However, divine revelation is infinitely more reliable and beneficial
It's only reliable if you can reliably determine what is "divine revelation" and what is imagination, delusion, hallucination, etcetera, and if you can explain why your divine revelation conflicts with the next guy's.
"Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition." - Freedom from religion foundation
True. However, don't confuse dogma with religion. The former is belief without reason; the latter is practice, to be tested by experience.
The core of Buddhism - and of neopaganism, and of several other paths - is experience, not dogma.
That's why I claim the label "Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian" for my "faith".
I don't know if you've noticed, in general, but most religion's add a lot of stress to people's lives, and to the world...To the extent that it tells people to stay calm, meditate an hour a day, and treat other people as though they were yourself, I don't consider it a religion.
The problem, as usual, is one of definition.
According to ESR's neopagan FAQ, "religion" comes from roots "re
ligare", meaning "to rebind" to roots, to strengths, to the basics of things. In that sense, of rebinding, reconnecting, us to our true natures, I'm all for religion.
But in Western society, our experience of religion is very much formed by authoritarian dogma, so that we assume religion implies belief in supernatural entities and unquestioning faith. In that sense, I hold no truck with it.
It's worth noting that there are dogmatic Eastern practices and non-dogmatic Western ones (the Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers, leaps to mind), so it's not a strict East/West split by any means.
(BTW, for any neopagan geeks out there, I'll be presenting a workshop on "Zen Paganism" at the Starwood Festival again this year.)
"Going on" about GNU/Linux or some subtly of the Ghostscript arrangement is very relevant to promoting and protecting our rights to use and modify software.
The immediate cause of the War of 1812 was Britian's failure to recognize the sovreignty of the U.S. Britian was impressing American sailors on the excuse that they were British subjects, and interfering with Franco-American trade.
Of course, the opportunity to "liberate" Canada from the British - and the fact that 1812 was an election year - certainly added to the picture.
So I took part time contracting type work to keep myself occupied
How did you go about finding part-time contracting work?
Late last year, for various reasons I made a decision to "down-shift" - I cut back to working 30 hours/week, and enrolled in an 18 month program in shiatsu and Asian bodywork. I just got the ax, I'm now trying to figure out if it's reasonable to try to find something part-time - not to keep myself occupied, but to pay the bills.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 1
Indeed. Until recently, American astronauts were soldiers...
Armstrong was a civilian. I don't think 1969 qualifies as "recently" in the context of manned spaceflight.
The word "science" predates the scientific method. It has other meanings besides "test hypothesises by controlled experiments". The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences isn't doing a lot of experiments, for example.
Science can also mean an organized body of knowledge. That's the "Science" in "Computer Science".
I've only been to the east coast a few times but they basically rub me the wrong way and, to me, are "yankees." So different is the lifestyle on the east coast that I would never even consider a job east of the Mississippi river.
Um, a large percentage of the East Coast falls well south of the Mason-Dixon line. Even here in Maryland, just south of the line, you'd get funny looks if you called us "yankees". Especially given the intense dislike of the New York Yankees among Baltimore Orioles fans. (They're baseball teams, for you dang foreigners.)
Indeed, to speak of an East Coast "lifestyle" strikes me as odd - East Coast includes contrasts from New England to the deep South, and Manhattan to Appalachia. Baltimore isn't Boston or Boca Raton.
Oh, and unless I went all the way to the West Coast (highly doubtful) I'd never consider living west of the Appalachians. Everything in between is just fly-over territory.:-)
Believe it or not, there are geeks who've lived only in the software world, and never even picked up a soldering iron (sad but true), but would like to learn a little. A simple electronics project that gives them a taste of the hardware world is just perfect for them.
The tough question is how much of civial liberty is appropriate to give away in the interest of national security?
Zero.
The purpose of national security is to secure the civil liberties of the citizens. Trying to trade civil liberty for national security is like selling your kidneys on the black market to raise money to buy health insurance.
I'm not being insulting, but it's my experience that whenever people say they're too "busy", it just means they don't want to put in the effort.
If I had infinite time and energy, I might devote some of it to learning to type on a Dvorak layout.
As it is, given limited resources and the time I already burn on creating poetry and music, learning shiatsu, teaching karate, fixing up my house, enjoying the company of friends, gettting enough sleep and exercise to stay healthy, beating dead horses on/. - and oh yeah, working for a living - messing around with Dvorak current ranks somewhere below "take a bartending class" (but above "learn to play guitar with my toes") on my list of things to do.
If you want to call that "lazy" rather than "busy", well, it's still a more-or-less free country in that respect.
the focus of the main design principle should be enough to make you realize that dvorak is much better suited to the needs of modern computer users
Neither QWERTY nor Dvorak was designed around the needs of modern computer users. Otherwise they'd include the modifiers (Ctrl and Alt) and cursor movement keys as integral parts of the layout, rather than as clear "add-ons" over on the side. (That's why I never bothered to learn to touch-type - it's a method suited to typewriters, not computer keyboards.)
Why does QWERTY rule the roost? It was here first, and Dvorak provides a very small increase in typing speed.
I'm usually spending much more time thinking about what to type, than actually hitting keys; the only time I might benefit significantly from another arrangement is when I'm typing up something I've handwritten. The inconvenience simply isn't worth it.
An analogy: somebody could probably design a "better" (for some defintion of better) way to control the acceleration and deceleration of a ground vehicle than using two foot pedals. (Maybe one pedal where pressing the right half accelerates and the left half brakes.) But I'll bet you a nickel that the drive-by-wire all-electric car of two decades hence will still have two foot pedals. (Probably even called "gas" and "brake" pedals, even if there's no gasoline involved.)
(OTOH, I am starting to get used to FITALY on my iPAQ. That is a very different case, however - short stylus-based input vs. long keyboarding sessions.)
...there is no evidence for that. Occam's Razor says, don't invent whole universes for the heck of it. The simplest explanation consistent with the facts is taken to be true.
The problem is, it's not always simple to tell which is the simpler explanation. Is it simpler to posit two forms of matter which behave similarly but don't interact with each other, or two forms of matter where one has complex structure and one doesn't? Certainly in the latter case, you've got to explain why our type of matter comes in thirty-six flavors while dark matter only comes in vanilla.
"We gave peace a chance, we got 9/11" -Anti-Anti war protester sign.
I've heard that one.
It's one of the most bizarre twistings of history I've ever encountered, since it was Gulf War I, and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to enfore the "no-fly" zone, that inflamed the hatred that motivated 9/11. It was aggressive foriegn policy that had the U.S. back both Saddam and Bin Laden for many years. (Foriegn policy shaped and executed, BTW, by many people who are now ranking members of the Bush junta.)
So, just when exactly did we "give peace a chance"?
And Iraq wasn't behind 9-11.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
If the first time you notice that their job is impacted happens to be the same time they are impacting upon someone else with a laden forklift then it's bit late. Prevention is the first step in workplace safety.
So maybe you should try real hard to notice such as thing. Hey, you could even check up on the employees to see if they were impaired. You know, give them some kind of test. An "impairment test", I guess we could call it.
Jeez. This is not hard, people. If you're worried about drivers and machine operators being high, drunk, stoned, buzzed on legal drugs, sleepy, or otherwise impaired, then it is easy, accurate, and cheap to test that.
OTOH, chemical screens are unreliable (false positives are common), irrelevant (they tell you nothing about a worker's performance or safety), intrusive, and expensive.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
If you see no problem with either violating state and federal laws or ignoring medical reccomendations just to feel good, why should a potential employer believe you would pay any attention to company and government health and safety requirements?
If you see no problem with peeing in a cup on demand, why should a potential employer treat you with any respect whatsoever?
If you like employers subjecting employees to urinalysis to find minor drug criminals, then I suppose you'd let your employer put a camera in your bedroom to make sure you're not a sex criminal? (It doesn't take much, in many states. I feel sorry for any adult in Maryland who's not a sex criminal.)
And install a monitor in your car to make sure you never speed?
And to review all your financial records to make sure you reported all your income, even the $20 your mom gave you for your birthday, to the IRS?
And you give your employer full access to your home computer, to make sure you're not making unauthorized audio or video copies? Or downloading kiddie porn?
Or, are you just another drug war hypocrite?
Passing a breathalizer doesn't mean you never drive drunk.
Neither does passing a piss test. But you can actually make a machine operator take an impairment test every time. But random spot checks should be good enough - much easier to do a random impairment test than a random urinalysis.
But what you're doing "on your own time" does have effects on the employer's time.
If the only way you can tell if someone is a user of currently illegal drugs not is by testing their urine, obviously it's not impacting their job.
Your utter lack of respect for basic human dignity - including your own, apparently - depresses me.
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 1
Put plain & simple, you don't want some crackhead/stoner/junkie driving a forklift around your warehouse.
Or someone who's drunk, or zoned out on legal meds, or had no sleep the previous night. That's why impairment testing can be a good idea.
But if the only way you can tell if someone is a drug user or not is by testing their urine, obviously it's not impacting their job. Chemical screens are a lifestyle test, and my lifestyle outside the job ain't nobody's business but my own.
But drug users do represent a higher risk in terms of attendance and health care issues
Re:Got a whole lotta hype
on
Brain Privacy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
A drug screen is meant to pick up illegal activity which poses a tangible safety and liability issue to a potential employer.
Bullshit.
Chemical screens for drug metabolites say absolutely nothing about whether you are a safety issue. If that was the issue, impairment tests would be used. (And a few intelligent employers do
use impairment tests.) Drug screens are about what you're doing in your own time - they are a lifestyle screen. They're a loyalty oath to the Drug War.
I got my first job in high school, 17 years ago. I've been in the workforce ever since. I've never pissed in a cup for an employer. I've turned down job offers over it. I've still done ok.
Well, technically there is no such thing as either C flat or B sharp. Neither exist in standard musical nomenclature...
Sure they do. The standard nomenclature is that each (major or minor diatonic) scale contains one note for each name A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The names are augmented with "sharp" (#) or "flat" (b) as needed - possibly even a double sharp or flat. Notes have several names depending on context.
To take a degenerate case, in the key of G# major, the notes are: G# A# B#(aka C) C# D# E#(aka F) F##(aka G) G#. Rather than have two notes with the name "C", we have a B# and a C#; there's even an F## so we can have an E, an F, and a G.
I always remember that I "heard" a TV show, even though that's an impossibility.
When I was a kid, we had a black and white TV. (Really. And this wasn't the Stone Age or anything, just the 70s.) But I always thought I could see the blue in Superman's outfit when watching the Superfriends...
If web discussions suck so much, why are you reading Slashdot, hm?
Slashcode is a good one - for the limited purpose for which it's designed./. discussions start with an article being posted, go for a day or so, and die out.
Compare with USENET or mailing lists, where several different discussions are going on simultaneously, each often lasting for weeks.
In Biology, I learned that one life cannot transform itself into something else.
Then your biology teachers were remarkable ignorant. All life is constantly transforming. Organisms grow and die, changing size and shape (sometimes radially - think catepillar to butterfly) along the way.
On the cellular level, single cells spilt in two. In some organisms two cells merge into one, or two cells swap DNA. Cells differentiate.
Everything changes. That's why today, life is more than a puddle of primordial uck.
The only difference between a blastula and an amoeba is that a blastula is actually a human, and then by definition a person.
It is not at all trivial to say that all humans are persons. Is a brain dead human still a person?
Is a pre-verbal infant a person? A newborn? A severely retarded adult? The issue of what organisms should be accorded "person" status is a condsiderable debate.
Nor is it obvious that a blastula is a human - composed of human cells, yes, but so the drop of blood I washed down the sink after cutting myself shaving. Don't confuse "human" as an adjective (e.g., "human cells", "human blood") with human as a noun.
A blastula is human, but it is not a human. It certainly isn't a person under any reasonable definition I've encountered that excludes supernaturalism (appeals to "the presense of a soul" and the like).
Slashdot Mirror
It's only reliable if you can reliably determine what is "divine revelation" and what is imagination, delusion, hallucination, etcetera, and if you can explain why your divine revelation conflicts with the next guy's.
True. However, don't confuse dogma with religion. The former is belief without reason; the latter is practice, to be tested by experience.
The core of Buddhism - and of neopaganism, and of several other paths - is experience, not dogma.
That's why I claim the label "Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian" for my "faith".
The problem, as usual, is one of definition.
According to ESR's neopagan FAQ, "religion" comes from roots "re ligare", meaning "to rebind" to roots, to strengths, to the basics of things. In that sense, of rebinding, reconnecting, us to our true natures, I'm all for religion.
But in Western society, our experience of religion is very much formed by authoritarian dogma, so that we assume religion implies belief in supernatural entities and unquestioning faith. In that sense, I hold no truck with it.
It's worth noting that there are dogmatic Eastern practices and non-dogmatic Western ones (the Society of Friends, a.k.a. Quakers, leaps to mind), so it's not a strict East/West split by any means.
(BTW, for any neopagan geeks out there, I'll be presenting a workshop on "Zen Paganism" at the Starwood Festival again this year.)
RMS is not interested in open source.
RMS is interested in Free Software.
"Going on" about GNU/Linux or some subtly of the Ghostscript arrangement is very relevant to promoting and protecting our rights to use and modify software.
The immediate cause of the War of 1812 was Britian's failure to recognize the sovreignty of the U.S. Britian was impressing American sailors on the excuse that they were British subjects, and interfering with Franco-American trade.
Of course, the opportunity to "liberate" Canada from the British - and the fact that 1812 was an election year - certainly added to the picture.
How did you go about finding part-time contracting work?
Late last year, for various reasons I made a decision to "down-shift" - I cut back to working 30 hours/week, and enrolled in an 18 month program in shiatsu and Asian bodywork. I just got the ax, I'm now trying to figure out if it's reasonable to try to find something part-time - not to keep myself occupied, but to pay the bills.
Armstrong was a civilian. I don't think 1969 qualifies as "recently" in the context of manned spaceflight.
The word "science" predates the scientific method. It has other meanings besides "test hypothesises by controlled experiments". The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences isn't doing a lot of experiments, for example.
Science can also mean an organized body of knowledge. That's the "Science" in "Computer Science".
Um, a large percentage of the East Coast falls well south of the Mason-Dixon line. Even here in Maryland, just south of the line, you'd get funny looks if you called us "yankees". Especially given the intense dislike of the New York Yankees among Baltimore Orioles fans. (They're baseball teams, for you dang foreigners.)
Indeed, to speak of an East Coast "lifestyle" strikes me as odd - East Coast includes contrasts from New England to the deep South, and Manhattan to Appalachia. Baltimore isn't Boston or Boca Raton.
Oh, and unless I went all the way to the West Coast (highly doubtful) I'd never consider living west of the Appalachians. Everything in between is just fly-over territory. :-)
Yes, it is a good /. story.
Believe it or not, there are geeks who've lived only in the software world, and never even picked up a soldering iron (sad but true), but would like to learn a little. A simple electronics project that gives them a taste of the hardware world is just perfect for them.
Zero.
The purpose of national security is to secure the civil liberties of the citizens. Trying to trade civil liberty for national security is like selling your kidneys on the black market to raise money to buy health insurance.
If I had infinite time and energy, I might devote some of it to learning to type on a Dvorak layout.
As it is, given limited resources and the time I already burn on creating poetry and music, learning shiatsu, teaching karate, fixing up my house, enjoying the company of friends, gettting enough sleep and exercise to stay healthy, beating dead horses on /. - and oh yeah, working for a living - messing around with Dvorak current ranks somewhere below "take a bartending class" (but above "learn to play guitar with my toes") on my list of things to do.
If you want to call that "lazy" rather than "busy", well, it's still a more-or-less free country in that respect.
So you're not composing, just engaing in verbal diarrhea?
Why bother failing your fingers around (QWERTY or Dvorak) if you're not composing something worth being out of your head?
Neither QWERTY nor Dvorak was designed around the needs of modern computer users. Otherwise they'd include the modifiers (Ctrl and Alt) and cursor movement keys as integral parts of the layout, rather than as clear "add-ons" over on the side. (That's why I never bothered to learn to touch-type - it's a method suited to typewriters, not computer keyboards.)
Why does QWERTY rule the roost? It was here first, and Dvorak provides a very small increase in typing speed.
I'm usually spending much more time thinking about what to type, than actually hitting keys; the only time I might benefit significantly from another arrangement is when I'm typing up something I've handwritten. The inconvenience simply isn't worth it.
An analogy: somebody could probably design a "better" (for some defintion of better) way to control the acceleration and deceleration of a ground vehicle than using two foot pedals. (Maybe one pedal where pressing the right half accelerates and the left half brakes.) But I'll bet you a nickel that the drive-by-wire all-electric car of two decades hence will still have two foot pedals. (Probably even called "gas" and "brake" pedals, even if there's no gasoline involved.) (OTOH, I am starting to get used to FITALY on my iPAQ. That is a very different case, however - short stylus-based input vs. long keyboarding sessions.)
The problem is, it's not always simple to tell which is the simpler explanation. Is it simpler to posit two forms of matter which behave similarly but don't interact with each other, or two forms of matter where one has complex structure and one doesn't? Certainly in the latter case, you've got to explain why our type of matter comes in thirty-six flavors while dark matter only comes in vanilla.
I've heard that one.
It's one of the most bizarre twistings of history I've ever encountered, since it was Gulf War I, and the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to enfore the "no-fly" zone, that inflamed the hatred that motivated 9/11. It was aggressive foriegn policy that had the U.S. back both Saddam and Bin Laden for many years. (Foriegn policy shaped and executed, BTW, by many people who are now ranking members of the Bush junta.)
So, just when exactly did we "give peace a chance"?
And Iraq wasn't behind 9-11.
So maybe you should try real hard to notice such as thing. Hey, you could even check up on the employees to see if they were impaired. You know, give them some kind of test. An "impairment test", I guess we could call it.
Jeez. This is not hard, people. If you're worried about drivers and machine operators being high, drunk, stoned, buzzed on legal drugs, sleepy, or otherwise impaired, then it is easy, accurate, and cheap to test that.
OTOH, chemical screens are unreliable (false positives are common), irrelevant (they tell you nothing about a worker's performance or safety), intrusive, and expensive.
If you see no problem with peeing in a cup on demand, why should a potential employer treat you with any respect whatsoever?
If you like employers subjecting employees to urinalysis to find minor drug criminals, then I suppose you'd let your employer put a camera in your bedroom to make sure you're not a sex criminal? (It doesn't take much, in many states. I feel sorry for any adult in Maryland who's not a sex criminal.)
And install a monitor in your car to make sure you never speed?
And to review all your financial records to make sure you reported all your income, even the $20 your mom gave you for your birthday, to the IRS?
And you give your employer full access to your home computer, to make sure you're not making unauthorized audio or video copies? Or downloading kiddie porn?
Or, are you just another drug war hypocrite?
Neither does passing a piss test. But you can actually make a machine operator take an impairment test every time. But random spot checks should be good enough - much easier to do a random impairment test than a random urinalysis.
If the only way you can tell if someone is a user of currently illegal drugs not is by testing their urine, obviously it's not impacting their job.
Your utter lack of respect for basic human dignity - including your own, apparently - depresses me.
Or someone who's drunk, or zoned out on legal meds, or had no sleep the previous night. That's why impairment testing can be a good idea.
But if the only way you can tell if someone is a drug user or not is by testing their urine, obviously it's not impacting their job. Chemical screens are a lifestyle test, and my lifestyle outside the job ain't nobody's business but my own.
Not true. Some evidence show that cannabis users actually make better employees.
Bullshit.
Chemical screens for drug metabolites say absolutely nothing about whether you are a safety issue. If that was the issue, impairment tests would be used. (And a few intelligent employers do use impairment tests.) Drug screens are about what you're doing in your own time - they are a lifestyle screen. They're a loyalty oath to the Drug War.
(They're also surprisingly inaccurate for something that can ruin your life.)
I got my first job in high school, 17 years ago. I've been in the workforce ever since. I've never pissed in a cup for an employer. I've turned down job offers over it. I've still done ok.
Drug tests: just say no.
Sure they do. The standard nomenclature is that each (major or minor diatonic) scale contains one note for each name A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The names are augmented with "sharp" (#) or "flat" (b) as needed - possibly even a double sharp or flat. Notes have several names depending on context.
To take a degenerate case, in the key of G# major, the notes are: G# A# B#(aka C) C# D# E#(aka F) F##(aka G) G#. Rather than have two notes with the name "C", we have a B# and a C#; there's even an F## so we can have an E, an F, and a G.
When I was a kid, we had a black and white TV. (Really. And this wasn't the Stone Age or anything, just the 70s.) But I always thought I could see the blue in Superman's outfit when watching the Superfriends...
Funny thing, the brain.
Slashcode is a good one - for the limited purpose for which it's designed. /. discussions start with an article being posted, go for a day or so, and die out.
Compare with USENET or mailing lists, where several different discussions are going on simultaneously, each often lasting for weeks.
We should stop throwing tax dollars at passenger rail only if we also stop throwing them at automobile and air transport.
Then your biology teachers were remarkable ignorant. All life is constantly transforming. Organisms grow and die, changing size and shape (sometimes radially - think catepillar to butterfly) along the way.
On the cellular level, single cells spilt in two. In some organisms two cells merge into one, or two cells swap DNA. Cells differentiate.
Everything changes. That's why today, life is more than a puddle of primordial uck.
It is not at all trivial to say that all humans are persons. Is a brain dead human still a person? Is a pre-verbal infant a person? A newborn? A severely retarded adult? The issue of what organisms should be accorded "person" status is a condsiderable debate.
Nor is it obvious that a blastula is a human - composed of human cells, yes, but so the drop of blood I washed down the sink after cutting myself shaving. Don't confuse "human" as an adjective (e.g., "human cells", "human blood") with human as a noun.
A blastula is human, but it is not a human. It certainly isn't a person under any reasonable definition I've encountered that excludes supernaturalism (appeals to "the presense of a soul" and the like).