When I watched the Discovery channel special on the Lockheed vs. Boeing contenders for the JSF contract, one of the two was behind schedule because the whole front of the aircraft was bolted to a giant bulkhead machined out of one giant titanium forging, and there was only one mill in the world that could machine this bulkhead in one go. I'm thinking, during a war, are you going to have access to a special milling machine and foundries that can make giant titanium forgings? Will you even be able to get titanium? I couldn't help thinking to myself just how detached from the realities of war the designers of this airplane, and possibly the whole military, is. Your example of the tanks is very apt, as is the proliferance of the AK-47. The cheaper, functional equipment always wins.
To be fair a lot of Unger's writing suffers from being written a 'long' time ago, in computer terms.
It's kind of funny; in one of his books he is explaining how burdensome storing Chinese characters is by pointing out that storing even a chopped-down Chinese character font set would require 2 megabytes. He emphasizes that "that's TWO MILLION BYTES".
Of course 2MB is insignificant amount of storage for many (but not all) computer applications, but it certainly doesn't compare to good old 7-bit ASCII.
Chinese characters are just completely unwieldy for anything but writing calligraphy on wood blocks (and I do admit that they can be read handily once you learn them). It's more storage, more memory, more font scaling issues, more trouble categorizing and searching text due to lack of good alphabeticalness, harder to OCR (I assume), and either harder or impossible to fit into things like typewriters, dot-matrix printing applications, and 7-segment LCD/LED displays. What about Morse code? Care to try to learn a 2000-character version? Most people have enough trouble with the regular <40 character version. What about those handy rubber stamps that are capable of being encoded to any word in the English language just by turning the little wheels? What about those nice, cheap 7-segment LCD/LED displays that can display the whole English language with a handful of simple blinkenleds? I can buy my daughter a set of 26 magnetic letters and she can instantly write anything on the fridge using them. If English was spelled phonemically like Japanese kana, she could spell any word she knows and write any word she hears with just the 40 or so syllabic characters they already have.
As I said before, it's almost a shame that computer technology advanced, because it didn't force script simplification that would have had great benefits everywhere, not just in storage space, or even in computers. For example, at work I do high-powered laser marking for industrial products. My scanner controller only needs ASCII to mark the entire English and many other languages, and all numbers I might need. I don't even know if it would be possible to make a laser marking machine like mine capable of marking Chinese characters, or an OCR system capable of reading them. So what do the Chinese do? They probably use the Latin alphabet in situations like this.
If you, as a society, continue to use Chinese characters except for those areas where they are unwieldy (that is, nowadays, practically everywhere that matters), then why are you using them anyway?
Except that Chinese can predict the spelling of new words somewhat. Probably at least as well as English speakers can predict the spelling of new English words.
Very few topics are shielded in as much bullshit as the Chinese language, and the Japanese language, and that holds whether it's illiterate Westerners discussing it or native speakers. You should read the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. I also recommend Ideogram:Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning for at least some amount of antidote to the bullshit storm.
Chinese characters are not ideograms. The characters are not little pictures. They contain no special amount of semantic content compared to alphabetic word roots. Chinese is not monosyllabic. Each Chinese character is not a complete word. Chinese characters are not indispensible. Chinese does not have to be written with Chinese characters. Japanese not only doesn't have to be written with Chinese characters, it's hard to imagine a language for which Chinese characters would be more unsuited. Chinese characters are more suited to writing English than to writing Japanese. Chinese people don't have to 'sight read'. Chinese characters are not devoid of phonetic information. They contain 'sound' information the same as any other writing. Chinese characters do not facilitate some special level of intercommunication between the different languages that employ them, at least not to any extent further than the common use of the Latin alphabet conveys a special level of intercommunication between the western languages that employ it.
Tons of people will argue with me on every one of these points but one thing IS beyond dispute, however. Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up, characterize in a book index, search, or do basically anything else but paint pretty calligraphy on wood boards. Whatever impediment Chinese characters are to literacy, writing ability, and legibility, they are a billiontyfold worse of an impediment when it comes to computing.
This is what prompted Unger to write his "5th generation fallacy: Or why Japan is betting its future on artificial intelligence". If you can remember way back to the '80s, there was this big wave of computer research about "5th generation computing" which was basically AI research. The Japanese saw what a bitch it was to shoehorn their abortion of a writing system into computing, and so they were grasping at straws and predicting that great advanced AI computers would come out that basically could operate on contemporary Japanese text. It never really amounted to anything, the only thing that happened was Moore's law, which allowed us to store entire multi-megabyte font sets and use 2-byte language encoding, and predictive input methods using regular old 104-key keyboards. In a way it's a shame that it happened, because it only enabled the Japanese to continue limping along with their teeth-gnashing archaic writing system rather than simply adopting one of the very efficient, superior, and easily computable 38-character phonemic syllabary scrips that EVERYONE JAPANESE PERSON ALREADY KNOWS ANYWAY.
That's not hypocritical, and it's not even necessarily religious. It's only you disagreeing with Rand Paul about at what point in biological development a person obtains human rights. Rand Paul supports human rights and freedom, and it's perfectly consistent for him to defend the rights of unborns if he feels they 'deserve' the status of human. Your accusations of hypocrisy and religiosity are just strawmen.
I'm a beekeeper. Bees come in the mail by the pound, packaged in small wooden crates. Imagine a wood crate about the size of a shoebox. On two opposite faces of the box, the sides are not wood, but instead are stapled-on window screen, with no reinforcing ribs or anything. So you can see straight through the box and see all the bees crawling around in there. You can also see their little legs sticking through the screen when they walk around. If you pick it up with your hand touching either of the sides that are screen, you can definitely feel the little bee-legs caressing your hand. The whole thing hums angrily when you shake it or set it down too hard. It goes right through the good ole' USPS that way. The hilarity of it never gets old to me.
Plus, the major consequence of sulfur emissions is acid rain. For a ship that sails across the ocean, does it really matter? Acid rain is a problem when it falls on buildings, people, and (maybe?) crops. Who cares if they cause some acid rain in the middle of the Pacific? Who cares if they generate tons of carcinogenic particulates in the middle of the Pacific? Nobody lives there, and the animals that live there breath water.
I agree and I have always thought DSLRs were a sort of hideous digi-kludge technology. They offend me as a bastardization of design.
The offense is compounded by the fact that if you want a high-end digital camera, you have no other choice...for some reason, DSLRs are the ONLY high-end digital camera design that is offered (other than the Leica and some of the new EVIL cams). If you want to shoot film, you have an infinite variety of cameras, all of which are vastly different, and cause you to approach your subject completely differently, to choose from. If you want to shoot digital, guess what, I hope you like SLR cameras, because that's basically all there is.
Cosmic radiation is imposed on you by the universe, not by the government. There is a difference in principle.
Same thing with analogies to medical xrays...people assume the risk of a chest X-ray because they have some medical problem and they voluntarily decide that undergoing a small amount of radiation is worth the information they will learn from the imaging. Any comparisons between the amount of radiation received from a medical x-ray and the amount of radiation imposed upon one by the federal government as a condition of using modern transportation is a gross category error. I don't care if these machines are the equivalent of 1 billionth of a chest Xray. The government should not be forcing me to be subjected to 1 billionth of a chest Xray. The government is not free to decide how much radiation I shall be exposed to. Or rather, it shouldn't be.
Older Japanese videogames often did not program in enough text fields to translate Japanese words into English equivalents. Japanese words other than jargon are rarely over 4 characters in length and names are typically 2 characters long, so even when the programmers delegated a generous 5 whole characters for name fields, the English translations ended up having chopped-off names. That's why the hero of Chrono Trigger is named Crono in the game. I didn't realize that till years after I played the game.
I agree completely. There needs to be more consequences for the government. If some law is later found unconstitutional, for example, all the people that voted for the law should be fired/shot/whatever. As it is, there is no risk at all. There is no feedback mechanism. Well, there is, but it's too slow, as you've pointed out. Individual politicians will probably be out of politics by the time the next revolution occurs.
This reminds me of my "violence bubble" theory. 'Western' cultures look at more 'violent' tribal societies in the middle east and think that they are horrendously violent and they need to be saved by bringing democracy to them. Through 'Western' eyes, being in a constant state of war, like Somalia, say, or certain groups of American Indian tribes, seems like a terrible way to live. However, on a long enough time scale, the western powers are also at war constantly; they just rest for several decades and then have massive invasion-style warfare that kills millions. Our obsession with peace allows "violence bubbles" to form, in which oppression happens which eventually gets bad enough that revolution happens with massive violence and unsatisfactory outcome most of the time anyway. It would be better if we had constant civil unrest, and citizens acted out violently/'voted from the rooftops' on a regular basis, over small bullshit issues like taxation and well, getting groped at airports. The overall amount of violence would be lower, and we wouldn't have to put up with, for example, being groped at airports during the supposed 'peacetime' stretches. Going against what we were all taught in pre-school, could more violence be the answer?
I have heard the current economic situation between US and China described as "Economic M.A.D.". I found it a telling enough description to bear repetition.
Concealed weapons are perfectly legal and actually rather commonplace in certain places in the US, so even if they see concealed weapons on someone, in theory that is not any justification to stop them and question them any further. In practice, I'm sure that they will use it as justification to stop and hassle people/me, and simply come up with some other reason why I was stopped if necessary.
"He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog."
George Rogers Clark is another famous example of a rich man who spent everything. He basically held down an entire front during the war on his own dime, and died poor.
There was a computer scientist who started a society to patent mathematical proofs and methods, as a way to highlight the absurdity of software patents. He was a big proponent of full, formal program verification and released a bunch of newsletters which were always hand-written. I can't remember his name for the life of me, thus I'm having no luck googling him.
Well, I don't see how you could make abuse of authority it a capital crime within the system itself, because it would be paradoxical for an abusive system to indict itself for abuse.
I think this is where the 2nd ammendment comes in.
Seriously, every single person I have ever seen that was addicted to hard drugs, started out with Caffeine. No exceptions. It must be the most powerful gateway drug out there, second only to water.
I also only buy vinyl now; I have no use for CDs, since CDS are but overpriced, fungible, digital data vessels to me, destined to ripped and then stuck on the shelf.
However, you don't need a special turntable to record vinyl, and it annoys me that people think that you do or that it's even a good idea. All you need to record vinyl is a regular turntable and a soundcard with a "line-in". I've ripped dozens of records with my utterly normal soundcard, the "tape out" from my stereo, a RCA-to-3.5mm adapter and Audacity. I've never seen a decent USB turntable anyway. It's cool to be able to hear the needle-drop sounds at the beginning of records and due to microphonics, I can even hear the turntable cover shutting, and sometimes hear conversation in the room when I was making the recording.
I think it's cool that you can edit dust pops by just deleting that section of waveform; you will never notice the missing milliseconds due to psychoacoustics.
"It's amazing that drone hardware is fairly well designed, but its software design and implementation is so slapdash"
No it's not. I work in a very high-tech industry and exactly the same situation holds. Since none of the engineers understand software, or know what source code is, we end up with very high performance robots and tools with questionable software that is unsupportable due to lack of documentation and source code availability, costing the industry millions of dollars, all because the old-guard engineers think that computers are magic things to be programmed by "others". The irony is that this is the semiconductor industry.
I agree completely. I think that early on, the big aversion to hearing "those words" on TV or movies was that "those words" were for a certain social audience, and probably served some importance social cohesion/in-group signalling function. I know when I was a kid, grandpa used words around me and my dad that he would NEVER use around women, girl children, or strangers. And I my dad never really cared if he found out I was using certain words around my friends, "just so long as he didn't catch me". So at the same time I gained a very diverse vocabulary and also learned when to use it.
My parents' water in Ohio can be lit on fire, although somewhat less dramatically than in the video. It works best if you do it in the morning after the gas bubbles have had a chance to accumulate in the water lines. I once installed a "no smoking" sign in the basement shower.
""Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.""
I accept your logic. Using your logic, God does not exist, using the meaning that you ascribe to "exist".
He is a nonexistent, nonphysical, supernatural being. There, we both agree that God does not 'exist'. I personally have faith that although God does not 'exist' in the physical, natural, observable world, He still "exists" (with a different shade of meaning) in the spiritual hyperverse.
As a Christian, I never really considered that God "exists" in the natural, observable, physical sense. It has always been rather obvious to me that He is a supernatural entity. Considering physical things to be gods is basically nature worship, which does exist, but that's not really the situation with Christianity (or any of the big name religions). It's not impossible to believe that God is nonexistent (by your natural, observable, physical sense of "exist") yet still exists spiritually. In fact it's pretty standard, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
When I watched the Discovery channel special on the Lockheed vs. Boeing contenders for the JSF contract, one of the two was behind schedule because the whole front of the aircraft was bolted to a giant bulkhead machined out of one giant titanium forging, and there was only one mill in the world that could machine this bulkhead in one go. I'm thinking, during a war, are you going to have access to a special milling machine and foundries that can make giant titanium forgings? Will you even be able to get titanium? I couldn't help thinking to myself just how detached from the realities of war the designers of this airplane, and possibly the whole military, is. Your example of the tanks is very apt, as is the proliferance of the AK-47. The cheaper, functional equipment always wins.
To be fair a lot of Unger's writing suffers from being written a 'long' time ago, in computer terms.
It's kind of funny; in one of his books he is explaining how burdensome storing Chinese characters is by pointing out that storing even a chopped-down Chinese character font set would require 2 megabytes. He emphasizes that "that's TWO MILLION BYTES".
Of course 2MB is insignificant amount of storage for many (but not all) computer applications, but it certainly doesn't compare to good old 7-bit ASCII.
Chinese characters are just completely unwieldy for anything but writing calligraphy on wood blocks (and I do admit that they can be read handily once you learn them). It's more storage, more memory, more font scaling issues, more trouble categorizing and searching text due to lack of good alphabeticalness, harder to OCR (I assume), and either harder or impossible to fit into things like typewriters, dot-matrix printing applications, and 7-segment LCD/LED displays. What about Morse code? Care to try to learn a 2000-character version? Most people have enough trouble with the regular <40 character version. What about those handy rubber stamps that are capable of being encoded to any word in the English language just by turning the little wheels? What about those nice, cheap 7-segment LCD/LED displays that can display the whole English language with a handful of simple blinkenleds? I can buy my daughter a set of 26 magnetic letters and she can instantly write anything on the fridge using them. If English was spelled phonemically like Japanese kana, she could spell any word she knows and write any word she hears with just the 40 or so syllabic characters they already have.
As I said before, it's almost a shame that computer technology advanced, because it didn't force script simplification that would have had great benefits everywhere, not just in storage space, or even in computers. For example, at work I do high-powered laser marking for industrial products. My scanner controller only needs ASCII to mark the entire English and many other languages, and all numbers I might need. I don't even know if it would be possible to make a laser marking machine like mine capable of marking Chinese characters, or an OCR system capable of reading them. So what do the Chinese do? They probably use the Latin alphabet in situations like this.
If you, as a society, continue to use Chinese characters except for those areas where they are unwieldy (that is, nowadays, practically everywhere that matters), then why are you using them anyway?
You shouldn't use comma splices.
A
I partly agree with you on all points.
Also: ghoti.
Except that Chinese can predict the spelling of new words somewhat. Probably at least as well as English speakers can predict the spelling of new English words.
Very few topics are shielded in as much bullshit as the Chinese language, and the Japanese language, and that holds whether it's illiterate Westerners discussing it or native speakers. You should read the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. I also recommend Ideogram:Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning for at least some amount of antidote to the bullshit storm.
Chinese characters are not ideograms. The characters are not little pictures. They contain no special amount of semantic content compared to alphabetic word roots.
Chinese is not monosyllabic. Each Chinese character is not a complete word.
Chinese characters are not indispensible. Chinese does not have to be written with Chinese characters. Japanese not only doesn't have to be written with Chinese characters, it's hard to imagine a language for which Chinese characters would be more unsuited. Chinese characters are more suited to writing English than to writing Japanese.
Chinese people don't have to 'sight read'. Chinese characters are not devoid of phonetic information. They contain 'sound' information the same as any other writing.
Chinese characters do not facilitate some special level of intercommunication between the different languages that employ them, at least not to any extent further than the common use of the Latin alphabet conveys a special level of intercommunication between the western languages that employ it.
Tons of people will argue with me on every one of these points but one thing IS beyond dispute, however. Chinese characters are just a bitch to store, encode, print, look up, characterize in a book index, search, or do basically anything else but paint pretty calligraphy on wood boards. Whatever impediment Chinese characters are to literacy, writing ability, and legibility, they are a billiontyfold worse of an impediment when it comes to computing.
This is what prompted Unger to write his "5th generation fallacy: Or why Japan is betting its future on artificial intelligence". If you can remember way back to the '80s, there was this big wave of computer research about "5th generation computing" which was basically AI research. The Japanese saw what a bitch it was to shoehorn their abortion of a writing system into computing, and so they were grasping at straws and predicting that great advanced AI computers would come out that basically could operate on contemporary Japanese text. It never really amounted to anything, the only thing that happened was Moore's law, which allowed us to store entire multi-megabyte font sets and use 2-byte language encoding, and predictive input methods using regular old 104-key keyboards. In a way it's a shame that it happened, because it only enabled the Japanese to continue limping along with their teeth-gnashing archaic writing system rather than simply adopting one of the very efficient, superior, and easily computable 38-character phonemic syllabary scrips that EVERYONE JAPANESE PERSON ALREADY KNOWS ANYWAY.
That's not hypocritical, and it's not even necessarily religious. It's only you disagreeing with Rand Paul about at what point in biological development a person obtains human rights. Rand Paul supports human rights and freedom, and it's perfectly consistent for him to defend the rights of unborns if he feels they 'deserve' the status of human. Your accusations of hypocrisy and religiosity are just strawmen.
I'm a beekeeper. Bees come in the mail by the pound, packaged in small wooden crates. Imagine a wood crate about the size of a shoebox. On two opposite faces of the box, the sides are not wood, but instead are stapled-on window screen, with no reinforcing ribs or anything. So you can see straight through the box and see all the bees crawling around in there. You can also see their little legs sticking through the screen when they walk around. If you pick it up with your hand touching either of the sides that are screen, you can definitely feel the little bee-legs caressing your hand. The whole thing hums angrily when you shake it or set it down too hard. It goes right through the good ole' USPS that way. The hilarity of it never gets old to me.
Plus, the major consequence of sulfur emissions is acid rain. For a ship that sails across the ocean, does it really matter? Acid rain is a problem when it falls on buildings, people, and (maybe?) crops. Who cares if they cause some acid rain in the middle of the Pacific? Who cares if they generate tons of carcinogenic particulates in the middle of the Pacific? Nobody lives there, and the animals that live there breath water.
I agree and I have always thought DSLRs were a sort of hideous digi-kludge technology. They offend me as a bastardization of design.
The offense is compounded by the fact that if you want a high-end digital camera, you have no other choice...for some reason, DSLRs are the ONLY high-end digital camera design that is offered (other than the Leica and some of the new EVIL cams). If you want to shoot film, you have an infinite variety of cameras, all of which are vastly different, and cause you to approach your subject completely differently, to choose from. If you want to shoot digital, guess what, I hope you like SLR cameras, because that's basically all there is.
Cosmic radiation is imposed on you by the universe, not by the government. There is a difference in principle.
Same thing with analogies to medical xrays...people assume the risk of a chest X-ray because they have some medical problem and they voluntarily decide that undergoing a small amount of radiation is worth the information they will learn from the imaging. Any comparisons between the amount of radiation received from a medical x-ray and the amount of radiation imposed upon one by the federal government as a condition of using modern transportation is a gross category error. I don't care if these machines are the equivalent of 1 billionth of a chest Xray. The government should not be forcing me to be subjected to 1 billionth of a chest Xray. The government is not free to decide how much radiation I shall be exposed to. Or rather, it shouldn't be.
Older Japanese videogames often did not program in enough text fields to translate Japanese words into English equivalents. Japanese words other than jargon are rarely over 4 characters in length and names are typically 2 characters long, so even when the programmers delegated a generous 5 whole characters for name fields, the English translations ended up having chopped-off names. That's why the hero of Chrono Trigger is named Crono in the game. I didn't realize that till years after I played the game.
I agree completely. There needs to be more consequences for the government. If some law is later found unconstitutional, for example, all the people that voted for the law should be fired/shot/whatever. As it is, there is no risk at all. There is no feedback mechanism. Well, there is, but it's too slow, as you've pointed out. Individual politicians will probably be out of politics by the time the next revolution occurs.
This reminds me of my "violence bubble" theory. 'Western' cultures look at more 'violent' tribal societies in the middle east and think that they are horrendously violent and they need to be saved by bringing democracy to them. Through 'Western' eyes, being in a constant state of war, like Somalia, say, or certain groups of American Indian tribes, seems like a terrible way to live. However, on a long enough time scale, the western powers are also at war constantly; they just rest for several decades and then have massive invasion-style warfare that kills millions. Our obsession with peace allows "violence bubbles" to form, in which oppression happens which eventually gets bad enough that revolution happens with massive violence and unsatisfactory outcome most of the time anyway. It would be better if we had constant civil unrest, and citizens acted out violently/'voted from the rooftops' on a regular basis, over small bullshit issues like taxation and well, getting groped at airports. The overall amount of violence would be lower, and we wouldn't have to put up with, for example, being groped at airports during the supposed 'peacetime' stretches. Going against what we were all taught in pre-school, could more violence be the answer?
I have heard the current economic situation between US and China described as "Economic M.A.D.". I found it a telling enough description to bear repetition.
Concealed weapons are perfectly legal and actually rather commonplace in certain places in the US, so even if they see concealed weapons on someone, in theory that is not any justification to stop them and question them any further. In practice, I'm sure that they will use it as justification to stop and hassle people/me, and simply come up with some other reason why I was stopped if necessary.
"He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog."
From 1984 by George Orwell
George Rogers Clark is another famous example of a rich man who spent everything. He basically held down an entire front during the war on his own dime, and died poor.
There was a computer scientist who started a society to patent mathematical proofs and methods, as a way to highlight the absurdity of software patents. He was a big proponent of full, formal program verification and released a bunch of newsletters which were always hand-written. I can't remember his name for the life of me, thus I'm having no luck googling him.
Well, I don't see how you could make abuse of authority it a capital crime within the system itself, because it would be paradoxical for an abusive system to indict itself for abuse.
I think this is where the 2nd ammendment comes in.
Seriously, every single person I have ever seen that was addicted to hard drugs, started out with Caffeine. No exceptions. It must be the most powerful gateway drug out there, second only to water.
I also only buy vinyl now; I have no use for CDs, since CDS are but overpriced, fungible, digital data vessels to me, destined to ripped and then stuck on the shelf.
However, you don't need a special turntable to record vinyl, and it annoys me that people think that you do or that it's even a good idea. All you need to record vinyl is a regular turntable and a soundcard with a "line-in". I've ripped dozens of records with my utterly normal soundcard, the "tape out" from my stereo, a RCA-to-3.5mm adapter and Audacity. I've never seen a decent USB turntable anyway. It's cool to be able to hear the needle-drop sounds at the beginning of records and due to microphonics, I can even hear the turntable cover shutting, and sometimes hear conversation in the room when I was making the recording.
I think it's cool that you can edit dust pops by just deleting that section of waveform; you will never notice the missing milliseconds due to psychoacoustics.
"It's amazing that drone hardware is fairly well designed, but its software design and implementation is so slapdash"
No it's not. I work in a very high-tech industry and exactly the same situation holds. Since none of the engineers understand software, or know what source code is, we end up with very high performance robots and tools with questionable software that is unsupportable due to lack of documentation and source code availability, costing the industry millions of dollars, all because the old-guard engineers think that computers are magic things to be programmed by "others". The irony is that this is the semiconductor industry.
I agree completely. I think that early on, the big aversion to hearing "those words" on TV or movies was that "those words" were for a certain social audience, and probably served some importance social cohesion/in-group signalling function. I know when I was a kid, grandpa used words around me and my dad that he would NEVER use around women, girl children, or strangers. And I my dad never really cared if he found out I was using certain words around my friends, "just so long as he didn't catch me". So at the same time I gained a very diverse vocabulary and also learned when to use it.
My parents' water in Ohio can be lit on fire, although somewhat less dramatically than in the video. It works best if you do it in the morning after the gas bubbles have had a chance to accumulate in the water lines. I once installed a "no smoking" sign in the basement shower.
Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude; at least it's an ethos.
""Things that "exist" are observable, and hence knowable, as part of the real world. If something is unknowable in principle, it doesn't exist, by definition.""
I accept your logic. Using your logic, God does not exist, using the meaning that you ascribe to "exist".
He is a nonexistent, nonphysical, supernatural being. There, we both agree that God does not 'exist'. I personally have faith that although God does not 'exist' in the physical, natural, observable world, He still "exists" (with a different shade of meaning) in the spiritual hyperverse.
As a Christian, I never really considered that God "exists" in the natural, observable, physical sense. It has always been rather obvious to me that He is a supernatural entity. Considering physical things to be gods is basically nature worship, which does exist, but that's not really the situation with Christianity (or any of the big name religions). It's not impossible to believe that God is nonexistent (by your natural, observable, physical sense of "exist") yet still exists spiritually. In fact it's pretty standard, IMO.