One of the purposes of religion is to organize people into an 'in group' so that they can function as a single organism rather than as selfing competing entities. The purpose of such an organism is to fight against an 'out group.'
The description fits Stallman's view of free software.
Some atheistic paradigms serve in this fashion, and some do not. Religions do not always require gods, per se.
The thing is, communism as it has always existed in the post-industrial world has been a consolidation of power in the hands of a few political leaders.
Demanding that source code be released to all is closer to the anarchist's position. That is, questioning any concentration of power and working against it if it is found to be unethical.
1. Doesn't have wild type relatives. 2. Is not a food crop.
After all, they're not trying to grow food, so it makes sense not to create plants which could interbreed with food crops if there's any chance that this modification could bring unsafe levels of selenium into people's diet. (yes, I know it's a micronutrient, but even more important nutrients, say Iron, are toxic if you get enough)
Then the bar for genetic modification would be much lower. True, genes can jump species barriers, but they're less likely to.
I've heard some other posters talk about Monsanto's so called 'terminator gene' and how it can prevent plants from breeding. I've always wondered if it was 100% effective, since the original purpose was to prevent farmers from reusing GM seeds next year.
It would only have to be 99% effective for that. But it'd have to be 100% effective to prevent a gene from spreading into the wild.
The woman who holds the world record for longevity was a smoker. Nicotine (as opposed to tar) does have some beneficial effects. It's strange, my chem professor talked about how chemists either died young or lived forever. Wonder if it's the same here.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It seems like nicotine is, possibly in addition to other things, a really interesting antifungal drug. And just like ulcers can be caused by H.Pylori, I think there are a lot of other problems caused by fungi like Candida which doctors simpy fail to address (claiming that it's part of the natural bacterial flora).
Doctors have their collective heads up their asses as far as Ulcerative Colitis goes, I think, just as they did with uclers and H.Pylori.
I tried to get an article on phage therapy posted a while back. I think it would bring up some interesting responses. But the editors nixed it. Maybe I'm just not good at submitting stuff.
HIV mutates far faster in the wild than it will in the lab. If HIV was going to go airborne, it would do so without our help.
Besides, HIV is comparativly weak. You need to be exposed to a large amount of virus to actually become HIV+. Even people stabbed with infected needles don't usually come down with the virus.
I'm glad to hear it! Honestly, I am. but I think you're the exception. Even today, most of the public seems horribly politically misinformed. None of the other people I went to China with had heard the alternate explanation for the bombing, nor had the PhD who helped me arrange the trip and had written several books on China.
But yeah, hopefully international news sources and the internet will help to give the POV of several sides. So hearing misinformation from multiple sources including a few direct sources will give us a better chance to filter out the lies.
Yeah, it was amazing how certain cultural observations about China were as true today as they were 500 years ago. Linnaeus, in a catagorization of people which seemed racist when I first read it, described Chinese people as 'yellow, melancholy and flexible.' So I was kindof shocked when one of my friends in China started talking about how Chinese people were more flexible than westerners. Same exact words. They really have a more racial view of things there than is permitted in the states.
Oh the US is extremly free. But I think the effect of that freedom in dubunking gov't propaganda is overestimated. It gives many people a false sense of security. The ends are the same, though the means are far less invasive.
The US has a free press, but it's killed (some have said deliberatly targeted) foreign reporters in Iraq and managed to make sure that the folks writing the news were 'embedded' and saw things from the POV of the troops, only. The ethical diellema on the use of DU has been mostly silenced.
So many of the major news outlets seem to fail to take a really critical look at some of the things that the government asserts.
I was in China not too long ago (2003 - beginning of 2004) and teaching English. One thing that was interesting was the stuff that I heard about Falun Gong. How supposedly people from Falun Gong had poisoned local beggars, it was a cult.
In the states, you never hear these rationales for the crackdowns against Falun Gong. They're not even brough up to be discredited, which makes me wonder if they're true or not?
More to the point, is the American gov't not explaining China's good reasons for cracking down on Falun Gong so that it keeps their citizens feeling superior to the Chineese? "Oh, we have religious freedom and they don't" etc. When the worst abuses against religion happened during the Cultural revolution, or currently against those religious groups with separatist ambitions (or who just don't want their land exploited by the influx of the ethnic Han majority) such as some Muslims in Xinjiang, Buddists in Tibet, etc.
A while ago, there was the whole issue of the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade by accident.
The Chinese line was that it was deliberate and pointless. The American line was that it was an accident. The London guardian at one point ran a piece on how the Chinese embassy had been quite likely rebroadcasting radio signals from Serb forces in violation of the laws governing embassies (neutrality) and how the bombing run that hit the embassy was the only one which didn't go through the NATO chain of command, but came directly from the CIA.
And how much did we in the states hear about this second, more likely explanation?
There were a few internet sites blocked in China. And it was hard to tell which ones were deliberate and which ones were accidental since there seemed to be very little set policy on the matter. China may censor, but it seems to lack the rigid efficiency and formality that one imagines when they think of the USSR or Nazi Germany. The place is anarchy and clannish with an authoritarian frosting. Things like the status and power of your family, and which powerful people you have pissed off and how respectfully you criticize power have a huge amount to do with what you can get away with.
The cultural revolution is over. The boys in power in China are mainly concerned with protecting their power and sometimes increasing it.
And despite the attempt at censorship, there was a lot of information about government corruption which managed to leak out anyways. (Chinese gov't billionaires, Political elite getting away with murder, etc. )
If there's one thing I learned in China, it was how deftly the US government manages to control the information which reaches the majority of its citizens, despite the existance of a 'free press.'
Antitrust law is kindof odd when it comes to software, since bundling and monopolies are much more natural in the software industry. Once you have your code working, it often makes sense for commercial products to standardize to a single product or two since very little money is required for maintenance and newcomers have a hard time paying the high cost of entry. Likewise, bundling thinks like 'windows explorer' (not IE, but WE) which used to be a separate application often makes sense. I mean, heck, auto sellers give floormats with each car. Should they have to remove these non-essential items to allow other floormat makers to compete? That doesn't mean I agree with all of MS's tactics, but the one which they were taken to court for, bundling IE with windows, they seem to have a decent case for. Morally anyways.
Of course, you'll always have open source competitors, but the commercial ventures can price themselves just low enough to discourage new commercial players.
1. Is proximity important. They seem to waffle on this. Either it's 'the whole world' or 'an individual with a set of cards.'
2. Do people have to die? Do sunspots work? Volcanoes? Major media events? Do you ever have sudden mass dyings that DONT cause problems? Is it related to cell phone traffic?
How about "I'll investigate it more seriously when then properly define what they're trying to measure?"
What is it? Fear? Happiness?
The article claims that random number generators close to a person can anticipate their reactions... and then it says on their website that monitors in India were as likely as monitors in NY to pick up 9-11 before it happened. So are these things influenced by proximity or no?
Their model is inconsistant and points more to a misinterpertation of the data rather than somthing actually being measured. This notion hasn't even passed a formal review process yet.
Finally, the article claims that this is backed by 75 top scientists. The web site says 75 people including scientists, artists and businessmen.
All these things point to a serious lack of genuine rigor on the part of the folks making the claims.
A person making extraordinary claims must present extraordiary proof in a rigerous fashion. I'm not required to go investigating every paranormal claim a person makes, with my failure to do so 'proving' the claim.
There are two problems with this. First, Occam's razor is not a law. It's just a way of saying, 'all other things being equal, choose the simpler hypothesis.'
Very often, the truth ends up being the more complex explanation.
Second, the purpose of religion isn't simply 'describing the world as it is.' It's there to change the world. Think of it like a "prisoner's diellema" from game theory. If you convince two prisoners that they should cooperate using deistic explanations and to not trust other prisoners who don't believe in God then those two prisoners will be more successful because of their cooperation. In this case, "Mutual belief in God and cooperation with coreligionists" is a successful strategy. In the real world, complex beliefs which are beneficial, even if physically meaninless, can be strategically relevant. (Honor, love, God, etc.)
One of the keys to determining which weapons are supposed to be legal for use in warfare is discretion. i.e. A gun is strictly under a person's control and may be fired at the wrong target but is always fired at a target, though this is often abused, of course.
Firebombs, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, etc. are inherantly designed to kill people in an area rather than take out a particular target. The US's prohibited use of cluster bombs, and our use of DU, for example, should be considered use of weapons of mass destruction given the degree of civilian damage that they cause.
Frankly, the notion of 'illegal weapons' seems to have been used more as grounds for prosecuting defeated leaders as opposed to actually improving the 'morality' of warfare. As I think Sherman said "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it."
In 1996 there were some... I think it was nerve gass. In fact, Reagan gave Saddam WMDs and this is a matter of historical record, but we asked Saddam to detroy the stuff after he invaded Kuwait and we thought he might be dangerous. He kept some in reserve and Clinton bombed the reserves, but it was hard to verify whether or not this was successful. Of course, there was never any evidence that Saddam restarted his nuclear program as claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the purposes of religion is to organize people into an 'in group' so that they can function as a single organism rather than as selfing competing entities. The purpose of such an organism is to fight against an 'out group.'
The description fits Stallman's view of free software.
Some atheistic paradigms serve in this fashion, and some do not. Religions do not always require gods, per se.
The thing is, communism as it has always existed in the post-industrial world has been a consolidation of power in the hands of a few political leaders. Demanding that source code be released to all is closer to the anarchist's position. That is, questioning any concentration of power and working against it if it is found to be unethical.
That I wrote the names of famous baseball players on paper and sold it to kids telling them that it was a genuine autograph.
Okay, I didn't really do that.
Maybe I should have.
Nah. Wesley became a godlike creature. And I doubt that'd be too interesting.
Wesley didn't have Q's endearing personality, ya know?
They should have used some other plant which;
1. Doesn't have wild type relatives.
2. Is not a food crop.
After all, they're not trying to grow food, so it makes sense not to create plants which could interbreed with food crops if there's any chance that this modification could bring unsafe levels of selenium into people's diet. (yes, I know it's a micronutrient, but even more important nutrients, say Iron, are toxic if you get enough)
Then the bar for genetic modification would be much lower. True, genes can jump species barriers, but they're less likely to.
I've heard some other posters talk about Monsanto's so called 'terminator gene' and how it can prevent plants from breeding. I've always wondered if it was 100% effective, since the original purpose was to prevent farmers from reusing GM seeds next year.
It would only have to be 99% effective for that. But it'd have to be 100% effective to prevent a gene from spreading into the wild.
They were using nicotine bug bombs 8 years ago in our High School greenhouse, if that means anything. I don't know about now.
Any clue how harmful nicotine is outside of being addictive? Honest question. I don't know.
The woman who holds the world record for longevity was a smoker. Nicotine (as opposed to tar) does have some beneficial effects. It's strange, my chem professor talked about how chemists either died young or lived forever. Wonder if it's the same here.
The viral payload for this thing is seriously reduced. But hey, if I had cancer I'd take the chance.
Yeah, I know what you mean. It seems like nicotine is, possibly in addition to other things, a really interesting antifungal drug. And just like ulcers can be caused by H.Pylori, I think there are a lot of other problems caused by fungi like Candida which doctors simpy fail to address (claiming that it's part of the natural bacterial flora).
Doctors have their collective heads up their asses as far as Ulcerative Colitis goes, I think, just as they did with uclers and H.Pylori.
I tried to get an article on phage therapy posted a while back. I think it would bring up some interesting responses. But the editors nixed it. Maybe I'm just not good at submitting stuff.
HIV mutates far faster in the wild than it will in the lab. If HIV was going to go airborne, it would do so without our help.
Besides, HIV is comparativly weak. You need to be exposed to a large amount of virus to actually become HIV+. Even people stabbed with infected needles don't usually come down with the virus.
Oooh! Me, me, me! I heard that ...
I'm glad to hear it! Honestly, I am. but I think you're the exception. Even today, most of the public seems horribly politically misinformed. None of the other people I went to China with had heard the alternate explanation for the bombing, nor had the PhD who helped me arrange the trip and had written several books on China.
But yeah, hopefully international news sources and the internet will help to give the POV of several sides. So hearing misinformation from multiple sources including a few direct sources will give us a better chance to filter out the lies.
Yeah, it was amazing how certain cultural observations about China were as true today as they were 500 years ago. Linnaeus, in a catagorization of people which seemed racist when I first read it, described Chinese people as 'yellow, melancholy and flexible.' So I was kindof shocked when one of my friends in China started talking about how Chinese people were more flexible than westerners. Same exact words.
They really have a more racial view of things there than is permitted in the states.
Oh the US is extremly free. But I think the effect of that freedom in dubunking gov't propaganda is overestimated. It gives many people a false sense of security. The ends are the same, though the means are far less invasive.
The US has a free press, but it's killed (some have said deliberatly targeted) foreign reporters in Iraq and managed to make sure that the folks writing the news were 'embedded' and saw things from the POV of the troops, only. The ethical diellema on the use of DU has been mostly silenced.
So many of the major news outlets seem to fail to take a really critical look at some of the things that the government asserts.
I was in China not too long ago (2003 - beginning of 2004) and teaching English. One thing that was interesting was the stuff that I heard about Falun Gong. How supposedly people from Falun Gong had poisoned local beggars, it was a cult.
In the states, you never hear these rationales for the crackdowns against Falun Gong. They're not even brough up to be discredited, which makes me wonder if they're true or not?
More to the point, is the American gov't not explaining China's good reasons for cracking down on Falun Gong so that it keeps their citizens feeling superior to the Chineese? "Oh, we have religious freedom and they don't" etc. When the worst abuses against religion happened during the Cultural revolution, or currently against those religious groups with separatist ambitions (or who just don't want their land exploited by the influx of the ethnic Han majority) such as some Muslims in Xinjiang, Buddists in Tibet, etc.
A while ago, there was the whole issue of the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade by accident.
The Chinese line was that it was deliberate and pointless. The American line was that it was an accident. The London guardian at one point ran a piece on how the Chinese embassy had been quite likely rebroadcasting radio signals from Serb forces in violation of the laws governing embassies (neutrality) and how the bombing run that hit the embassy was the only one which didn't go through the NATO chain of command, but came directly from the CIA.
And how much did we in the states hear about this second, more likely explanation?
There were a few internet sites blocked in China. And it was hard to tell which ones were deliberate and which ones were accidental since there seemed to be very little set policy on the matter. China may censor, but it seems to lack the rigid efficiency and formality that one imagines when they think of the USSR or Nazi Germany. The place is anarchy and clannish with an authoritarian frosting. Things like the status and power of your family, and which powerful people you have pissed off and how respectfully you criticize power have a huge amount to do with what you can get away with.
The cultural revolution is over. The boys in power in China are mainly concerned with protecting their power and sometimes increasing it.
And despite the attempt at censorship, there was a lot of information about government corruption which managed to leak out anyways. (Chinese gov't billionaires, Political elite getting away with murder, etc. )
If there's one thing I learned in China, it was how deftly the US government manages to control the information which reaches the majority of its citizens, despite the existance of a 'free press.'
How, exactly, do you draw the line?
Should they also be required to make engines optional?
Should 'giving away a free cupholder' be an offense against makers of cupholders.
With cars, we at least have some idea of what a car includes. With software, there are far fewer standards which makes things even more difficult.
Antitrust law is kindof odd when it comes to software, since bundling and monopolies are much more natural in the software industry. Once you have your code working, it often makes sense for commercial products to standardize to a single product or two since very little money is required for maintenance and newcomers have a hard time paying the high cost of entry. Likewise, bundling thinks like 'windows explorer' (not IE, but WE) which used to be a separate application often makes sense. I mean, heck, auto sellers give floormats with each car. Should they have to remove these non-essential items to allow other floormat makers to compete? That doesn't mean I agree with all of MS's tactics, but the one which they were taken to court for, bundling IE with windows, they seem to have a decent case for. Morally anyways.
Of course, you'll always have open source competitors, but the commercial ventures can price themselves just low enough to discourage new commercial players.
A few important questions.
1. Is proximity important. They seem to waffle on this. Either it's 'the whole world' or 'an individual with a set of cards.'
2. Do people have to die? Do sunspots work? Volcanoes? Major media events? Do you ever have sudden mass dyings that DONT cause problems?
Is it related to cell phone traffic?
It's all far too general right now.
How about "I'll investigate it more seriously when then properly define what they're trying to measure?"
'more seriously when then properly ' should read 'more seriously when they properly '
How about "I'll investigate it more seriously when then properly define what they're trying to measure?"
What is it? Fear? Happiness?
The article claims that random number generators close to a person can anticipate their reactions... and then it says on their website that monitors in India were as likely as monitors in NY to pick up 9-11 before it happened. So are these things influenced by proximity or no?
Their model is inconsistant and points more to a misinterpertation of the data rather than somthing actually being measured. This notion hasn't even passed a formal review process yet.
Finally, the article claims that this is backed by 75 top scientists. The web site says 75 people including scientists, artists and businessmen.
All these things point to a serious lack of genuine rigor on the part of the folks making the claims.
A person making extraordinary claims must present extraordiary proof in a rigerous fashion. I'm not required to go investigating every paranormal claim a person makes, with my failure to do so 'proving' the claim.
This sounds like a Jewish telegram
They read "start worrying, details to follow."
There are two problems with this. First, Occam's razor is not a law. It's just a way of saying, 'all other things being equal, choose the simpler hypothesis.'
Very often, the truth ends up being the more complex explanation.
Second, the purpose of religion isn't simply 'describing the world as it is.' It's there to change the world. Think of it like a "prisoner's diellema" from game theory. If you convince two prisoners that they should cooperate using deistic explanations and to not trust other prisoners who don't believe in God then those two prisoners will be more successful because of their cooperation. In this case, "Mutual belief in God and cooperation with coreligionists" is a successful strategy. In the real world, complex beliefs which are beneficial, even if physically meaninless, can be strategically relevant. (Honor, love, God, etc.)
Seeing a big Viagra ad splayed across the top of the saucer section would be worth watching the show again...
To boldly go where no man has gone before...?
I think you're confusing mass with massive.
One of the keys to determining which weapons are supposed to be legal for use in warfare is discretion. i.e. A gun is strictly under a person's control and may be fired at the wrong target but is always fired at a target, though this is often abused, of course.
Firebombs, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, etc. are inherantly designed to kill people in an area rather than take out a particular target. The US's prohibited use of cluster bombs, and our use of DU, for example, should be considered use of weapons of mass destruction given the degree of civilian damage that they cause.
Frankly, the notion of 'illegal weapons' seems to have been used more as grounds for prosecuting defeated leaders as opposed to actually improving the 'morality' of warfare. As I think Sherman said "War is cruelty and you cannot refine it."
While it i
Loftcrack, you said?
:)
Thanks.
In 1996 there were some... I think it was nerve gass.
In fact, Reagan gave Saddam WMDs and this is a matter of historical record, but we asked Saddam to detroy the stuff after he invaded Kuwait and we thought he might be dangerous. He kept some in reserve and Clinton bombed the reserves, but it was hard to verify whether or not this was successful. Of course, there was never any evidence that Saddam restarted his nuclear program as claimed.
Your use of 'before' is overly broad.
It has to be somthing that they either don't see coming or can't buy out and rebrand.