There is a huge difference between "If you want to live in the country of your birth, you must abide by my rules" versus "If you want to merge my work into your own, you must abide by my rules." I'm sorry you apparently don't get this simple concept.
These legal issues start and end with the mistaken notion that it's fair to treat a company like it was an individual under the law. The problem is that a company can't go to prison. It can only be fined money, that's pretty much it. Therefore companies take on less legal risk when they do something illegal than a person does. A person can be fined more than he owns, and can be sentenced to prison time. A company never has that happen to it.
So, we have a system where the individual takes more risk than the corporation, for the same exact activities. This has the predictable result that a corporation ends up viewing the laws as just another operating expense.
If you invest in the stock market for any reason other than wanting the companies you invest in to do well, then you're whoring the system. The attitude that stocks exist ONLY to make money is what leads to stock market crashes.
Or are you simply referring to the fact that some people take offense at some uses of the word "god"?
I take offense at attempts to deliberately engage in false equivocation fallacies, and the different definitions people use for "God" is one of those areas where this often happens. (Aside: A false equivocation fallacy is when someone uses a word that has different meanings in different contexts, and tries to come to a conclusion using that word in context X, and then apply that conclusion to something else using that word in context Y. It's easy for people to miss the fact that the context has shifted, and that therefore the speaker is actually using two different words entirely, that just happen to be spelled the same and pronounced the same, but have different definitions.)
Here's an example of a false equivocation fallacy:
-- "I don't like cars. I'm afraid of traffic. So I never ride in a car."
==== "But you rode in a train yesterday."
-- "So?"
==== "Trains have train cars. So you were lying when you said you never ride in a car."
Obviously, the problem there is that "car" has two different meanings, and the person is trying to use them interchangably.
Since I'm an atheist, and people have a lot of different definitions of God, some of which are so exceedingly fuzzy and vague that they don't mean much more than "thingy", I'm often on the receiving end of these kinds of false eqivocation fallacies. People think that if I say I don't believe in God, that this is equivilent to me saying I don't believe in (insert pretty much anything here).
Example 1: Atheists don't believe in Love, because they don't believe in God, and God is Love. (Yes, I have actually heard that one. I'm not making it up.)
Example 2: Atheists don't believe the sun exists, because some cultures worshipped the sun as a god, and atheists say they don't believe in any gods existing. Therefore atheism is illogical because it makes you disbelieve in really obvious things like the Sun. (Yes, I've heard that one too.)
founders being Christian and implementing law and practices in keeping with Christianity
If they were in keeping with Christianity, then how come it took Christians so many years to finally get around to enacting a government like that? The US constitution, in its accepted form with the 10 bill of rights amendments, was finally ratified and became the law of the land in 1791. So, what were all those Christians busy doing in the one-thousand-seven-hundred-ninety-one years since the alleged birth of Christ? Granted, the religion took time to really grow, and wasn't commonplace through western europe until centuries later, but even so, Christianity was in power throughout Europe for over a thousand years. And none of those Christians came up with a representative democracy. It was monarchies everywhere. Saying that people who were Christians were slowly being influenced to change their ways, by outside sources, seems to me a much better explanation for this than saying that Christianity had just been asleep at the wheel all that time.
I seem to recall it written somewhere that Jesus's attitude was supposed to be that the government really isn't relevant to the religion - render unto Ceaser and all that - so the notion of a government based on Christianity would seem counter-intuative.
Democracies and Republics predate Christianity, by the way. There's a reason all the government buildings in Washington DC have an archetectural style that mimics classic Greek and Roman structures. They were paying homage to where they got the seed of the idea from.
Your examples that I quoted do not seem to detract from that point, but rather indicate that there was a minority that disagreed with some of those values (or implementations thereof).
While it's true that it was a minority who felt that there must be absolutely no religious trappings in government of any kind, it's interesting to note that that minority contains the really BIG names everyone remembers: Like Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin (who, yes I realize was never really in congress).
I prefer Linux to Windows. That's proof right there that my tastes are different than the average person. I find pop music boring. I find most TV boring. When doing video games, I prefer a first-person to a third-person viewpoint. That's no longer what the market seems to want. I prefer turn-based strategy to realtime arcade^Wstrategy games, and again, that's no longer what the market seems to want. When it comes to roleplaying games, I'd rather do the tabletop pencil-and-paper variety than the video-game variety (a flesh and blood human is more able to deal with an unexpected solution to a problem than a computer program is, and so the player is more open to taking the story wherever he wants it to go in a tabletop game. Besides, there's the social aspect of gathering together with 6 to 8 friends and telling a story in concert.) All of these are not the way the majority goes.
I just find it sort of funny when the same people complain that no one's marketing stuff they want.
And I find it funny that you think you have enough information to detect that these are in fact the same people as each other.
Agreed. Although that happens more with popunders than popups - you try to click on the window to bring it to the front so you can kill it, and it turns out the entire surface area of the window was one gigantic hotspot, so you've now clicked on the link.
What you are describing is advertising - having a product, and then telling people about your product. Marketing is different. Marketting is more the other way around - deciding what product to make based on what you think people would want.
(I dislike Marketing more, not because it's a bad idea in principle, but because in practice it is populated by people with stagnant mindsets that keep making companies build products designed for yesterday's needs.)
You don't know which sites have popups until you visit them. So it is false to say that you are free to avoid any site that uses them (unless you meant avoiding all web sites altogether).
I'm a fan of directed advertising. I don't mind sites knowing my purchasing tastes if that means I don't get ads for pointless stuff I'd never buy. Ads for things I actually might like are much less annoying than wasting my time with ads that flood the market looking for those few people here and there that might be interested, of which I'm not one of them.
I think directed advertising would make consumers less annoyed (assuming it's based on accurate information and assuming you have the ability to ban categories you are not interested in), and make advertisers happier too because they know people might actually LOOK at their ad instead of immedieatly going, "oh, and ad - i'll click the 'X' button in the corner before I even look at it.
In all fairness, it's not an apt analogy because being a programmer is a choice you make, while being black isn't. That's a relevant difference when you're trying to claim you're being discriminated against. I think the best way to point out how wrong Jack is, is to point out that the people who would care about this issue, who are complaining about it, are the very people who actually understand the technology. (Who are not JUST linux users, by the way, so we shouldn't be phrasing it in those terms - someone might want to make an open DVD player for windows too).
Preventing hobbyists from working with your technology will kill your industry twenty years down the road.
The problem is that no industry has the right to dictate that reverse engineering is illegal, and that's precisely what the MPAA has done through the DMCA, and giving in to that unethical practice, by making a closed, licensed DVD player, just makes you part of the problem.
Linux users need to give up their technology that doesn't work correctly and use that which does.
P.S. I define "correctly" in this context as what is legal. So settle down cowboy.
If that's your definition of "correctly", then it was wrong to use it in conjunction with the word "technology" like you did - A technology is neither legal nor illegal. It's the way it's used.
No. That's exactly the lie the MPAA has fed you and you believed it. The MPAA disallows more than just freeloading copiers, it also disallows playing a PAYED-FOR movie as well unless it's on a playback device they like. And while the MPAA has the ethical right to define the terms of sale for their movies (yes, including such things as setting insane profit margins), they do not have the ethical right to extend that to defining the terms of sale of every single device that views that movie.
A liscensed DVD player is a closed source DVD player. It MUST BE by the terms of the NDA you have to sign to get the license. This is the problem, and this is what the interview SHOULD have been about - I despise laws that artificially prop up businesses model by making it mandatory that you have to be a customer of a company instead of doing things yourself. (It's like at tax time how if you want to fill out an electronic form there is NO WAY to just go to an IRS website where you just fill out the blanks and submit the form yourself. - instead, because of a stupid law that says the government is barred from competing with a tax law firm, you MUST do an electronic tax submission through a third-party tax preparation company, even if you have no desire to use any of their optimization programming and all you want to do is just fill out the blanks of a 1040, and hit submit.)
I think it's important to make a distinction between a definitional drift that occurs because someone uses a word a new way, versus the kind that occurs because someone's ignorant predjudices surrounding that word become a part of the definition. This happens mostly out of their ignorance of the fact that it's even possible for people not fitting their predjudice to be a part of the group the word refers to. It's especially problematic when the ones with the predjudice make up the majority of the population. For example, if "atheist" was to come to mean, by it's very definition in the dictionary, "One who hates god and refuses to see He exists", then that would be a problem.
In some cases, that very thing actually DOES happen (the definition contains an incorrect predjudice), and the point I'm trying to drive at is that it's not just a matter of someone being anal about language when they argue against that kind of usage being the norm. But those who always argue that "whatever the common usage is is automatically correct" don't realize that by doing so they are endorsing this kind of predjudice.
Groups that get maligned shouldn't have to keep inventing brand new terms for themselves every few years every time the public poisons the word they were using before.
With your examples are you simply arguing that governments change? I do not disagree. e.g. the modern German government is certainly not based on Nazism, though it once was.
The problem is with the implication that if a believes (or once believed) in X, and then goes on at some point in the future to do Y, that this means Y is founded on X. No, it doesn't mean that. If you want to open that can of worms, I could claim that slavery in the US was based on Christianity. And If I did that I'd be just as incorrect as someone who says that the principles of the US is based on Christianity, based purely on the fact that many of the people involved were Christian.
The notion that Christianity is responsible for everything in western culture is based on the failure to notice just how much Christianity has mutated over the years. I see it completely the other way around. Western culture is responsible for the way Christianity as we know it looks today. Secular things altered the religion more so than the other way around.
That's the interesting thing... it is my understanding that, perhaps until recently, religion did play a role in governmental processes (prayer, the Bible, etc.) and that the First Amendment was interpreted that no legal power was to be given to any religious authority. Of course, perhaps my impressions of US history are incomplete.
The notion goes back a really long way, but not everyone was fully behind it. For example, the first draft of Jefferson's Declaration of Independance didn't say that men are endowed by their creator with certain rights, but rather just that they were endowed with certain rights. The 'by their creator' part was added in a second draft at the request of other people. It's not from Jefferson's own preferences.
(And the idea of there being a chaplain in congress was also resisted by some founding fathers for precisely the reason that it violated the establishment clause in their minds, but those voices were not a majority, so they backed down.)
The heavier the shell, the bigger around it has to be to keep the thing lighter than air. A shell of inflexible metal is heavier than a shell of flexible stuff like fabric or mylar. Thus if you have two airships of equal lifting power, using the same kind of gas inside, if one has a fabric skin and one has rigid skin, the rigid-skinned one will take up more volume to achive the same lifting power.
And, having to push a bigger volume thing through the air means more fuel. And if instead of tethering it, you're using motors to keep the thing in place against the wind (which is likely if it has to be at a signifigant altitude), then the bigger surface area gasbag will be more affected by the wind than a smaller one, and need more fuel to just hold it still.
On another note, one thing I've often wondered is: if a lighter-than-air gas like helium can lift the shell, why not a complete lack of gas? Has anyone tried making a shell of vacuum to lift an airship with? It would require a more rigid shell, but it would generate a heck of a powerful lift.
It also helps that it's repetative. There's only so many times you can hear "I wish I was a hunter, in search of different food" and still be paying attention to the meaning. Eventually it just becomes sounds and not words.
I will defer to your opinion that Deism is incompatible (though derived from) Christianity.
A clarification: I never said Deism is derived from Christianity. I said that in the case of the founding fathers, that THEY got there through that path. That's not the same thing as saying that Deism itself is derived from Christianity. I have no idea where it got started or why. (Although I can guess as to why - it was starting to become plausable to believe that the universe behaves in a predictable way - a scientific way - but that not all the science was discovered yet. And thus, when something hard to explain is observed, the proper reaction should be to study it and try to figure out the reason behind it, rather than just chalk it up to a miracle and leave it at that. The only problem is that the origin of this system in the first place could not be explained with the system itself. In order to explain why there's a universe in the first place, they still deferred to a god existing - one that they believed designed the laws of science and intended for us to eventually discover them all, but beyond that never intervenes. (Yes, it was generally believed at the time that there could be an actual endpoint to this quest.) The notion that a god would go around doing things like talking through a burning bush, or handing stone tables to Moses, or supernaturally impregnating Mary, or resurrecting Jesus, is not compatable with this notion.
That is an interesting distinction. Is it therefore fair to say that the principles of the US is similarly based upon the principles of Christianity?
No. Are the principles of the modern German government based on Nazism? Are the principles of modern Russia based on Eastern Orthodox Christianity? Is the British Parliament based on the Divine Right of Kings? The setting up of the US was a deliberate break from the way things had been done in the past, and one of those deliberate breaks was to throw away the notion that Christianity should be the basis of all right of the government to rule over the people. That's why I get so annoyed at this revisionist attempt to claim the US was based on Christianity when it was just the opposite. The severing of religion from government was quite deliberate, and very much the whole point of the Establishment Clause. This is upheld by the very people who debated over it and ratified it, when you read their private letters to each other. If you are a religious individual, then by all means be religious. But that hat temporarily comes off when you enter the halls of government - or at least it's supposed to.
The notion that a 'god' can be something unthinking is something I've only ever heard from people who are trying to use the "Why, everyone believes in a god, even you, sir..." kind of idiotic rhetoric. The idea is that by stretching the definition to including pretty much anything somoene might hold in high esteem, they manage to make it so everyone has a "god", because everyone has *something* they hold in esteem. Thus they end up saying such idiotic things as "Money is your God", or "Science is your God". I find this tactic incredebly dishonest. People who use the word god to describe for THEMSELVES the thing they are worshipping, never apply it to these kinds of things. It's always something with a conscious stream of thought of some sort, even when it's an inanimate object like an idol, or The Sun - what makes it a god for them is the way they anthropomorphize it and attribute personality, and wants, and desires to it.
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There is a huge difference between "If you want to live in the country of your birth, you must abide by my rules" versus "If you want to merge my work into your own, you must abide by my rules." I'm sorry you apparently don't get this simple concept.
These legal issues start and end with the mistaken notion that it's fair to treat a company like it was an individual under the law. The problem is that a company can't go to prison. It can only be fined money, that's pretty much it. Therefore companies take on less legal risk when they do something illegal than a person does. A person can be fined more than he owns, and can be sentenced to prison time. A company never has that happen to it.
So, we have a system where the individual takes more risk than the corporation, for the same exact activities. This has the predictable result that a corporation ends up viewing the laws as just another operating expense.
If you invest in the stock market for any reason other than wanting the companies you invest in to do well, then you're whoring the system. The attitude that stocks exist ONLY to make money is what leads to stock market crashes.
Or are you simply referring to the fact that some people take offense at some uses of the word "god"?
I take offense at attempts to deliberately engage in false equivocation fallacies, and the different definitions people use for "God" is one of those areas where this often happens. (Aside: A false equivocation fallacy is when someone uses a word that has different meanings in different contexts, and tries to come to a conclusion using that word in context X, and then apply that conclusion to something else using that word in context Y. It's easy for people to miss the fact that the context has shifted, and that therefore the speaker is actually using two different words entirely, that just happen to be spelled the same and pronounced the same, but have different definitions.)
Here's an example of a false equivocation fallacy:
-- "I don't like cars. I'm afraid of traffic. So I never ride in a car."
==== "But you rode in a train yesterday."
-- "So?"
==== "Trains have train cars. So you were lying when you said you never ride in a car."
Obviously, the problem there is that "car" has two different meanings, and the person is trying to use them interchangably.
Since I'm an atheist, and people have a lot of different definitions of God, some of which are so exceedingly fuzzy and vague that they don't mean much more than "thingy", I'm often on the receiving end of these kinds of false eqivocation fallacies. People think that if I say I don't believe in God, that this is equivilent to me saying I don't believe in (insert pretty much anything here).
Example 1: Atheists don't believe in Love, because they don't believe in God, and God is Love. (Yes, I have actually heard that one. I'm not making it up.)
Example 2: Atheists don't believe the sun exists, because some cultures worshipped the sun as a god, and atheists say they don't believe in any gods existing. Therefore atheism is illogical because it makes you disbelieve in really obvious things like the Sun. (Yes, I've heard that one too.)
founders being Christian and implementing law and practices in keeping with Christianity
If they were in keeping with Christianity, then how come it took Christians so many years to finally get around to enacting a government like that? The US constitution, in its accepted form with the 10 bill of rights amendments, was finally ratified and became the law of the land in 1791. So, what were all those Christians busy doing in the one-thousand-seven-hundred-ninety-one years since the alleged birth of Christ? Granted, the religion took time to really grow, and wasn't commonplace through western europe until centuries later, but even so, Christianity was in power throughout Europe for over a thousand years. And none of those Christians came up with a representative democracy. It was monarchies everywhere. Saying that people who were Christians were slowly being influenced to change their ways, by outside sources, seems to me a much better explanation for this than saying that Christianity had just been asleep at the wheel all that time.
I seem to recall it written somewhere that Jesus's attitude was supposed to be that the government really isn't relevant to the religion - render unto Ceaser and all that - so the notion of a government based on Christianity would seem counter-intuative.
Democracies and Republics predate Christianity, by the way. There's a reason all the government buildings in Washington DC have an archetectural style that mimics classic Greek and Roman structures. They were paying homage to where they got the seed of the idea from.
Your examples that I quoted do not seem to detract from that point, but rather indicate that there was a minority that disagreed with some of those values (or implementations thereof).
While it's true that it was a minority who felt that there must be absolutely no religious trappings in government of any kind, it's interesting to note that that minority contains the really BIG names everyone remembers: Like Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin (who, yes I realize was never really in congress).
I prefer Linux to Windows. That's proof right there that my tastes are different than the average person. I find pop music boring. I find most TV boring. When doing video games, I prefer a first-person to a third-person viewpoint. That's no longer what the market seems to want. I prefer turn-based strategy to realtime arcade^Wstrategy games, and again, that's no longer what the market seems to want. When it comes to roleplaying games, I'd rather do the tabletop pencil-and-paper variety than the video-game variety (a flesh and blood human is more able to deal with an unexpected solution to a problem than a computer program is, and so the player is more open to taking the story wherever he wants it to go in a tabletop game. Besides, there's the social aspect of gathering together with 6 to 8 friends and telling a story in concert.) All of these are not the way the majority goes.
I just find it sort of funny when the same people complain that no one's marketing stuff they want.
And I find it funny that you think you have enough information to detect that these are in fact the same people as each other.
Since my tastes differ from the average person, some company that does good market research would be even less likely to make a product I would want.
Agreed. Although that happens more with popunders than popups - you try to click on the window to bring it to the front so you can kill it, and it turns out the entire surface area of the window was one gigantic hotspot, so you've now clicked on the link.
What you are describing is advertising - having a product, and then telling people about your product. Marketing is different. Marketting is more the other way around - deciding what product to make based on what you think people would want.
(I dislike Marketing more, not because it's a bad idea in principle, but because in practice it is populated by people with stagnant mindsets that keep making companies build products designed for yesterday's needs.)
You don't know which sites have popups until you visit them. So it is false to say that you are free to avoid any site that uses them (unless you meant avoiding all web sites altogether).
I'm a fan of directed advertising. I don't mind sites knowing my purchasing tastes if that means I don't get ads for pointless stuff I'd never buy. Ads for things I actually might like are much less annoying than wasting my time with ads that flood the market looking for those few people here and there that might be interested, of which I'm not one of them.
I think directed advertising would make consumers less annoyed (assuming it's based on accurate information and assuming you have the ability to ban categories you are not interested in), and make advertisers happier too because they know people might actually LOOK at their ad instead of immedieatly going, "oh, and ad - i'll click the 'X' button in the corner before I even look at it.
In all fairness, it's not an apt analogy because being a programmer is a choice you make, while being black isn't. That's a relevant difference when you're trying to claim you're being discriminated against. I think the best way to point out how wrong Jack is, is to point out that the people who would care about this issue, who are complaining about it, are the very people who actually understand the technology. (Who are not JUST linux users, by the way, so we shouldn't be phrasing it in those terms - someone might want to make an open DVD player for windows too).
Preventing hobbyists from working with your technology will kill your industry twenty years down the road.
The problem is that no industry has the right to dictate that reverse engineering is illegal, and that's precisely what the MPAA has done through the DMCA, and giving in to that unethical practice, by making a closed, licensed DVD player, just makes you part of the problem.
Linux users need to give up their technology that doesn't work correctly and use that which does.
P.S. I define "correctly" in this context as what is legal. So settle down cowboy.
If that's your definition of "correctly", then it was wrong to use it in conjunction with the word "technology" like you did - A technology is neither legal nor illegal. It's the way it's used.
No. That's exactly the lie the MPAA has fed you and you believed it. The MPAA disallows more than just freeloading copiers, it also disallows playing a PAYED-FOR movie as well unless it's on a playback device they like. And while the MPAA has the ethical right to define the terms of sale for their movies (yes, including such things as setting insane profit margins), they do not have the ethical right to extend that to defining the terms of sale of every single device that views that movie.
A liscensed DVD player is a closed source DVD player. It MUST BE by the terms of the NDA you have to sign to get the license. This is the problem, and this is what the interview SHOULD have been about - I despise laws that artificially prop up businesses model by making it mandatory that you have to be a customer of a company instead of doing things yourself. (It's like at tax time how if you want to fill out an electronic form there is NO WAY to just go to an IRS website where you just fill out the blanks and submit the form yourself. - instead, because of a stupid law that says the government is barred from competing with a tax law firm, you MUST do an electronic tax submission through a third-party tax preparation company, even if you have no desire to use any of their optimization programming and all you want to do is just fill out the blanks of a 1040, and hit submit.)
An example of prior art:
bash$ xset r rate 250 40
Hmm: Let's see - hold down a key for a brief while:
X
Or hold it down for a long while:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
I think it's important to make a distinction between a definitional drift that occurs because someone uses a word a new way, versus the kind that occurs because someone's ignorant predjudices surrounding that word become a part of the definition. This happens mostly out of their ignorance of the fact that it's even possible for people not fitting their predjudice to be a part of the group the word refers to. It's especially problematic when the ones with the predjudice make up the majority of the population. For example, if "atheist" was to come to mean, by it's very definition in the dictionary, "One who hates god and refuses to see He exists", then that would be a problem.
In some cases, that very thing actually DOES happen (the definition contains an incorrect predjudice), and the point I'm trying to drive at is that it's not just a matter of someone being anal about language when they argue against that kind of usage being the norm. But those who always argue that "whatever the common usage is is automatically correct" don't realize that by doing so they are endorsing this kind of predjudice.
Groups that get maligned shouldn't have to keep inventing brand new terms for themselves every few years every time the public poisons the word they were using before.
With your examples are you simply arguing that governments change? I do not disagree. e.g. the modern German government is certainly not based on Nazism, though it once was.
The problem is with the implication that if a believes (or once believed) in X, and then goes on at some point in the future to do Y, that this means Y is founded on X. No, it doesn't mean that. If you want to open that can of worms, I could claim that slavery in the US was based on Christianity. And If I did that I'd be just as incorrect as someone who says that the principles of the US is based on Christianity, based purely on the fact that many of the people involved were Christian.
The notion that Christianity is responsible for everything in western culture is based on the failure to notice just how much Christianity has mutated over the years. I see it completely the other way around. Western culture is responsible for the way Christianity as we know it looks today. Secular things altered the religion more so than the other way around.
That's the interesting thing... it is my understanding that, perhaps until recently, religion did play a role in governmental processes (prayer, the Bible, etc.) and that the First Amendment was interpreted that no legal power was to be given to any religious authority. Of course, perhaps my impressions of US history are incomplete.
The notion goes back a really long way, but not everyone was fully behind it. For example, the first draft of Jefferson's Declaration of Independance didn't say that men are endowed by their creator with certain rights, but rather just that they were endowed with certain rights. The 'by their creator' part was added in a second draft at the request of other people. It's not from Jefferson's own preferences.
(And the idea of there being a chaplain in congress was also resisted by some founding fathers for precisely the reason that it violated the establishment clause in their minds, but those voices were not a majority, so they backed down.)
Actually, both "zero" and "zeke" are equally 'slang' names for it. Officially, it was the Mitsubishi A6M.
Or was that a Zeke that crashed in cousin Zero's back yard...
The heavier the shell, the bigger around it has to be to keep the thing lighter than air. A shell of inflexible metal is heavier than a shell of flexible stuff like fabric or mylar. Thus if you have two airships of equal lifting power, using the same kind of gas inside, if one has a fabric skin and one has rigid skin, the rigid-skinned one will take up more volume to achive the same lifting power.
And, having to push a bigger volume thing through the air means more fuel. And if instead of tethering it, you're using motors to keep the thing in place against the wind (which is likely if it has to be at a signifigant altitude), then the bigger surface area gasbag will be more affected by the wind than a smaller one, and need more fuel to just hold it still.
On another note, one thing I've often wondered is: if a lighter-than-air gas like helium can lift the shell, why not a complete lack of gas? Has anyone tried making a shell of vacuum to lift an airship with? It would require a more rigid shell, but it would generate a heck of a powerful lift.
It also helps that it's repetative. There's only so many times you can hear "I wish I was a hunter, in search of different food" and still be paying attention to the meaning. Eventually it just becomes sounds and not words.
I will defer to your opinion that Deism is incompatible (though derived from) Christianity.
A clarification: I never said Deism is derived from Christianity. I said that in the case of the founding fathers, that THEY got there through that path. That's not the same thing as saying that Deism itself is derived from Christianity. I have no idea where it got started or why. (Although I can guess as to why - it was starting to become plausable to believe that the universe behaves in a predictable way - a scientific way - but that not all the science was discovered yet. And thus, when something hard to explain is observed, the proper reaction should be to study it and try to figure out the reason behind it, rather than just chalk it up to a miracle and leave it at that. The only problem is that the origin of this system in the first place could not be explained with the system itself. In order to explain why there's a universe in the first place, they still deferred to a god existing - one that they believed designed the laws of science and intended for us to eventually discover them all, but beyond that never intervenes. (Yes, it was generally believed at the time that there could be an actual endpoint to this quest.) The notion that a god would go around doing things like talking through a burning bush, or handing stone tables to Moses, or supernaturally impregnating Mary, or resurrecting Jesus, is not compatable with this notion.
That is an interesting distinction. Is it therefore fair to say that the principles of the US is similarly based upon the principles of Christianity?
No. Are the principles of the modern German government based on Nazism? Are the principles of modern Russia based on Eastern Orthodox Christianity? Is the British Parliament based on the Divine Right of Kings? The setting up of the US was a deliberate break from the way things had been done in the past, and one of those deliberate breaks was to throw away the notion that Christianity should be the basis of all right of the government to rule over the people. That's why I get so annoyed at this revisionist attempt to claim the US was based on Christianity when it was just the opposite. The severing of religion from government was quite deliberate, and very much the whole point of the Establishment Clause. This is upheld by the very people who debated over it and ratified it, when you read their private letters to each other. If you are a religious individual, then by all means be religious. But that hat temporarily comes off when you enter the halls of government - or at least it's supposed to.
The notion that a 'god' can be something unthinking is something I've only ever heard from people who are trying to use the "Why, everyone believes in a god, even you, sir..." kind of idiotic rhetoric. The idea is that by stretching the definition to including pretty much anything somoene might hold in high esteem, they manage to make it so everyone has a "god", because everyone has *something* they hold in esteem. Thus they end up saying such idiotic things as "Money is your God", or "Science is your God". I find this tactic incredebly dishonest. People who use the word god to describe for THEMSELVES the thing they are worshipping, never apply it to these kinds of things. It's always something with a conscious stream of thought of some sort, even when it's an inanimate object like an idol, or The Sun - what makes it a god for them is the way they anthropomorphize it and attribute personality, and wants, and desires to it.
I said that if the lyrics are mindless and ignorable, then it still works okay. The Run Lola Run lyrics fit that category.