And why is it so important or better to have people sharing the same "site"? (Not to mention that blog sites like LiveJournals have millions of people posting, far more than the number of people who contribute articles to Slashdot.)
I don't see how reading from a variety of various blogs/journals is worse than reading from a variety of people who contribute to Slashdot - and with the former, I can choose those people I find interesting, where as with Slashdot I have to take the bad with the good.
Isn't it a bit ironic that Wikipedia (supposedly a reliable encyclopedia) has less advanced moderation than Slashdot (famously unreliable)?
How is it less advanced?
- You can edit out stuff altogether, on Slashdot you can only moderate down by one point.
- If you don't have mod points, even if you know something is wrong (and can back it up), you can't moderate.
- Moderation on controversial comments is often basically a voting system between who has the most mod points. But I'm not convinced that what is right or wrong is a matter to vote on - these things should be discussed out on the talk pages. Look at how on Slashdot there are always the "popular views" (Apple is great, the RIAA is evil).
The reason why Slashdot's system is unreliable is because of these points, none of which apply to Wikipedia.
I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia
Says who? Normal encyclopedias only don't include as much due to lack of resources, or lack of space in a physical book. This is a plus for Wikipedia, I'd say.
Thanks for posting this - in practice it will do little to stop any actual problem websites (eg, material which shows genuine illegal acts), but will criminalise acts between consenting adults.
As well as writing to your MP, there is a consultation document (linked from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4195332.stm ) where you can answer questions. Hurry, the deadline is this Friday 2nd December!
This legislation will cover acts whether or not the participants are consenting, and will cover even mere depictions of violent acts.
So for example, enjoy play acting out a "rape" fantasy with your girlfriend? Better not take any pictures if this new proposal comes law, even if you only intend to keep them to yourself.
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc).
The problem is that this proposal doesn't just cover images of actual criminal acts (which would be reasonable), but includes both cases between consenting adults [this is explicitly mentioned in the conslutation document - so it's not a paranoid interpretation of the law], and cases which merely depict a violent scene, even if there is no such actual violence.
She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom.
I think that makes it far worse. It's bad enough trying to control material on the Internet just because some people don't like it, but this law will make you a criminal for merely possessing such material.
Ie, if you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
Obviously having an extra feature in an extension is better than something which can't offer that feature at all. The point is, why is it acceptable compared with offering that feature as standard?
But of course, if you're going to ignore Opera for the sake of it, I guess the only thing we can say about Firefox is that it's not as bad as IE...
What with all this talk about the death penalty being an effective/ineffective deterrant? It's a punishment
Of course it's a punishment. And what is the purpose of punishment? Punishment isn't an end in itself, it's a means to any one of things, including deterrent to others, but also any of preventing them from committing the crime again, rehabilitation and so on.
It's simply barbaric to keep these people alive, charging the victims (be they the direct victims or society as a whole) feed, shelter, and entertainment these people,
A death sentence ends up more costly than a life sentence, due to all the legal costs. (And yes you could shoot them straight away, but then the probability of shooting innocent people is vastly greater - you've done away with any chance of appeal, which people sentenced to prison are entitled to.)
and releasing them in the public at a later date to harm society once again.
Well that's an argument for "life should mean life", not the death sentence.
How much money does it take to wear a simple suit, shirt and tie rather than a curry-stained tshirt and sweaty jogging pants?
I don't think anyone is defending the right to wear sweaty, stained clothes - a sweaty, stained suit would be just as bad.
There may be good fashion and bad fashion, and I might disagree with the GP post that it doesn't take a lot of money to dress well, but there is nothing inherently bad about t-shirts, or good about shirt and ties, especially when one is not dealing with customers face to face.
How irrelevant this all should be is highlighted by the fact that women can usually get away with wearing t-shirts, and certainly never have to wear ties, and that is viewed as "smart". But would anyone get away with an article about how badly dressed women are, and how they should make more effort?
All this article shows is that the IT industry is less likely to join in the mainstream sheepish view that we should all dress in one particular way, and a good thing too in my opinion.
I think that a table is a table when it has a flat top, and can fufill its designed function. But I respect the carpenter's idea that it was always a table, and the purchaser's idea that it's not really a table until it is actually functioning as a table.
Rather, one should respect their right to hold a belief or have an idea. That doesn't mean I respect their idea. Especially if it's something like "An acorn is a table".
ScentCone's answer had this right - perhaps we can't draw a magic line where we suddenly go from "not a table" to "a table", but more importantly, we ought to be able to look at some earlier stages and say it most definitely wasn't a table then.
This may seem cold and crass, but think of life as a table.
And the biggest problem here (which people often forget) is that isn't about life at all. One side agrees that all cells are living, but simply being alive isn't what's important - rather it's being sentient. The other side also actually agrees that simply being alive isn't enough, since most people consider it ludicrous to suggest it's immoral to kill a blade of grass. Instead they have some other criterion, such as having human DNA (so a piece of human DNA on its own is more important than a living non-human mammal that shows some level of intelligence, for example).
So whilst we can't change someone's idea that an acorn counts as a table, we can argue about what features that are important. Is it important that we have a flat surface to put things on, or is it important that one day, something may grow into something and might be able to be made into something with a flat surface?
So why did you post this here? You're not famous, so who cares what you think?
Honestly, if it's bad that some people think their posts are interesting, it's far worse when people like you think your posts are interesting, and better than everyone else's, whose posts you think should be banned.
Should this apply to other things too? Should email and chat rooms be censored if they don't get your seal of approval?
Well, it's not like the majority use their real name, just like here on Slashdot. Whether that's intentional to avoid being found, or just because they like a fancy nickname, they result is the same.
The few that do are probably more likely to be "out" about anything that they do, or careful to keep things non-public if they don't want people knowing (it's easy to restrict posts to certain people on LiveJournal).
It's not like this is anything fundamentally new - consider when DejaNews came along, and suddenly all your obscure Usenet posts from ten years earlier were available for all to see.
Of course, chord changes to a song do not count. Anything that has the MELODY. So, you could make a Midi of everything except the melody, and put that out there. I don't believe that is a problem. The copyright issue is when you associate a chord progression with a melody. That is a song.
I can't believe that's true. There's clearly more to a song than "chord progression" and "melody"!
A chord progression alone cannot be copyrighted because that's just a series of chords which could appear in many songs, and is only something that lasts a few bars. But if you had more than that - not just the chord progression but the exact rhythms, being the same for the entire song, along with the exact particular notes played - just without the main melody, then that would still be copyrightable.
Yes, you could probably get away with someone just banging away the plain old chords with no particular notes at all. But the result would only vaguely resemble the actual song, and I don't see why any would be happy to listen to such a simplistic basic version of it.
If I tell you that I plan to call you at 8:00 am tomorrow then you only have to worry about whether that's a convenient time for you, not whether I mean my time, your time or someone else's time.
But we already have the best of both worlds.
If you want to communicate with someone internationally and arrange a common time, then it's obviously best to use GMT/UT. If you're talking about local time, then it's simpler for all local times to be the same around the world (eg, working 9-5) and adjust the local clock, rather than changing every single time reference depending on where you are.
I don't see the advantage in move all time references to only GMT/UT.
It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.
Sounds just like people posting on Slashdot;)
I think the problem is people only see "blog" as being one particular type: The type where someone runs a blog on a standalone website, and posts opinions that presumably he hopes people will read, but hardly anyone ever does, I agree is rather sad.
But many of them are read by many people. Not because they are well-known, but just because they have these things called "friends". Sites like LiveJournal make it easy to read many other posts without having to use RSS readers. There's also probably another category of people who just want to write, but don't care if anyone actually reads or not.
Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively.
No, its defenders say that nobody should rely on any one thing, if you want to claim something as being true. So the same issues face books/sites written by a closed group just as much as Wikipedia. You shouldn't rely on one encyclopedia if you want to be sure something is true - but I don't think that means we should never ship books off to Africa however. Even a single source can help people learn, as long as they are willing to revise what they learn if they come across new evidence.
After all, you shouldn't believe something is true just because one teacher at school told you so. But that doesn't mean we should throw away the education system.
And as another poster said, I presume they'll watch for articles that have been vandalised in the last 5 minutes before taking a hard copy. Perhaps they may avoid articles which are flagged as being in dispute or rapidly changing.
No one claims Wikipedia is perfect, but for some reason other people hold it to a higher standard than other books/sites, or seem to think that other books/sites are perfect.
Can I ask what sort of search terms you are using, that you get irrelevant postings by 15 year olds about their vacation?
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had blogs clogging up my results, unless an entry is actually relevant. Yet I often hear people claim their results are filled with irrelevant blog entries, so I'm curious what the difference is. Can someone give me an example?
By far the biggest problem for me is spam/advertising sites that fool Google, and then occasionally forum posts (although in most cases the latter are relevant, and I wouldn't want to remove them altogether).
Non sequitor. As a quick counter-argument, an intelligent designer could be eternal
In that case, the Intelligent Designer himself would be God.
In any case, all 'creation' is supernatural, including the Big Bang. Questions like 'what came before the Big Bang' cannot have any answers based on naturalism, because the Big Bang was the beginning of nature itself.
Well talking about natural versus supernatural is a bit misleading, as it's just a matter of definitions. The important point is whether the beginning was due to an intelligent designer (ie, God), or not. If not, I would call it a "natural" start of the Universe, though even if you want to say it's supernatural, that doesn't make it the same as a God.
If you're an ancient Greek ship captain in 1000 BC, the current theory is a flat Earth surrounded by a rotating-sphere of fixed-stars.
First of all, it depends what we mean by "flat". Even in ancient times, it could be seen that the earth had curvature, simply by observing a ship disappearing across the horizon. The question was whether the earth was a block with a curved top, or a full sphere (or indeed something else altogether).
Now here's the important point: if the difference between the two is indistinguishable, then any claims about the shape of the earth are merely conjecture, or at best hypotheses. "The earth is flat" is not something which had been tested, therefore it would be wrong to ever call it a scientific theory.
What happens outside of the known world is simply outside of the scope of any theory at that time. The only valid theory at the time was "The earth is locally curved", which was supported by evidence, and is true. Anything beyond that was conjecture.
The old flat Earth idea is a useful way to demonstrate how incorrect theories can still be supported by the evidence,
No, because the evidence at the time supported a earth with curvature. Any claim that the earth was totally flat would have been disproven at the time. Any claim about dropping off the ends of the earth if you went to far would not have been supported by any evidence.
We have this cunning system known as "remand" whereby people can be sent to prison until trial, if there is enough evidence, and it is believed they may try to flee the country.
What the Labour government want to do is throw people in prison without this evidence, and without intervention from a judge. If the only evidence you have is a hard drive which might or might not have encrypted information, then it is you who is living in fairytale land if you think all such people are terrorists who need to be locked up or else they'll flee the country.
So does everyone who thinks a bar owner should allow smoking think he or she should be able poison your beer? Health issues are different from free speech issues.
And similarly, messing up someone's education is different to kicking someone out of a bar.
The point is that "it's a private organisation" is not a blanket way of being exempt of any laws.
It's reasonable that a person's health takes priority to a person's right to put what they like in drinks. It's also quite reasonable that avoiding disruption in bars takes priority over a person's right to drink in one particular bar. I'm not sure it's reasonable that the right for a school to dictate what children do in their own time takes priority over their education.
You may be right about the US constitution, but as another reply said, that doesn't mean they should have no right.
There is no "school" right to free speech. There is no right to free speech on the job. There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise.
If I get sacked for keeping a blog in my own time, I'd be suing for unfair dismissal.
But then, I live in the UK where we realise the value of having laws so that employees, even for private employers, are treated fairly. I'd like to think that a child's education is at least as important as a job.
Not all private organisations are the same. Even in the US, rules governing bars or workplaces are different to those on a private home. A "school" is not some arbitrary private organisation, it is a particular entity which a child must attend.
As for malls, I think it's a bad thing that large amounts of "public" land, especially that necessary to cross in order to reach many shops, is owned by private organisations who are exempt from any laws. What good are these "rights" when all jobs, schools, land and prisons have passed into private hands?
The obvious answer is to say that malls are still subject to certain laws - any publically accessable land is not the same as a private home, clearly. Here in the UK, we have "right of way" laws which mean you can't prevent access across certain private land, but unfortunately that doesn't apply to malls necessarily (we've had some malls banning people wearing hoodies and other headwear, for example).
Whilst we're talking about "rights", it's a shame people don't seem to think we have a right to education.
A school, even if it is entirely private, is not the same thing as a private organisation that people can choose to go to such as a restaurant.
We live in a society where school is not a choice, but compulsory (indeed, here in the UK parents have been sent to prison for their children playing truant). It ought to follow that any organisation wanting to receive the status of "school" - even if it is totally private - should abide by certain rules (otherwise you could label anything a "school", and therefore avoid sending children to a proper school).
This particular case isn't even about admission policies, it's about kicking students out whilst they are already there. It's all very well saying "Don't like it, go somewhere else", but doing so will severely disrupt their education (not to mention causing problems if the only other schools are further away, or if other schools refuse to take them because they were "expelled" and labelled as troublemakers).
Therefore, in my opinion it follows that a private school most certainly does not have the right to do what it likes, if that causes disruption to a child's education.
Law is an external deposit of morality. Your idea of deciding if something is immoral is testing to see if it hurts someone. You want law to minimize suffering. You think suffering is a Bad thing (absolute moral qualifier). There are a lot of people who think morality is different. You not only look down upon their beliefs, but also think that your way is better. That your version of morality is better.
Law and morality, althoug related, are not the same thing. If you think that actions which don't harm others are nonetheless wrong, then fine, that's your opinion. But you need a stronger argument than that to show why we should put such people in prison.
If one's argument is that the law should enforce (your interpretation of) God's will, then sure, you can say their opinion is just as valid as my opinion of what the law should be. But that's exactly what the OP was pointing out when he called it the "Catholic Justice System" - ie, law which enforces the rules of a religion.
To speak more specifically on the idea of incarcerating adults (18 year olds) who have sex with minors (less than 18 years old), you could always consider the utilitarian argument. For the most part, 18 year olds have a chance at economic freedom, the ability to support themselves independent of their parents -- a productive member of a capitalist society.
Not when they're in prison they don't. If you're so worried about people's productivity, why are we so eager to put them in prison because their actions might have led to someone getting pregnant whilst as school, and then might drop out of school?
Why would you drop out of school? Because you're pregnant or because you're suffering from the emotional and psychological issues generated from considering and implementing abortion.
Yes, it's well known that sex between same-sex members can produce children, that's why we punish them even more harshly!
Don't you see? Try to justify it all you like, but these laws are not explained by the problems of teenage pregnancy.
And that isn't just a moral statement, but a measurable economic factor as well.
I take it you've factored in the productivity lost by locking up people (even where it didn't result in pregnancy), or the cost to keep them in prison?
Also, do you advocate raising the age of consent to 21 - after, we can't have people dropping out of University. Perhaps we should clamp down on it altogether - we can't have people's careers being affected by childbirth.
Japan is beginning to show signs of familial breakdown and their health system is having to support more people in their old-age. Same for Europe.
Erm, evidence? Here in the UK our families are doing quite well, and our national health system, though under strain, is still something better than the US.
As for retirement, that is a problem due to having too few children! If anything, we need to encourage people to have more children, even at a younger age.
Slashdot Mirror
And why is it so important or better to have people sharing the same "site"? (Not to mention that blog sites like LiveJournals have millions of people posting, far more than the number of people who contribute articles to Slashdot.)
I don't see how reading from a variety of various blogs/journals is worse than reading from a variety of people who contribute to Slashdot - and with the former, I can choose those people I find interesting, where as with Slashdot I have to take the bad with the good.
Isn't it a bit ironic that Wikipedia (supposedly a reliable encyclopedia) has less advanced moderation than Slashdot (famously unreliable)?
How is it less advanced?
- You can edit out stuff altogether, on Slashdot you can only moderate down by one point.
- If you don't have mod points, even if you know something is wrong (and can back it up), you can't moderate.
- Moderation on controversial comments is often basically a voting system between who has the most mod points. But I'm not convinced that what is right or wrong is a matter to vote on - these things should be discussed out on the talk pages. Look at how on Slashdot there are always the "popular views" (Apple is great, the RIAA is evil).
The reason why Slashdot's system is unreliable is because of these points, none of which apply to Wikipedia.
I do also notice that Wikipedia has a lot of entries for stuff that might not otherwise be considered important enough to be in an encyclopedia
Says who? Normal encyclopedias only don't include as much due to lack of resources, or lack of space in a physical book. This is a plus for Wikipedia, I'd say.
Thanks for posting this - in practice it will do little to stop any actual problem websites (eg, material which shows genuine illegal acts), but will criminalise acts between consenting adults.
As well as writing to your MP, there is a consultation document (linked from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4195332.stm ) where you can answer questions. Hurry, the deadline is this Friday 2nd December!
This legislation will cover acts whether or not the participants are consenting, and will cover even mere depictions of violent acts.
So for example, enjoy play acting out a "rape" fantasy with your girlfriend? Better not take any pictures if this new proposal comes law, even if you only intend to keep them to yourself.
To be fair, this one is only about attempting to extend the laws which cover possession of child pornography to violent porn (rape, mutilation, etc).
The problem is that this proposal doesn't just cover images of actual criminal acts (which would be reasonable), but includes both cases between consenting adults [this is explicitly mentioned in the conslutation document - so it's not a paranoid interpretation of the law], and cases which merely depict a violent scene, even if there is no such actual violence.
She's not trying to ban porn websites, just the (currently legal) possession of their materials within the United Kingdom.
I think that makes it far worse. It's bad enough trying to control material on the Internet just because some people don't like it, but this law will make you a criminal for merely possessing such material.
Ie, if you take some naughty images of you and your consenting partner that would fall under these new laws, then you'll be a criminal even if you have no intent of distributing these publically.
Obviously having an extra feature in an extension is better than something which can't offer that feature at all. The point is, why is it acceptable compared with offering that feature as standard?
But of course, if you're going to ignore Opera for the sake of it, I guess the only thing we can say about Firefox is that it's not as bad as IE...
What with all this talk about the death penalty being an effective/ineffective deterrant? It's a punishment
Of course it's a punishment. And what is the purpose of punishment? Punishment isn't an end in itself, it's a means to any one of things, including deterrent to others, but also any of preventing them from committing the crime again, rehabilitation and so on.
It's simply barbaric to keep these people alive, charging the victims (be they the direct victims or society as a whole) feed, shelter, and entertainment these people,
A death sentence ends up more costly than a life sentence, due to all the legal costs. (And yes you could shoot them straight away, but then the probability of shooting innocent people is vastly greater - you've done away with any chance of appeal, which people sentenced to prison are entitled to.)
and releasing them in the public at a later date to harm society once again.
Well that's an argument for "life should mean life", not the death sentence.
I like my ring-tones to actually sound like some sort of ringing.
Indeed - I'd be willing to pay good money for a ringtone that actually damn well sounds like a phone ringing!
How much money does it take to wear a simple suit, shirt and tie rather than a curry-stained tshirt and sweaty jogging pants?
I don't think anyone is defending the right to wear sweaty, stained clothes - a sweaty, stained suit would be just as bad.
There may be good fashion and bad fashion, and I might disagree with the GP post that it doesn't take a lot of money to dress well, but there is nothing inherently bad about t-shirts, or good about shirt and ties, especially when one is not dealing with customers face to face.
How irrelevant this all should be is highlighted by the fact that women can usually get away with wearing t-shirts, and certainly never have to wear ties, and that is viewed as "smart". But would anyone get away with an article about how badly dressed women are, and how they should make more effort?
All this article shows is that the IT industry is less likely to join in the mainstream sheepish view that we should all dress in one particular way, and a good thing too in my opinion.
I think that a table is a table when it has a flat top, and can fufill its designed function. But I respect the carpenter's idea that it was always a table, and the purchaser's idea that it's not really a table until it is actually functioning as a table.
Rather, one should respect their right to hold a belief or have an idea. That doesn't mean I respect their idea. Especially if it's something like "An acorn is a table".
ScentCone's answer had this right - perhaps we can't draw a magic line where we suddenly go from "not a table" to "a table", but more importantly, we ought to be able to look at some earlier stages and say it most definitely wasn't a table then.
This may seem cold and crass, but think of life as a table.
And the biggest problem here (which people often forget) is that isn't about life at all. One side agrees that all cells are living, but simply being alive isn't what's important - rather it's being sentient. The other side also actually agrees that simply being alive isn't enough, since most people consider it ludicrous to suggest it's immoral to kill a blade of grass. Instead they have some other criterion, such as having human DNA (so a piece of human DNA on its own is more important than a living non-human mammal that shows some level of intelligence, for example).
So whilst we can't change someone's idea that an acorn counts as a table, we can argue about what features that are important. Is it important that we have a flat surface to put things on, or is it important that one day, something may grow into something and might be able to be made into something with a flat surface?
So why did you post this here? You're not famous, so who cares what you think?
Honestly, if it's bad that some people think their posts are interesting, it's far worse when people like you think your posts are interesting, and better than everyone else's, whose posts you think should be banned.
Should this apply to other things too? Should email and chat rooms be censored if they don't get your seal of approval?
Well, it's not like the majority use their real name, just like here on Slashdot. Whether that's intentional to avoid being found, or just because they like a fancy nickname, they result is the same.
The few that do are probably more likely to be "out" about anything that they do, or careful to keep things non-public if they don't want people knowing (it's easy to restrict posts to certain people on LiveJournal).
It's not like this is anything fundamentally new - consider when DejaNews came along, and suddenly all your obscure Usenet posts from ten years earlier were available for all to see.
As a rule, people who lead interesting lives don't blog.
Of course not; people with interesting lives spend their day reading and posting on Slashdot!
Of course, chord changes to a song do not count. Anything that has the MELODY. So, you could make a Midi of everything except the melody, and put that out there. I don't believe that is a problem. The copyright issue is when you associate a chord progression with a melody. That is a song.
I can't believe that's true. There's clearly more to a song than "chord progression" and "melody"!
A chord progression alone cannot be copyrighted because that's just a series of chords which could appear in many songs, and is only something that lasts a few bars. But if you had more than that - not just the chord progression but the exact rhythms, being the same for the entire song, along with the exact particular notes played - just without the main melody, then that would still be copyrightable.
Yes, you could probably get away with someone just banging away the plain old chords with no particular notes at all. But the result would only vaguely resemble the actual song, and I don't see why any would be happy to listen to such a simplistic basic version of it.
If I tell you that I plan to call you at 8:00 am tomorrow then you only have to worry about whether that's a convenient time for you, not whether I mean my time, your time or someone else's time.
But we already have the best of both worlds.
If you want to communicate with someone internationally and arrange a common time, then it's obviously best to use GMT/UT. If you're talking about local time, then it's simpler for all local times to be the same around the world (eg, working 9-5) and adjust the local clock, rather than changing every single time reference depending on where you are.
I don't see the advantage in move all time references to only GMT/UT.
It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.
;)
Sounds just like people posting on Slashdot
I think the problem is people only see "blog" as being one particular type: The type where someone runs a blog on a standalone website, and posts opinions that presumably he hopes people will read, but hardly anyone ever does, I agree is rather sad.
But many of them are read by many people. Not because they are well-known, but just because they have these things called "friends". Sites like LiveJournal make it easy to read many other posts without having to use RSS readers. There's also probably another category of people who just want to write, but don't care if anyone actually reads or not.
Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively.
No, its defenders say that nobody should rely on any one thing, if you want to claim something as being true. So the same issues face books/sites written by a closed group just as much as Wikipedia. You shouldn't rely on one encyclopedia if you want to be sure something is true - but I don't think that means we should never ship books off to Africa however. Even a single source can help people learn, as long as they are willing to revise what they learn if they come across new evidence.
After all, you shouldn't believe something is true just because one teacher at school told you so. But that doesn't mean we should throw away the education system.
And as another poster said, I presume they'll watch for articles that have been vandalised in the last 5 minutes before taking a hard copy. Perhaps they may avoid articles which are flagged as being in dispute or rapidly changing.
No one claims Wikipedia is perfect, but for some reason other people hold it to a higher standard than other books/sites, or seem to think that other books/sites are perfect.
Can I ask what sort of search terms you are using, that you get irrelevant postings by 15 year olds about their vacation?
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had blogs clogging up my results, unless an entry is actually relevant. Yet I often hear people claim their results are filled with irrelevant blog entries, so I'm curious what the difference is. Can someone give me an example?
By far the biggest problem for me is spam/advertising sites that fool Google, and then occasionally forum posts (although in most cases the latter are relevant, and I wouldn't want to remove them altogether).
Non sequitor. As a quick counter-argument, an intelligent designer could be eternal
In that case, the Intelligent Designer himself would be God.
In any case, all 'creation' is supernatural, including the Big Bang. Questions like 'what came before the Big Bang' cannot have any answers based on naturalism, because the Big Bang was the beginning of nature itself.
Well talking about natural versus supernatural is a bit misleading, as it's just a matter of definitions. The important point is whether the beginning was due to an intelligent designer (ie, God), or not. If not, I would call it a "natural" start of the Universe, though even if you want to say it's supernatural, that doesn't make it the same as a God.
If you're an ancient Greek ship captain in 1000 BC, the current theory is a flat Earth surrounded by a rotating-sphere of fixed-stars.
First of all, it depends what we mean by "flat". Even in ancient times, it could be seen that the earth had curvature, simply by observing a ship disappearing across the horizon. The question was whether the earth was a block with a curved top, or a full sphere (or indeed something else altogether).
Now here's the important point: if the difference between the two is indistinguishable, then any claims about the shape of the earth are merely conjecture, or at best hypotheses. "The earth is flat" is not something which had been tested, therefore it would be wrong to ever call it a scientific theory.
What happens outside of the known world is simply outside of the scope of any theory at that time. The only valid theory at the time was "The earth is locally curved", which was supported by evidence, and is true. Anything beyond that was conjecture.
The old flat Earth idea is a useful way to demonstrate how incorrect theories can still be supported by the evidence,
No, because the evidence at the time supported a earth with curvature. Any claim that the earth was totally flat would have been disproven at the time. Any claim about dropping off the ends of the earth if you went to far would not have been supported by any evidence.
We have this cunning system known as "remand" whereby people can be sent to prison until trial, if there is enough evidence, and it is believed they may try to flee the country.
What the Labour government want to do is throw people in prison without this evidence, and without intervention from a judge. If the only evidence you have is a hard drive which might or might not have encrypted information, then it is you who is living in fairytale land if you think all such people are terrorists who need to be locked up or else they'll flee the country.
Quite right - it's travelling on the tube with suspicious behaviour such as not looking at police officers he should instead be worried about, and which will risk one being thrown in for prison for 90 days.
So does everyone who thinks a bar owner should allow smoking think he or she should be able poison your beer? Health issues are different from free speech issues.
And similarly, messing up someone's education is different to kicking someone out of a bar.
The point is that "it's a private organisation" is not a blanket way of being exempt of any laws.
It's reasonable that a person's health takes priority to a person's right to put what they like in drinks. It's also quite reasonable that avoiding disruption in bars takes priority over a person's right to drink in one particular bar. I'm not sure it's reasonable that the right for a school to dictate what children do in their own time takes priority over their education.
You may be right about the US constitution, but as another reply said, that doesn't mean they should have no right.
There is no "school" right to free speech. There is no right to free speech on the job. There is no right to free speech in a shopping mall, if the shopping mall has a rule that says otherwise.
If I get sacked for keeping a blog in my own time, I'd be suing for unfair dismissal.
But then, I live in the UK where we realise the value of having laws so that employees, even for private employers, are treated fairly. I'd like to think that a child's education is at least as important as a job.
Not all private organisations are the same. Even in the US, rules governing bars or workplaces are different to those on a private home. A "school" is not some arbitrary private organisation, it is a particular entity which a child must attend.
As for malls, I think it's a bad thing that large amounts of "public" land, especially that necessary to cross in order to reach many shops, is owned by private organisations who are exempt from any laws. What good are these "rights" when all jobs, schools, land and prisons have passed into private hands?
The obvious answer is to say that malls are still subject to certain laws - any publically accessable land is not the same as a private home, clearly. Here in the UK, we have "right of way" laws which mean you can't prevent access across certain private land, but unfortunately that doesn't apply to malls necessarily (we've had some malls banning people wearing hoodies and other headwear, for example).
Whilst we're talking about "rights", it's a shame people don't seem to think we have a right to education.
A school, even if it is entirely private, is not the same thing as a private organisation that people can choose to go to such as a restaurant.
We live in a society where school is not a choice, but compulsory (indeed, here in the UK parents have been sent to prison for their children playing truant). It ought to follow that any organisation wanting to receive the status of "school" - even if it is totally private - should abide by certain rules (otherwise you could label anything a "school", and therefore avoid sending children to a proper school).
This particular case isn't even about admission policies, it's about kicking students out whilst they are already there. It's all very well saying "Don't like it, go somewhere else", but doing so will severely disrupt their education (not to mention causing problems if the only other schools are further away, or if other schools refuse to take them because they were "expelled" and labelled as troublemakers).
Therefore, in my opinion it follows that a private school most certainly does not have the right to do what it likes, if that causes disruption to a child's education.
Law is an external deposit of morality. Your idea of deciding if something is immoral is testing to see if it hurts someone. You want law to minimize suffering. You think suffering is a Bad thing (absolute moral qualifier). There are a lot of people who think morality is different. You not only look down upon their beliefs, but also think that your way is better. That your version of morality is better.
Law and morality, althoug related, are not the same thing. If you think that actions which don't harm others are nonetheless wrong, then fine, that's your opinion. But you need a stronger argument than that to show why we should put such people in prison.
If one's argument is that the law should enforce (your interpretation of) God's will, then sure, you can say their opinion is just as valid as my opinion of what the law should be. But that's exactly what the OP was pointing out when he called it the "Catholic Justice System" - ie, law which enforces the rules of a religion.
To speak more specifically on the idea of incarcerating adults (18 year olds) who have sex with minors (less than 18 years old), you could always consider the utilitarian argument. For the most part, 18 year olds have a chance at economic freedom, the ability to support themselves independent of their parents -- a productive member of a capitalist society.
Not when they're in prison they don't. If you're so worried about people's productivity, why are we so eager to put them in prison because their actions might have led to someone getting pregnant whilst as school, and then might drop out of school?
Why would you drop out of school? Because you're pregnant or because you're suffering from the emotional and psychological issues generated from considering and implementing abortion.
Yes, it's well known that sex between same-sex members can produce children, that's why we punish them even more harshly!
Don't you see? Try to justify it all you like, but these laws are not explained by the problems of teenage pregnancy.
And that isn't just a moral statement, but a measurable economic factor as well.
I take it you've factored in the productivity lost by locking up people (even where it didn't result in pregnancy), or the cost to keep them in prison?
Also, do you advocate raising the age of consent to 21 - after, we can't have people dropping out of University. Perhaps we should clamp down on it altogether - we can't have people's careers being affected by childbirth.
Japan is beginning to show signs of familial breakdown and their health system is having to support more people in their old-age. Same for Europe.
Erm, evidence? Here in the UK our families are doing quite well, and our national health system, though under strain, is still something better than the US.
As for retirement, that is a problem due to having too few children! If anything, we need to encourage people to have more children, even at a younger age.