I am not disputing the fact that computers can win games from grandmasters in speed games. What I am saying is that they most likely can't when moves 2 through 4 are simply moving the king back and forth.
I looked at some of the games and these games are nuts. First of all you have a computer who seems to feel that castling is for wimps, that the king should be moved early as possible so that castling is impossible, that the king ought move towards the center of the board early and then retreat to the sidee of the board when attacked. In one game after eight moves or so all the major pieces were at their starting positions! Only the king had made a move and ended up back where it started. Only the pawns had made any progress whatsoever. He still won!. Whoever this guy is he is most definately not a computer. Did you look at the games? They are insane and brilliant at the same time. No way a computer did that. No way a computer would beat a GM when handicapped to that degree.
I have never seen pluto. I have never seen a picture of pluto. I have never seen a video of pluto. Yet I believe that pluto exists!. How can that be? Easy. I have read books by people claiming to be scientists and these people say that there is a planet called pluto way off there in outer space. Of course I never actually verified whether these people actually had degrees or whatnot but still they wrote books so it must mean something. I was also told by my teachers that pluto exists. Everybody I know also seems to be of the opinion that pluto exists.
It seems awfully scant evidence don't you think? It all boils down to this. Do you believe so and so when they tell you pluto exists? Well for me the answer seems to be Yes. Now if someone came along and said that pluto did not exist wouldn't I have the right to ask them for their qualifications? After all the only thing I have to go on is credibility.
The same situation exists here. I don't know too much about pysics (just what I picked up collage) so I have to take the word of other people. Given this dillema do I take the word of you (who I know nothing about) or the word of Stephen Hawkings (who I do know a little bit about, have read one of his books, have seen him on television, and have heard other people talk about him in positive terms). To me it seems like an obvious choice. Chances of you actually being right and him being wrong are pretty damned small.
Your inability to decipher this simple state of affairs tells me that perhaps you are not as brilliant as you lead yourself to believe. Your hostile reaction also leads me to believe that you may not be as mentally stable as I originally thought either.
Apparently you interpreted my previous post as an attack on you. That one was not meant to be an attack. This one started out not being an attack but alas it seems like it has degenerated into one anyways.
You forget one thing.
It's not enough to simply acquire a playing style similar to fischer. This is like saying "so and so aquired a playing style similar to Michael Jordan". Sure you can play like him but can you actually go on the basketball court and consistently beat Kobe Bryant?
Whoever this is reoutinely beat the pants off of a grandmaster even after throwing away as many as eight moves. I seriously doubt any computer can do that and whoever did it must be a player of enormous talent not just some shmoe of the street who studies patterns of play.
Really #1 is the most plausable theory. If it's not fischer it's somebody at least as good as him maybe better. I find it hard to believe somebody that good would play anonymously.
In one of the games the mystery player (black) moves
1.e4 e6 2.d4 Ke7 3.Nc3 Ke8 4.Nf3 Ke7 5.Bc4 Ke8
In essense throwing away his first five moves. In those five moves white proceeds to gain what seems like an impressive control of the center of the board. Despite this seemingly overwhelming advantage he loses. If he was me I could understand but he is a grandmaster and I really don't understand that.
Also in the next game playing white our mystery player quits after a few moves when the board does not look that bad to me (not that I would be a keen judge). Considering how he overcame much worse positions to win in earlier games it seems daffy. Certainly not something a computer would do.
Are computers that good that they can beat grandmasters after throwing away five moves?
I am not much of a chess player but that game three is some kind of voo-doo. In the beginning of the game he moves his king around but eventually the king ends up back where it started. I burst out laughing. If I was a GM, and someone did that to me, and I still lost the game I would be astonished (and maybe even ashamed). Insane and brilliant just awsome.
Why waste your time learning a language you will never ever use? If you are going to have to learn Java to get a job why not learn Java in the first place.
Yes Perl, Python, TCL (and you forgot rebol!) all are pretty damned portable too. Life is great when you don't have to tie yourself to one platform with a crappy language like VB anymore heh? Only if they some slick IDE like jbuilder.
"The idea that one can extrapolate closed time loop from extreme gravitational spacetime curvature is ludicrous. It's even more absurd when people talk about traveling in the loop to a time in the past. Yet, this is what Kip Thorne and Hawking claim is possible."
Interesting. One of the most brilliant physists in the world is wrong and you are right. Who would have thunk?
First of all user friendly is not the same as better quality. The fact you seem to confuse the two indicates how little you have thought about this issue.
Secondly Linux is not "harder to use" it's simply "not familiar enough". It's really not much harder to use linux then windows. To a beginner they are equally baffling set of analogies. Go get your grandma to look at your toolbar and tell you what each one of those cryptic icons do. I will give a hundred dollars if she can even name all the objects represented in the icons.
Thirdly Advocating linux benefits the consumer by breaking the chokehold on innovation that MS has. It also benefits the consumer by saving billions of tax dollars that are spent by the govt on software licenses. It makes no sense for the govt to simutaneously find MS guilty of criminal behavious and reward them with govt contracts.
Re:Perl Software Pet Peeve: not using warn and str
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
What you don't have time to submit a bug report? Give me a break. If you can't do it at work do it when you get home. If you are unwilling then don't use it and don't whine about it. There are plenty of commercial products that probably work just fine just pay your money and go about your business.
Lead, follow or get out of the way. And in any case nobody wants to hear you bitch when you aren't even willing to submit a bug report let alone a patch.
You know I read your post carefully but still it makes no sense to me.
1) if the old testemant is no longer valid then the ten commandments are no longer valid. The whole sabath thing is no longer valid.
2) God created everybody. The jews and their enemies. The idea that god wants to discourage the jews from killing by commanding them to commit genocide and unspeakable evil is just daffy. Besides which it didn't work! If that was gods plan it failed horribly. Not only did mankind not stop killing each other the jews themselves have killed and are continuing to kill hundreds of palestenians. This year alone more then 500 palestenians have been killed and appox three thousand wounded.
And finally I will go back to my original point (which you seem to be agreeing with somewhat). If you are allowed to pick and choose amongst the sections of the bible you like. If you are giving yourself the righ to ignore or "interpret" sections of the bible so that they make sense to you. Then you have to give everybody else the same right. You get to ignore chapter X verse Y and I get to ingnore Chapter A verse B. Same with interpretation. I get to interpret any section of the bible in a way that makes sense to me. It may make sense to you that God intended the jews to commit genocide but maybe it makes sense to me that God takes sides in human affairs and that he values the lives and wishes of jews more then he values the lives and wishes of other humans on the planet. Which makes more sense to you?
"God would write irrelevant words for the same reason that you our I would."
You are presuming that God is just like a human. That he has the same limitations as humans and the same tendencies as humans do. God is omnipotent. If anybody has the power to express his desires he does.
"Sure. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:33. Both of which are translated many different ways--and both of which can give a different message entirely from a hebrew perspective. "
If this is true then it's a horrible failure of God. God knew that people would be trying to follow his will for centuries (he alone knows how long). He knew/knows/willknow the future and knew the languages that would be prevelant in the future. His inability to express his desires in a format understandable by everybody at every time speaks volumes to me.
"Take a look at Ruth 1:16-17 and 2:10-11, which describe Ruth's close friendship with Naomi-"
Once again he could have just come out and said it. He could have but he chose to be coy instead. I wonder why.
"Or, if you'd like, start reading at the Ten Comandments and keep going--there are a lot of laws that simply aren't followed anymore. "
That;s most likely because it's in the old testemant. I have been told that the old testemant was supplanted by the new testament (that's why christians don't call for excution of homosexuals). And besides Christ offers forgiveness of all sins so it makes no sense even have ten commandments.
"Freedom's nice, but at the end of the day you need to be able to get shit done. "
At the end of the day freedom is more important then anything else. You have heard the saying about trading your freedom for security? Here you are trading your freedom for convenience.
BTW you can get your shit done with Star Office. I do all the time. Well maybe you can't but I and a bunch of people I know certainly can. Hell I get more shit done with vi then I do with MS office.
I don't think that people like you are the intended audience for SO. First of all you already have a copy of office and are used to the way it works. Also you are unwilling to spend more then 15 minutes to learning something new.
For people who have not used office before or who can not afford it (or simply don't want to pay for it) I think it's certainly a capable product. Maybe it's not better then office but it gets the job done. Once people are unable to pirate office anymore you will see a marked increase in market share of both SO and competing lower cost products like wordperfect office. I can't wait till MS implements that scheme.
The war in the middle east will end when two things stop happening.
1) The palestenians right now think that it's better to die then to live under israeli occupation.
2) The Israelis would rather kill palestenians then to stop occupying them.
One party or the other has to relent. Either the palestnians accept the will of their occupying army or the occupying army moves out.
Actually there is one more way. The Israelis can simply kill all the palestenians. They have already killed over 500 so far and the ratio is one to five (five palestenians killed for every israeli). At this rate (and actually they can very easliy increase their kill ratio) they can wipe out every single arab in palestine in a few years. No more worries after that. They can go back to their beaches and have more fun.
Re:Perl Software Pet Peeve: not using warn and str
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
Maybe when you have the time you could fix it and submit a diff to the author. Or perhaps you can submit a bug report. It couldn't hurt.
"And besides, there's some discussion on whether the actual number is "666" versus 6^6^6 (see post below about a 36,000 digit number) versus perhaps this being no more than a demonstration used for literary purposes. "
I just don't get it. God wrote the bible. God surely wrote down what he meant. God knows perfectly well what humans can understand and what they can't. Why would god choose to befuddle? Why would he choose obfuscate? Even worse why would he tell people "do what it says in this book" and then proceed to write a book full of contradictions, nonsense, and cryptic passages. How does he expect you to behave in a manner he chooses when he can't tell you what he want's in a clear and understandable manner.
If I was god and I was writing a book I would start by saying "you see you live on this round planet that goes around the sun" and then proceed to describe the solar system. Maybe I'd talk about math or atoms or calculus or geometry or anything but "kill the homosexuals and exile anybody who wears clothes made out of two different materials".
I find it facinating that the document god wrote for all his children contains not one piece of knowledge that was unavailable to the jews at the time. No mention of polar ice caps, planets, math, science, not even the freaking pyramids. What the hell kind of a instruction manual is that? What kind of a god writes a book that's so full of contradictions that one reader says "god is about love because he tells us to turn the other cheek" and the other says "god is about venagance because he tells us to kill them, kill their wives, kill their children, kill their animals and salt the earth so that not even their plants survive".
'Furthermore, "Chrisitans" are a wide and diverse group of people.'
No doubt about that. But to be a christian you have to believe in the bible. No sane person can believe in every single thing the bible says because the bible is full of vile and despicable acts. This sets up a congnitive dissonance in the mind of most devout christians. The casual ones simply say "it's OK to ignore certain parts of the bible" the devout ones are on the verge of mental disease.
Hi Doug.
"There are many other posts on slashdot, just as there are many chapters in the bible."
Last I checked God was not posting on slashdot. Are you saying that the word of God is no different then posts on slashdot. I find it very strange that you would equate the bible with slashdot. Most absurd.
"Within each chapter, as within each post, there are verses that are simply there to hold it together--and which can be toned down as not important for whole message. "
This is part I don't understand. All of it is god's word. All of it was written by god. Why would god write irrelevant words? why would you ignore any sentence uttered by god? Even worse why would you take one sentence and pretend that it does not say what it does. I'll give you an example.
In the bible (leviticus I think) it says that "if a man sleeps with another man they should both be killed" (not an exact quote look it up). Now many people point at this sentence and say "see god says homosexuality is a sin". No god does not say that. God says in plain language that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Why aren't the christians who are against homosexuality demanding that homosexuals be put to death? This is a very important question. If you can look at this sentence and say to me "well god didn't really mean that" then I can point at any passage and say "he didn't mean that". If you say "it doesn't count because it's the old testemant" then I can say "the ten commandmends don't count because they are in the old testament". Do you see where I am coming from here. The minute you give yourself the right to ignore, minimize or choose to interpret any way you want any passage in the bible you give me the exact same right.
Maybe you will go to hell for not killing homosexuals have you thought about that? How dare you ignore the word of god.
"Unix is fundementally extremely difficult to use. So much so that I don't think that it's possible to remedy."
I think I disagree with you vehemntly on this point. I think that you (like most people) confuse easy to use and easy to learn. Unix is harder to learn but once learned it's easy to use. It's like vi, sed, awk or even the find command. These tools are very hard to learn and proficient at but once learned and combined they can make your computer sing and dance like windows never even imagined. They let you get your job done in one tenth the time. I'll give you a DOS example. Let's say that I want to get rid of all the jpeg files on my C drive. I can either type "del *.jpg/s" or I can do this.
start->find
Type in *.jpg
Hit search button.
Wait
select first file
scroll down a very long list
hold shift key and click your mouse selecting the entire list
hit the delete key (or do the whole right mouse button dance).
Click OK on the "are you sure" button.
Which one is easier to USE? Which one is easier to LEARN.
"But just because Unix has held out against it this long doesn't make it particularly good at anything except being resilent against MS; that's not all that stunning on technical or usability grounds."
Well considering that no other operating system has been able to stand the onslaught of MS I'd say it was very stong proof that it's a good OS. Despite the fact that MS can throw billions into making NT better and attacking unix the fact that Unix is still standing is very strong evidence that it's technically more desirable. If it wasn't significantly better it would be long dead.
"My grandfather said the number 666 means nothing to him. He said that if you focus on the number you lose sight of the bigger picture, the fact that the work of the devil is all about."
What I find absolutely facinating about christians is that they are so willing to dismiss (or minimize) any passage in the bible they don't like. If OTOH you dare to dismiss a passage they are fond of then they get all over your case. It seems to me if you have the right to ignore any part of the bible then I have the right to ignore part I don't like either.
You want an operating system as reiable as unix, as flexable as unix, and that can run unix but you don't want to use unix because it's old. Is that right?
Maintaining backwards compatibility will doom you to hell forever. If you want a new OS there are a bunch being worked on right now. From inferno to atheos to hurd to symbian people are trying out new ideas all the time. Unfortunately no commercial effort can succeed due to the chokehold on innovation that MS maintains with it's monopoly. Starting an OS company when MS is around is just suicide (look at the string of technically superior operating systems windows has left in it's wake). Actually that's an opportunity for people like you. You can jump in and make a difference in any of these projects. Go get involved it's more fun then standing at the sidewalk and pointing.
Then this makes passport essentially useless. A passport account can be no more reliable then a free account on hotmail. Very interesting. An authentication mechanism that is unable to verify the real user.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not disputing the fact that computers can win games from grandmasters in speed games. What I am saying is that they most likely can't when moves 2 through 4 are simply moving the king back and forth.
I looked at some of the games and these games are nuts. First of all you have a computer who seems to feel that castling is for wimps, that the king should be moved early as possible so that castling is impossible, that the king ought move towards the center of the board early and then retreat to the sidee of the board when attacked. In one game after eight moves or so all the major pieces were at their starting positions! Only the king had made a move and ended up back where it started. Only the pawns had made any progress whatsoever. He still won!. Whoever this guy is he is most definately not a computer. Did you look at the games? They are insane and brilliant at the same time. No way a computer did that. No way a computer would beat a GM when handicapped to that degree.
Yes I have no argument. It's like this you see.
I have never seen pluto. I have never seen a picture of pluto. I have never seen a video of pluto. Yet I believe that pluto exists!. How can that be? Easy. I have read books by people claiming to be scientists and these people say that there is a planet called pluto way off there in outer space. Of course I never actually verified whether these people actually had degrees or whatnot but still they wrote books so it must mean something. I was also told by my teachers that pluto exists. Everybody I know also seems to be of the opinion that pluto exists.
It seems awfully scant evidence don't you think? It all boils down to this. Do you believe so and so when they tell you pluto exists? Well for me the answer seems to be Yes. Now if someone came along and said that pluto did not exist wouldn't I have the right to ask them for their qualifications? After all the only thing I have to go on is credibility.
The same situation exists here. I don't know too much about pysics (just what I picked up collage) so I have to take the word of other people. Given this dillema do I take the word of you (who I know nothing about) or the word of Stephen Hawkings (who I do know a little bit about, have read one of his books, have seen him on television, and have heard other people talk about him in positive terms). To me it seems like an obvious choice. Chances of you actually being right and him being wrong are pretty damned small.
Your inability to decipher this simple state of affairs tells me that perhaps you are not as brilliant as you lead yourself to believe. Your hostile reaction also leads me to believe that you may not be as mentally stable as I originally thought either.
Apparently you interpreted my previous post as an attack on you. That one was not meant to be an attack. This one started out not being an attack but alas it seems like it has degenerated into one anyways.
You forget one thing.
It's not enough to simply acquire a playing style similar to fischer. This is like saying "so and so aquired a playing style similar to Michael Jordan". Sure you can play like him but can you actually go on the basketball court and consistently beat Kobe Bryant?
Whoever this is reoutinely beat the pants off of a grandmaster even after throwing away as many as eight moves. I seriously doubt any computer can do that and whoever did it must be a player of enormous talent not just some shmoe of the street who studies patterns of play.
Really #1 is the most plausable theory. If it's not fischer it's somebody at least as good as him maybe better. I find it hard to believe somebody that good would play anonymously.
In one of the games the mystery player (black) moves
1.e4 e6 2.d4 Ke7 3.Nc3 Ke8 4.Nf3 Ke7 5.Bc4 Ke8
In essense throwing away his first five moves. In those five moves white proceeds to gain what seems like an impressive control of the center of the board. Despite this seemingly overwhelming advantage he loses. If he was me I could understand but he is a grandmaster and I really don't understand that.
Also in the next game playing white our mystery player quits after a few moves when the board does not look that bad to me (not that I would be a keen judge). Considering how he overcame much worse positions to win in earlier games it seems daffy. Certainly not something a computer would do.
Are computers that good that they can beat grandmasters after throwing away five moves?
I am not much of a chess player but that game three is some kind of voo-doo. In the beginning of the game he moves his king around but eventually the king ends up back where it started. I burst out laughing. If I was a GM, and someone did that to me, and I still lost the game I would be astonished (and maybe even ashamed). Insane and brilliant just awsome.
Yes the job market for lisp programmers is HUGE.
Why waste your time learning a language you will never ever use? If you are going to have to learn Java to get a job why not learn Java in the first place.
Yes Perl, Python, TCL (and you forgot rebol!) all are pretty damned portable too. Life is great when you don't have to tie yourself to one platform with a crappy language like VB anymore heh? Only if they some slick IDE like jbuilder.
"The idea that one can extrapolate closed time loop from extreme gravitational spacetime curvature is ludicrous. It's even more absurd when people talk about traveling in the loop to a time in the past. Yet, this is what Kip Thorne and Hawking claim is possible."
Interesting. One of the most brilliant physists in the world is wrong and you are right. Who would have thunk?
First of all user friendly is not the same as better quality. The fact you seem to confuse the two indicates how little you have thought about this issue.
Secondly Linux is not "harder to use" it's simply "not familiar enough". It's really not much harder to use linux then windows. To a beginner they are equally baffling set of analogies. Go get your grandma to look at your toolbar and tell you what each one of those cryptic icons do. I will give a hundred dollars if she can even name all the objects represented in the icons.
Thirdly Advocating linux benefits the consumer by breaking the chokehold on innovation that MS has. It also benefits the consumer by saving billions of tax dollars that are spent by the govt on software licenses. It makes no sense for the govt to simutaneously find MS guilty of criminal behavious and reward them with govt contracts.
What you don't have time to submit a bug report? Give me a break. If you can't do it at work do it when you get home. If you are unwilling then don't use it and don't whine about it. There are plenty of commercial products that probably work just fine just pay your money and go about your business.
Lead, follow or get out of the way. And in any case nobody wants to hear you bitch when you aren't even willing to submit a bug report let alone a patch.
You know I read your post carefully but still it makes no sense to me.
1) if the old testemant is no longer valid then the ten commandments are no longer valid. The whole sabath thing is no longer valid.
2) God created everybody. The jews and their enemies. The idea that god wants to discourage the jews from killing by commanding them to commit genocide and unspeakable evil is just daffy. Besides which it didn't work! If that was gods plan it failed horribly. Not only did mankind not stop killing each other the jews themselves have killed and are continuing to kill hundreds of palestenians. This year alone more then 500 palestenians have been killed and appox three thousand wounded.
And finally I will go back to my original point (which you seem to be agreeing with somewhat). If you are allowed to pick and choose amongst the sections of the bible you like. If you are giving yourself the righ to ignore or "interpret" sections of the bible so that they make sense to you. Then you have to give everybody else the same right. You get to ignore chapter X verse Y and I get to ingnore Chapter A verse B. Same with interpretation. I get to interpret any section of the bible in a way that makes sense to me. It may make sense to you that God intended the jews to commit genocide but maybe it makes sense to me that God takes sides in human affairs and that he values the lives and wishes of jews more then he values the lives and wishes of other humans on the planet. Which makes more sense to you?
"God would write irrelevant words for the same reason that you our I would."
You are presuming that God is just like a human. That he has the same limitations as humans and the same tendencies as humans do. God is omnipotent. If anybody has the power to express his desires he does.
"Sure. Leviticus 18:22 and 20:33. Both of which are translated many different ways--and both of which can give a different message entirely from a hebrew perspective. "
If this is true then it's a horrible failure of God. God knew that people would be trying to follow his will for centuries (he alone knows how long). He knew/knows/willknow the future and knew the languages that would be prevelant in the future. His inability to express his desires in a format understandable by everybody at every time speaks volumes to me.
"Take a look at Ruth 1:16-17 and 2:10-11, which describe Ruth's close friendship with Naomi-"
Once again he could have just come out and said it. He could have but he chose to be coy instead. I wonder why.
"Or, if you'd like, start reading at the Ten Comandments and keep going--there are a lot of laws that simply aren't followed anymore. "
That;s most likely because it's in the old testemant. I have been told that the old testemant was supplanted by the new testament (that's why christians don't call for excution of homosexuals). And besides Christ offers forgiveness of all sins so it makes no sense even have ten commandments.
"Freedom's nice, but at the end of the day you need to be able to get shit done. "
At the end of the day freedom is more important then anything else. You have heard the saying about trading your freedom for security? Here you are trading your freedom for convenience.
BTW you can get your shit done with Star Office. I do all the time. Well maybe you can't but I and a bunch of people I know certainly can. Hell I get more shit done with vi then I do with MS office.
I don't think that people like you are the intended audience for SO. First of all you already have a copy of office and are used to the way it works. Also you are unwilling to spend more then 15 minutes to learning something new.
For people who have not used office before or who can not afford it (or simply don't want to pay for it) I think it's certainly a capable product. Maybe it's not better then office but it gets the job done. Once people are unable to pirate office anymore you will see a marked increase in market share of both SO and competing lower cost products like wordperfect office. I can't wait till MS implements that scheme.
It's free.
The war in the middle east will end when two things stop happening.
1) The palestenians right now think that it's better to die then to live under israeli occupation.
2) The Israelis would rather kill palestenians then to stop occupying them.
One party or the other has to relent. Either the palestnians accept the will of their occupying army or the occupying army moves out.
Actually there is one more way. The Israelis can simply kill all the palestenians. They have already killed over 500 so far and the ratio is one to five (five palestenians killed for every israeli). At this rate (and actually they can very easliy increase their kill ratio) they can wipe out every single arab in palestine in a few years. No more worries after that. They can go back to their beaches and have more fun.
Maybe when you have the time you could fix it and submit a diff to the author. Or perhaps you can submit a bug report. It couldn't hurt.
Yes you'd have to be brainfucked.
"And besides, there's some discussion on whether the actual number is "666" versus 6^6^6 (see post below about a 36,000 digit number) versus perhaps this being no more than a demonstration used for literary purposes. "
I just don't get it. God wrote the bible. God surely wrote down what he meant. God knows perfectly well what humans can understand and what they can't. Why would god choose to befuddle? Why would he choose obfuscate? Even worse why would he tell people "do what it says in this book" and then proceed to write a book full of contradictions, nonsense, and cryptic passages. How does he expect you to behave in a manner he chooses when he can't tell you what he want's in a clear and understandable manner.
If I was god and I was writing a book I would start by saying "you see you live on this round planet that goes around the sun" and then proceed to describe the solar system. Maybe I'd talk about math or atoms or calculus or geometry or anything but "kill the homosexuals and exile anybody who wears clothes made out of two different materials".
I find it facinating that the document god wrote for all his children contains not one piece of knowledge that was unavailable to the jews at the time. No mention of polar ice caps, planets, math, science, not even the freaking pyramids. What the hell kind of a instruction manual is that? What kind of a god writes a book that's so full of contradictions that one reader says "god is about love because he tells us to turn the other cheek" and the other says "god is about venagance because he tells us to kill them, kill their wives, kill their children, kill their animals and salt the earth so that not even their plants survive".
'Furthermore, "Chrisitans" are a wide and diverse group of people.'
No doubt about that. But to be a christian you have to believe in the bible. No sane person can believe in every single thing the bible says because the bible is full of vile and despicable acts. This sets up a congnitive dissonance in the mind of most devout christians. The casual ones simply say "it's OK to ignore certain parts of the bible" the devout ones are on the verge of mental disease.
" Hello. My name is Doug."
Hi Doug.
"There are many other posts on slashdot, just as there are many chapters in the bible."
Last I checked God was not posting on slashdot. Are you saying that the word of God is no different then posts on slashdot. I find it very strange that you would equate the bible with slashdot. Most absurd.
"Within each chapter, as within each post, there are verses that are simply there to hold it together--and which can be toned down as not important for whole message. "
This is part I don't understand. All of it is god's word. All of it was written by god. Why would god write irrelevant words? why would you ignore any sentence uttered by god? Even worse why would you take one sentence and pretend that it does not say what it does. I'll give you an example.
In the bible (leviticus I think) it says that "if a man sleeps with another man they should both be killed" (not an exact quote look it up). Now many people point at this sentence and say "see god says homosexuality is a sin". No god does not say that. God says in plain language that the punishment for homosexuality is death. Why aren't the christians who are against homosexuality demanding that homosexuals be put to death? This is a very important question. If you can look at this sentence and say to me "well god didn't really mean that" then I can point at any passage and say "he didn't mean that". If you say "it doesn't count because it's the old testemant" then I can say "the ten commandmends don't count because they are in the old testament". Do you see where I am coming from here. The minute you give yourself the right to ignore, minimize or choose to interpret any way you want any passage in the bible you give me the exact same right.
Maybe you will go to hell for not killing homosexuals have you thought about that? How dare you ignore the word of god.
"Unix is fundementally extremely difficult to use. So much so that I don't think that it's possible to remedy."
/s" or I can do this.
I think I disagree with you vehemntly on this point. I think that you (like most people) confuse easy to use and easy to learn. Unix is harder to learn but once learned it's easy to use. It's like vi, sed, awk or even the find command. These tools are very hard to learn and proficient at but once learned and combined they can make your computer sing and dance like windows never even imagined. They let you get your job done in one tenth the time. I'll give you a DOS example. Let's say that I want to get rid of all the jpeg files on my C drive. I can either type "del *.jpg
start->find
Type in *.jpg
Hit search button.
Wait
select first file
scroll down a very long list
hold shift key and click your mouse selecting the entire list
hit the delete key (or do the whole right mouse button dance).
Click OK on the "are you sure" button.
Which one is easier to USE? Which one is easier to LEARN.
"But just because Unix has held out against it this long doesn't make it particularly good at anything except being resilent against MS; that's not all that stunning on technical or usability grounds."
Well considering that no other operating system has been able to stand the onslaught of MS I'd say it was very stong proof that it's a good OS. Despite the fact that MS can throw billions into making NT better and attacking unix the fact that Unix is still standing is very strong evidence that it's technically more desirable. If it wasn't significantly better it would be long dead.
True or not this is the funniest thing I have heard in a while.
"My grandfather said the number 666 means nothing to him. He said that if you focus on the number you lose sight of the bigger picture, the fact that the work of the devil is all about."
What I find absolutely facinating about christians is that they are so willing to dismiss (or minimize) any passage in the bible they don't like. If OTOH you dare to dismiss a passage they are fond of then they get all over your case. It seems to me if you have the right to ignore any part of the bible then I have the right to ignore part I don't like either.
Let me see if I get you right.
You want an operating system as reiable as unix, as flexable as unix, and that can run unix but you don't want to use unix because it's old. Is that right?
Maintaining backwards compatibility will doom you to hell forever. If you want a new OS there are a bunch being worked on right now. From inferno to atheos to hurd to symbian people are trying out new ideas all the time. Unfortunately no commercial effort can succeed due to the chokehold on innovation that MS maintains with it's monopoly. Starting an OS company when MS is around is just suicide (look at the string of technically superior operating systems windows has left in it's wake). Actually that's an opportunity for people like you. You can jump in and make a difference in any of these projects. Go get involved it's more fun then standing at the sidewalk and pointing.
Then this makes passport essentially useless. A passport account can be no more reliable then a free account on hotmail. Very interesting. An authentication mechanism that is unable to verify the real user.
Or he owes them a bunch of money. That 100 million he spent on the election had to come from someplace.