Pangloss

Exactly. There's no point in showing how different these men were from the modern religious right, which does not represent the modern majority view today either. People today -- even religious people -- are perfectly capable of separating their religious views from their athe- oh sorry!!!, secular views about how government should be run. Just as we know the founding fathers were, or we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Well put! An interesting point.

Of course! iNow's point is that they were deists, not Christians or atheists. Who believed that if there was a divine entity, it exerted no influence on the real universe nor makes his presence known in any way. Why, that's not "an atheistic understanding of religion" at all!

It's interesting that you see totalitarianism as something with degrees of severity (if I read that right). I would not have guessed that about you. Do you still feel some degree of wanting to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, or a chance to move to the right place over time? Not that I'm faulting your opinion, I'm just curious what your thinking is. It reminds me a bit of my slow journey of gradually increasing disappointment in the Bush administration after voting for it in 2000. (I'm not assuming you'll go the same route with Obama; I'm just wondering if we're seeing any insight here as to what can happen sometimes when politicians have to make decisions in the real world.) On a related note, Jon Meacham of Newsweek made a point about this issue on Bill Maher's show last week that I thought was interestingly flawed. He said that people will see this decision in the same light as the internment of Japanese-American citizens in WW2 and Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus. I think that's a very flawed analogy because I don't think people see those two events in the same light. I think people by and large tend to see the first one as severe and serious, and the second one as not very serious at all. Whether that's because it's further back in history or because it's Lincoln doesn't really matter (after all, FDR was popular too, and it's been over 60 years since the end of WW2). The difference is probably more on a level of how personal and direct the resulting victimization is. People don't know about people who were hurt by Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus. But it doesn't take much to empathize with Japanese-American families affected by the WW2 event. The same rule of thumb can be applied here, and when politicians do that emotional scale-balancing, the answer that seems to come up is that fear of danger trumps fear of putting the innocent in jail. My point being not that that's the right answer (it's actually a really bad way to run a railroad), but rather that we still live in a society that it's heavily influenced by emotional decision-making (in this case fear). I guess the only real way to stop that from happening is to either pass more laws (or constitutional amendments or whatever it takes), or try to build society's intelligence and maturity up to a level where it no longer makes these flawed choices.

Rofl! So, just to make sure I understand this, you were not at all trying to, as Jackson33 put it, "suggest that the US was formed under some atheistic understanding of religion". And you would now like the thread to "move back to debunking the claim that the founding fathers of the United States were a bunch of christians who founded our nation on christian values." Classic.

If I remember correctly there is no actual "reason" for this, in terms of physical laws. The amount of memory space that a CPU can address is just whatever the chip's designer says it is. By convention that number is 2^X, where X is the size of the instruction word. There have been exceptions (the usual example is the Apple II and C64 chip (MOS 6502) that used 8-bit instructions but addressed 16-bit memory spaces), but that's generally how it works. Most chips today don't actually have the ability to address 2^64, but they could in theory if their motherboards (and the chip sets that run them) supported it. That number (2^64) is 16 "exbibytes", by the way. It's a number type you don't hear very often, and an odd one to say out loud. It means that a 64-bit computer can, in theory, have a billion gigabytes of RAM, as opposed to the two or four gigabytes that's typical today. Guess we'll be working on that one for a while, huh?

It was posed as a reflection on the current political landscape, not a value judgment. Though quite frankly I'm not sure that moderate isn't exactly the right way to describe it. I don't know that this is a black and white issue.

That's not what he said. He used "atheistic" as an adjective, and you're using it as a noun. That point is not at all inconsistent with what iNow has been opining about the last few times it's come up, which is his belief that the founding fathers were not an overly religious lot by modern standards, and may not have been religious men at all.

Jackson33's quote is a rather loose interpretation of iNow's "deists" point, but it's an accurate interpretation and therefore not a straw man. The point of calling them deists is to further separate them from most religious concepts. Or as iNow put it, "strongly opposed to religious dogma".

That doesn't mean the issue isn't politicized, bascule.

Which just goes to show you how difficult Obama's choice of moderate paths is going to be. Feingold is as far to the left as the senate presently gets (noting that Al Franken has still not been seated). It's unfortunate that Rush Limbaugh's listeners won't even be exposed to this information, thus seeing how moderate Obama really is.

These memos were not intended for public release, either in the US or in the Muslim world. Still, I think it's a reasonable point -- such documents should be constructed in a proper manner and with the understanding that they would likely become public information at some point even if there's no hype or reporting on them whatsoever. JohnB makes some good points above as well.

It's bizarre watching this unfold, almost as if the GOP, having sent its moderates packing, is now saying "we don't want you back". Usually it's the other way around -- Democrats worked very hard to become the "big tent" party again, and they accomplished that task, but Republicans don't seem to even see it as a problem. Maybe they're still hung up on the meaningless "80% of Americans are Christians" statistic. Some interesting analysis on this in the Post today: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/24/AR2009052401664.html

Interesting post, CDarwin. Ah, so you feel that because the war was already "venturing dangerously close to 'crusade'", that we have sufficient context to determine that these quotes are intended to support that position, rather than a simple motivational thing. iNow made a similar point earlier, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. I'm sure eventually we'll find out if that was the case or not. I agree that there doesn't seem to be a constitutional issue, and I agree that it might not be appropriate. For me that would depend on the atmosphere -- if those reports suggesting an atmosphere of religious requirements in the military are true. Not in my view. I agree.

You're right iNow, that was a mistake. Actually you guys did a great job putting pseudoscience aside and answering the OP on point. I'll move it back to the original location right now. Thanks for pointing this out.

My opinions in this thread have been well-substantiated and well-reasoned. So were yours, Bascule's, The Bear's Key's, JohnB's, john5746's, Sisyphus's, Mokele's, Sh3rlock's, Gutz's, etc. But you chose to denigrate the opinions of those you disagreed with. Sterologist raised a valid question about whether these documents would have received the same objection had they come from a different religious text, and you rudely dismissed him. Sh3rlock made a relevant comment about whether or not most Americans would be offended by this, and you rudely rephrased his opinion (inaccurately), then declared it to be irrelevant and said "my point stands". Oh, and suggested that his eyesight needed correction. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg. That is not supporting the free expression of ideas. That's stomping your opponents flat because you don't like what they're saying. No, you are not. And your infraction rap sheet proves it. And if anybody had the gall to do to one of your opinions what you casually and frequently do to other people's opinions you would be on that Report Post button in a nanosecond. You don't care about the free expression of ideas, what you care about is which opinions this community will tolerate and which ones it will not. It is not appropriate for you to declare what would be an acceptable reply to your opinions. It is not appropriate for you to declare on behalf of the entire community whether or not an issue has been adequately addressed. It is not appropriate for you to declare that another person's opinion does not constitute a valid reply, and stamp your feet and demand a better one. Doing these things constitutes an attempt to control and frame this community's range of acceptable opinions, not because you actually represent this community, but by being the loudest and most obnoxious voice in the room. I will continue to respond to these inappropriate behaviors.

I agree. And we don't tolerate unsupported opinions in our science threads. But these Politics threads are really based on opinion -- that's their purpose. Unless someone actually states something that's factually incorrect, then their opinion has to be respected, or we don't have egalitarian, open discussion, but rather a tyranny of the majority (or loudest) viewpoint.

I did. You raised the subject of your frustrations, and you also accused me of calling your argument "bunk". I addressed those matters directly in my previous post. If you don't want to talk about something, don't bring it up.

You should have left that post as it was, iNow -- I was going to let you have the last word. But you seem to want to discuss this some more. So be it. I have never called your opinion "bunk". As usual you've stated a really interesting, well-supported position. It has a lot of merit. It adds something to this community. And, as I have shown (at your request), it is an opinion, not a fact. Therefore other people's opinions on this subject are acceptable as well. What frustrates you is that I won't let you get away with declaring other people's opinions and arguments to be invalid. When you speak in the plural as if you represent this community, when you use phrases like "my position stands", when you ridicule other members of this forum in lieu of logical argument, when you call other people's opinions "not reflective of reality", then you you will find me standing there ready to hit the reply button.

Wow. Adding more layers is conventional enough (DVDs already have two layers on each side), but that "angled" business is truly bizarre. I'm not sure I quite understood what they were saying.

I dislike old thread bumps (at least usually), but I did enjoy re-reading some of the more humorous ones in this one. Got no interest in revisiting the topic, though. Sorry.

All three have been restored.

Infractions have been issued in this thread, and it has been moved to Pseudoscience and Speculations where it belongs. Note the particular rules for this subforum, which may be found here, and the FAQ "Why has by thread been moved to P&S?", which may be found here.

Yes, I've replaced the image in your post with a video embed command. If you edit your post you'll see the tag, but it's basically (youtube)(/youtube) but with square brackets. In between the tags you put ONLY the END of the youtube URL (just the part after the equals sign).

For what it's worth, if memory serves we actually crossed the threshold with "service" overtaking "manufacturing" in 1955. I don't recall where that stat came from offhand but I posted it here before and I can look it up if there's any interest. On a related note, the other day I ran across this cool Wikipedia chart showing GDP by sector and labor force by occupation, with the three sectors being agriculture, manufacturing and service. Note how some countries differ between the two measurements. The stark contrast in China's coloring between the two charts is particularly revealing. (Sorry for the size of the chart -- probably a bit annoying for smaller monitors.)

You're right; poor choice of words on my part.