My uncle Fred died rescuing a young lady's cat from a fire. He threw the cat out a 2nd story window; he didn't make it out, they didn't get a ladder to him in time, and the building collapsed. He put his life on the line for the benefit of the young lady, or the cat, if you like (I'd be more worried about the cat, myself.) He died. The cat made it. Fred thought religion was an utter crock and would go on at length about the subject; we were great friends -- simpatico. He taught me a lot, not the least of which is to appreciate cats.
I fail to see how Fred's actions can be cast in the light of self-interest, or even enlightened self-interest. Perhaps you can. I'm very interested to see you try.
Brutality is not limited to the religious; therefore, religion cannot be attributed as the sole cause of brutality.
Certainly not. I would never attempt to argue such a position, nor am I likely to ever hold such a position.
Atheist regimes on a national scale have so far offered an inferior product to those influenced by Christianity. I recognize that's a matter of opinion, since "value" is measurable in many ways.
Yes, it's extremely debatable. For instance, if one wants to point to the USSR in such a mode, one has to first figure out some way of separating the effects of a very poorly managed communist-ish attempt at economic and political management from the attempt to eradicate superstition. It just won't do to point at the USSR, proclaim, they suck, therefore, atheism sucks. All of which is entirely disjoint from the value, or lack thereof, of an atheist viewpoint.
Not all people who are religious fit within the category of repressors.
Agreed. I am not saying religious people are bad, but I'm comfortable saying religion is bad. Not just organized religion, but religion across the board. Like any social system, good or evil, it can be transcended in either direction by its practitioners. Martin Luther King stood above religion and did a great deal of general good, despite resistance that continues to this day. Agnes Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa) likewise left us with a hugely positive impression, and for good reason. On the other hand, Osama and his comrades in creativity have set the Muslims and the middle east in general back so far I don't think we'll even understand it for a century or more. All of them used religion as the podium to stand on. Strong people often do powerful things, and strong people with wide power bases can get bigger things done, generally speaking -- which is not to say that those things will be good.
That's a different form of hatred: slow, insidious propaganda designed to get across a logically invalid but generally accepted message: All of the religious people I see are idiots, bigots, and fools. Therefore, all religious people in existence are idiots, bigots, and fools.
Is it a form of hatred, though? And does it send the message you think? I mean, Falwell is a nutcase, and a hugely popular one with the American public. The public usually gets to hear him pimp out prepared scripts, in which insidious and highly doubtful (but opaque to the less sharp of the population, at the very least to that 50% under the median/average IQ) points are trotted forth with no counterpoint at all. The news -- such as it is, please don't get me started on the news -- is showing the public that when all is not scripted, Falwell doesn't do so well but that a more reasonable, better educated person can. From your own argument:
Then a professor of religion from Duke or Harvard* is called in to make the other guy look that much more foolish.
Now, is that hatred, or is that encouraging the religious public to (a) respect education and scholarship, something I regard as altogether a good thing, and (b) telling them that they can do better than Falwell even in the religious domain by thinking? I don't buy your conclusion from the example you put forth, I'm sorry.
Luther's relationship to the Jews was more complicated than the single pamphlet you cite.
The thing is, once you are a murderer, society, rightfully so, doesn't care if you are also the football coach to the kids of the family you just killed. Luther's attack against the jews resounded down the ages and I really don't care if he thought they "cursed Christians in their morning prayers", he was an ass-knuckle for attacking them as a group when they had not, in fact, attacked him either
The sex remark was tongue in cheek. Apparently it has to be in your cheek before you feel it properly. Kind of a "princess and the pea" syndrome.
why do you include "pogroms" under the crimes perpetrated by the religious?
Er, duh... because they're crimes that have been committed by the religious? Martin Luther himself wrote a piece entitled "Against the Jews and their Lies", in which he advocated driving Jews out of Germany and burning their synagogues. Hitler liked to quote him on it. Or, if you'd like to take a little deeper dip into history, we can note that in 1391 a pogrom incited by the church arose in Seville. It spread through Spain and Portugal, killing 50,000 jews and destroying 70 Jewish communities. Afterwards, there were twenty years of massacres to make sure no one drew any wrong conclusions. Lovely, eh?
As regards size of pogroms; I wasn't talking about size, was I? I was just attributing some pogroms to religion, which is perfectly accurate. Furthermore, if Joe murders Jane and Martha, and then you murder Felicity, you don't get a free ride on an accusation of murder because Joe was more productive than you were. Maybe tomorrow, you'll be more efficient. We already know you suck, though. Darwin knows religion certainly hasn't stopped committing abuse and crime against society as yet. You can turn on the TV and hear unending hatred shouted out by the religious against homosexuals, the unmarried, the atheists... it's like an uncontrolled acid spill.
Good advice: Don't attack something I didn't say, it makes you look silly.
As far as atheism leading anyone anywhere, regimes come in all sizes (as do pogroms.) There are plenty of enlightened regimes, starting at the family level, for one. My parents were indeed enlightened, and the family was in turn. I am enlightened, and my children are in turn. Freedom and light are everywhere in my house. Pets, too.:-)
The rules are we are supposed to abide by are self interest.
Says who? What "authority" says we "are supposed" to abide by self interest? Why can't we be selfless? Why can't we be giving, sharing, kind, generous, gentle and giving? Or not? I fail entirely to see where you're getting this "rule" for atheists/atheism from.
Assuming you believe this and are not just making a smartass remark for the sake of seeing some pixels on your monitor change state, what you need to do is go look up what "god" means. I am atheist; yet I have no expectations of ever finding godlike qualities within myself. I am not omnipotent, omniscient, ineffible, omnipresent or inscrutable. Sorry.
I missed that, sorry -- I think I tuned it out as "signature space."
Agnosticism is generally -- by declared agnostics -- asserted to be the position that one cannot know if there is a god or gods, usually followed by a refusal to take a stand on belief.
Personally, I tend to view everyone as either in the atheist camp, or the theist camp. I've never met an agnostic to whom I couldn't legitimately say:
You're agnostic? OK, fine, you don't know if there is a god or gods. Now we've got that handled. Fact is, I don't know either. We're comrades! So, aside from that, I'd like to ask for an answer to this
other question: Taking into full consideration your professed lack of knowledge as to whether there is a god or gods, do you hold any shred of belief in a god or gods? Like the way you or your friends might have believed in Santa, or the easter bunny when you were kids? I mean, you didn't know those were real... but you believed. So, do you believe, even a little, in a god or gods today?
They can either fail to answer (which makes me laugh, usually to myself simply to be polite), or say no (the typically offered rationale being they don't know, so why hold a belief?) or say yes, perhaps a little -- or some other similarly lukewarm level of assertion.
Well, if they answer no, then they're squarely in the atheist camp. If they answer yes, they're squarely in the theist camp. If they waffle, they're either irresolute, confused, or outright lying. Also, irresolute or confused is where I place someone who goes so far as to interpret agnosticism as meaning to tell me that they don't know if they believe which is again quite a different proposition than not knowing if there is a god or gods. If you don't know what you think about a subject, you probably need to think a little harder. Unless you're simply too dim to achieve a reasonable and successful level of introspection (and then we're back to confused, though now we have a biological cause for it.)
Know why I take this approach? It's because knowledge is not even remotely close to the same class of mental function as belief is. If you ask for a metric of belief, and accept in return an answer that supplies a metric of knowledge, I have high confidence that you've been had.
Mind you, I understand that some people want to opt out of the whole question of theism vs. atheism. I don't blame them. Society, principally theists within society, makes it more difficult to be a declared atheist. Some of that is because the unwashed masses and their prominent and vocal theist members have done a very good job at attempting to lump all atheists into the "those folks who say god doesn't exist" barrel, as you are trying to do here. Well, it just isn't so. Some atheists take that position, some don't. All are, regardless, atheist.
Atheism is not "no belief in a god or gods." It is a belief in no god or gods.
Assuming this was correct (it's not, neither in the etymological sense or the actuality of the range of atheist positions) I'm curious -- where does a person who does not believe there is a god stand? What are they? What would you call them, as distinct from someone who disbelieves? Or, is it your position that disbelief == lack of belief?
For instance, I do not believe that you (specifically you, the person I am replying to) can lift the bible using the power of your mind. That's an actual disbelief. I'm there right now, and I don't need any further evidence to get there. I bring numerous objective facts to my mental table that lead me to this disbelief; in other words, I have high confidence this disbelief agrees with objective reality. However, I do not have any such position with regard to theism. I have no contrary evidence (which is a data point of sorts, but one of quite a different nature than what I have gathered about the proposition of telekinesis to date.) Still, I have no more reason to believe in a theist proposition than I do in any other proposition offered without any visible means of objective support. They all go in the same box: Interesting. Come back when you can show me something concrete.
Just as an exercise: If we were to construct a word for a person who does not hold a belief in thiesm, we'd go for a prefix meaning without (that'd be "a") and then the thing that they are lacking (theism) and since we're talking about a personal outlook, we'd use "theist" instead. Having cojoined these, we'd have -- oh my gosh -- "atheist.":-)
On the other hand, if we were to construct a word for a person who holds a belief that thiesm is invalid, we'd go for a prefix meaning against (that'd most likely be "anti") and then the thing that they are lacking (theism) and since we're talking about a personal outlook, we'd use "theist" instead. Having cojoined these, we'd have antitheist. If you wanted to go there.
However, it is worth noting that the concept of an antitheist is subsumed in the word atheist; you can (a) not hold a belief in theism and (b) hold a belief that theism is invalid at the same time. This is the position of an atheist who has added some icing to the cake, as it were. That's why no one (well, very few) bandy words like "antitheist" around.
It is very convenient for theists to assume that atheists disbelieve, but the fact is, some do, some don't.
Personally, I think it's a waste of time to concern yourself with belief in or against something that has no evidence. But in the case of much theism, we have an added twist that says one cannot measure or apprehend the domain in which the proposal has validity. Now I really think it's a waste of time to worry about how accurate the various theist views might, or might not, be.:-)
In the case of the healing power of pyramids, a pyramid has a distinct advantage over a concept that, at least so far, has only been shown to exist in people's imagination, and subsequent objective products of their imagination (such as the bible, churches, witch burnings, sessions on the rack) when it comes to scientific testing. A crystal pyramid is really there; you can prod it. The existence of the pyramid is objective fact, its interaction with the physical universe is also objective (and measurable) fact. Though it is definitely worth noting that there may be ways, or combinations of ways, that pyramids have not yet been prodded in. I'll come back to that.
With regard to a lack of belief in a god or gods, you definitely cannot accurately and objectively prod a figment of the imagination -- something imaginary -- but in attempting to, you can prod the person's imagination, which in turn may skew the results, because objectivity may be (probably is, I'm guessing) out the window. Unfortunately, you can't measure if the results are being skewed, because it would be happening in a domain we can't do any direct measurement of at this point in time -- thoughts, emotional predisposition, that sort of thing.
More philosophically, anything that is supernatural is by definition outside of nature (super-imposed upon, or supercedes) and consequently science isn't likely to be able to resolve it. Science deals with the natural domain and the predicted and measured effects of and on the natural domain. If god (or gods) is a part of nature then at least the Christian god is ruled out, because in that case, omnipotence in the domain of nature is toast. In other words, the "super" is gone, and in more than one way.
None of this contradicts what I said, however. Lack of belief in pyramid power is not a religion. Lack of belief in a god or gods is not a religion. In both cases, it's a lack of belief -- no more, no less. For sensible folk, if evidence is provided for either case, belief (or some level of confidence) will typically follow.
For instance, let's say that the reason that pyramid healing has not been shown to work is that healing only occurs when attempted with the pyramid exposed to a bath of (relatively) high-intensity shortwave ultraviolet light and also exposed to a [certain value] uW/cm3 of RF at 1.4141414 MHz for reasons we have not yet codified as physical "law" or theory. It'd be no wonder we haven't figured it
out as yet, and yet it would not be the least bit unreasonable to not hold a belief favoring, or have any confidence in, pyramid healing until one is shown that this works, and it works repeatedly and dependably. No doubt joyful and triumphant derivation of new physical theory would follow immediately. Not to mention a whole bunch of healing.
Likewise, it may be that prayer hasn't been shown to work as yet because it doesn't work unless you choke a lizard while spinning counterclockwise and chewing bat wing, because god is ineffible and that's what god requires of us, so we just have to deal with it. Once this is figured out (or god drops down and lets us know, k, thx), prayer will begin to work (oh god, please take the dents out of my car from the last hailstorm [spin,chomp]... pffft, dents gone) followed immediately, no doubt, by (oh god, no more hailstorms, thanks [spin,chomp].... pfft, hailstorms no more) and at that point, one would be likely to believe a supernatural influence actually exists. No doubt many fervent prayers would follow. In the meantime, a lack of belief (or a very low level of confidence in the proposition, if you're of my mindset) is a natural and reasonable choice to make, and does not constitute a religion in any way, shape or form.
In both of the above example cases of lack of belief, there are no rituals to follow, no ethics to be derived, no morals implied, no connection, or lack thereof, to be inferred with regard to your fellow human beings and the other fauna and flora you share the environment with. No golden anti-pyrami
...We can talk about the Papal inquisition, the Spanish inquisition, any one of the many crusades, the conquistadors, the "witch" burnings, abortion clinic bombers, the Irish Protestant and Catholic frenzies, and McCarthyism.
But wait.. there's more! We can drag out torture, theft, blood libel, scientific repression (including a nice, entertaining hanging now and then), McCarthyism, subjugation of women, vilification of sexuality, sanction of excessive breeding, financial parasitism, pogroms, persecutions of heretics, rapine, brainwashing, "exorcism"...
And that's just staying with Christianity. If we wish to enfold the Muslims and the Hindus into our loving little reminiscence, we can add genital mutilation, jihad, an interesting twist on repression of women (I think the Muslims actually take the terrorist cake on this one, but the Hindus sure try, what with castes and "female circumcision" and the burning of unsatisfactory womenfolk now and then) and gee, just a bunch more.
Muslims and Christians both want world domination, and neither one is willing to say "I'll stop here." That tends to lead to problems.
Well. Anyway, sex is good. Religion is bad.
How about you religious types come over from the dark side. I mean, those of you who haven't had their private parts mutilated. That sucks. You guys have my permission to hunt down your mutilators and do the same to them. And then kill them horribly. Most satisfaction I can offer, very sorry.
Most of your points have already been soundly rebuffed and I feel no need to rehash them; however, in re the constitution, article 1, section 9 (limits on congress) limits the ability to levy taxes; there's no authority granted by the constitution for the federal government to tax work product traded within the US. None at all. That right can accrue to the several states, if they so choose, but that's it.
An Excise tax, as they wrote it into the constitution, isn't what you think it is at all:
"Excise," in England and in the Colonies, for at least one hundred and forty years before it was used in the Constitution, meant an inland levy on selected tangible property, or upon the owners of it, because of the activity in which the property was moving, as in the manufacture, in intermediate sale, or in the ultimate sale commonly amounting to consumption. The
antithesis was the direct tax upon property in general, certainly land, when taxed on a rate fixed by its static appraised capital value, possibly when measured by its annual unwrought return in rent, income, or products, and, debatably, upon personal property so appraised or judged."
Antithesis means the opposite of something's meaning, and as we see, the Excise tax was conceived as the opposite of the mechanism you think it is.
The excise power had nothing, and cannot be interpreted in context with the understandings of that day to have anything -- absolutely zero -- to do with taxing the manufacture of chairs, eyeglasses, or pornography.
Until the 1909 "amendment" (AKA rape of the US public and the constitution, sometimes vilified as "class warfare" and sometimes as a political trick that simply backfired), the feds had to be satisfied with taxing imports and exports. That was it. Period. Not taxing the pamphlets produced by whoever stating or showing whatever. There were no such taxes. Nor did the constitution contemplate any such taxes or in any way, directly or indirectly, provide for them.
You have to read it all if you want to understand it. The first thing you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. You remember the tea party, a tiny little tax revolt against the King? These people knew about taxation as bludgeon and control mechanism. They weren't having any.
Nor did they provide the mechanism of amendments to destroy everything they had worked out. It was supposed to be a fine-tuning tool, not high explosives and knives in the back. I'm the first to tell you they have the power to do what they're doing; but they do not have the right, and more importantly, they can never have the right because it is inherent in the foundation of the country. They can only steal, which puts them outside the pale. Your moron, Mr. Senator, is a thief and a criminal by the very definition of the word. But people are stupid, and they're going to think it's OK. "Won't someone think of the children?" Pah. If they were thinking of the children they wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Right out of the gate, you fail it. There is no system of belief. Furthermore, there is no deity. Atheism is a lack of belief, no more, no less. No deities involved. None. Get it now? Not "belief there is a god", but no belief in a god or gods.
Anything else is in addition to atheism; other positions are neither required nor expected as a consequence of a declaration of atheism, except by those who have pre-defined what atheist means and blanket labels every atheist that way, which is just plain ignorant. If you want to know what an atheist believes, ask them. Otherwise, you don't know -- because the declaration of atheism doesn't specify.
Not likely. If so, it's probably thanks only to strict zoning laws
Oh, please. Spare me your paranoia. Mags and videos with naked and/or busy folk are behind the counter or in adult-only access areas like adult bookstores. If you've got porn lying around at home where your kid can get at it and you don't want them to get at it, it's not the state's job to police you, even though you're an idiot. If your community allows that stuff to be placed commercially where 8-year olds can get at it, speak to your town fathers and deal with your commercial enterprises, don't blame the pornographers, that's just idiotic. The problem occurs locally, just as the problem is local to you if you let your kids on the 'net without you monitoring and/or narrow-minded software. If you're concerned about porn email, etc, get a Mac, problem solved. White list their email and you'll never have to worry about it. If you want to do such a thing. The parental controls on a Mac are outstanding. Don't blame the porn folk; the problem is yours, and it is well within your power to solve it.
You may argue that letting a child go to school is tantamount to abdicating parental responsibility; I'd respond by considering you a loonie and moving on.
I argue that letting your child go to school without the information that much of what the school teaches is wrong, and much of what their peers think is true is false, and much of what they learn is incomplete and misleading is tantamount to abdicating parental responsibility. Not quite the same thing. I'm not about sheltering my kids, I'm about educating them. My kids did real well, thanks.:-)
You cannot download a gun from the Internet.
Your inability to generalize is no doubt what leads you down these bewildered mental paths. You can download how to make a home-made bomb. You can download how to make very, very heavy drugs. You can download how to create a man-trap. You can download how to pick a lock (real or virtual.) You can locate anarchists, atheists, communists, pedophiles, mormons, muslims, christians, and etc... someone who will be your worst nightmare, no matter who you are and what you think. The Internet, being a source of general knowledge and information, can be just as fruitful a source of truly dangerous knowledge (or bunkum posing as knowledge) as any "real" weapon. Is that the problem? No. The problem is when clueless, incompetent parents let their kids stumble into this stuff without any reasonable preparation or protection. Preparation and protection that does, and should, vary enormously depending on how the parenting is being pursued. For instance, I don't worry about my children seeing naked bodies. They know those are OK. I worry about them running into some charismatic, slick, lying son of a fundamentalist, because I consider religion the deepest, most dangerous shithole a child can fall into. And that's my right as a parent. You don't get to say what is OK for my kids. Because you have no idea what is OK for my kids, or a Muslim's kids, or a backwoods hunter's kids who have been carrying high powered rifles since they were four, or some pyramid-gazing parent's kids. You only know what's right for your kids. That's the problem.
First of all, keep in mind he's your god, not my god.
It's a turn of phrase. Take the stick out of your ass.
Man, you walked right into that one, didn't you? Exactly. Your invocation of God is offensive. You think it's OK, I think it's stupid and lowers you approximately to the level of a farm animal. But you had no trouble throwing it right in there. Well, porn may offend someone, but that doesn't mean it offends the next person over. It's a state of presumptuous, idiotic, moral imperialism. Take the stick out of your ass.
You're arguing from a formal logical fallacy there, bub. Children do not walk around all day in a protective bubble.
Children don't walk around in a world that dangles pornography in their faces, either. Porn is available in our society in only a few venues. Parents can easily control access to those venues (I did, and I know it can be done.) If a parent lets their kid onto the Internet unsupervised but desiring them to not be exposed to [insert favorite moral flogging horse here] then they have abdicated responsibility and I have zero respect for any whining they do about it. Likewise, if they don't lock up their guns, and their kids shoot each other or them or someone else, I blame the parents. The more "protection" you absolve yourself of by handing responsibility over to the state, the less freedom you, and your children, will have, and the more cookie-cutter the bunch of you will come out. Unfortunately, you won't have a choice as to what kind of cookie.
My god, man, get a sense of perspective! We're not talking about some obscure (or even not so obscure) precedent. We're talking about one of the few (18, to be specific) powers that is explicitly given to Congress by the original Constitution
First of all, keep in mind he's your god, not my god.
Second of all, you are the one in a dual-level logical fallacy; just because something is written into the founding documents doesn't make it correct ("all men are created equal" -- a line more full of bullshit is unlikely to be written in a serious context.) Nor, when a founding document espouses a concept that is correct and reasonable, does that automatically make it applicable to something just because you (or whoever) is being a lazy parent. Taxing adult porn to pay for child porn is not, as you would have it, comparable to fuel taxes or road taxes. 99.x% of vehicles are in fact driven on the road; 99.x% of vehicles produce exhaust products; that is certainly the broad casual link that one is meant to resolve for such taxation. However, to tax an aircraft for a road is not reasonable, and to tax a bicyclist for fuel is also not reasonable. It is not reasonable to tax purveyors of legitimate adult products for the costs associated with dealing with the purveyors of illegitimate child pornography. They are not the same people, they are not doing the same things, they are not aiming at the same audiences, they are not even in the same legal domain (illicit as opposed to perfectly legal.)
Atheism... does not mean lack of "cause, principle, or [a] system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith"
Nor does it mean the opposite. Some atheists, including myself, do not see any need to apply ardor, or faith, to a proposal without any evidence. Nor do we have a cause or principle involved, except the several-intellectual-layers-removed principle that confidence in a proposal requires evidence -- Sagan's "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a good summing up of the problem with theism from my point of view. Not only do we not have extraordinary evidence, we have no evidence at all. I do not find the various theist arguments for a god or gods compelling for this specific reason.
I never said that an atheist couldn't be religious; I said that atheism isn't a religion. They're not the same thing at all. Just so we're clear.
Children being exposed to pornography is an unavoidable consequence of it being available;
That's simplistic nonsense. There is more to children accessing porn than its existence, just as there is more to children killing each other than the existence of weapons would account for.
Children are exposed to pornography because the parents are either irresponsible (they object but fail to perform the required duties to ensure that their children do not come in contact with it), or they're accepting of it in which case there is no problem. In other words, it's not the responsibility of the purveyors of porn, it's the parents responsibility.
As for legislative justification, that is not meaningful in and of itself. The legislature makes bad law and bad precedent on a regular basis. I could quote you such things for hours on end.
So you agree that the state shouldn't tax something and then spend the monies on mitigating the moral degredation caused by said thing
...just remember, that's not what is being proposed here. This moron is proposing to tax the purveyors of adult material to adults, to use it to fight the purveyors of child porn.
That is similar to taxing those who create video game software to fight those who create viruses because you don't approve of video games. It is, quite simply, penalizing the law-abiding for the transgressions of the lawbreakers.
The senator is a moron. He is simply playing to the religious and stupid crowd; the one issue has nothing to do with the other. However, since the religious and stupid crowd make up, by far, the majority in the US, and both the house and the senate know exactly who the majority is, you can reasonably expect this to become law.
Oh yeah, I know that one. First, you step on the fly...
Oh, wait...
Python and C (not C++) are the two that are required for someone to get a job with us. If they have actual assembler experience, they get priority, because I am confident that this makes for a much better C programmer. I have a short assembler test I abuse prospective employees with; it is designed to see if they understand how stacks work more than anything else, because that is the key to not screwing up a lot of C programming. If they can tell me how a basic microprocessor system works, as in the hardware design, then that gets them even more priority. Aside from that, pixels need to be their subservient little bitches.
We've tried both ways -- fancy, "artsy" marketing, and fact-based, detail intensive marketing.
We prefer customers who study the product -- that's why we use so much descriptive text. An informed buyer is our best friend; if they manage to wade through all 70 megabytes of online details for the product, so much the better. Almost no one does, but still, the answers are all there if one looks. Every dialog, every control and every nuance is documented on our site, and a raft of tutorials, method explanations, and developer documents make available to the potential buyer as much information as they could possibly need. If we get pre-sales questions, we quite often answer them by providing a pointer to the appropriate document on the site. That saves a lot of time and effort on our part, time and effort that can go into the product instead.
It's not about selling as many as we can, because we're selling more than enough (this product has been selling in one form or another since 1992 on Windows and before that since 1986 on the Amiga.) It's about getting the product into the hands of real experts -- it is more complex, by far, than any other image editing / effects / animation system out there, and the amount of support required is directly proportional to the lack of experience of the buyers. In short, we don't want them buying just because they saw pretty pictures. When you go too far that way, you start getting support emails asking "What's a ZIP file and what do I do with it?" which we would just as soon do entirely without.
OK, I'll go ahead and say it then. By the time I have finished filling out the CMT, CMD SCM, internal monitoring tool, the problem ticket logs and the updates to the functional and technical specs (in two places), then I am all done for. Any enthusiasm for the work at hand has been sucked out of you before you get a chance to write a single line of code.
Your problem is not a corporate environment. Your problem is that your corporation sucks.
No one here has to jump through hoops the way you do. Instead, tasks are encapsulated at conception, and a development team and a testing team are assigned. The development team knows what they're trying to do (and they are free to innovate) and the testing team is tasked to make sure that (a) the original goal was met and (b) that it works, which is not always a minor issue. When it comes out of testing, it goes in the mainline code. No paperwork. None. Just conceptualization, sometimes with a proof of concept, sometimes not, coding, debugging, and pixel-pushing (we're a graphics company.)
Your enemy isn't the corporate environment. Your enemy arose spontaneously from a poor choice of employers.
Some smaller companies -- like mine -- have our own set of lunatics and there is no disconnect, or bridge to be built, between the idea of making something because you want to, and earning money, because you want money to be secure and live well. Nor is there any resistance to adding features that aren't broadly appealing, regardless of whose needs are (or are not) addressed.
And, as it happens, we make graphics software. We're a small company with a product that has considerably more features, and more power, than either the Gimp or Photoshop, and we do very well with it. There is no problem (for us) having the Gimp, at no cost, and Photoshop, at relatively high cost, marketing to the same group of people. With a moderate price model, we can (and do) convince owners of other products to give ours a shot without any particular problem.
The only trouble we've had is when we set our prices too low -- below $99.00, no one will take the product seriously. We've tried multiple times to set it lower, as we're well down the ROI curve, but it just won't sell below $99.95. We did find a workaround, though... we have an offer where we'll give it to you "at a discount" (for $49.95) if you say you have a Corel, JASC or Adobe product. We really don't care if you do or not; we don't even check.:-) But people will buy that even though they won't buy it if we actually price it at $49.95. The lesson? People are funny.
Aside from the in-your-face issue of price, commercial development, large or small, by its very nature brings something else to the table that open source doesn't, and that is a constant drive to work on the product without distraction or interruption. It does this by virtue of funding the development. This ensures that the developers can be secure in the knowledge they can go home at night and get the cat fed, pay the XM bill, and so on. They don't have to work at night (though of course they can, and if the company is smart they'll reward such behavior.) They can have a rich social life. Still, they get to spend many hours a day pushing pixels, and as a graphics developer, I can tell that is a significant pleasure.
All in all, I see no reason for commercial graphics development to be concerned about open source. Certainly there is no reason for open source to be concerned about commercial graphics development, per se.
Frankly the risk/danger (to everyone) is not other developers. The danger is software patents. The danger comes from the legislature. You can -- without ever intending to -- run afoul of someone's invention and be in a world of financial hurt as you try to defend yourself and protect the time and energy (and money, if you're commercial) you've put into your legitimate development, and the legal system can crash your progress as sure as if they were the on-coming train in the tunnel. In my opinion, that is the problem that needs addressing, and that is what will cause the most disruption(s) to any project, be it commercial or open source.
Please don't mistake me; I understand perfectly well that college (and the world) is rife with people insisting that things be done in less functional, poorly thought-out, inconvenient, silly, and outright stupid ways. On top of which you will often find layered the three functional retardations: patriotic, traditional, and religious.
What I am saying is that it is not neccessary, which is a concept that is quite disjoint from required, both in academia and business.
I would like to bring up the east of transfer gained from the use of PDF over HTML. With HML, there's no good way to include a bunch of images in a single directly readable file.
OK, lets look at the HTML-based alternatives.
You could just send them a URL. Or a filesystem location. Depending on what type of network you're sending the information over. You can always get space on the net, there are tons of free hosting services and for a university, they'd be well advised to give you a little space for things just like this.
If you really want to send a zipped collection of files, build the report in a sub-subdirectory, put the master page / index/toc/whatever alone in the subdirectory, ZIP it that way with the subdir included, and the instructor will unzip what appears to them to be one html file and a subdirectory that will go where-ever they want it to go in their filesystem. Everything will be fine, easy to delete, available in separate components (which means it'll be easier to mark up and quote and copy/paste and score, just to offhand name a few things.)
I don't want to forget about one of the tiny IE/firefox incompatibilities when I'm formatting my HTML
Mmmph. This is a different problem. Send your instructors -- all of them -- the URL for downloading Windows FireFox. They'll probably bump you up a grade if you can convince them to try it. Explorer isn't an HTML browser so much as it is a virus entry enabling mechanism.
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I fail to see how Fred's actions can be cast in the light of self-interest, or even enlightened self-interest. Perhaps you can. I'm very interested to see you try.
Certainly not. I would never attempt to argue such a position, nor am I likely to ever hold such a position.
Yes, it's extremely debatable. For instance, if one wants to point to the USSR in such a mode, one has to first figure out some way of separating the effects of a very poorly managed communist-ish attempt at economic and political management from the attempt to eradicate superstition. It just won't do to point at the USSR, proclaim, they suck, therefore, atheism sucks. All of which is entirely disjoint from the value, or lack thereof, of an atheist viewpoint.
Agreed. I am not saying religious people are bad, but I'm comfortable saying religion is bad. Not just organized religion, but religion across the board. Like any social system, good or evil, it can be transcended in either direction by its practitioners. Martin Luther King stood above religion and did a great deal of general good, despite resistance that continues to this day. Agnes Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresa) likewise left us with a hugely positive impression, and for good reason. On the other hand, Osama and his comrades in creativity have set the Muslims and the middle east in general back so far I don't think we'll even understand it for a century or more. All of them used religion as the podium to stand on. Strong people often do powerful things, and strong people with wide power bases can get bigger things done, generally speaking -- which is not to say that those things will be good.
Is it a form of hatred, though? And does it send the message you think? I mean, Falwell is a nutcase, and a hugely popular one with the American public. The public usually gets to hear him pimp out prepared scripts, in which insidious and highly doubtful (but opaque to the less sharp of the population, at the very least to that 50% under the median/average IQ) points are trotted forth with no counterpoint at all. The news -- such as it is, please don't get me started on the news -- is showing the public that when all is not scripted, Falwell doesn't do so well but that a more reasonable, better educated person can. From your own argument:
Now, is that hatred, or is that encouraging the religious public to (a) respect education and scholarship, something I regard as altogether a good thing, and (b) telling them that they can do better than Falwell even in the religious domain by thinking? I don't buy your conclusion from the example you put forth, I'm sorry.
The thing is, once you are a murderer, society, rightfully so, doesn't care if you are also the football coach to the kids of the family you just killed. Luther's attack against the jews resounded down the ages and I really don't care if he thought they "cursed Christians in their morning prayers", he was an ass-knuckle for attacking them as a group when they had not, in fact, attacked him either
Er, duh... because they're crimes that have been committed by the religious? Martin Luther himself wrote a piece entitled "Against the Jews and their Lies", in which he advocated driving Jews out of Germany and burning their synagogues. Hitler liked to quote him on it. Or, if you'd like to take a little deeper dip into history, we can note that in 1391 a pogrom incited by the church arose in Seville. It spread through Spain and Portugal, killing 50,000 jews and destroying 70 Jewish communities. Afterwards, there were twenty years of massacres to make sure no one drew any wrong conclusions. Lovely, eh?
As regards size of pogroms; I wasn't talking about size, was I? I was just attributing some pogroms to religion, which is perfectly accurate. Furthermore, if Joe murders Jane and Martha, and then you murder Felicity, you don't get a free ride on an accusation of murder because Joe was more productive than you were. Maybe tomorrow, you'll be more efficient. We already know you suck, though. Darwin knows religion certainly hasn't stopped committing abuse and crime against society as yet. You can turn on the TV and hear unending hatred shouted out by the religious against homosexuals, the unmarried, the atheists... it's like an uncontrolled acid spill.
Good advice: Don't attack something I didn't say, it makes you look silly.
As far as atheism leading anyone anywhere, regimes come in all sizes (as do pogroms.) There are plenty of enlightened regimes, starting at the family level, for one. My parents were indeed enlightened, and the family was in turn. I am enlightened, and my children are in turn. Freedom and light are everywhere in my house. Pets, too. :-)
Let's take your statement for a ride in the country.
"Everyone breathes, even if they're dead"
"Everyone has a Porsche, even if they don't have a car"
"Everyone believes in killing for pleasure, even if they don't.
Thanks for the laugh. :-)
Says who? What "authority" says we "are supposed" to abide by self interest? Why can't we be selfless? Why can't we be giving, sharing, kind, generous, gentle and giving? Or not? I fail entirely to see where you're getting this "rule" for atheists/atheism from.
Please explain.
Assuming you believe this and are not just making a smartass remark for the sake of seeing some pixels on your monitor change state, what you need to do is go look up what "god" means. I am atheist; yet I have no expectations of ever finding godlike qualities within myself. I am not omnipotent, omniscient, ineffible, omnipresent or inscrutable. Sorry.
I missed that, sorry -- I think I tuned it out as "signature space."
Agnosticism is generally -- by declared agnostics -- asserted to be the position that one cannot know if there is a god or gods, usually followed by a refusal to take a stand on belief.
Personally, I tend to view everyone as either in the atheist camp, or the theist camp. I've never met an agnostic to whom I couldn't legitimately say:
They can either fail to answer (which makes me laugh, usually to myself simply to be polite), or say no (the typically offered rationale being they don't know, so why hold a belief?) or say yes, perhaps a little -- or some other similarly lukewarm level of assertion.
Well, if they answer no, then they're squarely in the atheist camp. If they answer yes, they're squarely in the theist camp. If they waffle, they're either irresolute, confused, or outright lying. Also, irresolute or confused is where I place someone who goes so far as to interpret agnosticism as meaning to tell me that they don't know if they believe which is again quite a different proposition than not knowing if there is a god or gods. If you don't know what you think about a subject, you probably need to think a little harder. Unless you're simply too dim to achieve a reasonable and successful level of introspection (and then we're back to confused, though now we have a biological cause for it.)
Know why I take this approach? It's because knowledge is not even remotely close to the same class of mental function as belief is. If you ask for a metric of belief, and accept in return an answer that supplies a metric of knowledge, I have high confidence that you've been had.
Mind you, I understand that some people want to opt out of the whole question of theism vs. atheism. I don't blame them. Society, principally theists within society, makes it more difficult to be a declared atheist. Some of that is because the unwashed masses and their prominent and vocal theist members have done a very good job at attempting to lump all atheists into the "those folks who say god doesn't exist" barrel, as you are trying to do here. Well, it just isn't so. Some atheists take that position, some don't. All are, regardless, atheist.
Assuming this was correct (it's not, neither in the etymological sense or the actuality of the range of atheist positions) I'm curious -- where does a person who does not believe there is a god stand? What are they? What would you call them, as distinct from someone who disbelieves? Or, is it your position that disbelief == lack of belief?
For instance, I do not believe that you (specifically you, the person I am replying to) can lift the bible using the power of your mind. That's an actual disbelief. I'm there right now, and I don't need any further evidence to get there. I bring numerous objective facts to my mental table that lead me to this disbelief; in other words, I have high confidence this disbelief agrees with objective reality. However, I do not have any such position with regard to theism. I have no contrary evidence (which is a data point of sorts, but one of quite a different nature than what I have gathered about the proposition of telekinesis to date.) Still, I have no more reason to believe in a theist proposition than I do in any other proposition offered without any visible means of objective support. They all go in the same box: Interesting. Come back when you can show me something concrete.
Just as an exercise: If we were to construct a word for a person who does not hold a belief in thiesm, we'd go for a prefix meaning without (that'd be "a") and then the thing that they are lacking (theism) and since we're talking about a personal outlook, we'd use "theist" instead. Having cojoined these, we'd have -- oh my gosh -- "atheist." :-)
On the other hand, if we were to construct a word for a person who holds a belief that thiesm is invalid, we'd go for a prefix meaning against (that'd most likely be "anti") and then the thing that they are lacking (theism) and since we're talking about a personal outlook, we'd use "theist" instead. Having cojoined these, we'd have antitheist. If you wanted to go there.
However, it is worth noting that the concept of an antitheist is subsumed in the word atheist; you can (a) not hold a belief in theism and (b) hold a belief that theism is invalid at the same time. This is the position of an atheist who has added some icing to the cake, as it were. That's why no one (well, very few) bandy words like "antitheist" around.
It is very convenient for theists to assume that atheists disbelieve, but the fact is, some do, some don't.
Personally, I think it's a waste of time to concern yourself with belief in or against something that has no evidence. But in the case of much theism, we have an added twist that says one cannot measure or apprehend the domain in which the proposal has validity. Now I really think it's a waste of time to worry about how accurate the various theist views might, or might not, be. :-)
With regard to a lack of belief in a god or gods, you definitely cannot accurately and objectively prod a figment of the imagination -- something imaginary -- but in attempting to, you can prod the person's imagination, which in turn may skew the results, because objectivity may be (probably is, I'm guessing) out the window. Unfortunately, you can't measure if the results are being skewed, because it would be happening in a domain we can't do any direct measurement of at this point in time -- thoughts, emotional predisposition, that sort of thing.
More philosophically, anything that is supernatural is by definition outside of nature (super-imposed upon, or supercedes) and consequently science isn't likely to be able to resolve it. Science deals with the natural domain and the predicted and measured effects of and on the natural domain. If god (or gods) is a part of nature then at least the Christian god is ruled out, because in that case, omnipotence in the domain of nature is toast. In other words, the "super" is gone, and in more than one way.
None of this contradicts what I said, however. Lack of belief in pyramid power is not a religion. Lack of belief in a god or gods is not a religion. In both cases, it's a lack of belief -- no more, no less. For sensible folk, if evidence is provided for either case, belief (or some level of confidence) will typically follow.
For instance, let's say that the reason that pyramid healing has not been shown to work is that healing only occurs when attempted with the pyramid exposed to a bath of (relatively) high-intensity shortwave ultraviolet light and also exposed to a [certain value] uW/cm3 of RF at 1.4141414 MHz for reasons we have not yet codified as physical "law" or theory. It'd be no wonder we haven't figured it out as yet, and yet it would not be the least bit unreasonable to not hold a belief favoring, or have any confidence in, pyramid healing until one is shown that this works, and it works repeatedly and dependably. No doubt joyful and triumphant derivation of new physical theory would follow immediately. Not to mention a whole bunch of healing.
Likewise, it may be that prayer hasn't been shown to work as yet because it doesn't work unless you choke a lizard while spinning counterclockwise and chewing bat wing, because god is ineffible and that's what god requires of us, so we just have to deal with it. Once this is figured out (or god drops down and lets us know, k, thx), prayer will begin to work (oh god, please take the dents out of my car from the last hailstorm [spin,chomp]... pffft, dents gone) followed immediately, no doubt, by (oh god, no more hailstorms, thanks [spin,chomp].... pfft, hailstorms no more) and at that point, one would be likely to believe a supernatural influence actually exists. No doubt many fervent prayers would follow. In the meantime, a lack of belief (or a very low level of confidence in the proposition, if you're of my mindset) is a natural and reasonable choice to make, and does not constitute a religion in any way, shape or form.
In both of the above example cases of lack of belief, there are no rituals to follow, no ethics to be derived, no morals implied, no connection, or lack thereof, to be inferred with regard to your fellow human beings and the other fauna and flora you share the environment with. No golden anti-pyrami
But wait.. there's more! We can drag out torture, theft, blood libel, scientific repression (including a nice, entertaining hanging now and then), McCarthyism, subjugation of women, vilification of sexuality, sanction of excessive breeding, financial parasitism, pogroms, persecutions of heretics, rapine, brainwashing, "exorcism"...
And that's just staying with Christianity. If we wish to enfold the Muslims and the Hindus into our loving little reminiscence, we can add genital mutilation, jihad, an interesting twist on repression of women (I think the Muslims actually take the terrorist cake on this one, but the Hindus sure try, what with castes and "female circumcision" and the burning of unsatisfactory womenfolk now and then) and gee, just a bunch more.
Muslims and Christians both want world domination, and neither one is willing to say "I'll stop here." That tends to lead to problems.
Well. Anyway, sex is good. Religion is bad.
How about you religious types come over from the dark side. I mean, those of you who haven't had their private parts mutilated. That sucks. You guys have my permission to hunt down your mutilators and do the same to them. And then kill them horribly. Most satisfaction I can offer, very sorry.
An Excise tax, as they wrote it into the constitution, isn't what you think it is at all:
Antithesis means the opposite of something's meaning, and as we see, the Excise tax was conceived as the opposite of the mechanism you think it is.
The excise power had nothing, and cannot be interpreted in context with the understandings of that day to have anything -- absolutely zero -- to do with taxing the manufacture of chairs, eyeglasses, or pornography.
Until the 1909 "amendment" (AKA rape of the US public and the constitution, sometimes vilified as "class warfare" and sometimes as a political trick that simply backfired), the feds had to be satisfied with taxing imports and exports. That was it. Period. Not taxing the pamphlets produced by whoever stating or showing whatever. There were no such taxes. Nor did the constitution contemplate any such taxes or in any way, directly or indirectly, provide for them.
You have to read it all if you want to understand it. The first thing you have to do is put yourself in their shoes. You remember the tea party, a tiny little tax revolt against the King? These people knew about taxation as bludgeon and control mechanism. They weren't having any.
Nor did they provide the mechanism of amendments to destroy everything they had worked out. It was supposed to be a fine-tuning tool, not high explosives and knives in the back. I'm the first to tell you they have the power to do what they're doing; but they do not have the right, and more importantly, they can never have the right because it is inherent in the foundation of the country. They can only steal, which puts them outside the pale. Your moron, Mr. Senator, is a thief and a criminal by the very definition of the word. But people are stupid, and they're going to think it's OK. "Won't someone think of the children?" Pah. If they were thinking of the children they wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
Right out of the gate, you fail it. There is no system of belief. Furthermore, there is no deity. Atheism is a lack of belief, no more, no less. No deities involved. None. Get it now? Not "belief there is a god", but no belief in a god or gods.
Anything else is in addition to atheism; other positions are neither required nor expected as a consequence of a declaration of atheism, except by those who have pre-defined what atheist means and blanket labels every atheist that way, which is just plain ignorant. If you want to know what an atheist believes, ask them. Otherwise, you don't know -- because the declaration of atheism doesn't specify.
Oh, please. Spare me your paranoia. Mags and videos with naked and/or busy folk are behind the counter or in adult-only access areas like adult bookstores. If you've got porn lying around at home where your kid can get at it and you don't want them to get at it, it's not the state's job to police you, even though you're an idiot. If your community allows that stuff to be placed commercially where 8-year olds can get at it, speak to your town fathers and deal with your commercial enterprises, don't blame the pornographers, that's just idiotic. The problem occurs locally, just as the problem is local to you if you let your kids on the 'net without you monitoring and/or narrow-minded software. If you're concerned about porn email, etc, get a Mac, problem solved. White list their email and you'll never have to worry about it. If you want to do such a thing. The parental controls on a Mac are outstanding. Don't blame the porn folk; the problem is yours, and it is well within your power to solve it.
I argue that letting your child go to school without the information that much of what the school teaches is wrong, and much of what their peers think is true is false, and much of what they learn is incomplete and misleading is tantamount to abdicating parental responsibility. Not quite the same thing. I'm not about sheltering my kids, I'm about educating them. My kids did real well, thanks. :-)
Your inability to generalize is no doubt what leads you down these bewildered mental paths. You can download how to make a home-made bomb. You can download how to make very, very heavy drugs. You can download how to create a man-trap. You can download how to pick a lock (real or virtual.) You can locate anarchists, atheists, communists, pedophiles, mormons, muslims, christians, and etc... someone who will be your worst nightmare, no matter who you are and what you think. The Internet, being a source of general knowledge and information, can be just as fruitful a source of truly dangerous knowledge (or bunkum posing as knowledge) as any "real" weapon. Is that the problem? No. The problem is when clueless, incompetent parents let their kids stumble into this stuff without any reasonable preparation or protection. Preparation and protection that does, and should, vary enormously depending on how the parenting is being pursued. For instance, I don't worry about my children seeing naked bodies. They know those are OK. I worry about them running into some charismatic, slick, lying son of a fundamentalist, because I consider religion the deepest, most dangerous shithole a child can fall into. And that's my right as a parent. You don't get to say what is OK for my kids. Because you have no idea what is OK for my kids, or a Muslim's kids, or a backwoods hunter's kids who have been carrying high powered rifles since they were four, or some pyramid-gazing parent's kids. You only know what's right for your kids. That's the problem.
Man, you walked right into that one, didn't you? Exactly. Your invocation of God is offensive. You think it's OK, I think it's stupid and lowers you approximately to the level of a farm animal. But you had no trouble throwing it right in there. Well, porn may offend someone, but that doesn't mean it offends the next person over. It's a state of presumptuous, idiotic, moral imperialism. Take the stick out of your ass.
Children don't walk around in a world that dangles pornography in their faces, either. Porn is available in our society in only a few venues. Parents can easily control access to those venues (I did, and I know it can be done.) If a parent lets their kid onto the Internet unsupervised but desiring them to not be exposed to [insert favorite moral flogging horse here] then they have abdicated responsibility and I have zero respect for any whining they do about it. Likewise, if they don't lock up their guns, and their kids shoot each other or them or someone else, I blame the parents. The more "protection" you absolve yourself of by handing responsibility over to the state, the less freedom you, and your children, will have, and the more cookie-cutter the bunch of you will come out. Unfortunately, you won't have a choice as to what kind of cookie.
First of all, keep in mind he's your god, not my god.
Second of all, you are the one in a dual-level logical fallacy; just because something is written into the founding documents doesn't make it correct ("all men are created equal" -- a line more full of bullshit is unlikely to be written in a serious context.) Nor, when a founding document espouses a concept that is correct and reasonable, does that automatically make it applicable to something just because you (or whoever) is being a lazy parent. Taxing adult porn to pay for child porn is not, as you would have it, comparable to fuel taxes or road taxes. 99.x% of vehicles are in fact driven on the road; 99.x% of vehicles produce exhaust products; that is certainly the broad casual link that one is meant to resolve for such taxation. However, to tax an aircraft for a road is not reasonable, and to tax a bicyclist for fuel is also not reasonable. It is not reasonable to tax purveyors of legitimate adult products for the costs associated with dealing with the purveyors of illegitimate child pornography. They are not the same people, they are not doing the same things, they are not aiming at the same audiences, they are not even in the same legal domain (illicit as opposed to perfectly legal.)
Nor does it mean the opposite. Some atheists, including myself, do not see any need to apply ardor, or faith, to a proposal without any evidence. Nor do we have a cause or principle involved, except the several-intellectual-layers-removed principle that confidence in a proposal requires evidence -- Sagan's "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a good summing up of the problem with theism from my point of view. Not only do we not have extraordinary evidence, we have no evidence at all. I do not find the various theist arguments for a god or gods compelling for this specific reason.
I never said that an atheist couldn't be religious; I said that atheism isn't a religion. They're not the same thing at all. Just so we're clear.
That's simplistic nonsense. There is more to children accessing porn than its existence, just as there is more to children killing each other than the existence of weapons would account for.
Children are exposed to pornography because the parents are either irresponsible (they object but fail to perform the required duties to ensure that their children do not come in contact with it), or they're accepting of it in which case there is no problem. In other words, it's not the responsibility of the purveyors of porn, it's the parents responsibility.
As for legislative justification, that is not meaningful in and of itself. The legislature makes bad law and bad precedent on a regular basis. I could quote you such things for hours on end.
That is similar to taxing those who create video game software to fight those who create viruses because you don't approve of video games. It is, quite simply, penalizing the law-abiding for the transgressions of the lawbreakers.
The senator is a moron. He is simply playing to the religious and stupid crowd; the one issue has nothing to do with the other. However, since the religious and stupid crowd make up, by far, the majority in the US, and both the house and the senate know exactly who the majority is, you can reasonably expect this to become law.
Nothing religious about it. Simply a lack of belief.
Saying that atheism is a religion is precisely like saying a lack of belief in the healing power of pyramids is a religion.
It takes more than an atheist viewpoint to make a religion. Count on it.
Oh, wait...
Python and C (not C++) are the two that are required for someone to get a job with us. If they have actual assembler experience, they get priority, because I am confident that this makes for a much better C programmer. I have a short assembler test I abuse prospective employees with; it is designed to see if they understand how stacks work more than anything else, because that is the key to not screwing up a lot of C programming. If they can tell me how a basic microprocessor system works, as in the hardware design, then that gets them even more priority. Aside from that, pixels need to be their subservient little bitches.
We prefer customers who study the product -- that's why we use so much descriptive text. An informed buyer is our best friend; if they manage to wade through all 70 megabytes of online details for the product, so much the better. Almost no one does, but still, the answers are all there if one looks. Every dialog, every control and every nuance is documented on our site, and a raft of tutorials, method explanations, and developer documents make available to the potential buyer as much information as they could possibly need. If we get pre-sales questions, we quite often answer them by providing a pointer to the appropriate document on the site. That saves a lot of time and effort on our part, time and effort that can go into the product instead.
It's not about selling as many as we can, because we're selling more than enough (this product has been selling in one form or another since 1992 on Windows and before that since 1986 on the Amiga.) It's about getting the product into the hands of real experts -- it is more complex, by far, than any other image editing / effects / animation system out there, and the amount of support required is directly proportional to the lack of experience of the buyers. In short, we don't want them buying just because they saw pretty pictures. When you go too far that way, you start getting support emails asking "What's a ZIP file and what do I do with it?" which we would just as soon do entirely without.
Your problem is not a corporate environment. Your problem is that your corporation sucks.
No one here has to jump through hoops the way you do. Instead, tasks are encapsulated at conception, and a development team and a testing team are assigned. The development team knows what they're trying to do (and they are free to innovate) and the testing team is tasked to make sure that (a) the original goal was met and (b) that it works, which is not always a minor issue. When it comes out of testing, it goes in the mainline code. No paperwork. None. Just conceptualization, sometimes with a proof of concept, sometimes not, coding, debugging, and pixel-pushing (we're a graphics company.)
Your enemy isn't the corporate environment. Your enemy arose spontaneously from a poor choice of employers.
And, as it happens, we make graphics software. We're a small company with a product that has considerably more features, and more power, than either the Gimp or Photoshop, and we do very well with it. There is no problem (for us) having the Gimp, at no cost, and Photoshop, at relatively high cost, marketing to the same group of people. With a moderate price model, we can (and do) convince owners of other products to give ours a shot without any particular problem.
The only trouble we've had is when we set our prices too low -- below $99.00, no one will take the product seriously. We've tried multiple times to set it lower, as we're well down the ROI curve, but it just won't sell below $99.95. We did find a workaround, though... we have an offer where we'll give it to you "at a discount" (for $49.95) if you say you have a Corel, JASC or Adobe product. We really don't care if you do or not; we don't even check. :-) But people will buy that even though they won't buy it if we actually price it at $49.95. The lesson? People are funny.
Aside from the in-your-face issue of price, commercial development, large or small, by its very nature brings something else to the table that open source doesn't, and that is a constant drive to work on the product without distraction or interruption. It does this by virtue of funding the development. This ensures that the developers can be secure in the knowledge they can go home at night and get the cat fed, pay the XM bill, and so on. They don't have to work at night (though of course they can, and if the company is smart they'll reward such behavior.) They can have a rich social life. Still, they get to spend many hours a day pushing pixels, and as a graphics developer, I can tell that is a significant pleasure.
All in all, I see no reason for commercial graphics development to be concerned about open source. Certainly there is no reason for open source to be concerned about commercial graphics development, per se.
Frankly the risk/danger (to everyone) is not other developers. The danger is software patents. The danger comes from the legislature. You can -- without ever intending to -- run afoul of someone's invention and be in a world of financial hurt as you try to defend yourself and protect the time and energy (and money, if you're commercial) you've put into your legitimate development, and the legal system can crash your progress as sure as if they were the on-coming train in the tunnel. In my opinion, that is the problem that needs addressing, and that is what will cause the most disruption(s) to any project, be it commercial or open source.
What I am saying is that it is not neccessary, which is a concept that is quite disjoint from required, both in academia and business.
OK, lets look at the HTML-based alternatives.
You could just send them a URL. Or a filesystem location. Depending on what type of network you're sending the information over. You can always get space on the net, there are tons of free hosting services and for a university, they'd be well advised to give you a little space for things just like this.
If you really want to send a zipped collection of files, build the report in a sub-subdirectory, put the master page / index /toc /whatever alone in the subdirectory, ZIP it that way with the subdir included, and the instructor will unzip what appears to them to be one html file and a subdirectory that will go where-ever they want it to go in their filesystem. Everything will be fine, easy to delete, available in separate components (which means it'll be easier to mark up and quote and copy/paste and score, just to offhand name a few things.)
Mmmph. This is a different problem. Send your instructors -- all of them -- the URL for downloading Windows FireFox. They'll probably bump you up a grade if you can convince them to try it. Explorer isn't an HTML browser so much as it is a virus entry enabling mechanism.