But I prefer to call myself an atheist. Because I lead my life as though no gods existed, as opposed to leading my life as though they might exist. So from the point of view of an external observer, I am not affected by the existence of gods, and therefore I am not and indication of their existence, nor of belief in their existence.
The idea is that to me, something exists if it is observed to have an effect on the universe. Since the effects beliefs in deities cannot be observed from my actions, I am, for the observer, an atheist. Does it make sense?
The existence of gods is undecidable. Therefore using it to justify anything is dodgy. Note that using the non-existence of gods is just as dodgy.
You should justify your actions by some reason wholly outside the realm of theogonies. And therefore religion is useless to guide human actions.
I further claim it is harmful. Because it uses an undecidable (and unlikely) premise which is not necessarily shared by all the recipients of the actions.
- it is insulting that you think (against evidence, I might add) that atheists cannot have peace of mind. After all, Buddhism is an atheist philosophy, and peace of mind is their trademark.
- It is insulting that you think people do good things just because they are afraid of the great CCTV in the sky. People do good things for their own sake.
- It is insulting that you believe one cannot have any other hope in life than the afterlife. I am a scientist, and my research will live after me, so will my memory in my friends' minds. A writer's books will survive him. And artist's works. The good you do while alive. If you need materially motivated pretexts to do good, there it is.
You should live your life to the fullest, in awe of the universe, precisely because you will return to dust and nothingness. But knowing, because of the immense privilege we have of living now, that we exist because a generation of stars formed, aged and went nova so we could exist as carbon-based lifeforms. We exist because every single one of our ancestors, for four billion years, did no fail to reproduce. We stand half-way to the death of our star, and the beings which will see it die will be as far from us that we are from the first unicellular organism.
You, on the other hand revel in bronze age mythology.
I'll spare you comments about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy you committed in your last paragraph.
Unfortunately, religion also flourishes in parts of the developed world -- I'm looking at you USA. It is a bug in the human brain. Fortunately, brains are plastic, and it can be cured.
But the point is that although despair is a substrate on which religion can flourish, it is not necessary. Nor is religion necessary to have comfort and empathy. It is a mental illness, and should be treated as such.
In a sense, yes. If you are logically minded, you know that from false premises, one can prove anything. Someone who is driven to do stuff for bad reasons can do good an evil.
But you have no guarantee. So in some sense, it would be better if there were no drive: that way, you needn't worry that next time, instead of typesetting, it'll be bombs.
Bismark was the chancellor of the German Empire. Not a democracy in any way...
The fact that people do not like to know things is no excuse for anything. In fact one should go by the motto:
Ignorance Is Not A Valid Point Of View
If people see things, soon enough, they understand the parts of the process to be either wrong or necessary. Without transparency, you will never get rid of the wrong parts. As for the debt ceiling debate, it was such an act of collective stupidity that I still don't understand how you guys ended up with a decision to the right of the average republican voter.
Actually, I don't mind seeing how my sausages are made. I think it educative. Also, I have a strong opinion about anyone refusing to know anything.
Don't. You should try to know as much as you can on every possible topic. It is immensely hypocritical to detach the product from the process which created it.
I don't think that the back-stabbing and anti-social behaviour add to the quality of the law. Therefore, if the public eye forces the makers of the law to be civil, than that is a _good_ thing.
Sadly, you interpret that right. This is coming from the WSJ, where being rich makes you a more worthwhile human. Therefore, as the majority of the pirates have less wealth than the RIAA, they are worth less.
Also, the thing about wealth? it does not only increase your value as an individual. Once you are rich, it means you deserved it, and you should never be allowed to be poor again. Because that would be unfair.
So yes, this tripe is exactly what one would expect from the WSJ.
Actually, if your "birthday present" was, say "I got a really good job far away, pack your stuff, we are starting a new life", you might find that the recipient of the gift would have appreciated some transparency.
This. A million times this. There is never an excuse for not being transparent.
See, if you don't want me to see the law you are writing, clearly it means you know I won't agree. Now in a democracy, who are you to redact a law which does not have popular support? Bismark was not a democrat, and his laws were acts balancing the public interest, yes, but also all the special interests who supported the empire.
It's interesting. For cultural reasons, RH went the GNOME way a long time ago. They have GNOME people making decisions. Also, as a distro, historically, they did a long of the basic development from which everyone benefited. The downside is they they never really developed any prevention against NIH, and this attitude has also become prevalent in GNOME. All of which would not matter if KDE was not the path for linux to the desktop. A path never taken because of office politics.
How is it the path to the desktop? Basically, linux won the server side of things by being cheaper and better (I think Free matters enormously -- I just don't believe people are motivated by it in their business decisions). KDE, despite much less corporate support, continues to thrive and produce better results than GNOME: it is the better technical solution. But because it is only backed by openSuse (not SUSE enterprise, which is GNOME -- the eazel debacle), it never became sufficiently dominant to be the linux desktop, and GNOME keeps killing our chances.
Yes, GNOME is user-friendly -- except look in the mirror, you use linux: is it because it is user-friendly or because it is powerful? User-friendly is an ideal you must work towards, but power clinches the deal. Ubuntu is an OK distro, but it will never take over linux: the ecosystem thrives on users-hackers-makers, and if you cater for grandma, you will have loads of debian-using grandsons installing ubuntu on their grandma's computer. Which does absolutely nothing for market penetration. BTW, the grandson, he uses XFCE or ratpoison. He would use KDE, but debian has a history of terrible packaging of that particular project.
And you want the grandson to use a cool desktop, which, when friends see it will prompt the "what is that, it looks cool -- sure, and look what I can do" conversation. And that is KDE, not GNOME.
I actually prefer the books to have been stolen for profit: that way, they may have made their way into private libraries, and may, in time be recovered.
On the other hand, books burnt by religious idiots are lost forever.
I don't know if that works. I use konqueror of rekonq... They provide a browser optimised for touch, though, which is similar to the one you find on the ipad.
Plasma active _is_ a tablet-specific UI. The whole point of plasma as a foundation for the KDE desktop was that you got a generic library for making interfaces.
They have a desktop interface, but the also have a netbook interface. Active is their tablet interface. I have played around with it on an asus T91MT, and it works quite well. In fact, it is perhaps the only tablet interface which does multitasking in a clever way.
And yes the on-screen keyboard pops up when you touch a text entry field. And they also provide touch-friendly interfaces for common apps.
Which is completely meaningless. you cannot "not like the design". It can be too distracting, the icons not recognisable enough, the contrast can be too high or too low. You can dislike gradients, find the colours depressing or garish. but you cannot "not like the design".
"Usability" does not exist. There is only a collection of actions required to perform given tasks, which you could not easily find, or which you found too time consuming, or which gave you RSI.
I will guess that you are one of those guys who are somewhat sorry that DEs exist at all, but know that for sure, they should never have left their mid-nineties shape. I have bad news for you: these will disappear, and KDE4 is the only one which in the future will still do what you expect -- provided you configure it so.
I use it every day, because I think it works great and looks good. Objectively, it is faster, snappier and more stable. It also got features at each release.
Subjectively, I think the looks were always good, but that they improved with time. But that is, of course, subjective. There are not many styles I can say I have kept for a long time before I felt the need to change -- oxygen is the exception: it is clean, clear and, to me, beautiful.
But Your question is too vague to be answered meaningfully. What bugged you? Why? Could it not be changed? Did you report a bug (in a non-insulting, non-inflamatory way)?
Yup... But you have to be fair: there are two years between 4.4 and 4.8. And the progress has been very fast. It is to me a bit of a mystery why Debian stable does not upgrade the GUIs faster. The base components, the server bits, sure. But there is no valid reason to no update KDE and GNOME to their latest releases.
On the contrary: bugs in interfaces are in many cases not logic bugs, but unexpected behaviour, or inconsistency. And keeping the old version won't help.
In most of Europe, we don't vote for judges. They are appointed and are quite immune to lobbyists. Also, most of Europe has a civil law system, and under that system, the laws do not get "interpreted" by the judges...
It is a bug of the American system that judges are affected by lobbyists and get to decide what laws mean. This doesn't mean our system is better. This is just a bug we don't have.
Funny thing: some rights, you cannot sign away. So the EULA is irrelevant. For example, no contract of indentured servitude is legal. In the same way, you cannot sign away your right to privacy.
Oh, but although the company is fined 2%, ordering your employees to do something illegal is criminal... So I don't think this would end as "the cost of doing business".
Slashdot Mirror
But I prefer to call myself an atheist. Because I lead my life as though no gods existed, as opposed to leading my life as though they might exist. So from the point of view of an external observer, I am not affected by the existence of gods, and therefore I am not and indication of their existence, nor of belief in their existence.
The idea is that to me, something exists if it is observed to have an effect on the universe. Since the effects beliefs in deities cannot be observed from my actions, I am, for the observer, an atheist. Does it make sense?
The existence of gods is undecidable. Therefore using it to justify anything is dodgy. Note that using the non-existence of gods is just as dodgy.
You should justify your actions by some reason wholly outside the realm of theogonies. And therefore religion is useless to guide human actions.
I further claim it is harmful. Because it uses an undecidable (and unlikely) premise which is not necessarily shared by all the recipients of the actions.
- it is insulting that you think (against evidence, I might add) that atheists cannot have peace of mind. After all, Buddhism is an atheist philosophy, and peace of mind is their trademark.
- It is insulting that you think people do good things just because they are afraid of the great CCTV in the sky. People do good things for their own sake.
- It is insulting that you believe one cannot have any other hope in life than the afterlife. I am a scientist, and my research will live after me, so will my memory in my friends' minds. A writer's books will survive him. And artist's works. The good you do while alive. If you need materially motivated pretexts to do good, there it is.
You should live your life to the fullest, in awe of the universe, precisely because you will return to dust and nothingness. But knowing, because of the immense privilege we have of living now, that we exist because a generation of stars formed, aged and went nova so we could exist as carbon-based lifeforms. We exist because every single one of our ancestors, for four billion years, did no fail to reproduce. We stand half-way to the death of our star, and the beings which will see it die will be as far from us that we are from the first unicellular organism.
You, on the other hand revel in bronze age mythology.
I'll spare you comments about the "no true Scotsman" fallacy you committed in your last paragraph.
Unfortunately, religion also flourishes in parts of the developed world -- I'm looking at you USA. It is a bug in the human brain. Fortunately, brains are plastic, and it can be cured.
But the point is that although despair is a substrate on which religion can flourish, it is not necessary. Nor is religion necessary to have comfort and empathy. It is a mental illness, and should be treated as such.
In a sense, yes. If you are logically minded, you know that from false premises, one can prove anything. Someone who is driven to do stuff for bad reasons can do good an evil.
But you have no guarantee. So in some sense, it would be better if there were no drive: that way, you needn't worry that next time, instead of typesetting, it'll be bombs.
Bismark was the chancellor of the German Empire. Not a democracy in any way...
The fact that people do not like to know things is no excuse for anything. In fact one should go by the motto:
Ignorance Is Not A Valid Point Of View
If people see things, soon enough, they understand the parts of the process to be either wrong or necessary. Without transparency, you will never get rid of the wrong parts. As for the debt ceiling debate, it was such an act of collective stupidity that I still don't understand how you guys ended up with a decision to the right of the average republican voter.
Actually, I don't mind seeing how my sausages are made. I think it educative. Also, I have a strong opinion about anyone refusing to know anything.
Don't. You should try to know as much as you can on every possible topic. It is immensely hypocritical to detach the product from the process which created it.
I don't think that the back-stabbing and anti-social behaviour add to the quality of the law. Therefore, if the public eye forces the makers of the law to be civil, than that is a _good_ thing.
Sadly, you interpret that right. This is coming from the WSJ, where being rich makes you a more worthwhile human. Therefore, as the majority of the pirates have less wealth than the RIAA, they are worth less.
Also, the thing about wealth? it does not only increase your value as an individual. Once you are rich, it means you deserved it, and you should never be allowed to be poor again. Because that would be unfair.
So yes, this tripe is exactly what one would expect from the WSJ.
Actually, if your "birthday present" was, say "I got a really good job far away, pack your stuff, we are starting a new life", you might find that the recipient of the gift would have appreciated some transparency.
This. A million times this. There is never an excuse for not being transparent.
See, if you don't want me to see the law you are writing, clearly it means you know I won't agree. Now in a democracy, who are you to redact a law which does not have popular support? Bismark was not a democrat, and his laws were acts balancing the public interest, yes, but also all the special interests who supported the empire.
There is no place for that in a democracy.
If by "pulse" you mean pulseaudio, you cannot blame it on KDE...
As for the rest, well, of course XFCE consumes very little memory: it doesn't do anything!
It's interesting. For cultural reasons, RH went the GNOME way a long time ago. They have GNOME people making decisions. Also, as a distro, historically, they did a long of the basic development from which everyone benefited. The downside is they they never really developed any prevention against NIH, and this attitude has also become prevalent in GNOME. All of which would not matter if KDE was not the path for linux to the desktop. A path never taken because of office politics.
How is it the path to the desktop? Basically, linux won the server side of things by being cheaper and better (I think Free matters enormously -- I just don't believe people are motivated by it in their business decisions). KDE, despite much less corporate support, continues to thrive and produce better results than GNOME: it is the better technical solution. But because it is only backed by openSuse (not SUSE enterprise, which is GNOME -- the eazel debacle), it never became sufficiently dominant to be the linux desktop, and GNOME keeps killing our chances.
Yes, GNOME is user-friendly -- except look in the mirror, you use linux: is it because it is user-friendly or because it is powerful? User-friendly is an ideal you must work towards, but power clinches the deal. Ubuntu is an OK distro, but it will never take over linux: the ecosystem thrives on users-hackers-makers, and if you cater for grandma, you will have loads of debian-using grandsons installing ubuntu on their grandma's computer. Which does absolutely nothing for market penetration. BTW, the grandson, he uses XFCE or ratpoison. He would use KDE, but debian has a history of terrible packaging of that particular project.
And you want the grandson to use a cool desktop, which, when friends see it will prompt the "what is that, it looks cool -- sure, and look what I can do" conversation. And that is KDE, not GNOME.
I have bad news for you: it was scuttled. The armour was too strong for the Royal Navy. So you disabled the Bismark, yes, but she had to sink herself.
I actually prefer the books to have been stolen for profit: that way, they may have made their way into private libraries, and may, in time be recovered.
On the other hand, books burnt by religious idiots are lost forever.
I don't know if that works. I use konqueror of rekonq... They provide a browser optimised for touch, though, which is similar to the one you find on the ipad.
Plasma active _is_ a tablet-specific UI. The whole point of plasma as a foundation for the KDE desktop was that you got a generic library for making interfaces.
They have a desktop interface, but the also have a netbook interface. Active is their tablet interface. I have played around with it on an asus T91MT, and it works quite well. In fact, it is perhaps the only tablet interface which does multitasking in a clever way.
And yes the on-screen keyboard pops up when you touch a text entry field. And they also provide touch-friendly interfaces for common apps.
Which is completely meaningless. you cannot "not like the design". It can be too distracting, the icons not recognisable enough, the contrast can be too high or too low. You can dislike gradients, find the colours depressing or garish. but you cannot "not like the design".
"Usability" does not exist. There is only a collection of actions required to perform given tasks, which you could not easily find, or which you found too time consuming, or which gave you RSI.
I will guess that you are one of those guys who are somewhat sorry that DEs exist at all, but know that for sure, they should never have left their mid-nineties shape. I have bad news for you: these will disappear, and KDE4 is the only one which in the future will still do what you expect -- provided you configure it so.
I use it every day, because I think it works great and looks good. Objectively, it is faster, snappier and more stable. It also got features at each release.
Subjectively, I think the looks were always good, but that they improved with time. But that is, of course, subjective. There are not many styles I can say I have kept for a long time before I felt the need to change -- oxygen is the exception: it is clean, clear and, to me, beautiful.
But Your question is too vague to be answered meaningfully. What bugged you? Why? Could it not be changed? Did you report a bug (in a non-insulting, non-inflamatory way)?
Yup... But you have to be fair: there are two years between 4.4 and 4.8. And the progress has been very fast. It is to me a bit of a mystery why Debian stable does not upgrade the GUIs faster. The base components, the server bits, sure. But there is no valid reason to no update KDE and GNOME to their latest releases.
On the contrary: bugs in interfaces are in many cases not logic bugs, but unexpected behaviour, or inconsistency. And keeping the old version won't help.
It'll happen at the same time the magical pink unicorn farm gets discovered on Mars...
In general, fines are associated with a delay to remedy the situation. Then it becomes a repeat offence and the fines go up.
In most of Europe, we don't vote for judges. They are appointed and are quite immune to lobbyists. Also, most of Europe has a civil law system, and under that system, the laws do not get "interpreted" by the judges...
It is a bug of the American system that judges are affected by lobbyists and get to decide what laws mean. This doesn't mean our system is better. This is just a bug we don't have.
It is completely within their remit. The part of the company paying is EU-based, but the fine is calculated based on worldwide activities.
Funny thing: some rights, you cannot sign away. So the EULA is irrelevant. For example, no contract of indentured servitude is legal. In the same way, you cannot sign away your right to privacy.
Oh, but although the company is fined 2%, ordering your employees to do something illegal is criminal... So I don't think this would end as "the cost of doing business".