You may belong to a "liberal" Fundamentalist church, meaning that your parishoners don't hunt people who object to the theory of Intelligent Design, but make no mistake, your church is sanctioning the actions of the most radical.
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as an atheist.
There are two entirely separate beliefs here. The first is that the Bible is literally true. While I obviously believe that this is incorrect, it is nevertheless harmless. The second belief is the belief that all non-Christians must be purged from the land. This is the bad one. The two beliefs do not overlap at any point. I've met literalists who are very tolerant of other views and prepared to hold a rational debate, and I've met atheists who are absolute sodding nutters.
Saying that all Christians who take the Bible literally endorse the likes of George Bush and Jack Chick in any way, shape or form is directly equivalent to saying that all atheists endorse Stalin's views on religion. Intolerance does not follow from belief.
If we can assume that 99.9% of people disobeyed their parents at one time or another, we can safely say that parents, no matter how concerned or controlling, cannot regulate everything their children see and do.
Granted. However, in some areas, where exposure would tend to be more of a repetitive thing, you would expect parents to have some ability to control their offspring. For example, in the violent video games debate, you shouldn't expect parents to regulate what their children see at their friends' houses, but it's reasonable to expect them to notice if their children buy M-rated games themselves. Likewise, in terms of porn, you would expect parents to notice if their children are viewing porn regularly.
There needs to be a balance so that parents are given the tools they need to help protect their children. And one of the things kids need protection from is porn. Pop under ads, spyware, adware, hijacked IE preferences, and domain squatters are all gunning for our eyes and wallets. Kids being reeled in are just collateral damage to pornographers - future customers to others.
I totally agree that porn sites that employ things like pop-ups on non-porn sites, spyware and the like are evil, evil bastard-whores who must be found and killed (and not just for the childrens' sake). However, these threats generally require an entirely different set of tools (spyware/adware checkers, pop-up blockers, etc.) to deal with than the problem of children actively looking for porn, and you seem to be arguing for the latter set of tools rather than the former.
Now, I'm from Utah and I think Ralph Yarro is misguided. I think his plan is poorly thought out, but Hatch, who wanted to blow up my computer for using P2P networks, will probably love this guy, and maybe so will others. Sense and reason haven't always been employed when laws were passed. Not when a politician can look like a golden boy during an election by "saving the children".
*Sigh* I know exactly what you mean.
One issue that hasn't been discussed much is addiction. Why isn't the fact that pornography is addictive gaining any traction?
I would dispute this as a valid point against pornography. Just about everything is addictive. Gaming is addictive. Tasty food is addictive. Alcohol is addictive. Reading is addictive. (You'll probably want to contest that one, but I'm sure you can remember a few times you stayed up late to finish a book and ended up half-dead from sleep deprivation in the morning.) I, personally, am addicted to computers. I literally start to get mental withdrawal symptoms if I can't use one for a few days. I don't care though, because there are no real long-term effects except (perhaps) a good job later in life.
This is the most harmful aspect of porn on the mind. It's one thing to enjoy a woman's naked form. It's another to be compelled to enjoy hundreds of them all in one sitting. Nameless, sometimes faceless, they depersonalize sex while feeding a craving. Can anyone really argue that this addiction to sexual stimulation is not damaging to relationships or one's own mind?
*Blink* Addiction to sexual stimulation comes with being young (at least for males - not sure about females). Testosterone. Think about it. The only question is where the "fix" is going to come from, and in most cases the answer is Mrs. Palm and her five lovely daughters. Porn is in this sense simply an aid - without it, the mind would simply be visualising naked women rather than seeing them. Whether or not the addiction is harmful to relationships, it long predated porn.
Young minds don't know these are actors playing out fantasies for profit. They certainly don't know these actors are surgically augmented. It's enough to give any sex an inferiority complex. At best kids are growing up thinking that sex lasts for hours and involves awkward poses - oh and you need to look like Ken and Barbie. At worst they expect women to beg to be covered in body fluids while swingi
I can't find one either, actually. I think (but without an archive of Mark's blog I can't be sure) it might be because Google's paranoid about secrets being leaked and has a policy (official or unofficial) against blogging about work. I guess the blog being put back up with financial information removed could support that. I think there was also a description of a seminar in the first day that could have caused the first entry to be nixed. That could explain why Mark was fired (he'd just started at Google - maybe he didn't know the rules), and also why no-one's blogging about the Google culture. I'm guessing here, though.
I really don't see your point here. Result two is a gigantic list of Google employee blogs. Results one and four are stories about a Google blog getting taken down after criticism of the company, true, but result three says the blog went back up in a few days minus a few pieces of slightly sensitive (positive) financial information. The criticism was still there.
Check before you post next time. Darwin was Christian - and literalist, at that - for most of the time he was working on his theory. Even after he renounced Christianity in 1851, he was more of an agnostic than anything else. He even kept helping with parish work - hardly the actions of someone with an "anti-religious agenda".
At first glance you think "6 years for spam...damn that's harsh".
Actually, as far as I'm concerned there's only one fit punishment for a spammer:
1) Nail his genitalia to a tree.
2) Hand him a butter knife.
3) Set the tree on fire.
4) If he survives step 3, shoot him. (No sense in risking re-offence!)
Seriously, these people take the pristine fountain of communication that is e-mail and, with malice of forethought, piss in it. Six years is too light a sentence for a prolific spammer.
So... He's both doing anything he can to help find a cure, and refusing to let the medical community run any more tests on him. So how does he think they'll be able to find a cure without testing him? Perhaps he believes doctors have psychic powers, but only reveal them at times of great need?
Or perhaps RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy, Baten Kaitos, Harvest Moon), FPSes (Metroid Prime comes to mind), or survival horror games (like Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness). I'm really getting tired of people bashing Nintendo for being 'kiddy' when it is now blatantly false.
Had I the time to do the research while sitting here at work, I'd love to.
Maybe I'll bother on Wikipedia soon, or maybe you should try Google Research instead.
I did. I couldn't find anyone. The only two promising candidates I did find don't qualify:
- Lee Spetner (a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist with a PhD from MIT) attacks Darwinian evolution, but at no point endorses Intelligent Design as a theory. In fact, on closer examination he argues that macroevolution does in fact occur - just not in the Darwinian fashion (see the 'From the Author' section).
- Frank Tipler (a mathematical physicist, currently a professor at Tulane) may believe in intelligent design, but I have been unable to find any evidence that he believes this is a scientific theory and should be taught in schools. The Wikipedia article on the ID movement states that he sympathises with the aims of the Discovery Institute, but I have been unable to find any quote or statement from him to this effect and for this reason I believe the article is inaccurate. Furthermore, his one generally publicised work on the subject of creation (The Anthropomorphic Cosmology Principle) focuses not on conventional ID but a similar argument unrelated to evolution (that the constants of the universe appear to be finely tuned to allow intelligent life to arise).
I haven't read the books, so correct me if I'm wrong.
That said, intelligent design is a very recent version of creationism that does not require that the Christian God is the 'intelligence' in question, since that part of the equation would be very difficult to prove (as per your complaint).
It doesn't require the Christian God, true, but the presence of any intelligence at all in the process makes no falsifiable predictions that I can see.
I'd like to digress here too -- much of the complaint by those who wish to have these other ideas pointed out in said science classrooms is simply that much of evolutionary theory (in terms of 'origin of the species', or what creationists often call 'macro-evolution') has numerous problems and holes (no I'm not going to enumerate here, this is Slashdot) despite its various predictions.
Speaking as someone who hasn't made a detailed study of the evidence in support as macroevolution, I can't truthfully say I know the theory's without holes - even gaping holes. I believe it is, because the principle makes sense and the scientists who have examined the evidence mostly believe it, but I acknowledge that belief without full examination of the evidence is worth very little.
However, evolution does at least have a good deal of evidence in favour of it, in the form of microevolution, statistical data and paleontological finds. I haven't seen any evidence in favour of intelligent design - all of the arguments in favour of it seem to focus exclusively on attacking evolution rather than proving intelligent design. In other words, even if evolution is false, it does not follow that intelligent design is true and there is no evidence to support the idea. I could be wrong here - tell me if you know any arguments.
The complaint leads to 'why are uneducated teachers refering to evolution as a factual account of the origin of life on earth when so many people disagree?' Again, cf. the poll by (CNN?) showing that a vast majority of americans believe a 'god' created the planet and humanity as it is now.
The fact that a large number of people disagree with a statement doesn't make it false. Counterexample for the American population: "America won Vietnam". I could also argue that the lack of belief simply reflects a lack of education, or poor education, about the concept of evolution. For example, the m
Which, if you did your job right, would be the bottom of the loop, so it would break out the instant the termination condition becomes true.
And if there are multiple termination conditions which occur at different points in the loop and preclude further execution of the loop? I'd say it's cleaner to break out than add if(!termination_condition) statements encapsulating the rest of the loop at each potential breakpoint. Even if they don't preclude further execution, breaking seems cleaner than setting a bool, letting the loop run to completion and then checking the bool's state in the termination condition.
If I'm missing something here, please tell me - I'm an amateur programmer and I don't really like breaking out of loops either.
Because, in the scientific community, ID is not a hot-button issue. No true scientist believes that Intelligent Design is compatible with the scientific method.
Do some more reading before making blanket statements like that.
It's patently false.
Please give me one counter-example of someone generally accepted as a scientist by the scientific community at large who believes that ID is a scientific theory. (Note the distinction between accepting that someone is a scientist and accepting their views.) I made the blanket statement in good faith, and will gladly retract it given proof to the contrary. However, to my knowledge, only one peer-reviewed paper in support of ID has ever been published, in which the phrase "Intelligent Design" appears only once (excluding the bibliography), and then non-capitalised. That seems to indicate a profound lack of real scientists who believe that ID is a scientific theory.
Just to be absolutely clear - I'm not asking for examples of scientists who believe ID may potentially be correct. I'm certainly not asking for examples of scientists who believe in God - a belief in God is (as far as I can see) totally compatible with a belief in science. I'm just asking for a generally accepted scientist who believes that ID is a valid scientific theory and is therefore compatible with the scientific method. I've honestly never heard of one.
By the way, please address the main point I raised in the parent post - that ID makes no falsifiable predictions and is therefore not a scientific theory.
That's exactly what I was thinking. This is mis-use of Copyright if I've ever seen it.
Granted, although in this case it's for a good cause.
(disclaimer: I'm a Christian, and I have no problem with creationism as science, if you do, you probably don't understand the term "science")
As I understand it, science is a way of obtaining knowledge by means of constructing theories and rigorously testing the falsifiable predictions of said theories. For example, the luminiferous aether theory was discarded in favour of relativity primarily because Earth's predicted movement through the aether could not be detected. Intelligent Design makes no such falsifiable predictions. So while intelligence design might be true, it is not by any means a scientific theory.
That said, how can you believe a science education is well-balanced when you want to pick and choose on the hot-button issues?
Because, in the scientific community, ID is not a hot-button issue. No true scientist believes that Intelligent Design is compatible with the scientific method.
Does anyone care that plenty of highschools use the book of Job (see christian/judaic/muslim bible) for language studies (for many reasons), or that we teach kids about pagan rituals in grade-school or that we discuss and teach ancient myths of Egypt, Greece and Rome?
Not really, no. That's because if you use the Old Testament to teach ancient Greek or Hebrew, you are, in fact, still teaching ancient Greek or Hebrew. If you teach children about ancient mythology in history, you are, in fact, teaching history. If you teach intelligent design in science classes as anything other than an example of how not to do it, you are no longer teaching science. That is the issue.
And "christian/judaic/muslim bible"? Even I know that should be "Bible/Tanakh/Qur'an", and I'm an atheist!
Is there something inherently harmful about teaching people truth? Should we honestly censor it?
We aren't censoring you. You're perfectly free to teach children intelligent design as an alternative means of creation. We're just saying that it shouldn't be taught as science, as opposed to philosophy or theology, as it's not a scientific theory. It would be like requiring that evolution be taught as an alternative means of creation in fundamentalist theology classes.
And yes, I said it, truth. There's nothing untrue about "the greeks believed in Aphrodite" any more or less than "some scientists believe the world was created by intelligent design".
True. And while we're at it, let's give the Flat Earth theory equal time in Geography! After all, some people who claim to be scientists believe it!
True, but since they're only talking about giving pizza to computer science/engineering-type students it seems to be more about selling Google as a workplace than selling Google's products. And just about EVERY large company needs to recruit from the universities, at least to some degree.
We very rarely hear of research actually failing because it's hardly a newsworthy event. Very few scientific journals are going to print anything about a useless result when there are so many results that actually have a bearing on modern science to be published - at least, unless the experiment is very high profile. For similar reasons, when an experiment fails, the scientist's natural reaction is to try again rather than to publish, at least unless there's no other option (as in your example).
In other words, failures HAPPEN all the time - we just don't get to hear about them because normally they're neither a major setback nor newsworthy.
I see your point and agree that the practice is necessary, and that in another case they might have had a good reason, but according to TFA the quick patch was released on the 12th of April. The full patch was only released this month, and only then after Cesar Cerrudo released a paper on the inadequate patch. Not really the time gap you'd expect if they'd intended a full patch in the first place.
This has got to be a troll, but I'll bite. The global porn industry is worth about 60 billion dollars. Assuming an average annual expenditure per pundit of fifty dollars (which seems high), that's a total of about 1.2 billion people paying for porn worldwide. Even ignoring the people who get their porn free (probably at least another billion), and the people without access to porn, that makes 20% of the global population who should, by your logic, be exposing themselves in public.
Now, while I haven't checked the incidence of exhibitionist crimes in America, somehow I doubt they reflect your view of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I'm speaking as an atheist.
There are two entirely separate beliefs here. The first is that the Bible is literally true. While I obviously believe that this is incorrect, it is nevertheless harmless. The second belief is the belief that all non-Christians must be purged from the land. This is the bad one. The two beliefs do not overlap at any point. I've met literalists who are very tolerant of other views and prepared to hold a rational debate, and I've met atheists who are absolute sodding nutters.
Saying that all Christians who take the Bible literally endorse the likes of George Bush and Jack Chick in any way, shape or form is directly equivalent to saying that all atheists endorse Stalin's views on religion. Intolerance does not follow from belief.
Now why, oh why, can't more conservative Christians be like you? Bravo!
It is legal to sell R-rated movies to minors. Video game content should be treated no differently.
Granted. However, in some areas, where exposure would tend to be more of a repetitive thing, you would expect parents to have some ability to control their offspring. For example, in the violent video games debate, you shouldn't expect parents to regulate what their children see at their friends' houses, but it's reasonable to expect them to notice if their children buy M-rated games themselves. Likewise, in terms of porn, you would expect parents to notice if their children are viewing porn regularly.
There needs to be a balance so that parents are given the tools they need to help protect their children. And one of the things kids need protection from is porn. Pop under ads, spyware, adware, hijacked IE preferences, and domain squatters are all gunning for our eyes and wallets. Kids being reeled in are just collateral damage to pornographers - future customers to others.
I totally agree that porn sites that employ things like pop-ups on non-porn sites, spyware and the like are evil, evil bastard-whores who must be found and killed (and not just for the childrens' sake). However, these threats generally require an entirely different set of tools (spyware/adware checkers, pop-up blockers, etc.) to deal with than the problem of children actively looking for porn, and you seem to be arguing for the latter set of tools rather than the former.
Now, I'm from Utah and I think Ralph Yarro is misguided. I think his plan is poorly thought out, but Hatch, who wanted to blow up my computer for using P2P networks, will probably love this guy, and maybe so will others. Sense and reason haven't always been employed when laws were passed. Not when a politician can look like a golden boy during an election by "saving the children".
*Sigh* I know exactly what you mean.
One issue that hasn't been discussed much is addiction. Why isn't the fact that pornography is addictive gaining any traction?
I would dispute this as a valid point against pornography. Just about everything is addictive. Gaming is addictive. Tasty food is addictive. Alcohol is addictive. Reading is addictive. (You'll probably want to contest that one, but I'm sure you can remember a few times you stayed up late to finish a book and ended up half-dead from sleep deprivation in the morning.) I, personally, am addicted to computers. I literally start to get mental withdrawal symptoms if I can't use one for a few days. I don't care though, because there are no real long-term effects except (perhaps) a good job later in life.
This is the most harmful aspect of porn on the mind. It's one thing to enjoy a woman's naked form. It's another to be compelled to enjoy hundreds of them all in one sitting. Nameless, sometimes faceless, they depersonalize sex while feeding a craving. Can anyone really argue that this addiction to sexual stimulation is not damaging to relationships or one's own mind?
*Blink* Addiction to sexual stimulation comes with being young (at least for males - not sure about females). Testosterone. Think about it. The only question is where the "fix" is going to come from, and in most cases the answer is Mrs. Palm and her five lovely daughters. Porn is in this sense simply an aid - without it, the mind would simply be visualising naked women rather than seeing them. Whether or not the addiction is harmful to relationships, it long predated porn.
Young minds don't know these are actors playing out fantasies for profit. They certainly don't know these actors are surgically augmented. It's enough to give any sex an inferiority complex. At best kids are growing up thinking that sex lasts for hours and involves awkward poses - oh and you need to look like Ken and Barbie. At worst they expect women to beg to be covered in body fluids while swingi
I can't find one either, actually. I think (but without an archive of Mark's blog I can't be sure) it might be because Google's paranoid about secrets being leaked and has a policy (official or unofficial) against blogging about work. I guess the blog being put back up with financial information removed could support that. I think there was also a description of a seminar in the first day that could have caused the first entry to be nixed. That could explain why Mark was fired (he'd just started at Google - maybe he didn't know the rules), and also why no-one's blogging about the Google culture. I'm guessing here, though.
I really don't see your point here. Result two is a gigantic list of Google employee blogs. Results one and four are stories about a Google blog getting taken down after criticism of the company, true, but result three says the blog went back up in a few days minus a few pieces of slightly sensitive (positive) financial information. The criticism was still there.
Check before you post next time. Darwin was Christian - and literalist, at that - for most of the time he was working on his theory. Even after he renounced Christianity in 1851, he was more of an agnostic than anything else. He even kept helping with parish work - hardly the actions of someone with an "anti-religious agenda".
At first glance you think "6 years for spam...damn that's harsh". Actually, as far as I'm concerned there's only one fit punishment for a spammer: 1) Nail his genitalia to a tree. 2) Hand him a butter knife. 3) Set the tree on fire. 4) If he survives step 3, shoot him. (No sense in risking re-offence!) Seriously, these people take the pristine fountain of communication that is e-mail and, with malice of forethought, piss in it. Six years is too light a sentence for a prolific spammer.
So... He's both doing anything he can to help find a cure, and refusing to let the medical community run any more tests on him. So how does he think they'll be able to find a cure without testing him? Perhaps he believes doctors have psychic powers, but only reveal them at times of great need?
Or perhaps RPGs (e.g. Final Fantasy, Baten Kaitos, Harvest Moon), FPSes (Metroid Prime comes to mind), or survival horror games (like Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness). I'm really getting tired of people bashing Nintendo for being 'kiddy' when it is now blatantly false.
I'd recommend you check out this page. They do in fact still teach fractions in Mississippi.
I did. I couldn't find anyone. The only two promising candidates I did find don't qualify:
- Lee Spetner (a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist with a PhD from MIT) attacks Darwinian evolution, but at no point endorses Intelligent Design as a theory. In fact, on closer examination he argues that macroevolution does in fact occur - just not in the Darwinian fashion (see the 'From the Author' section).
- Frank Tipler (a mathematical physicist, currently a professor at Tulane) may believe in intelligent design, but I have been unable to find any evidence that he believes this is a scientific theory and should be taught in schools. The Wikipedia article on the ID movement states that he sympathises with the aims of the Discovery Institute, but I have been unable to find any quote or statement from him to this effect and for this reason I believe the article is inaccurate. Furthermore, his one generally publicised work on the subject of creation (The Anthropomorphic Cosmology Principle) focuses not on conventional ID but a similar argument unrelated to evolution (that the constants of the universe appear to be finely tuned to allow intelligent life to arise).
I haven't read the books, so correct me if I'm wrong.
That said, intelligent design is a very recent version of creationism that does not require that the Christian God is the 'intelligence' in question, since that part of the equation would be very difficult to prove (as per your complaint).
It doesn't require the Christian God, true, but the presence of any intelligence at all in the process makes no falsifiable predictions that I can see.
I'd like to digress here too -- much of the complaint by those who wish to have these other ideas pointed out in said science classrooms is simply that much of evolutionary theory (in terms of 'origin of the species', or what creationists often call 'macro-evolution') has numerous problems and holes (no I'm not going to enumerate here, this is Slashdot) despite its various predictions.
Speaking as someone who hasn't made a detailed study of the evidence in support as macroevolution, I can't truthfully say I know the theory's without holes - even gaping holes. I believe it is, because the principle makes sense and the scientists who have examined the evidence mostly believe it, but I acknowledge that belief without full examination of the evidence is worth very little.
However, evolution does at least have a good deal of evidence in favour of it, in the form of microevolution, statistical data and paleontological finds. I haven't seen any evidence in favour of intelligent design - all of the arguments in favour of it seem to focus exclusively on attacking evolution rather than proving intelligent design. In other words, even if evolution is false, it does not follow that intelligent design is true and there is no evidence to support the idea. I could be wrong here - tell me if you know any arguments.
The complaint leads to 'why are uneducated teachers refering to evolution as a factual account of the origin of life on earth when so many people disagree?' Again, cf. the poll by (CNN?) showing that a vast majority of americans believe a 'god' created the planet and humanity as it is now.
The fact that a large number of people disagree with a statement doesn't make it false. Counterexample for the American population: "America won Vietnam". I could also argue that the lack of belief simply reflects a lack of education, or poor education, about the concept of evolution. For example, the m
And if there are multiple termination conditions which occur at different points in the loop and preclude further execution of the loop? I'd say it's cleaner to break out than add if(!termination_condition) statements encapsulating the rest of the loop at each potential breakpoint. Even if they don't preclude further execution, breaking seems cleaner than setting a bool, letting the loop run to completion and then checking the bool's state in the termination condition.
If I'm missing something here, please tell me - I'm an amateur programmer and I don't really like breaking out of loops either.
Just to be absolutely clear - I'm not asking for examples of scientists who believe ID may potentially be correct. I'm certainly not asking for examples of scientists who believe in God - a belief in God is (as far as I can see) totally compatible with a belief in science. I'm just asking for a generally accepted scientist who believes that ID is a valid scientific theory and is therefore compatible with the scientific method. I've honestly never heard of one.
By the way, please address the main point I raised in the parent post - that ID makes no falsifiable predictions and is therefore not a scientific theory.
And "christian/judaic/muslim bible"? Even I know that should be "Bible/Tanakh/Qur'an", and I'm an atheist!
We aren't censoring you. You're perfectly free to teach children intelligent design as an alternative means of creation. We're just saying that it shouldn't be taught as science, as opposed to philosophy or theology, as it's not a scientific theory. It would be like requiring that evolution be taught as an alternative means of creation in fundamentalist theology classes. True. And while we're at it, let's give the Flat Earth theory equal time in Geography! After all, some people who claim to be scientists believe it!True, but since they're only talking about giving pizza to computer science/engineering-type students it seems to be more about selling Google as a workplace than selling Google's products. And just about EVERY large company needs to recruit from the universities, at least to some degree.
We very rarely hear of research actually failing because it's hardly a newsworthy event. Very few scientific journals are going to print anything about a useless result when there are so many results that actually have a bearing on modern science to be published - at least, unless the experiment is very high profile. For similar reasons, when an experiment fails, the scientist's natural reaction is to try again rather than to publish, at least unless there's no other option (as in your example). In other words, failures HAPPEN all the time - we just don't get to hear about them because normally they're neither a major setback nor newsworthy.
I see your point and agree that the practice is necessary, and that in another case they might have had a good reason, but according to TFA the quick patch was released on the 12th of April. The full patch was only released this month, and only then after Cesar Cerrudo released a paper on the inadequate patch. Not really the time gap you'd expect if they'd intended a full patch in the first place.
Fair enough - my bad. I thought you were referring to people who watched porn full stop - sorry! I totally agree.
This has got to be a troll, but I'll bite. The global porn industry is worth about 60 billion dollars. Assuming an average annual expenditure per pundit of fifty dollars (which seems high), that's a total of about 1.2 billion people paying for porn worldwide. Even ignoring the people who get their porn free (probably at least another billion), and the people without access to porn, that makes 20% of the global population who should, by your logic, be exposing themselves in public. Now, while I haven't checked the incidence of exhibitionist crimes in America, somehow I doubt they reflect your view of reality.