Ah yes, the old snort signature. Using the resonance of a person's nasal and sinus cavities as they inhale their blow vigorously through a $100 bill. I hear they still use children blind from birth to identify the snort signatures of perps. No FFT algorithm has been able to compete.
No, but you can get some semblance of your freedom back. (modulo any trauma endured during incarceration which alters your personality and decision making.)
loyalty is an antiquated concept. Loyalty implies a sacrifice of autonomy and critical thinking. A loyal dog will protect its master regardless of whether or not the master is truly worth protecting. Loyalty is a component of social or group-identity. Often loyalty is part of a pyramidal power structure. Those at the top demand loyalty from those at the bottom in order to maintain their control over the bottom. Loyalty is already a divisive and conflict oriented mentality. An independent rational critical thinker has no need for loyalty. They will form alliances with those who share the same values, but the "loyalty" is to the values, not to the persons they are in alliance with.
Think of all the uses of loyalty. Knights are loyal to their king, employees loyal to the company they work for, sons and daughters loyal to their parents, and relatives loyal to the family. In all these cases, that which is "loyal" is placing blind trust in something they do not really know to be trust worthy. They have to turn off their critical scrutiny in order to be loyal...
Does the genetic component matter as much as the memetic component? It's about the ideologies. And the question then is how is Hilary different ideologically from Bill. Given that they weathered a sex scandal and still together, I'd say their ideologies are in alignment enough to create a very strong attraction to each other.
Let's just take this at face value, and let's falsely pretend that the water shortages aren't also causing cutbacks by residential consumers. Then that's 40% of the state's water to provide a fraction of 2% of the GDP, in drought conditions.
Personally? I think you're a moron for using GDP as a valid way to allocate water resources. Seriously? Where did that idea even come from?......When a residential consumer drinks water, they are producing 0% of GDP.....You need to think a little more before responding.
*scratches head* Um.... a person needs to drink water to live. A person needs to live in order to work... GDP requires human work.... So we could take the average of GDP generated per person in the population and then average GDP per drink of water per person in the population and come up with a more legitimate value of GDP / drink of water than 0$. Perhaps you are the person needing to think a little more? Even taking into account the distribution of GDP across all the other necessities, food, housing, etc. the GDP per glass of water is still not $0. 0 Glasses of water per person for 7 days, and GDP will be at 0 from there on out.
Single doctor serving a small town denying service to someone who is hurt leaves them hurt. Bigotry can definitely cause harm in the denial of essential goods and services. Photography is a luxury and non-essential, but when the only grocery store in town refuses to sell to someone, there is no other grocery store to take their business to.
Photography is something anyone can do, but if there is a single service provider in a region for a service which must be certified, then allowing that service provider to discriminate is no good. For example, the only doctor in a small town refuses to see patients that are gay. Said gay patient must get a doc prescrip for life saving medication. Should they be forced to relocate to the next small town with its own single bigoted doctor?
Its clear that occupations which provide a necessary service should not be allowed to discriminate at all. Where should the line be drawn on occupations between those allowed to discriminate and those not allowed?
The laws that robots follow look NOTHING like the "3 laws". You don't tell a robot in English how to behave. An abstract principle like "Do not harm a human" has to be coded per situation, and there are thousands of systems which need to have their own tailored variant.
A robotic hand has to have pressure sensors to know when to stop squeezing an object that might be human so as not to cause damage. Nowhere in those device drivers are you going to see a statement that looks remotely like "do not harm a human". You'll see something like "if pressure sensors encounter resistance equivalent to soft squishy tissue, stop contracting the actuators and release until pressure = X". No concept of human, just a focus on an attribute that a human might have.
mobile robots will have to be told how to recognize potentially human objects through patterns of sensor readings and then each dimension of action will have to have its own specialized restrictions when the sensors read those patterns, or the internal model of the outside world tracks a "human" object.
A "3 laws" style rule might as well be a very abstract function or directive which has no indication of how that would manifest on the hardware of a robot. Our robotics coding right now is at the level of assembly language directives, not high level language built-in function calls. . We're still hacking the hardware, learning how to piece things together. It's going to be a few decades before we have a declarative language to express abstract rules which can be automatically compiled down into processing sensor readings to determine executability conditions for actions.
One robot to another is just another object in the world unless the robots have been explicitly coded to either learn about each other and attempt to communicate and coordinate through that learning, or they are intentionally coded to communicate with each other through various protocols ahead of time.
Statements like the 3 laws are only understood by humans. Proving that some hacked together assembly language level robotic behavior upholds the 3 laws is non-trivial. In all likelyhood it will require specialized domain specific languages to describe robotic behavior which then get compiled down to the hardware of the robot. At the level of the DSL the laws can be verified, and a formal translation from the DSL to hardware can be verified in order to guarantee the proof. Without such an integrated system, you're relying on sub-systems which are developed independently of each other to automagically cooperate together in such a way that the abstract laws are preserved as invariants.
Which ultimately should be optimized away by a good compiler. If the string is never read in the context of the loop, leave it in the StringBuilder until the loop is exited or until the StringBuilder content is passed in a function call, then render a String from it.
Ultimately this is a failure on the part of the compiler writers to not handle a very obvious optimization. (obvious to those versed in optimizing loop code as a compiler writer should be).
That is what they have proved. The problem is they don't even realize that this is exactly what they proved. If they had realized it (and they had any intelligence), they would be far too embarrassed about having spent so much time on this to mention it to anyone. "Look Ma, I proved 1+1 > 1"
More than likely its employing concurrency between computation and buffered writes to disc. This is really just a special case, a specific exception to a good principle.
You have 2 processes. The first process is a bit-generator which generates a bit at a time for as long as needed. The second process is a buffered writer to disc.
All I got out of the summary was that it is faster to stream the output of the bit generator to the buffered disc writer than to collect all the output of the bit-generater to an in memory storage and then stream the in memory storage to the buffered disc writer. WELL DUH. No mystery there. Stream processing 101.
That's all definitely interesting speculation, but the point remains: As far as quantum effects go, it is all speculation. Nothing like what you suggest has been discovered; further, no effect has been detected that cannot be attributed to one or more of the chemical, electrical or topological mechanisms we're already aware of.
I will kindly refer you to this type of phenomena:
These are alterations of the magnetic fields from sources outside the cranium and outside the myelin sheath which impact the neural processing. Would this not be indicative of quantum influences in neural processing?
Given that these effects are sourced outside the cranium, it would seem plausible then that the current generated as a signal propegates down the axon of neuron A would have an impact on parallel neuron B firing due to the magnetic field generated from A's firing. These generated magnetic fields are strong enough to be detected outside the cranium and are the basis of some FMRI techniques.
Taking into account the inverse square law, the noise coming off a neuron firing is MUCH LOUDER one parallel neuron over than for a sensor located outside the cranium.
Ultimately what this points to is that our mathematical models of neural networks and dynamic bayesian networds are not exactly what is happening inside the brain. At best its a discrete approximation to a continuous space which exists in a feedback loop with itself. Kinda like a Summation approximation for the Integral of a function.
The topological graph structure of the nueron connections through dendrite and axons is dominant, but it is not dominant enough to eliminate the influence of the fluctuations in the ambient electromagnetic fields. The above articles provide evidence of this. It's not just speculation.
I'm taking "quantum effects" to mean ambient electric/magnetic fields and the impact of the surrounding structure that is not directly "connected" to the electric signal traveling down a neuron's axon and across to dendrites. What would qualify as quantum effects is the following:
(1) signal interference from surrounding tissue or parallel neurons firing. This can be anything as small as something which modulates the RATE of signal propegation, therefore impacting the timing of networked events. (see race conditions in a computer). Any minute physiological changes or electrical field changes along the axon which might modulate the action potential.
(2) signal prohibition. Anything in the surrounding environment (electric or magnetic fields) which might select against the initiation of a signal, such as increasing the threshold energy needed to start the signal or suppressing the sensitivity/receptiveness in the dendrites to incoming signals.
(3) signal promotion. Similar to the above, something in the surrounding environment (outside the cell walls) which might alter the internal structure of the cell to make it easier for a signal to fire or make the dendrites more sensitive.
Given the inverse square laws for the drop off in potency of electric and magnetic fields, the local environment would have the most significant impact, but can we completely discount the possibility of waves propagating through london forces, especially in the hydrophobic interior of the cell wall? The effects might be miniscule, but if there is any effect at all, could it have an impact on signal transduction?
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Here is an example of an FPGA combined with genetic algorithms that resulted in a solution to a problem which depended on "quantum effects" as I've defined them above. Meaning they expected all solutions to be transistor based, but discovered that the interference between non-connected components was integral to the working of the final solution.
The poor in the western world is only poor by comparison to the local standards of living. Compare the bottom of the US to the bottom of Somalia or some other undeveloped nation and our poor is massively wealthy in comparison. Compare our poor now to the middle and upper class of the middle ages. Our healthcare alone has rid most diseases that were rampant. Technology has raised the standard of living up for everyone, and if you take the integral over the poor population, the combined increase in quality of life dwarfs the quality of life that the rich have gained.
What hasn't changed is that the rich get the freedom to do whatever they want while the poor have to live paycheck to paycheck and have little ability take extravagant vacations or buy expensive things.
But nerds are not omniscient. Advertising directly contributes to knowing what is available for purchase. There have been many products I did not know existed but was informed of their existence by advertising. Even when I am actively searching for solutions, unless someone advertised an existing solution in a space in which I would potentially search, I would not know of their solution. So advertising is very crucial for expanding awareness of solutions.
What people have problem with is the constant bombardment of the same ad over and over and over again, or being bombarded with irrelevant ads, and being forced to view ads when there is no problem needing a solution currently.
The more distance between the "gun" and the "target", the more opportunity there is for both (1) unintended targets entering the field of fire, and (2) minor jostling of the laser mount will create large arcs in the area where the target is. Seeing as the laser fire needs to be durative, collateral damage from these two factors is potentially going to increase.
Absolutely agree. I too work in the field of AI (logic and knowledge representation). Religion is something that preys upon a very complex self-concept. In AI there is no need for a self-concept unless you are trying to design a chat bot to pass the Turing test. Expert systems do not need to be self-aware. Autonomous vehicles do not need to be self-aware. And by self-aware I mean "Oh 'I' exist and 'I' am a program running on hardware". Autonomous vehicles are mostly reactionary systems, closest to our autonomic responses. If anything, simulating self-awareness is a tremendous inefficiency and may introduce some unpredictable results, which is not what we want from our AI. We design systems to get stuff done correctly and safely, not shoot the shit while toking a stogie.
Generally Fundamental Evangelical Christians teach humility and service to others and subscribe to the view that others are more important than me. That's exactly opposite to what you claim "ALL" religion is.
Quit focusing on the supposed virtues that are "extolled" and look at things which are fundamentally more important than surface teachings.
1. Look at the power-structure within the group organization. Typically each church or congregation has a few leader which tells everyone else what to believe, how to behave and promotes a very specific culture. This is structure is all about power and dominance. It is not egalitarian.
2. Look at what a person has to believe about themselves in order to be a Fundamental Evangelical Christian. The fundamental premise is that we are inherently tainted by sin. This is a direct attack on the self-esteem of the individual in order to dominate how they think, reason, and move through the world. You are fed a story about how bad you are and how much you must be saved. This is tremendously about thought-control. Power.
The focus on the virtues is a distraction in order to infect you with a debilitating self-belief and instill a willingness to participate in the herd of followers.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
What we now know as "Christianity" today is nothing like what was taught by the character "Jesus" in the bible. All of the great sages in history have had their teachings perverted, misused and abused by those that came after. Jesus's teachings are not the foundation for "modern Western Civilization."
There is what we SAY, and then there is what we DO. While the formal definition of a-theist is "absence of belief in a god", I've found a significant difference in the outward behavior between self-identified atheists and agnostics. The attitudinal disposition towards one identification over another has an impact in how people relate to each other, what they are willing to participate in and the tacit judgments held of those that self-identify differently.
There is a culture and ethos amongst the community of people that actively self-identify as atheist. They pass on tacit attitudes towards each other, and there is just as much group-think taking place in the local college's atheist club as there is in a religious club.
One very common assumption amongst atheists is material reductionism.
I've found just as much contempt-prior-to-investigation coming from atheists as theists, but agnostics tend to be either apathetic or more willing to investigate Subjective Phenomena beyond what is explainable via material reductionism.
Abuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
Who gets labelled a terrorist and why? It's not just about who commits violence. It's about who is a threat to the existing power-structure. Terrorist is the new communist.
Hire humans to build more hardware. Make robots to build more hardware. Build spacecraft when the Earth has been completely mined of its resources and start mining on other planets. Architect more efficient hardware and algorithms and recycle old hardware.... The limits we think we know are very often a product of limited imagination, and not intrinsic to the physical world.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, the old snort signature. Using the resonance of a person's nasal and sinus cavities as they inhale their blow vigorously through a $100 bill. I hear they still use children blind from birth to identify the snort signatures of perps. No FFT algorithm has been able to compete.
No, but you can get some semblance of your freedom back. (modulo any trauma endured during incarceration which alters your personality and decision making.)
loyalty is an antiquated concept. Loyalty implies a sacrifice of autonomy and critical thinking. A loyal dog will protect its master regardless of whether or not the master is truly worth protecting. Loyalty is a component of social or group-identity. Often loyalty is part of a pyramidal power structure. Those at the top demand loyalty from those at the bottom in order to maintain their control over the bottom. Loyalty is already a divisive and conflict oriented mentality. An independent rational critical thinker has no need for loyalty. They will form alliances with those who share the same values, but the "loyalty" is to the values, not to the persons they are in alliance with.
Think of all the uses of loyalty. Knights are loyal to their king, employees loyal to the company they work for, sons and daughters loyal to their parents, and relatives loyal to the family. In all these cases, that which is "loyal" is placing blind trust in something they do not really know to be trust worthy. They have to turn off their critical scrutiny in order to be loyal...
Children need guided and occasionally pushed are they turn out to be dependent, whiny, liberals.
Well you've certainly gone liberal with your use of grammar....
Does the genetic component matter as much as the memetic component? It's about the ideologies. And the question then is how is Hilary different ideologically from Bill. Given that they weathered a sex scandal and still together, I'd say their ideologies are in alignment enough to create a very strong attraction to each other.
Let's just take this at face value, and let's falsely pretend that the water shortages aren't also causing cutbacks by residential consumers. Then that's 40% of the state's water to provide a fraction of 2% of the GDP, in drought conditions.
Personally? I think you're a moron for using GDP as a valid way to allocate water resources. Seriously? Where did that idea even come from?......When a residential consumer drinks water, they are producing 0% of GDP.....You need to think a little more before responding.
*scratches head* Um.... a person needs to drink water to live. A person needs to live in order to work... GDP requires human work.... So we could take the average of GDP generated per person in the population and then average GDP per drink of water per person in the population and come up with a more legitimate value of GDP / drink of water than 0$. Perhaps you are the person needing to think a little more? Even taking into account the distribution of GDP across all the other necessities, food, housing, etc. the GDP per glass of water is still not $0. 0 Glasses of water per person for 7 days, and GDP will be at 0 from there on out.
Single doctor serving a small town denying service to someone who is hurt leaves them hurt. Bigotry can definitely cause harm in the denial of essential goods and services. Photography is a luxury and non-essential, but when the only grocery store in town refuses to sell to someone, there is no other grocery store to take their business to.
Photography is something anyone can do, but if there is a single service provider in a region for a service which must be certified, then allowing that service provider to discriminate is no good. For example, the only doctor in a small town refuses to see patients that are gay. Said gay patient must get a doc prescrip for life saving medication. Should they be forced to relocate to the next small town with its own single bigoted doctor?
Its clear that occupations which provide a necessary service should not be allowed to discriminate at all. Where should the line be drawn on occupations between those allowed to discriminate and those not allowed?
The laws that robots follow look NOTHING like the "3 laws". You don't tell a robot in English how to behave. An abstract principle like "Do not harm a human" has to be coded per situation, and there are thousands of systems which need to have their own tailored variant.
A robotic hand has to have pressure sensors to know when to stop squeezing an object that might be human so as not to cause damage. Nowhere in those device drivers are you going to see a statement that looks remotely like "do not harm a human". You'll see something like "if pressure sensors encounter resistance equivalent to soft squishy tissue, stop contracting the actuators and release until pressure = X". No concept of human, just a focus on an attribute that a human might have.
mobile robots will have to be told how to recognize potentially human objects through patterns of sensor readings and then each dimension of action will have to have its own specialized restrictions when the sensors read those patterns, or the internal model of the outside world tracks a "human" object.
A "3 laws" style rule might as well be a very abstract function or directive which has no indication of how that would manifest on the hardware of a robot. Our robotics coding right now is at the level of assembly language directives, not high level language built-in function calls. . We're still hacking the hardware, learning how to piece things together. It's going to be a few decades before we have a declarative language to express abstract rules which can be automatically compiled down into processing sensor readings to determine executability conditions for actions.
One robot to another is just another object in the world unless the robots have been explicitly coded to either learn about each other and attempt to communicate and coordinate through that learning, or they are intentionally coded to communicate with each other through various protocols ahead of time.
Statements like the 3 laws are only understood by humans. Proving that some hacked together assembly language level robotic behavior upholds the 3 laws is non-trivial. In all likelyhood it will require specialized domain specific languages to describe robotic behavior which then get compiled down to the hardware of the robot. At the level of the DSL the laws can be verified, and a formal translation from the DSL to hardware can be verified in order to guarantee the proof. Without such an integrated system, you're relying on sub-systems which are developed independently of each other to automagically cooperate together in such a way that the abstract laws are preserved as invariants.
Which ultimately should be optimized away by a good compiler. If the string is never read in the context of the loop, leave it in the StringBuilder until the loop is exited or until the StringBuilder content is passed in a function call, then render a String from it.
Ultimately this is a failure on the part of the compiler writers to not handle a very obvious optimization. (obvious to those versed in optimizing loop code as a compiler writer should be).
Assuming your posts was not so tongue-in-cheek that you lacerated your cheek,
"Scientists" deserve respect only if they do good science. Shitty science means they are shitty scientists and deserve to be repudiated.
That is what they have proved. The problem is they don't even realize that this is exactly what they proved. If they had realized it (and they had any intelligence), they would be far too embarrassed about having spent so much time on this to mention it to anyone. "Look Ma, I proved 1+1 > 1"
More than likely its employing concurrency between computation and buffered writes to disc. This is really just a special case, a specific exception to a good principle.
You have 2 processes. The first process is a bit-generator which generates a bit at a time for as long as needed. The second process is a buffered writer to disc.
All I got out of the summary was that it is faster to stream the output of the bit generator to the buffered disc writer than to collect all the output of the bit-generater to an in memory storage and then stream the in memory storage to the buffered disc writer. WELL DUH. No mystery there. Stream processing 101.
That's all definitely interesting speculation, but the point remains: As far as quantum effects go, it is all speculation. Nothing like what you suggest has been discovered; further, no effect has been detected that cannot be attributed to one or more of the chemical, electrical or topological mechanisms we're already aware of.
I will kindly refer you to this type of phenomena:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation
These are alterations of the magnetic fields from sources outside the cranium and outside the myelin sheath which impact the neural processing. Would this not be indicative of quantum influences in neural processing?
Given that these effects are sourced outside the cranium, it would seem plausible then that the current generated as a signal propegates down the axon of neuron A would have an impact on parallel neuron B firing due to the magnetic field generated from A's firing. These generated magnetic fields are strong enough to be detected outside the cranium and are the basis of some FMRI techniques.
http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/meg/pdfs/Xiong%20et%20al%202003.pdf
Taking into account the inverse square law, the noise coming off a neuron firing is MUCH LOUDER one parallel neuron over than for a sensor located outside the cranium.
There are actual articles on inter-neuronal communication via electromagnetic waves: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110202132617.htm and Neural and Brain Modeling by Rondald MacGregor
Ultimately what this points to is that our mathematical models of neural networks and dynamic bayesian networds are not exactly what is happening inside the brain. At best its a discrete approximation to a continuous space which exists in a feedback loop with itself. Kinda like a Summation approximation for the Integral of a function.
The topological graph structure of the nueron connections through dendrite and axons is dominant, but it is not dominant enough to eliminate the influence of the fluctuations in the ambient electromagnetic fields. The above articles provide evidence of this. It's not just speculation.
I'm taking "quantum effects" to mean ambient electric/magnetic fields and the impact of the surrounding structure that is not directly "connected" to the electric signal traveling down a neuron's axon and across to dendrites. What would qualify as quantum effects is the following:
(1) signal interference from surrounding tissue or parallel neurons firing. This can be anything as small as something which modulates the RATE of signal propegation, therefore impacting the timing of networked events. (see race conditions in a computer). Any minute physiological changes or electrical field changes along the axon which might modulate the action potential.
(2) signal prohibition. Anything in the surrounding environment (electric or magnetic fields) which might select against the initiation of a signal, such as increasing the threshold energy needed to start the signal or suppressing the sensitivity/receptiveness in the dendrites to incoming signals.
(3) signal promotion. Similar to the above, something in the surrounding environment (outside the cell walls) which might alter the internal structure of the cell to make it easier for a signal to fire or make the dendrites more sensitive.
Given the inverse square laws for the drop off in potency of electric and magnetic fields, the local environment would have the most significant impact, but can we completely discount the possibility of waves propagating through london forces, especially in the hydrophobic interior of the cell wall? The effects might be miniscule, but if there is any effect at all, could it have an impact on signal transduction?
http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ Here is an example of an FPGA combined with genetic algorithms that resulted in a solution to a problem which depended on "quantum effects" as I've defined them above. Meaning they expected all solutions to be transistor based, but discovered that the interference between non-connected components was integral to the working of the final solution.
THIS
The poor in the western world is only poor by comparison to the local standards of living. Compare the bottom of the US to the bottom of Somalia or some other undeveloped nation and our poor is massively wealthy in comparison. Compare our poor now to the middle and upper class of the middle ages. Our healthcare alone has rid most diseases that were rampant. Technology has raised the standard of living up for everyone, and if you take the integral over the poor population, the combined increase in quality of life dwarfs the quality of life that the rich have gained.
What hasn't changed is that the rich get the freedom to do whatever they want while the poor have to live paycheck to paycheck and have little ability take extravagant vacations or buy expensive things.
But nerds are not omniscient. Advertising directly contributes to knowing what is available for purchase. There have been many products I did not know existed but was informed of their existence by advertising. Even when I am actively searching for solutions, unless someone advertised an existing solution in a space in which I would potentially search, I would not know of their solution. So advertising is very crucial for expanding awareness of solutions.
What people have problem with is the constant bombardment of the same ad over and over and over again, or being bombarded with irrelevant ads, and being forced to view ads when there is no problem needing a solution currently.
The more distance between the "gun" and the "target", the more opportunity there is for both (1) unintended targets entering the field of fire, and (2) minor jostling of the laser mount will create large arcs in the area where the target is. Seeing as the laser fire needs to be durative, collateral damage from these two factors is potentially going to increase.
Absolutely agree. I too work in the field of AI (logic and knowledge representation). Religion is something that preys upon a very complex self-concept. In AI there is no need for a self-concept unless you are trying to design a chat bot to pass the Turing test. Expert systems do not need to be self-aware. Autonomous vehicles do not need to be self-aware. And by self-aware I mean "Oh 'I' exist and 'I' am a program running on hardware". Autonomous vehicles are mostly reactionary systems, closest to our autonomic responses. If anything, simulating self-awareness is a tremendous inefficiency and may introduce some unpredictable results, which is not what we want from our AI. We design systems to get stuff done correctly and safely, not shoot the shit while toking a stogie.
The point of all religion is power.
Not exactly...Well, not ALL of them anyway.
Generally Fundamental Evangelical Christians teach humility and service to others and subscribe to the view that others are more important than me. That's exactly opposite to what you claim "ALL" religion is.
Quit focusing on the supposed virtues that are "extolled" and look at things which are fundamentally more important than surface teachings.
1. Look at the power-structure within the group organization. Typically each church or congregation has a few leader which tells everyone else what to believe, how to behave and promotes a very specific culture. This is structure is all about power and dominance. It is not egalitarian.
2. Look at what a person has to believe about themselves in order to be a Fundamental Evangelical Christian. The fundamental premise is that we are inherently tainted by sin. This is a direct attack on the self-esteem of the individual in order to dominate how they think, reason, and move through the world. You are fed a story about how bad you are and how much you must be saved. This is tremendously about thought-control. Power.
The focus on the virtues is a distraction in order to infect you with a debilitating self-belief and instill a willingness to participate in the herd of followers.
A very real problem for the religious folks is that their purported creator seems to refuse to communicate with his (her?) creations. True, religious people routinely claim to be talking directly to their god, but they can't demonstrate this communication to the rest of us.
Have you ever heard of this man called Jesus? Preached in the Middle East 2,000 years ago, claimed to be God, started a major world religion which formed a foundation for modern Western Civilization?
What we now know as "Christianity" today is nothing like what was taught by the character "Jesus" in the bible. All of the great sages in history have had their teachings perverted, misused and abused by those that came after. Jesus's teachings are not the foundation for "modern Western Civilization."
There is what we SAY, and then there is what we DO. While the formal definition of a-theist is "absence of belief in a god", I've found a significant difference in the outward behavior between self-identified atheists and agnostics. The attitudinal disposition towards one identification over another has an impact in how people relate to each other, what they are willing to participate in and the tacit judgments held of those that self-identify differently.
There is a culture and ethos amongst the community of people that actively self-identify as atheist. They pass on tacit attitudes towards each other, and there is just as much group-think taking place in the local college's atheist club as there is in a religious club.
One very common assumption amongst atheists is material reductionism.
I've found just as much contempt-prior-to-investigation coming from atheists as theists, but agnostics tend to be either apathetic or more willing to investigate Subjective Phenomena beyond what is explainable via material reductionism.
Abuse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism Who gets labelled a terrorist and why? It's not just about who commits violence. It's about who is a threat to the existing power-structure. Terrorist is the new communist.
Hire humans to build more hardware. Make robots to build more hardware. Build spacecraft when the Earth has been completely mined of its resources and start mining on other planets. Architect more efficient hardware and algorithms and recycle old hardware.... The limits we think we know are very often a product of limited imagination, and not intrinsic to the physical world.
You can view "potential" as the integral from time t to infinity. Does that smooth over your cognitive dissonance?