It's a lesser distraction to not to have to focus on the UI, but I think even conversation with a person in the car can adversely affect your driving ; if spacial concepts come up for discussion, especially. I myself notice that my driving can waver when conversing with my wife.
I might be ok with passively consuming text messages, especially on some kind of HUD (maybe Google Glasses when they emerge), but I personally avoid initiating communications whenever possible if I'm driving.
I think he might take a more practical viewpoint, given that roughly 9% of the UK population use marijuana.
It's self-evident that sending all drug users to prison would reduce drug use, just by denying them access to supply. But it's simply not practical to do so. Our prisons are already overcrowded, so you'd have to divert quite a portion of the national economy into building, maintaining, and staffing prisons, and also suffer the removal of 9% of the population from the economy - currently, we have 0.001% incarceration rates.
So, given that incarcerating all drug offenders will essentially destroy the economy of the UK and turn us into an Island Stalag Luft, we have to ask the question, is there a less harmful way of dealing with the problems involved with drugs? Is it cheaper for the state to safely feed the habits of drug users, given the cost in social disruption and healthcare costs they cause through theft and the use of poor quality, unregulated product? Which solution causes the least amount of harm?
Whereas a politician stating that "Drug use is immoral and you should be locked up!" isn't providing any kind of justification. Pick one, he :
i) Hasn't thought it through. Should people who don't actually think about what they are saying actually be in charge of anything? Note that in this one I am including all the subspecies of not thinking things through, including religion, moral outrage, fear of a different culture, etc.
ii) HAS thought it through. Has a financial interest in the prison-industrial complex. Since 9% of the UK population is a drug offender, there is an effectively endless supply of "product" for the commercial prison system, since as we have already postulated, incarcerating all drugs users isn't actually possible given that it would probably plunge the country into revolution.
It makes far more sense to insist on locking up people who commit actual offences (other than just possessing drugs) to feed their drug habit. It makes even more sense to try and work out what causes drug habits and how to fix THAT.
Taking the software analogy further, I strongly believe that the law should be kept in Git, and amendments merged in, instead of the current practise of suffixing the text to the end of the bill, essentially making people run `patch amendment.diff` in their head.
In addition, you'd be able to `git blame` the right person for each part of the law, have thorough law amendment reviews, and spot the filibuster rammed between two paragraphs about providing more funds for kittens.
Removing the religion doesn't suddenly render you an immoral beast. I think the biggest problem with religion is that it provides an arbitrary justification for any stupid law you like, with a vast sourcebook of quotes that you can bend to support it. Without this, you have to justify your laws solely on their merits.
"Thou shalt not kill" is pretty obvious - everyone has an interest in this one being enforced. If you permit arbitrary killing, you might be next.
Despite "Thou shalt not kill" being quite early in the Bible, the rest of the Old Testament is packed with killing, genocide, etc, all approved of by Jehovah ; it translates more closely to "Thou shalt not murder". Wars of conquest, apparently, don't count as murder when God Says So. Without the religion, it becomes a whole lot more impartial - you don't have any particular groups of people who you can dismiss as being unimportant by dint of their religious beliefs or geographic location. So, remove the God, and now you have fewer justifications for killing, and you only have evidence and logic to fall back on - which really only leaves you with self-defence as a viable justification. If people only killed people in self defence, no-one would kill anyone, because there wouldn't be any people killing anyone except in self defence...
"Thou shalt not steal" is also pretty damn obvious. If you ask a 5 year old "How would you like it if I took your sweeties?", they'll say that's not fair. So if a 5 year old can grasp it, I'm sure it's not really a very challenging leap to ask atheists to support this remaining on the law books.
I think the kind of depressingly stupid laws being referred to are things like :
Tax exemption for religion : even Jesus said "Pay unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" ; ie, pay your damn taxes. Religion is all about the next world, right? So you can chip in your fair share to maintain the mundane and worldly matters we have in this one.
Laws that require Women to be subjugated and marginalized.
Laws that target homosexuals for different treatment, despite the evidence being very clear that homosexuality is a natural variation in not just humans but many other species, and thus presumably part of God's design (if you believe in that sort of thing).
Yes, in a perfect world with a healthcare system paid out of taxes, people wouldn't do anything adverse to their health. One current hypothesis is that lowering your calorie intake to 20% below what is considered a "normal" intake is actually the best way to prolong your life ; I can't see that happening on a mass scale either.
I think the main point here is that everyone needs healthcare of some kind, statistically speaking, throughout their life. Some people need more than others, often through no fault of their own. Their right to life is often dependent on them getting this healthcare. But their right to life does not automatically give them the income to pay for it. With the economy the way it is, many people are struggling to eat, let alone pay for healthcare.
What you are essentially saying is "I don't give a shit if you die, I want my [pool | car | foreign holiday]."
On top of this, the way that healthcare is paid for in the USA currently makes it the most expensive in the world. Of the G8 nations, you pay nearly twice the cost per head of the next nation, for pretty similar outcomes. This extra cost is pretty obviously because of the nature of your health insurance industry. It seems insane to leave your health in the hands of a corporation who profit the most from denying you as much healthcare as possible. The extra bureaucracy the insurance industry engages in for their campaign to deny their customers treatment undoubtedly increases costs.
A libertarian will usually step in at this point and say "Well then, do away with the insurance companies, let me pay my doctor out of my own pocket, and the prices will drop!". This, alas, does not work well for everyone, as pointed out, because not everyone can afford healthcare, even healthcare that is now cheaper because of market forces. Healthcare is both labour intensive and employs many expensive, low-volume technologies, and neither of these costs can be depressed by mass production.
If you want a cheaper healthcare system, you only have to look to countries with socialised healthcare. Here in the UK, we have very similar outcomes to the USA (they have slightly better cancer treatment, largely because they have a larger population, and this means that drug trials for rare cancers are more viable, we have better cardiac outcomes). But we pay less than half per head what you do, because our healthcare system is run by the government, and the focus is not on making a profit, but providing the best outcomes. When we cut costs, we aren't trying to prop up the bottom line. We cut reluctantly, because we know that cut is hurting our patients, instead of rubbing our hands expecting a juicy bonus.
Well, I can see your point of view. Everyone has a selfish streak. No-one likes to be told what to do. But I would be interested to see how long your resolve to be a self-reliant individual lasts should you contract a medical condition or suffer an accident that outstrips your ability to pay for the care it requires.
Cyberwarfare means money. As most of the preceding posters have identified, most of the perceived threat is total horseshit. But because computers are full of magic smoke and fairies, muggles presume that a computer hooked up to a machine is a terrible threat. Haven't you seen the famous historical documentary, "Terminator" ???
It's just like the TSA - because there hasn't been a compumatronically induced apocalypse, we're doing a good job, right? Hell yeah, line up another raft of Cyberwarfare Funding Bills, and we need some more staff to hotswap the drives in our pr0n^W evidence storage RAID array.
I mean, if the elevator speed is inaccurate, then that means the sensors in the elevator that determine it's speed are inaccurate, so you have to bring new sensors on site anyway, so you can calibrate it onsite.
Plus the last I looked, (not sure if this is still the case), OpenOffice demanded copyright attribution, whereas LibreOffice doesn't. LibreOffice can't realistically change their license to a non-GPL compatible, non copyleft license, because they would have to get permission from every copyright holder. The only reason the Apache foundation could change the license was because Sun / Oracle demanded that all the authors sign their rights away.
Yes, we can be a bit literal minded. But we depend on knowing the straight dope to do our jobs ; our core competencies are founded on the ability to employ facts that we know to be, well, factual.
Hence it's not really a surprise to find that we don't like people lying. It unsettles us. It's like some ghastly evil magic, the ability to blithely say things that aren't true without suffering any kind of stress reaction at all. Even that thing that management do where they misunderstand what you are saying about the capabilities of a technology and misrepresent it in a meeting brings us out in hives. Discovering that they are doing it on purpose really offends us.
Read some of the siblings ; by enabling a successful first-strike strategy, missile defence IS a provocation. In this case, the best offence is a good defence.
It suggests that God doesn't exist OR we have an imperfect understanding of either God or the universe.
A perfect reason to reject that particular *religion* then. If power supernatural sentience exists, both the atheist and the theist have their description of the universe wrong. As it happens, the atheist position may make assumptions about the non-existence of god - you can't, as you rightly point out, prove a negative - but the observable universe does not disagree with his position on the nature of God.
From the evidential POV, atheism and agnosticism are equal to a theistic stance which believes that God does not intervene in the universe, but most religions have the answer to prayer as a major plank of their platform, and thus hold a position at odds with the lack of evidence that prayer has a measurable effect. If God does not intervene in the universe, then religion is of dubious value unless it conveys benefits that are not achievable otherwise, which is observably not the case. People are capable of being moral, charitable, cooperative, law-abiding, good parents, and upstanding citizens without the aid of religion, and are probably less likely to stray from the "path" given that atheism has a strong correlation with better education and income. So the only possible benefits would seem to be set apart from the concerns of our life here on Earth.
The question of entry into an afterlife paradise is something we can't examine ; but if you have faith that over half the world's population are damned to eternal suffering, or even just exclusion from paradise, because blind chance has birthed them into the wrong religion, and yet you continue to worship a being you believe not just to be OK with that, but ordain it, what does this say about your own morals? Even if I had empirical proof that such an entity existed, I would still be an atheist - not claiming that no God existed, but refusing to worship any such God. (Coercion by fear negates act of worship as being mere pretence, in my mind).
Does the scientist delve in to the mystery because he dislikes it? I think you'll find as many scientists claiming to like the mystery he's exploring as you'll find theologists with the same claim.
The difference being emphasised is that the scientist revels in exploring mystery and revealing truth, where the religion exhorts it's followers to be content to perceive mystery and not explore it - the implication being that religion fears that truth so revealed is incompatible with it's doctrine, a fear that is not without basis or precedent.
It is impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, the believer feels as totally compelling and convincing.
Atheist is impelled by conviction fuelled by external evidence, or lack of evidence. It's incredibly compelling to note that the two largest theist franchises claim their deity possesses three qualities - omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence - and that the state of the world is completely at odds with any entity with all three qualities existing. It's also compelling to note that the more we discover about the universe, the more things we discover that work just fine without any kind of deity.
The believer typically makes a positive virtue of faith's being strong and unshakable, despite it not being based upon evidence.
Atheists don't make a positive virtue of unshakable faith. If anything we use this as an argument ad-hominem about how childish theists are. If you proved that a particular deity existed with actual evidence, most of us would probably a) pee ourselves b) recant our position.
There is a conviction that "mystery", per se, is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.
Many of the the most prominent atheists in the media are scientists, a kind of person who by definition delves into mysteries to see how they actually work. I personally find that atheism arises most in those with a questioning mind, the kind of mind that finds that understanding, for example, how the transition of electrons through particular quantum states governs the colour of the light emitted, does not diminish the beauty of phenomena like their aurora borealis, but instead enhances it.
There may be intolerant behaviour towards perceived rival faiths, in extreme cases even the killing of opponents or advocating of their deaths. Believers may be similarly violent in disposition towards apostates or heretics, even if those espouse only a slightly different version of the faith.
We're intolerant of unpleasant behaviour in general (giving the lie to the theistic argument that an atheist can have no moral foundation). We are particularly angered when such behaviour is justified on the basis of faith. Objectively, being a religious asshat is not worse than being a standard asshat, but we observe that religion has a tendency to nurture and encourage asshattery of certain types, and even for asshats it did not create, it provides a readily accessible stock of cherry-picked excuses and justifications for asshattery, whereas a faithless man might have fallen back on his conscience, or fear of the law.
The particular convictions that the believer holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, are likely to resemble those of the believer's parents.
I don't think this can be disputed - atheist parents are more likely to have atheist kids. This is nothing to do with religion per-se, this is an observation about culture in general.
If the believer is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation may be cultural transmission from a charismatic individual.
Another observation about culture and how it's transmitted, but it fits in with the "viral ideas" theory. Ideas ARE viral, and we invent new transmission vectors like Twitter, and hashtags.
The internal sensations of the 'faith-sufferer' may be reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love.
I don't think atheists have a woody for the absence of a deity. I don't think you can be sexually excited about the absence of something. I think atheists, just like everyone else, can have displacement of their sexual urges in a fetishi
The main reason to publish your article in a pay-for journal is to get peer review. Which is why the key phrase is "published in a peer-reviewed journal". You're paying for the trust.
You could establish a system of trusted peer reviews that didn't depend on paid journals quite readily. You could even make it difficult to fake by employing cryptographic signatures. What's more, an online system wouldn't have to stop at the board of reviewers employed by the journal - any interested party could add their own review, taking into account that a more widely trusted reviewer in the field would carry more weight. You could even add cryptographically signed "debunkings".
Trust is the main commodity that journals trade in, but it's mostly a facade produced by glossy printing - who actually checks our the credentials of peer reviewers?
The manual for my green laser pointer cautions you against using it constantly - I'm guessing the heatsink arrangements are not what they could be in there.
The researchers probably took them apart and made sure they were properly cooled though.
They're doing it in the UK too : Web War II: What a future cyberwar will look like ; and on the BBC. I wonder if it's just a few select plants in their newsroom, whether they are just being fed this stuff unwittingly, or whether their legendary neutrality is being eroded at an institutional level.
the word freedom is used to demand restrictions on behavior
Everything you describe would be a personal choice though - the exercise of the freedom that you claim is being eroded. What's more, as an informed choice, it's a better choice. I admire Stallman for his moral fortitude, but even he bows to practicality and will fly on airplanes, etc, even though these things involve compromise. He will go much further out of his way to make a choice that he is morally comfortable with, electing to travel by train whenever practical (to avoid tracking of his movements), buying hardware with an open BIOS, etc, even when these involve compromise (I think the laptop in question is quite an underpowered netbook).
The GPL itself is a compromise. Yes, it keeps one key right from you - the right to take a piece of source code, build a program from it, and then hide the source for that program from people to whom you distribute it. This is in contrast to the BSD-style licenses which permit you just this right. GPL demands only that you sow as ye reaped. Both license grant rights that you would otherwise not have for copyrighted works - GPL just grants one less.
GPL doesn't demand that you give up your choice, it just demands that you grant the same choice to those that come after you. If you don't want to, you don't get to use GPL code in your program - and that choice is laid out for you beforehand.
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It's a lesser distraction to not to have to focus on the UI, but I think even conversation with a person in the car can adversely affect your driving ; if spacial concepts come up for discussion, especially. I myself notice that my driving can waver when conversing with my wife.
I might be ok with passively consuming text messages, especially on some kind of HUD (maybe Google Glasses when they emerge), but I personally avoid initiating communications whenever possible if I'm driving.
I think he might take a more practical viewpoint, given that roughly 9% of the UK population use marijuana.
It's self-evident that sending all drug users to prison would reduce drug use, just by denying them access to supply. But it's simply not practical to do so. Our prisons are already overcrowded, so you'd have to divert quite a portion of the national economy into building, maintaining, and staffing prisons, and also suffer the removal of 9% of the population from the economy - currently, we have 0.001% incarceration rates.
So, given that incarcerating all drug offenders will essentially destroy the economy of the UK and turn us into an Island Stalag Luft, we have to ask the question, is there a less harmful way of dealing with the problems involved with drugs? Is it cheaper for the state to safely feed the habits of drug users, given the cost in social disruption and healthcare costs they cause through theft and the use of poor quality, unregulated product? Which solution causes the least amount of harm?
Whereas a politician stating that "Drug use is immoral and you should be locked up!" isn't providing any kind of justification. Pick one, he :
i) Hasn't thought it through. Should people who don't actually think about what they are saying actually be in charge of anything? Note that in this one I am including all the subspecies of not thinking things through, including religion, moral outrage, fear of a different culture, etc.
ii) HAS thought it through. Has a financial interest in the prison-industrial complex. Since 9% of the UK population is a drug offender, there is an effectively endless supply of "product" for the commercial prison system, since as we have already postulated, incarcerating all drugs users isn't actually possible given that it would probably plunge the country into revolution.
It makes far more sense to insist on locking up people who commit actual offences (other than just possessing drugs) to feed their drug habit. It makes even more sense to try and work out what causes drug habits and how to fix THAT.
Taking the software analogy further, I strongly believe that the law should be kept in Git, and amendments merged in, instead of the current practise of suffixing the text to the end of the bill, essentially making people run `patch amendment.diff` in their head.
In addition, you'd be able to `git blame` the right person for each part of the law, have thorough law amendment reviews, and spot the filibuster rammed between two paragraphs about providing more funds for kittens.
Removing the religion doesn't suddenly render you an immoral beast. I think the biggest problem with religion is that it provides an arbitrary justification for any stupid law you like, with a vast sourcebook of quotes that you can bend to support it. Without this, you have to justify your laws solely on their merits.
"Thou shalt not kill" is pretty obvious - everyone has an interest in this one being enforced. If you permit arbitrary killing, you might be next.
Despite "Thou shalt not kill" being quite early in the Bible, the rest of the Old Testament is packed with killing, genocide, etc, all approved of by Jehovah ; it translates more closely to "Thou shalt not murder". Wars of conquest, apparently, don't count as murder when God Says So. Without the religion, it becomes a whole lot more impartial - you don't have any particular groups of people who you can dismiss as being unimportant by dint of their religious beliefs or geographic location. So, remove the God, and now you have fewer justifications for killing, and you only have evidence and logic to fall back on - which really only leaves you with self-defence as a viable justification. If people only killed people in self defence, no-one would kill anyone, because there wouldn't be any people killing anyone except in self defence...
"Thou shalt not steal" is also pretty damn obvious. If you ask a 5 year old "How would you like it if I took your sweeties?", they'll say that's not fair. So if a 5 year old can grasp it, I'm sure it's not really a very challenging leap to ask atheists to support this remaining on the law books.
I think the kind of depressingly stupid laws being referred to are things like :
Tax exemption for religion : even Jesus said "Pay unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" ; ie, pay your damn taxes. Religion is all about the next world, right? So you can chip in your fair share to maintain the mundane and worldly matters we have in this one.
Laws that require Women to be subjugated and marginalized.
Laws that target homosexuals for different treatment, despite the evidence being very clear that homosexuality is a natural variation in not just humans but many other species, and thus presumably part of God's design (if you believe in that sort of thing).
*sigh*
Yes, in a perfect world with a healthcare system paid out of taxes, people wouldn't do anything adverse to their health. One current hypothesis is that lowering your calorie intake to 20% below what is considered a "normal" intake is actually the best way to prolong your life ; I can't see that happening on a mass scale either.
I think the main point here is that everyone needs healthcare of some kind, statistically speaking, throughout their life. Some people need more than others, often through no fault of their own. Their right to life is often dependent on them getting this healthcare. But their right to life does not automatically give them the income to pay for it. With the economy the way it is, many people are struggling to eat, let alone pay for healthcare.
What you are essentially saying is "I don't give a shit if you die, I want my [pool | car | foreign holiday]."
On top of this, the way that healthcare is paid for in the USA currently makes it the most expensive in the world. Of the G8 nations, you pay nearly twice the cost per head of the next nation, for pretty similar outcomes. This extra cost is pretty obviously because of the nature of your health insurance industry. It seems insane to leave your health in the hands of a corporation who profit the most from denying you as much healthcare as possible. The extra bureaucracy the insurance industry engages in for their campaign to deny their customers treatment undoubtedly increases costs.
A libertarian will usually step in at this point and say "Well then, do away with the insurance companies, let me pay my doctor out of my own pocket, and the prices will drop!". This, alas, does not work well for everyone, as pointed out, because not everyone can afford healthcare, even healthcare that is now cheaper because of market forces. Healthcare is both labour intensive and employs many expensive, low-volume technologies, and neither of these costs can be depressed by mass production.
If you want a cheaper healthcare system, you only have to look to countries with socialised healthcare. Here in the UK, we have very similar outcomes to the USA (they have slightly better cancer treatment, largely because they have a larger population, and this means that drug trials for rare cancers are more viable, we have better cardiac outcomes). But we pay less than half per head what you do, because our healthcare system is run by the government, and the focus is not on making a profit, but providing the best outcomes. When we cut costs, we aren't trying to prop up the bottom line. We cut reluctantly, because we know that cut is hurting our patients, instead of rubbing our hands expecting a juicy bonus.
Well, I can see your point of view. Everyone has a selfish streak. No-one likes to be told what to do. But I would be interested to see how long your resolve to be a self-reliant individual lasts should you contract a medical condition or suffer an accident that outstrips your ability to pay for the care it requires.
Here in the UK, it was £41,000 per year, so around $64,000.
So presumably not here.
They make financial instruments complex on purpose as well. Can't understand it? Can't tax it!
Then your system has to model trading these things... you either end up with fractal complexity, or dangerous assumptions...
Or "Goldeneye", in which the bad guy targets the City of London with an EMP weapon in order to bring about financial meltdown.
Cyberwarfare means money. As most of the preceding posters have identified, most of the perceived threat is total horseshit. But because computers are full of magic smoke and fairies, muggles presume that a computer hooked up to a machine is a terrible threat. Haven't you seen the famous historical documentary, "Terminator" ???
It's just like the TSA - because there hasn't been a compumatronically induced apocalypse, we're doing a good job, right? Hell yeah, line up another raft of Cyberwarfare Funding Bills, and we need some more staff to hotswap the drives in our pr0n^W evidence storage RAID array.
Just try to get into any big bilding without a security guard on your ass.
Get a boilerman's uniform. Wave your visitors pass. If the guard insists on accompanying you, look busy until he goes to pinch a loaf.
Half the reason Kevin Mitnick was notorious was not because he was a stone cold hacker - he was a good social engineer.
Ok, so why do you need to do that over a network?
I mean, if the elevator speed is inaccurate, then that means the sensors in the elevator that determine it's speed are inaccurate, so you have to bring new sensors on site anyway, so you can calibrate it onsite.
OpenJDK 7 is now the reference implementation, including the Java plugin.
I'm not sure whether the Oracle version still contains secret sauce, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Plus the last I looked, (not sure if this is still the case), OpenOffice demanded copyright attribution, whereas LibreOffice doesn't. LibreOffice can't realistically change their license to a non-GPL compatible, non copyleft license, because they would have to get permission from every copyright holder. The only reason the Apache foundation could change the license was because Sun / Oracle demanded that all the authors sign their rights away.
And concert tickets probably give more to the actual artists than the royalties on their album sales.
Yes, we can be a bit literal minded. But we depend on knowing the straight dope to do our jobs ; our core competencies are founded on the ability to employ facts that we know to be, well, factual.
Hence it's not really a surprise to find that we don't like people lying. It unsettles us. It's like some ghastly evil magic, the ability to blithely say things that aren't true without suffering any kind of stress reaction at all. Even that thing that management do where they misunderstand what you are saying about the capabilities of a technology and misrepresent it in a meeting brings us out in hives. Discovering that they are doing it on purpose really offends us.
Read some of the siblings ; by enabling a successful first-strike strategy, missile defence IS a provocation. In this case, the best offence is a good defence.
It suggests that God doesn't exist OR we have an imperfect understanding of either God or the universe.
A perfect reason to reject that particular *religion* then. If power supernatural sentience exists, both the atheist and the theist have their description of the universe wrong. As it happens, the atheist position may make assumptions about the non-existence of god - you can't, as you rightly point out, prove a negative - but the observable universe does not disagree with his position on the nature of God.
From the evidential POV, atheism and agnosticism are equal to a theistic stance which believes that God does not intervene in the universe, but most religions have the answer to prayer as a major plank of their platform, and thus hold a position at odds with the lack of evidence that prayer has a measurable effect. If God does not intervene in the universe, then religion is of dubious value unless it conveys benefits that are not achievable otherwise, which is observably not the case. People are capable of being moral, charitable, cooperative, law-abiding, good parents, and upstanding citizens without the aid of religion, and are probably less likely to stray from the "path" given that atheism has a strong correlation with better education and income. So the only possible benefits would seem to be set apart from the concerns of our life here on Earth.
The question of entry into an afterlife paradise is something we can't examine ; but if you have faith that over half the world's population are damned to eternal suffering, or even just exclusion from paradise, because blind chance has birthed them into the wrong religion, and yet you continue to worship a being you believe not just to be OK with that, but ordain it, what does this say about your own morals? Even if I had empirical proof that such an entity existed, I would still be an atheist - not claiming that no God existed, but refusing to worship any such God. (Coercion by fear negates act of worship as being mere pretence, in my mind).
Does the scientist delve in to the mystery because he dislikes it? I think you'll find as many scientists claiming to like the mystery he's exploring as you'll find theologists with the same claim.
The difference being emphasised is that the scientist revels in exploring mystery and revealing truth, where the religion exhorts it's followers to be content to perceive mystery and not explore it - the implication being that religion fears that truth so revealed is incompatible with it's doctrine, a fear that is not without basis or precedent.
Well, let's see
It is impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, the believer feels as totally compelling and convincing.
Atheist is impelled by conviction fuelled by external evidence, or lack of evidence. It's incredibly compelling to note that the two largest theist franchises claim their deity possesses three qualities - omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence - and that the state of the world is completely at odds with any entity with all three qualities existing. It's also compelling to note that the more we discover about the universe, the more things we discover that work just fine without any kind of deity.
The believer typically makes a positive virtue of faith's being strong and unshakable, despite it not being based upon evidence.
Atheists don't make a positive virtue of unshakable faith. If anything we use this as an argument ad-hominem about how childish theists are. If you proved that a particular deity existed with actual evidence, most of us would probably a) pee ourselves b) recant our position.
There is a conviction that "mystery", per se, is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.
Many of the the most prominent atheists in the media are scientists, a kind of person who by definition delves into mysteries to see how they actually work. I personally find that atheism arises most in those with a questioning mind, the kind of mind that finds that understanding, for example, how the transition of electrons through particular quantum states governs the colour of the light emitted, does not diminish the beauty of phenomena like their aurora borealis, but instead enhances it.
There may be intolerant behaviour towards perceived rival faiths, in extreme cases even the killing of opponents or advocating of their deaths. Believers may be similarly violent in disposition towards apostates or heretics, even if those espouse only a slightly different version of the faith.
We're intolerant of unpleasant behaviour in general (giving the lie to the theistic argument that an atheist can have no moral foundation). We are particularly angered when such behaviour is justified on the basis of faith. Objectively, being a religious asshat is not worse than being a standard asshat, but we observe that religion has a tendency to nurture and encourage asshattery of certain types, and even for asshats it did not create, it provides a readily accessible stock of cherry-picked excuses and justifications for asshattery, whereas a faithless man might have fallen back on his conscience, or fear of the law.
The particular convictions that the believer holds, while having nothing to do with evidence, are likely to resemble those of the believer's parents.
I don't think this can be disputed - atheist parents are more likely to have atheist kids. This is nothing to do with religion per-se, this is an observation about culture in general.
If the believer is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents, the explanation may be cultural transmission from a charismatic individual.
Another observation about culture and how it's transmitted, but it fits in with the "viral ideas" theory. Ideas ARE viral, and we invent new transmission vectors like Twitter, and hashtags.
The internal sensations of the 'faith-sufferer' may be reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love.
I don't think atheists have a woody for the absence of a deity. I don't think you can be sexually excited about the absence of something. I think atheists, just like everyone else, can have displacement of their sexual urges in a fetishi
The main reason to publish your article in a pay-for journal is to get peer review. Which is why the key phrase is "published in a peer-reviewed journal". You're paying for the trust.
You could establish a system of trusted peer reviews that didn't depend on paid journals quite readily. You could even make it difficult to fake by employing cryptographic signatures. What's more, an online system wouldn't have to stop at the board of reviewers employed by the journal - any interested party could add their own review, taking into account that a more widely trusted reviewer in the field would carry more weight. You could even add cryptographically signed "debunkings".
Trust is the main commodity that journals trade in, but it's mostly a facade produced by glossy printing - who actually checks our the credentials of peer reviewers?
The manual for my green laser pointer cautions you against using it constantly - I'm guessing the heatsink arrangements are not what they could be in there.
The researchers probably took them apart and made sure they were properly cooled though.
And out of his eight posts, four are negative of Google, one is negative of Linux, and three are positive about Microsoft.
They're doing it in the UK too : Web War II: What a future cyberwar will look like ; and on the BBC. I wonder if it's just a few select plants in their newsroom, whether they are just being fed this stuff unwittingly, or whether their legendary neutrality is being eroded at an institutional level.
This one relies on embedded codes in their URLs to measure their effectiveness ; it wouldn't be difficult to detect.
Yeah, my first thought was that I'd find it hard to find ethical music suppliers in the UK - specifically the ones run by the labels.
I guess the only places I'll by buying from now will be Magnatune and Bandcamp
the word freedom is used to demand restrictions on behavior
Everything you describe would be a personal choice though - the exercise of the freedom that you claim is being eroded. What's more, as an informed choice, it's a better choice. I admire Stallman for his moral fortitude, but even he bows to practicality and will fly on airplanes, etc, even though these things involve compromise. He will go much further out of his way to make a choice that he is morally comfortable with, electing to travel by train whenever practical (to avoid tracking of his movements), buying hardware with an open BIOS, etc, even when these involve compromise (I think the laptop in question is quite an underpowered netbook).
The GPL itself is a compromise. Yes, it keeps one key right from you - the right to take a piece of source code, build a program from it, and then hide the source for that program from people to whom you distribute it. This is in contrast to the BSD-style licenses which permit you just this right. GPL demands only that you sow as ye reaped. Both license grant rights that you would otherwise not have for copyrighted works - GPL just grants one less.
GPL doesn't demand that you give up your choice, it just demands that you grant the same choice to those that come after you. If you don't want to, you don't get to use GPL code in your program - and that choice is laid out for you beforehand.