I don't know about that. I suspect that Firefly was the victim of the fact that not many people enjoyed it. The fanbase is devoted, but pretty damn small.
I personally couldn't stand it, and I was predisposed to enjoy it, because I generally enjoy sci-fi (unlike most people). It's not that difficult to believe that the masses saw nothing to like, and the show was canceled as a result.
Not to diminish your experiences, but I've never felt the UI on my Droid was lacking. Whatever I need to do is in a place I'd expect to find it, I just go by intuition and it works.
I believe you when you say it doesn't work for you, of course. I just wanted to underscore your point, that it is a matter of personal preference.
While I disagree with your extremely negative assessment of Christianity, I must wholeheartedly agree with your general way of thinking. We always stand to gain from a respectful debate about our ideas, not only because we may learn something new and have our eyes opened, but also because it is important to understand why we believe the things we do, and to be able to defend them. I am truly glad to see I'm not the only one who approaches things in this way, even if we do disagree on some particulars.:)
That's fine, but my point is that what you say is a matter of interpretation, and depends on where you draw the "murder" line. Because of that, "Do not murder" does not necessarily apply to capital punishment.
The word "kill" is widely held to be a mistranslation, to my understanding. The more proper translation would be "murder", which means that certain forms of killing may or may not be allowed by such a statement.
I'm incredibly jealous. What's your address? And when will you next be taking a vacation? I need to know so I can... patrol for intruders while you're gone. Yes, that's it.
I look forward to when I have a proper house that I can fit stuff like this in. Even if I built a MAME cabinet now, I'd have nowhere to put it.:(
Oh, and I should add that even if I were to accept as true everything you say here (which I don't, obviously)... that still would not make religion "nothing more than child abuse". Child abuse, in my book, requires the intent to harm the child. At worst, you could say that a parent is guilty of negligence for passing their religious beliefs along to their children.
That's just more weasel-language, though. What's "evil"? To me, the fact that Leonardo da Vinci didn't have his own 8-core Mac Pro is "evil."
Oh, please. The fact that a term is difficult to nail down precisely doesn't mean it can't be used to communicate effectively. If that were the case, we would have stopped using the term "art" long ago.
Religion, being opt-in stupidity, certainly costs us all...
Speak for yourself. It's never cost me a thing. Furthermore, your assertion that it's "stupidity" isn't really well-founded, since the fundamental concept behind religion (existence of a deity) is purely a matter of opinion, and can neither be proven nor disproven. Certain tenets of certain religions may be argued to be stupid (I think that the usual arguments against creationism are fairly strong, for example), but I don't think you can reasonably argue that religion itself is "stupidity" based upon such.
I agree that people can be warped, but I mean actually peaceful, not someone who is twisted into believing that they are doing good while they do evil. When you talk about certain beliefs full of hate and vitriol, I can understand denouncing them, but the GP's claim was simply "religion". I refuse to acknowledge a statement as truthful which says that ALL religion is child abuse. There are plenty of religious people out there whose beliefs are truly harmless (although you or I may find them silly). For every Fred Phelps that rants about how God hates gays, there's a Christian who believes that God loves everyone, regardless of if they do something "wrong", and will keep his beliefs to himself and just be a friend, rather than trying to badger some gay man into submission to God.
That person does exist. While I am not myself a believer in any religion, I know plenty of people like I described. That two such types of people can exist, and both espousing their beliefs based on "religion", makes it clear to me that we can't make sweeping condemnations such as the GP made (and conversely, we can't make sweeping praises such as some people try to do). "Religion" is simply too diverse for such general judgements to be truthful.
Only what a cursory reading of Wikipedia gives, but it doesn't matter. There are good religious people, and bad religious people. There are good atheistic people, and bad atheistic people. It's not too hard to see that if religion (or lack thereof) was the cause of people's good/bad character, there would be no people with similar religious beliefs, but opposite moral characters. Religion, then, while no doubt an important factor in a person's development (as are any number of other things), is not the sole cause... and it would need to be the sole cause for claims such as yours to hold up.
But those limits have nothing to do with many people's religious beliefs. As long as they continue to make it their business, and not others' (not that this always happens by a long shot), tolerance is in order.
Not to mention that calling religious teachings "child abuse", or insinuating that it is as bad as racism (as the above AC did) is pathetic. Ironic that such mindless fanatics are the ones so loudly denouncing mindless religious fanaticism.
No truly enlightened person would claim that someone else's honest, peaceful attempt to teach their children truth (as they see it, however wrong they may be) is child abuse. Just saying.
The one that springs to mind is Comedy Central's censoring of South Park (twice!) because they were afraid of offending Muslims. The general PC belief seems to me to be that we need to avoid offending the poor Muslims at any cost, which is of course asinine.
We seem to be willing to cave to the Muslim extremists in every other way, so why not this one too? Surely it's only sensible to be pussies every time the extremists pressure us, life and liberty be damned!
Yeah, TFS is very ambiguous about that. Turns out that TFA is talking about names of people, and the pitfalls you can run into when allowing someone to enter their name into a system.
Users are pretty much self sufficient on Macs. End of story.
Speaking as a man who once had the misfortune of supporting Macs, I can assure you this is not true at all. It may be true for the specific people you have in your organization, but that's about it. Dumb users are dumb and require hand-holding and fixing, no matter what platform you stick them on.
Yeah. Not only that, but anyone (eg: the submitter) who thinks that Twitter is in any way pushing the NYT into obsolescence is insane. Twitter is inane and stupid, the NYT is actual, you know, news.
Other variations on news may or may not be making the NYT obsolete, but Twitter has not a damn thing to do with it.
They said that they're adding more realism in some modes as an aid for those who want to transition to real instruments. Your complaint is even more asinine than this complaint normally is, because they even SAY "This is to help you to be able to play a real instrument one day".
Maybe I just haven't worked in large enough companies, or in desktop support...
That's probably your trouble. Work in desktop support long enough, and you will realize that a lot of users are complete idiots. I don't just mean "not intimately familiar with how to use their computer", I mean they refuse to even apply a little brain power to figuring things out for themselves. The "horrors of tech support"-type stories are not exaggerations.
It's even worse if you have to deal with the public, rather than just your company's employees. God help you if you have that job.
We simply have to admit that FLYING ISN'T FUCKING 100% SAFE BECAUSE NOTHING IS.
You're correct. The problem is that many (the pessimist in me says "most") people in the US are not mature and level-headed enough to accept that everything in life has risk. They operate under the delusion that if something isn't risk-free, it's unacceptable.
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I don't know about that. I suspect that Firefly was the victim of the fact that not many people enjoyed it. The fanbase is devoted, but pretty damn small.
I personally couldn't stand it, and I was predisposed to enjoy it, because I generally enjoy sci-fi (unlike most people). It's not that difficult to believe that the masses saw nothing to like, and the show was canceled as a result.
This wasn't the Supreme Court.
Not to diminish your experiences, but I've never felt the UI on my Droid was lacking. Whatever I need to do is in a place I'd expect to find it, I just go by intuition and it works.
I believe you when you say it doesn't work for you, of course. I just wanted to underscore your point, that it is a matter of personal preference.
While I disagree with your extremely negative assessment of Christianity, I must wholeheartedly agree with your general way of thinking. We always stand to gain from a respectful debate about our ideas, not only because we may learn something new and have our eyes opened, but also because it is important to understand why we believe the things we do, and to be able to defend them. I am truly glad to see I'm not the only one who approaches things in this way, even if we do disagree on some particulars. :)
Good point. Thank you for the clarification.
It's not my faith, sir. Your assumptions are unfounded and reflect poorly upon you.
That's fine, but my point is that what you say is a matter of interpretation, and depends on where you draw the "murder" line. Because of that, "Do not murder" does not necessarily apply to capital punishment.
or for that matter, "thou shalt not kill"?
The word "kill" is widely held to be a mistranslation, to my understanding. The more proper translation would be "murder", which means that certain forms of killing may or may not be allowed by such a statement.
I'm incredibly jealous. What's your address? And when will you next be taking a vacation? I need to know so I can... patrol for intruders while you're gone. Yes, that's it.
I look forward to when I have a proper house that I can fit stuff like this in. Even if I built a MAME cabinet now, I'd have nowhere to put it. :(
Oh, and I should add that even if I were to accept as true everything you say here (which I don't, obviously)... that still would not make religion "nothing more than child abuse". Child abuse, in my book, requires the intent to harm the child. At worst, you could say that a parent is guilty of negligence for passing their religious beliefs along to their children.
That's just more weasel-language, though. What's "evil"? To me, the fact that Leonardo da Vinci didn't have his own 8-core Mac Pro is "evil."
Oh, please. The fact that a term is difficult to nail down precisely doesn't mean it can't be used to communicate effectively. If that were the case, we would have stopped using the term "art" long ago.
Religion, being opt-in stupidity, certainly costs us all...
Speak for yourself. It's never cost me a thing. Furthermore, your assertion that it's "stupidity" isn't really well-founded, since the fundamental concept behind religion (existence of a deity) is purely a matter of opinion, and can neither be proven nor disproven. Certain tenets of certain religions may be argued to be stupid (I think that the usual arguments against creationism are fairly strong, for example), but I don't think you can reasonably argue that religion itself is "stupidity" based upon such.
I agree that people can be warped, but I mean actually peaceful, not someone who is twisted into believing that they are doing good while they do evil. When you talk about certain beliefs full of hate and vitriol, I can understand denouncing them, but the GP's claim was simply "religion". I refuse to acknowledge a statement as truthful which says that ALL religion is child abuse. There are plenty of religious people out there whose beliefs are truly harmless (although you or I may find them silly). For every Fred Phelps that rants about how God hates gays, there's a Christian who believes that God loves everyone, regardless of if they do something "wrong", and will keep his beliefs to himself and just be a friend, rather than trying to badger some gay man into submission to God.
That person does exist. While I am not myself a believer in any religion, I know plenty of people like I described. That two such types of people can exist, and both espousing their beliefs based on "religion", makes it clear to me that we can't make sweeping condemnations such as the GP made (and conversely, we can't make sweeping praises such as some people try to do). "Religion" is simply too diverse for such general judgements to be truthful.
Only what a cursory reading of Wikipedia gives, but it doesn't matter. There are good religious people, and bad religious people. There are good atheistic people, and bad atheistic people. It's not too hard to see that if religion (or lack thereof) was the cause of people's good/bad character, there would be no people with similar religious beliefs, but opposite moral characters. Religion, then, while no doubt an important factor in a person's development (as are any number of other things), is not the sole cause... and it would need to be the sole cause for claims such as yours to hold up.
But those limits have nothing to do with many people's religious beliefs. As long as they continue to make it their business, and not others' (not that this always happens by a long shot), tolerance is in order.
Not to mention that calling religious teachings "child abuse", or insinuating that it is as bad as racism (as the above AC did) is pathetic. Ironic that such mindless fanatics are the ones so loudly denouncing mindless religious fanaticism.
We don’t have to defend our claims.
Everyone has to defend their claims. Maybe you're trying to say that said claims have already been sufficiently defended, but that's different.
No truly enlightened person would claim that someone else's honest, peaceful attempt to teach their children truth (as they see it, however wrong they may be) is child abuse. Just saying.
The one that springs to mind is Comedy Central's censoring of South Park (twice!) because they were afraid of offending Muslims. The general PC belief seems to me to be that we need to avoid offending the poor Muslims at any cost, which is of course asinine.
We seem to be willing to cave to the Muslim extremists in every other way, so why not this one too? Surely it's only sensible to be pussies every time the extremists pressure us, life and liberty be damned!
Yeah, TFS is very ambiguous about that. Turns out that TFA is talking about names of people, and the pitfalls you can run into when allowing someone to enter their name into a system.
No, that merely means that those people think it's your job. And even that doesn't mean a thing if those people aren't your boss(es).
Users are pretty much self sufficient on Macs. End of story.
Speaking as a man who once had the misfortune of supporting Macs, I can assure you this is not true at all. It may be true for the specific people you have in your organization, but that's about it. Dumb users are dumb and require hand-holding and fixing, no matter what platform you stick them on.
Yeah. Not only that, but anyone (eg: the submitter) who thinks that Twitter is in any way pushing the NYT into obsolescence is insane. Twitter is inane and stupid, the NYT is actual, you know, news.
Other variations on news may or may not be making the NYT obsolete, but Twitter has not a damn thing to do with it.
They said that they're adding more realism in some modes as an aid for those who want to transition to real instruments. Your complaint is even more asinine than this complaint normally is, because they even SAY "This is to help you to be able to play a real instrument one day".
Maybe I just haven't worked in large enough companies, or in desktop support...
That's probably your trouble. Work in desktop support long enough, and you will realize that a lot of users are complete idiots. I don't just mean "not intimately familiar with how to use their computer", I mean they refuse to even apply a little brain power to figuring things out for themselves. The "horrors of tech support"-type stories are not exaggerations.
It's even worse if you have to deal with the public, rather than just your company's employees. God help you if you have that job.
We simply have to admit that FLYING ISN'T FUCKING 100% SAFE BECAUSE NOTHING IS.
You're correct. The problem is that many (the pessimist in me says "most") people in the US are not mature and level-headed enough to accept that everything in life has risk. They operate under the delusion that if something isn't risk-free, it's unacceptable.