I beleive the brain consumes 30-60% of our total energy budget. I've read different numbers from different sources. This is based on the amount of oxygen consumed in respiration.
Pretty interesting, that the brain uses so much. I'm pretty sure I'm hungrier by lunchtime if I've done a solid morning's coding. Reading slashdot doesn't seem to bring on hunger...
I think you misunderstand the role of natural selection. Just because it's a theory that deconstructs some (or all) of Christianity and many other religions, doesn't mean it is a religion in itself, and does not mean it represents any sort of moral framework. A flaw in a story does not constitute an alternative story.
I typed in more than this, but then realised that Richard Dawkins says it much better than I could, in this short essay: Rebelling Against Our Selfish Genes"Humans must believe in evolution, but fight it. Through us, natural selection has blundered unwittingly into its own negation".
It's precisely "enforcing their religion on others" that leads secularists like me to want religion banished from schools. I'm very annoyed that I was indoctrinated with religion from the age of 4. I'm sure there are extremes and subversions of these secularizing efforts which we would agree have become absurd.
Aethism is a believe in the supremacy of man and that there is no divine spark, creator or all powerful intelligence
Nonsense! Atheism says nothing about "supremacy of man". Personally, I don't believe in such a thing, I think it's absurd. Supreme over what? On what authority? Where did you get that idea?
Atheism is the absence of a belief in God, simply that. It is a position on religion, and only in the very loosest sense could it be said to be a religion itself.
What are these cases of atheists getting away with things theists do not anyway? You can't practice atheism, there are no rituals. What were they doing? Getting expelled for expressing views sounds outrageous, how about some details?
Atheists want nothing more than to live their lives without God so they can live a life without any ultimate consequences
You can't choose to believe something because you like the implication. That would be like believing in God because it's a nice idea.
Oh wait, I forgot, that's exactly why a lot of people do believe.
And what is this life without ultimate consequences of which you speak? Our effect on the universe is our ultimate consequence. Many atheists care deeply about what will be around after our deaths and what our contribution was. I want to die feeling I contributed to the greater good.
I can get really pissed off with people who think atheism implies immorality. Psychopathic nutjobs may need their conscience laid down to them in rules in a book. Non sociopaths have a conscience and empathy built in.
I had a teacher lecture a class for an hour that religion was the cause of all man's sorrows, made statements such as "more people have died because of christianity than any other cause combined" a statement easily repudiated and was not chastised at all. While a child in that same school was warned against having a bible time during lunch hour. In fact the principle believed the statement was true until it was pointed out that property,jealousy,rage, disease, old age, wars in the name of Karl Marx (communism), Facism and Islam and automobile accidents easily outclassed the crusades.
In what way was he teaching a religion (or atheism)? In this description he's not teaching you his religious belief as fact. He's teaching you his (absurd, as stated) opinion about the effects of one religion on humanity. Hugely different things. Even if it were to be true, it says nothing about the truth or otherwise of Christianity.
While some of us are quite scared that so many doctors have such irrational beliefs, and what has that got to do with scientists?
Some research doctors are scientists, most practicing ones are not. They are more technologists, sort of biological mechanics.
I don't think that it's fair to use the National Academy of Science as the survey pool. People who have made it into the NAS have devoted at least 90% of their waking energy to the scientific fields are not consistent with most kinds of faith anyways
Yeah, exactly - most scientists have learned enough that is inconsistent with religions faith.. . How is this anything but an damning indictment of faith? That scientific knowledge can destroy it without even trying. Science doesn't have to replace faith to break it.
The issue is not that education is inconsistent with faith, it's that science education is (for most).
We can't disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy either. Or a teapot in orbit around Mars.
From Richard Dawkins:
"A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he thought God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's.
Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence.
The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."
By your definition teaching the Roman & Greek gods is then a state sponsored religion
If they were taught as a theory about the nature of the universe, yes. But then they're not actually, are they? What's the ID crowd suggest is teaching it as a scientific theory on the same level as natural selection.
What is said here is Congress shall make no laws "establishing a state religion", meaning that unlike the "Church of England", we would recognize all religous beliefs and allow their worship anywhere, anytime! What this amendment was morphed into is atheism established as the official religion of the US Educational System.
The definition I use for religion is: "An outward expression of a belief system in regards to man's role in the universe and or a divine god or gods."
Your definition of religion is so broad as to be nearly meaningless. The absense of a belief in god, is now a religion?
You limit the meaning of "establishing" a religion to mean sanctioning a named church, and then assert that atheism is established as the official religion...? Your arguments are just getting too silly to respond to further.
video games showing full frontal nudity or realistic depictions of death (and when I say this I mean watching actual video clips of people being tortured, decapitated, etc) should be looked into as we do with movies...
[snip]
I thought that as we matured as a society that this type of conservative bullshit would cease
Perhaps one day the USA will mature enough as a society to no longer view nudity in the same league as violence. I for one don't care whether a child of mine sees people without clothes on, but I'm dismayed by a lot of the violence that goes largely unchallenged.
Yeah, but you can see satellites because they're out there in the sunlight when it's dark down here. (Blinking? I've seen them glide across the sky, but not blink.)
That said, I'd have thought you'd see it.
145ft wide at 65000 ft, thats equivalent to 1/4 inch at 10 feet (or 11mm at 5m). It might well be visible in the right lighting, particularly just after sunset. And it's longer than it's wide.
I take many outdoor pictures, and rarely want a long zoom.
A long zoom is a lot of fun, for the occasions you want to pick out small areas in the mid to background. Good for shooting people without them knowing, but not particularly useful for landscape , group shots etc..
Many cameras have a 3x zoom, and that is very useful for most of the time, as a "framing" zoom - to choose the framing of the image you're seeing.
You also have to be aware that there is a tradeoff between quality and length of zoom. If you want really high quality shots, you're much more likely to get them from a 3x zoom than a 10x. That's the reason many cameras with long zooms have smaller sensors - the lens at that size/price can't produce a good image on a larger sensor.
Ummm, are you sure your preferences aren't a bit behind the times? 3-4 years ago the Mavica diehards may have had some justification for their advocacy, but these days?
512Mb memory cards (200-1000 photos) can be had for $50 these days, and USB2.0 can copy that off at a speed not much lower than reading a CD. Most cameras simply appearing as external storage devices, no drivers to install. Most people would rather have something much smaller in their pockets than camera that includes a mini-CD-writer.
Yeah, because you can rely on Google not to censor... Unless you do a Google image search for "Abu Ghraib" or "Lyndie England". Nope, no censorship here. Move along now.
It's about time some competitors to Google started appearing in other countries. Not sure I'd choose China though. Come on Sweden - what can you do for us?
I happen to believe the Bible...
We don't have to worry quite so much about how long we're going to live as the folks who don't.
Yeah, that's why so many religious fools are happy to destroy the environment, kill others, lead the planet into who knows what sort of disasters. Because this life isn't precious for them, and they've made that decision for the rest of us too.
Sad thing is, not only do we all have to live with the consequences of this delusion, we won't even get the satisfaction of seeing them realise the folly of their ways, when they die and their consciousness ceases to exist. No chance to even say "I told you so".
Apologies for feeding the trolls, but comparing emacs to an old version of Windows is about as inappropriate as you could get. Emacs is to "modern" GUI-intensive editors as Linux is to Windows. Perhaps not as pretty or slick and with a steep learning curve, but if you know how to use it, it's much, much easier and faster to use. It's an engineer's tool.
Where emacs falls down for email, is html. It can barely handle it, and slowly at that. Unpalatable as it may be to some of us, html email is the reality these days.
As someone else pointed out, it used to be criticised for being bloatware, being 8Mb in size... Those days are gone.
High technology counts for about zero in a guerilla war. But to the extent that fiddling with the next gadget takse your mind off the main goal, viz, making yourself liked by the locals, then leaving, it is counterproductive
Now now, we'll never get the job done if we start questioning whether we should be doing it at all. What's important is that we're strong, decisive, and hit them hard to let them know who is boss. In these times of war it's no good to ask such distracting questions. After all, once you start with your penatrating questions, there's no telling where it will end. Question the efficacy of battling these terrorists who hate Freedom, and you might as well question the good Christian motives of our leader. Our leader, with his God-given mandate to fight evil at home and abroad. You wouldn't want to be so unamerican and unchristian would you?
Sounds a plausible route. Automatic commercial vehicles could be small and efficient, down to pizza delivery bots. The vehicles could all form aerodynamically efficient chains on the freeways.
As has been pointed out, the fucked up legal system will probably cripple development in the US, though like you say, steady feature creep on cruise control may help.
Once it is fully there, it'll be great. Few people will really want to own their own as the taxi will be revolutionized to be a cheaper option. Life will become less centralized - there'll be few problems with living in a rural idyll, because nipping into population centers for entertainment and anything else will be easy and comfortable. Door to door service, no parking hassles. Get loaded if you like, and sleep it off on the way home. Sleeper cars for long distance travel...
Eventually, human piloted vehicles will be banned from the roads, as they'll be too dangerous and disrupt the efficiency. Predict a boom in track-days and off-roading in specialist cars for driving for fun.
I hope it's all here before I get too old to drive. It'll enrich life so much for the elderly.
...is to get you to tune in at 11. You give them way too much credit. They stir the pot, scare the parents, overhype the cancer cure or weight loss drug, or show soldiers with puppy dogs as the need arises.
Only if you decide that the point of everything is making money for your employer. That's just a ridiculous statement.
Or is the job of a doctor to see how many procedures and drugs he can make you have? The job of a police officer to find as many ways to fine you as possible?
The NYT, the BBC, Al-jazeera, Haaretz, the Washington Post, and Bloomberg all offer news from a variety of perspectives.
Those sources could only be considered "balance" in the USA. To most of the rest of the world they're at best centrist.
If you want some balance to the right-wing bias of US cable news etc., then there are some actual left leaning sources, like http://www.guardian.co.uk, http://www.democracynow.org, or for some meta-comment, http://mediamatters.org.
Of course, in the view of many US ultra-conservatives, for whom 'liberal' is a slur, these practially class as dangerous communist outfits.
You don't need to block the client. Simply block 6881..6889 (incoming). Then, all downloads will happen, but slowly. BT won't be able to engage with other clients.
the client can work with any other port, though with this you'll block anyone who doesn't change from the default ports, which probably means most of them.
By the way, Azureus for has the "safepeer" plugin which blocks known p2p watchers. There's also the ProtoWall firewall-type product that achieves the same thing for your whole machine. How complete the list is I have no idea. Naturally, if you're only doing legal downloads, you wouldn't care about these tools...
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty interesting, that the brain uses so much. I'm pretty sure I'm hungrier by lunchtime if I've done a solid morning's coding. Reading slashdot doesn't seem to bring on hunger...
I think you misunderstand the role of natural selection. Just because it's a theory that deconstructs some (or all) of Christianity and many other religions, doesn't mean it is a religion in itself, and does not mean it represents any sort of moral framework. A flaw in a story does not constitute an alternative story.
I typed in more than this, but then realised that Richard Dawkins says it much better than I could, in this short essay: Rebelling Against Our Selfish Genes "Humans must believe in evolution, but fight it. Through us, natural selection has blundered unwittingly into its own negation".
It's precisely "enforcing their religion on others" that leads secularists like me to want religion banished from schools. I'm very annoyed that I was indoctrinated with religion from the age of 4. I'm sure there are extremes and subversions of these secularizing efforts which we would agree have become absurd.
Nonsense! Atheism says nothing about "supremacy of man". Personally, I don't believe in such a thing, I think it's absurd. Supreme over what? On what authority? Where did you get that idea?
Atheism is the absence of a belief in God, simply that. It is a position on religion, and only in the very loosest sense could it be said to be a religion itself.
What are these cases of atheists getting away with things theists do not anyway? You can't practice atheism, there are no rituals. What were they doing? Getting expelled for expressing views sounds outrageous, how about some details?
You can't choose to believe something because you like the implication. That would be like believing in God because it's a nice idea.
Oh wait, I forgot, that's exactly why a lot of people do believe.
And what is this life without ultimate consequences of which you speak? Our effect on the universe is our ultimate consequence. Many atheists care deeply about what will be around after our deaths and what our contribution was. I want to die feeling I contributed to the greater good.
I can get really pissed off with people who think atheism implies immorality. Psychopathic nutjobs may need their conscience laid down to them in rules in a book. Non sociopaths have a conscience and empathy built in.
Replace "God" with "The Tooth Fairy", and see how insightful it seems.
Mod it funny, yes. Insightful?
I had a teacher lecture a class for an hour that religion was the cause of all man's sorrows, made statements such as "more people have died because of christianity than any other cause combined" a statement easily repudiated and was not chastised at all. While a child in that same school was warned against having a bible time during lunch hour. In fact the principle believed the statement was true until it was pointed out that property,jealousy,rage, disease, old age, wars in the name of Karl Marx (communism), Facism and Islam and automobile accidents easily outclassed the crusades.
In what way was he teaching a religion (or atheism)? In this description he's not teaching you his religious belief as fact. He's teaching you his (absurd, as stated) opinion about the effects of one religion on humanity. Hugely different things. Even if it were to be true, it says nothing about the truth or otherwise of Christianity.
Some research doctors are scientists, most practicing ones are not. They are more technologists, sort of biological mechanics.
Yeah, exactly - most scientists have learned enough that is inconsistent with religions faith.. . How is this anything but an damning indictment of faith? That scientific knowledge can destroy it without even trying. Science doesn't have to replace faith to break it.
The issue is not that education is inconsistent with faith, it's that science education is (for most).
We can't disprove the existence of the Tooth Fairy either. Or a teapot in orbit around Mars. From Richard Dawkins: "A friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew who observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a Tooth Fairy Agnostic. He will not call himself an atheist because it is in principle impossible to prove a negative. But "agnostic" on its own might suggest that he thought God's existence or non-existence equally likely. In fact, though strictly agnostic about god, he considers God's existence no more probable than the Tooth Fairy's. Bertrand Russell used a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars for the same didactic purpose. You have to be agnostic about the teapot, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as being on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things about which we strictly have to be agnostic doesn't stop at tooth fairies and celestial teapots. It is infinite. If you want to believe in a particular one of them -- teapots, unicorns, or tooth fairies, Thor or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why you believe in it. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why we do not. We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't' have to bother saying so."
If they were taught as a theory about the nature of the universe, yes. But then they're not actually, are they? What's the ID crowd suggest is teaching it as a scientific theory on the same level as natural selection.
Your definition of religion is so broad as to be nearly meaningless. The absense of a belief in god, is now a religion?
You limit the meaning of "establishing" a religion to mean sanctioning a named church, and then assert that atheism is established as the official religion...? Your arguments are just getting too silly to respond to further.
Perhaps one day the USA will mature enough as a society to no longer view nudity in the same league as violence. I for one don't care whether a child of mine sees people without clothes on, but I'm dismayed by a lot of the violence that goes largely unchallenged.
That said, I'd have thought you'd see it.
145ft wide at 65000 ft, thats equivalent to 1/4 inch at 10 feet (or 11mm at 5m). It might well be visible in the right lighting, particularly just after sunset. And it's longer than it's wide.
A long zoom is a lot of fun, for the occasions you want to pick out small areas in the mid to background. Good for shooting people without them knowing, but not particularly useful for landscape , group shots etc..
Many cameras have a 3x zoom, and that is very useful for most of the time, as a "framing" zoom - to choose the framing of the image you're seeing.
You also have to be aware that there is a tradeoff between quality and length of zoom. If you want really high quality shots, you're much more likely to get them from a 3x zoom than a 10x. That's the reason many cameras with long zooms have smaller sensors - the lens at that size/price can't produce a good image on a larger sensor.
512Mb memory cards (200-1000 photos) can be had for $50 these days, and USB2.0 can copy that off at a speed not much lower than reading a CD. Most cameras simply appearing as external storage devices, no drivers to install. Most people would rather have something much smaller in their pockets than camera that includes a mini-CD-writer.
Hmmm, perhaps I should withdraw my accusation... http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/04/11/07/2043207.shtml ?tid=217&tid=153&tid=17
It's about time some competitors to Google started appearing in other countries. Not sure I'd choose China though. Come on Sweden - what can you do for us?
Yeah, that's why so many religious fools are happy to destroy the environment, kill others, lead the planet into who knows what sort of disasters. Because this life isn't precious for them, and they've made that decision for the rest of us too.
Sad thing is, not only do we all have to live with the consequences of this delusion, we won't even get the satisfaction of seeing them realise the folly of their ways, when they die and their consciousness ceases to exist. No chance to even say "I told you so".
er... oh yeah. Embarassing. Browsing at +2, it just showed yours replying to the top level... Good suggestion though, it is a Friday afternoon.
Apologies for feeding the trolls, but comparing emacs to an old version of Windows is about as inappropriate as you could get. Emacs is to "modern" GUI-intensive editors as Linux is to Windows. Perhaps not as pretty or slick and with a steep learning curve, but if you know how to use it, it's much, much easier and faster to use. It's an engineer's tool.
Where emacs falls down for email, is html. It can barely handle it, and slowly at that. Unpalatable as it may be to some of us, html email is the reality these days.
As someone else pointed out, it used to be criticised for being bloatware, being 8Mb in size... Those days are gone.
Now now, we'll never get the job done if we start questioning whether we should be doing it at all. What's important is that we're strong, decisive, and hit them hard to let them know who is boss. In these times of war it's no good to ask such distracting questions. After all, once you start with your penatrating questions, there's no telling where it will end. Question the efficacy of battling these terrorists who hate Freedom, and you might as well question the good Christian motives of our leader. Our leader, with his God-given mandate to fight evil at home and abroad. You wouldn't want to be so unamerican and unchristian would you?
track days, offroading days... much more fun than sitting in traffic anyway.
Sounds a plausible route. Automatic commercial vehicles could be small and efficient, down to pizza delivery bots. The vehicles could all form aerodynamically efficient chains on the freeways.
As has been pointed out, the fucked up legal system will probably cripple development in the US, though like you say, steady feature creep on cruise control may help.
Once it is fully there, it'll be great. Few people will really want to own their own as the taxi will be revolutionized to be a cheaper option. Life will become less centralized - there'll be few problems with living in a rural idyll, because nipping into population centers for entertainment and anything else will be easy and comfortable. Door to door service, no parking hassles. Get loaded if you like, and sleep it off on the way home. Sleeper cars for long distance travel...
Eventually, human piloted vehicles will be banned from the roads, as they'll be too dangerous and disrupt the efficiency. Predict a boom in track-days and off-roading in specialist cars for driving for fun.
I hope it's all here before I get too old to drive. It'll enrich life so much for the elderly.
Journalism is enertainment for profit No, Journalism is used (and subverted) for entertainment and profit, particularly in the USA.
Or is the job of a doctor to see how many procedures and drugs he can make you have? The job of a police officer to find as many ways to fine you as possible?
Those sources could only be considered "balance" in the USA. To most of the rest of the world they're at best centrist.
If you want some balance to the right-wing bias of US cable news etc., then there are some actual left leaning sources, like http://www.guardian.co.uk, http://www.democracynow.org, or for some meta-comment, http://mediamatters.org.
Of course, in the view of many US ultra-conservatives, for whom 'liberal' is a slur, these practially class as dangerous communist outfits.
the client can work with any other port, though with this you'll block anyone who doesn't change from the default ports, which probably means most of them.
By the way, Azureus for has the "safepeer" plugin which blocks known p2p watchers. There's also the ProtoWall firewall-type product that achieves the same thing for your whole machine. How complete the list is I have no idea. Naturally, if you're only doing legal downloads, you wouldn't care about these tools...