Have you considered what this does to a kid? You can't be a kid in school, you can't be yourself - the environment is too structured, it's just like prison or the army and for the same reasons. Lock a kid in there year-round and they will NEVER figure out who they are outside of that context.
If parents aren't raising their kids during the summer months, work on the parents.
Remember the one thing school can NEVER teach you is who you are. (If it does, you're nobody worthwhile.) You have to know thy OWN damn self. Some people may, within the school building and the social contexts it provides, find some answers (as I did - I became an artist while trying to keep sane in a boring class), but to expect that all kids will find this in school is wrong. Kids are better equipped to develop social skills during summer vacation, assuming your parents weren't like mine, living in a part of town where there simply weren't any other kids. Eliminate summer vacation and kids will grow up and only ever make friends and have social interaction within the structured framework of a job.
As for your idea about kids getting work experience, I'm not real sure how that would work, but I DO know there are "lab" type classes that allow each kid to work and learn at his/her own level in that particular subject, and from what I've seen, they work GREAT. Couple this with some elective lecture-type classes (for those who want to learn high-level calculus from a teacher at a blackboard - would work best in a bigger school where you can choose a teacher) and you have an adaptive learning environment. Schools fail when they assume all kids are alike.
Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone?
Sounds exactly like the last eight staff meetings I attended.:-) That said, meeting-happy corporate types seem to have learned this skill from watching boring teachers. Make lecture-type classes optional and this kind of stuff will start to go away.
What causes one to kill while another under the same circumstances does not?
Same reason some kids GET bullied while others ARE bullied, really - no two kids are alike.
Nature vs nurture - anyone who ever went to school and met actual people knows it's both, in varying degrees, depending on the person AND their environment. Some people never quite rise above their environment; some are born with a certain disposition and never outgrow it; some people are dynamic enough to adapt, learn, or even reverse themselves as they grow; some people are just weird and seem to develop contrary to either nature or nurture. And as I said, no two kids are alike - two genetically identical kids raised in identical families may STILL develop differing ideas about the world.
That said, I agree about outlets - and not just for the victims who may snap and go postal. Bullies and asshole school officials tend to use kids as outlets for their own inadequacies. Isn't there a better way for THEM to deal with their feelings than pushing kids around?
And last, here's a thought that just occurred to me: going postal on one's school is a form of suicide (whether they intend to point the gun selfward at the end or not). It's the point of greatest confusion, greatest desperation, and greatest anger and fear - it's the point where a violent solution is the only one simple enough to make sense. A kid who puts his brain on the chalkboard with a handgun is trying to scream in the land of the deaf - a primal yell, an attempt at making someone, anyone, look at them for one second so they can say "here's what kind of pain I'm in" (and usually "and you caused it"). An MIT-style prank (slinging cow hearts all over the lockers of known bullies for example) might work much better, but these kids have already fallen through that, reached a point where the only scenarios that make sense are the ones where they can vent their anger, on themselves or on someone else or both.
The question, however, is HOW someone can make every parent better. Should the government send every parent to parenting school? Should we try to de-evolve to the 50's when there was a housewife whose full-time job was to raise kids, or should we just forget the issue and hope the parents solve it themselves?
That 50s mindset is part of the reason we have a problem: the 2.3 kids ideal is the reason there's whole generations of people who had kids they don't know how to raise, because it was a STATUS SYMBOL.
Granted that's no worse than having 14 kids just for the welfare check. Or having kids because you actually want to pass on your alcoholic, heart-diseased, inbred genetic material. At least if you have a kid by accident you're coming by it honest.:-)
The solution, near as I can figure, is to establish a NEW ideal - it should be "cool" to have kids only if you're prepared to put down everything and be a parent for 20 years. (I mean dads primarily - especially in married couples where the man has assumed authority to tell the woman to stay home with the kids.) It isn't cool if a kid grows up with parents as a distant entity. It isn't cool if a kid grows up having had no social interaction - and I can think of a lot of "status symbol parents" whose kids are socially undeveloped because of their parents' lifestyle. It isn't cool to, as some yuppie families do, treat the kids as pets. It's certainly not cool to have kids for financial reasons. All these things make a kid grow up feeling worthless. And the kid, having never seen any examples of actual parenting, will be incapable of figuring out what to do with their OWN screaming bundles of poop when they arrive.
I don't think a parenting school or a 'kid license' is the right answer - parents should be able to select their own parenting style, especially since some kids will have unusual dispositions, unique problems, or worst of all, be smarter than their parents - a government-endorsed "here's how you raise kids" will fail more often than it works. But on the other hand, if it's irresponsible to let a kid go buy a pet rabbit before making them read up on what it takes to keep one alive, what do we call it when adults go buy a pet baby before actually considering what demands it makes of them? Any couple who wants kids should at least think about what kind of ethical and moral standards they want the kid to have when it grows up - and hell, most adults don't even know their OWN ethical and moral standards until after they've done something naughty and can't sleep afterwards. No wonder censorware and raise-by-television are so popular - it relieves adults from having to figure out how to turn the screaming bundles of poop into functional human beings.
I think peer pressure could be used to our advantage. Figure out what the ideal should be, and then take over the media and popularize it subtly in sitcoms and car commercials.:-)
Seriously, what the f*ck does a person need a gun for anyway?
Same reason a person needs a lawyer - to defend oneself against other people with lawyers. We really don't need guns or lawyers, but as soon as one person pulls either a gun or a lawyer on you, you'll need both.:-)
Drop the religious aspect of your society back to the individual's beliefs. Don't ever allow it to creep back into politics or society as a whole. I've been to engineering meetings in the USA where problems encountered in designs were met with a "prayer" session. Sheesh - why don't we just sacrifice a goat or virgin or two to Baal to help our sales team.
Funny, I think, that the unholy marriage of religion and politics were something Jesus seemed to resent.
The only way a state religion can work is if EVERYONE - every last person - supports it, or at least if there's a convenient way for dissenters to move to a neighboring "free" nation that the religious nation isn't planning on conquering. (In many ways a theocracy is a bit like a Communist state - if even one person doesn't buy into it, it starts to collapse.)
Actually, that's not entirely true. A theocracy COULD possibly work if it's not the kind of fundamentalist regime we see in most Christian and Muslim countries - the real problem isn't the religion, or the link to politics, it's that for FAR too many people in the countries I've mentioned, religion amounts to little more than a desire to see everyone else become exactly like you, and for some, it's a means of gaining power. THAT's the real reason we have a separation of church and state - religion is all about interpretation and divine inspiration of unverifiable origin, so all it takes is one Cardinal Ximinez or one Jerry Falwell to start to impose his will onto a religion and then impose that religion onto the state. The only defense is to prevent religion from being imposed onto the state - and so far America has done a shitty job of this, mostly because the lawmakers tend to WANT religion imposed on the state.
Keeping-up-with-the-Jones' is going to be a real tricky thing - this is the result of feedback from a capitalist society - more money tends to breed more money, and a drive to get what is perceived to be better and better things. Some people will be able to afford the "bestest" things (generally the goal of all), most people will be able to afford the "next-to-bestest/acceptable" things, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people who never will - they get left out. I don't know how to counter this one.
Look at the root of the problem: people don't know how to be happy anymore. Unable to find emotional satisfaction, unable to comprehend subtlety, or unwilling to become philosophers who see more beauty in a rundown building than in a mansion, people have tended to latch onto dicksize as a means of happiness. They think if they LOOK happy, they can BE happy - and the only way to look happy is to look like you have more toys than the happy people next door. They shouldn't call 'em yuppies, they should call 'em Happies.
Anyway, it's an amusing situation - a whole sector of people who want big houses they can't live in because every room is a museum, big vehicles that get 8mpg and have 4 wheel drive they'll never use because going off road would get it dirty (I have no problem with people who buy SUVs because they actually intend to use the four wheel drive, but as status symbols they SUCK), and kids they don't even raise. (And yes, I think this tends to pass these same kinds of values on to the next generation.) All because these are the things they see other people having and it certainly makes THEM happy.
Me, I'm thankful I have such weird tastes in stuff. I've gotten cynical in my old age (26) and despite the limited world experience I have, I've nonetheless come to the conclusion that there is NOTHING in this world I can obtain - no stereo system, no car, no woman - that will grant me lasting happiness. There is joy to be had in owning things, which is why I hang out at thrift stores, and I do happen to like having a girlfriend - these things, for me at least, tend to subtly increase the level of joy in my life, but I already know there's no guarantee that ANY of them - or even ALL of them, if I should somehow one day be granted the complete checklist of "stuff I want" (a delightfully implausible list that includes Jennifer Connelly, 109 missing episodes of Doctor Who, various unbuilt Amiga prototypes from over the years, and a winning $250m lottery ticket) - will make me live happily ever after. Nor would I want them to - the struggle to become happy is the point of life. (Even for you religious types, "being happy" means pleasing God, and therefore is the point of life.)
Granted part of the reason I came to this conclusion was that I noticed I never really much liked "cool" things. It's a blessing not to have to judge oneself by other people's standards - and it's paid off, because I can get great deals on the stuff other people throw out.:-)
I don't know how to cure the Happies of their problem. The sad thing is, the ones who were once hippies used to have the answers (insofar as they had simpler tastes) and seem to have forgotten them. But there's another aspect to the problem - the Happies have been conditioned by the media. Come on with a commercial during Seinfeld to tell them this year's SUV brings happiness and they believe you - and once they own one, and can park it in the driveway where their neighbors can drool over it, pretty soon the whole block will have one. How do you decondition people from the media? Hell, most of them don't even realize they AREN'T as happy as they make the neighbors think (and when they do, it's called a midlife crisis) - which means as far as they're concerned, this kind of one-up lifestyle has WORKED. It's a religion, really - and people only ditch a religion when a) they realize how silly it sounds, b) they realize it isn't working for them, or c) they weren't really that deeply into it to begin with.
The problem is that waiting for the boomers to die won't help - the boomers have offspring who have been similarly conditioned.
Bill Gates' vast wealth exists mostly on paper. And there's more than one sense in which a cop may "get away with" violating someone's rights - in Bill Gates' case, I doubt a group of corrupt cops could get anywhere NEAR his fortified house to break and enter.
I can't think of too many people in history who've gotten insanely rich - rich enough to be above the harassment of a corrupt policeman, let's say - without the help of a giant artificial person (a corporation).
A subtle point being missed here is - yes, corporations are legally the equivalent of giant people with super powers. But behind every corporation there's usually a few REAL people operating the controls - they thus have access to all the super powers of the giant they control. It's always bugged me that the heads of a corporation get to claim the value of the corporation as their own assets.
Beneath the surface it's all still about people with money fetishes and a mean streak. But what the current legal definition of "corporation" provides, is a WAY-too-easy way for such people to acquire godlike powers. You can't eat people and absorb their strength, but you can buy corporations and add their powers (and wealth) to your own, removing a potential competitor in the process.
Corporations are a useful thing - there are things you can ONLY do with lots of money. But corporations as people, that's a mechanism that doesn't need to be there, wasn't always there, and now serves primarily as a way for greedy assholes to increase the size of their dicks.
Consider if you removed the "person" aspect from a corporation, and severely limited its rights to behave as a giant person. That is, restore the legal concept of a corporation to what it was 100 years ago. How much damage can a Bill Gates do, if he can only spend his own money, not that of the company? What if corporate mergers were a big deal again, not "oh we bought another one" like it is today? Corporations wield power over the marketplace - but if your power over that corporation is now INdirect, and you can't use their power as your own (to write company checks to bribe politicians for example), owning a corporation no longer grants you godlike power, so even if you're rich, you can't buy power! You can only buy material wealth (which is fine by me), and your "power" if any comes from your ability to personally convince people to see things your way.
But distributing it in order to allow interoperability is explicitly allowed.
"Interoperability" - that's a good one. Why, next you'll tell me American law also provides for "free speech" and "due process of law".
In other words, the interoperability clause in the DMCA so far seems like all those other too-good-to-be-true laws on the books that lawmakers and judges (and corporations) always conveniently forget - little things like the first ten Amendments. Publish a crack so these playback-inhibited CDs can be played like normal in CD-ROM drives and see how far "interoperability" gets you in court.
So now "fair use" for any piece of music you buy is meant to be defined by you're being able to make digital copies of it?
Taco said that?
I guess the RIAA is really fucking us with those analog LP's then, with their insidious built-in bumpy groove technology.
Actually the analogy would be if the RIAA (assuming they still made much money on records) mixed a signal on a 44.1khz carrier into the record, so you and I can hear the record just fine with our analog ears, but any attempt to rip it at that rate would pick up garbage.
However, Fair use DOES not by any stretch of the imagination mean you should be guaranteed to be able to copy directly to CD rather than tape, or that you should be facilitated in copying it to MiniOggCD-2010 or whatever alternate formats may emerge. That is ridiculous.
Why not? Being unable to copy a playback-protected CD to some other format is a side effect; the core of the problem is that these CDs simply won't work in certain kinds of PLAYERS. The RIAA doesn't grasp a lot of things about their own damn industry, but one of them is the fact that sometimes you HAVE to make a digital copy in order to hear it (like, say, "copying" the digital music stream to your speakers). This is Macrovision all over again but worse - Macrovision doesn't stop the pros but can be defeated. This doesn't stop the pros (they'll copy it flaws and all like they do DVDs) but you and I can't defeat it to actually USE what we've purchased.
Anyway what precedent does this set? They do this, some C64 hacker figures out a way to raw-read the CDs anyway, and people who legally own the CD now have to go online and download the MP3s just to listen to it (in the same way a lot of people who bought software legally ended up also obtaining the pirated version so they wouldn't have to mess with the dongle). Way to squelch the piracy there - everyone suddenly HAS to become a pirate just to listen to their stuff, and in the process they'll get so pissed they'll return the CD and keep the MP3s.
So then what happens? More insidious intentionally-corrupted CDs such that the damn things are just a little bit harder to copy, but won't play back on 50% of consumer CD players? A cyclic game of tit-for-tat until finally they hit upon the ultimate solution - they'll buy new legislation that makes the "Compact Disc" emblem equivalent to a shrinkwrap nontransferrable one-copy-one-player software license. They still can't prevent piracy, but they'll make more money off the lawsuits than they ever did selling CDs.
Fair use, ha. ANY use is gonna be with the RIAA's grudging permission.
Do you understand the Mandelbrot set? I mean really understand how it works and how to compute it? And how it was conceived? I don't mean to be rude, but I really doubt you do.
Well I THOUGHT I understood it - I just couldn't remember the details offhand because my copy of Fractal Geometry of Nature is under a stack of stuff.
But then I took calculus, and I learned how it really worked, and where it really came from, and I found out it was nothing. Just a number people put in their equations to make the math easier, (a lot easier). Similarly, PI, is just the arc-length integration of the equation of a circle, nothing spectacularly magical.
Aside from the fact that pi is universal. I'm getting at a deeper question here - why is it universal? Why does our universe work in such a way that pi is 3.14159268etc and not 3.00000? The number is inherent to the way circles and spheres work, both in geometry's idealized space AND in the real world where you can apply it to planets and wheels. It's the mechanism by which circles work that's the deeper magic, and I'm just using pi to illustrate it.
I have no idea why you would expect to see a circle, or some other kind of sinusoidal image.
Limit iterations to 2 and you DO get a circle. And the central shape of the complete set is a circle and a cardioid. Anyway, I read up on it and figured, if I were a mathematician messing around with escape times of repeated squares on the complex plane (and without a computer to help me get full 2D maps), I might expect some weird shapes, but there's NOTHING in the math that indicates either the shape of the Mandelbrot "thing", or the fact that the shape repeats infinitely far down, or all the swirls, tendrils, and so forth around the boundaries.
Put it like this. The algorithm says to loop through z^2+C until C exceeds a threshold. It does NOT say to draw a circle-cardioid with an array of smaller circles around the edge, then repeat that shape but deform it nonlinearly and twist the "spine" on one end into all sorts of tendril shapes, repeat until done.
You can do a Mandelbrot rendering in 10 lines of BASIC. It's not raytracing - it's more akin to discovering new digits of pi. z^2+c doesn't DRAW the Mandelbrot set - it reveals it.
Well, the numbers are already complex right? Actually, 'the numbers you feed it' are every single complex number. Why wouldn't you expect infinite complexity from infinite numbers.
Is this a pun? If so, blame me for using the word complex in its other sense.
Complex numbers are numbers with both a real and an imaginary (sqrt(-1)) part. And the point I was making was, exactly what Gaston Julia was thinking when he first started messing around with escape calculations (but in 1890 didn't have a way to do millions of calculations to see what was really going on) that one would expect something "geometric" out of it, a circle, cardioid, cloverleaf, or something of that nature.
Something looks nice, therefor there must be a god?
Fractals don't merely look nice - the Mandelbrot set is a complex-plane graph of a surprisingly simple function (it's been a couple years, someone help me remember what it was) that demonstrates insane amounts of complexity that clearly don't come from the numbers you feed it. The images get boring after awhile, like so many tie-dye shirts, it's the understanding of what's going on behind it, all the infinite (yes, infinite) detail found in such a simple equation, THAT'S what makes the images so impressive to me.
I mean, you'd look at the Mandelbrot set formula and with a decent knowledge of geometry, you'd expect a complex plane graph to be a circle, or at most, a cardioid. Some reasonably simple shape. Never would you expect to find the weird shape that appears onscreen - and you certainly wouldn't expect to find miniatures of that shape (each with unique patterns of streamers trailing off them) hidden all around it with smaller versions of the shape around them. I guess the closest analogy would be picking up a conch shell at the beach and listening to it, expecting to hear the echo of the waves, and instead hearing Philip Glass' "Music in Contrary Motion" in its entirety, with no music source in sight.
We can explain where living things came from. But so far as I know, no one has tackled the question of where mathematics came from. It simply seems to "be there" - and while it might not be obvious to everyone, it's obvious to me that math is the OS on which the universe runs. The universe is fixated with numbers - speed and gravitational constants, numeric patterns found in nature (spheres, fractals etc), and of course, the inherent mathness of objects - two rocks next to two rocks is always four rocks. If you were in charge of building universes, you could make one in which the speed of light is changed, and it wouldn't really affect the workings all that much - it'd work like our universe but with properties of matter adjusted up or down. Now, change the value of pi, and the universe suddenly CAN'T work like ours - a sphere would no longer be a sphere, the shape of the universe would have to be twisted to allow the circumference of a planet to be the new pi times its diameter. Or maybe such a universe can't have circles at all - points equidistant from a single point could NEVER lie in a single plane. What would a planet orbit look like? What would an electron shell look like? Could molecular reactions even take place in such a universe?
Where I'm going with this is, mathematics weren't born with the Big Bang. (Note that I don't mean the human understanding of mathematics - I mean the properties that our mathematics attempts to study. 2+2 was 4 long before humans learned to count - we just weren't there to give it a name.) Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but from where I sit, there's something about math - or whatever you can call this "OS on which the universe runs" that seems to have an awful lot in common with the math found in textbooks - that hints at an intelligence. Maybe math IS God (or as much of such a being as will fit in our universe). Maybe there's some great cosmic mechanism by which intelligent life from a completely nonmathematical (and self-spawned and matterless) universe created our universe entirely out of math as an experiment. Or by accident, as a result of their first experiments in creating math - maybe they don't know we're here! Maybe it really IS possible for our mathematical universe to arise from nothing - and either we ended up with this set of math rules by chance, or there's only one set of rules that works (but even THAT hints at a higher order). But you'll notice that Hawking, Einstein and others whose theories of the universe's origins depend on mathematics, don't have much of an answer as to where the underpinnings of mathematics came from.
I find there is hope and beauty in math, and I did lousy in the subject in school. If math IS somehow a representation of God, though, it's fine by me - mathematics, at least to my eyes, hints at an intelligent pre-Big Bang creator that cared enough about his/her/its work to leave all that complexity just laying around, yet seems to have left absolutely zero messages for us in there. No Hebrew characters that spell out the Ten Commandments. No Godly alphabet staring out at us from a Newton's root-solving method graph. No Scientology tracts hidden in the digits of pi (well, not unless some numerologist decides to "find" one there - see last week's discovery of a number that "contains" the DeCSS code - with enough digits to choose from, one can "find" whatever one wants to find in pi). Absolutely NO policy statements anywhere to be found in math. In short, nothing in common with any religion's picture of God that I've yet found.
(The bit about our having been created by intelligence from a nonmathematical universe is messing with my head now. I think I may have hit on something...)
Frankly, I have no problems beliving in Intelligent Design. I see spooky shit like Quantum Mechanics, and can see God in the details. I have no problems beliving that some higher power went and made the universe and set things in motion. If you ran up to me, panting, out of breath, and proclaimed that a "A Higher Power set everything into motion billions of years ago!" I would say "Who the fuck are you?" and then "Well, that makes sense to me."
I'm forced to agree. Check out fractals sometime if you want to read God's handwriting.
Which is why I think it's funny: I can go outside and look at trees, birds, fish and so on that are the work of nature - ostensibly the work of God. Yet if I try to learn something about God by studying these things, things that if God exists, MUST be His/Her doing, the Christians will call me a pagan, or worse, a scientist. Instead I'm supposed to take the word of a book written by men CLAIMING to have an inside track with God. A book that gets observable facts wrong, as we've mentioned. A book that, despite being divinely inspired, seems to demonstrate NO knowledge of the world that wasn't known when it was written - it's full of references to the sky as a hollow sphere, an Earth with corners (and a mountain from which you can see it all), superstitious non-medical causes for diseases, etc.
And if the best answer someone can come up with is "Well, God put that there to decieve us/give us a false sense of history", or "Well, God put the whole inbreeding causes problems thing into us AFTER the Great Flood" then you should immediately disqualify yourself from the Rational Thought Olympics.
God must have put the inbreeding-causes-problems thing there well after Noah's family dispersed. In the early days it seems God had an incest fetish.:-/
Anyway, if evidence for evolution really IS put there by God to test us, I'm happy to fail. What use could God possibly have for us that requires us to believe the ridiculous? Do you really wanna work for a God who lies? (I thought the godlike being who tells lies lived in the OTHER place.)
A great flood is mentioned among many many different societies. Even aboriginal culture made reference to an incredible, ancient flood.
Point - the Flood was supposed to have killed everyone who wasn't on the boat. So HOW could any other culture have had a legend about it? They'd all have to be descendents of Noah and would probably remember THAT as their creation myth.
The Chinese have a written history going back 8000 years and for some reason they don't remember spending time on the Ark.
As to the 'remarkable' fact that great floods are mentioned among many different societies - um, yes, it does so happen that floods, big ones and small ones, are a common occurrence.
You should really read and attempt to interpret the Bible for yourself. I'll pray for you.
I've already attempted to interpret the Bible for myself. Started at the beginning, noticed two DIFFERENT and contradictory accounts of the creation, noticed that Moses has to keep reminding us how humble he is, noticed God making people worship a golden snake (I guess it matters WHICH false idols), noticed that the whole book of Leviticus is basically the work of an obsessive-compulsive handwasher who hates EVERYONE, noticed that the book of Job is an account of a CONSPIRACY between God and Satan... got bummed out by this, skipped forward, read the story of the woman who was raped and murdered and cut into pieces and mailed to twelve nations (and you want KIDS to read this filth? if this was depicted in a movie you'd picket it!), read some of the "prophecies" that sound like they got hold of some bad acid, read the four Gospels and noticed that four men who supposedly walked with Jesus can't agree on his life story, noticed that Jesus, a man who preached humility, can't seem to decide whether he's the son of God or not (hinting at alterations in the text), noticed (had it pointed out to me) that if Jesus was a rabbi, he MUST have had a wife.
Noticed that despite the book's good parts - and there are some sublime things in there, yes - I did not hear the voice of God in it. I heard the voice of a bunch of angry men trying to justify their actions. I heard events being distorted through generations of oral tradition into "miracles". I heard the politics and traditions of 2000 and 4000 years ago, put into book form with "GOD says we shall do these things" at the front.
I did all this WHILE I was a Christian. I read the Bible and found reasons to get out. Maybe the Scientologists have the right idea - keep the holy texts under lock and key, lest someone actually READ them and notice they don't say what everyone thinks they say.
Yes, they very well could be the hugest cheekbones I've ever seen. Of course, I was born in this lifetime, so I can only compare it to what I know. Perhaps, if I was born in that lifetime, it would seem fairly normal to me. Big cheekbones don't make a human more or less of a human.
If they fit a pattern, between a nonhuman with huge cheekbones and a human with relatively small ones, then yes they do.
And the point I was trying to make, and failed, is that there is a LOT more difference between this thing and us than just cheekbones. The whole shape and structure of the head is different. Muscle attachment points are different. These are not trivial differences. These ARE the kinds of morphological differences that can reasonably be used to say "this skull is human" or "this skull isn't".
It's very impressive that they can differentiate between human and gorilla skulls, and I'm sure they're trying their best to identify what is presented them, but it's been my experience that it's rare (at best) to find people who can put aside their preconceived notions of how the world is to in order to determine how things really are.
The analogy is that they can identify a vehicle they've never seen before from a time period that's never been documented, give it a name, and then call every other thing that looks similar and appears to be from the same time period by the same name...except, whatever you do, don't call it a vehicle, because everyone knows that they didn't have vehicles back then. It is, however, surprisingly "vehicle-like".
Preconceived notions, I suppose, are all we have. But science is a celebration of the art of throwing out preconceived notions - you don't win Nobel prizes for preconceived notions, you get lauded if you shift paradigms and render whole wings of the library obsolete. It's EXPECTED that science keeps updating our understanding of things, since the closest we can get to knowing things for sure is running out of ways to disprove them. Indeed in science it's considered a good thing if you come back from the lab or field knowing less than you did when you left, because some huge discovery has forced you to tear the back 324 pages out of the definitive book on the subject. This is what scientists live for!
If this thing were "truly human" like you suggest, some three million years too soon, it'd be Nobel material. Thing is, scientists tend to want to not embarass themselves in front of the Nobel committee - if they don't think there's a reasonable chance this thing is truly human, they're not gonna say "it's human three million years too soon". If closer examination indicates that it IS what you say, a modern human three million years too early, yer durn tootin they'll follow it up - to be able to rewrite the family tree, of course with actual evidence to back it up, is probably the secret dream of every paleontologist. It's what drives the science. After all, if our recent family tree is just a preconceived notion, these people wouldn't be digging for new fossils anyway - they'd already "know" what they'd find!
Keep the remark in context. It's remarkably humanlike - not more humanlike than Homo habilus or H. erectus, but more humanlike than Australopithecus afarensus. It does not rearrange the chronology, it merely suggests a different ancestor at one point along the timeline. It says "here, I may be a better fit in place of A. afarensus. Try me and see if I fit." It is NOT out of line with the evolutionary "curve" (my term, 'cause I can't think of a better one) that leads through H. habilis, erectus, sapiens. If it were, the headline would be VERY different.
There is no such thing as "evolution" supported in science. Natural Selection is what Darwin wrote about and what modern science supports. The term evolution denotes that a certain species is generally "better" than all the species that preceded it on the planet while Natural Selection merely states that the morphology and behavior best suited to a particular environment will out-compete less well tuned varies of plants or animals.
Yes! To Obi-Wan you listen!
Not sure who said it, but there's a great line I read: "it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the fit." If you have a mutation that lets you find a place to live, eat, and breed, you'll pass on that mutation. If you end up competing against the nonmutated versions of yourself, either they'll die off, or you'll die off, or they'll move away, or you'll move away, or you'll specialize on different kinds of food and it won't matter. That's why humans and monkeys both still exist - we came out of the trees because the monkeys were eating all our damn bananas, so we decided to go look for food elsewhere.
It's always amusing when creationists point out when one or another human ancestor is still around (like the coelacanth) and that this somehow disproves evolution. Well, I suppose it does, if disproof of evolution is the assumption to begin with, ANYTHING will support it. All it really demonstrates is that there's no reason the ancestor needs to go away - if it finds a niche where it doesn't compete with its descendants, great! The coelacanth basically found a spot to hide in Madagascar and another in Indonesia, where it managed to maintain a small breeding population for a few million years. Nothing about this disproves ANY of the mechanics of evolution - in fact it supports it, because it demonstrates the importance of adaptation to one's environment. The coelacanth has the potential to go on land, but neither does it use this potential, nor has it lost it (well, not much of it anyway). It works just fine as a fish.
No, because it DOES work. There are situations where it doesn't work, and scientists know what those situations are and can avoid them and use other means. Creationists love to tell you how wrong carbon dating is - what they don't tell you is how scientists already KNOW the weaknesses of the technique and don't use it where they know they'll get incorrect results.
It's also not the only way to determine age. There are other radiologic dating methods used for different ages - using different elements - and if a sample falls in the overlap between two techniques, it provides an excellent cross-reference. You can count annual phenomena - sediment layers, tree rings (and compare seasonal difference between trees that died at various times and build a complete timeline of trees), etc. You can even use fossils - strange as that seems - since some fossils are known to appear only in a certain strata, if you find those fossils in a layer you can say with reasonable certainty that the layer is of similar age to layers containing that same fossil elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in the world that layer may sit in the middle of a 300-ft-high column of unbroken strata - the top of which can be radio-dated to 175 million years, the bottom of which can be radio-dated to 330 million years, which leaves you a pretty good way to visually estimate the age of your layer. Corroborate it with enough other layers worldwide, and enough other dating techniques, and you can pin down the age of that layer and any fossils you find in it rather neatly.
Evolution is a faith based belief too. At least Christians acknowledge the fact that they worship a belief grounded in faith.
Evolution is an observation-based belief too. It came about because people looked at a chart of animals and noticed a treelike structure, and considered that the "family tree" used in bookkeeping might actually be a reflection that animals really ARE related to each other - evolution existed as a concept before On the Origin of Species, all Darwin did was propose a mechanism.
Christianity is based on a BOOK, written by humans claiming to have gotten it from God. That book conflicts with observable reality in many places - go catch a grasshopper and counts its legs and you've just proven the Bible wrong. Accompany astronauts into space and notice there is no firmament from which stars hang and you've just proven it wrong again. (Wouldn't Mir's reentry cause another Great Flood as it bursts through the firmament and releases the waters?)
So given the choice between a science that is based on observable reality and physical evidence, and a book known to be at odds with observable reality and physical evidence, we're apparently supposed to side with... the book.
Umm...unless I'm misunderstanding something, this "evidence" just muddied up the water. It didn't provide any sort of concrete evidence for evolution.
All it did was make the bookkeeping a bit trickier. It provided no concrete evidence for OR against evolution - and although I'm sure the creationists will use this as evidence that scientists are making it up as they go along, it actually demonstrates something cool about science: it adapts to new facts. Find a skull that may rewrite all the textbooks and the scientists bust out the champagne. Find a lost chapter of Luke that says Jesus had a wife and kids and it'll probably be quietly buried.:-)
Here's a new thought...maybe it was a human face. I hate it when people dismiss the obvious because it doesn't make sense in their limited view of the world.
Oh yeah, it's a human face all right - stuck between two of the HUGEST cheekbones you've ever seen.
Look. These people digging in the African dust are not just schmucks off the street who dig up ordinary skulls and give them exotic names just to amuse themselves. These are people who are experienced anatomists - you can smash up a human skull into little pieces, hand them HALF the pieces in a bag, and they'll reassemble it for you and tell you what's missing. Hand them one of those pieces and they'll tell you which part of the skull it came from - even the seemingly uniformly round back part has telltale bumps and curvatures that a skilled paleontologist can recognize. They can tell what race a human skull is by the skull alone. They can tell a single broken fragment of a human skull from a single broken fragment of a gorilla skull. And yes, they've learned a thing or two since Piltdown. These are people who spend their lives doing this shit, they have offices full of skulls and probably a few spares in the truck when on expedition in Tanzania. If they say "it's not human but it looks human" you'd better have some damn good anatomical evidence at your disposal before you dispute them.
The analogy is that a paleontologist can identify a 1987 Nissan Stanza from a single back fender panel, and most of the people who dispute their results can't tell a Nissan from a Ford.
Did flightless creatures slowly develop functionless stubs on their backs, and generation after generation, these functionless stubs got bigger and bigger, even though they may not have offered any advantage, even though they may have offered severe survival disadvantage? Then at some point, they developed to where they were functional?
Are you sure you aren't trolling?
OK, assuming you're not trolling: the "functionless stubs" are ARMS. Take a good look at the next chicken you eat - notice the shoulder blades and fingers, things that probably wouldn't be there if the wings evolved late in the game from nonfunctional lumps of muscle on the animal's back.
This will probably sound ridiculous, but consider for a moment that feathers are useful even if the animal can't fly. (Flightless birds still find them useful.) Now consider for a moment the small theropod dinosaurs one found running around in the early Jurassic - Coelophysis, Compsognatus, and kin. Two-legged stance, long tails, fast runners. Predatory creatures with long fingers for clutching prey. Hollow bones for reduced weight = more efficient use of energy when chasing prey at high speed.
Now let's assume that a feather is basically a modified scale. A mutation causes one of these creatures to have "skeletal" scales - ones that are not solid like lizard scales, but are split into the fibers that make up the scale. Tada - a fluffy scale. This animal is able to survive the winter more easily because its fluffy scales allow it to conserve body heat - and it passes these genes on to the next generation. A few more mutations down the road give the fluffy scales the interlocking barbs and stiffening central quill, and we have feathers.
Useful even though the animal doesn't fly.
Now remember what our creature looks like. It stands on two legs, head upright, with hands outstretched in a "gonna grab you" position. Cover it with feathers instead of scales and let it proceed to run - long feathers on the arms become an advantage because the creature can use them in hunting! One outward "swoosh" of its arms and a small prey item would be literally sucked in. Or it could use the arm feathers to make it easier to turn at high speeds.
It would have been a sheer happy accident that the creature one day went up a tree chasing food, fell off a branch, and discovered it could glide to the ground. A few generations of this breeds creatures with much stronger arm muscles - and powered flight is born.
All the 'filterware' on the market IS censorware - it attempts to HIDE certain political viewpoints from your view without telling you what it's doing or why.
This bill would basically amount to federally requiring that all PCs come with a Republican bias built-in. Enable the "keep Junior from seeing boobs" option on your brand-new Dell and you'll have NO idea that suddenly Junior can't do research for his term paper on gay rights. And you won't know why.
Of course some people LIKE the idea of a Republicanized Internet. But nowhere is it supposed to be the job of the government to provide for such a thing. And notice the filterware vendors don't bill it that way anyway - they tell you it's supposed to keep Junior from seeing boobs, they don't tell you it's also supposed to keep Junior from reading about women's rights and whatnot.
To which the guy would probably reply: "You mean there are operating systems other than Windows?"
OK, this is a hilarious concept all around: censorware on the Gameboy Advance. Censorware on cellphones. Censorware in cars. After all, they're all computers that run OSes. You and I know this is ridiculous, but is there a safety valve in the bill to prevent precisely this scenario?
Given that it was drafted by a drunk Texan who admits he isn't smart enough to install censorware, somehow I doubt he has the tech savvy to think of these questions.
How old is this rep anyway? 30 must be a distant memory for him - or else his mind really DID go at 30.
Me, I'm 26 and don't expect my mind to be THAT far gone in four years. Besides, aren't people 30 and over the ones for whom censorware should be optional anyway? "We must protect the adults..."
It's possible that adult sites are apples to oranges in this discussion. Porn is a bit like cocaine: you simply can't saturate the market, and advertising it is basically a matter of saying "we have some." People probably click through porn banners more often, because it's ALWAYS well-targeted - if you're on the Net hunting for Live Teen Fuck Sluts, someone's likely to have a banner advertising it, and you're gonna click it and probably stick around once you get there.
The fact that some leaders of some sects happened to support evil causes is not a reflection of what those belief systems stand for, but rather a reflection of how horrible those particular individuals were.
Which Bible did you read that wasn't filled with God-ordained mass slaughter, that didn't give explicit instructions on how to murder homosexuals? Which Koran did you read that didn't say God's word is to be spread by the sword if necessary - and that if you die killing infidels you get a free ticket to heaven? Which newspaper did you read that says the constant violence in the Middle East isn't for religious reasons? Which U2 album did you buy that says the war in Northern Ireland wasn't between Catholics and Protestants?
Which history books did you read where it wasn't a worldwide thing to burn witches?
Which United States do you live in (bear with me if you don't) that doesn't have so many beatings and murders because of people's race or sexuality or religion that we're now considering laws specifically dealing with hate-crimes? Which USA is it where racism, religious intolerance, and violent homophobia AREN'T justified on a mass scale by religious fundamentalism?
On which Earth can you honestly say all this shit is due to a few evil leaders of a few extremist sects, in past tense?
The peace-loving followers of these religions seem to be the minority sects.
I'm not 100% comfortable myself with the bashing of religion around here, but on the other hand, I've seen too many people damaged by religion.
I've seen people who are genuinely helped out of a dark place in their life by religion, yes - but many more who are put in that dark place by religion. Many more who find religion a convenient excuse to do what they were gonna do anyway (like hate people and stay indoors). Many who use religion as a mind control device, so they can extract money, power, and allegiance from others - and MANY, MANY more who are victims of the above.
For religion to serve a useful purpose for us as human beings, it should enable us to become more than what we are, and I don't mean after we die. Instead it tends to make us LESS than we are - it tends to make us stop thinking, stop asking questions, and turn off the detectors in our head that light up when we hear bullshit and rhetoric. It gives people an irrefutable authority to do whatever they want - if they can find a way to say "but the Bible says" or "but God says" - often without even having to justify it to themselves the way the godless heathens have to do.:-) Religion has tended to draw people into a state where they disbelieve what they see in favor of what they've been told - thus they gradually come to live in a world that bears no resemblance to reality. I've been there.
As I said, I'm not comfortable with dismissing religion out of hand. But the notion that religion is used in all of the ways I listed above to make this country and this world into a violent, crippled shadow of what it could be, is something that I feel needs to be whacked on the head at every chance.
The way I understood it was that pretty much everything bad said against the Gnostics at the time was false made up by their 'rivals'. (is that the word?)
I kinda like the core belief of Gnosticism: that God went away after making the world, the God seen through the rest of the Old Testament is Jehovah, a poseur pretending to be God, and Jesus came to Earth to tell us about the REAL God. Rather clever way of dealing with the Bible's contuinity problems, if you ask me.:-)
The mainstream Christians claimed that Gnostics ate babies.
And the Romans claimed it about the Christians.
Which makes it rather ironic that Christians now claim it about Wiccans. Selective memory is wonderful.
I have a friend who's brother was converted to JW, and my friend told me that JW's believe that Heaven only has room for 27,000 (or something like that) souls.. is this true?
If it is true, where do they get the number from? (Do they believe Heaven has a Fire Code, or what?)
Isn't it 144,000 for the 12,000 each from twelve tribes of Israel? It's in the Bible, in Revelation I think (it's been awhile). Jehovah's Witnesses aren't the only ones who have this belief, I've heard it from Nazarenes before.
Me, I think it's a hilarious concept: 144,000 out of the billions of people who've ever lived, that's it. Neither you, nor anyone you know, is gonna make it. Were these odds meant to impress us, make Heaven sound better because it's a VERY exclusive club, scare us into line, or make us shrug and say why bother?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that school should be year-round.
:-) That said, meeting-happy corporate types seem to have learned this skill from watching boring teachers. Make lecture-type classes optional and this kind of stuff will start to go away.
Have you considered what this does to a kid? You can't be a kid in school, you can't be yourself - the environment is too structured, it's just like prison or the army and for the same reasons. Lock a kid in there year-round and they will NEVER figure out who they are outside of that context.
If parents aren't raising their kids during the summer months, work on the parents.
Remember the one thing school can NEVER teach you is who you are. (If it does, you're nobody worthwhile.) You have to know thy OWN damn self. Some people may, within the school building and the social contexts it provides, find some answers (as I did - I became an artist while trying to keep sane in a boring class), but to expect that all kids will find this in school is wrong. Kids are better equipped to develop social skills during summer vacation, assuming your parents weren't like mine, living in a part of town where there simply weren't any other kids. Eliminate summer vacation and kids will grow up and only ever make friends and have social interaction within the structured framework of a job.
As for your idea about kids getting work experience, I'm not real sure how that would work, but I DO know there are "lab" type classes that allow each kid to work and learn at his/her own level in that particular subject, and from what I've seen, they work GREAT. Couple this with some elective lecture-type classes (for those who want to learn high-level calculus from a teacher at a blackboard - would work best in a bigger school where you can choose a teacher) and you have an adaptive learning environment. Schools fail when they assume all kids are alike.
Well, what kind of social skill practice is it to sit in a room of 30 kids listening to some adult drone?
Sounds exactly like the last eight staff meetings I attended.
What causes one to kill while another under the same circumstances does not?
Same reason some kids GET bullied while others ARE bullied, really - no two kids are alike.
Nature vs nurture - anyone who ever went to school and met actual people knows it's both, in varying degrees, depending on the person AND their environment. Some people never quite rise above their environment; some are born with a certain disposition and never outgrow it; some people are dynamic enough to adapt, learn, or even reverse themselves as they grow; some people are just weird and seem to develop contrary to either nature or nurture. And as I said, no two kids are alike - two genetically identical kids raised in identical families may STILL develop differing ideas about the world.
That said, I agree about outlets - and not just for the victims who may snap and go postal. Bullies and asshole school officials tend to use kids as outlets for their own inadequacies. Isn't there a better way for THEM to deal with their feelings than pushing kids around?
And last, here's a thought that just occurred to me: going postal on one's school is a form of suicide (whether they intend to point the gun selfward at the end or not). It's the point of greatest confusion, greatest desperation, and greatest anger and fear - it's the point where a violent solution is the only one simple enough to make sense. A kid who puts his brain on the chalkboard with a handgun is trying to scream in the land of the deaf - a primal yell, an attempt at making someone, anyone, look at them for one second so they can say "here's what kind of pain I'm in" (and usually "and you caused it"). An MIT-style prank (slinging cow hearts all over the lockers of known bullies for example) might work much better, but these kids have already fallen through that, reached a point where the only scenarios that make sense are the ones where they can vent their anger, on themselves or on someone else or both.
The question, however, is HOW someone can make every parent better. Should the government send every parent to parenting school? Should we try to de-evolve to the 50's when there was a housewife whose full-time job was to raise kids, or should we just forget the issue and hope the parents solve it themselves?
:-)
:-)
That 50s mindset is part of the reason we have a problem: the 2.3 kids ideal is the reason there's whole generations of people who had kids they don't know how to raise, because it was a STATUS SYMBOL.
Granted that's no worse than having 14 kids just for the welfare check. Or having kids because you actually want to pass on your alcoholic, heart-diseased, inbred genetic material. At least if you have a kid by accident you're coming by it honest.
The solution, near as I can figure, is to establish a NEW ideal - it should be "cool" to have kids only if you're prepared to put down everything and be a parent for 20 years. (I mean dads primarily - especially in married couples where the man has assumed authority to tell the woman to stay home with the kids.) It isn't cool if a kid grows up with parents as a distant entity. It isn't cool if a kid grows up having had no social interaction - and I can think of a lot of "status symbol parents" whose kids are socially undeveloped because of their parents' lifestyle. It isn't cool to, as some yuppie families do, treat the kids as pets. It's certainly not cool to have kids for financial reasons. All these things make a kid grow up feeling worthless. And the kid, having never seen any examples of actual parenting, will be incapable of figuring out what to do with their OWN screaming bundles of poop when they arrive.
I don't think a parenting school or a 'kid license' is the right answer - parents should be able to select their own parenting style, especially since some kids will have unusual dispositions, unique problems, or worst of all, be smarter than their parents - a government-endorsed "here's how you raise kids" will fail more often than it works. But on the other hand, if it's irresponsible to let a kid go buy a pet rabbit before making them read up on what it takes to keep one alive, what do we call it when adults go buy a pet baby before actually considering what demands it makes of them? Any couple who wants kids should at least think about what kind of ethical and moral standards they want the kid to have when it grows up - and hell, most adults don't even know their OWN ethical and moral standards until after they've done something naughty and can't sleep afterwards. No wonder censorware and raise-by-television are so popular - it relieves adults from having to figure out how to turn the screaming bundles of poop into functional human beings.
I think peer pressure could be used to our advantage. Figure out what the ideal should be, and then take over the media and popularize it subtly in sitcoms and car commercials.
Seriously, what the f*ck does a person need a gun for anyway?
:-)
:-)
Same reason a person needs a lawyer - to defend oneself against other people with lawyers. We really don't need guns or lawyers, but as soon as one person pulls either a gun or a lawyer on you, you'll need both.
Drop the religious aspect of your society back to the individual's beliefs. Don't ever allow it to creep back into politics or society as a whole. I've been to engineering meetings in the USA where problems encountered in designs were met with a "prayer" session. Sheesh - why don't we just sacrifice a goat or virgin or two to Baal to help our sales team.
Funny, I think, that the unholy marriage of religion and politics were something Jesus seemed to resent.
The only way a state religion can work is if EVERYONE - every last person - supports it, or at least if there's a convenient way for dissenters to move to a neighboring "free" nation that the religious nation isn't planning on conquering. (In many ways a theocracy is a bit like a Communist state - if even one person doesn't buy into it, it starts to collapse.)
Actually, that's not entirely true. A theocracy COULD possibly work if it's not the kind of fundamentalist regime we see in most Christian and Muslim countries - the real problem isn't the religion, or the link to politics, it's that for FAR too many people in the countries I've mentioned, religion amounts to little more than a desire to see everyone else become exactly like you, and for some, it's a means of gaining power. THAT's the real reason we have a separation of church and state - religion is all about interpretation and divine inspiration of unverifiable origin, so all it takes is one Cardinal Ximinez or one Jerry Falwell to start to impose his will onto a religion and then impose that religion onto the state. The only defense is to prevent religion from being imposed onto the state - and so far America has done a shitty job of this, mostly because the lawmakers tend to WANT religion imposed on the state.
Keeping-up-with-the-Jones' is going to be a real tricky thing - this is the result of feedback from a capitalist society - more money tends to breed more money, and a drive to get what is perceived to be better and better things. Some people will be able to afford the "bestest" things (generally the goal of all), most people will be able to afford the "next-to-bestest/acceptable" things, and unfortunately, there are a lot of people who never will - they get left out. I don't know how to counter this one.
Look at the root of the problem: people don't know how to be happy anymore. Unable to find emotional satisfaction, unable to comprehend subtlety, or unwilling to become philosophers who see more beauty in a rundown building than in a mansion, people have tended to latch onto dicksize as a means of happiness. They think if they LOOK happy, they can BE happy - and the only way to look happy is to look like you have more toys than the happy people next door. They shouldn't call 'em yuppies, they should call 'em Happies.
Anyway, it's an amusing situation - a whole sector of people who want big houses they can't live in because every room is a museum, big vehicles that get 8mpg and have 4 wheel drive they'll never use because going off road would get it dirty (I have no problem with people who buy SUVs because they actually intend to use the four wheel drive, but as status symbols they SUCK), and kids they don't even raise. (And yes, I think this tends to pass these same kinds of values on to the next generation.) All because these are the things they see other people having and it certainly makes THEM happy.
Me, I'm thankful I have such weird tastes in stuff. I've gotten cynical in my old age (26) and despite the limited world experience I have, I've nonetheless come to the conclusion that there is NOTHING in this world I can obtain - no stereo system, no car, no woman - that will grant me lasting happiness. There is joy to be had in owning things, which is why I hang out at thrift stores, and I do happen to like having a girlfriend - these things, for me at least, tend to subtly increase the level of joy in my life, but I already know there's no guarantee that ANY of them - or even ALL of them, if I should somehow one day be granted the complete checklist of "stuff I want" (a delightfully implausible list that includes Jennifer Connelly, 109 missing episodes of Doctor Who, various unbuilt Amiga prototypes from over the years, and a winning $250m lottery ticket) - will make me live happily ever after. Nor would I want them to - the struggle to become happy is the point of life. (Even for you religious types, "being happy" means pleasing God, and therefore is the point of life.)
Granted part of the reason I came to this conclusion was that I noticed I never really much liked "cool" things. It's a blessing not to have to judge oneself by other people's standards - and it's paid off, because I can get great deals on the stuff other people throw out.
I don't know how to cure the Happies of their problem. The sad thing is, the ones who were once hippies used to have the answers (insofar as they had simpler tastes) and seem to have forgotten them. But there's another aspect to the problem - the Happies have been conditioned by the media. Come on with a commercial during Seinfeld to tell them this year's SUV brings happiness and they believe you - and once they own one, and can park it in the driveway where their neighbors can drool over it, pretty soon the whole block will have one. How do you decondition people from the media? Hell, most of them don't even realize they AREN'T as happy as they make the neighbors think (and when they do, it's called a midlife crisis) - which means as far as they're concerned, this kind of one-up lifestyle has WORKED. It's a religion, really - and people only ditch a religion when a) they realize how silly it sounds, b) they realize it isn't working for them, or c) they weren't really that deeply into it to begin with.
The problem is that waiting for the boomers to die won't help - the boomers have offspring who have been similarly conditioned.
Bill Gates' vast wealth exists mostly on paper. And there's more than one sense in which a cop may "get away with" violating someone's rights - in Bill Gates' case, I doubt a group of corrupt cops could get anywhere NEAR his fortified house to break and enter.
I can't think of too many people in history who've gotten insanely rich - rich enough to be above the harassment of a corrupt policeman, let's say - without the help of a giant artificial person (a corporation).
A subtle point being missed here is - yes, corporations are legally the equivalent of giant people with super powers. But behind every corporation there's usually a few REAL people operating the controls - they thus have access to all the super powers of the giant they control. It's always bugged me that the heads of a corporation get to claim the value of the corporation as their own assets.
Beneath the surface it's all still about people with money fetishes and a mean streak. But what the current legal definition of "corporation" provides, is a WAY-too-easy way for such people to acquire godlike powers. You can't eat people and absorb their strength, but you can buy corporations and add their powers (and wealth) to your own, removing a potential competitor in the process.
Corporations are a useful thing - there are things you can ONLY do with lots of money. But corporations as people, that's a mechanism that doesn't need to be there, wasn't always there, and now serves primarily as a way for greedy assholes to increase the size of their dicks.
Consider if you removed the "person" aspect from a corporation, and severely limited its rights to behave as a giant person. That is, restore the legal concept of a corporation to what it was 100 years ago. How much damage can a Bill Gates do, if he can only spend his own money, not that of the company? What if corporate mergers were a big deal again, not "oh we bought another one" like it is today? Corporations wield power over the marketplace - but if your power over that corporation is now INdirect, and you can't use their power as your own (to write company checks to bribe politicians for example), owning a corporation no longer grants you godlike power, so even if you're rich, you can't buy power! You can only buy material wealth (which is fine by me), and your "power" if any comes from your ability to personally convince people to see things your way.
Just a thought exercise, pay it no mind.
But distributing it in order to allow interoperability is explicitly allowed.
"Interoperability" - that's a good one. Why, next you'll tell me American law also provides for "free speech" and "due process of law".
In other words, the interoperability clause in the DMCA so far seems like all those other too-good-to-be-true laws on the books that lawmakers and judges (and corporations) always conveniently forget - little things like the first ten Amendments. Publish a crack so these playback-inhibited CDs can be played like normal in CD-ROM drives and see how far "interoperability" gets you in court.
So now "fair use" for any piece of music you buy is meant to be defined by you're being able to make digital copies of it?
Taco said that?
I guess the RIAA is really fucking us with those analog LP's then, with their insidious built-in bumpy groove technology.
Actually the analogy would be if the RIAA (assuming they still made much money on records) mixed a signal on a 44.1khz carrier into the record, so you and I can hear the record just fine with our analog ears, but any attempt to rip it at that rate would pick up garbage.
However, Fair use DOES not by any stretch of the imagination mean you should be guaranteed to be able to copy directly to CD rather than tape, or that you should be facilitated in copying it to MiniOggCD-2010 or whatever alternate formats may emerge. That is ridiculous.
Why not? Being unable to copy a playback-protected CD to some other format is a side effect; the core of the problem is that these CDs simply won't work in certain kinds of PLAYERS. The RIAA doesn't grasp a lot of things about their own damn industry, but one of them is the fact that sometimes you HAVE to make a digital copy in order to hear it (like, say, "copying" the digital music stream to your speakers). This is Macrovision all over again but worse - Macrovision doesn't stop the pros but can be defeated. This doesn't stop the pros (they'll copy it flaws and all like they do DVDs) but you and I can't defeat it to actually USE what we've purchased.
Anyway what precedent does this set? They do this, some C64 hacker figures out a way to raw-read the CDs anyway, and people who legally own the CD now have to go online and download the MP3s just to listen to it (in the same way a lot of people who bought software legally ended up also obtaining the pirated version so they wouldn't have to mess with the dongle). Way to squelch the piracy there - everyone suddenly HAS to become a pirate just to listen to their stuff, and in the process they'll get so pissed they'll return the CD and keep the MP3s.
So then what happens? More insidious intentionally-corrupted CDs such that the damn things are just a little bit harder to copy, but won't play back on 50% of consumer CD players? A cyclic game of tit-for-tat until finally they hit upon the ultimate solution - they'll buy new legislation that makes the "Compact Disc" emblem equivalent to a shrinkwrap nontransferrable one-copy-one-player software license. They still can't prevent piracy, but they'll make more money off the lawsuits than they ever did selling CDs.
Fair use, ha. ANY use is gonna be with the RIAA's grudging permission.
Do you understand the Mandelbrot set? I mean really understand how it works and how to compute it? And how it was conceived? I don't mean to be rude, but I really doubt you do.
Well I THOUGHT I understood it - I just couldn't remember the details offhand because my copy of Fractal Geometry of Nature is under a stack of stuff.
But then I took calculus, and I learned how it really worked, and where it really came from, and I found out it was nothing. Just a number people put in their equations to make the math easier, (a lot easier). Similarly, PI, is just the arc-length integration of the equation of a circle, nothing spectacularly magical.
Aside from the fact that pi is universal. I'm getting at a deeper question here - why is it universal? Why does our universe work in such a way that pi is 3.14159268etc and not 3.00000? The number is inherent to the way circles and spheres work, both in geometry's idealized space AND in the real world where you can apply it to planets and wheels. It's the mechanism by which circles work that's the deeper magic, and I'm just using pi to illustrate it.
I have no idea why you would expect to see a circle, or some other kind of sinusoidal image.
Limit iterations to 2 and you DO get a circle. And the central shape of the complete set is a circle and a cardioid. Anyway, I read up on it and figured, if I were a mathematician messing around with escape times of repeated squares on the complex plane (and without a computer to help me get full 2D maps), I might expect some weird shapes, but there's NOTHING in the math that indicates either the shape of the Mandelbrot "thing", or the fact that the shape repeats infinitely far down, or all the swirls, tendrils, and so forth around the boundaries.
Put it like this. The algorithm says to loop through z^2+C until C exceeds a threshold. It does NOT say to draw a circle-cardioid with an array of smaller circles around the edge, then repeat that shape but deform it nonlinearly and twist the "spine" on one end into all sorts of tendril shapes, repeat until done.
You can do a Mandelbrot rendering in 10 lines of BASIC. It's not raytracing - it's more akin to discovering new digits of pi. z^2+c doesn't DRAW the Mandelbrot set - it reveals it.
Well, the numbers are already complex right? Actually, 'the numbers you feed it' are every single complex number. Why wouldn't you expect infinite complexity from infinite numbers.
Is this a pun? If so, blame me for using the word complex in its other sense.
Complex numbers are numbers with both a real and an imaginary (sqrt(-1)) part. And the point I was making was, exactly what Gaston Julia was thinking when he first started messing around with escape calculations (but in 1890 didn't have a way to do millions of calculations to see what was really going on) that one would expect something "geometric" out of it, a circle, cardioid, cloverleaf, or something of that nature.
Something looks nice, therefor there must be a god?
Fractals don't merely look nice - the Mandelbrot set is a complex-plane graph of a surprisingly simple function (it's been a couple years, someone help me remember what it was) that demonstrates insane amounts of complexity that clearly don't come from the numbers you feed it. The images get boring after awhile, like so many tie-dye shirts, it's the understanding of what's going on behind it, all the infinite (yes, infinite) detail found in such a simple equation, THAT'S what makes the images so impressive to me.
I mean, you'd look at the Mandelbrot set formula and with a decent knowledge of geometry, you'd expect a complex plane graph to be a circle, or at most, a cardioid. Some reasonably simple shape. Never would you expect to find the weird shape that appears onscreen - and you certainly wouldn't expect to find miniatures of that shape (each with unique patterns of streamers trailing off them) hidden all around it with smaller versions of the shape around them. I guess the closest analogy would be picking up a conch shell at the beach and listening to it, expecting to hear the echo of the waves, and instead hearing Philip Glass' "Music in Contrary Motion" in its entirety, with no music source in sight.
We can explain where living things came from. But so far as I know, no one has tackled the question of where mathematics came from. It simply seems to "be there" - and while it might not be obvious to everyone, it's obvious to me that math is the OS on which the universe runs. The universe is fixated with numbers - speed and gravitational constants, numeric patterns found in nature (spheres, fractals etc), and of course, the inherent mathness of objects - two rocks next to two rocks is always four rocks. If you were in charge of building universes, you could make one in which the speed of light is changed, and it wouldn't really affect the workings all that much - it'd work like our universe but with properties of matter adjusted up or down. Now, change the value of pi, and the universe suddenly CAN'T work like ours - a sphere would no longer be a sphere, the shape of the universe would have to be twisted to allow the circumference of a planet to be the new pi times its diameter. Or maybe such a universe can't have circles at all - points equidistant from a single point could NEVER lie in a single plane. What would a planet orbit look like? What would an electron shell look like? Could molecular reactions even take place in such a universe?
Where I'm going with this is, mathematics weren't born with the Big Bang. (Note that I don't mean the human understanding of mathematics - I mean the properties that our mathematics attempts to study. 2+2 was 4 long before humans learned to count - we just weren't there to give it a name.) Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but from where I sit, there's something about math - or whatever you can call this "OS on which the universe runs" that seems to have an awful lot in common with the math found in textbooks - that hints at an intelligence. Maybe math IS God (or as much of such a being as will fit in our universe). Maybe there's some great cosmic mechanism by which intelligent life from a completely nonmathematical (and self-spawned and matterless) universe created our universe entirely out of math as an experiment. Or by accident, as a result of their first experiments in creating math - maybe they don't know we're here! Maybe it really IS possible for our mathematical universe to arise from nothing - and either we ended up with this set of math rules by chance, or there's only one set of rules that works (but even THAT hints at a higher order). But you'll notice that Hawking, Einstein and others whose theories of the universe's origins depend on mathematics, don't have much of an answer as to where the underpinnings of mathematics came from.
I find there is hope and beauty in math, and I did lousy in the subject in school. If math IS somehow a representation of God, though, it's fine by me - mathematics, at least to my eyes, hints at an intelligent pre-Big Bang creator that cared enough about his/her/its work to leave all that complexity just laying around, yet seems to have left absolutely zero messages for us in there. No Hebrew characters that spell out the Ten Commandments. No Godly alphabet staring out at us from a Newton's root-solving method graph. No Scientology tracts hidden in the digits of pi (well, not unless some numerologist decides to "find" one there - see last week's discovery of a number that "contains" the DeCSS code - with enough digits to choose from, one can "find" whatever one wants to find in pi). Absolutely NO policy statements anywhere to be found in math. In short, nothing in common with any religion's picture of God that I've yet found.
(The bit about our having been created by intelligence from a nonmathematical universe is messing with my head now. I think I may have hit on something...)
Frankly, I have no problems beliving in Intelligent Design. I see spooky shit like Quantum Mechanics, and can see God in the details. I have no problems beliving that some higher power went and made the universe and set things in motion. If you ran up to me, panting, out of breath, and proclaimed that a "A Higher Power set everything into motion billions of years ago!" I would say "Who the fuck are you?" and then "Well, that makes sense to me."
:-/
I'm forced to agree. Check out fractals sometime if you want to read God's handwriting.
Which is why I think it's funny: I can go outside and look at trees, birds, fish and so on that are the work of nature - ostensibly the work of God. Yet if I try to learn something about God by studying these things, things that if God exists, MUST be His/Her doing, the Christians will call me a pagan, or worse, a scientist. Instead I'm supposed to take the word of a book written by men CLAIMING to have an inside track with God. A book that gets observable facts wrong, as we've mentioned. A book that, despite being divinely inspired, seems to demonstrate NO knowledge of the world that wasn't known when it was written - it's full of references to the sky as a hollow sphere, an Earth with corners (and a mountain from which you can see it all), superstitious non-medical causes for diseases, etc.
And if the best answer someone can come up with is "Well, God put that there to decieve us/give us a false sense of history", or "Well, God put the whole inbreeding causes problems thing into us AFTER the Great Flood" then you should immediately disqualify yourself from the Rational Thought Olympics.
God must have put the inbreeding-causes-problems thing there well after Noah's family dispersed. In the early days it seems God had an incest fetish.
Anyway, if evidence for evolution really IS put there by God to test us, I'm happy to fail. What use could God possibly have for us that requires us to believe the ridiculous? Do you really wanna work for a God who lies? (I thought the godlike being who tells lies lived in the OTHER place.)
A great flood is mentioned among many many different societies. Even aboriginal culture made reference to an incredible, ancient flood.
Point - the Flood was supposed to have killed everyone who wasn't on the boat. So HOW could any other culture have had a legend about it? They'd all have to be descendents of Noah and would probably remember THAT as their creation myth.
The Chinese have a written history going back 8000 years and for some reason they don't remember spending time on the Ark.
As to the 'remarkable' fact that great floods are mentioned among many different societies - um, yes, it does so happen that floods, big ones and small ones, are a common occurrence.
You should really read and attempt to interpret the Bible for yourself. I'll pray for you.
I've already attempted to interpret the Bible for myself. Started at the beginning, noticed two DIFFERENT and contradictory accounts of the creation, noticed that Moses has to keep reminding us how humble he is, noticed God making people worship a golden snake (I guess it matters WHICH false idols), noticed that the whole book of Leviticus is basically the work of an obsessive-compulsive handwasher who hates EVERYONE, noticed that the book of Job is an account of a CONSPIRACY between God and Satan... got bummed out by this, skipped forward, read the story of the woman who was raped and murdered and cut into pieces and mailed to twelve nations (and you want KIDS to read this filth? if this was depicted in a movie you'd picket it!), read some of the "prophecies" that sound like they got hold of some bad acid, read the four Gospels and noticed that four men who supposedly walked with Jesus can't agree on his life story, noticed that Jesus, a man who preached humility, can't seem to decide whether he's the son of God or not (hinting at alterations in the text), noticed (had it pointed out to me) that if Jesus was a rabbi, he MUST have had a wife.
Noticed that despite the book's good parts - and there are some sublime things in there, yes - I did not hear the voice of God in it. I heard the voice of a bunch of angry men trying to justify their actions. I heard events being distorted through generations of oral tradition into "miracles". I heard the politics and traditions of 2000 and 4000 years ago, put into book form with "GOD says we shall do these things" at the front.
I did all this WHILE I was a Christian. I read the Bible and found reasons to get out. Maybe the Scientologists have the right idea - keep the holy texts under lock and key, lest someone actually READ them and notice they don't say what everyone thinks they say.
Yes, they very well could be the hugest cheekbones I've ever seen. Of course, I was born in this lifetime, so I can only compare it to what I know. Perhaps, if I was born in that lifetime, it would seem fairly normal to me. Big cheekbones don't make a human more or less of a human.
If they fit a pattern, between a nonhuman with huge cheekbones and a human with relatively small ones, then yes they do.
And the point I was trying to make, and failed, is that there is a LOT more difference between this thing and us than just cheekbones. The whole shape and structure of the head is different. Muscle attachment points are different. These are not trivial differences. These ARE the kinds of morphological differences that can reasonably be used to say "this skull is human" or "this skull isn't".
It's very impressive that they can differentiate between human and gorilla skulls, and I'm sure they're trying their best to identify what is presented them, but it's been my experience that it's rare (at best) to find people who can put aside their preconceived notions of how the world is to in order to determine how things really are.
The analogy is that they can identify a vehicle they've never seen before from a time period that's never been documented, give it a name, and then call every other thing that looks similar and appears to be from the same time period by the same name...except, whatever you do, don't call it a vehicle, because everyone knows that they didn't have vehicles back then. It is, however, surprisingly "vehicle-like".
Preconceived notions, I suppose, are all we have. But science is a celebration of the art of throwing out preconceived notions - you don't win Nobel prizes for preconceived notions, you get lauded if you shift paradigms and render whole wings of the library obsolete. It's EXPECTED that science keeps updating our understanding of things, since the closest we can get to knowing things for sure is running out of ways to disprove them. Indeed in science it's considered a good thing if you come back from the lab or field knowing less than you did when you left, because some huge discovery has forced you to tear the back 324 pages out of the definitive book on the subject. This is what scientists live for!
If this thing were "truly human" like you suggest, some three million years too soon, it'd be Nobel material. Thing is, scientists tend to want to not embarass themselves in front of the Nobel committee - if they don't think there's a reasonable chance this thing is truly human, they're not gonna say "it's human three million years too soon". If closer examination indicates that it IS what you say, a modern human three million years too early, yer durn tootin they'll follow it up - to be able to rewrite the family tree, of course with actual evidence to back it up, is probably the secret dream of every paleontologist. It's what drives the science. After all, if our recent family tree is just a preconceived notion, these people wouldn't be digging for new fossils anyway - they'd already "know" what they'd find!
Keep the remark in context. It's remarkably humanlike - not more humanlike than Homo habilus or H. erectus, but more humanlike than Australopithecus afarensus. It does not rearrange the chronology, it merely suggests a different ancestor at one point along the timeline. It says "here, I may be a better fit in place of A. afarensus. Try me and see if I fit." It is NOT out of line with the evolutionary "curve" (my term, 'cause I can't think of a better one) that leads through H. habilis, erectus, sapiens. If it were, the headline would be VERY different.
There is no such thing as "evolution" supported in science. Natural Selection is what Darwin wrote about and what modern science supports. The term evolution denotes that a certain species is generally "better" than all the species that preceded it on the planet while Natural Selection merely states that the morphology and behavior best suited to a particular environment will out-compete less well tuned varies of plants or animals.
Yes! To Obi-Wan you listen!
Not sure who said it, but there's a great line I read: "it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the fit." If you have a mutation that lets you find a place to live, eat, and breed, you'll pass on that mutation. If you end up competing against the nonmutated versions of yourself, either they'll die off, or you'll die off, or they'll move away, or you'll move away, or you'll specialize on different kinds of food and it won't matter. That's why humans and monkeys both still exist - we came out of the trees because the monkeys were eating all our damn bananas, so we decided to go look for food elsewhere.
It's always amusing when creationists point out when one or another human ancestor is still around (like the coelacanth) and that this somehow disproves evolution. Well, I suppose it does, if disproof of evolution is the assumption to begin with, ANYTHING will support it. All it really demonstrates is that there's no reason the ancestor needs to go away - if it finds a niche where it doesn't compete with its descendants, great! The coelacanth basically found a spot to hide in Madagascar and another in Indonesia, where it managed to maintain a small breeding population for a few million years. Nothing about this disproves ANY of the mechanics of evolution - in fact it supports it, because it demonstrates the importance of adaptation to one's environment. The coelacanth has the potential to go on land, but neither does it use this potential, nor has it lost it (well, not much of it anyway). It works just fine as a fish.
Because it's as good as we have.
No, because it DOES work. There are situations where it doesn't work, and scientists know what those situations are and can avoid them and use other means. Creationists love to tell you how wrong carbon dating is - what they don't tell you is how scientists already KNOW the weaknesses of the technique and don't use it where they know they'll get incorrect results.
It's also not the only way to determine age. There are other radiologic dating methods used for different ages - using different elements - and if a sample falls in the overlap between two techniques, it provides an excellent cross-reference. You can count annual phenomena - sediment layers, tree rings (and compare seasonal difference between trees that died at various times and build a complete timeline of trees), etc. You can even use fossils - strange as that seems - since some fossils are known to appear only in a certain strata, if you find those fossils in a layer you can say with reasonable certainty that the layer is of similar age to layers containing that same fossil elsewhere in the world. And elsewhere in the world that layer may sit in the middle of a 300-ft-high column of unbroken strata - the top of which can be radio-dated to 175 million years, the bottom of which can be radio-dated to 330 million years, which leaves you a pretty good way to visually estimate the age of your layer. Corroborate it with enough other layers worldwide, and enough other dating techniques, and you can pin down the age of that layer and any fossils you find in it rather neatly.
Evolution is a faith based belief too. At least Christians acknowledge the fact that they worship a belief grounded in faith.
Evolution is an observation-based belief too. It came about because people looked at a chart of animals and noticed a treelike structure, and considered that the "family tree" used in bookkeeping might actually be a reflection that animals really ARE related to each other - evolution existed as a concept before On the Origin of Species, all Darwin did was propose a mechanism.
Christianity is based on a BOOK, written by humans claiming to have gotten it from God. That book conflicts with observable reality in many places - go catch a grasshopper and counts its legs and you've just proven the Bible wrong. Accompany astronauts into space and notice there is no firmament from which stars hang and you've just proven it wrong again. (Wouldn't Mir's reentry cause another Great Flood as it bursts through the firmament and releases the waters?)
So given the choice between a science that is based on observable reality and physical evidence, and a book known to be at odds with observable reality and physical evidence, we're apparently supposed to side with... the book.
Umm...unless I'm misunderstanding something, this "evidence" just muddied up the water. It didn't provide any sort of concrete evidence for evolution.
:-)
All it did was make the bookkeeping a bit trickier. It provided no concrete evidence for OR against evolution - and although I'm sure the creationists will use this as evidence that scientists are making it up as they go along, it actually demonstrates something cool about science: it adapts to new facts. Find a skull that may rewrite all the textbooks and the scientists bust out the champagne. Find a lost chapter of Luke that says Jesus had a wife and kids and it'll probably be quietly buried.
Here's a new thought...maybe it was a human face. I hate it when people dismiss the obvious because it doesn't make sense in their limited view of the world.
Oh yeah, it's a human face all right - stuck between two of the HUGEST cheekbones you've ever seen.
Look. These people digging in the African dust are not just schmucks off the street who dig up ordinary skulls and give them exotic names just to amuse themselves. These are people who are experienced anatomists - you can smash up a human skull into little pieces, hand them HALF the pieces in a bag, and they'll reassemble it for you and tell you what's missing. Hand them one of those pieces and they'll tell you which part of the skull it came from - even the seemingly uniformly round back part has telltale bumps and curvatures that a skilled paleontologist can recognize. They can tell what race a human skull is by the skull alone. They can tell a single broken fragment of a human skull from a single broken fragment of a gorilla skull. And yes, they've learned a thing or two since Piltdown. These are people who spend their lives doing this shit, they have offices full of skulls and probably a few spares in the truck when on expedition in Tanzania. If they say "it's not human but it looks human" you'd better have some damn good anatomical evidence at your disposal before you dispute them.
The analogy is that a paleontologist can identify a 1987 Nissan Stanza from a single back fender panel, and most of the people who dispute their results can't tell a Nissan from a Ford.
Did flightless creatures slowly develop functionless stubs on their backs, and generation after generation, these functionless stubs got bigger and bigger, even though they may not have offered any advantage, even though they may have offered severe survival disadvantage? Then at some point, they developed to where they were functional?
Are you sure you aren't trolling?
OK, assuming you're not trolling: the "functionless stubs" are ARMS. Take a good look at the next chicken you eat - notice the shoulder blades and fingers, things that probably wouldn't be there if the wings evolved late in the game from nonfunctional lumps of muscle on the animal's back.
This will probably sound ridiculous, but consider for a moment that feathers are useful even if the animal can't fly. (Flightless birds still find them useful.) Now consider for a moment the small theropod dinosaurs one found running around in the early Jurassic - Coelophysis, Compsognatus, and kin. Two-legged stance, long tails, fast runners. Predatory creatures with long fingers for clutching prey. Hollow bones for reduced weight = more efficient use of energy when chasing prey at high speed.
Now let's assume that a feather is basically a modified scale. A mutation causes one of these creatures to have "skeletal" scales - ones that are not solid like lizard scales, but are split into the fibers that make up the scale. Tada - a fluffy scale. This animal is able to survive the winter more easily because its fluffy scales allow it to conserve body heat - and it passes these genes on to the next generation. A few more mutations down the road give the fluffy scales the interlocking barbs and stiffening central quill, and we have feathers.
Useful even though the animal doesn't fly.
Now remember what our creature looks like. It stands on two legs, head upright, with hands outstretched in a "gonna grab you" position. Cover it with feathers instead of scales and let it proceed to run - long feathers on the arms become an advantage because the creature can use them in hunting! One outward "swoosh" of its arms and a small prey item would be literally sucked in. Or it could use the arm feathers to make it easier to turn at high speeds.
It would have been a sheer happy accident that the creature one day went up a tree chasing food, fell off a branch, and discovered it could glide to the ground. A few generations of this breeds creatures with much stronger arm muscles - and powered flight is born.
All the 'filterware' on the market IS censorware - it attempts to HIDE certain political viewpoints from your view without telling you what it's doing or why.
This bill would basically amount to federally requiring that all PCs come with a Republican bias built-in. Enable the "keep Junior from seeing boobs" option on your brand-new Dell and you'll have NO idea that suddenly Junior can't do research for his term paper on gay rights. And you won't know why.
Of course some people LIKE the idea of a Republicanized Internet. But nowhere is it supposed to be the job of the government to provide for such a thing. And notice the filterware vendors don't bill it that way anyway - they tell you it's supposed to keep Junior from seeing boobs, they don't tell you it's also supposed to keep Junior from reading about women's rights and whatnot.
To which the guy would probably reply: "You mean there are operating systems other than Windows?"
OK, this is a hilarious concept all around: censorware on the Gameboy Advance. Censorware on cellphones. Censorware in cars. After all, they're all computers that run OSes. You and I know this is ridiculous, but is there a safety valve in the bill to prevent precisely this scenario?
Given that it was drafted by a drunk Texan who admits he isn't smart enough to install censorware, somehow I doubt he has the tech savvy to think of these questions.
How old is this rep anyway? 30 must be a distant memory for him - or else his mind really DID go at 30.
Me, I'm 26 and don't expect my mind to be THAT far gone in four years. Besides, aren't people 30 and over the ones for whom censorware should be optional anyway? "We must protect the adults..."
It's possible that adult sites are apples to oranges in this discussion. Porn is a bit like cocaine: you simply can't saturate the market, and advertising it is basically a matter of saying "we have some." People probably click through porn banners more often, because it's ALWAYS well-targeted - if you're on the Net hunting for Live Teen Fuck Sluts, someone's likely to have a banner advertising it, and you're gonna click it and probably stick around once you get there.
As for the Bible telling you how to kill homosexuals... that's just silly. Nowhere does the Bible even use a word meaning "homosexuals".
Then what does it mean in Leviticus when it says you're supposed to put to death any man who lays with another man?
Both belief systems preach non-violence.
Then they need to preach it a lot louder.
The fact that some leaders of some sects happened to support evil causes is not a reflection of what those belief systems stand for, but rather a reflection of how horrible those particular individuals were.
Which Bible did you read that wasn't filled with God-ordained mass slaughter, that didn't give explicit instructions on how to murder homosexuals? Which Koran did you read that didn't say God's word is to be spread by the sword if necessary - and that if you die killing infidels you get a free ticket to heaven? Which newspaper did you read that says the constant violence in the Middle East isn't for religious reasons? Which U2 album did you buy that says the war in Northern Ireland wasn't between Catholics and Protestants?
Which history books did you read where it wasn't a worldwide thing to burn witches?
Which United States do you live in (bear with me if you don't) that doesn't have so many beatings and murders because of people's race or sexuality or religion that we're now considering laws specifically dealing with hate-crimes? Which USA is it where racism, religious intolerance, and violent homophobia AREN'T justified on a mass scale by religious fundamentalism?
On which Earth can you honestly say all this shit is due to a few evil leaders of a few extremist sects, in past tense?
The peace-loving followers of these religions seem to be the minority sects.
I'm not 100% comfortable myself with the bashing of religion around here, but on the other hand, I've seen too many people damaged by religion.
:-) Religion has tended to draw people into a state where they disbelieve what they see in favor of what they've been told - thus they gradually come to live in a world that bears no resemblance to reality. I've been there.
I've seen people who are genuinely helped out of a dark place in their life by religion, yes - but many more who are put in that dark place by religion. Many more who find religion a convenient excuse to do what they were gonna do anyway (like hate people and stay indoors). Many who use religion as a mind control device, so they can extract money, power, and allegiance from others - and MANY, MANY more who are victims of the above.
For religion to serve a useful purpose for us as human beings, it should enable us to become more than what we are, and I don't mean after we die. Instead it tends to make us LESS than we are - it tends to make us stop thinking, stop asking questions, and turn off the detectors in our head that light up when we hear bullshit and rhetoric. It gives people an irrefutable authority to do whatever they want - if they can find a way to say "but the Bible says" or "but God says" - often without even having to justify it to themselves the way the godless heathens have to do.
As I said, I'm not comfortable with dismissing religion out of hand. But the notion that religion is used in all of the ways I listed above to make this country and this world into a violent, crippled shadow of what it could be, is something that I feel needs to be whacked on the head at every chance.
The way I understood it was that pretty much everything bad said against the Gnostics at the time was false made up by their 'rivals'. (is that the word?)
:-)
I kinda like the core belief of Gnosticism: that God went away after making the world, the God seen through the rest of the Old Testament is Jehovah, a poseur pretending to be God, and Jesus came to Earth to tell us about the REAL God. Rather clever way of dealing with the Bible's contuinity problems, if you ask me.
The mainstream Christians claimed that Gnostics ate babies.
And the Romans claimed it about the Christians.
Which makes it rather ironic that Christians now claim it about Wiccans. Selective memory is wonderful.
I have a friend who's brother was converted to JW, and my friend told me that JW's believe that Heaven only has room for 27,000 (or something like that) souls.. is this true?
If it is true, where do they get the number from? (Do they believe Heaven has a Fire Code, or what?)
Isn't it 144,000 for the 12,000 each from twelve tribes of Israel? It's in the Bible, in Revelation I think (it's been awhile). Jehovah's Witnesses aren't the only ones who have this belief, I've heard it from Nazarenes before.
Me, I think it's a hilarious concept: 144,000 out of the billions of people who've ever lived, that's it. Neither you, nor anyone you know, is gonna make it. Were these odds meant to impress us, make Heaven sound better because it's a VERY exclusive club, scare us into line, or make us shrug and say why bother?