Babies have a right to free speech and they certainly have a right to petition government. What's more, unlike other cases where exceptions and loopholes are frequently made resulting in people not actually being able to exercise their rights, I've never heard of a single case of a baby being refused the right to petition a government or get its book published. Not one.
> I suspect that if we do, we'll be very surprised...
If you suspect that you're going to be surprised, then it can't be a surprise after all. This is a consequence of a theorem from probability theory: your expectation of what you think your future expectation of something should be must match your current expectation of it.
> Does anyone else find it slightly amusing that as humans move out into space we may yet again end up living in caves?
It's no more interesting than the fact that people on Mars will probably wear shoes, just like upper paleolithic humans. In fact, less interesting because caves have never played a significant role in human habitation. Humans have lived all over the world, but how many of those places do you think have caves?
Don't confuse a propaganda campaign by NASA with what scientists actually think. Nobody working in the field is the least surprised by caves on Mars. But NASA need to make press releases and hype them up a bit. And anyway, caves on Mars are cool.
Nice selection. Colossus is much underrated. And if you liked it, check out Demon Seed, a remarkably prescient movie about another out-of-control computer.
What is the matter with the/. editors? These lists are content free. They're just a way to organise non-information, which you'll forget after about 5 minutes, in such a way that you have to click on a long sequence of pages, exposing you to as much advertising as possible. They are almost the lowest form of journalism. Given that there are many of millions of people out there in the tech world, many of whom are smart and interesting and working hard on cool stuff, surely there's something better to post than this drivel?
> if someone says, "I am Christian," the only person they have to answer to is themselves
If you allow people to say I am X, for any X, you're devaluing the English language in the sense that you strip all meaning from "I am". You can agree to disagree in the sense that it's your choice if you want to accept debased coin. But I think language is more useful if when someone says "I am a Christian" I now actually know more about that person than the fact that they've just said "I am a Christian".
> how do you know whether someone else is "truly" or "actually" Christian?
On a case-by-case basis. If someone claims to believe in an omniscient God then I'd expect them to act like they're being watched, even when they believe no person is watching them. If they claim to believe in eternal damnation for sinners, I'd expect them never to sin. If they claim to believe good people go to heaven I'd expect them to be cheerful about the death of loved ones. If they believe that human blastocysts are individual people I'd expect them to risk the life of a child on order to save a dozen such embryos on a petri dish. And so on.
But remember I am 'agreeing to disagree'. You seem to have a higher tolerance for hypocrisy than me but I can't really claim that you are incorrect to be so tolerant.
I bet you $100 that if it's not already the case, there will be more Vista desktops than XXX desktops by the end of the year for any choice of free XXX.
> that you claim to have the ability to judge who is "truly" or "actually" Christian
If someone claims that 6+3 is 10, but when complain when you given them only $3 change when they pay you $10 for a $6 you know they were lying. You don't need to wax philosophical about people making their identities however they want. Most people who claim to be religious believers are liars in the same way that this hypothetical alternative mathematician is. So in answer to your question:
> Who the hell are you to decide what people "actually or truly believe"?
I'm happy to answer for myself - I'm just a regular guy who expects a modicum of consistency from the people around me. Don't you have a similar expectation too?
I should point out (as someone who was brought up Jewish) that Judaism is unique among religions for its lack of creed and indifference to what its practitioners (note I use the word practioner) believe.
Higher primates can be very nasty to their own kind, and this is can hardly be blamed entirely on religion.
Oh right, your argument is that humans are nicer than primates, humans have more religion than primates, therefore religion makes people nicer. I'm not sure that needs any effort to debunk.
Here's a far more convincing difference: humans are much better than primates at tracking complex sequences of events and make better projections of the outcomes of those events. So humans can make much more complex agreements that sacrifice short term gains for much larger longer term benefits. Like "I could just whack you over the head with my club, but instead I'll swap these nice soft sheepskins for your arrowheads and meet you here next full moon to see if you have any more stuff to swap". Because humans can enter into these complex and long-term non-zero sum games humans have much more to gain from being civil than other primates.
Religion has rarely offered anything that a bit of enlightened self-interest didn't have to offer.
I don't like to speak ill of the dead, or at least the recently departed, so unfortunately I won't be telling you how unsurprised I am about the author of the crappiest book I've ever read dying in poverty.
What does gravity have to do with anything? When your heart pumps blood around your body it's not fighting gravity. There is no net upward motion of mass because for every kg of blood that goes up, another kg comes back down.
Hear, hear! Whoever makes the best tech in the world, I can still buy it just about anywhere I want. And I've already changed countries once to find the best job in the world that I can.
If 90 % of the world used Linux, then I'd bet that *Windows* would be effectively (not inherently) more secure than Linux.
But that doesn't mean the advice is bad. If 33% of people used Linux, 33% MacOS X and 33% Windows then we'd no longer have an OS monoculture and it'd be harder for viruses to spread than if 95% of machines ran the same OS.
If you must buy Vista, it might be advisable to sit on your wallet for a while. The discounts are bound to get sweeter
If you must buy Vista, try to manipulate the price by posting a story on high profile web sites about how you should hold off buying Vista until the price drops.
Weird. I gave up watching TV 20 years ago but over the last few years I've discovered Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Rome and a few other series and I suddenly think TV is worth watching again. And when I watch DVDs, they're often DVDs of TV shows. I think we're seeing the best TV in years.
Slashdot Mirror
Babies have a right to free speech and they certainly have a right to petition government. What's more, unlike other cases where exceptions and loopholes are frequently made resulting in people not actually being able to exercise their rights, I've never heard of a single case of a baby being refused the right to petition a government or get its book published. Not one.
> I suspect that if we do, we'll be very surprised... If you suspect that you're going to be surprised, then it can't be a surprise after all. This is a consequence of a theorem from probability theory: your expectation of what you think your future expectation of something should be must match your current expectation of it.
Just suspend them from a geostationary orbital platform with buckytubes.
It's no more interesting than the fact that people on Mars will probably wear shoes, just like upper paleolithic humans. In fact, less interesting because caves have never played a significant role in human habitation. Humans have lived all over the world, but how many of those places do you think have caves?
Don't confuse a propaganda campaign by NASA with what scientists actually think. Nobody working in the field is the least surprised by caves on Mars. But NASA need to make press releases and hype them up a bit. And anyway, caves on Mars are cool.
Said 1019680 to 613870.
Nice selection. Colossus is much underrated. And if you liked it, check out Demon Seed, a remarkably prescient movie about another out-of-control computer.
If you're going to do that, we might as well have BASIC DS. Hey! That's be pretty useful!
What is the matter with the /. editors? These lists are content free. They're just a way to organise non-information, which you'll forget after about 5 minutes, in such a way that you have to click on a long sequence of pages, exposing you to as much advertising as possible. They are almost the lowest form of journalism. Given that there are many of millions of people out there in the tech world, many of whom are smart and interesting and working hard on cool stuff, surely there's something better to post than this drivel?
Soft lockin? Is that like chocolate handcuffs?
If you allow people to say I am X, for any X, you're devaluing the English language in the sense that you strip all meaning from "I am". You can agree to disagree in the sense that it's your choice if you want to accept debased coin. But I think language is more useful if when someone says "I am a Christian" I now actually know more about that person than the fact that they've just said "I am a Christian".
> how do you know whether someone else is "truly" or "actually" Christian?
On a case-by-case basis. If someone claims to believe in an omniscient God then I'd expect them to act like they're being watched, even when they believe no person is watching them. If they claim to believe in eternal damnation for sinners, I'd expect them never to sin. If they claim to believe good people go to heaven I'd expect them to be cheerful about the death of loved ones. If they believe that human blastocysts are individual people I'd expect them to risk the life of a child on order to save a dozen such embryos on a petri dish. And so on.
But remember I am 'agreeing to disagree'. You seem to have a higher tolerance for hypocrisy than me but I can't really claim that you are incorrect to be so tolerant.
I bet you $100 that if it's not already the case, there will be more Vista desktops than XXX desktops by the end of the year for any choice of free XXX.
If someone claims that 6+3 is 10, but when complain when you given them only $3 change when they pay you $10 for a $6 you know they were lying. You don't need to wax philosophical about people making their identities however they want. Most people who claim to be religious believers are liars in the same way that this hypothetical alternative mathematician is. So in answer to your question:
> Who the hell are you to decide what people "actually or truly believe"?
I'm happy to answer for myself - I'm just a regular guy who expects a modicum of consistency from the people around me. Don't you have a similar expectation too?
I should point out (as someone who was brought up Jewish) that Judaism is unique among religions for its lack of creed and indifference to what its practitioners (note I use the word practioner) believe.
Here's a far more convincing difference: humans are much better than primates at tracking complex sequences of events and make better projections of the outcomes of those events. So humans can make much more complex agreements that sacrifice short term gains for much larger longer term benefits. Like "I could just whack you over the head with my club, but instead I'll swap these nice soft sheepskins for your arrowheads and meet you here next full moon to see if you have any more stuff to swap". Because humans can enter into these complex and long-term non-zero sum games humans have much more to gain from being civil than other primates.
Religion has rarely offered anything that a bit of enlightened self-interest didn't have to offer.
I don't like to speak ill of the dead, or at least the recently departed, so unfortunately I won't be telling you how unsurprised I am about the author of the crappiest book I've ever read dying in poverty.
What does gravity have to do with anything? When your heart pumps blood around your body it's not fighting gravity. There is no net upward motion of mass because for every kg of blood that goes up, another kg comes back down.
Or...it's no typo but the journalist thinks that 14 books in a device the size of a bookcase is a lot.
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Hear, hear! Whoever makes the best tech in the world, I can still buy it just about anywhere I want. And I've already changed countries once to find the best job in the world that I can.
It's amazing what surprising and counterintuitive discoveries can be made by studies. Who'd a thunk it?
Weird. I gave up watching TV 20 years ago but over the last few years I've discovered Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Rome and a few other series and I suddenly think TV is worth watching again. And when I watch DVDs, they're often DVDs of TV shows. I think we're seeing the best TV in years.