I'm going to assume you're a believer. I'm not. I'm also not the AC from up above, but I agree with a fair bit of what he said.
Suppose a god did "eliminate hunger". So, now the six billion people are nice and full and don't have to worry about starving to death. With all this food but without any restraint, there would be an explosion of births as there is suddenly nutrition to support 12 billion, 18 billion, or more.
(snip)
The same reasoning applies to disease. Disease does a generally good job at population control, this was set in place presumably by god to moderate the effects of a species population explosion.
So what you're telling me here, is that your all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god couldn't come up with any better way to keep the population down than through starvation and disease? Mass suffering and death is not a kind way to prevent overpopulation; it's the cruellest possible way - with omnipotence you could just adjust the fertility rate so that excess children wouldn't be born, not bring thousands of children into the world for the few short years they can eke out before they die in agony from hunger or illness.
Do you have any idea how painful it is to die that way? The slightest conception of what a horrific death people go through when they can't get enough food to live? Even if you don't, the god you believe in would have to know in intimate detail how thousands, millions, of "his children" are suffering and dying, and apparently he decrees that this is good? Your god, if he existed, would be a monster.
According to you, if god made us and we are special, then he is evil. But you don't believe in god. So what's the big deal about disease.
He said very clearly at the beginning that despite not believing in god, his argument was that even if god did exist, he would not be a fit object of worship. That the god described is evil, and hence should be reviled, even if he could be proved to exist. To an atheist, disease poses no problem; it's just something that happens and there's no special reason why it shouldn't. But for a believer... well, you have to wonder why your loving god would inflict ebola on the world.
You are correct though, that the animal kingdom is also full of suffering and death that an omni-max creator could have prevented. You say "kept in check by disease" so airily, as if most diseases aren't a horrible way to die. There is nothing in nature that suggests it was created by a kind or benevolent creator; every day animals (human and non-human) die by the million in terrible pain, debilitated by hunger and disease or torn open by predators. Either god does not exist (and all this suffering is just the way things are for entirely non-supernatural reasons) or your god exists but doesn't care, or created a world full of suffering for his own amusement.
Instead of being pissed of at whatever god, why don't you accept responsibility that we do all this to ourselves?
Once again, the argument was not about whether god exists, but what kind of being he would be if he did exist. An omnipotent being can intercede in any way imaginable with no effort whatsoever, if he existed then he would have ultimate power to bring about or prevent any event, so anything that happens must happen because he so chooses. In short, the god you believe in would have to be a sadist (if he existed).
The horrors of hunger and disease are no challenge to the atheist worldview, because they can come about by natural causes, but if you believe in god then the burden is on you to explain why he allows such horrible things to go on if he loves us all so much.
For all that you blame the christian god for every evil, did you never stop and think that perhaps you are not the most intelligent being in the universe.
Who's blaming anyone? I would "blame" the natural world for the consequences that an a
This means you have to have a way to override the protection system, which means an equal or better protection system to do that, so why not just use that anyway...
Maybe the "better" (more/equally secure) system is less convenient.
To postulate an over-extreme example, have the phone locked to your gait, and if your gait changes because you've lost a leg you have to take it... somewhere, the phone store I guess (note this is a hypothetical, not a suggestion) with proof of ID to have it reset. Although then the weak link would be the reset method.
Point stands though, even if I can't come up with a decent example; some methods of identifying yourself are more secure, but too inconvenient to be used for anything but infrequent exceptional cases.
So there is still a lot of work to do before Ubuntu is common place unless the hardware makers make their products so that they are compatible with it.
To go mainstream, Linux needs support from hardware/software producers. For it to be worth the time of the hardware/software producers to support Linux, it needs to be more mainstream.
Pretty standard deadlock, although the amount of stuff that is supported (and often without even installing anything extra) is only growing... comparing them purely on what they support out-of-the-box, Linux is a mile ahead. Shame that doesn't count for much when everything comes bundled with a CD of Windows drivers.
Says the guy whose sig claims he'll ask Google before "stupid citations", and can't spell the word divide. I'm torn though; does it support your point or undermine it, if you exhibit exactly the stupidity you're claiming is commonplace.
Sounds like you consider yourself separate from the 'internet generation' though, so I'm leaning towards undermine; that you can be counted as a demonstration that a little general ignorance is in every generation, regardless of how easy it is to come by information. Further, it seems that this never held past generations back when it came to inventing steam engines and space rockets.
IIRC, you can't be prevented from using your own name, even if someone else has it trademarked.
If your surname was McDonald for example, you could open a restaurant and call it McDonalds without the more well known chain having a claim against you, so long as you didn't copy any of their other trademarks (like the "golden arches" stylised M)
Did you catch this quote from TFA? "If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep," Kirstin Talvala, one of the students working on Shelley, told the AFP. Wow, no you can't. For one thing, you don't have to deal with other cars when you're making an exhibition run up Pikes. That was a stunningly stupid thing to say, Kirstin.
Well, it's a necessary first step. A student working on a cool project like that, you can forgive a little optimism. Once you've got the thing driving along an empty road on it's own, it's not so very hard to imagine it negotiating traffic too.
Where is that? It's a sensible policy... the most efficient way of using two lanes is to use both lanes equally, and merge alternately at the point where one lane ends, rather than mostly all queueing up in one lane and having people merge sporadically all up and down the length of it.
But of course if some people are already queuing, it does seem a tad unfair to blast past them in the other lane, then have to force your way in at the end of it. It only really works if everyone's using both lanes.
Given the frequency with which it's used by non-pedophiles, that would be a pretty crappy means of communication.
If the bear was supposed to be a secret "I'm a pedo too" signal, it'd just end up with perverts trying to contact random/b/tards, presumably with hilarious consequences.
Don't be obtuse. You can't honestly claim equivalence between "Click button, see formatting" and "Open file as a different file type and poke through the internal structure, see formatting".
If Word did the first, it would be explicitly offering to show you the formatting; it would be a feature of Word that it does that. With the latter, Word hides the fact that formatting is visible in the XML underlying its files unless you go outside the program to find it.
More importantly, if it had a formatting-view in place as a feature, you could actually use Word to fix those little formatting glitches that seem to arise so often, without having to save the file and open it again with another program.
(summary: Christianity could feed a lot more people if the Pope were to follow Matthew 19:21-24 a little more literally and sell his big house, or at least a little of of his hoard of treasure)
GP's point is that waste is only something to worry about when you also have scarcity.
Whilst there will always be some sort of finite limit to the power supply, electricity could be made so cheap to produce that it's not worth worrying about saving it, at which point waste becomes something of a non-issue.
It might still be "not a good thing", but it could become an acceptable evil if the cost of the waste really was minimal.
I dislike and don't use Office '07 for unrelated reasons, but that doesn't sound like a feature so much as a side-effect...
You might be able to extract the formatting by using other programs (in this case anything that'll read a zip file) but Word itself won't give you access to it.
For a while, possibly also just to get at a particularly useful form of stored energy - as has been said, you could have an oil well pumping using another energy source even if it was costing more energy than was in the oil. If the source in question isn't so well suited to transportation then it might make sense.
It'd still be expensive, but in mid-transition, when there are some very expensive things that can't be retrofitted to use new power sources, I'm sure they could find buyers.
Contrast against markers that aren't lit at all; if you just painted a mark on the ground then it might easily be obscured by the dirt kicked up in landing. Add some lights and it becomes visible through a certain amount of dust. Add some biological whatever and it becomes biodegradable. You could probably also have a biodegradable marker that wasn't luminescent, but that would be easily obscured by dust.
Using some firefly-like biological light source is useful because it's both luminescent (an advantage over unlit markers) and also biodegradable (an advantage over other light sources).
To my knowledge, the "show codes" feature is WP only. No equivalent thing in Word except for the "show all characters" button that (so far as I can tell) only reveals whitespace characters, not markup.
I was serious with the first line, not so much with the second. It annoys the piss out of me on the occasions when I do have to wait for it to finish fading. Honestly, I was mocking myself more than you with the dozen seconds bit; I care about those dozen seconds even while acknowledging that they're trivial.
There may not be many times when I have to wait, it probably won't add up to much total time, but every second of it feels so damnably unnecessary. Much like any time spent being distracted by the flickering "instant" results feels highly unnecessary.
The problem comes when the 2 year old with their fingers in their ears has any kind of responsibility or power. Then you need to shout them down with reason, if only so that everyone else has a chance to hear how wrong they are.
I would take "out-code" to be equivalent to "out-compete" - produce something better, quantity not necessarily a factor.
Unless the task ahead really does just require a large amount of code that isn't too difficult to write... in which case you'd probably be better off out-sourcing it to somewhere cheap.
Perhaps sleep is a bad example to cite, but the question remains; why exactly should experience be unable to end?
If you have conscious perception for some amount of time, and then it were to cease, then sure... you wouldn't have any perception during the end of perception itself (it being an atomic moment of transition, there wouldn't actually be any "during" to perceive), but why should my ability to experience something have the slightest relevance as to whether or not it can happen?
Aside from that, what do you suggest this 'experiencer', that continues experiencing after bodily death, actually is? I don't see any way for it to exist without positing some sort of supernatural spirit-stuff, which immediately falls foul of all the problems associated with dualism.
Alternatively, if this experiencer exists inside the physical world we're familiar with then it must be made from some variety of matter, which we'd be able to detect the effects of if it were so intimately involved with the workings of every human brain.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to assume you're a believer. I'm not. I'm also not the AC from up above, but I agree with a fair bit of what he said.
Suppose a god did "eliminate hunger". So, now the six billion people are nice and full and don't have to worry about starving to death. With all this food but without any restraint, there would be an explosion of births as there is suddenly nutrition to support 12 billion, 18 billion, or more.
(snip)
The same reasoning applies to disease. Disease does a generally good job at population control, this was set in place presumably by god to moderate the effects of a species population explosion.
So what you're telling me here, is that your all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god couldn't come up with any better way to keep the population down than through starvation and disease? Mass suffering and death is not a kind way to prevent overpopulation; it's the cruellest possible way - with omnipotence you could just adjust the fertility rate so that excess children wouldn't be born, not bring thousands of children into the world for the few short years they can eke out before they die in agony from hunger or illness.
Do you have any idea how painful it is to die that way? The slightest conception of what a horrific death people go through when they can't get enough food to live? Even if you don't, the god you believe in would have to know in intimate detail how thousands, millions, of "his children" are suffering and dying, and apparently he decrees that this is good? Your god, if he existed, would be a monster.
According to you, if god made us and we are special, then he is evil. But you don't believe in god. So what's the big deal about disease.
He said very clearly at the beginning that despite not believing in god, his argument was that even if god did exist, he would not be a fit object of worship. That the god described is evil, and hence should be reviled, even if he could be proved to exist. To an atheist, disease poses no problem; it's just something that happens and there's no special reason why it shouldn't. But for a believer... well, you have to wonder why your loving god would inflict ebola on the world.
You are correct though, that the animal kingdom is also full of suffering and death that an omni-max creator could have prevented. You say "kept in check by disease" so airily, as if most diseases aren't a horrible way to die. There is nothing in nature that suggests it was created by a kind or benevolent creator; every day animals (human and non-human) die by the million in terrible pain, debilitated by hunger and disease or torn open by predators. Either god does not exist (and all this suffering is just the way things are for entirely non-supernatural reasons) or your god exists but doesn't care, or created a world full of suffering for his own amusement.
Instead of being pissed of at whatever god, why don't you accept responsibility that we do all this to ourselves?
Once again, the argument was not about whether god exists, but what kind of being he would be if he did exist. An omnipotent being can intercede in any way imaginable with no effort whatsoever, if he existed then he would have ultimate power to bring about or prevent any event, so anything that happens must happen because he so chooses. In short, the god you believe in would have to be a sadist (if he existed).
The horrors of hunger and disease are no challenge to the atheist worldview, because they can come about by natural causes, but if you believe in god then the burden is on you to explain why he allows such horrible things to go on if he loves us all so much.
For all that you blame the christian god for every evil, did you never stop and think that perhaps you are not the most intelligent being in the universe.
Who's blaming anyone? I would "blame" the natural world for the consequences that an a
See also: the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act
This means you have to have a way to override the protection system, which means an equal or better protection system to do that, so why not just use that anyway...
Maybe the "better" (more/equally secure) system is less convenient.
To postulate an over-extreme example, have the phone locked to your gait, and if your gait changes because you've lost a leg you have to take it... somewhere, the phone store I guess (note this is a hypothetical, not a suggestion) with proof of ID to have it reset. Although then the weak link would be the reset method.
Point stands though, even if I can't come up with a decent example; some methods of identifying yourself are more secure, but too inconvenient to be used for anything but infrequent exceptional cases.
So there is still a lot of work to do before Ubuntu is common place unless the hardware makers make their products so that they are compatible with it.
To go mainstream, Linux needs support from hardware/software producers. For it to be worth the time of the hardware/software producers to support Linux, it needs to be more mainstream.
Pretty standard deadlock, although the amount of stuff that is supported (and often without even installing anything extra) is only growing... comparing them purely on what they support out-of-the-box, Linux is a mile ahead. Shame that doesn't count for much when everything comes bundled with a CD of Windows drivers.
Says the guy whose sig claims he'll ask Google before "stupid citations", and can't spell the word divide. I'm torn though; does it support your point or undermine it, if you exhibit exactly the stupidity you're claiming is commonplace.
Sounds like you consider yourself separate from the 'internet generation' though, so I'm leaning towards undermine; that you can be counted as a demonstration that a little general ignorance is in every generation, regardless of how easy it is to come by information. Further, it seems that this never held past generations back when it came to inventing steam engines and space rockets.
IIRC, you can't be prevented from using your own name, even if someone else has it trademarked.
If your surname was McDonald for example, you could open a restaurant and call it McDonalds without the more well known chain having a claim against you, so long as you didn't copy any of their other trademarks (like the "golden arches" stylised M)
Did you catch this quote from TFA? "If we can design a car that can autonomously go up Pikes Peak, we can design a car that can take over when a driver falls asleep," Kirstin Talvala, one of the students working on Shelley, told the AFP. Wow, no you can't. For one thing, you don't have to deal with other cars when you're making an exhibition run up Pikes. That was a stunningly stupid thing to say, Kirstin.
Well, it's a necessary first step. A student working on a cool project like that, you can forgive a little optimism. Once you've got the thing driving along an empty road on it's own, it's not so very hard to imagine it negotiating traffic too.
Where I live, it's actually required by law...
Where is that? It's a sensible policy... the most efficient way of using two lanes is to use both lanes equally, and merge alternately at the point where one lane ends, rather than mostly all queueing up in one lane and having people merge sporadically all up and down the length of it.
But of course if some people are already queuing, it does seem a tad unfair to blast past them in the other lane, then have to force your way in at the end of it. It only really works if everyone's using both lanes.
Given the frequency with which it's used by non-pedophiles, that would be a pretty crappy means of communication.
If the bear was supposed to be a secret "I'm a pedo too" signal, it'd just end up with perverts trying to contact random /b/tards, presumably with hilarious consequences.
Don't be obtuse. You can't honestly claim equivalence between "Click button, see formatting" and "Open file as a different file type and poke through the internal structure, see formatting".
If Word did the first, it would be explicitly offering to show you the formatting; it would be a feature of Word that it does that. With the latter, Word hides the fact that formatting is visible in the XML underlying its files unless you go outside the program to find it.
More importantly, if it had a formatting-view in place as a feature, you could actually use Word to fix those little formatting glitches that seem to arise so often, without having to save the file and open it again with another program.
Fed by religious adherents, yes (and non-believers too, of course). Fed by the holy text itself? Not so much.
Also, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bObItmxAGc
(summary: Christianity could feed a lot more people if the Pope were to follow Matthew 19:21-24 a little more literally and sell his big house, or at least a little of of his hoard of treasure)
Well... big step forward for IE9 then, IE8 only manages 12.
GP's point is that waste is only something to worry about when you also have scarcity.
Whilst there will always be some sort of finite limit to the power supply, electricity could be made so cheap to produce that it's not worth worrying about saving it, at which point waste becomes something of a non-issue.
It might still be "not a good thing", but it could become an acceptable evil if the cost of the waste really was minimal.
If IE8 is any indication, Firefox comes a damn sight closer to passing.
Not perfectly in compliance, granted, but really rather close when compared to what it looked like in IE for me.
I dislike and don't use Office '07 for unrelated reasons, but that doesn't sound like a feature so much as a side-effect...
You might be able to extract the formatting by using other programs (in this case anything that'll read a zip file) but Word itself won't give you access to it.
For a while, possibly also just to get at a particularly useful form of stored energy - as has been said, you could have an oil well pumping using another energy source even if it was costing more energy than was in the oil. If the source in question isn't so well suited to transportation then it might make sense.
It'd still be expensive, but in mid-transition, when there are some very expensive things that can't be retrofitted to use new power sources, I'm sure they could find buyers.
Contrast against markers that aren't lit at all; if you just painted a mark on the ground then it might easily be obscured by the dirt kicked up in landing. Add some lights and it becomes visible through a certain amount of dust. Add some biological whatever and it becomes biodegradable. You could probably also have a biodegradable marker that wasn't luminescent, but that would be easily obscured by dust.
Using some firefly-like biological light source is useful because it's both luminescent (an advantage over unlit markers) and also biodegradable (an advantage over other light sources).
To my knowledge, the "show codes" feature is WP only. No equivalent thing in Word except for the "show all characters" button that (so far as I can tell) only reveals whitespace characters, not markup.
I was serious with the first line, not so much with the second. It annoys the piss out of me on the occasions when I do have to wait for it to finish fading. Honestly, I was mocking myself more than you with the dozen seconds bit; I care about those dozen seconds even while acknowledging that they're trivial.
There may not be many times when I have to wait, it probably won't add up to much total time, but every second of it feels so damnably unnecessary. Much like any time spent being distracted by the flickering "instant" results feels highly unnecessary.
Have you ever used talk (old command line program)? Could you imagine if the comments section was some kind of massive talk system.
Given that my answer to the first of those is no, I'm going to have trouble with the second one unless you elaborate a little.
Or I suppose I could go Google it, but what am I? An animal? Googling my own information... to hell with that.
One second * number of times I will ever have to wait for the thing to finish fading
Why... it could be as much as a dozen seconds across my lifespan
Go ahead, tell me what pigeon hole I belong in now.
The one labelled "misc"
The problem comes when the 2 year old with their fingers in their ears has any kind of responsibility or power. Then you need to shout them down with reason, if only so that everyone else has a chance to hear how wrong they are.
I would take "out-code" to be equivalent to "out-compete" - produce something better, quantity not necessarily a factor.
Unless the task ahead really does just require a large amount of code that isn't too difficult to write... in which case you'd probably be better off out-sourcing it to somewhere cheap.
Perhaps sleep is a bad example to cite, but the question remains; why exactly should experience be unable to end?
If you have conscious perception for some amount of time, and then it were to cease, then sure... you wouldn't have any perception during the end of perception itself (it being an atomic moment of transition, there wouldn't actually be any "during" to perceive), but why should my ability to experience something have the slightest relevance as to whether or not it can happen?
Aside from that, what do you suggest this 'experiencer', that continues experiencing after bodily death, actually is? I don't see any way for it to exist without positing some sort of supernatural spirit-stuff, which immediately falls foul of all the problems associated with dualism.
Alternatively, if this experiencer exists inside the physical world we're familiar with then it must be made from some variety of matter, which we'd be able to detect the effects of if it were so intimately involved with the workings of every human brain.