Any believer worth the name either avoides sciense altogether, or comes to a conlusion similar to "God doesn't want to be found."
If you were an all-powerful being who decided to take 6 earth-days to create a Thing, and then fill this Thing with other Things, including smart Things called People, and you wanted to hide your own existnace from these People to see if they would believe in you... well, you could do it, becasue you're all-powerful.
The conflict between science and religion comes when science tries to extrapolate its theories and laws backwards to infinity. Take, for example, evolution. No one in their right mind says "beings do not evolve", when it's clear that they do--just ask any plant breeder, for instance.
The problem is when "animals evolve to best fit their environment" is extended backwards to "all beings evolved from other things."
And moving on, just to ensure that this is marked as offtopic, I feel like pointing out that my Christian faith isn't rooted in a book, it's rooted in a man called Jesus whom, when viewed from a modern persepctive, was really the first hippie.
Windows XP RC1 works just fine without passport enabled. I can check my e-mail, browse the web, use web servers, publish web pages, and even send error reports--all without sending MS a single fact about me.
Passport's just integrated, so if I *wanted* all of MS's shiney new toys (MSN Messenger,.Net, etc) I could use them. But if I don't want to, then WinXP is just like what Win2k should have been--the product of putting NT and 9x in a room with some spanish fly and waiting nine months.
No need to flame me over it. Or call simple misinformation "lies." (I will now prove I am a better man, by suppressing my urge to flame back. have a nice day.)
Can you think of a BETTER place for a facist bitch than the FBI? I mean, if someone has natural tendancies to stick to the rules and enforce them even when they anger people, she's *exactly* the kind of person I'd like to see going after criminals.
Just as long as she's not the judge who decides how harshly to treat the accused, and the jury's fair.
With security from something other than a lock, the lock becomes less important. Just like the modern man's skill in killing bears is much less than it was a hundred years ago--because there are other measure to protect him and his kind from bears.
*OF COURSE* a law like the DMCA causes security to be less; when done properly, it makes it irrelveant. The 'net would be a wonderful place if encryption wasn't needed--all of the resources devoted to encryption could be used on something else, and getting at your personal information would be much easier. (Of course, a world where everyone is beautiful and lives forever would be a wonderful place too, and just as likely to come about.)
On a final note, if you don't like what I say just skip it. People can and will say things that you disagree with, and even that you find quite offensive. But the appropriate response is to simply ignore them, or to correct them in a polite fashion. Not to call them names.
All that international law needs to claim jurisdiction is to have an effect. If I plan a terrorist assault on NY, I have an effect. If I shoot a gun over the border, I have an effect.
In either case the US will have to come to get me, or wait for me to show up--but if I'm foolish enough to show up, then that's my own damn fault.
While it may seem as if Adobe is folding, don't expect it. The DMCA is the law of the land, and Adobe would be foolish not to do exploit it as best they can.
If you want the DMCA gone, write your congressman, practice civil disobedience, and for Martin Luther King's sake, *take a case to court!*
The GPL survives in legal limbo because it's never been tested in court--and this is because those would benefit most from going to court (those who's work revolves around the GPL) would rather settle than risk legal correction.
Don't expect the same thing to work with the DMCA. Heck, don't expect anything short of a diplomatic incident to change the FBI's mind... they're officers of the law, who's job it is to gather cases against those who break the law.
(Yes, sometimes the FBI investigates innocents... but it happens. I've been investigated, you've probably been investigated... you might even have been arrested for a crime you didn't commit. Guess what? That's how the law works.)
Remember: those who want the GPL ambiguous and the DMCA unrepealed have deep pockets, and aren't afraid of the cost of a lawsuit. If we want these these things changed, we need to go to court.
the whole idea of punishment (as opposed to repartitions) is to get you to stop doing whatever it is that you did. (And, by example, others.)
If you convince the court that you'll never, ever, do what you did again, then OF COURSE you'll get a lighter sentence than someone whom the court thinks will go right out and do the same thing.
#1: If it's a trade secret, MS could ask that their code be hidden from the record. It wouldn't then appear in the transcript, and would be treated just like any other piece of evidence--like, say, a blue dress.
#2: Even IF it was entered into the public record, MS still has copyright on it. Great, you can read the source--but you can't make a derivitive work from it, even if you do get the *entire* source in the record.
IANAL, and you should never take legal advice from strangers on the internet, even if I was.
I never got the argument that code = speech. Sure, action = speech, and COMMENTS certainly = speech, and art = speech, and some code can = art, but...
I never got the argument that code = speech. I mean, it seems like an action that *can* be speech (like, say, burning the flag) but isn't *always* speech (like, oh, burning something at random.)
In all honestly, the 'net might be a better place if code wasn't "speech" at all. Think about it--if it's seen as functional, rather than art / speech, then there's a lot less of a tendancy to pamper rabid vanity (no! It's *my* code--you can't touch it!)
Aside from the freedom to break the law, I don't even get what the BENEFIT of being speech is. Buggy code, Script Kiddies, Prima Dona programmers, and elitist nerdy shmucks... and on the other side, a good number of people working to make computers do what they should do, and work.
I'm not sure how copyright law actually works, though, so this is just speculation. I seem to remember that patents are only supposed to be granted for works that are not obvious to an expert in the field (not like this matters in practice).
IANAL, But from what I recall in class, how "obvious" something is has no bearing on it's copyright. This post, for example, is a fairly simple thing that I'm writing, and it's clearly derivitive of your post--but I still have copyright on it.
Not that this copyright gets me anything, but if some AC were to come along and post something that was awfully similar, but that could be proven to not be derivitive, I'm out of luck.
(the EFF's sharks, and any other lawyer, will argue anything and everything their client tells them to... that's their job.)
Trademarks are important because they identify a product. (Service marks for services.) If you use a trademark to idenitfy what it's trademarked to identify (for example, if I use the name "Dungeons and Dragons" to identify WotC's roleplaying game) then I'm not diluting the trademark.
While I'm not familiar with the "Barney's Lawyers" case, I'd wager that the court decided that the name was used to identify that exact character, not a parody of that character, and so it got by.
*IF* slaves had been "subhuman" (Which they obviously aren't, by the way) we wouldn't have freed them--instead, in the last 150 odd years, we would have cleaned up the industry.
And I'm sure you aren't suggesting we'll ever get to a civil war over raising animals for food... symathetic vegitarians (who don't eat meat for moral reasons) are too nice, and nutritional vegitarians (who don't eat meat due to what's in it) don't care.)
Clever attack on my argument, although your reference to condoms borders on stereotyping. Althouh it might surprise you, both I and my meat-eating christian wife have no moral problems with condoms, birth control, or wiccans.
(Now, onto the rational points.)
1: Publishing houses don't care about the truth, they care about sales. If a book of blantant lies will increase their overall sales, they'll publish it. If it won't, or will bring on consequences greater than the benefit, they won't.
2: A sizeable number of vegitarians means that there is a vegitarian market--as shown by your local stores in Boston. Restaurants cater to vegitarians, again, because doing so increases their bottom line.
3: You not eating meat isn't 100% transfered to meat being not killed--you contribute to a slightly less demand, which, given sufficient mass, will decrease demand. But that's hardly 100% change.
4: Can you quote a source to say that there is less meat being eaten now that there was at some point in the past? Yes, there may be less meat in the grocery store--but that could be attributed to the general decline of home cooking, and of greater efficincy.
FINAL: Your end argument is lacking in completeness. Suffering is a fact of life, and refusing something because it has suffering at all will quickly get you dead. (Most farming incurrs direct human suffering, often human death.)
The moral question here is, "does eating meat cause undue suffering?" I answer "not to a point where I will stop eating meat, but to a point where I will take other action to reduce the suffering."
So, what action can you reccommend I take? If you really care, you will direct me to these people so that I might express my disgust, as a customer, at their treatment of the cows.
Sure, I will get a PR response immediatly--but if enough of the customers write their opinion, and purhcase only humanly treated meat, the industry will change.
MS has been found to be a monopoly that abuses its power. There will be corrective action.
Short of breaking up the company, forcing MS to support competing products *as much as they support their own, unrelated products* is the best fix.
So, it is very concievable that MS will be forced to support other company's languages / programs in Windows as much as it supports their own. So, we could find MS forced to host a Java VM on any Windows distro with a C# VM, for example.
Another problem with desktop Java on windows is associated file types. Without using some sort of installer, I don't know of a way to tell windows that every time I double-click on a file with a.txt,.html, or.java extension, I want it to open in my Java text editor, instead of notepad.exe.
You can simply go into the "file types" information and change that, y'know. Just find the file type, and either change the "Open" command or make a "Open With" command.
If you need help in figuring this out, you can e-mail me at username "dagondge" on the nycap.rr.com server.
Petrolum (A complex chemical formed from bioloical and geological funcitons, found only on Earth)
Enriched Uranium (a heavy element)
Deuterium (Hydrogen with another Neuron)
For both Uranum and Hydrogen's isotopes, we can always just go and look for them elsewhere. For Petrolium, well, unless we find a place that had life thousands of millions of year ago, we're not finding it anywhere but home.
Parody is one of the copyright exceptions that allow fair use. Copyright law has nearly *nothing* to do with Trademarks--in fact, there's no such thing as "fair use of trademark" at all. (Unless you use it to refer to the actual product, as in a review... and even then I'd check.)
Ever wonder why MAD magazine doesn't use real names?
The Federation was founded *ONLY* because of the Romulan threat.
I think you're right about the Klingons--but, really, unless TOS said something, they can do pretty much what they will. (Just like everything else in Trek, only the videos count.)
When Office goes down, you can still read documents. You just can't write new ones.
Windows XP activation is something else--but you knew that going in, so you checked everything *before* you went, right? I mean, that RAM was something that can wait until you get back to your office--and I suspect that there'll be something in the final version that doesn't count external devices (such as Zip drives) as a "change."
Gee, you were all rational right up until the last bit.
Quite simply, anyone can write a book about ANYTHING. I've seen books that declare (alternatly) that there is no God, that God exists, that we live in the greatest country on earth, and that we live in the next Rome.
And now that I've responded to that, I might as well rebut your reasons for being a Vegan... especially since you got all "militant vegan" at the end, and I can't stand those.
1: I know exactly where my food comes from, and I don't care. I would prefer it if some of the sources changed, but the world is rarely as I would prefer it.
2: Hi! I like to eat meat. Meat tastes good. I'm happy with my life, just as I am.
3: Sure, animals suffer in the animal industry. And lawyers suffer in the law industry. But by halting your consumption of meat, you're no longer the industry's customer, so they DON'T CARE what you think, and you really don't do a darn thing to stop the cruelty to animals--so stop pretending.
4: If everyone was vegan, the meat industry would dissappear--and cows, who aren't exactly man's favorite pet, would quickly go down in numbers. If everyone was a vegetarian cows might still get by, but pigs would soon be greatly reduced in number.
5: Life is suffering. Man, either rightly or wrongly, has achieved dominaiton over the earth and all its creatures. Given the choice between making animals suffer and people suffer, man (from his heights) causes animals to suffer. (What suffering? Why, denial of man's craving for meat, of course.)
You do have a point that suffering of animals is wrong--but as I said before, you don't do a SINGLE DARN THING to stop it. Everyone will not become Vegan one day. The Meat industry will not listen to you if you are not a customer.
However, I am a customer. Find me some information about how I can encourage the industry to treat the animals without unnecessary suffering, and I will to the best of my (sadly limited) capability.
In the US, there are publicly funded systems for those in criminal or civil court who can't afford a lawyer. You are *given* a lawyer, abiet a stressed one, if you are charged with a crime. The gov't also has money earmarked for other types of layers.
And adding on to that, lawyers are required to have a certain number of hours per year "pro bono."
And on top of THAT, there are non-governmental nonprofits (UCLA) that will take up legal cases.
What mental disorders are these? Many mental disorders are increasingly recognized as being rooted in oddball neurotransmitter imbalances, and genetic predispositions influencing those chemical flubs.
Memory, which holds all of the assumptions a person has, uses much the same neurotransmitter imbalances.
Claiming that mental disorders stem from faulty assumptions effectively places the "blame" for having a disorder on the person suffering it, whose "faulty assumptions" underlie his disease. More likely, whatever faulty assumptions he may possess are products of a deeper, less controllable cause.
I never said that faulty assumptions cause mental disorders. I said that faulty assumptions *are* mental disorders--or the inverse, if you like. The problem isn't that a person loses the ability to go, logically, from A to C. It's that he's got a rather unusual B in there messing up with what C he arrives at.
(This, of course, is an oversimplification--but it fits most mental disorders, especially if you recall that disorders are only such when they're at a point beyond what ordinary people have.)
Slashdot Mirror
You can patent the possition, not "copyright."
:)
Any believer worth the name either avoides sciense altogether, or comes to a conlusion similar to "God doesn't want to be found."
If you were an all-powerful being who decided to take 6 earth-days to create a Thing, and then fill this Thing with other Things, including smart Things called People, and you wanted to hide your own existnace from these People to see if they would believe in you... well, you could do it, becasue you're all-powerful.
The conflict between science and religion comes when science tries to extrapolate its theories and laws backwards to infinity. Take, for example, evolution. No one in their right mind says "beings do not evolve", when it's clear that they do--just ask any plant breeder, for instance.
The problem is when "animals evolve to best fit their environment" is extended backwards to "all beings evolved from other things."
And moving on, just to ensure that this is marked as offtopic, I feel like pointing out that my Christian faith isn't rooted in a book, it's rooted in a man called Jesus whom, when viewed from a modern persepctive, was really the first hippie.
and it's a real weapon, too... just not quite as pinballesque.
Windows XP RC1 works just fine without passport enabled. I can check my e-mail, browse the web, use web servers, publish web pages, and even send error reports--all without sending MS a single fact about me.
.Net, etc) I could use them. But if I don't want to, then WinXP is just like what Win2k should have been--the product of putting NT and 9x in a room with some spanish fly and waiting nine months.
Passport's just integrated, so if I *wanted* all of MS's shiney new toys (MSN Messenger,
Ok, I made a mistake. Darn rounding.
No need to flame me over it. Or call simple misinformation "lies." (I will now prove I am a better man, by suppressing my urge to flame back. have a nice day.)
The USA's yearly budget dwarves even the national debt. If we were to not spend any money at all for a year, we'd be in the black twice over.
:) Of course, then we'd face the challenge of buildign everything back together after it sat and rotted for a year.
Can you think of a BETTER place for a facist bitch than the FBI? I mean, if someone has natural tendancies to stick to the rules and enforce them even when they anger people, she's *exactly* the kind of person I'd like to see going after criminals.
Just as long as she's not the judge who decides how harshly to treat the accused, and the jury's fair.
Sure, they're being correlated.
With security from something other than a lock, the lock becomes less important. Just like the modern man's skill in killing bears is much less than it was a hundred years ago--because there are other measure to protect him and his kind from bears.
*OF COURSE* a law like the DMCA causes security to be less; when done properly, it makes it irrelveant. The 'net would be a wonderful place if encryption wasn't needed--all of the resources devoted to encryption could be used on something else, and getting at your personal information would be much easier. (Of course, a world where everyone is beautiful and lives forever would be a wonderful place too, and just as likely to come about.)
On a final note, if you don't like what I say just skip it. People can and will say things that you disagree with, and even that you find quite offensive. But the appropriate response is to simply ignore them, or to correct them in a polite fashion. Not to call them names.
All that international law needs to claim jurisdiction is to have an effect. If I plan a terrorist assault on NY, I have an effect. If I shoot a gun over the border, I have an effect.
In either case the US will have to come to get me, or wait for me to show up--but if I'm foolish enough to show up, then that's my own damn fault.
While it may seem as if Adobe is folding, don't expect it. The DMCA is the law of the land, and Adobe would be foolish not to do exploit it as best they can.
If you want the DMCA gone, write your congressman, practice civil disobedience, and for Martin Luther King's sake, *take a case to court!*
The GPL survives in legal limbo because it's never been tested in court--and this is because those would benefit most from going to court (those who's work revolves around the GPL) would rather settle than risk legal correction.
Don't expect the same thing to work with the DMCA. Heck, don't expect anything short of a diplomatic incident to change the FBI's mind... they're officers of the law, who's job it is to gather cases against those who break the law.
(Yes, sometimes the FBI investigates innocents... but it happens. I've been investigated, you've probably been investigated... you might even have been arrested for a crime you didn't commit. Guess what? That's how the law works.)
Remember: those who want the GPL ambiguous and the DMCA unrepealed have deep pockets, and aren't afraid of the cost of a lawsuit. If we want these these things changed, we need to go to court.
the whole idea of punishment (as opposed to repartitions) is to get you to stop doing whatever it is that you did. (And, by example, others.)
If you convince the court that you'll never, ever, do what you did again, then OF COURSE you'll get a lighter sentence than someone whom the court thinks will go right out and do the same thing.
Two problems with that.
#1: If it's a trade secret, MS could ask that their code be hidden from the record. It wouldn't then appear in the transcript, and would be treated just like any other piece of evidence--like, say, a blue dress.
#2: Even IF it was entered into the public record, MS still has copyright on it. Great, you can read the source--but you can't make a derivitive work from it, even if you do get the *entire* source in the record.
IANAL, and you should never take legal advice from strangers on the internet, even if I was.
I never got the argument that code = speech. Sure, action = speech, and COMMENTS certainly = speech, and art = speech, and some code can = art, but...
I never got the argument that code = speech. I mean, it seems like an action that *can* be speech (like, say, burning the flag) but isn't *always* speech (like, oh, burning something at random.)
In all honestly, the 'net might be a better place if code wasn't "speech" at all. Think about it--if it's seen as functional, rather than art / speech, then there's a lot less of a tendancy to pamper rabid vanity (no! It's *my* code--you can't touch it!)
Aside from the freedom to break the law, I don't even get what the BENEFIT of being speech is. Buggy code, Script Kiddies, Prima Dona programmers, and elitist nerdy shmucks... and on the other side, a good number of people working to make computers do what they should do, and work.
I'm not sure how copyright law actually works, though, so this is just speculation. I seem to remember that patents are only supposed to be granted for works that are not obvious to an expert in the field (not like this matters in practice).
IANAL, But from what I recall in class, how "obvious" something is has no bearing on it's copyright. This post, for example, is a fairly simple thing that I'm writing, and it's clearly derivitive of your post--but I still have copyright on it.
Not that this copyright gets me anything, but if some AC were to come along and post something that was awfully similar, but that could be proven to not be derivitive, I'm out of luck.
(the EFF's sharks, and any other lawyer, will argue anything and everything their client tells them to... that's their job.)
Trademarks are important because they identify a product. (Service marks for services.) If you use a trademark to idenitfy what it's trademarked to identify (for example, if I use the name "Dungeons and Dragons" to identify WotC's roleplaying game) then I'm not diluting the trademark.
While I'm not familiar with the "Barney's Lawyers" case, I'd wager that the court decided that the name was used to identify that exact character, not a parody of that character, and so it got by.
So, Cows are the equal of Man?
*IF* slaves had been "subhuman" (Which they obviously aren't, by the way) we wouldn't have freed them--instead, in the last 150 odd years, we would have cleaned up the industry.
And I'm sure you aren't suggesting we'll ever get to a civil war over raising animals for food... symathetic vegitarians (who don't eat meat for moral reasons) are too nice, and nutritional vegitarians (who don't eat meat due to what's in it) don't care.)
Clever attack on my argument, although your reference to condoms borders on stereotyping. Althouh it might surprise you, both I and my meat-eating christian wife have no moral problems with condoms, birth control, or wiccans.
(Now, onto the rational points.)
1: Publishing houses don't care about the truth, they care about sales. If a book of blantant lies will increase their overall sales, they'll publish it. If it won't, or will bring on consequences greater than the benefit, they won't.
2: A sizeable number of vegitarians means that there is a vegitarian market--as shown by your local stores in Boston. Restaurants cater to vegitarians, again, because doing so increases their bottom line.
3: You not eating meat isn't 100% transfered to meat being not killed--you contribute to a slightly less demand, which, given sufficient mass, will decrease demand. But that's hardly 100% change.
4: Can you quote a source to say that there is less meat being eaten now that there was at some point in the past? Yes, there may be less meat in the grocery store--but that could be attributed to the general decline of home cooking, and of greater efficincy.
FINAL: Your end argument is lacking in completeness. Suffering is a fact of life, and refusing something because it has suffering at all will quickly get you dead. (Most farming incurrs direct human suffering, often human death.)
The moral question here is, "does eating meat cause undue suffering?" I answer "not to a point where I will stop eating meat, but to a point where I will take other action to reduce the suffering."
So, what action can you reccommend I take? If you really care, you will direct me to these people so that I might express my disgust, as a customer, at their treatment of the cows.
Sure, I will get a PR response immediatly--but if enough of the customers write their opinion, and purhcase only humanly treated meat, the industry will change.
MS has been found to be a monopoly that abuses its power. There will be corrective action.
Short of breaking up the company, forcing MS to support competing products *as much as they support their own, unrelated products* is the best fix.
So, it is very concievable that MS will be forced to support other company's languages / programs in Windows as much as it supports their own. So, we could find MS forced to host a Java VM on any Windows distro with a C# VM, for example.
Another problem with desktop Java on windows is associated file types. Without using some sort of installer, I don't know of a way to tell windows that every time I double-click on a file with a .txt, .html, or .java extension, I want it to open in my Java text editor, instead of notepad.exe.
You can simply go into the "file types" information and change that, y'know. Just find the file type, and either change the "Open" command or make a "Open With" command.
If you need help in figuring this out, you can e-mail me at username "dagondge" on the nycap.rr.com server.
Which do you think we'll run out of first?
Petrolum (A complex chemical formed from bioloical and geological funcitons, found only on Earth)
Enriched Uranium (a heavy element)
Deuterium (Hydrogen with another Neuron)
For both Uranum and Hydrogen's isotopes, we can always just go and look for them elsewhere. For Petrolium, well, unless we find a place that had life thousands of millions of year ago, we're not finding it anywhere but home.
Parody is one of the copyright exceptions that allow fair use. Copyright law has nearly *nothing* to do with Trademarks--in fact, there's no such thing as "fair use of trademark" at all. (Unless you use it to refer to the actual product, as in a review... and even then I'd check.)
Ever wonder why MAD magazine doesn't use real names?
The Federation was founded *ONLY* because of the Romulan threat.
I think you're right about the Klingons--but, really, unless TOS said something, they can do pretty much what they will. (Just like everything else in Trek, only the videos count.)
When Office goes down, you can still read documents. You just can't write new ones.
Windows XP activation is something else--but you knew that going in, so you checked everything *before* you went, right? I mean, that RAM was something that can wait until you get back to your office--and I suspect that there'll be something in the final version that doesn't count external devices (such as Zip drives) as a "change."
Gee, you were all rational right up until the last bit.
Quite simply, anyone can write a book about ANYTHING. I've seen books that declare (alternatly) that there is no God, that God exists, that we live in the greatest country on earth, and that we live in the next Rome.
And now that I've responded to that, I might as well rebut your reasons for being a Vegan... especially since you got all "militant vegan" at the end, and I can't stand those.
1: I know exactly where my food comes from, and I don't care. I would prefer it if some of the sources changed, but the world is rarely as I would prefer it.
2: Hi! I like to eat meat. Meat tastes good. I'm happy with my life, just as I am.
3: Sure, animals suffer in the animal industry. And lawyers suffer in the law industry. But by halting your consumption of meat, you're no longer the industry's customer, so they DON'T CARE what you think, and you really don't do a darn thing to stop the cruelty to animals--so stop pretending.
4: If everyone was vegan, the meat industry would dissappear--and cows, who aren't exactly man's favorite pet, would quickly go down in numbers. If everyone was a vegetarian cows might still get by, but pigs would soon be greatly reduced in number.
5: Life is suffering. Man, either rightly or wrongly, has achieved dominaiton over the earth and all its creatures. Given the choice between making animals suffer and people suffer, man (from his heights) causes animals to suffer. (What suffering? Why, denial of man's craving for meat, of course.)
You do have a point that suffering of animals is wrong--but as I said before, you don't do a SINGLE DARN THING to stop it. Everyone will not become Vegan one day. The Meat industry will not listen to you if you are not a customer.
However, I am a customer. Find me some information about how I can encourage the industry to treat the animals without unnecessary suffering, and I will to the best of my (sadly limited) capability.
In the US, there are publicly funded systems for those in criminal or civil court who can't afford a lawyer. You are *given* a lawyer, abiet a stressed one, if you are charged with a crime. The gov't also has money earmarked for other types of layers.
And adding on to that, lawyers are required to have a certain number of hours per year "pro bono."
And on top of THAT, there are non-governmental nonprofits (UCLA) that will take up legal cases.
What mental disorders are these? Many mental disorders are increasingly recognized as being rooted in oddball neurotransmitter imbalances, and genetic predispositions influencing those chemical flubs.
Memory, which holds all of the assumptions a person has, uses much the same neurotransmitter imbalances.
Claiming that mental disorders stem from faulty assumptions effectively places the "blame" for having a disorder on the person suffering it, whose "faulty assumptions" underlie his disease. More likely, whatever faulty assumptions he may possess are products of a deeper, less controllable cause.
I never said that faulty assumptions cause mental disorders. I said that faulty assumptions *are* mental disorders--or the inverse, if you like. The problem isn't that a person loses the ability to go, logically, from A to C. It's that he's got a rather unusual B in there messing up with what C he arrives at.
(This, of course, is an oversimplification--but it fits most mental disorders, especially if you recall that disorders are only such when they're at a point beyond what ordinary people have.)