Atheism is a belief *about* religion, but that doesn't make it a religion.

I also have beliefs about planets, but those beliefs aren't planets...

Are they providing a sensible version of GNOME? I very want to shuck Ubuntu, and this would let me have my Steam games *and* a usable desktop system.

(I know there are GNOME alternatives, but I'm hoping for the easy way out.)

Let's see, you ask me what kind of Ferrari I drive, I say 'none', and you say that's a kind of Ferrari.

And you express that idiotic view with a glaring logical fallacy: If religion is a collection of beliefs, it does not follow that every collection of beliefs is a religion.

Hope you were just out for a troll...

No, that has to wait until we all get to Hell.

Except for those who think that means they *should* run rampant.

Yeah, I found his observation really offensive when I was a church-going schoolboy. But now I don't think many religious people even know what he meant: it's not about religion-as-a-drug, but rather about religion as a way to keep the masses under control. Apparently *lots* of famous leaders throughout history said the same thing, in their own words.

I vividly recall GWB at a memorial for some people he sent off to die in Iraq stating confidently that they were in a better place now. As if he (or anyone else) would actually know.

Apparently the neocons behind "intelligent design" were following the script from Plato's Republic: religious beliefs are good for the masses, though the Guardian class knows better. And they humbly consented to bear the burdens of being the Guardians and dealing with reality so the masses won't have to.

I disagree. Anyone who actually reasons about their religion will shuck it in a heartbeat. There's not the slightest evidence to support one religion's claims vs. another's, so the only rational choice is to set your standard for evidence low and believe all of them, or set it high and reject all of them. And since they are mutually contradictory, reason requires you to throw one of those options out.

Religion is a culturally transmitted phenomenon, almost like language. It's no accident that if you know when and where a randomly selected person lives or lived you can predict both their language and religion with fairly high accuracy. Reason indicates that religion all about tradition, not about some objective reality.

That's kind of how I feel about it. I don't believe in anything supernatural, period. But I don't need to join a club, go to meetings, fanboy some heros, and all that jazz. It starts to be a cult, even if not a religious cult.

Of course, rational argument isn't going to lever anyone out of religious beliefs, so maybe this kind of jazz is what is needed to break religion's stranglehold on public policy.

I suppose I'm just not the club-joining type.

Pointless? What is the sole purpose of plastic guns?

This is such a Slashdot story :)

"A girl invited me to her house on several occasions. Each time, I spent more and more time being impressed with the Commodore 64"

I think Snowden changed the game on this

Before the Snowden revelation, it wasn't widely accepted that the government was reading everything anybody ever wrote. For _one_ of these companies to come forward to complain was like the prisoners dilemma. There was no guarantee that other players would follow suit, so for GOOG to come out and say "The NSA is spying on you and we can't stop them" puts GOOG at a competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, all of this stuff was secret; not to be disclosed publicly, etc. Companies weren't sure how much teeth there were in those rules, so were further hesitant to talk much about it.

Post Snowden, its all different. Now its an open secret that this happens, and it happens to everyone. Now there's no posturing or competitive advantage to be exploited; everyone is in the same boat. This is a populist issue and once one company made noise about sticking it to the NSA, the rest were going to have to follow.

The other thing that has changed is that Snowden and Lavabit have both gone public. The public has spoken. We now have proof of what kind of stuff the Feds will do and how far they'll go to keep it quiet. The people who leaked this stuff survived.

The government might be able to sue Yahoo or Lavabit or any of them individually, but it cannot sue the entire tech industry.. not right now.

You are low. You need to also include Homeland Security, parts of the FBI that do surveillance and para-military operations [i.e. HRT], as well, in my opinion, the VA. This number is discussed often. For example here. Additionally, it does not include any "black" off budget operations, including a big part of the NSA and CIA budgets, perhaps $50B. You simply can't look at only the defense industry.

The fact that it is declining in terms of GDP percentage doesn't mean that defense is shrinking, it means it's not growing as fast the overall budget or the economy. Which is to say, it's still growing in real dollars in most years.

Thanks for correct on Medical GDP. I apparently have not updated that number in my head since the last 1990's. Healthcare is another huge topic.

The bottom line is that it is ridiculous to think that the US would go to war based on the advocacy of any single company, or even the defense industry.
And this is because it's not the single biggest sector in the US economy? It is a huge boondoggle, with millions flowing through the government to private industries. And it's highly political. The defense industry has outsized influence.

Zuckerberg is worth 19 billion. Assuming facebook saves 50k$ per year with every H1B hire...assuming zero costs for the hire...and assuming all of this is going straight into Zuckerberg's pocket, that's still chump change...

The problem is that you were a small part of an evil system. You didn't create it, you didn't make it, and you weren't responsible for it.

I mean it's not an unfair criticism. They are doing the job that the Administration asked of them.

The problem is that not enough people resigned. That is how you show the world you are unhappy. From the top to bottom, when Pres. Obama or anyone else asked them to do something that was illegal, or lied about it during routine oversight, there should have been waves of resignations. Waves.

When the order goes out to do something illegal, or without appropriate authority, then it should be met with cold silence and the sound of thousands of keyboards typing out letters of resignations.

c.f. - yes, but not all of those operations would be illegal. There are all sorts of intelligence gathering operations that are perfectly legal that states conduct against each other all the time.