Noone said after 9-11 "Well, that sucked. But that's the price of living in a free society. We could have engaged in massive spying and black ops and we could have made it a living hell for any Muslim to get on a plane but we didn't because we wanted freedom." No, instead we open up commissions and inquiries and try to assign blame
I think that the problem was that after 9-11 the US didn't recognise that it was something of a retaliation for all the Black Ops the US has run in other people's countries. Too many fingers in too many pies for too long.
Women want what they can't have. A guy with a girlfriend immediately means that he: 1. is able to commit to some extent 2. Capable of some sort of relationship
You know what the next killer algorithms will be for? Processing XML.
XML is good in a few limited circumstances. It works with small amounts of data, and is great for communication. And yet XML is being touted as the cure for cancer and being applied in every possible. MS has bought it big time with Longhorn from what I can see.
The way we are going, we are going to end with a lot of data stored and transmitted in XML and a lot of applications committed to XML. And you know what is wrong with that? XML doesn't scale well.
The XML thing is quite depressing. You take something that is good and useful and apply it everywhere, whether it is appropriate or not. Gah.
There is another issue. As I understand it mail is only considered to be delivered if it has left the sending server. When using something like an RBL, the connection is refused, hence the mail does not leave the server.
INANAL, but it appears to me that they should switch off *some* of their spam handling tools. Even if this cuts 25% of spam, this solves some of the problem.
Here's why. I own a domain name that I bought so that I could have an email address that is independant of any ISP. There are other advantages, but that is the main one. For a modest amount I have it hosted somewhere, and the people who host it also host the POP box.
However my ISP is different from the people hosting my site, so my emails are routed through my ISPs mail servers. Hence your suggestion would have problems for people like me.
I know sooner or later I'll have to set up a mail server and web server and buy a business DSL account (or use dynamic DNS) but right now this is a very convenient (and cheap) solution for me.
All that said, Reverse DNS checking only partically solves the problem of spam, namely it helps with the problem of correctly identifying where spam comes from. This isn't much help when we live in a world where there are whole networks of trojanned zombies and ISPs willing to swap spammers IP addresses througout their range.
That sort of revolution is only possible in poor countries where there is not enough wealth that the government can use to supress the discontented population. There is that kind of wealth in the US, and most of it in the hands of people who want to maintain the status-quo. Corporate America. Discontented people will not be enough here without fair elections, and maby not even then.
Really. Can you expand that a little? I think where you are trying to go is to say that the wealth of the government (and their supporters) far exceeds that of the general population. The difference in wealth between that population and the government as far more important that the actual values. Otherwise I could argue that a country that has a wealthy government but an even more wealthy population cannot be overturned because the government is wealthy.
Now that we've sorted out your argument, time to answer it.
Wealth is power, in the same way that the military gives power to those who control it. DIfferent kinds of power, both can be used. In the case of Indonesia: It was a freaking dicatorship. Financial wealth was concentrated in the hands of the government and their supporters. Military power was concentrated in the hands of the government and their supporters.
I suggest that you: 1. Refine your arguments 2. Refrain from making generalisations about poor countries, assuming that what happens there does not apply elsewhere 3. check your facts
All crime leaves a trace. That trace is noticed. Hence the criminal is noticed.
Do something nobody thought of before. Do it well. Do it and make sure nobody sees it for what it really is.
See above. Can you really think of a new crime?
Your other suggestions do not describe crimes. I am talsking about crimes here, not randomly closing down cell phone towers. We leave that kind of thing to the politicians.
I agree that crimes leave traces, but there are unresolved crimes - check crime detection rates anywhere. You can get away with murder, stating otherwise just goes against the facts.
I don't doubt that. My problem is with the concept of the master criminals. You know the hollywood image of someone who lives the life of luxury off crime and never gets caught.
My opinion is that while not all crimes are solved, most criminals will end up getting caught for something. That is, for many criminals crime is a lifestyle. And they only need to get caught for some of the crimes. Hence the result is that while not all crimes are solved, most criminals are caught for some of their crimes.
I've always heard people say this. The problem with this argument is that it is impossible to prove one way or the other. If you say the really good criminals aren't caught and that they leave no trace, then how do we know they exist? Equally how do we know that they don't exist. It is like a conspiracy theory.
Personally I think that there are far fewer of these smart criminals than we think there. It is a nice idea and Hollywood loves it, but I think reality is somewhat different. Crimes leave traces.
Fair enough. All I was point out is that he has made a fair criticism of Gnome, and one that the Gnome developers should take notice of.
In the code I write, I have come to a few conclusions regrading configuration. The first is that everything should be user configurable. The second is that these configuration options should not be immediately displayed because messing with them could cause some "interesting" conflicts. Instead configuration should occur on two levels. The higher level is to provide a simplified interface that groups together configuration options from the lower level. The idea being that the general user messes with the top level, but that they can drill down if they want to.
To me it would seem that from this guy's comment that Gnome's development team has made decisions that run counter to what my experience dictates is the best path.
Implicit in this is an assumption that governments need to be overturned by force of arms. I think that this is incorrect, force of arms is one means (and IMHO is the least appropriate means to do so). Recent history has shown that a well armed government can be overturned when there is enough discontent in the the population, with resorting to arms.
Check out the fall of Suharto in Indonesia for example. Dictactor overturned by discontent.
Ask the people that protested the Iraq war. The country was pretty darned divided about that. (To the point that I was stranded in downtown while the protestors inconsiderately closed off all the streets.)
The US is very diverse and covers a lot of ground. The reporting that reached the rest of the world is that there were some protests (eg NY), but by and large that was it. I could be completely wrong on this, but are you generalising from your experience to the whole country?
Another point worth making is on the size of the protests. In Sydney, Australia there was a protest of between 200,000 and 300,0000 people, out of a population of 5 million for the city. A protest of 5,000 people in a city of millions does not equate to a divided nation. I'm not saying this is the case, I just asking your opinion of the protests as an indicator of the divided state of the nation.
What the rest of the world has a VERY difficult time understanding is just how large the USA is. Worse, our neighbors don't give us trouble. We all love Canada. We all love Mexico. We don't hear a whole lot from south of Mex so it's not really on our radar. The stuff going on the other side of the world really doesn't affect us directly a whole lot..... Nobody seems to understand that we can't just hop into a car, drive for half a day, and be in another country.
All of what you've said could equally be said about Australia. Australia is geographically very diverse and is isolated from the rest of the world be oceans. Our closest neighbours are New Zealand (which we somewhat patronisingly consider almost part of Australia), New Guinea (effectively a former colony) and Indonesia. I can't hop in a car and drive to another country.
Geographically speaking we are a scaled down version of the US. I think the difference is that we aren't as powerful and tend to need to watch what is happening on the global stage because it affects us.
Man if you were here you wouldn't believe that. The country is pretty well divided about Iraq.
True, but the problem is that division is there because things aren't going well in Iraq rather than for any other reason.
Unfortunately, the media's biased, so it's hard to tell from watching the news that the country's so divided. To put it another way, whatever view you support, you'll find a significant number of people here will agree with you.
I'll pay that. You have a huge problem with the media.
I'm a little interested that you didn't really comment on what I said about torture. I could dig up some articles (Washington Post had one from memory). I'm not talking Afghanistan, I'm talking Iraq. At the time Iraq was painted as the country that was being 9/11. From recent polls (no links sorry), I think that view is still held by a signifigant minority (media bias not helping). So yes I am surprised (agreeably) at the storm that has erupted over the photos.
Seems like they should hate our gov't instead of us in particular. It bugs me that 9-11 resulted in so many civilian deaths even though they have little to no influence on what the gov't decides is right foreign policy-wise.
Isn't your government representing you? Isn't your government elected by the citizens? From what I hear and see (I am not an American) in the news, the US government, does move in the direction that most Americans want it to move. Shortly after 9/11 I seem to remember a series of articles being written debating whether the US was justified in torturing prisoners to gain information. Most seemed to think it was a good idea. The impression I gained at the time was that torture of suspects was supported by at least a majority of the US people. Why is the US now shocked by pictures coming out out Iraq?
My impression is that most Americans are poorly educated about the world outside their borders. Most Americans seem to believe that whatever America does is right, that blood washes off the shining armour. Most Americans believe that an American life worth more than the life of a person from another country. Note the wost "Most" in all of those sentences.
I wish I was as optimistic as you that a new president will fix this problem. I really don't think people generally understand our problems don't necessarily stem from having the 'wrong' president so many times in a row.
The impression from the outside was that Bill Clinton wasn't doing too badly and that GWB has completely screwed things up. If one president can make such a complete mess of things, surely one president can undo the damage.
Sorry to go quiet for a while, it was a busy weekend and I was sick on Monday.
While the last hundred years were pretty horrible, I think if we go back a thousand years or so we might conclude that the Europeans (most notably the Vikings and the Christians) were really a savage bunch. Then there's Ghengis Kahn, etc. But in relation to the whole planet, there most likely hasn't been any real change. The savagery just moved off shore (from Europe and the U.S. anyway)
It is very difficult to make generalisations on the period of Ghengis Khan and the like, because we don't know a whole lot about them. I think you are right though.
There was also a large group of natives on a Carribean island that, when facing the conquistadors, chose mass suicide over slavery. In truth, that's the way it should be done.
I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but I think that depends on your view of suicide. I think a better example would be a person who chose to starve rather than the steal food frrom someone else (which would have resulted in them starving).
Killing another person truly bad, no matter what. In reality, we are survival whores that will do anything to stay alive. I'm not how I would act when facing a situation like this, but I know I should just let it go and not try to cling to life.
You make a very interesting point. I think you have are right there. I remember reading some personal reflections on people going to war. Before they started fighting, some were mentally resigned to die, however once there was the chance of dying they were frightened of dying. It is like there is a real hunger and drive to survive. Why didn't prisoners in concentration camps just give up? They can't have had much hope of survival, and yet they did not (well not all) give in.
Don't hold out on me, man! My liking or accepting it is irrelevent.
My reason for believing this is because I am a Christian. I believe that humans were created perfect, but as a result of them doing what God told them not them to do, every part of the world we live in and ourselves has become damaged. As I said I'm not sure that you will agree with that. But what is interesting to me, is that what I believe is confirmed by the world I see around me. The word that springs to mind for me is flawed: the world we live in shows what it was created to be, but it is also damaged irrevocably. A flawed diamond. As people we show that flawed nature and we are broken to such and extent that we cann't fix ourselves. We need outside help.
I'm really holding out for some evidence that physical existance is not entirely evil and that death is not so absolute as to make life entirely meaningless.
Well from my perspecive that is a littla easier to answer. If you take what I said above, then physical life is not absolutely evil. Neither is death absolute and life is not a meaningless struggle that we cannot win, because we cannot change ourselves. God has interevened by sending Jesus so save us (and indeed the world) from this cycle.
I'm not sure where you stand on all this, I'd hazard a guess that my answer might surprise/disappoint you. That said, I have greatly enjoyed chatting, it has been an interesting and enlighening experience.
I'm not sure if you are interested in looking into this any further. If you are, can I suggest having a go at reading Ecclesiates, one of the books of the bible. The reason I suggest Ecclesiates is that it really charts one man's quest for meaning in life. It isn't what most people would consider Christian, indeed there was some debate on whether it should be part of the bible at all. From any perspective it is an interesting read.
"What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever."
IBM doesn't ship at rescue CD with their laptops, even if you specifically request it. I bought a T41 month ago and was very annoyed to find this. You can only get a rescue CD after the PC has been shipped. The support person seemed to be saying that this was due to a licensing agreement with MS. Even if that is true it doesn't reflect well on IBM, they should be able apply enough pressure on MS to be allowed to ship rescue CDs with the order if the person making the order specifically requests it.
Originally I was pushing for them to ship me an OEM CD with the laptop, but obviously that was right out of bounds.
I'm not sure that this is an accurate test of his power. There have been a number of other negative complaints about GMail.
Even if Google changes their tune after this column, this doesn't necessarily mean his article drove them to it. It may just mean that his article was the straw that broke the camel's back.
First off Microsoft will sell you anything they own on CD, generally only charging for postage. This is what you have. You can buy an installation CD for anything MS make for the price of the postage. You just don't get the license
I don't like a lot of stuff about MS but this is one thing they are doing right. Now if they would just publicise it a little and force the OEMS to ship the CD with a PC we might actually get somewhere.
. Let's not underestimate ourselves.(or overestimate) I tend to believe that there is a higher percentage of moral people now than there was, say, just 100 years ago.
This is hard to prove one way or the other. I'm inclined to believe the reverse, but that is because I am a pessimist. That doesn't make either of us right. However I think that the evidence of the last century weighs pretty heavily in my favour. I'm not if you read much history, but I'd say that the last century was the worst in the history of humanity morally speaking. I don't see any signs of that improving.
Maybe the problem comes up when good people have to do bad things to prevail or even to survive.
Does that not disquilify them being good? Surely a good person would prefer to sacrifice themselves than harm others to survive? Can all actions justified on the basis of survival?
I know that we CAN change ourselves. It's desire part that's hard to produce.
I see both as a problem. How is that you "know" we can change? I can explain why I know we aren't going to change, but I don't think you will like or accept my explanation.
If we survive long enough, we will evolve enough, and more!:-)
That assumes we will evolve morally, intelectually and physically. I would say there is some support for the last two, I don't see any support for the first one though.
Most of the worlds problems are man made. If man can make all these problems, surely we can stop.
That is a big assumption to make. You are assuming we can change ourselves. This assumption is made up of two others. 1. The assumption I pointed out earlier that we will evolve. 2. That we can control that evolution.
I'm not sure that either of those assumptions are valid.
However, in reality, I'll accept that we are not evolved enough to live in a world of "rules without rulers" yet.
We never will evolve enough. Faith in evolution as a means to improve the human race is as flawed as faith in technology. Take a look at the last century, our high point in evolution.
Let's face some facts. Technology will not solve all the world's problems. Science will not solve the world's problems. Our capacity to change ourselves is small. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
Slashdot Mirror
Noone said after 9-11 "Well, that sucked. But that's the price of living in a free society. We could have engaged in massive spying and black ops and we could have made it a living hell for any Muslim to get on a plane but we didn't because we wanted freedom." No, instead we open up commissions and inquiries and try to assign blame
I think that the problem was that after 9-11 the US didn't recognise that it was something of a retaliation for all the Black Ops the US has run in other people's countries. Too many fingers in too many pies for too long.
Women want what they can't have. A guy with a girlfriend immediately means that he:
1. is able to commit to some extent
2. Capable of some sort of relationship
You know what the next killer algorithms will be for? Processing XML.
XML is good in a few limited circumstances. It works with small amounts of data, and is great for communication. And yet XML is being touted as the cure for cancer and being applied in every possible. MS has bought it big time with Longhorn from what I can see.
The way we are going, we are going to end with a lot of data stored and transmitted in XML and a lot of applications committed to XML. And you know what is wrong with that? XML doesn't scale well.
The XML thing is quite depressing. You take something that is good and useful and apply it everywhere, whether it is appropriate or not. Gah.
There is another issue. As I understand it mail is only considered to be delivered if it has left the sending server. When using something like an RBL, the connection is refused, hence the mail does not leave the server.
INANAL, but it appears to me that they should switch off *some* of their spam handling tools. Even if this cuts 25% of spam, this solves some of the problem.
Here's why. I own a domain name that I bought so that I could have an email address that is independant of any ISP. There are other advantages, but that is the main one. For a modest amount I have it hosted somewhere, and the people who host it also host the POP box.
However my ISP is different from the people hosting my site, so my emails are routed through my ISPs mail servers. Hence your suggestion would have problems for people like me.
I know sooner or later I'll have to set up a mail server and web server and buy a business DSL account (or use dynamic DNS) but right now this is a very convenient (and cheap) solution for me.
All that said, Reverse DNS checking only partically solves the problem of spam, namely it helps with the problem of correctly identifying where spam comes from. This isn't much help when we live in a world where there are whole networks of trojanned zombies and ISPs willing to swap spammers IP addresses througout their range.
I would trust Maxim more...but that is only because I have a subscription to it.
and
still looking for a wife...
Uh huh.
Banks are regulated. Paypal isn't.
That sort of revolution is only possible in poor countries where there is not enough wealth that the government can use to supress the discontented population. There is that kind of wealth in the US, and most of it in the hands of people who want to maintain the status-quo. Corporate America. Discontented people will not be enough here without fair elections, and maby not even then.
Really. Can you expand that a little? I think where you are trying to go is to say that the wealth of the government (and their supporters) far exceeds that of the general population. The difference in wealth between that population and the government as far more important that the actual values. Otherwise I could argue that a country that has a wealthy government but an even more wealthy population cannot be overturned because the government is wealthy.
Now that we've sorted out your argument, time to answer it.
Wealth is power, in the same way that the military gives power to those who control it. DIfferent kinds of power, both can be used. In the case of Indonesia: It was a freaking dicatorship. Financial wealth was concentrated in the hands of the government and their supporters. Military power was concentrated in the hands of the government and their supporters.
I suggest that you:
1. Refine your arguments
2. Refrain from making generalisations about poor countries, assuming that what happens there does not apply elsewhere
3. check your facts
All crime leaves a trace. That trace is noticed. Hence the criminal is noticed.
Do something nobody thought of before. Do it well. Do it and make sure nobody sees it for what it really is.
See above. Can you really think of a new crime?
Your other suggestions do not describe crimes. I am talsking about crimes here, not randomly closing down cell phone towers. We leave that kind of thing to the politicians.
I agree that crimes leave traces, but there are unresolved crimes - check crime detection rates anywhere. You can get away with murder, stating otherwise just goes against the facts.
I don't doubt that. My problem is with the concept of the master criminals. You know the hollywood image of someone who lives the life of luxury off crime and never gets caught.
My opinion is that while not all crimes are solved, most criminals will end up getting caught for something. That is, for many criminals crime is a lifestyle. And they only need to get caught for some of the crimes. Hence the result is that while not all crimes are solved, most criminals are caught for some of their crimes.
The master criminal is an overrated concept.
I've always heard people say this. The problem with this argument is that it is impossible to prove one way or the other. If you say the really good criminals aren't caught and that they leave no trace, then how do we know they exist? Equally how do we know that they don't exist. It is like a conspiracy theory.
Personally I think that there are far fewer of these smart criminals than we think there. It is a nice idea and Hollywood loves it, but I think reality is somewhat different. Crimes leave traces.
Fair enough. All I was point out is that he has made a fair criticism of Gnome, and one that the Gnome developers should take notice of.
In the code I write, I have come to a few conclusions regrading configuration. The first is that everything should be user configurable. The second is that these configuration options should not be immediately displayed because messing with them could cause some "interesting" conflicts. Instead configuration should occur on two levels. The higher level is to provide a simplified interface that groups together configuration options from the lower level. The idea being that the general user messes with the top level, but that they can drill down if they want to.
To me it would seem that from this guy's comment that Gnome's development team has made decisions that run counter to what my experience dictates is the best path.
Implicit in this is an assumption that governments need to be overturned by force of arms. I think that this is incorrect, force of arms is one means (and IMHO is the least appropriate means to do so). Recent history has shown that a well armed government can be overturned when there is enough discontent in the the population, with resorting to arms.
Check out the fall of Suharto in Indonesia for example. Dictactor overturned by discontent.
Ask the people that protested the Iraq war. The country was pretty darned divided about that. (To the point that I was stranded in downtown while the protestors inconsiderately closed off all the streets.)
The US is very diverse and covers a lot of ground. The reporting that reached the rest of the world is that there were some protests (eg NY), but by and large that was it. I could be completely wrong on this, but are you generalising from your experience to the whole country?
Another point worth making is on the size of the protests. In Sydney, Australia there was a protest of between 200,000 and 300,0000 people, out of a population of 5 million for the city. A protest of 5,000 people in a city of millions does not equate to a divided nation. I'm not saying this is the case, I just asking your opinion of the protests as an indicator of the divided state of the nation.
What the rest of the world has a VERY difficult time understanding is just how large the USA is. Worse, our neighbors don't give us trouble. We all love Canada. We all love Mexico. We don't hear a whole lot from south of Mex so it's not really on our radar. The stuff going on the other side of the world really doesn't affect us directly a whole lot..... Nobody seems to understand that we can't just hop into a car, drive for half a day, and be in another country.
All of what you've said could equally be said about Australia. Australia is geographically very diverse and is isolated from the rest of the world be oceans. Our closest neighbours are New Zealand (which we somewhat patronisingly consider almost part of Australia), New Guinea (effectively a former colony) and Indonesia. I can't hop in a car and drive to another country.
Geographically speaking we are a scaled down version of the US. I think the difference is that we aren't as powerful and tend to need to watch what is happening on the global stage because it affects us.
Man if you were here you wouldn't believe that. The country is pretty well divided about Iraq.
True, but the problem is that division is there because things aren't going well in Iraq rather than for any other reason.
Unfortunately, the media's biased, so it's hard to tell from watching the news that the country's so divided. To put it another way, whatever view you support, you'll find a significant number of people here will agree with you.
I'll pay that. You have a huge problem with the media.
I'm a little interested that you didn't really comment on what I said about torture. I could dig up some articles (Washington Post had one from memory). I'm not talking Afghanistan, I'm talking Iraq. At the time Iraq was painted as the country that was being 9/11. From recent polls (no links sorry), I think that view is still held by a signifigant minority (media bias not helping). So yes I am surprised (agreeably) at the storm that has erupted over the photos.
This guy is a user of Gnome. It appears from the coments that his views represent the views of other Gnome users.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
Look dude... you are acting like it's the responsibility of the Gnome developers to produce a desktop that you like.
Are you seriously trying to tell me that it isn't the resposibility of the Gnome developers produce what the Gnome users want?
Seems like they should hate our gov't instead of us in particular. It bugs me that 9-11 resulted in so many civilian deaths even though they have little to no influence on what the gov't decides is right foreign policy-wise.
Isn't your government representing you? Isn't your government elected by the citizens? From what I hear and see (I am not an American) in the news, the US government, does move in the direction that most Americans want it to move. Shortly after 9/11 I seem to remember a series of articles being written debating whether the US was justified in torturing prisoners to gain information. Most seemed to think it was a good idea. The impression I gained at the time was that torture of suspects was supported by at least a majority of the US people. Why is the US now shocked by pictures coming out out Iraq?
My impression is that most Americans are poorly educated about the world outside their borders. Most Americans seem to believe that whatever America does is right, that blood washes off the shining armour. Most Americans believe that an American life worth more than the life of a person from another country. Note the wost "Most" in all of those sentences.
I wish I was as optimistic as you that a new president will fix this problem. I really don't think people generally understand our problems don't necessarily stem from having the 'wrong' president so many times in a row.
The impression from the outside was that Bill Clinton wasn't doing too badly and that GWB has completely screwed things up. If one president can make such a complete mess of things, surely one president can undo the damage.
Japanese army in Nanking/Nanjing
300,000 murdered civilians + 20,000 raped women != 60 murdered civilians
Not that I disagree with the fact that Chinese communist government has been as brutal the Japanese army, but please try to compare like events.
Sorry to go quiet for a while, it was a busy weekend and I was sick on Monday.
While the last hundred years were pretty horrible, I think if we go back a thousand years or so we might conclude that the Europeans (most notably the Vikings and the Christians) were really a savage bunch. Then there's Ghengis Kahn, etc. But in relation to the whole planet, there most likely hasn't been any real change. The savagery just moved off shore (from Europe and the U.S. anyway)
It is very difficult to make generalisations on the period of Ghengis Khan and the like, because we don't know a whole lot about them. I think you are right though.
There was also a large group of natives on a Carribean island that, when facing the conquistadors, chose mass suicide over slavery. In truth, that's the way it should be done.
I'm not sure I totally agree with that, but I think that depends on your view of suicide. I think a better example would be a person who chose to starve rather than the steal food frrom someone else (which would have resulted in them starving).
Killing another person truly bad, no matter what. In reality, we are survival whores that will do anything to stay alive. I'm not how I would act when facing a situation like this, but I know I should just let it go and not try to cling to life.
You make a very interesting point. I think you have are right there. I remember reading some personal reflections on people going to war. Before they started fighting, some were mentally resigned to die, however once there was the chance of dying they were frightened of dying. It is like there is a real hunger and drive to survive. Why didn't prisoners in concentration camps just give up? They can't have had much hope of survival, and yet they did not (well not all) give in.
Don't hold out on me, man! My liking or accepting it is irrelevent.
My reason for believing this is because I am a Christian. I believe that humans were created perfect, but as a result of them doing what God told them not them to do, every part of the world we live in and ourselves has become damaged. As I said I'm not sure that you will agree with that. But what is interesting to me, is that what I believe is confirmed by the world I see around me. The word that springs to mind for me is flawed: the world we live in shows what it was created to be, but it is also damaged irrevocably. A flawed diamond. As people we show that flawed nature and we are broken to such and extent that we cann't fix ourselves. We need outside help.
I'm really holding out for some evidence that physical existance is not entirely evil and that death is not so absolute as to make life entirely meaningless.
Well from my perspecive that is a littla easier to answer. If you take what I said above, then physical life is not absolutely evil. Neither is death absolute and life is not a meaningless struggle that we cannot win, because we cannot change ourselves. God has interevened by sending Jesus so save us (and indeed the world) from this cycle.
I'm not sure where you stand on all this, I'd hazard a guess that my answer might surprise/disappoint you. That said, I have greatly enjoyed chatting, it has been an interesting and enlighening experience.
I'm not sure if you are interested in looking into this any further. If you are, can I suggest having a go at reading Ecclesiates, one of the books of the bible. The reason I suggest Ecclesiates is that it really charts one man's quest for meaning in life. It isn't what most people would consider Christian, indeed there was some debate on whether it should be part of the bible at all. From any perspective it is an interesting read.
"What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever."
Link
IBM doesn't ship at rescue CD with their laptops, even if you specifically request it. I bought a T41 month ago and was very annoyed to find this. You can only get a rescue CD after the PC has been shipped. The support person seemed to be saying that this was due to a licensing agreement with MS. Even if that is true it doesn't reflect well on IBM, they should be able apply enough pressure on MS to be allowed to ship rescue CDs with the order if the person making the order specifically requests it.
Originally I was pushing for them to ship me an OEM CD with the laptop, but obviously that was right out of bounds.
I'm not sure that this is an accurate test of his power. There have been a number of other negative complaints about GMail.
Even if Google changes their tune after this column, this doesn't necessarily mean his article drove them to it. It may just mean that his article was the straw that broke the camel's back.
First off Microsoft will sell you anything they own on CD, generally only charging for postage. This is what you have. You can buy an installation CD for anything MS make for the price of the postage. You just don't get the license
Secondly the update CD includes SP4.
I don't like a lot of stuff about MS but this is one thing they are doing right. Now if they would just publicise it a little and force the OEMS to ship the CD with a PC we might actually get somewhere.
. Let's not underestimate ourselves.(or overestimate) I tend to believe that there is a higher percentage of moral people now than there was, say, just 100 years ago.
This is hard to prove one way or the other. I'm inclined to believe the reverse, but that is because I am a pessimist. That doesn't make either of us right. However I think that the evidence of the last century weighs pretty heavily in my favour. I'm not if you read much history, but I'd say that the last century was the worst in the history of humanity morally speaking. I don't see any signs of that improving.
Maybe the problem comes up when good people have to do bad things to prevail or even to survive.
Does that not disquilify them being good? Surely a good person would prefer to sacrifice themselves than harm others to survive? Can all actions justified on the basis of survival?
I know that we CAN change ourselves. It's desire part that's hard to produce.
I see both as a problem. How is that you "know" we can change? I can explain why I know we aren't going to change, but I don't think you will like or accept my explanation.
If we survive long enough, we will evolve enough, and more! :-)
That assumes we will evolve morally, intelectually and physically. I would say there is some support for the last two, I don't see any support for the first one though.
Most of the worlds problems are man made. If man can make all these problems, surely we can stop.
That is a big assumption to make. You are assuming we can change ourselves. This assumption is made up of two others.
1. The assumption I pointed out earlier that we will evolve.
2. That we can control that evolution.
I'm not sure that either of those assumptions are valid.
However, in reality, I'll accept that we are not evolved enough to live in a world of "rules without rulers" yet.
We never will evolve enough. Faith in evolution as a means to improve the human race is as flawed as faith in technology. Take a look at the last century, our high point in evolution.
Let's face some facts. Technology will not solve all the world's problems. Science will not solve the world's problems. Our capacity to change ourselves is small. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try.