Here's a great quote that shows how much of a believer Jefferson was:
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
And that was written back in the day when it was very looked down upon to not be a faithful christian. Imagine what he'd say in a modern context?
Here's another one that shows how the founding fathers were NOT eager to shove Christianity down everyone's throats.
"...an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, 'Jesus Christ...the holy author of our religion,' which was rejected 'By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.'" From Jefferson's biography
Funny how the definition you linked doesn't say "requires no proof" or anything close to it. But hey, if you want to use a definition of belief that means that it's not based in any evidence whatsoever, then you can't use it for a "belief" that the elevator isn't working. That's called "equivocation", and it's fallacious. You have to stick with one definition of a word at a time in an argument. Using multiple definitions is an example of faulty reasoning.
Yeah, you're kind of confused by the unicorn thing. Google "Bertrand Russell Teapot" for a full description of the analogy that shows why I don't need to prove a negative in this discussion.
What does the founding fathers primitive belief system have to do with anything? They didn't even have a working germ theory, an understanding of the atomic nature of matter, any understanding of the duality of light, or even a fledgling theory of Evolution. They had some brilliant insights into governance and really knew how to wear white wigs, but they had no friggin' clue on the nature of matter and the cosmos. In a discussion about whether or not religion is nonsense, how do their ignorant primitive opinions factor in? Oh, by the way, also google "Thomas Jefferson atheist quotes". Like I said, the guy had some serious doubts about religion.
Christianity is the anchor around our society's neck at the moment, but that's an entirely different discussion.
That's as assumption-ridden as, "The Bible is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie."
Basing morals on the Bible is pretty difficult to do, since it's so self-contradictory and arbitrary. But if I had to choose between your statement that natural advantages are "quite incompatible with any moral basis for meritocracy" vs mine that a "meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society", I'll take mine. Yours is just as loaded with assumptions, but headed in the wrong direction.
What's an outcome? And where did your false dichotomy come from?
Sorry, jumping ahead, but if you're saying that merit isn't moral when advantages are predetermined, then I can only assume that you think that some sort of outcome equalization must occur to make things fair and moral. Am I wrong?
The rewards of achievement and reputation will follow from talent and effort. If you have good meals and safe shelter, what else would you want?
I'd rather have a bullet in my head than be told that some degree of food and shelter is all I should want. Maybe I want an iPhone, or two computers instead of one. Maybe I want to take more vacations. Inevitably, some government wonk with much more stuff than I'll ever have will decide what is good enough for me. No thanks.
Certainly humanity's primary source of research, the university, is populated mostly by people who feel this way (otherwise they'd be somewhere else).
In exchange for the money made by industrial researches, university researchers don't have to deal with the risks of failure. They get their comfy tenured jobs and live lives with less stress. It's a tradeoff that they choose to make, and they make some decent discoveries... but if we only relied on them we wouldn't be nearly as far along on the technology scale as we are today. Not how in trade magazines where technological advances move practical science along, most of the discoveries are made by corporations. Sure, Astronomy Today is chock full of universities discovering new planets orbiting distant stars. You don't see industrial researchers discovering that stuff because nobody gives a shit.
Sorry, I didn't really want to fall into your trap of equivocation where your use of "belief" is a religious one not based in evidence or experience versus what I understood to be your upcoming argument that it's equivalent to "belief" that a mechanical failure had happened with an elevator.
No, belief that there is no god is not a religion any more than belief that there aren't invisible unicorns living on Saturn is not a religion. It's the utter lack of faith in something without proof. By definition, it is not a religion. Can you prove that there aren't invisible unicorns living on Saturn? Does that make you a member of some anti-unicorn religion? Of course not. My apologies to Bertrand Russell for borrowing his metaphor.
I can tell from the way that you called non-belief a religion that you haven't looked into this issue much. You've gone to your church, maybe even read your bible, and believed whatever your pastors told you to believe. Anyone who's done more than a cursory amount of research into comparative religion would know that it's not upon the non-believer to prove a negative (that god absolutely does NOT exist). It's upon you to prove your beliefs with evidence. Otherwise, it's all just made up fairy tales and one religion is as good as another.
As far as our founding fathers, the greatest of them, Thomas Jefferson was at best a Deist, and wrote more like an agnostic. Thomas Paine was an outright atheist. If anything, our founding fathers' rebellion from the shackles of religion drove them to create this nation. But I'll grant you that some good things that were done were based upon their religiously-based ethics. But if you factor the good of that in, you also need to factor in the 1000+ years of the dark ages that mankind had to endure because of your religion. Have you given much thought to how much further ahead the whole world would be without that blight upon history?
So many ideas these days are really commonplace, but their execution and timing are key.
This whole french kissing over IP is really novel and surprised me.
Kudos to the inventor.
Oh, and can I get it with a Thunderbolt(tm) interface? I'll need that and a serious upgrade to my internet connection to properly sample my high speed tongue rate. Line up, ladies.
I would amend the process it so that rather than going back and forth copying authorization codes, this could be handled by an open protocol between Sony and the bank so that after signing up for a PSN account that includes a link (OpenID kind of thing) back to your bank, you could go to your bank and just approve the transaction.
Then, in the event of a compromise, (like now) you'd just cancel the open transaction.
You'll have to spend a lot more time discussing the meaning of the word "moral", I guess. Meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie.
To me, it's immoral for a society to try to equalize outcomes for all individuals when it's obvious that they have wildly different performance and productivity levels that should be encouraged through reward. It doesn't really matter whether these level differences are the result of nature or nurture.
"Belief" in the religious sense is in more than faith in things unseen. It's faith in things completely undetectable and thus unprovable.
In the realm of rational discourse and policy making, it would seem to be beyond imaginable that anything without any sort of proof whatsoever would be allowed to dominate... yet it clearly does. It shows that people are largely irrational creatures.
Your elevator analogy is completely off base. Elevators are mechanical things that are testable and observable in the real world. Human beings have loads of empirical data showing the failure of mechanical things. It's perfectly rational to convey information about the rather common case of a non-functioning machine that could be fatal to your friend.
What you don't see in the real world, and what we have no empirical evidence for are religious claims. The Bible is chock full of people and beings who (with the help of their deity) can predict the future accurately, end famine, cause famine, cause plagues, destroy cities, bring the dead back to life, fit every living animal on earth in a ridiculously small ship, survive in the digestive tract of a sea monster, etc. Funny how now that we have the Scientific method and instruments capable of capturing data on these miraculous events, they no longer happen. Sure, we still have people who claim paranormal powers. James Randi's folks debunk them on a daily basis. It's just that we now know that they're all full of shit.
To not walk out of a store with unpaid-for products is a tough choice? How so? Unless there was some kind of life threatening emergency, I wouldn't even consider stealing. That half... HALF of the people that went into the store would walk out without paying is really disappointing.
So as US government expenditures and power are growing beyond all historical levels, exactly when is all this good stuff from them going to kick in. Oh yeah, voters are stupid and keep electing the same types of thieves into power who rather than going out of business when their ideas fail, just raise taxes and increase their authority.
The free market isn't perfect either, but it has two things going for it. 1) the free market doesn't directly control the use of force to obey them since they don't own the police and military. 2) free market entities are allowed to fail when their ideas suck.
Yep. Yet another money grab for a constituency. This has very little to do with a firm belief in the advancement of science.
As much as I'm okay with spending on key areas of science and science education, I say we cut all spending (or raise taxes) until these turkeys get the budget balanced.
Just because this is a NASA thing, Slashdot will likely be sympathetic. Everyone has to be willing to sacrifice their pet projects to prevent economic disaster, though.
Nope, I didn't get it. To me it looked like you were just taking a random trolling stab at a political group you dislike.
I'm just a dummy who doesn't much like my criminally incompetent and irresponsible big brother corporate-government overlord. I blame my tired and wrong rhetorical thinking.
Blu-Ray was expected to be a huge boon for the industry like DVDs were. When DVDs began to really catch on, they supplanted most of the need for VHS in just a few years. Blu-Ray has been a huge disappointment by comparison. I'm probably a typical example. Even before DVDs were the dominant format at Blockbuster, I had a DVD player in my living room and I used DVDs whenever possible.
If it wouldn't be for my PS3, I wouldn't have a Blu-Ray player in my house. I don't collect Blu-Ray discs because the cost isn't worth it and I think that the current pricing of them is just an insult.
Like others have said, it's probably just worth it to skip this format and wait for its inevitable successor.
Why is everyone parroting the trope that "everything is toxic in large quantities" without asking whether the modern Western diet is above the threshold of excess? Isn't that what we're talking about here?
Good point. More importantly, why didn't they watch the video before commenting?
I feel like the libertarians in the crowd are trying to dismiss a valid question before it's answered.
WTF does wanting less government interference in our lives have to do with understanding some biochemistry? You could just say, "I don't like libertarians" in your sig and leave it at that.
Re:everything toxic in large quantities
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Hey, another person (and some moderators) who didn't watch the video and doesn't know what he's talking about.
I agree completely. It's bad enough that many of these posts evidence such a lack of Scientific thinking; but the positive moderation of those posts really drives a stake into the heart of some kind of general Slashdot poster credibility.
If it wasn't for the nested comments, green headers, and lack of graphics... I'd swear I was reading Fark.
I don't have the biochemistry background to confirm or debunk Lustig. I do know that a physician with a lot of dietician experience first sent me to the link to learn more about the damage caused by HFCS.
Yeah. I love Chrome, but if Google doesn't bite the bullet and respect users' wishes for even a flag request for privacy... they can fuck off. I'll switch to Firefox in a heartbeat.
Your comment is the first one I've read that mentioned a code review tool.
That's a great idea to have in the mix of other communications tools. Being able to distribute your code review both geographically and temporally is very important.
Anyone have any other recommended code review applications that they'd recommend?
Agreed. I'd rather have someone's tired presence on a conference call where a decision can quickly be made than a multi-day email thread where things tend to go round and round due to a lack of immediate interactivity that forces feedback into the discussion.
Especially when your working hours are skewed, it can be excruciating waiting until the next day to inch the conversation forward, only to have the other person completely miss the point of an instruction and waste his entire day working in the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a great quote that shows how much of a believer Jefferson was:
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His father, in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823
And that was written back in the day when it was very looked down upon to not be a faithful christian. Imagine what he'd say in a modern context?
Here's another one that shows how the founding fathers were NOT eager to shove Christianity down everyone's throats.
"...an amendment was proposed by inserting the words, 'Jesus Christ...the holy author of our religion,' which was rejected 'By a great majority in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindoo and the Infidel of every denomination.'" From Jefferson's biography
Funny how the definition you linked doesn't say "requires no proof" or anything close to it. But hey, if you want to use a definition of belief that means that it's not based in any evidence whatsoever, then you can't use it for a "belief" that the elevator isn't working. That's called "equivocation", and it's fallacious. You have to stick with one definition of a word at a time in an argument. Using multiple definitions is an example of faulty reasoning.
Yeah, you're kind of confused by the unicorn thing. Google "Bertrand Russell Teapot" for a full description of the analogy that shows why I don't need to prove a negative in this discussion.
What does the founding fathers primitive belief system have to do with anything? They didn't even have a working germ theory, an understanding of the atomic nature of matter, any understanding of the duality of light, or even a fledgling theory of Evolution. They had some brilliant insights into governance and really knew how to wear white wigs, but they had no friggin' clue on the nature of matter and the cosmos. In a discussion about whether or not religion is nonsense, how do their ignorant primitive opinions factor in? Oh, by the way, also google "Thomas Jefferson atheist quotes". Like I said, the guy had some serious doubts about religion.
Christianity is the anchor around our society's neck at the moment, but that's an entirely different discussion.
That's as assumption-ridden as, "The Bible is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie."
Basing morals on the Bible is pretty difficult to do, since it's so self-contradictory and arbitrary. But if I had to choose between your statement that natural advantages are "quite incompatible with any moral basis for meritocracy" vs mine that a "meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society", I'll take mine. Yours is just as loaded with assumptions, but headed in the wrong direction.
What's an outcome? And where did your false dichotomy come from?
Sorry, jumping ahead, but if you're saying that merit isn't moral when advantages are predetermined, then I can only assume that you think that some sort of outcome equalization must occur to make things fair and moral. Am I wrong?
The rewards of achievement and reputation will follow from talent and effort. If you have good meals and safe shelter, what else would you want?
I'd rather have a bullet in my head than be told that some degree of food and shelter is all I should want. Maybe I want an iPhone, or two computers instead of one. Maybe I want to take more vacations. Inevitably, some government wonk with much more stuff than I'll ever have will decide what is good enough for me. No thanks.
Certainly humanity's primary source of research, the university, is populated mostly by people who feel this way (otherwise they'd be somewhere else).
In exchange for the money made by industrial researches, university researchers don't have to deal with the risks of failure. They get their comfy tenured jobs and live lives with less stress. It's a tradeoff that they choose to make, and they make some decent discoveries... but if we only relied on them we wouldn't be nearly as far along on the technology scale as we are today. Not how in trade magazines where technological advances move practical science along, most of the discoveries are made by corporations. Sure, Astronomy Today is chock full of universities discovering new planets orbiting distant stars. You don't see industrial researchers discovering that stuff because nobody gives a shit.
Sorry, I didn't really want to fall into your trap of equivocation where your use of "belief" is a religious one not based in evidence or experience versus what I understood to be your upcoming argument that it's equivalent to "belief" that a mechanical failure had happened with an elevator.
No, belief that there is no god is not a religion any more than belief that there aren't invisible unicorns living on Saturn is not a religion. It's the utter lack of faith in something without proof. By definition, it is not a religion. Can you prove that there aren't invisible unicorns living on Saturn? Does that make you a member of some anti-unicorn religion? Of course not. My apologies to Bertrand Russell for borrowing his metaphor.
I can tell from the way that you called non-belief a religion that you haven't looked into this issue much. You've gone to your church, maybe even read your bible, and believed whatever your pastors told you to believe. Anyone who's done more than a cursory amount of research into comparative religion would know that it's not upon the non-believer to prove a negative (that god absolutely does NOT exist). It's upon you to prove your beliefs with evidence. Otherwise, it's all just made up fairy tales and one religion is as good as another.
As far as our founding fathers, the greatest of them, Thomas Jefferson was at best a Deist, and wrote more like an agnostic. Thomas Paine was an outright atheist. If anything, our founding fathers' rebellion from the shackles of religion drove them to create this nation. But I'll grant you that some good things that were done were based upon their religiously-based ethics. But if you factor the good of that in, you also need to factor in the 1000+ years of the dark ages that mankind had to endure because of your religion. Have you given much thought to how much further ahead the whole world would be without that blight upon history?
So many ideas these days are really commonplace, but their execution and timing are key.
This whole french kissing over IP is really novel and surprised me.
Kudos to the inventor.
Oh, and can I get it with a Thunderbolt(tm) interface? I'll need that and a serious upgrade to my internet connection to properly sample my high speed tongue rate. Line up, ladies.
You're basically right on here.
I would amend the process it so that rather than going back and forth copying authorization codes, this could be handled by an open protocol between Sony and the bank so that after signing up for a PSN account that includes a link (OpenID kind of thing) back to your bank, you could go to your bank and just approve the transaction.
Then, in the event of a compromise, (like now) you'd just cancel the open transaction.
You'll have to spend a lot more time discussing the meaning of the word "moral", I guess. Meritocracy is the only moral basis for a society, prima facie.
To me, it's immoral for a society to try to equalize outcomes for all individuals when it's obvious that they have wildly different performance and productivity levels that should be encouraged through reward. It doesn't really matter whether these level differences are the result of nature or nurture.
"Belief" in the religious sense is in more than faith in things unseen. It's faith in things completely undetectable and thus unprovable.
In the realm of rational discourse and policy making, it would seem to be beyond imaginable that anything without any sort of proof whatsoever would be allowed to dominate... yet it clearly does. It shows that people are largely irrational creatures.
Your elevator analogy is completely off base. Elevators are mechanical things that are testable and observable in the real world. Human beings have loads of empirical data showing the failure of mechanical things. It's perfectly rational to convey information about the rather common case of a non-functioning machine that could be fatal to your friend.
What you don't see in the real world, and what we have no empirical evidence for are religious claims. The Bible is chock full of people and beings who (with the help of their deity) can predict the future accurately, end famine, cause famine, cause plagues, destroy cities, bring the dead back to life, fit every living animal on earth in a ridiculously small ship, survive in the digestive tract of a sea monster, etc. Funny how now that we have the Scientific method and instruments capable of capturing data on these miraculous events, they no longer happen. Sure, we still have people who claim paranormal powers. James Randi's folks debunk them on a daily basis. It's just that we now know that they're all full of shit.
Well, yeah. That's a good point. Some did just stroll out with merchandise, though.
To not walk out of a store with unpaid-for products is a tough choice? How so? Unless there was some kind of life threatening emergency, I wouldn't even consider stealing. That half... HALF of the people that went into the store would walk out without paying is really disappointing.
The lesson learned out of this (half the people stealing products) is that the RIAA should treat its customers better?
Really?
So as US government expenditures and power are growing beyond all historical levels, exactly when is all this good stuff from them going to kick in. Oh yeah, voters are stupid and keep electing the same types of thieves into power who rather than going out of business when their ideas fail, just raise taxes and increase their authority.
The free market isn't perfect either, but it has two things going for it. 1) the free market doesn't directly control the use of force to obey them since they don't own the police and military. 2) free market entities are allowed to fail when their ideas suck.
Yep. Yet another money grab for a constituency. This has very little to do with a firm belief in the advancement of science.
As much as I'm okay with spending on key areas of science and science education, I say we cut all spending (or raise taxes) until these turkeys get the budget balanced.
Just because this is a NASA thing, Slashdot will likely be sympathetic. Everyone has to be willing to sacrifice their pet projects to prevent economic disaster, though.
Bah, it doesn't expire until 2014. By then I'll be rid of these XP machines I've been holding on to.
Nope, I didn't get it. To me it looked like you were just taking a random trolling stab at a political group you dislike.
I'm just a dummy who doesn't much like my criminally incompetent and irresponsible big brother corporate-government overlord. I blame my tired and wrong rhetorical thinking.
Hear hear. I rarely look at the "extras" crap on DVDs. Why would I want to pay more for a format that gives me extra extras?
Blu-Ray was expected to be a huge boon for the industry like DVDs were. When DVDs began to really catch on, they supplanted most of the need for VHS in just a few years. Blu-Ray has been a huge disappointment by comparison. I'm probably a typical example. Even before DVDs were the dominant format at Blockbuster, I had a DVD player in my living room and I used DVDs whenever possible.
If it wouldn't be for my PS3, I wouldn't have a Blu-Ray player in my house. I don't collect Blu-Ray discs because the cost isn't worth it and I think that the current pricing of them is just an insult.
Like others have said, it's probably just worth it to skip this format and wait for its inevitable successor.
Why is everyone parroting the trope that "everything is toxic in large quantities" without asking whether the modern Western diet is above the threshold of excess? Isn't that what we're talking about here?
Good point. More importantly, why didn't they watch the video before commenting?
I feel like the libertarians in the crowd are trying to dismiss a valid question before it's answered.
WTF does wanting less government interference in our lives have to do with understanding some biochemistry? You could just say, "I don't like libertarians" in your sig and leave it at that.
Hey, another person (and some moderators) who didn't watch the video and doesn't know what he's talking about.
You're wrong about orange juice too.
I agree completely. It's bad enough that many of these posts evidence such a lack of Scientific thinking; but the positive moderation of those posts really drives a stake into the heart of some kind of general Slashdot poster credibility.
If it wasn't for the nested comments, green headers, and lack of graphics... I'd swear I was reading Fark.
I don't have the biochemistry background to confirm or debunk Lustig. I do know that a physician with a lot of dietician experience first sent me to the link to learn more about the damage caused by HFCS.
Another poster (and a couple of moderators) who didn't watch the video.
Nice.
You obviously didn't watch the video. Try again.
Yeah. I love Chrome, but if Google doesn't bite the bullet and respect users' wishes for even a flag request for privacy... they can fuck off. I'll switch to Firefox in a heartbeat.
Your comment is the first one I've read that mentioned a code review tool.
That's a great idea to have in the mix of other communications tools. Being able to distribute your code review both geographically and temporally is very important.
Anyone have any other recommended code review applications that they'd recommend?
Agreed. I'd rather have someone's tired presence on a conference call where a decision can quickly be made than a multi-day email thread where things tend to go round and round due to a lack of immediate interactivity that forces feedback into the discussion.
Especially when your working hours are skewed, it can be excruciating waiting until the next day to inch the conversation forward, only to have the other person completely miss the point of an instruction and waste his entire day working in the wrong direction.