No religion owns the word marriage. If marriage is an act before my God, than the "marriage" of Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists is no more legitimate to me (and presumably my God) than homosexuality or polyandry. Since our country honors religious plurality, and our laws are faith-neutral, legal marriage is clearly not an act before my God. Legalized gay marriage doesn't step on my denomination's toes any more or less than the legal infidel marriage that is status quo.
So the argument of "oppressing our church" by use of a word to mean something other than what a church wants is a red herring. On the contrary, the church is using its majority status to suppress the gay community. You see this in their other arguments--"then we'd have to let people marry animals too;" the implied comparison is appalling. The only legitimate question is how the law will address bigamy, but we have adequate precedent for that.
Rewriting our laws to replace each instance of the word "marriage" with something else, as has been suggested, is impractical and pointless. Next week we'll have to change "copyright" because it doesn't suit some powerful lobby.
It is an odd world, but it is true. You can be a successful writer without great talent, but you can't be one without business saavy. No noble patrons out there anymore to help us along the way.
Pardon, Everquest? Diablo? There's no shortage of people who do what you do for free. The difference, if I read your sig correctly, is that you're published, meaning you have a gravy train to protect. I think "bona fide" is a little heavy, there, Shakespeare (download parent's resplendent fanfic). Intellectual rights is a pompous weasel-word for copyrights.
The analogy doesn't transfer to the music business. Plenty of blockbuster artists advocate P2P. Nobody can argue a 1-1 correspondence between piracy and lost sales with a straight face. Last I heard, the variance in music / film revenues was so normal as to give no indication Napster, Kazaa and Bittorrent ever existed.
I was raised in the same public school system as everyone else and didn't even know who Jesus Christ was until around my junior or senior year of high school.
I don't feel it's unreasonable to call this a lie.
The questions were: what do you think the reason is that so many scientists, nerds and people otherwise rather similar to you think your beliefs are obviously incorrect? Do you think they are all deluded? Do you agree that there might be a possibility that your beliefs are not rational?
He only obliquely answers the first question by implying conventional scientific theory is spoon-fed to grade school students. Not surprisingly, he offers no support for his young-earth baloney, only an indictment of the "mainstram secular agenda" via carbon dating.
The only reason Zdziarski believes the earth revolves around the sun is that he was born a few centuries too late. While the rest of us take "proof" to mean, variously, mathematical proof, empirical proof, and statistical "proof," depending on whether we're discussing algebra, electricity, or sociology, Zdziarski wants to blur
the contextual distinction.
We're asked to lose presupposition--this is impossible--and emphasize "theory vs. fact vs. law." Screw that. Science is modeling. Evolution is a successful model. Semantics doesn't change that. When "Jesus is Lord" provides a model to explain gargantuan reptile skeletons, you can get him into the classroom alongside all that other faith-based mythology we call biology, chemistry and physics. The ID argument, here as always, is cowardly, half-baked, and desperately seeking its own justification.
Zdziarski claims he could argue his position if so inclined. It's another familiar religious tack [pardon the Hubbardism] for dodging criticism. Feynmann once defined science as the process of "bending over backwards" to answer critics. I don't know Feynmann's definition of marketing, but it's easy to see which is which.
As for myself, I believe as much in God and in the tenets of the Christian religion as I do in the laws of physics.
That's not a rational position. Ergo it invites criticism. If you ask the laws of physics for guidance, they always reply.
You appear to be worried more about the very idea that people will believe in religion, than about any consequence proceeding from it. There's a reason why "these people" are all over the place.
Not least of which is the missionary ethic, which maintains that professing your religious belief publicly, as you have here, earns you brownie points with the Creator. Surely God wants us to trust not our own reason and experience, but the assertions of charismatic people. And then there's the doctrine of "equally-yoked" mates that makes faith Man's equivalent of brightly-colored tailfeathers.
I went to a Christian boarding school. Some of the priests [salesians.org] there pointed out that there are many ways to read Genesis.
That number in Genesis--6000 or so?--is given by the simple recursion
X:= me;
AgeEarth:= 0;
While X != Adam do
{
Age(Earth):= Age(Earth)+Age(X);
X:=Father_of_X;
}
end do.
The number was not figurative to the Jews of 1500 AD [or many Orthodox Jews today].
Not that there's anything wrong with disagreement...
It's that one ought to consult experts when one wants to interpret Torah. I imagine priests don't, as said experts take a different view of the whole Messiah thing.
I've no doubt Zdziarski's reply will be both original and profound. However, I feel the question "Why Christianity?" is too often absorbed into "Why Religion?", from both camps. They're really quite separate.
We have a cultural mess on our hands. I'm just sick enough of defiant children to endorse the reaction we are seeing here. You can't spank children any more. Somehow it became a crime.
Well, with all due respect, sir, you're a fucktard. You're endorsing felony charges for removing some training wheels from school-issued hardware. No irreversible harm--at all--has been done. Your idiotic crusade to replace corporal punishment with a draconian crackdown divorced completely from the law's intent won't work. It's misguided and reactionary. The last thing arbitrary punishment engenders is respect for the rules.
Making an example of the few will not fix society. Children won't be respectful as long as their role models have first amendment rights, and nobody appointed you to compromise those for the rest of us.
If your biggest problem is getting truth from your sons, be thankful your biggest problem isn't heroin, theft, or pregnancy. Lying is an unfortunate par for the course in our entire way of life, because lies of omission are synonymous with putting your best foot forward in a competitive market. You might want to check your glass house, while we're at it--you can still spank children. Yours. Other peoples' children were never fair game. So you've lied to advance your position.
Respect, in general, should be restored as a key value in our culture and at the core of respect is fear of what might happen if you don't.
At the core of respect is keeping your self-righteous nose out of other peoples' business. Fear of consequences isn't respect, it's fear.
Also, if you click on the little update link at the bottom of the story, you'll see that the kids were also found to be downloading pornography. Might sound innocent to some of you, but adults / the school can get in trouble for "allowing" them access to X-rated material.
As per Hot Coffee, isn't that sort of thing a federal crime too?
what do you think the reason is that so many scientists, nerds and people otherwise rather similar to you think your beliefs are obviously incorrect?
It pretty much begins and ends with "God had a human son, whose death and resurrection fulfilled God's Divine Plan." I'll be happy to outline just a handful of the problems built into that idea, but they've all been beaten to death (no pun intended).
People take issue with Christianity (or ought to) because its theology is ludicrous. The existence of God can be argued all day, and fairly. However, postulating additionally that God's begotten son died to fulfill a Jewish prophecy he sort-of fits, then was raised from the dead, to confirm the One True Religion in a vision to a Roman soldier who never knew him, at odds with what his disciples taught, leaving such questions as God or Not to centuries-later council decision, and a confused mess of a historical record, demands more from the rational mind.
God created the universe, or didn't? Unprovable. Transubstantiation? Get real.
I'm tempted to take the essay "What It Means to Believe" through a chipper-shredder. Instead, I'll laugh at the irony:
I often hear individuals dismiss Christianity as a belief created by man. If this is true, then I wonder why we didn't create a God that was more passive and catered to our emotional needs, who would tell us that everything was going to be alright and pass out candies.
You ("we") did.
The "Age of the Earth" section is proof you can end spam and still be a total jackass. "Jesus Elicits a Reaction" is priceless.
It's revelation that saved many lives during 9/11 when God told many Christians not to go to work that day.
I doubt thats how it would work, it would probably require you to DO something after you clicked on the advertisement.
Now that's interesting. Advertising is too big for its britches when it requires meat puppets to do more than view it to generate that $0.0001 worth of product exposure.
I imagine bandwidth providers could tell such an uppity client to take a hike, as there's no shortage of businesses willing to pay market rates for "mere" views on the world's busiest street. Imagine Budweiser buying Superbowl airtime and only paying a commission on beer sold during the game!
It's not like they're starting a war. You might as well criticize Kasparov for feinting a pawn capture--the flagrant dishonesty!
What exactly are the negative ramifications of Google dissembling and denying rumors about its next product? If you feel cheated or hurt, it's time to go outside. However annoying the Google brown-nosing here might be, you're really reaching for something to complain about.
Battlestar Galactica. Also features a crazy space b*tch (for my money, you can never have too much of that--see 5th Element). The drama has a cinematic quality (like Lost), and the aforementioned leading lady is a Victoria's Secret model who's all kinds of hot.
I enjoyed Firefly, and look forward to the movie, but the River story is its only real hook. Every episode's smuggling job is a stage for each character to dance across, flatly. Entertaining, yes; high art, no. The hype I've heard includes "best on television," and that's a bit of a stretch IMO.
Trivia tidbit: Serenity takes its name from a character in episode 2 of the old Kung Fu series--the original East meets West story.
There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
There was no such thing as "upgrading" to Win 3.1. You didn't "migrate" from DOS, you installed Windows and ran it from the command line when you needed it.
Some things did need the GUI, and quite a few apps / games wouldn't run in it. At some point the you began to boot into Windows by default and hop out when necessary, instead of the other way round, but to call that an "upgrade" in today's terms obscures the parallelism we had to put up with until 9x.
Parent brings to mind speeding tickets: if they come up short the end of the month, they hand them out like candy. Parent is FUD without the qualification that "quota" does not mean the number of patent apps approved is fixed a priori. I cannot believe parent intended to say USPTO tracks employee productivity--one assumes they do, unless the government pay scale depends only on tenure.
What's the difference between your hypothetical and a guy who designs a new engine on paper, proposes a new synthesis on paper, or sketches a new circuit on paper, and posts it on the web, whereupon some third party company picks it up and mass produces it
This is fiction, and OSS is nonfiction. That's the difference. It captures the difference between invention and "IP" perfectly: no one in his right mind would put his new engine or drug plans online, and insofar as trivial modifications and implementations exist in tangible products, they aren't winning exclusivity grants left and right. Or if they are, it's small potatoes; the twist-off beer cap isn't strangling honest competition in the most explosive market ever.
That said, our protagonist should have GPL'd. If the main point is he couldn't afford to patent, it's implied the entire patent system should go. I don't think that's the conclusion you were after. The argument could use a more appropriate case study, IMO.
Nobody's mentioned this? Whatever Nintendo's put into R&D for the Revolution...That "downloadable back catalogue" feature is going to sell a system or two.
I have no idea what the numbers are. But the strategy is genius. In addition to fighting to be the second or third console in every household, be the only console for people, like myself, who don't buy them. I can't be the only twenty-something who gave up the rat race after SNES and weekend rentals.
They might not hook the MTV audience from mid-teens to college, but the risks in that segment are high. Using nostalgia as a gateway to untapped markets is brilliant. To say it "makes up for" development costs is hasty since I have no concept of the scale involved, but the machine is going to sell itself.
Slashdot Mirror
No religion owns the word marriage. If marriage is an act before my God, than the "marriage" of Hindus, Buddhists, or atheists is no more legitimate to me (and presumably my God) than homosexuality or polyandry. Since our country honors religious plurality, and our laws are faith-neutral, legal marriage is clearly not an act before my God. Legalized gay marriage doesn't step on my denomination's toes any more or less than the legal infidel marriage that is status quo.
So the argument of "oppressing our church" by use of a word to mean something other than what a church wants is a red herring. On the contrary, the church is using its majority status to suppress the gay community. You see this in their other arguments--"then we'd have to let people marry animals too;" the implied comparison is appalling. The only legitimate question is how the law will address bigamy, but we have adequate precedent for that.
Rewriting our laws to replace each instance of the word "marriage" with something else, as has been suggested, is impractical and pointless. Next week we'll have to change "copyright" because it doesn't suit some powerful lobby.
It is an odd world, but it is true. You can be a successful writer without great talent, but you can't be one without business saavy. No noble patrons out there anymore to help us along the way.
Pardon, Everquest? Diablo? There's no shortage of people who do what you do for free. The difference, if I read your sig correctly, is that you're published, meaning you have a gravy train to protect. I think "bona fide" is a little heavy, there, Shakespeare (download parent's resplendent fanfic). Intellectual rights is a pompous weasel-word for copyrights.
The analogy doesn't transfer to the music business. Plenty of blockbuster artists advocate P2P. Nobody can argue a 1-1 correspondence between piracy and lost sales with a straight face. Last I heard, the variance in music / film revenues was so normal as to give no indication Napster, Kazaa and Bittorrent ever existed.
It works the other way too:
"I'm leaving you."
What?
"I'm leaving you, Alice."
I don't understand what you're trying to do.
"I've met someone."
What do you mean 'met'?
"Look...just read the pamphlet."
I don't have the pamphlet.
"I have to go."
Which way do you want to go?
"Uh...west."
You would need a machete to head further west.
I can't tell you how many of my break-ups have ended with needing a machete.
I was raised in the same public school system as everyone else and didn't even know who Jesus Christ was until around my junior or senior year of high school.
I don't feel it's unreasonable to call this a lie.
The questions were:
what do you think the reason is that so many scientists, nerds and people otherwise rather similar to you think your beliefs are obviously incorrect? Do you think they are all deluded? Do you agree that there might be a possibility that your beliefs are not rational?
He only obliquely answers the first question by implying conventional scientific theory is spoon-fed to grade school students. Not surprisingly, he offers no support for his young-earth baloney, only an indictment of the "mainstram secular agenda" via carbon dating.
The only reason Zdziarski believes the earth revolves around the sun is that he was born a few centuries too late. While the rest of us take "proof" to mean, variously, mathematical proof, empirical proof, and statistical "proof," depending on whether we're discussing algebra, electricity, or sociology, Zdziarski wants to blur the contextual distinction.
We're asked to lose presupposition--this is impossible--and emphasize "theory vs. fact vs. law." Screw that. Science is modeling. Evolution is a successful model. Semantics doesn't change that. When "Jesus is Lord" provides a model to explain gargantuan reptile skeletons, you can get him into the classroom alongside all that other faith-based mythology we call biology, chemistry and physics. The ID argument, here as always, is cowardly, half-baked, and desperately seeking its own justification.
Zdziarski claims he could argue his position if so inclined. It's another familiar religious tack [pardon the Hubbardism] for dodging criticism. Feynmann once defined science as the process of "bending over backwards" to answer critics. I don't know Feynmann's definition of marketing, but it's easy to see which is which.
As for myself, I believe as much in God and in the tenets of the Christian religion as I do in the laws of physics.
That's not a rational position. Ergo it invites criticism. If you ask the laws of physics for guidance, they always reply.
You appear to be worried more about the very idea that people will believe in religion, than about any consequence proceeding from it. There's a reason why "these people" are all over the place.
Not least of which is the missionary ethic, which maintains that professing your religious belief publicly, as you have here, earns you brownie points with the Creator. Surely God wants us to trust not our own reason and experience, but the assertions of charismatic people. And then there's the doctrine of "equally-yoked" mates that makes faith Man's equivalent of brightly-colored tailfeathers.
the Bible encourages sound thinking
Clearly this is some new definition of "sound thinking": Assume there exists X such that (X is God) and (X is not God)...
Yea, tempt us not with the bananas of the wicked.
I went to a Christian boarding school. Some of the priests [salesians.org] there pointed out that there are many ways to read Genesis.
:= Age(Earth)+Age(X);
That number in Genesis--6000 or so?--is given by the simple recursion
X:= me;
AgeEarth:= 0;
While X != Adam do
{
Age(Earth)
X:=Father_of_X;
}
end do.
The number was not figurative to the Jews of 1500 AD [or many Orthodox Jews today].
Not that there's anything wrong with disagreement... It's that one ought to consult experts when one wants to interpret Torah. I imagine priests don't, as said experts take a different view of the whole Messiah thing.
I've no doubt Zdziarski's reply will be both original and profound. However, I feel the question "Why Christianity?" is too often absorbed into "Why Religion?", from both camps. They're really quite separate.
We have a cultural mess on our hands. I'm just sick enough of defiant children to endorse the reaction we are seeing here. You can't spank children any more. Somehow it became a crime.
Well, with all due respect, sir, you're a fucktard. You're endorsing felony charges for removing some training wheels from school-issued hardware. No irreversible harm--at all--has been done. Your idiotic crusade to replace corporal punishment with a draconian crackdown divorced completely from the law's intent won't work. It's misguided and reactionary. The last thing arbitrary punishment engenders is respect for the rules.
Making an example of the few will not fix society. Children won't be respectful as long as their role models have first amendment rights, and nobody appointed you to compromise those for the rest of us.
If your biggest problem is getting truth from your sons, be thankful your biggest problem isn't heroin, theft, or pregnancy. Lying is an unfortunate par for the course in our entire way of life, because lies of omission are synonymous with putting your best foot forward in a competitive market. You might want to check your glass house, while we're at it--you can still spank children. Yours. Other peoples' children were never fair game. So you've lied to advance your position.
Respect, in general, should be restored as a key value in our culture and at the core of respect is fear of what might happen if you don't.
At the core of respect is keeping your self-righteous nose out of other peoples' business. Fear of consequences isn't respect, it's fear.
Also, if you click on the little update link at the bottom of the story, you'll see that the kids were also found to be downloading pornography. Might sound innocent to some of you, but adults / the school can get in trouble for "allowing" them access to X-rated material.
As per Hot Coffee, isn't that sort of thing a federal crime too?
what do you think the reason is that so many scientists, nerds and people otherwise rather similar to you think your beliefs are obviously incorrect?
It pretty much begins and ends with "God had a human son, whose death and resurrection fulfilled God's Divine Plan." I'll be happy to outline just a handful of the problems built into that idea, but they've all been beaten to death (no pun intended).
People take issue with Christianity (or ought to) because its theology is ludicrous. The existence of God can be argued all day, and fairly. However, postulating additionally that God's begotten son died to fulfill a Jewish prophecy he sort-of fits, then was raised from the dead, to confirm the One True Religion in a vision to a Roman soldier who never knew him, at odds with what his disciples taught, leaving such questions as God or Not to centuries-later council decision, and a confused mess of a historical record, demands more from the rational mind.
God created the universe, or didn't? Unprovable.
Transubstantiation? Get real.
I'm tempted to take the essay "What It Means to Believe" through a chipper-shredder. Instead, I'll laugh at the irony:
I often hear individuals dismiss Christianity as a belief created by man. If this is true, then I wonder why we didn't create a God that was more passive and catered to our emotional needs, who would tell us that everything was going to be alright and pass out candies.
You ("we") did.
The "Age of the Earth" section is proof you can end spam and still be a total jackass. "Jesus Elicits a Reaction" is priceless.
It's revelation that saved many lives during 9/11 when God told many Christians not to go to work that day.
I doubt thats how it would work, it would probably require you to DO something after you clicked on the advertisement.
Now that's interesting. Advertising is too big for its britches when it requires meat puppets to do more than view it to generate that $0.0001 worth of product exposure.
I imagine bandwidth providers could tell such an uppity client to take a hike, as there's no shortage of businesses willing to pay market rates for "mere" views on the world's busiest street. Imagine Budweiser buying Superbowl airtime and only paying a commission on beer sold during the game!
It's not like they're starting a war. You might as well criticize Kasparov for feinting a pawn capture--the flagrant dishonesty!
What exactly are the negative ramifications of Google dissembling and denying rumors about its next product? If you feel cheated or hurt, it's time to go outside. However annoying the Google brown-nosing here might be, you're really reaching for something to complain about.
Battlestar Galactica. Also features a crazy space b*tch (for my money, you can never have too much of that--see 5th Element). The drama has a cinematic quality (like Lost), and the aforementioned leading lady is a Victoria's Secret model who's all kinds of hot.
I enjoyed Firefly, and look forward to the movie, but the River story is its only real hook. Every episode's smuggling job is a stage for each character to dance across, flatly. Entertaining, yes; high art, no. The hype I've heard includes "best on television," and that's a bit of a stretch IMO.
Trivia tidbit: Serenity takes its name from a character in episode 2 of the old Kung Fu series--the original East meets West story.
THEMES:
Ice. Ocean. Granite.
SUCK IT
Six legs, on the other hand, would be far more stable
"How to render the Segway obsolete:"
"BAM!
Third wheel."
Dear Consumer,
HAHAHAhahahahahahhaha!
OK, seriously. We're gonna need some liquor.
Best,
The media companies
There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
There was no such thing as "upgrading" to Win 3.1. You didn't "migrate" from DOS, you installed Windows and ran it from the command line when you needed it.
Some things did need the GUI, and quite a few apps / games wouldn't run in it. At some point the you began to boot into Windows by default and hop out when necessary, instead of the other way round, but to call that an "upgrade" in today's terms obscures the parallelism we had to put up with until 9x.
Scientist: Our research indicates that customers would prefer a mouse with more buttons, and also, less buttons.
Apple: Here I Come, To Save the Daaaaaaaaaaay!!
Parent brings to mind speeding tickets: if they come up short the end of the month, they hand them out like candy. Parent is FUD without the qualification that "quota" does not mean the number of patent apps approved is fixed a priori. I cannot believe parent intended to say USPTO tracks employee productivity--one assumes they do, unless the government pay scale depends only on tenure.
What's the difference between your hypothetical and a guy who designs a new engine on paper, proposes a new synthesis on paper, or sketches a new circuit on paper, and posts it on the web, whereupon some third party company picks it up and mass produces it
This is fiction, and OSS is nonfiction. That's the difference. It captures the difference between invention and "IP" perfectly: no one in his right mind would put his new engine or drug plans online, and insofar as trivial modifications and implementations exist in tangible products, they aren't winning exclusivity grants left and right. Or if they are, it's small potatoes; the twist-off beer cap isn't strangling honest competition in the most explosive market ever.
That said, our protagonist should have GPL'd. If the main point is he couldn't afford to patent, it's implied the entire patent system should go. I don't think that's the conclusion you were after. The argument could use a more appropriate case study, IMO.
Nothing in your link supports that assertion. +5 FUD.
Am I the only one that's ever done: Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs Tab -> Manage Add Ons Button in IE6?
As of yesterday afternoon, no.
You can just go Tools/Manage Add Ons, FYI.
Nobody's mentioned this? Whatever Nintendo's put into R&D for the Revolution...That "downloadable back catalogue" feature is going to sell a system or two.
I have no idea what the numbers are. But the strategy is genius. In addition to fighting to be the second or third console in every household, be the only console for people, like myself, who don't buy them. I can't be the only twenty-something who gave up the rat race after SNES and weekend rentals.
They might not hook the MTV audience from mid-teens to college, but the risks in that segment are high. Using nostalgia as a gateway to untapped markets is brilliant. To say it "makes up for" development costs is hasty since I have no concept of the scale involved, but the machine is going to sell itself.