I don't see how one can reasonably be considered a Christian, at least in any sense that has applied since the last of the great heresies was stamped out, if they deny the divinity of Christ. His position varied little from, say, a Jew or a Muslim.
One can certainly debate the electoral college system, but at least one should understand it's purpose. The Founding Fathers were concerned about any kind of tyranny, up to and including the tyranny of the majority. By creating an electoral college rather than directly electing the President it creates a check on the will of the majority.
Jefferson most assuredly rejected Christianity. The closest description you can make was that he was a Deist. Mind you, an 18th century Deist and a 20th century Deist like Einstein are going to have somewhat different views, but anyone who says Jefferson was any kind of Christian knows dick about Jefferson.
And your utterly wrong. A biologist (that's what they call evolutionists in the real world) is going to look at evidence via the lens of methodological naturalism. Whether he is an atheist or a theist is irrelevant. You're not seriously advocating a notion that all biologists reject God, are you?
When a geologist says "You're town is right in the path of a future lava flow..." and a politician says "building a big ditch to redirect the flow will harm our economy!", you think the politician is the guy who should get the upper hand?
And eugenics theory was never really a scientific theory at all. It certainly ran counter to Darwinian evolutionary mechanics (where variation is absolutely key to a species' survival), so the analogy is bad. Doubtless there were some scientists advocating it, but many of those, at the time, also rejected natural selection in favor of either racial purity nonsense or the more nebulous but equally vile economic purity concepts. At any rate, Darwin and his successors made very clear that the best way for a species to survive was diversity, which eugenics by and large rejects in favor of creating a very homogeneous genetic stock.
Besides what you've written is a red herring. I don't think anybody is saying scientists should run the show, but rather that the politicization of science harms science and ultimately harms people. Scientists should be free to publish their results without tampering and then it is up to the politicians and the public to decide what to do with it. If they decide digging a big ditch to redirect a future lava flow will damage their economy, then at least they were given the warning and understood the potential ramifications of their decision, rather than having politicians muzzle the geologist and try to put across the message that there's nothing to worry about.
If you're talking about a constitution, then knowing the intentions of the framers seems somewhat important, no? Otherwise how do you propose we deal with the very notions of jurisprudence, by making it all up again with each turn of the wheel?
Have you ever actually read anything about evolution written by a biologist? None of your objections pose any problem for biologists. We have the fossil record and the genetic evidence; the twin-nested hierarchy.
Evolution has not been in serious dispute in science for nearly a century. As Theodore Dobzhansky, an Orthodox Christian, famously said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution."
Your objection indicates that you may accept evolution, but you don't understand it. There is no arrow in evolution, no goal. There is absolutely no reason to think that human-level intelligence is in any way an inevitability. The most successful organisms on the planet do not even have even a rudimentary nervous system.
Evolution does not have a goal. There is no reason to expect that if we went back 4 billion years and reran things that we would end up with humans or human-like intelligence. Human evolution poses no more problem for evolution than the evolution of chordates or warm bloodedness.
The Founding Fathers were adherents of John Locke, and the first men who got a chance to put his principles into practice. They did not view secularism as being in opposition to religion, but rather as the only way to preserve religions. Any evangelical who thinks the Wall of Separation is a bad thing need only ponder that their religious forebearers; the non-Comformists, were heavily persecuted by the English state, that the Test Acts and other legislation was used at times vigorously to assure conformity to the Church of England. Their ancestors had left England in no small part because they were denied their liberties, and those descendants sought to create a nation where those abuses could not happen.
The fact of the matter is that the Founding Fathers were a mix of religious men, humanists and deists. For them the horrors of the Thirty Years War was just over a century old, and the abuses of the Test Acts and of the whole established Church of England still very much a reality. They realized that the very best way to guarantee a man his religious freedoms was to create a barrier between church and state (Jefferson's "wall of separation"). This idea foisted by some evangelicals that the First Amendment has been misinterpreted or that somehow the government being barred from advocating a particular religion is somehow an attack on religion is in complete defiance of what the Founding Fathers were intent upon, which was to make sure that the state could never persecute a man for his religious beliefs.
One side is pouring millions into research, the other side is pouring millions into PR "thinktanks" like the Heartland Institute.
Let's be very clear here. The oil companies are not doing AGW research. The closest they get to that is finding a few shills with degrees, a small number who may even in fact be experts (or more often, were experts) into fields related to climatology.
It's precisely the same scam that the Creationist organizations like the Discovery Institute have been pulling for decades.
And when evidence is provided, they either ignore it or go on about how it's all perfectly normal, and still insist that climatologists are in some big conspiracy to fuck over the world and sell lots of carbon credits to make huge profits at the expense of poor little oil companies (who happen to be among the wealthiest entities ever to have existed in the history of our species).
The lean upon convention. Stillbirths did not get birth certificates in most Common Law jurisdictions, and indeed recording of them before there was seen to be some use for the statistics was sporadic at best. The law was pretty simple; there is no person until birth.
Yes and no. Mechanical computers do not have the scalability of electronic computers, to be sure, so that line of development would have reached its end.
At the same time, having a Turing complete computer, even a mechanical one, in the first half of the 19th century would have given mathematicians and engineers a whole new grammar to begin working on, much as even the relatively primitive digital computers of the 1940s to 1960s spurred on an absolutely astonishing amount of R&D, some of it still bearing fruit today.
I expect that if the Babbage machines had been built and had been put to use, they would have spurred the digital revolution nearly a century earlier, concentrating huge amounts of R&D by the Great Powers in the post-Napoleonic era. The military value, for instance, of fast and accurate cannon/mortar trajectory calculations would have given whoever developed such machines a considerable edge. The late 19th-early 20th century arms race was transformative in many ways, and the successors of Babbage's machines would have been caught up in that.
Postfix has had throttling for several years now, based on the same basic concepts. I use Postfix with greylisting and to be honest, my Spamassassin and ClamAV filters rarely get hit. Since at least big spam attacks are by bots, and bots are primarily designed to just shove as much through as possible, greylisting alone does a spectacular job of killing them, though sometimes people get pissed when messages take a while to get to them from a recipient the first time.
Except Google wouldn't have killed Firefox, it's likely that, one way or the other, Microsoft would have gobbled Firefox up. This is pure strategy. Better to basically prop up Microsoft's other major web competitor than to let it get swallowed up by Redmond.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how one can reasonably be considered a Christian, at least in any sense that has applied since the last of the great heresies was stamped out, if they deny the divinity of Christ. His position varied little from, say, a Jew or a Muslim.
One can certainly debate the electoral college system, but at least one should understand it's purpose. The Founding Fathers were concerned about any kind of tyranny, up to and including the tyranny of the majority. By creating an electoral college rather than directly electing the President it creates a check on the will of the majority.
Jefferson most assuredly rejected Christianity. The closest description you can make was that he was a Deist. Mind you, an 18th century Deist and a 20th century Deist like Einstein are going to have somewhat different views, but anyone who says Jefferson was any kind of Christian knows dick about Jefferson.
And your utterly wrong. A biologist (that's what they call evolutionists in the real world) is going to look at evidence via the lens of methodological naturalism. Whether he is an atheist or a theist is irrelevant. You're not seriously advocating a notion that all biologists reject God, are you?
When a geologist says "You're town is right in the path of a future lava flow..." and a politician says "building a big ditch to redirect the flow will harm our economy!", you think the politician is the guy who should get the upper hand?
And eugenics theory was never really a scientific theory at all. It certainly ran counter to Darwinian evolutionary mechanics (where variation is absolutely key to a species' survival), so the analogy is bad. Doubtless there were some scientists advocating it, but many of those, at the time, also rejected natural selection in favor of either racial purity nonsense or the more nebulous but equally vile economic purity concepts. At any rate, Darwin and his successors made very clear that the best way for a species to survive was diversity, which eugenics by and large rejects in favor of creating a very homogeneous genetic stock.
Besides what you've written is a red herring. I don't think anybody is saying scientists should run the show, but rather that the politicization of science harms science and ultimately harms people. Scientists should be free to publish their results without tampering and then it is up to the politicians and the public to decide what to do with it. If they decide digging a big ditch to redirect a future lava flow will damage their economy, then at least they were given the warning and understood the potential ramifications of their decision, rather than having politicians muzzle the geologist and try to put across the message that there's nothing to worry about.
The Athenians democratically decided to go to war against Sparta, and lost both the war and their democracy.
If you're talking about a constitution, then knowing the intentions of the framers seems somewhat important, no? Otherwise how do you propose we deal with the very notions of jurisprudence, by making it all up again with each turn of the wheel?
Have you ever actually read anything about evolution written by a biologist? None of your objections pose any problem for biologists. We have the fossil record and the genetic evidence; the twin-nested hierarchy.
Evolution has not been in serious dispute in science for nearly a century. As Theodore Dobzhansky, an Orthodox Christian, famously said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution."
Your objection indicates that you may accept evolution, but you don't understand it. There is no arrow in evolution, no goal. There is absolutely no reason to think that human-level intelligence is in any way an inevitability. The most successful organisms on the planet do not even have even a rudimentary nervous system.
Evolution does not have a goal. There is no reason to expect that if we went back 4 billion years and reran things that we would end up with humans or human-like intelligence. Human evolution poses no more problem for evolution than the evolution of chordates or warm bloodedness.
The Founding Fathers were adherents of John Locke, and the first men who got a chance to put his principles into practice. They did not view secularism as being in opposition to religion, but rather as the only way to preserve religions. Any evangelical who thinks the Wall of Separation is a bad thing need only ponder that their religious forebearers; the non-Comformists, were heavily persecuted by the English state, that the Test Acts and other legislation was used at times vigorously to assure conformity to the Church of England. Their ancestors had left England in no small part because they were denied their liberties, and those descendants sought to create a nation where those abuses could not happen.
The fact of the matter is that the Founding Fathers were a mix of religious men, humanists and deists. For them the horrors of the Thirty Years War was just over a century old, and the abuses of the Test Acts and of the whole established Church of England still very much a reality. They realized that the very best way to guarantee a man his religious freedoms was to create a barrier between church and state (Jefferson's "wall of separation"). This idea foisted by some evangelicals that the First Amendment has been misinterpreted or that somehow the government being barred from advocating a particular religion is somehow an attack on religion is in complete defiance of what the Founding Fathers were intent upon, which was to make sure that the state could never persecute a man for his religious beliefs.
One side is pouring millions into research, the other side is pouring millions into PR "thinktanks" like the Heartland Institute.
Let's be very clear here. The oil companies are not doing AGW research. The closest they get to that is finding a few shills with degrees, a small number who may even in fact be experts (or more often, were experts) into fields related to climatology.
It's precisely the same scam that the Creationist organizations like the Discovery Institute have been pulling for decades.
And when evidence is provided, they either ignore it or go on about how it's all perfectly normal, and still insist that climatologists are in some big conspiracy to fuck over the world and sell lots of carbon credits to make huge profits at the expense of poor little oil companies (who happen to be among the wealthiest entities ever to have existed in the history of our species).
The lean upon convention. Stillbirths did not get birth certificates in most Common Law jurisdictions, and indeed recording of them before there was seen to be some use for the statistics was sporadic at best. The law was pretty simple; there is no person until birth.
Over and over again. There's expressing an opinion, and then there's shilling...
Fuck off you astroturfing piece of shit.
If you consider spamming /. an excellent marketing plan. Rarely have I seen such shameless astroturfing.
Yes and no. Mechanical computers do not have the scalability of electronic computers, to be sure, so that line of development would have reached its end.
At the same time, having a Turing complete computer, even a mechanical one, in the first half of the 19th century would have given mathematicians and engineers a whole new grammar to begin working on, much as even the relatively primitive digital computers of the 1940s to 1960s spurred on an absolutely astonishing amount of R&D, some of it still bearing fruit today.
I expect that if the Babbage machines had been built and had been put to use, they would have spurred the digital revolution nearly a century earlier, concentrating huge amounts of R&D by the Great Powers in the post-Napoleonic era. The military value, for instance, of fast and accurate cannon/mortar trajectory calculations would have given whoever developed such machines a considerable edge. The late 19th-early 20th century arms race was transformative in many ways, and the successors of Babbage's machines would have been caught up in that.
Postfix has had throttling for several years now, based on the same basic concepts. I use Postfix with greylisting and to be honest, my Spamassassin and ClamAV filters rarely get hit. Since at least big spam attacks are by bots, and bots are primarily designed to just shove as much through as possible, greylisting alone does a spectacular job of killing them, though sometimes people get pissed when messages take a while to get to them from a recipient the first time.
I'd love to see if the thing will work with some of the USB NIC devices, because it looks like it could make a great little router.
I'm afraid you will have to wait for the heat death of the Universe. Perhaps when protons start decaying...
Apparently you do, putz, because you opened the fucking article.
Jesus Christ, but the lengths some people go to to show off their enlightened indifference.
That gets most of its funding from a Big Company.
Except Google wouldn't have killed Firefox, it's likely that, one way or the other, Microsoft would have gobbled Firefox up. This is pure strategy. Better to basically prop up Microsoft's other major web competitor than to let it get swallowed up by Redmond.
If we're going to go this route and talk to our devices this way, I'd prefer the HAL 9000 voice, myself.