well, not only is 'he' correct actually the text book correct usage is 'He', only recently, the last 40 years or so has that convention changed.
To answer what seems to be the underlying question ( excuse me if I'm guessing wrong.)
In traditional Christian theology God is referred to in the masculine for several reasons.
1) In most of the places that God refers to himself or speaks in the bible God chooses the masculine in reference to Himself.
2) The masculine gender is a better ( although by no means perfect) analogy of the relationship between God and his creation then the feminine because of the theology of transcendence. In most Judeo-Christian theology God is wholly other, creator of the universe, but the universe is not part of God.
A human child is formed from within it's mothers body and is part of it's mother. So famine is a better analogical relationship with Hindu theology of the universe being part of God.
There are several lesser reasons as well, but they would take longer to explain then I have at the moment.
The key word in your statement , which I agree with is btw, is "actively"... to go into the theology of it you have to talk about the 'active' and the 'passive' will of God. God, passively wills all things that exist , because if he ceases to will the existance of anything that thing ceases to exists. That is contrasted with his 'active' will. Which is the commmon explination for how God wills that no man sins but still 'allows' it. ( this is text book Thomas Aquinus in case you are wondering).
One aspect of the gosphel tail about Jesus calming the storm at sea is the idea that God is God even of chaos. ( the ocean represented chaos in many ancient cultures.)
I often find it amazing how people are stereotyped. Not all people who believe God is responsible for creation of the universe have a problem with evolutionary theory. Roman Catholics believe God is responsible for everything. Including random chance ( which everyone knows is seldom all the random.)
So assuming all science were in and we could prove from end to end the entire evolution of the human species , you would have made no progress in proving or disproving either the existence of God or weather or not He was ultimately responsible for the creation of human beings.
The only group that holds 'evolution can't happen because the bible says' is a very small minority of Christians. Specifically biblical literalists.
Evolution also poses no particular threat to Hindu or Buddhist belief system.
Just to point out that not all software engineers with intrest in slashdot and opensource and mindless drones with identical opinions. I'd like to state for the record that the policies of the boy scouts of america regarding homosexual scout masters makes me MORE likely to help them and support them NOT less.
There are some interesting precidence here but I think the article did a very poor job of comming up with worst case senerios.
Grandma Mini How about the Chinese , or Russian , or German or American ( what have you ) have legalized euthanasia. Grandma mini's medical records indicate that she has become far too much of a drain on the nationalized medical system and that the taxes she and all of her immediate family pay into the government are causing a drain on society. Since obviously grandma mini can no longer expect a high quality of life the state puts subtle and not so subtle pressure on the family to let Grandma mini "die with dignity" even though it is the last thing in the world Grandma wants and goes directly against her religious beliefs. She is cut off from state funded medical aid , not able to find a doctor and unless her family takes steps to ensure her graceful departure they will be required to pay back the whole of grandma mini's medical expensive for the last 60 years.
( Think it can't happen check out the Chinese population limitation laws. They are already there.)
Sounds like a good read. I'll check it out thanks.
Right now though there are just to many unkowns so the idea of recording and replicating the functions of a brain must remain primarily an intresting possiblility suitable for sci-fi.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that the recording would not be possible because of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. All depends on how the brain is wired and who the pieces work together et al. Much of which is still squarely in the we don't have a clue catagory.
The mammillian life cycle begins when the gametes of the parents join.
That is the one and only tempral event that can be measured by wich an idividual is organism is established. Every other event is an events that happen to two genetically distict individual organism ( mother and child) one that is dependant on the other.
From the prepective of law there is a simple question that must be answered. How important are individual rights.
Individual rights obviously must be bounded by the importance of the idividual and the right to privacy is an idividual right. The most fundimental individual right is the right to continue living.
The circumstances under which one can be deprived of thier legal right to continue living are thus a bounding factor to the importance of individual privacy rights.
So if a living person is only so important that they can be deprived of thier right to be alive because they are an inconvience or even significant threat to thier mother ( on which they are dependant.)
It follows logically that lesser freedoms like the right to privacy can be depensed of for the individual when they are a threat to the security of the state as a whole to which the individual is dependant.
So I really dislike both republicans and democrats equally but feel forced to favor laws which promote the bounding factor of human freedom first with the hope that eventually sanity will set in about the others.
What a annoying choice to make. I wish oboma was not a supporter of genicide ( aka abortion) then the election would be an easy choice, but until the dems stop supporting abortion and buggery I guess me and most of the religious middle will keep voting against economic and personal self intrest in the hopes that one day the killing of millions will be abated.
I find it ironic that our first black president should he be elected will be with the support of the orginization that was founded primarily as a eugentics programs against Negro people (aka NOW).
Still it is a hard chioce to make, continue to let the country slide deeper and deeper into the bush/republic style anti-privacy police state or let it continue to slide into an amoral fascism where people are jailed for trying to stop babies form being killed and thier children from being taught that anal sex is a component of a healty alternative life style.
you know, as far as the soul thing. I've looked into it , but have to admit I'm pretty on the fence in some ways. Almost all modern physics theories are worked out in more the 4 dimensions. It seems like a huge leap to assume without proof that there is or is not some portion of the human being that evolved to take advantage of whatever physical implications a 5th and 6th dimension might have.
From a scientific perspective I would say it is pre-mature to have an opinion about weather or not a 'soul' exists.
Especially when faced with the claim that some pan-dimension being of sufficient power experimented on monkeys here on earth by infusing them with something it created that primarily exists in one of those other dimensions.
There simply is no evidence either way and to me to utterly preclude such a scenario is squarely unobjective and unscientific, not to mention showing a phenomenal lack of imagination.
It seems that many of the greatest scientific blunders , the flat earth, the theories of spontaneous generation and eather , at least in part basically come down to people assuming they know the answer to what is scientifically unknown.
It is a great struggle to remain truly objective, unfortunately most 'scientist' aren't.
From a scientific perspective you cannot objectively be an atheist,only an agnostic, because science does not disprove the existence of some kind of god/gods any more then in proves it. The continued mantra of religious atheism calling on science to justify so much pure conjecture is just as useless and harmful to true science as the very similar mantra's from various other 'religious' circles each of which continually tries to project what the 'assume' into what is yet unknown. Violating the very nature of objective studies.
Perhaps but all natural system are not repeatable or recordable.
Consider weather simulations. Even if you could create a 'perfect' simulation of the earth atmosphere , it would diverge significantly from the real atmosphere almost immediately because of things like rounding errors and the inability to caption ever detail with sufficient granularity. aka sensitivity to initial conditions. ( that is chaos theory.)
My point is , even if you could perfectly simulate a human brain and that brain could interact with the real world in real time. You still may not be able to 'capture the state' of an existing brain because of sensitivity to initial conditions.
* Technology will continue to improve exponentially (it is right now - see Moore's law)
However this will not and cannot continue ag nausium because eventually the laws of thermodynamics catch up with you.
* The brain is a fully deterministic computer. This is an unproven article of faith and contrary to a lot of evidence which would appear the brain uses at least some semi chaotic processes. Most natural system do.
Signatures are a throw back to when it was unusual and the mark of being gentility to be able to write. They were the next best thing to using your wax seal with the family crest and usually accompanied it.
Seriously how many people who work at a till or even a bank have had the nessary 10 plus years of training to be able to tell a real signature for a fake one? Even if they did would it be reasonable for them to look at all the signatures? I know personaly of more then one occasion when a bank has cashed a check with th e signature Mickey Mouse on it ( the person who wrote the check was just seeing if it would work and the store still got the money.)
THAT is for a real signature from a real person standing in front of you, and a computer is supposed to do better?
Fundamentally you are putting forth a very similar argument to the one that was used by the Nazi's to justify the killing of Jews. As "weak minded people" who take advance of others.
Diminishing others simply because you disagree with their demographics is precisely the definition of bigotry.
There are many highly intelligent people who embrace religion and deity of various kinds and type. They not because they like being told something for other or cannot think for themselves, but because they ascribe to a certain set of facts as being true.
You may disagree with them, but to denigrate without cause makes you the one who is acting in ignorance.
Considering some of the people you just classed as week minded and dolts would include: Aristotle, Plato, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa, C.S Lewis, JRR Tolkien etc.
I'd rather be classed as week minded then not.
Secondly, just because someone defers to the expertise of priest, or rabbi, or Imam as greater then their own when it comes to knowing something subject (in this case religion), doesn't mean they don't think about it for themselves any more then if I defer my to a set of people with PhD's in Quantum mechanics, because I only know a smaller amount about the subject. I certainly can a do think about Quantum mechanics , and the theory of relativity, but I'd be arrogant to claim I understood any better then even a meager Professional researcher in the field.
So just to re-iterate and sum it up, calling someone 'weak minded' because they disagree with you accomplishes 2 things: 1) It fails on every level to make your case. 2) It shows you to be just or more 'dogmatic' then the people you are calling weak minded.
Atheist and deist have legitimate disagreements about facts. I can certainly see how a rational intelligent person can come down on either side. The reason is simple enough however; intelligence and wisdom are not entirely the same thing.
I thought about feeding a troll today but that just seemed to drool today so I thought I'd take the time to say don't be silly go somewhere else and play.
Seriously , 'religion is for the weak minded' is a bigoted and antiquitated statment of an idialog that belongs long laid to rest with the Nazi's and stalin.
No new news here.. every body move on. The republicans remain - pro big business the democrats remain pro-libralism and socialism. Neither one of them has brought forth a centrist candidate in a very long time. So the whole population is forced to vote on polarizing political issue of which tech is often a casualty. I'm sorry being for or against futher military action in Iraq. For or agianst continued abortion. Pro-or Con Gay marriage rights. etc SOOOO eclipses tech issues as to not really make them even usful to report on. So of coarse they have no real opinion of thier own on these topics , why alienate your support based with creative thinking.
Just a comment about biometrics. Admitadly they are harder to compromise then simple passcodes , BUT once they ARE compromised which WILL happen, then what? Planning on chaning your finger prints or retna scan any time soon?
The major problem with all of this that few people realize is that the term 'disorder' as used in the DSM is considered 'undefinable' in the world of psychology. Therefore the only thing nessary for something to become offically a disorder ( or cease being so ) is that those who have voting membership in the group that writes the book 'feel' is should be classed that way or not. Although the greatest real world effect as I understand it is weather or not you have a 'condition' your health insurance will pay to help you fix or not.
I don't know why I am bothering, but sometimes I just give into temptation.
It is extraordinarily narrow and close minded as well phenomenally unscientific( aka non objective ) to claim there is no possibility that something which human beings are almost capable of doing in a test tube today ( the creation of a new species and or a living thing) could not have been accomplished , by an advanced alien race or some other kind of super alien intelligence.
The claim that such a thing happened can in no way have any real effect on the laws of natural selection as understood from the real science underlying the multiple theories of evolution nor can such a claim be refuted or used to refute the fossil record and those things that can actually be known with certainty from the biological sciences.
It is specifically the type of dogmatic, emotionally charged and bigoted hate speech shown by the parent which causes the multiple theories of evolution to have such a negative and controversial reputation. Especially when coupled with the a cloudlessness about the various problems that are presented by classical Darwinian evolution as opposed to the predominantly accepted theory of modern evolutionary synthesis which has replaced classical Darwinian evolution but still has problems of it's own.
There are very few people who have great problems accepting the idea the species adapt over time, but when you inject your personal religion views about things you cannot prove into the subject you cloud the scientific issue and cause unnecessary controversy.
It is exactly the attempt to take real science and use it enforce atheistic dogmatism that is the cause of the much controversy seen today within the American school system.
So what if the 'bible says' God or little green men from mars created man and the animals.?
If it happened obviously they were 'designed' to fit into an ecosystem in that is subject to natural selection and genetic sequences were picked for each of them that gave them a high level of relationship. How does weather or not the human being or any other given species was created as an independent act influenced at the sub atomic level or by a PURELY natural process effect that obvious relationships that exist between them and their genetics or application of the knowledge of those relationships?
The conclusion is simple, weather or not windows XP evolved through natural selection and random chance to become Windows vista or extra system intelligence like the mythical computer programmers from Microsoft were in part or in full responsible for causing the change, the obvious relationship between the two entities and it's practical application remains the same. So why bother to argue about.
The answer is bigotry, narrow minded dogmatism and lack of imagination.
Sorry, my bad, those who believe in thiestic teachings would be more accurate. Christains stuck in my mind because they are more ususally associated with creationism and the specific term Dogma.
well, the bias can be seen fairly clearly in the parent article consider: "His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, "the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction," and people who "cling to dogma." "
has in it more the a tacit suggestion that those who believe in Christian teachings ( dogma is Latin for teaching) 'cling' to them 'irrationally' as opposed to scientist who 'cannot let error stand' suggesting that those who have various faith ( by far the majority of the world) are willingly ignore fact and intentionally let errors be taught or propagated.
The whole tone of the article is extremely biased. So what's new?
Honestly I doubt very many creationist need to look at something small like this to find bias in the scientific community. Reading the 'God delusion' or any number of such works sufficiently shows that not all those who claim 'science' as the ground they stand on are any less dogmatic then creationists.
the answer is they don't want to spend time( aka money ) on testing and supporting a small market share. Sure it is probably the right thing to do , but since when does that have anything to do with $$$, and in the end that is all many companies care about.
the discussion about what must happen in the public form ( ie what I might see flipping channels acidentally) or what I might see walking down the street is very different then this judges case. He is talking about something it takes effort to see. More like a book , you must find it , purchase it and decide to play it.
Web cesorship is a different issue but the shere technical aspects of the web make it wholy impracticle
Not to bludgeded the issue with a wet noodle but both sides have it WRONG.
The judge is right violence is part of man and children and culture.
The legislatures are right that society has a responsibility to protect it's children from what is likely harmful to them at given stages of development.
The problem the judge has is that there is nothing wrong with protecting children from almost all violent imagery up till the age of 18.
The problem the legislatures have is that it is a PARENTS responsibility to _SPEND TIME WITH THERE CHILDREN_ and know what they are looking and how they are entertaining themselves it NOT the states responsibility.
This is what is called principle of subsidiary. The lowest level of governing power the parent has the highest level of responsibility. The problem with the legislature is they feel obligated to protect lazy parents who don't want to make the sacrifice of really knowing their kids, and refuse to admit that the government just doesn't belong sticking it's nose into every aspect of human life.
Slashdot Mirror
well, not only is 'he' correct actually the text book correct usage is 'He', only recently, the last 40 years or so has that convention changed.
To answer what seems to be the underlying question ( excuse me if I'm guessing wrong.)
In traditional Christian theology God is referred to in the masculine for several reasons.
1) In most of the places that God refers to himself or speaks in the bible God chooses the masculine in reference to Himself.
2) The masculine gender is a better ( although by no means perfect) analogy of the relationship between God and his creation then the feminine because of the theology of transcendence. In most Judeo-Christian theology God is wholly other, creator of the universe, but the universe is not part of God.
A human child is formed from within it's mothers body and is part of it's mother.
So famine is a better analogical relationship with Hindu theology of the universe being part of God.
There are several lesser reasons as well, but they would take longer to explain then I have at the moment.
The key word in your statement , which I agree with is btw, is "actively" ... to go into the theology of it you have to talk about the 'active' and the 'passive' will of God. God, passively wills all things that exist , because if he ceases to will the existance of anything that thing ceases to exists. That is contrasted with his 'active' will. Which is the commmon explination for how God wills that no man sins but still 'allows' it. ( this is text book Thomas Aquinus in case you are wondering).
One aspect of the gosphel tail about Jesus calming the storm at sea is the idea that God is God even of chaos. ( the ocean represented chaos in many ancient cultures.)
I often find it amazing how people are stereotyped. Not all people who believe God is responsible for creation of the universe have a problem with evolutionary theory. Roman Catholics believe God is responsible for everything. Including random chance ( which everyone knows is seldom all the random.)
So assuming all science were in and we could prove from end to end the entire evolution of the human species , you would have made no progress in proving or disproving either the existence of God or weather or not He was ultimately responsible for the creation of human beings.
The only group that holds 'evolution can't happen because the bible says' is a very small minority of Christians. Specifically biblical literalists.
Evolution also poses no particular threat to Hindu or Buddhist belief system.
Just to point out that not all software engineers with intrest in slashdot and opensource and mindless drones with identical opinions. I'd like to state for the record that the policies of the boy scouts of america regarding homosexual scout masters makes me MORE likely to help them and support them NOT less.
There are some interesting precidence here but I think the article did a very poor job of comming up with worst case senerios.
Grandma Mini
How about the Chinese , or Russian , or German or American ( what have you ) have legalized euthanasia. Grandma mini's medical records indicate that she has become far too much of a drain on the nationalized medical system and that the taxes she and all of her immediate family pay into the government are causing a drain on society. Since obviously grandma mini can no longer expect a high quality of life the state puts subtle and not so subtle pressure on the family to
let Grandma mini "die with dignity" even though it is the last thing in the world Grandma wants and goes directly against her religious beliefs. She is cut off from state funded medical aid , not able to find a doctor and unless her family takes steps to ensure her graceful departure they will be required to pay back the whole of grandma mini's medical expensive for the last 60 years.
( Think it can't happen check out the Chinese population limitation laws. They are already there.)
Sounds like a good read. I'll check it out thanks.
Right now though there are just to many unkowns so the idea of recording and replicating the functions of a brain must remain primarily an intresting possiblility suitable for sci-fi.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that the recording would not be possible because of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. All depends on how the brain is wired and who the pieces work together et al. Much of which is still squarely in the we don't have a clue catagory.
The idea of a soul entirely misses the point.
The mammillian life cycle begins when the gametes of the parents join.
That is the one and only tempral event that can be measured by wich an idividual is organism is established. Every other event is an events that happen to two genetically distict individual organism ( mother and child) one that is dependant on the other.
From the prepective of law there is a simple question that must be answered.
How important are individual rights.
Individual rights obviously must be bounded by the importance of the idividual and the right to privacy is an idividual right. The most fundimental individual right is the right to continue living.
The circumstances under which one can be deprived of thier legal right to continue living are thus a bounding factor to the importance of individual privacy rights.
So if a living person is only so important that they can be deprived of thier right to be alive because they are an inconvience or even significant threat to thier mother ( on which they are dependant.)
It follows logically that lesser freedoms like the right to privacy can be depensed of for the individual when they are a threat to the security of the state as a whole to which the individual is dependant.
So I really dislike both republicans and democrats equally but feel forced to favor laws which promote the bounding factor of human freedom first with the hope that eventually sanity will set in about the others.
What a annoying choice to make. I wish oboma was not a supporter of genicide ( aka abortion) then the election would be an easy choice, but until the dems stop supporting abortion and buggery I guess me and most of the religious middle will keep voting against economic and personal self intrest in the hopes that one day the killing of millions will be abated.
... bad choices on either side.
I find it ironic that our first black president should he be elected will be with the support of the orginization that was founded primarily as a eugentics programs against Negro people (aka NOW).
http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1294086/posts
Still it is a hard chioce to make, continue to let the country slide deeper and deeper into the bush/republic style anti-privacy police state or let it continue to slide into an amoral fascism where people are jailed for trying to stop babies form being killed and thier children from being taught that anal sex is a component of a healty alternative life style.
What can you say
you know, as far as the soul thing. I've looked into it , but have to admit I'm pretty on the fence in some ways. Almost all modern physics theories are worked out in more the 4 dimensions. It seems like a huge leap to assume without proof that there is or is not some portion of the human being that evolved to take advantage of whatever physical implications a 5th and 6th dimension might have.
,only an agnostic, because science does not disprove the existence of some kind of god/gods any more then in proves it. The continued mantra of religious atheism calling on science to justify so much pure conjecture is just as useless and harmful to true science as the very similar mantra's from various other 'religious' circles each of which continually tries to project what the 'assume' into what is yet unknown. Violating the very nature of objective studies.
From a scientific perspective I would say it is pre-mature to have an opinion about weather or not a 'soul' exists.
Especially when faced with the claim that some pan-dimension being of sufficient power experimented on monkeys here on earth by infusing them with something it created that primarily exists in one of those other dimensions.
There simply is no evidence either way and to me to utterly preclude such a scenario is squarely unobjective and unscientific, not to mention showing a phenomenal lack of imagination.
It seems that many of the greatest scientific blunders , the flat earth, the theories of spontaneous generation and eather , at least in part basically come down to people assuming they know the answer to what is scientifically unknown.
It is a great struggle to remain truly objective, unfortunately most 'scientist' aren't.
From a scientific perspective you cannot objectively be an atheist
Perhaps but all natural system are not repeatable or recordable.
Consider weather simulations. Even if you could create a 'perfect' simulation of the earth atmosphere , it would diverge significantly from the real atmosphere almost immediately because of things like rounding errors and the inability to caption ever detail with sufficient granularity. aka sensitivity to initial conditions. ( that is chaos theory.)
My point is , even if you could perfectly simulate a human brain and that brain could interact with the real world in real time. You still may not be able to 'capture the state' of an existing brain because of sensitivity to initial conditions.
Is it just me or is anyone else here reminded of the 'the hideous strength' the Sci-fi thriller by C.S. lewis when they read about the singularity?
Actually some of the implecations are truely uncanny.
* Technology will continue to improve exponentially (it is right now - see Moore's law)
However this will not and cannot continue ag nausium because eventually the laws of thermodynamics catch up with you.
* The brain is a fully deterministic computer.
This is an unproven article of faith and contrary to a lot of evidence which would appear the brain uses at least some semi chaotic processes. Most natural system do.
Signatures are a throw back to when it was unusual and the mark of being gentility to be able to write. They were the next best thing to using your wax seal with the family crest and usually accompanied it.
Seriously how many people who work at a till or even a bank have had the nessary 10 plus years of training to be able to tell a real signature for a fake one? Even if they did would it be reasonable for them to look at all the signatures?
I know personaly of more then one occasion when a bank has cashed a check with th e signature Mickey Mouse on it ( the person who wrote the check was just seeing if it would work and the store still got the money.)
THAT is for a real signature from a real person standing in front of you, and a computer is supposed to do better?
somthing similar could be said for mc cain. None of them are very centrist, because they all walk the party line, which is what I said.
Fundamentally you are putting forth a very similar argument to the one that was used by the Nazi's to justify the killing of Jews. As "weak minded people" who take advance of others.
Diminishing others simply because you disagree with their demographics is precisely the definition of bigotry.
There are many highly intelligent people who embrace religion and deity of various kinds and type. They not because they like being told something for other or cannot think for themselves, but because they ascribe to a certain set of facts as being true.
You may disagree with them, but to denigrate without cause makes you the one who is acting in ignorance.
Considering some of the people you just classed as week minded and dolts would include: Aristotle, Plato, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Mother Teresa, C.S Lewis, JRR Tolkien etc.
I'd rather be classed as week minded then not.
Secondly, just because someone defers to the expertise of priest, or rabbi, or Imam as greater then their own when it comes to knowing something subject (in this case religion), doesn't mean they don't think about it for themselves any more then if I defer my to a set of people with PhD's in Quantum mechanics, because I only know a smaller amount about the subject. I certainly can a do think about Quantum mechanics , and the theory of relativity, but I'd be arrogant to claim I understood any better then even a meager Professional researcher in the field.
So just to re-iterate and sum it up, calling someone 'weak minded' because they disagree with you accomplishes 2 things:
1) It fails on every level to make your case.
2) It shows you to be just or more 'dogmatic' then the people you are calling weak minded.
Atheist and deist have legitimate disagreements about facts. I can certainly see how a rational intelligent person can come down on either side. The reason is simple enough however; intelligence and wisdom are not entirely the same thing.
I thought about feeding a troll today
but that just seemed to drool today
so I thought I'd take the time to say
don't be silly go somewhere else and play.
Seriously , 'religion is for the weak minded' is a bigoted and antiquitated statment of an idialog
that belongs long laid to rest with the Nazi's and stalin.
Peace out.
No new news here.. every body move on.
The republicans remain - pro big business the democrats remain pro-libralism and socialism. Neither one of them has brought forth a centrist candidate in a very long time. So the whole population is forced to vote on polarizing political issue of which tech is often a casualty. I'm sorry being for or against futher military action in Iraq. For or agianst continued abortion. Pro-or Con Gay marriage rights. etc SOOOO eclipses tech issues as to not really make them even usful to report on.
So of coarse they have no real opinion of thier own on these topics , why alienate your support based with creative thinking.
Just a comment about biometrics. Admitadly they are harder to compromise then simple passcodes , BUT once they ARE compromised which WILL happen, then what? Planning on chaning your finger prints or retna scan any time soon?
The major problem with all of this that few people realize is that the term 'disorder' as used in the DSM is considered 'undefinable' in the world of psychology. Therefore the only thing nessary for something to become offically a disorder ( or cease being so ) is that those who have voting membership in the group that writes the book 'feel' is should be classed that way or not. Although the greatest real world effect as I understand it is weather or not you have a 'condition' your health insurance will pay to help you fix or not.
I don't know why I am bothering, but sometimes I just give into temptation.
It is extraordinarily narrow and close minded as well phenomenally unscientific( aka non objective ) to claim there is no possibility that something which human beings are almost capable of doing in a test tube today ( the creation of a new species and or a living thing) could not have been accomplished , by an advanced alien race or some other kind of super alien intelligence.
The claim that such a thing happened can in no way have any real effect on the laws of natural selection as understood from the real science underlying the multiple theories of evolution nor can such a claim be refuted or used to refute the fossil record and those things that can actually be known with certainty from the biological sciences.
It is specifically the type of dogmatic, emotionally charged and bigoted hate speech shown by the parent which causes the multiple theories of evolution to have such a negative and controversial reputation. Especially when coupled with the a cloudlessness about the various problems that are presented by classical Darwinian evolution as opposed to the predominantly accepted theory of modern evolutionary synthesis which has replaced classical Darwinian evolution but still has problems of it's own.
There are very few people who have great problems accepting the idea the species adapt over time, but when you inject your personal religion views about things you cannot prove into the subject you cloud the scientific issue and cause unnecessary controversy.
It is exactly the attempt to take real science and use it enforce atheistic dogmatism that is the cause of the much controversy seen today within the American school system.
So what if the 'bible says' God or little green men from mars created man and the animals.?
If it happened obviously they were 'designed' to fit into an ecosystem in that is subject to natural selection and genetic sequences were picked for each of them that gave them a high level of relationship. How does weather or not the human being or any other given species was created as an independent act influenced at the sub atomic level or by a PURELY natural process effect that obvious relationships that exist between them and their genetics or application of the knowledge of those relationships?
The conclusion is simple, weather or not windows XP evolved through natural selection and random chance to become Windows vista or extra system intelligence like the mythical computer programmers from Microsoft were in part or in full responsible for causing the change, the obvious relationship between the two entities and it's practical application remains the same. So why bother to argue about.
The answer is bigotry, narrow minded dogmatism and lack of imagination.
Sorry, my bad, those who believe in thiestic teachings would be more accurate. Christains stuck in my mind because they are more ususally associated with creationism and the specific term Dogma.
well, the bias can be seen fairly clearly in the parent article consider:
"His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, "the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction," and people who "cling to dogma."
"
has in it more the a tacit suggestion that those who believe in Christian teachings ( dogma is Latin for teaching) 'cling' to them 'irrationally' as opposed to scientist who 'cannot let error stand' suggesting that those who have various faith ( by far the majority of the world) are willingly ignore fact and intentionally let errors be taught or propagated.
The whole tone of the article is extremely biased. So what's new?
Honestly I doubt very many creationist need to look at something small like this to find bias in the scientific community. Reading the 'God delusion' or any number of such works sufficiently shows that not all those who claim 'science' as the ground they stand on are any less dogmatic then creationists.
the answer is they don't want to spend time( aka money ) on testing and supporting a small market share. Sure it is probably the right thing to do , but since when does that have anything to do with $$$, and in the end that is all many companies care about.
the discussion about what must happen in the public form ( ie what I might see flipping channels acidentally) or what I might see walking down the street is very different then this judges case. He is talking about something it takes effort to see. More like a book , you must find it , purchase it and decide to play it. Web cesorship is a different issue but the shere technical aspects of the web make it wholy impracticle
Not to bludgeded the issue with a wet noodle but both sides have it WRONG.
The judge is right violence is part of man and children and culture.
The legislatures are right that society has a responsibility to protect it's children
from what is likely harmful to them at given stages of development.
The problem the judge has is that there is nothing wrong with protecting children from almost all violent imagery up till the age of 18.
The problem the legislatures have is that it is a PARENTS responsibility to _SPEND TIME WITH THERE CHILDREN_ and know what they are looking and how they are entertaining themselves it NOT the states responsibility.
This is what is called principle of subsidiary. The lowest level of governing power the parent has the highest level of responsibility. The problem with the legislature is they feel obligated to protect lazy parents who don't want to make the sacrifice of really knowing their kids, and refuse to admit that the government just doesn't belong sticking it's nose into every aspect of human life.