Good point. I suppose that a person releasing 1 million copies of a CD should expect the same level of privacy as a person who submits encrypted credit card information. Oh wait, maybe not.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that watching television exposes one to more pop culture than reading a book. The point is that watching entertainment television should not generally be considered legitimate scholarship. This is the price that academia is paying for both "postmodernism" and the concentration in the humanities on cultural studies. Suddenly, works of art are no longer valued for their real content; they are valued for their insight into culture. In the past, popularity gave way to quality and bad art faded away because it had no lasting value. People who engage corporate entertainment on a scholarly level are just propagating meaningless garbage. Part of the problem is that these people aren't doing anything significant. I mean the "academics" who are studying pop music and television. They are searching for something unique or new. The other part of the problem is that some very good art is bound to be forgotten because we accept the opinions of trained historians and analysts, many of whom are too busy carving out a niche for themselves instead of stepping up and addressing the content of works as opposed to their cultural impact. I'm not saying that Star Trek doesn't quote or borrow from mythology, but that doesn't make Star Trek or any other television show itself worthy of graduate study. I'm also not saying that it has no absolute artistic value. Just being on television doesn't make it bad in the artistic sense, but the mere fact that people watch it shouldn't make it a legitimate topic of study. The GP was, if I understand correctly, making a statement about how lame academia has become. I agree. I know people doing PhD dissertations in things like pop music who probably couldn't pass a 9th grade algebra test. They truly are pseudo-scholars, they can't hack it in the world of the heavy-hitting academics, and they don't belong there.
As far as I have heard, CSM is a reliable source in spite of its name. I find it interesting that we'll automatically assume aljazeera.net isn't, because of its reputation.
Aspartame is innocuous? There is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. Plus it tastes like poo. Even if it didn't, though, some of us don't want to mess around with foodstuffs because we believe that the stuff God created for us to eat is better than the ideas we might have, and our ability to see consequences is limited. So yes, please label all foods according to what they are. That includes GMOs, which often are not labelled in the US.
It's funny that the manufacturers go out of their way to tell us how they've added acidophilus to yogurt, because it's mostly viewed as a positive addition, but when they use less popular or disputed additives, they hide it in the list of ingredients. Why do I have to search through the ingredients in a bottle of orange pop to find out whether it contains caffeine? Because I and many other people would never buy it if were made known up front that it does.
2) Someone starts selling another MP3 player with an amazing user interface, fantastic integration with your music library, and good looks.
Hopefully Rockbox makes some of that irrelevant. In fact, it might be smart for some manufacturer to pre-install Rockbox and put something into its development.
Maybe I will manufacture it myself. I'll call it the PePoD (Personal Portable Digital) Audio Player.
They're still expensive (I think around $300-600 last time I checked) but they're not $4,000 expensive. For that price I could buy a car. Of course cat food won't cost as much as gasoline. Then again, you can't use a cat to tow a motorboat to the lake and go waterskiing.
I think that idea has also been perpetuated because most of the mass of the brain and nervous system in general is provided by glial cells, not neurons. I guess it would be like saying that only 10% of a lamp works (the lightbulb) while the rest of the lamp doesn't do anything when you flip the switch.
Beautiful! I have a question though - does the Creative Commons license only apply to the ability to publish/record/print/perform the music? What about the original recordings - can they be bought and freely redistributed, and if so, how?
There was nothing "convoluted", as far as i see, about my post. Although you replied to your own post, i assume that you were referring to mine. It is part of Christianity to bring the gospel to non-Christians. If you don't want to hear it, there's nothing any human can do about it. I was simply responding to your definition of Christianity and the association between Christianity and ID.
The point is that intelligent design is not a companion to Christianity. God the Creator (and hence, the Designer) is an underlying assumption. Since you find it convoluted, i will restate it in simpler terms:
1. "Christian" means one who believes in Christ as the propitiation for sin. 2. There are many underlying beliefs of Christianity, including the Creator God, without which it makes absolutely no sense to put faith in Christ. 3. Calling yourself a Christian without the set of accompanying beliefs is meaningless.
Now you said that you are willing to accept that a person claiming to be a Christian is one. Do you accept other claims without verifying them?
Maybe you don't really care, and i can understand that, but i am refuting your definition of "Christian". You defined a Christian as someone who claims to be a Christian when talking to you. That is not accurate. The thing i have informed you of is the definition of "Christian". Please don't accept what i say though (if you've read this far); verify it for yourself.
Does this have anything to do with people celebrating Darwin's birthday? Maybe this is about favored races or something. I don't know, and i also don't remember the prez calling for the "death of thousands upon thousands of innocents." I think that the premises for fighting were
1. incapacitating terrorists and the nations that harbor them 2.the belief, backed by intelligence and prior experience, that Saddam Hussein and the nation of Iraq posed a gathering threat to other nations because of their intent and capacity to develop and use WMDs, and 3. iraq's breaking of a cease-fire agreement
I don't remember any prewar discussion about whether the US military should intentionally kill a bunch of innocent people. Of course, the hardcore Darwinist might view it as a part of natural selection - that Americans and Europeans are smarter or stronger, and should just commit genocide for the good of humanity because we can. I don't agree with that view, but i'm not really a big Darwin fan either. Another possible Darwinist rationale for killing a bunch of innocent people are that they don't agree with us, and we're better off just killing all of them to prevent future fighting and perpetuate our race. Again, i don't remember those rationales being presented before the war. If they had been, i suspect that US Congress would not have authorized force, and other nations would not have joined the US in taking action, but maybe there are enough hardcore Darwinists out there to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that Darwinists are genocidal maniacs. I just don't see how else this pertains to churches celebrating Darwin's birthday.
Believing in intelligent design (small i. small d.) is a given for Christians, because we believe in an Intelligent Designer (capital I. capital D.), which is just a fancy way of saying Creator God. The Creator God is essential Christian doctrine; someone who doesn't believe in a Creator God but calls himself a Christian is giving himself a title without knowing its meaning. In fact, believing in a Creator God is a given for all people as far as Judaism/Christianity is concerned - even non-Christians are presumed to believe in a Creator God. "The fool says in his heart 'there is no God'" (Psalm 14:1) -- "You believe there is one God... even the demons believe that" (James 2:19) -- "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse..." (Romans 1:20)
I don't believe that i am quoting anything out of context, and i'm not saying that non-Christians will accept these things as true, only that the Creator God is believed by Christians to be universally evident.
I don't hitch my star to a bunch of scientists trying to prove Intelligent Design (as in, i do not identify myself as an IDer). However, i (and Christians in general) believe that there is blatant overwhelming evidence for a Creator, whether the Creator used mainly natural or supernatural processes in creation. So all Christians believe in intelligent design, even if they aren't hung up on teaching theories and such, because without the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator God, it makes no sense whatsoever to be a Christian. Christianity presumes this Creator God.
It is not enough for people to call themselves Christian. Calling myself a Christian doesn't make me one, because that is meaningless if i don't believe essential Christian doctrine (faith in Jesus Christ as the propitiation for my sin). If i call myself a Muslim but don't believe in Mohammed's prophetic revelation, am i a Muslim? Calling myself a Christian and believing in ID doesn't make me a Christian. The thing that makes me a Christian is belief that Jesus Christ died on a cross to bear the sins of the world, and nothing i do, only what Christ has done, can ever gain me acceptance before God. It's not about trying to be a good person, or believing in scientific theories; non-Christians do those things as well as Christians.
So I would suggest that you ask a person claiming to be a Christian what it means to be a Christian. I would also ask a Christian who doesn't believe in intelligent design whether that person believes in a Creator God. If you get confusing or uncertain answers, then you're not talking to a Christian, but rather a fake or an ignoramus.
I don't get it. Why would a "neo-con" attach any political significance to word origins? Any educated person knows that we have thousands of words descended from Old or Middle French, which in turn mostly come from Latin, which in turn mostly come from Indo-European. I guess that this is relevant to the debate, though. In real life, when you're talking about two different things, is it appropriate to use the same word for both, or is it better to use a new word or term for the second, in order to avoid confusion? Does it take away the right of a person to do a thing by naming it differently?
More importantly, in the context of the video game, which is based largely on medieval lore, does it make sense to turn the game into a battleground for homosexual relationships? I mean, people play games to escape real life, not to have 21st-century politics brought into the game. If the GMs allow this kind of thing to creep in and take over the game, the company is ultimately going to lose participants and money. It isn't that people hate or even disagree with a lifestyle, it's just that most people want to play a game without turning it into an afternoon on talk radio.
Not everything has to be about sexuality. There's much more to life.
Most Americans I know who call themselves Libertarians are pretty much Democrats with a free-market slant, and maybe a taste for smaller government and isolationism. There's a reason that the Libertarians can't get any traction in elections: They appeal to middle America in their stance for small government, but they don't adhere to moral absolutes. All we need in this country is one party that stands for 3 things - the rights of all Americans, small government, and moral absolutism - add a bit of funding and there should be a new majority party in Congress. By the way, nice job to whoever did the threadjacking.
This is slightly offtopic, but the plural of "virus" is "viruses". I wish it weren't, but there is no recorded instance of a Latin plural for "virus". "Virii" would be the plural of "virius", which isn't even a word. Just saying.
"Person" is subjective? To think that most of the world has been believing falsely that a person is a sentient, intelligent living being. I haven't thought much about whether that qualifies as an every-and-only definition, but i believe it is widely accepted.
Personally, i'm highly opposed to all forms of cloning and embryo creation (other than the natural method), and i think my reasons are legitimate. But i don't believe logically that an embryo is a person. As much as we can certainly call it human life, the embryo hasn't exhibited any sentience or independent intelligence. I believe (it is my opinion based on logic) that it is a *potential* person, because it contains the elements of human life, and since we cannot say with certainty which potential people will become people, we must give all potential people the rights that people have.
If you don't like a person's definition, you should provide an exception which disproves the rule, or a more feasible definition. Just saying that a thing is subjective doesn't make it so, and preferring, enjoying, or wishing a thing is not remotely similar to properly defining a term.
I guess that's debatable. She's done some nice things, but she's also done and said some things that might lead me to believe that she is, in fact, a Pooh
The regions of the brain are consistent between different persons, though. Some areas of the brain are associated with factual or descriptive memory, and others with creative tasks, just as parts or areas of the brain are responsible for vision, balance, speaking, writing, music, etc.
A person who is lying must(a) rehearse the lie in order to commit it to memory, or (b) invent the lie during questioning. There is a very easy way to circumvent the rehearsed lie, and that is to ask questions to which the suspect must know the answer (e.g., what he did, said, or saw at a particular time), but has not thought to memorise an answer. I don't know what is the current state of research into deception and truth-telling, but it just stands to reason that you put the suspect in a situation in which he has to invent a lie during questioning, he will activate creative centers in the brain. I guess it wouldn't work for things the suspect does not remember, but even the lie of saying "i don't remember" when the suspect actually does remember should be easy to detect in the same way. Since brain chemistry is mostly a matter of degrees, percentages, and concentrations, the evidence for a lie will seldom be a 0 or 1, but relatively small differences can be detected by an analyst, especially with the aid of sophisticated equipment.
Thank God there are still people who believe that we shouldn't all be allowed to do whatever we want whenever we want, for the sake of a greater public good. We do have to give up freedoms that we would have in a state of anarchy to protect our private property or our values, children, etc. The difference in China is the prohibition of free speech and access to information even when it is not harmful, in order to keep a tyrannical government in power. So Google is aiding the Chinese government in the repression of free speech, and they're entitled to do so, but i and others may stop using their services because of it.
Google may be attending to shareholders by entering the Chinese market, but they should realise that US profits may drop as a result, because knowledgeable users may cease to use their services, causing Google to lose advertising revenue, which i'm guessing would not please shareholders.
According to TFA, this man is neither a government agent nor a university employee. He is just exercising his freedom. Should we condemn him for it? If he does something illegal, then prosectute him. If he does something that should be illegal, then a citizen or member of congress should propose legislature to make it so. Just like your expression of scepticism is protected by the first amendment, so is this man's exposition of professors whose views he believes are radical. If he turns over this information to the public and the press, then we will be able to judge for ourselves, and the professors themselves will speak more cautiously regarding their personal opinions. When I was in high school, i had plenty of teachers espousing fringe positions and advocating them to every student who sat in their classrooms. This is dangerous because the teacher is viewed as an expert who illuminates the material in the curriculum, and many students, even 18- and 19-year olds, have difficulty separating fact from opinion in the context of a lecture. Just as it is wonderful to have a debate in the public square about gasoline prices or environmental issues, it is great to talk about what is being taught in schools, so that the citizens who vote for school boards and legislatures can determine the curriculum and the teaching methods in their children's schools. This really is about freedom of speech, allowing people to bring information to the public so that the people can be informed voters.
So where does the US government stop nowadays? It stops and starts (or should) at the same place it always did - an informed electorate.
Neither are the play chips at pokerstars, etc. But people seem to be interested in buying them, even though it's fairly easy just to win them from some chump. Then again, if you're buying play poker chips, you're probably doing yourself a favor, because you stand to lose alot more with real $, and you obviously have not succeeded in winning play chips, which is arguably much easier to do. Also, i hear that people lose play chips on a friend/lover's account and have to replace them for fear of some type of reprisal or argument. Other than those reasons, i really can't figure out why anyone would buy any item that can only be used (and virtually, at that) in a game. Personally, i'm saving up real gold for when we return to the Gold Standard (tm).
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. I suppose that a person releasing 1 million copies of a CD should expect the same level of privacy as a person who submits encrypted credit card information. Oh wait, maybe not.
I don't think anyone would argue with the notion that watching television exposes one to more pop culture than reading a book. The point is that watching entertainment television should not generally be considered legitimate scholarship. This is the price that academia is paying for both "postmodernism" and the concentration in the humanities on cultural studies. Suddenly, works of art are no longer valued for their real content; they are valued for their insight into culture. In the past, popularity gave way to quality and bad art faded away because it had no lasting value. People who engage corporate entertainment on a scholarly level are just propagating meaningless garbage. Part of the problem is that these people aren't doing anything significant. I mean the "academics" who are studying pop music and television. They are searching for something unique or new. The other part of the problem is that some very good art is bound to be forgotten because we accept the opinions of trained historians and analysts, many of whom are too busy carving out a niche for themselves instead of stepping up and addressing the content of works as opposed to their cultural impact. I'm not saying that Star Trek doesn't quote or borrow from mythology, but that doesn't make Star Trek or any other television show itself worthy of graduate study. I'm also not saying that it has no absolute artistic value. Just being on television doesn't make it bad in the artistic sense, but the mere fact that people watch it shouldn't make it a legitimate topic of study. The GP was, if I understand correctly, making a statement about how lame academia has become. I agree. I know people doing PhD dissertations in things like pop music who probably couldn't pass a 9th grade algebra test. They truly are pseudo-scholars, they can't hack it in the world of the heavy-hitting academics, and they don't belong there.
As far as I have heard, CSM is a reliable source in spite of its name. I find it interesting that we'll automatically assume aljazeera.net isn't, because of its reputation.
There you go, I fixed that for you. No charge.
Aspartame is innocuous? There is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary. Plus it tastes like poo. Even if it didn't, though, some of us don't want to mess around with foodstuffs because we believe that the stuff God created for us to eat is better than the ideas we might have, and our ability to see consequences is limited. So yes, please label all foods according to what they are. That includes GMOs, which often are not labelled in the US. It's funny that the manufacturers go out of their way to tell us how they've added acidophilus to yogurt, because it's mostly viewed as a positive addition, but when they use less popular or disputed additives, they hide it in the list of ingredients. Why do I have to search through the ingredients in a bottle of orange pop to find out whether it contains caffeine? Because I and many other people would never buy it if were made known up front that it does.
Hopefully Rockbox makes some of that irrelevant. In fact, it might be smart for some manufacturer to pre-install Rockbox and put something into its development.
Maybe I will manufacture it myself. I'll call it the PePoD (Personal Portable Digital) Audio Player.
They're still expensive (I think around $300-600 last time I checked) but they're not $4,000 expensive. For that price I could buy a car. Of course cat food won't cost as much as gasoline. Then again, you can't use a cat to tow a motorboat to the lake and go waterskiing.
I think that idea has also been perpetuated because most of the mass of the brain and nervous system in general is provided by glial cells, not neurons. I guess it would be like saying that only 10% of a lamp works (the lightbulb) while the rest of the lamp doesn't do anything when you flip the switch.
I tried to copy an apple, but it got all lopsided, so i called it a "pear".
Beautiful! I have a question though - does the Creative Commons license only apply to the ability to publish/record/print/perform the music? What about the original recordings - can they be bought and freely redistributed, and if so, how?
Sorry, you replied to my post and i didn't notice it in the context of the thread. My most sincere apologies.
There was nothing "convoluted", as far as i see, about my post. Although you replied to your own post, i assume that you were referring to mine. It is part of Christianity to bring the gospel to non-Christians. If you don't want to hear it, there's nothing any human can do about it. I was simply responding to your definition of Christianity and the association between Christianity and ID.
The point is that intelligent design is not a companion to Christianity. God the Creator (and hence, the Designer) is an underlying assumption. Since you find it convoluted, i will restate it in simpler terms:
1. "Christian" means one who believes in Christ as the propitiation for sin.
2. There are many underlying beliefs of Christianity, including the Creator God, without which it makes absolutely no sense to put faith in Christ.
3. Calling yourself a Christian without the set of accompanying beliefs is meaningless.
Now you said that you are willing to accept that a person claiming to be a Christian is one. Do you accept other claims without verifying them?
Maybe you don't really care, and i can understand that, but i am refuting your definition of "Christian". You defined a Christian as someone who claims to be a Christian when talking to you. That is not accurate. The thing i have informed you of is the definition of "Christian". Please don't accept what i say though (if you've read this far); verify it for yourself.
Does this have anything to do with people celebrating Darwin's birthday? Maybe this is about favored races or something. I don't know, and i also don't remember the prez calling for the "death of thousands upon thousands of innocents." I think that the premises for fighting were
1. incapacitating terrorists and the nations that harbor them
2.the belief, backed by intelligence and prior experience, that Saddam Hussein and the nation of Iraq posed a gathering threat to other nations because of their intent and capacity to develop and use WMDs, and
3. iraq's breaking of a cease-fire agreement
I don't remember any prewar discussion about whether the US military should intentionally kill a bunch of innocent people. Of course, the hardcore Darwinist might view it as a part of natural selection - that Americans and Europeans are smarter or stronger, and should just commit genocide for the good of humanity because we can. I don't agree with that view, but i'm not really a big Darwin fan either. Another possible Darwinist rationale for killing a bunch of innocent people are that they don't agree with us, and we're better off just killing all of them to prevent future fighting and perpetuate our race. Again, i don't remember those rationales being presented before the war. If they had been, i suspect that US Congress would not have authorized force, and other nations would not have joined the US in taking action, but maybe there are enough hardcore Darwinists out there to prove me wrong. I'm not saying that Darwinists are genocidal maniacs. I just don't see how else this pertains to churches celebrating Darwin's birthday.
Believing in intelligent design (small i. small d.) is a given for Christians, because we believe in an Intelligent Designer (capital I. capital D.), which is just a fancy way of saying Creator God. The Creator God is essential Christian doctrine; someone who doesn't believe in a Creator God but calls himself a Christian is giving himself a title without knowing its meaning. In fact, believing in a Creator God is a given for all people as far as Judaism/Christianity is concerned - even non-Christians are presumed to believe in a Creator God. "The fool says in his heart 'there is no God'" (Psalm 14:1) -- "You believe there is one God... even the demons believe that" (James 2:19) -- "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse..." (Romans 1:20)
I don't believe that i am quoting anything out of context, and i'm not saying that non-Christians will accept these things as true, only that the Creator God is believed by Christians to be universally evident.
I don't hitch my star to a bunch of scientists trying to prove Intelligent Design (as in, i do not identify myself as an IDer). However, i (and Christians in general) believe that there is blatant overwhelming evidence for a Creator, whether the Creator used mainly natural or supernatural processes in creation. So all Christians believe in intelligent design, even if they aren't hung up on teaching theories and such, because without the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator God, it makes no sense whatsoever to be a Christian. Christianity presumes this Creator God.
It is not enough for people to call themselves Christian. Calling myself a Christian doesn't make me one, because that is meaningless if i don't believe essential Christian doctrine (faith in Jesus Christ as the propitiation for my sin). If i call myself a Muslim but don't believe in Mohammed's prophetic revelation, am i a Muslim? Calling myself a Christian and believing in ID doesn't make me a Christian. The thing that makes me a Christian is belief that Jesus Christ died on a cross to bear the sins of the world, and nothing i do, only what Christ has done, can ever gain me acceptance before God. It's not about trying to be a good person, or believing in scientific theories; non-Christians do those things as well as Christians.
So I would suggest that you ask a person claiming to be a Christian what it means to be a Christian. I would also ask a Christian who doesn't believe in intelligent design whether that person believes in a Creator God. If you get confusing or uncertain answers, then you're not talking to a Christian, but rather a fake or an ignoramus.
A.B.C. = A Bittorrent Client? Sounds like a good generic name to me.
It's four 286s and an Apple IIe in Vlad Putin's cousin's basement.
I don't get it. Why would a "neo-con" attach any political significance to word origins? Any educated person knows that we have thousands of words descended from Old or Middle French, which in turn mostly come from Latin, which in turn mostly come from Indo-European. I guess that this is relevant to the debate, though. In real life, when you're talking about two different things, is it appropriate to use the same word for both, or is it better to use a new word or term for the second, in order to avoid confusion? Does it take away the right of a person to do a thing by naming it differently?
More importantly, in the context of the video game, which is based largely on medieval lore, does it make sense to turn the game into a battleground for homosexual relationships? I mean, people play games to escape real life, not to have 21st-century politics brought into the game. If the GMs allow this kind of thing to creep in and take over the game, the company is ultimately going to lose participants and money. It isn't that people hate or even disagree with a lifestyle, it's just that most people want to play a game without turning it into an afternoon on talk radio.
Not everything has to be about sexuality. There's much more to life.
Most Americans I know who call themselves Libertarians are pretty much Democrats with a free-market slant, and maybe a taste for smaller government and isolationism. There's a reason that the Libertarians can't get any traction in elections: They appeal to middle America in their stance for small government, but they don't adhere to moral absolutes. All we need in this country is one party that stands for 3 things - the rights of all Americans, small government, and moral absolutism - add a bit of funding and there should be a new majority party in Congress. By the way, nice job to whoever did the threadjacking.
This is slightly offtopic, but the plural of "virus" is "viruses". I wish it weren't, but there is no recorded instance of a Latin plural for "virus". "Virii" would be the plural of "virius", which isn't even a word. Just saying.
"Person" is subjective? To think that most of the world has been believing falsely that a person is a sentient, intelligent living being. I haven't thought much about whether that qualifies as an every-and-only definition, but i believe it is widely accepted.
Personally, i'm highly opposed to all forms of cloning and embryo creation (other than the natural method), and i think my reasons are legitimate. But i don't believe logically that an embryo is a person. As much as we can certainly call it human life, the embryo hasn't exhibited any sentience or independent intelligence. I believe (it is my opinion based on logic) that it is a *potential* person, because it contains the elements of human life, and since we cannot say with certainty which potential people will become people, we must give all potential people the rights that people have.
If you don't like a person's definition, you should provide an exception which disproves the rule, or a more feasible definition. Just saying that a thing is subjective doesn't make it so, and preferring, enjoying, or wishing a thing is not remotely similar to properly defining a term.
Also she is not a Pooh,
I guess that's debatable. She's done some nice things, but she's also done and said some things that might lead me to believe that she is, in fact, a Pooh
The regions of the brain are consistent between different persons, though. Some areas of the brain are associated with factual or descriptive memory, and others with creative tasks, just as parts or areas of the brain are responsible for vision, balance, speaking, writing, music, etc. A person who is lying must(a) rehearse the lie in order to commit it to memory, or (b) invent the lie during questioning. There is a very easy way to circumvent the rehearsed lie, and that is to ask questions to which the suspect must know the answer (e.g., what he did, said, or saw at a particular time), but has not thought to memorise an answer. I don't know what is the current state of research into deception and truth-telling, but it just stands to reason that you put the suspect in a situation in which he has to invent a lie during questioning, he will activate creative centers in the brain. I guess it wouldn't work for things the suspect does not remember, but even the lie of saying "i don't remember" when the suspect actually does remember should be easy to detect in the same way. Since brain chemistry is mostly a matter of degrees, percentages, and concentrations, the evidence for a lie will seldom be a 0 or 1, but relatively small differences can be detected by an analyst, especially with the aid of sophisticated equipment.
Thank God there are still people who believe that we shouldn't all be allowed to do whatever we want whenever we want, for the sake of a greater public good. We do have to give up freedoms that we would have in a state of anarchy to protect our private property or our values, children, etc. The difference in China is the prohibition of free speech and access to information even when it is not harmful, in order to keep a tyrannical government in power. So Google is aiding the Chinese government in the repression of free speech, and they're entitled to do so, but i and others may stop using their services because of it.
Google may be attending to shareholders by entering the Chinese market, but they should realise that US profits may drop as a result, because knowledgeable users may cease to use their services, causing Google to lose advertising revenue, which i'm guessing would not please shareholders.
Internet Deplorer.
According to TFA, this man is neither a government agent nor a university employee. He is just exercising his freedom. Should we condemn him for it? If he does something illegal, then prosectute him. If he does something that should be illegal, then a citizen or member of congress should propose legislature to make it so. Just like your expression of scepticism is protected by the first amendment, so is this man's exposition of professors whose views he believes are radical. If he turns over this information to the public and the press, then we will be able to judge for ourselves, and the professors themselves will speak more cautiously regarding their personal opinions. When I was in high school, i had plenty of teachers espousing fringe positions and advocating them to every student who sat in their classrooms. This is dangerous because the teacher is viewed as an expert who illuminates the material in the curriculum, and many students, even 18- and 19-year olds, have difficulty separating fact from opinion in the context of a lecture. Just as it is wonderful to have a debate in the public square about gasoline prices or environmental issues, it is great to talk about what is being taught in schools, so that the citizens who vote for school boards and legislatures can determine the curriculum and the teaching methods in their children's schools. This really is about freedom of speech, allowing people to bring information to the public so that the people can be informed voters.
So where does the US government stop nowadays? It stops and starts (or should) at the same place it always did - an informed electorate.
Neither are the play chips at pokerstars, etc. But people seem to be interested in buying them, even though it's fairly easy just to win them from some chump. Then again, if you're buying play poker chips, you're probably doing yourself a favor, because you stand to lose alot more with real $, and you obviously have not succeeded in winning play chips, which is arguably much easier to do. Also, i hear that people lose play chips on a friend/lover's account and have to replace them for fear of some type of reprisal or argument. Other than those reasons, i really can't figure out why anyone would buy any item that can only be used (and virtually, at that) in a game. Personally, i'm saving up real gold for when we return to the Gold Standard (tm).