That's not a reward, it's a method. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is what is being sought, "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" is the method by which it is achieved.
The second part only has the purpose to satisfy the first. If the first part ceases to apply, the second stops applying either. For instance:
"I'm going to give you the power to get more milk when needed, by spending money at the supermarket"
What is being sought here is more milk. If it turns out there was plenty all along in some forgotten corner, you no longer need to go to the supermaket. The ability to spend money there is not a reward, just something you perform to obtain the desired result, having a supply of milk.
Also it by no means implies that going to a supermarket is the only possible way of getting milk. If the family obtained a bunch of cows and now always has plenty milk, your "power to buy milk" will never get exercised, because the purpose for which it exists is already being satisfied in a different way.
They are a limited monopoly granted as a quid pro quo for not keeping something as a trade secret.
Right, it's an exchange. But in the software industry that's not what happens. What happens is that multiple parties release their work, and then, at some later point get into a legal fight over it.
The release has happened already, sometimes years ago. There's nothing to exchange. What was desired, the release of information, has already happened. Since it has already happened, there's no reason to exchange anything for it.
It's not a zero sum game. If that money weren't spent on lawyers it might be spent on marketing. Or executive salaries. I mean, look at Apple; they're sitting on billions in cash. It's not like they're not investing in more in R&D because they're busy suing everyone. They invest as much as they need to and no more.
Broken window fallacy.
Lawyers are only needed to patch a problem in the system. The ideal case would be no lawyers and no lawsuits, with the money going on something more useful.
Apple is an exception here, most companies aren't swimming in cash, and money spent on lawyers is money that could have been spent on something more useful.
It's not like eliminating software patents would change this. Entering the cellphone market is still a giant task. You need supplier relations, distributors, manufacturing, high cost of R&D, regulation compliance
Nonsense. As a large player, sure. For just making cell phones, I don't see why a huge company would be necessary. There are modules on the market that take sim cards and allow to send SMS with an Arduino. All the bits like screens, batteries, CPUs, and all other components can be purchased and assembled at quite reasonable prices. I mean, the Openmoko people managed to get new hardware out, and that can't be a whole lot of people, nor a lot of funding.
Now, if we're talking something that would directly compete with Apple, Samsung or Nokia, then yes, it'd have to be huge. But manufacturing a cell phone can be done by a small company, and it could be perfectly profitable if they hit on some new idea the others haven't done.
and to top it all off there are hardware patents still! Any company willing to invest in those areas are going to be able to brave software patent litigation.
I'm not convinced patents in general need to exist anymore, but that would be getting offtopic.
You view it as "working around for no good reason" but the exclusivity right granted by patents are how they are supposed to promote the useful arts and sciences.
But see, I don't think useful arts and sciences are being promoted.
You having to work around it means you have to come up with a new and different way of doing it. If it's worse, and the person that has the patent came up with THE best way to solve a particular problem, shouldn't they be rewarded for that ingenuity?
No. Absolutely not.
Patents are supposed to promote the useful arts and sciences, period. They're not a reward, nor an inherent property right. Their only purpose is to incentivize creation: so that I don't stop working on something new due to a fear of it being immediately copied by some conglomerate. If both me and the other guy would have done the same work without patents, then patents are unnecessary. And anti-conglomerate protection by patent is pretty much inexistent.
We're currently in a situation where people avoid entering markets because of the mess with patents, which shows that the situation is precisely the reverse of what it should be.
If it's not THE best way to do it, maybe their patent will force you to find a better way, thereby promoting the arts and sciences.
That however doesn't seem to be happening in the software market. There are a precious few things I would consider really worthy of a patent. The vast majority of code is either a straightforward solution to the problem being solved, or some sort of ugly hack, and those get patented anyway.
Removing existing products from the market doesn't have any impact on the promotion of arts and sciences; designing around the existing patents is what causes that.
By "promotion of arts and sciences" in this case I understand "more stuff to choose from in the market". Thus the ideal case is where I can choose to buy the Galaxy Tab, iPad, and 20 other products. One of those managing to remove the rest from the market is undesirable for me as a consumer, and I have no reason to support such a thing.
As I've said in response to others, I don't see why software should be treated any differently than any other technology area. You haven't given me a reason they should.
Because, like I said, patents are a means to an end. They're a tool like sanctions, tax breaks, tariffs, subsidies and such. When a subsidy is granted to farmers due to a strategic interest in having a domestic food supply, nobody expects the rest of the country's industry to receive the same subsidy. Same here. Just like not all industries need subsidies, not all industries need patents.
Aside from that, I'm not convinced that patents are needed at all, but: I'm not familiar enough with the other industries to say that for sure, and that seems like far too ample of a subject to properly discuss here. I'm just concentrating on what I'm most familiar with and the original topic of the discussion.
My job is to get things done. When I have a task to accomplish, I want to accomplish it by the most efficient and quick way possible. Patents get in the way by doing it so there are solutions I can't use and must work around for no good technical reason.
That could be a tradeoff if there was something in them for me, but there isn't. Patents are mostly useless for single developers and small companies, so from my point of view they're always a weapon that can be used against me, but that I can never wield.
Since there's no reason for me to support them, I don't.
Wider take:
Looking at the industry, software patents horribly fail at the promotion of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" they're supposed to be doing. They're instead used as WMDs and to force negotiation. Look for instance at the current mess in the phone area: Both Apple and Samsung are warring with each other, but both already have existing products. Meaning, the "progress of science and useful arts" has already happened, and all those patents are getting used for is for trying to remove the other's product from the market, which would result in diminishing the "progress of science and useful arts", going against the stated intention.
Patents are a means to an end, that being said progress, not an end in themselves. If progress is already happening, then patents aren't needed, and if patents result in the rolling back of said progress, then they're actually being damaging.
They don't bother understanding the enemy as it were - as evidenced by the oft repeated fallacy of quoting the abstract instead of the claims, or failing to look at the file history - and instead just write mad. I don't respect that approach, or lend its arguments it much weight.
This in my view mostly unimportant. The way I see it, software patents are horribly failing from the general point of view. The important thing is the cumulative effect they're having, and it's heavily detrimental. If things are obviously wrong at the high level point of view, then people not getting the low level details right doesn't suddenly make the overall situation good. It just means that people see there is a problem but are failing at finding the right cause for it.
Have you ever thought that if so many people who work in the field are against them, then maybe they have a point?
I'm a software developer. I look at this mess and feel very glad that at least this insanity didn't get here yet. And I'm going to do what I can to keep it that way.
Software patents have been around for almost 30 years. You say they've destroyed innovation - do you have any evidence? I think computers have advanced pretty far since the 80s.
Destroys, not destroyed. As in, it's happening right now, and is an ongoing process.
In other words, it heavily limits it. Look at the mess in the industry right now: everybody is suing everybody else. Huge amounts of money are going on that. That money is going on lawyers and paper pushing, instead of research, development, and manufacturing something new.
Also, who in their right mind would stick their nose into such a battlefield? That's a negative effect of it right there. To enter the market at all and survive you need to be Google sized, and even then it's troublesome to say the least.
The very first patent category mentioned under 35 USC 101 is "process". Are "processes" physical objects? That line has been in the statute since the mid-1800s, so patents clearly are not just for physical objects.
IMO, unimportant. Who cares what a 200 year old document says? We're living in 2011, not in the 1800s, if something made back stopped working well, then the proper thing to do is to rethink things, not to stick to ages old principles because it's "tradition" or some nonsense like that.
Well, there's the AGPL for that. Which may be why Google doesn't seem to like it.
Yeah, some of that kind of thing may remain despite the AGPL, but it's not really practical to try to go against that. And it's probably not a good idea for a company to attempt, as the minute that makes it to the outside they may have to distribute their source.
1. That somebody in a lab figured out a way to make a cell 15% more efficient doesn't mean it's going to be manufactured tomorrow.
2. 15% more efficient means "15% more efficient than what we started with". This means "We took a cell that coverts 15% of the Sun's energy into electricity and made it covert 17.5%", not 30% as people seem to expect.
Also, if you need water at 96C, then you have all of 4 to 9 degrees of safety margin before the CPU performs an emergency shutdown, or starts skipping clock cycles. That's a pretty complicated problem: you have to provide just enough cooling at the heat exchanger that the CPU temperature doesn't go over the maximum, while keeping it hot enough for coffee. But cooling effect takes time to affect the CPU, so you may not be able to react fast enough.
Also, you'll have even less margin than that, because heat will be lost from the piping and the area around the heatsink on the CPU, so you need a slightly higher CPU temperature to compensate for that.
Heh, but I don't want to, which is why I write GPL3 code.
The GPL lets me ensure payment in some form. Either I get source, or I can possibly get money in exchange for a different license.
If you're not happy with that, then of course I don't get anything, but since there's nothing in it for me if I let you use my code without benefitting from it, it doesn't really make a difference.
The optimal temperature for brewing coffee is somewhere between 92 and 96C. That's way too high for a CPU. CPUs specs generally say that the max safe temperature is about 70C, the highest one I've seen is 100C, which would work, but is far too dangerous to operate at continously.
Add to that that unless you're going to be continously brewing coffee you need to exhaust the extra heat at any time you don't need it. And that a water cooling system's water (distilled, probably with additives to prevent algae growth) wouldn't result in good coffee. So what you'd need is a full water cooling system, and a full coffee machine, interconnected in the middle with a heat exchanger.
However, the people I've seen talking of using water cooling systems speak of having CPU temperatures of 35C or so. That's way too low to be useful, the machine would still need a decent heater to raise the temperature enough.
So, resuming: they're incompatible applications. Water cooling aims for low temperature and uses distilled water with additives that are probably unhealthy to drink, or at least would make for foul tasting coffee. Coffee needs high temperature with normal water with a mineral content that would quickly foul up a water cooling system. It seems highly impractical to try to put the two together.
That's the point exactly. In Hitchen's interpretation.
Atheism by itself doesn't have that requirement. Hitchens is free to have any take he wants on it. Wherever he got his idea from, there's no scripture for it. His view is not The Truth handed from above. It's not holy and inviolable. It can be criticised and ridiculed without committing any sort of blasphemy.
Basically because Christian theology directs me, for example, to give charity to the poor, and says if I am not helping the poor I'm doing it (Christianity) wrong. It's not that I never gave to charity as an atheist, but now it's an affirmative directive.
Are you sure you're giving to the right charity?
One problem I have with religion is that it's too simple. "Give to charity" is a straightforward command. It's quite easy to do. But it says nothing about the real complexity of the world, and doesn't ask you to actually think about what you're doing.
Do you think deeply about what your money gets spent on? Not all charity has ultimately positive effects.
Courage, likewise: I used to be able to look the other way when someone else was being dishonest or unethical. Now I am more prone to take a stand and talk to someone when I think they are out of line. So in a nutshell practicing Christianity makes me more mindful of the things I used to aspire to do, but was less consistent about.
Give some examples? Assertiveness isn't necessarily good in itself. It depends on what you take a stand on.
But that also confuses me, because there's quite a bit of scripture that seems to suggest you shouldn't be assertive.
Any ism can have dogma in it. The dogma of atheism would be something like "There is no god, period, exclamation point, end of sentence".
That would be strong atheism, which is indeed dogmatic.
But there's also weak atheism, which means "So far, I haven't seen any convincing proof of the existence of any gods", which is not. That is my position.
"All religion is inherently bad, and no good comes out of it"
Some people hold that position, but that's not a dogma of atheism.
Quite a few atheists consider some religions to be harmless. Others consider anything religious to be inherently evil indeed.
But that's the point, there's no dogma on that. Some people hold one position, some the other, others will have a different opinion and all I can do about it is try to argue that no human is perfectly rational, so a position of "all irrationality is evil" isn't terribly useful.
Now, that position of mine isn't backed up by dogma, just by my understanding of the world. It's not sacred, and no higher power will be offended if somebody finds a hole in my argument and gets me to change my mind, or if I challenge somebody else's position.
Religion is about one idea - YOU ARE NOT YOUR BODY. Your thoughts and feelings and desires and goals are not a bag of chemicals. Life is a separate source of energy from the physical manifestation. Your existence does not begin and end with the growth of a toenail, or a curly hair, or the firing of a synapse. Life is not a physical force, but it can act on physical forces, and can be tangentially measured in physical means.
There's lots of evidence that contradicts that position.
For instance there has been much research into brain damage and things like tumors, strokes and injuries that result in personality changes. Damage of specific areas of the brain produces specific changes in function and personality. Things like Alzheimer involve noticeable and consistent changes in the brain, which have noticeable and consistent effects on the personality of the affected people.
That's always going to be true. Why? Because in becoming religious, you adopted religious morality and changed your behavior to fit it better.
So if you became a Christian, in doing that you made your behavior more Christian-like, which from the Christian perspective made you a better person. I don't really see how it could be otherwise. It would be really hard to become Christian without changing your behavior in that direction, or especially in the opposite one.
It doesn't particularly matter which religion you go with. In any case you'll adopt that religion's morality and shift your conduct, and then by simply seeing how your behavior is now closer to the new standard, you can honestly claim you're now a better person according to the new standard. It doesn't really matter what the standard is.
What do you mean, "you can't question God-given truth", specifically? People do so every single day, both within and without religious organizations.
Let's take marriage for instance. Marriage is a social construct that works different in different places and times. There's nothing in nature that says who can marry who, at what age, under what conditions, and how marriage has to work, or even that marriage needs to exist at all.
I would expect most atheists to agree that there is no fixed rule about marriage. Some ways work worse, some better, but there's a large set of possibilities that are mostly a matter of taste.
But the Bible takes a quite clear stance on that issue.
Now, is a Christian free to say that they don't care about what any commandments from God say or what Jesus said on the issue? Can they adopt some radically incompatible with the bible position because of their preferences, or they did some research that indicate that something else would work better?
Why would they be included? There's no dogma in atheism.
Dogma is the main problem: If religion holds that something is the absolute truth, any attempt of questioning it inevitably clashes with religious authority, and does so in a way that rational discourse is impossible. This both greatly retards moral progress, and gives people a way to justify evil actions by clinging to scripture.
The only way that moral progress happens in religious societies is by slowly and painfully inventing ways to work around scripture while still keeping it, by for instance coming up with some convoluted explanation of why a passage formerly thought to be completely serious is actually not for real, because it's an obsolete rule made for an old brutal society, or means something entirely different if you squint just right at it. But those things never disappear entirely, and always remain in existence for people to cling to when it validates their position on some issue.
I'm not ok with it. I find it extremely offensive.
The funding was already provided, by a donation of 1.5 GBP, so all the costs have already been covered. Work funded by the public should be in the public domain, and I think that should be made a law. Additionally, it's public domain content, which IMO should be illegal to restrict.
It's fundamentally unethical to take public money and then double-charge the public by putting restrictions on the result.
Excellent idea, pull a random percentage out of your ass, without even stopping to consider the most fundamental issues, like:
How much tax is being collected right now How much tax would be collected under your scheme How much tax is needed to cover what the government spends
Looking at Wikipedia, the lowest tax bracket in the US is 10%. Highest is 35%. So if you put that in practice you've just cut tax revenue by a huge amount.
I've not done the calculations, but I'd be surprised if you could pay for the military with what remains, so your plan better include drastic military cuts for a start.
There has been a lot of talk about this in the community. I've not had a chance to experiment much yet, but as far as I gather, if you want Aegis gone, you'll have to flash a new kernel.
The N9 will allow it to boot, but part of Aegis includes encrypted datastores, with the encryption being performed by a security chip. If an unsigned kernel is loaded, the bootloader will tell the security chip and the encryption keys either change or are invalidated, which makes the data stores unreadable. Apparently that breaks several of the official apps, not sure which exactly.
Also the official kernel will refuse to work once you modified the phone with an unrestricted one and force you to reflash.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a reward, it's a method. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is what is being sought, "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" is the method by which it is achieved.
The second part only has the purpose to satisfy the first. If the first part ceases to apply, the second stops applying either. For instance:
"I'm going to give you the power to get more milk when needed, by spending money at the supermarket"
What is being sought here is more milk. If it turns out there was plenty all along in some forgotten corner, you no longer need to go to the supermaket. The ability to spend money there is not a reward, just something you perform to obtain the desired result, having a supply of milk.
Also it by no means implies that going to a supermarket is the only possible way of getting milk. If the family obtained a bunch of cows and now always has plenty milk, your "power to buy milk" will never get exercised, because the purpose for which it exists is already being satisfied in a different way.
Right, it's an exchange. But in the software industry that's not what happens. What happens is that multiple parties release their work, and then, at some later point get into a legal fight over it.
The release has happened already, sometimes years ago. There's nothing to exchange. What was desired, the release of information, has already happened. Since it has already happened, there's no reason to exchange anything for it.
Broken window fallacy.
Lawyers are only needed to patch a problem in the system. The ideal case would be no lawyers and no lawsuits, with the money going on something more useful.
Apple is an exception here, most companies aren't swimming in cash, and money spent on lawyers is money that could have been spent on something more useful.
Nonsense. As a large player, sure. For just making cell phones, I don't see why a huge company would be necessary. There are modules on the market that take sim cards and allow to send SMS with an Arduino. All the bits like screens, batteries, CPUs, and all other components can be purchased and assembled at quite reasonable prices. I mean, the Openmoko people managed to get new hardware out, and that can't be a whole lot of people, nor a lot of funding.
Now, if we're talking something that would directly compete with Apple, Samsung or Nokia, then yes, it'd have to be huge. But manufacturing a cell phone can be done by a small company, and it could be perfectly profitable if they hit on some new idea the others haven't done.
I'm not convinced patents in general need to exist anymore, but that would be getting offtopic.
But see, I don't think useful arts and sciences are being promoted.
No. Absolutely not.
Patents are supposed to promote the useful arts and sciences, period. They're not a reward, nor an inherent property right. Their only purpose is to incentivize creation: so that I don't stop working on something new due to a fear of it being immediately copied by some conglomerate. If both me and the other guy would have done the same work without patents, then patents are unnecessary. And anti-conglomerate protection by patent is pretty much inexistent.
We're currently in a situation where people avoid entering markets because of the mess with patents, which shows that the situation is precisely the reverse of what it should be.
That however doesn't seem to be happening in the software market. There are a precious few things I would consider really worthy of a patent. The vast majority of code is either a straightforward solution to the problem being solved, or some sort of ugly hack, and those get patented anyway.
By "promotion of arts and sciences" in this case I understand "more stuff to choose from in the market". Thus the ideal case is where I can choose to buy the Galaxy Tab, iPad, and 20 other products. One of those managing to remove the rest from the market is undesirable for me as a consumer, and I have no reason to support such a thing.
Because, like I said, patents are a means to an end. They're a tool like sanctions, tax breaks, tariffs, subsidies and such. When a subsidy is granted to farmers due to a strategic interest in having a domestic food supply, nobody expects the rest of the country's industry to receive the same subsidy. Same here. Just like not all industries need subsidies, not all industries need patents.
Aside from that, I'm not convinced that patents are needed at all, but: I'm not familiar enough with the other industries to say that for sure, and that seems like far too ample of a subject to properly discuss here. I'm just concentrating on what I'm most familiar with and the original topic of the discussion.
Maybe it's that with the overhaul the plants needed, the new production isn't fully debugged yet, so the expected failure rate has increased?
Personal take:
My job is to get things done. When I have a task to accomplish, I want to accomplish it by the most efficient and quick way possible. Patents get in the way by doing it so there are solutions I can't use and must work around for no good technical reason.
That could be a tradeoff if there was something in them for me, but there isn't. Patents are mostly useless for single developers and small companies, so from my point of view they're always a weapon that can be used against me, but that I can never wield.
Since there's no reason for me to support them, I don't.
Wider take:
Looking at the industry, software patents horribly fail at the promotion of "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" they're supposed to be doing. They're instead used as WMDs and to force negotiation. Look for instance at the current mess in the phone area: Both Apple and Samsung are warring with each other, but both already have existing products. Meaning, the "progress of science and useful arts" has already happened, and all those patents are getting used for is for trying to remove the other's product from the market, which would result in diminishing the "progress of science and useful arts", going against the stated intention.
Patents are a means to an end, that being said progress, not an end in themselves. If progress is already happening, then patents aren't needed, and if patents result in the rolling back of said progress, then they're actually being damaging.
This in my view mostly unimportant. The way I see it, software patents are horribly failing from the general point of view. The important thing is the cumulative effect they're having, and it's heavily detrimental. If things are obviously wrong at the high level point of view, then people not getting the low level details right doesn't suddenly make the overall situation good. It just means that people see there is a problem but are failing at finding the right cause for it.
Have you ever thought that if so many people who work in the field are against them, then maybe they have a point?
I'm a software developer. I look at this mess and feel very glad that at least this insanity didn't get here yet. And I'm going to do what I can to keep it that way.
Destroys, not destroyed. As in, it's happening right now, and is an ongoing process.
In other words, it heavily limits it. Look at the mess in the industry right now: everybody is suing everybody else. Huge amounts of money are going on that. That money is going on lawyers and paper pushing, instead of research, development, and manufacturing something new.
Also, who in their right mind would stick their nose into such a battlefield? That's a negative effect of it right there. To enter the market at all and survive you need to be Google sized, and even then it's troublesome to say the least.
IMO, unimportant. Who cares what a 200 year old document says? We're living in 2011, not in the 1800s, if something made back stopped working well, then the proper thing to do is to rethink things, not to stick to ages old principles because it's "tradition" or some nonsense like that.
Well, there's the AGPL for that. Which may be why Google doesn't seem to like it.
Yeah, some of that kind of thing may remain despite the AGPL, but it's not really practical to try to go against that. And it's probably not a good idea for a company to attempt, as the minute that makes it to the outside they may have to distribute their source.
Sure they do.
There are two problems though:
1. That somebody in a lab figured out a way to make a cell 15% more efficient doesn't mean it's going to be manufactured tomorrow.
2. 15% more efficient means "15% more efficient than what we started with". This means "We took a cell that coverts 15% of the Sun's energy into electricity and made it covert 17.5%", not 30% as people seem to expect.
It depends on the CPU. Some AMD ones shut down at 70C
Also, if you need water at 96C, then you have all of 4 to 9 degrees of safety margin before the CPU performs an emergency shutdown, or starts skipping clock cycles. That's a pretty complicated problem: you have to provide just enough cooling at the heat exchanger that the CPU temperature doesn't go over the maximum, while keeping it hot enough for coffee. But cooling effect takes time to affect the CPU, so you may not be able to react fast enough.
Also, you'll have even less margin than that, because heat will be lost from the piping and the area around the heatsink on the CPU, so you need a slightly higher CPU temperature to compensate for that.
Heh, but I don't want to, which is why I write GPL3 code.
The GPL lets me ensure payment in some form. Either I get source, or I can possibly get money in exchange for a different license.
If you're not happy with that, then of course I don't get anything, but since there's nothing in it for me if I let you use my code without benefitting from it, it doesn't really make a difference.
I am a computer and coffee nerd, so:
The optimal temperature for brewing coffee is somewhere between 92 and 96C. That's way too high for a CPU. CPUs specs generally say that the max safe temperature is about 70C, the highest one I've seen is 100C, which would work, but is far too dangerous to operate at continously.
Add to that that unless you're going to be continously brewing coffee you need to exhaust the extra heat at any time you don't need it. And that a water cooling system's water (distilled, probably with additives to prevent algae growth) wouldn't result in good coffee. So what you'd need is a full water cooling system, and a full coffee machine, interconnected in the middle with a heat exchanger.
However, the people I've seen talking of using water cooling systems speak of having CPU temperatures of 35C or so. That's way too low to be useful, the machine would still need a decent heater to raise the temperature enough.
So, resuming: they're incompatible applications. Water cooling aims for low temperature and uses distilled water with additives that are probably unhealthy to drink, or at least would make for foul tasting coffee. Coffee needs high temperature with normal water with a mineral content that would quickly foul up a water cooling system. It seems highly impractical to try to put the two together.
That's the point exactly. In Hitchen's interpretation.
Atheism by itself doesn't have that requirement. Hitchens is free to have any take he wants on it. Wherever he got his idea from, there's no scripture for it. His view is not The Truth handed from above. It's not holy and inviolable. It can be criticised and ridiculed without committing any sort of blasphemy.
Are you sure you're giving to the right charity?
One problem I have with religion is that it's too simple. "Give to charity" is a straightforward command. It's quite easy to do. But it says nothing about the real complexity of the world, and doesn't ask you to actually think about what you're doing.
Do you think deeply about what your money gets spent on? Not all charity has ultimately positive effects.
Give some examples? Assertiveness isn't necessarily good in itself. It depends on what you take a stand on.
But that also confuses me, because there's quite a bit of scripture that seems to suggest you shouldn't be assertive.
Or they could just, you know, release the source.
That would be strong atheism, which is indeed dogmatic.
But there's also weak atheism, which means "So far, I haven't seen any convincing proof of the existence of any gods", which is not. That is my position.
Some people hold that position, but that's not a dogma of atheism.
Quite a few atheists consider some religions to be harmless. Others consider anything religious to be inherently evil indeed.
But that's the point, there's no dogma on that. Some people hold one position, some the other, others will have a different opinion and all I can do about it is try to argue that no human is perfectly rational, so a position of "all irrationality is evil" isn't terribly useful.
Now, that position of mine isn't backed up by dogma, just by my understanding of the world. It's not sacred, and no higher power will be offended if somebody finds a hole in my argument and gets me to change my mind, or if I challenge somebody else's position.
There's lots of evidence that contradicts that position.
For instance there has been much research into brain damage and things like tumors, strokes and injuries that result in personality changes. Damage of specific areas of the brain produces specific changes in function and personality. Things like Alzheimer involve noticeable and consistent changes in the brain, which have noticeable and consistent effects on the personality of the affected people.
That's always going to be true. Why? Because in becoming religious, you adopted religious morality and changed your behavior to fit it better.
So if you became a Christian, in doing that you made your behavior more Christian-like, which from the Christian perspective made you a better person. I don't really see how it could be otherwise. It would be really hard to become Christian without changing your behavior in that direction, or especially in the opposite one.
It doesn't particularly matter which religion you go with. In any case you'll adopt that religion's morality and shift your conduct, and then by simply seeing how your behavior is now closer to the new standard, you can honestly claim you're now a better person according to the new standard. It doesn't really matter what the standard is.
Let's take marriage for instance. Marriage is a social construct that works different in different places and times. There's nothing in nature that says who can marry who, at what age, under what conditions, and how marriage has to work, or even that marriage needs to exist at all.
I would expect most atheists to agree that there is no fixed rule about marriage. Some ways work worse, some better, but there's a large set of possibilities that are mostly a matter of taste.
But the Bible takes a quite clear stance on that issue.
Now, is a Christian free to say that they don't care about what any commandments from God say or what Jesus said on the issue? Can they adopt some radically incompatible with the bible position because of their preferences, or they did some research that indicate that something else would work better?
Why would they be included? There's no dogma in atheism.
Dogma is the main problem: If religion holds that something is the absolute truth, any attempt of questioning it inevitably clashes with religious authority, and does so in a way that rational discourse is impossible. This both greatly retards moral progress, and gives people a way to justify evil actions by clinging to scripture.
The only way that moral progress happens in religious societies is by slowly and painfully inventing ways to work around scripture while still keeping it, by for instance coming up with some convoluted explanation of why a passage formerly thought to be completely serious is actually not for real, because it's an obsolete rule made for an old brutal society, or means something entirely different if you squint just right at it. But those things never disappear entirely, and always remain in existence for people to cling to when it validates their position on some issue.
I'm not ok with it. I find it extremely offensive.
The funding was already provided, by a donation of 1.5 GBP, so all the costs have already been covered. Work funded by the public should be in the public domain, and I think that should be made a law. Additionally, it's public domain content, which IMO should be illegal to restrict.
It's fundamentally unethical to take public money and then double-charge the public by putting restrictions on the result.
Excellent idea, pull a random percentage out of your ass, without even stopping to consider the most fundamental issues, like:
How much tax is being collected right now
How much tax would be collected under your scheme
How much tax is needed to cover what the government spends
Looking at Wikipedia, the lowest tax bracket in the US is 10%. Highest is 35%. So if you put that in practice you've just cut tax revenue by a huge amount.
I've not done the calculations, but I'd be surprised if you could pay for the military with what remains, so your plan better include drastic military cuts for a start.
It even had an episode on space burial, though I didn't like much their take on it.
There has been a lot of talk about this in the community. I've not had a chance to experiment much yet, but as far as I gather, if you want Aegis gone, you'll have to flash a new kernel.
The N9 will allow it to boot, but part of Aegis includes encrypted datastores, with the encryption being performed by a security chip. If an unsigned kernel is loaded, the bootloader will tell the security chip and the encryption keys either change or are invalidated, which makes the data stores unreadable. Apparently that breaks several of the official apps, not sure which exactly.
Also the official kernel will refuse to work once you modified the phone with an unrestricted one and force you to reflash.
No, that doesn't do it either.
Like I said, try to insmod something (not already loaded) after devel-su.