Sorry, but no it won't. Let me ask you a question: How many robots do you own that do things for you?
That doesn't change his point though. The point is that using machines to help in the manufacturing process means that products can be built more cheaply, less people will have to do menial or dangerous jobs, and people may be able to work shorter hours.
Arguing whether it's right that the means of production are owned by corporations, or whether we would be better of if the government owned them, or if we all individually produced for ourselves, is an entirely separate point. I note that despite our society becoming increasingly capitalist over the last century, there are less people doing menial jobs and people have lots more leisure time, so I would be curious to know why you think capitalism negates the original poster's point.
The reason why few people own robots to make things is because few people run their own mini-company. I do however own plenty of machines that make my life easier and my leisure time more fun.
The problem isn't that blogs show up in the results - clearly they must have some relevance to be there in the first place, and sometimes a blog entry may contain what you are actually looking for - it's that they may sometimes be overrated in the listings due to all the linking.
So I feel that fixing the rating system that Google uses is preferable to ignoring blogs altogether.
And yes, the option to remove blogs for a search result would be useful, but this would be useful for all sorts of things on the web - eg, sometimes I find forum posts popping up in search results, when that's not what I want. But relying on META tags reminds me of the bad old days of search engines, when they relied on the website to be honest about describing their site. No one is going to include a tag that removes them from search results (unless they don't want to be searched at all, but then they'll use the "no robots" stuff).
Yes but the issue is not whether I know about RSS readers and can be bothered to download and use one, it's whether I can convince 150+ of my LJ readers to do so. Just about everyone I know has an LJ, but few if any are using RSS readers.
Also RSS readers alone don't solve the problem of private "friends only" posting (afaik) - someone would still need an LJ account to be able to read my non-public entries, so once they've done that, it's usually easier to just use the Friends page system. If I was hosting my journal on my own website, I'd need to give people an account/password just to read the non-public entries of my journal, which is more hassle.
Want to have some fun on LJ? Try to disagree with someone on your friends list, and watch the hilarity ensue.
This is a problem with your friends, not with LJ.
I've had plenty of interesting discussions on LJ where I've disagreed with someone.
With interconnected friends networks, gossip can spread like wildfire and all sorts of wonderful sour attitudes towards one another can result.
Just about all "friends networks" are already interconnected in real life; LJ just reflects this fact. This is no different to the way that gossip can spread like wildfire in real life.
It may be true that it can happen more quickly online on LJ, but I think the benefits of having quicker and more efficient means of communication far outweigh the downsides.
How would you like it if some LJ using friend of yours decided to tell the world about something you did or didn't do to your embarassment?
How would you like it if some friend of yours decided to tell the world about something you did or didn't do to your embarassment?
I for one can't wait until the communication bubble bursts.
Before LJ, there existed methods such as emailing loads of people, or even telling them in real life, if you wanted to spread malicious gossip.
It's all very well noting that personalised information is better than non-personalised information about a person, but who has the time to do this for everyone you know? Maybe if you only have a few friends, but before LiveJournal came along, I was never writing a personalised email each for over 150 people!
Blogs aren't a replacement for personal email - if I have something which is personal, I still use email for that. Blogs allow something new.
Personally, I dont' read ANY BLOGS, unless you count Slashdot. But slashdot is hardly a "blog". When friends or acquaintances offer me their livejournal (or other blog) urls, I tell them "I"m sorry, but I don't read livejournals". It's nothing intended as offense toward them. I just don't waste my time reading things that I don't care about.
And that is exactly one of the good things about blogs. Would you prefer it if all your friends (or even people who just knew you but you didn't necessarily like) randomly spammed you with their updates, opinions and so on via email? Even if it was personalised, that could be annoying if you didn't want to hear from that person - the key point about blogs is that the reader decides what they want to read.
And why doesn't it count as a personal conversation just because there are more than two people involved? I have had plenty of discussions with friends over LiveJournal; just because I'm talking with more than one person doesn't make it non-personal.
She shared her intimate moments with someone she trusted, and the jerk betrayed her. This is less about sex and more about privacy.
True, though I wonder under what circumstances the video was originally transmitted to other people. It could have been given with her permission for all we know, and it would be one of the recipients who betrayed them. The article says that "Though public transmission and sale of pornography is a crime, possession and viewing is not" which suggests that the person who put it on the web site was clearly breaking the law, but it's worrying that sending to others through email (which isn't what I would consider a "public transmission", though I've no idea how they define it) is enough to get him arrested and charged.
Although it's not immediately clear that it was specifically reverse engineering that was upheld as being unlawful (which always seems to be a grey legal area), or whether it was specifically violating the EULA? Does this case mean that reverse engineering is illegal, or that EULAs are always valid?
If you want to be able to legally use the product without living by the terms you agreed to, you're SOL. Isn't this the same legal concept that the GPL uses to prevent distributions of derivative works without the source?
No.
Breaking the GPL: You're breaking copyright law anyway.
I believe that Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights use SDL for the Linux ports, and that's just off the top of my head. The list of commercial 2D games using SDL is probably a lot larger - remember that this is a library which provides more for 2D games than it does for 3D (ie, it provides a 2D graphics API, but 3D has to be done through OpenGL, and AFAIK can't be used with Direct3D).
So what are the Java commercial games, 3D or otherwise?
(Note, I think Java is a great language for some purposes, but it's wrong to cite SDL as an example lacking commercial games written in it).
Theism is belief in God. Atheism is lack of theism.
At the end of the day, this is just word definitions. If you want to use the word atheism like that, fair enough, but you have to accept that it is a fact that many atheists (if not most of them) do not use it in the same way.
I don't believe in God. That isn't a belief system just like Christianity etc. If you say I'm not an atheist (and I'm not agnostic either, by your definition - and incidentally, many people use agnostic in a different way to the way you define it too), then I'm left with no word to label myself with.
Is not believing in unicorns a belief system too? We never nitpick between "not believing" and "believing not" with things such as unicorns, ghosts and so on, so I don't see why an issue of this is always made with believing (or not) in God. I think the only reason it is done is so that theists can make out atheists to be no different to them in terms of having faith, when really they're just attacking a strawman idea of what they think atheists believe.
The Bible says very clearly in several places, both in the New Testament and the Old, that homosexuality is a sin.
I don't see that it is clear at all - there is much disagreement as to what is said, relating to issues such as translation and interpretation. http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibi.htm is a good write up of this.
And I don't see how you can say that certain parts of the document that your faith is based on don't matter
True, but I have to ask - do you take every part of the Bible literally, such as owning slaves, not doing anything on the Sabbath (and executing those who do), not eating shellfish, and believing that the story of Genesis is all literally true?
No, that's atheism - "without theism". Agnosticsm is about lack of knowledge, not belief.
Anyhow, the fact that some people use agnosticsm to talk about lack of belief doesn't change the fact that many (if not most) atheists use the term to indicate simply that they don't believe in God, and they do not have "just as much a beleif as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, or any of the other major religious beleifs in the world". That's a strawman argument making assumptions on people based on what they call themselves, and is no better than me claiming that anyone who calls themselves a Christian believes in creationism and takes the story on Genesis literally.
Well, the poster I was responding to said it's not socially acceptable based on the idea that it doesn't happen much, and (as I point out) it doesn't happen much because it can't happen (being illegal).
Now it may be that it's illegal because it's socially unacceptable, but you can't base whether it is socially acceptable on the fact that it rarely happens. My point was that how common polygamy is is irrelevant in terms of judging how common such behaviour would be, because it's illegal.
Sadly yes, polyamorous behaviour is seen as socially unacceptable by many, but not in *all* social circles, which I think was the earlier poster's point - in some social circles, it is quite acceptable (as I can confirm from my own experience).
But cloning an embryo isn't equal to cloning a human, as long as "cloning a human" means making a copy of a human that has been born, which would be analagous to "killing a human", and which clearly isn't what we have achieved.
The fact that people use "cloning a human" to mean "cloning an embryo" is an issue with language, and nothing to do with whether humans and embryos are equivalent in any moral sense.
Atheism is just as much a beleif as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, or any of the other major religious beleifs in the world, and yet they often consider themselves somehow higher than everybody else, that since they believe in no god, they are free to jab at ANY religion and that their intellect is somehow more valuable than faith.
Note that atheism is a lack of a particular belief. The joke here was against creationists specifically, not against religion in general. If "faith" means believing things like creationism, then yes, intellect is more valuable.
One of my best friend is jewish and an atheist (I know -- a contradiction, but that's what he calls himself).
It's not - presumably he means Jewish in the sense of race. Religion is often confused as being both belief, and race, when clearly these are very different attributes. Judaism is one of those religions where the race aspect is particularly strong.
Polyamorous is not polygamous. For the most part, polygamy isn't seen much outside the "communes" of the 60s, and rumors I've heard about Mormons.
What's the difference? If you mean being married to more than one person (which is the only difference I can see), then it's not so much that polygamy isn't socially accepted, but more that it's illegal.
I always find a good way to annoy an Atheist in an open minded debate is to challenge him that not believing is in itself a faith.
Well, it is annoying to claim things that are wrong, yes.
If one truly knows of the world's religions and chooses not to follow them, then it's still a very specific choice. A very specific choice they can't deviate from one bit, or else they're no longer part of the club. They'll stick to this even if that means denying anything and everything "supernatual" that they can't explain, unless it meets with "their" proof, and sometimes even still long after that.
For me at least, it means not believing in things that I have no evidence for. If I see evidence of a phenomenon for which I have no explanation for, I'll say "Hmm there's something strange here that I have no explanation for". What I won't do is make up stories about Gods, magic or fairies "explaining" how it works.
Also note that being an atheist does not imply that one doesn't believe in anything supernatural.
It's useful if you want some entries to be private, but you don't mind other entries being seen by other people (either specific people, or anyone).
Now you could maintain two separate journals, a LiveJournal, and one on your computer, but I'd say it's less hassle to maintain just one, and also more convenient to have the entries stored together.
I have done this when keeping a dream diary. I don't want to have the entries stored across separate journals, and I don't mind some of the entries being read by others. But obviously, some of my dreams are rather private.
I guess there are other advantages of an online journal, such as being able to post/read it anywhere.
You're wrong. Children under the age of one are not sentient, as near as we can tell given that the term itself has basically no rigorous meaning and that, if it did, it would be utterly untestable.
I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster.
You're the one claiming that babies are non-sentient beings, no different to machines without feelings. Sentience is hard to define, but let's talk in terms of any of the following: ability to feel pain, consciousness, the ability to have thoughts.
Now, I'm well aware than a baby brain is not fully formed. If there is proof that a baby brain has nothing we might consider sentience at all, you'll have to show me some URLs or whatever.
You yourself admit that this is something that is untestable - hence we cannot be sure, but the fact that they have working brains just like adults have working brains gives us a clue that they may be sentient. On the other hand, an embryo has no brain. We can be far more certain that it is no more sentient than a brick.
Put it this way - sometimes when people are born with non-functioning brains, or brain death occurs but the body is still alive, some people (including myself) argue that killing such people (letting them die by starvation, whatever) is okay. Would you say that such people are human/baby killers, or tell them "I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster"?
Wait. Hang on a sec. Before we go any further: How old are you? If you're too young for your reproductive instincts to have kicked in yet, that'll explain a lot.
That you can't make an argument without resorting to personal attacks?
So so far you've implied that it's okay to kill babies and people with brain damage or organic brain disorders. Anybody else you wanna get rid of?
I haven't argued that it's okay to kill babies, or anyone with some form of brain damage or disorders, since I believe that all these are sentient, thinking beings.
OTOH, see above - people do advocate allowing people with brain death (where the thinking part of the brain is dead, and only the part which controls bodily functions remains) to die. Whilst you may disagree with their point of view, you should understand that they exist, and they are hardly the same as "baby killers".
Look, I understand that you're being sincere and all that, but you DO know enough basic history to realize that societies that have chosen to make such life-and-death decisions have rapidly spiraled into the deepest sorts of depravity, don't you? [...] Are you prepared to go down that road again, just trusting that this time we'll know where to stop?
Okay I see your point - but why draw the line where you draw it? Why not go even further the other way, and don't kill any animals. Wait, plants are living too. If we kill them, who knows where it may lead.
What does "the definitions game" mean?
I mean that you started saying it was a fact that embryos are "babies", when it is dubious that this is true, and many people do not use the terms in this way.
Well, I'm real close to not considering you human, either. Does that mean it's okay for me to argue for your summary execution? If your answer here is anything other than "no," I think you really need to reconsider your values system.
My answer is "no". If an embryo started having a discussion with me on Slashdot, I'd change my point of view on the nature of an embryo.
You should realise that not everyone has the same viewpoint as you. I'm curious what your exact viewpoint is here - is it that all human life should be protected? If yes, I could start asking you about if torturing animals was okay, and paint you as some kind of "monster" for advocating that. If you said all life should be protected, then I'd ask the same question of plants - is it okay to eat them, or maybe torture them by chopping down a tree, or stamping on them? What about bacteria?
Just a note - most people (include myself) who call themselves atheist mean "I don't believe in (any) God", and not "I believe God doesn't exist".
So by this former meaning, I don't see how atheism is silly. Also agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief, so it is not mutually exclusive to atheism. I agree that, in the absence of evidence, "not knowing" is the logical choice - but I also believe that "not believing" is the logical choice (otherwise I would believe in all sorts of things that I didn't have evidence for).
Sure, a hard disk based one certainly has advantages, I'm just saying that you don't have to carry around huge amounts of CDs with you with a CD player.
Also I'm one of those people who likes to listen to music almost always by albums (which I know apparentely seems quite strange these days..)
I gave sentience as an example of a very significant difference between an embryo, and what people usually think of as babies (as it happens, I believe that sentience is the most important factor in determining whether a thing should be treated as an individual entity with its own rights, but I realise that other people have other viewpoints). And yes, if it were proven that babies were not sentient, then I wouldn't have a problem with people killing them. But I'm not convinced that this is the case - for starters, babies have functioning brains, unlike embryos which have nothing of the sort; and this is not something that I'm advocating here (for similar reasons, you won't find me advocating late stage abortions, except for life threatening cases). The difference is that it's plausible that babies may be sentient, where as there is no way that an embryo has sentience (at least, without resorting to arguments like "for all you know, this brick wall could be sentient").
Citing a dictionary, incidentally, is an excellent way of demonstrating that you have no idea what the conversation is really about, or for that matter what dictionaries are for. But since you brought it up
You brought up the definitions game, by claiming that embryos are babies, and when someone suggested that some people view the situation differently, you said that they were simply wrong, because it is a fact that embryos are babies.
So since you are making the claim that an embryo is a baby as a fact, it's fair game to point out evidence to the contrary.
True, the definitions of baby include "very young child" and "unborn child", but I don't consider an embryo to be a child either!
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever clinical, dehumanizing terms you want. Call it a "scrap of tissue," call it a "bunch of cells," call it an "unwanted growth." Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is a baby.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever personifying, emotive terms you want. Call it a "baby", call it a "person", call it a "lifeform". Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is not a sentient being.
Love is an emotion. If you are saying that God exists in the same sort of way that love does, then sure, fine. God exists. As an idea, or inside people's heads.
Now if you were to tell me that Love is some living being that talks to people and writes books telling us what to do, I'd start to think you were a bit strange..
You also seem to not understand what the words subjective and objective mean. Regarding how we define God, obviously we have to define God before we consider whether God exists or not, and then the question is an objective one.
Subjective means "Existing only within the experiencer's mind". Objective means "Having actual existence or reality".
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but no it won't. Let me ask you a question: How many robots do you own that do things for you?
That doesn't change his point though. The point is that using machines to help in the manufacturing process means that products can be built more cheaply, less people will have to do menial or dangerous jobs, and people may be able to work shorter hours.
Arguing whether it's right that the means of production are owned by corporations, or whether we would be better of if the government owned them, or if we all individually produced for ourselves, is an entirely separate point. I note that despite our society becoming increasingly capitalist over the last century, there are less people doing menial jobs and people have lots more leisure time, so I would be curious to know why you think capitalism negates the original poster's point.
The reason why few people own robots to make things is because few people run their own mini-company. I do however own plenty of machines that make my life easier and my leisure time more fun.
The problem isn't that blogs show up in the results - clearly they must have some relevance to be there in the first place, and sometimes a blog entry may contain what you are actually looking for - it's that they may sometimes be overrated in the listings due to all the linking.
So I feel that fixing the rating system that Google uses is preferable to ignoring blogs altogether.
And yes, the option to remove blogs for a search result would be useful, but this would be useful for all sorts of things on the web - eg, sometimes I find forum posts popping up in search results, when that's not what I want. But relying on META tags reminds me of the bad old days of search engines, when they relied on the website to be honest about describing their site. No one is going to include a tag that removes them from search results (unless they don't want to be searched at all, but then they'll use the "no robots" stuff).
Yes but the issue is not whether I know about RSS readers and can be bothered to download and use one, it's whether I can convince 150+ of my LJ readers to do so. Just about everyone I know has an LJ, but few if any are using RSS readers.
Also RSS readers alone don't solve the problem of private "friends only" posting (afaik) - someone would still need an LJ account to be able to read my non-public entries, so once they've done that, it's usually easier to just use the Friends page system. If I was hosting my journal on my own website, I'd need to give people an account/password just to read the non-public entries of my journal, which is more hassle.
Want to have some fun on LJ? Try to disagree with someone on your friends list, and watch the hilarity ensue.
This is a problem with your friends, not with LJ.
I've had plenty of interesting discussions on LJ where I've disagreed with someone.
With interconnected friends networks, gossip can spread like wildfire and all sorts of wonderful sour attitudes towards one another can result.
Just about all "friends networks" are already interconnected in real life; LJ just reflects this fact. This is no different to the way that gossip can spread like wildfire in real life.
It may be true that it can happen more quickly online on LJ, but I think the benefits of having quicker and more efficient means of communication far outweigh the downsides.
How would you like it if some LJ using friend of yours decided to tell the world about something you did or didn't do to your embarassment?
How would you like it if some friend of yours decided to tell the world about something you did or didn't do to your embarassment?
I for one can't wait until the communication bubble bursts.
Before LJ, there existed methods such as emailing loads of people, or even telling them in real life, if you wanted to spread malicious gossip.
It's all very well noting that personalised information is better than non-personalised information about a person, but who has the time to do this for everyone you know? Maybe if you only have a few friends, but before LiveJournal came along, I was never writing a personalised email each for over 150 people!
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Blogs aren't a replacement for personal email - if I have something which is personal, I still use email for that. Blogs allow something new.
Personally, I dont' read ANY BLOGS, unless you count Slashdot. But slashdot is hardly a "blog". When friends or acquaintances offer me their livejournal (or other blog) urls, I tell them "I"m sorry, but I don't read livejournals". It's nothing intended as offense toward them. I just don't waste my time reading things that I don't care about
And that is exactly one of the good things about blogs. Would you prefer it if all your friends (or even people who just knew you but you didn't necessarily like) randomly spammed you with their updates, opinions and so on via email? Even if it was personalised, that could be annoying if you didn't want to hear from that person - the key point about blogs is that the reader decides what they want to read.
And why doesn't it count as a personal conversation just because there are more than two people involved? I have had plenty of discussions with friends over LiveJournal; just because I'm talking with more than one person doesn't make it non-personal.
She shared her intimate moments with someone she trusted, and the jerk betrayed her. This is less about sex and more about privacy.
True, though I wonder under what circumstances the video was originally transmitted to other people. It could have been given with her permission for all we know, and it would be one of the recipients who betrayed them. The article says that "Though public transmission and sale of pornography is a crime, possession and viewing is not" which suggests that the person who put it on the web site was clearly breaking the law, but it's worrying that sending to others through email (which isn't what I would consider a "public transmission", though I've no idea how they define it) is enough to get him arrested and charged.
Although it's not immediately clear that it was specifically reverse engineering that was upheld as being unlawful (which always seems to be a grey legal area), or whether it was specifically violating the EULA? Does this case mean that reverse engineering is illegal, or that EULAs are always valid?
And anyone who replies to my post here will agree to give me $100?
If you want to be able to legally use the product without living by the terms you agreed to, you're SOL. Isn't this the same legal concept that the GPL uses to prevent distributions of derivative works without the source?
No.
Breaking the GPL: You're breaking copyright law anyway.
Breaking an EULA: Perfectly legal.
I believe that Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights use SDL for the Linux ports, and that's just off the top of my head. The list of commercial 2D games using SDL is probably a lot larger - remember that this is a library which provides more for 2D games than it does for 3D (ie, it provides a 2D graphics API, but 3D has to be done through OpenGL, and AFAIK can't be used with Direct3D).
So what are the Java commercial games, 3D or otherwise?
(Note, I think Java is a great language for some purposes, but it's wrong to cite SDL as an example lacking commercial games written in it).
"A-the -- ism" = "Lack of God -- belief"
Theism is belief in God. Atheism is lack of theism.
At the end of the day, this is just word definitions. If you want to use the word atheism like that, fair enough, but you have to accept that it is a fact that many atheists (if not most of them) do not use it in the same way.
I don't believe in God. That isn't a belief system just like Christianity etc. If you say I'm not an atheist (and I'm not agnostic either, by your definition - and incidentally, many people use agnostic in a different way to the way you define it too), then I'm left with no word to label myself with.
Is not believing in unicorns a belief system too? We never nitpick between "not believing" and "believing not" with things such as unicorns, ghosts and so on, so I don't see why an issue of this is always made with believing (or not) in God. I think the only reason it is done is so that theists can make out atheists to be no different to them in terms of having faith, when really they're just attacking a strawman idea of what they think atheists believe.
The Bible says very clearly in several places, both in the New Testament and the Old, that homosexuality is a sin.
I don't see that it is clear at all - there is much disagreement as to what is said, relating to issues such as translation and interpretation. http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibi.htm is a good write up of this.
And I don't see how you can say that certain parts of the document that your faith is based on don't matter
True, but I have to ask - do you take every part of the Bible literally, such as owning slaves, not doing anything on the Sabbath (and executing those who do), not eating shellfish, and believing that the story of Genesis is all literally true?
No, that's atheism - "without theism". Agnosticsm is about lack of knowledge, not belief.
Anyhow, the fact that some people use agnosticsm to talk about lack of belief doesn't change the fact that many (if not most) atheists use the term to indicate simply that they don't believe in God, and they do not have "just as much a beleif as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, or any of the other major religious beleifs in the world". That's a strawman argument making assumptions on people based on what they call themselves, and is no better than me claiming that anyone who calls themselves a Christian believes in creationism and takes the story on Genesis literally.
Well, the poster I was responding to said it's not socially acceptable based on the idea that it doesn't happen much, and (as I point out) it doesn't happen much because it can't happen (being illegal).
Now it may be that it's illegal because it's socially unacceptable, but you can't base whether it is socially acceptable on the fact that it rarely happens. My point was that how common polygamy is is irrelevant in terms of judging how common such behaviour would be, because it's illegal.
Sadly yes, polyamorous behaviour is seen as socially unacceptable by many, but not in *all* social circles, which I think was the earlier poster's point - in some social circles, it is quite acceptable (as I can confirm from my own experience).
But cloning an embryo isn't equal to cloning a human, as long as "cloning a human" means making a copy of a human that has been born, which would be analagous to "killing a human", and which clearly isn't what we have achieved.
The fact that people use "cloning a human" to mean "cloning an embryo" is an issue with language, and nothing to do with whether humans and embryos are equivalent in any moral sense.
Atheism is just as much a beleif as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhism, or any of the other major religious beleifs in the world, and yet they often consider themselves somehow higher than everybody else, that since they believe in no god, they are free to jab at ANY religion and that their intellect is somehow more valuable than faith.
Note that atheism is a lack of a particular belief. The joke here was against creationists specifically, not against religion in general. If "faith" means believing things like creationism, then yes, intellect is more valuable.
One of my best friend is jewish and an atheist (I know -- a contradiction, but that's what he calls himself).
It's not - presumably he means Jewish in the sense of race. Religion is often confused as being both belief, and race, when clearly these are very different attributes. Judaism is one of those religions where the race aspect is particularly strong.
Polyamorous is not polygamous. For the most part, polygamy isn't seen much outside the "communes" of the 60s, and rumors I've heard about Mormons.
What's the difference? If you mean being married to more than one person (which is the only difference I can see), then it's not so much that polygamy isn't socially accepted, but more that it's illegal.
I always find a good way to annoy an Atheist in an open minded debate is to challenge him that not believing is in itself a faith.
Well, it is annoying to claim things that are wrong, yes.
If one truly knows of the world's religions and chooses not to follow them, then it's still a very specific choice. A very specific choice they can't deviate from one bit, or else they're no longer part of the club. They'll stick to this even if that means denying anything and everything "supernatual" that they can't explain, unless it meets with "their" proof, and sometimes even still long after that.
For me at least, it means not believing in things that I have no evidence for. If I see evidence of a phenomenon for which I have no explanation for, I'll say "Hmm there's something strange here that I have no explanation for". What I won't do is make up stories about Gods, magic or fairies "explaining" how it works.
Also note that being an atheist does not imply that one doesn't believe in anything supernatural.
It's useful if you want some entries to be private, but you don't mind other entries being seen by other people (either specific people, or anyone).
Now you could maintain two separate journals, a LiveJournal, and one on your computer, but I'd say it's less hassle to maintain just one, and also more convenient to have the entries stored together.
I have done this when keeping a dream diary. I don't want to have the entries stored across separate journals, and I don't mind some of the entries being read by others. But obviously, some of my dreams are rather private.
I guess there are other advantages of an online journal, such as being able to post/read it anywhere.
You're wrong. Children under the age of one are not sentient, as near as we can tell given that the term itself has basically no rigorous meaning and that, if it did, it would be utterly untestable.
I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster.
You're the one claiming that babies are non-sentient beings, no different to machines without feelings. Sentience is hard to define, but let's talk in terms of any of the following: ability to feel pain, consciousness, the ability to have thoughts.
Now, I'm well aware than a baby brain is not fully formed. If there is proof that a baby brain has nothing we might consider sentience at all, you'll have to show me some URLs or whatever.
You yourself admit that this is something that is untestable - hence we cannot be sure, but the fact that they have working brains just like adults have working brains gives us a clue that they may be sentient. On the other hand, an embryo has no brain. We can be far more certain that it is no more sentient than a brick.
Put it this way - sometimes when people are born with non-functioning brains, or brain death occurs but the body is still alive, some people (including myself) argue that killing such people (letting them die by starvation, whatever) is okay. Would you say that such people are human/baby killers, or tell them "I'm pretty sure that makes you a monster"?
Wait. Hang on a sec. Before we go any further: How old are you? If you're too young for your reproductive instincts to have kicked in yet, that'll explain a lot.
That you can't make an argument without resorting to personal attacks?
So so far you've implied that it's okay to kill babies and people with brain damage or organic brain disorders. Anybody else you wanna get rid of?
I haven't argued that it's okay to kill babies, or anyone with some form of brain damage or disorders, since I believe that all these are sentient, thinking beings.
OTOH, see above - people do advocate allowing people with brain death (where the thinking part of the brain is dead, and only the part which controls bodily functions remains) to die. Whilst you may disagree with their point of view, you should understand that they exist, and they are hardly the same as "baby killers".
Look, I understand that you're being sincere and all that, but you DO know enough basic history to realize that societies that have chosen to make such life-and-death decisions have rapidly spiraled into the deepest sorts of depravity, don't you? [...] Are you prepared to go down that road again, just trusting that this time we'll know where to stop?
Okay I see your point - but why draw the line where you draw it? Why not go even further the other way, and don't kill any animals. Wait, plants are living too. If we kill them, who knows where it may lead.
What does "the definitions game" mean?
I mean that you started saying it was a fact that embryos are "babies", when it is dubious that this is true, and many people do not use the terms in this way.
Well, I'm real close to not considering you human, either. Does that mean it's okay for me to argue for your summary execution? If your answer here is anything other than "no," I think you really need to reconsider your values system.
My answer is "no". If an embryo started having a discussion with me on Slashdot, I'd change my point of view on the nature of an embryo.
You should realise that not everyone has the same viewpoint as you. I'm curious what your exact viewpoint is here - is it that all human life should be protected? If yes, I could start asking you about if torturing animals was okay, and paint you as some kind of "monster" for advocating that. If you said all life should be protected, then I'd ask the same question of plants - is it okay to eat them, or maybe torture them by chopping down a tree, or stamping on them? What about bacteria?
Just a note - most people (include myself) who call themselves atheist mean "I don't believe in (any) God", and not "I believe God doesn't exist".
So by this former meaning, I don't see how atheism is silly. Also agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief, so it is not mutually exclusive to atheism. I agree that, in the absence of evidence, "not knowing" is the logical choice - but I also believe that "not believing" is the logical choice (otherwise I would believe in all sorts of things that I didn't have evidence for).
Sure, a hard disk based one certainly has advantages, I'm just saying that you don't have to carry around huge amounts of CDs with you with a CD player.
Also I'm one of those people who likes to listen to music almost always by albums (which I know apparentely seems quite strange these days..)
So the test is "sentience" now?
I gave sentience as an example of a very significant difference between an embryo, and what people usually think of as babies (as it happens, I believe that sentience is the most important factor in determining whether a thing should be treated as an individual entity with its own rights, but I realise that other people have other viewpoints). And yes, if it were proven that babies were not sentient, then I wouldn't have a problem with people killing them. But I'm not convinced that this is the case - for starters, babies have functioning brains, unlike embryos which have nothing of the sort; and this is not something that I'm advocating here (for similar reasons, you won't find me advocating late stage abortions, except for life threatening cases). The difference is that it's plausible that babies may be sentient, where as there is no way that an embryo has sentience (at least, without resorting to arguments like "for all you know, this brick wall could be sentient").
Citing a dictionary, incidentally, is an excellent way of demonstrating that you have no idea what the conversation is really about, or for that matter what dictionaries are for. But since you brought it up
You brought up the definitions game, by claiming that embryos are babies, and when someone suggested that some people view the situation differently, you said that they were simply wrong, because it is a fact that embryos are babies.
So since you are making the claim that an embryo is a baby as a fact, it's fair game to point out evidence to the contrary.
True, the definitions of baby include "very young child" and "unborn child", but I don't consider an embryo to be a child either!
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever clinical, dehumanizing terms you want. Call it a "scrap of tissue," call it a "bunch of cells," call it an "unwanted growth." Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is a baby.
If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? Five, you say? No, the answer is four: calling a tail a leg doesn't make it so.
You can refer to an embryo in whatever personifying, emotive terms you want. Call it a "baby", call it a "person", call it a "lifeform". Applying these names doesn't change the essential fact that an embryo is not a sentient being.
You might like to note: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=baby ; at best, a fetus could be called a baby. But a fetus is not an embryo.
Love is an emotion. If you are saying that God exists in the same sort of way that love does, then sure, fine. God exists. As an idea, or inside people's heads.
Now if you were to tell me that Love is some living being that talks to people and writes books telling us what to do, I'd start to think you were a bit strange..
You also seem to not understand what the words subjective and objective mean. Regarding how we define God, obviously we have to define God before we consider whether God exists or not, and then the question is an objective one.
Subjective means "Existing only within the experiencer's mind". Objective means "Having actual existence or reality".