Actually, the very first thought I had after the first sentence of the summary was that Lisp would be a much better match than XML for something like this. Let me guess why: because after converting of text written in the extensible markup language into lists, you can also process them?
[...]when somebody induces a problem in a project, the leaders have a serious problem if they cannot boot him for sure, if they only can hope that he will not lie again if he discreetly comes back, or to be able to recognize him under another pseudonym or to detect the lies (and, then, be courageous enough to prolly endure other chases). They may prefer work in a more useful or even interesting way Well, they may prefer to work in a more useful or even interesting way than trying "to be able to recognize him under another pseudonym" (which goes against the very concept of pseudonym, does it not?) or "to detect the lies" (maybe wikipedia should get some lie detectors?)
Compunction makes the boot more useful because, without it, redemption seems somewhat far away (the leaders cannot hope that he will not lie again if he comes back) Perhaps this is true in the church (and I mind you not just any old church), but not in wikipedia.
Many potentially serious people will simply not deliberately write BS/propaganda under their real-life identity,[...] Then you probably would not believe me if I tell you how much propaganda of the worst kind has been written by people under their "real-life" names. Maybe they were not "potentially serious" but instead actually serious, or just serious, or were they not joking?
[...]and the other are often easy to detect. Who are the other? Would not the method of "detecting" then depend on who you are talking about?
I did not write that barring anonymous authors will be sufficient, but I do think that it will reduce the BS and cruft Oh, and what if all of authors of wikipedia are under pseudonyms, I mean anonymous?
There is nothing magic about Zulu, German, Jewish, Zulu or Chinese blood unless you're troll enough
to obsess here over religion. You will find that human blood regardless of race is pretty much the
same cocktail of proteins and cells with little evident difference in DNA in both the cell nucleus and
the Mitochondria. Which does not prove that Holocaust did not happen, does it?
I wonder where you find it in you to rank one man's cruel murder after another's
and mind you well that these were for the most part regular German Armed Forces troops and civilians. [emphasize mine]
Who are these? I gather you are not talking after all about Zulus, Chinese, Jewish or Zulus (presumably you're not talking about Zulus twice), you're talking about Germans,
in a specific historical context, right? So do I.
[...]I think you would agree that the French government and the German government both fill the same set of needs for their citizens, but that doesn't mean that they don't occasionally go to war with each other.[...] No, I do not agree with you on this.
What if he comes back under another pseudonym? It will prove that there is no sanction/compunction/efficient way to kick liars/... Rather complicated statement, no?
Let me try to understand it:
"efficient way to kick liars" would be proposed "sanction", and is very puzzling to me: why is it necessary
to kick him, and furthermore efficiently? Isn't this a bit extreme, especially considering
the matter in question, even if he did not show any compunction?
Therefore you read information without ever determining its source? And you hope to learn something useful and balanced, esp. on controversial subjects? This is about the least controversial part of the EssJay affair. Even wikipedia has disclaimers on its pages on whether the content of a particular page is disputed. And usefulness and "balance" of information there is rarely in direct relation to its source, esp. considering the process by which the wikipedia is edited. Apparently even Britannica contains errors even though its authors could be considered as "serious encyclopedists", or, to put it more frankly, the identity of an encyclopedist is not the substitute for critical thinking and research--this is after all why encyclopedias are not considered to be serious in academic community, even though I am sure that many people from academia use them.
It's quite amazing the mental contortions people will go through (calling all of this "disinformation" or "misinformation" rather than LIES) in order to convince themselves that they are in the right and ok. These are traits of truly mentally disturbed people, when they can't even admit to themselves that they deceived everybody. It's not about credentials, man, it's about right and wrong in the most fundamental sense. Then tell me, what is "the most fundamental sense" of "right and wrong"?
It would be evident to many people that the patches are indeed quality and that credentials or not the individual is talented. Then again as a potential employer I would be extremely cautious about hireling someone who misrepresents himself for no good reason. What else is he going to lie about? Could I ever expect any truthfulness from him especially when he does have a reason to lie? So what are you trying to say? What else is he going to lie about? What is his reason to lie?
What are you cautious about? What's troubling you so much? Say it.
So yes his contribution is effectively reduced to nothing at this point. But how are you going to sift through and figure out his contribution from the contribution of others?
And if "It would be evident to many people that the patches are indeed quality", what would you do with those patches?
... he may come back under another pseudonym What if he comes back under another pseudonym?
How a serious encyclopedist may not reveal his (real-life) identity is beyond me. It is beyond you.
The fundamental problem of course is developing a global signature for mind reading that is clean enough to derive robust statistics, keeping in mind that individuals brains are far from uniform in their anatomy, physiology or wiring. Why is that "the fundamental problem"?
I've long said we are not in the information age, we are in the data age. The information age will be when we've successfully organized all this crap we're storing/transmitting. Or, to paraphrase Travis: "One of these days, I'm gonna get my data organizized"
No, he's just saying that the religious will reproduce more and that those kids will be unlikely to have a proper education - thus continuing the cycle. Ditto for banning of contraception, banning of divorce and abstinence from sex before marriage.
Maybe the "religion" gene is neither helpful nor harmful, but linked to other useful genes (other higher brain function, perhaps)?
Sort of how blind cave-fish aren't being selected for blindness, so much as being selected for other traits which happen to have blindness as a side-effect? How about this:
Maybe "'religion' gene" has nothing to do with blind cave-fish (let's just provisionally say because these fish are not religious (yet)), but instead, is helpful/harmfull, and (not) linked to other usefull/useless genes/memes (other higher/lower brain functions, perhaps)?
(for a fun effect, feel free to try various combinations of choices offered by slashes and parenthesis)
But if someone came up to my door and said, instead, "We're from XYZ church down the street and we're trying to get some people to help with ABC event. The event is not associated with our church or any religion; we're just out here trying to get some people in our community together to help out," I would actually seriously consider doing it. I love the area that I live in, and spending an hour or two of my weekend improve that actually does appeal to me. Isn't this still an advertisement of/for XYZ church? All the more so if their claim "The event is not associated with our church" is "true", which is just redoubling of the advertisement. And if the ABC
turns out to be so great, well then here we go: "ABC was such a great event, organized by these people from XYZ church, who were not associated with XYZ, or any religion whatsoever. These people from XYZ not associated with XYZ are really cool for our comunity. It's actually really good (bad?) to know that that has nothing to do with XYZ or any religion"...
I would challenge that many of the similarities you describe didn't, in fact, develop independently. It can at least partially be explained by cultural exchange. For example, our (Western, Christian) image of God as the old white-haired powerful guy and our idea of hell owe a lot to the Greeks. The belief and worship of saints in Christianity can be attributed to polytheistic beliefs that existed before Christianity and were adapted. There are a lot of examples of this. There has always been a high amount of cultural exchange between different societies, even millennia ago[...] I do believe you are correct that the different beliefs serve the same needs, however. But is there not a profound difference between monotheism and polytheism? Saints are not gods.
And if the different beliefs serve the same needs, how come Romans and Christians did not get along better?
Reasoning requires both intellectual capacity and evidence. Some people find little evidence for or against God. Their paucity of reasoning comes not from a paucity of intellectual capacity but from a paucity of evidence. This way, even a smart person without solid evidence against God can have faith. I am not sure I can follow your reasoning, namely the curious emergence of the word "faith".
Would not what you say imply that even a smart person without solid evidence against God can have
reasoning. But faith?
This was one of the possibilities that Dawkins talked about in the God Delusion - according to the evolutionary approach, the belief in gods and the supernatural is really a 'spin-off' of a ingrained tendency to believe authority. Now, the reason this might be useful in an evolutionary perspective is that a child whose genetic makeup predisposes him to be a little more gullible, will probably heed his parents warnings about dangerous things. So if a child were to be told that he should not go down to a certain part of the riverside because of snakes - the more readily the child accepts this, the longer his genes will survive. Which then brings the question why believe Dawkins at the first place? I mean, even if he does explain the origin of "ingrained tendency to believe authority" (and that there is such a tendency is perhaps all too obvious) in people, that still does not explain why people believe in some things and not in others. He is authority, isn't he?
Most people associate Germany's surrender with positive imagery of
liberation from Nazi rule andthe Berlin airlift. As always however there is however an uglier truth
lurking below the surface. I think most people associate Germany's defeat in the second world war
with some rather ugly stuff about death camps. Here is a quote from the
frontline web site:
Sixty years ago, in the spring of 1945, Allied forces liberating Europe found evidence of atrocities which have tortured the world's conscience ever since. As the troops entered the German concentration camps, they made a systematic film record of what they saw. Work began in the summer of 1945 on the documentary, but the film was left unfinished. FRONTLINE found it stored in a vault of London's Imperial War Museum and, in 1985, broadcast it for the first time using the title the Imperial War Museum gave it, "Memory of the Camps." Sorry, but there is no uglier "truth lurking beneath the surface" than what was found in Germany at the end of the Second World War.
you could make one of the coprocessors interrupt when the electon beam of the monitor was at a certain position The Atari 800 could do that easily at the scan line level with Display Line Interrupts and somewhat harder with cycle counting at points across the line. And that was 1978 technology.. And Commodore 64 could do the same thing. Very cool stuff, you could
switch the video mode at a particular line of the screen and split screen into text and graphics, etc,
but I have never tried nor have seen anybody doing it with the points across the line...
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore you read information without ever determining its source? And you hope to learn something useful and balanced, esp. on controversial subjects? This is about the least controversial part of the EssJay affair. Even wikipedia has disclaimers on its pages on whether the content of a particular page is disputed. And usefulness and "balance" of information there is rarely in direct relation to its source, esp. considering the process by which the wikipedia is edited. Apparently even Britannica contains errors even though its authors could be considered as "serious encyclopedists", or, to put it more frankly, the identity of an encyclopedist is not the substitute for critical thinking and research--this is after all why encyclopedias are not considered to be serious in academic community, even though I am sure that many people from academia use them.
... he may come back under another pseudonym What if he comes back under another pseudonym? How a serious encyclopedist may not reveal his (real-life) identity is beyond me. It is beyond you.Maybe then Suspect Zero might help you?
...but supports only up to approx 16 exabytes long files.
If nothing else, your post illustrates how information can propagate backwards in time (notice the post that appeared 5 minutes before yours)
Sort of how blind cave-fish aren't being selected for blindness, so much as being selected for other traits which happen to have blindness as a side-effect? How about this: Maybe "'religion' gene" has nothing to do with blind cave-fish (let's just provisionally say because these fish are not religious (yet)), but instead, is helpful/harmfull, and (not) linked to other usefull/useless genes/memes (other higher/lower brain functions, perhaps)?
(for a fun effect, feel free to try various combinations of choices offered by slashes and parenthesis)