Re:Deity does not help analyze things
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 1
God is a possible answer to how the universe and everything in it sprung into existance.
BS. As an explanation, God is merely an added layer of complexity. If God made the universe spring into existence, what made Him/Her/It spring into existence? If God created himself, why can't the universe create itself? As far as "intelligent" design goes, we are here because of the and the very simple tautology of "that which survives, survives."
God can be many things (including an extremely important driving force in our lives), but as far as the nature of the universe goes, his existence introduces just as many logical problems as it solves.
The fossil record has organizims suddenly showing up fully formed, there is no proof of halfway or partial fetures. That favors an intellegent design rather then random chaos.
Natural selection may be blind, but it is not random. I don't know why I even bother to continue at this point, because you're spouting pure drivel. So no partial feature has ever been found anywhere in the fossil record? Utter bullshit. Creationists have this concept of "half an eye" that is utterly useless to our ancestors, yet somehow magically evolves on its own. This is not how things happen. You don't find "partial" (i.e. incomplete) features. A simple sensativity to light and darkness (present in many organisms, including single-celled organisms) is a useful trait, and each stage in its evolution to a fully formed, muscle-controlled eyeball with a lense and eyelids and variable focus length and billions of cones and rods IS MORE USEFUL THAN THE PREVIOUS STAGE. There are plenty of examples of this type of thing in the fossil record. Gaps exist, but an occasional lack of evidence hardly renders the entire theory of evolution invalid, any more than the theory of gravity is invalid if you were floating in deep space.
Likewise, to demand that scientists cause large-scale evolution as proof is akin to demanding that scientists blow up a star to prove that supernovas are real. It just isn't within our means yet.
Bah, I'm done. If you possess a modicum of logic or objectivity, read Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker", and realize that God and science simply do not belong in the same class. Science is a way of explaning the world around us rationally and objectively. Therefore, to see science as a threat to God is to say that your own beliefs are irrational... to then attempt to justify your belief in God with science and denounce a theory that has mountains of evidence and is accepted by the vast majority of modern biologists borders on insanity.
Someone send him a free computer, and last I heard there was a rather large petition to get him included as an extra in Return of the Sith. Worth a little bit of embarassment, I'd say.
Turn them over to the authorities? Isn't that like selling coke to someone, then turning them into the authorities? Either cracking and releasing their own game is legal (and hence, downloading and playing it is legal because they, the copyright holders, are personally GIVING it to us) or it is illegal (perhaps under some twisted interpretation of the DMCA), and thus they would be just as vulnerable as the people who played it.
IP banning should be ok, but if that is what they're doing they picked the WRONG time to do it. With so many people pissed off about authentication issues, I'm sure many of them are using cracks and thinking to themselves, "This isn't wrong; I'm just trying to play the game I paid for." If these paying customers get permanently banned because of this, then Valve is shooting themselves in the foot with a rocket launcher.
There's a difference between delays due to unforseen technical issues and/or poor planning, and delays specifcally designed to target your PAYING customers.
Yeah ok, it was actually designed to prevent non-paying "customers" from playing, but is ANYONE shocked at this point that the opposite has happened? That the freeloaders can play and the honest people are inconvienced? For the life of me I can't figure out why software companies waste so much time and money on these halfassed copy protection schemes that only serve to piss off legitimate users.
Oh yeah, and your 20-minute wait is not (necesarrily) indicative of the average experience.
I have not read up on the specifics, but my reasoning is as follows:
At some point, the video must be decrypted in order for it to play. If it can be decrypted for viewing, it can be decrypted for recording. Now, maybe they'll only allow approved, closed source software to play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but that alone isn't enough. As soon as either standard replaces DVD, we'll see millions of eyes and minds trained on this new format. Some will want to exploit it, but some will just want to be able to play their movies on Linux. No matter how great their encryption is, no matter how hard they try to discourage reverse engineering, it only takes one flawed implementation or one source code leak.
Hardware DRM can make life much more difficult. If the HD-DVD-ROM refuses to talk to anything but PowerHD-DVD (or whatever), there are going to be problems.
But this is means even more money, even more restrictions--not just for us, but for the third-party manufacturers as well. Maybe Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are headed down this dark path, but I think (and I hope) that one of them will look up and say hey! This is costing us money and it's not making the consumers or the manufacturers happy. Provided the media companies backing them can see the light, it's a simple matter of tossing the DRM (or at least, the uncrackable DRM) out the door and bam, the format war is over. It's simple greed. They want to control how we use their products, but I think they'll settle for simply selling us those products.
Oh yeah, SACD and DVD-A might be uncracked now, but neither one has supplanted the CD yet. Once the CD is long gone, there will be a much greater interest in cracking the new format.
BUT... they might never supplant it. According to Wikipedia: [regarding SACD] "These include 80 bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disk that is only readable by a licensed SACD device."
That's BS. Moral outrage aside, I'm sure has hell not going to buy media I can't play on my computer--it has the best speakers in the house.
The DRM will not prevent good old-fashoned "insert and hit play", but it will prevent uncontrolled ripping and copying.
...for the first couple of months, you mean.
I really wonder why they even bother. Unless they include hardware DRM to disallow access to all unauthorized programs, this WILL be cracked. And either one does do such a thing, the other one will almost assuredly win the format wars.
My message to MPAA is this: Save your money. Leave it unencrypted. Let us do what we want with our movies. The VCR did not put you out of business, and neither will this.
1) It was specifically said AHEAD OF TIME (though I cannot find the link offhand) that there would be two versions, regular and extended.
2) The LOTR extended editions have so far proved to be worth the money. I could care less about the behind-the-scenes stuff, but the added scenes are long (50 additional minutes for Return of the King!) and add to the story immeasurably. I particularly liked the extended edition of the Two Towers. The scenes like the flashback with Faromir and his father and the ents at Helm's Deep are so good/important you'll wonder how they ever got cut in the first place.
Don't complain about a company because they do something you don't like. Voice your opinion by disposing of your cash reserves elsewhere.
Again and again, whenever anyone complains about something this is the response they get. What about INFORMING the rest of us so that we can know not to buy our CDs there? We could even--
gasp!--boycott Wal-Mart if we so desired.
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this "like it or shut up" anti-consumer attitude around here.
The thing is, this is a "paper braclet" that a MACHINE can read and record at a distance of several feet. Currently, it would be very hard for the to track someone even if they knew their ID, but that's just a simple matter of making or enticing RFID manufacturers into recording every unique ID they "see". Now if they want, the government can find out every time you visited your favorite retailer, gassed up your car, etc...
I think that you forgot to bold the most disturbing line--the one about "creation science."
Creationism is at best a philosophy, not a science, and to put it in the same catagory as evolutionary theory both debases the foundations of science and trivializes Christianity (both by trying to prove the unprovable, and by making the false implication that Darwinism is somehow related to atheism.)
Maybe he's, you know, discussing his views on Gmail in a discussion forum FOR Gmail?
I, for one, am glad that there are people out there willing to share their security concerns, and I don't understand it they're told to shut up because it's an optional, free service. Free or not, we have a right to know and talk about these things.
Mods take note: this is called sarcasm. Or irony. Or something.
Point is, if alcoholism is a disease then so is caffine-ism. Also, if being "addicted" to a drug like marijuana/THC (which is not physically addictive) is a disease, so is every other psychological addiction out there--eating, shopping, TV, net, etc.
This is not to imply that these "diseases", these addictions are all of the same severity. But at a fundemental level, they all work the same and it's very bad science to call some of them diseases and dismiss the others as character flaws.
If a Christian says he prays to a different god, then he does. A scholarly analysis proves nothing, because mainstream Christian, Judaic, and Islamic beliefs are not based on scientific, scholarly debate.
To put it another way, you can't say that my imaginary friend is the same as your imaginary friend just because they're both loosely based on, say, Yoda. Neither friends are provable in the "real world", just as neither the Islamic nor the Christian god are provable. Their existence is entirely subjective and while that doesn't make them any less real (IMO), it does make them immune to this sort of logic.
I usually think that slashdot is a relatively openminded crowd but TROLL? For stating the exceedingly obvious fact there are more DOS games than linux games?
Theft is not copyright infringment, and copyright infringment is not a moral issue. By this I mean that, BY ITSELF, copyright infringment is not an immoral act. I could burn ten thousand copies of Metallica's latest album, then burn them (i.e. with fire) in good conscience. I have caused no one any real harm whatsoever, therefore what I did was not immoral--unless you want to talk about the environmental morality of burning that much plastic. Yet I have committed ten thousand acts of copyright infringment. I don't see how anyone other than a RIAA shill could look at such a compelling example and still turn copyright infringment into a moral issue.
The only moral issue here, if ANY, is that of financial harm to RIAA. But REALIZE THAT THIS MORAL ISSUE IS SEPERATE FROM THE LEGAL ISSUE OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT, and there are many similar legal, non-infringing examples of such "theft." People "steal" TV shows from advertisers by fast-forwarding through the commercials (the same goes for web content and popup blockers.) People "steal" from authors and publishers every time they visit the library. Every time someone borrows anything at all they are, hypothetically, "stealing" by your twisted definition of the word.
Oh, you say that you wouldn't have bought that dictionary anyway? If you really don't want it, or can't afford it, DON'T USE IT AT THE LIBRARY. That'll teach ya for stealing from Webster...
Oh, you say that commercials don't affect your buying habits anyway? Well, if you really don't have the time or patience to deal with 'em, stop watching TV.
The only difference between these examples and (unlawful) filesharing is legality, but this legality has no bearing whatsoever on their MORALITY. All of them have the potential to reduce sales, and if one of them is absolutely 100% wrong then they ALL are.
Slashdot Mirror
God can be many things (including an extremely important driving force in our lives), but as far as the nature of the universe goes, his existence introduces just as many logical problems as it solves.
Natural selection may be blind, but it is not random. I don't know why I even bother to continue at this point, because you're spouting pure drivel. So no partial feature has ever been found anywhere in the fossil record? Utter bullshit. Creationists have this concept of "half an eye" that is utterly useless to our ancestors, yet somehow magically evolves on its own. This is not how things happen. You don't find "partial" (i.e. incomplete) features. A simple sensativity to light and darkness (present in many organisms, including single-celled organisms) is a useful trait, and each stage in its evolution to a fully formed, muscle-controlled eyeball with a lense and eyelids and variable focus length and billions of cones and rods IS MORE USEFUL THAN THE PREVIOUS STAGE. There are plenty of examples of this type of thing in the fossil record. Gaps exist, but an occasional lack of evidence hardly renders the entire theory of evolution invalid, any more than the theory of gravity is invalid if you were floating in deep space.
Likewise, to demand that scientists cause large-scale evolution as proof is akin to demanding that scientists blow up a star to prove that supernovas are real. It just isn't within our means yet.
Bah, I'm done. If you possess a modicum of logic or objectivity, read Dawkin's "The Blind Watchmaker", and realize that God and science simply do not belong in the same class. Science is a way of explaning the world around us rationally and objectively. Therefore, to see science as a threat to God is to say that your own beliefs are irrational... to then attempt to justify your belief in God with science and denounce a theory that has mountains of evidence and is accepted by the vast majority of modern biologists borders on insanity.
Someone send him a free computer, and last I heard there was a rather large petition to get him included as an extra in Return of the Sith. Worth a little bit of embarassment, I'd say.
Turn them over to the authorities? Isn't that like selling coke to someone, then turning them into the authorities? Either cracking and releasing their own game is legal (and hence, downloading and playing it is legal because they, the copyright holders, are personally GIVING it to us) or it is illegal (perhaps under some twisted interpretation of the DMCA), and thus they would be just as vulnerable as the people who played it.
IP banning should be ok, but if that is what they're doing they picked the WRONG time to do it. With so many people pissed off about authentication issues, I'm sure many of them are using cracks and thinking to themselves, "This isn't wrong; I'm just trying to play the game I paid for." If these paying customers get permanently banned because of this, then Valve is shooting themselves in the foot with a rocket launcher.
There's a difference between delays due to unforseen technical issues and/or poor planning, and delays specifcally designed to target your PAYING customers.
Yeah ok, it was actually designed to prevent non-paying "customers" from playing, but is ANYONE shocked at this point that the opposite has happened? That the freeloaders can play and the honest people are inconvienced? For the life of me I can't figure out why software companies waste so much time and money on these halfassed copy protection schemes that only serve to piss off legitimate users.
Oh yeah, and your 20-minute wait is not (necesarrily) indicative of the average experience.
I've got a great new idea, even better than Amazon's revolutionary one-click shopping!
I'm going to accept money in exchange for goods or services. Anyone else who decides to copy this business model must pay me, oh, how about $699...
That's just want they want you to think!
The X-Files was a documentary.
Funny... I still back up my DVDs, and I've yet to go to jail.
...hold on a sec, a large black van just pulled in the driveway. I hope it's the pizza guy!
I have not read up on the specifics, but my reasoning is as follows:
At some point, the video must be decrypted in order for it to play. If it can be decrypted for viewing, it can be decrypted for recording. Now, maybe they'll only allow approved, closed source software to play Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, but that alone isn't enough. As soon as either standard replaces DVD, we'll see millions of eyes and minds trained on this new format. Some will want to exploit it, but some will just want to be able to play their movies on Linux. No matter how great their encryption is, no matter how hard they try to discourage reverse engineering, it only takes one flawed implementation or one source code leak.
Hardware DRM can make life much more difficult. If the HD-DVD-ROM refuses to talk to anything but PowerHD-DVD (or whatever), there are going to be problems.
But this is means even more money, even more restrictions--not just for us, but for the third-party manufacturers as well. Maybe Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are headed down this dark path, but I think (and I hope) that one of them will look up and say hey! This is costing us money and it's not making the consumers or the manufacturers happy. Provided the media companies backing them can see the light, it's a simple matter of tossing the DRM (or at least, the uncrackable DRM) out the door and bam, the format war is over. It's simple greed. They want to control how we use their products, but I think they'll settle for simply selling us those products.
Oh yeah, SACD and DVD-A might be uncracked now, but neither one has supplanted the CD yet. Once the CD is long gone, there will be a much greater interest in cracking the new format.
BUT... they might never supplant it. According to Wikipedia: [regarding SACD] "These include 80 bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disk that is only readable by a licensed SACD device."
That's BS. Moral outrage aside, I'm sure has hell not going to buy media I can't play on my computer--it has the best speakers in the house.
The DRM will not prevent good old-fashoned "insert and hit play", but it will prevent uncontrolled ripping and copying.
...for the first couple of months, you mean.
I really wonder why they even bother. Unless they include hardware DRM to disallow access to all unauthorized programs, this WILL be cracked. And either one does do such a thing, the other one will almost assuredly win the format wars.
My message to MPAA is this: Save your money. Leave it unencrypted. Let us do what we want with our movies. The VCR did not put you out of business, and neither will this.
1) It was specifically said AHEAD OF TIME (though I cannot find the link offhand) that there would be two versions, regular and extended.
2) The LOTR extended editions have so far proved to be worth the money. I could care less about the behind-the-scenes stuff, but the added scenes are long (50 additional minutes for Return of the King!) and add to the story immeasurably. I particularly liked the extended edition of the Two Towers. The scenes like the flashback with Faromir and his father and the ents at Helm's Deep are so good/important you'll wonder how they ever got cut in the first place.
I'm not saying that this guy is right, but "the ends justify the means" is NOT a logical fallacy by any stretch of the imagination.
It's not even a moral fallacy because sometimes the ends DO justify the means.
Only on slashdot could QUOTING THE ARTICLE be deemed "offtopic."
Just what the hell is wrong with telling others why you do not use a particular product or shop at a particular store?
To the grandparent, I can say only this: This is a Wal-Mart forum. If you do not want to talk about Wal-Mart here, YOU ARE FREE TO GO ELSEWHERE.
The thing is, this is a "paper braclet" that a MACHINE can read and record at a distance of several feet. Currently, it would be very hard for the to track someone even if they knew their ID, but that's just a simple matter of making or enticing RFID manufacturers into recording every unique ID they "see". Now if they want, the government can find out every time you visited your favorite retailer, gassed up your car, etc...
I think that you forgot to bold the most disturbing line--the one about "creation science."
Creationism is at best a philosophy, not a science, and to put it in the same catagory as evolutionary theory both debases the foundations of science and trivializes Christianity (both by trying to prove the unprovable, and by making the false implication that Darwinism is somehow related to atheism.)
Maybe he's, you know, discussing his views on Gmail in a discussion forum FOR Gmail?
I, for one, am glad that there are people out there willing to share their security concerns, and I don't understand it they're told to shut up because it's an optional, free service. Free or not, we have a right to know and talk about these things.
Mods take note: this is called sarcasm. Or irony. Or something.
Point is, if alcoholism is a disease then so is caffine-ism. Also, if being "addicted" to a drug like marijuana/THC (which is not physically addictive) is a disease, so is every other psychological addiction out there--eating, shopping, TV, net, etc.
This is not to imply that these "diseases", these addictions are all of the same severity. But at a fundemental level, they all work the same and it's very bad science to call some of them diseases and dismiss the others as character flaws.
Behind the pubic bone, near the urethra. Go in about 3 inches with your palm up and make a "come here" gesture with your finger.
Tempted to add some sort of joke here, but I'm shooting for "Informative" so I can get a little karma.
Dude, lay off the thesaurus for a while. I'm serious.
And yes, IAAEM (English Major.)
If a Christian says he prays to a different god, then he does. A scholarly analysis proves nothing, because mainstream Christian, Judaic, and Islamic beliefs are not based on scientific, scholarly debate.
To put it another way, you can't say that my imaginary friend is the same as your imaginary friend just because they're both loosely based on, say, Yoda. Neither friends are provable in the "real world", just as neither the Islamic nor the Christian god are provable. Their existence is entirely subjective and while that doesn't make them any less real (IMO), it does make them immune to this sort of logic.
I usually think that slashdot is a relatively openminded crowd but TROLL? For stating the exceedingly obvious fact there are more DOS games than linux games?
I can only hope that the metamods catch this...
Theft is not copyright infringment, and copyright infringment is not a moral issue. By this I mean that, BY ITSELF, copyright infringment is not an immoral act. I could burn ten thousand copies of Metallica's latest album, then burn them (i.e. with fire) in good conscience. I have caused no one any real harm whatsoever, therefore what I did was not immoral--unless you want to talk about the environmental morality of burning that much plastic. Yet I have committed ten thousand acts of copyright infringment. I don't see how anyone other than a RIAA shill could look at such a compelling example and still turn copyright infringment into a moral issue.
The only moral issue here, if ANY, is that of financial harm to RIAA. But REALIZE THAT THIS MORAL ISSUE IS SEPERATE FROM THE LEGAL ISSUE OF COPYRIGHT INFRINGMENT, and there are many similar legal, non-infringing examples of such "theft." People "steal" TV shows from advertisers by fast-forwarding through the commercials (the same goes for web content and popup blockers.) People "steal" from authors and publishers every time they visit the library. Every time someone borrows anything at all they are, hypothetically, "stealing" by your twisted definition of the word.
Oh, you say that you wouldn't have bought that dictionary anyway? If you really don't want it, or can't afford it, DON'T USE IT AT THE LIBRARY. That'll teach ya for stealing from Webster...
Oh, you say that commercials don't affect your buying habits anyway? Well, if you really don't have the time or patience to deal with 'em, stop watching TV.
The only difference between these examples and (unlawful) filesharing is legality, but this legality has no bearing whatsoever on their MORALITY. All of them have the potential to reduce sales, and if one of them is absolutely 100% wrong then they ALL are.
Let's all burn a copies of all of the songs we've "stolen" and send it to RIAA. Bam, the problem of music "theft"is solved!
Now the problem of music copyright infringment, on the other hand...