Let's be honest here. You just want to feel superior to a majority class. Not only does it make you feel important, it provides you a wonderful excuse for why you're not more famous/successful/whatever: It's those darn religious people keeping superior beings like yourself down
Talk about a straw man argument. How is finding some entertainment discussing topics like religion on Slashdot give me an inferiority complex? Truth be told, even though there are a lot of silly arguments made on Slashdot, it is still a much better forum for such debate than most places. Most of my friends are atheist so it is not very fun to discuss religion with them. And it is not easy to find a religious person who has put as much thought into their beliefs as the average person with the courage to post religious convictions in a place like Slashdot. It usually makes for very interesting discussions.
Being an atheist obviously necessitates no additional qualities, though you irrationally refuse to accept that simple fact.
When did I ever say that being an atheist necessitates additional qualities? I don't even say that being a scientist necessitates additional qualities. I do contend that having a rational mind assists in being a scientist, although I doubt even many religious scientists would argue with that (they may argue that being religious isn't irrational though). I explicitely state that I feel being religious is something that can be overcome to be even a great scientist. Some scientist may even be better because of their religious convictions if their faith helps motivate them.
You don't have a special brain, neither are you more rational or more intelligent simply because you're an atheist. Get over it and face reality
It is usally the opinion of atheists that we do not have special brains. This is why we question even our own deeply held beliefs. Some studies have shown that people with strong grasps on human biases are even more susceptible to them because their training allows them to form better arguments even when they are wrong. I find it far more humbling to accept that any opinion I have has to be carefully scrutinized because I understand my brain is not very good at being rational.
Histories greatest scientists have been predominantly theists, you know. I'll bet you have an impressively twisted explanation to force that fact in to your comforting delusion.
That is such a silly statement. It is like saying the greatest scientists (or at least most popular) since the industrial revolution are mostly white, so they must be better scientists. Could it be that the predominately caucasion countries have been more developed over the past few hundred years than more Asian / African / etc. countries? No, it must be that we are smarter. [heavy sarcasm intented]
It is a humbling thing to know that in 200 years even many of the dimmest people will seem like geniuses compared to me. I may be well above average in my field right now, but the technology I am researching right now will seem childishly basic in only a few generations. It is similar to how almost all of Newton's knowledge can now be taught in an undergraduate level to today's engineers and scientists. And Netwon is arguably on of the smartest men to have ever existed. Newton's religious beliefs do not detract from his brilliance any more than being a slave owner would have detracted from his morality. It is just a sign of his times.
We are not more capable than those who lived hundreds of years ago because we are superior, it is because we are standing on their shoulders. I did not come to my own form of personal enlightenment based purely on my own, it was with the assistance of great thinkers throughout history. Most of the ideas of men such as Aristotle may seem infantile to me now, but that in no way warps my perception of how intelligent they must have been.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Science doesn't say that AT ALL. Atheists say that, and then try to hide behind science to make their viewpoint seem like it has some weight to it. There is no mathematical formula, no physical laws, that say life is without meaning. Just smarmy people who like to pretend that they're knowledgeable about science.
It is to be expected that most arguments in this area are just going to be semantic in nature. Of course "Science" doesn't say anything, it is individual scientists that do. And no one is claiming that because some scientists, or even the vast majority of scientists, say something that this means their conjecture is 100% accurate.
But the human mind's propensity for anthropomorphism is a well founded concept in psychology and probably many other fields of science. Even most religious people would agree that when primitive men thought the sun was a living being they were just giving human qualities to an inanimate object.
It is almost impossible for someone without religious convictions to think that life has meaning. Even if life has meaning to some being more powerful than us (aka God), what is the meaning behind his existance? You can always play the game of "Why?" as long as you want to, even 2 year olds are very good at this. But as soon as you can stop wishful thinking it becomes very obvious that continuing to find existential meaning behind natural occurances is a pointless venture.
I gave a scientific answer for "Why did the big bang happen?" I am not saying that it is 100% accurate, but then again science never says that. Stating that a question is irrelevant is an answer even if it isn't what you are looking for. If you ask me what is 2 + Tree, I would give you an answer about why you need to take care of your units of measurement. If you ask me what the intent behind a natural phenomenom is, I will tell you that you need to stop anthropomorphizing.
The universe has no intent. When the sun rises in the morning, it is not because it has decided to do so because it finds some existential meaning behind it. Trying to find a reason behind it such as "It is hungry" or "It enjoys rising" is projecting human purpose on something that has no purpose.
I respectfully disagree. In my opinion, science is used to give us an answer to what is the universe and how does it work. It doesn't answer why it exists in the first place or why it works the way it does. At least not yet.
Science does answer why the universe exists in the first place and why it works the way it does. It is just that its answer is not very appealing to most people.
The answer, as I pointed out in my post, is that concepts like intent are human created ideas, and that inanimate objects do not have meanings behind their actions. There is just cause and effect. The desire to find some form of meaning behind why actions occur is anthropomorphism, just like if primitive men thought that the sun was angry with them if it hid behind clouds.
A well trained mind would understand the limitations of science
No, a well trained mind understands the limits of epistemology. Every limitation that you attribute to science is actually a limitation of our concepts of truth and knowledge.
Hence, even the best trained scientific mind would merely state that the notion of a creator is merely not useful as a predictor of natural events
It is more than that. Accepting something as a truth when you not only have no have no proof, but all available proof indicates the opposite, is a poor way to train your brain to reason properly. People who understand common biases are still very susceptible to them, so it is important to always be on the guard against them. Surrending to the many human biases that encourage people to have faith in religion is not harmless.
The nice thing is... you don't need to disbelieve to be a good scientist
That is true. It is the same thing as saying you can be 5'5" and still be a play in the NBA. It is very unlikely, but Muggsy Bogues was even shorter than that. A religious person lacks much of the reasoning ability that scientists require, just like Muggsy Bogues lacked much of the height that NBA players require. But it is not an insurmountable goal.
That is why in 1998 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences did not have belief in a personal God. Those 7% who are not atheist are still very good scientists, but it goes to show that it is very uncommon for someone who is capable of being religious to also have the intelligence to be one of the world's top scientists.
The problem with using words like belief and faith is that they have ugly connotations. A belief is simply a state in which someone holds a premise to be true. Faith is simply having confidence in something. But unfortunately when most people talk about faith, they mean a belief that is not based on proof. They mean having a level of conviction high enough that no matter what evidence presents itself, they will still hold onto their beliefs. This is primarily why most scientifically minded people reject using the word Faith, even though they still have faith in many things based on most definitions of the word.
That depends on how you define "religion". True Religion is living the lifestyle necessary to prove your beliefs.
I am not sure where you got that definition. Every definition of religion I have ever seen relates a system of beliefs with a supernatural and spiritual component. You really need to bastardize the definition of religion to claim that science is a religion. If you are willing to rewrite the definitions of common words then you can probably "win" just about any argument you want to.
As soon as Science _dictates_ how a person can understand truth it has become a religion.
No, it becomes a religion when your beliefs have supernatural explanations. That is it.
I agree that there are ways to discover truth without the use of the scientific method. Early humans learned that plants need water to grow long before we formalized the use of hypothesis, experiments, and theories (although you could contend that we were informally doing that). Science does not claim that the scientific method is the only way to find truth, although it does claim it is the best method we have found so far.
Technically Science is NOT a system of acquiring truth but about removing ignorance. (A quite successful masculine path as everyone is aware of.
Um, ignorance means a lack of accurate knowledge. Truth means having accurate knowledge. So saying something is about remove ignorance is the exact same thing as saying something is about gaining truth.
The other system IS a way of acquiring truth. Since it is the feminine path it is no wonder most men chose to remain ignorant and blindly ignore it.
No, religion is about holding onto beliefs so you can be confident that you have found the truth. Just believing in something does not get you closer to the truth, it just increased your confidence. Accurate knowledge (truth) is a system of justified true propositions. Religion is about holding onto beliefs based on faith, not going out and discovering justifications for those beliefs.
That is why _mind_ NOT space is the final frontier. Space is finite. The Mind is infinite.
This is just silly. I honestly didn't even read this last sentence until after I started responding, and now realize that I probably shouldn't have even bothered.
Science and religion are not intrinsically opposed to one another, but answer different questions with very little overlap from one to the other.
I contend that science and religion have 100% overlap in their intended usage. Both science and religion are used to give us the answer to "why?". Nothing more; nothing less.
When you talk about finding purpose and meaning you are really talking about the human tendency to anthropomorphize just about everything. There is meaning and purpose behind our actions, or at least we have that perception (depending on whether free will exists). That is what incorrectly causes us to project meaning and purpose into all aspects of life. It is a very useful trait, and our very ability to do this is part what separates us from other animals. But it is also a big flaw in our brain's ability to reason properly, along with plenty of other natural biases that adversely affect our ability to make good decisions. Honestly it is a miracle that we are able to think the way we do at all, so it is reasonable that our capacity for thought has many problems.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Heh... actually, that wouldn't be a bad official response. Puts the Chinese in the position of either accepting responsibility for hacking, or admitting that their state firewall is actually pretty porous.
I doubt they care very much that there firewall can be compromised by people skilled enough to hack into government and corporate computers. The main point of the firewall is to assert control over the general population.
It isn't likely that this would start a full out war, but it has the possibility of starting another cold war between the US and China. Not nearly as many lives are lost, except perhaps people dying in hospitals because the governments are spending more money on defense than on medicare.
Even if all this rhetoric does is give both countries a reason to waste trillions on excessive defense spending, that is already pretty bad.
You're saying that 17" 1920x1200 is good enough but 18.5" 1920x1080 is not? Sorry, that's silly.
Why is that silly? 1920x1200 has 200 extra vertical pixels, meaning quite a bit more vertical room for text. Considering most development environments probably lose around 300-400 pixels to toolbars, debug windows, etc., that is around a 15% increase in vertical screen size for your actual code.
I agree that a 18.5" 1920x1080 screen is very readable but it loses significant screen real estate that some laptop owners have enjoyed for over 10 years.
The Macbook Pro 17" was the only one with 1920x1200 resolution. There are now no vendors that sell that level of resolution or higher on a screen big enough for the equivalent of 1920x1200 to be very readable.
It is still a retarded question. He has a MacBook. MacBooks have Thunderbolt. There are adapters for Thunderbolt -> DVI, Thunderbolt ->VGA, Thunderbolt -> HDMI. Which means he can use pretty much any monitor in existence. The only thing that determines whether it is "portable" or not, is the size of his backpack. So basically his question is: "Can someone tell me how big my backpack is?"
Are one of the people who correct someone for saying it is 3:00pm by saying it is actually 2:59pm?
A 27" Thunderbolt Display is obviously not what he means about portable. People can technically transport houses to new locations, so I don't think that simply being able to lift and move a desktop monitor is enough to qualify it as portable.
I am fairly confident that by portable, he means he wants it to fit in a large laptop bag along with a laptop, a few papers/books, and likely a tablet. A convenient stand would also likely be a requirement, or the ability for it to flip open like a laptop. Being powered by USB would be nice, but probably not a requirement.
That is pretty awesome. Can you provide the names of the suit case you bought that is big enough for this, along with the type of foam you bought? I don't travel very much for work, but if you have found a reasonable way for me to transport my two apply thunderbolt displays I would be very interested in knowing the details. It would be useful even for times where I have to move my monitor setup to another area of the office to work with another team temporarily.
Buy a retina 15" macbook pro? Buy a chromebook pixel? Do you live under a rock?
Don't be an ass. He said he was a software developer, so it is doubtful that the nicer images you get from a retina display mean much to him. A 2880x1800 resolution on a 15" monitor is basically somewhere between a 1440x900 and 1920x1080 as far as reading text goes. That is worse than laptops that have been on the market for at least the past 10 years (I had a 1600x1200 laptop in 2002).
WTF is a 'real high resolution' monitor for you and what do you consider 'portable'.
While he should have been more explicit, it is obvious that what he wants is more vertical lines of text on screen and more characters per line. High resolution displays like retina screens are great for images and crisper text, but they don't actually help fit more text on a screen. The new MacBook Pro Retina may have 2880 x 1800 resolution, but for software enginers it isn't much better than a 1440x900 screen because it doesn't fit more text (at a readable size) than this smaller resolution.
For someone like myself who is used to working on either two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors at work or a 30" 2560x1600 + 24" 1920x1200 monitor at home, the removal of the macbook pro 17" laptop left a big hole in the marketplace for 'high text density' laptops. If someons starts making a 1920x1200 laptop again along with a 1200 vertical resolution portable external monitor, they would have my business.
Since I won't need a new laptop for a couple years, I am really hoping that a 17" Retina display laptop comes out by 2015. That would be essentially the same thing as the old 17" macbook.
Any smart person who is not also a strong idealist is most likely going to go where the money is. This could be on Wall Street, in online advertising, in going to the Moon, or in curing cancer. It is not their responsibility to do something to better the world. The people spending their money in the economy and electing officials who directly or indirectly decide where the money is going to go.
All this talk about training more people in STEM misses the entire benefit of being in a capitalistic economy. Instead of funding schools, fund research. Students will throw money at engineering programs like they current throw money at law schools to get at that research funding. People don't go into MBA programs or law school because the classes or fun or because sitting in board rooms is fun. They do it because of the money at the end of the tunnel. You put that same amount of money at the end of the tunnel for engineering, and capitalism with fix everything for us.
Taking math in school has very little to do with actually being able to perform calculus or differential equations in ten years. It is about training your brain to think differently than most people. To train your brain to think more logically.
The same people who struggled with Algebra in high school are the same people who are going to struggle with complex business rules in application code. If someone failed at something simple like integration by parts, I probably don't want them in a lead role designing important software. I am sure there are plenty of exceptions, but in my 10 year career I have still never found a quality developer who was bad at math in school (plenty who didn't like it, but none who struggled to pass Calc 1-3, except perhaps the ones who were severe slackers at a young age).
As a 30-ish adult trying to get into the industry who has gone through trade schooling I cannot say this emphatically enough F-you you elitist so-and-so your type are why I am literally going hungry Not all of us made the correct choice in College or have the time and money to go back. My blue collar resume and tech school are all I have and somehow you think my education is a character fault? Where the hell do you get off?
It is far more likely that you are going hungry because of a lack of socialization skills. Having a professional demeanor is important, and your post makes me doubt that you are able to pull that off well.
I made bad choices in my early to mid-twenties too, and I paid a price for those choices. I corrected them to the best of my ability and am doing very well for myself in my early thirties. That included getting an online degree that isn't worth the paper it is printed on, but at least allowed me to enter an MS program at a quality school. But the most important thing I realized is that most of the time there are people other than me who call the shots, and I had to decide whether I was just going to complain about it or do something about it.
You have an uphill battle ahead of you. The original poster is correct in saying that there are people out there who made better decisions than you in the past and WILL get preferential treatment because of it for quite some time. It is YOUR responsibility to overcome those obstacles that you self admittedly put in front of yourself years ago. It is not your future interviewer's job to help mitigate your past transgressions. If you do a good enough job of improving yourself, you will eventually find a company with the foresight to give you a chance. But your attitude will likely have to change quite a bit first.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
You mean like the hundreds of millions of users it has and who still value the service to the point where major established companies are bending over backwards to fit Facebook into their marketing schemes? Huh. Weird, I can't tell if that's more misanthropic or solipsistic of you.
Are you being serious? Considering Facebook's stock started at $38 and is now $23, and it took less than a week to lose 25% of its value, the only people being misanthropic or solipsistic are the ones who thought Facebook was worth such as ridiculous P/E ratio in the first place. Or the people who took advantage of the more weak minded traders who wanted another get rich quick scheme by buying an IPO they just expected to double in value over the first week.
Large lawsuits are already in the works. I assume that this fine makes it easier for the plaintiffs to show Nasdaq did do something wrong, but IANAL. I doubt that Nasdaq will get off this easy.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Software is the only system that gets better with time and use.
Are you sure you're a real e developer? This statement is totally wrong.
I think it is more accurate to say most production code becomes less buggy with time and use. But it also becomes less maintainable with time and use. It is a difficult balancing act to determine when you should continue with stable code that is hard to change, or risk decreasing stability to improve your ability to add new features.
I still remember reading through my computer's manual to try and find out what a Filename was when I was in 4th grade (some article listed the syntax to write a program as QBasic , or something like that). I also first learned to program by writing those little programs in 3-2-1 contact. They sold $5 discs that taught things like Algebra and BASIC, and I spent a good deal of my money from helping on the farm on those $5 discs. I wish I would have kept one of them for nostalgia purposes.
After those discs taught me enough to write my first tic tac toe program, the QBasic help files did the rest.
(I'm not 100% sure those discs were sold in 3-2-1 Contact, because I had a few magazine subscriptions back then. My memory is fuzzy after about 25 years)
59% buy new before the game drops in price, 41% find a cheaper alternative (gift, used, bundle, after price drop).
I'm not sure how you come to your conclusions. The figures show that games come from 67% new, 13% used, 12% gift, 7% bundle. Only 13% are used, although perhaps a small number of the 12% from gifts are used. So they are showing that somewhere around 80-85% of game sales are new games. And it also shows that even when people are trying to save a little money, they still prefer new games.
While gamasutra does show that a larger percentage of gamers do sell their games than I would have guessed, it still shows that they aren't making much money off of these sales. Well the segment they classify as game gluttons do make a lot of money (about enough to buy 20% more new games each year), but they are a small percentage of gamers. Overall only 15% of gamers ever sell a game for the purpose of buying new games (if you believe these numbers).
They estimate that 5% of the new game market is driven by their ability to sell their new games. But considering the used game market is around 10% of total game sales, it looks like it would help the game industry as a whole if the used game market completely went away. And based on the actions of game publishers in the past few years, I think they have came to this same conclusion.
The numbers you gave and the numbers I gave aren't that far off. jjgames.com included hardware with their figures, so it makes sense that their $24.5 billion figure is higher than NPD's $14.8 billion. Although I doubt that this is just because of hardware sales, though, so it is obvious that jjgames.com think the game industry is bigger than NPD does.
But the ratios are pretty similar. As long as you consider digital downloads as new game sales (which they obviously are) then NPD records about $13 billion in new game sales and $1.8 billion in used games. So jjgames.com said that used games are 10% of the market, and NPD says it is 12% of the market. While it does seem like these estimates are probably pretty suspect no matter where they come from, they do arrive at the same conclusions as far as our discussion is concerned.
Conservative estimating though would suggest that the used market is at least as large, unit wise, as the new market and that's why Microsoft and publishers want control of it.
Oops, forgot to refute this as well. Unit wise, the used game market is one fourth of the new game market. Considering that unit wise the used car market is 3 times the size of the new car market, it still holds that the used game market is much less of an influence on total game sales than the used car market is on total auto sales.
I only have anecdotal evidence on how much the resale value of cars impacts someone's new car purchase. But the type of person I know who buys a new car isn't thinking too much about its resale value. If they were that worried about money they would be buying a used car.
The same holds true for most people I know who buy new games. They buy the games that they think they will enjoy playing, based on the reputation of the franchise / game studio and on reviews. The cost very rarely plays into it. The only time I think about the cost of games is when buying casual games. In those cases I will notice if I am paying $0.99 or $4.99. But I never pay attention to whether a game costs $49 or $59. Either way, it is possibly the cheapest form of high quality entertainment there is.
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Let's be honest here. You just want to feel superior to a majority class. Not only does it make you feel important, it provides you a wonderful excuse for why you're not more famous/successful/whatever: It's those darn religious people keeping superior beings like yourself down
Talk about a straw man argument. How is finding some entertainment discussing topics like religion on Slashdot give me an inferiority complex? Truth be told, even though there are a lot of silly arguments made on Slashdot, it is still a much better forum for such debate than most places. Most of my friends are atheist so it is not very fun to discuss religion with them. And it is not easy to find a religious person who has put as much thought into their beliefs as the average person with the courage to post religious convictions in a place like Slashdot. It usually makes for very interesting discussions.
Being an atheist obviously necessitates no additional qualities, though you irrationally refuse to accept that simple fact.
When did I ever say that being an atheist necessitates additional qualities? I don't even say that being a scientist necessitates additional qualities. I do contend that having a rational mind assists in being a scientist, although I doubt even many religious scientists would argue with that (they may argue that being religious isn't irrational though). I explicitely state that I feel being religious is something that can be overcome to be even a great scientist. Some scientist may even be better because of their religious convictions if their faith helps motivate them.
You don't have a special brain, neither are you more rational or more intelligent simply because you're an atheist. Get over it and face reality
It is usally the opinion of atheists that we do not have special brains. This is why we question even our own deeply held beliefs. Some studies have shown that people with strong grasps on human biases are even more susceptible to them because their training allows them to form better arguments even when they are wrong. I find it far more humbling to accept that any opinion I have has to be carefully scrutinized because I understand my brain is not very good at being rational.
Histories greatest scientists have been predominantly theists, you know. I'll bet you have an impressively twisted explanation to force that fact in to your comforting delusion.
That is such a silly statement. It is like saying the greatest scientists (or at least most popular) since the industrial revolution are mostly white, so they must be better scientists. Could it be that the predominately caucasion countries have been more developed over the past few hundred years than more Asian / African / etc. countries? No, it must be that we are smarter. [heavy sarcasm intented]
It is a humbling thing to know that in 200 years even many of the dimmest people will seem like geniuses compared to me. I may be well above average in my field right now, but the technology I am researching right now will seem childishly basic in only a few generations. It is similar to how almost all of Newton's knowledge can now be taught in an undergraduate level to today's engineers and scientists. And Netwon is arguably on of the smartest men to have ever existed. Newton's religious beliefs do not detract from his brilliance any more than being a slave owner would have detracted from his morality. It is just a sign of his times.
We are not more capable than those who lived hundreds of years ago because we are superior, it is because we are standing on their shoulders. I did not come to my own form of personal enlightenment based purely on my own, it was with the assistance of great thinkers throughout history. Most of the ideas of men such as Aristotle may seem infantile to me now, but that in no way warps my perception of how intelligent they must have been.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Science doesn't say that AT ALL. Atheists say that, and then try to hide behind science to make their viewpoint seem like it has some weight to it. There is no mathematical formula, no physical laws, that say life is without meaning. Just smarmy people who like to pretend that they're knowledgeable about science.
It is to be expected that most arguments in this area are just going to be semantic in nature. Of course "Science" doesn't say anything, it is individual scientists that do. And no one is claiming that because some scientists, or even the vast majority of scientists, say something that this means their conjecture is 100% accurate.
But the human mind's propensity for anthropomorphism is a well founded concept in psychology and probably many other fields of science. Even most religious people would agree that when primitive men thought the sun was a living being they were just giving human qualities to an inanimate object.
It is almost impossible for someone without religious convictions to think that life has meaning. Even if life has meaning to some being more powerful than us (aka God), what is the meaning behind his existance? You can always play the game of "Why?" as long as you want to, even 2 year olds are very good at this. But as soon as you can stop wishful thinking it becomes very obvious that continuing to find existential meaning behind natural occurances is a pointless venture.
I gave a scientific answer for "Why did the big bang happen?" I am not saying that it is 100% accurate, but then again science never says that. Stating that a question is irrelevant is an answer even if it isn't what you are looking for. If you ask me what is 2 + Tree, I would give you an answer about why you need to take care of your units of measurement. If you ask me what the intent behind a natural phenomenom is, I will tell you that you need to stop anthropomorphizing.
The universe has no intent. When the sun rises in the morning, it is not because it has decided to do so because it finds some existential meaning behind it. Trying to find a reason behind it such as "It is hungry" or "It enjoys rising" is projecting human purpose on something that has no purpose.
I respectfully disagree. In my opinion, science is used to give us an answer to what is the universe and how does it work. It doesn't answer why it exists in the first place or why it works the way it does. At least not yet.
Science does answer why the universe exists in the first place and why it works the way it does. It is just that its answer is not very appealing to most people.
The answer, as I pointed out in my post, is that concepts like intent are human created ideas, and that inanimate objects do not have meanings behind their actions. There is just cause and effect. The desire to find some form of meaning behind why actions occur is anthropomorphism, just like if primitive men thought that the sun was angry with them if it hid behind clouds.
A well trained mind would understand the limitations of science
No, a well trained mind understands the limits of epistemology. Every limitation that you attribute to science is actually a limitation of our concepts of truth and knowledge.
Hence, even the best trained scientific mind would merely state that the notion of a creator is merely not useful as a predictor of natural events
It is more than that. Accepting something as a truth when you not only have no have no proof, but all available proof indicates the opposite, is a poor way to train your brain to reason properly. People who understand common biases are still very susceptible to them, so it is important to always be on the guard against them. Surrending to the many human biases that encourage people to have faith in religion is not harmless.
The nice thing is... you don't need to disbelieve to be a good scientist
That is true. It is the same thing as saying you can be 5'5" and still be a play in the NBA. It is very unlikely, but Muggsy Bogues was even shorter than that. A religious person lacks much of the reasoning ability that scientists require, just like Muggsy Bogues lacked much of the height that NBA players require. But it is not an insurmountable goal.
That is why in 1998 93% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences did not have belief in a personal God. Those 7% who are not atheist are still very good scientists, but it goes to show that it is very uncommon for someone who is capable of being religious to also have the intelligence to be one of the world's top scientists.
The problem with using words like belief and faith is that they have ugly connotations. A belief is simply a state in which someone holds a premise to be true. Faith is simply having confidence in something. But unfortunately when most people talk about faith, they mean a belief that is not based on proof. They mean having a level of conviction high enough that no matter what evidence presents itself, they will still hold onto their beliefs. This is primarily why most scientifically minded people reject using the word Faith, even though they still have faith in many things based on most definitions of the word.
That depends on how you define "religion". True Religion is living the lifestyle necessary to prove your beliefs.
I am not sure where you got that definition. Every definition of religion I have ever seen relates a system of beliefs with a supernatural and spiritual component. You really need to bastardize the definition of religion to claim that science is a religion. If you are willing to rewrite the definitions of common words then you can probably "win" just about any argument you want to.
As soon as Science _dictates_ how a person can understand truth it has become a religion.
No, it becomes a religion when your beliefs have supernatural explanations. That is it.
I agree that there are ways to discover truth without the use of the scientific method. Early humans learned that plants need water to grow long before we formalized the use of hypothesis, experiments, and theories (although you could contend that we were informally doing that). Science does not claim that the scientific method is the only way to find truth, although it does claim it is the best method we have found so far.
Technically Science is NOT a system of acquiring truth but about removing ignorance. (A quite successful masculine path as everyone is aware of.
Um, ignorance means a lack of accurate knowledge. Truth means having accurate knowledge. So saying something is about remove ignorance is the exact same thing as saying something is about gaining truth.
The other system IS a way of acquiring truth. Since it is the feminine path it is no wonder most men chose to remain ignorant and blindly ignore it.
No, religion is about holding onto beliefs so you can be confident that you have found the truth. Just believing in something does not get you closer to the truth, it just increased your confidence. Accurate knowledge (truth) is a system of justified true propositions. Religion is about holding onto beliefs based on faith, not going out and discovering justifications for those beliefs.
That is why _mind_ NOT space is the final frontier. Space is finite. The Mind is infinite.
This is just silly. I honestly didn't even read this last sentence until after I started responding, and now realize that I probably shouldn't have even bothered.
Science and religion are not intrinsically opposed to one another, but answer different questions with very little overlap from one to the other.
I contend that science and religion have 100% overlap in their intended usage. Both science and religion are used to give us the answer to "why?". Nothing more; nothing less.
When you talk about finding purpose and meaning you are really talking about the human tendency to anthropomorphize just about everything. There is meaning and purpose behind our actions, or at least we have that perception (depending on whether free will exists). That is what incorrectly causes us to project meaning and purpose into all aspects of life. It is a very useful trait, and our very ability to do this is part what separates us from other animals. But it is also a big flaw in our brain's ability to reason properly, along with plenty of other natural biases that adversely affect our ability to make good decisions. Honestly it is a miracle that we are able to think the way we do at all, so it is reasonable that our capacity for thought has many problems.
Science does currently have an answer to the question of purpose and meaning. It is that our primitive brains made those concepts up. Luckily a well trained mind is sometimes able to identify biases such as these and rule them out during decision making.
Heh... actually, that wouldn't be a bad official response. Puts the Chinese in the position of either accepting responsibility for hacking, or admitting that their state firewall is actually pretty porous.
I doubt they care very much that there firewall can be compromised by people skilled enough to hack into government and corporate computers. The main point of the firewall is to assert control over the general population.
It isn't likely that this would start a full out war, but it has the possibility of starting another cold war between the US and China. Not nearly as many lives are lost, except perhaps people dying in hospitals because the governments are spending more money on defense than on medicare.
Even if all this rhetoric does is give both countries a reason to waste trillions on excessive defense spending, that is already pretty bad.
You're saying that 17" 1920x1200 is good enough but 18.5" 1920x1080 is not? Sorry, that's silly.
Why is that silly? 1920x1200 has 200 extra vertical pixels, meaning quite a bit more vertical room for text. Considering most development environments probably lose around 300-400 pixels to toolbars, debug windows, etc., that is around a 15% increase in vertical screen size for your actual code.
I agree that a 18.5" 1920x1080 screen is very readable but it loses significant screen real estate that some laptop owners have enjoyed for over 10 years.
The Macbook Pro 17" was the only one with 1920x1200 resolution. There are now no vendors that sell that level of resolution or higher on a screen big enough for the equivalent of 1920x1200 to be very readable.
It is still a retarded question. He has a MacBook. MacBooks have Thunderbolt. There are adapters for Thunderbolt -> DVI, Thunderbolt ->VGA, Thunderbolt -> HDMI. Which means he can use pretty much any monitor in existence. The only thing that determines whether it is "portable" or not, is the size of his backpack. So basically his question is: "Can someone tell me how big my backpack is?"
Are one of the people who correct someone for saying it is 3:00pm by saying it is actually 2:59pm?
A 27" Thunderbolt Display is obviously not what he means about portable. People can technically transport houses to new locations, so I don't think that simply being able to lift and move a desktop monitor is enough to qualify it as portable.
I am fairly confident that by portable, he means he wants it to fit in a large laptop bag along with a laptop, a few papers/books, and likely a tablet. A convenient stand would also likely be a requirement, or the ability for it to flip open like a laptop. Being powered by USB would be nice, but probably not a requirement.
That is pretty awesome. Can you provide the names of the suit case you bought that is big enough for this, along with the type of foam you bought? I don't travel very much for work, but if you have found a reasonable way for me to transport my two apply thunderbolt displays I would be very interested in knowing the details. It would be useful even for times where I have to move my monitor setup to another area of the office to work with another team temporarily.
Buy a retina 15" macbook pro?
Buy a chromebook pixel?
Do you live under a rock?
Don't be an ass. He said he was a software developer, so it is doubtful that the nicer images you get from a retina display mean much to him. A 2880x1800 resolution on a 15" monitor is basically somewhere between a 1440x900 and 1920x1080 as far as reading text goes. That is worse than laptops that have been on the market for at least the past 10 years (I had a 1600x1200 laptop in 2002).
WTF is a 'real high resolution' monitor for you and what do you consider 'portable'.
While he should have been more explicit, it is obvious that what he wants is more vertical lines of text on screen and more characters per line. High resolution displays like retina screens are great for images and crisper text, but they don't actually help fit more text on a screen. The new MacBook Pro Retina may have 2880 x 1800 resolution, but for software enginers it isn't much better than a 1440x900 screen because it doesn't fit more text (at a readable size) than this smaller resolution.
For someone like myself who is used to working on either two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors at work or a 30" 2560x1600 + 24" 1920x1200 monitor at home, the removal of the macbook pro 17" laptop left a big hole in the marketplace for 'high text density' laptops. If someons starts making a 1920x1200 laptop again along with a 1200 vertical resolution portable external monitor, they would have my business.
Since I won't need a new laptop for a couple years, I am really hoping that a 17" Retina display laptop comes out by 2015. That would be essentially the same thing as the old 17" macbook.
Any smart person who is not also a strong idealist is most likely going to go where the money is. This could be on Wall Street, in online advertising, in going to the Moon, or in curing cancer. It is not their responsibility to do something to better the world. The people spending their money in the economy and electing officials who directly or indirectly decide where the money is going to go.
All this talk about training more people in STEM misses the entire benefit of being in a capitalistic economy. Instead of funding schools, fund research. Students will throw money at engineering programs like they current throw money at law schools to get at that research funding. People don't go into MBA programs or law school because the classes or fun or because sitting in board rooms is fun. They do it because of the money at the end of the tunnel. You put that same amount of money at the end of the tunnel for engineering, and capitalism with fix everything for us.
Taking math in school has very little to do with actually being able to perform calculus or differential equations in ten years. It is about training your brain to think differently than most people. To train your brain to think more logically.
The same people who struggled with Algebra in high school are the same people who are going to struggle with complex business rules in application code. If someone failed at something simple like integration by parts, I probably don't want them in a lead role designing important software. I am sure there are plenty of exceptions, but in my 10 year career I have still never found a quality developer who was bad at math in school (plenty who didn't like it, but none who struggled to pass Calc 1-3, except perhaps the ones who were severe slackers at a young age).
As a 30-ish adult trying to get into the industry who has gone through trade schooling I cannot say this emphatically enough
F-you you elitist so-and-so your type are why I am literally going hungry
Not all of us made the correct choice in College or have the time and money to go back.
My blue collar resume and tech school are all I have and somehow you think my education is a character fault?
Where the hell do you get off?
It is far more likely that you are going hungry because of a lack of socialization skills. Having a professional demeanor is important, and your post makes me doubt that you are able to pull that off well.
I made bad choices in my early to mid-twenties too, and I paid a price for those choices. I corrected them to the best of my ability and am doing very well for myself in my early thirties. That included getting an online degree that isn't worth the paper it is printed on, but at least allowed me to enter an MS program at a quality school. But the most important thing I realized is that most of the time there are people other than me who call the shots, and I had to decide whether I was just going to complain about it or do something about it.
You have an uphill battle ahead of you. The original poster is correct in saying that there are people out there who made better decisions than you in the past and WILL get preferential treatment because of it for quite some time. It is YOUR responsibility to overcome those obstacles that you self admittedly put in front of yourself years ago. It is not your future interviewer's job to help mitigate your past transgressions. If you do a good enough job of improving yourself, you will eventually find a company with the foresight to give you a chance. But your attitude will likely have to change quite a bit first.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
You mean like the hundreds of millions of users it has and who still value the service to the point where major established companies are bending over backwards to fit Facebook into their marketing schemes? Huh. Weird, I can't tell if that's more misanthropic or solipsistic of you.
Are you being serious? Considering Facebook's stock started at $38 and is now $23, and it took less than a week to lose 25% of its value, the only people being misanthropic or solipsistic are the ones who thought Facebook was worth such as ridiculous P/E ratio in the first place. Or the people who took advantage of the more weak minded traders who wanted another get rich quick scheme by buying an IPO they just expected to double in value over the first week.
Large lawsuits are already in the works. I assume that this fine makes it easier for the plaintiffs to show Nasdaq did do something wrong, but IANAL. I doubt that Nasdaq will get off this easy.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Software is the only system that gets better with time and use.
Are you sure you're a real e developer? This statement is totally wrong.
I think it is more accurate to say most production code becomes less buggy with time and use. But it also becomes less maintainable with time and use. It is a difficult balancing act to determine when you should continue with stable code that is hard to change, or risk decreasing stability to improve your ability to add new features.
I still remember reading through my computer's manual to try and find out what a Filename was when I was in 4th grade (some article listed the syntax to write a program as QBasic , or something like that). I also first learned to program by writing those little programs in 3-2-1 contact. They sold $5 discs that taught things like Algebra and BASIC, and I spent a good deal of my money from helping on the farm on those $5 discs. I wish I would have kept one of them for nostalgia purposes.
After those discs taught me enough to write my first tic tac toe program, the QBasic help files did the rest.
(I'm not 100% sure those discs were sold in 3-2-1 Contact, because I had a few magazine subscriptions back then. My memory is fuzzy after about 25 years)
59% buy new before the game drops in price, 41% find a cheaper alternative (gift, used, bundle, after price drop).
I'm not sure how you come to your conclusions. The figures show that games come from 67% new, 13% used, 12% gift, 7% bundle. Only 13% are used, although perhaps a small number of the 12% from gifts are used. So they are showing that somewhere around 80-85% of game sales are new games. And it also shows that even when people are trying to save a little money, they still prefer new games.
While gamasutra does show that a larger percentage of gamers do sell their games than I would have guessed, it still shows that they aren't making much money off of these sales. Well the segment they classify as game gluttons do make a lot of money (about enough to buy 20% more new games each year), but they are a small percentage of gamers. Overall only 15% of gamers ever sell a game for the purpose of buying new games (if you believe these numbers).
They estimate that 5% of the new game market is driven by their ability to sell their new games. But considering the used game market is around 10% of total game sales, it looks like it would help the game industry as a whole if the used game market completely went away. And based on the actions of game publishers in the past few years, I think they have came to this same conclusion.
The numbers you gave and the numbers I gave aren't that far off. jjgames.com included hardware with their figures, so it makes sense that their $24.5 billion figure is higher than NPD's $14.8 billion. Although I doubt that this is just because of hardware sales, though, so it is obvious that jjgames.com think the game industry is bigger than NPD does.
But the ratios are pretty similar. As long as you consider digital downloads as new game sales (which they obviously are) then NPD records about $13 billion in new game sales and $1.8 billion in used games. So jjgames.com said that used games are 10% of the market, and NPD says it is 12% of the market. While it does seem like these estimates are probably pretty suspect no matter where they come from, they do arrive at the same conclusions as far as our discussion is concerned.
Conservative estimating though would suggest that the used market is at least as large, unit wise, as the new market and that's why Microsoft and publishers want control of it.
Oops, forgot to refute this as well. Unit wise, the used game market is one fourth of the new game market. Considering that unit wise the used car market is 3 times the size of the new car market, it still holds that the used game market is much less of an influence on total game sales than the used car market is on total auto sales.
I only have anecdotal evidence on how much the resale value of cars impacts someone's new car purchase. But the type of person I know who buys a new car isn't thinking too much about its resale value. If they were that worried about money they would be buying a used car.
The same holds true for most people I know who buy new games. They buy the games that they think they will enjoy playing, based on the reputation of the franchise / game studio and on reviews. The cost very rarely plays into it. The only time I think about the cost of games is when buying casual games. In those cases I will notice if I am paying $0.99 or $4.99. But I never pay attention to whether a game costs $49 or $59. Either way, it is possibly the cheapest form of high quality entertainment there is.