I think it's called a wiki.

Well, for starters I would have thought it obvious from the statement I was making (and my signature) that I consider myself agnostic. I mean agnostic in the sense coined by Thomas Huxley, that is I believe in the fundamental lack of evidence for a deity (strong agnosticism) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_agnosticism .

If there really were no talk of proof or evidence then you really are as fundamentally unsound as any other religion. I mainly mean by atheism, what seems to be the most outspoken version at the moment, strong athiesm. i.e. the assertion that deities do not exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_atheism. Anything else seems to be a weaker version of that viewpoint, or a dishonest dressing up of weak agnosticism.

  Even the original greek word atheos, came to mean something like atheistic in the modern interpretation.

well we suppose it is there to explain anomalous gravitational effects. The main problem is that there are lots of ideas about what this dark matter could be - WIMPs or black holes etc...

technically dark matter is matter we can't detect. i.e. if there is dark matter it is weakly interacting - which obviously is a real pain if you are trying to work out if it exists.

Does anyone else get an uneasy feeling about the use of the word debunk in the summary?

Oh please, the prosecution had to drop half the charges because their evidence was useless. Not until after, let it be added TPB showed them the technical intricacies of why they were wrong.

an infinite surplus...

I am willing to pay nothing because I can go elsewhere and get it for nothing. It is how a free market works. Why would I pay more than I have to?

The fact that I pay nothing for it shows it worth that - nothing. It is a sad fact (or is it?), but that is the reality. Of course the physical media themselves may be worth something, as well as a live performance, or many other associated things. However, if a piece of information is available for free it is worthless, because who am I going to sell it to? Of course it enriches us in ways money can't, but strictly that is not monetary value.

well I do not agree with your analysis of whether they are service providers - but that is why we have courts - to interpret the law. As the media have been saying all week, this was a major test case in Sweden; I believe most of the Swedish lawyers thought what they were doing was possibly pushing the boundaries of what was legal, but there was no real consensus. So when you say they "so obviously cherry-picked parts of the law and ignored so much", I find it hard to believe you.

If their intent is to act within the law regardless of their views on copyright then the question is rather irrelevant. Their answer could have been something like, "I hate copyright and I will do everything within the law to subvert it".

If we are making it a crime to hate copyright then that is a very slippery, orwellian slope

I'd agree. In the trial itself the prosecutors asked the defendants their views on copyright. Their response? "I thought this wasn't a political trial?".

I think it is a shame they didn't openly state their opinions about it whilst still arguing they are within the law, either way it was a political trial and maybe they should have met it more head-on.

not quite. I'm pretty sure that there is a lot more evidence for the existence of stamps, which trivialises the decision...

What I am trying to say is that the analogy fails because it implies atheism requires inaction or no thought. At some point an atheist has concluded that the evidence for atheism is great enough to accept it as their current paradigm (or that all other evidence for contrary paradigms is weak enough).

So I would suggest that agnosticism is closer to 'not collecting stamps' and atheism is more like collecting something else, or perhaps burning stamps.

Yarr!

most of the 'geek' chicks who actually talk to me about my netbook tend to be the "we're just friends" type... you start talking to a women about computer specs, and she's already put you in the 'friends' category. So my best advice would be to actually engage her in talking up it's cuteness etc... and then quickly move into conversation about her, before she works out what a geek you really are ;)

um, you've just gone a round about way to describing solipsism. Really _anything_ can be described by assuming our minds can imitate it. Yet you will presumably accept physical explanations for nearly everything else? Causality is one of the most interesting (philosophically speaking) parts of physics.