Insurance for NASA rocket launches isn't and cheaper than for private launches, so this isn't an issue of private vs. public efficiency, it's just a question of who bears the risk: the feds or the organization launching the rocket. Since those used to always be the same organization, it wasn't a complicated question in the past. It is now.
That is exactly the point. The only way for the private sector to be more economical than the public sector in launching space craft is if the private sector doesn't have to bear the full cost (including insurance). The real question is whether or not it is cheaper for the government to pay somebody to launch spacecraft on it's behalf AND pay for insurance and potential damages versus just doing the whole thing itself? Chances are, without a profit motive, it will be cheaper to do it itself.
Look at the nuclear industry to see how this works. The cost of an accident can easily be in the hundreds of billions range and no-one can afford that kind of insurance so the government covers it. Otherwise, they argue, we would not have nuclear power, or it would be "less efficient" and somehow cost more.
A public utility is a different activity than launching a payload or people into space. Also, all of those nuclear power plants carry insurance, as do coal, hydro, etc. Lloyds insures most of them. It may be true that the government gets involved with the cleanup, but that is not because they weren't insured. They get involved with the cleanup because it is a public safety issue by that time.
Electric companies are required to maintain insurance and/or reserves to cover power plant accidents, including nuclear ones. It is paid for through the rate they charge to the consumer for electricity. A space launch, though, does have hundreds of thousands of people to spread the cost over, like a utility does. Therefore, the insurance makes the launch cost prohibitive if the government doesn't pay for it. So, in the end, the power plant and rocket launches are not alike at all.
The problem is the sue-happy state of affairs. If liability were genuinely limited to real, financial damage done by a failed launch, it would be possible to get private insurance. As long as courts are willing to award outrageous sums for stupid things, the liability is simply not calculable - and no private insurer will touch it. You know, things like "You launched, the smoke drifted thousands of miles over my city, I have lung cancer, it's your fault".
As a "small government" type, it pains me to say this, but until genuine tort-reform happens, there is little alternative to government involvement.
I, too, am for smaller government, but, if a business cannot be in business because the risk is too high (ie. cannot get insurance), I don't think that is the government's job to provide the insurance any more that it is the government's job to provide insurance to individuals because they cannot get it. If it is truly to high of a risk for a for-profit enterprise to enter into, then that is the type of activity that the government should be taking on, assuming it values the activity.
We always hear about how the private sector can do things cheaper and more efficiently than the government, and very often it is true. But for space launches, that does not appear to be the case as the cost of managing the risk is prohibitive. It would make more sense to privatize those activities that are actually profitable to privatize and leave those that are for the common good under government control.
It seems that if commercial space vehicles need the government to cover the risk, then they aren't really commercial. Commercial space ventures should pay their own way, including insuring against catastrophic failure. If that makes the commercial endeavour too expensive, then the market would dictate that commercial space ventures aren't feasible and it should be left to the government. That might not be what people want to hear, but if the private sector really can't do it cheaper than the government, then the government should do it.
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
Funny, we just hired two COBOL programmers at $80K each to maintain some legacy mainframe systems. When cloud technology can permit hard core data entry, say for insurance records or the like, then I'll worry. But until then, throughput is more important than an app being able to run from wherever in the cloud. Besides, in my line of business. We don't run apps. We run programs that process millions of secure transactions. We have data entry clerks that key documents and data that can't be captured electronically.
You would probably say that we have our own private cloud. I would say that we have our own methods to allow secure access to our internal systems. By the way, I would predict that there will be COBOL programmers still programming even after cloud computing has been replaced with the next marketing hyped phrase.
What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace...
It depends. Are we at economic full employment with american workers in those positions? If not, why would want to encourage businesses to hire non-american workers? On the other hand, if we are at economic full employment with american workers in those positions, then by all means, fill the empty positions with skilled non-americans.
Given that I am clearly talking of 2-way interactive videoconferencing, the instructor answers their questions.
Do you really think, even with two way interactive videoconferencing, that an instructor with 1000 students participating is going to be able to effectively answer questions? Even if you cut the size down to 100 students a 1 to 100 teacher student ratio is anything but good, particularly in grade and high schools.
I agree that the fundamentals need to come first. The reason why you see technology pushed, is because there is not enough money made available to do the things you mention above, and technology is actually cheaper than the above. So they are looking towards technology to help cut costs by being more financially efficient than paying a person who can make money equally as well actually using their skills as they can teaching. Sometimes they get their hopes too high, sure.
Technology may be cheaper, but if it doesn't help with learning the fundamentals it is like saving money by purchasing cat food when it is on sale, even if one does not own a cat. It is a false economy. I think the real reason that technology is pushed is because it is something tangible and concrete. It is easy to say to the public that we need $1M to upgrade computers so that students can compete in the 21st century (even though there is no evidence that the computers will allow that) versus we need $1M to provide remedial math and reading services so that students can have even a remote possibility of getting a job once out of school.
Neither does amputating a frostbitten finger, but you can be damn sure if I ever need that done I'll opt for the well equipped OR over the guy with a pack of ice and a cleaver.
That is only assuming the resources you are wanting are available. If you are on the north face of some mountain, you probably will take what you can get. The same with education. Resources are not unlimited and when they are re-allocated for high tech programs that can't really deliver on what they promise at the expense of basic education which does, the overall education system loses.
In the 50s and 60s and 70s the filmstrip and movie projector were the high tech of the day and yet, it was not acceptable to have kids sit in classrooms all day just watching them. They were used as tools to supplement the teaching/learning (except in PE where they were usually used in lieu of teaching). Back then, technology was a means to an end. Today, however, it is the end itself.
Back in the 90s, my wife taught computers in the junior high (it was a separate lab back then). She would work with the teachers on what they were teaching and adapt her class to supplement theirs. For instance, if in science they were studying Boyles law (pv=nrRT), in her class they used spreadsheets, as a tool, to calculate how long a scuba tank would last at various depths. Today, however, the science class has an "app" for that, where you just type in the air supply and the depth and it spits out the answer. So, if your goal is just to have an answer, today's method is much more efficient. On the other hand, if your goal is to understand the relationship in a gas to volume, temperature and pressure, the old way seems a much better way to use technology. Now, if I was going to go scuba diving, on the otherhand, I'd use the app.
My point being, technology in the classroom should be used to supplement the teaching, not replace it. If we aren't careful, we will have a new generation of adults who are very good at pushing buttons to get an answer with no grasp of the knowledge required to come up with that answer. I think there was an old Star Trek episode about that.
I can't imagine how we ever go by prior to all of this technology in the classroom? I received my master's using a slide rule and my doctorate with a calculator that cost as much as today's entry level PCs and yet, somehow, we and all of my fellow classmates managed to learn.
I'm all for technology, but throwing technology at a broken education system isn't going to fix it. Teaching kids to do powerpoint isn't very useful if they can't deal with real math and science (let alone read). Distance learning sounds good on paper, but with 1000 students watching passively, who answers their questions? Not the instructor 1000 miles away.
If you want to improve education in the US so that the country can be competitive with other countries, you need to adopt strategies these other countries use, like having teachers who are actually educated in the fields they are teaching instead of having a generic teaching certificate; like having actual homework, longer school days/years and yes, pushing the brightest students into programs where they can excel instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator.
None of those things require high tech solutions. They just require determination by educators, parents and students to turn a failing system around. Somehow, we educated generations of individuals who put men on the moon, built space shuttles and spliced genes and all of that was without high tech classrooms.
Technology is just a tool, one of many. It's not a solution.
Schools needs for relevant content from the internet is fairly limited. Moreover, most of the content in question is static. This is the perfect place to deploy a forward proxy cache like squid.. this can reduce the need for expensive fat pipes to the internet.
Or just use real books. Yes, books are expensive, but if they last three years between replacements (and often go five), that cost per student goes down. However, even after the initial cost of going to these high speeds per 1,000 students, there is still the cost of maintenance of equipment and salaries. If cost is a factor, then fat pipes is not the solution.
I got my first computer at the age of 8 when my disabled mother received her back pay. It had an AMD k6-2, 64mb ram, and a 6gb hard drive, which honestly wasn't too shabby for 1998. My first PC game was Independence War, a space sim which you could mod if you had some knowledge of coding. So I kind of picked it up, and playing video games led me to go to school now for Computer Science to learn how to make the damn things.
It's not all bad.
No, it's not, but then you aren't the type the article was being critical of, because you used it to do something constructive.
Congratulations, btw, from overcoming what could have been a very different route taken in life.
As a consultant who works with govt often, I really really hope that microsoft wins this battle. Right now all our document production is office based, and if we need to account for an entirely new office suite (google docs) then it's another magnitude of (nonbillable) complexity.
If I understand what you are saying, it is to keep using a broken system, because fixing it is too much of a pain. I would normally expect to hear that from politicians, but not the consultants themselves.
What I would like to see is the government demand open formats so that they aren't locked in to any one vendor's product because the conversion cost of the documents themselves is too high.
well, you're exactly right. if your word file is a grocery list, then it doesn't matter if its.txt,.docx, or whatever. But when your files start to get extraordinarily complex (hundred+ pages, tables, figs, headers, footnotes, track changes, comments), then translating from.docx to something else will be a mess and you might as well give up.
Maybe that's the strongest reason for them not to be in proprietary formats.
It is easy to circumvent the EULA. Either have your minor child install the software, as minors cannot enter into a binding contract or have somebody else install/set the computer up. That way, you can honestly say that you never saw the EULA nor agreed to it.
This would be a bonanza for Ubuntu or any other linux distro. They could advertise something like:
Buying a new PC shouldn't mean having to automatically giving up your legal rights if something is wrong with it. At Ubuntu (or Redhat, or Suse, etc.) we believe in freedom. Freedom to use the software we provide however you want to use it. Freedom to build on the software we provide however you want to build on it. Freedom to keep using the software we provide regardless of what we or anyone else decide to do in the future. At Ubuntu we believe that when you buy a computer, it is yours to do with as you wish, not as we wish you would. Ubuntu Linux - Freedom
Again, you can pretty much put in what ever Linux distro you want, but since Ubuntu is pushing the desktop market, that is why I used them.
Yes, and those Christians have slaughtered tens of millions of "unbelievers" over the centuries. Hitler had nothing on the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to body count.
Actually, no. Mainly because there weren't tens of millions of people in the world where the christians had influence. However, Between Hitler and Stalin, the godless leaders of the 20th century sure proved that lack of religion is no panacea, either.
"Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death"
Is the actual quote ( new international version ( 1984 ) ).
And it was a restriction. In otherwords, okay, you can put someone to death for cursing their mother or father, but not for just back talking. And by cursing they don't mean f*ck you. They mean calling down God to go after them.
"Most Christian sects have no problems with Darwin or evolution" - read up on the recent Republican candidates thoughts and quotes and then you'll rethink that statement
Mitt Romney "“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe, and I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”
His fatal mistake is to assume that creationists care about evidence.
Of course, those evolutionary scientists supporting the some 30 odd current theories of evolution might dispute or question various types of evidence, too. The study of evolution is not some nice and tidy field.
There is a group of people who do not care about the evidence - the Bible says so, so there it is. That's not going to change just because you amass more evidence.
On the other hand, there are a group of people who believe in God who also believe evolution was the method God used to create all of the different kinds of life we see. That is not something you can prove or disprove, therefore it's not in the realm of science. In other words, you want people to keep their religions hands off science, great. Keep your scientific hands off God. They don't have to be mortal enemies.
You probably don't really want religion to keep its hands of science. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental private funder of the sciences. That is religion funding a lot of research. I am not a Catholic, but not everyone who admits to having a belief in God is anti-science. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Most "religious scientists" that I've heard about believe that either 1) God set it in motion and then let it go or 2) God set it in motion and then subtly influenced everything thereafter. Very few of them take the Bible at its most literal - God created everything 6 thousand years ago, etc.
No scientist, religious or otherwise takes the bible literally. You have to remember that even that Catholic Church (Latin and Eastern), the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion all except evolution. It is only a small minority group of "Christians" who take the story of creation literally instead of how it was meant to be: As an explanation to a primitive people on how they go there. Not as a scientific discourse.
As I mentioned in another post, the Bible also talks about the four corners of the world, but fundamentalist Christians who believe the world is only 6,000 years old, accept that it is round instead of square. So, if one part can be an allegory, why can't another?
Meh, God just plaed all that there to test our faith... The denial will continue.
Or God is simply testing our sense of reason that we were imbued with when we were created in His image. For instance, when in the Bible God talks about the four corners of the earth, surely He knew that he had made it round. Or is that another just testing our faith?
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Insurance for NASA rocket launches isn't and cheaper than for private launches, so this isn't an issue of private vs. public efficiency, it's just a question of who bears the risk: the feds or the organization launching the rocket. Since those used to always be the same organization, it wasn't a complicated question in the past. It is now.
That is exactly the point. The only way for the private sector to be more economical than the public sector in launching space craft is if the private sector doesn't have to bear the full cost (including insurance). The real question is whether or not it is cheaper for the government to pay somebody to launch spacecraft on it's behalf AND pay for insurance and potential damages versus just doing the whole thing itself? Chances are, without a profit motive, it will be cheaper to do it itself.
Look at the nuclear industry to see how this works. The cost of an accident can easily be in the hundreds of billions range and no-one can afford that kind of insurance so the government covers it. Otherwise, they argue, we would not have nuclear power, or it would be "less efficient" and somehow cost more.
A public utility is a different activity than launching a payload or people into space. Also, all of those nuclear power plants carry insurance, as do coal, hydro, etc. Lloyds insures most of them. It may be true that the government gets involved with the cleanup, but that is not because they weren't insured. They get involved with the cleanup because it is a public safety issue by that time.
Electric companies are required to maintain insurance and/or reserves to cover power plant accidents, including nuclear ones. It is paid for through the rate they charge to the consumer for electricity. A space launch, though, does have hundreds of thousands of people to spread the cost over, like a utility does. Therefore, the insurance makes the launch cost prohibitive if the government doesn't pay for it. So, in the end, the power plant and rocket launches are not alike at all.
The problem is the sue-happy state of affairs. If liability were genuinely limited to real, financial damage done by a failed launch, it would be possible to get private insurance. As long as courts are willing to award outrageous sums for stupid things, the liability is simply not calculable - and no private insurer will touch it. You know, things like "You launched, the smoke drifted thousands of miles over my city, I have lung cancer, it's your fault".
As a "small government" type, it pains me to say this, but until genuine tort-reform happens, there is little alternative to government involvement.
I, too, am for smaller government, but, if a business cannot be in business because the risk is too high (ie. cannot get insurance), I don't think that is the government's job to provide the insurance any more that it is the government's job to provide insurance to individuals because they cannot get it. If it is truly to high of a risk for a for-profit enterprise to enter into, then that is the type of activity that the government should be taking on, assuming it values the activity.
We always hear about how the private sector can do things cheaper and more efficiently than the government, and very often it is true. But for space launches, that does not appear to be the case as the cost of managing the risk is prohibitive. It would make more sense to privatize those activities that are actually profitable to privatize and leave those that are for the common good under government control.
It seems that if commercial space vehicles need the government to cover the risk, then they aren't really commercial. Commercial space ventures should pay their own way, including insuring against catastrophic failure. If that makes the commercial endeavour too expensive, then the market would dictate that commercial space ventures aren't feasible and it should be left to the government. That might not be what people want to hear, but if the private sector really can't do it cheaper than the government, then the government should do it.
There's a term used called "cloudwashing" that covers inappropriate use of the term cloud, but cloud technology is real and every company in tech is pouring money into this transition.
Anyone who has worked in IT in large enterprise has seen the benefits of virtualization in action; there's an enormous amount of capex and opex savings, and VMware basically dominates the market. There's a reason 99%+ of the Fortune 500 have an ELA with them.
The same principles behind that revolution are now reaching into the public space, and looking to blend the private IT compute farms with public cloud resources as well; plus more apps being deployed as SaaS, and more apps being developed on PaaS stacks; all the technology of big data (eg, Mongo), messaging (eg RabbitMQ), and so on just form a virtuous circle with this trend. Apps become more able to run in generic clouds without requiring very specific hardware control, and thus IaaS clouds become more attractive.
If you're in system, network, storage, or security administration, or IT of any sort, and you're not learning about this, you're basically a COBOL programmer waiting to be put out to farm.
Funny, we just hired two COBOL programmers at $80K each to maintain some legacy mainframe systems. When cloud technology can permit hard core data entry, say for insurance records or the like, then I'll worry. But until then, throughput is more important than an app being able to run from wherever in the cloud. Besides, in my line of business. We don't run apps. We run programs that process millions of secure transactions. We have data entry clerks that key documents and data that can't be captured electronically.
You would probably say that we have our own private cloud. I would say that we have our own methods to allow secure access to our internal systems. By the way, I would predict that there will be COBOL programmers still programming even after cloud computing has been replaced with the next marketing hyped phrase.
What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace...
It depends. Are we at economic full employment with american workers in those positions? If not, why would want to encourage businesses to hire non-american workers? On the other hand, if we are at economic full employment with american workers in those positions, then by all means, fill the empty positions with skilled non-americans.
Given that I am clearly talking of 2-way interactive videoconferencing, the instructor answers their questions.
Do you really think, even with two way interactive videoconferencing, that an instructor with 1000 students participating is going to be able to effectively answer questions? Even if you cut the size down to 100 students a 1 to 100 teacher student ratio is anything but good, particularly in grade and high schools.
I agree that the fundamentals need to come first. The reason why you see technology pushed, is because there is not enough money made available to do the things you mention above, and technology is actually cheaper than the above. So they are looking towards technology to help cut costs by being more financially efficient than paying a person who can make money equally as well actually using their skills as they can teaching. Sometimes they get their hopes too high, sure.
Technology may be cheaper, but if it doesn't help with learning the fundamentals it is like saving money by purchasing cat food when it is on sale, even if one does not own a cat. It is a false economy. I think the real reason that technology is pushed is because it is something tangible and concrete. It is easy to say to the public that we need $1M to upgrade computers so that students can compete in the 21st century (even though there is no evidence that the computers will allow that) versus we need $1M to provide remedial math and reading services so that students can have even a remote possibility of getting a job once out of school.
Neither does amputating a frostbitten finger, but you can be damn sure if I ever need that done I'll opt for the well equipped OR over the guy with a pack of ice and a cleaver.
That is only assuming the resources you are wanting are available. If you are on the north face of some mountain, you probably will take what you can get. The same with education. Resources are not unlimited and when they are re-allocated for high tech programs that can't really deliver on what they promise at the expense of basic education which does, the overall education system loses.
In the 50s and 60s and 70s the filmstrip and movie projector were the high tech of the day and yet, it was not acceptable to have kids sit in classrooms all day just watching them. They were used as tools to supplement the teaching/learning (except in PE where they were usually used in lieu of teaching). Back then, technology was a means to an end. Today, however, it is the end itself.
Back in the 90s, my wife taught computers in the junior high (it was a separate lab back then). She would work with the teachers on what they were teaching and adapt her class to supplement theirs. For instance, if in science they were studying Boyles law (pv=nrRT), in her class they used spreadsheets, as a tool, to calculate how long a scuba tank would last at various depths. Today, however, the science class has an "app" for that, where you just type in the air supply and the depth and it spits out the answer. So, if your goal is just to have an answer, today's method is much more efficient. On the other hand, if your goal is to understand the relationship in a gas to volume, temperature and pressure, the old way seems a much better way to use technology. Now, if I was going to go scuba diving, on the otherhand, I'd use the app.
My point being, technology in the classroom should be used to supplement the teaching, not replace it. If we aren't careful, we will have a new generation of adults who are very good at pushing buttons to get an answer with no grasp of the knowledge required to come up with that answer. I think there was an old Star Trek episode about that.
I can't imagine how we ever go by prior to all of this technology in the classroom? I received my master's using a slide rule and my doctorate with a calculator that cost as much as today's entry level PCs and yet, somehow, we and all of my fellow classmates managed to learn.
I'm all for technology, but throwing technology at a broken education system isn't going to fix it. Teaching kids to do powerpoint isn't very useful if they can't deal with real math and science (let alone read). Distance learning sounds good on paper, but with 1000 students watching passively, who answers their questions? Not the instructor 1000 miles away.
If you want to improve education in the US so that the country can be competitive with other countries, you need to adopt strategies these other countries use, like having teachers who are actually educated in the fields they are teaching instead of having a generic teaching certificate; like having actual homework, longer school days/years and yes, pushing the brightest students into programs where they can excel instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator.
None of those things require high tech solutions. They just require determination by educators, parents and students to turn a failing system around. Somehow, we educated generations of individuals who put men on the moon, built space shuttles and spliced genes and all of that was without high tech classrooms.
Technology is just a tool, one of many. It's not a solution.
Schools needs for relevant content from the internet is fairly limited. Moreover, most of the content in question is static. This is the perfect place to deploy a forward proxy cache like squid.. this can reduce the need for expensive fat pipes to the internet.
Or just use real books. Yes, books are expensive, but if they last three years between replacements (and often go five), that cost per student goes down. However, even after the initial cost of going to these high speeds per 1,000 students, there is still the cost of maintenance of equipment and salaries. If cost is a factor, then fat pipes is not the solution.
Do they have any idea what the price is for that kind of Internet connection?
I'd be looking at huge caching servers first.
Kind of kills the idea of textbooks being too expensive.
If the problem is the administration, look at teaching in private schools or Catholic School Systems.
I got my first computer at the age of 8 when my disabled mother received her back pay. It had an AMD k6-2, 64mb ram, and a 6gb hard drive, which honestly wasn't too shabby for 1998. My first PC game was Independence War, a space sim which you could mod if you had some knowledge of coding. So I kind of picked it up, and playing video games led me to go to school now for Computer Science to learn how to make the damn things.
It's not all bad.
No, it's not, but then you aren't the type the article was being critical of, because you used it to do something constructive.
Congratulations, btw, from overcoming what could have been a very different route taken in life.
And what, pray tell, be constructive uses for game consoles, smart phones, etc. from the perspective of consumer use of said technologies?
As a consultant who works with govt often, I really really hope that microsoft wins this battle. Right now all our document production is office based, and if we need to account for an entirely new office suite (google docs) then it's another magnitude of (nonbillable) complexity.
If I understand what you are saying, it is to keep using a broken system, because fixing it is too much of a pain. I would normally expect to hear that from politicians, but not the consultants themselves.
What I would like to see is the government demand open formats so that they aren't locked in to any one vendor's product because the conversion cost of the documents themselves is too high.
well, you're exactly right. if your word file is a grocery list, then it doesn't matter if its .txt, .docx, or whatever. But when your files start to get extraordinarily complex (hundred+ pages, tables, figs, headers, footnotes, track changes, comments), then translating from .docx to something else will be a mess and you might as well give up.
Maybe that's the strongest reason for them not to be in proprietary formats.
It is easy to circumvent the EULA. Either have your minor child install the software, as minors cannot enter into a binding contract or have somebody else install/set the computer up. That way, you can honestly say that you never saw the EULA nor agreed to it.
This would be a bonanza for Ubuntu or any other linux distro. They could advertise something like:
Buying a new PC shouldn't mean having to automatically giving up your legal rights if something is wrong with it. At Ubuntu (or Redhat, or Suse, etc.) we believe in freedom. Freedom to use the software we provide however you want to use it. Freedom to build on the software we provide however you want to build on it. Freedom to keep using the software we provide regardless of what we or anyone else decide to do in the future. At Ubuntu we believe that when you buy a computer, it is yours to do with as you wish, not as we wish you would. Ubuntu Linux - Freedom
Again, you can pretty much put in what ever Linux distro you want, but since Ubuntu is pushing the desktop market, that is why I used them.
Yes, and those Christians have slaughtered tens of millions of "unbelievers" over the centuries. Hitler had nothing on the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to body count.
Actually, no. Mainly because there weren't tens of millions of people in the world where the christians had influence. However, Between Hitler and Stalin, the godless leaders of the 20th century sure proved that lack of religion is no panacea, either.
Its not for back talking.
"Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death"
Is the actual quote ( new international version ( 1984 ) ).
And it was a restriction. In otherwords, okay, you can put someone to death for cursing their mother or father, but not for just back talking. And by cursing they don't mean f*ck you. They mean calling down God to go after them.
"Most Christian sects have no problems with Darwin or evolution" - read up on the recent Republican candidates thoughts and quotes and then you'll rethink that statement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Santorum#Teaching_of_evolution_and_intelligent_design
Mitt Romney "“I believe that God designed the universe and created the universe, and I believe evolution is most likely the process he used to create the human body.”
See, even non-Christians believe in evolution
There's always a virtual machine. Still not a great solution but keeps you from having to reboot just to watch a movie.
His fatal mistake is to assume that creationists care about evidence.
Of course, those evolutionary scientists supporting the some 30 odd current theories of evolution might dispute or question various types of evidence, too. The study of evolution is not some nice and tidy field.
There is a group of people who do not care about the evidence - the Bible says so, so there it is. That's not going to change just because you amass more evidence.
On the other hand, there are a group of people who believe in God who also believe evolution was the method God used to create all of the different kinds of life we see. That is not something you can prove or disprove, therefore it's not in the realm of science. In other words, you want people to keep their religions hands off science, great. Keep your scientific hands off God. They don't have to be mortal enemies.
You probably don't really want religion to keep its hands of science. The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental private funder of the sciences. That is religion funding a lot of research. I am not a Catholic, but not everyone who admits to having a belief in God is anti-science. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Most "religious scientists" that I've heard about believe that either 1) God set it in motion and then let it go or 2) God set it in motion and then subtly influenced everything thereafter. Very few of them take the Bible at its most literal - God created everything 6 thousand years ago, etc.
No scientist, religious or otherwise takes the bible literally. You have to remember that even that Catholic Church (Latin and Eastern), the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion all except evolution. It is only a small minority group of "Christians" who take the story of creation literally instead of how it was meant to be: As an explanation to a primitive people on how they go there. Not as a scientific discourse.
As I mentioned in another post, the Bible also talks about the four corners of the world, but fundamentalist Christians who believe the world is only 6,000 years old, accept that it is round instead of square. So, if one part can be an allegory, why can't another?
Meh, God just plaed all that there to test our faith... The denial will continue.
Or God is simply testing our sense of reason that we were imbued with when we were created in His image. For instance, when in the Bible God talks about the four corners of the earth, surely He knew that he had made it round. Or is that another just testing our faith?