Except for some weirdos like me who have an interest in legal proceedings, my guess is that these trials will be as widely viewed as C-SPAN --- that is, practically not at all.
This doesn't mean that I don't think it's important that the proceedings of every trial are recorded and made (to the greatest extent possible) available to the public. It's just that I'm too cynical to think that Joe Sixpack is interested in watching anything like this. Even I would only be interested in watching the proceedings in interesting cases over copyright and patent issues.
Could have been real-world, except that they were white hats. And yes, I know that password hashing is a totally different use case whose utility is based on strength against preimage attack.
Yup! A major problem with copyright is that bits automatically don't have extra meta "license" bits.
If everyone was super-paranoid about misusing information which might possibly be under copyright, Western civilization would grind to a screeching halt.
> There is almost no difference between "single vendor" and FOSS, which is inherently "single solution", > except for the "free" part.
You don't realize that FOSS, even if "single solution", is inherently not "single vendor" since the source is forkable (by definition)?
> And in the end, you get what you pay for.
You obviously didn't pay list price for Windows ME. Would it have worked better if you had?
I'm curious --- does your mother do all of the shopping?
> The ODF, being based on some randomn peoples "ideas", could be just as screwed up in the end > as any Microsoft format, and possibly harder to support.
We know that ODF is more or less totally described by a standard of reasonable size, and OOXML is rather less comprehensively described by a standard of unreasonably large size (about an order of magnitude larger than ODF). And we have the source code to several programs which support ODF. Even ignoring the fact that ODF was standardized by a committee of experts and not "random people", this means your comment is silly.
> for most people
In case you didn't actually read the thread, the whole thrust of my comment was about governments, not Average Joe.
> A government should be thinking long term pretty much all the time.
So this means they should review all of their procurement policies which
lock them into using a single vendor, and
cause them to create documents in formats which only a single vendor can reliably read (and even that without any guarantee that newer versions of software from that vendor will display the document exactly like the version used to create it).
It seems to me that thinking long term should give a great advantage to the idea of using open source and a document format like ODF.
Unfortunately, there's the other side of the long term. If governments go FOSS, over the long term the politicians will get a lot less payback from lobbyists, no?
I hadn't thought of this before, but this is logical considering that the UN is an organization in which third world countries have relatively more influence than first world ones (not talking about Security Council stuff). It's obvious that IP violations are rampant in those countries so that any international treaty which would force those countries to disconnect users based on rightsholders' complaints without court review could lead to great hardship for them.
The abstract of the article about Canada doesn't say anything about how they corrected for the fact that many more poor Americans wouldn't be good subjects for a clinical trial since they are just not being treated for their health problems (as noted in the UK article: "Just 9 per cent of low income homes say they have unmet care needs, compared to 52 per cent in the U.S. and 24 per cent in Germany.")
Or were you assuming that this selection bias would actually make the results more accurate for someone who regularly reads Slashdot? This, ironically, could very well be the truth....
Oh, and BTW, invariably after anyone posts an article from The Daily Mail, a bevy of UK Slashdotters point out that its standards of journalism aren't exactly stellar. Doesn't necessarily mean the information is wrong, but.... I'd double check it before using it for a serious personal decision.
Not all scientific articles which are published are correct. Far from it. The two articles about GM corn upon which you are basing your argument were funded by Greenpeace and seem to be more propaganda than science. Read the Wikipedia article about it.
That doesn't mean I don't agree with you that this could be a problem. The articles merely rehash the (forcibly) published data from Monsanto's studies, and I was appalled to see that those studies were: (1) very short-term (only 90 days compared with an average lifetime of 2-3 years), and (2) seem to have been run on very small numbers of animals (it's hard to understand the wording of the anti-GM paper but it seems to me that no more than 80 mice ate the GM corn, of which only 40 had extensive testing like blood tests).
This seems to be because separate studies were done which just fed mice large doses of the pesticide which is being produced by the introduced gene (and the results were negative for significant toxicity). Still, living systems are complex and I'd prefer that the authorities would make Monsanto fund an independent lab to do more comprehensive testing of the whole plant.
> have more creative works and greater access to them than at any point in history. The system, flawed as it may be, works.
I'm willing to cede you that if your definition of "works" is that narrow, you might be right. Unfortunately, other people are also interested in things like anonymity, the ability to secretly share information without fear of government intervention, and other freedoms which they think are a bit more important than how many Hollywood blockbuster movies get released every year. "The system" is currently very successful financially, yet not so successful at preventing the implementation of anti-piracy procedures which infringe on these freedoms --- this is because all of the money is on the side of the hyper-enforcement of copyright side.
My apologies if when you wrote "the system" you meant "as it is now without PROTECT IP, COICA, ACTA, 3 strikes, etc.". My point is that copyright law seems continually evolving in one direction, towards more (and more onerous) copyright, and your observation that everything is actually working right should mean that it shouldn't be evolving at all.
Incidentally, if this policy was adopted by my university (not GA tech) I would freely violate copyright law and I would encourage my students to do so as well.
You mean you never violate copyright law currently, not even a teensy, teensy, little tiny bit? WOW! How do you manage? Can I have your autograph?
I hate to tell you, but you probably violate copyright law several times a day, totally without being aware of it (with each violation potentially opening you up to damages of up to $150k in the US). Yes, copyright law is that f***ed-up....
Actually, your post reveals that you already violate copyright law, as you are knowledgeably encouraging a third party (your students) to infringe on the academic journals' copyrights by accessing the freely available materials for your course. Or did you mean "I would continue to freely violate"? Anyway, personally, I can only commend you for it. The more civil disobedience there is against the insanity of current copyright law, the better. Only in this way is there even a smidgen of a chance that the law will be reformed.
Yes, I had a gut feeling that when I spouted off without doing any real research I was simplifying a more complex reality --- but, hey, this is Slashdot, no?
I find the analogy between software (FOSS vs. commercial) and education interesting. As others posted, the "product" involved in education is much less well defined, as it's obviously not only the knowledge gained.
Color me cynical, but somehow I get the feeling that institutions whose clientele are exclusively the super-rich do not have a real stake in trying to minimize the disparity between their clients and the less fortunate. They may put up something "for everyone" for its PR value, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the same time they're emphasizing to their paying customers how much better is the education their kids are getting.
This is in contrast with private universities, which are also terribly expensive, but which have a tradition of valuing education for its social benefits. Even these universities may one day get to the point where they feel economically threatened by the free material they post (for example MIT's OpenCourseWare) --- for example, if a new demographic of students starts to appear which demand to pay less but only to be tested and certified for their degrees, because the free educational material available is good enough for them.
Your post is theoretically "right on the ball", but as Yogi Berra is attributed to say "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is".
The amount of people who use your particular setup is going to be much smaller if it is very customized. This means two things: the amount of bugs in your setup which others are going to report will be smaller, and secondly, the projects bug-fixing efforts will discriminate against fixing those bugs compared to bugs in the default setup.
Without facts that I don't have, however, I cannot compare any particular customized setup under Ubuntu with a particular (almost certainly less popular) different distribution. And people who stick with Ubuntu will still gain benefit from the popularity of Ubuntu for fixing "core" bugs.
After reading this discussion, I also will probably end up sticking with Ubuntu, but customizing the UI (so in some ways, I suppose my gut feeling agrees with you). However, I certainly will look to download live versions of Mint and other distros to check out whether I think it might be worth my while to switch.
> I'm saying that most atheists that will debate the subject understand this too.
I have no good grasp of the statistical breakdown amongst atheists between those that understand and those that don't, so I cannot refute you. My point was that at least some atheists exist (and possibly this correlates positively with how vocal and aggressive these atheists are in trying to refute theism) who don't understand this. In fact, several of the atheists who posted opinions in this discussion seemed to me to not have a good understanding of this issue.
Because it's falling into the trap I was talking about:
> Of course every interpretation, in its time, is touted as "The Truth".
assuming that you know that they relate to this as "The Truth" with Capitol Ts. The whole point of the the argument is that moderates often do not relate to their religious beliefs in this way (e.g., see this post), but sometimes vocal atheists, when arguing, put up fundamentalist world-views as strawmen, not even intentionally, but merely because they can't conceive of someone going to church every Sunday without fail, while at the same time not being sure that God exists or believing that particular Church's beliefs are "The Truth".
> As long as you call yourself a Christian you're going to be conflated with all the other people who do the same
True, but that doesn't make it right.
By analogy, I think you'd find it peculiar if, after you identify yourself as a geek, someone started relating to you in a particular fashion because he was absolutely convinced that geeks behave in a certain way, say like the cast of "The Big Bang Theory" --- when you yourself know that isn't exactly a good depiction of general "geek culture", and certainly not of your own behavior.
You're not replying to the point. The point is that identifying with a religious group which is intellectually defined by a set of beliefs does not at all necessitate believing those beliefs. So it doesn't matter that atheists know more about the definitions of the sects' beliefs, what they don't necessarily understand is how the group of people who identify with that sect relate to the beliefs of the sect --- often the atheists just assume that they actually believe, which is not at all necessarily true!
Take Conservative Judaism, for example. My friends who identify with this religious group tell me that in most congregations, only the rabbi and the cantor actually keep the Sabbath, follow the rules for kosher food, and all of the other formal rules which the Conservative movement espouses. The vast majority of the people who identify with this sect do not follow many of the rules which they are "supposed" to follow --- and only the FSM knows what they actually believe in. If you believe my friends, most of them go to the synagogue or belong to a congregation only for social reasons.
So how exactly do you interact with other humans normally? Considering that you have practically no scientific evidence as to what they actually think and believe given their outward appearance?
You actually create tens if not hundreds of practically unsupported hypotheses every day, and make decisions based on them. If that's not a form of belief, I don't know what is.
> That you think some of it is a parable just means you're egotistical enough to judge what you believe to be divinely inspired.
How ironic that this comment just means that you're egotistical enough to judge others' moderate religious beliefs egotistical.
Your sources are interesting but seem to deal with factual knowledge, not sociological knowledge which is what I was talking about. In my limited experience, vocal atheists tend to look at religion as being a bunch of beliefs held to be factual (and attack the lack of scientific truthfulness of the beliefs), when it seems to me that religion is actually a social phenomenon which for many "believers" is totally disconnected with scientific truth. That is, if someone says to a vocal atheist "I am a Christian", the vocal atheist immediate thinks he knows what that person believes, because he equates "Christianity" to "a set of beliefs" --- when the person actually only meant "I identify with a social group called Christians", and in many cases doesn't believe in "Christian canon" in a particular stereotypical way.
I have no statistics on what the breakdown is between the moderates and the loonies, tho. I am sure that the loonies are a lot more irritating and vocal than the moderates and therefore end up being overestimated as representing religion as a whole.
How is it then that I've managed to live over 40 years, and the vast majority of non-atheists I know only believe moderately in their religion, and use it solely for life transition ceremonies like marriage, birth, burial, or perhaps the annual Christmas eve mass "before the party"?
Oh, and by the way, I'm not Christian, nor do I believe in any major religion. But your assumption that I have religious beliefs is another data point which shows me that atheists who actively protest against religion tend to be aggressive about it. I admire your ardentness but must point out that not everyone who disagrees with you believes in what you think they believe in.
Just because the fundies are a lot louder than the moderates (see, I can bold stuff also), doesn't make them a majority in many locations, even in the US.
the "moderate" Christians who supposedly represent a "majority" go completely silent. In spite of their alleged "majority" status, they seldom if ever seem to be capable of halting the relentless march back to the Dark Ages.
Your assumption that they are silent because they actively support the fundamentalist seems to me to need real statistics for confirmation. I take it that your reasoning is "because the percentage of non-fundamentalist Christians in the set of people actively protesting X is very small, this means that the majority of non-fundamentalist Christians support X". This seems to be erroneous reasoning, it only means that Christians are less likely to actively protest X compared to atheists. There are billions of Chinese atheists who also do not protest against anti-evolution crap, does this mean that they support it? It does, by your reasoning.
I think you are confusing belief with "literal belief" --- the difference is sometimes used as the distinguishing feature between religion and fundamentalist religion. E.g., one Christian when reading creation story believes in it as a parable for the current physical understanding of the Big Bang and its aftermath, while a fundamentalist Christian reads it and believes that the whole deal took 7 days as we know them.
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Check out this thread and this thread from Slashdot user GNUALMAFUERTE, who seems to be your man.
Being a strong agnostic myself, I found his emotional rants a rather interesting contrast to my cold position of indeterminacy --- and to top it off, I can now be proud that I've actually managed to have someone "foe" me on Slashdot!
Where is the difference between someone who is pushing their idea of god vs someone pushing the "certainty" of there being none? Prove there is no god please or admit you're the same as the ones you're criticizing.
I find it perfectly reasonable for someone to hold the belief that no evidence exists which would substantiate the more common models of deistic belief. This is, however, somewhat different than the kind of pushy atheism you're complaining about.
On the other hand, your argument stinks of the logical fallacy called "false continuum": "The idea that because there is no definitive demarcation line between two extremes, that the distinction between the extremes is not real or meaningful". Certainly there exist some "ideas of god" which are simply silly and do not stand up to simple tests. And there also exist abstract ideas of God which, I believe, are inherently unfalsifiable.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for some weirdos like me who have an interest in legal proceedings, my guess is that these trials will be as widely viewed as C-SPAN --- that is, practically not at all.
This doesn't mean that I don't think it's important that the proceedings of every trial are recorded and made (to the greatest extent possible) available to the public. It's just that I'm too cynical to think that Joe Sixpack is interested in watching anything like this. Even I would only be interested in watching the proceedings in interesting cases over copyright and patent issues.
You seem to be informed enough that you probably were aware of this, but see:
http://www.win.tue.nl/hashclash/rogue-ca/
Could have been real-world, except that they were white hats. And yes, I know that password hashing is a totally different use case whose utility is based on strength against preimage attack.
Yup! A major problem with copyright is that bits automatically don't have extra meta "license" bits.
If everyone was super-paranoid about misusing information which might possibly be under copyright, Western civilization would grind to a screeching halt.
> There is almost no difference between "single vendor" and FOSS, which is inherently "single solution",
> except for the "free" part.
You don't realize that FOSS, even if "single solution", is inherently not "single vendor" since the source is forkable (by definition)?
> And in the end, you get what you pay for.
You obviously didn't pay list price for Windows ME. Would it have worked better if you had?
I'm curious --- does your mother do all of the shopping?
> The ODF, being based on some randomn peoples "ideas", could be just as screwed up in the end
> as any Microsoft format, and possibly harder to support.
We know that ODF is more or less totally described by a standard of reasonable size, and OOXML is rather less comprehensively described by a standard of unreasonably large size (about an order of magnitude larger than ODF). And we have the source code to several programs which support ODF. Even ignoring the fact that ODF was standardized by a committee of experts and not "random people", this means your comment is silly.
> for most people
In case you didn't actually read the thread, the whole thrust of my comment was about governments, not Average Joe.
> A government should be thinking long term pretty much all the time.
So this means they should review all of their procurement policies which
It seems to me that thinking long term should give a great advantage to the idea of using open source and a document format like ODF.
Unfortunately, there's the other side of the long term. If governments go FOSS, over the long term the politicians will get a lot less payback from lobbyists, no?
I hadn't thought of this before, but this is logical considering that the UN is an organization in which third world countries have relatively more influence than first world ones (not talking about Security Council stuff). It's obvious that IP violations are rampant in those countries so that any international treaty which would force those countries to disconnect users based on rightsholders' complaints without court review could lead to great hardship for them.
OTOH, does the UN have any power whatsoever?
The abstract of the article about Canada doesn't say anything about how they corrected for the fact that many more poor Americans wouldn't be good subjects for a clinical trial since they are just not being treated for their health problems (as noted in the UK article: "Just 9 per cent of low income homes say they have unmet care needs, compared to 52 per cent in the U.S. and 24 per cent in Germany.")
Or were you assuming that this selection bias would actually make the results more accurate for someone who regularly reads Slashdot? This, ironically, could very well be the truth....
Oh, and BTW, invariably after anyone posts an article from The Daily Mail, a bevy of UK Slashdotters point out that its standards of journalism aren't exactly stellar. Doesn't necessarily mean the information is wrong, but.... I'd double check it before using it for a serious personal decision.
Not all scientific articles which are published are correct. Far from it. The two articles about GM corn upon which you are basing your argument were funded by Greenpeace and seem to be more propaganda than science. Read the Wikipedia article about it.
That doesn't mean I don't agree with you that this could be a problem. The articles merely rehash the (forcibly) published data from Monsanto's studies, and I was appalled to see that those studies were: (1) very short-term (only 90 days compared with an average lifetime of 2-3 years), and (2) seem to have been run on very small numbers of animals (it's hard to understand the wording of the anti-GM paper but it seems to me that no more than 80 mice ate the GM corn, of which only 40 had extensive testing like blood tests).
This seems to be because separate studies were done which just fed mice large doses of the pesticide which is being produced by the introduced gene (and the results were negative for significant toxicity). Still, living systems are complex and I'd prefer that the authorities would make Monsanto fund an independent lab to do more comprehensive testing of the whole plant.
Is this kind of like Silly Putty but the pictures glow in the dark?
> have more creative works and greater access to them than at any point in history. The system, flawed as it may be, works.
I'm willing to cede you that if your definition of "works" is that narrow, you might be right. Unfortunately, other people are also interested in things like anonymity, the ability to secretly share information without fear of government intervention, and other freedoms which they think are a bit more important than how many Hollywood blockbuster movies get released every year. "The system" is currently very successful financially, yet not so successful at preventing the implementation of anti-piracy procedures which infringe on these freedoms --- this is because all of the money is on the side of the hyper-enforcement of copyright side.
My apologies if when you wrote "the system" you meant "as it is now without PROTECT IP, COICA, ACTA, 3 strikes, etc.". My point is that copyright law seems continually evolving in one direction, towards more (and more onerous) copyright, and your observation that everything is actually working right should mean that it shouldn't be evolving at all.
You mean you never violate copyright law currently, not even a teensy, teensy, little tiny bit? WOW! How do you manage? Can I have your autograph?
I hate to tell you, but you probably violate copyright law several times a day, totally without being aware of it (with each violation potentially opening you up to damages of up to $150k in the US). Yes, copyright law is that f***ed-up....
Actually, your post reveals that you already violate copyright law, as you are knowledgeably encouraging a third party (your students) to infringe on the academic journals' copyrights by accessing the freely available materials for your course. Or did you mean "I would continue to freely violate"? Anyway, personally, I can only commend you for it. The more civil disobedience there is against the insanity of current copyright law, the better. Only in this way is there even a smidgen of a chance that the law will be reformed.
Yes, I had a gut feeling that when I spouted off without doing any real research I was simplifying a more complex reality --- but, hey, this is Slashdot, no?
I find the analogy between software (FOSS vs. commercial) and education interesting. As others posted, the "product" involved in education is much less well defined, as it's obviously not only the knowledge gained.
Color me cynical, but somehow I get the feeling that institutions whose clientele are exclusively the super-rich do not have a real stake in trying to minimize the disparity between their clients and the less fortunate. They may put up something "for everyone" for its PR value, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the same time they're emphasizing to their paying customers how much better is the education their kids are getting.
This is in contrast with private universities, which are also terribly expensive, but which have a tradition of valuing education for its social benefits. Even these universities may one day get to the point where they feel economically threatened by the free material they post (for example MIT's OpenCourseWare) --- for example, if a new demographic of students starts to appear which demand to pay less but only to be tested and certified for their degrees, because the free educational material available is good enough for them.
Your post is theoretically "right on the ball", but as Yogi Berra is attributed to say "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice, there is".
The amount of people who use your particular setup is going to be much smaller if it is very customized. This means two things: the amount of bugs in your setup which others are going to report will be smaller, and secondly, the projects bug-fixing efforts will discriminate against fixing those bugs compared to bugs in the default setup.
Without facts that I don't have, however, I cannot compare any particular customized setup under Ubuntu with a particular (almost certainly less popular) different distribution. And people who stick with Ubuntu will still gain benefit from the popularity of Ubuntu for fixing "core" bugs.
After reading this discussion, I also will probably end up sticking with Ubuntu, but customizing the UI (so in some ways, I suppose my gut feeling agrees with you). However, I certainly will look to download live versions of Mint and other distros to check out whether I think it might be worth my while to switch.
> Only if we schmear lamb's blood on our doorposts.
Jeez, I thought suing your customers was bad... and now you want to ritually sacrifice them????
> I'm saying that most atheists that will debate the subject understand this too.
I have no good grasp of the statistical breakdown amongst atheists between those that understand and those that don't, so I cannot refute you. My point was that at least some atheists exist (and possibly this correlates positively with how vocal and aggressive these atheists are in trying to refute theism) who don't understand this. In fact, several of the atheists who posted opinions in this discussion seemed to me to not have a good understanding of this issue.
Because it's falling into the trap I was talking about:
> Of course every interpretation, in its time, is touted as "The Truth".
assuming that you know that they relate to this as "The Truth" with Capitol Ts. The whole point of the the argument is that moderates often do not relate to their religious beliefs in this way (e.g., see this post), but sometimes vocal atheists, when arguing, put up fundamentalist world-views as strawmen, not even intentionally, but merely because they can't conceive of someone going to church every Sunday without fail, while at the same time not being sure that God exists or believing that particular Church's beliefs are "The Truth".
> As long as you call yourself a Christian you're going to be conflated with all the other people who do the same
True, but that doesn't make it right.
By analogy, I think you'd find it peculiar if, after you identify yourself as a geek, someone started relating to you in a particular fashion because he was absolutely convinced that geeks behave in a certain way, say like the cast of "The Big Bang Theory" --- when you yourself know that isn't exactly a good depiction of general "geek culture", and certainly not of your own behavior.
You're not replying to the point. The point is that identifying with a religious group which is intellectually defined by a set of beliefs does not at all necessitate believing those beliefs. So it doesn't matter that atheists know more about the definitions of the sects' beliefs, what they don't necessarily understand is how the group of people who identify with that sect relate to the beliefs of the sect --- often the atheists just assume that they actually believe, which is not at all necessarily true!
Take Conservative Judaism, for example. My friends who identify with this religious group tell me that in most congregations, only the rabbi and the cantor actually keep the Sabbath, follow the rules for kosher food, and all of the other formal rules which the Conservative movement espouses. The vast majority of the people who identify with this sect do not follow many of the rules which they are "supposed" to follow --- and only the FSM knows what they actually believe in. If you believe my friends, most of them go to the synagogue or belong to a congregation only for social reasons.
> It's belief that's the issue.
So how exactly do you interact with other humans normally? Considering that you have practically no scientific evidence as to what they actually think and believe given their outward appearance?
You actually create tens if not hundreds of practically unsupported hypotheses every day, and make decisions based on them. If that's not a form of belief, I don't know what is.
> That you think some of it is a parable just means you're egotistical enough to judge what you believe to be divinely inspired.
How ironic that this comment just means that you're egotistical enough to judge others' moderate religious beliefs egotistical.
Your sources are interesting but seem to deal with factual knowledge, not sociological knowledge which is what I was talking about. In my limited experience, vocal atheists tend to look at religion as being a bunch of beliefs held to be factual (and attack the lack of scientific truthfulness of the beliefs), when it seems to me that religion is actually a social phenomenon which for many "believers" is totally disconnected with scientific truth. That is, if someone says to a vocal atheist "I am a Christian", the vocal atheist immediate thinks he knows what that person believes, because he equates "Christianity" to "a set of beliefs" --- when the person actually only meant "I identify with a social group called Christians", and in many cases doesn't believe in "Christian canon" in a particular stereotypical way.
I have no statistics on what the breakdown is between the moderates and the loonies, tho. I am sure that the loonies are a lot more irritating and vocal than the moderates and therefore end up being overestimated as representing religion as a whole.
How is it then that I've managed to live over 40 years, and the vast majority of non-atheists I know only believe moderately in their religion, and use it solely for life transition ceremonies like marriage, birth, burial, or perhaps the annual Christmas eve mass "before the party"?
Oh, and by the way, I'm not Christian, nor do I believe in any major religion. But your assumption that I have religious beliefs is another data point which shows me that atheists who actively protest against religion tend to be aggressive about it. I admire your ardentness but must point out that not everyone who disagrees with you believes in what you think they believe in.
Just because the fundies are a lot louder than the moderates (see, I can bold stuff also), doesn't make them a majority in many locations, even in the US.
Your assumption that they are silent because they actively support the fundamentalist seems to me to need real statistics for confirmation. I take it that your reasoning is "because the percentage of non-fundamentalist Christians in the set of people actively protesting X is very small, this means that the majority of non-fundamentalist Christians support X". This seems to be erroneous reasoning, it only means that Christians are less likely to actively protest X compared to atheists. There are billions of Chinese atheists who also do not protest against anti-evolution crap, does this mean that they support it? It does, by your reasoning.
> Pretty much any belief in any part of the bible
I think you are confusing belief with "literal belief" --- the difference is sometimes used as the distinguishing feature between religion and fundamentalist religion. E.g., one Christian when reading creation story believes in it as a parable for the current physical understanding of the Big Bang and its aftermath, while a fundamentalist Christian reads it and believes that the whole deal took 7 days as we know them.
I have the distinct impression that many of the atheists who attempt to aggressively debunk religion actually have little understanding of what exactly they are debunking, never having done actual research into what the majority of moderately religious people actually believe and how it affects how they behave.
Check out this thread and this thread from Slashdot user GNUALMAFUERTE, who seems to be your man.
Being a strong agnostic myself, I found his emotional rants a rather interesting contrast to my cold position of indeterminacy --- and to top it off, I can now be proud that I've actually managed to have someone "foe" me on Slashdot!
I find it perfectly reasonable for someone to hold the belief that no evidence exists which would substantiate the more common models of deistic belief. This is, however, somewhat different than the kind of pushy atheism you're complaining about.
On the other hand, your argument stinks of the logical fallacy called "false continuum": "The idea that because there is no definitive demarcation line between two extremes, that the distinction between the extremes is not real or meaningful". Certainly there exist some "ideas of god" which are simply silly and do not stand up to simple tests. And there also exist abstract ideas of God which, I believe, are inherently unfalsifiable.