Scientology is entirely and utterly deserving of all the hate speech we can muster. This organization drains people of their entire livelihoods, forces them into human bondage, and ends in their untimely deaths.
Then let's call them racketeers, slavers, and killers. Calling them cultists means we only object to their *belief system*, which allows them to play the religious persecution card.
In scientology, ATROCITIES ARE THEIR CORE PRINCIPLES. If you can't see the difference between this cult and real religious teachings, you are just being willfully ignorant.
I disagree -- I'm not saying that other religions have atrocity as core principles, I'm disputing that you can differentiate scientology on those grounds.
The core principles of scientology, as I understand them, are that all of us are wise immortal spirits, whose bodies contain other confused and unhelpful spirits. By ridding ourselves of the confused body spirits, we can perform at our full "superhuman" potential.
These principles aren't atrocious: they're no more dangerous than "A single God created the world, and presides over an afterlife called Heaven; 2000 years ago he sent his immortal son to teach us the way to enter Heaven." In the hands of another organization, Scientology could be no more dangerous than Buddhism, Seventh Day Adventism, or Neopaganism.
It's not the principles of Scientology that are the problem: it's the *organization* built around it that is dangerous. And that's crucial for everyone to understand: no faith is immune from the dangers of cultism. Not yours, not mine, not even atheism.
How is that different from government?:-) No, seriously?
Government -- at least, non-totalitarian government -- only wants your money so it can govern your life: doesn't care if it has your mind. In the US today, you're welcome to be a socialist, a theocrat or a fascist, so long as you pay your taxes and don't blow stuff up. (Of course this hasn't always been true...)
There are cults that don't require any money, (or time), only your belief system.
Those aren't cults, they're religions. To my mind, religion is about pure belief. Cultism is about using those beliefs to create and wield power in the secular world.
Oh yeah, let's suddenly start assuming everyone who reads Slashdot is a black-hat script kiddie living in their mother's basement downloading torrents of Japanese tentacle porn while dreaming of moving to Sealand.
Copying a New York Times article wholesale, and then using a Slashdot post to bait-and-switch readers into visiting your website rather than the Times? Ballsy.
Doing so when the article's content is about using malicious links to artificially inflate your site's visibility? Just. Not. Cool.
The original NY TImes article is here. Whether you approve of the Times' registration policy or not, you shouldn't support people who steal their content and use it to make money.
Hint: because compromising that single key would compromise every lock you own instead of just a single lock.
That's not why we have separate physical keys. It's because re-keying a physical lock to open with a new user's existing key is a giant pain in the ass, and it's even more of a pain if the lock has to work with multiple different users with distinct keys. Matter locks are annoyingly hard to reconfigure: software locks are not.
In any case, since I keep my keys on a keychain, if one falls into the wrong hands, they all do. Same's true for authenticator apps on a phone: if you lose the phone, you compromise every site with an auth app on that phone. So why have more than one?
My physical key ring is already loaded with authentication tokens made of brass and metal. I've already got one authenticator app on my phone for World of Warcraft: why do I need a new one for every online entity I do business with? Can't we standardize on one?
(Yes, having just one authenticator app means Google can do a man-in-the-middle attack and steal all my WoW gold, but somehow that's not a big concern for me.)
Scientists glue spinach photosynthesis proteins to a plastic sheet.
I see no indication, apart from journalists' breathless summaries, that hydrogen is actually being produced. The neutron scattering thing is just the technique used to look at the proteins and their attachment to the plastic.
I could be wrong about the fall speed of an airplane, but not by more than a factor of 2. There could be updrafts, but on a global scale there are as many updrafts as downdrafts, so they tend to cancel out unless the airplane gets *astonishingly* lucky. And so on. Read the book: it'll change your life.
Even if you assume it falls as slowly at high altitude as it does near the ground, and even if you assume it's traveling in jet-stream speed winds the whole way, there's still no way for it to go from Germany to Jakarta before it hits the ground. See math & assumptions here:
Weather-related sources of lift may be significant over short distances, but what goes up must come down, so updrafts are as common as downdrafts. A human glider pilot can deliberately steer the plane to stay within the updrafts, but a paper plane cannot. For a plane to travel 7000 miles and remain in an updraft the entire way is so unlikely as to be impossible.
Glide slope is probably irrelevant. The upper atmosphere windspeeds (up to 40 m/s) are much greater than your average paper plane's airspeed (5 m/s or so), so the plane isn't so much flying as it is falling slowly while carried by the wind. The right calculation is to figure out how far the wind will carry it in the time it takes to hit the ground. Which still gives an answer much smaller than Germany to Jakarta, so I agree that the "sightings" are probably hoaxes.
Your average paper airplane thrown from head height hits the ground in a few seconds -- it descends at about 0.5 m/s. At high altitude, the plane will fall much faster in the thinner air, but since I'm not prepared to tackle stratospheric paper aerodynamics, let's just take 0.5 m/s as a best-case scenario.
How long does it take to fall 40 km at 0.5 m/s? A bit less than a day. Maximum wind speeds in the jet stream are around 40 m/s: in one day, this will carry the plane a maximum of 3000 km, roughly the distance from L.A. to Chicago. And that is a massive overestimate, since it assumes a constant fall rate and constant wind speed as the plane falls.
You'll note I've ignored the plane's airspeed: it's negligible, but I'll let the reader justify that on his/her own.
I believe that tech evangelist Upton Sinclair said it best -- I think this was in one of his columns in an early issue of Byte magazine:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
(Upton Sinclair, if you've never heard of him, was the coinventor of the Timex Sinclair -- he's not as well remembered as Wozniak, Jobs, or Gates, but he's far more quotable.)
Are you really going to equate bad parental decisions to genetic and economic disadvantage? Really? So in your view a well-off parent who chooses to feed their child nothing but sand and thumbtacks is morally the same as a starving mother who gives her last spoonful to her kid?
Parents who oppose vaccination are not innocent victims of social disadvantage or genetics. They have MADE A CHOICE to take medical advice from a Playboy bunny in contrast to every competent doctor and medical service on the planet, even when the Playboy bunny's advice proves to be the fruit of deliberate fraud.
We do not live in a world where a parent can choose their child's social class or attractiveness. We do live in a world where almost every parent can choose whether or not to allow their child to be injured or killed by measles.
I'd love to see definite proof of Wakefield being yet another pseudo-scientist
It's not that he's a pseudoscientist: many pseudoscientists are sincere but misguided. Wakefield FABRICATED EVIDENCE to MAKE MONEY. But here's your proof: it's long, but as you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
They probably could sue their parents, I'd rule in their favor if I was on the jury. But one of the things about parenthood is it gives you a unique power to brainwash your kid. Anti-vacc parents will have anti-vacc children, for the most part, making a lawsuit unlikely.
Bringing up the precise definition of a computer jargon term in an audience of millions of neurotic computer nerds? This is like wading into a piranha-filled river wearing a pork-chop bathing suit.
News flash: time can't actually fly, love doesn't actually bite, and the wind rarely cries "Mary".
Metaphors and anthropomorphization are useful tools for teaching and understanding. Nobody actually thinks that hydrogen is intelligent: the only people who are bothered by this are folks with Asperger's and people with zero sense of humor or creativity. Which are you?
They're not exactly kicking Mubarak to the curb, but they're brandishing the foreign aid stick, demanding democratic reform, and stressing that the US's loyalties lie with Egypt, not Mubarak.
No, I absolutely agree that Bush would have backed Ben Ali, and I think his support of Musharraf borders on criminal. But you're saying Tunisia doesn't count because of what Bush would have done: I'm saying that since the 2008 election, it's *Bush* that doesn't count anymore.
Maybe, in about 50 years or so, the rest of the world will agree.
That's so obvious it's left unsaid. My comment was specifically about how the U.S. should approach the Egyptian issue, not about the events in general.
Ah, but "might" is the key word here. If we play it right, the Egyptian riots *might* be a huge win for American ideals. Or they might not. But if we play it wrong, by backing the tyrant as we did in Iran, we *guarantee* that whatever replaces it will be a lot worse from our perspective.
The U.S. has almost no power to spin this event in our favor. But we have the absolute power to fuck it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Then let's call them racketeers, slavers, and killers. Calling them cultists means we only object to their *belief system*, which allows them to play the religious persecution card.
I disagree -- I'm not saying that other religions have atrocity as core principles, I'm disputing that you can differentiate scientology on those grounds.
The core principles of scientology, as I understand them, are that all of us are wise immortal spirits, whose bodies contain other confused and unhelpful spirits. By ridding ourselves of the confused body spirits, we can perform at our full "superhuman" potential.
These principles aren't atrocious: they're no more dangerous than "A single God created the world, and presides over an afterlife called Heaven; 2000 years ago he sent his immortal son to teach us the way to enter Heaven." In the hands of another organization, Scientology could be no more dangerous than Buddhism, Seventh Day Adventism, or Neopaganism.
It's not the principles of Scientology that are the problem: it's the *organization* built around it that is dangerous. And that's crucial for everyone to understand: no faith is immune from the dangers of cultism. Not yours, not mine, not even atheism.
Government -- at least, non-totalitarian government -- only wants your money so it can govern your life: doesn't care if it has your mind. In the US today, you're welcome to be a socialist, a theocrat or a fascist, so long as you pay your taxes and don't blow stuff up. (Of course this hasn't always been true...)
Those aren't cults, they're religions. To my mind, religion is about pure belief. Cultism is about using those beliefs to create and wield power in the secular world.
Oh yeah, let's suddenly start assuming everyone who reads Slashdot is a black-hat script kiddie living in their mother's basement downloading torrents of Japanese tentacle porn while dreaming of moving to Sealand.
Did I miss any stereotypes?
Point taken, I didn't see that line.
Copying a New York Times article wholesale, and then using a Slashdot post to bait-and-switch readers into visiting your website rather than the Times?
Ballsy.
Doing so when the article's content is about using malicious links to artificially inflate your site's visibility?
Just. Not. Cool.
The original NY TImes article is here. Whether you approve of the Times' registration policy or not, you shouldn't support people who steal their content and use it to make money.
That's not why we have separate physical keys. It's because re-keying a physical lock to open with a new user's existing key is a giant pain in the ass, and it's even more of a pain if the lock has to work with multiple different users with distinct keys. Matter locks are annoyingly hard to reconfigure: software locks are not.
In any case, since I keep my keys on a keychain, if one falls into the wrong hands, they all do. Same's true for authenticator apps on a phone: if you lose the phone, you compromise every site with an auth app on that phone. So why have more than one?
My physical key ring is already loaded with authentication tokens made of brass and metal. I've already got one authenticator app on my phone for World of Warcraft: why do I need a new one for every online entity I do business with? Can't we standardize on one?
(Yes, having just one authenticator app means Google can do a man-in-the-middle attack and steal all my WoW gold, but somehow that's not a big concern for me.)
Here's the actual news summary:
Scientists glue spinach photosynthesis proteins to a plastic sheet.
I see no indication, apart from journalists' breathless summaries, that hydrogen is actually being produced. The neutron scattering thing is just the technique used to look at the proteins and their attachment to the plastic.
It's called an "order of magnitude calculation". Here's a useful book to help you get the hang of 'em:
http://www.amazon.com/Consider-Spherical-Cow-Environmental-Problem/dp/093570258X/
I could be wrong about the fall speed of an airplane, but not by more than a factor of 2. There could be updrafts, but on a global scale there are as many updrafts as downdrafts, so they tend to cancel out unless the airplane gets *astonishingly* lucky. And so on. Read the book: it'll change your life.
Even if you assume it falls as slowly at high altitude as it does near the ground, and even if you assume it's traveling in jet-stream speed winds the whole way, there's still no way for it to go from Germany to Jakarta before it hits the ground. See math & assumptions here:
http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1985734&cid=35145548
Weather-related sources of lift may be significant over short distances, but what goes up must come down, so updrafts are as common as downdrafts. A human glider pilot can deliberately steer the plane to stay within the updrafts, but a paper plane cannot. For a plane to travel 7000 miles and remain in an updraft the entire way is so unlikely as to be impossible.
Glide slope is probably irrelevant. The upper atmosphere windspeeds (up to 40 m/s) are much greater than your average paper plane's airspeed (5 m/s or so), so the plane isn't so much flying as it is falling slowly while carried by the wind. The right calculation is to figure out how far the wind will carry it in the time it takes to hit the ground. Which still gives an answer much smaller than Germany to Jakarta, so I agree that the "sightings" are probably hoaxes.
http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1985734&cid=35145548
I agree. Here's some math.
Your average paper airplane thrown from head height hits the ground in a few seconds -- it descends at about 0.5 m/s. At high altitude, the plane will fall much faster in the thinner air, but since I'm not prepared to tackle stratospheric paper aerodynamics, let's just take 0.5 m/s as a best-case scenario.
How long does it take to fall 40 km at 0.5 m/s? A bit less than a day. Maximum wind speeds in the jet stream are around 40 m/s: in one day, this will carry the plane a maximum of 3000 km, roughly the distance from L.A. to Chicago. And that is a massive overestimate, since it assumes a constant fall rate and constant wind speed as the plane falls.
You'll note I've ignored the plane's airspeed: it's negligible, but I'll let the reader justify that on his/her own.
It's a joke, in the style of John Hodgman. The only point worth paying attention to is the quote itself.
I believe that tech evangelist Upton Sinclair said it best -- I think this was in one of his columns in an early issue of Byte magazine:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
(Upton Sinclair, if you've never heard of him, was the coinventor of the Timex Sinclair -- he's not as well remembered as Wozniak, Jobs, or Gates, but he's far more quotable.)
Are you really going to equate bad parental decisions to genetic and economic disadvantage? Really? So in your view a well-off parent who chooses to feed their child nothing but sand and thumbtacks is morally the same as a starving mother who gives her last spoonful to her kid?
Parents who oppose vaccination are not innocent victims of social disadvantage or genetics. They have MADE A CHOICE to take medical advice from a Playboy bunny in contrast to every competent doctor and medical service on the planet, even when the Playboy bunny's advice proves to be the fruit of deliberate fraud.
We do not live in a world where a parent can choose their child's social class or attractiveness. We do live in a world where almost every parent can choose whether or not to allow their child to be injured or killed by measles.
It's not that he's a pseudoscientist: many pseudoscientists are sincere but misguided. Wakefield FABRICATED EVIDENCE to MAKE MONEY. But here's your proof: it's long, but as you say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5347.full
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5258.full
They probably could sue their parents, I'd rule in their favor if I was on the jury. But one of the things about parenthood is it gives you a unique power to brainwash your kid. Anti-vacc parents will have anti-vacc children, for the most part, making a lawsuit unlikely.
Bringing up the precise definition of a computer jargon term in an audience of millions of neurotic computer nerds? This is like wading into a piranha-filled river wearing a pork-chop bathing suit.
News flash: time can't actually fly, love doesn't actually bite, and the wind rarely cries "Mary".
Metaphors and anthropomorphization are useful tools for teaching and understanding. Nobody actually thinks that hydrogen is intelligent: the only people who are bothered by this are folks with Asperger's and people with zero sense of humor or creativity. Which are you?
You're a day behind the news. That Clinton statement was from yesterday, and I interpret it as stalling for time. Today was a lot less ambivalent:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133242817
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=133212560
They're not exactly kicking Mubarak to the curb, but they're brandishing the foreign aid stick, demanding democratic reform, and stressing that the US's loyalties lie with Egypt, not Mubarak.
My point exactly.
No, I absolutely agree that Bush would have backed Ben Ali, and I think his support of Musharraf borders on criminal. But you're saying Tunisia doesn't count because of what Bush would have done: I'm saying that since the 2008 election, it's *Bush* that doesn't count anymore.
Maybe, in about 50 years or so, the rest of the world will agree.
That's so obvious it's left unsaid. My comment was specifically about how the U.S. should approach the Egyptian issue, not about the events in general.
Ah, but "might" is the key word here. If we play it right, the Egyptian riots *might* be a huge win for American ideals. Or they might not. But if we play it wrong, by backing the tyrant as we did in Iran, we *guarantee* that whatever replaces it will be a lot worse from our perspective.
The U.S. has almost no power to spin this event in our favor. But we have the absolute power to fuck it up.