The Tazmanian Tiger could easily be fit for its environment again. First, they only died out because we went around shooting them with guns. Just leaving them alone would probably be enough to get them back on their feet. Then there's the chance that it might be possible to sell gaming rights at some astronomical figure which makes it worthwhile for the locals to keep the tigers around.
Yes, I'm saying that we should bring these poor creatures back from extinction so we can start shooting them again.::ducks and runs::
If you really want to complain about attention to detail, we could start with the fact that Bugs never actually killed the Tazmanian Devil. Perhaps he might disguise a stick of dynamite as a baby in order to trick Taz into picking it up and, er, getting his fur burned off, or starting an avalanche that caused Taz to take up a humorously pancaked shape. In the end, he usually tricked Taz into getting on a plane headed back to his homeland. But Taz was basically an indestructable foe. If any overlooked detail should cause slashdotters across the world to rise up and denounce the parent post, it should be that one.
Assembling a computer probably isn't hard enough to warrant paying someone. Just find someone reasonably competent. If this isn't you, try and bribe someone with pizza and beer. Be sure not to zap the system with static. Wrist straps work well, though when I'm working on my own stuff I just touch the case metal a lot. Generally, if you get something in backwards, it won't blow up. It'll just fail to power on. No blood, no foul.
A couple hours with a PC upgrading book or a tech-savvy buddy, and you'll be up and running. I have faith in you.
Well, what would you read Slashdot for? I read it because it's easier than keeping up with Tom's Hardware, CNN, The New York Times [registration required], The Register, Kuro5hin, about a dozen science sites, mozilla.org/releases, arstechnica, and MSNBC. Plus, I get to bitch about the moderation, the beowulf cluster posts that stopped being funny so long ago that it's funny, and Jon Katz.
So quitcher bellyachin! Spend some time meditating on the contented visage of Tux near the top of your screen, and achieve inner harmony.
I submitted this story three weeks ago. Way to drop the ball, editors!
I never had much success with Audiogalaxy. All the songs I've, erm, downloaded for educational purposes in recent days have been from Gnucleus. As poor as the copyright controls were on AG, they were enough to deter a l4m3r like myself.
This is an interesting argument, and one which would have had some merit back in the early nineties, when the thing was being named. But fighting for the change now that "GNU/Linux" has gained widespread attention under the moniker "Linux" is pointless.
Everyone who matters knows that without GNU software, Linux would have remained just another academic research project. M4d pr0pz to GNU and to Stallman. But the "it's called Linux" meme owns the vast majority of the Free Software world, and trying to fight it is as useless as trying to fight the monstrosity that is the QWERTY keyboard.
While I'm not fully familiar with the politics involved here, it sounds like the name "Linux" was more of a historical accident than an intentional slam against the GNU folks. I wish everyone would just treat it as such and move on.
Ironic, isn't it? One of the benefits of using a nuclear craft would be that, by reducing the duration of the journey, it would reduce astronauts' exposure to radiation.
You would have to have made the same criticism about the founding of "The New England Journal of Medicine," or "Nature." The scientific process isn't being reinvented here. Ideally, it's just being made more efficient by making resources available. Sort of the way you can run TCP/IP over fiber optics or carrier pigeons, but the former is more efficient.
At least, that's the hope. The lack of peer review may hamper it. But let's not mod the whole endeavor as "redundant" quite yet.
Since this story is already off the main page, I don't know why I'm bothering, but here it goes. In the situation you describe, the employee did not legally acquire the source code. He stole it. Thus, he has no more right to distribute the source code to others than if he'd hacked into Adobe.com and stolen the code for Pagemaker.
Say I went and downloaded a copy of the zlib library source, inserted a humerous anecdote about my cat into the comments of the source files, and put it up for download at $100 a pop. Can you imagine a better deal?
Jane Hacker can. She desperately wants to know what happened to my cat, and hacks my server to get a copy of the source files. This is illegal, even though the files are under the GPL. She doesn't have a right to own my version of zlib, much less distribute it to others.
Or imagine if Red Hat 8.0 was released solely as a boxed distro, and ends the ISO downloads altogether. Until someone buys a legitimate copy and puts it up on a website, copies from any other source would be illegal.
The GPL is a license between two people, NOT between the recipient and the software itself. Until a person acquires zlib from me in a way which I authorize, that person has no rights to that software. You, sir, are passing on very rotten memes indeed.
Let me ask you this: Did we actually see Darth Maul die? We saw him forcibly removed from his own torso, yes. But does that mean he's dead?
Maul will be coming back, I guarantee it. He'll come back as a floating torso, but all that does is open up a vast range of spinning moves that he couldn't have dreamed of performing earlier. I can just imagine him slashing through wave after wave of Jedi Knights like some satanic buzz saw.
I'd also throw in "Black Hawk Down." It was an outstanding, gripping movie. But I didn't enjoy watching it. Seeing Black Hawk Down in a good theater is as close to "being there" as any sane person should want to get.
I'd definitely be interested in recruiting statistics before and after it was released.
Unless Microsoft is being completely dishonest, then they seem to have every confidence that the States can make a compelling presentation. As it is, we know that they're being at least partially dishonest. After all, to be "blindsided" by the fact that their own software was modular enough to remove key componenets?
Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh there. After all, the trial is winding up, and the XP Embedded presentation would amount to new evidence, which a defendant should be given time to prepare against. But you'd think that any competent lawyers would have prepared for this possibility, unless the M$ tech people have been exaggerating the merits of the case to the lawyers. It still seems like a stalling tactic.
It's time to surround the Redmond campus, and shout and wave signs! We will not rest until The Beast is overthrown! But we may take some time off for Star Wars II...
No - you are wrong. The "bible" is a bastardized version of verbal (transcribed later) stories. Those stories were likely written down by someone (likely a woman says the experts) years after the stories happened. Christians came along, fucked the whole thing up, changed the stories to fit their own idea (to gain political control), and further bastardize religion today.
Of course there are things which YOU may not believe but may have actually happened. The "seven day theory" isn't in scientific terms seven days at all. If you look at the age of the universe - a guess at this point - and look at everytime it expands to double it's size that would be one day. Of course we think one day around the Sun, but to a God that would be all knowing or powerful one day wouldn't mean anything to him/her/it. Maybe it's just easier to explain these things to idiot humans in simple terms.
Please explain why God, who is supposed to be all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good, would communicate the creation story in such a deliberately confusing way? Supposedly, God said the Earth was created in seven "days." If he meant "seven doublings of the size of the Universe, then that isn't seven "days." That's more like me walking around using "week" to describe a unit of time approximating the life of a Galapagos tortoise. As in, "Jesus was born about eight weeks ago, and died two hours later."
God knows everything, and that includes what we think of when the word "day" is used. If there wasn't an intellectually honest way of explaining the concept God was trying to put across, He would have been better off leaving those details out, rather than being deliberately misinformative.
Simply - Occam is a fag. It's quite parsimonious for you to say that there is no evidence. It's easy for the human mind to say there is no evidence and move on. The idea of God is one that says there is a being, a spirit or intelligence that we can not see. The idea of God is one that says we couldn't comprehend the idea of it.
Simply - you're a moron. Occam's razor means choosing the simplest explanation that explains all the evidence, and has never meant that a person is welcome to ignore evidence that contradicts a simple theory.
Your "definition" of God is a perfect example of the problems I was jabbering about in the original post. You're saying that God is undefinable by definition. Well, what does that tell me? What if I made up the word "holrihuko," and defined it as "something other than what you think of when you think of a holrihuko?" What use is a concept like that? It's not even a meaningful concept at all.
Notice further that nothing in my original post said anything about there being no evidence for God. I don't believe there is, but that's a completely separate issue. But what sort of evidence could you present that would support the nebulous "definition" of God that you offer us?
I'll close this line of thought by reminding you that the existence of Cowboy Neal is clear and irrefutable evidence of the existence of holrihukos."
We can't even explain the universe we do see. We can't imagine the size of it. There are so many theories in Quantum Phyics alone that suggest an idea of God because of interactions on the sub-partical level.
I doubt you know enough about quantum physics to give me an example. I doubt either of us know enough to distinguish a real quantum theory of God from a string of scientific-sounding buzzwords. So don't talk to me about quantum mechanical evidence for God.
Shit... you can give me reasons that God doesn't exist but you can't even support some of the science that claims it doesn't.
The only thing I said was that the literal, traditional understanding of Genesis is not supported by science. I could back this statement up easily. But I didn't feel it was required to make the argument. It's a Slashdot post, not a doctoral dissertation, you moron.
If you don't believe why bother trying to convince people that it doesn't exist? Put your effort towards science only. The claims made about science from the "Church" (you know who I mean) were all made because they were afraid that they would loose control. This is why you have a problem with people who believe - you want them in your camp. Why bother?
Why bother? I bothered to write my original post in response to a post that I thought showed a complete lack of serious insight or analysis into the issue at hand. Maybe I hoped to give people some food for thought, and consider exactly what it was they were believing in. Maybe I was hoping for an explanation for this curious ability to devote one's life to a concept of God that appears too vague to hold any interest. Maybe I was hoping that some fool would come along, skim through the post, and then write a misguided response that put words into my mouth. Well, one out of three ain't bad.
I say again, there can be no meaningful discussion about "God" until you define what it is that you mean by "God." Are we talking about the God of the Bible? Are we talking about an uninterested Creator who set off the Big Bang and then drifted off to do more interesting things? Are we talking about the Universe itself? If I decide to define God as "a toasted ham and cheese sandwich," the only meaningful discussion we can have about God is whether $3.50 is too high a price for God and a medium soda.
Words do not carry any inherent meaning. They're just strings of sound. We invest words with meaning. Only "God" is a word that has been used so many ways--that is, invested with so many contradictory meanings--that you can't assume that anyone else will know what you're talking about without specifying which form you're using.
Mathematics doesn't just have a single, nebulous, uninformative concept of infinity. It has several very specific and informative concepts of infinity, and selects the most appropriate one for the job at hand. No scientist would try to discuss infinity without being more specific.
Trust is earned. Would you mind telling me what the Catholic Church has done to deserve my trust? I mean besides making its priests more dangerous by denying them normal sexual outlets. Or besides enforcing a rigid hierarchy that makes it difficult to bring complaints against those in power. Or besides covering up the actions of priests, paying out millions in lawsuit settlements, and shipping perpetrators from area to area in order to minimize negative publicity?
I would trust the doctors in most hospitals. But if I learned that a hospital willingly hired doctors with suspended licenses, or that they used underhanded tactics to crush malpractice lawsuits, or that complaints were always ignored, why trust them then?
Don't forget to follow it up with a, "Now isn't that better? Say, you wouldn't mind giving me a big wad of cash so I can spread this message to otehrs, would you?"
However you phrase it, it's a misguided solution to a non-existant problem. It's a feel-good-quick scheme that sucks peoples' lives away.
Oh, and the "all you have to do is say the I-accept-Jesus prayer" is not a fundamental principle of Christianity. In fact, I don't believe that this principle was formulated prior to the 20th century.
Has anyone ever thought to giving dolphins hands? I mean, if they can make a remote-controlled rat, then could they build a remote control into a dolphin's brain? The "hand" itself would be a simple submarine thingy with a claw on the end. Graft the control in while the dolphin is still young, and the brain might learn how to send it the proper signals to control it.
I can't imagine what uses the critters would find for them.
If the technology was sophisticated enough, something similar might open up a new avenue for studying the human brain. If you suddenly had a robot scampering around that was controlled by the signals sent to it by your brain, using it would fundamentally alter the way your brain worked. Not only would it provide insight into the workings of the brain, but would be useful in its own right.
I refuse to concede the point that Nostradamus, Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha came up with anything so insightful as to require us to formulate a new cosmology to account for it. Was some of it +5 Insightful? Perhaps. But to claim that any of it was just beyond mankind's ability to invent on its own is to sell the entire species short.
Also, the idea that humanity keeps coming about in every new instance of the universe is to ignore the indescribably vast number of coincidences and one-in-a-million freak accidents necessary for humanity to have evolved. To paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, if we re-ran the simulation of life a trillion times, we'd never happen again.
The Bible Code (by Michael Drosnin) is a downright dishonest popularization of a well-meaning but scientifically shoddy paper. In short, it's something akin to a load of crap. Hit Google for more info.
Why is it that so many people think I'm insane for not believing in God, yet don't mind that they believe in a God that they can't seem to tell me anything about?
For thousands of years, the devout managed to convince people that the Bible was the literal Word of God. Then we found some stuff out about the world that didn't line up with the claims made by the Bible. So now different religious groups are either telling us that science is wrong, or telling us that it doesn't matter.
I can actually fathom the conservative viewpoint better. I mean, at least there's a weird logic to their position. But liberal religions don't seem to mind jettisoning things like a literal seven day creation, a literal Noah's Ark, and even a literal Resurrection. I understand why someone would give up on such apparent absurdities, but why continue to worship the vacuous concepts that remain?
It's impossible to just talk about "the existence of God" without explaining the nature of the thing being discussed. A conception of God that is "wide-minded" enough to adapt to any sort of evidence that science might present in the future cannot be informative enough to be compelling. If you're going to believe in God without believing anything in particular about God, why not just be an agnostic and be done with it?
I disagree. I think that the future is a world where EULAs are no longer necessary, because the IP barons already own every human being body and soul.:)
Regarding the reason that this bill is being pushed in Peru rather than in the U.S.: Follow the money. When an American governmental organization buys a software license, it's almost always money going to a tax-paying U.S. corporation, which provides jobs for U.S. workers, who themselves pay U.S. taxes. When a developing nation buys a software license. . . well, the exact same thing happens. For the developing world, buying a software license is like shoveling money into an incinerator.
I think that Peru is right to promote free software, and it's obvious that some officials down there really understand the Linux Lovefest. But I think that if it passes, it won't be for wholly altruistic reasons. Which is just fine by me. Given the choice between wiring cash out of the country or using the money to support a system that can be serviced and improved locally, Peru should do the latter.
Good advice, but I actually have a 56K modem. The problem is that the phone lines out where I live are too dirty to get better than a 28.8 connection. So I just tell everyone I have a 28.8 modem to keep things simple.
Slashdot Mirror
The Tazmanian Tiger could easily be fit for its environment again. First, they only died out because we went around shooting them with guns. Just leaving them alone would probably be enough to get them back on their feet. Then there's the chance that it might be possible to sell gaming rights at some astronomical figure which makes it worthwhile for the locals to keep the tigers around.
::ducks and runs::
Yes, I'm saying that we should bring these poor creatures back from extinction so we can start shooting them again.
If you really want to complain about attention to detail, we could start with the fact that Bugs never actually killed the Tazmanian Devil. Perhaps he might disguise a stick of dynamite as a baby in order to trick Taz into picking it up and, er, getting his fur burned off, or starting an avalanche that caused Taz to take up a humorously pancaked shape. In the end, he usually tricked Taz into getting on a plane headed back to his homeland. But Taz was basically an indestructable foe. If any overlooked detail should cause slashdotters across the world to rise up and denounce the parent post, it should be that one.
This is sheer genius. My search for a new case is officially over!
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Assembling a computer probably isn't hard enough to warrant paying someone. Just find someone reasonably competent. If this isn't you, try and bribe someone with pizza and beer. Be sure not to zap the system with static. Wrist straps work well, though when I'm working on my own stuff I just touch the case metal a lot. Generally, if you get something in backwards, it won't blow up. It'll just fail to power on. No blood, no foul.
A couple hours with a PC upgrading book or a tech-savvy buddy, and you'll be up and running. I have faith in you.
Well, what would you read Slashdot for? I read it because it's easier than keeping up with Tom's Hardware, CNN, The New York Times [registration required], The Register, Kuro5hin, about a dozen science sites, mozilla.org/releases, arstechnica, and MSNBC. Plus, I get to bitch about the moderation, the beowulf cluster posts that stopped being funny so long ago that it's funny, and Jon Katz.
So quitcher bellyachin! Spend some time meditating on the contented visage of Tux near the top of your screen, and achieve inner harmony.
I submitted this story three weeks ago. Way to drop the ball, editors!
I never had much success with Audiogalaxy. All the songs I've, erm, downloaded for educational purposes in recent days have been from Gnucleus. As poor as the copyright controls were on AG, they were enough to deter a l4m3r like myself.
This is an interesting argument, and one which would have had some merit back in the early nineties, when the thing was being named. But fighting for the change now that "GNU/Linux" has gained widespread attention under the moniker "Linux" is pointless.
Everyone who matters knows that without GNU software, Linux would have remained just another academic research project. M4d pr0pz to GNU and to Stallman. But the "it's called Linux" meme owns the vast majority of the Free Software world, and trying to fight it is as useless as trying to fight the monstrosity that is the QWERTY keyboard.
While I'm not fully familiar with the politics involved here, it sounds like the name "Linux" was more of a historical accident than an intentional slam against the GNU folks. I wish everyone would just treat it as such and move on.
Ironic, isn't it? One of the benefits of using a nuclear craft would be that, by reducing the duration of the journey, it would reduce astronauts' exposure to radiation.
You would have to have made the same criticism about the founding of "The New England Journal of Medicine," or "Nature." The scientific process isn't being reinvented here. Ideally, it's just being made more efficient by making resources available. Sort of the way you can run TCP/IP over fiber optics or carrier pigeons, but the former is more efficient.
At least, that's the hope. The lack of peer review may hamper it. But let's not mod the whole endeavor as "redundant" quite yet.
Since this story is already off the main page, I don't know why I'm bothering, but here it goes. In the situation you describe, the employee did not legally acquire the source code. He stole it. Thus, he has no more right to distribute the source code to others than if he'd hacked into Adobe.com and stolen the code for Pagemaker.
Say I went and downloaded a copy of the zlib library source, inserted a humerous anecdote about my cat into the comments of the source files, and put it up for download at $100 a pop. Can you imagine a better deal?
Jane Hacker can. She desperately wants to know what happened to my cat, and hacks my server to get a copy of the source files. This is illegal, even though the files are under the GPL. She doesn't have a right to own my version of zlib, much less distribute it to others.
Or imagine if Red Hat 8.0 was released solely as a boxed distro, and ends the ISO downloads altogether. Until someone buys a legitimate copy and puts it up on a website, copies from any other source would be illegal.
The GPL is a license between two people, NOT between the recipient and the software itself. Until a person acquires zlib from me in a way which I authorize, that person has no rights to that software. You, sir, are passing on very rotten memes indeed.
Let me ask you this: Did we actually see Darth Maul die? We saw him forcibly removed from his own torso, yes. But does that mean he's dead?
Maul will be coming back, I guarantee it. He'll come back as a floating torso, but all that does is open up a vast range of spinning moves that he couldn't have dreamed of performing earlier. I can just imagine him slashing through wave after wave of Jedi Knights like some satanic buzz saw.
I'd also throw in "Black Hawk Down." It was an outstanding, gripping movie. But I didn't enjoy watching it. Seeing Black Hawk Down in a good theater is as close to "being there" as any sane person should want to get.
I'd definitely be interested in recruiting statistics before and after it was released.
Unless Microsoft is being completely dishonest, then they seem to have every confidence that the States can make a compelling presentation. As it is, we know that they're being at least partially dishonest. After all, to be "blindsided" by the fact that their own software was modular enough to remove key componenets?
Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh there. After all, the trial is winding up, and the XP Embedded presentation would amount to new evidence, which a defendant should be given time to prepare against. But you'd think that any competent lawyers would have prepared for this possibility, unless the M$ tech people have been exaggerating the merits of the case to the lawyers. It still seems like a stalling tactic.
It's time to surround the Redmond campus, and shout and wave signs! We will not rest until The Beast is overthrown! But we may take some time off for Star Wars II...
Please explain why God, who is supposed to be all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good, would communicate the creation story in such a deliberately confusing way? Supposedly, God said the Earth was created in seven "days." If he meant "seven doublings of the size of the Universe, then that isn't seven "days." That's more like me walking around using "week" to describe a unit of time approximating the life of a Galapagos tortoise. As in, "Jesus was born about eight weeks ago, and died two hours later."
God knows everything, and that includes what we think of when the word "day" is used. If there wasn't an intellectually honest way of explaining the concept God was trying to put across, He would have been better off leaving those details out, rather than being deliberately misinformative.
Simply - you're a moron. Occam's razor means choosing the simplest explanation that explains all the evidence, and has never meant that a person is welcome to ignore evidence that contradicts a simple theory.
Your "definition" of God is a perfect example of the problems I was jabbering about in the original post. You're saying that God is undefinable by definition. Well, what does that tell me? What if I made up the word "holrihuko," and defined it as "something other than what you think of when you think of a holrihuko?" What use is a concept like that? It's not even a meaningful concept at all.
Notice further that nothing in my original post said anything about there being no evidence for God. I don't believe there is, but that's a completely separate issue. But what sort of evidence could you present that would support the nebulous "definition" of God that you offer us?
I'll close this line of thought by reminding you that the existence of Cowboy Neal is clear and irrefutable evidence of the existence of holrihukos."
I doubt you know enough about quantum physics to give me an example. I doubt either of us know enough to distinguish a real quantum theory of God from a string of scientific-sounding buzzwords. So don't talk to me about quantum mechanical evidence for God.
The only thing I said was that the literal, traditional understanding of Genesis is not supported by science. I could back this statement up easily. But I didn't feel it was required to make the argument. It's a Slashdot post, not a doctoral dissertation, you moron.
Why bother? I bothered to write my original post in response to a post that I thought showed a complete lack of serious insight or analysis into the issue at hand. Maybe I hoped to give people some food for thought, and consider exactly what it was they were believing in. Maybe I was hoping for an explanation for this curious ability to devote one's life to a concept of God that appears too vague to hold any interest. Maybe I was hoping that some fool would come along, skim through the post, and then write a misguided response that put words into my mouth. Well, one out of three ain't bad.
I say again, there can be no meaningful discussion about "God" until you define what it is that you mean by "God." Are we talking about the God of the Bible? Are we talking about an uninterested Creator who set off the Big Bang and then drifted off to do more interesting things? Are we talking about the Universe itself? If I decide to define God as "a toasted ham and cheese sandwich," the only meaningful discussion we can have about God is whether $3.50 is too high a price for God and a medium soda.
Words do not carry any inherent meaning. They're just strings of sound. We invest words with meaning. Only "God" is a word that has been used so many ways--that is, invested with so many contradictory meanings--that you can't assume that anyone else will know what you're talking about without specifying which form you're using.
Mathematics doesn't just have a single, nebulous, uninformative concept of infinity. It has several very specific and informative concepts of infinity, and selects the most appropriate one for the job at hand. No scientist would try to discuss infinity without being more specific.
Ten dollars an hour to code? Sign me up. Now.
Dilbert: Why does your simulation only count law students as half a person?
Dogbert: They don't drop to zero until they pass the bar.
Sorry, couldn't pass this one up.
Trust is earned. Would you mind telling me what the Catholic Church has done to deserve my trust? I mean besides making its priests more dangerous by denying them normal sexual outlets. Or besides enforcing a rigid hierarchy that makes it difficult to bring complaints against those in power. Or besides covering up the actions of priests, paying out millions in lawsuit settlements, and shipping perpetrators from area to area in order to minimize negative publicity?
I would trust the doctors in most hospitals. But if I learned that a hospital willingly hired doctors with suspended licenses, or that they used underhanded tactics to crush malpractice lawsuits, or that complaints were always ignored, why trust them then?
Don't forget to follow it up with a, "Now isn't that better? Say, you wouldn't mind giving me a big wad of cash so I can spread this message to otehrs, would you?"
However you phrase it, it's a misguided solution to a non-existant problem. It's a feel-good-quick scheme that sucks peoples' lives away.
Oh, and the "all you have to do is say the I-accept-Jesus prayer" is not a fundamental principle of Christianity. In fact, I don't believe that this principle was formulated prior to the 20th century.
Has anyone ever thought to giving dolphins hands? I mean, if they can make a remote-controlled rat, then could they build a remote control into a dolphin's brain? The "hand" itself would be a simple submarine thingy with a claw on the end. Graft the control in while the dolphin is still young, and the brain might learn how to send it the proper signals to control it.
I can't imagine what uses the critters would find for them.
If the technology was sophisticated enough, something similar might open up a new avenue for studying the human brain. If you suddenly had a robot scampering around that was controlled by the signals sent to it by your brain, using it would fundamentally alter the way your brain worked. Not only would it provide insight into the workings of the brain, but would be useful in its own right.
Oh well, resistance is futile.
I refuse to concede the point that Nostradamus, Jesus, Mohammed, or Buddha came up with anything so insightful as to require us to formulate a new cosmology to account for it. Was some of it +5 Insightful? Perhaps. But to claim that any of it was just beyond mankind's ability to invent on its own is to sell the entire species short.
Also, the idea that humanity keeps coming about in every new instance of the universe is to ignore the indescribably vast number of coincidences and one-in-a-million freak accidents necessary for humanity to have evolved. To paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould, if we re-ran the simulation of life a trillion times, we'd never happen again.
The Bible Code (by Michael Drosnin) is a downright dishonest popularization of a well-meaning but scientifically shoddy paper. In short, it's something akin to a load of crap. Hit Google for more info.
Why is it that so many people think I'm insane for not believing in God, yet don't mind that they believe in a God that they can't seem to tell me anything about?
For thousands of years, the devout managed to convince people that the Bible was the literal Word of God. Then we found some stuff out about the world that didn't line up with the claims made by the Bible. So now different religious groups are either telling us that science is wrong, or telling us that it doesn't matter.
I can actually fathom the conservative viewpoint better. I mean, at least there's a weird logic to their position. But liberal religions don't seem to mind jettisoning things like a literal seven day creation, a literal Noah's Ark, and even a literal Resurrection. I understand why someone would give up on such apparent absurdities, but why continue to worship the vacuous concepts that remain?
It's impossible to just talk about "the existence of God" without explaining the nature of the thing being discussed. A conception of God that is "wide-minded" enough to adapt to any sort of evidence that science might present in the future cannot be informative enough to be compelling. If you're going to believe in God without believing anything in particular about God, why not just be an agnostic and be done with it?
s/excellent/vacuous/
I disagree. I think that the future is a world where EULAs are no longer necessary, because the IP barons already own every human being body and soul. :)
Regarding the reason that this bill is being pushed in Peru rather than in the U.S.: Follow the money. When an American governmental organization buys a software license, it's almost always money going to a tax-paying U.S. corporation, which provides jobs for U.S. workers, who themselves pay U.S. taxes. When a developing nation buys a software license. . . well, the exact same thing happens. For the developing world, buying a software license is like shoveling money into an incinerator.
I think that Peru is right to promote free software, and it's obvious that some officials down there really understand the Linux Lovefest. But I think that if it passes, it won't be for wholly altruistic reasons. Which is just fine by me. Given the choice between wiring cash out of the country or using the money to support a system that can be serviced and improved locally, Peru should do the latter.
Good advice, but I actually have a 56K modem. The problem is that the phone lines out where I live are too dirty to get better than a 28.8 connection. So I just tell everyone I have a 28.8 modem to keep things simple.