A president like that would have caused the deaths of dozens, hundreds, or maybe tens of thousands of people depending on how much such an ensuing conflict would escalate to. Thank God we're not all dicks like you who think that it's worth killing people you don't know and spending collective money that you don't have because someone hurt your imaginary feelings.
As an agnostic, but scientifically minded person, I must admit that the very fact of existence implies something that we can't explain, and it doesn't require emotion or a belief in "gods". What/who created existence in the first place? How is it that atoms exist in the first place?
Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions of bearded men in clouds or astral humans with wings. What I do wonder is, how is it that existence exists? I can't argue that there must be "gods", but I do become humble in the paradoxical question of, what was first? What created atoms? How does existence exist? Did something create it? If so, what created it? If the Big Bang happened, what put all matter in the Universe in the single point in the first place? If something did put it there, what created it?
And so on... the question can't be answered. If I belittle the minds of people who think that the Christian God must Be for humanity to exist on earth, I then continue to ask the question of how existence exists, and I am just as ignorant as any other human.
But what intelligent allows is for science to actually function.
The reason science-minded people oppose intelligent design is because it's not testable. You say it allows science to function, but the premise behind the conclusions of intelligent design is NOT scientific: the scientific method requires testing evidence, and intelligent design cannot be tested.
It is perfectly acceptable within a scientific process to say that "the evidence of the nature of the universe that we can measure existence for ~13 billion years we can explain with science, but what was before that or was started by it can be attributed God." I think you probably agree with that, given your comment, but the statement that intelligent design is scientific is absolutely wrong... it is not testable.
There isn't an "explanation", and there doesn't need to be. All theories work on probabilities. All theories find that the chances of life forming on earth are infinitesimally small. We also don't have proof that "NONE" of the hundreds of millions or billions of earth-like planets that beat us in the formation race didn't develop life.
You are implying that, because there is a one in a "billions" chance that life only formed on earth, that the science is wrong. In fact, most theories do in fact think there is only a one in "billions" chance that life formed on earth. There are trillions of other places out there, though, that we are looking at.
In other words, it is completely acknowledged that life on earth is statistically impossible and a statistical fluke by most scientists... but obviously not implausible, because we're here.
First of all, 16GB of RAM to build an operating system isn't a big deal and has NOTHING to do with Java. Second of all, you don't need 16GM of RAM to build earlier versions of Android. Third of all, if you're making your own build of Android for the fun of it, you should be able to afford 16GB of RAM which costs nothing compared to the hardware you would be installing it on.
Second of all, why do you think the example you gave is a bad thing? Were you expecting other developers to cower from such frightening code? Why would another language make what you wrote there better? Was it the 4 method calls in one line, and a string concatenation? Do you understand what's going on there? That is OS-level code, which has to do with loading code dynamically, also past a certain security threshold, of which 99% of apps don't need to do. It would be more complicated in C-Windows or C-Linux than in Java-Android.
Java has the advantage of having many developers - which allowed Android to be picked up by many. It was a good choice by Google.
Your signature is a link to a complicated mathematical formula. And you believe that functional programming languages are the best.
Everyone already knows functional programming languages are the best for mathematics. Now, try writing a web application or a mobile app with functional programming. I'm not saying it can't be done... I'm saying it's ridiculous to think it's better than other paradigms to do so.
The US is a democracy. You are mistaking democracy with "rule by mob" or "direct democracy". People saying that the US is not a democracy is just a e-mail spam from the 90s which caught on.
You're absolutely right. But de facto, that's the historic definition. Hacker now means something different. (The same way it would be interesting to know what the term gay used to mean, but in reality it doesn't mean that anymore). Hell, it's now being used in contexts beyond software, such as life hacking.
LOL, I also just moved to California for a high paying tech job.
The down side is that I didn't realize my signing bonus was actually only going to be 55% of what I was paid after taxes (45% taxed).:( But I'm not leaving, for sure.
I don't get your argument. Even if eminent domain sucks, if private property is taken for public use with just compensation, it is acceptable under the 5th amendment:
...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?
You just brought out one of the worst problems in our system of democracy and made it out as if it were a good thing for California (it's not). California gets the same proportion of representatives in the lower legislative branch as every other state in our nation. That means the voters in the state have no more power/representation than any other voter in any other state. However, California only gets 2 representatives in the upper house (the senate), where as Oregon gets 2 representatives in the upper house as well. This means every 250,000 voters in Oregon get their own senator, where as every 20,000,000 voters in California get their own.
The proportional power of a voter in Oregon is approximately 80 TIMES more than a Californian's (in the Senate). Another way of putting it: California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. This means the population of those 21 states each individually have as much power as the population in California.
I don't understand how you made that out to be a benefit to California. On a side note, this disproportionate representation is a factor in why our nation is categorized as "conservative" or "center-right" - because the majority of power in the Senate is held by rural populations.
Say... didn't we just see what happens when you build expensive devices upon which human lives depend in an earthquake zone?
And kiddies... know what happens to really heavy trains full of people when they're going 520mph and the earth shakes like a pissed off hound dog? DEATH.
That's why they don't have trains in Japan. Oh, wait... they do. I guess they must have figured out a way to deal with it, eh?
Your statements are incorrect. You certainly can ask for the result of the work itself, which is how it's always been.
Also, people who create creative things work *once* but demand to be paid for each person who uses it, not an infinite amount of times. It's like saying Six Flags built an amusement park *once* but demands to be paid *infinite* times, for every person who comes to the park, without doing any more work.
But the present-day FDA, like other three-letter agencies such as the DEA, is just plain berserk with bureaucratic power.
Really? Why? No trolling, just curious why you think this. I've always thought of the FDA as a function that prevents people from selling radium elixirs out of covered wagons at the county fair. Seriously, I hear every other fucking day about some new shit that makes people healthy... some new diet (such as recently, not eating fruit, because it makes you fat), some new fad like some new super vegetable, water which can wash away fat, etc. Really curious of why you think the FDA is a bad thing, because I see it as a organization that prevents stupid people from doing stupid things.
There is nothing in my statement justifying censorship. I said that external censorship is worse than self-censorship - the gist of my mantra is that external harm is worse than self harm.
Nonetheless, I still think censoring other countries is worse than a country censoring itself. It goes against my general golden rule, "I don't care what you do, as long you don't harm me. You let me do whatever I want to do, as long as I don't harm you."
Do you really think that after WWII the European countries would not have fallen to communism one-by-one if the US had not had a presence in Europe?
I think that's too vague and bold of a statement to presume to be true. Sure, you could argue it. In fact, you could have a really long debate about it, and maybe come out with a strong probability of it being correct. But to really know the answer to that, to even get to that point of strong probability, you'd need to become an expert in many fields: history of the time, economics, military theory, etc. It's way too broad to make that statement as if it were a foregone conclusion.
The empires of Britain, Spain and France fell, and the American empire will also fall...
I have no comment on the rest of your post, except for this statement. The current American society is not an empire, it is just a sole superpower. Simplistically, an empire is a government which controls large territories/peoples outside of its sovereign home. Sure, there's places like Guam and Puerto Rico, but all of those territories which are not the 50 states and DC are paltry in population and land compared to the states. One could also argue about other types of foreign intrusions such as "cultural dominance" but that sure as hell doesn't compare to the British or Spanish empires.
Regardless of the patriotic sentiments that are being thrown around here, saying that the "World Wide Web was invented by a person" is so overblown. There was a person who was at the right place in the right time, that's it. It was going to be made by someone, anyone, around that time period. It wasn't even that great of an implementation (though it was fine for what he was doing at the time, it had problems when it went widespread). And it was mostly putting together things that other people already did together (which, granted, is how probably 99% of inventions occur).
I don't think the man sucks, I'm not hating on him by any means, but the credit for how an average citizen of earth uses the internet today goes 98% to people other than the "guy who invented the world wide web".
1. That's not the point of a mint, even if they can do that. Mints have never been a service to press coins for private people with the metal they collect, they have been a way of coining money for a government. 2. There is something to LOL about... He said that the US Constitution prohibits the government from making money. Absolute bullshit.
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A president like that would have caused the deaths of dozens, hundreds, or maybe tens of thousands of people depending on how much such an ensuing conflict would escalate to. Thank God we're not all dicks like you who think that it's worth killing people you don't know and spending collective money that you don't have because someone hurt your imaginary feelings.
As an agnostic, but scientifically minded person, I must admit that the very fact of existence implies something that we can't explain, and it doesn't require emotion or a belief in "gods". What/who created existence in the first place? How is it that atoms exist in the first place?
Don't get me wrong, I have no illusions of bearded men in clouds or astral humans with wings. What I do wonder is, how is it that existence exists? I can't argue that there must be "gods", but I do become humble in the paradoxical question of, what was first? What created atoms? How does existence exist? Did something create it? If so, what created it? If the Big Bang happened, what put all matter in the Universe in the single point in the first place? If something did put it there, what created it?
And so on... the question can't be answered. If I belittle the minds of people who think that the Christian God must Be for humanity to exist on earth, I then continue to ask the question of how existence exists, and I am just as ignorant as any other human.
But what intelligent allows is for science to actually function.
The reason science-minded people oppose intelligent design is because it's not testable. You say it allows science to function, but the premise behind the conclusions of intelligent design is NOT scientific: the scientific method requires testing evidence, and intelligent design cannot be tested.
It is perfectly acceptable within a scientific process to say that "the evidence of the nature of the universe that we can measure existence for ~13 billion years we can explain with science, but what was before that or was started by it can be attributed God." I think you probably agree with that, given your comment, but the statement that intelligent design is scientific is absolutely wrong... it is not testable.
There isn't an "explanation", and there doesn't need to be. All theories work on probabilities. All theories find that the chances of life forming on earth are infinitesimally small. We also don't have proof that "NONE" of the hundreds of millions or billions of earth-like planets that beat us in the formation race didn't develop life.
You are implying that, because there is a one in a "billions" chance that life only formed on earth, that the science is wrong. In fact, most theories do in fact think there is only a one in "billions" chance that life formed on earth. There are trillions of other places out there, though, that we are looking at.
In other words, it is completely acknowledged that life on earth is statistically impossible and a statistical fluke by most scientists... but obviously not implausible, because we're here.
Very awesome point.
First of all, 16GB of RAM to build an operating system isn't a big deal and has NOTHING to do with Java. Second of all, you don't need 16GM of RAM to build earlier versions of Android. Third of all, if you're making your own build of Android for the fun of it, you should be able to afford 16GB of RAM which costs nothing compared to the hardware you would be installing it on.
Second of all, why do you think the example you gave is a bad thing? Were you expecting other developers to cower from such frightening code? Why would another language make what you wrote there better? Was it the 4 method calls in one line, and a string concatenation? Do you understand what's going on there? That is OS-level code, which has to do with loading code dynamically, also past a certain security threshold, of which 99% of apps don't need to do. It would be more complicated in C-Windows or C-Linux than in Java-Android.
Java has the advantage of having many developers - which allowed Android to be picked up by many. It was a good choice by Google.
No software is "important" with quotes in it. Only friends, family, health, and happiness.
However, if there were "important" software, Facebook would be one of them.
Your signature is a link to a complicated mathematical formula. And you believe that functional programming languages are the best.
Everyone already knows functional programming languages are the best for mathematics. Now, try writing a web application or a mobile app with functional programming. I'm not saying it can't be done... I'm saying it's ridiculous to think it's better than other paradigms to do so.
omg... my signature!
The US is a democracy. You are mistaking democracy with "rule by mob" or "direct democracy". People saying that the US is not a democracy is just a e-mail spam from the 90s which caught on.
You're absolutely right. But de facto, that's the historic definition. Hacker now means something different. (The same way it would be interesting to know what the term gay used to mean, but in reality it doesn't mean that anymore). Hell, it's now being used in contexts beyond software, such as life hacking.
The government regulates so that your milk isn't sour, your meat isn't tainted, and your food isn't poisonous, brah.
If there is no government regulation, we're fucked. Running out of shared resources like land and water is only solvable by government regulation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
yep, my bad.
LOL, I also just moved to California for a high paying tech job.
The down side is that I didn't realize my signing bonus was actually only going to be 55% of what I was paid after taxes (45% taxed). :( But I'm not leaving, for sure.
I don't get your argument. Even if eminent domain sucks, if private property is taken for public use with just compensation, it is acceptable under the 5th amendment:
...nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Given the sheer number of representative and electoral votes they represent at the federal level, they certainly do get it back in quite a few other ways, no?
You just brought out one of the worst problems in our system of democracy and made it out as if it were a good thing for California (it's not). California gets the same proportion of representatives in the lower legislative branch as every other state in our nation. That means the voters in the state have no more power/representation than any other voter in any other state. However, California only gets 2 representatives in the upper house (the senate), where as Oregon gets 2 representatives in the upper house as well. This means every 250,000 voters in Oregon get their own senator, where as every 20,000,000 voters in California get their own.
The proportional power of a voter in Oregon is approximately 80 TIMES more than a Californian's (in the Senate). Another way of putting it: California, the most populous state, contains more people than the 21 least populous states combined. This means the population of those 21 states each individually have as much power as the population in California.
I don't understand how you made that out to be a benefit to California. On a side note, this disproportionate representation is a factor in why our nation is categorized as "conservative" or "center-right" - because the majority of power in the Senate is held by rural populations.
Say... didn't we just see what happens when you build expensive devices upon which human lives depend in an earthquake zone?
And kiddies... know what happens to really heavy trains full of people when they're going 520mph and the earth shakes like a pissed off hound dog? DEATH.
That's why they don't have trains in Japan. Oh, wait... they do. I guess they must have figured out a way to deal with it, eh?
Your statements are incorrect. You certainly can ask for the result of the work itself, which is how it's always been.
Also, people who create creative things work *once* but demand to be paid for each person who uses it, not an infinite amount of times. It's like saying Six Flags built an amusement park *once* but demands to be paid *infinite* times, for every person who comes to the park, without doing any more work.
But the present-day FDA, like other three-letter agencies such as the DEA, is just plain berserk with bureaucratic power.
Really? Why? No trolling, just curious why you think this. I've always thought of the FDA as a function that prevents people from selling radium elixirs out of covered wagons at the county fair. Seriously, I hear every other fucking day about some new shit that makes people healthy... some new diet (such as recently, not eating fruit, because it makes you fat), some new fad like some new super vegetable, water which can wash away fat, etc. Really curious of why you think the FDA is a bad thing, because I see it as a organization that prevents stupid people from doing stupid things.
There is nothing in my statement justifying censorship. I said that external censorship is worse than self-censorship - the gist of my mantra is that external harm is worse than self harm.
+1
Nonetheless, I still think censoring other countries is worse than a country censoring itself. It goes against my general golden rule, "I don't care what you do, as long you don't harm me. You let me do whatever I want to do, as long as I don't harm you."
Do you really think that after WWII the European countries would not have fallen to communism one-by-one if the US had not had a presence in Europe?
I think that's too vague and bold of a statement to presume to be true. Sure, you could argue it. In fact, you could have a really long debate about it, and maybe come out with a strong probability of it being correct. But to really know the answer to that, to even get to that point of strong probability, you'd need to become an expert in many fields: history of the time, economics, military theory, etc. It's way too broad to make that statement as if it were a foregone conclusion.
The empires of Britain, Spain and France fell, and the American empire will also fall...
I have no comment on the rest of your post, except for this statement. The current American society is not an empire, it is just a sole superpower. Simplistically, an empire is a government which controls large territories/peoples outside of its sovereign home. Sure, there's places like Guam and Puerto Rico, but all of those territories which are not the 50 states and DC are paltry in population and land compared to the states. One could also argue about other types of foreign intrusions such as "cultural dominance" but that sure as hell doesn't compare to the British or Spanish empires.
Regardless of the patriotic sentiments that are being thrown around here, saying that the "World Wide Web was invented by a person" is so overblown. There was a person who was at the right place in the right time, that's it. It was going to be made by someone, anyone, around that time period. It wasn't even that great of an implementation (though it was fine for what he was doing at the time, it had problems when it went widespread). And it was mostly putting together things that other people already did together (which, granted, is how probably 99% of inventions occur).
I don't think the man sucks, I'm not hating on him by any means, but the credit for how an average citizen of earth uses the internet today goes 98% to people other than the "guy who invented the world wide web".
This is an American news site.
AMERICA, FUCK YEAH! :)
1. That's not the point of a mint, even if they can do that. Mints have never been a service to press coins for private people with the metal they collect, they have been a way of coining money for a government.
2. There is something to LOL about... He said that the US Constitution prohibits the government from making money. Absolute bullshit.