Don't forget that it probably isn't blocking out UV and infrared rays like the collector mentioned in the article. A low tech dome could get you sunburned. Moreover, skylight domes can't possibly be an option below the top floors of an office building, while the collector's technology has room to expand in this regard, since it uses fiber optic cables to send the light.
Since when does the theory of evolution and stem cell research constitute all of science? The theory of evolution has already been made, and there isn't a whole lot more coming from it outside of how it does what it does. Adult stem cells, not taken from embryos (forgive my spelling) and thus perfectly acceptable by religious folks are proving to be about equal in flexibility as embryonic ones, with less of a risk of them getting out of control, and again, this is only one field of scientific study out of many for Fundamentalists to go crazy at.
I can hardly imagine that Fundamentalists have something against string theory, the Cassini probe, dark matter, or many other scientific matters of our time. The fault is not theirs, nor is it any other religious group or minority's.
There are free online games which do this. One look at nabisco.com and you can be playing a game where you're collecting oreos. They're all crap, of course, but at least you're saved the decision of what you're going to buy.
The Sims?
"Now, not only can you play a game where you actually have to use the bathroom, but you have a new 'TV meter' which makes sure you get your daily dose of TV and ads during the day! Or else you die from... uh... cultural isolation."
How did this get modded as insightful? It was a clever reply, but at least SOME people were talking about evolution and it's evidence rather then simply wittily replying to stupid posts. I might as well add in:
Yes we were. Get used to it. Grow up. And get a girlfriend.
And then he can reply, and we can slowly build a stupid argument the size of Hamlet that won't succeed in doing anything at all. Funny, perhaps, but insightful?
I'm just curious, and am asking this more out of wariness of bad science and studies then of anything that supports evolution. How do you know Humans are getting taller? Which people are they measuring? How long has the research been going on? Can you give more details of the study, and is there any possibility of, say, factors such as famines in Africa eliminating short people as a geographical cause rather then an evolutionary one (because tall populations live elsewhere)? Just curious.
"Remember, the "scientists" at the Institution for Creation Research have to sign an oath that nothing they "discover" will ever conflict with a litteral interpretation of the Bible."
I have no doubt that the Christians signing such a thing are not representative of all Christianity, and that similar things, sadly, do occur everywhere else, including evolutionary research, and that such biased research is not representative of the whole. Considering how hard the ID movement has it, wouldn't you say that there is a lot of social pressure on a scientist who discovered that evolution was false to not say so, or to gloss it over?
I am not saying that evolution has been disproved and that no one knows it. What I am saying is that in nearly any social group, whether "Christian" or "Scientific", you have people who are jerks, peer pressure, and shady business, mostly when one of them isn't really "in power" and oppressing the other.
First of all, do not confuse nature with design. Because of our sinful nature, it is quite natural for us to kill each other and have gay sex. But it is not what we were designed to do by God.
Tools such as airplanes are designed to do specific things when we do other things as we are designed to. We can travel on a plane because we can walk into it and sit down. You can hardly say that walking and sitting down is not part of what we're designed to be able to do.
But, there is a problem: What if I kill someone with a knife? Is that then, not part of our design to sin? Of course not! We're designed to be able to sin (think the Garden of Eden), not simply designed to sin, which are quite different things. This ability to decide between what we're designed to do and what we're not designed to do is part of what makes us, humans, so special to God.
As for history and animals: All you are saying is that animals do what they aren't designed to (a result of the fall of man) and that it is vastly more common in history for man to do the same. Both points I agree with. But your argument could just as well go for cannabalism, or murder, as sexual sin. People have murdered and cannibalized each other in the past: check. Male polar bears will kill baby bears even though they might be their own: check. And the female praying mantis eats her mate after they've mated: check.
Finally, God created Adam and Eve. He didn't create Adam, Eve, Becka, Sara, and Mary. Just Adam and Eve. As this was the Garden of Eden, before the fall of man, everything was working as it was designed to. Therefore, God designed us to be monogamous and heterosexual. The main reason why he seems to have done a "piss-poor job of it" is because we disobeyed him. All the sin, hate, jealousy, pride, greed, and evil we see in the world today is the result of both that choice, and our choices to continue to do so; Including divorce, polygamy, and homosexuality.
You must realize that the reason why such "unnatural" behavior is found in animals is there is for precisely the same reason it's found in us: We, humans, disobeyed God and became steeped in sin. When we did, all creation went with us. Therefore, it is inappropriate to point to creation and say,
"But chimps do it!" Some animals practice cannibalism, too, but do we use that a reason to practice such a thing ourselves?
ID does not say anything about whether or not God did it, or why we have imperfections in design.
Christianity, however, has a perfectly good reason for why we have back pain: Adam, Eve, and the fall. When we first disobeyed God, things like back pain and death consequently plagued us. This is not an answer to the eye example, however, and doesn't represent the opinion of all the ID movement, which is simply too broad for that.
But the ID movement does have a specific response, to the "Panda's Thumb" problem (things such as the blind spot in the human eye). Why would God design something to do more then it needs to? Yes, the panda's thumb seems to be inferior to a thumb like ours, and our eyes have a blind spot. Yet pandas and us all make excellent use of the tools we have, despite the fact that you consider them "inferior". Yes, it might have been easy for an all powerful designer like God to have eliminated a blind spot in our eyes. While you're at it, we should be able get angry and turn our hair yellow while flying around and shooting ki blasts.
Perhaps God is saying, "You don't need eyes without blind spots?" Perhaps God does not add "features" to his creations that are not particularly useful? Perhaps God is actually telling us something about making do with what we have, which is all that we really need, rather then wishing for eyes without blind spots, actual thumbs for pandas, and Super Saiyan powers?
Finally, I'm curious. I know how back pain and the blind spot in our eyes can be seen as negative, but you fail to mention why a nerve going through the heart is a problem. I and many others haven't studied anatomy, so enlighten us.
If you have to make another character and kill him off just to play the game properly, I'm not playing it. Some paranoia can be good in a game, but the level mentioned here seems ridiculous. You should be able to play through the game with a single character without a stupid trial and error experiance.
And frankly, I'm not going to spend even an hour on a game which describes itself as destroying my time, crushing my ego, and hosting players that make fun of me for criticizing such a terrible game.
I am a Christian. Doubtless, there are some Christians that you are right in this respect about. But I am not one of them.
The Christian point of view is that sex is great when you do it the way God designed you to: at the very least, monogamously. Doing it otherwise is like trying to eat vegetables with only your two upper front teeth. It's just not the way you were designed to eat.
The New Testament condemns any sort of violence, such as revenge, or even being really angry with your brother for spilling coke on your PS2. I admit, I don't have a very good short answer for what goes on in the Old Testament. I'm still looking into that. In any case, even it doesn't support randomly killing people like in GTA.
Note, I am not defending church history, or "Christian" culture. I am only defending the Christian the Bible tells us to be.
Now me and that strange person right next to me can reach even lower levels of interaction! Now we don't have to share anything but our approximate positions in common! Science never ceases to amaze me.
This is a worse idea then sticking weapons in space (they're pretty easy to counter, even anti-missile systems, and are very expensive). Not only will it cost simply too much money, but it won't help foreign relations to say, "We're taking these points in space and they're not yours".
And that's not even taking into consideration that we can't navigate freely in space yet anyways. If other countrie's sent satellites/probes to these points, what are they going to do there anyways? By the time the probes might do something actually useful, anyone who objects to their use will be able to destroy whatever early 21st century tech that is there and claim it for themselves. It's like claiming the bottom of the sea...
Frankly, the biggest factor for me concerning how fun a game is are my friends. Am I playing with them? Are they sitting next to me, or are we playing online miles away?
There is a reason LAN parties rock. Whatever networked game you play, as long as your friends play it, will be the best for a LAN party. Whether it is Halo 2, Starcraft, Counterstrike, or even a game that's kinda bad, it doesn't matter. What matters is having fun with your friends, making jokes, and generally just having fun.
Granted, if you don't have a set of friends for this sort of thing you have to simply play something meant for only one player. And the fact is that there are more old games then there are new ones, and so there will always be more good old games then there are good new games, and if you look at old games, only the good ones remain to have a name.
But still, I prefer LAN parties.
You missed an important point the article makes. If you do happen to start a company, and it does fail, Yahoo/MS/whatever will actually be more willing to hire you because you've been gaining experiance that is much more valuable then sitting in a cubicle for a couple years.
Moreover, on the off chance you succeed, you succeed! If Graham is right, running a start-up is really a win-win situation.
Why would you need an implant? A pair of really cool sunglasses could do a lot of that without you having to slice up or interfere with any part of your eyeball. The trick of putting little mirrors in the corners so that you can see behind you is actually pretty old.... spies used it all the time.
It's probably going to happen in some form or another, if most of it hasn't happened already. The main problems would be bringing all the technology together into one pair and having yet *another* source of constant distraction. I'll take the goggles without the email, Sam Fisher style please.
But just because most people are unethical and want to tell other people what is and is not morally right and wrong (as if they were some sort of authority)
In case you didn't notice, your statement is telling people it is morally wrong to say what is and isn't morally wrong. Therefore, by your own definition, your statement is unethical.
You must realize that there is freedom of speech in this country. Sure, people will abuse it, preachers and protesters of every kind might do nothing more then hurl insults at each other. But, I, like you, are entitled to at least an opinion, and am entitled to speak that opinion.
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Don't forget that it probably isn't blocking out UV and infrared rays like the collector mentioned in the article. A low tech dome could get you sunburned. Moreover, skylight domes can't possibly be an option below the top floors of an office building, while the collector's technology has room to expand in this regard, since it uses fiber optic cables to send the light.
Since when does the theory of evolution and stem cell research constitute all of science? The theory of evolution has already been made, and there isn't a whole lot more coming from it outside of how it does what it does. Adult stem cells, not taken from embryos (forgive my spelling) and thus perfectly acceptable by religious folks are proving to be about equal in flexibility as embryonic ones, with less of a risk of them getting out of control, and again, this is only one field of scientific study out of many for Fundamentalists to go crazy at.
I can hardly imagine that Fundamentalists have something against string theory, the Cassini probe, dark matter, or many other scientific matters of our time. The fault is not theirs, nor is it any other religious group or minority's.
There are free online games which do this. One look at nabisco.com and you can be playing a game where you're collecting oreos. They're all crap, of course, but at least you're saved the decision of what you're going to buy.
The Sims? "Now, not only can you play a game where you actually have to use the bathroom, but you have a new 'TV meter' which makes sure you get your daily dose of TV and ads during the day! Or else you die from... uh... cultural isolation."
How did this get modded as insightful? It was a clever reply, but at least SOME people were talking about evolution and it's evidence rather then simply wittily replying to stupid posts. I might as well add in:
Yes we were. Get used to it. Grow up. And get a girlfriend.
And then he can reply, and we can slowly build a stupid argument the size of Hamlet that won't succeed in doing anything at all. Funny, perhaps, but insightful?
I'm just curious, and am asking this more out of wariness of bad science and studies then of anything that supports evolution. How do you know Humans are getting taller? Which people are they measuring? How long has the research been going on? Can you give more details of the study, and is there any possibility of, say, factors such as famines in Africa eliminating short people as a geographical cause rather then an evolutionary one (because tall populations live elsewhere)? Just curious.
"Remember, the "scientists" at the Institution for Creation Research have to sign an oath that nothing they "discover" will ever conflict with a litteral interpretation of the Bible."
I have no doubt that the Christians signing such a thing are not representative of all Christianity, and that similar things, sadly, do occur everywhere else, including evolutionary research, and that such biased research is not representative of the whole. Considering how hard the ID movement has it, wouldn't you say that there is a lot of social pressure on a scientist who discovered that evolution was false to not say so, or to gloss it over?
I am not saying that evolution has been disproved and that no one knows it. What I am saying is that in nearly any social group, whether "Christian" or "Scientific", you have people who are jerks, peer pressure, and shady business, mostly when one of them isn't really "in power" and oppressing the other.
Sorry I took awhile to reply.
First of all, do not confuse nature with design. Because of our sinful nature, it is quite natural for us to kill each other and have gay sex. But it is not what we were designed to do by God.
Tools such as airplanes are designed to do specific things when we do other things as we are designed to. We can travel on a plane because we can walk into it and sit down. You can hardly say that walking and sitting down is not part of what we're designed to be able to do.
But, there is a problem: What if I kill someone with a knife? Is that then, not part of our design to sin? Of course not! We're designed to be able to sin (think the Garden of Eden), not simply designed to sin, which are quite different things. This ability to decide between what we're designed to do and what we're not designed to do is part of what makes us, humans, so special to God.
As for history and animals: All you are saying is that animals do what they aren't designed to (a result of the fall of man) and that it is vastly more common in history for man to do the same. Both points I agree with. But your argument could just as well go for cannabalism, or murder, as sexual sin. People have murdered and cannibalized each other in the past: check. Male polar bears will kill baby bears even though they might be their own: check. And the female praying mantis eats her mate after they've mated: check.
Finally, God created Adam and Eve. He didn't create Adam, Eve, Becka, Sara, and Mary. Just Adam and Eve. As this was the Garden of Eden, before the fall of man, everything was working as it was designed to. Therefore, God designed us to be monogamous and heterosexual. The main reason why he seems to have done a "piss-poor job of it" is because we disobeyed him. All the sin, hate, jealousy, pride, greed, and evil we see in the world today is the result of both that choice, and our choices to continue to do so; Including divorce, polygamy, and homosexuality.
You must realize that the reason why such "unnatural" behavior is found in animals is there is for precisely the same reason it's found in us: We, humans, disobeyed God and became steeped in sin. When we did, all creation went with us. Therefore, it is inappropriate to point to creation and say, "But chimps do it!" Some animals practice cannibalism, too, but do we use that a reason to practice such a thing ourselves?
ID does not say anything about whether or not God did it, or why we have imperfections in design.
Christianity, however, has a perfectly good reason for why we have back pain: Adam, Eve, and the fall. When we first disobeyed God, things like back pain and death consequently plagued us. This is not an answer to the eye example, however, and doesn't represent the opinion of all the ID movement, which is simply too broad for that.
But the ID movement does have a specific response, to the "Panda's Thumb" problem (things such as the blind spot in the human eye). Why would God design something to do more then it needs to? Yes, the panda's thumb seems to be inferior to a thumb like ours, and our eyes have a blind spot. Yet pandas and us all make excellent use of the tools we have, despite the fact that you consider them "inferior". Yes, it might have been easy for an all powerful designer like God to have eliminated a blind spot in our eyes. While you're at it, we should be able get angry and turn our hair yellow while flying around and shooting ki blasts.
Perhaps God is saying, "You don't need eyes without blind spots?" Perhaps God does not add "features" to his creations that are not particularly useful? Perhaps God is actually telling us something about making do with what we have, which is all that we really need, rather then wishing for eyes without blind spots, actual thumbs for pandas, and Super Saiyan powers?
Finally, I'm curious. I know how back pain and the blind spot in our eyes can be seen as negative, but you fail to mention why a nerve going through the heart is a problem. I and many others haven't studied anatomy, so enlighten us.
"Lots of people playing online like leveling and getting new items."
Absolutely correct. Otherwise Diablo 2 would never have stood a chance.
If you have to make another character and kill him off just to play the game properly, I'm not playing it. Some paranoia can be good in a game, but the level mentioned here seems ridiculous. You should be able to play through the game with a single character without a stupid trial and error experiance.
And frankly, I'm not going to spend even an hour on a game which describes itself as destroying my time, crushing my ego, and hosting players that make fun of me for criticizing such a terrible game.
I am a Christian. Doubtless, there are some Christians that you are right in this respect about. But I am not one of them.
The Christian point of view is that sex is great when you do it the way God designed you to: at the very least, monogamously. Doing it otherwise is like trying to eat vegetables with only your two upper front teeth. It's just not the way you were designed to eat.
The New Testament condemns any sort of violence, such as revenge, or even being really angry with your brother for spilling coke on your PS2. I admit, I don't have a very good short answer for what goes on in the Old Testament. I'm still looking into that. In any case, even it doesn't support randomly killing people like in GTA.
Note, I am not defending church history, or "Christian" culture. I am only defending the Christian the Bible tells us to be.
You could just download Mplayer (which plays just about everything, including music), or even *gasp* windows media player, which is also free.
Now me and that strange person right next to me can reach even lower levels of interaction! Now we don't have to share anything but our approximate positions in common! Science never ceases to amaze me.
This is a worse idea then sticking weapons in space (they're pretty easy to counter, even anti-missile systems, and are very expensive). Not only will it cost simply too much money, but it won't help foreign relations to say, "We're taking these points in space and they're not yours". And that's not even taking into consideration that we can't navigate freely in space yet anyways. If other countrie's sent satellites/probes to these points, what are they going to do there anyways? By the time the probes might do something actually useful, anyone who objects to their use will be able to destroy whatever early 21st century tech that is there and claim it for themselves. It's like claiming the bottom of the sea...
Frankly, the biggest factor for me concerning how fun a game is are my friends. Am I playing with them? Are they sitting next to me, or are we playing online miles away? There is a reason LAN parties rock. Whatever networked game you play, as long as your friends play it, will be the best for a LAN party. Whether it is Halo 2, Starcraft, Counterstrike, or even a game that's kinda bad, it doesn't matter. What matters is having fun with your friends, making jokes, and generally just having fun. Granted, if you don't have a set of friends for this sort of thing you have to simply play something meant for only one player. And the fact is that there are more old games then there are new ones, and so there will always be more good old games then there are good new games, and if you look at old games, only the good ones remain to have a name. But still, I prefer LAN parties.
You missed an important point the article makes. If you do happen to start a company, and it does fail, Yahoo/MS/whatever will actually be more willing to hire you because you've been gaining experiance that is much more valuable then sitting in a cubicle for a couple years.
Moreover, on the off chance you succeed, you succeed! If Graham is right, running a start-up is really a win-win situation.
Why would you need an implant? A pair of really cool sunglasses could do a lot of that without you having to slice up or interfere with any part of your eyeball. The trick of putting little mirrors in the corners so that you can see behind you is actually pretty old.... spies used it all the time.
It's probably going to happen in some form or another, if most of it hasn't happened already. The main problems would be bringing all the technology together into one pair and having yet *another* source of constant distraction. I'll take the goggles without the email, Sam Fisher style please.
But just because most people are unethical and want to tell other people what is and is not morally right and wrong (as if they were some sort of authority) In case you didn't notice, your statement is telling people it is morally wrong to say what is and isn't morally wrong. Therefore, by your own definition, your statement is unethical. You must realize that there is freedom of speech in this country. Sure, people will abuse it, preachers and protesters of every kind might do nothing more then hurl insults at each other. But, I, like you, are entitled to at least an opinion, and am entitled to speak that opinion.