Do you have any proof that the whole population as a whole would be less intelligent without religion? You know, there are plenty of psychopaths, schizophrenics, paranoids and God complex sufferers (though I'm not totally sure if they feel they're suffering) who are also quite intelligent.
It doesn't have anything to do with the smoothness of time. People have been doing differentiations and integrations over continuous-time functions for centuries. When you're talking about real physics with Plank time and distance limitations, the GP's 1 x 10^-99999m/s difference might make sense.
But the Newtonian model of physics usually just assume time and space to be continuous - e.g. to get the distance from a velocity function you do integration not summation over Plank-time steps. And the math still works. The reason it works is because it is mathematically ok to get a finite ratio over infinitesimal numbers. It doesn't work for the GP's scenario because the GP's number, 10^-99999m/s, is just finite, not infinitesimal. The GP is thinking differentiation and integration in discrete-time terms, and that wouldn't work.
As an open source JavaScript developer I hate IE and Microsoft just as much as the next guy. But if you're going to bash Microsoft, please keep to the facts.
The author was *deprived* of his freedoms, and same for the legitimate users of his open source software. This is not the same as steal, however - the asshole who filed the patent does not gain the same kind of freedom as the open source community and the original author.
There was a 2.5XRAM recommendation for swap files in early versions of SiSoft Sandra. Many hardware junkies took it as some kind of universal truth after using the benchmarking software.
You, sir, are a masochist. You love being ripped off by your ISP so much you scream for more.
You can have an uncapped, unlimited, 24x7 symmetric 100Mbps link in Hong Kong for just $268 HKD per month. Which is just about $35 USD, and pretty much everyone uses BitTorrent here. Go Verizon $130+ USD/month for FIOS and you still won't get anywhere near that. How can you be not paying enough?
Oh, and don't bother to pull the population density argument on me. There are metropolitan areas in your country that are denser and richer than the place I'm sitting at.
The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
The FSM bit is still relevant because it is yet another religion with yet another theory of creation. There have been millions of religions and variations of religions and everyone is free to make one like L. Ron Hubbard did - there are so many versions of creationism anyway so why are you thinking the specific version that your specific church told you is the real one? What kind of substantiations do you have that you're so sure your version of creationism is more real than Xenu? More real than mountain, midget and trees? More real than Pangu in Chinese myth? More real than the Greek's? More real than the Indian's?
The FSM is an eye opener for those people who don't bother to contemplate possibilities - what if we take into consideration of so many versions of creationism there are and stretch our imaginations a bit? We can get to a midget, a mountain and some trees and it still won't stand out as the most ridiculous one when compared to the other religions. If you're searching for an answer to the beginning of the universe, and you stuck yourself at the first theory you heard, then you're not even trying.
And who are those people who are actually trying that, and trying much harder than you? Scientists.
As a fervent believer of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'm still campaigning for teaching creationism in science classes. Not just a random version of creationism though - but the one true version.
The world started from a mountain, a midget, and some trees.
No. If that's the case, they made the mistake when they hired "web developers" who had to depend on Dreamweaver and couldn't understand the code. The manager's incompetence is no excuse of forcing the others to his level of incompetence.
And, if you're to argue about the cost and time required to hire a competent developer - competent developers usually don't cost that much more than an incompetent one, and they won't fuck up your projects. It's well worth the time and effort to find competent developers.
It's ok to blame the users for clogging up your pipes if the pipes you have a already the best in the world.
But it's not ok to do so when there're plenty of people in the likes of France, South Korea, Japan and Hogn Kong who're already having 100Mbps+ at home, at a much cheaper price, and not-so-clogged up.
Most of the educated Chinese population is taught pinyin when they were school children, pinyin is an encoding method of Chinese characters in alphabets and number. So, as long as you have passed primary school in China, you should be able to type in Chinese characters with pinyin in fixed keyboard mobile phones.
If you want to say primary schools aren't that popular in the poorer areas in China, you can just look at the numerous primary schools collapsed in the recent Sichuan earthquake - Sichuan isn't a particularly rich area in China. Basic education is available in most rich and poor areas of China. Finding a primary school in the middle of deserts or high mountains isn't easy, still, but not many people live in those places. If there's a people problem with SMS in China, it would be the mostly illiterate people of the older generation - those who never had a chance to go to school when China was poor, and are not going to school now because they're already old. They can't even read Chinese characters, much less typing in the pinyin. But how are you going to help them if they don't want to go back to school?
Unicode would be nice, yes. We have two different character sets for Chinese characters here - big5 for Traditional Chinese and GB for Simplified Chinese. Pain in the ass if you received an SMS from a person in Hong Kong who uses big5 - the message appears garbled because your phone decodes it in GB. But we can still fallback to English in that case.
Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?
You're wrong on so many levels.
First, there are many Chinese (even 1% out of 1.4 billion is still 14 million) who can perfectly talk and understand English. So, sending an English SMS message to them is perfectly fine.
Then, if the poor Chinese is confined to a phone with old styled 0-9*# keyboards, or QWERTY keyboards, he can type Chinese via input methods - basically he'll key in code sequences representing Chinese characters. If he switches the keyboard back to alphanumeric mode he can still type alphanumeric characters.
Finally, a Chinese with a iPhone and similar large touchscreen phones can just write Chinese characters on the screen. Again, typing alphanumeric characters can be accomplished by a simple mode switch.
Oh, and don't tell me Apple hasn't started selling iPhone in China yet. You can either buy that form Hong Kong (it's even unlocked out of the box), or from the black market.
When HTTP doesn't give you an error, it returns the code 200 and you'll get the content type and most of the time, content length (and some other stuff) in the header. 2 linebreaks later you have the contents. The contents may be gzipped if the header says so.
So, a geek who can view the web by parsing HTTP, implied he could cut the HTTP data up and parse all the usual content types (text/html, text/plain, image/jpeg, etc.) in his head, and thus, is a stronger geek than the geek who parses only HTML.
But that's nothing. I can demodulate Wi-Fi signals in my head, parse them to 802.3 data frames, parse them to IP packets, parse them to TCP sessions, parse them to HTTP conversations, parse whatever data in the HTTP conversation, parse the HTML and CSS to a DOM tree and related datastructures, parse the DOM tree to get the graphical representation of it, execute the JavaScript with the JIT compiler in my head, and send back the response with a butterfly. I do all that, while running ten miles to the R&D lab, ten feet in the snow, uphill, both ways. Now, that's what we call a real geek.
And this guy next to me, he doesn't need to do any of that, he created the universe. He knows every possible outcome in any time and any place, so before the web server even began tho send an HTTP response, he already knew what the web server is trying to send, and intent of the web developers who made the web page, and the location of that decayed butterfly who flapped its wings which doomed the web developers into becoming geeks when they were 10.
If you buy a handset in China you'll get the same keyboard anyone in the west gets - it may be QWERTY, most of the time 0-9*#, and a writing pad if you got the iPhone 3G from Hong Kong.
iPhone's writing pad is obivous - you write Chinese characters with your hand on it, and switch back to the keyboard if you need to input alphanumeric characters. For the fixed keyboards you get something called "input methods" - basically you input a few keys according to some pattern (e.g. you type in the word's pinyin, or an encoded form of the character's structural description), and it will give you a menu of Chinese characters in a menu to choose from. Again, if you need to input alphanumeric characters, there's some key to switch back to alphanumeric mode.
While scientific management has its uses (e.g. optimizing an industrial process), it is definitely not everything about management. Scientific management has received plenty of criticisms in the past when it's overused, especially when the manager pushed it to the extreme and overspecialized the roles of employees - it devastates morale and harms everyone in the long term.
So while I respect the work these guys are doing, the "to automate much of what we call management" bit sounds like an exaggeration to me. After all, a lot of management is about people and communication, and even our best AIs don't have much idea about the latter today.
Why? I think it is totally logically to believe in the flying spaghetti monster. His noodlely appendage touched me one day and I became totally awesome! So awesome, like... a pirate!
Man, I can't even think of why anyone doubts religious faith. People murmuring about science can go fuck themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
For an encore, try proving black is white at the next zebra crossing.
Do you have any proof that the whole population as a whole would be less intelligent without religion? You know, there are plenty of psychopaths, schizophrenics, paranoids and God complex sufferers (though I'm not totally sure if they feel they're suffering) who are also quite intelligent.
It looks like no major financial damage has been done yet.
When someone has finally squandered a few trillion dollars from banks, they'll begin to notice...
It doesn't have anything to do with the smoothness of time. People have been doing differentiations and integrations over continuous-time functions for centuries. When you're talking about real physics with Plank time and distance limitations, the GP's 1 x 10^-99999m/s difference might make sense.
But the Newtonian model of physics usually just assume time and space to be continuous - e.g. to get the distance from a velocity function you do integration not summation over Plank-time steps. And the math still works. The reason it works is because it is mathematically ok to get a finite ratio over infinitesimal numbers. It doesn't work for the GP's scenario because the GP's number, 10^-99999m/s, is just finite, not infinitesimal. The GP is thinking differentiation and integration in discrete-time terms, and that wouldn't work.
Have you ever even learned jQuery?
Have you ever read the project founder's book? It's not from Microsoft Press.
As an open source JavaScript developer I hate IE and Microsoft just as much as the next guy. But if you're going to bash Microsoft, please keep to the facts.
The author was *deprived* of his freedoms, and same for the legitimate users of his open source software. This is not the same as steal, however - the asshole who filed the patent does not gain the same kind of freedom as the open source community and the original author.
There was a 2.5XRAM recommendation for swap files in early versions of SiSoft Sandra. Many hardware junkies took it as some kind of universal truth after using the benchmarking software.
You, sir, are a masochist. You love being ripped off by your ISP so much you scream for more.
You can have an uncapped, unlimited, 24x7 symmetric 100Mbps link in Hong Kong for just $268 HKD per month. Which is just about $35 USD, and pretty much everyone uses BitTorrent here. Go Verizon $130+ USD/month for FIOS and you still won't get anywhere near that. How can you be not paying enough?
Oh, and don't bother to pull the population density argument on me. There are metropolitan areas in your country that are denser and richer than the place I'm sitting at.
From the immortal H2G2:
The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
Yeah, it's been 13 years and Microsoft is still not delivering that.
Duke Nukem Forever will be released before Microsoft delivered the Cairo they promised back in 1995.
You'll have to runs 10 miles in the snow, 10 feet deep, uphill, both ways, to find me and beat me down.
btw the "you" in my post is referring to the "students", not the GP poster.
The FSM bit is still relevant because it is yet another religion with yet another theory of creation. There have been millions of religions and variations of religions and everyone is free to make one like L. Ron Hubbard did - there are so many versions of creationism anyway so why are you thinking the specific version that your specific church told you is the real one? What kind of substantiations do you have that you're so sure your version of creationism is more real than Xenu? More real than mountain, midget and trees? More real than Pangu in Chinese myth? More real than the Greek's? More real than the Indian's?
The FSM is an eye opener for those people who don't bother to contemplate possibilities - what if we take into consideration of so many versions of creationism there are and stretch our imaginations a bit? We can get to a midget, a mountain and some trees and it still won't stand out as the most ridiculous one when compared to the other religions. If you're searching for an answer to the beginning of the universe, and you stuck yourself at the first theory you heard, then you're not even trying.
And who are those people who are actually trying that, and trying much harder than you? Scientists.
As a fervent believer of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I'm still campaigning for teaching creationism in science classes. Not just a random version of creationism though - but the one true version.
The world started from a mountain, a midget, and some trees.
No. If that's the case, they made the mistake when they hired "web developers" who had to depend on Dreamweaver and couldn't understand the code. The manager's incompetence is no excuse of forcing the others to his level of incompetence.
And, if you're to argue about the cost and time required to hire a competent developer - competent developers usually don't cost that much more than an incompetent one, and they won't fuck up your projects. It's well worth the time and effort to find competent developers.
It's ok to blame the users for clogging up your pipes if the pipes you have a already the best in the world.
But it's not ok to do so when there're plenty of people in the likes of France, South Korea, Japan and Hogn Kong who're already having 100Mbps+ at home, at a much cheaper price, and not-so-clogged up.
The new Thinkpads suck, just look at the thick border around X200's screen - ugleeeeeeee.
Most of the educated Chinese population is taught pinyin when they were school children, pinyin is an encoding method of Chinese characters in alphabets and number. So, as long as you have passed primary school in China, you should be able to type in Chinese characters with pinyin in fixed keyboard mobile phones.
If you want to say primary schools aren't that popular in the poorer areas in China, you can just look at the numerous primary schools collapsed in the recent Sichuan earthquake - Sichuan isn't a particularly rich area in China. Basic education is available in most rich and poor areas of China. Finding a primary school in the middle of deserts or high mountains isn't easy, still, but not many people live in those places. If there's a people problem with SMS in China, it would be the mostly illiterate people of the older generation - those who never had a chance to go to school when China was poor, and are not going to school now because they're already old. They can't even read Chinese characters, much less typing in the pinyin. But how are you going to help them if they don't want to go back to school?
Unicode would be nice, yes. We have two different character sets for Chinese characters here - big5 for Traditional Chinese and GB for Simplified Chinese. Pain in the ass if you received an SMS from a person in Hong Kong who uses big5 - the message appears garbled because your phone decodes it in GB. But we can still fallback to English in that case.
Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?
You're wrong on so many levels.
First, there are many Chinese (even 1% out of 1.4 billion is still 14 million) who can perfectly talk and understand English. So, sending an English SMS message to them is perfectly fine.
Then, if the poor Chinese is confined to a phone with old styled 0-9*# keyboards, or QWERTY keyboards, he can type Chinese via input methods - basically he'll key in code sequences representing Chinese characters. If he switches the keyboard back to alphanumeric mode he can still type alphanumeric characters.
Finally, a Chinese with a iPhone and similar large touchscreen phones can just write Chinese characters on the screen. Again, typing alphanumeric characters can be accomplished by a simple mode switch.
Oh, and don't tell me Apple hasn't started selling iPhone in China yet. You can either buy that form Hong Kong (it's even unlocked out of the box), or from the black market.
Hand in your geek card please.
When HTTP doesn't give you an error, it returns the code 200 and you'll get the content type and most of the time, content length (and some other stuff) in the header. 2 linebreaks later you have the contents. The contents may be gzipped if the header says so.
So, a geek who can view the web by parsing HTTP, implied he could cut the HTTP data up and parse all the usual content types (text/html, text/plain, image/jpeg, etc.) in his head, and thus, is a stronger geek than the geek who parses only HTML.
But that's nothing. I can demodulate Wi-Fi signals in my head, parse them to 802.3 data frames, parse them to IP packets, parse them to TCP sessions, parse them to HTTP conversations, parse whatever data in the HTTP conversation, parse the HTML and CSS to a DOM tree and related datastructures, parse the DOM tree to get the graphical representation of it, execute the JavaScript with the JIT compiler in my head, and send back the response with a butterfly. I do all that, while running ten miles to the R&D lab, ten feet in the snow, uphill, both ways. Now, that's what we call a real geek.
And this guy next to me, he doesn't need to do any of that, he created the universe. He knows every possible outcome in any time and any place, so before the web server even began tho send an HTTP response, he already knew what the web server is trying to send, and intent of the web developers who made the web page, and the location of that decayed butterfly who flapped its wings which doomed the web developers into becoming geeks when they were 10.
If you buy a handset in China you'll get the same keyboard anyone in the west gets - it may be QWERTY, most of the time 0-9*#, and a writing pad if you got the iPhone 3G from Hong Kong.
iPhone's writing pad is obivous - you write Chinese characters with your hand on it, and switch back to the keyboard if you need to input alphanumeric characters. For the fixed keyboards you get something called "input methods" - basically you input a few keys according to some pattern (e.g. you type in the word's pinyin, or an encoded form of the character's structural description), and it will give you a menu of Chinese characters in a menu to choose from. Again, if you need to input alphanumeric characters, there's some key to switch back to alphanumeric mode.
If you go to Finland are you forced to send messages only in Finnish? No?
If you go to Poland are you forced to send messages only in Polish? No?
Same for China.
Well, if Sun doesn't like it then we can just call it ECMAScript instead.
By Frederick Winslow Taylor, who pioneered the concept of scientific management.
While scientific management has its uses (e.g. optimizing an industrial process), it is definitely not everything about management. Scientific management has received plenty of criticisms in the past when it's overused, especially when the manager pushed it to the extreme and overspecialized the roles of employees - it devastates morale and harms everyone in the long term.
So while I respect the work these guys are doing, the "to automate much of what we call management" bit sounds like an exaggeration to me. After all, a lot of management is about people and communication, and even our best AIs don't have much idea about the latter today.
Why? I think it is totally logically to believe in the flying spaghetti monster. His noodlely appendage touched me one day and I became totally awesome! So awesome, like... a pirate!
Man, I can't even think of why anyone doubts religious faith. People murmuring about science can go fuck themselves.