Ignoring the parent troll for a moment, can someone please show an example of where multiple implementation inheritance is superior (not just equivalent) to multiple interfaces and the composition design pattern?
I've really tried to find a case, but ultimately fail. I even tend to agree with Gosling that abstract classes were a bad idea. On the other hand, I can name innumerable cases where MI causes more problems than it solves.
No, seriously, you're wrong. Just because you don't see that Java is being used for a web site's back end doesn't mean you haven't been using it. Personally, I like Eclipse, but then I'm a programmer. I used to use Azureus, but since I'm mostly on a Mac, I started using Bits on Wheels. Not a crack against Azureus from a functional or usability standpoint, I just preferred the "wheel" in BoW. Totally arbitrary eye candy.
The problem with Applets was that AWT was a GUI framework built on top of a web browser, which is already a (wait for it...) GUI framework. The only reason Flash succeeded was because web browsers didn't have vector graphic support ten years ago.
As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone? There are more examples, but just for a moment wrap your head around the concept of what if Sun never released the specs to NFS. What would the BSDs and Linux use to map file shares? CIFS/SMB aka Samba?
So let's take a look at Win32 MFC. That was written in C/C++. So did that framework suck so much? Answer: good code can come from any language where the developer is sufficiently skilled. Bad code can come from any language despite any intrinsic qualities in that language.
Are you sure you're not overreacting? If you hop on over to perl.com, you'll notice that the *compressed* source of Perl 5.10.0 is 14.9MB. The compressed source of Python 2.5.2 is 11MB. Ruby 1.8.7 comes out well at 3.9MB, but that's without any gems (good or bad depending on your point of view). The source for Common Lisp 2.4.5 is 7.1MB.
However you're singling out Java as the one that's bloated? Get real.
Mod parent up! This needs more attention. For day to day use, Macs don't generally need NTFS support. An obvious exception would be the 1TB external hard drive that's been formatted with NTFS because FAT32 wouldn't cut it.
If this is your situation, speed is not your primary concern, it's interoperability. That's where MacFUSE comes into play. Sure it won't access that NTFS drive as fast as Windows would, but so what. With MacFUSE, you can access just about *anything* in *any format*. Got a ext3 filesystem? MacFUSE reads/writes that too.
Just because Apple doesn't provide it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Regular checkups can't prevent everyone from having a heart attack, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get regular checkups. Even if you were notified of imminent failure only 44% of the time, that's still 44% more of the time than you would have without SMART.
Google's solution was to simply pull drives off the line after a given time interval. For most of us mere mortals on a budget, backups and SMART are better than nothing at all.
Is not a bad thing as long as it doesn't aggressively claim the memory. For example in Linux, the OS will try to use all available memory. Some of it will be by the kernel itself, a large part by applications, but a great deal of the rest as a memory cache of your filesystem (hard drive) accesses. However, if memory becomes tight, the OS will cache less of the filesystem to allow the applications more breathing room. This makes the hard drive work harder and, by result, makes your system less responsive.
The solution is not to get a filesystem that uses less memory. The solution is to get more RAM; it will probably increase your system performance more than a faster hard drive or CPU would.
Why is that? Are desktop apps not disk I/O bound anymore? Processors have gone from Pentium 60MHz to 3GHz quad code 64-bit chips in 15 years. Memory has gone from 8-16MB standard to 1-4GB standard. Memory speed has gone from MB/sec to GB/sec. Hard drive capacity has gone from 1GB to 1TB.
Hard drive speed, on the other hand, has gone from 1-5MB/sec (if you were lucky) to 50-100MB/sec. In other words, while everything else has improved by at least a factor of 500-1000, hard drives are pushing somewhere between a factor of 20 and 100.
For the best performance for your system, you should absolutely be offsetting hard drive performance with CPU and memory whenever possible. An exception would be intense graphics rendering, but dedicated GPUs are siphoning off those cases more and more.
Bottom line, the most you can get out of your hard drive I/O, the better. Even a 30% CPU overhead would pay for itself when the hard drive is your limiting factor, and that goes for most systems, desktop or server. For laptops, it depends. CPUs draw a fair amount of power. Then again, so do hard drives. There, the answer is little more unclear and must be examined on a case by case basis. For your desktop and server though, take the CPU hit.
Almost forgot: science (the body of knowledge) is a completely separate entity from the Scientific Method (a process for gaining knowledge).
Stating that science (the body of knowledge) is not complete is self-evident. You could even (in my opinion) safely assert that it will never be complete.
This doesn't mean that the Scientific Method is not still useful outside of physics, chemistry, and biology. It just means that we acknowledge that we, as humans, are not infallible. As such, we need an objective test to determine whether or not something is false. Note: we cannot establish truth with this, only falsehood. Rather than call it the Scientific Method, we should perhaps refer to it as the Objectivity Method. Then perhaps people would stop confusing science (the body of knowledge) with science (the process).
If nothing can work the miracle of an entire universe, why should an all powerful all-knowing God not be able to do what nothing supposedly did? We are told in the Bible that Jesus created everything that exists and apart from him nothing exists that does exist.
You're right, if nothing could do it, an all-powerful something presumably could as well. The problem with your argument there is that we have no evidence of an all-powerful something. All we have is a book (not even the oldest book) which starts off describing a jealous, spiteful, vengeful, egomaniacal, bloodthirsty male chauvinist pig.
Tell me why you don't believe in the Greek pantheon of Gods including Zeus, Apollo, and the others, and you will have your answer as to why I don't automatically accept the existence of your God. You and I are very similar in that we deny all of the Norse gods, the Greek, the Roman, the Zoroastrian, the Mayan, and Aztec, the Egyptian, the Sumerian, etc. The only difference between us is that I deny exactly one more.
If Jesus, claiming to be God come in human form can make the entire universe out of absolutely nothing...
Let's talk about that one for a moment. Jesus *had* to come down here to atone for man's sins that He let happen even though he's all knowing and could have prevented them, let Himself be crucified so as to absolve us of the sins He bestowed to us, rose from the dead to join Himself in Heaven, and I'm supposed to take that seriously? Seriously?
If God is omnipotent, why not just proclaim in His loud deity voice, "Changed my mind, you're not automatically damned anymore." I mean, that's effectively what He did by doing the whole Jesus routine.
And about that "Original Sin." When we are in court for some felony, one possible way out of it is to enter a plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity." The principle is that unless you have the mental faculties to distinguish right from wrong, you cannot be held to the same standard as someone who can. So let's look back at Adam, Eve, the Garden, and all that. Prior to eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were truly innocent, not knowing of Good and Evil. Satan took "the form" of the serpent. Adam and Eve ate the Fruit in defiance of God. Except that defiance is a Bad/Evil thing. They didn't know what Bad/Evil was, remember? Add to that, all serpents were all made to crawl on their bellies in punishment for Satan's treachery, like punishing all black people because some Asian guy made himself up in blackface makeup.
Not guilty by reason of insanity? No! Eternal damnation, torment, and all women have to bleed monthly to remind them of the Bad thing Eve did long before they were born.
And I'm just supposed to accept this? Because it was written down a few thousand years ago? Seriously, help me out. Why should I accept this? Give me a good reason.
Einstein tells us that time-space and matter-energy all came into existence together.
Please don't bring Einstein into this when you obviously don't understand what he brought forth. It smells of "Evolution is just a theory," where it's obvious the speaker is either lying about their intentions or is truly ignorant enough to be unaware that in a scientific context, "theory" means something very different from what it means in the common context. To quote Einstein:
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.
The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems naive. - in a letter to Beatrice Frohlich, December 17, 1952
Never once did I say that software does not exist. All I said is that software or information is not a material good. Sound or electricity are not immaterial but are very much physical, but the information carried by them is different. That is why we have the whole body of law called intellectual property law. Why intellectual property? What is different about intellectual property from normal physical property? Think about that for a minute.
Funny you should mention IP: that's bullshit too. It, like the soul, is a man-made construct. So-called Intellectual Property refers to copyright law, patent law, and trademark law all rolled into one umbrella even though they have little to nothing to do with one another both from a conceptual standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.
But I digress. The running program is still material. Even if it helps you to understand it on a conceptual level, it can still be measured. It can still be examined, and it is still strongly tied to the hardware upon which it runs. It's like saying a stream of electrons doesn't exist. A colony of ants use scent trails to find food over long distances, but that doesn't mean that the scent is immaterial nor the "coded" information the ants can detect from it on the ground and the wind.
Bottom line: we can perceive software (with our normal five senses) and can detect to varying degrees of precision when a program is running (by a process manager, excess heat off the processor, etc.).
In order for software or information to be perceived and utilized by us, it must be on a physical carrier.
Irrelevant to this discussion. Without a carrier such as a disk or memory centers in a brain, the software or information ceases to exist. It has no independent status.
These two items are distinct and separate and are treated as such by a large body of law.
Yes, and until the mid-1990s, strong encryption was considered munitions according to federal statutes. Legal statutes and processes of nature are not synonymous nor at times even correlative.
Why do computers misbehave on a transient or permanent basis when the hardware malfunctions either because of a passing electrical transient or a more permanent and therefore more serious hardware defect? There is nothing wrong with the software, but nevertheless the computer messes up, loses data and if the error is severe enough, ceases to function entirely.
Incorrect. The software is functioning as expected given faulty hardware. Nothing is wrong with the software only given a perspective of a functioning copy elsewhere. If the carrier fails, the "immaterial" information ceases to exist in its original form. The running program does not continue to exist as a running program in a sort of eternal software heaven. The running program as we perceive it ceases to exist. Kaput!
You *expect* the program to be there. You have your own *idea* of how the program should be there, but the program isn't there. Not anymore. That pattern of electrons is no longer present.
In computers as well as in people it is often difficult to tell whether the malfunction is due to hardware or software.
As long as we're taking this (failed) analogy to its logical end, there is no difference between hardware and software. Yes, you read that right. There is no difference. The distinction is an implementation detail. Just because a program executes from RAM instead of ROM doesn't make it special. Just because the algorithm is defined in a DSP instead of bits on a hard drive targeted toward a general purpose CPU doesn't make them completely separate entities. You are pulling from a dry well here.
I guess my mention of the Bible really pulled your chain didn't it? The fact is that we do observe and practice every day the distinction between a poem and the poet, a sculpture and to sculptor, the compo
If the software doesn't exist, what are they selling in those boxes at the computer shops? Your line of reasoning is like saying that diamonds don't exist since they're just a configuration of carbon atoms.
Immaterial != Invisible != Solid
Is a sound immaterial? No! It is a wave vibration propagating through a medium that we can perceive with our ears. Just because you can't wrap your head around that doesn't mean it doesn't actually exist or that it's immaterial. Just like sound, electrical impulses can be measured and induced. The software exists as a very specific pattern on a hard drive. That pattern is copied into RAM and executed in a specific order as defined by the *material* world.
There is no ghost in the machine with regard to computers just as there is none for our brains. Just because we do not understand all aspects does not automatically follow that there is a ghost in the machine. That is begging the question and an appeal to ignorance.
Backups are not relevant to this conversation. In fact, they hurt your argument. Software is a material item and is therefore easily seen in the backup analogy.
If the soul is who we are and is independent of the brain, then why do some people have a traumatic brain injury and subsequently have a radical change in their personality? Their memory? Their ability to reason? What are we beyond what we know, can remember, and how we think? If these things can change by altering the meat, what's left?
If we could copy our memories and the paths that our minds take through each of our neural networks, how would that be different than a backup. This is easy for me to grasp, but I fail to see why a soul -- and its backup -- are even necessary. It is merely the ghost in the machine, and a fool's errand.
And at the end, we come to it. "The Bible tells us exactly that is true." It has not been observed outside the Bible. No instance of it happening has been demonstrated. To be completely honest, the fact that the Bible has so many internal inconsistencies tends to make me doubt it as an infallible work: certainly not one to be used as an universal citation.
In the Bible animals can talk, wizards and witches summon spirits, demons possess pigs, sticks turn into snakes, food falls from the sky, people walk on water or through walls or remain lost for forty years in an area roughly this size of West Virginia. In the Bible the dead can come back to life, enough rain fall in seven weeks to cover the entire planet, all sorts of magical things happen that have no basis in the way we know the 'real world' works. If you know the world doesn't work this way, if all the evidence shows it impossible for the world to work this way, then what are your reasons for believing the Bible when it claims otherwise? You'd consider yourself crazy if you believed Greek and Roman myths that claimed the same types of things, or fairy tales, or old European fables, simply because you know how the world works and it doesn't work that way! And yet, when the Bible makes claims contrary to the way you know the world works, not only do you believe and defend it, but consider all those who don't as the ones who are living in error. Is this an honest assessment? Shouldn't what we believe somehow coincide with what we actually know?
Tiny children with encephalitis, cancer, cystic fibrosis, progeria, dying prematurely and painfully, suffering needlessly simply because they were born. This alone should be argument enough against the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and 'loving' God, but most believers who espouse this view conveniently overlook the obvious contradiction between Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence and the Problem of Evil (or Theodicy).
While it may come as a complete suprise to a majority of the faithful (although this information is clearly stated in most Bibles' own introductions to each of the the four Gospels), it has been known
The LDS Church has the highest number of units among all chartered organizations. General Authorities and other general board members of the Mormon Church continue to serve on national Boy Scouts of America committees.
While Scouting depends on public schools, it also relies on religious organizations, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of the roughly 1,600 Cub Scout packs, Boy Scout troops, and Explorer posts in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington, 40% are sponsored by Mormons. Another 35% are sponsored by other religious organizations.
Nationally, the vast majority of support also comes from religious organizations, with the Mormon Church sponsoring almost three times as many Boy Scout groups as the second-ranked religious sponsor, the United Methodist Church.
Scouting is the official youth program for Mormons. Their commitment is so strong that local bishops routinely assign men to become Scout leaders as part of their spiritual calling.
It was a statistical fact that Mormon troops graduated kids to Eagle Scout TWICE as fast as the national average. They allowed almost nonsensical Eagle Projects, such as carpet cleaning in the local ward or Stake Center. The national standard is to assure that this project was a REAL service and had an impact in someone's life, reading programs for the elderly, time spent entertaining sick children in the local hospitals. These projects had to involve participation over time.
Take away the concept of a soul and we're still not "just deterministically acting" due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. But I see where you're going. Because I don't believe in a soul and because I am an atheist, I must believe that rape and murder are okay or that the only reason I don't take a dump on someone's head is because I fear punishment or retaliation.
Science doesn't remove my ability to empathize.
As for how you can build a society or values without "faith," just ask Norway. They seem to be working it out alright.
Over 70% atheist (according to the last census)
Most peaceful nation in the world (according to the Global Peace Index)
2nd highest GDP in the world
Unemployment below 2%
Average hourly wages among the world's highest
1st in life expectancy
1st in literacy
1st in education
1st in standard of living
Arguably the least "faithful" nation in the world is also among the world's best.
So I ask you, what do you value and does that really derive from Christianity?
Still it find it odd that apologists will try to find any loophole to justify the impossible. It's just as curious to me that the fact that the Bible considers women only even marginally important in the context of their allegiance to a man.
You assert that there could have been daughters. How can you make that assertion? Because there is almost never mention of women who are not wives, and even then their names are not considered important. And this doesn't bother you at all? Not one bit? You don't find it odd that a book authored by God Himself by proxy considers women to be a superfluous afterthought? Really?
Still, these hypothetical daughters were Cain's sisters. So Cain got busy for 130 years with one or more sisters? And once again, if it's more, their names and even their existences are apparently pointless. These daughters would have been born after Cain killed Abel, right? So why would God anoint Adam and Eve with concubines for the "marked" Cain? Or were the women all girls gone wild from original sin?
The sum of your body is a material thing just as a computer program is a material thing even though we like to think of it as an immaterial construct. We can trace the sequence of steps and examine the individual pieces to get a sense of the whole.
If your definition of a soul is just like that of a program, it could be measured, thereby rendering it material, not immaterial.
A material thing (your brain) cannot interact with an immaterial thing (a soul). In philosophy this is referred to as a problem of participation. After all, if you could see or touch something, it wouldn't be immaterial. Conversely, how would an immaterial object "touch" us?
If your answer is, "It just does," you are not rational. You are like a child with their imaginary friend getting indignant because a parent won't set an extra place at the table. Sure, the parent could humor you. Sure, an imaginary friend can sometimes point to emotional issues within the child. On the other hand, the imaginary friend, no matter how comforting that concept may be to the child, is still imaginary.
There is no microscope that can see a soul, because no one has determined what a soul actually is or if it exists.
Why believe in the supernatural? If you can sense something, it's either in your head or there is an actual interaction with your body. If it's the latter, it's not supernatural; it's *natural*. If it's the former, seek counseling.
If your goal is really to experience that which cannot be measured, try drugs. Shrooms are great for hallucinatory effects without so many of the jitters associated with LSD. Just don't try to explain to me that those hallucinations are actually real or expect me to "respect" your insight come voting time.
And many people have thought a lot about it and think their children are the smartest, most beautiful creatures ever to grace this planet.
Thinking and believing do not make a thing so. That's why we make observations, make predictions based upon those observations, and then have others independently verify those predictions.
Humans are faulty. We need help with objectivity. That's what the Scientific Method does; it helps us to be more objective.
At least people made coins with Alexander's face on it. We have no burial plot for Alexander, but that doesn't mean that there is no corroborating archaeological evidence of his existence.
What has Jesus got? A shroud that was found to have been made around 1300AD? The Romans certainly didn't fall over themselves to make mention of Jesus during his life, even to ridicule him.
The four canonical Gospels (most commonly estimated to have been written between 65 and 110 A.D[6]) and the writings of Paul of the New Testament are among the earliest known documents relating to Jesus' life.
Jesus supposedly died about 33AD (give or take). Thirty to eighty years later, the Gospels are written. And we're to take them on their word?
Right, Paul was written first. He'd get the message out. Except...
Paul wrote nothing of the Virgin Birth, walking on water, water into wine, the Sermon on the Mount, healing the lepers, making the blind see, calming the seas, feeding 5,000 men and their families, raising Lazarus from the dead, or any of the other miracles associated with Jesus. They were really impressive acts, so wouldn't he at least mention them in passing?
In fact, Paul only really makes mention of the fact that Jesus was born of God, was crucified for our sins, and was resurrected. That was Jesus' life according to Paul. Sure, he had a lot of other things to say -- rules to proscribe, people to chastise -- but on Jesus' life, that's it.
Then suddenly, over thirty years after Jesus dies, the other apostles decide to start writing? And they have a perfect memory of all of these things that Paul seemingly forgot? Sermon on the Mount!? Paul forgot the Sermon on the Mount? Or did he simply think it wasn't all that important? During the thirty years after Jesus' death, it just wasn't that important, eh? No one decided to start writing while Jesus was alive apparently either. Is that right?
Without Paul, you've got nothing substantiating the historicity of Jesus. And as it turns out, there's nothing of consequence with Paul added to the mix.
You're tap dancing around the question. Our perception of the Sun and the Moon in the sky are dependent upon how they interact with the Earth.
For the Sun to stand still, the Earth could have stopped rotating or other similar feat of astronomical proportions. The Moon would have had to stop its revolutions around the Earth to be perceived as staying or the Earth would have had to rotate at the same rate as the Moon's revolutions.
For both to occur at the same time, the Moon would have had to stop its revolutions and the Earth would have had to stop rotating.
Things would have become quite toasty on one side of the planet while the other side became quite a bit cooler -- depending on the length of staying put, of course. The Moon would have crashed into the Earth due to the force of gravity and the ceasing of a stable orbit.
So my question to you is what other alternatives are there? The next question is whether you have a better alternative than "God did it?"
"Joshua is told in a way that made sense to the people witnessed the event..."(!?) C'mon! God did not pick up a quill pen and some parchment and write Joshua. At best, he inspired someone to write it. I thought the point of the Bible was that it was originally written by the people who were there, presuming that God told Adam what happened before he was created. But wait! Adam never wrote any of the books of the OT. Adam's great grandson perhaps? And perhaps he needed a better copy editor, because God wasn't doing his job in that capacity.
"Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him."
"No one?" It's just him and Adam and Eve, right?
"Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch."
Cain's wife? If Adam and Eve were the first humans, does that make Cain's wife Cain and Abel's sister? Or did Cain and Eve do the nasty to make Cain's wife? (Isn't it convenient that the Bible never mentions this woman or many others by name? God was kind of a chauvinist, wasn't He?)
"Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, 'God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.'"
So... umm... so I guess God created other women in the background so that the... umm... fratricidal maniac could get his groove on and procreate to make an entire line of damned souls.
Or do you not take a strict, literal interpretation of Genesis either? If all of these are allegorical and not literal, why base your life on it? Why does it hold special meaning over your life while Aesop's Fables do not?
Because you feel it? Muslims feel Allah's presence and the holiness of Muhammad. Tibetan Buddhists feel that the earthworms are possibly reincarnated loved ones. Why does your feeling trump what you know of the orbits of the planets and stars and moons? Why does it hold a great truth unto you when you do not see it as literal truth?
If a soul exists, when does it come into being? At conception, formation of a brain, or...?
The reason I ask is because if it's at the formation of a brain, that would imply that the "meat" has importance independent of some immaterial artifact.
If it's at conception, what about identical twins where the zygote splits in two? Does the soul split in two as well? If what about when two young embryos (fraternal twins) merge to make a single embryo, a chimera? Do the two souls merge or does one simply go away?
If you look at the natural world in and of itself, these questions don't need to be asked. Zygotes sometimes split and young embryos sometimes merge. Done.
If however you fixate on the lessons of the Bible, you are stuck with an awkward sort of soul arithmetic; one soul divided by two equals two souls (or one half a soul), and one soul plus one soul equals one soul (or two souls in one body).
Citing Occam's Razor, which is more likely? That one zygote into two is simply that or that an immaterial and unproven concept known as a soul inhabits each of us and must under a special arithmetic to follow natural processes?
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Ignoring the parent troll for a moment, can someone please show an example of where multiple implementation inheritance is superior (not just equivalent) to multiple interfaces and the composition design pattern?
I've really tried to find a case, but ultimately fail. I even tend to agree with Gosling that abstract classes were a bad idea. On the other hand, I can name innumerable cases where MI causes more problems than it solves.
No, seriously, you're wrong. Just because you don't see that Java is being used for a web site's back end doesn't mean you haven't been using it. Personally, I like Eclipse, but then I'm a programmer. I used to use Azureus, but since I'm mostly on a Mac, I started using Bits on Wheels. Not a crack against Azureus from a functional or usability standpoint, I just preferred the "wheel" in BoW. Totally arbitrary eye candy.
The problem with Applets was that AWT was a GUI framework built on top of a web browser, which is already a (wait for it...) GUI framework. The only reason Flash succeeded was because web browsers didn't have vector graphic support ten years ago.
As for Sun, they have given far more to the open source community than most give them credit for. NFS anyone? There are more examples, but just for a moment wrap your head around the concept of what if Sun never released the specs to NFS. What would the BSDs and Linux use to map file shares? CIFS/SMB aka Samba?
So let's take a look at Win32 MFC. That was written in C/C++. So did that framework suck so much? Answer: good code can come from any language where the developer is sufficiently skilled. Bad code can come from any language despite any intrinsic qualities in that language.
Perl, Python, and LISP are all more "obese" than Java.
http://clisp.cons.org/
Considering that Emacs is a lot of folks' LISP engine of choice, the standalone GNU implementation seemed a legitimate choice.
Are you sure you're not overreacting? If you hop on over to perl.com, you'll notice that the *compressed* source of Perl 5.10.0 is 14.9MB. The compressed source of Python 2.5.2 is 11MB. Ruby 1.8.7 comes out well at 3.9MB, but that's without any gems (good or bad depending on your point of view). The source for Common Lisp 2.4.5 is 7.1MB.
However you're singling out Java as the one that's bloated? Get real.
First off, MacFUSE is free (in both senses of the word).
Windows has a new arrival on the FUSE front too: http://www.suchwerk.net/sodcms_FUSE_for_WINDOWS.htm
Mod parent up! This needs more attention. For day to day use, Macs don't generally need NTFS support. An obvious exception would be the 1TB external hard drive that's been formatted with NTFS because FAT32 wouldn't cut it.
If this is your situation, speed is not your primary concern, it's interoperability. That's where MacFUSE comes into play. Sure it won't access that NTFS drive as fast as Windows would, but so what. With MacFUSE, you can access just about *anything* in *any format*. Got a ext3 filesystem? MacFUSE reads/writes that too.
Just because Apple doesn't provide it doesn't mean it can't be done.
Regular checkups can't prevent everyone from having a heart attack, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't get regular checkups. Even if you were notified of imminent failure only 44% of the time, that's still 44% more of the time than you would have without SMART.
Google's solution was to simply pull drives off the line after a given time interval. For most of us mere mortals on a budget, backups and SMART are better than nothing at all.
Is not a bad thing as long as it doesn't aggressively claim the memory. For example in Linux, the OS will try to use all available memory. Some of it will be by the kernel itself, a large part by applications, but a great deal of the rest as a memory cache of your filesystem (hard drive) accesses. However, if memory becomes tight, the OS will cache less of the filesystem to allow the applications more breathing room. This makes the hard drive work harder and, by result, makes your system less responsive.
The solution is not to get a filesystem that uses less memory. The solution is to get more RAM; it will probably increase your system performance more than a faster hard drive or CPU would.
Why is that? Are desktop apps not disk I/O bound anymore? Processors have gone from Pentium 60MHz to 3GHz quad code 64-bit chips in 15 years. Memory has gone from 8-16MB standard to 1-4GB standard. Memory speed has gone from MB/sec to GB/sec. Hard drive capacity has gone from 1GB to 1TB.
Hard drive speed, on the other hand, has gone from 1-5MB/sec (if you were lucky) to 50-100MB/sec. In other words, while everything else has improved by at least a factor of 500-1000, hard drives are pushing somewhere between a factor of 20 and 100.
For the best performance for your system, you should absolutely be offsetting hard drive performance with CPU and memory whenever possible. An exception would be intense graphics rendering, but dedicated GPUs are siphoning off those cases more and more.
Bottom line, the most you can get out of your hard drive I/O, the better. Even a 30% CPU overhead would pay for itself when the hard drive is your limiting factor, and that goes for most systems, desktop or server. For laptops, it depends. CPUs draw a fair amount of power. Then again, so do hard drives. There, the answer is little more unclear and must be examined on a case by case basis. For your desktop and server though, take the CPU hit.
Almost forgot: science (the body of knowledge) is a completely separate entity from the Scientific Method (a process for gaining knowledge).
Stating that science (the body of knowledge) is not complete is self-evident. You could even (in my opinion) safely assert that it will never be complete.
This doesn't mean that the Scientific Method is not still useful outside of physics, chemistry, and biology. It just means that we acknowledge that we, as humans, are not infallible. As such, we need an objective test to determine whether or not something is false. Note: we cannot establish truth with this, only falsehood. Rather than call it the Scientific Method, we should perhaps refer to it as the Objectivity Method. Then perhaps people would stop confusing science (the body of knowledge) with science (the process).
You're right, if nothing could do it, an all-powerful something presumably could as well. The problem with your argument there is that we have no evidence of an all-powerful something. All we have is a book (not even the oldest book) which starts off describing a jealous, spiteful, vengeful, egomaniacal, bloodthirsty male chauvinist pig.
Tell me why you don't believe in the Greek pantheon of Gods including Zeus, Apollo, and the others, and you will have your answer as to why I don't automatically accept the existence of your God. You and I are very similar in that we deny all of the Norse gods, the Greek, the Roman, the Zoroastrian, the Mayan, and Aztec, the Egyptian, the Sumerian, etc. The only difference between us is that I deny exactly one more.
Let's talk about that one for a moment. Jesus *had* to come down here to atone for man's sins that He let happen even though he's all knowing and could have prevented them, let Himself be crucified so as to absolve us of the sins He bestowed to us, rose from the dead to join Himself in Heaven, and I'm supposed to take that seriously? Seriously?
If God is omnipotent, why not just proclaim in His loud deity voice, "Changed my mind, you're not automatically damned anymore." I mean, that's effectively what He did by doing the whole Jesus routine.
And about that "Original Sin." When we are in court for some felony, one possible way out of it is to enter a plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity." The principle is that unless you have the mental faculties to distinguish right from wrong, you cannot be held to the same standard as someone who can. So let's look back at Adam, Eve, the Garden, and all that. Prior to eating of the Fruit of Knowledge, Adam and Eve were truly innocent, not knowing of Good and Evil. Satan took "the form" of the serpent. Adam and Eve ate the Fruit in defiance of God. Except that defiance is a Bad/Evil thing. They didn't know what Bad/Evil was, remember? Add to that, all serpents were all made to crawl on their bellies in punishment for Satan's treachery, like punishing all black people because some Asian guy made himself up in blackface makeup.
Not guilty by reason of insanity? No! Eternal damnation, torment, and all women have to bleed monthly to remind them of the Bad thing Eve did long before they were born.
And I'm just supposed to accept this? Because it was written down a few thousand years ago? Seriously, help me out. Why should I accept this? Give me a good reason.
Please don't bring Einstein into this when you obviously don't understand what he brought forth. It smells of "Evolution is just a theory," where it's obvious the speaker is either lying about their intentions or is truly ignorant enough to be unaware that in a scientific context, "theory" means something very different from what it means in the common context. To quote Einstein:
Funny you should mention IP: that's bullshit too. It, like the soul, is a man-made construct. So-called Intellectual Property refers to copyright law, patent law, and trademark law all rolled into one umbrella even though they have little to nothing to do with one another both from a conceptual standpoint as well as a legal standpoint.
But I digress. The running program is still material. Even if it helps you to understand it on a conceptual level, it can still be measured. It can still be examined, and it is still strongly tied to the hardware upon which it runs. It's like saying a stream of electrons doesn't exist. A colony of ants use scent trails to find food over long distances, but that doesn't mean that the scent is immaterial nor the "coded" information the ants can detect from it on the ground and the wind.
Bottom line: we can perceive software (with our normal five senses) and can detect to varying degrees of precision when a program is running (by a process manager, excess heat off the processor, etc.).
Irrelevant to this discussion. Without a carrier such as a disk or memory centers in a brain, the software or information ceases to exist. It has no independent status.
Yes, and until the mid-1990s, strong encryption was considered munitions according to federal statutes. Legal statutes and processes of nature are not synonymous nor at times even correlative.
Incorrect. The software is functioning as expected given faulty hardware. Nothing is wrong with the software only given a perspective of a functioning copy elsewhere. If the carrier fails, the "immaterial" information ceases to exist in its original form. The running program does not continue to exist as a running program in a sort of eternal software heaven. The running program as we perceive it ceases to exist. Kaput!
You *expect* the program to be there. You have your own *idea* of how the program should be there, but the program isn't there. Not anymore. That pattern of electrons is no longer present.
As long as we're taking this (failed) analogy to its logical end, there is no difference between hardware and software. Yes, you read that right. There is no difference. The distinction is an implementation detail. Just because a program executes from RAM instead of ROM doesn't make it special. Just because the algorithm is defined in a DSP instead of bits on a hard drive targeted toward a general purpose CPU doesn't make them completely separate entities. You are pulling from a dry well here.
Immaterial != Invisible != Solid
Is a sound immaterial? No! It is a wave vibration propagating through a medium that we can perceive with our ears. Just because you can't wrap your head around that doesn't mean it doesn't actually exist or that it's immaterial. Just like sound, electrical impulses can be measured and induced. The software exists as a very specific pattern on a hard drive. That pattern is copied into RAM and executed in a specific order as defined by the *material* world.
There is no ghost in the machine with regard to computers just as there is none for our brains. Just because we do not understand all aspects does not automatically follow that there is a ghost in the machine. That is begging the question and an appeal to ignorance.
Backups are not relevant to this conversation. In fact, they hurt your argument. Software is a material item and is therefore easily seen in the backup analogy.
If the soul is who we are and is independent of the brain, then why do some people have a traumatic brain injury and subsequently have a radical change in their personality? Their memory? Their ability to reason? What are we beyond what we know, can remember, and how we think? If these things can change by altering the meat, what's left?
If we could copy our memories and the paths that our minds take through each of our neural networks, how would that be different than a backup. This is easy for me to grasp, but I fail to see why a soul -- and its backup -- are even necessary. It is merely the ghost in the machine, and a fool's errand.
And at the end, we come to it. "The Bible tells us exactly that is true." It has not been observed outside the Bible. No instance of it happening has been demonstrated. To be completely honest, the fact that the Bible has so many internal inconsistencies tends to make me doubt it as an infallible work: certainly not one to be used as an universal citation.
The LDS Church has the highest number of units among all chartered organizations. General Authorities and other general board members of the Mormon Church continue to serve on national Boy Scouts of America committees.
While Scouting depends on public schools, it also relies on religious organizations, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Of the roughly 1,600 Cub Scout packs, Boy Scout troops, and Explorer posts in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington, 40% are sponsored by Mormons. Another 35% are sponsored by other religious organizations.
Nationally, the vast majority of support also comes from religious organizations, with the Mormon Church sponsoring almost three times as many Boy Scout groups as the second-ranked religious sponsor, the United Methodist Church.
Scouting is the official youth program for Mormons. Their commitment is so strong that local bishops routinely assign men to become Scout leaders as part of their spiritual calling.
It was a statistical fact that Mormon troops graduated kids to Eagle Scout TWICE as fast as the national average. They allowed almost nonsensical Eagle Projects, such as carpet cleaning in the local ward or Stake Center. The national standard is to assure that this project was a REAL service and had an impact in someone's life, reading programs for the elderly, time spent entertaining sick children in the local hospitals. These projects had to involve participation over time.
I could go on.
Science doesn't remove my ability to empathize.
As for how you can build a society or values without "faith," just ask Norway. They seem to be working it out alright.
- Over 70% atheist (according to the last census)
- Most peaceful nation in the world (according to the Global Peace Index)
- 2nd highest GDP in the world
- Unemployment below 2%
- Average hourly wages among the world's highest
- 1st in life expectancy
- 1st in literacy
- 1st in education
- 1st in standard of living
Arguably the least "faithful" nation in the world is also among the world's best.So I ask you, what do you value and does that really derive from Christianity?
Still it find it odd that apologists will try to find any loophole to justify the impossible. It's just as curious to me that the fact that the Bible considers women only even marginally important in the context of their allegiance to a man.
You assert that there could have been daughters. How can you make that assertion? Because there is almost never mention of women who are not wives, and even then their names are not considered important. And this doesn't bother you at all? Not one bit? You don't find it odd that a book authored by God Himself by proxy considers women to be a superfluous afterthought? Really?
Still, these hypothetical daughters were Cain's sisters. So Cain got busy for 130 years with one or more sisters? And once again, if it's more, their names and even their existences are apparently pointless. These daughters would have been born after Cain killed Abel, right? So why would God anoint Adam and Eve with concubines for the "marked" Cain? Or were the women all girls gone wild from original sin?
The sum of your body is a material thing just as a computer program is a material thing even though we like to think of it as an immaterial construct. We can trace the sequence of steps and examine the individual pieces to get a sense of the whole.
If your definition of a soul is just like that of a program, it could be measured, thereby rendering it material, not immaterial.
A material thing (your brain) cannot interact with an immaterial thing (a soul). In philosophy this is referred to as a problem of participation. After all, if you could see or touch something, it wouldn't be immaterial. Conversely, how would an immaterial object "touch" us?
If your answer is, "It just does," you are not rational. You are like a child with their imaginary friend getting indignant because a parent won't set an extra place at the table. Sure, the parent could humor you. Sure, an imaginary friend can sometimes point to emotional issues within the child. On the other hand, the imaginary friend, no matter how comforting that concept may be to the child, is still imaginary.
There is no microscope that can see a soul, because no one has determined what a soul actually is or if it exists.
Why believe in the supernatural? If you can sense something, it's either in your head or there is an actual interaction with your body. If it's the latter, it's not supernatural; it's *natural*. If it's the former, seek counseling.
If your goal is really to experience that which cannot be measured, try drugs. Shrooms are great for hallucinatory effects without so many of the jitters associated with LSD. Just don't try to explain to me that those hallucinations are actually real or expect me to "respect" your insight come voting time.
And many people have thought a lot about it and think their children are the smartest, most beautiful creatures ever to grace this planet.
Thinking and believing do not make a thing so. That's why we make observations, make predictions based upon those observations, and then have others independently verify those predictions.
Humans are faulty. We need help with objectivity. That's what the Scientific Method does; it helps us to be more objective.
Belief is not objective nor is it always right.
At least people made coins with Alexander's face on it. We have no burial plot for Alexander, but that doesn't mean that there is no corroborating archaeological evidence of his existence.
What has Jesus got? A shroud that was found to have been made around 1300AD? The Romans certainly didn't fall over themselves to make mention of Jesus during his life, even to ridicule him.
Jesus supposedly died about 33AD (give or take). Thirty to eighty years later, the Gospels are written. And we're to take them on their word?
Right, Paul was written first. He'd get the message out. Except...
Paul wrote nothing of the Virgin Birth, walking on water, water into wine, the Sermon on the Mount, healing the lepers, making the blind see, calming the seas, feeding 5,000 men and their families, raising Lazarus from the dead, or any of the other miracles associated with Jesus. They were really impressive acts, so wouldn't he at least mention them in passing?
In fact, Paul only really makes mention of the fact that Jesus was born of God, was crucified for our sins, and was resurrected. That was Jesus' life according to Paul. Sure, he had a lot of other things to say -- rules to proscribe, people to chastise -- but on Jesus' life, that's it.
Then suddenly, over thirty years after Jesus dies, the other apostles decide to start writing? And they have a perfect memory of all of these things that Paul seemingly forgot? Sermon on the Mount!? Paul forgot the Sermon on the Mount? Or did he simply think it wasn't all that important? During the thirty years after Jesus' death, it just wasn't that important, eh? No one decided to start writing while Jesus was alive apparently either. Is that right?
Without Paul, you've got nothing substantiating the historicity of Jesus. And as it turns out, there's nothing of consequence with Paul added to the mix.
Just wishful thinking.
Anthropic Principle. Those words could save your life. Well maybe not, but they could allow your life to come into being in the first place.
Also, the quote you gave seems to imply that the planets are just a hair's breadth away from jumping the rails. Luckily for us, that just isn't so.
For the Sun to stand still, the Earth could have stopped rotating or other similar feat of astronomical proportions. The Moon would have had to stop its revolutions around the Earth to be perceived as staying or the Earth would have had to rotate at the same rate as the Moon's revolutions.
For both to occur at the same time, the Moon would have had to stop its revolutions and the Earth would have had to stop rotating.
Things would have become quite toasty on one side of the planet while the other side became quite a bit cooler -- depending on the length of staying put, of course. The Moon would have crashed into the Earth due to the force of gravity and the ceasing of a stable orbit.
So my question to you is what other alternatives are there? The next question is whether you have a better alternative than "God did it?" "Joshua is told in a way that made sense to the people witnessed the event..."(!?) C'mon! God did not pick up a quill pen and some parchment and write Joshua. At best, he inspired someone to write it. I thought the point of the Bible was that it was originally written by the people who were there, presuming that God told Adam what happened before he was created. But wait! Adam never wrote any of the books of the OT. Adam's great grandson perhaps? And perhaps he needed a better copy editor, because God wasn't doing his job in that capacity.
"Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him."
"No one?" It's just him and Adam and Eve, right?
"Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch."
Cain's wife? If Adam and Eve were the first humans, does that make Cain's wife Cain and Abel's sister? Or did Cain and Eve do the nasty to make Cain's wife? (Isn't it convenient that the Bible never mentions this woman or many others by name? God was kind of a chauvinist, wasn't He?)
"Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, 'God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.'"
So... umm... so I guess God created other women in the background so that the... umm... fratricidal maniac could get his groove on and procreate to make an entire line of damned souls.
Or do you not take a strict, literal interpretation of Genesis either? If all of these are allegorical and not literal, why base your life on it? Why does it hold special meaning over your life while Aesop's Fables do not?
Because you feel it? Muslims feel Allah's presence and the holiness of Muhammad. Tibetan Buddhists feel that the earthworms are possibly reincarnated loved ones. Why does your feeling trump what you know of the orbits of the planets and stars and moons? Why does it hold a great truth unto you when you do not see it as literal truth?
I'm honestly curious.
If a soul exists, when does it come into being? At conception, formation of a brain, or...?
The reason I ask is because if it's at the formation of a brain, that would imply that the "meat" has importance independent of some immaterial artifact.
If it's at conception, what about identical twins where the zygote splits in two? Does the soul split in two as well? If what about when two young embryos (fraternal twins) merge to make a single embryo, a chimera? Do the two souls merge or does one simply go away?
If you look at the natural world in and of itself, these questions don't need to be asked. Zygotes sometimes split and young embryos sometimes merge. Done.
If however you fixate on the lessons of the Bible, you are stuck with an awkward sort of soul arithmetic; one soul divided by two equals two souls (or one half a soul), and one soul plus one soul equals one soul (or two souls in one body).
Citing Occam's Razor, which is more likely? That one zygote into two is simply that or that an immaterial and unproven concept known as a soul inhabits each of us and must under a special arithmetic to follow natural processes?