I think it's a lot more than a difference of culture. You'll notice a sharp decline in textbook quality after the launch of Sputnik. Sputnik freaked out Americans, so they started pumping loads of money into revamping math and science education. Money, unfortunately is not the main thing that makes a good textbook. Basically, after Sputnik, for some reason, it became necessary to cram as much set theory into every single math book as possible, whether it needed it or not.

The fact that it's not a 1:1 comparison doesn't make it invalid. The comparison has relevance regardless of the relative values of books and people. People being free and information being free are two good things. Just because one is intensely more good than the other doesn't change the fact that here are two situations that are similar, in that we are balancing one "good" against the "good" of not screwing people.

The comparison illustrates the point that there are clearly things in life that outweigh the good of "not screwing some people." Human freedom is certainly one of those things.

Is freedom of information another such thing? That's obviously a tougher issue, but the slavery comparison makes it clear that it isn't a slam-dunk argument. "It is a bad idea because it screws some people over" is clearly demonstrated to be an incomplete argument. The point was made, and made effectively, I thought. I'm really not sure why all this meta-discussion was necessary.

Absurd. At no point did his comparison imply that problems with copyright are as significant as the problem of slavery.

What is the problem with comparing things with other things of a much greater magnitude? When people compare electrons to planets, do you object because planets are obviously much, much larger and clearly must have nothing at all in common with something with such a far removed size?

His sentence was clearly saying that not screwing specific people over is not always the most important thing. This holds true for big issues like slavery, and for small issues like copyright. It's a valid comparison. What's so wrong with that?

Nothing more? That's it? We have encapsulated everything about this guy's humanity in one sentence? I'm a Christian, and I therefore disagree with Dawkins on a great many things, but I still think he's got a lot of good things to offer. I'm glad he's around. I frequently find his talks very refreshing. It's always a good thing to have devil's advocate in a discussion to weed out the crappy ideas. And regardless of your flavor of Christianity, there's certainly a surplus of crappy ideas. (Sam Harris is a way better atheist than Dawkins, though.)

I can't disagree with your second sentence, but I see no reason to believe the first. Why would you think that they don't do both, and why isn't it ok to make money simultaneously with improving user's experiences?

As much as I love the idea of open source anything, this statement seems true. Please tell me that there's another side to this discussion.

How much meaningful spectral analysis can be done on the Dirac delta function?

Look at the article for more normal pictures, and how they generally become darker when they are scaled by algorithms with the bug.

Also, the blurring algorithm seems just as likely to have this averaging bug as the scaling algorithm.

Unless I seriously misread TFA, this error has nothing to do with the spectral content of the data. Spectral content certainly influences the way things scale, but it seems to have no connection to this particular bug.

Look at the test picture in the "Explanation" part of the article. http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html#explanation Filtered or not, the test picture should not result in the second column being dark grey.

Where do you get the idea that the "overwhelming majority" of Christians believe this? Anything beyond anecdotal evidence?

This may be a prominent view in Calvinist churches, (reformed baptist, presbyterian, etc.) but is certainly not a prominent view in churches with a more Arminian flavor (methodist, pentecostal, etc.)

In some branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is believed, and in other branches of modern (and less modern) Christianity this is not believed. The beliefs of the christian community are far from homogeneous.

I think we can agree the passages you've cited are clearly talking about the human death. To my reading, there seems to be no strong indication that animal and plant death are included or excluded.

Sorry, you did raise that point earlier, and I should have addressed it then..Anyhow, if the account is in some ways allegorical or symbolic, that does not necessarily mean that it has no bearing on the literal world. And there are a large number of possible interpretations as far as which parts may be literal and which parts may not.

This is such a large issue that, unfortunately, there is no slam dunk argument possible here. There are too many possible interpretations to debunk all of them with such a simple argument. I'm not saying that you're not right. I'm saying that your attack is unfair and oversimplified.

I'm not sure that death is necessarily indicated by Rom 8:19-23; death is never mentioned. It seems to me that a world where nothing ever died would be more cursed than a world with death. As far as I can tell, the Bible only mentions death as a result of sin when it is referring to man's death. Decay could be read in any number of ways. There is no one obvious meaning.

I don't really subscribe to this "long day" viewpoint. I really don't care very much how the world got here. I'm just afraid of calling seemingly reasonable ideas unreasonable without a rational and conclusive discussion.

"19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."

Where does this say that anything about "death"? Also, what's wrong with an allegorical meaning? The long day theory is clearly non-literal.