I will study the topics you've recommended. Might take a year or two to work through Popper, but he's already on the list anyway.:)
I have to warn you, though; I don't have much truck with non-empirical arguments or representational systems that are totally divorced from subjective reality. "I seen a cow, I seen a horse, but I ain't seen none of that thar bovinity nor horsiness neither" was Edward Abby's reply to Plato, and I have a similar reaction to Wittgenstein and his ilk. My mind doesn't work that way, I guess.
Unfortunately your choice of examples shows that you are not arguing what you claim, innocently or not, to be arguing. Instead of arguing about proof, you're arguing about a corner of epistemology (the philosophical study of how we know things) known as empiricism.
Yes; this has become apparent in retrospect; thanks for your help. The other posters were talking about the syntactical rules of a representational grammar (that is, today's version of math) whereas I'm talking about physical reality.
Have you read Spinoza's Ethics? I'm working on it at the moment, because I'm trying to understand why so many pantheists (which he was and I am) have come to the conclusion that God has no personality. Spinoza states both the ideas he believes and those he disbelieves in the form of a "geometrickal proof" - not because he thought that mathematical proof was canonical proof, but because he wanted to restrict the incidence of misinterpretation of what he was saying by forcing the arguments into a very rigid, well known format. This apparently worked for a century or so but makes the work more difficult to comprehend for most modern readers. It also freaks out mathematicians because he essentially provides "geometrickal proof" of concepts he then states are false. Lots of interesting discussion of this here.
One can indeed offer proof of the non-existence of a thing. What one cannot do is offer evidence of its non-existence. Evidence and proof are not the same. "Proof" is a logical idea and "evidence" is an empirical idea.
If you want to prove something to me, you must provide independently verifiable evidence or describe a means of finding same. This, to me, is the meaning of the english word proof. It's also the number one definition on dictionary.com, incidentally, and you are only the second poster to state that you are using the special mathematical meaning for the words "proof" and "prove" and not the common english meaning. Again, my thanks to both of you.
Standard logic is one system, amongst many, for extending knowledge. We seem to have a large measure of faith in logic because one of its consequences is that no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction. In other words it is a system born of our cultural uneasiness with contradictions.
I'm not sure it's true that "no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction". I know that's the target, but I need to think on that a little more. Are you saying that all paradoxes are the result of erroneous axioms, or that our logic is imperfect because the syntactica of human communication permit paradoxical statements, or some combination of both?
In fact, one way to logically extend our knowledge is to posit (assert) the truth or falsehood of a statement and then show (prove) that the rules of the logical system lead to a contradiction. Since your assumptions lead to a contradiction, logic says that at least one of your assumptions must be false. This is called "proof by contradiction" or, in classical terminology, "reductio ad absurdum."
I understand. But without empiricism, the only thing that method is useful for is creating very abstract methods, and
While I understand your point (Alan Robertson likes to say "Complexity is the enemy of reliability") there is a necessary level of complexity required to provide a decent service.
Would it be acceptable for a doctor to hire nurses and receptionists with infectious typhus, if that cost him less money, or somehow simplified his office routines?
Why is it acceptable for broadband ISPs with billion-dollar budgets to create a breeding pit for worms and viruses, when they could just hire more capable staff and solve the problem by increasing the level of complexity their staff could handle?
Because they have geographic monopolies, the large ISPs don't have to provide decent service. Remember Lily Tomlin's old routine? "Sir, we are the phone company. We are a monopoly. We don't care, because we don't have to." A little dated since the breakup of Ma Bell but it seems those days are coming back again.
As for the RIAA, you are probably right that a cleaner network worldwide would help them with their nefarious schemes. The CIA, on the other hand, is probably quite happy knowing millions of zombie computers are available to them at any time. Plausible deniability is easy to come by under such circumstances.
While I'd prefer an approach that puts the burden on the infected PC owners rather than on people who actually have a clue, I'd be willing to make the phonecall.
And your method would be simple enough that even Comcast might conceivably be competent enough to implement it. Maybe. Unfortunately I am a customer, so I'm kind of pessimistic on that front.
The patterns used by worms and spammers are extremely noticeable. You can identify them with Snort (free software) and you can slow them down with a tarpit (free software). It's almost impossible not to see the worms, in particular, if you are doing the most basic sorts of network monitoring in order to allow proper network management.
It'd be easy to block infected machines, and machines that are spamming, using the DOCSIS cable modem (which is controlled by the ISP, not the end user). Reroute all traffic to and from infected machines to a special "hey you are infected here are some antidotes" network and charge the antivirus companies for the privilege of hawking their products and services on that network.
Easy, that is, for a highly competent and experienced network engineer. Which is to say someone who commands a higher salary than the greedy broadband ISPs are apparently willing to pay. Instead they hire people who think port-blocking customers is reasonable (that is, inexperienced people) and incompetents who can't even figure out how to run a web cache (also available as free software) without getting themselves in trouble.
You don't need to find the lusrs with pwned boxen. They, after all, are only doing what they've been told to do by us technical elitey types.
You just need to realize that the broadband providers are capable of stopping this problem by themselves, with their existing equipment, and the only reason they don't do it is because it would impact their revenue stream (well, that and the high correlation of greed with stupidity).
With Comcast's resources at my disposal, I could stop all spam and virus propagation from their networks in a month or less. But a certain number of customers (mostly spammers and other criminals) would stop paying their monthly bill as a result, and thus Comcast has a simple ROI equation: Screw you over, and get paid, do the Right Thing, and don't get paid.
Easy decision for them, because WE are letting them get away with it. Write your congresscritter, make Comcast (and their ilk) liable for running worm farms.
I'm going to get flamed big time for this one! Ah well, I have six sock puppets in cold storage.
If you have the opinion that brown people in foreign lands are just as deserving of the American Dream as anyone else, you might want to hire some bright young Indian lad who is willing to start at a more reasonable wage than the local sulky teenagers.
When this fellow's visa runs out, you might have to prove that you can't hire a local talent so you can sponsor his citizenship and help him on his way to the fine home and Americanized family he is so willing to work towards.
So, you write the job description so that only one person can fill it - this is the usual reason for requiring experience in WeWroteItHere 2.0 and suchlike.
"Bring me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free" might not be so applicable in the current political climate, but some employers still believe in it, and don't feel that being born here automagically entitles you to first pick of the tech jobs. Obviously, they can't admit this, given the social and legal realities of 21st century America.
Ah, I see the problem. You are talking math, I am talking philosophy. Logic applies to both, because both must be continuously redefined in light of continuing discovery, but math is a self-contained grammar that explicitly allows irresolveable contradictions (Kurt Godel, remember?) which does not necessarily apply to philosophy.
If you want to talk math, I am not really qualified (not that kind of scientist) but I think you have to confine yourself to statements that can be expressed entirely in mathematical notations, right? I think you'll have to define "God" as "Infinity" or else do some really ground-breaking work.
OT, I was taught in college that it was mathematically impossible to put 200 channels on a coaxial cable.
One can do foolish things, and make foolish assumptions, without being a fool. I was attacking the idea that God's existence is not logically falseable, but I didn't intend to attack you personally; I apologize for the miscommunication.
On the other hand, I could easily construe your post as a direct attack on my religious beliefs, so don't think I'm not excercising some restraint here.
"Delicious, spreadable puppies" actually sounds much tastier than butter, BTW, but then I'm mostly carnivorous and I've never cared much for dogs as pets.
Your post is hilariously recursive and ironic, though.
If you define "God" as "a little red demon made of paste that only lives in George Bush's nose" you can prove that such a thing DOESN'T exist. If you define "God" as Spinoza did, you can prove such a thing DOES exist. There is NO UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED DEFINITION OF GOD so you must specify WHICH god.
And incidentally, my prior post wasn't a flame. THIS is a flame.
Do you understand yet, or am I using words that are too big for you?
It does not sound as though you are open to other viewpoints. All your statements are presented as revealed truth, not as logically reasoned arguments.
I personally believe science consists of skepticism and experimentation. I am highly skeptical of the ability of any human to discern that any theory is "the most successful" and I do not see any experiment that can be performed to support any such statements.
Incidentally, "Might makes Right" is a perfectly defensible model of reality - not that I necessarily agree with that definition of "theory", but I'm willing to play along - based on three assumptions.
Axiom1: If God exists, God is the biggest, most powerful thing there is.
Axiom2: A thing may be composed of other things.
Axiom3: God prefers Right to Wrong (tautology restatable as Right=what_God_prefers)
I recommend to you the work of Baruch Spinoza, specifically the Ethics, and to Einstein's comments regarding Spinoza's idea of God, if you want to think deeply about the first two axioms; the last is an assumption based on faith (but all reasoning is based on faith, see Renee DesCartes Meditations on First Philosophy or the movie The Matrix if you don't agree).
Finally, you've made much of "intuition", which is is not only entirely subjective, it's practically the opposite of science. I think that all things that are real would be intuitive to a sufficiently enlightened being; we humans are however limited to the capabilities of the meat engines that house us, and perhaps any being capable of intuition is similarly limited (though I doubt it).
You are making the foolish assumption that everyone believes in the same definition of God.
Is Earth's Sun the physical body of God? Deus Sol Invictus, all hail the invincible Sun! (I like to say that around this time of year.) I can prove the existence of the sun rather easily.
Define which God you are talking about (the Bhuddist god? Which flavor of Bhuddism?) before you start blithely asserting nobody can prove God exists.
Postulate that this has been done, and call the resulting list p1,p2,p3...pn,P
Since this is impossible, you can't use it in your proof.
Let me make an analogy for the non-scientific:
Hypothesis: No dogs have green, purple and orange spots.
Proof: Suppose we put all the existing dogs in one place where we could physically inspect them for coloration.
Postulate that this has been done, and call the place the Dog Pound.
None of the dogs will have green, purple, or orange spots, because dogs don't come in those colors, therefore they cannot have spots of those colors.
Therefore, physical inspection will reveal that no green, purple, or orange spotted dogs.
Therefore, we just proved a negative. Except that obviously this is bogus, especially since I just painted my dog this morning.
Where do people get the ridiculous idea that a negative can't be proven?
Because it has so far proved impossible for any one human to be cognizant of all existence, therefore no human can ever be certain that there are not existing things or conditions outside his or her knowledge, therefore no human can provide rigorous proof of the non-existence of anything.
Consider: What if the earthly laws of physics are local to a specific region of space-time that the solar system happens to be in right now, and most of the universe is not in that region? Can you prove that this is not so?
You can, of course, prove negatives that can be restated as strictly confined positives. But as a general principle, you cannot prove that something doesn't exist anywhere.
This year somebody will leave a semicolon out of the source code for their nanites, and everything will dissolve into a pulsating earth-sized blob of yellow goop.
Later spacefaring civilizations will put up warning signs just inside the Oort cloud: "Danger! do not touch the yellow sticky stuff! It's evil!"
The PDP's implementation of CCL (concise command language) let you abbreviate to the shortest non-ambigous string. Later DEC renamed CCL to DCL (DEC command language) and VAX/VMS shipped with DCL (although without all the fancy F$lexicals at first). Somewhere around VMS 4, I think, the TPARSE routines were rewritten and abbreviation was limited to a minimum of four characters, which caused my highly trained fingers to betray me repeatedly.
Having trained end-users in both, I can say that VMS was much easier to learn and understand than *nix for native english-speakers. If you have no english, or english as a second language, *nix is less typing and you have to memorize everything anyway.
The sad part is I still remember RSX Indirect and MCR, the predecessors to CCL. That backwards PIP syntax was a bitch.
I don't get it either, but hey, I'm happily married to a member of the opposite sex.
But the weirdest, strangest, sickest thing of all - far weirder and sicker than any consensual sexual act could ever be - it the need for people to regulate the behaviour of others.
There is no person in this world who is so morally perfect they need to direct their efforts to remediating the perceived sinfulness of other people who are engaging in purely voluntary activities. Jesus says, "cast ye not the first stone", remember?
Incidentally, you seem to be correct when you state that committed, loving, truly homosexual relationships do not breed true. I know 3 families based on same-sex pair-bonding (my church has never had a problem with that sort of thing, so I see happy, well-adjusted gay couples all the time) and none of the children are homosexual so far (all but one are adopted; children nobody else wanted who now have stable, loving homes). The one who is not adopted is quite the ladies' man now that he's an adult... perhaps having two moms gave him some insights.
Wanting to curb promiscuity is somewhat defensible, in this day of incurable STDs. Wanting to oppress non-promiscuous gay folks is just poisonous bigotry and/or the self-hate of repressed homos looking for a violent outlet.
If two people love each other, and some other people want to stop that, who are the evil-doers?
I've spent a fair amount of time in Utah, and I believe I've read everything Card's written on the subject of homosexuality (obviously I could be wrong, and I've never heard him speak on the subject).
Did Brigham Young wear black robes? How about Joe Smith? I've read his stuff too. No social experiments there, no sir.
Incidentally, my own church has accepted homosexuals freely, and has been in existence quite a bit longer than the LDS church. Strangely enough, we haven't been struck down by lightning bolts yet (apparently God is reserving that treatment for Mel Gibson's employees).
Card is an outspoken homophobe (although he wraps his fears in weird pseudo-logic based on his Mormon upbringing - if you're a member of a revealed-truth religion perhaps the arguments will make sense to you) so the parent post was actually pretty damn funny.
Card's anti-gay rants are saddening, since he is otherwise a voice of tolerance and sanity in the LDS - he has no knee-jerk distrust of science, for example.
If you treat it as an engineering problem the keyboard gets optimized with 10 keys, chorded to match American Sign Language for the most used letters. Really.
But, all this ignores that fact that almost nobody has all ten fingers working all the time. Some of us, like the late Jerry Garcia, don't have ten typing fingers at all.
When I slipped whilst climbing down a rope and burned my right palm down to the bones, I lost the use of three fingers for several months. But my typing didn't slow down much, because I'm not a touch typist in the traditional sense of the word (I use all my available fingers, but whichever one is closest at the moment) and I like BIG keyboards (keeps bandages from blocking so many keys).
QWERTY is very fault-tolerant if you consider finger incapacitation a fault. You can type on QWERTY with a single finger, or even a stick in your mouth. If you are ever partially incapacitated you'll have enough worries without having to buy a new keyboard and relearn the key positions!
The main problem with the Insight's much-vaunted mileage superiority is that it only holds half as many passengers as a Prius. Since it doesn't get double the mileage, well, you do the math.
A unicycle gets better gas mileage than either. Does it do the same job? No.
But anyway, you can pretty much assume that anything anyone from GM says about anything other than "there's no replacement for displacement" (the GM mantra) is pure FUD.
What can you do with this that you can't do with good ol' reaction wheels and gyros powered by solar panels?
You can raise and lower your orbit with nothing but electric motors if you've got moveable masses and electricity. I seem to recall it's done rather commonly in existing satellites.
We've had electronic voting booths for ages (we had incredibly complex mechanical ones until the old clockmakers that built them for us all died or retired).
But we still haven't had any election fraud attributable to the machines.
Basically, it's because we have so few electors our votes aren't worth stealing.:(
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I'll happily pay for at least one 3rd world child's $100 laptop if I can buy another one for MY kids!
I have to warn you, though; I don't have much truck with non-empirical arguments or representational systems that are totally divorced from subjective reality. "I seen a cow, I seen a horse, but I ain't seen none of that thar bovinity nor horsiness neither" was Edward Abby's reply to Plato, and I have a similar reaction to Wittgenstein and his ilk. My mind doesn't work that way, I guess.
Yes; this has become apparent in retrospect; thanks for your help. The other posters were talking about the syntactical rules of a representational grammar (that is, today's version of math) whereas I'm talking about physical reality.
Have you read Spinoza's Ethics? I'm working on it at the moment, because I'm trying to understand why so many pantheists (which he was and I am) have come to the conclusion that God has no personality. Spinoza states both the ideas he believes and those he disbelieves in the form of a "geometrickal proof" - not because he thought that mathematical proof was canonical proof, but because he wanted to restrict the incidence of misinterpretation of what he was saying by forcing the arguments into a very rigid, well known format. This apparently worked for a century or so but makes the work more difficult to comprehend for most modern readers. It also freaks out mathematicians because he essentially provides "geometrickal proof" of concepts he then states are false. Lots of interesting discussion of this here.
If you want to prove something to me, you must provide independently verifiable evidence or describe a means of finding same. This, to me, is the meaning of the english word proof. It's also the number one definition on dictionary.com, incidentally, and you are only the second poster to state that you are using the special mathematical meaning for the words "proof" and "prove" and not the common english meaning. Again, my thanks to both of you.
I'm not sure it's true that "no group of true statements will ever lead to a contradiction". I know that's the target, but I need to think on that a little more. Are you saying that all paradoxes are the result of erroneous axioms, or that our logic is imperfect because the syntactica of human communication permit paradoxical statements, or some combination of both?
I understand. But without empiricism, the only thing that method is useful for is creating very abstract methods, and
While I understand your point (Alan Robertson likes to say "Complexity is the enemy of reliability") there is a necessary level of complexity required to provide a decent service.
Would it be acceptable for a doctor to hire nurses and receptionists with infectious typhus, if that cost him less money, or somehow simplified his office routines?
Why is it acceptable for broadband ISPs with billion-dollar budgets to create a breeding pit for worms and viruses, when they could just hire more capable staff and solve the problem by increasing the level of complexity their staff could handle?
Because they have geographic monopolies, the large ISPs don't have to provide decent service. Remember Lily Tomlin's old routine? "Sir, we are the phone company. We are a monopoly. We don't care, because we don't have to." A little dated since the breakup of Ma Bell but it seems those days are coming back again.
As for the RIAA, you are probably right that a cleaner network worldwide would help them with their nefarious schemes. The CIA, on the other hand, is probably quite happy knowing millions of zombie computers are available to them at any time. Plausible deniability is easy to come by under such circumstances.
While I'd prefer an approach that puts the burden on the infected PC owners rather than on people who actually have a clue, I'd be willing to make the phonecall.
And your method would be simple enough that even Comcast might conceivably be competent enough to implement it. Maybe. Unfortunately I am a customer, so I'm kind of pessimistic on that front.
The patterns used by worms and spammers are extremely noticeable. You can identify them with Snort (free software) and you can slow them down with a tarpit (free software). It's almost impossible not to see the worms, in particular, if you are doing the most basic sorts of network monitoring in order to allow proper network management.
It'd be easy to block infected machines, and machines that are spamming, using the DOCSIS cable modem (which is controlled by the ISP, not the end user). Reroute all traffic to and from infected machines to a special "hey you are infected here are some antidotes" network and charge the antivirus companies for the privilege of hawking their products and services on that network.
Easy, that is, for a highly competent and experienced network engineer. Which is to say someone who commands a higher salary than the greedy broadband ISPs are apparently willing to pay. Instead they hire people who think port-blocking customers is reasonable (that is, inexperienced people) and incompetents who can't even figure out how to run a web cache (also available as free software) without getting themselves in trouble.
You don't need to find the lusrs with pwned boxen. They, after all, are only doing what they've been told to do by us technical elitey types.
You just need to realize that the broadband providers are capable of stopping this problem by themselves, with their existing equipment, and the only reason they don't do it is because it would impact their revenue stream (well, that and the high correlation of greed with stupidity).
With Comcast's resources at my disposal, I could stop all spam and virus propagation from their networks in a month or less. But a certain number of customers (mostly spammers and other criminals) would stop paying their monthly bill as a result, and thus Comcast has a simple ROI equation: Screw you over, and get paid, do the Right Thing, and don't get paid.
Easy decision for them, because WE are letting them get away with it. Write your congresscritter, make Comcast (and their ilk) liable for running worm farms.
I'm going to get flamed big time for this one! Ah well, I have six sock puppets in cold storage.
If you have the opinion that brown people in foreign lands are just as deserving of the American Dream as anyone else, you might want to hire some bright young Indian lad who is willing to start at a more reasonable wage than the local sulky teenagers.
When this fellow's visa runs out, you might have to prove that you can't hire a local talent so you can sponsor his citizenship and help him on his way to the fine home and Americanized family he is so willing to work towards.
So, you write the job description so that only one person can fill it - this is the usual reason for requiring experience in WeWroteItHere 2.0 and suchlike.
"Bring me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free" might not be so applicable in the current political climate, but some employers still believe in it, and don't feel that being born here automagically entitles you to first pick of the tech jobs. Obviously, they can't admit this, given the social and legal realities of 21st century America.
Ah, I see the problem. You are talking math, I am talking philosophy. Logic applies to both, because both must be continuously redefined in light of continuing discovery, but math is a self-contained grammar that explicitly allows irresolveable contradictions (Kurt Godel, remember?) which does not necessarily apply to philosophy.
If you want to talk math, I am not really qualified (not that kind of scientist) but I think you have to confine yourself to statements that can be expressed entirely in mathematical notations, right? I think you'll have to define "God" as "Infinity" or else do some really ground-breaking work.
OT, I was taught in college that it was mathematically impossible to put 200 channels on a coaxial cable.
One can do foolish things, and make foolish assumptions, without being a fool. I was attacking the idea that God's existence is not logically falseable, but I didn't intend to attack you personally; I apologize for the miscommunication.
On the other hand, I could easily construe your post as a direct attack on my religious beliefs, so don't think I'm not excercising some restraint here.
"Delicious, spreadable puppies" actually sounds much tastier than butter, BTW, but then I'm mostly carnivorous and I've never cared much for dogs as pets.
Your post is hilariously recursive and ironic, though.
If you define "God" as "a little red demon made of paste that only lives in George Bush's nose" you can prove that such a thing DOESN'T exist. If you define "God" as Spinoza did, you can prove such a thing DOES exist. There is NO UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED DEFINITION OF GOD so you must specify WHICH god.
And incidentally, my prior post wasn't a flame. THIS is a flame.
Do you understand yet, or am I using words that are too big for you?
It does not sound as though you are open to other viewpoints. All your statements are presented as revealed truth, not as logically reasoned arguments.
I personally believe science consists of skepticism and experimentation. I am highly skeptical of the ability of any human to discern that any theory is "the most successful" and I do not see any experiment that can be performed to support any such statements.
Incidentally, "Might makes Right" is a perfectly defensible model of reality - not that I necessarily agree with that definition of "theory", but I'm willing to play along - based on three assumptions.
Axiom1: If God exists, God is the biggest, most powerful thing there is.
Axiom2: A thing may be composed of other things.
Axiom3: God prefers Right to Wrong (tautology restatable as Right=what_God_prefers)
I recommend to you the work of Baruch Spinoza, specifically the Ethics, and to Einstein's comments regarding Spinoza's idea of God, if you want to think deeply about the first two axioms; the last is an assumption based on faith (but all reasoning is based on faith, see Renee DesCartes Meditations on First Philosophy or the movie The Matrix if you don't agree).
Finally, you've made much of "intuition", which is is not only entirely subjective, it's practically the opposite of science. I think that all things that are real would be intuitive to a sufficiently enlightened being; we humans are however limited to the capabilities of the meat engines that house us, and perhaps any being capable of intuition is similarly limited (though I doubt it).
You are making the foolish assumption that everyone believes in the same definition of God.
Is Earth's Sun the physical body of God? Deus Sol Invictus, all hail the invincible Sun! (I like to say that around this time of year.) I can prove the existence of the sun rather easily.
Define which God you are talking about (the Bhuddist god? Which flavor of Bhuddism?) before you start blithely asserting nobody can prove God exists.
Let me make an analogy for the non-scientific:
Hypothesis: No dogs have green, purple and orange spots.
Proof: Suppose we put all the existing dogs in one place where we could physically inspect them for coloration.
Postulate that this has been done, and call the place the Dog Pound.
None of the dogs will have green, purple, or orange spots, because dogs don't come in those colors, therefore they cannot have spots of those colors.
Therefore, physical inspection will reveal that no green, purple, or orange spotted dogs.
Therefore, we just proved a negative. Except that obviously this is bogus, especially since I just painted my dog this morning.
Because it has so far proved impossible for any one human to be cognizant of all existence, therefore no human can ever be certain that there are not existing things or conditions outside his or her knowledge, therefore no human can provide rigorous proof of the non-existence of anything.
Consider: What if the earthly laws of physics are local to a specific region of space-time that the solar system happens to be in right now, and most of the universe is not in that region? Can you prove that this is not so?
You can, of course, prove negatives that can be restated as strictly confined positives. But as a general principle, you cannot prove that something doesn't exist anywhere.
This year somebody will leave a semicolon out of the source code for their nanites, and everything will dissolve into a pulsating earth-sized blob of yellow goop.
Later spacefaring civilizations will put up warning signs just inside the Oort cloud: "Danger! do not touch the yellow sticky stuff! It's evil!"
The PDP's implementation of CCL (concise command language) let you abbreviate to the shortest non-ambigous string. Later DEC renamed CCL to DCL (DEC command language) and VAX/VMS shipped with DCL (although without all the fancy F$lexicals at first). Somewhere around VMS 4, I think, the TPARSE routines were rewritten and abbreviation was limited to a minimum of four characters, which caused my highly trained fingers to betray me repeatedly.
Having trained end-users in both, I can say that VMS was much easier to learn and understand than *nix for native english-speakers. If you have no english, or english as a second language, *nix is less typing and you have to memorize everything anyway.
The sad part is I still remember RSX Indirect and MCR, the predecessors to CCL. That backwards PIP syntax was a bitch.
I don't get it either, but hey, I'm happily married to a member of the opposite sex.
But the weirdest, strangest, sickest thing of all - far weirder and sicker than any consensual sexual act could ever be - it the need for people to regulate the behaviour of others.
There is no person in this world who is so morally perfect they need to direct their efforts to remediating the perceived sinfulness of other people who are engaging in purely voluntary activities. Jesus says, "cast ye not the first stone", remember?
Incidentally, you seem to be correct when you state that committed, loving, truly homosexual relationships do not breed true. I know 3 families based on same-sex pair-bonding (my church has never had a problem with that sort of thing, so I see happy, well-adjusted gay couples all the time) and none of the children are homosexual so far (all but one are adopted; children nobody else wanted who now have stable, loving homes). The one who is not adopted is quite the ladies' man now that he's an adult... perhaps having two moms gave him some insights.
Wanting to curb promiscuity is somewhat defensible, in this day of incurable STDs. Wanting to oppress non-promiscuous gay folks is just poisonous bigotry and/or the self-hate of repressed homos looking for a violent outlet.
If two people love each other, and some other people want to stop that, who are the evil-doers?
It's either an Apple, a Platypus, or a dogcow. Depending on the Mac.
Hell, I'd pay money to see Dvorak being beaten up by a platypus.
I've spent a fair amount of time in Utah, and I believe I've read everything Card's written on the subject of homosexuality (obviously I could be wrong, and I've never heard him speak on the subject).
Did Brigham Young wear black robes? How about Joe Smith? I've read his stuff too. No social experiments there, no sir.
Incidentally, my own church has accepted homosexuals freely, and has been in existence quite a bit longer than the LDS church. Strangely enough, we haven't been struck down by lightning bolts yet (apparently God is reserving that treatment for Mel Gibson's employees).
But no, I wouldn't dream of arguing with you.
Sadly, the stupid are shameless.
Card is an outspoken homophobe (although he wraps his fears in weird pseudo-logic based on his Mormon upbringing - if you're a member of a revealed-truth religion perhaps the arguments will make sense to you) so the parent post was actually pretty damn funny.
Card's anti-gay rants are saddening, since he is otherwise a voice of tolerance and sanity in the LDS - he has no knee-jerk distrust of science, for example.
If you treat it as an engineering problem the keyboard gets optimized with 10 keys, chorded to match American Sign Language for the most used letters. Really.
But, all this ignores that fact that almost nobody has all ten fingers working all the time. Some of us, like the late Jerry Garcia, don't have ten typing fingers at all.
When I slipped whilst climbing down a rope and burned my right palm down to the bones, I lost the use of three fingers for several months. But my typing didn't slow down much, because I'm not a touch typist in the traditional sense of the word (I use all my available fingers, but whichever one is closest at the moment) and I like BIG keyboards (keeps bandages from blocking so many keys).
QWERTY is very fault-tolerant if you consider finger incapacitation a fault. You can type on QWERTY with a single finger, or even a stick in your mouth. If you are ever partially incapacitated you'll have enough worries without having to buy a new keyboard and relearn the key positions!
The main problem with the Insight's much-vaunted mileage superiority is that it only holds half as many passengers as a Prius. Since it doesn't get double the mileage, well, you do the math.
A unicycle gets better gas mileage than either. Does it do the same job? No.
But anyway, you can pretty much assume that anything anyone from GM says about anything other than "there's no replacement for displacement" (the GM mantra) is pure FUD.
What can you do with this that you can't do with good ol' reaction wheels and gyros powered by solar panels?
You can raise and lower your orbit with nothing but electric motors if you've got moveable masses and electricity. I seem to recall it's done rather commonly in existing satellites.
We've had electronic voting booths for ages (we had incredibly complex mechanical ones until the old clockmakers that built them for us all died or retired).
But we still haven't had any election fraud attributable to the machines.
Basically, it's because we have so few electors our votes aren't worth stealing.