It's still the same. At least morally. Do something for no good reason other than a threat.
The Gospels are not a threat, they're an offer to help. Jesus basically said "All of you have gotten yourselves into a really bad situation that you can't escape by yourselves. Trust me, follow me. I can help."
No strings attached, no fine print, no conditions of any kind. Just an unconditional promise.
Trust is built from a person's knowledge and experience with someone else. (Your parents, friends, teachers, etc.) Faith, on the otherhand, is at best only second-hand trust for most people.
Christians believe that they do have a personal, first hand relationship with Jesus Christ.
It's also a way to bilk believers out of their money and to run an illegitimate form of government.
This is simple slander of the vast majority of religous people.
Yes, there are places, especially in the Muslim world, where religion is coerced upon people in the form of government. But in my country, we believe in the separation of church and state and the vast majority of religous people adhere to this rule (mainly because they don't want the government telling people what they can or can't do in their spiritual life).
And who are you to tell people how they should spend their money? People have the right to spend their money in a way that reflects their beliefs. Just because you don't happen to believe the same things doesn't mean those people are being "bilked".
There are a lot of religous people in this world, and if you would step down off your high horse of asserted intellectual superiority, you might realize that some of them are pretty bright people who have their own reasons for believing something different than you do. In a nutshell, your "argument" seems to be "religous people think differently than I do, therefore they must be idiots". Perhaps some humility is in order?
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games.
He was comparing American knowledge workers with Indian (and other) knowledge workers. Indian knowledge workers are being exploited in a way that will probably double their standard of living in a few years. I'm sure they're very happy to continue being exploited in this fashion.
My great-uncle, on the other hand, claims that my political views have been trashed from listening to too much NPR, yet he thinks of the Washington Times as fair-and-balanced journalism, and calls any political dissent "liberal."
I bet that he had much less problem with political dissent when Clinton was in office.
I would just like to point out that even when writing GUI apps, non-GUI C, C++ and Java libraries can be compiled and called from Cocoa pretty much as is. So if you have most of your business logic (Model) already in one of these languages, and factored out of the GUI, you pretty much just need to build the GUI in Interface Builder (View) and write a thin layer of Objective C "glue" code to connect it to your library (Controller). The new Controller classes in Panther mean even less glue code is necessary.
So even when building a Cocoa GUI app, you can still get a lot of reuse from existing libraries.
Does anyone have a running total of fines/judgements against Microsoft? $2B here, $0.5B there, sooner or later share holders might notice and ask that MS stop engaging in practices that throw away the shareholders money. Every billion paid out is less for future dividends.
It's not so cheap to implement sotrage of that level. To expand it requires not getting another disk, but getting more disks, hardware to hold those disks, a tape backup unit capable of backing up ALL the storage in one shot, tapes to hold those backups, and space in the storage facility (we actually get that last one for free).
We don't just get to drive to CompUSA, drop $200 and boost the disk space. It takes thousands of dollars, not to mention staff time spent planning and implementing the changeover to result in no loss of service or data.
I think what Google has probably achieved is finding away to keep the marginal cost of adding capacity to something close to the cost of the added drives. This is the company that doesn't even bother to pull dead blades out of the rack, as it's cheaper to just slap a new one in somewhere else. They've probably figured out a way to throw more disks into the system with almost no manual work or thought required.
As many have already said, though, the greater issue is probably handling the added bandwidth.
They're probably also counting on storage prices to continue falling in accordance with Moore's law, of course.
I believe it is a bit simplistic to say that Freedom is THE thing the USA was founded on, it was an important aspect, but in the end, balance to get a state that worked for as big a part of its citizens as possible, and finding the right balance between individualism and the common good were at least as important if not more important.
You did not mention the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is very much about freedom and individualism. Of course, it did not come right away, but I still think it needs to considered a core part of the founding of the U.S.A.
I just want to congratulate you on the amount of thought and discussion you have been able to generate with your sig. You've gotten people to stop and think, always an achievement in this day and age:).
As a quick answer to all of your questions, the distinguishing characteristic of a Christian is that he or she professes to be a follower of Christ. Close after that is the belief that the primary revelation about Christ is the Gospels.
From there, you branch out to the rest of the Biblical texts, as Christ clearly presented his teachings in their context.
However, mindlessly following any religious "leader" is not advocated or condoned by any of this. The biggest counter example is Christ himself. His harshest words and fiercest anger were directed toward the religous "leaders" of his day.
So, in short, rejecting false religion, false teaching, and corrupt leaders is very much an integral part of Christian belief.
The difference between science and religion is that one follows logic while the other follow faith.
In general, scientists take it on faith that God is the wrong answer to every question. As its generally practiced, science starts from a foundation of natural materialism.
Whether scientific or religous, logic always requires some assumptions as a starting point. This does not distinguish science from religion. The nature of the starting point for discussion is what distinguishes science from religion.
You cannot prove or show in some logical manner that praying, for example, means anything. Does God reward those that pray? Not really.
This assumes the reason to pray is that you are a selfish, greedy, self centered individual who sees prayer as a way to get stuff you want. A more enlightened view might be that prayer is a way to learn more about and draw closer to God.
For example, a religious person cannot question why a priest/cleric must always be male*
Which explains why there is no controversy or differences of opinion about this issue among religous people. Furthermore, you need to seriously expand your exposure to the range of religous thought in the world.
Something like a functional flavor of Alphora Dataphor integrated at the systems level since the installer could be the answer perhaps; while this would be a tall order for the near future, having it in sight for, say, twenty years in the future while implementing it step by step -- for example, first the D-compliant RDBMS interfaces, then an upwards- and downwards-scalable RDBMS engine with a quasi-SQL interface for backwards compatibility, then integration in the OS, then POSIX interoperability --, would give us the initiative and reduce MS to yet another platform direction change in the future, while we'd be able to keep our perfect POSIX backwards compatibility.
I have utterly no idea what of this means. Can you (or someone else more clueful than I) explain it again in a manner assuming less cluefulness on the part of the reader?
Tests are good, but testing is no substitute for static checking;
Static checking is no substitute for testing. If the tradeoff is more and better tests versus static checking by the compiler, it's a good tradeoff. True, testing probably won't exercise every line of code, but static checking doesn't exercise ANY code. The user of your app won't care one whit that the program compiled without errors if it doesn't do what she wants.
This is just vapid. Not that there's anything wrong with criticizing the U.S. or the U.S. government. You just don't substantiate your off the cuff remarks with anything resembling analysis, facts, or reasoned argument. You present a "well, we all know that..." non-argument. Just one example:
Note that by the second definition, some in the U.S. government are guilty of terrorism against the citizens of th U.S.
No examples, no sources, no reasoning. Just a "well, we all know..." (wink wink). This is what gets +5 Insightful on Slashdot now? *sigh*
No other DRM system actually lets you choose your player.
This is true right now, but it's important to distinguish technical realities and business realities. It's a current business reality that only iPods support AAC encoded music with the DRM (FairPlay?) used by Apple. But I don't think this format is less open as a technical standard than WinDRM, and the business reality could change if other music player vendors decide they want to be compatible with the iTunes music store.
If I'm wrong about this, please anyone correct me.
So, by removing some functionality of the OS, how will this help consumers in general?
Because PC vendors will be able to configure the default software installs on their PCs, or offer custom configurations by customer request. MS uses their power to take choices away from customers.
Just because you designed your engine to run only if there's an air conditioning unit... doesn't mean you've redefined a car.. you just fucked up your engine.
Great quote for anytime MS tries to justify their "innovation" strategies. Great.sig material.
Sheesh, this isn't even Read The Fine Article, but just Read The Fine Slashdot-Post!
'The problem is not a lack of highly educated workers,' said Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. 'The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S. Costs are driving outsourcing, not the quality of American schools.'"
This quote is NOT from Carly Fiorina, but Scott Kirwin. HP's CEO DID NOT SAY THAT AMERICAN IT PROFESSIONALS SHOULD WORK FOR MINIMUM WAGE. What she said is quite flameworthy in and of itself, but not even being able to read a short blurb like this demonstrates a serious reading disability. Get some help.
I think you missed my point entirely. From the termite's viewpoint, he is surmising that there must be a designer that greatly surpasses his own capabilities, who designed the thing he is eating. It is too structured, too orderly to be explained otherwise.
Similarly, a human looking at the universe in all it's intricacy, how it seems so finally tuned and constructed, may infer a designer far beyond his own abilities, too.
The termite, it turns out, would be right. How can you know with certainty that the human is not right, too?
Slashdot Mirror
It's still the same. At least morally. Do something for no good reason other than a threat.
The Gospels are not a threat, they're an offer to help. Jesus basically said "All of you have gotten yourselves into a really bad situation that you can't escape by yourselves. Trust me, follow me. I can help."
No strings attached, no fine print, no conditions of any kind. Just an unconditional promise.
Where's the threat in that?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Trust is built from a person's knowledge and experience with someone else. (Your parents, friends, teachers, etc.) Faith, on the otherhand, is at best only second-hand trust for most people.
Christians believe that they do have a personal, first hand relationship with Jesus Christ.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
It's also a way to bilk believers out of their money and to run an illegitimate form of government.
This is simple slander of the vast majority of religous people.
Yes, there are places, especially in the Muslim world, where religion is coerced upon people in the form of government. But in my country, we believe in the separation of church and state and the vast majority of religous people adhere to this rule (mainly because they don't want the government telling people what they can or can't do in their spiritual life).
And who are you to tell people how they should spend their money? People have the right to spend their money in a way that reflects their beliefs. Just because you don't happen to believe the same things doesn't mean those people are being "bilked".
There are a lot of religous people in this world, and if you would step down off your high horse of asserted intellectual superiority, you might realize that some of them are pretty bright people who have their own reasons for believing something different than you do. In a nutshell, your "argument" seems to be "religous people think differently than I do, therefore they must be idiots". Perhaps some humility is in order?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games.
He was comparing American knowledge workers with Indian (and other) knowledge workers. Indian knowledge workers are being exploited in a way that will probably double their standard of living in a few years. I'm sure they're very happy to continue being exploited in this fashion.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
My great-uncle, on the other hand, claims that my political views have been trashed from listening to too much NPR, yet he thinks of the Washington Times as fair-and-balanced journalism, and calls any political dissent "liberal."
I bet that he had much less problem with political dissent when Clinton was in office.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Thank goodness pbs/npr, bbc and newspapers still exist.
Kinda like how the BBC faithfully informed us that U.S. forces were nowhere near Baghdad, shortly before Baghdad fell?
Kinda like how an independent panel found the charges made by Andrew Gilligan against Tony Blair to be pretty much groundless?
Kinda like how there's a website devoted solely to unconvering BBC bias?
I think pbs/npr/bbc/etc. like to think their lack of popularity proves their lack of bias, but I'm not yet convinced.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
I would just like to point out that even when writing GUI apps, non-GUI C, C++ and Java libraries can be compiled and called from Cocoa pretty much as is. So if you have most of your business logic (Model) already in one of these languages, and factored out of the GUI, you pretty much just need to build the GUI in Interface Builder (View) and write a thin layer of Objective C "glue" code to connect it to your library (Controller). The new Controller classes in Panther mean even less glue code is necessary.
So even when building a Cocoa GUI app, you can still get a lot of reuse from existing libraries.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Does anyone have a running total of fines/judgements against Microsoft? $2B here, $0.5B there, sooner or later share holders might notice and ask that MS stop engaging in practices that throw away the shareholders money. Every billion paid out is less for future dividends.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
It's not so cheap to implement sotrage of that level. To expand it requires not getting another disk, but getting more disks, hardware to hold those disks, a tape backup unit capable of backing up ALL the storage in one shot, tapes to hold those backups, and space in the storage facility (we actually get that last one for free).
We don't just get to drive to CompUSA, drop $200 and boost the disk space. It takes thousands of dollars, not to mention staff time spent planning and implementing the changeover to result in no loss of service or data.
I think what Google has probably achieved is finding away to keep the marginal cost of adding capacity to something close to the cost of the added drives. This is the company that doesn't even bother to pull dead blades out of the rack, as it's cheaper to just slap a new one in somewhere else. They've probably figured out a way to throw more disks into the system with almost no manual work or thought required.
As many have already said, though, the greater issue is probably handling the added bandwidth.
They're probably also counting on storage prices to continue falling in accordance with Moore's law, of course.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
As a suburbanite, I'm all for "tearing down, redesigning, and rebuilding 8,778 square miles of urban sprawl."
Let's start over and make something worthwhile.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
I believe it is a bit simplistic to say that Freedom is THE thing the USA was founded on, it was an important aspect, but in the end, balance to get a state that worked for as big a part of its citizens as possible, and finding the right balance between individualism and the common good were at least as important if not more important.
You did not mention the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is very much about freedom and individualism. Of course, it did not come right away, but I still think it needs to considered a core part of the founding of the U.S.A.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
I just want to congratulate you on the amount of thought and discussion you have been able to generate with your sig. You've gotten people to stop and think, always an achievement in this day and age :).
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
As a quick answer to all of your questions, the distinguishing characteristic of a Christian is that he or she professes to be a follower of Christ. Close after that is the belief that the primary revelation about Christ is the Gospels.
From there, you branch out to the rest of the Biblical texts, as Christ clearly presented his teachings in their context.
However, mindlessly following any religious "leader" is not advocated or condoned by any of this. The biggest counter example is Christ himself. His harshest words and fiercest anger were directed toward the religous "leaders" of his day.
So, in short, rejecting false religion, false teaching, and corrupt leaders is very much an integral part of Christian belief.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
The difference between science and religion is that one follows logic while the other follow faith.
In general, scientists take it on faith that God is the wrong answer to every question. As its generally practiced, science starts from a foundation of natural materialism.
Whether scientific or religous, logic always requires some assumptions as a starting point. This does not distinguish science from religion. The nature of the starting point for discussion is what distinguishes science from religion.
You cannot prove or show in some logical manner that praying, for example, means anything. Does God reward those that pray? Not really.
This assumes the reason to pray is that you are a selfish, greedy, self centered individual who sees prayer as a way to get stuff you want. A more enlightened view might be that prayer is a way to learn more about and draw closer to God.
For example, a religious person cannot question why a priest/cleric must always be male*
Which explains why there is no controversy or differences of opinion about this issue among religous people. Furthermore, you need to seriously expand your exposure to the range of religous thought in the world.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Something like a functional flavor of Alphora Dataphor integrated at the systems level since the installer could be the answer perhaps; while this would be a tall order for the near future, having it in sight for, say, twenty years in the future while implementing it step by step -- for example, first the D-compliant RDBMS interfaces, then an upwards- and downwards-scalable RDBMS engine with a quasi-SQL interface for backwards compatibility, then integration in the OS, then POSIX interoperability --, would give us the initiative and reduce MS to yet another platform direction change in the future, while we'd be able to keep our perfect POSIX backwards compatibility.
I have utterly no idea what of this means. Can you (or someone else more clueful than I) explain it again in a manner assuming less cluefulness on the part of the reader?
Thanks,
-jimbo
Tests are good, but testing is no substitute for static checking;
Static checking is no substitute for testing. If the tradeoff is more and better tests versus static checking by the compiler, it's a good tradeoff. True, testing probably won't exercise every line of code, but static checking doesn't exercise ANY code. The user of your app won't care one whit that the program compiled without errors if it doesn't do what she wants.
Best,
-jimbo
This is just vapid. Not that there's anything wrong with criticizing the U.S. or the U.S. government. You just don't substantiate your off the cuff remarks with anything resembling analysis, facts, or reasoned argument. You present a "well, we all know that..." non-argument. Just one example:
Note that by the second definition, some in the U.S. government are guilty of terrorism against the citizens of th U.S.
No examples, no sources, no reasoning. Just a "well, we all know..." (wink wink). This is what gets +5 Insightful on Slashdot now? *sigh*
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
No other DRM system actually lets you choose your player.
This is true right now, but it's important to distinguish technical realities and business realities. It's a current business reality that only iPods support AAC encoded music with the DRM (FairPlay?) used by Apple. But I don't think this format is less open as a technical standard than WinDRM, and the business reality could change if other music player vendors decide they want to be compatible with the iTunes music store.
If I'm wrong about this, please anyone correct me.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
So, by removing some functionality of the OS, how will this help consumers in general?
Because PC vendors will be able to configure the default software installs on their PCs, or offer custom configurations by customer request. MS uses their power to take choices away from customers.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Just because you designed your engine to run only if there's an air conditioning unit... doesn't mean you've redefined a car.. you just fucked up your engine.
Great quote for anytime MS tries to justify their "innovation" strategies. Great .sig material.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
A large fine will barely dent their $50b cash reserves :-/
Unless it's a fine for $50B :-).
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Those Republicans are still there and the economy sucks.
Uh, read a newspaper. Highest quarterly GDP growth in 20 years. Highest increase in manufacturing activity in 20 years.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
Sheesh, this isn't even Read The Fine Article, but just Read The Fine Slashdot-Post!
'The problem is not a lack of highly educated workers,' said Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America. 'The problem is a lack of highly educated workers willing to work for the minimum wage or lower in the U.S. Costs are driving outsourcing, not the quality of American schools.'"
This quote is NOT from Carly Fiorina, but Scott Kirwin. HP's CEO DID NOT SAY THAT AMERICAN IT PROFESSIONALS SHOULD WORK FOR MINIMUM WAGE. What she said is quite flameworthy in and of itself, but not even being able to read a short blurb like this demonstrates a serious reading disability. Get some help.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
seriously do we really need a story every time ITMS reaches a nice number? 10 million, 20 million, 25 million...
Yes, so we don't forget all the standard arguments that appear every time one of these stories is posted. :)
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
I think you missed my point entirely. From the termite's viewpoint, he is surmising that there must be a designer that greatly surpasses his own capabilities, who designed the thing he is eating. It is too structured, too orderly to be explained otherwise.
Similarly, a human looking at the universe in all it's intricacy, how it seems so finally tuned and constructed, may infer a designer far beyond his own abilities, too.
The termite, it turns out, would be right. How can you know with certainty that the human is not right, too?
Peace be with you,
-jimbo