Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting
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Believe it or not there are many Catholics that see no conflict between science and our faith. We start from the definition of God being the creator of the universe. Therefore anything you learn about science teaches you about God. There can be no conflict.
Well, science and religion are not the same thing, dude. Science is merely a methodology, A methodology can make no assertion about anything, whereas religion makes all sorts of assertions about everything. So your assertion that there is no conflict between religion and science, while true, is vacuous. They are not in conflict because they aren't in the same category. Leaving that aside, your definition rests on an untestable hypothesis, the existence of some supernatural entity. For your argument to be valid would require faith, which is not compatible with any method of rational inquiry, of which science is a shining example. This further underscores the serious differences between science and religion. So -- put your Nicene Creed back on the shelf next to your copies of Augustine and Aquinas, and pick up some Dawkins or Dennett, instead. If you are trying to defend your faith (and you should!) you would be better served to see what arguments are marshaled against you, than to recite 1600-year-old Catholic doctrine in the hope that nobody will call you out.
These missile interceptors aren't for North Korea. That is the excuse. They are actually a bargaining chip for China. If China reels in North Korea, then these missile interceptors near their borders will be removed.
Uh, did you even read the summary, dude? Can you explain to me how defensive interceptors parked off the US pacific coast can simultaneously be located "near [China's] borders?"
All of the gadgets that existed twenty years ago are still here, but with only a fraction of the redundancy. I think about what my home looked like twenty years ago, and compare it to what it looks like now, and the difference is stark and revealing. Cable closets and their attendant tentacles of cat 5 abandoned for a single wireless router, telephones in the kitchen, bedroom, and den abandoned for one that I carry in my pocket, the bulky one-way media devices that tended to dominate a room abandoned for slim, elegant two-way devices that hang on my walls. This is not a loss at all -- what I am seeing is a consolidation of redundant hardware, not a loss of gadgets. Gadgets exist for their functionality, and I have all the functionality I've ever had, plus new capabilities I only dreamed about twenty years ago. The big win is not having to replicate all the gadget's hardware in every place that I want to use the functionality of the gadget.
Re:A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting
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New Pope Selected
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· Score: 1
How did you test that hypothesis?
The same way you tested the hypothesis that empirical methods can discover regular, universal laws; and with equivalent results.
What? You are assuming science and religion are the same kinds of things. They aren't. Science is a methodology, religion is an artifact -- an ontological distinction that Augustine and Aquinas understood, even if the rest of the good Doctors of the Church do not...:) It makes sense to test the assertions of religions against reality, because religions can and do make assertions about reality. But a methodology is merely a methodology -- it can't make assertions about anything.
A Jesuit Pope -- this could be very interesting
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New Pope Selected
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you have ever had the pleasure of debating with a Jesuit, you'll know what I'm talking about. I'm not being sarcastic or ironic in the least. If the Church is the Federation, the Jesuits are the Vulcans. Jesuit scholars have made many contributions to our collective store of knowlege, especially in math, astronomy, and philosophy.. These are the guys that invented propaganda, and are trained in logic, analysis, and debate in support of their faith. Speaking of their faith, it is the most rarefied, intellectualized faith on the planet. I'm looking forward to a vigorous debate between secularism and theism over the next several decades, and it's good to know that the opposition is putting their best foot forward.
Well, are we listening to the complete Der God-Damn-Her-Dung (I'd be tweeting my ass off) or La Mer? All seriousness aside, however: in defense of those darn kids, most of the music heard at such events was made before there was recording. Lots of repetition. Certain performers have tried to deal with that by editing out (or down) thematic repetition. Yet that, too, is considered blasphemy in most quarters: how dare you not play every single note that Mozart or Beethoven wrote?
But what probably matters more than that is quality. Once upon a time in America, about 75 years ago, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartok lived in the same hood, within blocks of one another, in L.A. Toscanini, Stokowski, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, all lived in this country and gave life to our culture. Walt Disney made a famous film with great music; our American Mozart, Gershwin, was an icon. Now, orchestras can't pay their musicians and a once-great culture is draining or drifting out of our cities. What rotted first, the chicken or the egg? Did we abandon quality or did it leave us? And, leaving America alone and taking a broader view: where are the new great composers? Since Shostakovich died (1975), has there been a significant symphonic composer? Can you name one?
Glass, Copland, Britten? Tomita, Schnittke, Khachaturian? Khodaly, Salonen, Takemitsu? I've limited myself to significant symphonic composers (feel free to engage me on the error bars around "significant") who were alive as of your (pretty arbitrary) date of 1975. Do I need to go on, or are you satisfied that you were just fucking wrong?
I think Jacobs doesn't understand the economics of the performing arts. The performing arts are largely a legacy of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Symphonies, like theater troupes and opera companies, depend on patronage to survive, not the box office. Ticket prices for a given performance are set high enough to keep the riff-raff out, with the gap between the production costs and the box office being closed by wealthy patrons. For a symphony to survive, they would be better served to figure out how to keep and increase their patronage, not their audience. Wealthy people aren't always motivated by the lure of profit (they are already wealthy, after all) but being recognized by their wealthy peers as a patron of the arts does have value. That is what symphonies should try to exploit, the enhanced social standing that those performances provide to their wealthy patrons. I guess a case could be made for attracting the children of their wealthy patrons, but that is decidedly not the same case as attracting the children of the riff-raff that are already structurally excluded on purpose.
The good doctor seems to be (perhaps carefully and deliberately) missing the point that science is merely a methodology, purely functional in nature, independent of what it is applied to, and that a religion is an artifact, dependent on a whole host of concepts to give it form, meaning and function. Augustine and his somewhat more intellectual heir, Aquinas, missed this point, too, so Dr Bakker is in really good company, if it's not deliberate.:) Science would exist whether or not there was a mind around capable of discovering it and exploiting it. Not so a religion, which must be produced by a mind in the first place, and can exist only as long as some mind is around to embrace it and defend it against competing religions. Let me hammer this point home -- a methodology like science doesn't require a mind to exist (it exists whether or not a mind is around to discover it) but an artifact like a religion must first be created by a mind, and then it must be defended when some other mind dreams up a competitor. Science and religion are two irreconcilably different things, and no amount of wishful thinking, no matter how eloquently phrased, is going to bridge the ontological gap between them.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
Hmmm...Pol Pot did as you suggest, so did Mao. When you attack the ideological infrastructure of the regime you are trying to overthrow, as you are suggesting, you leave a vacuum that has to be filled. If you can replace that ideological infrastructure with one more commensurate with your own, fine -- but you have to get your own in place and then protect it so that some other ideologue can't displace you by attacking you in the same way, which is where Pol Pot and Mao failed. The lesson to be learned from their failures? Control the sources of information about competing ideologies. Whacking ideological opponents was a viable strategy, back when suppressing competing ideas was merely a matter of killing the brains where those ideas resided. Technology (starting with writing, then the printing press, then radio and TV, and then the net) allowed ideas to slip from brain to brain faster than the regime could kill off the contaminated brains. Pol Pot killed teachers and parents (by the millions) and successfully inserted his own ideology into a new generation, but failed to keep competing ideologies out, resulting in his ultimate loss of control. Mao made the same mistake at first, but realized (too late, perhaps, but he did try to correct course) that keeping opposing ideologies out was impossible when you had over a billion vulnerable brains to protect. His course correction resulted in complete state control of information, culminating in the Great Firewall of China, which at least delayed the onset of ideological rot, which in theory would give time for the regime to devise a way to innoculate all those vulnerable brains. Iran is doing the exact same thing by clamping down on the sources of ideological rot. It remains to be seen whether or not regimes like Iran and North Korea can delay it long enough to survive, but I kinda doubt it, though ideologues in the US seem to have found a way that might work -- make it easier for your subjects to get the information you want them to have while simultaneously attacking the sources of information that oppose your ideology. Rupert Murdoch may be a multi-billionaire capitalist running dog in Mao's eyes, but he is Mao's spiritual heir none-the-less.
If you serve the ads yourself, then afaik no ad blockers block them.
huh? If I see any ad (rare with ABP, even locally-hosted ads, but it does happen) I can manually block just that element with ABP's element killer functionality. Basically, I use it to kill any frame/element that contains content I'm not interested in at the moment. I use it on news sites to block news that I'm not interested in (who gives a fuck about sports news or movie reviews?) and I use it on ebay and amazon to block *everything* except the details of the item I'm purchasing. I use it to block those annoying social networking badges and icons that have started to show up everywhere. I use it on Netflix to block everything except the show launch elements. A few clever content creators have started putting sappy little "We see you are using an ad blocker, please consider whitelisting us" messages underneath the elements that ABP automatically blocks. I never go back to those sites -- so there's probably truth to the meme that relying on a revenue stream generated by serving advertising to people who don't want advertising is a bad thing to do.
They are simply doing what the law allows them to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
As an aside, I'll note that something doesn't have to be illegal for it to be ethically questionable. "Not forbidden by law" and "not wrong" are categories that generally have some mutual overlap, but should not be conflated. From a technical standpoint, I believe sociologists and psychologists refer to individuals who define their personal morality solely by what is or is not illegal as "assholes".
...and those same sociologists and psychologists have a term for people like you who think there is some kind of ethical or moral standard against which a person's behavior can reliably be judged. The term is "delusional."
If you're not familiar with the Beretta 92F's (aka M9) habit of throwing slides into shooter's faces you haven't been paying attention to guns for very long. This isn't some Saturday night special failing in a catastrophic manner, this was a premium-priced weapon chosen to replace the 1911 as the US Army standard sidearm.
Despite Beretta's continual claim that the failures were due to military use of +P rounds, many prominent LE armorers have reported failures with standard pressure loads.
Nah -- My twenty-five-year-old M9 has over 15000 +P rounds through it. The slide failure rate on the M9 was beyond six sigma land -- 14 recorded cases of the M9 slide failing out of over 300k M9 pistols purchased by DoD. In case you aren't trolling on behalf of SACO (who lost the bidding war when Beretta came in at $1 per gun cheaper) I will allow that you might be thinking of the Beretta 92SB, which is the civilian version of the M9. You can read a pretty good run down of the M9 slide failure myth here.
It reminds me of those few gun stores where they ban their customers from carrying a gun while their staff is openly carrying. Sure, it's their right to ban such but it's still hypocritical.
lol...I live in one of the most gun-friendly states in the union -- Arizona. There are seven gun shops within a ten minute drive of my house, and two shooting ranges inside of fifteen minutes. There are three supermarkets (yes, supermarkets!) -- two Wal-marts and a K-Mart -- that also sell sporting goods, including shotguns, rifles and a small selection of hand guns. At the Wally-world, you can purchase 500 rounds of 9mm parabellum at 6am on a Sunday morning, and the sleepy-eyed clerk just yawns as she's stacking the boxes for you on the counter. Getting the picture, yet? Let me see if I can make it a little clearer. Maybe one more anecdote to crystallize this for you. People can and do carry openly in Arizona (not a majority, not even a large minority) but you will always see somebody carrying in Arizona if you are out in public enough. The local military base has a "local conditions" briefing for newly arrived personnel and their families, which includes a presentation to explain why there is no need to dial 911 if the guy or girl standing in line next to you at the Starbucks or the bank has a piece shoved into their waistband. Now, about your hypocrisy thing -- at every gun shop in my home town that I've ever visited, there is a sign on the door with words to the effect that your weapon must be secured in your holster, or you will be relieved of it -- probably by prying it from your cold, dead fingers. Not that you can't carry it, mind you, but just that you be smart about it. One even has a picture of Dirty Harry with "Do you feel lucky, Punk?" tacked beneath the warning sign, in case you think they are being a tad hypocritical. All this is to point out to you that in Arizona, the idea that somebody can stop you from responsibly bearing a weapon is a non-starter. Hypocrisy can only occur when it's possible for you to prevent somebody from doing something that you do your self. When it comes to Arizona and carrying a gun, that kind of hypocrisy just can't happen.
I still chuckle at physicists who think that objective reality can be determined using mathematics, which is a purely abstract tool. Truly useful, but there will always be a gap between model and reality. String theorists are absolutely ok with this -- they don't need to walk away from anything, because they aren't playing the SM game to begin with. The SM is incomplete and cannot ever be complete -- having to plug-and-chug 17 physical constants into your model is not the stuff of a complete theory. String theorists know this, and are content to wait for the paradigm shift that is inevitably coming.
The interesting part of the search is over -- what follows is a couple of decades of shrinking the error bars. As it stands right now, all the data is converging to a bog-stock standard model particle. There is an anomaly in some of the ATLAS data, but the discrepancy is shrinking. According to the LHC data presented at the Moriond Conference on March 6, the anomaly isn't getting worse when more data is included, which means that it probably can be explained by something other than new physics. Add in the 2.5GeV difference between the Higgs masses in the ATLAS data, and it looks more like there is some kind of systemic error with ATLAS, not a glimpse of new physics. All other data are tightly consistent with the SM. And for what it is worth, the idea that a spin determination needs to be made is a bit of wishful thinking. It's probably Director Bertolucci trying to keep the media interest going. A 126 GeV particle can have only spin zero -- there isn't even a model for a spin 2 resonance that is simultaneously mathematically rigorous and not eliminated by experimental evidence that already exists. According to this excellent blog by a particle physicist based in Paris, the best chance of finding new physics is observing the Higgs making non-SM interactions in some hitherto unexpected decay channel, something that is possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the fierce competition for shrinking scientific research funding, getting funding for that kind of research is not going to happen, and the grumbling coming from particle physicists is because they realize that the Higgs is not going to be a meal ticket for them anymore. .
1) Threat meter (h/t to Omen from my WoW days). An app that scans public databases to build a threat profile (criminal and civil convictions, restraining orders, presence on sexual predator lists, bankruptcies, etc) and tags each person in view with their threat level and the axis of the threat. There are companies that do this right now; HR departments routinely engage their services to screen potential employment candidates.
2) Snopes-o-matic. Parses assertions from people you are conversing with and bounces them against snopes, factcheck, and other debunking sites returning a credibility score, tagging these people appropriately when you meet them again.
3) Continuity checker. Remembers every encounter you have (when, where, what was said by whom) and tags people with a precis of your previous conversations should you meet them again. Helps to keep your story straight and flags people who like to mis-remember things.
I guess I should point out that all of these apps would require a redefinition (at minimum!) of what constitutes civil etiquette, but currently acceptable modes of social intelligence gathering is already in a high state of flux thanks to the internet. I don't see politeness and/or the reverence/fetish for privacy being a significant barrier to these kinds of apps once people get a taste for the potential leverage they provide during social encounters.
Man, I've seen some distorted submissions, but this one takes the cake. Paul was filibustering Obama's nominee to head the CIA, not drones, though he repeatedly hit on themes of the overreach of executive power. It was grandstanding by Paul, period. Its purpose was to get him some exposure in the news cycle, and that was it -- mission accomplished. For what it is worth, *was* is the proper tense; it's been over since 1am EST today)
Their FAQ says that and Android client is in the works and will be demoed very soon. As for Apple they claim that Apple's restrictions shuts them out of iOS - but if you have Apple you already have access to FaceTime for all your Apple devices, not that FT can do multi person calls though.
That real-soon-now claim was made for the FOSDEM 2013 conference which occurred over a month ago. There was no jitsi android client at FOSDEM 2013. For what its worth, they've made several real-soon-now claims about an android client for the past couple of years. While there *is* a jitsi android client, it still lacks a committed user interface, so it definitely is still just a work in progress -- I suspect the devs are waiting for android's platform fragmentation problem to go away.:)
How long before all RC helicopters (and all hobby RC planes for that matter) will be banned ?
They are already trying in Texas and in New Hampshire. Notice the inclusion of drones by name in the legislation, and the lack of differentiation between government use and private use.
This article from a few weeks ago shows that two other state legislatures, specifically Florida and Virginia, are attempting a legislative fix to drone use, though those attempts are targeted specifically at government use of drones. The mayor of Seattle cancelled the Seattle PD's drone program and ordered the chief of police to return the ones they'd already bought to the manufacturer for a refund.
With that said, attempts to block government use of drones are probably doomed to failure, since the FAA has already been directed by the 112th Congress to integrate drones into the national airspace via HR 658 (relevant section here,) and police departments across the nation are buying them in droves, despite what happened in Seattle. The DHS's "loan a drone" program, coupled with DHS's $4M grant program to local law authorities to acquire drones, would strongly suggest that government use of drones is here to stay.
Given the push/pull legislative wars being driven by the privacy vs. public safety debate, I doubt that banning RC aircraft is a viable legislative option. What is (probably) going to happen with RC aircraft is what has already happened with other "hobbies" that are deemed to be a threat to public safety (think: greenhouses that could be used for growing pot, legal chemicals that could be used to manufacture illegal drugs, model rockets that could be weaponized.) Purchases of RC aircraft and related equipment will be tracked at the point of sale and those records will be forwarded to the feds, where the purchasers will end up on an FBI watch list, just like the purchasers of the above-mentioned items.
Agreed that he's overrated in general, but the original Ender novel is excellent.
That being said, I have read about 20 of his books, and a funny thing is that Card's personal view are not at all evident in most of his books. I know he's a Mormon and everything, but the characters and situations in his stories often convey a very progressive and rational outlook on the universe.
Cord writes very well about one thing -- pain. It suffuses his novels in a way that is interesting at first, but gets decidedly old pretty quickly. I loved Ender's Game, tolerated Speaker For the Dead, and could barely finish Xenocide. Pain is fun to explore sometimes, but Card can't seem to write about anything else. I don't know where you get the rational and progressive outlook from, though -- his homosexual characters seem to magically get out of their pain by finding a member of the opposite gender. I don't find that progressive at all -- in fact it is actually pretty retarded.
Does that not simply lend credence to his claim of "the end of democracy in America"?
No, what would lend credence to his claim would be a US state enacting a same-sex marriage law without the necessary majority support from elected representatives.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
lol. it's called checks and balances and it works, dude. Or did you sleep through your American Government classes in high school? America has a democratic form of government, but it is by no means a democracy. Judicial nullification of stupid laws is a good thing. I don't care what the majority thinks is right -- if it is stupid, it is still stupid, and needs to be corrected. Fortunately our system of government, via the checks and balances that the framers of the US Constitution had the foresight to write into the law of the land, gets that part right. Stupid laws get passed all the time, and they get struck down by the courts all the time.
Bell's theorem combined with all the experiments that have been done based on it, rule out local hidden variable theories. So either (1) your description is correct and the particle doesn't have an exact speed and position at the same time, (2) a LOT of experiments have suffered from horrible systematic errors, (3) the universe is non-local, (4) the universe is superdetermined or (5) mathematics doesn't work properly.
(1) seems the most likely right now, but I'm personally rooting for (3). Instantaneous communication, teleportation, etc.
No...please stop muddying already murky waters. von Neumann ruled out hidden-variable theories only for non-dynamical systems (systems that do not evolve with time.) Unfortunately, von Neumann's proof was incorrectly interpreted by physicists to apply to all systems. What Bell actually did was merely demonstrate that physicists (including Bell himself) had been misinterpreting von Neumann wrongly for 35 years. With that said, loopholes in the Bell test experiments leave the door open for viable hidden-variable theories to be found. So don't get your hopes up for an ansible just yet...:)
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Believe it or not there are many Catholics that see no conflict between science and our faith. We start from the definition of God being the creator of the universe. Therefore anything you learn about science teaches you about God. There can be no conflict.
Well, science and religion are not the same thing, dude. Science is merely a methodology, A methodology can make no assertion about anything, whereas religion makes all sorts of assertions about everything. So your assertion that there is no conflict between religion and science, while true, is vacuous. They are not in conflict because they aren't in the same category. Leaving that aside, your definition rests on an untestable hypothesis, the existence of some supernatural entity. For your argument to be valid would require faith, which is not compatible with any method of rational inquiry, of which science is a shining example. This further underscores the serious differences between science and religion. So -- put your Nicene Creed back on the shelf next to your copies of Augustine and Aquinas, and pick up some Dawkins or Dennett, instead. If you are trying to defend your faith (and you should!) you would be better served to see what arguments are marshaled against you, than to recite 1600-year-old Catholic doctrine in the hope that nobody will call you out.
My theory:
These missile interceptors aren't for North Korea. That is the excuse. They are actually a bargaining chip for China. If China reels in North Korea, then these missile interceptors near their borders will be removed.
Uh, did you even read the summary, dude? Can you explain to me how defensive interceptors parked off the US pacific coast can simultaneously be located "near [China's] borders?"
All of the gadgets that existed twenty years ago are still here, but with only a fraction of the redundancy. I think about what my home looked like twenty years ago, and compare it to what it looks like now, and the difference is stark and revealing. Cable closets and their attendant tentacles of cat 5 abandoned for a single wireless router, telephones in the kitchen, bedroom, and den abandoned for one that I carry in my pocket, the bulky one-way media devices that tended to dominate a room abandoned for slim, elegant two-way devices that hang on my walls. This is not a loss at all -- what I am seeing is a consolidation of redundant hardware, not a loss of gadgets. Gadgets exist for their functionality, and I have all the functionality I've ever had, plus new capabilities I only dreamed about twenty years ago. The big win is not having to replicate all the gadget's hardware in every place that I want to use the functionality of the gadget.
The same way you tested the hypothesis that empirical methods can discover regular, universal laws; and with equivalent results.
What? You are assuming science and religion are the same kinds of things. They aren't. Science is a methodology, religion is an artifact -- an ontological distinction that Augustine and Aquinas understood, even if the rest of the good Doctors of the Church do not... :) It makes sense to test the assertions of religions against reality, because religions can and do make assertions about reality. But a methodology is merely a methodology -- it can't make assertions about anything.
If you have ever had the pleasure of debating with a Jesuit, you'll know what I'm talking about. I'm not being sarcastic or ironic in the least. If the Church is the Federation, the Jesuits are the Vulcans. Jesuit scholars have made many contributions to our collective store of knowlege, especially in math, astronomy, and philosophy.. These are the guys that invented propaganda, and are trained in logic, analysis, and debate in support of their faith. Speaking of their faith, it is the most rarefied, intellectualized faith on the planet. I'm looking forward to a vigorous debate between secularism and theism over the next several decades, and it's good to know that the opposition is putting their best foot forward.
Paert. I'd make a case for John Williams. Arguably Howard Hanson. Some others. You know, the guys who are sneered at by critics and "real" composers.
Hansen, yes, and Paert. Williams, not so much -- I think he made a career out of borrowing from Holst, Rachmaninoff and Rimsky-Korsakov... :)
Well, are we listening to the complete Der God-Damn-Her-Dung (I'd be tweeting my ass off) or La Mer? All seriousness aside, however: in defense of those darn kids, most of the music heard at such events was made before there was recording. Lots of repetition. Certain performers have tried to deal with that by editing out (or down) thematic repetition. Yet that, too, is considered blasphemy in most quarters: how dare you not play every single note that Mozart or Beethoven wrote?
But what probably matters more than that is quality. Once upon a time in America, about 75 years ago, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Bartok lived in the same hood, within blocks of one another, in L.A. Toscanini, Stokowski, Horowitz, Rubinstein, Bernstein, all lived in this country and gave life to our culture. Walt Disney made a famous film with great music; our American Mozart, Gershwin, was an icon. Now, orchestras can't pay their musicians and a once-great culture is draining or drifting out of our cities. What rotted first, the chicken or the egg? Did we abandon quality or did it leave us? And, leaving America alone and taking a broader view: where are the new great composers? Since Shostakovich died (1975), has there been a significant symphonic composer? Can you name one?
Glass, Copland, Britten? Tomita, Schnittke, Khachaturian? Khodaly, Salonen, Takemitsu? I've limited myself to significant symphonic composers (feel free to engage me on the error bars around "significant") who were alive as of your (pretty arbitrary) date of 1975. Do I need to go on, or are you satisfied that you were just fucking wrong?
I think Jacobs doesn't understand the economics of the performing arts. The performing arts are largely a legacy of the feudal systems of the Middle Ages. Symphonies, like theater troupes and opera companies, depend on patronage to survive, not the box office. Ticket prices for a given performance are set high enough to keep the riff-raff out, with the gap between the production costs and the box office being closed by wealthy patrons. For a symphony to survive, they would be better served to figure out how to keep and increase their patronage, not their audience. Wealthy people aren't always motivated by the lure of profit (they are already wealthy, after all) but being recognized by their wealthy peers as a patron of the arts does have value. That is what symphonies should try to exploit, the enhanced social standing that those performances provide to their wealthy patrons. I guess a case could be made for attracting the children of their wealthy patrons, but that is decidedly not the same case as attracting the children of the riff-raff that are already structurally excluded on purpose.
The good doctor seems to be (perhaps carefully and deliberately) missing the point that science is merely a methodology, purely functional in nature, independent of what it is applied to, and that a religion is an artifact, dependent on a whole host of concepts to give it form, meaning and function. Augustine and his somewhat more intellectual heir, Aquinas, missed this point, too, so Dr Bakker is in really good company, if it's not deliberate. :) Science would exist whether or not there was a mind around capable of discovering it and exploiting it. Not so a religion, which must be produced by a mind in the first place, and can exist only as long as some mind is around to embrace it and defend it against competing religions. Let me hammer this point home -- a methodology like science doesn't require a mind to exist (it exists whether or not a mind is around to discover it) but an artifact like a religion must first be created by a mind, and then it must be defended when some other mind dreams up a competitor. Science and religion are two irreconcilably different things, and no amount of wishful thinking, no matter how eloquently phrased, is going to bridge the ontological gap between them.
Want to fix the world? Kill the people behind the curtains watching and reporting.
Hmmm...Pol Pot did as you suggest, so did Mao. When you attack the ideological infrastructure of the regime you are trying to overthrow, as you are suggesting, you leave a vacuum that has to be filled. If you can replace that ideological infrastructure with one more commensurate with your own, fine -- but you have to get your own in place and then protect it so that some other ideologue can't displace you by attacking you in the same way, which is where Pol Pot and Mao failed. The lesson to be learned from their failures? Control the sources of information about competing ideologies. Whacking ideological opponents was a viable strategy, back when suppressing competing ideas was merely a matter of killing the brains where those ideas resided. Technology (starting with writing, then the printing press, then radio and TV, and then the net) allowed ideas to slip from brain to brain faster than the regime could kill off the contaminated brains. Pol Pot killed teachers and parents (by the millions) and successfully inserted his own ideology into a new generation, but failed to keep competing ideologies out, resulting in his ultimate loss of control. Mao made the same mistake at first, but realized (too late, perhaps, but he did try to correct course) that keeping opposing ideologies out was impossible when you had over a billion vulnerable brains to protect. His course correction resulted in complete state control of information, culminating in the Great Firewall of China, which at least delayed the onset of ideological rot, which in theory would give time for the regime to devise a way to innoculate all those vulnerable brains. Iran is doing the exact same thing by clamping down on the sources of ideological rot. It remains to be seen whether or not regimes like Iran and North Korea can delay it long enough to survive, but I kinda doubt it, though ideologues in the US seem to have found a way that might work -- make it easier for your subjects to get the information you want them to have while simultaneously attacking the sources of information that oppose your ideology. Rupert Murdoch may be a multi-billionaire capitalist running dog in Mao's eyes, but he is Mao's spiritual heir none-the-less.
If you serve the ads yourself, then afaik no ad blockers block them.
huh? If I see any ad (rare with ABP, even locally-hosted ads, but it does happen) I can manually block just that element with ABP's element killer functionality. Basically, I use it to kill any frame/element that contains content I'm not interested in at the moment. I use it on news sites to block news that I'm not interested in (who gives a fuck about sports news or movie reviews?) and I use it on ebay and amazon to block *everything* except the details of the item I'm purchasing. I use it to block those annoying social networking badges and icons that have started to show up everywhere. I use it on Netflix to block everything except the show launch elements. A few clever content creators have started putting sappy little "We see you are using an ad blocker, please consider whitelisting us" messages underneath the elements that ABP automatically blocks. I never go back to those sites -- so there's probably truth to the meme that relying on a revenue stream generated by serving advertising to people who don't want advertising is a bad thing to do.
They are simply doing what the law allows them to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
As an aside, I'll note that something doesn't have to be illegal for it to be ethically questionable. "Not forbidden by law" and "not wrong" are categories that generally have some mutual overlap, but should not be conflated. From a technical standpoint, I believe sociologists and psychologists refer to individuals who define their personal morality solely by what is or is not illegal as "assholes".
...and those same sociologists and psychologists have a term for people like you who think there is some kind of ethical or moral standard against which a person's behavior can reliably be judged. The term is "delusional."
If you're not familiar with the Beretta 92F's (aka M9) habit of throwing slides into shooter's faces you haven't been paying attention to guns for very long. This isn't some Saturday night special failing in a catastrophic manner, this was a premium-priced weapon chosen to replace the 1911 as the US Army standard sidearm.
Despite Beretta's continual claim that the failures were due to military use of +P rounds, many prominent LE armorers have reported failures with standard pressure loads.
Nah -- My twenty-five-year-old M9 has over 15000 +P rounds through it. The slide failure rate on the M9 was beyond six sigma land -- 14 recorded cases of the M9 slide failing out of over 300k M9 pistols purchased by DoD. In case you aren't trolling on behalf of SACO (who lost the bidding war when Beretta came in at $1 per gun cheaper) I will allow that you might be thinking of the Beretta 92SB, which is the civilian version of the M9. You can read a pretty good run down of the M9 slide failure myth here.
It reminds me of those few gun stores where they ban their customers from carrying a gun while their staff is openly carrying. Sure, it's their right to ban such but it's still hypocritical.
lol...I live in one of the most gun-friendly states in the union -- Arizona. There are seven gun shops within a ten minute drive of my house, and two shooting ranges inside of fifteen minutes. There are three supermarkets (yes, supermarkets!) -- two Wal-marts and a K-Mart -- that also sell sporting goods, including shotguns, rifles and a small selection of hand guns. At the Wally-world, you can purchase 500 rounds of 9mm parabellum at 6am on a Sunday morning, and the sleepy-eyed clerk just yawns as she's stacking the boxes for you on the counter. Getting the picture, yet? Let me see if I can make it a little clearer. Maybe one more anecdote to crystallize this for you. People can and do carry openly in Arizona (not a majority, not even a large minority) but you will always see somebody carrying in Arizona if you are out in public enough. The local military base has a "local conditions" briefing for newly arrived personnel and their families, which includes a presentation to explain why there is no need to dial 911 if the guy or girl standing in line next to you at the Starbucks or the bank has a piece shoved into their waistband. Now, about your hypocrisy thing -- at every gun shop in my home town that I've ever visited, there is a sign on the door with words to the effect that your weapon must be secured in your holster, or you will be relieved of it -- probably by prying it from your cold, dead fingers. Not that you can't carry it, mind you, but just that you be smart about it. One even has a picture of Dirty Harry with "Do you feel lucky, Punk?" tacked beneath the warning sign, in case you think they are being a tad hypocritical. All this is to point out to you that in Arizona, the idea that somebody can stop you from responsibly bearing a weapon is a non-starter. Hypocrisy can only occur when it's possible for you to prevent somebody from doing something that you do your self. When it comes to Arizona and carrying a gun, that kind of hypocrisy just can't happen.
I still chuckle at physicists who think that objective reality can be determined using mathematics, which is a purely abstract tool. Truly useful, but there will always be a gap between model and reality. String theorists are absolutely ok with this -- they don't need to walk away from anything, because they aren't playing the SM game to begin with. The SM is incomplete and cannot ever be complete -- having to plug-and-chug 17 physical constants into your model is not the stuff of a complete theory. String theorists know this, and are content to wait for the paradigm shift that is inevitably coming.
The interesting part of the search is over -- what follows is a couple of decades of shrinking the error bars. As it stands right now, all the data is converging to a bog-stock standard model particle. There is an anomaly in some of the ATLAS data, but the discrepancy is shrinking. According to the LHC data presented at the Moriond Conference on March 6, the anomaly isn't getting worse when more data is included, which means that it probably can be explained by something other than new physics. Add in the 2.5GeV difference between the Higgs masses in the ATLAS data, and it looks more like there is some kind of systemic error with ATLAS, not a glimpse of new physics. All other data are tightly consistent with the SM. And for what it is worth, the idea that a spin determination needs to be made is a bit of wishful thinking. It's probably Director Bertolucci trying to keep the media interest going. A 126 GeV particle can have only spin zero -- there isn't even a model for a spin 2 resonance that is simultaneously mathematically rigorous and not eliminated by experimental evidence that already exists. According to this excellent blog by a particle physicist based in Paris, the best chance of finding new physics is observing the Higgs making non-SM interactions in some hitherto unexpected decay channel, something that is possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the fierce competition for shrinking scientific research funding, getting funding for that kind of research is not going to happen, and the grumbling coming from particle physicists is because they realize that the Higgs is not going to be a meal ticket for them anymore. .
1) Threat meter (h/t to Omen from my WoW days). An app that scans public databases to build a threat profile (criminal and civil convictions, restraining orders, presence on sexual predator lists, bankruptcies, etc) and tags each person in view with their threat level and the axis of the threat. There are companies that do this right now; HR departments routinely engage their services to screen potential employment candidates.
2) Snopes-o-matic. Parses assertions from people you are conversing with and bounces them against snopes, factcheck, and other debunking sites returning a credibility score, tagging these people appropriately when you meet them again.
3) Continuity checker. Remembers every encounter you have (when, where, what was said by whom) and tags people with a precis of your previous conversations should you meet them again. Helps to keep your story straight and flags people who like to mis-remember things.
I guess I should point out that all of these apps would require a redefinition (at minimum!) of what constitutes civil etiquette, but currently acceptable modes of social intelligence gathering is already in a high state of flux thanks to the internet. I don't see politeness and/or the reverence/fetish for privacy being a significant barrier to these kinds of apps once people get a taste for the potential leverage they provide during social encounters.
Does apple ever get in trouble for bundling safari?
Altogether now: Apple is not *yet* a convicted monopolist so they can do what they like.
FTFY
Man, I've seen some distorted submissions, but this one takes the cake. Paul was filibustering Obama's nominee to head the CIA, not drones, though he repeatedly hit on themes of the overreach of executive power. It was grandstanding by Paul, period. Its purpose was to get him some exposure in the news cycle, and that was it -- mission accomplished. For what it is worth, *was* is the proper tense; it's been over since 1am EST today)
Pass. Who uses a full PC to make calls?
Their FAQ says that and Android client is in the works and will be demoed very soon. As for Apple they claim that Apple's restrictions shuts them out of iOS - but if you have Apple you already have access to FaceTime for all your Apple devices, not that FT can do multi person calls though.
That real-soon-now claim was made for the FOSDEM 2013 conference which occurred over a month ago. There was no jitsi android client at FOSDEM 2013. For what its worth, they've made several real-soon-now claims about an android client for the past couple of years. While there *is* a jitsi android client, it still lacks a committed user interface, so it definitely is still just a work in progress -- I suspect the devs are waiting for android's platform fragmentation problem to go away. :)
How long before all RC helicopters (and all hobby RC planes for that matter) will be banned ?
They are already trying in Texas and in New Hampshire. Notice the inclusion of drones by name in the legislation, and the lack of differentiation between government use and private use.
This article from a few weeks ago shows that two other state legislatures, specifically Florida and Virginia, are attempting a legislative fix to drone use, though those attempts are targeted specifically at government use of drones. The mayor of Seattle cancelled the Seattle PD's drone program and ordered the chief of police to return the ones they'd already bought to the manufacturer for a refund.
With that said, attempts to block government use of drones are probably doomed to failure, since the FAA has already been directed by the 112th Congress to integrate drones into the national airspace via HR 658 (relevant section here,) and police departments across the nation are buying them in droves, despite what happened in Seattle. The DHS's "loan a drone" program, coupled with DHS's $4M grant program to local law authorities to acquire drones, would strongly suggest that government use of drones is here to stay.
Given the push/pull legislative wars being driven by the privacy vs. public safety debate, I doubt that banning RC aircraft is a viable legislative option. What is (probably) going to happen with RC aircraft is what has already happened with other "hobbies" that are deemed to be a threat to public safety (think: greenhouses that could be used for growing pot, legal chemicals that could be used to manufacture illegal drugs, model rockets that could be weaponized.) Purchases of RC aircraft and related equipment will be tracked at the point of sale and those records will be forwarded to the feds, where the purchasers will end up on an FBI watch list, just like the purchasers of the above-mentioned items.
Agreed that he's overrated in general, but the original Ender novel is excellent. That being said, I have read about 20 of his books, and a funny thing is that Card's personal view are not at all evident in most of his books. I know he's a Mormon and everything, but the characters and situations in his stories often convey a very progressive and rational outlook on the universe.
Cord writes very well about one thing -- pain. It suffuses his novels in a way that is interesting at first, but gets decidedly old pretty quickly. I loved Ender's Game, tolerated Speaker For the Dead, and could barely finish Xenocide. Pain is fun to explore sometimes, but Card can't seem to write about anything else. I don't know where you get the rational and progressive outlook from, though -- his homosexual characters seem to magically get out of their pain by finding a member of the opposite gender. I don't find that progressive at all -- in fact it is actually pretty retarded.
Does that not simply lend credence to his claim of "the end of democracy in America"?
No, what would lend credence to his claim would be a US state enacting a same-sex marriage law without the necessary majority support from elected representatives.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
lol. it's called checks and balances and it works, dude. Or did you sleep through your American Government classes in high school? America has a democratic form of government, but it is by no means a democracy. Judicial nullification of stupid laws is a good thing. I don't care what the majority thinks is right -- if it is stupid, it is still stupid, and needs to be corrected. Fortunately our system of government, via the checks and balances that the framers of the US Constitution had the foresight to write into the law of the land, gets that part right. Stupid laws get passed all the time, and they get struck down by the courts all the time.
Bell's theorem combined with all the experiments that have been done based on it, rule out local hidden variable theories. So either (1) your description is correct and the particle doesn't have an exact speed and position at the same time, (2) a LOT of experiments have suffered from horrible systematic errors, (3) the universe is non-local, (4) the universe is superdetermined or (5) mathematics doesn't work properly.
(1) seems the most likely right now, but I'm personally rooting for (3). Instantaneous communication, teleportation, etc.
No...please stop muddying already murky waters. von Neumann ruled out hidden-variable theories only for non-dynamical systems (systems that do not evolve with time.) Unfortunately, von Neumann's proof was incorrectly interpreted by physicists to apply to all systems. What Bell actually did was merely demonstrate that physicists (including Bell himself) had been misinterpreting von Neumann wrongly for 35 years. With that said, loopholes in the Bell test experiments leave the door open for viable hidden-variable theories to be found. So don't get your hopes up for an ansible just yet... :)
...how soon until we have Heisenberg Compensators?