Now, you could say, "well, Ron Paul wants to reduce federal interference in our lives, so it doesn't matter what he believes since he's going to let us choose". That would be wrong. Just listen to the second link, starting at 0:15. He says:
But it's academic to talk about civil liberties if you don't talk about the true protection of all life. So if you're going to protect liberty, you've got to protect the life of the unborn just as well.
Do you really think those are the words of a man who's just going to let the states decide on this issue**? Hell no. And I bet you anything that the rest of his "libertarian" position is just that, a position he wouldn't keep up when he has a chance to make changes.
Basically, the only thing that differentiates Ron Paul from the current crop of crazy GOP politicians is the fact that he'd end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Big whoop. He's no better at all in terms of public policy.
**He had to cut five different departments to get his "trillion" number, which utterly ignores the detrimental effects such cuts would have on the GDP; do you really think that cutting the Dept. of Commerce won't affect the economy? That cutting the Dept. of Education along with Housing and Urban Development won't have detrimental effects five, ten years down the line? And there's no mention at all of cutting the Department of Defense, which would probably give you that trillion right there, as long as we're ignoring the ramifications.
*and as well he shouldn't; if life truly begins at conception, he's morally obligated to work to prohibit abortions. Too bad for him that it really doesn't.
That alone would cause a shift in the sort of people who want to be politicians because it would remove a lot of the profit motive.
Yeah, that's pretty much the only reason why Newt Gingrich even pretends to run for president; if he doesn't make a realistic campaign every few years, he won't get as much donor money.
Sooo... God hates stage magic? Is that what you're saying? Shall we burn Penn and Teller at the stake?
(also I hate to break it to you, but Exodus simply didn't happen. It was made up out of whole cloth much later. I mean, when you say "the Pharaoh", do you realize that he's never named in the story? A common interpretation is that he's Ramses II, but we have his mummy - he died an old man, and Egypt was doing fine at the time.)
Not only that, if you follow Pascal's wager through to its logical conclusion, it leads to horrific actions.
Consider: it is of infinite benefit to die and go to heaven. Children who die with faith are guaranteed to go to heaven. Children who do not die have a non-zero chance of growing up and becoming godless atheists, which means that they will not go to heaven - which is, relatively, of zero benefit.
This means that allowing a faithful child to grow to maturity and, potentially, lose their faith is one of the worst things you could do; it is far better to kill them right now, in order to ensure their entry into heaven.
Therefore, if you accept Pascal's wager, you ought to kill your children right now; otherwise they might grow up and become atheists. Not only that, you ought to kill all the faithful children you can find, for exactly the same reason.
Of course, you won't be going to heaven yourself if you do this; but that's a small price to pay, if you save all those children at the same time.
The Bible states that homosexual behavior is sin, along with sex before marriage, failure to respect your parents, and witchcraft, among other things. God hates sin because it separates him from his creation, which he loves.
So let me get this straight: God hates witchcraft. Does that, therefore, imply that witchcraft exists? That one can curse the cows of their neighbors by performing certain rituals?
Or does witchcraft not exist? If that's the case, then what does God hate in that context?
Just out of curiosity, how exactly do they constrain the upper bound on the mass of the Higgs boson? I mean, the lower bound seems to be "we've looked at that energy level and it probably isn't there", but they can't do that for the upper bound, can they?
You do realize that even if you call it a "prebate", you're not getting a basic income program past the current crop of right-wing nutjobs, right? They'd say that you're giving Cadillacs to welfare queens, and that would be the end of it.
Though I have to admit, they would probably be super okay with a flat 20-ish percent tax on their "toys" if you got rid of the capital gains and income taxes entirely; after all, toys can be bought overseas.
Sorry, the end of the post got cut off because I had to leave for work and didn't proofread it enough.
Anyway, what I'm going on about is this quote from the article:
The study appeared in the September issue of the medical journal Fertility and Sterility.
If you look at the September 2011 issue of Fertility and Sterility, the only thing involving wifi at all is the article I cited. I'm not sure how you got your citation, but it does look more like the paper the article is talking about - though it doesn't match the "already published in September" criteria.
They actually aren't claiming anything. I tracked down the paper (which was fucking harder than it should have been, the article didn't cite anything but the journal and month - turns out it was in the supplemental issue from September, not the main journal). The real citation is:
A. Van-Gheem, J. Martin, L. Penrose, N. Farooqi, S. Prien, Short-term exposure to cell phone levels of radio frequency radiation do not appear to to influence semen parameters in vitro, Fertility and Sterility, Volume 96, Issue 3, Supplement, September 2011, Page S155, ISSN 0015-0282, 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2011.07.610. (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028211017079)
I wonder why the article didn't cite it? Maybe because in the title itself, it says "do not appear to influence". Anyway, turns out it's not a real paper, it's really just a blurb about "We did this and it turns out nothing happened".
Here's the results section:
As expected, all measured semen parameters decreased with time (p
So basically, I have absolutely no idea where this article came from. What it says directly contradicts the paper it claims to be reporting on. It looks like there is an agenda here, but it's not the scientists'.
Right - it took Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and basically the founding of an entirely new religion in order to get the Bible translated out of Latin and into a language people actually used because the Catholic Church was totally okay with common people reading the Bible.
The announcement also pops up after you stop playing a Steam game. Normally there's some ads when you do that, but currently the first thing that shows up is the text that Slashdot posted here. It's actually quite effective, because normally you get pictures and ads and things instead of a wall of text, so it stands out.
Your emotional attachment to the transitory things of this world are the source of your suffering. The only way to escape suffering is to cease to have attachments.
And that is exactly why Christopher Hitchens says that religion poisons everything, even theoretically "secular" religions like Buddhism.
Emotional attachment to transitory things is a source of suffering, yes, but it's also a source of humanity. How can you love without attachment? That Buddhist dogma, if truly followed, would lead only to cold, distant and lonely people.
Like the Christmas tree tax that just got added into all the other ridiculous Agri-taxes the fed has imposed over the years...
Oh good fucking grief. The "Christmas Tree Tax" is 15 cents (on a $40-$60 purchase), that was being imposed by some advisory board, in order to fund the advertising of Christmas trees.
You don't bitch about the "Milk Tax" that goes into paying for those Got Milk commercials, do you? Because it's definitely in there, and you're paying for it.
We're paying Cadillac prices in order to get a Chevy Aveo delivered here, and a couple of bombs delivered in the Mid East.
I don't know why people have such a hard time seeing that pretty much all the extra tax money we're paying that's not going to local services is going to the military. It's not like the USA just magically ends up spending more on the military than the next three nations combined.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time and whatever "spades" you're getting paid pack in are 99% emotional, not physical.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was wondering. I actually RTFA'd to see if the author had any sort of real statistics, but he really doesn't; the one thing that's presented as any sort of evidence is Netcraft's list of most reliable hosting companies for February, which is pretty meaningless. Sure, the top three are running FreeBSD, but every other company on the list is running Linux (besides number 9, which is running Windows Server 2003).
Furthermore, if you look at the historical monthly data for "best datacenter", it's pretty obvious that the whole thing is hugely variable. Sure, in Feb 2011 the top three were FreeBSD sites; in April 2011, the top three were Rackspace (which runs something I've never heard of), Linux and Windows. You would imagine that if this were really a measurement of the operating system's reliability, the top ten lists would be fairly consistent; after all, it's not like the OS is changing significantly month to month. Instead, because it varies so much, this is probably mostly measuring how good the providers are at making sure data flows to and from their data center, instead of how good they are at responding to it.
And finally, the server admins who choose FreeBSD are pretty self-selecting. Someone who really knows how to tune and administer Linux is probably going to have just as stable a system as someone who really knows FreeBSD.
It makes sense, particularly whehn you consider the fact that when you run afoul of the Department of Truth, you get handed over to the Department of Corrections.
I know it is trendy & hip to not spank your children and I disagree with that -- I do spank my children on occasion and I can usually tell - from the behavior of other kids in their classes - which parents don't
Sooo... do you recognize them by the bruises you see? Or maybe you're just too short-sighted to realize that there's other ways of teaching your child that don't involve resorting to violence?
He reduced her allowance and took away the Mercedes. Most people do not earn enough to drive a Mercedes.
And you're entirely sure that, if she doesn't have the Mercedes to drive around, she has some other means of transportation? Keep in mind that this is Texas we're talking about, with some of the absolute worst public transit in the nation. If she doesn't have an alternate car to drive, she may not be able to lose her job.
I mean, do you really think that driving Dad's Mercedes around is some sort of giant privilege? It's a fancy car that will get you whipped if there's so much as a dent on it when you get home.
If you look at the actual data, that's pretty well supported. Here's an article from Sept 8 showing that searches from Bing.com are 12% of the search market, searches from yahoo.com are 15% of the search market, and it's only when you talk about the agglomeration known as "Bing powered search" that Bing even gets close to 33% of the search market.
It seems like most people aren't really searching on Bing; they're searching on Google and Yahoo and their web browser, and occasionally Bing provides those results.
The more menus you make me sit through, the more it hurts. Keeping Bing as the default on Windows costs about 1 menu (accept the defaults) - switching to something else costs about three or four menus (it's been a while), plus you load up a slow-ass page that asks you to pick something out of a list of incomprehensible choices.
At my last job, I actually saw people using Windows XP computers with the newest version of IE who hadn't actually sat through all those menus yet - every single morning, when they opened up Internet Explorer, they would just reflexively click "Cancel" on the menu. Some of these users had been using the same computer for over a year.
So yeah. That 33% of the market is composed of a lot of people who type "google" into bing search.
Since everything is publicly available, I would love to see some examples of (particularly) Dr. Coyne or "everybody that hangs around his online forum" acting like ignorant, blinkered, petty, rabid zealots.
Surely a couple of links or maybe a timestamp from the video isn't too much to ask for?
Slashdot Mirror
Ron Paul is just as batshit crazy as Rick Perry, except he wants to make the USA more isolationist instead of Team America: World Police (fuck yeah!). He's on record saying he doesn't accept evolution, that life begins at conception, and that American Christians are probably God's chosen people in the end of days - and that's completely leaving out the utter irresponsibility of his plan to nuke several government departments*.
Now, you could say, "well, Ron Paul wants to reduce federal interference in our lives, so it doesn't matter what he believes since he's going to let us choose". That would be wrong. Just listen to the second link, starting at 0:15. He says:
Do you really think those are the words of a man who's just going to let the states decide on this issue**? Hell no. And I bet you anything that the rest of his "libertarian" position is just that, a position he wouldn't keep up when he has a chance to make changes.
Basically, the only thing that differentiates Ron Paul from the current crop of crazy GOP politicians is the fact that he'd end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Big whoop. He's no better at all in terms of public policy.
**He had to cut five different departments to get his "trillion" number, which utterly ignores the detrimental effects such cuts would have on the GDP; do you really think that cutting the Dept. of Commerce won't affect the economy? That cutting the Dept. of Education along with Housing and Urban Development won't have detrimental effects five, ten years down the line? And there's no mention at all of cutting the Department of Defense, which would probably give you that trillion right there, as long as we're ignoring the ramifications.
*and as well he shouldn't; if life truly begins at conception, he's morally obligated to work to prohibit abortions. Too bad for him that it really doesn't.
Yeah, that's pretty much the only reason why Newt Gingrich even pretends to run for president; if he doesn't make a realistic campaign every few years, he won't get as much donor money.
Sooo... God hates stage magic? Is that what you're saying? Shall we burn Penn and Teller at the stake?
(also I hate to break it to you, but Exodus simply didn't happen. It was made up out of whole cloth much later. I mean, when you say "the Pharaoh", do you realize that he's never named in the story? A common interpretation is that he's Ramses II, but we have his mummy - he died an old man, and Egypt was doing fine at the time.)
Not only that, if you follow Pascal's wager through to its logical conclusion, it leads to horrific actions.
Consider: it is of infinite benefit to die and go to heaven. Children who die with faith are guaranteed to go to heaven. Children who do not die have a non-zero chance of growing up and becoming godless atheists, which means that they will not go to heaven - which is, relatively, of zero benefit.
This means that allowing a faithful child to grow to maturity and, potentially, lose their faith is one of the worst things you could do; it is far better to kill them right now, in order to ensure their entry into heaven.
Therefore, if you accept Pascal's wager, you ought to kill your children right now; otherwise they might grow up and become atheists. Not only that, you ought to kill all the faithful children you can find, for exactly the same reason.
Of course, you won't be going to heaven yourself if you do this; but that's a small price to pay, if you save all those children at the same time.
So let me get this straight: God hates witchcraft. Does that, therefore, imply that witchcraft exists? That one can curse the cows of their neighbors by performing certain rituals?
Or does witchcraft not exist? If that's the case, then what does God hate in that context?
He did, they call it Islam.
Then apparently he clarified even more, and they call that Mormonism.
It's a pity that God's definition of "clarity" seems to be the exact opposite of ours.
Yeah, even the NYT got hit with a fake anti-virus attack ad.
Untrusted ads are simply not safe.
Just out of curiosity, how exactly do they constrain the upper bound on the mass of the Higgs boson? I mean, the lower bound seems to be "we've looked at that energy level and it probably isn't there", but they can't do that for the upper bound, can they?
You do realize that even if you call it a "prebate", you're not getting a basic income program past the current crop of right-wing nutjobs, right? They'd say that you're giving Cadillacs to welfare queens, and that would be the end of it.
Though I have to admit, they would probably be super okay with a flat 20-ish percent tax on their "toys" if you got rid of the capital gains and income taxes entirely; after all, toys can be bought overseas.
I know for a fact that you did not RTFA, because that link is broken :)
Sorry, the end of the post got cut off because I had to leave for work and didn't proofread it enough.
Anyway, what I'm going on about is this quote from the article:
If you look at the September 2011 issue of Fertility and Sterility, the only thing involving wifi at all is the article I cited. I'm not sure how you got your citation, but it does look more like the paper the article is talking about - though it doesn't match the "already published in September" criteria.
They actually aren't claiming anything. I tracked down the paper (which was fucking harder than it should have been, the article didn't cite anything but the journal and month - turns out it was in the supplemental issue from September, not the main journal). The real citation is:
A. Van-Gheem, J. Martin, L. Penrose, N. Farooqi, S. Prien, Short-term exposure to cell phone levels of radio frequency radiation do not appear to to influence semen parameters in vitro, Fertility and Sterility, Volume 96, Issue 3, Supplement, September 2011, Page S155, ISSN 0015-0282, 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2011.07.610.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0015028211017079)
I wonder why the article didn't cite it? Maybe because in the title itself, it says "do not appear to influence". Anyway, turns out it's not a real paper, it's really just a blurb about "We did this and it turns out nothing happened".
Here's the results section:
Right - it took Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and basically the founding of an entirely new religion in order to get the Bible translated out of Latin and into a language people actually used because the Catholic Church was totally okay with common people reading the Bible.
In fact, the official content policy of the United States expressly allows things that could be considered terroristic, or even things that advocate Islamist extremism.
The announcement also pops up after you stop playing a Steam game. Normally there's some ads when you do that, but currently the first thing that shows up is the text that Slashdot posted here. It's actually quite effective, because normally you get pictures and ads and things instead of a wall of text, so it stands out.
And that is exactly why Christopher Hitchens says that religion poisons everything, even theoretically "secular" religions like Buddhism.
Emotional attachment to transitory things is a source of suffering, yes, but it's also a source of humanity. How can you love without attachment? That Buddhist dogma, if truly followed, would lead only to cold, distant and lonely people.
Oh good fucking grief. The "Christmas Tree Tax" is 15 cents (on a $40-$60 purchase), that was being imposed by some advisory board, in order to fund the advertising of Christmas trees.
You don't bitch about the "Milk Tax" that goes into paying for those Got Milk commercials, do you? Because it's definitely in there, and you're paying for it.
We're paying Cadillac prices in order to get a Chevy Aveo delivered here, and a couple of bombs delivered in the Mid East.
I don't know why people have such a hard time seeing that pretty much all the extra tax money we're paying that's not going to local services is going to the military. It's not like the USA just magically ends up spending more on the military than the next three nations combined.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was wondering. I actually RTFA'd to see if the author had any sort of real statistics, but he really doesn't; the one thing that's presented as any sort of evidence is Netcraft's list of most reliable hosting companies for February, which is pretty meaningless. Sure, the top three are running FreeBSD, but every other company on the list is running Linux (besides number 9, which is running Windows Server 2003).
Furthermore, if you look at the historical monthly data for "best datacenter", it's pretty obvious that the whole thing is hugely variable. Sure, in Feb 2011 the top three were FreeBSD sites; in April 2011, the top three were Rackspace (which runs something I've never heard of), Linux and Windows. You would imagine that if this were really a measurement of the operating system's reliability, the top ten lists would be fairly consistent; after all, it's not like the OS is changing significantly month to month. Instead, because it varies so much, this is probably mostly measuring how good the providers are at making sure data flows to and from their data center, instead of how good they are at responding to it.
And finally, the server admins who choose FreeBSD are pretty self-selecting. Someone who really knows how to tune and administer Linux is probably going to have just as stable a system as someone who really knows FreeBSD.
It makes sense, particularly whehn you consider the fact that when you run afoul of the Department of Truth, you get handed over to the Department of Corrections.
Sooo... do you recognize them by the bruises you see? Or maybe you're just too short-sighted to realize that there's other ways of teaching your child that don't involve resorting to violence?
And you're entirely sure that, if she doesn't have the Mercedes to drive around, she has some other means of transportation? Keep in mind that this is Texas we're talking about, with some of the absolute worst public transit in the nation. If she doesn't have an alternate car to drive, she may not be able to lose her job.
I mean, do you really think that driving Dad's Mercedes around is some sort of giant privilege? It's a fancy car that will get you whipped if there's so much as a dent on it when you get home.
If you look at the actual data, that's pretty well supported. Here's an article from Sept 8 showing that searches from Bing.com are 12% of the search market, searches from yahoo.com are 15% of the search market, and it's only when you talk about the agglomeration known as "Bing powered search" that Bing even gets close to 33% of the search market.
It seems like most people aren't really searching on Bing; they're searching on Google and Yahoo and their web browser, and occasionally Bing provides those results.
It's a matter of pain.
The more menus you make me sit through, the more it hurts. Keeping Bing as the default on Windows costs about 1 menu (accept the defaults) - switching to something else costs about three or four menus (it's been a while), plus you load up a slow-ass page that asks you to pick something out of a list of incomprehensible choices.
At my last job, I actually saw people using Windows XP computers with the newest version of IE who hadn't actually sat through all those menus yet - every single morning, when they opened up Internet Explorer, they would just reflexively click "Cancel" on the menu. Some of these users had been using the same computer for over a year.
So yeah. That 33% of the market is composed of a lot of people who type "google" into bing search.
Since everything is publicly available, I would love to see some examples of (particularly) Dr. Coyne or "everybody that hangs around his online forum" acting like ignorant, blinkered, petty, rabid zealots.
Surely a couple of links or maybe a timestamp from the video isn't too much to ask for?