By claiming that your rules are divine will at ANY point in time means that they must be divine will at ALL points in time as divinity by its very nature is unchanging. So if you have a rule that says "God says priests can't marry" then changing it is not something you can ever do without putting the lie to all your other "god says" rules. This is actually quite untrue. You are claiming that any rule God would make must apply equally to all people in all circumstances. You apparently believe that if there is a God, He is incapable of giving a particular $ENTITY a circumstance-specific rule?
If any of you have children, perhaps you can relate to an example. You tell small children not to touch sharp knives. You might tell teenagers who are making dinner to be careful with small knives. You make no mention of being careful with knives to your spouse, because s/he knows that already. Does that make you somehow illogical or fallible or whatever to suggest one rule to your 2 year old, one rule to your 18 year old, and not mention any rules at all to your spouse? Of course not - you are giving circumstance-specific rules.
This is easy to understand - God's unchanging nature is irrelevant to the circumstance-specific rules He may choose to give to someone.
If you think I'm wrong, explain to me why God cannot give circumstance-specific rules if He so desires.
I don't think he was saying that most people don't kill simply because some deity says it's wrong, he was saying that some people don't. To continue his firewall example, the act of putting up a firewall does not imply that I believe most people will try to infiltrate my network, but it does imply that I believe some people will (or might) do so.
PS: If I can't ridicule the silliness of religious theology and the invariably laughable premise of 'belief' and existence, as outlined in my previous post, then I might as well go shoot myself right now. I'm sorry, but no educated adult can take that crap with a straight face. I'm not going to say you can't ridicule what you call the "silliness of religious theology", because that's your right. I am, however, going to object to your statement that "no educated adult can take that crap with a straight face" by providing several examples of high-profile members of my church (Yes, this will give it away) who were/are also notable people in the secular world:
Henry Eyring was a noted chemist who won many awards. He was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1966 for developing the Absolute Rate Theory of chemical reactions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Eyring
Making up (or "believing", or getting handed down from ancient texts) some absurd, senseless claims about the world being under effect from an unseen being who "created" a universe larger than human conception to play a sick version of SimCity with us to justify a predefined ending in which billions of people get sadistic torture in hell "for ever" because they "believe" otherwise, is just stupid. This piece of your comment, in particular, shows two things:
First, you're generalizing every Christian religion into one set of beliefs that does *not* best represent the beliefs of all Christian religions. (That, of course, would be impossible, since it is possible to pick a "Christian" belief and one "Christian" church that believes it and another that does not.) Generalizations are generally (zing!) not reality.
Second, you're showing your complete lack of understanding of what other people *do* believe.
I believe there is a God, and yet I do not believe in a "predefined ending in which billions of people get sadistic torture in hell 'for ever'". In fact, practically everything you said in that phrase I don't believe:
"a predefined ending" (God's foreknowledge does not imply predestination)
"sadistic torture in hell" (people will only suffer the consequences of their actions, somewhat like a drug addict in rehab must suffer through withdrawl)
"sadistic torture in hell 'for ever'" (any suffering that occurs as a consequence of one's actions in life will *not* last forever, just as a drug addict's withdrawl symptoms go away)
I've found, through experience, that most people's objections to my beliefs are founded on a complete lack of understanding of them.
I believe - and I am not alone in this - that religion and science are *not* incompatible. For example, many pro-science-anti-religion advocates assert that the theory of evolution disproves religion, yet they ignore the possibility that God could have directed evolution such that it produced us. I don't want to hear anyone object with "that presupposes the existence of God" because I know that - but it's irrelevant to my point.
Religion and science can be harmonized - claiming they cannot be is as absurd as believing that traveling faster than 30mph will rip the air out of your lungs (hello, 1800s!).
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying all religions or their beliefs can be harmonized with science. Obviously I believe mine can, but in the interest of not starting a flame war I won't name names.)
We should make a new moderation... "+2 (Funny *and* Insightful)". Sometimes it's hard to choose... but I don't have mod points, and if I did it'd erase my own comments, so... blah. I give it to you in spirit;)
I hope you realize that 90% of the episodes of Voyager didn't make (scientific) sense and/or could have seen them home if they had dealt with the situation another way (in particular the first episode)...
That comment is, of course, opinion, not fact. An opinion a large number of people disagree with. Don't assume that because you know how to use the word "technically" in a sentence that it somehow makes your opinion more valid than others. Incidentally, based on the number of grammatical errors in your post, you're the *last* person that should be making a comment like "he is technically a poor writer". At least his sentences are grammatically correct.
"Why? he's dead. Just because someone died doesn't mean they deserve some respect."
So your view is that noone gets respect unless they do something specifically for you to deserve it? And since you never met Robert Jordan he doesn't deserve your respect?
It takes a lot of effort to write lengthy novels. That by itself is deserving of respect, whether or not you like what he wrote, whether or not you like him personally, whether or not he's alive. He created a world that has inspired the imagination of (dare I say it) hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. (Have you ever done that? I didn't think so.)
"No, those people who bad the comments you mention are rude and insensitive"
So... I can badmouth a dead man without being rude, but if I defend the dead man the people are badmouthing, I'm rude?
Maybe telling you all that "you [who badmouth Robert Jordan] suck" is rude. I can live with that. But you cannot say with any degree of accuracy that the people I'm referring to are not rude.
"I would make those comments, but dying take no effort"
He fought a rare blood disease bravely, death did not take him easily. It would have been easier for him to just let the disease kill him, but he did not give up. That too earns him respect.
geekoid, just because you don't like his writing does not mean he's unworthy of respect. It just goes to show you don't know very much about him.
The ability to respect those you dislike and/or disagree with is a sign of maturity. Grow up, geekoid.
No, I understand *that* completely... my complaint was coryking saying I should stop caring about "good code" and care about my paycheck instead.
Some places have strict deadlines, and I understand that. If that's the only reason you don't write "good code", then that's great, at least your heart is in the right place, right? But if you just plain don't care, that's what I have a problem with. Even on tight schedules it's occasionally possible to make things nice, but you won't if you don't care... it's *that* mindset that makes things harder for the rest of us.
I'm not talking about cleaning code, I'm talking about writing it correctly in the first place. I happen to like writing clean, "good" code.
Are you seriously telling me to stop enjoying my job? You're telling me it's selfish to write good code and take enjoyment out of it? And here I thought my employer and future coworkers would benefit from maintaining clean, well-written code.
And you're wrong about my users too - the code I write directly affects the users' experience with our software. If I write it clean and "good" in the first place, the chance that there will be bugs in it is much smaller - in other words, the chance that something will inhibit the users' workflow is much smaller.
People like you, who don't think "good code" is important, are the people making it hard for the rest of us to maintain codebases after you leave. *That* is what is selfish - writing hard-to-maintain and hard-to-understand code just because it's easier in the immediate sense.
Optimizing queries *does* affect a user's experience, especially if they're waiting on the result. If I make a 15 second process take 10 seconds by taking an extra two hours to plan it out right, I just saved a lot more time than I spent (multiply number of users by number of process executions by five seconds, that's sure to be more than two hours). It was harder for me, but it makes life easier for the users by increasing their efficiency.
Don't tell me I'm being selfish by writing good code - you're simply wrong.
Mod me -1 Troll if you will, but you guys who complain about the books all suck. No, hear me out.
I won't say you're wrong (though personally I think you are) because it's largely a matter of opinion - but to claim that everyone else is wasting their time is just plain rude. If it's too long for you, move on - don't tell everyone else they're stupid for reading the series. I happen to love long books and long series with deep characters and plots - even if it's frustrating sometimes.
It reminds me of the thread about Robert Jordan's death. Those of you who made comments to the effect of "Good Riddance" are just plain horrible people. That's very insensitive. Have some respect, seriously. Those comments made me bitter towards the general slashdot populace for several weeks (and I'm not a bitter person). I guess some of that is still lingering.
Don't ruin the mood of those of us who are looking forward to the last book, or I'll send you spam email with a picture of a cat saying "IM IN UR HEAD HAXING UR PASSWORD";P
The trouble is when you actually care about the code you write (I'm one of those people that likes to do it right, not necessarily fast). It's hard to be in the mindset you describe when you care.
The job I'm at right now lets me write code the way I want - the right way, not necessarily the fast way - and even though I could make more working as a.NET programmer for my math professor, or as a database admin for some local company, or whatever, I'm going to stay at my current job because even though they don't let me fix some things that *should* be fixed ("noone has complained about that, so it's not a bug") and that irks me to no end, they let me write quality code for the things I can work on. There is something to be said for that kind of job.
When I clicked "Reply to this" I was in the mood to complain about people bashing Mormons just for the fun of it. (You've probably guessed, I'm Mormon.) For some reason I lost that desire while the reply page loaded so I'm just going to point out that the earth could support far more people than we have living on it if we were more concerned about growing food and building infrastructure and such than waging wars and eyeing the land of neighbouring countries (and I don't just mean the U.S., I mean the world as a whole).
Actually OOo is of no use to me at work..doc is the "official" format used, and some of the macros used in our spreadsheets don't work in OOo (making the spreadsheets useless). It also means I can't make changes to those documents. On top of that, most of the people in the office don't have OOo, so no use saving stuff in.odX. In any case it's mostly a non-issue, since I rarely have need to create my own documents there. At home, however, I use OOo and.odX formats almost exclusively.
However, I would maintain that comparing Excel's.xls filesize to OOo's.xls filesize *is* an apples-to-apples comparison, at least more than.xls vs.ods. Where exactly does OOo come up with 80KB of data to put in an empty.xls file? It can't be *that* difficult to figure out what data is and isn't necessary in an.xls file - all you need to do is save one with Excel and look at what's in it.
That's one thing OOo can improve drastically on.
Noone tell me about how people should use ODF instead. I know the arguments. But like it or not,.doc and.xls are here to stay. We may as well work with them as well as possible.
A blank Excel workbook with three sheets is ~17KB. But how big is it if you save it with OpenOffice 2.3? 95K (i just checked). Which one, exactly, is bloated?
Granted, OO doesn't have the luxury of knowing all the shortcuts that MS probably uses when saving their files..doc files have the same issue.
You know, some people don't appreciate it when they send you a 30KB.doc and you send them back a 100+KB.doc that had only minor changes (or even no changes!) from the original.
Don't get me wrong, I love OpenOffice, and I use it almost exclusively. But at work I just uninstalled it in favor of Office 2k3, and this was one of the reasons.
You mean everyone over the age of 8 who plays (or played) console or handheld games? You don't have to be a non-ordinary geek to know how to use a dpad-menu. D-pad menus are, in fact, intuitive - I have a four-directional button on the left of my controller (gee, what does that do?) so I would expect that pressing the 'down' button would move the current selection down, 'up' should move it up, and so forth.
My 10-year-old little brother whose DS I used had a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance (as well as a Gamecube) before he ever got his DS. I'm quite sure he is used to d-pad-driven menus, though I doubt he cares how the menus work.
Don't act like only geeks know how to use d-pad-based menus, that's entirely untrue.
I certainly don't think they should have dropped the whole touchscreen thing, I just think they should allow both the new way and the "old" way so everyone is happy. I don't believe it's a whole lot of extra effort to add in d-pad support on a menu.
I played some Mario game or other on my little brother's DS a few months ago, and I was absolutely confused by its insistence that you actually use the touch screen to work the menu. Intuitively, if a menu item is highlighted by default (and it was), using the d-pad should change which menu item is selected... but it didn't.
I absolutely hate the whole "use the [touch screen/motion sensor/whatever] just because it's there" fad. It drives me insane.
I haven't tried Metroid Prime III yet, so I can't say whether I like its control scheme or not, but the upcoming light saber duel thing has me... hesitant. I fail to see how the Wiimote could provide a good duel experience with light sabers. You'd have no feedback when you hit your opponent's light saber. Your arm would continue to swing while your on-screen avatar's saber is blocked by your opponent's, and more than likely, if you move your hands back to match what shows on-screen, it'll move your saber while you do that in a direction you don't intend.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course by "small knives" I meant "sharp knives".
If any of you have children, perhaps you can relate to an example. You tell small children not to touch sharp knives. You might tell teenagers who are making dinner to be careful with small knives. You make no mention of being careful with knives to your spouse, because s/he knows that already. Does that make you somehow illogical or fallible or whatever to suggest one rule to your 2 year old, one rule to your 18 year old, and not mention any rules at all to your spouse? Of course not - you are giving circumstance-specific rules.
This is easy to understand - God's unchanging nature is irrelevant to the circumstance-specific rules He may choose to give to someone.
If you think I'm wrong, explain to me why God cannot give circumstance-specific rules if He so desires.
I don't think he was saying that most people don't kill simply because some deity says it's wrong, he was saying that some people don't. To continue his firewall example, the act of putting up a firewall does not imply that I believe most people will try to infiltrate my network, but it does imply that I believe some people will (or might) do so.
So you're saying that none of these men qualify as educated, since they were religious?
I believe there is a God, and yet I do not believe in a "predefined ending in which billions of people get sadistic torture in hell 'for ever'". In fact, practically everything you said in that phrase I don't believe:
I've found, through experience, that most people's objections to my beliefs are founded on a complete lack of understanding of them.
I believe - and I am not alone in this - that religion and science are *not* incompatible. For example, many pro-science-anti-religion advocates assert that the theory of evolution disproves religion, yet they ignore the possibility that God could have directed evolution such that it produced us. I don't want to hear anyone object with "that presupposes the existence of God" because I know that - but it's irrelevant to my point.
Religion and science can be harmonized - claiming they cannot be is as absurd as believing that traveling faster than 30mph will rip the air out of your lungs (hello, 1800s!).
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying all religions or their beliefs can be harmonized with science. Obviously I believe mine can, but in the interest of not starting a flame war I won't name names.)
We should make a new moderation... "+2 (Funny *and* Insightful)". Sometimes it's hard to choose... but I don't have mod points, and if I did it'd erase my own comments, so... blah. I give it to you in spirit ;)
See that thing whooshing over your head? It's a Seinfeld reference.
I hope you realize that 90% of the episodes of Voyager didn't make (scientific) sense and/or could have seen them home if they had dealt with the situation another way (in particular the first episode)...
:D
That said, I loved that show
Where I live they use flashing *yellow* lights to mean "stop, then go if clear"... but usually they just use stop signs.
"He is technically a poor writer."
That comment is, of course, opinion, not fact. An opinion a large number of people disagree with. Don't assume that because you know how to use the word "technically" in a sentence that it somehow makes your opinion more valid than others. Incidentally, based on the number of grammatical errors in your post, you're the *last* person that should be making a comment like "he is technically a poor writer". At least his sentences are grammatically correct.
"Why? he's dead. Just because someone died doesn't mean they deserve some respect."
So your view is that noone gets respect unless they do something specifically for you to deserve it? And since you never met Robert Jordan he doesn't deserve your respect?
It takes a lot of effort to write lengthy novels. That by itself is deserving of respect, whether or not you like what he wrote, whether or not you like him personally, whether or not he's alive. He created a world that has inspired the imagination of (dare I say it) hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. (Have you ever done that? I didn't think so.)
"No, those people who bad the comments you mention are rude and insensitive"
So... I can badmouth a dead man without being rude, but if I defend the dead man the people are badmouthing, I'm rude?
Maybe telling you all that "you [who badmouth Robert Jordan] suck" is rude. I can live with that. But you cannot say with any degree of accuracy that the people I'm referring to are not rude.
"I would make those comments, but dying take no effort"
He fought a rare blood disease bravely, death did not take him easily. It would have been easier for him to just let the disease kill him, but he did not give up. That too earns him respect.
geekoid, just because you don't like his writing does not mean he's unworthy of respect. It just goes to show you don't know very much about him.
The ability to respect those you dislike and/or disagree with is a sign of maturity. Grow up, geekoid.
No, I understand *that* completely... my complaint was coryking saying I should stop caring about "good code" and care about my paycheck instead.
Some places have strict deadlines, and I understand that. If that's the only reason you don't write "good code", then that's great, at least your heart is in the right place, right? But if you just plain don't care, that's what I have a problem with. Even on tight schedules it's occasionally possible to make things nice, but you won't if you don't care... it's *that* mindset that makes things harder for the rest of us.
I'm not talking about cleaning code, I'm talking about writing it correctly in the first place. I happen to like writing clean, "good" code.
Are you seriously telling me to stop enjoying my job? You're telling me it's selfish to write good code and take enjoyment out of it? And here I thought my employer and future coworkers would benefit from maintaining clean, well-written code.
And you're wrong about my users too - the code I write directly affects the users' experience with our software. If I write it clean and "good" in the first place, the chance that there will be bugs in it is much smaller - in other words, the chance that something will inhibit the users' workflow is much smaller.
People like you, who don't think "good code" is important, are the people making it hard for the rest of us to maintain codebases after you leave. *That* is what is selfish - writing hard-to-maintain and hard-to-understand code just because it's easier in the immediate sense.
Optimizing queries *does* affect a user's experience, especially if they're waiting on the result. If I make a 15 second process take 10 seconds by taking an extra two hours to plan it out right, I just saved a lot more time than I spent (multiply number of users by number of process executions by five seconds, that's sure to be more than two hours). It was harder for me, but it makes life easier for the users by increasing their efficiency.
Don't tell me I'm being selfish by writing good code - you're simply wrong.
Mod me -1 Troll if you will, but you guys who complain about the books all suck. No, hear me out.
;P
I won't say you're wrong (though personally I think you are) because it's largely a matter of opinion - but to claim that everyone else is wasting their time is just plain rude. If it's too long for you, move on - don't tell everyone else they're stupid for reading the series. I happen to love long books and long series with deep characters and plots - even if it's frustrating sometimes.
It reminds me of the thread about Robert Jordan's death. Those of you who made comments to the effect of "Good Riddance" are just plain horrible people. That's very insensitive. Have some respect, seriously. Those comments made me bitter towards the general slashdot populace for several weeks (and I'm not a bitter person). I guess some of that is still lingering.
Don't ruin the mood of those of us who are looking forward to the last book, or I'll send you spam email with a picture of a cat saying "IM IN UR HEAD HAXING UR PASSWORD"
The trouble is when you actually care about the code you write (I'm one of those people that likes to do it right, not necessarily fast). It's hard to be in the mindset you describe when you care.
.NET programmer for my math professor, or as a database admin for some local company, or whatever, I'm going to stay at my current job because even though they don't let me fix some things that *should* be fixed ("noone has complained about that, so it's not a bug") and that irks me to no end, they let me write quality code for the things I can work on. There is something to be said for that kind of job.
The job I'm at right now lets me write code the way I want - the right way, not necessarily the fast way - and even though I could make more working as a
The closest I've seen is a guy (jokingly) saying that a case window adds one megahertz.
My grandma had neither excess money nor hired help. In fact they were somewhat poor.
Ok ok, she only had *six* kids. I guess that's why.
When I clicked "Reply to this" I was in the mood to complain about people bashing Mormons just for the fun of it. (You've probably guessed, I'm Mormon.) For some reason I lost that desire while the reply page loaded so I'm just going to point out that the earth could support far more people than we have living on it if we were more concerned about growing food and building infrastructure and such than waging wars and eyeing the land of neighbouring countries (and I don't just mean the U.S., I mean the world as a whole).
Isn't Data's neural network positronic?
I call first in line to meet Lor!
Actually OOo is of no use to me at work. .doc is the "official" format used, and some of the macros used in our spreadsheets don't work in OOo (making the spreadsheets useless). It also means I can't make changes to those documents. On top of that, most of the people in the office don't have OOo, so no use saving stuff in .odX. In any case it's mostly a non-issue, since I rarely have need to create my own documents there. At home, however, I use OOo and .odX formats almost exclusively.
.xls filesize to OOo's .xls filesize *is* an apples-to-apples comparison, at least more than .xls vs .ods. Where exactly does OOo come up with 80KB of data to put in an empty .xls file? It can't be *that* difficult to figure out what data is and isn't necessary in an .xls file - all you need to do is save one with Excel and look at what's in it.
.doc and .xls are here to stay. We may as well work with them as well as possible.
However, I would maintain that comparing Excel's
That's one thing OOo can improve drastically on.
Noone tell me about how people should use ODF instead. I know the arguments. But like it or not,
Funny. When I do that it pops up a dialog saying ODF is better, unless I explicitly tell it not to remind me.
A blank Excel workbook with three sheets is ~17KB. But how big is it if you save it with OpenOffice 2.3? 95K (i just checked). Which one, exactly, is bloated?
.doc files have the same issue.
.doc and you send them back a 100+KB .doc that had only minor changes (or even no changes!) from the original.
Granted, OO doesn't have the luxury of knowing all the shortcuts that MS probably uses when saving their files.
You know, some people don't appreciate it when they send you a 30KB
Don't get me wrong, I love OpenOffice, and I use it almost exclusively. But at work I just uninstalled it in favor of Office 2k3, and this was one of the reasons.
That's a good idea, it hadn't occurred to me to do something like that.
"ordinary non-geek mortals"?
You mean everyone over the age of 8 who plays (or played) console or handheld games? You don't have to be a non-ordinary geek to know how to use a dpad-menu. D-pad menus are, in fact, intuitive - I have a four-directional button on the left of my controller (gee, what does that do?) so I would expect that pressing the 'down' button would move the current selection down, 'up' should move it up, and so forth.
My 10-year-old little brother whose DS I used had a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance (as well as a Gamecube) before he ever got his DS. I'm quite sure he is used to d-pad-driven menus, though I doubt he cares how the menus work.
Don't act like only geeks know how to use d-pad-based menus, that's entirely untrue.
I certainly don't think they should have dropped the whole touchscreen thing, I just think they should allow both the new way and the "old" way so everyone is happy. I don't believe it's a whole lot of extra effort to add in d-pad support on a menu.
I played some Mario game or other on my little brother's DS a few months ago, and I was absolutely confused by its insistence that you actually use the touch screen to work the menu. Intuitively, if a menu item is highlighted by default (and it was), using the d-pad should change which menu item is selected... but it didn't.
I absolutely hate the whole "use the [touch screen/motion sensor/whatever] just because it's there" fad. It drives me insane.
I haven't tried Metroid Prime III yet, so I can't say whether I like its control scheme or not, but the upcoming light saber duel thing has me... hesitant. I fail to see how the Wiimote could provide a good duel experience with light sabers. You'd have no feedback when you hit your opponent's light saber. Your arm would continue to swing while your on-screen avatar's saber is blocked by your opponent's, and more than likely, if you move your hands back to match what shows on-screen, it'll move your saber while you do that in a direction you don't intend.