If anything, "says that stuff when not under the influence of drugs" is sort of the standard criterion; "says funny things while under the influence of drugs" just means "yep, drugs."
They've had to change. It's what happens when you predict the End of the World, and it doesn't happen, and you rewrite your theories and predict The End of the World, and it doesn't happen again, and you rewrite them again and predict The End of the World, This Time for Sure!, and it still doesn't happen. If you're just one guy, like Harold Camping, you can do this a few times and people laugh at you and eventually you go out of business, but if you've got a large movement, it can have enough momentum to stick around even after the founder gets it wrong.
There were several saints named Francis. The popular one is St. Francis of Assisi, the hippie pacifist monk dude, but there's also St. Francis Xavier, a cofounder of the Jesuits. And the new pope is a Jesuit.
The Pope has always been the Bishop of Rome. That doesn't mean that the Bishop of Rome has always been the Pope; just because Rome was the capitol of the Roman Empire doesn't mean that the head of the Christian churches in Rome was part of a hierarchical organization or that he was in charge of the bishops of other cities. And the phrase doesn't have to have been inserted into the Bible later; the people who thought Rome should be in charge could have just reinterpreted it.
On the other hand, the title "Pontifex Maximus" was traditionally the head of the Roman civic religion, and got borrowed later by Popes.
I hope they make enough of them that when the product fails, they'll be able to sell them off cheap. Assuming it's easy to jailbreak, there may be uses for it.
I'm a vegetarian, and all this BACON meme stuff is really annoying. Not as annoying as tempeh-based fake bacon, but annoying. And it's supposed to be crispy, but not burnt.
The prices have probably changed a bit since the 80s, but at the time it was about $50 for the cruise, so probably the "$59 port tax" they're charging really pays for the cruise. The Bahamas really aren't that far away - the cruise took about 4 hours each way.
In return for listening to a time-share presentation in Atlantic City, you could get the cruise and a couple of days of hotel in the Bahamas (you had to get yourself to Miami), and my wife and I decided the presentation was a good excuse to drive down the shore for the day and go to a show. The time-share was a financially ridiculous deal, of course (trading for a week of timeshare in somewhere interesting needs 2-3 weeks of New Jersey timeshare, and the prices were way out of line, plus the annual maintenance fee was about what I'd pay for a week of hotels back then anyway.) But the cruise was ok, enough to convince me that cruise vacations aren't for me, and the Bahamas was a relaxing place to hang out on the beach and drink rum.
Yes, they were manufactured in Japan (and the fact that the chip was designed in the US wasn't relevant.) It was legal to import to the US, but not legal to reship to Commies, even though they could buy Playstations directly from Japan. That was many things that made it embarrassingly obvious that ITAR was broken, though the fact that a toy for kids was officially an illegal-to-export supercomputer was a bigger factor.
There were other demonstrations of how ridiculous the rules were, like the request for an export permit for a T-shirt with a 4-line PERL script implementation of RSA (they never replied to that one, even though the forms were all filled out correctly, and they never sent Raph his T-shirts back either.) (I'm a little fuzzy about timing; that version of the shirt might have been a 3-line or 2-line PERL script, since the original 4-line version inspired people to write even terser uglier implementations.)
Making them? None. Exporting them to Official Enemy Countries? That violated ITAR, the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations criminal codes. Was this ridiculous? You betcha.
I spent a decade or so as a systems engineering consultant supporting a group of sales people. Sales people generally experience the world differently than engineers, and sales managers do lots of different things that they think will motivate them to sell lots of stuff, compensating them in often rapidly and randomly changing mixtures of salary, commission, bonuses, recognition programs, plaques, cheap trinkets, expensive trinkets, travel, whatever. Most of those years the people supporting them got similar pay programs (usually more salary, less commission.) Yay, one year they gave us iPods, after I already had one!
For probably five years about 5% of my pay (from the "bonus" column, so it varied depending on how sales were doing) was in [BRAND NAME REDACTED] Points, which could be used for overpriced "luxury" consumer goods or for a limited number of stores, most of which I didn't shop at, using a sort of debit card that most places didn't take. Borders Books (so I bought a few more hardbacks than I would have, but "free books" was the only thing that made it feel like a perk), some clothing stores, Home Depot (but not during the years I was buying much there). They did cover some hotel chains, but mostly not useful ones for where I was traveling. Eventually I needed a new mattress, and the card worked at Macy's which was having a mattress sale, so I burned most of the balance on that, which left me a few hundred dollars that mostly went to books and coffee at the bookstore.
The US has export control laws to prevent Commies from getting ahold of critical technologies such as crypto, supercomputers, and nukes. Back during the 90s we had a long fight to get US civilian access to open crypto technology (which was being restricted much more by the FBI to prevent Americans from having wiretap-proof communications than actually by the military to hinder the ex-Soviets), and we finally won, though our communications are still much less secure because of it. Supercomputers were banned because enemy militaries might use them to design weapons. Computer technology was changing much faster than the export laws, and both the Playstation and Playstation 2 were illegally fast supercomputers that we weren't allowed to export to enemy countries, and that was before people started making them into clusters to do useful supercomputing. (The thresholds for "too fast" got raised after the spooks got ridiculed about the PS1, but the PS2 exceeded the new limits.)
Sorry, but the recent Corporate Real Estate diagrams for my department's new data center had areas labeled "hot isle" and "cold isle", and somebody ought to get flamed for it.
It's not just about Evolution - that's a hook for getting one particular voting block supporting the Republican Party, and a favor to them for cooperating, but there's more to it than that. Teaching Anti-Evolution Anti-Science makes it easier to teach Anti-Global-Warming Anti-Science - same tools, same skepticism and unwillingness to believe the real world instead of the authorities.
The Republican Party doesn't really care much about evolution. But their Corporate Sponsors really do care about global warming, and about anything that might force the government to make laws that affect their business. Anti-Evolution is fun, but anti-global-warming is where the money is.
At least some states have said that teachers have to teach Intelligent Design, but aren't allowed to teach any particular religion's view of who the Intelligent Designer is, because that would be establishing religion and therefore blatantly unconstitutional.
But that doesn't mean that different cultures don't have different beliefs about the design process that lead to different world views separately from the issue of the Designer's identity. For instance, did it happen quickly or slowly? Recently, or a long long time ago? Just once, or repeated in multi-million-year cycles? Did the stars, Earth, plants, animals, and humans get designed together, or in some order? How could you tell? Did the design follow song-lines? Were only natural processes involved, or supernatural beings, or pirates or other tricksters? Does there seem to have been just one designer, or multiple designers in the process? Does the design process appear to have been personal or impersonal? Can we learn anything from the distribution of genetic material in different human populations, or the genetic differences between modern humans and Neandertals and other apes? Why are we more closely related to fungi than to plants? How does Death affect design?
If you want to teach Intelligent Design as Science, not just as philosophy, you can do it, but you'll find it's a much harder problem than its proponents think, and they may not like all the questions you'll be asking, much less the answers your students come up with.
I don't know if the anti-evolution folks really understand what they're asking for when they say that teachers should "Teach the Controversy".
One theory of evolution says it took billions of years. Another says evolution all happened in six days back in 4004 B.C. and then stopped, and that it may have gotten further restricted a thousand years or so later when all the land animals drowned except one boatload of them. How would you compare those two theories? What kind of evidence would let you reject or tentatively accept one of them? Are there fossil records that fit better with either? What about historical records from different cultures around the world? Does the distribution of animals around the planet tell us anything that would let us pick one of the theories, or lead us to modify either of them?
I don't see how that's relevant - many parts of the Bible are history, and good history includes talking about people who did bad things, dumb things, and morally questionable things, not just talking about good people doing good things.
One story that I've seen anti-Bible people use to claim the Bible's offensive is a conversation between an invading general and whoever was in charge of one of the Jewish cities. The general trash-talks about how the Jews had better surrender or here's what he'll do to them, and uses some language that's still offensive today. (Well, duh! He's the bad guy in that scene - he was trying to offend the people he was attacking.)
Ironic to hear them talking about what they look for when they're hiring - they just laid off a lot of people from their main company (and I think also from VMware.)
I was last in Egypt back in the mid-80s, mostly in Cairo but we also crossed Sinai. Everybody was really friendly, the buses were very crowded, the bureaucracy was really weird but as a tourist I didn't have to deal with much of it (the US got rid of stamp taxes as part of our revolution; Egypt still had them.) Didn't get very lost wandering around the city, and never felt unsafe. Couldn't go some places because the trains were on strike, but that happens in lots of places.
But I also had friends of friends who were arrested because they had converted from Islam to Christianity. Sorry, not safe, not sane, not a government I'd be willing to live under, even if it's claiming to be secular (as it claimed back then.) And while it's always dangerous to be around during a revolution, religious and ethnic bigotry against the Copts seems to still be a big problem today, though there were also a lot of brave people opposing it, and it's not like there aren't western countries with severe race problems.
If you were paying attention a decade or two ago, Federal court buildings and many state and local court buildings all got metal detectors in a big hurry after some judge got shot by somebody who didn't like a decision they'd made.
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If anything, "says that stuff when not under the influence of drugs" is sort of the standard criterion; "says funny things while under the influence of drugs" just means "yep, drugs."
They've had to change. It's what happens when you predict the End of the World, and it doesn't happen, and you rewrite your theories and predict The End of the World, and it doesn't happen again, and you rewrite them again and predict The End of the World, This Time for Sure!, and it still doesn't happen. If you're just one guy, like Harold Camping, you can do this a few times and people laugh at you and eventually you go out of business, but if you've got a large movement, it can have enough momentum to stick around even after the founder gets it wrong.
There were several saints named Francis. The popular one is St. Francis of Assisi, the hippie pacifist monk dude, but there's also St. Francis Xavier, a cofounder of the Jesuits. And the new pope is a Jesuit.
The Pope has always been the Bishop of Rome. That doesn't mean that the Bishop of Rome has always been the Pope; just because Rome was the capitol of the Roman Empire doesn't mean that the head of the Christian churches in Rome was part of a hierarchical organization or that he was in charge of the bishops of other cities. And the phrase doesn't have to have been inserted into the Bible later; the people who thought Rome should be in charge could have just reinterpreted it.
On the other hand, the title "Pontifex Maximus" was traditionally the head of the Roman civic religion, and got borrowed later by Popes.
This is probably a remix rather than the original "goats yelling like humans", but there are a number of "humans yelling like goats yelling like humans" in response.
Of course, we could find that Venezuela has been developing zombie technology, and he could hang around undead for a while.
No, I don't think so.
I hope they make enough of them that when the product fails, they'll be able to sell them off cheap. Assuming it's easy to jailbreak, there may be uses for it.
I'm a vegetarian, and all this BACON meme stuff is really annoying. Not as annoying as tempeh-based fake bacon, but annoying. And it's supposed to be crispy, but not burnt.
Sure, if she'd been "fifteen", she'd have been a cop, but there are other kinds of trolls out there.
The prices have probably changed a bit since the 80s, but at the time it was about $50 for the cruise, so probably the "$59 port tax" they're charging really pays for the cruise. The Bahamas really aren't that far away - the cruise took about 4 hours each way.
In return for listening to a time-share presentation in Atlantic City, you could get the cruise and a couple of days of hotel in the Bahamas (you had to get yourself to Miami), and my wife and I decided the presentation was a good excuse to drive down the shore for the day and go to a show. The time-share was a financially ridiculous deal, of course (trading for a week of timeshare in somewhere interesting needs 2-3 weeks of New Jersey timeshare, and the prices were way out of line, plus the annual maintenance fee was about what I'd pay for a week of hotels back then anyway.) But the cruise was ok, enough to convince me that cruise vacations aren't for me, and the Bahamas was a relaxing place to hang out on the beach and drink rum.
Yes, they were manufactured in Japan (and the fact that the chip was designed in the US wasn't relevant.) It was legal to import to the US, but not legal to reship to Commies, even though they could buy Playstations directly from Japan. That was many things that made it embarrassingly obvious that ITAR was broken, though the fact that a toy for kids was officially an illegal-to-export supercomputer was a bigger factor.
There were other demonstrations of how ridiculous the rules were, like the request for an export permit for a T-shirt with a 4-line PERL script implementation of RSA (they never replied to that one, even though the forms were all filled out correctly, and they never sent Raph his T-shirts back either.) (I'm a little fuzzy about timing; that version of the shirt might have been a 3-line or 2-line PERL script, since the original 4-line version inspired people to write even terser uglier implementations.)
You can go dig up the sources yourself. I remember it, since I was doing a lot of crypto activism in those days.
Making them? None. Exporting them to Official Enemy Countries? That violated ITAR, the International Trafficking in Arms Regulations criminal codes. Was this ridiculous? You betcha.
Are you saying Darwin wasn't part of "modern science"?
I spent a decade or so as a systems engineering consultant supporting a group of sales people. Sales people generally experience the world differently than engineers, and sales managers do lots of different things that they think will motivate them to sell lots of stuff, compensating them in often rapidly and randomly changing mixtures of salary, commission, bonuses, recognition programs, plaques, cheap trinkets, expensive trinkets, travel, whatever. Most of those years the people supporting them got similar pay programs (usually more salary, less commission.) Yay, one year they gave us iPods, after I already had one!
For probably five years about 5% of my pay (from the "bonus" column, so it varied depending on how sales were doing) was in [BRAND NAME REDACTED] Points, which could be used for overpriced "luxury" consumer goods or for a limited number of stores, most of which I didn't shop at, using a sort of debit card that most places didn't take. Borders Books (so I bought a few more hardbacks than I would have, but "free books" was the only thing that made it feel like a perk), some clothing stores, Home Depot (but not during the years I was buying much there). They did cover some hotel chains, but mostly not useful ones for where I was traveling. Eventually I needed a new mattress, and the card worked at Macy's which was having a mattress sale, so I burned most of the balance on that, which left me a few hundred dollars that mostly went to books and coffee at the bookstore.
The US has export control laws to prevent Commies from getting ahold of critical technologies such as crypto, supercomputers, and nukes. Back during the 90s we had a long fight to get US civilian access to open crypto technology (which was being restricted much more by the FBI to prevent Americans from having wiretap-proof communications than actually by the military to hinder the ex-Soviets), and we finally won, though our communications are still much less secure because of it. Supercomputers were banned because enemy militaries might use them to design weapons. Computer technology was changing much faster than the export laws, and both the Playstation and Playstation 2 were illegally fast supercomputers that we weren't allowed to export to enemy countries, and that was before people started making them into clusters to do useful supercomputing. (The thresholds for "too fast" got raised after the spooks got ridiculed about the PS1, but the PS2 exceeded the new limits.)
So will the PS4 also be too fast to export?
Sorry, but the recent Corporate Real Estate diagrams for my department's new data center had areas labeled "hot isle" and "cold isle", and somebody ought to get flamed for it.
It's not just about Evolution - that's a hook for getting one particular voting block supporting the Republican Party, and a favor to them for cooperating, but there's more to it than that. Teaching Anti-Evolution Anti-Science makes it easier to teach Anti-Global-Warming Anti-Science - same tools, same skepticism and unwillingness to believe the real world instead of the authorities.
The Republican Party doesn't really care much about evolution. But their Corporate Sponsors really do care about global warming, and about anything that might force the government to make laws that affect their business. Anti-Evolution is fun, but anti-global-warming is where the money is.
At least some states have said that teachers have to teach Intelligent Design, but aren't allowed to teach any particular religion's view of who the Intelligent Designer is, because that would be establishing religion and therefore blatantly unconstitutional.
But that doesn't mean that different cultures don't have different beliefs about the design process that lead to different world views separately from the issue of the Designer's identity. For instance, did it happen quickly or slowly? Recently, or a long long time ago? Just once, or repeated in multi-million-year cycles? Did the stars, Earth, plants, animals, and humans get designed together, or in some order? How could you tell? Did the design follow song-lines? Were only natural processes involved, or supernatural beings, or pirates or other tricksters? Does there seem to have been just one designer, or multiple designers in the process? Does the design process appear to have been personal or impersonal? Can we learn anything from the distribution of genetic material in different human populations, or the genetic differences between modern humans and Neandertals and other apes? Why are we more closely related to fungi than to plants? How does Death affect design?
If you want to teach Intelligent Design as Science, not just as philosophy, you can do it, but you'll find it's a much harder problem than its proponents think, and they may not like all the questions you'll be asking, much less the answers your students come up with.
I don't know if the anti-evolution folks really understand what they're asking for when they say that teachers should "Teach the Controversy".
One theory of evolution says it took billions of years. Another says evolution all happened in six days back in 4004 B.C. and then stopped, and that it may have gotten further restricted a thousand years or so later when all the land animals drowned except one boatload of them. How would you compare those two theories? What kind of evidence would let you reject or tentatively accept one of them? Are there fossil records that fit better with either? What about historical records from different cultures around the world? Does the distribution of animals around the planet tell us anything that would let us pick one of the theories, or lead us to modify either of them?
So yeah. Teach The Controversy. Proudly.
I don't see how that's relevant - many parts of the Bible are history, and good history includes talking about people who did bad things, dumb things, and morally questionable things, not just talking about good people doing good things.
One story that I've seen anti-Bible people use to claim the Bible's offensive is a conversation between an invading general and whoever was in charge of one of the Jewish cities. The general trash-talks about how the Jews had better surrender or here's what he'll do to them, and uses some language that's still offensive today. (Well, duh! He's the bad guy in that scene - he was trying to offend the people he was attacking.)
Ironic to hear them talking about what they look for when they're hiring - they just laid off a lot of people from their main company (and I think also from VMware.)
I was last in Egypt back in the mid-80s, mostly in Cairo but we also crossed Sinai. Everybody was really friendly, the buses were very crowded, the bureaucracy was really weird but as a tourist I didn't have to deal with much of it (the US got rid of stamp taxes as part of our revolution; Egypt still had them.) Didn't get very lost wandering around the city, and never felt unsafe. Couldn't go some places because the trains were on strike, but that happens in lots of places.
But I also had friends of friends who were arrested because they had converted from Islam to Christianity. Sorry, not safe, not sane, not a government I'd be willing to live under, even if it's claiming to be secular (as it claimed back then.) And while it's always dangerous to be around during a revolution, religious and ethnic bigotry against the Copts seems to still be a big problem today, though there were also a lot of brave people opposing it, and it's not like there aren't western countries with severe race problems.
If you were paying attention a decade or two ago, Federal court buildings and many state and local court buildings all got metal detectors in a big hurry after some judge got shot by somebody who didn't like a decision they'd made.