Google has a default monopoly on all searching in the mac market?
That's just silly. Google owns neither Apple nor Safari. So no. That Apple made this choice is Apple's decision.
If "Bob's PC World" chose only to sell windows pc's does that somehow show microsoft has an OS monopoly? No. Microsoft had no hand in deciding what "Bob's PC World" does.
Some third party decided their product was the best and went ahead with that. Google has no final say in what Safari or Firefox uses. They have to win based on the quality of their product and what people want.
Given that no third party browser I'm aware of defaults to msn it seems fair to assume that were IE developed by some 3rd party they would also choose google as the default. It's by far the most used search engine and is perceived by everyone to be the best. So obviously they are using a different system to decide who should be the default. Unlike Firefox they do not have to compete with other browsers to get installed. They will always be installed. Their choice of defaults is basically immune to what people think, you have to buy it either way. They are interested in increasing their marketshare at the expense of all else.
This is textbook monopoly expansion. They used windows to make IE big. Now they can use IE to spread into whatever else they want.
Microsoft controls the OS, browser, and search engine that will be the default on almost every PC shipped. Google cannot even compete in the search engine on a default installation for a PC because their competitor owns all the other pieces as well.
If Microsoft were so inclined they could go out and attempt to court Firefox to make them the default search engine. Since most of us consider MSN to be an inferior search engine they probably would loose based on a 3rd parties perceived best choice. Most Firefox users are using google as their search engine. In this case they are going with the provider that is considered the best based on the merits of the product and what the users are requesting. IE is unfairly excluding Google from competition to be the default not based on any merit.
This is textbook how Microsoft has managed to run several other competitor out of their respected markets. Once the competitors are gone the quality starts to drop and/or the price starts to rise. Look at IE. Once they won the browser wars they basically stopped doing anything with the browser. All advances in browsers since IE took over have come from others. Do you really want Microsoft leveraging their products in this way to run Google out of the market?
Microsoft was the underdog when office came out and when IE got started. It would be silly to assume Google cannot be taken out. On the contrary Microsoft has gotten pretty good at such things.
Did you see the iraq war protest episode on south park?
"the great thing about this country is our ability to say one thing and do another. this way we can go to war, but make it look like we don't want to."
I was thinking the same thing. This way they get to have their cake and eat it too.
It is kind of hard to tell, but they suggest the list price is always closer to $30. But if you look at those that aren't, then go look up the regular dvd price, they seem to be about $10 higher.
I grabbed "last samurai" because it has the biggest mark-off on the page you showed me (34%), so should be a really fair test subject.
recommended retail: $28.99
amazon price: $18.99
regular dvd price: $9.99
I'm willing to bet your average retailer will be closer to that recommended retail price too. They could not give those high-def audio formats away and still they kept the prices much higher than regular cd's, what would lead you to believe this is going to be different?
When I first read this article i had a similar first thought. Vista is 2 1/2 years behind and shipping with almost none of the promised features, BUT we made time to write some new tools to bug people who own the software we're working feverishly to replace anyway.
Mind you this doesn't disable or break anything. It just pesters them.
One does wonder what that else was on that list of needs-patching.
I'm betting both will burn. What format were all those high-def audio discs they tried to release? I don't even remember the names. Cd's were a big upgrade in features and quality from casettes. Just like dvd's were for vhs.
Like the high-def audio disc formats though this is a marginal upgrade. They won't be smart about it, and they will try to charge everyone an arm and a leg for all the new media. Joe Shmoe will see great new movie X for 2 prices (dvd and high-def). Dvd will be cheaper so he will just go with that.
it's not defection that you are seeing in your stats. it's that the numbers are lying to begin with. just because i'm a registered democrat doesn't mean i viewed the world the same as kerry. as a democrat you have an inherent weakness that you have such a wide base you have to please, where as a republican has a pretty solid set of core values one needs to court. for many democrats kerry had nothing for them that bush didn't.
it's because the only common denominator among all democrats is that they aren't republican. even when democrats control the houses it's pretty rough because you have such a huge range of values. the only way to rise to the top is to be in the middle and court everyone, which makes a platform of "core values" very hard to make work.
you can only think of 1 party spin-off? i could name dozens...
look at hillary clinton. regardless of what anyone says/thinks about her, the woman is very socialist. personally i'm not sure we should make health care the business of the federal government. many democrats feel the same way, yet many others think this is the ultimate utopia. so immediatly it looks like we have this huge schism in the democratic party. the schism is/was always there. the only thing socially i think i have on common with hillary is that we don't think the federal government should be in the business of telling me who i can sleep with. we're in the same party not because our views are so similar, but because we aren't conservative/republican.
given the option of her or a more conservative republican for president i'm not sure which i'd vote for off the top of my head. it's not because of security or whatever you want to call it, it's because hillary is almost as far to the left of my values as republicans are to the right. yet she's in my party.
the thing that really has me scratching my head is the loyalty in the republican party. in the last decade they have made a complete 180 on all the things that used to be considered core values. now they are the big spenders and government can't get big enough or in enough people's lives. do the smaller government proponents really think the federal government needs to get in the act of what constitutes marriage? do small government proponents really sit at home wondering why we don't give more tax dollars to religious charities? is the federal government really the place to tackle public education policies and reform?
i was just pointing out that in terms of voting and agenda the republicans basically put up a unified front (regardless of why this is). like always the devil is in the details, but at the moment they are enjoying so much power because they are the largest unified group.
registered democrats in this country way outnumber the registered republicans. yet you watch politics in this country and you would think republican's were a much larger group than they are, and it's because democrat isn't so much a party as it is "everyone who isn't republican". so in reality the democratic party isn't as large as it seems either because it contains many people with very different beliefs who's only common ground is that they aren't conservative/republican.
hard to build a strong party and unified message when there really isn't much common ground to base it on.
imo the democratic party would become much stronger if some splitting was allowed to occur.
it's mostly because "republican" is better defined. basically there is a vary narrow set of ideologies, and everyone in the party (for the most part) shares them. everyone else just gets lumped into "democrat". so inside the democratic party you actually have a vary wide range of values and agendas, and people who probably shouldn't be lumped together polictically anyway (yay for 2 party system).
the reason democrats can't put up a unified face is because they aren't a unified party.
i think you missed the point she was trying to make. it is not in anyones best interest to have the prosecution also be the judge, which is what is going on. no judge would mandate you drop out of college to pay a debt immediately. something would be worked out.
if she feels she would loose anyway (i agree she seems to be admitting guilt here) she's trying to find some middle ground. the prosecution is holding the threat of how much this is all going to cost to go to court over her head to effectively make itself judge.
6months to pay off near 4 grand for a student is ridiculous. most students don't have that kind of money (around $600 a month) extra just lying around.
their stance is $4k now or over 6 months. she simply does not have that kind of money. going to court is not going to suddently make it appear. so who is this helping? getting there will end up costing her even more money if she has to go through a judge. she's admitting guilt and asking for a settlement that is possible for her to meet.
what's so wrong with that?
are you seriously advocating that she should drop out of college for this?
I was more asking why you felt our being "invaded" by one country gave us the ok to go invade a third country. i fail to see how some extremists who blew up our towers somehow makes attacking randomly those we don't like for other reasons now ok.
the US has done and armed some pretty vial people/things over the last century, so it's hardly fair to go pointing fingers at all sadam's doings we don't like and use those as evidence he should have been tossed. Using that process we could easily make the argument that we should be tossed. We directly supported and trained Osama at one time after all, and he was directly related to the attack. he's using the methods we enouraged when he was fighting russia. so if you really want to play the blame game you don't need to go across the ocean. your government taught this dog his tricks, not sadam.
Last i heard there still wasn't a direct connection between sadam and osama. so i'm back at asking how 9/11 has anything to do with Iraq.
and yes, I count actions by foreign nationals resulting in thousands of deaths and colleratal damage as an act of invasion, regardless of their method of entry.
when did iraq send foreign nationals into the US resulting in thousands of deaths? has there been an attack i didn't hear about?
You just said earlier you doubt even he genuinely believes in this. If that's the case then he isn't promoting his view at all. He found a weird view of christianity and ran with it to make a story. You still haven't told me how you would like the book labeled to indicate to these drooling masses who are effected by the book that this isn't real.
Feel free to think of christians as nuts, but if you intend to live as a neighbour to said christians, please be a good neighbour, and stand up for them when unreasonable criticism is made of them
i'm trying to be, but you guys just aren't being reasonable. you aren't mad because you're being treated differently than other groups, you are mad because we aren't treating you differently. the world is awash with unreasonable criticism.
i am an atheist. do you have any idea how much ragging i get on a day-to-day basis about that? in my view there is no evidence that there is a god. criticism of my view based on some scrolls written thousands of years ago (to impart moral values) by someone who knew very little about the actual world, and has then been translated, changed, and bastardised beyong recognition to the bible today is cited as evidence? anywhere but religion you'd get laughed right out the door if that was all you had.
when some nut releases a book showing that evolution hasn't proven every crack of the process yet, therefore proving his unproven "belief" to be true, and labels it as non-fiction, do you hear the atheist community screaming? in fact the only reason we responded at all was because these unreasonable people kept pushing the envelope until they wanted to bring their religious ignorance into our education process.
we have christians who genuinely believe we should throw away centuries of empirical evidence for evolution because they "believe" something different. that is completely not reasonable. when the amercian ministers and catholic church issued press releases saying that trying to combat the teaching of evolution was silly, i had nothing but respect for them. they understand that evolution is not an assault on their beliefs, it's just a word we use to describe the natural processes we have witnessed. we are busy trying to understand and quantify the natural world. screaming "god did it" accomplishes nothing. i won't even get started on abortion and stem cells.
the point is i've read lots of books that were critical of my values. my reaction to them usually is to do more reading and find out more facts about the issue if i'm genuinely bothered by what i'm reading or ignorant enough that i can't discredit it. this is the process that many modern christians simply refuse to partake in. you expect the rest of the world to bend over backwards to accomodate you because you refuse to engage your brains on anything having to do with faith. worse you have a history of violence against those that do.
i am being reasonable. if you don't like brown's book, throw it away and never read it again. don't read anything else he does or any other books that touch on this topic. if there's no money in it people won't write them any more. leave the rest of us that do enjoy it alone. your right is to choose for yourself, not for me. when the word "fiction" is printed on the book you can claim anything you want because the word is supposed to tell the reader it's not real.
if i want to take every word of brown's book and hold it as gospel truth that is my right. it doesn't have to influence you either way. your faith should be yours. it is unreasonable to expect him to change a book he created that is wildly successful because some don't like it. it is equally unreasonable to expect special treatment from the author because it has to do with your religion and you don't like what it had to say.
2. Knowingly allowing, accepting, and encouraging reproduction of individuals, who...shouldn't (No, I don't mean Bush). There's some bad genes out there. Some that shouldn't be passed on. While we're at a point where we can curtail some of this through prescreening parents for likely inherited traits, we continue to become more accepting of people with, well, bad genes. Aren't we effectively letting people piss into the pool?
sometimes the weirdest difference in genes has an unforseen, hugely positive benefit (think sickle cell in afrians).
i'm almost as wary of this idea as you are the idea of unclean genes. if we get to start choosing our genes it will probably have a significant decrease in the variance of the gene pool. which could be disasterous.
we've already discovered weird spin-offs that seem to make one resistant to aids. if we were custom ordering genes this trait probably never would have been found or created. diseases that could wipe out the entire human race quickly becomes a huge possibility because all our bodies would essentially be the same, and evolving virii would quickly learn to exploit our unchanging state.
evolution would essentially stop. we would find a "most desirable" set of genes and everyone would try to get those. drift would no longer be possible.
think of it like computers. selective bread people would become like windows with 90+% of the "human pool". suddenly it's very easy to quickly and effectively infect a huge portion of the pool before it has time to respond. this war has waged since life began. i would argue the variance of genes you see is indicative that there is no such things as a perfect gene set. the fact is you don't know what unforseen challeneges will arise in the future. some "undesirable" gene today may be the key to surviving some event tomorrow.
evolution is very good at what it does. obviously the unclean genes you are so worried about aren't that big a deal because as a species we are still here and kicking. evolution has had life going for billions of years now, and humans have problems building a car that can last a decade.
i can tell you which i'd prefer to trust with this problem.
this is mostly caused by our lifestyle, not our genetics. as are many of our "correctable defects". realize that on an evolutionary level there really hasn't been enough time since medievil eurpoe and today to make a difference in this type of thing (and by your logic people from medival europe until glasses became common should all have had poor eye sight). reading and staring at computer screens weakens the eyes. things like diabeties are actually caused/exasberated by our diets in the first world. we're exposed to chemicals on a daily basis that have never existed in the world previously that can cause birth defects for other non-genetic reasons. things like missing appendages from birth are usually the result of some other circumstance (umbilical cord wrapped wrong for example) than any kind of gene defect that could be passed to a child.
this was the mistake people made pre-evolution theory. they assumed things you physically observed about an individual/species was indicative of the genes they carried. it often is not. being born with a particular ailment does not mean that your genes are in any way responsible.
in the end not enough time has passed to make much of a difference in the gene pool today. evolution responds to active stimuli only; things like your appendix prove that. you still have an appendix because there isn't any active stimuli providing an advantage to loosing it. so it just lingers. you wouldn't evolve weaker eyes unless there was some active stimuli to do so. evolving away because it just doesn't matter anymore takes a very very very very very long time. your appendix and wisdom teeth prove that.
funny enough the only advantage third worlders may have today (and make them "superior") is the one whites had when they took over most of the world. we are exposed to fewer and fewer diseases today. on a micro scale that is a much bigger deal as exposure to disease hardens your immune system on an individual basis. if you can pass that disease to non -hardened individuals you have a huge advantage. but because of our medicine they probably would never be able to really exploit it.
i actually saw one. and i've tested it myself. i just installed win2k3 on a machine, hooked it up to a t1 and left it for a week (monitoring the traffic). lots of people found it but no one i saw ever got in.
win2k was a completely different story. i did this test with that and people were in by the end of the day.
I'm only saying that some authors pretend to believe things they more or less disbelieve themselves.
if you are acknowledging this i don't see what there is left to discuss. he wrote a piece of fiction and is under no requirement real or imagined to defend the contents of the fiction book to you or anyone else, be they christian or whatever.
Brown has dodged criticism on an entirely different scale, and got away with it, because most of his critics are christians.
and that should tell you something. the rest of the world doesn't care because it's in a book of fiction. only the christians seem to be having a difficult time with the concept that the contents of a book aren't always real.
i don't understand how you can be the critic of the contents of a fiction book (other than whether or not it entertained).
that global warming is a conspiracy in his case.
and where is the indignation at this? i read this book and found it very entertaining. i even agree with some of the points he brings up in this book, but i sure didn't get those beliefs from reading this book. in all his books crichton clearly has a fairly anti-science we-don't-know-what-we're-doing attitude. you don't hear the science community all up in a roar b/c michael crichton wrote this or that. i've never even heard of an eco-group getting bothered, and those are the nuts i'd expect it from.
and i'm not sure i've ever heard a serious argument about the reality of a clancy novel. the guy spins a pretty good yarn, and because we all find him entertaining we suspend disbelief for some things in order to enjoy the novel. i don't hear yelling from the muslim community that clancy is destroying their public image.
it's a work of fiction and he has no obligation to respond to anything you may say about it.
i'm more interested in why you care about this so much? i've read many many books, and i read this one and threw it in the closet along with the others. i didn't particularly enjoy it and so it was out of mind pretty quickly. why is everyone so stuck on this particular work of fiction?
the only reason i can see is because it tries to bring a flashlight to the otherwise completely ignorant masses who just swallow whatever their church tells them out of blind ignorance/lazyness. this book only would really challenge you if you were so ignorant of the facts that you couldn't tell the truth from the fiction, and had a difficult time using your brain to understand this wasn't real. i still fail to see why brown has any responsibility to that at all. if you can't write works of fiction without worrying about offending some crack-pots somewhere than nothing would ever get written (we can include the bible in this).
christians claim the bible is real. they cherry pick out the parts that science has shown is completely and verifiably wrong and say we can't focus on those to judge the whole book (after of course threatening to kill people over the centuries who dare try to figure out the truth). we let them have their little game, and quietly smirk behind their backs. so leave the fiction alone. if it makes christians feel better let's tell them to cherry pick out the parts they don't like. they have lots of experience with that.
1. Promoting a particular new-age idea, which the author may half-heartedly believe in, but mostly he believes in...
if he only half-heartedly believes it, isn't it more likely he just went with a premise that would be entertaining, then some super conspiracy to convert us all to a way of thinking he doesn't even necessarily believe himself?
2. Generating controversy and
yes. heaven forbid the author of a book tries to engage our brains, even in fiction. i'm not even contending that this might or might not be true, i'm saying who cares? he released it in a work of fiction which should signal to everyone to take these "claims" with a grain of salt. other than that i think authors who manage to connect with you and get in your head and make you think are the most enjoyable. i enjoy a good novel when i'm forced to think about the issues brought up.
3. PROFIT!
i'm betting we're getting to the real meat of the matter, which is why this argument is so silly. points 1 and 2 probably only existed to create 3. he wrote a book of fiction, based on cherry picked facts, to create a reaction in the reader, therefore creating a more enjoyable book, therefore selling more. his secret agenda here was to sell you a book and make money.
is making money now a questionable motive?
Seeing the Da vinci code as merely a work of fiction is to ignore the long history of polemical books dodging criticism by defining themselves as "fiction" or "speculation".
assuming for the moment that brown considers the claims he makes important plot points to get the reader submerged in his world. and is compeltely content with the book the way it is. he's sold several million copies now, and made a small fortune, therefore we can assume he got that right. so since he's the author and this is his work you cannot change it's contents (or cover). it's his right to put this in the format he believes will sell the most copies. how would you like him to label the book?
i still don't really get what the big deal is on either side. i don't get why it's such a high seller. i've read magazine articles i thought were better. but i also don't get why people are so bothered by it. it's clearly just a bad work of fiction why are we all taking it so seriously?
conversely i've seen some truly offensive things printed in anti-evolution books, and they were not marked fiction.
You would have a point, if christians tried to censor the book. But that's not what the vast majority is trying to do, most who are "up in arms" are only trying to bring their own arguments forward.
Well without the "facts" he uses it would have been a very boring book. So it's not really a fair position to start with. You are taking it seriously, while Dan Brown stuck with the facts that made for a good story. Then you call him names and accuse him of "ignoring the facts". He was ignoring the other parts, they just didn't make for a good conspiracy theory novel.
With all the fiction books that get released each year it still seems this one is getting a response only because it deals with christianity. In a fiction book i can claim the earth is flat, that i'm a god, or that sugar is a tool of the devil. that's what fiction is. to take it this seriously is to miss the point of a good fiction novel. to hold someone accountable for the claims made in a work of fiction is stupid. we wouldn't have any of the fun that can come from completely made up worlds.
if you want to spread your "truth" about these issues that's fine. but attacking a work of fiction and it's author is hardly the best way to go about it. it results in conversations like this one. instead of talking about the topic, now we're discussing why you feel the need to attack works of fiction...
yes. some tv show i saw a while ago. the evil near-death atheist had denounced god and was fading away. miraculously by the end of the episode he had found god again, and was happy and of course healed from his otherwise incurable ailments. it was blatant propoganda, and it didn't change my views on anything. because it's fiction.
i'm going to quote what i said to another poster on this topic:
i'm just saying that i picked the book up in the fiction section. therefore right away i know brown isn't an authoratative source for this material. i knew what i was getting into. of course he has his opinions, everyone does. if i pick up a fiction book about the loch ness monster and the author spends the first chapter of the book telling me how true he thinks it is, isn't going to seriuosly change my views on how real the loch ness monster is. it's in a fiction book, i'd take it with a grain of salt that the loch ness monster exists.
it's his opinion and he's entitled to that. the only reason i can see why everyone is up in arms about this is because it deals with christianity. which is an especially dangerous precident to me. if your understanding of something you believe whole heartedly in is based on such absolute ignorance of the topic that a fictional book and disenting opinion leaves you seriously bothered, we have a whole different set of problems.
if you whole heartedly believe in christ and this book honestly brought question to that belief, then i would suggest those people go do research of their own to come to their own conclusions. if brown's work of fiction and bizarre beliefs actually results in smarter more educated people on matters of their faith, i fail to see what the downside is.
many of the people complaining about this think there is a serious debate about whether evolution occurs. because they are blisfully unaware of all the evidence that is there to support it. education can only be a good thing.
people are allowed to hold strange views on every topic that exists. and write both fiction and non about their opinions. why is christianity supposed to be given some special treatment?
no thanks. i read this book only because i had heard so much about it. i actually found the story boring, and didn't think it had been written very well.
I said he doesn't admit that ALL his work is fiction
i'm just saying that i picked the book up in the fiction section. therefore right away i know brown isn't an authoratative source for this material. i knew what i was getting into. of course he has his opinions, everyone does. if i pick up a fiction book about the loch ness monster and the author spends the first chapter of the book telling me how true he thinks it is, isn't going to seriuosly change my views on how real the loch ness monster is. it's in a fiction book, i'd take it with a grain of salt that the loch ness monster exists.
it's his opinion and he's entitled to that. the only reason i can see why everyone is up in arms about this is because it deals with christianity. which is an especially dangerous precident to me. if your understanding of something you believe whole heartedly in is based on such absolute ignorance of the topic that a fictional book and disenting opinion leaves you seriously bothered, we have a whole different set of problems.
if you whole heartedly believe in christ and this book honestly brought question to that belief, then i would suggest those people go do research of their own to come to their own conclusions. if brown's work of fiction and bizarre beliefs actually results in smarter more educated people on matters of their faith, i fail to see what the downside is.
people are allowed to hold strange views on every topic that exists. and write both fiction and non about their opinions. why is christianity supposed to be given some special treatment?
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That's just silly. Google owns neither Apple nor Safari. So no. That Apple made this choice is Apple's decision.
If "Bob's PC World" chose only to sell windows pc's does that somehow show microsoft has an OS monopoly? No. Microsoft had no hand in deciding what "Bob's PC World" does.
Some third party decided their product was the best and went ahead with that. Google has no final say in what Safari or Firefox uses. They have to win based on the quality of their product and what people want.
Given that no third party browser I'm aware of defaults to msn it seems fair to assume that were IE developed by some 3rd party they would also choose google as the default. It's by far the most used search engine and is perceived by everyone to be the best. So obviously they are using a different system to decide who should be the default. Unlike Firefox they do not have to compete with other browsers to get installed. They will always be installed. Their choice of defaults is basically immune to what people think, you have to buy it either way. They are interested in increasing their marketshare at the expense of all else.
This is textbook monopoly expansion. They used windows to make IE big. Now they can use IE to spread into whatever else they want.
If Microsoft were so inclined they could go out and attempt to court Firefox to make them the default search engine. Since most of us consider MSN to be an inferior search engine they probably would loose based on a 3rd parties perceived best choice. Most Firefox users are using google as their search engine. In this case they are going with the provider that is considered the best based on the merits of the product and what the users are requesting. IE is unfairly excluding Google from competition to be the default not based on any merit.
This is textbook how Microsoft has managed to run several other competitor out of their respected markets. Once the competitors are gone the quality starts to drop and/or the price starts to rise. Look at IE. Once they won the browser wars they basically stopped doing anything with the browser. All advances in browsers since IE took over have come from others. Do you really want Microsoft leveraging their products in this way to run Google out of the market?
Microsoft was the underdog when office came out and when IE got started. It would be silly to assume Google cannot be taken out. On the contrary Microsoft has gotten pretty good at such things.
"the great thing about this country is our ability to say one thing and do another. this way we can go to war, but make it look like we don't want to."
I was thinking the same thing. This way they get to have their cake and eat it too.
It is kind of hard to tell, but they suggest the list price is always closer to $30. But if you look at those that aren't, then go look up the regular dvd price, they seem to be about $10 higher.
I grabbed "last samurai" because it has the biggest mark-off on the page you showed me (34%), so should be a really fair test subject.
recommended retail: $28.99
amazon price: $18.99
regular dvd price: $9.99
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000E5KJDO/ref=am b_link_1119432_/102-0089251-1421717?n=130
I'm willing to bet your average retailer will be closer to that recommended retail price too. They could not give those high-def audio formats away and still they kept the prices much higher than regular cd's, what would lead you to believe this is going to be different?
Mind you this doesn't disable or break anything. It just pesters them.
One does wonder what that else was on that list of needs-patching.
now that would be funny. need to write a virus who's sole purpose is to propogate and change the windows key. pure genius.
Like the high-def audio disc formats though this is a marginal upgrade. They won't be smart about it, and they will try to charge everyone an arm and a leg for all the new media. Joe Shmoe will see great new movie X for 2 prices (dvd and high-def). Dvd will be cheaper so he will just go with that.
That is my prediction.
it's because the only common denominator among all democrats is that they aren't republican. even when democrats control the houses it's pretty rough because you have such a huge range of values. the only way to rise to the top is to be in the middle and court everyone, which makes a platform of "core values" very hard to make work.
you can only think of 1 party spin-off? i could name dozens...
look at hillary clinton. regardless of what anyone says/thinks about her, the woman is very socialist. personally i'm not sure we should make health care the business of the federal government. many democrats feel the same way, yet many others think this is the ultimate utopia. so immediatly it looks like we have this huge schism in the democratic party. the schism is/was always there. the only thing socially i think i have on common with hillary is that we don't think the federal government should be in the business of telling me who i can sleep with. we're in the same party not because our views are so similar, but because we aren't conservative/republican.
given the option of her or a more conservative republican for president i'm not sure which i'd vote for off the top of my head. it's not because of security or whatever you want to call it, it's because hillary is almost as far to the left of my values as republicans are to the right. yet she's in my party.
the thing that really has me scratching my head is the loyalty in the republican party. in the last decade they have made a complete 180 on all the things that used to be considered core values. now they are the big spenders and government can't get big enough or in enough people's lives. do the smaller government proponents really think the federal government needs to get in the act of what constitutes marriage? do small government proponents really sit at home wondering why we don't give more tax dollars to religious charities? is the federal government really the place to tackle public education policies and reform?
registered democrats in this country way outnumber the registered republicans. yet you watch politics in this country and you would think republican's were a much larger group than they are, and it's because democrat isn't so much a party as it is "everyone who isn't republican". so in reality the democratic party isn't as large as it seems either because it contains many people with very different beliefs who's only common ground is that they aren't conservative/republican.
hard to build a strong party and unified message when there really isn't much common ground to base it on.
imo the democratic party would become much stronger if some splitting was allowed to occur.
the reason democrats can't put up a unified face is because they aren't a unified party.
if she feels she would loose anyway (i agree she seems to be admitting guilt here) she's trying to find some middle ground. the prosecution is holding the threat of how much this is all going to cost to go to court over her head to effectively make itself judge.
6months to pay off near 4 grand for a student is ridiculous. most students don't have that kind of money (around $600 a month) extra just lying around.
their stance is $4k now or over 6 months. she simply does not have that kind of money. going to court is not going to suddently make it appear. so who is this helping? getting there will end up costing her even more money if she has to go through a judge. she's admitting guilt and asking for a settlement that is possible for her to meet.
what's so wrong with that?
are you seriously advocating that she should drop out of college for this?
the US has done and armed some pretty vial people/things over the last century, so it's hardly fair to go pointing fingers at all sadam's doings we don't like and use those as evidence he should have been tossed. Using that process we could easily make the argument that we should be tossed. We directly supported and trained Osama at one time after all, and he was directly related to the attack. he's using the methods we enouraged when he was fighting russia. so if you really want to play the blame game you don't need to go across the ocean. your government taught this dog his tricks, not sadam.
Last i heard there still wasn't a direct connection between sadam and osama. so i'm back at asking how 9/11 has anything to do with Iraq.
when did iraq send foreign nationals into the US resulting in thousands of deaths? has there been an attack i didn't hear about?
Feel free to think of christians as nuts, but if you intend to live as a neighbour to said christians, please be a good neighbour, and stand up for them when unreasonable criticism is made of them
i'm trying to be, but you guys just aren't being reasonable. you aren't mad because you're being treated differently than other groups, you are mad because we aren't treating you differently. the world is awash with unreasonable criticism.
i am an atheist. do you have any idea how much ragging i get on a day-to-day basis about that? in my view there is no evidence that there is a god. criticism of my view based on some scrolls written thousands of years ago (to impart moral values) by someone who knew very little about the actual world, and has then been translated, changed, and bastardised beyong recognition to the bible today is cited as evidence? anywhere but religion you'd get laughed right out the door if that was all you had.
when some nut releases a book showing that evolution hasn't proven every crack of the process yet, therefore proving his unproven "belief" to be true, and labels it as non-fiction, do you hear the atheist community screaming? in fact the only reason we responded at all was because these unreasonable people kept pushing the envelope until they wanted to bring their religious ignorance into our education process.
we have christians who genuinely believe we should throw away centuries of empirical evidence for evolution because they "believe" something different. that is completely not reasonable. when the amercian ministers and catholic church issued press releases saying that trying to combat the teaching of evolution was silly, i had nothing but respect for them. they understand that evolution is not an assault on their beliefs, it's just a word we use to describe the natural processes we have witnessed. we are busy trying to understand and quantify the natural world. screaming "god did it" accomplishes nothing. i won't even get started on abortion and stem cells.
the point is i've read lots of books that were critical of my values. my reaction to them usually is to do more reading and find out more facts about the issue if i'm genuinely bothered by what i'm reading or ignorant enough that i can't discredit it. this is the process that many modern christians simply refuse to partake in. you expect the rest of the world to bend over backwards to accomodate you because you refuse to engage your brains on anything having to do with faith. worse you have a history of violence against those that do.
i am being reasonable. if you don't like brown's book, throw it away and never read it again. don't read anything else he does or any other books that touch on this topic. if there's no money in it people won't write them any more. leave the rest of us that do enjoy it alone. your right is to choose for yourself, not for me. when the word "fiction" is printed on the book you can claim anything you want because the word is supposed to tell the reader it's not real.
if i want to take every word of brown's book and hold it as gospel truth that is my right. it doesn't have to influence you either way. your faith should be yours. it is unreasonable to expect him to change a book he created that is wildly successful because some don't like it. it is equally unreasonable to expect special treatment from the author because it has to do with your religion and you don't like what it had to say.
sometimes the weirdest difference in genes has an unforseen, hugely positive benefit (think sickle cell in afrians).
i'm almost as wary of this idea as you are the idea of unclean genes. if we get to start choosing our genes it will probably have a significant decrease in the variance of the gene pool. which could be disasterous.
we've already discovered weird spin-offs that seem to make one resistant to aids. if we were custom ordering genes this trait probably never would have been found or created. diseases that could wipe out the entire human race quickly becomes a huge possibility because all our bodies would essentially be the same, and evolving virii would quickly learn to exploit our unchanging state.
evolution would essentially stop. we would find a "most desirable" set of genes and everyone would try to get those. drift would no longer be possible.
think of it like computers. selective bread people would become like windows with 90+% of the "human pool". suddenly it's very easy to quickly and effectively infect a huge portion of the pool before it has time to respond. this war has waged since life began. i would argue the variance of genes you see is indicative that there is no such things as a perfect gene set. the fact is you don't know what unforseen challeneges will arise in the future. some "undesirable" gene today may be the key to surviving some event tomorrow.
evolution is very good at what it does. obviously the unclean genes you are so worried about aren't that big a deal because as a species we are still here and kicking. evolution has had life going for billions of years now, and humans have problems building a car that can last a decade.
i can tell you which i'd prefer to trust with this problem.
coke just squirted out of my nose. touche!
this is mostly caused by our lifestyle, not our genetics. as are many of our "correctable defects". realize that on an evolutionary level there really hasn't been enough time since medievil eurpoe and today to make a difference in this type of thing (and by your logic people from medival europe until glasses became common should all have had poor eye sight). reading and staring at computer screens weakens the eyes. things like diabeties are actually caused/exasberated by our diets in the first world. we're exposed to chemicals on a daily basis that have never existed in the world previously that can cause birth defects for other non-genetic reasons. things like missing appendages from birth are usually the result of some other circumstance (umbilical cord wrapped wrong for example) than any kind of gene defect that could be passed to a child.
this was the mistake people made pre-evolution theory. they assumed things you physically observed about an individual/species was indicative of the genes they carried. it often is not. being born with a particular ailment does not mean that your genes are in any way responsible.
in the end not enough time has passed to make much of a difference in the gene pool today. evolution responds to active stimuli only; things like your appendix prove that. you still have an appendix because there isn't any active stimuli providing an advantage to loosing it. so it just lingers. you wouldn't evolve weaker eyes unless there was some active stimuli to do so. evolving away because it just doesn't matter anymore takes a very very very very very long time. your appendix and wisdom teeth prove that.
funny enough the only advantage third worlders may have today (and make them "superior") is the one whites had when they took over most of the world. we are exposed to fewer and fewer diseases today. on a micro scale that is a much bigger deal as exposure to disease hardens your immune system on an individual basis. if you can pass that disease to non -hardened individuals you have a huge advantage. but because of our medicine they probably would never be able to really exploit it.
win2k was a completely different story. i did this test with that and people were in by the end of the day.
if you are acknowledging this i don't see what there is left to discuss. he wrote a piece of fiction and is under no requirement real or imagined to defend the contents of the fiction book to you or anyone else, be they christian or whatever.
Brown has dodged criticism on an entirely different scale, and got away with it, because most of his critics are christians.
and that should tell you something. the rest of the world doesn't care because it's in a book of fiction. only the christians seem to be having a difficult time with the concept that the contents of a book aren't always real.
i don't understand how you can be the critic of the contents of a fiction book (other than whether or not it entertained).
that global warming is a conspiracy in his case.
and where is the indignation at this? i read this book and found it very entertaining. i even agree with some of the points he brings up in this book, but i sure didn't get those beliefs from reading this book. in all his books crichton clearly has a fairly anti-science we-don't-know-what-we're-doing attitude. you don't hear the science community all up in a roar b/c michael crichton wrote this or that. i've never even heard of an eco-group getting bothered, and those are the nuts i'd expect it from.
and i'm not sure i've ever heard a serious argument about the reality of a clancy novel. the guy spins a pretty good yarn, and because we all find him entertaining we suspend disbelief for some things in order to enjoy the novel. i don't hear yelling from the muslim community that clancy is destroying their public image.
it's a work of fiction and he has no obligation to respond to anything you may say about it.
i'm more interested in why you care about this so much? i've read many many books, and i read this one and threw it in the closet along with the others. i didn't particularly enjoy it and so it was out of mind pretty quickly. why is everyone so stuck on this particular work of fiction?
the only reason i can see is because it tries to bring a flashlight to the otherwise completely ignorant masses who just swallow whatever their church tells them out of blind ignorance/lazyness. this book only would really challenge you if you were so ignorant of the facts that you couldn't tell the truth from the fiction, and had a difficult time using your brain to understand this wasn't real. i still fail to see why brown has any responsibility to that at all. if you can't write works of fiction without worrying about offending some crack-pots somewhere than nothing would ever get written (we can include the bible in this).
christians claim the bible is real. they cherry pick out the parts that science has shown is completely and verifiably wrong and say we can't focus on those to judge the whole book (after of course threatening to kill people over the centuries who dare try to figure out the truth). we let them have their little game, and quietly smirk behind their backs. so leave the fiction alone. if it makes christians feel better let's tell them to cherry pick out the parts they don't like. they have lots of experience with that.
1. Promoting a particular new-age idea, which the author may half-heartedly believe in, but mostly he believes in...
if he only half-heartedly believes it, isn't it more likely he just went with a premise that would be entertaining, then some super conspiracy to convert us all to a way of thinking he doesn't even necessarily believe himself?
2. Generating controversy and
yes. heaven forbid the author of a book tries to engage our brains, even in fiction. i'm not even contending that this might or might not be true, i'm saying who cares? he released it in a work of fiction which should signal to everyone to take these "claims" with a grain of salt. other than that i think authors who manage to connect with you and get in your head and make you think are the most enjoyable. i enjoy a good novel when i'm forced to think about the issues brought up.
3. PROFIT!
i'm betting we're getting to the real meat of the matter, which is why this argument is so silly. points 1 and 2 probably only existed to create 3. he wrote a book of fiction, based on cherry picked facts, to create a reaction in the reader, therefore creating a more enjoyable book, therefore selling more. his secret agenda here was to sell you a book and make money.
is making money now a questionable motive?
Seeing the Da vinci code as merely a work of fiction is to ignore the long history of polemical books dodging criticism by defining themselves as "fiction" or "speculation".
assuming for the moment that brown considers the claims he makes important plot points to get the reader submerged in his world. and is compeltely content with the book the way it is. he's sold several million copies now, and made a small fortune, therefore we can assume he got that right. so since he's the author and this is his work you cannot change it's contents (or cover). it's his right to put this in the format he believes will sell the most copies. how would you like him to label the book?
conversely i've seen some truly offensive things printed in anti-evolution books, and they were not marked fiction.
Well without the "facts" he uses it would have been a very boring book. So it's not really a fair position to start with. You are taking it seriously, while Dan Brown stuck with the facts that made for a good story. Then you call him names and accuse him of "ignoring the facts". He was ignoring the other parts, they just didn't make for a good conspiracy theory novel.
With all the fiction books that get released each year it still seems this one is getting a response only because it deals with christianity. In a fiction book i can claim the earth is flat, that i'm a god, or that sugar is a tool of the devil. that's what fiction is. to take it this seriously is to miss the point of a good fiction novel. to hold someone accountable for the claims made in a work of fiction is stupid. we wouldn't have any of the fun that can come from completely made up worlds.
if you want to spread your "truth" about these issues that's fine. but attacking a work of fiction and it's author is hardly the best way to go about it. it results in conversations like this one. instead of talking about the topic, now we're discussing why you feel the need to attack works of fiction...
i'm going to quote what i said to another poster on this topic:
i'm just saying that i picked the book up in the fiction section. therefore right away i know brown isn't an authoratative source for this material. i knew what i was getting into. of course he has his opinions, everyone does. if i pick up a fiction book about the loch ness monster and the author spends the first chapter of the book telling me how true he thinks it is, isn't going to seriuosly change my views on how real the loch ness monster is. it's in a fiction book, i'd take it with a grain of salt that the loch ness monster exists.
it's his opinion and he's entitled to that. the only reason i can see why everyone is up in arms about this is because it deals with christianity. which is an especially dangerous precident to me. if your understanding of something you believe whole heartedly in is based on such absolute ignorance of the topic that a fictional book and disenting opinion leaves you seriously bothered, we have a whole different set of problems.
if you whole heartedly believe in christ and this book honestly brought question to that belief, then i would suggest those people go do research of their own to come to their own conclusions. if brown's work of fiction and bizarre beliefs actually results in smarter more educated people on matters of their faith, i fail to see what the downside is.
many of the people complaining about this think there is a serious debate about whether evolution occurs. because they are blisfully unaware of all the evidence that is there to support it. education can only be a good thing.
people are allowed to hold strange views on every topic that exists. and write both fiction and non about their opinions. why is christianity supposed to be given some special treatment?
no thanks. i read this book only because i had heard so much about it. i actually found the story boring, and didn't think it had been written very well.
I said he doesn't admit that ALL his work is fiction
i'm just saying that i picked the book up in the fiction section. therefore right away i know brown isn't an authoratative source for this material. i knew what i was getting into. of course he has his opinions, everyone does. if i pick up a fiction book about the loch ness monster and the author spends the first chapter of the book telling me how true he thinks it is, isn't going to seriuosly change my views on how real the loch ness monster is. it's in a fiction book, i'd take it with a grain of salt that the loch ness monster exists.
it's his opinion and he's entitled to that. the only reason i can see why everyone is up in arms about this is because it deals with christianity. which is an especially dangerous precident to me. if your understanding of something you believe whole heartedly in is based on such absolute ignorance of the topic that a fictional book and disenting opinion leaves you seriously bothered, we have a whole different set of problems.
if you whole heartedly believe in christ and this book honestly brought question to that belief, then i would suggest those people go do research of their own to come to their own conclusions. if brown's work of fiction and bizarre beliefs actually results in smarter more educated people on matters of their faith, i fail to see what the downside is.
people are allowed to hold strange views on every topic that exists. and write both fiction and non about their opinions. why is christianity supposed to be given some special treatment?