Without a creator deity (let's call him God), you can't explain eternal life. Oops, I forgot, you probably don't believe in that either.
No, I don't, but the questions are quite orthagonal. Creator god(ess)(es/s) still wouldn't explain the continuity of psychology after bodily death, because we still have to explain the existance of the creator.
Saying "X was created by Y" leads to the question "So what created Y?" If your answer is "Y is eternal", why not skip the middleman and asusme that X is eternal in the first place?
And if there is no God and no eternal life, why worry about morals? There would be no right and no wrong? The biggest dog eats the most, might make right, etc.
I don't worry about morals at all. Consult any Zen master or Taoist sage for further enlightenment.
I just try to act compassionately, simply because it suits me to do so - not out of any fear of "eternal damnation" or "the wrath of god(ess)(es/s)", but because my experience is that it leads to less suffering. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it; speculations about some process whereby the fiction "I" call "my self" might continue after this body dies, don't help me figure out how to live this life at all.
You do not set the price (except by market demand) and your unwillingness to meet my price does not give you the right to steal.
Except of course that copying isn't theft.
A more relevant example might be mechanical royalties for songwriters. Songwriters don't get to set the price I have to pay for a for-profit performance, it's set by law; and they don't get a cent if I'm humming their song in the shower.
Whatever job security may exist is based on the need for your skills, not the legal fiction involved. A "permanent" position is no more secure than a contract - I lost two perm positions in the space of a year due to corporate restructuring, and contracting clients scramble to keep me around when I was considering leaving.
then what about radiation? Cosmic rays and the 3k background are bound to disrupt celluar actions (assuming they are
cells). Also, space is quite harsh to adapt to.
According to you we would have had no need to colonize beyond the first cradel of humanity to serve the burgeoning need for resources to house, feed, and ensure the survival of our kind.
The fact that space colonizatoin cannot relieve population pressures does not imply that space colonization is not a good idea for other reasons.
There are resources to be harvested, knowledge to be gained, and (as you point out) having humans on more than one rock increases the species chance of survival.
This is a free software license, not a strong copyleft, and incompatible with the GNU GPL. It consists of the Mozilla Public
License with an added clause that permits Netscape to use your added code even in their proprietary versions of the program.
Of course, they do not give you permission to use their code in the analogous way. We urge you not to use the NPL.
Re:not as easy as you might think
on
al Qaeda Hacks XP?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Code generally goes through peer reviews and quality assurance before it is accepted into the main stream.
Where is this wonderful place you work?
I've worked for, lessee, eight companies over the years, ranging from the tiny to mammoth international corporations. Only two had code reviews.
At one, a well known company in the computer security field, code for a secure operating system base was reviewed by trust engineers - who were knowledgeable about the theory of security but who were not so knowledgeable about the programming language being use. We'd get questions like "what does char somecstring[16]; somecstring[0] = char(0); mean"?
At the other, a well-known aerospace contractor, reviews of code for a NASA project focused on making sure that your code met the formatting standards required - no one asked me anything at all about the semantics of my code.
To reap the benefits of the desktop metaphor, we have to design computer systems that leave the user clearly anchored in the desktop metaphor at all times.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Think! Expand the metaphor! Why in the world stick everything on the desktop(s)? Does not your desk have drawers?
Multiple desktops are good. I have one in my real-life work area here, where a desk and a table make a "L". But there are other parts of a desk besides its top.
The desktops are where stuff you are currently working with resides.The user should be able to place everything else should be in a drawer or filing cabinet analog, just as they do in real life.
And what do they find in that file drawer? Why, files and folders.
It seems most people who have so called ADHD, its a childhood phase, i havent met any adults with it.
I know three. They're all nice people, but sometimes you want to stick a sock in their mouths as they launch into discoherent monologues that cover a half a dozen topics over ten minutes without a chance for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.
For a while I've been saying that as soon as I had an alternative I'd gladly drop C & P / Bell Atlantic / Verizon, and their "We don't care. We don't have to. We're The Phone Company" attitude.
There's a CLEC in the Baltimore area, Cavalier Telephone. I was going to wait until they'd been around for a little while to make sure I
wasn 't jumping from one bastard to another, but this has pushed me into making the jump. Bye bye bastards.
And probably nobody but Hop-On and its customers benefit from Hop-On's selling
disposable cellphones.
Consider the electronics manufacturers, plastics makers, the software geeks who provide the voice reco, the guys who make whatever other software and hardware Hop-On uses to run its systems, the retailers who sell them at a markup...just for starters.
What does matter is that AbiWord claims that it is comparable to Microsoft Word
(feature wise), when really it isn't
If they were, I'd agree; I haven't followed the project too closely (me, when I need dead tree or PDF/Postscript pretty printing, I'm a LaTeX man), but I don't think they are. From their web site:
"AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word. It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos, and so forth."
Perhaps "similar" is ambiguous - I think of general look and feel and purpose, not depth of features.
I know engineering students who find that very useful for school work.
And engineering students make up "most users"? Methinks not.
For math-heavy texts, one would probably better off with a tool devoted to such things - like maybe TeXmacs.
Most people want a simple, WYSWIG, omnipurpose tool
No, people want a tool that lets them do the things they need to do in a simple manner. Omnipurpose means 99% useless. For the "average" user, complexity and price are stronger negatives than lack of features that they never use.
So AbiWord is becoming a serious alternative to commercial products, but doesn't have the same functionality as a commercial
product?!?
Sure. Much of the so-called "functionality" of modren commerical word processors is, for most users, nothing but bloat.
All most people need in a word processor s enough to write a letter to grandma, or a twenty-page report for school. And if you need more, you don't want a word processor, you want a document preparation system - LaTeX, Framemaker, DocBook, etcetera.
Of course, I'm an old (by/. standards) curmudgeon who fondly recalls writing high school papers in Turbo Pascal IDE's editor and printing them out with a "near letter quality" 24-pin dot-matrix printer on tractor-feed paper...
The chances of life there are astronomical, because we haven't found life there yet.
The chances of life there are incalculable, because we are woefully ignorant of the processes that give rise to life.
If you've got a vase full of marbles, and you pick one at random, and it's white, what are the chances that next marble is also white? You can't answer that because there's insufficient data.
Same here - we hve insufficient data to say whether some weird combination of salts or some weird bacteria are a more likely explanation. Occam's razor is of no help when you can't say which explanation is more likely.
It may be that life is almost as common as water. It may be the life is extremely rare. We cannot say. Saying, we would know. Do not know, so cannot say.
humans don't need firearms to brutalize one another. They got along quite well for the millenia before the invention of gunpowder.
For millenia, the strong brutalized the weak. But as the technology of "democratic" weapons (to use Orwell's term) improved - the longbow, the crossbow, the musket, and finally the revolver - the weak were given more equal power.
As one wag in the Old West put it, "God created man, but it was Sam Colt who made them equal."
Compare your (ie America's) murder/rape stats to those in Europe and you may start to understand exactly why you don't want
millions of people carrying guns.
Our problems with violence have more to do with
economic disparity, lingering racism and segregation, and the war on (some) drugs, than with the legal status of firearms.
Within the US, there is a clear correlation between gun control and violence crime - states with strong gun control laws have more crime, states which respect the RKBA have less crime.
I really don't get this aspect of the US - even if you FEEL safer when carrying a
gun, statistically you are in considerable danger.
Simply not correct. The statistics clearly show that those parts of the US that allow for the leagl concealed carrying of firearms have less violent crime, and that individual people with guns are best able to avoid being killed or injured by violent attackers.
Let me recommend the "Pro-gun FAQ", chock full of facts, numbers, and references.
What you probably don't realise is that hand to hand combat can diffuse 96% of situations.
BULLSHIT.
I have studied the martial arts for over sixteen years, and I will tell you this: decades of training in hand-to-hand combat can be nullified by a sharp piece of metal, a baseball bat, or even a great enough difference in size and strength. Yes, self-defense training can improve your odds - but if you're a little old lady with arthritic hips facing a strong crazy guy with a big stick, you're in a heap of trouble even if you've devoted your life to budo.
The best way to defend yourself againt an attacker intent on killing you or infliciting great bodily harm, is to use a firearm. Period. No question. The statistical evidence in quite clear that pointing a gun at someone is the best way currently known to mankind to deter them from attacking you.
especially if guns were, as they always should have been, removed from this country.
I'll give up mine just as soon as all the criminals, cops, soldiers, and other people I don't trust give up theirs, ok?
Gun control is about as effective at keeping guns away from bad guys as the war on drugs is at keeping heroin away from junkies.
and yet you can apparently wander into a corner shop and buy a shotgun that you kids can have GREAT fun playing with when you're out!
No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork and background checks are required to buy firearms in the U.S.
And while there are stupid parents who leave guns where kids can get them, there are alo stupid parents who leave matches, lighters, rat poision, sharp knives, and other dangerous things where kids can get them - that's no rationale for banning dangerous things. (BTW, accidental firearms deaths in the U.S. are extremely rare - one is several times more likely to drown, or to die from fire, than by a gun accident.)
Get some perspective, and get rid of the guns. Soldiers need guns, bank managers and secretaries don't.
A bank manager or secretary who is about to be murdered or raped needs a gun very very badly.
Anyone whose life may be threatened by a violent person needs a means to defend themselves. Firearms are the best tool to do that.
My life is no less valuable than that of a soldier, police officer, private security guard, whatever, and I will not willingly surrender the means to defend myself, my family, and my community.
Slashdot Mirror
One need only wait. They unmake themselves. (You just may have to wait a very, very, very long time...)
My housemate had to surrender his Zippo to get on a post-9/11 flight.
Not necessarily, and that's the problem. You can be far away from any people, yet still viewable by a hidden camera, or telephoto lens.
No, I don't, but the questions are quite orthagonal. Creator god(ess)(es/s) still wouldn't explain the continuity of psychology after bodily death, because we still have to explain the existance of the creator.
Saying "X was created by Y" leads to the question "So what created Y?" If your answer is "Y is eternal", why not skip the middleman and asusme that X is eternal in the first place?
I don't worry about morals at all. Consult any Zen master or Taoist sage for further enlightenment.
I just try to act compassionately, simply because it suits me to do so - not out of any fear of "eternal damnation" or "the wrath of god(ess)(es/s)", but because my experience is that it leads to less suffering. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it; speculations about some process whereby the fiction "I" call "my self" might continue after this body dies, don't help me figure out how to live this life at all.
In which case, you still have to come up with an answer to where did god(ess)(es/s) come from originally?
Invoking a creator deity has no explanatory power.
Except of course that copying isn't theft .
A more relevant example might be mechanical royalties for songwriters. Songwriters don't get to set the price I have to pay for a for-profit performance, it's set by law; and they don't get a cent if I'm humming their song in the shower.
Whatever job security may exist is based on the need for your skills, not the legal fiction involved. A "permanent" position is no more secure than a contract - I lost two perm positions in the space of a year due to corporate restructuring, and contracting clients scramble to keep me around when I was considering leaving.
Bacteria are tough; they can spore up and be very hard to kill. (That's why anthrax is such a bitch to deal with.) Earth bacteria survived for several years unprotected on the moon.
The fact that space colonizatoin cannot relieve population pressures does not imply that space colonization is not a good idea for other reasons. There are resources to be harvested, knowledge to be gained, and (as you point out) having humans on more than one rock increases the species chance of survival.
But it's still the case that the planet's population is increaseing by several people each second; just to keep up with the growth, every three days you'd have to build a new space-city the size of San Francisco and transport enough people to fill it.
NPL'd software is free software. There are many free software licenses besides the GPL.
From a list of free software licenses at the GNU website:
Where is this wonderful place you work?
I've worked for, lessee, eight companies over the years, ranging from the tiny to mammoth international corporations. Only two had code reviews.
At one, a well known company in the computer security field, code for a secure operating system base was reviewed by trust engineers - who were knowledgeable about the theory of security but who were not so knowledgeable about the programming language being use. We'd get questions like "what does char somecstring[16]; somecstring[0] = char(0); mean"?
At the other, a well-known aerospace contractor, reviews of code for a NASA project focused on making sure that your code met the formatting standards required - no one asked me anything at all about the semantics of my code.
Offtopic, but:
Only because people try to misuse it as a boolean function, which it ain't - its an order test. If you say
if (strcmp(username, "osama") == 0) or
if (strcmp(username, "oscama") != 0)
your code will be clearer - the == 0 or != 0 (or > 0 or < 0) is the same sense as the string comparison.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Think! Expand the metaphor! Why in the world stick everything on the desktop(s)? Does not your desk have drawers?
Multiple desktops are good. I have one in my real-life work area here, where a desk and a table make a "L". But there are other parts of a desk besides its top.
The desktops are where stuff you are currently working with resides.The user should be able to place everything else should be in a drawer or filing cabinet analog, just as they do in real life.
And what do they find in that file drawer? Why, files and folders.
I know three. They're all nice people, but sometimes you want to stick a sock in their mouths as they launch into discoherent monologues that cover a half a dozen topics over ten minutes without a chance for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.
For a while I've been saying that as soon as I had an alternative I'd gladly drop C & P / Bell Atlantic / Verizon, and their "We don't care. We don't have to. We're The Phone Company" attitude.
There's a CLEC in the Baltimore area, Cavalier Telephone. I was going to wait until they'd been around for a little while to make sure I wasn 't jumping from one bastard to another, but this has pushed me into making the jump. Bye bye bastards.
I have seen telnet clients with x/y/zmodem or kermit built in. Useful in certain help-I'm-trapped-behind-a-dumb-firewall situations.
Consider the electronics manufacturers, plastics makers, the software geeks who provide the voice reco, the guys who make whatever other software and hardware Hop-On uses to run its systems, the retailers who sell them at a markup...just for starters.
If they were, I'd agree; I haven't followed the project too closely (me, when I need dead tree or PDF/Postscript pretty printing, I'm a LaTeX man), but I don't think they are. From their web site:
Perhaps "similar" is ambiguous - I think of general look and feel and purpose, not depth of features.
And engineering students make up "most users"? Methinks not.
For math-heavy texts, one would probably better off with a tool devoted to such things - like maybe TeXmacs.
No, people want a tool that lets them do the things they need to do in a simple manner. Omnipurpose means 99% useless. For the "average" user, complexity and price are stronger negatives than lack of features that they never use.
Sure. Much of the so-called "functionality" of modren commerical word processors is, for most users, nothing but bloat.
All most people need in a word processor s enough to write a letter to grandma, or a twenty-page report for school. And if you need more, you don't want a word processor, you want a document preparation system - LaTeX, Framemaker, DocBook, etcetera.
Of course, I'm an old (by /. standards) curmudgeon who fondly recalls writing high school papers in Turbo Pascal IDE's editor and printing them out with a "near letter quality" 24-pin dot-matrix printer on tractor-feed paper...
The chances of life there are incalculable, because we are woefully ignorant of the processes that give rise to life.
If you've got a vase full of marbles, and you pick one at random, and it's white, what are the chances that next marble is also white? You can't answer that because there's insufficient data.
Same here - we hve insufficient data to say whether some weird combination of salts or some weird bacteria are a more likely explanation. Occam's razor is of no help when you can't say which explanation is more likely.
It may be that life is almost as common as water. It may be the life is extremely rare. We cannot say. Saying, we would know. Do not know, so cannot say.
For millenia, the strong brutalized the weak. But as the technology of "democratic" weapons (to use Orwell's term) improved - the longbow, the crossbow, the musket, and finally the revolver - the weak were given more equal power.
As one wag in the Old West put it, "God created man, but it was Sam Colt who made them equal."
Our problems with violence have more to do with economic disparity, lingering racism and segregation, and the war on (some) drugs, than with the legal status of firearms.
Within the US, there is a clear correlation between gun control and violence crime - states with strong gun control laws have more crime, states which respect the RKBA have less crime.
Simply not correct. The statistics clearly show that those parts of the US that allow for the leagl concealed carrying of firearms have less violent crime, and that individual people with guns are best able to avoid being killed or injured by violent attackers.
Let me recommend the "Pro-gun FAQ", chock full of facts, numbers, and references.
I have studied the martial arts for over sixteen years, and I will tell you this: decades of training in hand-to-hand combat can be nullified by a sharp piece of metal, a baseball bat, or even a great enough difference in size and strength. Yes, self-defense training can improve your odds - but if you're a little old lady with arthritic hips facing a strong crazy guy with a big stick, you're in a heap of trouble even if you've devoted your life to budo.
The best way to defend yourself againt an attacker intent on killing you or infliciting great bodily harm, is to use a firearm. Period. No question. The statistical evidence in quite clear that pointing a gun at someone is the best way currently known to mankind to deter them from attacking you.
I'll give up mine just as soon as all the criminals, cops, soldiers, and other people I don't trust give up theirs, ok?
Gun control is about as effective at keeping guns away from bad guys as the war on drugs is at keeping heroin away from junkies.
No, you can't just "wander in", much paperwork and background checks are required to buy firearms in the U.S.
And while there are stupid parents who leave guns where kids can get them, there are alo stupid parents who leave matches, lighters, rat poision, sharp knives, and other dangerous things where kids can get them - that's no rationale for banning dangerous things. (BTW, accidental firearms deaths in the U.S. are extremely rare - one is several times more likely to drown, or to die from fire, than by a gun accident.)
A bank manager or secretary who is about to be murdered or raped needs a gun very very badly.
Anyone whose life may be threatened by a violent person needs a means to defend themselves. Firearms are the best tool to do that.
My life is no less valuable than that of a soldier, police officer, private security guard, whatever, and I will not willingly surrender the means to defend myself, my family, and my community.