Your reply seems to have made his point. You suppose that because his view on atheism is different than your view of it that therefor he is wrong.
His point was that most atheists treat atheism as a religion. I don't see how spelling out that most atheists literally don't give a damn supports his point in any fashion what so ever.
Then go so far as to imply that while you can understand both points of view, he can't possibly do the same.
Hey, you are welcome to come up with your own explanation as for why the very religious seem to consistently describe atheism as a religion despite what most atheists have to say about the matter. Seems me to that taking a religionist's description of atheism as gospel is about as reasonable as saying that Frankling Graham is an authortative export on islam.
Lol, the whole terrorists are "probing" our security is such baloney. The TSA regualrly trumpets their useless accomplishments like confiscating drugs and guns but not a single person has even been indicted on terrorism charges, much less convicted, due to a TSA interdiction. Furthermore, if the TSA really was effective at stopping terrorists, they would just go somewhere else like a shopping mall or movie theater or sabotage the train tracks out in the boonies where there is nobody at all much less anybody actually watching for them. Yet none of it happens, ergo their ain't anything going on.
The reason why Obama hasn't changed "a number of policies" is because of things like inertia and irrational freak-outs like what happened when he tried to close gitmo and move the prisoners to a maximum security prison.
There are a lot of mindless bigots on both sides as well as reasonable intellectuals. Atheists aren't some elite group, who, through patient and thoughtful deliberation have come to an objective understanding of the universe and the people around them. Some might, but for the vast majority it's a belief system not unlike mot organized religions.
I'd say you have that exactly backwards. It's only the occasional extremist that holds atheism as a belief system. For most athiests it is simply just not worth a second thought. As the saying goes, atheism is a religion the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. As an atheist I suspect that such a concept is just fundamentally incomprehensible to a religious person, kind of like explaining the third dimension to a flatlander. So it is much easier to just categorize atheism as a religion-equivalent rather than a no-op.
The idea that america is "loaded" with spies implies a call for change in government policy. Even your anecdotes don't rise to the level that requires government action - if you knew that guy was plotting espionage than tell your boss, get him fired and the problem is solved.
And yes, AQ's threat to the US is and has been effectively non-existant. They shot their wad on 9-11 and since then the best they could muster has been incompetents like the shoe, underwear and times square bombers - even if they had been competent the sum threat they all posed was less than a week's worth of traffic fatalities, or 12 hours worth of heart disease.
America is LOADED with Chinese spies. China is in a cold war with the west, and the west is disregarding it. Sad.
No, it is something to be proud of. That such things can happen is a necessary consequence of a free society. It's one of the many things encompassed by the saying that, "Freedom isn't free."
We've already destroyed far too much of our freedom because of an irrational fear of practically non-existant terrorists, we should not sacrifice any more of the fundamental principles that make american society superior to chinese society. Unless, of course, civil liberties aren't inherently better than authoritarianism.
If they didn't spell it out, then they would be courting scandal if it ever got out. Lots of people have moral objections to weapons development - to secretly recruit their labor for something they are morally opposed to would be a huge deal.
In the US, and so I assume Canada is similar, it is perfectly legal for a store to re-shrinkwrap otherwise new merchandise and sell it as new. Re-shrinkwrapping used and selling as new is illegal, but merely opening the package does not disqualify a product from being new.
It is almost certain that a store like futureshop has a shrinkwrap machine. Therefore it is either a failure of corporate policies or a failure of local staff to follow corporate policies that resulted in them not verifying the returned merchandise.,
Tilt up is more expensive, but only by 5-10% which can be made up in reduced operational costs (cheaper to heat and cool, no termite treatments, better fire resistance for cheaper insurance, etc). But builders don't care about operational costs - only the selling price and most buyers are not informed enough to understand the implications of modern construction techniques.
There are some concrete additives that make it "self-healing." I don't know how well they work for plumbing type applications, they were designed for water-proofing of concrete walls and roofs. The way they work is that when the concrete cracks and moisture enters the new crack it reacts with the additive which expands, fills the crack and then cures.
Nope. Too hard. I cannot routinely make a moderately complex medical note comprehensible to any random patient. For one thing, patients vary enormously in their ability to understand things - you might be an engineer who would be interested and could understand a lot of technical detail. You might be functionally illiterate. No possible way to reconcile that.
The enemy of good is perfect. It is pure fatalism to say that because it is not possible to improve the situation for the least capable then there is no point in doing anything at all.
I cannot think of a system that is less geared toward creating material that an average patient can understand
The only reason that is the case is because medical records have been hidden from their owners for so long. As soon as patients start to expect to be able to use their own medical records the pressure will be on to make those records more comprehensible.
the media company's have been busted in the past posting there content on torrent sites just to catch people downloading
Let's see a citation for that because it sure sounds like bullshit to me. Note you made TWO claims in that sentence I quoted, I want a cite for both of them in a single incident.
If "big media company" deliberately shares their own content then they are going to have a tough time showing to the court that they didn't want it shared. And if they share someone else's content, then they don't have standing to sue.
Yes, the ads are the expensive part. But the whole 'not tied to the candidate" thing of super-pacs is a restriction on the "free speech" that is equivalent to the anonymity requirement of Lessig's proposal. The difference being that the "not tied to the candidate" thing is basically nothing but a fiction in practice.
This is one of the few issues that is absolutely black and white. Giving money to a politician is a bribe, and those who give the most money will inherently have more influence. There's just no good way to prevent that.
I've heard at least one clever way to handle that problem. Make campaign bribes anonymous. I think it was Lessig who proposed it. All bribes go into a big pot and are revocable. That way even if the politician sees you put your bribe into the pot, he can't know for sure if you took it back out later on.
That gets you past the whole "bribes are speech" thing because people are not restricted at all in the amount of bribes they can give. They can even claim credit for the bribes they give, just can't prove it.
Apparently something similar was tried for the election of judges in Florida. It worked so well that campaign contributions effectively dropped to nothing.
Just cookie-block and noscript the shit out of google, that's what I do. The only problem that has caused for me was to make it hard turn off safe-search until I found out you could add &safe=off to the end of any google search URL to turn off safe-search. I even added it to the google search-box in my firefox install,
Depends on your hardware. Recent intel "centrino" wifi chips can not change their MACs- I found this out personally because the driver under linux lets you try to change the MAC, but if you try to use it with one of these new chips it just fails to work over the air.
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
You have the risk model backwards. Targeted advertising is not much of a risk to the people viewing the advertising. Maybe they are suckered out of a few more dollars, and that's shitty but not anything new.
The problem comes when the goal is to pull information on a specific individual - someone who, for whatever reason, has become a person of interest. At that point every single piece of data that has ever been associated with that person will be examined in excruciating detail in order to gain some sort of leverage over them.
Consider the case of former US representative Anthony Weiner. The guy had an official public twitter feed and a personal one that was private. He used the private one to send dirty pictures of himself to women, had apparently been doing it for well over a year. One day one of his dick shots ends up on the official public feed for a few minutes and that is the beginning of the end of his career -- and the republican take over of what had been a staunchly democrat seat for nearly a century.
Now consider this totally hypothetical scenario -- somebody at twitter didn't like Rep Weiner. Maybe it was one of the angel investors, maybe it was just a partisan employee, who knows. But this twitter insider had full access to everything Weiner ever did on twitter -- public and private. They new about his naughty pictures - even though Weiner thought they were private, only between himself and the women he was cybersexing. Once known, it wouldn't take much work for a "bug" in the twitter system to "accidentally" publish that dick shot on Rep Weiner's public twitter feed.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that happened at all - chances are it was just PEBKAC. Even if it did, chances are we would never know for sure anyway. Think of it as an entirely plausible cautionary tale.
Which is worse, that the FBI waited 4 years to kick Lockheed off the project or that the FBI has regained control of unfinished software?
The worst is the realisation that the only thing saving us from law-enforcement totalitarian nirvana is institutional incompetence. If they ever really get their shit together we are so screwed.
Holy shit, you are an asshole. What part of, "I realize this does not directly address your point, but its at least tangential" did you Fail! to understand?
I realize this does not directly address your point, but its at least tangential...
Look into prepaid. There is a lot more competition for prepaid phones (and much less taxation) than there is on contract phones. For example, virgin mobile has a bunch of android phones in the $100-$200 range and $35/month gets you 350 minutes plus unlimited text and 3g data. Plus its month to month so if the carrier succumbs to competition and reduces prices, you can take advantage next month instead of 2 years later when your contract runs out.
Yet even Amtrak has stupidities like making it practically impossible to purchase a ticket without using some form of identification at some point in its use.
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Your reply seems to have made his point. You suppose that because his view on atheism is different than your view of it that therefor he is wrong.
His point was that most atheists treat atheism as a religion. I don't see how spelling out that most atheists literally don't give a damn supports his point in any fashion what so ever.
Then go so far as to imply that while you can understand both points of view, he can't possibly do the same.
Hey, you are welcome to come up with your own explanation as for why the very religious seem to consistently describe atheism as a religion despite what most atheists have to say about the matter. Seems me to that taking a religionist's description of atheism as gospel is about as reasonable as saying that Frankling Graham is an authortative export on islam.
Lol, the whole terrorists are "probing" our security is such baloney. The TSA regualrly trumpets their useless accomplishments like confiscating drugs and guns but not a single person has even been indicted on terrorism charges, much less convicted, due to a TSA interdiction. Furthermore, if the TSA really was effective at stopping terrorists, they would just go somewhere else like a shopping mall or movie theater or sabotage the train tracks out in the boonies where there is nobody at all much less anybody actually watching for them. Yet none of it happens, ergo their ain't anything going on.
The reason why Obama hasn't changed "a number of policies" is because of things like inertia and irrational freak-outs like what happened when he tried to close gitmo and move the prisoners to a maximum security prison.
There are a lot of mindless bigots on both sides as well as reasonable intellectuals. Atheists aren't some elite group, who, through patient and thoughtful deliberation have come to an objective understanding of the universe and the people around them. Some might, but for the vast majority it's a belief system not unlike mot organized religions.
I'd say you have that exactly backwards. It's only the occasional extremist that holds atheism as a belief system. For most athiests it is simply just not worth a second thought. As the saying goes, atheism is a religion the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. As an atheist I suspect that such a concept is just fundamentally incomprehensible to a religious person, kind of like explaining the third dimension to a flatlander. So it is much easier to just categorize atheism as a religion-equivalent rather than a no-op.
It's weird that you think no change in government policy is equivalent to "nobody cares."
They did arrest this guy didn't they?
The idea that america is "loaded" with spies implies a call for change in government policy. Even your anecdotes don't rise to the level that requires government action - if you knew that guy was plotting espionage than tell your boss, get him fired and the problem is solved.
And yes, AQ's threat to the US is and has been effectively non-existant. They shot their wad on 9-11 and since then the best they could muster has been incompetents like the shoe, underwear and times square bombers - even if they had been competent the sum threat they all posed was less than a week's worth of traffic fatalities, or 12 hours worth of heart disease.
America is LOADED with Chinese spies. China is in a cold war with the west, and the west is disregarding it. Sad.
No, it is something to be proud of. That such things can happen is a necessary consequence of a free society. It's one of the many things encompassed by the saying that, "Freedom isn't free."
We've already destroyed far too much of our freedom because of an irrational fear of practically non-existant terrorists, we should not sacrifice any more of the fundamental principles that make american society superior to chinese society. Unless, of course, civil liberties aren't inherently better than authoritarianism.
If they didn't spell it out, then they would be courting scandal if it ever got out. Lots of people have moral objections to weapons development - to secretly recruit their labor for something they are morally opposed to would be a huge deal.
In the US, and so I assume Canada is similar, it is perfectly legal for a store to re-shrinkwrap otherwise new merchandise and sell it as new. Re-shrinkwrapping used and selling as new is illegal, but merely opening the package does not disqualify a product from being new.
It is almost certain that a store like futureshop has a shrinkwrap machine. Therefore it is either a failure of corporate policies or a failure of local staff to follow corporate policies that resulted in them not verifying the returned merchandise.,
Tilt up is more expensive, but only by 5-10% which can be made up in reduced operational costs (cheaper to heat and cool, no termite treatments, better fire resistance for cheaper insurance, etc). But builders don't care about operational costs - only the selling price and most buyers are not informed enough to understand the implications of modern construction techniques.
There are some concrete additives that make it "self-healing." I don't know how well they work for plumbing type applications, they were designed for water-proofing of concrete walls and roofs. The way they work is that when the concrete cracks and moisture enters the new crack it reacts with the additive which expands, fills the crack and then cures.
Nope. Too hard. I cannot routinely make a moderately complex medical note comprehensible to any random patient. For one thing, patients vary enormously in their ability to understand things - you might be an engineer who would be interested and could understand a lot of technical detail. You might be functionally illiterate. No possible way to reconcile that.
The enemy of good is perfect. It is pure fatalism to say that because it is not possible to improve the situation for the least capable then there is no point in doing anything at all.
I cannot think of a system that is less geared toward creating material that an average patient can understand
The only reason that is the case is because medical records have been hidden from their owners for so long. As soon as patients start to expect to be able to use their own medical records the pressure will be on to make those records more comprehensible.
the media company's have been busted in the past posting there content on torrent sites just to catch people downloading
Let's see a citation for that because it sure sounds like bullshit to me. Note you made TWO claims in that sentence I quoted, I want a cite for both of them in a single incident.
If "big media company" deliberately shares their own content then they are going to have a tough time showing to the court that they didn't want it shared. And if they share someone else's content, then they don't have standing to sue.
Yes, the ads are the expensive part. But the whole 'not tied to the candidate" thing of super-pacs is a restriction on the "free speech" that is equivalent to the anonymity requirement of Lessig's proposal. The difference being that the "not tied to the candidate" thing is basically nothing but a fiction in practice.
This is one of the few issues that is absolutely black and white. Giving money to a politician is a bribe, and those who give the most money will inherently have more influence. There's just no good way to prevent that.
I've heard at least one clever way to handle that problem. Make campaign bribes anonymous. I think it was Lessig who proposed it. All bribes go into a big pot and are revocable. That way even if the politician sees you put your bribe into the pot, he can't know for sure if you took it back out later on.
That gets you past the whole "bribes are speech" thing because people are not restricted at all in the amount of bribes they can give. They can even claim credit for the bribes they give, just can't prove it.
Apparently something similar was tried for the election of judges in Florida. It worked so well that campaign contributions effectively dropped to nothing.
Just cookie-block and noscript the shit out of google, that's what I do.
The only problem that has caused for me was to make it hard turn off safe-search until I found out you could add &safe=off to the end of any google search URL to turn off safe-search. I even added it to the google search-box in my firefox install,
Since most murders go unsolved, I think you've picked a fantastically poor rationalization.
Depends on your hardware. Recent intel "centrino" wifi chips can not change their MACs- I found this out personally because the driver under linux lets you try to change the MAC, but if you try to use it with one of these new chips it just fails to work over the air.
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
You have the risk model backwards. Targeted advertising is not much of a risk to the people viewing the advertising. Maybe they are suckered out of a few more dollars, and that's shitty but not anything new.
The problem comes when the goal is to pull information on a specific individual - someone who, for whatever reason, has become a person of interest. At that point every single piece of data that has ever been associated with that person will be examined in excruciating detail in order to gain some sort of leverage over them.
Consider the case of former US representative Anthony Weiner. The guy had an official public twitter feed and a personal one that was private. He used the private one to send dirty pictures of himself to women, had apparently been doing it for well over a year. One day one of his dick shots ends up on the official public feed for a few minutes and that is the beginning of the end of his career -- and the republican take over of what had been a staunchly democrat seat for nearly a century.
Now consider this totally hypothetical scenario -- somebody at twitter didn't like Rep Weiner. Maybe it was one of the angel investors, maybe it was just a partisan employee, who knows. But this twitter insider had full access to everything Weiner ever did on twitter -- public and private. They new about his naughty pictures - even though Weiner thought they were private, only between himself and the women he was cybersexing. Once known, it wouldn't take much work for a "bug" in the twitter system to "accidentally" publish that dick shot on Rep Weiner's public twitter feed.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that happened at all - chances are it was just PEBKAC. Even if it did, chances are we would never know for sure anyway. Think of it as an entirely plausible cautionary tale.
Which is worse, that the FBI waited 4 years to kick Lockheed off the project or that the FBI has regained control of unfinished software?
The worst is the realisation that the only thing saving us from law-enforcement totalitarian nirvana is institutional incompetence.
If they ever really get their shit together we are so screwed.
Holy shit, you are an asshole. What part of, "I realize this does not directly address your point, but its at least tangential" did you Fail! to understand?
I realize this does not directly address your point, but its at least tangential...
Look into prepaid. There is a lot more competition for prepaid phones (and much less taxation) than there is on contract phones. For example, virgin mobile has a bunch of android phones in the $100-$200 range and $35/month gets you 350 minutes plus unlimited text and 3g data. Plus its month to month so if the carrier succumbs to competition and reduces prices, you can take advantage next month instead of 2 years later when your contract runs out.
Yet even Amtrak has stupidities like making it practically impossible to purchase a ticket without using some form of identification at some point in its use.
The goal of terrorism is, you now, terror, not "Aw crap, this is going to be a hassle."
Neologism: Hasselism. As in committing acts of hasselism. No relationship to David Hasslehoff.