When religion builds an airplane, I'll buy into your figures of speech. Until then, I'm down with science. It works.
A little bit back on topic, is anyone else disturbed that unwavering belief in the theory of evolution has become a litmus test for intelligence?
It hasn't. The issue is that "skepticism" towards the theory of evolution is emblematic of a rejection of science itself. This rejection of science takes place within a context of all the technology, medicine, and other wonders that the scientific method has produced. This all-out denial of the obvious fact that the scientific worldview is useful, productive, and beneficial does tend to call these people's intelligence into question. If they aren't stupid, what are they?
I read a comment on Slashdot just a few days ago (really wish I had bookmarked it, since I'd love to read it again) where the poster mentioned evolution, the Y2K bug, avian flu, and said "science just has no credibility left." I wanted to say "so I guess you won't be using medicine, driving in cars, or POSTING ON THE INTERNET anymore...?" but I've said it before, and the absurdity of rejecting science while depending on it so heavily is just lost on these people.
Yes, the war is over, for me. MS Office's PDF output capability, with nested TOC and html links intact, really sold me and I don't see why I would ever go back. You can even copy/paste from a web page and all the hyperlinks in the text will be intact, and you can export your document to PDF and the links will STILL be intact, even with a TOC if you bothered to use headings. Way cool.
Add that to the fact that, even if I hose my HD, I can boot into a Knoppix|Kanotix|Ubuntu|whatever CD|DVD and use MS Office perfectly well without even needing to install an OS! Another thing I love about MS Office is that, if someone who doesn't own it needs to edit an MS Office file, I can legally hand them a copy for free, or point them to the free download page. There's also an MS Office page at Portable Apps, and they have a version (also free) you can run from a USB thumb drive, no installation needed! So the group of people I can share documents with isn't limited to people who have paid for (or pirated) a certain version of my office suite.
Except that all of that is untrue, and those advantages belong only to OpenOffice.
I'm sure that MS Office has some technical capabilities that Openoffice lacks. But I don't know what they are, and it appears that I don't need them. But I have just documented some advantages that Openoffice enjoys but MS Office lacks, and I need|want those advantages more than I need the unknown, unused advantages of MS Office. Ergo the war, as you say, is over.
On a side note, I have plenty of co-workers who don't want to use computers at all. They hate email, hate MS Office, don't understand spreadsheets, and want to go back to "the way things were before". I'm wondering whether our workplace will accomdoate them, or just make them suck it up and get used to what we have to use today.
Seriously, I understand that people have preferences. But every time I hear that someone doesn't want to use OpenOffice, or Linux, or even LaTeX, and that this is a reason why they shouldn't be implemented, I think of all the workers who just have to use what they have to use, and they eventually got over it. I've seen people forcibly moved from Windows to Mac, from Mac to Windows, and all over the place, and people eventually just stop grumbling and get their work done. I hate using Windows, would much rather use Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but essentially no one cares, because my employer made a technology choice, and if I wish to continue my employment I have to abide by it.
MS Office is expensive, proprietary, closed-source, and has planned expensive upgrades built into the MS business model. OpenOffice isn't perfect (what is?) but if the secretary were told "well, this is what we're using" she just might get over it.
These are all foreign nationals and do not have any inherent right to do business in the US.
Neither do you. If we're going by a legalistic, "let's see if we can find this written in the Constitution" sense of freedom, then you have precious few of them, and even those have been interpreted out of existence--"free speech zones" and so on.
The Constitution grants the government not plenary, but enumerated powers. Even if we quibble over the fine points of what powers it should have, the foundational logic is that you have to present a case to justify the government abridging freedom, as opposed to having to present a case to justify that freedom.
The government making a list and checking it twice doesn't make you naughty, and it sure doesn't give them a broad authority to threaten all and sundry with jail and fines for something as nebulous as "all financial transactions." Something this vague is bound to be abused, so much so that it must have been designed that way. Will an ex-Haliburton CEO be charged with trading with Iran? No, but if something this nebulous is allowed to pass then they can pop up and arrest anyone they want without having to justify it. If you make enough bad law, everyone is a criminal, and whoever holds the reins of the Justice Department can politicize enforcement to keep one party in power forever. Alternatively, they can just use it as a club against anyone and everyone they don't like--Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, etc.
We have to be vigilant almost to the point of parania in protecting our freedom. Freedom isn't free, and the cost is a suspicion of our own government. Trusting the government with fair and non-politicized enforcement of vague law is a cancer to freedom.
What I'm curious about is, what do you mean when you say that something is wrong?
Why do you think I mean anything different than the normal dictionary definition, or what everyone else generally means? I guess you can reduce morality to meaning "things I don't want people to do" but that blurs the distinction between axe-murder and letting kids watch too much TV. The only distinction that I can think of between me and religious people is that they attribute the rules to God, while I just say "Do you really want to live in that kind of world?"
I'm not sure whether your questions is profound or trivial. You can say "orange" or "door" and I can reply "but what do you mean?" but I'm not really sure that accomplishes much. Words are by their nature imprecise tools, and in using them we are only approximating our real meaning. I don't think we ever really communicate, but we get by okay, usually.
Back to ethics, you may want to read Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You. That, and reading Doestoevsky compulsively over a couple of years, influenced me heavily. Yes, as an atheist I was heavily influenced by two Christian mystics. I'm also big on Emerson and Blake. Well, Blake may not be all that Christian, but he's great. Not that any of this addresses your question.
Me not finding the idea of God persuasive doesn't make me religious. You might want to look up that word, because I don't think it means what you think it means. I don't have any supernatural beliefs, and there are no tenets per se that one must hold to qualify as an atheist. If you lack a belief in God(s), you're an atheist, but that's about it.
Some are dogmatic about it (asserting there is no God), and some consider themselves agnostic (maybe we can never know?) and some just find the idea about as compelling and sensible as a Southern Baptist preacher finds the Upanishads. Like the old saw goes, if atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair color.
Or to grammatically correct, in what kind of world do you want to live? Do you want to live in a world where people rape|murder|torture|steal|lie|cheat? No? Neither do I. Ergo I don't do those things. The way the world is, morally, is a direct result of the way we are. I don't see how attributing this seemingly obvious insight to a divine being is going to make it more sensible or compelling.
Since believers are obviously not more moral in their actions, we can safely infer that grounding morality in God|The Bible|religion has no actual impact on human conduct. Yes, I'm sure it feels great to have that rhetorical trump card of "God said so!" but my main concern is human conduct, not so much the epistemological framework.
I realize that believers often believe that not believing in God would undermine morality, but think for a minute what that's saying. Are you saying that the only reason you don't go out tonight and rape you a nine year old is because you believe in God? If your faith in God was shaken, would you suddenly go on a murder spree? If the only reason you can think of to be moral is that you believe in God and an afterlife, then that says something about your character. But I doubt you're really like that. We may not be able to nail down the epistemology, but we all (homicidal wackos/sociopaths aside) share some common ground when it comes to recognizing morality.
Yeah, that must be why religious people are so much more moral. Oh, that's right--they aren't. Belief that there is a right and a wrong isn't linked to belief in a divine being, despite what people who believe in divine beings tell you. I'm an atheist, and I recognize right and wrong. There are many countries (most, in fact) with a relatively lower percentage of believers (than in the USA) but whose morality is not noticably worse.
It may sound persuasive to you to say that not believing in God means that there is suddenly no right or wrong and we can do anything, but real atheists, with very few exceptions, don't really believe that. And for every exception (Pol Pot and Stalin come to mind) I can give you more examples of people who thought God wanted them to commit atrocities. Hitler, Torquemada, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and so on. Yes, some power-mad wackos are atheists, but the fact that there are also plenty of power-mad wackos who believe in God should tell you that the atheism isn't the root of that particular problem. It happens that there are murderous psychos in the world, some who believe in God and a few who don't, and all of them bring their own beliefs, or lack thereof, to the table with them.
And we don't really think you're stupid, any more than you think people who believe in Shiva or Mithra are stupid. Yes, Dawkins is mouthy. He's one Oxford zoology professor who is rather vocal about his atheism. When the President of the USA says that religious people whouldn't even be considered citizens (like Bush Sr. said about atheists when he was President) then you may have a case. But even then, it falls a bit short of true intolerance or persecution. Dawkins is entitled to his beliefs. If Christians enjoy the right to think that Dawkins deserves to roast for all eternity in a lake of fire, I think he's entitled to think this is a crazy, illogical, and sadistic doctrine.
Seriously, when was the last time MS came out with something that really got you excited, something elegant and useful?
Well, all the security problems in Windows, all those zombie machines and so on, can be called useful in a way, because they persuaded me to ditch Windows altogether. Does that count? That sounds like a joke, but really isn't.
Not just the security problems, but the whole ever-increasing DRM vise, the dumbing-down of all the functions (animated search charactes, etc) make Windows increasingly unattractive to even moderately skilled users and push them in droves towards Linux, OSX, BSD, etc.
Even giving up MS Office is easier because their resistance to a well-documented non-Windows-dependent open standard for documents. Ubuntu lured me in, but it was easier to do because Microsoft was pushing me out the door as hard as they could.
I'm in a similar spot. Many people fault Linux because it isn't sufficiently like Windows, and conclude that it isn't "ready" for the desktop. I'm the obverse of that--I like Debian and Ubuntu so much that I wouldn't even bother pirating Windows now. Even if they sent me the latest Vista Ultimate DVD for free and gave me on-site support, I wouldn't be interested. Windows isn't enough like Ubuntu, therefore Windows isn't quite there yet. I can install Cygwin on windows, but why would I want to?
I'd bet the vast majority of geeks who still use Windows do so because they have to due to their job. If I was locked into Outlook or Photoshop I'd be stuck in a similar boat, but that predicament doesn't magically make Windows not suck anymore. I have a Win2K VM so I can upload Mapsource maps to my Garmin Nuvi (it works, BTW), but I use that as infrequently as possible.
Windows is dead for home use, at least as far as using Windows for Windows, not just for legacy software that hasn't been ported to Linux yet. The only thing that is keeping Microsoft alive (for home use) is that 3rd-party companies like Adobe aren't porting their software to Linux. Yet. Well, and gaming, but I'm not a gamer, so that isn't my problem. In the workplace I understand that Sharepoint and Outlook, etc, have a pretty good lock, but I don't work in corporate America so I can't attest to that.
I went to Panthip Plaza in Bangkok once and was simply enthralled by the piracy opportunities. All the Adobe stuff, Microsoft, CAD software, the whole bit. I went back a few years later and there was no point in buying any of it. Software, movies, music--why buy the pirated stuff when it's all online? I live overseas and I see people buy pirated DVDs all the time for $5USD, but it's only because they don't know how to find it online. I think the technophobes are the only ones keeping old-school pirates in business.
Kids want to be entertained, not taught. Parents want their kids to have good grades and they don't want to hear, ever, from a teacher that their kid isn't trying, is not keeping up, and so on--the "there are no bad students, only bad teachers" mantra. Teachers have to work with the kids every day, their employment can be affected by complaining parents, and ultimately they, like everyone else, are going to take the path of least resistance.
We are gutting education to the extent that it won't be verifiable anymore. If you reduce education to a videogame, you can't very well test on it, and you won't have quantifiable data to point to to show that little Johnny is an idiot. They'll dazzle you with buzzwords about emotional intelligence and self-esteem while fighting standardized testing. I don't blame the teachers all that much--they are subject to the demands of parents, and parents have long brought their power as consumers and taxpayers to bear on the school systems. The parents don't want to fault their own little angels because to do so would call their own parenting into question. It isn't even about the kids.
Frankly, we shouldn't even have computers in the classrooms until high school. It should be all books, chalkboards (cheaper than dry-erase boards/markers) and that's it. Kids need to read. For that matter, adults need to read. But will it change? I doubt it. Parents view teachers as their own contracted employees. Even when I was in high school back in the 80s it was changing--one of my best, most challenging teachers was fired becasue parents complained.
It always cracks me up how many people will rant all day about the USA being "a Christian nation." It's also a nation with a murder rate vastly higher than places like Sweden or Japan, still loves capital punishment, isn't that great when it comes to infant mortality, and oh yeah, we are actually having conversations about whether or not torture is okay. That last bit really sticks. How can we actually be discussing the moral points of torture? Should we discuss the ethical nuances of lynching next?
If you read a bit about how the interrogation has been happening, you might not be so optimistic. Seymore Hersch's book Chain of Command details it quite nicely. Also, the central defense of the GIs accused/convicted in these cases is that they weren't properly trained, ergo their bosses weren't responsible, and so on. Also, the Taguba report explicitly mentions that torture was taking place.
Reports of torture have come from all the US-run "terrorist" prisons, so we are talking about a universal pattern, not a couple of bad apples. Overall, I think you're being too optimistic about the US government.
Depending on which version you believe, you get to choose between different kinds of bad. Either senior people authorized torture, or junior, untrained people were encouraged to "get results" and a blind eye was turned as to methods.
So, rather than the parent being "absurd" (which means "logically impossible", rather than "factually untrue", by the way) it seems that you are either naive or uninformed. It really is bad. Governments do torture. People don't handle power well, and if you hide them away in a secret place, remove oversight, and pat them on the back for being a bit rough, they will in short order torture people to death. It's not about being American, Iraqi, or any indictment of the Bush Doctrine--it's just human nature. Read about the Zimbardo prison experiment, or Milgram's experiments, the book Ordinary Men, and so on. People can be savage if you put them in a situation where it's condoned and rewarded. That inner moral compass isn't as reliable as we like to think. If we had more cynics and less optimists when it comes to human nature, we would recognize that power corrupts and minimize the situations in which torture is likely to occur. Your optimism is exactly what we need less of.
Here are a fewlinks about the half or so of Americans who believe things about Iraq that aren't true. Herearesomemore. Most of these refer to the studies they're referring to, or are good starting-points if you want to do more research into the subject. I spent a whopping 5 minutes googling for this info, so I can understand how you never came across it in all your TV watching.
You obviously think everyone is an idiot.
No, if I thought they were an idiot then it wouldn't matter if they watched TV, because idiots are beyond hope anyway. I'm saying they are poorly served by their choice of news outlet. Me pointing out that TV doesn't inform you doesn't make me a bad person, or arrogant, or whatever you think I am. Please don't resort to ad hominem attacks just because you don't like what I'm saying. I've been reading this stuff for YEARS because even if you just read blogs, if you read blogs from different political leanings you get more of that nuance you like so much. If you read only Daily Kos or only Red State then you get a skewed view of reality, but if you read both and follow up with more research, you get more naunce and perspective than if you read only one.
Some people don't have time to read 8 hours of fucking news every day to meet your standards.
They have that much time to watch TV, don't they? Are they meeting your fucking standards yet? Me pointing out that people believe crap that isn't true, don't know what is, and do these things because they watch TV doesn't make me some arrogant ass who has some mythical "standards" I'm setting for people. I'm just pointing out that watching TV is inferior to critical reading when it comes to keeping yourself somewhat informed.
One should take in all sources of news and make up their own minds.
So they don't have time to read, but they have time to watch yet more TV and then "make up their own minds"? Look, could you point me to which TV news program I can watch tonight to learn more about whether or not torture has taken place in US-run prisons abroad? Which TV program can I wach tonight to tell me more about whether or not the War on Terror is undermining habeus corpus? Or about the effects privatization had on the quality of care at the Army hospitals? Or about the billions of our taxpayer money that was handed out from the back of pickup trucks in Iraq, with no accountability? Are their Fox News exposes, or for that matter 60-Minutes exposes, I can watch tonight? I sure as hell can read articles and books about them, and I don't have to rely on my cable provider. Help me out here--what TV programs do I watch to get as educated as you on these subjects?
Yep. Obesity isn't a problem, until they develop diabetes later in life and have their feet chopped off. Or they could go blind. Look, obesity does have health consequences, which we are aware of. The rates of obesity have also gone up. We know this too. So what exactly is the mystery? I agree that there are media-created "problems" (the hysteria over child abductions comes to mind) but that we have more fat people and that being fat is bad for your health isn't one of them.
I know you were kidding, but you're on to something uncomfortable. Athletic superiority is okay to have, even to be proud of, but academic superiority is something we have to be humble about. If you have a decent vocabulary you get "You think you're so smart!" but no one ever confronts the sprinting champion with "You think you're so fast!"
Look, polls were done years ago that showed that people who relied on TV news exclusively for information were vastly more likely to think that Saddam had WMD, was involved in 9/11, and so forth. What makes the TV news is largely the decision of a very few corporations, and no, not all viewpoints are presented. TV (and movies, for that matter) get science wrong almost all the time--if you don't read about evolution, for example, you won't understand evolution. Everyone THINKS they evaluate what's on TV objectively, but increased TV viewing maps very well to a decrease in critical thinking. No, print isn't objective either, but reading text, analyzing a verbal argument, exercises our intellect a different way that makes critical judgement more likely. When people watch TV they are more subject to subliminals such as tone, background music, facial expressions, that damned flag waving in the background, and so on.
I'm not advocating a Luddite movement, only pointing out that TV dulls your mind. Even putting aside politics, do you really think that a 1/2-hour long documentary on crocodiles would teach you as much as an article about them in National Geographic?
Picking up politics again, you'd be better informed if you stopped watching TV news altogether and read every issue of Harpers and The National Review. Add in the Economist if you're ambitious. Pick magazines from different parts of the political spectrum. Don't just read Mother Jones, but don't just read The American Spectator, either. Subscribe to a few and alternate which ones you read. Have them around your house, and if you have kids, let them see you reading. Even Rolling Stone has good articles. Fox News is political theater, not news, and CNN and the other networks are only vying to keep up. Even Olbermann, who is so fun to watch stick it to O'Reilly, is still entertainment, not news.
Every day I deal with people who think they're informed because they watch the news. They know about some missing kid, about Britney Spears, and they know that liberals want the terrorists to win. But mention that the US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq war is making terrorism worse, and you don't get fierce debate--you get blank looks. TV is great for the "gotcha!" soundbite, but it's horrible for perspective and nuance. You need to read. No, I'm not saying that all educated people agree with me, politically or otherwise. I've worked with an arch-conservative who I really respected, because he had done his reading and was willing to talk about stuff. We don't have to agree, because this isn't about my opinion vs. your opinion. This is about having a common ground of facts on which we can base a debate. Over half of the people who rely on TV news still think that Iraq was behind the WTC attacks. How do you have a debate with a person like that?
I agree that Dell will probably get frustrated and quit the whole idea just because the Linux community is too demanding and everyone wants their distro of choice. They should aim lower, in my opinion, and just ensure that their hardware was Linux-compatible. If you make sure the onboard NIC, soundchip, video-out, or whatever has documented standards that the Linux community can make work, then the end result will be more Dells with Linux. Right now I have a Sony desktop with a soundchip that isn't supported by ALSA, and because of my frustrations with it I'll probably never buy a Sony again. Ding ding ding!
I think the point is that if the hardware works under Ubuntu, it'll work under Fedora. Really it comes down to hardware compatibility with ALSA, the kernel, and so on. Now Ubuntu is said to have above-average hardware detection, so I guess Ubuntu could find/configure some bits that other distros hang up on, like on-board NICs or whatever. But I don't care if it's NetBSD so long as the hardware is generally supported by Linux. I can reinstall (and probably would anyway) because I'd use either Linux Mint or Ubuntu with Automatix. Plus Dell would load it with other crap I don't want.
The worldband radio I bought for $5 in a market in Phnom Penh (I overpayed because I was in a hurry) would do quite well in receiving emergency broadcasts. TV is about advertising and consumerism and keeping people fat and happy, and you probably know this.
The planned obsolescence of your last TV was a government handout to corporations. This upgrade bill is another government handout to corporations. If you want to stick it to The Man, stop watching television. None of my books are DRMd. I do watch movies on occasion, but I haven't watched TV in eight years.
This is not a shift in their business moel--TV was always about making money off of you. The "shows" you were watching exist to keep you watching so they can advertise to you. You are the product. If they let you record the shows, then you can skip the advertising, and they have less product to sell to advertisers.
If spending $1B ensures that the majority of citizens can watch TV, especially news, it is money well spent.
On what channel would I find this "news" you speak of? How many hours per day do you want me to watch breathless commentary on Britney's shaved head, Anna's death, or the latest missing kid?
Because citizens that are uninformed just believe what they see on TV and support wars that shouldn't be supported. Something like half of Americans still believe that Saddam had an active WMD program and that we went to Iraq over his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Also, TV is bad for you. It drugs you with a simplistic black-and-white worldview, addicts you to easy answers, makes you comfortable having no critical thinking skills, derides intelligence, presents a dumbed-down picture of science, and so on. I'm not suggesting we can fix this, but at least we can refuse to fund it. TV may not be the devil, but with it you don't need the devil.
If only there were a group of people who had been studying the problem for decades. We could call them, say, climatologists, and they could collect data and analyze it, and give us their best answer as to the cause of global warming, how significant of a problem it might be for us, and what we should do, if anything, to try and improve the situation. Their answers wouldn't be foolproof, but, dangit, at least we could say that the climatologists were offering the best, most studied, most thorough answers humans are capable of finding. I mean, there are always going to be differences of opinion, but if the climatologists came to an overwhelming consensus, that might indicate that the data really was compelling, and we could trust that more than we can trust individual naysayers. If only we had these... oh, wait a tic!
Slashdot Mirror
I read a comment on Slashdot just a few days ago (really wish I had bookmarked it, since I'd love to read it again) where the poster mentioned evolution, the Y2K bug, avian flu, and said "science just has no credibility left." I wanted to say "so I guess you won't be using medicine, driving in cars, or POSTING ON THE INTERNET anymore...?" but I've said it before, and the absurdity of rejecting science while depending on it so heavily is just lost on these people.
Add that to the fact that, even if I hose my HD, I can boot into a Knoppix|Kanotix|Ubuntu|whatever CD|DVD and use MS Office perfectly well without even needing to install an OS! Another thing I love about MS Office is that, if someone who doesn't own it needs to edit an MS Office file, I can legally hand them a copy for free, or point them to the free download page. There's also an MS Office page at Portable Apps, and they have a version (also free) you can run from a USB thumb drive, no installation needed! So the group of people I can share documents with isn't limited to people who have paid for (or pirated) a certain version of my office suite.
Except that all of that is untrue, and those advantages belong only to OpenOffice.
I'm sure that MS Office has some technical capabilities that Openoffice lacks. But I don't know what they are, and it appears that I don't need them. But I have just documented some advantages that Openoffice enjoys but MS Office lacks, and I need|want those advantages more than I need the unknown, unused advantages of MS Office. Ergo the war, as you say, is over.
Seriously, I understand that people have preferences. But every time I hear that someone doesn't want to use OpenOffice, or Linux, or even LaTeX, and that this is a reason why they shouldn't be implemented, I think of all the workers who just have to use what they have to use, and they eventually got over it. I've seen people forcibly moved from Windows to Mac, from Mac to Windows, and all over the place, and people eventually just stop grumbling and get their work done. I hate using Windows, would much rather use Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but essentially no one cares, because my employer made a technology choice, and if I wish to continue my employment I have to abide by it.
MS Office is expensive, proprietary, closed-source, and has planned expensive upgrades built into the MS business model. OpenOffice isn't perfect (what is?) but if the secretary were told "well, this is what we're using" she just might get over it.
The Constitution grants the government not plenary, but enumerated powers. Even if we quibble over the fine points of what powers it should have, the foundational logic is that you have to present a case to justify the government abridging freedom, as opposed to having to present a case to justify that freedom.
The government making a list and checking it twice doesn't make you naughty, and it sure doesn't give them a broad authority to threaten all and sundry with jail and fines for something as nebulous as "all financial transactions." Something this vague is bound to be abused, so much so that it must have been designed that way. Will an ex-Haliburton CEO be charged with trading with Iran? No, but if something this nebulous is allowed to pass then they can pop up and arrest anyone they want without having to justify it. If you make enough bad law, everyone is a criminal, and whoever holds the reins of the Justice Department can politicize enforcement to keep one party in power forever. Alternatively, they can just use it as a club against anyone and everyone they don't like--Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, etc.
We have to be vigilant almost to the point of parania in protecting our freedom. Freedom isn't free, and the cost is a suspicion of our own government. Trusting the government with fair and non-politicized enforcement of vague law is a cancer to freedom.
I'm not sure whether your questions is profound or trivial. You can say "orange" or "door" and I can reply "but what do you mean?" but I'm not really sure that accomplishes much. Words are by their nature imprecise tools, and in using them we are only approximating our real meaning. I don't think we ever really communicate, but we get by okay, usually.
Back to ethics, you may want to read Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You. That, and reading Doestoevsky compulsively over a couple of years, influenced me heavily. Yes, as an atheist I was heavily influenced by two Christian mystics. I'm also big on Emerson and Blake. Well, Blake may not be all that Christian, but he's great. Not that any of this addresses your question.
Some are dogmatic about it (asserting there is no God), and some consider themselves agnostic (maybe we can never know?) and some just find the idea about as compelling and sensible as a Southern Baptist preacher finds the Upanishads. Like the old saw goes, if atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair color.
Since believers are obviously not more moral in their actions, we can safely infer that grounding morality in God|The Bible|religion has no actual impact on human conduct. Yes, I'm sure it feels great to have that rhetorical trump card of "God said so!" but my main concern is human conduct, not so much the epistemological framework.
I realize that believers often believe that not believing in God would undermine morality, but think for a minute what that's saying. Are you saying that the only reason you don't go out tonight and rape you a nine year old is because you believe in God? If your faith in God was shaken, would you suddenly go on a murder spree? If the only reason you can think of to be moral is that you believe in God and an afterlife, then that says something about your character. But I doubt you're really like that. We may not be able to nail down the epistemology, but we all (homicidal wackos/sociopaths aside) share some common ground when it comes to recognizing morality.
It may sound persuasive to you to say that not believing in God means that there is suddenly no right or wrong and we can do anything, but real atheists, with very few exceptions, don't really believe that. And for every exception (Pol Pot and Stalin come to mind) I can give you more examples of people who thought God wanted them to commit atrocities. Hitler, Torquemada, Jim Jones, David Koresh, and so on. Yes, some power-mad wackos are atheists, but the fact that there are also plenty of power-mad wackos who believe in God should tell you that the atheism isn't the root of that particular problem. It happens that there are murderous psychos in the world, some who believe in God and a few who don't, and all of them bring their own beliefs, or lack thereof, to the table with them.
And we don't really think you're stupid, any more than you think people who believe in Shiva or Mithra are stupid. Yes, Dawkins is mouthy. He's one Oxford zoology professor who is rather vocal about his atheism. When the President of the USA says that religious people whouldn't even be considered citizens (like Bush Sr. said about atheists when he was President) then you may have a case. But even then, it falls a bit short of true intolerance or persecution. Dawkins is entitled to his beliefs. If Christians enjoy the right to think that Dawkins deserves to roast for all eternity in a lake of fire, I think he's entitled to think this is a crazy, illogical, and sadistic doctrine.
Not just the security problems, but the whole ever-increasing DRM vise, the dumbing-down of all the functions (animated search charactes, etc) make Windows increasingly unattractive to even moderately skilled users and push them in droves towards Linux, OSX, BSD, etc.
Even giving up MS Office is easier because their resistance to a well-documented non-Windows-dependent open standard for documents. Ubuntu lured me in, but it was easier to do because Microsoft was pushing me out the door as hard as they could.
I'd bet the vast majority of geeks who still use Windows do so because they have to due to their job. If I was locked into Outlook or Photoshop I'd be stuck in a similar boat, but that predicament doesn't magically make Windows not suck anymore. I have a Win2K VM so I can upload Mapsource maps to my Garmin Nuvi (it works, BTW), but I use that as infrequently as possible.
Windows is dead for home use, at least as far as using Windows for Windows, not just for legacy software that hasn't been ported to Linux yet. The only thing that is keeping Microsoft alive (for home use) is that 3rd-party companies like Adobe aren't porting their software to Linux. Yet. Well, and gaming, but I'm not a gamer, so that isn't my problem. In the workplace I understand that Sharepoint and Outlook, etc, have a pretty good lock, but I don't work in corporate America so I can't attest to that.
I went to Panthip Plaza in Bangkok once and was simply enthralled by the piracy opportunities. All the Adobe stuff, Microsoft, CAD software, the whole bit. I went back a few years later and there was no point in buying any of it. Software, movies, music--why buy the pirated stuff when it's all online? I live overseas and I see people buy pirated DVDs all the time for $5USD, but it's only because they don't know how to find it online. I think the technophobes are the only ones keeping old-school pirates in business.
We are gutting education to the extent that it won't be verifiable anymore. If you reduce education to a videogame, you can't very well test on it, and you won't have quantifiable data to point to to show that little Johnny is an idiot. They'll dazzle you with buzzwords about emotional intelligence and self-esteem while fighting standardized testing. I don't blame the teachers all that much--they are subject to the demands of parents, and parents have long brought their power as consumers and taxpayers to bear on the school systems. The parents don't want to fault their own little angels because to do so would call their own parenting into question. It isn't even about the kids.
Frankly, we shouldn't even have computers in the classrooms until high school. It should be all books, chalkboards (cheaper than dry-erase boards/markers) and that's it. Kids need to read. For that matter, adults need to read. But will it change? I doubt it. Parents view teachers as their own contracted employees. Even when I was in high school back in the 80s it was changing--one of my best, most challenging teachers was fired becasue parents complained.
It always cracks me up how many people will rant all day about the USA being "a Christian nation." It's also a nation with a murder rate vastly higher than places like Sweden or Japan, still loves capital punishment, isn't that great when it comes to infant mortality, and oh yeah, we are actually having conversations about whether or not torture is okay. That last bit really sticks. How can we actually be discussing the moral points of torture? Should we discuss the ethical nuances of lynching next?
Reports of torture have come from all the US-run "terrorist" prisons, so we are talking about a universal pattern, not a couple of bad apples. Overall, I think you're being too optimistic about the US government.
Depending on which version you believe, you get to choose between different kinds of bad. Either senior people authorized torture, or junior, untrained people were encouraged to "get results" and a blind eye was turned as to methods.
So, rather than the parent being "absurd" (which means "logically impossible", rather than "factually untrue", by the way) it seems that you are either naive or uninformed. It really is bad. Governments do torture. People don't handle power well, and if you hide them away in a secret place, remove oversight, and pat them on the back for being a bit rough, they will in short order torture people to death. It's not about being American, Iraqi, or any indictment of the Bush Doctrine--it's just human nature. Read about the Zimbardo prison experiment, or Milgram's experiments, the book Ordinary Men, and so on. People can be savage if you put them in a situation where it's condoned and rewarded. That inner moral compass isn't as reliable as we like to think. If we had more cynics and less optimists when it comes to human nature, we would recognize that power corrupts and minimize the situations in which torture is likely to occur. Your optimism is exactly what we need less of.
Yep. Obesity isn't a problem, until they develop diabetes later in life and have their feet chopped off. Or they could go blind. Look, obesity does have health consequences, which we are aware of. The rates of obesity have also gone up. We know this too. So what exactly is the mystery? I agree that there are media-created "problems" (the hysteria over child abductions comes to mind) but that we have more fat people and that being fat is bad for your health isn't one of them.
I know you were kidding, but you're on to something uncomfortable. Athletic superiority is okay to have, even to be proud of, but academic superiority is something we have to be humble about. If you have a decent vocabulary you get "You think you're so smart!" but no one ever confronts the sprinting champion with "You think you're so fast!"
I'm not advocating a Luddite movement, only pointing out that TV dulls your mind. Even putting aside politics, do you really think that a 1/2-hour long documentary on crocodiles would teach you as much as an article about them in National Geographic?
Picking up politics again, you'd be better informed if you stopped watching TV news altogether and read every issue of Harpers and The National Review. Add in the Economist if you're ambitious. Pick magazines from different parts of the political spectrum. Don't just read Mother Jones, but don't just read The American Spectator, either. Subscribe to a few and alternate which ones you read. Have them around your house, and if you have kids, let them see you reading. Even Rolling Stone has good articles. Fox News is political theater, not news, and CNN and the other networks are only vying to keep up. Even Olbermann, who is so fun to watch stick it to O'Reilly, is still entertainment, not news.
Every day I deal with people who think they're informed because they watch the news. They know about some missing kid, about Britney Spears, and they know that liberals want the terrorists to win. But mention that the US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq war is making terrorism worse, and you don't get fierce debate--you get blank looks. TV is great for the "gotcha!" soundbite, but it's horrible for perspective and nuance. You need to read. No, I'm not saying that all educated people agree with me, politically or otherwise. I've worked with an arch-conservative who I really respected, because he had done his reading and was willing to talk about stuff. We don't have to agree, because this isn't about my opinion vs. your opinion. This is about having a common ground of facts on which we can base a debate. Over half of the people who rely on TV news still think that Iraq was behind the WTC attacks. How do you have a debate with a person like that?
I agree that Dell will probably get frustrated and quit the whole idea just because the Linux community is too demanding and everyone wants their distro of choice. They should aim lower, in my opinion, and just ensure that their hardware was Linux-compatible. If you make sure the onboard NIC, soundchip, video-out, or whatever has documented standards that the Linux community can make work, then the end result will be more Dells with Linux. Right now I have a Sony desktop with a soundchip that isn't supported by ALSA, and because of my frustrations with it I'll probably never buy a Sony again. Ding ding ding!
I think the point is that if the hardware works under Ubuntu, it'll work under Fedora. Really it comes down to hardware compatibility with ALSA, the kernel, and so on. Now Ubuntu is said to have above-average hardware detection, so I guess Ubuntu could find/configure some bits that other distros hang up on, like on-board NICs or whatever. But I don't care if it's NetBSD so long as the hardware is generally supported by Linux. I can reinstall (and probably would anyway) because I'd use either Linux Mint or Ubuntu with Automatix. Plus Dell would load it with other crap I don't want.
The worldband radio I bought for $5 in a market in Phnom Penh (I overpayed because I was in a hurry) would do quite well in receiving emergency broadcasts. TV is about advertising and consumerism and keeping people fat and happy, and you probably know this.
This is not a shift in their business moel--TV was always about making money off of you. The "shows" you were watching exist to keep you watching so they can advertise to you. You are the product. If they let you record the shows, then you can skip the advertising, and they have less product to sell to advertisers.
Because citizens that are uninformed just believe what they see on TV and support wars that shouldn't be supported. Something like half of Americans still believe that Saddam had an active WMD program and that we went to Iraq over his involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Also, TV is bad for you. It drugs you with a simplistic black-and-white worldview, addicts you to easy answers, makes you comfortable having no critical thinking skills, derides intelligence, presents a dumbed-down picture of science, and so on. I'm not suggesting we can fix this, but at least we can refuse to fund it. TV may not be the devil, but with it you don't need the devil.
If only there were a group of people who had been studying the problem for decades. We could call them, say, climatologists, and they could collect data and analyze it, and give us their best answer as to the cause of global warming, how significant of a problem it might be for us, and what we should do, if anything, to try and improve the situation. Their answers wouldn't be foolproof, but, dangit, at least we could say that the climatologists were offering the best, most studied, most thorough answers humans are capable of finding. I mean, there are always going to be differences of opinion, but if the climatologists came to an overwhelming consensus, that might indicate that the data really was compelling, and we could trust that more than we can trust individual naysayers. If only we had these... oh, wait a tic!