That is presuming gloabl warming is real and that it's linked to CO2.
You may be completely right and it's great for everyone to have an opinion on global warming and carbon dioxide. But is your opinion based on what you got from the media or was it formed through scientific reasoning?
<satire>
In other news, Max Born advises people to keep on smoking and eating only McDonalds burgers until they have personally verified and reproduced the scientific data suggesting smoking 20 a day and weighing 30 stone is unhealthy, and taken a degree in cardiology. After all, those suggestions that obesity, smoking, and a lack of exercise aren't good for you were probably heard through the media.
</satire>
Re:Infrastructure not old business model
on
The New Boom
·
· Score: 1
over-hyped
You mean as opposed to just hyped? I absolutely love this word to bits. It's as if mere hyperbole just isn't enough to describe Google stock and instead we have to hype up the word hype with over-exaggeration in order to capture the ultra-extremity of the situation.
Over-hyped is when something has been hyped so much that people notice it has been hyped and stop believing the illusion.
You mean that country in Europe where the head of state is also the head of the state's established church? And where you can't be head of state unless you're a member of the established church.
In the US, you determinedly separate church and state. In the UK, we determinedly separate state and government. That's what lets us our state be infused with centuries of history and culture, including remembering Britain's importance in the Reformation and it's 16th-17th century "struggle to maintain its sovereignty against the forces of popery" (both the Gunpowder Plot and the Spanish Armada were attempts to have protestant Britain taken over by a Catholic power), while our government remains independent, modern, multi-cultural and objective.
It's not a big controversy here. In fact, the BBC news story even mentions that the Panorama documentary the survey was commissioned for is looking at the controversy in the US.
In the UK, there is no constitutional requirement on the separation of church and state to spark the controversy. So, we are quite happy [for the most part] having church schools and even many atheist parents are keen to get their children into them because they regularly outperform the free non-church schools on the GCSE and A-level results tables. Nonetheless, the National Curriculum (what schools have to teach) includes the theory of evolution and nobody is complaining terribly much about that either.
In fact, far from the UK having a problem with people who "want to teach religion as science", we have more of an issue with some poor quality science teachers who "want to teach science as history" - that is teaching science as a set of dates and facts rather than teaching much about the scientific process. It's only when you hit A-level (age 17), when lots of people have dropped physics, that quantum physics and the idea of scientists disagreeing with each other really pops up in earnest. And it's well known here that science is in more danger here from being seen by teenagers as "uncool" rather than as "heretical".
The stats on belief don't surprise me at all and seem very sensible. There is always going to be a discrepancy between people's views on "what is the best-supported scientific theory" and "what do I secretly reckon is really the case". Personally as a computer scientist, I'm not totally satisfied that the "but does it really scale?" question has been answered to my satisfaction about evolution - the argument seems to be "well it must have or we couldn't have evolved" which seems too circular for my liking. So I'll secretly suspect there's something more to it, even though I'll happily agree in a classroom that evolution is the best scientifically-supported theory at the moment.
(But that niggle is certainly enough that if my son was told "we evolved" as a fact of history, I'd tell him that's just the most scientifically supported theory at the moment and could be wrong - much like the plum pudding model of atoms was before Rutherford came along)
The biggest problem isn't that the Flash player itself is proprietary (even though it would be nice if it weren't); it's that SWF is proprietary. This suppresses competition from would-be open source (or even other proprietary) Flash players that have to compete with Adobe/Macromedia. If SWF was open, an open source Flash player could be easily written that would eliminate such bugs.
I would challenge "easily written". You seem to have a mystical belief that just because a format is open-source, a second implementation will magically spring out of the ground that doesn't have bugs. More often than not the reality is that second, third and fourth implementations will slowly creep out of the ground with just as many bugs and normally lagging a version or two behind the commercial version that has more money being thrown at it. SVG is an open format with much of the capabilities of Flash, and yet the players for it remain buggy and incomplete years after they were started. Even Mozilla (the hero of open-source projects for open standards) took many years in the doldrums before finally catching up with Internet Explorer, and then a big reason for Mozilla being able to catch up was that Microsoft stopped developing IE at all for four years.
But as long as SWF remains proprietary, it needs to be replaced by a format that everyone can use.
That was the rationale behind SVG, but the last few years have shown there are fewer people rushing out to replace SWF than we thought after all.
It would be trivial to have a (rechargeable) backup battery in the device that powers the, well, powerswitch. You could even use a normally-closed relay, so that when the battery powers down, the device powers up, stealthily enters sleep mode just to recharge the battery, and the shuts down; though that would cost more energy and doesn't make much sense (why have a sleep mode at all on devices that are switched off for months at end?).
Or more simply you use a capacitor and a relay. While the tv is operating the capacitor remains charged. When switched into standby mode, the capacitor will keep the relay closed for a while allowing power to the transformer and the infra red receiver. After being in standby for too long (an hour or two) the capacitor will have discharged and the relay pops open cutting the power on the mains side. Pressing the button on the tv will momentarily reconnect the power (not via the relay) and put the tv back into 'on' mode - the current flowing again will close the relay and recharge the capacitor. Simple, costs a few pence/cents, and is presumably what the One Watt campaign is trying to persuade the manufacturers to do.
For us that live in coldish countries, and I'd place Scotland in this group, as long as you have regulated heating, heat from PSUs is just as good as any other heat.
True but irrelevant. Given that most of the time the tv is on standby, you are either out at work or tucked up in bed in another room, how much use is that heat in the room that will have dissipated before you wake up or get home? Presumably you don't have your central heating timer set to keep your empty house toasty warm during the working part of the day.
VOIP has many problems, e.g. unlike regular telephones on regular telephone lines, they do not work during power cuts.
Since a large part of the UK has a portable (not mobile) phone as their only home phone - like me, rather a lot of the UK's regular phones don't work during power cuts either. Ok, you can answer (using handsfree on the base), but dialling is a problem.
I thought the purpose of the GPL was to ensure that open source works weren't sold in a commercial product without providing the source-code at no added cost. I don't understand how that runs contrary to Digital Rights Management, which is, after all, just another kind of software product. Oh well, I guess you don't have to use the GPL in order to release an open source product if you don't want to.
At a cynical level, the purpose of the GPL is to further Richard Stallman's political agenda and that of the FSF. (At a practical level it has also turned out to be very useful indeed and "a good thing"). This agenda appears to have extended from his original frustrations about HP (IIRC) not letting giving him the source of a printer driver so he could modify it to, presumably, frustrations about media firms driving DRM into most popular computer systems.
Last time, the GPL encouraged a lot of open source software and drove the software industry in an interesting and (I think) beneficial direction. This time it might do the same again; or it might become a barrier to the use of GPL software for some purposes in the home (If the next wave of growth of computer use in the home is as a media centre, then a dearth of content that can be viewed with GPL'ed software could be an issue. For example if your Mac Mini can record digital tv, and so can your Dell Mini, but your Linux-based mini cannot. More likely, though, it will simply mean that the media software that gets developed for Linux for those uses will not be licensed under GPL 3. Which might that most Linux media software we'll see in the future will come from the cable companies themselves and be locked in to their services - like cable company PVRs only more so? Just a guess.)
It is a bit ironic that the same companies that don't want you to see their movies for free will use software that can be obtained for free to make their movies. I guess the entertainment industry motto is: "Why pay for it if you don't have to?"
For me, that length==1 trigger is the most convincing evidence. It's not just that it's the wrong input, it's that it's the one specific value of wrong input that triggers the behavior. That seems like design.
I'm not convinced.
length==-109 and the code section has these four words at the start: 0x9823412 0x12374123 0x13451321 0x213412
Secondly, I fail to see where you think the OED refutes anything I said, as I never claimed that morals and ethics are unrelated (in fact, I said the opposite). I distinguish between them merely in terms of scope: morality establishes a set of agreed behavioural guidelines, and ethics apply these morals to specific situations, some of which may not have existed when the original moral code was established.
The point is that the OED does not concur with your distinction, and neither do I because I don't feel it's a useful distinction to make in this forum. "Ethics" is a term for the study of morality, and within that academic field the words may have particular jargon meanings that are no doubt open to academic debate, but beyond that both historical and common contemporary usage shows them to be interchangeable and without a clear single definition. (From a cognitive viewpoint, I also suspect morals/applications works the other way around -- that morals are shortcut rules for a connected sequence of thoughts, and thus applications are likely to turn into morals rather than morals simply leading to applications).
I don't feel your distinction is useful in this forum because for the whole of this conversation you've been saying "X is not a moral, it's just an ethical application of morals Y, and Z" giving us the silly amateur psychology game of debating which might be "base morals" on your terms. Morals as atomic units rather than thought-out applications can come from a wide variety of sources, everything from Aesop's fables and common literary background to law to religion to, in weaker cases, simple experience ("don't mix family and business") or what your gran kept telling you when you were young. So I don't feel it's worthwhile debating specific examples of which might be an atomic moral and which might be a compound application of different morals. At least not here, and not without a large quantity of experimental data to back it up (and even then it's likely to vary from community to community). Nonetheless, being a bit argumentative, I felt I should refute your rhetorical allegation that I was "confused" about any of this.
NB: It seems that you are rather emotionally bound to this, and are therefore misreading a great deal of what I have said as being some sort of attack on you and your beliefs. I shall therefore terminate this debate by conceding victory to you, as it is only of interest to me from an academic viewpoint.
Not at all - just my argumentative side kicking in. As for "misreading" what you said - you might wish to check the context of your original post to see why I naturally assumed you were concurring with the OP's assertion that morals are unaffected by religion. You replied in rhetorically strong tones to my reply to him - I believe your first line was "it is you who appears to be confused", [where my post had indicated the OP had confused two issues together], which I naturally took as indicating both your opposition to my post and your alignment with his.
No, you're going down your own line of trying to cherry-pick a carefully engineered definition "ethic" and "moral" to suit your own circular argument, and you're even attempting to redefine "emotional" to try to cover your back where several things obviously do not fit. ("Emotional issues" means "issues that tend to stir up people's emotions" but does not mean that a person's stance on the issue depends on their emotional state at the time you ask the question). For example, in order to support your assertion [actually the OP's] that morals only evolve and are unaffected by religious affiliation, you have attempted to define "moral" as requiring a "general consensus [across all of society], not something that is imposed by one part of society on an equally large but dissident portion" and are attempting to use your own artificial re-definition of the word to define out morals influenced by religion on the grounds that members of other religions do not have the same ones. That is circular. A reasonable person would describe the two sections of the community as having differing moral stances on the issue. For you're next step, you'll define cats as "felines without tails" and use this to show that only the manx species is a cat because all others have tails!
To provide some external backing for my comment about your attempt to cherry-pick a favoured definition of moral and ethic just in case you don't believe me (and to save you the trouble of hunting for a favourable definition in a random dictionary), let's do a quick online lookup in the Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com/. We get definitions of "ethic" which include: "The moral principles by which a person is guided.", "Relating to morals.". (and about a dozen others including references to their first documented usages)
Similarly, "moral" gives us entries including: "Thought and discourse about moral questions; moral philosophy, ethics. Also occas. in sing. Cf. MORALITY n. 7a. Now arch. and hist." "In pl. (earlier in sing.). Originally: the title of St Gregory the Great's moral exposition of the biblical Book of Job. Later also: the collective title given to Plutarch's writings other than the 'Lives', to the ethical writings of Seneca, etc. Now rare." (again plus a dozen others)
And you will notice there is no such artificially inserted distinction to try to save your argument. Indeed not only is ethic used as a synonym for morals, but moral is also used for thought and discourse which you would attempt to define as only being ethics. There is an entry for ethics as a subject of science - the academic study of ethics - as I used it, but not one that would help you.
I entirely disagree. While members of the academic community and relevant professionals such as doctors and legislators study these issues as ethics, members of the general populace tend to have fairly unambiguous moral stances on them. People do not tend to study ethics before they express the moral principle that the berieved relative must assent before a loved one's organs are harvested. Neither do they tend to weigh up purjury even though they may feel that lying in other areas of life is 'ok'. And while for doctors and legislators the abortion debate is an ethical issue, for the pro-life US Conservatives and the pro-choice feminists it is simply a moral issue. (the conservatives do not accept the feminists' moral that a woman has complete rights over her own body at all times, and the feminists do not accept the conservatives' moral that any taking of life is wrong - there is no "weighing up" or "application of morals" but simply one not accepting the other's morals)
You are conflating two completely seperate things, though the religious always claim one comes from the other. Morals are a result of social and biological evolution, not religion. Most animals have their own unique moral behavior. Many animals, especially those closely related to us, exhibit moral behavior very closely resembling our own.
No, you're getting slightly confused. While entirely historically a-religious groups [eg animals] will exhibit some morals/social behaviour (although the animal example is not as close as you would claim), the morals of any particular human, atheist or not, are affected by the society he/she has been brought up in, which is always affected by religion since no human society has been religion-free for its entire existence.
Secondly, animal moral behaviours do not "closely resemble" our own except for an extraordinarily broad interpretation of "closely resemble". Animals do not have organ-transplants to have morals about whether the family of the donor should have to assent, they do not have courts to have moral beliefs about whether they should present false evidence in them, they do not have abortions to debate how close to term the foetus has to be before it has the same rights as its mother, etc etc. Those who wish to claim animals are morally "very close" are left discussing a few small similarities around rights to territory, mating partners, food, and the fact that animals tend to form a social pecking order. And the rest is wild extrapolation.
O'Grady writes:"Hopefully it'll be the PowerBook nano I've been dreaming of. Unfortunately, it's not likely as the pro software (Final Cut, Creative Suite, etc.) isn't universal binary yet. Rosetta emulation isn't fun folks. Odds: 50-1."
So, basically, he's saying that because a certain segment of the userbase will be waiting a little while, EVERYONE should wait?
Quite likely - otherwise Apple could face the prospect of it being reported in the media as "Apple have released a new computer but some of their important software packages won't work with it", and bang goes the iPod halo effect.
Control in a way, and I wouldn't say invented. There is strong evidence that our brains are wired for religion. In other words, religion helped early humans in some way probably by letting them explain the world around them and explaining why certain social norms should be followed. In other words it's the flip side of rationality and logic.
Now that in itself says nothing about it being required or useful in the modern day (or counterproductive). However, one of the above has been replaced with science and the other isn't required (atheists aren't all moraless bastards).
However atheists often conveniently neglect that they have been brought up within a society that has been shaped by religion over thousands of years. So although atheists themselves have no religious beliefs, their morals are still affected by the religious beliefs and traditions of others via social processes.
To have more consciousness, because we are the only beings who can appreciate this marvelous creation.
That's utter drivel. My cat knows the difference between being cold and wet and miserable and scared and being cuddled up before the fire in a pair of loving arms. My cat will signal her appreciation in a completely unequivocal manner by purring and loving up. Her level of appreciation is different, but it is not lacking.
I'll be impressed when I meet a cat that appreciates quantum physics...
In my world, we investigate things that we don't want to be repeated too. But instead of trying to apply the same recipy to all cases...
Actually we find the recipe of "investigate and find out what happened" (yes, the recipe I described in the post you're replying to) really is applicable across all cases.
And, somehow, you will know how they became suiciders by following their paths on their last hours, instead of trying to analize it from a general sociologic point of view.
Almost right. Instead of simply inserting our heads in our posteriors to debate sociology we examine the known cases. Not just "how in our limited sociological assumpions might they organise", but how do they organise and does that fit with what we thought. Rather useful to know given that similar attacks were attempted again two weeks later. Incidentally footage of the 21 July suspects was released on 22 July, and the suspects were arrested within the week.
what it really remains is privacy and individual lives being on hands of some benevolent (so we hope) tyrants
This is where we have a very big advantage over you - our system of government makes "tyrants" incredibly unlikely. We have no FBI. We have no president, but a Prime Minister who can easily be removed mid-term (just like Thatcher was [defeated by her party], or like Callaghan was [motion of no confidence], or even the way Blair is going [had to make a deal with his party that he will retire before the next election]) That's 3 of the last 4 asked to leave mid-term. I understand US presidents historically have been more likely to die in office than be removed mid-term, so maybe they'd be candidates to become tyrants. Our judges are not political appointments, unlike the US Supreme Court, ensuring the independence of our judiciary. Rather than 1 representative per 500,000 people we have 1 MP per 91,000. That means it takes five times fewer people to change an MP, and since (unlike the US congress) the MPs can easily remove the head of government and regularly have done so, it has a bigger effect too. And it means that local campaigning door-to-door trumps business bankrolling of high profile election tv campaigns. And means we have more "common-as-muck" MPs rather than just business high-fliers. Even our ministers [secretaries of state] have to face elections in their local constituencies (British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was elected; US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice was not). And we don't do undemocratic things like removing the right to vote simply because you were once convicted of an offence [unlike the US]. And the strength of British common law means that even speed cameras have to be painted bright yellow, clearly signed, and the location of every one is listed on the internet by the police themselves. Tyrants - maybe in your country.
The funny thing is that everyone in the UK knows what the "conspiracy theory" in this story is, and it isn't monitoring but that in five years time Road Tax might perhaps be replaced with national congestion charging.
I wouldn't bet on it. It's being reported as an award for the best scientific achievement, when it's just an editorial list of "what topics were hot this year".
So, ummmm, while I'm in the bank my accomplice spray paints the registration ready for the getaway...
Talk about drawing attention to yourself! "Nah, nobody'll think anything's up. Spray painting over your registration in the middle of the High Street happens every day." And of course what every bank-robber most wants is a get-away car that's really distinctive and stands out from every other car on the road... say with a painted-out registration plate.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a big controversy here. In fact, the BBC news story even mentions that the Panorama documentary the survey was commissioned for is looking at the controversy in the US.
In the UK, there is no constitutional requirement on the separation of church and state to spark the controversy. So, we are quite happy [for the most part] having church schools and even many atheist parents are keen to get their children into them because they regularly outperform the free non-church schools on the GCSE and A-level results tables. Nonetheless, the National Curriculum (what schools have to teach) includes the theory of evolution and nobody is complaining terribly much about that either.
In fact, far from the UK having a problem with people who "want to teach religion as science", we have more of an issue with some poor quality science teachers who "want to teach science as history" - that is teaching science as a set of dates and facts rather than teaching much about the scientific process. It's only when you hit A-level (age 17), when lots of people have dropped physics, that quantum physics and the idea of scientists disagreeing with each other really pops up in earnest. And it's well known here that science is in more danger here from being seen by teenagers as "uncool" rather than as "heretical".
The stats on belief don't surprise me at all and seem very sensible. There is always going to be a discrepancy between people's views on "what is the best-supported scientific theory" and "what do I secretly reckon is really the case". Personally as a computer scientist, I'm not totally satisfied that the "but does it really scale?" question has been answered to my satisfaction about evolution - the argument seems to be "well it must have or we couldn't have evolved" which seems too circular for my liking. So I'll secretly suspect there's something more to it, even though I'll happily agree in a classroom that evolution is the best scientifically-supported theory at the moment.
(But that niggle is certainly enough that if my son was told "we evolved" as a fact of history, I'd tell him that's just the most scientifically supported theory at the moment and could be wrong - much like the plum pudding model of atoms was before Rutherford came along)
I would challenge "easily written". You seem to have a mystical belief that just because a format is open-source, a second implementation will magically spring out of the ground that doesn't have bugs. More often than not the reality is that second, third and fourth implementations will slowly creep out of the ground with just as many bugs and normally lagging a version or two behind the commercial version that has more money being thrown at it. SVG is an open format with much of the capabilities of Flash, and yet the players for it remain buggy and incomplete years after they were started. Even Mozilla (the hero of open-source projects for open standards) took many years in the doldrums before finally catching up with Internet Explorer, and then a big reason for Mozilla being able to catch up was that Microsoft stopped developing IE at all for four years.
That was the rationale behind SVG, but the last few years have shown there are fewer people rushing out to replace SWF than we thought after all.
...in 20,000AD, the carniverous species that evolved from chihauhas has discovered a new source of frozen meat snacks.
Last time, the GPL encouraged a lot of open source software and drove the software industry in an interesting and (I think) beneficial direction. This time it might do the same again; or it might become a barrier to the use of GPL software for some purposes in the home (If the next wave of growth of computer use in the home is as a media centre, then a dearth of content that can be viewed with GPL'ed software could be an issue. For example if your Mac Mini can record digital tv, and so can your Dell Mini, but your Linux-based mini cannot. More likely, though, it will simply mean that the media software that gets developed for Linux for those uses will not be licensed under GPL 3. Which might that most Linux media software we'll see in the future will come from the cable companies themselves and be locked in to their services - like cable company PVRs only more so? Just a guess.)
Or maybe it's simply "obey the license".
I'm not convinced.sounds like a secret key and a conspiracy;sounds like stupidity
You're not a troll because you swear? But I've met lots of trolls that use profane language...
The point is that the OED does not concur with your distinction, and neither do I because I don't feel it's a useful distinction to make in this forum. "Ethics" is a term for the study of morality, and within that academic field the words may have particular jargon meanings that are no doubt open to academic debate, but beyond that both historical and common contemporary usage shows them to be interchangeable and without a clear single definition. (From a cognitive viewpoint, I also suspect morals/applications works the other way around -- that morals are shortcut rules for a connected sequence of thoughts, and thus applications are likely to turn into morals rather than morals simply leading to applications).
I don't feel your distinction is useful in this forum because for the whole of this conversation you've been saying "X is not a moral, it's just an ethical application of morals Y, and Z" giving us the silly amateur psychology game of debating which might be "base morals" on your terms. Morals as atomic units rather than thought-out applications can come from a wide variety of sources, everything from Aesop's fables and common literary background to law to religion to, in weaker cases, simple experience ("don't mix family and business") or what your gran kept telling you when you were young. So I don't feel it's worthwhile debating specific examples of which might be an atomic moral and which might be a compound application of different morals. At least not here, and not without a large quantity of experimental data to back it up (and even then it's likely to vary from community to community). Nonetheless, being a bit argumentative, I felt I should refute your rhetorical allegation that I was "confused" about any of this.
Not at all - just my argumentative side kicking in. As for "misreading" what you said - you might wish to check the context of your original post to see why I naturally assumed you were concurring with the OP's assertion that morals are unaffected by religion. You replied in rhetorically strong tones to my reply to him - I believe your first line was "it is you who appears to be confused", [where my post had indicated the OP had confused two issues together], which I naturally took as indicating both your opposition to my post and your alignment with his.
No, you're going down your own line of trying to cherry-pick a carefully engineered definition "ethic" and "moral" to suit your own circular argument, and you're even attempting to redefine "emotional" to try to cover your back where several things obviously do not fit. ("Emotional issues" means "issues that tend to stir up people's emotions" but does not mean that a person's stance on the issue depends on their emotional state at the time you ask the question). For example, in order to support your assertion [actually the OP's] that morals only evolve and are unaffected by religious affiliation, you have attempted to define "moral" as requiring a "general consensus [across all of society], not something that is imposed by one part of society on an equally large but dissident portion" and are attempting to use your own artificial re-definition of the word to define out morals influenced by religion on the grounds that members of other religions do not have the same ones. That is circular. A reasonable person would describe the two sections of the community as having differing moral stances on the issue. For you're next step, you'll define cats as "felines without tails" and use this to show that only the manx species is a cat because all others have tails!
To provide some external backing for my comment about your attempt to cherry-pick a favoured definition of moral and ethic just in case you don't believe me (and to save you the trouble of hunting for a favourable definition in a random dictionary), let's do a quick online lookup in the Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com/. We get definitions of "ethic" which include:
"The moral principles by which a person is guided.",
"Relating to morals.".
(and about a dozen others including references to their first documented usages)
Similarly, "moral" gives us entries including:
"Thought and discourse about moral questions; moral philosophy, ethics. Also occas. in sing. Cf. MORALITY n. 7a. Now arch. and hist."
"In pl. (earlier in sing.). Originally: the title of St Gregory the Great's moral exposition of the biblical Book of Job. Later also: the collective title given to Plutarch's writings other than the 'Lives', to the ethical writings of Seneca, etc. Now rare."
(again plus a dozen others)
And you will notice there is no such artificially inserted distinction to try to save your argument. Indeed not only is ethic used as a synonym for morals, but moral is also used for thought and discourse which you would attempt to define as only being ethics. There is an entry for ethics as a subject of science - the academic study of ethics - as I used it, but not one that would help you.
I entirely disagree. While members of the academic community and relevant professionals such as doctors and legislators study these issues as ethics, members of the general populace tend to have fairly unambiguous moral stances on them. People do not tend to study ethics before they express the moral principle that the berieved relative must assent before a loved one's organs are harvested. Neither do they tend to weigh up purjury even though they may feel that lying in other areas of life is 'ok'. And while for doctors and legislators the abortion debate is an ethical issue, for the pro-life US Conservatives and the pro-choice feminists it is simply a moral issue. (the conservatives do not accept the feminists' moral that a woman has complete rights over her own body at all times, and the feminists do not accept the conservatives' moral that any taking of life is wrong - there is no "weighing up" or "application of morals" but simply one not accepting the other's morals)
No, you're getting slightly confused. While entirely historically a-religious groups [eg animals] will exhibit some morals/social behaviour (although the animal example is not as close as you would claim), the morals of any particular human, atheist or not, are affected by the society he/she has been brought up in, which is always affected by religion since no human society has been religion-free for its entire existence.
Secondly, animal moral behaviours do not "closely resemble" our own except for an extraordinarily broad interpretation of "closely resemble". Animals do not have organ-transplants to have morals about whether the family of the donor should have to assent, they do not have courts to have moral beliefs about whether they should present false evidence in them, they do not have abortions to debate how close to term the foetus has to be before it has the same rights as its mother, etc etc. Those who wish to claim animals are morally "very close" are left discussing a few small similarities around rights to territory, mating partners, food, and the fact that animals tend to form a social pecking order. And the rest is wild extrapolation.
Quite likely - otherwise Apple could face the prospect of it being reported in the media as "Apple have released a new computer but some of their important software packages won't work with it", and bang goes the iPod halo effect.
However atheists often conveniently neglect that they have been brought up within a society that has been shaped by religion over thousands of years. So although atheists themselves have no religious beliefs, their morals are still affected by the religious beliefs and traditions of others via social processes.
I'll be impressed when I meet a cat that appreciates quantum physics...
Actually we find the recipe of "investigate and find out what happened" (yes, the recipe I described in the post you're replying to) really is applicable across all cases.
Almost right. Instead of simply inserting our heads in our posteriors to debate sociology we examine the known cases. Not just "how in our limited sociological assumpions might they organise", but how do they organise and does that fit with what we thought. Rather useful to know given that similar attacks were attempted again two weeks later. Incidentally footage of the 21 July suspects was released on 22 July, and the suspects were arrested within the week.
This is where we have a very big advantage over you - our system of government makes "tyrants" incredibly unlikely. We have no FBI. We have no president, but a Prime Minister who can easily be removed mid-term (just like Thatcher was [defeated by her party], or like Callaghan was [motion of no confidence], or even the way Blair is going [had to make a deal with his party that he will retire before the next election]) That's 3 of the last 4 asked to leave mid-term. I understand US presidents historically have been more likely to die in office than be removed mid-term, so maybe they'd be candidates to become tyrants. Our judges are not political appointments, unlike the US Supreme Court, ensuring the independence of our judiciary. Rather than 1 representative per 500,000 people we have 1 MP per 91,000. That means it takes five times fewer people to change an MP, and since (unlike the US congress) the MPs can easily remove the head of government and regularly have done so, it has a bigger effect too. And it means that local campaigning door-to-door trumps business bankrolling of high profile election tv campaigns. And means we have more "common-as-muck" MPs rather than just business high-fliers. Even our ministers [secretaries of state] have to face elections in their local constituencies (British Foreign Minister Jack Straw was elected; US Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice was not). And we don't do undemocratic things like removing the right to vote simply because you were once convicted of an offence [unlike the US]. And the strength of British common law means that even speed cameras have to be painted bright yellow, clearly signed, and the location of every one is listed on the internet by the police themselves. Tyrants - maybe in your country.
The funny thing is that everyone in the UK knows what the "conspiracy theory" in this story is, and it isn't monitoring but that in five years time Road Tax might perhaps be replaced with national congestion charging.
I wouldn't bet on it. It's being reported as an award for the best scientific achievement, when it's just an editorial list of "what topics were hot this year".
Talk about drawing attention to yourself! "Nah, nobody'll think anything's up. Spray painting over your registration in the middle of the High Street happens every day." And of course what every bank-robber most wants is a get-away car that's really distinctive and stands out from every other car on the road... say with a painted-out registration plate.