But what if you posit a God who interferes in the world not through sudden, startling violations of the natural order, but through guiding what we humans see as random chance?
The world itself is enough of a chaotic system that even today, we can't come close to being able to explain precisely why, for instance, a bolt of lighting hit this tree instead of that power line, or why a hurricane shifted course to hit this city instead of that one. Or even why one neuron fires, and not another, leading a person to pick one out of a set of similarly likely choices.
Such a God we still would not be able to pinpoint any individual points of interference by—but He would still be guiding events subtly to some greater purpose.
Perhaps "reliable" is too likely to be read as "always 100% correct", and I apologise for that.. I didn't want to confuse the basic question, but what you've said is quite true.
You can indeed show that memory is not always reliable.
But you can only do that once you have assumed by faith that memory is at least mostly reliable.
You keep using that word. I do no think it means what you think it means.
The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process.
Yes, it is. Repeating this drivel over and over and over has become the latest fashion of putting your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".
Evolution is the death sentence to any and all religious creation myths because it removes the necessity of creation. If life can evolve on its own, and we have no evidence of any outside influence (godlike, alien or anything else), then the most likely answer is that it has, and anyone claiming otherwise carries the burden of proof.
So unless you have any evidence for evolution being "guided" or whatever, you're just someone who can't let his pet myth go despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That's something of a non sequitur, though.
I completely see where you're coming from—if there is no necessity for a God to make the world be as we see it, then Occam's Razor says that we should assume that there isn't one.
However, that only means that it's less likely that there's a God. It doesn't disprove the existence of God. I mean, that's sort of the whole problem with God in science: He's unfalsifiable.
I understand your desire to disabuse people of what you see as a dangerous delusion of belief in God, but logically, your argument that these two things are "incompatible" simply doesn't hold up.
Let me put it this way: If this was your daughter, I'm sure she has a nice character, and maybe she is really smart, too. But, to put it nicely, I just don't date women so ugly I wouldn't want to be caught dead with them.
My entire life I have hated text editors that give me icons and a mouse-driven interface. I've just (thanks to some other comment) discovered Sublime Text 2 - and they do that part very, very right: When I'm in a text editor, I'm obviously editing text, and I'll be 10x as fast with a keyboard-driven interface.
And geany looks so horribly ugly, if it's any good as an editor, I suggest starting a fund to buy the dev team a graphics and UI designer.
Well, what it looks like is another Windows-wannabe. It looks like it was designed for people who just love Visual Studio and similar Microsoft products.
And that is definitely a huge part of what is wrong with "Linux on the desktop." Copying Microsoft just isn't going to get you anywhere good.
Acer made a shockingly similar one several years ago but with an Atom chip (so no overheating problems, lol) and it was slow, the touchscreen was sluggish, and overall it sucked lol.
Why would it need a touchscreen?
The only major uses I've ever seen for a touchscreen all-in-one like an iMac are for a kiosk machine of some sort, or a POS system (fancy cash register).
For normal use, as various people (including, I believe, Steve Jobs) have noted, it's just too darn hard on the arms.
Am I the only one suspecting that the delay in the iMac lineup may be the result of Apple responding to something like this by revamping the entire line so that the sorts of things possible with this thin ITX board seem trivial in comparison?
If so, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about:-)
Let's hope that some of the major retail PC makers pick up on this, and start making their own.
I love Apple, but I'd also love to see some competition out there for them in areas like this, to ensure that they always have a good reason to be keeping one step ahead.;-D
Well, let me be a counterexample for you: I've been married for nearly a decade, and I'm very happy, and still very much in love.
Is my wife practically perfect in every way? No, but neither am I. We both have strengths that make up for each other's shortcomings.
Part of the problem, I think, is that there's a cultural pressure, especially for men, to act like marriage is a great burden, and bachelorhood is somehow the Great Ideal.
Here's a free bit of security advise: The proper answer to making sure your communication can not be read by someone who may intercept it through whatever means, including typos in the address, is to use encryption. Period.
Encrypting the email with the public key of the mistyped address wouldn't help anyone, would it?
And why in the name of Great Cthulhu would you have the public key of some random person who just happens to have an email address a character or two away from one of your regular business partners'?
However, if you are a good employee with a good work ethic you'll be able to find a job elsewhere for more than minimum wage once you've built a bit of work history.
The person I know who's working at the chocolate store only took the job because none of the other companies with open jobs in the area could make head or tails of her 8 years of experience doing design, product development, marketing, and management work for an international company.
She's applied for a half-dozen jobs she'd be able to do with half her brain tied behind her back, and they either ignore her completely (probably because she's overqualified), or choose someone who went to school with the boss's son. (Well, and then there's the couple of jobs she applied for that she later found out they were looking for things that were not specified in the position description—like the one for an "assistant communications manager" that listed a number of skills she has in abundance, but when she talked to the people in the know, they told her they were really looking for a publicist with connections in the media.)
Yet, apparently, they keep showing up for work and are able to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves in some fashion. Me? I'd move to somewhere where it wasn't so expensive to live. If everyone does that then the business will have no choice but to increase wages or die. I've got no sympathy for someone in a bad situation that does nothing to change it -- especially in America where you have the freedom to do exactly that.
This presupposes total freedom of movement, no costs to pulling up sticks and leaving, and no opportunity cost to finding a new job somewhere else. None of these are true.
Then the owner can pound sand. Oh, it's the best job offer on the market? Well, maybe you should take it then? Or move. Or start a competing business. Etc.
Actually, the person I know who's stuck in this job would love to start a business of her own. She's even got several good ideas and some real, solid marketable skills. What she doesn't have is money. Believe it or not, it takes money to start a business.
You are not intended to live on minimum wage. Anybody who shows up on time and sober will be making above minimum in three months.
Conversely anybody who can't produce at least minimum wage worth of value per hour will never ever be able to get (or keep) a job.
Good God that's poorly informed.
I mean, I don't currently have direct evidence that you're wrong in the literal sense. However, I do know that there are plenty of places where youmay not make minimum wage, but you still don't make anywhere close to enough to live on, and no matter how long you work there (doing a good job, showing up on time, etc), you have no guarantee of making more.
I have personal knowledge of a job making $8/hr at a chocolate store, where the owner is on the lookout for more adults to hire, part time, for that much money, on a long-term basis. And has no intention of raising the pay, making a full-time position, or anything of the sort.
Minimum wage in this country is a joke, and while raising it to be a living wage would, indeed, cause some short-term loss of jobs, over the longer term, as the poorest working people were measurably better off and able to spend more money, it would contribute greatly to the country's economy.
He'd probably think the market of people who want to pay for a whole new TV isn't all that big.
Except that X thousand people buy new TVs every year. Sure, it's not a growing market like smartphones and tablets, but it's not like a TV is a "buy once, use forever" thing.
And if Apple's TV set offered something especially compelling—like enough content deals with the major providers that you could cancel your cable or satellite service, and still get all the shows you liked as they aired, for a competitive price—then people might find reasons to replace their old TVs with one.
Not saying I have any particular reason to believe that Apple has achieved that, just that it's the kind of thing I would expect them to consider necessary and sufficient to release such a TV.
Given all the rumours, it sounds more and more likely that Apple will be releasing an actual TV set of one sort or another. That wouldn't be an "extra box," it would just be a replacement TV.
I wonder what Mr. White would think of the chances of that sort of "Apple TV"?
"The issues are too complex" is a complete cop-out. All that means is "we can't articulate what we want, you figure it out".
And saying this is more of a cop-out, because that's not what he said.
What he said, and what the Occupy protesters have been saying, is not "what we want is to complex to describe" or "too complex for you to understand." They've been saying "it's too complex for a headline or soundbite." Which is true.
What they want includes various things, such as: tax reform to ensure that corporations pay their fair share and people making less than the median income aren't overly burdened (as they are now), stronger regulation of the financial sector to ensure that the conditions that caused the meltdown in 2008 can't happen again (as they could, currently, since the rules haven't materially changed since then), stronger regulation of executive pay to ensure that it can't be so absurdly out of line with both line-worker pay and actual executive performance...
All of these are things that can be, and have been, clearly articulated, but don't make easy soundbites (like "votes for women," or "equal rights now"), and are difficult to achieve precisely because they are aimed at reducing the power of those who currently have and hoard the power in this country. Congress won't take up issues like these unless they're forced to, because many of them explicitly espouse political platforms that seek the exact opposite of these, and even most of the rest are either directly in the pay of, or deeply afraid of the influence of, the people and entities whose bank accounts would grow by fewer billions each year because of the changes that are wanted here.
So don't try to dismiss the Occupy movement with a disingenuous, "they're like a crying baby," "they can't figure out what they want," just because you demand a simplistic soundbite so you don't have to actually expend any effort to comprehend their desires.
I buy stuff on the credit card, then pay off the full balance at the end of each month. (Or, well, billing cycle, these days, which happens to be in the middle of the month.) No problems with payment, and also not "financing" in any meaningful sense of the term.
Also, my credit card has a high enough limit that I could, indeed, buy a car on it (though not a BMW;-) ).
Proof, of course, is the fact that they didn't do anything before the suicides hit the news.
Factcheck: The suicides were not at an Apple Foxconn plant. I'm pretty sure I recall reading that they were at an XBox 360 plant, but I could be misremembering. It was definitely something non-Apple, though.
No, a "hater" is the opposite of a "fanboi". If the latter is one who supports a particular brand, person, or other entity no matter what, then the former is one who opposes it no matter what.
There are very few terms which, by their very use, can indicate an extremely low level of intelligence. I do not believe that "hater" is among them.
I think this is great move by Apple. It also shows that they care about other things than profit, unlike *ahem* certain privacy violating company Mountain View that just decided to pack their packs and leave after they couldn't compete with Baidu.
Indeed, this is not a big surprise to me, but it is definitely welcome news.
I just wonder what the Apple haters are going to say to justify their mindless frothing that Apple would never do such a thing, because they're only interested in profit...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that idea is misguided populism. The problem isn't that "corporrations are people too" or that "money is speech"
It isn't the whole problem, but it's definitely part of it, and not just in terms of politics.
Dan Aris
But what if you posit a God who interferes in the world not through sudden, startling violations of the natural order, but through guiding what we humans see as random chance?
The world itself is enough of a chaotic system that even today, we can't come close to being able to explain precisely why, for instance, a bolt of lighting hit this tree instead of that power line, or why a hurricane shifted course to hit this city instead of that one. Or even why one neuron fires, and not another, leading a person to pick one out of a set of similarly likely choices.
Such a God we still would not be able to pinpoint any individual points of interference by—but He would still be guiding events subtly to some greater purpose.
Dan Aris
Can you really think of a situation that would require you to trust any kind of clown?
Eating at McDonalds?
And you think that's a good idea in the first place?
Dan Aris
Perhaps "reliable" is too likely to be read as "always 100% correct", and I apologise for that.. I didn't want to confuse the basic question, but what you've said is quite true.
You can indeed show that memory is not always reliable.
But you can only do that once you have assumed by faith that memory is at least mostly reliable.
You keep using that word. I do no think it means what you think it means.
Dan Aris
The belief that the world is billions of years old and that biological diversity has grown gradually through a process of mutation and natural selection is in no way incompatible with the belief that God created the world or that He has guided the process.
Yes, it is. Repeating this drivel over and over and over has become the latest fashion of putting your fingers in your ears and going "lalalala".
Evolution is the death sentence to any and all religious creation myths because it removes the necessity of creation. If life can evolve on its own, and we have no evidence of any outside influence (godlike, alien or anything else), then the most likely answer is that it has, and anyone claiming otherwise carries the burden of proof.
So unless you have any evidence for evolution being "guided" or whatever, you're just someone who can't let his pet myth go despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
That's something of a non sequitur, though.
I completely see where you're coming from—if there is no necessity for a God to make the world be as we see it, then Occam's Razor says that we should assume that there isn't one.
However, that only means that it's less likely that there's a God. It doesn't disprove the existence of God. I mean, that's sort of the whole problem with God in science: He's unfalsifiable.
I understand your desire to disabuse people of what you see as a dangerous delusion of belief in God, but logically, your argument that these two things are "incompatible" simply doesn't hold up.
Dan Aris
I've just had one look at the screenshots.
Let me put it this way: If this was your daughter, I'm sure she has a nice character, and maybe she is really smart, too. But, to put it nicely, I just don't date women so ugly I wouldn't want to be caught dead with them.
My entire life I have hated text editors that give me icons and a mouse-driven interface. I've just (thanks to some other comment) discovered Sublime Text 2 - and they do that part very, very right: When I'm in a text editor, I'm obviously editing text, and I'll be 10x as fast with a keyboard-driven interface.
And geany looks so horribly ugly, if it's any good as an editor, I suggest starting a fund to buy the dev team a graphics and UI designer.
Well, what it looks like is another Windows-wannabe. It looks like it was designed for people who just love Visual Studio and similar Microsoft products.
And that is definitely a huge part of what is wrong with "Linux on the desktop." Copying Microsoft just isn't going to get you anywhere good.
Dan Aris
Acer made a shockingly similar one several years ago but with an Atom chip (so no overheating problems, lol) and it was slow, the touchscreen was sluggish, and overall it sucked lol.
Why would it need a touchscreen?
The only major uses I've ever seen for a touchscreen all-in-one like an iMac are for a kiosk machine of some sort, or a POS system (fancy cash register).
For normal use, as various people (including, I believe, Steve Jobs) have noted, it's just too darn hard on the arms.
Dan Aris
Am I the only one suspecting that the delay in the iMac lineup may be the result of Apple responding to something like this by revamping the entire line so that the sorts of things possible with this thin ITX board seem trivial in comparison?
If so, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about :-)
Dan Aris
Let's hope that some of the major retail PC makers pick up on this, and start making their own.
I love Apple, but I'd also love to see some competition out there for them in areas like this, to ensure that they always have a good reason to be keeping one step ahead. ;-D
Dan Aris
Well, let me be a counterexample for you: I've been married for nearly a decade, and I'm very happy, and still very much in love.
Is my wife practically perfect in every way? No, but neither am I. We both have strengths that make up for each other's shortcomings.
Part of the problem, I think, is that there's a cultural pressure, especially for men, to act like marriage is a great burden, and bachelorhood is somehow the Great Ideal.
Dan Aris
Here's a free bit of security advise: The proper answer to making sure your communication can not be read by someone who may intercept it through whatever means, including typos in the address, is to use encryption. Period.
Encrypting the email with the public key of the mistyped address wouldn't help anyone, would it?
And why in the name of Great Cthulhu would you have the public key of some random person who just happens to have an email address a character or two away from one of your regular business partners'?
Dan Aris
However, if you are a good employee with a good work ethic you'll be able to find a job elsewhere for more than minimum wage once you've built a bit of work history.
The person I know who's working at the chocolate store only took the job because none of the other companies with open jobs in the area could make head or tails of her 8 years of experience doing design, product development, marketing, and management work for an international company.
She's applied for a half-dozen jobs she'd be able to do with half her brain tied behind her back, and they either ignore her completely (probably because she's overqualified), or choose someone who went to school with the boss's son. (Well, and then there's the couple of jobs she applied for that she later found out they were looking for things that were not specified in the position description—like the one for an "assistant communications manager" that listed a number of skills she has in abundance, but when she talked to the people in the know, they told her they were really looking for a publicist with connections in the media.)
Dan Aris
Yet, apparently, they keep showing up for work and are able to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves in some fashion. Me? I'd move to somewhere where it wasn't so expensive to live. If everyone does that then the business will have no choice but to increase wages or die. I've got no sympathy for someone in a bad situation that does nothing to change it -- especially in America where you have the freedom to do exactly that.
This presupposes total freedom of movement, no costs to pulling up sticks and leaving, and no opportunity cost to finding a new job somewhere else. None of these are true.
Then the owner can pound sand. Oh, it's the best job offer on the market? Well, maybe you should take it then? Or move. Or start a competing business. Etc.
Actually, the person I know who's stuck in this job would love to start a business of her own. She's even got several good ideas and some real, solid marketable skills. What she doesn't have is money. Believe it or not, it takes money to start a business.
Dan Aris
They are unable to produce enough wealth to be paid minimum plus mandated benefits
What mandated benefits? Mandated benefits would be like socialism, and that's, like, all evil and stuff.
Yeah, there's no benefits at the jobs I'm describing.
Dan Aris
You are not intended to live on minimum wage. Anybody who shows up on time and sober will be making above minimum in three months.
Conversely anybody who can't produce at least minimum wage worth of value per hour will never ever be able to get (or keep) a job.
Good God that's poorly informed.
I mean, I don't currently have direct evidence that you're wrong in the literal sense. However, I do know that there are plenty of places where youmay not make minimum wage, but you still don't make anywhere close to enough to live on, and no matter how long you work there (doing a good job, showing up on time, etc), you have no guarantee of making more.
I have personal knowledge of a job making $8/hr at a chocolate store, where the owner is on the lookout for more adults to hire, part time, for that much money, on a long-term basis. And has no intention of raising the pay, making a full-time position, or anything of the sort.
Minimum wage in this country is a joke, and while raising it to be a living wage would, indeed, cause some short-term loss of jobs, over the longer term, as the poorest working people were measurably better off and able to spend more money, it would contribute greatly to the country's economy.
Dan Aris
So...what about diseases that aren't the result of any lifestyle? What about ebola? Bird flu? What about genetic diseases? What about cancer?
It's easy to be holier-than-thou about "vice diseases" like those you name, but they're hardly the only things killing people.
If I had a terminal cancer, I could get all the fresh air and exercise I wanted, I'd still be dead in six months without the pharmaceutical industry.
Dan Aris
He'd probably think the market of people who want to pay for a whole new TV isn't all that big.
Except that X thousand people buy new TVs every year. Sure, it's not a growing market like smartphones and tablets, but it's not like a TV is a "buy once, use forever" thing.
And if Apple's TV set offered something especially compelling—like enough content deals with the major providers that you could cancel your cable or satellite service, and still get all the shows you liked as they aired, for a competitive price—then people might find reasons to replace their old TVs with one.
Not saying I have any particular reason to believe that Apple has achieved that, just that it's the kind of thing I would expect them to consider necessary and sufficient to release such a TV.
Dan Aris
Given all the rumours, it sounds more and more likely that Apple will be releasing an actual TV set of one sort or another. That wouldn't be an "extra box," it would just be a replacement TV.
I wonder what Mr. White would think of the chances of that sort of "Apple TV"?
Dan Aris
How about backups?
Consolidating and virtualizing your backup servers sounds like a recipe for trouble to me.
Dan Aris
Do you also like lively protoplasm?
Dan Aris
"The issues are too complex" is a complete cop-out. All that means is "we can't articulate what we want, you figure it out".
And saying this is more of a cop-out, because that's not what he said.
What he said, and what the Occupy protesters have been saying, is not "what we want is to complex to describe" or "too complex for you to understand." They've been saying "it's too complex for a headline or soundbite." Which is true.
What they want includes various things, such as: tax reform to ensure that corporations pay their fair share and people making less than the median income aren't overly burdened (as they are now), stronger regulation of the financial sector to ensure that the conditions that caused the meltdown in 2008 can't happen again (as they could, currently, since the rules haven't materially changed since then), stronger regulation of executive pay to ensure that it can't be so absurdly out of line with both line-worker pay and actual executive performance...
All of these are things that can be, and have been, clearly articulated, but don't make easy soundbites (like "votes for women," or "equal rights now"), and are difficult to achieve precisely because they are aimed at reducing the power of those who currently have and hoard the power in this country. Congress won't take up issues like these unless they're forced to, because many of them explicitly espouse political platforms that seek the exact opposite of these, and even most of the rest are either directly in the pay of, or deeply afraid of the influence of, the people and entities whose bank accounts would grow by fewer billions each year because of the changes that are wanted here.
So don't try to dismiss the Occupy movement with a disingenuous, "they're like a crying baby," "they can't figure out what they want," just because you demand a simplistic soundbite so you don't have to actually expend any effort to comprehend their desires.
Dan Aris
I buy stuff on the credit card, then pay off the full balance at the end of each month. (Or, well, billing cycle, these days, which happens to be in the middle of the month.) No problems with payment, and also not "financing" in any meaningful sense of the term.
Also, my credit card has a high enough limit that I could, indeed, buy a car on it (though not a BMW ;-) ).
Dan Aris
Proof, of course, is the fact that they didn't do anything before the suicides hit the news.
Factcheck: The suicides were not at an Apple Foxconn plant. I'm pretty sure I recall reading that they were at an XBox 360 plant, but I could be misremembering. It was definitely something non-Apple, though.
Dan Aris
No, a "hater" is the opposite of a "fanboi". If the latter is one who supports a particular brand, person, or other entity no matter what, then the former is one who opposes it no matter what.
There are very few terms which, by their very use, can indicate an extremely low level of intelligence. I do not believe that "hater" is among them.
Dan Aris
I think this is great move by Apple. It also shows that they care about other things than profit, unlike *ahem* certain privacy violating company Mountain View that just decided to pack their packs and leave after they couldn't compete with Baidu.
Indeed, this is not a big surprise to me, but it is definitely welcome news.
I just wonder what the Apple haters are going to say to justify their mindless frothing that Apple would never do such a thing, because they're only interested in profit...
Dan Aris