Personally, I find that flashlights are worse than darkness for seeing - but this joke made me literally laugh out loud (gasp, I forgot to abbreviate!), and deserves to be modded up.
We need fewer people with moral values such as "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not commit adultery." The earth could be a paradise if we could just rid ourselves of such chafing limitations.
These aren't religious values. They are moral values that have been adopted after the fact by some religions. Morals never come from religion.
It is against Islam as a religion which I might add has some rather seriously violent aspects, racism and marginalisation of women - as do all religions.
Well... Most religions, but to be fair, some of the more recent ones lift themselves a little out of that morass...
Moreover, it's basically the biggest fallacy ever that maintaining the celibacy of the priesthood perpetuates child sexual abuse. The decisions that those priests make are THEIRS, and theirs alone... not the Vatican's. Hell, I guess since I'm not getting laid, I should be going and molesting little boys, by your logic. Well, except for the fact that no one's forcing it on me, I guess, so I have no one to blame the molestation on.
True. However, the very existence of hierarchical power structures does promote child sexual abuse within them. And the Pope is at the top of a hierarchical power structure. It's all about power...
If I were starving I'd plant some food in my backyard and most people would do the same in their backyards, though I have no idea what people in places like NYC would do.
They'd kill you for your food, and/or starve to death. Some of each, I suspect.
On the plus side, all of the surplus population that starved to death when current food production methods ceased to be would themselves be available as food, for a short time. Although, given the assumption of no fuel, refrigerating them would be impossible...
Maybe its a civilization that managed to blow themselves out of history trought an accident somehow? If it is, I hope we can control that technology better when we advance enough to have it.
Yes, this seems like the most reasonable explaination.
That score of 0 is the numerical representation of the sound of your sarcasm whooshing over the heads of thousands...
You forgot to mention Christopher Columbus's theory that the earth is round... Oh wait I know why. Because he used the Bible as his inspiration when the rest of the so called "Intelligent" people of the world said it was flat.
Nobody said it was flat. Christopher Columbus didn't have a theory that the world was round, he had a theory that the world was smaller than everyone else said it was, making it a shorter trip West to India and China than East. Guess what - everyone else was right, and Christopher Columbus was wrong. If there hadn't been a continent unknown to most Europeans in the way, Columbus likely would not have made it back to Europe alive.
Indeed, the designer is intelligent. Think about your eyeball and all the millions of light sensitive cells that work together so that you can read this reply.
The Retina is in backwards. The nerve endings hang in front of the light-collecting ends, and thus create a blind spot where they come together to form the optic nerve and exit the eye. If the eye was designed, the Designer was a complete moron, and should be sued for malpractice. To support a hypothesis of an Intelligent Designer, you need a design that is in fact intelligent, and in the real world, biological "designs" are filled with stupid, pointless, and downright psychotic flaws.
Its amazing what you could learn with even a few minutes of research on the subject. If people took the time to know more about the world they live in, maybe there wouldn't be so much knee-jerking going on.
It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately, it isn't. Highly educated people who research the topics they are passionate about knee-jerk just as much. format=Rip Torn's voice: "Sucks, doesn't it?"/format
Morality has to come from a higher unchanging authority.
And yet it never has. Morality has always arisen from secular sources, been resisted by and eventually imposed upon religions which then claimed to have originated it themselves.
Gods learn morality from Humans, never the other way around.
The advantage of bipedalism in animals is that it allows them to use their front legs for manipulation, but at the cost of lower stability. Robots don't have to make that compromise.
Bipedalism also confers a roundabout advantage - the lesser stability forces the would-be bipedal species to be more agile, or else fail. The greater agility is then an advantage. Thus there are a fairly low percentage of bipedal species versus "other-pedal" species, but the bipedalists tend to be very successful (Therapods, birds, certain hair-challenged primates, etc).
More to the point, not even a hundred years elapsed between the time we made the first tentative experiments with radio and the point at which we developed the technology to wipe life off the planet with the machinery of war.
Umm... We don't yet have the capability to wipe life off this planet. If we used every single nuke AND every single last gram of toxins and every single last gram of bioweaponry, and every last bomb and bullet and incendiary and industrial pollutant and so on etc, if we used every last trace of our life-destroying technology, we'd barely make a dent in the biomass of the Earth. I doubt we'd even manage to the cyanobacteria's kill record from when they first converted the atmosphere over to organic-molecule-dissolving free oxygen! Let's have some sense of prportion here, please.
Oh wait, this is the Internet, I forgot where I was...
Uh, since when has ANY planet that we know of had life on it (let alone intelligent)?
WHOOOSH!!!!
We have discovered one planet that has life on it. That planet has intelligent life on it - several species, with different levels of tool-using capability and differing levels of language skills. You have (most likely) heard of it. You may have even visited it at some point in your life... /sarcasm
I always liked Sci-Fi stories where aliens had alien chemistry. There was one where creatures lived on the Sun with bodies formed of plasma shaped by intricately twisted magnetic fields. They were spacefaring, but one of the hazards was annoying chunks of cold dark matter in the orbital plane. (what was God thinking?) One touch was instant death for a Sun person. Another had inhabitants of Jupiter swimming in methane seas and smelting solid hydrogen for tools.
My favorite alien chemistry had to be the story that had life evolving on the surface of a Neutron star. The surface was a skin of nuclear iron (iron nuclei stripped of all electrons), and life evolved based on "nuclear chemistry" (electromagnetic interactions between the protons in the nuclei, rather than between the electrons in orbital shells). They grew up in an environment that required them to move along magnetic field lines - crossing them required a huge amount of effort - and they resembled amoebas, but much smaller. They eventually developed spaceflight, but it required the creation of subatomic scale black holes to generate sufficient gravitational field strength to keep them alive (outside the gravity well of their "world" they tended to die by expanding into oddly glowing lumps of iron).
I really enjoyed the chutzpah of trying to come up with a plausible picture of life on a Neutron Star.
"Have YOU ever had to argue with Microsoft to get another activation code? Has anyone you know (in real life, not on the net) had to argue with Microsoft to get a code?"
I do know someone who had to argue with Microsoft to get an activation code, and then had to argue some more to get one that actually worked. Just last night, as a matter of fact...
"I think the problem that the Ghostbusters faced in the movie was that the guy from the EPA was a prick and didn't bother doing any follow up or open a channel of communication with the Ghostbusters. Now, Spamhaus might be violating rules at the same time they provide the public a valuable service. Has the United State's judicial system attempted any lines of communication with them aside from a cease-and-desist letter threatening them with $11.7 million?"
This is a very interesting analogy, especially since the Ghostbusters created their own problem in the movie by refusing to talk to the guy, and leaving him to draw his own idiotic conclusions. To some extent, they did cause the explosion - by not talking to the prick until it was too late.
IANAL, but perhaps Spamhaus created this problem by not showing up, even if they were in the right? The analogy may hold better than the initial reading suggests.
"What if the government decides they want to come interogate you because you bought The Anarchist's Cookbook?"
More likely they would put you on the "No-Fly" list. Searching for information about protest groups might get you on there too. You also might get pulled over any time you crossed the border for a day at the Casino in Canada...
Just want to mention that I regularly get sent pictures for use in ads and brochures... in Word. They call them "Word images", accordingly. "Hey, I just sent you a Word image of the diagram you asked for."
In my office the official procedure we are supposed to follow for screen prints is to use the "Print Scrn" button to copy the screen image to the clipboard and then paste it to a Word document.
"While this may sound absurd, it's perhaps worth asking: How much rock do you have to move off the Moon before the Earth starts seeing climatic changes as a result? Any one know of research into this area?"
I'm not aware of anyone researching this, but a little thought comes up with the following:
The Moon's influence on the Earth's weather and environment is gravitational. As material is removed from the Moon and transported to the Earth the Moon's gravitational influence wanes, and the Earth's gravitational influence waxes. The Earth currently has a mass of approximately 5,976,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons If we transported a million tons of material a year, it would take appr 5,976,000,000,000 years to make a.1% difference in the gravitational strength of the Earth. Environmental effects might start showing up a tad sooner, but they would be very subtle - ironically, the greater energy needed to move air and water around would tend to counter the effects of global warming, although those effects would likely become much much stronger over that period of time. Or be reversed altogether. Or, even more likely, long before Lunar mining created a measurable effect on Earth, we would have developed the technology to conjure desired minerals out of the Faerie Realms...
"Maybe I'm wrong. I remember from college science class. Isn't evolution still based on a blind belief that someday in the past, life just magically began with a strike of lightning?"
No.
Actually, that's a different study. The theory of Evolution is based on the observations of how species differ. It doesn't say anything about how life began.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Circles is one of three major components of Google+ (the others being Hangouts and Sparks.)
Sparks, or Sparkles? Sounds like one for the Twilight crown\d...
Personally, I find that flashlights are worse than darkness for seeing - but this joke made me literally laugh out loud (gasp, I forgot to abbreviate!), and deserves to be modded up.
That's a stereotypical response. Rinse. Repeat.
These aren't religious values. They are moral values that have been adopted after the fact by some religions. Morals never come from religion.
Well... Most religions, but to be fair, some of the more recent ones lift themselves a little out of that morass...
Wicca, Discordianism, The Church of All Worlds...
Umm...
I can't think of any others actually...
True. However, the very existence of hierarchical power structures does promote child sexual abuse within them. And the Pope is at the top of a hierarchical power structure. It's all about power...
They'd kill you for your food, and/or starve to death. Some of each, I suspect.
On the plus side, all of the surplus population that starved to death when current food production methods ceased to be would themselves be available as food, for a short time. Although, given the assumption of no fuel, refrigerating them would be impossible...
That score of 0 is the numerical representation of the sound of your sarcasm whooshing over the heads of thousands...
Nobody said it was flat. Christopher Columbus didn't have a theory that the world was round, he had a theory that the world was smaller than everyone else said it was, making it a shorter trip West to India and China than East. Guess what - everyone else was right, and Christopher Columbus was wrong. If there hadn't been a continent unknown to most Europeans in the way, Columbus likely would not have made it back to Europe alive.
The Retina is in backwards. The nerve endings hang in front of the light-collecting ends, and thus create a blind spot where they come together to form the optic nerve and exit the eye. If the eye was designed, the Designer was a complete moron, and should be sued for malpractice.
To support a hypothesis of an Intelligent Designer, you need a design that is in fact intelligent, and in the real world, biological "designs" are filled with stupid, pointless, and downright psychotic flaws.
MAN I wish I had mod points right now! And multiple user IDs (each with its own mod points) so that I could mod up more than once...
It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately, it isn't. Highly educated people who research the topics they are passionate about knee-jerk just as much. format=Rip Torn's voice: "Sucks, doesn't it?"
And yet it never has. Morality has always arisen from secular sources, been resisted by and eventually imposed upon religions which then claimed to have originated it themselves.
Gods learn morality from Humans, never the other way around.
Tempura or Teriyaki style Ding-Dongs on Air Force One?
No, you're not the only one, and yes, that would have been frickin' awesome!
Bipedalism also confers a roundabout advantage - the lesser stability forces the would-be bipedal species to be more agile, or else fail. The greater agility is then an advantage. Thus there are a fairly low percentage of bipedal species versus "other-pedal" species, but the bipedalists tend to be very successful (Therapods, birds, certain hair-challenged primates, etc).
Umm... We don't yet have the capability to wipe life off this planet. If we used every single nuke AND every single last gram of toxins and every single last gram of bioweaponry, and every last bomb and bullet and incendiary and industrial pollutant and so on etc, if we used every last trace of our life-destroying technology, we'd barely make a dent in the biomass of the Earth. I doubt we'd even manage to the cyanobacteria's kill record from when they first converted the atmosphere over to organic-molecule-dissolving free oxygen! Let's have some sense of prportion here, please.
Oh wait, this is the Internet, I forgot where I was...
WHOOOSH!!!!
We have discovered one planet that has life on it. That planet has intelligent life on it - several species, with different levels of tool-using capability and differing levels of language skills. You have (most likely) heard of it. You may have even visited it at some point in your life...
My favorite alien chemistry had to be the story that had life evolving on the surface of a Neutron star. The surface was a skin of nuclear iron (iron nuclei stripped of all electrons), and life evolved based on "nuclear chemistry" (electromagnetic interactions between the protons in the nuclei, rather than between the electrons in orbital shells). They grew up in an environment that required them to move along magnetic field lines - crossing them required a huge amount of effort - and they resembled amoebas, but much smaller. They eventually developed spaceflight, but it required the creation of subatomic scale black holes to generate sufficient gravitational field strength to keep them alive (outside the gravity well of their "world" they tended to die by expanding into oddly glowing lumps of iron).
I really enjoyed the chutzpah of trying to come up with a plausible picture of life on a Neutron Star.
I do know someone who had to argue with Microsoft to get an activation code, and then had to argue some more to get one that actually worked. Just last night, as a matter of fact...
Recant, or we shall be forced to bring out...
...the Comfy Chair©
This is a very interesting analogy, especially since the Ghostbusters created their own problem in the movie by refusing to talk to the guy, and leaving him to draw his own idiotic conclusions. To some extent, they did cause the explosion - by not talking to the prick until it was too late.
IANAL, but perhaps Spamhaus created this problem by not showing up, even if they were in the right? The analogy may hold better than the initial reading suggests.
Hmm, maybe I should have posted anonymously...
In my office the official procedure we are supposed to follow for screen prints is to use the "Print Scrn" button to copy the screen image to the clipboard and then paste it to a Word document.
In. Order. To. Print. It.
The Moon's influence on the Earth's weather and environment is gravitational.
As material is removed from the Moon and transported to the Earth the Moon's gravitational influence wanes, and the Earth's gravitational influence waxes.
The Earth currently has a mass of approximately 5,976,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons
If we transported a million tons of material a year, it would take appr 5,976,000,000,000 years to make a
Or, even more likely, long before Lunar mining created a measurable effect on Earth, we would have developed the technology to conjure desired minerals out of the Faerie Realms...
Actually, that's a different study. The theory of Evolution is based on the observations of how species differ. It doesn't say anything about how life began.