Just a bunch of religions zealots shoving their shit with lies and manipulation down children's throats.
Nice flamebait. You mean of course "just people explaining their sincere beliefs to the next generation, beliefs with which I disagree".
Do you really not get the difference between 'teaching beliefs (AKA passing on fabrications with no basis in reality)' and 'being delivered an education based on facts'?
"I think there's definitely an overestimation of science's significance (in terms of awareness rather than potential) to the average person going on here."
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Every person who isn't scientifically literate to a basic level is one of those people who doesn't get their kids immunized, or is someone who's against stem cell research, or who wants evolutionary theory out of the curriculum, or who is pro-organic food or...
Not understanding science - or at least an understanding of the scientific process - is leading to a greater and greater burden as we cram more people onto the planet but have to fight harder to make the necessary technological advances to keep us all fed and living comfortably.
Then why live in a country that doesn't represent what you stand for? If you're afraid or untrusting of your government, surely LEAVING THE FUCKING COUNTRY is a better option than sticking around and buying a gun.
America might have the lowest tax rates in the West, but what about when you compare a return on investment for your taxes?
I mean, if I had a brain, and I lived in the USA, I'd be thinking real hard about why I'm interested in 90% of my tax dollars funding the military-industrial complex. I'd rather pay more taxes, live in Sweden, and get free health care, free University, a lower crime rate, etc etc etc.
I think we can *all* appreciate how cool some of the gymnastics stunts are. But fourty-odd competitors doing more or less the same routine? I mean, once you've seen a few back flips, don't they all start to look the same? Imagine if every fight scene in an action movie had the same four moves over and over again...
The Olympics: Making sports that are only normally interesting for two minutes suddenly magically become interesting for two weeks.
Let's not forget Alastair Reynolds
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
Another excellent scifi author from the UK, Alastair Reynolds, is beyond compare. He writes space opera with not only a cyberpunk feel, but a gritty hard SF feel. The Revelation Space universe is every bit as rewarding as the Culture universe.
I only mention this because if Iain Banks is off the radar in American bookshops, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Reynolds is too.
I, for one, am a-ok with everyone chipping in to support the arts whether they want to or not. I'd much rather everyone pay into an arts fund than let the masses dictate where our reward (money) for artistic achievement goes. Heard much commercial radio lately? I'd hardly say that Jessica Simpson deserves whatever stupid sum of money she's getting for singing songs we've all heard before (that she hasn't even written herself!) when there are plenty of innovative artists who barely have any recognition because the system has made people stupid.
Ooh, even better, let's recycle some Pop Idol runners-up...
A CD of music is a lot like a disc with a console game on it. No support is ever going to be required.
Are you suggesting that all console games should be free?
Some music has absolutely no value-adding in its live performance, because it would be very similar to watching someone code a spreadsheet app. Wheeeeeee!
By your reasoning, once someone writes a piece of software, they shouldn't expect to be paid for it unless they run around writing copies in 'shows' for everyone to watch.
Sure, someone like Aerosmith who just run around doing the same song over and over again probably are worthy of your rant. But someone like Aphex Twin (for instance) probably spends as much production time on a song as a software developper does writing an app that sells on download.com for $30. Why is the software developer's time any different than that of a producer's?
Being a computer dork doesn't exempt you from considering other professionals' efforts as worthy.
Why yes, I can't think of a single hospital built by a religious group. With profits made that then go... back into the coffers at the Vatican, and not back into improving health systems!
(A rudimentary bit of Googling will turn up all sorts of information on the stupidly large amounts of money Mother Theresa made, and what kind of shit conditions her charges lived in while the money all flowed back to Italy)
In general, countries tend to not-tax non-profits for the same reason they don't tax government subsidiaries... it would be stupid. Why would you tax what is already a public service to collect revenues to provide public services? What's next, are you going to charge me income tax on the estimated value of my labor when I go volunteer with Habitat for Humanity?
Because a religious organization's 'public services' are not services for the public - they are services for its members. I really don't think that the Catholic church should be granted a tax-exempt status so it can build more missions that further the glory of god, when I know those taxable funds could be going towards building hospitals that benefit the entirety of society.
I can't answer #1, #4 and #5 (which is why I'm still interested in the show - I *like* there being surprises for me. The wife and I are those people who figure out most shows (almost all of the drivel on TV or in cinemas in other words) early on and turn them off in boredom. But, I can probably give you my guess as to the rest of them.
The Cylons want to find Earth. I don't know why, as detailed above. But since they do, they have to figure out how. Odds are if they ask the humans for directions, they be told to 'go get stuffed'. So the master plan is to create a scenario where the humans have no choice but to make a run for Earth. I have a very strong feeling that the first attack was coordinated to ensure all the other 42 people in the line of succession BEFORE Laura Roslyn were wiped out. Why? Because the new president was going to have to be someone with a religious conviction, who would take the survivors on a stupid goose chase after Earth. And, guess what? She did. Convinced everyone else to go off on her stupid religious journey, and it paid off for the Cylons, it seems. They needed to look human in order to have agents in place to both keep an eye on the fleet, but also to pull off the plan to make sure Roslyn was the surviving member of the cabinet.
As for #7, I suspect they're NOT Cylons, but that is just me hoping that the show isn't as bad as it will be if they are.
Apparently only the west is allowed anything nuclear or dangerous - everyone else has no right, apparently.
Unfortunately, someone has to have it.
And, given the choice, would you rather have a country with a fairly small chain of command, where the nutjob at the top is pretty close to the button (hello, Kim Jong-Il!) - or a democracy where the nutjob at the top (hello, Dubya!) has a few checks and balances keeping him from plunging the world into a Nuclear Winter?
I'm not saying I'm a great fan of American foreign policy, but it sure as hell beats Iran's.
The simple reason why violence is OK in media and sex is not is that all violence needs to be in the public eye. There's no reason that your neighbors or children need to know when or how often you fuck. But they DO need to know each and every time you kill someone, stab someone in the eye, or do any other act of violence.
That's a bit of a logical fallacy there, don't you think? I agree entirely that we all need to know when an injustice has been committed. However, you state only that violence needs to be in the media, and haven't given any reason why that means nudity can't share the same space in the media.
No-one NEEDS to know the results of the Super Bowl, but it's in the media - so how does nudity somehow not get the same treatment?
Honestly, and I don't mean this as a troll, I'd like a response: who uses WMP other then people too lazy to download something else? What does it have to offer?
Until I find a player that has the library features (or better!) that WMP has, I'll keep using it. Even with its sluggish response with large libraries, it's still the best tool I've found to keep track of a 5000-song plus library. I tend to have only a few songs from artists rather than whole albums (there are few artists who can put out an album that has more than a few songs worth ripping) and being able to sift through that many artists with ease is the main reason I stick with WMP. Winamp's library is crud, and iTunes doesn't really work for me either.
I downloaded WMP11 beta 2, and immediately uninstalled it because the drag and drop sorting seemed to have been removed from the software. I'm hoping that the full release will have fixed that...
Let's be fair, here: it's not like it's a bad thing that Saddam was removed from power.
There are, however, bad things here.
The first bad thing is that the UN is a toothless pack of cowards for not having done something about him a long time ago, and it's a shame it took 9/11 for the world to relize that letting people like the Taliban @#$*wits run a country is a BAD IDEA.
The second bad thing is the reasons *why* the Yankees went to Iraq after the UN proved it was too shit-scared to touch the issue of deposing a madman who was conducting genocide on his own citizens. We would have gotten a much nicer response from the arab world out of a united world saying 'This guy's a dickhead' rather than the Coalition saying 'Yankees want your oil'.
Decimal measurement systems? As opposed to what... Binary? Octal? Good old hex? It's only 0F13 miles from New York to Paris, you know.
I suppose I should have provided a picture or a chart of some kind to avoid this kind of confusion for some of you...
12 inches = 1 foot (NOT DECIMAL)
3 feet = 1 yard (NOT DECIMAL; and, heck, not even base twelve, like the last one)
2 yards = 1 fathom (NOT DECIMAL; not base 3, like the last one - what the?)
They don't have "significant meaning in popular culture" either, but you would not go around redefining those words, would you?
Only in everyone's favourite 'most important' country, would Joule be classified as not having significant meaning in poular culture. Travel to the outside world, where people use decimal measurement systems, and you'll see kilojoules in the nutritional information of everything in your supermarket.
I have to agree 100% with seminumerical. Enough with the 'Science Fantasy'! Thank Bob we finally have a term to describe all of that fluff that just happens to be set in space, so is classified as science fiction by the dim-bulbs. It's bad enough that most bookshops put science fiction books in the fantasy section.
Science fiction, at its core, should be about how technology affects humanity. Star Trek qualifies because its central theme is 'what if' that with technology, humanity will be able to overcome its differences. Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a samurai / western / action movie set in space. Obi-Wan using a medichlorimeter is about as scientific as Tom Cruise threatening to e-meter you.
People like you deserve to get held down and injected with heroin. It might not be your fault you're addicted, but let's see how easy it is to fix your problem.
Good grief.
Yet another bleeding heart liberal who thinks the rest of us should all be concerned with repairing the stupid choices other people make. It's not like it's some monster surprise how starting up a heroin habit is going to end up, is it? This is Darwin's good work in action, and we should certainly let it run its course.
People like you should be forced to spend all your time in malls, with fat people and moronic teenagers so you stop thinking we should be saving all these half-wits and genetic rejects who aren't really doing much for the quality of the gene pool.
I'm sure there are some governments out there not doing enough to educate their people about health risks and addiction, but there is no first-world country that I've been to that doesn't have all sorts of health funding and educational programs. If some people choose not to listen, so be it, and good riddance.
FYI - Anyone who takes up smoking in this day and age, having seen what it has done to people who started back in the middle of last century, and knowing full well that they won't get to choose if they can quit or not, deserve what they have coming. I'm pretty sure the surgeon-general stopped advocating smoking for good health some time ago.
"I would imagine alot has changed in California and New York and other states since 1900 wouldn't you say?"
Er, well, except it was only 50 years ago that the south thought that people were less than human because the colour of their skin was different.
If we apply simple mathematics to this problem, we can estimate that people in the south take at least twice as long to do things as people from other parts of the country!
Take this as humour, or get pissed off; either one is your right (and feel fine to take twice as long to do it if you're from Kentucky).
Slashdot Mirror
Just a bunch of religions zealots shoving their shit with lies and manipulation down children's throats.
Nice flamebait. You mean of course "just people explaining their sincere beliefs to the next generation, beliefs with which I disagree".
Do you really not get the difference between 'teaching beliefs (AKA passing on fabrications with no basis in reality)' and 'being delivered an education based on facts'?
Nice flamebait.
"I think there's definitely an overestimation of science's significance (in terms of awareness rather than potential) to the average person going on here."
Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Every person who isn't scientifically literate to a basic level is one of those people who doesn't get their kids immunized, or is someone who's against stem cell research, or who wants evolutionary theory out of the curriculum, or who is pro-organic food or...
Not understanding science - or at least an understanding of the scientific process - is leading to a greater and greater burden as we cram more people onto the planet but have to fight harder to make the necessary technological advances to keep us all fed and living comfortably.
Slashdot posters baffled by spelling rules!
Correction #1:
Britain should be capitalized, just like Americans.
Correction #2:
It's Britain, not Britian.
Then why live in a country that doesn't represent what you stand for? If you're afraid or untrusting of your government, surely LEAVING THE FUCKING COUNTRY is a better option than sticking around and buying a gun.
Clearly guns don't kill people -- cars kill people. Unlike a car, however, only a gun can protect you from an assailant.
Playing devil's advocate:
Unlike a gun, however, a car has a purpose other than killing.
America might have the lowest tax rates in the West, but what about when you compare a return on investment for your taxes?
I mean, if I had a brain, and I lived in the USA, I'd be thinking real hard about why I'm interested in 90% of my tax dollars funding the military-industrial complex. I'd rather pay more taxes, live in Sweden, and get free health care, free University, a lower crime rate, etc etc etc.
I think we can *all* appreciate how cool some of the gymnastics stunts are. But fourty-odd competitors doing more or less the same routine? I mean, once you've seen a few back flips, don't they all start to look the same? Imagine if every fight scene in an action movie had the same four moves over and over again...
The Olympics: Making sports that are only normally interesting for two minutes suddenly magically become interesting for two weeks.
Another excellent scifi author from the UK, Alastair Reynolds, is beyond compare. He writes space opera with not only a cyberpunk feel, but a gritty hard SF feel. The Revelation Space universe is every bit as rewarding as the Culture universe.
I only mention this because if Iain Banks is off the radar in American bookshops, I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Reynolds is too.
I, for one, am a-ok with everyone chipping in to support the arts whether they want to or not. I'd much rather everyone pay into an arts fund than let the masses dictate where our reward (money) for artistic achievement goes. Heard much commercial radio lately? I'd hardly say that Jessica Simpson deserves whatever stupid sum of money she's getting for singing songs we've all heard before (that she hasn't even written herself!) when there are plenty of innovative artists who barely have any recognition because the system has made people stupid.
Ooh, even better, let's recycle some Pop Idol runners-up...
Art is dead; long live art!
A CD of music is a lot like a disc with a console game on it. No support is ever going to be required.
Are you suggesting that all console games should be free?
Some music has absolutely no value-adding in its live performance, because it would be very similar to watching someone code a spreadsheet app. Wheeeeeee!
Let me play deveil's advocate, here....
By your reasoning, once someone writes a piece of software, they shouldn't expect to be paid for it unless they run around writing copies in 'shows' for everyone to watch.
Sure, someone like Aerosmith who just run around doing the same song over and over again probably are worthy of your rant. But someone like Aphex Twin (for instance) probably spends as much production time on a song as a software developper does writing an app that sells on download.com for $30. Why is the software developer's time any different than that of a producer's?
Being a computer dork doesn't exempt you from considering other professionals' efforts as worthy.
(A rudimentary bit of Googling will turn up all sorts of information on the stupidly large amounts of money Mother Theresa made, and what kind of shit conditions her charges lived in while the money all flowed back to Italy)
Because a religious organization's 'public services' are not services for the public - they are services for its members. I really don't think that the Catholic church should be granted a tax-exempt status so it can build more missions that further the glory of god, when I know those taxable funds could be going towards building hospitals that benefit the entirety of society.
I can't answer #1, #4 and #5 (which is why I'm still interested in the show - I *like* there being surprises for me. The wife and I are those people who figure out most shows (almost all of the drivel on TV or in cinemas in other words) early on and turn them off in boredom. But, I can probably give you my guess as to the rest of them.
The Cylons want to find Earth. I don't know why, as detailed above. But since they do, they have to figure out how. Odds are if they ask the humans for directions, they be told to 'go get stuffed'. So the master plan is to create a scenario where the humans have no choice but to make a run for Earth. I have a very strong feeling that the first attack was coordinated to ensure all the other 42 people in the line of succession BEFORE Laura Roslyn were wiped out. Why? Because the new president was going to have to be someone with a religious conviction, who would take the survivors on a stupid goose chase after Earth. And, guess what? She did. Convinced everyone else to go off on her stupid religious journey, and it paid off for the Cylons, it seems. They needed to look human in order to have agents in place to both keep an eye on the fleet, but also to pull off the plan to make sure Roslyn was the surviving member of the cabinet.
As for #7, I suspect they're NOT Cylons, but that is just me hoping that the show isn't as bad as it will be if they are.
Unfortunately, someone has to have it.
And, given the choice, would you rather have a country with a fairly small chain of command, where the nutjob at the top is pretty close to the button (hello, Kim Jong-Il!) - or a democracy where the nutjob at the top (hello, Dubya!) has a few checks and balances keeping him from plunging the world into a Nuclear Winter?
I'm not saying I'm a great fan of American foreign policy, but it sure as hell beats Iran's.
That's a bit of a logical fallacy there, don't you think? I agree entirely that we all need to know when an injustice has been committed. However, you state only that violence needs to be in the media, and haven't given any reason why that means nudity can't share the same space in the media.
No-one NEEDS to know the results of the Super Bowl, but it's in the media - so how does nudity somehow not get the same treatment?
Until I find a player that has the library features (or better!) that WMP has, I'll keep using it. Even with its sluggish response with large libraries, it's still the best tool I've found to keep track of a 5000-song plus library. I tend to have only a few songs from artists rather than whole albums (there are few artists who can put out an album that has more than a few songs worth ripping) and being able to sift through that many artists with ease is the main reason I stick with WMP. Winamp's library is crud, and iTunes doesn't really work for me either.
I downloaded WMP11 beta 2, and immediately uninstalled it because the drag and drop sorting seemed to have been removed from the software. I'm hoping that the full release will have fixed that...
Let's be fair, here: it's not like it's a bad thing that Saddam was removed from power.
There are, however, bad things here.
The first bad thing is that the UN is a toothless pack of cowards for not having done something about him a long time ago, and it's a shame it took 9/11 for the world to relize that letting people like the Taliban @#$*wits run a country is a BAD IDEA.
The second bad thing is the reasons *why* the Yankees went to Iraq after the UN proved it was too shit-scared to touch the issue of deposing a madman who was conducting genocide on his own citizens. We would have gotten a much nicer response from the arab world out of a united world saying 'This guy's a dickhead' rather than the Coalition saying 'Yankees want your oil'.
Decimal measurement systems? As opposed to what... Binary? Octal? Good old hex? It's only 0F13 miles from New York to Paris, you know.
l _multiples
I suppose I should have provided a picture or a chart of some kind to avoid this kind of confusion for some of you...
12 inches = 1 foot (NOT DECIMAL)
3 feet = 1 yard (NOT DECIMAL; and, heck, not even base twelve, like the last one)
2 yards = 1 fathom (NOT DECIMAL; not base 3, like the last one - what the?)
And miles are even more completely archaic.
Whereas...
10 milimetres = 1 centimetre
10 centimetres = 1 decimetre
10 decimetres = 1 metre
But if you don't beleive me that that's what a decimal system is, maybe you'll beleive something else you read on the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#Decima
Angstrom, Joule, Candella.
They don't have "significant meaning in popular culture" either, but you would not go around redefining those words, would you?
Only in everyone's favourite 'most important' country, would Joule be classified as not having significant meaning in poular culture. Travel to the outside world, where people use decimal measurement systems, and you'll see kilojoules in the nutritional information of everything in your supermarket.
I have to agree 100% with seminumerical. Enough with the 'Science Fantasy'! Thank Bob we finally have a term to describe all of that fluff that just happens to be set in space, so is classified as science fiction by the dim-bulbs. It's bad enough that most bookshops put science fiction books in the fantasy section.
Science fiction, at its core, should be about how technology affects humanity. Star Trek qualifies because its central theme is 'what if' that with technology, humanity will be able to overcome its differences. Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a samurai / western / action movie set in space. Obi-Wan using a medichlorimeter is about as scientific as Tom Cruise threatening to e-meter you.
When Skylab went down they nearly crashed it into Australia! Don't trust their aim!
Yes, actually, I do. I'm an aerospace engineer.
Now Y is moving several thousand miles an hour else it would simply fall to the earth.
Try several tens of thousands, 17,500 mi/h for LEO.
An aerospace engineer who works in imperial measurements? Suuuure you are.
People like you deserve to get held down and injected with heroin. It might not be your fault you're addicted, but let's see how easy it is to fix your problem .
Good grief.
Yet another bleeding heart liberal who thinks the rest of us should all be concerned with repairing the stupid choices other people make. It's not like it's some monster surprise how starting up a heroin habit is going to end up, is it? This is Darwin's good work in action, and we should certainly let it run its course.
People like you should be forced to spend all your time in malls, with fat people and moronic teenagers so you stop thinking we should be saving all these half-wits and genetic rejects who aren't really doing much for the quality of the gene pool.
I'm sure there are some governments out there not doing enough to educate their people about health risks and addiction, but there is no first-world country that I've been to that doesn't have all sorts of health funding and educational programs. If some people choose not to listen, so be it, and good riddance.
FYI - Anyone who takes up smoking in this day and age, having seen what it has done to people who started back in the middle of last century, and knowing full well that they won't get to choose if they can quit or not, deserve what they have coming. I'm pretty sure the surgeon-general stopped advocating smoking for good health some time ago.
"I would imagine alot has changed in California and New York and other states since 1900 wouldn't you say?"
Er, well, except it was only 50 years ago that the south thought that people were less than human because the colour of their skin was different.
If we apply simple mathematics to this problem, we can estimate that people in the south take at least twice as long to do things as people from other parts of the country!
Take this as humour, or get pissed off; either one is your right (and feel fine to take twice as long to do it if you're from Kentucky).