In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.
When I took Mandarin, I went through about 15 different kinds of pens trying to find one that could give a good continuous line while still possessing a good "feel". If a pen temporarily goes dead in the middle (which pretty much all ball points did) then you have to redo your stroke. If you redo your stroke, the professor notices you have an extra stroke on the character, and you lose a point off your homework for that character. Happen enough, and your pen will cost you a grade.
My Chinese penmanship is actually a lot better than my horrible English handwriting, which I find to be kind of interesting. My Chinese isn't good... but it's not hideous, like my English cursive is. When I was in elementary school, I tended to print everything because they told me when I got to middle school, I'd be required to use cursive for everything. In middle school, they told me to use cursive because high schools would require it. In high school, they yelled at me for printing all my essays because it would cause me to fail out of college.
In college, they said either type it on the computer, or print.
"...noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there."
Will it include, complementary, one or two members of the Vista dev team that decided to break the reasonably good UI in Windows XP? Or one of the Office guys that thought getting rid of menus would be a great idea?
Because then I'd pay to have my birthday party there.
>>So, they're implying that evolutionary traits should disappear after a relatively short period? Why? I'd suspect they may fade away over centuries, but not necessarily.
Heck, palm trees still have defenses against dinosaurs. 500 years of anti-moa is nothing.
I give tech workshops. Today (in El Centro) I asked the participants how many of them liked the Vista UI. Guess what? Every single one hated it. In fact, we had to detour to show them how to make Vista's UI look like XP's.
XP's UI + Vista's Internal = Win.
Unfortunately, the idiot children at WinOS development are in love with their hideous monstrosity of a file browser, breadcrumbs, uglyButton, and fucktarded start menu, so they're keeping those improvements in Win7.
That's why it's called an analogy. It IS more important than choosing things for dinner, but the analogy is valid. There is a very important difference between picking between various choices, and failing to choose at all. While I understand it's quite vogue these days to recite trite Hitchens-esque aphorisms like "Christians are atheists for everything but Christianity", by and large these arguments are not rational, nor right, but merely clever-sounding. Next I'll expect you to claim that Occam's Razor proves the non-existence of God...
Not choosing to believe in anything is itself a choice, and not a very good one at that. It essentially a form of philosophical cowardice, that a person is so afraid to be wrong, he fails to decide to do anything at all - which is itself a failure.
I'm reading Cornwall's book Agincourt right now. It's a bit repetitive at times, and has a fictional main character, but otherwise provides a great deal of information on Henry V and his campaign through northern France. I'd never heard of the massacre at Soissons before the book, as well, but it was apparently bloody enough (in real life as well as in the book) to help convince Henry V that he should invade.
Is it? There is indeed a major difference between choosing to believe in something, and choosing to believe in nothing at all. The dinner analogy fits perfectly. We don't call those that eat beef "chicken-atheistic", since they chose to eat the beef. The person who eats nothing at all is the one who goes hungry. And then gets a little bitter and passive-aggressive about it.
The second sentence is very much self-explanatory, unless you're a total theist with no beliefs involving only one/a particular subset of divinities to exist, which would be pretty rare outside of a subset of pagans and hindus, but still, you're likely only a step below the hardcore atheists
Ah, that old adage.
No, there's actually quite a substantial difference between choosing to believe in something, and adopting the code of ethics derived thereof, and choosing to believe in nothing. A person who chooses to eat chicken at dinner is more closely related to the person who chooses the beef, rather than the person who decides he's not going to eat at all.
>>Oh, and Franken didn't 'keep doing recounts'. Franken did not ask for the single recount that happened, it was required by law.
There were a number of "corrections" that got sent in, and they heavily favored Franken.
As far as the disputed ballots went, I spent a while looking at them online (did you?). The official decision disagreed with what was on the ballot (as by my own judging, and by the general public) almost always only for Franken.
Complaining that I didn't link something? You can use Google as well as anyone and pull up the primary sources for yourself. And there's plenty of articles on the subject to go around - take your pick.
Unlike the Florida 2000 election, this one actually WAS stolen.
>>Is there a reason you couldn't work out the algorithm and design first, and then code different parts independently, and just review the other's work?
We'd already worked out the design, and the other bits of the program were trivial (and we did split them up). But the math bits were complicated enough that it was important we both watched it go in so that it was implemented correctly.
Tell Gabe to answer my emails. I'd like the TF2 source code opened up, so that people can make real mods for it instead of the half-assed server mod hacks that they have to use now.
CustomTF extended the life of TF by 10 years, and CustomTF2 could do the same.
He'd get a community game thatno one would have to pay for. Does anyone make money off mods... if they're not bought out by Valve? They're labors of love, and as such, the programmers are often much more productive than people working for money. When you're getting paid for something, it oftentimes ceases to be fun.
The universe is subject to the same rules you would apply to god. God cannot logically exist unless it violates the rules applied to the universe. The usual claim is that the universe could not always have existed, but god could have. This is nonsense; inconsistent, irrational, and could support many ideas other than a god.
This is a common, but bad, argument. Indeed, there are other possibilities. (I also note that atheists nearly always refuse to speculate, since their ideas usually sound even stupider than a deistic creation.) But between a universe autocreating itself ex nihilo, and a universe created by something else, I think the latter option is by far the more likely, and matches our scientific understanding more than ex nihilo autocreation.
Ethics exist for a simple reason: beings that harm each other stand less a chance of survival
Sure. But you can use evolutionary arguments to prove nearly any thesis statement in sociology, so it's relatively meaningless and unscientific. (Evolutionary psychology is not the same as evolution, and is the place where softcore scientists gravitate to in order to be able to write papers without needing any proof whatsoever.) You see, if we were all ruthless oppresors of each other, you could craft an evolutionary theory for that. If we were all hippie communists, you could create a theory for that. It's not science.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about (almost) all people acting as if there was an absolute moral code, even if they don't profess to believe in one. Emotivism is the logical consequence of atheism, with moral relativism being the consequent of that. But moral relativism is logically impossible. Therefore atheism has serious issues, unless it accepts some form of absolute moralism. (Kant is often proposed as a solution to this problem, but even Kant said that if God didn't exist, they'd need to invent him in order for his moral system to work.)
Self-ness? I don't know what you mean there, so I'll ignore that one. It doesn't matter, since even one solid and indisputable fact supporting god would not be the extraordinary evidence needed for such a claim, and I am sure it's anything but indisputable.
It's pretty indisputable that I exist. If you exist, then it should be pretty indisputable to you. This alone causes problems, because you didn't exist before you were born, but now you're a thinking, conscious entity. Therefore there's been a transition from nothingness to existence. And, probably, when you die, you'll transition back to nothingness. This is indisputable evidence that nothingness can transition to self-ness, and so when an atheist claims that when you die, that's it, the evidence is actually against him, since it has already happened to you. The evidence unquestionably supports either the notion of Buddhistic reincarnation or Christian resurrection of the "soul" over atheistic nihilism.
You're not convincing anyone.
Atheists have already decided they know how the world is, and so will not listen to any argument otherwise. It's not rational, nor scientific, so please don't pretend that it is. You sound like one of those fundamentalist Christians who are terrified of rational debate.
Hmm, so you postulate a cause for 'self-ness', the 'universe', and 'ethics', namely God, and then say that because these three exist, God must exist. This is called begging the question. You even do something logically worse than this: you state that someone who does not belief in your favourite cause, must therefore not believe in the existence of your three consequences, under which the existence of the universe itself!
So, your argument boils down to: if you are an atheist you do not believe in the existence of the universe. Why? Because God made the universe, that's why!/i.
To the contrary, if you start with the question, "Why is there anything at all?" the rest are logical conclusions. Logically, atheism implies nothingness.
It is atheists that assume a priori that they know that God doesn't exist - which is called assuming your conclusion.
No, what I said was: the hardworking student will complain and have the OTHER student get an F. Ofcourse the one doing all the work would just get a normal grade.
Well, that'll teach me never to imply things on a slashdot posting:P
I TAed introductory computer science a number of quarters and never once had a student complain to me that their partner was an anchor. Even when it was brutally, painfully obvious from watching a pair work in the computer labs that one of the partners was completely clueless.
Instead, one of the classes went with an alternate route and a massive cheating network popped up for all the anchors.
Ah, so you're the guy that took the Shaka name. =)
Please tell us a bit more about the code, I'd like to look at some hairy neural net code right now, actually.
Hmm, my old UCSD account is no longer active, but various people took our code and made open source projects out of it. I didn't follow it, but maybe this is one of them: http://variant.ch/phpwiki/NeuralNetworksForSpamDetection
The math was the tough part - segmenting 56-dimensional spaces in optimal fashions, essentially.
Lack of proof for IS proof against. In the absence of any proof ether way, the rational assumption is the assertion is false. Something doesn't get to be "maybe" or "probably true" until there is extraordinary evidence for it. As I said in another post, god requires more evidence than any other theory in the history of man-kind to be even a "maybe". How much of that exists?
I'd say that, all things considered, the evidence favors God rather than the reverse.
I think atheism => non-existence of various things, our self-ness, the universe, and ethics. Since all three exist, the balance of evidence is against atheism.
>>There's no point in disproving it - a belief in passive, non-intervening God is, for all practical purposes, the same as atheism, because such a belief does not affect your decisions in any way (if God is passive, then he won't encourage you or punish you for right/wrong moral choices).
Not exactly. He might toss you in hell after you die. He might just not like interfering in this world.
You assume the hardworking student will just let that happen... that's not my experience (i had 4 years of compsci study where every programming course was done in pairs. This was in the late 80's). When one of the pair was slacking, the other one tended to either do the same (and both failed the exercise), or just do everything himself and complain to the assistents about it, generally leaving the other with an F.
Uh, no. You really think the hardworking student is going to allow himself to get an F? You forget that our teachers have been exposing kids to this collaborative stuff since 1st grade now, hell, including peer teaching, in which the teacher explains something to the class, and then the smart kids explain it to their not-so-smart friends. They won't complain to their TA, they'll just roll their eyes and do all the work, like they're used to.
Speaking from personal experience, teachers love pair programming because it halves the amount of homework they have to grade, and because if you have limited seats in a computer lab, you can squeeze more people in.
That said, I actually do like doing pair programming.
But pair programming is only useful when both people already know how to program (you're not towing an anchor), but you're doing something complicated enough you're worried about bugs. In my neural nets class, the math was so hairy that Bob Boyer and I really had to go over each line of code in order to make sure it was correct. I don't think either of us would have been able to do it on our own (or at least, not without a lot of pain). Our work's been used in various open source spam filters and referenced in patent applications, so it's pretty cool. =)
First of all: how many ballots could you have tampered with anyway? What if you had 20 friends helping in other polling stations? Enough to sway the outcome? I find that very hard to believe.
*Cough*Al Franken*Cough*
You just keep doing recounts. If your team is willing to break the law and the other team isn't, you can move the vote enough in one direction to overcome a few thousand vote gap.
If you've investigated the matter at all, it's quite obvious he was fraudulently elected. Not fake-fraudlently like what people claim with Bush, but actual fraud. His lawyer he hired for the recount process is known for rigging elections, the statistical likelyhood of every recount moving votes only in his direction is incredibly implausible if true, and the official decisions on the disputed ballots tended only in one way. The local newspaper scanned them and put them online, and the only times the officials disagreed with the general public... was FOR Al Franken.
But since we have a Democrat-controlled government, there won't be an inquest. Just celebration, because they're filabuster-proof.
It takes a modern computer far less than six days to computationally model the behavior of the large belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using Newton's law of gravitation.
If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop.
If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
Well, there you go. It took you less than six days. =)
You misunderstand communism, then, or at least are confusing it with socialism. Communism, at its heart, is a centrally controlled economy where the government determines where you work, how much you earn, etc. The bits about egalitarianism, holding properties in common, and the doing away with money are essentially window dressing, and do not actually happen in any communist societies.
Someone ends up owning the farms, making decisions about what to grow, and who can or cannot leave the farm, and it's certainly not the peasants that run them. And when you have one guy that can tell another guy what he has to do with his life, that's not egalitarianism, that's tyranny worse than anything that "The Bush Administration" (!?) ever did.
It's also not coincidental that all communism regimes end up this way, as tyranny is a necessary element in getting a centrally planned economy to work.
"Socialism" like you have in the Scandinavian countries is not the Socialism of Marx, but rather the replacement of the free market with government-run enterprises. The US Postal Service is a socialist enterprise, for example.
>>The great creative flourishing of Soviet art came to an unfortunate end with Stalin
You say that like it was an accident.
All communist regimes end up being dictatorial by nature (if people do what they want, it's called capitalism). Look at Mao and his blossoming of a thousand flowers for another great example of this.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.
When I took Mandarin, I went through about 15 different kinds of pens trying to find one that could give a good continuous line while still possessing a good "feel". If a pen temporarily goes dead in the middle (which pretty much all ball points did) then you have to redo your stroke. If you redo your stroke, the professor notices you have an extra stroke on the character, and you lose a point off your homework for that character. Happen enough, and your pen will cost you a grade.
My Chinese penmanship is actually a lot better than my horrible English handwriting, which I find to be kind of interesting. My Chinese isn't good... but it's not hideous, like my English cursive is. When I was in elementary school, I tended to print everything because they told me when I got to middle school, I'd be required to use cursive for everything. In middle school, they told me to use cursive because high schools would require it. In high school, they yelled at me for printing all my essays because it would cause me to fail out of college.
In college, they said either type it on the computer, or print.
So it just goes to show you...
"...noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there."
Will it include, complementary, one or two members of the Vista dev team that decided to break the reasonably good UI in Windows XP? Or one of the Office guys that thought getting rid of menus would be a great idea?
Because then I'd pay to have my birthday party there.
Oh, yes.
>>So, they're implying that evolutionary traits should disappear after a relatively short period? Why? I'd suspect they may fade away over centuries, but not necessarily.
Heck, palm trees still have defenses against dinosaurs. 500 years of anti-moa is nothing.
>>I don't know why so many people hate vista
I give tech workshops. Today (in El Centro) I asked the participants how many of them liked the Vista UI. Guess what? Every single one hated it. In fact, we had to detour to show them how to make Vista's UI look like XP's.
XP's UI + Vista's Internal = Win.
Unfortunately, the idiot children at WinOS development are in love with their hideous monstrosity of a file browser, breadcrumbs, uglyButton, and fucktarded start menu, so they're keeping those improvements in Win7.
Adding them all together, it still doesn't reach $100B.
No Rave for you, Dr. Jones!
That's why it's called an analogy. It IS more important than choosing things for dinner, but the analogy is valid. There is a very important difference between picking between various choices, and failing to choose at all. While I understand it's quite vogue these days to recite trite Hitchens-esque aphorisms like "Christians are atheists for everything but Christianity", by and large these arguments are not rational, nor right, but merely clever-sounding. Next I'll expect you to claim that Occam's Razor proves the non-existence of God...
Not choosing to believe in anything is itself a choice, and not a very good one at that. It essentially a form of philosophical cowardice, that a person is so afraid to be wrong, he fails to decide to do anything at all - which is itself a failure.
I'm reading Cornwall's book Agincourt right now. It's a bit repetitive at times, and has a fictional main character, but otherwise provides a great deal of information on Henry V and his campaign through northern France. I'd never heard of the massacre at Soissons before the book, as well, but it was apparently bloody enough (in real life as well as in the book) to help convince Henry V that he should invade.
Is it? There is indeed a major difference between choosing to believe in something, and choosing to believe in nothing at all. The dinner analogy fits perfectly. We don't call those that eat beef "chicken-atheistic", since they chose to eat the beef. The person who eats nothing at all is the one who goes hungry. And then gets a little bitter and passive-aggressive about it.
The second sentence is very much self-explanatory, unless you're a total theist with no beliefs involving only one/a particular subset of divinities to exist, which would be pretty rare outside of a subset of pagans and hindus, but still, you're likely only a step below the hardcore atheists
Ah, that old adage.
No, there's actually quite a substantial difference between choosing to believe in something, and adopting the code of ethics derived thereof, and choosing to believe in nothing. A person who chooses to eat chicken at dinner is more closely related to the person who chooses the beef, rather than the person who decides he's not going to eat at all.
Let's be fair - you're only slightly less atheistic than Dawkins
That's... what?
>>Oh, and Franken didn't 'keep doing recounts'. Franken did not ask for the single recount that happened, it was required by law.
There were a number of "corrections" that got sent in, and they heavily favored Franken.
As far as the disputed ballots went, I spent a while looking at them online (did you?). The official decision disagreed with what was on the ballot (as by my own judging, and by the general public) almost always only for Franken.
Complaining that I didn't link something? You can use Google as well as anyone and pull up the primary sources for yourself. And there's plenty of articles on the subject to go around - take your pick.
Unlike the Florida 2000 election, this one actually WAS stolen.
>>Is there a reason you couldn't work out the algorithm and design first, and then code different parts independently, and just review the other's work?
We'd already worked out the design, and the other bits of the program were trivial (and we did split them up). But the math bits were complicated enough that it was important we both watched it go in so that it was implemented correctly.
Tell Gabe to answer my emails. I'd like the TF2 source code opened up, so that people can make real mods for it instead of the half-assed server mod hacks that they have to use now.
CustomTF extended the life of TF by 10 years, and CustomTF2 could do the same.
He'd get a community game thatno one would have to pay for. Does anyone make money off mods... if they're not bought out by Valve? They're labors of love, and as such, the programmers are often much more productive than people working for money. When you're getting paid for something, it oftentimes ceases to be fun.
The universe is subject to the same rules you would apply to god. God cannot logically exist unless it violates the rules applied to the universe. The usual claim is that the universe could not always have existed, but god could have. This is nonsense; inconsistent, irrational, and could support many ideas other than a god.
This is a common, but bad, argument. Indeed, there are other possibilities. (I also note that atheists nearly always refuse to speculate, since their ideas usually sound even stupider than a deistic creation.) But between a universe autocreating itself ex nihilo, and a universe created by something else, I think the latter option is by far the more likely, and matches our scientific understanding more than ex nihilo autocreation.
Ethics exist for a simple reason: beings that harm each other stand less a chance of survival
Sure. But you can use evolutionary arguments to prove nearly any thesis statement in sociology, so it's relatively meaningless and unscientific. (Evolutionary psychology is not the same as evolution, and is the place where softcore scientists gravitate to in order to be able to write papers without needing any proof whatsoever.) You see, if we were all ruthless oppresors of each other, you could craft an evolutionary theory for that. If we were all hippie communists, you could create a theory for that. It's not science.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about (almost) all people acting as if there was an absolute moral code, even if they don't profess to believe in one. Emotivism is the logical consequence of atheism, with moral relativism being the consequent of that. But moral relativism is logically impossible. Therefore atheism has serious issues, unless it accepts some form of absolute moralism. (Kant is often proposed as a solution to this problem, but even Kant said that if God didn't exist, they'd need to invent him in order for his moral system to work.)
Self-ness? I don't know what you mean there, so I'll ignore that one. It doesn't matter, since even one solid and indisputable fact supporting god would not be the extraordinary evidence needed for such a claim, and I am sure it's anything but indisputable.
It's pretty indisputable that I exist. If you exist, then it should be pretty indisputable to you. This alone causes problems, because you didn't exist before you were born, but now you're a thinking, conscious entity. Therefore there's been a transition from nothingness to existence. And, probably, when you die, you'll transition back to nothingness. This is indisputable evidence that nothingness can transition to self-ness, and so when an atheist claims that when you die, that's it, the evidence is actually against him, since it has already happened to you. The evidence unquestionably supports either the notion of Buddhistic reincarnation or Christian resurrection of the "soul" over atheistic nihilism.
You're not convincing anyone.
Atheists have already decided they know how the world is, and so will not listen to any argument otherwise. It's not rational, nor scientific, so please don't pretend that it is. You sound like one of those fundamentalist Christians who are terrified of rational debate.
Hmm, so you postulate a cause for 'self-ness', the 'universe', and 'ethics', namely God, and then say that because these three exist, God must exist. This is called begging the question. You even do something logically worse than this: you state that someone who does not belief in your favourite cause, must therefore not believe in the existence of your three consequences, under which the existence of the universe itself!
So, your argument boils down to: if you are an atheist you do not believe in the existence of the universe. Why? Because God made the universe, that's why!/i.
To the contrary, if you start with the question, "Why is there anything at all?" the rest are logical conclusions. Logically, atheism implies nothingness.
It is atheists that assume a priori that they know that God doesn't exist - which is called assuming your conclusion.
No, what I said was: the hardworking student will complain and have the OTHER student get an F. Ofcourse the one doing all the work would just get a normal grade.
Well, that'll teach me never to imply things on a slashdot posting :P
I TAed introductory computer science a number of quarters and never once had a student complain to me that their partner was an anchor. Even when it was brutally, painfully obvious from watching a pair work in the computer labs that one of the partners was completely clueless.
Instead, one of the classes went with an alternate route and a massive cheating network popped up for all the anchors.
Nice nickname!
Ah, so you're the guy that took the Shaka name. =)
Please tell us a bit more about the code, I'd like to look at some hairy neural net code right now, actually.
Hmm, my old UCSD account is no longer active, but various people took our code and made open source projects out of it. I didn't follow it, but maybe this is one of them:
http://variant.ch/phpwiki/NeuralNetworksForSpamDetection
The math was the tough part - segmenting 56-dimensional spaces in optimal fashions, essentially.
Lack of proof for IS proof against. In the absence of any proof ether way, the rational assumption is the assertion is false. Something doesn't get to be "maybe" or "probably true" until there is extraordinary evidence for it. As I said in another post, god requires more evidence than any other theory in the history of man-kind to be even a "maybe". How much of that exists?
I'd say that, all things considered, the evidence favors God rather than the reverse.
I think atheism => non-existence of various things, our self-ness, the universe, and ethics. Since all three exist, the balance of evidence is against atheism.
>>There's no point in disproving it - a belief in passive, non-intervening God is, for all practical purposes, the same as atheism, because such a belief does not affect your decisions in any way (if God is passive, then he won't encourage you or punish you for right/wrong moral choices).
Not exactly. He might toss you in hell after you die. He might just not like interfering in this world.
You assume the hardworking student will just let that happen... that's not my experience (i had 4 years of compsci study where every programming course was done in pairs. This was in the late 80's). When one of the pair was slacking, the other one tended to either do the same (and both failed the exercise), or just do everything himself and complain to the assistents about it, generally leaving the other with an F.
Uh, no. You really think the hardworking student is going to allow himself to get an F? You forget that our teachers have been exposing kids to this collaborative stuff since 1st grade now, hell, including peer teaching, in which the teacher explains something to the class, and then the smart kids explain it to their not-so-smart friends. They won't complain to their TA, they'll just roll their eyes and do all the work, like they're used to.
Speaking from personal experience, teachers love pair programming because it halves the amount of homework they have to grade, and because if you have limited seats in a computer lab, you can squeeze more people in.
That said, I actually do like doing pair programming.
But pair programming is only useful when both people already know how to program (you're not towing an anchor), but you're doing something complicated enough you're worried about bugs. In my neural nets class, the math was so hairy that Bob Boyer and I really had to go over each line of code in order to make sure it was correct. I don't think either of us would have been able to do it on our own (or at least, not without a lot of pain). Our work's been used in various open source spam filters and referenced in patent applications, so it's pretty cool. =)
First of all: how many ballots could you have tampered with anyway? What if you had 20 friends helping in other polling stations? Enough to sway the outcome? I find that very hard to believe.
*Cough*Al Franken*Cough*
You just keep doing recounts. If your team is willing to break the law and the other team isn't, you can move the vote enough in one direction to overcome a few thousand vote gap.
If you've investigated the matter at all, it's quite obvious he was fraudulently elected. Not fake-fraudlently like what people claim with Bush, but actual fraud. His lawyer he hired for the recount process is known for rigging elections, the statistical likelyhood of every recount moving votes only in his direction is incredibly implausible if true, and the official decisions on the disputed ballots tended only in one way. The local newspaper scanned them and put them online, and the only times the officials disagreed with the general public... was FOR Al Franken.
But since we have a Democrat-controlled government, there won't be an inquest. Just celebration, because they're filabuster-proof.
It takes a modern computer far less than six days to computationally model the behavior of the large belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using Newton's law of gravitation.
If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop.
If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
Well, there you go. It took you less than six days. =)
You misunderstand communism, then, or at least are confusing it with socialism. Communism, at its heart, is a centrally controlled economy where the government determines where you work, how much you earn, etc. The bits about egalitarianism, holding properties in common, and the doing away with money are essentially window dressing, and do not actually happen in any communist societies.
Someone ends up owning the farms, making decisions about what to grow, and who can or cannot leave the farm, and it's certainly not the peasants that run them. And when you have one guy that can tell another guy what he has to do with his life, that's not egalitarianism, that's tyranny worse than anything that "The Bush Administration" (!?) ever did.
It's also not coincidental that all communism regimes end up this way, as tyranny is a necessary element in getting a centrally planned economy to work.
"Socialism" like you have in the Scandinavian countries is not the Socialism of Marx, but rather the replacement of the free market with government-run enterprises. The US Postal Service is a socialist enterprise, for example.
>>The great creative flourishing of Soviet art came to an unfortunate end with Stalin
You say that like it was an accident.
All communist regimes end up being dictatorial by nature (if people do what they want, it's called capitalism). Look at Mao and his blossoming of a thousand flowers for another great example of this.