of credulity. The sort of things that only someone who was out to ban a product no matter what the reality would say. In fact, it sounds a lot like the outrageous claims the Kansas senator is spouting. How wonderful, Ashcroft kicks off the War on Copying, followed closely by the War on Porn. Give these guys a few more years, I'm sure they'll work their way through the entire dictionary of things to declare war on.
Why is it that 'millions', 'thousands', 'hundreds', and 'dozens' sound correct, but 'tens' and whatever we might use to describe a single-digit number sound stupid?
After voting at your electronic ballot, you are prompted for a password. This password is hashed along with a voter registration ID number, or your name, or some such. Your vote is stored and can be retrieved with this hash. Afterwards, the votes and the hash are made publicly accessible. Anyone can count up the total votes, but only someone with both the public ID and private password can find the votes stored for them. If you are worried about intimidation, don't enter in a password, the system will use random gibberish instead. You will be unable to verify your votes, but they can still be verified in the total. Given the weaknesses of hashing algorithms, there will need to be good randomnness requirements for the password.
This does not solve the vote-buying dillemma, but honestly, I don't think it's that much of a problem. Most people wouldn't sell theirs for a measly $5, and for a price much above that it becomes cost-prohibitive to make large-scale bribes.
Nor does this solve the 'voting the cemetary' problem of generating fake ballots. But it's a start.
Uhh, sex outside of marriage was a felony in half a dozen states until last year, when the SCOTUS ruled that states couldn't regulate the sex lives of consenting adults.
But you're missing the point of sweeping, all-inclusive laws that make criminals out of the entire population. They don't do it so that the cops can arrest _everyone_, they do it so they can arrest _anyone_. It's so very handy for a police state to know that you can randomly pick out anyone on the street, spend 5 minutes researching their lives, and "find something in it to hang him with", as Cardinal Richelieu put it.
To 'incite action' would require that the cops actually start enforcing every law on the books to the best of their ability. But they won't do that, because it would put 90% of the population in prison and nobody currently in power is that stupid. They're perfectly happy, evidently, with 1%, since that's where we sit now.
That's the worst thing about politicians. They write laws that a 4-year-old could tell you will be ignored and unenforcable, and then act shocked, _shocked_ when they turn end up being ignored and unenforcable and create massive injustices when they are used.
3 years in prison for a video camera? The woman who burned my house and everything in it to the ground 7 years ago got 3 years and 3 months. I find it absolutely vulgar that anyone is willing to meet out similar punishments for the two.
When it comes to voice votes, I'm given to understand that any representative or senator may request that a recorded vote be used instead. So when they do a voice vote, especially on one they wouldn't want on their records, it's because the vote is more or less unanimous.
Pride goeth before a fall, it was running for a lot more than 3648 hours. More like 10224. So 2e-4 m/s^2, which I believe is the result someone else posted.
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Almost. A Creationist would say that and then scoff at the unliklihood of having something useful. And given that statement, they'd be right. The critical difference is that the only 'random' electronics that ever got recombined actually managed to do something useful already. Maybe not operate a VCR, but _something_. All the evolved boards that did nothing but release magic smoke got dumped on the scrap heap.
If you so called liberals were really liberal then you would favor the civil liberties of the majority not the minority
That leads to what is called "The Tyranny of the Majority". If you can get 51% of the population to agree to reduce the other 49% to abject slavery, then by your logic, that's a-OK.
The Legislative and Executive branches are there to represent the will of the majority. The Judicial branch in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, is there to make sure that no matter how many people want something, they cannot have it if it violates any of a few fundamental principles. Freedom of speech is one. Separation of church and state is another, which these religiously-grounded stickers violate.
The government of the US is based on majority rule with protection of rights even for the minority. It's kind of a sad state of affairs when those not interested in a theocracy actually constitute a minority, but that does not give Christians any special power to put their delusions into public schools.
The disbelief of an all powerful being requires as much faith as the belief in one
Says who? You? Why? More specifically, why can merely mundane beings (like unicorns, leprechauns, ghosts, Loch Ness monsters, souls, angels, demons, fire-breathing dragons, etc, etc, etc) be dismissed in the standard fashion with Occam's Razor and that pesky 'lack of evidence' thing, but disbelief in an all-powerful being requires active proof of nonexistence?
Given that A) the only way to prove that something _doesn't_ exist is to find a contradiction in its definition and B) you religious types take such joy in defining your deities with so many nonsensical terms that they defy any sort of logical analysis, it sounds to me like you're trying to change the rules of the deductive process just to allow your favorite fantasy through.
Spoken like someone who studied evolution at Bible school.
Arguably evolution is even _better_ supported than gravity/general relativity. After all, we know the mechanisms underlying evolution and while it's not exactly a deterministic process, we can still make reasonably accurate predictions. Whereas the best we can do for gravity is a idealized 2-body mathematical approximation. We still don't really know for sure why two masses fall towards each other.
Ok, there is a world of difference between mathematical axioms and any religion.
The axioms are accepted as true, not because they can't be tested, but because they can't be proven. Testing them is easy! Let's see, there's the identity axiom; namely that for any value of x, x = x. It's worked for every value ever tested, and while it cannot be rigorously proven, the evidence for it is astoundingly convincing.
Then there's axioms of self-awareness. We assume that, barring identifiable exceptions like hallucinations or mental illness, our mental perceptions more or less correspond to physical reality. We assume it because without it, every single piece of knowledge, no matter how insignificant or apparently true, becomes suspect and useless.
Or maybe legal assumptions. We assume that killing and stealing are bad and ought tno be punished, not because there's a proof for it, but for pragmatic reasons. Lots of history (real world case studies) have shown that the net benefit to a large group of people is higher with such restrictions than without.
Now, let's compare that to distinct religious assumptions, i.e., ones that cannot logically be derived from one another. God exists. God created the universe. God loves everyone. God wants you to worship him. God wants you to not work on weekends. If you obey all his rules, God rewards you, otherwise, he tortures you forever. God has always existed, God will always exist. God wrote the bible. God hates unbelievers. God cares who you have sex with. God doesn't like pictures. God has a plan. God gave us free will. And on, and on, and on. Half of them are contradictory, all are untestable.
I'm an atheist, but if you could please convey this line of reasoning to anyone who has ever used the phrase "God needs" in a sentence, it would be greatly appreciated. "God wants you to" has been used as justification for some of the most heinous acts ever committed. But as for me, even if I believed in god, I wouldn't waste a moment of my life trying to second-guess him, so I'd end of living exactly the same way I do now. Oh, and the problem with the 'lesser of two evils' earthquake hypothesis is that there's no reason why the tectonic stress couldn't also have been let out through hundreds of itty-bitty tremors over a period of years. That it was instead 'saved up' for centuries and released via one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history suggests either apathy, malevolence, or nonexistence.
All hail Cthulhu, High Priest of R'lyeh, bringer of destruction and doom!
It's said that the easiest way to make an atheist is just to have a christian actually _read_ the bible, cover to cover.
So, they make up an entity and then spend centuries trying to figure out why it never ever makes any sense when applied to the real world? Gee, that's productive.
One of ID's other tenets is that speciation and significant morphological changes by evolution alone is impossible, and that instead magic underpants gnomes have been running around making modifications to the DNA of millions of species for 3 or 4 billion years.
Gee, I don't see any problems with that idea at all!
That bit of the article is completely wrong. H2 has a gravimetric energy density 3 times that of gasoline. The problem is that even in liquid form, it's still only 1/10th as dense (mass/volume) as gasoline, so it has a net volumetric energy density of about a third of gasoline. Source: http://xtronics.com/reference/energy_density.htm
The twin technological Holy Grails of H2 energy economy: H2 storage density on par with gasoline and high-efficiency production from water. And for people to stop thinking "Hindenberg!" anytime someone mentions H2.
drugs destroy entire cultures
They do? Really? Name one.
You seem like someone who understands the subtle motivations of governments waging unwinnable wars. So it's kind of surprising to hear Reefer Madness propganda from the same source.
I mean, do you have any idea how many cultures historically not only survived in spite of drug use but actually made it into a central theme? LSD would probably have been a big hit amongst many pre-Judeo-Christian tribes and civilizations. They were all about the externally induced visions, whether from pharmacopia or physical stress.
Guns, shmuns. Do you know how many species we wiped out with nothing more complicated than a spear?
When some actually manages to say "Atheism is a religion", I can pretty safely ignore anything else they have to offer, since it's likely to be incomprehensible nonsense. (Reads the rest of your post) Yup.
The courts are quite atheistic, true. They are _supposed_ to be that way. They are not supposed to consider matters of religion. They are not supposed to care if you are christian, muslim, pagan, whatever. They are _supposed_ to be based on facts and evidence, not faith or belief; i.e., atheist. Theoretically, as far as the US government is concerned, religious beliefs do not matter one whit.
Of course, it doesn't always work out. Churches demand and get tax-free status for billions of dollars of income and property. Religious groups railroad through legislation legitimizing their fantasies (e.g., creationism, the pledge and motto). Bush Sr. said that he thought atheists ought to be stripped of their citizenship. Did you know that there are 7 states in the union whose constitutions explicitly forbid atheists from holding public office?
So go on, tell me about how you poor, poor christians are being oppressed. Tell me about how you'd be totally understanding and not worried at all if a judge had "Allahu Ackbar" embroidered on his robes and declared that he would dispense Sharia law.
if the courts were asked fFor their stance on pedantry like the parking meter example, they would surely come out on the side of reason
You must be new here.
That's because the universe needs balance. We have a 5-book Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy, clearly we need some 2-movie trilogies like The Godfather to even it out. How many years was Star Wars a 3-movie sextilogy (yeesh, that sounds like a porno), and how many fans think it was better that way?
I stand corrected. Point is, trying to make it illegal is stupid beyond compare. If a tree falls in a forest and there's nobody around, who do we arrest?
Crack, heroin, gambling, the big three right now--they all have the very real potential to take every dime a person owns without ever looking back, and for this reason they are legislated against.
Lemme see here. Someone doesn't like XYZ, so we'll make it illegal, thus driving it onto the black market, where the cost will rise by a factor of 100 and quality control will drop to null, and trade in the product will fall entirely into the domain of criminals. And when all that's done, and we're arresting 800,000 people a year for being caught holding a plant, then we'll pat ourselves on the back on what a kindly service we're doing making these expensive, dangerous, criminal drugs illegal. Do you really think heroin is illegal because it's expensive, or is it perhaps the other way around? May I remind you that hemp and marijuana at one time could be found growing in road-side ditches along half of all US roads? it's not called 'weed' for nothing.
Have you ever read some of the claims early proponents of prohibition made about drugs? They are farcical beyond the limits of credulity. The sort of things that only someone who was out to ban a product no matter what the reality would say. In fact, it sounds a lot like the outrageous claims the Kansas senator is spouting. How wonderful, Ashcroft kicks off the War on Copying, followed closely by the War on Porn. Give these guys a few more years, I'm sure they'll work their way through the entire dictionary of things to declare war on.
Why is it that 'millions', 'thousands', 'hundreds', and 'dozens' sound correct, but 'tens' and whatever we might use to describe a single-digit number sound stupid?
After voting at your electronic ballot, you are prompted for a password. This password is hashed along with a voter registration ID number, or your name, or some such. Your vote is stored and can be retrieved with this hash. Afterwards, the votes and the hash are made publicly accessible. Anyone can count up the total votes, but only someone with both the public ID and private password can find the votes stored for them. If you are worried about intimidation, don't enter in a password, the system will use random gibberish instead. You will be unable to verify your votes, but they can still be verified in the total. Given the weaknesses of hashing algorithms, there will need to be good randomnness requirements for the password.
This does not solve the vote-buying dillemma, but honestly, I don't think it's that much of a problem. Most people wouldn't sell theirs for a measly $5, and for a price much above that it becomes cost-prohibitive to make large-scale bribes.
Nor does this solve the 'voting the cemetary' problem of generating fake ballots. But it's a start.
Uhh, sex outside of marriage was a felony in half a dozen states until last year, when the SCOTUS ruled that states couldn't regulate the sex lives of consenting adults.
But you're missing the point of sweeping, all-inclusive laws that make criminals out of the entire population. They don't do it so that the cops can arrest _everyone_, they do it so they can arrest _anyone_. It's so very handy for a police state to know that you can randomly pick out anyone on the street, spend 5 minutes researching their lives, and "find something in it to hang him with", as Cardinal Richelieu put it.
To 'incite action' would require that the cops actually start enforcing every law on the books to the best of their ability. But they won't do that, because it would put 90% of the population in prison and nobody currently in power is that stupid. They're perfectly happy, evidently, with 1%, since that's where we sit now.
That's the worst thing about politicians. They write laws that a 4-year-old could tell you will be ignored and unenforcable, and then act shocked, _shocked_ when they turn end up being ignored and unenforcable and create massive injustices when they are used. 3 years in prison for a video camera? The woman who burned my house and everything in it to the ground 7 years ago got 3 years and 3 months. I find it absolutely vulgar that anyone is willing to meet out similar punishments for the two.
When it comes to voice votes, I'm given to understand that any representative or senator may request that a recorded vote be used instead. So when they do a voice vote, especially on one they wouldn't want on their records, it's because the vote is more or less unanimous.
Pride goeth before a fall, it was running for a lot more than 3648 hours. More like 10224. So 2e-4 m/s^2, which I believe is the result someone else posted.