The notion that these ideas sprouted in various places completely separated actually lends credence to their existence.
Wrong. They appeared because of the way our brains are organized.
Marvin Minsky (a principal founder of Al) and Michael Gazzaniga (one of the major workers in split-brain research) have independently come to a virtually identical model of the mind. Both view minds as vast collections of interacting, largely parallel (co-conscious) modules, or "agents." The lowest level of such a society of agents consists of a small number of nerve cells that innervate a section of muscle. A few of the higher level modules have been isolated in clever experiments by Gazzaniga, some of them on split-brain patients.
One surprise from this work is that we seem to have our mental modules arranged in a way that guarantees we will form beliefs. What we believe in depends, at least in part, on what we are exposed to and the order in which we are exposed. Gazzaniga argues that we slowly evolved the ability to form beliefs because the ability provides a major advantage in surviving. Being able to infer, that is to form new beliefs, and to learn, in the sense of acquiring such beliefs from others, was a major advance over learning by trial and error. Being able to pass the rare new ways our ancestors found for chipping rock or making pots from person to person and generation to generation was vital in allowing humans to spread over the earth. But as this ability became the norm, communicating human minds formed a new "primal soup" in which a new kind of non-biological evolution, that of replicating information patterns or memes, could get started. A wide variety of competing memes has evolved in the intervening seventy thousand years or so. It should not be surprising that the survivors of this process, like astrology or religions, are so effective at inducing their hosts to spread and defend them.
Thanks to Keith Henson. I'd never have expressed it so well.
Its enough to say its at least possible. However, personally, I've found that science has brought us further along, therefore I throw my weight behind them. It's not that I chose science over religion. I just could never get myself to believe it. However, that doesn't mean someone else can't or that I'm intellectually superior just because they believe something I can't. Maybe I lack some understanding that has been blinded by pure reason and cold logic. Who am I to know? Logically, its possible.
No. A Spook In The Sky that Wills the World? That's as illogical as it gets! It's a delusion of the "imaginary friend" type. Why don't we consider it a disease?
So, honestly, religion and science are at worst competing ideas, one not better than the other. At best, they're two sides of the same coin and can co-exist.
What... no. Science explores and explains the world by the scientific method. Religion is a delusion-inducing disease. They're "competing ideas" in the memetic sense, but one systematically explores reality, and the other is a dangerous delusion about an imaginary friend that really hates you unless you worship it.
If they need a reason for war, they'll listen to the priest telling them to go die for God.
If they need a reason for war, they'll listen to anybody.
Yes.
Its much more difficult than that. If you remove all conditions that would cause this supposed 'war mode,' there is a high chance that it will just fester under the surface and eventually explode from some unknown circumstance. Violence is a part of us and of nature itself. It cannot be suppressed by simply saying, "hey, there's enough for everyone." People will argue over anything. And some resources are not in full abundance. One of hand that I can think of is women. Whil
I'm a casual drug user. I don't want Society to tell me that there are things I can't put in my body. Thus, following my Law, the only law I follow and respect : do unto others as you would have them do to you, I'd say NOT to prevent them and stop them believing. Not gonna work anyway./
No, no, let believe the ones who won't change their minds, they're unimportant after all, they're only individuals. But educate their kids, teach them the TRUE models of how the world works, show them it's simple to test for one varying condition, show them that the world is simple! Just has many, many systems and conditions and causal loops and historical accidents. They'll NEVER think there's a Spook In The Sky, "ready to cut off the power supply of the cluster part we exist in, so let's pray he does not".
Yeah. We (atheists) are right. And they (religions) are wrong.
If they had to respond to the sword with their prayers, who'd have the survival advantage? Religion is a bad tool.
I'm NOT advocating a religious war. I don't want anyone killed over that AGAIN. I want religions to disappear, displaced by science. Teach all children the self-evident scientific method, the origins of the world, give them answers to the Eternal Questions, and all religions will disappear in under a century.
If people on drugs are happy, why should we stop them? Ah yes, because of the behaviours they exhibit besides being happy and that are both anti-social and consequential of their drug use. There's also a public health thing involved, but the day that aspect is relevant to a discussion about theology, things will be bad indeed...:)
Then let the people on drugs be happy! And, WHAT behaviours? Drugs make people feel GOOD. People who feel good are peaceful. People who are oppressed, ostracized from Good Society, e.g. for inflicting feelgood to themselves, THEN exhibit anti-social behaviors. Public health? Drugs are pretty safe, as long as they're pure.
No health/safety control, high prices, antisocial behaviour : all the problems of drugs are due to the prohibition. But yes, that's a whole other debate... (Solved, too : put the demanded products on the Free Market. Counter-argument : "Making yourself feel good by consuming a substance, that's a Bad Thing, immmoral like all that makes feel good." It really boils down to that.)
Life is itself a problem-solving system, you'd think that we'd have abandoned a tool that's become as useless as religion, using Science instead! But the inertia of stupidity is infinite.
You have part of it.
What problem does religion (and belief in general) solve?
Bonus: Can you formulate an answer that does not make you inherently superior to religions people? See this as a challenge befitting your superior intellect. (Then once seen, unsee.)
I can't... I've just used my brain, seen that comparing religion to science rationally makes science stand out as the superior tool, and feel pity and contempt for the myriads of people who live their whole lives believing those delusions and living in accordance to them. It is an waste of effort of apocalyptic proportions and infinite stupidity; I can't see it any other way. Even if I try to imagine "all the good religions have done", I view it as an oasis in the midst of the pile of all corpses, all the witches and the dead in the religious wars... Religions are only peaceful when the people are. If they need a reason for war, they'll listen to the priest telling them to go die for God. All those conditions, environmental switches, species-specific behaviors, is a sort of social game that us primates play unconsciously and collectively.
The solution to all wars, and to religion to a large extent, is EDUCATION to teach Science to everyone, and RESOURCES so that they never get the perception that those will lack.
Do you really think millions of years of human evolution can be changed by education and resources?
And, before you turn the flames on me, I'm agnostic, so chill.
Million of years of evolution can't be changed, but, just suppress the environmental conditions that flip the behavioral switch to "war mode", and the dire consequences of religions will all be avoided : they won't be the xenophobic meme that mediates the dehumanization of the people's perception of their neighbours, if the conditions in which xenophobic memes thrive (impending lack of resources) just never happens anymore.
You don't understand. I vehemently defend my position, which is that the religions should be buried under the global scream of "ENOUGH!"... and no religion has any right whatsoever to peaceful dialogue, with THEIR track records!
When did any religion ever turn peaceful? They're all 1/an excuse for the regime they serve 2/a set of fairytales that explains how the world came to be (not, but it took us a while to find out) 3/a set of answers to the Eternal Questions 4/a social bonding thing 5/an excuse to go kill the neighbours in the name of God, but our real need is to either conquer their place so as to use their resources, or get all killed so that our genes will replicate when their men will have captured our women. (Capture-bonding is a survival trait coming directly from this causal loop btw.)
And I find you are a primitive primate, who shows his lack of intelligence by looking for the tone instead of the message. Come on, show me how enlightened you are, answer one of my points.
An OS in ROM? Well, they invented the Amiga. Good idea, that.
Sarcasm aside, it's a good idea. Such a shame that the product is ready to ship since year 2000, or before, and (check...) They don't support shit. No, really. Now they have the OLPC (it uses LinuxBios, right? Please don't tell me The Perfect Laptop takes a minute to boot!) showing, "hey it works, our obvious to self-evidence idea, so when will you replace that old legacy useless crap BIOS?"
A real kernel in ROM and boot times reduced to few seconds is a killer app. "Look how fast my computers are! They're so fast, they boot instantly! Come buy one now!" Fortune in seconds.
This means he's spent most of his life poring over empty crap that has no use.
It's really sad that even I, loser, am so fucking superior to that monkey with his belief that the sky could fall on his head "if God wills it so". Not even beginning to think of the countless hordes of lobotomized morons who listen to what he says. It's a sad, sad world, where over one half of all people still believe in those disproven delusions.
Yeah, disproven. There is no God. Religion is full of shit. It only survives by vertical spread, even though any kid not blindingly stupid will, some day, see right through the lies and develop a profound hate for the elders who tried to inculcate him with a clear handicap for problem-solving, which is all that life's about. The paradigm of life as evolving replicates of genetic material is a problem-solving algorithm. Life is itself a problem-solving system, you'd think that we'd have abandoned a tool that's become as useless as religion, using Science instead! But the inertia of stupidity is infinite.
Oh, I see an argument coming... "Religion says why, science says how" Fuck That. Religion says "Because God Willed It So" and has nothing, NOTHING else to say.
"Teaches us great MORALS..."... just like Lot and his daughters. Or Noah who expels one of his sons who's seen him drunk. Two of the most evident... Our morals come from our evolved urge to cooperate with other humans. It's a group-survival trait, only preempted by other evolved traits such as "war behaviour". Or Allah uh-akbar, let's go kill them all, God's with us, Blut und Ehre, and shit. Religion includes memes of the sort that gets the warriors jumping up and down, screaming "KILL! KILL!", when resources go down and people need to die to make room in the ecological niche. Not that we REALLY need that since we invented agriculture, but as we evolved in constantly warring small tribes for 6000000 years, we haven't lost the habit of killing the neighbours, take their land and capture their women, yet, because that's been one thousand times longer than we've been in towns fed by high-yield crops, instead of in small villages with scarce game and small berries. The solution to all wars, and to religion to a large extent, is EDUCATION to teach Science to everyone, and RESOURCES so that they never get the perception that those will lack.
Add to the above the fact that religion is generally useful to control people and that explains why we haven't waked up yet. Causal loop : people in power use religion to keep religion in place.
Oh well. If someone repiles with an argument I haven't adressed yet, I'll destroy it then... So, creation of the world - check. The origin of war and the link to religion - check. Destroy the "Religion gives us Morals" argument - check. Destroy "Why vs How" - check.
It is no longer a private opinion if you publish it. Once something is published, it's the exact opposite of private -- it's public. Complete, totally, and irrevocably public.
Only if there is no need to have an username and associated password to read the member profiles. If there are, then the site is a PRIVATE community.
Besides, universities are BUSINESSES. You know what those are, right? In a free society, businesses are allowed to concern themselves with their public image. Any responsibly run business is very interested in what people think of them. They want to know what magazines, news sites, and bloggers are publishing about them. So they do, among things, Google searches on the name of the school.
As for Uni a business - this has got to stop. Universities have a well-defined role in society : to pass on knowledge. They have no business conducting background checks on their students, period. They don't even have to make money, just do their job right! Yeah, right, I know, it's the US, the only country where you count both education and health services in mortgage years instead of dollars.
Note well the ways in which this is different than doing an investigation into a student's private life. First, the thing being investigated is the university itself -- which is undeniably part of the purview of a university administrator. Second, the parts of the student's life that are being discovered aren't private -- they're statements that the student deliberately made public in the full knowledge that his University's administrators (among others) could read them.
Oh. Okay. The Uni can google itself all they wants, they're welcome. They don't get to 1. register as an individual, against the site TOS 2. on a social networking site where a school has NOTHING to do whatsoever in the first place 3. so as to check on students to see what they're writing about thewselves, which is none of their business. Only what he says about the Uni. Which they should treat as feedback, not possible tarnishing of their image. (unless it's clearly libel. Is it illegal to bash an institution like libel for a person? I don't know if the term covers that meaning)
How much MORE Orwellian do you want the scool system to be? I pity your kids. Please do them a favor already and get a vasectomy, instead of inflicting them years of your control-freak abuse.
I don't understand why you keep calling me a fascist, you Big Brother worshipper, how can you include in your value system that it is GOOD that a school concerns itself with their students' private opinions, even if they're publicly posted, the school has no business checking anyone's web identity, save on the school's website. THAT's the reason they should not have expelled the guy. It's just None Of Their Business. Now if the guy has disruptive behaviors IN SCHOOL (e.g. wearing a shirt that reads "SHOOT ME I'M FAMOUS" under a portrait of JFK might be considered offensive) that's something else entirely.
Excuse me? Code that loads as root using a known vulnerability of a fraction of the Linux userbase, those with the precise unpatched versions, then mounts the HD and hides itself without destroying the filesystem data, no matter what FS it is. Yeah, right, as if someone who could do Just That had nothing better to write than viruses...
No, no. They shoud have no right to do that on behalf of the school, let alone expel a student on those grounds! I've posted that they are morons because of their reaction. Then I began saying it might be argued this way or that, and voicing what my sense of morals tells me about the situation.
(I shouldn't have posted the sentence about complulsory school, I forgot it was a Uni. Stupid me, too much weed, all that.)
I'd like to point out that workflow decisions can only be made when you know the whole of your tool. I've seen people lose years of time, because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to do things in the ways the toolmakers already thought about.
No. I don't advocate a surveillance system the other way, either. Compulsory school is bad enough... I'd rather like the school not to engage in background searches on their students. The school needs only be concerned with what actually happens on school premises. And if they had ever used their behaviorist science to actually prevent acts of violence instead of making them happen, the idea of a school performing routine background checks on its students would be obviously useless, and more dangerous than not doing them.
This is ridiculous. Every student who uses Photoshop needs the full version, to learn to use it for his future job. Thus, they'd make some millions more if they'd price it $30 instead of $650. The Big Companies use volume licenses, and those are much cheaper. Big companies like Adobe just rape the little guy out of his money, for his only license on his work computer. Which he'll use on his laptop too, and ask the trained monkeys at Adobe Call Center for a working "I had to reinstall and now it won't work" activation number, which they'll give without much questions, as those things happen all the time... They lose the moral high ground, and I'm happily using $100,000 worth of software on my Hackintosh. Come get me, I'm unemployed and penniless. Where is the lost sale then? Answer : at the price point I could have afforded.
Yeah, but that is going too far already. The school should not have a right to do that as a school. It's none of its business. Maybe the campus administration could do that, because it's a little more concerned about who the student is, but not the school administration. That's what makes it wrong. And if the campus administration did that, they'd better not have the right to expel a student, unless there are really good reasons. If the guy posts somethiong about himself, they might want to know it before they find out, as long as it remains as private as the student might want it to be. He posts online about it, but he might want his roommates not to know... How did the school find his profile, too? Did he give them the address? If yes, he can't do much. If not, then, did he register under his real name? If he signed under his real name, the school might argue that he published it, released it, and so it might be read by anyone. But,are Facebook profiles visible to unregistered users? If no, then the school has no business there. May a school register, following Facebook's terms of use? Whose account was used to read the guy's? These might be important points.
This is not "online surveillance going too far". It's "Some universities employ complete morons who can't even read. This hazs serious consequenes, such as students expelled for non-reasons."
Why is that news? Maybe sections with a counter in each, such as "$UNIVERSITY expels $STUDENT for reason $STUPID" would do it, with an index that links to each relevant article. Good idea for a web 2.0 news site, that.
What little energy there is just fades and dies, like the current stops when you turn off the light. No more matter (glucose) is used in the brain, like a lamp on "OFF" uses no energy.
However the energy that our mind makes up cannot be explained away as saying "it stops", energy has to go somewhere.
The energy is not there. Death is a process in which the neural activity decreases until it stops. Death is accomplished when there is no more measurable brain energy, the kinds that can be detected with an EEG.
In fact the change in state that the energy, (be it synapses firing in the brain or pure thought), can be taken as a the journey to Heaven or to be reincarnated,
What are you talking about? Change in state, right. What happens is that you die. Your conscience is asleep without dreams forever, but it's as close to what you think as reality allows.
(after all what are we really but recycled matter and energy from what we eat and drink), which also points out a deficiency of answers to #1.
If you're talking about the substance that make up our bodies, then yes. I was thinking more of "what was needed to produce the historical model of you" as defines your identity.
Yeah, but no one will ever be allowed to publish anything new whatsoever on the 'Net, then, because the older Mickey gets, the longer copyright lasts. Until they finally decide that copyright is forever and everyone will laugh and happily copy content just the same.
It really is true that many of the best inventions are obvious only in hindsight.
No. Not in this case. I've been thiking of that the first time I've seen two GSMs near each other, on different networks, with the communication between them ridiculously oiverpriced, and I happened to think "Wait a sec. Those things are radios. Why can't they communicate directly?"
Then I learned, much later, that they *are* radios that send digitalized sounds, as encrypted packets, to some hub... And NO ONE in the industry EVER thought to connect them when near, route between them, and relay to an antenna when $DESTINATION is not reachable over the mesh. Yeah, right.
Not. It's really evident since forever. But the Holy business plan in telco seems to be 1. Get investors to pay for infrastructure 2. Brutally sodomize your customers with every bill 3. Profit forever doing nothing.
Other : Sell at a premium the capabilities your basic service already provides, make your clients pay 50 times the cost, and that's for normal traffic, take 35% on all pay-per-phone transactions, sell asymmetric Internet lines, like I don't need as much upload as download, sell phone communications by the minute when it's all VOIP and even national calls use gateways in India because it's cheaper than their own lines (that they can rent, and oversell, to their competitors, at extortionist prices) and cost them zilch, and even zilch times their number of customers would be paid a thousand times over with a flat rate per month for any call from anywhere to anywhere. Not even going into their Open Communications Agreements (it's like those Free Trade Agreements that give to corporations the power over citizens, but in cyberspace) about ten years ago. So, how comes it's still not the same price to phone to and from any point in the world? And they give our usage data for free to the government, and probably resold the logs to DoubleClick (now Google) too.
I hate telcos. Let's all go build routers on vacuum tubes...
So what? We'll build them with handmade vacuum tubes if that's what it takes. Then some one of us will find enough $$$ to sell trhem at a profit, and they'll be part of the system again. The only other option is to ban the use of some devices, and the 'Net is not made for that. It's open. There will be so many unfixable flaws for so many years that it will stay impossible to close.
And good luck with closing Internet when there already exists a mesh-networked computer. (The mesh-network is an idea so immediately obvious that I'm wondering how comes no one developed it before, btw. Why on Earth do we still use GSMs that need expensive infrastructure even in city centres because they can't even connect to their closest neighbours? It's been completely evident for twenty years, at which time the problems would have been solved by the first company to throw enough money at it, in, what, two years?)
Yeah, and what about efficiency? I tried FreeNet in 2001 or something, it was unusably slow. Well, I'll go back to using it the day I have no more limits on my traffic AND an upload speed that's not a crippled 5% of my DL speed. I was thinking of something much, much lighter. Not distributed, only encrypted end-to-end, something like a TCP packet with the destination port encrypted but not the destination address. Something that only hides what you're doing - anonymization for privacy, not overkill paranoia. (Does SSL hide what it is you're doing, or just the message?)
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. They appeared because of the way our brains are organized.
Thanks to Keith Henson. I'd never have expressed it so well.
No. A Spook In The Sky that Wills the World? That's as illogical as it gets! It's a delusion of the "imaginary friend" type. Why don't we consider it a disease?
What ... no. Science explores and explains the world by the scientific method. Religion is a delusion-inducing disease. They're "competing ideas" in the memetic sense, but one systematically explores reality, and the other is a dangerous delusion about an imaginary friend that really hates you unless you worship it.
Yes.
I'm a casual drug user. I don't want Society to tell me that there are things I can't put in my body. Thus, following my Law, the only law I follow and respect : do unto others as you would have them do to you, I'd say NOT to prevent them and stop them believing. Not gonna work anyway./
No, no, let believe the ones who won't change their minds, they're unimportant after all, they're only individuals. But educate their kids, teach them the TRUE models of how the world works, show them it's simple to test for one varying condition, show them that the world is simple! Just has many, many systems and conditions and causal loops and historical accidents. They'll NEVER think there's a Spook In The Sky, "ready to cut off the power supply of the cluster part we exist in, so let's pray he does not".
Yeah. We (atheists) are right. And they (religions) are wrong.
If they had to respond to the sword with their prayers, who'd have the survival advantage? Religion is a bad tool.
I'm NOT advocating a religious war. I don't want anyone killed over that AGAIN. I want religions to disappear, displaced by science. Teach all children the self-evident scientific method, the origins of the world, give them answers to the Eternal Questions, and all religions will disappear in under a century.
If people on drugs are happy, why should we stop them? Ah yes, because of the behaviours they exhibit besides being happy and that are both anti-social and consequential of their drug use. There's also a public health thing involved, but the day that aspect is relevant to a discussion about theology, things will be bad indeed... :)
Then let the people on drugs be happy! And, WHAT behaviours? Drugs make people feel GOOD. People who feel good are peaceful. People who are oppressed, ostracized from Good Society, e.g. for inflicting feelgood to themselves, THEN exhibit anti-social behaviors. Public health? Drugs are pretty safe, as long as they're pure.
No health/safety control, high prices, antisocial behaviour : all the problems of drugs are due to the prohibition. But yes, that's a whole other debate... (Solved, too : put the demanded products on the Free Market. Counter-argument : "Making yourself feel good by consuming a substance, that's a Bad Thing, immmoral like all that makes feel good." It really boils down to that.)
Funny how the other story I cite is that of the guy who fucks all of his three daughters. Whose MMV?
You have part of it.
What problem does religion (and belief in general) solve?
Bonus: Can you formulate an answer that does not make you inherently superior to religions people? See this as a challenge befitting your superior intellect. (Then once seen, unsee.)
I can't... I've just used my brain, seen that comparing religion to science rationally makes science stand out as the superior tool, and feel pity and contempt for the myriads of people who live their whole lives believing those delusions and living in accordance to them.
It is an waste of effort of apocalyptic proportions and infinite stupidity; I can't see it any other way. Even if I try to imagine "all the good religions have done", I view it as an oasis in the midst of the pile of all corpses, all the witches and the dead in the religious wars... Religions are only peaceful when the people are. If they need a reason for war, they'll listen to the priest telling them to go die for God.
All those conditions, environmental switches, species-specific behaviors, is a sort of social game that us primates play unconsciously and collectively.
Million of years of evolution can't be changed, but, just suppress the environmental conditions that flip the behavioral switch to "war mode", and the dire consequences of religions will all be avoided : they won't be the xenophobic meme that mediates the dehumanization of the people's perception of their neighbours, if the conditions in which xenophobic memes thrive (impending lack of resources) just never happens anymore.
See? No flames
You don't understand. I vehemently defend my position, which is that the religions should be buried under the global scream of "ENOUGH!"... and no religion has any right whatsoever to peaceful dialogue, with THEIR track records!
When did any religion ever turn peaceful?
They're all
1/an excuse for the regime they serve
2/a set of fairytales that explains how the world came to be (not, but it took us a while to find out)
3/a set of answers to the Eternal Questions
4/a social bonding thing
5/an excuse to go kill the neighbours in the name of God, but our real need is to either conquer their place so as to use their resources, or get all killed so that our genes will replicate when their men will have captured our women. (Capture-bonding is a survival trait coming directly from this causal loop btw.)
And I find you are a primitive primate, who shows his lack of intelligence by looking for the tone instead of the message. Come on, show me how enlightened you are, answer one of my points.
An OS in ROM? Well, they invented the Amiga. Good idea, that.
Sarcasm aside, it's a good idea. Such a shame that the product is ready to ship since year 2000, or before, and (check...) They don't support shit. No, really. Now they have the OLPC (it uses LinuxBios, right? Please don't tell me The Perfect Laptop takes a minute to boot!) showing, "hey it works, our obvious to self-evidence idea, so when will you replace that old legacy useless crap BIOS?"
A real kernel in ROM and boot times reduced to few seconds is a killer app. "Look how fast my computers are! They're so fast, they boot instantly! Come buy one now!" Fortune in seconds.
He's a theologian.
... just like Lot and his daughters. Or Noah who expels one of his sons who's seen him drunk. Two of the most evident... Our morals come from our evolved urge to cooperate with other humans. It's a group-survival trait, only preempted by other evolved traits such as "war behaviour".
This means he's spent most of his life poring over empty crap that has no use.
It's really sad that even I, loser, am so fucking superior to that monkey with his belief that the sky could fall on his head "if God wills it so". Not even beginning to think of the countless hordes of lobotomized morons who listen to what he says. It's a sad, sad world, where over one half of all people still believe in those disproven delusions.
Yeah, disproven. There is no God. Religion is full of shit. It only survives by vertical spread, even though any kid not blindingly stupid will, some day, see right through the lies and develop a profound hate for the elders who tried to inculcate him with a clear handicap for problem-solving, which is all that life's about. The paradigm of life as evolving replicates of genetic material is a problem-solving algorithm. Life is itself a problem-solving system, you'd think that we'd have abandoned a tool that's become as useless as religion, using Science instead! But the inertia of stupidity is infinite.
Oh, I see an argument coming... "Religion says why, science says how" Fuck That. Religion says "Because God Willed It So" and has nothing, NOTHING else to say.
"Teaches us great MORALS..."
Or Allah uh-akbar, let's go kill them all, God's with us, Blut und Ehre, and shit. Religion includes memes of the sort that gets the warriors jumping up and down, screaming "KILL! KILL!", when resources go down and people need to die to make room in the ecological niche. Not that we REALLY need that since we invented agriculture, but as we evolved in constantly warring small tribes for 6000000 years, we haven't lost the habit of killing the neighbours, take their land and capture their women, yet, because that's been one thousand times longer than we've been in towns fed by high-yield crops, instead of in small villages with scarce game and small berries.
The solution to all wars, and to religion to a large extent, is EDUCATION to teach Science to everyone, and RESOURCES so that they never get the perception that those will lack.
Add to the above the fact that religion is generally useful to control people and that explains why we haven't waked up yet. Causal loop : people in power use religion to keep religion in place.
Oh well. If someone repiles with an argument I haven't adressed yet, I'll destroy it then... So, creation of the world - check. The origin of war and the link to religion - check. Destroy the "Religion gives us Morals" argument - check. Destroy "Why vs How" - check.
Yeah, but you get to re-invent "HIBERNATE" first.
HOW THE FUCK IS THAT NEWS?
Only if there is no need to have an username and associated password to read the member profiles. If there are, then the site is a PRIVATE community.
As for Uni a business - this has got to stop. Universities have a well-defined role in society : to pass on knowledge. They have no business conducting background checks on their students, period. They don't even have to make money, just do their job right! Yeah, right, I know, it's the US, the only country where you count both education and health services in mortgage years instead of dollars.
Oh. Okay. The Uni can google itself all they wants, they're welcome. They don't get to
1. register as an individual, against the site TOS
2. on a social networking site where a school has NOTHING to do whatsoever in the first place
3. so as to check on students to see what they're writing about thewselves, which is none of their business. Only what he says about the Uni. Which they should treat as feedback, not possible tarnishing of their image. (unless it's clearly libel. Is it illegal to bash an institution like libel for a person? I don't know if the term covers that meaning)
How much MORE Orwellian do you want the scool system to be? I pity your kids. Please do them a favor already and get a vasectomy, instead of inflicting them years of your control-freak abuse.
I don't understand why you keep calling me a fascist, you Big Brother worshipper, how can you include in your value system that it is GOOD that a school concerns itself with their students' private opinions, even if they're publicly posted, the school has no business checking anyone's web identity, save on the school's website.
THAT's the reason they should not have expelled the guy. It's just None Of Their Business. Now if the guy has disruptive behaviors IN SCHOOL (e.g. wearing a shirt that reads "SHOOT ME I'M FAMOUS" under a portrait of JFK might be considered offensive) that's something else entirely.
Excuse me? Code that loads as root using a known vulnerability of a fraction of the Linux userbase, those with the precise unpatched versions, then mounts the HD and hides itself without destroying the filesystem data, no matter what FS it is. Yeah, right, as if someone who could do Just That had nothing better to write than viruses...
No, no. They shoud have no right to do that on behalf of the school, let alone expel a student on those grounds! I've posted that they are morons because of their reaction. Then I began saying it might be argued this way or that, and voicing what my sense of morals tells me about the situation.
(I shouldn't have posted the sentence about complulsory school, I forgot it was a Uni. Stupid me, too much weed, all that.)
I'd like to point out that workflow decisions can only be made when you know the whole of your tool. I've seen people lose years of time, because they couldn't be bothered to learn how to do things in the ways the toolmakers already thought about.
No. I don't advocate a surveillance system the other way, either. Compulsory school is bad enough... I'd rather like the school not to engage in background searches on their students.
The school needs only be concerned with what actually happens on school premises. And if they had ever used their behaviorist science to actually prevent acts of violence instead of making them happen, the idea of a school performing routine background checks on its students would be obviously useless, and more dangerous than not doing them.
This is ridiculous. Every student who uses Photoshop needs the full version, to learn to use it for his future job. Thus, they'd make some millions more if they'd price it $30 instead of $650.
The Big Companies use volume licenses, and those are much cheaper. Big companies like Adobe just rape the little guy out of his money, for his only license on his work computer. Which he'll use on his laptop too, and ask the trained monkeys at Adobe Call Center for a working "I had to reinstall and now it won't work" activation number, which they'll give without much questions, as those things happen all the time... They lose the moral high ground, and I'm happily using $100,000 worth of software on my Hackintosh. Come get me, I'm unemployed and penniless. Where is the lost sale then? Answer : at the price point I could have afforded.
Yeah, but that is going too far already. The school should not have a right to do that as a school. It's none of its business. Maybe the campus administration could do that, because it's a little more concerned about who the student is, but not the school administration. That's what makes it wrong. And if the campus administration did that, they'd better not have the right to expel a student, unless there are really good reasons. If the guy posts somethiong about himself, they might want to know it before they find out, as long as it remains as private as the student might want it to be. He posts online about it, but he might want his roommates not to know...
How did the school find his profile, too? Did he give them the address? If yes, he can't do much. If not, then, did he register under his real name? If he signed under his real name, the school might argue that he published it, released it, and so it might be read by anyone. But,are Facebook profiles visible to unregistered users? If no, then the school has no business there. May a school register, following Facebook's terms of use? Whose account was used to read the guy's? These might be important points.
This is not "online surveillance going too far". It's "Some universities employ complete morons who can't even read. This hazs serious consequenes, such as students expelled for non-reasons."
Why is that news? Maybe sections with a counter in each, such as "$UNIVERSITY expels $STUDENT for reason $STUPID" would do it, with an index that links to each relevant article. Good idea for a web 2.0 news site, that.
What little energy there is just fades and dies, like the current stops when you turn off the light. No more matter (glucose) is used in the brain, like a lamp on "OFF" uses no energy.
The energy is not there. Death is a process in which the neural activity decreases until it stops. Death is accomplished when there is no more measurable brain energy, the kinds that can be detected with an EEG.
What are you talking about? Change in state, right. What happens is that you die. Your conscience is asleep without dreams forever, but it's as close to what you think as reality allows.
If you're talking about the substance that make up our bodies, then yes. I was thinking more of "what was needed to produce the historical model of you" as defines your identity.
Yeah, but no one will ever be allowed to publish anything new whatsoever on the 'Net, then, because the older Mickey gets, the longer copyright lasts. Until they finally decide that copyright is forever and everyone will laugh and happily copy content just the same.
No. Not in this case. I've been thiking of that the first time I've seen two GSMs near each other, on different networks, with the communication between them ridiculously oiverpriced, and I happened to think "Wait a sec. Those things are radios. Why can't they communicate directly?"
Then I learned, much later, that they *are* radios that send digitalized sounds, as encrypted packets, to some hub... And NO ONE in the industry EVER thought to connect them when near, route between them, and relay to an antenna when $DESTINATION is not reachable over the mesh. Yeah, right.
Not. It's really evident since forever. But the Holy business plan in telco seems to be
1. Get investors to pay for infrastructure
2. Brutally sodomize your customers with every bill
3. Profit forever doing nothing.
Other : Sell at a premium the capabilities your basic service already provides, make your clients pay 50 times the cost, and that's for normal traffic, take 35% on all pay-per-phone transactions, sell asymmetric Internet lines, like I don't need as much upload as download, sell phone communications by the minute when it's all VOIP and even national calls use gateways in India because it's cheaper than their own lines (that they can rent, and oversell, to their competitors, at extortionist prices) and cost them zilch, and even zilch times their number of customers would be paid a thousand times over with a flat rate per month for any call from anywhere to anywhere. Not even going into their Open Communications Agreements (it's like those Free Trade Agreements that give to corporations the power over citizens, but in cyberspace) about ten years ago. So, how comes it's still not the same price to phone to and from any point in the world? And they give our usage data for free to the government, and probably resold the logs to DoubleClick (now Google) too.
I hate telcos. Let's all go build routers on vacuum tubes...
So what? We'll build them with handmade vacuum tubes if that's what it takes. Then some one of us will find enough $$$ to sell trhem at a profit, and they'll be part of the system again. The only other option is to ban the use of some devices, and the 'Net is not made for that. It's open. There will be so many unfixable flaws for so many years that it will stay impossible to close.
And good luck with closing Internet when there already exists a mesh-networked computer. (The mesh-network is an idea so immediately obvious that I'm wondering how comes no one developed it before, btw. Why on Earth do we still use GSMs that need expensive infrastructure even in city centres because they can't even connect to their closest neighbours? It's been completely evident for twenty years, at which time the problems would have been solved by the first company to throw enough money at it, in, what, two years?)
Yeah, and what about efficiency? I tried FreeNet in 2001 or something, it was unusably slow. Well, I'll go back to using it the day I have no more limits on my traffic AND an upload speed that's not a crippled 5% of my DL speed.
I was thinking of something much, much lighter. Not distributed, only encrypted end-to-end, something like a TCP packet with the destination port encrypted but not the destination address. Something that only hides what you're doing - anonymization for privacy, not overkill paranoia. (Does SSL hide what it is you're doing, or just the message?)