Good point! One more reason to believe that biotech is the future, not clunky 1940s nuclear or 1800s petroleum tech. The only way to get better cows is to breed better cows, they won't spontaneously generate themselves out of a particle accelerator or a steam engine.
Aren't most of the spam kings either dead, retired, or in jail at this point? I hear it's lonely in Boca Raton these days.
And wasn't there a wave of murders in the former Soviet Union when Microsoft and Time-Warner/AOL decided they were no longer going to ignore spammers? Bunch of free-lance software developers with connections to organized crime found dead, as I recall; the rumor was that the spam kings were eliminating people who knew too much.
Well, regardless of the truth or falsehood of any of these tales and rumors, if corporate pressure has made spamming unprofitable, I'm certainly not complaining. It's about time the f***ing invisible hand did something besides j***ng off US Congressmen.
Methane biogas is the future, baby! Renewable, far more cost-effective than nukes and obviously more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
Sadly, your major point is still right... it's unlikely we can continue to increase our population forever without triggering some kind of extinction event.
I run a secure Linux system. There is no *data* on a USB drive that I need to fear.
Your lack of imagination is refreshing!
I've seen things on the Internet that I'd pay cash money to have erased from my mind... I'm pretty sure there's some things you really don't want to see..jpg files are data.
I've got over 20 years experience and an average of one language a year over that (but I'd only claim to really have half a dozen completely understood).
I've got almost 40 years in, and long ago lost count of languages, operating systems, and hardware environments.
You'll get past this stage.
You will never have any living computer language "completely understood" for any significant amount of time if you are working on anything more meaningful than simply tracking that language's implementation arc in a world of constantly changing underlying platforms.
There's a difference between learning a language and memorizing that language's commands and libraries. There's a difference between knowing a language and knowing which language features are optimally supported on a specific OS or hardware implementation, too.
Learning how you learn is the key, and I think you've already got that. Trying to learn every single thing there is to know about a computer language is a waste of time that could be better spent creating something wonderful. Instead, just learn language weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and google for syntactic boilerplate as you need it.
Hopefully you'll reach a point where you know exactly what you want to accomplish, and how that can be optimally computed in the target execution environment (regardless of whether that evironment is an embedded RISC processor or a browser DOM) and you'll plot the best path to get to that goal in whatever languages are available to you.
Eventually you'll probably start avoiding the use of any libraries at all, and start liking languages with very terse syntax. When you find yourself preferring to write fifty lines of C rather than five lines of perl that calls in 50,000 lines of code from CPAN, look out! If you don't keep that tendency well under control, you might turn into Paul Graham.
To avoid that fate, train yourself to always write code that is maintainable by people who are far less skilled than you are. That way you can delegate maintenance and enhancement to less skilled hands, and go do more interesting things yourself.
We must tax innovative businesses that have low profit margins heavily, so that the taxes will be passed on to the consumer.
Otherwise we'd have to tax the highly profitable entrenched industries (like, um, say OIL COMPANIES) that could easily absorb tax increases without raising consumer prices.
And THAT would be so unamerican it would surely cause the earth to fall out of its orbit and go careening into the sun!
When you design a system to use solid fuel, and that fuel turns liquid, the system won't work any more. This is pretty consistent across most such systems, not just low-end systems like the GE boiling water reactor family (which were specifically marketed as being the lowest-cost design that could legally be built).
Nuclear reactors cannot produce power cost-effectively, so they are subsidized by tax dollars. It reminds me of the TARP bailouts; politicians pissing away my money in order to subvert the free market. And that's what you should be scared of, to answer your other question; a bipartisan bunch of lying bastards who have nearly unlimited access to your money, zero accountability, and who will say whatever you want to hear.
That was a very well written and well thought-out post, but now I'm going to point out the Achilles heel in it.
In a sterile lab, with nice clean white papers, humming machinery, and the ability to measure the circumference of the earth or the wavelengths emitted by radioactive atoms, metric is very convenient - especially for people who find mathematical operations more difficult than moving a decimal place bothersome. It satisfies your (excellently stated) conditions well enough, and is highly appropriate for laboratory science.
But in a sweltering pit, surrounded by creaking shoring, with thunderheads on the horizon - the world of the working man, not the scientist - give me a system with more whole divisors, based on an accumulation of pragmatic measures derived from real use over centuries. I don't want to have to use a fragile, battery-dependent calculator in order to revise a foundation plan that some egghead architect specified incorrectly from his air-conditioned office - when I was an excavator 20 years ago I couldn't even wear a wristwatch for a week without it being pulverised, much less carry a calculator.
Inches, feet, acres, rods, chains, furlongs, dayworks, dozens, all these measures are optimal for the individual citizen-farmer-statesman - the land owning free man of the original American Dream [tm].
And in America, we still respect our tradition of "rugged individualism". Sure, it's kind of a joke nowadays with both major government factions promising to keep standing armies to protect us from ourselves, and local municipalities issuing tickets to people who repair their water heaters without a permit, but don't underestimate how powerful this meme still is among the mass of American citizens. There are many Americans who have never called on the services of a mechanic, electrician, carpenter or plumber their whole lives. I know whole families who have never hired anyone more skilled than a farmhand since their forefathers came to this country 250 years ago.
A "furlong" is one furrow long and it's a pragmatic measure related both to the amount of work a plow team can do in a day (without compromising the health of the draft animals) and to the optimal length of a crop row being tended by humans on foot. Just so with acres, chains, ricks, cords and perches - all of which are usefully related to things like the standardized length of a rod (16'6") and the turning radii of plows and harrows. Feet and inches (and sixteenths, of course) allow thirds and sixths to be expressed as whole units, which is pragmatically optimal when working outdoors with hand tools while covered with sweat and dirt. Read wikipedia's "anthropic units" entry for more information on this.
Given the unstoppable collapse of the petrodollar, the non-specialists may actually be the citizens best prepared for America's future; unemployed people can't afford to hire carpenters, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, etc. but the stereotypical American farmboy can do all these jobs and more.
And that all-American boy uses feet and inches. Because, frankly, they are better suited to his needs. And when he measures the amount of water, gasoline or diesel in the family tanks, he's likely to be using a bright yellow stick, either ten or sixteen and a half feet long, clearly marked in inches.
It doesn't make sense to use a system that is optimal for people who have the skills and tools to convert numbers trivially, and sub-optimal for people who have neither the tools, the training or the proclivity to do complex math. Use a system that works best for the manual laborer in the field, and let the highly educated science johnnies suck it up.
Or, use both systems, each one in its proper place. That's mostly what we do in the USA now, although I'd argue that metric would be better for the kitchen nowadays, since we're no longer hanging our own hams and scalding chickens inside our houses.
The point isn't that nuclear is perfectly safe. It's that it's better than many of the alternatives out there.
Not really. It's only better than coal, and just barely so.
Nuclear isn't even cost-effective without massive taxpayer subsidies, and neither the free market nor government sponsorship can prevent the boom-and-bust cycle of human endeavors from guaranteeing Mr. Burns and Homer will be running the plant sooner or later.
Biotechnology is the future. Coal, petroleum, nukes, even big hydro are all obsolete crap at this point.
I'd rather take the smart path, the shiny futuristic biotech path, instead of continuing to fund clumsy Victorian steam boilers. I know slashdotters like steampunk and muscle cars, but I want better, stronger, faster, cooler stuff. Screw this low tech fission garbage, it's for retro losers with elvis hairdos.
Most of these processes are political and economic, and are fundamentally caused by wealthy sociopaths being willing to do absolutely anything to retain their wealth and power. Some hacking of culture and society seems in order.
Communist revolution seems unlikely to gain the desired result; a politburo isn't any more likely to curb pollution than the plutocrats.
I was hoping for something a little more creative. Perhaps something along the lines of matrix-style virtual realities, so that we could just plug all the dictatorial sociopaths into machines and let them wither away happily, without reproducing, while the rest of us got humanity's problems solved? We could actually charge them admittance and maintenance fees if we hacked their worldview effectively enough... "Be the CEO of Halliburton Interplanetary! Have bevies of beautiful alien slaves in your secret torture chambers! Only 500 capsules available to the highest bidders!" or something of that sort.
What you want is the Mauna Loa CO2 data and the ice core data. From there, you can cross-correlate with dendro data from archeology and historical records of sea heights and other cross-cultural phenomena.
I asked the same question 20 years ago, and a Woods Hole scientist gave me the same advice I just gave you. I had told him I didn't want to see anyone's analysis or conclusions or extrapolations or press releases, I wanted objectively verifiable pure raw data that I could obtain independently.
After two years of careful study, I decided that the data is incontrovertible and the conclusion inescapable. We have modified the Earth's albedo with pollution; the Earth does not reflect as much sunlight as it used to, one of the many symptoms of this problem is a slight increase in global average temperatures.
From that conclusion, I did not proceed to "OMG ONE POLITICAL PARTY MUST HAVE ALL POWER" or "OMG ONLY GOD CAN SAVE US". Instead, I decided that humankind needs to gain control over our carbon emissions and needs to be able to modify the planet's albedo at will.
"Global Warming" is a symptom of excessive pollution. Attacking the symptom is stupid - we need to gain total control over the processes that drive the underlying causes of pollution. Most of these processes are political and economic, and are fundamentally caused by wealthy sociopaths being willing to do absolutely anything to retain their wealth and power. Some hacking of culture and society seems in order.
Find the cheapest single-root wildcard that will let you do at least 2K. Then install it everywhere in the intranet, being careful with the permissions so nobody can easily steal it.
Either get it on a single-year basis or be prepared to do a revocation if it gets stolen before it expires. If you are conscientious with your file and folder structures and permissions, though, and you hire trustworthy techs, it probably won't get stolen. Unless you depend heavily on an OS with lots of zero-days and your site is a high-value target, of course; banks that use IIS are just asking for trouble.
If you never patch your server OSes or firewalls you shouldn't buy certs at all. They'll just get stolen.
I thought phrenology was thoroughly out of fashion since Gould debunked Morton and Broca in "the Mismeasure of Man".
But who cares about that. The Internet is made of cats! On with the cat stories!
Our eight-year-old ginger tabby taught himself to use the toilet. I'm not kidding.
I was wondering why I kept finding the toilet unflushed, and little splashes on the rim. The kids claimed it wasn't them, but I didn't really believe them.
Then one day I walk in, and there's the cat sitting on the toilet. He looks up at me with a perfect "Excuse me, can a guy get some privacy around here" expression on his face and keeps right on peeing.
My dog taught herself to dig up cat feces and eat them.
Have the Chinese demanded back payments for the IP in gunpowder and noodles yet?
I understand that guy Marco Polo owes them some money, too.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity... The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
Maybe your faith and science are. Maybe your dog is painted blue, too, but that doesn't mean everyone else's dog is also painted blue.
Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism are religions that explicitly acknowledge science, and in both cases they encourage practitioners place faith in the scientific method. If you can scientifically prove that some article of either faith is fundamentally wrong, then it can be changed to reflect observed reality.
I have heard that Quakers have a similar trust that a God who gave us an inclination to use our powers of reason and observation will not punish us for doing so. I'm not a Quaker, though, so I can't confirm or deny that.
Scientifically, existence of one counter-example (I am an ordained minister, and a practicing scientist, I do not oppose science, my church does not oppose science, my religion does not oppose science) proves that a categorical statement (religion and science are mutually exclusive) is false.
It is in the interests of both the dogmatic religions and militant atheism to paint science as inimical to religion. It is in the interests of science to refuse to accept this fundamentally wrong, easily disprovable thesis.
Now, if you said most of the Christian faiths in the USA can't be reconciled with science, I'd have to agree with you there. That's a special case, and not general, even though we are talking about the mainstream of religion in America. Precise distinctions may not be meaningful to religious fanatics (Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His) but should be meaningful to scientists.
In before everyone else: there is no such word as 'virii'.
Yes, because pedantry and slavish worship of Tom Christiansen is more important than providing a search-engine friendly way to distinguish between biological viruses and computer virii .
When did computer geeks become completely incapable of basic logic?
We spelled it byte and not bite for goddamned reason, you know.
I'll get modded flamebait, I suppose. Here's a translation for people who can't understand that a separate concept is best delineated by a separate word.
Marklar, because marklar and marklar marklar of Marklar is more marklar than providing a marklar marklar marklar to distinguish between marklar and marklar .
I thought when you were consistently losing market share for years in every market that permitted competition, and your existing monopolized markets were being steadily eroded away, you weren't doing well.
Last time I looked, that was Comcast's ISP business in a nutshell. Maybe that's changed, though? I stopped paying attention about the same time I disconnected their service-filtered worm farm from my house.
Well, they actually said it was technically impossible, and when I offered to do it for free using their existing equipment the tech support management declined to let me speak with anyone who would have the authority to make such a thing happen.
But in fact my entire neighborhood did go over to FIOS - nearly all of them on my recommendation. As did my father's entire neighborhood - we watched the trucks come and go and tallied 'em up (he's retired so he has time for that sort of thing).
That's a damn good reason. Thanks for pointing it out!
Of course, if it hadn't worked "out of the box" you'd have been better off buying a mac... so to some extent you got lucky on the hardware compatibility front.
But hey, as Napoleon said, luck is at least as important as skill.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point! One more reason to believe that biotech is the future, not clunky 1940s nuclear or 1800s petroleum tech. The only way to get better cows is to breed better cows, they won't spontaneously generate themselves out of a particle accelerator or a steam engine.
Aren't most of the spam kings either dead, retired, or in jail at this point? I hear it's lonely in Boca Raton these days.
And wasn't there a wave of murders in the former Soviet Union when Microsoft and Time-Warner/AOL decided they were no longer going to ignore spammers? Bunch of free-lance software developers with connections to organized crime found dead, as I recall; the rumor was that the spam kings were eliminating people who knew too much.
Well, regardless of the truth or falsehood of any of these tales and rumors, if corporate pressure has made spamming unprofitable, I'm certainly not complaining. It's about time the f***ing invisible hand did something besides j***ng off US Congressmen.
Methane is an energy source, and methane from shit can be used to replace fossil fuels.
http://www.google.com/search?q=methane+digester
Methane biogas is the future, baby! Renewable, far more cost-effective than nukes and obviously more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
Sadly, your major point is still right... it's unlikely we can continue to increase our population forever without triggering some kind of extinction event.
Your lack of imagination is refreshing!
I've seen things on the Internet that I'd pay cash money to have erased from my mind... I'm pretty sure there's some things you really don't want to see. .jpg files are data.
I've got almost 40 years in, and long ago lost count of languages, operating systems, and hardware environments.
You'll get past this stage.
You will never have any living computer language "completely understood" for any significant amount of time if you are working on anything more meaningful than simply tracking that language's implementation arc in a world of constantly changing underlying platforms.
There's a difference between learning a language and memorizing that language's commands and libraries. There's a difference between knowing a language and knowing which language features are optimally supported on a specific OS or hardware implementation, too.
Learning how you learn is the key, and I think you've already got that. Trying to learn every single thing there is to know about a computer language is a waste of time that could be better spent creating something wonderful. Instead, just learn language weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and google for syntactic boilerplate as you need it.
Hopefully you'll reach a point where you know exactly what you want to accomplish, and how that can be optimally computed in the target execution environment (regardless of whether that evironment is an embedded RISC processor or a browser DOM) and you'll plot the best path to get to that goal in whatever languages are available to you.
Eventually you'll probably start avoiding the use of any libraries at all, and start liking languages with very terse syntax. When you find yourself preferring to write fifty lines of C rather than five lines of perl that calls in 50,000 lines of code from CPAN, look out! If you don't keep that tendency well under control, you might turn into Paul Graham.
To avoid that fate, train yourself to always write code that is maintainable by people who are far less skilled than you are. That way you can delegate maintenance and enhancement to less skilled hands, and go do more interesting things yourself.
We must tax innovative businesses that have low profit margins heavily, so that the taxes will be passed on to the consumer.
Otherwise we'd have to tax the highly profitable entrenched industries (like, um, say OIL COMPANIES) that could easily absorb tax increases without raising consumer prices.
And THAT would be so unamerican it would surely cause the earth to fall out of its orbit and go careening into the sun!
"The nuclear plant, she is BROKEN."
When you design a system to use solid fuel, and that fuel turns liquid, the system won't work any more. This is pretty consistent across most such systems, not just low-end systems like the GE boiling water reactor family (which were specifically marketed as being the lowest-cost design that could legally be built).
Nuclear reactors cannot produce power cost-effectively, so they are subsidized by tax dollars. It reminds me of the TARP bailouts; politicians pissing away my money in order to subvert the free market. And that's what you should be scared of, to answer your other question; a bipartisan bunch of lying bastards who have nearly unlimited access to your money, zero accountability, and who will say whatever you want to hear.
That was a very well written and well thought-out post, but now I'm going to point out the Achilles heel in it.
In a sterile lab, with nice clean white papers, humming machinery, and the ability to measure the circumference of the earth or the wavelengths emitted by radioactive atoms, metric is very convenient - especially for people who find mathematical operations more difficult than moving a decimal place bothersome. It satisfies your (excellently stated) conditions well enough, and is highly appropriate for laboratory science.
But in a sweltering pit, surrounded by creaking shoring, with thunderheads on the horizon - the world of the working man, not the scientist - give me a system with more whole divisors, based on an accumulation of pragmatic measures derived from real use over centuries. I don't want to have to use a fragile, battery-dependent calculator in order to revise a foundation plan that some egghead architect specified incorrectly from his air-conditioned office - when I was an excavator 20 years ago I couldn't even wear a wristwatch for a week without it being pulverised, much less carry a calculator.
Inches, feet, acres, rods, chains, furlongs, dayworks, dozens, all these measures are optimal for the individual citizen-farmer-statesman - the land owning free man of the original American Dream [tm].
And in America, we still respect our tradition of "rugged individualism". Sure, it's kind of a joke nowadays with both major government factions promising to keep standing armies to protect us from ourselves, and local municipalities issuing tickets to people who repair their water heaters without a permit, but don't underestimate how powerful this meme still is among the mass of American citizens. There are many Americans who have never called on the services of a mechanic, electrician, carpenter or plumber their whole lives. I know whole families who have never hired anyone more skilled than a farmhand since their forefathers came to this country 250 years ago.
A "furlong" is one furrow long and it's a pragmatic measure related both to the amount of work a plow team can do in a day (without compromising the health of the draft animals) and to the optimal length of a crop row being tended by humans on foot. Just so with acres, chains, ricks, cords and perches - all of which are usefully related to things like the standardized length of a rod (16'6") and the turning radii of plows and harrows. Feet and inches (and sixteenths, of course) allow thirds and sixths to be expressed as whole units, which is pragmatically optimal when working outdoors with hand tools while covered with sweat and dirt. Read wikipedia's "anthropic units" entry for more information on this.
Given the unstoppable collapse of the petrodollar, the non-specialists may actually be the citizens best prepared for America's future; unemployed people can't afford to hire carpenters, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, etc. but the stereotypical American farmboy can do all these jobs and more.
And that all-American boy uses feet and inches. Because, frankly, they are better suited to his needs. And when he measures the amount of water, gasoline or diesel in the family tanks, he's likely to be using a bright yellow stick, either ten or sixteen and a half feet long, clearly marked in inches.
It doesn't make sense to use a system that is optimal for people who have the skills and tools to convert numbers trivially, and sub-optimal for people who have neither the tools, the training or the proclivity to do complex math. Use a system that works best for the manual laborer in the field, and let the highly educated science johnnies suck it up.
Or, use both systems, each one in its proper place. That's mostly what we do in the USA now, although I'd argue that metric would be better for the kitchen nowadays, since we're no longer hanging our own hams and scalding chickens inside our houses.
Not really. It's only better than coal, and just barely so.
Nuclear isn't even cost-effective without massive taxpayer subsidies, and neither the free market nor government sponsorship can prevent the boom-and-bust cycle of human endeavors from guaranteeing Mr. Burns and Homer will be running the plant sooner or later.
Biotechnology is the future. Coal, petroleum, nukes, even big hydro are all obsolete crap at this point.
I'd rather take the smart path, the shiny futuristic biotech path, instead of continuing to fund clumsy Victorian steam boilers. I know slashdotters like steampunk and muscle cars, but I want better, stronger, faster, cooler stuff. Screw this low tech fission garbage, it's for retro losers with elvis hairdos.
Communist revolution seems unlikely to gain the desired result; a politburo isn't any more likely to curb pollution than the plutocrats.
I was hoping for something a little more creative. Perhaps something along the lines of matrix-style virtual realities, so that we could just plug all the dictatorial sociopaths into machines and let them wither away happily, without reproducing, while the rest of us got humanity's problems solved? We could actually charge them admittance and maintenance fees if we hacked their worldview effectively enough... "Be the CEO of Halliburton Interplanetary! Have bevies of beautiful alien slaves in your secret torture chambers! Only 500 capsules available to the highest bidders!" or something of that sort.
What you want is the Mauna Loa CO2 data and the ice core data. From there, you can cross-correlate with dendro data from archeology and historical records of sea heights and other cross-cultural phenomena.
I asked the same question 20 years ago, and a Woods Hole scientist gave me the same advice I just gave you. I had told him I didn't want to see anyone's analysis or conclusions or extrapolations or press releases, I wanted objectively verifiable pure raw data that I could obtain independently.
After two years of careful study, I decided that the data is incontrovertible and the conclusion inescapable. We have modified the Earth's albedo with pollution; the Earth does not reflect as much sunlight as it used to, one of the many symptoms of this problem is a slight increase in global average temperatures.
From that conclusion, I did not proceed to "OMG ONE POLITICAL PARTY MUST HAVE ALL POWER" or "OMG ONLY GOD CAN SAVE US". Instead, I decided that humankind needs to gain control over our carbon emissions and needs to be able to modify the planet's albedo at will.
"Global Warming" is a symptom of excessive pollution. Attacking the symptom is stupid - we need to gain total control over the processes that drive the underlying causes of pollution. Most of these processes are political and economic, and are fundamentally caused by wealthy sociopaths being willing to do absolutely anything to retain their wealth and power. Some hacking of culture and society seems in order.
If they are worth looking at, I like to look at them.
Another nice thing to do is make postcards and send them to other people.
Huh. That core must have had some ancillary responsibilities.
I can't shut off the turret defences.
Oh well. If you want my advice, you should just go lie down in front of a rocket. Trust me, it will be a lot less painful than the neurotoxin.
Find the cheapest single-root wildcard that will let you do at least 2K. Then install it everywhere in the intranet, being careful with the permissions so nobody can easily steal it.
Either get it on a single-year basis or be prepared to do a revocation if it gets stolen before it expires. If you are conscientious with your file and folder structures and permissions, though, and you hire trustworthy techs, it probably won't get stolen. Unless you depend heavily on an OS with lots of zero-days and your site is a high-value target, of course; banks that use IIS are just asking for trouble.
If you never patch your server OSes or firewalls you shouldn't buy certs at all. They'll just get stolen.
I thought phrenology was thoroughly out of fashion since Gould debunked Morton and Broca in "the Mismeasure of Man".
But who cares about that. The Internet is made of cats! On with the cat stories!
Our eight-year-old ginger tabby taught himself to use the toilet. I'm not kidding.
I was wondering why I kept finding the toilet unflushed, and little splashes on the rim. The kids claimed it wasn't them, but I didn't really believe them.
Then one day I walk in, and there's the cat sitting on the toilet. He looks up at me with a perfect "Excuse me, can a guy get some privacy around here" expression on his face and keeps right on peeing.
My dog taught herself to dig up cat feces and eat them.
Have the Chinese demanded back payments for the IP in gunpowder and noodles yet?
I understand that guy Marco Polo owes them some money, too.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity...
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
I just use dd to pipe the database partition through gawk.
Maybe your faith and science are. Maybe your dog is painted blue, too, but that doesn't mean everyone else's dog is also painted blue.
Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism are religions that explicitly acknowledge science, and in both cases they encourage practitioners place faith in the scientific method. If you can scientifically prove that some article of either faith is fundamentally wrong, then it can be changed to reflect observed reality.
I have heard that Quakers have a similar trust that a God who gave us an inclination to use our powers of reason and observation will not punish us for doing so. I'm not a Quaker, though, so I can't confirm or deny that.
Scientifically, existence of one counter-example (I am an ordained minister, and a practicing scientist, I do not oppose science, my church does not oppose science, my religion does not oppose science) proves that a categorical statement (religion and science are mutually exclusive) is false.
It is in the interests of both the dogmatic religions and militant atheism to paint science as inimical to religion. It is in the interests of science to refuse to accept this fundamentally wrong, easily disprovable thesis.
Now, if you said most of the Christian faiths in the USA can't be reconciled with science, I'd have to agree with you there. That's a special case, and not general, even though we are talking about the mainstream of religion in America. Precise distinctions may not be meaningful to religious fanatics (Kill them all. For the Lord knoweth them that are His) but should be meaningful to scientists.
Yes, because pedantry and slavish worship of Tom Christiansen is more important than providing a search-engine friendly way to distinguish between biological viruses and computer virii .
When did computer geeks become completely incapable of basic logic?
We spelled it byte and not bite for goddamned reason, you know.
I'll get modded flamebait, I suppose. Here's a translation for people who can't understand that a separate concept is best delineated by a separate word.
Marklar, because marklar and marklar marklar of Marklar is more marklar than providing a marklar marklar marklar to distinguish between marklar and marklar .
Believe me, FIOS only looks good compared to Comcast. It's like saying horse crap smells better than pig crap, really.
I thought when you were consistently losing market share for years in every market that permitted competition, and your existing monopolized markets were being steadily eroded away, you weren't doing well.
Last time I looked, that was Comcast's ISP business in a nutshell. Maybe that's changed, though? I stopped paying attention about the same time I disconnected their service-filtered worm farm from my house.
Well, they actually said it was technically impossible, and when I offered to do it for free using their existing equipment the tech support management declined to let me speak with anyone who would have the authority to make such a thing happen.
But in fact my entire neighborhood did go over to FIOS - nearly all of them on my recommendation. As did my father's entire neighborhood - we watched the trucks come and go and tallied 'em up (he's retired so he has time for that sort of thing).
I just wish some right wing capitalist politicians actually existed.
Well, OK, there's Ron Paul, but I'm not in his district.
Wait, you mean they don't actually need any customers at all?
Just when I thought I had this capitalism thing figured out... wow. Go figure.
That's a damn good reason. Thanks for pointing it out!
Of course, if it hadn't worked "out of the box" you'd have been better off buying a mac... so to some extent you got lucky on the hardware compatibility front.
But hey, as Napoleon said, luck is at least as important as skill.