If a company invests thousands of man hours in a project, and someone else capitalizes on it, well that sucks, but company #1 has always had the opportunity to capitalize on the knowledge of others, so it balances out.
So, basically (just to be clear, here), you're not really in the mood to allow someone who invents something any opportunity to recoup what it costs them to invent it? Rather, you'd like all research to be communal, and would not like any competitive pressures to inspire one person to produce something better, or quicker than anyone else? So, no iPhones, or $50 500GB disk drives... just Technology By Committee? With no chance for the knowledge that you create to actually pay for the time it takes you to make it, how will you attract the money that you use to eat and have a roof over your head while you tackle a multi-year project? Who will feed you while you work? I can guess where you're headed on that subject.
Because... you want to share with the world what would happen if something that it takes an entire lab to operate on ultra tiny targets were, what... strapped to the back of a super soldier flying around in a black helicopter? Without a little context, your questions seems a little... absurd.
Incidentally, I presume that since you think that whatever the people doing this research learn belongs to the world, that you've figured out how to collect taxes from the entire world to help pay for the research? In fact, there are all sorts of things being researched, all over the world. Who's paying the salaries and the material expenses for every one of those projects? Should I be able to demand that a company in South Korea working on a better LCD projection chip, in which they're investing hundreds of thousands of man hours, should - the moment they have some solid "human knowledge" about how to make it - just hand that over to a factory in China who will then produce products with that knowledge, happy that the knowledge belongs to them, since they are part of the world?
Oh, and since you probably know your banking information, and that's part of human knowledge, please provide that to the world.
Or, just use less of a ridiculous platitude for your sig, especially when you're wondering out loud what a picosecond lab laser would do when shot at a human being.
You should be able to give permissions down to the individual site (ala NoScript) or even down to the individual script.
Look, for most people, the zone idea actually makes sense. Basically, don't trust ANY web site to do the tricksy stuff, but add (for example) your company's intranet to the safe zone, where it can do more desktop-ish stuff. I don't think that's such an awkward concept, and it spares people from having to think through what to allow, or not, on a site by site basis, as they surf. Most people are not this audience. And being able to enforce zone policies at the enterprise level makes a lot of sense, since average users are routinely shown to be spineless and witless: they'll add a poisonous Russian casino spam site to the safe list if that site pops up a tutorial on the steps the have to take to do so, if they want their free emoticon package.
Fiddly, granular systems only work for fiddly, granular people.
No Christian (that's what I'm defending, ultimately) person I've ever met has claimed any of the beliefs you describe
Really? You've never bumped into a fundamentalist who claims that the dinosaur fossiles are tests of faith and aren't really millions of years old? You've never watched with your mouth hanging open as Christians gather around a rust stain under a bridge and cry because they think that the Virgin Mary has caused iron oxide to magically arrange itself in a blob that resembles something like a twinky, but which they are convinced is actually a magic apparition?
Do you never watch the news? Do so after a large natural disaster. You know, like when a popular Christian leader with a large following proclaims that one of the reasons that Hurrican Katrina wiped out New Orleans was because Ellen Degeneres had a house there, and God was punishing the city for it.
Do you never listen when devout Christians point at their devestated neighborhood, fresh from being splintered to rubble by a tornado, and then point to the mostly intact houses on their own side of the street, and proclaim that they had been in the basement busily calling for devine intervention, and that indeed, magic saved their house? No? You really don't ever hear your contemporary, thoughtful, well-informed Christians talking about the entire earth being flooded by an angry god? Or about
How hard is to observe that someones says they believe in magic, supernatural beings that run the universe? Huh, that just seems like such a simple observation. Especially because you don't have to try hard to observe it, since those people come right out and TELL you that they believe it, and further, assert that they not only know that there's no evidence for it, but that the only thing that makes their beliefs valid is their assertion that it's fact that they believ it without any evidence that makes it valid. The people we're talking about actually spell that out, very clearly.
To say that you're observing the universe, and have concluded that you now know how it works, and that the mechanism is magic power that can't be observed, for which there is no evidence, and to which you must pray, and to which you can only connect once you've sworn that you realize you can't see it or understand it... that doesn't strike you as a broken way to relate to your surroundings? If I child said all of the exact same things about the tooth fairy, and refused to let go of those notions even as he turned into an adult... would you NOT wonder a bit about what's happening in there, cognitively? Can you really say that someone is "thoughtful and well informed" when the very basis for their belief system is something about which - at the root of it - they must agree cannot be understood, seen, or contemplated? You can't be thoughtful about something that you simultaneously insist is beyond your comprehension. You can't be well-informed about something for which there is no evidence. You can memorize the myths, and call your self well informed about them, but that's no different than having memorized every episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for as much bearing as it has on reality. Is a well-informed Tolkein scholar, who is very thoughtful about those works, any better informed - for having studied those works - to understand actual biology? Or physics?
Is a thoughtful student of Norse mythology thus better equipped to understand their own genetics, or electrodynamics, or orbital mechanics? Or even simple math? No. And most wouldn't suggest that they're studying anything but cultural history. It's the people who suggest that the myths spun out 2000 years ago happen to also be true - and yet are also a better explanation for how earthquakes occur than is plate tectonics - they're the ones with the cognitive problems. And that IS a simple observation.
Sure, in the same sense we can say that the number of people who haven't been crippled by Polio is "growing." By which, of course, I mean that the number of people afflicted by it is shrinking. When Polio was a big problem, there were community meetings about vaccines, publications, people speaking to groups to allay irrational fears about putting science to work on their behalf, etc. Sound familiar?
You're confusing the number of people who have not been talked into believing silly crap with those people in that demographic who actively seek to make sure that the world understands the colossal damage done by and to the people that DO believe in silly crap. I don't really care what people believe... except that some of them tend to vote to put mysticism into the science classroom, or use their twisted fantasies to make blowing people up a personal act of salvation and a shot at 70 imaginary virgins. To the extent that such nonsense plays a role in public policy, or shapes cultural trends in a poisonous way, of course it makes sense to speak out against it.
Would you say that the People Who Aren't Contracting HIV In North America group is growing, or that the rate of people getting it is shrinking? Mysticism and superstition in adults is a cognitive disorder. The number of people who are being damaged by it are shrinking. Just like the number of racists. Or would you say that the number of non-racists is growing? Not particularly giving a crap what color someone is a rational perspective. There's no honor in it, no special status associated with it, you're not in a special group when you don't care about skin pigment... it's just the sensible way to be. Should every trend towards sensible, rational behavior be described as the "growth" of sensibility, or (as is obviously more appropriate) the reduction of a problem? You've obviously got an agenda here, and it somehow serves you to speak of non-mystics as the incorrect exception to the proper way of running a culture. Obviously, I consider superstition and fairy tales to be the less constructive foundation of a healthy society, and so describing the diminishing rate at which people are recruited into that magic world view as a reduction in their numbers is reasonable. What's left is larger portion of normaly... which isn't "growth in normaly," it's just... normal.
There's no "narrow" way in which that's correct. It's just a simple observation of reality. Fewer magical thinkers means just that. Magical thinking IS the exception to normal and to reason. As its inertia bleeds away, it shrinks. Simple as that.
if you weren't in the thick of offering such arguments yourself
Making a brief rhetorical point, in this context, is shorthand for all of the larger arguments. The burden, argument-wise, is on the people who are asserting the existence of the supernatural (and, paradoxically, their personal command of it). I feel no need to walk through that entire discussion so that I can make a pointed reference to some of the absurdities that come along with mysticism while pointing out that fewer and fewer people feel obliged to sign up for it.
it really is growing atheism
Nonsense. It's shrinking mysticism. Why? Because one isn't born with a religion, or a particular fantasy and imaginary back-story implanted in one's head. That has to be taken onboard either through instruction or invention. If you don't let someone tell you what to believe, and don't make up some fantasy of your own, and you have the ample riches of what science can handily show you about the nature of the world around you, you're more likely to NOT adopt primitive superstitions about existence. You have to take deliberate steps to crank up your willing suspension of disbelief in order to spend the rest of your life with an all powerful, if very moody invisible friend. The passive result of fewer people refusing to grow out of having invisible friends is a larger section of the population not being addicted to such fantasies.
Those that never adopt them aren't somehow swelling the ranks of the atheist club... they're just living, and not having to spend hours every week wondering if they've performed the right rituals to make the gods like them, if they'll still be alive even when they're dead, etc. All of the action, here, is in the form of people either choosing to become adults while still hanging onto childish magical thinking, or simply not doing so. One doesn't become an atheist, per se, one simply is... and then chooses to displace it with mysticism if the peer pressure is just too much, or they are slightly addled, or their parents went out of their way to make sure the family doesn't embrace critical thinking and reason, etc.
IMHO the fastest growing religion these days is atheism
You're confusing things. The fact that fewer people are being suckered into adopting a world view and moral framework that's creakily perched on top of a fantasy notion of the supernatural isn't "growing atheism," it's... just fewer people falling for the fairy tales. Mysticism has a harder and harder time getting hold of young minds when they grow up not needing it to (badly!) explain earthquakes, the weather, viruses, and vitamins.
Atheism isn't a religion. It's the simple absence of one. It's the normal state of seeing the world. It doesn't "grow," it simply IS. The only thing to pay attention to are the numbers of people who go out of their way to twist their kids' minds into tolerating the contradictory, silly notions of a capricious, personality-having omniscient and all-powerful being that isn't happy unless he's worshipped and having people beg for a good life... but who none the less still likes to sometimes kill kids with cancer and tornados just to keep everyone on their toes.
Indeed. In the DC metro area, public transit can get you from one suburb (where you live) to the neighboring suburb (where you work) in about three hours, round trip. There will be essentially no parking near the transit points. It will cost you $5 to $12 per day to use it each day. I simply can't affort to give up three hours a day sitting on a bus and a train. The solution is telework for the vast armies of people that mostly just spend their days pushing around information and talking to each other or their customers on the phone. That will save huge amounts in energy, wasted time, required paved infrastructure, etc.
So, you're saying that even though the democrats have brought forth, or at least proposed MANY bills that were guaranteed a veto (and have even sent them FOR that veto), that they won't even PROPOSE a bill to address what the GP seems to think is entirely the administration's fault? He blames the credit "crisis" (though I don't think that "coming to your senses and no longer offering absurd loans to people that are going to be overextending themselves" counts as a "crisis") on the current administration, because he says that the current administration isn't controlling the banks or the borrowers enough. Happily, the executive branch doesn't have that sort of direct control over how banks and their customers operate. Those are legislative matters.
You're saying that there are all sorts of brilliant would-be regulations just waiting in the wings, about which their democrat authors aren't saying a peep, because it will make them look bad? As bad as spending weeks and millions of dollars holding hearings about steroid use by baseball players? As bad as not ejecting a fellow democrat from congress after $90,000 in cash bribe money is found in his freezer... and then putting him on the DHS oversight committee? How brilliant can this hidden legislation be if it can't even get a simple majority in the house they run to consider voting for it? Ah... perhaps that's because it doesn't exist, and the GP was blowing hot air out of ignorance about how such things work, and you're really stretching it to give him some cover. It's just silly.
all those are the direct result of sh@tty republican reign over white house, in which they didnt do scat to regulate the filthy credit business, tried to reduce dependence on arab oil, and printed money like a banana republic. all those will change, when new administration takes over
So, since you know so much about this, you can explain in more detail. Please do explain how such tighter regulation was in place when a Democrat administration was in office for the previous eight years. Ah, I see.
While you're at it, please explain how the person in the executive office can cause the legislative actions in the congress and the senate that would be necessary to do what you're talking about. Perhaps you can cite the Democrats (who have been running both houses for a while now) who - since they have the majority, and can control what legislation is brought to votes - had a firm grasp on how regulation would have prevented people from borrowing more money than they could pay back, and put forth legislation that would have prevented it. Then point to the calander date during which the Democrats mustered a vote on that subject, being in charge of the legislative agenda as they are, and then sent such legislation to the president you hate so much, where he vetoed it - since that's the mechanism by which he would have prevented such regulation. No, really, please pass along those details... I'm having trouble finding any sign of them, or finding any sign of the actions that The Wise Bill Clinton took to address that issue, but which The Evil Bush tore down.
So, thanks in advance for providing that information. Oh, and please also, if you would, explain how a new administration will suddenly have new constitutional authority to regulate banking and real estate in a way that doesn't have to start with the congress. I'm intrigued, since neither candidate is asserting such new powers, though you're convinced they will have them.
I'm sorry, but you're confusing what you want with the actual state of affairs. Why you want it to be that way is a little mysterious, but your ability to confuse it with reality suggests just the sort of disconnect that might drive you to want to see a failed economy, the better to justify your world view.
... and Slashdot covers flying cars.
I'll have to check, but I assume you make the same exact complaint when Slashdot talks about new video boards, hair-splitting differences between Linux distros, the space program, squabbles over pirated movies and music, 4D rubik's cubes, what China does with web filtering, sailing robots, and whether or not Google is obscuring people's faces in Street View? Nah, I won't check, because I'm sure you did.
I'm not advocating slavery, I'm just saying true free market capitalism is no better.
What are you talking about? Your social safety net programs are actually the guy without a jog making a slave of me. I'm forced (on penalty of losing my liberty by going to jail) to write a check that's used, in part, to feed him.
Why does he have no job, and no prospect of getting one? Because he's been raised in a culture that tells him it's OK not to prepare for that possibility. You make it sound like the economy is a fixed-size pie, and that nobody creates jobs through investment, that nobody starts businesses, and that no companies grow. Why do you supposed there are tens of millions of illegal immigrants risking their lives to sneak into the US in order to work? Because there's work. The guy without a job is one bus ticket away from having one. It's not a nice, middle-class job. But it's also not him holding a gun to my head, saying, "Feed me. I never learned how to do anything else, and it's your responsibility to buy me food."
he point is that on the whole, the vast majority of people DO NOT WANT to suck anyone dry or enslave anyone. That is just a myth propagated by rationalist capitalists and communists to morally justify the fact that they themselves do.
Ah well, just so long as nobody is making broad, sweeping, baseless statements, then we should be fine.
The Authorites in North America want to suck you dry in order to enslave you
I see. And that would be by, what... raising your taxes while also creating a culture of dependency? Great. Then don't vote for socialists and left wingers. They're the ones that are sure they know better than you what to do with your income. And they're the ones that woo votes from the very people they're feeding with my money, rather than telling them that they need to raise their next generation of kids to have the same work ethic and entrepeneurial vision as the people that are fighting to get into the country.
You know, I'm normally not a grammar nazi... but that's just one of those ones that reflects an actual cognitive disconnect. It's not said ironically, it's generally actually meant to convey that there is nothing one could care less about. It's the least important thing on your mind. What would be the point of saying you COULD care less? How much less? It's a completely pointless thing to say, makes no sense at all. And yet, people utter those sounds, minus an important part of it, because they've heard someone else say something similar. It betrays the person's poor communication skills, and suggests that they are particularly prone to group mimickry without actually giving any thought to what they're saying. I think it IS fair to extrapolate - especially in the context of a Microsoft bash - a fair amount about someone's motivations and the way in which they interact with their culture... from how they do or don't choose the words they use.
it turns out it was a difference in diet and nutrition
The steady flow of which, in a particular vein, causes different populations to adapted over time. There's a reason that Inuits look the way they do. I guarantee that if you take someone with a sub-Saharan diet and available nutrition, but raise them in Norway eating herring cold weather root vegetables, they will not become pasty pale, and grow blond hair. Neither will the Norwegian, transplanted to Papua, take on the local look - no matter what she eats.
Very well fed and nutritionally well-taken-care-of Vietnamese folks aren't going to have the same body type as a large-boned Teutonic alp-dweller, complete with turbo-powered fat cells designed for packing on the pounds before the cold whether sets in. It's breeding... adaptation.
And now that we're all past the geographic re-inforcing of these traits by virtue of a more globe-wandering population, you're forced to look at what people actually DO. You can't have made it past high school without recognizing the trend (with exceptions, of course) for lanky, attractive people to tend to wind up with each other, and with similar children. Likewise with the more trollish body types. This is slashdot, you know what I mean.
Would you have any scientific evidence on these?
No need, really. Just use your eyes. For purposes of this discussion, you know exactly what I mean. If you travel, you can spot it instantly. In a given area, economic classes can show a visible differences that are not strictly quality-of-dinner related. I have no axe to grind here - just calling like I've actually seen it. In Pennsylvania, in Verona, in Athens, in Denver, in Mexico City.
Your tests are interesting, but you're not really parsing the responses in the right context. They're problematic. Keep in mind this understanding engine understands the world in a way that was hatched out in San Fransisco.
Who is David Bowie? I trust that it came back with, "aka Ziggy Stardust, normal family guy"
Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Well, obviously, the villain is "capitalism."
Billie Jean King and Madonna... like I said, it's San Fransisco
Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road?
You had it at "organ," and it got distracted. What they need is some dev guys from Toledo to collaborate, and provide a little cognitive counterweight to the understanding engine. OK, maybe not Toledo. Maybe Atlanta.
I personally believe we don't yet have the wisdom or foresight necessary to manipulate our genes
Nonsense. What do you think the thousands-of-years-old practice of arrangement marriages was all about? Not strictly village economics. Parents also sized up prospective mates for their kids based on the health, history, and talents of thei prospective mate and his/her family. Yeah, yeah, eugenics. Except, that's exactly what it is, and was for a long time.
We can (the old fasioned way) make new specialized breeds of livestock, dogs, and chickens with only a few decades of paying attention to cause and effect. Cultures do the same thing - it just takes longer. And that's why - whether anyone wants to admit it or not - you can spot, in a given geographic region - people that have a "peasant" look/build and other people that have an "aristrocratic" look/build. Genetic manipulation.
Counselnaut? Astrolawyer? Orbital Mouthpiece? Defender (get it)? Prosecutron? Baikonur Barrister?
Still, I guess this isn't any different than those lawyers that specialize in oddball maritime issues.
ll three are self-serving, but the Chinese government are the most socially responsible of the lot.
I see. That would be the China that just shouted down any attempt by the UN to even hold discussions about whether to try to bypass the Burma junta and get international aid directly to the million people that are about to die there? That IS socially responsible!
And corporations? They exist to serve the people that form and invest in them. That's their actual purpose. Of course, many of them are lining up to provide goods and services to aid the people who are about to die in Burma, while China and Russia are backing the junta's demands to funnel all of the aid through them (you know, the people who elected not to warn their coastal population that they were about to die in droves, even though the rest of the world scrambled to let that military regime know what was about to happen). You know, the military regime that is confiscating such aid as IS allowed to land there, and which they are labeling with their own stickers and political propoganda before handing it out. You know, the military regime that China is insulating from so much as a formal rebuke from the UN.
What's your motivation, here, exactly? You find the Chinese government - who jail and even kill people for saying the sorts of things you can sit at a US corporate desk and say all day long, and who harbor and sanction outright network vandalism and malware propogation around the world, and prop up hell holes like North Korea - more trustworthy than Honda, or Bayer, or LG, or Nokia, or Virgin Atlantic, or AMD, or your local grocery store chain? Really?
Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Ask the international Olypmic commitee what they were thinking. The companies that make money off of the broadcasting and related licensing are going to make money regardless of where the games are held. It would likely be a lot easier, logistically, NOT to have to put up with the Chinese nonsense while moving the media army into place to cover the games. Which corporations are being pandered to, here? The corporation that is China? They (the Chinese) promised all sorts of open access and press freedom as part of the package they pitched while trying to seduce the panel that chooses the venues. They were obviously lying, a lot. How that broadly strokes "corporate" interests enough to refer to it that way in the summary is not clear enough in the summary to warrant that particular bit of editorial spin.
I couldn't care less how much less he could care. Because here he is bitching about licensing issues in a thread that's all about splitting hairs over the use of the words "shared" and "open." And amidst all of that fussing over word definitions, he sees fit to say the exact opposite of what he actually means, by leaving out the negative. I suppose, to someone who doesn't actually think about the words he uses, and simply does a phonetic regurgitation, minus an important syllabile or two, of a phrase he hears regularly - without a care about the fact that doing so alters the meaning of the sentence - that it's perfectly normal to also just mindlessly parrot Teh Eevil Microsoft mantra. Hey, once you stop caring about whether the sounds that come out of your mouth actually represent your thoughts (or mean anything at all), then it probably is easier just to fall back on the group think and repeat whatever you last heard.
The difference between the relationship that I might have with China, and that which I might have with, say, General Motors or Apple Computer, is still fundamentally different. If GM or Apple were caught routinely lying about how they do business, or were routinely shipping out tainted goods, or were routinely busted trying to break into DoD computers or running large counterfeit goods operations... they'd be OUT of business, and the people making those decisions would be in jail. The Chinese government not only isn't held accountable for that sort of thing, they encourage it, and spin like crazy whenever they get observed doing it.
To the extent that the Chinese government IS the corporation running that company (only a somewhat useful analogy), they are a really corrupt company. And obviously, General Motors doesn't have nuclear weapons, doesn't sponsor countries like North Korea, doesn't threaten the democracy in Taiwan, and doesn't sell spare parts to fine fellows like the thugs running Iran. I'm sure you see my point... but I just like to avoid analogies that sort of backfire. Saying that China is like what we think of as a corporation kinds of puts a bad spin on the use of that word. If you and I were to get together to start a small business, and incorporated in order to do it right, we'd still be forced to obey laws - just like Apple has to, or Intel, or the Dole Fruit people. China doesn't seem to feel any such urge. They only bother to enforce rules when getting busted in the public eye might damage their market presence. They really don't get it, yet, about ethics being the things you do when no one is looking. There are people in every country that don't get that... but China is an entire country that operates that way, and is strangely naive enough to think that we can't see right through the charade.
For a culture as ancient as that one, it's a wierdly adolescent way to exist.
But are these Botnets actually being controlled by people in China?
Almost every attack of consequence that I've seen tried or at least partially successful in the last 6 months (mostly SQL injection attempts against legacy web apps here in the US) have originated in China. Sure, could be that the bad guys launched those attacks from Russia, using pwned machines in China. But the scripts that these attacks attempt to insert into web content cause browsers to surf to web sites hosted in China that in turn attempt to install trojans. These same sites go unchanged for months at a time, are hosted by companies operating in China, with domain names registered by Chinese companies. If it looks like Peking Duck, walks like Peking Duck... you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
If a company invests thousands of man hours in a project, and someone else capitalizes on it, well that sucks, but company #1 has always had the opportunity to capitalize on the knowledge of others, so it balances out.
So, basically (just to be clear, here), you're not really in the mood to allow someone who invents something any opportunity to recoup what it costs them to invent it? Rather, you'd like all research to be communal, and would not like any competitive pressures to inspire one person to produce something better, or quicker than anyone else? So, no iPhones, or $50 500GB disk drives... just Technology By Committee? With no chance for the knowledge that you create to actually pay for the time it takes you to make it, how will you attract the money that you use to eat and have a roof over your head while you tackle a multi-year project? Who will feed you while you work? I can guess where you're headed on that subject.
if we aim that to a human being?
--
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
Because... you want to share with the world what would happen if something that it takes an entire lab to operate on ultra tiny targets were, what... strapped to the back of a super soldier flying around in a black helicopter? Without a little context, your questions seems a little... absurd.
Incidentally, I presume that since you think that whatever the people doing this research learn belongs to the world, that you've figured out how to collect taxes from the entire world to help pay for the research? In fact, there are all sorts of things being researched, all over the world. Who's paying the salaries and the material expenses for every one of those projects? Should I be able to demand that a company in South Korea working on a better LCD projection chip, in which they're investing hundreds of thousands of man hours, should - the moment they have some solid "human knowledge" about how to make it - just hand that over to a factory in China who will then produce products with that knowledge, happy that the knowledge belongs to them, since they are part of the world?
Oh, and since you probably know your banking information, and that's part of human knowledge, please provide that to the world.
Or, just use less of a ridiculous platitude for your sig, especially when you're wondering out loud what a picosecond lab laser would do when shot at a human being.
You should be able to give permissions down to the individual site (ala NoScript) or even down to the individual script.
Look, for most people, the zone idea actually makes sense. Basically, don't trust ANY web site to do the tricksy stuff, but add (for example) your company's intranet to the safe zone, where it can do more desktop-ish stuff. I don't think that's such an awkward concept, and it spares people from having to think through what to allow, or not, on a site by site basis, as they surf. Most people are not this audience. And being able to enforce zone policies at the enterprise level makes a lot of sense, since average users are routinely shown to be spineless and witless: they'll add a poisonous Russian casino spam site to the safe list if that site pops up a tutorial on the steps the have to take to do so, if they want their free emoticon package.
Fiddly, granular systems only work for fiddly, granular people.
... well, you get the idea.
No Christian (that's what I'm defending, ultimately) person I've ever met has claimed any of the beliefs you describe
Really? You've never bumped into a fundamentalist who claims that the dinosaur fossiles are tests of faith and aren't really millions of years old? You've never watched with your mouth hanging open as Christians gather around a rust stain under a bridge and cry because they think that the Virgin Mary has caused iron oxide to magically arrange itself in a blob that resembles something like a twinky, but which they are convinced is actually a magic apparition?
Do you never watch the news? Do so after a large natural disaster. You know, like when a popular Christian leader with a large following proclaims that one of the reasons that Hurrican Katrina wiped out New Orleans was because Ellen Degeneres had a house there, and God was punishing the city for it.
Do you never listen when devout Christians point at their devestated neighborhood, fresh from being splintered to rubble by a tornado, and then point to the mostly intact houses on their own side of the street, and proclaim that they had been in the basement busily calling for devine intervention, and that indeed, magic saved their house? No? You really don't ever hear your contemporary, thoughtful, well-informed Christians talking about the entire earth being flooded by an angry god? Or about
you are well past the point of simple observation
How hard is to observe that someones says they believe in magic, supernatural beings that run the universe? Huh, that just seems like such a simple observation. Especially because you don't have to try hard to observe it, since those people come right out and TELL you that they believe it, and further, assert that they not only know that there's no evidence for it, but that the only thing that makes their beliefs valid is their assertion that it's fact that they believ it without any evidence that makes it valid. The people we're talking about actually spell that out, very clearly.
To say that you're observing the universe, and have concluded that you now know how it works, and that the mechanism is magic power that can't be observed, for which there is no evidence, and to which you must pray, and to which you can only connect once you've sworn that you realize you can't see it or understand it... that doesn't strike you as a broken way to relate to your surroundings? If I child said all of the exact same things about the tooth fairy, and refused to let go of those notions even as he turned into an adult... would you NOT wonder a bit about what's happening in there, cognitively? Can you really say that someone is "thoughtful and well informed" when the very basis for their belief system is something about which - at the root of it - they must agree cannot be understood, seen, or contemplated? You can't be thoughtful about something that you simultaneously insist is beyond your comprehension. You can't be well-informed about something for which there is no evidence. You can memorize the myths, and call your self well informed about them, but that's no different than having memorized every episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for as much bearing as it has on reality. Is a well-informed Tolkein scholar, who is very thoughtful about those works, any better informed - for having studied those works - to understand actual biology? Or physics?
Is a thoughtful student of Norse mythology thus better equipped to understand their own genetics, or electrodynamics, or orbital mechanics? Or even simple math? No. And most wouldn't suggest that they're studying anything but cultural history. It's the people who suggest that the myths spun out 2000 years ago happen to also be true - and yet are also a better explanation for how earthquakes occur than is plate tectonics - they're the ones with the cognitive problems. And that IS a simple observation.
Sure, in the same sense we can say that the number of people who haven't been crippled by Polio is "growing." By which, of course, I mean that the number of people afflicted by it is shrinking. When Polio was a big problem, there were community meetings about vaccines, publications, people speaking to groups to allay irrational fears about putting science to work on their behalf, etc. Sound familiar?
... it's just the sensible way to be. Should every trend towards sensible, rational behavior be described as the "growth" of sensibility, or (as is obviously more appropriate) the reduction of a problem? You've obviously got an agenda here, and it somehow serves you to speak of non-mystics as the incorrect exception to the proper way of running a culture. Obviously, I consider superstition and fairy tales to be the less constructive foundation of a healthy society, and so describing the diminishing rate at which people are recruited into that magic world view as a reduction in their numbers is reasonable. What's left is larger portion of normaly... which isn't "growth in normaly," it's just... normal.
You're confusing the number of people who have not been talked into believing silly crap with those people in that demographic who actively seek to make sure that the world understands the colossal damage done by and to the people that DO believe in silly crap. I don't really care what people believe... except that some of them tend to vote to put mysticism into the science classroom, or use their twisted fantasies to make blowing people up a personal act of salvation and a shot at 70 imaginary virgins. To the extent that such nonsense plays a role in public policy, or shapes cultural trends in a poisonous way, of course it makes sense to speak out against it.
Would you say that the People Who Aren't Contracting HIV In North America group is growing, or that the rate of people getting it is shrinking? Mysticism and superstition in adults is a cognitive disorder. The number of people who are being damaged by it are shrinking. Just like the number of racists. Or would you say that the number of non-racists is growing? Not particularly giving a crap what color someone is a rational perspective. There's no honor in it, no special status associated with it, you're not in a special group when you don't care about skin pigment
There's no "narrow" way in which that's correct. It's just a simple observation of reality. Fewer magical thinkers means just that. Magical thinking IS the exception to normal and to reason. As its inertia bleeds away, it shrinks. Simple as that.
if you weren't in the thick of offering such arguments yourself
Making a brief rhetorical point, in this context, is shorthand for all of the larger arguments. The burden, argument-wise, is on the people who are asserting the existence of the supernatural (and, paradoxically, their personal command of it). I feel no need to walk through that entire discussion so that I can make a pointed reference to some of the absurdities that come along with mysticism while pointing out that fewer and fewer people feel obliged to sign up for it.
it really is growing atheism
Nonsense. It's shrinking mysticism. Why? Because one isn't born with a religion, or a particular fantasy and imaginary back-story implanted in one's head. That has to be taken onboard either through instruction or invention. If you don't let someone tell you what to believe, and don't make up some fantasy of your own, and you have the ample riches of what science can handily show you about the nature of the world around you, you're more likely to NOT adopt primitive superstitions about existence. You have to take deliberate steps to crank up your willing suspension of disbelief in order to spend the rest of your life with an all powerful, if very moody invisible friend. The passive result of fewer people refusing to grow out of having invisible friends is a larger section of the population not being addicted to such fantasies.
Those that never adopt them aren't somehow swelling the ranks of the atheist club... they're just living, and not having to spend hours every week wondering if they've performed the right rituals to make the gods like them, if they'll still be alive even when they're dead, etc. All of the action, here, is in the form of people either choosing to become adults while still hanging onto childish magical thinking, or simply not doing so. One doesn't become an atheist, per se, one simply is... and then chooses to displace it with mysticism if the peer pressure is just too much, or they are slightly addled, or their parents went out of their way to make sure the family doesn't embrace critical thinking and reason, etc.
IMHO the fastest growing religion these days is atheism
You're confusing things. The fact that fewer people are being suckered into adopting a world view and moral framework that's creakily perched on top of a fantasy notion of the supernatural isn't "growing atheism," it's... just fewer people falling for the fairy tales. Mysticism has a harder and harder time getting hold of young minds when they grow up not needing it to (badly!) explain earthquakes, the weather, viruses, and vitamins.
Atheism isn't a religion. It's the simple absence of one. It's the normal state of seeing the world. It doesn't "grow," it simply IS. The only thing to pay attention to are the numbers of people who go out of their way to twist their kids' minds into tolerating the contradictory, silly notions of a capricious, personality-having omniscient and all-powerful being that isn't happy unless he's worshipped and having people beg for a good life... but who none the less still likes to sometimes kill kids with cancer and tornados just to keep everyone on their toes.
Indeed. In the DC metro area, public transit can get you from one suburb (where you live) to the neighboring suburb (where you work) in about three hours, round trip. There will be essentially no parking near the transit points. It will cost you $5 to $12 per day to use it each day. I simply can't affort to give up three hours a day sitting on a bus and a train. The solution is telework for the vast armies of people that mostly just spend their days pushing around information and talking to each other or their customers on the phone. That will save huge amounts in energy, wasted time, required paved infrastructure, etc.
So, you're saying that even though the democrats have brought forth, or at least proposed MANY bills that were guaranteed a veto (and have even sent them FOR that veto), that they won't even PROPOSE a bill to address what the GP seems to think is entirely the administration's fault? He blames the credit "crisis" (though I don't think that "coming to your senses and no longer offering absurd loans to people that are going to be overextending themselves" counts as a "crisis") on the current administration, because he says that the current administration isn't controlling the banks or the borrowers enough. Happily, the executive branch doesn't have that sort of direct control over how banks and their customers operate. Those are legislative matters.
You're saying that there are all sorts of brilliant would-be regulations just waiting in the wings, about which their democrat authors aren't saying a peep, because it will make them look bad? As bad as spending weeks and millions of dollars holding hearings about steroid use by baseball players? As bad as not ejecting a fellow democrat from congress after $90,000 in cash bribe money is found in his freezer... and then putting him on the DHS oversight committee? How brilliant can this hidden legislation be if it can't even get a simple majority in the house they run to consider voting for it? Ah... perhaps that's because it doesn't exist, and the GP was blowing hot air out of ignorance about how such things work, and you're really stretching it to give him some cover. It's just silly.
all those are the direct result of sh@tty republican reign over white house, in which they didnt do scat to regulate the filthy credit business, tried to reduce dependence on arab oil, and printed money like a banana republic. all those will change, when new administration takes over
So, since you know so much about this, you can explain in more detail. Please do explain how such tighter regulation was in place when a Democrat administration was in office for the previous eight years. Ah, I see.
While you're at it, please explain how the person in the executive office can cause the legislative actions in the congress and the senate that would be necessary to do what you're talking about. Perhaps you can cite the Democrats (who have been running both houses for a while now) who - since they have the majority, and can control what legislation is brought to votes - had a firm grasp on how regulation would have prevented people from borrowing more money than they could pay back, and put forth legislation that would have prevented it. Then point to the calander date during which the Democrats mustered a vote on that subject, being in charge of the legislative agenda as they are, and then sent such legislation to the president you hate so much, where he vetoed it - since that's the mechanism by which he would have prevented such regulation. No, really, please pass along those details... I'm having trouble finding any sign of them, or finding any sign of the actions that The Wise Bill Clinton took to address that issue, but which The Evil Bush tore down.
So, thanks in advance for providing that information. Oh, and please also, if you would, explain how a new administration will suddenly have new constitutional authority to regulate banking and real estate in a way that doesn't have to start with the congress. I'm intrigued, since neither candidate is asserting such new powers, though you're convinced they will have them.
The U. S. has collapsed economically ...
... and Slashdot covers flying cars.
I'm sorry, but you're confusing what you want with the actual state of affairs. Why you want it to be that way is a little mysterious, but your ability to confuse it with reality suggests just the sort of disconnect that might drive you to want to see a failed economy, the better to justify your world view.
I'll have to check, but I assume you make the same exact complaint when Slashdot talks about new video boards, hair-splitting differences between Linux distros, the space program, squabbles over pirated movies and music, 4D rubik's cubes, what China does with web filtering, sailing robots, and whether or not Google is obscuring people's faces in Street View? Nah, I won't check, because I'm sure you did.
I'm not advocating slavery, I'm just saying true free market capitalism is no better.
What are you talking about? Your social safety net programs are actually the guy without a jog making a slave of me. I'm forced (on penalty of losing my liberty by going to jail) to write a check that's used, in part, to feed him.
Why does he have no job, and no prospect of getting one? Because he's been raised in a culture that tells him it's OK not to prepare for that possibility. You make it sound like the economy is a fixed-size pie, and that nobody creates jobs through investment, that nobody starts businesses, and that no companies grow. Why do you supposed there are tens of millions of illegal immigrants risking their lives to sneak into the US in order to work? Because there's work. The guy without a job is one bus ticket away from having one. It's not a nice, middle-class job. But it's also not him holding a gun to my head, saying, "Feed me. I never learned how to do anything else, and it's your responsibility to buy me food."
he point is that on the whole, the vast majority of people DO NOT WANT to suck anyone dry or enslave anyone. That is just a myth propagated by rationalist capitalists and communists to morally justify the fact that they themselves do.
Ah well, just so long as nobody is making broad, sweeping, baseless statements, then we should be fine.
The Authorites in North America want to suck you dry in order to enslave you
I see. And that would be by, what... raising your taxes while also creating a culture of dependency? Great. Then don't vote for socialists and left wingers. They're the ones that are sure they know better than you what to do with your income. And they're the ones that woo votes from the very people they're feeding with my money, rather than telling them that they need to raise their next generation of kids to have the same work ethic and entrepeneurial vision as the people that are fighting to get into the country.
You know, I'm normally not a grammar nazi... but that's just one of those ones that reflects an actual cognitive disconnect. It's not said ironically, it's generally actually meant to convey that there is nothing one could care less about. It's the least important thing on your mind. What would be the point of saying you COULD care less? How much less? It's a completely pointless thing to say, makes no sense at all. And yet, people utter those sounds, minus an important part of it, because they've heard someone else say something similar. It betrays the person's poor communication skills, and suggests that they are particularly prone to group mimickry without actually giving any thought to what they're saying. I think it IS fair to extrapolate - especially in the context of a Microsoft bash - a fair amount about someone's motivations and the way in which they interact with their culture... from how they do or don't choose the words they use.
it turns out it was a difference in diet and nutrition
The steady flow of which, in a particular vein, causes different populations to adapted over time. There's a reason that Inuits look the way they do. I guarantee that if you take someone with a sub-Saharan diet and available nutrition, but raise them in Norway eating herring cold weather root vegetables, they will not become pasty pale, and grow blond hair. Neither will the Norwegian, transplanted to Papua, take on the local look - no matter what she eats.
Very well fed and nutritionally well-taken-care-of Vietnamese folks aren't going to have the same body type as a large-boned Teutonic alp-dweller, complete with turbo-powered fat cells designed for packing on the pounds before the cold whether sets in. It's breeding... adaptation.
And now that we're all past the geographic re-inforcing of these traits by virtue of a more globe-wandering population, you're forced to look at what people actually DO. You can't have made it past high school without recognizing the trend (with exceptions, of course) for lanky, attractive people to tend to wind up with each other, and with similar children. Likewise with the more trollish body types. This is slashdot, you know what I mean.
Would you have any scientific evidence on these?
No need, really. Just use your eyes. For purposes of this discussion, you know exactly what I mean. If you travel, you can spot it instantly. In a given area, economic classes can show a visible differences that are not strictly quality-of-dinner related. I have no axe to grind here - just calling like I've actually seen it. In Pennsylvania, in Verona, in Athens, in Denver, in Mexico City.
Your tests are interesting, but you're not really parsing the responses in the right context. They're problematic. Keep in mind this understanding engine understands the world in a way that was hatched out in San Fransisco.
... like I said, it's San Fransisco
Who is David Bowie? I trust that it came back with, "aka Ziggy Stardust, normal family guy"
Who played the villain in the first Die Hard? Well, obviously, the villain is "capitalism."
Billie Jean King and Madonna
Who was the organist for The Beatles on Abbey Road?
You had it at "organ," and it got distracted. What they need is some dev guys from Toledo to collaborate, and provide a little cognitive counterweight to the understanding engine. OK, maybe not Toledo. Maybe Atlanta.
I personally believe we don't yet have the wisdom or foresight necessary to manipulate our genes
Nonsense. What do you think the thousands-of-years-old practice of arrangement marriages was all about? Not strictly village economics. Parents also sized up prospective mates for their kids based on the health, history, and talents of thei prospective mate and his/her family. Yeah, yeah, eugenics. Except, that's exactly what it is, and was for a long time.
We can (the old fasioned way) make new specialized breeds of livestock, dogs, and chickens with only a few decades of paying attention to cause and effect. Cultures do the same thing - it just takes longer. And that's why - whether anyone wants to admit it or not - you can spot, in a given geographic region - people that have a "peasant" look/build and other people that have an "aristrocratic" look/build. Genetic manipulation.
Counselnaut? Astrolawyer? Orbital Mouthpiece? Defender (get it)? Prosecutron? Baikonur Barrister? Still, I guess this isn't any different than those lawyers that specialize in oddball maritime issues.
ll three are self-serving, but the Chinese government are the most socially responsible of the lot.
I see. That would be the China that just shouted down any attempt by the UN to even hold discussions about whether to try to bypass the Burma junta and get international aid directly to the million people that are about to die there? That IS socially responsible!
And corporations? They exist to serve the people that form and invest in them. That's their actual purpose. Of course, many of them are lining up to provide goods and services to aid the people who are about to die in Burma, while China and Russia are backing the junta's demands to funnel all of the aid through them (you know, the people who elected not to warn their coastal population that they were about to die in droves, even though the rest of the world scrambled to let that military regime know what was about to happen). You know, the military regime that is confiscating such aid as IS allowed to land there, and which they are labeling with their own stickers and political propoganda before handing it out. You know, the military regime that China is insulating from so much as a formal rebuke from the UN.
What's your motivation, here, exactly? You find the Chinese government - who jail and even kill people for saying the sorts of things you can sit at a US corporate desk and say all day long, and who harbor and sanction outright network vandalism and malware propogation around the world, and prop up hell holes like North Korea - more trustworthy than Honda, or Bayer, or LG, or Nokia, or Virgin Atlantic, or AMD, or your local grocery store chain? Really?
Will these Olympics lead to a more free China, or is it just corporate pandering?
Ask the international Olypmic commitee what they were thinking. The companies that make money off of the broadcasting and related licensing are going to make money regardless of where the games are held. It would likely be a lot easier, logistically, NOT to have to put up with the Chinese nonsense while moving the media army into place to cover the games. Which corporations are being pandered to, here? The corporation that is China? They (the Chinese) promised all sorts of open access and press freedom as part of the package they pitched while trying to seduce the panel that chooses the venues. They were obviously lying, a lot. How that broadly strokes "corporate" interests enough to refer to it that way in the summary is not clear enough in the summary to warrant that particular bit of editorial spin.
Really? How much less could you care?
I couldn't care less how much less he could care. Because here he is bitching about licensing issues in a thread that's all about splitting hairs over the use of the words "shared" and "open." And amidst all of that fussing over word definitions, he sees fit to say the exact opposite of what he actually means, by leaving out the negative. I suppose, to someone who doesn't actually think about the words he uses, and simply does a phonetic regurgitation, minus an important syllabile or two, of a phrase he hears regularly - without a care about the fact that doing so alters the meaning of the sentence - that it's perfectly normal to also just mindlessly parrot Teh Eevil Microsoft mantra. Hey, once you stop caring about whether the sounds that come out of your mouth actually represent your thoughts (or mean anything at all), then it probably is easier just to fall back on the group think and repeat whatever you last heard.
The whiter you are, the quicker you get it
Correlation is not causation.
Africa's latency in moving ahead, economically, doesn't have anything to do with skin color. It's culture. Big difference.
Well, as long as we're fine-tuning the analogy...
The difference between the relationship that I might have with China, and that which I might have with, say, General Motors or Apple Computer, is still fundamentally different. If GM or Apple were caught routinely lying about how they do business, or were routinely shipping out tainted goods, or were routinely busted trying to break into DoD computers or running large counterfeit goods operations... they'd be OUT of business, and the people making those decisions would be in jail. The Chinese government not only isn't held accountable for that sort of thing, they encourage it, and spin like crazy whenever they get observed doing it.
To the extent that the Chinese government IS the corporation running that company (only a somewhat useful analogy), they are a really corrupt company. And obviously, General Motors doesn't have nuclear weapons, doesn't sponsor countries like North Korea, doesn't threaten the democracy in Taiwan, and doesn't sell spare parts to fine fellows like the thugs running Iran. I'm sure you see my point... but I just like to avoid analogies that sort of backfire. Saying that China is like what we think of as a corporation kinds of puts a bad spin on the use of that word. If you and I were to get together to start a small business, and incorporated in order to do it right, we'd still be forced to obey laws - just like Apple has to, or Intel, or the Dole Fruit people. China doesn't seem to feel any such urge. They only bother to enforce rules when getting busted in the public eye might damage their market presence. They really don't get it, yet, about ethics being the things you do when no one is looking. There are people in every country that don't get that... but China is an entire country that operates that way, and is strangely naive enough to think that we can't see right through the charade.
For a culture as ancient as that one, it's a wierdly adolescent way to exist.
But are these Botnets actually being controlled by people in China?
... you get the idea.
Almost every attack of consequence that I've seen tried or at least partially successful in the last 6 months (mostly SQL injection attempts against legacy web apps here in the US) have originated in China. Sure, could be that the bad guys launched those attacks from Russia, using pwned machines in China. But the scripts that these attacks attempt to insert into web content cause browsers to surf to web sites hosted in China that in turn attempt to install trojans. These same sites go unchanged for months at a time, are hosted by companies operating in China, with domain names registered by Chinese companies. If it looks like Peking Duck, walks like Peking Duck