You can bet that mom and pop have prayed the gospel right into Junior Sixpack from birth through puberty.
I'm of the firm belief that people simply shouldn't be allowed to do this. A child is completely dependant on its parents for just about everything. An unscrupulous person can get a child to believe just about anything. You could get a child to believe the world was doughnut shaped and made by the great pastry chef in the sky. Essentially, this is what most religions more or less actually do.
The tradgedy here, is that when a child is indoctrinated in this way, it is more or less permanent. Forever more, for the rest of their lives, that person will believe what are essentially complete fantasies. Gods creating the eartg in seven day or out of their dreams. People seeing angels or coming back from the dead. Gods and Godesses battling on earth through human proxy. It's terrible.
Not only that, but a considerable amount of doublethink will be required on the part of that person to maintain these incredible beliefs. This will in turn lead to a very cognitively dissonant person who secretly, even to themselves, realises that it's all hogwash anyway, but is so insecure about it that they torment themselves into believing it. Whenever I see a religious person, I see a tortured soul.
I view religion like I view gun control. There may be some spurious benefits, but overall, religion has far more cons than pros and we'd be better off without it. Religion promotes intolerance, bigotry, tribalism, ignorence, hatred, sexism, etc, etc, etc. Some people argue it promotes love and kindness, but from what I've seen, this appears to be a purely random event. What's worst of all, being religious means obeying the will of unelected clergy, and anethema to any democratic society.
To indoctriate your children into such a nonsensible and divisive thing as a religion, I personally view as a morally repugnant act. Let them choose when they reach majority if they wish to join you or not. But to essentially yoke their minds forever to the will of someone else is something which cannot be viewed as anything but wrong.
We're supposed to have freedom of religion. But where is a child's freedom from religion?
Because what you really want to do to the speeding 3-ton SUV is blind the driver... yup, definitely makes things safer for everyone.
This is especially the case if the driver is a professional soccer mom, ferrying her manicured offspring to the local mall. Her sunglasses will shield her from the glare, and what filters through will only cause her already strained mind to finally snap. In her rage, she will plough over the road blocks and escaping marines in her three ton death mobile, hunched over the steering wheel, hands circling wildly screaming; "Won't Anyone Please Think Of The Children!! How Am I Supposed Get Them To Soccer Practice With All The Porno On TV, Violet Video Games, And Now US Soldier FLASHING Me On The Roads!! I Have A God Given Right To Do Whatever I Want In My Car!!!"
Re:ah, who cares about geneva conventions.
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Have you seen this? We're napalming civilians, now.
Not to sound condescending to the younger slashdotters amoung us, but this isn't in fact, as recent a development as you might think. There was this thing way back when called The Vietnam War, where US forces used napalm quite copiously on civilians.
Great. A Microsoft announcment detailing their new development of a "bell curve" according to its "mean" and "standard deviation". Are MS claiming to have invented the Gaussian curve?
What's next. Embrace, extend and extinguish calculus? I can just hear the boardroom conversation when the mathematicians try to claim precenent.
Ballmer: "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Carl Friedrich Gauss!"
I remember people back in 1998 smugly telling me as they surfed the net over my shoulder: "You know if you view an image with a virus, it'll infect your computer"
I vividly remember openly scoffing at their remarks and explaining in detail why what they were proposing was completely impossible.
And now they were right all along. Do I have to email out apologies?
I freely admit it. I have a digital music player filled with video game music. As a friend once said to be "you lose on a new level". I'm happy with it though. Super Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy etc.. etc, etc. I've got a few modern game soundtracks on there as well. Much of the music was ripped from CD and ROM titles and decoded and then encoded by myself at great time and expense.
I consider the whole collection to be 100% legitimate. Both on the grounds that I own, or have owned, all the games in question; I ripped the music myself for completely personal use from legitimate CDs and ROMs (absolutely did not upload to P2P networks), and lastly for the fact that the music itself was essentially not for sale at any price anywhere in my market.
What I'm wondering now is, as Satan's incarnation on this Earth, EA Games, has decided that there are enough geeks like me innocently enjoying this music, and hence we should all start paying for it; has my entire collection suddenly gone from legal to illegal in the blink of an eye?
Is there no safe refuge from the money gougers anymore? If enough people begin enjoying something will companies like EA force us to pay for it? Wither Fair Use?
would it not be easier to just use the centripetal force, which we know IS real, and simply write off the centrifugal force as the reactionary force that it really is?
I'm not sure what you mean here, but if you're asking why the centrifugal force is "made up" as it were rather than simply dealing with more "real" forces, the answer is simply that it makes the system easier to deal with mathematically.
You could restrict yourself to actual forces, but you'd be making your life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.
As a side note, you may think that the centrifugal force is not real, but from the reference frame of the rotating body, it may in fact seem quite real. Just take a spin on a merry go round, and see can you "feel" this centrifugal force. It's not as made up as you might think.
Is this the same thermodynamics framework that holds that every atom in the universe should have reached thermal equilibrium by now? Their theories seem more suspect than ever now!!
I'm sure I could write a witty comment about how the once noble Google has fallen from grace and sold its soul, rising like a rocket to the grat and smog filled heights of modern corperate decadence, but the storyline has probably been patented by now.
Of course, most people never take it beyond some sort of exclamation of suprise.
For them to actually say they are surprised shows they have an issue.
For you to feel the need to tell everyone your sex also shows you have an issue.
Wityh regards to personal information on the web, I have a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" approach. I'm the type that winces uncomfortably in a previously pristine online aquaintance is ruined when someone blurts out a totally superflous piece of information such as "I like cheese" or "I'm 21". That's more than I needed to know.
Can we as Americans still be proud when the Chinese finally land on the moon?
Well, you can still be proud of the little things like democracy and freedom of speech. They may seem trivial and perhaps in decline in modern America, but you're still light (years)^2/metre ahead of the Chinese, whose last emperor, Mao Zedong, has built a nation which looks like it's going to be an authoritarian oligarchy for some time into the future.
Without accurate credit reporting, all businesses would need to increase prices to factor in the risk of loss and the added costs of extracting late payments.
Really? Maybe they could just get up off their asses and compete instead. With all of the time and effort banks and businesses spend in fondling joe consumer's privates before they do business with him, perhaps they've forgotton that unless they actually do business with him they won't make any money. The bank that is out there doing business instead of tut tutting over credit card overdrafts, will be the one that makes money. Business rewards risk, not playing it safe.
I fear that the government would be utterly incompetent at creating such a system, even if consumers did decide that all their purchase/payment history data should go to the government.
And what exactly makes you think that private industry will be any less incompetant? What exactly is it about private companies that will somehow make doing sonething "better"?
ChoicePoint essentially proved that private industry is no more capable of handling this data than anyone else. Bottom line is, they should never have had any of this. People's personal information is on a need to know basis, and ChoicePoint did not need to know.
If the banks want my information, then they can ask me for it up front, instead of all this skulking about with shady datamongers who would sell their grandmother's address to a rapist if the price was right.
In any case, you need to rething your view on the care, protection, and feeding of children, and on organizing social groups to do these tasks. You hopelessly simplify evolutionary psychology (and the article we are talking about) when you pretend that all women did was "pick berries".
I was pointing out that this assumption, which is quite common, was in fact a gross simplification, as were the majority of the points in you rebuttal.
Essentially you are arguing that human beings have specialised roles based on their gender. I regard this as complete nonsense. One of the key traits of human beings is that we are unspecialised, adaptable creatures. To argue that human females have evolved to look after children, and that males have evolved to hunt prey makes no sense. If we evolved in this way, we should expect to see that the majority of men would be useless at social interaction and caring for young and the majority of women being useless at physical, spatial related activities. This isn't the case.
My key point was that it is highly unlikely that human females evolved to stay at home looking after children all day. It is more likely that human males and females both evolved both gather rescources and care for young. Given the precarious status of our ancestors, it stands to reason that most of the group, male and female, would go out to gather rescources as a team. A group that had half of its adult population doing nothing to gather resources wouldn't last very long in the harsh, pre microwave dinner and duvet era of our history.
-(Sony Rootkit) X -(The Warden) = -(Cheating)... hmmm, I think I must've messed up the math. This will only work if the Sony Rootkit and The Warden both contain imaginary parts and The Warden is the complex conjugate of the Sony Rootkit, and vice versa. In this case, the imaginary part of cheating will disappear.
I'd say the PATRIOT Act is a likely culprit here. By restricting candidacy to "allied" nations, Mozillia become less of a target for investigation and scrutiny than if it allowed candidates from more suspect countries like, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, China, France.....
This "doofus" is part of the New Wave of Hip young legal eagles, trained in the modern intellectual property mindset, who are going to sweep away all your old outdated notions of "justice" and "fairness" and take the legal industry to new heights of glorious profit!
So Preacheth The Church Of The New Global Economy! Hail Satan!!
Well, it's only a matter of time before the application travels down the conveyor belt and reaches the red rubber stamp machine. Unless someone can break in and sabotage the automated automatic approval device that is the USPTO, well... no one will be allowed to write anymore.
Surely any halfway intelligent person can see that this system just isn't working
That is assumming that all halfway intelligent people haven't been conned into the new Intellectual Property Mindset. A lot of companies have made it their business to shift the publics view of business from ownership to licencing. pretty soon you'll be licencing your house and car from the developers and dealers.
The new business Duckspeak has driven everyone completely insane. No one now knows what is reasonable and what isn't. You'll tell people about patenting a storyline. These will be intelligent, educated, reasonable people. And you know what? They'll think it's a good idea!! Why shouldn't I be allowed to patent my innovative storyline so others don't copy it.
this all began with the software industry, and is now beginning to infect the rest of the business world. This is what happens when you allow mathematical algorithms to be patentable. RSA was simply the beginning of the slippery slope.
If you have only one video to see, check the one about the custom palette -- but the other are interesting too:-)
Whew! After all that mousewaving I finally got through it.
Basically, what I'm seeing here is Visual Basic, with object orientation. Not to knock it because of this. It seems like a good system, but the VB paradigm was never my cup of tea. I'm sure VB programmers would love it though, if it was ever ported to Windows.(And they could understand Objects!)
The concept of a Gui creator is of course nice. No one should be coding GUI's in c or c++ or whatever. However I would still feel that XUL offers greater long term benefits. The power of HTML on the client side, and highly portable. Javascript is still a little iffy of course. I wish they'd improve it.
Slashdot Mirror
You can bet that mom and pop have prayed the gospel right into Junior Sixpack from birth through puberty.
I'm of the firm belief that people simply shouldn't be allowed to do this. A child is completely dependant on its parents for just about everything. An unscrupulous person can get a child to believe just about anything. You could get a child to believe the world was doughnut shaped and made by the great pastry chef in the sky. Essentially, this is what most religions more or less actually do.
The tradgedy here, is that when a child is indoctrinated in this way, it is more or less permanent. Forever more, for the rest of their lives, that person will believe what are essentially complete fantasies. Gods creating the eartg in seven day or out of their dreams. People seeing angels or coming back from the dead. Gods and Godesses battling on earth through human proxy. It's terrible.
Not only that, but a considerable amount of doublethink will be required on the part of that person to maintain these incredible beliefs. This will in turn lead to a very cognitively dissonant person who secretly, even to themselves, realises that it's all hogwash anyway, but is so insecure about it that they torment themselves into believing it. Whenever I see a religious person, I see a tortured soul.
I view religion like I view gun control. There may be some spurious benefits, but overall, religion has far more cons than pros and we'd be better off without it. Religion promotes intolerance, bigotry, tribalism, ignorence, hatred, sexism, etc, etc, etc. Some people argue it promotes love and kindness, but from what I've seen, this appears to be a purely random event. What's worst of all, being religious means obeying the will of unelected clergy, and anethema to any democratic society.
To indoctriate your children into such a nonsensible and divisive thing as a religion, I personally view as a morally repugnant act. Let them choose when they reach majority if they wish to join you or not. But to essentially yoke their minds forever to the will of someone else is something which cannot be viewed as anything but wrong.
We're supposed to have freedom of religion. But where is a child's freedom from religion?
Because what you really want to do to the speeding 3-ton SUV is blind the driver... yup, definitely makes things safer for everyone.
This is especially the case if the driver is a professional soccer mom, ferrying her manicured offspring to the local mall. Her sunglasses will shield her from the glare, and what filters through will only cause her already strained mind to finally snap. In her rage, she will plough over the road blocks and escaping marines in her three ton death mobile, hunched over the steering wheel, hands circling wildly screaming; "Won't Anyone Please Think Of The Children!! How Am I Supposed Get Them To Soccer Practice With All The Porno On TV, Violet Video Games, And Now US Soldier FLASHING Me On The Roads!! I Have A God Given Right To Do Whatever I Want In My Car!!!"
Have you seen this?
We're napalming civilians, now.
Not to sound condescending to the younger slashdotters amoung us, but this isn't in fact, as recent a development as you might think. There was this thing way back when called The Vietnam War, where US forces used napalm quite copiously on civilians.
History inevitably repeats.
Great. A Microsoft announcment detailing their new development of a "bell curve" according to its "mean" and "standard deviation". Are MS claiming to have invented the Gaussian curve?
What's next. Embrace, extend and extinguish calculus? I can just hear the boardroom conversation when the mathematicians try to claim precenent.
Ballmer: "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Carl Friedrich Gauss!"
I remember people back in 1998 smugly telling me as they surfed the net over my shoulder:
"You know if you view an image with a virus, it'll infect your computer"
I vividly remember openly scoffing at their remarks and explaining in detail why what they were proposing was completely impossible.
And now they were right all along. Do I have to email out apologies?
Game developer suggests producing product to cater to customers rather than producing customers to cater to product.
Which part of "business" don't these guys understand?
I freely admit it. I have a digital music player filled with video game music. As a friend once said to be "you lose on a new level". I'm happy with it though. Super Mario, Sonic, Final Fantasy etc.. etc, etc. I've got a few modern game soundtracks on there as well. Much of the music was ripped from CD and ROM titles and decoded and then encoded by myself at great time and expense.
I consider the whole collection to be 100% legitimate. Both on the grounds that I own, or have owned, all the games in question; I ripped the music myself for completely personal use from legitimate CDs and ROMs (absolutely did not upload to P2P networks), and lastly for the fact that the music itself was essentially not for sale at any price anywhere in my market.
What I'm wondering now is, as Satan's incarnation on this Earth, EA Games, has decided that there are enough geeks like me innocently enjoying this music, and hence we should all start paying for it; has my entire collection suddenly gone from legal to illegal in the blink of an eye?
Is there no safe refuge from the money gougers anymore? If enough people begin enjoying something will companies like EA force us to pay for it? Wither Fair Use?
It's not an error, don't you know that in US english on the Internet any vowel can replace any other ?
wat nounseanze!!!11 amereikan shood b riten coretcktly buy evrywon on teh internet. none of thes deegenarate english shood be aloud!`1!
would it not be easier to just use the centripetal force, which we know IS real, and simply write off the centrifugal force as the reactionary force that it really is?
I'm not sure what you mean here, but if you're asking why the centrifugal force is "made up" as it were rather than simply dealing with more "real" forces, the answer is simply that it makes the system easier to deal with mathematically.
You could restrict yourself to actual forces, but you'd be making your life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.
As a side note, you may think that the centrifugal force is not real, but from the reference frame of the rotating body, it may in fact seem quite real. Just take a spin on a merry go round, and see can you "feel" this centrifugal force. It's not as made up as you might think.
Is this the same thermodynamics framework that holds that every atom in the universe should have reached thermal equilibrium by now? Their theories seem more suspect than ever now!!
I'm sure I could write a witty comment about how the once noble Google has fallen from grace and sold its soul, rising like a rocket to the grat and smog filled heights of modern corperate decadence, but the storyline has probably been patented by now.
Of course, most people never take it beyond some sort of exclamation of suprise.
For them to actually say they are surprised shows they have an issue.
For you to feel the need to tell everyone your sex also shows you have an issue.
Wityh regards to personal information on the web, I have a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" approach. I'm the type that winces uncomfortably in a previously pristine online aquaintance is ruined when someone blurts out a totally superflous piece of information such as "I like cheese" or "I'm 21". That's more than I needed to know.
While I'm sure Carmony could make a bundle on the deal, could he really support all of South Korea?
What is this 'support' you speak of? The article mentions licencing only.
'Support'? 'Usability'? A Ledi craves not these things.
Can we as Americans still be proud when the Chinese finally land on the moon?
Well, you can still be proud of the little things like democracy and freedom of speech. They may seem trivial and perhaps in decline in modern America, but you're still light (years)^2/metre ahead of the Chinese, whose last emperor, Mao Zedong, has built a nation which looks like it's going to be an authoritarian oligarchy for some time into the future.
Without accurate credit reporting, all businesses would need to increase prices to factor in the risk of loss and the added costs of extracting late payments.
Really? Maybe they could just get up off their asses and compete instead. With all of the time and effort banks and businesses spend in fondling joe consumer's privates before they do business with him, perhaps they've forgotton that unless they actually do business with him they won't make any money. The bank that is out there doing business instead of tut tutting over credit card overdrafts, will be the one that makes money. Business rewards risk, not playing it safe.
I fear that the government would be utterly incompetent at creating such a system, even if consumers did decide that all their purchase/payment history data should go to the government.
And what exactly makes you think that private industry will be any less incompetant? What exactly is it about private companies that will somehow make doing sonething "better"?
ChoicePoint essentially proved that private industry is no more capable of handling this data than anyone else. Bottom line is, they should never have had any of this. People's personal information is on a need to know basis, and ChoicePoint did not need to know.
If the banks want my information, then they can ask me for it up front, instead of all this skulking about with shady datamongers who would sell their grandmother's address to a rapist if the price was right.
In any case, you need to rething your view on the care, protection, and feeding of children, and on organizing social groups to do these tasks. You hopelessly simplify evolutionary psychology (and the article we are talking about) when you pretend that all women did was "pick berries".
I was pointing out that this assumption, which is quite common, was in fact a gross simplification, as were the majority of the points in you rebuttal.
Essentially you are arguing that human beings have specialised roles based on their gender. I regard this as complete nonsense. One of the key traits of human beings is that we are unspecialised, adaptable creatures. To argue that human females have evolved to look after children, and that males have evolved to hunt prey makes no sense. If we evolved in this way, we should expect to see that the majority of men would be useless at social interaction and caring for young and the majority of women being useless at physical, spatial related activities. This isn't the case.
My key point was that it is highly unlikely that human females evolved to stay at home looking after children all day. It is more likely that human males and females both evolved both gather rescources and care for young. Given the precarious status of our ancestors, it stands to reason that most of the group, male and female, would go out to gather rescources as a team. A group that had half of its adult population doing nothing to gather resources wouldn't last very long in the harsh, pre microwave dinner and duvet era of our history.
-(Sony Rootkit) X -(The Warden) = -(Cheating) ... hmmm, I think I must've messed up the math.
This will only work if the Sony Rootkit and The Warden both contain imaginary parts and The Warden is the complex conjugate of the Sony Rootkit, and vice versa. In this case, the imaginary part of cheating will disappear.
That is why you should install 2 Windows installations side-by-side when you install it in the first place.
Great. That'll be another $200 for every PC I own, on top of the administrative headache of maintaining two seperate systems.
I think Knoppix is the superior option here. Or you could just use DOS boot disks or whatever.
I'd say the PATRIOT Act is a likely culprit here. By restricting candidacy to "allied" nations, Mozillia become less of a target for investigation and scrutiny than if it allowed candidates from more suspect countries like, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, China, France.....
Oh Wait.
This doofus JUST GOT OUT OF LAW SCHOOL.
This "doofus" is part of the New Wave of Hip young legal eagles, trained in the modern intellectual property mindset, who are going to sweep away all your old outdated notions of "justice" and "fairness" and take the legal industry to new heights of glorious profit!
So Preacheth The Church Of The New Global Economy! Hail Satan!!
Well, it's only a matter of time before the application travels down the conveyor belt and reaches the red rubber stamp machine. Unless someone can break in and sabotage the automated automatic approval device that is the USPTO, well... no one will be allowed to write anymore.
But is this Knight guy actually serious about this? Is this all just satire to show that the USPTO is incompetant?
The site is so absurb that it almost does count as some kind of anti-patent comic sketch.
Surely any halfway intelligent person can see that this system just isn't working
That is assumming that all halfway intelligent people haven't been conned into the new Intellectual Property Mindset. A lot of companies have made it their business to shift the publics view of business from ownership to licencing. pretty soon you'll be licencing your house and car from the developers and dealers.
The new business Duckspeak has driven everyone completely insane. No one now knows what is reasonable and what isn't. You'll tell people about patenting a storyline. These will be intelligent, educated, reasonable people. And you know what? They'll think it's a good idea!! Why shouldn't I be allowed to patent my innovative storyline so others don't copy it.
this all began with the software industry, and is now beginning to infect the rest of the business world. This is what happens when you allow mathematical algorithms to be patentable. RSA was simply the beginning of the slippery slope.
If you have only one video to see, check the one about the custom palette -- but the other are interesting too :-)
Whew! After all that mousewaving I finally got through it.
Basically, what I'm seeing here is Visual Basic, with object orientation. Not to knock it because of this. It seems like a good system, but the VB paradigm was never my cup of tea. I'm sure VB programmers would love it though, if it was ever ported to Windows.(And they could understand Objects!)
The concept of a Gui creator is of course nice. No one should be coding GUI's in c or c++ or whatever. However I would still feel that XUL offers greater long term benefits. The power of HTML on the client side, and highly portable. Javascript is still a little iffy of course. I wish they'd improve it.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
You are too enraptured by the Star Wars mythos. To the Dark Side of the Fandom headed you are!