You could serve the.dll easily enough... somebody will be serving up BackOrifice in an identically named.dll sometime soon, I'd imagine...
As for duplicating the functions, you might be able to do it with Apache::ASP or something similar, but you'd have to do some reverse engineering and hope it didn't do any inherently evil ActiveX tricks. Might be more effort than it's worth, given that there are already plenty of discussion board systems that don't require downloading.dll objects on the fly.
People running Apache are starting to see this junk in their logs:
GET/_vti_bin/owssvr.dll?UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER =4&CAPREQ=0 HTTP/1.1 GET/MSOffice/cltreq.asp?UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=2614&STRMVER =4&CAPREQ=0 HTTP/1.1 This noise gets spewed at websites by IE if you load the latest version of Microsoft Office and turn on the discussion bar "feature".
You'd think sending these GETS to every single web site visited would be unnecessary (since IE can tell if it's connected to IIS, and only IIS is going to have cltreq.asp installed).
I have testified in a court case where the totality of the evidence against the defendant was a single.jpg on a computer that was in a publicly accessible room in a shared house (the defendant's ex-wife almost certainly planted it, and called the cops too). The police had a warrant in less than 24 hours based on the tipoff and they cuffed the defendant before they even started searching.
Your description of what you think would happen is extremely unlikely. Most likely you'd be convicted, unless a very creditable eyewitness actually saw the evidence being planted and was able to identify the culprit in a lineup. If you survived prison you'd be permanently tagged as a sex offender and child molester and your neighbors would be notified where ever you moved.
That's how it works in the USA. Feel free to do some research and verify this for yourself; don't take my word for it.
Um, there are hundreds of options available besides Exchange.
But, if you want to have something that actually embodies the few good features of Exchange without having to accept the fundamentally bad design and poor scalability, you should probably look at scalix.
I'd say throw them all in jail, SPECIFICALLY the users. If you want to kill a problem, you have to control demand, not supply - reducing supply only increases demand Except... that can't possibly work. Incidentally, while you were typing on slashdot I put 100 kiddie porn DVDs in your living room media center and a roll of toilet paper next to the sofa, then called the cops. Can you hear them knocking? They'd like a word with you, pervert. It's why the army isn't deploying their autonomous killer robots, the afghan opium growers would just stencil AK-47 silhouettes on the houses of their enemies and bingo! the army has robots working to further the purposes of drug lords.
Incidentally, I don't think the classical supply/demand stuff you're talking about really applies when the cost of shipping and reproducing goods is sufficiently minimized - as for example in electronically distributed media. I believe that relationship describes lack of producers or distribution creating a lack of physical product.
In the link you kindly provided, Microsoft is not saying "Jet sucks and you shouldn't use it" (although certainly there are people outside MS who are saying exactly that) but rather Jet is no longer supported by Microsoft.
Which is a good enough reason not to have anything to do with it, it really doesn't matter if it sucks or not; nobody should be buying product based on unsupported closed-source software.
A government that claims to be representative and democratically elected certainly shouldn't be trusting elections to a company that is shipping product based on unsupported closed-source software.
...Jet is well known to be massively broken. Still haven't seen any proof of that here... I'm not trying to say anyone is lying, but I'm not going to sign off on "Microsoft says don't use it" until I see a link to microsoft.com to that effect.
If you don't think it is, you've never tried to do anything non-trivial with it. Hell, I haven't tried to do anything with it. I'm old, in my day if we needed a database we wrote one. Nowadays mysql seems to do the job just fine (at least it works for my MythTV box) but filesystems and diskdrives have gotten so fast I typically just use a journalling filesystem on a RAID array as a data sink. It's easier than mucking about with extensible hash tables in the app code, and compatible with pretty much all backup and search utilities.
...even Microsoft, who wrote Jet and used it for years as the basis of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic's database component, says not to use it 'cause it's crap. Got a link for that?
There's always SQL Server 2005 Express/Compact/whatever Edition, and this is what Microsoft recommends today. Hmmm, don't use our old product, it sucks, use our new product (which, of course, has no bugs whatsoever) available from us to you today! Have you driven a Ford... lately?
Wikipedia needs to go ahead and block all elementary and most high schools from editing the site.
You certainly can't post to Wikipedia from my children's schools. The kids are upset about it, although they understand that with the wonders of NAT it only takes one kid to get an entire school district flagged. I wonder about the potential for grade-school witch hunts, personally - I wouldn't want to be the kid fingered for having gotten my school banned.
Well, it looks like we've reached an impasse. I'll recap.
You say "atheism is the absence of religion" (as part of the setup for a funny tag, which I do appreciate).
I say "All the atheists I've met practice atheism as a religion" (because I find their non-negotiable base axioms to be indistinguishable from any other religious faith).
You say "Well that does not apply to me and I will accept no argument otherwise" (because you axiomatically define yourself as nonreligious).
I say "You just proved my point" (true given my axioms, false under yours).
You say "That's because you are a deluded, gullible wishful thinker" (true given your axioms, false given mine).
I think now is where we both say, "OK, you're wrong, but I hope that works out for you since you seem like an otherwise reasonable guy".:)
If we cannot accept each other's base axioms we cannot construct a mutually acceptable proof.
Well, if this strategy weren't the most successful, then the long-term-thinking companies would win out in the end, no? Capitalism won't allow an inefficient system to survive in a competitive marketplace. Yes, in a geologic time scale you are correct. In fact, I predict that the "invisible guiding hand" of capitalism will correct this problem in well under a thousand years.
Well, actually I disagree very slightly with Spinoza, although I enormously respect his work. I find Leibnitz's views on the subject to be very interesting, too, even though Voltaire skewered him pretty thoroughly. I don't think Descartes' ontological proof is equivalent to Spinoza, either, but I can see some similarity and I suppose there's more than one ontological proof. You can consider me "spinoza-ist" if you like, the differences are pretty abstract and unlikely to matter to anyone but a "small vehicle" Buddhist.
When you wrote "I'd be a theist in your language, but not mine, nor the rest of the world's" you came within a hairbreadth of something that I consider a fundamental truth: all existence is subjective. No human or human-equivalent intelligence can truly have an objective experience of anything, or a truly objective viewpoint, because the meat engine our consciousness rides filters our perceptions and restricts our comprehension. Voltaire's Candide pretty effectively destroys Leibnitz's "best of all possible worlds" by simply introducing subjective experience to Leibnitz's airy theorizing.
You are a theist in my language. And you are religious, too, although certainly not deist. In my language. And millions of other people's languages. I'm an atheist to some people, although frankly (I hope you won't be offended) I find that viewpoint insulting. I'm willing to bet you find the idea that you might be a theist equally insulting, even though it is subjectively true to me and I'm really not trying to insult anyone. My best friend has a viewpoint that I think is very similar to yours.
And I must disagree with you that "the rest of the world" shares your language of God - that's clearly not true, what with millions of pantheists joining me in disagreement (I do go to church, you know) but I will agree that the argument is pointless from your point of view. Um, the argument of whether you are a theist or not, that is - it's a subjective value judgment, and each of us is assigning you the value we consider "better".
Now consider from my point of view. Atheism is pointless from where I live, firmly grounded in reality. I can not escape God even if I want to, I cannot deny the reality of God even by committing suicide. God is physically here, and undeniable, and every atheist I see preaching is clearly an anti-deist - which is a religious belief, from my viewpoint, since it's a belief based entirely on faith and contradicts observable reality.
A lot of atheists go around proclaiming that "religion is backward and stupid and hurts people and is scientifically hogwash". Then, when someone presents them with a religion that clearly does not have those characteristics, a set of religious beliefs that has existed for thousands of years, those same atheists say "well, you are cheating and redefining words". The idea that they might have created a false categorization that only applies to some religious beliefs is inconceivable to these people, and they will not consider it. And to most of the world (stealing your generalization there), when you have a belief that is unsupported by evidence, that is a religion if not simply insanity. And thus, these people do not have "an absence of religion" (the phrase that originally caused me to hijack this thread) but rather a deep, strong and abiding faith in their dogma.
It seems to me that anyone who truly had an absence of religion would be what we call an agnostic; a person who has no definition of God. Isn't defining God the very heart of every religion? One's definition of God is what determines one's relationship with God, and with God's will... only agnostics are leaving these things up in the air.
Can you disagree without making a blanket statement of "everything you know is wrong and your language is stupid?" That doesn't seem like a very convincing argument to me.
I think you understood the definition reasonably well. God is indeed the universe. God is also everything that is not described by the word "Universe". God is not restricted by time or space, those things are just parts of God. God is the all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-knowing all. If your definition of the universe, or of God, has any exclusions, that's not the God I'm talking about. God is all.
Pantheism has existed in many forms for over 2000 years. We don't know when the Chandogya Unpanishad was written, but it is at least that old and perhaps much older. Accusing me of playing semantics, of redefining words, is not useful. I'm using the same definition that various religions in China and India have been continuously using since at least 8 BC. It's a very popular definition among scientists who are religious, because it does not contradict observable phenomena. For example, the problem of evil does not exist for pantheists.
I think you might have strong religious beliefs, like every other atheist I've ever met. Perhaps to you, God MUST be an anthropomorphic phantasm - this may be an article of faith to you, just as it is to Christians and Muslims. Are you willing to consider other ideas? If the nature of your non-existent God is not open to debate, that's a religious position, not an open-minded or scientific position.
If you cannot consider any other form of God, then you do not have an "absence of religion" - far from it. How one defines God is the essence of one's religion. It is the entire point of theology; to know God. I'm not trying to insult you, here, I am quite willing to respect any belief system that doesn't go around murdering people and destroying things in the name of God. Many people who attend my church call themselves atheists and also call themselves members of the UU religion. Many people consider Jains and Buddhists to be atheists. So-called "elite" taoists consider themselves to be religious atheists and are very proud of this.
I'm very willing to consider that a person might have a form of atheism that is not religious, but I don't think I've met any yet. All the forms of atheism that I've encountered are centered around unproveable premises, a faith unsupported by objective evidence.
If you really want to know more about pantheism (I'm actually more interested in discussing atheism, because it is much more puzzling to me; pantheism seems totally self-evident and obviously correct) I recommend this entry in the Stanford encylopedia of philosophy. I just read it, and although it's long and might bore you I thought it did a good job of representing Schopenhauer's dismissal of pantheism as a religion (very similar to your "semantic" objections) - and it's certainly less boring than reading Schopenhauer!:P It's got some discussion of the really hard problems of pantheist theology too, the places where we all disagree with each other (sort of like how all the Christian sects constantly squabble over things nobody else really cares about).
Some people say pantheism and atheism are the same thing; sort of like in "The Incredibles" when the guy says "when everybody is special, nobody is." I guess that's Schopenhauer's argument in a nutshell - if everything is divine, nothing is. I disagree, and I think you might also.
I just referenced Schopenhauer and Disney in the same post. I'm not sure if that's good or bad...
Do you have any problems with OpenSuSE stepping on your drivers during routine updates, or does everything survive OK? Are you using 802.1x by any chance?
I haven't used SuSE for several years. Maybe I should revisit! I've been pretty dissatisfied with Fedora, so I'm running Ubuntu a lot these days.
Seriously, Dad uses an old iMac to keep his books, a windoze XP box the IRS provides him with gratis (he volunteers at the senior center to help old folks who can't figure out their taxes) and the Ubuntu box I built for him to get his email. He has no problems operating any of these systems despite his age and physical infirmities; he's a pretty smart guy.
I've seen him use his windows laptop to connect to an encrypted wireless network. He's had no training with RF since he was a radio repairman in the Korean War, doesn't know 802.11 from a V8, but he just waltzed right in there, nobody had to do anything but tell him the key. I eventually gave up trying to connect to the same network with one of my linux laptops after a half hour and rebooted into windows... and I got right in too! Since I am much more familiar with linux than I am with windows, this was frustrating and annoying.
You haven't defined your God. If you did, it would be easily refuted; otherwise it is refuted by default. That is always the way.
I've defined God several times now, you are just refusing to acknowledge it. I am a pantheist, one of a huge number of pantheists, my philosophy is extensively documented in many languages, it's in every dictionary and encyclopedia, and although there are minor differences in "flavor" between the various kinds of pantheist we all agree on who God is.
My definition of God has existed for over 2000 years, so you can't honestly say I'm "hijacking a word". You're dodging. Or trolling.
What, precisely, do you not understand about my definition of God? Have you read Wikipedia's entry on Pantheism? Will you accept any of these? If so, which one?
Oh yes, its "simply" an "easily scripted" task!
on
WEP Broken Even Worse
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· Score: 1
That is indeed what I do as soon as I run into anything "esoteric" (that is, anything that a mac or windows PC can handle effortlessly but which chokes my linux machines HARD).
I just drop to a command line, superuser myself (sudo is too much typing, so I re-enable su on my unbuntu boxen and macs, it's pretty easy), kill network manager, iwlist to get the network, cut and paste the fiddly bits into an iwconfig line, swear repeatedly because each wireless driver has idiosyncrasies that need pampering (try using a hex key that looks like an alpha key - BEADFEEDBEADFEEDFEEDBEADBF for example - some drivers will let you use a special 0x prefix, others just don't seem to be able to cope), use bash command line editing to fix as appropriate to the particular hardware I'm using, then bring up a DHCP client (of course, I have to figure out which client this distribution uses since they have totally different command line syntax) to get the interface useable, and then go back into X where I can use a browser.
Sure, it's simple. My dad, an octogenarian rocket scientist (retired), can do it in less than a week if he also has a windows PC handy so that he can look up things in Google! I can do it myself in mere minutes! And using su for this instead of sudo has the side effect of not leaving WPA keys in the history of an unprivileged account, incidentally.
But you know, it's really annoying to watch the people around me just click and go with their Windows and Mac laptops. I guess nobody should use a linux computer wirelessly unless they not only have leet skillz, but also lots of time to spend typing things and memorizing connectivity tricks? Why are we bothering with GUIs, then? Linux wireless works perfectly in some subset of configurations (that happily includes most corporate and Starbucks-type rigs) but, in my personal experience, does not come close to mac or windows wireless.
Ever try to connect to an Intel Pro-Wireless 802.11a AP with linux on a Dell laptop? Turn off Network Manager and prepare to spend some time dicking around. In windows, it's a couple of clicks and type the key... done.
You have to measure the savings by looking at the sales of candles, the same way Ben Franklin did.
After all, if it was good enough for the Founding Fathers it's good enough for patriotic Americans, eh? Anybody that says otherwise is clearly a liberal who is soft on terrorism and hates America.
Linux wireless support is OK for connecting to large corporate networks with RADIUS and 802.1x with enterprise-class WPA. I routinely do it with Ubuntu, Fedora, and Red Hat linux; it even works with Network Manager. Well, most of the time with Network Manager... Recent versions of Network Manager... And it always works with a painstakingly hand-crafted custom-compiled WPA supplicant, even on Fedora, you just have to bleed some neurons out of your ears figuring it out the first time.
But for home networks, I've only found WEP to work really well. Trying to get "personal" WPA PSK working from a linux laptop to a commercial broadband router like a linksys or FIOS box is brutally painful, even with decades of experience, and if you have Network Manager flailing around hijacking your wifi hardware every few minutes it's even worse. If you wanted a rock-solid, high-bandwidth wireless connection with enough encryption to convince casual wardrivers to use the neighbor's connection instead of yours, you just ran WEP-128 on your dd-wrt box, and happily connected up with Network Manager or iwconfig... but if the next version of the stumbler's going to crack your WEP nearly instantaneously the weak deterrent effect of WEP just went out the window!
Do you see? I have a definition of God that is shared by millions of other people. It is, in my opinion, the correct definition of God. And furthermore, I can prove that my God physically exists!
I originally said, "every professed atheist I ever met refused to entertain the idea that God might be different than the precise definition of God he or she refused to believe in." You said you are different, but now you are rejecting my definition of God because it doesn't match yours.
Most atheists are primarily anti-Christian and anti-occult. They cannot be said to have an "absence of religion" because they have a faith-based definition of God that is dictated by holy scriptures or divine revelations of some sort. They are often not even aware of the existence of science-based religions like Pantheism (or Panentheism, which is a bit different), even though there are literally many millions of us all over the world.
Anyway, your stated definition was: "God is a term for 1) being that 2) listen to prayers 3) does miracles. If you want to discuss something else, give it another name, please." That's not my definition, but in fact my God (who again is the God of millions of other people, including a great many Buddhists, Hindus and Unitarian Universalists) does those things. Every word that is spoken is heard by God, so all prayers are heard (the written prayers that are hidden deep inside Tibetan prayer wheels where no human can see them are known to God too). Every day miracles happen and all of them proceed from God because nothing that happens is not a part of God. Life itself is a miraculous anti-entropic force, taking unorganized materials and organizing them into incredibly, miraculously complex structures; love is a miracle too. The greatest miracle of all is that you and I can have this discussion - that God is so vast and complex that individual pieces of God can argue with each other over the nature of reality!
I agree with the Christians that "you cannot petition the Lord with prayer" - praying for something won't change physics, nor will God change his plans because you prayed for something. Prayer just makes you feel better. That's one of the few things the Pope and I agree on, theologically.
In the USA, where I live, the Judeo-Christian tradition can claim Atheism as a bastard stepchild in some ways. Just as Satanism is delimited by the Bible and the Talmud, so is mainstream atheism... the articles of faith are the same as Catholicism, just with a "not" prepended. If I try to explain the nature of God to local atheists, the discussion proceeds exactly along the lines you and I have just gone down (if the atheist is at all intelligent - the dumb ones just insist I'm an atheist too). Essentially, my God is not permitted to be discussed, because he's demonstrably real; only straw-man Gods can be mentioned because they are so easily refuted.
Incidentally, you've accused me of "redefining people" because I said Einstein was a Spinoza-style pantheist - but I was just repeating what Einstein himself said! "I believe in Spinoza's god who reveals Himself in orderly harmony that exists, not a God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings." Albert Einstein, New York Times 1929-04-25. Who is "redefining" anything here? Not me! Still, you are right that dead people's beliefs really shouldn't enter into our discussion, and I'm not really a Spinoza monadist myself, so I will stop talking about Albert.:)
I almost always refuse to discuss atheism with anybody until they start providing defining properties to their superstitions.
Gee, that's not a loaded statement.
Now that you've met an atheist that doesn't fit your preconceived notions, you'll have to change your story.
No evidence of that so far:) but I try to be open-minded.
Perhaps this will help you with my "superstitions"?
Mathematically (paraphrased from Spinoza): By definition, there can be nothing greater than God. The set of things that contains all other things is greater than any other thing. The set of things which contains all things that ever will or have existed is greater than the set of thing that exist now. Therefore, since nothing can be greater than God; God is all things, unbounded by time. Therefore, to deny the existence of God is to deny all reality, all knowledge, all reasoning; these are all God.
Metaphorically (paraphrased from Zen Buddhism): A tree is no less a tree for being part of a forest. A forest is no less a forest for being composed of trees. Humans decide what level of discernment to employ depending on their needs; a man who makes maps sees forests, a man who cuts firewood sees trees. If you could discern all of what is, what isn't, what was and what will be, even for a moment, you would know God.
Get it? No ancient people in the sky with exaggerated sexual characteristics; those are just little tiny fake gods. The real God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing entity that we experience as participants rather than supplicants. Most atheists I've met at this point either insist that I'm an atheist too, or that my definition of God is invalid because my God physically exists (which is incompatible with their religion, er, I meant, their philosophy, which pre-defines God as imaginary).
Atheists who wish to deny the existence of a pantheistic God will probably have to start by disproving cogito ergo sum, which is pretty tricky. Confucius dodged the whole question (which was pretty smart, considering he had to compete with Taoism).
First things first... my sig was supposed to be a joke. At least I found it funny:)
I liked it too.
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
Every professed atheist I ever met refused to entertain the idea that God might be different than the precise definition of God he or she refused to believe in.
Well, congratulations, you have just met one who doesn't believe in any fairy, God or other made-up beings. I don't believe in Thor, Odin, Ra, Jehova or even the flying spaghetti monster.
Hmmm... which is kind of what I was referring to. God isn't a made-up being; God is physically in the room with you right now and everything you touch is physically part of God. All those other things you mention don't really have anything to do with God... Freud would say they are just transference of childish father-worship to an imaginary super-father figure.
This (non)belief was a core article of faith, and not available for reasoned discourse. Atheists quite often will insist noted pantheists (such as Abner Kneeland) are in fact atheists, and will not accept any proof to the contrary. If that's not religion, it's certainly got the features of a bad one, such as fanaticism and denial of reality.
I am not familiar with Abner Kneeland. I do agree that that atheists trying to make a convince for "this-and-this guy was really an atheist, though he never said so" is silly. Who cares? They are invariable dead anyway. Only the realllly silly claims to religion (like saying that Einstein was Christian... which he explicitly said he was not) can be a good thing to get out of the way:)
I think we're definitely in agreement on that. Kneeland was the last man imprisoned in the USA for heresy. Wikipedia correctly identifies him as a pantheist, but atheists.org redefines him as an atheist. Us pantheists think this is claim-jumping;) especially since Kneeland's "Philosophical Creed" is one of the most elegant statements of pantheism extant.
Einstein was also a pantheist, incidentally; but since he was a Spinoza-school pantheist he didn't think God has a personality in the sense that you and I supposedly do. Kneeland's a little more agnostic on that subject, but he certainly did not expect God to be anything like a giant bearded human in the sky.
So being agnostic about whether there is life in the universe is probably wise. Being agnostic about the e.g. protestantic three-in-one superstition is silly, in my humble opinion. But, if you want to believe that, and I am not physically threatened for making fun of that, I am not forcing anyone.
You seem very sensible to me. I think the trinity was just something St. Augustine came up with for political reasons, myself.
Have a nice friday:D
Thanks, I did! Sorry about the excessive blockquoting above... I couldn't figure out a better way.
Atheism is not a religion, it is the absence of religion.
Every professed atheist I ever met refused to entertain the idea that God might be different than the precise definition of God he or she refused to believe in. This (non)belief was a core article of faith, and not available for reasoned discourse. Atheists quite often will insist noted pantheists (such as Abner Kneeland) are in fact atheists, and will not accept any proof to the contrary. If that's not religion, it's certainly got the features of a bad one, such as fanaticism and denial of reality.
Agnosticism is the absence of decisiveness.
Which is not necessarily a bad thing... no decision might be less harmful than a bad decision, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
You could serve the .dll easily enough... somebody will be serving up BackOrifice in an identically named .dll sometime soon, I'd imagine...
.dll objects on the fly.
As for duplicating the functions, you might be able to do it with Apache::ASP or something similar, but you'd have to do some reverse engineering and hope it didn't do any inherently evil ActiveX tricks. Might be more effort than it's worth, given that there are already plenty of discussion board systems that don't require downloading
GET
You'd think sending these GETS to every single web site visited would be unnecessary (since IE can tell if it's connected to IIS, and only IIS is going to have cltreq.asp installed).
I'm guessing they didn't fix that one?
I have testified in a court case where the totality of the evidence against the defendant was a single .jpg on a computer that was in a publicly accessible room in a shared house (the defendant's ex-wife almost certainly planted it, and called the cops too). The police had a warrant in less than 24 hours based on the tipoff and they cuffed the defendant before they even started searching.
Your description of what you think would happen is extremely unlikely. Most likely you'd be convicted, unless a very creditable eyewitness actually saw the evidence being planted and was able to identify the culprit in a lineup. If you survived prison you'd be permanently tagged as a sex offender and child molester and your neighbors would be notified where ever you moved.
That's how it works in the USA. Feel free to do some research and verify this for yourself; don't take my word for it.
Um, there are hundreds of options available besides Exchange.
But, if you want to have something that actually embodies the few good features of Exchange without having to accept the fundamentally bad design and poor scalability, you should probably look at scalix.
Incidentally, I don't think the classical supply/demand stuff you're talking about really applies when the cost of shipping and reproducing goods is sufficiently minimized - as for example in electronically distributed media. I believe that relationship describes lack of producers or distribution creating a lack of physical product.
In the link you kindly provided, Microsoft is not saying "Jet sucks and you shouldn't use it" (although certainly there are people outside MS who are saying exactly that) but rather Jet is no longer supported by Microsoft.
Which is a good enough reason not to have anything to do with it, it really doesn't matter if it sucks or not; nobody should be buying product based on unsupported closed-source software.
A government that claims to be representative and democratically elected certainly shouldn't be trusting elections to a company that is shipping product based on unsupported closed-source software.
...Jet is well known to be massively broken. Still haven't seen any proof of that here... I'm not trying to say anyone is lying, but I'm not going to sign off on "Microsoft says don't use it" until I see a link to microsoft.com to that effect. If you don't think it is, you've never tried to do anything non-trivial with it. Hell, I haven't tried to do anything with it. I'm old, in my day if we needed a database we wrote one. Nowadays mysql seems to do the job just fine (at least it works for my MythTV box) but filesystems and diskdrives have gotten so fast I typically just use a journalling filesystem on a RAID array as a data sink. It's easier than mucking about with extensible hash tables in the app code, and compatible with pretty much all backup and search utilities.
...even Microsoft, who wrote Jet and used it for years as the basis of Microsoft Access and Visual Basic's database component, says not to use it 'cause it's crap. Got a link for that? There's always SQL Server 2005 Express/Compact/whatever Edition, and this is what Microsoft recommends today. Hmmm, don't use our old product, it sucks, use our new product (which, of course, has no bugs whatsoever) available from us to you today! Have you driven a Ford... lately?Well, it looks like we've reached an impasse. I'll recap.
:)
You say "atheism is the absence of religion" (as part of the setup for a funny tag, which I do appreciate).
I say "All the atheists I've met practice atheism as a religion" (because I find their non-negotiable base axioms to be indistinguishable from any other religious faith).
You say "Well that does not apply to me and I will accept no argument otherwise" (because you axiomatically define yourself as nonreligious).
I say "You just proved my point" (true given my axioms, false under yours).
You say "That's because you are a deluded, gullible wishful thinker" (true given your axioms, false given mine).
I think now is where we both say, "OK, you're wrong, but I hope that works out for you since you seem like an otherwise reasonable guy".
If we cannot accept each other's base axioms we cannot construct a mutually acceptable proof.
Incidentally, Buddhism and pantheism are extremely compatible.
Well, actually I disagree very slightly with Spinoza, although I enormously respect his work. I find Leibnitz's views on the subject to be very interesting, too, even though Voltaire skewered him pretty thoroughly. I don't think Descartes' ontological proof is equivalent to Spinoza, either, but I can see some similarity and I suppose there's more than one ontological proof. You can consider me "spinoza-ist" if you like, the differences are pretty abstract and unlikely to matter to anyone but a "small vehicle" Buddhist.
When you wrote "I'd be a theist in your language, but not mine, nor the rest of the world's" you came within a hairbreadth of something that I consider a fundamental truth: all existence is subjective. No human or human-equivalent intelligence can truly have an objective experience of anything, or a truly objective viewpoint, because the meat engine our consciousness rides filters our perceptions and restricts our comprehension. Voltaire's Candide pretty effectively destroys Leibnitz's "best of all possible worlds" by simply introducing subjective experience to Leibnitz's airy theorizing.
You are a theist in my language. And you are religious, too, although certainly not deist. In my language. And millions of other people's languages. I'm an atheist to some people, although frankly (I hope you won't be offended) I find that viewpoint insulting. I'm willing to bet you find the idea that you might be a theist equally insulting, even though it is subjectively true to me and I'm really not trying to insult anyone. My best friend has a viewpoint that I think is very similar to yours.
And I must disagree with you that "the rest of the world" shares your language of God - that's clearly not true, what with millions of pantheists joining me in disagreement (I do go to church, you know) but I will agree that the argument is pointless from your point of view. Um, the argument of whether you are a theist or not, that is - it's a subjective value judgment, and each of us is assigning you the value we consider "better".
Now consider from my point of view. Atheism is pointless from where I live, firmly grounded in reality. I can not escape God even if I want to, I cannot deny the reality of God even by committing suicide. God is physically here, and undeniable, and every atheist I see preaching is clearly an anti-deist - which is a religious belief, from my viewpoint, since it's a belief based entirely on faith and contradicts observable reality.
A lot of atheists go around proclaiming that "religion is backward and stupid and hurts people and is scientifically hogwash". Then, when someone presents them with a religion that clearly does not have those characteristics, a set of religious beliefs that has existed for thousands of years, those same atheists say "well, you are cheating and redefining words". The idea that they might have created a false categorization that only applies to some religious beliefs is inconceivable to these people, and they will not consider it. And to most of the world (stealing your generalization there), when you have a belief that is unsupported by evidence, that is a religion if not simply insanity. And thus, these people do not have "an absence of religion" (the phrase that originally caused me to hijack this thread) but rather a deep, strong and abiding faith in their dogma.
It seems to me that anyone who truly had an absence of religion would be what we call an agnostic; a person who has no definition of God. Isn't defining God the very heart of every religion? One's definition of God is what determines one's relationship with God, and with God's will... only agnostics are leaving these things up in the air.
Can you disagree without making a blanket statement of "everything you know is wrong and your language is stupid?" That doesn't seem like a very convincing argument to me.
I think you understood the definition reasonably well. God is indeed the universe. God is also everything that is not described by the word "Universe". God is not restricted by time or space, those things are just parts of God. God is the all-powerful, all-encompassing, all-knowing all. If your definition of the universe, or of God, has any exclusions, that's not the God I'm talking about. God is all.
:P It's got some discussion of the really hard problems of pantheist theology too, the places where we all disagree with each other (sort of like how all the Christian sects constantly squabble over things nobody else really cares about).
Pantheism has existed in many forms for over 2000 years. We don't know when the Chandogya Unpanishad was written, but it is at least that old and perhaps much older. Accusing me of playing semantics, of redefining words, is not useful. I'm using the same definition that various religions in China and India have been continuously using since at least 8 BC. It's a very popular definition among scientists who are religious, because it does not contradict observable phenomena. For example, the problem of evil does not exist for pantheists.
I think you might have strong religious beliefs, like every other atheist I've ever met. Perhaps to you, God MUST be an anthropomorphic phantasm - this may be an article of faith to you, just as it is to Christians and Muslims. Are you willing to consider other ideas? If the nature of your non-existent God is not open to debate, that's a religious position, not an open-minded or scientific position.
If you cannot consider any other form of God, then you do not have an "absence of religion" - far from it. How one defines God is the essence of one's religion. It is the entire point of theology; to know God. I'm not trying to insult you, here, I am quite willing to respect any belief system that doesn't go around murdering people and destroying things in the name of God. Many people who attend my church call themselves atheists and also call themselves members of the UU religion. Many people consider Jains and Buddhists to be atheists. So-called "elite" taoists consider themselves to be religious atheists and are very proud of this.
I'm very willing to consider that a person might have a form of atheism that is not religious, but I don't think I've met any yet. All the forms of atheism that I've encountered are centered around unproveable premises, a faith unsupported by objective evidence.
If you really want to know more about pantheism (I'm actually more interested in discussing atheism, because it is much more puzzling to me; pantheism seems totally self-evident and obviously correct) I recommend this entry in the Stanford encylopedia of philosophy. I just read it, and although it's long and might bore you I thought it did a good job of representing Schopenhauer's dismissal of pantheism as a religion (very similar to your "semantic" objections) - and it's certainly less boring than reading Schopenhauer!
Some people say pantheism and atheism are the same thing; sort of like in "The Incredibles" when the guy says "when everybody is special, nobody is." I guess that's Schopenhauer's argument in a nutshell - if everything is divine, nothing is. I disagree, and I think you might also.
I just referenced Schopenhauer and Disney in the same post. I'm not sure if that's good or bad...
Do you have any problems with OpenSuSE stepping on your drivers during routine updates, or does everything survive OK? Are you using 802.1x by any chance?
I haven't used SuSE for several years. Maybe I should revisit! I've been pretty dissatisfied with Fedora, so I'm running Ubuntu a lot these days.
Do you use a packaged distribution, or do you custom-compile your drivers and/or kernel?
Seriously, Dad uses an old iMac to keep his books, a windoze XP box the IRS provides him with gratis (he volunteers at the senior center to help old folks who can't figure out their taxes) and the Ubuntu box I built for him to get his email. He has no problems operating any of these systems despite his age and physical infirmities; he's a pretty smart guy.
I've seen him use his windows laptop to connect to an encrypted wireless network. He's had no training with RF since he was a radio repairman in the Korean War, doesn't know 802.11 from a V8, but he just waltzed right in there, nobody had to do anything but tell him the key. I eventually gave up trying to connect to the same network with one of my linux laptops after a half hour and rebooted into windows... and I got right in too! Since I am much more familiar with linux than I am with windows, this was frustrating and annoying.
Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the rant.
You haven't defined your God. If you did, it would be easily refuted; otherwise it is refuted by default. That is always the way.
I've defined God several times now, you are just refusing to acknowledge it. I am a pantheist, one of a huge number of pantheists, my philosophy is extensively documented in many languages, it's in every dictionary and encyclopedia, and although there are minor differences in "flavor" between the various kinds of pantheist we all agree on who God is.
My definition of God has existed for over 2000 years, so you can't honestly say I'm "hijacking a word". You're dodging. Or trolling.
What, precisely, do you not understand about my definition of God? Have you read Wikipedia's entry on Pantheism? Will you accept any of these? If so, which one?
That is indeed what I do as soon as I run into anything "esoteric" (that is, anything that a mac or windows PC can handle effortlessly but which chokes my linux machines HARD).
I just drop to a command line, superuser myself (sudo is too much typing, so I re-enable su on my unbuntu boxen and macs, it's pretty easy), kill network manager, iwlist to get the network, cut and paste the fiddly bits into an iwconfig line, swear repeatedly because each wireless driver has idiosyncrasies that need pampering (try using a hex key that looks like an alpha key - BEADFEEDBEADFEEDFEEDBEADBF for example - some drivers will let you use a special 0x prefix, others just don't seem to be able to cope), use bash command line editing to fix as appropriate to the particular hardware I'm using, then bring up a DHCP client (of course, I have to figure out which client this distribution uses since they have totally different command line syntax) to get the interface useable, and then go back into X where I can use a browser.
Sure, it's simple. My dad, an octogenarian rocket scientist (retired), can do it in less than a week if he also has a windows PC handy so that he can look up things in Google! I can do it myself in mere minutes! And using su for this instead of sudo has the side effect of not leaving WPA keys in the history of an unprivileged account, incidentally.
But you know, it's really annoying to watch the people around me just click and go with their Windows and Mac laptops. I guess nobody should use a linux computer wirelessly unless they not only have leet skillz, but also lots of time to spend typing things and memorizing connectivity tricks? Why are we bothering with GUIs, then? Linux wireless works perfectly in some subset of configurations (that happily includes most corporate and Starbucks-type rigs) but, in my personal experience, does not come close to mac or windows wireless.
Ever try to connect to an Intel Pro-Wireless 802.11a AP with linux on a Dell laptop? Turn off Network Manager and prepare to spend some time dicking around. In windows, it's a couple of clicks and type the key... done.
You have to measure the savings by looking at the sales of candles, the same way Ben Franklin did.
After all, if it was good enough for the Founding Fathers it's good enough for patriotic Americans, eh? Anybody that says otherwise is clearly a liberal who is soft on terrorism and hates America.
Linux wireless support is OK for connecting to large corporate networks with RADIUS and 802.1x with enterprise-class WPA. I routinely do it with Ubuntu, Fedora, and Red Hat linux; it even works with Network Manager. Well, most of the time with Network Manager... Recent versions of Network Manager... And it always works with a painstakingly hand-crafted custom-compiled WPA supplicant, even on Fedora, you just have to bleed some neurons out of your ears figuring it out the first time.
But for home networks, I've only found WEP to work really well. Trying to get "personal" WPA PSK working from a linux laptop to a commercial broadband router like a linksys or FIOS box is brutally painful, even with decades of experience, and if you have Network Manager flailing around hijacking your wifi hardware every few minutes it's even worse. If you wanted a rock-solid, high-bandwidth wireless connection with enough encryption to convince casual wardrivers to use the neighbor's connection instead of yours, you just ran WEP-128 on your dd-wrt box, and happily connected up with Network Manager or iwconfig... but if the next version of the stumbler's going to crack your WEP nearly instantaneously the weak deterrent effect of WEP just went out the window!
Do you see? I have a definition of God that is shared by millions of other people. It is, in my opinion, the correct definition of God. And furthermore, I can prove that my God physically exists!
:)
I originally said, "every professed atheist I ever met refused to entertain the idea that God might be different than the precise definition of God he or she refused to believe in." You said you are different, but now you are rejecting my definition of God because it doesn't match yours.
Most atheists are primarily anti-Christian and anti-occult. They cannot be said to have an "absence of religion" because they have a faith-based definition of God that is dictated by holy scriptures or divine revelations of some sort. They are often not even aware of the existence of science-based religions like Pantheism (or Panentheism, which is a bit different), even though there are literally many millions of us all over the world.
Anyway, your stated definition was: "God is a term for 1) being that 2) listen to prayers 3) does miracles. If you want to discuss something else, give it another name, please." That's not my definition, but in fact my God (who again is the God of millions of other people, including a great many Buddhists, Hindus and Unitarian Universalists) does those things. Every word that is spoken is heard by God, so all prayers are heard (the written prayers that are hidden deep inside Tibetan prayer wheels where no human can see them are known to God too). Every day miracles happen and all of them proceed from God because nothing that happens is not a part of God. Life itself is a miraculous anti-entropic force, taking unorganized materials and organizing them into incredibly, miraculously complex structures; love is a miracle too. The greatest miracle of all is that you and I can have this discussion - that God is so vast and complex that individual pieces of God can argue with each other over the nature of reality!
I agree with the Christians that "you cannot petition the Lord with prayer" - praying for something won't change physics, nor will God change his plans because you prayed for something. Prayer just makes you feel better. That's one of the few things the Pope and I agree on, theologically.
In the USA, where I live, the Judeo-Christian tradition can claim Atheism as a bastard stepchild in some ways. Just as Satanism is delimited by the Bible and the Talmud, so is mainstream atheism... the articles of faith are the same as Catholicism, just with a "not" prepended. If I try to explain the nature of God to local atheists, the discussion proceeds exactly along the lines you and I have just gone down (if the atheist is at all intelligent - the dumb ones just insist I'm an atheist too). Essentially, my God is not permitted to be discussed, because he's demonstrably real; only straw-man Gods can be mentioned because they are so easily refuted.
Incidentally, you've accused me of "redefining people" because I said Einstein was a Spinoza-style pantheist - but I was just repeating what Einstein himself said! "I believe in Spinoza's god who reveals Himself in orderly harmony that exists, not a God who concerns Himself with fates and actions of human beings." Albert Einstein, New York Times 1929-04-25. Who is "redefining" anything here? Not me! Still, you are right that dead people's beliefs really shouldn't enter into our discussion, and I'm not really a Spinoza monadist myself, so I will stop talking about Albert.
Perhaps this will help you with my "superstitions"?
Mathematically (paraphrased from Spinoza):
By definition, there can be nothing greater than God.
The set of things that contains all other things is greater than any other thing.
The set of things which contains all things that ever will or have existed is greater than the set of thing that exist now.
Therefore, since nothing can be greater than God; God is all things, unbounded by time.
Therefore, to deny the existence of God is to deny all reality, all knowledge, all reasoning; these are all God.
Metaphorically (paraphrased from Zen Buddhism):
A tree is no less a tree for being part of a forest.
A forest is no less a forest for being composed of trees.
Humans decide what level of discernment to employ depending on their needs; a man who makes maps sees forests, a man who cuts firewood sees trees.
If you could discern all of what is, what isn't, what was and what will be, even for a moment, you would know God.
Get it? No ancient people in the sky with exaggerated sexual characteristics; those are just little tiny fake gods. The real God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing entity that we experience as participants rather than supplicants. Most atheists I've met at this point either insist that I'm an atheist too, or that my definition of God is invalid because my God physically exists (which is incompatible with their religion, er, I meant, their philosophy, which pre-defines God as imaginary).
Atheists who wish to deny the existence of a pantheistic God will probably have to start by disproving cogito ergo sum, which is pretty tricky. Confucius dodged the whole question (which was pretty smart, considering he had to compete with Taoism).
Einstein was also a pantheist, incidentally; but since he was a Spinoza-school pantheist he didn't think God has a personality in the sense that you and I supposedly do. Kneeland's a little more agnostic on that subject, but he certainly did not expect God to be anything like a giant bearded human in the sky.You seem very sensible to me. I think the trinity was just something St. Augustine came up with for political reasons, myself.Thanks, I did! Sorry about the excessive blockquoting above... I couldn't figure out a better way.