The lack of evidence that there was a creator of the universe is not equal to the lack of evidence that there was was not. We deeply understand making statements well enough by now that we know without positive evidence, we don't have reason to believe a positive statement.
There's also plenty of evidence that this creator is not what anyone says it is, except remotely possibly an omnipotent, perfectly enigmatic entity. We don't believe in the tooth fairy, and the consequences of believing in the creator are much more extreme. So it's unreasonable to believe in the creator.
Plenty of mental illnesses are learned. Religion is one of them. The presently popular theory that religion is an evolutionary advantage merely proposes that a birth defect has more value in reproduction than in living with its consequences. BTW, "IQ" and mental illnesses are largely independent, though there's plenty of evidence suggesting that extremes of one can bring the other.
What's rational about it? It merely argues that the mental illness of religion is still protected by the culture it completely dominated for millennia, until recently when it started to share dominance with a mostly compatible ideology mostly practiced only by specialists: science.
It depends on which religion you believe in, and what you do to worship. If you believe in some god nobody else does, even if they did long ago, and you worship it by beating yourself bloody, a shrink would probably say you're mentally ill. But if you beat yourself bloody for Jesus, as people did for centuries, you might get a lot more shrinks saying you're not nuts. But some still would.
Believing the practice is good for you, even if you can't quite bring yourself to do it, doesn't change whether the belief is crazy. It just indicates that you're not totally crazy, and have some healthy inhibitions.
See how the standards of "a mainstream body of mental health professionals" during a period when religion and nostalgia about it are still very popular is no good test of the mental health of a religious believer?
Government people would probably be willing to agree that Kopism is a cult, though not a "religion".
To become a "religion", a cult has to have existed since before the person thinking it's a religion was born, and have members who that person knows personally, through someone else directly, or has seen on TV without it being called a cult.
It helps if the cult has paid bribes to the person asked to consider it a religion.
Any loosely consistent collection of knowledge that cannot be proven can be a religion. But first it has to pay its dues as a cult for a while.
There is no reason that anyone's unprovable beliefs should ever be the subject of any government action, either positive, negative or otherwise. Membership in a group that believes something unprovable should not entitle anyone to special consideration of any kind. If their actions don't infringe anyone else's rights, they can do whatever they want for whatever reason.
Tax the churches already. The religion exception to everything is the world's second oldest profession, and typically indistinguishable from the oldest - except perhaps as competition.
Doesn't Oracle have a tool that will analyze a MySQL schema, (optimize), generate an Oracle schema, query MySQL and populate Oracle? Even for pretty large live databases (~20GB in RAM) that need some cycles to update the new DB to sync with the old DB then cutover, this seems like a highly automatable and deterministic procedure, at least to get started. Then DBAs to optimize the new schema more, using the superior Oracle features.
This seems like exactly why Oracle bought MySQL AB: to be the default upsell path for MySQL instances that have outgrown MySQL. Isn't this something that comes cheap or free with an Oracle database?
If not, this seems like a success-defining opportunity for EnterpriseDB to do the opposite: use Oracle's promotion of MySQL but hard path to Oracle to save MySQL users from their Oracle destiny with free/open migration tools.
It also buys old people food and rent, dividends on their lifetime of investment in the US when they were working.
Before Social Security and Medicare, lots, probably most, old Americans starved and lived in rat traps. Thanks, compassionate conservatives, for sending us back to the good old days!
We should stop spending on you first. Too bad you Republicans elect politicians who insist on funding you until the bitter end, while cutting anyone else with less access to power than you have.
Please back up your insistence on "stop spending" by mailing in an extra check to the IRS in the amount above what you pay it in taxes that the rest of us spend in your state. Then go on about it, once you've put your money where your Republican mouth is.
The Romans were a major power for a thousand years as a republic and then as an empire, and then even after centuries of "fall" the power behind all power in Europe for another thousand. Even after other powers rose they were incarnations of Rome, and required the power in Rome (the pope and his bureaucracy) to exert any power for more centuries, and remains powerful even apart from the major power in Italy.
The same is true of the Persians and Mongolians, and other empires - Spain, Britain, France, China, Egypt, Babylon...
The US power in the world ain't going away anytime you can foresee. Like previous empires, its misfortunes are matched and exceeded by its contemporary rivals, which fall further and faster.
Whoever tagged this story "obama" either doesn't realize that the House is controlled by Republicans, not Obama (the Democratic president) - or they're just another lying Republican blaming their party's worst behavior on someone else, usually a Democrat and especially a Democratic president.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim of brain drain stealing talent from patent examiners?
Or are entirely unrelated factors the basis for the PTO's looseness and even silliness in freely granting patent protected monopolies to anyone buying them.
Innovation in SW, even when instantiated in epochal releases like Java, is evolutionary. Every SW patent was at most a few percent extra improvements on some other techniques being developed elsewhere before it, usually directly adapted by the "inventor". Patents on those filings are BS. They don't "promote progress in science or the useful arts", their only Constitutional justification. They just interfere with the free expression of the programmers and incremental inventors.
I remember when Michael Robertson's MP3.com was prohibited from letting us store a copy of our own music we'd bought and encoded to MP3, that was locked where only we could play it back for ourselves. Supposedly the music industry had to stop him, because flash-ROM players (the Diamond Rio) were going to kill music sales once and for all.
Once again it will be proven that piracy of content is business as usual for those rich enough to make it part of big business. Mere humans must pay the total potential market value of any content copied without some claimant's authorization, for years after the content has become folk content from the work of the audience keeping it alive (usually by copying it among themselves).
I remember when Michael Robertson's MP3.com was prohibited from letting us store a copy of our own music we'd bought and encoded to MP3, that was locked where only we could play it back for ourselves. Supposedly the music industry had to stop him, because flash-ROM players (the Diamond Rio) were going to kill music sales once and for all.
Once again it will be proven that piracy of content is business as usual for those rich enough to make it part of big business. Mere humans must pay the total potential market value of any content copied without some claimant's authorization, for years after the content has become folk content from the work of the audience keeping it alive (usually by copying it among themselves).
None of these Oracle patents are "promoting science or the useful arts". They're obviously just ways for Oracle to compete without doing anything for anyone, by buying a monopoly impeding the progress of others who are investing in doing something with invention.
A corporate repeat offender should be prohibited from getting any new "temporary" government monopolies like patents when proving they are a serial abuser. That might make their corporate boards think twice before trolling, and costing the people and the markets so much in lost time and expensive government mediation.
Your attitude is annoying. There's plenty we can and do do without catastrophically damaging our environment. The standard is "could it have some ecological impact". If it were, we'd be a lot better off. Instead it's "will this instantly kill us", and if it takes a little longer or just makes us sick, it's OK.
5% cheaper earbuds for you is not worth trashing millions of cubic meters of ocean. Your selfish obsession does not outweigh the nature that we share the planet with.
But at least you admitted that you're just kneejerking without knowing what you're talking about. Next time it would be better for you to have some knowledge before you talked like you did.
Does it help if you point your DNS client at alternate DNS servers that don't cooperate with the Australian government (or anyone else, except maybe each other)?
So if I encrypt with DES, then run a trivial extra transform (eg. ROT12(destext)), it won't be exactly DES and just running undes(ciphertext) won't decrypt it.
My point isn't to be annoying. It's that there could be value to DES between parties that know it's "DES + ROT12", or whatever trivial function is added, despite DES itself being without real protection value. Especially since DES is now so fast to run.
If I encrypt a string with DES, and you intercept it but I didn't tell you it's DES, can you tell by inspecting the ciphertext that it's DES (and then use DES cracking tools to crack it)?
Which of these funded corps will first launch and retrieve satellites while in orbit? Or can the latest one still keep closest to USA orbital continuity, but better than the first? The latter would be better.
Slashdot Mirror
The lack of evidence that there was a creator of the universe is not equal to the lack of evidence that there was was not. We deeply understand making statements well enough by now that we know without positive evidence, we don't have reason to believe a positive statement.
There's also plenty of evidence that this creator is not what anyone says it is, except remotely possibly an omnipotent, perfectly enigmatic entity.
We don't believe in the tooth fairy, and the consequences of believing in the creator are much more extreme. So it's unreasonable to believe in the creator.
Plenty of mental illnesses are learned. Religion is one of them. The presently popular theory that religion is an evolutionary advantage merely proposes that a birth defect has more value in reproduction than in living with its consequences. BTW, "IQ" and mental illnesses are largely independent, though there's plenty of evidence suggesting that extremes of one can bring the other.
What's rational about it? It merely argues that the mental illness of religion is still protected by the culture it completely dominated for millennia, until recently when it started to share dominance with a mostly compatible ideology mostly practiced only by specialists: science.
It depends on which religion you believe in, and what you do to worship. If you believe in some god nobody else does, even if they did long ago, and you worship it by beating yourself bloody, a shrink would probably say you're mentally ill. But if you beat yourself bloody for Jesus, as people did for centuries, you might get a lot more shrinks saying you're not nuts. But some still would.
Believing the practice is good for you, even if you can't quite bring yourself to do it, doesn't change whether the belief is crazy. It just indicates that you're not totally crazy, and have some healthy inhibitions.
See how the standards of "a mainstream body of mental health professionals" during a period when religion and nostalgia about it are still very popular is no good test of the mental health of a religious believer?
So if the scam was minted generations ago, and accumulated all kinds of abuses since then, that's OK?
Government people would probably be willing to agree that Kopism is a cult, though not a "religion".
To become a "religion", a cult has to have existed since before the person thinking it's a religion was born, and have members who that person knows personally, through someone else directly, or has seen on TV without it being called a cult.
It helps if the cult has paid bribes to the person asked to consider it a religion.
Any loosely consistent collection of knowledge that cannot be proven can be a religion. But first it has to pay its dues as a cult for a while.
There is no reason that anyone's unprovable beliefs should ever be the subject of any government action, either positive, negative or otherwise. Membership in a group that believes something unprovable should not entitle anyone to special consideration of any kind. If their actions don't infringe anyone else's rights, they can do whatever they want for whatever reason.
Tax the churches already. The religion exception to everything is the world's second oldest profession, and typically indistinguishable from the oldest - except perhaps as competition.
Without the Internet, you won't be asking random crowds to help you fundamentally restructure your life. The way you're doing here.
You're right. Computers were invented to steer bombs to people and kill them. Through WWII and the 1960s missiles that brought us the IC and beyond.
As mountainous as advertising suck is, bomb suck is worse. I like where computers have gone from their purely murderous beginnings.
Doesn't Oracle have a tool that will analyze a MySQL schema, (optimize), generate an Oracle schema, query MySQL and populate Oracle? Even for pretty large live databases (~20GB in RAM) that need some cycles to update the new DB to sync with the old DB then cutover, this seems like a highly automatable and deterministic procedure, at least to get started. Then DBAs to optimize the new schema more, using the superior Oracle features.
This seems like exactly why Oracle bought MySQL AB: to be the default upsell path for MySQL instances that have outgrown MySQL. Isn't this something that comes cheap or free with an Oracle database?
If not, this seems like a success-defining opportunity for EnterpriseDB to do the opposite: use Oracle's promotion of MySQL but hard path to Oracle to save MySQL users from their Oracle destiny with free/open migration tools.
You mean the Democrats' moderately corporatist real world? You Republicans aren't fit to run Sim City, let alone the US.
It also buys old people food and rent, dividends on their lifetime of investment in the US when they were working.
Before Social Security and Medicare, lots, probably most, old Americans starved and lived in rat traps. Thanks, compassionate conservatives, for sending us back to the good old days!
We should stop spending on you first. Too bad you Republicans elect politicians who insist on funding you until the bitter end, while cutting anyone else with less access to power than you have.
Please back up your insistence on "stop spending" by mailing in an extra check to the IRS in the amount above what you pay it in taxes that the rest of us spend in your state. Then go on about it, once you've put your money where your Republican mouth is.
The Romans were a major power for a thousand years as a republic and then as an empire, and then even after centuries of "fall" the power behind all power in Europe for another thousand. Even after other powers rose they were incarnations of Rome, and required the power in Rome (the pope and his bureaucracy) to exert any power for more centuries, and remains powerful even apart from the major power in Italy.
The same is true of the Persians and Mongolians, and other empires - Spain, Britain, France, China, Egypt, Babylon...
The US power in the world ain't going away anytime you can foresee. Like previous empires, its misfortunes are matched and exceeded by its contemporary rivals, which fall further and faster.
Whoever tagged this story "obama" either doesn't realize that the House is controlled by Republicans, not Obama (the Democratic president) - or they're just another lying Republican blaming their party's worst behavior on someone else, usually a Democrat and especially a Democratic president.
Republicans. Not Obama.
Do you have any evidence to back up your claim of brain drain stealing talent from patent examiners?
Or are entirely unrelated factors the basis for the PTO's looseness and even silliness in freely granting patent protected monopolies to anyone buying them.
Innovation in SW, even when instantiated in epochal releases like Java, is evolutionary. Every SW patent was at most a few percent extra improvements on some other techniques being developed elsewhere before it, usually directly adapted by the "inventor". Patents on those filings are BS. They don't "promote progress in science or the useful arts", their only Constitutional justification. They just interfere with the free expression of the programmers and incremental inventors.
I remember when Michael Robertson's MP3.com was prohibited from letting us store a copy of our own music we'd bought and encoded to MP3, that was locked where only we could play it back for ourselves. Supposedly the music industry had to stop him, because flash-ROM players (the Diamond Rio) were going to kill music sales once and for all.
Once again it will be proven that piracy of content is business as usual for those rich enough to make it part of big business. Mere humans must pay the total potential market value of any content copied without some claimant's authorization, for years after the content has become folk content from the work of the audience keeping it alive (usually by copying it among themselves).
I remember when Michael Robertson's MP3.com was prohibited from letting us store a copy of our own music we'd bought and encoded to MP3, that was locked where only we could play it back for ourselves. Supposedly the music industry had to stop him, because flash-ROM players (the Diamond Rio) were going to kill music sales once and for all.
Once again it will be proven that piracy of content is business as usual for those rich enough to make it part of big business. Mere humans must pay the total potential market value of any content copied without some claimant's authorization, for years after the content has become folk content from the work of the audience keeping it alive (usually by copying it among themselves).
None of these Oracle patents are "promoting science or the useful arts". They're obviously just ways for Oracle to compete without doing anything for anyone, by buying a monopoly impeding the progress of others who are investing in doing something with invention.
A corporate repeat offender should be prohibited from getting any new "temporary" government monopolies like patents when proving they are a serial abuser. That might make their corporate boards think twice before trolling, and costing the people and the markets so much in lost time and expensive government mediation.
Your attitude is annoying. There's plenty we can and do do without catastrophically damaging our environment. The standard is "could it have some ecological impact". If it were, we'd be a lot better off. Instead it's "will this instantly kill us", and if it takes a little longer or just makes us sick, it's OK.
5% cheaper earbuds for you is not worth trashing millions of cubic meters of ocean. Your selfish obsession does not outweigh the nature that we share the planet with.
But at least you admitted that you're just kneejerking without knowing what you're talking about. Next time it would be better for you to have some knowledge before you talked like you did.
Does it help if you point your DNS client at alternate DNS servers that don't cooperate with the Australian government (or anyone else, except maybe each other)?
So if I encrypt with DES, then run a trivial extra transform (eg. ROT12(destext)), it won't be exactly DES and just running undes(ciphertext) won't decrypt it.
My point isn't to be annoying. It's that there could be value to DES between parties that know it's "DES + ROT12", or whatever trivial function is added, despite DES itself being without real protection value. Especially since DES is now so fast to run.
If I encrypt a string with DES, and you intercept it but I didn't tell you it's DES, can you tell by inspecting the ciphertext that it's DES (and then use DES cracking tools to crack it)?
Which of these funded corps will first launch and retrieve satellites while in orbit? Or can the latest one still keep closest to USA orbital continuity, but better than the first? The latter would be better.
I'd collect the energy from the particles. I'd convert the thrust of the particles out in space into microwaves before beaming it to Earth.
Read my post and think instead of just posting a cliche.