I don't think I would worry about Obama or any other president in the near future cutting off Internet access to the country. There would be tons of lawsuits and our country is too legal-based for this to stand for long. What I would be concerned about, though, is our government shutting down websites/seizing domain names of companies that it decrees are illegal without any previous due process. (Fighting a lengthy court battle to recover your domain name while you are down or online under a lesser-known name isn't a valid option.) Sadly, this is being done now: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Homeland-Security-Begins-Seizing-Domains-Again-112598
If these websites are conducting illegal activity, gather evidence, launch a lawsuit against them, let the courts decide that first and *then* seize the domain (if the court decides that should happen). Don't seize the domain and say "want it back? Sue us."
Evolution is a pretty well proven theory. There are some details that still need to be hashed out, but that's for the scientists, not high school science class students to do. High school science class should be about foundations. Students should learn about the scientific method and perform some experiments, but shouldn't be expected to produce something that will alter commonly accepted scientific theory. They should also learn about what the currently accepted theory is along with why it is the accepted theory.
The main problem with high school science is limited time. Even dividing class up into Physics, Biology and Chemistry means that there is a lot of ground to cover in the course of a year. If biology devotes a week to discussing what some people view as weaknesses of Evolution, they'll:
1) Run out of time on other topics 2) Need to spend more time on why scientists still accept Evolution despite these "weaknesses" 3) Need to spend more time on why these weaknesses aren't really weaknesses.
Usually, I'd be for this additional education, but with time short I'd rather have them skip this ultimately unnecessary segment and include some other important science topic.
First off, Evolution doesn't describe how life came to be. That's a common mistake. Evolution says that, once life is here, this is how it will adapt to changes. Ambiogenesis is the study of how life arose. There was a link to a YouTube video awhile back where someone showed how simple chemicals could spontaneously, over a few steps, form into proto-life forms. Sadly, I have lost that link. It showed "bubbles" forming and mentioned about how pourous the membranes were, etc. There was a kind of evolution (small e) at work there in that the "bubbles" that had membranes of the correct pourousness could reproduce whicle others couldn't, but this isn't a standard application of the Theory of Evolution (big e).
Sadly, they're choosing it for all of us. They, being an especially vocal group against whom politicians are reluctant to act against (lest they be painted as "anti-god", a death knell in politics) lobby for law/circullum changes that will get their religious beliefs into the schools. Now, if they formed their own religious school and put their kids in there, that'd be one thing. But by making the changes in the public school, they are affecting the education of other kids as well.
Say you don't live near these kinds of people. Do you think your child is safe? No. Because as they get big states (like Texas) to become more "religious friendly" in the classroom, the text book manufacturers will respond. And these companies aren't going to create a Looney-Texas Edition and a Rational Rest-Of-The-Country Edition. They'll tailor their textbooks to Texas and that's that. So, your child, far from these religious activists, will be reading in their text book about how evolution might not be true because the eye is just too complex and therefore some Intelligent Designer (*cough*God*cough*) must have did it.
As the kids who grow up learning this stuff become adults, they'll be more likely to enact further changes and it'll become harder and harder to get an actual scientific education in the US. Meanwhile, they'll scratch their heads and wonder why we keep falling further and further behind before turning on the TV to the televangelist channel and shouting "AMERICA ROCKS!"
Where I live we have schools run by corporations. They're called Charter Schools. They keep opening more and more of them around there. They feed off of the money for public schools since they aren't technically private schools even though corporations run them. The schools get to choose who gets in, get to choose which of their test scores to report and yet many of them are still failing their metrics. And yet, any monetary "threat" against the school results in that school's board (highly paid officers, BTW) crying about how government is destroying their wonderful school. Meanwhile, the public schools are bled dry of funds and are the first lined up on the chopping block for budget cuts.
(No, I'm not bitter about my son's current and future education. Not at all.)
If this were a battle for history class then we'd be seeing people campaigning for lessons on "teaching the controversy" on whether or not the Holocaust really happened and whether slaves in the South were really enslaved against their will or were treated perfectly fairly by their benevolant masters. (Of course, really teaching those in a class would rightfully raise a huge stink.)
I put up family photos so my friends and family can see them. Of course, I take precautions. I upload resized-for-the-web, watermarked photos. That's not 100% protection against my photo being stolen, but it would take effort to get it in a usable form and an image freeloader would likely use another image.
To give a counter-example to the "company steals images" stories that are all too common, an advertising firm contacted us about a photo my wife posted showing our younger son learning to walk. They represented Western Digital and wanted to use our photo in an advertising campaign. After hashing some terms out, we sold them the rights to the photo (not copyright ownership, just meant we couldn't sell that photo to another ad agency). They used the photo to advertise Western Digital hard drives (the ad showed the photo being lost in a data crash & promoted WD hard drives as a backup tool) and we got paid something for a photo that would have just sat on our hard drive. Everybody won.
It's not like people who post their photos online are looking for massive payments (or, if they are, they're not likely to get them), they just want basic copyright respected.
You basically would have four kinds of people that would be susceptible when people don't vaccinate their kids. The first are, of course, the kids of the parents who don't vaccinate. Next are people who can't vaccinate due to a valid medical reason (weak immune system, allergic, etc). Then there are the very young who aren't old enough yet for the vaccine. (See: Dana McCaffery) Finally, there are also the very old who might not have gotten the vaccine when they were young as it wasn't available. If the parents who don't vaccinate were only risking their kids' lives that would be bad enough. But they are also risking the lives of other kids, babies and the elderly.
Just over 2 decades after BTTF 2, we have the Wii, Kinect and other "handless" or nearly-handless computer gaming systems. It's not too far-fetched to think that our kids, or our kids' kids will think of hand-held gaming as a baby toy while the "big kid games" are controlled by moving around.
Think of the universe as a balloon. (A REALLY big balloon.) We're 2-dimensional creatures (say, squares... maybe a trapezoid) living on the inside surface of it. We can look left, right, forward and backwards, but can't look up or down. You could travel all over the balloon-universe and never find an edge. Yet, the balloon-universe has a definite size. It isn't infinite. The same is true for our Universe. If you could traverse the entire Universe (ignoring the expansion of the Universe and the huge distances you would have to cover for a second), you could wind up right back where you started without ever having seen an edge.
I had only gotten Internet access a year prior. I remember hopping onto gopher and being wide-eyed as I went from "site" to "site." Then I stopped at an entry titled "Middle East." Suddenly, I worried about getting in trouble for causing long-distance charges to my school so I signed off. I quickly learned that you didn't incur long distance charges online, though and clicked away next time.
Of course, not too long later, I dialed in from home and was downloading some freeware from a "far away location" (i.e. another state). My father heard what I was doing and got upset that I was costing him long distance fees. He didn't understand either at the time.
Now, we semi-regularly use Skype to video chat. (Lets them talk to my kids who do better with a "video phone" than a normal phone. Kids don't quite understand that the other person can't see what you see.) How technology's changed in just 17 years. Imagine what it will be like in 2028! ("What do you mean you had to type things out? With your fingers? Why didn't you just use thought-2-computer tech?")
VHS was nice, but it got painful to find a tape you were willing to tape over, remember to set the timer and then when watching the show, fast forward past programs other people in your household recorded to get to your shows. (You could have your own tapes, but that meant switching them out between recordings. Not practical if two recordings were close together.)
In all of those examples, not pushing your religion on others would allow religious and non-religious folks to co-exist. When it comes to abortion, Judaism doesn't think of the fetus as a "baby" until it exits the mother. While it would certainly frown on using abortion as birth control, there is no question in cases of life of the mother. (My personal view is that abortion should be safe and legal for people who want it. People who think it is a sin can simply not have abortions.) When it comes to marriage, I don't think religious institutions should be forced to marry two men or two women if they don't want to, but any couple of consenting age should be allowed to get married (provided that couple would be allowed to get married were they of opposite genders) in a civil ceremony. Religious marriage and Civil marriage are two different things. I also don't agree with Blue Laws. (Especially since those are enforcements of Christian law and I happen to be Jewish. Judaism doesn't ban drinking on any day save for a few fast days where you're not supposed to eat or drink.)
Both you (marking 1 candidate) and the guy next to you (marking several), both get the same number of potntial votes to cast. You just opt not to cast them all (which isn't a bad thing). Otherwise, right now, you could claim that two people voting are unequal if one votes in every possible category available while the other skips school board elections and other "too small to bother with" positions.
Whether I believe in a god or not in my business. I don't push my religious beliefs on anyone else and I don't expect anyone else to push their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) onto me. The First Amendment guarantees me freedom of religion which means "suppressing" religion (as you propose) would be highly illegal. Of course, on the flip side, it would be highly illegal for the government to tell me that I *have* to worship Jesus Christ (or Allah or FSM) or else. As with many things, it isn't religion itself that is the problem, it is the people who take their particular flavor of religion and insist that everyone needs to follow it or else.
I completely agree about teaching evolution, however I don't know of any Jew (myself included) who is offended to learn about the Nazis. If a school was teaching "Aryans are the master race and Jews should be rounded up and shot", I would be offended. If the school teaches "Nazis thought that Aryans were the master race and Jews should be rounded up and shot", I wouldn't be offended. Yes, I'm horrified when I read about the Holocaust. (My trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC shortly after it opened was quite an emotionally draining experience.) I'm guessing that blacks feel similarly about slavery. It's an ugly piece of history but important to learn/remember.
Getting back to evolution, I'm all for local control of the schools, but incidents like Texas school boards trying to "teach the controversy" make me think there's something to be said for minimum national standards as well. And those minimum standards should include basic science like Evolution. Of course, any national standard like this would get the radical church going crowd out in the streets foaming at the mouth.
Exactly. If you want to have religious/creationism-type discussions in school, the place for it is a philosophy class. "Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Is there some higher purpose?" These are perfectly valid questions for religion to tackle. Religion's not a requirement, of course, but, when you get right down to it, these kinds of questions are what religion is "designed" for. The question of "what physical processes took place to develop life", though, is one that science can answer just find without shrugging your shoulders and saying "God did it and we don't know how."
Well, obviously, when God made the world 6,000 years ago, he made it so that everything *seemed* really old but it's all a trick to deceive you. True believers will see the truth instead of trusting logic and reason.
(Sadly, I'm being sarcastic, but the same thing would be said completely seriously by many religious folk.)
Either you meant GB instead of MB or your cap is only 125MB. Even when Time Warner Cable was proposing ridiculously low caps, they chose 5GB. If any ISP decided that users should only download 125MB per month, they'd have a huge uprising on their hands.
We tend to wash the bottles once per week. The energy spent making dish detergent to wash the bottles is negligable because it gets used to wash all of our dishes as well. The full dishwasher was going to be run anyway, so adding a few water bottles to the mix doesn't cost more. Compare that with the energy to make and dispose of (or recycle) all of the disposable plastic water bottles one might use instead of the reusable one. I'm sure you'd find that the reusable bottle is the greener solution.
Kind of makes me wonder if the porn accusations were all smoke and mirrors in a barely-legal extortion attempt. As in "Our data shows you downloading 'Naked Underage Midgets 3'. You wouldn't want your friends and family to find out you've been sued for downloading this movie, would you? Just pay our settlement fee and this can go away quietly."
I don't think being green has to be the same thing as being anti-human. Just respecting that the planet's resources aren't infinite and there isn't some great cosmic garbage collector who will turn the trash you dump into gold. Reducing how much waste we produce is a "green" action, yet I don't think my use of a reusable Nalgene water bottle over thousands of disposable plastic bottles is in any way anti-human. I do agree that some people take it to the extreme and would slice humanity off the planet if they could, but not everyone who tries to be "green" is a "green fundamentalist."
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I don't think I would worry about Obama or any other president in the near future cutting off Internet access to the country. There would be tons of lawsuits and our country is too legal-based for this to stand for long. What I would be concerned about, though, is our government shutting down websites/seizing domain names of companies that it decrees are illegal without any previous due process. (Fighting a lengthy court battle to recover your domain name while you are down or online under a lesser-known name isn't a valid option.) Sadly, this is being done now: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Homeland-Security-Begins-Seizing-Domains-Again-112598
If these websites are conducting illegal activity, gather evidence, launch a lawsuit against them, let the courts decide that first and *then* seize the domain (if the court decides that should happen). Don't seize the domain and say "want it back? Sue us."
Evolution is a pretty well proven theory. There are some details that still need to be hashed out, but that's for the scientists, not high school science class students to do. High school science class should be about foundations. Students should learn about the scientific method and perform some experiments, but shouldn't be expected to produce something that will alter commonly accepted scientific theory. They should also learn about what the currently accepted theory is along with why it is the accepted theory.
The main problem with high school science is limited time. Even dividing class up into Physics, Biology and Chemistry means that there is a lot of ground to cover in the course of a year. If biology devotes a week to discussing what some people view as weaknesses of Evolution, they'll:
1) Run out of time on other topics
2) Need to spend more time on why scientists still accept Evolution despite these "weaknesses"
3) Need to spend more time on why these weaknesses aren't really weaknesses.
Usually, I'd be for this additional education, but with time short I'd rather have them skip this ultimately unnecessary segment and include some other important science topic.
First off, Evolution doesn't describe how life came to be. That's a common mistake. Evolution says that, once life is here, this is how it will adapt to changes. Ambiogenesis is the study of how life arose. There was a link to a YouTube video awhile back where someone showed how simple chemicals could spontaneously, over a few steps, form into proto-life forms. Sadly, I have lost that link. It showed "bubbles" forming and mentioned about how pourous the membranes were, etc. There was a kind of evolution (small e) at work there in that the "bubbles" that had membranes of the correct pourousness could reproduce whicle others couldn't, but this isn't a standard application of the Theory of Evolution (big e).
Sadly, they're choosing it for all of us. They, being an especially vocal group against whom politicians are reluctant to act against (lest they be painted as "anti-god", a death knell in politics) lobby for law/circullum changes that will get their religious beliefs into the schools. Now, if they formed their own religious school and put their kids in there, that'd be one thing. But by making the changes in the public school, they are affecting the education of other kids as well.
Say you don't live near these kinds of people. Do you think your child is safe? No. Because as they get big states (like Texas) to become more "religious friendly" in the classroom, the text book manufacturers will respond. And these companies aren't going to create a Looney-Texas Edition and a Rational Rest-Of-The-Country Edition. They'll tailor their textbooks to Texas and that's that. So, your child, far from these religious activists, will be reading in their text book about how evolution might not be true because the eye is just too complex and therefore some Intelligent Designer (*cough*God*cough*) must have did it.
As the kids who grow up learning this stuff become adults, they'll be more likely to enact further changes and it'll become harder and harder to get an actual scientific education in the US. Meanwhile, they'll scratch their heads and wonder why we keep falling further and further behind before turning on the TV to the televangelist channel and shouting "AMERICA ROCKS!"
Where I live we have schools run by corporations. They're called Charter Schools. They keep opening more and more of them around there. They feed off of the money for public schools since they aren't technically private schools even though corporations run them. The schools get to choose who gets in, get to choose which of their test scores to report and yet many of them are still failing their metrics. And yet, any monetary "threat" against the school results in that school's board (highly paid officers, BTW) crying about how government is destroying their wonderful school. Meanwhile, the public schools are bled dry of funds and are the first lined up on the chopping block for budget cuts.
(No, I'm not bitter about my son's current and future education. Not at all.)
If this were a battle for history class then we'd be seeing people campaigning for lessons on "teaching the controversy" on whether or not the Holocaust really happened and whether slaves in the South were really enslaved against their will or were treated perfectly fairly by their benevolant masters. (Of course, really teaching those in a class would rightfully raise a huge stink.)
I put up family photos so my friends and family can see them. Of course, I take precautions. I upload resized-for-the-web, watermarked photos. That's not 100% protection against my photo being stolen, but it would take effort to get it in a usable form and an image freeloader would likely use another image.
To give a counter-example to the "company steals images" stories that are all too common, an advertising firm contacted us about a photo my wife posted showing our younger son learning to walk. They represented Western Digital and wanted to use our photo in an advertising campaign. After hashing some terms out, we sold them the rights to the photo (not copyright ownership, just meant we couldn't sell that photo to another ad agency). They used the photo to advertise Western Digital hard drives (the ad showed the photo being lost in a data crash & promoted WD hard drives as a backup tool) and we got paid something for a photo that would have just sat on our hard drive. Everybody won.
It's not like people who post their photos online are looking for massive payments (or, if they are, they're not likely to get them), they just want basic copyright respected.
You basically would have four kinds of people that would be susceptible when people don't vaccinate their kids. The first are, of course, the kids of the parents who don't vaccinate. Next are people who can't vaccinate due to a valid medical reason (weak immune system, allergic, etc). Then there are the very young who aren't old enough yet for the vaccine. (See: Dana McCaffery) Finally, there are also the very old who might not have gotten the vaccine when they were young as it wasn't available. If the parents who don't vaccinate were only risking their kids' lives that would be bad enough. But they are also risking the lives of other kids, babies and the elderly.
Just over 2 decades after BTTF 2, we have the Wii, Kinect and other "handless" or nearly-handless computer gaming systems. It's not too far-fetched to think that our kids, or our kids' kids will think of hand-held gaming as a baby toy while the "big kid games" are controlled by moving around.
Think of the universe as a balloon. (A REALLY big balloon.) We're 2-dimensional creatures (say, squares... maybe a trapezoid) living on the inside surface of it. We can look left, right, forward and backwards, but can't look up or down. You could travel all over the balloon-universe and never find an edge. Yet, the balloon-universe has a definite size. It isn't infinite. The same is true for our Universe. If you could traverse the entire Universe (ignoring the expansion of the Universe and the huge distances you would have to cover for a second), you could wind up right back where you started without ever having seen an edge.
I'm not in favor of that at all. It's a horrible idea. How dare you suggest doing such violence to circa-1995 Cisco routers!
I had only gotten Internet access a year prior. I remember hopping onto gopher and being wide-eyed as I went from "site" to "site." Then I stopped at an entry titled "Middle East." Suddenly, I worried about getting in trouble for causing long-distance charges to my school so I signed off. I quickly learned that you didn't incur long distance charges online, though and clicked away next time.
Of course, not too long later, I dialed in from home and was downloading some freeware from a "far away location" (i.e. another state). My father heard what I was doing and got upset that I was costing him long distance fees. He didn't understand either at the time.
Now, we semi-regularly use Skype to video chat. (Lets them talk to my kids who do better with a "video phone" than a normal phone. Kids don't quite understand that the other person can't see what you see.) How technology's changed in just 17 years. Imagine what it will be like in 2028! ("What do you mean you had to type things out? With your fingers? Why didn't you just use thought-2-computer tech?")
Don't worry. The Dupe will appear in only 8 more years.
VHS was nice, but it got painful to find a tape you were willing to tape over, remember to set the timer and then when watching the show, fast forward past programs other people in your household recorded to get to your shows. (You could have your own tapes, but that meant switching them out between recordings. Not practical if two recordings were close together.)
In all of those examples, not pushing your religion on others would allow religious and non-religious folks to co-exist. When it comes to abortion, Judaism doesn't think of the fetus as a "baby" until it exits the mother. While it would certainly frown on using abortion as birth control, there is no question in cases of life of the mother. (My personal view is that abortion should be safe and legal for people who want it. People who think it is a sin can simply not have abortions.) When it comes to marriage, I don't think religious institutions should be forced to marry two men or two women if they don't want to, but any couple of consenting age should be allowed to get married (provided that couple would be allowed to get married were they of opposite genders) in a civil ceremony. Religious marriage and Civil marriage are two different things. I also don't agree with Blue Laws. (Especially since those are enforcements of Christian law and I happen to be Jewish. Judaism doesn't ban drinking on any day save for a few fast days where you're not supposed to eat or drink.)
Both you (marking 1 candidate) and the guy next to you (marking several), both get the same number of potntial votes to cast. You just opt not to cast them all (which isn't a bad thing). Otherwise, right now, you could claim that two people voting are unequal if one votes in every possible category available while the other skips school board elections and other "too small to bother with" positions.
Actually, you can hurt people with data. Mainly, people in power. And that's what they're afraid of.
Whether I believe in a god or not in my business. I don't push my religious beliefs on anyone else and I don't expect anyone else to push their religious beliefs (or lack thereof) onto me. The First Amendment guarantees me freedom of religion which means "suppressing" religion (as you propose) would be highly illegal. Of course, on the flip side, it would be highly illegal for the government to tell me that I *have* to worship Jesus Christ (or Allah or FSM) or else. As with many things, it isn't religion itself that is the problem, it is the people who take their particular flavor of religion and insist that everyone needs to follow it or else.
I completely agree about teaching evolution, however I don't know of any Jew (myself included) who is offended to learn about the Nazis. If a school was teaching "Aryans are the master race and Jews should be rounded up and shot", I would be offended. If the school teaches "Nazis thought that Aryans were the master race and Jews should be rounded up and shot", I wouldn't be offended. Yes, I'm horrified when I read about the Holocaust. (My trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC shortly after it opened was quite an emotionally draining experience.) I'm guessing that blacks feel similarly about slavery. It's an ugly piece of history but important to learn/remember.
Getting back to evolution, I'm all for local control of the schools, but incidents like Texas school boards trying to "teach the controversy" make me think there's something to be said for minimum national standards as well. And those minimum standards should include basic science like Evolution. Of course, any national standard like this would get the radical church going crowd out in the streets foaming at the mouth.
Exactly. If you want to have religious/creationism-type discussions in school, the place for it is a philosophy class. "Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Is there some higher purpose?" These are perfectly valid questions for religion to tackle. Religion's not a requirement, of course, but, when you get right down to it, these kinds of questions are what religion is "designed" for. The question of "what physical processes took place to develop life", though, is one that science can answer just find without shrugging your shoulders and saying "God did it and we don't know how."
Well, obviously, when God made the world 6,000 years ago, he made it so that everything *seemed* really old but it's all a trick to deceive you. True believers will see the truth instead of trusting logic and reason.
(Sadly, I'm being sarcastic, but the same thing would be said completely seriously by many religious folk.)
Either you meant GB instead of MB or your cap is only 125MB. Even when Time Warner Cable was proposing ridiculously low caps, they chose 5GB. If any ISP decided that users should only download 125MB per month, they'd have a huge uprising on their hands.
We tend to wash the bottles once per week. The energy spent making dish detergent to wash the bottles is negligable because it gets used to wash all of our dishes as well. The full dishwasher was going to be run anyway, so adding a few water bottles to the mix doesn't cost more. Compare that with the energy to make and dispose of (or recycle) all of the disposable plastic water bottles one might use instead of the reusable one. I'm sure you'd find that the reusable bottle is the greener solution.
Kind of makes me wonder if the porn accusations were all smoke and mirrors in a barely-legal extortion attempt. As in "Our data shows you downloading 'Naked Underage Midgets 3'. You wouldn't want your friends and family to find out you've been sued for downloading this movie, would you? Just pay our settlement fee and this can go away quietly."
I don't think being green has to be the same thing as being anti-human. Just respecting that the planet's resources aren't infinite and there isn't some great cosmic garbage collector who will turn the trash you dump into gold. Reducing how much waste we produce is a "green" action, yet I don't think my use of a reusable Nalgene water bottle over thousands of disposable plastic bottles is in any way anti-human. I do agree that some people take it to the extreme and would slice humanity off the planet if they could, but not everyone who tries to be "green" is a "green fundamentalist."