""Isn't it a moral duty for the religious to examine their beliefs?""
"Quite constantly....it teaches us to love each other no matter what others believe...problem is you haven't examined any religious beliefs well enough to understand how we keep our faith in our beliefs."
We understand well enough how you do it. Doublethink, i.e. training to flee thoughts and ideas that threaten your precious fictitious belief system away from cognitive dissonance. That's what you do in the post above, where you speak of "turning the other cheek", "kindness" and "compassion", citing anecdotes involving 'authority' figures; it obviously means "please stop making me think that maybe all I believe in is BULLSHIT, by kind compassion for my feeble tolerance to actually thinking about the superstitious angle where my magical sky-man just might not exist any more than the Easter Bunny".
""It isn't praying that cures cancers. It isn't priests that perform heart transplants. Nuns don't resuscitate dead people, electricity does. ""
"No but if you're prayed over as a cancer patient, it often comforts a person which increases the potency of the immune system. A psychosomatic response. Laughter eases pain....which helps a patient live a better life until they die."
So, praying works as well as a placebo. Thus, does nothing to actually stop the cancer.
Medicine wins, prayer fails.
""Given that religion has never saved a child, extended the human lifespan or caused an extended period of peace to break out, isn't it the moral duty of your Mormon pal to question why they spend their days putting the brakes on human progress - and worse, molesting the minds of children with the same crap thereby dooming them to a less productive and less valuable life than they could have had?""
"Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Neil Armstrong, Hippocrates....all religious...all forwarded human progress. "
Religious people. Not religion. Conflating much? And, appeal to authority. Two fallacies in as many sentences. Some you cite even had so much problems with religion that the Church still hasn't forgiven them 400 years later. An other wasted half his life doing alchemy and chasing ghosts. What would Newton have discovered if he'd been totally sane? Maybe we'd have had relativity half a century earlier.
""Putting fear and ignorance into the minds of small children, telling them blatant lies, that's child molesting. Churches and priests should not get a free pass for fucking their butts or fucking their minds. It's simply wrong to allow either act to go unchallenged.""
"Seems your fear of religion is causing your ignorance. Those pastors were not only charged, but defrocked by their respective Christian denominations. You've gone straw man."
Oh and now YOU're talking about logical fallacies? That's so fucking precious. And, are you doing so while defending the teaching of fiction as fact to children?
This guy and each and every last person who takes him seriously should be legally considered a minor.
Wait, let's do one better. Each and every last person who confuses fact and fiction should legally be considered a minor.
So, anyone who seriously speaks to an imaginary friend, believes in magical sky-men who come back from death, or what-have-you : no right to vote, drive a car, hold a gun, get a loan, on grounds of proven immaturity and likely mental instability.
This would definitively solve the problem of policies based on superstition.
1. There is no organization on the planet that's totally in order with all the licenses for the software they use.
2. Especially in developing/re-emerging countries.
I'm completely prepared to give up my privacy entirely, but I want EVERYONE ELSE'S in exchange.
There is nobody on earth whose privacy is worth more than the sum total of the data about what everyone else is doing.
And there still are hiding places, if you really need secrecy, as in "distributed database in the form of a blockchain, with homomorphic encryption on all data, connected by a PEER-to-PEER, onion-routed mesh network".
Now if only all surveillance equipment could store everything forever, and make it absolutely transparently public, that would change the world for the better.
Because the data that models my whole life is worth less than the combined value of everyone else's, and NO sane human can say that theirs is.
Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Apr 29th, 2013 @ 3:27pm
That derringer case is interesting : the Deringer guy was incompetent in the market, otherwise h'd b the better-remembered guy.
What matters is that a product can be bought by the greatest count of people, nothing else.
I have a personal example. My mom innovated a revolutionary technique in chocolates, and some bigger industry tried to copy it, we sued and won and they stopped.
The market had to wait for six years for the patent to expire, before someone actually competent in marketing products got to actually sell volumes of that product.
The original ones were better, but the knockoffs had the advantage of existing on the market, being there to buy.
My point is that, ideas are free. It's not even "obviousness", it's "existence".
Humans have a moral duty to use and apply every idea that exists. The one who deserves money from an idea is the one to manages to get the result to the most people. End.
It's all about who can make it cheapest and quickest and keep supplying the demand. THAT. IS. ALL.
If I invent something that can change the world, all I want is that everyone gets to use it. Of course I'd love to get st up for life for one good idea, but that's not going to happen in a just and fair world.
In a just and fair world, those who get money for products are those who actually sell the product to the most people. That is reality. That is business.
As a Belgian chocolatier, I've been to those industry meetings where they negotiated a label for "good quality" chocolate. In the 90s. (Like, 94-97, I can't remember precisely.) They were worse than worthless.
See, WE asked -with ONE other chocolatier, out of ALL those who felt concerned enough to even show up- that there be NO certification label, but only that ALL the ingredients used in the product have to be listed.
They answered that THERE IS AN EUROPEAN DIRECTIVE THAT SAYS THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIST AN INGREDIENT IF THERE IS UNDER 2% OF IT IN THE FINAL PRODUCT.
That's when we walked out of the meeting. One of our suppliers was there and got certified later, and we SAW one tub of sunflower oil in front of their tank of white chocolate, when we went to visit them. That was NEVER listed in the ingredients lists, even on the technical specifications sheet.
The "rules about what goes in the chocolate" were pre-broken. It's not even the later lobbying that did it.
As for the decline in quality, you're almost right. What happened was that, at some point, people got interested in chocolate without fillings. So, suppliers began to market chocolate displaying prominently their cocoa mass percentage.
Chocolate is made out of three ingredients : cocoa powder, cocoa butter, and sugar. Sugar is cheap, powder is even cheaper, cocoa butter is expensive.
So, to achieve high percentages while keeping their margins, they began to unbalance their recipes and put way too much cocoa powder relative to the cocoa butter.
Those dark chocolates that leave a bitter paste in your mouth that doesn't go away? That's too much powder and not enough butter to make it go down. Long-tasting should means that the flavor is delivered in your mouth, result of a good quality from the bean through a careful processing that respects the product, not that your palate gets unpleasantly coated because of an shitty recipe committed by accountants.
Then, they tried to fix that by adding other fats to the chocolate. As if getting your mouth burned by processed animal fats were better than getting it coated with cocoa powder. Right. Because two wrongs make a right, ostensibly.
I'd say "let the idiots buy from the dishonest makers, at least MY product's GOOD", but then I find it harder to sell my chocolates when people are afraid of eating dark chocolates because they now think it's supposed to taste bad.
It's not the first time someone tries to create a label for "Belgian chocolate". Those have always failed.
You could buy cocoa beans from, say, Callebaut, refine them in Ivory Coast or wherever it is they're grown, ship the half-made chocolate to the US and then finish it with the Belgian methods, it will be Belgian chocolate in all but name. Why not give it the name then?
One Belgian chocolatier only consists of an office and everything is outsourced, not especially in Belgium. They're marketing their product as Belgian chocolate. Does it deserve the name?
You really can't certify that. There is no Unique Secret Recipe, just some nebulous cloud of ways to make the chocolate, like everywhere else. I mean, the sort of output from our couverture factories is different from what you find at the exit of, say, American couverture factories, and that's part of Belgianness. It's made (mainly) from other Belgian products, by people who learned to make chocolates in Belgium. Take the same source product and methods anywhere in the world, you're making Belgian chocolates.
"Belgian chocolate" means about as much as "French fries".
On the post: Germany And US Government's Agree Not To Spy On Each Other... But What About Their Citizens?
What 4th Amendment?
On the post: Microsoft Folds Again: Xbox One Will Now Work Without Kinect Enabled
How to shut the Kinect down
Some of those people will be minors, thus video capture from that will be child porn.
Therefore, we can accuse Microsoft of producing the biggest collection of child porn EVAR, getting the feds to bust the service down.
Problem fucking solved.
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "sins"
I feel threatened.
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "sins"
"Quite constantly....it teaches us to love each other no matter what others believe...problem is you haven't examined any religious beliefs well enough to understand how we keep our faith in our beliefs."
We understand well enough how you do it. Doublethink, i.e. training to flee thoughts and ideas that threaten your precious fictitious belief system away from cognitive dissonance. That's what you do in the post above, where you speak of "turning the other cheek", "kindness" and "compassion", citing anecdotes involving 'authority' figures; it obviously means "please stop making me think that maybe all I believe in is BULLSHIT, by kind compassion for my feeble tolerance to actually thinking about the superstitious angle where my magical sky-man just might not exist any more than the Easter Bunny".
""It isn't praying that cures cancers. It isn't priests that perform heart transplants. Nuns don't resuscitate dead people, electricity does. ""
"No but if you're prayed over as a cancer patient, it often comforts a person which increases the potency of the immune system. A psychosomatic response. Laughter eases pain....which helps a patient live a better life until they die."
So, praying works as well as a placebo. Thus, does nothing to actually stop the cancer.
Medicine wins, prayer fails.
""Given that religion has never saved a child, extended the human lifespan or caused an extended period of peace to break out, isn't it the moral duty of your Mormon pal to question why they spend their days putting the brakes on human progress - and worse, molesting the minds of children with the same crap thereby dooming them to a less productive and less valuable life than they could have had?""
"Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Marie Curie, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Neil Armstrong, Hippocrates....all religious...all forwarded human progress. "
Religious people. Not religion. Conflating much? And, appeal to authority. Two fallacies in as many sentences. Some you cite even had so much problems with religion that the Church still hasn't forgiven them 400 years later. An other wasted half his life doing alchemy and chasing ghosts. What would Newton have discovered if he'd been totally sane? Maybe we'd have had relativity half a century earlier.
""Putting fear and ignorance into the minds of small children, telling them blatant lies, that's child molesting. Churches and priests should not get a free pass for fucking their butts or fucking their minds. It's simply wrong to allow either act to go unchallenged.""
"Seems your fear of religion is causing your ignorance. Those pastors were not only charged, but defrocked by their respective Christian denominations. You've gone straw man."
Oh and now YOU're talking about logical fallacies? That's so fucking precious. And, are you doing so while defending the teaching of fiction as fact to children?
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
Re: Re: "sins"
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "sins"
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
Re: Re: "sins"
On the post: Pat Robertson: Murder Committed In Video Games Is No Different Than Real Life Murder
"sins"
Wait, let's do one better. Each and every last person who confuses fact and fiction should legally be considered a minor.
So, anyone who seriously speaks to an imaginary friend, believes in magical sky-men who come back from death, or what-have-you : no right to vote, drive a car, hold a gun, get a loan, on grounds of proven immaturity and likely mental instability.
This would definitively solve the problem of policies based on superstition.
On the post: As Russia Expands Its 'Think Of The Children' Laws To Copyright, Agency In Charge Investigated For Infringement
Well duh
2. Especially in developing/re-emerging countries.
On the post: Two Key Points: Copyright Isn't The Only Business Model; And When Done Wrong Makes Other Models More Difficult
Mike, I can't watch the video
That's hilarious or?
On the post: Because Some People Share A Lot Of Info On Facebook, We Should Admit We've Given Up All Privacy Rights?
Same difference between SEX and RAPE n/t
On the post: Do Dutch Spies Also Have Access To PRISM's Data? And If So, Who Else Does?
Why is there no public interface?
I'm completely prepared to give up my privacy entirely, but I want EVERYONE ELSE'S in exchange.
There is nobody on earth whose privacy is worth more than the sum total of the data about what everyone else is doing.
And there still are hiding places, if you really need secrecy, as in "distributed database in the form of a blockchain, with homomorphic encryption on all data, connected by a PEER-to-PEER, onion-routed mesh network".
On the post: Kitchen Nightmares Lawyers Threaten Infamous Samy And Amy If They Talk About Their Experience On The Show
ROTFLMAO
Free speech, yeah right
On the post: How Low Can Drones Go?
privacy's dead
Now if only all surveillance equipment could store everything forever, and make it absolutely transparently public, that would change the world for the better.
Because the data that models my whole life is worth less than the combined value of everyone else's, and NO sane human can say that theirs is.
On the post: Don't Let Patents Kill 3D Printing
Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Apr 29th, 2013 @ 3:27pm
What matters is that a product can be bought by the greatest count of people, nothing else.
I have a personal example. My mom innovated a revolutionary technique in chocolates, and some bigger industry tried to copy it, we sued and won and they stopped.
The market had to wait for six years for the patent to expire, before someone actually competent in marketing products got to actually sell volumes of that product.
The original ones were better, but the knockoffs had the advantage of existing on the market, being there to buy.
My point is that, ideas are free. It's not even "obviousness", it's "existence".
Humans have a moral duty to use and apply every idea that exists. The one who deserves money from an idea is the one to manages to get the result to the most people. End.
It's all about who can make it cheapest and quickest and keep supplying the demand. THAT. IS. ALL.
If I invent something that can change the world, all I want is that everyone gets to use it. Of course I'd love to get st up for life for one good idea, but that's not going to happen in a just and fair world.
In a just and fair world, those who get money for products are those who actually sell the product to the most people. That is reality. That is business.
On the post: Don't Let Patents Kill 3D Printing
Sell the printers on SilkRoad already, problem solved
On the post: How Not To Email Constituents: The Brian Nieves Story
Solution : do away with politicians entirely
It's not like we don't have solutions to crowdfund public necessities on a permanent basis. Built right into money itself.
Lie this : https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_3:_Assurance_contracts
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Smar t_Property
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Dominant_Assurance_Contracts
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Dist ributed_markets#Pay_to_policy_outputs
We can vote with our wallets for what we know that we need.
So. Would YOU rather pay for Mars, or for Wars?
On the post: Can Commercial VPNs Really Protect Your Privacy?
NO THEY CAN'T unless paid cash
On the post: Belgium: We Want To Be The Champagne Of Chocolate
Not exactly in that order
See, WE asked -with ONE other chocolatier, out of ALL those who felt concerned enough to even show up- that there be NO certification label, but only that ALL the ingredients used in the product have to be listed.
They answered that THERE IS AN EUROPEAN DIRECTIVE THAT SAYS THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIST AN INGREDIENT IF THERE IS UNDER 2% OF IT IN THE FINAL PRODUCT.
That's when we walked out of the meeting. One of our suppliers was there and got certified later, and we SAW one tub of sunflower oil in front of their tank of white chocolate, when we went to visit them. That was NEVER listed in the ingredients lists, even on the technical specifications sheet.
The "rules about what goes in the chocolate" were pre-broken. It's not even the later lobbying that did it.
As for the decline in quality, you're almost right. What happened was that, at some point, people got interested in chocolate without fillings. So, suppliers began to market chocolate displaying prominently their cocoa mass percentage.
Chocolate is made out of three ingredients : cocoa powder, cocoa butter, and sugar. Sugar is cheap, powder is even cheaper, cocoa butter is expensive.
So, to achieve high percentages while keeping their margins, they began to unbalance their recipes and put way too much cocoa powder relative to the cocoa butter.
Those dark chocolates that leave a bitter paste in your mouth that doesn't go away? That's too much powder and not enough butter to make it go down. Long-tasting should means that the flavor is delivered in your mouth, result of a good quality from the bean through a careful processing that respects the product, not that your palate gets unpleasantly coated because of an shitty recipe committed by accountants.
Then, they tried to fix that by adding other fats to the chocolate. As if getting your mouth burned by processed animal fats were better than getting it coated with cocoa powder. Right. Because two wrongs make a right, ostensibly.
I'd say "let the idiots buy from the dishonest makers, at least MY product's GOOD", but then I find it harder to sell my chocolates when people are afraid of eating dark chocolates because they now think it's supposed to taste bad.
On the post: Belgium: We Want To Be The Champagne Of Chocolate
I'M A BELGIAN CHOCOLATIER
You could buy cocoa beans from, say, Callebaut, refine them in Ivory Coast or wherever it is they're grown, ship the half-made chocolate to the US and then finish it with the Belgian methods, it will be Belgian chocolate in all but name. Why not give it the name then?
One Belgian chocolatier only consists of an office and everything is outsourced, not especially in Belgium. They're marketing their product as Belgian chocolate. Does it deserve the name?
You really can't certify that. There is no Unique Secret Recipe, just some nebulous cloud of ways to make the chocolate, like everywhere else. I mean, the sort of output from our couverture factories is different from what you find at the exit of, say, American couverture factories, and that's part of Belgianness. It's made (mainly) from other Belgian products, by people who learned to make chocolates in Belgium. Take the same source product and methods anywhere in the world, you're making Belgian chocolates.
"Belgian chocolate" means about as much as "French fries".
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