Actually Stallman does not believe that we should be able to charge money for producing code but believes we should give it away for free.
I was at the lecture at U of Waterloo and he explicitly said the opposite. He said that he is fine with software-for-money (which in any case does not preclude its being free-as-in-speech), and in fact is even fine with custom or in-house software -- which he argued is the vast majority of paid software -- not being made publicly available.
I read what you wrote and understood every word of it. And, even after a second reading, you're still wrong. But considering your attitude, no amount of rational, data-backed argument will do you any good, so you just go along believing your nonsense.
I haven't heard anyone say "Line-ux" in a long time and I think it's because so many people remained vigilant with correcting people.
You find the people that pronounce it Line-ucks mostly tend to be the more old school users, because they began using it heavily long before there was mainstream recognition of it, and so didn't really hear anyone else pronounce it.
I used to pronounce it Line-ucks, though rarely do so these days not because I've been convinced Line-ucks is wrong but because I'm such a damn lame conformist, clearly. But, in my humble opinion, if you were using Linux back in the early days and made any notable contribution to the community, you've earned the right to pronounce it however the fuck you want.
Keep in mind that any kind of "high definition," as opposed to let's say normal DVD definition, only really makes any kind of sense if you have a 6-foot (2 meter) or larger LCD or plasma screen.
No, optimal resolution is a function of both screen size and seating distance. The easiest way to show that you're wrong is that you're suggesting a person viewing on a computer in front of a 21" LCD can't benefit from the added resolution of HD video. Clearly, given a particular screen size, when you're close enough, you can see the added detail.
I'm not sure that "I believe there is no God" is the same as "I don't believe there is a God" (which would be atheism)... but I'm open to correction...
Both stances are atheism, which some might call strong atheists ("I believe there is no god") and weak atheists ("I don't believe there is a god"). Although people of the latter category often call themselves agnostics. (Agnosticism cannot apply to those of the former category.) As is demonstrated by the debate in this thread, there is varying opinion as to what the definition is. Indeed many people consider all atheists to hold the position that there's no god.
Nowadays I generally avoid using labels like "atheist" or "agnostic" because the terms have different implications to different people. People can't communicate effectively unless they agree first on language. Years ago, I had a friend insist that she knew god existed, and after minutes of back-and-forth getting nowhere, she added, "I know in my heart god exists." Her definition of "knowledge" was considerably different from mine, which only ended up resulting in frustration and general miscommunication between us.
It can be reconciled when you take the view that atheism is "an absence of belief in deities." Therefore one who says "I believe there is no God" and one who says "I cannot disprove God but I don't believe one exists" are quite different views, but both atheism.
A person who merely rejected theistic world views is open to the possibility of there being a deity, just not one resembling that worshiped by deistic religions. In other words, God can exist, as long as no-one believes in him. Somewhat ridiculous.
I'd say that depends entirely on your interpretation of "does not accept theistic world views" or "rejects theistic world views." I argue the latter is held by one whose belief precludes the existence of god, whereas the former is held by one who accepts the possibility, but doesn't currently believe. (The difference can be clarified by comparing "does not currently accept" with "will never accept.") That is to say there is a logical difference between not accepting and rejecting.
Your assumption is that your position doesn't demand belief from you - demonstrably false.
No, my contention is that atheism of the form "I do not believe god exists" doesn't require faith because you're not asserting a position on the existence or non-existence of god. In contrast, the atheistic view "I believe God does not exist" I accept does require faith.
"...it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism."
Interesting. Thanks, I will investigate this some more. However there are still two common uses of the word: existence god is not knowable, or existence of god is not known (discussed here). So it seems as if I've got my notion of "classical agnosticism" completely backwards from how Huxley defined it compared to how it is used in modern "scientific literature in psychology and neuroscience."
The viewpoint you are describing was not therefore a part of agnosticism, so the following assertion is just plain wrong:
"In fact, it is not a contradiction to be both a theist and an agnostic, when one applies the classical definition of agnostic."
If we accept the definition of agnosticism as the one you quoted from Huxley (who is obviously authoritative), then we remove the word 'classical' from my sentence above (or leave it in, because we're using Huxley's definition which is clearly the classical one), this still seems perfectly consistent to me. Theism refers to a belief in god, whereas agnosticism speaks to the question of knowledge, or the truth about a belief. I therefore maintain anyone who says "I don't know if god exists, but I believe that he does on faith" is both a theist and an agnostic.
Unfortunately, that essay is based on a common straw man definition of agnosticism which only seems to exist among intellectually dishonest atheists who are trying to present their ideas as being the only logical ones.
Please elaborate. Given the definition of agnostic in that essay, I don't see anything glaryingly contradictory when compared to what you quoted above.
Ah yes, the "you must be new here" sleight. (I'm not.) Well, seeing as I've not, unlike yourself, personally visited the majority of all forums on the Internet, I will have to cede your point.
That's what faith is though - in that case the belief that something that has happend 99 million times previously will happen the same way again.
I'd be willing to accept the use of the word faith in that context, except that most theists also use the word to describe their belief in God. To equate the expectation that the ball will drop (based on unvarying past experience and the established body of science explaining it) with a belief in God is to dilute the word into meaninglessness. I don't mean to belittle people's religious beliefs, but the two degrees of "faith" are just on completely different levels, to an extent that can't be captured with colloquial use of the word.
Since proving that life is not a dream or that you're not connected to the Matrix depends on things outside your head, you can't prove either.
What you say is entirely true.
And it's certainly a very interesting area of philosophy to explore. But to claim that everything (except that which is explicitly defined and self-contained, like the rules of logic) requires faith is to completely remove any meaning to the word "faith." It can no longer be used in meaningful conversion.
I take a ball, and I drop it 20 times in a row. It falls to the ground each time. Then I go out and learn about the laws of gravity, and the huge body of theory around it. When I pick up the ball and drop it again, I will say that I "know" it will fall to the ground, based both consistent past experience and the science supporting it. You will say that the expectation that the ball will drop requires faith, and to some literal degree you're right, but to use the term that way (and expect everyone else to use it that way) is in practice nonsensical, and should be reserved for pedants and philosophers (which even then requires context).
Absence of faith, or the belief that it's not possible to decide on the given evidence, is agnosticism. Belief that God does not exist is atheism. If you mean the former, don't use the term "Athiest"
It's really semantics. Even agnosticism can imply two considerably (logically speaking) different positions. Classical agnosticism also makes an epistemologically unsound assertion: that one cannot know whether or not god exists. Modern agnostics however tend to simply say "I don't know based on available evidence." So now we have two definitions of agnostic.
One can be an atheist and still not assert the non-existence of god (a so-called weak atheist). In fact, it is not a contradiction to be both a theist and an agnostic, when one applies the classical definition of agnostic. I've also learned that, to some, agnosticism implies that one gives equal probability to the existence or non-existence of god, which is why I've begin to shy away from applying the term to myself.
It's therefore still possible for an atheist to conclude there is insufficient evidence to believe, and accordingly would adopt a world view that doesn't include God. This sounds a lot like agnosticism except when you consider that someone who says "I don't know if God exists but I believe he does" could get away with calling themselves agnostic, because agnosticism deals with the matter of knowledge, not of belief.
This essay represents my opinions decently. I've lately begun shying away from labels like these because people have such differing notions.
(yes, 'logical' 'rational' atheists also base their beliefs on faith, just as much as 'logical' 'rational' theists do.)
I'm doubtful. At least in my experience, most modern atheists do not assert the non-existence of God, but merely do not accept theistic world views. Absence of belief does not require faith.
I used to believe but after I "survived" an accident I lost the beliefs I had. was riding my bike when a moving van hit me. While I was in a coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. If I were to talk to those docs now I'd say they were wrong, my life has been a living hell since.
"A random bad thing happened to me therefore God doesn't exist" is rather similar to "a random good thing happened to me therefore God exists." One usually hears the latter in a form similar to (for example) "I prayed that my mother's cancer would go into remission and it did. God tested my faith and he came through for me. Praise be!"
I know nothing of your plight and I'm sympathetic. But it really doesn't speak to the existence or non-existence of God.
Neither IE7 or Opera do that and the browsing experience with those two is completely different just because of this performance issue in Firefox.
I don't know about IE7 or Opera on Windows, but at least on Linux, Opera suffers from the same responsiveness problem as Firefox. I did try this last year, after a spat of disgust with Firefox. I just downloaded the latest version of Opera and tried again: open one comment-heavy slashdot page (I picked the recent one about the Creation Museum) in the background and try to use the UI. Both Firefox and Opera get head-fucked while crunching on the page.
In fact Opera is even worse: the whole time I've been typing this comment (in Firefox), Opera has been stuck spinning its wheels sucking 100% CPU, and the UI refuses to render at all. (It's repeatable, I just killed it and tried again.)
I'm embarrassed on behalf of both Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software
The Bible actually predicted what we have discovered since Darwin, but only if one gets past the idea that "days" has to mean 24 hour periods.
The problem is that if you decide to treat the bible as metaphor, then you can continually retrofit that metaphor to fit our evolving understanding of the universe, which results in an endless cycle of confirmation bias. So either the bible must be taken literally, in which case it is ridiculous, or it must be interpreted as metaphor, in which case it is useless.
Captain Picard's response to a Cardassian's question of how many light he could see.
Actually, his response was that there were four lights. However I don't know what the episode name is, so there's still a chance that I might get laid some day.
What's really funny is the people who assume all this stuff matters for digital signals (as I saw in a few of the "reviews" on the Monster website).
One of my favorite discussions on this topic in some A/V forum (I no longer recall which) was an extremely long thread debating the quality merits of coax vs. toslink for digital audio. One person insisted that the sound produced from a coax connection was "warmer" and more pleasing than with toslink. Others insisted that optical provided crisper sound. The conversation had me in stitches.
The only plausible theory I could come up with was that those who actually were able to discern a difference were creating a ground loop by using coax -- but I really think that'd be hard to mistake for anything else. I think the more likely explanation is psychological: some of these people were trying desperately to justify spending $80 on a "quality" optical cable when a $0.99 RCA cable from the pawn shop would have done just as well.
I haven't changed a thing. As I said, I simply didn't "write out every single exception".
My objection was simply over this claim:
And there's no way to compare [performance] between ati and fglrx, since the later doesn't even have Xv support at all.
You weasel your way out of this by saying you didn't feel like enumerating the few exceptions. What you fail to realize is that you closed the door on this by saying "at all." You made an absolute claim and this is what prompted my reply, because I knew it to be wrong.
This arrogant and ignorant fool has spent a great deal of time hacking on various media related projects such as xine, mplayer, and freevo, and I follow the relevant issues on Linux carefully. Clearly this doesn't make me infallible, but it does make me a bit more qualified than your average person.
I believe the real reason for your hostile reaction is simply that I called you on your bullshit and you don't like it. I note that you've subtly adjusted your claim from "fglrx does not support Xv" to "fglrx does not provide Xv on some cards" or "Xv provided by fglrx is buggy." Neither is relevant. The context of the original claim is that one is unable to compare Xv performance between the OSS ati drivers and fglrx because fglrx doesn't support Xv. That's just demonstrably incorrect. Of course there are bugs, but the bugs I've encountered (in both nvidia and fglrx drivers) on the hardware I've used don't preclude a meaningful comparison with their OSS counterparts.
But hey, it's surely much easier to write me off as arrogant and ignorant and point me to some useless gmane search about fglrx bugs (shall we go through the same exercise with the nv, nvidia, ati, and radeon drivers?).
Slashdot Mirror
I was at the lecture at U of Waterloo and he explicitly said the opposite. He said that he is fine with software-for-money (which in any case does not preclude its being free-as-in-speech), and in fact is even fine with custom or in-house software -- which he argued is the vast majority of paid software -- not being made publicly available.
I read what you wrote and understood every word of it. And, even after a second reading, you're still wrong. But considering your attitude, no amount of rational, data-backed argument will do you any good, so you just go along believing your nonsense.
You find the people that pronounce it Line-ucks mostly tend to be the more old school users, because they began using it heavily long before there was mainstream recognition of it, and so didn't really hear anyone else pronounce it.
I used to pronounce it Line-ucks, though rarely do so these days not because I've been convinced Line-ucks is wrong but because I'm such a damn lame conformist, clearly. But, in my humble opinion, if you were using Linux back in the early days and made any notable contribution to the community, you've earned the right to pronounce it however the fuck you want.
Are you also so sure it's not the case that when an email is sent from a BlackBerry in Europe to a BES connected in Europe it never leaves Europe?
If a government (France, say) is terribly concerned about this, I have every confidence that RIM would make every effort to allay their doubts.
Why do people insist on perpetuating this myth? It is simply untrue.
Just as trivial as it is to sniff SSL traffic over the general internet. Trivial, and worthless.
Both stances are atheism, which some might call strong atheists ("I believe there is no god") and weak atheists ("I don't believe there is a god"). Although people of the latter category often call themselves agnostics. (Agnosticism cannot apply to those of the former category.) As is demonstrated by the debate in this thread, there is varying opinion as to what the definition is. Indeed many people consider all atheists to hold the position that there's no god.
Nowadays I generally avoid using labels like "atheist" or "agnostic" because the terms have different implications to different people. People can't communicate effectively unless they agree first on language. Years ago, I had a friend insist that she knew god existed, and after minutes of back-and-forth getting nowhere, she added, "I know in my heart god exists." Her definition of "knowledge" was considerably different from mine, which only ended up resulting in frustration and general miscommunication between us.
It can be reconciled when you take the view that atheism is "an absence of belief in deities." Therefore one who says "I believe there is no God" and one who says "I cannot disprove God but I don't believe one exists" are quite different views, but both atheism.
I'd say that depends entirely on your interpretation of "does not accept theistic world views" or "rejects theistic world views." I argue the latter is held by one whose belief precludes the existence of god, whereas the former is held by one who accepts the possibility, but doesn't currently believe. (The difference can be clarified by comparing "does not currently accept" with "will never accept.") That is to say there is a logical difference between not accepting and rejecting.
No, my contention is that atheism of the form "I do not believe god exists" doesn't require faith because you're not asserting a position on the existence or non-existence of god. In contrast, the atheistic view "I believe God does not exist" I accept does require faith.
Interesting. Thanks, I will investigate this some more. However there are still two common uses of the word: existence god is not knowable, or existence of god is not known (discussed here). So it seems as if I've got my notion of "classical agnosticism" completely backwards from how Huxley defined it compared to how it is used in modern "scientific literature in psychology and neuroscience."
If we accept the definition of agnosticism as the one you quoted from Huxley (who is obviously authoritative), then we remove the word 'classical' from my sentence above (or leave it in, because we're using Huxley's definition which is clearly the classical one), this still seems perfectly consistent to me. Theism refers to a belief in god, whereas agnosticism speaks to the question of knowledge, or the truth about a belief. I therefore maintain anyone who says "I don't know if god exists, but I believe that he does on faith" is both a theist and an agnostic.
Please elaborate. Given the definition of agnostic in that essay, I don't see anything glaryingly contradictory when compared to what you quoted above.
Ah yes, the "you must be new here" sleight. (I'm not.) Well, seeing as I've not, unlike yourself, personally visited the majority of all forums on the Internet, I will have to cede your point.
I'd be willing to accept the use of the word faith in that context, except that most theists also use the word to describe their belief in God. To equate the expectation that the ball will drop (based on unvarying past experience and the established body of science explaining it) with a belief in God is to dilute the word into meaninglessness. I don't mean to belittle people's religious beliefs, but the two degrees of "faith" are just on completely different levels, to an extent that can't be captured with colloquial use of the word.
What you say is entirely true.
And it's certainly a very interesting area of philosophy to explore. But to claim that everything (except that which is explicitly defined and self-contained, like the rules of logic) requires faith is to completely remove any meaning to the word "faith." It can no longer be used in meaningful conversion.
I take a ball, and I drop it 20 times in a row. It falls to the ground each time. Then I go out and learn about the laws of gravity, and the huge body of theory around it. When I pick up the ball and drop it again, I will say that I "know" it will fall to the ground, based both consistent past experience and the science supporting it. You will say that the expectation that the ball will drop requires faith, and to some literal degree you're right, but to use the term that way (and expect everyone else to use it that way) is in practice nonsensical, and should be reserved for pedants and philosophers (which even then requires context).
It's really semantics. Even agnosticism can imply two considerably (logically speaking) different positions. Classical agnosticism also makes an epistemologically unsound assertion: that one cannot know whether or not god exists. Modern agnostics however tend to simply say "I don't know based on available evidence." So now we have two definitions of agnostic.
One can be an atheist and still not assert the non-existence of god (a so-called weak atheist). In fact, it is not a contradiction to be both a theist and an agnostic, when one applies the classical definition of agnostic. I've also learned that, to some, agnosticism implies that one gives equal probability to the existence or non-existence of god, which is why I've begin to shy away from applying the term to myself.
It's therefore still possible for an atheist to conclude there is insufficient evidence to believe, and accordingly would adopt a world view that doesn't include God. This sounds a lot like agnosticism except when you consider that someone who says "I don't know if God exists but I believe he does" could get away with calling themselves agnostic, because agnosticism deals with the matter of knowledge, not of belief.
This essay represents my opinions decently. I've lately begun shying away from labels like these because people have such differing notions.
I'm doubtful. At least in my experience, most modern atheists do not assert the non-existence of God, but merely do not accept theistic world views. Absence of belief does not require faith.
I certainly wouldn't place the BlackJack anywhere near the BlackBerry, let alone right next to it. :) (I'm biased, granted.)
"A random bad thing happened to me therefore God doesn't exist" is rather similar to "a random good thing happened to me therefore God exists." One usually hears the latter in a form similar to (for example) "I prayed that my mother's cancer would go into remission and it did. God tested my faith and he came through for me. Praise be!"
I know nothing of your plight and I'm sympathetic. But it really doesn't speak to the existence or non-existence of God.
I don't know about IE7 or Opera on Windows, but at least on Linux, Opera suffers from the same responsiveness problem as Firefox. I did try this last year, after a spat of disgust with Firefox. I just downloaded the latest version of Opera and tried again: open one comment-heavy slashdot page (I picked the recent one about the Creation Museum) in the background and try to use the UI. Both Firefox and Opera get head-fucked while crunching on the page.
In fact Opera is even worse: the whole time I've been typing this comment (in Firefox), Opera has been stuck spinning its wheels sucking 100% CPU, and the UI refuses to render at all. (It's repeatable, I just killed it and tried again.)
I'm embarrassed on behalf of both Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software
The problem is that if you decide to treat the bible as metaphor, then you can continually retrofit that metaphor to fit our evolving understanding of the universe, which results in an endless cycle of confirmation bias. So either the bible must be taken literally, in which case it is ridiculous, or it must be interpreted as metaphor, in which case it is useless.
Actually, his response was that there were four lights. However I don't know what the episode name is, so there's still a chance that I might get laid some day.
One of my favorite discussions on this topic in some A/V forum (I no longer recall which) was an extremely long thread debating the quality merits of coax vs. toslink for digital audio. One person insisted that the sound produced from a coax connection was "warmer" and more pleasing than with toslink. Others insisted that optical provided crisper sound. The conversation had me in stitches.
The only plausible theory I could come up with was that those who actually were able to discern a difference were creating a ground loop by using coax -- but I really think that'd be hard to mistake for anything else. I think the more likely explanation is psychological: some of these people were trying desperately to justify spending $80 on a "quality" optical cable when a $0.99 RCA cable from the pawn shop would have done just as well.
My objection was simply over this claim:
You weasel your way out of this by saying you didn't feel like enumerating the few exceptions. What you fail to realize is that you closed the door on this by saying "at all." You made an absolute claim and this is what prompted my reply, because I knew it to be wrong.
And for this I am an ignorant fool.
This arrogant and ignorant fool has spent a great deal of time hacking on various media related projects such as xine, mplayer, and freevo, and I follow the relevant issues on Linux carefully. Clearly this doesn't make me infallible, but it does make me a bit more qualified than your average person.
I believe the real reason for your hostile reaction is simply that I called you on your bullshit and you don't like it. I note that you've subtly adjusted your claim from "fglrx does not support Xv" to "fglrx does not provide Xv on some cards" or "Xv provided by fglrx is buggy." Neither is relevant. The context of the original claim is that one is unable to compare Xv performance between the OSS ati drivers and fglrx because fglrx doesn't support Xv. That's just demonstrably incorrect. Of course there are bugs, but the bugs I've encountered (in both nvidia and fglrx drivers) on the hardware I've used don't preclude a meaningful comparison with their OSS counterparts.
But hey, it's surely much easier to write me off as arrogant and ignorant and point me to some useless gmane search about fglrx bugs (shall we go through the same exercise with the nv, nvidia, ati, and radeon drivers?).
By "write out every single exception" I suppose you mean "verify that my claims are true"?
It's not like I was nitpicking. There is no exception here. You said that fglrx doesn't support Xv and that's simply not true.