Some of this I agree with; we can get a bit more sophisticated.
We come into the world knowing more or less nothing, and have first make the leap to trust that our observations reflect an external reality... then make a lot of decisions around "who to trust" -- even taking a science-based approach, where I can technically understand & perform at least some of the experiments myself, I have actually personally performed/witnessed a very, very small percentage. You can't "stand on the shoulders of giants" if you don't accept the work of those giants... though of course, the results of scientific inquiry are everywhere; the knowledge gained is put to use in manipulating our environment. And scientific fame is gained through revolutionary discoveries, upsetting the status quo, so there's a large incentive for scientists to uncover errors made by their predecessors.
So as you were saying, we go through life giving a rough probability value to everything we believe, absolutely.
Various Christian beliefs rest on varying levels of evidence. The resurrection relies largely on testimony (a bit like having newspaper reports or eye-witness interviews as evidence) and the existence and history of the church itself. There are other reasons.
This is where I feel like it goes off the rails; the claims are extraordinary, but the evidence is extremely thin on the ground. Try standing back and thinking of it as if, say, two gospel authors came to your house, 40 years after Jesus' death -- just long enough that any physical evidence of miracles (including the resurrection) was long gone. You just had these two guys, with second or third-hand knowledge that didn't really match up in some important ways. Would you be convinced? What would they have to say to convince you? Either way, remember, you have nothing but their word.
Then suppose a different two guys came to your house the next day, saying similar things about a completely different prophet. Would you *also* be convinced by them?
I should have added 'an intelligent, moral mind'. Intelligence is only useful for carrying data and understanding it. Morals are needed to decide on the right response.
I saw various references to morality as being a basis for worshiping a supreme being in another post of yours, but I'm not grasping the concept at all. Why would spending time in worship be a moral act? Isn't it better to be out interacting with the world in the way God wants (assuming you know)? You may just have a very different concept of morality than mine.
Somehow that option is unavailable with God. Instead we have: * ancient & highly contradictory writings by people who claimed to have some kind of contact with God thousands of years ago * "messages" from God, in the form of natural occurrences that require aggressive interpretation.
You left out the Bible and prayer.
Is the Bible consistent, then? And prayer doesn't seem to differ in any observable way from simple goal-directed meditation, a perfectly natural occurrence.
You mean like having millions of people spreading the word about him? Or leaving written records of his works?
Wait, the millions of people spreading *which* word about him? Because it varies quite a bit, like you'd expect from non-supernaturally-inspired regular people. The written records of his works -- not written by God, mind you, but by more people as told to them by other people.. and filtered/collected by still more people -- are also still very inconsistent.
Which suggests two questions: * why would God refuse to provide any reliable, consistent source of knowledge about what he wants? Even if everyone who prayed sincerely reached a common wisdom, that would help an awful lot; but they don't. * Given the reality of the situation, is it more likely that God actually exists, or that the idea was created and spread via people?
That's not the way God does things. Jesus explicitly rejected giving signs like that. The followers God gathers are those who recognise their need for him, not those who demand grand signs.
Doesn't this ever strike you as oddly convenient? Based on this refusal, an enormous percentage of all human beings who have existed have never even heard about Jesus. Why does God rely so completely on very fallible human action to spread his word? Or, what they claim to be his word -- obviously, most of them are wrong, since they differ so widely.
The God of the Bible also sends the Holy Spirit to convince people and his word in the form of the Bible. It's not the might or power or persuasiveness of individuals that results in converts.
But what form does this influence take? Because it certainly seems like the charisma of the missionary/church leader/etc. has a pretty strong correlation with the number of converts (leaving aside historical forced conversions).
If God himself is at work in people's hearts by the Holy Spirit, then what could be more effective?
Okay, then why isn't it more effective? Why aren't there more Christians? There are an awful lot... if you count Mormons, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. all as Christian... but their beliefs are very divergent, so clearly the Holy Spirit isn't communicating anything very consistent or coherent. And the majority aren't getting any kind of Christian message anyway.
Who said miracles have stopped? People becoming Christians is a type of miracle.
Most people mean "supernatural event" by miracle. The parting of the seas, rising from the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, etc. doesn't happen any more.
Sorry if I seem rather negative about these ideas; I'm an incurable idealist about humanity, and really think we can do better as a whole than we are now, but part of that requires the realization that some inarguable "truths" that force us into useless conflict constantly are not so inarguable after all. Reality is messy, but at least it's consistent.
If life is about enjoying yourself, then extreme hedonism, while doing unlimited harm to those around you to get it, is the only way to go.
Wait, wait. Stop there. You have a seriously screwed up idea of what makes people happy. You'll be blithe and carefree if you spend all your waking hours doing unlimited harm to those around you? I suppose you also imagine that the most pleasant life is built on massive orgies and drugs binges 24/7, right?
Good luck with that, I guess.
Or -- wait -- maybe you were attacking a straw man? Hmm.
I mean, come on now -- you have to dedicate at least a few seconds of thought to what you're "arguing" against. People are social creatures. Unless you're a psychopath, you have empathy, and you care about the respect & love of those around you. So the happiest, most fulfilling life is actually doing honest work and feeling like you've used your talents well and made a real difference in the lives of others.
Not doing whatever "feels good" with no other thought involved. That could work for about a week, maximum.
Who said anything about blind faith? I certainly don't have it and hope that people have faith on the basis of evidence.
Does *anyone* have religious belief on the basis of evidence? My understanding is that there are certainly religious people who are rational thinkers and even scientifically minded, but they generally agree that a leap of faith is required. There are many questions about the universe to which science's answer is "we don't know", but based on observable reality, the answers that religions offer are not probable by any stretch of the imagination.
Surely a intelligent mind, upon discovering an infinitely worthy being, would worship it?
An intelligent mind would not leap to the conclusion that "worship" was at all helpful or desirable to that worthy being.
An intelligent mind, exposed to an infinitely worthy being (and somehow able to recognize that), would attempt to communicate with it.
Somehow that option is unavailable with God. Instead we have: * ancient & highly contradictory writings by people who claimed to have some kind of contact with God thousands of years ago * "messages" from God, in the form of natural occurrences that require aggressive interpretation.
What's the point of having a supremely worthy being if all your calls go straight to voicemail?
That's a tricky issue; clearly God doesn't approve (Leviticus 18:22)
Well, don't quote any book of the Bible (Leviticus is a fine example) as evidence of what God supposedly wants unless you also accept what the rest of the book says.
Because Leviticus... boy, oh boy. There are some strange rules in there.
How in the world do you decide which bits to quote? People talk with such confidence about what God wants, and back it up with very carefully cherry-picked quotations. It always kind of baffles me; I've actually read the Bible.
A god who wants anything specific should at least, you know, notify us that he's around.
I mean seriously, it's not that hard. If it were me, I'd put an enormous floating obelisk in some highly public place, and make it do something extra-magical, like whoever looks at it seems my latest message in their native language.
I just came up with that off the top of my head. Imagine what an all-powerful being might think up!
Probably something better than "sending" various people to be his emissaries. And stopping all the miracles once scientific principles became widespread.
I sure wouldn't want to go to heaven. I mean, look at how our morality has evolved over time.
Go back even just a few hundred years, and even the "good" people are perfectly accepting of horrific levels of racism, sexism, etc. etc.. Do you want to hang out with those people?
And I'm sure that in the future, people will look back on us, our ignorance and horrible prejudices.
So if heaven existed, it'd either still be EMPTY, or full of racists.
Correct -- killing is very much okay in biblical terms, like how you should kill any woman who isn't a virgin on her wedding night, any son who curses his parents, any fortuneteller, anyone who sacrifice to other gods, anyone who works on the sabbath, anyone on the other side in war (sometimes women & children as well), etc.
It's just "murder" that's wrong -- basically killing someone when it's NOT justified by the law.
You seem to have a very... loose sense of causation. Huh.
First, a very obvious point: the utility of religion is utterly irrelevant to the TRUTH value of it. If we found that people who worshiped the Hamburgler were invariably happier, more peaceful, and more responsible world citizens, you're saying you'd be on board? Really?
It's a valid question, because if you actually study the utility of religion (instead of just swallowing the huge leaps of logic and painful oversimplifications of history that you've listed), chances are pretty likely you're going to have to set aside your religion and head towards a reality-based viewpoint. The argument that religious belief is doing more harm than good in the world today is fairly solid.
That's a little miracle in itself there, but it's the kind of miracle of circumstance and determination -- not the sort that goes into the science section.
Aside: I think this word "miracle" does not mean what you think it means.
There's a lot of all kinds of things in the Bible (including long strings of genealogy, which is pretty useless particularly nowadays) but yes, there are some treatments of morality.
Many religious texts include some kind of attempt at codification of a system of morality.
Unfortunately, while studying a source like the Bible might lead you to think more on moral questions (always a good thing!), it isn't much good at *teaching* you morality or even in providing a good framework for thorny moral questions. In general, the bible seems to actively oppose a deep & considered morality in favor of a very parental kind of approach, "obey me and don't ask questions".
Also: moral philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. have continued to develop rather a lot over the last couple of thousand years (though certainly not to the extent that many other fields of knowledge have... moral questions are more limited & recurring). We also have a much better understanding now of where our basic moral impulses come from and how they function (and how they fail to function when reasonably they ought to...) -- I feel like studying *that* will give you a much better moral base, with a pragmatic approach to actually guiding your own and others' behavior to make society safer, kinder, more just, healthier, etc., then you could ever get studying the Bible.
I mean, think about it -- on the one hand, you have a invented parables delivered by people who actually doesn't *know* how this particular action will turn out in most cases... they invent a pat result based on their (hopefully relatively extensive) personal observations to teach you a simple moral. Some of them are relatively sensible, but some are designed to show the power of "our" deity as opposed to competitors, some are designed to more-or-less record law as it was a few thousand years ago (long before current concepts of human rights and so on), and some are just plain weird, maybe due to poor transmission somewhere along the line. At least Aesop's Fables are relatively consistent in quality, by comparison.
On the other hand, you have long-term, large-scale studies with sometimes surprising & counter-intuitive (or counter-to-common-wisdom) results. Which actually show what methods of impulse control are most successful, how different child-rearing strategies affect development, how different approaches to incarceration & rehabilitation affect recidivism, etc. etc..
Which is more valuable? How much time should we spend studying each, if we want a solid & useful moral foundation?
I actually do think the bible (as well as Qur'an & other major religious scriptures) is worth some study -- it's a fascinating collection of documents, and a strange little window into people's minds thousands of years ago -- but I have never understood the people who argue that it's an important source for learning morality.
Who's to say that there isn't a god, and he/she/it didn't design evolution? The whole concept of "god" is outside the realm of science, since it's something that can't be proven or falsified, unless a real god makes itself known
It's not "outside" the realm of science. Logic and reality (i.e., science) provide no support whatsoever for belief in a god or gods. That doesn't mean "it/they don't exist". But that also doesn't mean the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist... that's an incredibly weak foundation for any strong belief.
I have ideas that I find emotionally appealing -- a concept that the universe is an enormous machine or organism, and I am a tiny but essential cog or cell within it -- vague ideas of predestination and so on.
But when I talk about "reality", I put those ideas aside.
This is the problem with religion -- people have no idea what it's "truth-value" actually is. They actually pray NOT because it helps them think & evaluate by whispering to an imagined benevolent deity... but because they seriously think a magic being is listening, might help them out, and that praying is a better use of their time than trying to solve the problem themselves.
The problem with this approach is that people substitute "God" as an answer to questions: * to which we simply do not know the answers, nor any way to know them (yet, if ever) -- example: beginnings of the universe. OR * for which there are far better answers available that are based in reality, not mythology -- example: an evolved basis for human morality.
If religious people acknowledged "we don't know X & Y, but I like the idea of explanation Z, so I'm going with that for now"... everyone would get along.
They don't. The vast majority say "Z is true, and it's outside the realm of science so don't try to tell me it's not true."
Do you honestly think Childs would have been risking jail if he'd *given* them the passwords when asked? That's a bit amazing. Even if they'd gone in and fucked everything up, he had a room full of witnesses that he'd given full admin control over to them.
More importantly, the whole unprofessional paranoid situation should have never happened in the first place.
I think the legal case against him currently seems dicey, but it's very clear he deserved to be fired. It's incompetence (or malice) to set up any important system with one huge single point of failure and no recovery plan.
If there's no other guy, it was his responsibility to make sure his boss always had access to the information another network admin would need to replace him -- sufficient documentation of the system including all passwords required to administer it.
And sorry, but yes: the system was fragile. If only one person has the access required to manage the system in any way, then the moment something happens to him (incapacitated, or simply with a dead cellphone battery on vacation when something goes wrong...) they're screwed. It's not much comfort that "it's running now" when you have no way of fixing the problems that will arise 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year down the line.
Who would intentionally pay someone to set up a network for them with a configuration set in stone?
The important difference here is that he had set up a system where *he* was the only one with the admin access required to maintain it.
If he had set up multiple accounts with the required access, sure -- the new admin could just wipe out Childs' access when he left, and no one would *need* to ask for his passwords.
But he didn't create a normal system. He created one with a huge single point of failure, himself.
Have you ever managed a significant network where only one person had admin access?
The difference here is that his passwords were required to keep the system running. There were no other admin accounts that could be used to maintain the system if he were hit by a bus.
So it's more like if you hire a locksmith to reset the combo to your safe... and he does, but then says "I'm right around the corner; just ring me up whenever you need to open the safe". Because he won't give you the code.
Would you have given over the root passwords for your network and servers in those circumstances? Especially since you're likely to take the blame and/or get sued if some monkey screws something up and then blames it on you.
People keep making this point, but it isn't a good one. I mean, there's a whole crowd of people there; no one would question that he'd given *all* of those people access and they were all then responsible for whatever went wrong if they went onto the system. They couldn't just blame him, particularly if he's capable of tracing config changes and so on (which he should be). It wasn't his choice to make. It's their system to break if they want.
OK, Childs had a bit of a God complex, but after years designing something that intricate, and being the only 24/7/365 support for a few years due to budget cuts, it's understandable. They've basically charged him for having the tools, access and knowledge to actually do his job.
I'm not sure about the legal charges (they sound a bit dicey to me), but I'm quite sure he deserved to be fired. It's simple incompetence to set up any important system that fails the "bus" test so badly. I.e., if he got hit by a bus one day, they would have been screwed. He should *never* have been the only one with access -- if they couldn't afford a second admin to work with him, he should have had current passwords & setup details updated in a sealed envelope in his boss' desk (or something like that) -- whatever would be required to replace him without losing service in case of disaster.
That bit just blows my mind, that they let him setup this whole fragile thing from the start. They should never have turned it on before he'd documented this stuff.
There's something to be said for putting some focus on quality of life as opposed to simply maximizing income.
It's kind of nice to notice in France that grocery stores aren't normally open 24/7 (more like 10/6 or less), so no one has to work those shitty shifts. I moved to France a few years ago; I never noticed how weird the US was until I was back on business and managed to get a haircut at 10pm on a Sunday night. WTF, America? Yay, jobs created. But they are so shitty and so poorly paid that mostly they just prevent the employees from having the time for education, family, friends, or even searching for a better job.
Not that France had the ideal balance at all (or even that they took the best approach to "enforcing" quality of life) but I think the base idea is a very good thing.
That's interesting. I'm also self employed and I've found that usually I get more productive towards the end of a 12 hour day.
I find the same thing, but (at its worst) I think it functions more along the lines of "holy shit -- I have gotten hardly anything done and it's 6pm".
Though there's also the factor of thinking more clearly when it's dark out and quiet, and all of those other things I know I should do before stores close/etc. can be forgotten.
Read the first statement I made in the GP post. It's factually true (I haven't HEARD that you're competent), but very misleading, because there's no reason I *would* hear anything positive or negative about your programming.
I was making a point, which I explained in the second paragraph.
Your original "That's rich!" comment was mocking someone for suggesting Java to speed up a RoR app, but apparently you have no basis to mock them; you simply haven't heard that suggested before, so while your statement was true -- you technically hadn't heard it seriously suggested -- it was highly misleading, because you simply aren't in much contact with Java, so you don't know how well it performs, or if sections of pure Java would be a good solution to Rails performance problems.
Ah, now that's rich! You say you "program" in Ruby, but I can't think of the last time I heard anyone seriously suggest that you were even a competent programmer.
Oh, wait -- the "factual" nature of that statement doesn't mean it's not misleading, full of crap and worth calling out. I simply don't know anything about you.
Maybe you're just trolling, at this point; whatever.
We're trying to figure out what your point *is*, and if it makes any sense at all. You started with:
Haha. This is the first time in a long time I have seen anyone seriously suggest using Java for better performance...
But then you agree that:
Obviously it is faster than the more dynamic languages like Python or Ruby. I never claimed otherwise.
Er... if it's faster than Python or Ruby, why is it so funny to use it for better performance?
There's also a lot of evidence that Java's performance in general is quite close to that of C/C++, but many tens of times faster than Python/Ruby/etc.....so, it seems pretty reasonable to use Java for a performance improvement. I've done it before a number of times -- my last large project involved reimplementing a large PHP-based site in Java, adding new features and vastly increasing performance (and reducing hardware requirements).
That's why people keep asking to you to elaborate -- you aren't even bothering to provide *anecdotal* evidence to back up your point.
As I stated before, it may be the fastest in its class, but it still ain't fast.
What do you use when you need something better performing than Ruby? You aren't going to say "hand-tuned assembly language", are you?
I've been using Java for a long time (this may be obvious from my userid & screen name), though it's not the only language I use nowadays.
Startup is slow (though finally they have addressed this for client apps in a recent release, and it's irrelevant for stable server apps); memory consumption is still not optimal (this hasn't seen massive improvements), but performance is excellent nowadays, assuming your code isn't crap (or using some library that's doing a billion extra things at each call).
The stats that show up in various performance shootouts, which place it just a tad behind straight C/C++ and miles ahead of languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc., match up with my experiences pretty well...though of course actual webapp hotspots are usually in data access or remote communication -- and have nothing to do with the development language.
There are also now more situations where the hotspot compiler can result in *faster* execution than C/C++ because it operates using live runtime performance data, which is obviously unavailable to a static compiler.
Do you have any specifics to point to, or are you just talking?
Slashdot Mirror
Some of this I agree with; we can get a bit more sophisticated.
We come into the world knowing more or less nothing, and have first make the leap to trust that our observations reflect an external reality... then make a lot of decisions around "who to trust" -- even taking a science-based approach, where I can technically understand & perform at least some of the experiments myself, I have actually personally performed/witnessed a very, very small percentage. You can't "stand on the shoulders of giants" if you don't accept the work of those giants... though of course, the results of scientific inquiry are everywhere; the knowledge gained is put to use in manipulating our environment. And scientific fame is gained through revolutionary discoveries, upsetting the status quo, so there's a large incentive for scientists to uncover errors made by their predecessors.
So as you were saying, we go through life giving a rough probability value to everything we believe, absolutely.
Various Christian beliefs rest on varying levels of evidence. The resurrection relies largely on testimony (a bit like having newspaper reports or eye-witness interviews as evidence) and the existence and history of the church itself. There are other reasons.
This is where I feel like it goes off the rails; the claims are extraordinary, but the evidence is extremely thin on the ground. Try standing back and thinking of it as if, say, two gospel authors came to your house, 40 years after Jesus' death -- just long enough that any physical evidence of miracles (including the resurrection) was long gone. You just had these two guys, with second or third-hand knowledge that didn't really match up in some important ways. Would you be convinced? What would they have to say to convince you? Either way, remember, you have nothing but their word.
Then suppose a different two guys came to your house the next day, saying similar things about a completely different prophet. Would you *also* be convinced by them?
I should have added 'an intelligent, moral mind'. Intelligence is only useful for carrying data and understanding it. Morals are needed to decide on the right response.
I saw various references to morality as being a basis for worshiping a supreme being in another post of yours, but I'm not grasping the concept at all. Why would spending time in worship be a moral act? Isn't it better to be out interacting with the world in the way God wants (assuming you know)? You may just have a very different concept of morality than mine.
You left out the Bible and prayer.
Is the Bible consistent, then? And prayer doesn't seem to differ in any observable way from simple goal-directed meditation, a perfectly natural occurrence.
You mean like having millions of people spreading the word about him? Or leaving written records of his works?
Wait, the millions of people spreading *which* word about him? Because it varies quite a bit, like you'd expect from non-supernaturally-inspired regular people. The written records of his works -- not written by God, mind you, but by more people as told to them by other people.. and filtered/collected by still more people -- are also still very inconsistent.
Which suggests two questions:
* why would God refuse to provide any reliable, consistent source of knowledge about what he wants? Even if everyone who prayed sincerely reached a common wisdom, that would help an awful lot; but they don't.
* Given the reality of the situation, is it more likely that God actually exists, or that the idea was created and spread via people?
That's not the way God does things. Jesus explicitly rejected giving signs like that. The followers God gathers are those who recognise their need for him, not those who demand grand signs.
Doesn't this ever strike you as oddly convenient? Based on this refusal, an enormous percentage of all human beings who have existed have never even heard about Jesus. Why does God rely so completely on very fallible human action to spread his word? Or, what they claim to be his word -- obviously, most of them are wrong, since they differ so widely.
The God of the Bible also sends the Holy Spirit to convince people and his word in the form of the Bible. It's not the might or power or persuasiveness of individuals that results in converts.
But what form does this influence take? Because it certainly seems like the charisma of the missionary/church leader/etc. has a pretty strong correlation with the number of converts (leaving aside historical forced conversions).
If God himself is at work in people's hearts by the Holy Spirit, then what could be more effective?
Okay, then why isn't it more effective? Why aren't there more Christians? There are an awful lot... if you count Mormons, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. all as Christian... but their beliefs are very divergent, so clearly the Holy Spirit isn't communicating anything very consistent or coherent. And the majority aren't getting any kind of Christian message anyway.
Who said miracles have stopped? People becoming Christians is a type of miracle.
Most people mean "supernatural event" by miracle. The parting of the seas, rising from the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, etc. doesn't happen any more.
Sorry if I seem rather negative about these ideas; I'm an incurable idealist about humanity, and really think we can do better as a whole than we are now, but part of that requires the realization that some inarguable "truths" that force us into useless conflict constantly are not so inarguable after all. Reality is messy, but at least it's consistent.
If life is about enjoying yourself, then extreme hedonism, while doing unlimited harm to those around you to get it, is the only way to go.
Wait, wait. Stop there. You have a seriously screwed up idea of what makes people happy. You'll be blithe and carefree if you spend all your waking hours doing unlimited harm to those around you? I suppose you also imagine that the most pleasant life is built on massive orgies and drugs binges 24/7, right?
Good luck with that, I guess.
Or -- wait -- maybe you were attacking a straw man? Hmm.
I mean, come on now -- you have to dedicate at least a few seconds of thought to what you're "arguing" against. People are social creatures. Unless you're a psychopath, you have empathy, and you care about the respect & love of those around you. So the happiest, most fulfilling life is actually doing honest work and feeling like you've used your talents well and made a real difference in the lives of others.
Not doing whatever "feels good" with no other thought involved. That could work for about a week, maximum.
Who said anything about blind faith? I certainly don't have it and hope that people have faith on the basis of evidence.
Does *anyone* have religious belief on the basis of evidence? My understanding is that there are certainly religious people who are rational thinkers and even scientifically minded, but they generally agree that a leap of faith is required. There are many questions about the universe to which science's answer is "we don't know", but based on observable reality, the answers that religions offer are not probable by any stretch of the imagination.
Surely a intelligent mind, upon discovering an infinitely worthy being, would worship it?
An intelligent mind would not leap to the conclusion that "worship" was at all helpful or desirable to that worthy being.
An intelligent mind, exposed to an infinitely worthy being (and somehow able to recognize that), would attempt to communicate with it.
Somehow that option is unavailable with God. Instead we have:
* ancient & highly contradictory writings by people who claimed to have some kind of contact with God thousands of years ago
* "messages" from God, in the form of natural occurrences that require aggressive interpretation.
What's the point of having a supremely worthy being if all your calls go straight to voicemail?
That's a tricky issue; clearly God doesn't approve (Leviticus 18:22)
Well, don't quote any book of the Bible (Leviticus is a fine example) as evidence of what God supposedly wants unless you also accept what the rest of the book says.
Because Leviticus... boy, oh boy. There are some strange rules in there.
How in the world do you decide which bits to quote? People talk with such confidence about what God wants, and back it up with very carefully cherry-picked quotations. It always kind of baffles me; I've actually read the Bible.
A god who wants anything specific should at least, you know, notify us that he's around.
I mean seriously, it's not that hard. If it were me, I'd put an enormous floating obelisk in some highly public place, and make it do something extra-magical, like whoever looks at it seems my latest message in their native language.
I just came up with that off the top of my head. Imagine what an all-powerful being might think up!
Probably something better than "sending" various people to be his emissaries. And stopping all the miracles once scientific principles became widespread.
I sure wouldn't want to go to heaven. I mean, look at how our morality has evolved over time.
Go back even just a few hundred years, and even the "good" people are perfectly accepting of horrific levels of racism, sexism, etc. etc.. Do you want to hang out with those people?
And I'm sure that in the future, people will look back on us, our ignorance and horrible prejudices.
So if heaven existed, it'd either still be EMPTY, or full of racists.
Correct -- killing is very much okay in biblical terms, like how you should kill any woman who isn't a virgin on her wedding night, any son who curses his parents, any fortuneteller, anyone who sacrifice to other gods, anyone who works on the sabbath, anyone on the other side in war (sometimes women & children as well), etc.
It's just "murder" that's wrong -- basically killing someone when it's NOT justified by the law.
The penalty is death.
You seem to have a very... loose sense of causation. Huh.
First, a very obvious point: the utility of religion is utterly irrelevant to the TRUTH value of it. If we found that people who worshiped the Hamburgler were invariably happier, more peaceful, and more responsible world citizens, you're saying you'd be on board? Really?
It's a valid question, because if you actually study the utility of religion (instead of just swallowing the huge leaps of logic and painful oversimplifications of history that you've listed), chances are pretty likely you're going to have to set aside your religion and head towards a reality-based viewpoint. The argument that religious belief is doing more harm than good in the world today is fairly solid.
That's a little miracle in itself there, but it's the kind of miracle of circumstance and determination -- not the sort that goes into the science section.
Aside: I think this word "miracle" does not mean what you think it means.
There's a lot of all kinds of things in the Bible (including long strings of genealogy, which is pretty useless particularly nowadays) but yes, there are some treatments of morality.
Many religious texts include some kind of attempt at codification of a system of morality.
Unfortunately, while studying a source like the Bible might lead you to think more on moral questions (always a good thing!), it isn't much good at *teaching* you morality or even in providing a good framework for thorny moral questions. In general, the bible seems to actively oppose a deep & considered morality in favor of a very parental kind of approach, "obey me and don't ask questions".
Also: moral philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc. have continued to develop rather a lot over the last couple of thousand years (though certainly not to the extent that many other fields of knowledge have... moral questions are more limited & recurring). We also have a much better understanding now of where our basic moral impulses come from and how they function (and how they fail to function when reasonably they ought to...) -- I feel like studying *that* will give you a much better moral base, with a pragmatic approach to actually guiding your own and others' behavior to make society safer, kinder, more just, healthier, etc., then you could ever get studying the Bible.
I mean, think about it -- on the one hand, you have a invented parables delivered by people who actually doesn't *know* how this particular action will turn out in most cases... they invent a pat result based on their (hopefully relatively extensive) personal observations to teach you a simple moral. Some of them are relatively sensible, but some are designed to show the power of "our" deity as opposed to competitors, some are designed to more-or-less record law as it was a few thousand years ago (long before current concepts of human rights and so on), and some are just plain weird, maybe due to poor transmission somewhere along the line. At least Aesop's Fables are relatively consistent in quality, by comparison.
On the other hand, you have long-term, large-scale studies with sometimes surprising & counter-intuitive (or counter-to-common-wisdom) results. Which actually show what methods of impulse control are most successful, how different child-rearing strategies affect development, how different approaches to incarceration & rehabilitation affect recidivism, etc. etc..
Which is more valuable? How much time should we spend studying each, if we want a solid & useful moral foundation?
I actually do think the bible (as well as Qur'an & other major religious scriptures) is worth some study -- it's a fascinating collection of documents, and a strange little window into people's minds thousands of years ago -- but I have never understood the people who argue that it's an important source for learning morality.
...some of us are athier than others?
Who's to say that there isn't a god, and he/she/it didn't design evolution? The whole concept of "god" is outside the realm of science, since it's something that can't be proven or falsified, unless a real god makes itself known
It's not "outside" the realm of science. Logic and reality (i.e., science) provide no support whatsoever for belief in a god or gods. That doesn't mean "it/they don't exist". But that also doesn't mean the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist... that's an incredibly weak foundation for any strong belief.
I have ideas that I find emotionally appealing -- a concept that the universe is an enormous machine or organism, and I am a tiny but essential cog or cell within it -- vague ideas of predestination and so on.
But when I talk about "reality", I put those ideas aside.
This is the problem with religion -- people have no idea what it's "truth-value" actually is. They actually pray NOT because it helps them think & evaluate by whispering to an imagined benevolent deity... but because they seriously think a magic being is listening, might help them out, and that praying is a better use of their time than trying to solve the problem themselves.
The problem with this approach is that people substitute "God" as an answer to questions:
* to which we simply do not know the answers, nor any way to know them (yet, if ever) -- example: beginnings of the universe.
OR
* for which there are far better answers available that are based in reality, not mythology -- example: an evolved basis for human morality.
If religious people acknowledged "we don't know X & Y, but I like the idea of explanation Z, so I'm going with that for now"... everyone would get along.
They don't. The vast majority say "Z is true, and it's outside the realm of science so don't try to tell me it's not true."
Do you honestly think Childs would have been risking jail if he'd *given* them the passwords when asked? That's a bit amazing. Even if they'd gone in and fucked everything up, he had a room full of witnesses that he'd given full admin control over to them.
More importantly, the whole unprofessional paranoid situation should have never happened in the first place.
I think the legal case against him currently seems dicey, but it's very clear he deserved to be fired. It's incompetence (or malice) to set up any important system with one huge single point of failure and no recovery plan.
If there's no other guy, it was his responsibility to make sure his boss always had access to the information another network admin would need to replace him -- sufficient documentation of the system including all passwords required to administer it.
And sorry, but yes: the system was fragile. If only one person has the access required to manage the system in any way, then the moment something happens to him (incapacitated, or simply with a dead cellphone battery on vacation when something goes wrong...) they're screwed. It's not much comfort that "it's running now" when you have no way of fixing the problems that will arise 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year down the line.
Who would intentionally pay someone to set up a network for them with a configuration set in stone?
The important difference here is that he had set up a system where *he* was the only one with the admin access required to maintain it.
If he had set up multiple accounts with the required access, sure -- the new admin could just wipe out Childs' access when he left, and no one would *need* to ask for his passwords.
But he didn't create a normal system. He created one with a huge single point of failure, himself.
Have you ever managed a significant network where only one person had admin access?
The difference here is that his passwords were required to keep the system running. There were no other admin accounts that could be used to maintain the system if he were hit by a bus.
So it's more like if you hire a locksmith to reset the combo to your safe... and he does, but then says "I'm right around the corner; just ring me up whenever you need to open the safe". Because he won't give you the code.
Would you have given over the root passwords for your network and servers in those circumstances? Especially since you're likely to take the blame and/or get sued if some monkey screws something up and then blames it on you.
People keep making this point, but it isn't a good one. I mean, there's a whole crowd of people there; no one would question that he'd given *all* of those people access and they were all then responsible for whatever went wrong if they went onto the system. They couldn't just blame him, particularly if he's capable of tracing config changes and so on (which he should be). It wasn't his choice to make. It's their system to break if they want.
OK, Childs had a bit of a God complex, but after years designing something that intricate, and being the only 24/7/365 support for a few years due to budget cuts, it's understandable. They've basically charged him for having the tools, access and knowledge to actually do his job.
I'm not sure about the legal charges (they sound a bit dicey to me), but I'm quite sure he deserved to be fired. It's simple incompetence to set up any important system that fails the "bus" test so badly. I.e., if he got hit by a bus one day, they would have been screwed. He should *never* have been the only one with access -- if they couldn't afford a second admin to work with him, he should have had current passwords & setup details updated in a sealed envelope in his boss' desk (or something like that) -- whatever would be required to replace him without losing service in case of disaster.
That bit just blows my mind, that they let him setup this whole fragile thing from the start. They should never have turned it on before he'd documented this stuff.
Right. That worked so well in France.
There's something to be said for putting some focus on quality of life as opposed to simply maximizing income.
It's kind of nice to notice in France that grocery stores aren't normally open 24/7 (more like 10/6 or less), so no one has to work those shitty shifts. I moved to France a few years ago; I never noticed how weird the US was until I was back on business and managed to get a haircut at 10pm on a Sunday night. WTF, America? Yay, jobs created. But they are so shitty and so poorly paid that mostly they just prevent the employees from having the time for education, family, friends, or even searching for a better job.
Not that France had the ideal balance at all (or even that they took the best approach to "enforcing" quality of life) but I think the base idea is a very good thing.
That's interesting. I'm also self employed and I've found that usually I get more productive towards the end of a 12 hour day.
I find the same thing, but (at its worst) I think it functions more along the lines of "holy shit -- I have gotten hardly anything done and it's 6pm".
Though there's also the factor of thinking more clearly when it's dark out and quiet, and all of those other things I know I should do before stores close/etc. can be forgotten.
Okay, last shot, then I give up.
Read the first statement I made in the GP post. It's factually true (I haven't HEARD that you're competent), but very misleading, because there's no reason I *would* hear anything positive or negative about your programming.
I was making a point, which I explained in the second paragraph.
Your original "That's rich!" comment was mocking someone for suggesting Java to speed up a RoR app, but apparently you have no basis to mock them; you simply haven't heard that suggested before, so while your statement was true -- you technically hadn't heard it seriously suggested -- it was highly misleading, because you simply aren't in much contact with Java, so you don't know how well it performs, or if sections of pure Java would be a good solution to Rails performance problems.
Ah, now that's rich! You say you "program" in Ruby, but I can't think of the last time I heard anyone seriously suggest that you were even a competent programmer.
Oh, wait -- the "factual" nature of that statement doesn't mean it's not misleading, full of crap and worth calling out. I simply don't know anything about you.
Maybe you're just trolling, at this point; whatever.
We're trying to figure out what your point *is*, and if it makes any sense at all.
You started with:
Haha. This is the first time in a long time I have seen anyone seriously suggest using Java for better performance...
But then you agree that:
Obviously it is faster than the more dynamic languages like Python or Ruby. I never claimed otherwise.
Er... if it's faster than Python or Ruby, why is it so funny to use it for better performance?
There's also a lot of evidence that Java's performance in general is quite close to that of C/C++, but many tens of times faster than Python/Ruby/etc.. ...so, it seems pretty reasonable to use Java for a performance improvement. I've done it before a number of times -- my last large project involved reimplementing a large PHP-based site in Java, adding new features and vastly increasing performance (and reducing hardware requirements).
That's why people keep asking to you to elaborate -- you aren't even bothering to provide *anecdotal* evidence to back up your point.
As I stated before, it may be the fastest in its class, but it still ain't fast.
What do you use when you need something better performing than Ruby? You aren't going to say "hand-tuned assembly language", are you?
I've been using Java for a long time (this may be obvious from my userid & screen name), though it's not the only language I use nowadays.
Startup is slow (though finally they have addressed this for client apps in a recent release, and it's irrelevant for stable server apps); memory consumption is still not optimal (this hasn't seen massive improvements), but performance is excellent nowadays, assuming your code isn't crap (or using some library that's doing a billion extra things at each call).
The stats that show up in various performance shootouts, which place it just a tad behind straight C/C++ and miles ahead of languages like PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc., match up with my experiences pretty well ...though of course actual webapp hotspots are usually in data access or remote communication -- and have nothing to do with the development language.
There are also now more situations where the hotspot compiler can result in *faster* execution than C/C++ because it operates using live runtime performance data, which is obviously unavailable to a static compiler.
Do you have any specifics to point to, or are you just talking?