Yes, doing science or social work is also much more productive than doing religion. (Organized religions occasionally claim that they are doing either, but we know how much they suck in both areas.)
It is not useless, however, to be able to understand what religious people are talking about. We all live on the same planet, and we can all benefit from reconciling our differences in a non-violent manner. Agnosticism, unlike atheism, provides a solid foundation for understanding every religion, no matter how irrational, convoluted or just plain evil. Atheism towards irrational Gods (and these include all of the takes on LORD) is nothing more than posturing.
There is no what? Can you give a logical account of "God"? You cannot: not of the Christian God, it is self-contradictory by design. If you want to hold a consistent view towards the Christian God, you have to say: "This is gibberish", you cannot say "It does not exist", on pain of producing more gibberish.
Greek and Russian Orthodoxies have nearly identical claims to legitimacy, but them and RCC barely intersect geographically, so your comment is still true.
Atheism is not logical. The statement "there is no God" has no clear meaning, but you go out of your way defending it, being driven by little more than emotion. You may be well-justified in hating organized religion, but you shouldn't expect this hatred to provide a foundation for your morals. If you seek consistency in your beliefs, try agnosticism.
Ouch. I am definitely waiting for a few months before upgrading my 3 Karmic systems (2 of them are my girlfriend's). The forth one is my main rig, and I just converted it to Slackware 13. I left Slackware a few years ago for Ubuntu, and now I cannot figure out why the hell did I ever do that. It took me only a few hours to get the system to triple boot (new Slack partition, old Ubuntu one, and the OEM Vista), and to import all of my files, app settings, and scripts (with more or less just cp -r). Hardware worked perfectly out of the box (but so it did with Ubuntu). The hardest part was actually juggling Lilo and Grub together with 3 OSes spread over 2 hard drives.
My point is, after a few minutes with Slack, I cannot imagine going back to Ubuntu with its bloated Gnome and thorny upgrade path, although I still think that in the right context it is an excellent OS. Personally, though, I'll stick with Patrick Volkerding, the demigod of GNU/Linux distros; I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he descended from "Bob" himself.
I would never again gamble online, because there is absolutely no way to tell if
I am being scammed, but I am strongly in favor of legalizing and taxing online gambling,
for one reason:
I would like to judge the measure by consequences. If it is made illegal, people
will still gamble just as much in off-shore casinos. Nothing at all can be achieved here
as far as the human behavior goes. A punishment for a petty crime like that can only be
slight (this is no black-and-white matter, like possession of x gram of marijuana: try
defining "gambling"), and the discovery process needed to convict would have to be
very expensive. This just cannot be effectively enforced. Only positive net changes will
result from legalizing it: people will flock to a few legit online casinos and start loosing
money to the houses and the colluding sharks, whereas now, on top of that, they also
get scammed. There shouldn't be a law whose only purpose is to prevent a fool from parting
with his money, while being told of the risks, but there should be one that helps many of us
to do commerce online without getting the identity stolen. If one's only counter-argument is
that "gambling is immoral", but one cannot point out how legalizing it would lead to negative
consequences for the public, then one needs to re-evaluate his morals.
Part of their success is because of the lock-down.
If you mean that Apple is shrewdly using the lockdown to trap users into a yearly payment program and to spy on them, then yes, I agree completely. If by success you mean, better OS, I disagree. Known hardware and UI consistency have nothing whatsoever to do with this: Apple could make a free OS for their hardware just as well. They could do it tomorrow, they'd just have to live with people removing the parts that phone home.
I have first-hand experience with pretty much every major OS and platform. I grew up playing games on computers you probably didn't know existed, like Yamaha MSX with Basic as an OS. In my rather educated opinion, everything except for Linux and BSD running on vanilla x86 parts sucks major ass. Go on, tell me how great your Mac is. For all I care, any OS that is remotely controlled by a private company is utter trash from a security standpoint, a total non-starter. Any OS where I cannot change configuration only because someone else decided I can't -- garbage. These concerns are valid for any user, even the least sophisticated one, and for any productive task. A Mac may be OK as a dedicated entertainment system as long as you don't connect it to the Internet, but it has no other legitimate uses.
Sure, I might need a super-amplifier to hear your pillow talk from across the street, but too bad, it is silly to expect your words to be private if you let sound waves out of your house, right?
If DNA was half as private as a whisper in a well-enclosed space, you'd have a point. But it's not. Good luck eavesdropping on my pillow talk from across the street when my windows are closed and my curtains are drawn. This is actually impossible, given the current state of technology, as opposed to getting your DNA without you even knowing, which is easy as pie. Hell, one can collect your DNA without ever coming to within hundreds of miles of you, so no stalking is required. Good luck trying to find another copy of what I said after I finished talking. And if I make enough noise for it to be picked up outside of my property, then I shouldn't be surprised that someone may be recording it.
Imagine if someone was doing it to software or any kind of digitized info: making millions of unencrypted copies on little dust-sized particles and blowing them into the wind all over the public space. You are saying that it is a breach of his privacy when people collect these memory cells, read them, discuss them, and republish them in a different form? I don't know how else to tell you this: if you expect a piece of information to be private, then publishing millions of copies all over the place is the single worst thing to go about it.
See the reply above. Analyzing what you deposit in a public restroom is also likely to work. A single hair that you shed from your head in a public place may be clearly visible and identifiable, depending on your hair style.
And you have to understand that identification is not at the core of the issue. It may irk you more when they know that your name is attached to this DNA, but much damage can be done by discriminating based even on the results of an anonymous study: if you sweep an area frequented by members of a certain social group (say, immigrants), then you can make statistical statements about that social group. The statistics can be perfectly sound, but the discrimination is still unethical.
Whatever difficulties face those who are determined to collect your DNA without depriving you of your liberty, the simple fact is that it is silly to expect something to be private if you drop millions of copies of it everywhere you go.
I agree completely. I like your analogy with skin color: DNA is just as clearly exposed in the world, arguably even more so, but people get fooled into thinking that it is supposed to be private only because they cannot see it with a naked eye.
The line can only be drawn at "no expectation of DNA privacy for anyone". Each of us sheds millions of skin cells every day, everywhere we go, leaving our DNA samples on everything we touch. Anyone who considers their DNA their property should kindly not litter and keep it to themselves. What we should fight is the discrimination based on DNA analysis, because the genotype only describes some initial conditions, whereas the phenotype is what we are, and in many respects, what we've made of ourselves through culture, even in spite of our genes.
This is still an overestimate, I think. The Wiki says there are 5758 higher education institutions in the US alone. The entire budget of the Wikimedia foundation hovers around $10000000 a year, which is ~ $1736 per year per institution. We can have a project that costs 10 times as much as Wikipedia, containing, most likely, more than hundred times more data, for measly $17360 per year per institution. This is about as much as one lucky teaching fellow gets paid. This is such a trivial sum of money for the academia as a whole, Harvard alone could afford it for several decades if they wished so, although it would make a quite a blip on their balance sheet.
Whatever, Wikimedia is already doing it with textbooks, so that part is taken care of. It would be nice, though, do have a big ass research exchange, kind of like famed JSTOR, but where everything comes with the source attached (original LaTeX, raw media, raw data, etc), and everything is available to everyone (public domain or, better yet, copyleft).
Hey I get The Daily Show from the same source. It's free online, right? But the legit version is low resolution, it lags a lot, it skips, and it has a short ad in the beginning that AdBlock Plus does not block. That, and it uses flash, and I am so through with people running secret code on my CPU. One day I said, screw it. The Swedish version downloads in 2.5 minutes, in full glorious HD and with zero ad footage.
We are just patting each other's backs, aren't we? This is getting kind of gay...
Paranoia, really? Did you know that "gullible" is not in the dictionary? The first part is a fact. The second part I have no proof for, but IMHO it is a fair assumption. Would it benefit them? Yes. Would there be a blowback? Hardly. So what would prevent them from doing it, if not now, then starting with the next patch?
Slashdot Mirror
"Assmasher" could also be atoms smasher abbreviated. So he either designs tokamaks or mashes asses (so, probably an actor).
Yes, doing science or social work is also much more productive than doing religion. (Organized religions occasionally claim that they are doing either, but we know how much they suck in both areas.)
It is not useless, however, to be able to understand what religious people are talking about. We all live on the same planet, and we can all benefit from reconciling our differences in a non-violent manner. Agnosticism, unlike atheism, provides a solid foundation for understanding every religion, no matter how irrational, convoluted or just plain evil. Atheism towards irrational Gods (and these include all of the takes on LORD) is nothing more than posturing.
There is no what? Can you give a logical account of "God"? You cannot: not of the Christian God, it is self-contradictory by design. If you want to hold a consistent view towards the Christian God, you have to say: "This is gibberish", you cannot say "It does not exist", on pain of producing more gibberish.
Greek and Russian Orthodoxies have nearly identical claims to legitimacy, but them and RCC barely intersect geographically, so your comment is still true.
Atheism is not logical. The statement "there is no God" has no clear meaning, but you go out of your way defending it, being driven by little more than emotion. You may be well-justified in hating organized religion, but you shouldn't expect this hatred to provide a foundation for your morals. If you seek consistency in your beliefs, try agnosticism.
I am surprised they didn't go for the Internet Roulette.
Ouch. I am definitely waiting for a few months before upgrading my 3 Karmic systems (2 of them are my girlfriend's). The forth one is my main rig, and I just converted it to Slackware 13. I left Slackware a few years ago for Ubuntu, and now I cannot figure out why the hell did I ever do that. It took me only a few hours to get the system to triple boot (new Slack partition, old Ubuntu one, and the OEM Vista), and to import all of my files, app settings, and scripts (with more or less just cp -r). Hardware worked perfectly out of the box (but so it did with Ubuntu). The hardest part was actually juggling Lilo and Grub together with 3 OSes spread over 2 hard drives.
My point is, after a few minutes with Slack, I cannot imagine going back to Ubuntu with its bloated Gnome and thorny upgrade path, although I still think that in the right context it is an excellent OS. Personally, though, I'll stick with Patrick Volkerding, the demigod of GNU/Linux distros; I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he descended from "Bob" himself.
I would never again gamble online, because there is absolutely no way to tell if I am being scammed, but I am strongly in favor of legalizing and taxing online gambling, for one reason:
I would like to judge the measure by consequences. If it is made illegal, people will still gamble just as much in off-shore casinos. Nothing at all can be achieved here as far as the human behavior goes. A punishment for a petty crime like that can only be slight (this is no black-and-white matter, like possession of x gram of marijuana: try defining "gambling"), and the discovery process needed to convict would have to be very expensive. This just cannot be effectively enforced. Only positive net changes will result from legalizing it: people will flock to a few legit online casinos and start loosing money to the houses and the colluding sharks, whereas now, on top of that, they also get scammed. There shouldn't be a law whose only purpose is to prevent a fool from parting with his money, while being told of the risks, but there should be one that helps many of us to do commerce online without getting the identity stolen. If one's only counter-argument is that "gambling is immoral", but one cannot point out how legalizing it would lead to negative consequences for the public, then one needs to re-evaluate his morals.
Part of their success is because of the lock-down.
If you mean that Apple is shrewdly using the lockdown to trap users into a yearly payment program and to spy on them, then yes, I agree completely. If by success you mean, better OS, I disagree. Known hardware and UI consistency have nothing whatsoever to do with this: Apple could make a free OS for their hardware just as well. They could do it tomorrow, they'd just have to live with people removing the parts that phone home.
I have first-hand experience with pretty much every major OS and platform. I grew up playing games on computers you probably didn't know existed, like Yamaha MSX with Basic as an OS. In my rather educated opinion, everything except for Linux and BSD running on vanilla x86 parts sucks major ass. Go on, tell me how great your Mac is. For all I care, any OS that is remotely controlled by a private company is utter trash from a security standpoint, a total non-starter. Any OS where I cannot change configuration only because someone else decided I can't -- garbage. These concerns are valid for any user, even the least sophisticated one, and for any productive task. A Mac may be OK as a dedicated entertainment system as long as you don't connect it to the Internet, but it has no other legitimate uses.
a hodge-podge of brittle hardware and opaque, restrictive software
Sounds like Steve Jobs can claim another victim.
Sure, I might need a super-amplifier to hear your pillow talk from across the street, but too bad, it is silly to expect your words to be private if you let sound waves out of your house, right?
If DNA was half as private as a whisper in a well-enclosed space, you'd have a point. But it's not. Good luck eavesdropping on my pillow talk from across the street when my windows are closed and my curtains are drawn. This is actually impossible, given the current state of technology, as opposed to getting your DNA without you even knowing, which is easy as pie. Hell, one can collect your DNA without ever coming to within hundreds of miles of you, so no stalking is required. Good luck trying to find another copy of what I said after I finished talking. And if I make enough noise for it to be picked up outside of my property, then I shouldn't be surprised that someone may be recording it.
Imagine if someone was doing it to software or any kind of digitized info: making millions of unencrypted copies on little dust-sized particles and blowing them into the wind all over the public space. You are saying that it is a breach of his privacy when people collect these memory cells, read them, discuss them, and republish them in a different form? I don't know how else to tell you this: if you expect a piece of information to be private, then publishing millions of copies all over the place is the single worst thing to go about it.
See the reply above. Analyzing what you deposit in a public restroom is also likely to work. A single hair that you shed from your head in a public place may be clearly visible and identifiable, depending on your hair style.
And you have to understand that identification is not at the core of the issue. It may irk you more when they know that your name is attached to this DNA, but much damage can be done by discriminating based even on the results of an anonymous study: if you sweep an area frequented by members of a certain social group (say, immigrants), then you can make statistical statements about that social group. The statistics can be perfectly sound, but the discrimination is still unethical.
Whatever difficulties face those who are determined to collect your DNA without depriving you of your liberty, the simple fact is that it is silly to expect something to be private if you drop millions of copies of it everywhere you go.
I agree completely. I like your analogy with skin color: DNA is just as clearly exposed in the world, arguably even more so, but people get fooled into thinking that it is supposed to be private only because they cannot see it with a naked eye.
I don't think I understand. Can't you just build a Faraday cage around your property?
The line can only be drawn at "no expectation of DNA privacy for anyone". Each of us sheds millions of skin cells every day, everywhere we go, leaving our DNA samples on everything we touch. Anyone who considers their DNA their property should kindly not litter and keep it to themselves. What we should fight is the discrimination based on DNA analysis, because the genotype only describes some initial conditions, whereas the phenotype is what we are, and in many respects, what we've made of ourselves through culture, even in spite of our genes.
This is still an overestimate, I think. The Wiki says there are 5758 higher education institutions in the US alone. The entire budget of the Wikimedia foundation hovers around $10000000 a year, which is ~ $1736 per year per institution. We can have a project that costs 10 times as much as Wikipedia, containing, most likely, more than hundred times more data, for measly $17360 per year per institution. This is about as much as one lucky teaching fellow gets paid. This is such a trivial sum of money for the academia as a whole, Harvard alone could afford it for several decades if they wished so, although it would make a quite a blip on their balance sheet.
Whatever, Wikimedia is already doing it with textbooks, so that part is taken care of. It would be nice, though, do have a big ass research exchange, kind of like famed JSTOR, but where everything comes with the source attached (original LaTeX, raw media, raw data, etc), and everything is available to everyone (public domain or, better yet, copyleft).
Hey I get The Daily Show from the same source. It's free online, right? But the legit version is low resolution, it lags a lot, it skips, and it has a short ad in the beginning that AdBlock Plus does not block. That, and it uses flash, and I am so through with people running secret code on my CPU. One day I said, screw it. The Swedish version downloads in 2.5 minutes, in full glorious HD and with zero ad footage.
We are just patting each other's backs, aren't we? This is getting kind of gay...
Same here. Cannot take this crap anymore for more than a few minutes at a time, watching it mainly just to see how badly it sucks.
Paranoia, really? Did you know that "gullible" is not in the dictionary? The first part is a fact. The second part I have no proof for, but IMHO it is a fair assumption. Would it benefit them? Yes. Would there be a blowback? Hardly. So what would prevent them from doing it, if not now, then starting with the next patch?
Ah.
Who doesn't know about McDonald's?
The children.
No, I mean, who is that other candidate? McCain? Are you referring to anything specific?
Did you mean, weak enough?
or the corporatist that wants to regulate who you fuck
What's that?