The Bay area is already a known earthquake zone, so don't worry, you're covered by natural disaster. In fact, you're one of the places the rest of us feel pity for.
Coming from someone in central Texas who sees tornadoes every fall and every spring, that's saying something. (we also get flooding here, and occasional hurricane threats. Had Ivan come to texas instead of alabama, it would have been interesting to see what happened around here)
Nowadays, with mass media and Internet hype about to cause the end of the world, now's a probably good time to get yourself a survival kit, a good pair of shoes, a topographic map, instantly removable hard drive enclosure kit, and become acquainted with a treadmill. Even forgoing the last option, spending three hours and a hundred bucks now putting together such a backpack might just save your life in the future.
I don't need any of that shit. I've got a Swiss Army Knife.:)
Of course, it is a bit dull, and my wife lost the toothpick in it (she's still in trouble over it and it happened 8 years ago). Still, I can face any disaster as long as I've got--
This could be the next Lex Luthor plot. Instead of triggering the San Andreas to get beachfront property in Nevada, he could trigger the landslide and buy cheap, devastated land on the US east coast.
As nasty as that would be, why bother? A series of large underwater explosions would be far more dangerous, controllable, and difficult to detect. (if you place them right, that is, and if you're lucky, you might trigger some earthquakes too)
You thought crashing airplanes into skyscrapers was mean, just wait until the next wave hits....
Looks like tsunami waves can diffract like any other kind of wave....
Profound. Also, tsunamis can travel very close to the speed of sound. When you get right down to it, a tsunami is a sound wave, but it doesn't repeat.;)
Re:They're improving the file dialogs...
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Well just because something is gratis and has liberal licenses doesn't give it an execuse for incompetence. Many of these useability problems have been well researched and fixed years ago.
Aha, but you see, GNOME suffers from a terminal case of Not Invented Here. In fact, anything touched by the GNU must be completely rewritten, or thrown away and a new component written from the ground up. So they have to relearn all the hard lessons the rest of us learned 14 years ago.
*sigh* The sad thing is, this new file dialog still looks like something from Amiga Workbench 1.3.
Re:They're improving the file dialogs...
on
GTK 2.6.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Don't forget Qt. I've enjoyed beautiful file dialogs in KDE for as long as I can remember....
GTK's only redeeming trait, near as I can tell, is that the Unix version of wxWidgets uses it.
Re:Deity does not help analyze things
on
Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 1
When someone claims the non-existance of God as their proof, then the burden of proof would fall to them. However, Science generally attempts to not use God at all and seek an explanation which matches the experimental results of multiple controlled tests. This is not attempting to disprove God, but rather attempting to find an explanation which provides consistantly accurate results.
It may not be clear from the two posts I made that you've responded to, but I don't subscribe to any religion. So there's no confusion, I'm firmly in the science camp.
Besides that, science and religion aren't mutually exclusive. Science can't admit the existence of God (or any gods or goddesses) simply because there's no empirical evidence, observations, and what-not that can be tested. If God showed up today and said "Hey look, I'm God, this is my sidekick, Kato. Say hello, Kato," scientists would just accept him into the model without changing anything. The model will have grown, and there would be a new source of information, but scientists would do no backpedalling or apologizing. There'd be no need.
Religion, on the other hand, doesn't have to find science so contemptable. Once upon a time science was thought by various churches to be a wholesome pursuit because it meant getting to know God's creation better, and therefore getting closer to God. In that light, scientific exploration and research is just another way to pursue religion in your daily life.
The fact that the two sides see each other as mutually exclusive is far more telling than what either side is actually saying.
If it's not possible, then why? Can we empirically test this? I feel that no we can't. Empirical evidence cannot be acurately obtained from subjective experiences, which means we would need some way of providing a controlled experiment, which means we need to control God's influence on the groups so we can have one group which definitely has no "help" from God in determining the answers, and another group which does have "help" from God.
One thing I find interesting about prayer, meditation, and a whole slew of things in fact.:) The power of the subconscious isn't at all understood. Douglas Adams mentioned (I think in one of the Dirk Gently books) that while most people can't consciously do very much math, subconsciously most people are capable of solving very complex calculus, demonstrated by simple tasks like catching baseballs. Or throwing them for that matter.
It's my hypothesis that that's all that prayer amounts to, deep down inside, and it is what meditation is. So naturally you're either alluding to it or outright saying it and we're actually in agreement.:)
Re:Deity does not help analyze things
on
Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 1
Note: This isn't intended purely (or even mostly) as an attack on the theory. If you do have such a list, I would really like to read it. I just haven't yet encountered anyone who did.
The following things would prove that God doesn't exist:
Monkeys flying out of my butt.
Everyone in China jumping at exactly the right time that they all touch the ground at exactly the same time.
Gay marriage
Martha Stewart not being blood-related to MacGuyver, even though he's a fictional character.
I still wonder why most people see the two options of creation and evolution as mutually exclusive when really they aren't.
No shit. I've felt for sometime that the best way to stop your kids from doing anything stupid is to teach them about stupid things and smart things, and they'll inevitably do smart things when given the choice. Therefore, teach Creationism and Evolution in school, respectively, because we should teach stupid and smart things in school to arm kids against doing stupid things.
However, everything comming together juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust right in just the right proportions to start everything from basic proteins seems a bit remote to me. granted, it's possible, just not that likely, especially with the complexity that things have developed.
There are two serious issues with this that seem to be frequently overlooked.
1. In an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, all possiblities, no matter how improbably, must exist somewhere. We do not even know if this is an infinite universe with infinite possiblities, so we can't rule out the possibility.*
2. It's an endless cycle. If it's so improbably that things just randomly happened to develop life, the universe, and, well, everything that you figure there just has to be a guiding intelligence behind it, where did that guiding intelligence come from? Who made who, here? Did that intelligence just sort of exist, alone, beforehand? (Knowing that too much alone time causes insanity)
* Crediting the source, of course. Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, providing the only reasonable explanation for the whole world that's not solipsistic in nature.
Personally I don't think the assumption that universal laws governing the behavior of the universe exist is any less silly in the end than the assumption that a powerful intelligence makes a conscious descision to make everything the way it is. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I'm sure that the assertions are actually any different.
I'm definitely leaning towards solipsism.:)
On a personal level, though, gotta say that I prefer the traditional scientific viewpoint of "I have no idea what the hell is going on - lets find out" to the traditional religious viewpoint of "We already know all there is to know - fuck you". I can't honestly say this is any more than a personal preference born of social training, though.
I think it can be "proven" scientifically to be a better approach to things. I think that we can also dig up shit from various religious sources to also prove that "I know it all" is always a bad approach to things.
Sadly, since the world is of my own creation and will end when I wake, or when the consciousness that is me is no longer, I'm not in a hurry to push any particular point of view on my own mental constructs. So carry on, my friend. Carry on.
I happen to believe in the existance of greater being, not because I can cite someones scientific evidence but because there has to be something more to the world that we don't understand.
Well, I guess there just isn't enough in the world that we don't understand to satisfy you that you have to go and make shit up just so you won't understand it. To each his own, I suppose.
Other than that, why does there "have to be something more to the world that we don't understand"? Scientists have recently come out with "this is the last universe, whatever else may have existed before, this is definitely it", and that it stretches on forever. So it looks like there's always going to be something new for us not to understand, again without making shit up just so we'll have something we don't understand.
Yeah. But why did our brain bother to create neurotransmitters that do this in response to religion? You yourself admit this is "strange". I prefer to rationalize this as the work of the Holy Spirit.
That's because of how you've phrased the question. Plato has hurt us deeply with the dialogs, but dammit if you phrase the question subjectively the answer will be subjective.
But why did our brain bother to create neurotransmitters that do this in response to religion?
Now, let's see. There's an easy way to defeat this.:) For many people, there are numerous types of sex that also result in various natural hormones going through the body that stimulate production of various neurotransmitters.
But sodomy is a sin you fucking bastard. Ahem. Indeed, the Bible discusses entire cities that God destroyed for committing that sin.
So, "feels good" isn't a good enough qualification when the Bible itself details how you will be punished if that's your only reason for doing something.
The predictions go something like this, and they actually work. I shit you not.
"Read the Bible, when you encounter something you don't understand, pray about it. If, after doing so, you still don't understand, then you're free to say you're right. But GOD will speak to you and explain it, if you ask."
What experiments have you performed to test the predictions?
I couldn't muster enough faith to perform the test, sorry.
How many people have duplicated the results?
I don't think that many have. When's the last time you saw a Christian defeat a non-Christian in a debate over content that's actually in the Bible? It's my observation that Christians read the Bible far far less than non-Christians. Which might rule out the idea that many of them read the Bible and prayed about anything they didn't understand.
After all, it's not a very big jump from being spoon-fed cute lab demonstrations by a middle aged adult who probably couldn't use the words non sequitir in a sentence, even after using the dictionary, to being spoon-fed heaping piles of balderdash sprinkled with a few large words by a middle aged adult in a white labcoat on T.V.
I'll bet that middle-aged person that can't use the words non sequitir in a sentence can instead close an em tag.
Cheapshot aside, it's time for the tinfoil hat!
You see, if reason and skepticism were actually taught as methods of thought to be applied next to analytical reasoning and critical thinking (the purpose of math in school), then kids would grow up questioning what they hear. This isn't good for politicians who want to ban gay marriage, for example. If people don't quesiton it, you can push it, threaten people with their children, and ultimately get a boost in approval rating (and more power in the deal). If people question it, you have to come up with something better, harder, possibly something you can't actually accomplish.
An ignorant and gullible population is ideal for exploitation from the government. Having government manage the education system is trusting the fox to watch the chicken coup.
Speaking for myself, I'm from Asia. And no, I don't have anything against any country on the basis of geography or culture. I've been on Slashdot long enough (much longer than my UID suggests) to recognize a potential meme when I see one. My personal speculation is that the country-themed memes are no different from any other meme, and if they are stupid (which all memes become eventually), it's from overuse and not from cultural bias.
What is the goal of open source software? Is it to drag users away from proprietary solutions, or is there a grander purpose to the open source movement?
Depends on who you ask. As the story goes, RMS started the GNU project with the intent of dragging users from proprietary, closed-source programs. But that's Free Software, and you asked about Open Source. Open Source, of course, is all about a superior development model.
Why do you release your code? What is your motivation?
When I started working on pyAlarm, I felt that releasing the code was the right thing to do for many reasons. In fact, I wrote an article about it.
I think that many of the reasons I made pyAlarm open source apply as a general case to pretty much all other software. But to really understand why I do it, you'll have to read that article.
Has the OS movement's hatred for Microsoft overwhelmed their perceived goals?
No. The movement, by and large, doesn't hate Microsoft specifically. Many individuals do, but the community doesn't. If we hate Microsoft, how are we going to welcome them when they finally embrace open source software? It is something of an inevitability, you know. Basic survival and all that.
Would you mind hitting my website with Safari and maybe grabbing a screenshot? I put an article on there about IE and FireFox and how my website looks better in FireFox, and I tested it in Opera and Konqueror both, but I don't have a Mac to test it in Safari, and until I've seen enough of Safari/Konqueror I don't feel real confident just using Konqueror.
Anyway, if you don't mind. I'd greatly appreciate it.:)
Man, GIMP 2 is really fucking awesome. I tried it out for the first time last week, it got installed when I upgraded to Mandrake 10.1. I wasn't looking forward to GIMPing again (I love what it does, but I don't like having to use it). But GIMP2 is a whole different ballgame.
Still haven't decided about it, but it's waaaay improved over the old GIMP at least.
Slashdot Mirror
You recall incorrectly, sorry. Turns out that Missouri is extremely active seismically, and there are numerous fault lines there.
Google it, sorry I just closed the tab that discussed it. But googling Missouri earthquake will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about it.
The Bay area is already a known earthquake zone, so don't worry, you're covered by natural disaster. In fact, you're one of the places the rest of us feel pity for.
Coming from someone in central Texas who sees tornadoes every fall and every spring, that's saying something. (we also get flooding here, and occasional hurricane threats. Had Ivan come to texas instead of alabama, it would have been interesting to see what happened around here)
Nowadays, with mass media and Internet hype about to cause the end of the world, now's a probably good time to get yourself a survival kit, a good pair of shoes, a topographic map, instantly removable hard drive enclosure kit, and become acquainted with a treadmill. Even forgoing the last option, spending three hours and a hundred bucks now putting together such a backpack might just save your life in the future.
I don't need any of that shit. I've got a Swiss Army Knife. :)
Of course, it is a bit dull, and my wife lost the toothpick in it (she's still in trouble over it and it happened 8 years ago). Still, I can face any disaster as long as I've got--
I'll finish that sentence when the check arrives.
I can't believe you didn't make this a soviet russia joke....
This could be the next Lex Luthor plot. Instead of triggering the San Andreas to get beachfront property in Nevada, he could trigger the landslide and buy cheap, devastated land on the US east coast.
As nasty as that would be, why bother? A series of large underwater explosions would be far more dangerous, controllable, and difficult to detect. (if you place them right, that is, and if you're lucky, you might trigger some earthquakes too)
You thought crashing airplanes into skyscrapers was mean, just wait until the next wave hits....
Looks like tsunami waves can diffract like any other kind of wave....
Profound. Also, tsunamis can travel very close to the speed of sound. When you get right down to it, a tsunami is a sound wave, but it doesn't repeat. ;)
At least he's not the guy who's sig says "As a matter of fact, I AM a rocket scientist!"
Dude, nobody likes a smart-ass.
*a mob of physicists murders waynegoode
Well just because something is gratis and has liberal licenses doesn't give it an execuse for incompetence. Many of these useability problems have been well researched and fixed years ago.
Aha, but you see, GNOME suffers from a terminal case of Not Invented Here. In fact, anything touched by the GNU must be completely rewritten, or thrown away and a new component written from the ground up. So they have to relearn all the hard lessons the rest of us learned 14 years ago.
*sigh* The sad thing is, this new file dialog still looks like something from Amiga Workbench 1.3.
Don't forget Qt. I've enjoyed beautiful file dialogs in KDE for as long as I can remember....
GTK's only redeeming trait, near as I can tell, is that the Unix version of wxWidgets uses it.
When someone claims the non-existance of God as their proof, then the burden of proof would fall to them. However, Science generally attempts to not use God at all and seek an explanation which matches the experimental results of multiple controlled tests. This is not attempting to disprove God, but rather attempting to find an explanation which provides consistantly accurate results.
It may not be clear from the two posts I made that you've responded to, but I don't subscribe to any religion. So there's no confusion, I'm firmly in the science camp.
Besides that, science and religion aren't mutually exclusive. Science can't admit the existence of God (or any gods or goddesses) simply because there's no empirical evidence, observations, and what-not that can be tested. If God showed up today and said "Hey look, I'm God, this is my sidekick, Kato. Say hello, Kato," scientists would just accept him into the model without changing anything. The model will have grown, and there would be a new source of information, but scientists would do no backpedalling or apologizing. There'd be no need.
Religion, on the other hand, doesn't have to find science so contemptable. Once upon a time science was thought by various churches to be a wholesome pursuit because it meant getting to know God's creation better, and therefore getting closer to God. In that light, scientific exploration and research is just another way to pursue religion in your daily life.
The fact that the two sides see each other as mutually exclusive is far more telling than what either side is actually saying.
If it's not possible, then why? Can we empirically test this? I feel that no we can't. Empirical evidence cannot be acurately obtained from subjective experiences, which means we would need some way of providing a controlled experiment, which means we need to control God's influence on the groups so we can have one group which definitely has no "help" from God in determining the answers, and another group which does have "help" from God.
One thing I find interesting about prayer, meditation, and a whole slew of things in fact. :) The power of the subconscious isn't at all understood. Douglas Adams mentioned (I think in one of the Dirk Gently books) that while most people can't consciously do very much math, subconsciously most people are capable of solving very complex calculus, demonstrated by simple tasks like catching baseballs. Or throwing them for that matter.
It's my hypothesis that that's all that prayer amounts to, deep down inside, and it is what meditation is. So naturally you're either alluding to it or outright saying it and we're actually in agreement. :)
Note: This isn't intended purely (or even mostly) as an attack on the theory. If you do have such a list, I would really like to read it. I just haven't yet encountered anyone who did.
The following things would prove that God doesn't exist:
I think the point is that you can't actually have any knowledge of religion at all. You can only have beliefs.
Then what are the mitichlorines for?????
I still wonder why most people see the two options of creation and evolution as mutually exclusive when really they aren't.
No shit. I've felt for sometime that the best way to stop your kids from doing anything stupid is to teach them about stupid things and smart things, and they'll inevitably do smart things when given the choice. Therefore, teach Creationism and Evolution in school, respectively, because we should teach stupid and smart things in school to arm kids against doing stupid things.
However, everything comming together juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust right in just the right proportions to start everything from basic proteins seems a bit remote to me. granted, it's possible, just not that likely, especially with the complexity that things have developed.
There are two serious issues with this that seem to be frequently overlooked.
1. In an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, all possiblities, no matter how improbably, must exist somewhere. We do not even know if this is an infinite universe with infinite possiblities, so we can't rule out the possibility.*
2. It's an endless cycle. If it's so improbably that things just randomly happened to develop life, the universe, and, well, everything that you figure there just has to be a guiding intelligence behind it, where did that guiding intelligence come from? Who made who, here? Did that intelligence just sort of exist, alone, beforehand? (Knowing that too much alone time causes insanity)
* Crediting the source, of course. Douglas Adams, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, providing the only reasonable explanation for the whole world that's not solipsistic in nature.
Personally I don't think the assumption that universal laws governing the behavior of the universe exist is any less silly in the end than the assumption that a powerful intelligence makes a conscious descision to make everything the way it is. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I'm sure that the assertions are actually any different.
I'm definitely leaning towards solipsism. :)
On a personal level, though, gotta say that I prefer the traditional scientific viewpoint of "I have no idea what the hell is going on - lets find out" to the traditional religious viewpoint of "We already know all there is to know - fuck you". I can't honestly say this is any more than a personal preference born of social training, though.
I think it can be "proven" scientifically to be a better approach to things. I think that we can also dig up shit from various religious sources to also prove that "I know it all" is always a bad approach to things.
Sadly, since the world is of my own creation and will end when I wake, or when the consciousness that is me is no longer, I'm not in a hurry to push any particular point of view on my own mental constructs. So carry on, my friend. Carry on.
I happen to believe in the existance of greater being, not because I can cite someones scientific evidence but because there has to be something more to the world that we don't understand.
Well, I guess there just isn't enough in the world that we don't understand to satisfy you that you have to go and make shit up just so you won't understand it. To each his own, I suppose.
Other than that, why does there "have to be something more to the world that we don't understand"? Scientists have recently come out with "this is the last universe, whatever else may have existed before, this is definitely it", and that it stretches on forever. So it looks like there's always going to be something new for us not to understand, again without making shit up just so we'll have something we don't understand.
I'll tell you what I don't understand. I don't understand why gay people can't enjoy the benefits of marriage.
Yeah. But why did our brain bother to create neurotransmitters that do this in response to religion? You yourself admit this is "strange". I prefer to rationalize this as the work of the Holy Spirit.
That's because of how you've phrased the question. Plato has hurt us deeply with the dialogs, but dammit if you phrase the question subjectively the answer will be subjective.
But why did our brain bother to create neurotransmitters that do this in response to religion?
Now, let's see. There's an easy way to defeat this. :) For many people, there are numerous types of sex that also result in various natural hormones going through the body that stimulate production of various neurotransmitters.
But sodomy is a sin you fucking bastard. Ahem. Indeed, the Bible discusses entire cities that God destroyed for committing that sin.
So, "feels good" isn't a good enough qualification when the Bible itself details how you will be punished if that's your only reason for doing something.
What are the predictions of this theory?
The predictions go something like this, and they actually work. I shit you not.
"Read the Bible, when you encounter something you don't understand, pray about it. If, after doing so, you still don't understand, then you're free to say you're right. But GOD will speak to you and explain it, if you ask."
What experiments have you performed to test the predictions?
I couldn't muster enough faith to perform the test, sorry.
How many people have duplicated the results?
I don't think that many have. When's the last time you saw a Christian defeat a non-Christian in a debate over content that's actually in the Bible? It's my observation that Christians read the Bible far far less than non-Christians. Which might rule out the idea that many of them read the Bible and prayed about anything they didn't understand.
In Korea, only old people know the complexities of reality.
After all, it's not a very big jump from being spoon-fed cute lab demonstrations by a middle aged adult who probably couldn't use the words non sequitir in a sentence, even after using the dictionary, to being spoon-fed heaping piles of balderdash sprinkled with a few large words by a middle aged adult in a white labcoat on T.V.
I'll bet that middle-aged person that can't use the words non sequitir in a sentence can instead close an em tag.
Cheapshot aside, it's time for the tinfoil hat!
You see, if reason and skepticism were actually taught as methods of thought to be applied next to analytical reasoning and critical thinking (the purpose of math in school), then kids would grow up questioning what they hear. This isn't good for politicians who want to ban gay marriage, for example. If people don't quesiton it, you can push it, threaten people with their children, and ultimately get a boost in approval rating (and more power in the deal). If people question it, you have to come up with something better, harder, possibly something you can't actually accomplish.
An ignorant and gullible population is ideal for exploitation from the government. Having government manage the education system is trusting the fox to watch the chicken coup.
Speaking for myself, I'm from Asia. And no, I don't have anything against any country on the basis of geography or culture. I've been on Slashdot long enough (much longer than my UID suggests) to recognize a potential meme when I see one. My personal speculation is that the country-themed memes are no different from any other meme, and if they are stupid (which all memes become eventually), it's from overuse and not from cultural bias.
In China, potential memes are always positive!
What is the goal of open source software? Is it to drag users away from proprietary solutions, or is there a grander purpose to the open source movement?
Depends on who you ask. As the story goes, RMS started the GNU project with the intent of dragging users from proprietary, closed-source programs. But that's Free Software, and you asked about Open Source. Open Source, of course, is all about a superior development model.
Why do you release your code? What is your motivation?
When I started working on pyAlarm, I felt that releasing the code was the right thing to do for many reasons. In fact, I wrote an article about it.
I think that many of the reasons I made pyAlarm open source apply as a general case to pretty much all other software. But to really understand why I do it, you'll have to read that article.
Has the OS movement's hatred for Microsoft overwhelmed their perceived goals?
No. The movement, by and large, doesn't hate Microsoft specifically. Many individuals do, but the community doesn't. If we hate Microsoft, how are we going to welcome them when they finally embrace open source software? It is something of an inevitability, you know. Basic survival and all that.
Would you mind hitting my website with Safari and maybe grabbing a screenshot? I put an article on there about IE and FireFox and how my website looks better in FireFox, and I tested it in Opera and Konqueror both, but I don't have a Mac to test it in Safari, and until I've seen enough of Safari/Konqueror I don't feel real confident just using Konqueror.
Anyway, if you don't mind. I'd greatly appreciate it. :)
Man, GIMP 2 is really fucking awesome. I tried it out for the first time last week, it got installed when I upgraded to Mandrake 10.1. I wasn't looking forward to GIMPing again (I love what it does, but I don't like having to use it). But GIMP2 is a whole different ballgame.
Still haven't decided about it, but it's waaaay improved over the old GIMP at least.