Well, I've no intent on getting into a debate over semantics. How about this one?
4. It's wrong to view pornography
The bottom line is this: It is one thing to hold a certain view (for example, the view that pornography is bad and should not be available.) It is another thing altogether to hijack the legislative process, ignore the Constitution, use campaigns of FUD, etc. to codify that view and force it upon everybody. It is this type of intrusion that we must guard against. As I've said, I don't want to get into a semantics debate; if you don't want to call this "imposition of morality", then feel free call it whatever you want.:-)
Is it just me, or is the number of self-appointed groups crusading to promote "decency" on the rise? "American Decency Association?" Some would claim that title is a joke. Still others would claim it's an oxymoron. It's hard to tell. Their home page is pretty typical; Bible verses mixed with warnings about pornography addiction and the other evils of the Internet. Yawn. (No, I have no problem with the Bible, and I have no problem with people and/or families basing their morality on it. What I do have a problem with is groups that point their fingers at my family and say, "All right, now we'll set your moral standards for you.")
Why isn't there more vocal opposition to groups like this? Sure, on Slashdot, they get raked over the coals, but you would expect it: the average Slashdot reader is a little bit more concerned about his or her freedom than the average person on the street. But this ought to be bigger than Slashdot and a few other forums. I don't care if you're the most rabid of the rabid religious fundamentalists or the most die-hard of the die-hard atheists. If you value personal freedom, then you must be morally opposed to a single group attempting to establish their moral standard as the compulsory baseline for everyone! This certainly includes filtering; by definition filtering consists of a single person or group of people unilaterally deciding that a particular site is inappropriate for everybody.
So start letting people know that you're not going to accept this. Start letting people know that you are more than capable of deciding what you and your children can and cannot see. Start letting people know that it is you, not some fundamentalist group with a three-letter acronym name, that is ultimately responsible for raising your children. Because I'll tell you what folks: what we really need to be protected from are the folks who think they know better than anybody else what's best for us. So to the ADA, the FRC, the CC, and any other "moral watchdog" organization, I say "Thanks, but no thanks." This is something that families can handle by themselves.
He didn't say, "Tell it to everyone who wants to hear about me." The message is for all people. I know that not everyone is going to accept it as truth ("For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." 1 Cor. 1:18 NIV), but everyone needs to hear it.
At this point in the year 1999, you can probably divide the readership of Slashdot into roughly two categories:
those who have heard the message and accepted it ("Howdy, Jesus.. come on into my life!")
those who have heard the message and found it lacking ("Thanks anyway, Jesus.. but not today.")
Have you ever considered that one of the reasons so many people are bitter towards Christianity (and, to some extent, Christians) is because they've heard "the message" many times, and yet are still repeatedly confronted with it? I don't mean this to be a flame, but believe it or not, there are plenty of people who have evaluated the case for Christianity and have decided to pass. If we change our minds at some point in the future, we know where to go. (Believe me, we know where to go.) But to be honest, for the time being, repeated (and unwelcome) attempts to "minister" do not further the cause of Christianity. In fact, they probably do it irreparable harm. And it doesn't help when disturbed fundamentalists insist that we ought to be teaching children that the entire universe is 6,000 years old or that dinosaurs and man coexisted. Y'all would do well to work on reigning those people in.
Reading the review I was struck by the common fallacy that predetermination somehow demonstrates the abscence of free will.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the discovery of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle essentially deal the death blow to scientific determinism, which would render the fallacy a moot point? Sure, the type of determinism ruled out by the uncertainty principle is very "low-level" determinism, but one would not expect "higher-level" determinism to be valid if it wasn't built on a valid "low-level" base.
Or do I just have no idea what I'm talking about?:-)
Why not? I don't believe in deluding myself, and I think it's logically wrong to believe in something simply because you want it to be true. I don't fault people for having faith that when they die they will have eternal life in Paradise with some omnipotent creator that loves them all very much. Why not believe that? It's comforting. If that trips your trigger.. more power to you. But personally, I need a little bit more than that. The bottom line is that if there is no evidence, or no good reason to believe that something is true, then belief should be withheld until such time that the belief is justified. In my experience, no religion (either past or present) has held up to this standard. Therefore.. no religion.:-)
2. how much actual study have I done on the subject of atheism (and the proofs therein)?
I'll have to agree with the other guy on this one. What are the canonical "scriptures" of atheism? What proofs do you believe are associated with atheism?
3. how do I know there isn't a God?
I don't. Obviously, there is no way to disprove the existence of a surpreme being that does not manifest itself in any observable way anywhere in the universe. So while there is no way to disprove the existence of any arbitrary god (for example, the Christian god Yahweh), there is also no way to disprove the existence of an Invisible Pink Unicorn that will impale me on its horn if I don't listen to a Winger album once a week. In other words, I fully admit that both Yahweh and the IPU are possibilities, but I do not for one minute entertain the notion that either of them actually exists.
4. how much of my belief system comes from my parents?
I was raised in a Lutheran home, and was brought to Sunday School and the whole nine yards for many years. But the truth is that I stopped believing in Yahweh shortly after I stopped believing in Santa Claus, for similar reasons. However, most of my "moral upbringing" was nonreligious in nature. Aside from Sunday mornings, my parents didn't even really mention God at all. There was, of course, bedtime prayers and table prayers, but I always considered those to be insignificant rote memorization and nothing else. Most of my morality and ethics comes from the Golden Rule, which was reinforced by my parents. The Golden Rule, as you know, is notorious for not mentioning "God" or "Jesus" at all.
I never told my parents that I didn't believe in any of the church stuff.. I just went along with it all because I thought it was pretty harmless and some of it was fun (i.e., roller skating trips and mountain hikes.) Hell, I was even confirmed in my church. But as I look back on those days, it's becoming clearer to me that we all just considered that stuff meaningless rituals. Confirmation: a rite of passage where relatives give you lots of money. Very few of the other people I was confirmed with are "regular churchgoers." In fact, most are agnostic if not "outright atheist." The point I'm trying to make is that I was raised with a fair amount of religion in the background, but I was surrounded by friends and parents who never really took much of it very seriously.
why do you want to be right so badly?
It's not about wanting to be anything. I am what I am because I think it's right. If I thought it was right to be a foaming-at-the-mouth, Bible-thumping fundamentalist Baptist, I would be a foaming-at-the-mouth, Bible-thumping fundamentalist Baptist. I think it's right to live life to the fullest, to not delude oneself, to do everything in your power to make things here on Earth a little bit more like heaven, because this is as close to heaven as we're ever going to get. Get out! Have fun! Enjoy life! Make contributions! Develop relationships! This is the only shot we get at it, and despite what many folks will tell you, that does not mean you must live a meaningless life of despair. No atheist that I know does.:-)
It's the left wing that is doing everything they can do destroy freedom of religion, and instead give people "freedom" from religion.
And what, pray tell, has the "left wing" done to destroy your ability to practice your religion? Have they gotten your religious television programming taken off the air? They haven't? Well, certainly they must have torn your church down. They haven't? Wait, I know. Well, they probably block your family in the driveway on Sunday morning, don't they. What's that? They don't? I'll bet they've passed laws criminalizing Christianity, haven't they! Hmm? They didn't?
All right, I'll bite. What is "the left" doing to "destroy freedom of religion?"
Or are you one of these misguided types that believes you're being oppressed because people rightfully oppose unconstitutional attempts to mandate your religion and impose it on everybody (teaching of the bible in science class, etc.)? Would your stance on this issue be the same if it were Islamic fundamentalists lobbying to have all schools teach that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet? Or does "freedom of religion" really mean "freedom of religion, just as long as it's Christianity."
I'm not trying to be inflammatory here (really, I'm not).. I just have to admit I'm always a bit puzzled when religionists claim that their right to practice their religion is being threatened (in the United States, any way.)
Actually, if you slow down you will move into a higher orbit.
Well, I was thinking of a situation where you've got an engine that you do an extended burn with (say, for a Hohmann transfer.) The effect of firing the engine is going to be that you go into a higher orbit, but once you're in that higher orbit and the burn ends, your velocity will obviously be less than what it was in the lower orbit, even though it took an initial increase in velocity to get you there.
Now I wonder why that codependency exists (Laws of Physics, yeah, yeah), and can it be broken.
Short answers: Laws of Physics, and no. The closer a spacecraft is to the Earth (i.e., the lower the altitude) the more the Earth attracts the spacecraft and therefore the faster it travels. (This is, of course, Newton's law of universal gravitation.. that any two bodies attract one another with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.) Similarly, the further away a spacecraft is from the Earth (a higher altitude), the less the Earth attracts it, and therefore the slower it travels. That is why the codependency exists; blame Newton.
For further reference, consult a book on astrodynamics.. I've got to go to bed.:-)
Is that for a stationary object? What about flying the satellite at the speed of the earth's rotation? Please explain this to me like I'm 4. I'm starting to get a headache from not seeing why this won't work.
But what do you mean by a stationary object? The velocity and the orbit radius (altitude) are codependent. If you are travelling at a certain altitude and you increase your velocity, you also increase your altitude. If you decrease your velocity, you also decrease your altitude. The two are inseperably tied together. You can't be travelling at a certain altitude, cut your velocity in half, and remain at the same altitude. It doesn't work that way. There is a constant velocity for objects in a geostationary orbit, just as there is a constant velocity for objects orbiting at an altitude of 675km.
So all we need to do is fly it higher and match the rotation speed of the earth, thereby making the earth seem to be still from the satellite's perspective.
Ikonos orbits at an altitude of 675 kilometers. The altitude required for a geostationary orbit is approximately 36,000 kilometers. It's safe to say that the instrument array is not going to yield a 1 meter spatial resolution from that height.:-)
On the other hand, a geostationary orbit like this is obviously great for communications satellites.
wouldn't the area covered by the satellite (not necessarily Ikonos) depend entirely on its orbit, including the time spent over a given area?
Well, if you're suggesting that they might be able to slow the spacecraft down over an area of interest, it doesn't work that way. The forces of orbital mechanics overrule the curiosity of any national security agency. The velocity of the spacecraft is directly related to the radius (altitude) of its orbit. The lower the altitude, the higher the velocity. And at the altitude Ikonos is at, it's chugging along at a good clip.:-)
If Bill G. (or anyone with sufficient funds) wanted to, he could watch anyone, anytime for as long as he wanted just by buying aritime on a service like this.
No, he couldn't. Maybe you've been watching too much Enemy of the State? It would be awfully difficult for a spacecraft moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour to monitor you sunbathing naked in the backyard in real-time. The spacecraft images what it is passing over. Once it's past, it's gone until the next go-round.
I don't know anything about the orbital design of Ikonos, but a good analogy is this: take a basketball and a roll of masking tape, and then start unrolling the tape across the surface of the ball, starting at the "south pole" and heading north. The width of the tape represents the swath, or the total width of the imaged area. Once you get to the north pole and back down to the south, keep on unrolling.. you're now unrolling tape over a slightly different area of the basketball. Depending on how your "orbit" is engineered, you're probably overlapping a small percentage of a previous swath. Keep this up, and eventually you'll have covered the entire basketball with tape (or nearly all of it.) At this point you start over.
Again, a lot of this depends on the design of the spacecraft's orbit (which I know nothing about), but that's the general idea.
If you're looking at areas over the United States, you're looking at aerial photography, not satellite images. Specifically, they are DOQs (Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles.) This is aerial photography that is georegistered and then terrain corrected (a digital elevation model is applied to the data to correct for relief.) The spatial resolution is 1 meter, which certainly puts it on par with Ikonos.
Of course, there's a big difference between satellite data and aircraft data: assuming that you've got the listening infrastructure (antennas and ground stations available worldwide) or a big-ass solid state recorder, acquiring satellite data allows you to assemble more or less a complete archive of data for a selected region or regions. With aerial photography, there's obviously a lot more involved, and clearly you can't have coverage of a single place on Earth updated every (say) eight days! (The exact time period would depend on the orientation of the spacecraft's orbit.) Most of the DOQs provided by the USGS are several years old; very few have "newer versions."
Oh, and if you're going to be continuously acquiring satellite data, shitloads of storage capacity helps.:-)
When you die (because we all eventually do), aren't you are all curious and prehaps scared that maybe, just maybe, the God of Israel is going to pass judgement against your soul?
The device that you invoke here is called "Pascal's Wager." The short form of this device is "God is a safe bet." The long form of it is usually a warning from a Christian to an atheist that goes something like this: "If you (the atheist) are right and I am wrong, then when we die, I have lost nothing. But if I (the Christian) am right and you are wrong, when we die I will gain eternal life and you will gain eternal torture. Therefore, to be safe you should believe in the Christian God."
I'd encourage you to take the advice in the subject line and do a little research on this Wager. It has several flaws, such as the fact that it assumes there are only two possibilities: either Christians are right and the Christian god exists, or atheists are right and no god exists. What if the real god is Shiva? Or Zeus? If your interest is keeping your butt covered on a theological basis, shouldn't you be practicing all world religions? That way, you at least know that you've got the "right" one. Or what if the "right" one hasn't been discovered yet? I know that Christians believe that their religion is "right", but that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Christians are a minority in the world, and that the number of folks who practice it is on the decline.
Pascal's Wager is not an effective tool. By far its most fatal flaw is the tasteless manner in which it attempts to threaten people into faith. I once saw a "Christian" bumper sticker (and I put the word in quotes because I refuse to believe that it would be condoned by average Christians) that said "BELIEVE OR SUFFER ETERNAL PAIN." The word "BELIEVE" was written on the left-hand side, in puffy white letters on top of a cross. The words "SUFFER ETERNAL PAIN" were writen on the right-hand side, in jagged red letters. This bumper sticker remains, in my mind, as one of the most intellectually insulting and outrageous pieces of religionist propoganda that I have ever seen.
It would be difficult, I think, to fully explain how "those who don't believe" react to things like this. By virtue of the fact that we "don't believe", we reject the very precepts that you're using to threaten us! So more often than not, the Christian (who may or may not be well-intentioned) often comes away worse off then he was to begin with. Threats of the "believe-or-be-butchered" type don't frighten the unbeliever, nor do they cause the "unbeliever" to seriously re-evaluate his lack of Christian faith. What they do is so offend the sensibilities of the target "unbeliever" that they are even less receptive to the religion and adherents than they were to begin with.
However, I agree with you when you condemn the antics of some of the more vociferous atheists here on Slashdot. Most of us aren't like that. Most of us just want to be left alone. I find Christianity patently absurd, but at the same time I have no desire to piss in anybody's pool, either. So how about we live and let live? If you want to secretly pray for us in the hope that we all don't wind up roasting in hell, then by all means, do so. But please stop threatening us, because it's not working; in fact, it's having the opposite effect.
I don't think that the government ought to be subsidising the erotic arousal of others.
Riiiight. For those keeping score at home, this is the same government that published "The Starr Report" and made "Long Dong Silver" a household name. Whoops.:-)
Thanks.:-) Nice debating with you. I hope I didn't come off as being overly confrontational or flippant, which I tend to do when talking about this issue. Apologies if I did.
Actually, considering the current state of evolutionary theory, it probably wouldn't present a problem at all.
Please elaborate. My contention is that a lack of any similarity in DNA would be a death blow to evolutionary common descent. I am interested to know why you don't think this would be the case.
They do?? That's news to me. Do you have any references? Or is this just 'conventional wisdom?
You must be trolling. Are you honestly saying that you are unfamiliar with the "humans are too perfect to have evolved" argument that comes from creationists? If you are even remotely knowledgable about the evolution-creation "debate", I can fathom no circumstances under which you would not have heard this "argument." It is quite popular, albeit misinformed.
If you think that the appendix is a useless organ, I suggest you check up on current biological theory.
Current biological theory is what you're attacking.:-)
Okay, the appendix. I'm not a biologist, and I'm not up to speed on all of the intricacies of this benevolent organ, but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the human body can function just fine without it. (This, from personal experience.) But you poke holes in my example instead of addressing the point itself. Okay, fair enough. How about nipples on men? The point is not the appendix. The point is that if you wanted to falsify a theory of evolutionary common descent, having a world full of creatures that have "truly" perfect design and no structures in common with other creatures would pretty much do it.
(This is not what we see, however.)
Tell me, for instance, what was the evolutionary process that brought about RNA, DNA, and proteins in a mutually interdependent fashion?
This is obviously a trick question since anybody with a scintilla of knowledge about evolution knows that it has absolutely nothing to say about the origin of life. There is a large population of Bible-thumpers who believe that "evolution" covers everything from the Big Bang to planetary formation to abiogenesis to the creation of Britney Spears. However, since I refuse to believe that you are one of these, I shall simply smile knowingly and congratulate you for perpetrating such a shrewd trick.
How did the giraffe evolve a circulatory system that keeps it from bursting an artery when it bends down to drink water?
Evolution (macro), on the other hand, is not provable (perhaps someday it will be), and is certainly not disprovable (i.e. it does not even make allowances for being disproved).
What on Earth are you talking about? One of the repeated arguments that is made by the enemies of evolution and scientific progress is that it is not falsifiable. "Sure," they claim. "You argue that nobody can falsify Genesis creation because it doesn't make any claims. Well, the same is true of evolution," they complain. If I read you right, that's what you're saying above.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. Genetics is one example. If we looked at the DNA of two different but similar creatures and saw that there were very few similarities, then that would be very strong evidence against the sort of common descent that is currently postulated. Now, that doesn't mean that some god couldn't have engineered the DNA that way, but that's not the point; we're looking at things that could falsify evolution, not prove a god.
Design would be another example. If every creature on Earth appeared to be optimally "engineered", you would not see some of the deficiencies that are present. Take humans, for example. Creationists like to arrogantly claim that humans are "perfect." We are? Then why do we have (for example) an appendix? At best, it's a useless organ. At worst, it can become infected and threaten your life. Why is it even there? If a god engineered it, he's a pretty lousy engineer.
On the other hand, if you approach things from the standpoint that life has evolved in twin-nested hierarchies from common ancestors, you would pretty much expect to see an appendix in mammals such as ourselves, even if we've gotten to the point where it's no longer of any use. If we saw individual families of creatures with wildly varying designs, all of which appeared to be optimal, that would obviously deal the death blow to evolutionary common descent theories.
And the examples go on and on. No, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable.. it's that the things that could have falsified it have not.
What do you mean, "state"? Delaware is one of those cough-drop sized countries in eastern Europe, right? Wasn't it the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand of Delaware that started World War I? Or maybe I'm thinking of Serbia? Or the War of 1812? Christ, I just don't know.
Its wrong to have the most basic data type wobble over the bit length.
No. This simply wrong, and almost humorously so. What are you going to do? In the C standard, are you going to say "Implementations shall make int 32 bits wide?" What do you do on a machine (say, an embedded system) with 9-bit bytes? What about a Cray YMP? The goal of the C standard is to have the implementor pick representations for the basic types that make sense for the target machine. Performance is nice, but in the end, they have to make sense. Now, there are some limits in the form of minimal ranges that are placed on the "basic" integral types, but that's about it.
The solution would have been to have the basic data types with fixed size, and additional data types with "some size between 16 and 64 bit giving the optimal performance on the target machine".
You should be more than pleased with the next revision of the C language standard, C99. Among other things, it standardizes such types as int16_t and int32_t, which provide exactly the functionality that you seem to think is important to portability.
This would have saved many people a lot of grief...
What would have saved many people a lot of grief is if they would have learned C correctly in the first place. They would then know what it guarantees and what it does not, and how they can use the language facilities (i.e., typedef to satisfy their non-portable desires.) The amount of junk I see in code written even today is staggering! (assumption that short is 16 bits, long is 32 bits, etc.. casting the return value of malloc(), etc..)
The obvious part of K-12 science education to cut is the teaching of evolution.
Don't forget the Big Bang and heliocentrism as well.
It's not enough that these subjects be taken out of the curriculum; they must be banned outright. The teaching of evolution needs to be criminalized immediately, and in order to give this legislation teeth, the Congress needs to authorize an expedited death penalty for anyone who is caught disseminating information on these topics. Along with this, we will need to incinerate any and all books related to these topics. I would recommend beginning a complete and total purge of the works of Darwin, Hawking, Einstein etc. from our society.
Slashdot Mirror
The bottom line is this: It is one thing to hold a certain view (for example, the view that pornography is bad and should not be available.) It is another thing altogether to hijack the legislative process, ignore the Constitution, use campaigns of FUD, etc. to codify that view and force it upon everybody. It is this type of intrusion that we must guard against. As I've said, I don't want to get into a semantics debate; if you don't want to call this "imposition of morality", then feel free call it whatever you want.
Is it just me, or is the number of self-appointed groups crusading to promote "decency" on the rise? "American Decency Association?" Some would claim that title is a joke. Still others would claim it's an oxymoron. It's hard to tell. Their home page is pretty typical; Bible verses mixed with warnings about pornography addiction and the other evils of the Internet. Yawn. (No, I have no problem with the Bible, and I have no problem with people and/or families basing their morality on it. What I do have a problem with is groups that point their fingers at my family and say, "All right, now we'll set your moral standards for you.")
Why isn't there more vocal opposition to groups like this? Sure, on Slashdot, they get raked over the coals, but you would expect it: the average Slashdot reader is a little bit more concerned about his or her freedom than the average person on the street. But this ought to be bigger than Slashdot and a few other forums. I don't care if you're the most rabid of the rabid religious fundamentalists or the most die-hard of the die-hard atheists. If you value personal freedom, then you must be morally opposed to a single group attempting to establish their moral standard as the compulsory baseline for everyone! This certainly includes filtering; by definition filtering consists of a single person or group of people unilaterally deciding that a particular site is inappropriate for everybody.
So start letting people know that you're not going to accept this. Start letting people know that you are more than capable of deciding what you and your children can and cannot see. Start letting people know that it is you, not some fundamentalist group with a three-letter acronym name, that is ultimately responsible for raising your children. Because I'll tell you what folks: what we really need to be protected from are the folks who think they know better than anybody else what's best for us. So to the ADA, the FRC, the CC, and any other "moral watchdog" organization, I say "Thanks, but no thanks." This is something that families can handle by themselves.
At this point in the year 1999, you can probably divide the readership of Slashdot into roughly two categories:
- those who have heard the message and accepted it ("Howdy, Jesus
.. come on into my life!")
- those who have heard the message and found it lacking ("Thanks anyway, Jesus
.. but not today.")
Have you ever considered that one of the reasons so many people are bitter towards Christianity (and, to some extent, Christians) is because they've heard "the message" many times, and yet are still repeatedly confronted with it? I don't mean this to be a flame, but believe it or not, there are plenty of people who have evaluated the case for Christianity and have decided to pass. If we change our minds at some point in the future, we know where to go. (Believe me, we know where to go.) But to be honest, for the time being, repeated (and unwelcome) attempts to "minister" do not further the cause of Christianity. In fact, they probably do it irreparable harm. And it doesn't help when disturbed fundamentalists insist that we ought to be teaching children that the entire universe is 6,000 years old or that dinosaurs and man coexisted. Y'all would do well to work on reigning those people in.That's how I see it, anyway.
Reading the review I was struck by the common fallacy that predetermination somehow demonstrates the abscence of free will.
:-)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the discovery of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle essentially deal the death blow to scientific determinism, which would render the fallacy a moot point? Sure, the type of determinism ruled out by the uncertainty principle is very "low-level" determinism, but one would not expect "higher-level" determinism to be valid if it wasn't built on a valid "low-level" base.
Or do I just have no idea what I'm talking about?
What the hell. :-)
.. more power to you. But personally, I need a little bit more than that. The bottom line is that if there is no evidence, or no good reason to believe that something is true, then belief should be withheld until such time that the belief is justified. In my experience, no religion (either past or present) has held up to this standard. Therefore .. no religion. :-)
.. I just went along with it all because I thought it was pretty harmless and some of it was fun (i.e., roller skating trips and mountain hikes.) Hell, I was even confirmed in my church. But as I look back on those days, it's becoming clearer to me that we all just considered that stuff meaningless rituals. Confirmation: a rite of passage where relatives give you lots of money. Very few of the other people I was confirmed with are "regular churchgoers." In fact, most are agnostic if not "outright atheist." The point I'm trying to make is that I was raised with a fair amount of religion in the background, but I was surrounded by friends and parents who never really took much of it very seriously.
:-)
1. why am I an atheist?
Why not? I don't believe in deluding myself, and I think it's logically wrong to believe in something simply because you want it to be true. I don't fault people for having faith that when they die they will have eternal life in Paradise with some omnipotent creator that loves them all very much. Why not believe that? It's comforting. If that trips your trigger
2. how much actual study have I done on the subject of atheism (and the proofs therein)?
I'll have to agree with the other guy on this one. What are the canonical "scriptures" of atheism? What proofs do you believe are associated with atheism?
3. how do I know there isn't a God?
I don't. Obviously, there is no way to disprove the existence of a surpreme being that does not manifest itself in any observable way anywhere in the universe. So while there is no way to disprove the existence of any arbitrary god (for example, the Christian god Yahweh), there is also no way to disprove the existence of an Invisible Pink Unicorn that will impale me on its horn if I don't listen to a Winger album once a week. In other words, I fully admit that both Yahweh and the IPU are possibilities, but I do not for one minute entertain the notion that either of them actually exists.
4. how much of my belief system comes from my parents?
I was raised in a Lutheran home, and was brought to Sunday School and the whole nine yards for many years. But the truth is that I stopped believing in Yahweh shortly after I stopped believing in Santa Claus, for similar reasons. However, most of my "moral upbringing" was nonreligious in nature. Aside from Sunday mornings, my parents didn't even really mention God at all. There was, of course, bedtime prayers and table prayers, but I always considered those to be insignificant rote memorization and nothing else. Most of my morality and ethics comes from the Golden Rule, which was reinforced by my parents. The Golden Rule, as you know, is notorious for not mentioning "God" or "Jesus" at all.
I never told my parents that I didn't believe in any of the church stuff
why do you want to be right so badly?
It's not about wanting to be anything. I am what I am because I think it's right. If I thought it was right to be a foaming-at-the-mouth, Bible-thumping fundamentalist Baptist, I would be a foaming-at-the-mouth, Bible-thumping fundamentalist Baptist. I think it's right to live life to the fullest, to not delude oneself, to do everything in your power to make things here on Earth a little bit more like heaven, because this is as close to heaven as we're ever going to get. Get out! Have fun! Enjoy life! Make contributions! Develop relationships! This is the only shot we get at it, and despite what many folks will tell you, that does not mean you must live a meaningless life of despair. No atheist that I know does.
It's the left wing that is doing everything they can do destroy freedom of religion, and instead give people "freedom" from religion.
.. I just have to admit I'm always a bit puzzled when religionists claim that their right to practice their religion is being threatened (in the United States, any way.)
And what, pray tell, has the "left wing" done to destroy your ability to practice your religion? Have they gotten your religious television programming taken off the air? They haven't? Well, certainly they must have torn your church down. They haven't? Wait, I know. Well, they probably block your family in the driveway on Sunday morning, don't they. What's that? They don't? I'll bet they've passed laws criminalizing Christianity, haven't they! Hmm? They didn't?
All right, I'll bite. What is "the left" doing to "destroy freedom of religion?"
Or are you one of these misguided types that believes you're being oppressed because people rightfully oppose unconstitutional attempts to mandate your religion and impose it on everybody (teaching of the bible in science class, etc.)? Would your stance on this issue be the same if it were Islamic fundamentalists lobbying to have all schools teach that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet? Or does "freedom of religion" really mean "freedom of religion, just as long as it's Christianity."
I'm not trying to be inflammatory here (really, I'm not)
Actually, if you slow down you will move into a higher orbit.
Well, I was thinking of a situation where you've got an engine that you do an extended burn with (say, for a Hohmann transfer.) The effect of firing the engine is going to be that you go into a higher orbit, but once you're in that higher orbit and the burn ends, your velocity will obviously be less than what it was in the lower orbit, even though it took an initial increase in velocity to get you there.
Sound better?
Now I wonder why that codependency exists (Laws of Physics, yeah, yeah), and can it be broken.
.. that any two bodies attract one another with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.) Similarly, the further away a spacecraft is from the Earth (a higher altitude), the less the Earth attracts it, and therefore the slower it travels. That is why the codependency exists; blame Newton.
.. I've got to go to bed. :-)
Short answers: Laws of Physics, and no. The closer a spacecraft is to the Earth (i.e., the lower the altitude) the more the Earth attracts the spacecraft and therefore the faster it travels. (This is, of course, Newton's law of universal gravitation
For further reference, consult a book on astrodynamics
The damn "no score +1 bonus" button is too close to "post anonymously." The above reply is mine.
Is that for a stationary object? What about flying the satellite at the speed of the earth's rotation? Please explain this to me like I'm 4. I'm starting to get a headache from not seeing why this won't work.
But what do you mean by a stationary object? The velocity and the orbit radius (altitude) are codependent. If you are travelling at a certain altitude and you increase your velocity, you also increase your altitude. If you decrease your velocity, you also decrease your altitude. The two are inseperably tied together. You can't be travelling at a certain altitude, cut your velocity in half, and remain at the same altitude. It doesn't work that way. There is a constant velocity for objects in a geostationary orbit, just as there is a constant velocity for objects orbiting at an altitude of 675km.
So all we need to do is fly it higher and match the rotation speed of the earth, thereby making the earth seem to be still from the satellite's perspective.
:-)
Ikonos orbits at an altitude of 675 kilometers. The altitude required for a geostationary orbit is approximately 36,000 kilometers. It's safe to say that the instrument array is not going to yield a 1 meter spatial resolution from that height.
On the other hand, a geostationary orbit like this is obviously great for communications satellites.
wouldn't the area covered by the satellite (not necessarily Ikonos) depend entirely on its orbit, including the time spent over a given area?
:-)
Well, if you're suggesting that they might be able to slow the spacecraft down over an area of interest, it doesn't work that way. The forces of orbital mechanics overrule the curiosity of any national security agency. The velocity of the spacecraft is directly related to the radius (altitude) of its orbit. The lower the altitude, the higher the velocity. And at the altitude Ikonos is at, it's chugging along at a good clip.
If Bill G. (or anyone with sufficient funds) wanted to, he could watch anyone, anytime for as long as he wanted just by buying aritime on a service like this.
.. you're now unrolling tape over a slightly different area of the basketball. Depending on how your "orbit" is engineered, you're probably overlapping a small percentage of a previous swath. Keep this up, and eventually you'll have covered the entire basketball with tape (or nearly all of it.) At this point you start over.
No, he couldn't. Maybe you've been watching too much Enemy of the State? It would be awfully difficult for a spacecraft moving thousands and thousands of miles an hour to monitor you sunbathing naked in the backyard in real-time. The spacecraft images what it is passing over. Once it's past, it's gone until the next go-round.
I don't know anything about the orbital design of Ikonos, but a good analogy is this: take a basketball and a roll of masking tape, and then start unrolling the tape across the surface of the ball, starting at the "south pole" and heading north. The width of the tape represents the swath, or the total width of the imaged area. Once you get to the north pole and back down to the south, keep on unrolling
Again, a lot of this depends on the design of the spacecraft's orbit (which I know nothing about), but that's the general idea.
.. not all of them, at least.
:-)
If you're looking at areas over the United States, you're looking at aerial photography, not satellite images. Specifically, they are DOQs (Digital Orthophoto Quadrangles.) This is aerial photography that is georegistered and then terrain corrected (a digital elevation model is applied to the data to correct for relief.) The spatial resolution is 1 meter, which certainly puts it on par with Ikonos.
Of course, there's a big difference between satellite data and aircraft data: assuming that you've got the listening infrastructure (antennas and ground stations available worldwide) or a big-ass solid state recorder, acquiring satellite data allows you to assemble more or less a complete archive of data for a selected region or regions. With aerial photography, there's obviously a lot more involved, and clearly you can't have coverage of a single place on Earth updated every (say) eight days! (The exact time period would depend on the orientation of the spacecraft's orbit.) Most of the DOQs provided by the USGS are several years old; very few have "newer versions."
Oh, and if you're going to be continuously acquiring satellite data, shitloads of storage capacity helps.
When you die (because we all eventually do), aren't you are all curious and prehaps scared that maybe, just maybe, the God of Israel is going to pass judgement against your soul?
The device that you invoke here is called "Pascal's Wager." The short form of this device is "God is a safe bet." The long form of it is usually a warning from a Christian to an atheist that goes something like this: "If you (the atheist) are right and I am wrong, then when we die, I have lost nothing. But if I (the Christian) am right and you are wrong, when we die I will gain eternal life and you will gain eternal torture. Therefore, to be safe you should believe in the Christian God."
I'd encourage you to take the advice in the subject line and do a little research on this Wager. It has several flaws, such as the fact that it assumes there are only two possibilities: either Christians are right and the Christian god exists, or atheists are right and no god exists. What if the real god is Shiva? Or Zeus? If your interest is keeping your butt covered on a theological basis, shouldn't you be practicing all world religions? That way, you at least know that you've got the "right" one. Or what if the "right" one hasn't been discovered yet? I know that Christians believe that their religion is "right", but that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that Christians are a minority in the world, and that the number of folks who practice it is on the decline.
Pascal's Wager is not an effective tool. By far its most fatal flaw is the tasteless manner in which it attempts to threaten people into faith. I once saw a "Christian" bumper sticker (and I put the word in quotes because I refuse to believe that it would be condoned by average Christians) that said "BELIEVE OR SUFFER ETERNAL PAIN." The word "BELIEVE" was written on the left-hand side, in puffy white letters on top of a cross. The words "SUFFER ETERNAL PAIN" were writen on the right-hand side, in jagged red letters. This bumper sticker remains, in my mind, as one of the most intellectually insulting and outrageous pieces of religionist propoganda that I have ever seen.
It would be difficult, I think, to fully explain how "those who don't believe" react to things like this. By virtue of the fact that we "don't believe", we reject the very precepts that you're using to threaten us! So more often than not, the Christian (who may or may not be well-intentioned) often comes away worse off then he was to begin with. Threats of the "believe-or-be-butchered" type don't frighten the unbeliever, nor do they cause the "unbeliever" to seriously re-evaluate his lack of Christian faith. What they do is so offend the sensibilities of the target "unbeliever" that they are even less receptive to the religion and adherents than they were to begin with.
However, I agree with you when you condemn the antics of some of the more vociferous atheists here on Slashdot. Most of us aren't like that. Most of us just want to be left alone. I find Christianity patently absurd, but at the same time I have no desire to piss in anybody's pool, either. So how about we live and let live? If you want to secretly pray for us in the hope that we all don't wind up roasting in hell, then by all means, do so. But please stop threatening us, because it's not working; in fact, it's having the opposite effect.
I don't think that the government ought to be subsidising the erotic arousal of others.
:-)
Riiiight. For those keeping score at home, this is the same government that published "The Starr Report" and made "Long Dong Silver" a household name. Whoops.
Thanks. :-) Nice debating with you. I hope I didn't come off as being overly confrontational or flippant, which I tend to do when talking about this issue. Apologies if I did.
Actually, considering the current state of evolutionary theory, it probably wouldn't present a problem at all.
:-)
Please elaborate. My contention is that a lack of any similarity in DNA would be a death blow to evolutionary common descent. I am interested to know why you don't think this would be the case.
They do?? That's news to me. Do you have any references? Or is this just 'conventional wisdom?
You must be trolling. Are you honestly saying that you are unfamiliar with the "humans are too perfect to have evolved" argument that comes from creationists? If you are even remotely knowledgable about the evolution-creation "debate", I can fathom no circumstances under which you would not have heard this "argument." It is quite popular, albeit misinformed.
If you think that the appendix is a useless organ, I suggest you check up on current biological theory.
Current biological theory is what you're attacking.
Okay, the appendix. I'm not a biologist, and I'm not up to speed on all of the intricacies of this benevolent organ, but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that the human body can function just fine without it. (This, from personal experience.) But you poke holes in my example instead of addressing the point itself. Okay, fair enough. How about nipples on men? The point is not the appendix. The point is that if you wanted to falsify a theory of evolutionary common descent, having a world full of creatures that have "truly" perfect design and no structures in common with other creatures would pretty much do it.
(This is not what we see, however.)
Tell me, for instance, what was the evolutionary process that brought about RNA, DNA, and proteins in a mutually interdependent fashion?
This is obviously a trick question since anybody with a scintilla of knowledge about evolution knows that it has absolutely nothing to say about the origin of life. There is a large population of Bible-thumpers who believe that "evolution" covers everything from the Big Bang to planetary formation to abiogenesis to the creation of Britney Spears. However, since I refuse to believe that you are one of these, I shall simply smile knowingly and congratulate you for perpetrating such a shrewd trick.
How did the giraffe evolve a circulatory system that keeps it from bursting an artery when it bends down to drink water?
How should I know? Ask the giraffe.
Evolution (macro), on the other hand, is not provable (perhaps someday it will be), and is certainly not disprovable (i.e. it does not even make allowances for being disproved).
.. it's that the things that could have falsified it have not.
What on Earth are you talking about? One of the repeated arguments that is made by the enemies of evolution and scientific progress is that it is not falsifiable. "Sure," they claim. "You argue that nobody can falsify Genesis creation because it doesn't make any claims. Well, the same is true of evolution," they complain. If I read you right, that's what you're saying above.
Well, I call bullshit on that.
There are plenty of things that could falsify evolution. Genetics is one example. If we looked at the DNA of two different but similar creatures and saw that there were very few similarities, then that would be very strong evidence against the sort of common descent that is currently postulated. Now, that doesn't mean that some god couldn't have engineered the DNA that way, but that's not the point; we're looking at things that could falsify evolution, not prove a god.
Design would be another example. If every creature on Earth appeared to be optimally "engineered", you would not see some of the deficiencies that are present. Take humans, for example. Creationists like to arrogantly claim that humans are "perfect." We are? Then why do we have (for example) an appendix? At best, it's a useless organ. At worst, it can become infected and threaten your life. Why is it even there? If a god engineered it, he's a pretty lousy engineer.
On the other hand, if you approach things from the standpoint that life has evolved in twin-nested hierarchies from common ancestors, you would pretty much expect to see an appendix in mammals such as ourselves, even if we've gotten to the point where it's no longer of any use. If we saw individual families of creatures with wildly varying designs, all of which appeared to be optimal, that would obviously deal the death blow to evolutionary common descent theories.
And the examples go on and on. No, the problem for creationists is not that evolution isn't falsifiable
*COUGH* First State *COUGH*
:-)
*COUGH* WE OWN YOUR SALES-TAX PAYING ASS! *COUGH*
Ahh yes, it's all coming back to me now.
What do you mean, "state"? Delaware is one of those cough-drop sized countries in eastern Europe, right? Wasn't it the assassination of Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand of Delaware that started World War I? Or maybe I'm thinking of Serbia? Or the War of 1812? Christ, I just don't know.
Nice. Good for a few belly laughs.
However, I feel compelled to point out that sendmail was written by Eric Allman, not Eric Raymond.
Its wrong to have the most basic data type wobble over the bit length.
.. casting the return value of malloc(), etc ..)
No. This simply wrong, and almost humorously so. What are you going to do? In the C standard, are you going to say "Implementations shall make int 32 bits wide?" What do you do on a machine (say, an embedded system) with 9-bit bytes? What about a Cray YMP? The goal of the C standard is to have the implementor pick representations for the basic types that make sense for the target machine. Performance is nice, but in the end, they have to make sense. Now, there are some limits in the form of minimal ranges that are placed on the "basic" integral types, but that's about it.
The solution would have been to have the basic data types with fixed size, and additional data types with "some size between 16 and 64 bit giving the optimal performance on the target machine".
You should be more than pleased with the next revision of the C language standard, C99. Among other things, it standardizes such types as int16_t and int32_t, which provide exactly the functionality that you seem to think is important to portability.
This would have saved many people a lot of grief...
What would have saved many people a lot of grief is if they would have learned C correctly in the first place. They would then know what it guarantees and what it does not, and how they can use the language facilities (i.e., typedef to satisfy their non-portable desires.) The amount of junk I see in code written even today is staggering! (assumption that short is 16 bits, long is 32 bits, etc
Well, not this release, anyway
The obvious part of K-12 science education to cut is the teaching of evolution.
Don't forget the Big Bang and heliocentrism as well.
It's not enough that these subjects be taken out of the curriculum; they must be banned outright. The teaching of evolution needs to be criminalized immediately, and in order to give this legislation teeth, the Congress needs to authorize an expedited death penalty for anyone who is caught disseminating information on these topics. Along with this, we will need to incinerate any and all books related to these topics. I would recommend beginning a complete and total purge of the works of Darwin, Hawking, Einstein etc. from our society.