Uhm. You do realize, most of these fields dovetail together quite nicely? There's very little inter-disciplinary bickering? You do know this, right?
That was exactly my point, though from your response it sounds like you thought I was arguing the opposite - in science, everything fits together, thus it makes sense to have a large amount of respect for the grand edifice that has been created. [FWIW, the bickering I referred to is not usually over correctness but over the relative beauty or importance of each field] Religion as a field does not fit together nearly as tightly as science does (though an individual religion may be entirely self-consistent), and no religion has had the kind of observable logical successes that would make me automatically respect someone's belief in one. Nor has philosophy, which in my opinion is a bunch of farts sitting around debating definitions. And don't anyone even give me that Godel crap, he was a mathematician doing mathematical work and I won't accept any claim to the contrary!
The great irony is that when scientists criticize the (often unfounded) tenets of religion, they are vilified and looked upon as cruel assholes for daring to threaten someone else's belief system, yet starting multimillion dollar campaigns to rid the world of highly scrutinized scientific fact is considered to be a reasonable undertaking! Yeesh...
There are literally over 30,000 different denominations of Protestant christian churches in the US, not just hundreds. Most are probably just one church wonders, but...
This is true, however I would be content even to lump them together, since most Christianities are not mutually exclusive, since if one is right, they (pretty much) all are. Their disagreements boil down to how to most effectively carry out the mission of God, not to whether there is a mission or a God.
Just what are your criteria for deciding what beliefs are "stupid"? What makes your approach towards this any different from others'?
Excellent question. Generally, I carefully consider the idea, and look at all available evidence supporting or taking away from the idea, read what others have written, think a bit for myself, etc. Then I look at the pile of information and try to figure out whether you'd have to be a really pathetic fool to buy into it. As a particular example, all that I know of the world leads me to believe that a belief in the historical and physical claims of Scientology is, by itself, enough to damn someone as "stupid" in my eyes.
Now, this does not necessarily apply to all religion. It is not completely out of the question to look at the world and decide that there must have been some root cause for its existence. Thus I cannot make a blanket statement that every religion is "stupid" - surely some are more right than others. However, most religions will turn out to be wrong, which means that religion viewed as a whole is certainly "stupid." Probably greater than 99% of the people on earth have incorrect but very committed views as to what this root cause was, thus most beliefs on this matter are stupid (including, almost certainly, my own! Though my view at least includes the caveat that I don't know much about the issue...). What else would you call a field of inquiry where (almost by definition) a vast majority of the theories are not even approximations of the truth, but are downright false?
As a counterexample, look at science. You have many fields of science, and much bickering between them, etc. But it will never happen that physics turns out to be "right," thus making chemistry, biology, sociology (okay, not really a science), and psychology wrong. The entire edifice holds together quite nicely, and it's most likely that the majority of the practitioners are correct, at least about the most important issues. This is something that religion can never achieve, therefore I don't see the point in respecting religion as a concept. If everything coalesces together, or some facts are accepted by all as correct, then we can discuss further, and actually evaluate the merits of these ideas. But there is no such consensus at the moment, so I'm happy to throw the blanket label of "stupid" on religion.
To go back to your question, let me offer you a brief answer: my approach is not different to anyone else's. A stupid belief is one that doesn't have much logical weight behind it, which I think is a reasonable definition. But that's not what was under discussion - if you recall, the GP suggested that the fact that Scientology is a religion should mean that we respect it. I propose that whether or not someone calls something a religion, if they are talking about aliens, Xenu, and thetans, we should evaluate the idea on its own merit rather than automatically granting it respect!
I personally hate Scientology but they are a religion and must be respected as one.
I'm really not trying to be a troll here, but what exactly makes religion especially worthy of respect? There are literally hundreds of religions, almost all of which contradict each other in several areas. This means that most of them are flat out wrong.
So let me rephrase. If it's all but 100% certain that almost every religious person holds deep seated beliefs that are wrong, why should I respect religious belief in aggregate? I don't respect people that think Einstein was "wrong." I also don't respect people who "don't believe" in arithmetic. Generally speaking, if someone believes something stupid, that lowers my respect level for them. In the case of religion, I don't know which religion is right (at least to 100% accuracy), but I know that most of them are wrong, so to me that says that I should not have respect for the religious. Yes, I'm being unfair to the lucky few that happen to be right about their religious beliefs, but on average, I think this is the most reasonable approach.
Am I completely off base here? If so, please explain.
Music, graphics, movies - you can't do that with the Google model.
But this is more a function of crappy browser plugins than an inherent deficiency in the model. My prediction is that if the web-app thing really gets rolling along, eventually someone's going to manage to get something besides Flash and Java applets (plus Javascript) running in our (meaning all of our) browsers. Ideally we'd have some sort of well sandboxed assembly code that we could use compiled languages on top of instead of interpreted ones. Then things like video editing would be simple, and it would be much easier to port an existing application to a web-friendly language. Of course, bandwidth is another story, but if things could be edited on your hard-drive there's nothing preventing the editing software itself from coming from elsewhere. All this would require is a decent way to allow partial access to local files in a safe way (perhaps with a security popup, perhaps by manually copying the relevant files in and out of a sandboxed area of the HD).
Trust me, no matter what happens, in ten years there will be a better way to write web applications than there is today, whether it's a new dominant plugin or an entirely new paradigm for delivery.
I'm not going to get into most of this; I think you're kind of caricaturing what Libertarians believe, but not being one (I believe that some programs must be imposed by the government because the magical "market" is really bad at doing things that have no short term profit potential - that's not to say that it actually does these things in our world, of course) I'm not the person to correct you. However, I couldn't resist this:
It is based on another falsehood: that every individual is an island unto themselves, and that barring some kind of court challenge, nothing anyone does can be said to impact anyone else. The fact is, everything you do impacts everything else. Therefore, any decision or action you take is the concern of every other human being on the planet. You have a responsibility to the rest of humanity, because we all need to live together and cooperate to make society work.
This tells me that you don't have a clue what you're talking about. Libertarianism doesn't for one freaking second claim that nothing I do affects you. All it claims is that if what I do doesn't affect you (or anyone), then you have no right to force me to stop doing it. Perhaps something must also be added: that your mere knowledge that I am doing something does not count as me affecting you for the purposes of your right to make me stop - it is these kinds of issues that the Libertarians tend to be appalled by today, where some highly moral group wants to stop immoral (by their standards) actions that they neither see nor are hurt by in any way other than an abstract one. Which is to say that Joe's freedom of action is always to be preferred over Bob's freedom to constrain Joe's actions. Freedom over meta-freedom, if you prefer.
But if I actually hurt you in some way, no Libertarian is going to suggest that I shouldn't be punished. My responsibility to society is to keep from doing bad things to others, and that's where it ends. Everything I do most emphatically is not the concern of every other human being; I'm somewhat amazed you would even claim that, except in the vaguest philosophical sense. Society has absolutely no right to regulate what does not concern it - to me, this does not seem selfish at all, and certainly not anarchistic or intellectually dishonest.
And yes, I know the parent was just an anti-Slashdot troll...I don't know why I bother...
Well, in any case, any access to the raw data of the brain would be an improvement to me. Even if all minds are incomprehensible mazes of virtual languages never spoken before in any other brain, I'd love the data itself to be collectible onto some medium. Given enough data sources, the steps each brain goes through to communicate with the outside world may be able to be decoded, and perhaps some day we may be able to at least have a simulation of previously recorded memory.
Yes, I'll wholeheartedly agree that it would be a huge improvement over the current means of recording brain data (pen and paper). Any trimming of the intermediate steps between brain and storage, assuming the data is possible to interpret, is a great thing. I would also not overlook the huge potential of sharing this information with anyone else that is "plugged in." When billions of stupid cells get together, each one communicating with only its neighbors, you get a reasonably intelligent human. What do you get when a billion reasonably intelligent humans connect up and start processing data on a global scale? [errr...other than a technophobe crusade, allegations of "playing God," a strange new version of democracy and maybe even a religious war or two, I mean]
That's the clearest evidence against Intelligent Design I've heard all week. Everybody knows that a real God would have used a Model-View-Controller architecture.
First, I have to give the obligatory chuckle to this, but it actually brings up a serious question for CS: is it possible that our current inclination to separate function from state is seriously damaging the prospects for pushing the field further? Evolution tends to be a discriminating bitch when it comes to finding effective ways to solve nasty problems (the simpler ones it just solves any old way - the problem is that the harder ones are so tough to solve that if it gets done at all, the solution must be one of the simplest), so it doesn't seem that unlikely to me that the only feasible way to carry out many of the toughest feats that the brain handles is to throw encapsulation to the wind and let everything slosh around in one big program/data object, then just figure out how to tweak and constrain that object to get it to behave nicely.
Think about it this way: a large part of the "data" that we carry around in our heads - the very stuff that most people on/. make their livings off of - is actually the details of how to use our brains to solve certain problems. Now imagine setting up a Java program whose purpose was to store different methods of solving problems in Java. Yeah, you could do it, but it would be a nasty piece of work, more or less equivalent to writing your own version of a Java compiler. And that's just to figure out how to run the instructions, let alone generate them! I really think there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way we view programming to tackle "bigger" problems. I'm certainly aware that Lisp can handle this type of stuff, but honestly, until these features make it into a mainstream language (by which I mean one that you cannot possibly graduate with a major in CS without having seen), they will not be widely understood or effectively exploited (no slight to the Lisp programmers out there, of course, I just mean that a million minds using a great tool will leverage it much more effectively than a thousand). A huge step in that direction would be to create a variant of Lisp that bore more resemblance syntactically to C, which unfortunately is about the only language that everyone working with computers is guaranteed to be exposed to. This might be tricky, especially considering that the strange syntax is in some ways indispensable to Lisp, but if you think about it less as a port of Lisp and more as an extra feature tacked on to C (or Java, or whatever - please not VB, though!), it doesn't seem all that ridiculous. To some extent the simple insertion of an eval() function to one of the mainstream languages would allow people to start thinking more along these lines, slow execution of those calls be damned!
What would be fascinating is if we were to discover interfaces that allow contents of memory or other brain contents to be read in this way.
This would be incredibly tricky, as there is no data format to speak of that the brain uses - program and data are all bound together in one messy lump. The parallel is actually very close to that of neural networks in CS: suppose you trained a network to implement some complicated function that had some parameters hard coded into it, like (for instance) to generate a sine wave at a few particular frequencies within some range of input. How would you go about reading those parameters from the weight structure? Your only option is really to look at and interpret the output, since the network has not necessarily encapsulated away the sine function and stored the parameters separately (though it might have). Such is the problem with the brain, at least barring some incredible discovery in neuroscience that shows us that the brain does have a central data repository. Alas, to my understanding, the data storage literally happens along the very connections that perform the data processing, so I doubt that this is feasible.
However, this is still a very interesting development, as neurons have proven to be quite adaptable, so one could (in theory) learn to recieve or transmit a data feed to an off-site storage location. What I see as more plausible is that one could in theory wean his/herself off of brain-based permanent memory and attempt to rely more and more on the external data feed. This is not as clean as a hard copy of the brain, but provided that the data path was sufficiently wide and the person was trained exceptionally well, could be a decent approximation, especially if you got skilled enough to subconsciously feed records of your thoughts and perceptions into your "backup." But I don't think it will be easy!
Gotta wonder who's going to weasel the patent system into blocking further inquiry on this one, though!
I've never paid Google a cent in my life, yet they have for a long time provided me with services that truly make my life easier. I will more than happily put up with a few ads for the use of their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Earth alone.
Microsoft, on the other hand, treats me like a criminal, writes software that is designed more to line their pockets than help the user get things done, and has now weaseled me into paying for XP three times over because of their shady OEM deals. And frankly, I don't even like the software very much, I only use it because of lock-in.
If someone has screwed you in the past, you expect the worst, whereas if someone has treated you well you give them the benefit of the doubt. Google has my trust until they show me that they no longer deserve it; Microsoft has already convinced me that it's up to no good. So yes, you are right, people would be up in arms if Microsoft was pulling this stuff, because people quite reasonably expect Microsoft to rip the customer off as much as possible, while taking all possible steps to force them to remain customers. People expect Google to make a damned killing off of this while actually creating a valuable service at a reasonable price. To me that goes way beyond being "not microsoft."
You make some interesting points, which I mostly agree with - the Republican ideal has been perverted beyond any recognition. Of course, I'm young enough so that frankly, it has been that way for as long as I've been following politics at all, so I quite often forget that this is not how conservativism is supposed to look. But let's be honest with ourselves, when you're talking about a party that prefers small government and unrestricted personal freedom (within reason, of course), you've never been talking about the Republican party, you've been talking about the Libertarians. For quite a while now the Republican party has been in favor of restricting personal freedoms, and this idea is so widely accepted within the party (not just by the politicians, but by the members) that I don't think preservation of individual freedoms can still be considered a fundamental piece of their philosophy.
The ultimate irony is that if you do actually care about being free and conducting your nation's finances with some restraint, you have to cast your vote for the "let the government control everything" Democrats...such is the crapped up nature of a two party system - sometimes it splits the wrong way between issues, and you end up with one party that's left economically and right socially, and vice versa; worse, they sometimes act exactly opposite what you'd expect from their stated intentions. In my opinion, part of the reason behind that is that nobody in their right mind would vote for a party that stood by the platform of big government and no personal freedoms. People generally want a few simple things: safety, freedom, money, and small government (note well that taken as a whole, these are mutually contradictory). So parties split along the lines of which factors they consider the most important, and you've just got to hold your nose and pick based on your own personal prioritization of these essentials.
What I wouldn't give to be able to decouple the individual issues from the parties that stand for them, though! But it's easy enough to understand why a two party system is all but inevitable, so I guess we'll have to accept it and keep living with it as long as democracy rules this country. [Here's a hint on that one: Democracy as we know it is destined to be completely, utterly, and irreversibly f-ed beyond recognition the moment the first computer passes the Turing test...but more on that another time.]
I can't think of any scientific theories that explain why there is something and not nothing... science is limited in the scope of what it can test and prove. Philosophy takes over the rest.
For the first part, I'm with you. Science is (at a fundamental level that we may very well never reach) limited in the sense that the greatest possible triumph of science would be the discovery of a set of mathematical axioms from which all the rules of physics would follow. Once you have the axioms, you can investigate no further, as it is impossible by definition to prove that you must have a certain set of axioms that control reality; that word "must" requires that you already possess axioms that allow you to think about implication, as well as priors to derive further theorems from. And the fact that something exists rather than nothing must certainly be one of those unexplainable axioms and not (as some of the more loose tongued and foolish physicists would have you believe) some trivial event that relates in an ill defined way to quantum cosmology - a priori, quantum mechanics has no greater right to existence than pink unicorns or Windows Vista, so it's not fair to apply its rules. Put another way, nonexistence is a wildly different beast from the vacuum of quantum field theory, so the dynamics of the latter cannot be reasonably invoked to explain away the nonexistence of the former.
But to suggest that philosophy "takes over" the rest implies that anything useful could ever come of it, and this is so far from the case that it's ridiculous. I would argue that there is no possible answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing - what kind of answer could possibly satisfy us? Any answer would necessarily be of the form "Something exists rather than nothing because of X," which presupposes that X exists and that the truthhood of the chain of logic leading to X exists, thus begging the question. God is no way out, either, and when people claim that their philosophy or religion allows them to investigate things which science "is not able to," they are being disingenuous since they can do no better. The best you can do in that direction is to assert that we exist because of God (or a higher power, or whatever you want to call it), and God exists because of Himself. That's all well and good, and trivially consistent, but it doesn't tell us anything useful. It's like suggesting the insertion of an axiom into a system purported to represent reality that says "This axiom is true" (maybe a closer analogy to religion would be "This axiom is true because this axiom is true") - it might be true, and it might be false, but either way it's neither falsifiable or very enlightening, and certainly not worthy of more than an amused chuckle, let alone a massive investigation on the scale of modern scientific research.
Back on point, though: a question that by virtue of its content can have no meaningful answer is a bad question, end of story. And it is true, science cannot answer bad questions that don't have answers. But this is not a limitation; rather, it is an indication that scientists are not stupid enough to get bogged down thinking about things that will never amount to anything useful. To me, that is what makes science great, not what leaves it lacking...the philosophers are more than welcome to hole up with these bad questions and argue over them until they are blue in the face. But I can tell you for sure that whatever they "discover," it just won't be all that interesting.
I suspect that the problem would be that most of these companies have authorized the *AAs to distribute copies in the service of fighting piracy, so you might actually have some trouble finding pairs that they weren't authorized to touch.
Of course, this brings up an obvious out: IANAL, so I don't know how this would hold up, though. All you need to do is bundle an original piece of creative work, say, a text file, that would qualify as a copyrighted work that some group owns the copyright to. This group would explicitly license the work for distribution except by agents of the *AAs or other anti-piracy groups. The file would need to be bundled with every torrent served to be effective. The group could also set up a legal agreement with the distributors of said file such that any money generated by enforcement of the copyright (through settlements or court awards) would go towards offsetting awards to the *AAs on copyright violations of their bundled items. The idea being that should the *AA bring the case to court, they would be admitting that they also infringed upon an equally costly copyrighted work that they certainly do not have the rights to distribute, and the awards would balance out, thus they have no incentive to bring the case at all (except that they clearly have the money to continue a drawn out court case whereas the average user does not). Furthermore, a BT client could be configured to refuse to distribute anything but the copyrighted text file to another client until it has also recieved that text file - some sort of mutually assured destruction handshake protecting against litigation.
There's probably some loophole here, though, I'm not entirely sure...any law-inclined people out there care to comment?
But look, would you have taken Wikipedia over Brittanica five years ago? Neither would I. I just think it's not time yet. There are several fundamental problems that haven't yet been solved, and which must be solved before it can be considered to have won in my opinion.
I'll agree with you that Wikipedia has some problems that haven't yet been ironed out, mostly the ones that you outlined above. However, I have to disagree with you on the issue of bias - while I certainly would agree that many articles involve edit wars and significant amounts of bias, nobody in their right mind sees (or expects to see) Wikipedia as free of such things. Rather, you must evaluate everything that appears there with a skeptical set of eyes. In truth, everything should always be viewed this way, including textbooks and encyclopedias, but the physical heft of those types of books tends to fool the reader into attributing undue authority to the authors. I personally like the fact that Wikipedia is a pretty good source with a healthy dose of crap - what better way to keep a reader on his toes than to have the occasional article edited so that every other "the" reads "penis!" In order to think critically you need to occasionally see a good reason to do so, and twelve years of schooling by textbook does not prepare students for the real world, where everything hasn't been evaluated extensively for accuracy and pre-approved for your safe consumption before you read it.
Until you can show me data that demonstrates that the mob is less partial than formally edited text, I'm not biting. I'm playing the FUD card and waiting for data.
We'll never get there. But the overall utility of a gargantuan amount of free and somewhat biased text far surpasses that of the tiny but expensive amount of carefully sanitized summarizing that you would find in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia can actually serve as a springboard for further investigation; an encyclopedia is nothing more than a glorified dictionary.
25.000 lines of JS script as you claim would mean at least 25.000 line-feeds which would mean at least 25k bandwidth per connection which means your shit sucks. You can do a LOT with server side includes these days. Please use JS only for rendering.
I'm sorry, but this is just bad advice. Yes, I'll admit that 25,000 lines of JS is a lot, but depending on the calculation that's being performed, the frequency of updates, and the number of users expected to access that script during a given period, putting the processing load on the client can be more than worth a once-per-pageload 25k cost (besides, these days, most web sites push far more than 25k in title graphics alone!).
Your "Please use JS only for rendering." is likely to get you in trouble if followed dogmatically, especially in situations like stock data feeds where you might be getting one piece of data from the server every 10 seconds and calculating several customized indicators based on that data. It would be foolish (in most cases) to do the complex math on the server's end, because it would tie up the server while it could be pushing out data to other customers. I think a better rule is to be aware of your constraints, and choose the tools appropriate to the job. Spread out the processing power and bandwidth if at all possible, and you'll likely be fine.
Seriously, though, I understand something about these topics, and a) I wouldn't be surprised at all if that knifepoint was where the damn value stayed for another decade or so, seeing as Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) seems to quite enjoy placing these geometry-of-space constants so close to the critical values that we can't say a thing for sure. b) is that it's a cute theory and an interesting geometry, but frankly I haven't seen anything so far that convinces me that it's right.
But either way, you're correct - this does not appear to be crackpot stuff (I haven't read the peer-reviewed article, but I'll trust that it's there). You can always tell, because the real loonies always talk about how wrong Einstein was.
Timecube sig:
Ignorance of 4 days is evil,
Evil educators teach 1 day.
1 day will destroy humans.
The mistake is thinking of there being an actual boundary. You need to think of it more like the crotch on a pair of pants - imagine that each pentagon has a tube connected to it, and you run it to the other side and connect it up with the appropriate twist. Then imagine that you turned the whole thing into rubber. There is no longer a sharp edge, just a blobby series of tubes joined by a bunch of U-shaped pant crotch things. The fact that two particles that were very close to each other before they entered separate tubes has no bearing at all on how far they will be after they enter the tubes. It may have great bearing on the details of the force laws that they interact under (basically, every "mirror" particle has to be accounted for, including the infinite copies of the particle itself; this is an incredibly delicate self-action problem even for the simplest multiply connected spacetimes).
This is true, and what it suggests to me is that if you do know about these rights, the only reasonable course of action if you're questioned about it is to twist the truth a bit - after all, it seems to me to go directly against our constitutional rights to prescreen anyone who actually knows what rights we have from a true "jury of your peers." A cautionary tale, however, from The Jury Rights Project:
The JRP formed in response to the case of Laura Kriho, a Gilpin County juror who was maliciously prosecuted after she was the lone holdout juror on a drug possession case. Kriho was convicted of
contempt of court, after four months of deliberation by the judge, for failing to volunteer information about her political beliefs and knowledge of the Constitution during jury selection.
A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.
In 1988, in U.S. v. Krzyske, the jury asked the judge about jury nullification. The judge responded "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification." The jury convicted the defendant, and the judge's answer was upheld on appeal.
In 2001, a California Supreme Court ruling on a case involving statutory rape led to a new jury instruction that requires jurors to inform the judge whenever a fellow panelist appears to be deciding a case based on his or her dislike of a law.[10] However, the ruling could not overturn the practice of jury nullification itself because of double jeopardy: a defendant who has been acquitted of a charge cannot be charged a second time with it, even if the court later learns jury nullification played a role in the verdict.
This last case sends an unclear message: I'm not sure if the judge can actually prevent a jury from deciding a case on this basis if he knows about it while it's happening, or if you can get rid of a juror for expressing this type of opinion. To my understanding (IANAL), the power of jury nullification basically rests on the fact that jurors have essentially no enforceable obligation to rule on the basis of the law - you can't legally punish a juror for their decision, therefore the jurors can do whatever they damn well please. As to whether you can preemptively (i.e. before the verdict is rendered) prevent a juror from pushing for jury nullification, I don't think this has been clearly established one way or the other.
For example, if someone were to be prosecuted under the DMCA and the defendant wanted a trial by jury and the jury decided the DMCA wasn't good law, something could actually be done!
Very true - alas, most people have never even heard of jury nullification, although I suspect if they did, many would feel they had no right to apply it in most cases. Wikipedia claims that "Jurors are likely to be struck from the panel during voir dire if they reveal awareness of the concept of jury nullification.", although this is without a citation.
Did you study Hitler and Nazi Germany - GENOCIDAL MANIAC! You're a horrible person for wanting to kill Jews. Don't deny it, you already said you studied Hitler in school, so obviously this means you're just like him.
This thread is dying, but I'll comment on this anyways. The difference here is that when we study Hitler in school, the school board doesn't tell us that a text that glorifies his genocide is the literal word of God. The Christian establishment does tell us that Deuteronomy is part of the word of God. If you call something the word of God, it's no longer a story about history; rather, it is elevated to the status of an important, life-altering piece of wisdom, explaining to us how to do good in God's eyes. Deuteronomy tells us that God loved it when a bunch of people massacred nonbelievers. There's no subtlety here - the word of God contains many examples of God being pleased by violence, so it should be no surprise that people take this as a major message of any Old Testament based religion.
And again, I come to the point - the New Testament has a lot of good messages, I don't argue with that. But the Old Testament, by and large, is composed of many horrific stories of people acting in despicable manners and being praised by God for it. If a religion wants to do no harm, it should release itself from being tied to the Old Testament. In my opinion, if most Christians followed the word of Jesus, they would not have such a bad name. But most of the negativity surrounding Christianity flows from these ancient books that Jesus essentially said were irrelevant (not exactly, but IMO, you could get the right moral message from the Bible without opening the OT at all).
The problem in America right now is that just as in any democracy, a bit more than half of the country agrees with the current government (at least regarding personal freedom - no question about it, the Dems only won because of Iraq) and subscribes to the notion that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide. And hey, we're a democracy, so if 51% of the people agree, that means the rest of us should all just bend over, right? That's what it means to be free! Combine that sentiment with the hideous educational system and attitude in this country, and it becomes a very hostile place to free scientific inquiry - people don't care whether things are true, because belief is much easier than research (especially when you're too stupid to understand the research even if you did look into it, and trust me, I've taught way too many American high school students to believe that more than a fraction are even minimally educated, let alone intelligent).
I finally realized how bad things were going to get when I first started hearing people advance the argument that it was unconstitutional and - worse! - unpatriotic to limit their democratic "right" to vote away my freedoms. Here's a hint, America: if someone is pissed about "judicial activism" it usually means they are trying to take away a minority's right to not be punished for being a minority (and I don't mean this in the strictly racial sense). Cover your ass or you know what you get...
Sorry, hobbyists, Nintendo only sells devkits to legitimate, established software houses. Ones that have secure offices where Nintendo can be assured that their proprietary resources won't be stolen from and put up for sale to the least scrupulous bidder.
I still fail to understand Nintendo's paranoia on this matter. What needs to be in a developer's kit that is so potentially damaging to their interests if it were to get out? Wouldn't the kit basically just consist of a hardware interface and an API with some precompiled binaries to run against? Validate the software with a hardware dongle and I don't see what the issue is with selling the things to anyone that has the cash...I mean, they're not putting source code in these kits or anything, are they?
I assume that the real issue is that Nintendo wants to continue exercising its right to screen developers to make sure crap games aren't coming out on the system, right? Or am I just being cynical? [disclaimer: I'm actually something of a Nintendo fanboy, I'm just bitter because I would love to develop for the Wii and probably won't get a chance...]
Nice catch, that's a good point! First, I will obligatorily point out the difference in persuasive power between a religious text and a video game; people aren't generally willing to die for a video game, but many are more than happy to offer their lives for their Gods. But no, even considering the differences in situation, I absolutely don't think this stuff should be censored. At the very least it has enormous historical, cultural, and literary relevance. However, if you look back to near the start of this thread, I was responding to the claim that games like this do not represent Christianity. I would argue that by leaving a piece of text in the "You'll go to HELL if you don't believe this!" category and having it in your holy book you lose all right to claim that extremists are perverting your cause when they interpret that text in a literalist fashion.
So basically all I'm saying is that even the most moderate Christians should be at least a bit embarrassed by the fact that it is their scripture being used to justify a lot of this crap that's going on, and that it really only takes a very little twisting to do so. And as this article said, this appears to be the case, as the people pissed off about this game and protesting it were Christian themselves.
For some reason I thought you were talking about Christians, not Jews. Obviously I was mistaken since you are quoting scriptures included in the Torah - obviously not the New Testament preached by Jesus.
But the Old Testament is a part of the Christian Bible, and is read and studied by Christians right alongside the New Testament - at my Sunday school we did half of each class on each section - so it's perfectly relevant here, whether or not it is shared with other religions. The problem I have is that if a religion professes to have a peaceful God that asks His adherents to act peacefully, then it does itself and everyone else a disservice by continuing to accept scripture that glorifies destruction in God's name. And you are correct these verses are also in the Torah, so this criticism applies equally there; the only reason I passed over Judaism and Islam earlier is that I don't really know much about their teachings and I am utterly unqualified to comment.
Unfortunately you are quoting this passage out of context, if you read the whole chapter, you can see that it is referring to a pact made between one specific group of people (a long time ago, obviously) and God.
Absolutely true. You are also correct that many of the other quotations are similarly plucked without context to just display the "good" parts. However, at least in Deuteronomy, there is a loud and clear message that God likes it when you kick ass in his name. And since one of the major methods of getting points across in the Bible is by analogy and example (rather than direct orders from God), I would argue that if these stories have made it into the Bible, they are not mere historical records of human/God interactions that are no longer relevant. There has to be some message, and the message that I see is that God wanted his people to conquer those of other faiths, often in extremely violent ways - at least at some point. He even punished them severely if they failed to completely and utterly wipe out the people he wanted them to conquer. And I do understand that Jesus "canceled out" a lot of the Old Testament stuff, and also that it also appears in other religious texts, etc. - my original reason for posting it was just that a lot of people asked where in the Bible there are quotes that suggest that killing those who don't worship God is acceptable. Deuteronomy gave me that impression, whether or not it was supposed to, and whether or not I'm supposed to disregard its message based on the content of the New Testament. You may (reasonably, in my opinion) claim that the particular moral is supposed to be interpreted away, but I had to respond those who claimed it wasn't there at all. If you'll recall, TFA is about a group of fundamentalists that apparently didn't get the memo that said the kill-or-convert thing went out with the Crusades.
Your next point: rejecting parts of the Bible. For exactly the same reason as above (Jesus said to forget it, to badly paraphrase) most Christians at the very least deem large portions of the Old Testament irrelevant or misleading. Most do not accept the literal story of creation (though this is a more recent development). Most do not believe in the laws of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Most do not believe in offering sacrifices to God. Most think God loves all his creations, not just the Christians/Jews/Muslims. Most think God is merciful, not vengeful and cruel. There is a general sense (at least from what I have seen - I do live in a quite liberal area, so I could be wrong) that the Bible needs to be looked at more as analogy than rulebook, and that its purpose is to spread a good moral message rather than impose absolute restrictions on behavior and explain historical fact. I don't know if you can call these things outright rejection of parts of the Bible, but they certainly point to a looser view of the document than I imagine was initially intended.
And of course it's the few Christians that do believe wholesale in the (intolerance-promoting subset of the) Old Testament rules that Jesus told them to stop obsessing over that really cause most of the bad light to be shed on Christianity, which is a shame. Back up at the top of this thread, I was groping at the point that it's not real Christianity that Slashdotters hate, it's this crazy fundamentalist crap that's been dominating the conversation lately - true Christianity breeds caring and loving people that do good in this world far beyond the mere spreading of their dogma, and I think our world could use a lot more of that these days.
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The great irony is that when scientists criticize the (often unfounded) tenets of religion, they are vilified and looked upon as cruel assholes for daring to threaten someone else's belief system, yet starting multimillion dollar campaigns to rid the world of highly scrutinized scientific fact is considered to be a reasonable undertaking! Yeesh...
Excellent question. Generally, I carefully consider the idea, and look at all available evidence supporting or taking away from the idea, read what others have written, think a bit for myself, etc. Then I look at the pile of information and try to figure out whether you'd have to be a really pathetic fool to buy into it. As a particular example, all that I know of the world leads me to believe that a belief in the historical and physical claims of Scientology is, by itself, enough to damn someone as "stupid" in my eyes.
Now, this does not necessarily apply to all religion. It is not completely out of the question to look at the world and decide that there must have been some root cause for its existence. Thus I cannot make a blanket statement that every religion is "stupid" - surely some are more right than others. However, most religions will turn out to be wrong, which means that religion viewed as a whole is certainly "stupid." Probably greater than 99% of the people on earth have incorrect but very committed views as to what this root cause was, thus most beliefs on this matter are stupid (including, almost certainly, my own! Though my view at least includes the caveat that I don't know much about the issue...). What else would you call a field of inquiry where (almost by definition) a vast majority of the theories are not even approximations of the truth, but are downright false?
As a counterexample, look at science. You have many fields of science, and much bickering between them, etc. But it will never happen that physics turns out to be "right," thus making chemistry, biology, sociology (okay, not really a science), and psychology wrong. The entire edifice holds together quite nicely, and it's most likely that the majority of the practitioners are correct, at least about the most important issues. This is something that religion can never achieve, therefore I don't see the point in respecting religion as a concept. If everything coalesces together, or some facts are accepted by all as correct, then we can discuss further, and actually evaluate the merits of these ideas. But there is no such consensus at the moment, so I'm happy to throw the blanket label of "stupid" on religion.
To go back to your question, let me offer you a brief answer: my approach is not different to anyone else's. A stupid belief is one that doesn't have much logical weight behind it, which I think is a reasonable definition. But that's not what was under discussion - if you recall, the GP suggested that the fact that Scientology is a religion should mean that we respect it. I propose that whether or not someone calls something a religion, if they are talking about aliens, Xenu, and thetans, we should evaluate the idea on its own merit rather than automatically granting it respect!
So let me rephrase. If it's all but 100% certain that almost every religious person holds deep seated beliefs that are wrong, why should I respect religious belief in aggregate? I don't respect people that think Einstein was "wrong." I also don't respect people who "don't believe" in arithmetic. Generally speaking, if someone believes something stupid, that lowers my respect level for them. In the case of religion, I don't know which religion is right (at least to 100% accuracy), but I know that most of them are wrong, so to me that says that I should not have respect for the religious. Yes, I'm being unfair to the lucky few that happen to be right about their religious beliefs, but on average, I think this is the most reasonable approach.
Am I completely off base here? If so, please explain.
Trust me, no matter what happens, in ten years there will be a better way to write web applications than there is today, whether it's a new dominant plugin or an entirely new paradigm for delivery.
But if I actually hurt you in some way, no Libertarian is going to suggest that I shouldn't be punished. My responsibility to society is to keep from doing bad things to others, and that's where it ends. Everything I do most emphatically is not the concern of every other human being; I'm somewhat amazed you would even claim that, except in the vaguest philosophical sense. Society has absolutely no right to regulate what does not concern it - to me, this does not seem selfish at all, and certainly not anarchistic or intellectually dishonest.
And yes, I know the parent was just an anti-Slashdot troll...I don't know why I bother...
Think about it this way: a large part of the "data" that we carry around in our heads - the very stuff that most people on
However, this is still a very interesting development, as neurons have proven to be quite adaptable, so one could (in theory) learn to recieve or transmit a data feed to an off-site storage location. What I see as more plausible is that one could in theory wean his/herself off of brain-based permanent memory and attempt to rely more and more on the external data feed. This is not as clean as a hard copy of the brain, but provided that the data path was sufficiently wide and the person was trained exceptionally well, could be a decent approximation, especially if you got skilled enough to subconsciously feed records of your thoughts and perceptions into your "backup." But I don't think it will be easy!
Gotta wonder who's going to weasel the patent system into blocking further inquiry on this one, though!
I've never paid Google a cent in my life, yet they have for a long time provided me with services that truly make my life easier. I will more than happily put up with a few ads for the use of their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google Earth alone.
Microsoft, on the other hand, treats me like a criminal, writes software that is designed more to line their pockets than help the user get things done, and has now weaseled me into paying for XP three times over because of their shady OEM deals. And frankly, I don't even like the software very much, I only use it because of lock-in.
If someone has screwed you in the past, you expect the worst, whereas if someone has treated you well you give them the benefit of the doubt. Google has my trust until they show me that they no longer deserve it; Microsoft has already convinced me that it's up to no good. So yes, you are right, people would be up in arms if Microsoft was pulling this stuff, because people quite reasonably expect Microsoft to rip the customer off as much as possible, while taking all possible steps to force them to remain customers. People expect Google to make a damned killing off of this while actually creating a valuable service at a reasonable price. To me that goes way beyond being "not microsoft."
You make some interesting points, which I mostly agree with - the Republican ideal has been perverted beyond any recognition. Of course, I'm young enough so that frankly, it has been that way for as long as I've been following politics at all, so I quite often forget that this is not how conservativism is supposed to look. But let's be honest with ourselves, when you're talking about a party that prefers small government and unrestricted personal freedom (within reason, of course), you've never been talking about the Republican party, you've been talking about the Libertarians. For quite a while now the Republican party has been in favor of restricting personal freedoms, and this idea is so widely accepted within the party (not just by the politicians, but by the members) that I don't think preservation of individual freedoms can still be considered a fundamental piece of their philosophy.
The ultimate irony is that if you do actually care about being free and conducting your nation's finances with some restraint, you have to cast your vote for the "let the government control everything" Democrats...such is the crapped up nature of a two party system - sometimes it splits the wrong way between issues, and you end up with one party that's left economically and right socially, and vice versa; worse, they sometimes act exactly opposite what you'd expect from their stated intentions. In my opinion, part of the reason behind that is that nobody in their right mind would vote for a party that stood by the platform of big government and no personal freedoms. People generally want a few simple things: safety, freedom, money, and small government (note well that taken as a whole, these are mutually contradictory). So parties split along the lines of which factors they consider the most important, and you've just got to hold your nose and pick based on your own personal prioritization of these essentials.
What I wouldn't give to be able to decouple the individual issues from the parties that stand for them, though! But it's easy enough to understand why a two party system is all but inevitable, so I guess we'll have to accept it and keep living with it as long as democracy rules this country. [Here's a hint on that one: Democracy as we know it is destined to be completely, utterly, and irreversibly f-ed beyond recognition the moment the first computer passes the Turing test...but more on that another time.]
But to suggest that philosophy "takes over" the rest implies that anything useful could ever come of it, and this is so far from the case that it's ridiculous. I would argue that there is no possible answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing - what kind of answer could possibly satisfy us? Any answer would necessarily be of the form "Something exists rather than nothing because of X," which presupposes that X exists and that the truthhood of the chain of logic leading to X exists, thus begging the question. God is no way out, either, and when people claim that their philosophy or religion allows them to investigate things which science "is not able to," they are being disingenuous since they can do no better. The best you can do in that direction is to assert that we exist because of God (or a higher power, or whatever you want to call it), and God exists because of Himself. That's all well and good, and trivially consistent, but it doesn't tell us anything useful. It's like suggesting the insertion of an axiom into a system purported to represent reality that says "This axiom is true" (maybe a closer analogy to religion would be "This axiom is true because this axiom is true") - it might be true, and it might be false, but either way it's neither falsifiable or very enlightening, and certainly not worthy of more than an amused chuckle, let alone a massive investigation on the scale of modern scientific research.
Back on point, though: a question that by virtue of its content can have no meaningful answer is a bad question, end of story. And it is true, science cannot answer bad questions that don't have answers. But this is not a limitation; rather, it is an indication that scientists are not stupid enough to get bogged down thinking about things that will never amount to anything useful. To me, that is what makes science great, not what leaves it lacking...the philosophers are more than welcome to hole up with these bad questions and argue over them until they are blue in the face. But I can tell you for sure that whatever they "discover," it just won't be all that interesting.
I suspect that the problem would be that most of these companies have authorized the *AAs to distribute copies in the service of fighting piracy, so you might actually have some trouble finding pairs that they weren't authorized to touch.
Of course, this brings up an obvious out: IANAL, so I don't know how this would hold up, though. All you need to do is bundle an original piece of creative work, say, a text file, that would qualify as a copyrighted work that some group owns the copyright to. This group would explicitly license the work for distribution except by agents of the *AAs or other anti-piracy groups. The file would need to be bundled with every torrent served to be effective. The group could also set up a legal agreement with the distributors of said file such that any money generated by enforcement of the copyright (through settlements or court awards) would go towards offsetting awards to the *AAs on copyright violations of their bundled items. The idea being that should the *AA bring the case to court, they would be admitting that they also infringed upon an equally costly copyrighted work that they certainly do not have the rights to distribute, and the awards would balance out, thus they have no incentive to bring the case at all (except that they clearly have the money to continue a drawn out court case whereas the average user does not). Furthermore, a BT client could be configured to refuse to distribute anything but the copyrighted text file to another client until it has also recieved that text file - some sort of mutually assured destruction handshake protecting against litigation.
There's probably some loophole here, though, I'm not entirely sure...any law-inclined people out there care to comment?
I'll agree with you that Wikipedia has some problems that haven't yet been ironed out, mostly the ones that you outlined above. However, I have to disagree with you on the issue of bias - while I certainly would agree that many articles involve edit wars and significant amounts of bias, nobody in their right mind sees (or expects to see) Wikipedia as free of such things. Rather, you must evaluate everything that appears there with a skeptical set of eyes. In truth, everything should always be viewed this way, including textbooks and encyclopedias, but the physical heft of those types of books tends to fool the reader into attributing undue authority to the authors. I personally like the fact that Wikipedia is a pretty good source with a healthy dose of crap - what better way to keep a reader on his toes than to have the occasional article edited so that every other "the" reads "penis!" In order to think critically you need to occasionally see a good reason to do so, and twelve years of schooling by textbook does not prepare students for the real world, where everything hasn't been evaluated extensively for accuracy and pre-approved for your safe consumption before you read it.
We'll never get there. But the overall utility of a gargantuan amount of free and somewhat biased text far surpasses that of the tiny but expensive amount of carefully sanitized summarizing that you would find in an encyclopedia. Wikipedia can actually serve as a springboard for further investigation; an encyclopedia is nothing more than a glorified dictionary.
Your "Please use JS only for rendering." is likely to get you in trouble if followed dogmatically, especially in situations like stock data feeds where you might be getting one piece of data from the server every 10 seconds and calculating several customized indicators based on that data. It would be foolish (in most cases) to do the complex math on the server's end, because it would tie up the server while it could be pushing out data to other customers. I think a better rule is to be aware of your constraints, and choose the tools appropriate to the job. Spread out the processing power and bandwidth if at all possible, and you'll likely be fine.
Sorry, -1 points because you aren't allowed to mention Timecube without putting in a link to Timecube so that everyone can experience cubic salvation. Preferably several.
Seriously, though, I understand something about these topics, and a) I wouldn't be surprised at all if that knifepoint was where the damn value stayed for another decade or so, seeing as Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) seems to quite enjoy placing these geometry-of-space constants so close to the critical values that we can't say a thing for sure. b) is that it's a cute theory and an interesting geometry, but frankly I haven't seen anything so far that convinces me that it's right.
But either way, you're correct - this does not appear to be crackpot stuff (I haven't read the peer-reviewed article, but I'll trust that it's there). You can always tell, because the real loonies always talk about how wrong Einstein was.
Timecube sig:
Ignorance of 4 days is evil, Evil educators teach 1 day. 1 day will destroy humans.
The mistake is thinking of there being an actual boundary. You need to think of it more like the crotch on a pair of pants - imagine that each pentagon has a tube connected to it, and you run it to the other side and connect it up with the appropriate twist. Then imagine that you turned the whole thing into rubber. There is no longer a sharp edge, just a blobby series of tubes joined by a bunch of U-shaped pant crotch things. The fact that two particles that were very close to each other before they entered separate tubes has no bearing at all on how far they will be after they enter the tubes. It may have great bearing on the details of the force laws that they interact under (basically, every "mirror" particle has to be accounted for, including the infinite copies of the particle itself; this is an incredibly delicate self-action problem even for the simplest multiply connected spacetimes).
And again, I come to the point - the New Testament has a lot of good messages, I don't argue with that. But the Old Testament, by and large, is composed of many horrific stories of people acting in despicable manners and being praised by God for it. If a religion wants to do no harm, it should release itself from being tied to the Old Testament. In my opinion, if most Christians followed the word of Jesus, they would not have such a bad name. But most of the negativity surrounding Christianity flows from these ancient books that Jesus essentially said were irrelevant (not exactly, but IMO, you could get the right moral message from the Bible without opening the OT at all).
The problem in America right now is that just as in any democracy, a bit more than half of the country agrees with the current government (at least regarding personal freedom - no question about it, the Dems only won because of Iraq) and subscribes to the notion that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide. And hey, we're a democracy, so if 51% of the people agree, that means the rest of us should all just bend over, right? That's what it means to be free! Combine that sentiment with the hideous educational system and attitude in this country, and it becomes a very hostile place to free scientific inquiry - people don't care whether things are true, because belief is much easier than research (especially when you're too stupid to understand the research even if you did look into it, and trust me, I've taught way too many American high school students to believe that more than a fraction are even minimally educated, let alone intelligent).
I finally realized how bad things were going to get when I first started hearing people advance the argument that it was unconstitutional and - worse! - unpatriotic to limit their democratic "right" to vote away my freedoms. Here's a hint, America: if someone is pissed about "judicial activism" it usually means they are trying to take away a minority's right to not be punished for being a minority (and I don't mean this in the strictly racial sense). Cover your ass or you know what you get...
I assume that the real issue is that Nintendo wants to continue exercising its right to screen developers to make sure crap games aren't coming out on the system, right? Or am I just being cynical? [disclaimer: I'm actually something of a Nintendo fanboy, I'm just bitter because I would love to develop for the Wii and probably won't get a chance...]
Nice catch, that's a good point! First, I will obligatorily point out the difference in persuasive power between a religious text and a video game; people aren't generally willing to die for a video game, but many are more than happy to offer their lives for their Gods. But no, even considering the differences in situation, I absolutely don't think this stuff should be censored. At the very least it has enormous historical, cultural, and literary relevance. However, if you look back to near the start of this thread, I was responding to the claim that games like this do not represent Christianity. I would argue that by leaving a piece of text in the "You'll go to HELL if you don't believe this!" category and having it in your holy book you lose all right to claim that extremists are perverting your cause when they interpret that text in a literalist fashion.
So basically all I'm saying is that even the most moderate Christians should be at least a bit embarrassed by the fact that it is their scripture being used to justify a lot of this crap that's going on, and that it really only takes a very little twisting to do so. And as this article said, this appears to be the case, as the people pissed off about this game and protesting it were Christian themselves.
Your next point: rejecting parts of the Bible. For exactly the same reason as above (Jesus said to forget it, to badly paraphrase) most Christians at the very least deem large portions of the Old Testament irrelevant or misleading. Most do not accept the literal story of creation (though this is a more recent development). Most do not believe in the laws of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. Most do not believe in offering sacrifices to God. Most think God loves all his creations, not just the Christians/Jews/Muslims. Most think God is merciful, not vengeful and cruel. There is a general sense (at least from what I have seen - I do live in a quite liberal area, so I could be wrong) that the Bible needs to be looked at more as analogy than rulebook, and that its purpose is to spread a good moral message rather than impose absolute restrictions on behavior and explain historical fact. I don't know if you can call these things outright rejection of parts of the Bible, but they certainly point to a looser view of the document than I imagine was initially intended.
And of course it's the few Christians that do believe wholesale in the (intolerance-promoting subset of the) Old Testament rules that Jesus told them to stop obsessing over that really cause most of the bad light to be shed on Christianity, which is a shame. Back up at the top of this thread, I was groping at the point that it's not real Christianity that Slashdotters hate, it's this crazy fundamentalist crap that's been dominating the conversation lately - true Christianity breeds caring and loving people that do good in this world far beyond the mere spreading of their dogma, and I think our world could use a lot more of that these days.