But I bet these 80% never use Control Panel.:) Personally, I think the new control panel design is just hideous, thank you very much. But I use Win2k anyway.
I am not saying Google is necessarily trying to do this, but they mail service can be used to tie the users to Google. If they continue adding more and more functionality, eventually the cost of switching may become too high.
P.S. I am already using alltheweb, teoma and some other search engines in addition to G. I also think that many people outside America use local search engines too. Google often have a localised page, but the quality of local searches is total shit.
Well, yeah. And it's happen to be called "leveraging monopoly power". I know that I am not using GMail, no thanks. From the descriptions it seems that GMail heavily borrowed ideas from Opera innovative M2 client (most modern clients did the same thing), including, of course, the abandonment of folders. Why settle for an imitator when you can have the original? And I don't think like I should trust anyone with my data so much. Remember, any good drug dealer will offer you a shot of heroin for free.
Why can't the manufacturers include an option to turn that shit off? Most of the devices usually have some way to change the settings, either an on-screen menu or a computer control panel applet. It should be rather simple to add a "disable LED indicator" option. I have an ADSL modem and a switch, sitting on the table. Honestly, I don't care about what these devices are doing 99.99% of the time. And in those rare cases when I do care, I can usually afford 30 seconds to enable the LEDs. To think of it, I probably can use the program on the PC they are connected to to find out how they are doing. So the manufacturer can save the cost of those LEDs and make the product less annoying.
The faster "organic" farming dies - the better. As far as I am concerned, it's as good as herbal viagra or penis enlargement pills. Simply put - it is crap sold to suckers.
The theory of green cows includes the existence of black and white cows. Everytime you see a black cow you witness an event that is consistent with both theories, neither probability is reduced. The "green" theory predicts says that the probability of this particular cow (or crow) being black or white is P, where P1. The "b/w" theory says the probability is 1. Let's say that before the experiment a priori probability of "green" being correct is A and probability of "b/w" being correct is 1-A (assuming there are no other theories). Now let's have an experiment. Look at a random cow. If it is black, a posteriori probability of "green" theory being correct is equal to (A * P)/1 = A*P. A posteriory probability of "b/w" being correct is (1-A)*1/1 = 1-A. After normalisation the probability of "green" is A*P/(A*P + 1-A) and the probability of "b/w" is (1-A)/(A*P + 1-A). It is trivial to show that the probability of "green" is now less than A, while the probability of "b/w" is greater than 1-A.
So although a black cow is consistent with both theories, every time you see it, the probability of "green" theory being correct decreases.
As for applicability of the Bayes theorem, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be applied here. First, we are not discussing whether one SHOULD believe on god, but merely whether such beliefs (and atheistic) are consistent with reality. Same applies to the existence test - it is just not important and there are some tests anyway (supposedly he might eventually come here and solve the question once and for all). Finally, regarding the prosecutor's fallacy, there is no reason to believe that a priory probability of god's existence is high (before we consider our history, humans, etc., what is more plausible - that the world emerged as a result of a random vacuum fluctuation or that that there always was a god who created the world? I'd say the god hypothesis smells too much like bullshit). Furthermore, the a priori probability is irrelevant for the question at hand - which beliefs are consistent. As I said, Bayes theorem shows that god hypothesis is less consistent with reality than "laws of nature" hypothesis. Every day that passes is another proof that there is no god. It can never be conclusive, but that doesn't matter this proof is irrelevant.
I doubt that, and its a stupid example anyway. You would be hard pressed to make a common sense argument in favor of rape. It's an allegory.:) The point is - just because some things are good for some people doesn't mean they will be good for everyone and for society in general.
Irrelevent, I'm sure you know why..... Explain, please. We are discussing whether religious beliefs should be tolerated. One argument for that is people make their own choice and we ought to respect that. If it happens that people do not make the choice, but are forced to adopt religion, it removes one of the reasons to respect religious beliefs. I think it is very relevant.
God and the laws of nature are not mutually exclusive. You make three serious blunders.
1) You ignore the Bayes theorem. Assume we have several hypothesis, some of which involve gods that may have ifluence and some don't. Then after each experiement that fails to provide evidence for the existence of god the probability that god hypothesises are true decreases. As of today, they are basically zero. The only class of hypothesises including god that are not invalidated in this way are those that argue god may not have any direct effect on our reality (at most he could have created the universe and collect our souls when we die). But the bible strongly argues that he can have a lot of direct contact with us.
2) You use the false dilemma fallacy. There are more than two options represented by existing scientific theories. And there is a lot of evidence supporting some of these theories. Take for example the results of the background microwave radiation study. The hypothesis including god does not make any predictions about background radiation and its distribution. Some scientific theories, on the other hand, correctly predict it. And so, in accordance with the Bayes theorem, the probability of god's existance decreases. The same happens every time another scientific theory proves to be better than religion. All that doesn't reduce probability that god exists precisely to zero, but it decrease it a lot (to nearly zero, although that depends on the initial probabilities you assign to god vs. no god theories).
3) Godel's theorem is absolutely irrelevant here. I suggest you read something about it (BTW, how did you manage to insert a diacritic symbol in a Slashdot post? I though it was impossible.)
A simply analogy is the story about green crows. One theory is that all crows are black and some few albino crows are white. Another theory is that someone (may be god) created some green crows. Theory of probability shows how every time you see a black crow, the first theory is supported. Once you see a green crow, the second theory is proved. There are, of course, alternative theories, such as "green crows only live in Australia", "green crows hide during the day", etc. But once the possibilities for such prop theories are exausted, once we see a sufficient number of black crows in different environment, the chances that there are any green crows are reduced to extremely small. Same happens with gods. Chances that there are gods in our Universe are extremely small based on the evidence we have. There may be gods outside of our Universe, unable to influence our world in any way - that's possible, if someone wants to believe that. But that is extremely far from what any real religions tell.
The NPoV of the Wiki article is not under suspition. So I tend to take that as a more credible source then you.
Well, in "The historicity of Jesus" there is only one paragraph out of nine describing the "mythological school". This is clearly not NPoV. A more detailed article has the same quote ("Most historians do not dispute the existence of a person named Jesus"), but fails to give any reliable evidence (and the low value of such evidence is openly admitted in other articles, such as the one on Tacitus). Given the nature of Wikipedia, I would suspect that "Most historians..." was inserted by a Christian, trying to promote his point of view. To check for that I would need to delve deep into the history of the article, for which I sadly don't have the time now.
I have never met a christian who thought the bible was written by god. Well it would be more precise for me to say that very often every word of the Bible is considered to be inspired by God, not directly written by him. Otherwise, we have little to no reasons to believe anything written in there.
Wrong. The bible is considered by most to be allegorical. And so the information content would be zero. Allergory is not information, it's merely someone's opinion on some topics.
That's a perfectly valid opinion, I'm not going to argue that. But it would be a fallacy of division to argue that every individual christian has a negative effect. You are correct. I agree that there are some christians in this world who have positive effect, that there are some christians, for which their beliefs have benefits and some christians, who are better for the society because of their beliefs. Would be hard to argue about that. In the same venue, there are probably also some people, who were victims of rape and who are better off now because of that.
If people choose to believe then that is their choice. First of all, very often it's not their choice, especially in predominantly christian societies (ditto for muslim countries). If you have ever had a Brazilian friend, you would know how everyone is made a believer from the birth and nobody even tells a child that he has a choice. An atheist, especially an open atheist is still a rare creature in Brazil. There is no choice, that's all. Still, when a person makes a conscious choice to believe, that's their right and I do respect it to some extent.
Their belief that God does exist is no more valid then anothers belief that god doesn't exist. That's not true. We have a lot of indirect evidence that there is no god and the world is governed by laws of nature. We have a lot of evidence that the world was created also because of laws of nature (albeit we are still learning). We have tons of facts and knowledge on how religions emerge. We also have thousands of religions and since they all contradict each other we have a reason to believe that most of them are false. At the same time, we have zilch evidence for the existence of god. All in all, we have a very good understanding of how the world, life and us were created, of how religious beliefs emerged and evolved, of how old testament was written and then new testament, of how these religious texts evolved and were interpreted. None of this requires a belief in god. As Laplace famously proclamed to Napoleon, "I have no need for this hypothesis." So my belief that there is no god is clearly more valid than someone's beliefs that there is one (or several). If you want to argue otherwise, please consider first my invisible hamster (I feel that he is watching me right now) and tell me if my belief in him is less valid than someone's belief in JC and if so, why.
And, as research shows, you don't need to believe yourself to convert others. There have been some studies of Anglican priests that showed how as much as 50% of them didn't believe in some of the main tenets of christianity (don't remember the details, one particular thing was the virgin birth of the christ). Isn't that funny?:)
This particular wiki page is clearly biased. And even then it doesn't disprove what I said - that new testament is basically the only proof of jesus existence. This may be alright for christians, but usually not enought for a real scientist (unless they live in a thoroughly christian country and are greatly influenced by that). And the claim of "majority of scientists" is clealrly bullshit, and even more so if we mean "the majority of historians specialising in ~1 century".
As for interpretation, last time I checked, every word of the bible was written by the god. That's the only thing that makes it worth reading it. I mean, there are thousands holy books written by humans. If bible is nothing more than that, we can't trust a word from it. And if you allow interpretation, you remove all predictive power and all usefullness from it. If tomorrow we finally find a convincing proof that Jesus didn't, in fact exist, a proof so compelling that even the Pope agrees, do you think christians will just break up? No, the priests will say that the new testament is an allegory, that it should be interpreted, that even though jesus didn't come to Earth, he is clearly in our heart and metaforically he did die for us, etc. What are christians supposed to believe in? Is there anything in the bible that we can be be 99% sure of? If anything is subject to interpretation, then there is zero information content, like in Nostradamus quatrains - you can assign any meaning to it. And for a rational person that means the bible is a crock of shit.
I tend to believe that everyones beliefs should be respected as long as those beliefs compel a person towards good. This depends on our definitions of "respect", "compel", "good", etc. And it is my opinion that the net effect of christianity is negative. What benefit we get in the form of people, who do good, because they believe in god, is outweighed by religion trying to sway the society in the wrong direction (in practically every imaginable field, from geopolitics to stem cell research).
And don't forget that there is no proof that all those nice cristians (as opposed to evil cristians, who kill in the name of god, fire thousands of workers, pollute rivers, kill kittens, etc.) are nice because they believe. I suspect that most of them will remain nice even if they suddenly become atheists. After all, I have never seen a psychologist arguing that personality depends on religion - they always mention genetic traits, upbringing, family, school, education, but never religion specifically.
Ask any christian - will he stop doing good if they find out there is no god? I suspect most would say they will continue living pretty much in the same way.
You raise an interesting (albeit old) question - what to think of those christians, who chose not to believe anything that contradicts reality, but to interpret or abandon altogether the old writings. Well, this phenomenon, called "god of the gaps" was described a long time ago. Even though such beliefs do not contradict the reality directly, they are a manifestation of a weakened mind, with no predictive power or usefulness (beyond feeling warm and nice) - not much better than my belief in a silent and invisible hamster sitting on top of my monitor, capable of moving ultra-quickly to avoid my hand and undetectable by any available method. Does my belief in this mystical creature contradict reality? Not directly. Is it good/useful/deserving respect/etc.? I think not.
As for Jesus Christ, I would appreciate any references to sources, arguing that "most historians do not dispute the fact that a preacher named Jesus who claimed to be the son of god existed". According to my knowledge of history (however limited it is), there is practically zero reliable evidence that such a person existed, besides the bible, which cannot be considered evidence at all, despite the wishes of some cristians. On the other hand, we have shitloads of historic records, including official documents, private letters, inscriptions, trade documents, statues, paintings, etc., etc. proving the existence of Julius Caesar. We have nothing proving that JC existed, other than billions of crusifixes, none of which are 2k years old and the New Testament, written around the year 100 of our era.
If you could point out a serious history book written by an acclaimed atheist historian, admitting that JC existed (not claiming that he was son of god, mind you), I would be extremely surprised, as none of the history books I am familiar with (obviously a small fraction of all the history books in existence, but I like to think I didn't chose the least trustworthy ones) tell about this character (but of course, they do speak about christianity and christians).
Beliefs that Earth was created 6000 years ago are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that water can be turned into wine are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that whole Earth can be fully covered with water because of rains are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that a human can be turned into a pillar of salt are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs in most of christian mythology are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that Jesus Christ, son of god, lived around 2000 years ago are inconsistent with reality.
That bible claims it happened in the past and we can't directly validate or disprove it does not make them consistent with reality.
My beliefs, on the other hand, are rational and agree with the evidence we have. That the Earth was created ~4.5 billion years ago, that water can only be turned into wine if you pour it on grapes, wait about a year, pick the harvest and make the wine yourself, that humans can only be cremated, mummified or plasticised, etc. or they will decompose. You get my point.
As for the ID thing, he talked about it in a recent post here. And since we are discussing the consistency of his beliefs with reality, I think it is actually quite relevant.
My beliefs are consistent with reality. His beliefs probably aren't. In the best case his beliefs do not contradict reality (see "god of the gaps"), while my beliefs are actually supported by it.
We do not know what flavour of christianity laetus believes in, but apparently, he believes that it's a real concern (though it's not necessarily true) that UK plans for a universal ID might signify the coming of the antichrist. While I can't prove it is not so (you can't usually prove a negative), I find such beliefs dangerously delusional.
Nope, it's you who got a skewed view on religion, sorry.:) I am generally content with people like you, who don't let their belief in gods interfere with the life. Unfortunately, most religious people are not like you. You, like the Earth, are mostly harmless. It is still stupid to believe in wrong things, but if you are not forcing your beliefs on others, please, enjoy your right to freedom of religion and may Yarilo be with you.
"We've seen response rates 24 times that of banners," Mr. Stevenson said, indicating Web users like IntelliTXT better than other forms of online advertising they encounter. I though everyone already knew that new advertisement technologies always have dramatically higher response rates not because they are more effective, but simply because they are new. Personally I know that after I see it for the first ten times, I will spend a minute and add a filter to Proxomitron to never see it again.
Iraq had nothing to do with the attack other than sharing a religion.
Even less. Iraq was a secular dictatorship. People didn't wear towels on their head, they weared western-style clothes, went to secular universities, watched secular TV and red secular books. Islamic churches, priests, cults, etc. were tightly controlled by Saddam. Now that Iraq was "liberated", Shiites (and other religious groups) reared their ugly heads... Personally, I'd rather live in a secular dictatorship than in religious one.
Would you be opposed to a guy pissing on the ruins of WTC if he barely escaped from one of the towers himself and lost a wife and both parents there? And who above all else lost a hand in Afganistan, looking for Bin Laden?
The developers live next to Chernobyl, it's their history, it's a part of their life and they have every right to do everything they did. I am sure at least one of them lost a friend or relative in the past because of the accident. If you followed the development more closely, you would not suspect them for being disrespectful (judging from all the interviews they gave). Probably the problem here was that the French guy had little experience of cross-cultural communications and saw disrespect where there was none.
Well, I think it's not for an American to decide (assuming you are American). The developers are Russian/Ukrainian and they live close to Chernobyl (their office is currently in about 60 km from the Zone). Their own lives and lives of their relatives have certainly been affected, so they aren't outsiders exploiting the disaster.
Re:The whole streaming audio/video field's gone cr
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Real Problems
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I disagree. I think, just like two other proprietary players, Quicktime prospers entirely mostly it is proprietary. Of course, the fact that it doesn't bombard you with ads or force to upgrade helps, but I don't think that's the most important. If Quicktime (and especially codecs) were really open, many alternatives would emerge, just like with MPEG, AVI and MP3. There is Quicktime Alternative, but one player simply isn't strong enough to get wide adoption.
There is no fundamental difference between hypocritical support of anti-porn initiatives by American public and obligatory "but I am against child porn" remarks. There is no clear-cut difference between child porn and art. Furthermore, child porn is beneficial to children because in countries where it is mostly produced they basically face a choice between starving on the street and starring in porn.
Come on, is a porn clip of Thai 10-year old so bad? Consider the fact that she is in the prostitution business anyway and she does it to feed her family. If she is paid for posing and having sex with a nice, clean and non-violent guy instead of risking her life in some den of debauchery - good for her.
This is the truth that "they" don't want you to know. It's better if a kid is engaged in child porn production than if he is outright sold by his parents into slavery (to get the money to support the rest of the family). And even legitimately working for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week is some sweatshop (not the Nike factory) is not necessarily better than starring in porn.
So get over your initial fear, reject the stereotypes and realise that the only harmful variety of child porn is when someone kidnaps an American/Western European girl from an affluent family, locks her in the basement and repeatedly rapes her on camera. When a third-world girl shows her private parts and masturbates on camera, it causes her no harm that couldn't be healed by the money she earns.
I don't know what I was thinking. The scalable sources of course are fusion, fission, carbo* burning and solar. Stupid me.
Still, the main point is that as of today the cars are economically unfriendly. They are too expensive overall, compared with using a mixture of transportation technologies. When you spend money on highways, wars with Iraq, etc., you waste money that could have been spent on something better. When we finally build communism (to everyone according to wants), inefficiency will cease to be a problem, as a sustanable economy would provide everything (within reasonable limits), including cars and energy to run them.
But until this happens, every dollar you spend on your car means two wasted dollars that could have been spent on improving human lives (through research or directly). And no matter how efficient solar panels may become, until they can be made for 0$ without human labour at all, money spent on cars will be wasted, because a mixture of technologies will always be better (unless you stop doing any research on them and concentrate on improving the universal car - possible, but stupid).
You should finally get your head out of your ass and think out of the box. Thanks, you are being real nice here.:)
I totally agree that in the future the environmental friendliness will cease to be an issue. When that happens, I would be all for "letting" everyone drive a stadium sized tank if they wanted to get across the town or fly a hypersonic scramjet just to get from their shack on the beach on Hawaii to their mountain castle in the Andes. Although it would be much easier to just do everything in virtual reality.
But at the moment cars (even the most efficient ones) suck badly. They are not just environmentally unfriendly (although they are), they are also economically unfriendly. It just takes too much resources to build a car for every American. We have better things to spend the resources on. And, as a temporary measure, it would be great if people opened their eyes to alternatives.
The cars are causing the problems now and future technologies are sadly irrelevant to the here and now.
P.S. There is no such thing as renewable source of energy. The only scalable ones are either burning coal/oil/gas, which are not renewable or fusion, which is not renewable too (though you may say it is non-depletable). Wind/tidal/solar/biowhatever are not scalable - just check out energy consumption data.
Well, I am not particularly opposed to what he did (just warning about the dangers of preemptive monitoring/recording), but now that you ask...
- he could have stopped at finding out who sent the messages and if he appeared again, warn him that spam is not tolerated - he could have set up the network to limit outbound mail: traffic shaping to decrease speed, a Windows Messaging alert that spamming is not tolerated, etc. - he could just live with being blacklisted (depends on how serious the problem was on practice)
I might have been too vague, but that's because we first need to define "monitoring". I am not saying that no monitoring is acceptable - clearly watching overall download/upload speed for the cafe is ok, but sniffing traffic to read personal e-mails is not. Where to draw the line is up to sysadmins, but I would prefer if they limit themselves to general well-being of the network.
Slashdot Mirror
But I bet these 80% never use Control Panel. :) Personally, I think the new control panel design is just hideous, thank you very much. But I use Win2k anyway.
I am not saying Google is necessarily trying to do this, but they mail service can be used to tie the users to Google. If they continue adding more and more functionality, eventually the cost of switching may become too high.
P.S. I am already using alltheweb, teoma and some other search engines in addition to G. I also think that many people outside America use local search engines too. Google often have a localised page, but the quality of local searches is total shit.
Well, yeah. And it's happen to be called "leveraging monopoly power". I know that I am not using GMail, no thanks. From the descriptions it seems that GMail heavily borrowed ideas from Opera innovative M2 client (most modern clients did the same thing), including, of course, the abandonment of folders. Why settle for an imitator when you can have the original? And I don't think like I should trust anyone with my data so much. Remember, any good drug dealer will offer you a shot of heroin for free.
Why can't the manufacturers include an option to turn that shit off? Most of the devices usually have some way to change the settings, either an on-screen menu or a computer control panel applet. It should be rather simple to add a "disable LED indicator" option. I have an ADSL modem and a switch, sitting on the table. Honestly, I don't care about what these devices are doing 99.99% of the time. And in those rare cases when I do care, I can usually afford 30 seconds to enable the LEDs. To think of it, I probably can use the program on the PC they are connected to to find out how they are doing. So the manufacturer can save the cost of those LEDs and make the product less annoying.
The faster "organic" farming dies - the better. As far as I am concerned, it's as good as herbal viagra or penis enlargement pills. Simply put - it is crap sold to suckers.
The theory of green cows includes the existence of black and white cows. Everytime you see a black cow you witness an event that is consistent with both theories, neither probability is reduced.
The "green" theory predicts says that the probability of this particular cow (or crow) being black or white is P, where P1. The "b/w" theory says the probability is 1. Let's say that before the experiment a priori probability of "green" being correct is A and probability of "b/w" being correct is 1-A (assuming there are no other theories).
Now let's have an experiment. Look at a random cow. If it is black, a posteriori probability of "green" theory being correct is equal to (A * P)/1 = A*P. A posteriory probability of "b/w" being correct is (1-A)*1/1 = 1-A. After normalisation the probability of "green" is A*P/(A*P + 1-A) and the probability of "b/w" is (1-A)/(A*P + 1-A). It is trivial to show that the probability of "green" is now less than A, while the probability of "b/w" is greater than 1-A.
So although a black cow is consistent with both theories, every time you see it, the probability of "green" theory being correct decreases.
As for applicability of the Bayes theorem, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be applied here. First, we are not discussing whether one SHOULD believe on god, but merely whether such beliefs (and atheistic) are consistent with reality. Same applies to the existence test - it is just not important and there are some tests anyway (supposedly he might eventually come here and solve the question once and for all). Finally, regarding the prosecutor's fallacy, there is no reason to believe that a priory probability of god's existence is high (before we consider our history, humans, etc., what is more plausible - that the world emerged as a result of a random vacuum fluctuation or that that there always was a god who created the world? I'd say the god hypothesis smells too much like bullshit). Furthermore, the a priori probability is irrelevant for the question at hand - which beliefs are consistent. As I said, Bayes theorem shows that god hypothesis is less consistent with reality than "laws of nature" hypothesis. Every day that passes is another proof that there is no god. It can never be conclusive, but that doesn't matter this proof is irrelevant.
I doubt that, and its a stupid example anyway. You would be hard pressed to make a common sense argument in favor of rape. :) The point is - just because some things are good for some people doesn't mean they will be good for everyone and for society in general.
It's an allegory.
Irrelevent, I'm sure you know why.....
Explain, please. We are discussing whether religious beliefs should be tolerated. One argument for that is people make their own choice and we ought to respect that. If it happens that people do not make the choice, but are forced to adopt religion, it removes one of the reasons to respect religious beliefs. I think it is very relevant.
God and the laws of nature are not mutually exclusive.
You make three serious blunders.
1) You ignore the Bayes theorem. Assume we have several hypothesis, some of which involve gods that may have ifluence and some don't. Then after each experiement that fails to provide evidence for the existence of god the probability that god hypothesises are true decreases. As of today, they are basically zero. The only class of hypothesises including god that are not invalidated in this way are those that argue god may not have any direct effect on our reality (at most he could have created the universe and collect our souls when we die). But the bible strongly argues that he can have a lot of direct contact with us.
2) You use the false dilemma fallacy. There are more than two options represented by existing scientific theories. And there is a lot of evidence supporting some of these theories. Take for example the results of the background microwave radiation study. The hypothesis including god does not make any predictions about background radiation and its distribution. Some scientific theories, on the other hand, correctly predict it. And so, in accordance with the Bayes theorem, the probability of god's existance decreases. The same happens every time another scientific theory proves to be better than religion. All that doesn't reduce probability that god exists precisely to zero, but it decrease it a lot (to nearly zero, although that depends on the initial probabilities you assign to god vs. no god theories).
3) Godel's theorem is absolutely irrelevant here. I suggest you read something about it (BTW, how did you manage to insert a diacritic symbol in a Slashdot post? I though it was impossible.)
A simply analogy is the story about green crows. One theory is that all crows are black and some few albino crows are white. Another theory is that someone (may be god) created some green crows. Theory of probability shows how every time you see a black crow, the first theory is supported. Once you see a green crow, the second theory is proved. There are, of course, alternative theories, such as "green crows only live in Australia", "green crows hide during the day", etc. But once the possibilities for such prop theories are exausted, once we see a sufficient number of black crows in different environment, the chances that there are any green crows are reduced to extremely small. Same happens with gods. Chances that there are gods in our Universe are extremely small based on the evidence we have. There may be gods outside of our Universe, unable to influence our world in any way - that's possible, if someone wants to believe that. But that is extremely far from what any real religions tell.
The NPoV of the Wiki article is not under suspition. So I tend to take that as a more credible source then you.
Well, in "The historicity of Jesus" there is only one paragraph out of nine describing the "mythological school". This is clearly not NPoV. A more detailed article has the same quote ("Most historians do not dispute the existence of a person named Jesus"), but fails to give any reliable evidence (and the low value of such evidence is openly admitted in other articles, such as the one on Tacitus). Given the nature of Wikipedia, I would suspect that "Most historians..." was inserted by a Christian, trying to promote his point of view. To check for that I would need to delve deep into the history of the article, for which I sadly don't have the time now.
I have never met a christian who thought the bible was written by god.
Well it would be more precise for me to say that very often every word of the Bible is considered to be inspired by God, not directly written by him. Otherwise, we have little to no reasons to believe anything written in there.
Wrong. The bible is considered by most to be allegorical.
And so the information content would be zero. Allergory is not information, it's merely someone's opinion on some topics.
That's a perfectly valid opinion, I'm not going to argue that. But it would be a fallacy of division to argue that every individual christian has a negative effect.
You are correct. I agree that there are some christians in this world who have positive effect, that there are some christians, for which their beliefs have benefits and some christians, who are better for the society because of their beliefs. Would be hard to argue about that. In the same venue, there are probably also some people, who were victims of rape and who are better off now because of that.
If people choose to believe then that is their choice.
First of all, very often it's not their choice, especially in predominantly christian societies (ditto for muslim countries). If you have ever had a Brazilian friend, you would know how everyone is made a believer from the birth and nobody even tells a child that he has a choice. An atheist, especially an open atheist is still a rare creature in Brazil. There is no choice, that's all. Still, when a person makes a conscious choice to believe, that's their right and I do respect it to some extent.
Their belief that God does exist is no more valid then anothers belief that god doesn't exist.
That's not true. We have a lot of indirect evidence that there is no god and the world is governed by laws of nature. We have a lot of evidence that the world was created also because of laws of nature (albeit we are still learning). We have tons of facts and knowledge on how religions emerge. We also have thousands of religions and since they all contradict each other we have a reason to believe that most of them are false. At the same time, we have zilch evidence for the existence of god. All in all, we have a very good understanding of how the world, life and us were created, of how religious beliefs emerged and evolved, of how old testament was written and then new testament, of how these religious texts evolved and were interpreted. None of this requires a belief in god. As Laplace famously proclamed to Napoleon, "I have no need for this hypothesis." So my belief that there is no god is clearly more valid than someone's beliefs that there is one (or several). If you want to argue otherwise, please consider first my invisible hamster (I feel that he is watching me right now) and tell me if my belief in him is less valid than someone's belief in JC and if so, why.
And, as research shows, you don't need to believe yourself to convert others. There have been some studies of Anglican priests that showed how as much as 50% of them didn't believe in some of the main tenets of christianity (don't remember the details, one particular thing was the virgin birth of the christ). Isn't that funny? :)
This particular wiki page is clearly biased. And even then it doesn't disprove what I said - that new testament is basically the only proof of jesus existence. This may be alright for christians, but usually not enought for a real scientist (unless they live in a thoroughly christian country and are greatly influenced by that). And the claim of "majority of scientists" is clealrly bullshit, and even more so if we mean "the majority of historians specialising in ~1 century".
As for interpretation, last time I checked, every word of the bible was written by the god. That's the only thing that makes it worth reading it. I mean, there are thousands holy books written by humans. If bible is nothing more than that, we can't trust a word from it. And if you allow interpretation, you remove all predictive power and all usefullness from it. If tomorrow we finally find a convincing proof that Jesus didn't, in fact exist, a proof so compelling that even the Pope agrees, do you think christians will just break up? No, the priests will say that the new testament is an allegory, that it should be interpreted, that even though jesus didn't come to Earth, he is clearly in our heart and metaforically he did die for us, etc. What are christians supposed to believe in? Is there anything in the bible that we can be be 99% sure of? If anything is subject to interpretation, then there is zero information content, like in Nostradamus quatrains - you can assign any meaning to it. And for a rational person that means the bible is a crock of shit.
I tend to believe that everyones beliefs should be respected as long as those beliefs compel a person towards good.
This depends on our definitions of "respect", "compel", "good", etc. And it is my opinion that the net effect of christianity is negative. What benefit we get in the form of people, who do good, because they believe in god, is outweighed by religion trying to sway the society in the wrong direction (in practically every imaginable field, from geopolitics to stem cell research).
And don't forget that there is no proof that all those nice cristians (as opposed to evil cristians, who kill in the name of god, fire thousands of workers, pollute rivers, kill kittens, etc.) are nice because they believe. I suspect that most of them will remain nice even if they suddenly become atheists. After all, I have never seen a psychologist arguing that personality depends on religion - they always mention genetic traits, upbringing, family, school, education, but never religion specifically.
Ask any christian - will he stop doing good if they find out there is no god? I suspect most would say they will continue living pretty much in the same way.
You raise an interesting (albeit old) question - what to think of those christians, who chose not to believe anything that contradicts reality, but to interpret or abandon altogether the old writings. Well, this phenomenon, called "god of the gaps" was described a long time ago. Even though such beliefs do not contradict the reality directly, they are a manifestation of a weakened mind, with no predictive power or usefulness (beyond feeling warm and nice) - not much better than my belief in a silent and invisible hamster sitting on top of my monitor, capable of moving ultra-quickly to avoid my hand and undetectable by any available method. Does my belief in this mystical creature contradict reality? Not directly. Is it good/useful/deserving respect/etc.? I think not.
As for Jesus Christ, I would appreciate any references to sources, arguing that "most historians do not dispute the fact that a preacher named Jesus who claimed to be the son of god existed". According to my knowledge of history (however limited it is), there is practically zero reliable evidence that such a person existed, besides the bible, which cannot be considered evidence at all, despite the wishes of some cristians. On the other hand, we have shitloads of historic records, including official documents, private letters, inscriptions, trade documents, statues, paintings, etc., etc. proving the existence of Julius Caesar. We have nothing proving that JC existed, other than billions of crusifixes, none of which are 2k years old and the New Testament, written around the year 100 of our era.
If you could point out a serious history book written by an acclaimed atheist historian, admitting that JC existed (not claiming that he was son of god, mind you), I would be extremely surprised, as none of the history books I am familiar with (obviously a small fraction of all the history books in existence, but I like to think I didn't chose the least trustworthy ones) tell about this character (but of course, they do speak about christianity and christians).
Beliefs that Earth was created 6000 years ago are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that water can be turned into wine are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that whole Earth can be fully covered with water because of rains are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that a human can be turned into a pillar of salt are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs in most of christian mythology are inconsistent with reality. Beliefs that Jesus Christ, son of god, lived around 2000 years ago are inconsistent with reality.
That bible claims it happened in the past and we can't directly validate or disprove it does not make them consistent with reality.
My beliefs, on the other hand, are rational and agree with the evidence we have. That the Earth was created ~4.5 billion years ago, that water can only be turned into wine if you pour it on grapes, wait about a year, pick the harvest and make the wine yourself, that humans can only be cremated, mummified or plasticised, etc. or they will decompose. You get my point.
As for the ID thing, he talked about it in a recent post here. And since we are discussing the consistency of his beliefs with reality, I think it is actually quite relevant.
My beliefs are consistent with reality. His beliefs probably aren't. In the best case his beliefs do not contradict reality (see "god of the gaps"), while my beliefs are actually supported by it.
We do not know what flavour of christianity laetus believes in, but apparently, he believes that it's a real concern (though it's not necessarily true) that UK plans for a universal ID might signify the coming of the antichrist. While I can't prove it is not so (you can't usually prove a negative), I find such beliefs dangerously delusional.
Nope, it's you who got a skewed view on religion, sorry. :) I am generally content with people like you, who don't let their belief in gods interfere with the life. Unfortunately, most religious people are not like you. You, like the Earth, are mostly harmless. It is still stupid to believe in wrong things, but if you are not forcing your beliefs on others, please, enjoy your right to freedom of religion and may Yarilo be with you.
"We've seen response rates 24 times that of banners," Mr. Stevenson said, indicating Web users like IntelliTXT better than other forms of online advertising they encounter.
I though everyone already knew that new advertisement technologies always have dramatically higher response rates not because they are more effective, but simply because they are new. Personally I know that after I see it for the first ten times, I will spend a minute and add a filter to Proxomitron to never see it again.
Iraq had nothing to do with the attack other than sharing a religion.
Even less. Iraq was a secular dictatorship. People didn't wear towels on their head, they weared western-style clothes, went to secular universities, watched secular TV and red secular books. Islamic churches, priests, cults, etc. were tightly controlled by Saddam. Now that Iraq was "liberated", Shiites (and other religious groups) reared their ugly heads... Personally, I'd rather live in a secular dictatorship than in religious one.
Would you be opposed to a guy pissing on the ruins of WTC if he barely escaped from one of the towers himself and lost a wife and both parents there? And who above all else lost a hand in Afganistan, looking for Bin Laden?
The developers live next to Chernobyl, it's their history, it's a part of their life and they have every right to do everything they did. I am sure at least one of them lost a friend or relative in the past because of the accident. If you followed the development more closely, you would not suspect them for being disrespectful (judging from all the interviews they gave). Probably the problem here was that the French guy had little experience of cross-cultural communications and saw disrespect where there was none.
Well, I think it's not for an American to decide (assuming you are American). The developers are Russian/Ukrainian and they live close to Chernobyl (their office is currently in about 60 km from the Zone). Their own lives and lives of their relatives have certainly been affected, so they aren't outsiders exploiting the disaster.
I disagree. I think, just like two other proprietary players, Quicktime prospers entirely mostly it is proprietary. Of course, the fact that it doesn't bombard you with ads or force to upgrade helps, but I don't think that's the most important. If Quicktime (and especially codecs) were really open, many alternatives would emerge, just like with MPEG, AVI and MP3. There is Quicktime Alternative, but one player simply isn't strong enough to get wide adoption.
There is no fundamental difference between hypocritical support of anti-porn initiatives by American public and obligatory "but I am against child porn" remarks. There is no clear-cut difference between child porn and art. Furthermore, child porn is beneficial to children because in countries where it is mostly produced they basically face a choice between starving on the street and starring in porn.
Come on, is a porn clip of Thai 10-year old so bad? Consider the fact that she is in the prostitution business anyway and she does it to feed her family. If she is paid for posing and having sex with a nice, clean and non-violent guy instead of risking her life in some den of debauchery - good for her.
This is the truth that "they" don't want you to know. It's better if a kid is engaged in child porn production than if he is outright sold by his parents into slavery (to get the money to support the rest of the family). And even legitimately working for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week is some sweatshop (not the Nike factory) is not necessarily better than starring in porn.
So get over your initial fear, reject the stereotypes and realise that the only harmful variety of child porn is when someone kidnaps an American/Western European girl from an affluent family, locks her in the basement and repeatedly rapes her on camera. When a third-world girl shows her private parts and masturbates on camera, it causes her no harm that couldn't be healed by the money she earns.
Cows are.
Or, as American experience proves, if you are black.
I don't know what I was thinking. The scalable sources of course are fusion, fission, carbo* burning and solar. Stupid me.
Still, the main point is that as of today the cars are economically unfriendly. They are too expensive overall, compared with using a mixture of transportation technologies. When you spend money on highways, wars with Iraq, etc., you waste money that could have been spent on something better. When we finally build communism (to everyone according to wants), inefficiency will cease to be a problem, as a sustanable economy would provide everything (within reasonable limits), including cars and energy to run them.
But until this happens, every dollar you spend on your car means two wasted dollars that could have been spent on improving human lives (through research or directly). And no matter how efficient solar panels may become, until they can be made for 0$ without human labour at all, money spent on cars will be wasted, because a mixture of technologies will always be better (unless you stop doing any research on them and concentrate on improving the universal car - possible, but stupid).
You should finally get your head out of your ass and think out of the box. :)
Thanks, you are being real nice here.
I totally agree that in the future the environmental friendliness will cease to be an issue. When that happens, I would be all for "letting" everyone drive a stadium sized tank if they wanted to get across the town or fly a hypersonic scramjet just to get from their shack on the beach on Hawaii to their mountain castle in the Andes. Although it would be much easier to just do everything in virtual reality.
But at the moment cars (even the most efficient ones) suck badly. They are not just environmentally unfriendly (although they are), they are also economically unfriendly. It just takes too much resources to build a car for every American. We have better things to spend the resources on. And, as a temporary measure, it would be great if people opened their eyes to alternatives.
The cars are causing the problems now and future technologies are sadly irrelevant to the here and now.
P.S. There is no such thing as renewable source of energy. The only scalable ones are either burning coal/oil/gas, which are not renewable or fusion, which is not renewable too (though you may say it is non-depletable). Wind/tidal/solar/biowhatever are not scalable - just check out energy consumption data.
Well, I am not particularly opposed to what he did (just warning about the dangers of preemptive monitoring/recording), but now that you ask...
- he could have stopped at finding out who sent the messages and if he appeared again, warn him that spam is not tolerated
- he could have set up the network to limit outbound mail: traffic shaping to decrease speed, a Windows Messaging alert that spamming is not tolerated, etc.
- he could just live with being blacklisted (depends on how serious the problem was on practice)
I might have been too vague, but that's because we first need to define "monitoring". I am not saying that no monitoring is acceptable - clearly watching overall download/upload speed for the cafe is ok, but sniffing traffic to read personal e-mails is not. Where to draw the line is up to sysadmins, but I would prefer if they limit themselves to general well-being of the network.