"Then why did you make the false implication US Christians believe mostly one way - and the rest of the world mostly another? (Hint: The majority of US Christians and Catholics aren't fundamentalist either. Like you most, you confuse noise and activity with size.)"
Thanks for pointing this out, because It wasn't my intention to imply this, just as I doubt you intended to imply that US Catholics aren't Christians!
"One shouldn't be so touchy about strawmen when being so quick to set one up yourself.
Neither theism nor atheism are religions by themselves."
That was why, as is obvious from what you pasted from my post, the word "religion" was in quotes, so your your accusation of a straw is itself a straw man!
"A comprehensive belief system may even be atheist and a religion if it requires faith in something that cannot measured or falsified (Buddhism, New Age-ism and such)."
"If you're a catholic and your church, which you believe is more than a social organization, refuses to recognize your marriage that means you don't have a marriage. Which means you're living in sin, which means you're going to hell, whether or not they actually excommunicate you."
I'm not a Catholic, but being married to one means I know that they believe the only baptised people who go to hell are those who don't repent their sins. The whole point of confession and penance is due to their belief that even the most devout people sin, hence the fact that all those who are part of the church itself are also expected to confess regularly. Repenting will also result in the sacraments being granted to those who have been excommunicated (i.e. they cease to be excommunicated).
I wouldn't have known this without having met an orthodox Jew who had studied the rules rather more deeply than most to justify eating bacon and mussels, both of which he believed were created by Jahweh with an in-built deliciousness factor so that man could enjoy them once he'd found a way to do so safely.
"Totalitarians (including most religious people) wants to forbid things because it's challenging them."
Which is precisely what you're doing: you claim that your views are the only correct ones, so anything that doesn't agree with them is by definition wrong, and should therefore be banned. Those who don't feel threatened and challenged by what others choose to believe don't advocate using force to make everyone else to conform with their views.
"We already do this for other things -- I can't sell a black box that I say can cure any illness, but I can sell a faith where I say a god can cure any illness. That's inconsistent and illogical."
You can sell items that make all sorts of ludicrous claims, and ask people to invest in companies which are based around what amounts to snake oil. Here are a few examples (there are thousands of others):
Many companies sell so-called "Long Range Locators" that can supposedly detect anything and everything remotely valuable from tens to hundreds of miles away. All of them are widely known in treasure hunting circles to be scams, because despite having lots of digital dials, expensive flight cases, and impressive looking instruction manuals, they're actually based on dowsing, and none of the the ones that have been independently tested have been able to detect anything. This web page has more information:
It would indeed be logical and inconsistent if your claims were true instead of being nothing more than easily debunked attempt pretend that there's a justification for forcing everyone to conform with your views that doesn't boil down to "any views that are different from nine should be illegal".
"I'm sorry to see that you have the same narrow mind that Stalin and Mao had"
LOL!
"Religious fraud should, of course, be subject to the same laws as any other fraud, with the same penalties. No special treatment, because there's nothing special about it."
It is treated in exactly the same way as the frauds in the links above, and all the many other bits of balderdash that are bought by people every day.
"Can't we just dispense with all the fairy tales and superstition once and for all? Pass a law against religion that will remain in effect until a deity, without the aid of humans, asks for it to be lifted?"
Totalitarians everywhere would agree that the ideal way to run a society is by making it illegal for people to say what they think, illegal for them to gather without permission, illegal for them to own certain types of literature, and exercise completely control all media to ensure that illegal material can't be disseminated.
"In my opinion, Lenin had the right idea, it was just Stalin's and Mao's executions that were awful."
Stalin's and Mao's executions were the inevitable result of the sort of laws you're advocating, because the easiest way to "protect" the public from "disruptive influences" is by removing those influences, and a bullet, noose, or gas chamber is the quickest and cheapest way of doing this (slave labour / re-education camps can a also be used, because a piece of bread and a cup of water is a small price to pay for making all those dissidents do an honest 18 hour day of back-breaking work).
"If you denounced Christianity openly, you would be burned as a witch."
Denouncing Christianity was heresy, not witchcraft. The definition of "witch" at that period was a person who was directly in league with the devil, from whom any magical powers that they were supposed to have were derived (it was believed that all supernatural phenomena came from either God or The Devil). Things were very different prior to the late 13th. century, when the Devil in the later (and indeed current) sense hadn't been invented, so "sorcery" was only punishable by a period of penance.
" One example is the whole "do not eat pigs"-thing: It started as simple sanitary advice, since pig meat rots much faster in hot weather than beef, thus making it difficult to store (and easier to kill yourself by eating it)."
Pig meat doesn't rot faster than beef or goat / sheep, and is at least as amenable to preservation by salting / drying / smoking as any of the meats they're allowed to eat, as is proven by the fact that salami and a wide variety of other dried / smoked sausages are made from pork, as is Parma ham and Spanish Jamon Serrano, both of which are dry-cured rather than cooked hams. The reason that both Judaeism and Islam prohibit eating pork is therefore most probably due to the fact that pigs carry diseases such as trichinosis that can easily be transferred to humans if their meat isn't properly prepared and cooked, whereas most of the diseases affecting cud-chewing hooved animals are much more species-specific.
The Jewish food prohibition that probably did come from problems with rotting is the one about only eating water-dwellers that have both scales and fins. Fish can be pretty effectively preserved by salting or smoking, but many other forms of water life such as crustaceans are much more difficult to preserve in societies without refrigeration, and spoiled food of this sort can harbour a variety of very toxic bacteria even when it looks and smells OK.
"If the majority of members of a religion enforce a particular policy than that policy is as good as that of the "official" religion."
One anecdote doesn't say anything about what the majority of people in a religion do. I come from a line of what Catholics term "mixed marriages" that goes back to my great grandmother (Irish Catholic married English Protestant) in the 19th century; my parents were a mixed marriage; and my wife is a Catholic, while I was baptised Anglican, but have been an agnostic since my early teen years. None of these people were _ever_ threatened with excommunication, and none of their parents forbade the marriages, but these family experiences are precisely that, and are not indicative of any general tendencies, so YMMV.
NB: the Catholic faith prohibits mixed marriages (mixed religions, not mixed races), but by far the most common penalty for having one is a refusal to recognise the marriage, although they've usually been willing to give it a limited form of recognition in return for a written promise to baptise any children that issue from the union as Catholics. This is precisely the same status as that of divorced Catholics who marry without having their prior marriages annulled (which can be a long and difficult process, so the vast majority of Catholics who remarry fall into this category).
"Given that the world's largest religion is based on it, I think knowing which bits are true would be rather important.
My point being that if the Bible is the infallible word of God then there is no room to pick and choose. If the tale of Jonah is a myth then the gospels are suspect as well. "
This is a straw man, because the major Christian denominations outside the US (and therefore the vast bulk of the world's Christians) don't claim that the Bible is the infallible word of God, and do not therefore try and pretend that scientific explanations of the origins of the universe and the origin of species are false. I'm not a Christian myself, but I am interested in the truth, and the fact of the matter is that the three biggest branches of Christianity (Catholicism, which dwarfs the others, followed by Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, in that order) are far from being biblical fundamentalists, but like the Jews, regard science science and religion as being two faces of the same coin.
NB: interestingly, secularism (atheism, agnosticism, etc.) is the third largest "religion" in the world, having 1.1 billion "members", which is more than Catholicism, by far the largest Christian denomination (half of the world's Christians are Catholics).
"In fact, I don't even see drunk Irish on TV congregating in public places chanting death to anything, except maybe during the occasional football match and even then only a few really mean it for more than a minute or two."
There were plenty of Irish people chanting death slogans in Northern Ireland in very recent history, and both Catholics and Protestants had an excellent personal delivery service that would execute members of the "opposing" religion in the comfort of their own homes. Other services offered by these merry and inoffensive individuals included putting bombs on mass transport systems, blowing up funerals, blowing up busloads of nuns, blowing up shops and pubs while they were open to the public, blowing up members of the British Royal Family, blowing up hotels, executing celebrities (part of the home delivery service), blowing up journalists, running protection rackets, robbing banks, and of course free medical services such as increasing leg ventilation by drilling a handy set of holes in a patient's kneecaps.
But apart from that, groups of Christian white people haven't killed civilians because of some grievance, perceived or real, for centuries. White people didn't plant a bomb in Oklahoma that killed a load of little kids; the Baader-Meihoff group wasn't white, and neither were the Italian Red Brigades, and whites are notably lacking from Spain's ETA; white, God fearing Serbs didn't execute thousands of Muslims (and indeed non-Muslims) and bury them in mass graves, and white Germans didn't systematically murder millions of civilians just over half a century ago.
"Oh, and lest I forget, what is more WYSIWYG than a hard print?"
Hard prints that don't look like what's on the screen are actually known as WYGIWYG, which stands for "What You Get Is What You Get". All computer printing was WYGIWYG before raster-based visual displays and raster-based printing became common.
"At least with TeX you have sections, subsections, etc, sprinkled in the text that explicitly tell what is going on. Good luck making an OCR understand what is a title, a subtitle or whatever."
This illustrates a simple computing rule that was well known in the days when WYGIWYG was all the rage: those who don't enjoy spending lots of time typing and manually checking for errors tend to avoid using hard copy as a computer storage medium.
"hich can only result in higher prices for internet services that all of their customers will have to pay, including those who (e.g. out of respect for the law) would never engage in non-authorized "file sharing"."
The law abiding always end up footing the bill for those who choose to ignore various laws. We pay higher prices for products and services whose manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers pass the costs of losses to crime and the security apparatus they use to reduce such losses onto us; we pay in the form of insurance policies to reimburse both ourselves and others who have been the victims of acts by others; we pay for politicians to pass laws making things illegal, police forces to catch those who contravene said laws, court systems to prosecute them, and prisons to keep them in.
"Mankind will never make it to the stars. We're destined to destroy ourselves first."
We'll get there if something's discovered that somebody wants, which will ensure that somebody else will devote enormous resources into putting an army there to prevent them from having it.
And recording, and the ability to generate publicity. In the "golden era" of prog. rock, it was very difficult for musicians who weren't signed to a major label to produce decent quality recordings or get publicity in the press, and without recordings they couldn't get on local radio, let alone national radio, so even groups that created a notable buzz locally had no real way of breaking out unless they were lucky enough to have a decent agent with connections or a record industry A&R rep. in the audience. This was especially the case for those whose music was of a type that few agents or A&R people would have seen any commercial market for even in the unlikely event that they got to hear it, yet this was generally where most of the really talented people who produced music out of love for the art were to be found. Some of them therefore eventually became part of other, more successful outfits or played stage and studio sessions for those who had recording deals, but the majority either retired from music completely, or continued to play for fun while earning a living from other things.
Having said the above however, it should be noted that "fringe acts" whose music appealed to a niche audience that was difficult to classify (e.g. Gentle Giant, The Mahavishnu Orchestra) stood a much better chance of landing a recording deal with a "major" before nearly every notable label was owned by three mega-corporations. Videos not being a factor back then also helped, because they've not only produced a situation where the appearance of an artist or group is very important (and the fact of the matter is that most prog. rock musicians were less than wonderful to look at), but also raised the costs of launching somebody new to a point where it doesn't make financial sense for the majors to bother with acts that obviously won't appeal to a fairly wide audience.
Melville's "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times" rather eloquently sums up the way things were in the "golden age" of prog. rock, when lots of people managed to make and sell records containing long, self-indulgent voyages of musical exploration, while many potential gems never managed to get the opportunities they deserved.
"The impetus for revolution has to come from within, you can't try to force democracy on a country whose people aren't ready to fight and die for it."
The very act of trying to force _any_ political system on a country is contrary to the principles of freedom. People who live in a country should be the ones who choose the system they want to live under, not outsiders who are arrogant enough to think that their way is so superior to all others that it should be spread and perpetuated by the use of force. That type of thinking leads to things like The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, World War 2, and the Cold War (to name but four of the long litany of tragedies that were caused by people who were convinced that their way was the right, and therefore only way).
Note also that revolutions have a notable historic tendency to produce governments that are worse than the one they removed, because it's the leaders of the revolution who get to form them, and the first thing they do is ensure that nobody can ever start a revolution against them.
"In the olden days, there were relatively few artists to choose from."
If by a few, you mean several hundred who released albums in the prog. rock, heavy rock, rock fusion, folk rock, and jazz rock fields between 1969 and 1979, then there were indeed only a few, if of course we restrict those several hundred to those who weren't primarily commercially oriented.
"If you wanted psychedelic-sounding proggish rock, you were pretty much stuck with Floyd."
Or Tangerine Dream, or Aphrodite's Child, or The Moody Blues (who did much to popularise the form before it even had a name), or Camel, or a lot of bands Steve Hillage was in, or...
"Most people don't even listen to progressive death metal but there are more prog death metal bands nationally available than there were prog bands in the heyday of prog"
I don't know how many progressive death metal bands there are, because it's not genre I'm interested in, but I can affirm that there were literally hundreds of prog. rock bands who released records during the "heyday", and there were probably thousands that performed in concerts and are fondly remembered, but didn't manage to get recording deals. What later became known as "The Cambridge Scene" produced a whole slew of prog. rock and various types of fusion groups during the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom are largely forgotten, although they had some people in them that later became pretty well known in the prog. rock scene afterwards such as Kevin Ayers, Bill Bruford, Alan Holdsworth, Dave Stewart, etc. This was just one small section of the UK, and while it was a notably prolific one, prog. rock was being produced all over the world, including Japan, most of Europe (Italy had a particularly vibrant scene that some regard as a distinct prog. rock sub-genre), Australia / New Zealand (Ozzie prog. rock fans will probably remember the rather excellent The Master's Apprentices in their hard rock incarnation), and of course the US.
Just because there weren't many prog. rock bands who had worldwide success doesn't mean that there weren't large numbers of them who made records for their own national markets, and played to full houses when they toured. Spain's Heroes Del Silencio Brazil's Os Mutantes for example aren't well known outside those countries because they didn't write English lyrics, but they released several albums that are still "in print", attracted large live audiences, and their record company still releases occasional compilations that sell well despite the fact that the bands themselves no longer exist.
"Your government is showing us a perfect example right now of why invading a country whose people don't want to be free never works."
I fail to see how not being thrilled about swapping a military dictator for a system where one gets to vote for anyone the US approves of whose future is decided by the US using criteria that the the US has unilaterally imposed can be described as not wanting freedom. When the Soviets did this sort of thing to other countries, the West described it as "oppression", and those who fought against foreign occupying forces were "freedom fighters", whereas our version of the same is "freedom", and those who fight against foreign occupying forces are "insurgents".
"Pournelle has been one of the top-tier SF writers over the last couple decades and he certainly can't retire on his residuals. Authors aren't like some sixteen-year-old made-up pop icon that's gonna make millions and blow it all on coke whether or not you copy her songs."
It's very rare for anyone working in a niche area of any part of the media industry to make very much money, so you comment about sixteen year old pop icons was way off base, because they're serving the mass media, and successful mass media authors also make lots of money (e.g. J.K. Rowlings, whose personal fortune is well over half a billion dollars).
Note that the above is true in most fields, e.g:
CEOs of large mass-market corporations earn lots of money. CEOs of small niche-market corporations don't. Movie industry actors, producers, and directors who are successful in the mass market earn lots of money. Those who are successful in small niche markets don't. Models who are successful in the mass market make lots of money. The others earn a modest income. Athletes who are successful in mass-media sports make lots of money. The others don't.
So the fact that Pournelle didn't make vast sums from his published works is due to the fact that he was writing for a niche audience, and not because authors in general make less than musicians, actors, professional athletes, business people, etc. Blues and Jazz were pretty big business between the 1920s to 1950s, yet many of the people who afficionados of those genres (including a lot of well known rock and pop musicians) cite as notable influences died in extreme poverty despite having made a large number of records and playing concerts every night for most of their lives.
One can thus argue that sharing files without the copyright owner's permission is wrong, or that it is right, but saying that it is right in some cases or with some types of media, and wrong in other cases or for other types of media is sheer hypocrisy.
"E.g., consider this "most insects have 6 legs, spiders are insects, therefore spiders have 6 legs." The fallacy there is the implied extrapolation from "most" (i.e., a variant of "some") to "all", not the "most insects have 6 legs" premise."
The fallacy is the statement about spiders being insects. They're chelicerates, which is a distinct arthropod sub-phylum that's much older, and genetically distinct from the hexapods (which includes insects and other six legged arthropods such as diplura). As the name "hexapod" suggests, _all_ normal (i.e. undamaged) adult insects have six legs, although their larvae can have anything ranging from none (e.g. maggots) to many (e.g. some caterpillars).
NB: some zoologists used to use the term "insect" as a general catch-all for any arthropod, but it's now considered as obsolete as the sun being classed as one of the planets.
Yes, that must be it, because anybody who actually understood something about the topic would obviously agree with you due to the fact that you are correct, so all other points of view must obviously be wrong.
"Read something about Emergence. Some people write books because they're better at explaining the concept than I am on/. - maybe because they've got editors and a year of time to do it."
Just because some people write books claiming that computers and the internet (usually via the much-vaunted by currently unimpressive "Web 2") count as emergence doesn't mean they're correct. Emergence in the ontological sense is something new coming into being with each instance of some level or pattern of lower level constituents, and putting information into a central repository that others can access isn't new, just as sending information over conductive wires or radio waves isn't new. Such authors paint a picture of the Internet (usually some fictitious "Web N" variant that nobody's managed to actually implement) as a vast collective mind that builds communities where summed intellects will perform great deeds that can only be imagined. The reality is of course that, as anybody unfortunate enough to sit near a large group of people on a long train journey could easily have told them, information bandwidth doesn't increase in proportion to the number participants, but noise does, so the result of the "collective intellect" is a system whose content to piffle ratio is quite frankly pathetic (Sturgeon's Law which states that 90% of everything is crap was written before the Internet ceased to be a geek-only resource, after which 99.99999% of everything became crap).
Excellent heuristic: most sources that claim to be factual are not. Groups of people who write about the same things tend to produce self-perpetuating myths due to the fact that authors use the work of other authors as references, so errors on early works tend to be repeated in later ones. There are many, many examples of this in science (popular and academic) and news reporting, to name but two, and increasing use of the Internet as a resource has resulted in the incidence of such collective myths rising exponentially in recent years.
The preceding was fucked up. A knee in the groin emoticon is a less-than sign, so the last part should read:
"Something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon ("<"), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y<)"
If you think that's bad, then you haven't encountered any of Britain's various "F" dialects, where the entirety of the human condition is expressed by combining fuck, fucked, fucking, or fucker. These may be used in combination with each other, and no more than two other English words which may only have one syllable each. A major difficulty is that much of the meaning of these dialects is contained not in the words themselves, but the way that pitch changes, varying loudness, and pauses are used to emphasise various parts of the phrase.
As an example of the above, consider "Fuck off", which can mean "please go away" or "I do not wish to do that" depending on whether the two words are pronounced monotonally as "fuckoff", or as "fu uckoff", with a rapidly lowering pitch before the pause (fu ), which is maintained throughout the "uck" part, and then rises again or the "off".
The above has led to a special set of F emoticons that help to distinguish between various forms of the same phrase when F is being written. A capital Y is used to indicate a British three-fingered salute, so "fuck off Y" would mean that the writer was telling the reader to go away, something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon (""), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y), or as the British sometimes say "in spades".
"Imagine if you will Microsoft, Sun, and Apple were to get together and begin prosecuting those who infringe on their copyrights (ISOs of Windows, Solaris and OSX). However, it is *not* MS, Apple or Sun prosecuting, it is a thirdparty that was created as an industry group."
And let's imagine for a moment that they called this industry group "The Business Software Alliance", or BSA for short, and that it had a US web site at: http://w3.bsa.org/usa, but unlike the RIAA, it operated at an international level. If such an organisation existed, it would probably also have an entry on the Internet's favourite toilet wall, which knowing the way Wikipedia tends to name things, would very likely be stored as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Software_All iance.
"Computers can do things that books can't - animated 3D graphics, for example."
This s a straw man, because I didn't claim that computers were the same as books in any of my posts.
BTW: computers have flat screens that aren't capable of rendering three dimensions. And I suggest you check into the history of Disney, Warner Bros. Hannnah-Barbera etc. if you think that animation projected onto a flat display device is something that started with computers.
"Sure we have vision, but it is based on light sensitivity - something a single-cell organism can have"
Again, a straw man, because my phrase was:
"We perceive the world around us with a variety of senses that are specific to multi-celled creatures."
I didn't mention any particular sense, so phototaxis does not refute the point at all.
"and (nerve) pulses being delivered - also something present in single-cell organisms."
Nerve pulses are carried by nerves (hence the name!), which are multicellular structures. Multicellular structures cannot exist in a single celled organism, so it cannot have nerve pulses, and doesn't require them, because nerves are a system for carrying information between groups of cells. They don' even exist in all multicellular organisms (sponges for example don't have them).
"for the communities: Sure we had communities for as long as we know. But still there are considerable differences."
Again a straw man, because I didn't say that there weren't differences, but the differences between computer communities are far less profound than those that have always existed (and still exist) between various different types of non-virtual community.
"To many different communities did your ancestors belong, 500 years ago? Two? Three? "
Why are you so obsessed with the world of 500 years ago? Is it possibly because seeding the straw man of a pre-technoogical society makes it far easier to argue your point than using the far more logical one of the Western world in the 1960s, when people managed to live pretty full, modern lives without being connected to the World Wide Web or having computers in their homes?
"Don't tell me that's only a difference in numbers. It makes a huge difference in how we deal with our lives. How we see ourselves and others."
I was born in 1960, and can categorically state that home computers and the Web have not had anything like the amount of impact that you claim. Western democracies in the 1960s had an instantaneous global communications network, international and domestic travel that was no slower than it is today, TV, radio, recorded music that people could buy and listen to at home, cars, buses, trains, helicopters, hovercraft, hydrofoils, communications satellites, space travel, plastics, regular international trade, nuclear power, electron microscopes, and a vast range of other things that are still present in a recognisable form today. Unless it has managed to escape your notice, the majority of domestic and business Internet links rely on the venerable wired telephone network to carry all that information, and communications satellites to move it between countries, and they were already being used for multimedia (i.e. faxes over telephone, TV and radio on the satellites) long before most of the people on Slashdot were born.
"Sure there's a lot of stuff of the "just like offline, just online" variety. But not everything is of that kind. A lot is not just faster, or more convenient, but an entirely different class of thing that simply didn't exist 100 years ago."
But the vast majority of it did exist 30 years ago, despite the fact that home computers were in their infancy (and therefore expensive and quite rare), the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, and the Internet was a restricted US-only network with a few tens of nodes. If you want to go back 100 years, then you might like to consider the fact that few people in Western democracies of 1907 had electricity, and refrigeration was something that industries used
Slashdot Mirror
"Then why did you make the false implication US Christians believe mostly one way - and the rest of the world mostly another? (Hint: The majority of US Christians and Catholics aren't fundamentalist either. Like you most, you confuse noise and activity with size.)"
Thanks for pointing this out, because It wasn't my intention to imply this, just as I doubt you intended to imply that US Catholics aren't Christians!
"One shouldn't be so touchy about strawmen when being so quick to set one up yourself.
Neither theism nor atheism are religions by themselves."
That was why, as is obvious from what you pasted from my post, the word "religion" was in quotes, so your your accusation of a straw is itself a straw man!
"A comprehensive belief system may even be atheist and a religion if it requires faith in something that cannot measured or falsified (Buddhism, New Age-ism and such)."
See above.
"If you're a catholic and your church, which you believe is more than a social organization, refuses to recognize your marriage that means you don't have a marriage. Which means you're living in sin, which means you're going to hell, whether or not they actually excommunicate you."
I'm not a Catholic, but being married to one means I know that they believe the only baptised people who go to hell are those who don't repent their sins. The whole point of confession and penance is due to their belief that even the most devout people sin, hence the fact that all those who are part of the church itself are also expected to confess regularly. Repenting will also result in the sacraments being granted to those who have been excommunicated (i.e. they cease to be excommunicated).
I wouldn't have known this without having met an orthodox Jew who had studied the rules rather more deeply than most to justify eating bacon and mussels, both of which he believed were created by Jahweh with an in-built deliciousness factor so that man could enjoy them once he'd found a way to do so safely.
"Totalitarians (including most religious people) wants to forbid things because it's challenging them."
r ee-energy-machine-demonstrated-tomorrow/
i ndex.pl?page=lrl&file=reward.dat
Which is precisely what you're doing: you claim that your views are the only correct ones, so anything that doesn't agree with them is by definition wrong, and should therefore be banned. Those who don't feel threatened and challenged by what others choose to believe don't advocate using force to make everyone else to conform with their views.
"We already do this for other things -- I can't sell a black box that I say can cure any illness, but I can sell a faith where I say a god can cure any illness. That's inconsistent and illogical."
You can sell items that make all sorts of ludicrous claims, and ask people to invest in companies which are based around what amounts to snake oil. Here are a few examples (there are thousands of others):
http://www.healingcrystals.com/
http://www.magnecare.co.uk/
http://www.lutec.com.au/
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/04/steorns-orbo-f
http://www.doctorajadams.com/DetoxFootSpa.html
Many companies sell so-called "Long Range Locators" that can supposedly detect anything and everything remotely valuable from tens to hundreds of miles away. All of them are widely known in treasure hunting circles to be scams, because despite having lots of digital dials, expensive flight cases, and impressive looking instruction manuals, they're actually based on dowsing, and none of the the ones that have been independently tested have been able to detect anything. This web page has more information:
http://geotech.thunting.com/cgi-bin/pages/common/
"That's inconsistent and illogical."
It would indeed be logical and inconsistent if your claims were true instead of being nothing more than easily debunked attempt pretend that there's a justification for forcing everyone to conform with your views that doesn't boil down to "any views that are different from nine should be illegal".
"I'm sorry to see that you have the same narrow mind that Stalin and Mao had"
LOL!
"Religious fraud should, of course, be subject to the same laws as any other fraud, with the same penalties. No special treatment, because there's nothing special about it."
It is treated in exactly the same way as the frauds in the links above, and all the many other bits of balderdash that are bought by people every day.
"Can't we just dispense with all the fairy tales and superstition once and for all? Pass a law against religion that will remain in effect until a deity, without the aid of humans, asks for it to be lifted?"
Totalitarians everywhere would agree that the ideal way to run a society is by making it illegal for people to say what they think, illegal for them to gather without permission, illegal for them to own certain types of literature, and exercise completely control all media to ensure that illegal material can't be disseminated.
"In my opinion, Lenin had the right idea, it was just Stalin's and Mao's executions that were awful."
Stalin's and Mao's executions were the inevitable result of the sort of laws you're advocating, because the easiest way to "protect" the public from "disruptive influences" is by removing those influences, and a bullet, noose, or gas chamber is the quickest and cheapest way of doing this (slave labour / re-education camps can a also be used, because a piece of bread and a cup of water is a small price to pay for making all those dissidents do an honest 18 hour day of back-breaking work).
"If you denounced Christianity openly, you would be burned as a witch."
Denouncing Christianity was heresy, not witchcraft. The definition of "witch" at that period was a person who was directly in league with the devil, from whom any magical powers that they were supposed to have were derived (it was believed that all supernatural phenomena came from either God or The Devil). Things were very different prior to the late 13th. century, when the Devil in the later (and indeed current) sense hadn't been invented, so "sorcery" was only punishable by a period of penance.
" One example is the whole "do not eat pigs"-thing: It started as simple sanitary advice, since pig meat rots much faster in hot weather than beef, thus making it difficult to store (and easier to kill yourself by eating it)."
Pig meat doesn't rot faster than beef or goat / sheep, and is at least as amenable to preservation by salting / drying / smoking as any of the meats they're allowed to eat, as is proven by the fact that salami and a wide variety of other dried / smoked sausages are made from pork, as is Parma ham and Spanish Jamon Serrano, both of which are dry-cured rather than cooked hams. The reason that both Judaeism and Islam prohibit eating pork is therefore most probably due to the fact that pigs carry diseases such as trichinosis that can easily be transferred to humans if their meat isn't properly prepared and cooked, whereas most of the diseases affecting cud-chewing hooved animals are much more species-specific.
The Jewish food prohibition that probably did come from problems with rotting is the one about only eating water-dwellers that have both scales and fins. Fish can be pretty effectively preserved by salting or smoking, but many other forms of water life such as crustaceans are much more difficult to preserve in societies without refrigeration, and spoiled food of this sort can harbour a variety of very toxic bacteria even when it looks and smells OK.
"If the majority of members of a religion enforce a particular policy than that policy is as good as that of the "official" religion."
One anecdote doesn't say anything about what the majority of people in a religion do. I come from a line of what Catholics term "mixed marriages" that goes back to my great grandmother (Irish Catholic married English Protestant) in the 19th century; my parents were a mixed marriage; and my wife is a Catholic, while I was baptised Anglican, but have been an agnostic since my early teen years. None of these people were _ever_ threatened with excommunication, and none of their parents forbade the marriages, but these family experiences are precisely that, and are not indicative of any general tendencies, so YMMV.
NB: the Catholic faith prohibits mixed marriages (mixed religions, not mixed races), but by far the most common penalty for having one is a refusal to recognise the marriage, although they've usually been willing to give it a limited form of recognition in return for a written promise to baptise any children that issue from the union as Catholics. This is precisely the same status as that of divorced Catholics who marry without having their prior marriages annulled (which can be a long and difficult process, so the vast majority of Catholics who remarry fall into this category).
"Given that the world's largest religion is based on it, I think knowing which bits are true would be rather important.
My point being that if the Bible is the infallible word of God then there is no room to pick and choose. If the tale of Jonah is a myth then the gospels are suspect as well. "
This is a straw man, because the major Christian denominations outside the US (and therefore the vast bulk of the world's Christians) don't claim that the Bible is the infallible word of God, and do not therefore try and pretend that scientific explanations of the origins of the universe and the origin of species are false. I'm not a Christian myself, but I am interested in the truth, and the fact of the matter is that the three biggest branches of Christianity (Catholicism, which dwarfs the others, followed by Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, in that order) are far from being biblical fundamentalists, but like the Jews, regard science science and religion as being two faces of the same coin.
NB: interestingly, secularism (atheism, agnosticism, etc.) is the third largest "religion" in the world, having 1.1 billion "members", which is more than Catholicism, by far the largest Christian denomination (half of the world's Christians are Catholics).
"In fact, I don't even see drunk Irish on TV congregating in public places chanting death to anything, except maybe during the occasional football match and even then only a few really mean it for more than a minute or two."
There were plenty of Irish people chanting death slogans in Northern Ireland in very recent history, and both Catholics and Protestants had an excellent personal delivery service that would execute members of the "opposing" religion in the comfort of their own homes. Other services offered by these merry and inoffensive individuals included putting bombs on mass transport systems, blowing up funerals, blowing up busloads of nuns, blowing up shops and pubs while they were open to the public, blowing up members of the British Royal Family, blowing up hotels, executing celebrities (part of the home delivery service), blowing up journalists, running protection rackets, robbing banks, and of course free medical services such as increasing leg ventilation by drilling a handy set of holes in a patient's kneecaps.
But apart from that, groups of Christian white people haven't killed civilians because of some grievance, perceived or real, for centuries. White people didn't plant a bomb in Oklahoma that killed a load of little kids; the Baader-Meihoff group wasn't white, and neither were the Italian Red Brigades, and whites are notably lacking from Spain's ETA; white, God fearing Serbs didn't execute thousands of Muslims (and indeed non-Muslims) and bury them in mass graves, and white Germans didn't systematically murder millions of civilians just over half a century ago.
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, say "hello" to pot.
"Oh, and lest I forget, what is more WYSIWYG than a hard print?"
Hard prints that don't look like what's on the screen are actually known as WYGIWYG, which stands for "What You Get Is What You Get". All computer printing was WYGIWYG before raster-based visual displays and raster-based printing became common.
"At least with TeX you have sections, subsections, etc, sprinkled in the text that explicitly tell what is going on. Good luck making an OCR understand what is a title, a subtitle or whatever."
This illustrates a simple computing rule that was well known in the days when WYGIWYG was all the rage: those who don't enjoy spending lots of time typing and manually checking for errors tend to avoid using hard copy as a computer storage medium.
"hich can only result in higher prices for internet services that all of their customers will have to pay, including those who (e.g. out of respect for the law) would never engage in non-authorized "file sharing"."
The law abiding always end up footing the bill for those who choose to ignore various laws. We pay higher prices for products and services whose manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers pass the costs of losses to crime and the security apparatus they use to reduce such losses onto us; we pay in the form of insurance policies to reimburse both ourselves and others who have been the victims of acts by others; we pay for politicians to pass laws making things illegal, police forces to catch those who contravene said laws, court systems to prosecute them, and prisons to keep them in.
"Mankind will never make it to the stars. We're destined to destroy ourselves first."
We'll get there if something's discovered that somebody wants, which will ensure that somebody else will devote enormous resources into putting an army there to prevent them from having it.
"the main difference now is distribution"
And recording, and the ability to generate publicity. In the "golden era" of prog. rock, it was very difficult for musicians who weren't signed to a major label to produce decent quality recordings or get publicity in the press, and without recordings they couldn't get on local radio, let alone national radio, so even groups that created a notable buzz locally had no real way of breaking out unless they were lucky enough to have a decent agent with connections or a record industry A&R rep. in the audience. This was especially the case for those whose music was of a type that few agents or A&R people would have seen any commercial market for even in the unlikely event that they got to hear it, yet this was generally where most of the really talented people who produced music out of love for the art were to be found. Some of them therefore eventually became part of other, more successful outfits or played stage and studio sessions for those who had recording deals, but the majority either retired from music completely, or continued to play for fun while earning a living from other things.
Having said the above however, it should be noted that "fringe acts" whose music appealed to a niche audience that was difficult to classify (e.g. Gentle Giant, The Mahavishnu Orchestra) stood a much better chance of landing a recording deal with a "major" before nearly every notable label was owned by three mega-corporations. Videos not being a factor back then also helped, because they've not only produced a situation where the appearance of an artist or group is very important (and the fact of the matter is that most prog. rock musicians were less than wonderful to look at), but also raised the costs of launching somebody new to a point where it doesn't make financial sense for the majors to bother with acts that obviously won't appeal to a fairly wide audience.
Melville's "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times" rather eloquently sums up the way things were in the "golden age" of prog. rock, when lots of people managed to make and sell records containing long, self-indulgent voyages of musical exploration, while many potential gems never managed to get the opportunities they deserved.
"The impetus for revolution has to come from within, you can't try to force democracy on a country whose people aren't ready to fight and die for it."
The very act of trying to force _any_ political system on a country is contrary to the principles of freedom. People who live in a country should be the ones who choose the system they want to live under, not outsiders who are arrogant enough to think that their way is so superior to all others that it should be spread and perpetuated by the use of force. That type of thinking leads to things like The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, World War 2, and the Cold War (to name but four of the long litany of tragedies that were caused by people who were convinced that their way was the right, and therefore only way).
Note also that revolutions have a notable historic tendency to produce governments that are worse than the one they removed, because it's the leaders of the revolution who get to form them, and the first thing they do is ensure that nobody can ever start a revolution against them.
"In the olden days, there were relatively few artists to choose from."
If by a few, you mean several hundred who released albums in the prog. rock, heavy rock, rock fusion, folk rock, and jazz rock fields between 1969 and 1979, then there were indeed only a few, if of course we restrict those several hundred to those who weren't primarily commercially oriented.
"If you wanted psychedelic-sounding proggish rock, you were pretty much stuck with Floyd."
Or Tangerine Dream, or Aphrodite's Child, or The Moody Blues (who did much to popularise the form before it even had a name), or Camel, or a lot of bands Steve Hillage was in, or...
"Most people don't even listen to progressive death metal but there are more prog death metal bands nationally available than there were prog bands in the heyday of prog"
I don't know how many progressive death metal bands there are, because it's not genre I'm interested in, but I can affirm that there were literally hundreds of prog. rock bands who released records during the "heyday", and there were probably thousands that performed in concerts and are fondly remembered, but didn't manage to get recording deals. What later became known as "The Cambridge Scene" produced a whole slew of prog. rock and various types of fusion groups during the 1960s and 1970s, many of whom are largely forgotten, although they had some people in them that later became pretty well known in the prog. rock scene afterwards such as Kevin Ayers, Bill Bruford, Alan Holdsworth, Dave Stewart, etc. This was just one small section of the UK, and while it was a notably prolific one, prog. rock was being produced all over the world, including Japan, most of Europe (Italy had a particularly vibrant scene that some regard as a distinct prog. rock sub-genre), Australia / New Zealand (Ozzie prog. rock fans will probably remember the rather excellent The Master's Apprentices in their hard rock incarnation), and of course the US.
Just because there weren't many prog. rock bands who had worldwide success doesn't mean that there weren't large numbers of them who made records for their own national markets, and played to full houses when they toured. Spain's Heroes Del Silencio Brazil's Os Mutantes for example aren't well known outside those countries because they didn't write English lyrics, but they released several albums that are still "in print", attracted large live audiences, and their record company still releases occasional compilations that sell well despite the fact that the bands themselves no longer exist.
"Your government is showing us a perfect example right now of why invading a country whose people don't want to be free never works."
I fail to see how not being thrilled about swapping a military dictator for a system where one gets to vote for anyone the US approves of whose future is decided by the US using criteria that the the US has unilaterally imposed can be described as not wanting freedom. When the Soviets did this sort of thing to other countries, the West described it as "oppression", and those who fought against foreign occupying forces were "freedom fighters", whereas our version of the same is "freedom", and those who fight against foreign occupying forces are "insurgents".
"Pournelle has been one of the top-tier SF writers over the last couple decades and he certainly can't retire on his residuals. Authors aren't like some sixteen-year-old made-up pop icon that's gonna make millions and blow it all on coke whether or not you copy her songs."
It's very rare for anyone working in a niche area of any part of the media industry to make very much money, so you comment about sixteen year old pop icons was way off base, because they're serving the mass media, and successful mass media authors also make lots of money (e.g. J.K. Rowlings, whose personal fortune is well over half a billion dollars).
Note that the above is true in most fields, e.g:
CEOs of large mass-market corporations earn lots of money. CEOs of small niche-market corporations don't.
Movie industry actors, producers, and directors who are successful in the mass market earn lots of money. Those who are successful in small niche markets don't.
Models who are successful in the mass market make lots of money. The others earn a modest income.
Athletes who are successful in mass-media sports make lots of money. The others don't.
So the fact that Pournelle didn't make vast sums from his published works is due to the fact that he was writing for a niche audience, and not because authors in general make less than musicians, actors, professional athletes, business people, etc. Blues and Jazz were pretty big business between the 1920s to 1950s, yet many of the people who afficionados of those genres (including a lot of well known rock and pop musicians) cite as notable influences died in extreme poverty despite having made a large number of records and playing concerts every night for most of their lives.
One can thus argue that sharing files without the copyright owner's permission is wrong, or that it is right, but saying that it is right in some cases or with some types of media, and wrong in other cases or for other types of media is sheer hypocrisy.
"E.g., consider this "most insects have 6 legs, spiders are insects, therefore spiders have 6 legs." The fallacy there is the implied extrapolation from "most" (i.e., a variant of "some") to "all", not the "most insects have 6 legs" premise."
The fallacy is the statement about spiders being insects. They're chelicerates, which is a distinct arthropod sub-phylum that's much older, and genetically distinct from the hexapods (which includes insects and other six legged arthropods such as diplura). As the name "hexapod" suggests, _all_ normal (i.e. undamaged) adult insects have six legs, although their larvae can have anything ranging from none (e.g. maggots) to many (e.g. some caterpillars).
NB: some zoologists used to use the term "insect" as a general catch-all for any arthropod, but it's now considered as obsolete as the sun being classed as one of the planets.
"I give up, you don't get it."
/. - maybe because they've got editors and a year of time to do it."
Yes, that must be it, because anybody who actually understood something about the topic would obviously agree with you due to the fact that you are correct, so all other points of view must obviously be wrong.
"Read something about Emergence. Some people write books because they're better at explaining the concept than I am on
Just because some people write books claiming that computers and the internet (usually via the much-vaunted by currently unimpressive "Web 2") count as emergence doesn't mean they're correct. Emergence in the ontological sense is something new coming into being with each instance of some level or pattern of lower level constituents, and putting information into a central repository that others can access isn't new, just as sending information over conductive wires or radio waves isn't new. Such authors paint a picture of the Internet (usually some fictitious "Web N" variant that nobody's managed to actually implement) as a vast collective mind that builds communities where summed intellects will perform great deeds that can only be imagined. The reality is of course that, as anybody unfortunate enough to sit near a large group of people on a long train journey could easily have told them, information bandwidth doesn't increase in proportion to the number participants, but noise does, so the result of the "collective intellect" is a system whose content to piffle ratio is quite frankly pathetic (Sturgeon's Law which states that 90% of everything is crap was written before the Internet ceased to be a geek-only resource, after which 99.99999% of everything became crap).
Excellent heuristic: most sources that claim to be factual are not. Groups of people who write about the same things tend to produce self-perpetuating myths due to the fact that authors use the work of other authors as references, so errors on early works tend to be repeated in later ones. There are many, many examples of this in science (popular and academic) and news reporting, to name but two, and increasing use of the Internet as a resource has resulted in the incidence of such collective myths rising exponentially in recent years.
The preceding was fucked up. A knee in the groin emoticon is a less-than sign, so the last part should read:
"Something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon ("<"), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y<)"
If you think that's bad, then you haven't encountered any of Britain's various "F" dialects, where the entirety of the human condition is expressed by combining fuck, fucked, fucking, or fucker. These may be used in combination with each other, and no more than two other English words which may only have one syllable each. A major difficulty is that much of the meaning of these dialects is contained not in the words themselves, but the way that pitch changes, varying loudness, and pauses are used to emphasise various parts of the phrase.
As an example of the above, consider "Fuck off", which can mean "please go away" or "I do not wish to do that" depending on whether the two words are pronounced monotonally as "fuckoff", or as "fu uckoff", with a rapidly lowering pitch before the pause (fu ), which is maintained throughout the "uck" part, and then rises again or the "off".
The above has led to a special set of F emoticons that help to distinguish between various forms of the same phrase when F is being written. A capital Y is used to indicate a British three-fingered salute, so "fuck off Y" would mean that the writer was telling the reader to go away, something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon (""), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y), or as the British sometimes say "in spades".
"Imagine if you will Microsoft, Sun, and Apple were to get together and begin prosecuting those who infringe on their copyrights (ISOs of Windows, Solaris and OSX). However, it is *not* MS, Apple or Sun prosecuting, it is a thirdparty that was created as an industry group."
l iance.
And let's imagine for a moment that they called this industry group "The Business Software Alliance", or BSA for short, and that it had a US web site at: http://w3.bsa.org/usa,
but unlike the RIAA, it operated at an international level. If such an organisation existed, it would probably also have an entry on the Internet's favourite toilet wall, which knowing the way Wikipedia tends to name things, would very likely be stored as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Software_Al
"Computers can do things that books can't - animated 3D graphics, for example."
This s a straw man, because I didn't claim that computers were the same as books in any of my posts.
BTW: computers have flat screens that aren't capable of rendering three dimensions. And I suggest you check into the history of Disney, Warner Bros. Hannnah-Barbera etc. if you think that animation projected onto a flat display device is something that started with computers.
"Sure we have vision, but it is based on light sensitivity - something a single-cell organism can have"
Again, a straw man, because my phrase was:
"We perceive the world around us with a variety of senses that are specific to multi-celled creatures."
I didn't mention any particular sense, so phototaxis does not refute the point at all.
"and (nerve) pulses being delivered - also something present in single-cell organisms."
Nerve pulses are carried by nerves (hence the name!), which are multicellular structures. Multicellular structures cannot exist in a single celled organism, so it cannot have nerve pulses, and doesn't require them, because nerves are a system for carrying information between groups of cells. They don' even exist in all multicellular organisms (sponges for example don't have them).
"for the communities: Sure we had communities for as long as we know. But still there are considerable differences."
Again a straw man, because I didn't say that there weren't differences, but the differences between computer communities are far less profound than those that have always existed (and still exist) between various different types of non-virtual community.
"To many different communities did your ancestors belong, 500 years ago? Two? Three? "
Why are you so obsessed with the world of 500 years ago? Is it possibly because seeding the straw man of a pre-technoogical society makes it far easier to argue your point than using the far more logical one of the Western world in the 1960s, when people managed to live pretty full, modern lives without being connected to the World Wide Web or having computers in their homes?
"Don't tell me that's only a difference in numbers. It makes a huge difference in how we deal with our lives. How we see ourselves and others."
I was born in 1960, and can categorically state that home computers and the Web have not had anything like the amount of impact that you claim. Western democracies in the 1960s had an instantaneous global communications network, international and domestic travel that was no slower than it is today, TV, radio, recorded music that people could buy and listen to at home, cars, buses, trains, helicopters, hovercraft, hydrofoils, communications satellites, space travel, plastics, regular international trade, nuclear power, electron microscopes, and a vast range of other things that are still present in a recognisable form today. Unless it has managed to escape your notice, the majority of domestic and business Internet links rely on the venerable wired telephone network to carry all that information, and communications satellites to move it between countries, and they were already being used for multimedia (i.e. faxes over telephone, TV and radio on the satellites) long before most of the people on Slashdot were born.
"Sure there's a lot of stuff of the "just like offline, just online" variety. But not everything is of that kind. A lot is not just faster, or more convenient, but an entirely different class of thing that simply didn't exist 100 years ago."
But the vast majority of it did exist 30 years ago, despite the fact that home computers were in their infancy (and therefore expensive and quite rare), the World Wide Web had yet to be invented, and the Internet was a restricted US-only network with a few tens of nodes. If you want to go back 100 years, then you might like to consider the fact that few people in Western democracies of 1907 had electricity, and refrigeration was something that industries used