Yes the MPAA and RIAA are overzealous and the changes to copyright law they pushed through are wrongheaded, but that doesn't mean it's okay to just pirate their work! People like this ruin it for the rest of us who do NOT want to deprive the movie makers of their revenue stream, but *do* want to be allowed to actually USE the mcontent we buy from them in reasonable ways. (For example, not having to pay again to just get a reliable backup of some file, or to change format from one media type to another, or to play on (gasp!) a linux machine, or to actually have a working (gasp!) fast forward at any point on the movie we want it, or to view that hard-to-find movie purchased legally while travelling in a foreign country.)
This site just adds more fuel to the fire for their freedom-sucking legislative endevours. "See!! See!! - look at the piracy that runs rampant if you don't let us have draconian control over all content! See?!"
You totally missed my point. You thought I was referring to abstaining from voting. I was referring to when you *do* vote, but your choice wasn't the one that won.
The USA needs to learn something from the other countries that picked up the democracy thing later on in history and learned from our mistakes. A system where a 45%/35%/15%/5% type of split has the exact same effect as a 100%/0%/0%/0% split is seriously broken. It encourages people *not* to vote for the candidate they really prefer and instead try to settle for the lesser of two evils they don't want.
That would have been true no matter who won, regardless of the Florida debacle, or the whole popular vote versus electorial college thing. It would have been true purely due to the number of people who voted something other than the main 2 parties. So technically you are right - the winners aren't always more than 50%. But they are typically the largest of the groups. And what I said still stands if you just change "majority" to "whater group one the election". You don't necessarily get the government you deserve. You get the government the winers of the election, whoever they are, deserve.
Ignorant people do not slice up and cart around 2000-tonne blocks of stone
Of course they do. Ignorance is not the same thing as lack of intelligence, something your tone in your post seems to imply you don't realize. Ignorance is about not knowing things. Lack of intelligence is about not knowing how to put together the knowlege you do have in order to derive some more knowlege.
...and speaking of ignorance... yes, they did
Speaking of ignorance it should have been obvious that the context was not about all the ancient peoples, but specificly those that wrote the bible's creation story. THEY obviously didn't know, since they believed an earth-centric creation story.
[Snip pointless bit where you attribute a belief to atheists w.r.t. Egypt that not all atheists necessarily have.]
Atheism [dictionary.com] is not a default condition, it is the deliberate denial of theism [dictionary.com].
Check the same dictionary and see that denial doesn't have to mean belief. It can mean refusal to believe. Which means atheism isn't any different than the stance one would have had without even knowing what this alleged god concept is. Agnosticism, using the modern definition of a 50/50 fence-sitter (rather than the classical one where it refers to those who don't think knowlege is even possible) Isn't possible without having heard of god.
You are using a model where you think of agnosticsm as the zero point, and atheism as being off in one direction while theism is in the other. It doesn't work that way. Atheism is an endpoint on that scale because it's not possible to be more atheistic than just saying "I don't believe any of the tales people have told me about god." There isn't any further you can go in that "direction".
Nice try, but I've seen that faulty dictionary argument used too many times before to count.
Consider the following statements:
"I own three elephants that each cost me $5.00."
"I can eat 25 heads of lettuce in 2 minutes."
"You owe me $5000.00, but you just don't remember what from. Pay up."
Now, were you thinking on any of those subjects before I brought them up? I suspect the amswer is no. Do you believe any of the above statements? I suspect the answer is no. So, did I just succeed in giving you three new beliefs by stating things in your presence that you don't believe? Did I just succeed in giving you extra burden of proof you didn't have before? Of course not.
Theists saying things in my presense that I don't believe doesn't give me any extra burden of proof I wouldn't have had before. From a burden of proof standpoint, there is no signifigant difference between someone who has never heard of god and someone you've just told about god who then says "I don't see any reason yet to believe you."
we both agree that there is no legal onus upon the manufacturer to prove (or even claim) to have good intentions.
I don't know how you got that impresion I agree with that when I said the exact opposite of that. Yes, there is an incentive on the manufacturer to claim the product is only meant to be used in certain legally safe ways. Even though it's wrong, it's a fact that our society now has a tendency to blame the manufacturer when a device is used to harm someone. So, yes there *is* a huge incentive to cover one's butt legally by making such statements regardless of if the statements are honest or not. The fact that a company states publicly that their product is only for ethical uses is meaningless. They would say that whether they believed it or not. The fact that they make the statement fails to shed any light on whether or not they really mean it.
Wrong, we are not the government, because WE are not in the majority. It has been said that you get the government you deserve. That's not true. What you get is the government the MAJORITY deserves. If you aren't in that majority, you are getting what someone else is deserving.
I agree. What I don't agree with is the notion that allowing companies to veto the results of government studies will improve the situation. Government studies need the same
peer-review that other science findings get. That they don't get that review is what makes them be able to get away with outrageous claims about environmentalism. But peer review does not mean court cases. It means being forced to duplicate the findings by others, under other types of conditions, before taking them as canon fact.
Do you want scientists arguing court cases? If not, then why let Lawyers determine which science findings are true and which are not?
Hubris plain and simple. You accuse me of hubris yet claim to have knowlege of god. Think on that a moment, hypocrite.
the scientific method is not synonymous w/logic. There is evidence for God - but that evidence and all the arguments that exist around it do not fit the scientific model of investigating repeatable, measurable phenomenon.
I take it you do not believe in love as it is not measured. false
You also default to the position that Abraham Lincoln never existed as we have nothing more than heresay. false
I'm getting a little annoyed but the clue stick thing bugs me a bit.
If from the start you create a 'rule' that God cannot exist so any explanation that rests upon God is invalid then you are not looking at all your options. True. What is false is your claim that this is what atheists are doing, liar. Since the rest of your post is based on that lie, I'll stop here.
#1 - I didnt' say people back then were dumb. I used the word "ignorant". It doesn't mean the same thing. They just didn't know any better to realize such things as "the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth goes around it." That doesn't make them dumb. The amount of analysis of planetary movement necessary to realize that is not trivial, and for one thing you needed a lot more data than they had the ability to collect at the time about movement of the planets. I'm not calling them dumb. I'm calling them ignorant.
Now, TODAY, anyone who still believes in a 7-day creation, TODAY I would call such a person dumb. Sorry if that is offensive, but to say otherwise I would have to lie.
Another flaw is your failure to understand tha atheism isn't a claim, nor a belief. It's the default hypothesis when evidence is lacking, and there hasn't been enough evidence yet to sway from that default hypothesis. We don't often see it as a default hypothesis because we are indoctrinated to believe in a god since early childhood, such that anything else now seems like a deviation from the norm. But that is culture speaking, not logic.
but you have to remember that before Windows 95 for Windows 3.1x users you had to install Trumpet Winsock separately to get Internet access.
I mentioned that explicitly in the post you are replying to. Did you read that far before replying? It's not like my post was exceedingly long or anything.
I agree the rise of internet popularity killed BBSes. But the phrasing used in the post was that it "came along and killed BBSes" - implying two errors, 1 - that it was a new thing that had just "come along", and 2 - that the internet itself did it, when the internet really didn't change much at all - it's just that clients for it finally became easy to install by people without technical understanding. The internet didn't change, and didn't *do* anything to kill BBSes. It was superior to BBSes all along, from when they first appeared on the scene. The demographic of who *knew* about it and could set up access to it is what changed.
Perhaps the reason I assumed you didn't know of the internet being old is that you phrased it as "And then the internet came along and killed it". That phrasing contains the (perhaps unintended) implication that the internet is something that had just recently come along. If it was your intention to blame the death of BBSes on the *social* change that more people had suddenly heard of the internet who previously hadn't, you picked a poor way to phrase it.
[...]will not cede that moral highground to anyone who comes along and claims otherwise without their providing any evidence.
But my point was that the opposite position is NOT a claim. It incurs no burden of proof to say "I don't specify what type of killing they are intended for." It does incur a burden of proof to say "I claim they are only meant for ethical types of killing." Your position is like asking an atheist to prove there's no god, when such proof isn't necessary. Atheism is the natural default stance when evidence for god is lacking. It requires no evidence of it's own, and in fact you wouldn't expect any. You can't prove something does not exist, even if it happens to be true. And no amount of evidence can support "I don't specify the type of killing the gun is used for." - because it's a stance that is actually made *stronger* by a lack of evidence either way.
That finding was misrepesented on slashdot (as usual, sigh). The finding was NOT that video games are incapable of expressing ideas, but that they aren't guaranteed to, and thus don't automatically get free speech protection. That is a very different finding from the one slashdot claimed, which is that they CANNOT get free speech protection. (Which would be damn near impossible to defend in court because you would have to define which computer software is a "game" and which isn't.)
Science facts are not subject to opinion. Take a vote 1000 years ago and it would have established as "fact" that the earth is flat. The following may sound elitist, but dammit it's true: The majority of people don't know a damn thing about science. There's a reason for that - it takes years of hard study to become good at it. And even those who do know a lot about some science are only really knowlegable in their main field, with more "layman" knowlege than average about the other fields.
How would you like it if computer issues got to be decided by public vote: "Because CPU X has more megahertz that cpu Y it must be faster!" - "But, it's not the same kind of archetecture, you can't make that comparasin!" - "Shut up, eletist tech-boy, We can see one is faster than the other - look at the numbers! You've been outvoted."
Actually, the DMCA says if you comply immediately and remove the material you can't get into trouble, but if you fight it and are found wrong, you do. That is in essence a disincentive to holding out. (If you comply and remove the material we claim is an infringement, you incur zero risk. If you ask us to prove it first, you incur some risk.) So even if you know you are in the right and think you have, say, a 85% chance of winning and being allowed to keep the material on line, you are still talking about incurring a 15% risk versus no risk at all. That is often enough to silence people.
But there is tension when the science begins w/the assertion that there is no God or supernatural.
Let me get out the clue stick: *whack*.
The position that a particular proposed thing isn't known to exist is not an assertion!
It's simply the default position you get when you can't find conclusive evidence. If you claim something exists, the burden of proof is on you. If someone doesn't think the thing exists, that isn't technically even a claim at all.
If you don't think that's the way logic works, then I invite you to pay me the $100 you owe me for the thing I did for you that you can't remember anymore. After all, you aren't going to be able to prove you *don't* owe me.
Until there is a light/dark cycle in existence, the word "Day" is totally undefined. One of the silly things about literalist creationism (the type that insists it was exactly 7 of our normal earth-days) is that before the earth exists, the measurement "day" is undefined. Before there was light, the measurement "day" is undefined. How long is a "day" when there isn't even a rotating earth or a sun yet?
Of course, as an atheist, I don't see this as evidence of creationism and evolution being compatable. I see it as evidence of the story being likely made up by ordinary humans at a time when people didn't realize what causes days and nights, and didn't realize that the length of a day is different depending on what planet you are talking about. The story was good enough to explain the unknown at the time, but later on as some of those unknowns became knowns, the errors in the explanation started to become noticable, and apologists started finding strange ways to patch around those errors.
3. The arrival of operating systems with easy-to-setup Internet access. Depsite what many people here on/. think of Microsoft, you have to admit that the inclusion of dial-up PPP access for Internet connections in Windows 95 was a major factor in the explosive growth of Internet usage.
Systems with easy to set up access predate Win95's inclusion of dial-up PPP. What MS's inclusion of that dialog did is bring the internet to those people who would keep using MS regardless of if it had good internet capability or not (and that's a very big group). So, yes, it has a lot to do with the popularity of the internet, but not quite in the way you implied.
Wanting good internet capability is what first drove me *off* of Windows and into Linux. (Back in the day when internet connectivity in Windows mean using Trumpet Winsock.)
The internet didn't begin in the '90s. It predates the BBS stuff you refer to. Saying "And then the internet came and killed it all!" makes no sense to me.
I don't have the burden of proof. I'm not making claims about putting limits on the intended purpose of the item. I'm claiming it's made to injure or kill, without qualifications as to what type of killing - ethical or otherwise. The fact that the manufacturers have to cover thier asses and claim it's only for ethical purposes makes such claims meaningless in this context. They'd say that whether it was true or not, for liability reasons.
When you claim the post was accurate you are claiming that there are no alternative or pop stations east of the mississippi river. Not in New York. Not in Boston. Not in Chicago. Not in Washington. Not in the most populous half of the country, essentially.
And if you tell me that a true communist country has yet to be seen, I will barf.
A true communist country has yet to be seen.
Here, let me get you a bucket.
And communism isn't the opposite of capitalism, so don't assume that anyone opposed to one is in favor of the other. Socialism is the opposite of capitalism, and there have been examples of that type of country, and they all sucked - for the same reason that unregulated capitalism sucks - any sufficiently gigantic organisation is no longer beholden to the people that made it big. That's true regardless of whether that organisation is one for the purpose of making money or one for the purpose of controlling a country. Both types have the same problem.
Slashdot Mirror
This site just adds more fuel to the fire for their freedom-sucking legislative endevours. "See!! See!! - look at the piracy that runs rampant if you don't let us have draconian control over all content! See?!"
The USA needs to learn something from the other countries that picked up the democracy thing later on in history and learned from our mistakes. A system where a 45%/35% /15%/5% type of split has the exact same effect as a 100%/0%/0%/0% split is seriously broken. It encourages people *not* to vote for the candidate they really prefer and instead try to settle for the lesser of two evils they don't want.
That would have been true no matter who won, regardless of the Florida debacle, or the whole popular vote versus electorial college thing. It would have been true purely due to the number of people who voted something other than the main 2 parties. So technically you are right - the winners aren't always more than 50%. But they are typically the largest of the groups. And what I said still stands if you just change "majority" to "whater group one the election". You don't necessarily get the government you deserve. You get the government the winers of the election, whoever they are, deserve.
[Snip pointless bit where you attribute a belief to atheists w.r.t. Egypt that not all atheists necessarily have.]
Check the same dictionary and see that denial doesn't have to mean belief. It can mean refusal to believe. Which means atheism isn't any different than the stance one would have had without even knowing what this alleged god concept is. Agnosticism, using the modern definition of a 50/50 fence-sitter (rather than the classical one where it refers to those who don't think knowlege is even possible) Isn't possible without having heard of god. You are using a model where you think of agnosticsm as the zero point, and atheism as being off in one direction while theism is in the other. It doesn't work that way. Atheism is an endpoint on that scale because it's not possible to be more atheistic than just saying "I don't believe any of the tales people have told me about god." There isn't any further you can go in that "direction".Nice try, but I've seen that faulty dictionary argument used too many times before to count.
Consider the following statements:
"I own three elephants that each cost me $5.00."
"I can eat 25 heads of lettuce in 2 minutes."
"You owe me $5000.00, but you just don't remember what from. Pay up."
Now, were you thinking on any of those subjects before I brought them up? I suspect the amswer is no. Do you believe any of the above statements? I suspect the answer is no. So, did I just succeed in giving you three new beliefs by stating things in your presence that you don't believe? Did I just succeed in giving you extra burden of proof you didn't have before? Of course not.
Theists saying things in my presense that I don't believe doesn't give me any extra burden of proof I wouldn't have had before. From a burden of proof standpoint, there is no signifigant difference between someone who has never heard of god and someone you've just told about god who then says "I don't see any reason yet to believe you."
I don't know how you got that impresion I agree with that when I said the exact opposite of that. Yes, there is an incentive on the manufacturer to claim the product is only meant to be used in certain legally safe ways. Even though it's wrong, it's a fact that our society now has a tendency to blame the manufacturer when a device is used to harm someone. So, yes there *is* a huge incentive to cover one's butt legally by making such statements regardless of if the statements are honest or not. The fact that a company states publicly that their product is only for ethical uses is meaningless. They would say that whether they believed it or not. The fact that they make the statement fails to shed any light on whether or not they really mean it.
Wrong, we are not the government, because WE are not in the majority. It has been said that you get the government you deserve. That's not true. What you get is the government the MAJORITY deserves. If you aren't in that majority, you are getting what someone else is deserving.
Do you want scientists arguing court cases? If not, then why let Lawyers determine which science findings are true and which are not?
You accuse me of hubris yet claim to have knowlege of god. Think on that a moment, hypocrite.
the scientific method is not synonymous w/logic. There is evidence for God - but that evidence and all the arguments that exist around it do not fit the scientific model of investigating repeatable, measurable phenomenon. I take it you do not believe in love as it is not measured.
false
You also default to the position that Abraham Lincoln never existed as we have nothing more than heresay.
false
I'm getting a little annoyed but the clue stick thing bugs me a bit. If from the start you create a 'rule' that God cannot exist so any explanation that rests upon God is invalid then you are not looking at all your options.
True. What is false is your claim that this is what atheists are doing, liar. Since the rest of your post is based on that lie, I'll stop here.
.
Now, TODAY, anyone who still believes in a 7-day creation, TODAY I would call such a person dumb. Sorry if that is offensive, but to say otherwise I would have to lie.
Another flaw is your failure to understand tha atheism isn't a claim, nor a belief. It's the default hypothesis when evidence is lacking, and there hasn't been enough evidence yet to sway from that default hypothesis. We don't often see it as a default hypothesis because we are indoctrinated to believe in a god since early childhood, such that anything else now seems like a deviation from the norm. But that is culture speaking, not logic.
but you have to remember that before Windows 95 for Windows 3.1x users you had to install Trumpet Winsock separately to get Internet access.
I mentioned that explicitly in the post you are replying to. Did you read that far before replying? It's not like my post was exceedingly long or anything.
I agree the rise of internet popularity killed BBSes. But the phrasing used in the post was that it "came along and killed BBSes" - implying two errors, 1 - that it was a new thing that had just "come along", and 2 - that the internet itself did it, when the internet really didn't change much at all - it's just that clients for it finally became easy to install by people without technical understanding. The internet didn't change, and didn't *do* anything to kill BBSes. It was superior to BBSes all along, from when they first appeared on the scene. The demographic of who *knew* about it and could set up access to it is what changed.
Perhaps the reason I assumed you didn't know of the internet being old is that you phrased it as "And then the internet came along and killed it". That phrasing contains the (perhaps unintended) implication that the internet is something that had just recently come along. If it was your intention to blame the death of BBSes on the *social* change that more people had suddenly heard of the internet who previously hadn't, you picked a poor way to phrase it.
But my point was that the opposite position is NOT a claim. It incurs no burden of proof to say "I don't specify what type of killing they are intended for." It does incur a burden of proof to say "I claim they are only meant for ethical types of killing." Your position is like asking an atheist to prove there's no god, when such proof isn't necessary. Atheism is the natural default stance when evidence for god is lacking. It requires no evidence of it's own, and in fact you wouldn't expect any. You can't prove something does not exist, even if it happens to be true. And no amount of evidence can support "I don't specify the type of killing the gun is used for." - because it's a stance that is actually made *stronger* by a lack of evidence either way.
That finding was misrepesented on slashdot (as usual, sigh). The finding was NOT that video games are incapable of expressing ideas, but that they aren't guaranteed to, and thus don't automatically get free speech protection. That is a very different finding from the one slashdot claimed, which is that they CANNOT get free speech protection. (Which would be damn near impossible to defend in court because you would have to define which computer software is a "game" and which isn't.)
How would you like it if computer issues got to be decided by public vote: "Because CPU X has more megahertz that cpu Y it must be faster!" - "But, it's not the same kind of archetecture, you can't make that comparasin!" - "Shut up, eletist tech-boy, We can see one is faster than the other - look at the numbers! You've been outvoted."
Actually, the DMCA says if you comply immediately and remove the material you can't get into trouble, but if you fight it and are found wrong, you do. That is in essence a disincentive to holding out. (If you comply and remove the material we claim is an infringement, you incur zero risk. If you ask us to prove it first, you incur some risk.) So even if you know you are in the right and think you have, say, a 85% chance of winning and being allowed to keep the material on line, you are still talking about incurring a 15% risk versus no risk at all. That is often enough to silence people.
The position that a particular proposed thing isn't known to exist is not an assertion! It's simply the default position you get when you can't find conclusive evidence. If you claim something exists, the burden of proof is on you. If someone doesn't think the thing exists, that isn't technically even a claim at all.
If you don't think that's the way logic works, then I invite you to pay me the $100 you owe me for the thing I did for you that you can't remember anymore. After all, you aren't going to be able to prove you *don't* owe me.
Until there is a light/dark cycle in existence, the word "Day" is totally undefined. One of the silly things about literalist creationism (the type that insists it was exactly 7 of our normal earth-days) is that before the earth exists, the measurement "day" is undefined. Before there was light, the measurement "day" is undefined. How long is a "day" when there isn't even a rotating earth or a sun yet?
Of course, as an atheist, I don't see this as evidence of creationism and evolution being compatable. I see it as evidence of the story being likely made up by ordinary humans at a time when people didn't realize what causes days and nights, and didn't realize that the length of a day is different depending on what planet you are talking about. The story was good enough to explain the unknown at the time, but later on as some of those unknowns became knowns, the errors in the explanation started to become noticable, and apologists started finding strange ways to patch around those errors.
Systems with easy to set up access predate Win95's inclusion of dial-up PPP. What MS's inclusion of that dialog did is bring the internet to those people who would keep using MS regardless of if it had good internet capability or not (and that's a very big group). So, yes, it has a lot to do with the popularity of the internet, but not quite in the way you implied.
Wanting good internet capability is what first drove me *off* of Windows and into Linux. (Back in the day when internet connectivity in Windows mean using Trumpet Winsock.)
The internet didn't begin in the '90s. It predates the BBS stuff you refer to. Saying "And then the internet came and killed it all!" makes no sense to me.
I don't have the burden of proof. I'm not making claims about putting limits on the intended purpose of the item. I'm claiming it's made to injure or kill, without qualifications as to what type of killing - ethical or otherwise. The fact that the manufacturers have to cover thier asses and claim it's only for ethical purposes makes such claims meaningless in this context. They'd say that whether it was true or not, for liability reasons.
Your premise that the purpose of a gun is only for ethical behaviour remains unproven.
When you claim the post was accurate you are claiming that there are no alternative or pop stations east of the mississippi river. Not in New York. Not in Boston. Not in Chicago. Not in Washington. Not in the most populous half of the country, essentially.
And communism isn't the opposite of capitalism, so don't assume that anyone opposed to one is in favor of the other. Socialism is the opposite of capitalism, and there have been examples of that type of country, and they all sucked - for the same reason that unregulated capitalism sucks - any sufficiently gigantic organisation is no longer beholden to the people that made it big. That's true regardless of whether that organisation is one for the purpose of making money or one for the purpose of controlling a country. Both types have the same problem.