You can't, genius. That's the whole point. Their "religious technology" is copyrighted, so anyone who posts it, or even refers to it, gets sued by the "church."
Apparently the deal is that A. they feel they have the right to copyright whatever they want (as I religious institution, I have my doubts about that) but also B. their beliefs are that if you hear the "higher level" teachings before you are ready, you will become sick and die. That's why it's always important to let a low-level Scientology "preclear" know that your consciousness is made up of many spirits called "thetans" from outer space who were banished to this planet billions of years ago by the evil galactic overlord Xenu. Then ask them if they are feeling well.
Be was the best-engineered desktop OS out there. It's main failure was that while it was beautifully engineered, it needed a lot more software. This is a problem that opening it up could solve. New development environments and tools will make it a joy to work with.
I still love Linux because it is my favorite *NIX, and I think it's irresponsible to use anything but *NIX on a server.
When OpenBeOS is ready to go, it will be one hell of an OS. I wonder if it can count on the support of the *NIX snobs? Maybe Be's dream-deferred might actually be supported by the geek community: "UNIX on the server, Be on the desktop!"
The Jews have been persecuted, but not because God promised it. The Jews have been attacked throughout history for a number of reasons, only a few of which are their own fault.
But this does not answer my comment anyway, does it? "Keeps his promises" is not a valid characteristic. It tells me nothing about the entity who makes those promises. But which promise are we talking about here? The promise to make us His people? Or the promise that we will be persecuted?
The Jews were not saved by a supernatural daddy in the sky. The Jews saved themselves, because we have an amazing capacity for perserverence. We worked harder than everyone else because we wanted to have the chances we deserved. To attribute that to God is to desecrate the memory of your ancestors, frummy. They suffered and worked so that you could be here blithely and ignorantly pissing on their efforts. Let's give the Jews themselves a little credit in that area.
But let's also not pretend that the persecution the Jews suffered was in no way their own responsibility. The Jews insisted on living with Christians. The Jews insisted that Christians live in a way that they abhorred: being respectful of other religions. And the Jews sacrificed many generations on the altar of monetary comfort. So let's lay to rest this horrible culture of victimhood and self-pity that has fueled the current situation in Israel.
Any god that makes a covenant with a nation, just to keep them in terror, so that they can in turn inflict terror on others, I can do without. If the Jews were smart they'd sue God for Breach Of Bris.
1. No atheist bases his rejection of god-belief in the lack of evidence. An atheist bases his lack of god-belief in the fact that a definition of "god" that makes sense is not only apparently very difficult, but theoretically impossible. You can't make me believe in something you can't even define; even you don't know what it is. Don't make me take you seriously when you don't even know what's going on inside your own head.
2. There IS NO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS. The writings of Christian theologians are not acceptable because of the conflict of interest, we need secular evidence as well. However, the only evidence Christians have provided is the writings of the secular historian Josephus -- and the parts of Josephus' writings which directly refer to Jesus or Christianity were discovered to be forgeries committed by theologians. Pick up a modern translation of Josephus from a secular source...it does not contain that passage anymore because scholars agree on its fraudulent nature. Other than that there is nothing.
3. There are all kinds of philosophies that do not depend on God for morality or ethics. Don't believe me? Read from the following authors:
David Hume
Frederich Nietsche
Immanuel Kant
Baruch Spinoza
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Mark Twain
Ayn Rand
Robert Pirsig
It's pretty clear that the existence of a supernatural entity which rewards or punishes people cannot be the basis for morality, actually. That's just coersion. Morality is when you do good because there's a logical reason for it, not because you've been threatened.
4. There is a terrific website at this location that can address your questions and concerns about freedom from religion. While you're at it, I suggest you check out this one as well. May prove to be informative.
I am a Jew who is also an atheist. Yes, you can be both. A skinhead would still kick my ass no matter what I believe or don't believe, so a Jew I remain.
Anyway, the real problem here is that while everyone seems to be postulating the existence of the god they happen to have been taught about since childhood, no one has cared to give any definitions, characteristics, or dimensions of their god. It sure would help to prove his existence, wouldn't it?
But they never will, and here's why: they insist that God is infinite. Anything that is infinite, and borderless, is unmeasurable, and therefore indefinable. Characteristics are, by definition, statistics regarding the borders of a thing: it starts here, and ends there. Characteristics describe limitations. If God has no limitations, he has no characteristics. As a thing that has no meaningful characteristics, I reject it without a second thought.
You have a serious misunderstanding of Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor does not state that the simplest explanation should be adopted. The principle of Occam's Razor, to quote Occam directly:
"Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."
There is no need to indroduce God into an equation because science explains it very well without him. Scientific evidence indicates not only is there no "creator," there was no need for anything to be "created" at all. So there is no need for God. That's what Occam's Razor says.
Sorry, a matter of semantics...You are correct, it is better to describe it as "shouldn't" rather than "can't." Inbreeding is successful quite regularly, it's just that among individuals of similar genetics, it dramatically increases the chance of genetic defects. Say you are a carrier of the recessive gene that causes Crohn's disease; it's a strong possibility that your sister does as well, having inherited that gene from the same people. And if you and your sister have children, the chance of each of your children developing Crohn's disease has just increased to 25% from the usual less-than-1% they'd otherwise have.
In addition to that, I should have also more explicitly explained that too little genetic variation makes us more vulnerable to infectious agents that depend on our genetics.
For example: at some point along this path, a catastrophic disease that might have wiped out 10% of the world's population will be successful at wiping out 40% of it, because so many more people have the same genetic vulnerabilities. I am not merely bluffing about this, it is a statistical inevitability.
This is such a terrible solution to the crime problem and I can't believe that anyone knowledgeable about biology would ever discuss it without severe prejudice...
Biology does not make people into criminals, for the most part. It's criminal law that does that. But that's not my main objection, and I don't care to argue the merits of it -- my main objection is that the human gene pool is dangerously homogeneous already, and we should not, at this point, be going out of our way to make it more so.
Human beings have, since distant prehistory, slaughtered many millions of minority ethnic groups. "Parallax" does not shrink from that fact. What we are not acknowledging, however, is that their genes are gone forever. By committing so many atrocities, we have made ourselves incredibly (and nearly irreverseably) vulnerable to diseases that depend on common genetics. By killing people with different genetics, it leaves only those with similar genetics to reproduce with each other. It makes each of us genetic siblings, to a degree...and I shouldn't have to tell you why siblings can't reproduce...
This isn't going to be the last security hole found in IE.
You know, I figured that the one last week was the last one. I mean, you can't keep having security holes all the time like this, can you? But then this one came out...I'm beginning to think you may be right!
Because they assume we've made our own version and insist that it must be better somehow. Which is a fair assumption -- if our economic philosophy is so good, like we keep telling ourselves, why the fuck can't we make things anymore?
Seriously! I went to see Spider-Man, and I was pretty bored and a little insulted by the whole thing. The whole movie is just so "gee-whiz" I wanted to vomit.
If it's better than Attack of the Clones, as most people are saying, I don't think I'll even RENT Attack of the Clones.
Flamebait???!!! Mod up!
God is not scientific. Any entity that:
1. Cannot be defined,
2. Has contradictory characteristics,
3. Is not supported by evidence,
certainly does not deserve to be acknowledged by a scientist. The scientist is far more likely to be real. Science does not acknowledge the existence of a supernatural "creator" -- or that anything was "created" at all -- and therefore does not need to limit its research accordingly.
I've made several comments of this sort on/. and I keep getting modded into oblivion. Come on everyone, it's not like we have some kind of atheist-troll pact here (although that sounds like fun). A lot of scientists and scholars are atheists and they deserve respect.
Someone has finally figured out that what MS is trying to do with the XB is already being done better on PCs. PCs are amazing in their ability to add new technical dimensions to games, but when people load up a console, they are not looking for that. They want to pop in the disk and go.
If you want to understand why old console systems are still so popular, that's why. It's more than just nostalgia for old tech -- it's nostalgia for a time when consoles were what they were supposed to be.
It's fine if software prices increase because of theft. That will never affect me, because I will never pay for software at any cost. I have not paid for software in 5 years, and music in 2 years. Call me a jerk, call me a bad guy, but calling me names does not make me more inclined to pay the Stupid People Tax. Your outrage does not make me more accountable, so fling your monkey bone to the sky but don't beat me with it -- I ain't paying.
Of course all this is rather pointless sophistry, because GOD IS JUST IMAGINARY.
Gould, while a luminary in the world of knowledge, has not gone anywhere. He's just dead. We'll miss him, and we needed him now more than ever, but that's it.
Re:RCN was like this..
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
I can completely verify these experiences with RCN. RCN has, hands-down, the worst billing department in the world. It sometimes takes over 2 weeks for them to process a regular, timely payment; they start calling and complaining that your payment is late when really they are sitting on it. Everyone in Chicago who has ever used them for cable, phone or internet has the same experience: billing hell.
I'll second that. I don't know how many times rightclick-dragdown-release has saved my butt, but Opera smokes all comers.
My girlfriend is afraid of the interface, and I guess I was too, when I first downloaded v.5.whatever. Once I realized how easily you could customize it, tho, I loved it. F12!
P.S. Use the real Opera interface -- don't cheat and use the IE-emulation mode. Everything about IE is as fucked up as a football bat, interface included.
Listen up, people. We Americans are funny. The only reason we get along with one another at all is because we are too dumb to understand what everyone else is thinking and saying.
We are all so certain that our neighbors are decent people, but we are not at all possessed of the necessary intellectual curiosity to investigate what the hell it is, exactly, that our neighbors stand for. And even if we did know what it is that our fellow Americans stood for, we'd be far too ignorant about how logic works and just plain too gutless to follow these facts through to their natural conclusions.
We Americans prefer comfort far more than intellectual honesty. We dread the idea of confrontation so much that we don't have the balls to draw the line, even when there is no other real choice!
And so the Internet forces you to come face to face with other people's real beliefs, with the personal facade removed, and everyone is so astonished at what they find: there are all kinds of people out there, really!
What a bunch of dysfunctional pansies we've become. All the Internet is doing is forcing us to do things we should have been doing already: argue! Fucking ARGUE! What is wrong with that? Buck up, you fucking nerds. A little hostility isn't gonna kill you.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the deal is that A. they feel they have the right to copyright whatever they want (as I religious institution, I have my doubts about that) but also B. their beliefs are that if you hear the "higher level" teachings before you are ready, you will become sick and die. That's why it's always important to let a low-level Scientology "preclear" know that your consciousness is made up of many spirits called "thetans" from outer space who were banished to this planet billions of years ago by the evil galactic overlord Xenu. Then ask them if they are feeling well.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Be was the best-engineered desktop OS out there. It's main failure was that while it was beautifully engineered, it needed a lot more software. This is a problem that opening it up could solve. New development environments and tools will make it a joy to work with.
I still love Linux because it is my favorite *NIX, and I think it's irresponsible to use anything but *NIX on a server.
When OpenBeOS is ready to go, it will be one hell of an OS. I wonder if it can count on the support of the *NIX snobs? Maybe Be's dream-deferred might actually be supported by the geek community: "UNIX on the server, Be on the desktop!"
The Jews have been persecuted, but not because God promised it. The Jews have been attacked throughout history for a number of reasons, only a few of which are their own fault.
But this does not answer my comment anyway, does it? "Keeps his promises" is not a valid characteristic. It tells me nothing about the entity who makes those promises. But which promise are we talking about here? The promise to make us His people? Or the promise that we will be persecuted?
The Jews were not saved by a supernatural daddy in the sky. The Jews saved themselves, because we have an amazing capacity for perserverence. We worked harder than everyone else because we wanted to have the chances we deserved. To attribute that to God is to desecrate the memory of your ancestors, frummy. They suffered and worked so that you could be here blithely and ignorantly pissing on their efforts. Let's give the Jews themselves a little credit in that area.
But let's also not pretend that the persecution the Jews suffered was in no way their own responsibility. The Jews insisted on living with Christians. The Jews insisted that Christians live in a way that they abhorred: being respectful of other religions. And the Jews sacrificed many generations on the altar of monetary comfort. So let's lay to rest this horrible culture of victimhood and self-pity that has fueled the current situation in Israel.
Any god that makes a covenant with a nation, just to keep them in terror, so that they can in turn inflict terror on others, I can do without. If the Jews were smart they'd sue God for Breach Of Bris.
2. There IS NO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS. The writings of Christian theologians are not acceptable because of the conflict of interest, we need secular evidence as well. However, the only evidence Christians have provided is the writings of the secular historian Josephus -- and the parts of Josephus' writings which directly refer to Jesus or Christianity were discovered to be forgeries committed by theologians. Pick up a modern translation of Josephus from a secular source...it does not contain that passage anymore because scholars agree on its fraudulent nature. Other than that there is nothing.
3. There are all kinds of philosophies that do not depend on God for morality or ethics. Don't believe me? Read from the following authors:
David Hume
Frederich Nietsche
Immanuel Kant
Baruch Spinoza
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Mark Twain
Ayn Rand
Robert Pirsig
It's pretty clear that the existence of a supernatural entity which rewards or punishes people cannot be the basis for morality, actually. That's just coersion. Morality is when you do good because there's a logical reason for it, not because you've been threatened.
4. There is a terrific website at this location that can address your questions and concerns about freedom from religion. While you're at it, I suggest you check out this one as well. May prove to be informative.
I am a Jew who is also an atheist. Yes, you can be both. A skinhead would still kick my ass no matter what I believe or don't believe, so a Jew I remain. Anyway, the real problem here is that while everyone seems to be postulating the existence of the god they happen to have been taught about since childhood, no one has cared to give any definitions, characteristics, or dimensions of their god. It sure would help to prove his existence, wouldn't it? But they never will, and here's why: they insist that God is infinite. Anything that is infinite, and borderless, is unmeasurable, and therefore indefinable. Characteristics are, by definition, statistics regarding the borders of a thing: it starts here, and ends there. Characteristics describe limitations. If God has no limitations, he has no characteristics. As a thing that has no meaningful characteristics, I reject it without a second thought.
You have a serious misunderstanding of Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor does not state that the simplest explanation should be adopted. The principle of Occam's Razor, to quote Occam directly: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." There is no need to indroduce God into an equation because science explains it very well without him. Scientific evidence indicates not only is there no "creator," there was no need for anything to be "created" at all. So there is no need for God. That's what Occam's Razor says.
Sorry, a matter of semantics...You are correct, it is better to describe it as "shouldn't" rather than "can't." Inbreeding is successful quite regularly, it's just that among individuals of similar genetics, it dramatically increases the chance of genetic defects. Say you are a carrier of the recessive gene that causes Crohn's disease; it's a strong possibility that your sister does as well, having inherited that gene from the same people. And if you and your sister have children, the chance of each of your children developing Crohn's disease has just increased to 25% from the usual less-than-1% they'd otherwise have.
In addition to that, I should have also more explicitly explained that too little genetic variation makes us more vulnerable to infectious agents that depend on our genetics.
For example: at some point along this path, a catastrophic disease that might have wiped out 10% of the world's population will be successful at wiping out 40% of it, because so many more people have the same genetic vulnerabilities. I am not merely bluffing about this, it is a statistical inevitability.
Thanks for clarifying.
This is such a terrible solution to the crime problem and I can't believe that anyone knowledgeable about biology would ever discuss it without severe prejudice...
Biology does not make people into criminals, for the most part. It's criminal law that does that. But that's not my main objection, and I don't care to argue the merits of it -- my main objection is that the human gene pool is dangerously homogeneous already, and we should not, at this point, be going out of our way to make it more so.
Human beings have, since distant prehistory, slaughtered many millions of minority ethnic groups. "Parallax" does not shrink from that fact. What we are not acknowledging, however, is that their genes are gone forever. By committing so many atrocities, we have made ourselves incredibly (and nearly irreverseably) vulnerable to diseases that depend on common genetics. By killing people with different genetics, it leaves only those with similar genetics to reproduce with each other. It makes each of us genetic siblings, to a degree...and I shouldn't have to tell you why siblings can't reproduce...
You know, I figured that the one last week was the last one. I mean, you can't keep having security holes all the time like this, can you? But then this one came out...I'm beginning to think you may be right!
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=33473&cid=3618 667
Because they assume we've made our own version and insist that it must be better somehow. Which is a fair assumption -- if our economic philosophy is so good, like we keep telling ourselves, why the fuck can't we make things anymore?
You and I, my friend, are united by a common love of a very unique and special type of pr0n. I salute you, comrade!
Sounds like those "intelligent people with college degrees" are not intelligent enough to know that they need a union.
LOL...By the time this game arrives, I'm sure our grandkids will be overjoyed. Or is that more Romero's thing?
Seriously! I went to see Spider-Man, and I was pretty bored and a little insulted by the whole thing. The whole movie is just so "gee-whiz" I wanted to vomit.
If it's better than Attack of the Clones, as most people are saying, I don't think I'll even RENT Attack of the Clones.
Flamebait???!!! Mod up! God is not scientific. Any entity that: 1. Cannot be defined, 2. Has contradictory characteristics, 3. Is not supported by evidence, certainly does not deserve to be acknowledged by a scientist. The scientist is far more likely to be real. Science does not acknowledge the existence of a supernatural "creator" -- or that anything was "created" at all -- and therefore does not need to limit its research accordingly. I've made several comments of this sort on /. and I keep getting modded into oblivion. Come on everyone, it's not like we have some kind of atheist-troll pact here (although that sounds like fun). A lot of scientists and scholars are atheists and they deserve respect.
"The enemy's gate is down"?
Mod up, please.
Someone has finally figured out that what MS is trying to do with the XB is already being done better on PCs. PCs are amazing in their ability to add new technical dimensions to games, but when people load up a console, they are not looking for that. They want to pop in the disk and go.
If you want to understand why old console systems are still so popular, that's why. It's more than just nostalgia for old tech -- it's nostalgia for a time when consoles were what they were supposed to be.
It's fine if software prices increase because of theft. That will never affect me, because I will never pay for software at any cost. I have not paid for software in 5 years, and music in 2 years. Call me a jerk, call me a bad guy, but calling me names does not make me more inclined to pay the Stupid People Tax. Your outrage does not make me more accountable, so fling your monkey bone to the sky but don't beat me with it -- I ain't paying.
Of course all this is rather pointless sophistry, because GOD IS JUST IMAGINARY. Gould, while a luminary in the world of knowledge, has not gone anywhere. He's just dead. We'll miss him, and we needed him now more than ever, but that's it.
I can completely verify these experiences with RCN. RCN has, hands-down, the worst billing department in the world. It sometimes takes over 2 weeks for them to process a regular, timely payment; they start calling and complaining that your payment is late when really they are sitting on it. Everyone in Chicago who has ever used them for cable, phone or internet has the same experience: billing hell.
I'll second that. I don't know how many times rightclick-dragdown-release has saved my butt, but Opera smokes all comers. My girlfriend is afraid of the interface, and I guess I was too, when I first downloaded v.5.whatever. Once I realized how easily you could customize it, tho, I loved it. F12! P.S. Use the real Opera interface -- don't cheat and use the IE-emulation mode. Everything about IE is as fucked up as a football bat, interface included.
Listen up, people. We Americans are funny. The only reason we get along with one another at all is because we are too dumb to understand what everyone else is thinking and saying. We are all so certain that our neighbors are decent people, but we are not at all possessed of the necessary intellectual curiosity to investigate what the hell it is, exactly, that our neighbors stand for. And even if we did know what it is that our fellow Americans stood for, we'd be far too ignorant about how logic works and just plain too gutless to follow these facts through to their natural conclusions. We Americans prefer comfort far more than intellectual honesty. We dread the idea of confrontation so much that we don't have the balls to draw the line, even when there is no other real choice! And so the Internet forces you to come face to face with other people's real beliefs, with the personal facade removed, and everyone is so astonished at what they find: there are all kinds of people out there, really! What a bunch of dysfunctional pansies we've become. All the Internet is doing is forcing us to do things we should have been doing already: argue! Fucking ARGUE! What is wrong with that? Buck up, you fucking nerds. A little hostility isn't gonna kill you.