So what did your last 3 paragraphs have to do with the rest of your argument?
There was no "argument", there was idle speculation. The last three paragraphs elaborated on the idle speculation begun in the previous paragraphs. That seems simple enough.
The simple fact is, those two kids were obviously insane, and criminal.
Well, duh. Of course they were. I think most of us are in agreement on that. You could argue about the definition of "insane", but by any normal standards those kids had some badly defective wiring. I wasn't discussing that at all, though. I was talking about some people's reaction to their insanity and criminality. This culture appears to be under a lot of strain for some reason. People are freaking out in all kinds of ways. A lot of them seem to be worshipping imaginary benevolent aliens who perform elective surgery on them, which they find incredibly terrifying but which they nevertheless consider beneficial. Others are fixated on millenarian religions, and still others are convinced that the government is plotting to kill them for mysterious reasons. Many of those believe that the United States government is controlled by Israel (BTW many Israelis bitterly suspect that it's just the opposite). People are retreating wholesale into a lot of very dark and disturbing fantasies. Of course, maybe it's not as bad as I think. Maybe the above concerns are my "dark and disturbing fantasy". Fortunately, I'm not obsessed with it. Well . . . I don't think I am . . .:)
Back on the topic, a "dark and disturbing fantasy" is as good a term as any for what must have been going through these kids heads when they decided to murder their schoolmates.
nobody in their right minds just goes on a killing spree because they feel hated.
There isn't a simple, clear-cut distinction between "right mind" and "not right mind". We all have our little issues, some more than others, and some overwhelmingly. IMHO these kids were out towards the weird end of the scale, but it's not like they were an entirely different kind of animal from you and I. They just had in great abundance some qualities that you and I are fortunate to have in very small doses. As for feeling "hated", I can't understand any more than you how that would drive somebody to commit mass murder. But you don't know how "hated" they felt, and if they were only an inch from the edge to begin with . . . When I was in high school (if I may overwork the metaphor), I was several feet from the edge. A lot of taunting in the halls might have driven me an inch or two towards that edge, but I had so much room to spare that it was no problem. I could cope. These kids lacked that room. The people who taunted them had no way of knowing that, of course. (If they'd known, I doubt very much that they'd have behaved as they did.) The taunters were raised in a world where it's admirable to shit on geeks, and they followed the rules. They were good kids. Millions of good kids like them engage in socially approved sadism every year in schools where nobody gets killed. Fortunately, very, very few people are as unstable and amoral as those two killers. I don't care what kind of abuse those two kids had to put up with, their response was insanely out of proportion. Not only was it out of proportion, but I doubt that most of the people they hurt had anything to do with the abuse anyway.
do you really think that ALL the jocks in that school teased them? All the popular people? I seriously doubt it.
I never even alluded to that issue. As it happens, I share your doubts, but that's unrelated to anything that I can see in my post. Now, of course, I've discussed it above.
I'm beginning to think that you saw my post as an attempt to justify or excuse the killings in some way. If so, please allow me to apologize. That was not at all my intent. I was rambling about the politics swirling around the whole thing, not about the event itself. Now that I think about it, that's pretty depressing, isn't it? The ultimate significance of this thing for most Americans will be as a political football. Meanwhile, the families grieve. IMHO they deserve better than to be used so cynically. The killers laughed when they shot people, and we're all shocked by that, but the people rushing to make use of the event to sell an agenda aren't showing any clear signs of human decency either.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Uneducated people", eh? Heh. You're not talking about education. You're talking about sharing your world-view. That's a very different thing.
As for your "facts", that same boilerplate has been posted about ten times in this discussion alone. It's funny this one essay seems to be the only thing any of you people have to support your opinions. Oh, yeah, I forgot: You people also have an endless list of quotations from famous people, which is just plain ridiculous. I could compile an equally long list of mots justes supporting just about anything, from flat-earthism to Leninism. So what? Somebody famous said something in a memorable way. BFD. That proves nothing.
if you are stupid enough to keep your gun where it accessible to your kids, you shouldn't have had kids in the first place.
Heh. It doesn't matter. You won't have them for long.
By the way, the tiny part of your own post which was yours, rather than regurgitated pap, is almost as obnoxious and childish as the fool you're defending. You, also, have reinforced my impression of gun nuts as intellectually dishonest swine. In fact, I've met some who didn't fit the mold at all, but it's hard to hold them in mind when dealing with people like you.
I've met a lot of people who are intelligent and emotionally stable enough to be trusted with deadly weapons. You aren't one of them.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
This is what annoys me about gun people.
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#1: When somebody disagrees with you, you immediately start howling personal insults. (Incidentally, behaving like a moron or a maniac makes it very hard for people not to write off your views as the views of a maniacal moron). I'm looking at your post, and you clearly lack the maturity, self-control, and intelligence to be trusted with anything more dangerous than a Q-tip. You are not furthering your cause.
#2: THIS HOME IS A GUN-FREE ZONE
I wish you joy of all the delightful visitors you will attract.
Blah, blah, blah. In the dark, in a strange house, a baseball bat or a golf club is a lot more dangerous than a gun. (Of course, on a sunny sunday afternoon when your twelve-year-old and his friend find a loaded gun in your drawer . . . that's a different matter, and you'd better hope the odds of a clean kill are poor.) Furthermore, how often do criminals invade people's houses? I once lived in a high-crime area for years and never heard of this happening. I'm sure it happens occasionally, but certainly a lot less often than some drunk idiot blows his brother-in-law's head off by accident.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
I believe it was all first born sons. This particular scene in the movie "Prince of Egypt" gave my seven year old daughter the hee-bee-jeebies.
Yeah, I'll bet. I hope you gave 101 Dalmatians a clean miss. I'd never expose young kids to the Old Testament, any more than I'd expose them to Disney or William S. Burroughs. They can learn about senseless brutality when they're old enough to understand why it's wrong.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Or the problems in N. Ireland where it's the Protestants versus catholics?
The religion is incidental there. The problem is, essentially, that the locals are still resisting an invasion that happened 800 years ago, and which wasn't about religion at all -- in fact that was long before Luther. It's just a garden-variety war. It's no more about religion than was the resistance of largely Catholic Frenchmen against largely protestant Germans in WWII.
I don't mean to suggest that this invalidates your thesis, though.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Oh yeah? What about Sodom'n'Gomorrah, the plagues in Egypt, etc. etc. etc. God was a bloody-handed bastard in those days, before He got religion and settled down in the New Testament.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Watching the right-wing spin evolve.
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pipe bombs . . . killed the most people at the school.
This is very interesting. The same claim is made in the post adjacent to yours, the first response to the post to which you responded. I wonder if you're aware that your claim is false? I'm not sure that's a meaningful question to ask.
One way or another, the real issue here is the opportunity to watch in real time as the right wingers communally evolve a myth about the incident, a myth which twists and/or denies the facts just enough to support their dogma, but no more than necessary (after all, you don't want to be too obvious when you've got to hide your dishonesty from yourself as well as your neighbors). I don't recall seeing the "bombs did the killing" meme until today. I'm expecting to see it thrive, because it's very convenient, and it dovetails with some questionable statements made by some of the police about the power of the bombs that were found. There's obviously no logical connection between one and the other, but there's an emotional connection, which is what counts when you're building a myth. A couple of weeks from now, there will be a standard revisionist history of these events, which will still swing pretty close to reality at a number of points, but which will profoundly distort the meaning of what happened. To be fair, the mainstream media are also in the process of creating a palatable myth about it, without much greater concern for factual accuracy. Their myth is palatable to people with different preconceptions, that's all.
I've been watching the right wing in the U.S. (loosely defined as anything from Rush Limbaugh on out to Aryan Nation) on and off, and they seem to be engaged in a massive act of communal myth-generation, almost like the founding of a religion. It's not a consistent "story", of course. For example, they talk a lot about Hitler, but some of them try to wish the Holocaust away, while others brag about it, and still others use it as a conventional symbol of evil and accuse their "enemies" of "acting like Hitler". In other respects, they're very much on the same wavelength, for example about the environment, "free enterprise", the establishment of a state-imposed religion, and so on.
Of course this stuff has been going on forever. The red scares of the thirties and fifties were mining the same vein, and conspiracy theories are always popular on the fringe. These lies were old when William Jennings Bryan told them. Are we really seeing something new, or just the same old flowers of evil blooming anew in the hothouse of cheap bandwidth? (Whoa! Purple prose!:) I think it may be different in terms of scale and severity. A significant portion of the population is voluntarily retreating into a mass consensual hallucination, and that hallucination is radical enough that those who retreat are frequently unable to coexist with the rest of society. It doesn't help that the hallucination they've chosen happens to promote an ethic of violence, ignorance, and xenophobia.
These things are caused by fear and uncertainty. Rigid, elaborate dogma appeals to people who need something to cling to. Why are they so afraid? My guess is that it's the economy. Voices on the left have been trying to warn us for a few years now that the "prosperity" we now have in the U.S. is largely illusory. Hey, I'm writing code, I'm fat and happy, right? Sure, and that applies to a lot of us, but the demand on food banks has been growing steadily for years, and while unemployment remains low, millions of well-paying, full-time manufacturing jobs have morphed into part-time, minimum-wage "service sector" jobs. We heard about the whole "rust belt" thing back in the 1980's, but has anything changed, or did the media just get bored with the story and move on? We're having a great time partying in here, inside the gates, but the peasants are out there with pitchforks and they are pissed. (By the way, check out Pat Buchanan's platform this year -- in addition to the standard-issue xenophobia and religious intolerance, he's got some very old-time-populist emphasis on jobs-for-the-working-man and so forth. He's talking about siding with labor against management. He sees it too.)
Hell, maybe it's millenarian anxiety. Who knows? Whatever it is, it's a trip to watch.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Okay, so Netcraft says that Apache's market share is 1.3% greater than the previous month, and IIS's market share is 0.41% smaller.
But what does that mean?
Netcraft also says that the total number of web servers just exceeded five million. Is all of this Apache vs. IIS activity happening on existing web servers, on the new ones? Is Apache growing slowly-but-steadily across the board, or is it growing like a weed on new web servers, while market share on the existing ones remains frozen? That's good news, too, but it's different news. Among other things, it suggests that people aren't so unhappy with IIS that they're willing to put up with the annoyance of moving to a different server.
I dunno, I'm just wondering.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
The truth or falsehood of the Mindcraft study is irrelevant to its intended audience. The point is to give NT "believers" something to quote in arguments, that's all. It's the Rush Limbaugh Principle. In a disagreement, it's helpful to have official-sounding statistics to back up your point. It doesn't matter where they came from, and it doesn't matter whether they're even remotely accurate. What counts is that somebody "important" (read "well-known") said it in public, which "validates" it. This "validation" isn't about truth. What it means is that the proper forms have been followed, and so it's acceptable to introduce the "evidence" in an argument. What's being offered is not evidence in the conventional sense, but the appearance of evidence, or the outward form of evidence. In poker, what does the four of diamonds mean? It means the four of diamonds. It's pure, disembodied symbol.
Disagreement and debate in our culture (especially on the net) isn't a whole lot less stylized (nor a whole lot less predictable) than Noh drama. You have to play by the rules and observe the forms. The content of the Mindcraft study is arbitrary. The study is a signifier, or token. A yacc parser says, "hey, this token is a function, hey, that one's an operator." The actual content of the token is not significant; what matters is what kind of token it is.
Everybody should learn at least a bonehead popularized minimum of semiotics (which is all I know, obviously:)
While we're at it, let's be honest with ourselves: How many of us are going to check Eric Raymond's facts for ourselves -- even to the minimal extent of clicking on the links he provides? And how many of us who don't check the facts are going to run around repeating them? Quite a few, probably. Dammit, I think Raymond's right on the money with this, and I'm confident that he's done his homework -- but I don't have the time to go about proving it. As far as many of us are concerned, Eric has given us a counter-signifier. Some "good spin" to match against the "bad spin". (That makes it sound dishonest, but IMHO if the "good spin" is factual and accurate, then "good" is a perfectly reasonable thing to call it.)
Think about it.
(Experienced sysadmins are a bit of a special case here. They can judge for themselves. The Limbaugh Principle applies mainly to people who are arguing in an area outside of their field of expertise -- I don't recall who it was who said that "every man is gullible outside his specialty", but it's true even of the best of us.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
He was elected, mostly by slandering and slaughtering his opponents,
Slander doesn't depend on guns, much less on dictators. It happens in every election on earth. As for slaughter, now that I think about it, Hitler's goons were armed with sticks and knives. They had very few, if any, guns in the early days. Guns would have made it easier, I suspect, but who can say?
Hitler had enough Nazis in the legislative body to give him power to form laws
Watch those passive verbs. How did they get there? They were elected. Probably they weren't elected very honestly, but again, that's in the nature of elections.
He then dismantled the rest of the government and built it back up to suit him.
And? Again, this was done by political means, with a garnish of terror around the edges; but the terror was not directed at the majority of the electorate. It was directed at fringe groups like Jews and communists, and also at political opponents.
Essentially, what you're describing is what the militias and religious extremists want to do in the United States: Grab power, as "democratically" as possible, and then "fix" the government. What Hitler did was exactly what the gun nuts tell us we should be doing "every twenty years": Overthrowing the government and replacing it with one that vigorously supresses whatever we're feeling nervous about this week. Hitler was not the government until he grabbed power. When Hitler started grabbing power, he was an armed private citizen.
When people talk about "a revolution every twenty years", they always assume that the new government will be composed of them and their friends, or at least their ideological soul-mates. They always assume that it will be a government that they like, and that it will not send goons to kill them in the streets and/or pack them into cattle cars. But you know what? More often than not, when the "armed private citizens" grab power, they do exactly that. When you look back with hindsight, it's easy to say "Oh, the Bolsheviks were a government and look how bad they were!" Well, they weren't a government until they'd grabbed power. Before that, they were, as usual, armed private citizens. They were much less of a majority than the Nazis were, by the way. The government collapsed, a weak but reasonably popular democratic government replaced it (Kerensky et al.), and then the Bolsheviks moved in and seized power. Arms were everywhere, but the Bolsheviks had the will and they had skilled leadership. The rest is history.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
In theory that's true, but unfortunately the theory is based on wishful thinking rather than facts.
The few real-world examples where an armed society is actually polite, are atypical in a lot of ways. For example, the Swiss aren't being deterred from violence by the presence of arms in their homes; they're simply too fat and happy for violence to be appealing. They also have a far more civilized culture than the U.S., which is a hairs-breadth from barbarism at best. There are a hell of a lot of armed societies that are absolute bloodbaths.
It does not deter social unrest.
Please clarify that.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Well, if someone hoses down a high school with the same ammunition, he can expect to catch hell over it, too. Doesn't look like "catching hell" is much of a deterrent, does it?
Must be something else.
Read my post again. I already said that: "none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did."
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Other than that, IMHO most of the rest are a matter of opinion. Actually, Dershowitz' line is a matter of opinion, too -- but IMHO (I have a lot of humble opinions:), it's a broader and more important point.
As for Orwell, if you haven't read Homage to Catalonia, read it immediately. It's way cool and he says even better things about armed citizens in there.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Duh. I knew that:) Yeah, they all do have such weapons -- but if they show up for exercises (once a year for everybody, IIRC) with the seal broken on the ammunition, they catch hell over it. Furthermore, they aren't required to carry their rifles at all times; far from it. The guns stay in a closet or under the bed.
Still, it's valid (none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did) and I feel kinda stupid for forgetting about it.
(My information is from La Place de la Concorde Suisse by John McPhee, by the way. If you haven't read it, it's a cool look at the Swiss military, with incidental material on general Swiss history, wine, and scenery. It was written IIRC in the early 80's.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
a good definition is they're the same species if they can mate (and produce offspring)
Yeah, I think that is the standard thing, but it has to be viable offspring. But what if they don't turn each other on? What if they're tired, or they have a headache? Even at best, you'll have to wait for the offspring (if any) to reproduce successfully before you've got an answer. It's a lot easier to just compare it to the Archetypical Horse and blow off the details.:)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Perhaps you could give us some examples of places where everyone is armed all the time and the resultant "...horrifying level of violence..."
The African-bloodbath-nation-of-the-week, anytime in the last ten years. See CNN for particulars. The Balkans (before NATO), ditto CNN. Russia in 1917 and for a few years after. Afghanistan in recent years. Also any place, any time where there's no reasonably strong and stable central government.
Better yet, please name a single counterexample from any place or time in the entire history of the human race.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Ugh. How depressing. I mean, if they're "polite" about it, that at least implies that they know there's something wrong with it. It suggests that they're not inhabiting a perfect moral and intellectual void. Of course, IMHO those are the most dangerous, because you can't always see them coming. Being more respectable, they gather a lot more power.
Intelligent and rational don't mean the same thing.
True.
Consider Hitler for example, by any measure the man was a sociopath, his irrational hatred of the Jews is the supreme example of this, but the man had to be a genuis to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
I don't know. I think a lot of what he did was just getting everybody moving in the same direction, enthusiastically. Morale is worth a lot, and it still works if it's based on psychotic premises. I often think that psychological manipulation is such a delicate art that you just can't do it in a calculated way, much like playing music (but with more destructive results). Still, I really don't know. If we knew exactly what happened there and how and why, we'd be a lot better off.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Some student said he said that, true. I was wondering if the student was possibly misquoting? But that really doesn't make much sense, does it.
Not that anybody here would know for sure anyway, of course.:)
I think I was asking more of a rhetorical question than anything else, based on aghast disbelief that people can really be such overt, knowing dumbasses. Then again, these kids were shooting people right and left, weren't they, and that's a bit of a dumbass move to begin with.
What really freaked me out was a quote on cnn's website, from one of the students who escaped:
". . . these guys shot to kill, for no reason.... They didn't care what race you were. It didn't matter."
Note that the second ellipses are not mine; they are there in the article that I'm quoting. That having been said, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it looks to me almost as if the kid is implying that if they were shooting people on the basis of their race, it would somehow make sense. That's weird. Then again, a quote mangled in a hurry by journalists can't be taken too seriously anyway. We don't know what, or how much, is missing where it's elided. Some of the rest of the CNN articles about this are downright incoherent in spots; obviously CNN was in a hurry to get things in print.
Oh, well.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Last I saw the source (Builder version 1, Delphi 2) the two VCL's were identical ObjectPascal code. Builder can compile ObjectPascal just fine; I've written VCL controls in ObjectPascal and compiled and used them in Builder. At an old job I used mostly Builder but sometimes Delphi, and so I wrote VCL things in ObjectPascal so I could use 'em in both.
The MFC thing isn't true, anyway. As many others have said, the VCL is its own thing from the ground up, based directly on the API.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
If Borland does a port to Linux then I feel they could really shake up the industry.
IMHO yeah, with emphasis. If they'd had Delphi out before Visual Basic (which IMHO is sadly inferior), they'd now own the windows RAD tool market. They may yet own the Linux RAD tool market if they move fast enough. They won't just have a time-to-market advantage, but also a we're-not-Microsoft advantage. And AFAIK Delphi is already very well-liked in massive, hellish, elephantine, necropolistic MIS departments.:)
If anyone from Borland is reading this, do the port and I will buy an enterprise edition the week it is released.
I've emailed them, and I got a vague response. If they get more requests, maybe they'll listen more closely. IMHO the fact that they've released JBuilder is a good sign that they're on the ball with this.
I don't use C++ Builder any more, except in contract work I do for an ex-employer. I'm not so fond of the RAD thing on the whole. Still, if you are doing RAD, C++ Builder/Delphi are as good as it gets. In particular, the VCL (which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with MFC; I've looked at the source for both) is abstract enough (unlike MFC) that it wouldn't have to be broken very badly on an interface level if it were ported.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
the whole idea of "transitions between species" is rather ill-defined; nature doesn't put up nice neat dividing lines between species.
Yeah, as I understand it, that's what led poor Plato astray. If A is a horse and B is a horse, but they're not identical, why are they both horses when C (a goat, also not identical) is not a horse? Eek! Well, jeez . . . So Plato went through all these contortions trying to kludge a way to postulate a hard-and-fast line between horse and not-horse. In fact, the right way to look at it is that "A and B are pretty goddamn horsey, while C isn't very horsey at all (while still being horsier than a fruit-bat)". That's all you get. Ha ha, you see what you learn from reading a popular book on fuzzy logic? Yeah!:)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
. . . one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers"
Do people ever really talk like that? It seems so cartoonish. All the racists I've known have been very respectable types and/or loudmouthed pseudo-libertarian morons, neither of which will ever admit it as explicitly as that. They always say "I'm not a racist, but . .."
Then again, maybe I've led a sheltered life.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
ALL law abiding adults should be armed at all times.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it's not only out right but our duty.
Would you mind citing where Jefferson said that? Or are you paraphrasing him to the point of semantic alteration?
This is not meant to be a flame. I just have a hard time believing that Jefferson actually said that. The "right to keep and bear arms" is one thing; the obligation to be armed every moment of one's life is another thing entirely. Why would it be a duty anyway? What would be gained? Or is it a disembodied moral imperative?
Of course, even if Jefferson did say it, that doesn't make it true. Nor does it explain the horrifying level of violence that always seems to result when everybody is armed all the time.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
He's mostly known for "discovering" the Ice Ages. Nobody took him seriously in Europe, and he ended up at Harvard where he was received more favorably. I guess you don't believe in glaciation, either, since it's supposed to have taken place so long ago. If that's the case, are you familiar with all of the evidence? It's a bit hard to explain in any other way.
As for Agassiz' racism, I've never heard about that, but I'm not an expert on the man by any means. All I know about him I learned from John McPhee's writings about geology.
Darwin's theory of evolution should result in several transitory fossils being found.
Ummm . . . no. It suggests that such transitory organisms existed at some point, but a theory of natural selection makes absolutely no predictions about which fossils must necessarily survive until the 20th century, or which surviving fossils must be found. If such fossils have not at this point been found, that does not prove that they don't exist. I never heard of Columbine High School until this morning. So what? It existed anyway.
I really don't know whether fossils of that sort have been found or not, because I don't follow paleontology very closely.
Finally: Like a lot of theories, evolution is the best explanation that we have for the facts available to us. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. Also like all theories, it's probably not perfect. Do you know how many theories have come and gone trying to explain the building of mountains? The one we've got now looks pretty good, and I'm betting that it will turn out to have been substantially accurate, but no responsible geologist will tell you that he knows the absolute and final truth about it. This is where religion and science part ways. Religion demands a "final truth"; science does not. This is where creationists are coming from when they criticize evolution: They see a discrepancy somewhere, and they conclude that therefore the theory is not the absolute final truth. As religion, evolution is therefore unacceptable. So they reject it. The problem is that it isn't meant to be religion. It's science. Scientists aren't looking for an infallible moral compass, they're just trying to explain what they've observed as best they can.
Evolution fits the evidence reasonably well, while creationism requires us to ignore a massive body of evidence. As for me, I'll go with the one that doesn't ask me to forget half of what I know.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
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So what did your last 3 paragraphs have to do with the rest of your argument?
There was no "argument", there was idle speculation. The last three paragraphs elaborated on the idle speculation begun in the previous paragraphs. That seems simple enough.
The simple fact is, those two kids were obviously insane, and criminal.
Well, duh. Of course they were. I think most of us are in agreement on that. You could argue about the definition of "insane", but by any normal standards those kids had some badly defective wiring. I wasn't discussing that at all, though. I was talking about some people's reaction to their insanity and criminality. This culture appears to be under a lot of strain for some reason. People are freaking out in all kinds of ways. A lot of them seem to be worshipping imaginary benevolent aliens who perform elective surgery on them, which they find incredibly terrifying but which they nevertheless consider beneficial. Others are fixated on millenarian religions, and still others are convinced that the government is plotting to kill them for mysterious reasons. Many of those believe that the United States government is controlled by Israel (BTW many Israelis bitterly suspect that it's just the opposite). People are retreating wholesale into a lot of very dark and disturbing fantasies. Of course, maybe it's not as bad as I think. Maybe the above concerns are my "dark and disturbing fantasy". Fortunately, I'm not obsessed with it. Well . . . I don't think I am . . .
Back on the topic, a "dark and disturbing fantasy" is as good a term as any for what must have been going through these kids heads when they decided to murder their schoolmates.
nobody in their right minds just goes on a killing spree because they feel hated.
There isn't a simple, clear-cut distinction between "right mind" and "not right mind". We all have our little issues, some more than others, and some overwhelmingly. IMHO these kids were out towards the weird end of the scale, but it's not like they were an entirely different kind of animal from you and I. They just had in great abundance some qualities that you and I are fortunate to have in very small doses. As for feeling "hated", I can't understand any more than you how that would drive somebody to commit mass murder. But you don't know how "hated" they felt, and if they were only an inch from the edge to begin with . . . When I was in high school (if I may overwork the metaphor), I was several feet from the edge. A lot of taunting in the halls might have driven me an inch or two towards that edge, but I had so much room to spare that it was no problem. I could cope. These kids lacked that room. The people who taunted them had no way of knowing that, of course. (If they'd known, I doubt very much that they'd have behaved as they did.) The taunters were raised in a world where it's admirable to shit on geeks, and they followed the rules. They were good kids. Millions of good kids like them engage in socially approved sadism every year in schools where nobody gets killed. Fortunately, very, very few people are as unstable and amoral as those two killers. I don't care what kind of abuse those two kids had to put up with, their response was insanely out of proportion. Not only was it out of proportion, but I doubt that most of the people they hurt had anything to do with the abuse anyway.
do you really think that ALL the jocks in that school teased them? All the popular people? I seriously doubt it.
I never even alluded to that issue. As it happens, I share your doubts, but that's unrelated to anything that I can see in my post. Now, of course, I've discussed it above.
I'm beginning to think that you saw my post as an attempt to justify or excuse the killings in some way. If so, please allow me to apologize. That was not at all my intent. I was rambling about the politics swirling around the whole thing, not about the event itself. Now that I think about it, that's pretty depressing, isn't it? The ultimate significance of this thing for most Americans will be as a political football. Meanwhile, the families grieve. IMHO they deserve better than to be used so cynically. The killers laughed when they shot people, and we're all shocked by that, but the people rushing to make use of the event to sell an agenda aren't showing any clear signs of human decency either.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Uneducated people", eh? Heh. You're not talking about education. You're talking about sharing your world-view. That's a very different thing.
As for your "facts", that same boilerplate has been posted about ten times in this discussion alone. It's funny this one essay seems to be the only thing any of you people have to support your opinions. Oh, yeah, I forgot: You people also have an endless list of quotations from famous people, which is just plain ridiculous. I could compile an equally long list of mots justes supporting just about anything, from flat-earthism to Leninism. So what? Somebody famous said something in a memorable way. BFD. That proves nothing.
if you are stupid enough to keep your gun where it accessible to your kids, you shouldn't have had kids in the first place.
Heh. It doesn't matter. You won't have them for long.
By the way, the tiny part of your own post which was yours, rather than regurgitated pap, is almost as obnoxious and childish as the fool you're defending. You, also, have reinforced my impression of gun nuts as intellectually dishonest swine. In fact, I've met some who didn't fit the mold at all, but it's hard to hold them in mind when dealing with people like you.
I've met a lot of people who are intelligent and emotionally stable enough to be trusted with deadly weapons. You aren't one of them.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
#1: When somebody disagrees with you, you immediately start howling personal insults. (Incidentally, behaving like a moron or a maniac makes it very hard for people not to write off your views as the views of a maniacal moron). I'm looking at your post, and you clearly lack the maturity, self-control, and intelligence to be trusted with anything more dangerous than a Q-tip. You are not furthering your cause.
#2: THIS HOME IS A GUN-FREE ZONE
I wish you joy of all the delightful visitors you will attract.
Blah, blah, blah. In the dark, in a strange house, a baseball bat or a golf club is a lot more dangerous than a gun. (Of course, on a sunny sunday afternoon when your twelve-year-old and his friend find a loaded gun in your drawer . . . that's a different matter, and you'd better hope the odds of a clean kill are poor.) Furthermore, how often do criminals invade people's houses? I once lived in a high-crime area for years and never heard of this happening. I'm sure it happens occasionally, but certainly a lot less often than some drunk idiot blows his brother-in-law's head off by accident.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
I believe it was all first born sons. This particular scene in the movie "Prince of Egypt" gave my seven year old daughter the hee-bee-jeebies.
Yeah, I'll bet. I hope you gave 101 Dalmatians a clean miss. I'd never expose young kids to the Old Testament, any more than I'd expose them to Disney or William S. Burroughs. They can learn about senseless brutality when they're old enough to understand why it's wrong.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Or the problems in N. Ireland where it's the Protestants versus catholics?
The religion is incidental there. The problem is, essentially, that the locals are still resisting an invasion that happened 800 years ago, and which wasn't about religion at all -- in fact that was long before Luther. It's just a garden-variety war. It's no more about religion than was the resistance of largely Catholic Frenchmen against largely protestant Germans in WWII.
I don't mean to suggest that this invalidates your thesis, though.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
PEOPLE did all that . . . Not God.
Oh yeah? What about Sodom'n'Gomorrah, the plagues in Egypt, etc. etc. etc. God was a bloody-handed bastard in those days, before He got religion and settled down in the New Testament.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
pipe bombs . . . killed the most people at the school.
This is very interesting. The same claim is made in the post adjacent to yours, the first response to the post to which you responded. I wonder if you're aware that your claim is false? I'm not sure that's a meaningful question to ask.
One way or another, the real issue here is the opportunity to watch in real time as the right wingers communally evolve a myth about the incident, a myth which twists and/or denies the facts just enough to support their dogma, but no more than necessary (after all, you don't want to be too obvious when you've got to hide your dishonesty from yourself as well as your neighbors). I don't recall seeing the "bombs did the killing" meme until today. I'm expecting to see it thrive, because it's very convenient, and it dovetails with some questionable statements made by some of the police about the power of the bombs that were found. There's obviously no logical connection between one and the other, but there's an emotional connection, which is what counts when you're building a myth. A couple of weeks from now, there will be a standard revisionist history of these events, which will still swing pretty close to reality at a number of points, but which will profoundly distort the meaning of what happened. To be fair, the mainstream media are also in the process of creating a palatable myth about it, without much greater concern for factual accuracy. Their myth is palatable to people with different preconceptions, that's all.
I've been watching the right wing in the U.S. (loosely defined as anything from Rush Limbaugh on out to Aryan Nation) on and off, and they seem to be engaged in a massive act of communal myth-generation, almost like the founding of a religion. It's not a consistent "story", of course. For example, they talk a lot about Hitler, but some of them try to wish the Holocaust away, while others brag about it, and still others use it as a conventional symbol of evil and accuse their "enemies" of "acting like Hitler". In other respects, they're very much on the same wavelength, for example about the environment, "free enterprise", the establishment of a state-imposed religion, and so on.
Of course this stuff has been going on forever. The red scares of the thirties and fifties were mining the same vein, and conspiracy theories are always popular on the fringe. These lies were old when William Jennings Bryan told them. Are we really seeing something new, or just the same old flowers of evil blooming anew in the hothouse of cheap bandwidth? (Whoa! Purple prose!
These things are caused by fear and uncertainty. Rigid, elaborate dogma appeals to people who need something to cling to. Why are they so afraid? My guess is that it's the economy. Voices on the left have been trying to warn us for a few years now that the "prosperity" we now have in the U.S. is largely illusory. Hey, I'm writing code, I'm fat and happy, right? Sure, and that applies to a lot of us, but the demand on food banks has been growing steadily for years, and while unemployment remains low, millions of well-paying, full-time manufacturing jobs have morphed into part-time, minimum-wage "service sector" jobs. We heard about the whole "rust belt" thing back in the 1980's, but has anything changed, or did the media just get bored with the story and move on? We're having a great time partying in here, inside the gates, but the peasants are out there with pitchforks and they are pissed. (By the way, check out Pat Buchanan's platform this year -- in addition to the standard-issue xenophobia and religious intolerance, he's got some very old-time-populist emphasis on jobs-for-the-working-man and so forth. He's talking about siding with labor against management. He sees it too.)
Hell, maybe it's millenarian anxiety. Who knows? Whatever it is, it's a trip to watch.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Okay, so Netcraft says that Apache's market share is 1.3% greater than the previous month, and IIS's market share is 0.41% smaller.
But what does that mean?
Netcraft also says that the total number of web servers just exceeded five million. Is all of this Apache vs. IIS activity happening on existing web servers, on the new ones? Is Apache growing slowly-but-steadily across the board, or is it growing like a weed on new web servers, while market share on the existing ones remains frozen? That's good news, too, but it's different news. Among other things, it suggests that people aren't so unhappy with IIS that they're willing to put up with the annoyance of moving to a different server.
I dunno, I'm just wondering.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
The truth or falsehood of the Mindcraft study is irrelevant to its intended audience. The point is to give NT "believers" something to quote in arguments, that's all. It's the Rush Limbaugh Principle. In a disagreement, it's helpful to have official-sounding statistics to back up your point. It doesn't matter where they came from, and it doesn't matter whether they're even remotely accurate. What counts is that somebody "important" (read "well-known") said it in public, which "validates" it. This "validation" isn't about truth. What it means is that the proper forms have been followed, and so it's acceptable to introduce the "evidence" in an argument. What's being offered is not evidence in the conventional sense, but the appearance of evidence, or the outward form of evidence. In poker, what does the four of diamonds mean? It means the four of diamonds. It's pure, disembodied symbol.
Disagreement and debate in our culture (especially on the net) isn't a whole lot less stylized (nor a whole lot less predictable) than Noh drama. You have to play by the rules and observe the forms. The content of the Mindcraft study is arbitrary. The study is a signifier, or token. A yacc parser says, "hey, this token is a function, hey, that one's an operator." The actual content of the token is not significant; what matters is what kind of token it is.
Everybody should learn at least a bonehead popularized minimum of semiotics (which is all I know, obviously
While we're at it, let's be honest with ourselves: How many of us are going to check Eric Raymond's facts for ourselves -- even to the minimal extent of clicking on the links he provides? And how many of us who don't check the facts are going to run around repeating them? Quite a few, probably. Dammit, I think Raymond's right on the money with this, and I'm confident that he's done his homework -- but I don't have the time to go about proving it. As far as many of us are concerned, Eric has given us a counter-signifier. Some "good spin" to match against the "bad spin". (That makes it sound dishonest, but IMHO if the "good spin" is factual and accurate, then "good" is a perfectly reasonable thing to call it.)
Think about it.
(Experienced sysadmins are a bit of a special case here. They can judge for themselves. The Limbaugh Principle applies mainly to people who are arguing in an area outside of their field of expertise -- I don't recall who it was who said that "every man is gullible outside his specialty", but it's true even of the best of us.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
He was elected, mostly by slandering and slaughtering his opponents,
Slander doesn't depend on guns, much less on dictators. It happens in every election on earth. As for slaughter, now that I think about it, Hitler's goons were armed with sticks and knives. They had very few, if any, guns in the early days. Guns would have made it easier, I suspect, but who can say?
Hitler had enough Nazis in the legislative body to give him power to form laws
Watch those passive verbs. How did they get there? They were elected. Probably they weren't elected very honestly, but again, that's in the nature of elections.
He then dismantled the rest of the government and built it back up to suit him.
And? Again, this was done by political means, with a garnish of terror around the edges; but the terror was not directed at the majority of the electorate. It was directed at fringe groups like Jews and communists, and also at political opponents.
Essentially, what you're describing is what the militias and religious extremists want to do in the United States: Grab power, as "democratically" as possible, and then "fix" the government. What Hitler did was exactly what the gun nuts tell us we should be doing "every twenty years": Overthrowing the government and replacing it with one that vigorously supresses whatever we're feeling nervous about this week. Hitler was not the government until he grabbed power. When Hitler started grabbing power, he was an armed private citizen.
When people talk about "a revolution every twenty years", they always assume that the new government will be composed of them and their friends, or at least their ideological soul-mates. They always assume that it will be a government that they like, and that it will not send goons to kill them in the streets and/or pack them into cattle cars. But you know what? More often than not, when the "armed private citizens" grab power, they do exactly that. When you look back with hindsight, it's easy to say "Oh, the Bolsheviks were a government and look how bad they were!" Well, they weren't a government until they'd grabbed power. Before that, they were, as usual, armed private citizens. They were much less of a majority than the Nazis were, by the way. The government collapsed, a weak but reasonably popular democratic government replaced it (Kerensky et al.), and then the Bolsheviks moved in and seized power. Arms were everywhere, but the Bolsheviks had the will and they had skilled leadership. The rest is history.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Everyone being armed deters violence.
In theory that's true, but unfortunately the theory is based on wishful thinking rather than facts.
The few real-world examples where an armed society is actually polite, are atypical in a lot of ways. For example, the Swiss aren't being deterred from violence by the presence of arms in their homes; they're simply too fat and happy for violence to be appealing. They also have a far more civilized culture than the U.S., which is a hairs-breadth from barbarism at best. There are a hell of a lot of armed societies that are absolute bloodbaths.
It does not deter social unrest.
Please clarify that.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Well, if someone hoses down a high school with the same ammunition, he can expect to catch hell over it, too. Doesn't look like "catching hell" is much of a deterrent, does it?
Must be something else.
Read my post again. I already said that: "none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did."
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Other than that, IMHO most of the rest are a matter of opinion. Actually, Dershowitz' line is a matter of opinion, too -- but IMHO (I have a lot of humble opinions
As for Orwell, if you haven't read Homage to Catalonia, read it immediately. It's way cool and he says even better things about armed citizens in there.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Duh. I knew that :) Yeah, they all do have such weapons -- but if they show up for exercises (once a year for everybody, IIRC) with the seal broken on the ammunition, they catch hell over it. Furthermore, they aren't required to carry their rifles at all times; far from it. The guns stay in a closet or under the bed.
Still, it's valid (none of the above caveats would ever prevent anybody from doing what the kids in Colorado did) and I feel kinda stupid for forgetting about it.
(My information is from La Place de la Concorde Suisse by John McPhee, by the way. If you haven't read it, it's a cool look at the Swiss military, with incidental material on general Swiss history, wine, and scenery. It was written IIRC in the early 80's.)
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
a good definition is they're the same species if they can mate (and produce offspring)
Yeah, I think that is the standard thing, but it has to be viable offspring. But what if they don't turn each other on? What if they're tired, or they have a headache? Even at best, you'll have to wait for the offspring (if any) to reproduce successfully before you've got an answer. It's a lot easier to just compare it to the Archetypical Horse and blow off the details.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Perhaps you could give us some examples of places where everyone is armed all the time and the resultant "...horrifying level of violence..."
The African-bloodbath-nation-of-the-week, anytime in the last ten years. See CNN for particulars. The Balkans (before NATO), ditto CNN. Russia in 1917 and for a few years after. Afghanistan in recent years. Also any place, any time where there's no reasonably strong and stable central government.
Better yet, please name a single counterexample from any place or time in the entire history of the human race.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Cartoonish it may be, but it still happens.
Ugh. How depressing. I mean, if they're "polite" about it, that at least implies that they know there's something wrong with it. It suggests that they're not inhabiting a perfect moral and intellectual void. Of course, IMHO those are the most dangerous, because you can't always see them coming. Being more respectable, they gather a lot more power.
Intelligent and rational don't mean the same thing.
True.
Consider Hitler for example, by any measure the man was a sociopath, his irrational hatred of the Jews is the supreme example of this, but the man had to be a genuis to take the broken nation of Germany and make it an industrial and military power.
I don't know. I think a lot of what he did was just getting everybody moving in the same direction, enthusiastically. Morale is worth a lot, and it still works if it's based on psychotic premises. I often think that psychological manipulation is such a delicate art that you just can't do it in a calculated way, much like playing music (but with more destructive results). Still, I really don't know. If we knew exactly what happened there and how and why, we'd be a lot better off.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Some student said he said that, true. I was wondering if the student was possibly misquoting? But that really doesn't make much sense, does it.
Not that anybody here would know for sure anyway, of course.
I think I was asking more of a rhetorical question than anything else, based on aghast disbelief that people can really be such overt, knowing dumbasses. Then again, these kids were shooting people right and left, weren't they, and that's a bit of a dumbass move to begin with.
What really freaked me out was a quote on cnn's website, from one of the students who escaped:
". . . these guys shot to kill, for no reason.
Note that the second ellipses are not mine; they are there in the article that I'm quoting. That having been said, maybe I'm too sensitive, but it looks to me almost as if the kid is implying that if they were shooting people on the basis of their race, it would somehow make sense. That's weird. Then again, a quote mangled in a hurry by journalists can't be taken too seriously anyway. We don't know what, or how much, is missing where it's elided. Some of the rest of the CNN articles about this are downright incoherent in spots; obviously CNN was in a hurry to get things in print.
Oh, well.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
Last I saw the source (Builder version 1, Delphi 2) the two VCL's were identical ObjectPascal code. Builder can compile ObjectPascal just fine; I've written VCL controls in ObjectPascal and compiled and used them in Builder. At an old job I used mostly Builder but sometimes Delphi, and so I wrote VCL things in ObjectPascal so I could use 'em in both.
The MFC thing isn't true, anyway. As many others have said, the VCL is its own thing from the ground up, based directly on the API.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
If Borland does a port to Linux then I feel they could really shake up the industry.
IMHO yeah, with emphasis. If they'd had Delphi out before Visual Basic (which IMHO is sadly inferior), they'd now own the windows RAD tool market. They may yet own the Linux RAD tool market if they move fast enough. They won't just have a time-to-market advantage, but also a we're-not-Microsoft advantage. And AFAIK Delphi is already very well-liked in massive, hellish, elephantine, necropolistic MIS departments.
If anyone from Borland is reading this, do the port and I will buy an enterprise edition the week it is released.
I've emailed them, and I got a vague response. If they get more requests, maybe they'll listen more closely. IMHO the fact that they've released JBuilder is a good sign that they're on the ball with this.
I don't use C++ Builder any more, except in contract work I do for an ex-employer. I'm not so fond of the RAD thing on the whole. Still, if you are doing RAD, C++ Builder/Delphi are as good as it gets. In particular, the VCL (which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with MFC; I've looked at the source for both) is abstract enough (unlike MFC) that it wouldn't have to be broken very badly on an interface level if it were ported.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
the whole idea of "transitions between species" is rather ill-defined; nature doesn't put up nice neat dividing lines between species.
Yeah, as I understand it, that's what led poor Plato astray. If A is a horse and B is a horse, but they're not identical, why are they both horses when C (a goat, also not identical) is not a horse? Eek! Well, jeez . . . So Plato went through all these contortions trying to kludge a way to postulate a hard-and-fast line between horse and not-horse. In fact, the right way to look at it is that "A and B are pretty goddamn horsey, while C isn't very horsey at all (while still being horsier than a fruit-bat)". That's all you get. Ha ha, you see what you learn from reading a popular book on fuzzy logic? Yeah!
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
. . . one one of them was quoted saying "I hate niggers"
Do people ever really talk like that? It seems so cartoonish. All the racists I've known have been very respectable types and/or loudmouthed pseudo-libertarian morons, neither of which will ever admit it as explicitly as that. They always say "I'm not a racist, but . .
Then again, maybe I've led a sheltered life.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
ALL law abiding adults should be armed at all times.
To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, it's not only out right but our duty.
Would you mind citing where Jefferson said that? Or are you paraphrasing him to the point of semantic alteration?
This is not meant to be a flame. I just have a hard time believing that Jefferson actually said that. The "right to keep and bear arms" is one thing; the obligation to be armed every moment of one's life is another thing entirely. Why would it be a duty anyway? What would be gained? Or is it a disembodied moral imperative?
Of course, even if Jefferson did say it, that doesn't make it true. Nor does it explain the horrifying level of violence that always seems to result when everybody is armed all the time.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
He's mostly known for "discovering" the Ice Ages. Nobody took him seriously in Europe, and he ended up at Harvard where he was received more favorably. I guess you don't believe in glaciation, either, since it's supposed to have taken place so long ago. If that's the case, are you familiar with all of the evidence? It's a bit hard to explain in any other way.
As for Agassiz' racism, I've never heard about that, but I'm not an expert on the man by any means. All I know about him I learned from John McPhee's writings about geology.
Darwin's theory of evolution should result in several transitory fossils being found.
Ummm . . . no. It suggests that such transitory organisms existed at some point, but a theory of natural selection makes absolutely no predictions about which fossils must necessarily survive until the 20th century, or which surviving fossils must be found. If such fossils have not at this point been found, that does not prove that they don't exist. I never heard of Columbine High School until this morning. So what? It existed anyway.
I really don't know whether fossils of that sort have been found or not, because I don't follow paleontology very closely.
Finally: Like a lot of theories, evolution is the best explanation that we have for the facts available to us. It makes a hell of a lot of sense. Also like all theories, it's probably not perfect. Do you know how many theories have come and gone trying to explain the building of mountains? The one we've got now looks pretty good, and I'm betting that it will turn out to have been substantially accurate, but no responsible geologist will tell you that he knows the absolute and final truth about it. This is where religion and science part ways. Religion demands a "final truth"; science does not. This is where creationists are coming from when they criticize evolution: They see a discrepancy somewhere, and they conclude that therefore the theory is not the absolute final truth. As religion, evolution is therefore unacceptable. So they reject it. The problem is that it isn't meant to be religion. It's science. Scientists aren't looking for an infallible moral compass, they're just trying to explain what they've observed as best they can.
Evolution fits the evidence reasonably well, while creationism requires us to ignore a massive body of evidence. As for me, I'll go with the one that doesn't ask me to forget half of what I know.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
It's the queers! They're in it with the aliens! They're building landing strips for gay martians!
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"