I disagree.:-) First point: Why do I need to pray to an omnipotent god to ask himself to appear to me? God can appear to me at any point he wants. I would love it if he appeared now. God clearly knows this so why do I have to pray? I mean, it'd be great if there was an all-loving god as depicted in the Bible but just because it'd be nice doesn't make it true.
Second point: I have prayed a number of times throughout my life. Why should I pray now when my feelings on god are the same as they were then ie. "I am here - where are you?" No, I've never felt anything that could remotely be called divine.
I am careful to treat my feelings with respect. I don't play games with what I perceive to be reality. That is dangerous as any psychologist will tell you. Indeed I imagine I could convince myself of anything if I wanted it to be true enough. It's happened before - look at Scientologists.
Perhaps a rather cynical view is that praying opens you up to the possiblity god exists and thus carefully influences you into thinking more about this thus-far invisible god. Up until the god meme embeds itzself into your head enough to make you think "well I'll go for it - I can live in this state comfortably". Although not conciously.
I wouldn't like to place a value on the worth of that view but if you can provide a reason why I should pray to your god rather than any of the other thousands of gods people worship across the world daily then I'd be glad to listen.
If I have an experiment in a lab that gets a measurement for the charge on an electron to test a theory of mine and a researcher friend gets a reading, I would, should I consider it important enough, want to see this for myself. So I can conduct the experiment again to see. The experiment is useful (and the result of worth) because it is repeatable. I can't perform any experiment here with discovering God, at least not in any scientifically rigorous way. So just taking people's experience on face value is akin to me listening to someone say they once saw a lemming jump off a cliff, therefore lemmings must be suicidal, and going "Wow they really are". I am afraid the scientific analogy doesn't hold up when you can't be scientific in seeking.
That someone goes looking for evidence a skeptic and becomes a believer means nothing to me. Someone else's personal dividing line between atheism and theism is their business. Praying to someone who I don't believe exists is a little silly. I don't tal to imaginry friends for teh same reason as I don't believe they exist to listen to me. I'm afraid the hidden codes are interesting but without the full original manuscripts exactly how did God place these there? Or was he workign through the translators in the various interpretations and reinterpretations of the Bible? In which case explain inconsistencies betwen them? I can honestly say I do have better things to look at in my attempts to work out the world right now but maybe some day I will read about those.
Faith is a tricky word often - I can get into all manner of semantic arguments here. I have reasonable evidence for getting off my sofa and making breakfast and eating it because past evidence shows it'll make me feel better. The experiment is repeatable too. I'm pretty confident if I continue to eat breakfast each morning I'll feel less hungry. How may I apply the same rigour to something even *more* fundemental than that? It goes deeper than everything, and subsequently requires far greater amounts of evidence than personal testimony, historical evidence from 2000 years ago or whatever. I am not sitting on my couch - I am living and experiencing a world I am constantly wondering about, and often testing. If there is a God involved in this world then I've yet to see evidence as good as that which I have seen for a lot else.
I can think of more plausible (in the face of a lack of evidence other than personal testimony) and simpler explanations for people's strong feelings about God and his influence on their lives. I utterly discount "but I felt something" as there are millions across the world who say this about their religion. Even if only 5% of these millions from each religion are really really genuine and 100% convinced they cannot all be right. Therefore I take this as reasonable evidence for people's ability to fool themselves.
A consistent argument is not in itself evidence for anything.
How can I trust the book? It will not answer all my sceptical questions - it can't. I know a little bit about the history of when the NT was written and so on, and I can always ask "so what if these guys were really fooled or behaved in a similar way to modern day cult followers?" The argument that they died for what they believed is weakened by watching people in our age die for cult religions we know are just plain wrong.
I don't intend to give up wondering or reading (and thank you for the book tip), but I don't intend to lower my standards either.
Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?
If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice, and no I don't accuse you or any other person of being theist for that reason. Merely stating the hurdle which this postulation has to overcome in order to become a belief.
Ah...I've not been following release notes then. Fair enough. There was once a link posted on here that was t a page that detailed exactly what kind of standards impovements had gone on etc. Wouldn't mind finding that again.
Having upgraded from 1.0 to 1.1 Mozilla has kept those settings, so no need to go running around. It hasn't even wiped history or cleared the URL bar history.
What not-for-profit domain registration? Did you not read my comment? They already allow for-profit organisations. It is entirely unworkable to set a non-profit agenda for this domain in the future. At some point you're going to have to be grossly unfair to a lot of people which is what we want to avoid.
BTW the.org TLD owner doesn't get involved in domain name disputes - that's WIPO. What was your point again?
I'm still not entirely sure what they would do that would upset.org so much. The rules probably won't change if they take it over. To enforce a "non-profit only" policy now on new owners would be deeply unfair, and to ask current domain name owners to give them up would be even worse. Not the way to go. So it will most likely remain a free-for-all.
What do you imagine they might do to restrict your freedom? I'm not saying they can't, but that I can't think of anything right now.
ISOC has many representatives from large companies on its books. So it represents no one company, and when it does something it will do it with industry backing. This is a Good thing. Exactly what can be done with the.org TLD that is going to be so bad anyhow? It is already open to anyone, regardless of whether they are non-profit or not.
Nope. Client-side processing is so annoying to get right for *all* users that you may as well not use it for anything important. Cool features are "okay" but when they break because you just happened to use a PDA or something you get annoyed, and whoever owns teh web site you're looking at it about to lose an pair of eyeballs.
Interesting but not quite a fair comparison. The industries you mention can and will use their might to introduce all this Digital Rights Management stuff into our lives as they have begun to do. At some stage once formats begin to appear to replace the old non-DRM ones we can see a lot of content become harder to use "fairly".
That's one grass roots movement among...well..thousands. I know this may come as a shock but Open Source is not that popular yet. The vast majority of Internet users don't care about it.
> Funny thing is that all the traffic jams I see in > central London are caused by the traffic lights. At > some junctions (e.g. Cheapside to Bank) the green > period is so short, it's only just possible for > two buses to get through.
So the other streams of traffic can be let through, no doubt. Are you suggesting we remove traffic lights?
Plenty of roads will be traffic-free which is basically because few people want to go down them.
Okay, fair points. Given that coding time is ultimately more expensive than more boxes, can PHP be used to separate application and display logic easily? One of the reasons I use HTML::Mason is because it makes it easy to structure large web sites so they're easy to maintain. Where are the mechanisms/frameworks for doing this in PHP?
Janet got the hell out of KPNQ as fast as it could when it heard the news it was shutting down. They have already moved their traffic elsewhere. There is no Janet problem and the scare stories are all wrong, thank god.
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I disagree. :-)
First point:
Why do I need to pray to an omnipotent god to ask himself to appear to me?
God can appear to me at any point he wants.
I would love it if he appeared now. God clearly knows this so why do I have to pray?
I mean, it'd be great if there was an all-loving god as depicted in the Bible but just because it'd be nice doesn't make it true.
Second point:
I have prayed a number of times throughout my life.
Why should I pray now when my feelings on god are the same as they were then ie. "I am here - where are you?"
No, I've never felt anything that could remotely be called divine.
I am careful to treat my feelings with respect. I don't play games with what I perceive to be reality. That is dangerous as any psychologist will tell you.
Indeed I imagine I could convince myself of anything if I wanted it to be true enough. It's happened before - look at Scientologists.
Perhaps a rather cynical view is that praying opens you up to the possiblity god exists and thus carefully influences you into thinking more about this thus-far invisible god. Up until the god meme embeds itzself into your head enough to make you think "well I'll go for it - I can live in this state comfortably". Although not conciously.
I wouldn't like to place a value on the worth of that view but if you can provide a reason why I should pray to your god rather than any of the other thousands of gods people worship across the world daily then I'd be glad to listen.
If I have an experiment in a lab that gets a measurement for the charge on an electron to test a theory of mine and a researcher friend gets a reading, I would, should I consider it important enough, want to see this for myself.
So I can conduct the experiment again to see. The experiment is useful (and the result of worth) because it is repeatable.
I can't perform any experiment here with discovering God, at least not in any scientifically rigorous way.
So just taking people's experience on face value is akin to me listening to someone say they once saw a lemming jump off a cliff, therefore lemmings must be suicidal, and going "Wow they really are".
I am afraid the scientific analogy doesn't hold up when you can't be scientific in seeking.
That someone goes looking for evidence a skeptic and becomes a believer means nothing to me.
Someone else's personal dividing line between atheism and theism is their business.
Praying to someone who I don't believe exists is a little silly. I don't tal to imaginry friends for teh same reason as I don't believe they exist to listen to me.
I'm afraid the hidden codes are interesting but without the full original manuscripts exactly how did God place these there? Or was he workign through the translators in the various interpretations and reinterpretations of the Bible?
In which case explain inconsistencies betwen them?
I can honestly say I do have better things to look at in my attempts to work out the world right now but maybe some day I will read about those.
Faith is a tricky word often - I can get into all manner of semantic arguments here.
I have reasonable evidence for getting off my sofa and making breakfast and eating it because past evidence shows it'll make me feel better. The experiment is repeatable too. I'm pretty confident if I continue to eat breakfast each morning I'll feel less hungry.
How may I apply the same rigour to something even *more* fundemental than that?
It goes deeper than everything, and subsequently requires far greater amounts of evidence than personal testimony, historical evidence from 2000 years ago or whatever.
I am not sitting on my couch - I am living and experiencing a world I am constantly wondering about, and often testing.
If there is a God involved in this world then I've yet to see evidence as good as that which I have seen for a lot else.
I can think of more plausible (in the face of a lack of evidence other than personal testimony) and simpler explanations for people's strong feelings about God and his influence on their lives.
I utterly discount "but I felt something" as there are millions across the world who say this about their religion. Even if only 5% of these millions from each religion are really really genuine and 100% convinced they cannot all be right.
Therefore I take this as reasonable evidence for people's ability to fool themselves.
A consistent argument is not in itself evidence for anything.
How can I trust the book?
It will not answer all my sceptical questions - it can't. I know a little bit about the history of when the NT was written and so on, and I can always ask "so what if these guys were really fooled or behaved in a similar way to modern day cult followers?"
The argument that they died for what they believed is weakened by watching people in our age die for cult religions we know are just plain wrong.
I don't intend to give up wondering or reading (and thank you for the book tip), but I don't intend to lower my standards either.
You're right. But then Charles Babbage was not the "father of computing" in that case.
Baird *was* the first person to demonstrate a television system and I don't think this takes anything away from Farnsworth's superior system.
Look at it from a Babbage/Turing point of view.
babbage was first, but Turing was the father of the modern machines we now use.
And this is not a mild form of psychosis how?
Where is the evidence that Larry talks about? It's there if I care to look, but surely that's all in history?
If my life changes I want it to be for a reason other than I felt like believing in something that was nice, and no I don't accuse you or any other person of being theist for that reason.
Merely stating the hurdle which this postulation has to overcome in order to become a belief.
> Why don't we hear the artists who aren't Top 20,
> platinum album, millions in the bank jumping up
> and down in favor of this?
You do. Have you not found any of the huge number of mp3 showcase sites for artists not on major labels?
Lots of music waiting to be downloaded.
Prince was doing that sort of thing back in 1982.
His comments on P2P are interesting given his famous stance on record industry "enslavement".
Ah...I've not been following release notes then. Fair enough.
There was once a link posted on here that was t a page that detailed exactly what kind of standards impovements had gone on etc.
Wouldn't mind finding that again.
Having upgraded from 1.0 to 1.1 Mozilla has kept those settings, so no need to go running around. It hasn't even wiped history or cleared the URL bar history.
Buggy how? I've just upgraded to 1.1 on XP so I'd be interested...
WIPO settles domain name disputes of that nature. How many times have you read about this?
What not-for-profit domain registration?
.org TLD owner doesn't get involved in domain name disputes - that's WIPO.
Did you not read my comment? They already allow for-profit organisations.
It is entirely unworkable to set a non-profit agenda for this domain in the future. At some point you're going to have to be grossly unfair to a lot of people which is what we want to avoid.
BTW the
What was your point again?
I'm still not entirely sure what they would do that would upset .org so much. The rules probably won't change if they take it over. To enforce a "non-profit only" policy now on new owners would be deeply unfair, and to ask current domain name owners to give them up would be even worse. Not the way to go.
So it will most likely remain a free-for-all.
What do you imagine they might do to restrict your freedom?
I'm not saying they can't, but that I can't think of anything right now.
Oh you may jest now...
ISOC has many representatives from large companies on its books. .org TLD that is going to be so bad anyhow?
So it represents no one company, and when it does something it will do it with industry backing.
This is a Good thing.
Exactly what can be done with the
It is already open to anyone, regardless of whether they are non-profit or not.
Great. Now can it have all the other missing features?
Nope. Client-side processing is so annoying to get right for *all* users that you may as well not use it for anything important.
Cool features are "okay" but when they break because you just happened to use a PDA or something you get annoyed, and whoever owns teh web site you're looking at it about to lose an pair of eyeballs.
Interesting but not quite a fair comparison.
The industries you mention can and will use their might to introduce all this Digital Rights Management stuff into our lives as they have begun to do.
At some stage once formats begin to appear to replace the old non-DRM ones we can see a lot of content become harder to use "fairly".
That's one grass roots movement among...well..thousands. I know this may come as a shock but Open Source is not that popular yet.
The vast majority of Internet users don't care about it.
> Funny thing is that all the traffic jams I see in
> central London are caused by the traffic lights. At
> some junctions (e.g. Cheapside to Bank) the green
> period is so short, it's only just possible for
> two buses to get through.
So the other streams of traffic can be let through, no doubt. Are you suggesting we remove traffic lights?
Plenty of roads will be traffic-free which is basically because few people want to go down them.
Okay, fair points. Given that coding time is ultimately more expensive than more boxes, can PHP be used to separate application and display logic easily?
One of the reasons I use HTML::Mason is because it makes it easy to structure large web sites so they're easy to maintain. Where are the mechanisms/frameworks for doing this in PHP?
Janet got the hell out of KPNQ as fast as it could when it heard the news it was shutting down.
They have already moved their traffic elsewhere.
There is no Janet problem and the scare stories are all wrong, thank god.