Your "opium" argument does not have a lot of force. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures both recommend the hard work of study and deep meditation (in the sense of deep silent thought) on ethics and the nature of good. Nor does the Bible leave this as the duty only of a priestly class, but it commends every individual to do this. That many organized religions today have distorted what the Bible teaches with mysticism and ritual tells more of Rome than it does of the Scriptures themselves.
Religion was intended to produce happiness in people. Marx was gravely wrong, however, in saying this was a false happiness, judging it to be mere pleasure analogous to what an opiate produces. Happiness does arise from living up to standards of right, and engaging with family, neighbor and stranger. If one throws out the standards in the Bible, then one must adopt relative measures. Any measure that is relative must ultimately reduce to amorality and pleasure-seeking. It is pleasure-seeking amorality that is the true opiate of the people. In a feel-good society, people don't bother with marriage and children, family duties, neighborhoods and communities. "Why should I take care of Grandma? What's in it for me?" They take their pleasure and isolate themselves.
True religion and true science are not incompatible. Religion-as-political-tool and science-as-religion certainly are incompatible. I believe both will ultimately be discarded. True religion's purpose is to teach us about God and about how to live up to his standard's of goodness, and how to treat one another. True science seeks to increase knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
On the matter of whether scientists will ever be able to "observe" God, I suggest a simple question. If every phenomena in the universe is, for lack of a better analogy, computations occurring in God's imagination, then how could science ever step outside of its own system? Can science disprove the notion? No. Can that notion be proven scientifically? No. Can things that are true be unprovable? We know the answer to this question is "Yes" (from Godel, Turing and others). Does the truth of the notion matter? If it is true, it does matter quite a bit. It means that the entire existence of everything around us is evidence of God's existence and doings. If it is false, then it doesn't matter. In either case, it is up to each individual to pursue that choice of belief.
If you say that you have some right to make that choice for another person, then I think you ought to check your thinking. The same goes for anyone, believer or not, that would make that choice for another. That way leads totalitarianism and despotism. These things things are measurably bad.
I predict that many Republicans will oppose this bill...
The problem with that is you're expecting Republicans to act like conservatives. That's like expecting Democrats to act like the Jeffersonian Democratic Repulicans of times long past.
Kinda hard to make pro-socialist stuff, if your target audience doesn't want to pay for it...
There's a simple and obvious solution to this problem. Legislate the consumption of that pro-socialist stuff. Step one: the Fairness Doctrine.
The real problem is that you can't count on any politician today to be biased in favor of individual liberty and national sovereignty. Mourn the passing of the party of Lincoln and the party of Jefferson. Ponder wishfully Madison and Washington's dream; a government of, for, and by the moral individual.
Errrmmmm, has no one considered the idea that he did precisely the job he was paid to do? Linux was becoming very hot in IT when SCO launched the lawsuit. Linux-oriented business cooled off for a while, long enough for Microsoft to suspend vendor drift toward Linux (to some extent). They waved the promises of the glories the turd that is Vista, and the uncertainty of the legal standing of GNU/Linux in front of businesses.
Microsoft launched their FUD campaign around that time, pumping 2 million dollars into SCO by buying licenses. Then Microsoft does that bizarro-world lawsuit thing with Kodak and Sun. MS settles for 2 billion (!) dollars with Sun, Sun turns around and settles with Kodak for 92 million dollars. I believe PJ did some dot-connecting at one point showing that MS was behind a lot of this, in an effort to pump up the notion of "Intellectual Property," strengthening software patents, in particular, through precedent in the courts.
SCO was simply the the blunt instrument wielded by the Canopy Group to distract from the behind-closed-doors stuff. So, in theory, Scott did what he was paid to do.
Disclaimer: I enjoy conspiracy theories involving MS.
Yeah, but what's gonna suck is all those posers wearing testosterone-laced naugahyde froo-froos. I mean, that stuff starts to smell after ten minutes of body heat... Ick. So people, when you go shopping for your hormone-laden froo-froos, do not spare the cows! Make sure they're genuine leather, mmm-K?
I just hope "stacks" (aka Piles from Panther but never in Panther)...
Every time I hear about this feature I imagine an error dialog popping up with AOL guy's voice "You've got Piles!" I'd hate to discover this feature using the laptop while perched upon the commode. It makes one wonder if there's a 3rd party add-on called "Preparation-H" that enhances Piles.
I hate to (possibly) burst your bubble, but she is co-author of these, not sole author. Two other boys worked on the high school paper with her, and three men and two other women worked on the psych. paper. There's no telling how much content is hers, short of asking her. There you go, write her a letter...
Dear Natalie,
I read your psych paper on Google (I read it three times, it was REALLY GOOD!) the other day. I was wondering if you could tell me which paragraphs you wrote, so I could read them again, only with your voice in my head, because that would be awesome, OK?
In my day, single clicking every unit and inching them forward one at a time WAS a tank rush. And another thing... super bats were the first "mobs," why I can remember one Wumpus hunt...
It was Dune 2, and not Wing Commander, that convinced me to by a Sound Blaster. Granted, Wing Commander made more use of it.
You're right of course, there was no rushing in Dune 2. But remember setting up a semi-circle of vehicles and baiting the bad guys in? Or laying out concrete all the way to the doorstep of your opponent, building a couple of turrets, then stationing a handful of rocket launchers there? Or running down those three pixels worth of infantry with the harvesters to make little splats in the sand... Good times. Then this WarCraft thing came along and everybody was talking about this new genre...
...and my "whatever-trickle" is none of your business.
When I was your age, we only had one RTS called Dune 2. It didn't even have a frickin' colon in it's name! We had to lay the frickin' concrete before we could build the goram tank plant and even THINK about havin' a rush of anythin'! And then, when you built yer unit cap of 10 whole tanks, a sandworm'd come along and eat 'em all before you got within shooting range. You youngsters've got it too easy, what with yer fancy-shmancy zerglings and no sandworms. Bah!
So this completes project Shoehorn, maybe now they can get back on track building the Longhorn they wanted. Remember, the U.S. Government and several major customers arm-wrestled them into making their ship dates. So Microsoft did the only thing it could reasonably do, short of saying "No" and breaking their contracts, they cut features.
We should see "Longhorn" in the "Vista" before us, I suppose. What should've been there? How about:
Avalon: A completely new GUI framework, available with.Net, accessible through XAML... We only see pieces of it.
WinFS: File System == Database. You'll have metadata coming out 'yer ears! This would have been good, but this was one of the last things they pulled before finalizing the feature set of Vista.
Indigo: An SOA framework making easy work of building service-oriented applications. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a Java guy, but I still remember what Microsoft did to GUI programming with VB. For better or worse, it pulled GUI client-server into the reach of a lot more people, and Indigo could possibly have done that for SOA on the Microsoft platform. As it is... SCA looks a lot more palatable.)
What we have instead is all the DRM crap and a lobotomized security system (WinFS would've made it a bit more real), and fragments of the GUI system. XP SP3 is Shoehorn.
Someone's been watching too much of the SciFi channel...
If particle accelerators were able to create black holes, those black holes would be so minuscule as to dissipate immediately (we do not have anywhere near the level of technology needed to create non-transient black holes, and if we did, we'd also have the technology to create them away from existing gravity wells). As another poster pointed out, space elevators could be designed such that they fail upward, just as we can now design nuclear fission reactors that cannot melt down.
Also, just to throw it in, a small fusion reaction in a magnetic bottle would not create gravity, just in case you saw Spider-Man 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Your "opium" argument does not have a lot of force. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures both recommend the hard work of study and deep meditation (in the sense of deep silent thought) on ethics and the nature of good. Nor does the Bible leave this as the duty only of a priestly class, but it commends every individual to do this. That many organized religions today have distorted what the Bible teaches with mysticism and ritual tells more of Rome than it does of the Scriptures themselves.
Religion was intended to produce happiness in people. Marx was gravely wrong, however, in saying this was a false happiness, judging it to be mere pleasure analogous to what an opiate produces. Happiness does arise from living up to standards of right, and engaging with family, neighbor and stranger. If one throws out the standards in the Bible, then one must adopt relative measures. Any measure that is relative must ultimately reduce to amorality and pleasure-seeking. It is pleasure-seeking amorality that is the true opiate of the people. In a feel-good society, people don't bother with marriage and children, family duties, neighborhoods and communities. "Why should I take care of Grandma? What's in it for me?" They take their pleasure and isolate themselves.
True religion and true science are not incompatible. Religion-as-political-tool and science-as-religion certainly are incompatible. I believe both will ultimately be discarded. True religion's purpose is to teach us about God and about how to live up to his standard's of goodness, and how to treat one another. True science seeks to increase knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
On the matter of whether scientists will ever be able to "observe" God, I suggest a simple question. If every phenomena in the universe is, for lack of a better analogy, computations occurring in God's imagination, then how could science ever step outside of its own system? Can science disprove the notion? No. Can that notion be proven scientifically? No. Can things that are true be unprovable? We know the answer to this question is "Yes" (from Godel, Turing and others). Does the truth of the notion matter? If it is true, it does matter quite a bit. It means that the entire existence of everything around us is evidence of God's existence and doings. If it is false, then it doesn't matter. In either case, it is up to each individual to pursue that choice of belief.
If you say that you have some right to make that choice for another person, then I think you ought to check your thinking. The same goes for anyone, believer or not, that would make that choice for another. That way leads totalitarianism and despotism. These things things are measurably bad.
Apparently you feel a lot more than you think.
The problem with that is you're expecting Republicans to act like conservatives. That's like expecting Democrats to act like the Jeffersonian Democratic Repulicans of times long past.
There's a simple and obvious solution to this problem. Legislate the consumption of that pro-socialist stuff. Step one: the Fairness Doctrine.
The real problem is that you can't count on any politician today to be biased in favor of individual liberty and national sovereignty. Mourn the passing of the party of Lincoln and the party of Jefferson. Ponder wishfully Madison and Washington's dream; a government of, for, and by the moral individual.
No... Deckard blinks first.
The kind of rule you were advocating only needs one exception to show that it is a bad rule.
Hmmm... I think I'd want Wheeler to use his own book if I were studying gravitation with him. But that's just me.
Errrmmmm, has no one considered the idea that he did precisely the job he was paid to do? Linux was becoming very hot in IT when SCO launched the lawsuit. Linux-oriented business cooled off for a while, long enough for Microsoft to suspend vendor drift toward Linux (to some extent). They waved the promises of the glories the turd that is Vista, and the uncertainty of the legal standing of GNU/Linux in front of businesses.
Microsoft launched their FUD campaign around that time, pumping 2 million dollars into SCO by buying licenses. Then Microsoft does that bizarro-world lawsuit thing with Kodak and Sun. MS settles for 2 billion (!) dollars with Sun, Sun turns around and settles with Kodak for 92 million dollars. I believe PJ did some dot-connecting at one point showing that MS was behind a lot of this, in an effort to pump up the notion of "Intellectual Property," strengthening software patents, in particular, through precedent in the courts.
SCO was simply the the blunt instrument wielded by the Canopy Group to distract from the behind-closed-doors stuff. So, in theory, Scott did what he was paid to do.
Disclaimer: I enjoy conspiracy theories involving MS.
Yeah, but what's gonna suck is all those posers wearing testosterone-laced naugahyde froo-froos. I mean, that stuff starts to smell after ten minutes of body heat... Ick. So people, when you go shopping for your hormone-laden froo-froos, do not spare the cows! Make sure they're genuine leather, mmm-K?
Every time I hear about this feature I imagine an error dialog popping up with AOL guy's voice "You've got Piles!" I'd hate to discover this feature using the laptop while perched upon the commode. It makes one wonder if there's a 3rd party add-on called "Preparation-H" that enhances Piles.
Newbie: "Good! What is a registry?"
Mensa member: "Perhaps I'm not as stupid as I am ugly, Commander!"
Wouldn't the name be "Wiiii!" (even more fun!)
I hate to (possibly) burst your bubble, but she is co-author of these, not sole author. Two other boys worked on the high school paper with her, and three men and two other women worked on the psych. paper. There's no telling how much content is hers, short of asking her. There you go, write her a letter...
Well said, Comic Book Guy!
According to this site "kishimu" is one Japanese word that translates as "jar" in English.
"The door is a kishimu. The door is a kishimu."
Under the "obligatory" heading...
I, for one, welcome our new, magnetoresistant giant overlords.
The "Go Screw Yourself" pack comes with no controller and a Pokemon game for the N-Cube.
In my day, single clicking every unit and inching them forward one at a time WAS a tank rush. And another thing... super bats were the first "mobs," why I can remember one Wumpus hunt...
It was Dune 2, and not Wing Commander, that convinced me to by a Sound Blaster. Granted, Wing Commander made more use of it.
You're right of course, there was no rushing in Dune 2. But remember setting up a semi-circle of vehicles and baiting the bad guys in? Or laying out concrete all the way to the doorstep of your opponent, building a couple of turrets, then stationing a handful of rocket launchers there? Or running down those three pixels worth of infantry with the harvesters to make little splats in the sand... Good times. Then this WarCraft thing came along and everybody was talking about this new genre...
...and my "whatever-trickle" is none of your business.
Just imagine if Cliff Claven had had Wikipedia...
When I was your age, we only had one RTS called Dune 2. It didn't even have a frickin' colon in it's name! We had to lay the frickin' concrete before we could build the goram tank plant and even THINK about havin' a rush of anythin'! And then, when you built yer unit cap of 10 whole tanks, a sandworm'd come along and eat 'em all before you got within shooting range. You youngsters've got it too easy, what with yer fancy-shmancy zerglings and no sandworms. Bah!
So this completes project Shoehorn, maybe now they can get back on track building the Longhorn they wanted. Remember, the U.S. Government and several major customers arm-wrestled them into making their ship dates. So Microsoft did the only thing it could reasonably do, short of saying "No" and breaking their contracts, they cut features.
We should see "Longhorn" in the "Vista" before us, I suppose. What should've been there? How about:
What we have instead is all the DRM crap and a lobotomized security system (WinFS would've made it a bit more real), and fragments of the GUI system. XP SP3 is Shoehorn.
Someone's been watching too much of the SciFi channel...
If particle accelerators were able to create black holes, those black holes would be so minuscule as to dissipate immediately (we do not have anywhere near the level of technology needed to create non-transient black holes, and if we did, we'd also have the technology to create them away from existing gravity wells). As another poster pointed out, space elevators could be designed such that they fail upward, just as we can now design nuclear fission reactors that cannot melt down.
Also, just to throw it in, a small fusion reaction in a magnetic bottle would not create gravity, just in case you saw Spider-Man 2.