Remind me again - how many years ago was it "ridiculous" that a man could not fly like a bird? Or reach the moon? Hmmm? Often times some of the most ridiculous areas of research deliver some absolutely stunning results. To not support those would be turning our back on history and closing off whole avenues of discovery.
We have to choose. Our resources are very finite. If a thousand projects want time on a large-scale particle collider, and there's only room for ten, we have to choose which ten. We do not have the resources to build a hundred new CERN:s. The same goes for research in general - and society in general, which always has been about managing scarcity in one way or another. It's about resource allocation; money is just a convenient unit for keeping track.
Yes it would be nice if anybody could do anything they wanted with no limits - including having multiple duplicate earths; what do you suggest if one group wants to dig up an archeological find to study it, and another wants to keep it in wait for better analysis methods, for example? One group will have to give up their proposal, and someone will have to make the decision.
Point. But that doesn't make it right. Science, and indeed any research, should never in my opinion depend on cashflow. As far as I'm concerned it colors the research.
Right? Why? Does not the people with the money have a right to decide what to fund? Or do you suggest any project, whether promising or utterly ridiculous, get funded equally?
And scientists are people. We want money and job security. We want health insurance, we want clothes for our kids, and we want a secure retirement, just like everybody else. If you want science to be some kind of monk-like self-depriving calling rather than a fun, absorbing, fascinating - but still - career, then you're looking at losing well over 99% of all practicioners in the field.
As for stretching your focus to get funding - if you lie to do your job then your job will become a lie.
It's not about lying - I am suggesting no such thing. What I am saying is that there are many ways of approaching any given project, and people will select the approach that lets them do what they want, even if that might not be the best way to actually approach it.
But they shouldn't have to do this. This isn't something they should need to know to be scientists and researchers. Period.
If you are independenty wealthy and are doing science as a hobby, your post is absolutely right.
For the rest of us, doing science does mean getting funding - not only for equipment, travel, conferences and the rest, but also for the rather important, if mundane, reason that it's good to be able to pay for food and rent. Being homeless and begging for food tends to put a crimp in your research, whether you're really interested in your work or not.
But take heart - people are working on what they find interesting and worthwhile. It really is amazing how far you can stretch descriptions of your actual work to make it fit whatever is the flavor of the day. Take just about any two subjects - models of neuarl plasticity in the accessory basal amygdala and feminist influences in nineteenth-century reinterpretations of Chaucer, say - and any good researcher working in either field will be perfectly able to seek money earmarked for the other.
It seems to say, if you do it again, only then will make it illegal so you can't do it a third time.
So it wasn't actually illegal, then? No actual standing to stop it, or sue over it, in other words. If it is legal, you are allowed to do it, after all. And we do not want a society where only the legal behavior is listed, rather than the illegal.
And if the behavior is immoral and causes harm, then making it illegal sounds like a pretty good idea.
Anyone can file a patent, but it's a lot harder to do so if there's prior art - and when you help an open project like what the Baker Lab does, there's a much greater chance that that will create prior art, and hence not lead to restrictive patents.
David's a nice guy. He runs a good lab, and they do good work that a lot of other good scientists use, but I can't guarantee anything since he's not me.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here. Again, I have no doubts about him or his lab; that's not what worries me. In fact, it looks like just the kind of place I'd want to work in. To put it this way, even if you were he - even if I were he - I would still not trust this fully. He (you|me) is not in control of what his superiors may get into their heads to do if the project turns up something that is economically hugely valuable.
The best way to dispel any such nagging doubts is to spell it out, in a binding document, what the project may or may not do with the results of peoples' contributions (and I'm not necessarily asking for some hugely liberal, "anyone can do anything" kind of license eiter; just that whatever will be allowed is spelled out).
There's plenty of worthy projects out there, and choosing between them, the lack of a formal statement is just the kind of thing that would make me look for something else. Just like for software, in fact.
I'm now over by Lake Union, but my girlfriend works one floor down from the Baker Labs at the UW, so I can attest it's pretty above-board.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure it is above board, and from all I see it's good people running the place.
But this is rather like the issue of software licensing. You can have a great group of people doing wonderful work, and you know they will share the work right back with the community. But people do leave or get replaced, companies get bought up and so on and so forth. We've seen people's contributions disappear into commercial black holes before when the work was done under the "trust us" model (the CDDB database is perhaps the most widespread example). The lab may be a wonderful place, but they do not - for example - have control over UW:s policy on research results, and if they determine that all results must be fully commercialized there is probably not a whole lot the lab can do. I'm really not comfortable with things like this not being spelled out in writing.
It was the "Baker Labs" thing I was referring to; I went on a look-around on the website, but nowhere could I find addressed who was going to own the results, or in what form they were going to be made available. And "Public research" is of course not a guarantee that the results will actually be avaiable on a royalty-free or similar basis.
I do notice they are not mentioning anywhere what form the use of any discoveries will take. I have little desire to volonteer my time and cycles without compensation to an effort that ultimately just ends up as another set of restrictive medical patents.
I understand the idea behind marginal returns, the question is what has caused the decrease in production in this specific case./i
There hasn't been a decrease in production. Production has increased a little bit.
What has happened is that consumption has increased as the world population increases and grows wealthier, and production has turned out not to be able to follow - with steep price increases as the consequences. Most oil producers have very little production margin left (you can't run any large system flat out for very long, since the lack of maintenance downtime and such will come back and bite you), and those that still do have a bit only have fairly poor quality oil that is messy and expensive to work with - so much so that many refineries don't want it even at current prices.
And the reason production hasn't been able to increase is that new fields have not been discovered and put into production faster than older fields are declining. And the reason for _That_ is of course that there's fewer and fewer fields left to discover (or develop), and they are smaller, or more difficult to extract from, or have lower quality oil - the very same reasons they weren't discovered and put into production before.
Point well taken. But if you want to lower total consumption it makes sense to pick the low-hanging fruit first so to speak. And for various reasons, the US is using oil out of proportion to its population and GDP. Other highly indistrialzied countries manage to have just about the same living standard on very much lower consumption, which would indicate that you could achieve quite substantial savings without actually sacrificing anything.
Just convince Hummer owners that painting them orange and plaid is really cool, then let Dick Cheney out on the streets with a shotgun. You solve the oil consumption problem _and_ any impending shotgun pellet glut, all in one, bold stroke.
It seemed like he just got bored and wanted to hurry up and finish the book.
That pretty much describes the ending of every single text he writes. Excellent books, but he just can't seem to write an ending worth a damn. They actually read a lot like the last few pages are missing; my uninformed guess is that he _really_ can't write endings he's happy with, and so he cuts his losses as it were, and stops when the action does.
For what it's worth, I use a Panasonic CF-R3 with a 1.1Ghz Pentium M. Battery life in practical use (writing and surfing using the wireless card) is about 6 hours. If I don't use a network connection I can easily reach 7 hours of actual use on a charge - great for conferences where I can leave the power adapter at the hotel. And the machine is good enough that I use it as my main computer.
It sure doesn't hurt that it's small and light and has no active cooling at all - the only sound is the very low murmur of the drive, and once it spins down the machine all but totally quiet (you can just hear the backlight if you put your ear right next to it).
So if you want something quiet and portable with excellent battery life, that is available today.
A Vic for me too, though I did play quite bit with a friend's dads ZX-81 before that. Learned Basic programming on it, and gradually machine code as well - though without an assembler you wrote a small loader program and entered your code as decimal numbers in DATA statements. A pirated copy of a machine code monitor we got hold of after a year was pure heaven in comparison.
And then the CBM-64, of course (I believe still the single most sold computer model ever), followed briefly by an Amiga 500 and then a 386 I got as part payment for a summer job. When IBM donated OS/2 to all comp-sci students we all had a pile of high-quality floppies and what better use for them than download this new Unix-like hobby OS, right?
People make a big deal of suicide in Japan but I have to wonder if this perception is based more on stereotyping rather than facts.
Yes, absolutely. Japan is fairly high in the rankings, but I believe the idea that it's highest stems from outdated information - or has perhaps always been a myth; since there is comparatively little stigma attached to it, it has likely been more truthfully reported here than in places with a different view of the practice. According to WHO, Japan ranks at around #11 today, with a bunch of eastern European countries topping the list.
I think Google and Gmail illustrate the limits of online apps (that would include Ajax as well as any other remote system). I see three basic issues:
* I (like many others) use mail as a general information storage system. And whenever I'm offline, that information is unavailable. And yes, offline still happens quite regularily - there's still plenty of trains, planes, trainstations and airports, hotels and conference venues that don't have it, have it but at ridiculous cost, or have it but some random component is down leaving everyone offline.
I need to have data cached locally - but if I'm going to have a local solution set up anyways I might as well go with that and avoid the hassle.
* If I leave data at Google (or some other off-site organization), my data integrity is only as good as their security. That is something I do not have any control over and (as has been demonstrated) even supposedly very security conscious companies regularily goof.
* Google and Yahoo have amply demonstrated a third issue: jurisdiction. If I have information stored with Google, I may suddenly be exposed to liability and possible data seizures in both my own country as well as Googles base country (USA at this time). If I am a company owner, do I really need the headache of reading up on data retention minutiae for a country on a different continent?
As a private citizen, there are today plenty of books and audio recordings that are in the public domain in Europe but not in the US. Also, rules about fair use are different. If I store an mp3 of an early Elvis recording in a service run by a company that is based in the US, will I get hit by a lawsuit, or have my (perfectly legal) recording deleted with no warning? I do not need that headache.
I think these kind of apps really will find their niche as internally run company-wide systems, where you have control, not primarily as the kind of third-party enterprises we usually talk about.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", about a love-stricken young poet that kills himself in despair caused a similar wave of suicides among European youths when it was first published.
Similarily, this "wave" of internet suicides (which is nothing new; it's been reported here for at least a couple of years already), seems to be something of a fashion thing as well. Not that perfectly cheerful people decides to kill themselves, of course, but people that were already suicidal and would probably have done it anyway decide that this is the way to do it based on the perceived popularity. If they hadn't done this, they'd have jumped in front of a local train instead.
But as far as I know, nowhere but in Japan do the above 3 types of suicidal people get created to the degree in which they're created in Japan.
WHen you consider that you by definition need to be Japanese for the first two (and have to have lived before the Meji restoration era and during the second world war, respectively), that's not exactly a profound statement.
People become depressed or financially or emotionally desperate all over the world. What kind of action (if any) it translates into depends a lot on social factors, such as the general acceptance of a given act, the impact on friends and relatives, the number of friends and relatives you have to be impacted and so on.
So in a culture where a suicide doesn't carry a heavy stigma, where you tend to have small circles of family and friends and where some peculiarities of financial law can make it an attractive option in some corner cases you'll get quite a few suicides.
Note that another way of "dealing" with an intolerable life situation, the killing spree or "going postal" kind of shootout, drunken rampages with a vehicle and so on, is very rare to unheard of here.
Agreed, and well put. In the same way, people will be put off Islam by the fundamentalists burning embassies because someone dared mock their religion.
Religion is religion. I don't care what particular brand makes you realize the whole concept is fraudulent.
And to the other poster here (don't want to spam with lots of replies), "joining a religion" is not the same thing as believing in it. Joining out of fear, or out of pain, or because the local place of worship is a social hub and everybody else in their neighbourhood are members, doesn't make them believers, just adaptible.
If enough members are not actually _believers_, when people think, more or less, that "well all this resurrection, heaven and so on is some pretty farfetched metaphor - but hey, the yearly interchurch soccer match and beerfest sure makes up for the boring bits!", to what degree can you any longer call it a religious congregation? Rather than, say, a social club with some offbeat rites - like an inclusive Freemason chapter or open-for-all college fraternity?
I'm not a christian, but I'm glad there's some active stance among religious people against the fundamentalists who seem to have taken over any kind of discussion of religion in this country.
I'm not religious, and I find, on the whole, that fundamentalists hijacking a religion can be a good thing in the long run. Probably nothing else could turn as many people away from the whole idea of religion so much as a generation of frothing-at-the-mouth zealots fighting each other and anyone disagreeing with their inflexible, warped view of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
what happens if all muslims are like the Wahabi?
What happens if all Christians are like Pat Robertson?
Remind me again - how many years ago was it "ridiculous" that a man could not fly like a bird? Or reach the moon? Hmmm? Often times some of the most ridiculous areas of research deliver some absolutely stunning results. To not support those would be turning our back on history and closing off whole avenues of discovery.
We have to choose. Our resources are very finite. If a thousand projects want time on a large-scale particle collider, and there's only room for ten, we have to choose which ten. We do not have the resources to build a hundred new CERN:s. The same goes for research in general - and society in general, which always has been about managing scarcity in one way or another. It's about resource allocation; money is just a convenient unit for keeping track.
Yes it would be nice if anybody could do anything they wanted with no limits - including having multiple duplicate earths; what do you suggest if one group wants to dig up an archeological find to study it, and another wants to keep it in wait for better analysis methods, for example? One group will have to give up their proposal, and someone will have to make the decision.
Point. But that doesn't make it right. Science, and indeed any research, should never in my opinion depend on cashflow. As far as I'm concerned it colors the research.
Right? Why? Does not the people with the money have a right to decide what to fund? Or do you suggest any project, whether promising or utterly ridiculous, get funded equally?
And scientists are people. We want money and job security. We want health insurance, we want clothes for our kids, and we want a secure retirement, just like everybody else. If you want science to be some kind of monk-like self-depriving calling rather than a fun, absorbing, fascinating - but still - career, then you're looking at losing well over 99% of all practicioners in the field.
As for stretching your focus to get funding - if you lie to do your job then your job will become a lie.
It's not about lying - I am suggesting no such thing. What I am saying is that there are many ways of approaching any given project, and people will select the approach that lets them do what they want, even if that might not be the best way to actually approach it.
But they shouldn't have to do this. This isn't something they should need to know to be scientists and researchers. Period.
If you are independenty wealthy and are doing science as a hobby, your post is absolutely right.
For the rest of us, doing science does mean getting funding - not only for equipment, travel, conferences and the rest, but also for the rather important, if mundane, reason that it's good to be able to pay for food and rent. Being homeless and begging for food tends to put a crimp in your research, whether you're really interested in your work or not.
But take heart - people are working on what they find interesting and worthwhile. It really is amazing how far you can stretch descriptions of your actual work to make it fit whatever is the flavor of the day. Take just about any two subjects - models of neuarl plasticity in the accessory basal amygdala and feminist influences in nineteenth-century reinterpretations of Chaucer, say - and any good researcher working in either field will be perfectly able to seek money earmarked for the other.
It seems to say, if you do it again, only then will make it illegal so you can't do it a third time.
So it wasn't actually illegal, then? No actual standing to stop it, or sue over it, in other words. If it is legal, you are allowed to do it, after all. And we do not want a society where only the legal behavior is listed, rather than the illegal.
And if the behavior is immoral and causes harm, then making it illegal sounds like a pretty good idea.
Anyone can file a patent, but it's a lot harder to do so if there's prior art - and when you help an open project like what the Baker Lab does, there's a much greater chance that that will create prior art, and hence not lead to restrictive patents.
David's a nice guy. He runs a good lab, and they do good work that a lot of other good scientists use, but I can't guarantee anything since he's not me.
I think we may be talking past each other a bit here. Again, I have no doubts about him or his lab; that's not what worries me. In fact, it looks like just the kind of place I'd want to work in. To put it this way, even if you were he - even if I were he - I would still not trust this fully. He (you|me) is not in control of what his superiors may get into their heads to do if the project turns up something that is economically hugely valuable.
The best way to dispel any such nagging doubts is to spell it out, in a binding document, what the project may or may not do with the results of peoples' contributions (and I'm not necessarily asking for some hugely liberal, "anyone can do anything" kind of license eiter; just that whatever will be allowed is spelled out).
There's plenty of worthy projects out there, and choosing between them, the lack of a formal statement is just the kind of thing that would make me look for something else. Just like for software, in fact.
I'm now over by Lake Union, but my girlfriend works one floor down from the Baker Labs at the UW, so I can attest it's pretty above-board.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure it is above board, and from all I see it's good people running the place.
But this is rather like the issue of software licensing. You can have a great group of people doing wonderful work, and you know they will share the work right back with the community. But people do leave or get replaced, companies get bought up and so on and so forth. We've seen people's contributions disappear into commercial black holes before when the work was done under the "trust us" model (the CDDB database is perhaps the most widespread example). The lab may be a wonderful place, but they do not - for example - have control over UW:s policy on research results, and if they determine that all results must be fully commercialized there is probably not a whole lot the lab can do. I'm really not comfortable with things like this not being spelled out in writing.
It was the "Baker Labs" thing I was referring to; I went on a look-around on the website, but nowhere could I find addressed who was going to own the results, or in what form they were going to be made available. And "Public research" is of course not a guarantee that the results will actually be avaiable on a royalty-free or similar basis.
I do notice they are not mentioning anywhere what form the use of any discoveries will take. I have little desire to volonteer my time and cycles without compensation to an effort that ultimately just ends up as another set of restrictive medical patents.
I understand the idea behind marginal returns, the question is what has caused the decrease in production in this specific case./i
There hasn't been a decrease in production. Production has increased a little bit.
What has happened is that consumption has increased as the world population increases and grows wealthier, and production has turned out not to be able to follow - with steep price increases as the consequences. Most oil producers have very little production margin left (you can't run any large system flat out for very long, since the lack of maintenance downtime and such will come back and bite you), and those that still do have a bit only have fairly poor quality oil that is messy and expensive to work with - so much so that many refineries don't want it even at current prices.
And the reason production hasn't been able to increase is that new fields have not been discovered and put into production faster than older fields are declining. And the reason for _That_ is of course that there's fewer and fewer fields left to discover (or develop), and they are smaller, or more difficult to extract from, or have lower quality oil - the very same reasons they weren't discovered and put into production before.
Point well taken. But if you want to lower total consumption it makes sense to pick the low-hanging fruit first so to speak. And for various reasons, the US is using oil out of proportion to its population and GDP. Other highly indistrialzied countries manage to have just about the same living standard on very much lower consumption, which would indicate that you could achieve quite substantial savings without actually sacrificing anything.
A big STFU to all the Hummer owners out there.
Just convince Hummer owners that painting them orange and plaid is really cool, then let Dick Cheney out on the streets with a shotgun. You solve the oil consumption problem _and_ any impending shotgun pellet glut, all in one, bold stroke.
It seemed like he just got bored and wanted to hurry up and finish the book.
That pretty much describes the ending of every single text he writes. Excellent books, but he just can't seem to write an ending worth a damn. They actually read a lot like the last few pages are missing; my uninformed guess is that he _really_ can't write endings he's happy with, and so he cuts his losses as it were, and stops when the action does.
Old winbond southbridge... no USB2.0 or firewire. :-(
Kinda necessary for a portable IMHO... USB1.1 is dismally slow.
No firewire, but I do have USB2.0.
For what it's worth, I use a Panasonic CF-R3 with a 1.1Ghz Pentium M. Battery life in practical use (writing and surfing using the wireless card) is about 6 hours. If I don't use a network connection I can easily reach 7 hours of actual use on a charge - great for conferences where I can leave the power adapter at the hotel. And the machine is good enough that I use it as my main computer.
It sure doesn't hurt that it's small and light and has no active cooling at all - the only sound is the very low murmur of the drive, and once it spins down the machine all but totally quiet (you can just hear the backlight if you put your ear right next to it).
So if you want something quiet and portable with excellent battery life, that is available today.
A Vic for me too, though I did play quite bit with a friend's dads ZX-81 before that. Learned Basic programming on it, and gradually machine code as well - though without an assembler you wrote a small loader program and entered your code as decimal numbers in DATA statements. A pirated copy of a machine code monitor we got hold of after a year was pure heaven in comparison.
And then the CBM-64, of course (I believe still the single most sold computer model ever), followed briefly by an Amiga 500 and then a 386 I got as part payment for a summer job. When IBM donated OS/2 to all comp-sci students we all had a pile of high-quality floppies and what better use for them than download this new Unix-like hobby OS, right?
People make a big deal of suicide in Japan but I have to wonder if this perception is based more on stereotyping rather than facts.
Yes, absolutely. Japan is fairly high in the rankings, but I believe the idea that it's highest stems from outdated information - or has perhaps always been a myth; since there is comparatively little stigma attached to it, it has likely been more truthfully reported here than in places with a different view of the practice. According to WHO, Japan ranks at around #11 today, with a bunch of eastern European countries topping the list.
I think Google and Gmail illustrate the limits of online apps (that would include Ajax as well as any other remote system). I see three basic issues:
* I (like many others) use mail as a general information storage system. And whenever I'm offline, that information is unavailable. And yes, offline still happens quite regularily - there's still plenty of trains, planes, trainstations and airports, hotels and conference venues that don't have it, have it but at ridiculous cost, or have it but some random component is down leaving everyone offline.
I need to have data cached locally - but if I'm going to have a local solution set up anyways I might as well go with that and avoid the hassle.
* If I leave data at Google (or some other off-site organization), my data integrity is only as good as their security. That is something I do not have any control over and (as has been demonstrated) even supposedly very security conscious companies regularily goof.
* Google and Yahoo have amply demonstrated a third issue: jurisdiction. If I have information stored with Google, I may suddenly be exposed to liability and possible data seizures in both my own country as well as Googles base country (USA at this time). If I am a company owner, do I really need the headache of reading up on data retention minutiae for a country on a different continent?
As a private citizen, there are today plenty of books and audio recordings that are in the public domain in Europe but not in the US. Also, rules about fair use are different. If I store an mp3 of an early Elvis recording in a service run by a company that is based in the US, will I get hit by a lawsuit, or have my (perfectly legal) recording deleted with no warning? I do not need that headache.
I think these kind of apps really will find their niche as internally run company-wide systems, where you have control, not primarily as the kind of third-party enterprises we usually talk about.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther", about a love-stricken young poet that kills himself in despair caused a similar wave of suicides among European youths when it was first published.
Similarily, this "wave" of internet suicides (which is nothing new; it's been reported here for at least a couple of years already), seems to be something of a fashion thing as well. Not that perfectly cheerful people decides to kill themselves, of course, but people that were already suicidal and would probably have done it anyway decide that this is the way to do it based on the perceived popularity. If they hadn't done this, they'd have jumped in front of a local train instead.
But as far as I know, nowhere but in Japan do the above 3 types of suicidal people get created to the degree in which they're created in Japan.
WHen you consider that you by definition need to be Japanese for the first two (and have to have lived before the Meji restoration era and during the second world war, respectively), that's not exactly a profound statement.
Cultural differences. Really.
People become depressed or financially or emotionally desperate all over the world. What kind of action (if any) it translates into depends a lot on social factors, such as the general acceptance of a given act, the impact on friends and relatives, the number of friends and relatives you have to be impacted and so on.
So in a culture where a suicide doesn't carry a heavy stigma, where you tend to have small circles of family and friends and where some peculiarities of financial law can make it an attractive option in some corner cases you'll get quite a few suicides.
Note that another way of "dealing" with an intolerable life situation, the killing spree or "going postal" kind of shootout, drunken rampages with a vehicle and so on, is very rare to unheard of here.
Science can't tell you if it's right or wrong to kill a guy for instance.
Of course, you don't need religion for that either. Religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for a sustainable moral code.
I agree with you for the most part, except for the abslute skepticism. I don't take anything as fact.
Whew, that was a long, arduous hospital stay! Now, maybe if I step in front of _this_ bus, maybe it will not hurt me at all.
Yes, I'm overstating your case.
Agreed, and well put. In the same way, people will be put off Islam by the fundamentalists burning embassies because someone dared mock their religion.
Religion is religion. I don't care what particular brand makes you realize the whole concept is fraudulent.
And to the other poster here (don't want to spam with lots of replies), "joining a religion" is not the same thing as believing in it. Joining out of fear, or out of pain, or because the local place of worship is a social hub and everybody else in their neighbourhood are members, doesn't make them believers, just adaptible.
If enough members are not actually _believers_, when people think, more or less, that "well all this resurrection, heaven and so on is some pretty farfetched metaphor - but hey, the yearly interchurch soccer match and beerfest sure makes up for the boring bits!", to what degree can you any longer call it a religious congregation? Rather than, say, a social club with some offbeat rites - like an inclusive Freemason chapter or open-for-all college fraternity?
I'm not a christian, but I'm glad there's some active stance among religious people against the fundamentalists who seem to have taken over any kind of discussion of religion in this country.
I'm not religious, and I find, on the whole, that fundamentalists hijacking a religion can be a good thing in the long run. Probably nothing else could turn as many people away from the whole idea of religion so much as a generation of frothing-at-the-mouth zealots fighting each other and anyone disagreeing with their inflexible, warped view of the world.