No-one has seriously used billion to mean "million million" in perhaps the last 25 years here in the UK.
I'm 42 and I have never seen billion used here in the UK to mean anything other than "thousand million". If it wasn't for Americans asking which meaning is intended I doubt anyone here would even know of the "million million" sense.
It's not really. Its business model was to lend money to almost anyone based on the rising house market. Now that the market has peaked they're screwed and rightly so because the value of their mortgages is falling while their real - cash - assets have shrunk too; they are effectively bankrupt although on paper they have some wiggle-room to pretend otherwise. That room shrinks everyday the house market contracts.
The reason they've lent so much in such a little time is that they were reckless and now the Bank of England is going to prop them up in a way which you or I could only dream of if our businesses got into trouble for being stupid, reckless, and negligent.
NR's big break is that the Government's entire economic policy is based on house prices going up forever (or at least unlil the Tories get in again and have to deal with the consequences). In order to do keep prices going up at trans-inflation levels, the government will do ANYTHING to prevent a major mortgage lender going to the wall because that would cause a meltdown in the house market and the result of that would be the vaporisation of hundreds of billions of pounds in credit - credit which is keeping the economy afloat. We would be looking at double digit inflation by the end of the year and a recession that would put us out of the G8.
But that's normal for ecomomies based on credit - they're very fragile because, like the Northern Rock itself, they only work as long as no one starts asking for repayments of the capital.
We are also born without knowledge if supernatural beings exist. So atheism is a belief, because atheists believe in the nonexistance of supernatural beings.
If you and I meet and you say that there is a secret president of the whole world elected by a cabal of jews, and when I ask you to prove it you show me a plastic badge with "President" printed on it you found in a synagogue then I will not move from my current lack of belief in a secret world president. Yet this is very close to what religious people ask me to believe everyday and my response to them.
I was born without a belief in a secret world president just as I was born without a belief in invisible beings who control our destinies; it's up to you to prove such things, not me to just accept every weird idea presented to me by some nutter I meet.
If you want to call that stance a positive belief in the non-existance of a secret world president/God then go ahead, but I think you're playing word games to stoke your vanity.
Of course atheism is a religion, it is a system of belief about the supernatural nature (or lack there of) of this universe.
Incorrect. We are born without any knowledge of religion - it is a purely cultural add-on. As such, athiesm is the simple state of being unconvinced by religious explanations of the world. It is no more a religion than being without infection is a type of illness.
Or do you have some kind of study proving your allegation of a high iPod failure rate?
I don't need a study; I've seen it. You're the one that wants a study to bolster your world-view, not me.
My post is in contrast to your post, as a demonstration that anecdotal evidence is useless.
Firstly, two things that are the same are not in contrast; secondly, your experience is not useless to you. Or do you always form your opinions through other people's lives instead of your own?
When you go to college, take a logic class.
Done both, thanks. Logic does not override personal experience, either mine or yours.
I thought one of the points to Apple's computers is that you don't need to 'save your butt'.
You've not owned one then? I have several friends with Macs. One is on her 4th replacement machine, another on his second, and another's "angle-poise" is left in the corner where it was sitting when they gave up trying to boot it. God knows how many dead iPods I could russle up at short notice.
I keep warning people not to touch Apple's plastic tat but they're sooooo pretty that apparently some people just can resist.
It's surprising how quickly the quality of a piece of plastic degrades when you drag a sharp diamond over it. Or perhaps it isn't, in hindsight.
The only thing that's making vinyl sound good to 15-year-old kids is that modern producers are by and large shite button-monkeys who compress the fuck out of everything so it'll sound good when ripped to mp3 and/or played through tiny earphones or club sound systems.
The sort of engineers and producers who would care enought to produce a vinyl LP these days would probably also make damn good CDs.
ie, what proportion of the worldwide car market is there? I couldn't find numbers in a quick search, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was at least 50%. So this car is going to shake up the worldwide car market when it can't be sold in half of it?
If this thing gets 50% of ITS target market then North America will not account for anything like 50% of the whole market anymore. That's changing the world market in my book.
I bet it'll be a different car then though. This one is going to be looking a bit dated.
Have you been to India? This looks like something from the space-year 2525 compared to what many of them are driving now!
When you vote on an electronic machine, why not have it give you a printout with a unique number (maybe a checksum) just for you and a list of how you voted.
No. That way you can pay/threaten someone to vote a certain way and then check to see if they did it.
The car is underpowered and not safe enough for Europe and North America. The hype claims that this car will shake up the WORLDWIDE car market.
Europe AND North America, you say? So that's what, 1/6th of the world (population-wise)? I'd say that rounding 5/6ths up to "worldwide" is fair enough.
The only one of those I've had the displeasure of using is the Atari 400 keyboard. Wow. What a monstrosity.
True; the keyboard was the main reason I sprang for the 800. I'd used the Commodore PET keyboard, which was worse than any of the ones listed, and I wasn't ever going back to "quirky" keyboards! I type this on an IBM Model 'M' which is one of my few "return to the burning building" items.
I'd like to know how the fuck school officials are allowed to discipline students for activities not relating to school.
Students get bad rep; parents decide not to send little Jimmy to "that school with all the drunks"; school either has to put up with the children of parent who don't give a fuck about who their kids mix with or reduce intake, which means reduced budget.
If you mean Earth-sized ones then it's a no go. That small a detail is impossible for a mirror the size of Hubble's to resolve. What's being done here is an increase in sensitivity, rather than resolution.
Firstly I think that you underestimate how hard teaching is. Sure, you or I can grasp the concept of pointers quickly but the reality is that if you tell a room of 100 students to put on their coats ten will do nothing and five will probably get up and leave! It's a total pain.
Secondly, languages like Lisp which are not ultimately Algol-derived are useful for showing that there are other ways of looking at problems. Even if you never actually program in Lisp (or Forth, another totally different approach) you will be a better C/C++/Java programmer for having studied it.
The goal of rational thought is obviously to abandon irrational thought - duh! - you don't understand that because you have embraced irrational superstitions as an explanation for experiences you don't understand - the classic "god of the gaps". Fortunately, such base and craven desires to bend the knee to bogymen is something that is dying out in the West as science gradually closes those gaps.
And, Newton was a guy who spent his later years trying to calculate the end of the world. He decided it would be 2020; I might not be Newton, but I'm pretty sure he was wrong.
For writing I start my laptop up in text mode with the background set to blue. I type into Emacs with Flyspell and when I'm finished I use plainTeX to format the output to anyone of several layouts for editing, reviewing or even final output with crop marks, ToC, index etc. I can have in-line notes which appear in some or all of these formats, tables, multiple columns (via the eplain extensions); I've even typeset a Bible with indexing based on Chapter:Verse rather than page numbers.
That appears to cover everything, and more, that WriteRoom offers, and Scrivener just looks silly and distracting to me.
you admitted that many of those people did indeed believe in God and also engaged in rational thought. anything further to add?
I admit it, I was being idealistic.
The ultimate goal of thinking rationally is to abandon all irrational beliefs, clearly. Sadly, most people do not achieve perfection. I, for example, have managed to shake off superstitious fears of almost all sky-deities but would never have come up with Godel's theorm in a million years. The people you listed had indeed managed a great deal of rational thought but their childhood programming and social context had left them without the ability to judge (or even question, in most cases) the irrational, trivial, and nonsensical whafflings of badly written jewish folklore correctly.
Being right about calculus does not mean that you're right about everything else.
DVD is good enough for me. I've yet to impressed enough with HD to replace my tv or media
Indeed. I was in Curry's yesterday and walked around all their HD TV's, playing HD sources. Talk about unimpressed! What is the point? I have a 22-year-old CRT TV and the picture quality on it is not even apparently lower than most of the LCD/Plasma screens I saw yesterday and those that were better had such a small advantage that I'd have to win one for it to be worth upgrading.
Einstien did not believe in god, despite using the word as a surrogate for "nature". As to the others, yes, they were wrong. I notice that all the ones you mention believed in one of the the European versions of the Judeo/Christian/Pauline god(s); this was nothing more than social context.
If they had each been Indian they would have belived in Rama, Shiva etc. but their work would have been the same, or at least of the same quality. That's because science and rational thought are striving towards a truth, whereas religion, having no basis in reality, is arbitrary and whimsical with no need to strive towards any particular thing. Indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of religion that it avoids striving towards any truth since that would require an admitance that the current dogma is not the final word. Such admitance is suicide for something as paper-thin as religious "thought".
To put it another way, I don't believe in God in order to explain anything.
Well, that's a good idea since it doesn't explain anything. As the original poster pointed out, as more and more evidence is collected the need for gods, ghosts, and goblins declines and never increases. That is because it was an incorrect hypothesis to begin with.
The reality is that the "gods of the gaps" argument is the only argument for the existance of these fantasy beings and if you don't accept that then there is no other reason to believe they exist other than "it says so in a book I read once".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm 42 and I have never seen billion used here in the UK to mean anything other than "thousand million". If it wasn't for Americans asking which meaning is intended I doubt anyone here would even know of the "million million" sense.
TWW
It's not really. Its business model was to lend money to almost anyone based on the rising house market. Now that the market has peaked they're screwed and rightly so because the value of their mortgages is falling while their real - cash - assets have shrunk too; they are effectively bankrupt although on paper they have some wiggle-room to pretend otherwise. That room shrinks everyday the house market contracts.
The reason they've lent so much in such a little time is that they were reckless and now the Bank of England is going to prop them up in a way which you or I could only dream of if our businesses got into trouble for being stupid, reckless, and negligent.
NR's big break is that the Government's entire economic policy is based on house prices going up forever (or at least unlil the Tories get in again and have to deal with the consequences). In order to do keep prices going up at trans-inflation levels, the government will do ANYTHING to prevent a major mortgage lender going to the wall because that would cause a meltdown in the house market and the result of that would be the vaporisation of hundreds of billions of pounds in credit - credit which is keeping the economy afloat. We would be looking at double digit inflation by the end of the year and a recession that would put us out of the G8.
But that's normal for ecomomies based on credit - they're very fragile because, like the Northern Rock itself, they only work as long as no one starts asking for repayments of the capital.
TWW
TWW
If you and I meet and you say that there is a secret president of the whole world elected by a cabal of jews, and when I ask you to prove it you show me a plastic badge with "President" printed on it you found in a synagogue then I will not move from my current lack of belief in a secret world president. Yet this is very close to what religious people ask me to believe everyday and my response to them.
I was born without a belief in a secret world president just as I was born without a belief in invisible beings who control our destinies; it's up to you to prove such things, not me to just accept every weird idea presented to me by some nutter I meet.
If you want to call that stance a positive belief in the non-existance of a secret world president/God then go ahead, but I think you're playing word games to stoke your vanity.
TWW
Incorrect. We are born without any knowledge of religion - it is a purely cultural add-on. As such, athiesm is the simple state of being unconvinced by religious explanations of the world. It is no more a religion than being without infection is a type of illness.
TWW
I don't need a study; I've seen it. You're the one that wants a study to bolster your world-view, not me.
My post is in contrast to your post, as a demonstration that anecdotal evidence is useless.
Firstly, two things that are the same are not in contrast; secondly, your experience is not useless to you. Or do you always form your opinions through other people's lives instead of your own?
When you go to college, take a logic class.
Done both, thanks. Logic does not override personal experience, either mine or yours.
TWW
A whole year? Gosh, it must be great to have such low expectations.
I've still never seen a broken iPod,
I simply don't believe that, sorry.
Anecdotal evidence is worse than useless
You mean when other people use it I assume, since your post is all anecdotal evidence. Actually, there's nothing wrong with it.
You've not owned one then? I have several friends with Macs. One is on her 4th replacement machine, another on his second, and another's "angle-poise" is left in the corner where it was sitting when they gave up trying to boot it. God knows how many dead iPods I could russle up at short notice.
I keep warning people not to touch Apple's plastic tat but they're sooooo pretty that apparently some people just can resist.
TWW
The only thing that's making vinyl sound good to 15-year-old kids is that modern producers are by and large shite button-monkeys who compress the fuck out of everything so it'll sound good when ripped to mp3 and/or played through tiny earphones or club sound systems.
The sort of engineers and producers who would care enought to produce a vinyl LP these days would probably also make damn good CDs.
TWW
If this thing gets 50% of ITS target market then North America will not account for anything like 50% of the whole market anymore. That's changing the world market in my book.
I bet it'll be a different car then though. This one is going to be looking a bit dated.
Have you been to India? This looks like something from the space-year 2525 compared to what many of them are driving now!
TWW
No. That way you can pay/threaten someone to vote a certain way and then check to see if they did it.
TWW
Europe AND North America, you say? So that's what, 1/6th of the world (population-wise)? I'd say that rounding 5/6ths up to "worldwide" is fair enough.
TWW
True; the keyboard was the main reason I sprang for the 800. I'd used the Commodore PET keyboard, which was worse than any of the ones listed, and I wasn't ever going back to "quirky" keyboards! I type this on an IBM Model 'M' which is one of my few "return to the burning building" items.
TWW
I never said the parents weren't being idiots.
TWW
Students get bad rep; parents decide not to send little Jimmy to "that school with all the drunks"; school either has to put up with the children of parent who don't give a fuck about who their kids mix with or reduce intake, which means reduced budget.
There: wasn't that complex really, was it?
TWW
TWW
Jesus! They might as well just give the user a box of matches and instructions on how to set fire to their house.
TWW
Secondly, languages like Lisp which are not ultimately Algol-derived are useful for showing that there are other ways of looking at problems. Even if you never actually program in Lisp (or Forth, another totally different approach) you will be a better C/C++/Java programmer for having studied it.
TWW
I know, I'm just saying that the tools are already out there for free. Emacs and TeX are very universal.
TWW
The goal of rational thought is obviously to abandon irrational thought - duh! - you don't understand that because you have embraced irrational superstitions as an explanation for experiences you don't understand - the classic "god of the gaps". Fortunately, such base and craven desires to bend the knee to bogymen is something that is dying out in the West as science gradually closes those gaps.
And, Newton was a guy who spent his later years trying to calculate the end of the world. He decided it would be 2020; I might not be Newton, but I'm pretty sure he was wrong.
TWW
That appears to cover everything, and more, that WriteRoom offers, and Scrivener just looks silly and distracting to me.
TWW
I admit it, I was being idealistic.
The ultimate goal of thinking rationally is to abandon all irrational beliefs, clearly. Sadly, most people do not achieve perfection. I, for example, have managed to shake off superstitious fears of almost all sky-deities but would never have come up with Godel's theorm in a million years. The people you listed had indeed managed a great deal of rational thought but their childhood programming and social context had left them without the ability to judge (or even question, in most cases) the irrational, trivial, and nonsensical whafflings of badly written jewish folklore correctly.
Being right about calculus does not mean that you're right about everything else.
TWW
Indeed. I was in Curry's yesterday and walked around all their HD TV's, playing HD sources. Talk about unimpressed! What is the point? I have a 22-year-old CRT TV and the picture quality on it is not even apparently lower than most of the LCD/Plasma screens I saw yesterday and those that were better had such a small advantage that I'd have to win one for it to be worth upgrading.
TWW
If they had each been Indian they would have belived in Rama, Shiva etc. but their work would have been the same, or at least of the same quality. That's because science and rational thought are striving towards a truth, whereas religion, having no basis in reality, is arbitrary and whimsical with no need to strive towards any particular thing. Indeed, it is one of the defining characteristics of religion that it avoids striving towards any truth since that would require an admitance that the current dogma is not the final word. Such admitance is suicide for something as paper-thin as religious "thought".
TWW
Well, that's a good idea since it doesn't explain anything. As the original poster pointed out, as more and more evidence is collected the need for gods, ghosts, and goblins declines and never increases. That is because it was an incorrect hypothesis to begin with.
The reality is that the "gods of the gaps" argument is the only argument for the existance of these fantasy beings and if you don't accept that then there is no other reason to believe they exist other than "it says so in a book I read once".
TWW