An ad hominem attack without a source. What a wonderfully high level of argument!
Incidentally, paedophilia is sexual attraction of an adult to pre-pubescent children, not what adolescents do among themselves. Not that you have a scrap of evidence he did either.
only "evidence" we have is testimony, which is often thousands of years old, and distorted etc. Certainly some of the testimony is thousands of years old - it comes from all periods of history. Some is modern. You can find millions of people who will claim a direct experience of God. It is just a matter of credible you think they are.
One of the key influences that made me think more logically, and sceptically, was reading CS Lewis (mostly his religious non-fiction, although there are relevant bits in books such as The Screwtape letters. So that is one of my answers to the question. Reading real theology or philosophy would be even better. Descartes is a good start.
Chesterton also wrote something religion preventing superstition - I think in one of the Father Brown stories, but I am not sure.
Critical thinking should usually be absolutely vital to religion. Belief is a pre-requisite of faith (no, they are not the same thing, although the latter implies the former). It is dishonest not to apply your intellect to belief, and if a God exists who is anything like theists conceive, he could not be pleased by dishonesty.
Partly as a result of thinking this way, I have gone from Christian to agnostic and back to Christian. My political opinions have also changed quite radically.
You mean those USB tape drives we've all been hearing so much about?
I mean USB hard drives. You may not have heard of them, but they exist. I use one.
You evidently did not RTFA. The first sentence is:
Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.
The summary does not use the word flash, at all.
I was not saying "RTFA", I was saying:
1) Your assumption is correct
2) The summary should have made it clear so you did not need to make an assumption.
I assume the idiot who modded my comment flamebait also misread it the same way you did. Did you bother reading my comment and the parent properly before replying?
If people want to voluntarily burn their own property - more power to them. Where I live we call that freedom of speach. Exactly the point that most people seem to be missing.
Farenheit 451 (and real oppressive governments): the government seizes and burns books from people.
What is being proposed here: people voluntarily burn their own property as a symbolic gesture.
Being unable to see the difference is plains stupid.
There are plenty of Farenheit 451 situations around: The British law banning possession of certain books (with a very vague definition of what is banned) is a good example. This is not.
Slow, expensive, view of very little other than the ocean.
Have you done this? I imagine most of the long haul flights I have done (e.g. London- Colombo (Sri Lanka), Colombo - Sydney) would take a while this way....
I have used trains to travel within Europe, and ferries between the UK and France, but avoiding flying for long journeys seems to imply having a lot of money and a lot of leisure.
Every time I go to a supermarket they seem to be handing out free samples of something. Does he think that should be illegal? If he has taken an economics course and managed to understand it (although that sounds unlikely), you could have pointed out that the marginal cost of production of a downloaded copy of Linux is much less than that of a free sample of any physical product.
I wonder if he thinks that free websites and web services should be illegal as well? Should Internet Explorer be banned because it lost Netscape a lot of money?
Did you ever mange to explain to him that there is actually a sound business model behind Red Hat?
The question was posed by an anarcho-capitalist who can therefore be expected to oppose any form of state control. You are defending the idea of copyright on the (accurate) basis that it is a state-mandated temporary monopoly for the public good.
I agree with you, but the problem is that it appears impossible to persuade governments to legislate to provide copyright and patent laws that are anything like what would be optimal for society as a whole.
Most things that desktop users does work out of the box with Linu. The only common problem is with wireless networking: if you buy a PC with Linux pre-installed (from Sytem76 for example), even that will not be a problem.
How easy is it to get MacOS working on random PC hardware? Compare like with like and Linux looks pretty good.
The cost of imprisonment will be greatly reduced as there is no need to go to court. The police in the UK can now imprison you for a month without trial.
Microsoft also has a search engine, although I'm pretty sure I've never used it, and can't recall anybody else using it either. People use it because it is the default search engine for IE: they tend to be the sort of people who do not know what a search engine is, they will tell you that to search "I just type it into the internet"
Google's office suite is severely limited compared to MS Office. I don't understand why MS would be so afraid of Google. For most people Google's suite does what they need. I know plenty of people who only use a word processor to write letters, and a spreadsheet to format tables. Google's spreadsheet has some nice touches, like being able to incorporate live securities prices.
It is not proven (IMHO not even that likely) that Google simply gives extra authority/link juice to.edu domains. What is probably happening is that a lot of.edu sites have characteristics, that Google likes - i.e. lots of content and lots of incoming links.
I find myself link to.edu and.ac.uk sites a lot because that is where I find primary sources and otherwise authoritative sources. I doubt I would ever link to this particular.edu.
I doubt the fake edu domain in question will do any better with Google than any other search engine spammer site. The main effect is that some people who thoroughly deserve it are going to waste money.
I suppose, in some sense, that it's like telling her that her religion is wrong.
What is wrong with telling someone their religion was wrong? If I got upset every time someone said my religion was wrong, I would have to stop taking part in discussions on Slashdot.
It is easy to understand why people get so emotional about this, but, by refusing to face facts, they do real harm to themselves and others. They dissuade people from giving their children vaccines, they waste time in court, the cause themselves distress...
Regardless of platform, most users
1) Run as root, administrator, or some other super-trusted user account I have never come across a Linux user doing this. I thought Macs (and some Linux distros) did not even have root accounts and come pretty close to working the way you suggest.
Where you have entire IT departments which are used to doing 90% of their work (desktop AND server) on Microsoft products, the effort and expense of suddenly discovering that Microsoft products are now verboten for new systems would be rather more than most could realistically bear. At least they would learn to to avoid lock-in to any one vendor in future.
not replacing one heterogeny (Windows) with another (Unix, albeit in a number of guises) ... because "Unix" is controlled by a single vendor and locks users in too strongly to allow them to switch?
As such, the principle of Occam's razor - do not make theories more complicated than necessary - eliminates the existence of a God Occam apparently did not think so, he was a Franciscan Friar!
On the other, if you lower your standards of evidence to accept one religious claim, you have to accept them all (or else be hypocritical about it).
You are making an implicit assumption that all religions have an equal amount of (or lack of) supporting evidence.
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true.
Slashdot Mirror
An ad hominem attack without a source. What a wonderfully high level of argument!
Incidentally, paedophilia is sexual attraction of an adult to pre-pubescent children, not what adolescents do among themselves. Not that you have a scrap of evidence he did either.
One of the key influences that made me think more logically, and sceptically, was reading CS Lewis (mostly his religious non-fiction, although there are relevant bits in books such as The Screwtape letters. So that is one of my answers to the question. Reading real theology or philosophy would be even better. Descartes is a good start.
Chesterton also wrote something religion preventing superstition - I think in one of the Father Brown stories, but I am not sure.
Critical thinking should usually be absolutely vital to religion. Belief is a pre-requisite of faith (no, they are not the same thing, although the latter implies the former). It is dishonest not to apply your intellect to belief, and if a God exists who is anything like theists conceive, he could not be pleased by dishonesty.
Partly as a result of thinking this way, I have gone from Christian to agnostic and back to Christian. My political opinions have also changed quite radically.
I mean USB hard drives. You may not have heard of them, but they exist. I use one.
You evidently did not RTFA. The first sentence is:
Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same.The summary does not use the word flash, at all.
I was not saying "RTFA", I was saying: 1) Your assumption is correct
2) The summary should have made it clear so you did not need to make an assumption.
I assume the idiot who modded my comment flamebait also misread it the same way you did. Did you bother reading my comment and the parent properly before replying?
One would have thought that the editors of a technology website would know that a USB drive is not necessarily flash - oops, sorry this is Slashdot.
Most non-tech people have never heard of Linux
Those that have think it is developed by hobbyists
Being unable to see the difference is plains stupid.
There are plenty of Farenheit 451 situations around: The British law banning possession of certain books (with a very vague definition of what is banned) is a good example. This is not.
Have you done this? I imagine most of the long haul flights I have done (e.g. London- Colombo (Sri Lanka), Colombo - Sydney) would take a while this way....
I have used trains to travel within Europe, and ferries between the UK and France, but avoiding flying for long journeys seems to imply having a lot of money and a lot of leisure.
What if you need to go further than that - outside the country?
Every time I go to a supermarket they seem to be handing out free samples of something. Does he think that should be illegal? If he has taken an economics course and managed to understand it (although that sounds unlikely), you could have pointed out that the marginal cost of production of a downloaded copy of Linux is much less than that of a free sample of any physical product. I wonder if he thinks that free websites and web services should be illegal as well? Should Internet Explorer be banned because it lost Netscape a lot of money? Did you ever mange to explain to him that there is actually a sound business model behind Red Hat?
....it might change things. Legislators in the US and EU, for example.
I agree with you, but the problem is that it appears impossible to persuade governments to legislate to provide copyright and patent laws that are anything like what would be optimal for society as a whole.
To compare like with like you need to compare GDP to value added or profit.
The problem with the power corporations have is not how much any one corporation controls directly. It is:
1) The power a corporation has within its own industry (e.g. MS)
2) The political influence they can buy
It is also the most fakeable part of the commerce. If all you need to prove guilt is a file on a computer, then it is VERY easy to frame someone.
Your grandma uses RAID?
Most things that desktop users does work out of the box with Linu. The only common problem is with wireless networking: if you buy a PC with Linux pre-installed (from Sytem76 for example), even that will not be a problem.
How easy is it to get MacOS working on random PC hardware? Compare like with like and Linux looks pretty good.
What do you mean its not terrorism? The law says it is.
The cost of imprisonment will be greatly reduced as there is no need to go to court. The police in the UK can now imprison you for a month without trial.
The problem is that trademarks have become a form of property, rather than a mechanism to avoid misleading consumers.
There is a market for directly sold consumer desktops (Mepis seems to survive), but it is too small for RH and Canonical to bother with.
The money is in selling to businesses, or selling to PC manufacturers - and MS has the latter sewn up.
I find myself link to .edu and .ac.uk sites a lot because that is where I find primary sources and otherwise authoritative sources. I doubt I would ever link to this particular .edu.
I doubt the fake edu domain in question will do any better with Google than any other search engine spammer site. The main effect is that some people who thoroughly deserve it are going to waste money.
What is wrong with telling someone their religion was wrong? If I got upset every time someone said my religion was wrong, I would have to stop taking part in discussions on Slashdot.
It is easy to understand why people get so emotional about this, but, by refusing to face facts, they do real harm to themselves and others. They dissuade people from giving their children vaccines, they waste time in court, the cause themselves distress...
You are making an implicit assumption that all religions have an equal amount of (or lack of) supporting evidence.
What about people who believe that there is more supporting evidence (usually strong supporting evidence) for particular beliefs? That is the usual case for people who do believe a religion to be true.