You've certainly managed to pick some negative examples of what can happen but for each of your examples there are dozens of positive ones. E.g.
And this is OK, because we all know that every law in every country at every time must by definition be just (otherwise it wouldn't be a law), so anyone who breaks one deserves whatever punishment they get. Yes some laws are bad laws but there are also an awful lot of laws which aren't.
What you haven't done is presented any argument as to what is wrong with beginning to phase out religous institutions. I've said they serve no purpose and on balance get in the way of rational society and nothing you've said has convinced me otherwise.
You're quite correct to say that it's religious dogma which is the main problem rather than spirtuality its self but it is a problem which I believe needs to be addressed. Dogma seems to be inseparable from organised religion which is why I am proposing that society abolish these religious organisations and attempt to prevent the new generation inheriting religious dogma from their parents.
People would still be perfectly free to believe in the idea of some sort of fuzzy spirituality if they found it helped them but they wouldn't be free to construct huge edifices of edicts and commandments or begin to organise themselves in any way and actions they took in society would not be based on religious dogma.
I think that given the current terrorism situation it's almost certain attempts to dismantle organised religion would give rise to some terrorist backlash and whilst I agree it would only be a small minority of people involved you don't need many terrorists to cause a lot of problems.
Exactly, visit any police station late at night and hear the cries of prisoners decrying the foul persecution they are suffering because they did not do it guv' and it wos my mate wot hit him.
Society has always stepped in to discourage activies which it deems antisocial, in many countries society even goes so far as to kill people who break its laws. As I said I'm not advocating putting anyone to death just taking reasonable steps to break addicts dependance on religous props which are as a whole counterproductive.
I realise this will involve intervention in peoples lives and this is a regrettable but not by any means an unusual activity for a society to engage in to ensure it can run smoothly.
And yet religion tells us that the eucharist transforms bread into the body of christ and wine into his blood whereas science proves that the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine no matter how much religious belief you have.
Which methodology would you prefer someone like the food standards agency to employ ?
Yes, go to Lourdes and witness no miracles at all happening for the majority of people. Witness those who thought they were miraculously healed regressing back to their normal state once the euphoria of the pilgrimage has worn off. Witness nothing happening which can't be explained by pure random chance !
There are no scientifically verified "miracles" and there never will be because the entire framework which leads you to expect miracles is a crock of shit.
I don't care what the churchs belief is, it's a fact that restricting the use of condoms does help to increase the spread of AIDS. Anyone with the influence to affect peoples actions or lives on the scale the church should not be able to get away with simply hiding behind some belief rather than taking into account the actual situation.
those who honestly and in good faith do not believe in it?
And thats really the whole problem with Religion, its adherents like to think that "acting in good faith" is the ultimate get out clause for every disaster and every fuck up they are responsible for.
When you are influencing real people in real life simply having faith that you are doing the right thing is nowhere near good enough, you need to have unbiased scientific proof you are doing the right thing so I don't care whether the Pope has faith that providing condoms is really a good thing when all the actual evidence to the contrary says that his stance is stupid and dangerous. The problem is that he's relying on 'faith' and some ancient book to make his decisions rather than rational thought and evidence based reasoning and for someone with the influence the pope has that is simply unacceptable on any terms.
The point is that the world does not need religion, it is evil and serves no purpose but to perpetuate its self and get in the way of rational, proper thinking.
However much you or anyone else think you believe in some sort of god doesn't change the fact that there is no god and that you have simply been deluded either by yourself or by your parents or elders into believing that nonsense. Imagine a family of dole bludging crack addicts, assuming any children survived they would be convinced that leeching of the state and undertaking petty crime to pay for their crack is perfectly normal behaviour and something to be applauded. The fact is no matter how much they might believe in that it still doesn't make it right and society has a duty to get involved when things go wrong like this and put an end to the problem.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter that most peoples actual belief is more or less half hearted and innocuous in order to target the real criminals, priests, nuns, monks and evangalists etc they must be brought to understand that supporting religious activity is no longer an acceptable behaviour. Without their 'flock' the real work can begin; taking down the organisation and infrastructure of relgion. There is no real need to imprison any but the most hardline extremists ( who will undoubtedly turn to terrorism to maintain a grasp on their power ) it will be enough to make sure that no religious nonsense can ever be taught to children and no religious organisation can be allowed to operate, eventually with a lack of support and aggressive teaching about the fallacy of religion it will wither and die a natural, but long overdue death.
You seem awfully keen to see this investigation quashed, interesting don't you think. Perhaps you'd like to explain what you were doing in 1986 Mr Anonymous Coward...
I once had the opportunity to vote for a party called "The Avatars Of The Great Worm God Shuggoreth" but including mine they only got 20 or so votes and I've never heard of them since.
I agree that it's not the technology at issue here but the general principles involved in sharing this sort of personal data between countries. The trouble is that its often only the technical solution which is considered without too much thought for the consequences on a personal or political level.
Putting in the infrastructure to share this information does raise concerns about who will have access to this data and what it will be used for. For example the DNA information the UK police currently collect is collected from anyone they arrest regardless of whether they have actually committed a crime or are charged and convicted with anything.
So far as I am aware that information is handled in accordance with the UK rules governing the collection and maintenance of peoples records which our allies such as the US or Canada may not adhere to so it may be if the police question me about something in the UK and take my DNA ( I have no option to refuse permission for them to do this ) then later on they may pass that to the FBI who might decide to outsource it's storage to an external company who then decide to sell my data on to other 3rd parties. I'm fairly sure the US does not have the same standards for dealing with personal data that the UK does so I'm curious exactly how they will share this data and not breach their legal obligations in the UK for it's protection.
We have that on some buses around here now too and it's just pointlessly annoying. For a start they only have around 15mins of programming after which it just repeats its self and absolutely no useful information on them at all, just celebrity gossip "news", what you're missing on TV right now and loads of adverts.
Whats worse is that the local trains have an even more annoying TV system which do have sound and are an equally inane blend of celebrity gossip, adverts and film trailers. The absolute last thing I want to be subjected to at 6AM in the morning is what Paris Fucking Hilton has been up to at full volume right above my head, it so distracting you have to really concentrate to read a book or whatever and ignore it. Just because I have to travel to work by train does not mean I consent to be a victim of this sort of blatant advertising, especially when with the ticket prices going up and not down I'm not getting anything at all out of it.
I don't think this new scheme of Microsofts is going to get too far, for a start who on earth writes their shopping list on a computer ? When I make shopping lists I walk around the kitchen looking in the cupboards to see what I need and I only really write down generalities like "some vegetables, stuff for tea tomorrow".
Well I don't know what you have in your car but the stereo which came built into mine was made by Blaupunkt. The car its self is made by Nissan. I would imagine that most car stereos are actually built and supplied by car stereo manufacturers rather than the automaker themselves. In fact an awful lot of the components for cars are not built by the manufacturer themselves but bought in from other manufacturers. In effect car makers really do support a large 3rd party market. Having had a number of large auto companies close down in the immediate area lately the one thing you see is that as well as the actual auto company there was a huge number of other manufacturers more or less dependant on producing equipment for that auto maker to buy off them.
If a car manufacturer were to design a car where using another companies tyre caused your air conditioning to break then it might be valid to compare them to Microsoft but the car industry has a lot of healthy competition and no real monopolies so that sort of behaviour would not be tolerated by the customer and is why Microsoft should be punished when it tries to do that sort of thing and abuse its monopolistic position.
Agreed, I think at every point in history there have been similar concerns from the earliest times when feeding yourselves during times of famine was a real concern through the British Navies concern at running out of Oak Trees to maintain it's fleet to the current worries about oil running out.
Every civilisation thinks it's at the peak of technological advancement until something completely new and revolutionary comes along and changes the way things work completely. Today you hear people saying how scientific development has never been so rapid, how we have things now our parents would never have even thought of but I bet in every period in history people were saying the exact same thing and I bet in 1000 years time people will look back at now and think the same as we do when we look back 1000 years.
There are unquestionably enough resources on the planet to sustain a population and to allow progress to happen although it's quite possible that there may be widespread upheavals or conflict in order to control those resources effectively.
If I was a criminal in any country under the crown and a government agency tried to implant an RFID tag in me, I would insist that the government agency be dissolved and all the members of said agency involved in my implant be charged. Just following orders is no defence
If it were ever the case that this became government policy then you could all for agencies to be dissolved all you liked but it would make no difference at all, if you fell into the category of criminals needing to be tagged you'd be tagged just like all the rest and there would be nothing that could be done about it.
Personally though I can't see anything like this actually happening in the UK anytime soon, this is simply a diversionary tactic to make it appear the government is actually addressing the real problem of having no room left in the prisons without actually doing anything about it.
Great, so rather than bothering to deal with the criminals here in the UK we can just ship them over to the US then can we, and you'll all be fine with that. A lot of criminals are simply criminal scum and should be locked up, education is wasted on such people.
I think the background to this is that the current bunch of clowns in government have been imprisoning more people and not building any more prisons with the, obviously surprising, result that there are now not enough spaces in prison for all the prisoners. Thousands are being released early to free up space and the government is desperately trying to look as though it is doing something about it when in fact it's not.
They already tag people so they don't have to lock them up despite the fact that tags obviously don't work very well.
On the one hand you have school which has various sports teams for it's students but forces students to agree to an arbitary set of regulations in order to join their schools sports team. There is no reason why sports teams need to have people agree not to smoke, drink or whatever and the team could function perfectly normally without any such "agreement".
On the other hand if you're my tenant then there is a very good reason why I have a contract with you which sets out what you can and cannot do in my flat, making big holes in the walls is one of the things you can't do for the very good reasons that it will cost me money to repair the hole and making such holes may damage the structure of the building.
If I asked you to sign an agreement to not smoke or drink anywhere, even when you weren't in my apartment then you'd say "That's bullshit, I'm not signing that" and if I insisted you'd go and rent another apartment where they didn't attempt to enfore arbitary silly restrictions on your behaviour. These students don't have the choice of going elsewhere because they already belong to the school so the school team is the only school team they can join which leaves the only option of signing what you have to and ignoring any arbitary and nonsensical rubbish on the agreement.
So you run a company and don't want to employ people who drink or smoke, no problem. I do drink and smoke but if you tell me you're not going to employ me for doing those things I will say "I don't drink and I don't smoke" and I probably won't do so during working time but what I do when you're not paying me is up to me and nothing whatsoever to do with you. So your business is free to make what policies it likes and I'm free to do what I like.
What is not acceptable is for your business to be able to monitor anything I do when I'm not at work, you have no right to know whether I'm drinking, you have no right to know whether I'm smoking, you've no rights to any information at all as to what I'm doing when you're not paying me. Any system where the government does tell you as a business this information about me is obviously horribly fascist and possible totalitarian and certainly not a system of government I want either but without such a system your business will simply not be able to access the information you need to make polices like "I'm not employing anyone who drinks".
Yep, you're right there nowadays prohibition would be a complete success, just like the marijuana prohibition has almost eliminated it's use altogether and anyone found using cocaine completely loses all their job prospects and becomes a jobless bum.
I was visiting New York once a few years ago, I think I was 27 years old at the time and had been drinking, legally, in the UK for over 9 years and hadn't ever been asked for ID for at least 11 years. One bar did actually demand ID from me to prove I was over 21 and when I explained I was English and didn't have a US driving licence the idiot barman said without ID he wouldn't serve me. I did have my passport so I showed him that but he wouldn't accept it as ID at all !!!
Amusingly the next bar we came across was an Irish bar of some sort with a massive queue outside and bouncers telling everyone to get lost because no one else was coming in, until my friend who is Irish said "Are you boys from Kerry ?" And then correctly identified the tiny village one of them came from where upon we skipped the masssive queue got a free drink and had the manager actually kick some American tourists off their table so we could sit down. No requests for ID in that bar.
I thought the point of laundering money was to turn the vast pile of banknotes you have just robbed from the bank are turned into money you can account for and pay into the bank in some legitamate manner. Opening things like bars, laundrettes stuff like that is one way of doing it. Even when they're empty they still mysteriously generate huge quantities of income. I can't see how doing this in 2nd life is more fun than opening a strip joint and you still need to account for how whoever it is pumping the money into 2nd life has got the money.
Slashdot Mirror
What you haven't done is presented any argument as to what is wrong with beginning to phase out religous institutions. I've said they serve no purpose and on balance get in the way of rational society and nothing you've said has convinced me otherwise.
You're quite correct to say that it's religious dogma which is the main problem rather than spirtuality its self but it is a problem which I believe needs to be addressed. Dogma seems to be inseparable from organised religion which is why I am proposing that society abolish these religious organisations and attempt to prevent the new generation inheriting religious dogma from their parents.
People would still be perfectly free to believe in the idea of some sort of fuzzy spirituality if they found it helped them but they wouldn't be free to construct huge edifices of edicts and commandments or begin to organise themselves in any way and actions they took in society would not be based on religious dogma.
I think that given the current terrorism situation it's almost certain attempts to dismantle organised religion would give rise to some terrorist backlash and whilst I agree it would only be a small minority of people involved you don't need many terrorists to cause a lot of problems.
Exactly, visit any police station late at night and hear the cries of prisoners decrying the foul persecution they are suffering because they did not do it guv' and it wos my mate wot hit him.
Society has always stepped in to discourage activies which it deems antisocial, in many countries society even goes so far as to kill people who break its laws. As I said I'm not advocating putting anyone to death just taking reasonable steps to break addicts dependance on religous props which are as a whole counterproductive.
I realise this will involve intervention in peoples lives and this is a regrettable but not by any means an unusual activity for a society to engage in to ensure it can run smoothly.
And yet religion tells us that the eucharist transforms bread into the body of christ and wine into his blood whereas science proves that the bread remains bread and the wine remains wine no matter how much religious belief you have.
Which methodology would you prefer someone like the food standards agency to employ ?
Yes, go to Lourdes and witness no miracles at all happening for the majority of people. Witness those who thought they were miraculously healed regressing back to their normal state once the euphoria of the pilgrimage has worn off. Witness nothing happening which can't be explained by pure random chance !
There are no scientifically verified "miracles" and there never will be because the entire framework which leads you to expect miracles is a crock of shit.
I don't care what the churchs belief is, it's a fact that restricting the use of condoms does help to increase the spread of AIDS. Anyone with the influence to affect peoples actions or lives on the scale the church should not be able to get away with simply hiding behind some belief rather than taking into account the actual situation.
And thats really the whole problem with Religion, its adherents like to think that "acting in good faith" is the ultimate get out clause for every disaster and every fuck up they are responsible for.
When you are influencing real people in real life simply having faith that you are doing the right thing is nowhere near good enough, you need to have unbiased scientific proof you are doing the right thing so I don't care whether the Pope has faith that providing condoms is really a good thing when all the actual evidence to the contrary says that his stance is stupid and dangerous. The problem is that he's relying on 'faith' and some ancient book to make his decisions rather than rational thought and evidence based reasoning and for someone with the influence the pope has that is simply unacceptable on any terms.
The point is that the world does not need religion, it is evil and serves no purpose but to perpetuate its self and get in the way of rational, proper thinking.
However much you or anyone else think you believe in some sort of god doesn't change the fact that there is no god and that you have simply been deluded either by yourself or by your parents or elders into believing that nonsense. Imagine a family of dole bludging crack addicts, assuming any children survived they would be convinced that leeching of the state and undertaking petty crime to pay for their crack is perfectly normal behaviour and something to be applauded. The fact is no matter how much they might believe in that it still doesn't make it right and society has a duty to get involved when things go wrong like this and put an end to the problem.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter that most peoples actual belief is more or less half hearted and innocuous in order to target the real criminals, priests, nuns, monks and evangalists etc they must be brought to understand that supporting religious activity is no longer an acceptable behaviour. Without their 'flock' the real work can begin; taking down the organisation and infrastructure of relgion. There is no real need to imprison any but the most hardline extremists ( who will undoubtedly turn to terrorism to maintain a grasp on their power ) it will be enough to make sure that no religious nonsense can ever be taught to children and no religious organisation can be allowed to operate, eventually with a lack of support and aggressive teaching about the fallacy of religion it will wither and die a natural, but long overdue death.
You seem awfully keen to see this investigation quashed, interesting don't you think. Perhaps you'd like to explain what you were doing in 1986 Mr Anonymous Coward...
I once had the opportunity to vote for a party called "The Avatars Of The Great Worm God Shuggoreth" but including mine they only got 20 or so votes and I've never heard of them since.
I agree that it's not the technology at issue here but the general principles involved in sharing this sort of personal data between countries. The trouble is that its often only the technical solution which is considered without too much thought for the consequences on a personal or political level.
Putting in the infrastructure to share this information does raise concerns about who will have access to this data and what it will be used for. For example the DNA information the UK police currently collect is collected from anyone they arrest regardless of whether they have actually committed a crime or are charged and convicted with anything.
So far as I am aware that information is handled in accordance with the UK rules governing the collection and maintenance of peoples records which our allies such as the US or Canada may not adhere to so it may be if the police question me about something in the UK and take my DNA ( I have no option to refuse permission for them to do this ) then later on they may pass that to the FBI who might decide to outsource it's storage to an external company who then decide to sell my data on to other 3rd parties. I'm fairly sure the US does not have the same standards for dealing with personal data that the UK does so I'm curious exactly how they will share this data and not breach their legal obligations in the UK for it's protection.
We have that on some buses around here now too and it's just pointlessly annoying. For a start they only have around 15mins of programming after which it just repeats its self and absolutely no useful information on them at all, just celebrity gossip "news", what you're missing on TV right now and loads of adverts.
Whats worse is that the local trains have an even more annoying TV system which do have sound and are an equally inane blend of celebrity gossip, adverts and film trailers. The absolute last thing I want to be subjected to at 6AM in the morning is what Paris Fucking Hilton has been up to at full volume right above my head, it so distracting you have to really concentrate to read a book or whatever and ignore it. Just because I have to travel to work by train does not mean I consent to be a victim of this sort of blatant advertising, especially when with the ticket prices going up and not down I'm not getting anything at all out of it.
I don't think this new scheme of Microsofts is going to get too far, for a start who on earth writes their shopping list on a computer ? When I make shopping lists I walk around the kitchen looking in the cupboards to see what I need and I only really write down generalities like "some vegetables, stuff for tea tomorrow".
Well I don't know what you have in your car but the stereo which came built into mine was made by Blaupunkt. The car its self is made by Nissan. I would imagine that most car stereos are actually built and supplied by car stereo manufacturers rather than the automaker themselves. In fact an awful lot of the components for cars are not built by the manufacturer themselves but bought in from other manufacturers. In effect car makers really do support a large 3rd party market. Having had a number of large auto companies close down in the immediate area lately the one thing you see is that as well as the actual auto company there was a huge number of other manufacturers more or less dependant on producing equipment for that auto maker to buy off them.
If a car manufacturer were to design a car where using another companies tyre caused your air conditioning to break then it might be valid to compare them to Microsoft but the car industry has a lot of healthy competition and no real monopolies so that sort of behaviour would not be tolerated by the customer and is why Microsoft should be punished when it tries to do that sort of thing and abuse its monopolistic position.
Agreed, I think at every point in history there have been similar concerns from the earliest times when feeding yourselves during times of famine was a real concern through the British Navies concern at running out of Oak Trees to maintain it's fleet to the current worries about oil running out.
Every civilisation thinks it's at the peak of technological advancement until something completely new and revolutionary comes along and changes the way things work completely. Today you hear people saying how scientific development has never been so rapid, how we have things now our parents would never have even thought of but I bet in every period in history people were saying the exact same thing and I bet in 1000 years time people will look back at now and think the same as we do when we look back 1000 years.
There are unquestionably enough resources on the planet to sustain a population and to allow progress to happen although it's quite possible that there may be widespread upheavals or conflict in order to control those resources effectively.
If it were ever the case that this became government policy then you could all for agencies to be dissolved all you liked but it would make no difference at all, if you fell into the category of criminals needing to be tagged you'd be tagged just like all the rest and there would be nothing that could be done about it.
Personally though I can't see anything like this actually happening in the UK anytime soon, this is simply a diversionary tactic to make it appear the government is actually addressing the real problem of having no room left in the prisons without actually doing anything about it.
Great, so rather than bothering to deal with the criminals here in the UK we can just ship them over to the US then can we, and you'll all be fine with that. A lot of criminals are simply criminal scum and should be locked up, education is wasted on such people.
I think the background to this is that the current bunch of clowns in government have been imprisoning more people and not building any more prisons with the, obviously surprising, result that there are now not enough spaces in prison for all the prisoners. Thousands are being released early to free up space and the government is desperately trying to look as though it is doing something about it when in fact it's not.
They already tag people so they don't have to lock them up despite the fact that tags obviously don't work very well.
Thats a totally different scenario.
On the one hand you have school which has various sports teams for it's students but forces students to agree to an arbitary set of regulations in order to join their schools sports team. There is no reason why sports teams need to have people agree not to smoke, drink or whatever and the team could function perfectly normally without any such "agreement".
On the other hand if you're my tenant then there is a very good reason why I have a contract with you which sets out what you can and cannot do in my flat, making big holes in the walls is one of the things you can't do for the very good reasons that it will cost me money to repair the hole and making such holes may damage the structure of the building.
If I asked you to sign an agreement to not smoke or drink anywhere, even when you weren't in my apartment then you'd say "That's bullshit, I'm not signing that" and if I insisted you'd go and rent another apartment where they didn't attempt to enfore arbitary silly restrictions on your behaviour. These students don't have the choice of going elsewhere because they already belong to the school so the school team is the only school team they can join which leaves the only option of signing what you have to and ignoring any arbitary and nonsensical rubbish on the agreement.
Thats to do with the people they keep voting in to govern them, if they could sort that out it would be a great start.
So you run a company and don't want to employ people who drink or smoke, no problem. I do drink and smoke but if you tell me you're not going to employ me for doing those things I will say "I don't drink and I don't smoke" and I probably won't do so during working time but what I do when you're not paying me is up to me and nothing whatsoever to do with you. So your business is free to make what policies it likes and I'm free to do what I like.
What is not acceptable is for your business to be able to monitor anything I do when I'm not at work, you have no right to know whether I'm drinking, you have no right to know whether I'm smoking, you've no rights to any information at all as to what I'm doing when you're not paying me. Any system where the government does tell you as a business this information about me is obviously horribly fascist and possible totalitarian and certainly not a system of government I want either but without such a system your business will simply not be able to access the information you need to make polices like "I'm not employing anyone who drinks".
Yep, you're right there nowadays prohibition would be a complete success, just like the marijuana prohibition has almost eliminated it's use altogether and anyone found using cocaine completely loses all their job prospects and becomes a jobless bum.
I was visiting New York once a few years ago, I think I was 27 years old at the time and had been drinking, legally, in the UK for over 9 years and hadn't ever been asked for ID for at least 11 years. One bar did actually demand ID from me to prove I was over 21 and when I explained I was English and didn't have a US driving licence the idiot barman said without ID he wouldn't serve me. I did have my passport so I showed him that but he wouldn't accept it as ID at all !!!
Amusingly the next bar we came across was an Irish bar of some sort with a massive queue outside and bouncers telling everyone to get lost because no one else was coming in, until my friend who is Irish said "Are you boys from Kerry ?" And then correctly identified the tiny village one of them came from where upon we skipped the masssive queue got a free drink and had the manager actually kick some American tourists off their table so we could sit down. No requests for ID in that bar.
Crows.
I thought the point of laundering money was to turn the vast pile of banknotes you have just robbed from the bank are turned into money you can account for and pay into the bank in some legitamate manner. Opening things like bars, laundrettes stuff like that is one way of doing it. Even when they're empty they still mysteriously generate huge quantities of income. I can't see how doing this in 2nd life is more fun than opening a strip joint and you still need to account for how whoever it is pumping the money into 2nd life has got the money.
Ferrets.