Not sure where your definition of supernatural comes from, but most people use the concept to describe something that is in this universe and that interacts with it in some way beyond the possibilities of nature and beyond cause-and-effect as defined by possible physical forces. See the laws of thermodynamics if you are unsure what I'm getting at.
How about Merriam-Webster? "Of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe." Or the American Heritage Dictionary: "Of or relating to existence outside the natural world."
Also, there is absolutely NO proof that god has ever revealed himself in any shape or form. Your assumptions are based on hearsay and zero evidence. See the problem?
There is no proof any more. There was proof 2,000 years ago. There were eyewitnesses to clearly supernatural events, and natural events that fulfilled centuries-old prophecies in a significant way. But we no longer have this proof; all we have is what people wrote about it later. And since God has not chosen to reveal Himself in a testable way since then, we have no current proof. I don't claim otherwise. However, the absence of proof is not proof of absence.
By definition, the existence of God cannot be disproven by science. That doesn't mean God exists, and it doesn't mean God doesn't exist. Either belief must be held on faith, and I respect your belief in this matter even though it differs from mine.
Similarly, the embryos are already being created and destroyed en masse by fertility clinics. (And yet, for some reason, pro-lifers never complain about that.)
That's ignorance, not hypocrisy. The average pro-lifer is simply not aware that these embryos are being destroyed.
You know what sucks? Spending time in pico that includes frequently searching for a string of text, and then trying to search for a string of text in Firefox.
I'm really glad they added the Recently Closed Tabs feature.
Thanks for translating for us.:-) A few grammatical notes for your reference:
because the address of the site had erroneously became included
The correct conjugation is "had become". I blame lack of sleep.
NBI and operators assured last spring, that...
The verb "assure" is never used without an object. You need to either provide an object (whom did they assure?) or use a different verb. Also, this comma should be omitted.
Many operators have also announced that they will make the filtering voluntary to their customers due to technical problems and negative publicity.
Did they announce this to their customers, or will they make filtering voluntary to their customers? If the former, you need to rearrange as "Many operators have also announced to their customers that they will..." If the latter, "to" is the wrong word here. I'm not sure the best thing to replace it with.
Internet operators gave an estimate for Tietokone magazine last spring, that implementing...
This comma needs to be removed as well, for the same reason. Also, this is somewhat awkward sentence structure.
Public relationship officer of DNA
This should be "DNA's public relations officer".
But there are still differences in the time how quickly the addresses on the list will end up in systems of different operators. W3C's address is known to have been end up also to the systems of Mikkeli Telecom Co-operative (MPY).
I suspect you got extra tired here. I'm pretty tired too though.
And therefore falls outside the realm of the observable universe which is tied to things like cause and effect. And therefore is not in the universe. And therefore does not exist. No flaw in the understanding of science here, mate.
You're limiting your definition of "exists" to exclude anything that is outside of our physical universe. When you define your terms this way, of course nothing supernatural "exists".
If god exists, it is only as an outside observer, and undetectable. If he is not just an observer but is actively "involved", his actions will be scientifically measurable in SOME regard, most likely by some heinous breach of the laws of thermodynamics.
So, either he doesn't exist, or he does but exerts absolutely no control over anything in the universe, including doing things like talking to humans and writing on clay tablets -- and by definition therefore, all religion and understanding of him does not come from him.
Alright, that's fair. I would argue that the influences of the Holy Spirit are subtle enough that they cannot be measured (at least not practically - I don't mean that they couldn't be measured theoretically, merely that we don't really have a way to do it right now), but beyond that, God has not chosen to reveal Himself to us physically in the last 2,000 years. That's not a permanent situation; God will reveal Himself to us again - but not even Jesus Christ knew when that would be. Unfortunately in the mean time, we have nothing to measure.
The other issue is that God usually uses natural phenomena to achieve supernatural goals. God exists outside of time, which means if God wants to cause something to happen tomorrow, He can set events in motion thousands of years ago that will culminate at that exact point - no heinous breach of thermodynamics required. For this kind of event, the only thing that makes it supernatural is the prophecies foretelling it and the significance ascribed to it; the event itself is a natural event.
If the supernatural exists, it is a part of nature, and, thus, natural.
The supernatural is, by definition, not a part of nature. The God that created the laws of physics cannot be measured by them.
Many religions (inlcuding Christianity), however, has the rule that their god frowns upon any attempt at proving their existence. Pretty convinient, huh?
The problem is not that God doesn't want to be proven to exist, but that He hasn't sent any physical proof into our world in the last 2,000 years, and that was long enough ago that nobody believes the people who actually did have proof at the time. One passage that comes to mind is the second chapter of the book of Acts, where Peter addresses a crowd and says essentially "you know this is true, because you have seen it." At the time, the miracles performed by Jesus Christ weren't myth or superstition, they were actual events that many people witnessed themselves. However, because there was not a culture of documenting such things in writing, most of them didn't write it down. No measurements were taken, no scientific study was done, because at the time that just wasn't thought of as being important. A lot of what we do have is letters that were written with the expectation that the recipients would have full understanding of the context in which they were written, which isn't true today.
God will reveal Himself again one day, in a way that can be directly observed and measured. Until that day, there can be no proof.
The funny thing about the Drake equation is that most of the numbers you have to plug into it, we have no data on, so everybody just makes stuff up, and then they come up with a number that they can say must be accurate because the math all checks out.
Nah mate, science and Christianity are NOT compatible, so long as Christianity promotes any kind of belief that is either at odds with provable fact, or is not supported by any direct evidence.
If Christianity promotes a belief that is at odds with provable fact, then you're right, but the argument of young-earth Creationists is that macro-evolution and a billions-of-years-old universe is NOT provable fact. This is where you have a conflict, not in the logical conclusions that follow.
I believe your view of the scientific method to be flawed. The existence of God clearly falls completely outside the realm of empirical science. This doesn't make God false, it makes God untestable. Science only deals with the natural, which doesn't mean that the supernatural cannot exist. The scientific method does not require that you begin with a disbelief in God; indeed, many well-known scientists including Kepler, Galileo, Pasteur and Newton put God at the center of their scientific work. These men endeavored to better know the Creator through the better understanding of His Creation. Would you call their work unscientific?
Personally, I find religion deeply offensive, in the same way I find littering, racism, homeopathy, and liars offensive. If anybody is going to be doing any of that on my lawn, I'm going to yell at them.
I find that most people who are offended by religion in general (as opposed to being offended by some specific aspect of a particular religion) completely misunderstand what religion is.
Were Unicorns mentioned in the Bible before Noah? (The Irish Rovers song doesn't count)
No.
I wasn't aware that the Bible mentioned unicorns at all, but it turns out that the King James Version does mention unicorns in several places. The Hebrew word that the KJV renders as "unicorn" is translated as "wild ox" in the NIV; there's no way to know for sure exactly what was being referred to.
The unicorn (or wild ox) is mentioned in Numbers 23:22 and 24:8, Job 39, Psalm 29:6, and Psalm 92:10.
The book of Job also describes the "behemoth" (chapter 40) and the "leviathan" (chapter 41), the latter of which is also mentioned in Psalm 74:14 and 104:26 and Isaiah 27:1. I believe these to be dinosaurs of some sort, but it's impossible to say what they really were. Footnotes in the NIV suggest they could be a hippopotamus or elephant and crocodile respectively, but the (rather poetic) descriptions clearly don't fit anything like those animals.
The idea was that the web server in his wallet would have access to the amount of cash that's in his wallet; he could connect to it over the Internet to find out how much cash he has, instead of pulling out his wallet to look.
If more regular consumers get over this "gotta be DOS compatable man" fixation then things will get REALLY interesting.
Consumers don't have a fixation with DOS compatibility. Their fixation is with being able to run all the obscure applications they've become accustomed to, and have working stable drivers for all their hardware. If all the apps they want to run are available for another OS, they're free to switch. If there is a suitable alternative available, they're free to switch. If they don't think one of these is true, then they'll stay until they have a compelling reason to investigate and try to determine whether they can switch.
Note that this investigation may be beyond the user's ability - if they don't understand that Internet Explorer is a web browser, they can't very well determine whether Safari would be a suitable replacement.
My roommates' daughter, who isn't old enough to read yet, can navigate menus on the Nintendo Wii by using trial and error to determine which button "works" and which button "doesn't work" to get where she wants, then (with repetition) memorizing the position or appearance of the correct button. She has absolutely no idea what any of the text says if it isn't accompanied by pictures, but she only occasionally needs help navigating.
Shouldn't we expect better from adults using a computer?
You're absolutely right, but it will be important for Microsoft to make consumers think this new OS is completely different from Vista, because everyone knows Vista sucks. This is mostly because a lot of people have experienced incompatibilities with older applications or drivers, switched back to XP where everything works, and warned all their friends not to make the same mistake.
By the time Windows 7 is released, third party developers will have updated their crap to be compatible with Vista, so as long as Microsoft doesn't change anything important under the hood, everything should work fine. It'll work fine in Vista too, but consumers won't know that; they'll assume Vistas is still broken, but they'll be willing to give Windows 7 a try.
One also gets the impression that what Obama is promising change from includes not just the past 8 years under Bush, but also the previous 8 years under Clinton.
Oh come on, it's not THAT complicated. Here, I'll deobfuscate it for you:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
foreach my $word ('Just','another','Perl','hacker') {
my $address=gethostbyname("$word.aacs.phroggy.com"); # get a single 32-bit binary value
my @integers=unpack('C4',$address); # convert each byte into an integer (four total)
printf('%02X%02X%02X%02X',@integers); # format each integer as 2-digit hexadecimal }
Slashdot Mirror
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
Not sure where your definition of supernatural comes from, but most people use the concept to describe something that is in this universe and that interacts with it in some way beyond the possibilities of nature and beyond cause-and-effect as defined by possible physical forces. See the laws of thermodynamics if you are unsure what I'm getting at.
How about Merriam-Webster? "Of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe." Or the American Heritage Dictionary: "Of or relating to existence outside the natural world."
Also, there is absolutely NO proof that god has ever revealed himself in any shape or form. Your assumptions are based on hearsay and zero evidence. See the problem?
There is no proof any more. There was proof 2,000 years ago. There were eyewitnesses to clearly supernatural events, and natural events that fulfilled centuries-old prophecies in a significant way. But we no longer have this proof; all we have is what people wrote about it later. And since God has not chosen to reveal Himself in a testable way since then, we have no current proof. I don't claim otherwise. However, the absence of proof is not proof of absence.
By definition, the existence of God cannot be disproven by science. That doesn't mean God exists, and it doesn't mean God doesn't exist. Either belief must be held on faith, and I respect your belief in this matter even though it differs from mine.
Similarly, the embryos are already being created and destroyed en masse by fertility clinics. (And yet, for some reason, pro-lifers never complain about that.)
That's ignorance, not hypocrisy. The average pro-lifer is simply not aware that these embryos are being destroyed.
You know what sucks? Spending time in pico that includes frequently searching for a string of text, and then trying to search for a string of text in Firefox.
I'm really glad they added the Recently Closed Tabs feature.
Thanks for translating for us. :-) A few grammatical notes for your reference:
because the address of the site had erroneously became included
The correct conjugation is "had become". I blame lack of sleep.
NBI and operators assured last spring, that...
The verb "assure" is never used without an object. You need to either provide an object (whom did they assure?) or use a different verb. Also, this comma should be omitted.
Many operators have also announced that they will make the filtering voluntary to their customers due to technical problems and negative publicity.
Did they announce this to their customers, or will they make filtering voluntary to their customers? If the former, you need to rearrange as "Many operators have also announced to their customers that they will..." If the latter, "to" is the wrong word here. I'm not sure the best thing to replace it with.
Internet operators gave an estimate for Tietokone magazine last spring, that implementing...
This comma needs to be removed as well, for the same reason. Also, this is somewhat awkward sentence structure.
Public relationship officer of DNA
This should be "DNA's public relations officer".
But there are still differences in the time how quickly the addresses on the list will end up in systems of different operators. W3C's address is known to have been end up also to the systems of Mikkeli Telecom Co-operative (MPY).
I suspect you got extra tired here. I'm pretty tired too though.
Whgen is the next version coming out? Why no patches/hotfixes for the released one?
Usually that's a clear sign that the problem isn't a bug, but a design flaw; they can't just patch it, because that would break things.
And therefore falls outside the realm of the observable universe which is tied to things like cause and effect. And therefore is not in the universe. And therefore does not exist. No flaw in the understanding of science here, mate.
You're limiting your definition of "exists" to exclude anything that is outside of our physical universe. When you define your terms this way, of course nothing supernatural "exists".
If god exists, it is only as an outside observer, and undetectable. If he is not just an observer but is actively "involved", his actions will be scientifically measurable in SOME regard, most likely by some heinous breach of the laws of thermodynamics.
So, either he doesn't exist, or he does but exerts absolutely no control over anything in the universe, including doing things like talking to humans and writing on clay tablets -- and by definition therefore, all religion and understanding of him does not come from him.
Alright, that's fair. I would argue that the influences of the Holy Spirit are subtle enough that they cannot be measured (at least not practically - I don't mean that they couldn't be measured theoretically, merely that we don't really have a way to do it right now), but beyond that, God has not chosen to reveal Himself to us physically in the last 2,000 years. That's not a permanent situation; God will reveal Himself to us again - but not even Jesus Christ knew when that would be. Unfortunately in the mean time, we have nothing to measure.
The other issue is that God usually uses natural phenomena to achieve supernatural goals. God exists outside of time, which means if God wants to cause something to happen tomorrow, He can set events in motion thousands of years ago that will culminate at that exact point - no heinous breach of thermodynamics required. For this kind of event, the only thing that makes it supernatural is the prophecies foretelling it and the significance ascribed to it; the event itself is a natural event.
Pro-choice people don't force abortions on other people who are against abortions.
Sure they do, if you take the view that a fetus is a person.
If the supernatural exists, it is a part of nature, and, thus, natural.
The supernatural is, by definition, not a part of nature. The God that created the laws of physics cannot be measured by them.
Many religions (inlcuding Christianity), however, has the rule that their god frowns upon any attempt at proving their existence. Pretty convinient, huh?
The problem is not that God doesn't want to be proven to exist, but that He hasn't sent any physical proof into our world in the last 2,000 years, and that was long enough ago that nobody believes the people who actually did have proof at the time. One passage that comes to mind is the second chapter of the book of Acts, where Peter addresses a crowd and says essentially "you know this is true, because you have seen it." At the time, the miracles performed by Jesus Christ weren't myth or superstition, they were actual events that many people witnessed themselves. However, because there was not a culture of documenting such things in writing, most of them didn't write it down. No measurements were taken, no scientific study was done, because at the time that just wasn't thought of as being important. A lot of what we do have is letters that were written with the expectation that the recipients would have full understanding of the context in which they were written, which isn't true today.
God will reveal Himself again one day, in a way that can be directly observed and measured. Until that day, there can be no proof.
The funny thing about the Drake equation is that most of the numbers you have to plug into it, we have no data on, so everybody just makes stuff up, and then they come up with a number that they can say must be accurate because the math all checks out.
Nah mate, science and Christianity are NOT compatible, so long as Christianity promotes any kind of belief that is either at odds with provable fact, or is not supported by any direct evidence.
If Christianity promotes a belief that is at odds with provable fact, then you're right, but the argument of young-earth Creationists is that macro-evolution and a billions-of-years-old universe is NOT provable fact. This is where you have a conflict, not in the logical conclusions that follow.
I believe your view of the scientific method to be flawed. The existence of God clearly falls completely outside the realm of empirical science. This doesn't make God false, it makes God untestable. Science only deals with the natural, which doesn't mean that the supernatural cannot exist. The scientific method does not require that you begin with a disbelief in God; indeed, many well-known scientists including Kepler, Galileo, Pasteur and Newton put God at the center of their scientific work. These men endeavored to better know the Creator through the better understanding of His Creation. Would you call their work unscientific?
Personally, I find religion deeply offensive, in the same way I find littering, racism, homeopathy, and liars offensive. If anybody is going to be doing any of that on my lawn, I'm going to yell at them.
I find that most people who are offended by religion in general (as opposed to being offended by some specific aspect of a particular religion) completely misunderstand what religion is.
Were Unicorns mentioned in the Bible before Noah? (The Irish Rovers song doesn't count)
No.
I wasn't aware that the Bible mentioned unicorns at all, but it turns out that the King James Version does mention unicorns in several places. The Hebrew word that the KJV renders as "unicorn" is translated as "wild ox" in the NIV; there's no way to know for sure exactly what was being referred to.
The unicorn (or wild ox) is mentioned in Numbers 23:22 and 24:8, Job 39, Psalm 29:6, and Psalm 92:10.
The book of Job also describes the "behemoth" (chapter 40) and the "leviathan" (chapter 41), the latter of which is also mentioned in Psalm 74:14 and 104:26 and Isaiah 27:1. I believe these to be dinosaurs of some sort, but it's impossible to say what they really were. Footnotes in the NIV suggest they could be a hippopotamus or elephant and crocodile respectively, but the (rather poetic) descriptions clearly don't fit anything like those animals.
You must be new here. Slashdot has never been objective, fair, or balanced when it comes to Microsoft.
The idea was that the web server in his wallet would have access to the amount of cash that's in his wallet; he could connect to it over the Internet to find out how much cash he has, instead of pulling out his wallet to look.
Took me a minute to get it too.
Only if they redistribute their modified version.
And no, distributing it internally within the military does not count as distribution.
If more regular consumers get over this "gotta be DOS compatable man" fixation then things will get REALLY interesting.
Consumers don't have a fixation with DOS compatibility. Their fixation is with being able to run all the obscure applications they've become accustomed to, and have working stable drivers for all their hardware. If all the apps they want to run are available for another OS, they're free to switch. If there is a suitable alternative available, they're free to switch. If they don't think one of these is true, then they'll stay until they have a compelling reason to investigate and try to determine whether they can switch.
Note that this investigation may be beyond the user's ability - if they don't understand that Internet Explorer is a web browser, they can't very well determine whether Safari would be a suitable replacement.
My roommates' daughter, who isn't old enough to read yet, can navigate menus on the Nintendo Wii by using trial and error to determine which button "works" and which button "doesn't work" to get where she wants, then (with repetition) memorizing the position or appearance of the correct button. She has absolutely no idea what any of the text says if it isn't accompanied by pictures, but she only occasionally needs help navigating.
Shouldn't we expect better from adults using a computer?
You're absolutely right, but it will be important for Microsoft to make consumers think this new OS is completely different from Vista, because everyone knows Vista sucks. This is mostly because a lot of people have experienced incompatibilities with older applications or drivers, switched back to XP where everything works, and warned all their friends not to make the same mistake.
By the time Windows 7 is released, third party developers will have updated their crap to be compatible with Vista, so as long as Microsoft doesn't change anything important under the hood, everything should work fine. It'll work fine in Vista too, but consumers won't know that; they'll assume Vistas is still broken, but they'll be willing to give Windows 7 a try.
Uh, if it's not attached to the earth at the bottom, won't the top just fly off into space? Then we don't have an elevator anymore.
One also gets the impression that what Obama is promising change from includes not just the past 8 years under Bush, but also the previous 8 years under Clinton.
Oh come on, it's not THAT complicated. Here, I'll deobfuscate it for you:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
foreach my $word ('Just','another','Perl','hacker') {
my $address=gethostbyname("$word.aacs.phroggy.com"); # get a single 32-bit binary value
my @integers=unpack('C4',$address); # convert each byte into an integer (four total)
printf('%02X%02X%02X%02X',@integers); # format each integer as 2-digit hexadecimal
}
Using this label gives this guy far too much credit.
You didn't try running it, did you?
Does it clip to your belt? If not, you have to lug it.
Hey, finally my sig is relevant again!