Try to consider the possibility that your interpretation of facts tends to favor explanations which reflect well upon America.
I don't have any illusions that the US is perfect. The problems of the prisons is primarily cultural -- too many poor people choose crime rather than embrace the opportunities that are open to them. I don't see this as a problem of the US government, but a problem of the culture. Take black culture -- the "black leaders" exploit their own people by telling them that "the man" will never let them get ahead. Their only chance is to give power to these so-called "leaders". Meanwhile, they don't bother to become educated because they think it won't do any good, and they think it's "selling out".
I will blame the US government in one way: welfare has totally destroyed the work ethic of the poor. The "great experiment" has done more damage to the culture than anything our enemies could have done.
If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.
In fact, that's probably way high. I bet if you count only the people who have at least 1 album, the average is only 20 albums. If you count people who never buy music, it's probably much lower than that.
At an average of 8 songs per CD, 6500 MP3s would be over 800 albums (about $10K worth). That's a lot of albums. If you say you have 1875 albums, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean that 800 isn't a lot. I would say that's way above average.
If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.
was able to load all 6500 of my MP3s on my home network in just a few minutes.
Since we know that all MP3s are only backup copies of what we have already purchased, I'm sure that Taco actually paid for all that music and the musicians were properly paid for their effort.:)
I know this because Slashdot has always told me that Napster et al actually increases music purchases.
Neither was Osama bin Laden when the CIA was funding him.
I see this kind of stuff a lot, and I think it's very short-sighted. We can't look in our crystal ball and see "terrorist mastermind" in his future. Second, there is a reason we funded them: to stop Soviet expansionism. They might not have been "nice people" back then, but the Soviets was one of the most opprossive regimes in the history of the world.
If America is such a paradigm of freedom, why does it have the largest prison population in the world.
Because we are not oppressive, and grant our citizens more freedom. Think about this way: how much crime do you think there is when the punishment for stealing is cutting off a hand? Not to mention the public executions (which helps keep the prison population down).
The accusations against the US might be a completely unjustified pack of lies, but you should at least know what the accusations are. You cannot possibly refute them if they are not even mentioned.
I don't see how its helpful to list all the lies that circulate through the Islamic countries. That's just a symptom of the fact that they hate us, and I'm more interested in the underlying reasons than to just deal with some random ignorant rumor. For example, how do you refute the "4000 Jews were absent for the WTC because they got a 'phone call'?". It's absurd and illogical.
I try and refute guys like SubtleNuance, but their hatred of the US is so deep that there is no way to logically refute anything. You have to fix the underlying problems before logic can take effect.
I can pretty much discredit your entire post by focusing on this one sentence:
The American media will be more than happy to call the Kurdish rebels in Iraq freedom fighters.
It's very clear you did not live in the US during the Gulf War. The major news media was VERY biased against the gulf war. I still remember all the rhetoric: "the military has order 10,000 body bags", "The soldiers of Iraq are battle-hardened veterans, we are heading into another vietnam", on and on.
If you think that the American national media is biased toward "America is always right", you have ABSOLUTELY no clue about the culture within the national media.
The national media is normally unbelievably biased and cynical of the military. In this particular case, however, it was an attack directly ON THEM. They finally see that there really are bad guys in the world, there really are fanatics who want to kill them -- personally. They all know that they could have been up in the world trade center that day, just like anyone here in the country, and in fact, just like anyone in the world (who lives in a country where they are free to travel, that is).
That's why so many people are behind this war. No one is safe when you have religious fanatics who will kill any number of people in order remake the world into radical Islam.
Maybe you should consider that it's YOU who don't get it, rather than 90% of the rest of the world. A war will be fought. We can either fight it now when our enemies are weak, or we can fight WW/III in the future when bin Laden takes over the middle east.
the Arabs hate america because its 'free'.. yeah thats it.. they hate your 'democracy'.
If that's what all you took from reading eight carefully researched articles (and one opinion piece), many written by apparently an arab (Fareed Zakaria), then you may consider that proof that you are unable to accept anything that conflicts with your preconceived ideas, and in fact, you will rewrite whatever you read to match what you think it's saying, rather than read what it's actually saying.
You'll note that the articles DO NOT make the US blameless, but it does try to look at the cultural problems.
I think what really bothers you is that it tries to actually find the roots of the problems of the middle east in the middle east itself, rather than just ignorantly and simplistically blaming the US for every single problem.
Considering all the historical perspective present in the series of articles, the cultural history, and the fact that it's not just a one-sided blame-a-thon, I think it's highly probable that the arab that wrote the articles has more of a clue about these things than you do.
I am astounded by how threatened you seem to be by this article ("fucking ethnocentric garbage, language and themes right out of plutocratic propaganda"!?). Just out of curiosity, are you open at all to accepting any information that conflicts with what you "already know"?
There just aren't that many people who care about e-mail encryption. I understand all the arguments and the technology, and *I* don't care about it. I can only imagine what someone who doesn't know about the issues thinks about it.
And frankly, I wouldn't care about sending all my mail on postcards without envelopes. I can't even think of any personal mail that I would care about some anonymous postal worker reading, even if I thought postal workers sit around reading letters that zoom by. Except for maybe things with credit card numbers or bank numbers, but I wouldn't send thinks like that through e-mail anyway (and I venture to say that most people are probably savvy enough to know that's bad as well).
My understanding of the helium effect is that the lighter gas coming from your lungs causes the gas to go past your vocal cords faster, thus causing a higher pitched sound. This is in contrast to how a speaker works, which is to vibrate a cone at a certain rate, independent of the surrounding gas.
Would it? The sound waves might possibly travel faster through helium because they don't have to vibrate as much mass, but would it change the pitch? The pitch is the vibrational velocity of the medium. I don't see how just a lighter medium would cause the pitch to rise.
Or to put it another way, the cone of the speaker is moving the gas at a certain rate. What would cause the gas to accelerate to a different rate?
Now, it's possible that you would get better high range out of the speaker in a lighter medium, because the speaker doesn't have to move as much mass. Just like I can vibrate a feather about the same rate as a small rock, but I couldn't vibrate a 5 pound weight very quickly.
If these inventors have some way to make a balloon as rigid as 3/4" birch plywood with closely spaced transverse braces, the article doesn't mention it.
I think most of us probably have an image of some cheap inflatable pool float, but we don't really know what materials this is made out of or what pressure it is inflated to. Put it this way, what if the enclosure were made of tire rubber and inflated to 250 pounds pressure, with cross braces etc? It would probably be pretty rigid.
Now, I doubt that scenerio that I just laid out would give you any weight or cost savings, but it's an idea of how this might go if that used more interesting materials.:)
I agree with you. It's a question of trust. I normally look at traditional news sources with grains of salt, but I trust very little information that I get on the net that isn't from the traditional news sources.
One thing that net has allowed is for the traditional news sources to be able to go even more in-depth than they do in their print pubs.
I really want to put in a plug for the link I have in my.sig. It's a Newsweek series of articles that are just really excellent as far as giving in-depth information about the Middle East. Why do they hate us?. Truly a great piece of well-researched journalism.
P.S. Someone told me they had trouble getting to the site. I suspect that certain Netscape versions may have problems. It's worth firing up IE to check it out.
The file was not found, even after searching on any extensions to the file name. The file does not exist or is read-protected.
Hmmm; weird. I tried it again, and it works for me. I tweaked the link a little; try it again. If that doesn't work, try going to www.newsweek.com, and then click on the big "why do they hate us" graphic. That should take you to the link that I posted, which is http://www.msnbc.com/news/nw-101501issue_front.asp.
Let me know what happens... I'm curious if you still have problems. I'd really like for people to read that Newsweek article. It's a great in-depth analysis of the cultural problems surrounding the Middle East.
To find longitude and latitude, you need 1) an accurate clock, 2) a sextant, 3) a book of astronomical tables, and 4) a calculator (or more tables). Given that you need to carry all that, I think carrying the GPS is a little easier.
Apparently someone didn't watch the movie "Longitude". Pretty good movie, actually.:)
A five-minute reading of any basic book on Astronomy will teach you how to find your location anywhere on earth, day or night.
If it's that easy, I'm sure you wouldn't mind explaining it to us. Please demonstrate how to find longitude and latitude with just astronomical knowledge, both night and day.
It's sheer nonsense for the only known characteristic of a thing to be that it is entirely unknown. If that's the only characteristic you have, you are essentially just as easily talking about an "unie" or any totally other undefined term.
Well, the nature of the definition of the word "God" is pretty slippery. I'm using the word as its generally accepted in the Judeo-Christian sense of "that intelligence which created the universe" or "that intelligence which runs the universe". In other words, was the universe created by a self-aware, intelligent entity, or was the universe made by "natural" processes? I think this definition covers what most people think of when they think of God; i.e., the clockmaker God.
That's the first fundamental question, and then the further questions are, if there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe, what is the nature of that being? Is "God" really just a bunch of programmers running an AI simulation? That scenerio would fit the image of an all-powerful, all-knowing God.
Sure, you could just define "God" as "that process, natural or otherwise, that created the universe", but that wouldn't be very interesting.:)
So my point is that the question of whether there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe is unknowable, because we are limited by our senses to the subjective reality of the universe. It seems to me that to "prove" God, you would have to be able to exist in the same place as God and look down on our subjective reality, like an AI in a computer program being able to "leave" the program and enter our world, and view the program he left. By being able to sense his own universe from beyond it, that would give him the perspective to know the nature of it.
Does it make sense that we can't ultimately know objective truth while we live inside that which we are trying to analyze? I can see the logic, but it's hard to describe in this Slashdot post.:)
Now, it's possible that after we die, we may get that "ultimate proof", as described by the Judeo-Christian faiths. In that sense, I suppose it's possible that it's "knowable". But given our current senses, and our limitations imposed by subjective reality, I don't think that the question of the existence of God is knowable.
Of course, by this argument, the existence and nature of anything is unknowable. Substitute "my mom", "slashdot", or "Osama bin Laden" for "God" in the above post and it remains just as true.
Ultimately, yes, everything is unknowable except your own existence. But there is a difference between knowledge of Slashdot and knowledge of God. Most day to day knowledge is knowledge about subjective reality, that is, the reality that we assume based on our senses. That is the grand assumption that makes living day to day possible.
God is a different deal. God is dealing with objective reality, that is, what's really going on, rather than just what we assume is going on. When you start trying to discover what's really going on, then you are attempting to go beyond what is or isn't being fed into your senses, and thus are trapped having to deal with the fact that everything is ultimately unknowable.
That is racism. Every arab is NOT a potential terrorist.
In any case, it's irrelevent anyway. It's like saying for every Nazi we kill, we just create more Nazis. That might or might not be true, but it's irrelevent. You have to keep killing them until there aren't any left, because they are the aggressors. They have set the rules, which is that we either kill them, or they kill us. I personally am not going to die just so they can be happy that they have found a scapegoat for their own problems.
usualy we do not do it because we are sooo convinced about it but because we think that the rules are good for our society.
To address another one of your points, I've often thought that I would like to see a "religion" without God. I see a lot of benefit to have a place (such as a church) where moral and ethical issues are discussed. That and the fellowship are one of the positive aspects of religion.
If we could only get rid of the supernatural stuff out of religion, it would be great.
Try and think of it like this: the Weak Atheist does not believe in the existence of God whereas the Strong Atheist position believes in the non-existence of God.
I don't really see the difference as far as the words go, but I see where you (and others) are going, and I have to admit there are a couple of categories that aren't really covered by the conventional terms:
1. The belief that the probability of God is very low
2. The belief that there is insufficient evidence at this time to believe in God, but am willing to review further evidence.
I believe these two stands do not fit in with the conventional definitions of Atheism and Agnosticism, although a lot of people probably latch onto one or the other word because there really aren't any words for these beliefs.
For the record, I am agnostic (the belief in God is unknowable, for proof see this post), and also believe in #1. I suppose everyone believes #2 to some extent, since if you die and appear before God, that's pretty strong evidence.:)
But it's worth noting that non-belief in, or even denial of, gods does NOT equal claiming that one knows that no gods exist.
While I think my definitions are accurate (as definitions for these things go), I have to admit that I don't have a good word for "belief that the probability of God is extremely low". I think people latch onto Atheist for that, but that really doesn't cover it. Agnosticism doesn't cover it, either. I embrace Agnosticism, but I also embrace "low probability". I think we need a new word.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Try to consider the possibility that your interpretation of facts tends to favor explanations which reflect well upon America.
I don't have any illusions that the US is perfect. The problems of the prisons is primarily cultural -- too many poor people choose crime rather than embrace the opportunities that are open to them. I don't see this as a problem of the US government, but a problem of the culture. Take black culture -- the "black leaders" exploit their own people by telling them that "the man" will never let them get ahead. Their only chance is to give power to these so-called "leaders". Meanwhile, they don't bother to become educated because they think it won't do any good, and they think it's "selling out".
I will blame the US government in one way: welfare has totally destroyed the work ethic of the poor. The "great experiment" has done more damage to the culture than anything our enemies could have done.
If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.
In fact, that's probably way high. I bet if you count only the people who have at least 1 album, the average is only 20 albums. If you count people who never buy music, it's probably much lower than that.
At an average of 8 songs per CD, 6500 MP3s would be over 800 albums (about $10K worth). That's a lot of albums. If you say you have 1875 albums, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean that 800 isn't a lot. I would say that's way above average.
If I had to take a guess, I would say the average person has 50-100 albums.
was able to load all 6500 of my MP3s on my home network in just a few minutes.
Since we know that all MP3s are only backup copies of what we have already purchased, I'm sure that Taco actually paid for all that music and the musicians were properly paid for their effort. :)
I know this because Slashdot has always told me that Napster et al actually increases music purchases.
Neither was Osama bin Laden when the CIA was funding him.
I see this kind of stuff a lot, and I think it's very short-sighted. We can't look in our crystal ball and see "terrorist mastermind" in his future. Second, there is a reason we funded them: to stop Soviet expansionism. They might not have been "nice people" back then, but the Soviets was one of the most opprossive regimes in the history of the world.
If America is such a paradigm of freedom, why does it have the largest prison population in the world.
Because we are not oppressive, and grant our citizens more freedom. Think about this way: how much crime do you think there is when the punishment for stealing is cutting off a hand? Not to mention the public executions (which helps keep the prison population down).
The accusations against the US might be a completely unjustified pack of lies, but you should at least know what the accusations are. You cannot possibly refute them if they are not even mentioned.
I don't see how its helpful to list all the lies that circulate through the Islamic countries. That's just a symptom of the fact that they hate us, and I'm more interested in the underlying reasons than to just deal with some random ignorant rumor. For example, how do you refute the "4000 Jews were absent for the WTC because they got a 'phone call'?". It's absurd and illogical.
I try and refute guys like SubtleNuance, but their hatred of the US is so deep that there is no way to logically refute anything. You have to fix the underlying problems before logic can take effect.
I can pretty much discredit your entire post by focusing on this one sentence:
The American media will be more than happy to call the Kurdish rebels in Iraq freedom fighters.
It's very clear you did not live in the US during the Gulf War. The major news media was VERY biased against the gulf war. I still remember all the rhetoric: "the military has order 10,000 body bags", "The soldiers of Iraq are battle-hardened veterans, we are heading into another vietnam", on and on.
If you think that the American national media is biased toward "America is always right", you have ABSOLUTELY no clue about the culture within the national media.
The national media is normally unbelievably biased and cynical of the military. In this particular case, however, it was an attack directly ON THEM. They finally see that there really are bad guys in the world, there really are fanatics who want to kill them -- personally. They all know that they could have been up in the world trade center that day, just like anyone here in the country, and in fact, just like anyone in the world (who lives in a country where they are free to travel, that is).
That's why so many people are behind this war. No one is safe when you have religious fanatics who will kill any number of people in order remake the world into radical Islam.
Maybe you should consider that it's YOU who don't get it, rather than 90% of the rest of the world. A war will be fought. We can either fight it now when our enemies are weak, or we can fight WW/III in the future when bin Laden takes over the middle east.
the Arabs hate america because its 'free'.. yeah thats it.. they hate your 'democracy'.
If that's what all you took from reading eight carefully researched articles (and one opinion piece), many written by apparently an arab (Fareed Zakaria), then you may consider that proof that you are unable to accept anything that conflicts with your preconceived ideas, and in fact, you will rewrite whatever you read to match what you think it's saying, rather than read what it's actually saying.
You'll note that the articles DO NOT make the US blameless, but it does try to look at the cultural problems.
I think what really bothers you is that it tries to actually find the roots of the problems of the middle east in the middle east itself, rather than just ignorantly and simplistically blaming the US for every single problem.
Considering all the historical perspective present in the series of articles, the cultural history, and the fact that it's not just a one-sided blame-a-thon, I think it's highly probable that the arab that wrote the articles has more of a clue about these things than you do.
I am astounded by how threatened you seem to be by this article ("fucking ethnocentric garbage, language and themes right out of plutocratic propaganda"!?). Just out of curiosity, are you open at all to accepting any information that conflicts with what you "already know"?
There just aren't that many people who care about e-mail encryption. I understand all the arguments and the technology, and *I* don't care about it. I can only imagine what someone who doesn't know about the issues thinks about it.
And frankly, I wouldn't care about sending all my mail on postcards without envelopes. I can't even think of any personal mail that I would care about some anonymous postal worker reading, even if I thought postal workers sit around reading letters that zoom by. Except for maybe things with credit card numbers or bank numbers, but I wouldn't send thinks like that through e-mail anyway (and I venture to say that most people are probably savvy enough to know that's bad as well).
My understanding of the helium effect is that the lighter gas coming from your lungs causes the gas to go past your vocal cords faster, thus causing a higher pitched sound. This is in contrast to how a speaker works, which is to vibrate a cone at a certain rate, independent of the surrounding gas.
Would it? The sound waves might possibly travel faster through helium because they don't have to vibrate as much mass, but would it change the pitch? The pitch is the vibrational velocity of the medium. I don't see how just a lighter medium would cause the pitch to rise.
Or to put it another way, the cone of the speaker is moving the gas at a certain rate. What would cause the gas to accelerate to a different rate?
Now, it's possible that you would get better high range out of the speaker in a lighter medium, because the speaker doesn't have to move as much mass. Just like I can vibrate a feather about the same rate as a small rock, but I couldn't vibrate a 5 pound weight very quickly.
If these inventors have some way to make a balloon as rigid as 3/4" birch plywood with closely spaced transverse braces, the article doesn't mention it.
I think most of us probably have an image of some cheap inflatable pool float, but we don't really know what materials this is made out of or what pressure it is inflated to. Put it this way, what if the enclosure were made of tire rubber and inflated to 250 pounds pressure, with cross braces etc? It would probably be pretty rigid.
Now, I doubt that scenerio that I just laid out would give you any weight or cost savings, but it's an idea of how this might go if that used more interesting materials. :)
If you have trouble with Alta Vista's translation, or just want an alternative translation, you might also try Google's Translation.
I agree with you. It's a question of trust. I normally look at traditional news sources with grains of salt, but I trust very little information that I get on the net that isn't from the traditional news sources.
One thing that net has allowed is for the traditional news sources to be able to go even more in-depth than they do in their print pubs.
I really want to put in a plug for the link I have in my .sig. It's a Newsweek series of articles that are just really excellent as far as giving in-depth information about the Middle East. Why do they hate us?. Truly a great piece of well-researched journalism.
P.S. Someone told me they had trouble getting to the site. I suspect that certain Netscape versions may have problems. It's worth firing up IE to check it out.
The file was not found, even after searching on any extensions to the file name. The file does not exist or is read-protected.
Hmmm; weird. I tried it again, and it works for me. I tweaked the link a little; try it again. If that doesn't work, try going to www.newsweek.com, and then click on the big "why do they hate us" graphic. That should take you to the link that I posted, which is http://www.msnbc.com/news/nw-101501issue_front.asp .
Let me know what happens... I'm curious if you still have problems. I'd really like for people to read that Newsweek article. It's a great in-depth analysis of the cultural problems surrounding the Middle East.
Ah well, I'll answer for you: you can't.
To find longitude and latitude, you need 1) an accurate clock, 2) a sextant, 3) a book of astronomical tables, and 4) a calculator (or more tables). Given that you need to carry all that, I think carrying the GPS is a little easier.
Apparently someone didn't watch the movie "Longitude". Pretty good movie, actually. :)
A five-minute reading of any basic book on Astronomy will teach you how to find your location anywhere on earth, day or night.
If it's that easy, I'm sure you wouldn't mind explaining it to us. Please demonstrate how to find longitude and latitude with just astronomical knowledge, both night and day.
It's sheer nonsense for the only known characteristic of a thing to be that it is entirely unknown. If that's the only characteristic you have, you are essentially just as easily talking about an "unie" or any totally other undefined term.
Well, the nature of the definition of the word "God" is pretty slippery. I'm using the word as its generally accepted in the Judeo-Christian sense of "that intelligence which created the universe" or "that intelligence which runs the universe". In other words, was the universe created by a self-aware, intelligent entity, or was the universe made by "natural" processes? I think this definition covers what most people think of when they think of God; i.e., the clockmaker God.
That's the first fundamental question, and then the further questions are, if there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe, what is the nature of that being? Is "God" really just a bunch of programmers running an AI simulation? That scenerio would fit the image of an all-powerful, all-knowing God.
Sure, you could just define "God" as "that process, natural or otherwise, that created the universe", but that wouldn't be very interesting. :)
So my point is that the question of whether there is a self-aware, intelligent being behind the universe is unknowable, because we are limited by our senses to the subjective reality of the universe. It seems to me that to "prove" God, you would have to be able to exist in the same place as God and look down on our subjective reality, like an AI in a computer program being able to "leave" the program and enter our world, and view the program he left. By being able to sense his own universe from beyond it, that would give him the perspective to know the nature of it.
Does it make sense that we can't ultimately know objective truth while we live inside that which we are trying to analyze? I can see the logic, but it's hard to describe in this Slashdot post. :)
Now, it's possible that after we die, we may get that "ultimate proof", as described by the Judeo-Christian faiths. In that sense, I suppose it's possible that it's "knowable". But given our current senses, and our limitations imposed by subjective reality, I don't think that the question of the existence of God is knowable.
RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives.
According to pricewatch, a 40 gig hard drive is $78. Let's say $120 for a good one. That makes RAM 20 times more expensive, at $60/gig.
It's still really cheap, but let's not get crazy. :)
Where the hell are my presents, then? I guess I must be on the "naughty" list. :)
Of course, by this argument, the existence and nature of anything is unknowable. Substitute "my mom", "slashdot", or "Osama bin Laden" for "God" in the above post and it remains just as true.
Ultimately, yes, everything is unknowable except your own existence. But there is a difference between knowledge of Slashdot and knowledge of God. Most day to day knowledge is knowledge about subjective reality, that is, the reality that we assume based on our senses. That is the grand assumption that makes living day to day possible.
God is a different deal. God is dealing with objective reality, that is, what's really going on, rather than just what we assume is going on. When you start trying to discover what's really going on, then you are attempting to go beyond what is or isn't being fed into your senses, and thus are trapped having to deal with the fact that everything is ultimately unknowable.
That is racism. Every arab is NOT a potential terrorist.
In any case, it's irrelevent anyway. It's like saying for every Nazi we kill, we just create more Nazis. That might or might not be true, but it's irrelevent. You have to keep killing them until there aren't any left, because they are the aggressors. They have set the rules, which is that we either kill them, or they kill us. I personally am not going to die just so they can be happy that they have found a scapegoat for their own problems.
usualy we do not do it because we are sooo convinced about it but because we think that the rules are good for our society.
To address another one of your points, I've often thought that I would like to see a "religion" without God. I see a lot of benefit to have a place (such as a church) where moral and ethical issues are discussed. That and the fellowship are one of the positive aspects of religion.
If we could only get rid of the supernatural stuff out of religion, it would be great.
Well, I'm not trolling, so I must just be really stupid. :)
Try and think of it like this: the Weak Atheist does not believe in the existence of God whereas the Strong Atheist position believes in the non-existence of God.
I don't really see the difference as far as the words go, but I see where you (and others) are going, and I have to admit there are a couple of categories that aren't really covered by the conventional terms:
1. The belief that the probability of God is very low
2. The belief that there is insufficient evidence at this time to believe in God, but am willing to review further evidence.
I believe these two stands do not fit in with the conventional definitions of Atheism and Agnosticism, although a lot of people probably latch onto one or the other word because there really aren't any words for these beliefs.
For the record, I am agnostic (the belief in God is unknowable, for proof see this post), and also believe in #1. I suppose everyone believes #2 to some extent, since if you die and appear before God, that's pretty strong evidence. :)
But it's worth noting that non-belief in, or even denial of, gods does NOT equal claiming that one knows that no gods exist.
While I think my definitions are accurate (as definitions for these things go), I have to admit that I don't have a good word for "belief that the probability of God is extremely low". I think people latch onto Atheist for that, but that really doesn't cover it. Agnosticism doesn't cover it, either. I embrace Agnosticism, but I also embrace "low probability". I think we need a new word. :)