Because if agnosticism is the only choice then so is not denying UFO observations, ghosts, ESP (clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, telempathy etc.), the Leviathan, Bigfoot, that Atlantis and Lemuria were actual continents that vanished, and so on and so forth...
Of course your logic fails because of these points you overlooked:
1) Religion defies logic. Think of the Genesis 1 counting of days before there was a difference between night and day...
2) It should be obvious that, in order for the teapot to orbit Venus there had to be a Venus and accompanying universe. Therefore it was necessary for the teapot to create the universe and Venus to orbit, and it follows: that is precisely what the teapot did!
Yes, I am waiting for all the "atheism is a faith" claimers to come up with a refutation to the common "is not collecting stamps a hobby?" counter argument/analogy, or to come up with various Greek terms for all the other non-provable things people can or can not believe in...
Or to show that there is any difference between an Atheist not believing in Jehova and a Christian not believing in Zeus.
An "agnostic" is apparently an atheist (someone who lives without a belief in gods) who thinks the label atheist offends religious people.
But as others have ponited out, the strong believers among religious people tend to be 99% atheist anyway, since there are probably a hundred gods they don't believe in...
Sort of. However, it depends on context: I used the free, ad-supported client for Anarchy Online, and really felt that 30,000 years into the future, people would be very unlikely to drink Sprite Zero or listen to Mötley Crüe - which were advertising in the game at the time...
(Using old form because the new, fancy, Ajaxy form does not understand UTF-8, which this does. Fix plz kthx bye.)
I am not sure if ISO is irrelevant when it comes to government purchasing.
Yeah that is why goverments exclusively rely on ISO MOTIS (X.400 family of specs) for mail exchange instead of that "hacked together by nerds" un-ISO protocols like SMTP... Sent over X.25 networks instead of over "Berkeley student project" protocols like TCP/IP...
What should we use? "Microsoft" is a trademark, and "MSFT" - their stock ticker - is too un-geeky. Everyone on the site understands "M$". What other criteria do you need?
If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you.
This promise is not an assurance [...] that a Covered Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.
Yeah using a mouse and keyboard over Bluetooth or USB. Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3 for instance lets the player choose standard WASD+mouselook if they want to.
Sort of; it could still have minimum requirements that didn't cover the whole. So a "compliant" application would have to be able to *read* a standard document but be allowed fallbacks
E.g. SQL-92; I saw an Oracle manual where it addressed standard compliance, and said they implemented SQL-92 *basic*, and heaved a lot of proprietary molasses on top.
Or CSS1: Where they helpfully operate with a "CSS Core" concept which lets an implementor, even if they have to *parse* e.g. "border-style" correctly, can get away by implementing this: "CSS1 core: UAs may interpret all of 'dotted', 'dashed', 'double', 'groove', 'ridge', 'inset' and 'outset' as 'solid'.". Not ISO, but still. In fact for internet technologies it could be argued both the W3C and IESG are more important than ISO...
ISO standards are otherwise frequently full of aspects "left for further study" (if a deadline suddenly appeared around the bend) or "left to the implementation" (if corporate infighting in the JTC reared its ugly head). So how helpful they are is up for diuscussion.
I find their logic to be from Bizarroworld, not Norway: So they appear to claim that by approving the fast-track acceptance of a standard larger than "10 years in the making" SQL, it sets it up for later improvement? Unlike, say, the alternative which is to leave it to a longer and more thorough process in a technical committe?
The real issue is that the "leaders" of the Norwegian standards organization have interests in promoting Microsoft technology, and have apparently swallowed the largely incorrect arguments from that camp. (For instance, OOXML does not automagically transform older Office documents, they are just "swept under the rug" inside the new file format, still as unparseable by non-Microsoft tools as before.)
The growth of early Christianity is a powerful piece of evidence that can't be explained away easily.
Ssh, you are feeding arguments to the Scientologists. And (probaly) after-the-fact manufactured texts are no more proof of your religion than L. Ron Hubbard's works are proof of the alien souls the Scientologists believe in.
But this is not collective licensing, it's yet another badly disguised attack on independent music (i.e. non-RIAA companies and independent artists):
1) User, learing he can download music freely, downloads music from struggling indie artist. 2) ISP pays "protection fee" to RIAA 3) RIAA pays some Big Four artist 4) Struggling indie artist quits for a paying job and we are left with the cocaine-snorting crap-shovelers.
There were also the case with the U.S. steel tariffs when European steel mills had the adacity to actually produce cheaper goods than the archaic rust belt could. So the lobbyists made Bush save a few thousand jobs in the steel producing industry - at the cost of many more thousands of jobs in the larger steel CONSUMING industry which suddenly had to pay more.
No, it reflects understanding: Convenience trumps principle. Realpolitik trumps rhetoric. "We want to spread democracy in the Middle East... NO! BAD PALESTINIANS! YOU ELECTED WRONG PARTY!"
The trade embargo against Cuba was because of lobbyists associated with the U.S. companies and Cuban elite that prospered under the dictator Batista's ruthless regime. It's the usual double standards in action.
For UN operations othercountries do just that: You will notice that most US foreign deployments of troops are NOT under UN command, what with the sovereignty shit and all that. U.S. soldiers in the field are generally in "pure" U.S. or NATO operations.
Don't like it? Resign. From the WTO, U.N., NATO, NAFTA, IOC and other international bodies you are member of. We could probably relocate the U.N. headquarters in some country that wants to be a part of the world as a whole and not act like a selfish, psychopatic criminal.
1) Their Java support always lags the rest of the world by one full version because they're arrogant and insist on maintaining their own fork, which is mind-numbingly stupid in my opinion. Except when you see the Mac OS X architecture picture that shows the Java VM reaching right down to the kernel. Sacrifice scripting support (1.6 "major selling point") for speed? Yes please!
Apple's major foulup in the Java department was to drop the Cocoa bindings.
Slashdot Mirror
Because if agnosticism is the only choice then so is not denying UFO observations, ghosts, ESP (clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, telempathy etc.), the Leviathan, Bigfoot, that Atlantis and Lemuria were actual continents that vanished, and so on and so forth...
Of course your logic fails because of these points you overlooked:
1) Religion defies logic. Think of the Genesis 1 counting of days before there was a difference between night and day...
2) It should be obvious that, in order for the teapot to orbit Venus there had to be a Venus and accompanying universe. Therefore it was necessary for the teapot to create the universe and Venus to orbit, and it follows: that is precisely what the teapot did!
3) Any competing theories to Teapot Creationism is heresy. What do we say about places where there are heretics? Kill them all and let the Teapot sort them out!
Yes, I am waiting for all the "atheism is a faith" claimers to come up with a refutation to the common "is not collecting stamps a hobby?" counter argument/analogy, or to come up with various Greek terms for all the other non-provable things people can or can not believe in...
Or to show that there is any difference between an Atheist not believing in Jehova and a Christian not believing in Zeus.
An "agnostic" is apparently an atheist (someone who lives without a belief in gods) who thinks the label atheist offends religious people.
But as others have ponited out, the strong believers among religious people tend to be 99% atheist anyway, since there are probably a hundred gods they don't believe in...
Sort of. However, it depends on context: I used the free, ad-supported client for Anarchy Online, and really felt that 30,000 years into the future, people would be very unlikely to drink Sprite Zero or listen to Mötley Crüe - which were advertising in the game at the time...
(Using old form because the new, fancy, Ajaxy form does not understand UTF-8, which this does. Fix plz kthx bye.)
I am not sure if ISO is irrelevant when it comes to government purchasing.
Yeah that is why goverments exclusively rely on ISO MOTIS (X.400 family of specs) for mail exchange instead of that "hacked together by nerds" un-ISO protocols like SMTP... Sent over X.25 networks instead of over "Berkeley student project" protocols like TCP/IP...
Good thing HTML 4.0 is an ISO standard otherwise they probably would not even have websites...
What should we use? "Microsoft" is a trademark, and "MSFT" - their stock ticker - is too un-geeky. Everyone on the site understands "M$". What other criteria do you need?
"No strings"? Here are a couple of "strings":
If you file, maintain or voluntarily participate in a patent infringement lawsuit against a Microsoft implementation of such Covered Specification, then this personal promise does not apply with respect to any Covered Implementation of the same Covered Specification made or used by you.
This promise is not an assurance [...] that a Covered Implementation would not infringe patents or other intellectual property rights of any third party.
From http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx
"Getting work done" apparently is your eupheism for "being forced to buy an expensive software package from Micro-planned-obsolescence-soft".
Do you get hard when you make these sad attempts at defending Microsoft's incompatible file formats?
Yeah using a mouse and keyboard over Bluetooth or USB. Unreal Tournament 3 for the PS3 for instance lets the player choose standard WASD+mouselook if they want to.
Sort of; it could still have minimum requirements that didn't cover the whole. So a "compliant" application would have to be able to *read* a standard document but be allowed fallbacks
E.g. SQL-92; I saw an Oracle manual where it addressed standard compliance, and said they implemented SQL-92 *basic*, and heaved a lot of proprietary molasses on top.
Or CSS1: Where they helpfully operate with a "CSS Core" concept which lets an implementor, even if they have to *parse* e.g. "border-style" correctly, can get away by implementing this: "CSS1 core: UAs may interpret all of 'dotted', 'dashed', 'double', 'groove', 'ridge', 'inset' and 'outset' as 'solid'.". Not ISO, but still. In fact for internet technologies it could be argued both the W3C and IESG are more important than ISO...
ISO standards are otherwise frequently full of aspects "left for further study" (if a deadline suddenly appeared around the bend) or "left to the implementation" (if corporate infighting in the JTC reared its ugly head). So how helpful they are is up for diuscussion.
I find their logic to be from Bizarroworld, not Norway: So they appear to claim that by approving the fast-track acceptance of a standard larger than "10 years in the making" SQL, it sets it up for later improvement? Unlike, say, the alternative which is to leave it to a longer and more thorough process in a technical committe?
The real issue is that the "leaders" of the Norwegian standards organization have interests in promoting Microsoft technology, and have apparently swallowed the largely incorrect arguments from that camp. (For instance, OOXML does not automagically transform older Office documents, they are just "swept under the rug" inside the new file format, still as unparseable by non-Microsoft tools as before.)
You mean 100% atehist: a Christian, for instance, is 99% atheist since there are over a hundred gods they doesn't believe in.
So all Hubbard had needed to do was to add, say, a George Washington reference in Dianetics and Scientology would be A-OK in your book? Convenient.
Ssh, you are feeding arguments to the Scientologists. And (probaly) after-the-fact manufactured texts are no more proof of your religion than L. Ron Hubbard's works are proof of the alien souls the Scientologists believe in.
Easier than lying with a camera.
Yeah. Heffalumps are a better example, a certain Disney movie notwithstanding.
Or what about Xomotishes? Noone has ever seen a Xomotish.
Wrong science: Prayer is a substitute for medicine.
Protection racket.
I mean the old Mafia has been doing it for years, it was just a question of time before the new MAAFIA also got on the act.
1) User, learing he can download music freely, downloads music from struggling indie artist.
2) ISP pays "protection fee" to RIAA
3) RIAA pays some Big Four artist
4) Struggling indie artist quits for a paying job and we are left with the cocaine-snorting crap-shovelers.
There were also the case with the U.S. steel tariffs when European steel mills had the adacity to actually produce cheaper goods than the archaic rust belt could. So the lobbyists made Bush save a few thousand jobs in the steel producing industry - at the cost of many more thousands of jobs in the larger steel CONSUMING industry which suddenly had to pay more.
No, it reflects understanding: Convenience trumps principle. Realpolitik trumps rhetoric. "We want to spread democracy in the Middle East... NO! BAD PALESTINIANS! YOU ELECTED WRONG PARTY!"
The trade embargo against Cuba was because of lobbyists associated with the U.S. companies and Cuban elite that prospered under the dictator Batista's ruthless regime. It's the usual double standards in action.
For UN operations othercountries do just that: You will notice that most US foreign deployments of troops are NOT under UN command, what with the sovereignty shit and all that. U.S. soldiers in the field are generally in "pure" U.S. or NATO operations.
Yes there is: http://www.un.org/law/
Don't like it? Resign. From the WTO, U.N., NATO, NAFTA, IOC and other international bodies you are member of. We could probably relocate the U.N. headquarters in some country that wants to be a part of the world as a whole and not act like a selfish, psychopatic criminal.
1) Their Java support always lags the rest of the world by one full version because they're arrogant and insist on maintaining their own fork, which is mind-numbingly stupid in my opinion.
Except when you see the Mac OS X architecture picture that shows the Java VM reaching right down to the kernel. Sacrifice scripting support (1.6 "major selling point") for speed? Yes please!
Apple's major foulup in the Java department was to drop the Cocoa bindings.