Atheism is not a "tenet". It is simply the lack of faith in the supernatural.
There are at least a half dozen distinct different forms of atheism. The few that are inherently compatible with agnosticism are not faith-based, but the rest of them quite necessarily are.
But your definition of atheism is easily disproved anyway; absolute statements require only one counterexample. I have no belief in the "supernatural" whatsoever. Everything that exists, exists in nature. I am not an atheist and would resent being called one; I am an ordained religious theist (pantheist, essential monist variety). Therefore your definition of atheism is false, according to the rules of logic and science.
Did you know that there are several atheist religions? Did you know that many atheists believe in the supernatural? No, of course you didn't. We are all subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect; if you decide to study theology you'll be come less confident of your understanding of atheism the more you learn. A planet is smooth as a billiard ball if you look at it from far enough away.
OK, there are larger craters because the crust is thinner on this side, but why is the crust thinner on this side? Mere happenstance, or is it caused by orbital mechanics or some other reason?
One way to make a crust thinner is to hit it a lot.
Works on pizza and iron, don't see why it wouldn't work on moons...
In days of old, before the Black Ships came and the secret of hose gartering that never ravels was lost and forgotten, Niklaus Wirth figured this out and bequeathed us Wirth's Law.
Back when the building RSX-11 executables larger than one MB that would consistently execute in real time required manually mapping memory for the taskbuilder step, software engineers had to write rockin' code just to survive in the field. We were all computer scientists by necessity. Today, though, the barrier is pretty low; just slap together a bunch of Java modules some anonymous 13-year-old wrote in a GUI and call it programming.
The point is that in many cases someone who is a mathematical genius is a complete idiot in many other aspects of life.
And almost everyone else possesses an utterly unimpressive amount of intelligence. I'll take the "idiot" who actually innovates.
And I will feed him, and care for him, and team him up with a group of hard working plodders, and under my leadership they will build a race of inhuman monsters and take over the world!
As someone who purchases insurance to cover all my properties and belongings, I find it objectionable that my tax dollars go to help anybody who chooses to live near the water.
That's a little too Ayn Rand for me. I'm OK with helping others as long as we're helping them get out of harm's way. Public assistance to relocate, but not to rebuild. If they insist on staying they can do it on their own dime.
I don't generally see Sisyphus as a model for good governance.:)
I'd happily help the people wiped out by Sandy relocate to safer ground. I'll help them load their belongings into trucks and give them money, too. But if they want to stay I don't think the government should force me to subsidize that decision. It's fundamentally unethical of them to take my money for such futile endeavors; especially when cheerleaders for rebuilding Hello, Governor Christie are ideologically opposed to spending tax dollars that might actually benefit actual poor people.
"The problem" would be socialization of costs and privatization of profits.
I pay for the beach rebuild, the people who are rebuilt (who are wealthier than I am) reap the profits, but my neighbors and I can't afford to visit the beaches anyway. Lather, rinse, repeat since the beaches are highly impermanent and might well move five miles inland over the next hundred years.
Chris Christie, Chris Christie Riding through the land Chris Christie, Chris Christie With his teabagger band He steals from the poor And gives to the rich Stupid bitch
If by "fixed" you mean the beaches are being "prepared for the next hurricane that will sweep them into the sea" then, yes!
This sort of thing reminds me of the Great Stone Fleet.
And all for naught. The waters pass-- Currents will have their way; Nature is nobody's ally; 'tis well; The harbor is bettered-will stay. A failure, and complete, Was your Old Stone Fleet.
Tax dollars weren't used to relocate owners of expensive beachfront properties that washed away, instead they were used to rebuild the same beaches and homes.
Which are already washing away again...
Chris Christie stirred, Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard The cars of battle and his own name cried; And fought with the invulnerable tide.
I can admit that C approaches low level, sure. But "bare metal" it ain't... it has curly braces. And structs.
C only looks low level if you're spending every day looking at stuff like Java and perl. If you're debugging with an oscilloscope C's a reasonably high-level language.
There will always be at least one 'bare metal' language around because we have to be able to write for the hardware, whether it be C/C++ or something else, and every programmer should be familiar with its basics at least.
Man, I never thought I'd see "bare metal language" and C++ in the same sentence.
BITS 16
start:
mov ax, 07C0h ; Set up 4K stack space after this bootloader
add ax, 288 ; (4096 + 512) / 16 bytes per paragraph
mov ss, ax
mov sp, 4096
mov ax, 07C0h ; Set data segment to where we're loaded
mov ds, ax
mov si, text_string ; Put string position into SI
call print_string ; Call our string-printing routine
jmp $ ; Jump here - infinite loop!
text_string db 'This is my cool new OS!', 0
print_string: ; Routine: output string in SI to screen
mov ah, 0Eh ; int 10h 'print char' function
.repeat:
lodsb ; Get character from string
cmp al, 0
je.done ; If char is zero, end of string
int 10h ; Otherwise, print it
jmp.repeat
.done:
ret
times 510-($-$$) db 0 ; Pad remainder of boot sector with 0s
dw 0xAA55 ; The standard PC boot signature
Especially if you're in PHP or another high-level language which can be very rapidly developed.
The problem, of course, is that it takes much more skill to build something good without a framework. The hard part is finding the right people. People who don't need "frameworks". You may not be able to find or afford programmers of the requisite quality.
Really well written code won't be significantly benefited by the inclusion of stylistically different one-size-fits-all code written and supported by other hands.
The postal service is self-supporting, or at least it is supposed to be.
Nope, not since Nixon, Reagan and Bush reconfigured it to fail, I'm afraid. It's supposed to die, as part of the ongoing campaign to eliminate middle-class employment. You might like to read these:
Is there a good reason to be, essentially, throwing this (public!) money away?
They waste public money because there's no consequences for them. And if you object you'll just get called a Koch-funded teabagger who wants to shut down the government.
Can people not take the 15 seconds it takes to put a physical plug in?
Apparently not. At least, not the 1% whose corporate vehicles might actually gain value from this.
Or is this being done strictly to make electric cars "sexier?"
Um, if you think it's "sexier" not to plug in, you just might be doing it wrong.
I stopped reading at "Not to mention a UI thatâ(TM)s impossible to navigate." My bullshit detector went off the scale.
You got that right. For me - a person who never even owned a cell phone before - it took a whole week to figure out how to ditch crappy vendor-grade bowdlerized Android and load cyanogenmod. Then a day or two to master the Cyanogenmod UI, that offers more choices (like, for example, it lets me remove "airplane mode" buttons since I'm not in the frequent air travel socio-economic bracket).
If you need to know something about the Android UI just ask the nearest 13-year-old and you're good to go. It's really like the Apple UIs - completely non-intuitive, yes, but consistent and simple enough that it "feels" intuitive as soon as you learn a few simple concepts. There are no truly intuitive interfaces; even the nipple is learned. Android's UI is reasonably user friendly.
With my big old American hands it's damn near impossible to plug in a micro-usb jack with less than perfect lighting, or in a moving vehicle, or really anything other than ideal conditions.
I can't tell which side of the connector is up without my glasses, although I can read just fine without them.
My dad has to have someone else plug in his e-reader for him every couple of days. He's over 80 so it's completely impossible for him.
Designers who are raging egotists always consider their own capabilities as the standard, like Frank Lloyd Wright designing buildings with 5' 10" ceilings because he was short.
MicroUSB is another example of this, its ergonomics suck.
As I understand it, the amount of juice needed to drive electricity through a crappy conductor (like water) is fantastically higher using DC than when using AC. I'll be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, especially if you propose a reasonable experiment that'll empirically prove it one way or another.
When I was an electrician's mate I was taught that current (amps, not volts) and whether the electricity passes through nervous tissue (such as brain or heart pacemaker) determines the lethality of a shock. That was a long time ago.
That being said, I've taken 120vac through my body while soaking wet and standing in water and suffered no more harm than if I'd been stuck with a sharp pin, and decades ago I was hit with 30,000 volts high frequency from three separate flybacks (pretty much simultaneously) and survived... although that last incident really hurt, left three big red spots on my arm, and wiped every thought out of my head for a minute or two. I was dry and wearing rubber soled shoes when that happened.
Oh, sorry, I skipped your question. I seem to remember the submarine ran off one or more car batteries, so some small multiple of 12 volts DC.
Anyway, this idea that water has magically bad effects on electricity needs to die; the reality (that nanopure water insulates, and salty water conducts) is more interesting and useful.
The water could either conduct back to fire fighters,
Pure water is a decent insulator. Contaminated water can conduct AC pretty good, but batteries are DC. In 2002 on the show "Junkyard Wars" they built a DC-powered submarine with exposed uninsulated wiring and nobody got shocked and nothing shorted out.
Even if we ignore the above little-known facts, it's pretty hard to conceive of a situation where electrically energized water would send any significant current through a gloved and rubber-booted fireman instead of just going directly to the ground through the puddle, or up the hose to the incredibly well grounded hydrant. Current's going to be distributed according to resistance, and there are certain to be so many less resistive paths that's it's incredibly unlikely that any measurable current whatsoever would "conduct back to firefighters".
In the movies, of course you'd be electrocuted, but in the movies, a gas car would have exploded into a 30 foot fireball.
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least a half dozen distinct different forms of atheism. The few that are inherently compatible with agnosticism are not faith-based, but the rest of them quite necessarily are.
But your definition of atheism is easily disproved anyway; absolute statements require only one counterexample. I have no belief in the "supernatural" whatsoever. Everything that exists, exists in nature. I am not an atheist and would resent being called one; I am an ordained religious theist (pantheist, essential monist variety). Therefore your definition of atheism is false, according to the rules of logic and science.
Did you know that there are several atheist religions? Did you know that many atheists believe in the supernatural? No, of course you didn't. We are all subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect; if you decide to study theology you'll be come less confident of your understanding of atheism the more you learn. A planet is smooth as a billiard ball if you look at it from far enough away.
One way to make a crust thinner is to hit it a lot.
Works on pizza and iron, don't see why it wouldn't work on moons...
If you've got rsync and bash you can run shootsnap. It's dead simple.
http://typinganimal.net/code/
Oh, wait, you said Windows. You'll have to spend money, then ;)
In days of old, before the Black Ships came and the secret of hose gartering that never ravels was lost and forgotten, Niklaus Wirth figured this out and bequeathed us Wirth's Law.
Back when the building RSX-11 executables larger than one MB that would consistently execute in real time required manually mapping memory for the taskbuilder step, software engineers had to write rockin' code just to survive in the field. We were all computer scientists by necessity. Today, though, the barrier is pretty low; just slap together a bunch of Java modules some anonymous 13-year-old wrote in a GUI and call it programming.
And I will feed him, and care for him, and team him up with a group of hard working plodders, and under my leadership they will build a race of inhuman monsters and take over the world!
That's a little too Ayn Rand for me. I'm OK with helping others as long as we're helping them get out of harm's way.
Public assistance to relocate, but not to rebuild. If they insist on staying they can do it on their own dime.
I don't generally see Sisyphus as a model for good governance. :)
I'd happily help the people wiped out by Sandy relocate to safer ground. I'll help them load their belongings into trucks and give them money, too. But if they want to stay I don't think the government should force me to subsidize that decision. It's fundamentally unethical of them to take my money for such futile endeavors; especially when cheerleaders for rebuilding Hello, Governor Christie are ideologically opposed to spending tax dollars that might actually benefit actual poor people.
Love the Laplace quote, BTW, makes a good sig.
"The problem" would be socialization of costs and privatization of profits.
I pay for the beach rebuild, the people who are rebuilt (who are wealthier than I am) reap the profits, but my neighbors and I can't afford to visit the beaches anyway.
Lather, rinse, repeat since the beaches are highly impermanent and might well move five miles inland over the next hundred years.
Pretty typical post-Reagan economic setup, really.
Chris Christie, Chris Christie
Riding through the land
Chris Christie, Chris Christie
With his teabagger band
He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich
Stupid bitch
If by "fixed" you mean the beaches are being "prepared for the next hurricane that will sweep them into the sea" then, yes!
This sort of thing reminds me of the Great Stone Fleet.
And all for naught. The waters pass--
Currents will have their way;
Nature is nobody's ally; 'tis well;
The harbor is bettered-will stay.
A failure, and complete,
Was your Old Stone Fleet.
Well, I don't think the Koch Brothers actually wrote the Fox talking points, although they might be the ones paying to have them posted here.
Nice usernames, dude. Totally convincing.
Tax dollars weren't used to relocate owners of expensive beachfront properties that washed away, instead they were used to rebuild the same beaches and homes.
Which are already washing away again...
Chris Christie stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
Fox News has arrived, I see.
I can admit that C approaches low level, sure. But "bare metal" it ain't... it has curly braces. And structs.
C only looks low level if you're spending every day looking at stuff like Java and perl. If you're debugging with an oscilloscope C's a reasonably high-level language.
Sounds dreadful.
Man, I never thought I'd see "bare metal language" and C++ in the same sentence.
BITS 16
start:
mov ax, 07C0h ; Set up 4K stack space after this bootloader
add ax, 288 ; (4096 + 512) / 16 bytes per paragraph
mov ss, ax
mov sp, 4096
mov ax, 07C0h ; Set data segment to where we're loaded
mov ds, ax
mov si, text_string ; Put string position into SI
call print_string ; Call our string-printing routine
jmp $ ; Jump here - infinite loop!
text_string db 'This is my cool new OS!', 0
print_string: ; Routine: output string in SI to screen
mov ah, 0Eh ; int 10h 'print char' function
lodsb ; Get character from string
cmp al, 0
je
int 10h ; Otherwise, print it
jmp
ret
times 510-($-$$) db 0 ; Pad remainder of boot sector with 0s
dw 0xAA55 ; The standard PC boot signature
Especially if you're in PHP or another high-level language which can be very rapidly developed.
The problem, of course, is that it takes much more skill to build something good without a framework. The hard part is finding the right people. People who don't need "frameworks". You may not be able to find or afford programmers of the requisite quality.
Really well written code won't be significantly benefited by the inclusion of stylistically different one-size-fits-all code written and supported by other hands.
Nope, not since Nixon, Reagan and Bush reconfigured it to fail, I'm afraid. It's supposed to die, as part of the ongoing campaign to eliminate middle-class employment.
You might like to read these:
The USPS is still turning a profit and hasn't been funded by taxpayers since 1971
What kind of nation wouldn't fund a post office anyway?
Holy shit, someone thinking outside a predetermined cartoon box on slashdot.
Are you sure we haven't been magically transported into the past, before the paid shill battalions got here?
They waste public money because there's no consequences for them. And if you object you'll just get called a Koch-funded teabagger who wants to shut down the government.
Apparently not. At least, not the 1% whose corporate vehicles might actually gain value from this.
Um, if you think it's "sexier" not to plug in, you just might be doing it wrong.
Word, testify! I wish I could give you a +5 "common sense" mod.
You got that right. For me - a person who never even owned a cell phone before - it took a whole week to figure out how to ditch crappy vendor-grade bowdlerized Android and load cyanogenmod. Then a day or two to master the Cyanogenmod UI, that offers more choices (like, for example, it lets me remove "airplane mode" buttons since I'm not in the frequent air travel socio-economic bracket).
If you need to know something about the Android UI just ask the nearest 13-year-old and you're good to go. It's really like the Apple UIs - completely non-intuitive, yes, but consistent and simple enough that it "feels" intuitive as soon as you learn a few simple concepts. There are no truly intuitive interfaces; even the nipple is learned. Android's UI is reasonably user friendly.
With my big old American hands it's damn near impossible to plug in a micro-usb jack with less than perfect lighting, or in a moving vehicle, or really anything other than ideal conditions.
I can't tell which side of the connector is up without my glasses, although I can read just fine without them.
My dad has to have someone else plug in his e-reader for him every couple of days. He's over 80 so it's completely impossible for him.
Designers who are raging egotists always consider their own capabilities as the standard, like Frank Lloyd Wright designing buildings with 5' 10" ceilings because he was short.
MicroUSB is another example of this, its ergonomics suck.
GM, Ford & Chrysler haven't already spent 7 figures each on battery technology.
What? You told me to tell you that!
As I understand it, the amount of juice needed to drive electricity through a crappy conductor (like water) is fantastically higher using DC than when using AC. I'll be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong, especially if you propose a reasonable experiment that'll empirically prove it one way or another.
When I was an electrician's mate I was taught that current (amps, not volts) and whether the electricity passes through nervous tissue (such as brain or heart pacemaker) determines the lethality of a shock. That was a long time ago.
That being said, I've taken 120vac through my body while soaking wet and standing in water and suffered no more harm than if I'd been stuck with a sharp pin, and decades ago I was hit with 30,000 volts high frequency from three separate flybacks (pretty much simultaneously) and survived... although that last incident really hurt, left three big red spots on my arm, and wiped every thought out of my head for a minute or two. I was dry and wearing rubber soled shoes when that happened.
Oh, sorry, I skipped your question. I seem to remember the submarine ran off one or more car batteries, so some small multiple of 12 volts DC.
Anyway, this idea that water has magically bad effects on electricity needs to die; the reality (that nanopure water insulates, and salty water conducts) is more interesting and useful.
Pure water is a decent insulator. Contaminated water can conduct AC pretty good, but batteries are DC. In 2002 on the show "Junkyard Wars" they built a DC-powered submarine with exposed uninsulated wiring and nobody got shocked and nothing shorted out.
Even if we ignore the above little-known facts, it's pretty hard to conceive of a situation where electrically energized water would send any significant current through a gloved and rubber-booted fireman instead of just going directly to the ground through the puddle, or up the hose to the incredibly well grounded hydrant. Current's going to be distributed according to resistance, and there are certain to be so many less resistive paths that's it's incredibly unlikely that any measurable current whatsoever would "conduct back to firefighters".
In the movies, of course you'd be electrocuted, but in the movies, a gas car would have exploded into a 30 foot fireball.