Wrong. Agnostics are atheists, and you just explained why. Agnostics don't believe they can answer "Is there a God?", which obviously means they don't believe the answer is "yes".
AC: Religion implies the belief in things which are not perceivable by our senses, and thus incompatible with Atheism.
Wrong. Atheism means you don't believe in god(s). What you're talking about can be called naturalism or materialism (or even "asupernaturalism")... disbelief in supernatural forces. Gods are one kind of supernatural force, but not the only kind, so materialists are a subset of atheists.
AC: The point of Atheism is not to avoid deism or theology but to avoid the acceptance of ideas that cannot be disproven
Once again, you have incorrect definitions for words. What you're talking about is scepticism (or "rationality", or "science"). Many atheists are also sceptics, and vice-versa, but the words are not equivalent (although this explains your confusion)
Also, you keep on capitalizing "Atheism", which is technically a spelling error. It is not a proper noun.
Having been to the moon, worked on the moon and having time to reflect on the implications of *no earth* does
No, no it doesn't. Standing on the surface of the moon tells you NOTHING about how likely it is for an asteroid to hit Earth, or how damaging it would be for that to happen. Any one of the engineers who actually applied heavy brainpower to put him there would be more qualified.
Oh, and that sig ("Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism...") is wrong for another reason: atheism is not incompatible with religion. You can have a religion without theism. For example, Zen Buddhists don't believe in God, but are very religious (and sometimes they even erect displays)
Atheism [reference.com] is a belief system as much as Christianity. It is an unwavering belief that there is NO God.
Hey, next time try READING the dictionary link you provided. That way maybe you can correctly repeat the contents of one single sentence. Here it is:
One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.
This might require some tough thinking, but notice how it can mean EITHER active denial, OR just disbelief? Disbelief means you don't believe, but it doesn't imply you've ever even considered the idea. 100% of people less than 2 years old are atheists, since they haven't even heard (or comprehended) the concept of "God" yet.
To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant.
All agnostics are also atheists. They don't believe in God... the fact that they're not quite about it doesn't change the fact that they don't believe in God.
No they're not. Generously, I could agree that Wolfenstein to Quake2 were the same (in singleplay), and that Quake to Quake3 were the same (multiplay)... but Doom3 is different (and worse!) from any of their previous games.
It contains far less entertaining gameplay, so in this case the tech-demo accusation is almost accurate (except that it's a bad demo too, of course... no one can watch a demonstration in pitch darkness)
"Nano tech" is "nanoscale technology", so yes, that's exactly what it means.
rather than artificially constructed mechanisms with molecules as components
If you want to talk about nanomachinery, you're free to use that specific word.
What _I_ want to know is how all those slimey doctors redefined "cloning" to mean induced monozygotic reproduction, instead of building a full copy of an adult organism, which is what it's always meant in scifi...
First, there was no implication of matrices within matrices. The architect spoke of five previous matrices
That implication was at the very end of Reloaded, when Neo discovered he could use magic powers "outside" the Matrix.
That's a resolution. And a damn fine one at that.
It's not fine, because it doesn't even make any sense. The first movie was perfectly rational, and suggested thoughtful sequels would follow. They didn't. The whole concept of "each time, One creates a virus that will destroy everything unless he stops it an we reboot" is totally silly and unjustified.
The whole matrix within a matrix just perpetuates the endless loop and IMHO is a cop-out ending.
True. The Everquest-thing woudl've been the best ending.
As evidenced by Taken, Peacekeeper Wars, the two Stargate series, Buck Rogers, Andromeda, the constant reruns of Star Trek, the X-Files and the Outer Limits, Five Days to Midnight, and an original movie list that out of about 60 films contains seven (in my opinion) with even a vague fantasy bent.
Wrong. You listed 9 specific things. One of them (Peacekeeper) is unfamilar to me, but all the rest are fantasy, except for Outer Limits (which vacillates fantasy and sci-fi on each episode). You apparently don't know what "fantasy" actually means. Star Trek and especially Star Gate are undeniably fantasy.
But, your mistake is understandable, because in the wake of Tolkien's overwhelming success, a new and incorrect definition of fantasy has emerged: "involving swords, magic, and/or dragons". That's comprable to the definition of sci-fi you were using: "involving lasers, robots, and/or spaceships". Both those definitions are used when book/video stores arrange their shelving.
The original, "highbrow" definitions of fantasy and science fiction remain as described in your dictionary, untainted by the contours of pop-culture genre patterns.
That's the reason why complaints about the removal of the correct ending from the Return Of The King movie are actually valid, and not just rantings of disgruntled nerds.
In the book, the black-robed master of incarnated evil was defeated just halfway through, but the "Scouring of the Shire" chapters served as a reminder that violence springs eternal. Wherever there is life, there will be animals (men or hobbits) competing for food and doing "evil" to each other.
The book's ending respected the continuance of non-supernatural evil, while the film went more towards the comforting idea that evil comes from outsider forces, not ourselves.
I don't blame TV producers for making race changes to fit the actors they have available,
They could've easily recruited actors of absolutely any ethnicity. There's no way they can blame anything on scarcity of non-"caucasian" actors.
Plus, the Earthsea hero was actually supposed to be red, a shade not found in human skin, but easily managable with either makeup or CGI. (Especially when the series is only 2 episodes long)
...uh, how exactly do whites have the privilege of being colorblind ?
In the media context of North America, white/caucasian is the default ethnicity. For an interesting demonstration, watch an episode of Fox's The Simpsons. Notice that most people are colored yellow, which means white, unless they're brown, which means brown (Abu and Karl).
Cygwin has to go though an extra layer (hence the need for the dlls everywhere)
Tons of native Windows programs rely on extra DLLs.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Free but not free?
If you don't know what Free means, why did you specifically write "Free" instead of "free"? That'd be like someone using "Windows" in a sentence and not knowing it means a Microsoft product instead of a pane of glass.
I did EXACTLY that in my last post, Einstein.
Illegal copyright infringement doesn't count... but that's what it means to redistribute their old product without permission. But that doesn't matter anyway, since I tried your link, and it won't run on Microsoft(tm) Windows XP(r): "Error: Unable to update TNTPROC.INI file". A visit to microimages.com will confirm:
"NOTE: The version of MI/X that comes with the TNT products cannot be used apart from the TNT products. If you want to use MI/X for other X applications, you need the stand-alone version."
So, that one doesn't work, so it sucks. As far as your other link (pexus.com), that product was only freely released in the middle of this year. It's therefore entirely reasonable for people to have been unaware of it, making your rude assaults completely uncalled-for.
However, I'll give it a try too, and see if it sucks or not. Hmm, 15 meg- not as small as what you were claiming, but a reasonable size. Run it, and:
XCL MFC Application: XCL MFC Applition has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
So, it doesn't work either, so it also sucks. Oh, wait, I was wrong- it works, but only if you start the "X-Deep 32 Root Window (:0 SW Mode)" first. So alhough not rootless like you said, it's not totally useless.
However, it doesn't include SSH, and configuring putty to tunnel X11 for a separate application is difficult enough to make the Cygwin approach easier overall.
Junk food often is MUCH more expensive to eat in the long run.
For an adult, the greatest measure of how well a food will sustain you is calorie-count. Calories are what keep you alive and moving. And, the highest calorie/dollar ratio comes from buying large units of pure lard.
Because it would be dishonest. Rewriting the past is a trick of the Orwellian overlords. (Although I supposed it'd be OK to allow you to edit a post so long as nobody else had viewed it yet)
The law should require registration to renew copyrights of computer software. If it isn't renewed on a certain schedule (10 years perhaps?)
Requiring copyrights to be periodically renewed sounds like a good idea, but would be unworkable in practice, for multiple reasons.
So much copyrighted content is created every day that it'd be impossible to administer the system fairly (without spending excessive tax-dollars on government paper-shufflers). Every single thing you write is copyrighted. Every minorly different version of a game published is copyright separately... so what happens when a publisher renews on 4 of those versions, but not the Asian release that was recalled after 2 weeks for crashing USB drives? A small oversight, and now the product is out for free.
No, renewable copyright registration doesn't work in a world where the initial registration is implicit (unless the renewal were somehow implicit too).
Much simpler and better to merely cut the number of years copyright lasts from 97 down to 30 or less. There is no good reason for Nintendo to continue collecting profits on games written in 1981... it doesn't encourage them to write new games, and in fact discourages them from ongoing creativity (by providing an alternate revenue stream).
Older versions of M/IX, before they discontinued their Free version, were quite small...
There was never a Free M/IX. There were free versions, but not Free (if there had ever been, they'd still be availible).
Why not just use a native Windows XServer. Hell, you could fit one on a floppy disk if you like...
Give a link to one I can download without paying money, and that won't time out after 120 minutes of use, or turn off after a month without registering.
AC: the needed password changes every minute or so, and you need a program on your PDA that tells you what password to use
If you want to go down that path, then don't base the program on time- that would create a needless opportunity for failure (what if your clocks get unsynced, and you can't login?). Instead, just pregenerate a big list of random passwords for the server, and copy it to your PDA. Set the server to only accept each password once, and then move down the list.
This also avoids giving the keystroke logger even a 1-minute window of opportunity, because the password is instantly expired as soon as its logged. (However, as I already said, if he's not just logging by also has 0wned the client PC, that's still not enough to make you safe)
Explain why you would want to use a cygwin version of X11 running off a CD, rather than a native Windows XServer.
Cygwin is native-Windows. It's nice to run from CD because the cygwin installer is irritating to operate. The reason it's preferable to other native Windows XServers is that all the rest are either expensive, or suck.
No. I cross-compile with Ming32, and test with Wine, and if any problems crop up that I didn't see, it's just blamed on Microsoft instability.
Mozilla's got one covered and the other is just wrong.
That's self-contradictory. By acknowledging that putting Mozilla on Windows helped free software, the consistent view would be that other Free things on windows also help it.
In short, your time and effort are better spend doing anything other than making Windows better.
Making Windows "better" by making it more similar to Linux. The more Linux apps that get Windows ports, the greater the proportion of Windows users who can switch to Linux without re-learning their applications, and thus the more who are willing to do the switch.
The indiscretions of the GUI toolkits cannot be blamed on the X11 protocol or server design.
I wasn't blaming anyone... but such an accusation wouldn't be completely invalid.
After all, X11 advertises itself as a "network transparent" protocol, but if that were really true, toolkits wouldn't need to specifically optimize for high-latency situations.
Also, X11 doesn't provide a good way for toolkit libraries to learn what network constraints they're working under, which would enable some kind of graceful degradation of eye-candy. For example, those translucently-shadowed menus in KDE are fine locally, but unreasonably slow on the network. If there were some way for the X11 server to send the application a hint that performance was low, the GUI could automatically scale-down to simpler graphics. (Of course, that approach violates network transparency, but it could be an easy path to higher performance)
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Agnostics are atheists, and you just explained why. Agnostics don't believe they can answer "Is there a God?", which obviously means they don't believe the answer is "yes".
Both of these statements are true:
"Agnostic != atheist"
in the same way that these statements are:
"Honda != automobile"
So, all you've really demonstrated is that
Equality is different from set-membership.
AC: Religion implies the belief in things which are not perceivable by our senses, and thus incompatible with Atheism.
Wrong. Atheism means you don't believe in god(s). What you're talking about can be called naturalism or materialism (or even "asupernaturalism")... disbelief in supernatural forces. Gods are one kind of supernatural force, but not the only kind, so materialists are a subset of atheists.
AC: The point of Atheism is not to avoid deism or theology but to avoid the acceptance of ideas that cannot be disproven
Once again, you have incorrect definitions for words. What you're talking about is scepticism (or "rationality", or "science"). Many atheists are also sceptics, and vice-versa, but the words are not equivalent (although this explains your confusion)
Also, you keep on capitalizing "Atheism", which is technically a spelling error. It is not a proper noun.
Having been to the moon, worked on the moon and having time to reflect on the implications of *no earth* does
No, no it doesn't. Standing on the surface of the moon tells you NOTHING about how likely it is for an asteroid to hit Earth, or how damaging it would be for that to happen. Any one of the engineers who actually applied heavy brainpower to put him there would be more qualified.
Oh, and that sig ("Banning all religious displays "establishes" Atheism...") is wrong for another reason: atheism is not incompatible with religion. You can have a religion without theism. For example, Zen Buddhists don't believe in God, but are very religious (and sometimes they even erect displays)
Hey, next time try READING the dictionary link you provided. That way maybe you can correctly repeat the contents of one single sentence. Here it is:
This might require some tough thinking, but notice how it can mean EITHER active denial, OR just disbelief? Disbelief means you don't believe, but it doesn't imply you've ever even considered the idea. 100% of people less than 2 years old are atheists, since they haven't even heard (or comprehended) the concept of "God" yet.
To be agnostic is to assume a question such as God is unknowable by human mind, so is irrelevant.
All agnostics are also atheists. They don't believe in God... the fact that they're not quite about it doesn't change the fact that they don't believe in God.
In summary 15,000 hrs training, 15100 hrs in flight hours and 835 hrs in 6 space flights.
So flying around in fast airplanes qualifies you to evaluate the density of trans-terrestrial asteroids and their ecological impact?
I don't know what christmas music you listen to!
Mostly just The Exorcist themesong.
Yes, because they are all the same game.
No they're not. Generously, I could agree that Wolfenstein to Quake2 were the same (in singleplay), and that Quake to Quake3 were the same (multiplay)... but Doom3 is different (and worse!) from any of their previous games.
It contains far less entertaining gameplay, so in this case the tech-demo accusation is almost accurate (except that it's a bad demo too, of course... no one can watch a demonstration in pitch darkness)
Since we have now redefined nanotech
There was no redefinition.
anything that deals in nanometer scale structures
"Nano tech" is "nanoscale technology", so yes, that's exactly what it means.
rather than artificially constructed mechanisms with molecules as components
If you want to talk about nanomachinery, you're free to use that specific word.
What _I_ want to know is how all those slimey doctors redefined "cloning" to mean induced monozygotic reproduction, instead of building a full copy of an adult organism, which is what it's always meant in scifi...
and after that are working on Red Faction II.
What kind of work are do they plan to do to it? Red Faction II was published more than a year ago...
First, there was no implication of matrices within matrices. The architect spoke of five previous matrices
That implication was at the very end of Reloaded, when Neo discovered he could use magic powers "outside" the Matrix.
That's a resolution. And a damn fine one at that.
It's not fine, because it doesn't even make any sense. The first movie was perfectly rational, and suggested thoughtful sequels would follow. They didn't. The whole concept of "each time, One creates a virus that will destroy everything unless he stops it an we reboot" is totally silly and unjustified.
The whole matrix within a matrix just perpetuates the endless loop and IMHO is a cop-out ending.
True. The Everquest-thing woudl've been the best ending.
As evidenced by Taken, Peacekeeper Wars, the two Stargate series, Buck Rogers, Andromeda, the constant reruns of Star Trek, the X-Files and the Outer Limits, Five Days to Midnight, and an original movie list that out of about 60 films contains seven (in my opinion) with even a vague fantasy bent.
Wrong. You listed 9 specific things. One of them (Peacekeeper) is unfamilar to me, but all the rest are fantasy, except for Outer Limits (which vacillates fantasy and sci-fi on each episode). You apparently don't know what "fantasy" actually means. Star Trek and especially Star Gate are undeniably fantasy.
But, your mistake is understandable, because in the wake of Tolkien's overwhelming success, a new and incorrect definition of fantasy has emerged: "involving swords, magic, and/or dragons". That's comprable to the definition of sci-fi you were using: "involving lasers, robots, and/or spaceships". Both those definitions are used when book/video stores arrange their shelving.
The original, "highbrow" definitions of fantasy and science fiction remain as described in your dictionary, untainted by the contours of pop-culture genre patterns.
and even the "villains" are entirely human.
That's the reason why complaints about the removal of the correct ending from the Return Of The King movie are actually valid, and not just rantings of disgruntled nerds.
In the book, the black-robed master of incarnated evil was defeated just halfway through, but the "Scouring of the Shire" chapters served as a reminder that violence springs eternal. Wherever there is life, there will be animals (men or hobbits) competing for food and doing "evil" to each other.
The book's ending respected the continuance of non-supernatural evil, while the film went more towards the comforting idea that evil comes from outsider forces, not ourselves.
I don't blame TV producers for making race changes to fit the actors they have available,
They could've easily recruited actors of absolutely any ethnicity. There's no way they can blame anything on scarcity of non-"caucasian" actors.
Plus, the Earthsea hero was actually supposed to be red, a shade not found in human skin, but easily managable with either makeup or CGI. (Especially when the series is only 2 episodes long)
...uh, how exactly do whites have the privilege of being colorblind ?
In the media context of North America, white/caucasian is the default ethnicity. For an interesting demonstration, watch an episode of Fox's The Simpsons. Notice that most people are colored yellow, which means white, unless they're brown, which means brown (Abu and Karl).
While in the west this might be true it is not true in say, Japan
Please remember that if you live in America, Japan and China are both west of you.
Tons of native Windows programs rely on extra DLLs.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Free but not free?
If you don't know what Free means, why did you specifically write "Free" instead of "free"? That'd be like someone using "Windows" in a sentence and not knowing it means a Microsoft product instead of a pane of glass.
I did EXACTLY that in my last post, Einstein.
Illegal copyright infringement doesn't count... but that's what it means to redistribute their old product without permission. But that doesn't matter anyway, since I tried your link, and it won't run on Microsoft(tm) Windows XP(r): "Error: Unable to update TNTPROC.INI file". A visit to microimages.com will confirm:
So, that one doesn't work, so it sucks. As far as your other link (pexus.com), that product was only freely released in the middle of this year. It's therefore entirely reasonable for people to have been unaware of it, making your rude assaults completely uncalled-for.
However, I'll give it a try too, and see if it sucks or not. Hmm, 15 meg- not as small as what you were claiming, but a reasonable size. Run it, and:
So, it doesn't work either, so it also sucks. Oh, wait, I was wrong- it works, but only if you start the "X-Deep 32 Root Window (:0 SW Mode)" first. So alhough not rootless like you said, it's not totally useless.
However, it doesn't include SSH, and configuring putty to tunnel X11 for a separate application is difficult enough to make the Cygwin approach easier overall.
Junk food often is MUCH more expensive to eat in the long run.
For an adult, the greatest measure of how well a food will sustain you is calorie-count. Calories are what keep you alive and moving. And, the highest calorie/dollar ratio comes from buying large units of pure lard.
why doesn't /. have a "delete post" or something?
Because it would be dishonest. Rewriting the past is a trick of the Orwellian overlords. (Although I supposed it'd be OK to allow you to edit a post so long as nobody else had viewed it yet)
The law should require registration to renew copyrights of computer software. If it isn't renewed on a certain schedule (10 years perhaps?)
Requiring copyrights to be periodically renewed sounds like a good idea, but would be unworkable in practice, for multiple reasons.
So much copyrighted content is created every day that it'd be impossible to administer the system fairly (without spending excessive tax-dollars on government paper-shufflers). Every single thing you write is copyrighted. Every minorly different version of a game published is copyright separately... so what happens when a publisher renews on 4 of those versions, but not the Asian release that was recalled after 2 weeks for crashing USB drives? A small oversight, and now the product is out for free.
No, renewable copyright registration doesn't work in a world where the initial registration is implicit (unless the renewal were somehow implicit too).
Much simpler and better to merely cut the number of years copyright lasts from 97 down to 30 or less. There is no good reason for Nintendo to continue collecting profits on games written in 1981... it doesn't encourage them to write new games, and in fact discourages them from ongoing creativity (by providing an alternate revenue stream).
You still haven't noticed that Cygwin is NATIVE.
Older versions of M/IX, before they discontinued their Free version, were quite small...
There was never a Free M/IX. There were free versions, but not Free (if there had ever been, they'd still be availible).
Why not just use a native Windows XServer. Hell, you could fit one on a floppy disk if you like...
Give a link to one I can download without paying money, and that won't time out after 120 minutes of use, or turn off after a month without registering.
AC: the needed password changes every minute or so, and you need a program on your PDA that tells you what password to use
If you want to go down that path, then don't base the program on time- that would create a needless opportunity for failure (what if your clocks get unsynced, and you can't login?). Instead, just pregenerate a big list of random passwords for the server, and copy it to your PDA. Set the server to only accept each password once, and then move down the list.
This also avoids giving the keystroke logger even a 1-minute window of opportunity, because the password is instantly expired as soon as its logged. (However, as I already said, if he's not just logging by also has 0wned the client PC, that's still not enough to make you safe)
Explain why you would want to use a cygwin version of X11 running off a CD, rather than a native Windows XServer.
Cygwin is native-Windows. It's nice to run from CD because the cygwin installer is irritating to operate. The reason it's preferable to other native Windows XServers is that all the rest are either expensive, or suck.
To develop M$ crap, you have to own it.
No. I cross-compile with Ming32, and test with Wine, and if any problems crop up that I didn't see, it's just blamed on Microsoft instability.
Mozilla's got one covered and the other is just wrong.
That's self-contradictory. By acknowledging that putting Mozilla on Windows helped free software, the consistent view would be that other Free things on windows also help it.
In short, your time and effort are better spend doing anything other than making Windows better.
Making Windows "better" by making it more similar to Linux. The more Linux apps that get Windows ports, the greater the proportion of Windows users who can switch to Linux without re-learning their applications, and thus the more who are willing to do the switch.
The indiscretions of the GUI toolkits cannot be blamed on the X11 protocol or server design.
I wasn't blaming anyone... but such an accusation wouldn't be completely invalid.
After all, X11 advertises itself as a "network transparent" protocol, but if that were really true, toolkits wouldn't need to specifically optimize for high-latency situations.
Also, X11 doesn't provide a good way for toolkit libraries to learn what network constraints they're working under, which would enable some kind of graceful degradation of eye-candy. For example, those translucently-shadowed menus in KDE are fine locally, but unreasonably slow on the network. If there were some way for the X11 server to send the application a hint that performance was low, the GUI could automatically scale-down to simpler graphics. (Of course, that approach violates network transparency, but it could be an easy path to higher performance)