I thought Doom 3 was boring and unimaginative. It looked good, of course, but looks alone don't make a game great. There were no interesting puzzles to solve, no original encounters and action scenarios, just more of the same dark hallways and slobbering monsters slowly thudding toward you ready to absorb a hundred hits from the rocket launcher.
HL2, by comparison, was quite a bit better just for the diversity of gamepla, with vehicles and interesting new weapons (grav gun was innovative). This made up for the heavily scripted, linear gameplay.
Now that there's competition from other amazing game engines too, I think Doom 4 is going to have to raise the bar on its gameplay if it wants to compete with new titles like Crysis. Not only did Crysis look astonishingly good, but the gameplay was hugely varied, with the sandbox option of playing missions a dozen different ways each time.
Would someone like to explain, for the benefit of us still in the dark, why internet 2 can't just be connected to the rest of the internet? I mean, if I have a machine whose hardware and software enable it to accept incoming connections and push data in and out super fast, why does it matter who connects to it? If someone who old gear connects, they're going to run at the limits of their gear. If someone with new gear like mine connects, they're going to achieve higher performance. What's the big deal?
Santa Monica, not Beverly Hills, dumbass. I lived in an apartment not much bigger than a closet less than a mile from their showroom while my wife went to UCLA - considerably closer than Beverly Hills. You obviously know nothing about the LA area.
Hopefully the retarded 'vaporware' tag will be removed from this article. $109k is quite expensive, but there is a VERY large market for luxury autombiles, many of which are MUCH more expensive that $109k. We're not just talking about Ferraris here either. High-end BMW and Mercedes, and even Cadillacs, can reach or exceed these prices with full options.
The fact that this car is in production, that there is now a showroom where the public - if not the 'masses' - can see production models in person, and that according to Motor Trend and Car & Driver the Tesla Roadster out-performs every other production car EVER in the 30-70mph range (where 95% of all 'sport' driving of sports cars takes place), and that the car has gone from concept to production in under 10 years, in addition to the fact that this is an all-electric vehicle, altogether makes this a positively ASTONISHING accomplishment. Add to that the fact this car is a proof-of-concept and is, by design, a logical stepping-stone toward a mass-market all-electric vehicle, and you've got one of the few genuine harbingers of the green technology future in action TODAY.
So fuck you assholes and your vaporware tags. Get out of mom's basement, grow some balls and some vision, and maybe - just maybe - you might one day have a shot at being involved in a project one tenth as exciting and momentous as this one.
As if this wasn't totally obvious. You hear about a handful of successful entrepreneurs who are very young, without hearing about the thousands of others who are very young who fail. The success ratio for extremely young entrepreneurs is abyssmal - no better than chance. Dot-coms are an exception, but that time has come and gone, and many of the dot-coms that have endured and actually achieved long-term success were NOT started by young kids in garages or basements; certainly, even more of those that are successful have become so because more experienced management was brought onboard early enough to keep the companies working.
As for actual technology companies, as in those innovative businesses based on applied sciences, they are unlikely to be started by people who are not accomplished in their various scientific disciplines. Computer science is still something of an exception, but it won't stay that way for long. Look at biomed, for example. How many successful biomed start-ups are done by undergrads in their dorm rooms? Zero. That's because you actually have to be trained and educated in a mature field in order to bring something new to biomed. Not so for computers - particular software - but that will not remain the case for long.
What is positively astonishing is how persistent this problem is. Look back at the thousands of linux threads over the last 10 years, and you will see the SAME complaint again and again, and again. And again. And AGAIN. It is farking ridiculous.
How hard is it to sit down and run a simple test like the (excellent) one this guy did with his girlfriend for every release?
To Ubtunu's credit, most of the fault lies with the applications and not with the OS itself. Well-designed apps like Skype make things simple and intuitive for new users. But Ubuntu itself could develop specs for developers that required basic intros, wizards, etc for introducing and explaining the simple but non-obvious stuff to new users. Conversion rates would then skyrocket.
Again, there is no logical reason why this hasn't been implemented before. The only explanation is therefore stupidity on the part of the developers - both on the OS and the app side. Cue the irony tag, given how clever most of these folks like to think they are. I guess what it shows is that being a math jock or code monkey with a stratospheric IQ doesn't make you a good UI designer any more than it makes you a suave and charming socialite.
Give me Russian-built aerospace hardware any day. Their stuff is built brick-shithouse tough. Re-entry without the heatshield? Astonishing. I've heard lots of stuff over the years about how tough the old Migs and SUs were as well, and I think the attitude would translate well to space exploration. I think NASA's approach of building craft out of gold foil and tissue paper in clean rooms, trying to turn every last ounce of the payload into instrumentation is misguided. How much does a Soyuz laucnh cost compared to a shuttle launch? Fuel and other materials are the cheapest part of the overall cost of spaceflight, so the logical thing would seem to be to build simple, cheap, super-tough craft and just launch dozens of them rather than investing heavily in individual craft. And why not launch missions with a fleet of craft, rather than just a single vehicle? When we do launch more than one vehicle, it is months apart as in the case of the Mars rovers. Doesn't make much sense.
There's a moral that applies here... how does it go again? Something about not putting all your eggs in one basket, if I recall correctly...
You know what are cheaper that voting machines? Turnstyles. And boxes. And marbles. Counting votes is easy, as long as you Keep It Simple, Stupid. When you add electronics, butterfly ballots and hanging chads, then you're inviting disaster.
With three sets of turnstyles, some marbles and some boxes you could have a virtually bullet-proof vote. First turnstyle you go through you show/type/swipe your ID and SSN. This shows you voted, and prevents you from voting more than once. Then you pick one marble (or whatever) - preferably with an RFID or barcode on it - out of a box. Then choose a door for your candidate - nice big posters of candidates right on the doors (behind plexiglass, of course). Door on the left, Obama or whoever. Door on the right, McCain, etc. As you walk through the door, you go through another turnstyle which counts candidate votes. You then put your marble in the candidate box - if it has a RFID/barcode it gets scanned at this point as a bonus. Then you walk through an exit turnstyle. The candidate turnstyles won't work for the next person until you exit, preventing duplicate votes - because some moron is sure to try to just sit there spinning the turnstyle to add votes.
This way you have a super-low-tech solution. It counts the number of voters and prevents voters from doing dupes - if you try to vote more than once at the same or different precincts, that can be corrected for by checking the SSNs later. It counts the votes per candidate three times (turnstyle, marbles in the box, RFID/barcodes), for redundancy. And it is extremely difficult to accidentally vote for the wrong person, since you have to walk through a door.
The only thing that might get compromised is privacy. This can be solved by only letter one person at a time into the little room with all the candidates' doors. Slow, but secure.
The problem with Rights is that they are inherently absolute. Absolutes are tough to deal with because they don't allow for logic or reasoning relative to context. You have a right to privacy. I have a right to free expression. I have a camera with a telephoto lens, and, voila, pictures of you are on the internet. Whose rights win? Registered sex-offenders have a right to privacy. Do I have a right to know if my new neighbor who moved in is a convicted child molester? I think so, although it's not in the constitution. Whose rights win?
Moral principles are another example. Take pacifism and non-violence. As Sam Harris points out, a single maniac with a knife could lay waste to a city of millions if it contained nothing but pacifists.
What we need - and what we have, to some degree - is a system that looks at the conflicting interests between parties and evaluates whose claims deserve priority. Rights do get violated in this way, but it is - quite obviously - the only sensible course. Our evaluations change over time, too. Smokers used to have the 'right' to smoke anywhere they pleased in their pursuit of happiness. No longer - thank goodness. Our evaluations of the rights of pedaphiles to privacy may one day change too. For now, we place importance of children's right to safety and security above the importance of pedaphiles' right to privacy.
The point is that pedaphiles being denied privacy today does NOT mean that every citizen will be denied privacy tomorrow. It may be a slippery slope, but the solution is build good steps into the slope, not to mindlessly level the whole playing field with absolute rights and eliminate any possibility of contextual logic and reasoning.
You can't just hire a bunch of folks who spent 10 years going to school and ask them to produce something for "free". Also, that electron microscope or that gene sequencer does not grow on a tree.
You could quite easily run an organization with well-trained researchers writing software or inventing drugs that had no mandate to earn a profit - it would simply be a nonprofit organization. The organization would still sell it products, and it would still pay its employees and its other expenses with the revenue from those sales. But without a mandate for profit there would be no fiduciary obligation to do things like charge 3000% mark-ups on AIDS drugs. There are organizations out there like this - credit unions, for example, compete with for-profit banks. They are legally limited (thanks to the American Bankers Association lobbyists) to serving only a narrow membership and not the general public, but we might have avoided the current banking/credit/loan crisis if the for-profit Wall Street banks had nonprofit competitors.
Bear in mind that the arguments for charging high prices to recover R&D don't hold up, whether for the software or the pharmaceutical industry. Pfizer's profits, for example, have increased by a factor of 9 in the last 7 years. Over the same period, R&D expenditure has risen only be a factor of 2.5.
A couple of things. First, beware the Green Scam. I looked closely into biodiesel-from-algae as a possible startup last year, and found a number of scammers in the market - most notably Global Green Solutions (www.globalgreensolutionsinc.com) whose technology claims turned out to be not only ambitious by thermodynamically impossible: over 80% total efficiency. The physical limit of photosynthesis is under 20%.
Still, algae biodiesel is probably the way to go because it can use seawater in concrete raceway ponds paved onto otherwise unarable land. Thermal depolymerization looks good too, but we have to wait to see the long-term numbers for the Butterball Turkey test plant.
It powered South Africa during the Apartheid regime.
Not completely. A number of Gulf countries illegally supplied oil to South Africa during aparteid. In Oman, this turned brothers Omar and Qais Zawawi into billionaires.
You're doing a lot of barking up the wrong trees. Also, I'm guessing from your comments that you've not got any experience with manufacturing start-ups.
Starting a business based on a patentable idea largely means you're making something, i.e. you're not providing a service (since services lack the attribute of property to make them protectable). Starting a new, non-service-based business is very expensive relative to the median income of a 4-person family in the United States. It is not completely impossible to start a cottage-industry manufacturing business out of your home and grow - I have done it myself - but it is extremely difficult, and it's all the more difficult to compete with large companies whose relative costs are four or five orders of magnitude lower. As an obvious example, patent filing fees for my small business represented 2 months' net income, whereas the same patent fees represent perhaps 2 seconds of net income for Google. Google might be a nice company willing to treat patent-holders fairly, license good ideas in good faith, and settle disputes quickly and responsibly. But if so, Google is the one shark in the sea that is a vegetarian. The burden of proof, I'm afraid, is on you to show that large corporations do readily license patents from individuals in good faith. In my experience, as I said in my previous post, they go to great lengths to circumvent patents and if a dispute is made they go to equally great lengths to protract the litigation process in an effort to defeat the IP owner in financial terms.
If you cannot see how and why this stifles individual innovation and gives an advantage to large organizations, well, the conversation is basically over before it has begun.
These software behemoths are like Emacs with the brakes removed - allmost an operating system by themselves.
Funny how creating a powerful, intuitive, user-friendly GUI for OSs is what catapulted computers from being nifty novelties into being essential productivity tools from the top to the bottom of society in every sphere, from social to economic. Funnier still is how many bozos are too stupid to realize this, still think command-line interfaces are where the cool kids hang out, etc. It's ridiculous. Get. Your. Farking. Interface. Sorted.
Compared to the challenge of creating the tools themselves, the task is trivial; but it takes the skillset of a designer, not a math jock or code monkey.
It's fine to condemn frivolous patent trolling, but one important part of the reality is that it is often enormously expensive to implement a genuinely innovative idea. Innovation therefore only goes into production when huge sums of money support the organization behind it, and this is profoundly stifling of individual invention and creativity. Individuals with good ideas often cannot realize any rewards for their ideas except through patenting and litigation, since it is notoriously difficult for a individual inventor or innovator to secure a licensing agreement with a producer ahead of the fact. In absence of that option, post-facto licensing in the form of patent lawsuits is the only alternative. It sucks, but that's the way it is. If large companies were more willing to honestly license good ideas rather than attempt to circvumvent them or win wars of attrition against individuals through protracted litigation, there would be far less need of patent trolling.
I fear that the ostracized members of the scientific community will make the evolutionists look just as much like religious zealots trying to purge their ranks of people with open minds.
I think your fears are unfounded. With a tiny handful of exceptions such as Ben Stein and Francis Collins, the vast majority of people who are not grotesquely ignorant fully accept evolution as fact based on the absolutely overwhelming mountain of evidence that exists for it across all scientific fields from astronomy to zoology. There is no more danger of 'evolutionists' coming to be seen as dogmatic zealots than there is for 'arithmetists' coming to be seen as dogmatic zealots for not respecting the view that relationships between numbers are not logical but rather "God's Magic."
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it.
No, it is not necessary to respect someone who is woefully ignorant. You can humor or tolerate a person of this sort, and treat them with compassion as you try to educate them, but respect is absolutely the wrong word. We do not respect ignorance. If someone believes women are inherently intellectually inferior to men - despite vast scientific evidence to the contrary - because their cultural background and magic books tell them so, we do not respect this belief. We condemn it as ignorance and attempt to rectify the problem through education. If someone is racist because their religion tells them a minority is inherently inferior and subhuman, as Mormonism did up until the eve of the Civil Rights Act, we do not respect this belief. We condemn it as ignorance and attempt to rectify the problem through education.
Education and dispellation of ignorance does not preclude kindness, but ignorance is not an attribute deserving of respect under any circumstances.
Creationism/ID is not on equal footing with evolution. It is transparently false, and we must treat it as so. It is necessary to correctly identify both truth and falsehood, otherwise we live delusional lives deatched from reality - the consequences of which are almost uniformly negative.
There's nothing morally wrong with eating meat. The moral problems are with how the meat is grown. Growing meat in a vat would be nice, but what PETA ignores is that if this was the only way we ever farmed meat, then billions of creatures would never even have the privilege of existing in the first place.
The real moral issue is about suffering: do farmed animals suffer while they live or suffer while they die? If so, then farming is immoral. If not, well, then it's hard to argue farming is immoral. All things die. It may be morally wrong for humans to decide when an animal should die, but that's a much harder issue to resolve. What is easy to resolve is that animals should live comfortable, pleasant, healthy, hygenic lives and then be slaughtered instantly and painlessly without any prior fear or anxiety. This is readily achievable, though it is more expensive than growing animals in filthy boxes and pumping them full of drugs. Farmed in this way, it's pretty difficult to categorically condemn livestock agriculture.
RTFA before you mod me down: Ben Stein wrote and produced this movie. Scientific American specifically criticizes this film for quoting Darwin out of context. It's front and center on www.sciam.com.
Ben Stein and the other semi-literate creationist nutjobs will come crawling out of the woodwork to scour these works for out-of-context soundbites in 5... 4... 3...
Slashdot Mirror
Sequestration of carbon in biomass works pretty well too. And last time I checked, planting trees was a well-proven technology.
HL2, by comparison, was quite a bit better just for the diversity of gamepla, with vehicles and interesting new weapons (grav gun was innovative). This made up for the heavily scripted, linear gameplay.
Now that there's competition from other amazing game engines too, I think Doom 4 is going to have to raise the bar on its gameplay if it wants to compete with new titles like Crysis. Not only did Crysis look astonishingly good, but the gameplay was hugely varied, with the sandbox option of playing missions a dozen different ways each time.
Would someone like to explain, for the benefit of us still in the dark, why internet 2 can't just be connected to the rest of the internet? I mean, if I have a machine whose hardware and software enable it to accept incoming connections and push data in and out super fast, why does it matter who connects to it? If someone who old gear connects, they're going to run at the limits of their gear. If someone with new gear like mine connects, they're going to achieve higher performance. What's the big deal?
Yup. It's called legislation. It's what democracy is for.
Back down into the basement you go now.
Why, are you one of the brainless pricks who called the Tesla Roadster vaporware?
The fact that this car is in production, that there is now a showroom where the public - if not the 'masses' - can see production models in person, and that according to Motor Trend and Car & Driver the Tesla Roadster out-performs every other production car EVER in the 30-70mph range (where 95% of all 'sport' driving of sports cars takes place), and that the car has gone from concept to production in under 10 years, in addition to the fact that this is an all-electric vehicle, altogether makes this a positively ASTONISHING accomplishment. Add to that the fact this car is a proof-of-concept and is, by design, a logical stepping-stone toward a mass-market all-electric vehicle, and you've got one of the few genuine harbingers of the green technology future in action TODAY.
So fuck you assholes and your vaporware tags. Get out of mom's basement, grow some balls and some vision, and maybe - just maybe - you might one day have a shot at being involved in a project one tenth as exciting and momentous as this one.
As for actual technology companies, as in those innovative businesses based on applied sciences, they are unlikely to be started by people who are not accomplished in their various scientific disciplines. Computer science is still something of an exception, but it won't stay that way for long. Look at biomed, for example. How many successful biomed start-ups are done by undergrads in their dorm rooms? Zero. That's because you actually have to be trained and educated in a mature field in order to bring something new to biomed. Not so for computers - particular software - but that will not remain the case for long.
How hard is it to sit down and run a simple test like the (excellent) one this guy did with his girlfriend for every release?
To Ubtunu's credit, most of the fault lies with the applications and not with the OS itself. Well-designed apps like Skype make things simple and intuitive for new users. But Ubuntu itself could develop specs for developers that required basic intros, wizards, etc for introducing and explaining the simple but non-obvious stuff to new users. Conversion rates would then skyrocket.
Again, there is no logical reason why this hasn't been implemented before. The only explanation is therefore stupidity on the part of the developers - both on the OS and the app side. Cue the irony tag, given how clever most of these folks like to think they are. I guess what it shows is that being a math jock or code monkey with a stratospheric IQ doesn't make you a good UI designer any more than it makes you a suave and charming socialite.
There's a moral that applies here... how does it go again? Something about not putting all your eggs in one basket, if I recall correctly...
At least their technical support calls won't be long distance...
With three sets of turnstyles, some marbles and some boxes you could have a virtually bullet-proof vote. First turnstyle you go through you show/type/swipe your ID and SSN. This shows you voted, and prevents you from voting more than once. Then you pick one marble (or whatever) - preferably with an RFID or barcode on it - out of a box. Then choose a door for your candidate - nice big posters of candidates right on the doors (behind plexiglass, of course). Door on the left, Obama or whoever. Door on the right, McCain, etc. As you walk through the door, you go through another turnstyle which counts candidate votes. You then put your marble in the candidate box - if it has a RFID/barcode it gets scanned at this point as a bonus. Then you walk through an exit turnstyle. The candidate turnstyles won't work for the next person until you exit, preventing duplicate votes - because some moron is sure to try to just sit there spinning the turnstyle to add votes.
This way you have a super-low-tech solution. It counts the number of voters and prevents voters from doing dupes - if you try to vote more than once at the same or different precincts, that can be corrected for by checking the SSNs later. It counts the votes per candidate three times (turnstyle, marbles in the box, RFID/barcodes), for redundancy. And it is extremely difficult to accidentally vote for the wrong person, since you have to walk through a door.
The only thing that might get compromised is privacy. This can be solved by only letter one person at a time into the little room with all the candidates' doors. Slow, but secure.
Moral principles are another example. Take pacifism and non-violence. As Sam Harris points out, a single maniac with a knife could lay waste to a city of millions if it contained nothing but pacifists.
What we need - and what we have, to some degree - is a system that looks at the conflicting interests between parties and evaluates whose claims deserve priority. Rights do get violated in this way, but it is - quite obviously - the only sensible course. Our evaluations change over time, too. Smokers used to have the 'right' to smoke anywhere they pleased in their pursuit of happiness. No longer - thank goodness. Our evaluations of the rights of pedaphiles to privacy may one day change too. For now, we place importance of children's right to safety and security above the importance of pedaphiles' right to privacy.
The point is that pedaphiles being denied privacy today does NOT mean that every citizen will be denied privacy tomorrow. It may be a slippery slope, but the solution is build good steps into the slope, not to mindlessly level the whole playing field with absolute rights and eliminate any possibility of contextual logic and reasoning.
You could quite easily run an organization with well-trained researchers writing software or inventing drugs that had no mandate to earn a profit - it would simply be a nonprofit organization. The organization would still sell it products, and it would still pay its employees and its other expenses with the revenue from those sales. But without a mandate for profit there would be no fiduciary obligation to do things like charge 3000% mark-ups on AIDS drugs. There are organizations out there like this - credit unions, for example, compete with for-profit banks. They are legally limited (thanks to the American Bankers Association lobbyists) to serving only a narrow membership and not the general public, but we might have avoided the current banking/credit/loan crisis if the for-profit Wall Street banks had nonprofit competitors.
Bear in mind that the arguments for charging high prices to recover R&D don't hold up, whether for the software or the pharmaceutical industry. Pfizer's profits, for example, have increased by a factor of 9 in the last 7 years. Over the same period, R&D expenditure has risen only be a factor of 2.5.
Still, algae biodiesel is probably the way to go because it can use seawater in concrete raceway ponds paved onto otherwise unarable land. Thermal depolymerization looks good too, but we have to wait to see the long-term numbers for the Butterball Turkey test plant.
It powered South Africa during the Apartheid regime.
Not completely. A number of Gulf countries illegally supplied oil to South Africa during aparteid. In Oman, this turned brothers Omar and Qais Zawawi into billionaires.
Better to read a whole post before replying to it.
Starting a business based on a patentable idea largely means you're making something, i.e. you're not providing a service (since services lack the attribute of property to make them protectable). Starting a new, non-service-based business is very expensive relative to the median income of a 4-person family in the United States. It is not completely impossible to start a cottage-industry manufacturing business out of your home and grow - I have done it myself - but it is extremely difficult, and it's all the more difficult to compete with large companies whose relative costs are four or five orders of magnitude lower. As an obvious example, patent filing fees for my small business represented 2 months' net income, whereas the same patent fees represent perhaps 2 seconds of net income for Google. Google might be a nice company willing to treat patent-holders fairly, license good ideas in good faith, and settle disputes quickly and responsibly. But if so, Google is the one shark in the sea that is a vegetarian. The burden of proof, I'm afraid, is on you to show that large corporations do readily license patents from individuals in good faith. In my experience, as I said in my previous post, they go to great lengths to circumvent patents and if a dispute is made they go to equally great lengths to protract the litigation process in an effort to defeat the IP owner in financial terms.
If you cannot see how and why this stifles individual innovation and gives an advantage to large organizations, well, the conversation is basically over before it has begun.
Funny how creating a powerful, intuitive, user-friendly GUI for OSs is what catapulted computers from being nifty novelties into being essential productivity tools from the top to the bottom of society in every sphere, from social to economic. Funnier still is how many bozos are too stupid to realize this, still think command-line interfaces are where the cool kids hang out, etc. It's ridiculous. Get. Your. Farking. Interface. Sorted.
Compared to the challenge of creating the tools themselves, the task is trivial; but it takes the skillset of a designer, not a math jock or code monkey.
It's fine to condemn frivolous patent trolling, but one important part of the reality is that it is often enormously expensive to implement a genuinely innovative idea. Innovation therefore only goes into production when huge sums of money support the organization behind it, and this is profoundly stifling of individual invention and creativity. Individuals with good ideas often cannot realize any rewards for their ideas except through patenting and litigation, since it is notoriously difficult for a individual inventor or innovator to secure a licensing agreement with a producer ahead of the fact. In absence of that option, post-facto licensing in the form of patent lawsuits is the only alternative. It sucks, but that's the way it is. If large companies were more willing to honestly license good ideas rather than attempt to circvumvent them or win wars of attrition against individuals through protracted litigation, there would be far less need of patent trolling.
I think your fears are unfounded. With a tiny handful of exceptions such as Ben Stein and Francis Collins, the vast majority of people who are not grotesquely ignorant fully accept evolution as fact based on the absolutely overwhelming mountain of evidence that exists for it across all scientific fields from astronomy to zoology. There is no more danger of 'evolutionists' coming to be seen as dogmatic zealots than there is for 'arithmetists' coming to be seen as dogmatic zealots for not respecting the view that relationships between numbers are not logical but rather "God's Magic."
If you have friends who believe in Creationism, respect them and provide for them sound arguments against it.
No, it is not necessary to respect someone who is woefully ignorant. You can humor or tolerate a person of this sort, and treat them with compassion as you try to educate them, but respect is absolutely the wrong word. We do not respect ignorance. If someone believes women are inherently intellectually inferior to men - despite vast scientific evidence to the contrary - because their cultural background and magic books tell them so, we do not respect this belief. We condemn it as ignorance and attempt to rectify the problem through education. If someone is racist because their religion tells them a minority is inherently inferior and subhuman, as Mormonism did up until the eve of the Civil Rights Act, we do not respect this belief. We condemn it as ignorance and attempt to rectify the problem through education.
Education and dispellation of ignorance does not preclude kindness, but ignorance is not an attribute deserving of respect under any circumstances.
Creationism/ID is not on equal footing with evolution. It is transparently false, and we must treat it as so. It is necessary to correctly identify both truth and falsehood, otherwise we live delusional lives deatched from reality - the consequences of which are almost uniformly negative.
The real moral issue is about suffering: do farmed animals suffer while they live or suffer while they die? If so, then farming is immoral. If not, well, then it's hard to argue farming is immoral. All things die. It may be morally wrong for humans to decide when an animal should die, but that's a much harder issue to resolve. What is easy to resolve is that animals should live comfortable, pleasant, healthy, hygenic lives and then be slaughtered instantly and painlessly without any prior fear or anxiety. This is readily achievable, though it is more expensive than growing animals in filthy boxes and pumping them full of drugs. Farmed in this way, it's pretty difficult to categorically condemn livestock agriculture.
So graphene is the future of computers? Maybe we can sequester all our carbon that way!
You must be new here. images.google.com is your friend.
Get a brain indeed, morans.
Ben Stein and the other semi-literate creationist nutjobs will come crawling out of the woodwork to scour these works for out-of-context soundbites in 5 ... 4 ... 3 ...