However, there’s a few exceptions.

Star Trek has Q, which is an alien so powerful that he may just as well be the christian God/Allah/Vishnu or whatever.
It’s nifty because they dont promote lunacy (religion), but rather explore how realistic people react to extremly-powerful beeings.
It really pushes sci-fi to the limit.

Stargate has ascension, which also challanges sci-fi. It explains a life-after death, by ascending instead of dying. They use sci-fi to explain it, no magic needed.

BSG is just BS, those people didnt even try exploring the universe, they choose to make killer-robots as a hobby.
“Curse the sudden but enevitable betrail” ~Wash, Firefly

Then join Kurdistan into the EU *before* Turkey, hehe

But as right-wing guys will be quick to point out, this also opens the way for some hard-to-fire “parasites”, which do nothing serious on their work hours and just take the money home. So we’re currently moving into a more fragile contract-based system, where you’re free to silence a researcher when you were not happy with his previous contract’s conclusions, by simply not hiring him again.

This is one of the oldest dilemma of democracy : when we have to make a choice between both, should we rather save innocents or punish culprits ?

Real-world example : I think one can do better than Unices and Windows for desktop use. I’ve written stuff on my blog explaining in some details why I think so. But until I’ve shown that the thing can be implemented and that the implemented result can indeed do better, my point is moot.

It’s the same thing with physics, climatology, or other empiric sciences : you can claim whatever you want about the actual nature of the universe, that will be religious thinking. No human being with limited sensing capabilities can know that. We can only propose a way the universe might work based on experimental knowledge. The sole things which are valid in the realm of empiric science are experimental proofs and theoretical simplicity.

Prove your model right in a number of real-world use cases, and spot a contradiction or correct your model when others try to prove it wrong. That’s how science works.

Remember Einstein sorry about havnig to make a living while working for science?
The contradiction is obvious: how can you be at the SAME TIME non-partisan AND published?

You can’t because if you do not choose your camp, then everybody (in the field) will be against you (because you support nobody).

That’s the sorry state of Science today, and things get worse only because BigCos get richer (massively stealing tax-payers money with the very willing to help authorities) and therefore asking Science to “comply” even further with its (private-interests) agenda.

I am not against money, or groups. I am against this culture of corruption which has become the rule in the ‘civilized world’… because one has to pay the price for this - and this is you and me.

José: to a large extent because your Muslims are better than our Muslims.

To some extent that’s an effect of the way the US (and Canada) is different from (much of) the EU in how we treat newcomers.

Also, we have had (and still have) a real Left. You know, honest to God Socialists. Communists, even. They’ve had a sad tendency to explain away problematic behaviour from Muslim immigrants with “poverty”, “class”, and “racism shown by the majority”. They also tend to believe that cultures have rights and that those rights are more important than the rights of individual people. That makes it very hard to take a stand against some of the bad sides of Islam.

But back to the main reasons:
1) We simply don’t attract the same people, 2) it is way easier to sneak across a border or two in or around Europe than to sneak across the Atlantic, 3) we don’t as tough a filter for immigrants as you do, 4) we don’t treat those that get in the same way you do. Oh, and 5), how many Muslims do you have? Do they clump together so that their kids can dominate the local schools?

ad 1: if you work hard/are resourceful/are well-educated/are lucky, you are way better off in the US than in the EU, even in the UK. If you can barely read in your own language (and can’t be bothered to learn) then you are better off here.

ad 2: on the other hand, we have very few Mexicans…

ad 3: we suffer from chain immigration where one generation immigrates and their children get married off (often against their will) to someone from back home. We also take more refugees (in many cases those would actually be “refugees”) — this varies a lot from country to country. Some European countries hardly have any Muslim “immigration through asylum”, not just because they are tough but also because they aren’t sought as much by would-be refugees.

ad 4: they instantly have many rights here that they don’t get in the US or Canada. They can (or could) for example more or less decide not to learn the local language (or English), decide they don’t want to work, demand interpreters every time they show up at local social office to talk about jobs and government handouts. And they get to call people they don’t like racists. And they get money per child (probably the last thing we should be doing). As I stated in ‘ad 3′, this depends a lot on the European country. For some reason, those that give immigrants many rights (even long before they have become citizens) are sought more by these people and have more of the undesirable kind. Those that have more limited government handouts and perhaps only for a short time also have remarkably few asylum seekers. Imagine that.

We also don’t have “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” laws because we consider them barbaric. But they seem ever more attractive by the day…

ad 5: imagine lots of countries that were never set up for large-scale immigration. Perhaps like Maine or Idaho writ large. Then imagine that over a few decades, about 10% of the population end up being Muslim immigrants and their descendants. And that the rate is still growing…

—

And the problem isn’t really Islam as such, it is the culture — i.e. values, norms, and habits — of a few predominantly Muslim countries that’s problematic. The non-Muslims — Christians, say — from the same countries are just as problematic. Most of our immigrants, which includes immigrants from other EU countries, are barely even thought of as immigrants because they simply don’t cause any trouble. That’s true not just for Finns, Canadians, and Germans, but also for Ukrainians, Australians, Columbians, Thais, …

The tragic thing is that many of the immigrants from Muslim countries actually are okay. It’s just that so many of them are not.

Granted, we would also have a problem if more of the Gypsies(*) from Romania and Bulgaria decided that they wanted to move to other EU countries. The relatively few of them who tour the richer EU countries are already causing enough trouble. Again, the problem is the culture — not in the sense of songs, poems, food, and folkloristic dresses but in the sense of values, norms, and habits. In this case it’s a cultural practice of stealing and vandalizing.

*) No, they are not all Roma. Easier to just use the perfectly good word Gypsy.

-Peter, Denmark.

Despite being quite old, this post is interesting. You might be surprised on how I landed here…. I googles “MIT license in a nutshell”. :)

First result was this.

I tend to prefer a GNU license for one simple reason: PEOPLE DIE. If it turns out that someone takes a source code, creates a much better version investing lots of time and effort into it, but never releases back his changer, and then one day he/she DIES, then all that good work goes down the drain.

We as a species should stop having to re-invent the wheel every few years.

Best regards,
FC