Tell me... what IDE runs on ChromeOS? Where's the Emacs for Android? When I see that, we'll talk. Until then, I don't think that Google's going to be able to migrate it's most vital employees (engineers) to "eat their own dogfood." Might be interesting to migrate support staff, but that's not where the heart of Google is.
This is the Financial Times, not the New York Post, Mac OS Rumors, or some random blog. This reminds me of when the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Apple was going to Intel, and Slashdot said, "Never going to happen." Of course, it did happen. Folks, when a major newspaper like the FT, WSJ, or New York Times reports something, it's probably true.
Which makes this very interesting. I think the most interesting aspect will probably be that feature parity for things like Google Chrome will probably benefit--no longer will Chrome, or Google Toolbar, or Google Earth lag behind on Linux and Mac, because Google employees are using Linux or Macs, because now Google employees will be using Linux and Macs.
In our society, men are terrified of being accused of sexual predation, and we steer clear of it. We know where the lines are, and we know we can be accused at any time. Maybe this administrator just wasn't as aware because, after all, she's a she and nobody would ever think that she would use the camera for illicit purposes! Seriously, the reason why that stereotype is there is because, on a whole, men tend to be more interested in pornographic images. Maybe part of the problem here is that, in the female dominated world of education, no man ever saw this policy and said, "uh, ladies... you do realize what people could use these cameras for, right?"
I wear glasses. Plain old-fashioned glasses. And the 3-d glasses are uncomfortable and don't fit right. Duh. I can see the 3-d images, but they never quite focus right, because the glasses aren't on my face right.
Again, as I've posted elsewhere, it's called "Pluralism." Once you have separation of church and state (something I firmly believe in!) the church has no power to enforce its views. Instead, you have many churches, all of which express the deeply held beliefs of some fraction of the population. Some will be right, some will be wrong. Deal with it. However, by giving these deeply and sincerely held moral beliefs (called "religion") special protection, you give these things a chance to sort out. Whereas, when you don't give them protection, there is only one source of right and wrong--government. History shows that the tyranny of the majority is no better than any sort of tyranny.
P.S. I do have a Theological question for you. I promise not to argue. Do you think Mt 28:19, 20 is binding upon all Christians today, and what does that mean they should be doing in practical application?
Yes, I do think it's binding. In terms of practical application, however, I think that our first emphasis should be on "teaching them to obey everything which I have commanded you." It's no accident that Mt 28.19-20 comes at the end of the gospel of Matthew, which contains the most explicit account of Christianity distinctive ethics--that is, Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount.) The reason we fail at evangelism is because we've failed at "making disciples." The reason we fail at "making disciples" is because we've failed at being disciples. The problem is our own accommodation to worldliness, and until we get our own house in order we will fail.
I am actually in favor of freedom "just 'cuz" in most cases. For example, i think that all marriage should be civil unions, purely contractual, and the state should get out of the "marriage" business--even though my personal conviction opposes homosexuality. I don't believe in prohibition of much of anything, including "drugs", and I believe in unlimited free speech. Not that I'm a libertarian... politically, I'm more of a pragmatist.
The problem is that governments have a habit of making stupid laws that offend people's religious beliefs. For example, consider the recent French law that forbade the wearing of the Burqa (and the ensuing riots.) We can say, "the government shouldn't tell you what to wear", but the reality is that governments *do* sometimes tell people what to wear. We can say, "the government can't tell you what to believe", but the reality is that the governments sometime *do* tell you what to believe. We can say, "the government can't tell you how to raise your children", but the reality is that governments sometimes *do* try to tell people how to raise their children. And in some cases, it's legitimate for the government to do these things.
However, when the behaviors that offend society arise from deeply held convictions, there are several factors that come into play.
First, it may be that the individual knows more about their behavior than the government does. There may be something fundamental to a person's dignity going on here... like, in the case of the Burqa, a woman's right to choose how she presents herself to the world, that comes into play.
There may be a deeper social change afoot that government shouldn't suppress, because it's a good thing.
It may be the case that, when the government offends the deep moral convictions of some of its people, it's simply wrong.
In any of these cases (and there may be more), we call "deeply held convictions" "Religion"--or we can. And we've found that the free exercise of those deeply held convictions, whether moral, spiritual, mythological, cosmogenic, or anything else, to be of value in a free society. Freedom of religion places the burden of proof on the state, to show that they are not unduly restricting my freedom, and takes it off me to show that they are for any activity that can be called "religious". Since most religions have praxis that covers every aspect of life, it's simply more efficient to address it that way than to start addressing, "deeply held convicitions regarding ones dress/hairstyle/piercings/sabbath rest/peiote/whatever". And the deeply held convictions language would be essential to avoid absolute anarchy, where the state could forbid nothing. The point is to distinguish the woman who wears a Burqa because it's a deeply held conviction from the guy wearing a ski mask so he can rob people with impunity.
Let it be said, however, that this is one right among many. In the United States, this is one clause of 1 of the 10 bills of rights. I wouldn't want to dispense with freedom of the press, or freedom of (secular) assembly, or due process, or even some of the unenumerated rights (e.g. the right to privacy.) It is a vital right, because it protects my right to be a free, moral, thinking, feeling, human being, judge of my own actions. I am very grateful I live in a country that has freedom of religion, and the minute the U.S. no longer has it I'll be looking to go somewhere that does.
They were also roundly denounced in churches, at times when those views were unpopular - just like homosexuality in the modern era. It's almost like the people giving sermons in church are people with varying opinions, and not particularly special in any way!
Sure. It's called "religious pluralism." And it's a good thing. But it's meaningless if it's only allowed when the expressions of religious pluralism are popular. The legal standard is that the state must show a compelling interest before it can do anything that touches a church. As a student of church history, I think that's a good standard--because before we had that standard, we had the "state churches" of Europe (an idea that's alive and well in places like the Muslim world!) who were simply pawns for the state. It was the notion of a "state church" that led, for example, to the German Lutheran church's endorsement of Hitler, and the Catholic... accomodation... with him.
What all of you who are arguing me are missing is the very real fact that governments change, and that history shows that where there is no religious freedom, there is no freedom. Having a little restriction of freedom of religion is like being a little bit pregnant. Let's here it for good ol' American education, where religious history is glossed over for fear of offending someone, so people simply don't understand what has gone before.
Nope. Bzzt. Wrong. We are talking about exceptions to the law that everyone else must abide by due to your religion. We are not talking about being told what you may or may not believe.
There was a time when it as illegal to teach a black person to read. A law which some of the better churches happily disregarded, because it offended their religious sensibilities. I'm advocating for that sort of exception. Your whole system depends on government being the ultimate arbitrator of right and wrong. I think (and history backs me up) that government really sucks at that.
I agree with you in principle, but not in the particular. Here's why I think that the clean air and clean water acts are okay, constitutionally. It is because Air and water pollution are necessarily interstate concerns. Imagine a factory in Virginia, on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, with a nice stiff north wind. What incentive would Virginia have to regulate its emissions? Clearly, this is a form of interstate commerce (albeit a negative one.) Likewise, let's suppose that a factory in Southern Michigan is pumping a toxic pollutant into a tributary of the MIssissippi,.5 miles north of the state line. What incentive does Michigan have to deal with it? Yet this pollutant is so toxic as to kill off the whole Mississippi river, all the way to New Orleans! This is a navigable waterway and a major fishery, over which the federal government clearly has jurisdiction, yet for that jurisdiction to mean anything they need the clean air and clean water acts, or something much like them.
Would a constitutional amendment be nice? Yes, it would, I suppose. But I don't think it's necessary.
The alternative you suggest is absurd for one simple reason: Suppose my religion involves cannibalism. Am I allowed to kill and eat people in the name of religious freedom? Why not? Aren't you saying unpopular beliefs should be encouraged?
This is a legitimate concern (and you come back to it in a number of places in various ways) but it's been dealt with many times in the courts. The basic legal standard (IANAL, but I have made it my business to understand the law in this area) is that the state must show a compelling interest before it interferes with a religious practice. So, for example, the state has a compelling interest in protecting human life, so human sacrifice (and even animal sacrifice IIRC--there was a case in Florida) may be outlawed. The state has a compelling interest in the education of children, so they can require you to educate them. However, this interest has to be balanced agains the right of religious freedom. So, for example, the state can require me to educate my children, but it can't require them to say that they believe in evolution. Nor can the state require my children to say the pledge of allegiance (offensive to some Christians) in public schools. Nor can it require parochial schools to say the pledge. --because in those cases, the courts have found that the state interest is not compelling enough to override my religious freedom.
What little bit I've learned of law is that we laypeople tend to want to argue from principles to cases. Lawyers always argue from cases to principles. Reading some of the litigation in this area is *very* interesting. We geeks also tend to want Law to be clear cut, boolean, and algorithmic. It's rarely that simple. It's usually a lot more messy, and it's not always clear how a particular issue should be (or will be) decided.
The constitution is a contract, established between "the several states", the people of said states, and the federal government. If you tried to interpret any other contract as a "living document", granting one party new rights and privileges according to its own interpretation of changing conditions, you'd be laughed out of court. The contract has a process for dealing with changing conditions--it's called an amendment! Now I happen to agree with you that the clean air act is constitutional (under the commerce clause, because air pollution is interstate) but this "living document" stuff is a formula for tyranny. It takes what was intended to be a written constitution, with strictly enumerated powers, privileges and rights, and turns it into something like the Roman Republic, which had no written constitution--just traditions. And we all know how that ended up.
My first choice for career was theology, and I have a Ph.D. in New Testament. So I've given this a bit of thought.
The problem is that, without these exceptions, you end up setting the disastrous precedent of the state defining what is an acceptable religious belief to hold. That's all very well and good when you happen to agree with the religious and cultural perspectives of the state--for example, from the sound of your posts, you seem to hold to "liberal democracy" (in the technical sense, not the pundit sense.) But what happens when George W. Bush takes over and he and the Republicans from the Bible Belt start defining what's acceptable religious belief?
The problem is that government doesn't have a very good record for being able to pick the side of the angels (anymore than religion does.) However, allowing freedom of religion--allowing religious groups the freedom to have mixed services, or women in the pulpit, or roller-skating as a religious service, or damned near anything so long as you can make some sort of argument that it serves a religious function--becomes the place where unpopular viewpoints can be expressed. It's worth remembering that all the humanist values that you hold dear... the rights of man, civil liberty, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement... were first nurtured in churches, at a time when these views were very unpopular.
So, my point is that granting special privileges to religious belief serves a useful social purpose. Yes, it's good for religious people (although I might argue how good it really is... religions tend to thrive on persecution.) But it's also good for society as a whole. Simply put, kill religious freedom is like eating your seed-corn.
As someone with a Ph.D. in New Testament, let me just assure you that you need to learn a good bit more about the Bible and about Christian theology. First off, it's highly debatable whether or not the book of Genesis is incompatible with evolution. The whole notion of "literal" interpretation--as used by the reformers when they called for the "sensus literalis"--doesn't mean what you think it means, because "figurative" and "allegory" are *not* the same thing. An allegorical interpretation would be something like saying, "Adam represents the church, and Eve represents the devil, and the serpent represents the Gnostics". This sort of interpretation was all the rage in Medieval Catholicism, and it's that sort of interpretation that is to be rejected. A figurative interpretation acknowledges that people, and books, don't always speak in a direct, literal way. See, for example, parables.
On the other hand, a bone-headed literalism is just as bad as allegorical interpretation, because it ends up missing the words of the text. In the words of John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1:6:
"For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. "
Regarding eschatology... I highly suggest you take some time to read "Revelation: Four Views", which is a parallel commentary. When you read it, consider the preterist position and how well it compares to premillenial nonsense, and consider the possibility that you've been badly deceived, because the bottom line is that chiliasts have been promising the "end is nigh" for 2000 years now and... ahem... it hasn't yet materialized. Maybe there's something wrong with that whole reading of scripture? You really don't have a choice: either scripture's wrong, or your reading of it is wrong. I'm going with you being wrong, brother. "End Times Fiction" is also quite good, but sadly out of print.
Seriously, what are the philosophical, theological, and scientific implications if we were to be the only planet to evolve "intelligent" (I use the term advisedly) life. Genesis is starting to look pretty good, if that were true. (Not that I think it is true.)
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted? I'm referring here not to signals deliberately sent, but to leakage, that sort of thing. There may be a relatively short window in which any civilization uses unencrypted radio. Then they move on to digital radio, encryption, etc., at much lower power, and the chance of finding them (in the speed of light window) is lost. The thing is that an encrypted data stream will look pretty close to random. So, your odds of picking it out of the noise are low.
I think the basic problem is the notion that you can make competent nutritional recommendations without controlled, double-blind studies. Imagine that a drug manufacturer came to you and said, "we know that the per capita use of inhaled Marijuana in the Netherlands is much higher than in the U.S., and that they have lower heart attack risk, therefore we want you to let us market Hashish tablets to the entire population as something *everyone* should take." Everyone would agree that this is absurd. Yet that is exactly the sort of study that is used to support the "low fat" recommendation. What's ridiculous is that every study that has attempted to "prove" low fat diets are better, once and for all, has failed--"failure" being defined as "not proving it".
There's a silly notion out there that nutritional interventions are somehow safer and less powerful than medical ones. Yet, in some cases they are *more* powerful and less safe. And, what's worse, is that people really listen to this crap. People really do cut down on their fat intake based on "fat is bad" dogma. People really do eliminate salt from their diet (or try to) because they're convinced it's bad for you. There's a lot of evidence now that we need more Vitamin D than we're getting--why? Because we're staying out of the Sun because we're convinced that skin cancer is going to kill us! And yet one of the reasons we need Vitamin D is to... wait for it... prevent cancer!
Until there's a real, rigorous, controlled scientific foundation to any of this stuff, I'm sticking to the "caveman" principle. That is, "did my caveman ancestor eat it?" If not, then I don't eat it. If so, then how much? How often? I figure that's what my body evolved to eat.
Oh tosh. It's not that complicated to come up with reasonably accurate nutritional information. You take the ingredients (based on the label or information from the USDA, which is freely available on the Internet.) You add up them up for the total recipe. Weigh the serving. Divide. I do it literally every day at home. This isn't science, this is accounting, and anyone who can't do it can't run a profitable restaurant anyway.
Is it as accurate as laboratory testing on my end product? Maybe not. Is it good enough? Yes.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but a minor point - I don't think the reduction in carbohydrate intake directly impacted your blood pressure (it clearly did impact blood glucose and triglycerides, and I'm guessing cholesterol too since I've seen a similar effect when I cut out refined carbs). I think it led to the drastic weight loss you describe, which was the primary factor in lowering your blood pressure.
If I may suggest, I think that this is sort of outmoded thinking. Most of the recent research recognizes "metabolic syndrome", which includes T2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, all of which come together. It is certainly possible that my hypertension was partly caused by my obesity (in fact I think that's partly true.). However, I think it's worth asking whether there is a "common cause" rather than a causal effect.
I have anecdotal evidence to suggest this: namely, once I stopped eating carbs, my blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) dropped 15 points in a week--way too fast for weight loss to be the dominant factor. It continues to fall, but that may well be an effect of exercise (I've started going to the gym since I have so much more energy since I've been off the blood sugar roller coaster.) Various studies have reported the need to reduce doses of blood pressure medication in patients on low carb diets, and the authors of Protein Power apparently have a "physician's guide" that they'll send to any interested physician detailing the modifications they suggest for blood pressure and diabetes medication. So, while I don't have really solid evidence--i.e. a controlled study-- to prove that low carb diet will help with hypertension, I do have some pretty strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's worth trying. And, frankly, a few weeks on a low carb diet is unlikely to kill anyone, so why not try it?
Here's how I, as someone who admittedly knows jack about biochemistry beyond what I've learned trying to rescue my own health, think it works. (Let it be said, however, that that reading includes innumerable journal articles, med school textbooks, and other professional literature, so I'm not a total idiot on this.) I think that once you develop insulin resistance and some level of diabetes, you get blood sugar spikes. These in turn cause various sorts of inflammation of the arteries, which in turn raise blood pressure. However, again, IANAMD, so this just represents my own uneducated understanding of how it works.
Study purported to show that based on a genetic test you could determine what sort of diet someone would lose the most weight on. People lost substantially more weight on the right diet.
"Too much salt" is one of those dietary memes that just won't seem to die. However, the reality is that (a) only a fraction of individuals (even individuals with high blood pressure) seem to be salt sensitive and (b) there are much more effective ways of reducing high blood pressure than reducing salt consumption. I was on blood pressure medication, a low salt diet, etc. prior to reducing my carbohydrate intake dramatically last summer, and all it got me was drug side effects and blood pressure that was just barely normal (average 136/88). Since I've stopped eating most concentrated carbohydrates, my blood pressure has reduced dramatically (I don't bother to monitor any more, but at my last doctor's appointment it was 122/72). On top of that, my blood sugars have improved dramatically (from average BG of 138 to average BG of 91) and my lipid profile has improved dramatically (total cholestorol 233 then vs. 135 at last doctor's appt., triglycerides 700+ vs. 85 at last doctor's appointment.) All this even as I lost almost 100 lbs.
What was the change? I *stopped* eating sugar and other refined carbohydrates, and I *started* eating salt again. Oh yeah, and I *love* fat and protein, because they make me feel full.
The bottom line is that I have no confidence in the ability of the "main stream" medical community to define a single nutritional standard that will work for everyone. And I have even less confidence in the ability of bureaucrats and legislators to correctly parse through the research to find the truth. So leave my food alone. If you really feel like you've got to do something, please start requiring restaurants to label their foods (on the menu) so that it's easier for diabetics like me to find menu items that aren't loaded with sugars that will make our blood sugars spike. Or if you really want to interfere, require restaurants to offer low-fat, low-carb, and low-salt entrees. But don't impose your notion of good nutrition on me, because I tried to do it your way and it damn near killed me.
Like most, I disagree. The bottom line is that my early days programming BASIC (first on a Commodore VIC 20, then on an Altair, then on a Commodore 64 which is about when I graduated to assembler, then to C. But I still did some BASIC right through the 90's from time to time until I learned perl for "quick and dirty" stuff.
I think that the most important thing that BASIC taught me was that, there had to be a better way. So, I started to learn different programming languages, different environments. And I eventually learned the habit of using the best language for the job. If I needed to make "Patrick Rox!" scroll up the screen, ad infinitum, I used BASIC. Along the way I was forced to learn many languages, and learned most of the standard ones as well as some oddities (like Forth, Prolog, etc.) If I needed to write something fast, I used Assembler. If I needed to write a lot of code, I used C or Pascal or (later) perl. Nowadays, I do most of my code in Ruby, but at work I just got stuck with a project that's a combination of perl and shell and it was no biggy, and I decided yesterday to do a personal project in Python/Django because of it's better unicode support (the project will be mostly "about" handling Greek texts.) From an early age, I developed a solid understanding that languages are fungible, and that there's often a better language and environment for the job and than the one I might know best.
This contrasts with the kids I see nowadays (grump grump) who, if they bother to program at all, only seem to ever learn one programming language and one programming environment and tend to think that that's the end-all-be-all solution to everything. If they know VB, it's all VB. If C++, then it's all got to be C++. Java, python, ruby... you get the idea. Why? Because none of those languages (except maybe VB) really suck, and certainly none of them suck nearly as much as good old Microsoft BASIC on an early 80's Micro did. So it's easy to just stay stuck in a single language and never learn a vital lesson that separates "prorammers" from "people who write some code."
The problem is that the best interests of the doctor are not aligned with the best interests of the patient. Instead, we've got a situation where the best interests of the doctor are to "play it safe, spend as much as necessary, preserve life at ALL costs (because that won't get me sued)". The tail is wagging the dog, in the form of a very small percentage of patients who will someday sue their doctors.
However, the solution is not tort reform--in the sense of limiting verdicts--because the problem is not the size of verdicts. The problem is the things that doctors do in over-the-top efforts to avoid really frivolous lawsuits. (Believe it or not, many doctors are devastated when they lose a patient, and to then be sued by the patient's family just makes it worse. So, to defend their own self-image, they of course do *everything* they can to avoid being sued. Which is very expensive.) I think something more akin to the "good samaritan" laws, where the nature of a doctor's obligations are spelled out, would be a better choice.
Once at Walmart I bought a stick an SD card... got it home, and instead of a 1GB stick, it was like 32MB. The package had been opened and resealed, and someone had clearly gypped walmart by returning the 1GB package with the 32MB card in it. Let me tell you, it was really interesting trying to explain to the manager what the problem was, but they did eventually exchange it.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me... what IDE runs on ChromeOS? Where's the Emacs for Android? When I see that, we'll talk. Until then, I don't think that Google's going to be able to migrate it's most vital employees (engineers) to "eat their own dogfood." Might be interesting to migrate support staff, but that's not where the heart of Google is.
This is the Financial Times, not the New York Post, Mac OS Rumors, or some random blog. This reminds me of when the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Apple was going to Intel, and Slashdot said, "Never going to happen." Of course, it did happen. Folks, when a major newspaper like the FT, WSJ, or New York Times reports something, it's probably true. Which makes this very interesting. I think the most interesting aspect will probably be that feature parity for things like Google Chrome will probably benefit--no longer will Chrome, or Google Toolbar, or Google Earth lag behind on Linux and Mac, because Google employees are using Linux or Macs, because now Google employees will be using Linux and Macs.
In our society, men are terrified of being accused of sexual predation, and we steer clear of it. We know where the lines are, and we know we can be accused at any time. Maybe this administrator just wasn't as aware because, after all, she's a she and nobody would ever think that she would use the camera for illicit purposes! Seriously, the reason why that stereotype is there is because, on a whole, men tend to be more interested in pornographic images. Maybe part of the problem here is that, in the female dominated world of education, no man ever saw this policy and said, "uh, ladies... you do realize what people could use these cameras for, right?"
I wear glasses. Plain old-fashioned glasses. And the 3-d glasses are uncomfortable and don't fit right. Duh. I can see the 3-d images, but they never quite focus right, because the glasses aren't on my face right.
Again, as I've posted elsewhere, it's called "Pluralism." Once you have separation of church and state (something I firmly believe in!) the church has no power to enforce its views. Instead, you have many churches, all of which express the deeply held beliefs of some fraction of the population. Some will be right, some will be wrong. Deal with it. However, by giving these deeply and sincerely held moral beliefs (called "religion") special protection, you give these things a chance to sort out. Whereas, when you don't give them protection, there is only one source of right and wrong--government. History shows that the tyranny of the majority is no better than any sort of tyranny.
Yes, I do think it's binding. In terms of practical application, however, I think that our first emphasis should be on "teaching them to obey everything which I have commanded you." It's no accident that Mt 28.19-20 comes at the end of the gospel of Matthew, which contains the most explicit account of Christianity distinctive ethics--that is, Matthew 5-7 (the Sermon on the Mount.) The reason we fail at evangelism is because we've failed at "making disciples." The reason we fail at "making disciples" is because we've failed at being disciples. The problem is our own accommodation to worldliness, and until we get our own house in order we will fail.
I am actually in favor of freedom "just 'cuz" in most cases. For example, i think that all marriage should be civil unions, purely contractual, and the state should get out of the "marriage" business--even though my personal conviction opposes homosexuality. I don't believe in prohibition of much of anything, including "drugs", and I believe in unlimited free speech. Not that I'm a libertarian... politically, I'm more of a pragmatist.
The problem is that governments have a habit of making stupid laws that offend people's religious beliefs. For example, consider the recent French law that forbade the wearing of the Burqa (and the ensuing riots.) We can say, "the government shouldn't tell you what to wear", but the reality is that governments *do* sometimes tell people what to wear. We can say, "the government can't tell you what to believe", but the reality is that the governments sometime *do* tell you what to believe. We can say, "the government can't tell you how to raise your children", but the reality is that governments sometimes *do* try to tell people how to raise their children. And in some cases, it's legitimate for the government to do these things.
However, when the behaviors that offend society arise from deeply held convictions, there are several factors that come into play.
Let it be said, however, that this is one right among many. In the United States, this is one clause of 1 of the 10 bills of rights. I wouldn't want to dispense with freedom of the press, or freedom of (secular) assembly, or due process, or even some of the unenumerated rights (e.g. the right to privacy.) It is a vital right, because it protects my right to be a free, moral, thinking, feeling, human being, judge of my own actions. I am very grateful I live in a country that has freedom of religion, and the minute the U.S. no longer has it I'll be looking to go somewhere that does.
Sure. It's called "religious pluralism." And it's a good thing. But it's meaningless if it's only allowed when the expressions of religious pluralism are popular. The legal standard is that the state must show a compelling interest before it can do anything that touches a church. As a student of church history, I think that's a good standard--because before we had that standard, we had the "state churches" of Europe (an idea that's alive and well in places like the Muslim world!) who were simply pawns for the state. It was the notion of a "state church" that led, for example, to the German Lutheran church's endorsement of Hitler, and the Catholic ... accomodation ... with him.
What all of you who are arguing me are missing is the very real fact that governments change, and that history shows that where there is no religious freedom, there is no freedom. Having a little restriction of freedom of religion is like being a little bit pregnant. Let's here it for good ol' American education, where religious history is glossed over for fear of offending someone, so people simply don't understand what has gone before.
There was a time when it as illegal to teach a black person to read. A law which some of the better churches happily disregarded, because it offended their religious sensibilities. I'm advocating for that sort of exception. Your whole system depends on government being the ultimate arbitrator of right and wrong. I think (and history backs me up) that government really sucks at that.
I agree with you in principle, but not in the particular. Here's why I think that the clean air and clean water acts are okay, constitutionally. It is because Air and water pollution are necessarily interstate concerns. Imagine a factory in Virginia, on the border between Virginia and North Carolina, with a nice stiff north wind. What incentive would Virginia have to regulate its emissions? Clearly, this is a form of interstate commerce (albeit a negative one.) Likewise, let's suppose that a factory in Southern Michigan is pumping a toxic pollutant into a tributary of the MIssissippi, .5 miles north of the state line. What incentive does Michigan have to deal with it? Yet this pollutant is so toxic as to kill off the whole Mississippi river, all the way to New Orleans! This is a navigable waterway and a major fishery, over which the federal government clearly has jurisdiction, yet for that jurisdiction to mean anything they need the clean air and clean water acts, or something much like them.
Would a constitutional amendment be nice? Yes, it would, I suppose. But I don't think it's necessary.
This is a legitimate concern (and you come back to it in a number of places in various ways) but it's been dealt with many times in the courts. The basic legal standard (IANAL, but I have made it my business to understand the law in this area) is that the state must show a compelling interest before it interferes with a religious practice. So, for example, the state has a compelling interest in protecting human life, so human sacrifice (and even animal sacrifice IIRC--there was a case in Florida) may be outlawed. The state has a compelling interest in the education of children, so they can require you to educate them. However, this interest has to be balanced agains the right of religious freedom. So, for example, the state can require me to educate my children, but it can't require them to say that they believe in evolution. Nor can the state require my children to say the pledge of allegiance (offensive to some Christians) in public schools. Nor can it require parochial schools to say the pledge. --because in those cases, the courts have found that the state interest is not compelling enough to override my religious freedom.
What little bit I've learned of law is that we laypeople tend to want to argue from principles to cases. Lawyers always argue from cases to principles. Reading some of the litigation in this area is *very* interesting. We geeks also tend to want Law to be clear cut, boolean, and algorithmic. It's rarely that simple. It's usually a lot more messy, and it's not always clear how a particular issue should be (or will be) decided.
The constitution is a contract, established between "the several states", the people of said states, and the federal government. If you tried to interpret any other contract as a "living document", granting one party new rights and privileges according to its own interpretation of changing conditions, you'd be laughed out of court. The contract has a process for dealing with changing conditions--it's called an amendment! Now I happen to agree with you that the clean air act is constitutional (under the commerce clause, because air pollution is interstate) but this "living document" stuff is a formula for tyranny. It takes what was intended to be a written constitution, with strictly enumerated powers, privileges and rights, and turns it into something like the Roman Republic, which had no written constitution--just traditions. And we all know how that ended up.
My first choice for career was theology, and I have a Ph.D. in New Testament. So I've given this a bit of thought.
The problem is that, without these exceptions, you end up setting the disastrous precedent of the state defining what is an acceptable religious belief to hold. That's all very well and good when you happen to agree with the religious and cultural perspectives of the state--for example, from the sound of your posts, you seem to hold to "liberal democracy" (in the technical sense, not the pundit sense.) But what happens when George W. Bush takes over and he and the Republicans from the Bible Belt start defining what's acceptable religious belief?
The problem is that government doesn't have a very good record for being able to pick the side of the angels (anymore than religion does.) However, allowing freedom of religion--allowing religious groups the freedom to have mixed services, or women in the pulpit, or roller-skating as a religious service, or damned near anything so long as you can make some sort of argument that it serves a religious function--becomes the place where unpopular viewpoints can be expressed. It's worth remembering that all the humanist values that you hold dear... the rights of man, civil liberty, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement... were first nurtured in churches, at a time when these views were very unpopular.
So, my point is that granting special privileges to religious belief serves a useful social purpose. Yes, it's good for religious people (although I might argue how good it really is... religions tend to thrive on persecution.) But it's also good for society as a whole. Simply put, kill religious freedom is like eating your seed-corn.
As someone with a Ph.D. in New Testament, let me just assure you that you need to learn a good bit more about the Bible and about Christian theology. First off, it's highly debatable whether or not the book of Genesis is incompatible with evolution. The whole notion of "literal" interpretation--as used by the reformers when they called for the "sensus literalis"--doesn't mean what you think it means, because "figurative" and "allegory" are *not* the same thing. An allegorical interpretation would be something like saying, "Adam represents the church, and Eve represents the devil, and the serpent represents the Gnostics". This sort of interpretation was all the rage in Medieval Catholicism, and it's that sort of interpretation that is to be rejected. A figurative interpretation acknowledges that people, and books, don't always speak in a direct, literal way. See, for example, parables.
On the other hand, a bone-headed literalism is just as bad as allegorical interpretation, because it ends up missing the words of the text. In the words of John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1:6:
Regarding eschatology... I highly suggest you take some time to read "Revelation: Four Views", which is a parallel commentary. When you read it, consider the preterist position and how well it compares to premillenial nonsense, and consider the possibility that you've been badly deceived, because the bottom line is that chiliasts have been promising the "end is nigh" for 2000 years now and ... ahem ... it hasn't yet materialized. Maybe there's something wrong with that whole reading of scripture? You really don't have a choice: either scripture's wrong, or your reading of it is wrong. I'm going with you being wrong, brother. "End Times Fiction" is also quite good, but sadly out of print.
Seriously, what are the philosophical, theological, and scientific implications if we were to be the only planet to evolve "intelligent" (I use the term advisedly) life. Genesis is starting to look pretty good, if that were true. (Not that I think it is true.)
Did anyone think that, maybe, most hypothetical alien signals might encrypted? I'm referring here not to signals deliberately sent, but to leakage, that sort of thing. There may be a relatively short window in which any civilization uses unencrypted radio. Then they move on to digital radio, encryption, etc., at much lower power, and the chance of finding them (in the speed of light window) is lost. The thing is that an encrypted data stream will look pretty close to random. So, your odds of picking it out of the noise are low.
I think the basic problem is the notion that you can make competent nutritional recommendations without controlled, double-blind studies. Imagine that a drug manufacturer came to you and said, "we know that the per capita use of inhaled Marijuana in the Netherlands is much higher than in the U.S., and that they have lower heart attack risk, therefore we want you to let us market Hashish tablets to the entire population as something *everyone* should take." Everyone would agree that this is absurd. Yet that is exactly the sort of study that is used to support the "low fat" recommendation. What's ridiculous is that every study that has attempted to "prove" low fat diets are better, once and for all, has failed--"failure" being defined as "not proving it".
There's a silly notion out there that nutritional interventions are somehow safer and less powerful than medical ones. Yet, in some cases they are *more* powerful and less safe. And, what's worse, is that people really listen to this crap. People really do cut down on their fat intake based on "fat is bad" dogma. People really do eliminate salt from their diet (or try to) because they're convinced it's bad for you. There's a lot of evidence now that we need more Vitamin D than we're getting--why? Because we're staying out of the Sun because we're convinced that skin cancer is going to kill us! And yet one of the reasons we need Vitamin D is to... wait for it... prevent cancer!
Until there's a real, rigorous, controlled scientific foundation to any of this stuff, I'm sticking to the "caveman" principle. That is, "did my caveman ancestor eat it?" If not, then I don't eat it. If so, then how much? How often? I figure that's what my body evolved to eat.
Sorry. Should have been "weigh the total recipe. weigh the serving. Divide."
Oh tosh. It's not that complicated to come up with reasonably accurate nutritional information. You take the ingredients (based on the label or information from the USDA, which is freely available on the Internet.) You add up them up for the total recipe. Weigh the serving. Divide. I do it literally every day at home. This isn't science, this is accounting, and anyone who can't do it can't run a profitable restaurant anyway.
Is it as accurate as laboratory testing on my end product? Maybe not. Is it good enough? Yes.
If I may suggest, I think that this is sort of outmoded thinking. Most of the recent research recognizes "metabolic syndrome", which includes T2 diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, all of which come together. It is certainly possible that my hypertension was partly caused by my obesity (in fact I think that's partly true.). However, I think it's worth asking whether there is a "common cause" rather than a causal effect.
I have anecdotal evidence to suggest this: namely, once I stopped eating carbs, my blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) dropped 15 points in a week--way too fast for weight loss to be the dominant factor. It continues to fall, but that may well be an effect of exercise (I've started going to the gym since I have so much more energy since I've been off the blood sugar roller coaster.) Various studies have reported the need to reduce doses of blood pressure medication in patients on low carb diets, and the authors of Protein Power apparently have a "physician's guide" that they'll send to any interested physician detailing the modifications they suggest for blood pressure and diabetes medication. So, while I don't have really solid evidence--i.e. a controlled study-- to prove that low carb diet will help with hypertension, I do have some pretty strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's worth trying. And, frankly, a few weeks on a low carb diet is unlikely to kill anyone, so why not try it?
Here's how I, as someone who admittedly knows jack about biochemistry beyond what I've learned trying to rescue my own health, think it works. (Let it be said, however, that that reading includes innumerable journal articles, med school textbooks, and other professional literature, so I'm not a total idiot on this.) I think that once you develop insulin resistance and some level of diabetes, you get blood sugar spikes. These in turn cause various sorts of inflammation of the arteries, which in turn raise blood pressure. However, again, IANAMD, so this just represents my own uneducated understanding of how it works.
There was an article about this not too long ago.
DNA test 'could predict most effective diet'
Study purported to show that based on a genetic test you could determine what sort of diet someone would lose the most weight on. People lost substantially more weight on the right diet.
"Too much salt" is one of those dietary memes that just won't seem to die. However, the reality is that (a) only a fraction of individuals (even individuals with high blood pressure) seem to be salt sensitive and (b) there are much more effective ways of reducing high blood pressure than reducing salt consumption. I was on blood pressure medication, a low salt diet, etc. prior to reducing my carbohydrate intake dramatically last summer, and all it got me was drug side effects and blood pressure that was just barely normal (average 136/88). Since I've stopped eating most concentrated carbohydrates, my blood pressure has reduced dramatically (I don't bother to monitor any more, but at my last doctor's appointment it was 122/72). On top of that, my blood sugars have improved dramatically (from average BG of 138 to average BG of 91) and my lipid profile has improved dramatically (total cholestorol 233 then vs. 135 at last doctor's appt., triglycerides 700+ vs. 85 at last doctor's appointment.) All this even as I lost almost 100 lbs.
What was the change? I *stopped* eating sugar and other refined carbohydrates, and I *started* eating salt again. Oh yeah, and I *love* fat and protein, because they make me feel full.
The bottom line is that I have no confidence in the ability of the "main stream" medical community to define a single nutritional standard that will work for everyone. And I have even less confidence in the ability of bureaucrats and legislators to correctly parse through the research to find the truth. So leave my food alone. If you really feel like you've got to do something, please start requiring restaurants to label their foods (on the menu) so that it's easier for diabetics like me to find menu items that aren't loaded with sugars that will make our blood sugars spike. Or if you really want to interfere, require restaurants to offer low-fat, low-carb, and low-salt entrees. But don't impose your notion of good nutrition on me, because I tried to do it your way and it damn near killed me.
Like most, I disagree. The bottom line is that my early days programming BASIC (first on a Commodore VIC 20, then on an Altair, then on a Commodore 64 which is about when I graduated to assembler, then to C. But I still did some BASIC right through the 90's from time to time until I learned perl for "quick and dirty" stuff.
I think that the most important thing that BASIC taught me was that, there had to be a better way. So, I started to learn different programming languages, different environments. And I eventually learned the habit of using the best language for the job. If I needed to make "Patrick Rox!" scroll up the screen, ad infinitum, I used BASIC. Along the way I was forced to learn many languages, and learned most of the standard ones as well as some oddities (like Forth, Prolog, etc.) If I needed to write something fast, I used Assembler. If I needed to write a lot of code, I used C or Pascal or (later) perl. Nowadays, I do most of my code in Ruby, but at work I just got stuck with a project that's a combination of perl and shell and it was no biggy, and I decided yesterday to do a personal project in Python/Django because of it's better unicode support (the project will be mostly "about" handling Greek texts.) From an early age, I developed a solid understanding that languages are fungible, and that there's often a better language and environment for the job and than the one I might know best.
This contrasts with the kids I see nowadays (grump grump) who, if they bother to program at all, only seem to ever learn one programming language and one programming environment and tend to think that that's the end-all-be-all solution to everything. If they know VB, it's all VB. If C++, then it's all got to be C++. Java, python, ruby... you get the idea. Why? Because none of those languages (except maybe VB) really suck, and certainly none of them suck nearly as much as good old Microsoft BASIC on an early 80's Micro did. So it's easy to just stay stuck in a single language and never learn a vital lesson that separates "prorammers" from "people who write some code."
The problem is that the best interests of the doctor are not aligned with the best interests of the patient. Instead, we've got a situation where the best interests of the doctor are to "play it safe, spend as much as necessary, preserve life at ALL costs (because that won't get me sued)". The tail is wagging the dog, in the form of a very small percentage of patients who will someday sue their doctors.
However, the solution is not tort reform--in the sense of limiting verdicts--because the problem is not the size of verdicts. The problem is the things that doctors do in over-the-top efforts to avoid really frivolous lawsuits. (Believe it or not, many doctors are devastated when they lose a patient, and to then be sued by the patient's family just makes it worse. So, to defend their own self-image, they of course do *everything* they can to avoid being sued. Which is very expensive.) I think something more akin to the "good samaritan" laws, where the nature of a doctor's obligations are spelled out, would be a better choice.
Once at Walmart I bought a stick an SD card... got it home, and instead of a 1GB stick, it was like 32MB. The package had been opened and resealed, and someone had clearly gypped walmart by returning the 1GB package with the 32MB card in it. Let me tell you, it was really interesting trying to explain to the manager what the problem was, but they did eventually exchange it.