See, ranton, your OTHER post was not a troll. This is. And flamebait.
While I did use a little more sarcasm in this post, I still do not consider it trolling.
Your implication that only stupid, non-above-average people are religious is patently absurd and contradcits evidence to the contrary. Should we put together a list of extremely smart people over the ages that were religious?
Actually I do imply that the smarter you are the more likely you are to not believe in religion. I do not think that is flamebait. There are plenty of studies that suggest this. Two such studies were done by James H Leuba in 1914 and a study done in Nature magazine in 1998. In Leuba's study he took the 400 leading scientists from the American Men of Science (AMS). 73.6% of the respondants claimed to be athiest or agnostic. He redid his study in 1933 and found the number rose to 85% of the scientists claiming to not believe in God. When Nature magazine redid the study using the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), they found that 93% of the respondants did not believe in God.
There are many other studies, these are just a few. While this does not mean that you are stupid if you believe in God, it does show that highly intelligent people rarely are spiritual. I am sure there are hundreds of exceptions, but the general rule seams to be that the more intelligent you are the less likely you are to believe in a God.
Exactly. Don't force your atheism on me or my children, please.
Atheism is rarely forced on anyone, I do not know many atheists that go around trying to convert religious people. What atheists do is try to get people to think rationally about their beliefs, and this just so happens almost always conflicts with religious ideas. The end result is that religious people feel that they are being attacked, but no more than NeoNazis or any other group with rediculous beliefs.
I can't believe this troll was modded insightful. Actually, it's Slashdot, yes I can... if it attacks religion or conservative politics, it's insightful. If it supports religion or attacks liberal politics, it's flamebait, trolling, etc.
You are saying that most Slashdot readers have a certain bias, but you are forgetting what Slashdot is. It is "News For Nerds", which generally implies it is built for a slightly above average in intelligence crowd. This may not always be true, but I am sure that your average Slashdot reader has at least slightly above average intelligence. Therefore it is pretty obvious that in such a society of smart people, religion is going to get a bad rap.
Maybe if you find a "News For Mindless Masses" site you will find people who praise religion and discard rational thought.
Every time someone has a different opinion than you, you scream trolling. And with beliefs such as yours, it is no woner that you have alot of differing opinions with alot of people.
Just because both religion and science have a different explanation for life does not mean both belong in a science classroom. All it could mean is that they both may belong in a class discussing the origin of life. But as for a science classroom, only science's theories should be discussed. As soon as another theory for the origin of life is found it will be discussed in classrooms right next to evolution. But no such theory exists.
Religion's explanations should stay in sunday school classes and private religous schools where they belong. I do agree that they could be put into a philosophy/history/sociology class, but never a science classroom.
Presenting multiple theories will not "broaden" the scientific minds of our children if we present them with unscientific theories. If I went into a math classroom and started saying that 2 + 2 = 5, that does not broaden the minds of the students. It confuses them, and makes the job of the teachers harder. It would produce students with problems in learning and using mathematics.
If you present propoganda like ID in science classrooms, it will confuse children. Average people have a hard enough time understanding what a theory is already, we do not need to confuse them further. The very fact that ideas like intelligent design are even being humored by our society goes to show that we need to improve how science is taught in school, not go backwards.
Interesting how a Libertarian would want to post his ideas under Anonymous Coward. It is almost like he realizes how rediculous he is. While I dont agree with Libertarians, I do feel sorry for them because it is people like this guy that give them all a bad name.
Isnt that Business 101? Buy Low / Sell High? So they embrace marketplace factors when they are in their favor, and try to minimize those factors when they are not in their favor. Makes sense.
The parent post never said that gaming itself in a non-social event. It had nothing to do with whether or not you are social when you are gaming. His point was that roleplaying allows a person to enter a different world, one in which he is more important than he is in the real world. He is escaping the real world because for some reason he doesnt like it that much. Gardening, reading, running - all of these tasks actually take place in the real world, so are far different than role playing.
The poster isnt claiming that there is a cause/effect relationship between roleplaying and a lack of social skills. He is simply saying that there is a correlation. Gaming doesnt make someone unsocial, but unsocial people as a general rule are more drawn to roleplaying and similar hobbies. Can you honestly say that you dont agree that there is such a correlation?
Like the parent poster said, it is not economically efficient to sell "blank" computers. The cost that they save per computer is going to be marginal, probably only about $40 at the most (windows is alot cheaper for retailers). And for that $40 they are going to see less sales, more technical support questions, and more returns.
There are going to be less sales because most people want an operating system preinstalled on their computer. A store such as Best Buy only has so much space to sell equipment, and a computer that doesnt sell is better off not being on the shelves.
If they sell computers without OSes, there are going to be more technical support questions. Those tech support staff members cost money, and they need to be more knowledgeable if they need to know how to help setup linux.
And returns cost money too, even if it is just shipping costs or the loss in profit from selling refurbished systems.
While it is true that religous private schools give a better education than public schools, that has nothing to do with the "religous" part and everything to with them being "private". I have three close friends who went to catholic schools, and only one is even christian. It just so happens that the only private schools in the area were catholic schools.
While I do not think that religion is the main reason for the decline, I think that it definetly helps cause it. And it isnt that the regilous right is "anti-science". The point is simply that forming opinions based on religion goes against everything science stands for, which is to approach every problem rationally and with an open mind. Having a religious mindset and having a scientific mindset are polar opposites.
That is absolutely not true, because Intelligent Design is not science. Whether or not Intelligent Design has merits is not the point. The point is that if you want to teach it keep it in a philosophy or history class not the science classroom. I believe that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a good book, and worth teaching to students. But I do not think that it should be read in a science class.
This kind of nonsense would raise prices of software in the same manner as the rising costs of hospitals. One factor that increases hospital prices is the fact that they have to worry about malpractice insurance. If software developers had to purchase liability insurance as well then can you imagine how expensive software would become?
I guess it would help the open source movement though, since no one would want to pay $500 for a copy of Windows. Not that we want to pay for it at its current price anyway.
I am not sure how the UN actually works, but doesnt the United States have veto power over any decisions, just like the other original members? Wouldnt any decision the UN maks be ultimatly vetoes by the US?
Starcraft had cooperation mode where 2 people played the same side. I loved playing it that way, since I could do the base management and resource allocation and my partner could worry about the fighting. I could do what I did best and leave the fighting to someone else:-)
In Civ III there were unmanageable time delays in between each turn at the mid-late stages of the game. If you played on a large or huge world, it could take five minutes or more for the AI to complete its turn. And you couldnt just go and eat a sandwitch, because there would be prompts along the way for diplomacy and such that you had to be ready to click on. Is this new version of Civilization going to run faster, even on non top of the line computers?
You seam to me that you are just like all those other software engineers that thought they were worth so much, but soon found out that they werent. I have dozens of friends in various areas of the computer industry, some that have had career problems and some that have not. And the one thing that is true about 100% of the people I know who have had career problems is that they simply were not worth what their ego told them they were.
If you are still working in the computer industry then lets hope you are at least making 25k a year right now. That means that if you took a 75% pay cut then you were making a 6-digit salary. I am sorry but if you were honestly worth that much money then you wouldnt have trouble finding a job in any economy. You may have had to take a cut to 50k or so in a bad economy, but would never have spent 26 months unemployed.
People in the computer industry were being overpayed for so long that they got an inflated self image about what they were worth. If you are good at what you do and are worth what you are being payed then you WILL keep your job in ANY economy. Of course there are exceptions, but they are very few and far between.
It is said that 20% of the workforce does 80% of the work. Only the other 80% of the workers ever have to worry about losing their jobs because of a sagging economy. And those 80% only have other people to thank that they had those jobs in the first place. They shouldnt turn around a bitch that they arent getting a free ride anymore.
I think that this is an important point about Microsoft's security issues that I know I never considered before. When you have any software that is so widely used it is going to have more security breaches than an equal but less mainstream peice of software. Looks like the problems that Microsoft has had over the years have more to do with being too widely used than actual poor design (or more likely they are on par with eachother). And with the kind of money Microsoft has at its disposal, they are finally cutting down on those security issues.
I wonder if this will be a problem for open source software in general if it starts to become more mainstream. Maybe it will be found that without a large amount of money to be put into security that there will be massive security holes in the future for OS software.
Yes, we definetly still have obesity problems even though we already glamorize health and beauty. But the rise in obesity isnt because of this, it is because of the easier access to food and expecially unhealthy food. That just shows that whenever you make something unhealthy mainstream, such as fast food, the society becomes less healthy.
This can directly be applied to glamorizing video games on the same level as sports. If you make playing games more mainstream, more people will choose it over doing something active. So basically that shows it is very reasonable to believe that the spread of gaming will make our children more unhealthy.
I sure hope that frags per second never gets the familiarity of batting averages. The last thing we need to do is glamorize computer games over actual excersize. While I am not saying that there isnt real skill in these games, kids should still be encouraged to put down FIFA soccer and actually buy a soccer ball. Kids are already too out of shape, the last thing we should ever do is glamorize your average out of shape computer gamer.
I agree with you that if people do not want to put up with Linux then it is much easier to just move to Windows than to wait for a change in Linux. The problem is that the point of this entire news article and all of these threads is that some of the big companies associated with Linux (such as Novell) want to take some of the marketplace from Windows. That is what everyone here is talking about. So the parent posters are talking about what it is going to take to make MORE people happy with Linux, not just the people who already are happy with it.
When I worked as a systems admin almost all of my servers ran off of linux. I really like the operating system, but I never once used it as a desktop except for just as an experiment or case study. I still own a linux machine at my home, but frankly I havent even turned it on for months. I only need a desktop at home most of the time, to serf the internet, play games, and do programming. I will not switch over to linux as a desktop until it is EASIER to do the above tasks with linux than windows, and neither will anyone else in the mainstream.
It doesnt seam to me that all these different versions are much different than what has been done in the past. I just helped my girlfriend buy a laptop online, and she had the choice between XP Home, Media, and Professional. And that doesnt start to cover any of the current server operating systems.
If Microsoft is doing anything confusing with Vista, they have been doing the same thing with XP and Windows Server for years.
You completely missed the point of the GP post. People like you who will not engage in intelligent discussions about the origins of prejudice because it is too taboo (or not politically correct) are a large part of the problem. Saying that prejudice is around just because some people are stupid bigots is just like looking at a kid with ADHD and saying he is stupid because he does poorly in school. There are real social and biological reasons for these prejudices.
Human beings are generally thought of as having better cognitive abilities than any other animal. This means we can take in more information, in this case statistical information, that can help us make decisions. Most animals dont really understand the nutritional values of their foods, but humans can descriminate between empty calories and foods with good nutritional content.
The problem is that this same ability to categorize things causes many stereotypes and racism. The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in 1994, 67% if all arrests were made against whites and 21% were made against blacks. Since 80% of the population was white and 12% black in 1990, that shows that blacks were twice as likely to commit crimes. And the statistics inside the prisons is more alarming. 35% of inmates were white and 48% were black. This means that a black person was about 9 times more likely to be in prison. It is not very hard to see why people can form stereotypes that assert that black people commit more crimes.
And yes I know that prejudices and racial inequalities are part of the cause for these differences, but that is not what people see. People simply see black people committing more crimes than white people. And that is what helps cause racism to fester.
I am not saying that these stereotypes are good, im just saying that ignoring the fact that they are formed for a reason is just stupid. One of the major steps in stopping any form of prejudice is to eliminate its roots, since as the GP said there is usually a real reason for any stereotype.
You didnt understand what the GP post meant regarding the skill involved in Poker. Poker is different from most gambling because you are not playing against the dealer, you are playing against the other players. In almost any form of gambling you will eventually lose money because the odds are set by the casino. But the only thing you have to beat in online poker is the rake.
If you can win more money from your opponents than the casinos rakes in on each hand, then you WILL make money at poker. There are plenty of people who make a living off of poker. I know of two friends who are paying their way through college with online poker (one still gets over half of the money from student loans). I dont make that much money, but I havent ever had a stretch of more than a couple days where I havent increased my money online.
You CAN make money from playing poker, it is not gambling in the sense that you can beat the system in poker. You just have to have some skill, and a bank roll big enough to absorb losses from a few bad beats.
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See, ranton, your OTHER post was not a troll. This is. And flamebait.
While I did use a little more sarcasm in this post, I still do not consider it trolling.
Your implication that only stupid, non-above-average people are religious is patently absurd and contradcits evidence to the contrary. Should we put together a list of extremely smart people over the ages that were religious?
Actually I do imply that the smarter you are the more likely you are to not believe in religion. I do not think that is flamebait. There are plenty of studies that suggest this. Two such studies were done by James H Leuba in 1914 and a study done in Nature magazine in 1998. In Leuba's study he took the 400 leading scientists from the American Men of Science (AMS). 73.6% of the respondants claimed to be athiest or agnostic. He redid his study in 1933 and found the number rose to 85% of the scientists claiming to not believe in God. When Nature magazine redid the study using the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), they found that 93% of the respondants did not believe in God.
There are many other studies, these are just a few. While this does not mean that you are stupid if you believe in God, it does show that highly intelligent people rarely are spiritual. I am sure there are hundreds of exceptions, but the general rule seams to be that the more intelligent you are the less likely you are to believe in a God.
Exactly. Don't force your atheism on me or my children, please.
Atheism is rarely forced on anyone, I do not know many atheists that go around trying to convert religious people. What atheists do is try to get people to think rationally about their beliefs, and this just so happens almost always conflicts with religious ideas. The end result is that religious people feel that they are being attacked, but no more than NeoNazis or any other group with rediculous beliefs.
I can't believe this troll was modded insightful. Actually, it's Slashdot, yes I can... if it attacks religion or conservative politics, it's insightful. If it supports religion or attacks liberal politics, it's flamebait, trolling, etc.
You are saying that most Slashdot readers have a certain bias, but you are forgetting what Slashdot is. It is "News For Nerds", which generally implies it is built for a slightly above average in intelligence crowd. This may not always be true, but I am sure that your average Slashdot reader has at least slightly above average intelligence. Therefore it is pretty obvious that in such a society of smart people, religion is going to get a bad rap.
Maybe if you find a "News For Mindless Masses" site you will find people who praise religion and discard rational thought.
Every time someone has a different opinion than you, you scream trolling. And with beliefs such as yours, it is no woner that you have alot of differing opinions with alot of people.
Just because both religion and science have a different explanation for life does not mean both belong in a science classroom. All it could mean is that they both may belong in a class discussing the origin of life. But as for a science classroom, only science's theories should be discussed. As soon as another theory for the origin of life is found it will be discussed in classrooms right next to evolution. But no such theory exists.
Religion's explanations should stay in sunday school classes and private religous schools where they belong. I do agree that they could be put into a philosophy/history/sociology class, but never a science classroom.
Presenting multiple theories will not "broaden" the scientific minds of our children if we present them with unscientific theories. If I went into a math classroom and started saying that 2 + 2 = 5, that does not broaden the minds of the students. It confuses them, and makes the job of the teachers harder. It would produce students with problems in learning and using mathematics.
If you present propoganda like ID in science classrooms, it will confuse children. Average people have a hard enough time understanding what a theory is already, we do not need to confuse them further. The very fact that ideas like intelligent design are even being humored by our society goes to show that we need to improve how science is taught in school, not go backwards.
Interesting how a Libertarian would want to post his ideas under Anonymous Coward. It is almost like he realizes how rediculous he is. While I dont agree with Libertarians, I do feel sorry for them because it is people like this guy that give them all a bad name.
Isnt that Business 101? Buy Low / Sell High? So they embrace marketplace factors when they are in their favor, and try to minimize those factors when they are not in their favor. Makes sense.
The parent post never said that gaming itself in a non-social event. It had nothing to do with whether or not you are social when you are gaming. His point was that roleplaying allows a person to enter a different world, one in which he is more important than he is in the real world. He is escaping the real world because for some reason he doesnt like it that much. Gardening, reading, running - all of these tasks actually take place in the real world, so are far different than role playing.
The poster isnt claiming that there is a cause/effect relationship between roleplaying and a lack of social skills. He is simply saying that there is a correlation. Gaming doesnt make someone unsocial, but unsocial people as a general rule are more drawn to roleplaying and similar hobbies. Can you honestly say that you dont agree that there is such a correlation?
Like the parent poster said, it is not economically efficient to sell "blank" computers. The cost that they save per computer is going to be marginal, probably only about $40 at the most (windows is alot cheaper for retailers). And for that $40 they are going to see less sales, more technical support questions, and more returns.
There are going to be less sales because most people want an operating system preinstalled on their computer. A store such as Best Buy only has so much space to sell equipment, and a computer that doesnt sell is better off not being on the shelves.
If they sell computers without OSes, there are going to be more technical support questions. Those tech support staff members cost money, and they need to be more knowledgeable if they need to know how to help setup linux.
And returns cost money too, even if it is just shipping costs or the loss in profit from selling refurbished systems.
While it is true that religous private schools give a better education than public schools, that has nothing to do with the "religous" part and everything to with them being "private". I have three close friends who went to catholic schools, and only one is even christian. It just so happens that the only private schools in the area were catholic schools.
While I do not think that religion is the main reason for the decline, I think that it definetly helps cause it. And it isnt that the regilous right is "anti-science". The point is simply that forming opinions based on religion goes against everything science stands for, which is to approach every problem rationally and with an open mind. Having a religious mindset and having a scientific mindset are polar opposites.
That is absolutely not true, because Intelligent Design is not science. Whether or not Intelligent Design has merits is not the point. The point is that if you want to teach it keep it in a philosophy or history class not the science classroom. I believe that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is a good book, and worth teaching to students. But I do not think that it should be read in a science class.
This kind of nonsense would raise prices of software in the same manner as the rising costs of hospitals. One factor that increases hospital prices is the fact that they have to worry about malpractice insurance. If software developers had to purchase liability insurance as well then can you imagine how expensive software would become?
I guess it would help the open source movement though, since no one would want to pay $500 for a copy of Windows. Not that we want to pay for it at its current price anyway.
I am not sure how the UN actually works, but doesnt the United States have veto power over any decisions, just like the other original members? Wouldnt any decision the UN maks be ultimatly vetoes by the US?
Starcraft had cooperation mode where 2 people played the same side. I loved playing it that way, since I could do the base management and resource allocation and my partner could worry about the fighting. I could do what I did best and leave the fighting to someone else :-)
In Civ III there were unmanageable time delays in between each turn at the mid-late stages of the game. If you played on a large or huge world, it could take five minutes or more for the AI to complete its turn. And you couldnt just go and eat a sandwitch, because there would be prompts along the way for diplomacy and such that you had to be ready to click on. Is this new version of Civilization going to run faster, even on non top of the line computers?
You seam to me that you are just like all those other software engineers that thought they were worth so much, but soon found out that they werent. I have dozens of friends in various areas of the computer industry, some that have had career problems and some that have not. And the one thing that is true about 100% of the people I know who have had career problems is that they simply were not worth what their ego told them they were.
If you are still working in the computer industry then lets hope you are at least making 25k a year right now. That means that if you took a 75% pay cut then you were making a 6-digit salary. I am sorry but if you were honestly worth that much money then you wouldnt have trouble finding a job in any economy. You may have had to take a cut to 50k or so in a bad economy, but would never have spent 26 months unemployed.
People in the computer industry were being overpayed for so long that they got an inflated self image about what they were worth. If you are good at what you do and are worth what you are being payed then you WILL keep your job in ANY economy. Of course there are exceptions, but they are very few and far between.
It is said that 20% of the workforce does 80% of the work. Only the other 80% of the workers ever have to worry about losing their jobs because of a sagging economy. And those 80% only have other people to thank that they had those jobs in the first place. They shouldnt turn around a bitch that they arent getting a free ride anymore.
I think that this is an important point about Microsoft's security issues that I know I never considered before. When you have any software that is so widely used it is going to have more security breaches than an equal but less mainstream peice of software. Looks like the problems that Microsoft has had over the years have more to do with being too widely used than actual poor design (or more likely they are on par with eachother). And with the kind of money Microsoft has at its disposal, they are finally cutting down on those security issues.
I wonder if this will be a problem for open source software in general if it starts to become more mainstream. Maybe it will be found that without a large amount of money to be put into security that there will be massive security holes in the future for OS software.
Yes, we definetly still have obesity problems even though we already glamorize health and beauty. But the rise in obesity isnt because of this, it is because of the easier access to food and expecially unhealthy food. That just shows that whenever you make something unhealthy mainstream, such as fast food, the society becomes less healthy.
This can directly be applied to glamorizing video games on the same level as sports. If you make playing games more mainstream, more people will choose it over doing something active. So basically that shows it is very reasonable to believe that the spread of gaming will make our children more unhealthy.
I sure hope that frags per second never gets the familiarity of batting averages. The last thing we need to do is glamorize computer games over actual excersize. While I am not saying that there isnt real skill in these games, kids should still be encouraged to put down FIFA soccer and actually buy a soccer ball. Kids are already too out of shape, the last thing we should ever do is glamorize your average out of shape computer gamer.
I agree with you that if people do not want to put up with Linux then it is much easier to just move to Windows than to wait for a change in Linux. The problem is that the point of this entire news article and all of these threads is that some of the big companies associated with Linux (such as Novell) want to take some of the marketplace from Windows. That is what everyone here is talking about. So the parent posters are talking about what it is going to take to make MORE people happy with Linux, not just the people who already are happy with it.
When I worked as a systems admin almost all of my servers ran off of linux. I really like the operating system, but I never once used it as a desktop except for just as an experiment or case study. I still own a linux machine at my home, but frankly I havent even turned it on for months. I only need a desktop at home most of the time, to serf the internet, play games, and do programming. I will not switch over to linux as a desktop until it is EASIER to do the above tasks with linux than windows, and neither will anyone else in the mainstream.
It doesnt seam to me that all these different versions are much different than what has been done in the past. I just helped my girlfriend buy a laptop online, and she had the choice between XP Home, Media, and Professional. And that doesnt start to cover any of the current server operating systems.
If Microsoft is doing anything confusing with Vista, they have been doing the same thing with XP and Windows Server for years.
You completely missed the point of the GP post. People like you who will not engage in intelligent discussions about the origins of prejudice because it is too taboo (or not politically correct) are a large part of the problem. Saying that prejudice is around just because some people are stupid bigots is just like looking at a kid with ADHD and saying he is stupid because he does poorly in school. There are real social and biological reasons for these prejudices.
Human beings are generally thought of as having better cognitive abilities than any other animal. This means we can take in more information, in this case statistical information, that can help us make decisions. Most animals dont really understand the nutritional values of their foods, but humans can descriminate between empty calories and foods with good nutritional content.
The problem is that this same ability to categorize things causes many stereotypes and racism. The Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that in 1994, 67% if all arrests were made against whites and 21% were made against blacks. Since 80% of the population was white and 12% black in 1990, that shows that blacks were twice as likely to commit crimes. And the statistics inside the prisons is more alarming. 35% of inmates were white and 48% were black. This means that a black person was about 9 times more likely to be in prison. It is not very hard to see why people can form stereotypes that assert that black people commit more crimes.
And yes I know that prejudices and racial inequalities are part of the cause for these differences, but that is not what people see. People simply see black people committing more crimes than white people. And that is what helps cause racism to fester.
I am not saying that these stereotypes are good, im just saying that ignoring the fact that they are formed for a reason is just stupid. One of the major steps in stopping any form of prejudice is to eliminate its roots, since as the GP said there is usually a real reason for any stereotype.
The GP never claimed to be a good scientist. :-)
You didnt understand what the GP post meant regarding the skill involved in Poker. Poker is different from most gambling because you are not playing against the dealer, you are playing against the other players. In almost any form of gambling you will eventually lose money because the odds are set by the casino. But the only thing you have to beat in online poker is the rake.
If you can win more money from your opponents than the casinos rakes in on each hand, then you WILL make money at poker. There are plenty of people who make a living off of poker. I know of two friends who are paying their way through college with online poker (one still gets over half of the money from student loans). I dont make that much money, but I havent ever had a stretch of more than a couple days where I havent increased my money online.
You CAN make money from playing poker, it is not gambling in the sense that you can beat the system in poker. You just have to have some skill, and a bank roll big enough to absorb losses from a few bad beats.