Believe me, she does not want to go to court. First off, she's probably guilty.
Possibly. But the question is, can you prove it in a court of law with lawfully obtained evidence?
There are plenty on guilty mob bosses and criminals out there who are probably guilty, but we live in a society that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt in order for someone to be convicted. And the methods used to obtain that proof cannot themselves be unlawful.
How can the RIAA prove this student downloaded the files? Do they have this evidence? Has the student's ISP given it to them? Was this done in a lawful manner? Do they have evidence of the files residing on the students computer? Was this evidence obtained from the students computer in a lawful manner? Does the RIAA know for a fact that the files it believes were illegal copies were in fact illegal copies of songs to which it has copyright?
The fact is, if it goes to court, and the RIAA presents its evidence, there's a good chance that they'll face bigger charges than the student.
If public broadcasting did not exist, would the Vacuum for unbiased news be filled by private industry, Yes I believe it would.
You'd be wrong. Very wrong. Look at every other news medium. What dominates? The Lowest Common Denominator.
Rupert Murdoch understands that he who wins the race to the bottom, wins the media war. Most people will eagerly devour celebrity gossip, page three girls, sports news, jingoistic propaganda and biased news. The rational, responsible journalists who work for the likes of the broadsheets or bbc news simply cannot, ever compete with headlines like "GOTCHA". It can't be done.
And even if one headline goes over the top and arouses public revultion, like say "Bonkers Bruno...", the public will easily be lured back with another lurid sex scandel frontpage.
Left entirely to private industry, the news media would degenerate into the information ages version of the medieval catholic church. A hysterical, backward, reactionary, jingoistic and largely self serving monopoly would steer public opinion in any direction it so chose.
Take a look at the tone of news media in the US, and then take a look at the media in the UK. Bottom line; the BBC existance has kept the bar from being lowered to rock bottom. Without a professional, impartial, responsible public news outlet, prime times news quickly becomes sensationalist, biased tripe with a horrifically inappropriate sound track edited into stories, all followed by the sports news.
The power of a simple statement by the presenter along the lines of: "Hi, You're listening to $SHOW, brought to you with $COMPANY, makers of $QUALITY_PRODUCT", is seriously underestimated. Do advertisers really think full blown ads interest me.
Personal story. I've tried listening to a few american podcasts lately. Some of them had ads. The first time the ads came on, I laughed myself silly. How these ridiculous, melodramatic, usually rather cheap and overacted ads sell anything is beyond me. I used to think the ads in GTA were an extreme joke. In fact they're quite close to what radio ads in America are actually like.
Bottom line. Five minutes of innane advertising sells close to nothing. Three seconds of a well placed company name, in the presenters voice will accomplish more than any commercial break. The ads are just random noise. The presenters voice is part of the show you're currently absorbed in. If he says Coca-Cola, you're going to pick up that more than if an overexaggerated voice actor in an advertisement you're probably ignoring anyway says it.
No hurry though - if he's gone fifty-four years without grasping the concepts of Entropy or Ideal Gas Laws, he'll probably go his whole life.
There's nothing to grasp about entropy. Simply saying something won't work because of a fairly loose theoetical framework is unwise. Before Watt invented the steam engine, everyone thought that there was no way of designing an engine that could use linear momentum to generate angular momentum.
Saying an engine design won't work because of entropy is more or less a similar argument. Entropy is simply technical constrait an engine or solonoid must overcome to become useful.
You see, the names of the players are in fact interrogative pronouns. So when the manager answers the questions giving the players names, he uses a noun that makes the sentence appear to be a question. Moreover, the "apparent" question appears to be a prompt for the the peanut vendor to clarify his original question, leading the vendor to restate the question, which begins the cycles again.
This is humorous because the vendors attempts to clarify and reason an answer out of the manager leads only to more succinct answers from the manager, which in fact, sound exactly like curt questions.
I was able to see this movie last year with fan-made subtitles, and while the movie itself was pretty damn good visually, story-wise, the dialogue left quite a bit to be desired. So I am curious as to how the official translation will compare to the fan made one.
More than likely, very poorly.
Than Fansub was unparalleled. I've rarely seen something translated so well in such a short space of time. No engrish, no errors, just the love of FFVII freaks giving their gift to all of FFVII Fandom.
The "offical" translation will likely be a cold, sterile affair written by someone who has never even played FFVII. I'm keeping the Fansub for when I finally mux the DVD Rip into an mkv.
When people say you can't fight big corporations, it is only because these corporations have taken the law that is supposed to protect our rights and instead made it into a preferential treatment law.
Essentially open source works because Open Source style companies don't play by the rules that rig the game in favour of the big company encumbant. If you try to beat Oracle by selling a proprietry database, you'll crash and burn, and on the off chance you begin to succeed, Oracle will use its embedded position and vast resources to either crush you underfoot, or just buy you out.
With open source, you're not selling a big hunk of enterprise database. You're selling a nice neat package of, say, MySQL support. No licencing costs, no multicore bull, none of the regular software industry bullshit that managers hate. Just the service. You even give the customer the option to walk away, and the fear of that will keep you competative enough that they'll most likely stick to you like glue.
Meanwhile Oracle walks around looking for custom, and has to drag their whole hulking outfit along with them. How much does Oracle even cost these days? What, ten times the yearly cost of what some professional MySQL based support will cost? Give that choice to 90% of SME owners and see which they choose.
It goes for everything else. Webservers, email servers, DNS servers, Office software and, slowly but surely, desktop OSes. Software is a service, not a product. Customers are going to wake up one day and realise this, and when they do, closed source vendors had better get competative fast or die trying.
This is an unnecessary law. If you make a contract to trade with a party, put in the agreement that you want your information to be private and you want them to notify you of any breach of that agreement.
Wait a second. Why does a company require an express instruction not to sell my data, but can do as it pleases with my data without any approval implied or explicit?
Is it implied that if I do business with a company that every detail of our transaction is forever available for that company to; use, sell, trade, exchange or barter, as it pleases, with any other company or entity that it so chooses, now and for all of time?
Surely, common sense would tell us that this is not implied, and that in fact, it is the exact opposite that is implied in the absence of express contract. Namely, if it is not an expressly agreed upon matter, the paticulars of my dealings with that company are to remain, forever, a private matter between myself and that company.
And if companies choose to abuse their customer's trust by making private dealings public, then it's clear that legislation is needed.
My son's medical information was on some backup tapes stolen from the back of a car from a different healthcare organization....Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
Any business that allows it backup tapes to be ferried around in the back of a car doesn't deserve to be in business.
Alternately you could argue that you don't trust any company, and would want them to undergo expensive and painful audits - and that you'd be happy as a consumer to pay for that...
You mean there are people out there that actually trust, private companies?!!
Private companies are the most untrustworthy entities on planet earth. They exist for one reason and one reason only, making money by whatever means necessary. If your "trust" in them stands in the way, they'll gladly walk all over it. Nay, eagerly. At least Mob bosses and pimps have some kind of reputation to keep together. Private companies have no such scruples.
One should also note that there are much more illegal information in some of EU countries than kiddie prn: - possession of pirated software/music/movies is illegal in some countries - political/historical discussions like contesting the accepted extent of WWII holocaust -...
Or revealing government abuses covered by the myriad of Offical Secrets Acts that litter the continent.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have freenet. I'm only saying that his claim about it not having any effect on child abuse is bullshit.
Are you sure? Can you show evidence that greater access to child pornography leads to and increase in actual child abuse? Will more children be abused if more existing images are simply copied?
As an analogy, and quite a good one, will more music be written if people download it en masse over freenet?
I can't face the idea of CP on my HD, even if I don't know it's CP. Hence no freenet for me. The buck stops here.
Regardless of the amount of material belonging to democracy movements in totalitarian regimes that resides on the same mentioned HD?
Encrypted fragments of child porn may or may not travel through my freenet node. To be frank, I don't care. I'm not "facilitating" its transfer any more than the transferers ISP or electricity company.
FreeNet is a force. How that force is used, good or bad, is up to people. By joining Freenet or its like, you simply add raw resources to a force that can be used for good or bad, just like and electricity company, or indeed, every ISP on the planet.
It's better that 100 perverts get access to some twisted jpegs, than one person struggling against tyranny be told to shut up and learn to love the boot.
We will suffer for sleep walking to a state where unelected civil servants have the power to snoop on us without any real oversight. This will be abused by these civil servants for their own personal ends.
Personally I think the situation will be less like Big Brother, and more so like Brazil (the movie). A dystopian world where bureaucracy is king, civil servants have enormous unchecked power, civil rights are non existant, but a place where people, on the whole, simply accept the situation, as it is not yet so opressive as to warrent revolution.
Let's just be clear. You're not religious. You have probably never seriously studied religion (accept those anti-religion fun-sites on the internet). You have probably never taken college-level courses in the philosophy of religion. In basically every way that matters, you are more or less completely ignorant of what religion is. I can think of no one less-qualified than you to tell the general public what religion is in "its purest essence".
Ignorant of what? Ignorant of the fact that people believe utterly ridiculous, unsubstanciated things and then try to force their folly upon others aroud them? Ignorant of the fact that time and again the forces of conservative religious dogma have, time and again, lashed out at science and the march of human progress? Ignorant of the fact that millions live in thrall to a few clerics who wield enormous power?
Your entire post seems to paint me out as some kind of grey suited philistine, all because I resent the fact that I exists as a second class citizen in a world where any belief system, no matter how ridiculous and baseless, takes legal and social prescendence over any modern enlightened values or outlooks.
I admire philosophy. I admire art, poetry, prose, beauty, mystery, debate, every humanites subject under the sun. I admire those who would debate the mysteries which science has not yet delved, or may never be able to delve.
But I draw the line when people leave behind reason, rationality, tolerance, humanity and every other value of the Enlightenment, and descend into dogma, believing outlandish tales and holding them above every value of rational thinking, and them hefting these beliefs, many of which are fundamentally opposed to out free society, on everyone and everything around them.
Where's my freedom from religion? Why should I have to suffer the institutionalised nonsense I see about me everyday? Why should some have the right to ride roughshod over the rule of law, yet if I so much as try to object, I'm the villian? Why should young children be made to suffer the wrongs of religion hoisted on them? Why should religious canon and dogma be codified into law? Why should religion be privilaged in this way? What good does it serve, except to calm the bleating cries of those already under its nepenthine grip?
The more I have thought about it, the more they look similar too me. In mathematics, I have been made to believe the wildest things, but not without a reason. Yeah, kinda similar.
They are not similar at all. As you say, mathematics gives valid reason for accepting that X is true. If one were to delve into the proofs, one could attempt to falsify them.
Everything in mathematics, every single fact, can ultimately be traced back to a few simple axioms. It is only these very reasonable truths that need be accepted, and only in the mathematical framework they define. Having accepted these, all the rest falls under, "thus it may be shown that", as they say.
Religion does not give any valid reasons for accepting that X is true. It lays down truths by dictat, not by proof or persuasion. Conjectures are based on lemmas heaped on assumptions resting on foundations of nothing. Religious texts regularly contradict themselves, have glaring errors, logical fallicies, predict nothing useful, etc, etc. Nothing can be subjected to falsification. It's not even wrong.
Science and religion are two completely different things. Polar opposites on a spectrum of human thought.
Isn't that how you build faith? (Oh, I _think_ "faith" is the right word, at least.) We believe in the axioms because we haven't failed us before, even though we haven't yet seen if they worked the _next_ time.
No, that is how you build confidence, by continuously attempting to falsify the axiom, and failing. "But will it really add up to...? Oh it does"
The axioms of mathematics are certainly not anything akin to a religious belief. If they were, Euclids fifth's axiom would be an edict, and Lobachevsky would be remembered as one of the greatest heretics to have ever lived, and all his works put to the torch. As it is, mathematics is not a belief system. It is a science.
Ah, come on. That definitely isn't the case for most people.
Mosty people join a religion for a false sense of security. Most of those preaching religion are there to be in a position of power over their relgious underlings.
As to the sexual gratification part, it's well know that nearly all cult leaders engage in sexual abuse of their followers, and clerics in major religions frequently abuse their positions in this way.
here are two main points: 1 - You can be devoutly religious and also logical/rational/scientific.
No you can't. A man cannot have two masters. You cannot accept the scientific method and yet continue to believe in ridiculous things. If you do, your worth as a scientist is in serious question. Are you really probing, questioning, investigating, hypothesising; or are you simply regurgitating dogma accepted on blind faith, in much the same was as you do religiously.
Those nutjobs are a SUBSET of religious people. A proper subset, if you want to get technical.
Those nutjobs are religion distilled into its purest essence. They are the logical outcome of a system that is flawed to its very foundations. You cannot indoctrinate people into such absurd beliefs without producing a siignificant number of mentally damaged people. Hence, the ID theorists.
Sorry, but as for a proof, you wouldn't get away with that. And also, possibly a bit off topic.. Any strict mathematical proof is based on the assumption that the axioms we use are correct. We choose to put our faith in those because they seem to work. We tried and they held. We tasted and they were good. Without trying or tasting we wouldn't know.
The definition of the operator + which maps two numbers to a resulting number is such that 2+2=4.
This itself is based off the axioms that govern the manipulation of numbers. Numbers are mathematical constructs, products of the human mind. They obey whatever rules we set for them. As such 2+2=4 in the mathematical framework we create, which incidentally is internally consistant.
If you ask, does 2+2=4 when applied to anything, not just numbers, the answer is clearly no. One could always find some concept, object or operation in which the "addition" of objects did not obey standard mathematical rules. For example, 2*infinity plus 2*infinity is not equal to infinity.
Obviously, one can also not guarantee that objects or concepts for which addition is known to be valid will apply in all region of space, or for all time. For example, will addition hold in the event horizon of a black hole? Or under your shoe?
However, to say that we place "faith" in the axioms is a fallacy. We accept the axioms to be true, but do not do so blindly. In fact, it takes some time to convince a child that two plus two really will equal four, and it requires much effort. The axioms of mathematics are proved to use, albiet in a manner outside of the mathematical framework. We are convined of their validity by sound argument, not by fantastic mythologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me, she does not want to go to court. First off, she's probably guilty.
Possibly. But the question is, can you prove it in a court of law with lawfully obtained evidence?
There are plenty on guilty mob bosses and criminals out there who are probably guilty, but we live in a society that demands proof beyond reasonable doubt in order for someone to be convicted. And the methods used to obtain that proof cannot themselves be unlawful.
How can the RIAA prove this student downloaded the files? Do they have this evidence? Has the student's ISP given it to them? Was this done in a lawful manner? Do they have evidence of the files residing on the students computer? Was this evidence obtained from the students computer in a lawful manner? Does the RIAA know for a fact that the files it believes were illegal copies were in fact illegal copies of songs to which it has copyright?
The fact is, if it goes to court, and the RIAA presents its evidence, there's a good chance that they'll face bigger charges than the student.
I also nominate myself for the Award for Post with the Most Uses of the word "Pirate." ....in a serious Slashdot discussion.
*WOP!!!*
If public broadcasting did not exist, would the Vacuum for unbiased news be filled by private industry, Yes I believe it would.
You'd be wrong. Very wrong. Look at every other news medium. What dominates? The Lowest Common Denominator.
Rupert Murdoch understands that he who wins the race to the bottom, wins the media war. Most people will eagerly devour celebrity gossip, page three girls, sports news, jingoistic propaganda and biased news. The rational, responsible journalists who work for the likes of the broadsheets or bbc news simply cannot, ever compete with headlines like "GOTCHA". It can't be done.
And even if one headline goes over the top and arouses public revultion, like say "Bonkers Bruno...", the public will easily be lured back with another lurid sex scandel frontpage.
Left entirely to private industry, the news media would degenerate into the information ages version of the medieval catholic church. A hysterical, backward, reactionary, jingoistic and largely self serving monopoly would steer public opinion in any direction it so chose.
Take a look at the tone of news media in the US, and then take a look at the media in the UK. Bottom line; the BBC existance has kept the bar from being lowered to rock bottom. Without a professional, impartial, responsible public news outlet, prime times news quickly becomes sensationalist, biased tripe with a horrifically inappropriate sound track edited into stories, all followed by the sports news.
The power of a simple statement by the presenter along the lines of: "Hi, You're listening to $SHOW, brought to you with $COMPANY, makers of $QUALITY_PRODUCT", is seriously underestimated. Do advertisers really think full blown ads interest me.
Personal story. I've tried listening to a few american podcasts lately. Some of them had ads. The first time the ads came on, I laughed myself silly. How these ridiculous, melodramatic, usually rather cheap and overacted ads sell anything is beyond me. I used to think the ads in GTA were an extreme joke. In fact they're quite close to what radio ads in America are actually like.
Bottom line. Five minutes of innane advertising sells close to nothing. Three seconds of a well placed company name, in the presenters voice will accomplish more than any commercial break. The ads are just random noise. The presenters voice is part of the show you're currently absorbed in. If he says Coca-Cola, you're going to pick up that more than if an overexaggerated voice actor in an advertisement you're probably ignoring anyway says it.
You're trying to make a scientific argument about something based off an entertainment TV show?
Can you say Star Trek?
No hurry though - if he's gone fifty-four years without grasping the concepts of Entropy or Ideal Gas Laws, he'll probably go his whole life.
There's nothing to grasp about entropy. Simply saying something won't work because of a fairly loose theoetical framework is unwise. Before Watt invented the steam engine, everyone thought that there was no way of designing an engine that could use linear momentum to generate angular momentum.
Saying an engine design won't work because of entropy is more or less a similar argument. Entropy is simply technical constrait an engine or solonoid must overcome to become useful.
s/hack/grok/g
Better get that cortex thickened up son.
You see, the names of the players are in fact interrogative pronouns. So when the manager answers the questions giving the players names, he uses a noun that makes the sentence appear to be a question. Moreover, the "apparent" question appears to be a prompt for the the peanut vendor to clarify his original question, leading the vendor to restate the question, which begins the cycles again.
This is humorous because the vendors attempts to clarify and reason an answer out of the manager leads only to more succinct answers from the manager, which in fact, sound exactly like curt questions.
Don't be ridiculous!
Clearly a Ruby on Rails based AJAX solution with realtime GUI synergy is what's required here.
I was able to see this movie last year with fan-made subtitles, and while the movie itself was pretty damn good visually, story-wise, the dialogue left quite a bit to be desired. So I am curious as to how the official translation will compare to the fan made one.
More than likely, very poorly.
Than Fansub was unparalleled. I've rarely seen something translated so well in such a short space of time. No engrish, no errors, just the love of FFVII freaks giving their gift to all of FFVII Fandom.
The "offical" translation will likely be a cold, sterile affair written by someone who has never even played FFVII. I'm keeping the Fansub for when I finally mux the DVD Rip into an mkv.
When people say you can't fight big corporations, it is only because these corporations have taken the law that is supposed to protect our rights and instead made it into a preferential treatment law.
Essentially open source works because Open Source style companies don't play by the rules that rig the game in favour of the big company encumbant. If you try to beat Oracle by selling a proprietry database, you'll crash and burn, and on the off chance you begin to succeed, Oracle will use its embedded position and vast resources to either crush you underfoot, or just buy you out.
With open source, you're not selling a big hunk of enterprise database. You're selling a nice neat package of, say, MySQL support. No licencing costs, no multicore bull, none of the regular software industry bullshit that managers hate. Just the service. You even give the customer the option to walk away, and the fear of that will keep you competative enough that they'll most likely stick to you like glue.
Meanwhile Oracle walks around looking for custom, and has to drag their whole hulking outfit along with them. How much does Oracle even cost these days? What, ten times the yearly cost of what some professional MySQL based support will cost? Give that choice to 90% of SME owners and see which they choose.
It goes for everything else. Webservers, email servers, DNS servers, Office software and, slowly but surely, desktop OSes. Software is a service, not a product. Customers are going to wake up one day and realise this, and when they do, closed source vendors had better get competative fast or die trying.
This is an unnecessary law. If you make a contract to trade with a party, put in the agreement that you want your information to be private and you want them to notify you of any breach of that agreement.
Wait a second. Why does a company require an express instruction not to sell my data, but can do as it pleases with my data without any approval implied or explicit?
Is it implied that if I do business with a company that every detail of our transaction is forever available for that company to; use, sell, trade, exchange or barter, as it pleases, with any other company or entity that it so chooses, now and for all of time?
Surely, common sense would tell us that this is not implied, and that in fact, it is the exact opposite that is implied in the absence of express contract. Namely, if it is not an expressly agreed upon matter, the paticulars of my dealings with that company are to remain, forever, a private matter between myself and that company.
And if companies choose to abuse their customer's trust by making private dealings public, then it's clear that legislation is needed.
My son's medical information was on some backup tapes stolen from the back of a car from a different healthcare organization....Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
Any business that allows it backup tapes to be ferried around in the back of a car doesn't deserve to be in business.
Alternately you could argue that you don't trust any company, and would want them to undergo expensive and painful audits - and that you'd be happy as a consumer to pay for that...
You mean there are people out there that actually trust, private companies?!!
Private companies are the most untrustworthy entities on planet earth. They exist for one reason and one reason only, making money by whatever means necessary. If your "trust" in them stands in the way, they'll gladly walk all over it. Nay, eagerly. At least Mob bosses and pimps have some kind of reputation to keep together. Private companies have no such scruples.
One should also note that there are much more illegal information in some of EU countries than kiddie prn: ...
- possession of pirated software/music/movies is illegal in some countries
- political/historical discussions like contesting the accepted extent of WWII holocaust
-
Or revealing government abuses covered by the myriad of Offical Secrets Acts that litter the continent.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have freenet. I'm only saying that his claim about it not having any effect on child abuse is bullshit.
Are you sure? Can you show evidence that greater access to child pornography leads to and increase in actual child abuse? Will more children be abused if more existing images are simply copied?
As an analogy, and quite a good one, will more music be written if people download it en masse over freenet?
I can't face the idea of CP on my HD, even if I don't know it's CP. Hence no freenet for me. The buck stops here.
Regardless of the amount of material belonging to democracy movements in totalitarian regimes that resides on the same mentioned HD?
Encrypted fragments of child porn may or may not travel through my freenet node. To be frank, I don't care. I'm not "facilitating" its transfer any more than the transferers ISP or electricity company.
FreeNet is a force. How that force is used, good or bad, is up to people. By joining Freenet or its like, you simply add raw resources to a force that can be used for good or bad, just like and electricity company, or indeed, every ISP on the planet.
It's better that 100 perverts get access to some twisted jpegs, than one person struggling against tyranny be told to shut up and learn to love the boot.
We will suffer for sleep walking to a state where unelected civil servants have the power to snoop on us without any real oversight. This will be abused by these civil servants for their own personal ends.
Personally I think the situation will be less like Big Brother, and more so like Brazil (the movie). A dystopian world where bureaucracy is king, civil servants have enormous unchecked power, civil rights are non existant, but a place where people, on the whole, simply accept the situation, as it is not yet so opressive as to warrent revolution.
Let's just be clear. You're not religious. You have probably never seriously studied religion (accept those anti-religion fun-sites on the internet). You have probably never taken college-level courses in the philosophy of religion. In basically every way that matters, you are more or less completely ignorant of what religion is. I can think of no one less-qualified than you to tell the general public what religion is in "its purest essence".
Ignorant of what? Ignorant of the fact that people believe utterly ridiculous, unsubstanciated things and then try to force their folly upon others aroud them? Ignorant of the fact that time and again the forces of conservative religious dogma have, time and again, lashed out at science and the march of human progress? Ignorant of the fact that millions live in thrall to a few clerics who wield enormous power?
Your entire post seems to paint me out as some kind of grey suited philistine, all because I resent the fact that I exists as a second class citizen in a world where any belief system, no matter how ridiculous and baseless, takes legal and social prescendence over any modern enlightened values or outlooks.
I admire philosophy. I admire art, poetry, prose, beauty, mystery, debate, every humanites subject under the sun. I admire those who would debate the mysteries which science has not yet delved, or may never be able to delve.
But I draw the line when people leave behind reason, rationality, tolerance, humanity and every other value of the Enlightenment, and descend into dogma, believing outlandish tales and holding them above every value of rational thinking, and them hefting these beliefs, many of which are fundamentally opposed to out free society, on everyone and everything around them.
Where's my freedom from religion? Why should I have to suffer the institutionalised nonsense I see about me everyday? Why should some have the right to ride roughshod over the rule of law, yet if I so much as try to object, I'm the villian? Why should young children be made to suffer the wrongs of religion hoisted on them? Why should religious canon and dogma be codified into law? Why should religion be privilaged in this way? What good does it serve, except to calm the bleating cries of those already under its nepenthine grip?
The more I have thought about it, the more they look similar too me. In mathematics, I have been made to believe the wildest things, but not without a reason. Yeah, kinda similar.
They are not similar at all. As you say, mathematics gives valid reason for accepting that X is true. If one were to delve into the proofs, one could attempt to falsify them.
Everything in mathematics, every single fact, can ultimately be traced back to a few simple axioms. It is only these very reasonable truths that need be accepted, and only in the mathematical framework they define. Having accepted these, all the rest falls under, "thus it may be shown that", as they say.
Religion does not give any valid reasons for accepting that X is true. It lays down truths by dictat, not by proof or persuasion. Conjectures are based on lemmas heaped on assumptions resting on foundations of nothing. Religious texts regularly contradict themselves, have glaring errors, logical fallicies, predict nothing useful, etc, etc. Nothing can be subjected to falsification. It's not even wrong.
Science and religion are two completely different things. Polar opposites on a spectrum of human thought.
Isn't that how you build faith? (Oh, I _think_ "faith" is the right word, at least.) We believe in the axioms because we haven't failed us before, even though we haven't yet seen if they worked the _next_ time.
No, that is how you build confidence, by continuously attempting to falsify the axiom, and failing. "But will it really add up to...? Oh it does"
The axioms of mathematics are certainly not anything akin to a religious belief. If they were, Euclids fifth's axiom would be an edict, and Lobachevsky would be remembered as one of the greatest heretics to have ever lived, and all his works put to the torch. As it is, mathematics is not a belief system. It is a science.
Ah, come on. That definitely isn't the case for most people.
Mosty people join a religion for a false sense of security. Most of those preaching religion are there to be in a position of power over their relgious underlings.
As to the sexual gratification part, it's well know that nearly all cult leaders engage in sexual abuse of their followers, and clerics in major religions frequently abuse their positions in this way.
here are two main points: 1 - You can be devoutly religious and also logical/rational/scientific.
No you can't. A man cannot have two masters. You cannot accept the scientific method and yet continue to believe in ridiculous things. If you do, your worth as a scientist is in serious question. Are you really probing, questioning, investigating, hypothesising; or are you simply regurgitating dogma accepted on blind faith, in much the same was as you do religiously.
Those nutjobs are a SUBSET of religious people. A proper subset, if you want to get technical.
Those nutjobs are religion distilled into its purest essence. They are the logical outcome of a system that is flawed to its very foundations. You cannot indoctrinate people into such absurd beliefs without producing a siignificant number of mentally damaged people. Hence, the ID theorists.
Sorry, but as for a proof, you wouldn't get away with that. And also, possibly a bit off topic.. Any strict mathematical proof is based on the assumption that the axioms we use are correct. We choose to put our faith in those because they seem to work. We tried and they held. We tasted and they were good. Without trying or tasting we wouldn't know.
The definition of the operator + which maps two numbers to a resulting number is such that 2+2=4.
This itself is based off the axioms that govern the manipulation of numbers. Numbers are mathematical constructs, products of the human mind. They obey whatever rules we set for them. As such 2+2=4 in the mathematical framework we create, which incidentally is internally consistant.
If you ask, does 2+2=4 when applied to anything, not just numbers, the answer is clearly no. One could always find some concept, object or operation in which the "addition" of objects did not obey standard mathematical rules. For example, 2*infinity plus 2*infinity is not equal to infinity.
Obviously, one can also not guarantee that objects or concepts for which addition is known to be valid will apply in all region of space, or for all time. For example, will addition hold in the event horizon of a black hole? Or under your shoe?
However, to say that we place "faith" in the axioms is a fallacy. We accept the axioms to be true, but do not do so blindly. In fact, it takes some time to convince a child that two plus two really will equal four, and it requires much effort. The axioms of mathematics are proved to use, albiet in a manner outside of the mathematical framework. We are convined of their validity by sound argument, not by fantastic mythologies.
Ah, they do? So, what is their motive?
Power.
And very often; Sexual Gratification.