Finding a few people unjustly killed in two millennia is hardly surprising and doesn't prove anything in regard of "religion doesn't like science". If anything, this proves that religion doesn't prevent some people from being assholes.
Oh well Hitler only killed a few million Jews, and that has been disputed too. I suppose you'd like to support him too? Oh wait your pope already has. The fact that you can make a disgraceful and ill informed statement like the one above just further proves my point. Did god personally tell you it was justified?
Haha, no, but that displaces the problem, it is not science vs. religion any more, it's dick vs. politically powerful other dick. Science and religion may have been used as justification for this, but this is not typical of religion (specifically catholic church here). Try insulting an atheist that happens to be head of state or powerful enough. Would you conclude that atheists don't like whatever is your line of work?
When politically powerful other dick starts contributing their lack of wisdom to science and saying what views a scientist may hold using power obtained through a religious institution, it does become about science vs religion....and unfortunately this is typical of the catholic church. Yes both atheists and theists can be can be dicks, but scientists don't justify it by saying God says it's alright.
I think this is a case of anonymous coward dick justifying church dick who commented on scientific dick. Anonymous coward dick either does not realise or does not admit the harm that has been done.
They opposed him more for being a dick than anything else.
Well that's okay then isn't it. I mean forcing someone to recant what they know and putting him under house arrest is something we do all the time for 'being a dick'.
And he was wrong on numerous points (comets are just reflections in the upper atmosphere!),
Got news for you. Scientists are wrong all the time. The difference between religion and science is that in science you don't have to take it on faith and what is said CAN be disproven.
and his methodology was all but impossible to verify in a short time-frame, given how crappy telescopes were back then.
Yes, he was eventually proven right, but at the time he had really bad support for his theories, and went around pretty much insulting everybody. It's not as clear cut as most people make it out to be
Yes he was an insulting twit. No his methodology wasn't bad nor was his methodology particularly hard to verify. The idea that the earth was round had been supressed by crackpots for a couple of millennia. It wasn't a new idea. And the church perscuted many people other than him for holding this view.
Really? The church opposed Galileo? Or fellow scientist? Read again and re-learn your history before you continue to propagate these kind of myths.
I've read extensively thanks. How about you re-read, and stop posting as AC so we can have a proper discussion, because your take on it is laughable. He was about as "free" to continue his experiments as a caged bird. He was also no friend of the pope once he parodied him.
What the church did was inexcusable and apologists like you make me ill.
They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.
"The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world and the only research group directly supported by the Holy See". It's just the VATT (Vatican Telescope) that's relatively new.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology?.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun. Yes, Galileo was an ass about how he said it, but it doesn't change the fact that the church opposed the science with real physical and political force. Since this is how a "more reasonable major religion" behaves I think this is an EXCELLENT argument against "moderate" religion.
Hey this guy made movies like Terminator and Predator. Just because he's gone all Kindergarten Cop politician, doesn't mean that he doesn't profit daily from kids seeing his older movies. I remember they were big hits with "minors" when I was one myself growing up in the late 80s and early 90s. It's just pure hypocrisy.
I'll give him due respect as a fellow human being, one whose wisdom probably far exceeds my own in a great many things. However, I have a feeling I know a bit more on the subject of Internet Transparency than him, so I'll politely decline his advice.
His wisdom is indeed great on subjects such as covering up pedophilia, how to help spread disease by opposing contraception, how to set up an oppressive regime protected by superstition.
Basing morality on religion and myth is bad enough. Also most Popes have done varying degrees of harm. But this one seems to be the worst of the worst!
Decimate us, huh? Thank goodness! You see, Decimate literally means "to reduce by ten percent", or "to kill one of every ten". If an alien asteroid attack on Earth is only going to kill one in ten, I'll take my chances. Had you said we'd be annihilated, which means "to destroy completely", then I'd be scared.
Clearly the alien plot to drive us all insane with pedantry started years ago on slashdot.
You want to know how to arrange your developers? Why in the world don't you just ask them?
Apart from being stupid about not asking his developers, he's trying to create a workplace where open or closed dominate. Developers may not always want one or the other. The best environment would allow developers to work in isolation when they needed no distraction and bring them together easily face to face when they wanted to collaborate. Not when their bosses decide it must be so.
If they're happy with laptops and net connections (And external keyboards). it's easy Ask them what they want most of the time and then either arrange meeting rooms where they can sit around and collaborate in addition to traditional cubicles, or give them break out rooms where they can work isolated if they prefer to sit together for the majority of the itme. If they don't like the laptops desktops + remote desktop might work.
These companies need to get it through their rotten skulls that we aren't all always connected to the Internet. Many, many people go through periods where they don't have a net connection at all. All these greedy fools are doing is shooting themselves in the foot by reducing their customer base. A customer only has to buy a small number of titles that don't work for them, for whatever reason, to conclude that all the games are junk and that they're better off to pirate or go without.
First of all I'm sorry you were assaulted. No one deserves that. I mean that sincerely.
On the other hand I'm appalled that you would think it is wrong to track this guy down, but that it is not more wrong that he's out there doing this to other women.
Sometimes there is no high moral ground. It's a question of the lesser of two evils, and the landscape is treacherously filled with slippery slopes. Sometimes there is no right - just two wrongs and one of them less so. I think you're allowing your ordeal to cloud your judgement.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more.
In the absence of an effective and well staffed police force what you're advocating is that people do nothing.
And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society.
Yes it is. We can tolerate private detectives and have for a long time. We can tolerate the citizenry being involved in policing. (Ever heard of a citizen's arrest?). What we can't tolerate is people ignoring the law then they track the person down, or once they've found the person. Collecting information intelligently and presenting it to the police is to be commended not condemned. Furthermore we're not talking about tracking anyone for any purpose. This is tracking down someone who has committed a crime.
When I read the lines you have written above I have to wonder what personal agenda you have?
Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong.
No it's not. If you have an argument to present, go ahead, but just stating it is wrong does not make it so.
There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
If the information is already public, there should be ZERO expectation of privacy. Collating facts should not be illegal.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines.
The police can be part of the problem. They can be corrupt. They can be complacent. They can simply be overworked and underfunded. Often they don't want help that requires even more effort. But if they are presented with collated facts and evidence that can lead to the quick conviction of a dangerous criminal, it's hard to justify not acting.
Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party.
You act as if police, both individuals and organisations are all good and have no agenda of their own. This is a dangerous and naive view to hold. There are plenty of incidents in recent history that show the Police aren't always the wonderful pillars of society we wish them to be. That isn't to say all Police are corrupt or bad. There are some awesome people there. But the nature of the job has a way of selecting for bullies and power maniacs, and of taking even the best of people and overworking them while showing them the worst side of humanity. Believing in a fairytale Police that is good and pure is harmful.
Then there's the legal system itself. An antiquated collection of rules of law that are so complex that no individual can ever learn them and so strew with holes that criminals can and do often get off on "technicalities". Harsh sentences tend to be handed down for trivial crimes "to make an example" of someone for a political agend, and soft punishment can be dealt out to violent criminals. Expecting someone to see a rapist get away with a couple of years in prison, when someone else gets up to 5 for copying a damn DVD is ridiculous. Suggesting that I trust you and that such a system is good and fair is equally ridiculous. "It's not perfect but it's the best system we had" is good for fairytale style cop shows but useless in the real world.
This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
No it doesn't, and the solution is not to make it illegal for public citizens to present collated facts to the Police.
UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses. More of the usual.
Only their top CEOs win when they cut and run before the company goes under. You can't treat your customers as badly as they have been lately without losing them and gaining a reputation as a company to avoid. Their management is signing their death warrant with moves like this.
Sustainable forestry doesn't hurt the ecosystem. We can harvest trees until kingdom come and still have trees left, as long as we do it properly.
It's the fossil fuels, inks, and man hours that go into harvesting, producing and shipping the materials and final products that's the problem.
You know how to do large scale sustainable forestry without using fossil fuels or releasing greenhouse gas? I'd love to know how you do that. Even if you get rid of machinery and beasts of burden, people cutting down trees need tools and food to keep doing it.
Close, but no, the blame lies with the media who persistently presented what was in fact a dissenting view in the face of increasing amounts of evidence that suggested otherwise.
It's easy to blame the media, but was the paper retracted? Was there any official and easy way to gauge if it still had the support of the scientific community? Was a retraction of some sort printed? Because if not to the lay person and the lay media it all just looks like different groups of reputable scientists squabbling over their pet view point.
The current scientific publication and peer review system is completely broken.
Putting data into peoples hands whoa aren't experts often leads to bad things. See every non expert who believed Wakefield study because they didn't understand how to interpret data.
So hang on here, what are people suppose to do? You're blaming these people for believing an expert (and a published study).
In that case kids died , and kids are still dying.
Well the blame lies on the expert and on the peer review that wasn't properly conducted, not on the people who believed him!!!
In principle I agree with you, but we live in an are where everyone thinks they are a qualified expert in anything.
But you just cited a case in which an expert did no better and children died!?!?
That simply isn't true, and no good will come out of this.
The data wan't show a flaw in the study because it wasn't used, but he will inevitably cherry pick data to 'prove' the study is wrong. And people like Hannah Devlin are always happy to publish claims without proper study. So no good can come from this, and people need to understand that.
It's hard problem to solve.
Again, don't blame the non-experts for bad behaviour of the experts. If anything this is a case for more openness so that other experts can disprove false claims.
In any case I'd rather be master of my own destiny and at least try to understand expert data on issues of my choosing, rather than just take it on faith that an expert is doing proper science. Yeah I could make an idiot of myself or harm myself but at least I've got a fighting chance!
You know the multi-billion dollar LHC? Guess what they did their first physics on. Not finding new exotic particles
I could do that all day long for $200/hr. I'm not finding new exotic particles right as we speak. And last night I did it in my sleep. No takers??? Okay how about a one off special just for today $50/hr?
Slashdot Mirror
What Happened To Obama's Open Source Adviser?
He was invited to One Microsoft Way in Redmond, WA and while there discussing standards had a very unfortunate ... shall we say ... "accident?"
IP Czar takes Open Source Adviser. Check mate!
Finding a few people unjustly killed in two millennia is hardly surprising and doesn't prove anything in regard of "religion doesn't like science". If anything, this proves that religion doesn't prevent some people from being assholes.
Oh well Hitler only killed a few million Jews, and that has been disputed too. I suppose you'd like to support him too? Oh wait your pope already has. The fact that you can make a disgraceful and ill informed statement like the one above just further proves my point. Did god personally tell you it was justified?
Haha, no, but that displaces the problem, it is not science vs. religion any more, it's dick vs. politically powerful other dick. Science and religion may have been used as justification for this, but this is not typical of religion (specifically catholic church here). Try insulting an atheist that happens to be head of state or powerful enough. Would you conclude that atheists don't like whatever is your line of work?
When politically powerful other dick starts contributing their lack of wisdom to science and saying what views a scientist may hold using power obtained through a religious institution, it does become about science vs religion. ...and unfortunately this is typical of the catholic church. Yes both atheists and theists can be can be dicks, but scientists don't justify it by saying God says it's alright.
I think this is a case of anonymous coward dick justifying church dick who commented on scientific dick. Anonymous coward dick either does not realise or does not admit the harm that has been done.
They opposed him more for being a dick than anything else.
Well that's okay then isn't it. I mean forcing someone to recant what they know and putting him under house arrest is something we do all the time for 'being a dick'.
And he was wrong on numerous points (comets are just reflections in the upper atmosphere!),
Got news for you. Scientists are wrong all the time. The difference between religion and science is that in science you don't have to take it on faith and what is said CAN be disproven.
and his methodology was all but impossible to verify in a short time-frame, given how crappy telescopes were back then.
Yes, he was eventually proven right, but at the time he had really bad support for his theories, and went around pretty much insulting everybody. It's not as clear cut as most people make it out to be
Yes he was an insulting twit. No his methodology wasn't bad nor was his methodology particularly hard to verify. The idea that the earth was round had been supressed by crackpots for a couple of millennia. It wasn't a new idea. And the church perscuted many people other than him for holding this view.
Really? The church opposed Galileo? Or fellow scientist? Read again and re-learn your history before you continue to propagate these kind of myths.
I've read extensively thanks. How about you re-read, and stop posting as AC so we can have a proper discussion, because your take on it is laughable. He was about as "free" to continue his experiments as a caged bird. He was also no friend of the pope once he parodied him.
What the church did was inexcusable and apologists like you make me ill.
They did that a while ago; they have an observatory and host astronomy conferences. Obviously it's an attempt to live down what their predecessors did to Galileo, but I welcome it.
"The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world and the only research group directly supported by the Holy See". It's just the VATT (Vatican Telescope) that's relatively new.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology?.
Yes, and it was only in 1992 that they admitted that they had made a mistake in forcing Galileo to recant that the Earth went around the sun. Yes, Galileo was an ass about how he said it, but it doesn't change the fact that the church opposed the science with real physical and political force. Since this is how a "more reasonable major religion" behaves I think this is an EXCELLENT argument against "moderate" religion.
Covering up for pedophiles is bad. Really bad. But it's not quite the worst of the worst.
Give the man time, and power. The way he talks and acts I'm sure he'd make the Inquisition look like a family outing.
Hey this guy made movies like Terminator and Predator. Just because he's gone all Kindergarten Cop politician, doesn't mean that he doesn't profit daily from kids seeing his older movies. I remember they were big hits with "minors" when I was one myself growing up in the late 80s and early 90s. It's just pure hypocrisy.
I'll give him due respect as a fellow human being, one whose wisdom probably far exceeds my own in a great many things. However, I have a feeling I know a bit more on the subject of Internet Transparency than him, so I'll politely decline his advice.
His wisdom is indeed great on subjects such as covering up pedophilia, how to help spread disease by opposing contraception, how to set up an oppressive regime protected by superstition.
Basing morality on religion and myth is bad enough. Also most Popes have done varying degrees of harm. But this one seems to be the worst of the worst!
The pope is either an idiot, or a budding tyrant with ambitions of bringing the world back to the dark ages under dominion of the vatican.
You're wrong. It's not an either or.
Decimate us, huh? Thank goodness! You see, Decimate literally means "to reduce by ten percent", or "to kill one of every ten". If an alien asteroid attack on Earth is only going to kill one in ten, I'll take my chances.
Had you said we'd be annihilated, which means "to destroy completely", then I'd be scared.
Clearly the alien plot to drive us all insane with pedantry started years ago on slashdot.
You want to know how to arrange your developers? Why in the world don't you just ask them?
Apart from being stupid about not asking his developers, he's trying to create a workplace where open or closed dominate. Developers may not always want one or the other. The best environment would allow developers to work in isolation when they needed no distraction and bring them together easily face to face when they wanted to collaborate. Not when their bosses decide it must be so.
If they're happy with laptops and net connections (And external keyboards). it's easy Ask them what they want most of the time and then either arrange meeting rooms where they can sit around and collaborate in addition to traditional cubicles, or give them break out rooms where they can work isolated if they prefer to sit together for the majority of the itme. If they don't like the laptops desktops + remote desktop might work.
These companies need to get it through their rotten skulls that we aren't all always connected to the Internet. Many, many people go through periods where they don't have a net connection at all. All these greedy fools are doing is shooting themselves in the foot by reducing their customer base. A customer only has to buy a small number of titles that don't work for them, for whatever reason, to conclude that all the games are junk and that they're better off to pirate or go without.
Just to answer my own question, Wikipedia to the rescue. High res original Mona Lisa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg
Meh... maybe I am jaded, but half of these more than give you the gist of what it is... being in front of it adds nothing.
While I agree with the gist of the point you're making, I don't think you see realise the irony of pointing to a source with so many altered versions.
Anyone got a good link to a high res image of the original?
So you do have a personal agenda.
First of all I'm sorry you were assaulted. No one deserves that. I mean that sincerely.
On the other hand I'm appalled that you would think it is wrong to track this guy down, but that it is not more wrong that he's out there doing this to other women.
Sometimes there is no high moral ground. It's a question of the lesser of two evils, and the landscape is treacherously filled with slippery slopes. Sometimes there is no right - just two wrongs and one of them less so. I think you're allowing your ordeal to cloud your judgement.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more.
In the absence of an effective and well staffed police force what you're advocating is that people do nothing.
And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society.
Yes it is. We can tolerate private detectives and have for a long time. We can tolerate the citizenry being involved in policing. (Ever heard of a citizen's arrest?). What we can't tolerate is people ignoring the law then they track the person down, or once they've found the person. Collecting information intelligently and presenting it to the police is to be commended not condemned. Furthermore we're not talking about tracking anyone for any purpose. This is tracking down someone who has committed a crime.
When I read the lines you have written above I have to wonder what personal agenda you have?
Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong.
No it's not. If you have an argument to present, go ahead, but just stating it is wrong does not make it so.
There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
If the information is already public, there should be ZERO expectation of privacy. Collating facts should not be illegal.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines.
The police can be part of the problem. They can be corrupt. They can be complacent. They can simply be overworked and underfunded. Often they don't want help that requires even more effort. But if they are presented with collated facts and evidence that can lead to the quick conviction of a dangerous criminal, it's hard to justify not acting.
Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party.
You act as if police, both individuals and organisations are all good and have no agenda of their own. This is a dangerous and naive view to hold. There are plenty of incidents in recent history that show the Police aren't always the wonderful pillars of society we wish them to be. That isn't to say all Police are corrupt or bad. There are some awesome people there. But the nature of the job has a way of selecting for bullies and power maniacs, and of taking even the best of people and overworking them while showing them the worst side of humanity. Believing in a fairytale Police that is good and pure is harmful.
Then there's the legal system itself. An antiquated collection of rules of law that are so complex that no individual can ever learn them and so strew with holes that criminals can and do often get off on "technicalities". Harsh sentences tend to be handed down for trivial crimes "to make an example" of someone for a political agend, and soft punishment can be dealt out to violent criminals. Expecting someone to see a rapist get away with a couple of years in prison, when someone else gets up to 5 for copying a damn DVD is ridiculous. Suggesting that I trust you and that such a system is good and fair is equally ridiculous. "It's not perfect but it's the best system we had" is good for fairytale style cop shows but useless in the real world.
This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
No it doesn't, and the solution is not to make it illegal for public citizens to present collated facts to the Police.
UbiSoft wins. The game strategy guide industry wins. The customer loses. More of the usual.
Only their top CEOs win when they cut and run before the company goes under. You can't treat your customers as badly as they have been lately without losing them and gaining a reputation as a company to avoid. Their management is signing their death warrant with moves like this.
So to be green they're removing the most environmentally friendly part of the product?
If they really want to be green they can close for business. No carbon footprint at all.
Environmentalism has become nothing more than a cynical rort.
Sustainable forestry doesn't hurt the ecosystem. We can harvest trees until kingdom come and still have trees left, as long as we do it properly.
It's the fossil fuels, inks, and man hours that go into harvesting, producing and shipping the materials and final products that's the problem.
You know how to do large scale sustainable forestry without using fossil fuels or releasing greenhouse gas? I'd love to know how you do that. Even if you get rid of machinery and beasts of burden, people cutting down trees need tools and food to keep doing it.
I don't know about you, but I usually read the instruction manual on the crapper.
Did you hear that everyone!? Poster admits he is full of shit!
Close, but no, the blame lies with the media who persistently presented what was in fact a dissenting view in the face of increasing amounts of evidence that suggested otherwise.
It's easy to blame the media, but was the paper retracted? Was there any official and easy way to gauge if it still had the support of the scientific community? Was a retraction of some sort printed? Because if not to the lay person and the lay media it all just looks like different groups of reputable scientists squabbling over their pet view point.
The current scientific publication and peer review system is completely broken.
Putting data into peoples hands whoa aren't experts often leads to bad things. See every non expert who believed Wakefield study because they didn't understand how to interpret data.
So hang on here, what are people suppose to do? You're blaming these people for believing an expert (and a published study).
In that case kids died , and kids are still dying.
Well the blame lies on the expert and on the peer review that wasn't properly conducted, not on the people who believed him!!!
In principle I agree with you, but we live in an are where everyone thinks they are a qualified expert in anything.
But you just cited a case in which an expert did no better and children died!?!?
That simply isn't true, and no good will come out of this.
The data wan't show a flaw in the study because it wasn't used, but he will inevitably cherry pick data to 'prove' the study is wrong. And people like Hannah Devlin are always happy to publish claims without proper study. So no good can come from this, and people need to understand that.
It's hard problem to solve.
Again, don't blame the non-experts for bad behaviour of the experts. If anything this is a case for more openness so that other experts can disprove false claims.
In any case I'd rather be master of my own destiny and at least try to understand expert data on issues of my choosing, rather than just take it on faith that an expert is doing proper science. Yeah I could make an idiot of myself or harm myself but at least I've got a fighting chance!
You know the multi-billion dollar LHC? Guess what they did their first physics on. Not finding new exotic particles
I could do that all day long for $200/hr. I'm not finding new exotic particles right as we speak. And last night I did it in my sleep. No takers??? Okay how about a one off special just for today $50/hr?