Atheism is literally the lack of a belief. It doesn't require active denial of anything. An atheist will typically reject your claim with "show me proof". A lack of belief in something is not more of a belief than baldness is a hair style.
Atheism is simply the lack of a belief. There's no founders, no prophets, no rituals, no dogma, no philosophy, no bible of any sorts for atheism. Calling that a religion is like saying that my lack of a car is my car, which is clearly nonsense.
Now, I'm guessing you're talking about "strong atheism" which is the active denial of that a deity exists. But that goes rather further than plain atheism.
IMO, agnosticism is rather inconsistent. By that logic you must admit that anything at all is possible, so you need to consider every bizarre theory, like the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Ignosticism at least looks more logical. The position here is more or less "You say that your God is both infinitely benevolent and a jerk at once. Come back when you have something that makes sense."
The first time I saw something like that happen it was really bad. Performance was very badly affected, and the objects would launch people into the air, so the only thing that could be done was sitting (you can't be pushed if you're sitting) and talking until they fixed it. And after a while the whole grid had to be brought down for hours.
Now all that happens is that things slow down for a while, they close logins for a few minutes, and soon everything is back to normality. Some areas aren't even very noticeably affected, because object creation is disabled, so the stuff doesn't get to run on those sims in the first place. The only effect felt there is the degradation of the central servers.
While it's certainly annoying, it's not nearly the problem it used to be.
I've yet to see a RTS where the AI can manage being even moderately difficult without resorting to cheating. The Starcraft AI for example, cheats badly by getting periodic resource injections. From what I heard, Civilization also cheats.
Nah, it's one of those popular things that get passed around, so everybody has it. The same goes for the "french erotic film", hamster dance, badgerbadgerbadger, etc.
Noobs play that stuff a lot. It's a lot less heard in areas with established communities, as people get tired of the stuff after a while.
Not really possible. Differences run a lot deeper than just syntax.
For example, take mySQL and PostgreSQL. They've got vastly different locking methods: mySQL does row locking, while PostgreSQL does MVCC. Databases like mySQL like small, short running transactions because otherwise things start getting caught on locks and performance goes way down. PostgreSQL on the other hand LOVES big transactions to the point that you can BEGIN ; SELECT * FROM multi_gb_table ; COMMIT as a perfectly good backup strategy, and gets worse performance if you don't use transactions (implicit transaction per statement) as the overhead is pretty big.
In fact, unless you get caught with the following problem, forgetting to commit for an hour in PostgreSQL has no noticeable effect besides the lack of database vaccuuming (removal of unused rows), while mySQL would quickly grind to a halt if you did that.
Then you have the quirks. For example, PostgreSQL does use locks in one case: foreign keys. It's possible to get a deadlock if you have transactions that modify the table referenced by a foreign key constraint, because the lock is placed to ensure the constraint is still satisfied by the end of the transaction. This can even happen if you don't change the primary key column, which is the whole concern here.
A postgresql specific workaround is splitting the table in two: One with just the primary key to use for the constraints, and another for the actual data. Besides ugly, this is a PostgreSQL-specific workaround. For mySQL you'd hit something else instead, which probably works perfectly fine in PostgreSQL.
Trying to design a database that works with every DB provider would end up as an unholy mess of ugly workarounds like that, and seriously bad performance in at least one of them.
Text speak in an English exam of course should result in failing it. On the other hand, I think bad grammar and spelling should be ignored on a math or a chemistry exam, so long the answer is understandable.
I don't give a damn whether it's convenient to you or not to provide a bit of privacy for me. If your original logging plan was dumping everything into one file, well, too bad, you'll have to redesign it now.
So how would you like it if semaphores kept the color arrangement but were ordered randomly? Or every UI had hardcoded colors? It's easy for some silly thing like that to make life more complicated than it could be, especially when it's not all that hard to keep everybody happy.
For example, color blindness is an easy one: When I make an interface, I make sure color is never the only way to present information. I might for example color rows in a list box differently depending on status, but the status is going to appear there anyway so you don't miss anything vital if you can't tell the difference. And it doesn't really take me that much effort to make colors customizable either.
You probably haven't had to complain much because color seldom carries vital information that can't be obtained in any other way, but a good part of the reason is that somebody actually bothered to think of that.
AFAIK, there's service that allows deaf people to use a TDD to speak to an intermediary who will be the one placing an order on their behalf. So it's not strictly necessary for you to be able to accept orders from a TDD directly, because there's a way around that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with the requirement that it should be possible to enter into your shop in a wheelchair. Somebody who can't walk is already compensating for their disability as much as they can by using a wheelchair. It's rather unfair to deny them the ability to live a normal life by placing unnecessary obstacles in their path.
The same way, blind people already compensate for their disability as much as they can by using a screen reader. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to browse websites like everybody else, other than bad website design.
Libelous, that I can see, but how about factually incorrect?
Britannica isn't the only encyclopedia around. There's a lot of much smaller ones. What would be the result of exposing something similar in any other encyclopedia? My best guess is that if you contacted one with a correction you'd be likely to be silently ignored. The press would probably ignore as well, unless you had something really juicy for them.
I only remember hearing of one of those cases on TV: 12 year old found several mistakes in an encyclopedia. Case was presented roughly as follows: "Aww, isn't the kid clever?". A few minutes to imply that not all young people are morons after all, a statement from the encyclopedia of "we appreciate the corrections and will make sure it goes in the next release", and in general it could be said that even the encyclopedia got good PR out of it.
See the link. Compared with the reaction Wikipedia gets sometimes, it's incredibly positive. "In spite of the mistakes, Lucian said he still considered the encyclopaedia to be the single best source of information." I don't think encyclopedias have all that much to fear.
Newsflash: You aren't supposed to use ANY sort of encyclopedia as a source of anything. Encyclopedias are there to provide a starting point about a topic, not to be used themselves as part of the school work or whatever.
If you ever cite any sort of encyclopedia in your work, any decent teacher should give you a big fat 0. Only valid use of an encyclopedia is checking an entry for something you're unfamiliar with, to learn a general overview and get leads about what you should research.
Got an early version at a HispaLinux convention. It cost me some cash, but it was still cheaper than I could get it otherwise, so I bought it. Coincidentally, there was a WiFi security talk at the convention, and I used the chance to ask them what they thought about the whole FON thing. They were extremely unimpressed and thought it couldn't be made secure.
Based on a cursory examination, I determined the system was insecure. Suppose I enable the router, and somebody comes near and tries to connect. To connect, they try to connect to my wireless network, and the AP authenticates them against the FON RADIUS server.
Now, the problem is that I'm in control of the router, so I can easily fetch their username and password. SSL wouldn't help because at best you have User AP RADIUS, as my understanding is that the AP isn't acting as a router here. The user isn't talking to the RADIUS server directly, the AP does on his/her behalf. So there's no way of stopping me from sniffing people's passwords.
After I get passwords I can easily find some other FON AP, use somebody else's credentials, and have reasonable chances that the person getting in trouble for downloading/uploading something illegal won't be me.
I voiced my concerns on the forum, but the replies weren't satisfying, so now I reflashed it with new firmware and there's no FON-related stuff left on it.
Oh yes, it's very easy, right up until the point where their computer breaks. Then they get to experience the joys of data loss, instability, bad performance and viruses in the friendly environment that is Windows. And that's when they call me and beg me to fix it, because they have no clue what they did, what broke, and how to begin fixing it.
Fortunately this most often happens with some friends with who I have a sort of a nice arrangement: They cook really good food, invite me over, I come, do my stuff, and leave with a very full stomach and new books to read. They also don't do it very often, so I'm quite happy with the arrangement.
However, the fact remains that without me they wouldn't have known what computer to buy, and if I didn't fix it, it wouldn't even boot. So much for user friendliness.
May we assume you grow all your own food, generate all your power, and perform all your own surgery?
Of course not.
Or do you occasionally rely on the expertise of others?
Of course I do.
That, however, isn't my point. My point is that the lack of a skill isn't something that you should be proud of. I have no idea about medicine for instance, but I'm not proud in the slightest of the fact. It's more of a weakness - if I had even 10% of the knowledge necessary to have an official education in anything related to medicine, that'd probably be enough to improve my expected lifetime, recognize problems before they become serious and provide assistance with some degree of competency if needed.
drsquare seems to be awfully proud of that for him "machines and tools merely as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself", but he's only able to think that way because he relies on work done by people who he derides for thinking that machines are an end in itself.
I certainly don't spend all day messing with my computer. It's been working flawlessly for years because I know how it works and how to maintain it. By knowing what I need and how to get it I built a system that's stable and has good performance. I also saved a nice amount of cash. My install has gone through vast hardware changes without problems. Every day I know everything is going to work like before. In fact, I spent more time on writing this post than messing with computers in the last few months. I don't know any "normal users" who can say the same.
Ever heard of 'jack of all trades, master of none'?
Uhh, of course I have. That's the whole point of the quote. It says "jack of all trades" is better than specialization.
While the jack of all trades will probably not be especially great at anything, he'll be a lot less likely to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, because he can do things like changing a tire and you can't.
I'm not saying you've got to be able to do everything. However, being unable to do something is nothing to be proud of.
The only reason you can afford to be dumb is because you're taking advantage of the work done by somebody who is smart. Thus, you're in a weak position. Where would you be if mechanics, IT people, doctors and the rest of the services sector suddenly vanished?
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Err, no, at the center of the Earth gravitational pull wouldn't be infinite. Rather, there wouldn't be any.
The mistake you're making is trying to do the calculation with Earth's mass and zero radius. But the thing is the gravity doesn't come from a tiny point in the center, that's just a simplification. As you go inside the earth, there's going to be more and more matter over you pulling in the opposite direction. Were you to end up in the center there would be no gravity at all, as the matter around you would pull equally in every direction.
What does testosterone have to do with the gender of the child? The gender is a result of chromosome combination. The woman contributes XX, and the man XY. Depending on whether your "X" or "Y" chromosome gets used, the resulting child will be male or female.
Interestingly, spermatozoids carrying the "Y" swim faster, and can be told apart from the "Y" ones that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Atheism is literally the lack of a belief. It doesn't require active denial of anything. An atheist will typically reject your claim with "show me proof". A lack of belief in something is not more of a belief than baldness is a hair style.
Uhh, founded?
Atheism is simply the lack of a belief. There's no founders, no prophets, no rituals, no dogma, no philosophy, no bible of any sorts for atheism. Calling that a religion is like saying that my lack of a car is my car, which is clearly nonsense.
Now, I'm guessing you're talking about "strong atheism" which is the active denial of that a deity exists. But that goes rather further than plain atheism.
IMO, agnosticism is rather inconsistent. By that logic you must admit that anything at all is possible, so you need to consider every bizarre theory, like the Invisible Pink Unicorn.
Ignosticism at least looks more logical. The position here is more or less "You say that your God is both infinitely benevolent and a jerk at once. Come back when you have something that makes sense."
The first time I saw something like that happen it was really bad. Performance was very badly affected, and the objects would launch people into the air, so the only thing that could be done was sitting (you can't be pushed if you're sitting) and talking until they fixed it. And after a while the whole grid had to be brought down for hours.
Now all that happens is that things slow down for a while, they close logins for a few minutes, and soon everything is back to normality. Some areas aren't even very noticeably affected, because object creation is disabled, so the stuff doesn't get to run on those sims in the first place. The only effect felt there is the degradation of the central servers.
While it's certainly annoying, it's not nearly the problem it used to be.
I'd turn around, pee on the bastard, then punch him in the face.
A few times like that should be discouraging enough.
Realtime Strategy games.
I've yet to see a RTS where the AI can manage being even moderately difficult without resorting to cheating. The Starcraft AI for example, cheats badly by getting periodic resource injections. From what I heard, Civilization also cheats.
Nah, it's one of those popular things that get passed around, so everybody has it. The same goes for the "french erotic film", hamster dance, badgerbadgerbadger, etc.
Noobs play that stuff a lot. It's a lot less heard in areas with established communities, as people get tired of the stuff after a while.
Not really possible. Differences run a lot deeper than just syntax.
For example, take mySQL and PostgreSQL. They've got vastly different locking methods: mySQL does row locking, while PostgreSQL does MVCC. Databases like mySQL like small, short running transactions because otherwise things start getting caught on locks and performance goes way down. PostgreSQL on the other hand LOVES big transactions to the point that you can BEGIN ; SELECT * FROM multi_gb_table ; COMMIT as a perfectly good backup strategy, and gets worse performance if you don't use transactions (implicit transaction per statement) as the overhead is pretty big.
In fact, unless you get caught with the following problem, forgetting to commit for an hour in PostgreSQL has no noticeable effect besides the lack of database vaccuuming (removal of unused rows), while mySQL would quickly grind to a halt if you did that.
Then you have the quirks. For example, PostgreSQL does use locks in one case: foreign keys. It's possible to get a deadlock if you have transactions that modify the table referenced by a foreign key constraint, because the lock is placed to ensure the constraint is still satisfied by the end of the transaction. This can even happen if you don't change the primary key column, which is the whole concern here.
A postgresql specific workaround is splitting the table in two: One with just the primary key to use for the constraints, and another for the actual data. Besides ugly, this is a PostgreSQL-specific workaround. For mySQL you'd hit something else instead, which probably works perfectly fine in PostgreSQL.
Trying to design a database that works with every DB provider would end up as an unholy mess of ugly workarounds like that, and seriously bad performance in at least one of them.
Text speak in an English exam of course should result in failing it. On the other hand, I think bad grammar and spelling should be ignored on a math or a chemistry exam, so long the answer is understandable.
Money is nice, but a pleasant life is better.
I don't give a damn whether it's convenient to you or not to provide a bit of privacy for me. If your original logging plan was dumping everything into one file, well, too bad, you'll have to redesign it now.
So how would you like it if semaphores kept the color arrangement but were ordered randomly? Or every UI had hardcoded colors? It's easy for some silly thing like that to make life more complicated than it could be, especially when it's not all that hard to keep everybody happy.
For example, color blindness is an easy one: When I make an interface, I make sure color is never the only way to present information. I might for example color rows in a list box differently depending on status, but the status is going to appear there anyway so you don't miss anything vital if you can't tell the difference. And it doesn't really take me that much effort to make colors customizable either.
You probably haven't had to complain much because color seldom carries vital information that can't be obtained in any other way, but a good part of the reason is that somebody actually bothered to think of that.
webnavix "web experts", eh? Haven't you heard that alt tags aren't optional? That's some expertise you have there.
AFAIK, there's service that allows deaf people to use a TDD to speak to an intermediary who will be the one placing an order on their behalf. So it's not strictly necessary for you to be able to accept orders from a TDD directly, because there's a way around that.
On the other hand, I don't see anything wrong with the requirement that it should be possible to enter into your shop in a wheelchair. Somebody who can't walk is already compensating for their disability as much as they can by using a wheelchair. It's rather unfair to deny them the ability to live a normal life by placing unnecessary obstacles in their path.
The same way, blind people already compensate for their disability as much as they can by using a screen reader. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to browse websites like everybody else, other than bad website design.
Libelous, that I can see, but how about factually incorrect?
Britannica isn't the only encyclopedia around. There's a lot of much smaller ones. What would be the result of exposing something similar in any other encyclopedia? My best guess is that if you contacted one with a correction you'd be likely to be silently ignored. The press would probably ignore as well, unless you had something really juicy for them.
I only remember hearing of one of those cases on TV: 12 year old found several mistakes in an encyclopedia. Case was presented roughly as follows: "Aww, isn't the kid clever?". A few minutes to imply that not all young people are morons after all, a statement from the encyclopedia of "we appreciate the corrections and will make sure it goes in the next release", and in general it could be said that even the encyclopedia got good PR out of it.
See the link. Compared with the reaction Wikipedia gets sometimes, it's incredibly positive. "In spite of the mistakes, Lucian said he still considered the encyclopaedia to be the single best source of information." I don't think encyclopedias have all that much to fear.
Newsflash: You aren't supposed to use ANY sort of encyclopedia as a source of anything. Encyclopedias are there to provide a starting point about a topic, not to be used themselves as part of the school work or whatever.
If you ever cite any sort of encyclopedia in your work, any decent teacher should give you a big fat 0. Only valid use of an encyclopedia is checking an entry for something you're unfamiliar with, to learn a general overview and get leads about what you should research.
Got an early version at a HispaLinux convention. It cost me some cash, but it was still cheaper than I could get it otherwise, so I bought it. Coincidentally, there was a WiFi security talk at the convention, and I used the chance to ask them what they thought about the whole FON thing. They were extremely unimpressed and thought it couldn't be made secure.
Based on a cursory examination, I determined the system was insecure. Suppose I enable the router, and somebody comes near and tries to connect. To connect, they try to connect to my wireless network, and the AP authenticates them against the FON RADIUS server.
Now, the problem is that I'm in control of the router, so I can easily fetch their username and password. SSL wouldn't help because at best you have User AP RADIUS, as my understanding is that the AP isn't acting as a router here. The user isn't talking to the RADIUS server directly, the AP does on his/her behalf. So there's no way of stopping me from sniffing people's passwords.
After I get passwords I can easily find some other FON AP, use somebody else's credentials, and have reasonable chances that the person getting in trouble for downloading/uploading something illegal won't be me.
I voiced my concerns on the forum, but the replies weren't satisfying, so now I reflashed it with new firmware and there's no FON-related stuff left on it.
Godwin's law doesn't apply if the mention of nazis is completely appropiate.
Oh yes, it's very easy, right up until the point where their computer breaks. Then they get to experience the joys of data loss, instability, bad performance and viruses in the friendly environment that is Windows. And that's when they call me and beg me to fix it, because they have no clue what they did, what broke, and how to begin fixing it.
Fortunately this most often happens with some friends with who I have a sort of a nice arrangement: They cook really good food, invite me over, I come, do my stuff, and leave with a very full stomach and new books to read. They also don't do it very often, so I'm quite happy with the arrangement.
However, the fact remains that without me they wouldn't have known what computer to buy, and if I didn't fix it, it wouldn't even boot. So much for user friendliness.
Of course not.
Of course I do.
That, however, isn't my point. My point is that the lack of a skill isn't something that you should be proud of. I have no idea about medicine for instance, but I'm not proud in the slightest of the fact. It's more of a weakness - if I had even 10% of the knowledge necessary to have an official education in anything related to medicine, that'd probably be enough to improve my expected lifetime, recognize problems before they become serious and provide assistance with some degree of competency if needed.
drsquare seems to be awfully proud of that for him "machines and tools merely as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself", but he's only able to think that way because he relies on work done by people who he derides for thinking that machines are an end in itself.
I certainly don't spend all day messing with my computer. It's been working flawlessly for years because I know how it works and how to maintain it. By knowing what I need and how to get it I built a system that's stable and has good performance. I also saved a nice amount of cash. My install has gone through vast hardware changes without problems. Every day I know everything is going to work like before. In fact, I spent more time on writing this post than messing with computers in the last few months. I don't know any "normal users" who can say the same.
Uhh, of course I have. That's the whole point of the quote. It says "jack of all trades" is better than specialization.
While the jack of all trades will probably not be especially great at anything, he'll be a lot less likely to get stuck in the middle of nowhere, because he can do things like changing a tire and you can't.
I'm not saying you've got to be able to do everything. However, being unable to do something is nothing to be proud of.
The only reason you can afford to be dumb is because you're taking advantage of the work done by somebody who is smart. Thus, you're in a weak position. Where would you be if mechanics, IT people, doctors and the rest of the services sector suddenly vanished?
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
Err, no, at the center of the Earth gravitational pull wouldn't be infinite. Rather, there wouldn't be any.
The mistake you're making is trying to do the calculation with Earth's mass and zero radius. But the thing is the gravity doesn't come from a tiny point in the center, that's just a simplification. As you go inside the earth, there's going to be more and more matter over you pulling in the opposite direction. Were you to end up in the center there would be no gravity at all, as the matter around you would pull equally in every direction.
America seems to be steadily drifting towards Fascism, or a dictatorship at the very least.
"Land of the free", my ass.
What does testosterone have to do with the gender of the child? The gender is a result of chromosome combination. The woman contributes XX, and the man XY. Depending on whether your "X" or "Y" chromosome gets used, the resulting child will be male or female.
Interestingly, spermatozoids carrying the "Y" swim faster, and can be told apart from the "Y" ones that way.