Actually, the politicos in Washington DO care what folks overseas think, because they don't want to hurt American interests abroad.
I wouldn't be surprised if your voice was actually heard more than my own, because of that very issue. My suggestion if you really want to have some impact is to put some thought into how passage of this law would damage the US abroad, especially if you can link it to a corporate interest. Then communicate your conclusions to as many people/organiztions in the EU as possible so that the 535 reps and the U.S.President all know that alot of voices in Europe are against parts of the law being proposed.
Also (and this is more targeted at folks in the US): remember, it has to pass two legislative bodies and get signed to become law, and there's alot of ways to kill or improve a bad piece of legislation before it even reaches the voting stages in the Senate or House of Representatives, let alone before it reaches the president's desk. And if all else fails and significant enough constitutional issues can be raised, the US Supreme court is a last-resort opportunity to get rid of bad legislation if all else fails.
The important thing is to remember that apathy never changes the world in a positive direction.
To quote you: "This isn't a Windows problem directly, it's an admin problem". 'Xcuse me, but that's utter bulls---. As other posters have noted, M$ install programs are notorious for mucking up previously stable machines in areas that may or may not have anything to do with the install because their cross-application quality control and error testing is absolute crap.
Service packs can be even worse -- by the time the OS is re-stabilized, the service packs are usually hopelessly out of date, the documentation for them fluctuates almost daily, and very few of their support sites or personnel seem to accept the idea that honesty is the best policy, instead relying on corporate supplied FUD and arrogance about market share to tell the unfortunate user(s) that "it must be their machine, because we don't see that kind of problem here in Redmond..." [insert obligatory ostrich photo here.
Gartner's point isn't that the WinXX OS's can't be kept stable, it is that the TCO (total cost of ownership) for the software and endless admin chores do not compare favorably with other choices any more.
I agree: my life is about ten times simpler since I dumped M$ products for everything except a few non-essential word processing, spreadsheet, and imaging apps on one M$ workstation so that I can exchange files with clients when they need M$ based softcopies of project data, etc.
...doesn't prove anything about "Christians" at all, because all -- or probably even most--Christians do not believe that the Crusades were a "moral" undertaking.
Just like the fact that one leader (Osama bin Lauden)'s distortions of the Muslim faith (wrapping of terrorism into jihad) do not mean that the teachings of Islam are morally bankrupt.
If anything, the Crusades, etc. more accurately reflect that unfortunately, a large majority of people (Christians included) are more easily influenced by the morals and choices of their leaders when the actions/teachings of that leader are cloaked in the disquise of religious piety.
On the contrary, there are good people in the world, AND evil people in the world, unless your definition requires a "good" person to be absolutely flawless, and an "evil" person to be absolute in their immoral choices.
I'm not a Bible thumper by anyone's account -- (I'm more closely a follower of Zen BTW)-- but isn't there some verse or quote that says something like "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"?
So perhaps a more useful definition would be that those who we would probably agree as being "good" consistently make a high percentage of their choices in accordance with moral principles, while those whom we would define as "evil" or "bad" consisently make the opposite choices a high percentage of the time.
Kinda like a spiritual baseball game -- the good teams and players make good choices for succeeding within the rules of the game (thus getting more hits, playing better defense, getting better pitching, suffering lower injuries,etc.) while lousy teams and players fail to succeed because they do not make the right choices (swinging at bad pitches, making errant throws, getting stupid injuries, etc.) and are thereby considered "bad".
While your reply has some valid points, in my opinion, attempting to link "absolutism" so closely with "religion" is a prejudice-based, logically weak argument for "moral relativism".
For example, "agents of Satan" is a context that you introduced, not the original poster-- with Satan being a personage associated with only a limited number of religions-- presumably the ones you wish to attack.
Similarly, the statement that "relativism is the only obvious truth simply because there is a range of ideas" is not only incorrect (some ideas have been proven to be correct, others false), it doesn't logically prove that "Absolute morality is a farce". Substitute the words "ideas about morals" and your argument might be closer, but nothing precludes a particular subset of "moral ideas" from being absolutely correct, with the remainder being less so or totally incorrect.
The point about "those who did this" (presumably the WTC terrorists) feeling "righteous" adds your connection -a feeling- to morality. Perhaps I am wrong in this but most people I know would argue that "feelings" are the reason that people do not act in a more moral manner. So again, religions is not the issue here.
You say that "maybe we're all these people- after all, we've all done something immoral weakens your position even more, because for all people to be considered immoral, there has to be an absolute standard against which they are judged.
Now then, I readily agree that most religious groups tend to claim that their own interpretation of this "absolute set" is the only correct interpretation. I also agree that some but not all of the loudest proponents of their own rightness are Christian sects.
However -- and with my I acknowledge that I'm not wording this as well as I would like to -- but the core Christian teachings of the New Testament do not claim that "all morals are absolute", because that was the position held by the Sanhedrin -- the very men who put Christ to death because he opposed their overly narrow interpretation of what the "absolute morals" are. But the sermons and sayings attributed to Jesus do offer plenty of direction as to what is "right" and what is wrong". Whether the words captured in the New Testament are the entire set of Christ's teachings, whether the transcriptions and translations of his apostles's teachings (and interpretations of Christ's teachings) perfectly relate that whole set of teachings is another issue entirely.
So your idea (paraphrased) that "the purpose of religion is to give people something behind which to rally (absolute morality), and an enemy to against which to fight"
strikes me as your belief about religion, not an accurate statement. AFAICT, the core teachings of nearly all major religions that I have studied agree on one principle: that seeking to uplift your fellow creatures without the necessity of reward is the essence of being moral, while seeking to enrich oneself or one's group without regard to this principle is NOT moral.
Which appears to be the original poster's premise, except that he/she said that some people are always moral, some always evil. It is probably more accurate to say that some things which a person can do can be considered "good" in terms of absolute morals, and other things can be considered "evil" and that the best people "do the most good", and the worst people "do the most evil", with an entire spectrum of people between the two.
About the time the "I Love You" virus got loose, I had to upgrade a client's machine to Windows 98 for a particular consulting job. As you may or may not know, Win98 had a bad idea known as the WSC ("Windows Scripting Component" )['xcuse me if I am not remembering the name right, btw] installed and turned on by default. Like a good sys admin concerned with security, I had disabled the WSC and thus when most of the Outlook attacking virii came by, the client was safe.
That's not the trouble, however.... About a year later I had to install another M$ tool on that system that isn't even directly related to Internet usage... and without alerting me or giving me the option to stop it, the damn installer updated the WSC and turned it back on -- essentially opening up that workstation to attack. Which translates to the fact that some M$ updates are insalling what amounts to a back-door on unwary user's systems.
Fortunately a client noticed something different on one of the app tool screens, which led us to discovering the reactivation of the WSC. Net result: one less client on a MS-based workstation, one sys admin even more committed to an M$ free world.
Just what we all need -- Yet Another Reason To Ditch Microsoft.
As if their support of the (1)DCMA, (2) UCITA, (3)CSS encryption wasn't bad enough... How 'bout we throw in (4) extremely poorly secured software allowing email and VBA script viruses, (5) attempting to poison Java, (6), OS-extortion/control over virtually every major PC maker for a number of years, or (7) even limiting our reason's to ditch their company to one practice: their constant FUD and attempts to "embrace, extend, and control" virtually every facet of the software industry.
Well Mr. Gates & co., it's like this: Allaire's "Homesite", etc. are a whole lot better than FP any version, ASP is possibly the worst method of Web programming I've had to endure, and now that Linux and the BSD's have fully stabilized, I don't need your stinkin' OS anymore either. So your vaunted M$ monopoly hasn't earned even a penny of my hard earned income in something like six years now, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Shoot, with this new language in their EULA, it's rapidly approaching the point where using MS products is not only a stupid thing to do, but practically un-American as well.
Hearty agreement with most of what you have said, but I would like to add a bit to it.
I like the comparison: in fact I like it a lot, with one caveat: most communities are willing to cut behind-the-scenes deals to larger businesses in order to their employees, etc. into the tax revenue base. So what's to stop the same biased pricing structures, etc. to be inflicted on the little guys, aka the citizens of the community.
Similarly, do I pay for how much bandwidth is used by others in the muni that are browsing my content? Outside the muni-? What kind of monitoring? I mean, if a city says you used $xxx dollars in water, you pay it or they do nasty things like putting tax liens against your property, etc.
Most communities also have certain standards over what you can put "down the drain" so to say, and polluters can face heavy fines.
However, what if a person had the ability to ran a server on my broadband connection to the muni- network to distributed adult porn, hate propoganda, or other forms of speech that are currently "protected", i.e. not against the law but that most people would agree are morally questionable? Could the muni legally punish that person for "polluting" the local broadband?
Reversing the last point: what kind of monitoring of the content that a user is browsing, and who protects any rights to at least a semblance of privacy on a quasi- governmental network? Would a person browsing certain kinds of sites my internet use subject me to police scrutiny, for example, based on the type of sites I browse?
I guess that most if what I am thinking about is that what I do with the water coming down the pipe is my own private business so long as the water I return to the system isn't unduly polluted. But nothing about my Internet usage isn't remotely monitorable by a city-run ISP. Let me know what y'all think...
Re: Religion is the direct enemy
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Breaking my own rule here and posting one or two more "short thoughts"
Yes, we have been having a somewhat boisterous discussion. By the way, I was being sarcastic when I mentioned the date for the word "epistemology", and pointing out that this idea of atheism is a somewhat recent phenomena. Stupid in a debate perhaps and so acknowledged.
"as evidence of your own perceived superiority" was not meant as a dig. But your whole post is based on the position which you are defending which is that "I am rational because I don't believe a particular thing even if I have no proof of my position other than logic, where you are irrational because you believe in something you haven't proved to me but for which you claim to have similarly well-reasoned logic!" Doesn't this assume a superior/inferior attitude?
Last point: given that most of the scientific arguments which I have heard to say "there is no God" are currently known as "theories" for which there is some but not conclusive evidence (and exclusive-->i.e precluding Deity), and that most of the philosophic discussions that argue the same thing do so by logical exclusions, usually by denying the possibility of that religious experiences can be real without conclusive evidence that they are not.
So try Occam's razor on a few of my personal experiences:
I have seen
a typhoon class storm dissipated,
multiple cancers driven into remission for more than a dozen years until a mother finished raising a specific child (in fulfillment of a religious promise),
more than once times travelled long distances (10 to +20 miles) by following a specific type of feeling to a previously unknown destination, arriving just in time to offer critical assistance to someone I had never met-- an individual who had been "praying" for assistance,
detected liars in front of a jury,
understood the unspoken thoughts of a person who I did not know very well with sufficiently accuracy to give them another option besides suicide, and
seen healthy, normal infants born when the medical doctors insisted that the only possibility was brain damage
-- all as a result of what I would presume you would call "religious experiences". I've had nearly twenty years to try and figure some of these things out, and still have found no other reasonable and rational explanations for how they could have occurred, other than the simple one: the existence of a being or (for the sake of logical inclusion) beings who fit most people's definition of God.
Re: Religion is the direct enemy
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This will be my last post on this thread, as it is aging and beyond this I see any further debate fro my side as being redundant to what I posted previously or in this post. So here is my collective response to the attacks on my statements that belief in God can be considered a "rational" choice: I am accused of skirting "the issue", which started out to be that "religious people are not rational, therefore they are dangerous" It is also stated that I am "philosophically corrupt" because I "ducked my responsibility" by using "Occam's Razor." My responsibility to do what? The issue seems to have devolved into something else: "prove God's exists or else you are irrational..."
The best example of this type of thinking was best expressed in the part of a post which stated "Religious people can act in a manner which is rational, but that isn't the same thing as *being* rational. You seem to forget that religion is predicated upon an epistemological tenet that is at direct odds with logic and rationality. No matter how much you try to rationalize your "faith" it can never be rational. Hmmm... [Being sarcastic for the moment] Assuming you are using the definition of "predicated" as equalling 'the basis for') Try this link to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, which states that epistemology is "the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity", circa 1856. So "religion" -- which has existed for thousands of years-- is predicated upon the tenets of a system of thought for a word less than 150 years old....
Look at your statement that "faith can never be rational", yet scientists have "faith" of sorts in claiming that they understand "the truth" until a better theory is proposed which lowers the cognitive dissonance which they feel as they attempt to comprehend and project their understanding on the observed reality around them. By extension then, I could argue that scientists cannot be considered to be rational because what they believe at any given time is a moving target.
However, I make no such argument, because reason and rationality are not diametrically opposed to all beliefs everywhere, but are opposed to things which can be proven to be "not true". For example, it has been substantially proven that most diseases are the result of microbial infections, not "acts of God", therefore it is not reasonable or rational to assume otherwise. Therefore, my reference to "scientists" was not to buck up my argument by saying "other smart people think like I do...", but to point out that even in the scientific community, the jury is still out, because there are leading researchers in nearly all fields of study which dispute the existence of God and other equally qualified, leading researchers in those same fields who find the existence of God to be as equally evidenced by some of the same data. (damn-- wish I was at home with enough spare time to collect all the URLs and book titles which I've read that argue these points better than I do...) So is my pointing out the existence of both viewpoints in fact "shameful" or just honest acknowledgement?
The discussion about the "law of identity" was interesting, because as far as I can tell, nothing in it precludes an object from having certain properties as a result of design. In other words, without arguing for a specific religious viewpoint, I can point out logically that the statements that "all order is derived from the shear(sic) fact of existence" and "The universe has order, because it exists" do not exclude the distinct possibility that some or all of that order in the universe may exist in a somewhat stable manner because that is how it was designed." For example, wouldn't it make more sense in terms of the idea of "natural selection" for the evolutionary ladder to have included more possibilities for cross-species or even "cross sub-species" reproduction? Instead, most crosses up until recently have been genetic dead ends (mules are sterile, etc.). What I am calling the more recent "crosses" are mostly in the realm of bioengineering, in which the mutation was designed by scientists who only succeed after alot of experimentation before which their design(s) did not work. (Round-up Ready soybeans, etc.)
The assumption that I depend on negating the negation --"God exists because I can point out that no-one has proved that he doesn't" to prove that I or other people with religious beliefs are rational is your construction, not mine. Instead, my statement is that in order to be considered fully rational, the non-believer must be able successfully attack every experience of any religious person at any point in history (including my own) with a credible, "more likely to be true explanation" for those experiences than that given by the person relating the experience, because if even one religious experience is left standing with a more credible, rational explanation, then belief cannot be used as a disqualification from a person's inclusion in the group of people purported to be "rational beings".
So...my guess is that the collective objections to my post are that I haven't provided my own personal experiences and logical reasonings based on those experiences so that they can be so attacked. [Is that what y'all are fishing for? Perhaps I should and will, but in another forum, at another time. If so, fix the email address and send me an email address offline, so that when I do you can take your best shots...] In this forum of news about things that matter, hoever, I conclude by stating that I do not push my beliefs on you or anyone else. I merely state that I can hold those beliefs and continue to be as equally rational and reasonable human being as those of you who so loudly trumpet yout own disbelief(s) as evidence of your own perceived superiority.
Re: Religion is the direct enemy
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Let me start by saying that whoever moderated your reply down as flamebait was wrong. Now then, the summation of your response seems to be a simple repeat of your initial premise: that believing in a supreme being is irrational. So I will again take the bait, and continue the dialog.
You state "All I need to do is point to two or more mutually exclusive religions, that alone is proof that one or more are wrong." Correct. But it doesn't prove that all are wrong, or which ones are correct, or which parts of which ones are correct or incorrect.
Perhaps you did not notice that I did not and still have not attempted to prove a Biblical or other religious textual foundation in my previous post, or this one either. Nor have I stated or attempted to push my personal beliefs in this being [except to say that I do not believe the creator of this world to be "petulant"] onto anyone else. I never mentioned even what my own religious preference is, although it is obvious that you have assumed me to be a "Bible thumping Christian." So your attacks aren't necessarily even aimed at the right targets.
You state that the least logical thing I said was "you can't disprove the existance of God, can you?" Actually in this case, the philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor favors the believer. For readers not familiar with this term, Occam's Razor states (in direct translation) that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." The most commonly qutoted version of this is as follows: "The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions to be true is most likely to be correct."
My view (which is held by many scientists, by the way) is that the way this world operates is easier to comprehend as a "design" than as a result of random, chaotic chance. It requires at least 100X more convoluted and unproved assumptions to be true for life to exist here on our planet without a Creator than for one relatively simple assumption to be true: that a comparatively or completely immortal being with perfect scientific knowledge and technology beyond our current comprehension could set about and succeed in designing, implementing, and populating a world capable of supporting and sustaining life.
So on this basis I repeat that my statement of belief is based on a perfectly rational, but not necessarily provable assumption. You state: Further, you can't prove a negative, calls for someone to do this are empty. No? I can easily prove a negative: that at any point over a critical temperature [which varies by substance] water or other fluids cannot exist as a solid or liquid. Similarly, there are hundreds of expirements that prove that without a design, things tend toward chaos, where life appears to be a uniquely compatible, well balanced design. Well, except where us humans seem to be mucking it up.
I can attack your proof that (sic) the(re) is a god, and in the absence of proof, I think it's fairly obvious which is correct. Again, not logically infallible. This "being" you refer to as God can exist whether or not I can personally and individually prove it to your satisfaction. Or not exist, in spite of all my seeming proofs and/or other evidence. My point is that my own logical debating skills are irrelevant.
So let's get to the heart of the matter... your assertion that "Either your god, alone of all gods, exists, or we could show that at most one religion could be true, and with the many inconsistencies in them all, it's likely that instead of 99% of them being false, it's more likely that 100% are false."Actually, the rational choice is that many or all religions may comprehend and be correct in their understanding of a small part of what will ultimately be proven to be true in the "scientific" sense of the word, but that all cannot be completely correct, because the things they teach are incompatible. Most religions [including most of the major Christian movements, btw] I have studied are not even internally compatible in all of their teachings. Oh, and I have read most of the web pages which I have found dealing with "bible" and other religious textual "inconsistencies" etc. Any rational person should.
So what is your "strong cause to disbelieve the existance of a god" -- that man-made religions do not accurately seem to comprehend the nature of such a being? Shallow proof indeed!
This leads to a final point. You challenged my assertion that "coercion was not been part of the process that led me to be a believer", stating that if you start with a child, telling them something, discouraging them from thinking analytically about it, and from questioning it, of course they're going to believe it.True. The problem with your argument in my case is that I came to this place of belief not as a child, nor from how I was raised, but as an adult with many years of my own experiences and literally tens of thousands of pages, if not well in excess of 100,000 to 200,000 pages of study in many diverse areas. So finally you ask, and although I will not provide all the details here, I will answer your question as to "what proof (tangible) swayed you to make the decision?"
Well, what is fact in my world may be unprovable in yours: that I have had numerous events and experiences occur over many years in my life that cannot be explained by any amount of logical reasoning except one: that a higher power than mankind is for some reason is interested in what is happening to us human creatures on an individual basis. Collectively the likelihood of these events being random chance in just my own life are currently probably at something like one in several billion. [In my book, believing the one in several billion to be random chance -- now that would be irrational!!] So based on Occam's Razor, my belief still stands as a rational option.
So you argue and rage against the Christian Bible, or point out that many so called "religious people" do not behave consistently in line with their beliefs. The fact remains that a bibliography of collected writings or observing imperfect people do not prove anything about "God", unless that Being was exactly and only as the incomplete bibliography or imperfect people (myself included) portray or have written about {him/her/them, whatever} in which case your "proofs" would have more validity.
Oh, and my point in mentioning U.S. Constitution isn't that the U.S. is, was, or ever will be perfect. My point is, was, and continues to be that under U.S law, neither you nor I have to be "rehabilitated" from this specific belief or non-belief in the existence of some type of being we would call a "God" in order to be "rational", useful person. Hence my assertion continues to be that insist that our educational systems insistence on teaching a system of thought based on atheism (belief that there is no God) is just as much a method of brainwashing and dishonest indoctrination as you claim religion to be. And that coercion is more definitely involved in that teaching process than what I was raised with.
"Simply not indoctrinating children with false teaching will allow them to choose on their own..." Like I did? I still do not feel "compelled to create a god to believe in."Instead, I find it much, much easier to acknowledge that I am convinced by my own experiences and learning of the existence of the God (or Gods, as the case could ultimately prove out to be (?)) that is/are already there.
Re: Religion is the direct enemy
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Pardon my candor, but while I agree with your first sentence, most of your post is absolute crap, so riddled with bad reasoning that is almost a waste of my time to point all the illogical assumptions.
On second thought, it is worth my time: there is value in pointing out poor reasoning whereever it exusts, so be prepared to see your post ripped post to shreds by very simple logical arguments, instead of the drivel you seem to spout so easily...
1st example: you state your opinion that "religion is a method of brainwashing." I think it would be quite a bit more accurate to state that "religion as a whole is believing that there are higher powers than mortal mankind", and that "any given religion is a attempt by people to put rational language to that belief." By the way, the belief in some kind of God seems to be a core part of most people's world view, although not yours. At least in my case, coercion was not been part of the process that led me to be a believer.
You continue: "Yet everyday we pass buildings built by those who are essentially cultists. These buildings a meeting halls for people who believe an internally inconsistent set of beliefs that culminates in an omnipotent being creating the entire universe, for humanity, specifically their fellow believers, who then gets petulent when his tiny creations don't worship in the exact ways specified..." Does it occur to you that people may have an internally and externally consistent beliefs, and that many people (myself included) do not believe God to be petulant in any way shape or form, else that being would not be a God whom we could believe in.
By the way, being in a particular type of building (specifically a church) does not define a person as being a cultist any more than saying that using a computer automagically makes a person a technologist or being in a automobile car automagically makes a person into a race car driver. Since our country has laws based on a the U.S. Constitution, you are free to disbelieve, but I am also free to believe, and practice my beliefs so long as they remain within the constraints of societal law. Most "cults" do not remain within those constraints.
Again, I quote from your post: "A bunch of sick people acting in direct contrast to what a rational view of reality would suggest is NOT something we should sit back and accept as normal." Oops.. You just committed another logical fallacy by excluding the possibility that rational people can also be religious, another logical fallacy, like saying "the sky is blue, my eyes are blue, therefore anyone whose eye's aren't blue can't possibly see the sky..."
It is just as much brainwashing and dishonest indoctrination to to insist that our educational systems teach that atheism is somehow more rational and therefore "good", "right", or "normal" than religious belief, is it not? I think most people who know me would say that I am at least as intelligent and rational as the next person, and I can easily be proven to be a useful member of society, even though I believe in God.
You continue "This indoctrination hurts us all by raising people unable to cope with reality without retreating into their fantasy world. It raises people who act in a manner that is insane when viewed by someone who hasn't been similarly brainwashed." Hmm. I wonder what you would say if you were trapped in the WTC explosions and I was the only person who could help you get down the stairs and told you that it was my "God-given duty to help you get out of the building alive." Would you so glibly accuse me of retreating into fantasy then? True beliefs don't allow a retreat-- they obligate the owner of those beliefs to act.
I guess my point is that people who promote terrorism by mingling religion in with it are sick, not every person who believes in any religion, anywhere.
Contrary to your own beliefs (which are guaranteed to be at least partially false on the basis of logic: you can't disprove the existence of God, can you?), hatred is the enemy of all people, not religion. Seeking to control or make a profit by taking advantage of others is the enemy of all people, and I will readily and sadly acknowledge that many so-called churches and preachers are so corrupted that they fail in their essential mission: teaching people to co-operate peacefully in lifting their fellow man. This one message is the essence and goal of almost every major and minor religious system of thought.
So if you don't mind, I'll try to become a better person based on my beliefs, and work with and teach my family and friends who are like minded to be good people, and you? All I can suggest is that if you want to preach atheism, you at least learn to do a better, more logical job of it.
'xcuse me but the combined death toll from both atomic bombs, horrific as they were, is only a drop in the bucket compared to the millions killed by the Nazi's in and before WW-II.
Nor does it hold up to the slaughter of innocents by the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the 1970's, the 800,000 in Rwanda a few years ago, or the estimated millions of Christians in southern Sudan in the last few years, Sadam Hussein's chemical warfare against his own people -- any number of massacres by tuly horrific groups and individuals. Not even counting the from the fact that the Allies warned Japan weeks before the a-bombs wqere dropped-- with no response from Tokyo.
Sorry, I can't help your site develop, because it is so distinctly "not-free" as the title implies.
Your click through EULA shot my interest all to hell. I have better things to do with my time than to analyze all of the legal ramifications stapled to the entry process for your site.
If/. had or tried to implement something like that, it would be the last time I connected to this site either.
...as much as it is thermal efficiency, which is the amount of useful engine "work" produced in comparison to how much heat energy is contained in the fuel.
If modern small diesel and spark-ignited engines could be raised to the efficiency levels of say -- larger gas turbine and combined cycle systems, the net C02 emmissions into the atmosphere would drop by around 50%. As is, the average thermal efficiency of these engines is less than 30%, and this class of engines makes up easily 95% of the total engine output for all vehicles worldwide.
I also don't buy the "evil petroleum company" theory because it assumes that if such efficient vehicle enginess could be produced, petroleum companies would necessarily lose money. Fact is, sometimes conservation raises prices, because there is less commodity required to maintain operations, the cost per unit of commodity goes up.
What would happen is that worldwide demand for crude oil would drop the price of the raw materials to better levels, and the profit would move from mass production of auto fuels into niche value-added product development, which AFAICT would not be a that horribly bad of a thing anyway. I mean, consider just the economic impact in the US alone if all of the diesel trains and trucks could move freight around at say 30-40% of current fuel costs, and mass transit (AKA buses, light rail, etc. were made more effective in the process...
--humor mode on--
of course, in order to maintain harem and profit margin growth standards, the major royal houses of about 50% of (the more currupt)Middle Eastern contries would have to declare on their major customers....:-)
Folks, this is more serious than you might think. Right now, any school in the US can have their own domain address in the.US TLD, free of charge, with the technical limitation that they have to have a couple of name servers to point at the machine which actually houses the web site. Any town or City in the.US TLD, likewise. Any civic organization in a town or city, library, hospital, non-profit, etc. likewise.
Does anybody really think that the proposed changes to the.US tld is administered will offer anything good to these types of organizations? There is a bit about these sites being grandfathered in, but what about newer sites? Aren't they entitled to have a place on the Web without having to pay and then having the fate of their site registrations being inextricably tied to a company who consistently make unfriendly manuevers designed to control all of the most important TLD name spaces?
Wake up, make some noise, people. This needs to be stopped!!!
Interesting. I had not heard some of what you posted about OS-2 on the PPC, etc.
What I do know is that I tried various flavors of OS-2 on several different generations of x86 PCs, with fairly generic video and audio cards, etc.
It was never a seemless install, and the resulting setups never stabilized to the extent that I was willing to entrust transferring my client's to an OS that I couldn't count on finding broad based support for.
Interestingly enough, I am recommending that some of these users move to Linux, because even without a single monolithic corporation, support for most things linux is only a mouse click or two away from someone else on the WWW who knows how to solve a specific problem.
...has nothing to do with superior marketing. It has to do with the arm twist they put on manufacturers, the lies, broken business deals, and a host of other malicious business tactics they have used to try to damage any other competitor to their supremacy. Not to mention that the entire MFC is based on flawed code that is so byzantine and obscure that it really does give MS an inside advantage to be able to develop the next API in private in a way that gives them ways to essentially break any software they choose to attack during the inevitable service pack and OS upgrade processes.
When SmartSuite was ported to OS/2, everybody hoped that it would make a difference to OS/2's fortune.
It wasn't lack of software that killed OS/2 in the early days. It was the fact that Big Blue didn't catch a clue that the keys to selling any current OS are #1) quality device drivers for darn near every imaginable combination of hardware, and #2) a commitment to providing inexpensive, powerful development tools to the small- and mid- level programming shops. Which is why I never invested much time beyond first looks and did not buy the OS/2 Smartsuite.
Of course, it hasn't helped since that OS/2 was so heavily X86 that for all practical purposes it couldn't be ported, or that Big Blue couldn't seem to market their way out of a paper bag back then.
No, I don't think *current* linux users will buy SmartSuite....
With an acknowledgement that I might be in a small but vocal minority, in my case, you'd be wrong. If IBM released Smartsuite on Linux, I'd be online buying something like 30 seconds after it became available. In fact, I would contribute development time to porting it, because next to the M$ hegenomy, Smartsuite has consistently been a good choice for many of my smaller clients.
Most of whom I would like to migrate to Linux, (preferably before what little MS support is left for the Win9X operating system completely evaporates), but without requiring them to endure the heavy pains of relearning a new app suite. Aside from which I would love to have a Linux, Lotus-script enabled version of Approach for my family to use and learn on.
That, a corporate-grade email app, and end-to-end MIDI capability would be enough for me to banish all MS software from my home machine permanently.
I post this in hopes that folks with more knowledge and experience than mine will reply to some of the issues brought up here:
Having not done feature articles, I don't know what the standard, legal practice is. Maybe the writer shouldn't get paid again as part of a compilation/web site, etc., maybe they should. I do know that if I were approached to do a feature article, I would make damn sure that the re-publishing rights were spelled out explicitly in the contract.
That said, I am more concerned with how this case has been/will be scoped by the courts because of the potential spillover effects. Normally when a writer's work has been out of print for a specific period of time, the rights to their work revert to him/her. Two current technologically based scenarios threaten this reversion process: publishing on demand (by which a company can print and sell just one book within the specified period, thereby retaining the rights), and the web, which in essence can be used to keep something "published" for years, merely by keeping an active link to it available to the outside world.
Then if someone does a CD-compilation from the web site, the work was never out of print, so the author is essentially still tied to whatever contract they negotiated up front. My guess is that 9 out of 10 times (if not 99 out of 100) the entity that is probably going to get screwed in such a scenario is the author.
On the other hand, a decision favoring the author(s) too much isn't necessarily good, because of the hated Sonny Bono extensions to the original and renewable copyright periods, potential tie ups via the DCMA (put encoding on the CD-ROM, there goes fair use...)
Please, feel free to take both or either sides of the discussion, because I for one really need to learn what the best possible decisions in this case would look like.
Months ago, there was an article about running multiple images of Linux on a 390, and I am wondering (based on a previous poster's comments about the zOS being somewhat of a nomenclature (naming convention) type thing rather than a brand new OS, will the zOS boxes be able to do the same kind of Linux tricks as we've heard about on the 390's?
Secondarily, and a bit more in detail: aside from not having to have a whole farm of servers, what are the upside and downside issues of running multiple images on one machine? Similarly, could multiple images of a BSDs (Net, Free, etc.) be run on a z/OS or 390 machine?
Bounty Quest is different. They look for specific items of prior art, where the site mentioned (not open ip, the first one) if my understanding is correct is essentially offering a document repository service that allows people to place their "inventions" in the public domain in such a way as to establish their idea as "prior art" for the USPTO to search first.
Not a bad idea, even if they do charge. I am just wondering about the cost overhead of doing the same thing for free.
Try OpenIP.org . Although it has been a while, I was very familiar with what the project is trying to do, and although AFAICT they do not have a database set up, they do have some projects running.
If OpenIP is interested in doing this, it would not be that hard to add a similar database to the IP.Com database, and I am sure that the fellow in charge would welcome the assistance. (I will be emailing him offline with the suggestion, btw.)
The real work would probably be in convincing the USPTO that this new database would also be worth consulting.
What do you think? Would this be worth pursuing via this site?
According to the Article:...convinced Lucas that a computer-generated (CG) character should do what no CG has yet done: appear as a lead character in a major live-action motion picture release.
Anybody besides me see the 1996 movie Dragonheart, which included Drago, a CGI generated dragon voiced by Shawn Connery?
Funny, but Draco seemed like a lead character in that story...
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't be surprised if your voice was actually heard more than my own, because of that very issue. My suggestion if you really want to have some impact is to put some thought into how passage of this law would damage the US abroad, especially if you can link it to a corporate interest. Then communicate your conclusions to as many people/organiztions in the EU as possible so that the 535 reps and the U.S.President all know that alot of voices in Europe are against parts of the law being proposed.
Also (and this is more targeted at folks in the US): remember, it has to pass two legislative bodies and get signed to become law, and there's alot of ways to kill or improve a bad piece of legislation before it even reaches the voting stages in the Senate or House of Representatives, let alone before it reaches the president's desk. And if all else fails and significant enough constitutional issues can be raised, the US Supreme court is a last-resort opportunity to get rid of bad legislation if all else fails.
The important thing is to remember that apathy never changes the world in a positive direction.
Service packs can be even worse -- by the time the OS is re-stabilized, the service packs are usually hopelessly out of date, the documentation for them fluctuates almost daily, and very few of their support sites or personnel seem to accept the idea that honesty is the best policy, instead relying on corporate supplied FUD and arrogance about market share to tell the unfortunate user(s) that "it must be their machine, because we don't see that kind of problem here in Redmond..." [insert obligatory ostrich photo here.
Gartner's point isn't that the WinXX OS's can't be kept stable, it is that the TCO (total cost of ownership) for the software and endless admin chores do not compare favorably with other choices any more.
I agree: my life is about ten times simpler since I dumped M$ products for everything except a few non-essential word processing, spreadsheet, and imaging apps on one M$ workstation so that I can exchange files with clients when they need M$ based softcopies of project data, etc.
Just like the fact that one leader (Osama bin Lauden)'s distortions of the Muslim faith (wrapping of terrorism into jihad) do not mean that the teachings of Islam are morally bankrupt.
If anything, the Crusades, etc. more accurately reflect that unfortunately, a large majority of people (Christians included) are more easily influenced by the morals and choices of their leaders when the actions/teachings of that leader are cloaked in the disquise of religious piety.
I'm not a Bible thumper by anyone's account -- (I'm more closely a follower of Zen BTW)-- but isn't there some verse or quote that says something like "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God"?
So perhaps a more useful definition would be that those who we would probably agree as being "good" consistently make a high percentage of their choices in accordance with moral principles, while those whom we would define as "evil" or "bad" consisently make the opposite choices a high percentage of the time.
Kinda like a spiritual baseball game -- the good teams and players make good choices for succeeding within the rules of the game (thus getting more hits, playing better defense, getting better pitching, suffering lower injuries,etc.) while lousy teams and players fail to succeed because they do not make the right choices (swinging at bad pitches, making errant throws, getting stupid injuries, etc.) and are thereby considered "bad".
For example, "agents of Satan" is a context that you introduced, not the original poster-- with Satan being a personage associated with only a limited number of religions-- presumably the ones you wish to attack.
Similarly, the statement that "relativism is the only obvious truth simply because there is a range of ideas" is not only incorrect (some ideas have been proven to be correct, others false), it doesn't logically prove that "Absolute morality is a farce". Substitute the words "ideas about morals" and your argument might be closer, but nothing precludes a particular subset of "moral ideas" from being absolutely correct, with the remainder being less so or totally incorrect.
The point about "those who did this" (presumably the WTC terrorists) feeling "righteous" adds your connection -a feeling- to morality. Perhaps I am wrong in this but most people I know would argue that "feelings" are the reason that people do not act in a more moral manner. So again, religions is not the issue here.
You say that "maybe we're all these people- after all, we've all done something immoral weakens your position even more, because for all people to be considered immoral, there has to be an absolute standard against which they are judged.
Now then, I readily agree that most religious groups tend to claim that their own interpretation of this "absolute set" is the only correct interpretation. I also agree that some but not all of the loudest proponents of their own rightness are Christian sects.
However -- and with my I acknowledge that I'm not wording this as well as I would like to -- but the core Christian teachings of the New Testament do not claim that "all morals are absolute", because that was the position held by the Sanhedrin -- the very men who put Christ to death because he opposed their overly narrow interpretation of what the "absolute morals" are. But the sermons and sayings attributed to Jesus do offer plenty of direction as to what is "right" and what is wrong". Whether the words captured in the New Testament are the entire set of Christ's teachings, whether the transcriptions and translations of his apostles's teachings (and interpretations of Christ's teachings) perfectly relate that whole set of teachings is another issue entirely.
So your idea (paraphrased) that "the purpose of religion is to give people something behind which to rally (absolute morality), and an enemy to against which to fight"
strikes me as your belief about religion, not an accurate statement. AFAICT, the core teachings of nearly all major religions that I have studied agree on one principle: that seeking to uplift your fellow creatures without the necessity of reward is the essence of being moral, while seeking to enrich oneself or one's group without regard to this principle is NOT moral.
Which appears to be the original poster's premise, except that he/she said that some people are always moral, some always evil. It is probably more accurate to say that some things which a person can do can be considered "good" in terms of absolute morals, and other things can be considered "evil" and that the best people "do the most good", and the worst people "do the most evil", with an entire spectrum of people between the two.
About the time the "I Love You" virus got loose, I had to upgrade a client's machine to Windows 98 for a particular consulting job. As you may or may not know, Win98 had a bad idea known as the WSC ("Windows Scripting Component" )['xcuse me if I am not remembering the name right, btw] installed and turned on by default. Like a good sys admin concerned with security, I had disabled the WSC and thus when most of the Outlook attacking virii came by, the client was safe.
That's not the trouble, however.... About a year later I had to install another M$ tool on that system that isn't even directly related to Internet usage... and without alerting me or giving me the option to stop it, the damn installer updated the WSC and turned it back on -- essentially opening up that workstation to attack. Which translates to the fact that some M$ updates are insalling what amounts to a back-door on unwary user's systems.
Fortunately a client noticed something different on one of the app tool screens, which led us to discovering the reactivation of the WSC. Net result: one less client on a MS-based workstation, one sys admin even more committed to an M$ free world.
As if their support of the (1)DCMA, (2) UCITA, (3)CSS encryption wasn't bad enough... How 'bout we throw in (4) extremely poorly secured software allowing email and VBA script viruses, (5) attempting to poison Java, (6), OS-extortion/control over virtually every major PC maker for a number of years, or (7) even limiting our reason's to ditch their company to one practice: their constant FUD and attempts to "embrace, extend, and control" virtually every facet of the software industry.
Well Mr. Gates & co., it's like this: Allaire's "Homesite", etc. are a whole lot better than FP any version, ASP is possibly the worst method of Web programming I've had to endure, and now that Linux and the BSD's have fully stabilized, I don't need your stinkin' OS anymore either. So your vaunted M$ monopoly hasn't earned even a penny of my hard earned income in something like six years now, and won't for the foreseeable future.
Shoot, with this new language in their EULA, it's rapidly approaching the point where using MS products is not only a stupid thing to do, but practically un-American as well.
- I like the comparison: in fact I like it a lot, with one caveat: most communities are willing to cut behind-the-scenes deals to larger businesses in order to their employees, etc. into the tax revenue base. So what's to stop the same biased pricing structures, etc. to be inflicted on the little guys, aka the citizens of the community.
- Similarly, do I pay for how much bandwidth is used by others in the muni that are browsing my content? Outside the muni-? What kind of monitoring? I mean, if a city says you used $xxx dollars in water, you pay it or they do nasty things like putting tax liens against your property, etc.
- Most communities also have certain standards over what you can put "down the drain" so to say, and polluters can face heavy fines.
- Reversing the last point: what kind of monitoring of the content that a user is browsing, and who protects any rights to at least a semblance of privacy on a quasi- governmental network? Would a person browsing certain kinds of sites my internet use subject me to police scrutiny, for example, based on the type of sites I browse?
I guess that most if what I am thinking about is that what I do with the water coming down the pipe is my own private business so long as the water I return to the system isn't unduly polluted. But nothing about my Internet usage isn't remotely monitorable by a city-run ISP. Let me know what y'all think...However, what if a person had the ability to ran a server on my broadband connection to the muni- network to distributed adult porn, hate propoganda, or other forms of speech that are currently "protected", i.e. not against the law but that most people would agree are morally questionable? Could the muni legally punish that person for "polluting" the local broadband?
Yes, we have been having a somewhat boisterous discussion. By the way, I was being sarcastic when I mentioned the date for the word "epistemology", and pointing out that this idea of atheism is a somewhat recent phenomena. Stupid in a debate perhaps and so acknowledged.
"as evidence of your own perceived superiority" was not meant as a dig. But your whole post is based on the position which you are defending which is that "I am rational because I don't believe a particular thing even if I have no proof of my position other than logic, where you are irrational because you believe in something you haven't proved to me but for which you claim to have similarly well-reasoned logic!" Doesn't this assume a superior/inferior attitude?
Last point: given that most of the scientific arguments which I have heard to say "there is no God" are currently known as "theories" for which there is some but not conclusive evidence (and exclusive-->i.e precluding Deity), and that most of the philosophic discussions that argue the same thing do so by logical exclusions, usually by denying the possibility of that religious experiences can be real without conclusive evidence that they are not.
So try Occam's razor on a few of my personal experiences:
- I have seen
- a typhoon class storm dissipated,
- multiple cancers driven into remission for more than a dozen years until a mother finished raising a specific child (in fulfillment of a religious promise),
- more than once times travelled long distances (10 to +20 miles) by following a specific type of feeling to a previously unknown destination, arriving just in time to offer critical assistance to someone I had never met-- an individual who had been "praying" for assistance,
- detected liars in front of a jury,
- understood the unspoken thoughts of a person who I did not know very well with sufficiently accuracy to give them another option besides suicide, and
- seen healthy, normal infants born when the medical doctors insisted that the only possibility was brain damage
-- all as a result of what I would presume you would call "religious experiences". I've had nearly twenty years to try and figure some of these things out, and still have found no other reasonable and rational explanations for how they could have occurred, other than the simple one: the existence of a being or (for the sake of logical inclusion) beings who fit most people's definition of God.The best example of this type of thinking was best expressed in the part of a post which stated "Religious people can act in a manner which is rational, but that isn't the same thing as *being* rational. You seem to forget that religion is predicated upon an epistemological tenet that is at direct odds with logic and rationality. No matter how much you try to rationalize your "faith" it can never be rational. Hmmm... [Being sarcastic for the moment] Assuming you are using the definition of "predicated" as equalling 'the basis for') Try this link to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, which states that epistemology is "the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity", circa 1856. So "religion" -- which has existed for thousands of years-- is predicated upon the tenets of a system of thought for a word less than 150 years old....
Look at your statement that "faith can never be rational", yet scientists have "faith" of sorts in claiming that they understand "the truth" until a better theory is proposed which lowers the cognitive dissonance which they feel as they attempt to comprehend and project their understanding on the observed reality around them. By extension then, I could argue that scientists cannot be considered to be rational because what they believe at any given time is a moving target.
However, I make no such argument, because reason and rationality are not diametrically opposed to all beliefs everywhere, but are opposed to things which can be proven to be "not true". For example, it has been substantially proven that most diseases are the result of microbial infections, not "acts of God", therefore it is not reasonable or rational to assume otherwise. Therefore, my reference to "scientists" was not to buck up my argument by saying "other smart people think like I do...", but to point out that even in the scientific community, the jury is still out, because there are leading researchers in nearly all fields of study which dispute the existence of God and other equally qualified, leading researchers in those same fields who find the existence of God to be as equally evidenced by some of the same data. (damn-- wish I was at home with enough spare time to collect all the URLs and book titles which I've read that argue these points better than I do...) So is my pointing out the existence of both viewpoints in fact "shameful" or just honest acknowledgement?
The discussion about the "law of identity" was interesting, because as far as I can tell, nothing in it precludes an object from having certain properties as a result of design. In other words, without arguing for a specific religious viewpoint, I can point out logically that the statements that "all order is derived from the shear(sic) fact of existence" and "The universe has order, because it exists" do not exclude the distinct possibility that some or all of that order in the universe may exist in a somewhat stable manner because that is how it was designed." For example, wouldn't it make more sense in terms of the idea of "natural selection" for the evolutionary ladder to have included more possibilities for cross-species or even "cross sub-species" reproduction? Instead, most crosses up until recently have been genetic dead ends (mules are sterile, etc.). What I am calling the more recent "crosses" are mostly in the realm of bioengineering, in which the mutation was designed by scientists who only succeed after alot of experimentation before which their design(s) did not work. (Round-up Ready soybeans, etc.)
The assumption that I depend on negating the negation --"God exists because I can point out that no-one has proved that he doesn't" to prove that I or other people with religious beliefs are rational is your construction, not mine. Instead, my statement is that in order to be considered fully rational, the non-believer must be able successfully attack every experience of any religious person at any point in history (including my own) with a credible, "more likely to be true explanation" for those experiences than that given by the person relating the experience, because if even one religious experience is left standing with a more credible, rational explanation, then belief cannot be used as a disqualification from a person's inclusion in the group of people purported to be "rational beings".
So...my guess is that the collective objections to my post are that I haven't provided my own personal experiences and logical reasonings based on those experiences so that they can be so attacked. [Is that what y'all are fishing for? Perhaps I should and will, but in another forum, at another time. If so, fix the email address and send me an email address offline, so that when I do you can take your best shots...] In this forum of news about things that matter, hoever, I conclude by stating that I do not push my beliefs on you or anyone else. I merely state that I can hold those beliefs and continue to be as equally rational and reasonable human being as those of you who so loudly trumpet yout own disbelief(s) as evidence of your own perceived superiority.
You state "All I need to do is point to two or more mutually exclusive religions, that alone is proof that one or more are wrong." Correct. But it doesn't prove that all are wrong, or which ones are correct, or which parts of which ones are correct or incorrect.
Perhaps you did not notice that I did not and still have not attempted to prove a Biblical or other religious textual foundation in my previous post, or this one either. Nor have I stated or attempted to push my personal beliefs in this being [except to say that I do not believe the creator of this world to be "petulant"] onto anyone else. I never mentioned even what my own religious preference is, although it is obvious that you have assumed me to be a "Bible thumping Christian." So your attacks aren't necessarily even aimed at the right targets.
You state that the least logical thing I said was "you can't disprove the existance of God, can you?" Actually in this case, the philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor favors the believer. For readers not familiar with this term, Occam's Razor states (in direct translation) that "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." The most commonly qutoted version of this is as follows: "The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions to be true is most likely to be correct."
My view (which is held by many scientists, by the way) is that the way this world operates is easier to comprehend as a "design" than as a result of random, chaotic chance. It requires at least 100X more convoluted and unproved assumptions to be true for life to exist here on our planet without a Creator than for one relatively simple assumption to be true: that a comparatively or completely immortal being with perfect scientific knowledge and technology beyond our current comprehension could set about and succeed in designing, implementing, and populating a world capable of supporting and sustaining life.
So on this basis I repeat that my statement of belief is based on a perfectly rational, but not necessarily provable assumption. You state: Further, you can't prove a negative, calls for someone to do this are empty. No? I can easily prove a negative: that at any point over a critical temperature [which varies by substance] water or other fluids cannot exist as a solid or liquid. Similarly, there are hundreds of expirements that prove that without a design, things tend toward chaos, where life appears to be a uniquely compatible, well balanced design. Well, except where us humans seem to be mucking it up.
I can attack your proof that (sic) the(re) is a god, and in the absence of proof, I think it's fairly obvious which is correct. Again, not logically infallible. This "being" you refer to as God can exist whether or not I can personally and individually prove it to your satisfaction. Or not exist, in spite of all my seeming proofs and/or other evidence. My point is that my own logical debating skills are irrelevant.
So let's get to the heart of the matter... your assertion that "Either your god, alone of all gods, exists, or we could show that at most one religion could be true, and with the many inconsistencies in them all, it's likely that instead of 99% of them being false, it's more likely that 100% are false."Actually, the rational choice is that many or all religions may comprehend and be correct in their understanding of a small part of what will ultimately be proven to be true in the "scientific" sense of the word, but that all cannot be completely correct, because the things they teach are incompatible. Most religions [including most of the major Christian movements, btw] I have studied are not even internally compatible in all of their teachings. Oh, and I have read most of the web pages which I have found dealing with "bible" and other religious textual "inconsistencies" etc. Any rational person should.
So what is your "strong cause to disbelieve the existance of a god" -- that man-made religions do not accurately seem to comprehend the nature of such a being? Shallow proof indeed!
This leads to a final point. You challenged my assertion that "coercion was not been part of the process that led me to be a believer", stating that if you start with a child, telling them something, discouraging them from thinking analytically about it, and from questioning it, of course they're going to believe it.True. The problem with your argument in my case is that I came to this place of belief not as a child, nor from how I was raised, but as an adult with many years of my own experiences and literally tens of thousands of pages, if not well in excess of 100,000 to 200,000 pages of study in many diverse areas. So finally you ask, and although I will not provide all the details here, I will answer your question as to "what proof (tangible) swayed you to make the decision?"
Well, what is fact in my world may be unprovable in yours: that I have had numerous events and experiences occur over many years in my life that cannot be explained by any amount of logical reasoning except one: that a higher power than mankind is for some reason is interested in what is happening to us human creatures on an individual basis. Collectively the likelihood of these events being random chance in just my own life are currently probably at something like one in several billion. [In my book, believing the one in several billion to be random chance -- now that would be irrational!!] So based on Occam's Razor, my belief still stands as a rational option.
So you argue and rage against the Christian Bible, or point out that many so called "religious people" do not behave consistently in line with their beliefs. The fact remains that a bibliography of collected writings or observing imperfect people do not prove anything about "God", unless that Being was exactly and only as the incomplete bibliography or imperfect people (myself included) portray or have written about {him/her/them, whatever} in which case your "proofs" would have more validity.
Oh, and my point in mentioning U.S. Constitution isn't that the U.S. is, was, or ever will be perfect. My point is, was, and continues to be that under U.S law, neither you nor I have to be "rehabilitated" from this specific belief or non-belief in the existence of some type of being we would call a "God" in order to be "rational", useful person. Hence my assertion continues to be that insist that our educational systems insistence on teaching a system of thought based on atheism (belief that there is no God) is just as much a method of brainwashing and dishonest indoctrination as you claim religion to be. And that coercion is more definitely involved in that teaching process than what I was raised with.
"Simply not indoctrinating children with false teaching will allow them to choose on their own..." Like I did? I still do not feel "compelled to create a god to believe in."Instead, I find it much, much easier to acknowledge that I am convinced by my own experiences and learning of the existence of the God (or Gods, as the case could ultimately prove out to be (?)) that is/are already there.
On second thought, it is worth my time: there is value in pointing out poor reasoning whereever it exusts, so be prepared to see your post ripped post to shreds by very simple logical arguments, instead of the drivel you seem to spout so easily...
1st example: you state your opinion that "religion is a method of brainwashing." I think it would be quite a bit more accurate to state that "religion as a whole is believing that there are higher powers than mortal mankind", and that "any given religion is a attempt by people to put rational language to that belief." By the way, the belief in some kind of God seems to be a core part of most people's world view, although not yours. At least in my case, coercion was not been part of the process that led me to be a believer.
You continue: "Yet everyday we pass buildings built by those who are essentially cultists. These buildings a meeting halls for people who believe an internally inconsistent set of beliefs that culminates in an omnipotent being creating the entire universe, for humanity, specifically their fellow believers, who then gets petulent when his tiny creations don't worship in the exact ways specified..." Does it occur to you that people may have an internally and externally consistent beliefs, and that many people (myself included) do not believe God to be petulant in any way shape or form, else that being would not be a God whom we could believe in.
By the way, being in a particular type of building (specifically a church) does not define a person as being a cultist any more than saying that using a computer automagically makes a person a technologist or being in a automobile car automagically makes a person into a race car driver. Since our country has laws based on a the U.S. Constitution, you are free to disbelieve, but I am also free to believe, and practice my beliefs so long as they remain within the constraints of societal law. Most "cults" do not remain within those constraints.
Again, I quote from your post: "A bunch of sick people acting in direct contrast to what a rational view of reality would suggest is NOT something we should sit back and accept as normal." Oops.. You just committed another logical fallacy by excluding the possibility that rational people can also be religious, another logical fallacy, like saying "the sky is blue, my eyes are blue, therefore anyone whose eye's aren't blue can't possibly see the sky..."
It is just as much brainwashing and dishonest indoctrination to to insist that our educational systems teach that atheism is somehow more rational and therefore "good", "right", or "normal" than religious belief, is it not? I think most people who know me would say that I am at least as intelligent and rational as the next person, and I can easily be proven to be a useful member of society, even though I believe in God.
You continue "This indoctrination hurts us all by raising people unable to cope with reality without retreating into their fantasy world. It raises people who act in a manner that is insane when viewed by someone who hasn't been similarly brainwashed." Hmm. I wonder what you would say if you were trapped in the WTC explosions and I was the only person who could help you get down the stairs and told you that it was my "God-given duty to help you get out of the building alive." Would you so glibly accuse me of retreating into fantasy then? True beliefs don't allow a retreat-- they obligate the owner of those beliefs to act.
I guess my point is that people who promote terrorism by mingling religion in with it are sick, not every person who believes in any religion, anywhere.
Contrary to your own beliefs (which are guaranteed to be at least partially false on the basis of logic: you can't disprove the existence of God, can you?), hatred is the enemy of all people, not religion. Seeking to control or make a profit by taking advantage of others is the enemy of all people, and I will readily and sadly acknowledge that many so-called churches and preachers are so corrupted that they fail in their essential mission: teaching people to co-operate peacefully in lifting their fellow man. This one message is the essence and goal of almost every major and minor religious system of thought.
So if you don't mind, I'll try to become a better person based on my beliefs, and work with and teach my family and friends who are like minded to be good people, and you? All I can suggest is that if you want to preach atheism, you at least learn to do a better, more logical job of it.
Nor does it hold up to the slaughter of innocents by the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Kampuchea (Cambodia) in the 1970's, the 800,000 in Rwanda a few years ago, or the estimated millions of Christians in southern Sudan in the last few years, Sadam Hussein's chemical warfare against his own people -- any number of massacres by tuly horrific groups and individuals. Not even counting the from the fact that the Allies warned Japan weeks before the a-bombs wqere dropped-- with no response from Tokyo.
Get your history right, or shut the f--- up.
Your click through EULA shot my interest all to hell. I have better things to do with my time than to analyze all of the legal ramifications stapled to the entry process for your site.
If /. had or tried to implement something like that, it would be the last time I connected to this site either.
If modern small diesel and spark-ignited engines could be raised to the efficiency levels of say -- larger gas turbine and combined cycle systems, the net C02 emmissions into the atmosphere would drop by around 50%. As is, the average thermal efficiency of these engines is less than 30%, and this class of engines makes up easily 95% of the total engine output for all vehicles worldwide.
I also don't buy the "evil petroleum company" theory because it assumes that if such efficient vehicle enginess could be produced, petroleum companies would necessarily lose money. Fact is, sometimes conservation raises prices, because there is less commodity required to maintain operations, the cost per unit of commodity goes up.
What would happen is that worldwide demand for crude oil would drop the price of the raw materials to better levels, and the profit would move from mass production of auto fuels into niche value-added product development, which AFAICT would not be a that horribly bad of a thing anyway. I mean, consider just the economic impact in the US alone if all of the diesel trains and trucks could move freight around at say 30-40% of current fuel costs, and mass transit (AKA buses, light rail, etc. were made more effective in the process...
--humor mode on--
of course, in order to maintain harem and profit margin growth standards, the major royal houses of about 50% of (the more currupt)Middle Eastern contries would have to declare on their major customers.... :-)
Folks, this is more serious than you might think. Right now, any school in the US can have their own domain address in the .US TLD, free of charge, with the technical limitation that they have to have a couple of name servers to point at the machine which actually houses the web site. Any town or City in the .US TLD, likewise. Any civic organization in a town or city, library, hospital, non-profit, etc. likewise.
Does anybody really think that the proposed changes to the .US tld is administered will offer anything good to these types of organizations? There is a bit about these sites being grandfathered in, but what about newer sites? Aren't they entitled to have a place on the Web without having to pay and then having the fate of their site registrations being inextricably tied to a company who consistently make unfriendly manuevers designed to control all of the most important TLD name spaces?
Wake up, make some noise, people. This needs to be stopped!!!
--Rant Mode Off--
What I do know is that I tried various flavors of OS-2 on several different generations of x86 PCs, with fairly generic video and audio cards, etc.
It was never a seemless install, and the resulting setups never stabilized to the extent that I was willing to entrust transferring my client's to an OS that I couldn't count on finding broad based support for.
Interestingly enough, I am recommending that some of these users move to Linux, because even without a single monolithic corporation, support for most things linux is only a mouse click or two away from someone else on the WWW who knows how to solve a specific problem.
...has nothing to do with superior marketing. It has to do with the arm twist they put on manufacturers, the lies, broken business deals, and a host of other malicious business tactics they have used to try to damage any other competitor to their supremacy. Not to mention that the entire MFC is based on flawed code that is so byzantine and obscure that it really does give MS an inside advantage to be able to develop the next API in private in a way that gives them ways to essentially break any software they choose to attack during the inevitable service pack and OS upgrade processes.
--rant mode off.
It wasn't lack of software that killed OS/2 in the early days. It was the fact that Big Blue didn't catch a clue that the keys to selling any current OS are #1) quality device drivers for darn near every imaginable combination of hardware, and #2) a commitment to providing inexpensive, powerful development tools to the small- and mid- level programming shops. Which is why I never invested much time beyond first looks and did not buy the OS/2 Smartsuite.
Of course, it hasn't helped since that OS/2 was so heavily X86 that for all practical purposes it couldn't be ported, or that Big Blue couldn't seem to market their way out of a paper bag back then.
With an acknowledgement that I might be in a small but vocal minority, in my case, you'd be wrong. If IBM released Smartsuite on Linux, I'd be online buying something like 30 seconds after it became available. In fact, I would contribute development time to porting it, because next to the M$ hegenomy, Smartsuite has consistently been a good choice for many of my smaller clients.
Most of whom I would like to migrate to Linux, (preferably before what little MS support is left for the Win9X operating system completely evaporates), but without requiring them to endure the heavy pains of relearning a new app suite. Aside from which I would love to have a Linux, Lotus-script enabled version of Approach for my family to use and learn on.
That, a corporate-grade email app, and end-to-end MIDI capability would be enough for me to banish all MS software from my home machine permanently.
Having not done feature articles, I don't know what the standard, legal practice is. Maybe the writer shouldn't get paid again as part of a compilation/web site, etc., maybe they should. I do know that if I were approached to do a feature article, I would make damn sure that the re-publishing rights were spelled out explicitly in the contract.
That said, I am more concerned with how this case has been/will be scoped by the courts because of the potential spillover effects. Normally when a writer's work has been out of print for a specific period of time, the rights to their work revert to him/her. Two current technologically based scenarios threaten this reversion process: publishing on demand (by which a company can print and sell just one book within the specified period, thereby retaining the rights), and the web, which in essence can be used to keep something "published" for years, merely by keeping an active link to it available to the outside world.
Then if someone does a CD-compilation from the web site, the work was never out of print, so the author is essentially still tied to whatever contract they negotiated up front. My guess is that 9 out of 10 times (if not 99 out of 100) the entity that is probably going to get screwed in such a scenario is the author.
On the other hand, a decision favoring the author(s) too much isn't necessarily good, because of the hated Sonny Bono extensions to the original and renewable copyright periods, potential tie ups via the DCMA (put encoding on the CD-ROM, there goes fair use...)
Please, feel free to take both or either sides of the discussion, because I for one really need to learn what the best possible decisions in this case would look like.
Secondarily, and a bit more in detail: aside from not having to have a whole farm of servers, what are the upside and downside issues of running multiple images on one machine? Similarly, could multiple images of a BSDs (Net, Free, etc.) be run on a z/OS or 390 machine?
Not a bad idea, even if they do charge. I am just wondering about the cost overhead of doing the same thing for free.
If OpenIP is interested in doing this, it would not be that hard to add a similar database to the IP.Com database, and I am sure that the fellow in charge would welcome the assistance. (I will be emailing him offline with the suggestion, btw.)
The real work would probably be in convincing the USPTO that this new database would also be worth consulting.
What do you think? Would this be worth pursuing via this site?
Anybody besides me see the 1996 movie Dragonheart, which included Drago, a CGI generated dragon voiced by Shawn Connery?
Funny, but Draco seemed like a lead character in that story...