Good point but the reasoning may be a little flawed. First of all, I'm allowed to treat similar things similarly and different things differently. I wouldn't give my child a choice to do something dangerous. Adults, however, have ownership of their lives and I don't have a right to impose my will on them know matter how much I love or know what's best for them. In a similar vain, the Bible suggests that children who die automatically go to be with God. They aren't given a choice in the matter. Once they become adults, however, God gives them the choice on how they will spend eternity. That's an internally consistent system anyway.
Oh, and I'm not saying Hell is not fire and brimstone. I'm just acknowledging that I don't know what form separation of God takes. Also, just because it's post-biblical (not sure what that means) doesn't mean it's wrong. I just consider that there might be a difference between infinite suffering and endless suffering.
My apologies if I inadvertently built a straw-man. I'll try to clarify. You asked why would God punish someone if he was ignorant of the fact that he was marrying another man's wife. That line of thinking suggests to me that you think there has to be intent in order for something to be wrong. I'm simply suggesting that something can be wrong regardless of intent. The rest of the post was sort of stream of consciousness stuff addressed at no one in particular.
The premise to which you subscribe says that right and wrong are a function of intent (colloquial meaning of intent). I don't agree. While the case of Abilimech and Sarai at first seems murky, it's easy to resolve if you just accept the notion that in the objective universe it's wrong to marry another man's wife, even if you don't know she's married. This is why I have a problem with the philosophy that says do as you will as long as it does no harm to other. It's impossible to know how your actions will affect everything else. God wants obedience because, having a privileged perspective on the universe, he does know what is absolute best. Yeah, I know it makes me sound like a sheep, but everyone is to some degree. I'd just rather cut out all the middlemen.
Actually, that's not how it works. I don't know what Hell is other than separation from God. It's not that God is sending you to Hell; it's that he is not violating your free will by bringing you into forcing Himself on you for all eternity. As far as having the power to forgive all of us, He does have that and exercises it through Christ's redemptive sacrifice.
I wish I had chimed in earlier. I'm an aspiring mathematician, not an engineer but I don't have an issue with the term 'zero-defect'. Engineering is all about tolerances and software engineering is no different. The highly mathematical nature of programming (as opposed to development) tends to obscure this fact. When an engineer designs a bridge they're not concerned about perfection, only how it will perform under a constrained set of conditions. For example, consider the math: the sets of memory locations and registers are finite and therefore pointer arithmetic (the operation of succession) is not closed hence buffer overflows are always theoretically possible on the hardware level. Some languages (C) unfortunately encourage us to forget this, and others (Java, and the.NETs) try to help out by at least simulating an environment in which we have infinite sets of memory (or in purer mathematical terms, pointer arithmetic is closed). The point is, as long as you're coding to the bare metal (and at some point you must) you'll always have the chance of at least this kind of 'defect'. At some point you need to be pragmatic (somewhat antithetical to pure mathematics) and decide when it is good enough: i.e. how many possible inputs should you test and how much peer review do you need? I personally would prefer to see software constructed in the same way as a mathematical proof (especially the peer review part which is a good argument for open source) but I also recognize that this is not compatible with all business models.
You've been able to do this since IE4 via the Quick Search Power Toys Accessory. It has several predefined searches (Yahoo, Lycos, etc.) and you can very easily define others. I created one for Google so that I just type g + the search terms in the address bar as well as one for Google groups (d + search terms). You're right however, Firefox is a more compelling offering.
P.S. Funny anecdote, spyware broke the Quick Search on my IE at work
I'm glad someone finally pointed out this fact to the rest of the masses. There was never a question on whether or not Virtual PC would continue to support Linux, after all, Microsoft would have to add to the code to not support an OS designed to work on any x86 hardware. No, they don't support Linux (which could be looked upon as a reduction in quality since I believe Connectix did support it) but why should they. Furthermore, the Linux support was just a predefined configuration which very few used anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't tried this myself but wouldn't changing the shell value to point to firefox in the registry have the intended effect?
e.g.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS NT\CURRENT VERSION\WINLOGON
Shell = Your_Firefox_Installation_Directory\firefox.exe
I think this is a relevent link to the parent's post.
Hey, I came across your site. You do some nice work.
Good point but the reasoning may be a little flawed. First of all, I'm allowed to treat similar things similarly and different things differently. I wouldn't give my child a choice to do something dangerous. Adults, however, have ownership of their lives and I don't have a right to impose my will on them know matter how much I love or know what's best for them. In a similar vain, the Bible suggests that children who die automatically go to be with God. They aren't given a choice in the matter. Once they become adults, however, God gives them the choice on how they will spend eternity. That's an internally consistent system anyway. Oh, and I'm not saying Hell is not fire and brimstone. I'm just acknowledging that I don't know what form separation of God takes. Also, just because it's post-biblical (not sure what that means) doesn't mean it's wrong. I just consider that there might be a difference between infinite suffering and endless suffering.
My apologies if I inadvertently built a straw-man. I'll try to clarify. You asked why would God punish someone if he was ignorant of the fact that he was marrying another man's wife. That line of thinking suggests to me that you think there has to be intent in order for something to be wrong. I'm simply suggesting that something can be wrong regardless of intent. The rest of the post was sort of stream of consciousness stuff addressed at no one in particular.
The premise to which you subscribe says that right and wrong are a function of intent (colloquial meaning of intent). I don't agree. While the case of Abilimech and Sarai at first seems murky, it's easy to resolve if you just accept the notion that in the objective universe it's wrong to marry another man's wife, even if you don't know she's married. This is why I have a problem with the philosophy that says do as you will as long as it does no harm to other. It's impossible to know how your actions will affect everything else. God wants obedience because, having a privileged perspective on the universe, he does know what is absolute best. Yeah, I know it makes me sound like a sheep, but everyone is to some degree. I'd just rather cut out all the middlemen.
Actually, that's not how it works. I don't know what Hell is other than separation from God. It's not that God is sending you to Hell; it's that he is not violating your free will by bringing you into forcing Himself on you for all eternity. As far as having the power to forgive all of us, He does have that and exercises it through Christ's redemptive sacrifice.
I'm running IE 4.01, 5, 5.5, and 6 on one XP box as well as Netscape (4, 6 and 7), Opera 7, and Firefox 0.x
I wish I had chimed in earlier. I'm an aspiring mathematician, not an engineer but I don't have an issue with the term 'zero-defect'. Engineering is all about tolerances and software engineering is no different. The highly mathematical nature of programming (as opposed to development) tends to obscure this fact. When an engineer designs a bridge they're not concerned about perfection, only how it will perform under a constrained set of conditions. For example, consider the math: the sets of memory locations and registers are finite and therefore pointer arithmetic (the operation of succession) is not closed hence buffer overflows are always theoretically possible on the hardware level. Some languages (C) unfortunately encourage us to forget this, and others (Java, and the .NETs) try to help out by at least simulating an environment in which we have infinite sets of memory (or in purer mathematical terms, pointer arithmetic is closed). The point is, as long as you're coding to the bare metal (and at some point you must) you'll always have the chance of at least this kind of 'defect'. At some point you need to be pragmatic (somewhat antithetical to pure mathematics) and decide when it is good enough: i.e. how many possible inputs should you test and how much peer review do you need? I personally would prefer to see software constructed in the same way as a mathematical proof (especially the peer review part which is a good argument for open source) but I also recognize that this is not compatible with all business models.
P.S. Funny anecdote, spyware broke the Quick Search on my IE at work
In that case, couldn't one just edit their host file to map the domain names to the appropriate IP address?
I'm glad someone finally pointed out this fact to the rest of the masses. There was never a question on whether or not Virtual PC would continue to support Linux, after all, Microsoft would have to add to the code to not support an OS designed to work on any x86 hardware. No, they don't support Linux (which could be looked upon as a reduction in quality since I believe Connectix did support it) but why should they. Furthermore, the Linux support was just a predefined configuration which very few used anyway.
Windows XP: netstat -o