Maybe it is only nitpicking, but how can you "intercept a broadcast"? A broadcast is by it very nature, public, and it is literally sloshing over you throughout its duration; you will have to be in a very isolated place to avoid "intercepting" it. Talking about "aiding terrorists" in this situation is meaningless; you might as well say that producing food or teaching skills like reading and writing "aids terrorists", because having food to eat and being to read/write makes it easier for them to commit acts of terrorism.
The big problem for P2P services right now is that many big ISPs don't allow that kind of traffic, and they often don't even tell you so up front. That kind of policies is what keeps it back, not whether it is built into the lazy choice browser on Windows.
None of these whiners were going to buy this game...
While I agree in principle, that one shouldn't censor out the controversial part of a game just to be PC, I think you shoot yourself in the foot by starting to call people names; that way you have lowered the discussion to a level that precludes any compromise. And objectively speaking, you are in opposition to the majority of people when you want to be allowed to play the enemy side, so you are the one that has an objective need to be persuasive and reach some form of compromise - your opponents don't really care, they have got their way, haven't they?
Apart from that, seeing only the one side if what games have always offered in the past - and fantasy stories before that. It may even be the reason why LotR is so popular - because the heroes are good all the way through and the enemy is completely evil. Personally, I think it would be very refreshing if one could see the other side - refreshing and intellectually stimulating. So far I have only seen it in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
What happens if you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider?
What do you mean exactly? What happens to your hand - or which results could you expect from the experiment?
The experimental data are hard to predict - a hand is a very complex target, and many reactions are possible. Quite likely the measurements will be too overcrowded to make much sense.
What will happen to the hand is perhaps easier to predict. Firstly there is the hard vacuum, which will make the blood boil - the resulting water vapour will disrupt the beam, so nothing further will happen until the hand has completely desiccated and vacuum has been restored. When the beam has been started up again, it will start interacting with the remaining tissue of the hand, breaking down chemical bonds and releasing further gases into the vacuum, this time not only stopping the beam, but also depositing a film of sticky hydrocarbons which will need to be cleaned away. Once that has been done - after, say 2 years - we will probably start seeing the beam mainly blasting atoms apart, if the target hasn't by lost its structural integrity due the chemical decomposition.
In all, I don't think I can't recommend this experiment. The scientific benefits are modest compared to the operational costs involved.
Does a country have a right to use information illegally obtained by a third party to enforce laws against those implicated by that tainted information?
Wrong question, I think. The legal situation is that this probably won't hold up as proof in a criminal court, but in a civil case you don't have to "prove beyond any reasonable doubt", you just have to make a more convincing case than your opponent. And perhaps more relevant, who say they will use the data to prove anything? Compare with the police: they use a lot of information in their investigations that can't be used in court, which is OK as long as it leads to evidence that will. So what HMRC will do is use these data to tell them where they should be looking for more tangible evidence.
Does anybody have a "right" to use information obtained illegally? Well, it's information; you can't NOT know it if you've obtained it, and wilfully acting against your knowledge is wrong in every sense of the word. They have not only a right, but a duty to use what they know.
So it's more like an amusement park owing suppliers massive debts payable in amusement park tokens (except amusement park tokens cost more to make than "electronic" US dollars).
Except that, of course, everybody is aware of this; representing the value of anything as an amount of money is only and only ever been a convenient way of keeping track of the real value: goods and services. And that, at the end of the is what the debt will be repayable as. If the USD has been devalued too much, the Chinese (and everbody else) aren't going to accept the lower repayment, that would be silly.
Sure, I'm sure there's corruption in some of those too, but by no means all of them.
I think it is worth bearing in mind that whereas corruption in power structures is universal, democracy is really a mostly Western invention. Also, although the stated purpose of democracy is to put power in the hands of "the people", the real purpose is to defuse the tensions and dissatisfaction that arises when people feel unhappy about their rulers - in a democracy they can always say "Look, you have elected us, so stuff it".
Anopther thing is that democracy is a luxury enabled by the wealth we enjoy in the West. Democracy is a big, lumbering, expensive and inefficient contruction, which is why it is normally suspended during war; that should provide a hint about why so many poor countries find it hard to see the use of it.
I doubt the situation between Japan and China is the Japanese peoples' fault at this point
Hmm, I see. Perhaps you are unaware of the events during the Japanese occupation of China - read up on it, Wikipedia has a several items on this, eg: The Nanjing massacre [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_massacre]. As far as the Chinese goes, they have a lot of very painful memories from WWII, all connected with what Japanese soldiers did in China. The Japanese had a reputation during the war for extreme cruelty - one could almost think they enjoyed doing it. For comparison - German soldiers captured by Britain were treated with some decency in POW camps back in England, and British soldiers captured by the Germans were not too bad off either (as opposed to the Jews in the extermination camps), whereas US and British soldiers captured by the Japanese faced rather different conditions.
The Chinese have many good reasons for hating Japan; it is not all to do with money. Can one blame the current generation of Japanese for what their grand parents did during the war? Perhaps not, but it is hardly any wonder that the Chinese find it distasteful when the Japanese government are totally unapologetic about what happened and still honour some of the war criminals as heroes. No doubt if China and Japan were friendly neighbors, they could easily find a compromise over the division of the water territories, but as you can see, that is exactly where something is missing.
The real world has crime - even turning a country into some kind of controlled Stazi state in the name of defending against "crime" will not change that. Most of us are not prepared to live in a police state/baby pen internet under the (fake) pretense of knocking a few percentage points off the crime stats or child porn bogymen population.
Crime? I'm not talking about crime - at least in the classical sense. I'm talking about the fact that far the largest part of email traffic is SPAM, and unless you use AdBlock and NoScript on your browser, you are bombarded with what is mostly fraudulent adverts and idiotic porn. And the impression that the internet is "free" as in beer, is an illusion - it is paid by our taxes or included userfees - so I am paying for something that is some 95% useless to me. Shouldn't I expect my payment to be protected against this sort of unscrupulous abuse? I rather think so.
... destroy the Internets potential to bring true accountability and openness to our respective governments
I like your unlimited idealism; I just don't like to be immersed to my neck in the cesspit of SPAM and other duplicity that the internet so uniquely enables.
Apart from that - what makes you think that anonymity makes it possible to hold governments and big business to account? All this is just a dummy; something to keep potential troublemakers occupied with thundering impotently on their soapboxes instead of organising something more worthwhile.
The real problem is not "censure", but the complete lack of ethical standards and moral leadership. Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about "moral" as in the religious right, but moral as in being trustworthy, decent, reliable: some very fundamental and practical things. When newsmedia and public figures of all kinds are shamelessly twisting everything, then we have a real problem - because that means that democracy is meaningless because people never know the facts about any important issue.
No, give me a bit of censure, if that is what it takes to ensure truthful and reliable reporting.
Every religious text claims that it's the truth and everyone else is wrong - that's a central tenent of religion.
Not quite. It is a major component of most theology - ie the interpretation of the scriptures - but even the Bible or the Koran don't actually say that "everything else is false". There are statements about other gods being false, and what that actually means may be open to interpretation (like, does it mean that there are no other gods, or does it mean that other godss are liars?), but I don't think you can find anywhere in any holy text that it says "Only the words in this text are True". And some religions are amazingly tolerant towards other religions; eg Hinduism doesn't doesn't seem to put any limit on what gods are allowable. Just because Christianism is often narrowminded doesn't have tyo mean that all religions are.
It is a matter of taste, really - or coordinate transformation, to be precise. There is nothing wrong in placing Earth in the centre of the universe - as a matter of fact, my house could arguably be the centre if nobody objects. Of course, it does cause complications when it comes to calculate the planetary orbits; that part is a lot easier if one chooses a coordinate system with the Sun at origo.
I certainly thought I did - while we had the dark ages in Europe, the Islamic world made huge progress in science and medicine. Is that what you are thinking of?
The problem is not religion as such, but the sad fact that religion so often tends to attract and over time accumulate the worst mankind can offer: secresy, intolerance, abuse and reality-denial. A large part of that has to do with the common misconception that there is such a thing as "The Final Truth" and that religion represents it; as far as I know, there is no major, religious text that claims that "This is The Only Truth and all alse is A Lie" - certainly this is something that has always been wide open to discussion.
However, I think it is true that religion has nothing to offer science; religion is after all, what you choose to believe in when your knowledge and understanding don't suffice.
Actually it just means that once again the new prediction for sea level rise falls outside of the 95% confidence interval reported in the IPCC reports
And?
In science we are not concerned with "being right" and "winning discussions" - we just want to get closer to the objective truth. All scientists know that they are wrong to some degree; it is a common misconception that science is "The Truth". Science is a method, and what is more, it is a method for discovering falsehoods, which is why a scientific theory must be falsifiable. Because a theory is, basically, only a suggested explanation for why we make the observations we do.
So, when we hear that the fine-structure constant may not be constant, all physicists feel delighted: here we have something new and unexpected. And when a climate scientist sees that the rate of melting in Greenland is lower than he thought, s/he goes back to the model and tries to figure out where it is wrong. Which is why the new data are not hidden away, but published despite the fact that all climate deniers are going to pounce on them and claim that "It Is All A Lie".
Now, all of this is probably also an explanation why climate deniers have any public following - most people believe that science works in the same way as politics and religion, that you start out with your preconceived opinion, which you call "The Truth", and then you try to twist your observations and your logic around until everything fits, even if it requires the amputation of heels and toes. And that also explains why there is a conflict.
The really bizarre thing is that while people are willing to do the most horrible things to logic and facts in order to avoid accepting reality in one area, they have no problem accepting even the wildest, scientific speculations. I mean, if one can accept without hesitation that particles are waves (not actually an observed fact, but an interpretation that is consistent with observations, which is slightly different), then one should have no problems accepting that humans have caused the present climate change. The logic in both cases is impeccable, the observations are sound; if you believe in one part of science, then you have no good reason to disbelieve another on such a fundamental level as what the climate deniers do.
Burning wood or cloth fibers that you own isn't hateful. It may be stupid, it may be meaningless, it may be a waste of time, but for all I care you can burn an entire pallet full of On the Origin of Species - it won't change my belief in how life developed to its current form on Earth, I won't be insulted, I just don't care (except to the extent that presumably whoever is doing this as an expression of opinion is lacking some serious logical skills and I hope they recognize their disability and don't consider themselves qualified to vote, run for office, or serve on juries).
Objectively speaking, this is true, just like it is true that Westergaard's cartoons or Rushdie's books are in themselves insignificant. However, the significance of things is so often not only a function of such objective criteria - if all people were as rational and thoughtful as you, we wouldn't have any conflicts in the world. Israel and Palestine would agree that of course the Jewish settlers shouldn't just be allowed to take land for themselves in occupied territory, and of course Jerusalem can be the capital of both nations - why not? And so on.
Unfortunately there are huge numbers of people who for various reasons are not thinking rationally; one of them would seem to be that insignificant wanker that wants to provoke the already inflamed tempers of a lot of muslims all over the world. Is this what he imagines will please God; the God whose son, if we are to believe the Bible stories, used to say things like "turn the other cheek" and "forgive..."? It makes you wonder what sort of spirit he listens to when he thinks he talks to the Almighty.
I don't know - most elements heavier than iron (or carbon or something like that) were created in a supernova, since their creation by fusion require energy rather than releasing it. So, in a way, we are all full of "supernova shrapnel".
People everywhere are under attack by the armed gangs otherwise known as government.
Argh! Get a life already. You sound like one of those Tea Party Tossers who can see nothing good about society - in the "good old days" you guys seem to be longing for, you would have been called misfits or weirdos.
Try using your brains for once, assuming you've got some: Being seen by others is part of life, unless you are a recluse on a desert island. "Surveillance" as you call it gives you many benefits: if you crash with your car, chances are that you'll be helped by those nice folks known as paramedics; if you get mugged somewhere or your business is broken into, having a few CCTV cameras around can help put the bastards away, and so on.
It is not the monitoring that should worry you, it is the secresy. When information is kept away from public scrutiny, that is when criminals start infecting things. IMO monitoring is OK, but make the information freely available to the public; seeing how crap like Big Brother, Twitter and Facebook attract crowds, such a scheme might prove hugely popular.
I remember the first, exciting days of the internet, when there were all these incredible new possibilities: ftp, that allowed you to fetch files, even 100s of K from the other side of the world, email and usenet that let you communicate in no time with people far away - for free, almost; and then gopher and the web.
And what has it come to now? SPAM, ever more intrusive and idiotic adverts, and even the most inconsequential crap has become the must have of the moment.
I have always been a bit confused about this - savoury bisciuts are the ones that are sort of dry and a bit salty, so the sweet ones are called unsavoury, am I right?
'Ultimately, I'm quite glad the UAE's authorities block websites, and thrilled that they're so inept at it,' concludes PC Pro's writer. 'Just like everybody in Dubai, all they've done is made me a master of internet chicanery.'
This sort of flippant attitude can come back to bite - when something is illegal, then it is illegal even if they don't enforce it very well, and if they one day decides to do it, then they will have a field day sweeping up fools like this one.
Considering that this is a rather inflamed subject at the moment, I think it is remarkable that there seems to be nothing about this; certainly not when I search for "Vermion 380", which seems to be the name of the rig, according to the picture.
Does anybody else have any links to a reliable, main-stream news site, please?
I assume you mean "so that rich people back home don't have to."?
Whatever; but apart from topics like censorship and respect for soldiers, isn't there something to be gained from playing the side of your opponent in a conflict? Understanding your enemy and what drives them, is often essential to winning. One of the main reasons, if not the only reason, why conflicts like the one in Palestine/Israel (and the one in Northern Ireland) seem to be impossible to end, is that people on each side refuse to see their opponents as humans capable of anything positive. And as far as I can see, it is the men on the ground that need to understand this - the generals on both sides already know this. The men on the ground are the ones that engage with the enemy on a daily basis; they are the ones that can (and do) perpetuate the conflict, Thus, getting them to understand that it can be different, may be the fastest way to end conflict.
This is of course just meant to be a grand sounding quotation; nothing wrong with that.
However, is it really resonable to talk about "God" in the Biblical sense (although, even in the Bible it doesn't seem to be quite the same "God" all the way through)? That concept of God quickly runs into the old Russell paradox, for one thing. And if God and belief in God is about truth more than enything else, our thoughts about it must at least make logical sense.
It seems more appropriate to think of God as the Universe, if one must; it may even make sense to talk about God as sentient, who knows.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is only nitpicking, but how can you "intercept a broadcast"? A broadcast is by it very nature, public, and it is literally sloshing over you throughout its duration; you will have to be in a very isolated place to avoid "intercepting" it. Talking about "aiding terrorists" in this situation is meaningless; you might as well say that producing food or teaching skills like reading and writing "aids terrorists", because having food to eat and being to read/write makes it easier for them to commit acts of terrorism.
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
Well, I am using a major browser (Firefox - almost 23% according to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/firefox-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&sample=28) and when I click on a torrent link, it starts downloading. Admittedly by using an external client, but what is the problem with that?
The big problem for P2P services right now is that many big ISPs don't allow that kind of traffic, and they often don't even tell you so up front. That kind of policies is what keeps it back, not whether it is built into the lazy choice browser on Windows.
None of these whiners were going to buy this game ...
While I agree in principle, that one shouldn't censor out the controversial part of a game just to be PC, I think you shoot yourself in the foot by starting to call people names; that way you have lowered the discussion to a level that precludes any compromise. And objectively speaking, you are in opposition to the majority of people when you want to be allowed to play the enemy side, so you are the one that has an objective need to be persuasive and reach some form of compromise - your opponents don't really care, they have got their way, haven't they?
Apart from that, seeing only the one side if what games have always offered in the past - and fantasy stories before that. It may even be the reason why LotR is so popular - because the heroes are good all the way through and the enemy is completely evil. Personally, I think it would be very refreshing if one could see the other side - refreshing and intellectually stimulating. So far I have only seen it in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
What happens if you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider?
What do you mean exactly? What happens to your hand - or which results could you expect from the experiment?
The experimental data are hard to predict - a hand is a very complex target, and many reactions are possible. Quite likely the measurements will be too overcrowded to make much sense.
What will happen to the hand is perhaps easier to predict. Firstly there is the hard vacuum, which will make the blood boil - the resulting water vapour will disrupt the beam, so nothing further will happen until the hand has completely desiccated and vacuum has been restored. When the beam has been started up again, it will start interacting with the remaining tissue of the hand, breaking down chemical bonds and releasing further gases into the vacuum, this time not only stopping the beam, but also depositing a film of sticky hydrocarbons which will need to be cleaned away. Once that has been done - after, say 2 years - we will probably start seeing the beam mainly blasting atoms apart, if the target hasn't by lost its structural integrity due the chemical decomposition.
In all, I don't think I can't recommend this experiment. The scientific benefits are modest compared to the operational costs involved.
Does a country have a right to use information illegally obtained by a third party to enforce laws against those implicated by that tainted information?
Wrong question, I think. The legal situation is that this probably won't hold up as proof in a criminal court, but in a civil case you don't have to "prove beyond any reasonable doubt", you just have to make a more convincing case than your opponent. And perhaps more relevant, who say they will use the data to prove anything? Compare with the police: they use a lot of information in their investigations that can't be used in court, which is OK as long as it leads to evidence that will. So what HMRC will do is use these data to tell them where they should be looking for more tangible evidence.
Does anybody have a "right" to use information obtained illegally? Well, it's information; you can't NOT know it if you've obtained it, and wilfully acting against your knowledge is wrong in every sense of the word. They have not only a right, but a duty to use what they know.
So it's more like an amusement park owing suppliers massive debts payable in amusement park tokens (except amusement park tokens cost more to make than "electronic" US dollars).
Except that, of course, everybody is aware of this; representing the value of anything as an amount of money is only and only ever been a convenient way of keeping track of the real value: goods and services. And that, at the end of the is what the debt will be repayable as. If the USD has been devalued too much, the Chinese (and everbody else) aren't going to accept the lower repayment, that would be silly.
Sure, I'm sure there's corruption in some of those too, but by no means all of them.
I think it is worth bearing in mind that whereas corruption in power structures is universal, democracy is really a mostly Western invention. Also, although the stated purpose of democracy is to put power in the hands of "the people", the real purpose is to defuse the tensions and dissatisfaction that arises when people feel unhappy about their rulers - in a democracy they can always say "Look, you have elected us, so stuff it".
Anopther thing is that democracy is a luxury enabled by the wealth we enjoy in the West. Democracy is a big, lumbering, expensive and inefficient contruction, which is why it is normally suspended during war; that should provide a hint about why so many poor countries find it hard to see the use of it.
I doubt the situation between Japan and China is the Japanese peoples' fault at this point
Hmm, I see. Perhaps you are unaware of the events during the Japanese occupation of China - read up on it, Wikipedia has a several items on this, eg: The Nanjing massacre [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_massacre]. As far as the Chinese goes, they have a lot of very painful memories from WWII, all connected with what Japanese soldiers did in China. The Japanese had a reputation during the war for extreme cruelty - one could almost think they enjoyed doing it. For comparison - German soldiers captured by Britain were treated with some decency in POW camps back in England, and British soldiers captured by the Germans were not too bad off either (as opposed to the Jews in the extermination camps), whereas US and British soldiers captured by the Japanese faced rather different conditions.
The Chinese have many good reasons for hating Japan; it is not all to do with money. Can one blame the current generation of Japanese for what their grand parents did during the war? Perhaps not, but it is hardly any wonder that the Chinese find it distasteful when the Japanese government are totally unapologetic about what happened and still honour some of the war criminals as heroes. No doubt if China and Japan were friendly neighbors, they could easily find a compromise over the division of the water territories, but as you can see, that is exactly where something is missing.
How can we change the relationship so we think of these devices not as devices but as assistants or even companions?
A phone is a tool; I don't know about you, but I don't want my hammer to "befriend" me and want to get intimate.
The real world has crime - even turning a country into some kind of controlled Stazi state in the name of defending against "crime" will not change that. Most of us are not prepared to live in a police state/baby pen internet under the (fake) pretense of knocking a few percentage points off the crime stats or child porn bogymen population.
Crime? I'm not talking about crime - at least in the classical sense. I'm talking about the fact that far the largest part of email traffic is SPAM, and unless you use AdBlock and NoScript on your browser, you are bombarded with what is mostly fraudulent adverts and idiotic porn. And the impression that the internet is "free" as in beer, is an illusion - it is paid by our taxes or included userfees - so I am paying for something that is some 95% useless to me. Shouldn't I expect my payment to be protected against this sort of unscrupulous abuse? I rather think so.
... destroy the Internets potential to bring true accountability and openness to our respective governments
I like your unlimited idealism; I just don't like to be immersed to my neck in the cesspit of SPAM and other duplicity that the internet so uniquely enables.
Apart from that - what makes you think that anonymity makes it possible to hold governments and big business to account? All this is just a dummy; something to keep potential troublemakers occupied with thundering impotently on their soapboxes instead of organising something more worthwhile.
The real problem is not "censure", but the complete lack of ethical standards and moral leadership. Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about "moral" as in the religious right, but moral as in being trustworthy, decent, reliable: some very fundamental and practical things. When newsmedia and public figures of all kinds are shamelessly twisting everything, then we have a real problem - because that means that democracy is meaningless because people never know the facts about any important issue.
No, give me a bit of censure, if that is what it takes to ensure truthful and reliable reporting.
Every religious text claims that it's the truth and everyone else is wrong - that's a central tenent of religion.
Not quite. It is a major component of most theology - ie the interpretation of the scriptures - but even the Bible or the Koran don't actually say that "everything else is false". There are statements about other gods being false, and what that actually means may be open to interpretation (like, does it mean that there are no other gods, or does it mean that other godss are liars?), but I don't think you can find anywhere in any holy text that it says "Only the words in this text are True". And some religions are amazingly tolerant towards other religions; eg Hinduism doesn't doesn't seem to put any limit on what gods are allowable. Just because Christianism is often narrowminded doesn't have tyo mean that all religions are.
It is a matter of taste, really - or coordinate transformation, to be precise. There is nothing wrong in placing Earth in the centre of the universe - as a matter of fact, my house could arguably be the centre if nobody objects. Of course, it does cause complications when it comes to calculate the planetary orbits; that part is a lot easier if one chooses a coordinate system with the Sun at origo.
We all know what happened to Persia after Islam
I certainly thought I did - while we had the dark ages in Europe, the Islamic world made huge progress in science and medicine. Is that what you are thinking of?
The problem is not religion as such, but the sad fact that religion so often tends to attract and over time accumulate the worst mankind can offer: secresy, intolerance, abuse and reality-denial. A large part of that has to do with the common misconception that there is such a thing as "The Final Truth" and that religion represents it; as far as I know, there is no major, religious text that claims that "This is The Only Truth and all alse is A Lie" - certainly this is something that has always been wide open to discussion.
However, I think it is true that religion has nothing to offer science; religion is after all, what you choose to believe in when your knowledge and understanding don't suffice.
Actually it just means that once again the new prediction for sea level rise falls outside of the 95% confidence interval reported in the IPCC reports
And?
In science we are not concerned with "being right" and "winning discussions" - we just want to get closer to the objective truth. All scientists know that they are wrong to some degree; it is a common misconception that science is "The Truth". Science is a method, and what is more, it is a method for discovering falsehoods, which is why a scientific theory must be falsifiable. Because a theory is, basically, only a suggested explanation for why we make the observations we do.
So, when we hear that the fine-structure constant may not be constant, all physicists feel delighted: here we have something new and unexpected. And when a climate scientist sees that the rate of melting in Greenland is lower than he thought, s/he goes back to the model and tries to figure out where it is wrong. Which is why the new data are not hidden away, but published despite the fact that all climate deniers are going to pounce on them and claim that "It Is All A Lie".
Now, all of this is probably also an explanation why climate deniers have any public following - most people believe that science works in the same way as politics and religion, that you start out with your preconceived opinion, which you call "The Truth", and then you try to twist your observations and your logic around until everything fits, even if it requires the amputation of heels and toes. And that also explains why there is a conflict.
The really bizarre thing is that while people are willing to do the most horrible things to logic and facts in order to avoid accepting reality in one area, they have no problem accepting even the wildest, scientific speculations. I mean, if one can accept without hesitation that particles are waves (not actually an observed fact, but an interpretation that is consistent with observations, which is slightly different), then one should have no problems accepting that humans have caused the present climate change. The logic in both cases is impeccable, the observations are sound; if you believe in one part of science, then you have no good reason to disbelieve another on such a fundamental level as what the climate deniers do.
Burning wood or cloth fibers that you own isn't hateful. It may be stupid, it may be meaningless, it may be a waste of time, but for all I care you can burn an entire pallet full of On the Origin of Species - it won't change my belief in how life developed to its current form on Earth, I won't be insulted, I just don't care (except to the extent that presumably whoever is doing this as an expression of opinion is lacking some serious logical skills and I hope they recognize their disability and don't consider themselves qualified to vote, run for office, or serve on juries).
Objectively speaking, this is true, just like it is true that Westergaard's cartoons or Rushdie's books are in themselves insignificant. However, the significance of things is so often not only a function of such objective criteria - if all people were as rational and thoughtful as you, we wouldn't have any conflicts in the world. Israel and Palestine would agree that of course the Jewish settlers shouldn't just be allowed to take land for themselves in occupied territory, and of course Jerusalem can be the capital of both nations - why not? And so on.
Unfortunately there are huge numbers of people who for various reasons are not thinking rationally; one of them would seem to be that insignificant wanker that wants to provoke the already inflamed tempers of a lot of muslims all over the world. Is this what he imagines will please God; the God whose son, if we are to believe the Bible stories, used to say things like "turn the other cheek" and "forgive ..."? It makes you wonder what sort of spirit he listens to when he thinks he talks to the Almighty.
Talk about finding a needle in a cosmic haystack.
I don't know - most elements heavier than iron (or carbon or something like that) were created in a supernova, since their creation by fusion require energy rather than releasing it. So, in a way, we are all full of "supernova shrapnel".
People everywhere are under attack by the armed gangs otherwise known as government.
Argh! Get a life already. You sound like one of those Tea Party Tossers who can see nothing good about society - in the "good old days" you guys seem to be longing for, you would have been called misfits or weirdos.
Try using your brains for once, assuming you've got some: Being seen by others is part of life, unless you are a recluse on a desert island. "Surveillance" as you call it gives you many benefits: if you crash with your car, chances are that you'll be helped by those nice folks known as paramedics; if you get mugged somewhere or your business is broken into, having a few CCTV cameras around can help put the bastards away, and so on.
It is not the monitoring that should worry you, it is the secresy. When information is kept away from public scrutiny, that is when criminals start infecting things. IMO monitoring is OK, but make the information freely available to the public; seeing how crap like Big Brother, Twitter and Facebook attract crowds, such a scheme might prove hugely popular.
Would you feel differently about Big Lebowski Bowling if you knew it was created in North Korea?
Not really; however, knowing that Rupert Murdoch makes money from it certainly does.
I remember the first, exciting days of the internet, when there were all these incredible new possibilities: ftp, that allowed you to fetch files, even 100s of K from the other side of the world, email and usenet that let you communicate in no time with people far away - for free, almost; and then gopher and the web.
And what has it come to now? SPAM, ever more intrusive and idiotic adverts, and even the most inconsequential crap has become the must have of the moment.
'unsavoury' content.
I have always been a bit confused about this - savoury bisciuts are the ones that are sort of dry and a bit salty, so the sweet ones are called unsavoury, am I right?
'Ultimately, I'm quite glad the UAE's authorities block websites, and thrilled that they're so inept at it,' concludes PC Pro's writer. 'Just like everybody in Dubai, all they've done is made me a master of internet chicanery.'
This sort of flippant attitude can come back to bite - when something is illegal, then it is illegal even if they don't enforce it very well, and if they one day decides to do it, then they will have a field day sweeping up fools like this one.
The government is quite happy to legislate that people can lose two demerit points for having music up too loud in their cars
I would have thought that demerit points are the kind you wouldn't mind losing anyway.
Considering that this is a rather inflamed subject at the moment, I think it is remarkable that there seems to be nothing about this; certainly not when I search for "Vermion 380", which seems to be the name of the rig, according to the picture.
Does anybody else have any links to a reliable, main-stream news site, please?
... so that people back home don't have to
I assume you mean "so that rich people back home don't have to."?
Whatever; but apart from topics like censorship and respect for soldiers, isn't there something to be gained from playing the side of your opponent in a conflict? Understanding your enemy and what drives them, is often essential to winning. One of the main reasons, if not the only reason, why conflicts like the one in Palestine/Israel (and the one in Northern Ireland) seem to be impossible to end, is that people on each side refuse to see their opponents as humans capable of anything positive. And as far as I can see, it is the men on the ground that need to understand this - the generals on both sides already know this. The men on the ground are the ones that engage with the enemy on a daily basis; they are the ones that can (and do) perpetuate the conflict, Thus, getting them to understand that it can be different, may be the fastest way to end conflict.
... then we should know the mind of God
This is of course just meant to be a grand sounding quotation; nothing wrong with that.
However, is it really resonable to talk about "God" in the Biblical sense (although, even in the Bible it doesn't seem to be quite the same "God" all the way through)? That concept of God quickly runs into the old Russell paradox, for one thing. And if God and belief in God is about truth more than enything else, our thoughts about it must at least make logical sense.
It seems more appropriate to think of God as the Universe, if one must; it may even make sense to talk about God as sentient, who knows.