Why, then, does my own statistics show a very strong upwards trend? Is the volume getting lower, but it bypasses the filters better?
Seriously. I have as much spam in my inbox now as I used to do 10 years ago, when it started to piss me off enough that I installed spam filters. Except now there's little more I can do.:-(
Actually, if you're not an idiot, it doesn't matter all that much.
I do my development on this OS X machine, and it gets rsynced to both a testing and a production system, both are Linux servers, but running different distributions. It works just fine. Other developers working on the same project use Linux, some use Windows. Getting everything set up correctly takes a small bit of effort, but as I said: If you know what you're doing, there's no reason why this shouldn't work.
Unless you write low-level code, your hardware and your OS shouldn't matter. We're talking about web development here, not some binary application code.
Every other "WoW killer" is more or less trying to beat WoW at its own game. Thinking you'll be better than something because you have the better skills package, the better graphics, the more interesting franchise or whatever is missing the big picture.
GW2 is one of the few game changers out there. It's not trying to copy WoW and improve it here and there, it's trying to re-invent the MMORPG genre. The only other example I know that was brave enough to question pretty much everything and do it differently was Mortal Online, and that unfortunately turned out to be a massive fail due to developer incompetence (technical - the last beta RC was so dramatically unplayably buggy, I didn't bother buying the release version - but also design-wise - listening to the hardcore forum-whores instead of imagining what kind of people you want to capture to create a solid player-base).
I'm really looking forward to GW2, since GW1 is still one of my favourites.
The problem with "multiple monitor" studies is that they're always highly context-specific.
For many tasks, having a 2nd monitor is more of a distraction. For large monitors, a 2nd one is more hurt than good (let me tell you, my want for a 2nd one has dropped to zero since I got this 27" iMac, but when I sit down in front of a 17" screen, I desperately want a 2nd one).
Plants, on the other hand, are always a good idea. And a good chair is important for all jobs in which you sit the majority of the day.
I have a Kindle and an iPad, and I read books on the Kindle. The iPad is heavy, uncomfortable to hold, and less easy on the eyes. It's a jack-of-many-trades, master of none.
That's fine with me, because that's what I need. I may be reading a book for the first part of the trip, but on the second I might want to browse the web, read and write mails, or put down some notes on an idea I just had.
I'm by far not an art critic. However, I've understood this much: It doesn't have to hang in the national gallery to be art. The vast majority of art does not happen in the major galleries, but in smaller ones. The "long tail" applies here as elsewhere.
That said, I don't say Duke is any kind of fine art. It definitely is of the more base kind, but even so it is art in the same sense that a movie is, even if he's out of Hollywood.
prime time shows such as Family Guy. They can curse, they insult everyone from religion to specific people, they can talk about sex, they can do massive violence...and beyond.
Yes, but not because it is offensive. They can do it because it isn't offensive anymore. That's a perfectly normal development. There were times when just seing a woman's knee was enough to get the man aroused, because it was provocative, uncommon and sexy. Today, you couldn't get the same effect by showing your tits.
As I see it, things have become progressively less and less PC over the years.
Not at all. PC isn't about being conservative, it is about dressing things up in words that are lies. It is the marketing of language, the PR department of expression. And it has gone far beyond anything we could imagine when it first raised its ugly head. The biggest victory is that people like you think it's been defeated. But look at the world around you, and check what's going on. Everything is dressed in "proper words" these days. I could run down a long list of those terms in my native language, but I'll abstain from english examples because I could only scratch the surface.
Let's be honest here: Having all the Internet hype about something, no matter if it's a game, movie or something else, and not being able to get it is one of the major contributors to piracy. If you don't realize that, you're an idiot. There is this multi-million dollar marketing campaign that has one and only one goal: To make you want this, right now. And then you can't. But The Pirate Bay has a copy...
I've said this before: There are roughly three groups of people with respect to piracy vs. sales. One is the group that'll buy your stuff and wouldn't copy it unless you push them really hard. You can forget thinking about those, they're not a problem. Two is the group that'll download a torrent no matter what. They may be too poor, or do it out of principle, or whatever their reason. You can forget thinking about those, because no matter what you're not turning them into sales, even if you make getting a pirate copy impossible, they won't buy your game, they'll go download something else. Three is the only group you should worry about, that's the people who may pirate it, given the opportunity. But they might also buy it. If it isn't too expensive and if it is available. These are the people you can turn into sales by making a pirate copy unavailable through better copy protection, or through a good price, or by simple availability. And these are the people who'll download instead if you're too expensive, or do the staggered release bullshit.
And, btw., I'm not making this up. There are a couple studies on this in a more general approach showing that you can group people in general into "honest", "dishonest" and "opportunistic". And that in crime prevention, the third group is what you need to focus on.
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works? I mean, we have people out there doing studies, research and experiments for a living. We put a good portion of our economy into finding out how life, the universe and everything actually works, from physics to chemistry and yes, social sciences, and the guys running major companies rely on their gut feelings instead?
The iPad does give you a nice user experience, if all you basically want to do is consume. However if you want to do anything more than play with a toy, you may need something different.
I'm afraid you don't get what Steve Jobs does: Most people today and certainly the vast majority in the iPad target audience, already have a computer. You can try selling them a new one, or you can sell them a totally new device that satisfies needs that their existing machine doesn't.
Take me, for example. I'll be buying an iPad 2 when it comes out this week in my country, even though I already have two computers in this house, and my girlfriend has another two, and two out of those four are a notebook and a netbook. But none of them allow me to lie down on the couch and ready a PDF book comfortably. Or take with me when I go on a trip in much the same way I'd take a book.
It's not a pressing issue - if I had to build my household from scratch, a computer would come first, long before a tablet, but neither is a tablet simply a notebook without keyboard. Whoever writes that disqualifies himself from the discussion as not having understood a thing about why the iPad sells as quickly as the factories can make 'em.
In this time and age of Political Correctness Ãoeber Alles, I am glad that some creative people still enjoy ruffling some feathers. That used to be common in arts, does anyone remember? Today, few artists dare upset the cocktail-drinking ladies in the galleries.
On the contrary, fines are the only solution to the problem we can apply without getting really heavy-handed.
Why? Because it changes the equation for the worst offenders - corporations. A company bribes because it is financially advantageous for it to do so - bribing is easier (which reduces risk, which reduces costs), faster (which reduces costs) and often cheaper than the official channels. All of that boils down to $$$.
Putting a fine on bribing - not on being bribed, but on bribing - adds $$$ (multiplied by the chance of getting caught) to the other side of the equation. If the fine and the chance of getting caught are high enough, bribing stops being the better option. Once that happens, a rational company will stop bribing.
Amusing, but no. Evolution started out with the claim that intelligent design cannot explain what happened, since "God" can't exist, so another "add on" is necessary to explain how things got started without him.
Whatever you're smoking, it ought to be illegal. You need to read the Origin of Species - not as a book on evolution, but as a travel report that describes how Darwin came up with the idea.
SSL is too much trouble for a small website. The certificates are expensive, and cover one URL - but I work extensively with subdomains, for example. My browsergame has it's own domain at battlemaster.org and then there's forum.battlemaster.org, bugs.battlemaster.org, etc. - I'd need either a very expensive wildcard certificate, or several.
Options such as CaCert exist, and I use it internally, but since it's not in all the major browsers, you can't use it anywhere where you will have non-geek visitors.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country?
Yes, in this case there are international treaties in place. Corruption has been recognized as an international problem and thus the need for international laws became obvious - and was addressed. See http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CAC/index.html
Is it our job to keep civil servants of foreign governments honest?
No if you have no dealing with them. Yes if you do.
Corruption is a corrosive influence on any country, and a lot of them suffer from it. However, the changes that are needed to make that happen probably have to begin from within. I'm not against the law in this case, but I can see why some people in government look around at even our Western countries and wonder if everyone is on the same page.
That is a very simplistic world view. That corruption does not come out of nothing. Sure, in some countries tips to people aside from waiters and taxi drivers are more common than in others, but the massive corruption we have today is in part due to foreign capital and the huge difference in income - what is a pittance for some manager setting up a new plant in a cheap-labor country is a years' wage for the official doing the paperwork. You can't claim these things are entirely seperate matters.
That is why laws against corruption are enforced, and why there is an international treaty (one the US signed, for a change) that requires enforcement against companies even if the crime happened in another country.
The problem is that there are other - legal, official - ways to get your paperwork done. They just aren't as convenient. But it is the little guys who usually can not afford to go them, the big guys can and should. IBM can hire a team of lawyers to get that delayed paperwork forced through. Doing so would help a lot to make corruption less normal and give the little guys a signal that it's not the only way. But it's slightly more expensive, slightly more risky, and might take a short while longer.
So, thanks to our capitalism-fanatism that almost forces large companies to do whatever is economically advantageous, no matter what other side-effects it has, that is the route that IBM - and let's be honest, pretty much every other major corporation - will go.
Some judges know that. There's a famous work law case here in Germany, where the employer, a major company, refused any and all cooperation with the works council, even though such cooperation is at least to some degree, required by law. The judge in that case ordered the entire board taken into custody until they at least initiated talks with the workers. Legend has it that a meeting was scheduled within a few hours.
I've actually talked to some of those dirty muslims in their home countries (been to Egypt twice, for example), and the rationale that they propose (having multiple wives is allowed, but most men can't afford it, so monogamy is the norm) is that it's actually for the good of the women. You see, women have little rights in those countries. If their husband dies, they are left with little to nothing, and no way to earn a living. The most common multiple-wives case amongst the regular population is that a brother of the deceased takes in his family, by marrying the widow.
Again, this is according to common people who live there. I don't know if it's true or not, but they seem to believe it.
Thanks for that thoughtful answer. I hope someone mods you up, seriously.
Monogamous relationships seem to be a basic part of stable human societies. Polygamous societies have, by definition, a shortage of suitable mates for young men; young men need to "prove" themselves to have a chance at a mate, which tends to involve violence, aggression, etc. That is oversimplified, but the pattern is clear to see: societies with widespread polygamy tend to be economic disasters with frequent civil wars.
This is an indirect causation, if at all. There are many monogamous societies where males need to prove themselves to get a wife. In fact, almost all of them. The difference would not be in the proving, but in the difficulty level - with less females available, the difficulty would rise - and in the amount of men who don't get one in the end.
This is a non-religious reason for governments to regulate the marriage practices of the societies they govern.
The actual power reason (government or church, and in the european middle ages definitely the church) was a different one: Monogamy increases the average number of childs per woman. Population growth is higher in monogamous societies. Europe needed soldiers to fight against Islam, and it needed farmers to replace those lost to disease and hunger (at least in part caused by the very religion now hungering for bodies, btw. - the closing down of the bathing houses dramatically raised disease rates in early medieval times).
With a broad brush: most of Africa is traditionally polygamous, and most of Africa is a mess. Most of the Middle East is polygamous, and is a mess. Asia is a mixed bag: those countries that are doing well economically are mostly or entirely monogamous (China, Japan, India, etc.); those doing poorly tend to be polygamous (e.g., Bangladesh).
If polygamy were the reason, then they should've been doing horrible for a very, very long time. But truth is that Africa did ok, the Middle East was actually ahead of Europe until around the 13th, 14th century, and Asia had a few thousand years of sophisticated cultures by the time we got regular contact with them. The main reasons they are messed up today has little to do with sex and marriage, and lots to do with Europe messing them up. As soon as we had the superior technology, we had nothing better to do then fuck up the planet.
I am a Christian and I actually bothered to read the book. It's very informative and it shows just how full of hot air and bullshit most evangelists/preachers are.
Nice talking to you. I'm a militant atheist and I've actually bothered to read that book. And I'm 100% with Pen&Teller: More people should read the bible - we need more atheists. "3rd grade literature" would be lauding it.
Lastly: government should get the fuck out of the business of marriage since it is first and foremost an expression of faith, and by dictating who can or cannot marry whom, government is restricting the free expression of religion. It is a first amendment issue.
Errr... what???
Marriage is an expression of faith??? My condolences to whoever you're married to or plan to marry some day. I'd have thought a life-long commitment to someone would first and foremost be an expression of love.
And, for what it's worth, none of the things that you mentioned which would falsify the theory of evolution are in the least bit contrary to the theory of intelligent design, either. Traits get passed on, living things adapt, and nature favors the strongest creatures.
Well, if it is that version of ID you support, there is an even simpler argument: It isn't necessary. A "designer" acting in such a way that his actions do not actually change a thing isn't much of a designer, is he?
ID started out with the claim that the theory of evolution alone can not explain what happens, so another "add on" is necessary. Well, after a bit of deliberation and scientific fact-checking early on when the theory was new and there could've been something to it, it turns out that basic assumption isn't true. The statistics hold up, the numbers work out, there is no add-on necessary. ID has been revealed as the salesman trying to sell you an upgrade you don't need.
And returning to that point, that theories adapt as part of the scientific process - well, when the theory of evolution adapts you say it's the scientific process at work, but when the theory of intelligent design adapts you say that its proponents are trying to weasel their way out of what you claim is their theory having been disproven. Is that not hypocritical?
Scientific theories evolve to include new facts and generate a theory that explains them better. Weaseling out is a process by which a concept changes to evade criticism, not to include new facts, and the end result is not a better theory, but a more difficult to attack theory. To be honest, I think that some of the changes to String Theory are along that line rather than the scientific one.
The problem with ID is that its reaction to the most profound criticism isn't to accept and incorporate it, all the while remaining open to the possibility that the whole idea is bunk. The reaction is to plug your ears with your fingers and go *nananana*. Michael Behe, for example, had an interesting original point that caused quite some investigation. But that was what, 20 years ago? He's been solidly debunked since then, but creationists/IDers still quite his "irreducible complexity" as a flaw of evolution. Well, it isn't, because it doesn't even exist, not in the way that Behe claims.
And polygamy is illegal why, exactly? (assuming that all involved are ok with it)
Oh yes, because it's written in that holy book from an ancient goat-herders culture that we somehow think still applies to live in a world that is so radically different.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, then, does my own statistics show a very strong upwards trend? Is the volume getting lower, but it bypasses the filters better?
Seriously. I have as much spam in my inbox now as I used to do 10 years ago, when it started to piss me off enough that I installed spam filters. Except now there's little more I can do. :-(
Actually, if you're not an idiot, it doesn't matter all that much.
I do my development on this OS X machine, and it gets rsynced to both a testing and a production system, both are Linux servers, but running different distributions. It works just fine. Other developers working on the same project use Linux, some use Windows. Getting everything set up correctly takes a small bit of effort, but as I said: If you know what you're doing, there's no reason why this shouldn't work.
Unless you write low-level code, your hardware and your OS shouldn't matter. We're talking about web development here, not some binary application code.
Every other "WoW killer" is more or less trying to beat WoW at its own game. Thinking you'll be better than something because you have the better skills package, the better graphics, the more interesting franchise or whatever is missing the big picture.
GW2 is one of the few game changers out there. It's not trying to copy WoW and improve it here and there, it's trying to re-invent the MMORPG genre. The only other example I know that was brave enough to question pretty much everything and do it differently was Mortal Online, and that unfortunately turned out to be a massive fail due to developer incompetence (technical - the last beta RC was so dramatically unplayably buggy, I didn't bother buying the release version - but also design-wise - listening to the hardcore forum-whores instead of imagining what kind of people you want to capture to create a solid player-base).
I'm really looking forward to GW2, since GW1 is still one of my favourites.
The problem with "multiple monitor" studies is that they're always highly context-specific.
For many tasks, having a 2nd monitor is more of a distraction. For large monitors, a 2nd one is more hurt than good (let me tell you, my want for a 2nd one has dropped to zero since I got this 27" iMac, but when I sit down in front of a 17" screen, I desperately want a 2nd one).
Plants, on the other hand, are always a good idea. And a good chair is important for all jobs in which you sit the majority of the day.
Is it really the music, or is it the fact that it drowns out other audio sources?
I know that I do my best work when nothing disturbs me. Music is one way to push disturbances to the background.
I have a Kindle and an iPad, and I read books on the Kindle. The iPad is heavy, uncomfortable to hold, and less easy on the eyes. It's a jack-of-many-trades, master of none.
That's fine with me, because that's what I need. I may be reading a book for the first part of the trip, but on the second I might want to browse the web, read and write mails, or put down some notes on an idea I just had.
I'm by far not an art critic. However, I've understood this much: It doesn't have to hang in the national gallery to be art. The vast majority of art does not happen in the major galleries, but in smaller ones. The "long tail" applies here as elsewhere.
That said, I don't say Duke is any kind of fine art. It definitely is of the more base kind, but even so it is art in the same sense that a movie is, even if he's out of Hollywood.
prime time shows such as Family Guy. They can curse, they insult everyone from religion to specific people, they can talk about sex, they can do massive violence...and beyond.
Yes, but not because it is offensive. They can do it because it isn't offensive anymore. That's a perfectly normal development. There were times when just seing a woman's knee was enough to get the man aroused, because it was provocative, uncommon and sexy. Today, you couldn't get the same effect by showing your tits.
As I see it, things have become progressively less and less PC over the years.
Not at all. PC isn't about being conservative, it is about dressing things up in words that are lies. It is the marketing of language, the PR department of expression. And it has gone far beyond anything we could imagine when it first raised its ugly head. The biggest victory is that people like you think it's been defeated. But look at the world around you, and check what's going on. Everything is dressed in "proper words" these days. I could run down a long list of those terms in my native language, but I'll abstain from english examples because I could only scratch the surface.
Where do I sign?
Let's be honest here: Having all the Internet hype about something, no matter if it's a game, movie or something else, and not being able to get it is one of the major contributors to piracy. If you don't realize that, you're an idiot. There is this multi-million dollar marketing campaign that has one and only one goal: To make you want this, right now. And then you can't. But The Pirate Bay has a copy...
I've said this before: There are roughly three groups of people with respect to piracy vs. sales.
One is the group that'll buy your stuff and wouldn't copy it unless you push them really hard. You can forget thinking about those, they're not a problem.
Two is the group that'll download a torrent no matter what. They may be too poor, or do it out of principle, or whatever their reason. You can forget thinking about those, because no matter what you're not turning them into sales, even if you make getting a pirate copy impossible, they won't buy your game, they'll go download something else.
Three is the only group you should worry about, that's the people who may pirate it, given the opportunity. But they might also buy it. If it isn't too expensive and if it is available. These are the people you can turn into sales by making a pirate copy unavailable through better copy protection, or through a good price, or by simple availability. And these are the people who'll download instead if you're too expensive, or do the staggered release bullshit.
And, btw., I'm not making this up. There are a couple studies on this in a more general approach showing that you can group people in general into "honest", "dishonest" and "opportunistic". And that in crime prevention, the third group is what you need to focus on.
Really, do these highly paid management guys know anything about how the world works? I mean, we have people out there doing studies, research and experiments for a living. We put a good portion of our economy into finding out how life, the universe and everything actually works, from physics to chemistry and yes, social sciences, and the guys running major companies rely on their gut feelings instead?
The iPad does give you a nice user experience, if all you basically want to do is consume. However if you want to do anything more than play with a toy, you may need something different.
I'm afraid you don't get what Steve Jobs does: Most people today and certainly the vast majority in the iPad target audience, already have a computer. You can try selling them a new one, or you can sell them a totally new device that satisfies needs that their existing machine doesn't.
Take me, for example. I'll be buying an iPad 2 when it comes out this week in my country, even though I already have two computers in this house, and my girlfriend has another two, and two out of those four are a notebook and a netbook. But none of them allow me to lie down on the couch and ready a PDF book comfortably. Or take with me when I go on a trip in much the same way I'd take a book.
It's not a pressing issue - if I had to build my household from scratch, a computer would come first, long before a tablet, but neither is a tablet simply a notebook without keyboard. Whoever writes that disqualifies himself from the discussion as not having understood a thing about why the iPad sells as quickly as the factories can make 'em.
$49 isn't "free" in my dictionary.
In this time and age of Political Correctness Ãoeber Alles, I am glad that some creative people still enjoy ruffling some feathers. That used to be common in arts, does anyone remember? Today, few artists dare upset the cocktail-drinking ladies in the galleries.
It wouldn't be Duke without stuff like this.
On the contrary, fines are the only solution to the problem we can apply without getting really heavy-handed.
Why? Because it changes the equation for the worst offenders - corporations. A company bribes because it is financially advantageous for it to do so - bribing is easier (which reduces risk, which reduces costs), faster (which reduces costs) and often cheaper than the official channels. All of that boils down to $$$.
Putting a fine on bribing - not on being bribed, but on bribing - adds $$$ (multiplied by the chance of getting caught) to the other side of the equation. If the fine and the chance of getting caught are high enough, bribing stops being the better option. Once that happens, a rational company will stop bribing.
Amusing, but no. Evolution started out with the claim that intelligent design cannot explain what happened, since "God" can't exist, so another "add on" is necessary to explain how things got started without him.
Whatever you're smoking, it ought to be illegal. You need to read the Origin of Species - not as a book on evolution, but as a travel report that describes how Darwin came up with the idea.
I'll tell you why:
SSL is too much trouble for a small website. The certificates are expensive, and cover one URL - but I work extensively with subdomains, for example. My browsergame has it's own domain at battlemaster.org and then there's forum.battlemaster.org, bugs.battlemaster.org, etc. - I'd need either a very expensive wildcard certificate, or several.
Options such as CaCert exist, and I use it internally, but since it's not in all the major browsers, you can't use it anywhere where you will have non-geek visitors.
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country?
Yes, in this case there are international treaties in place. Corruption has been recognized as an international problem and thus the need for international laws became obvious - and was addressed. See http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/CAC/index.html
Is it our job to keep civil servants of foreign governments honest?
No if you have no dealing with them.
Yes if you do.
Corruption is a corrosive influence on any country, and a lot of them suffer from it. However, the changes that are needed to make that happen probably have to begin from within. I'm not against the law in this case, but I can see why some people in government look around at even our Western countries and wonder if everyone is on the same page.
That is a very simplistic world view. That corruption does not come out of nothing. Sure, in some countries tips to people aside from waiters and taxi drivers are more common than in others, but the massive corruption we have today is in part due to foreign capital and the huge difference in income - what is a pittance for some manager setting up a new plant in a cheap-labor country is a years' wage for the official doing the paperwork. You can't claim these things are entirely seperate matters.
Normal - yes.
Acceptable - no.
That is why laws against corruption are enforced, and why there is an international treaty (one the US signed, for a change) that requires enforcement against companies even if the crime happened in another country.
The problem is that there are other - legal, official - ways to get your paperwork done. They just aren't as convenient. But it is the little guys who usually can not afford to go them, the big guys can and should. IBM can hire a team of lawyers to get that delayed paperwork forced through. Doing so would help a lot to make corruption less normal and give the little guys a signal that it's not the only way. But it's slightly more expensive, slightly more risky, and might take a short while longer.
So, thanks to our capitalism-fanatism that almost forces large companies to do whatever is economically advantageous, no matter what other side-effects it has, that is the route that IBM - and let's be honest, pretty much every other major corporation - will go.
Some judges know that. There's a famous work law case here in Germany, where the employer, a major company, refused any and all cooperation with the works council, even though such cooperation is at least to some degree, required by law.
The judge in that case ordered the entire board taken into custody until they at least initiated talks with the workers. Legend has it that a meeting was scheduled within a few hours.
Yes.
I've actually talked to some of those dirty muslims in their home countries (been to Egypt twice, for example), and the rationale that they propose (having multiple wives is allowed, but most men can't afford it, so monogamy is the norm) is that it's actually for the good of the women. You see, women have little rights in those countries. If their husband dies, they are left with little to nothing, and no way to earn a living. The most common multiple-wives case amongst the regular population is that a brother of the deceased takes in his family, by marrying the widow.
Again, this is according to common people who live there. I don't know if it's true or not, but they seem to believe it.
And why is the state even involved in regulating marriage?
Power.
If you can regulate the things that people worry about the most, you have power over them.
Thanks for that thoughtful answer. I hope someone mods you up, seriously.
Monogamous relationships seem to be a basic part of stable human societies. Polygamous societies have, by definition, a shortage of suitable mates for young men; young men need to "prove" themselves to have a chance at a mate, which tends to involve violence, aggression, etc. That is oversimplified, but the pattern is clear to see: societies with widespread polygamy tend to be economic disasters with frequent civil wars.
This is an indirect causation, if at all. There are many monogamous societies where males need to prove themselves to get a wife. In fact, almost all of them. The difference would not be in the proving, but in the difficulty level - with less females available, the difficulty would rise - and in the amount of men who don't get one in the end.
This is a non-religious reason for governments to regulate the marriage practices of the societies they govern.
The actual power reason (government or church, and in the european middle ages definitely the church) was a different one: Monogamy increases the average number of childs per woman. Population growth is higher in monogamous societies. Europe needed soldiers to fight against Islam, and it needed farmers to replace those lost to disease and hunger (at least in part caused by the very religion now hungering for bodies, btw. - the closing down of the bathing houses dramatically raised disease rates in early medieval times).
With a broad brush: most of Africa is traditionally polygamous, and most of Africa is a mess. Most of the Middle East is polygamous, and is a mess. Asia is a mixed bag: those countries that are doing well economically are mostly or entirely monogamous (China, Japan, India, etc.); those doing poorly tend to be polygamous (e.g., Bangladesh).
If polygamy were the reason, then they should've been doing horrible for a very, very long time. But truth is that Africa did ok, the Middle East was actually ahead of Europe until around the 13th, 14th century, and Asia had a few thousand years of sophisticated cultures by the time we got regular contact with them.
The main reasons they are messed up today has little to do with sex and marriage, and lots to do with Europe messing them up. As soon as we had the superior technology, we had nothing better to do then fuck up the planet.
I am a Christian and I actually bothered to read the book. It's very informative and it shows just how full of hot air and bullshit most evangelists/preachers are.
Nice talking to you. I'm a militant atheist and I've actually bothered to read that book. And I'm 100% with Pen&Teller: More people should read the bible - we need more atheists. "3rd grade literature" would be lauding it.
Lastly: government should get the fuck out of the business of marriage since it is first and foremost an expression of faith, and by dictating who can or cannot marry whom, government is restricting the free expression of religion. It is a first amendment issue.
Errr... what???
Marriage is an expression of faith??? My condolences to whoever you're married to or plan to marry some day. I'd have thought a life-long commitment to someone would first and foremost be an expression of love.
And, for what it's worth, none of the things that you mentioned which would falsify the theory of evolution are in the least bit contrary to the theory of intelligent design, either. Traits get passed on, living things adapt, and nature favors the strongest creatures.
Well, if it is that version of ID you support, there is an even simpler argument: It isn't necessary. A "designer" acting in such a way that his actions do not actually change a thing isn't much of a designer, is he?
ID started out with the claim that the theory of evolution alone can not explain what happens, so another "add on" is necessary. Well, after a bit of deliberation and scientific fact-checking early on when the theory was new and there could've been something to it, it turns out that basic assumption isn't true. The statistics hold up, the numbers work out, there is no add-on necessary. ID has been revealed as the salesman trying to sell you an upgrade you don't need.
And returning to that point, that theories adapt as part of the scientific process - well, when the theory of evolution adapts you say it's the scientific process at work, but when the theory of intelligent design adapts you say that its proponents are trying to weasel their way out of what you claim is their theory having been disproven. Is that not hypocritical?
Scientific theories evolve to include new facts and generate a theory that explains them better.
Weaseling out is a process by which a concept changes to evade criticism, not to include new facts, and the end result is not a better theory, but a more difficult to attack theory. To be honest, I think that some of the changes to String Theory are along that line rather than the scientific one.
The problem with ID is that its reaction to the most profound criticism isn't to accept and incorporate it, all the while remaining open to the possibility that the whole idea is bunk. The reaction is to plug your ears with your fingers and go *nananana*. Michael Behe, for example, had an interesting original point that caused quite some investigation. But that was what, 20 years ago? He's been solidly debunked since then, but creationists/IDers still quite his "irreducible complexity" as a flaw of evolution. Well, it isn't, because it doesn't even exist, not in the way that Behe claims.
And that's weaseling out.
And polygamy is illegal why, exactly? (assuming that all involved are ok with it)
Oh yes, because it's written in that holy book from an ancient goat-herders culture that we somehow think still applies to live in a world that is so radically different.