Sounds to me like the difference is that you're allowed to use this new edition for (limited) production use as well. Now, I'm sure there are a ton of small shops currently using the free, "non-production" edition for production apps, but of course they're not really supposed to; this gives them a legal route. But I still think the deliberately crippled nature of the product makes it unattractive relative to the open source contenders, in terms that even PHB's will understand: "Boss, if we go with 'free' Oracle, we're going to run into that disk space limit pretty fast, and then we'll have to pay $$$."
[shrug] I don't see it as so mysterious, personally. Way I look at it is, awareness (of any sort) is a survival characteristic, and therefore likely to be favored in evolutionary terms; self-awareness will arise as a result in any creature with a big enough brain (enough extra processor cycles, so to speak, although I think that's a very inexact metaphor) that it doesn't have to spend all its time thinking about survival on a minute-by-minute basis. This is particularly true of social animals, of which both dogs and people are prime examples; for us, awareness of ourselves in relation to other members of the pack/tribe is in and of itself particularly valuable for survival. Basically I don't consider it any more mystical than anything else our brains do.
... this is crippleware. It's no threat to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or any other open source DBMS, because the developers of those databases are working to put as many features as possible into their free products, while Oracle is deliberately taking features out. This will probably be a good resource for people who want to learn Oracle on their own time, or organizations already using Oracle that want to test a new rollout without having to pay additional fees via Oracle's baroque pricing scheme, but that's about it.
In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
Yawn. The idea that humans have those characteristics and other intelligent social animals don't is dogma, no more. My dog is more self-aware than a lot of people I've known...
It's like saying it's a serious blow to the bank's credibility that they caught the robbers.
Like it or not, most people will probably feel more secure putting their money in a bank that hasn't been robbed at all, than in one which has been robbed and then caught the robbers over a year later.
If you think your patent will get narfled by the US government what stops you from patenting it overseas first so the cats out of the bag?
Well, if you live in the US (especially if you work for the NSA) the answer is this: you won't be enjoying any of the profits from those overseas patents while you're sitting in Leavenworth.
If you've never been in a position handling classified information, it may be hard to see security holes.
I have "been in a position handling classified information" -- some of it very classified indeed -- and here's why I think you're wrong:
1) Classification costs insane amounts of money; not just the classification process and the protections classified material requires, but in the case of technology, the potential profit to be realized by releasing the technology for civilian use. A good example of this is what the British government did to their nascent computer industry after WW2. At the end of the war, they had the best computer technology and computer scientists in the world, bar none. No one else, including the US, was even in the running. So, of course, in classic late-stage empire style, they classified everything, destroyed the actual machines, hounded people out of that line of work (and at least one of them to death)... and gave away the entire computer industry in the process. The world could have been at least a decade ahead in computer technology, and the UK far richer, if not for this display of paranoia.
2) Classifying everything is equivalent to classifying nothing. People who work with classified information which they know is bullshit tend to get contemptuous of the rules (I've seen classified documents just sitting around in public areas, no one watching them, with people milling by!) So it increases the chances of genuinely important information getting leaked.
3) We, the people of the United States, pay for that work with our tax dollars. I don't think anyone will argue that everything the government comes up with should be for sale at Radio Shack -- but the government must have an overriding interest in keeping potentially useful technology (and everything else, for that matter) secret from the people who paid for it, and whose interests it is supposed to serve. And no, "this might be useful to someone somewhere sometime who wants to do something bad, better safe than sorry" just doesn't cut it.
I suspect it's the sign of a culture clash as much as anything. Below the top level of bureaucracy, the NSA employs a lot of very smart people -- and not just smart, but creative and curious people as well, many of them mathematicians and computer scientists engaged in pure research. (One of my math professors, an absolutely brilliant guy and a great teacher, was hired away by them to work on Some Project for Some Amount Of Money That Was Unspecified, But Was Much More Than He Was Making Teaching College. I was happy for him, but sad that I wouldn't be able to take any more classes from him.) Even if they work for "No Such Agency," they're basically long-haired hippies who want to share their work with, like, the human race, man. And of course the Pentagon is... well, it's the Pentagon. No hippies allowed. It's like the standard IT-guys-vs.-suits conflict that's played out in the corporate world all the time, but with much higher stakes.
To boil it down to/. terms: the Pentagon loves Microsoft, the NSA released its own Linux distro. You figure it out.
If it offers insight into the day-to-day thinking of someone who makes decisions which can initimately affect the lives of millions of people, I'm all for it. I'm just deeply skeptical that that's what it is; it feels like another type of campaigning to me. Offering some visible means of feedback would go a long way toward alleviating that skepticism.
I will gladly give politicians a break for saying dumb things in their blogs if they later admit that they said dumb things, but that's a big if. I have the nasty feeling that their campaign advisers will tell them never to back down, because it will be seen as a sign of weakness. The sad thing is, those advisers are probably right. It seems like consistency to the point of insanity ("doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results") is valued by a large portion, perhaps a majority, of the electorate over reasoned views that may evolve over time in response to new information or a changing situation.
The information presented in it is freely available all over the web, often with more insightful examples, tutorials, etc. I just don't see the justification in spending x dollars on a book when a simple google search will yield a better result for free.
There are at least three answers:
1) The information you get from your "simple google search" may or may not be better than what you get from the book.
2) A book provides all the information in one place, with a (hopefully) consistent style, and if well-indexed, will point you to the right information even faster than the Godlike powers of mighty Google.
3) There are a whole hell of a lot of programmers who, believe it or not, find printed documentation easier to use, in many circumstances, than online. Look, I love online documentation, both local (man pages etc.) and on the web. But it's not the be-all and end-all. There are times when reading about something, on paper, or having the book right there to refer to when working, simply works better than trying to extract the same information from the screen.
Try sticking to the facts. They're at least relevant. Use of the presidential seal is covered by US Federal Law. Being cool, satirical, running amok shouting "freedom of speech", and knocking a politician is not going to cut it when there are specific applicable laws for the use the this and other seals. The Onion didn't adhere to the law. Period, end of discussion.
In short, you are the one who doesn't "get it".
One could argue, of course, that those laws are themselves unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech; I'd be interested to know if they've ever been challenged on that basis. In any case, it's immaterial here, because both the laws you cited (and, I suspect, any other applicable laws on the subject) contain key clauses limiting the prohibition:
"... for the purpose of conveying and in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the false impression that such communication is from a department, agency, bureau, or instrumentality of the United States or in any manner represents the United States..."
"... for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof..."
No reasonable person could possibly think that The Onion is trying to misrepresent itself as being, or being sponsored or approved by, the United States government or the United states itself. Period. They didn't break the law, and by claiming they did so, the White House is putting itself clearly in the wrong.
The same way I did. After high-school (which is free), attend JC (which is next to free). I'm not sure how other states operate, but ANYONE who completes a 2 year degree at a JC in California MUST be accepted to a cal-state university. Cal-states run about $4000-$5000 (including books) per year. Live cheap, rent a room, live in the dorms, walk, take buses AND work while going to school.
If one CANT work while going to school, guess what! Financial aid is easily available in the form of student loans and grants.
For "free," of course, read "paid for by other people's taxes." Buses? Subsidized by taxes. Financial aid? Backed by the government... yup, taxes again. And all of these are classic liberal programs.
Life without modern liberalism would look -- well, it would look a lot like the dog-eat-dog world of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a situation which reached its logical end point with the savage poverty of the 1930's. FDR and the New Deal created the modern economy, from which liberals and conservatives alike have benefitted for generations; the problem is that this approach to government has been so successful, and has been going on so long, that it's become invisible to most people. It's a victim of its own success. So it's easy for conservatives to claim pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and attack government spending when it's been there for them their whole lives.
We do get tornadoes on the outlying fringes, just not as often. Back when I was a medic, stationed at Minot AFB (North Dakota), I had the fascinating experience of sitting in an ambulance parked just off the flightline watching an F3 heading straight for the B-52's... fortunately it veered off before it hit them, but I had visions of it picking them up and tossing them right into base housing. Which it would have done, if it had kept going the way it was. It's a rare occurrence, I agree; I think I've seen all of three tornadoes in my life, and maybe fifteen funnel clouds that didn't touch down. I understand that in Oklahoma it's a lot more common.
Some are whiners and some just get on with life. When I compare my neighbors in the Midwest with my regrettable neighbors in LA, I think the former look pretty good.
Heh. There's different types of whining. When the Minnesotan says, "Oh, yah, sure, didja hear about Ole Nordqvist, went missin' last October, and they just now dug him out?" and the North Dakotan replies, "Well, ya know, oh for sad, and here, have some more lutefisk!"... they're whining, just in a different way from West Coasters.;)
LA is an interesting contrast. Insanely mild climate, beautiful scenery, all the Stuff you could possibly want -- and sitting on one of the world's biggest time bombs. Here on the northern plains at least you know when the weather's coming to get you.
I didn't think my post was entirely unrelated to the question. The point was to suggest that worrying about whether your weather is a personal message from God is rather a narcissist weenie kind of thing to do, and folks who routinely survive such weather are probably not the sort to be doing it. I hope I'm clearer now.
Okay, I see what you're saying, I just don't agree. I don't think worrying about whether God is targeting you with the weather is narcissistic at all; if you believe in God, and you believe that He taketh heed lest a sparrow fall and is therefore presumably quite aware of hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis and tornadoes... then it's reasonable to ask exactly what your faith in Him is going to get you, and if maybe there's something wrong the umpteenth time your home gets flattened. Or it would be reasonable, if there were anything reasonable about faith at all.
I was in Eastern Colorado, so I'm going to go with Midwest. People on the western slope sure didn't seem to consider us real Westerners, and having spent a smidge of traveling time in Nevada and Utah I kind of agree. On the other hand, calling coastal Californians "westerners" is plain ludicrous, so what can I say? It's probably just a state of mind.
Eastern Colorado is very Midwest, I agree; "West" pretty much begins at the Front Range, where I'm from. And yeah, West Coast is a completely different category. Of course, it's all arbitrary anyway, and a lot of it has to do as much with history as with geography. If "West" means cowboys and Indians, f'rinstance, then eastern Colorado and western Kansas are more West than the mountains are! Personally, I was always fascinated by the mining history in the Front Range, and wish that was played up more, rather than the cattle business that was never all that large a part of Colorado's history. It was the pickaxe and the shovel that built the state, not the saddle and the spur.
In the case of some event sufficient to sterilize the land surface of the Earth, which would presumably sterilize the ocean down to some significant depth as well, yeah, there are little critters that would survive. (Ditto for the reverse, although it's hard to imagine anything that would kill off life in the oceans without doing the same on land.) Life in all its diversity is amazingly tough. Now, certainly they share our basic makeup (they all use DNA to transmit genetic information, and with a few exceptions, translate DNA to proteins in the same way) but whether they would ever again evolve into anything like us is an open question; we simply don't know whether the sequence of events that led to complex life was common, or a series of very rare lucky accidents; there are good arguments both ways. AFAIK, all the true extremophiles are single-celled, so it would take a looong time.
A much, much smaller event could kill off, say, all endoskeletal surface life (i.e., mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians) and leave insects and assorted plants around on land, and presumably at least some fish in the sea. Again, they'd go on, but where would they go from there? Nobody knows for sure.
Anyway. I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that humans are going to create such an event. We could, if we really put our minds to it -- say, by devoting considerable effort to the production of lots and lots of really big nukes, and then positioning them carefully and setting them all off at once; or by building a ship to haul a good-sized asteroid into a collision course with Earth -- but we're probably not going to do so. In fact, the things we're doing unintentionally are very unlikely to lead to total human extinction, much less be on the scale of one of the Really Big Rocks that seem to have occasionally reset the clock of life. What we can do -- what we have, in fact, shown our capacity to do, in many places at many times, with much more primitive technology than we have now -- is kill off a lot of people, and make life really unpleasant for the survivors. This isn't "egotism," but simple reality, and amply borne out by the historical record.
Now we're at the point, technologically, where we can do to the whole planet what we used to be able to do only to one island, or even one continent, at a time. And like I said, extinction is very unlikely, but Big Unpleasantness is not. Here's a thought experiment: take a look at a topographical map of any heavily settled coastal area in the world (which is most of them) and figure out what a three-meter rise in sea level would do there. I'm not talking about giant tidal waves sweeping in and washing New York City out to sea. Just three meters. A little less than ten feet. Which is about what we'd get if half the Greenland ice sheet melted, leaving aside any effect at all from Antarctic melting... which in turn is something we may very well see in our lifetimes.
Three meters, vertical, of the world's coastline, gone. Yep. Lots of people living there. A whole lot of people. Also the port facilities which make it possible to feed a lot of people, both right on the coasts and a little farther inland.
You see what I'm getting at here? It wouldn't be The End Of The World, by any means. But it would be a pretty Godawful mess.
As for Australia: you know the Outback? That big stretch of mostly-desert that dominates the whole center of the country? Turns out that fairly recently, geologically speaking, it wasn't desert at all; it was forest and prairie, something like the American Midwest. Then people -- not, mind you, European settlers with guns and horse-drawn plows, but a tiny number of hunter-gatherers with no technology more advanced than chipping flint, the ancestors of today's Aborigines -- made their way there. And in the blink of an eye, pretty much, they slash-and-burned and overhunted their way across an entire continent, and turned the middle of it into a deser
I've lived in the American Midwest (Colorado and Illinois). They're a tough breed. You don't stay if you're scared of big storms, or worry that they're a personal message from God.
Oh, please. I've been a Midwesterner most of my life (Colorado, North Dakota, and now Minnesota; BTW, whether Colorado is "Midwest" or just "West" is debatable, but there's no question about the other two) and people here are no more a "tough breed" than anywhere else. Every place on Earth has its hardships, and overall the life here is a lot easier than it is in a lot of other places. It's also a matter of what you, personally, find most tolerable -- blizzards and tornadoes, I can deal with, but basic training in the Georgia summer damn near killed me. A lot of my family lives on the Gulf Coast, and I think they're nuts for staying, given the way things are going, but then, they think I'm nuts for voluntarily living somewhere that regularly sees temperatures of -40 F. Etc.
Anyway. The question of "toughness" is a straw man; the GP poster's question was about faith. Specifically, why is it that people turn to God for comfort after natural disasters, but seem unable to ask hard questions about why they're suffering from these "Acts of God" in the first place? And I agree; it's dumb. Millennia of apologists have come up with ever-more-baroque philosophical explanations for the Problem of Suffering (both natural and man-made) and not a single one of them has ever arrived at a convincing answer.
There is no ecosystem on Earth that's been in place for "millions and millions of years." And Australia is a uniquely bad example to try to prove your point; the place is an ecological mess. (Although to be fair, the Aborigines did just as much to mess it up as the English did.) For better or for worse, humans have always had a dramatic effect on every ecosystem they inhabit -- and these days, that means pretty much the whole planet.
I fear the politics too, but I have to admit to a nasty little surge of glee at the thought of the "pro-life" crowd getting their hypocrisy and self-righteousness thrown back in their faces in such a dramatic manner.
Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
You're just trying to redefine something that is much broader, your nonsense about being able to make derivatives is just as bad as the Free Software Foundation trying to redefine the meaning of Freedom.
Open source, in it's purest meaning, is something that allows you to see the source, nothing more. If I make a licence that doesn't allow anything, not even the compilation of binaries, but release the source under it, it's still open source.
Now you're the one trying to redefine things to suit your own purposes; pretty much everyone understands "open source" to mean that you can not only see the code, but also (perhaps subject to some restrictions) use the code in your own work. I mean, you can claim otherwise if you want, but you're igoring the way the phrase is actually used.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me like the difference is that you're allowed to use this new edition for (limited) production use as well. Now, I'm sure there are a ton of small shops currently using the free, "non-production" edition for production apps, but of course they're not really supposed to; this gives them a legal route. But I still think the deliberately crippled nature of the product makes it unattractive relative to the open source contenders, in terms that even PHB's will understand: "Boss, if we go with 'free' Oracle, we're going to run into that disk space limit pretty fast, and then we'll have to pay $$$."
[shrug] I don't see it as so mysterious, personally. Way I look at it is, awareness (of any sort) is a survival characteristic, and therefore likely to be favored in evolutionary terms; self-awareness will arise as a result in any creature with a big enough brain (enough extra processor cycles, so to speak, although I think that's a very inexact metaphor) that it doesn't have to spend all its time thinking about survival on a minute-by-minute basis. This is particularly true of social animals, of which both dogs and people are prime examples; for us, awareness of ourselves in relation to other members of the pack/tribe is in and of itself particularly valuable for survival. Basically I don't consider it any more mystical than anything else our brains do.
... this is crippleware. It's no threat to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or any other open source DBMS, because the developers of those databases are working to put as many features as possible into their free products, while Oracle is deliberately taking features out. This will probably be a good resource for people who want to learn Oracle on their own time, or organizations already using Oracle that want to test a new rollout without having to pay additional fees via Oracle's baroque pricing scheme, but that's about it.
In particular, I am thinking of free will, conciousness, and self-awareness (which are all probably words for the same underlying phenomenon). No one has the slightest idea how these characteristics arise in a human (and, puzzlingly, don't seem to in any other form of life).
...
Yawn. The idea that humans have those characteristics and other intelligent social animals don't is dogma, no more. My dog is more self-aware than a lot of people I've known
Okay, okay: "a bank that isn't known to have been robbed at all," etc.
It's like saying it's a serious blow to the bank's credibility that they caught the robbers.
Like it or not, most people will probably feel more secure putting their money in a bank that hasn't been robbed at all, than in one which has been robbed and then caught the robbers over a year later.
So what you're saying is, while the geek was off in his workshop making cool toys, the jock was getting it on with the hot chick? There's a shocker.
If you think your patent will get narfled by the US government what stops you from patenting it overseas first so the cats out of the bag?
Well, if you live in the US (especially if you work for the NSA) the answer is this: you won't be enjoying any of the profits from those overseas patents while you're sitting in Leavenworth.
If you've never been in a position handling classified information, it may be hard to see security holes.
... and gave away the entire computer industry in the process. The world could have been at least a decade ahead in computer technology, and the UK far richer, if not for this display of paranoia.
I have "been in a position handling classified information" -- some of it very classified indeed -- and here's why I think you're wrong:
1) Classification costs insane amounts of money; not just the classification process and the protections classified material requires, but in the case of technology, the potential profit to be realized by releasing the technology for civilian use. A good example of this is what the British government did to their nascent computer industry after WW2. At the end of the war, they had the best computer technology and computer scientists in the world, bar none. No one else, including the US, was even in the running. So, of course, in classic late-stage empire style, they classified everything, destroyed the actual machines, hounded people out of that line of work (and at least one of them to death)
2) Classifying everything is equivalent to classifying nothing. People who work with classified information which they know is bullshit tend to get contemptuous of the rules (I've seen classified documents just sitting around in public areas, no one watching them, with people milling by!) So it increases the chances of genuinely important information getting leaked.
3) We, the people of the United States, pay for that work with our tax dollars. I don't think anyone will argue that everything the government comes up with should be for sale at Radio Shack -- but the government must have an overriding interest in keeping potentially useful technology (and everything else, for that matter) secret from the people who paid for it, and whose interests it is supposed to serve. And no, "this might be useful to someone somewhere sometime who wants to do something bad, better safe than sorry" just doesn't cut it.
I suspect it's the sign of a culture clash as much as anything. Below the top level of bureaucracy, the NSA employs a lot of very smart people -- and not just smart, but creative and curious people as well, many of them mathematicians and computer scientists engaged in pure research. (One of my math professors, an absolutely brilliant guy and a great teacher, was hired away by them to work on Some Project for Some Amount Of Money That Was Unspecified, But Was Much More Than He Was Making Teaching College. I was happy for him, but sad that I wouldn't be able to take any more classes from him.) Even if they work for "No Such Agency," they're basically long-haired hippies who want to share their work with, like, the human race, man. And of course the Pentagon is ... well, it's the Pentagon. No hippies allowed. It's like the standard IT-guys-vs.-suits conflict that's played out in the corporate world all the time, but with much higher stakes.
/. terms: the Pentagon loves Microsoft, the NSA released its own Linux distro. You figure it out.
To boil it down to
Perhaps they could use a moderation system. That would be sure to help. ;)
If it offers insight into the day-to-day thinking of someone who makes decisions which can initimately affect the lives of millions of people, I'm all for it. I'm just deeply skeptical that that's what it is; it feels like another type of campaigning to me. Offering some visible means of feedback would go a long way toward alleviating that skepticism.
I will gladly give politicians a break for saying dumb things in their blogs if they later admit that they said dumb things, but that's a big if. I have the nasty feeling that their campaign advisers will tell them never to back down, because it will be seen as a sign of weakness. The sad thing is, those advisers are probably right. It seems like consistency to the point of insanity ("doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results") is valued by a large portion, perhaps a majority, of the electorate over reasoned views that may evolve over time in response to new information or a changing situation.
Yep. And in this context, without comments it's not much of a blog at all; it's just another vehicle for delivering political addresses.
Why would anyone spend the money on this book?
The information presented in it is freely available all over the web, often with more insightful examples, tutorials, etc. I just don't see the justification in spending x dollars on a book when a simple google search will yield a better result for free.
There are at least three answers:
1) The information you get from your "simple google search" may or may not be better than what you get from the book.
2) A book provides all the information in one place, with a (hopefully) consistent style, and if well-indexed, will point you to the right information even faster than the Godlike powers of mighty Google.
3) There are a whole hell of a lot of programmers who, believe it or not, find printed documentation easier to use, in many circumstances, than online. Look, I love online documentation, both local (man pages etc.) and on the web. But it's not the be-all and end-all. There are times when reading about something, on paper, or having the book right there to refer to when working, simply works better than trying to extract the same information from the screen.
Try sticking to the facts. They're at least relevant. Use of the presidential seal is covered by US Federal Law. Being cool, satirical, running amok shouting "freedom of speech", and knocking a politician is not going to cut it when there are specific applicable laws for the use the this and other seals. The Onion didn't adhere to the law. Period, end of discussion.
..."
..."
In short, you are the one who doesn't "get it".
One could argue, of course, that those laws are themselves unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech; I'd be interested to know if they've ever been challenged on that basis. In any case, it's immaterial here, because both the laws you cited (and, I suspect, any other applicable laws on the subject) contain key clauses limiting the prohibition:
"... for the purpose of conveying and in a manner reasonably calculated to convey the false impression that such communication is from a department, agency, bureau, or instrumentality of the United States or in any manner represents the United States
"... for the purpose of conveying, or in a manner reasonably calculated to convey, a false impression of sponsorship or approval by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof
No reasonable person could possibly think that The Onion is trying to misrepresent itself as being, or being sponsored or approved by, the United States government or the United states itself. Period. They didn't break the law, and by claiming they did so, the White House is putting itself clearly in the wrong.
Do you get it now?
The same way I did. After high-school (which is free), attend JC (which is next to free). I'm not sure how other states operate, but ANYONE who completes a 2 year degree at a JC in California MUST be accepted to a cal-state university. Cal-states run about $4000-$5000 (including books) per year. Live cheap, rent a room, live in the dorms, walk, take buses AND work while going to school.
... yup, taxes again. And all of these are classic liberal programs.
If one CANT work while going to school, guess what! Financial aid is easily available in the form of student loans and grants.
For "free," of course, read "paid for by other people's taxes." Buses? Subsidized by taxes. Financial aid? Backed by the government
Life without modern liberalism would look -- well, it would look a lot like the dog-eat-dog world of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a situation which reached its logical end point with the savage poverty of the 1930's. FDR and the New Deal created the modern economy, from which liberals and conservatives alike have benefitted for generations; the problem is that this approach to government has been so successful, and has been going on so long, that it's become invisible to most people. It's a victim of its own success. So it's easy for conservatives to claim pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and attack government spending when it's been there for them their whole lives.
We do get tornadoes on the outlying fringes, just not as often. Back when I was a medic, stationed at Minot AFB (North Dakota), I had the fascinating experience of sitting in an ambulance parked just off the flightline watching an F3 heading straight for the B-52's ... fortunately it veered off before it hit them, but I had visions of it picking them up and tossing them right into base housing. Which it would have done, if it had kept going the way it was. It's a rare occurrence, I agree; I think I've seen all of three tornadoes in my life, and maybe fifteen funnel clouds that didn't touch down. I understand that in Oklahoma it's a lot more common.
:) Thanks!
Some are whiners and some just get on with life. When I compare my neighbors in the Midwest with my regrettable neighbors in LA, I think the former look pretty good.
... they're whining, just in a different way from West Coasters. ;)
... then it's reasonable to ask exactly what your faith in Him is going to get you, and if maybe there's something wrong the umpteenth time your home gets flattened. Or it would be reasonable, if there were anything reasonable about faith at all.
Heh. There's different types of whining. When the Minnesotan says, "Oh, yah, sure, didja hear about Ole Nordqvist, went missin' last October, and they just now dug him out?" and the North Dakotan replies, "Well, ya know, oh for sad, and here, have some more lutefisk!"
LA is an interesting contrast. Insanely mild climate, beautiful scenery, all the Stuff you could possibly want -- and sitting on one of the world's biggest time bombs. Here on the northern plains at least you know when the weather's coming to get you.
I didn't think my post was entirely unrelated to the question. The point was to suggest that worrying about whether your weather is a personal message from God is rather a narcissist weenie kind of thing to do, and folks who routinely survive such weather are probably not the sort to be doing it. I hope I'm clearer now.
Okay, I see what you're saying, I just don't agree. I don't think worrying about whether God is targeting you with the weather is narcissistic at all; if you believe in God, and you believe that He taketh heed lest a sparrow fall and is therefore presumably quite aware of hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis and tornadoes
I was in Eastern Colorado, so I'm going to go with Midwest. People on the western slope sure didn't seem to consider us real Westerners, and having spent a smidge of traveling time in Nevada and Utah I kind of agree. On the other hand, calling coastal Californians "westerners" is plain ludicrous, so what can I say? It's probably just a state of mind.
Eastern Colorado is very Midwest, I agree; "West" pretty much begins at the Front Range, where I'm from. And yeah, West Coast is a completely different category. Of course, it's all arbitrary anyway, and a lot of it has to do as much with history as with geography. If "West" means cowboys and Indians, f'rinstance, then eastern Colorado and western Kansas are more West than the mountains are! Personally, I was always fascinated by the mining history in the Front Range, and wish that was played up more, rather than the cattle business that was never all that large a part of Colorado's history. It was the pickaxe and the shovel that built the state, not the saddle and the spur.
In the case of some event sufficient to sterilize the land surface of the Earth, which would presumably sterilize the ocean down to some significant depth as well, yeah, there are little critters that would survive. (Ditto for the reverse, although it's hard to imagine anything that would kill off life in the oceans without doing the same on land.) Life in all its diversity is amazingly tough. Now, certainly they share our basic makeup (they all use DNA to transmit genetic information, and with a few exceptions, translate DNA to proteins in the same way) but whether they would ever again evolve into anything like us is an open question; we simply don't know whether the sequence of events that led to complex life was common, or a series of very rare lucky accidents; there are good arguments both ways. AFAIK, all the true extremophiles are single-celled, so it would take a looong time.
... which in turn is something we may very well see in our lifetimes.
A much, much smaller event could kill off, say, all endoskeletal surface life (i.e., mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians) and leave insects and assorted plants around on land, and presumably at least some fish in the sea. Again, they'd go on, but where would they go from there? Nobody knows for sure.
Anyway. I don't think anyone is seriously proposing that humans are going to create such an event. We could, if we really put our minds to it -- say, by devoting considerable effort to the production of lots and lots of really big nukes, and then positioning them carefully and setting them all off at once; or by building a ship to haul a good-sized asteroid into a collision course with Earth -- but we're probably not going to do so. In fact, the things we're doing unintentionally are very unlikely to lead to total human extinction, much less be on the scale of one of the Really Big Rocks that seem to have occasionally reset the clock of life. What we can do -- what we have, in fact, shown our capacity to do, in many places at many times, with much more primitive technology than we have now -- is kill off a lot of people, and make life really unpleasant for the survivors. This isn't "egotism," but simple reality, and amply borne out by the historical record.
Now we're at the point, technologically, where we can do to the whole planet what we used to be able to do only to one island, or even one continent, at a time. And like I said, extinction is very unlikely, but Big Unpleasantness is not. Here's a thought experiment: take a look at a topographical map of any heavily settled coastal area in the world (which is most of them) and figure out what a three-meter rise in sea level would do there. I'm not talking about giant tidal waves sweeping in and washing New York City out to sea. Just three meters. A little less than ten feet. Which is about what we'd get if half the Greenland ice sheet melted, leaving aside any effect at all from Antarctic melting
Three meters, vertical, of the world's coastline, gone. Yep. Lots of people living there. A whole lot of people. Also the port facilities which make it possible to feed a lot of people, both right on the coasts and a little farther inland.
You see what I'm getting at here? It wouldn't be The End Of The World, by any means. But it would be a pretty Godawful mess.
As for Australia: you know the Outback? That big stretch of mostly-desert that dominates the whole center of the country? Turns out that fairly recently, geologically speaking, it wasn't desert at all; it was forest and prairie, something like the American Midwest. Then people -- not, mind you, European settlers with guns and horse-drawn plows, but a tiny number of hunter-gatherers with no technology more advanced than chipping flint, the ancestors of today's Aborigines -- made their way there. And in the blink of an eye, pretty much, they slash-and-burned and overhunted their way across an entire continent, and turned the middle of it into a deser
I've lived in the American Midwest (Colorado and Illinois). They're a tough breed. You don't stay if you're scared of big storms, or worry that they're a personal message from God.
Oh, please. I've been a Midwesterner most of my life (Colorado, North Dakota, and now Minnesota; BTW, whether Colorado is "Midwest" or just "West" is debatable, but there's no question about the other two) and people here are no more a "tough breed" than anywhere else. Every place on Earth has its hardships, and overall the life here is a lot easier than it is in a lot of other places. It's also a matter of what you, personally, find most tolerable -- blizzards and tornadoes, I can deal with, but basic training in the Georgia summer damn near killed me. A lot of my family lives on the Gulf Coast, and I think they're nuts for staying, given the way things are going, but then, they think I'm nuts for voluntarily living somewhere that regularly sees temperatures of -40 F. Etc.
Anyway. The question of "toughness" is a straw man; the GP poster's question was about faith. Specifically, why is it that people turn to God for comfort after natural disasters, but seem unable to ask hard questions about why they're suffering from these "Acts of God" in the first place? And I agree; it's dumb. Millennia of apologists have come up with ever-more-baroque philosophical explanations for the Problem of Suffering (both natural and man-made) and not a single one of them has ever arrived at a convincing answer.
There is no ecosystem on Earth that's been in place for "millions and millions of years." And Australia is a uniquely bad example to try to prove your point; the place is an ecological mess. (Although to be fair, the Aborigines did just as much to mess it up as the English did.) For better or for worse, humans have always had a dramatic effect on every ecosystem they inhabit -- and these days, that means pretty much the whole planet.
I fear the politics too, but I have to admit to a nasty little surge of glee at the thought of the "pro-life" crowd getting their hypocrisy and self-righteousness thrown back in their faces in such a dramatic manner.
Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
You're just trying to redefine something that is much broader, your nonsense about being able to make derivatives is just as bad as the Free Software Foundation trying to redefine the meaning of Freedom.
Open source, in it's purest meaning, is something that allows you to see the source, nothing more. If I make a licence that doesn't allow anything, not even the compilation of binaries, but release the source under it, it's still open source.
Now you're the one trying to redefine things to suit your own purposes; pretty much everyone understands "open source" to mean that you can not only see the code, but also (perhaps subject to some restrictions) use the code in your own work. I mean, you can claim otherwise if you want, but you're igoring the way the phrase is actually used.