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friendlyatheist reblogged atheistramblings:“The story of the redemption will not stand examination. That man should redeem himself from the sin of eating an apple, by committing a murder on Jesus Christ, is the strangest system of religion ever set up.”
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“A law that demands consent to internet cookies has been approved and will be in force across the EU within 18 months. It is so breathtakingly stupid that the normally law-abiding business may be tempted to bend the rules to breaking point.”
— Consent will be required for cookies in Europe (via @drewm).
Now, at first this appears to be a good thing. It respect’s the user’s privacy and gives them back full control over any cookies set on their machine. Yes, most browsers give users that control anyway, but we’ll skip over that.
So, if I want to serve cookies to my users I will have to ask first. If they don’t want to accept cookies, that’s absolutely fair enough. Completely understandable. I don’t want to intrude upon them any further, so I’ll record that preference and we can carry on.
The question is where I store that preference. I can’t use a cookie, because I’m not allowed to. The user doesn’t log into my site, so I can’t put it into their profile. I can’t record it alongside their IP address because they probably share that with several other people at their ISP.
So I guess i’ll just have to ask them the same question every time they visit any cookie-serving page on my site. Install a web-stats package (e.g. Webtrends or Google Analytics) and that means every single page on the site.
They’ll get annoyed and go elsewhere (perhaps to a site based outside the EU), or they’ll become blind to the question and start mindlessly clicking “Yeah, whatever, stop bothering me about the cookies, I don’t care any more.”
There is an exception — where the cookie is ‘strictly necessary’ for the provision of a service ‘explicitly requested’ by the user — so some applications will be able to continue unchanged. That quite clearly doesn’t include analytics or advertising software though.
The technical side of me is wondering if people will start abusing the new HTML5 local storage APIs if this law makes cookies infeasible? Is that even possible? Will the browser manufacturers come up with a solution?
Or is this just a knee-jerk reaction to change?
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langer reblogged unburyingthelead:“The richest three people in the world possess a combined fortune greater than the total GDP of the forty-eight poorest countries in the world put together. Let’s suppose we want to provide the world’s total population with a quantifiable access to nutrition, say 2,700 calories a day, as well as access to drinkable water and basic health resources. This will add up, more or less, to the amount of money that the inhabitants of Europe and the United States spend every year on perfumes.”
— Alain Badiou, The Century
(via unburyingthelead)
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“We all have faith! I have faith in God, and you have faith in reason.”
…and other lies told to children.
Let it be written in stone — or, at least, on Tumblr’s temporary tablets: reason is a tool to navigate an indifferent world, just as one uses his or her other senses of sight, touch, sound, and smell as one rambles around a chaotic city street. It is a biological imperative.
Faith, on the other hand, has not been proven to have any use whatsoever. Whereas rationality allows one to avoid danger, solve problems, and find answers, faith is the wilfull denial of any such thought process. Faith is not a substitute for reason and rationality — if rationality fails to solve a problem, it does not mean irratonal faith is the solution. Just as closing one’s eyes is never the cure for being unable to see clearly.
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“Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.”
— Christopher Hitchens -
friendlyatheist reblogged atheistramblings:
panel of experts in women’s reproductive rights
Experts. HA!
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“God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That, sir, is not free will. It would be akin to a man telling his girlfriend, ‘Do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out.’ When a man says this we call him a psychopath and cry out for his imprisonment/execution. When a god says the same, we call him loving and build churches in his honor.”
— Chuck Easttom -
"Without God, there would be no basis for morality!"
…and other lies told to children.
Whether this lie is told with the Ten Commandments in mind or from a Lewis-esque frame of mind that believes the instinct as to what is right or wrong is God’s tinkering with your brain, installing an irrational impulse that could not have risen out of natural selection, it can easily be disputed using a nasty little apparatus called thought.
The fact that the morals of the Bible are simply no longer applicable, that morality has in fact evolved, makes it all too evident that either God has no idea what is or is not moral, or he doesn’t exist. It’s a toss-up, isn’t it.
Then there’s a very natural, biological, instinctual trait known as “empathy.” It can be found in all working human brains (and in the brains of many other species of animal who happen to lack moral laws). Could this not be the material basis for morality? No? Very well.Let us sic our rationality on the issue: isn’t it a rather basic realization that the well-being of the community at large (whether your family, your town, your country, or your entire species) is required for the well-being of the individual? It might be a selfish mode of thought — and, as you know, survival of the fittest is a selfish enterprise — but we’ve nonetheless discovered a rational basis for morality: if I allow my brothers or sisters to be harmed, no one will help to keep me from harm. No human needed a fictitious son of an imaginary God to lay out that rule before they would follow it, and with good reason. Unconvinced, are you? As you wish.
A question for the more morally concrete: is stealing wrong? Yes? Always? Oh, all right. Stealing is wrong — God said it and implanted that knowledge in my mind. That’s that. End of fucking story.
You mean to say that a seven-year-old boy should die a horrible death of starvation rather than steal a single loaf of bread from the richest man in the city? Otherwise, he WILL spend eternity being tortured for the infraction. Morally speaking, that boy should choose death over life. But rationally-speaking? It seems rationality is a better guide to morality than… well, “morality.” -
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
— George Bernard Shaw
