No one says they're an agnostic with respect to unicorns. They just say "Unicorns aren't real." Only when it comes to this "God" concept, does everyone become such a pedant. The problem with this analogy is that I have never heard of any reliable witnesses who say they have seen a unicorn.
On the other hand there are many people who claim to have experienced God, in many different times and cultures, some have written about their experiences, some are happy to talk about what they experienced. etc. Many of these people are reliable witnesses (e.g. you would probably quite happily accept their evidence in court), who are sceptical about evidence in many areas, and who have put a great deal of thought into whether their experiences were genuine of delusional.
For one thing Dawkins claims that all religion is fundamentally evil. That is simply silly, and arises from his failures to understand why people believe what they do. A lot of his attacks, like the supposed need to explain who made God also fail to understand beliefs about the nature of God and eternity.
You quote only one dictionary.com definition. The others are very different. It makes it very clear which is the relevant one here: "8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.", this is very close to "1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability." and obviously implies "3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.".
The definition of faith is not wrong, but there are several and it is important to pick the right one.
He was rejected because he stated that he would be compelled to force his religiously based views on others Quite the opposite. He said his views were at matter of personal conscience and said:
The state has no right to stick its nose into these things and nobody can be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation... this stands in the Charter of Human Rights, this stands in the Constitution and I have pledged to defend this constitution The very fact that the press coverage leaves you with the recollection it has, may be evidence of the bias I claimed (either in you or the coverage you read).
as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists. That may be true in the US, but Dawkins is British. As in much of the rest of Europe, it is religious beliefs that are stigmatised. Why do you think British politicians do not discuss any faith they have until after they have retired? Do you know about man who was not made an EU commissioner because he was a Catholic?
I do think Dawkins does do one thing that is harmful: he attacks theism without understanding it. He makes the common mistakes atheists make that faith is synonymous with belief and that that belief an arbitrary, unreasoned choice.
Many Slashdot posters do something else that is both harmful and dishonest: associating atheism with evolution. The vast majority of Christians (and most people I meet of other religions) accept the theory of evolution as well proven.
In fact, creationism is more of an characteristically American belief than a Christian one: every Christian creationist I have ever come across is either American or belongs to a heavily American influenced evangelical church. The other major stronghold of creationism is in the Middle East, where Islamic fundamentalists have a very similar mindset to Christian ones (or intolerant groups of any religion, or none, in general).
I actually quite liked Quicksilver - no sign of Rushdie-itis at all.
This books does seem to draw on history. My immediate reaction was that he is basing this on monsataries in Europe during the dark ages, like Canticle for Leibowitz. I then read the article and found it said exactly the same.
The main difference seems to be that he seems to have removed the religious element: either to make it less obviously based on history, or to cater to people (like the typical slashdotter) who hate it.
I would gladly migrate the entire enterprise over to Free (either speech or beer) software tomorrow for every single business need - it would eliminate that worry at a stroke - but this is the real world and half-decent Free accounting and payroll applications are pretty thin on the ground.
Why not use free where you can and will in the gaps with proprietary software? If you can have a free OS on desktops then you are likely to have a lower risk of having infringing software installed and tracking a smaller number of licences should be easier.
Using thin clients would give you even better control. I know Linux thin clients can work very well and if I ever have to set up things for a small business again, it would be the way I do things.
Get rid of the TV. We do not have one and my five year old daughter is virtually immune to that kind of marketing. Her associations for the Disney brand seem to mildly negative.
What she does no is play with Meccano and Lego, read, play board games, listen to CDs (sometimes reading along with it) and listen to stories on her computer (including podcasts).
How much of that would she do if she had easy entertainment available? yes you can limit time spent on TV and its effects, but why set yourself up for a struggle.
The US used to be the land of competition - which is why it became so economically successful.
Things have changed: they broke up Standard Oil and AT & T, but they have not broken up Microsoft, and current regulation of telecoms is pretty poor.
It is not just a US problem either. "Business friendly" governments and regulators all over the world are prepared to accept fairly weak arguments for tolerating monopolies, and seem to be quite happy to regard oligopoly as an adequate level of competition.
I agree with 1). It is not a problem for me because I do not do many charts, but if you do do a lot of charts it I can see it would get irritating.
2) You can turn off Java. There are also some other optimisations you can do.
3) You could use IBM's Lotus Symphony. The next version (currently in beta), is a tailored version of OO with a very nice, very modern looking UI. The problem is that it uses Java heavily and is even more bloated and sluggish than the usual version of Open Office.
You might also look at Gnumeric for spreadsheets. I find OO Writer works fine, although I prefer Lyx.
But believers in astrology would claim that there is large amounts of anecdotal evidence from people who say it worked, or even personal experience that it worked for them! I don't see how this is different to religious or any other kind of supernatural belief.
Evidence for astrology should be statistically significant so anecdotal evidence is not good enough. Evidence for the existence of something is rather different: it depends on the credibility of the witnesses. Consider deciding whether a person exists or not: if a few people say they have met him, you would probably be convinced of his existence.
Clearly there haven't been millions or billions of eye witnesses for seeing God - perhaps you mean billions of people who say they've experience God, but the same goes for astrology and so on too.
Obviously God is not visible, so I use eye-witness loosely - in the same way that you might call someone hearing or feeling soemthing eye-witness evidence.
How can you experience astrology? I cannot imagine someone saying that they saw or felt astrology...
The only sensible alternative is for businesses to opt in to voluntary schemes
The best alternative is for the people affected to sue. If a restaurant gives enough people food poisoning they will be sued into bankruptcy.
Licensing also causes other problems. Until very recently new pubs were refused licenses if the licensing authorities decided there were enough pubs in the area: reducing competition and preventing many who might have run a better pub from putting the existing ones out of business.
The restaurant rules are just silly: attend a course on food hygiene before you are allowed to make a sandwich!
I knew someone would come up with this fatuous argument. You evidently cannot distinguish between.
1) believing in something on the basis of no significant evidence (astrology), 2) believing in something on the basis of tens of millions or even billions of "eye witnesses" including a significant number who are credible (a common case for belief in theistic religions) 3) believing in something you have experienced yourself (another common case for believing in theistic religions.
The difference is why the groups of people who believe in astrology and in God are so intellectually different.
Incidentally, given the reliance of the major religions on written scriptures (many of them pretty good works of literature), suggesting the slur of illiteracy is ludicrous.
My answer to the original question is that no-one sensible should date someone who believes in astrology. Apart from the fact that they are obviously bad at thinking clearly, many people screw up their lives by making decisions based on astrology. Get involved with one and you will be under a lot of pressure to go along with unpredictable and arbitrary decisions.
Last time I looked the catholic church didn't take votes on This Years Beliefs. What the pope says goes and all the religious sheep believe whatever he says.
Its not quite so simple: the Pope cannot stop people from disagreeing with him. Almost every Catholic probably disagrees with him on some point, and most people I know disagree on some point of significance (for example, priests who are in favour of ordaining women).
Furthermore, the most significant decisions on doctrine are taken by councils of the church (the last was the 2nd Vatican Council). You can find plenty of people who disagree with these as well.
The church's attitude to this is not as negative as you might imagine: Cardinal Newman (a significant influence on the modern church) wrote an entire book on the importance of the laity's role in developing doctrine.
I am fairly sure the term "Vole" for MS did not originate with free software advocates, but on a IT news site, most of whose journalists are Windows users.
It may sem a triviality, but the point is that a lot of Windows users dislike MS too, they just do not know enough about alternatives to jump ship: they have lots of misconceptions about it and think it is only for Unix geeks.
Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The effects of strengthening patent rights on firms engaged in cumulative innovation: insights from the semiconductor industry.
Home and small business users use Windows because they do not know of an alternative (except possible Mac OS), and because most PCs come installed with Windows. Corporate users do so because of FUD, CYA, better marketing, a bigger sales force, and industry vertical apps that run on Windows.
Linux is actually becoming fairly usable for the first time
Which is more than you can say for Windows. Every time I touch a Windows PC I come across some UI horror.
Linux--as a brand--is getting its ass kicked. The same can be said for most "free" products.
Yes, proprietary software has better marketing.
However, the notion that any commercial products are having a hard time "competing with free" is bass ackwards.
Lets see: web servers, mail servers, server OSes (proprietary Unix seems to be slowly disappearing), embedded OSes, scientific publishing (Tex/Latex)...
Even where proprietary software is still leading in market share terms, free software has changed the game and made life a lot harder for proprietary software vendors. Firefox has forced MS to put a lot more money into IE. Email clients have disappeared as a standalone product (when did you last see anyone use a mail client that was not either free or bundled with something else?).
In addition, whole categories of client software are dominated by either free to use ('as in beer') or open source software (torrent clients and other P2P, RSS and podcast clients....).
Intel would make no money if anybody could just copy Intel chips.
The only academic research I know of that has been done into this came to the conclusion that patents made little difference to semiconductor R & D: the main incentive was to get products out before the competition.
Like a lot of pro-patent arguments, your turns out to be an unfounded assertion.
Where are the linux billionaires?
That is a red herring. It does not matter how much money people make, as long as the products are developed. The existence of Linux rebuts your argument. S
AS and SPSS are the industry standards for statistical computing, and they are proprietary, intellectually protected, for-profit firms.
Apache is the industry standard webserver and is open source, Linux is as close as anything to being the industry standard server OS and it is open source. Tex/Latex is the standard for publishing the results of mathematical work and is open source. What is your point? At the very most you might have some evidence that proprietary software might be needed in some specialist niches.
My five year old daughter has been using a simple password for over two years now. She also knows my father's root password (which is not so simple) because he told it to me (because I needed root to install or configure something for him) in front of her and she promptly memorised it.
As for locking parents out of a child's computer. Sorry, that is not going to work. The only question is whether they go for "tell me the password now or the PC gets confiscated" or just boot into a lower run level and change it.
The problem with your argument is that the device attacks innocent and guilty alike. Can you not see that there is something wrong with attacking everyone below a certain age?
Defending yourself is not the same as attacking every possible attacker.
You sneer at the idea that just blaming the children is wrong. I suppose you think that kids now are naturally evil, not like when you were a kid when they were all naturally good.
To suggest England is dystopian is ludicrous. Violent crime rates are very low. Compare the murder rate in the UK (300 a year with a population of 60m) with the US (about 16,000 a year with a population of 300m).
Yes, bad bits of Britain are unpleasant - I have lived in Salford btw - but the crime is mostly low level (vandalism, car theft) and localised into certain really bad areas that are not represent the country as a whole.
The biggest problem Britain has is the heavy had the authorities get to deal with the mythical high crime rate and near mythical terrorist threat, thanks to right wing nutters like you. Look at some facts and wake up.
I do not use Adblock, but I find Noscript blocks the intrusvie ads anyway. Most people use neither and carry on watching the ads.
I do not watch TV either, but we are in a tiny minority.
Adblock also only works effectively because there has been very little effort to stop it working, if more people used it there woudl be more done to stop it being effective: embedding ads within the content server-side, making slight changes to markup, etc.
Finally, I really do hope that ads do keep being effective, because if they disappear, they are likely to be replaced by advertorials, which I really loathe.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand there are many people who claim to have experienced God, in many different times and cultures, some have written about their experiences, some are happy to talk about what they experienced. etc. Many of these people are reliable witnesses (e.g. you would probably quite happily accept their evidence in court), who are sceptical about evidence in many areas, and who have put a great deal of thought into whether their experiences were genuine of delusional.
You quote only one dictionary.com definition. The others are very different. It makes it very clear which is the relevant one here: "8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.", this is very close to "1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability." and obviously implies "3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.".
The definition of faith is not wrong, but there are several and it is important to pick the right one.
I do think Dawkins does do one thing that is harmful: he attacks theism without understanding it. He makes the common mistakes atheists make that faith is synonymous with belief and that that belief an arbitrary, unreasoned choice.
Many Slashdot posters do something else that is both harmful and dishonest: associating atheism with evolution. The vast majority of Christians (and most people I meet of other religions) accept the theory of evolution as well proven.
In fact, creationism is more of an characteristically American belief than a Christian one: every Christian creationist I have ever come across is either American or belongs to a heavily American influenced evangelical church. The other major stronghold of creationism is in the Middle East, where Islamic fundamentalists have a very similar mindset to Christian ones (or intolerant groups of any religion, or none, in general).
Many people say exactly the same thing about Windows vs Linux....
In fact you could say it about any piece of software: many KDE users would say the same about Gnome.
I find Gnome does not work well for me (I try it every year of so), so the choice is good for me, though it may not be good for you.
Search Flickr or Google for screenshots from last year "Slashdot OMG Ponies"
I actually quite liked Quicksilver - no sign of Rushdie-itis at all.
This books does seem to draw on history. My immediate reaction was that he is basing this on monsataries in Europe during the dark ages, like Canticle for Leibowitz. I then read the article and found it said exactly the same.
The main difference seems to be that he seems to have removed the religious element: either to make it less obviously based on history, or to cater to people (like the typical slashdotter) who hate it.
Why not use free where you can and will in the gaps with proprietary software? If you can have a free OS on desktops then you are likely to have a lower risk of having infringing software installed and tracking a smaller number of licences should be easier.
Using thin clients would give you even better control. I know Linux thin clients can work very well and if I ever have to set up things for a small business again, it would be the way I do things.
Get rid of the TV. We do not have one and my five year old daughter is virtually immune to that kind of marketing. Her associations for the Disney brand seem to mildly negative.
What she does no is play with Meccano and Lego, read, play board games, listen to CDs (sometimes reading along with it) and listen to stories on her computer (including podcasts).
How much of that would she do if she had easy entertainment available? yes you can limit time spent on TV and its effects, but why set yourself up for a struggle.
Things have changed: they broke up Standard Oil and AT & T, but they have not broken up Microsoft, and current regulation of telecoms is pretty poor.
It is not just a US problem either. "Business friendly" governments and regulators all over the world are prepared to accept fairly weak arguments for tolerating monopolies, and seem to be quite happy to regard oligopoly as an adequate level of competition.
I agree with 1). It is not a problem for me because I do not do many charts, but if you do do a lot of charts it I can see it would get irritating.
2) You can turn off Java. There are also some other optimisations you can do.
3) You could use IBM's Lotus Symphony. The next version (currently in beta), is a tailored version of OO with a very nice, very modern looking UI. The problem is that it uses Java heavily and is even more bloated and sluggish than the usual version of Open Office.
You might also look at Gnumeric for spreadsheets. I find OO Writer works fine, although I prefer Lyx.
How can you experience astrology? I cannot imagine someone saying that they saw or felt astrology...
If they were gamers they could not be using Linux in the first place. Gamers either do not use Linux or are happy to dual boot.
The best alternative is for the people affected to sue. If a restaurant gives enough people food poisoning they will be sued into bankruptcy.
Licensing also causes other problems. Until very recently new pubs were refused licenses if the licensing authorities decided there were enough pubs in the area: reducing competition and preventing many who might have run a better pub from putting the existing ones out of business.
The restaurant rules are just silly: attend a course on food hygiene before you are allowed to make a sandwich!
Licensing does work fairly well for taxis.
I knew someone would come up with this fatuous argument. You evidently cannot distinguish between.
1) believing in something on the basis of no significant evidence (astrology),
2) believing in something on the basis of tens of millions or even billions of "eye witnesses" including a significant number who are credible (a common case for belief in theistic religions)
3) believing in something you have experienced yourself (another common case for believing in theistic religions.
The difference is why the groups of people who believe in astrology and in God are so intellectually different.
Incidentally, given the reliance of the major religions on written scriptures (many of them pretty good works of literature), suggesting the slur of illiteracy is ludicrous.
My answer to the original question is that no-one sensible should date someone who believes in astrology. Apart from the fact that they are obviously bad at thinking clearly, many people screw up their lives by making decisions based on astrology. Get involved with one and you will be under a lot of pressure to go along with unpredictable and arbitrary decisions.
Its not quite so simple: the Pope cannot stop people from disagreeing with him. Almost every Catholic probably disagrees with him on some point, and most people I know disagree on some point of significance (for example, priests who are in favour of ordaining women).
Furthermore, the most significant decisions on doctrine are taken by councils of the church (the last was the 2nd Vatican Council). You can find plenty of people who disagree with these as well.
The church's attitude to this is not as negative as you might imagine: Cardinal Newman (a significant influence on the modern church) wrote an entire book on the importance of the laity's role in developing doctrine.
I am fairly sure the term "Vole" for MS did not originate with free software advocates, but on a IT news site, most of whose journalists are Windows users.
It may sem a triviality, but the point is that a lot of Windows users dislike MS too, they just do not know enough about alternatives to jump ship: they have lots of misconceptions about it and think it is only for Unix geeks.
James Besen and Eric Maskin, Sequential Innovation, patents and imitation. It was on the web some years ago as an MIT working paper.
Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The Patent Paradox Revisited: Determinants of Patenting in the US Semiconductor Industry, 1980-94
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158610
drafts of both that and this:
Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The effects of strengthening patent rights on firms engaged in cumulative innovation: insights from the semiconductor industry.
from here:
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/bhpapers.html
Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)
http://www.nber.org/papers/W7552.pdf
Home and small business users use Windows because they do not know of an alternative (except possible Mac OS), and because most PCs come installed with Windows. Corporate users do so because of FUD, CYA, better marketing, a bigger sales force, and industry vertical apps that run on Windows.
Which is more than you can say for Windows. Every time I touch a Windows PC I come across some UI horror.
Yes, proprietary software has better marketing.
Lets see: web servers, mail servers, server OSes (proprietary Unix seems to be slowly disappearing), embedded OSes, scientific publishing (Tex/Latex)...
Even where proprietary software is still leading in market share terms, free software has changed the game and made life a lot harder for proprietary software vendors. Firefox has forced MS to put a lot more money into IE. Email clients have disappeared as a standalone product (when did you last see anyone use a mail client that was not either free or bundled with something else?).
In addition, whole categories of client software are dominated by either free to use ('as in beer') or open source software (torrent clients and other P2P, RSS and podcast clients....).
The only academic research I know of that has been done into this came to the conclusion that patents made little difference to semiconductor R & D: the main incentive was to get products out before the competition.
Like a lot of pro-patent arguments, your turns out to be an unfounded assertion.
That is a red herring. It does not matter how much money people make, as long as the products are developed. The existence of Linux rebuts your argument.
S
Apache is the industry standard webserver and is open source, Linux is as close as anything to being the industry standard server OS and it is open source. Tex/Latex is the standard for publishing the results of mathematical work and is open source. What is your point? At the very most you might have some evidence that proprietary software might be needed in some specialist niches.
Depends on your point of view. I am pretty sure the Americans were not happy about it when Britain ruled the seas.
My five year old daughter has been using a simple password for over two years now. She also knows my father's root password (which is not so simple) because he told it to me (because I needed root to install or configure something for him) in front of her and she promptly memorised it.
As for locking parents out of a child's computer. Sorry, that is not going to work. The only question is whether they go for "tell me the password now or the PC gets confiscated" or just boot into a lower run level and change it.
The problem with your argument is that the device attacks innocent and guilty alike. Can you not see that there is something wrong with attacking everyone below a certain age?
Defending yourself is not the same as attacking every possible attacker.
You sneer at the idea that just blaming the children is wrong. I suppose you think that kids now are naturally evil, not like when you were a kid when they were all naturally good.
To suggest England is dystopian is ludicrous. Violent crime rates are very low. Compare the murder rate in the UK (300 a year with a population of 60m) with the US (about 16,000 a year with a population of 300m).
Yes, bad bits of Britain are unpleasant - I have lived in Salford btw - but the crime is mostly low level (vandalism, car theft) and localised into certain really bad areas that are not represent the country as a whole.
The biggest problem Britain has is the heavy had the authorities get to deal with the mythical high crime rate and near mythical terrorist threat, thanks to right wing nutters like you. Look at some facts and wake up.
I do not use Adblock, but I find Noscript blocks the intrusvie ads anyway. Most people use neither and carry on watching the ads.
I do not watch TV either, but we are in a tiny minority.
Adblock also only works effectively because there has been very little effort to stop it working, if more people used it there woudl be more done to stop it being effective: embedding ads within the content server-side, making slight changes to markup, etc.
Finally, I really do hope that ads do keep being effective, because if they disappear, they are likely to be replaced by advertorials, which I really loathe.
In what way is Red Hat not FOSS? All the cod in the Red Hat distro - that is why Centos can exist. I think Suse is all FOSS as well.