Countless means literally "without count". Magnitude has no bearing on it except insomuch as it may affect how practical it might be to count it in the first place.
Consider that if X < Y, and Y is not too many to count, then X cannot actually be too many to count either.
For example, while the number of breaths you will have taken in your lifetime before you die can easily be said to be countless... that number is certain to be far less than, for example, the number of times a cesium 133 atom oscillates in one second, the number of which is the basis for the definition of 1 second itself (unless you live to be way over 400 years old). How can you argue that something which has been specifically been counted is countless, and how can you argue that something which has simply never been counted or will be counted, but is much less than that, be "too many to count"?
The definitions you cite are more for the word uncountable than countless, despite the fact that they may have come from a dictionary.
People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work, and at least 3/4 of the time, trying to port documents that are created in Office between it and Open/LibreOffice is only going to lead to gratuitous quantities of pain as formatting gets fucked all to hell.
Enforcement would make an enormous difference, but one big reason that enforcement isn't as strong on cyclists in the first place is because it is generally more work to hold a cyclist accountable for infractions... a license would remedy that because it is, in principle at least. traceable to a particular person who lives at a particular address, just as a drivers license is.
The number of adult cyclists that have a valid drivers license and have at least at one time known the rules of the road sufficiently well to obtain a license seems immaterial to the number of adult cyclists that apparently have the foggiest idea that the same rules that apply to cars apply to them as well (things like one-way signs, stop signs, red lights.... really basic stuff).
While a license doesn't ensure they will necessarily follow all of the rules, it assures that they at least know they are expected to follow them, and potentially provides an avenue of holding them accountable when they do not.
And *THAT*, which I've emphasized above, is the problem.... one that a cyclist license would at least have a chance at trying to prevent. And to the extent that it didn't stop people from ignoring the rules, it would provide a mechanism for holding them accountable if they are caught.
This was all out long before Jobs died... long before Woz even left Apple, for that matter.
If it hadn't been for Jobs, the Apple computer company may not have ever existed, but that isn't because Jobs helped design the computer, it is because Steve Jobs, Wozniak's good friend at the time, had the business savvy that Woz lacked to make it commercially successful.
Jobs played a pivitol role in the creation of the company, but not the computer.
I've come to believe that cyclists should require a license to use public roads, if for no other reason than to ensure that the cyclist is at least aware that they are subject to all of the same laws that cars are, because at least half of the time, it really doesn't seem to me like cyclists have a clue. Make the minimum age on it low enough that it not impractical for kids to ride on the roads (once they are old enough to do it safely), but old enough that you can have some kind of statistical assurance they would be able to do so competently in the first place. Maybe age 12 or something. Before that age, they can only cycle on private property or bicycle paths.
No offense meant to those who cycle and actually play it by the book, and follow all the rules of the road correctly.... I know that there are a lot of you out there, but there's also one helluvalot of people who cycle who apparently can't be bothered to care. A license would at least ensure a minimum education standard so that the person should know what to do, and would also provide a certain amount of accountability.
Against my own better judgement, I am going to respond here. Last time. Really, I'm done.
Yes, that is what I said.... but you allege that I am proclaiming that God somehow forced this kind of thing out of Pharoah against his free will, but I did not say that.
I said that Pharoah strengthened his own resolve to continue to defy God as his direct response to the things God had done. While that can readily be described as God doing something to Pharoah (God caused the plagues, the plagues as a source of adversity strengthened Pharoah's resolve to fight God, thus God harden's Pharoah's heart from that perspective), it certainly isn't an example of God poking around with Pharoah's free will.
You allege that somehow this interpretation is implausible because it talks about hardening of Pharoah's heart before God did anything at all, but the only time the text actually says that before the plagues is when God is proclaiming prophetically that is what he will do after the plagues start to hit. When God is saying that he will be hardening Pharoah's heart earlier, while no adversity has happened yet, God, being omniscient, knows how things are going to play out even before anything starts, and tells Moses this to prepare him for the worst, so that he does not get discouraged when it happens.
Foreknowledge does not necessarily imply active manipulation (it *CAN* sometimes imply that in human experience, but it does not necessarily mean that such manipulation happened), so God proclaiming how Pharoah was going to react does not inherently mean that God was mucking around with free will.
The issue of resolving God's foreknowledge of the future with the existence of free will is extraordinarily complicated, and I am not going to even pretend that I have all the answers. What follows is my own best attempt at it.
You can sometimes exactly predict how somebody you know very well is going to respond to something that you do long before you do it, that does not mean that you are meddling with their mental states either. The only difference between humans and God in that respect is that while there might be some chance that a human prediction could be wrong, God wouldn't be, and the only reason God wouldn't be is because he knows everything, not because he determines the outcome. That one might liken such foreknowledge to somehow fixing what future events are going to unfold is only a manifestation of our inability to comprehend how God can know with certainty something that appears to us to not be knowable.
Actually, you haven't been very detailed at all on why you think my explanation isn't plausible beyond stating that the verses themselves and how those verses read to you.
While this offered a decent explanation for why you think what you do, you haven't offered any sort of explanation for the implausibility of what I have suggested, beyond that it simply doesn't support your theory that God is actually evil or a "raging douchenozzle", to use your own words.
You originally alleged that God was not good because of what he did to Pharoah. and then basically proceed to allege that your interpretation of what he did to Pharoah is the only plausible one, which supports your original supposition that God was actually being evil in those sections of the Bible.
Go ahead and believe whatever you want. I'm done here.
I already answered that question... as I said, God hardening Pharoah's heart wasn't changing his mental state, it was simply forcing to the surface something that was actually already there. God was involved directly in the hardening of Pharoah's heart insomuch as God's actions that had already occurred had given Pharoah the motivation to strengthen his own resolve to continue to defy God. It is not unheard of, after all, for adversity to strengthen resolve... since God was the source of Pharoah's adversity, then to that same extent, God indeed did harden Pharoah's heart. but not in the sense that God directly affected Pharoah's ability to make a free-willed choice.
Of course, when I last offered this explanation, you pronounced it as a "stretch", and decided to ignore that I had ever even said it.
I'm not actually angry.... a little annoyed, perhaps, because you represented yourself as someone who may have sincerely wanted some kind of an explanation and when one is given, you discarded it, substituted your own, and did nothing less than basically congratulate yourself on being right, while challenging me to respond to your own assumptions that completely contradicted what I said.
That's not a debate, that's just deciding what you want to think and ignoring any view that differs from it.
I already said how god hardening Pharoah's heart was *NOT* altering Pharoah's mental state.... *YOU* have chosen to reject that analysis, and then proceed to question me about matters that are completely ignoring the point that I said in the first place.
If you are going to dismiss anything that I might say which could otherwise substantiate my position by blindly calling it some sort of "stretch" and discarding it as though it had never been submitted in the first place, that is not a debate... it is simply you having made up your own mind on what you want to believe and merely pretending to be interested in hearing alternative points so that you can shoot them down by repeatedly claiming that your interpretation can be the only possible valid one.
I offered an explanation for what happened in Pharoah's case, but you claimed it was a "stretch", without really offering any basis as to why that was an unreasonable conclusion, and then proffered your own interpretation that served no apparent purpose but to simply almost blindly contradict what I said.
Don't pretend like it's somehow my responsibility to convince you... you are responsible for what you believe in, not me.
The hardening of Pharoah's heart in Exodus is not God interfering with Pharoah's free will, it is God actually pushing Pharoah to act as he truly intends. Had God not done that, Pharoah may have released the Israelites sooner, but would have done so only because of mounting pressure caused by the plagues, not because Pharoah's resolve to defy God's will had actually been broken.
Creates humans in His image, gives them free will, and then punish the fuck out of them for using it.
God doesn't punish us for using our free will to defy him... the "punishment" is separation from God, which is what the person chose to do. Doing anything else would not be respectful of that person's free will. That this might somehow be unpleasant and perceived of as punishment is simply a manifestation of the fact that by being separated from God, one is not fulfilling their ultimate purpose for existing in the first place.
The algorithm is new... or at least it's one I've never seen before, and I've been a fairly avid follower of game programming algorithms since the early 1990's, and reading rec.games.programmer every single day.
Using steering behaviors or a physics engine to separate randomly generated rooms is a different approach from anything I've ever seen for dungeon generation.
I'm not convinced that the approach is necessarily superior to anything else that has been done so far, however. It is innovative, yes... interesting, even. Useful? I'm not so sure about that.
God didn't make Pharaoh do or say anything that was not already there... the notion of hardening the Pharoah's heart does not suggest that God revoked the Pharoah's free will or somehow made him say no to Moses, but more like forcing him to act out on what was already there. God forced the Pharoah's hand, as it were, but didn't cause the Pharoah to do anything that wasn't already in his heart.
While one might criticize God for deliberately "poking the bear", as it were, if He had not done so, it can be argued that the Pharoah would have only released the Hebrews earlier than he did due to mounting pressure from the plagues, and not because the Pharoah's resolve to defy the so-called God of Moses had been finally broken.
That's not not picking up kids when they're learning to walk, that's like kicking your kids over when they're trying to walk then punishing them for failing to walk.
Bad comparison, because God does not voluntarily cause evil to happen, it is allowed to happen because it is a consequence of man's abandonment of God, and if God simply spared us from all of the repercussions of that choice, however far more etxreme they might be than man might have imagined before turning away from God, then there would not have been any point in giving man a free will in the first place.
Epicurus was about 3rd century BC.... well after the founding of Judaism.
However, the problems with it is that it presupposes a moral absolute that if God were truly good, and both willing and able to prevent evil, then He would. But is such a moral absolute justified as necessarily being true? Consider, does a parent who watches as their child struggles learning to walk instead of holding them up as they go necessarily hate their children?
Epicurus also fails to acknowledge that preventing evil thoughts, intentions, or consequences carries an unavoidable implication of denying free will.
AIDS being God's revenge on homosexuals is not actually a fundamentalist Christian belief.
The fundamentalist Christian view is that disease, all disease, exists because of man's rebellion from God. This is alleged to be not so much revenge on God's part because you can't blame a fire for not keeping you warm if you don't stay near it in the first place.
No.... you have it backwards again. It's not so much the strength of your math skills that helps you code better, it's how much you actually learn about math in the first place that helps you code better.
Discrete mathematics is as foundational to programming and computer science in general as exercise is to being an Olympic athlete. Without the former, there is going to be a much lower limit to how good you can become at the latter, whatever the limit of your innate skill happens to be. With the former, you can surpass that limit and become even better at it than you may have ever imagined possible.
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Countless means literally "without count". Magnitude has no bearing on it except insomuch as it may affect how practical it might be to count it in the first place.
Consider that if X < Y, and Y is not too many to count, then X cannot actually be too many to count either.
For example, while the number of breaths you will have taken in your lifetime before you die can easily be said to be countless... that number is certain to be far less than, for example, the number of times a cesium 133 atom oscillates in one second, the number of which is the basis for the definition of 1 second itself (unless you live to be way over 400 years old). How can you argue that something which has been specifically been counted is countless, and how can you argue that something which has simply never been counted or will be counted, but is much less than that, be "too many to count"?
The definitions you cite are more for the word uncountable than countless, despite the fact that they may have come from a dictionary.
That is, generally, what the expression means... that nobody counted, and so nobody knows how many, exactly.
People pay for Office because other people actually use Office at work, and at least 3/4 of the time, trying to port documents that are created in Office between it and Open/LibreOffice is only going to lead to gratuitous quantities of pain as formatting gets fucked all to hell.
Enforcement would make an enormous difference, but one big reason that enforcement isn't as strong on cyclists in the first place is because it is generally more work to hold a cyclist accountable for infractions... a license would remedy that because it is, in principle at least. traceable to a particular person who lives at a particular address, just as a drivers license is.
The number of adult cyclists that have a valid drivers license and have at least at one time known the rules of the road sufficiently well to obtain a license seems immaterial to the number of adult cyclists that apparently have the foggiest idea that the same rules that apply to cars apply to them as well (things like one-way signs, stop signs, red lights.... really basic stuff).
While a license doesn't ensure they will necessarily follow all of the rules, it assures that they at least know they are expected to follow them, and potentially provides an avenue of holding them accountable when they do not.
And *THAT*, which I've emphasized above, is the problem.... one that a cyclist license would at least have a chance at trying to prevent. And to the extent that it didn't stop people from ignoring the rules, it would provide a mechanism for holding them accountable if they are caught.
This was all out long before Jobs died... long before Woz even left Apple, for that matter.
If it hadn't been for Jobs, the Apple computer company may not have ever existed, but that isn't because Jobs helped design the computer, it is because Steve Jobs, Wozniak's good friend at the time, had the business savvy that Woz lacked to make it commercially successful.
Jobs played a pivitol role in the creation of the company, but not the computer.
I've come to believe that cyclists should require a license to use public roads, if for no other reason than to ensure that the cyclist is at least aware that they are subject to all of the same laws that cars are, because at least half of the time, it really doesn't seem to me like cyclists have a clue. Make the minimum age on it low enough that it not impractical for kids to ride on the roads (once they are old enough to do it safely), but old enough that you can have some kind of statistical assurance they would be able to do so competently in the first place. Maybe age 12 or something. Before that age, they can only cycle on private property or bicycle paths.
No offense meant to those who cycle and actually play it by the book, and follow all the rules of the road correctly.... I know that there are a lot of you out there, but there's also one helluvalot of people who cycle who apparently can't be bothered to care. A license would at least ensure a minimum education standard so that the person should know what to do, and would also provide a certain amount of accountability.
Against my own better judgement, I am going to respond here. Last time. Really, I'm done.
Yes, that is what I said.... but you allege that I am proclaiming that God somehow forced this kind of thing out of Pharoah against his free will, but I did not say that.
I said that Pharoah strengthened his own resolve to continue to defy God as his direct response to the things God had done. While that can readily be described as God doing something to Pharoah (God caused the plagues, the plagues as a source of adversity strengthened Pharoah's resolve to fight God, thus God harden's Pharoah's heart from that perspective), it certainly isn't an example of God poking around with Pharoah's free will.
You allege that somehow this interpretation is implausible because it talks about hardening of Pharoah's heart before God did anything at all, but the only time the text actually says that before the plagues is when God is proclaiming prophetically that is what he will do after the plagues start to hit. When God is saying that he will be hardening Pharoah's heart earlier, while no adversity has happened yet, God, being omniscient, knows how things are going to play out even before anything starts, and tells Moses this to prepare him for the worst, so that he does not get discouraged when it happens.
Foreknowledge does not necessarily imply active manipulation (it *CAN* sometimes imply that in human experience, but it does not necessarily mean that such manipulation happened), so God proclaiming how Pharoah was going to react does not inherently mean that God was mucking around with free will.
The issue of resolving God's foreknowledge of the future with the existence of free will is extraordinarily complicated, and I am not going to even pretend that I have all the answers. What follows is my own best attempt at it.
You can sometimes exactly predict how somebody you know very well is going to respond to something that you do long before you do it, that does not mean that you are meddling with their mental states either. The only difference between humans and God in that respect is that while there might be some chance that a human prediction could be wrong, God wouldn't be, and the only reason God wouldn't be is because he knows everything, not because he determines the outcome. That one might liken such foreknowledge to somehow fixing what future events are going to unfold is only a manifestation of our inability to comprehend how God can know with certainty something that appears to us to not be knowable.
Actually, you haven't been very detailed at all on why you think my explanation isn't plausible beyond stating that the verses themselves and how those verses read to you.
While this offered a decent explanation for why you think what you do, you haven't offered any sort of explanation for the implausibility of what I have suggested, beyond that it simply doesn't support your theory that God is actually evil or a "raging douchenozzle", to use your own words.
You originally alleged that God was not good because of what he did to Pharoah. and then basically proceed to allege that your interpretation of what he did to Pharoah is the only plausible one, which supports your original supposition that God was actually being evil in those sections of the Bible.
Go ahead and believe whatever you want. I'm done here.
Well, I've offered what seems to me like an entirely plausible explanation for it... if that's not acceptable to you, that's not my problem.
I already answered that question... as I said, God hardening Pharoah's heart wasn't changing his mental state, it was simply forcing to the surface something that was actually already there. God was involved directly in the hardening of Pharoah's heart insomuch as God's actions that had already occurred had given Pharoah the motivation to strengthen his own resolve to continue to defy God. It is not unheard of, after all, for adversity to strengthen resolve... since God was the source of Pharoah's adversity, then to that same extent, God indeed did harden Pharoah's heart. but not in the sense that God directly affected Pharoah's ability to make a free-willed choice.
Of course, when I last offered this explanation, you pronounced it as a "stretch", and decided to ignore that I had ever even said it.
I'm not actually angry.... a little annoyed, perhaps, because you represented yourself as someone who may have sincerely wanted some kind of an explanation and when one is given, you discarded it, substituted your own, and did nothing less than basically congratulate yourself on being right, while challenging me to respond to your own assumptions that completely contradicted what I said.
That's not a debate, that's just deciding what you want to think and ignoring any view that differs from it.
I already said how god hardening Pharoah's heart was *NOT* altering Pharoah's mental state.... *YOU* have chosen to reject that analysis, and then proceed to question me about matters that are completely ignoring the point that I said in the first place.
If you are going to dismiss anything that I might say which could otherwise substantiate my position by blindly calling it some sort of "stretch" and discarding it as though it had never been submitted in the first place, that is not a debate... it is simply you having made up your own mind on what you want to believe and merely pretending to be interested in hearing alternative points so that you can shoot them down by repeatedly claiming that your interpretation can be the only possible valid one.
I offered an explanation for what happened in Pharoah's case, but you claimed it was a "stretch", without really offering any basis as to why that was an unreasonable conclusion, and then proffered your own interpretation that served no apparent purpose but to simply almost blindly contradict what I said.
Don't pretend like it's somehow my responsibility to convince you... you are responsible for what you believe in, not me.
You appear to have made up your own mind, so there's not much point in discussing this further.
The hardening of Pharoah's heart in Exodus is not God interfering with Pharoah's free will, it is God actually pushing Pharoah to act as he truly intends. Had God not done that, Pharoah may have released the Israelites sooner, but would have done so only because of mounting pressure caused by the plagues, not because Pharoah's resolve to defy God's will had actually been broken.
God doesn't punish us for using our free will to defy him... the "punishment" is separation from God, which is what the person chose to do. Doing anything else would not be respectful of that person's free will. That this might somehow be unpleasant and perceived of as punishment is simply a manifestation of the fact that by being separated from God, one is not fulfilling their ultimate purpose for existing in the first place.
The algorithm is new... or at least it's one I've never seen before, and I've been a fairly avid follower of game programming algorithms since the early 1990's, and reading rec.games.programmer every single day.
Using steering behaviors or a physics engine to separate randomly generated rooms is a different approach from anything I've ever seen for dungeon generation.
I'm not convinced that the approach is necessarily superior to anything else that has been done so far, however. It is innovative, yes... interesting, even. Useful? I'm not so sure about that.
God didn't make Pharaoh do or say anything that was not already there... the notion of hardening the Pharoah's heart does not suggest that God revoked the Pharoah's free will or somehow made him say no to Moses, but more like forcing him to act out on what was already there. God forced the Pharoah's hand, as it were, but didn't cause the Pharoah to do anything that wasn't already in his heart.
While one might criticize God for deliberately "poking the bear", as it were, if He had not done so, it can be argued that the Pharoah would have only released the Hebrews earlier than he did due to mounting pressure from the plagues, and not because the Pharoah's resolve to defy the so-called God of Moses had been finally broken.
Bad comparison, because God does not voluntarily cause evil to happen, it is allowed to happen because it is a consequence of man's abandonment of God, and if God simply spared us from all of the repercussions of that choice, however far more etxreme they might be than man might have imagined before turning away from God, then there would not have been any point in giving man a free will in the first place.
Epicurus was about 3rd century BC.... well after the founding of Judaism.
However, the problems with it is that it presupposes a moral absolute that if God were truly good, and both willing and able to prevent evil, then He would. But is such a moral absolute justified as necessarily being true? Consider, does a parent who watches as their child struggles learning to walk instead of holding them up as they go necessarily hate their children?
Epicurus also fails to acknowledge that preventing evil thoughts, intentions, or consequences carries an unavoidable implication of denying free will.
AIDS being God's revenge on homosexuals is not actually a fundamentalist Christian belief.
The fundamentalist Christian view is that disease, all disease, exists because of man's rebellion from God. This is alleged to be not so much revenge on God's part because you can't blame a fire for not keeping you warm if you don't stay near it in the first place.
No.... you have it backwards again. It's not so much the strength of your math skills that helps you code better, it's how much you actually learn about math in the first place that helps you code better.
Discrete mathematics is as foundational to programming and computer science in general as exercise is to being an Olympic athlete. Without the former, there is going to be a much lower limit to how good you can become at the latter, whatever the limit of your innate skill happens to be. With the former, you can surpass that limit and become even better at it than you may have ever imagined possible.
I have to say that I like the symmetry of your statement much better than how I put it. Nice.
Only if you don't understand what mathematics is.
Google "mathematics is programming", and you'll find no shortage of explanations.