"Least soviet" yes. Dissolving government twice, once to prevent a vote and the other to avoid discussing a controversial issue. Cutting a deal with Google to allow the Speech From the Throne to be publicly broadcast but NOT the opposition's response. The G20 debacle.
hate to burst your bubble but my campus uses Moodle. We still have campuses and meatspace classes and whatnot. Moodle is a tool, not a replacement for schools.
what is that an alternate interpretation OF? My statement was that no emergency service should be opt in by the very fact that their service can be described as for "emergencies". I said finances should not be a factor at all. Police can't go on strike (they can work to rule where they don't hand out tickets or fines but they can't just NOT arrest people who are committing felonies) and emergency rooms can't refuse to treat someone who gets sent there just because that person can't pay. What if someone had still been in that building and the family were too disoriented/uninformed to realize? (their son had his girlfriend over or something but passed out from smoke inhalation and was carried out before he could tell anyone for example)
You can't compare the fire department to an insurance company because insurance companies don't provide a service which can mean the immediate difference between life and death or the establishment of the fundamental rule of law in our society.
I forgot to pay my taxes on time this year, and when the police who they fund saw my getting mugged they just sat there and let it happen. The fire department is an emergency service, they should not have a "we won't help you" option and their service should not be opt in.
You go to a friends house/the local library/an internet cafe. Download the tools, copy them onto a zip drive and go home.
You're screwed, but since the only options are the bot takes you down and the ISP takes you offline or the bot takes you down then spreads to everyone else, I'm ok with that. The idea is to prevent large swaths of the internet from getting infected.
Unless the ISP is now sending out gigs and gigs of spam email and viruses, no they aren't.
The people in charge of the roads should be allowed to take you off the road it if your vehicle has been installed with a jackhammer on the back that tears up the road where ever you go until such time as said jackhammer is removed. "but how will I drive to the repair shop to have it removed?" you ask. Hire a tow truck, the internet version of which is "use the school's computer or an internet cafe to download the things you need onto a flash drive"
You're missing the "help out of the party closer to their platform" bit. The chances of a third party under your current system, getting enough votes to win is not, to most people, worth the chance of the party they LEAST want to win getting into power. Unless you can expect at least some chance of your party getting at least 33.34% percent of the vote by voting for your party you're not actually helping anyone except the party LEAST similar to your ideals because you're giving up the opportunity to vote for whoever is most likely to stop them. If you hate both the dems and reps equally than fine, don't vote. But as long as you hate one even SLIGHTLY more than the other your system rewards not voting 3rd party.
But in Canada we have a system where each riding you win is worth a seat for your party and the PM is the leader of whichever party gets the most seats. In the states it's a winner take all deal. Whichever party has the MOST votes gets their guy in charge. Independents and third parties make sense for American Congress and Senate races, but for the presidential race you're just going to hurt whatever major party your policies are closest to (ie, if a third party liberal candidate gets 10% of the US vote he's actually helping the republicans because that 10% is mostly coming out of the democratic candidates voting base.)
well one reason is plumbing. Even in Canada our plumbing is done in imperial for legacy reasons. Same with carpentry. All old pipes and beams and joints (so the entire sewer system) is imperial.
yeah, and for casual conversation and meteorology in the states I'm sure it does a bang up job. But my point is that for an article posted on a site with an international audience or any article dealing with scientific experiments and studies it's somewhat anachronistic. Like describing the content of a graduated cylinder in pints.
Wii has sold more units but 360 is the most used. Basically, a lot of people have the wii sitting there collecting dust. Also, the wii isn't really a competitor of the 360. The overlap between their target markets compared to the 360 and PS3 is minimal.
Those people tend to be corporate CEOs. I consider them less obnoxious and more flagrantly dangerous. The way I see it, it goes:
Extreme pirates (I should ever have to pay for anything in a digital format because copying doesn't remove a physical copy.): Annoying, obnoxious, entitled, making it worse for the rest of us.
Extreme IP trolls (Everything should be licenced and you can't own a copy of any of our stuff): Dangerous, powerful, not very common on/. so not annoying in/. comment sections.
Everyone else: Assuming anyone more "pro freedom" than them is an extreme pirate and anyone more "pro right to profit" is an extreme IP troll, causing every discussion on the topic to immediately devolve into strawmen and nameslinging. None of which matters because the issue is completely gray and up to personal interpretation to the same degree as politics so you aren't going to change anyone's mind even if you COULD have a civil discussion.
As someone who isn't American I can't even do that. My entire knowledge of Farenheit is that 0 C is around 32 F. and 451 F is where paper burns. Also the conversion rate is like TempInCelcius * (9/5) -32 or something. It's really a terrible system to use for a scienctific article.
Watch this discussion get rolling. Here on/. they seem to be a pretty decent sized chunk of the population and certainly not insignificant. They feel that as long as they make a copy of the work they no longer owe the person who invested the time and effort into creating it anything ever.
but blaming the divorce rate on lawyers is ridiculous. The logical connection is tenuous at best. It's a shift in the societal acceptance of divorce and the increase in double income families not really having time for each other anymore. I have never seen an ad saying "not happy with you marriage? Come see Lionel Hutz for a free consultation about possibly getting a divorce!"
Lawyers profit off almost everything. Crime? Requires a defense and a prosecution. Copyright law? lawyers profit. Drunk driving? lawyers. Buying a house? Someone has to write up and deal with the property law. Anything that society has rules for, lawyers profit off of. If you allow connections as tenuous as the GP is making then you might as well allow your example as well.
Almost all my friends own 360s. I know one guy with a PS3. Sales figures indicate this is the normal trend. PS3 may be prettier, but I'm pretty sure 360 is still the king of the hill on the current console market. I don't think Microsoft are really shaking in their boots and bitter over the PS3.
they can't. You are a victim of ambiguous phraseology. I initially had the same problem. What they're saying is that even if you take the teens who use phones at all into account (with 0 texts each) the overall rate per teen is going up. It's like saying "the rate of firefox use is going up (even including people who don't own computers)" they're not saying people without computers are using firefox, they're saying even if you take the nonusers into account when determining what percentage of people use firefox, the total rate is still rising.
If a religion has prayer then is almost certainly has somewhere in its holy texts that prayers will be answered which implies a success rate above chance. This is a testable claim. A religion who's deity did not care would not have prayer. It wouldn't make any sense to.
When I argue against the existence of God I am talking about established belief systems. While you can argue that there might be some higher intelligence than us that isn't what religions say. Religions set out specific parameters regarding the nature of that higher power, the nature of humans, of history, of reality. THOSE are what I would argue against.
Saying "maybe there's is a higher intelligence and you can't definitively prove otherwise so nyah" is not science, it is philosophy. Meaningless philosophy. And it is not what atheists (I know personally) have problems with. The claim that "The Christian God as described in the New International Version Bible circa 2002 exists exactly as there stated" or "Allah as described in the Koran exists exactly as there stated" is what we take issue with.
I do not believe in any god I have had described to me because I have not seen or heard of any convincing evidence for it. In weighing the evidence I have not found significant reason to believe any of the claims being made are true and if they honestly cannot find a way to prove any of their beliefs scientifically because their god has so little effect on the world that it cannot be measured then their god either doesn't exist or is too ineffectual to matter.
I believe in higher intelligence because I am not so arrogant as to believe there is lower life than up but not higher. After all, the cells that make up our own bodies have nuclei which is like a primitive brain, what's to say we aren't "cells" of something bigger? There's no way you can prove me wrong nor (I strongly suspect) and way you can prove me right. You can't prove the nonexistence of ANYTHING. You can't prove unicorns don't exist but we just can't tell because we don't believe strongly enough or that pixies don't hide your car keys. This doesn't mean that everybody who doesn't believe in those things has to prove them wrong to justify, or even bother entertaining a reason behind, their disbelief in them any more than I have to justify or even bother entertaining the reasons behind my disbelief any given faith's unscientific hypothesis. The burden of proof is on the person making incredible claims about the nature of reality.
Do you have evidence that the creation myths were meant as parables? Even today there are people who believe them to be literal interpretations, what makes you think that it was different then? The bible especially has 2 creation stories, one of which is a poem (and therefore has more leniency for interpretation) and the other is more likely mean to be a factual account.
Also your Shakespeare example only work for religions that don't believe that god is actively affecting the world today. Your CPU example confuses the machine that runs the program with the programmer and user of the simulation. God is only "the CPU" if you consider "God" nothing more than the engine that runs the universe and if you do then God is just a word for "the natural order of the universe" and therefore religiously meaningless. If you mean the user of the simulation then assuming the people in the simulation are sentient they can measurably observe any changes the user makes. There would be a sudden unaccountable change in the universe. Which could be measured.
There are certain religions that cannot be tested. Taosim, for example, makes nor real major claims about the nature of reality and has no deity. But any religion with a ceation myth and a deity who is supposed to be active in our world can be.
My problem with God coming down and saying "Hi" is that I find the odds of that happening to be statistically lower than the odds that I have gone insane. After all, people go insane all the time, but in pretty much every currently active faith God very rarely comes to earth.
Anybody who uses "outside the domain of science" to describe anything doesn't understand what science is. If there is a god, and it has any sort of measurable effect on the universe then it is within the domain of science. Because we can measure its effects. We can test various religions' prayers to see if they get answered at a rate different from chance.
We can compare various religions creation myths against what we know about the nature of reality.
Lots of things can be tested scientifically. If you give us a solid, meaningful definition of "god" then we can probably define a test for it.
You can't drink the water in the USA without getting horribly sick. Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.
Most Homo Sapiens cannot safely drink water that hasn't been purified anymore. Especially standing water. Flowing water is lower risk, but still not a guarantee.
Slashdot Mirror
"Least soviet" yes. Dissolving government twice, once to prevent a vote and the other to avoid discussing a controversial issue. Cutting a deal with Google to allow the Speech From the Throne to be publicly broadcast but NOT the opposition's response. The G20 debacle.
You stay open and fair Harper.
hate to burst your bubble but my campus uses Moodle. We still have campuses and meatspace classes and whatnot. Moodle is a tool, not a replacement for schools.
what is that an alternate interpretation OF? My statement was that no emergency service should be opt in by the very fact that their service can be described as for "emergencies". I said finances should not be a factor at all. Police can't go on strike (they can work to rule where they don't hand out tickets or fines but they can't just NOT arrest people who are committing felonies) and emergency rooms can't refuse to treat someone who gets sent there just because that person can't pay. What if someone had still been in that building and the family were too disoriented/uninformed to realize? (their son had his girlfriend over or something but passed out from smoke inhalation and was carried out before he could tell anyone for example)
You can't compare the fire department to an insurance company because insurance companies don't provide a service which can mean the immediate difference between life and death or the establishment of the fundamental rule of law in our society.
I forgot to pay my taxes on time this year, and when the police who they fund saw my getting mugged they just sat there and let it happen. The fire department is an emergency service, they should not have a "we won't help you" option and their service should not be opt in.
You go to a friends house/the local library/an internet cafe. Download the tools, copy them onto a zip drive and go home.
You're screwed, but since the only options are the bot takes you down and the ISP takes you offline or the bot takes you down then spreads to everyone else, I'm ok with that. The idea is to prevent large swaths of the internet from getting infected.
Unless the ISP is now sending out gigs and gigs of spam email and viruses, no they aren't.
The people in charge of the roads should be allowed to take you off the road it if your vehicle has been installed with a jackhammer on the back that tears up the road where ever you go until such time as said jackhammer is removed. "but how will I drive to the repair shop to have it removed?" you ask. Hire a tow truck, the internet version of which is "use the school's computer or an internet cafe to download the things you need onto a flash drive"
You're missing the "help out of the party closer to their platform" bit. The chances of a third party under your current system, getting enough votes to win is not, to most people, worth the chance of the party they LEAST want to win getting into power. Unless you can expect at least some chance of your party getting at least 33.34% percent of the vote by voting for your party you're not actually helping anyone except the party LEAST similar to your ideals because you're giving up the opportunity to vote for whoever is most likely to stop them. If you hate both the dems and reps equally than fine, don't vote. But as long as you hate one even SLIGHTLY more than the other your system rewards not voting 3rd party.
Right, because people only count if they were born in the USA.
But in Canada we have a system where each riding you win is worth a seat for your party and the PM is the leader of whichever party gets the most seats. In the states it's a winner take all deal. Whichever party has the MOST votes gets their guy in charge. Independents and third parties make sense for American Congress and Senate races, but for the presidential race you're just going to hurt whatever major party your policies are closest to (ie, if a third party liberal candidate gets 10% of the US vote he's actually helping the republicans because that 10% is mostly coming out of the democratic candidates voting base.)
well one reason is plumbing. Even in Canada our plumbing is done in imperial for legacy reasons. Same with carpentry. All old pipes and beams and joints (so the entire sewer system) is imperial.
yeah, and for casual conversation and meteorology in the states I'm sure it does a bang up job. But my point is that for an article posted on a site with an international audience or any article dealing with scientific experiments and studies it's somewhat anachronistic. Like describing the content of a graduated cylinder in pints.
Wii has sold more units but 360 is the most used. Basically, a lot of people have the wii sitting there collecting dust. Also, the wii isn't really a competitor of the 360. The overlap between their target markets compared to the 360 and PS3 is minimal.
well you know who profits off ads right? marketing companies. They are clearly the true cause of divorce.
Seriously though. The existence of that ad is upsetting.
Those people tend to be corporate CEOs. I consider them less obnoxious and more flagrantly dangerous. The way I see it, it goes:
Extreme pirates (I should ever have to pay for anything in a digital format because copying doesn't remove a physical copy.): Annoying, obnoxious, entitled, making it worse for the rest of us.
Extreme IP trolls (Everything should be licenced and you can't own a copy of any of our stuff): Dangerous, powerful, not very common on /. so not annoying in /. comment sections.
Everyone else: Assuming anyone more "pro freedom" than them is an extreme pirate and anyone more "pro right to profit" is an extreme IP troll, causing every discussion on the topic to immediately devolve into strawmen and nameslinging. None of which matters because the issue is completely gray and up to personal interpretation to the same degree as politics so you aren't going to change anyone's mind even if you COULD have a civil discussion.
As someone who isn't American I can't even do that. My entire knowledge of Farenheit is that 0 C is around 32 F. and 451 F is where paper burns. Also the conversion rate is like TempInCelcius * (9/5) -32 or something. It's really a terrible system to use for a scienctific article.
Watch this discussion get rolling. Here on /. they seem to be a pretty decent sized chunk of the population and certainly not insignificant. They feel that as long as they make a copy of the work they no longer owe the person who invested the time and effort into creating it anything ever.
but blaming the divorce rate on lawyers is ridiculous. The logical connection is tenuous at best. It's a shift in the societal acceptance of divorce and the increase in double income families not really having time for each other anymore. I have never seen an ad saying "not happy with you marriage? Come see Lionel Hutz for a free consultation about possibly getting a divorce!"
Lawyers profit off almost everything. Crime? Requires a defense and a prosecution. Copyright law? lawyers profit. Drunk driving? lawyers. Buying a house? Someone has to write up and deal with the property law. Anything that society has rules for, lawyers profit off of. If you allow connections as tenuous as the GP is making then you might as well allow your example as well.
Almost all my friends own 360s. I know one guy with a PS3. Sales figures indicate this is the normal trend. PS3 may be prettier, but I'm pretty sure 360 is still the king of the hill on the current console market. I don't think Microsoft are really shaking in their boots and bitter over the PS3.
they can't. You are a victim of ambiguous phraseology. I initially had the same problem. What they're saying is that even if you take the teens who use phones at all into account (with 0 texts each) the overall rate per teen is going up. It's like saying "the rate of firefox use is going up (even including people who don't own computers)" they're not saying people without computers are using firefox, they're saying even if you take the nonusers into account when determining what percentage of people use firefox, the total rate is still rising.
If a religion has prayer then is almost certainly has somewhere in its holy texts that prayers will be answered which implies a success rate above chance. This is a testable claim. A religion who's deity did not care would not have prayer. It wouldn't make any sense to.
When I argue against the existence of God I am talking about established belief systems. While you can argue that there might be some higher intelligence than us that isn't what religions say. Religions set out specific parameters regarding the nature of that higher power, the nature of humans, of history, of reality. THOSE are what I would argue against.
Saying "maybe there's is a higher intelligence and you can't definitively prove otherwise so nyah" is not science, it is philosophy. Meaningless philosophy. And it is not what atheists (I know personally) have problems with. The claim that "The Christian God as described in the New International Version Bible circa 2002 exists exactly as there stated" or "Allah as described in the Koran exists exactly as there stated" is what we take issue with.
I do not believe in any god I have had described to me because I have not seen or heard of any convincing evidence for it. In weighing the evidence I have not found significant reason to believe any of the claims being made are true and if they honestly cannot find a way to prove any of their beliefs scientifically because their god has so little effect on the world that it cannot be measured then their god either doesn't exist or is too ineffectual to matter.
I believe in higher intelligence because I am not so arrogant as to believe there is lower life than up but not higher. After all, the cells that make up our own bodies have nuclei which is like a primitive brain, what's to say we aren't "cells" of something bigger? There's no way you can prove me wrong nor (I strongly suspect) and way you can prove me right. You can't prove the nonexistence of ANYTHING. You can't prove unicorns don't exist but we just can't tell because we don't believe strongly enough or that pixies don't hide your car keys. This doesn't mean that everybody who doesn't believe in those things has to prove them wrong to justify, or even bother entertaining a reason behind, their disbelief in them any more than I have to justify or even bother entertaining the reasons behind my disbelief any given faith's unscientific hypothesis. The burden of proof is on the person making incredible claims about the nature of reality.
Do you have evidence that the creation myths were meant as parables? Even today there are people who believe them to be literal interpretations, what makes you think that it was different then? The bible especially has 2 creation stories, one of which is a poem (and therefore has more leniency for interpretation) and the other is more likely mean to be a factual account.
Also your Shakespeare example only work for religions that don't believe that god is actively affecting the world today. Your CPU example confuses the machine that runs the program with the programmer and user of the simulation. God is only "the CPU" if you consider "God" nothing more than the engine that runs the universe and if you do then God is just a word for "the natural order of the universe" and therefore religiously meaningless. If you mean the user of the simulation then assuming the people in the simulation are sentient they can measurably observe any changes the user makes. There would be a sudden unaccountable change in the universe. Which could be measured.
There are certain religions that cannot be tested. Taosim, for example, makes nor real major claims about the nature of reality and has no deity. But any religion with a ceation myth and a deity who is supposed to be active in our world can be.
My problem with God coming down and saying "Hi" is that I find the odds of that happening to be statistically lower than the odds that I have gone insane. After all, people go insane all the time, but in pretty much every currently active faith God very rarely comes to earth.
Anybody who uses "outside the domain of science" to describe anything doesn't understand what science is. If there is a god, and it has any sort of measurable effect on the universe then it is within the domain of science. Because we can measure its effects. We can test various religions' prayers to see if they get answered at a rate different from chance.
We can compare various religions creation myths against what we know about the nature of reality.
Lots of things can be tested scientifically. If you give us a solid, meaningful definition of "god" then we can probably define a test for it.
but if the dead deer corpse falls in the river and you drink from it at the wrong time...
You can't drink the water in the USA without getting horribly sick. Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.
Oh, and once you're far enough south in Mexico, Mexicans don't drink the water. And the times they can it's only because MEXICO ALSO PURIFIES THEIR WATER!
Most Homo Sapiens cannot safely drink water that hasn't been purified anymore. Especially standing water. Flowing water is lower risk, but still not a guarantee.