I've had the opposite experience. I started out nice to my coworkers. but people see nice, courteous as 'weak'. mind you, i had no problems voicing my thoughts to the highest levels. so what's happened is that the highest levels respect me for the spinal fortitude. my co-workers think i'm a pushover.
I'll concede that what you're arguing is pretty cool. Too much "Matrix" perhaps?
However, memory is such a fundamental basis of our existence that if it were incorrect we don't even exist. How do you know you exist? you remember experiencing your senses. but if your memory is 'incorrect', you didn't really exist since maybe the memory of having experienced something even NOW was implanted/recreated for you to 'remember'. so forget religion, forget god, NOTHING exists.
you're still on my lawn. this time in a pod. to power my house.
Hold a big ass hammer about waist level, directly above your foot. Let go. My memory of past experiments of similar nature says that the hammer will hurt your foot. How sure are you that my memory doesn't reflect any degree of truth? If you really are convinced that human memory doesn't reflect any degree of truth then prove it by conducting the above experiment - you have no reason to not do it, right?
If I can predict an outcome relying on nothing but my memory (If i put my hand in a fire, it will burn) - I just proved that my memory reflects a high degree of truth.
If I press my fingers at certain locations I can type certain letters. If memory didn't work. I should not have been able to type anything.
But then, you're probably going to question whether I really did submit a reply. Were you even on/.? Were you even in this world? Were you born? How do you know? Your mom told you? How does she know? In other words, you're not really here. I'm not either.
Now get off my lawn. You weren't on my lawn? How the hell do you know?
See, civility works both ways. If athiests weren't met with sheer contempt by believers, you wouldn't see the sneer either. That was Dawkins point anyways. Religion doesn't afford any respect towards athiests. Why should athiests afford religion the defrential by default treatment.
If, like you, others let athiests be, I suspect athiests would hardly care what you chose to believe in - or not.
You have ONE friend who is an athiest. I have almost ALL my friends who are believers. Civility indeed.
> Their worst failing... is that they are so convinced that the believers are wrong...
I don't have that failing at all. I do have a different one though. I have trouble picking the "right" believers. At this point, my money is on the believers of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monsters. But I'm sure that's not the "right" religion you're thinking of.
> and the evidence is that they are actually older...
If vintage == validity, i can think of a few other religions you might like to pick from - the menu is quite exquisite.
You make an excellent argument. But that's not what the religions teach. They claim to know "God" a lot more precisely. They know, for example, IPU is not a God. FSM is not a God. All the other religions' Gods aren't the real God. It's THEIR God that's the real god. (BTW, The closest to pantheism, that I know, is Hinduism - but that too has been perverted to provide specific interpretations convenient to those in power).
Now, if they KNOW, why can't they prove it? If they said, "I don't know" - I could respect that - like you said, there are a lot of things we don't know and for all we know the last reveal might be what we call God. But the smugness of "KNOWING" and then ending the argument with "it's gods will" for any inconsistensies leads me to argue that there is indeed a Dragon in my garage and IPU and FSM are just as good a religion as any out there.
I guess my point is that i could get with the God the way you're approaching it. but with the "this is the real god, and that's not" - i suspect serious mass sheepalizing tool more than anything else. for that i have no use - i don't intend to subvert the masses nor be subverted by any.
"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them." — Steve Eley
You are correct in that just because you can't observe something at your command doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But the burden of proof falls on the one claiming something exists to demonstrate the existence. In the case of lightning, it's been demonstrated. In the case of $YOU_FAV_DAITY, not so much. If the burden of proof fell on disproving the existence, I got one mean dragon in my garage.
I was thinking more of a language that's a cross between erlang and lisp.
Strangely, weird as the syntax is for erlang, I had the easiest time 'debugging' the one moderate sized app that I wrote in it. It was originally in Java - grew frustrated after about 20,000 lines of code. Re-wrote in erlang - came out to about 2,000 lines. Much easier to digest the code in my head.
I loved OOP in lisp. I was able to build up a serious DSL which meant that once I made sure the 'extensions' were good, I could use a much higher level of abstraction of what I was working on. Much easier to digest the code in my head.
Now, those two languages aren't 'mainstream' and the only other mainstream language example that I could think of that has elements of some type of compiler generated code was ObjC and its @synthesize.
> Call me old fashion
I wouldn't do that. After all, to be really old fashioned, you'd have to go beyond not trusting just the abstractions at the language level. You'd have to not trust the abstractions a language compiler provides and start checking the assembly. Or even start peaking at the ELF to make sure;)
typical code spends less than 10% time in development. the rest in production and maintenance. IDE (or a tool, as in RoR) generated code is still code that has to be maintained. the more code you have, the more bugs you have and the more shit you have to wade through to find your bugs.
Also, if something like an IDE can generate the code, isn't that by definition 'boilerplate'? if it's boilerplate, why couldn't it be part of the language itself?
compare and contrast the @synthesize in ObjC with the getters/setters in java. Sure, in java the IDE generates those for me. but I still have to wade through those in the source code to find the method I actually wrote. Couldn't java just implement some default implementation for getters/setters through some annotation? a la POJO annotations for EJB - compare that to the XML mess that was there before.
that's just one example.
to me, if i'm copying and pasting code anywhere, i'm doing it wrong (code duplication, bug duplication and what's worse, fixing one part doesn't mean i've found and fixed all the same bugs). but java just begs copy and paste. sure there are great tools (Netbeans, Eclipse) to help mitigate that - but that's just it - all the tools are still mitigating a shitty language.
i'm not a language purist either. over however many years i've been doing this, i've found that there are some languages that let me express my thoughts quickly, concisely and elegantly whereby i don't even have to step through code in a debugger to see where i messed up - it just becomes obvious on re-reading the code. java is not one of those languages.
However, IRL, the people that I've run into that are "anti-abortion" are usually pro-war, have some detectable racism tinge, have no issues with issues like child exploitation (eg. google "baccha bazi DynCorp"). To me, that's hypocrisy. They have no respect for the lives already here that need protection because they are defenseless (civilian casualties, sexually exploited children, the list goes on..)
Yet they try to project some vague "respect for life" ethos. I wonder how much of that is a case of "every sperm is sacred" (Meaning of Life) mentality as opposed to truly valuing and respecting life.
"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them."
Just because there is absence of of proof doesn't mean that's proof of absence!
> Or it might not require carbon at all. Just because we can't imagine a certain combination leading to a certain result, doesn't mean it can't exist.
I've always believed that "life" exists elsewhere and we would never recognize it as such.
What I mean by that is that even on earth, our assumptions about life changed with the discovery of the cell. Then, with the discovery of the DNA. But we still grapple with how to classify viruses. Is it? is it not? why not? etc..
Those are based on the DNA. And the "basic" building blocks - the elements. The atom. At one point we thought an atom was the most basic building block of everything. Then some smartass had to figure out ways of splitting it (or, find the constituents - electron/proton). Is there more to it?
But then, we still haven't figured out what the hell is gravitation. It's just there. What other forces are "just there" that we don't know about? Is one of those forces "alive" - and therefore totally non-carbon based?
Isn't looking for "carbon-based life form" self selective? To me, it's like if I were to look for humans that have exactly my height, weight, skin-tone, eye color, distance between the eyes, length and width of nose etc.. and then being disappointed to find that I am alone in this universe!!
P.S. If you read read that after smoking a particular carbon-based life form rolled up in some paper, trust me, it'll make a whole lot of sense.
> In ten years, if you think of this at all, you'll look back and think how young, dumb, and naive you were.
I started off on that principle about 15 years ago. Here we are, 15 years later, and I don't look back at how young (well, I'll give you that one. I was young), dumb or naive I was.
To the contrary, I'd say I made some wise decisions. I'm not the most brightest, smartest guy (programming or otherwise). But I've managed to do fairly well by traveling roads less traveled.
Just because there are X number of jobs for Y doesn't mean you do do Y. You just need the *1* job. Might as well be something in line with your principles, and what you actually enjoy doing.
And if you think his principles are silly, fine. At least he's got one.
If the stove didn't consent to the marriage it might be declared null and void. It might even constitute a criminal rape charge if the door had actually performed coitus as a "fucking door" is wont to do.
I have a droid and i really don't care how fragmented the android market is. I got to pick the phone i liked. and *my* droid - the single instance of the phone - is not fragmented. it works the same every day of the week. so, as a user, i don't really care how fragmented the market is. as a developer i do care - but Jobs, trying to frame it as something a user would care - "every phone works the same" - how is that a benefit for a user?
> 76 million people in 1900 with all the currency distributed amongst them... 300+ million people now... that means the currency is going to be distributed a lot more thinly...
Ahhh.. the Fed is the Capitalists way of "distributing" wealth.
Say, I have $1000 and there is 100,000 in circulation. That means my share of the total wealth is 1/100. Now if the Fed pumps in another 100,000 my share is suddenly 1/200. The other way to achieve that same effect would have been to tax me 50% on my savings. But then that's all "socialist". Nobody wants to do that.
I don't care why they do it.. to stabilize the economy, to account for the population growth.. the end effect is that it devalues (effectively, taxes away) my hard earned dollars that I've diligently saved up. It's like I'm working hard at putting money away in the bank but the Feds have a back door into the vault where they can walk in and take a portion away anytime they feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the opposite experience. I started out nice to my coworkers. but people see nice, courteous as 'weak'. mind you, i had no problems voicing my thoughts to the highest levels. so what's happened is that the highest levels respect me for the spinal fortitude. my co-workers think i'm a pushover.
sed 's/String.Replace/sed /;s/("/"s\//;s/", "/\//;s/");/\/"/'
Sheesh..
I'll concede that what you're arguing is pretty cool. Too much "Matrix" perhaps?
However, memory is such a fundamental basis of our existence that if it were incorrect we don't even exist. How do you know you exist? you remember experiencing your senses. but if your memory is 'incorrect', you didn't really exist since maybe the memory of having experienced something even NOW was implanted/recreated for you to 'remember'. so forget religion, forget god, NOTHING exists.
you're still on my lawn. this time in a pod. to power my house.
Try out a simple "experiment".
Hold a big ass hammer about waist level, directly above your foot. Let go. My memory of past experiments of similar nature says that the hammer will hurt your foot. How sure are you that my memory doesn't reflect any degree of truth? If you really are convinced that human memory doesn't reflect any degree of truth then prove it by conducting the above experiment - you have no reason to not do it, right?
If I can predict an outcome relying on nothing but my memory (If i put my hand in a fire, it will burn) - I just proved that my memory reflects a high degree of truth.
If I press my fingers at certain locations I can type certain letters. If memory didn't work. I should not have been able to type anything.
But then, you're probably going to question whether I really did submit a reply. Were you even on /.? Were you even in this world? Were you born? How do you know? Your mom told you? How does she know? In other words, you're not really here. I'm not either.
Now get off my lawn. You weren't on my lawn? How the hell do you know?
See, civility works both ways. If athiests weren't met with sheer contempt by believers, you wouldn't see the sneer either. That was Dawkins point anyways. Religion doesn't afford any respect towards athiests. Why should athiests afford religion the defrential by default treatment.
If, like you, others let athiests be, I suspect athiests would hardly care what you chose to believe in - or not.
You have ONE friend who is an athiest. I have almost ALL my friends who are believers. Civility indeed.
> Their worst failing ... is that they are so convinced that the believers are wrong...
I don't have that failing at all. I do have a different one though. I have trouble picking the "right" believers. At this point, my money is on the believers of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monsters. But I'm sure that's not the "right" religion you're thinking of.
> and the evidence is that they are actually older...
If vintage == validity, i can think of a few other religions you might like to pick from - the menu is quite exquisite.
You make an excellent argument. But that's not what the religions teach. They claim to know "God" a lot more precisely. They know, for example, IPU is not a God. FSM is not a God. All the other religions' Gods aren't the real God. It's THEIR God that's the real god. (BTW, The closest to pantheism, that I know, is Hinduism - but that too has been perverted to provide specific interpretations convenient to those in power).
Now, if they KNOW, why can't they prove it? If they said, "I don't know" - I could respect that - like you said, there are a lot of things we don't know and for all we know the last reveal might be what we call God. But the smugness of "KNOWING" and then ending the argument with "it's gods will" for any inconsistensies leads me to argue that there is indeed a Dragon in my garage and IPU and FSM are just as good a religion as any out there.
I guess my point is that i could get with the God the way you're approaching it. but with the "this is the real god, and that's not" - i suspect serious mass sheepalizing tool more than anything else. for that i have no use - i don't intend to subvert the masses nor be subverted by any.
if the vintage is proof of validity, i can think of a few other religions that the parent might like better.
hehe..
see? god's will my friend. just like GP said:
> ... there is a lot of God in even those who do not believe in Him.
I kid, I kid.
bbhhh.
i know this ain't going anywhere.. but, in good fun, here goes:
"The Dragon In My Garage" - Carl Sagan.
Or this:
"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them."
— Steve Eley
You are correct in that just because you can't observe something at your command doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But the burden of proof falls on the one claiming something exists to demonstrate the existence. In the case of lightning, it's been demonstrated. In the case of $YOU_FAV_DAITY, not so much. If the burden of proof fell on disproving the existence, I got one mean dragon in my garage.
bbhhh my friend.
> But ObjC is a wrong example here.
You're right. No arguments there.
I was thinking more of a language that's a cross between erlang and lisp.
Strangely, weird as the syntax is for erlang, I had the easiest time 'debugging' the one moderate sized app that I wrote in it. It was originally in Java - grew frustrated after about 20,000 lines of code. Re-wrote in erlang - came out to about 2,000 lines. Much easier to digest the code in my head.
I loved OOP in lisp. I was able to build up a serious DSL which meant that once I made sure the 'extensions' were good, I could use a much higher level of abstraction of what I was working on. Much easier to digest the code in my head.
Now, those two languages aren't 'mainstream' and the only other mainstream language example that I could think of that has elements of some type of compiler generated code was ObjC and its @synthesize.
> Call me old fashion
I wouldn't do that. After all, to be really old fashioned, you'd have to go beyond not trusting just the abstractions at the language level. You'd have to not trust the abstractions a language compiler provides and start checking the assembly. Or even start peaking at the ELF to make sure ;)
> why should I care about the verbosity?
one word. maintainance.
typical code spends less than 10% time in development. the rest in production and maintenance. IDE (or a tool, as in RoR) generated code is still code that has to be maintained. the more code you have, the more bugs you have and the more shit you have to wade through to find your bugs.
Also, if something like an IDE can generate the code, isn't that by definition 'boilerplate'? if it's boilerplate, why couldn't it be part of the language itself?
compare and contrast the @synthesize in ObjC with the getters/setters in java. Sure, in java the IDE generates those for me. but I still have to wade through those in the source code to find the method I actually wrote. Couldn't java just implement some default implementation for getters/setters through some annotation? a la POJO annotations for EJB - compare that to the XML mess that was there before.
that's just one example.
to me, if i'm copying and pasting code anywhere, i'm doing it wrong (code duplication, bug duplication and what's worse, fixing one part doesn't mean i've found and fixed all the same bugs). but java just begs copy and paste. sure there are great tools (Netbeans, Eclipse) to help mitigate that - but that's just it - all the tools are still mitigating a shitty language.
i'm not a language purist either. over however many years i've been doing this, i've found that there are some languages that let me express my thoughts quickly, concisely and elegantly whereby i don't even have to step through code in a debugger to see where i messed up - it just becomes obvious on re-reading the code. java is not one of those languages.
i used 'eject /dev/cdrom' for visual cues of which server i was in and/or if i was at the command prompt.
I get that. And that's respectable.
However, IRL, the people that I've run into that are "anti-abortion" are usually pro-war, have some detectable racism tinge, have no issues with issues like child exploitation (eg. google "baccha bazi DynCorp"). To me, that's hypocrisy. They have no respect for the lives already here that need protection because they are defenseless (civilian casualties, sexually exploited children, the list goes on..)
Yet they try to project some vague "respect for life" ethos. I wonder how much of that is a case of "every sperm is sacred" (Meaning of Life) mentality as opposed to truly valuing and respecting life.
> Absense of proof is not proof of absense.
Precisely!
"Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them."
Just because there is absence of of proof doesn't mean that's proof of absence!
> Or it might not require carbon at all. Just because we can't imagine a certain combination leading to a certain result, doesn't mean it can't exist.
I've always believed that "life" exists elsewhere and we would never recognize it as such.
What I mean by that is that even on earth, our assumptions about life changed with the discovery of the cell. Then, with the discovery of the DNA. But we still grapple with how to classify viruses. Is it? is it not? why not? etc..
Those are based on the DNA. And the "basic" building blocks - the elements. The atom. At one point we thought an atom was the most basic building block of everything. Then some smartass had to figure out ways of splitting it (or, find the constituents - electron/proton). Is there more to it?
But then, we still haven't figured out what the hell is gravitation. It's just there. What other forces are "just there" that we don't know about? Is one of those forces "alive" - and therefore totally non-carbon based?
Isn't looking for "carbon-based life form" self selective? To me, it's like if I were to look for humans that have exactly my height, weight, skin-tone, eye color, distance between the eyes, length and width of nose etc.. and then being disappointed to find that I am alone in this universe!!
P.S. If you read read that after smoking a particular carbon-based life form rolled up in some paper, trust me, it'll make a whole lot of sense.
Really? A Fleshlight?
- No more invitations to family gatherings? Check.
> In ten years, if you think of this at all, you'll look back and think how young, dumb, and naive you were.
I started off on that principle about 15 years ago. Here we are, 15 years later, and I don't look back at how young (well, I'll give you that one. I was young), dumb or naive I was.
To the contrary, I'd say I made some wise decisions. I'm not the most brightest, smartest guy (programming or otherwise). But I've managed to do fairly well by traveling roads less traveled.
Just because there are X number of jobs for Y doesn't mean you do do Y. You just need the *1* job. Might as well be something in line with your principles, and what you actually enjoy doing.
And if you think his principles are silly, fine. At least he's got one.
> but the "number of the beast" is 666, not a fraction higher than 666.
Oh, that's just the Apple premium.
> it's almost time to stop touching devices at all
I've been touching devices for quite a while and I am going blind.
Seriously. I'm supposed to pick up my prescription glasses today.. for reading on the computer monitor.
So quit touching your device. You'll go blind.
> by marrying ... a stove and a fucking door.
If the stove didn't consent to the marriage it might be declared null and void. It might even constitute a criminal rape charge if the door had actually performed coitus as a "fucking door" is wont to do.
Didn't know Ben Franklin was kinky..
PornPerCapita (PPC) might just be the new meme to replace LoC...
> Android is very fragmented
I have a droid and i really don't care how fragmented the android market is. I got to pick the phone i liked. and *my* droid - the single instance of the phone - is not fragmented. it works the same every day of the week. so, as a user, i don't really care how fragmented the market is. as a developer i do care - but Jobs, trying to frame it as something a user would care - "every phone works the same" - how is that a benefit for a user?
> 76 million people in 1900 with all the currency distributed amongst them... 300+ million people now... that means the currency is going to be distributed a lot more thinly...
Ahhh.. the Fed is the Capitalists way of "distributing" wealth.
Say, I have $1000 and there is 100,000 in circulation. That means my share of the total wealth is 1/100. Now if the Fed pumps in another 100,000 my share is suddenly 1/200. The other way to achieve that same effect would have been to tax me 50% on my savings. But then that's all "socialist". Nobody wants to do that.
I don't care why they do it.. to stabilize the economy, to account for the population growth.. the end effect is that it devalues (effectively, taxes away) my hard earned dollars that I've diligently saved up. It's like I'm working hard at putting money away in the bank but the Feds have a back door into the vault where they can walk in and take a portion away anytime they feel like it.
D. Adams was onto something.
Life, Universe and Everything = 42
42 = 101010
10 10 10 = X X X
XXX = Porn!!!
Cheeky bastard!!