Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Lot of hardcore unix guys pronounce it "et-see" because you sound retarded saying, "It's in "et-cetera-slash-init-period-d" rather than "et-see init-dee". Same reason people transliterate Ess-Que-Ell into "Sequel"...It's quicker, and it sounds better.
In my mind I always label people who insist on saying it exactly like it's written down as amatures, or anal retentive, though people who try to come up with ways of saying things like "url" make my teeth hurt.
In the end though, this sort of corporate behavior is hugely annoying. Microsoft rose to the top partly because it looked the other way on unlicensed use of it's products, and now that it's the standard, it's trying to lock down. Well, the problem is, now there is a huge group of people who have a vested interest in using that software for free, and there is no way that they're going to beat them using a purely technical solution...Crackers are proving that on a daily basis.
Yea, that's me, because I just don't have enough opinions of my own without borrowing from random people...Especially when I'm basically echoing the article summary. And I'm soooo desperate for meaningless karma.
Can I just follow you around all day? I mean, wow, the originality of the idea that people who claim to have academic credentials ought to have academic credentials! Wow! If only I could aspire to such brilliance on my own, without having to copy from jackasses like you!
Seriously. Are you a patent lawyer or something, spending your days looking around for people who you can claim are copying your ideas? I think there's more than enough prior art in this case to make both of us decidedly unoriginal...Or at least you, because I'm not trying to claim I said something profound here.
Frankly, I didn't read what you had to say, though now that I've read it, obviously I agree with you.
I hate it when I agree with someone who turns out to be a jackass. Do you wander around all day finding people who agree with you and calling them un-original?
Nice authoritiative source there. I'd sure like to trust anything he's had a hand in. Sure makes me trust Wikipedia, knowing that they view someone who lies extensively about his academic credentials is really just employing a "pseudonym". It's stuff like this that makes wikipedia a worthless source for anything other than knee jerk information. Cite it in an academic paper, and your professor will laugh his ass of, right before he fails you.
So it's okay to lie about your academic credentials? If you're that good, you will get recognition with or without the paper. If you're not, you can get some recognition for having put forth the effort to get the paper.
But getting the recognition for lying about the paper? That's crap. You've got neither the skill to get by without it, the dedication to get it, or the integrity to tell the truth about it.
Am I equating all Christians with fundies? No. Most regular christian's don't go out of their way to insult and deride people because their beliefs are dissimilar to their own. But I do hate fundies, probably as much as they hate me, and the fact that you feel the shoe fits in your case, is not my problem. It seems more to me like you believe that all non-christians are crazy athiests in order to justify your theism. Don't lump me in with the radical fringe, if you do not care to be so lumped.
I am interested in which country you live in where being christian is a problem. China? Japan? Former Yugoslav republic?
No, I don't care about your religion. Frankly, while I am open to the idea that there is a god, I have issues with the judeo-christian-muslim religions, and am perfectly capable of writing them all off in my head as incorrect. I find most organized religion to be unpleasant, and that's speaking from a wealth of experience.
I'm not really in favor of any sort of religion course to be taught in schools. I think it's a can of worms best left unopened, and I think the odds of getting a qualified philosopher of religion to teach that course are almost non-existent...You'd get a pastor's wife or something, and the course would develop a bias, and a biased course would (rightly) provoke people like me into decrying the whole mess, as an unbiased course would probably do the same for the fundamentalists.
Sure, because there is no way the Wii would come with Extensive Parental Controls...Because, like everyone knows, Nintendo absolutely leads the field in games that have nothing but blood, guts and violence.
As a non-childless Slashdotter, speculating wildly about my obviously meaningless to you life experience as a parent, I find it perfectly easy to play the stuff my daughter plays, and watch the things my daughter watches, and to manage the parental controls accordingly, thereby making sure she won't encounter porn until she wants to encounter porn at least not where I can control it...And don't tell me kids are smarter than me at this particular activity; if there is a way to find porn, I'll have found it long before she will--finding porn is like a male geek superpower.
And for the record: "Porno" is so hilariously 1970's it really gives you a good idea of the level of technology these jokers are comfortable with.
These days the issue is somewhat more blurry because people who have inherent disadvantages are still able to survive and reproduce.
In the past however, it was not uncommon to have extreme die offs, whether due to hunger or illness or environmental conditions, a la the dinosaurs. In that case, from the potential pool of 99% of mutations being "bad" mutations, it is far more likely that that sub-population would be drastically reduced, and not survive to breed into the population at large, and further that the disadvantageous traits that are passed on would be a more extreme liability in the next generation, and so on.
I think certainly, we've done things to our mutation rate in the last few hundred years, with increases in environmental problems, and greater exposure to toxins, and I think that we've certainly seen increases in what we would consider non-beneficial mutations. That doesn't mean that there aren't beneficial mutations being passed along. Some people are less likely to develop cancer, some people have a higher tolerance for environmental mercury, some people can get HIV and never transition to aids(cite).
Just because you can look at the world, and to you, it seems like there is nothing good coming from natural selection, doesn't mean that in the future, some gene group that is even now arising will be seen as the second luckiest break our species ever had (after that guy who did that thing with the stick).
Too bad he didn't leave some evidence in the fricking bible, because that's about the only place they look.
You can talk fossil record, and carbon dating, and geological matching, and genetic regression, and shared genes and cleft points until you're blue in the face. Either they're open-minded, in which case it's unlikely that you'll need to talk for long at all, as it is easy enough to fit the idea of evolution into religion if you're not a "literal read" dumbass, or they're one of the aforementioned dumbasses, and nothing you can say will convince them you're right...They've already had years of practice ignoring rational argument, and the evidence of their senses.
As usual, it's all about how much we the minority are putting the christian majority down. Non-religious people never have to take crap from overly religious fundamentalists; they give our opinions weight, and treat us with respect. They don't try to actively undermine the teaching of scientific thought, while at the same time accusing us of trying to kill religion. They don't kill people who don't believe what they believe.
Oh wait, my bad, they do. What was your point again?
I'm not an atheist, though I am agnostic. I don't give a damn about your religion...I can't come up with a word for how little I care. You can do whatever you like, you can believe whatever you like. I don't care if you choose to believe in god, I don't care what you do on Sundays.
But when you start trying to force your beliefs down my throat, you damn betcha I'm going to get pissed, and try to defend what I believe.
And then you'll start crying about how the bad atheist is trying to kill christmas, or saying you're descended from monkeys, or saying the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and then I'll have angry irrational protesters bussed into my neightborhood by some goddamn fundie organization that specializes in bussing whackjob fundies from place to place to protest people who have the audacity to believe in scientific truth and a material universe
And it'll all be because the scary atheist minority is trying to kill religion.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Matthew 7:5
The AC hit it, maybe it was a poor choice of words.
The simple fact is, that there are things in the world that have a value that is completely separate from their material components, and a truly balanced society should protect and appreciate things that have it.
I'm not a vegetarian or anything; I don't believe in putting the value of living things up on a pedestal where we can't touch it, but have to worship it from afar. I like a good steak as much as anyone.
By the same token, it bothers me when people just randomly do more damage than they have to...I used to jog through this walnut orchard...100 years old if it was a day....Beautiful place. So the developers move in, and level it, I mean clear cut to the ground. Here's the kicker...They only put one house in that area...part of it was on the edge of a golf course, and the first thing they did after they'd gotten everything squared away? They planted goddamn walnut trees!
What was the reasoning behind it? Those trees had all kinds of value, both in appearance, and in raw monetary terms. But the guy who'd done the planning hadn't been able to appreciate them as anything but an obstacle, and so he'd cut 'em down. Just a kind of emptiness.
If you had concrete personal proof of the existence of a divine being, then yes it would be rational to believe in god.
But that would be the opposite of faith. You wouldn't need faith, you'd have proof.
I think a lot of modern evangelicals are completely lacking in faith...they refuse to ever admit that there is anything about god that they can't touch, and don't understand. Still, somehow, magically, there is no proof for the existence of god, so they ought to be taking things on faith...And yet they aren't.
It's the worst of both worlds. A very sad existence to have neither proof nor faith, but instead only a bootless false certainty.
In terms of Philosophy, physicalism (or materialism if you prefer) represents the view in which the material universe is the universe. By throwing out integers, you are showing that you can't read carefully at all. We came up with integers to represent things found in the physical world...Are you saying that integers are of the same class of things as god and souls? Because unless you are, then they're perfectly in tune with physicalism.
I'm not going to redefine what I mean by spirituality for the fourth time in this thread. I will say however, that the word "empathize" that you used touches the heart of the issue. We don't empathize with non-living things. We do empathize with living things. That part of us that sees things as having value aside from the value of their component parts is pretty much what I mean by spiritualism, and I see society's that fail to appreciate and develop that part of their people as empty.
Hate to disagree, but it is irrational by definition. You can't touch it, you can't measure it, and you can't have a third party perform an independent confirmation.
That makes it a completely subjective experience, and while you may believe it, you can't prove that it's not just noise in the neurons.
Religious experience has to be taken on faith. It does not have objective reality.
Sensibly, our government distinguishes between controlled substances and "controlled" ideas, so while it can be ruled that a hazardous physical substance can be restricted in terms of sale, it does not rule that a "hazardous" idea can be withheld because withheld ideas can become a method of control for the state and the constitution has a lot of safeguards against that sort of thing.
How can an opinion be a logical fallacy? I'm a pure physicalist. I've said it a dozen times in this thread. I don't believe in god. I don't believe in souls.
I am not challenging the physical nature of the universe, I am saying that, as a living thing, if you do not see the difference between living things and nonliving things then you're a closet sociopath, unsuited for living in a civilized society, and that a society based on those principles would be problematical, oh-so-very problematical.
The world you're advocating is a world where you can just walk around shooting other people and it's no different than if you were shooting robots, or clay pigeons, because it's all about the atoms, right? What does it matter? Go rape a child, it's just matter...Long chain hydrocarbons feel no pain, right? Torture a baby or an old person just for fun. Just atoms, right? Nothing special about atoms, is there?
Meh. I did for most of it, then pulled in one friend for the last bit...It's slow going though, and since I wasn't getting xp anyway, I'd have preferred to have blown through those instances like a bad sushi dinner, rather than having to slog it out.
It took me until the bottom of your comment to figure out which religion you were talking about. All those criticisms can be leveled against any number of religions...Burning books, stealing art, murdering unbelievers.
Thinking it's only Muslims that do that is a very bad idea.
If there is no difference then why does one make you feel bad, and the other not?
I say there is a difference. I say there is something that makes a real puppy more than one of those stupid robo-puppy toys from a few years back. Something that makes a beautiful painting different from a different piece of canvas with some paint sloshed on it (modern art affectionado's would disagree, of course). Something that gives living things an inherent value above non-living things, all else being equal.
Religion explains away the value of living things by introducing the idea of an immortal soul; I'm a physicalist, so I don't buy that. It doesn't explain much anyway, because they're forever arguing about what does or does not have one.
I simply say that there are things that have intrinsic value, above and beyond their material composition, and that recognition and appreciation of that value is something that is important in a human being.
Not sure what's "charitable" about giving people their due; Europe sank into ignorance and superstition, and Asia Minor and North Africa entered an intellectual golden age.
Central and South America had their periods of intellectualism (mostly fueled by religious needs, ironically, as were the muslim's) but progressive cultures in Central and South America tended to be invaded by their less progressive neighbors, and the height of their civilization never reached the same level as civilizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Whether this is because the America's were settled for a shorter period of time than the rest of the world or because of hypothesized inadequacies in available grains and herd animals, I'm not going to speculate.
I can verify this...I picked up my pally again and decided I'd finally do the damn epic mount quest. Went to Strat, DM, and Scholo...On a high pop server, mind you...and didn't find a single person in any of those instances.
Not surprising; I'll bet there are people in the under 50 instances still, but 50 and up? I doubt anyone will be in those until level 70s start grouping up and grinding them as a lark.
Slashdot Mirror
Lot of hardcore unix guys pronounce it "et-see" because you sound retarded saying, "It's in "et-cetera-slash-init-period-d" rather than "et-see init-dee". Same reason people transliterate Ess-Que-Ell into "Sequel"...It's quicker, and it sounds better.
In my mind I always label people who insist on saying it exactly like it's written down as amatures, or anal retentive, though people who try to come up with ways of saying things like "url" make my teeth hurt.
Ha! Me? Who's the guy who roams threads accusing people of stealing his ideas? I honestly find this whole thing to be pretty amusing.
When it's Microsoft's long costly lawsuit?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
In the end though, this sort of corporate behavior is hugely annoying. Microsoft rose to the top partly because it looked the other way on unlicensed use of it's products, and now that it's the standard, it's trying to lock down. Well, the problem is, now there is a huge group of people who have a vested interest in using that software for free, and there is no way that they're going to beat them using a purely technical solution...Crackers are proving that on a daily basis.
Smarter of them to leave things as they were.
Yea, that's me, because I just don't have enough opinions of my own without borrowing from random people...Especially when I'm basically echoing the article summary. And I'm soooo desperate for meaningless karma.
Can I just follow you around all day? I mean, wow, the originality of the idea that people who claim to have academic credentials ought to have academic credentials! Wow! If only I could aspire to such brilliance on my own, without having to copy from jackasses like you!
Seriously. Are you a patent lawyer or something, spending your days looking around for people who you can claim are copying your ideas? I think there's more than enough prior art in this case to make both of us decidedly unoriginal...Or at least you, because I'm not trying to claim I said something profound here.
Frankly, I didn't read what you had to say, though now that I've read it, obviously I agree with you.
I hate it when I agree with someone who turns out to be a jackass. Do you wander around all day finding people who agree with you and calling them un-original?
Correct.
In this case he is defined as: "Liar."
And obviously a fricking untrustworthy liar.
Nice authoritiative source there. I'd sure like to trust anything he's had a hand in. Sure makes me trust Wikipedia, knowing that they view someone who lies extensively about his academic credentials is really just employing a "pseudonym". It's stuff like this that makes wikipedia a worthless source for anything other than knee jerk information. Cite it in an academic paper, and your professor will laugh his ass of, right before he fails you.
So it's okay to lie about your academic credentials? If you're that good, you will get recognition with or without the paper. If you're not, you can get some recognition for having put forth the effort to get the paper.
But getting the recognition for lying about the paper? That's crap. You've got neither the skill to get by without it, the dedication to get it, or the integrity to tell the truth about it.
No respect from me.
Am I equating all Christians with fundies? No. Most regular christian's don't go out of their way to insult and deride people because their beliefs are dissimilar to their own. But I do hate fundies, probably as much as they hate me, and the fact that you feel the shoe fits in your case, is not my problem. It seems more to me like you believe that all non-christians are crazy athiests in order to justify your theism. Don't lump me in with the radical fringe, if you do not care to be so lumped.
I am interested in which country you live in where being christian is a problem. China? Japan? Former Yugoslav republic?
No, I don't care about your religion. Frankly, while I am open to the idea that there is a god, I have issues with the judeo-christian-muslim religions, and am perfectly capable of writing them all off in my head as incorrect. I find most organized religion to be unpleasant, and that's speaking from a wealth of experience.
I'm not really in favor of any sort of religion course to be taught in schools. I think it's a can of worms best left unopened, and I think the odds of getting a qualified philosopher of religion to teach that course are almost non-existent...You'd get a pastor's wife or something, and the course would develop a bias, and a biased course would (rightly) provoke people like me into decrying the whole mess, as an unbiased course would probably do the same for the fundamentalists.
Sure, because there is no way the Wii would come with Extensive Parental Controls...Because, like everyone knows, Nintendo absolutely leads the field in games that have nothing but blood, guts and violence.
As a non-childless Slashdotter, speculating wildly about my obviously meaningless to you life experience as a parent, I find it perfectly easy to play the stuff my daughter plays, and watch the things my daughter watches, and to manage the parental controls accordingly, thereby making sure she won't encounter porn until she wants to encounter porn at least not where I can control it...And don't tell me kids are smarter than me at this particular activity; if there is a way to find porn, I'll have found it long before she will--finding porn is like a male geek superpower.
And for the record: "Porno" is so hilariously 1970's it really gives you a good idea of the level of technology these jokers are comfortable with.
In a nutshell. The bible is 100% fact and 0% allegory as far as they're concerned.
Which I guess means that the kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed...Who knew?
These days the issue is somewhat more blurry because people who have inherent disadvantages are still able to survive and reproduce.
In the past however, it was not uncommon to have extreme die offs, whether due to hunger or illness or environmental conditions, a la the dinosaurs. In that case, from the potential pool of 99% of mutations being "bad" mutations, it is far more likely that that sub-population would be drastically reduced, and not survive to breed into the population at large, and further that the disadvantageous traits that are passed on would be a more extreme liability in the next generation, and so on.
I think certainly, we've done things to our mutation rate in the last few hundred years, with increases in environmental problems, and greater exposure to toxins, and I think that we've certainly seen increases in what we would consider non-beneficial mutations. That doesn't mean that there aren't beneficial mutations being passed along. Some people are less likely to develop cancer, some people have a higher tolerance for environmental mercury, some people can get HIV and never transition to aids( cite ).
Just because you can look at the world, and to you, it seems like there is nothing good coming from natural selection, doesn't mean that in the future, some gene group that is even now arising will be seen as the second luckiest break our species ever had (after that guy who did that thing with the stick).
Too bad he didn't leave some evidence in the fricking bible, because that's about the only place they look.
You can talk fossil record, and carbon dating, and geological matching, and genetic regression, and shared genes and cleft points until you're blue in the face. Either they're open-minded, in which case it's unlikely that you'll need to talk for long at all, as it is easy enough to fit the idea of evolution into religion if you're not a "literal read" dumbass, or they're one of the aforementioned dumbasses, and nothing you can say will convince them you're right...They've already had years of practice ignoring rational argument, and the evidence of their senses.
As usual, it's all about how much we the minority are putting the christian majority down. Non-religious people never have to take crap from overly religious fundamentalists; they give our opinions weight, and treat us with respect. They don't try to actively undermine the teaching of scientific thought, while at the same time accusing us of trying to kill religion. They don't kill people who don't believe what they believe.
Oh wait, my bad, they do. What was your point again?
I'm not an atheist, though I am agnostic. I don't give a damn about your religion...I can't come up with a word for how little I care. You can do whatever you like, you can believe whatever you like. I don't care if you choose to believe in god, I don't care what you do on Sundays.
But when you start trying to force your beliefs down my throat, you damn betcha I'm going to get pissed, and try to defend what I believe.
And then you'll start crying about how the bad atheist is trying to kill christmas, or saying you're descended from monkeys, or saying the earth isn't the center of the solar system, and then I'll have angry irrational protesters bussed into my neightborhood by some goddamn fundie organization that specializes in bussing whackjob fundies from place to place to protest people who have the audacity to believe in scientific truth and a material universe
And it'll all be because the scary atheist minority is trying to kill religion.
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Matthew 7:5
The AC hit it, maybe it was a poor choice of words.
The simple fact is, that there are things in the world that have a value that is completely separate from their material components, and a truly balanced society should protect and appreciate things that have it.
I'm not a vegetarian or anything; I don't believe in putting the value of living things up on a pedestal where we can't touch it, but have to worship it from afar. I like a good steak as much as anyone.
By the same token, it bothers me when people just randomly do more damage than they have to...I used to jog through this walnut orchard...100 years old if it was a day....Beautiful place. So the developers move in, and level it, I mean clear cut to the ground. Here's the kicker...They only put one house in that area...part of it was on the edge of a golf course, and the first thing they did after they'd gotten everything squared away? They planted goddamn walnut trees!
What was the reasoning behind it? Those trees had all kinds of value, both in appearance, and in raw monetary terms. But the guy who'd done the planning hadn't been able to appreciate them as anything but an obstacle, and so he'd cut 'em down. Just a kind of emptiness.
If you had concrete personal proof of the existence of a divine being, then yes it would be rational to believe in god.
But that would be the opposite of faith. You wouldn't need faith, you'd have proof.
I think a lot of modern evangelicals are completely lacking in faith...they refuse to ever admit that there is anything about god that they can't touch, and don't understand. Still, somehow, magically, there is no proof for the existence of god, so they ought to be taking things on faith...And yet they aren't.
It's the worst of both worlds. A very sad existence to have neither proof nor faith, but instead only a bootless false certainty.
In terms of Philosophy, physicalism (or materialism if you prefer) represents the view in which the material universe is the universe. By throwing out integers, you are showing that you can't read carefully at all. We came up with integers to represent things found in the physical world...Are you saying that integers are of the same class of things as god and souls? Because unless you are, then they're perfectly in tune with physicalism.
I'm not going to redefine what I mean by spirituality for the fourth time in this thread. I will say however, that the word "empathize" that you used touches the heart of the issue. We don't empathize with non-living things. We do empathize with living things. That part of us that sees things as having value aside from the value of their component parts is pretty much what I mean by spiritualism, and I see society's that fail to appreciate and develop that part of their people as empty.
Hate to disagree, but it is irrational by definition. You can't touch it, you can't measure it, and you can't have a third party perform an independent confirmation.
That makes it a completely subjective experience, and while you may believe it, you can't prove that it's not just noise in the neurons.
Religious experience has to be taken on faith. It does not have objective reality.
Eh. Really it's just about drug legislation.
Sensibly, our government distinguishes between controlled substances and "controlled" ideas, so while it can be ruled that a hazardous physical substance can be restricted in terms of sale, it does not rule that a "hazardous" idea can be withheld because withheld ideas can become a method of control for the state and the constitution has a lot of safeguards against that sort of thing.
How can an opinion be a logical fallacy? I'm a pure physicalist. I've said it a dozen times in this thread. I don't believe in god. I don't believe in souls.
I am not challenging the physical nature of the universe, I am saying that, as a living thing, if you do not see the difference between living things and nonliving things then you're a closet sociopath, unsuited for living in a civilized society, and that a society based on those principles would be problematical, oh-so-very problematical.
The world you're advocating is a world where you can just walk around shooting other people and it's no different than if you were shooting robots, or clay pigeons, because it's all about the atoms, right? What does it matter? Go rape a child, it's just matter...Long chain hydrocarbons feel no pain, right? Torture a baby or an old person just for fun. Just atoms, right? Nothing special about atoms, is there?
Are you that stupid? Do you really think that?
Meh. I did for most of it, then pulled in one friend for the last bit...It's slow going though, and since I wasn't getting xp anyway, I'd have preferred to have blown through those instances like a bad sushi dinner, rather than having to slog it out.
It took me until the bottom of your comment to figure out which religion you were talking about. All those criticisms can be leveled against any number of religions...Burning books, stealing art, murdering unbelievers.
Thinking it's only Muslims that do that is a very bad idea.
If there is no difference then why does one make you feel bad, and the other not?
I say there is a difference. I say there is something that makes a real puppy more than one of those stupid robo-puppy toys from a few years back. Something that makes a beautiful painting different from a different piece of canvas with some paint sloshed on it (modern art affectionado's would disagree, of course). Something that gives living things an inherent value above non-living things, all else being equal.
Religion explains away the value of living things by introducing the idea of an immortal soul; I'm a physicalist, so I don't buy that. It doesn't explain much anyway, because they're forever arguing about what does or does not have one.
I simply say that there are things that have intrinsic value, above and beyond their material composition, and that recognition and appreciation of that value is something that is important in a human being.
Not sure what's "charitable" about giving people their due; Europe sank into ignorance and superstition, and Asia Minor and North Africa entered an intellectual golden age.
Central and South America had their periods of intellectualism (mostly fueled by religious needs, ironically, as were the muslim's) but progressive cultures in Central and South America tended to be invaded by their less progressive neighbors, and the height of their civilization never reached the same level as civilizations in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Whether this is because the America's were settled for a shorter period of time than the rest of the world or because of hypothesized inadequacies in available grains and herd animals, I'm not going to speculate.
I can verify this...I picked up my pally again and decided I'd finally do the damn epic mount quest. Went to Strat, DM, and Scholo...On a high pop server, mind you...and didn't find a single person in any of those instances.
Not surprising; I'll bet there are people in the under 50 instances still, but 50 and up? I doubt anyone will be in those until level 70s start grouping up and grinding them as a lark.