Those segments are not assumptions, they are part of our grammar. Once you establish a subject, you can refer to the subject as "it, he, she" etc. Using pronouns is not the same as making assumptions, and nothing you added to my post is an assumption, you've merely expanded the pronouns (with the exception of my very first sentence perhaps, but the subject of my rant is explicitly spelled out in the second sentence). Some of the brackets were just expanding pronouns, otheres were not. For instance "in [the United States of] America" I made the assumption you were refferring to the country, USA, and not the Continent, North America. Oh, and prounouns can sometimes be ambiguous as well.
Instead of the blanket "everyone on D1 is a chump" (or whatever was said) he's narrowing who the statement is targeted at, without any indication that the editor really did mean to make a blanket statement or not. It was actually a joke:\
This [making assumptions] needs to stop. You're making an assumption about what the [slashdot] editor meant, [and making assumptions about what people say is] foolish thing to do. How about we do this in [the United States of] America: let's take people [their statements] for what they say [as its written/spoken], and stop going on [making assumptions] and saying "well they [those who made the assumptions] implied so and so!!!". Its [making assumptions that] is really irritating, and its [making assumptions that has] destroyed our ability to debate.
Evolution is the non-intuitive and non-disprovableidea that everything in current life started from the elementry chemicals and worked its way up through natural selection. No. I can't think of a better way of saying that... Read this (Theres a good quote near the top) http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-definiti on.html
Oh boy, where to start. I'm lazy, so I'm gonna just grab the obvious stuff thats easy to respond too.
Argument: Creationism is religion, not science This one is simple. Science seeks natural explanations to phenomena. "In science, a theory is a mathematical or logical explanation, or a testable model of the manner of interaction of a set of natural phenomena..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
Of course it suits materialists to confuse operational and origins science, although I'm sure with most the confusion arises out of ignorance. Insults now? They're not even amusing ones
The next question might be about what the authors' definition of evolution is. The answer would be mutation and natural selection acting over millions of years to bring about complex life forms from simpler ones. The final question might be: "Then did they really observe evolution?" The answer would be: "No Thats a bad definition of evolution. A good definition of evolution comes from Douglas J. Futuyma: "In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest protoorganism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions." http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-definiti on.html
Thumbs up or down on macroevolution is not a "major decision". It is an untestable hypothesis with no bearing on anyone's life. The only difference between macro and micro evolution is time
Do you have any evidence of this whatsoever? As a devil's advocate, let's assume that the author writing this article has done research showing that Firefox users indeed do not represent a significant amount of purchasing power, what do you have to counter that? If the number of firefox users aren't significant, its not worth treating them special:\
The other argument I've heard is that the earth has been warmer than this before, which is true, but there weren't any people then. As a person, that doesn't really comfort me much. But we did evolve from life that lived in some of those periods.
This stuff normally happens on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Just 120+ years of rapidly accelerating human industry has managed to create a significant spike in global temperature. http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm I don't see the spike
Did it ever occur to you, maybe if you learned to fucking spell and how to express yourself in your own native fucking language, your foe list would be shorter? Just a thought. Try repeating that sentence out loud.
In addition to everything else that they are, women ARE baby factories. Usually baby factory means that their "use" is to make babies... if you can't see why that term is bad.. well...
Not only that, they are the only baby factories. Yet we scorn them for making babies that we need and give them kudos for abandoning that responsibility and living a white collar lifestyle. We don't scorn them? I can't think of any other way to say that.
All the while, the signs that the society is in desperate need of a next generation that was never produced are rapidly moving from the realm of the abstract to the physical realm, and becoming more pressing because the capacity to poach the youth of other nations to make up for the shortfall has been impeded. There are approximately 6,602,224,175 people in the world... Lets do something with them. (Hint: it will require that we drop racism)
This is short sighted to the point of retardation. And we can extrapolate data to count for the next 100 years perfectly.
If we can't find a rationally driven way to have a society that respects the next generation of people and holds accountable those who for whatever reason cause harm to that next generation, then we will just keep puttering along with the best tools we do have... religion. See the part about world population.
The trick is in identifying the societal needs these distasteful patterns are meeting, so you can come up with a less ornerous pattern that still meets those needs. Trying to make the world a better place sure is distasteful
If you want to argue that it's ok that we're dying off, because other peoples aren't, and nothing means anything anyways, pass me another pill thanks... See part about racism (Second hint: Try not to section off people due to skin color/country of origin)
well, as far as I'm concerned, you can just fucking die right now and get out of the way. You sir, just made my day. Thank you!
And if you think he's right about America being insulated from this by younger demographics, remember that this was written in 2000, before the borders were locked so tightly. So the answer to there being too many people in 3rd world countries, is to overpopulate 1st world countries?
Take a look at what closed immigration is doing to the farmers fields now that they are having trouble getting illegal labour. Take a look at the tech sector, where the companies are actually leaving for foreign shores because they can't hire the foreign born from the US anymore. America has been dependent on immigrants for labor for a LONG time, it only makes sense we don't know how to cope with it once it gets taken away.
Either we collectively come up with a better vision of the world that acknowledges that this one is leading to the extermination of those who believe in it, and try to come up with something better that isn't couched in religious fundamentalism, but still allows us to continue to flourish and grow, or we don't, and religious fundamentalism and a new dark age of superstition begins when what we all came to know sputters out like a candle. Huh? Look around. Its usually religious fundamentalists who portray women as baby factories and put out strict rules on their place in society... yet you seem to be doing that now.
We are on the edge of a population bust that will halve the population of the Western world in the next decade or two. Do some research. This is just the U.S. Doesn't really look like a population bust...
Wealth is people. Money is just a ticket that you redeem for someone elses time. The poorer parts of the world that haven't been infected with our malignant philosophies are rising, and the west is going bankrupt... it's a place genetic material goes to die. Its sort of like bartering, only with a universally tradable good. Hard to do much without it...
You can call me a misogynist all you like. If you think a world that expects young women to kill their unborn children and spend the most vital years of their lives stuck in universities being professed at by their elders, No one expects any females to terminate their pregnancies... Nice straw man, I think.. I mean, I don't really know what your auguring against right now, you were just talking about how Western civilization was in a decline, you seemed to think that was bad... But you also don't seem to like western civilization. Hmm
so they can get meaningless jobs and finally wake to what they've been missing when their plumbing is just about worn out, when they need a surgeon just to get pregnant, when they are too old and tired to play with their kids if they do actually have one, Average life span (and health to go with it) keeps on getting extended with each generation. Only makes sense that each stage of life takes a bit longer. But change sure is scary.
if you think that is friendly to women, or men, or children, or anyone at all, you're the one that needs to have their head examined. But doctors got "professed" at by their elders. DON'T YOU SEE? THEY ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM... OH NOES!
The way it is now, the women fantasize about virile, politically incorrect black goons like 50c, who actually behave as though they had a set of balls Its nice to know your "hip" and "with it" enough to know what women fantasize about.
Your grasp of the history of both Marxism and socialism is laughably bad. For some reason I doubt your laughing
Socialism pre-existed Marxism as both an idea and in practice. Marx actually said very little about what comes after capitalism, except that involved the political dominance of the working class and the public ownership of means of production. Bah, its been too long. Your right, the term socialism has existed long before Lenin. And I believe it was Marxism that referred to an intermediate "socialist" state that would come about with reform, and then the state would more or less wither away. Lenin, however, thought reform was impossible, and that only through revolutionary means would the socialist state be achieved.
That is what (most) communists think. I doubt very much that socialists think that their preferred system is just a stepping stone to another system. Lenin figured that communism wasn't going to just happen from capitalism, as Marx said it would. So, Lenin came up with socialism to ease the population into communism.
Similarly, according to Marx, capitalism was a phase that that was "supposed" to precede communism. That does not mean that capitalists think that they are in a transitory phase for communism. But socialism was originally made to be a "transitory phase".
The quote that started it all:
What's the difference between this and breaking DRM on a music CD so that you can rip it to MP3 to play on your iPod? So, the (great?) great grandparent had said music cd, that transformed into audio cd, and now that evidently refers to Compact Disc Digital Audio...
I loathe this argument with a rare passion, the fact that 51% of people think something is true or false has no bearing on the truth of the assertion in question Your right, the problem is that we're not arguing whether or not it conforms to the standard. The op didn't say "Compact Disc Digital Audio", he said "music cd". Now if only you had a brain for that straw man of yours...
So no. No audio CDs have DRM
The original statement didn't say "Red Book standard audio cd", so it was ambigious. Thus, I'm assuming he meant what people usually mean when they refer to an audio cd, which is an audio cd they play in a cd player.
On a side note, there are cd's you get with data stream containing music video's/extras. Though I don't know if these are part of the Red Book standard or not, most people would also consider these to be audio cd's.
It really doesn't matter if you agree with the decisions that have already been made because they have already been made. Discussion whether or not we should be in Iraq, for example, is pointless because we already are in Iraq, and no decision we make today is going to undo the 2003 invasion. The only relevant debate should be about the future.
Yeah, it may have been a "bad decision" but lets not think about what was a good or bad decision, because that may help us make better decisions. We instead want to continually make bad decisions, about the future no less.
How are kids supposed to learn proper spelling & grammar?
Anyone remember "Ebonics"?
Its interesting that you have a disliking of ebonics. Studies have shown it to be less ambigous then English.
Now, the thing to look at is how language is instinctive. This means you don't learn language in school, but from hearing and participating in it when your growing up. I suggest reading Steven's Pinker's The Language Instinct. What the book is about should be fairly obvious.
There are reasons to believe that Pinker is correct. There are Children who grow up with only a pidgin language to learn from, and they end up "filling in the gaps" so to speak, and come up with a full language just as powerful as English or any other.
What IS learned in school, however, is reading and writing. These are not things that people will learn naturally, as there are an infinite number of ways to represent any word. So, by allowing the New Zealender's (If thats what they are called) to use text speak, its allowing another way to represent the language they speak. This does not mean it will change their langauge, or how they speak.
One thing to note about text speak, is its an offshoot of another written representation. Indeed, I know no better way to learn text speak then to first learn the langauge its based off. So fears of it changing standard english writting forever seem to be ridiciulous, as text speak is based off of it.
The point was that if you can understand the post, like the one in question, it doesn't matter if perfect grammar and spelling are used.
Though I dare you to look up pidgin languages and see how language is learned instinctivly through interaction among children, even if only given a sparse incomplete language. Another case to look at is deaf children who are allowed be around each other for the first time. Even with no given instruction they began to create they're own language, full of grammar and everything.
The third case to look at is ebonics, which has shown to be less ambigous then standard English.
*Sigh* Everyone thinks grammar is learned in school...
The problem isn't that it takes work, the problem is that people want to get paid to do something thats free, ie, distribute music. Yes, artists should get paid for the hard work they do, but only for the work thats done. I see no reason why an artist can create a work, and get paid for distrubiting copies of it for the next 20 years. A miner (who, by the way, probably works much harder then a musician) only gets paid for the hours they put in. And if you say anyone can be a miner, you probably have never worked in a mine. Also, it has nothing to do with it being intellectual because a physicist also only gets paid for the time he's working, and that is intellectual work as well.
I apoligize for the misspellings, grammatical and logical errors in this post. Its late and I'm tired.
God does not decide what is moral. What God decides "just happens to be" moral, always.
Yes, so whatever God decides is moral. So morality is constructed from God, and thus God could change it whenever he wanted
(If sin leads to death and immoral acts are sin, immortal beings cannot be immoral.)
So the devil cannot be immoral?
Yes. Because God knows more than you do. God is an expert in everything, if you will. If the guy from the bomb squad tells you to run, do you doubt him because everything looks fine to you?
So we should always trust the experts and never question their judgements?
If we study the field, we can improve accuracy. Which is why we are told to study God's word: if we know what God has decided in the past, our intuition will more often be correct.
Its hard to study Gods word when we don't know which book is inspired by him, or that he even exists.
God is not whimsical.
He could be, we don't know anything about him.
And if you (not you you, obviously) think that God is telling you to kill your neighbor, what can anyone say to that?
I'd say he's crazy.
And then you go and tell other people and they think "what kind of a God does that?" and are discouraged from ever learning the truth.
You speak as if its a fact that God exists, when it is not a fact.
This is not unique to morality. Our own intuition is very often wrong in many areas.
I disagree, I'd like to see some examples.
But again, there are many distorted views in christianity. Partly this is because the Bible can be difficult to understand, but more because people want to bend it to fit their own desires.
There is no evidence that the Bible has anything to do with God at all. The only proof giving is that the bible says so. This, however, isn't logical. Why the Bible and not the Koran, or any other religious text, or any religious text at all? God could not follow any of them, or not even exist.
Slashdot Mirror
This [making assumptions] needs to stop. You're making an assumption about what the [slashdot] editor meant, [and making assumptions about what people say is] foolish thing to do. How about we do this in [the United States of] America: let's take people [their statements] for what they say [as its written/spoken], and stop going on [making assumptions] and saying "well they [those who made the assumptions] implied so and so!!!". Its [making assumptions that] is really irritating, and its [making assumptions that has] destroyed our ability to debate.
And if you think he's right about America being insulated from this by younger demographics, remember that this was written in 2000, before the borders were locked so tightly. So the answer to there being too many people in 3rd world countries, is to overpopulate 1st world countries? Take a look at what closed immigration is doing to the farmers fields now that they are having trouble getting illegal labour. Take a look at the tech sector, where the companies are actually leaving for foreign shores because they can't hire the foreign born from the US anymore. America has been dependent on immigrants for labor for a LONG time, it only makes sense we don't know how to cope with it once it gets taken away. Either we collectively come up with a better vision of the world that acknowledges that this one is leading to the extermination of those who believe in it, and try to come up with something better that isn't couched in religious fundamentalism, but still allows us to continue to flourish and grow, or we don't, and religious fundamentalism and a new dark age of superstition begins when what we all came to know sputters out like a candle. Huh? Look around. Its usually religious fundamentalists who portray women as baby factories and put out strict rules on their place in society... yet you seem to be doing that now.
I loathe this argument with a rare passion, the fact that 51% of people think something is true or false has no bearing on the truth of the assertion in question Your right, the problem is that we're not arguing whether or not it conforms to the standard. The op didn't say "Compact Disc Digital Audio", he said "music cd". Now if only you had a brain for that straw man of yours...
The original statement didn't say "Red Book standard audio cd", so it was ambigious. Thus, I'm assuming he meant what people usually mean when they refer to an audio cd, which is an audio cd they play in a cd player.
On a side note, there are cd's you get with data stream containing music video's/extras. Though I don't know if these are part of the Red Book standard or not, most people would also consider these to be audio cd's.
Does that clear up the difference?
After years of internet research, I have come up with this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_manag
the internet is hard :(
http://gpl-violations.org/
If by "People took exception to being insulted" you mean "they thought some lights were bombs" then yes
Now, the thing to look at is how language is instinctive. This means you don't learn language in school, but from hearing and participating in it when your growing up. I suggest reading Steven's Pinker's The Language Instinct. What the book is about should be fairly obvious.
There are reasons to believe that Pinker is correct. There are Children who grow up with only a pidgin language to learn from, and they end up "filling in the gaps" so to speak, and come up with a full language just as powerful as English or any other.
What IS learned in school, however, is reading and writing. These are not things that people will learn naturally, as there are an infinite number of ways to represent any word. So, by allowing the New Zealender's (If thats what they are called) to use text speak, its allowing another way to represent the language they speak. This does not mean it will change their langauge, or how they speak.
One thing to note about text speak, is its an offshoot of another written representation. Indeed, I know no better way to learn text speak then to first learn the langauge its based off. So fears of it changing standard english writting forever seem to be ridiciulous, as text speak is based off of it.
The point was that if you can understand the post, like the one in question, it doesn't matter if perfect grammar and spelling are used.
Though I dare you to look up pidgin languages and see how language is learned instinctivly through interaction among children, even if only given a sparse incomplete language. Another case to look at is deaf children who are allowed be around each other for the first time. Even with no given instruction they began to create they're own language, full of grammar and everything.
The third case to look at is ebonics, which has shown to be less ambigous then standard English.
*Sigh* Everyone thinks grammar is learned in school...
The problem isn't that it takes work, the problem is that people want to get paid to do something thats free, ie, distribute music. Yes, artists should get paid for the hard work they do, but only for the work thats done. I see no reason why an artist can create a work, and get paid for distrubiting copies of it for the next 20 years. A miner (who, by the way, probably works much harder then a musician) only gets paid for the hours they put in. And if you say anyone can be a miner, you probably have never worked in a mine. Also, it has nothing to do with it being intellectual because a physicist also only gets paid for the time he's working, and that is intellectual work as well.