Are you really missing the point? Having run an enterprise in the US he has benefited from there being a police force available which keeps order. Among other things that has protected his warehouse.
That's why he didn't locate his warehouse in Somalia.
in an ideal world, people wouldn't judge on appearance
Depends what you judge I think. If it's about judging whether someone is trustworthy, good in his job or interesting to listen to - yeah it doesn't make sense to judge on appearance. It's perfectly reasonable to judge whether you find someone pretty based on appearance. (Certainly there are other factors which can attract you to people - like a sense of humor, warmth or a fascinating intellect - but being pretty is one and that's legitimate, too.)
Yes I agree, it's cognitive dissonance. They believe themselves to be literalists, but they are not.
As for Dawkins - he's going with the teapot circling the sun. Let's say someone claims that there is a teapot circling the sun somewhere in our solar system. There is no reason for that teapot to be there, there is no evidence that it is. Even if you were to search the entire solar system cubic centimeter by cubic centimeter and not find anything the teapotters would just claim that you'd made a mistake or that the teapot was there at one time but had now moved away etc.
Yes you don't *have* to disprove that claim to disprove it, but it's pretty clear that it's not possible to disprove it. That you can nevertheless assign a rough probability to the existence of that teapot is interesting in a scientific sense. Not because teapots orbiting the sun are interesting, but because claims like this appear frequently (not just as part of major religions) and it makes sense to have a framework which allows you to decide which claims are worth investigating in which are not. When you say that you "don't have to disprove it" - that's a decision based on such a framework. It's important to understand why some claims don't need to be further investigated but others do. The philosophical and methodological underpinnings of science, basically.
The new covenant doesn't get them around the grasshopper thing. Besides there is no literal interpretation of the bible which provides guidance which parts of the old law should be disregarded. I think you are being nice by giving them a free pass and bending the rules because it's impossible to do what they claim. That's not correct, though. Literalism would mean you actually pick up that book and believe it to the letter. That's not possible, everybody has to pick and chose to come to some kind of halfway coherent interpretation. So different groups of alleged literalists don't believe in the same things. Otherwise they'd have a new edition of the bible which has only the parts in it which are not superseded by the new covenant. They can't produce such an edition because they would not agree what's in it.
"Atheist" and "Agnostic" aren't well-defined terms, but Dawkins is not stupid and knows that you can't disprove a god who has no concrete properties and about whom no specific claims have been defined. So instead he estimates the probability of it's existence.
Apart from that he assumes that there is no god, gives no place to a possible god in his life and thinks religion is overall a negative influence on society. I'm not sure how you define atheism, but do you think you can disprove the existence of a hypothetical god? If not then I think you either need to stop calling yourself an atheist, or use the same label for him.
But it's not. If you want it to be democratically based you need to give the power to elected representatives instead of having positions of power filled by deals between national governments. Or alternatively transfer those powers back to the national governments so you have control via the national parliaments. As it is now specific EU issues like the one in the article aren't much discussed during national elections - because that's not the main topic - and not much during EU elections - because the EU parliament doesn't have much power.
We need to make up our minds where we want to take this - make a decision and stick with it.
How strange, because I've run into people who *do* take the whole mish-mash literally (which is, of course, their right).
Are you sure you have? Did they wear a wedding ring? (Wearing gold is forbidden.) Any clothes which were not hand-made? (No mixing fibers.) Did they check that none of their ancestors in the last ten generation were born out of wedlock? (Not allowed inside the church then.) Do they also believe grasshoppers have four legs? (Leviticus is quite adamant about that.)
I'm sure they believe they are literalists, I just don't think they know what they are talking about.
If you believe in creation, the answer is obvious - the egg.
Hang on - creation basically says "god made chickens" (and a few other animals etc) - not chicken eggs. Not believing in evolution has no impact there, since god just happened to make chickens so that they would lay eggs. You can believe in evolution and creation - e.g. you can believe that god made birds and chickens evolved from them. (Or that he merely created life and let things evolve from there according to "HIS" plan.) Obviously once you have decided evolution is correct you don't need a creator anymore (due to Occam's razor), but you could believe in a creator regardless. That's the position of the catholic church btw.
However if you decide to take that specific piece of the bible literally - (nobody actually does that with the whole text, there are no real literalists, only people who haven't read it all) - well, then chickens came first.
This is a bit too much of the "good old times" for me. Yes many German politicians today chose politics as a career. Name one country where that isn't the case. Whether it was all that different in the 50s is a bit doubtful. Sure there were some good guys, but there were many old Nazis in government positions, the political system was basically static. A lot of stuff then didn't come out because Germans just couldn't handle it anymore, and because the press didn't do a great job. Later there was the support of the Vietnam war, Spiegel-Affaere & the Starfighter scandal etc.
Then compare with our neighbors: everybody in the British and French political system comes from the same small set of schools. Comparing to the US: higher office is reserved for the super-rich or people utterly dependent on them.
Ok a bit of hyperbole, but you know what I mean.
Then think of how dynamic the German system is: how much the established parties changed and picked up topics pushed by the Green party - and the Greens are even the senior partner in a coalition government of one of the most conservative states in Germany. (Well, formerly one of the most conservative.) And now the Pirate Party is pushing into more and more state parliaments - the SPD has already stated they'd go into a coalition with them. Do you know how long it took in the UK until a third party could participate in government? When do you think that will happen in the US (not in my lifetime, I suspect) or in France?
Reminds me of a joke: a Vietnamese, a fag and a women from East-Germany walk into a bar. "Who are you?" the barkeeper asks. They reply: "We are the German federal government."
(Sorry for the crude choice of words, but it wouldn't work otherwise.) Can you think of another country which could have a similar joke currently? Heck, Germany's current president is a former priest living undivorced with his new life partner. Germany doesn't have a first lady it has a first mistress.
Point is: it's theoretically possible to use PV on planes. The costs they add e.g. by increased weight are not necessarily related to the energy they provide - it's dependent on the technology. You'd have to calculate whether it's worth it with a given technology or not.
However if you add a wind turbine you will necessarily slow down the plane by at least the amount of energy it produces, no amount of technological progress will change that. The only way it would help is if you were to recover the energy when braking (like many electric vehicles do).
If you were actually going for "funny" in your post above, that's fine - if you genuinely can't tell the fundamental difference between these setups, then I sincerely hope you don't have an engineering degree.
If you get seriously sick in your room there is someone to 1. notice and 2. do something about it.
So that helps if you suddenly get so sick that you can't get out of the room, can't reach a phone and your room mate just happens to be in (and not e.g. attending a class). Should we enforce a policy where nobody can ever be alone anywhere just because they could possibly get sick?
Not sure if that's a valid argument. I suppose they can also ask you to install cameras in your home until there is a law forbidding it? Can they ask for the password to your bank account? Ask for a copy of your house an car keys? Install a GPS in your private car?
None of these things belong to them, and they don't have a right to them unless there is a valid contract between them and the employee expressly granting them that right. Of course, if you live in a state with no employment protection and few jobs, then the employer can abuse that situation.
Nokia is in a mess, but it isn't Stephen Elop (the CEO) who created it.
No, but he made it worse. Nokia had a decent strategy, but failed to deliver in time. That cost them dearly, but they still had a chance to recover. Now they swiched to another strategy putting all their eggs in one basket.
It sounded crazy to me from the start, but fair enough: you don't really know before you tried. They did try though, and they do know now. The only reason they are hanging on to the Windows-only strategy is because of Elop's ego - that is his fault.
Samsung copied the device shape of the iPhone (which wasn't terribly original to start with) - but the real technology, like the breakthrough touchscreen displays is developed by them. Which is the reason why Apple buys those from them - they'd go elsewhere if another manufacturer could make that.
That's not a valid argument. You can have bad intentions and still screw up when you implement them - that's not mutually exclusive. The war in Iraq was started for no legitimate reason, and it was a failure as well.
If you were to infer the intentions solely from the outcome you would have to conclude that it must have been the intention to make the US much poorer, reduce its international reputation and tie up military resources which would have been needed elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation.
Part of the problem is that the US probably didn't have that knowledge in the first place - at least not to the extent it's commonly thought of today. Most of us probably think that after the end of WWII, Germans basically accepted the new government and went back to work. Unfortunately that's a propaganda legend of sorts - there was actually a lot of guerrilla fighting, murdering "collaborators", attacking allied troops and destroying infrastructure. However it was decided not to give these events any press in order not to encourage the resistance. Which made a lot of sense at the time.
The result today is that we have a distorted view of the way things went in Germany, and that may have contributed to the ill-fated decision to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a documentary available on youtube about the German "Werwolfs". It's quite an eye opener.
Of course another problem of applying the "German approach" to Iraq, is that the Germans had genuinely done something wrong, and you could appeal to human morals as part of an occupation strategy. That doesn't work in Iraq, because the criminal action in this war was on the US side. In Afghanistan that angle would be possible, but nobody actually voted for Bin Laden or the Taliban, so it's hard to claim that an ordinary citizen had any involvement in that.
It might have helped if similar education had been provided for Americans - perhaps it would have changed the approach to engage the population with more humility "we messed up but we need to fix the situation now". But generally US politicians are too afraid to tell the population that the US can be morally wrong, too.
If you are very dense, then maybe that's the only interpretation. Otherwise you'd consider the context in which the yelling occurred - I won't quote that yet again - and that this is from a complete stranger. Yes, what these people did to that child was child abuse, including the yelling at a child which was already frightened by these assholes. No that's not comparable to a parent yelling because they lost patience, and I sincerely hope you are the only person on slashdot which needs that explicitly explained.
"take the distressed child to another room, away from and out of sight of all of the adults who were with her, and search her there." - do you read what you respond to?
So, how was the site manipulated? Did the attacker actually modify the bank's server? ==> In that case, bank clearly bears the responsibility, as they have a duty to keep their service secure.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think I once got the same (or a very similar) phishing mail that customer got. Basically it invites you to click on a link in the email to go to the bank's site (the bank warns against never doing that) which actually goes somewhere else (the URL is displayed in the browser's location bar) and then enter 10 TANs (something the bank would never ask for in normal operation of the web site).
If things had been as you describe I would agree - however that wouldn't match the definition of phishing, I believe.
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Are you really missing the point? Having run an enterprise in the US he has benefited from there being a police force available which keeps order. Among other things that has protected his warehouse.
That's why he didn't locate his warehouse in Somalia.
The green t-shirt would feel depressed because it only got 4 likes.
in an ideal world, people wouldn't judge on appearance
Depends what you judge I think. If it's about judging whether someone is trustworthy, good in his job or interesting to listen to - yeah it doesn't make sense to judge on appearance. It's perfectly reasonable to judge whether you find someone pretty based on appearance. (Certainly there are other factors which can attract you to people - like a sense of humor, warmth or a fascinating intellect - but being pretty is one and that's legitimate, too.)
Yes I agree, it's cognitive dissonance. They believe themselves to be literalists, but they are not.
As for Dawkins - he's going with the teapot circling the sun. Let's say someone claims that there is a teapot circling the sun somewhere in our solar system. There is no reason for that teapot to be there, there is no evidence that it is. Even if you were to search the entire solar system cubic centimeter by cubic centimeter and not find anything the teapotters would just claim that you'd made a mistake or that the teapot was there at one time but had now moved away etc.
Yes you don't *have* to disprove that claim to disprove it, but it's pretty clear that it's not possible to disprove it. That you can nevertheless assign a rough probability to the existence of that teapot is interesting in a scientific sense. Not because teapots orbiting the sun are interesting, but because claims like this appear frequently (not just as part of major religions) and it makes sense to have a framework which allows you to decide which claims are worth investigating in which are not. When you say that you "don't have to disprove it" - that's a decision based on such a framework. It's important to understand why some claims don't need to be further investigated but others do. The philosophical and methodological underpinnings of science, basically.
The new covenant doesn't get them around the grasshopper thing. Besides there is no literal interpretation of the bible which provides guidance which parts of the old law should be disregarded. I think you are being nice by giving them a free pass and bending the rules because it's impossible to do what they claim. That's not correct, though. Literalism would mean you actually pick up that book and believe it to the letter. That's not possible, everybody has to pick and chose to come to some kind of halfway coherent interpretation. So different groups of alleged literalists don't believe in the same things. Otherwise they'd have a new edition of the bible which has only the parts in it which are not superseded by the new covenant. They can't produce such an edition because they would not agree what's in it.
"Atheist" and "Agnostic" aren't well-defined terms, but Dawkins is not stupid and knows that you can't disprove a god who has no concrete properties and about whom no specific claims have been defined. So instead he estimates the probability of it's existence. Apart from that he assumes that there is no god, gives no place to a possible god in his life and thinks religion is overall a negative influence on society. I'm not sure how you define atheism, but do you think you can disprove the existence of a hypothetical god? If not then I think you either need to stop calling yourself an atheist, or use the same label for him.
because in the last 17 years its had an excess of capital due to the enormous trade surplus which its had thanks to the Euro
That seems far-fetched. Germany didn't exactly have a lot of trouble exporting it's goods before the Euro.
I thought it was democratically based
But it's not. If you want it to be democratically based you need to give the power to elected representatives instead of having positions of power filled by deals between national governments. Or alternatively transfer those powers back to the national governments so you have control via the national parliaments. As it is now specific EU issues like the one in the article aren't much discussed during national elections - because that's not the main topic - and not much during EU elections - because the EU parliament doesn't have much power.
We need to make up our minds where we want to take this - make a decision and stick with it.
He didn't make that argument though. He just argued that the alleged "dictator" couldn't be blamed for the current situation.
How strange, because I've run into people who *do* take the whole mish-mash literally (which is, of course, their right).
Are you sure you have? Did they wear a wedding ring? (Wearing gold is forbidden.) Any clothes which were not hand-made? (No mixing fibers.) Did they check that none of their ancestors in the last ten generation were born out of wedlock? (Not allowed inside the church then.) Do they also believe grasshoppers have four legs? (Leviticus is quite adamant about that.)
I'm sure they believe they are literalists, I just don't think they know what they are talking about.
If you believe in creation, the answer is obvious - the egg.
Hang on - creation basically says "god made chickens" (and a few other animals etc) - not chicken eggs. Not believing in evolution has no impact there, since god just happened to make chickens so that they would lay eggs. You can believe in evolution and creation - e.g. you can believe that god made birds and chickens evolved from them. (Or that he merely created life and let things evolve from there according to "HIS" plan.) Obviously once you have decided evolution is correct you don't need a creator anymore (due to Occam's razor), but you could believe in a creator regardless. That's the position of the catholic church btw.
However if you decide to take that specific piece of the bible literally - (nobody actually does that with the whole text, there are no real literalists, only people who haven't read it all) - well, then chickens came first.
kings were commonly elected, so it was pretty democratic ...
Nooooo ... an election by 12 hereditary electors is not democratic. Demos means "the people". They didn't have a say in that.
This is a bit too much of the "good old times" for me. Yes many German politicians today chose politics as a career. Name one country where that isn't the case. Whether it was all that different in the 50s is a bit doubtful. Sure there were some good guys, but there were many old Nazis in government positions, the political system was basically static. A lot of stuff then didn't come out because Germans just couldn't handle it anymore, and because the press didn't do a great job. Later there was the support of the Vietnam war, Spiegel-Affaere & the Starfighter scandal etc.
Then compare with our neighbors: everybody in the British and French political system comes from the same small set of schools. Comparing to the US: higher office is reserved for the super-rich or people utterly dependent on them.
Ok a bit of hyperbole, but you know what I mean.
Then think of how dynamic the German system is: how much the established parties changed and picked up topics pushed by the Green party - and the Greens are even the senior partner in a coalition government of one of the most conservative states in Germany. (Well, formerly one of the most conservative.) And now the Pirate Party is pushing into more and more state parliaments - the SPD has already stated they'd go into a coalition with them. Do you know how long it took in the UK until a third party could participate in government? When do you think that will happen in the US (not in my lifetime, I suspect) or in France?
Reminds me of a joke: a Vietnamese, a fag and a women from East-Germany walk into a bar. "Who are you?" the barkeeper asks. They reply: "We are the German federal government."
(Sorry for the crude choice of words, but it wouldn't work otherwise.) Can you think of another country which could have a similar joke currently? Heck, Germany's current president is a former priest living undivorced with his new life partner. Germany doesn't have a first lady it has a first mistress.
Seriously man show some fucking pride!
Point is: it's theoretically possible to use PV on planes. The costs they add e.g. by increased weight are not necessarily related to the energy they provide - it's dependent on the technology. You'd have to calculate whether it's worth it with a given technology or not.
However if you add a wind turbine you will necessarily slow down the plane by at least the amount of energy it produces, no amount of technological progress will change that. The only way it would help is if you were to recover the energy when braking (like many electric vehicles do).
If you were actually going for "funny" in your post above, that's fine - if you genuinely can't tell the fundamental difference between these setups, then I sincerely hope you don't have an engineering degree.
If you get seriously sick in your room there is someone to 1. notice and 2. do something about it.
So that helps if you suddenly get so sick that you can't get out of the room, can't reach a phone and your room mate just happens to be in (and not e.g. attending a class). Should we enforce a policy where nobody can ever be alone anywhere just because they could possibly get sick?
Until there's a law prohibiting it, they do...
Not sure if that's a valid argument. I suppose they can also ask you to install cameras in your home until there is a law forbidding it? Can they ask for the password to your bank account? Ask for a copy of your house an car keys? Install a GPS in your private car?
None of these things belong to them, and they don't have a right to them unless there is a valid contract between them and the employee expressly granting them that right. Of course, if you live in a state with no employment protection and few jobs, then the employer can abuse that situation.
You have anything to say?
I watch the news.
Nokia is in a mess, but it isn't Stephen Elop (the CEO) who created it.
No, but he made it worse. Nokia had a decent strategy, but failed to deliver in time. That cost them dearly, but they still had a chance to recover. Now they swiched to another strategy putting all their eggs in one basket.
It sounded crazy to me from the start, but fair enough: you don't really know before you tried. They did try though, and they do know now. The only reason they are hanging on to the Windows-only strategy is because of Elop's ego - that is his fault.
Samsung copied the device shape of the iPhone (which wasn't terribly original to start with) - but the real technology, like the breakthrough touchscreen displays is developed by them. Which is the reason why Apple buys those from them - they'd go elsewhere if another manufacturer could make that.
That's not a valid argument. You can have bad intentions and still screw up when you implement them - that's not mutually exclusive. The war in Iraq was started for no legitimate reason, and it was a failure as well.
If you were to infer the intentions solely from the outcome you would have to conclude that it must have been the intention to make the US much poorer, reduce its international reputation and tie up military resources which would have been needed elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the US seems to have lost the knowledge of how to deal with a conquered nation.
Part of the problem is that the US probably didn't have that knowledge in the first place - at least not to the extent it's commonly thought of today. Most of us probably think that after the end of WWII, Germans basically accepted the new government and went back to work. Unfortunately that's a propaganda legend of sorts - there was actually a lot of guerrilla fighting, murdering "collaborators", attacking allied troops and destroying infrastructure. However it was decided not to give these events any press in order not to encourage the resistance. Which made a lot of sense at the time.
The result today is that we have a distorted view of the way things went in Germany, and that may have contributed to the ill-fated decision to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a documentary available on youtube about the German "Werwolfs". It's quite an eye opener.
Of course another problem of applying the "German approach" to Iraq, is that the Germans had genuinely done something wrong, and you could appeal to human morals as part of an occupation strategy. That doesn't work in Iraq, because the criminal action in this war was on the US side. In Afghanistan that angle would be possible, but nobody actually voted for Bin Laden or the Taliban, so it's hard to claim that an ordinary citizen had any involvement in that.
It might have helped if similar education had been provided for Americans - perhaps it would have changed the approach to engage the population with more humility "we messed up but we need to fix the situation now". But generally US politicians are too afraid to tell the population that the US can be morally wrong, too.
If you are very dense, then maybe that's the only interpretation. Otherwise you'd consider the context in which the yelling occurred - I won't quote that yet again - and that this is from a complete stranger. Yes, what these people did to that child was child abuse, including the yelling at a child which was already frightened by these assholes. No that's not comparable to a parent yelling because they lost patience, and I sincerely hope you are the only person on slashdot which needs that explicitly explained.
"take the distressed child to another room, away from and out of sight of all of the adults who were with her, and search her there." - do you read what you respond to?
He asked for examples for bombs being planted on women without their knowledge.
So, how was the site manipulated? Did the attacker actually modify the bank's server? ==> In that case, bank clearly bears the responsibility, as they have a duty to keep their service secure.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think I once got the same (or a very similar) phishing mail that customer got. Basically it invites you to click on a link in the email to go to the bank's site (the bank warns against never doing that) which actually goes somewhere else (the URL is displayed in the browser's location bar) and then enter 10 TANs (something the bank would never ask for in normal operation of the web site).
If things had been as you describe I would agree - however that wouldn't match the definition of phishing, I believe.