Well, I re-read the first part of the article to give your rant a fair shot at convincing me. Here's what the author wrote:
Erinâ(TM)s knowledge of computers is limited to word processors, spreadsheets, Photoshop and a reasonable amount of browsing on the Web. Fairly standard stuff for a university philosophy student.
I'm honestly lost as to how you got from there to
his girlfriend HAS to be some untutored user who has no clue about computers, tee-hee
When I read "girlfriend" in the title, the image I picked up was "the non-geek in the pair", or more precisely, "a normal person". But perhaps I'm atypical.
I asked my wife to perform a similar test about a year ago (she's a fashion merchandising major), and she switched to Ubuntu with no problems and refused to go back. I wasn't expecting problems, though - while she's no geek, she's plenty smart.
In contrast, my 88 year old dad switched a year ago too, again with minimal issues. (The "minimal issue" was a minor rule change in the version of solitaire he used on Ubuntu versus the standard Windows version.:-) He's an engineer, but retired prior to the desktop computer revolution hit engineering in the 80's.
So, while I will apologize for the juvenile and sexist comments that objectify Erin in the discussion arena, and some certainly do, the original poster just doesn't come across to me as the sexist pig you imply.
If your entire personality ceases to exist and only an animating spirit/soul sans personality goes to heaven, then most people would view that as the same as death.
Just in the interest of accuracy, Christianity (specifically 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21) does not teach that some "animating spirit/soul sans personality goes to heaven", but rather that a Christian will receive a new "imperishable body" (15:42) amidst a "new heaven and new earth" (21:1).
Great! I'd like for you to develop an application for me. I'll sign a contract to pay you $595,000 for it. But you have to agree that, if I add 400 requirements a year into development, you have to keep the original schedule or else you pay me $3,000,000.
He points to a dress rehearsal held in May 2007 as when "development and scoping problems emerged." The bureau then identified "more than 400 new or clarified technical requirements," he said, which were delivered to Harris on Jan. 16.
Not sure how you get from "the government missed or mis-stated 400 requirements" to "it is a corporation that is to blame", but calling people names doesn't lend credence to your view. It's much more likely that both contractor and Customer have plenty of room for shared blame. (Haven't these guys ever heard of "release early, release often"? From 2006 to May 2007 with no dry runs, just blind faith? What is this, the 1960's?)
The really fun thing about absolute statements is that one counter-example disproves them. I use Linux on desktop. See? You're wrong.:-)
Of course, so does my wife (who majored in fashion merchandising), and my 88 year old father, and the exchange student who stayed in my house last year, and roughly half of the thousand people at PyCon two weeks ago (just from snooping screens during the plenaries), and about 4% of the desktop users world-wide. True, that's small compared to Windows' 85% share and a bit below Mac's 8%, but it's certainly not "nobody".
And note that the market share leader Windows survived the Mac by a day (though, my friend the Mac-fan said that only proves the Mac was so much more desirable than the other two laptops - touché!:-)
What wireless laptop do you order for Linux compatibility?
Oh, I'd probably order one of the Dells that come with Ubuntu pre-loaded and supported. You know, the same way you buy a Windows laptop. But you might try one of the other pre-load vendors before making up your mind.
I find your timing amusing in that my new Corporate-issue Dell Latitude D630 won't connect wirelessly... using Windows XP. Selecting Networking in the Control Panel informs me that it can't configure networking that way; a little experimenting has revealed a redundant utility (why??), which demands that I type in an 8 digit key from the bottom of the wireless router. It then gives me the hourglass for two minutes with "Downloading Configuration" on the status line, and then responds "Connection failed". Really friendly. I'm writing this on that very machine under XP, with a wire connected to my router.
However, when I insert the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD, the wireless connects as soon as I select my SSID ("constellation") from the convenient drop-down pre-populated on the desktop's menu bar. One click. Why isn't Windows this friendly?
(I'm certainly not asserting that Dell can't provide a working XP image, or that Linux works with any random hardware - only pointing out a single anecdote. But for those who keep chanting "Windows just Works", a lot of us have not had anything like that experience, and this is just the latest in a long string of personal experiences along those lines.)
This theory that a piece of software cannot be released under GPL if the software loads non-GPL objects, falls flat on its face.
It would certainly be an odd restriction, but of course that's not even close to what Linus said. You might want to read what he wrote before so badly misrepresenting the topic.
A serious disadvantage in finding a job??? You have to be kidding.
Well, not every job.:-)
But if you're working in the field of biology, and you reject evolutionary science, with what do you work? On what do you create hypotheses to test experimentally? How do you address the "why" questions, rather than just the "is" questions?
I'm a computer engineer. I've never personally used evolutionary theory, but I have colleagues who do so on a regular basis. Some classes of problems are extremely difficult to solve by direct calculation, even with a good supercomputer. But if you model them based on evolutionary theory - that is, you mutate a proposed solution set according to some controlling rule set, and evaluate the next generation of proposed solutions against the problem definition and keep only those that work "best" - a type of "survival of the fittest" in math - you're likely to find a solution to that particular class of problem much faster. If I discard this approach because it is "evil", you bet I'll be at a serious disadvantage in solving that class of problems.
Well, the same is true of biology, in which organisms mutate according to a controlling rule set, and the next generation is evaluated by its ability to survive in a given environment. I can model that biological process mathematically, and use it to make useful predictions about the type of organisms likely to evolve over time (and to understand why the organisms we see today are here). Should I really reject such a useful model, even though I believe firmly in a certain Creator of which I'm quite fond?
I'm not arguing for attacking children's faith. In fact, just the opposite - one of my Bible classes is taught unapologetically in a local public elementary school, and it's about as evangelical as I can make it. I believe that faith in God is extremely important, and I put my actions where my beliefs are. But at the same time, when a model is useful for understanding how our reality is what we experience, and in predicting how it will change, I see no reason to reject that model out of hand or to avoid teaching it to children. (I believe someone else in this rather extended thread pointed out that origin of life is different from evolution of life, in case that's what's hanging you up.)
Well, that's what I believe - obviously with non-trivial passion.:-) You'll have to make up your own mind, just like the rest of us. I hope I've given you some new ideas over which to ponder, regardless of where they lead you.
Of one biological theory I'm quite confident - when we stop thinking, we die.;-)
What if your goal is to teach kids that evolution is _true_
Then I won't want you to teach my kids. "Evolution is _true_" != Evolution is "a rational method for understanding things". Tools aren't "truth"; they're useful to a certain but not unlimited extent, and always to be handled with the understanding that they are approximations of reality, not reality itself.
If you believe evolution (or quantum physics or any other model of reality that we find so useful) is somehow ground "Truth", then you'll be highly susceptible to defending that "truth" to whatever extreme in necessary against a new, possibly more useful model that challenges it. I really don't want you to teach my kids that.
Thanks! A quick example - if you're offended by religion, skip to the next message now, and please accept my apologies for the off-topic detour.:-)
Find a duck sauce packet that barely floats, and put it in a 2L soda bottle filled to the brim with water with the cap tightened. The packet should float normally, but sink when you squeeze the bottle.
Science: This is the basis for hydraulics - water doesn't compress, air does, so squeezing the bottle makes the air bubble in the packet smaller, increasing the density so that it sinks. It also shows why an air bubble in your car's brake line is not a good idea!
Religion: (From a Christian viewpoint) God gives us free will rather than lightning bolts from on high. If a Christian is sensitive to His guidance (i.e., pressure on the bottle), his heart will respond (i.e., heart == bubble).
It's called a "Cartesian diver", I believe - much easier to make that the old pen-cap-and-paperclip design I used to use. And it's not so much the kids as the adults that love to play with the bottle.:-)
I have about 250 or so lessons like this, with a dozen or two published thus far on my website ("Lessons" on the left menu). As is not uncommon with personal websites, I have great plans but not as great timely implementation. I guess I love teaching more than writing websites.:-/
why not let the kids decide what is useful to them (atheism/agnosticism, or your brand of religion) when they are old enough to make informed choices?
A fair question. Just as farmers rarely let a field select its own crop when it's ready, parents are rarely content to leave their kids alone and see what develops. Certainly in my case, I have rather firm ideas based on forty-mumble years of experience about what constitutes a "successful life" (nothing to do with money, a lot to do with what changed in the world because I / they were here).
Because I love my kids, I have attempted to pass along those ideas by my words and (much more importantly) example. And, since my faith is a big part of that, I pass my faith along to them as well.
In the long run, of course, they'll make their own choices whether I make a conscious effort to teach them what has worked for me or not. But since I believe more information enables better choices, I've provided them with as much information on what worked for me as I can.
As far as my other students, each one without fail is in my class because their parents share the above sentiment. I suspect most parents would agree - though I'm not here to criticize anyone's parenting approach. I was a true expert in parenting right up until I had kids.:-) If you're a parent, I bet you empathize.
Very amusing, but (1) I'm talking about education, not politics, (2) I didn't support government interference in the Schiavo case, (3) I don't know or care about Karl Rove, and (4) evangelicals are "winning" (assuming by that you mean "growing in number in the USA" - see
this article for recent statistics).
Politically I'm more Libertarian than Republican, I'm an evangelical Christian because the philosophy of life you advocate didn't appeal to me when I tried it and this one does, and I very much prefer to live in the society called Texas, thanks (though I enjoy traveling abroad rather frequently - most people are delighted to share their culture and experiences, and are interested and accepting of mine).
But other than that, you're dead on. I mean the part about your being harsh.;-)
So you'll accept that God created the universe, suns, planets, and life, but you believe a few written records are just too darned hard? Honestly? What we have here is a failure of imagination.
(Not that I believe for one second the earth was created 6000 years ago - or last Thursday, as another poster mentioned - since the Bible says no such thing, and I just don't see any reason for God to plant a large, consistent set of false evidence just to confuse us. But as long as we're letting our imaginations run free, perhaps you should let yours run... well, free-er.;-)
Reading comprehension just isnn't a strong suit on/. *sigh* I'll give it one more go.
I wrote, "if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children... would it really matter?" Your response is to claim science is seeking "truth" (how noble). Philosophy seeks "truth" - science seeks understanding. Science is horseshoes - a better model wins points, even if it's still not exactly right. Newton's theories are demonstratably wrong (i.e., not the "truth") - but they greatly help me to understand how matter interacts because they are close enough for practical purposes. That's useful!
Evolution helps me understand how life transforms itself through generational variations to fulfill environmental niches created by changes in its environment. Despite that I'm obviously not a biology major, and so have only a weak laymen's understanding of evolution at all, I find that useful. I don't give a flip whether it's "truth" or not.
I strongly believe children should receive the best training in science - all of science - as we possibly can. Toward this goal (and note it's not my only goal!), I don't care whether their parents believe life originated from the primordial sludge, God Almighty, or the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster, as long as their kids learn how to handle science and so can better understand their world, I'll consider that a good thing.
Just as an aside, I teach three Bible classes to children most weeks, and I use science experiments to illustrate Biblical concepts (I teach the science concepts at the same time). This is right in line the St. Paul's argument that he would "be all things to all men that I might persuade a few". Because I have found Christianity to work very well for me (compared to my disastrous attempts at atheism), I'm very interested in helping children to know God (that's an even bigger goal of mine). I believe that will be very helpful to them, and having done this for several decades, I now know adults who agree that it does. And if children learn science along with the Bible, more's the better.
Anyway, now that's $0.09 worth, and I've probably exhausted my quota of words on/. for the month. I just trying to warn you that "evolution == anti-Christian" is a losing tactic at least in the USA, where 75% or so of the population self-identifies as Christian. "Evolution == a useful tool for understanding life" is a winning tactic for convincing parents to permit their children to learn about evolution. Even for geeks, marketing matters. But do what you like.
You missed a rather large point (God could create diversity, too), but forget that for the moment. Focus on the main point for a moment, and try to empathize.
If your goal is to convince parents that their children need to understand evolutionary theory, is it better to say, "Your most deeply held beliefs are wrong, wrong, wrong, and we're going to teach them a different view because we're smarter than you and know it's right, right, right!", or is it better to say, "Regardless of whether history played out as you believe or as we believe, the evolutionary model is the best tool that we have for understanding the biological world as it exists today, and if your children don't understand or actually misunderstand it, they will be at a serious disadvantage in the competitive marketplace of ideas and jobs!"?
If you answer the first because it better fits your world view, then be prepared to continue to fight a losing battle. Evangelicals are extremely focused on children, and will perceive the first approach as an attack on their children and their own right to raise them in accordance with their culture and beliefs. As with bears, you mess with the cubs at your peril. It's not a recipe for success; it's a recipe for irrelevance. If you don't believe me, look where it's gotten you today.
Sometimes it's the science geeks who can't see the forest for the trees...
The process of evolution is a highly confirmed theory
Actually, if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children, this isn't the best point to make. How about, "The process of evolution is a highly useful theory" instead? Even if God created the world 6,000 years ago exactly as it was 6,000 years ago, and let evolutionary processes take it from there, would it really matter? Evolutionary science would still be just as useful in understanding life - well, whatever life is...
Just $0.02 from a real, live evangelical Christian in the wild...;-)
what kind of modifications you can make when you have the source code that you can't make otherwise?
I'm not certain that Python can't create any arbitrary GUI out of a.glade file - certainly, Python's incredible flexibility has surprised me before.:-)
However, when I'm creating a GUI dynamically based on a configuration file (for example), taking a basic framework of code generated by a GUI designer and modifying it to be dynamically tailored is more direct that trying to learn the details of the GUI designer's internals to create the same effect.
Here's where I'd love to show you a really great example, and I almost have one. I've been playing with the design of a high-end screenshot utility - something with the power of (say) SnagIt or ScreenHunter, but for Linux desktops. I laid out the design so that plug-ins could be sequenced by a "power" user in a graphical flow to be used as single-click capture profiles for "normal" users. So, data could be sequenced from image sources (e.g., grab a region of the screen, the contents of a scrolling window, or even the time as a transparent image) to image transforms (e.g., content-based crop, merge images, scale or rotate) to image destinations (e.g., a file, website, printer or email).
I laid out several possible UIs in Glade, but kept hitting dead ends in terms of generality. My Glade-based UIs always included some limits to make the UI-based UI design process more manageable. As we agreed, if I were more clever I could probably find a way to remove those barriers with clever code that interacted with the Glade libraries, but in the end I've concluded the most direct approach is to generate the UI as I interpret the plug-in configuration.
Probably not the best example, but the best I have.:-)
So maybe it's a theoretical vs. practical distinction. Theoretically we could build a defense system with a billion lines of code, but practically we're not smart enough yet to build a workable system of that magnitude. And I'm not smart enough to implement a really general, end-user configurable UI using Glade. YSMV (Your Smartness May Vary).;-)
You can connect signals and handle events, everything you can do with generated or self-written GTK+ code.
The one very important thing you can do with generated code that you can't do with a 4-line call to libglade is customize the code. A library can't do everything custom code can do, though good libraries seem to cover 80-90% of the most common use cases. For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design and then customize the small portions that are unique.
Ah, that clarifies your thinking quite a bit, thanks. I would have interpreted "treat your wife as you want to be treated" as "understand what your wife wants and try to provide it" because you'd want to be understood and accommodated, too, rather than "ignore your wife's desires and just treat her like she's a mini-me". So perhaps we arrive at the same position from different perspectives.
But thanks for giving me more grist for the mind mill.:-)
If I had a mod point handy, I'd happily toss it your way. Reading your post, I had a sudden insight into why I went from a Microsoft enthusiast (back when Microsoft seemed anxious for me to use their stuff) to a Microsoft "highly unenthusiast" (now that they treat me like dirt, or worse).
Using Microsoft products just isn't fun anymore. It's like living in Apple's "1984" commercial, but without the girl. Using FOSS is still very much fun. It's like living in a GoDaddy commercial, but without the Fox censors.
You're judging the two statements by completely different standards. You interpret the rule you like in light of a "good faith effort", but the time-tested rule I prefer by a brain-dead "if I were gay I'd want to be dead" savagely warped perspective. I certainly wouldn't want to treat your guideline as you are treating mine - but I guess you think I want mine to be (mis)treated that way.:-)
See how easy yours is to game? The time-tested original is much harder to game IMHO, though certainly neither is "the be all end all" of anything. I'll stick with what's worked so well for me for so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I re-read the first part of the article to give your rant a fair shot at convincing me. Here's what the author wrote:
I'm honestly lost as to how you got from there to
When I read "girlfriend" in the title, the image I picked up was "the non-geek in the pair", or more precisely, "a normal person". But perhaps I'm atypical.
I asked my wife to perform a similar test about a year ago (she's a fashion merchandising major), and she switched to Ubuntu with no problems and refused to go back. I wasn't expecting problems, though - while she's no geek, she's plenty smart.
In contrast, my 88 year old dad switched a year ago too, again with minimal issues. (The "minimal issue" was a minor rule change in the version of solitaire he used on Ubuntu versus the standard Windows version. :-) He's an engineer, but retired prior to the desktop computer revolution hit engineering in the 80's.
So, while I will apologize for the juvenile and sexist comments that objectify Erin in the discussion arena, and some certainly do, the original poster just doesn't come across to me as the sexist pig you imply.
Just in the interest of accuracy, Christianity (specifically 1 Corinthians 15 and Revelation 21) does not teach that some "animating spirit/soul sans personality goes to heaven", but rather that a Christian will receive a new "imperishable body" (15:42) amidst a "new heaven and new earth" (21:1).
I think I'm superfluous to this argument...
Great! I'd like for you to develop an application for me. I'll sign a contract to pay you $595,000 for it. But you have to agree that, if I add 400 requirements a year into development, you have to keep the original schedule or else you pay me $3,000,000.
Ready to sign? Hello?
Exactly. Everything that I've never tried has been easy, too.
The information the CIA and NSA collects on us is classified, you doofus. They have to collect it all again so they'll have an unclassified copy.
Duh.
Had you RTFA, you would have seen this:
Not sure how you get from "the government missed or mis-stated 400 requirements" to "it is a corporation that is to blame", but calling people names doesn't lend credence to your view. It's much more likely that both contractor and Customer have plenty of room for shared blame. (Haven't these guys ever heard of "release early, release often"? From 2006 to May 2007 with no dry runs, just blind faith? What is this, the 1960's?)
The really fun thing about absolute statements is that one counter-example disproves them. I use Linux on desktop. See? You're wrong. :-)
Of course, so does my wife (who majored in fashion merchandising), and my 88 year old father, and the exchange student who stayed in my house last year, and roughly half of the thousand people at PyCon two weeks ago (just from snooping screens during the plenaries), and about 4% of the desktop users world-wide. True, that's small compared to Windows' 85% share and a bit below Mac's 8%, but it's certainly not "nobody".
And note that the market share leader Windows survived the Mac by a day (though, my friend the Mac-fan said that only proves the Mac was so much more desirable than the other two laptops - touché! :-)
Well, anyway, sorry to have fed the troll.
Oh, I'd probably order one of the Dells that come with Ubuntu pre-loaded and supported. You know, the same way you buy a Windows laptop. But you might try one of the other pre-load vendors before making up your mind.
I find your timing amusing in that my new Corporate-issue Dell Latitude D630 won't connect wirelessly... using Windows XP. Selecting Networking in the Control Panel informs me that it can't configure networking that way; a little experimenting has revealed a redundant utility (why??), which demands that I type in an 8 digit key from the bottom of the wireless router. It then gives me the hourglass for two minutes with "Downloading Configuration" on the status line, and then responds "Connection failed". Really friendly. I'm writing this on that very machine under XP, with a wire connected to my router.
However, when I insert the Ubuntu 7.10 live CD, the wireless connects as soon as I select my SSID ("constellation") from the convenient drop-down pre-populated on the desktop's menu bar. One click. Why isn't Windows this friendly?
(I'm certainly not asserting that Dell can't provide a working XP image, or that Linux works with any random hardware - only pointing out a single anecdote. But for those who keep chanting "Windows just Works", a lot of us have not had anything like that experience, and this is just the latest in a long string of personal experiences along those lines.)
It would certainly be an odd restriction, but of course that's not even close to what Linus said. You might want to read what he wrote before so badly misrepresenting the topic.
Well, not every job. :-)
But if you're working in the field of biology, and you reject evolutionary science, with what do you work? On what do you create hypotheses to test experimentally? How do you address the "why" questions, rather than just the "is" questions?
I'm a computer engineer. I've never personally used evolutionary theory, but I have colleagues who do so on a regular basis. Some classes of problems are extremely difficult to solve by direct calculation, even with a good supercomputer. But if you model them based on evolutionary theory - that is, you mutate a proposed solution set according to some controlling rule set, and evaluate the next generation of proposed solutions against the problem definition and keep only those that work "best" - a type of "survival of the fittest" in math - you're likely to find a solution to that particular class of problem much faster. If I discard this approach because it is "evil", you bet I'll be at a serious disadvantage in solving that class of problems.
Well, the same is true of biology, in which organisms mutate according to a controlling rule set, and the next generation is evaluated by its ability to survive in a given environment. I can model that biological process mathematically, and use it to make useful predictions about the type of organisms likely to evolve over time (and to understand why the organisms we see today are here). Should I really reject such a useful model, even though I believe firmly in a certain Creator of which I'm quite fond?
I'm not arguing for attacking children's faith. In fact, just the opposite - one of my Bible classes is taught unapologetically in a local public elementary school, and it's about as evangelical as I can make it. I believe that faith in God is extremely important, and I put my actions where my beliefs are. But at the same time, when a model is useful for understanding how our reality is what we experience, and in predicting how it will change, I see no reason to reject that model out of hand or to avoid teaching it to children. (I believe someone else in this rather extended thread pointed out that origin of life is different from evolution of life, in case that's what's hanging you up.)
Well, that's what I believe - obviously with non-trivial passion. :-) You'll have to make up your own mind, just like the rest of us. I hope I've given you some new ideas over which to ponder, regardless of where they lead you.
Of one biological theory I'm quite confident - when we stop thinking, we die. ;-)
Then I won't want you to teach my kids. "Evolution is _true_" != Evolution is "a rational method for understanding things". Tools aren't "truth"; they're useful to a certain but not unlimited extent, and always to be handled with the understanding that they are approximations of reality, not reality itself.
If you believe evolution (or quantum physics or any other model of reality that we find so useful) is somehow ground "Truth", then you'll be highly susceptible to defending that "truth" to whatever extreme in necessary against a new, possibly more useful model that challenges it. I really don't want you to teach my kids that.
Don't marry your theories; divorce hurts.
Thanks! A quick example - if you're offended by religion, skip to the next message now, and please accept my apologies for the off-topic detour. :-)
Find a duck sauce packet that barely floats, and put it in a 2L soda bottle filled to the brim with water with the cap tightened. The packet should float normally, but sink when you squeeze the bottle.
Science: This is the basis for hydraulics - water doesn't compress, air does, so squeezing the bottle makes the air bubble in the packet smaller, increasing the density so that it sinks. It also shows why an air bubble in your car's brake line is not a good idea!
Religion: (From a Christian viewpoint) God gives us free will rather than lightning bolts from on high. If a Christian is sensitive to His guidance (i.e., pressure on the bottle), his heart will respond (i.e., heart == bubble).
It's called a "Cartesian diver", I believe - much easier to make that the old pen-cap-and-paperclip design I used to use. And it's not so much the kids as the adults that love to play with the bottle. :-)
I have about 250 or so lessons like this, with a dozen or two published thus far on my website ("Lessons" on the left menu). As is not uncommon with personal websites, I have great plans but not as great timely implementation. I guess I love teaching more than writing websites. :-/
A fair question. Just as farmers rarely let a field select its own crop when it's ready, parents are rarely content to leave their kids alone and see what develops. Certainly in my case, I have rather firm ideas based on forty-mumble years of experience about what constitutes a "successful life" (nothing to do with money, a lot to do with what changed in the world because I / they were here).
Because I love my kids, I have attempted to pass along those ideas by my words and (much more importantly) example. And, since my faith is a big part of that, I pass my faith along to them as well.
In the long run, of course, they'll make their own choices whether I make a conscious effort to teach them what has worked for me or not. But since I believe more information enables better choices, I've provided them with as much information on what worked for me as I can.
As far as my other students, each one without fail is in my class because their parents share the above sentiment. I suspect most parents would agree - though I'm not here to criticize anyone's parenting approach. I was a true expert in parenting right up until I had kids. :-) If you're a parent, I bet you empathize.
Very amusing, but (1) I'm talking about education, not politics, (2) I didn't support government interference in the Schiavo case, (3) I don't know or care about Karl Rove, and (4) evangelicals are "winning" (assuming by that you mean "growing in number in the USA" - see this article for recent statistics).
Politically I'm more Libertarian than Republican, I'm an evangelical Christian because the philosophy of life you advocate didn't appeal to me when I tried it and this one does, and I very much prefer to live in the society called Texas, thanks (though I enjoy traveling abroad rather frequently - most people are delighted to share their culture and experiences, and are interested and accepting of mine).
But other than that, you're dead on. I mean the part about your being harsh. ;-)
So you'll accept that God created the universe, suns, planets, and life, but you believe a few written records are just too darned hard? Honestly? What we have here is a failure of imagination.
(Not that I believe for one second the earth was created 6000 years ago - or last Thursday, as another poster mentioned - since the Bible says no such thing, and I just don't see any reason for God to plant a large, consistent set of false evidence just to confuse us. But as long as we're letting our imaginations run free, perhaps you should let yours run... well, free-er. ;-)
Best wishes either way.
Reading comprehension just isnn't a strong suit on /. *sigh* I'll give it one more go.
I wrote, "if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children... would it really matter?" Your response is to claim science is seeking "truth" (how noble). Philosophy seeks "truth" - science seeks understanding. Science is horseshoes - a better model wins points, even if it's still not exactly right. Newton's theories are demonstratably wrong (i.e., not the "truth") - but they greatly help me to understand how matter interacts because they are close enough for practical purposes. That's useful!
Evolution helps me understand how life transforms itself through generational variations to fulfill environmental niches created by changes in its environment. Despite that I'm obviously not a biology major, and so have only a weak laymen's understanding of evolution at all, I find that useful. I don't give a flip whether it's "truth" or not.
I strongly believe children should receive the best training in science - all of science - as we possibly can. Toward this goal (and note it's not my only goal!), I don't care whether their parents believe life originated from the primordial sludge, God Almighty, or the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster, as long as their kids learn how to handle science and so can better understand their world, I'll consider that a good thing.
Just as an aside, I teach three Bible classes to children most weeks, and I use science experiments to illustrate Biblical concepts (I teach the science concepts at the same time). This is right in line the St. Paul's argument that he would "be all things to all men that I might persuade a few". Because I have found Christianity to work very well for me (compared to my disastrous attempts at atheism), I'm very interested in helping children to know God (that's an even bigger goal of mine). I believe that will be very helpful to them, and having done this for several decades, I now know adults who agree that it does. And if children learn science along with the Bible, more's the better.
Anyway, now that's $0.09 worth, and I've probably exhausted my quota of words on /. for the month. I just trying to warn you that "evolution == anti-Christian" is a losing tactic at least in the USA, where 75% or so of the population self-identifies as Christian. "Evolution == a useful tool for understanding life" is a winning tactic for convincing parents to permit their children to learn about evolution. Even for geeks, marketing matters. But do what you like.
You missed a rather large point (God could create diversity, too), but forget that for the moment. Focus on the main point for a moment, and try to empathize.
If your goal is to convince parents that their children need to understand evolutionary theory, is it better to say, "Your most deeply held beliefs are wrong, wrong, wrong, and we're going to teach them a different view because we're smarter than you and know it's right, right, right!", or is it better to say, "Regardless of whether history played out as you believe or as we believe, the evolutionary model is the best tool that we have for understanding the biological world as it exists today, and if your children don't understand or actually misunderstand it, they will be at a serious disadvantage in the competitive marketplace of ideas and jobs!"?
If you answer the first because it better fits your world view, then be prepared to continue to fight a losing battle. Evangelicals are extremely focused on children, and will perceive the first approach as an attack on their children and their own right to raise them in accordance with their culture and beliefs. As with bears, you mess with the cubs at your peril. It's not a recipe for success; it's a recipe for irrelevance. If you don't believe me, look where it's gotten you today.
Sometimes it's the science geeks who can't see the forest for the trees...
Actually, if your goal is to convince parents to allow evolution to be taught to their children, this isn't the best point to make. How about, "The process of evolution is a highly useful theory" instead? Even if God created the world 6,000 years ago exactly as it was 6,000 years ago, and let evolutionary processes take it from there, would it really matter? Evolutionary science would still be just as useful in understanding life - well, whatever life is...
Just $0.02 from a real, live evangelical Christian in the wild... ;-)
I'm not certain that Python can't create any arbitrary GUI out of a .glade file - certainly, Python's incredible flexibility has surprised me before. :-)
However, when I'm creating a GUI dynamically based on a configuration file (for example), taking a basic framework of code generated by a GUI designer and modifying it to be dynamically tailored is more direct that trying to learn the details of the GUI designer's internals to create the same effect.
Here's where I'd love to show you a really great example, and I almost have one. I've been playing with the design of a high-end screenshot utility - something with the power of (say) SnagIt or ScreenHunter, but for Linux desktops. I laid out the design so that plug-ins could be sequenced by a "power" user in a graphical flow to be used as single-click capture profiles for "normal" users. So, data could be sequenced from image sources (e.g., grab a region of the screen, the contents of a scrolling window, or even the time as a transparent image) to image transforms (e.g., content-based crop, merge images, scale or rotate) to image destinations (e.g., a file, website, printer or email).
I laid out several possible UIs in Glade, but kept hitting dead ends in terms of generality. My Glade-based UIs always included some limits to make the UI-based UI design process more manageable. As we agreed, if I were more clever I could probably find a way to remove those barriers with clever code that interacted with the Glade libraries, but in the end I've concluded the most direct approach is to generate the UI as I interpret the plug-in configuration.
Probably not the best example, but the best I have. :-)
So maybe it's a theoretical vs. practical distinction. Theoretically we could build a defense system with a billion lines of code, but practically we're not smart enough yet to build a workable system of that magnitude. And I'm not smart enough to implement a really general, end-user configurable UI using Glade. YSMV (Your Smartness May Vary). ;-)
The one very important thing you can do with generated code that you can't do with a 4-line call to libglade is customize the code. A library can't do everything custom code can do, though good libraries seem to cover 80-90% of the most common use cases. For many applications, the libraries do everything you need. For everything else, you'd like to generate the commonplace code from your glade design and then customize the small portions that are unique.
I think they've heard about me.
Precisely. GNU is about "freedom".
Ah, that clarifies your thinking quite a bit, thanks. I would have interpreted "treat your wife as you want to be treated" as "understand what your wife wants and try to provide it" because you'd want to be understood and accommodated, too, rather than "ignore your wife's desires and just treat her like she's a mini-me". So perhaps we arrive at the same position from different perspectives.
But thanks for giving me more grist for the mind mill. :-)
If I had a mod point handy, I'd happily toss it your way. Reading your post, I had a sudden insight into why I went from a Microsoft enthusiast (back when Microsoft seemed anxious for me to use their stuff) to a Microsoft "highly unenthusiast" (now that they treat me like dirt, or worse).
Using Microsoft products just isn't fun anymore. It's like living in Apple's "1984" commercial, but without the girl. Using FOSS is still very much fun. It's like living in a GoDaddy commercial, but without the Fox censors.
Thanks, you're cheaper than a shrink. :-)
You're judging the two statements by completely different standards. You interpret the rule you like in light of a "good faith effort", but the time-tested rule I prefer by a brain-dead "if I were gay I'd want to be dead" savagely warped perspective. I certainly wouldn't want to treat your guideline as you are treating mine - but I guess you think I want mine to be (mis)treated that way. :-)
See how easy yours is to game? The time-tested original is much harder to game IMHO, though certainly neither is "the be all end all" of anything. I'll stick with what's worked so well for me for so long.