And "Incorruptible" for the counter-perspective and analysis of the true costs of redemption. Waid was brilliant in mapping the 12 steps to the theme of super-hero redemption.
Ye Gawds, a thoughtful, courteous, and polite response that ends a debate on/. ! Thank you for the response, and the clarification. Your point is well made, sir. Now you'd better run for the hills, because I believe this thread marks the coming of the End of the World, where the Great Old Ones return to eat our brains.
Have you done the independent analysis of their data? have you read through their abstract, perused the data, and then done a test for yourself? Do you possess the necessary experience and qualifications to be able not only to do so, but to be listened to authoritatively regarding your results? No? Then you, sir, are merely spouting rhetoric in the guise of reason and making unconnected assertions about the quality of the article according to your own bias.
I agree with you. Morons are morons, shadowfaxcrx. But you're talking about someone's loved ones who aren't as smart as we are (possibly including yours). Hearing that your father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, etc are stupid morons who deserve the fates they get is really, really harsh. If you're willing to look your family member/friend in the face and call them a stupid moron for downloading what they thought was a reasonable app (let's just concede that anyone who downloads tentacle porn apps or screaming Japanese girls does get what they deserve - it's not a zero sum game here), then yes, you are perfectly entitled to tell the whole world that approximately half of its population is on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Just be ready to pay the emotional price of hurting someone's feelings, pride, or undermining their sense of self-confidence. It's a bitter price to pay, because I've done it. And I've regretted it ever since. Sometimes the illusion of competence is the only comfort one has.
As much as I'd love to throw down with you on this, I am reminded about the passage of casting stumbling stones into someone else's path. I don't want to do that to you, because no good would come of it. So let's just conclude this. I respect your belief, and your strength of conviction in coming onto/. with your beliefs. You believe in biblical inerrancy, while I do not (I believe in biblical ineffability, which is a far stranger beast). I wish you well.
When I said I'm leery of doing that with the New Testament, I meant to type Old Testament. New Testament has four concurrent stories of the Gospel that can be read in parallel. Old Testament has stories and accounts that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years apart.
Hmm... reading Old Testament books in parallel with each other. I know it's done with the New Testament, particularly the Gospel. That being said, I'm leery of doing that with New Testament, particularly since we're dealing with enormous timeframe reference issues, translations, etc. So let me ask you this: What ecclesiastical authority is behind this interpretation of the two Genesis stories, and linking Jeremiah and Psalms to account for the gap? Also, how do you explain a prior poster's assertion that Lucifer is a mistranslation of a fallen Babylonian/Phoenician King (I've heard the King of Tyre references)? I'd be interested to know what theological authority and research has been done to assert this, or if this is a reading based on an inerrancy philosophy.
Citation please. Where exactly in Genesis does it mention that the Earth got trashed by Lucifer during the Rebellion, and that it had to be rebuilt. That is the most... well... perhaps not the most outlandish explanation for the two Genesis stories I've heard.
did you consider that perhaps what you call an "anti-intellectual" bias is actually a hallmark of American culture? America has always had a love/hate relationship with its intellectuals, because here the intellectuals are the elites, and most settlers came here to get away from "elites". It wasn't the elites who first settled America, it was the common men and women who wanted to get a little piece of paradise for themselves, without any of the elaborate social constrictions/prohibitions of the Old World.
I liked your blog post, and I don't believe you've posted anything new in it. America has always short-changed its teachers and it's elite class because we've always been suspicious of education, educated people, and the elite in general. It's in our cultural make-up to be - chances were good that in the 1700s and prior, any intellectual you met was an aristocrat and/or wealthy. To me, this anti-college anti-intellectual geek movement is nothing new. From extensive personal experience, I can tell you that I've had plenty of geek friends revolt against "knowledge" because knowledge stood in the way of their particular obsession. If it wasn't directly related to what they found interesting, then there was no use for it (a mindset too many comp sci/engineers have regarding the liberal arts). I also believe that there will always be intellectuals in our society. There's simply too many geeks and trivia purists out there to ever allow intellectuals to fade away as a species of man.
thank you again for that blog post, I quite enjoyed it
Isn't it interesting that the Earth is situated on the inner edge of the arm of our galaxy? Close enough to stay within the Galaxy's gravity well and prevent being thrown out into the void, but not so close that we're going to get sucked into the core. We're nowhere near any black holes, or extreme gravitational tides that would tear our solar system apart. We're well over 600 light years away from any giant or supergiant stars so we're outside the range of supernovae. We're not near the galactic core either, so we're not getting burned to a crisp by extra-solar radiation.
Then we've got Jupiter conveniently positioned in the mid-to-outer reaches of our solar system to sweep away comets and asteroids, not to mention Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Our sun is a medium orange star and probably one of the most stable configurations out there as far as stars go. We're at a convenient range away from the sun, plus we're on a planet that has an active core and thus can generate a magnetic field to protect us from the solar wind. And then, there's the Moon - a abnormally-sized piece of extraordinarily round rock that happens to be in a stable orbit around our planet.
Given all the possibilities and probabilities out there, I feel there's a legitimate case for saying we fail the Copernicus test, and that there's more than just coincidence to our existence here.
I can give you a tour of the Quantum building and you can look at our lab with our nifty-keen tape and disk libraries! Even more importantly, afterwards I can take you to awesome pubs here on the Eastside!!!
Very well put. I find myself having to revise my notion of rights into 'positive' and 'negative' rights because you've defined the idea very well. I also find that the reason I'm attacking your position has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with emotion masquerading as logic (belief that emotion translates into logic and thus into a 'right', if you will).
I find that I'm attacking your viewpoint mistakenly. Instead of targeting your logical premise, which is sound, I'm targeting your arrogance and your condescension towards others. You have little to no compassion for those who see the world differently from you. You label them "marxists", idiots, and other perjoratives to indicate that they are not only 'wrong', they are subhuman and worthy only of contempt. THAT is the problem with the ethos you're espouting. If you take someone who believe in Might Makes Right, as you do, and combine that with your attitude, then you're setting up a system in where the strong devour the weak irregardless of context or circumstance. Thus, a logical inhuman system of rights and privileges based solely on who has the power to dictate terms, and who does not. It's logical, its inhuman, and the lack of compassion or understanding towards those who disagree means that if you ever got your way and your philosophy dominated, you'd eventually wipe the earth clean of all those who are different from you. Or be destroyed yourself because someone stronger than you saw you as an impediment and eliminated you due to their own imperative.
Either way, your logic's sound and I concede that. I'd check your attitude really fast though, if I were you.
so if I understand you correctly, then rights are merely enforceable agreements 'not' to do something entered into by two or more distinct parties, and only occur when both parties have enough power to be able to state and hold their position (but one party is distinctly less powerful than the other and therefore must rely on the mercy, largess, or discinclination of the more powerful party to expend resources towards extermination and domination). Am I getting the general gist?
That's a very materialistic/empiricist view to take towards a definition of rights. I'd interpret your position as "Might makes right" essentially. So let me ask you this: how far are you willing to take that worldview? Are you willing to espouse it up until you end up on the wrong side of a gun?
Or maybe a gun is a little extreme. How about this: how strongly will you cling to your conviction that rights only matter in terms of the individual vs the collective when debating governmental permissions, when you are in the minority and you are being decided against?
I think you're just spouting this as a belief because your belief system has never been seriously tested
I like your point that computer illiteracy should be no more acceptable than normal illiteracy. It made me think: why in this day and age do we still have computer illiterate people, let alone illiterate people in our culture?
The previous poster had a good point too in that he (and I) have witnessed anecdotal evidence of people who cannot handle Windows. I too have seen people dump everything straight to their desktop instead of employing folder classifications, never ever shut their computer off and then complain about how slow it's working (if it's not the malware they've racked up, it's that they never allow their computer to shut down and clear the RAM), etc. I've seen these same emotional attitudes in people with functional illiteracy: they know just enough to get by and that's about it. They don't read unless they have to, nor do they take any steps to fix the issue.
So, what if computer illiteracy isn't so much a knowledge issue as an emotional/psychological issue? TWhat if you can't reason someone into becoming literate? What if they refuse because they either don't want to learn, or don't have the capacity/desire to learn? For these people (and there's a few in my finance department), I'd say ChromeOS with its visual apps and "push-the-button" design is perfect. They're never going to improve their literacy unless a gun's aimed at them, so why try to fight it?
Why do you care? Are you really THAT important to the world that some shadowy group of villains are going to expend the time and effort to track your every move? Your greatest defense against intrusion is anonymity within the crowd, and that there's no reason for anyone to pay attention to you.
Exactly how much time do you think the bad guys are going to spend on you? To take the time to craft an ultra-convincing phishing attack, along with the subsequent necessary complex plotting to dissuade your fears, and get you to click seems like an inefficient, and ineffective expenditure of time to me. Maybe it's just me, but the ROI would have to be incredible to justify that kind of attention to detail.
I believe that the majority of these email addresses are going to be passed off as quickly as possible to some sucker on the black market, who'll send out a mass spam of phishing attacks that won't fool a sophisticated user, but will get Ma or Pa Kettle (who has dementia, alzheimers, naivety, or is just plain stupid). It's more cost effective to target stupid people with cheap spam than it is to try and lure smart people in
Slashdot Mirror
And "Incorruptible" for the counter-perspective and analysis of the true costs of redemption. Waid was brilliant in mapping the 12 steps to the theme of super-hero redemption.
Ye Gawds, a thoughtful, courteous, and polite response that ends a debate on /. ! Thank you for the response, and the clarification. Your point is well made, sir. Now you'd better run for the hills, because I believe this thread marks the coming of the End of the World, where the Great Old Ones return to eat our brains.
Damn it all... you're RIGHT. I shall go crawl back under my rock now and cry.
Have you done the independent analysis of their data? have you read through their abstract, perused the data, and then done a test for yourself? Do you possess the necessary experience and qualifications to be able not only to do so, but to be listened to authoritatively regarding your results? No? Then you, sir, are merely spouting rhetoric in the guise of reason and making unconnected assertions about the quality of the article according to your own bias.
I agree with you. Morons are morons, shadowfaxcrx. But you're talking about someone's loved ones who aren't as smart as we are (possibly including yours). Hearing that your father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, etc are stupid morons who deserve the fates they get is really, really harsh. If you're willing to look your family member/friend in the face and call them a stupid moron for downloading what they thought was a reasonable app (let's just concede that anyone who downloads tentacle porn apps or screaming Japanese girls does get what they deserve - it's not a zero sum game here), then yes, you are perfectly entitled to tell the whole world that approximately half of its population is on the wrong side of the bell curve.
Just be ready to pay the emotional price of hurting someone's feelings, pride, or undermining their sense of self-confidence. It's a bitter price to pay, because I've done it. And I've regretted it ever since. Sometimes the illusion of competence is the only comfort one has.
And you would be smarter than those decorated, experienced, educated doctors who support this theory HOW????
As much as I'd love to throw down with you on this, I am reminded about the passage of casting stumbling stones into someone else's path. I don't want to do that to you, because no good would come of it. So let's just conclude this. I respect your belief, and your strength of conviction in coming onto /. with your beliefs. You believe in biblical inerrancy, while I do not (I believe in biblical ineffability, which is a far stranger beast). I wish you well.
Stop trying to Nazi the Nazi reference you Godwin Nazi! Nazi that, you Nazi bitch!
When I said I'm leery of doing that with the New Testament, I meant to type Old Testament. New Testament has four concurrent stories of the Gospel that can be read in parallel. Old Testament has stories and accounts that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years apart.
Hmm... reading Old Testament books in parallel with each other. I know it's done with the New Testament, particularly the Gospel. That being said, I'm leery of doing that with New Testament, particularly since we're dealing with enormous timeframe reference issues, translations, etc. So let me ask you this: What ecclesiastical authority is behind this interpretation of the two Genesis stories, and linking Jeremiah and Psalms to account for the gap? Also, how do you explain a prior poster's assertion that Lucifer is a mistranslation of a fallen Babylonian/Phoenician King (I've heard the King of Tyre references)? I'd be interested to know what theological authority and research has been done to assert this, or if this is a reading based on an inerrancy philosophy.
Citation please. Where exactly in Genesis does it mention that the Earth got trashed by Lucifer during the Rebellion, and that it had to be rebuilt. That is the most... well... perhaps not the most outlandish explanation for the two Genesis stories I've heard.
Outcasts, miscreants, and religious nuts constitute the vast bulk of the ranks of the "Common Man" in any age. We are uniform only in our deviancy.
Mr. Sanger,
did you consider that perhaps what you call an "anti-intellectual" bias is actually a hallmark of American culture? America has always had a love/hate relationship with its intellectuals, because here the intellectuals are the elites, and most settlers came here to get away from "elites". It wasn't the elites who first settled America, it was the common men and women who wanted to get a little piece of paradise for themselves, without any of the elaborate social constrictions/prohibitions of the Old World.
I liked your blog post, and I don't believe you've posted anything new in it. America has always short-changed its teachers and it's elite class because we've always been suspicious of education, educated people, and the elite in general. It's in our cultural make-up to be - chances were good that in the 1700s and prior, any intellectual you met was an aristocrat and/or wealthy. To me, this anti-college anti-intellectual geek movement is nothing new. From extensive personal experience, I can tell you that I've had plenty of geek friends revolt against "knowledge" because knowledge stood in the way of their particular obsession. If it wasn't directly related to what they found interesting, then there was no use for it (a mindset too many comp sci/engineers have regarding the liberal arts). I also believe that there will always be intellectuals in our society. There's simply too many geeks and trivia purists out there to ever allow intellectuals to fade away as a species of man.
thank you again for that blog post, I quite enjoyed it
I stand corrected, sir. Thank you!
Isn't it interesting that the Earth is situated on the inner edge of the arm of our galaxy? Close enough to stay within the Galaxy's gravity well and prevent being thrown out into the void, but not so close that we're going to get sucked into the core. We're nowhere near any black holes, or extreme gravitational tides that would tear our solar system apart. We're well over 600 light years away from any giant or supergiant stars so we're outside the range of supernovae. We're not near the galactic core either, so we're not getting burned to a crisp by extra-solar radiation.
Then we've got Jupiter conveniently positioned in the mid-to-outer reaches of our solar system to sweep away comets and asteroids, not to mention Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Our sun is a medium orange star and probably one of the most stable configurations out there as far as stars go. We're at a convenient range away from the sun, plus we're on a planet that has an active core and thus can generate a magnetic field to protect us from the solar wind. And then, there's the Moon - a abnormally-sized piece of extraordinarily round rock that happens to be in a stable orbit around our planet.
Given all the possibilities and probabilities out there, I feel there's a legitimate case for saying we fail the Copernicus test, and that there's more than just coincidence to our existence here.
I can give you a tour of the Quantum building and you can look at our lab with our nifty-keen tape and disk libraries! Even more importantly, afterwards I can take you to awesome pubs here on the Eastside!!!
Very well put. I find myself having to revise my notion of rights into 'positive' and 'negative' rights because you've defined the idea very well. I also find that the reason I'm attacking your position has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with emotion masquerading as logic (belief that emotion translates into logic and thus into a 'right', if you will).
I find that I'm attacking your viewpoint mistakenly. Instead of targeting your logical premise, which is sound, I'm targeting your arrogance and your condescension towards others. You have little to no compassion for those who see the world differently from you. You label them "marxists", idiots, and other perjoratives to indicate that they are not only 'wrong', they are subhuman and worthy only of contempt. THAT is the problem with the ethos you're espouting. If you take someone who believe in Might Makes Right, as you do, and combine that with your attitude, then you're setting up a system in where the strong devour the weak irregardless of context or circumstance. Thus, a logical inhuman system of rights and privileges based solely on who has the power to dictate terms, and who does not. It's logical, its inhuman, and the lack of compassion or understanding towards those who disagree means that if you ever got your way and your philosophy dominated, you'd eventually wipe the earth clean of all those who are different from you. Or be destroyed yourself because someone stronger than you saw you as an impediment and eliminated you due to their own imperative.
Either way, your logic's sound and I concede that. I'd check your attitude really fast though, if I were you.
so if I understand you correctly, then rights are merely enforceable agreements 'not' to do something entered into by two or more distinct parties, and only occur when both parties have enough power to be able to state and hold their position (but one party is distinctly less powerful than the other and therefore must rely on the mercy, largess, or discinclination of the more powerful party to expend resources towards extermination and domination). Am I getting the general gist?
That's a very materialistic/empiricist view to take towards a definition of rights. I'd interpret your position as "Might makes right" essentially. So let me ask you this: how far are you willing to take that worldview? Are you willing to espouse it up until you end up on the wrong side of a gun?
Or maybe a gun is a little extreme. How about this: how strongly will you cling to your conviction that rights only matter in terms of the individual vs the collective when debating governmental permissions, when you are in the minority and you are being decided against?
I think you're just spouting this as a belief because your belief system has never been seriously tested
Hmmm... wonder what websites he was checking on company time then?
And once again, I betray my lack of knowledge. It's back to the 'tard school for me.
I like your point that computer illiteracy should be no more acceptable than normal illiteracy. It made me think: why in this day and age do we still have computer illiterate people, let alone illiterate people in our culture?
The previous poster had a good point too in that he (and I) have witnessed anecdotal evidence of people who cannot handle Windows. I too have seen people dump everything straight to their desktop instead of employing folder classifications, never ever shut their computer off and then complain about how slow it's working (if it's not the malware they've racked up, it's that they never allow their computer to shut down and clear the RAM), etc. I've seen these same emotional attitudes in people with functional illiteracy: they know just enough to get by and that's about it. They don't read unless they have to, nor do they take any steps to fix the issue.
So, what if computer illiteracy isn't so much a knowledge issue as an emotional/psychological issue? TWhat if you can't reason someone into becoming literate? What if they refuse because they either don't want to learn, or don't have the capacity/desire to learn? For these people (and there's a few in my finance department), I'd say ChromeOS with its visual apps and "push-the-button" design is perfect. They're never going to improve their literacy unless a gun's aimed at them, so why try to fight it?
Just a thought for pondering
Why do you care? Are you really THAT important to the world that some shadowy group of villains are going to expend the time and effort to track your every move? Your greatest defense against intrusion is anonymity within the crowd, and that there's no reason for anyone to pay attention to you.
Could gravity then be a function of resonance rather than mass?
Exactly how much time do you think the bad guys are going to spend on you? To take the time to craft an ultra-convincing phishing attack, along with the subsequent necessary complex plotting to dissuade your fears, and get you to click seems like an inefficient, and ineffective expenditure of time to me. Maybe it's just me, but the ROI would have to be incredible to justify that kind of attention to detail.
I believe that the majority of these email addresses are going to be passed off as quickly as possible to some sucker on the black market, who'll send out a mass spam of phishing attacks that won't fool a sophisticated user, but will get Ma or Pa Kettle (who has dementia, alzheimers, naivety, or is just plain stupid). It's more cost effective to target stupid people with cheap spam than it is to try and lure smart people in