I'm sorry but as an atheist and wholehearted supporter of evolution, I still have to admit that Dawkins is an asshole.
As much as I used to be a fan of his writings, he seems to have blind faith that religion is the cause of every single problem in the entire universe, however unrelated, and is not afraid to admit it in the most asinine way possible. I don't like religion, but he takes it to quite a ridiculous extreme.
That being said, it shouldn't prevent him from speaking or anything. Universities invite assholes to speak all the time.
Well, since science is obviously irrelevant in the abortion debate when up against the rantings of religious fanatics, if we're going to ban abortion we should ban it in the christian way.
And in all the writtings of early christians and the early catholic church, it's not the brain that develops over time but the soul. The soul starts out as the equivalent of a plant-soul (okay to kill) then over time develops into an animal-soul (okay to kill), then into a human soul (OH NO!). This last stage was supposed to be reached about 60-90 days after conception.
This is why christian groups, including the Catholic Church have always been pro-abortion (during the first 60 days of pregnancy) until modern times. Now that it can be turned into a wedge issue and one of the few remaining tools left the church has to screw with women, all the religious doctrine goes out the window and suddenly every sperm is sacred!
Thus I claim that all christians that oppose abortion in the first 60 days of pregnancy are either bad christians or must allow religious dogma to change over time ( and thus have no excuse for hating gays).
P.S: I know in the bible, it specifically says not to have abortions, but for most of the church's history, people who violated this were treated no worse than those who violated the ban on masturbation or working on Sunday. You paid a small fine to the church and everything was okay. Early abortions weren't considered "murder" until modern times.
If you RTFA, it says he's getting macbooks, not cheap easily breakable laptops.
I've had my macbook forever, including back in highschool. I treated it like crap, dropped it all the time, lugged it around in my backpack which I tossed around carelessly. I ate food while using my macbook and even spilled a bottle of water on the keyboard (I freaked out and flipped the computer over so the water could drain, but the computer was fine, didn't even miss a beat on the video I was watching.)
The only thing that doesn't last in a macbook is the power cord. They're cheaply made and break easily. The rest of the computer is still completely fine (except for scars and a somewhat warped frame).
In the US, its not fashionable to know math or science.
In most of the world through most of history (with definite exceptions) knowledge of math and science were not fashionable.
Just look what happened to Galileo.
It's not fashionable to work hard.
This is how it's been for most of history. (except for the wacky puritans who thought they'd go to hell if they didn't work) If work was fun, they wouldn't have to pay you for it.
'Being liked' is in. Girls are encouraged to look pretty
As opposed to the good old days when 'being hated' was in and girls were encouraged to be ugly? 'Being liked' is always in and outside of fundamentalist religious groups, girls have always been encouraged to look pretty.
and boys are encouraged to be force wielding leaders (to later wind up as PHB's?).
People have always wanted to have power. The only difference is that now we have a slight amount of class mobility and so normal people who dream of becoming powerful leaders might actually be able to.
Look at kids' movies and TV shows. The message is that all you have to do is believe in yourself.
I think more often, the message stressed is obedience. For example, look at Finding Nemo (number 1 grossing G rated movie). It's about a Fish who get's screwed over because he doesn't listen to his dad.
Prosperity is being taken as a birthright.
Damn, let's go back to when it actually was a birthright.
I half wonder if the outcry against illegal aliens is due to the fact that these people work hard.
This one might be right, but I think there's also a pretty strong race factor.
And from your other post:
So what caused the shift from an emphasis on inward appearance to outward? Why force as a tool of leadership, instead of love?
When did leaders ever rule out of love? The more you go back in time, the more brutal leaders tend to get.
It really bugs me that people are always trying to get back to the "good old days" when these "good old days" that they yearn for never actually existed.
And that is my review of Phantom of the Opera's revenge of the nerds post.
It's time to start a union how long before more stuff comes up that cut's you pay.
Why did this get a -1 troll?
Okay, let me explain how this works. Just because somebody posts something that doesn't agree to "the great libertarian ideas of Ron Paul" doesn't mean it should be marked as a troll. There is no -1 "I Disagree". Stop modding people down for having differing political views.
In the past when workers were getting screwed, they formed unions and things got better. Now, union membership is dropping and they're getting screwed again. It seems pretty obvious to me that workers need to start unionizing again. (That and voting out corrupt union bosses who sell out to the companies.)
Your pie chart includes things like "Veterasns benefits" separate from defense. I do agree that after asking these people to die for their government you better as hell at least give them benefits. But without our excessive warmongering, there wouldn't be nearly as many veterans. So I think, until we start fighting wars without humans, we can include "veterans benefits" as part of money spent on military and wars.
And Interest on debt doesn't count at all in your pie chart? Well, I'm glad to see that instead of spending money on the military, we're spending money paying off interest for the loans we took out in order to finance our military.
And social security? Social security isn't even part of the taxes collected. It's pretty much just a pyramid scheme that steals from the young to give to the old. But it just shuffles money around among various people, the government doesn't actually spend it anywhere. The government only puts that into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.
Not to mention that a lot of the money for the war on terror is financed outside the official yearly budget and so doesn't even go into your pie chart. Though it may not be in the yearly budget, it is still a part of the governments budget that you and I still pay with our tax dollars.
Then again, wth is a "terrorist video"? \ Any video without a proudly flying american flag is a terrorist video. Or at least that's what I figure after watching fox.
Actually as far as colors actually being produced by the monitor it is multiplicative and thus 766. Because the reds greens and blues are mixed together by your eye, you appear to see 255^3 colors even though only 255*3 are being created.
I think the point he was trying to make is that all color resolutions are based upon what is seen by the eye, not what is actually produced and so Apple's strategy of using dithering to make the eye see new colors is nothing new but an extension of the same strategy (if I can combine red and blue subpixels to make purple, why not combine pixels of two different shades of red to make a third shade of red?).
My mac screen uses dithering and it can get millions of colors on ALL RESOLUTIONS just like they advertised (no, I didn't take their word for it, I checked myself, just now. Nothing beats observation and experimentation.)
I know everybody likes to accuse liars but suing Apple because they use combine colored pixels to produce colors is just as ridiculous as suing a company for making purple by mixing red and blue light. Now if Apple said they don't use dithering and used dithering, that would be bad. But they just said they can produce millions of colors. And their screens do produce millions of colors. So find something legitimate to whine about Apple for (like their non-replaceable ipod batteries).
Umm, no. Environmentalists were always huge opponents to Biofuel. The main reason I was skeptical about biofeul was because if all the Environmentalists are opposed to something that politicians say "will help the environment", something seemed pretty wrong.
When Bush last visited Brazil there were Environmentalists protesting his visit. Why? Because Bush was supporting biofeul and biofeul companies were cutting down their rainforests for sugarcane.
Here's an article about environmentalists opposing biofuel because it would damage the bay that I found in about 2 seconds, you can find stuff like this everywhere:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/16/AR2007071601845.html
Environmentalists have always been the staunchest opponents of biofuel that I've seen (though of course probably not for the same reasons you may have opposed it). I know they tend to also be nuts and are easy to make fun of, but it looks like they got it right for once.
At first I thought your post was probably meant as a troll but when you got a (5 interesting) from an ignorant rant about something you apparently know nothing about, it seems that you aren't the only one to base their perception of environmentalists on what politicians say rather than what environmentalists actually say.
Though the "corporations" represent real people, they do not represent "The People". They represent a select group of The People that happened to invest in that particular corporation. On the other hand governements aren't alive either and the government does represent "The People" (though they may not do this as well as some may like, they represent "The People" better than any one corporation).
So actually this is a win for a select group of people who invested in Google against The People and thus evil.
Though anybody who actually believed Google would do no evil just because they said so need to stop drinking the kool-aid. Public corporations are required by law to try and make money, even if they must be "evil" to do it.
Of course there should be some things that the country needs to keep secret for national security purposes. Though the number of things it needs to keep secret 25 years later should be EXTREMELY small. One of the things I'm fed up with is the assumption that everything the government is trying to keep secret is for national security purposes while everything people want to keep secret must be some sort of thing they're doing wrong. The government has no reason to be spying on it's citizens, the citizens should be the government's boss. The government should thus let the citizens know EVERYTHING it possibly can without causing serious national security risks and the current government's "declare everything classified" policy is definitly the wrong direction. This isn't utopian, it's the principle America was founded on.
I love how when Bush tries to spy on the American people, all the neofacists chime in with the "if people aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't mind if the government knows their business" bit but when people want to be able to see what the government (also made of people, but with more power and more corrupt) is doing, the neofacists instantly defend the government's right to privacy.
I'm sorry but this is America we're talking about. We the people, rule America. The government should answer to the people and report to the people. Instead of the government spying on the people, the people should be spying on the government. This shouldn't be about left or right, liberal or conservative, it is about being American or being Facist.
Okay let's think about this logically:
If 99% of human DNA is the same then that means any two humans are going to have at least 99% in common (because that is the 99% that is the same in all humans)
chimps have 98%
which doesn't mean that there are two people such that one is equally different than the person
so yes, if you throw logic to the wind and pull stuff out of your ass(pretty common on slashdot it seems), you can make crazy inferences
The difference is that JMRI is constantly getting the **** beat out of them in court by this patent troll. They've already ran into many problems and lost lots of $'s.
Lots of the nasty criminals have something wrong with their brain. Even if it wasn't genetic it usually takes serious abuse (not just bad parenting) to screw somebody up and this abuse may or may not have anything to do with their parents (their gym teacher could have been a pedophile). Despite common conceptions, parenting doesn't effect the child's personally that much(beyond manners, beliefs, etc) unless it is outright abusive. A parent of a bad kid can be tough as nails, but it'll just encourage the kid to hide their bad activities from their parent.
Besides, if we are to hold the parents responsible for not magically raising their kid to be perfect, why not hold the parents' parents for not raising their kids to be able raise good kids. And what about their other kids? They were raised by the same parents. Hell, might as well just throw anybody related to the criminal in jail with them.
People have free will (whether this is some God-given right or because the randomness of neuron firings make people do unexpected things) and you can't always blame something on somebody's parent. You can't blame it on the porn they watch. When a person does something wrong it is that person who should receive the blame.
Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like
to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president.
May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For
now.
Yep,
From the human rights review in the legal section (there's something about this in the questions too but they seem to be more truthful in the legal section, mentioning that it actually can cause hearing damage in long term exposure):
"2. As the transmission of the sound produced by the Device is directional and as high frequency wavelengths do not travel through solid objects, we do not consider that it is likely that the Device will cause a nuisance to neighbours of its users. "
Since this is not heard by adults because it is a very high frequency and since it doesn't travel that far even through open air, I doubt it could bemuch of bother sleeping nearby or such since you wouldn't be able to hear it through the walls of your house.
Don't burn your voter registration cards. We live in a democracy and so votes are the most powerful way of affecting government. If all the people who oppose the current gov'ts nonsense didn't vote, we'd likely slide completely into facism. Whatever you do, you NEED to vote. What needs to happen is that the people who realize what is going on need to ALL go out and vote.
Hacking Diebold voting machines to make them actually be accurate would probably help too. Or maybe they should be altered to all report that one of those nutso "UFOs are attacking the earth with zombies" people won a congressional election so people will actually realize how flawed the system is.
The reason apple is popular isn't because they have lot's of shiny ads. Okay, maybe that's one reason but microsoft has lots of shiny ads too. The reason apple is popular is because it is EASIER TO USE. Slashdotters often seem to forget that most of the world are not geeks and don't want to have to deal with making things work. With windows you actually have to solve your own problems and do work to get your computer to do what you want it to do. Macs just work, do a lot of your work for you, allow you to be lazy, and allow you to have almost no knowledge of computers.
Macs may be slower, they may be uglier, they may be more expensive, but they don't make a non-geek's life a living hell the way a windows box does. Since the majority of the world consists of non-geeks, it is likely that most people would use macs if everything wasn't so currently entrenched in Microsoft's monopoly.
If you RTFA, you'll see that they never say the earth was this warm 1200 years ago, it's just that that's the farthest back they were able to check. They never found a time warmer than it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but as an atheist and wholehearted supporter of evolution, I still have to admit that Dawkins is an asshole.
As much as I used to be a fan of his writings, he seems to have blind faith that religion is the cause of every single problem in the entire universe, however unrelated, and is not afraid to admit it in the most asinine way possible. I don't like religion, but he takes it to quite a ridiculous extreme.
That being said, it shouldn't prevent him from speaking or anything. Universities invite assholes to speak all the time.
Well, since science is obviously irrelevant in the abortion debate when up against the rantings of religious fanatics, if we're going to ban abortion we should ban it in the christian way.
And in all the writtings of early christians and the early catholic church, it's not the brain that develops over time but the soul. The soul starts out as the equivalent of a plant-soul (okay to kill) then over time develops into an animal-soul (okay to kill), then into a human soul (OH NO!). This last stage was supposed to be reached about 60-90 days after conception.
This is why christian groups, including the Catholic Church have always been pro-abortion (during the first 60 days of pregnancy) until modern times. Now that it can be turned into a wedge issue and one of the few remaining tools left the church has to screw with women, all the religious doctrine goes out the window and suddenly every sperm is sacred!
Thus I claim that all christians that oppose abortion in the first 60 days of pregnancy are either bad christians or must allow religious dogma to change over time ( and thus have no excuse for hating gays).
P.S: I know in the bible, it specifically says not to have abortions, but for most of the church's history, people who violated this were treated no worse than those who violated the ban on masturbation or working on Sunday. You paid a small fine to the church and everything was okay. Early abortions weren't considered "murder" until modern times.
If you RTFA, it says he's getting macbooks, not cheap easily breakable laptops. I've had my macbook forever, including back in highschool. I treated it like crap, dropped it all the time, lugged it around in my backpack which I tossed around carelessly. I ate food while using my macbook and even spilled a bottle of water on the keyboard (I freaked out and flipped the computer over so the water could drain, but the computer was fine, didn't even miss a beat on the video I was watching.) The only thing that doesn't last in a macbook is the power cord. They're cheaply made and break easily. The rest of the computer is still completely fine (except for scars and a somewhat warped frame).
In the US, its not fashionable to know math or science.
In most of the world through most of history (with definite exceptions) knowledge of math and science were not fashionable. Just look what happened to Galileo.
It's not fashionable to work hard.
This is how it's been for most of history. (except for the wacky puritans who thought they'd go to hell if they didn't work) If work was fun, they wouldn't have to pay you for it.
'Being liked' is in. Girls are encouraged to look pretty
As opposed to the good old days when 'being hated' was in and girls were encouraged to be ugly? 'Being liked' is always in and outside of fundamentalist religious groups, girls have always been encouraged to look pretty.
and boys are encouraged to be force wielding leaders (to later wind up as PHB's?).
People have always wanted to have power. The only difference is that now we have a slight amount of class mobility and so normal people who dream of becoming powerful leaders might actually be able to.
Look at kids' movies and TV shows. The message is that all you have to do is believe in yourself.
I think more often, the message stressed is obedience. For example, look at Finding Nemo (number 1 grossing G rated movie). It's about a Fish who get's screwed over because he doesn't listen to his dad.
Prosperity is being taken as a birthright.
Damn, let's go back to when it actually was a birthright.
I half wonder if the outcry against illegal aliens is due to the fact that these people work hard.
This one might be right, but I think there's also a pretty strong race factor.
And from your other post:
So what caused the shift from an emphasis on inward appearance to outward? Why force as a tool of leadership, instead of love?
When did leaders ever rule out of love? The more you go back in time, the more brutal leaders tend to get.
It really bugs me that people are always trying to get back to the "good old days" when these "good old days" that they yearn for never actually existed.
And that is my review of Phantom of the Opera's revenge of the nerds post.
It's time to start a union how long before more stuff comes up that cut's you pay.
Why did this get a -1 troll?
Okay, let me explain how this works. Just because somebody posts something that doesn't agree to "the great libertarian ideas of Ron Paul" doesn't mean it should be marked as a troll. There is no -1 "I Disagree". Stop modding people down for having differing political views.
In the past when workers were getting screwed, they formed unions and things got better. Now, union membership is dropping and they're getting screwed again. It seems pretty obvious to me that workers need to start unionizing again. (That and voting out corrupt union bosses who sell out to the companies.)
Your pie chart includes things like "Veterasns benefits" separate from defense. I do agree that after asking these people to die for their government you better as hell at least give them benefits. But without our excessive warmongering, there wouldn't be nearly as many veterans. So I think, until we start fighting wars without humans, we can include "veterans benefits" as part of money spent on military and wars.
And Interest on debt doesn't count at all in your pie chart? Well, I'm glad to see that instead of spending money on the military, we're spending money paying off interest for the loans we took out in order to finance our military.
And social security? Social security isn't even part of the taxes collected. It's pretty much just a pyramid scheme that steals from the young to give to the old. But it just shuffles money around among various people, the government doesn't actually spend it anywhere. The government only puts that into it's official budget to make it look like it spends less on the military.
Not to mention that a lot of the money for the war on terror is financed outside the official yearly budget and so doesn't even go into your pie chart. Though it may not be in the yearly budget, it is still a part of the governments budget that you and I still pay with our tax dollars.
Actually as far as colors actually being produced by the monitor it is multiplicative and thus 766. Because the reds greens and blues are mixed together by your eye, you appear to see 255^3 colors even though only 255*3 are being created. I think the point he was trying to make is that all color resolutions are based upon what is seen by the eye, not what is actually produced and so Apple's strategy of using dithering to make the eye see new colors is nothing new but an extension of the same strategy (if I can combine red and blue subpixels to make purple, why not combine pixels of two different shades of red to make a third shade of red?). My mac screen uses dithering and it can get millions of colors on ALL RESOLUTIONS just like they advertised (no, I didn't take their word for it, I checked myself, just now. Nothing beats observation and experimentation.) I know everybody likes to accuse liars but suing Apple because they use combine colored pixels to produce colors is just as ridiculous as suing a company for making purple by mixing red and blue light. Now if Apple said they don't use dithering and used dithering, that would be bad. But they just said they can produce millions of colors. And their screens do produce millions of colors. So find something legitimate to whine about Apple for (like their non-replaceable ipod batteries).
Umm, no. Environmentalists were always huge opponents to Biofuel. The main reason I was skeptical about biofeul was because if all the Environmentalists are opposed to something that politicians say "will help the environment", something seemed pretty wrong. When Bush last visited Brazil there were Environmentalists protesting his visit. Why? Because Bush was supporting biofeul and biofeul companies were cutting down their rainforests for sugarcane. Here's an article about environmentalists opposing biofuel because it would damage the bay that I found in about 2 seconds, you can find stuff like this everywhere: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/16/AR2007071601845.html Environmentalists have always been the staunchest opponents of biofuel that I've seen (though of course probably not for the same reasons you may have opposed it). I know they tend to also be nuts and are easy to make fun of, but it looks like they got it right for once. At first I thought your post was probably meant as a troll but when you got a (5 interesting) from an ignorant rant about something you apparently know nothing about, it seems that you aren't the only one to base their perception of environmentalists on what politicians say rather than what environmentalists actually say.
Though the "corporations" represent real people, they do not represent "The People". They represent a select group of The People that happened to invest in that particular corporation. On the other hand governements aren't alive either and the government does represent "The People" (though they may not do this as well as some may like, they represent "The People" better than any one corporation). So actually this is a win for a select group of people who invested in Google against The People and thus evil. Though anybody who actually believed Google would do no evil just because they said so need to stop drinking the kool-aid. Public corporations are required by law to try and make money, even if they must be "evil" to do it.
Of course there should be some things that the country needs to keep secret for national security purposes. Though the number of things it needs to keep secret 25 years later should be EXTREMELY small. One of the things I'm fed up with is the assumption that everything the government is trying to keep secret is for national security purposes while everything people want to keep secret must be some sort of thing they're doing wrong. The government has no reason to be spying on it's citizens, the citizens should be the government's boss. The government should thus let the citizens know EVERYTHING it possibly can without causing serious national security risks and the current government's "declare everything classified" policy is definitly the wrong direction. This isn't utopian, it's the principle America was founded on.
That's why he was modded 5: funny.
I love how when Bush tries to spy on the American people, all the neofacists chime in with the "if people aren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't mind if the government knows their business" bit but when people want to be able to see what the government (also made of people, but with more power and more corrupt) is doing, the neofacists instantly defend the government's right to privacy. I'm sorry but this is America we're talking about. We the people, rule America. The government should answer to the people and report to the people. Instead of the government spying on the people, the people should be spying on the government. This shouldn't be about left or right, liberal or conservative, it is about being American or being Facist.
Okay let's think about this logically: If 99% of human DNA is the same then that means any two humans are going to have at least 99% in common (because that is the 99% that is the same in all humans) chimps have 98% which doesn't mean that there are two people such that one is equally different than the person so yes, if you throw logic to the wind and pull stuff out of your ass(pretty common on slashdot it seems), you can make crazy inferences
The difference is that JMRI is constantly getting the **** beat out of them in court by this patent troll. They've already ran into many problems and lost lots of $'s.
Lots of the nasty criminals have something wrong with their brain. Even if it wasn't genetic it usually takes serious abuse (not just bad parenting) to screw somebody up and this abuse may or may not have anything to do with their parents (their gym teacher could have been a pedophile). Despite common conceptions, parenting doesn't effect the child's personally that much(beyond manners, beliefs, etc) unless it is outright abusive. A parent of a bad kid can be tough as nails, but it'll just encourage the kid to hide their bad activities from their parent. Besides, if we are to hold the parents responsible for not magically raising their kid to be perfect, why not hold the parents' parents for not raising their kids to be able raise good kids. And what about their other kids? They were raised by the same parents. Hell, might as well just throw anybody related to the criminal in jail with them. People have free will (whether this is some God-given right or because the randomness of neuron firings make people do unexpected things) and you can't always blame something on somebody's parent. You can't blame it on the porn they watch. When a person does something wrong it is that person who should receive the blame.
Well, this reporter was...possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to...reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president. May not be perfect, but it's still the best government we have. For now.
Yep, From the human rights review in the legal section (there's something about this in the questions too but they seem to be more truthful in the legal section, mentioning that it actually can cause hearing damage in long term exposure): "2. As the transmission of the sound produced by the Device is directional and as high frequency wavelengths do not travel through solid objects, we do not consider that it is likely that the Device will cause a nuisance to neighbours of its users. " Since this is not heard by adults because it is a very high frequency and since it doesn't travel that far even through open air, I doubt it could bemuch of bother sleeping nearby or such since you wouldn't be able to hear it through the walls of your house.
Don't burn your voter registration cards. We live in a democracy and so votes are the most powerful way of affecting government. If all the people who oppose the current gov'ts nonsense didn't vote, we'd likely slide completely into facism. Whatever you do, you NEED to vote. What needs to happen is that the people who realize what is going on need to ALL go out and vote. Hacking Diebold voting machines to make them actually be accurate would probably help too. Or maybe they should be altered to all report that one of those nutso "UFOs are attacking the earth with zombies" people won a congressional election so people will actually realize how flawed the system is.
The reason apple is popular isn't because they have lot's of shiny ads. Okay, maybe that's one reason but microsoft has lots of shiny ads too. The reason apple is popular is because it is EASIER TO USE. Slashdotters often seem to forget that most of the world are not geeks and don't want to have to deal with making things work. With windows you actually have to solve your own problems and do work to get your computer to do what you want it to do. Macs just work, do a lot of your work for you, allow you to be lazy, and allow you to have almost no knowledge of computers. Macs may be slower, they may be uglier, they may be more expensive, but they don't make a non-geek's life a living hell the way a windows box does. Since the majority of the world consists of non-geeks, it is likely that most people would use macs if everything wasn't so currently entrenched in Microsoft's monopoly.
There's a link to the abstract from slashdot and the abstract has a link that sayeth: "full text"
There are public schools that teach creationism in many parts of the country. Just because it is unconstitutional doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
If you RTFA, you'll see that they never say the earth was this warm 1200 years ago, it's just that that's the farthest back they were able to check. They never found a time warmer than it is now.
They're talking about inbetween a normal blackhole and a supermassive blackhole like the one in the center of the galaxy.
Actually, Lincoln was a Republican.