Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah speaks of "One dwelling above the circle of the Earth." The Hebrew word translated as "circle" can also mean "ball" or "sphere". Note that a sphere is the only shape that looks like a circle from any angle. And for all you folks out there that wish to nitpick, yes, the Earth is actually an oblate spheroid, being slightly flattened at the poles. It still looks round from space... and Isaiah didn't need to go there to find that out. Isaiah's writings date back to approximately 800 to 850 B.C.E., by the way.
A pizza is also a circle, yet it's flat. In the bible, it talks about someone (David?) having a dream where he climbs the highest tree in the world and sees the entire world at once. Also, Jesus and the devil go to the tallest mountain and the devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world at once. You can't do that with a sphere no matter how far away you are. The only way you can see the entire earth at once from a high vantage point is if it's flat.
The bible also talks about the earth being on pillars, and that those pillars shake when there's an earthquake.
Oh, and speaking of writings that go back... check out what Buddha said and did some 800 years before Jesus was around, and then what Jesus supposedly said and did 800 years after Buddha. Who copied whom?
3) It is Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the scientists say "Umm... can we have a closer look at that book of yours?"
The Bible is already used as a historical tool. It's one of the few sources of stories from that era and contains many references to locations, people, etc. which existed back then. However, to say then that the whole Bible is true because some historical data have been shown to be true (as Evidence That Demands a Verdict does, for example) is going too far.
For example: "George W. Bush became Ruler of the Land and took up his abode in the Whitehouse. He cried out to heaven and God heard his cries and sent two massive jumbo jets crashing into the World Trade Center buildings, and leveled them."
If someone from the future reads this, they can verify that George W. Bush existed. They can verify that he was Ruler of the Land (aka President of the USA). They can verify that two jets crashed into the WTC buildings and they were leveled. All these are facts, but the story is complete bullshit. Same thing with the Bible. Take a bunch of facts which are passed down from generation to generation. Many books of the Bible weren't actually written down for several centuries after the fact. Ever play the telephone game for a few hundred years? The kernel of truth still survives, but now the stories are marred in legend and embellishments.
So someone just might even find the remains of a large boat. Wonderful. But they'd have to provide a lot more evidence to counter the existing evidence that no global flood ever occurred.
To put this in English, start at the bottom. While you still have ambition and you're not yet at the top, keep incrementing your position. Once you're at the top, increment your position one last time so that you're over the top. All the while, you're doing nothing at all in this loop.
I've never understood how athiests could view life as more important than --insert random religion here--s.
Think of it this way. From an atheist point of view, you only have one life. An average 70 to 80 years to spend as you see fit. And then it's gone forever. From a Christian point of view, you might have an average 70 to 80 years still, but this is just a drop in the ocean compared to an eternity of afterlife. As long as Christians follows Christian principles for that time, it doesn't really matter whether they experience everything of the world they can because there's supposedly something so much better waiting for them in heaven.
Now take this analogy another step. Instead of years, consider dollars. If you're an atheist, you're given $80 to spend traveling the world and then you die and that's the end. If you're a Christian, you have an infinite amount of money at your disposal, $80 of which you can spend traveling the world before you die, then you can spend the other infinite amount at your leisure. With that in mind, which one do you think will treat their $80 as more important than the other? Which one will seek to make the absolute most of that $80 before he dies?
If we just die...and we're poof, gone, then we wouldn't know we were gone, we would be cease to exist, so would we have really lost anything?? We wouldn't be aware of it's loss because we wouldn't exist. Just a thought that's been bugging me for a while, maybe somebody can explain from their personal opinions.
Do you feel your life is meaningless unless you'll be able to feel a sense of loss when you die? Don't *wait* for a sense of loss! Realize that every second of every day that ticks by, you're already losing your life. Those seconds are priceless and irreplaceable. Tick. Tick. Tick. How old are you? Figure out how many seconds you have left on your life's clock before it runs out. Tick. Tick. Tick. If you're 25 years old, you have about 1.5 billion seconds left in your life. It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Start the timer, it's ticking down -- there's already 86,400 less seconds today than yesterday. Since last month, you've already lost over 2.5 million seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Do you smoke? Do drugs? Are you overweight? Do you eat poorly? Guess what... it's even worse than that. Maybe you only have 1.2 billion seconds left. Tick. Tick. Tick. Don't worry if, in the past, you have squandered your time. We all have. What are you doing with your life now, today, tomorrow, to improve the quality of your life and experience more that life has to offer?
Backwards doesn't imply bottom-to-top orientation. Last time I looked at myself in the mirror, my feet appeared below my head. Plus, reading it top-to-bottom makes it sound like Yoda wrote that function. "Converts a buffer, this function does... hmm?"
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public?
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 1
Having a PhD does NOT make one smarter, it just means that said person found (or has) the financial means to become more educated...
Sure, anyone can buy a PhD from a diploma mill. That's not very hard. But reputable PhDs, the kind that Google would want to hire, have had to learn a lot of material, prepare a thesis, successfully defend that thesis and demonstrate their broad as well as in-depth knowledge of the subject. But I might be out to lunch on this one -- why don't you buy yourself a PhD for $199 and apply for a job at Google. Let us know how the interview goes, ok?
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public?
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
With google: before I give them my money, I would like to know how many servers they have, how close to capacity they are, what softwares they use (compatibility issues).
I agree it would be nice to know. But if those are your conditions for investing in Google, I think Google would probably tell you to keep your money. I imagine Google's quarterly reports would probably say something like:
"Our operation depends on having the ability to increase our server and bandwidth resources as we grow our services. Business may be adversely impacted should capacity be unavailable. Our servers are also at risk for viruses, worms, and DDoS attacks which could put the operation of those servers at risk and adversely affect business." etc...
That would give you, as an investor, the information you need to determine whether those risks are worth your money. In all likelihood you'll just have to rely on the fact that they have an army of PhDs who are smarter than you and I put together and know their shit when it comes to security, databases, clustering, etc.
Now I could be wrong. Perhaps Google is waiting for the IPO and will then detail their server infrastructure, wow Wall Street (and geeks worldwide) with their amazing capacity, and their stock will skyrocket on the first day of trading. I'd wager that Google's stock is going to have amazing gains anyway given that it's a bit of an industry darling. Other tech companies which have been thinking of going public would be wise to time their IPO very shortly after Google's and ride the wave.
What, as in "Did you mean french military defeats"?
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public?
on
How does Google do it?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
Why would a shareholder care about server specifications? Investing is all about money. Read any quarterly report from a public company. Income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow are the primary interests on the numbers side as well as a general roadmap of where the company's heading. Warren Buffett doesn't care if each server has two 80 GB drives, or whether they have four 250 GB drives per server. The only thing that matters is that there are competent people to handle these kinds of "dirty details" that an investor doesn't give a rats ass about.
Take a look at the kinds of information you could expect from Google's quarterly reports.
Care to repeat your above steps to elaborate on the creation of God?
From Carl Sagan's Cosmos, p. 212:
"If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or if we say tha God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?"
Whether mathematics works or not is kind of a moot point. Really what it boils down to is this: does one need faith in order to not have faith? Sounds like a Zen question, but that's it in a nutshell. If my hammer doesn't have faith in God (hammers can't even think!), does that necessarily imply that my hammer has faith that there is no God? Of course not! Lack of faith does not require faith, although one can certainly have faith in something else -- but that's a whole other matter.
You pay more for the fine French Restaurant, right? Then they make better _meals_.
But if a McDonalds makes more total than that French Restaurant, then they're a better _Restaurant_.
So if I opened up a restaurant serving up McDonald's excess food from yesterday that they threw in the garbage (ignoring legalities) for $50 a plate, would you say my restaurant made better meals because you paid more?
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You say it only requires common sense to support your belief that there is no god... I say to you "Prove it."
If you're going to pick on faulty logic, may I suggest you start with your own?:) Let's analyze your logic, shall we? You are claiming:
atheist = faith in (not god)
Which does not logically follow. Allow me to prove why:
1. definition: theist = faith in god 2. definition: atheist = not (theist)
Substituting the above, we get:
3. atheist = not (faith in god)
Easy enough. Now your assumption that not having a faith in god requires faith that there is no god can be expressed as:
4. assume: not (faith in god) = faith in (not god)
Let's take the negation of both the left and right sides of the above equation. Since we're assuming they're equal, then their negations will also be equal. Their negations are:
5. not (not (faith in god)) = faith in god 6. not (faith in (not god)) = not faith in god
Since the left and right sides of line 4 are equal, we substitute back in and end up with:
7. faith in god = not faith in god 8. theist = atheist
Since we have arrived at an absurd conclusion (reductio ad absurdum) by following your logic (the assumption on line 4), this demonstrates that your assumption is incorrect. Using your logic, we would come to the conclusion that theist = atheist which is obviously wrong. So what has this proven? Precisely that simply being an atheist or "not having faith that there is a god" doesn't imply "having faith that there is no god". In other words, atheism doesn't *require* faith.
"How is atheism a faith? It is by definition a lack of faith"
No, it is by definition a faith that there is no Deity. You are confusing it with agnosticism, which does lack faith.
The greek prefix "a-" means "non-", so an atheist is someone who is a non-theist. What is a theist? One who has faith in God(s) and/or Goddess(es) who created the universe, etc. So an atheist or non-theist is one who doesn't fit into that category.
This is logically a contrapositive. If A implies B then the contrapositive of that is not B implies not A. If would be false to say that not A implies not B. However, there are two meanings to atheist, the classical atheism which simply means "I don't share your beliefs" and the modern atheism which means "I believe in no God(s)/Goddess(es)". The modern atheism does require faith, as you've pointed out and doesn't exactly fit the definition of a non-theist. The classic atheism doesn't require faith as it simply means that "I don't hold those beliefs", and not "I hold beliefs opposite to yours".
The misunderstanding between atheist and agnostic is very widespread. However, read up on what a Theist believes vs. what a Gnostic believes and you'll find that there's a huge difference between the two, and saying that an agnostic is an atheist without faith would be similar to saying that a Gnostic is a Theist without faith.
Isn't that a bit like judging L. Ron Hubbard's material by units sold? Sure, Dianetics may be a best seller but how does it rank when you subtract sales (often multiple copies) to Scientologists? If it's still a mega-bestseller, then the book has been fairly judged. But if the book sells very few copies outside of the choir it's preaching to, what does that say about the quality?
You're echoing the exact same arguments made when the iPod mini details were announced on Slashdot. Just about everyone chimed in and said that this thing was too expensive and wouldn't sell. Well, the small form factor (and possibly color choices) have shown to be a hit with the market and iPod minis are currently selling like hotcakes.
So once again, another company is working around the problem instead of fixing it.
One man's workaround is another man's fix. Here, the problem is that video lags the audio by a fraction of a second. So there's two solutions to this problem: play the video with less delay or play the audio with more delay. Adding delay to the audio costs close to $0 because it just needs to be buffered for the 60ms it takes for the video to be shown. Speeding up the video might double the cost of the display as you might need parallel video processors which break up the incoming signal by physical region. Or you might need to find a faster display technology which hasn't been invented yet.
In case my posting on grokshill somehow gets (ahem) lost, here's what I wrote in reference to this article:
Once again Dan O'Dowd, CEO of Green Hills Software Inc. opens his
mouth and inserts foot. He simply doesn't understand what Linux is.
Proof? What *is* Linux then, and can you back up *your* claims?
The only two reasons why Linux doesn't have an EAL 7 rating are
money, and time.
Why should I believe this? You appear to be shilling for Linux.
It costs lot's of money to get an EAL rating.
How much money and how much time? For what rating? Where is
your
proof?
IBM is working with SuSe on that right now.
Please provide proof. It sounds like you're shilling.
It also takes time to work out that rating.
How much time?
He mentions that Windows has a rating of EAL 4. What the
doesn't
say is that rating is only for Win2K(not sure but I don't think XP is there
yet.)with only specific patches applied and all recent patches can not be
applied or the rating is void.
You're not sure? You only *think* XP isn't there? What kind of anti-
shill
information are you presenting if you can't even document your own
claims?
IBM is working on the ratings as we speak, so those concerns
will
soon be gone.
SHILL! First of all, please provide your evidence that IBM is working
on
it so we may verify your claims independently. How can you claim that
the concerns will soon be gone? That's like saying that Microsoft is
working on Longhorn as we speak, so all Microsoft security concerns will
soon be gone.
He believes just any idiot can contribute to the Linux Kernel. He
believes that all changes are automatically accepted. He Believes that
the code isn't checked by a half-dozen or more people before it works
it's way up the line.
Okay, so you've outlined what he believes. Is what he believes
incorrect
or correct? If it's incorrect, how about you provide some information on
what IS correct, rather than just assuming the reader will pick up on the
subtle "the opposite of what I say is true" nature of your commentary.
He seems to think that you can trust a proprietary company
because
it's software is EAL 7 rated but Linux is exposed to Russian hackers and
only rated EAL 2 because today it is EAL 2 means that it can't ever reach
EAL 7.
That's a very unclear sentence. First of all, ignoring the incredible
run-
on of ideas you have incoherently given, how about you explain what the
hell EAL is? What does an EAL 7 rating mean? What does an EAL 2
rating mean? Is an EAL 7 rating worth anything at all? If not, then it
doesn't matter that Linux can theoretically achieve EAL 7. If an EAL 7
rating *is* worth something, then what does it matter that it comes from
a "proprietary company"? Note also that there's no such thing as a
"proprietary company" -- this is your shill way of referring to a company
which releases products which aren't open source.
I think at any rate his letters are more confusing than my
own.
Yours are plenty confusing enough as it is. How about you fix your
own
lack of reason before attempting to debunk others?
There is so much doublespeak in his own words that he is shown
to
be ignorant of the simple Truth.
Which doublespeak? And why is "Truth" capitalized? Is this some
mystical holy grail that only Linux devotees can understand? You are
spreading your own FUD here -- Fanaticism and Undying Devotion.
Linux can be customized to do what ever you need it to do. The
military with the NSA's help could make a Linux EAL 7 rated system and
keep it in house, only updating the software with patches from the
outside. Whether or not the entire U.S. government is considered
keeping it in house as per the GPL is up to the lawyers.
Sure, and an open source "Hello World" program *can* b
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, the prophet Isaiah speaks of "One dwelling above the circle of the Earth." The Hebrew word translated as "circle" can also mean "ball" or "sphere". Note that a sphere is the only shape that looks like a circle from any angle. And for all you folks out there that wish to nitpick, yes, the Earth is actually an oblate spheroid, being slightly flattened at the poles. It still looks round from space... and Isaiah didn't need to go there to find that out. Isaiah's writings date back to approximately 800 to 850 B.C.E., by the way.
A pizza is also a circle, yet it's flat. In the bible, it talks about someone (David?) having a dream where he climbs the highest tree in the world and sees the entire world at once. Also, Jesus and the devil go to the tallest mountain and the devil shows him all the kingdoms of the world at once. You can't do that with a sphere no matter how far away you are. The only way you can see the entire earth at once from a high vantage point is if it's flat.
The bible also talks about the earth being on pillars, and that those pillars shake when there's an earthquake.
Oh, and speaking of writings that go back... check out what Buddha said and did some 800 years before Jesus was around, and then what Jesus supposedly said and did 800 years after Buddha. Who copied whom?
3) It is Noah's ark, we will go on with our regular lives, and the scientists say "Umm... can we have a closer look at that book of yours?"
The Bible is already used as a historical tool. It's one of the few sources of stories from that era and contains many references to locations, people, etc. which existed back then. However, to say then that the whole Bible is true because some historical data have been shown to be true (as Evidence That Demands a Verdict does, for example) is going too far.
For example: "George W. Bush became Ruler of the Land and took up his abode in the Whitehouse. He cried out to heaven and God heard his cries and sent two massive jumbo jets crashing into the World Trade Center buildings, and leveled them."
If someone from the future reads this, they can verify that George W. Bush existed. They can verify that he was Ruler of the Land (aka President of the USA). They can verify that two jets crashed into the WTC buildings and they were leveled. All these are facts, but the story is complete bullshit. Same thing with the Bible. Take a bunch of facts which are passed down from generation to generation. Many books of the Bible weren't actually written down for several centuries after the fact. Ever play the telephone game for a few hundred years? The kernel of truth still survives, but now the stories are marred in legend and embellishments.
So someone just might even find the remains of a large boat. Wonderful. But they'd have to provide a lot more evidence to counter the existing evidence that no global flood ever occurred.
I think your looking for the "Post Humorously option in this case...Thank you, I'll be here all week!
Yeah, I'm just dying to know where it is.
for (i=bottom; i<=top && ambition; i++);
To put this in English, start at the bottom. While you still have ambition and you're not yet at the top, keep incrementing your position. Once you're at the top, increment your position one last time so that you're over the top. All the while, you're doing nothing at all in this loop.
What happen?
...
Someone set us up the trademark!
We get signal.
Main screen turn on.
It's Torvalds!
How are you gentlemen?
All your distros are belong to us.
You are on your way to destruction.
What you say?
You have no chance to fork Linux make your time.
Ha ha ha
Wow, a +5 "BSD is dying" troll. Congratulations!
I've never understood how athiests could view life as more important than --insert random religion here--s.
Think of it this way. From an atheist point of view, you only have one life. An average 70 to 80 years to spend as you see fit. And then it's gone forever. From a Christian point of view, you might have an average 70 to 80 years still, but this is just a drop in the ocean compared to an eternity of afterlife. As long as Christians follows Christian principles for that time, it doesn't really matter whether they experience everything of the world they can because there's supposedly something so much better waiting for them in heaven.
Now take this analogy another step. Instead of years, consider dollars. If you're an atheist, you're given $80 to spend traveling the world and then you die and that's the end. If you're a Christian, you have an infinite amount of money at your disposal, $80 of which you can spend traveling the world before you die, then you can spend the other infinite amount at your leisure. With that in mind, which one do you think will treat their $80 as more important than the other? Which one will seek to make the absolute most of that $80 before he dies?
If we just die...and we're poof, gone, then we wouldn't know we were gone, we would be cease to exist, so would we have really lost anything?? We wouldn't be aware of it's loss because we wouldn't exist. Just a thought that's been bugging me for a while, maybe somebody can explain from their personal opinions.
Do you feel your life is meaningless unless you'll be able to feel a sense of loss when you die? Don't *wait* for a sense of loss! Realize that every second of every day that ticks by, you're already losing your life. Those seconds are priceless and irreplaceable. Tick. Tick. Tick. How old are you? Figure out how many seconds you have left on your life's clock before it runs out. Tick. Tick. Tick. If you're 25 years old, you have about 1.5 billion seconds left in your life. It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Start the timer, it's ticking down -- there's already 86,400 less seconds today than yesterday. Since last month, you've already lost over 2.5 million seconds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Do you smoke? Do drugs? Are you overweight? Do you eat poorly? Guess what... it's even worse than that. Maybe you only have 1.2 billion seconds left. Tick. Tick. Tick. Don't worry if, in the past, you have squandered your time. We all have. What are you doing with your life now, today, tomorrow, to improve the quality of your life and experience more that life has to offer?
Carpe diem!
Backwards doesn't imply bottom-to-top orientation. Last time I looked at myself in the mirror, my feet appeared below my head. Plus, reading it top-to-bottom makes it sound like Yoda wrote that function. "Converts a buffer, this function does... hmm?"
Having a PhD does NOT make one smarter, it just means that said person found (or has) the financial means to become more educated...
Sure, anyone can buy a PhD from a diploma mill. That's not very hard. But reputable PhDs, the kind that Google would want to hire, have had to learn a lot of material, prepare a thesis, successfully defend that thesis and demonstrate their broad as well as in-depth knowledge of the subject. But I might be out to lunch on this one -- why don't you buy yourself a PhD for $199 and apply for a job at Google. Let us know how the interview goes, ok?
With google: before I give them my money, I would like to know how many servers they have, how close to capacity they are, what softwares they use (compatibility issues).
I agree it would be nice to know. But if those are your conditions for investing in Google, I think Google would probably tell you to keep your money. I imagine Google's quarterly reports would probably say something like:
"Our operation depends on having the ability to increase our server and bandwidth resources as we grow our services. Business may be adversely impacted should capacity be unavailable. Our servers are also at risk for viruses, worms, and DDoS attacks which could put the operation of those servers at risk and adversely affect business." etc...
That would give you, as an investor, the information you need to determine whether those risks are worth your money. In all likelihood you'll just have to rely on the fact that they have an army of PhDs who are smarter than you and I put together and know their shit when it comes to security, databases, clustering, etc.
Now I could be wrong. Perhaps Google is waiting for the IPO and will then detail their server infrastructure, wow Wall Street (and geeks worldwide) with their amazing capacity, and their stock will skyrocket on the first day of trading. I'd wager that Google's stock is going to have amazing gains anyway given that it's a bit of an industry darling. Other tech companies which have been thinking of going public would be wise to time their IPO very shortly after Google's and ride the wave.
Google search for the letter "a" resulted in 3,530,000,000 hits [search took 0.12 seconds].
Neat. I wonder what doing a Google search would return for other letters:
"c" -- 299,792,458 hits
"e" -- 2.71828183 hits
"h" -- 6.626068 × 10^-34 hits
"i" -- sqrt(-1) hits
"k" -- 1.3806503 × 10^-23 hits
Looks like Google is definitely busted. They should fix these bugs.
Google already has spell check...
What, as in "Did you mean french military defeats"?
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
Why would a shareholder care about server specifications? Investing is all about money. Read any quarterly report from a public company. Income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow are the primary interests on the numbers side as well as a general roadmap of where the company's heading. Warren Buffett doesn't care if each server has two 80 GB drives, or whether they have four 250 GB drives per server. The only thing that matters is that there are competent people to handle these kinds of "dirty details" that an investor doesn't give a rats ass about.
Take a look at the kinds of information you could expect from Google's quarterly reports.
And what about the colors... does it come in Clockwork Orange?
By your logic the windows source code should be documented to all hell, while the linux source code has roughly three comments in it.
No, no... in Linux, the comments are written *backwards*.
Care to repeat your above steps to elaborate on the creation of God?
From Carl Sagan's Cosmos, p. 212:
"If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe, devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or if we say tha God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?"
One question: is faith required in order for someone to not have faith?
Whether mathematics works or not is kind of a moot point. Really what it boils down to is this: does one need faith in order to not have faith? Sounds like a Zen question, but that's it in a nutshell. If my hammer doesn't have faith in God (hammers can't even think!), does that necessarily imply that my hammer has faith that there is no God? Of course not! Lack of faith does not require faith, although one can certainly have faith in something else -- but that's a whole other matter.
You pay more for the fine French Restaurant, right? Then they make better _meals_.
But if a McDonalds makes more total than that French Restaurant, then they're a better _Restaurant_.
So if I opened up a restaurant serving up McDonald's excess food from yesterday that they threw in the garbage (ignoring legalities) for $50 a plate, would you say my restaurant made better meals because you paid more?
Faith is a belief that lacks evidence to support it. To this extent, atheism is a faith just as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You say it only requires common sense to support your belief that there is no god ... I say to you "Prove it."
:) Let's analyze your logic, shall we? You are claiming:
If you're going to pick on faulty logic, may I suggest you start with your own?
atheist = faith in (not god)
Which does not logically follow. Allow me to prove why:
1. definition: theist = faith in god
2. definition: atheist = not (theist)
Substituting the above, we get:
3. atheist = not (faith in god)
Easy enough. Now your assumption that not having a faith in god requires faith that there is no god can be expressed as:
4. assume: not (faith in god) = faith in (not god)
Let's take the negation of both the left and right sides of the above equation. Since we're assuming they're equal, then their negations will also be equal. Their negations are:
5. not (not (faith in god)) = faith in god
6. not (faith in (not god)) = not faith in god
Since the left and right sides of line 4 are equal, we substitute back in and end up with:
7. faith in god = not faith in god
8. theist = atheist
Since we have arrived at an absurd conclusion (reductio ad absurdum) by following your logic (the assumption on line 4), this demonstrates that your assumption is incorrect. Using your logic, we would come to the conclusion that theist = atheist which is obviously wrong. So what has this proven? Precisely that simply being an atheist or "not having faith that there is a god" doesn't imply "having faith that there is no god". In other words, atheism doesn't *require* faith.
QED.
"How is atheism a faith? It is by definition a lack of faith"
No, it is by definition a faith that there is no Deity. You are confusing it with agnosticism, which does lack faith.
The greek prefix "a-" means "non-", so an atheist is someone who is a non-theist. What is a theist? One who has faith in God(s) and/or Goddess(es) who created the universe, etc. So an atheist or non-theist is one who doesn't fit into that category.
This is logically a contrapositive. If A implies B then the contrapositive of that is not B implies not A. If would be false to say that not A implies not B. However, there are two meanings to atheist, the classical atheism which simply means "I don't share your beliefs" and the modern atheism which means "I believe in no God(s)/Goddess(es)". The modern atheism does require faith, as you've pointed out and doesn't exactly fit the definition of a non-theist. The classic atheism doesn't require faith as it simply means that "I don't hold those beliefs", and not "I hold beliefs opposite to yours".
The misunderstanding between atheist and agnostic is very widespread. However, read up on what a Theist believes vs. what a Gnostic believes and you'll find that there's a huge difference between the two, and saying that an agnostic is an atheist without faith would be similar to saying that a Gnostic is a Theist without faith.
Isn't that a bit like judging L. Ron Hubbard's material by units sold? Sure, Dianetics may be a best seller but how does it rank when you subtract sales (often multiple copies) to Scientologists? If it's still a mega-bestseller, then the book has been fairly judged. But if the book sells very few copies outside of the choir it's preaching to, what does that say about the quality?
You're echoing the exact same arguments made when the iPod mini details were announced on Slashdot. Just about everyone chimed in and said that this thing was too expensive and wouldn't sell. Well, the small form factor (and possibly color choices) have shown to be a hit with the market and iPod minis are currently selling like hotcakes.
So once again, another company is working around the problem instead of fixing it.
One man's workaround is another man's fix. Here, the problem is that video lags the audio by a fraction of a second. So there's two solutions to this problem: play the video with less delay or play the audio with more delay. Adding delay to the audio costs close to $0 because it just needs to be buffered for the 60ms it takes for the video to be shown. Speeding up the video might double the cost of the display as you might need parallel video processors which break up the incoming signal by physical region. Or you might need to find a faster display technology which hasn't been invented yet.
Once again Dan O'Dowd, CEO of Green Hills Software Inc. opens his mouth and inserts foot. He simply doesn't understand what Linux is.
Proof? What *is* Linux then, and can you back up *your* claims?
The only two reasons why Linux doesn't have an EAL 7 rating are money, and time.
Why should I believe this? You appear to be shilling for Linux.
It costs lot's of money to get an EAL rating.
How much money and how much time? For what rating? Where is your proof?
IBM is working with SuSe on that right now.
Please provide proof. It sounds like you're shilling.
It also takes time to work out that rating.
How much time?
He mentions that Windows has a rating of EAL 4. What the doesn't say is that rating is only for Win2K(not sure but I don't think XP is there yet.)with only specific patches applied and all recent patches can not be applied or the rating is void.
You're not sure? You only *think* XP isn't there? What kind of anti- shill information are you presenting if you can't even document your own claims?
IBM is working on the ratings as we speak, so those concerns will soon be gone.
SHILL! First of all, please provide your evidence that IBM is working on it so we may verify your claims independently. How can you claim that the concerns will soon be gone? That's like saying that Microsoft is working on Longhorn as we speak, so all Microsoft security concerns will soon be gone.
He believes just any idiot can contribute to the Linux Kernel. He believes that all changes are automatically accepted. He Believes that the code isn't checked by a half-dozen or more people before it works it's way up the line.
Okay, so you've outlined what he believes. Is what he believes incorrect or correct? If it's incorrect, how about you provide some information on what IS correct, rather than just assuming the reader will pick up on the subtle "the opposite of what I say is true" nature of your commentary.
He seems to think that you can trust a proprietary company because it's software is EAL 7 rated but Linux is exposed to Russian hackers and only rated EAL 2 because today it is EAL 2 means that it can't ever reach EAL 7.
That's a very unclear sentence. First of all, ignoring the incredible run- on of ideas you have incoherently given, how about you explain what the hell EAL is? What does an EAL 7 rating mean? What does an EAL 2 rating mean? Is an EAL 7 rating worth anything at all? If not, then it doesn't matter that Linux can theoretically achieve EAL 7. If an EAL 7 rating *is* worth something, then what does it matter that it comes from a "proprietary company"? Note also that there's no such thing as a "proprietary company" -- this is your shill way of referring to a company which releases products which aren't open source.
I think at any rate his letters are more confusing than my own.
Yours are plenty confusing enough as it is. How about you fix your own lack of reason before attempting to debunk others?
There is so much doublespeak in his own words that he is shown to be ignorant of the simple Truth.
Which doublespeak? And why is "Truth" capitalized? Is this some mystical holy grail that only Linux devotees can understand? You are spreading your own FUD here -- Fanaticism and Undying Devotion.
Linux can be customized to do what ever you need it to do. The military with the NSA's help could make a Linux EAL 7 rated system and keep it in house, only updating the software with patches from the outside. Whether or not the entire U.S. government is considered keeping it in house as per the GPL is up to the lawyers.
Sure, and an open source "Hello World" program *can* b