There are like 5 clearly labeled checkboxes in the chrome options which turn off all of the "enhanced" features which report to google.
I'm not convinced they are "clearly labelled" at all. For starters, they are under a tab that is named specifically in a way that will deter most users from opening it with the suggestion that unless they are technicians they won't understand the options and could stop the browser from functioning properly if they fiddle with it: "Under the Hood".
It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Oh, come come -- this is a story about how many of us scientists don't just believe in invisible tea-sets in space (Russell's accusation of religion), we believe there's more invisible tea-sets (dark matter) than visible matter! And bet millions of dollars of research funding on that belief. While the chap who's saying "maybe there's no dark matter" is fighting an uphill battle. Trying to knock religion isn't going to do anyone many favours in this thread.
Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.
An utterly misleading analogy -- to make it more realistic you'd need a large number of sailors to be simultaneously on both boats and (same study) only a small minority of the US Navy ship's crew to be actively hostile to the Japanese ship.
That's not really the issue here. The issue fundamentally isn't whether or not these lying quacks cure anybody or not, but rather whether real scientists are free to judge them by the scientific method.
According to the summary, no it isn't. He's suing three blogs. He would find it very difficult indeed to sue a scientific publication for libel as science papers generally contain within them the evidence that supports their claims. It's important to remember that science is not "everything a scientist does" -- science is a specific set of practices. That I personally am a scientist does not make my shopping science. That I am a scientist does not of itself make my blogging science. (Even if I post the conclusion of one of my published papers on my blog, the blog post is not science, it is marketing -- the blog post does not contain all the information for reproducing the experiment and is not subject to peer review.) I'm not saying this out of any support for Burzynski -- frankly, I've never heard of him and I sincerely hope he loses the lawsuit -- or alternative medicine, but I've noticed there is a worrying trend on slashdot and other venues to believe that anything a scientist says must be science. The worst example, sadly, is The Infinite Monkey Cage -- where scientists come on a radio show and talk almost exclusively about things they have not conducted experiments on. When Paul Nurse says "It actually is about passion" of what causes some people to be climate skeptics (no I'm not one), it is not science -- he has not conducted any experiments into the psychological reasoning of climate change deniers, and he's not presenting any experimental data on the reasons why they deny climate change, he's just spouting off an opinion but using the word "actually" and the fact that he's a scientist to make the public believe that must psychologically be the cause. The whole bloomin' show consists of opinionation like that. And this is doing an appalling disservice by making it appear that science is "holding a particular set of opinions", rather than "performing a particular a set of practices". Rant over, move along.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
In real terms, the average US male wage is slightly lower than it was in 1968. (The female wage has risen, but largely as a result of women taking on different roles than they used to.) But the unemployment rate has more than doubled. It's a worrying trend, and more worrying is the single-minded rhetoric that's still around in some quarters that the solution is low taxes -- the top marginal rate of tax is half what it was in 1968 but nonetheless unemployment has risen and average male income has fallen.
A common misconception related to piracy, foss, etc (anything where you are not paying) is that not paying = reducing the number of jobs. In reality, money doesn't just disappear, but rather it is spent elsewhere.
Technically, that's not true. Money can very easily sit it wallets and bank accounts being economically rather inactive (especially as banks' willingness to lend is low at the mo). It doesn't disappear, but a $5 note that sits under a mattress forever is economically equivalent to it having disappeared. Economically, you might hope that in that case the saved money goes to paying down debt, again but that depends on the demographics of the customer base -- are the people saving the money the same people who are indebted? To use a very crude and very hypothetical analogy, if it turns out the "1%" are saving all the money by being able to use free software, but not then putting it to economic use, and the heavily in debt and jobless "99%" are losing all the money by not being able to sell their product, it could be very bad for the economy. Hopefully it's not the case, though it is known for instance that technology companies employ far fewer people than manufacturing companies of equivalent revenue -- so a rise in the technology sector struggles to completely compensate for a decline in the manufacturing sector.
I asked a series of sincere questions of you, attempting to gain some information or understanding from you, and you answered exactly none of them.
For example, I still honestly have absolutely no idea whether you do or do not believe Pharaoh had actual sorcerers who could (and did) magically turn sticks into snakes.
As you're not interested in understanding what I said to you, but just on dogmatically insisting on answers to what I consider irrelevant questions -- "Does a person you don't know believe something that's irrelevant to what they said" -- I'll leave the conversation there. I have not read the remainder of your post.
The bible is a collection of forty books with ages that vary by a few thousand years
Pardon me, poor editing of a sentence. Had said that the Old Testament is a collection of about 40 books. With the New Testament (when I changed the sentence to read "The bible is...", it's more than sixty.
I honestly don't understand. Can you help me, pointing out where my assumptions are incorrect or where you think I'm being unreasonable? To explain my confusion I need start with a silly illustration... please bear with me through it, and just point out where my assumptions are wrong in the first part or where I'm being unreasonable in the second part.
Your entire analogy is wrong in the first part, and consequently the second part was abject nonsense. The bible is a collection of forty books with ages that vary by a few thousand years. If your model of understanding it is limited to "treat it like a single book using modern English idioms written over a short space of time within the last century or so", you're stuffed before you've started. Actually I'd hazard a guess you are aware of this, and are simply karma-whoring. You surely must be aware, for instance, that the Psalms are very different in form, language, and style from Genesis, which is in turn very different in form, language and style from the epistles, which are very different in form language and style from (insert book here). So it seems to me your attempts to draw poor conclusions are probably malicious rather than ignorant.
However I find it odd that you are complaining about him calling the bible fiction, and somehow your argument against him is to point out that many Christians accept that it's fictional.
You have a misconception in your head that "fictionality" is merely the opposite of "historicity". (Or more accurately, you are temporarily pretending to believe that "fictionality" is merely the opposite of "historicity" because you've been challenged on it, in order to then re-attach all the other meanings and connotations of the word later.)
In fact the majority of Christians accept evolution, effectively acknowledging the entirety of Genesis is fiction.
Ah, the misconception that people must only consider that choice to be binary and mutually exclusive. That's not what empirical research shows about people's beliefs in the matter.
And when you know a global flood and walking talking snakes are fictional, I'm baffled why anyone would anyone believe it wasn't fictional for Jesus to be the son of a God and rose from the dead?
And the misconception that the Bible is a single book that must adopt the same mode of communication throughout.
Actually that's not how belief works. Unless someone is brainwashed as a kid, you have to provide evidence that something is real for them to believe any of it and not expect them to try and disprove it.
Was it an intentional irony that your post provides no evidence for what you're saying?
Forceibly inpregnanting a child is one of the lesser of God's crimes according to the bible. How about several murders, numerous genocides - both direct and ordered - the creation of a realm of eternal torture... God is a nasty piece of work.
Even those ten plagues are more evil than they seem. God manipulated Pharoh into refusing his instructions purely in order to give himself an excuse to let loose the plagues upon the rest of Pharohs country - and even goes so far as to admit to Moses that he didn't *need* to kill a substantial portion of the population of Egypt, but did so simply to ensure the people of Israel would never forget their debt to him.
Your argument is that God plays God, and someone modded that as insightful?
The only reason why Linux don't have viruses "in the wild" is because it is extremely difficult to write viruses for Linux that can be run or installed without user interaction.
What a bizarre comment. There's plenty of Linux malware in the wild. A great number of the compromised websites run Linux, and there are botnets scanning your server hourly to install some via a known hole in WordPress or some other common application. You might not feel the pain -- they then use this installed malware to compromise a passing Windows machine -- but that is entirely because the malware writers see the passing Windows machine with its personal information etc as a more valuable pool of data than the crappy blog on garden gnomes that the Linux server is running.
I disagree. That's not what you said at all. Perhaps it's what you meant, but it's not what you said.
It captured the factual dilemma that Page referred to just fine - that they have to play the patent game or Android will keep getting hit by MS and Apple in court. It does not attempt to capture your somewhat rose-tinted view of what that means -- from your post, you seem to believe that having to play the patent game is the same as not playing the patent game. Let's point out the difference this way -
Plainly, Google's purchase of Motorola promotes the value of patents as being several hundred thousand dollars a pop. That tangibly builds up, rather than tearing down, the edifice of patents. Increase demand, and patents are valued higher not lower. You argue that surely Google would only use them defensively -- but that is a false argument because a patent is a barrier to any other company or individual even prior to a lawsuit being entered. For all Mom-And-Pop Inc know, Page or a successor of his might use them to sue them into bankruptcy next week. If Google wanted to step out boldly against patents they could -- for instance they could use their 17,000 strong patent arsenal they have acquired as a kind of pro-bono version of Intellectual Ventures -- make them available free for any entity that is sued for patent infringement to use in a countersuit. Paul Graham's patent pledge is also readily available waiting for Google to put its name to it.
Answers.com did NOT make Facebook the only way to log in. They are eliminating support for three centralized login services, which should make you happy. They probably kept Facebook because too many people would have complained. However, the only thing you need to maintain an account on Answers.com is an e-mail address, which should also make you happy.
I can suggest a very simple strategic reason for this change. If you look on their front page, the questions and answers tend not to be businessy. So they don't want your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google graph. They'd much rather you OAuth-orise them to access your personal social graph instead. This change corrals those users who are willing to use a social network log-in into using their Facebook one.
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page. It's a genuine tragedy of the commons -- many of the same people who think patents are bad news are also having to go out and register or acquire them at ever increasing rates so they are armed with them. And the first person to lay down their patents and walk away would be the big loser (as Android nearly found out with its previous strategy of not having many patents, and wound up on the wrong end of so many patent lawsuits).
Google has so much contradiction in what it wants for itself and what it does with other websites
For them it already is theirs. As long as nobody clearly states that it isn't their data, they will treat it as theirs. And nobody is saying that the personal data belongs to the person, so companies can keep confusing you and telling that as soon as it is somehow online, it is not yours anymore.
Are you suggesting Google is a toddler?. They're supposed to be 13 years old now. Someone send them a note to grow up and start grunting and concentrating on their music like any other teenager!
Actually, the ACM recently refused to publish an author because he posted it on ArXiv.
This was a copyright assignment issue, but it directly impacts the strategy you suggest. As an academic myself, the copyright assignment issue is as big an issue as open access. For example, ACM does not allow me to let others use any figures I publish with the ACM. Sorry, Wikipedia, I may have the perfect figure to illustrate one of your articles, but the ACM won't let me give it to you.
I'm not even allowed to use my own figures for my own uses unless I put an ACM copyright notice on every copy of the figure and every slide with such a figure. This is not consistent with academic practice and custom (almost all presentations at ACM conferences violate this rule).
This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of science by scientists. They should be the ones pushing open access, not having to have it pushed upon them.
And I should point out (since the GP doesn't know about referers, he probably needs more than a one word answer) that the Referer is a field in your HTTP request that's automatically sent by your browser telling it the address of the website that you came from. Since Google (and other search engines) put the query string in the URL of the search results page (like they should), the website can read the results out of the URL and know what your search terms were.
Google didn't invent this as a way to invade your privacy -- it's been a feature of the web since the early days.
It's also what was behind the "Bing copies Google" ridiculousness some time ago. For Bing toolbar users, the HTTP request when you visit any site is also sent to Microsoft (if you have "suggested sites" turned on), so they get the traffic stats. Bing also used the Referer that brought a user to a page as one of its minor indexing terms. By clicking a link on a page, the user has indicated they think the link is relevant to what they are looking for -- so the Referer, and especially any query contained within it, is pretty good information. And it's the user's information -- the user both typed the search query, and chose to click the link. Google's experiment spammed the signal by ordering employees to visit a page for a made-up search query (non-existent words) so that those paid click-throughs would be the only information Bing could receive for those made-up words. The words didn't exist, so Bing couldn't index them off the web -- so it doesn't matter what algorithms Bing uses, that forced the paid click-throughs to be the only results because there was no other source of data in the world for those words. Google then spun it that it was Google's information that Bing was using (Google own their generated results page, most of which was not clicked on and did not appear in Bing) rather than the human user's information (what sites the user chooses to visit). The difference being that if it's the human user's information (if your clicks belong to you not Google), then the human user within his rights to give that information to whomever he likes, including Microsoft, and Microsoft are within their rights to use it as an index signal, albeit according to them it was a very minor one.
There is a current relevance to this history. That Referer information from the user's browser is valuable data. By making this change, Google is ensuring that they get this valuable data and other's don't. They get to see the full details of both where you came from and where you went; others only get the full details of where you went, and no longer get full details on where you came from. That's a straightforward business advantage. They can then sell more detailed stats to companies (in a freemium model), sell tools that let you access the Referer information that users used to give you for free, etc. While there's a privacy angle to this story (your data is now sent to fewer places), there's also money in this decision.
It has nothing to do with utilitarianism to demand that before you make a decision you must know what it is, that you are making decisions about. Period.
Already this is a vastly different claim from "people who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so" (your earlier quote). But nonetheless your revised claim is clearly faulty. Every day, every single person on this planet makes moral judgments -- they have no choice about it, as they fill in their expenses claim they do have to make that decision about whether to fiddle them or not -- regardless of their level of expertise in macroeconomics as to the compound effects of expenses fraud on business and the economy. Whether or not to donate money to the charity collector they just passed on the street -- regardless of their level of expertise in sociology and evidence-based community development. There simply is no delegating moral judgments to just those of us who are scientists, as the vast majority of moral judgments are made by individuals in the actions they take.
You cannot use 100 year old moral judgments on kidney or heart transplantations, simply because 100 years ago this was not possible and all such judgments were made by people whose decisions were not based on our reality today, but on the fact that giving a living person the heart or kidney of a dead person in order to save that persons life was literally unthinkable. There was nothing to be done with a dead body other than burn or bury it.
Factually incorrect. For instance, in the Victorian era, dissections of cadavers was one of the well-known avenues of research that was an issue for moral debate (consent not being obtained, use in public spectacle, etc). But anyway, I suggest you improve your reading skills and notice the word "healthy" (rather emphatically not "dead") in the post you replied to. But if you do want to try to make the argument that morally we should kidnap you, murder you, chop you up, and harvest your body parts to save a number of other lives and make them happier (utilitarianism, eudaemonianism, etc) -- well, by all means try to make the case. Jonathan Swift was always entertaining reading after all... I can't imagine anyone taking it seriously though.
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so.... Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
You are stuck in a very narrow utilitarian preconception of morality, which is not how most people consider morality.
That we do not chop up one healthy person to harvest their organs to save five critically ill people is not based on a utilitarian cause-and-effect chain; it is based on the moral judgment your healthy body is not ours to chop. That I do not cheat on my wife is not dependent on a utilitarian cause-and-effect chain (the likelihood of getting away with it and whatever benefits I might persuade myself it would bring, weighed against the likelihood and harm of being discovered...) It is directly because I place a high value on the fact that I have made a commitment not to do so. Those are philosophically-grounded moral judgements, not calculations of cause and effect.
I mean, just think about it. If all your decisions are based on solely personally calculating "Do I think this is likely to benefit me", regardless of all other questions, nobody would call you moral. It's no different for society -- utilitarianism (society simply calculating "Do we think the effect of this would be of net benefit to us") is effectively communal amorality, not morality.
Rather than relying on any particular dictionary definition, I would prefer to rely on a question posed by another of my favourite authors, williamhb, "Do you think there's a God," a negative answer to which satisfies the minimum requirement to get you across the atheist threshold.
However as the English language does not correspond directly to predicate logic, you'd also find your "no" to be interpreted as "I think there's no God", not "I'm not willing to make the affirmative statement that there is a God, and instead say nothing". The answer that would communicate that you have no belief either way would be "I don't know".
Most people would call Dawkins and the new breed of "atheists" as 'atheist' and not as 'agnostic.'
And that would be because they infer (from the fervour with which Dawkins campaigns against theism) that he actually believes that God does not exist, and is not expressing a neutral "no belief either way" position.
Or is this some feeble attempt to shift the onus of proof. Is not collecting stamps really a hobby?
Oh goodness, you're not really buying into that tired old piece of rhetoric are you? If you publish books on not-stamp-collecting, travel the world speaking about not-stamp-collecting, advertise not-stamp-collecting on buses, organise societies like the Brights for not-stamp-collectors, where they can meet together to discuss their not-stamp-collecting, print t-shirts for not-stamp-collecting, and regularly go on television to advocate the benefits of not-stamp-collecting, and make your career being the world's most famous not-stamp-collector, then yes it is a hobby! It's a particularly sad hobby, being that it's exclusively about griping and whinging about stamp-collectors, but you'd clearly have made it your hobby.
The only dictionary that counts;) defines 'atheist' as "[o]ne who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God..."
In which you will notice the key word denies appears first, and its definition of "disbelieve" (unless it has changed in newer editions) is "to hold not to be true or real" (rather than "not to hold to be true or real"). Doesn't appear to help your cause any, that one! You might prefer Webster that separates them distinctly as two meanings. But even proponents of your own preferred view, such as Flew and Edwards, had to start "Whereas nowadays the usual meaning of "atheist" in English is "someone who asserts there is no such being as God," I want the word to be understood not positively but negatively". They first recognised their intended meaning is not the usual one. I've not made an especially controversial a claim -- that much of society generally takes the meaning of "atheism" to be "believing there is no God". Indeed you yourself have been complaining just how often you keep having to "correct" people's understanding of the word. Take the hint from your own empirical experience: the word usually does not communicate what you think it communicates. I don't honestly see what you think you have to gain by fighting the tide on this one. Just pick a different word that actually does communicate what you intend and have done with it! From what you've said "agnostic" both in common usage and in what Huxley originally intended (which is a bit more limited) actually seems to fit what you say you intended to communicate rather well.
The last is particularly interesting as it gives the technical definition before the colloquial one you quote?!
Frankly, I think this claim to "the technical definition" is utter tosh. A feeble claim that language is subordinate to jargon, and worse to jargon that itself is ill-defined (Wittgenstein family resemblence). Somehow you feel it's appropriate to constrain language to your jargon words but not to mine; whereas I think neither is appropriate. As you quote one of your favourite authors (yourself): "It would be a mistake to allow that jargonistic use to colour your everyday use of the word"
It's fairly clear, isn't it, that it is you who wants the words to mean something other than they do. As to your motivation, I can but guess.
Ho hum. You'd better check under the beds again to see if there are any reds there since last time you looked.
You are not in the vegetable aisle. The popular misconceptions of 8 year olds and unaccomplished adults...
Are you kidding? "The popular misconceptions of 8 year olds and unaccomplished adults" could practically be Slashdot's slogan.
The fallacy of equating the non-acceptance of a proposition with the acceptance of the negation of that proposition is the crucial point in this whole discussion.
No, it's just ridiculous bickering about what the word atheism means. You'd like it to mean "not being affirmatively convinced of God's existence", but society (and most dictionaries) put is as "the theory or belief that God does not exist" (quietly cutting and pasting what the Mac dictionary widget gives as being an exemplar of common usage). And, as I noted three posts ago, the first definition is very much broader than the second.
Which is an extreme example of jargonisation...
Which is why my response was "I'm probably the wrong person to ask", if you'll recall.
Additionally if you are an atheist who has an evidence based epistemology you will lack the belief that "god(s) don't exist" (on the presumption that positive evidence for that proposition is hard to come by.)
In which case you're probably better off putting up with the fact that society commonly attaches the word "agnostic" to that meaning ("a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God", pasting the Mac widget again) rather than trying to fight the rest of the English-speaking world to change their dictionaries.
Slashdot Mirror
There are like 5 clearly labeled checkboxes in the chrome options which turn off all of the "enhanced" features which report to google.
I'm not convinced they are "clearly labelled" at all. For starters, they are under a tab that is named specifically in a way that will deter most users from opening it with the suggestion that unless they are technicians they won't understand the options and could stop the browser from functioning properly if they fiddle with it: "Under the Hood".
It wasn't a shot at religion, it was a shot at religious fanaticism. There's a difference, and pretending otherwise is disingenuous at best.
Oh, come come -- this is a story about how many of us scientists don't just believe in invisible tea-sets in space (Russell's accusation of religion), we believe there's more invisible tea-sets (dark matter) than visible matter! And bet millions of dollars of research funding on that belief. While the chap who's saying "maybe there's no dark matter" is fighting an uphill battle. Trying to knock religion isn't going to do anyone many favours in this thread.
Hostilities were opened a long time ago. Your objection makes as much sense as saying to the captain of a US Navy ship, "I agree that if that Japanese ship over there shoots at us, we should blow them out of the water, but can we just hold off the hostilities until in happens?" in 1943.
An utterly misleading analogy -- to make it more realistic you'd need a large number of sailors to be simultaneously on both boats and (same study) only a small minority of the US Navy ship's crew to be actively hostile to the Japanese ship.
That's not really the issue here. The issue fundamentally isn't whether or not these lying quacks cure anybody or not, but rather whether real scientists are free to judge them by the scientific method.
According to the summary, no it isn't. He's suing three blogs. He would find it very difficult indeed to sue a scientific publication for libel as science papers generally contain within them the evidence that supports their claims. It's important to remember that science is not "everything a scientist does" -- science is a specific set of practices. That I personally am a scientist does not make my shopping science. That I am a scientist does not of itself make my blogging science. (Even if I post the conclusion of one of my published papers on my blog, the blog post is not science, it is marketing -- the blog post does not contain all the information for reproducing the experiment and is not subject to peer review.) I'm not saying this out of any support for Burzynski -- frankly, I've never heard of him and I sincerely hope he loses the lawsuit -- or alternative medicine, but I've noticed there is a worrying trend on slashdot and other venues to believe that anything a scientist says must be science. The worst example, sadly, is The Infinite Monkey Cage -- where scientists come on a radio show and talk almost exclusively about things they have not conducted experiments on. When Paul Nurse says "It actually is about passion" of what causes some people to be climate skeptics (no I'm not one), it is not science -- he has not conducted any experiments into the psychological reasoning of climate change deniers, and he's not presenting any experimental data on the reasons why they deny climate change, he's just spouting off an opinion but using the word "actually" and the fact that he's a scientist to make the public believe that must psychologically be the cause. The whole bloomin' show consists of opinionation like that. And this is doing an appalling disservice by making it appear that science is "holding a particular set of opinions", rather than "performing a particular a set of practices". Rant over, move along.
It is funny how pretty much your EXACT argument was made some 100+ years ago. Today, in the industrialized world, we have a higher standard of living, on average, than the richest kings did 500, or even 200, years ago.
In real terms, the average US male wage is slightly lower than it was in 1968. (The female wage has risen, but largely as a result of women taking on different roles than they used to.) But the unemployment rate has more than doubled. It's a worrying trend, and more worrying is the single-minded rhetoric that's still around in some quarters that the solution is low taxes -- the top marginal rate of tax is half what it was in 1968 but nonetheless unemployment has risen and average male income has fallen.
A common misconception related to piracy, foss, etc (anything where you are not paying) is that not paying = reducing the number of jobs. In reality, money doesn't just disappear, but rather it is spent elsewhere.
Technically, that's not true. Money can very easily sit it wallets and bank accounts being economically rather inactive (especially as banks' willingness to lend is low at the mo). It doesn't disappear, but a $5 note that sits under a mattress forever is economically equivalent to it having disappeared. Economically, you might hope that in that case the saved money goes to paying down debt, again but that depends on the demographics of the customer base -- are the people saving the money the same people who are indebted? To use a very crude and very hypothetical analogy, if it turns out the "1%" are saving all the money by being able to use free software, but not then putting it to economic use, and the heavily in debt and jobless "99%" are losing all the money by not being able to sell their product, it could be very bad for the economy. Hopefully it's not the case, though it is known for instance that technology companies employ far fewer people than manufacturing companies of equivalent revenue -- so a rise in the technology sector struggles to completely compensate for a decline in the manufacturing sector.
I asked a series of sincere questions of you, attempting to gain some information or understanding from you, and you answered exactly none of them.
For example, I still honestly have absolutely no idea whether you do or do not believe Pharaoh had actual sorcerers who could (and did) magically turn sticks into snakes.
As you're not interested in understanding what I said to you, but just on dogmatically insisting on answers to what I consider irrelevant questions -- "Does a person you don't know believe something that's irrelevant to what they said" -- I'll leave the conversation there. I have not read the remainder of your post.
The bible is a collection of forty books with ages that vary by a few thousand years
Pardon me, poor editing of a sentence. Had said that the Old Testament is a collection of about 40 books. With the New Testament (when I changed the sentence to read "The bible is...", it's more than sixty.
I honestly don't understand. Can you help me, pointing out where my assumptions are incorrect or where you think I'm being unreasonable? To explain my confusion I need start with a silly illustration... please bear with me through it, and just point out where my assumptions are wrong in the first part or where I'm being unreasonable in the second part.
Your entire analogy is wrong in the first part, and consequently the second part was abject nonsense. The bible is a collection of forty books with ages that vary by a few thousand years. If your model of understanding it is limited to "treat it like a single book using modern English idioms written over a short space of time within the last century or so", you're stuffed before you've started. Actually I'd hazard a guess you are aware of this, and are simply karma-whoring. You surely must be aware, for instance, that the Psalms are very different in form, language, and style from Genesis, which is in turn very different in form, language and style from the epistles, which are very different in form language and style from (insert book here). So it seems to me your attempts to draw poor conclusions are probably malicious rather than ignorant.
However I find it odd that you are complaining about him calling the bible fiction, and somehow your argument against him is to point out that many Christians accept that it's fictional.
You have a misconception in your head that "fictionality" is merely the opposite of "historicity". (Or more accurately, you are temporarily pretending to believe that "fictionality" is merely the opposite of "historicity" because you've been challenged on it, in order to then re-attach all the other meanings and connotations of the word later.)
In fact the majority of Christians accept evolution, effectively acknowledging the entirety of Genesis is fiction.
Ah, the misconception that people must only consider that choice to be binary and mutually exclusive. That's not what empirical research shows about people's beliefs in the matter.
And when you know a global flood and walking talking snakes are fictional, I'm baffled why anyone would anyone believe it wasn't fictional for Jesus to be the son of a God and rose from the dead?
And the misconception that the Bible is a single book that must adopt the same mode of communication throughout.
Actually that's not how belief works. Unless someone is brainwashed as a kid, you have to provide evidence that something is real for them to believe any of it and not expect them to try and disprove it.
Was it an intentional irony that your post provides no evidence for what you're saying?
Forceibly inpregnanting a child is one of the lesser of God's crimes according to the bible. How about several murders, numerous genocides - both direct and ordered - the creation of a realm of eternal torture... God is a nasty piece of work.
Even those ten plagues are more evil than they seem. God manipulated Pharoh into refusing his instructions purely in order to give himself an excuse to let loose the plagues upon the rest of Pharohs country - and even goes so far as to admit to Moses that he didn't *need* to kill a substantial portion of the population of Egypt, but did so simply to ensure the people of Israel would never forget their debt to him.
Your argument is that God plays God, and someone modded that as insightful?
The only reason why Linux don't have viruses "in the wild" is because it is extremely difficult to write viruses for Linux that can be run or installed without user interaction.
What a bizarre comment. There's plenty of Linux malware in the wild. A great number of the compromised websites run Linux, and there are botnets scanning your server hourly to install some via a known hole in WordPress or some other common application. You might not feel the pain -- they then use this installed malware to compromise a passing Windows machine -- but that is entirely because the malware writers see the passing Windows machine with its personal information etc as a more valuable pool of data than the crappy blog on garden gnomes that the Linux server is running.
In Linux you have a "default walled garden" that is your distribution and related repositories...
...and whatever a passing botnet installs via the latest hole in WordPress...
I disagree. That's not what you said at all. Perhaps it's what you meant, but it's not what you said.
It captured the factual dilemma that Page referred to just fine - that they have to play the patent game or Android will keep getting hit by MS and Apple in court. It does not attempt to capture your somewhat rose-tinted view of what that means -- from your post, you seem to believe that having to play the patent game is the same as not playing the patent game. Let's point out the difference this way -
Plainly, Google's purchase of Motorola promotes the value of patents as being several hundred thousand dollars a pop. That tangibly builds up, rather than tearing down, the edifice of patents. Increase demand, and patents are valued higher not lower. You argue that surely Google would only use them defensively -- but that is a false argument because a patent is a barrier to any other company or individual even prior to a lawsuit being entered. For all Mom-And-Pop Inc know, Page or a successor of his might use them to sue them into bankruptcy next week. If Google wanted to step out boldly against patents they could -- for instance they could use their 17,000 strong patent arsenal they have acquired as a kind of pro-bono version of Intellectual Ventures -- make them available free for any entity that is sued for patent infringement to use in a countersuit. Paul Graham's patent pledge is also readily available waiting for Google to put its name to it.
Answers.com did NOT make Facebook the only way to log in. They are eliminating support for three centralized login services, which should make you happy. They probably kept Facebook because too many people would have complained. However, the only thing you need to maintain an account on Answers.com is an e-mail address, which should also make you happy.
I can suggest a very simple strategic reason for this change. If you look on their front page, the questions and answers tend not to be businessy. So they don't want your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google graph. They'd much rather you OAuth-orise them to access your personal social graph instead. This change corrals those users who are willing to use a social network log-in into using their Facebook one.
Tim Porter may be a nice guy and all, but if it was Google with all those so-called bogus/lax patents he'd be up there talking about how the patent system is fine and the problem really is more that the enforcement process depends on endless litigation and how the determination of infringement needs to be more streamlined.
He's a lawyer, his job is to be an advocate/mouthpiece for his employer's interests.
They (and most companies) play both sides of the fence. At the same time as saying how bad patents are for impinging on their products, they are buying as many companies with far-reaching patents as they can get their hands on -- "Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio", Larry Page. It's a genuine tragedy of the commons -- many of the same people who think patents are bad news are also having to go out and register or acquire them at ever increasing rates so they are armed with them. And the first person to lay down their patents and walk away would be the big loser (as Android nearly found out with its previous strategy of not having many patents, and wound up on the wrong end of so many patent lawsuits).
For them it already is theirs.
As long as nobody clearly states that it isn't their data, they will treat it as theirs. And nobody is saying that the personal data belongs to the person, so companies can keep confusing you and telling that as soon as it is somehow online, it is not yours anymore.
Are you suggesting Google is a toddler?. They're supposed to be 13 years old now. Someone send them a note to grow up and start grunting and concentrating on their music like any other teenager!
Actually, the ACM recently refused to publish an author because he posted it on ArXiv.
This was a copyright assignment issue, but it directly impacts the strategy you suggest. As an academic myself, the copyright assignment issue is as big an issue as open access. For example, ACM does not allow me to let others use any figures I publish with the ACM. Sorry, Wikipedia, I may have the perfect figure to illustrate one of your articles, but the ACM won't let me give it to you.
I'm not even allowed to use my own figures for my own uses unless I put an ACM copyright notice on every copy of the figure and every slide with such a figure. This is not consistent with academic practice and custom (almost all presentations at ACM conferences violate this rule).
This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of science by scientists. They should be the ones pushing open access, not having to have it pushed upon them.
And I should point out (since the GP doesn't know about referers, he probably needs more than a one word answer) that the Referer is a field in your HTTP request that's automatically sent by your browser telling it the address of the website that you came from. Since Google (and other search engines) put the query string in the URL of the search results page (like they should), the website can read the results out of the URL and know what your search terms were.
Google didn't invent this as a way to invade your privacy -- it's been a feature of the web since the early days.
It's also what was behind the "Bing copies Google" ridiculousness some time ago. For Bing toolbar users, the HTTP request when you visit any site is also sent to Microsoft (if you have "suggested sites" turned on), so they get the traffic stats. Bing also used the Referer that brought a user to a page as one of its minor indexing terms. By clicking a link on a page, the user has indicated they think the link is relevant to what they are looking for -- so the Referer, and especially any query contained within it, is pretty good information. And it's the user's information -- the user both typed the search query, and chose to click the link. Google's experiment spammed the signal by ordering employees to visit a page for a made-up search query (non-existent words) so that those paid click-throughs would be the only information Bing could receive for those made-up words. The words didn't exist, so Bing couldn't index them off the web -- so it doesn't matter what algorithms Bing uses, that forced the paid click-throughs to be the only results because there was no other source of data in the world for those words. Google then spun it that it was Google's information that Bing was using (Google own their generated results page, most of which was not clicked on and did not appear in Bing) rather than the human user's information (what sites the user chooses to visit). The difference being that if it's the human user's information (if your clicks belong to you not Google), then the human user within his rights to give that information to whomever he likes, including Microsoft, and Microsoft are within their rights to use it as an index signal, albeit according to them it was a very minor one.
There is a current relevance to this history. That Referer information from the user's browser is valuable data. By making this change, Google is ensuring that they get this valuable data and other's don't. They get to see the full details of both where you came from and where you went; others only get the full details of where you went, and no longer get full details on where you came from. That's a straightforward business advantage. They can then sell more detailed stats to companies (in a freemium model), sell tools that let you access the Referer information that users used to give you for free, etc. While there's a privacy angle to this story (your data is now sent to fewer places), there's also money in this decision.
It has nothing to do with utilitarianism to demand that before you make a decision you must know what it is, that you are making decisions about. Period.
Already this is a vastly different claim from "people who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so" (your earlier quote). But nonetheless your revised claim is clearly faulty. Every day, every single person on this planet makes moral judgments -- they have no choice about it, as they fill in their expenses claim they do have to make that decision about whether to fiddle them or not -- regardless of their level of expertise in macroeconomics as to the compound effects of expenses fraud on business and the economy. Whether or not to donate money to the charity collector they just passed on the street -- regardless of their level of expertise in sociology and evidence-based community development. There simply is no delegating moral judgments to just those of us who are scientists, as the vast majority of moral judgments are made by individuals in the actions they take.
You cannot use 100 year old moral judgments on kidney or heart transplantations, simply because 100 years ago this was not possible and all such judgments were made by people whose decisions were not based on our reality today, but on the fact that giving a living person the heart or kidney of a dead person in order to save that persons life was literally unthinkable. There was nothing to be done with a dead body other than burn or bury it.
Factually incorrect. For instance, in the Victorian era, dissections of cadavers was one of the well-known avenues of research that was an issue for moral debate (consent not being obtained, use in public spectacle, etc). But anyway, I suggest you improve your reading skills and notice the word "healthy" (rather emphatically not "dead") in the post you replied to. But if you do want to try to make the argument that morally we should kidnap you, murder you, chop you up, and harvest your body parts to save a number of other lives and make them happier (utilitarianism, eudaemonianism, etc) -- well, by all means try to make the case. Jonathan Swift was always entertaining reading after all... I can't imagine anyone taking it seriously though.
In order to make any moral decision at all, you need to know the consequences of those decisions. People who don't know science or are not properly informed about the results of scientific studies, cannot make reliable moral judgments and should refrain from doing so. ...
Moral judgment is entirely derivative of our knowledge of the world, of the cause and effect relationships involved.
You are stuck in a very narrow utilitarian preconception of morality, which is not how most people consider morality.
That we do not chop up one healthy person to harvest their organs to save five critically ill people is not based on a utilitarian cause-and-effect chain; it is based on the moral judgment your healthy body is not ours to chop. That I do not cheat on my wife is not dependent on a utilitarian cause-and-effect chain (the likelihood of getting away with it and whatever benefits I might persuade myself it would bring, weighed against the likelihood and harm of being discovered...) It is directly because I place a high value on the fact that I have made a commitment not to do so. Those are philosophically-grounded moral judgements, not calculations of cause and effect.
I mean, just think about it. If all your decisions are based on solely personally calculating "Do I think this is likely to benefit me", regardless of all other questions, nobody would call you moral. It's no different for society -- utilitarianism (society simply calculating "Do we think the effect of this would be of net benefit to us") is effectively communal amorality, not morality.
Rather than relying on any particular dictionary definition, I would prefer to rely on a question posed by another of my favourite authors, williamhb, "Do you think there's a God," a negative answer to which satisfies the minimum requirement to get you across the atheist threshold.
However as the English language does not correspond directly to predicate logic, you'd also find your "no" to be interpreted as "I think there's no God", not "I'm not willing to make the affirmative statement that there is a God, and instead say nothing". The answer that would communicate that you have no belief either way would be "I don't know".
Most people would call Dawkins and the new breed of "atheists" as 'atheist' and not as 'agnostic.'
And that would be because they infer (from the fervour with which Dawkins campaigns against theism) that he actually believes that God does not exist, and is not expressing a neutral "no belief either way" position.
Or is this some feeble attempt to shift the onus of proof. Is not collecting stamps really a hobby?
Oh goodness, you're not really buying into that tired old piece of rhetoric are you? If you publish books on not-stamp-collecting, travel the world speaking about not-stamp-collecting, advertise not-stamp-collecting on buses, organise societies like the Brights for not-stamp-collectors, where they can meet together to discuss their not-stamp-collecting, print t-shirts for not-stamp-collecting, and regularly go on television to advocate the benefits of not-stamp-collecting, and make your career being the world's most famous not-stamp-collector, then yes it is a hobby! It's a particularly sad hobby, being that it's exclusively about griping and whinging about stamp-collectors, but you'd clearly have made it your hobby.
(Pardon the editing error -- "As you quote..." should read "And to quote...")
The only dictionary that counts ;) defines 'atheist' as "[o]ne who denies or disbelieves the existence of a God ..."
In which you will notice the key word denies appears first, and its definition of "disbelieve" (unless it has changed in newer editions) is "to hold not to be true or real" (rather than "not to hold to be true or real"). Doesn't appear to help your cause any, that one! You might prefer Webster that separates them distinctly as two meanings. But even proponents of your own preferred view, such as Flew and Edwards, had to start "Whereas nowadays the usual meaning of "atheist" in English is "someone who asserts there is no such being as God," I want the word to be understood not positively but negatively". They first recognised their intended meaning is not the usual one. I've not made an especially controversial a claim -- that much of society generally takes the meaning of "atheism" to be "believing there is no God". Indeed you yourself have been complaining just how often you keep having to "correct" people's understanding of the word. Take the hint from your own empirical experience: the word usually does not communicate what you think it communicates. I don't honestly see what you think you have to gain by fighting the tide on this one. Just pick a different word that actually does communicate what you intend and have done with it! From what you've said "agnostic" both in common usage and in what Huxley originally intended (which is a bit more limited) actually seems to fit what you say you intended to communicate rather well.
The last is particularly interesting as it gives the technical definition before the colloquial one you quote?!
Frankly, I think this claim to "the technical definition" is utter tosh. A feeble claim that language is subordinate to jargon, and worse to jargon that itself is ill-defined (Wittgenstein family resemblence). Somehow you feel it's appropriate to constrain language to your jargon words but not to mine; whereas I think neither is appropriate. As you quote one of your favourite authors (yourself): "It would be a mistake to allow that jargonistic use to colour your everyday use of the word"
It's fairly clear, isn't it, that it is you who wants the words to mean something other than they do. As to your motivation, I can but guess.
Ho hum. You'd better check under the beds again to see if there are any reds there since last time you looked.
You are not in the vegetable aisle. The popular misconceptions of
8 year olds and unaccomplished adults...
Are you kidding? "The popular misconceptions of 8 year olds and unaccomplished adults" could practically be Slashdot's slogan.
The fallacy of equating the non-acceptance of a proposition with the acceptance of the negation of that proposition is the crucial point in this whole discussion.
No, it's just ridiculous bickering about what the word atheism means. You'd like it to mean "not being affirmatively convinced of God's existence", but society (and most dictionaries) put is as "the theory or belief that God does not exist" (quietly cutting and pasting what the Mac dictionary widget gives as being an exemplar of common usage). And, as I noted three posts ago, the first definition is very much broader than the second.
Which is an extreme example of jargonisation...
Which is why my response was "I'm probably the wrong person to ask", if you'll recall.
Additionally if you are an atheist who has an evidence
based epistemology you will lack the belief that "god(s) don't
exist" (on the presumption that positive evidence for that
proposition is hard to come by.)
In which case you're probably better off putting up with the fact that society commonly attaches the word "agnostic" to that meaning ("a person who claims neither faith nor disbelief in God", pasting the Mac widget again) rather than trying to fight the rest of the English-speaking world to change their dictionaries.