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Comment: Re:Piracy, and making money (Score 1) 288

by AnalogDiehard (#40079295) Attached to: MPAA Agent Poses As Homebuyer To Catch Pirates

I would agree with you, except I have a much, much bigger problem with corporations sending UNDERCOVER FUCKING AGENTS into people's homes under false pretenses.

Not just undercover agents, but agents who are not affiliated with law enforcement. This is extremely troubling.

While they have uncovered a copyright infringement operation, the case is on very shaky ground because of the tactics under which evidence was procured.

The courts would have serious issues regarding the gathering of evidence by non-law enforcement entities and used to justify a warrant in a court of law. Law enforcement has strict guidelines under which evidence is admissible in a court of law and private entities are not exempt from these guidelines. This is malicious enough that the evidence should be barred from a court of law and the person(s) responsible should be reprimanded.

Legal precedent has been established for DECADES. It is common for vindictive friends or relatives to report a false crime to law authorities. Knowing this, law authorities take such reports with a grain of salt. Founder of Co$ L. Ron Hubbard had a habit of reporting enemies to the FBI during the 1950s communist witch hunt and they eventually just ignored him. Today there are criminal charges for filing a false report of a crime.

Comment: Re:Advertising as a whole isn't worth the money (Score 1) 400

by AnalogDiehard (#40019751) Attached to: General Motors: "Facebook Ads Aren't Worth It"

People are burned out.

Why are we burned out?

I'm tired of the half-truths and deception of marketing. I'm tired of the sugarcoating of a poor product. I'm tired of the 20-easy-payments-of-$49-a-month sales pitch that some moron fails to do the math before he realizes he paid $1000 for a cucumber slicer. I'm tired of the sale prices that print "after rebate" in small unreadable font on a fast ticker tape scrollbar because I refuse to use rebates. I'm tired of the "some restrictions apply" that is the devil in the details in which that great sales price no longer applies.

I'm tired of being deluged with ads at every turn. Billboards on tractor trailers, vans, and other rolling stock. Billboards on sports clothing. Billboards on racing cars. Animated billboards digitally overlayed on sports fields and borders. Billboards in the doctors office and pharmacies. Billboards on the public school football field scoreboard. Billboards in the restaurants. Billboards on the platemats in restaurants. Junk mail in my mailbox and inbox. Sales pitches at my phone. Text spam messages. Billboards at the urinals and bathroom stall doors for crying out loud!

I'm tired of the ads on broadcast radio. There is a lot of decent music not getting on radio because radio wants three minute song formats that can fit into their advertising format. I'm tired of ads being blared at higher volume than the songs. I'm tired of turning down the volume knob or station surfing until the ad is over.

I'm tired of TV displaying ads in the bottom border during a program. I'm tired of ads on the news broadcast disguised as stories. I'm tired of the "ticker tape" scrolling ad banners distracting me. I'm tired of that itty bitty TV screen being split into multiple frames where ads are displayed on one of them. I'm tired of the worsening program-to-ad ratio where there are increasing ad time per hour and more frequent interruptions in the program. I'm tired of ads being blared at higher volume than the program. I'm tired of channel surfing until the ads are over.

Yeah, we're burned out. I unplugged from broadcast TV since 2000. I quit listening to broadcast radio and ripped all my CDs to mp3s and play them on my car CD player. I got an unpublished phone number to keep telemarketers out. I signed up to get off junk mail lists and previewed credit card offers. I refuse to install Flash and any other application that can deliver animated ads on my computer. I refuse to divulge my email, physical address, or phone number to retailers.

TOO MUCH!

Comment: Re:Decent validation (Score 1) 229

by gillbates (#39762541) Attached to: Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud

"Evolution describes..."

And what leads you to believe this is what is taught as "evolution" in American schools? What you said may be true about the theory of evolution, but it is not true about what is taught under the banner of evolution in the American school system.

The interesting thing about this is that I, quite frankly, don't trust the Left-leaning American public school establishment to teach science of any kind. I remember being taught in 8th grade that satellite orbits were due not to the balance of forces between rotational acceleration and gravity, but rather, that the satellite was moving so fast that it managed to "miss" the Earth as it fell. It's bad to teach things that are untrue, but much worse when those untruths have significant consequences. Here in the US, evolution is the only scientific theory taught which is not experimentally verifiable, has no predictive power, and has significant gaps in its ability to explain the origins and forms of life, and relies on an astronomically improbable, random event in order to get started. With science misrepresented as some pseudo-intellectual voodoo, it should not surprise anyone that the US lags the industrialized world in accepting the authority of science on subjects such as climate change. In the US at least, the debate over teaching evolution is not a debate about the implications of a scientific theory, but about teaching atheism. As a Christian, I'm content to regard evolution as an explanation of how God created what Genesis describes. But I recognize that what is called "evolution" in our public school system discredits both faith and science.

As for evolutionary theory itself, even at its best it is still an explanation of how things could have happened, not necessarily how they did. Given that humankind has almost reached the ability to engineer life in a mere 10,000 years, it seems to me more likely that life on Earth is the vestige of the genetic engineering efforts of another. Of course, I can't prove it, but life more closely resembles something engineered (or, more accurately, programmed - with all the code reuse and cruft that entails) than something directed by random events. And the problem evolution encounters - as does any theory about past events, even an engineered life hypothesis - is that the past can't be experimentally verified. At best it will be only an explanation - one of many. An explanation which could be disproven, but never proven. 200 years from now, evolution theory will have changed so much that today's biologists would not recognize it as such.

100 years ago, evolutionary theories implied that racism was scientifically justifiable. Today, it reveals (or rather, genetics does) that racial distinctions have no significant scientific basis. Imagine if you had lived in the 1800s - would you want your children to be taught racism because it has a scientific basis? If not, perhaps you can understand the objection Christians have to teaching a theory which implies that God does not exist. Even though I can appreciate the distinctions between revealed truths and scientific speculation, such distinctions are difficult for even the general population to make, much less primary and secondary students. As a result, students taught evolution will be inclined to believe that God doesn't exist, in spite of the philosophical problems with such a position. We in America are still dealing with the consequences of racism a full century after scientific racism was discredited, largely due to the fact that science in the 1800's had such a large impact on the culture, and taught things which were not only untrue, but justified immoral behavior.

Comment: Re:Decent validation (Score 1) 229

by gillbates (#39755625) Attached to: Studies Suggest Massive Increase In Scientific Fraud

"Evolution cannot be "experimentally proven". but it can be used to formulate a great number of hypotheses which can then be verified experimentally."

You seem not to understand that here in America, when we talk of evolution, we are talking of the naturalist philosophy that God doesn't exist. It has nothing to do with experimentally verifiable theories and everything to do with discrediting Christianity and the Biblical account of creation.

Which is why you can teach genetics, but not "Evilution". Americans are generally not as ignorant as our atheist critics would have you believe.

When you become used to never being alone, you may consider yourself Americanized.

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