Actually death has been linked to life. Research has showed that every single death is the result of being alive. Nobody has died from being not-alive and nobody dead has died again.
Yes, but he was talking about murder, not death in general. To both of you then I can add that murder in particular is directly related, in 100% of cases, to humans. Hence, the best way for us to get rid of murder is to get rid of human beings, the main advantage afterwards being that no one (or, rather, nothing else) will ever die from murderous causes again.
About every serious scholar of comparative religion, history of philosophy and theology, including non-religious ones, consider what you write on those subjects to be clearly devoid of any serious research. Atheists philosopher of science Michael Ruse, the same one whose testimony in McLean v. Arkansas helped the Arkansas judiciary develop the definition of science based on which the teaching of creationism in public schools was blocked back in 1982, for example, has famously said about one of your works:
"Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant."
Glancing over criticisms made to the philosophical side of your works by Ruse and others leads one to the conclusion that your scholarly critics think you misrepresent concepts, oversimplify arguments into straw mans, and generally plainly doesn't understand what you're talking about whenever you dwell into them.
So, here's my question: why do you keep doing to these academic fields pretty much the same things the worst of the creationists you so well criticize do to the fields you actually know about? Why the double standard?
Amazon has been licensing their http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click to various companies like Apple. I guess Bezos just wants to use other people's patents for free but expects everyone to pay to use their patents.
Not necessarily. A system in which patents still exist but must be licensed for a reasonable fee, like a compulsory FRAND, would both end the patent wars as well as keep things like the 1-Click patent intact.
I find it ironic that your defense against my claims that your god doesn't exist is to call my depiction of your god a "straw man."
So, let me get this straight: you refute your own depiction of what a god is, not that of actual religious individuals, then don't see why that is an argumentative error? I'm disappoint, rage face and all. In fact, it's the first time I saw someone try to straw man the straw man argument so as to make it easier to refute a refutation based on it. That's as meta as one can get! Simply wow!:)
It is easy for you to claim that any representation of god that you do not like is just a "straw man" because God is an amorphous concept open to broad interpretation.
You're confused. In logic there's no such thing as liking or not liking. Either both sides are talking about the same subject, and hence they can arrive at some conclusion pertaining that single subject, or they are talking about different subjects and reaching conclusions that have no relationship to each other.
So, let me put it straight. Your criticism of your concept of God is good. You can perfectly demonstrate that a God as you envisioned cannot exist. I'll go even further: if such a God as you envisioned existed, he'd be evil, and our enemy, and we should combat him to the death. In fact, I'd join you in an army assembled to fight him. So, good thing he most definitely doesn't exist, eh? I'm completely with you in you atheism towards this God of yours. He most definitely doesn't exist, and in this both our hearts rejoice!:)
But, that applies to that specific concept of God of your. As for the many other concepts of God you haven't talked about, well, you haven't talked about.
I will also note that in your defense, you made no attempt to provide your own description of God.
I did. Here's it:
"For anything to exist and to continue existing ('anything' includes time and space themselves), it needs a source of existentiating from which to get its continual existence, otherwise it'd instantly degrade into nothingness. Such source, in turn, must itself neither be in need of any external existentiating, nor subject to any kind of cessation (it existentiates time, so there's no 'after' in which a 'previous' active existentiating would 'stop'). So, not so much that it is "in" everything, but that it is everything, more so than any other secondary attribute of any particular thing."
That's God as understood by the top theologians and philosophers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as of both Greek and Roman Paganisms, and in good measure Hinduism too.
So, let's do this right now: how do you refute this God, the one they all actually believe in?
I'll qualify some of your statements to show how this is all still withing a straw man argument, and proceed with some proper definitions:
to illustrate how absurd the idea of a god is to me as an adult.
To illustrate how absurd a children's idea of god is to an adult.
Contradictions abound in the descriptions of what God is.
Contradictions abound whenever we compare the many analogies used in trying to describe what God is when we go about simplifying it for mass consumption. Ditto for any simplification of any complex concept, look at your nearest Scientific American magazine.
As somebody pointed out above, the Bible does claim that god made us in his own image. It stands to reason then that goes does have an image, and that image is observable from some real place.
Nope. That's one such analogy. Comparisons with human attributes are quite often used because they offer some ground upon which to explain things. This is done quite directly for children, but it becomes progressively more qualified and distanced from such raw impressions as conceptual understanding advances.
We are also told that he is everywhere and in everything and invisible.
Another such child analogy is that he is somewhat like a guy who happens to have superpowers such as that of jumping around and looking everywhere, among others. This simplification is a reversal of what philosophical theology conceptualizes and reads in the myths. For anything to exist and to continue existing ('anything' includes time and space themselves), it needs a source of existentiating from which to get its continual existence, otherwise it'd instantly degrade into nothingness. Such source, in turn, must itself neither be in need of any external existentiating, nor subject to any kind of cessation (it existentiates time, so there's no 'after' in which a 'previous' active existentiating would 'stop'). So, not so much that it is "in" everything, but that it is everything, more so than any other secondary attribute of any particular thing.
The alternative to this is to suppose and infinite regression of ever more remote existentiating sources, which is logically inconsistent. Also, the rhetorical alternative of proposing the universe as the source of its own existentiating in some kind of existential inertia modeled after inertial movement, quite popular among atheists who know about this argument, doesn't take into account the fact the universe: a) is composed of degrading entities; b) is bounded to space-time, thus not exhausting all the things that aren't so bounded.
We are told that Heaven and Hell are real places that people go when they die. As children we believe Heaven to be above the sky and Hell to be below the earth. These images are inescapable because people presumably believed this to be true at some point. Modern man knows there is nowhere left in either the ground nor the sky for such places to hide, so the religious mind has moved them to parallel universes, alternate planes, and other unobservable sanctuaries of the mind.
Now, this is a proper criticism, but it has only the barest relationship with a proper concept of God. In any case, it isn't only modern man. You have religious theologians and philosophers as far back as either discipline, many of which considered saints in their respective religions, reading in these myths references to modes of human perception, not literal descriptions. So, whatever criticism you'd like to make towards literalists in this matter is fair game, as long as it isn't supposed to also encompass non-literalists, otherwise it becomes a straw man against them.
I should add that "parallel universes, alternate planes" etc. are all still physical literalism, analogies based, this time around, on badly understood science, if not science fiction.
it does make it a reasonable description of their God.
Only if the sentence "the belief that an explosion in a junkyard can produce a fully functional airplane" counts as a reasonable description of evolution, which it evidently doesn't. Straw man is as straw man goes.
Thus, unless one's going to talk about an existing sect within one of the existing branches of one of the existing Abrahamic religions, said sect actually believing and preaching that God indeed and literally is an "invisible man in the sky", that argumentative path doesn't apply. And even if there is such a sect, any argument trying to disprove that specific belief about God applies only to that sect, not to any of the other ones, which comprise the majority of those religions.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have believing that nonsense
No, they don't. The part about it being "a man" is called anthropomorphism, which the three reject. The part about it being "in the sky" is called idolatry, which the three also reject. The only correct point would be the "invisible" one, but even that arguably so given that's a property of every abstract out there (numbers, logical concepts etc.).
I'm not sure if your question was merely rhetorical, or if you are a {troll|idiot}.
Well, my guess is that both you and the OP are going for a straw man fallacy, but if not, we can continue.
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
I doubt it. Newton dwelt A LOT in prophecies and such, just glance over the index of his works on the subject available at Newton's Views on on Prophecy, Revelation and the End of Times. He'd be right at home in any of the not-too-crazy millenarist churches of today.
Not all religious people are bigots (my personal experience is that very few actually are), however I have yet to meet a bigot who WASN'T religious
Haven't talked to many campus liberals, have you? Here's an exchange I had back when I was majoring in Philosophy, circa 2007:
Liberal 'friend': "Sorry, Alexander, but I don't want to discuss about anything political with you anymore. I don't want to talk to someone who defines himself as a libertarian."
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place? That's right; legislation.
Before there was such legislation you could still restrict yourself to only purchase from companies that voluntarily got certified and voluntarily informed ingredients. No one were making you buy food from producers who didn't list ingredients. It was your choice to buy from them. You could always go and pay 5x more for the good stuff. And, if in doubt whether it actually was the good stuff, contract a well known specialist to provide you professional assurance on whether it actually was or wasn't the good stuff.
Nanny State is this: nanny. It forces everyone to spend more than they'd want to on premium stuff they don't care about or that have lower priority for them even though, given the choice, they'd prefer to buy the dirt cheap crap instead and deal with the consequences of applying their own free will, as the responsible adults they are and should be.
However, on the same track, could they offer the "updates" as paid options that cost exactly the amount that Apple/MS/fill-in-the-blank-patent-holder requires for licensing?
That would be fun. Just imagine what the app store would look like:
Apple iBoooing: $1 Microsoft Your Map As It Should Be: $1 Amazon ONE Click, Not TWO: $1 Motorola CALLR - Your phone, able to call other phones!: $1
It'd be amazing. In a creepy, distopian way. But amazing nevertheless.
Well, if something is generally known to experts in the field, there's no need to give credit; everyone already knows who discovered it and won't believe it's you.
It's safer to err on the side of precaution. Why risk being called a plagiarist when all that's needed to avoid trouble is to change from this:
Blah blah blah blah.
To this:
"Blah blah bah blah." (Author, "Title", p. Page)
?
My guess is that most plagiarism out there is more a case of laziness than of anything else.
Hmm... perhaps there's an unexplored market out there for auto-quoting services for lazy researches, who knows? Submit your unpublished paper, get all unintentional plagiarisms marked for review, click a button and have them turned into proper quotations in any style your paper uses, either all at once or individually, and download the result.
I'm all for letting countries stay to themselves, but why does a dictator need to step on your lawn before he gets a response? Didn't most of Europe take that stance during WWII?
There are exceptions to any rule. The problem is when the exception becomes the rule.
That can get difficult -- what do you do when one of your trading partner countries refuses to trade with you, because you refuse to be unfriendly to a country they don't like?
Consistency is key. If they know you absolutely will not give up neutrality, they don't try making you give up neutrality, as they know it'll be futile. But even if they decide to stop trading with you, well, you stop trading, all the while keeping diplomatic channels open.
Regarding the Falkland islands, I don't know details on how our diplomacy deal with it, but Argentina is indeed our biggest regional trade partner, and they do have this habit of now and then simply suspending trade while they attempt failed economic policy after failed economic policy. This happens with such a frequency we've become used to it already. Whenever the news reports of some new trade problem with them, we just sigh and shrug it off. So, not a big deal.:)
See, there are very bad people in the world who want to kill me and destroy my country. Doesn't matter which country.
Wrong. Brazil is one of the largest economies in the world, and a regional power in South America, with influence over all our neighboring countries. But we don't have enemies. Why? Because we mostly keep to ourselves. Our relationship with other countries is one of selling and purchasing, not one of throwing military might around. Truth be told, a few times some more ideologically motivated governments of ours indeed started moving into that direction, but the next one usually defused the situation by reverting the idiot policy, thus bringing back international goodwill. So, although we do have lots of internal social issues, at least one we don't have is the entirely optional one of terrorism, which we avoid by the quite simple expedient of not pissing people off.
What doesn't mean avoiding legitimate wars when they present themselves. The trick here is to not start them. Keeping to oneself does wonders in that regards too. The other country has a dictator you despise? Don't mess there, it isn't your problem. It has a dictator you like who's going to be overthrown? Don't mess there, it isn't your problem. There are troops marching into your borders. Oh, now you go and mess there.
Of course I don't care about that, because I have nothing to hide...
The problem isn't what you do, is what you can be accused of having done, which is an entirely different problem. If you were near a crime scene at or near the moment it occurred, and might ever so slightly linked to it (you were friends in college to the roommate of the boyfriend of the victim) and at some point in your life commented on Friendster (yep, going old school here) you found said boyfriend a slob or whatever, a case WILL be made for you potentially being the criminal. Things can go downhill from there pretty fast.
That said, yeah, I also don't mind carrying a mobile phone around. Convenience and all that. But that doesn't mean we couldn't be aware of what could possibly go wrong.
Anyway, here's the always repeated rule of thumb, once again: whatever happens, NEVER talk to the police about ANYTHING without your lawyer near you. Resist the urge to talk, even about the weather, no matter what. If you were in the above or a similar scenario, any word you said would be twisted into strengthening the case against you. Be on the safe side and don't talk. It won't hurt you in any way other than the slightly "social ape" discomfort we feel, while talking most certainly might, and in many cases definitely will.
The US is at fault for Muslim creationism? Crazy people from the US may be supporting Christian creationism in other countries, but do, say, the crazy Turkish Muslim creationists spring from US support?
As a political movement? Yep, it does. The methods, modus operandi and arguments are all drawn from American and, to a lesser extent, European (in turn American-influenced) authors.
By the way: Muslim fundamentalism was born in the 18th century inspired by British puritanism. That original movement weakened in England, but went on to live in US Christianity. So, both fundamentalisms are basically children of the same father.
I used to be a Christian. I stopped at thought about it when I met other Christians who believed that crap - and came to the only rational conclusion when thinking about gods - there aren't any.
That's a bit silly. There are idiots in all fields of life. Just because you happened to be exposed to idiot Christians (hence idiot Christianity), or, for that matter, idiot Muslims/Islam, Jews/Judaism, Buddhists/Buddhism etc., it doesn't imply that either of those things themselves are idiotic, only that they have idiotic elements within them. That can be generalized to Theism as a whole: while there are clearly silly concepts of gods, there are some very clever ones that avoid all the typical attacks made against the former, and whose defenders/followers actually join the Atheist in attacking the former. The problem I see then is that Atheists and silly-theists both look at the question as if it had only two camps, when actually it has at least three.
An excellent example of the 3rd camp, which names itself "classical theism" (as opposed to the modern or non-classical variety which Atheists usually battle against) is Edward Feser's blog. It is a good starting point for one to see that in this, as in everything else, the world isn't structured in black and white, and not even in mere shades of gray, as the more sophisticated two-camp actors would like to think, but actually has many colors, and shades between all of them.
Only an idiot or a religious fundamentalist thinks religious fundamentalism is harmless.
All fundamentalism is dangerous. That said, they rarely endure more than two generations. They get tired with age, and their bored descendants change things around.
As for nukes, lots of governments presumably in the hands of fundamentalists (but not really -- those who actually govern don't get in that position by being idiots) have nuclear weapons. And yet, the only country ever to actually use not one, but two of them, was (also presumably) not in the hands of any fundamentalist, but rather fighting two fundamentalists.
RealityTM: killing oversimplifications since 14.5 bi BC.
There is only a miniscule number of genuine "neutral parties" in this debate. Most people were successfully "imprinted" with their local religion from earliest childhood.
I'm talking about these. Most religions don't give a damn about evolution or creation (well, except in the USA, where for some odd reason it matters). Then, if you attack them for something they don't care about, guess what? They'll start caring about it. And not in a way favorable for whomever appeared out of nowhere attacking them for, from their perspective, no reason at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually death has been linked to life. Research has showed that every single death is the result of being alive. Nobody has died from being not-alive and nobody dead has died again.
Yes, but he was talking about murder, not death in general. To both of you then I can add that murder in particular is directly related, in 100% of cases, to humans. Hence, the best way for us to get rid of murder is to get rid of human beings, the main advantage afterwards being that no one (or, rather, nothing else) will ever die from murderous causes again.
About every serious scholar of comparative religion, history of philosophy and theology, including non-religious ones, consider what you write on those subjects to be clearly devoid of any serious research. Atheists philosopher of science Michael Ruse, the same one whose testimony in McLean v. Arkansas helped the Arkansas judiciary develop the definition of science based on which the teaching of creationism in public schools was blocked back in 1982, for example, has famously said about one of your works:
"Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant."
Glancing over criticisms made to the philosophical side of your works by Ruse and others leads one to the conclusion that your scholarly critics think you misrepresent concepts, oversimplify arguments into straw mans, and generally plainly doesn't understand what you're talking about whenever you dwell into them.
So, here's my question: why do you keep doing to these academic fields pretty much the same things the worst of the creationists you so well criticize do to the fields you actually know about? Why the double standard?
Amazon has been licensing their http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click to various companies like Apple. I guess Bezos just wants to use other people's patents for free but expects everyone to pay to use their patents.
Not necessarily. A system in which patents still exist but must be licensed for a reasonable fee, like a compulsory FRAND, would both end the patent wars as well as keep things like the 1-Click patent intact.
You may have the last word if it makes you more comfortable in your insanity.
And that is an example of an appeal to ridicule. :)
I find it ironic that your defense against my claims that your god doesn't exist is to call my depiction of your god a "straw man."
So, let me get this straight: you refute your own depiction of what a god is, not that of actual religious individuals, then don't see why that is an argumentative error? I'm disappoint, rage face and all. In fact, it's the first time I saw someone try to straw man the straw man argument so as to make it easier to refute a refutation based on it. That's as meta as one can get! Simply wow! :)
It is easy for you to claim that any representation of god that you do not like is just a "straw man" because God is an amorphous concept open to broad interpretation.
You're confused. In logic there's no such thing as liking or not liking. Either both sides are talking about the same subject, and hence they can arrive at some conclusion pertaining that single subject, or they are talking about different subjects and reaching conclusions that have no relationship to each other.
So, let me put it straight. Your criticism of your concept of God is good. You can perfectly demonstrate that a God as you envisioned cannot exist. I'll go even further: if such a God as you envisioned existed, he'd be evil, and our enemy, and we should combat him to the death. In fact, I'd join you in an army assembled to fight him. So, good thing he most definitely doesn't exist, eh? I'm completely with you in you atheism towards this God of yours. He most definitely doesn't exist, and in this both our hearts rejoice! :)
But, that applies to that specific concept of God of your. As for the many other concepts of God you haven't talked about, well, you haven't talked about.
I will also note that in your defense, you made no attempt to provide your own description of God.
I did. Here's it:
"For anything to exist and to continue existing ('anything' includes time and space themselves), it needs a source of existentiating from which to get its continual existence, otherwise it'd instantly degrade into nothingness. Such source, in turn, must itself neither be in need of any external existentiating, nor subject to any kind of cessation (it existentiates time, so there's no 'after' in which a 'previous' active existentiating would 'stop'). So, not so much that it is "in" everything, but that it is everything, more so than any other secondary attribute of any particular thing."
That's God as understood by the top theologians and philosophers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, as well as of both Greek and Roman Paganisms, and in good measure Hinduism too.
So, let's do this right now: how do you refute this God, the one they all actually believe in?
I'll qualify some of your statements to show how this is all still withing a straw man argument, and proceed with some proper definitions:
to illustrate how absurd the idea of a god is to me as an adult.
To illustrate how absurd a children's idea of god is to an adult.
Contradictions abound in the descriptions of what God is.
Contradictions abound whenever we compare the many analogies used in trying to describe what God is when we go about simplifying it for mass consumption. Ditto for any simplification of any complex concept, look at your nearest Scientific American magazine.
As somebody pointed out above, the Bible does claim that god made us in his own image. It stands to reason then that goes does have an image, and that image is observable from some real place.
Nope. That's one such analogy. Comparisons with human attributes are quite often used because they offer some ground upon which to explain things. This is done quite directly for children, but it becomes progressively more qualified and distanced from such raw impressions as conceptual understanding advances.
We are also told that he is everywhere and in everything and invisible.
Another such child analogy is that he is somewhat like a guy who happens to have superpowers such as that of jumping around and looking everywhere, among others. This simplification is a reversal of what philosophical theology conceptualizes and reads in the myths. For anything to exist and to continue existing ('anything' includes time and space themselves), it needs a source of existentiating from which to get its continual existence, otherwise it'd instantly degrade into nothingness. Such source, in turn, must itself neither be in need of any external existentiating, nor subject to any kind of cessation (it existentiates time, so there's no 'after' in which a 'previous' active existentiating would 'stop'). So, not so much that it is "in" everything, but that it is everything, more so than any other secondary attribute of any particular thing.
The alternative to this is to suppose and infinite regression of ever more remote existentiating sources, which is logically inconsistent. Also, the rhetorical alternative of proposing the universe as the source of its own existentiating in some kind of existential inertia modeled after inertial movement, quite popular among atheists who know about this argument, doesn't take into account the fact the universe: a) is composed of degrading entities; b) is bounded to space-time, thus not exhausting all the things that aren't so bounded.
We are told that Heaven and Hell are real places that people go when they die. As children we believe Heaven to be above the sky and Hell to be below the earth. These images are inescapable because people presumably believed this to be true at some point. Modern man knows there is nowhere left in either the ground nor the sky for such places to hide, so the religious mind has moved them to parallel universes, alternate planes, and other unobservable sanctuaries of the mind.
Now, this is a proper criticism, but it has only the barest relationship with a proper concept of God. In any case, it isn't only modern man. You have religious theologians and philosophers as far back as either discipline, many of which considered saints in their respective religions, reading in these myths references to modes of human perception, not literal descriptions. So, whatever criticism you'd like to make towards literalists in this matter is fair game, as long as it isn't supposed to also encompass non-literalists, otherwise it becomes a straw man against them.
I should add that "parallel universes, alternate planes" etc. are all still physical literalism, analogies based, this time around, on badly understood science, if not science fiction.
We are told that he controls ev
it does make it a reasonable description of their God.
Only if the sentence "the belief that an explosion in a junkyard can produce a fully functional airplane" counts as a reasonable description of evolution, which it evidently doesn't. Straw man is as straw man goes.
Thus, unless one's going to talk about an existing sect within one of the existing branches of one of the existing Abrahamic religions, said sect actually believing and preaching that God indeed and literally is an "invisible man in the sky", that argumentative path doesn't apply. And even if there is such a sect, any argument trying to disprove that specific belief about God applies only to that sect, not to any of the other ones, which comprise the majority of those religions.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have believing that nonsense
No, they don't. The part about it being "a man" is called anthropomorphism, which the three reject. The part about it being "in the sky" is called idolatry, which the three also reject. The only correct point would be the "invisible" one, but even that arguably so given that's a property of every abstract out there (numbers, logical concepts etc.).
I'm not sure if your question was merely rhetorical, or if you are a {troll|idiot}.
Well, my guess is that both you and the OP are going for a straw man fallacy, but if not, we can continue.
invisible man in the sky
Which religion believes that?
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
I doubt it. Newton dwelt A LOT in prophecies and such, just glance over the index of his works on the subject available at Newton's Views on on Prophecy, Revelation and the End of Times. He'd be right at home in any of the not-too-crazy millenarist churches of today.
It will only be worn by women.
Well, google "male bra japan"...
(Replying to undo incorrect moderation.)
Not all religious people are bigots (my personal experience is that very few actually are), however I have yet to meet a bigot who WASN'T religious
Haven't talked to many campus liberals, have you? Here's an exchange I had back when I was majoring in Philosophy, circa 2007:
Liberal 'friend': "Sorry, Alexander, but I don't want to discuss about anything political with you anymore. I don't want to talk to someone who defines himself as a libertarian."
Me: "... okay."
Do you know why food products provide accurate lists of ingredients on the packaging in the first place?
That's right; legislation.
Before there was such legislation you could still restrict yourself to only purchase from companies that voluntarily got certified and voluntarily informed ingredients. No one were making you buy food from producers who didn't list ingredients. It was your choice to buy from them. You could always go and pay 5x more for the good stuff. And, if in doubt whether it actually was the good stuff, contract a well known specialist to provide you professional assurance on whether it actually was or wasn't the good stuff.
Nanny State is this: nanny. It forces everyone to spend more than they'd want to on premium stuff they don't care about or that have lower priority for them even though, given the choice, they'd prefer to buy the dirt cheap crap instead and deal with the consequences of applying their own free will, as the responsible adults they are and should be.
However, on the same track, could they offer the "updates" as paid options that cost exactly the amount that Apple/MS/fill-in-the-blank-patent-holder requires for licensing?
That would be fun. Just imagine what the app store would look like:
Apple iBoooing: $1
Microsoft Your Map As It Should Be: $1
Amazon ONE Click, Not TWO: $1
Motorola CALLR - Your phone, able to call other phones!: $1
It'd be amazing. In a creepy, distopian way. But amazing nevertheless.
Well, if something is generally known to experts in the field, there's no need to give credit; everyone already knows who discovered it and won't believe it's you.
It's safer to err on the side of precaution. Why risk being called a plagiarist when all that's needed to avoid trouble is to change from this:
Blah blah blah blah.
To this:
"Blah blah bah blah." (Author, "Title", p. Page)
?
My guess is that most plagiarism out there is more a case of laziness than of anything else.
Hmm... perhaps there's an unexplored market out there for auto-quoting services for lazy researches, who knows? Submit your unpublished paper, get all unintentional plagiarisms marked for review, click a button and have them turned into proper quotations in any style your paper uses, either all at once or individually, and download the result.
I'm all for letting countries stay to themselves, but why does a dictator need to step on your lawn before he gets a response? Didn't most of Europe take that stance during WWII?
There are exceptions to any rule. The problem is when the exception becomes the rule.
That can get difficult -- what do you do when one of your trading partner countries refuses to trade with you, because you refuse to be unfriendly to a country they don't like?
Consistency is key. If they know you absolutely will not give up neutrality, they don't try making you give up neutrality, as they know it'll be futile. But even if they decide to stop trading with you, well, you stop trading, all the while keeping diplomatic channels open.
Regarding the Falkland islands, I don't know details on how our diplomacy deal with it, but Argentina is indeed our biggest regional trade partner, and they do have this habit of now and then simply suspending trade while they attempt failed economic policy after failed economic policy. This happens with such a frequency we've become used to it already. Whenever the news reports of some new trade problem with them, we just sigh and shrug it off. So, not a big deal. :)
See, there are very bad people in the world who want to kill me and destroy my country. Doesn't matter which country.
Wrong. Brazil is one of the largest economies in the world, and a regional power in South America, with influence over all our neighboring countries. But we don't have enemies. Why? Because we mostly keep to ourselves. Our relationship with other countries is one of selling and purchasing, not one of throwing military might around. Truth be told, a few times some more ideologically motivated governments of ours indeed started moving into that direction, but the next one usually defused the situation by reverting the idiot policy, thus bringing back international goodwill. So, although we do have lots of internal social issues, at least one we don't have is the entirely optional one of terrorism, which we avoid by the quite simple expedient of not pissing people off.
What doesn't mean avoiding legitimate wars when they present themselves. The trick here is to not start them. Keeping to oneself does wonders in that regards too. The other country has a dictator you despise? Don't mess there, it isn't your problem. It has a dictator you like who's going to be overthrown? Don't mess there, it isn't your problem. There are troops marching into your borders. Oh, now you go and mess there.
How hard can that be?
Of course I don't care about that, because I have nothing to hide...
The problem isn't what you do, is what you can be accused of having done, which is an entirely different problem. If you were near a crime scene at or near the moment it occurred, and might ever so slightly linked to it (you were friends in college to the roommate of the boyfriend of the victim) and at some point in your life commented on Friendster (yep, going old school here) you found said boyfriend a slob or whatever, a case WILL be made for you potentially being the criminal. Things can go downhill from there pretty fast.
That said, yeah, I also don't mind carrying a mobile phone around. Convenience and all that. But that doesn't mean we couldn't be aware of what could possibly go wrong.
Anyway, here's the always repeated rule of thumb, once again: whatever happens, NEVER talk to the police about ANYTHING without your lawyer near you. Resist the urge to talk, even about the weather, no matter what. If you were in the above or a similar scenario, any word you said would be twisted into strengthening the case against you. Be on the safe side and don't talk. It won't hurt you in any way other than the slightly "social ape" discomfort we feel, while talking most certainly might, and in many cases definitely will.
Watch this. It's long, but worth every second.
IT doesn't make money. It COSTS money!
Oh! Another Peter Drucker fan stuck in 1940's MBA theory. Time to upgrade to 2000's version, yes?
The US is at fault for Muslim creationism? Crazy people from the US may be supporting Christian creationism in other countries, but do, say, the crazy Turkish Muslim creationists spring from US support?
As a political movement? Yep, it does. The methods, modus operandi and arguments are all drawn from American and, to a lesser extent, European (in turn American-influenced) authors.
By the way: Muslim fundamentalism was born in the 18th century inspired by British puritanism. That original movement weakened in England, but went on to live in US Christianity. So, both fundamentalisms are basically children of the same father.
I used to be a Christian. I stopped at thought about it when I met other Christians who believed that crap - and came to the only rational conclusion when thinking about gods - there aren't any.
That's a bit silly. There are idiots in all fields of life. Just because you happened to be exposed to idiot Christians (hence idiot Christianity), or, for that matter, idiot Muslims/Islam, Jews/Judaism, Buddhists/Buddhism etc., it doesn't imply that either of those things themselves are idiotic, only that they have idiotic elements within them. That can be generalized to Theism as a whole: while there are clearly silly concepts of gods, there are some very clever ones that avoid all the typical attacks made against the former, and whose defenders/followers actually join the Atheist in attacking the former. The problem I see then is that Atheists and silly-theists both look at the question as if it had only two camps, when actually it has at least three.
An excellent example of the 3rd camp, which names itself "classical theism" (as opposed to the modern or non-classical variety which Atheists usually battle against) is Edward Feser's blog. It is a good starting point for one to see that in this, as in everything else, the world isn't structured in black and white, and not even in mere shades of gray, as the more sophisticated two-camp actors would like to think, but actually has many colors, and shades between all of them.
Only an idiot or a religious fundamentalist thinks religious fundamentalism is harmless.
All fundamentalism is dangerous. That said, they rarely endure more than two generations. They get tired with age, and their bored descendants change things around.
As for nukes, lots of governments presumably in the hands of fundamentalists (but not really -- those who actually govern don't get in that position by being idiots) have nuclear weapons. And yet, the only country ever to actually use not one, but two of them, was (also presumably) not in the hands of any fundamentalist, but rather fighting two fundamentalists.
RealityTM: killing oversimplifications since 14.5 bi BC.
There is only a miniscule number of genuine "neutral parties" in this debate. Most people were successfully "imprinted" with their local religion from earliest childhood.
I'm talking about these. Most religions don't give a damn about evolution or creation (well, except in the USA, where for some odd reason it matters). Then, if you attack them for something they don't care about, guess what? They'll start caring about it. And not in a way favorable for whomever appeared out of nowhere attacking them for, from their perspective, no reason at all.