> As for Bin Laden, I'm sure that with the billions of taxpayer dollars we give the Military Industrial Complex each year, we are only days from finding a man in a cave, and another one on the run in Iraq.
Pardon my cynicism, but I suspect he's not being caught so that the Bush Administration will have a boogeyman to scare domestic audiences with.
Saddam's probably vacationing in the Bahamas while the US military pretends to look for him.
(Sigh.... Before Bush got appointed I used to laugh at conspiracy theorists.)
> Amazing, isn't it? So far as I'm concerned (the illegality of his actions aside) he performed a public service. This whole idea that Amercans need to be made to feel safer regardless of whether they actually are safer I find to be patronizing and offensive.
Shoot the messenger, or anyone else who fails to see the emperor's new clothes...
This is, BTW, a major embarrassment for the DoHS, after all the draconian laws and major airport conveniences that are supposed to make this kind of thing impossible.
> remember that Stage One is silence your critics.
Look at the guy who made fools of the DoHS by waltzing through airport security and hiding box cutters on several airplanes... where they remained for five months, despite "daily" inspections, and were only finally found because someone finally read his e-mail a month after he sent it.
Now he's being described as a dangerous criminal...
Then there's the "free speech zones" where people carrying protest signs are marched away to when the presidential motorcade comes to town...
"The Silence of the Critics" seems to be the vision of the politicians/companies running the USA these days. See the emperor's new clothes, or go to jail. Orwell would be proud.
I took three computers out in my rowboat, a Windows system, a Linux system, and a BSD system, and threw them overboard to see what would happen.
The Windows system sank like a rock, the Linux system bobbed back to the surface, and the BSD system rose to the sky, to be greated by a chorus of angels.
Then I woke up, so I don't know what the angels were singing.
We know that the universe was once inhospitable to biological life, and we know that at least one corner of it now teems with biological life.
Ergo, life had a non-biological beginning at some point.
Notice that even creationists believe this: the only point in dispute is the mechanism.
> Are you going to cite Miller-Urey????
No, U-M is simply a demonstration that complex biological molecules can arise from simpler precursors. Since then we've even discovered that amino acids arise in deep space.
No one claims to know how abiogenesis happened, but there are some plausible ideas out there. A recent one (which I have only skimmed) can be found here.
And, as we must apparently remind you an infinite number of times, evolution and abiogenesis are separate topics. Evolution would happen even if your god created the original life forms, if he happened to use imperfect replicators in his design. (And since existing life forms do use imperfect replicators, you should be able to work out the implications on your own.)
> I don't get it. Why try and apply the scientific method to faith? That's just silly. God isn't Santa Claus; HE IS GOD! Duh! I'm sure God is a bit wiser than us (if you have faith that he is omniscient, omnipresent, etc. - basically infinitely perfect in all things). Why a scientist would try to apply a 4 dimensional measuring system to an infinite being (God) is beyond my comprehension.
How 'bout 'cause lots of people claim that God actually has an effect within that 4-D system?
Lots of theists whinge that scientists are "philosophical naturalists" who won't give God a fair chance in their game, but when they do give him a fair chance, he never seems to show up.
> So one solution is for that virus writer who is exploiting the new Windows holes to cause the machines to all pop up a message at the same time: "We are conducting a search for God. Everyone please pray for [X]."
> Dunno what to put in [X] but it should be something easy to verify, like...
...a sudden horrible death for the guy who wrote the virus program.
> This one is really straightforward to explain. You see, in addition to prayer by the One True Religion, the prayers of infidels were also mixed in. Since the prayers of infidels are actually prayers to the Dark One who does the opposite of what was asked, these amount to anti-prayers. Hence they cancelled out their results.
Heretic! You subscribe to the false doctrine that prayers and anti-prayers interact as waves, whereas the true doctrine reveals that they interact as particles!
> It doesn't go without saying though, that God is not a neutral, unintelligent force that is manipulated by the hands of men. Many people treat prayer like a magic spell, a way we can force His hand to our will. The truth is (from a Christian perspective, obviously not from a New Ager or others who believe that all things make up God) that if a person's time to die has come, they will die.
IOW, true believers believe that it's effective, but don't think it actually does anything.
The whole concept is really strange. If you pray for rain and it rains, then the prayer was answered; if you pray for rain and it doesn't, it was still answered - just not with the answer you wanted. And BTW, God already knows everything, including what you need and want, and he's going to do what he thinks best in the grander plan regardless of what you pray or even whether you pray at all... So what it all boils down to is that prayer is a useless exercise, and a moment's thought would have let people reason it out without the need for an experiment. The only role prayer plays in Christianity is to show that you're willing to grovel in a context where it won't make the slightest difference.
> I am of an increasingly minority view in Christianity today. After the New Testament was completed, the spiritual gifts (healing, prophecy, miracles, etc) ceased. Their purpose for that time had been completed, and they ended
Church of Christ? No, I suppose not, or you would have used their stock phrase "to confirm the word". Strange doctrine though, since those purportedly confirming signs and wonders are reported in the same book as the stuff they're supposed to be confirming, which means they need to be confirmed in turn... Unfortunate infinite recursive problem, completely ignored by the apologists.
> - as had happened in times before. Then over the next 400 years, culminating with Christianity becoming the official religion of Rome, the supposed miraculous increased in number. But these were not the true gifts - they were pseudo miracles, hypnotism, trickery and deception.
Stranger and stranger. How do you tell the real ones from the fakes? What good are the real ones as signs, if they're indistinguishable from the fakes? How did the apostles' signs "confirm the word", if the devil's disciples could do the same things?
> This experiment confirmed what I already believed - that prayer is our chance to worship God, to make known our heartache, and pray for His intercession in ours and other's lives.
Prayer is the opportunity to... pray? Your theology is truly baffling.
> We can request from Him a miracle for healing or other things. In reality, such true miracles are very rare. As someone said, for the few thousand that Jesus fed miraculously, millions still have to cook their meals every night.
And millions of others starve, all as part of some inscrutable plan.
If you wonder at the harrumphs of skeptics, you should consider the matter of signal and noise. Something's getting lost in the mix here.
And if God had even half the properties ascribed to him, he could make himself known to all mankind without the faintest doubt. The only possible conclusion is that if God exists and has the powers attributed to him, he doesn't want to be known.
> The truth is, I don't expect God to make much of a difference for all those prayers made, regardless of whether it's a test or just a ministry, regardless of whether they are all from the "One True Religion" or not. If God has any power at all, then we are His servants, not the other way around.
IOW, you don't believe in prayer any more than the staunchest atheist, but you prefer to spin it otherwise rather than coming out and saying it.
Slashdot Mirror
> He can't tell the truth for 5 minutes at a time.
He's the perfect guide to truth... just take whatever he says and invert it.
> Bush's job approval rating is currently 52%.
Is that the raw score of the Diebold score?
> when the Nazi war machine came to France, it simply laid down its arms in fear of the german bombers, lest any of their precious art be burned.
Your ignorance of recent history is stunning.
> France surrendered to the Nazis without so much as a whimper you SCHMUCK...
Ever compared the number of Frenchmen who died fighting the Nazis to the number of Americans who did?
> As for Bin Laden, I'm sure that with the billions of taxpayer dollars we give the Military Industrial Complex each year, we are only days from finding a man in a cave, and another one on the run in Iraq.
Pardon my cynicism, but I suspect he's not being caught so that the Bush Administration will have a boogeyman to scare domestic audiences with.
Saddam's probably vacationing in the Bahamas while the US military pretends to look for him.
(Sigh.... Before Bush got appointed I used to laugh at conspiracy theorists.)
> I e-mailed Scott with a late nomination of SCO as the weaseliest company and Darl McBride as thw weaseliest induhvidual...
Oh. I saw your subject line and thought you were going to complain about not being able to vote for Cowboy Neal.
> Hello, my name is George W. Bush.
Shut up and say what Dick tells you to you moron, or we won't let you be Baseball Commissioner when your term's up.
> I find it interesting that Dubya won his category. I had no idea public opinion of him was so low.
I think PO is actually split approximately evenly (+/-).
Presumably Dilbert readers aren't a cross-section of US political demographics.
> Amazing, isn't it? So far as I'm concerned (the illegality of his actions aside) he performed a public service. This whole idea that Amercans need to be made to feel safer regardless of whether they actually are safer I find to be patronizing and offensive.
Shoot the messenger, or anyone else who fails to see the emperor's new clothes...
This is, BTW, a major embarrassment for the DoHS, after all the draconian laws and major airport conveniences that are supposed to make this kind of thing impossible.
> > Now he's being described as a dangerous criminal...
> He is?
Sounds like you didn't hear the federal agent's newconference.
> He'll reach a plea deal, serve no time, and spend a couple years on probation. I'd bet money on it.
Hope you're right. The media is talking about a decade of hard time.
> remember that Stage One is silence your critics.
Look at the guy who made fools of the DoHS by waltzing through airport security and hiding box cutters on several airplanes... where they remained for five months, despite "daily" inspections, and were only finally found because someone finally read his e-mail a month after he sent it.
Now he's being described as a dangerous criminal...
Then there's the "free speech zones" where people carrying protest signs are marched away to when the presidential motorcade comes to town...
"The Silence of the Critics" seems to be the vision of the politicians/companies running the USA these days. See the emperor's new clothes, or go to jail. Orwell would be proud.
I took three computers out in my rowboat, a Windows system, a Linux system, and a BSD system, and threw them overboard to see what would happen.
The Windows system sank like a rock, the Linux system bobbed back to the surface, and the BSD system rose to the sky, to be greated by a chorus of angels.
Then I woke up, so I don't know what the angels were singing.
> If they'd recanted when people first started complaining about it it might have mattered, but a year later just doesn't cut it.
Presumably the timing has something to do with a sales cycle based on the annual tax cycle.
> It seems that Adobe has decided to go they way of Intuit's TurboTax last year and add activation to their products.
I read somewhere recently that Intuit had issued an apology to their customers about that.
> Let's see your evidence for abiogenesis.
We know that the universe was once inhospitable to biological life, and we know that at least one corner of it now teems with biological life.
Ergo, life had a non-biological beginning at some point.
Notice that even creationists believe this: the only point in dispute is the mechanism.
> Are you going to cite Miller-Urey????
No, U-M is simply a demonstration that complex biological molecules can arise from simpler precursors. Since then we've even discovered that amino acids arise in deep space.
No one claims to know how abiogenesis happened, but there are some plausible ideas out there. A recent one (which I have only skimmed) can be found here.
And, as we must apparently remind you an infinite number of times, evolution and abiogenesis are separate topics. Evolution would happen even if your god created the original life forms, if he happened to use imperfect replicators in his design. (And since existing life forms do use imperfect replicators, you should be able to work out the implications on your own.)
> 30 seconds google
What makes you think an evolution denier would invest so much as 30 seconds looking for facts that might rattle his comfy beliefs?
If creationists were interested in facts, they wouldn't be creationists.
I can't find the Cowboy Neal option!
> "We're sorry, you need to be logged in to vote for this contest."
At least you didn't have to use a Diebold machine...
> I don't get it. Why try and apply the scientific method to faith? That's just silly. God isn't Santa Claus; HE IS GOD! Duh! I'm sure God is a bit wiser than us (if you have faith that he is omniscient, omnipresent, etc. - basically infinitely perfect in all things). Why a scientist would try to apply a 4 dimensional measuring system to an infinite being (God) is beyond my comprehension.
How 'bout 'cause lots of people claim that God actually has an effect within that 4-D system?
Lots of theists whinge that scientists are "philosophical naturalists" who won't give God a fair chance in their game, but when they do give him a fair chance, he never seems to show up.
> So one solution is for that virus writer who is exploiting the new Windows holes to cause the machines to all pop up a message at the same time: "We are conducting a search for God. Everyone please pray for [X]."
> Dunno what to put in [X] but it should be something easy to verify, like...
> > Jesus said in his temptation in the desert by Satan: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
> That's pretty rich, in light of all of the appalling tests which Job had to endure at God's hand. What happened to 'do unto others....?
Surely you've had enough jobs to know that the Boss gets to stick it to the employees, but not vice versa.
> This one is really straightforward to explain. You see, in addition to prayer by the One True Religion, the prayers of infidels were also mixed in. Since the prayers of infidels are actually prayers to the Dark One who does the opposite of what was asked, these amount to anti-prayers. Hence they cancelled out their results.
Heretic! You subscribe to the false doctrine that prayers and anti-prayers interact as waves, whereas the true doctrine reveals that they interact as particles!
> It doesn't go without saying though, that God is not a neutral, unintelligent force that is manipulated by the hands of men. Many people treat prayer like a magic spell, a way we can force His hand to our will. The truth is (from a Christian perspective, obviously not from a New Ager or others who believe that all things make up God) that if a person's time to die has come, they will die.
IOW, true believers believe that it's effective, but don't think it actually does anything.
The whole concept is really strange. If you pray for rain and it rains, then the prayer was answered; if you pray for rain and it doesn't, it was still answered - just not with the answer you wanted. And BTW, God already knows everything, including what you need and want, and he's going to do what he thinks best in the grander plan regardless of what you pray or even whether you pray at all... So what it all boils down to is that prayer is a useless exercise, and a moment's thought would have let people reason it out without the need for an experiment. The only role prayer plays in Christianity is to show that you're willing to grovel in a context where it won't make the slightest difference.
> I am of an increasingly minority view in Christianity today. After the New Testament was completed, the spiritual gifts (healing, prophecy, miracles, etc) ceased. Their purpose for that time had been completed, and they ended
Church of Christ? No, I suppose not, or you would have used their stock phrase "to confirm the word". Strange doctrine though, since those purportedly confirming signs and wonders are reported in the same book as the stuff they're supposed to be confirming, which means they need to be confirmed in turn... Unfortunate infinite recursive problem, completely ignored by the apologists.
> - as had happened in times before. Then over the next 400 years, culminating with Christianity becoming the official religion of Rome, the supposed miraculous increased in number. But these were not the true gifts - they were pseudo miracles, hypnotism, trickery and deception.
Stranger and stranger. How do you tell the real ones from the fakes? What good are the real ones as signs, if they're indistinguishable from the fakes? How did the apostles' signs "confirm the word", if the devil's disciples could do the same things?
> This experiment confirmed what I already believed - that prayer is our chance to worship God, to make known our heartache, and pray for His intercession in ours and other's lives.
Prayer is the opportunity to... pray? Your theology is truly baffling.
> We can request from Him a miracle for healing or other things. In reality, such true miracles are very rare. As someone said, for the few thousand that Jesus fed miraculously, millions still have to cook their meals every night.
And millions of others starve, all as part of some inscrutable plan.
If you wonder at the harrumphs of skeptics, you should consider the matter of signal and noise. Something's getting lost in the mix here.
And if God had even half the properties ascribed to him, he could make himself known to all mankind without the faintest doubt. The only possible conclusion is that if God exists and has the powers attributed to him, he doesn't want to be known.
> The truth is, I don't expect God to make much of a difference for all those prayers made, regardless of whether it's a test or just a ministry, regardless of whether they are all from the "One True Religion" or not. If God has any power at all, then we are His servants, not the other way around.
IOW, you don't believe in prayer any more than the staunchest atheist, but you prefer to spin it otherwise rather than coming out and saying it.
> 1: The CEO of a company that makes voting machines expresses a political preference and a will to see that preference follow through elections.
No problem; just let each candidate's supporters provide a voting machine, and then the voters can choose whose machine they want to use to vote!
Vote with your vote, so to speak.
> (fwiw, I vote Libetarian, and no, GW doesn't get my vote in 04 either)
That may depend on whose voting machine you use.