I'm sure in the 1950s it seemed pretty unlikely random civilians could get their hands on their own private computer, let alone one with the processing power of today's consumer desktops. Technology tends to get much cheaper surprisingly quickly, and for many institutions, overhauling their security policies even within a decade is a pretty daunting challenge.
Of course, anyone who uses public key cryptography for anything other than quickly exchanging keys for symmetric cyphers has bigger problems than quantum computers already.
All email spam together amounts to about 10-15 petabytes a month. YouTube alone uses 25 a month. Spam is a real problem, but it's not as significant to this "bandwidth crisis" as all that.
Actually, since all of that money is just adding to your public debt rather than tapping into an existing treasury, it probably wouldn't have been spent at all. It's not like they had piles of money lying around and decided a war was the best way to burn it.
The free market's solution is to ignore net neutrality and screw over the average consumer, remember? Some government regulation is needed, though much of the problem is also that most legislators are just ignorant regarding these matters.
The people who tend to buy the most D&D sourcebooks are the DMs, who aren't really helped by MMORPGs. There aren't that many MMORPGs out there that allow players to build their own worlds.
That doesn't have anything to do with Bob-taro's comment, which is what I was replying to.
I would contend, though, that looking for answers to those why-questions in an entity that, to the best of anyone's knowledge, is completely made up, is far more ill-advised than allowing the physical realities of the universe (as revealed by science) to inform you. It's absolutely true that evolution isn't a moral guideline in the sense that survival of the fittest is automatically a good thing (as some fundies claim it to be), but constructing a system of ethics or morality without understanding what, for example, motivates altruism (which evolution *also* answers) is just plain dangerous.
When you have a theory that explains the natural world as perfectly as evolution does, invoking a creator just because not having one makes you uncomfortable is a terrible unparsimonious thing to do. If there's a bias here, it's that science tends to favor the simplest explanation that can explain the observed facts. (And that's without even going into the massive amount of questions invoking a creator invokes in the first place.)
Keep in mind, though, that evolution is not a theory about the origin of the universe, just about life. If you really want a gap for your god to hide in, have him hide "before the Big Bang".
In fairness, at least that makes your quote more in the spirit of the original. Soviet Russia jokes weren't meant to just be random, they were meant to be unsettling. The most typical one was "In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU!", after all.
The extinction events are too abrupt to be explained this way, and the "approximate 62 million-year cycle" only looks like a cycle if you squint really hard.
I'd pick "being a creationist" as a metric over "going to church". Over half of all christians in the US (44% of the total US population; about 80% of the population is christian) believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, remember? Since that length of time is based on counting the generations in the Bible, I'd consider those people biblical literalists. I don't know how many Old Earth creationists there are, or if they'd count as biblical literalists, but I think it's fair to say they're also insane religious nuts. Compared to Europe (well, western Europe anyway), everyone in the US essentially *does* walk around with a Bible.
There are, of course, sane pockets, where you can actually walk down the street without encountering a creationist, but I'm afraid you're outnumbered.
Still, an interpretation that goes against both the letter and the spirit of what is by definition the only real guideline to Christianity is a pretty worthless one. And I think you'll find that in the US especially, Biblical literalists outnumber liberal christians by quite a margin (even if most of them don't even know what the Bible actually says). The world *would* be a better place if everyone used common sense in interpreting their religion (it'd be a lot less religious, at the very least). Unfortunately, almost nobody does.
Secondly, if by killing unbelievers your referring to the old testament where the israelites go into other lands and drive them out, then before sticking up for the poor people that were driven out and murdered as unbelievers, why not study the atrocities that these unbelievers were committing against women and children. Im sure you'll see why it wasn't such a bad thing after all (like world war 2 and going against the atrocities Hitler was committing)
Hitler was Catholic, and the Nazi regime had the full support of the Church. Though even if he had been an "unbeliever", so fucking what? How does that justify anything? Does that mean genocide against vegetarians is justified because Hitler was a vegetarian too?
I'm sure your able to find a new testament passage that backs the pork and shellfish, and stoning kids bit up..... and let me know if you do... because i haven't seen it yet.
Fun fact: the Old Testament is part of the Bible too, and your Jesus said the laws are still in effect.
The historical texts are meaningless if they contradict the Bible, which is still by definition Christianity's only holy text.//The idea that to be a good christian one also has to be a good jew is actually a relatively NEW idea!//
Is it? Matt 5:17-18 disagrees with you. "New Covenant" or not, the laws of the OT are still supposed to apply.//the point is "true Christian" doesn't mean jack shit. There is no one checklist of things that a Christian MUST do/believe and CAN'T do/believe.//
I'll agree that "true Christian" doesn't mean anything, but not that there's no such checklist. The Bible is just that.
Except that the "do unto others" bit, like "love thy neighbor" and "thou shalt not kill", was only meant to apply to Jews, as you'd know if you'd read it in context. There's nothing in the Bible opposing enslaving or murdering other "races", and it positively encourages killing unbelievers. You're right in saying that by the standard of the Bible, American Christians aren't true Christians, but it's not because they are all-round love-spreading machines. If anything, it's because they eat pork and shellfish and don't stone their kids to death.
Quite frankly, it time to dump this backward religion altogether.
How will this affect the recent SABAM/Tiscali lawsuit in Belgium (was on Slashdot a while ago) that said ISPs are responsible for the browsing habits of their customers? Will it nullify it as it's essentially unenforceable now?
On another episode they demonstrated that's the most dangerous seat, because the crash position isn't adapted for rear-facing seats in typical crash landings. All they demonstrated on the episode you're talking about is that in very, very specific circumstances, it's possible for a person sitting there to survive.
Might that have anything to do with the fact that WW2 was a real war, while the War on Terror is just an excuse to expand the power of the executive branch? Back then, they'd have been traitors. Now, they're desperately-needed whistleblowers.
Terrorists also eat food. Clearly the FBI should be logging all transactions in grocery stores and supermarkets because of that.
There are rational justifications for the sort of thing TFA says they're doing, but just "correlation with prior terrorist conduct" isn't one of them. In fact, none of them have anything to do with terrorism whatsoever.
Similarly, nobody would remember Geller exists if he didn't do idiotic things like this from time to time. He's an attention whore, plain and simple, and these lawsuits are doing exactly what he's hoping they will.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure in the 1950s it seemed pretty unlikely random civilians could get their hands on their own private computer, let alone one with the processing power of today's consumer desktops. Technology tends to get much cheaper surprisingly quickly, and for many institutions, overhauling their security policies even within a decade is a pretty daunting challenge.
Of course, anyone who uses public key cryptography for anything other than quickly exchanging keys for symmetric cyphers has bigger problems than quantum computers already.
Most nerds I know are socialists or social democrats.
Is this like Eric S. Raymond claiming most programmers are neoconservatives now?
All email spam together amounts to about 10-15 petabytes a month. YouTube alone uses 25 a month.
Spam is a real problem, but it's not as significant to this "bandwidth crisis" as all that.
Actually, since all of that money is just adding to your public debt rather than tapping into an existing treasury, it probably wouldn't have been spent at all. It's not like they had piles of money lying around and decided a war was the best way to burn it.
The free market's solution is to ignore net neutrality and screw over the average consumer, remember?
Some government regulation is needed, though much of the problem is also that most legislators are just ignorant regarding these matters.
The people who tend to buy the most D&D sourcebooks are the DMs, who aren't really helped by MMORPGs. There aren't that many MMORPGs out there that allow players to build their own worlds.
That doesn't have anything to do with Bob-taro's comment, which is what I was replying to.
I would contend, though, that looking for answers to those why-questions in an entity that, to the best of anyone's knowledge, is completely made up, is far more ill-advised than allowing the physical realities of the universe (as revealed by science) to inform you.
It's absolutely true that evolution isn't a moral guideline in the sense that survival of the fittest is automatically a good thing (as some fundies claim it to be), but constructing a system of ethics or morality without understanding what, for example, motivates altruism (which evolution *also* answers) is just plain dangerous.
When you have a theory that explains the natural world as perfectly as evolution does, invoking a creator just because not having one makes you uncomfortable is a terrible unparsimonious thing to do. If there's a bias here, it's that science tends to favor the simplest explanation that can explain the observed facts.
(And that's without even going into the massive amount of questions invoking a creator invokes in the first place.)
Keep in mind, though, that evolution is not a theory about the origin of the universe, just about life. If you really want a gap for your god to hide in, have him hide "before the Big Bang".
Just because it orbits in 360 days doesn't mean it has an Earth-like orbit.
In fairness, at least that makes your quote more in the spirit of the original. Soviet Russia jokes weren't meant to just be random, they were meant to be unsettling.
The most typical one was "In Soviet Russia, TV watches YOU!", after all.
The extinction events are too abrupt to be explained this way, and the "approximate 62 million-year cycle" only looks like a cycle if you squint really hard.
I'd pick "being a creationist" as a metric over "going to church". Over half of all christians in the US (44% of the total US population; about 80% of the population is christian) believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, remember? Since that length of time is based on counting the generations in the Bible, I'd consider those people biblical literalists.
I don't know how many Old Earth creationists there are, or if they'd count as biblical literalists, but I think it's fair to say they're also insane religious nuts. Compared to Europe (well, western Europe anyway), everyone in the US essentially *does* walk around with a Bible.
There are, of course, sane pockets, where you can actually walk down the street without encountering a creationist, but I'm afraid you're outnumbered.
Still, an interpretation that goes against both the letter and the spirit of what is by definition the only real guideline to Christianity is a pretty worthless one. And I think you'll find that in the US especially, Biblical literalists outnumber liberal christians by quite a margin (even if most of them don't even know what the Bible actually says).
The world *would* be a better place if everyone used common sense in interpreting their religion (it'd be a lot less religious, at the very least). Unfortunately, almost nobody does.
Though even if he had been an "unbeliever", so fucking what? How does that justify anything? Does that mean genocide against vegetarians is justified because Hitler was a vegetarian too? Fun fact: the Old Testament is part of the Bible too, and your Jesus said the laws are still in effect.
The historical texts are meaningless if they contradict the Bible, which is still by definition Christianity's only holy text. //The idea that to be a good christian one also has to be a good jew is actually a relatively NEW idea!//
//the point is "true Christian" doesn't mean jack shit. There is no one checklist of things that a Christian MUST do/believe and CAN'T do/believe.//
Is it? Matt 5:17-18 disagrees with you. "New Covenant" or not, the laws of the OT are still supposed to apply.
I'll agree that "true Christian" doesn't mean anything, but not that there's no such checklist. The Bible is just that.
Someone beat him to it. I've seen fanfic by three separate authors that uses that very premise.
Don't ask me why I was looking at Harry Potter fanfic.
Except that the "do unto others" bit, like "love thy neighbor" and "thou shalt not kill", was only meant to apply to Jews, as you'd know if you'd read it in context. There's nothing in the Bible opposing enslaving or murdering other "races", and it positively encourages killing unbelievers.
You're right in saying that by the standard of the Bible, American Christians aren't true Christians, but it's not because they are all-round love-spreading machines. If anything, it's because they eat pork and shellfish and don't stone their kids to death.
Quite frankly, it time to dump this backward religion altogether.
The internet has a way of facilitating and speeding up social and political reforms. With that, the rest will follow.
Presumably.
If nothing else, internet access ought to make the logistics of it a bit easier to manage.
How will this affect the recent SABAM/Tiscali lawsuit in Belgium (was on Slashdot a while ago) that said ISPs are responsible for the browsing habits of their customers? Will it nullify it as it's essentially unenforceable now?
On another episode they demonstrated that's the most dangerous seat, because the crash position isn't adapted for rear-facing seats in typical crash landings. All they demonstrated on the episode you're talking about is that in very, very specific circumstances, it's possible for a person sitting there to survive.
This legislation is dachshund, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a litotes.
The "you don't need privacy if you have nothing to hide" fallacy again?
0 54219
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/2
Might that have anything to do with the fact that WW2 was a real war, while the War on Terror is just an excuse to expand the power of the executive branch?
Back then, they'd have been traitors. Now, they're desperately-needed whistleblowers.
Terrorists also eat food. Clearly the FBI should be logging all transactions in grocery stores and supermarkets because of that.
There are rational justifications for the sort of thing TFA says they're doing, but just "correlation with prior terrorist conduct" isn't one of them. In fact, none of them have anything to do with terrorism whatsoever.
Similarly, nobody would remember Geller exists if he didn't do idiotic things like this from time to time.
He's an attention whore, plain and simple, and these lawsuits are doing exactly what he's hoping they will.