# Lot refuses to give up his angels to the perverted mob, offering his two "virgin daughters" instead. He tells the bunch of angel rapers to "do unto them [his daughters] as is good in your eyes." This is the same man that is called "just" and "righteous" in 2 Pet.2:7-8. 19:8
# God likes neither woman nor pillows. He says, "Woe to the woman that sew pillows... Behold, I am against your pillows." 13:18-21
Two sisters were guilty of "committing whoredoms" by pressing their breasts and bruising "the teats of their virginity." As a punishment, one sister's nakedness was discovered, her children were taken from her, and she was killed by the sword. And the fate of the surviving sister was even worse: Her nose and ears were cut off, she was made to "pluck off" her own breasts, and then after being raped and mutilated, she is stoned to death. Praise God. 23:1-49
# Paul explains that "the natural use" of women is to act as sexual objects for the pleasure of men. 1:27
(You can't really use probabilities for this stuff; they are more like confidence indicators.)
I don't think a weak atheist needs to feel there is only a 50% chance god exists. Would they need to also consider there is a 50% chance of invisible pink unicorns, ghosts, astral travel by mind power, etc? (Also, which god? If 50% of the thousands of supposed gods exists would make the world a crowded place!
So it comes down to how conclusive you feel the evidence is, and how sure are you that you have interpreted it correctly. It is possible to have a strong atheist who is aware that at least 1% of their decisions are wrong, and so they are never more than 99% sure of themselves. (I'm somewhere near this position.)
It is possible to say "well, all the evidence *so far* is conclusive, but it's not inconceivable that it might be wrong, just very unlikely." I think most intelligent hard atheists don't go here.
It may be more useful to think of the standards of proof used in law: "on the balance of probabilities", or "beyond reasonable doubt", or somewhere in between: "it's overwhelmingly likely".
Theology is certainly entertaining in the way you describe. I find solipsism similarly entertaining: how can you prove that there is any world outside of your own imagination?
The problem is, too many people ignore the fine print on religious texts stating that they are For Entertainment Purposes Only. Not to be Taken. (They do still print that, don't they?)
For example, let's start with the following axioms: God exists, God created the universe, God loves all humans.
Those are acceptable (unverifiable) axioms. One might equally well assume that God hates all humans.
The problem comes in the conclusions that people try to derive from them ("eat fish on fridays", "no gay marriage"), and that they forget that they are only arbitrary assumptions.
Dozens or more go down per day, according to Google sysadmins. But they have many spares already powered up and ready to take over the work. The applications are written to spread around pretty transparently.
At one point, I hear, they didn't even bother pulling out dead machines. They just left them in the rack until the whole rack was replaced. That seems... creepy, or something. I'd hate to have dead coworkers just left in their cubes...
As another poster wrote, this is only suitable for certain applications, and Google have to write their apps to fit on it.
You make good points throughout your reply, but if you're clustering--the idea of buying the fastest available just doesnt make sense, unless underlying it really is that much faster in even a cluser envrironment?
That sentence doesn't even parse, but anyhow: single-thread performance still matters to clusters. There is a limit to how much you can effectively parallelize many problems. If that limit is 1, then you need a Cray or something. If the limit is extremely high, you can use distributed.net, or a cluster of recycled C64s.
In the middle, you might be able to parallelize the task to a limited extent. If you can only split your work into 500 parallel tasks, then you want 500 of the fastest processors you can get. For many applications, that means 500 Itaniums. Even if you could buy 800 Opterons for the money, they might not be as fast.
only other option would be they thought intel would hold up better/be more stable./shrug
Itanium has slightly better manageability; you can find out when a memory module or CPU is likely to fail for example. There is a heap of error detection/correction in the CPU, far beyond Xeon or Opteron afaik. If you have hundreds of machines being able to easily detect failures is worth something.
(Or you can just take the google route and let it fail and replace the whole box. But that really requires your whole application to be written to accomodate it.)
So you're not allowed to be alive until you can spell correctly? I fully sympathize. I'm sick of alot of loosers misspelling things on slashdot.
But how would that work exactly? A little spelling bee delivered over ultrasound to a conceptus still in the womb? Or, if you believe life begins at conception, are we supposed to give gametes a spelling test before before coitus?
And that's only about $200/yr in real money! (Finally, one thing that is cheaper in Australia than the US.)
Anyhow, just because they ship phones with new features every year doesn't mean you have to upgrade. I have a 3.5yo Nokia which is small, friendly and works well. Who cares that it doesn't have a camera? Spend the money on a real camera.
I had a similar problem the other day when searching for a digital camera, and indeed the other day when searching for a slightly exotic piece of HP Fiber Channel hardware. Who would have thought there were so many "Internet Entrepranurs" wanting to sell $5k PCI cards?...
I don't think the spammers can be actually selling the cards; they presumably want to bring you in just to show banners or to sell something else. I suspect the spammers got the product name by gobbling up HP's site or some other reseller.
Anyhow, here is an amusing conspiracy theory: Google are happy for product keywords to get totally spammed out, because it makes it more likely that people will just click the paid links. They might not be the best value, but at least you know they're enough of a real business to pay their advertising bills.
Of course this is a bit tough if you don't actually want to buy the thing, but just to find the manual or drivers or linux support information.
I don't think Google are really doing this, because they seem to be sticking to "don't be evil so far".
Even error-correcting memory may suffer an uncorrected failure in the multi-year lifespan of a disk. I don't know if RAM would be more reliable byte-for-byte than platters. In fact, I think either one has an MTBF on the order of a few years for typical sizes, and disks are a lot larger.
Disks are so much cheaper than you can simply have mirrors and backups. Buy ten disks, and put them in mirrorred pairs. Use something like rdiff-backup to make backups and you can likely keep every version of your filesystem for the last year.
You need to protect against user error and software failure, not just hardware failure. Accidental deletion is far more common than drive failure, and only some kind of backup or snapshot system will protect you against that.
Well, as with a chicken, it came from something which looked almost like a cell but was not quite.
If you had been there at the time watching the hatching of the first "chicken", it would have been nearly indistinguishable from its supposedly non-chicken parents. It's probably impossible to point to a single organism that was the first "chicken", but in retrospect we can say roughly when it evolved.
My biology is a bit rusty to describe the exact sequence, but it goes like this: complex cells evolved from simpler cells. Simple cells evolved from objects that didn't quite match the definition of cells but were close to it. Wikipedia has a decent article about cells.
The big question is how did replicators such as RNA first get going.
There is a big difference between "condoms sometimes fail" (true) and "there are holes in (all) condoms that viruses can pass through".
Anyhow, the reason for the statement is nothing to do with the safety or not of condoms. The Vatican has tied itself into a bizarre knot with the Humanae Vitae proclamation that contraception is always wrong, and they can't admit that condoms might be a good thing for some people. How many people will die because of following this advice?
Here is the text of Humanae Vitae. I don't have time to rebutt it here, but I encourage you to see how many fallacies you can spot.
The biggest one of course, is that they assume God intends every single act (e.g. intercourse) to be possible to lead to its organic purpose (i.e. birth of a child.) Interrupting sex before ejaculation is a sin. But where do you draw the line, and where did they get that bizarre idea from in the first place? Is it a sin to not proceed from a kiss to ejaculation? Is it a sin not to procreate with the first partner you ever ask on a date? Is it a sin to make a cup of tea and then not drink it?
If an all-powerful loving God wants a couple to have a child, one fertile sex act is enough. Indeed, God could certainly rip a little condom if He wanted.
The origin is an interview between Trujilo and the BBC. I can't find a transcript but it is cited in the Guardian. (I don't entirely agree with the Guardian but I trust them to report direct quotes accurately.)
The Catholic Church is telling people in countries stricken by Aids not to use condoms because they have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass - potentially exposing thousands of people to risk.
The church is making the claims across four continents despite a widespread scientific consensus that condoms are impermeable to HIV.
A senior Vatican spokesman backs the claims about permeable condoms, despite assurances by the World Health Organisation that they are untrue.
"Condoms change the beautiful act of love into a selfish search for pleasure" -- which is putting a lot of weight on a little bit of rubber!
"Condoms may even be one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS."
I can't work out if this is funny or sad or both. The Vatican has said a lot of stupid and evil things over the centuries. This one is particularly amusing because it takes only a middle-school understanding of science to realize it's so ridiculous, as I said in the grandparent.
I have to stop reading it. The sheer distortion and lies are making me mad.
Everyone should read "Humanae Vitae" -- it's only about ten pages and a great exercise in detecting invalid arguments.
As far as I can see, most realistic people think Linux will take another 3-5 years to hit 10% on the desktop, including big Linux figures.
Of course 10% will likely be about a hundred million machines, which is no small market. To sell that many machines in five years means about $10bn Linux sales per year, assuming a round number of $500/machine for hardware, some fraction of which will also go to software and support.
HP is reported to have done about $2.5bn in Linux-related business last year -- probably mostly hardware, but some services and systems.
There was even a way in for religion into Cell Theory. If all cells came from other cells, where did the first cell come from?
Which is a pretty typical cheap trick. Chickens prove the existence of god, otherwise where did the first chicken come from?
That kind of sophistry went out of intellectual fashion in about the 15th century. But it still seems to linger around some of the more cult-like christian churches.
Slashdot Mirror
blah blah blah
(You can't really use probabilities for this stuff; they are more like confidence indicators.)
I don't think a weak atheist needs to feel there is only a 50% chance god exists. Would they need to also consider there is a 50% chance of invisible pink unicorns, ghosts, astral travel by mind power, etc? (Also, which god? If 50% of the thousands of supposed gods exists would make the world a crowded place!
So it comes down to how conclusive you feel the evidence is, and how sure are you that you have interpreted it correctly. It is possible to have a strong atheist who is aware that at least 1% of their decisions are wrong, and so they are never more than 99% sure of themselves. (I'm somewhere near this position.)
It is possible to say "well, all the evidence *so far* is conclusive, but it's not inconceivable that it might be wrong, just very unlikely." I think most intelligent hard atheists don't go here.
It may be more useful to think of the standards of proof used in law: "on the balance of probabilities", or "beyond reasonable doubt", or somewhere in between: "it's overwhelmingly likely".
Theology is certainly entertaining in the way you describe. I find solipsism similarly entertaining: how can you prove that there is any world outside of your own imagination?
The problem is, too many people ignore the fine print on religious texts stating that they are For Entertainment Purposes Only. Not to be Taken. (They do still print that, don't they?)
Degrading this with derision and invalidation isn't going to change the fact that, in fact, Scientology works ...
Well, it certainly makes a lot of money, so I suppose it's fulfilling the stated purpose.
Who was it that said "I'm surprised Mr. Torvalds let's you talk with your mouth full"?
Someone who didn't know how to use apostrophes?
He may as well say that we should ask the gardener or the chef about questions of sociology rather than a faculty member of the sociology department.
If the sociologist's answers are merely an argument from authority, or assume their conclusions, then we may as well ask the gardener.
For example, let's start with the following axioms: God exists, God created the universe, God loves all humans.
Those are acceptable (unverifiable) axioms. One might equally well assume that God hates all humans.
The problem comes in the conclusions that people try to derive from them ("eat fish on fridays", "no gay marriage"), and that they forget that they are only arbitrary assumptions.
It depends on what conclusion you draw.
"I think there probably is a unicorn, though we can't see it." - unicornist
"I'm not sure if there is a unicorn, since it might be hidden." - unicorn-agnostic
"I think there aren't any unicorns, otherwise we would have seen one." weak-unicorn-atheist
"It's impossible for something to exist and be absolutely undetectable, so unicorns are a logical impossibility."[*] strong-unicorn-atheist
([*] i'm not necessarily making this argument; it's just an example)
That would be hard atheism, based on a personal conviction.
I am more of a soft atheist: I think it's highly unlikely that a god exists, but only because that is the simplest explanation of the evidence.
I wonder if burning vegetable oil extracts more useful energy than human digestion?
To make bio-diesel you need vegitable oil and alcohol. i.e. you need the parts of the plant that contain oil, not just any plant matter.
Right, but the other parts of the plant can be put to other productive uses; for example burned to drive electricity generation.
Hmm, have you ever heard of STP?
Scientifically Treated Petroleum?
Well, Crays are also parallel computers
I think in their heyday they were the fastest straight-line processors. I don't know what holds that record now. It may well be I2, for some tasks.
The other stuff you described, including checkpointing, falls under my category of writing your app to expect failures.
mod parent up!
I just got one of the rx1600 machines, and they are seriously cute.
Itanium2 processors with no CPU fans. After seeing the Intel Lion box with about 20 fans I would never have believed it.
Dozens or more go down per day, according to Google sysadmins. But they have many spares already powered up and ready to take over the work. The applications are written to spread around pretty transparently.
At one point, I hear, they didn't even bother pulling out dead machines. They just left them in the rack until the whole rack was replaced. That seems... creepy, or something. I'd hate to have dead coworkers just left in their cubes...
As another poster wrote, this is only suitable for certain applications, and Google have to write their apps to fit on it.
You make good points throughout your reply, but if you're clustering--the idea of buying the fastest available just doesnt make sense, unless underlying it really is that much faster in even a cluser envrironment?
/shrug
That sentence doesn't even parse, but anyhow: single-thread performance still matters to clusters. There is a limit to how much you can effectively parallelize many problems. If that limit is 1, then you need a Cray or something. If the limit is extremely high, you can use distributed.net, or a cluster of recycled C64s.
In the middle, you might be able to parallelize the task to a limited extent. If you can only split your work into 500 parallel tasks, then you want 500 of the fastest processors you can get. For many applications, that means 500 Itaniums. Even if you could buy 800 Opterons for the money, they might not be as fast.
only other option would be they thought intel would hold up better/be more stable.
Itanium has slightly better manageability; you can find out when a memory module or CPU is likely to fail for example. There is a heap of error detection/correction in the CPU, far beyond Xeon or Opteron afaik. If you have hundreds of machines being able to easily detect failures is worth something.
(Or you can just take the google route and let it fail and replace the whole box. But that really requires your whole application to be written to accomodate it.)
So you're not allowed to be alive until you can spell correctly? I fully sympathize. I'm sick of alot of loosers misspelling things on slashdot.
But how would that work exactly? A little spelling bee delivered over ultrasound to a conceptus still in the womb? Or, if you believe life begins at conception, are we supposed to give gametes a spelling test before before coitus?
And that's only about $200/yr in real money! (Finally, one thing that is cheaper in Australia than the US.)
Anyhow, just because they ship phones with new features every year doesn't mean you have to upgrade. I have a 3.5yo Nokia which is small, friendly and works well. Who cares that it doesn't have a camera? Spend the money on a real camera.
I had a similar problem the other day when searching for a digital camera, and indeed the other day when searching for a slightly exotic piece of HP Fiber Channel hardware. Who would have thought there were so many "Internet Entrepranurs" wanting to sell $5k PCI cards?...
I don't think the spammers can be actually selling the cards; they presumably want to bring you in just to show banners or to sell something else. I suspect the spammers got the product name by gobbling up HP's site or some other reseller.
Anyhow, here is an amusing conspiracy theory: Google are happy for product keywords to get totally spammed out, because it makes it more likely that people will just click the paid links. They might not be the best value, but at least you know they're enough of a real business to pay their advertising bills.
Of course this is a bit tough if you don't actually want to buy the thing, but just to find the manual or drivers or linux support information.
I don't think Google are really doing this, because they seem to be sticking to "don't be evil so far".
Even error-correcting memory may suffer an uncorrected failure in the multi-year lifespan of a disk. I don't know if RAM would be more reliable byte-for-byte than platters. In fact, I think either one has an MTBF on the order of a few years for typical sizes, and disks are a lot larger.
Disks are so much cheaper than you can simply have mirrors and backups. Buy ten disks, and put them in mirrorred pairs. Use something like rdiff-backup to make backups and you can likely keep every version of your filesystem for the last year.
You need to protect against user error and software failure, not just hardware failure. Accidental deletion is far more common than drive failure, and only some kind of backup or snapshot system will protect you against that.
Well, as with a chicken, it came from something which looked almost like a cell but was not quite.
If you had been there at the time watching the hatching of the first "chicken", it would have been nearly indistinguishable from its supposedly non-chicken parents. It's probably impossible to point to a single organism that was the first "chicken", but in retrospect we can say roughly when it evolved.
My biology is a bit rusty to describe the exact sequence, but it goes like this: complex cells evolved from simpler cells. Simple cells evolved from objects that didn't quite match the definition of cells but were close to it. Wikipedia has a decent article about cells.
The big question is how did replicators such as RNA first get going.
There is a big difference between "condoms sometimes fail" (true) and "there are holes in (all) condoms that viruses can pass through".
Anyhow, the reason for the statement is nothing to do with the safety or not of condoms. The Vatican has tied itself into a bizarre knot with the Humanae Vitae proclamation that contraception is always wrong, and they can't admit that condoms might be a good thing for some people. How many people will die because of following this advice?
Here is the text of Humanae Vitae. I don't have time to rebutt it here, but I encourage you to see how many fallacies you can spot.
The biggest one of course, is that they assume God intends every single act (e.g. intercourse) to be possible to lead to its organic purpose (i.e. birth of a child.) Interrupting sex before ejaculation is a sin. But where do you draw the line, and where did they get that bizarre idea from in the first place? Is it a sin to not proceed from a kiss to ejaculation? Is it a sin not to procreate with the first partner you ever ask on a date? Is it a sin to make a cup of tea and then not drink it?
If an all-powerful loving God wants a couple to have a child, one fertile sex act is enough. Indeed, God could certainly rip a little condom if He wanted.
Even when they try to spin this back, we still have
"Condoms change the beautiful act of love into a selfish search for pleasure" -- which is putting a lot of weight on a little bit of rubber!
"Condoms may even be one of the main reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS."
I can't work out if this is funny or sad or both. The Vatican has said a lot of stupid and evil things over the centuries. This one is particularly amusing because it takes only a middle-school understanding of science to realize it's so ridiculous, as I said in the grandparent.
I have to stop reading it. The sheer distortion and lies are making me mad.
Everyone should read "Humanae Vitae" -- it's only about ten pages and a great exercise in detecting invalid arguments.
As far as I can see, most realistic people think Linux will take another 3-5 years to hit 10% on the desktop, including big Linux figures.
Of course 10% will likely be about a hundred million machines, which is no small market. To sell that many machines in five years means about $10bn Linux sales per year, assuming a round number of $500/machine for hardware, some fraction of which will also go to software and support.
HP is reported to have done about $2.5bn in Linux-related business last year -- probably mostly hardware, but some services and systems.
There was even a way in for religion into Cell Theory. If all cells came from other cells, where did the first cell come from?
Which is a pretty typical cheap trick. Chickens prove the existence of god, otherwise where did the first chicken come from?
That kind of sophistry went out of intellectual fashion in about the 15th century. But it still seems to linger around some of the more cult-like christian churches.
We can date if your iq is higher than your weight!
Just curious (I don't want to date you) -- are you working in pounds or kilograms?