Of course, we could all be a single sad kid having conversations with himself from his mother's basement.
Wait, everyone else on/. is some sort of figment of my imagination talking to me? I'm not sure whether to be happy that I have the central plot device of my next story, or sad b/c my imagination is puerile and hates me...
If my legal-fu is working today, this would seem to imply that Universal's claims that the promotional CDs are not a gift is an admission that they broke whichever statute your link refers to. If these aren't gifts, and Universal isn't a charity, that blurb makes it pretty clear everything else is illegal to send without the recipient's permission.
To be fair, THE ENTIRE WORLD was a lot more violent, cruel, and nasty at the time that modern mainstream religions were at their most vicious. As civilization's standards have risen, the behavior of most religions has improved. On the other hand, there are very few modern organizations that are as vicious as the Church of Scientology.
You keep talking about trespass here. What you are overlooking is that I am accessing a signal on my property. I am not somehow "hacking" into your computer; your equipment is broadcasting a signal onto my property. It's like CBS getting pissed b/c I pick up their TV channel without asking them first. If the signal is encrypted (satellite) and I actively circumvent that protection, that's a no-no. If it is unencrypted (broadcast TV), I am allowed to use it. How is this any different?
then I'm addicted to my job, my second job... pooping...it's trivially easy for me to become absorbed in something and simply forget to eat or go to bed - for hours on end.
If you become absorbed in pooping for hours on end, you might not have a mental disease level addiction, but I'd still recommend seeing a doctor.
It does seem to me that a profound life-defining belief in something which cannot be proved to exist is incompatible with the scientific method of a rigorous and logical evaluation of evidence to arrive at a conclusion.
This seems to be the key point that a lot of non-religious people stick at, and I'm not entirely sure why. Can not be proved to exist != proved to not exist. Believing something that has neither been proved true nor false doesn't contradict evaluating evidence to arrive at a conclusion - there is no evidence.
And the objections (theoretically) rational people come up with here! Most common: <sarcasm> So I guess I should just believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny b/c there is no proof they don't exist, either!</sarcasm> Nope; no one is saying you have to believe everything that can't be proven false; that is just as ridiculous as saying you shouldn't believe anything that can't be proven true. Which is the second objection commonly given: <self-righteous rationality>I don't believe anything that can't be proven</self-righteous rationality> This is almost certainly bull-shit; if not, it is a sign of insanity. The average person believes all kinds of things without what would be considered rigorous scientific evidence. In fact, you pretty much have to, the key point about scientific evidence being repeatability and falsifiability. Unfortunately, the real world isn't set up as a controlled experiment (I think...), so you seldom have these luxuries when making decisions in life. Instead, you come to a conclusion based on experience (anecdotal evidence) and what you judge to be good advice (appeals to authority) far more often than you come to a conclusion based on the experimental method. In fact, the people that truly only believe what has been experimentally proven probably all died at a very young age, death being one of those non-repeatable experimental results.
I am not, BTW, claiming you said any of these things, 15Bit. Just pointing out the two most common, IMHO, fallacious rebuttals to the obvious disconnect between lack of proof and proof of lack. The only truly scientific response to the God question is "I don't know"; fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), humans are NOT truly scientific on all points at all times. Most of us are, well, human. And the idea of a supernatural being guiding us and the world around us seems to speak very deeply to the human spirit.
Ha! Back in the day (it may have changed by now), CS majors at my Uni. had to have 4 semesters of a foreign language. General requirements were only 2. I always felt, if anything, I ought to be able to count learning C++, Pascal, Perl, Java, etc. towards the general requirement, rather than having to take extra semesters over the humanities students. And CS was in the Math department, which only required the 2 semesters. Even my adviser couldn't explain it to me.
Wait, when the pot stops working, people turn to speed or coke to fill the gap? Huh? I understand they are stoners, so not thinking too clearly, but that's still a pretty round peg they are trying to squeeze into that triangular hole.
Completely off-topic, but I just had a conversation with a moron recently where I tried to use that example. For some reason, I was trying to explain to her that cold is not an actual "thing", it is the absence of heat, heat being the "thing". I tried to explain it to her as being similar to the way dark is really just the absence of light. I made some comment about you can shine light on something, but you can't shine dark on it, merely block the light. This baffled her, which fact baffled me, so I conceded the bet and bought her a beer.
There are certain special brands of stupid you just can't argue with.
It's b/c you only hear about the overreactions. You don't hear about the 4 million times/day a teacher is harassed to some degree by a student and just moves on with his/her life.
We've come a long way in 50 years....I don't see that making a crime (already against the law) worse by making it a 'hate' crime is justified in this day in age. Nobody gets away with the *wink*wink* crap anymore, it is immediately on tv...and you have outrage about it broadcast nationally.
Oh, I agree. And I don't mean to say that any one group should have more worth under the law than any other. In this day and age, maybe it makes sense to do away with hate crime laws. I'm just saying that the context in which these laws were passed explains why they might have seemed like a good idea, despite the obvious downsides. Sure, institutionalized racism like we (well, not me personally, but my parents) saw back in the day is a thing of the past. But whose to say hate crime laws didn't play a role in stamping that out? They were an institutional response to an institutional problem.
Actually, at least in NC, racial slurs in conjunction with threats are illegal. Hate crimes. The threats are illegal by themselves, but the added "hate" aspect increases the penalty.
There is a difference in arresting someone for threats, and yet a WHOLE other thing if trying to arrest for 'thoughts' and opinons expressed. That latter one gets scary.
You have to put it in a historical context. Yes, in a perfect world, people should be allowed to express thoughts and opinions with out fear of the consequences. Unfortunately, NC and other places have quite a bit of experience telling us that it is a short quick hop from threatening someone based on their race to actually harming them b/c of their race. You can criticize someone's race (the KKK is perfectly legal), but you can not threaten them. You can't threaten anyone, legally, but so called "hate crimes" add an extra penalty in an effort to head off things like lynching and gang-raping someone simply b/c they are the wrong color. After 50 years or so of *winkwinknodnod* b/c the victim was black, swinging a bit too far the other way doesn't strike me as that bad of an idea.
Just to throw in my $0.02 (USD); I work for a public health research project and this is exactly how we operate. Whoever does the lion's share of the work is primary, with all contributors being co-authors, and the PI is the last name. However, she does get her name on there whether she had anything to do with the work or not. I don't know if this is standard, or attributable to the fact that her name will help get my paper published, where they would laugh it out the door if it was just me (I don't have the right letters after my name).
However, I am convinced at least part of this is b/c she hates to present at conferences:)
But the startups aren't being forced to sell, they choose to do so for the money. So it sounds like we are back to "every chemist/biochemist/biomedical researcher in the world is inherently just in it for the money". I simply find that hard to believe.
There are plenty of these scammers in the town I live in, which is a college town. The reason I mention this is most of these guys just say they are trying to get to the next town over, or at most, the next. I guess this works on college kids w/ no car, but I always just offer them a ride instead of the $$$. It's fun to watch them stammer, trying to come up with a reason they can't just accept a ride from me, but MUST HAVE an actual bus ticket.
I've never had anyone take me up on the offer of a ride:D
I didn't see the movie either, but I did see a Monk episode with a fairly realistic car hacking scenario. Guy hacks a vehicle's GPS unit, feeds the driver incorrect directions and leads him directly into the villain's remote ambush. The most realistic part (to me) is the guy and his wife are both like "Where the hell is this taking us? This can't be right. But it's GPS, so I guess I will turn down this deserted road and come to a stop..." The cleverness is actually in the social hack, not the technical crack.
To be fair, Britney did reproduce. From a strictly evolutionary view, she is a success. Well, unless heavy drug use damaged her kids. Or her choice of mate reduced her off-springs' chances of survival. Or...nevermind; failure it is.
Now, I would argue that progress is by its nature exponential and so I would not say that religion's waning influence caused it; I would, however, say religion is irrelevant to progress except when it is actively opposing it. One of the two conclusions I pointed to as reasonable, I might add.
At best, you would be forced to conclude that it is irrelevant when considering its impact on progress, and more honestly you might have to conclude that it might actually be harmful to progress.
Perhaps I misinterpreted; it seemed to me you were arguing that religion is harmful to progress. While I certainly wasn't trying to argue that religion somehow enhances progress, I do think, given the large number of religious people that have contributed greatly to science in the past that the obvious conclusion is that religion does not inherently hinder progress. The particularly nasty (and VOCAL) form of extremism popular these days does, but I suspect that is actually a minority of the people that would consider themselves religious. Maybe I am just an optimist.
As for social progress, I was thinking more the last decade or so. I think you could find people that would argue social progress has gone backwards in many places (especially in terms of personal freedoms) during that period. I don't know, maybe if you could somehow take an average "freedom index" or something across the entire globe, it has steadily risen over the last 50 years. It just doesn't look like that from where I sit.
However, the fact that the last 50 years has seen a diminishing influence of religion and also the greatest period of social and technology progress that humanity has ever seen
Uhm, pretty much any 50 year period in the last 300 years or so could have been described (at the time) as the greatest period of technological progress that humanity has ever seen. Social progress, well, that's quite debatable, given that a lot of "social progress" is based entirely on subjective interpretation, which society you are referring to, which period in that society you are comparing which aspects to, etc.
Spending money on things for the good of the people, but that is something the average person wouldnt want to pay for himself, is what the government is for.
So you are advocating letting the government decide what is "the good of the people", and object to the idea of including the opinion of the people in such a decision?
I knew Microsoft had fooled around w/ Xenix before going DOS, but I hadn't realized the extent. That softpanorama link looks like a very interesting read; I'll have to check it out more closely later. Thanks!
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You didn't mail me the lawnmower, so of course I can't sell it. What if I sold the key, though?
I would say it is terrible when innocents suffer in a geek-by rickrolling, but we all know there are no innocents on /.
Of course, we could all be a single sad kid having conversations with himself from his mother's basement.
/. is some sort of figment of my imagination talking to me? I'm not sure whether to be happy that I have the central plot device of my next story, or sad b/c my imagination is puerile and hates me...
Wait, everyone else on
If my legal-fu is working today, this would seem to imply that Universal's claims that the promotional CDs are not a gift is an admission that they broke whichever statute your link refers to. If these aren't gifts, and Universal isn't a charity, that blurb makes it pretty clear everything else is illegal to send without the recipient's permission.
To be fair, THE ENTIRE WORLD was a lot more violent, cruel, and nasty at the time that modern mainstream religions were at their most vicious. As civilization's standards have risen, the behavior of most religions has improved. On the other hand, there are very few modern organizations that are as vicious as the Church of Scientology.
You keep talking about trespass here. What you are overlooking is that I am accessing a signal on my property. I am not somehow "hacking" into your computer; your equipment is broadcasting a signal onto my property. It's like CBS getting pissed b/c I pick up their TV channel without asking them first. If the signal is encrypted (satellite) and I actively circumvent that protection, that's a no-no. If it is unencrypted (broadcast TV), I am allowed to use it. How is this any different?
then I'm addicted to my job, my second job... pooping...it's trivially easy for me to become absorbed in something and simply forget to eat or go to bed - for hours on end.
If you become absorbed in pooping for hours on end, you might not have a mental disease level addiction, but I'd still recommend seeing a doctor.
Wait. You had these dreams before you knew what the Holocaust was? By what mechanism would you say you incurred these nightmares?
Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Especially when mixed with large quantities of alcohol. Just saying.
It does seem to me that a profound life-defining belief in something which cannot be proved to exist is incompatible with the scientific method of a rigorous and logical evaluation of evidence to arrive at a conclusion.
This seems to be the key point that a lot of non-religious people stick at, and I'm not entirely sure why. Can not be proved to exist != proved to not exist. Believing something that has neither been proved true nor false doesn't contradict evaluating evidence to arrive at a conclusion - there is no evidence.
And the objections (theoretically) rational people come up with here! Most common: <sarcasm> So I guess I should just believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny b/c there is no proof they don't exist, either!</sarcasm> Nope; no one is saying you have to believe everything that can't be proven false; that is just as ridiculous as saying you shouldn't believe anything that can't be proven true. Which is the second objection commonly given: <self-righteous rationality>I don't believe anything that can't be proven</self-righteous rationality> This is almost certainly bull-shit; if not, it is a sign of insanity. The average person believes all kinds of things without what would be considered rigorous scientific evidence. In fact, you pretty much have to, the key point about scientific evidence being repeatability and falsifiability. Unfortunately, the real world isn't set up as a controlled experiment (I think...), so you seldom have these luxuries when making decisions in life. Instead, you come to a conclusion based on experience (anecdotal evidence) and what you judge to be good advice (appeals to authority) far more often than you come to a conclusion based on the experimental method. In fact, the people that truly only believe what has been experimentally proven probably all died at a very young age, death being one of those non-repeatable experimental results.
I am not, BTW, claiming you said any of these things, 15Bit. Just pointing out the two most common, IMHO, fallacious rebuttals to the obvious disconnect between lack of proof and proof of lack. The only truly scientific response to the God question is "I don't know"; fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), humans are NOT truly scientific on all points at all times. Most of us are, well, human. And the idea of a supernatural being guiding us and the world around us seems to speak very deeply to the human spirit.
Ha! Back in the day (it may have changed by now), CS majors at my Uni. had to have 4 semesters of a foreign language. General requirements were only 2. I always felt, if anything, I ought to be able to count learning C++, Pascal, Perl, Java, etc. towards the general requirement, rather than having to take extra semesters over the humanities students. And CS was in the Math department, which only required the 2 semesters. Even my adviser couldn't explain it to me.
Wait, when the pot stops working, people turn to speed or coke to fill the gap? Huh? I understand they are stoners, so not thinking too clearly, but that's still a pretty round peg they are trying to squeeze into that triangular hole.
Completely off-topic, but I just had a conversation with a moron recently where I tried to use that example. For some reason, I was trying to explain to her that cold is not an actual "thing", it is the absence of heat, heat being the "thing". I tried to explain it to her as being similar to the way dark is really just the absence of light. I made some comment about you can shine light on something, but you can't shine dark on it, merely block the light. This baffled her, which fact baffled me, so I conceded the bet and bought her a beer.
There are certain special brands of stupid you just can't argue with.
It's b/c you only hear about the overreactions. You don't hear about the 4 million times/day a teacher is harassed to some degree by a student and just moves on with his/her life.
We've come a long way in 50 years....I don't see that making a crime (already against the law) worse by making it a 'hate' crime is justified in this day in age. Nobody gets away with the *wink*wink* crap anymore, it is immediately on tv...and you have outrage about it broadcast nationally.
Oh, I agree. And I don't mean to say that any one group should have more worth under the law than any other. In this day and age, maybe it makes sense to do away with hate crime laws. I'm just saying that the context in which these laws were passed explains why they might have seemed like a good idea, despite the obvious downsides. Sure, institutionalized racism like we (well, not me personally, but my parents) saw back in the day is a thing of the past. But whose to say hate crime laws didn't play a role in stamping that out? They were an institutional response to an institutional problem.
Actually, at least in NC, racial slurs in conjunction with threats are illegal. Hate crimes. The threats are illegal by themselves, but the added "hate" aspect increases the penalty.
There is a difference in arresting someone for threats, and yet a WHOLE other thing if trying to arrest for 'thoughts' and opinons expressed. That latter one gets scary.
You have to put it in a historical context. Yes, in a perfect world, people should be allowed to express thoughts and opinions with out fear of the consequences. Unfortunately, NC and other places have quite a bit of experience telling us that it is a short quick hop from threatening someone based on their race to actually harming them b/c of their race. You can criticize someone's race (the KKK is perfectly legal), but you can not threaten them. You can't threaten anyone, legally, but so called "hate crimes" add an extra penalty in an effort to head off things like lynching and gang-raping someone simply b/c they are the wrong color. After 50 years or so of *winkwinknodnod* b/c the victim was black, swinging a bit too far the other way doesn't strike me as that bad of an idea.
Just to throw in my $0.02 (USD); I work for a public health research project and this is exactly how we operate. Whoever does the lion's share of the work is primary, with all contributors being co-authors, and the PI is the last name. However, she does get her name on there whether she had anything to do with the work or not. I don't know if this is standard, or attributable to the fact that her name will help get my paper published, where they would laugh it out the door if it was just me (I don't have the right letters after my name).
:)
However, I am convinced at least part of this is b/c she hates to present at conferences
But the startups aren't being forced to sell, they choose to do so for the money. So it sounds like we are back to "every chemist/biochemist/biomedical researcher in the world is inherently just in it for the money". I simply find that hard to believe.
There are plenty of these scammers in the town I live in, which is a college town. The reason I mention this is most of these guys just say they are trying to get to the next town over, or at most, the next. I guess this works on college kids w/ no car, but I always just offer them a ride instead of the $$$. It's fun to watch them stammer, trying to come up with a reason they can't just accept a ride from me, but MUST HAVE an actual bus ticket.
:D
I've never had anyone take me up on the offer of a ride
I didn't see the movie either, but I did see a Monk episode with a fairly realistic car hacking scenario. Guy hacks a vehicle's GPS unit, feeds the driver incorrect directions and leads him directly into the villain's remote ambush. The most realistic part (to me) is the guy and his wife are both like "Where the hell is this taking us? This can't be right. But it's GPS, so I guess I will turn down this deserted road and come to a stop..." The cleverness is actually in the social hack, not the technical crack.
To be fair, Britney did reproduce. From a strictly evolutionary view, she is a success. Well, unless heavy drug use damaged her kids. Or her choice of mate reduced her off-springs' chances of survival. Or...nevermind; failure it is.
Now, I would argue that progress is by its nature exponential and so I would not say that religion's waning influence caused it; I would, however, say religion is irrelevant to progress except when it is actively opposing it. One of the two conclusions I pointed to as reasonable, I might add.
At best, you would be forced to conclude that it is irrelevant when considering its impact on progress, and more honestly you might have to conclude that it might actually be harmful to progress.
Perhaps I misinterpreted; it seemed to me you were arguing that religion is harmful to progress. While I certainly wasn't trying to argue that religion somehow enhances progress, I do think, given the large number of religious people that have contributed greatly to science in the past that the obvious conclusion is that religion does not inherently hinder progress. The particularly nasty (and VOCAL) form of extremism popular these days does, but I suspect that is actually a minority of the people that would consider themselves religious. Maybe I am just an optimist.
As for social progress, I was thinking more the last decade or so. I think you could find people that would argue social progress has gone backwards in many places (especially in terms of personal freedoms) during that period. I don't know, maybe if you could somehow take an average "freedom index" or something across the entire globe, it has steadily risen over the last 50 years. It just doesn't look like that from where I sit.
However, the fact that the last 50 years has seen a diminishing influence of religion and also the greatest period of social and technology progress that humanity has ever seen
Uhm, pretty much any 50 year period in the last 300 years or so could have been described (at the time) as the greatest period of technological progress that humanity has ever seen. Social progress, well, that's quite debatable, given that a lot of "social progress" is based entirely on subjective interpretation, which society you are referring to, which period in that society you are comparing which aspects to, etc.
Spending money on things for the good of the people, but that is something the average person wouldnt want to pay for himself, is what the government is for.
So you are advocating letting the government decide what is "the good of the people", and object to the idea of including the opinion of the people in such a decision?
I knew Microsoft had fooled around w/ Xenix before going DOS, but I hadn't realized the extent. That softpanorama link looks like a very interesting read; I'll have to check it out more closely later. Thanks!