OT: Will non net-neutrality kill the internet?

[Chris H]

God created the Earth. Moving the crust plates is not hard for Him.

But he did not do it so as to create a flood across the Anatolia plateau
5K5 years ago.

 

[Chris H]

Prior to Noah, Earth's geography was different. Mountains were not as
tall and seabeds were not as deep.

Do you have any evidence for that?

There is a LOT of scientific evidence and historical evidence to show it
did not happen in NE Turkey over the last 10K years

Many people reject the truth, because like Eve, they disdain advice from
one older and wiser than themselves, God.

You have had advice from God?

People who don't listen, can only learn the hard way.

Too true... the Christians for example.

 

[Stephen Sprunk]

well, there is a limit...

for example, it is one thing to try to talk the other person into it
(although, doing so is often questionable on ethical grounds, like if
someone has already made up their mind, and it is not to their benefit to
reconsider, then trying to convince them is not necessarily a good line of
action...).

If we were to ban such speech, then most people would have to walk
around with a muzzle all day. OTOH, it'd be the end of most political
(and most other) ads, and that's probably a good thing...

but, there is a cut-off, like it is one thing to try to convince them of
something, but yet quite another to try to use coercion, insults, or threats
(this happens sometimes, like the person goes from casual flirtation to
making insults and threats to try to get their way...).

Coercion and threats take away another person's freedom. That's bad.

Insults are a childish way of expressing your opinion, but they do not
infringe someone else's freedom, and I prefer not to go that far down
the slippery slope of restricting speech.

S

 

[BGB / cr88192]

If we were to ban such speech, then most people would have to walk
around with a muzzle all day. OTOH, it'd be the end of most political
(and most other) ads, and that's probably a good thing...

fair enough.

but, I just mean for personal ethics: although it is perfectly reasonable
for a person to try to work for their own gain, trying to talk someone else
into doing something that is not to their benefit is, IMO, questionable on
ethical grounds.

but, note that "my" ethics don't mean I believe that there should be any
sort of speech, but unless one is in actual need of something, it is better
if one not impose their will on others.


selling a product is not the same as trying to force them into it, or trying
to rip them off.
advertising is simply saying "hell, here is my product, here is what it
does" (and, the companies pay the TV networks, ... to run their ads, so the
network is getting a good deal). similarly, end consumers are paying to
watch all this crap, and there is no real way the consumer is "entitled" to
the shows (with or without ads), so from the POV of consumer/network
interactions, all is good (after all, no one is forcing consumers to watch
the TV, nor do ads themselves force one to go buy products).


there is a good deal of difference from a typical ad (describing produce,
maybe trying to appeal to desires or emotions, ...), and actually trying to
force someone into something that they really don't want, and that would
leave them worse off then they were originally. (or, trying to use
passive-aggressive means to try to control the person, like they have to
cooperate or there is an implied risk that their propery will be stolen or
vandalized, ...).

there need not be a ban, but ethically, this is not a good thing either.

Coercion and threats take away another person's freedom. That's bad.

Insults are a childish way of expressing your opinion, but they do not
infringe someone else's freedom, and I prefer not to go that far down
the slippery slope of restricting speech.

it depends on the insult.

I guess, there is a difference:
private insults, where a person is insulted directly and in private
(usually, meant as a direct attack on their emotions or volition);
public insults, which are usually more subtle, and made to make the other
person look bad around others (this is often known of "losing face"), and a
person is more or less forced into going along in an attempt to "save face".

and example of the former would be:
a person turns someone down, and then the other person counters by saying
that they turned them down because they are gay.

the other would take the form of, in a public situation, implying that maybe
the other person turned them down because they are gay (the other person
being obligated to cooperate, since being accused of gayness in public may
be a greater dishonor than, say, promiscuous behavior, or maybe even
comitting adultery, which is, sadly, almost half expected of most males, but
is generally considered a much worse offense for females...).

a person may similarly be stuck in such a situation, since generally, it
they express anger or try to deny the accusation, this may be taken as
further evidence of guilt (so, ones' best course of action is to say nothing
and hope the matter blows over, and that their friends or collegues will
realize that it is really the accuser who is at fault, ...).


or such...

 

[BGB / cr88192]

That makes you a liberal. Except in the Limbaugh sense.

yeah.
my dad likes Limbaugh.
I guess he also likes O'Reilly and others...

liberals (in the US sense) are viewed as generally being the evil scum of
the world, ...


but, admitted, I don't always agree on everything.
not everything in the world needs to be a value judgement, or
black-and-white, good-vs-evil, ...

sometimes, things are just tradeoffs....


actually, in my own "feelings", I don't really have a good grasp on right vs
wrong sometimes, but rules are something I understand, so really one doesn't
have to "feel" anything:
what is morally right is what the rules say is such, and what is wrong is
what the rules so condemn.
although, this is a weak basis, there is nothing solidly better than I can
see.

but, more subtly, there is a sense of things being "good" or "not good", but
it is not nearly so fine or articulate as the rules, and it may take a long
time to "feel" one way or another, and generally agrees, so good enough...

random new scenario: I have no idea, and thinking rationally rarely yeilds
good answers (thinking alone fails to resolve even most "simple" moral
scenarios).

so, alas:
if the rule says something, good enough;
if the rule can be interpreted to say something, usually good enough (except
when the interpretation is overly restraining or just absurd);
....

but, works for programming, works for theology, and works for law, good
enough...

but, alas, as much as I sometimes despise "feelings", at the same time,
sometimes they are inescapable. like the ever present 6-year-old who will
often throw tantrums over nothing, but without them, something is missing,
and they often have insights that good old "mr. logic" can fail to provide
(although, maybe this is because I never really understood set theory, and
at best I can typically do little better than boolean...).


or such...

 

[BGB / cr88192]

This is an international group so use international definitions the same
as the rest of us are using. It is impossible to discuss things if
people use local definitions not understood by the majority.

in the mind of the US, the US *IS* majority...

it is enough that I have a qualifier...

to be a "true" American I need not even say this, rather I could just take
it as self-evident that US culture is authority (not even that it *has*
authority, but rather, that what is decreed by the culture is by definition
authority in itself), and then assume that to use such a qualifier would
diminish the standing of the greatness of the US in the world, or some other
patriotic crap...


for most people, it is sufficient to have much smaller allegances.
consider just how many live, fight, and die, for no greater cause than the
gain and loss of areas of "turf", and for no greater ideal than that of
"keeping it real".

community and association are king, and best one can do is to say where they
stand.

 

[Nick Keighley]

I was aware that you weren't trying to cover all possibilitites. But I
did think it telling that you missed some quite significant scenarios.


that is, not compatible with christianity (or any other of the Big 3)

4. there is a powerful being that dwells in the universe and
communicates with people from time to time

5. all religions are human constructs. And religious writings are one
aspect of this construction. [PRATCHETT "Small Gods"]

Yeah, I agree that these are other plausible views.

I'd believe something very unusual had happened!

That's the point.  How you interpret it depends on your frame of
reference.  I think the majority of people who find faith in the Bible
and Jesus Christ tend to be those that are suffering.  Contrast the
personas of Pharoah who witnessed the 10 plagues and did not believe
to the blind man whom Jesus restored his sight.  There's a lot of pain
in the world, and science doesn't provide hope or a refuge from it.
What it tells me that you're a cosmic accident, destined like dust to
exist and then fade away, with no point other than to observe itself.

and yet every day I live with that!

As someone who has sat in a car in a garage ready to asphyxiate
himself because of the emotional turmoil from experiences in my youth,
I'm sure that it has put me in a position to think about the Bible in
a different way than others.  In 10th grade, there was a girl who was
in one of my classes who was nice but I didn't know very well who on
the monday before easter vacation (we had school on Monday, half day
Tuesday) was acting quite strange, wouldn't give eye contact instead
of her normal friendly self.  I thought about doing something nice for
her on Tuesday, but she didn't show up.  In the afternoon on the way
home, I had an very strong feeling that I really needed to go over to
her house.  I didn't respond to the feeling and went my way home.  The
next day I found out that same girl took her parents gun and shot
herself in the head before her parents came home.

I always find it odd that people start with the biggies like the red
sea parting and then come down to very personnel things like dreams
and feelings and coincidences. I don't in anyway want to detract from
these personnel experiences but I find the contrast very odd.

In the absence of direct observation, the best one can do is try to
verify what is there.

I think you're missing the point. I don't understand why people have
to find mundane explanations for Biblical miracles. The attitude seems
to be "they can't be supernatural, but the can't be made from whole
cloth so there must be some natural phenomenon that led to the
apparent miracle". I'm rather of the idea that mythology is about the
narrative. Noah's Ark is story about a good man in a wicked world. The
wicked were destroyed and the good man and the tools to rebuild were
saved. Stories are filled with wicked people who get their just
rewards. With white knights and mysterious gun slingers. With old
ladies gathering wood and disguised gods. Such stories speak to things
within us. It's an attempt to make sense of a chaotic and arbitary
world. "What goes around comes around" "it was a miracle she survived
the accident" "the favourite had my sister's name so I bet the lot".

 Are the towns and cities and people and
civilizations in the Bible really exist?

sometimes. Jerico's walls didn't come tumbling down, the Jews were
never slaves in Egypt and there was no tax that involved returning to
your home city in 1 AD.

 At least the Jewish people
are still around today.  If God showed himself directly to you and
only you, I don't foresee even that changing your mind as you seem to
rely on the collective experiences of others rather than your own.

if you think so!

It's not by any means a bad position to live by, but if you had a
"real" supernatural experience (where real depends on what the person
considers real), I think it would likely be ignored.

well I'm still waiting...

{I] think it's a pretty amazing universe without adding in the
supernatural.

I can certainly respect that position.  It's kind of ironic that if
the universe has no creator is true, why do so many people try to put
a creator there?

to provide a narrative stream in an arbitary world. Some superstitions
we abandon. No one hangs an acorn in their window to placate the
thunder god (though take a look at some of the things used to pull
window blinds down...). No one nails a horseshoe up for good luck. Or
reads the stars for their future.

Sure, when I visited Taiwan, I went to one of their places of worship
and the people there would ask a question, cast a lot of some kind
(looked like a pair of lips),

I'd guess a yarrow stalk. This would be the I Ching I guess.

and depending on the result (each lip
has two sides, and they had different colors) they would get their
divine answer and act upon it.  Or keep recasting the lot until they
get an answer they liked ;-)

I know people who buy a lottery ticket every week. I know people who
light candles for the dead. I don't see how the I Ching is
significantly different. It's just a different culture's way of
handling the problem.

Of course this leaves the question as to how *I* manage the world.
Perhaps I've been lucky not to be hit with too many random
visissitudes.

While one can certainly create an argument to combine evolution and a
supernatural creator together, I don't think that it's a position that
can be harmonious with the Bible.

that isn't very high on my list. A flat earth is harmonious with the
bible. With heaven above and hell below. Isn't the real question a
matter of what best explains what we see?

 Granted there are things that could
be considered figurative in the Bible.  But once one starts taking the
Bible less literally and more figuratively, you get on a slippery
slope that will lead that person to trust it less and less.  

Genesis seems to me to be the connonical example of a creation myth
(try reading some others). To believe there were only two people. In
world wide floods. In a boat full of all the animals of the earth. Is
plainly myth. Was the recent rain of ash caused by Loki struggling in
his bounds beneath the earth? Or was god punishing Ryan Air?

Next
thing you know, you'll start believing that people really didn't see
Jesus die on the cross, he really didn't rise from the grave, he was
just a nice guy, or that he didn't even exist, just another story from
someone else who didn't know what they were experiencing or writing
out the machinations of their mind.

an argument from consequences. There must have been a talking snake or
we're all going to die, forever!

Not just the origin, but what we experience itself.  The idea that a
complicated set of physics laws and chemical equations can experience
the universe in the way we do is rather hard to me to accept.

I don't understand why

 Other
people seem to accept it just fine, as I have run into people that
believe that we experience is just the illusion of a very complicated
sequence of chemical formulas,

not an illusion, but a consequence of chemistry and physics and
biology

rather than by free will or choice of
what we make.

why does experience have to be free will?

 At some level, they have a point.  Bacteria do what
their DNA tells them to do.  We all start from a single cell with a
strand of DNA telling it what to do.  At what point does the illusion
of experience in what we see and feel come into shape?

when the nervous system develops. Which animals have the "experience"
you talk about?

I agree that the soul is in the realm of the supernatural.

and the sticking point for creationists. Creationists tend to get less
excited about say astronomy and geology than evolution because they
aren't such a direct challenge to their world view.

It was an antagonistic way of putting it, so apologies for that.  I
meant that the process of determining the genome is to break it up
into pieces and do sophisticated pattern matching (at least that's how
the genome lab down the hall from the image processing lab explained
what they were doing to me back a few years ago).  Don't get me wrong,
it's an admirable achievement to get to where we are.

and has nothing to do with the origin of life. Do you doubt that they
have reconstructed the human genome by such techniques?

I will also fully admit that my highest understanding is what I've
read from web sites (and not just the fundy ones).  Unfortunately,
there is only so much time in the day, and there will likely always be
a disconnect between me and those who spend much more time
understanding the low-level details.  I suppose I could try my hand at
"fold it", seems like a interesting game.

again, bugger all to do with the origin of life

No I don't think they made that number up.  The question is how can a
scientist observe or repeat this experiment.  

not all science is experimental. No one has created a super nova in a
lab. Or observed a main sequence star over its whole life. Consider
pluto. Pluto has not yet completed a single orbit around the sun in
all the years it's been observed. Do we doubt pluto is in orbit round
the sun?

It's not like we live 3
billion years.  The best we can do is to try to recreate environments
that have properties that exhibit some of the behavior we observe in
life and make hypotheses on what it would do (given enough time).

<snip>

 

[Nick Keighley]

In message <[email protected]>, BGB / cr88192









The US definitions for many/most things tend to be different to the rest
of the world.

I know I was horrified when I found a US T1 link only carries 24 x 8k
channels when it was obvious that god had always intended 32 x 8k
channels, as everyone else uses (well ok apart from Japan and South
Korea which are nearly US states anyway

 

[ImpalerCore]

I always find it odd that people start with the biggies like the red
sea parting and then come down to very personnel things like dreams
and feelings and coincidences. I don't in anyway want to detract from
these personnel experiences but I find the contrast very odd.

Well, it's not like I was there to witness the biggies, so I have to
make my choice whether to believe other people's witness on faith
based on my study and experiences.

<snip>

 

[John Kelly]

Well, it's not like I was there to witness the biggies, so I have to
make my choice whether to believe other people's witness on faith
based on my study and experiences.

Yeah some of these clowns expect God to appear in person before they
will believe.

Exodus 33:20

 

[BGB / cr88192]

I know I was horrified when I found a US T1 link only carries 24 x 8k
channels when it was obvious that god had always intended 32 x 8k
channels, as everyone else uses (well ok apart from Japan and South
Korea which are nearly US states anyway

well, it is better than having only 384 kbps DSL available...

 

[Richard Bos]

Satan is a corruption of the religion of Saturnalia...

Ah. Atheist etymology. Yes, Chris, you're _still_ ignorant; but for the
education of the masses, may they note that Shaitan is from the Semitic
languages, while Saturnus is probably Etrurian but certainly Italic.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

*that* old canard. "fittest" doesn't mean what you think it does. It
pays to live in a moral fashion in a moral society.

The trick is finding the moral society. Humans haven't yet.

You don't need religion for this.

....nor does the religion of atheism suffice.

you get put in prison for life. Some countries would execute you.

....and others would make you president. Just this week.

So you don't understand basic morality or evolutionary biolgy or what
Darwin said. Religious people like you scare me.

So do ignorant atheists (but I repeat myself). In fact, so do ignorant
fundamentalists of _all_ sorts (but I repeat myself again), which, IME,
includes most atheists - or at least, most people who argue for atheism
on Usenet.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

God created the Earth. Moving the crust plates is not hard for Him.

Stop blaspheming. God is not a petulant child, out to cheat His
children. Do not make him out to be a liar.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

I'd pin the origins of it on FDR, the first major "social liberal" in
the US, and his Four Freedoms:

Please note: what you, in the USA, understand the words "liberal" and
"social" to mean is not necessarily what the real world understands
those words to mean. Insisting that we, who invented both the politics
and the words, adhere to your meaning for these words, is essentially
libertarian, and therefore dictatorial.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

Yes, in the USSR, if you are "aligned with the system", then you're free =
(from these pesky choices). You will be given everything you deserve, =
and so on.

Funny how the introduction of capitalism under Comrade Putin hasn't
changed much of that, isn't it?

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

A liberal would say Person A is free to choose whether to sleep with
Person B and Person B is free to choose to complain about it. Just like
Person C is free to choose to complain if A _does_ choose to sleep with
B, and Person D is free to choose to ignore all of them.

No, that's common to everybody sane.

What liberals are _not_ down with is one person forcing their choices on
others; that deprives the victim of _their_ freedom to choose.

No, that's common to everybody sane, too. Unless Person A is a business.
_That_ is what liberals are all about. A liberal would say that
Company A is free to royally **** over Person B, because that's in the
interest of business freedom, and "therefore" good for personal freedom.
A socialist, OTOH, would prefer Person B to be protected from
Company A's rapacious practices, because that's good for personal
freedom, and who knows, Company A might even get Person C to go to bed
with it.

That makes you a liberal.

No, it makes him a-moral, and therefore Un-American.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

Today, the FCC backed off on requiring net-neutrality.

And how is this relevant to the _free_ world?

IMO, this is a huge mistake for a country that cherishes freedom and
privacy.

Well, yes, it would have been, but since it was the FCC, it didn't
happen in that kind of country at all.

Not having net-neutrality means that cable and telephone providers can
restrict, block, or censor *ANY* content of their choosing.

Does it allow them to block trolls by the name of Pemberton?
If so: bring it on.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

OTOH, there _is_ a reasonable scientific explanation. Modern research
has identified that it was the _Reed_ Sea (now Ballah Lake) that the
Israelites crossed.

What the hell do you mean, "modern"!?

That was the translation used in the first official Dutch bible
translation in... wait for it... 1637!

Please do not mistake a dawning realisation that the King James
translation is really, really bad for an argument that the Bible
_itself_ should be maltreated as science text.
What it boils down to is this: every time you feel yourself moved to
argue against faith (Christianity especially, but any faith, really),
you must first check _thoroughly_ that your argument is not actually
against Anglo-Saxon culture. The latter is corrupted much more often.

Richard

 

[Richard Bos]

No. Where did the matter come from?

It has always existed.

Stop trying to reduce God to a physics exercise, you blasphemer.

Richard