So the jury falls back on that old tried and true method... does the defendant *look* guilty?
I just wonder, though, whether it is statistically more accurate than tossing a coin.
In the olden days it was easier - if the police charged you, you were obviously guilty. But then we discovered that the police were not entirely reliable. Occasionally, even, they were the criminals.
Maybe universal CCTV is the answer. If your entire life is recorded, then criminal charges will be easier to determine.
Um, you don't vote for laws in this country (Australia), you vote for representatives.
And most representatives like compulsory voting because it saves them the cost of advertising to get people to vote at all.
Besides, we tend to view voting as a responsibility, not a right. It is like vaccination. Each individual may be fine if they skip vaccination while everyone else gets vaccinated. But if everyone decides to skip vaccination, then we have an epidemic. What is OK for one individual may have consequences when done on a mass scale.
The point of voting is not to get a government that represents *you*, but a government that represents *everybody*. It is called democracy, not me-ocracy. It is not "my right to vote", it is "our right to vote".
In Australia, the counting (of paper ballots, no machines!) is done by local electoral officials, who are watched throughout (like hawks!) by scrutineers from all parties who care to send representatives.
This makes for a completely open, above-board, transparent system. The major parties closely monitor counting in every polling booth - and send back their own tallies to their party HQs, so there is at least triple counting. We know the national result by about 10 o'clock the same evening - our polling closes at 6 PM. By the time we go to bed on election day, we know who the next government is going to be. And the winners take over government within a couple of days of the poll - no waiting for several months under a lame duck government.
Well, on Slashdot, when they read the question "Where are the Flying Cars", the first thing that pops into some people's minds is "Hot grits and Natalie Portman and in Soviet Russia cars fly you."
"Don't most GNU/Linux users surf with Lynx anyway?"
The wussy ones do.
We he-men use telnet. Or write our own web client in bash shell script or assembly language. After we write our own assembler. And that's after we fabricate our own chip.
"they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory?"
Interesting argument, but a logical fallacy.
On this basis we should reject the "Good Samaritan" as a parable (i.e. a fictitious story): "If the 'Good Samaritan' is a parable, what else is a parable?"
The obvious reply is: "Whatever else has the characteristics of a parable."
The very early stories in the Bible have a few features in common with figurative stories - e.g. the story of the Garden of Eden has a talking snake (and explains how he begins to crawl); an idyllic garden; an infinite and invisible God who goes for walks in the garden and acts as though he cannot see Adam hiding behind a bush; one or two "magic" fruit trees that give you either all knowledge, or immortal life; a man called "Man" (="Adam" in Hebrew) and a woman called "Life" (="Eve" in Hebrew) - i.e. in the literary context, these characters are very plausible representatives of the whole human race, rather than actual historical people; etc. If you insist that the story "must" be historically accurate narrative, then you will dismiss all these literary characteristics. But if you start from the position of "I don't know beforehand what kind of genre ytis passage is", then the signs are all there.
In other words, the Bible is certainly a mixture of literary genres, and you have to work out what kind of genre any passage is by considering its literary qualities. Fundamentalists try to dictate what the genre is. They build a castle of faith based on their *fallible* claims about what a passage "must" means, and then call it *infallible* because "they are just believing what the Bible says". No they are not. They are believing a very fallible human interpretation of the Bible, and then calling *their interpretation* "the Word of God". This is self-delusion.
I cannot see that a belief in miracles (or rather, the belief that certain miracles have occurred) is inimical to science. The point about miracles is that they are NOT the normal working of the universe, and do NOT tell us how the natural world works in general. Indeed, the fact that they are normally impossible is what makes them miraculous. This leaves the field of normal events (i.e. 99.999999+% of all that happens) open to explanation by empirical science as the only source of reliable knowledge in that sphere.
The problem is with the use of ancient texts, no matter how inspired ("revelation"), to resolve general scientific matters. In particular, the problem lies in the assumption that fiction is not a valid form of scripture. I not only like fiction, but find some fiction profoundly moving and enlightening - why cannot scripture include fiction? Some ancient texts (like the parables told by Christ) are clearly meant to be fictions, and yet inspired and truth (just not truth in the narrative sense). The early parts of Genesis work very well as inspired *literature*, as vivid symbolism (e.g. with "Adam" and "Eve" as everyman and everywoman - the story is about human nature in general, not about some alleged first man and first woman in time). When people see the literary and personal value of many kinds of scripture (not all, but many), they worry less about whether it is narrative fact - the issue actually isn't important (e.g. the whole book of Job is an imaginary play about the meaning of suffering - it doesn't need to have a single iota of narrative truth to be worthwhile spiritual literature).
Even Christian scholars in the 4th century (Jerome, Augustine) thought that Genesis described the origin of the world in a poetic manner, rather than scientifically. It is modern (or at least more recent) fundamentalists, not the ancient religious scholars, who try to impose ancient religious texts onto scientists in a way that those texts were never written to be used. I have no trouble believing that the world is created (every moment) by God and at the same time holding that it is an evolving world, lasting billions of years. To use a literary example: who created the One Ring - Sauron or Tolkien? The answer is that both did, but in different ways. God, if you like, is the Tolkien of the universe - we are all characters in the story he is telling (and no, you are not likely to be the Frodo of the story - live with it).
Fundamentalism suffers from a lack of imagination. Those who think that fundamentalism is the only form of religion (or, somehow, that it is the "true" form, because it is the form they love to hate) are either biased or lacking experience of the real, diverse world of religion. And neither of these conditions is very scientific. Fundamentalism exists, and it is a real problem - not just for those outside the religion of the fundamentalists but also for the non-fundamentalists within that religion.
Science and religion are not in conflict. They are simply different things. And to the extent that this article discusses Muslim scientists and Muslim anti-scientists the conflict did not exist in the past either: both sides of the conflict were religious.
Where's the multi-million dollar law suit? The lawyers versus the lawyers? The court room drama?
How can you have any commercial credibility if you resolve things like rational human beings. Where's your greed, your lust for power, your ruthlessness?
That's why Linux and BSD are not ready for business - no socially destructive tendencies. No underhandedness.
Not even a little dagger in the back. Come on guys!
No doubt the people who tell us how wonderful it would be without net neutrality are the same people who tell us how marvellous it is to watch ads instead of TV programs.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem, I gather, has been fixed.
Or you could use the Open Source equivalents: QEMU or VirtualBox OSE.
What did you expect: "Slashdot - News for the naive, Stuff that no one knew before"?
"the actual words are less important than the intonation - which is almost completely missing from text."
I DON'T THINK SO!!!!!!!!
(suddenly I feel really lame for some reason)
"I beleive this is incorrect"
"I beleieve" - this is incorrect (wow - how to correct someone by just quoting their words! I feel lame AND exhilarated at the same time)
And even confessions are unreliable.
... does the defendant *look* guilty?
So the jury falls back on that old tried and true method
I just wonder, though, whether it is statistically more accurate than tossing a coin.
In the olden days it was easier - if the police charged you, you were obviously guilty. But then we discovered that the police were not entirely reliable. Occasionally, even, they were the criminals.
Maybe universal CCTV is the answer. If your entire life is recorded, then criminal charges will be easier to determine.
Good. Problem solved. Next!
Um, you don't vote for laws in this country (Australia), you vote for representatives.
And most representatives like compulsory voting because it saves them the cost of advertising to get people to vote at all.
Besides, we tend to view voting as a responsibility, not a right. It is like vaccination. Each individual may be fine if they skip vaccination while everyone else gets vaccinated. But if everyone decides to skip vaccination, then we have an epidemic. What is OK for one individual may have consequences when done on a mass scale.
The point of voting is not to get a government that represents *you*, but a government that represents *everybody*. It is called democracy, not me-ocracy. It is not "my right to vote", it is "our right to vote".
There is a difference.
If you live on Terra, does that make you a Terraling?
In Australia, the counting (of paper ballots, no machines!) is done by local electoral officials, who are watched throughout (like hawks!) by scrutineers from all parties who care to send representatives.
This makes for a completely open, above-board, transparent system. The major parties closely monitor counting in every polling booth - and send back their own tallies to their party HQs, so there is at least triple counting. We know the national result by about 10 o'clock the same evening - our polling closes at 6 PM. By the time we go to bed on election day, we know who the next government is going to be. And the winners take over government within a couple of days of the poll - no waiting for several months under a lame duck government.
That is keeping the system honest!
Well, on Slashdot, when they read the question "Where are the Flying Cars", the first thing that pops into some people's minds is "Hot grits and Natalie Portman and in Soviet Russia cars fly you."
Not that they popped into my mind or anything.
Nup, it's called CP/M.
Loaded apps *much* faster than Linux or (*shudder*) Windows.
"Don't most GNU/Linux users surf with Lynx anyway?"
The wussy ones do.
We he-men use telnet. Or write our own web client in bash shell script or assembly language. After we write our own assembler. And that's after we fabricate our own chip.
"they feel if the Creation story is an allegory, what else is an allegory?"
Interesting argument, but a logical fallacy.
On this basis we should reject the "Good Samaritan" as a parable (i.e. a fictitious story): "If the 'Good Samaritan' is a parable, what else is a parable?"
The obvious reply is: "Whatever else has the characteristics of a parable."
The very early stories in the Bible have a few features in common with figurative stories - e.g. the story of the Garden of Eden has a talking snake (and explains how he begins to crawl); an idyllic garden; an infinite and invisible God who goes for walks in the garden and acts as though he cannot see Adam hiding behind a bush; one or two "magic" fruit trees that give you either all knowledge, or immortal life; a man called "Man" (="Adam" in Hebrew) and a woman called "Life" (="Eve" in Hebrew) - i.e. in the literary context, these characters are very plausible representatives of the whole human race, rather than actual historical people; etc. If you insist that the story "must" be historically accurate narrative, then you will dismiss all these literary characteristics. But if you start from the position of "I don't know beforehand what kind of genre ytis passage is", then the signs are all there.
In other words, the Bible is certainly a mixture of literary genres, and you have to work out what kind of genre any passage is by considering its literary qualities. Fundamentalists try to dictate what the genre is. They build a castle of faith based on their *fallible* claims about what a passage "must" means, and then call it *infallible* because "they are just believing what the Bible says". No they are not. They are believing a very fallible human interpretation of the Bible, and then calling *their interpretation* "the Word of God". This is self-delusion.
"DOC if I need hell to freeze over."
.DOC format helps fight global warming?
So what you are saying is, saving files in
A new advertising angle for Microsoft's marketroids.
I'd like to see you run Google on Microsoft OSs with that attitude that licences don't add much cost ...
In other words, I'd like to see a Beowulf cluster of those licences.
Like "as solid as iron" plus a little bit "as solid as carbon", I guess.
"I want know what the hell is my wife taking that makes her cold even when I'm sweating bullets!"
That's odd, she's not cold with me.
I hate those sentences, too, kind of. And the prepositions they end with. I understand what you are on about.
"Why is the hole bigger over the south than it is in the north?"
It's like a dress. The hole at the top for the head is smaller than the hole at the bottom for the legs to stick out.
What's hard to understand about that?
Why are criminals always "hardened"?
Why aren't there any "softened" criminals?
I cannot see that a belief in miracles (or rather, the belief that certain miracles have occurred) is inimical to science. The point about miracles is that they are NOT the normal working of the universe, and do NOT tell us how the natural world works in general. Indeed, the fact that they are normally impossible is what makes them miraculous. This leaves the field of normal events (i.e. 99.999999+% of all that happens) open to explanation by empirical science as the only source of reliable knowledge in that sphere.
The problem is with the use of ancient texts, no matter how inspired ("revelation"), to resolve general scientific matters. In particular, the problem lies in the assumption that fiction is not a valid form of scripture. I not only like fiction, but find some fiction profoundly moving and enlightening - why cannot scripture include fiction? Some ancient texts (like the parables told by Christ) are clearly meant to be fictions, and yet inspired and truth (just not truth in the narrative sense). The early parts of Genesis work very well as inspired *literature*, as vivid symbolism (e.g. with "Adam" and "Eve" as everyman and everywoman - the story is about human nature in general, not about some alleged first man and first woman in time). When people see the literary and personal value of many kinds of scripture (not all, but many), they worry less about whether it is narrative fact - the issue actually isn't important (e.g. the whole book of Job is an imaginary play about the meaning of suffering - it doesn't need to have a single iota of narrative truth to be worthwhile spiritual literature).
Even Christian scholars in the 4th century (Jerome, Augustine) thought that Genesis described the origin of the world in a poetic manner, rather than scientifically. It is modern (or at least more recent) fundamentalists, not the ancient religious scholars, who try to impose ancient religious texts onto scientists in a way that those texts were never written to be used. I have no trouble believing that the world is created (every moment) by God and at the same time holding that it is an evolving world, lasting billions of years. To use a literary example: who created the One Ring - Sauron or Tolkien? The answer is that both did, but in different ways. God, if you like, is the Tolkien of the universe - we are all characters in the story he is telling (and no, you are not likely to be the Frodo of the story - live with it).
Fundamentalism suffers from a lack of imagination. Those who think that fundamentalism is the only form of religion (or, somehow, that it is the "true" form, because it is the form they love to hate) are either biased or lacking experience of the real, diverse world of religion. And neither of these conditions is very scientific. Fundamentalism exists, and it is a real problem - not just for those outside the religion of the fundamentalists but also for the non-fundamentalists within that religion.
Science and religion are not in conflict. They are simply different things. And to the extent that this article discusses Muslim scientists and Muslim anti-scientists the conflict did not exist in the past either: both sides of the conflict were religious.
Aw, come on guys!
Where's the multi-million dollar law suit? The lawyers versus the lawyers? The court room drama?
How can you have any commercial credibility if you resolve things like rational human beings. Where's your greed, your lust for power, your ruthlessness?
That's why Linux and BSD are not ready for business - no socially destructive tendencies. No underhandedness.
Not even a little dagger in the back. Come on guys!
No doubt the people who tell us how wonderful it would be without net neutrality are the same people who tell us how marvellous it is to watch ads instead of TV programs.
So that's how...Bill got to be a billionaire?
... $65,535 $100.000 ... $655,350 $1,000,000 ... $65,535,000 $100,000,000 ...
He couldn't count: $1 $2 $3 $4
He is really only 2/3 as rich as he says he is!
"which lets you know where your body parts are"
Girlfriends will also do that.
*slap*
"wear a swastika, and try to explain you're just waving an old Christian symbol about"
...
Except that the swastika is a Hindu symbol, regarded by the Nazis as the "Aryan" symbol.
It has nothing to do with Christianity.
Talk about gratuitous insults
I think you misspelled "Redmond anus".