Protecting Children from the Church's Abuse Of Power

Its sad that some people are more concerned with apologizing for pedophiles than with stopping future abuse. Even assuming everything you say is true what difference would it make? Is it really a defense of child abuse in the Catholic church to say it happens in other churches as well? If that is the case then we should be investigating it in protestant churches and where ever it occurs.
About Christianity
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Why America Must Win the Supercomputing Race

Well said. Its a shame that the vast majority of government sponsored R&D has been for "defense" for decades now. There was a very brief couple of years during the first Clinton administration where they managed to do some serious investment, I think it was called the Technology Reinvestment Program, in non-defense or in "dual use" general things such as super computers and networking that could be used for business and the military. But that ended and in the current climate that believes the only thing government can or should do is blow things up I don't see it coming back.
About Careers
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Airports, Security, Titanium and Lingerie

I thought this was an excellent article on a subject that is getting blown out of proportion. I'm a big civil rights fan and I hate a lot of what was done and still lingers on from the Bush administration. Spying on emails without a warrant, detaining people without habeus corpus, torture, those are things that make my blood boil. But while the extra airport stuff annoys me (for some reason the shoes are the thing that really gets to me) I think its fairly minor.



And I also don't mind the full body scans. To me its the kind of thing we need a smart technical solution to speed up the process. I'm as they say a very sex positive hetero male. I like looking at women and at pictures of women but I can't see how anyone could get turned on by the grainy pictures those scanners produce. I think its really a sign of our puritanical culture that so many people are so hung up about people taking grainy pictures of them.
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Islam and the West: Reaching Intercultural Understanding

I don't think we really need much analysis. The truth as they say is out there, all you have to do is look.



The US has cultivated the most reactionary forms of Islam since the end of WWII as a defense against "communism". It was really a defense against nationalism but communism worked better to scare people. Then those rotten commies committed the ultimate act of treachery. They gave up! In the conservative and then neo-conservative intelligensia there was literal panic about the fact that we no longer had an enemy. So we needed a new one and Islam was perfect. The fact that there is no actual war between Islam and the west is highlighted by the fact that one of the strongest US allies (Saudi Arabia) is also the most powerful state for the most extreme form of Islam (Wahabi).



In a weird way there is a synergy between radical Islam and neo-conservatism. This was brought out by the wonderful BBC documentary the Power of Nightmares: http://en.­wikipedia.­org/wiki/T­he_Power_o­f_Nightmar­es



Both ideologies are all about frightening people and harnesing their hate and fear in order to control them.
About Barack Obama
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Amanda Knox Indicted On Slander Charges (VIDEO)

BB, I can see your reply in the side bar but not here. I don't agree with you but I hate censoring.



I don't get your point. I'm pointing out what I think is an example of racism and you call me a racist? I don't understand your logic.
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Cloud Computing Powers up Cyberwar Threat

"Well, maybe if they have The Mother Of All Hacker Battles online, and they manage to drop the internets like a bad habit, "



That won't happen. its one of the major flaws in this article that it pretends the cloud is more vulnerable to hacking, in fact its less although there are some new concerns that have to be dealt with.



"there'd be less web-based espionage, industrial, or otherwise. "



There is almost zero actual web-based espionange industrial or otherwise right now. Most of the hacks that make the news are nuisance attacks not anything like espionage. Things that take down a server for a while or corrupt some data or steal some data that wasn't classified as secret.



The military (unlike the every day perception) has been pretty smart about how they handle data, they have very rigorous policies and procedures that they follow for handling secret data and as long as those policies are followed its virtually impossible for anyone to get at such data via the Internet.
About Israel
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Cloud Computing Powers up Cyberwar Threat

"Employment of the beer can analogy was a deliberate simpling down to engage netizens who have little or no knowledge of subject matter."



OK, but that doesn't justify giving people an inaccurate picture of where the risks are in Cloud computing which I think it did a bit.



"Moore's Law will render the the cloud obsolete "



Why is that? I mean to some extent that's almost a tautology. Moore's law is what drives the rapid change in the IT world and just as other architectures (Mainframe, client-server, distributed components) that preceded the cloud were replaced by newer architectures so eventually will the cloud is that all you meant or are you implying that as Moore's law makes computers more powerful we will go away from servers completely? If its the latter I disagree.



"The main points of the article are that netizens while being data mined to the hilt for free disclosure info, they are chumps, [who] don't have role in a crafting the future of the information highway beyond heavily mediated social media conversations that are a cruise to nowhere. "



You have a high opinion of your readers. We are chumps eh? And as for "heavily mediated social media conversations that are a cruise to nowhere. " to be honest that's pretty much what I think this article was. A lot of buzzwords and names but little content and most of the actual content was mis-guided or just wrong.
About Israel
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Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time

Thank you. That's it exactly. No deep mystery. Its amazing that educated men like Dr. Lanza still quote the paradox as if it were an open question. A quick trip to the math department of any college and he could get it explained in a few minutes.
About Death
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Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time

I'm sure you believe all that you say.



I just read a fascinating book by Steven Pinker called The Blank Slate. Pinker described some of the things we know about how the physical brain creates consciousness. One of the fascinating experiments he described was where people have the connection between their left and right brains severed. Since the different sides are responsible for things like speech, vision, etc. you would get amazing results. E.g. show someone two different bits of info, one to the left and one to the right and ask them the question and they will answer one way verbally and another if asked to point.



Now, I already knew about these experiments but the fascinating thing I didn't know was that when confronted with these inconsistencies people would make up complex rationalizations that they absolutely believed to be true.



"when a subject's right hemisphere is shown the command walk she will walk out of the room. When the left hemisphere is asked why she did that rather then say 'I don't know' or 'no reason' she'll invent some plausible reason 'to get a coke'"



To me this demonstrates the amazing ability humans have to invent rationalizations and to spontaneously believe and remember what fits in with our needs and preconceptions.
About Death
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Why I'm (Still) Catholic

"I believe in God, or at least I think that belief in God is a positive and inspiring factor in one's life. "



So regardless of whether God exists or not you think its a good thing to believe that He does? I just don't get this. For any other subject we don't weigh the alternatives as to which will make us feel better. We evaluate facts and arguments and determine what makes the most sense. Why is God somehow different? Why do people decide that on what seems to be one of the most important questions you can ask -- is there a supreme creator of the Universe? -- that its better to just ignore the truth and believe what makes us feel good?
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Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time

"I think scientists sometimes can get too clever for themselves"



Perhaps but that has nothing to do with this article. Dr. Lanza is a scientist but what he is doing here is not science. Its more like poetry if you want to be generous or gibberish if not.



"If I stare at an atomic bomb that is set to go off, it's going to explode. I don't think I'm smart enough to understand those two analogies. "



Those aren't analogies.
About Death
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