But it's not the 60s anymore, and the current chinese government is pretty far away from Mao. I've seen them make immoral decisions, hostile (to both other countries and their own people) decisions, and even some evil ones. But I've not yet seem them utterly GWB-level-dumb-as-shit ones. Have you?
you can't tar all of the people of the world who happen to have a religious bent with the same brush.
Actually, I can. As long as I understand that what I am saying about them is a generalisation and what it applies to.
You can't say that all such people form a control group of "known wrong specimens"
But of course I can. We always work with incomplete samples. We are pretty certain of gravity thanks to experience with it as far back as humans have recorded anything, and experiments too many to count - but of course you can always come up with a place or an object or a combination of both where we haven't tested whether the theory of gravity applies.
And yet, it is not unreasonable to assume that it does, given the evidence we have. What is unreasonable is to assume it doesn't. And what is almost as unreasonable is to claim that we don't know, can't know or the verdict is still out on that question. In short: All the usual fallback non-arguments of believers.
Same with god (any god, not just the christian one. jews, muslims, hindus, etc.: I'm an equal-opportunity insulter, so you're always included). We have massive evidence that none of the testable claims regarding any deity have ever checked out. We have no evidence whatsoever of any deities existence. Any evidence brought forth so far has been debunked, and explained sufficiently without having to resort to deities.
Just like gravity, you can always come up with a specific place or object - but the same argument applies, except that the amount of history and evidence isn't quite so crushing, as we've not been collecting it for so long.
You, sir, are an utter fool and know not what you talk about.
Science regularily dabbles in theories that are unfalsifiable at the time. Religion, however, is unfalsifiable, etc. etc, in principle. If you don't see the difference between these two approaches, do not despair, a decade or two of education can fix that.
Interesting how most comments wank on about fears of backdoors.
How stupid do you think the chinese are? A hardware backdoor in every device means that if you lose control of it even once, your entire infrastructure belongs to whoever you lost it to. I don't think anyone would take that risk for a bit of spying, not if you already have 100 better ways of spying.
What is so unlikely about the assumption that it really is in order to become independent of the west? That's a biggy right there. There's an elephant in the room, you know? The chinese are fast becoming one of the most important players on the world stage and they can't have something as important as chip design rest with a country (USA) that might turn hostile at the next unpredictable election.
If you're against Christian teaching and you think you're an analytic thinker, I challenge you find out what's wrong about the content of the bible and find an convincing argument why people who believe in Christ are doing it in vein. If you want to show that the bible is made up, or its text is corrupt, I'm going to put you through scientific method process and axiomatic logic reasoning to establish your case.
Could you do the same with the FSM and its holy book, please? Because it would save us a lot of work, pretty much every anti-FSM argument can be made into an anti-christianity argument by switching around one or two words.
The bible is much like "Mein Kampf" (since we had this topic today) - once we're done with christianity, our ancestors will read it with disgust and wonder how anyone sane could ever belief such drivel.
If you take the bible as a collection of badly-written folklore, randomly collected from whatever some desert tribesmen managed to scrabble down, then there's a bit of information you can get there, from a historic and anthropological perspective.
If you take it as the holy word of god, unfailable, perfect and eternal... well, let's just say you've got a lot of explaining to do in how it can be so false, evil and contradictory.
If the scripture is false, then there is no hell to which they can go. If the scripture is true, then they are telling the truth.
And if weren't all so brainwashed by Aristotle, we'd realize that there can be a hell without the scripture being true. It can be true in some parts and false in others. It can be wrong everywhere, but close in some parts. It can be distorted. Or - the gnostic argument - it can be the book of Satan because the real god only exists in heaven and the one posing as god down here with all the miracles and Jesus and other stuff is an imposter.
Nothing of which can be proven either way, so basically you could throw some dice.
I can strongly recommend The Golden Bough for a good read on magic and religion and, as an aside, how science came to be and how they all relate to each other.
Basically, magical thinking was there first. Over time, people realized that it fails more often than it succeeds. Religion was the "proprietary fork" that resulted. Didn't work out too well, either, but it was too strict and too many people had invested too much for an easy reversal, so it continued on, with a different agenda (much like modern politics). Magical thinking persisted, and continued to fail, but started another "fork" - science.
You started out strong there. Indeed, not all religion is anti-intellectual and there are quite a few very smart people who are also devout believers. And some theological thoughts are quite refined.
But programming wars or philosophies or other world-views are not religious tendencies. While they sometimes exhibit similarities, there are also vast differences. Things are more complicated and not black-and-white. Fandom and flamewars are on one end of the spectrum - I can't recall anyone ever being killed by a vi fanatic because he openly proclaimed that emacs is superior. Then you have philosophies and world-views. Lives are being ruined in the name of neo-liberalism, and people have killed and died for Marxism. However, none of them actively promote killing, there isn't a list of people "thou shalt put to death" in Marx "Das Kapital". Most religions, however, do contain such instructions, often very detailed down to the level of whom to kill how for what offense.
So even if you put all of these into the same category, they are on a scale from harmless to desastrous. And that's quite a long scale.
But that's not all. There is also the question of scope. Apple- and Linux fans generally do not have their entire lives dominated by their choice of OS. They have no trouble playing a game of chess with each other, or soccer. They don't read the news in different ways, or watch different movies. Most of their lives are entirely independent of their choice. Libertarianism or other philosophies affect more of the way you see the world, but they still leave a lot of space that is not affected. Religion affects most of your life, if you take it seriously. Ask the average afghan woman if there is any part of her life that isn't affected by religion.
So yes, there's quite a difference and many good reasons to view religious beliefs as especially dangerous.
Thinking reduces your reliance on unproven, untested, unverified, based purely on argument-from-authority, internally and externally contradictory belief systems.
This here is where they're discussing his Mein Kampf reading. You'll notice how he utterly destroys everyone else. He's the only guy in the room who knows how to talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=669CVEvy9VY
That's pretty arrogant. Have you thought that maybe it's because you are consistently on the wrong side of the argument? Just a thought.
Let me think about that... ah yes: "No"
If I am on the wrong side of the argument, then the other side should be able to prove me wrong unless a) they are right, but so completely incompetent and stupid that they can't demonstrate it or b) they are wrong and the assumption fails, ergo, I am right.
Given that I know quite a few smart christians, for example, I'll go with b)
a website with straightforward rebuttals instead of just annotations in a printed copy.
Rebuttals are known to not work against believers. Why are you bringing up a proposal for which we have ample evidence of failure?
If rebuttals would work, there wouldn't be any christians left in the world, nor many climate-change deniers.
but it would give those who are on the fence
These people are always quoted, but I've yet to meet a single one. No matter if it's child porn or nazis, there is this straw man. Do you really think there is much of a fence to sit on? I think the boundary is much less defined than that, and that people aren't sitting there, wavering, undecided. I rather have an image of a grey zone that people pass through on a trajectory. Some faster, some slower, some straight and some not so straight, but very few tangentially. I don't think we really have so many people thinking "this neo-nazi thing sounds interesting, but I'm not certain, I need more information".
Problem with this approach is, such "humor" hurts the victims (or their survivors) just as much as the Nazis. Turning concentration camps into the butt of jokes cheapens the human suffering that happened therein...
The victims are mostly dead, the survivors of old age by now.
But the ideology lives on. So at one point you have to make a decision as to who is more important - the past victims, or the future victims if you don't do something about it.
I'm all for respecting people's feelings. I don't want my own trampled, either. But there's a point where real danger of bodily and much more severe harm outweighs that. I'm very sure that the victims and survivors would agree that every step should be taken to make sure nobody suffers their fate.
If the book had been readily available, there would be fewer neo-nazis in Germany.
I've read it (my parents own a copy, from their grandparents, as Mein Kampf was regularily given as presents at weddings, etc.). It's interesting in parts and revolting in most. It's also pretty badly written. As an author, Hitler was much worse than as a speaker.
There was a comedian here in Germany, of turkish origin, who read from Mein Kampf for school classes and other audiences. He got attacked pretty badly, but in every discussion, he leaves his critics in the dust with his wit and intelligence. In one, he told a former MinisterprÃsident (our equivalent of american governors) that her anti-nazi initiatives had pretty much no effect whatsoever on the youth, because the young people distrust authoritarian stuff that's being forced down their throats. But his readings had a profound effect. Oh and also, the neo-nazis hated him for it, up to death threats.
You can not resolve history by hiding it, only by discussing it.
Here. There's a number of things you can do to improve your chances dramatically, and the alternative is being crashed into a building, so the rational choice is to do it. So I'd stuff a blanket and my iPad under my shirt and go for him.
On the other hand, I'd also give the security guard a kick to the face if he'd sexually assault a kid while I'm standing within reach, mine or anyone elses.
The problem is not the possible compromise - that is just as true for the current way of updates.
The problem is the automation and speed. Right now, if someone were to compromise the updater and install some malware, some people would update quickly, some not so quickly, some would wait or don't use their browser/computer every day, etc.
A compromise would probably be found, the update pulled and the problem fixed before the majority of users did the update.
Not so with a push service. Compromise that and boom, instant botnet. By the time the issue is discovered, you'd already have millions of compromised machines.
Human Resource Departments: the single biggest brake on the World's economy. The reason for the lack of productivity, innovation and creativity in most large enterprises.
Like all simplifications, this is not entirely true. I've worked with (actually, against as per my job description) HR for many years. While there are fuckups and lots of nonsense, at least in my former company most of the actual people working there enjoyed their work and wanted to do things.
You seem to think that HR is only for hiring and firing people, but it isn't. Our HR department, for example, also had the oversight over training programs, employee benefits of all kinds and other stuff that's basically "maintainance", if you want an engineering term.
The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
I think the one bearing a grudge here is you. Had a couple bad experiences with HR, I take?
I'm going to say the same to you that I like to say to republicans and other idiots who think that "less government" is the solution: It's not quantity, it's quality. We don't need less government, we need better government. And we don't need less HR, but better HR.
Now on the next detail level, in some countries, companies or even parts of those, that can very well mean less. "better" does not automatically mean "more", just as it doesn't automatically mean "less".
One advantage of the legal requirement in my country that you can only fire in writing (which means paper, e-mail doesn't legally count as "writing"). It's much less likely that you send out, say, 1300 termination letters, you know with post stamps and all, without noticing that something is wrong.
Is and always has been. The USA was founded by the upper class for their own benefit and run that way. There's a reason it's a republic and not a democracy.
The new things is that the pendulum has begun to swing back. For a long time, more and more people became a share of the pie, with the blacks and the women allowed to vote, for example.
Basically, it has several problems, the main one being that where they write "random key" in the "browser" box in their little flowchart it should honestly say "weak pseudo-random key".
Didn't some banks recommend people buy stocks and derivatives that they themselves were trying to get rid of? I suppose they're going to be charged with fraud too?
No. Other than the teen twins, they did their homework and bought the proper laws first. If you do your paperwork properly (i.e. get registrated, "regulated" and put the proper disclaimers on the stuff you sell) then you can pretty much do whatever you want. Oh, and if you blow up, the government will bail you out.
I'm a bit worried about the precedent this is setting though. If I choose to buy a newspaper with a horoscope in there, or if I buy horoscope software and the predictions don't come true, should I sue?
I'd join. If just for the entertainment value of finding out what they come up with in their defense.
Slashdot Mirror
True to a point.
But it's not the 60s anymore, and the current chinese government is pretty far away from Mao. I've seen them make immoral decisions, hostile (to both other countries and their own people) decisions, and even some evil ones. But I've not yet seem them utterly GWB-level-dumb-as-shit ones. Have you?
you can't tar all of the people of the world who happen to have a religious bent with the same brush.
Actually, I can. As long as I understand that what I am saying about them is a generalisation and what it applies to.
You can't say that all such people form a control group of "known wrong specimens"
But of course I can. We always work with incomplete samples. We are pretty certain of gravity thanks to experience with it as far back as humans have recorded anything, and experiments too many to count - but of course you can always come up with a place or an object or a combination of both where we haven't tested whether the theory of gravity applies.
And yet, it is not unreasonable to assume that it does, given the evidence we have. What is unreasonable is to assume it doesn't. And what is almost as unreasonable is to claim that we don't know, can't know or the verdict is still out on that question. In short: All the usual fallback non-arguments of believers.
Same with god (any god, not just the christian one. jews, muslims, hindus, etc.: I'm an equal-opportunity insulter, so you're always included). We have massive evidence that none of the testable claims regarding any deity have ever checked out. We have no evidence whatsoever of any deities existence. Any evidence brought forth so far has been debunked, and explained sufficiently without having to resort to deities.
Just like gravity, you can always come up with a specific place or object - but the same argument applies, except that the amount of history and evidence isn't quite so crushing, as we've not been collecting it for so long.
You, sir, are an utter fool and know not what you talk about.
Science regularily dabbles in theories that are unfalsifiable at the time. Religion, however, is unfalsifiable, etc. etc, in principle. If you don't see the difference between these two approaches, do not despair, a decade or two of education can fix that.
Interesting how most comments wank on about fears of backdoors.
How stupid do you think the chinese are? A hardware backdoor in every device means that if you lose control of it even once, your entire infrastructure belongs to whoever you lost it to. I don't think anyone would take that risk for a bit of spying, not if you already have 100 better ways of spying.
What is so unlikely about the assumption that it really is in order to become independent of the west? That's a biggy right there. There's an elephant in the room, you know? The chinese are fast becoming one of the most important players on the world stage and they can't have something as important as chip design rest with a country (USA) that might turn hostile at the next unpredictable election.
If you're against Christian teaching and you think you're an analytic thinker, I challenge you find out what's wrong about the content of the bible and find an convincing argument why people who believe in Christ are doing it in vein. If you want to show that the bible is made up, or its text is corrupt, I'm going to put you through scientific method process and axiomatic logic reasoning to establish your case.
Could you do the same with the FSM and its holy book, please? Because it would save us a lot of work, pretty much every anti-FSM argument can be made into an anti-christianity argument by switching around one or two words.
The bible is much like "Mein Kampf" (since we had this topic today) - once we're done with christianity, our ancestors will read it with disgust and wonder how anyone sane could ever belief such drivel.
But that's the entire problem:
If you take the bible as a collection of badly-written folklore, randomly collected from whatever some desert tribesmen managed to scrabble down, then there's a bit of information you can get there, from a historic and anthropological perspective.
If you take it as the holy word of god, unfailable, perfect and eternal... well, let's just say you've got a lot of explaining to do in how it can be so false, evil and contradictory.
If the scripture is false, then there is no hell to which they can go. If the scripture is true, then they are telling the truth.
And if weren't all so brainwashed by Aristotle, we'd realize that there can be a hell without the scripture being true. It can be true in some parts and false in others. It can be wrong everywhere, but close in some parts. It can be distorted. Or - the gnostic argument - it can be the book of Satan because the real god only exists in heaven and the one posing as god down here with all the miracles and Jesus and other stuff is an imposter.
Nothing of which can be proven either way, so basically you could throw some dice.
There is nothing wrong with critical thinking
No, but there is everything wrong in new-speaking a genocide into an act of mercy, compassion and love.
No matter how you put it, no matter how you twist it, that is one sick, fucking piece of evil.
Religion was the world's first science.
Nice soundbite.
Unfortunately, also utter bullshit.
I can strongly recommend The Golden Bough for a good read on magic and religion and, as an aside, how science came to be and how they all relate to each other.
Basically, magical thinking was there first. Over time, people realized that it fails more often than it succeeds. Religion was the "proprietary fork" that resulted. Didn't work out too well, either, but it was too strict and too many people had invested too much for an easy reversal, so it continued on, with a different agenda (much like modern politics). Magical thinking persisted, and continued to fail, but started another "fork" - science.
You started out strong there. Indeed, not all religion is anti-intellectual and there are quite a few very smart people who are also devout believers. And some theological thoughts are quite refined.
But programming wars or philosophies or other world-views are not religious tendencies. While they sometimes exhibit similarities, there are also vast differences. Things are more complicated and not black-and-white.
Fandom and flamewars are on one end of the spectrum - I can't recall anyone ever being killed by a vi fanatic because he openly proclaimed that emacs is superior.
Then you have philosophies and world-views. Lives are being ruined in the name of neo-liberalism, and people have killed and died for Marxism. However, none of them actively promote killing, there isn't a list of people "thou shalt put to death" in Marx "Das Kapital".
Most religions, however, do contain such instructions, often very detailed down to the level of whom to kill how for what offense.
So even if you put all of these into the same category, they are on a scale from harmless to desastrous. And that's quite a long scale.
But that's not all. There is also the question of scope. Apple- and Linux fans generally do not have their entire lives dominated by their choice of OS. They have no trouble playing a game of chess with each other, or soccer. They don't read the news in different ways, or watch different movies. Most of their lives are entirely independent of their choice.
Libertarianism or other philosophies affect more of the way you see the world, but they still leave a lot of space that is not affected.
Religion affects most of your life, if you take it seriously. Ask the average afghan woman if there is any part of her life that isn't affected by religion.
So yes, there's quite a difference and many good reasons to view religious beliefs as especially dangerous.
Thinking reduces your reliance on unproven, untested, unverified, based purely on argument-from-authority, internally and externally contradictory belief systems.
Really?
Who'd have thought... ...oh, wait...
As the other commentator said.
This here is where they're discussing his Mein Kampf reading. You'll notice how he utterly destroys everyone else. He's the only guy in the room who knows how to talk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=669CVEvy9VY
That's pretty arrogant. Have you thought that maybe it's because you are consistently on the wrong side of the argument? Just a thought.
Let me think about that... ah yes: "No"
If I am on the wrong side of the argument, then the other side should be able to prove me wrong unless a) they are right, but so completely incompetent and stupid that they can't demonstrate it or b) they are wrong and the assumption fails, ergo, I am right.
Given that I know quite a few smart christians, for example, I'll go with b)
a website with straightforward rebuttals instead of just annotations in a printed copy.
Rebuttals are known to not work against believers. Why are you bringing up a proposal for which we have ample evidence of failure?
If rebuttals would work, there wouldn't be any christians left in the world, nor many climate-change deniers.
but it would give those who are on the fence
These people are always quoted, but I've yet to meet a single one. No matter if it's child porn or nazis, there is this straw man. Do you really think there is much of a fence to sit on? I think the boundary is much less defined than that, and that people aren't sitting there, wavering, undecided. I rather have an image of a grey zone that people pass through on a trajectory. Some faster, some slower, some straight and some not so straight, but very few tangentially. I don't think we really have so many people thinking "this neo-nazi thing sounds interesting, but I'm not certain, I need more information".
Problem with this approach is, such "humor" hurts the victims (or their survivors) just as much as the Nazis. Turning concentration camps into the butt of jokes cheapens the human suffering that happened therein...
The victims are mostly dead, the survivors of old age by now.
But the ideology lives on. So at one point you have to make a decision as to who is more important - the past victims, or the future victims if you don't do something about it.
I'm all for respecting people's feelings. I don't want my own trampled, either. But there's a point where real danger of bodily and much more severe harm outweighs that. I'm very sure that the victims and survivors would agree that every step should be taken to make sure nobody suffers their fate.
Wasn't required reading when I went to school here, so no. I've never heard about that from anyone else, either.
If the book had been readily available, there would be fewer neo-nazis in Germany.
I've read it (my parents own a copy, from their grandparents, as Mein Kampf was regularily given as presents at weddings, etc.). It's interesting in parts and revolting in most. It's also pretty badly written. As an author, Hitler was much worse than as a speaker.
There was a comedian here in Germany, of turkish origin, who read from Mein Kampf for school classes and other audiences. He got attacked pretty badly, but in every discussion, he leaves his critics in the dust with his wit and intelligence. In one, he told a former MinisterprÃsident (our equivalent of american governors) that her anti-nazi initiatives had pretty much no effect whatsoever on the youth, because the young people distrust authoritarian stuff that's being forced down their throats. But his readings had a profound effect. Oh and also, the neo-nazis hated him for it, up to death threats.
You can not resolve history by hiding it, only by discussing it.
Anybody?
Here. There's a number of things you can do to improve your chances dramatically, and the alternative is being crashed into a building, so the rational choice is to do it. So I'd stuff a blanket and my iPad under my shirt and go for him.
On the other hand, I'd also give the security guard a kick to the face if he'd sexually assault a kid while I'm standing within reach, mine or anyone elses.
The problem is not the possible compromise - that is just as true for the current way of updates.
The problem is the automation and speed. Right now, if someone were to compromise the updater and install some malware, some people would update quickly, some not so quickly, some would wait or don't use their browser/computer every day, etc.
A compromise would probably be found, the update pulled and the problem fixed before the majority of users did the update.
Not so with a push service. Compromise that and boom, instant botnet. By the time the issue is discovered, you'd already have millions of compromised machines.
Human Resource Departments: the single biggest brake on the World's economy. The reason for the lack of productivity, innovation and creativity in most large enterprises.
Like all simplifications, this is not entirely true. I've worked with (actually, against as per my job description) HR for many years. While there are fuckups and lots of nonsense, at least in my former company most of the actual people working there enjoyed their work and wanted to do things.
You seem to think that HR is only for hiring and firing people, but it isn't. Our HR department, for example, also had the oversight over training programs, employee benefits of all kinds and other stuff that's basically "maintainance", if you want an engineering term.
The only people who do work in HR, are those who have failed. And they bear a grudge.
I think the one bearing a grudge here is you. Had a couple bad experiences with HR, I take?
I'm going to say the same to you that I like to say to republicans and other idiots who think that "less government" is the solution: It's not quantity, it's quality. We don't need less government, we need better government. And we don't need less HR, but better HR.
Now on the next detail level, in some countries, companies or even parts of those, that can very well mean less. "better" does not automatically mean "more", just as it doesn't automatically mean "less".
One advantage of the legal requirement in my country that you can only fire in writing (which means paper, e-mail doesn't legally count as "writing"). It's much less likely that you send out, say, 1300 termination letters, you know with post stamps and all, without noticing that something is wrong.
Sometimes, those regulations are quite useful.
It's just bewildering. Is this really the USA?
Is and always has been. The USA was founded by the upper class for their own benefit and run that way. There's a reason it's a republic and not a democracy.
The new things is that the pendulum has begun to swing back. For a long time, more and more people became a share of the pie, with the blacks and the women allowed to vote, for example.
Javascript isn't half as evil as you make it.
It's main failing is that it sucks for crypto. A quick reference I could dig out:
http://www.matasano.com/articles/javascript-cryptography/
Basically, it has several problems, the main one being that where they write "random key" in the "browser" box in their little flowchart it should honestly say "weak pseudo-random key".
Didn't some banks recommend people buy stocks and derivatives that they themselves were trying to get rid of? I suppose they're going to be charged with fraud too?
No. Other than the teen twins, they did their homework and bought the proper laws first. If you do your paperwork properly (i.e. get registrated, "regulated" and put the proper disclaimers on the stuff you sell) then you can pretty much do whatever you want. Oh, and if you blow up, the government will bail you out.
I'm a bit worried about the precedent this is setting though. If I choose to buy a newspaper with a horoscope in there, or if I buy horoscope software and the predictions don't come true, should I sue?
I'd join. If just for the entertainment value of finding out what they come up with in their defense.