if A is defined as "transcendent", then the assertion "A does [not] exist" has no possible evidence, so atheism is a religion:)
the real problem being people using the concept of existence OUTSIDE its scope appying it to God.
Interesting. You don't claim that God exists - instead you claim that the question 'Does God exist' is ill-posed?
Fair enough - and I'd agree with you, for such a definition of 'God' - but you're probably heretical to most Western religions. The Christians I've known would generally claim that God definitely does exist.
Anyway, if God is transcendent then that only means he is not a solution of a nonzero polynomial with rational coefficients. Doesn't mean he can't be said to exist or not exist:-)
Atheists believe a quantum fluxuation or something like that occurred to bring all of this universe into existence from nothing. Now if that is not faith (religion) I don't know what is.
This atheist doesn't believe anything of the sort. I don't know what happens at the very earliest stages of the Big Bang, and I'm not even certain that 'before' is a well-defined direction in spacetime in that region. I simply don't have the necessary quantum theory of gravity to describe such events. But I'm not about to (for example) invent an extra-universal intelligence to fill in this gap in my knowledge, much less start telling people that said extra-universal intelligence has strongly held opinions that coincidentally happen to match my own on who can marry who.
Access has its place. There's a niche between 'Spreadsheet with rather a lot of VLOOKUPs' and 'Hire a professional DBA and developers', and Access fills it nicely.
Problems with both Access and Excel arise when they're pushed beyond what they're supposed to do. Excel workbooks like the one I described earlier ought to be Access databases. Access databases of the sort we hear of on/. - with their many gigabytes size and their multiple concurrent users - well, they ought to be properly maintained databases on their own server.
But however bad an Access database, at least there's usually only one of them. All the mess is in one place, and however badly designed the database at least it was designed, normally by one person, to some sort of rational scheme, however misguided. The job of fixing such a mess may be daunting but it can be done.
Where you find one awful Excel database - for a database is what it is when it gets this bad, sheets upon sheets VLOOKUPing each other, the same data presented a dozen different ways for ignorance of what a pivot table is for - you then discover an entire ecology of more horrible workbooks, a web of interdependencies and contradictory cross-references. Which rely on people taking copies, emailing them around, and pasting things back in. These things evolve. No one person comprehends the whole structure. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
It gets worse... Excel 2007 has a row limit numbered in the millions
This fills me with dread. Hitherto, when you reached the 65k row limit, you knew you were doing something wrong. You'd normally rethink what you were doing, reorganise your data in a sane way. Maybe you'd even work out what that 'Access' program was for.
What horrors await when clueless users carry on doing their business all the way down to a million rows, I fear to imagine. I've already got a 120MB spreadsheet someone made which actually contained about 300K of data, a masterpiece of duplication upon duplication. Now Microsoft offer these people a million rows.
That which infuriates me the most about the tech sector is corporate executives building wealth upon the backs of laboring engineers. I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself. When the company is not making record profits, it is an engineering problem. When we are raking in the dough, it is an executive success.
Congratulations, comrade, you have rediscovered what Marx knew a hundred years ago. Welcome to the class war. May I now direct you to the Communist Manifesto?
OpenOffice.org produces perfectly good.doc files, but I find they're rather large. If someone makes a trivial change to using Word and mails one back to me, the returned file is far smaller than what I sent.
Not sure why this should be. Hundreds of kilobytes of entirely redundant data? Is it saving multiple restore points or something?
Personally I always print things in Garamond. It's a perfectly tidy, respectable serif font, but just different enough to Times New Roman that it looks distinguished from the crowd. That's never a bad thing, whether you're writing an essay or a CV.
I applied for a job in a large chain store a few years ago and got a question almost exactly like the last one, it was something a long the lines of "Do workers and management have the same interests at heart?" Woe to the blue collar wage worker who has read the first page of the Communist Manifesto, which says "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat."
This is the equivalent of the American immigration question, 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of a subversive organisation?' Has anybody, ever, answered 'yes'? Maybe Nelson Mandela or somebody?
The planet's biosphere won't survive for any period of time in the in space between two stars - the whole thing will freeze over to a level you couldn't believe.
By that stage, after a couple of billion years of civilisation, the entire land surface of the planet will likely be built up; our chief environmental problem would be getting shot of waste heat from all those fusion plants.
And supposing that by some long shot it WERE possible: where are we going to magically get the skills to move the planet without years and years of experience moving smaller things (like spaceships)?
Buy an inertialess, reactionless drive from the Outsiders. Expect to pay through the nose, of course.
If you want to save humanity, dig a hole, don't plan to live some where you didn't evolve...
Living where you didn't evolve is how new species come about. You can dig a hole and be a coelacanth if you like. I'd rather take to the stars and be an amphibian.
That is until another 3,000+ Americans die because of another Muslim attack.
Exactly how large a military budget is required to scramble eight fighters to shoot down four airliners? Because that's what it would have taken to prevent the last incident. Occupying foreign nations, on the other hand, does nothing to prevent such actions. Imagine the scene in the US terror cell's safe-house. 'Oh, brothers - our plan to destroy the World Trade Centre is well advanced, our pilots trained, our tickets bought, but alas! the infidels have occupied Baghdad! We must now go and fight them over there, for certainly we cannot now fight them here.' Yeah, I don't see it either.
Did you know that we spend less of our money as a percentage of GDP on military now then we ever have in our history as a nation since WWII?
I should hope so too. From 1945 to 1990 the US was engaged in a global struggle for dominance against a rival superpower, and had to maintain a large and intimidating armed force in order to appear credible compared to the Soviet military. And in WWII the US was actively fighting two major rivals simultaneously.
Whereas right now the US is fighting, er... a bunch of guys with AK-47s and home-made bombs. And the occasional lunatic in a suicide belt.
If these clowns are an enemy that calls for Cold War levels of expenditure, then wow, were the Russians ever wasting their money on all those planes and rockets.
"NASA says the extra engine doubles the chance that something will fail". Wow! Applying that logic would really simplify most of our jobs. RAID? Don't waste your money; all those extra disks just increase the odds of failure.
THE POINT: you miss it.
Rocket engines aren't redundant, like disks in an array are. If a disk fails, you can replace it, and reconstruct the data from the redundant copies on the other disks in the array. If a rocket engine in a cluster fails, the launch aborts, and if you're very, very lucky the crew survive.
They are 'renegade' engineers, and they are 'bucking' their bosses.
If I remember correctly, the original 'renegades' were Christians who had joined the Muslim Barbary pirates and gone into business as white-slavers. For the metaphor to hold, these engineers ought to have left NASA and gone to work for a rival. If any ex-NASA people are now at SpaceX, they might well be considerer renegades, but not if they're still within the organisation.
Where are these revolutionary games that were supposed to change the face of console gaming? Where are these games that have gameplay mechanics never seen before?
They typically get dismissed as non-games, or as Nintendo abandoning the hardcore gamer, where 'hardcore' is defined as 'FPS'.
I had 'Eire' down as somewhat archaic - a usage you tend to see in old atlases in libraries and so on - but not strictly wrong. As it turns out, as with so many things in Ireland, it's been a bit political over the years.
Excessive adherence to the officially correct rules seems to lead to some awful sentences, though:
Lord Rooker, a Government minister, said that the Regulations would: "acknowledge the special place that the island of Ireland and the Republic of Ireland occupy in the political life of Northern Ireland". Responding, Lord Glentoran suggested that Lord Rooker in fact "meant to say that [the draft Regulations recognise] the special place that Ireland occupies in the political life of Northern Ireland." Agreeing with Lord Glentoran's observation, Lord Rooker responded:
'I still cannot get used to the fact that we do not refer to the Republic of Ireland. I stumbled over that part of my brief because I saw "Ireland". Yes, I did mean the special role that Ireland plays in the political life of Northern Ireland.'
'The special role that Ireland plays in the political life of Northern Ireland'? That's just awful. Technically correct, but... ugh.
And at any rate, if using 'Eire' in English is so terribly wrong, what's it still doing in the Constitution? 'We, the people of Éire', it says.
You mean Eire and Polska I guess. Or as most of us know then, Ireland and Poland.
There is actually a good reason to use the Irish name here: it makes it clear that you refer specifically to the Republic of Ireland, not to the island of Ireland as a whole.
Really, it's the cosmologists. If it is not hydrogen or helium, it's a metal. I am not really sure why - maybe because there is a fair amount of lithium, and that is a metal.
Hydrogen and helium are primordial elements, formed in the Big Bang. Anything heavier than helium was made in stars - hence the cut-off there. Why the word 'metals' in particular came to be used to describe heavy elements I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Like, say, Wikipedia.
Interesting. You don't claim that God exists - instead you claim that the question 'Does God exist' is ill-posed?
Fair enough - and I'd agree with you, for such a definition of 'God' - but you're probably heretical to most Western religions. The Christians I've known would generally claim that God definitely does exist.
Anyway, if God is transcendent then that only means he is not a solution of a nonzero polynomial with rational coefficients. Doesn't mean he can't be said to exist or not exist :-)
This atheist doesn't believe anything of the sort. I don't know what happens at the very earliest stages of the Big Bang, and I'm not even certain that 'before' is a well-defined direction in spacetime in that region. I simply don't have the necessary quantum theory of gravity to describe such events. But I'm not about to (for example) invent an extra-universal intelligence to fill in this gap in my knowledge, much less start telling people that said extra-universal intelligence has strongly held opinions that coincidentally happen to match my own on who can marry who.
Oh God yes.
Access has its place. There's a niche between 'Spreadsheet with rather a lot of VLOOKUPs' and 'Hire a professional DBA and developers', and Access fills it nicely.
Problems with both Access and Excel arise when they're pushed beyond what they're supposed to do. Excel workbooks like the one I described earlier ought to be Access databases. Access databases of the sort we hear of on /. - with their many gigabytes size and their multiple concurrent users - well, they ought to be properly maintained databases on their own server.
But however bad an Access database, at least there's usually only one of them. All the mess is in one place, and however badly designed the database at least it was designed, normally by one person, to some sort of rational scheme, however misguided. The job of fixing such a mess may be daunting but it can be done.
Where you find one awful Excel database - for a database is what it is when it gets this bad, sheets upon sheets VLOOKUPing each other, the same data presented a dozen different ways for ignorance of what a pivot table is for - you then discover an entire ecology of more horrible workbooks, a web of interdependencies and contradictory cross-references. Which rely on people taking copies, emailing them around, and pasting things back in. These things evolve. No one person comprehends the whole structure. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.
This fills me with dread. Hitherto, when you reached the 65k row limit, you knew you were doing something wrong. You'd normally rethink what you were doing, reorganise your data in a sane way. Maybe you'd even work out what that 'Access' program was for.
What horrors await when clueless users carry on doing their business all the way down to a million rows, I fear to imagine. I've already got a 120MB spreadsheet someone made which actually contained about 300K of data, a masterpiece of duplication upon duplication. Now Microsoft offer these people a million rows.
Congratulations, comrade, you have rediscovered what Marx knew a hundred years ago. Welcome to the class war. May I now direct you to the Communist Manifesto?
Not sure why this should be. Hundreds of kilobytes of entirely redundant data? Is it saving multiple restore points or something?
Personally I always print things in Garamond. It's a perfectly tidy, respectable serif font, but just different enough to Times New Roman that it looks distinguished from the crowd. That's never a bad thing, whether you're writing an essay or a CV.
This is the equivalent of the American immigration question, 'Are you now or have you ever been a member of a subversive organisation?' Has anybody, ever, answered 'yes'? Maybe Nelson Mandela or somebody?
I hear they were both in Reno at the time.
By that stage, after a couple of billion years of civilisation, the entire land surface of the planet will likely be built up; our chief environmental problem would be getting shot of waste heat from all those fusion plants.
And supposing that by some long shot it WERE possible: where are we going to magically get the skills to move the planet without years and years of experience moving smaller things (like spaceships)?
Buy an inertialess, reactionless drive from the Outsiders. Expect to pay through the nose, of course.
Living where you didn't evolve is how new species come about. You can dig a hole and be a coelacanth if you like. I'd rather take to the stars and be an amphibian.
Exactly how large a military budget is required to scramble eight fighters to shoot down four airliners? Because that's what it would have taken to prevent the last incident. Occupying foreign nations, on the other hand, does nothing to prevent such actions. Imagine the scene in the US terror cell's safe-house. 'Oh, brothers - our plan to destroy the World Trade Centre is well advanced, our pilots trained, our tickets bought, but alas! the infidels have occupied Baghdad! We must now go and fight them over there, for certainly we cannot now fight them here.' Yeah, I don't see it either.
I should hope so too. From 1945 to 1990 the US was engaged in a global struggle for dominance against a rival superpower, and had to maintain a large and intimidating armed force in order to appear credible compared to the Soviet military. And in WWII the US was actively fighting two major rivals simultaneously.
Whereas right now the US is fighting, er... a bunch of guys with AK-47s and home-made bombs. And the occasional lunatic in a suicide belt.
If these clowns are an enemy that calls for Cold War levels of expenditure, then wow, were the Russians ever wasting their money on all those planes and rockets.
Most Socialist states are republics, but few are democracies.
Looking at that ship, I'm overcome with a sudden urge to fly it to Pleione to track down Mic Turner.
But they'd probably guess, and guess correctly, since the 747 is likely to be the first one to come to mind when you ask someone to name an airliner.
THE POINT: you miss it.
Rocket engines aren't redundant, like disks in an array are. If a disk fails, you can replace it, and reconstruct the data from the redundant copies on the other disks in the array. If a rocket engine in a cluster fails, the launch aborts, and if you're very, very lucky the crew survive.
If I remember correctly, the original 'renegades' were Christians who had joined the Muslim Barbary pirates and gone into business as white-slavers. For the metaphor to hold, these engineers ought to have left NASA and gone to work for a rival. If any ex-NASA people are now at SpaceX, they might well be considerer renegades, but not if they're still within the organisation.
They typically get dismissed as non-games, or as Nintendo abandoning the hardcore gamer, where 'hardcore' is defined as 'FPS'.
Excessive adherence to the officially correct rules seems to lead to some awful sentences, though:
'The special role that Ireland plays in the political life of Northern Ireland'? That's just awful. Technically correct, but... ugh.
And at any rate, if using 'Eire' in English is so terribly wrong, what's it still doing in the Constitution? 'We, the people of Éire', it says.
There is actually a good reason to use the Irish name here: it makes it clear that you refer specifically to the Republic of Ireland, not to the island of Ireland as a whole.
These are not reasons to get married, I just simply wanted to point out it is not the end of childishness/fun. Obligatory.
Hydrogen and helium are primordial elements, formed in the Big Bang. Anything heavier than helium was made in stars - hence the cut-off there. Why the word 'metals' in particular came to be used to describe heavy elements I don't know.
What a shocking notion...