And atheists aren't immune from being the bad guy either: Communist atheists killed off a lot of people for being religious.
So this puts all atheists in a bad light, right? Because you know, all atheists are alike. (beware of sarcasm)
Communist atheists killed a lot of people for being religious because it didn't agree with their communist ideals of society, not because they were atheists and followed a doctrine to exterminate all who believe in any religion.
A major problem with most religion on the other hand is, that their followers are duty bound to show other humans the way to enlightenment. A good believer doesn't keep to himself, he tries to help other people. You might say people who do this are extremists, lack common sense, but I say: They simply follow their scripture, truly believe what it says.
In the end it is: And people aren't immune from being the bad guy either: People killed a lot of people for any reason.
Personal belief and Religion are two different things, they can coincide but don't have to. Atheism is the absence of religion. Weak Atheism is a faith that there is no God, because it can't be proven. Even an Agnostic does believe in the existence of God or doesn't. There is absolutely no in between. Strong Atheism are convinced that there is/are no god(s) and claim to have evidence. Their "personal belief" is much stronger and almost on a religious level, but that's not what makes a Religion into a Religion.
I'm an Atheist, weak Atheist, Agnostic, however you might want to call it.
Do I believe our existence origins from the supernatural? - No.
Do I believe there is an intrinsic purpose to our existence? - No.
Do I follow any rules, that stem from this alleged purpose? - No.
Do I organize myself with other Atheists and worship anything (like the non-Existance of god(s)), because I believe these things? - No.
All these things are core elements of Religion. And, well, I certainly follow some of the principles that are told in many Religions, but for other reasons than being told to by some god(s). I follow those guidelines because I "believe" that they're good for society, but I allow myself to question those morals constantly.
If an alien race turned up and said "WE MADE YOU" would you start flailing BUT NOOOOOO TEH FACTS SAY EVOLUTION as some Christians do? There's a infinitesimally slim chance of happening but it would test your faith in science as you have been taught it.
What about your logic from before? You said that the key difference is that a scientist will believe one thing until evidence shows that believe to be false. If said alien race would have very convincing evidence, then they might as well be our creators.
Most scientists won't refute the possibility that, at some point in evolution, there was intervention, by something Christians might call Creator, because they are always external influences. They just don't believe that this mystical, omnipotent engineer, who came up with all these things all by himself, observes everything and pulls the strings, is a necessity to explain the existence of the universe and our own existence.
But the much bigger question is. Just because someone created you, do you have to obey them 'for ever and ever''?
No real scientists, who is 'faithful' to his own profession, will claim that anything is an absolute and irrefutable fact. It's always religion that claims to know the ultimate truth about anything and everything. Science in itself is obligated to accept change, when there is a new and better concept, which allows better predictions for example. Most Religion however is very slow to accept any change to their doctrine, it only adopts new principles when there is no other way around it.
This whole theory-nonsense is just a futile attempt to drag scientific theories, based on logic, observation, tons of empirical evidence, that have been challenged again and again and didn't fail to the same level as crackpot theories. It's very similar to calling Atheism a religion.
Besides of wasted tax money, there's a distinct difference.
In your example these "public servants" do things in private and keep them private. But children using Social Media choose to reveal their activities and thoughts to the public, by definition, aren't keeping these things private.
As long as these companies don't 'hack' the Social Media accounts of the children to get access to 'private' information, I don't see the problem. The same thing applies to public servants as well. Anyone can access public information anyway.
This might even reduce cyber-bullying but won't do anything about the cause of bullying itself. It's more of a quick fix to soothe the guilty conscience.
My parents didn't want me to play video games that much, because they didn't have those during their youth and didn't need them to grow up. Therefore I must not need it.
Their parents didn't want them to watch TV, because they didn't have those things during their youth and didn't need to them to grow up. Therefore their children must not need it.
The parents of their parents didn't want them to listen music on the radio, because...
I think I made my point.
It's the parents failure to cope with modern technology, therefore there must be a blanket ban for everything that they don't want to understand. This is most convenient, find a scapegoat to put the blame on. The same logic that applies to ideas of banning violent video games. All because it is just so convenient to ban things instead of dealing with them, teaching your kids how to use these new forms of media properly.
I realize that most parents don't even have the time to do this. But I'd also like them to realize that these kinds of bans won't work anyway, their children will be exposed to technology and modern media. Unless they want to keep them in chains down in their basement.
It know what happens, it's called condensation and not frost or fog. Heating the windshield from the inside usually took about 4-5 minutes so get a perfect view, but then again the winters aren't very cold here.
I usually used an ice scraper to "defrost" windshields. It's not as fun as just sitting down in your preheated car but it does work.
Certainly, the usage requires me to burn some calories which requires oxygen and emits carbon dioxide, and to compensate for that I need to eat food. And what do you know, the ice scraper is made from fossil fuels. But it's still less wasteful than starting the engine of your car when you don't use it as vehicle.
But lately I rely more upon public transport, while sacrificing some of my convenient spare time, it is cheaper AND quite reliable here in (Western) Europe to use public transport, at least for a single person, who doesn't need to buy food for a whole family.
No, no, no, mister. You can't consider anything a 'high living standard' that is below leaving your car running while you go shopping, so that the air condition can keep it nice and cozy until you get back.
Cry me a river, assuming you're talking about 1MByte/s. I get 2mBit/s down and 128kBit/s up for 40€/mo (~$51.67/mo) in Germany, from the major ISP, Telekom.
They don't want to expand their infrastructure apparently because it is 'too expensive'. If I want any more bandwidth they politely tell me that I'd have to move or get WiMax.
It strongly depends on the game.
Take a first person shooter, where the gameplay is most linear, only competitive and least creative you will have a very unpleasant community. Now take a game like EVE Online, which has a more non linear gameplay and allows more creative gameplay and you will have a diverse community. There will be disagreeable personalities in these games but also plenty of helpful and friendly players and to some extend you choose to associate with the player type you like. This game doesn't foster instant action, fast paced and aggressive gameplay for impatient players but rather fosters the more patient and willing to learn player type. The economy simulation basis of the game also rewards cooperation between players a lot. Where you have to learn to trust your peers to a certain extend and communicate with them because achieving everything alone is very hard or even impossible.
I can see therapeutic value in games like these. Well, perhaps not EVE Online per se, since it has been known to make some people paranoid:).
I utilize hardware quite often to be honest, but that's at work, where I use Linux, which is dominant in embedded systems anyway. But at home on my desktop computer, which is a general purpose machine and is mostly used for non work related stuff, why should I care?
So please elaborate where you need fully utilise the hardware of your general purpose desktop machine all the time.
I have all drivers installed, but I think that the culprits are the USB devices, since those also give me trouble on smart TV I recently bought. However, I never had any problems with the same devices on my laptop, which runs Linux Mint since version 11.
His first point was that the interface was ugly and inflexible. Most likely his main reason to not look further into the OS.
To be honest I don't know why the Windows 7 GUI receives so much hate, I get it that W8's metro GUI isn't quite the right thing for desktop computers, but where does Windows 7 fail in that discipline so horribly?
The interface might take up some computer resources you could use otherwise, but we live in 2013. Our PCs have plenty of CPU cores that most of the time are 'bored', we have 32GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of HDD space. Who is actually still counting bits and processor cycles on their desktop computer?
As for drivers, I often have problems with USB devices like external hard disks or flash drives on Windows 7, then I usually have to troubleshoot the problem via a rather complicated process for non computer savvy people or simply plug in the device again and again until it works on its own.
This combined with the somewhat outdated filesystem NTFS (prone to data fragmentation) are the only true downsides of Windows 7 for me as a user. And as long as I get my Windows copies for free and 100% legally from my university I will stick with it as my main OS, although I've omitted W8 so far, which I didn't even do with Vista.
You expect me to run missions in a gallentean shuttle?
I'd rather watch grass grow, which is almost as entertaining as mining is in EVE Online.
I suggest:
Go for a walk, take a shower, get some sleep. Do things that can't done sufficiently during the daily downtime of about 15 minutes. Or if it has to be EVE related map out the skills you are going to learn on your characters for the next few years in EVEmon or create a whole fleet setup for PvP in your EFT or Pyfa.
When the servers are back on CCP might reimburse you some skillpoints, who knows.
Well, I guess you just spend too much time stuck in a crappy lab. I don't know what lab you work in, but the one I work in (and previous ones too) have quite a few people volunteering on their free time to do outreach, which means spending a lot of time talking to people without science backgrounds, including many of which that are lower class. And despite the stereotypes some people develop, a lot of them are quick learners and will pick up things fast if you catch their attention.
All we get as volunteers are other bachelor students from the lower semesters or engineers/technicians with no university/college degree. Only sometimes we have an open door day where interested children can visit the lab. Those children deserve a chance to get a good education, no matter what social class they are from. They didn't choose to be born into that class or to parents who think that education is useless since you can live on welfare too. The real lower class in my eyes already gave up on their education, and I don't really want to help them unless they come forward with it.
And i used to run an interferometer at a previous job... was pretty easy to explain and was one of the funner parts of a lab tour and demonstrations, especially if you have a chance to set up an interferometer that shows the deflections in a cinder block wall from a kid pushing on it.
We usually have a setup with an interferometer and a speaker under a large transparent vacuum bell jar. Then we turn on the music and people can hear the sound from the speaker, when we drain the air from the jar the sound becomes inaudible, then we turn on the laser and the electronics behind the photodiode turn the signal to audible sound again. This is usually a very effective demonstration. It's not really annoying to talk to business reps since they usually have excellent communication skills, but it's still one of the most annoying things I have to do there:).
It is really sad, but I can only confirm this from what I've learned from my peers and me.
We mostly chose to stay at the university in a laboratory, have comfortable working hours for less pay, but we're surrounded mostly by smart people all the time. The most annoying things are when I have to explain that LIDAR and laser interferometry, which we mostly do here, aren't quite the same to some business representatives, who obviously also lack scientific education. Which is still magnitudes away from the dull conversations I can have with real 'lower class' citizens because of the huge educational gap.
A short conversation with those 'lower class' people may also reveal that their perception of the 'smart types' often isn't that good anyway. There is a lot of envy because the smart types apparently don't have to work that much, but instead sit in front of a computers and play their little games, write numbers and talk with nerd words all day, and of course they earn a ****load of money for doing 'nothing'.
Punishment, lecturing, reward - the differences sometimes are really subtle.
When she is "forced" to learn about scientific methods at the Space Camp, it could be considered some kind of punishment, it would be similar to detention. An expensive form of detention, but since people pay with their spare money and not everyone paid through their taxes I don't see a problem.
So it is ok to reward people that don't get caught?
The charges were dropped but she didn't get rewarded by the authorities, the crowd funding project rewarded here, which is funded by 'people'. The same people that might have been on the jury during her day in court, which might also have said 'not guilty' considering all the circumstances.
Rules are not set in stone, rules have to be able to be criticized and changed according to the circumstances. Just because a single rule was broken it doesn't justify a punishment that is out of the ordinary. She was charged with a felony, which is not a trivial offense.
I wouldn't dare to write poetry in English, not even in my primary language, but for simple communication it is a solid language.
I'm a native Transylvanian Saxon speaker, which is technically a dialect of German but as far from High German as Luxembourgish is. It shares some of the grammar as most Germanic languages do, but has a quite different spelling and different vocabulary.
Both German and English haven't been that hard for me to learn, German was even harder for me because of all the different definite and indefinite articles and a lot of irregular verbs, but it still wasn't that hard because it belonged to the same sub-branch of Indo-European languages. During school I struggled a lot with French and so did others, but none of my peers had problems to grasp the basics of the English language, even though a lot of them had different primary languages than German, like Russian and Turkish.
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And atheists aren't immune from being the bad guy either: Communist atheists killed off a lot of people for being religious.
So this puts all atheists in a bad light, right? Because you know, all atheists are alike. (beware of sarcasm)
Communist atheists killed a lot of people for being religious because it didn't agree with their communist ideals of society, not because they were atheists and followed a doctrine to exterminate all who believe in any religion.
A major problem with most religion on the other hand is, that their followers are duty bound to show other humans the way to enlightenment. A good believer doesn't keep to himself, he tries to help other people. You might say people who do this are extremists, lack common sense, but I say: They simply follow their scripture, truly believe what it says.
In the end it is: And people aren't immune from being the bad guy either: People killed a lot of people for any reason.
Personal belief and Religion are two different things, they can coincide but don't have to. Atheism is the absence of religion. Weak Atheism is a faith that there is no God, because it can't be proven. Even an Agnostic does believe in the existence of God or doesn't. There is absolutely no in between. Strong Atheism are convinced that there is/are no god(s) and claim to have evidence. Their "personal belief" is much stronger and almost on a religious level, but that's not what makes a Religion into a Religion.
I'm an Atheist, weak Atheist, Agnostic, however you might want to call it.
Do I believe our existence origins from the supernatural? - No.
Do I believe there is an intrinsic purpose to our existence? - No.
Do I follow any rules, that stem from this alleged purpose? - No.
Do I organize myself with other Atheists and worship anything (like the non-Existance of god(s)), because I believe these things? - No.
All these things are core elements of Religion. And, well, I certainly follow some of the principles that are told in many Religions, but for other reasons than being told to by some god(s). I follow those guidelines because I "believe" that they're good for society, but I allow myself to question those morals constantly.
If an alien race turned up and said "WE MADE YOU" would you start flailing BUT NOOOOOO TEH FACTS SAY EVOLUTION as some Christians do? There's a infinitesimally slim chance of happening but it would test your faith in science as you have been taught it.
What about your logic from before? You said that the key difference is that a scientist will believe one thing until evidence shows that believe to be false. If said alien race would have very convincing evidence, then they might as well be our creators.
Most scientists won't refute the possibility that, at some point in evolution, there was intervention, by something Christians might call Creator, because they are always external influences. They just don't believe that this mystical, omnipotent engineer, who came up with all these things all by himself, observes everything and pulls the strings, is a necessity to explain the existence of the universe and our own existence.
But the much bigger question is. Just because someone created you, do you have to obey them 'for ever and ever''?
No real scientists, who is 'faithful' to his own profession, will claim that anything is an absolute and irrefutable fact. It's always religion that claims to know the ultimate truth about anything and everything. Science in itself is obligated to accept change, when there is a new and better concept, which allows better predictions for example. Most Religion however is very slow to accept any change to their doctrine, it only adopts new principles when there is no other way around it.
This whole theory-nonsense is just a futile attempt to drag scientific theories, based on logic, observation, tons of empirical evidence, that have been challenged again and again and didn't fail to the same level as crackpot theories. It's very similar to calling Atheism a religion.
I think the Coward was referring to this here, which curiously is about the northern ice.
Besides of wasted tax money, there's a distinct difference.
In your example these "public servants" do things in private and keep them private. But children using Social Media choose to reveal their activities and thoughts to the public, by definition, aren't keeping these things private.
As long as these companies don't 'hack' the Social Media accounts of the children to get access to 'private' information, I don't see the problem. The same thing applies to public servants as well. Anyone can access public information anyway.
This might even reduce cyber-bullying but won't do anything about the cause of bullying itself. It's more of a quick fix to soothe the guilty conscience.
It's the usual generation conflict.
...
My parents didn't want me to play video games that much, because they didn't have those during their youth and didn't need them to grow up. Therefore I must not need it.
Their parents didn't want them to watch TV, because they didn't have those things during their youth and didn't need to them to grow up. Therefore their children must not need it.
The parents of their parents didn't want them to listen music on the radio, because
I think I made my point.
It's the parents failure to cope with modern technology, therefore there must be a blanket ban for everything that they don't want to understand. This is most convenient, find a scapegoat to put the blame on. The same logic that applies to ideas of banning violent video games. All because it is just so convenient to ban things instead of dealing with them, teaching your kids how to use these new forms of media properly.
I realize that most parents don't even have the time to do this. But I'd also like them to realize that these kinds of bans won't work anyway, their children will be exposed to technology and modern media. Unless they want to keep them in chains down in their basement.
Actually, most of the Disney 'Birds' have no use for gloves at all, and pants.
It know what happens, it's called condensation and not frost or fog. Heating the windshield from the inside usually took about 4-5 minutes so get a perfect view, but then again the winters aren't very cold here.
I usually used an ice scraper to "defrost" windshields. It's not as fun as just sitting down in your preheated car but it does work. Certainly, the usage requires me to burn some calories which requires oxygen and emits carbon dioxide, and to compensate for that I need to eat food. And what do you know, the ice scraper is made from fossil fuels. But it's still less wasteful than starting the engine of your car when you don't use it as vehicle.
But lately I rely more upon public transport, while sacrificing some of my convenient spare time, it is cheaper AND quite reliable here in (Western) Europe to use public transport, at least for a single person, who doesn't need to buy food for a whole family.
No, no, no, mister. You can't consider anything a 'high living standard' that is below leaving your car running while you go shopping, so that the air condition can keep it nice and cozy until you get back.
Cry me a river, assuming you're talking about 1MByte/s. I get 2mBit/s down and 128kBit/s up for 40€/mo (~$51.67/mo) in Germany, from the major ISP, Telekom.
They don't want to expand their infrastructure apparently because it is 'too expensive'. If I want any more bandwidth they politely tell me that I'd have to move or get WiMax.
It strongly depends on the game.
:).
Take a first person shooter, where the gameplay is most linear, only competitive and least creative you will have a very unpleasant community. Now take a game like EVE Online, which has a more non linear gameplay and allows more creative gameplay and you will have a diverse community. There will be disagreeable personalities in these games but also plenty of helpful and friendly players and to some extend you choose to associate with the player type you like. This game doesn't foster instant action, fast paced and aggressive gameplay for impatient players but rather fosters the more patient and willing to learn player type. The economy simulation basis of the game also rewards cooperation between players a lot. Where you have to learn to trust your peers to a certain extend and communicate with them because achieving everything alone is very hard or even impossible.
I can see therapeutic value in games like these. Well, perhaps not EVE Online per se, since it has been known to make some people paranoid
I utilize hardware quite often to be honest, but that's at work, where I use Linux, which is dominant in embedded systems anyway.
But at home on my desktop computer, which is a general purpose machine and is mostly used for non work related stuff, why should I care?
So please elaborate where you need fully utilise the hardware of your general purpose desktop machine all the time.
I have all drivers installed, but I think that the culprits are the USB devices, since those also give me trouble on smart TV I recently bought. However, I never had any problems with the same devices on my laptop, which runs Linux Mint since version 11.
His first point was that the interface was ugly and inflexible. Most likely his main reason to not look further into the OS.
To be honest I don't know why the Windows 7 GUI receives so much hate, I get it that W8's metro GUI isn't quite the right thing for desktop computers, but where does Windows 7 fail in that discipline so horribly?
The interface might take up some computer resources you could use otherwise, but we live in 2013. Our PCs have plenty of CPU cores that most of the time are 'bored', we have 32GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of HDD space. Who is actually still counting bits and processor cycles on their desktop computer?
As for drivers, I often have problems with USB devices like external hard disks or flash drives on Windows 7, then I usually have to troubleshoot the problem via a rather complicated process for non computer savvy people or simply plug in the device again and again until it works on its own.
This combined with the somewhat outdated filesystem NTFS (prone to data fragmentation) are the only true downsides of Windows 7 for me as a user. And as long as I get my Windows copies for free and 100% legally from my university I will stick with it as my main OS, although I've omitted W8 so far, which I didn't even do with Vista.
You expect me to run missions in a gallentean shuttle?
I'd rather watch grass grow, which is almost as entertaining as mining is in EVE Online.
I suggest: Go for a walk, take a shower, get some sleep. Do things that can't done sufficiently during the daily downtime of about 15 minutes. Or if it has to be EVE related map out the skills you are going to learn on your characters for the next few years in EVEmon or create a whole fleet setup for PvP in your EFT or Pyfa.
When the servers are back on CCP might reimburse you some skillpoints, who knows.
All we get as volunteers are other bachelor students from the lower semesters or engineers/technicians with no university/college degree. Only sometimes we have an open door day where interested children can visit the lab. Those children deserve a chance to get a good education, no matter what social class they are from. They didn't choose to be born into that class or to parents who think that education is useless since you can live on welfare too. The real lower class in my eyes already gave up on their education, and I don't really want to help them unless they come forward with it.
We usually have a setup with an interferometer and a speaker under a large transparent vacuum bell jar. Then we turn on the music and people can hear the sound from the speaker, when we drain the air from the jar the sound becomes inaudible, then we turn on the laser and the electronics behind the photodiode turn the signal to audible sound again. This is usually a very effective demonstration. It's not really annoying to talk to business reps since they usually have excellent communication skills, but it's still one of the most annoying things I have to do there :).
It is really sad, but I can only confirm this from what I've learned from my peers and me.
We mostly chose to stay at the university in a laboratory, have comfortable working hours for less pay, but we're surrounded mostly by smart people all the time. The most annoying things are when I have to explain that LIDAR and laser interferometry, which we mostly do here, aren't quite the same to some business representatives, who obviously also lack scientific education. Which is still magnitudes away from the dull conversations I can have with real 'lower class' citizens because of the huge educational gap.
A short conversation with those 'lower class' people may also reveal that their perception of the 'smart types' often isn't that good anyway. There is a lot of envy because the smart types apparently don't have to work that much, but instead sit in front of a computers and play their little games, write numbers and talk with nerd words all day, and of course they earn a ****load of money for doing 'nothing'.
So, I can sue the planet for letting offensive information propagate through its atmospheric medium?
Since those aren't SI base units it could only add to the confusion, we need to keep it simple.
I completely agree. Now I will start to write electrical resistance no longer as Ohm or even V/A but as (kg*m^2)/((A*s^1.5)^2).
Punishment, lecturing, reward - the differences sometimes are really subtle.
When she is "forced" to learn about scientific methods at the Space Camp, it could be considered some kind of punishment, it would be similar to detention. An expensive form of detention, but since people pay with their spare money and not everyone paid through their taxes I don't see a problem.
So it is ok to reward people that don't get caught?
The charges were dropped but she didn't get rewarded by the authorities, the crowd funding project rewarded here, which is funded by 'people'. The same people that might have been on the jury during her day in court, which might also have said 'not guilty' considering all the circumstances.
Rules are not set in stone, rules have to be able to be criticized and changed according to the circumstances. Just because a single rule was broken it doesn't justify a punishment that is out of the ordinary. She was charged with a felony, which is not a trivial offense.
I wouldn't dare to write poetry in English, not even in my primary language, but for simple communication it is a solid language. I'm a native Transylvanian Saxon speaker, which is technically a dialect of German but as far from High German as Luxembourgish is. It shares some of the grammar as most Germanic languages do, but has a quite different spelling and different vocabulary.
Both German and English haven't been that hard for me to learn, German was even harder for me because of all the different definite and indefinite articles and a lot of irregular verbs, but it still wasn't that hard because it belonged to the same sub-branch of Indo-European languages. During school I struggled a lot with French and so did others, but none of my peers had problems to grasp the basics of the English language, even though a lot of them had different primary languages than German, like Russian and Turkish.