"With a subscription system, the game has to actually be GOOD..."
I really doubt this, there are many good games (even single player games) that are both good and commercial failures, many other games were good but no one liked the theme (Earth & beyond and other MMO's that shut down).
Most game developers right now are serving pretty much dumbed down shovel-ware crap, to people who have no twitch skills IMHO. The action element in most MMO's is totally missing, it appeals to gamers who like minimum of interactivity, to be able to chat with people. People pay and play it but the lack of interactivity kills it for me.
"While true, this reminds me of that study [washingtontimes.com] they did recently where they showed that peoples' happiness was more based on relative income than absolute income. Though it should be job satisfaction and the other things you mentioned that really count. "
I think stability in income is what most people are worried about now-a-days.
"Infallible? Ah, you must be thinking of religion. Scientific ideas change all the time."
I think he was talking about the implied 'infallibility', i.e. scientists 'preach' evolutionary evidence way out over what the actual evidence *is* and tell us that they are *certain* that diversification of life has occured with the *implied certainty* that life arose *naturally* with *no need* of interventionism.
Everytime something about evolution gets posted someone mentions intelligent design, obviously people insist or imply that evolution with implied natural abiogensis is unfalsifiable or 'infallible' in that sense or they wouldn't make fun of intelligent design. Design is a legitimate mode of scientific explanation, hence crick and his ideas about panspermia. If scientists were really serious about science they wouldn't be so hostile against ID, especially with things like the flagella popping up, no natural / evolutionary explanation posited we'd find technology in life, but ID did, and the hypothesis that life is technological machines is clearly anti-thetical to the theory of naturally arising without pre-existing intelligence. If you are going to bring up the arugment of infinite regress, the same applies to pure naturally arisen, you can equally posit infinite natural causes to something as well. It's just as much a problem for naturalism as it is for a chain of designers, of which the first would have to have naturally arisn. Take for instance our own bioengineering new life forms in the future, all future AI and newly engineered life forms will have their history and scientific theory of *human creationism*, then all of a sudden its connected to nature and they might wonder why we didn't do a thorough the other side.
"I'm sure people get the two confused all the time."
They do and this not just the problem of creationists and ID'ists, dogmatism is equally as rampant in science as well.
"That might actually work, if they were willing to do the whole "further investigation" part. They firmly refuse to do anything."
They do this because 1) it costs them money and 2) there are way too many people abusing paypal already, no company on earth could effectively deal with in a timely manner millions of users fucking around on their system.
His Noodlyness feared that you wouldn't worship him if you were his equal. There is truly no limit to what He can do with merely the wave of His Noodly Appendage.
"Is this the answer? Obviously not. Do I have a better one? Not really. The problem is a way of really attacking the people who are making a big profit off of privacy."
And I bet you at least part of the movie industry is double dipping, I wouldn't be surprised if the industry own both legitimate and counterfeit operations themselves, it makes total financial sense.
"You're not activists, you're law breakers. If you have a problem with the law, then do something about it. Don't just hide and hope you won't get caught."
Again the law itself is relative, how many old laws are still on the books that no one enforces since they're passed their prime? Or what if this was a socialist country? What one person views as theivery another views as justified against a wholly corrupt capitalist system and conceptions of ownership that benefit the few rather then the many, I wont cry for hollywood or anyone else that makes at least 20K a year, when there are over 2 billion people that live on less then 2-3 dollars a day.
"But just because these two scientists were wrong about the precise mechanics of evolution doesn't mean that they were wrong about how the data should be interpreted."
If you don't understand the foundational mechanics, you dont undetstand the process and if you dont understand the process you won't have any actual idea if your ideas of how such things came to be are correct or how to interpret them. A stone tied to a stick is a hammer, you would interpret such a structure much differently then the stone and stick seperately. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Most of darwins ideas about how evolution worked were totally wrong, with the amount we know now about the body's repair systems and bacterial communication his views of evolution look extremely naive and childlike, it wasn't hard for evolution to gain any momentum simply because the facts of geology and cosmology were irrefutable, life was easy to mold into the ideas that life was just an extension of geological and cosmological processes. Natural selection has had its day, but we've discovered it's not the primary driving force of evolution, only someone naive would think that, or was educated a long time ago.
Evolution didn't have truly rough time its only competition were myths, not exactly hard to piggy back on geologic and cosmological time and say 'it was the environment that caused all this'. When your only competition are error ridden mythological works.
It doesn't take a genius, such theories have been around long before darwin.
We live in an age of credentialism, one only has to look to last centuries Degreed, MD's, and PHD's to realize that credentials don't guarantee anything. Even now 40-50 years from many who we look upon as 'smart' or at 'the top of their field' today will seem like idiots when history shows how foolish they were, those who live in the time and age are not always the best judges of who is smart and who is not, between the credentialed and uncredentialed alike.
Cooking is more a science then an art, recipes are practically verbatim science. Science is all about measuring, and so is cooking if you plan to make good meals.
... any education that you might get. University degree, a community college, or what have you. One only has to look back on their experiences in college/university or hell even primary/public school and even highschool to see where *you* would have changed the curriculum and stopped wasting the students time with a bunch of filler or out-dated courses (i.e. programming with unisys icons, or 8088's and turing)
IMO the big difference between being certified meaning anything is the quality of the teachers, quality of the curriculum and the 'labs'/ real world problem solving you do to get experience, those who don't do any hands on problem solving consistently will not learn anything.
"Finally, the more effectively our weaponry is, the less likely we'll ever need to use it."
Yeah thats exactly why the US dropped not one, but two nukes on Japan.
Sorry but I just had to comment on this utter fantasy you are spouting. How many people thought this before the advent of nukes, and did it stop them from using their most advanced weapons? No.
I'm curious if the author of the tragedy of the commons would suggest humanity kill themselves if an advanced alien race showed up making all the 'biologically strong people' in the world comparitively weak. If he's going to argue for "merit" biologically based inheritance, then surely he shouldn't mind releasing the resources that he and all humanity is made of to a superior species?
While humanity has to at some point agree not to breed, I believe the selection should be a by choice, and those who choose not to should be adequately lookd after (fed, housing, etc) for forfeiting what is natural. If not enough choose not to breed then a random selection taken from the populace and those in power would make up the slack, either way I believe human beings have to become more compassionate and rational towards those they view as 'strangers' before any of this will be possible otherwise you'd be looking at riots if not the beginnings of sowing the seeds of civil war.
A good portion of the worlds people have children for economic reasons, if you are going to require them to forfeit that, you must make up the slack to look after them.
But I believe once science and technology makes people immortal, technology for genetic engineering, artificial wombs/created humans, etc, breeding will not be necessary anymore. I believe those technologies will come long before most countries would get a chance to deny people the freedom to breed. War is most and secret government operations taking biological warfare against their own people and covering it up as "natural diseases" seems much more likely then openly attempting to deny what people consider their 'natural rights'.
"it is because they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level, and therefore they take having that skill for granted and expect that everyone should be able to do it."
Yes but women frequently see things that aren't there because they believe they are good at reading other people, when in actual fact many women while they read way too much into situations that are trivial and logically explained. Hence "Drama Queen", women frequently cause drama where there is none, the same goes for both sexes though. Also I think the 'subtlety' aspect is a part of the differences in the types of minds people are given. I'd think there are just as many men as women that can grasp people, just as there are just as many people who can't.
Grasping subtlety is a skill that can be learned IMHO, all it takes is being very socially active - people oriented - people interested, which many men aren't comparitively to women.
"Yet another case of bonehead government IT staff justifying their knowledge and position with an MCSE certification."
I'm tired of hearing this bullshit MCSE has been overhauled much since the NT days and even then it wasn't exactly a cakewalk (you had to solve real problems and if you didn't know what they were talking about for many problems you were up shit creek). Sure it may be easy for some hardcore computer geeks but seriously doing the full MCSE certainly isn't a waste of time if you want to learn about networking in regards to windows, it is more of an addition to ones education then the 'main course' itself and it should have always been understood to be that way.
"... requires moving them past short-sighted views on how we need to "learn how to live on earth first."
There's nothing shortsighted about learning to sustain the planet we've got, after all we got a few billion years of the suns energy left and I really really doubt people want to go to even more dangerous places to live out a tenuous existence. Space radiation is an enormous problem once you get outside the atmosphere, you are no longer protected by all of earths protections and the same goes for other artifacts.
If you can't solve the most basic and fundamental problems of living together sustainably on your home planet just what pray-tell do you think spawning more idiots who can't live together on foreign planets will do? The only short sighted one here is you.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the market is flooded with too much entertainment, period. This is not just limited to games either, all forms of entertainment take up a single resource people have to manage - TIME, so therefore if you want people to buy your stuff they have to have a good reason and enough time and money (to justify it on entertainment) to do so.
"This is an unfathomable opinion. You obviously value the skills and understanding that can be obtained from studying physics and chemistry, and are unable to see how that argument applies to the teaching of biological evolution."
(sorry for the previous, I accidentally hit submit without finishing and the formatting was messed)
No, Darwin himself was (in his own thoughts) christian up until about 40 years of age by his own words or maybe you haven't read anything by darwin himself? He said it wasn't until about 40 until it was out of his system.
For most people that go to university and end up being in biological related fields, of which evolution has the most importance. Evolution simply *doesn't matter* for much of anyone outside of the related fields unless you want to indoctrinate people and push your worldview on them, the fact is evolution in its ultimate form must bow to molecular biology of which the historical development of species via molecular biology is centuries away from being understood coherently by anyone. And thats a claim I will standby 100%. Its easy enough to see through religious shenanigans with age of the earth and cosmology.
If you want to minimize religious effects, you have to have classes exclusively related to debunking or allegorizing religion taught in schools. You wont do it with any amount of critical thinking or pro-evo propoganda, you forget that people believe in religion because of the reward (i.e. eternal life) evolution has no such draw, so I believe your attempts would be futile. This is why real historians understand the role of religion in mankinds development while 'faux' intellectuals who want force everyone to be, accept and think like themselves dont understand why other people's ignorance is omni-present in such an advanced age.
Let me repeat that being taught biological evolution DOESN'T matter if it has no bearing on how you function in your job in society, its easy enough to see the earths and universes implied age and exploding/imploding stars to gather all one needs to know about cause and effect in relation to christianity.
Anyone who isn't lazy knows most christians dont even read the bible anyway, if you rationally tried to extract doctrines out of the biblical text accurately you'd find over 90% of christendom has been astray from what the bible has actually taught for a long long time throughout history.
Religious believers havea a problem with evolution as philosophical alternative worldview crushing, worldview. Evolution as a philosophy is equally philosophical in its implied claims and conclusions by popular authors - i.e. god does not exist, life is meaningless, the universe will one day experience calamities perhaps taking out mankind, making even your worthy goal to make sure 'everyone understands' evolution quite ridiculous. The people who hold such beliefs we just have to wait to die and enough people can think for themselves as schools get better over time.
Quite simply we live in a brief window of time in the universe whether it will all be for naught countless of generations down the line we'll never know but the odds are in the universes favor.
Creationism and religion has a minimal effect on science, its influence is overblown and you're forgetting that historically people dont give up what they've been taught as world history for centuries very easily. Many big scientists were creationists and it didn't effect their science, i.e. newton, maxwell, mendell, pasteur, faraday, etc.
Next creationism has been outlawed from being taught by the courts, period. Intelligent design doesn't try to force fit its theory into the claims of a religious text, nor does it try to name or finger a particilar god / designer, nor even a supernatural one at that. How such beleif could effect ones science seems pretty ridiculous, it would be like claiming cricks entertaining the notion of panspermia made his science worthless. There are lots of 'cranks' that do perfectly good science and compa
"This is an unfathomable opinion. You obviously value the skills and understanding that can be obtained from studying physics and chemistry, and are unable to see how that argument applies to the teaching of biological evolution."
No, Darwin himself was (in his own thoughts) christian up until about 40 years of age by his own words or maybe you haven't read anything by darwin himself? He said it wasn't until about 40 until it was out of his system.
For most people that go to university and end up being in biological related fields, of which evolution has the most importance, evolution there simply *doesn't matter* unless you want to indoctrinate people and push your worldview on them, the fact is evolution in its ultimate form must bow to molecular biology of which the historical development of species via molecular biology is centuries away from being understood coherently by anyone.
If you want to minimize religious effects, you have to have classes exclusively related to debunking or allegorizing religion taught in schools, you wont do it with any amount of critical thinking or pro-evo indoctrination, you forget that people believe in religion because of the reward (i.e. eternal life) evolution has no such draw, so I believe your attempts would be futile. This is why real historians understand the role of religion in mankinds development while 'faux' intellectuals who want force everyone to be, accept and think like themselves dont understand why ignorance is omni-present in such an advanced age.
Let me repeat that being taught biological evolution DOESN'T matter, its easy enough to see the earths and universes implied age and exploding/imploding stars to gather all one needs to know about cause and effect in relation to christianity. Most christians dont even read the bible anyway, if you rationally tried to extract doctrines out of the biblical text accurately you'd find over 90% of christendom has been astray from what the bible has actually taught for a long long time throughout history.
Evolution as a philosophy is equally philosophical in its implied claims and conclusions by popular authors - i.e. god does not exist, life is meaningless, the universe will one day experience calamities perhaps taking out mankind, making even your worthy goal to make sure 'everyone understands' evolution quite ridiculous. The people who hold such beliefs we just have to wait to die and enough people can think for themselves as schools get better over time.
Quite simply we live in a brief window of time in the universe whether it will all be for naught countless of generations down the line we'll never know but the odds are in the universes favor.
Creationism and religion has a minimal effect on science, its influence is overblown and you're forgetting that historically people dont give up what they've been taught as world history for centuries very easily. Many big scientists were creationists and it didn't effect their science, i.e. newton, maxwell, mendell, pasteur, faraday, etc.
Next creationism has been outlawed from being taught by the courts, period. Intelligent design doesn't try to force fit its theory into the claims of a religious text, nor does it try to name or finger a particilar god / designer, nor even a supernatural one at that. How such beleif could effect ones science seems pretty ridiculous, it would be like claiming cricks entertaining the notion of panspermia made his science worthless. There are lots of 'cranks' that do perfectly good science and compartmentalize their understanding and their job from what their opinions, religious people do this all the time and everyone does it actually.
Obviously you are missing entirely the historical perspective of mankinds evolution and development.
The fact that religion exists is a result of evolution and mankind suddenly appearing in a world without any memory and badly recorded / heavily mythologized prior history. Then there is the evolved psychological need that helped get our ancestors through a hellish life on earth in times past (and even) i
"And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?"
Well it is true for a lot of subjects, how much of what they are teaching you and the work you actually do all year is going to really stick to you by the time you get to university? Seriously, unless you use every aspect of what you are taught every day it will simply vanish. While it may perturb you, many people that exist didn't choose to be born into this world, if they want to avoid working like a dog for a minority of owners/well paid managers or corporate asshats by avoiding all the tough, painfully boring and grinding work. Good for them! You can't really believe in freedom if you want to force everyone to become competitive worker drone bee and fall in line, I work to LIVE, not live to work.
"Well, this is a good sign, since private Catholic schools teach the theory of evolution."
And evolution has what relevance to most of the job market? I'd wager maybe 10% of the jobs out there have anything that requires an *absolutely critical* understanding of evolution, and when people mean evolution they mean with respect to lineage, not cause and effects and the objective data - the actual science. There have been creationists for hundreds (and longer), there are YEC, OEC, TE creationists, and many of them have earned their their PHD's and what have you, people like to try to blame everything but their own lack of ambition and work ethic in themselves.
Religion may have a small influence but please there is simply no way holding a simple belief can ever interfere with your knowledge of physics and chemistry or the cause and effect. You just believe in one more type of cause and effect, a transcendant one.
The pain isn't just for you, its there for a reason. There are people who don't feel any pain at all and they never know when something is amiss with their body and many times before its too late, also if you shut off your pain receptors you'd also shut off the exact same receptors that give you pleasure. It's a double edged sword they say.
Slashdot Mirror
"With a subscription system, the game has to actually be GOOD..."
I really doubt this, there are many good games (even single player games) that are both good and commercial failures, many other games were good but no one liked the theme (Earth & beyond and other MMO's that shut down).
Most game developers right now are serving pretty much dumbed down shovel-ware crap, to people who have no twitch skills IMHO. The action element in most MMO's is totally missing, it appeals to gamers who like minimum of interactivity, to be able to chat with people. People pay and play it but the lack of interactivity kills it for me.
"While true, this reminds me of that study [washingtontimes.com] they did recently where they showed that peoples' happiness was more based on relative income than absolute income. Though it should be job satisfaction and the other things you mentioned that really count. "
I think stability in income is what most people are worried about now-a-days.
"Infallible? Ah, you must be thinking of religion.
Scientific ideas change all the time."
I think he was talking about the implied 'infallibility', i.e. scientists 'preach' evolutionary evidence way out over what the actual evidence *is* and tell us that they are *certain* that diversification of life has occured with the *implied certainty* that life arose *naturally* with *no need* of interventionism.
Everytime something about evolution gets posted someone mentions intelligent design, obviously people insist or imply that evolution with implied natural abiogensis is unfalsifiable or 'infallible' in that sense or they wouldn't make fun of intelligent design. Design is a legitimate mode of scientific explanation, hence crick and his ideas about panspermia. If scientists were really serious about science they wouldn't be so hostile against ID, especially with things like the flagella popping up, no natural / evolutionary explanation posited we'd find technology in life, but ID did, and the hypothesis that life is technological machines is clearly anti-thetical to the theory of naturally arising without pre-existing intelligence. If you are going to bring up the arugment of infinite regress, the same applies to pure naturally arisen, you can equally posit infinite natural causes to something as well. It's just as much a problem for naturalism as it is for a chain of designers, of which the first would have to have naturally arisn. Take for instance our own bioengineering new life forms in the future, all future AI and newly engineered life forms will have their history and scientific theory of *human creationism*, then all of a sudden its connected to nature and they might wonder why we didn't do a thorough the other side.
"I'm sure people get the two confused all the time."
They do and this not just the problem of creationists and ID'ists, dogmatism is equally as rampant in science as well.
"That might actually work, if they were willing to do the whole "further investigation" part. They firmly refuse to do anything."
They do this because 1) it costs them money and 2) there are way too many people abusing paypal already, no company on earth could effectively deal with in a timely manner millions of users fucking around on their system.
His Noodlyness feared that you wouldn't worship him if you were his equal. There is truly no limit to what He can do with merely the wave of His Noodly Appendage.
"Is this the answer? Obviously not. Do I have a better one? Not really. The problem is a way of really attacking the people who are making a big profit off of privacy."
And I bet you at least part of the movie industry is double dipping, I wouldn't be surprised if the industry own both legitimate and counterfeit operations themselves, it makes total financial sense.
"You're not activists, you're law breakers. If you have a problem with the law, then do something about it. Don't just hide and hope you won't get caught."
Again the law itself is relative, how many old laws are still on the books that no one enforces since they're passed their prime? Or what if this was a socialist country? What one person views as theivery another views as justified against a wholly corrupt capitalist system and conceptions of ownership that benefit the few rather then the many, I wont cry for hollywood or anyone else that makes at least 20K a year, when there are over 2 billion people that live on less then 2-3 dollars a day.
"But just because these two scientists were wrong about the precise mechanics of evolution doesn't mean that they were wrong about how the data should be interpreted."
If you don't understand the foundational mechanics, you dont undetstand the process and if you dont understand the process you won't have any actual idea if your ideas of how such things came to be are correct or how to interpret them. A stone tied to a stick is a hammer, you would interpret such a structure much differently then the stone and stick seperately. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Most of darwins ideas about how evolution worked were totally wrong, with the amount we know now about the body's repair systems and bacterial communication his views of evolution look extremely naive and childlike, it wasn't hard for evolution to gain any momentum simply because the facts of geology and cosmology were irrefutable, life was easy to mold into the ideas that life was just an extension of geological and cosmological processes. Natural selection has had its day, but we've discovered it's not the primary driving force of evolution, only someone naive would think that, or was educated a long time ago.
Evolution didn't have truly rough time its only competition were myths, not exactly hard to piggy back on geologic and cosmological time and say 'it was the environment that caused all this'. When your only competition are error ridden mythological works.
It doesn't take a genius, such theories have been around long before darwin.
"Together with his optical super-powers, in this case I'm of course referring to what is simplistically referred to as his 'heat vision'"
I suppose now I'll always think of cyclops on x-men as having 'heat vision' instead of 'laser eyes'.
My life is ruined... just ruined...
There's only one kind for those that are blind.
We live in an age of credentialism, one only has to look to last centuries Degreed, MD's, and PHD's to realize that credentials don't guarantee anything. Even now 40-50 years from many who we look upon as 'smart' or at 'the top of their field' today will seem like idiots when history shows how foolish they were, those who live in the time and age are not always the best judges of who is smart and who is not, between the credentialed and uncredentialed alike.
Cooking is more a science then an art, recipes are practically verbatim science. Science is all about measuring, and so is cooking if you plan to make good meals.
... any education that you might get. University degree, a community college, or what have you. One only has to look back on their experiences in college/university or hell even primary/public school and even highschool to see where *you* would have changed the curriculum and stopped wasting the students time with a bunch of filler or out-dated courses (i.e. programming with unisys icons, or 8088's and turing)
IMO the big difference between being certified meaning anything is the quality of the teachers, quality of the curriculum and the 'labs'/ real world problem solving you do to get experience, those who don't do any hands on problem solving consistently will not learn anything.
"Finally, the more effectively our weaponry is, the less likely we'll ever need to use it."
Yeah thats exactly why the US dropped not one, but two nukes on Japan.
Sorry but I just had to comment on this utter fantasy you are spouting. How many people thought this before the advent of nukes, and did it stop them from using their most advanced weapons? No.
I'm curious if the author of the tragedy of the commons would suggest humanity kill themselves if an advanced alien race showed up making all the 'biologically strong people' in the world comparitively weak. If he's going to argue for "merit" biologically based inheritance, then surely he shouldn't mind releasing the resources that he and all humanity is made of to a superior species?
While humanity has to at some point agree not to breed, I believe the selection should be a by choice, and those who choose not to should be adequately lookd after (fed, housing, etc) for forfeiting what is natural. If not enough choose not to breed then a random selection taken from the populace and those in power would make up the slack, either way I believe human beings have to become more compassionate and rational towards those they view as 'strangers' before any of this will be possible otherwise you'd be looking at riots if not the beginnings of sowing the seeds of civil war.
A good portion of the worlds people have children for economic reasons, if you are going to require them to forfeit that, you must make up the slack to look after them.
But I believe once science and technology makes people immortal, technology for genetic engineering, artificial wombs/created humans, etc, breeding will not be necessary anymore. I believe those technologies will come long before most countries would get a chance to deny people the freedom to breed. War is most and secret government operations taking biological warfare against their own people and covering it up as "natural diseases" seems much more likely then openly attempting to deny what people consider their 'natural rights'.
"Long sick lives are not as good as long health lives."
I think you're forgetting "Eat healthy, excercise, die anyway"
It doesn't matter if you had the most pristine food in the world, the human body was not built to last, hence procreation.
"it is because they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level, and therefore they take having that skill for granted and expect that everyone should be able to do it."
Yes but women frequently see things that aren't there because they believe they are good at reading other people, when in actual fact many women while they read way too much into situations that are trivial and logically explained. Hence "Drama Queen", women frequently cause drama where there is none, the same goes for both sexes though. Also I think the 'subtlety' aspect is a part of the differences in the types of minds people are given. I'd think there are just as many men as women that can grasp people, just as there are just as many people who can't.
Grasping subtlety is a skill that can be learned IMHO, all it takes is being very socially active - people oriented - people interested, which many men aren't comparitively to women.
"Yet another case of bonehead government IT staff justifying their knowledge and position with an MCSE certification."
I'm tired of hearing this bullshit MCSE has been overhauled much since the NT days and even then it wasn't exactly a cakewalk (you had to solve real problems and if you didn't know what they were talking about for many problems you were up shit creek). Sure it may be easy for some hardcore computer geeks but seriously doing the full MCSE certainly isn't a waste of time if you want to learn about networking in regards to windows, it is more of an addition to ones education then the 'main course' itself and it should have always been understood to be that way.
"... requires moving them past short-sighted views on how we need to "learn how to live on earth first."
There's nothing shortsighted about learning to sustain the planet we've got, after all we got a few billion years of the suns energy left and I really really doubt people want to go to even more dangerous places to live out a tenuous existence. Space radiation is an enormous problem once you get outside the atmosphere, you are no longer protected by all of earths protections and the same goes for other artifacts.
If you can't solve the most basic and fundamental problems of living together sustainably on your home planet just what pray-tell do you think spawning more idiots who can't live together on foreign planets will do? The only short sighted one here is you.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the market is flooded with too much entertainment, period. This is not just limited to games either, all forms of entertainment take up a single resource people have to manage - TIME, so therefore if you want people to buy your stuff they have to have a good reason and enough time and money (to justify it on entertainment) to do so.
"This is an unfathomable opinion. You obviously value the skills and understanding that can be obtained from studying physics and chemistry, and are unable to see how that argument applies to the teaching of biological evolution."
(sorry for the previous, I accidentally hit submit without finishing and the formatting was messed)
No, Darwin himself was (in his own thoughts) christian up until about 40 years of age by his own words or maybe you haven't read anything by darwin himself? He said it wasn't until about 40 until it was out of his system.
For most people that go to university and end up being in biological related fields, of which evolution has the most importance. Evolution simply *doesn't matter* for much of anyone outside of the related fields unless you want to indoctrinate people and push your worldview on them, the fact is evolution in its ultimate form must bow to molecular biology of which the historical development of species via molecular biology is centuries away from being understood coherently by anyone. And thats a claim I will standby 100%. Its easy enough to see through religious shenanigans with age of the earth and cosmology.
If you want to minimize religious effects, you have to have classes exclusively related to debunking or allegorizing religion taught in schools. You wont do it with any amount of critical thinking or pro-evo propoganda, you forget that people believe in religion because of the reward (i.e. eternal life) evolution has no such draw, so I believe your attempts would be futile. This is why real historians understand the role of religion in mankinds development while 'faux' intellectuals who want force everyone to be, accept and think like themselves dont understand why other people's ignorance is omni-present in such an advanced age.
Let me repeat that being taught biological evolution DOESN'T matter if it has no bearing on how you function in your job in society, its easy enough to see the earths and universes implied age and exploding/imploding stars to gather all one needs to know about cause and effect in relation to christianity.
Anyone who isn't lazy knows most christians dont even read the bible anyway, if you rationally tried to extract doctrines out of the biblical text accurately you'd find over 90% of christendom has been astray from what the bible has actually taught for a long long time throughout history.
Religious believers havea a problem with evolution as philosophical alternative worldview crushing, worldview. Evolution as a philosophy is equally philosophical in its implied claims and conclusions by popular authors - i.e. god does not exist, life is meaningless, the universe will one day experience calamities perhaps taking out mankind, making even your worthy goal to make sure 'everyone understands' evolution quite ridiculous. The people who hold such beliefs we just have to wait to die and enough people can think for themselves as schools get better over time.
Quite simply we live in a brief window of time in the universe whether it will all be for naught countless of generations down the line we'll never know but the odds are in the universes favor.
Creationism and religion has a minimal effect on science, its influence is overblown and you're forgetting that historically people dont give up what they've been taught as world history for centuries very easily. Many big scientists were creationists and it didn't effect their science, i.e. newton, maxwell, mendell, pasteur, faraday, etc.
Next creationism has been outlawed from being taught by the courts, period. Intelligent design doesn't try to force fit its theory into the claims of a religious text, nor does it try to name or finger a particilar god / designer, nor even a supernatural one at that. How such beleif could effect ones science seems pretty ridiculous, it would be like claiming cricks entertaining the notion of panspermia made his science worthless. There are lots of 'cranks' that do perfectly good science and compa
"This is an unfathomable opinion. You obviously value the skills and understanding that can be obtained from studying physics and chemistry, and are unable to see how that argument applies to the teaching of biological evolution." No, Darwin himself was (in his own thoughts) christian up until about 40 years of age by his own words or maybe you haven't read anything by darwin himself? He said it wasn't until about 40 until it was out of his system. For most people that go to university and end up being in biological related fields, of which evolution has the most importance, evolution there simply *doesn't matter* unless you want to indoctrinate people and push your worldview on them, the fact is evolution in its ultimate form must bow to molecular biology of which the historical development of species via molecular biology is centuries away from being understood coherently by anyone. If you want to minimize religious effects, you have to have classes exclusively related to debunking or allegorizing religion taught in schools, you wont do it with any amount of critical thinking or pro-evo indoctrination, you forget that people believe in religion because of the reward (i.e. eternal life) evolution has no such draw, so I believe your attempts would be futile. This is why real historians understand the role of religion in mankinds development while 'faux' intellectuals who want force everyone to be, accept and think like themselves dont understand why ignorance is omni-present in such an advanced age. Let me repeat that being taught biological evolution DOESN'T matter, its easy enough to see the earths and universes implied age and exploding/imploding stars to gather all one needs to know about cause and effect in relation to christianity. Most christians dont even read the bible anyway, if you rationally tried to extract doctrines out of the biblical text accurately you'd find over 90% of christendom has been astray from what the bible has actually taught for a long long time throughout history. Evolution as a philosophy is equally philosophical in its implied claims and conclusions by popular authors - i.e. god does not exist, life is meaningless, the universe will one day experience calamities perhaps taking out mankind, making even your worthy goal to make sure 'everyone understands' evolution quite ridiculous. The people who hold such beliefs we just have to wait to die and enough people can think for themselves as schools get better over time. Quite simply we live in a brief window of time in the universe whether it will all be for naught countless of generations down the line we'll never know but the odds are in the universes favor. Creationism and religion has a minimal effect on science, its influence is overblown and you're forgetting that historically people dont give up what they've been taught as world history for centuries very easily. Many big scientists were creationists and it didn't effect their science, i.e. newton, maxwell, mendell, pasteur, faraday, etc. Next creationism has been outlawed from being taught by the courts, period. Intelligent design doesn't try to force fit its theory into the claims of a religious text, nor does it try to name or finger a particilar god / designer, nor even a supernatural one at that. How such beleif could effect ones science seems pretty ridiculous, it would be like claiming cricks entertaining the notion of panspermia made his science worthless. There are lots of 'cranks' that do perfectly good science and compartmentalize their understanding and their job from what their opinions, religious people do this all the time and everyone does it actually. Obviously you are missing entirely the historical perspective of mankinds evolution and development. The fact that religion exists is a result of evolution and mankind suddenly appearing in a world without any memory and badly recorded / heavily mythologized prior history. Then there is the evolved psychological need that helped get our ancestors through a hellish life on earth in times past (and even) i
"And that last point is always said with almost an air of superiority, like there's an underlying "I didn't do well at math and I'm successful, why did you waste your time?" - often enough people will actually come out and say that too. I'm sure any other mathematicians here on Slashdot can testify to much the same thing. There is a deep deated cultural belief that mathematics isn't important - is it any suprise teachers and parents pass that attitude on to their kids?"
Well it is true for a lot of subjects, how much of what they are teaching you and the work you actually do all year is going to really stick to you by the time you get to university? Seriously, unless you use every aspect of what you are taught every day it will simply vanish. While it may perturb you, many people that exist didn't choose to be born into this world, if they want to avoid working like a dog for a minority of owners/well paid managers or corporate asshats by avoiding all the tough, painfully boring and grinding work. Good for them! You can't really believe in freedom if you want to force everyone to become competitive worker drone bee and fall in line, I work to LIVE, not live to work.
"Well, this is a good sign, since private Catholic schools teach the theory of evolution."
And evolution has what relevance to most of the job market? I'd wager maybe 10% of the jobs out there have anything that requires an *absolutely critical* understanding of evolution, and when people mean evolution they mean with respect to lineage, not cause and effects and the objective data - the actual science. There have been creationists for hundreds (and longer), there are YEC, OEC, TE creationists, and many of them have earned their their PHD's and what have you, people like to try to blame everything but their own lack of ambition and work ethic in themselves.
Religion may have a small influence but please there is simply no way holding a simple belief can ever interfere with your knowledge of physics and chemistry or the cause and effect. You just believe in one more type of cause and effect, a transcendant one.
The pain isn't just for you, its there for a reason. There are people who don't feel any pain at all and they never know when something is amiss with their body and many times before its too late, also if you shut off your pain receptors you'd also shut off the exact same receptors that give you pleasure. It's a double edged sword they say.