Exactly. My real point was the fact that religion had just as much to do with the preservation of knowledge as it did with its destruction.
I think it's interesting that even though I consider myself agnostic, to read a lot of my posts here recently, you'd think I was a true believer. It's a shame that so many people here are willing to through out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to religion... it seems the antireligious faction here on Slashdot are just as closed minded as the religious fanatics they oppose. Sad, really.
Secular as in religion had absolutely nothing to do with it. Archimedes was killed because he angered a soldier, not because of his religion. Caesar burned whatever he burned (as I mentioned in another post, it turns out that it's disputed whether or not his forces burned the Library or not) in order to gain a tactical advantage. So yes, these were secular forces. Whether or not the Romans had their own religion is irrelevant.
Actually, it's disputed. It all depends on who the historian disliked the most... Plutarch disliked Caesar, Gibbons disliked Christianity (and blamed Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria), and Hebraeus hated the Moslems (and so blamed Omar). I was unaware of the dispute, having only heard the story of Caesar, so I thank you for your attempt at correcting me. From the reading I did writing this reply, I think it's most likely that none of these culprits single-handedly destroyed the Library, and that they all had a hand in the crime.
Check here, here, and here for three different perspectives on who did it.
But my actual point stands... the Christian Church and the Moslems owe us just as great a debt for what they saved of the ancients' wisdom as they are responsible for what they destroyed.
Not only was a lot of the knowledge preserved, much of what was lost was destroyed by secular forces. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier who grew impatient when the inventor didn't come quickly enough. The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
I must say, if the Church ever did anything right, it was preserving the works of the great masters. Sure, they may not have been complete, and they may have destroyed some other works that they disagreed with, but all in all, it was the Church that made the Renaissance possible.
I think the grandparent poster was really just taking advantage of Slashdot's antireligious bias to score some karma.
Actually, growth by invitation might be the best way to limit the problems people are having with child porn and other distasteful things. Assuming that the core developers aren't purveyers of such things, one would expect that those they associate with would not be either and so on recursively. It's not necessarily guaranteed, but I think a social-based distribution is a feasible method for limiting the number of distasteful nodes.
Ummm... the rover has already far exceeded its design lifetime, so there was no money wasted here... they've already achieved more than what they spent it on in the first place.
Oddly enough, when I first heard of the Narnia's ties to Christianity, I felt foolish for not noticing it before. I also found them even more interesting, because of how well written the allegory was. It wasn't so much that it was subtle (it's not) but that the story works well even if you are ignorant of the allegory! That is what I found most impressive about them.
What he's saying is that an athiest following the golden rule is most likely doing so out of its truth (though I wouldn't say there isn't a stick, since a lot of the violations of the golden rule are also illegal, but I digress:) whereas a Christian follows it because if he doesn't he'll get in trouble with God. I'm not entirely sure I agree with his logic (again, the whole legal stick thing), but I can certainly understand where it came from.
I certainly don't think he'd claim that an athiest would be more likely to follow the golden rule, but that an athiest who does follow it is doing it out of a reasoned examination rather than out of fear of punishment.
It's really an attack on akamai? Think about it... everyone starts proxying through google, so now popular web sites no longer need akamai to balance their loads. Once akamai's dead (or even before), google starts offering preferential or fine-tuned caching for websites for a fee. Brilliant.
Well, referring to all of them as zealots is a start:) Specificity towards Christianity is a second. Complete intolerance was the final clue. I'm sorry, but your intolerance makes you no different than the "zealots" you rail against. You seem to be just as closed minded as they. Perhaps you're still too young to realize that civility and respect are not signs of weakness, nor political correctness, but rather that which makes "civil"ization possible.
I understand your sentiment... I was as vehement as you once--then I realized that first of all, no matter what logical arguments I made to the contrary, there simply was no way to sway the believers from their belief, secondly, that their belief (with the exception of a rather obnoxious and loud few) didn't really hurt me in any way, and thirdly, it actually made living with them better to be civil than it was to call them fools and stupid. Attacking them really gained me nothing, and just made them dislike me.
While I've already conceded that my actual understanding of 'thee', 'thy' et. al. is actually wrong , I can't help but notice you seem to have a rather vitriolic opinion of religion. While I am myself no true believer (nor even really a false believer:), I think you may want to rethink your apparent hatred. It makes you seem no better than the zealots about whom you are foaming. Perhaps I am wrong on this point?
Of course it's amazing that my little off-handed comment has generated so much discussion. Kinda indicates how thoroughly content-free the actual article was, eh?
Huh. Well, that's what I get for basing my knowledge on what I was taught during rehearsals for a Renaissance Faire:) Shoulda done the research myself:) Of course it was years ago, so it's entirely possible that I'm remembering it incorrectly as well (it may have simply been an artistic conceit to drive home to the patrons the difference between the classes... the director in charge of this particular aspect of the Faire was actually very knowledgeable... I think she had done graduate studies in Renaissance English lit). Thanks for pointing out my error. I've been using this little bit of trivia for years... I'm lucky I never used it on anyone who knew any better:) Well, until now, that is;)
Languages are living, mutating things. They aren't static, and what was true in 1500 by and large isn't true today.
That's correct. And today, the use of the familiar form at all is largely gone. So, using it as an honorific is still technically incorrect, because in modern usage, it's use at all is just wierd:) I wouldn't say that 'thy' and 'your' have reversed meanings... they're just used so rarely that nobody understands their use anymore. I would argue that in the KJV of the bible (the version that most popularized the use of the familiar form) it was intended to actually show that while God is greater than Man, Man's relationship with God is a personal one. Besides, poetically, it often works better. Nor would I say that the meanings have reversed because of their use by the religious; I would argue that Victorian formality and American linguistic laziness had more to do with it than religion. As society became more and more impersonal, there was less and less need for a separate familiar form, so people became accustomed to simply addressing everyone using the honorific, and the familiar form simply fell out of usage. Once the separation between familiar and unfamiliar was effectively gone, the familiar form was restricted to usage in older texts (like the KJV, or for a more secular example, in Shakespeare) where it seemed to be a more formal use of language (because it made a distinction between the two forms). So, in fact, since 'thee', 'thy', and 'thou' are now effectively no longer a part of Modern English, using them incorrectly really is a sign of ignorance of how they should be used in the style of language the speaker is trying to evoke.
It's not a question of pedantry. Like I said, the familiar form is effectively dead, so if you're using it, you're trying to evoke an earlier version of the language, and so, you should use it correctly within that earlier version. Otherwise, more educated people (who actually care about history, as opposed to most people who seem to pretty much ignore it) will laugh at your ignorance.
Of course if GL had known what he was doing, he would have known that 'thy' is the familiar form. 'You' is the honorific form in English. We just got rid of the familiar form, so 'thy' only sounds more formal... it would in fact be an insult to address someone of higher station using the 'thy' form. It'd be like using 'tu' instead of 'usted' in Spanish. So, the correct way for Vader to address the Emperor would in fact be "What is your bidding my master?"
The problem is there's a lot of initscripts that list hard dependencies that are really soft (need instead of use). This creates a lot of bottlenecks that essentially make even a parallel boot linear. I've run my current system with both parallel boots and linear boots, and saw no real difference in boot speed. Most of the time was taken up in the bottlenecks (some of which, like checking the disks, can't be avoided).
Personally I think this is a tragic case of miscommunications, coupled with a "checkpoint" standard that is absurdly biased towards presuming guilt
Because when a suicide bomber is speeding towards you you have so much time to prove that they're trying to kill you. Face it. If you don't stop at a military checkpoint, you will be assumed to be an attacker. Any other assumption is simply irresponsible.
Memory allocation and management is something that anybody who has completed the freshman sequence in programming SHOULD be able to answer, come on, pointers are introduced in the second course, memory management in depth in the third.
Maybe you just are interviewing a lot of canidates with brain rot? I honestly cannot think of a SINGLE one of my fellow students who could not answer that.
Unfortunately, I can name several of my fellow students who have openly admitted that they don't fully understand pointers and memory management in C++. And these are graduating seniors no less. In a C++-based program (our department never drank the Java Kool-Aid, mainly because most of our graduates go into the auto industry to build embedded systems) But I would certainly agree that they should know it.
I also agree with your sentiments in your earlier post. While I haven't quite gotten to 25, I have learned enough that I can see where the languages in the same categories are pretty much all the same. But I also would agree with the other poster that C++ is kind of in a category all its own. For example, while I grok templates for simple types of generic programming (i.e. just plug in the type here), I haven't learned any other languages that have a similar facility, so I can't say I fully grok it (since I haven't seen it from a different viewpoint), and there are things I've heard about using templates that I don't fully understand.
Even if CS came up with a scientific solution to improve code quality
They have... they're called formal methods. Unfortunately, few programmers ever are exposed to them, even fewer understand them, and even fewer use them. There are even tools that can take a specification in a formal language, and check it against an implementation, to see if the implementation matches the specification (well, as far as that's possible, at any rate... there are limits to static analysis). However, as far as I can tell all those tools are abandonware... somebody wrote them for a paper then moved on to something else... I can't even get some of them to compile on my system (of course I also didn't invest much time in it, since at this point, I'd rather just do my specs and proofs by hand than waste hours trying to get software that hasn't been updated since 1999 to compile cleanly on AMD64... once I finish this project I may go back to it though:)
If programmers weren't allowed to make stuff up as they went along but instead had to use scientific method for everything they did not many progams would be completed.
Of course, then again, maybe they'd actually work.
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Exactly. My real point was the fact that religion had just as much to do with the preservation of knowledge as it did with its destruction.
I think it's interesting that even though I consider myself agnostic, to read a lot of my posts here recently, you'd think I was a true believer. It's a shame that so many people here are willing to through out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to religion... it seems the antireligious faction here on Slashdot are just as closed minded as the religious fanatics they oppose. Sad, really.
Secular as in religion had absolutely nothing to do with it. Archimedes was killed because he angered a soldier, not because of his religion. Caesar burned whatever he burned (as I mentioned in another post, it turns out that it's disputed whether or not his forces burned the Library or not) in order to gain a tactical advantage. So yes, these were secular forces. Whether or not the Romans had their own religion is irrelevant.
Actually, it's disputed. It all depends on who the historian disliked the most... Plutarch disliked Caesar, Gibbons disliked Christianity (and blamed Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria), and Hebraeus hated the Moslems (and so blamed Omar). I was unaware of the dispute, having only heard the story of Caesar, so I thank you for your attempt at correcting me. From the reading I did writing this reply, I think it's most likely that none of these culprits single-handedly destroyed the Library, and that they all had a hand in the crime.
Check here, here, and here for three different perspectives on who did it.
But my actual point stands... the Christian Church and the Moslems owe us just as great a debt for what they saved of the ancients' wisdom as they are responsible for what they destroyed.
Not only was a lot of the knowledge preserved, much of what was lost was destroyed by secular forces. Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier who grew impatient when the inventor didn't come quickly enough. The Library of Alexandria was burned down by the Romans.
I must say, if the Church ever did anything right, it was preserving the works of the great masters. Sure, they may not have been complete, and they may have destroyed some other works that they disagreed with, but all in all, it was the Church that made the Renaissance possible.
I think the grandparent poster was really just taking advantage of Slashdot's antireligious bias to score some karma.
Oh, come on, moderators... my comment wasn't insightful... sheesh.
Actually, growth by invitation might be the best way to limit the problems people are having with child porn and other distasteful things. Assuming that the core developers aren't purveyers of such things, one would expect that those they associate with would not be either and so on recursively. It's not necessarily guaranteed, but I think a social-based distribution is a feasible method for limiting the number of distasteful nodes.
Ummm... the rover has already far exceeded its design lifetime, so there was no money wasted here... they've already achieved more than what they spent it on in the first place.
Moron. Can't hesitate to knock NASA, can we?
Oddly enough, when I first heard of the Narnia's ties to Christianity, I felt foolish for not noticing it before. I also found them even more interesting, because of how well written the allegory was. It wasn't so much that it was subtle (it's not) but that the story works well even if you are ignorant of the allegory! That is what I found most impressive about them.
What he's saying is that an athiest following the golden rule is most likely doing so out of its truth (though I wouldn't say there isn't a stick, since a lot of the violations of the golden rule are also illegal, but I digress:) whereas a Christian follows it because if he doesn't he'll get in trouble with God. I'm not entirely sure I agree with his logic (again, the whole legal stick thing), but I can certainly understand where it came from.
I certainly don't think he'd claim that an athiest would be more likely to follow the golden rule, but that an athiest who does follow it is doing it out of a reasoned examination rather than out of fear of punishment.
It's really an attack on akamai? Think about it... everyone starts proxying through google, so now popular web sites no longer need akamai to balance their loads. Once akamai's dead (or even before), google starts offering preferential or fine-tuned caching for websites for a fee. Brilliant.
I hear that:) Though I hadn't heard 65-70 for tomorrow (I'm in Ypsilanti). Just checked the forecast for Thursday... no fire and brimstone:)
Well, referring to all of them as zealots is a start:) Specificity towards Christianity is a second. Complete intolerance was the final clue. I'm sorry, but your intolerance makes you no different than the "zealots" you rail against. You seem to be just as closed minded as they. Perhaps you're still too young to realize that civility and respect are not signs of weakness, nor political correctness, but rather that which makes "civil"ization possible.
I understand your sentiment... I was as vehement as you once--then I realized that first of all, no matter what logical arguments I made to the contrary, there simply was no way to sway the believers from their belief, secondly, that their belief (with the exception of a rather obnoxious and loud few) didn't really hurt me in any way, and thirdly, it actually made living with them better to be civil than it was to call them fools and stupid. Attacking them really gained me nothing, and just made them dislike me.
Tell me about it... it was snowing here this morning (and no, that's not normal in May)
While I've already conceded that my actual understanding of 'thee', 'thy' et. al. is actually wrong , I can't help but notice you seem to have a rather vitriolic opinion of religion. While I am myself no true believer (nor even really a false believer:), I think you may want to rethink your apparent hatred. It makes you seem no better than the zealots about whom you are foaming. Perhaps I am wrong on this point?
Of course it's amazing that my little off-handed comment has generated so much discussion. Kinda indicates how thoroughly content-free the actual article was, eh?
Huh. Well, that's what I get for basing my knowledge on what I was taught during rehearsals for a Renaissance Faire:) Shoulda done the research myself:) Of course it was years ago, so it's entirely possible that I'm remembering it incorrectly as well (it may have simply been an artistic conceit to drive home to the patrons the difference between the classes... the director in charge of this particular aspect of the Faire was actually very knowledgeable... I think she had done graduate studies in Renaissance English lit). Thanks for pointing out my error. I've been using this little bit of trivia for years... I'm lucky I never used it on anyone who knew any better:) Well, until now, that is;)
Languages are living, mutating things. They aren't static, and what was true in 1500 by and large isn't true today.
That's correct. And today, the use of the familiar form at all is largely gone. So, using it as an honorific is still technically incorrect, because in modern usage, it's use at all is just wierd:) I wouldn't say that 'thy' and 'your' have reversed meanings... they're just used so rarely that nobody understands their use anymore. I would argue that in the KJV of the bible (the version that most popularized the use of the familiar form) it was intended to actually show that while God is greater than Man, Man's relationship with God is a personal one. Besides, poetically, it often works better. Nor would I say that the meanings have reversed because of their use by the religious; I would argue that Victorian formality and American linguistic laziness had more to do with it than religion. As society became more and more impersonal, there was less and less need for a separate familiar form, so people became accustomed to simply addressing everyone using the honorific, and the familiar form simply fell out of usage. Once the separation between familiar and unfamiliar was effectively gone, the familiar form was restricted to usage in older texts (like the KJV, or for a more secular example, in Shakespeare) where it seemed to be a more formal use of language (because it made a distinction between the two forms). So, in fact, since 'thee', 'thy', and 'thou' are now effectively no longer a part of Modern English, using them incorrectly really is a sign of ignorance of how they should be used in the style of language the speaker is trying to evoke.
It's not a question of pedantry. Like I said, the familiar form is effectively dead, so if you're using it, you're trying to evoke an earlier version of the language, and so, you should use it correctly within that earlier version. Otherwise, more educated people (who actually care about history, as opposed to most people who seem to pretty much ignore it) will laugh at your ignorance.
Of course if GL had known what he was doing, he would have known that 'thy' is the familiar form. 'You' is the honorific form in English. We just got rid of the familiar form, so 'thy' only sounds more formal... it would in fact be an insult to address someone of higher station using the 'thy' form. It'd be like using 'tu' instead of 'usted' in Spanish. So, the correct way for Vader to address the Emperor would in fact be "What is your bidding my master?"
The problem is there's a lot of initscripts that list hard dependencies that are really soft (need instead of use). This creates a lot of bottlenecks that essentially make even a parallel boot linear. I've run my current system with both parallel boots and linear boots, and saw no real difference in boot speed. Most of the time was taken up in the bottlenecks (some of which, like checking the disks, can't be avoided).
Steve Tyler's gonna love this elevator:)
Personally I think this is a tragic case of miscommunications, coupled with a "checkpoint" standard that is absurdly biased towards presuming guilt
Because when a suicide bomber is speeding towards you you have so much time to prove that they're trying to kill you. Face it. If you don't stop at a military checkpoint, you will be assumed to be an attacker. Any other assumption is simply irresponsible.
Memory allocation and management is something that anybody who has completed the freshman sequence in programming SHOULD be able to answer, come on, pointers are introduced in the second course, memory management in depth in the third.
Maybe you just are interviewing a lot of canidates with brain rot? I honestly cannot think of a SINGLE one of my fellow students who could not answer that.
Unfortunately, I can name several of my fellow students who have openly admitted that they don't fully understand pointers and memory management in C++. And these are graduating seniors no less. In a C++-based program (our department never drank the Java Kool-Aid, mainly because most of our graduates go into the auto industry to build embedded systems) But I would certainly agree that they should know it.
I also agree with your sentiments in your earlier post. While I haven't quite gotten to 25, I have learned enough that I can see where the languages in the same categories are pretty much all the same. But I also would agree with the other poster that C++ is kind of in a category all its own. For example, while I grok templates for simple types of generic programming (i.e. just plug in the type here), I haven't learned any other languages that have a similar facility, so I can't say I fully grok it (since I haven't seen it from a different viewpoint), and there are things I've heard about using templates that I don't fully understand.
And SEs are the ones everyone ignores.
Even if CS came up with a scientific solution to improve code quality
They have... they're called formal methods. Unfortunately, few programmers ever are exposed to them, even fewer understand them, and even fewer use them. There are even tools that can take a specification in a formal language, and check it against an implementation, to see if the implementation matches the specification (well, as far as that's possible, at any rate... there are limits to static analysis). However, as far as I can tell all those tools are abandonware... somebody wrote them for a paper then moved on to something else... I can't even get some of them to compile on my system (of course I also didn't invest much time in it, since at this point, I'd rather just do my specs and proofs by hand than waste hours trying to get software that hasn't been updated since 1999 to compile cleanly on AMD64... once I finish this project I may go back to it though:)
If programmers weren't allowed to make stuff up as they went along but instead had to use scientific method for everything they did not many progams would be completed.
Of course, then again, maybe they'd actually work.
Except, in most cases, bank interest is close to or below the rate of inflation, so by keeping it in the bank, he'd actually wind up losing it all.