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Comment Re:Minimum suggested level $25? (Score 3, Insightful) 58

Really? Did you just call a guy who ACTUALLY donated a cheapskate?

Compare how often you use your mobile data plan and/or ISP to how often you use archive.org's services. I use my ISP every single day, for hours, and couldn't get a lot of my work done without them. I still gripe about how much I'm forced to pay them, too! By comparison, I've maybe looked for one site (which wasn't there) on archive.org in the last year or two.

They need $150,000 in donations. At BenJeremy's $5 level, they'd only need 30,000 donors. Just gonna guess his donation will come in well above the median for users of the site.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 783

Your comment clearly shows: you have no clue what you are talking about. Please do us a favour and stay out of this discusion.

And your comment clearly shows that you are unable to engage rationally with viewpoints which differ from your own. Unfortunately, you've missed the point of my post, and simply repeated the same logical fallacies as the GP which I was attempting to point out.

Comment Re:good (Score 1, Insightful) 783

Simple. There's people who ascribe the term "evil" to each of those concepts (yes, even potty-training). They have, in some cases, equally emotionally-charged opinions about secular humanism or potty training as Nadaka seems to have about religion. They would claim that those things cause "severe mental, emotional and ethical harm". They could even back it up with some anecdotal evidence ("I grew up in a secular-humanist household", or "I grew up in a household that potty-trained"), or some statistics (there's an awful lot of criminally-minded individuals out there who commit a lot of evil who have been potty-trained).

Hopefully, most of us would see right through their arguments. But, for some reason, when people start talking about the "evils of religion", we don't see the same holes in those arguments that we would see in a similarly-constructed argument about the "evils of potty-training", the "evils of vaccination", the "evils of wi-fi radiation", etc. Nadaka's argument is high on the same sort of hyperbole ("it imposes a severe mental, emotional, and ethical harm", "inflicting the communicable memetic disease", "the child never recovers") that often comes from the "anti-everything" crowd, but pretty short on data to support some pretty over-the-top claims.

Now, none of this is to say that Nadaka's "fundamentalist christian" upbringing DIDN'T have any hallmarks of mental, emotional, or ethical harm, or even child abuse. Perhaps it did. It does happen. But to paint all of "religion", or even all of "fundamentalist christian" with the same brush is rather poor reasoning.

Comment Re:good (Score 1) 783

I grew up in a fundamentalist christian household. And inflicting the communicable memetic disease of faith on children and brainwashing them to believe in the evil of religion is absolutely child abuse. It imposes a severe mental, emotional and ethical harm to children's minds before they are capable of fighting off the infection. In most cases this harm is permanent, and the child never recovers and becomes healthy again.

One could just as easily substitute "secular humanism", "agnosticism", or for that matter "potty training" for the word "religion", and be on equally shaky philosophical footing with your comment.

Comment Re:good (Score 5, Insightful) 783

I disagree. You may teach your children as you like, but to never teach them about evolution is abuse.

I'm a biology teacher at a Christian school. I do teach evolution - with far more rigour than I ever taught it in public school - because I think that it's important for anyone who wants to hold a dissenting view on something considered to be this foundational to be really, really well informed about what they're disagreeing with. That said, I also work with students who have actually been abused by their parents - real abuse... emotional, physical, sexual, etc. Dogmatically stating "never teaching a child about evolution is abuse" just seems silly and insulting to anyone who has actually encountered abuse. Let's not throw the term "abuse" around so lightly.

Comment Re:2013 Year of the Linux Desktop (Score 1) 150

That's funny... On my work laptop, I use Linux specifically for Xournal, because I prefer it (in it's Linux binary form) so heavily to OneNote... Then, for all the other stuff I have to run at work, I boot back into Windows. But, Xournal doesn't have handwriting recognition, search, notebook organization, etc... just really, really awesome for producing miniscule pdfs of my handwritten notes.

Comment Re:Make it illegal (Score 1) 1199

Well, he does have a point - if someone enjoys something, but it shortens their life span, is it "bad for them"? I suppose one does need to consider the "benefits" side of the cost-benefit analysis. That being said, it would be much easier to argue that someone smoking is certainly bad for ME - I get no particular benefit, and yet there are potential health hazards for me, there's the nuisance of the bad smells wafting into my home from the neighbours, and my health insurance premiums (or, in my case, my taxes) go up to cover the costs of their habit. But that can be a pretty slippery slope... I suppose my love of poutine (fries with cheese curds and gravy, for you non-Canadians) would also be considered "bad for you" due to the health problems it may well cause me one day...

Comment Re:Make it illegal (Score 5, Insightful) 1199

Well, that's a rather poor example. The people who "don't believe in abortion", by which I assume you mean "don't believe that abortion should ever occur", predominately believe that because they equate it to murdering a helpless child. Whether that's right or wrong, surely you wouldn't say the same thing about murder - "don't try to keep me from murdering if I want to, just because you've got a hang-up about it". Again, not arguing the case one way or the other here, but when you think about it from from their point of view (abortion == murder), at least their strong stance is understandable.

Comment Re:Torrents != Piracy (Score 1) 130

This is true, but unfortunately, as a heuristic, "textbook + torrent == infringement" is probably going to be a pretty good one. I'd guess the vast majority of textbook torrents are "piratical". At this point, Mr. Jackson represents an edge-case - a very welcome one, but an edge case nonetheless. Still, it would sure be nice if there was a quicker way to get past the algorithm to an actual human who could take a look at particular cases like this one. Then perhaps we'd start overcoming that BitTorrent stigma.

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