Similar here. The tax credits/deductions made buying my car (Civic Hybrid) about the same price as a non-hybrid model. It's difficult for me to see the argument that at ~$24k it's a rich liberal's car. I'm certainly not rich, although I definitely make above the average. (At the time, I was a graduate student, so you can imagine how not-rich I was.)
Electric cars are currently different, they're pricier so far from what I've seen. But the best way to bring the price down is to make them a better investment to produce in bulk, I'm reasonable certain.
It's not clear to me that guilt is what's being detected, though. They use the phrase "guilty knowledge", but could mean something that would make them legally guilty or just information that they want hidden. After all, the researcher subjects surely didn't feel guilt for imagining terrorist attacks that they weren't really going to carry out.
Now, granted, this technique doesn't point to terrorist motives or even anything legally culpable. (It sounds like I might trigger a positive be having any sort of hidden information in mind, including the fact that I'm traveling to Argentina to see my mistress there.) But it might still be quite useful as a way to focus in on some people over others. After all, the major problem of security in a lot of venues is volume of people to be screened. If you can cut that down by a factor of 10 or 100, that helps.
On the third hand, it's not clear how useful this is, since it involves skin contact right now. Or how many false positives it'll yield in a real setting. If more than half of people have some "guilty knowledge" at any time, yeah, it's useless.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. But just because something is legally and morally alright, it doesn't mean you want everyone knowing you're doing it. With grabbing profile information like that, one can easily imagine a PR nightmare (especially given recent, related events), so why even chance it?
Looking over the long list of companies, you see what amounts to a list of large employers. Since we can't know if the downloading was an individual or a company decision, this tells us exactly nothing. There's no story here because there's no useful information.
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. Companies aren't always that foresighted, of course, but they're also not generally stupid if they're successful.
(It's like noting that an IP from the NSA checks Slashdot. It could be Slashdot being monitored or, more likely, it could be a random employee just posting.)
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University. The ticket sales and merchandising are a HUGE boon for most universities, with little in the way of player salaries to cut into all that phat cash.
That's a commonly made claim that's not borne out by facts. There are several books, such as The Game of Life that have examined what data is public (a lot of football programs will guard their finances jealously, even from their universities) and for the most part, football teams are a net money loss for the university.
I dont think that the majority of deniers dont believe that the world is warming
I can't really speak to the majority since I don't know, but there are plenty of people out there who will deny the warming trend. Witness comments every winter or about how a given recent year isn't as hot as year X on record.
think the majority just believe that its not mans fault, that it is in fact natural. I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
You do know, do you not, that we're not the first species to alter the planet in a significant, global way? The very presence of oxygen in our atmosphere (20 frelling percent) is entirely due to biological processes. Our influence, while perhaps larger than previous life forms have had, is not exactly unprecedented.
People are using this (very crappy, by the looks of it) study to bash on Apple users as being snotty, tribal jerks. I'm saying that that people everywhere are (we all probably are to varying degrees) and so this is a non-story. Why not have a long thread about how water is wet?
Although the writers at MyType may attempt to do an actual study, they post no statistical significance numbers, no methods on how they normalized their bias, and even make the obviously biased mistake of creating two categories or people
Actually, they do. Of course, if you read the end of that document, you also learn that they based this study on the 3% of internet survey takers who were iPad owners or planning to buy. So the 20,000 "owners" are really fewer than 600.
Actually, just looking at the site, it doesn't come off as a competent research firm like Harris-Black and more like a crappy version of any number of internet quiz sites. The "quizzes" they have up look more like corporate astrology style crap than like useful polls of public opinion. (And their methodology specifically says that they surveyed the iPad owners by tucking their questions into one of those quizzes.)
Basically, even if this wasn't funded by an Apple competitor, it looks like it's only slightly better than asking a few people in your immediate family what they think and then generalizing it to the entire population.
but Apple fanboys(girls) are rabid on a level that is just plain scary.
Of course, we could say the same for a lot of Linux geeks, Android geeks, football fans, political partisans, and folks of any religion (including atheism, yes).
Some people are disposed to being tribal assholes. I've never seen any compelling evidence that this is because of what product or ideals they support, these things just delimit their tribal boundaries. Trying to pin this on any one product or ideology just furthers that divisiveness and makes us a part of it, too.
Actually, in WWII the Japanese attacked the US at least four times. (More, if you count foreign holdings like the Phillipines, where American forces there were attacked, captured, and taken on a little walk of some fame.) In addition to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese firebombed (crudely) the Pacific Northwest, shelled an oil refinery in California, attacked Midway Island in Hawaii (attempted to capture it so as to serve as an advanced base to threaten the rest of Hawaii), and actually captured on the Aleutian islands during the Battle of Midway.
The Germans, meanwhile, were attacking US ships (and no, they weren't stopping to verify contents) and landed eight saboteurs in the US to try to generally blow stuff up. (They failed because their leader lost his nerve and turned the entire group in.)
Yes, we weren't as much a battleground as Europe, Korea, or Japan. But in all three of those wars, we certainly didn't start them and only responded in two of them to outright attacks. I'm not saying the US is a saint, but I can't give you that point at all.
Same thing that making man from dust has to do with astronomy, I expect.
Or were you trying to be funny?
(And yes, they are trying to get Creationism into the astronomy classes as well. Biology has been their bigger target as part of their wedge strategy, though. It hits closer to home emotionally, apparently.)
But the atheist who says there's no logical reason to believe in God is simply wrong (or more likely uninformed of the various debates on the issue).
There isn't. That's sort of the point of faith, though: to carry you where logic can't go.
And the First Cause argument doesn't work identically for science and religion, at least not indefinitely. Right now, we don't know any reason why we'd ever be able to study and test the pre-universe universe, in which case everything before the Big Bang is no different from religion. But if we ever do come up with a way to make testable predictions, science has something of an upper hand.
Yes. On a linear scale, we're basically all the way there. So what's you're point?
Seriously, log scales are the better way to measure this sort of thing, not just for convenience. Look at Moore's law.
On the other hand, I'm confused as to why we're only halfway there. Light wavelenghts aren't nanometer in size, they're hundreds of nanometers. Which means that we've gone from 1E-3 m to 1E-6 on our way to 1E-7. In log space, we're 75% of the way there.
it's unclear if it is necessary for an entity existing outside of time to be created.
You don't understand the Big Bang. If any event precipitated it, it must have happened — by definition — outside of our time. So your same argument, that whatever spawned out universe might exist outside of our notion of time, works in both cases.
Though it doesn't appear that religious people on average are any more moral then the secular.
That doesn't actually argue against my point, though. If you want to argue against my point, you have to show that people who are well-disposed toward believing in higher powers would be just as moral without that belief as with it. Otherwise, you're comparing two different populations.
Atheism is the same way, though. We're betting our afterlives against stuff here and now on our being right. And a religious person would argue that the only way to win, even at long odds, is to play. (A version of Pascal's Wager, basically.)
And in the end, religion has more to it than salvation and being right. There's something to be said for the philosophy, particularly the moral part. We can argue all day about whether people should need god to do the right thing, but you know? If that helps, then I'm OK with it.
The only sane position to take is that they're all wrong, and while there might exist an omnipotent entity, it's insane to think he gives a fuck about you following a religion.
Your argument doesn't quite work. It argues eloquently for the non-uniqueness of a particular religion and therefore for, in the very least, non-obviousness of the "right" choice. (This last "obviousness" is what a lot of the more obnoxious religious folks seem to argue from, so that's not a trivial thing to demolish.)
But sometimes the universe does seem to choose one solution over another. Why was I born in the US rather than any of the roughly 200 other, equally valid, places I could have came into existence? Why is the mass of the electron what it is, rather than the nearly infinite array of other options? Clearly, the fact that there is no unique, a priori solution to these questions doesn't mean that no choice/value/option is possible. Similarly, just because there are many possible religions doesn't prove that none of them can be right (or sane world-views).
(Atheists often think that Christian == fundamentalist, which simply isn't true.)
There's a good bit of that around to be sure, but I don't think most of us do. The problem is that both sides are letting themselves be spoken for by the loudest (and therefore generally the most extreme) elements. We have Dawkins and Harris, Christians have Phelps and Robertson. What the world really, really needs is for moderates on both sides to stand up and tell these guys to shut the hell up and let the rest of us go about our business of getting along with mutual respect.
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
More logical? Maybe not. But certainly not less so, either. Either way, you have the same issue, one of origination. If you say "God did it", then you've just pushed it back a level. (Just like if you say, "Something in a previous universe triggered our Big Bang", that just pushes it back.)
Well, for one thing: in a lot of the cases, it sounds like the site owners aren't posting the content, it's user-uploaded. That calls for a take-down notice, not a lawsuit. So they're more likely trolling for lawsuit money and not interested in protecting IP.
Also, it isn't clear to me how much of each story is being reposted. Is it the whole thing without commentary? Snippets within a much larger post? Somewhere in between?
A solar sail isn't an antenna. An antenna has to be much more rigid in order to accurately reflect the radio waves to the receiver. It's apples and oranges.
In any case, you're talking about an 8-m sail, a far cry from a 70-m dish.
And no one said it was impossible. But possible and smart are far from identical concepts.
There are currently no plans that I know of to scale back the unmanned space program. (The opposite, if anything.) So your sort of grousing in the wrong place.
You're still paying the cost for the launch. To simply put something into orbit is around $10,000/kg. That's Earth orbit, getting it to Saturn is even more expensive. I'm pretty sure that you'd be lucky to do it for under a few tens of millions of dollars, probably more in the hundreds.
Even if you did it, you still have to downlink the data to Earth at some point. And now you're still contending for the dishes. Yes, you can be more flexible as to when you downlink and you could even use a 35-m dish (which are more abundant), but they're still too few in number for the missions we fly/want to fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Similar here. The tax credits/deductions made buying my car (Civic Hybrid) about the same price as a non-hybrid model. It's difficult for me to see the argument that at ~$24k it's a rich liberal's car. I'm certainly not rich, although I definitely make above the average. (At the time, I was a graduate student, so you can imagine how not-rich I was.)
Electric cars are currently different, they're pricier so far from what I've seen. But the best way to bring the price down is to make them a better investment to produce in bulk, I'm reasonable certain.
It's not clear to me that guilt is what's being detected, though. They use the phrase "guilty knowledge", but could mean something that would make them legally guilty or just information that they want hidden. After all, the researcher subjects surely didn't feel guilt for imagining terrorist attacks that they weren't really going to carry out.
Now, granted, this technique doesn't point to terrorist motives or even anything legally culpable. (It sounds like I might trigger a positive be having any sort of hidden information in mind, including the fact that I'm traveling to Argentina to see my mistress there.) But it might still be quite useful as a way to focus in on some people over others. After all, the major problem of security in a lot of venues is volume of people to be screened. If you can cut that down by a factor of 10 or 100, that helps.
On the third hand, it's not clear how useful this is, since it involves skin contact right now. Or how many false positives it'll yield in a real setting. If more than half of people have some "guilty knowledge" at any time, yeah, it's useless.
No, Slashdot actually does what it's supposed to do much too well for that.
I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. But just because something is legally and morally alright, it doesn't mean you want everyone knowing you're doing it. With grabbing profile information like that, one can easily imagine a PR nightmare (especially given recent, related events), so why even chance it?
Looking over the long list of companies, you see what amounts to a list of large employers. Since we can't know if the downloading was an individual or a company decision, this tells us exactly nothing. There's no story here because there's no useful information.
Heck, if I were a company that wanted that torrent, I'd get someone to download it at home and walk it in to our office. Companies aren't always that foresighted, of course, but they're also not generally stupid if they're successful.
(It's like noting that an IP from the NSA checks Slashdot. It could be Slashdot being monitored or, more likely, it could be a random employee just posting.)
In all fairness, most football programs MAKE money for the University. The ticket sales and merchandising are a HUGE boon for most universities, with little in the way of player salaries to cut into all that phat cash.
That's a commonly made claim that's not borne out by facts. There are several books, such as The Game of Life that have examined what data is public (a lot of football programs will guard their finances jealously, even from their universities) and for the most part, football teams are a net money loss for the university.
I dont think that the majority of deniers dont believe that the world is warming
I can't really speak to the majority since I don't know, but there are plenty of people out there who will deny the warming trend. Witness comments every winter or about how a given recent year isn't as hot as year X on record.
think the majority just believe that its not mans fault, that it is in fact natural. I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
You do know, do you not, that we're not the first species to alter the planet in a significant, global way? The very presence of oxygen in our atmosphere (20 frelling percent) is entirely due to biological processes. Our influence, while perhaps larger than previous life forms have had, is not exactly unprecedented.
I think you just missed my point entirely.
People are using this (very crappy, by the looks of it) study to bash on Apple users as being snotty, tribal jerks. I'm saying that that people everywhere are (we all probably are to varying degrees) and so this is a non-story. Why not have a long thread about how water is wet?
Although the writers at MyType may attempt to do an actual study, they post no statistical significance numbers, no methods on how they normalized their bias, and even make the obviously biased mistake of creating two categories or people
Actually, they do. Of course, if you read the end of that document, you also learn that they based this study on the 3% of internet survey takers who were iPad owners or planning to buy. So the 20,000 "owners" are really fewer than 600.
Actually, just looking at the site, it doesn't come off as a competent research firm like Harris-Black and more like a crappy version of any number of internet quiz sites. The "quizzes" they have up look more like corporate astrology style crap than like useful polls of public opinion. (And their methodology specifically says that they surveyed the iPad owners by tucking their questions into one of those quizzes.)
Basically, even if this wasn't funded by an Apple competitor, it looks like it's only slightly better than asking a few people in your immediate family what they think and then generalizing it to the entire population.
but Apple fanboys(girls) are rabid on a level that is just plain scary.
Of course, we could say the same for a lot of Linux geeks, Android geeks, football fans, political partisans, and folks of any religion (including atheism, yes).
Some people are disposed to being tribal assholes. I've never seen any compelling evidence that this is because of what product or ideals they support, these things just delimit their tribal boundaries. Trying to pin this on any one product or ideology just furthers that divisiveness and makes us a part of it, too.
Ah, yes, I can't believe I forgot that. Thanks!
Actually, in WWII the Japanese attacked the US at least four times. (More, if you count foreign holdings like the Phillipines, where American forces there were attacked, captured, and taken on a little walk of some fame.) In addition to Pearl Harbor, the Japanese firebombed (crudely) the Pacific Northwest, shelled an oil refinery in California, attacked Midway Island in Hawaii (attempted to capture it so as to serve as an advanced base to threaten the rest of Hawaii), and actually captured on the Aleutian islands during the Battle of Midway.
The Germans, meanwhile, were attacking US ships (and no, they weren't stopping to verify contents) and landed eight saboteurs in the US to try to generally blow stuff up. (They failed because their leader lost his nerve and turned the entire group in.)
Yes, we weren't as much a battleground as Europe, Korea, or Japan. But in all three of those wars, we certainly didn't start them and only responded in two of them to outright attacks. I'm not saying the US is a saint, but I can't give you that point at all.
Same thing that making man from dust has to do with astronomy, I expect.
Or were you trying to be funny?
(And yes, they are trying to get Creationism into the astronomy classes as well. Biology has been their bigger target as part of their wedge strategy, though. It hits closer to home emotionally, apparently.)
But the atheist who says there's no logical reason to believe in God is simply wrong (or more likely uninformed of the various debates on the issue).
There isn't. That's sort of the point of faith, though: to carry you where logic can't go.
And the First Cause argument doesn't work identically for science and religion, at least not indefinitely. Right now, we don't know any reason why we'd ever be able to study and test the pre-universe universe, in which case everything before the Big Bang is no different from religion. But if we ever do come up with a way to make testable predictions, science has something of an upper hand.
Yes. On a linear scale, we're basically all the way there. So what's you're point?
Seriously, log scales are the better way to measure this sort of thing, not just for convenience. Look at Moore's law.
On the other hand, I'm confused as to why we're only halfway there. Light wavelenghts aren't nanometer in size, they're hundreds of nanometers. Which means that we've gone from 1E-3 m to 1E-6 on our way to 1E-7. In log space, we're 75% of the way there.
it's unclear if it is necessary for an entity existing outside of time to be created.
You don't understand the Big Bang. If any event precipitated it, it must have happened — by definition — outside of our time. So your same argument, that whatever spawned out universe might exist outside of our notion of time, works in both cases.
Though it doesn't appear that religious people on average are any more moral then the secular.
That doesn't actually argue against my point, though. If you want to argue against my point, you have to show that people who are well-disposed toward believing in higher powers would be just as moral without that belief as with it. Otherwise, you're comparing two different populations.
Atheism is the same way, though. We're betting our afterlives against stuff here and now on our being right. And a religious person would argue that the only way to win, even at long odds, is to play. (A version of Pascal's Wager, basically.)
And in the end, religion has more to it than salvation and being right. There's something to be said for the philosophy, particularly the moral part. We can argue all day about whether people should need god to do the right thing, but you know? If that helps, then I'm OK with it.
The only sane position to take is that they're all wrong, and while there might exist an omnipotent entity, it's insane to think he gives a fuck about you following a religion.
Your argument doesn't quite work. It argues eloquently for the non-uniqueness of a particular religion and therefore for, in the very least, non-obviousness of the "right" choice. (This last "obviousness" is what a lot of the more obnoxious religious folks seem to argue from, so that's not a trivial thing to demolish.)
But sometimes the universe does seem to choose one solution over another. Why was I born in the US rather than any of the roughly 200 other, equally valid, places I could have came into existence? Why is the mass of the electron what it is, rather than the nearly infinite array of other options? Clearly, the fact that there is no unique, a priori solution to these questions doesn't mean that no choice/value/option is possible. Similarly, just because there are many possible religions doesn't prove that none of them can be right (or sane world-views).
(Atheists often think that Christian == fundamentalist, which simply isn't true.)
There's a good bit of that around to be sure, but I don't think most of us do. The problem is that both sides are letting themselves be spoken for by the loudest (and therefore generally the most extreme) elements. We have Dawkins and Harris, Christians have Phelps and Robertson. What the world really, really needs is for moderates on both sides to stand up and tell these guys to shut the hell up and let the rest of us go about our business of getting along with mutual respect.
I'm not sure it's more logical to say that the universe created itself than it was created by someone, but to each his own, I guess.
More logical? Maybe not. But certainly not less so, either. Either way, you have the same issue, one of origination. If you say "God did it", then you've just pushed it back a level. (Just like if you say, "Something in a previous universe triggered our Big Bang", that just pushes it back.)
Well, for one thing: in a lot of the cases, it sounds like the site owners aren't posting the content, it's user-uploaded. That calls for a take-down notice, not a lawsuit. So they're more likely trolling for lawsuit money and not interested in protecting IP.
Also, it isn't clear to me how much of each story is being reposted. Is it the whole thing without commentary? Snippets within a much larger post? Somewhere in between?
A solar sail isn't an antenna. An antenna has to be much more rigid in order to accurately reflect the radio waves to the receiver. It's apples and oranges.
In any case, you're talking about an 8-m sail, a far cry from a 70-m dish.
And no one said it was impossible. But possible and smart are far from identical concepts.
There are currently no plans that I know of to scale back the unmanned space program. (The opposite, if anything.) So your sort of grousing in the wrong place.
Entirely possible, yep. It would have been nice if the story had commented, though.
You're still paying the cost for the launch. To simply put something into orbit is around $10,000/kg. That's Earth orbit, getting it to Saturn is even more expensive. I'm pretty sure that you'd be lucky to do it for under a few tens of millions of dollars, probably more in the hundreds.
Even if you did it, you still have to downlink the data to Earth at some point. And now you're still contending for the dishes. Yes, you can be more flexible as to when you downlink and you could even use a 35-m dish (which are more abundant), but they're still too few in number for the missions we fly/want to fly.