Explore their neighborhood? Have you ever been to suburbia? There's literally nothing but other people's houses for miles around. And God forbid you take the bus or other public transit anywhere - that's just gross.
And 1400 years ago, the Muslim world was a shining beacon of science and philosophy. For example, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, one of the founders of algebra, was a Persian who lived circa AD 800. In the 1200s, Latin translations of his book "Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala" introduced the foundations of math as we know it to the Europeans. Up until that point, they were still using Roman numerals, with no concept of zero or decimals.
So basically, I would love it if the Muslim world went back to living the Qur'an like they did 1400 years ago - they'd probably be even more civilized than we are.
As it is, they stand as a stark example of what happens when fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism control a nation for extended periods of time. Sure, Obama isn't the greatest - but electing Palin as VP would have led us even further down that road.
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
You know what Aunt Myrtle can do though? She can plug that nice blinky box the telephone company gave her between her computer(s) and the wall. She doesn't care if it's a DSL modem with a built-in NAT router, or a DSL modem with a built in firewall. And either one will work exactly the same, from her perspective.
... and so, the early decades of the digital age, when many fundamental crucial decisions were made that have defined our culture today, are forever lost to us...
That is not an accurate example. You are assuming that the people are describing the table from memory, which is not the case; if you give ten people all the tools they want and all the time they want to use, all of their descriptions of the table will be both mutually consistent and internally self-consistent, assuming sanity and good will on the part of the participants.
The same is not true for God. The descriptions of God will be either internally inconsistent, inconsistent with the rest of reality, or simply make no concrete statements when examined in enough detail.
Science has answered many of the questions that religion once was used for, but that doesn't mean there are many deep questions to which the scientific method cannot be applied. Some atheists appear to expect humans to throw up their hands in the face of these questions and say "Well! These are not scientific questions, therefore they cannot and will not be approached."
Please, feel free to provide examples. I frequently see statements like this, but there's rarely any actual substance to them.
A further subtlety: the golem exists on the Discworld, where gods do exist. Earthling atheism is a completely irrational position in a universe where one can go out and have a drink with the God of Booze, and end up in a gutter with the Oh God of Hangovers. However, the kind of religious atheism the golem is explaining makes perfect sense in such a universe - after all, if it takes faith to believe in a god when there is no evidence for it, it must also take faith to disbelieve in any god when there is plenty of evidence for them.
And yet another one is ignosticism - "I don't know what you mean when you say 'god'"
Given that God has no measurable presence in reality, this is actually everyone's position whether they realize it or not.
When Alice tells Bob, "I really like that table", Bob can know exactly which table Alice is referring to, because that table is a well-defined real entity. When Alice tells Bob "I really like God", it is impossible for Bob to know what Alice means, because "God" refers to a poorly defined, potentially imaginary entity.
This applies even if both Alice and Bob follow the same religion; ask ten Roman Catholics to describe God in enough detail, and you will get ten mutually exclusive entities.
Honestly, that list is ten times better than the one in the actual article. Xbox 360 defined the decade? Seriously? OSX and Win XP are gadgets? What the hell is wrong with you guys?
We've been building bridges for what, four, five thousand years? And some still fall, and we still learn from them.
Yet somehow, people expect that their software will be as stable as a bridge - despite the fact that behind each and every bridge there are more than ten thousand years of collective human experience, while software has maybe a scant thousand.
Seriously guys, take it in perspective: software is a ridiculously new field compared to basically every other field of human endeavor. Don't expect rock-solid software to be common for at least a couple hundred years.
A real life example: someone at work asked me to get a list of all the files in a certain directory whose names contained the word "change". That was just "find -iname "change"./". How would you do that in Windows?
To all the people suggesting PE discs - what AV do you use? The vast majority simply do not work in a preboot environment. The ones that do tend to be old versions, which are about as helpful in removing real threats as a dull knife.
I love the idea of Powershell, but the implementation is crap. The best thing about the Unix shell is that you can rely on it being there; you can sit down at any Unix computer and be confident that at least some subset of your usual commands will work in similar ways. Further, Powershell is stupidly verbose - it's like they expect the command line to have Intellisense. I don't want to type a bajillion characters when I want to do something in the command line; just use mnemonics.
I bought Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl from the Steam store when it was on sale for $5 (that's really the "why not?" price point). It would run, but I'd only get sound and a cryptic error from my monitor. I spent about ten minutes figuring out what was going wrong, and an hour hunting down a program to fix it that would work on 64 bit Windows 7 (most of them were written for Windows 2000 or XP SP 1).
I then played the game for about twenty minutes before getting bored. It was still totally worth it - that was a fun hour and ten minutes.
People like you, who slash holes in the support network whenever they can. If he ventures out alone, there is basically nothing to catch him if he fails. When that's weighed against the less efficient (for him) but safer alternative of sticking with this current crappy job, it's really a no-brainer. Certain monotony vs the chance to lose everything? What kind of fool would choose the latter?
Provide me with a house (free), food (free), and transportation anywhere I want (free), and my sex change operation (free).
I know you're being facetious, but honestly I don't see what's wrong with any of those. If we as a society have the excess resources to provide a good house, good food, good transportation and good health care (which may even include things like gender reassignment surgery) to everyone, why not?
I mean, think about it. Right now, a lot of our excess resources are going towards making maybe ten thousand people filthy rich. This is simply inefficient; the marginal value of that fourth or fifth million is much smaller than the marginal value of the first million. That million dollar bonus Joe CEO got last year could pay for about fifty sex change operations, fifty college educations, fifty buses, or fifty houses (in some parts of the country, where they would need it the most anyway). Do you think that million dollars held a marginal value for Joe CEO that was greater than a sex change operation for even one of the transsexuals?
Capitalism is a great system for efficiently allocating scarce resources. The problem is that it fundamentally breaks down as you move towards infinite resources; it's built entirely around competition, which is a waste of effort when there is no longer any need to compete. Just consider the plight of the entertainment cartels - their system is based on the fundamental assumption that the resource they sell (movies and music) is finite; there are only a finite number of CDs, only a finite number of DVDs. It has broken down because computers make this resource verge on the infinite; anyone who is willing to torrent can get as much of this resource as they want, for almost no cost.
Competition and adversarial systems are simply not the future. Any government capable of giving you everything you want is capable of taking everything you have, yes - but it can also give you everything you want. You just have to trust that the people in the government won't be interested in taking everything you have, because they already have everything they want.
For the next 1-2 years, it'll probably work, after that, all bets are off. Maybe it'll work as long as I turn down some of the graphical options or maybe it'll be completely unplayable. This is especially true if I'm building a PC that has a cost in the same range as a game console.
This has been true historically, but it seems like things are levelling off. I bet that if you built a $500 computer when the PS3 was released, it would still be able to play games at higher quality than the PS3 today. Modern chips are going more towards parallelism than pure power - after all, CPUS hit 3.0 Ghz, and haven't gone much higher than that. Instead, they're going outwards to dual and quad and oct cores. It'll take a long time for game developers to start leveraging that, and even more time for it to get to the point where it's necessary.
... or at least will be easily worth the cost it's going to take getting an infrastructure up that will cover the nation.
Uh... we've already paid that cost. The telcos just haven't delivered yet, because they don't have to. There was a site explaining how much we've subsidized them through extra charges and exactly what we (haven't) gotten, but I can't find it at the moment.
So NASA says "Hey guys, we've found an asteroid that has a 90% chance of hitting the Earth in a hundred years. We don't really know what'll happen, but we're pretty sure it'll be bad."
Would you say that the people who believe them and start taking steps to minimize the damage the asteroid can cause are blind-faith followers? You'd need to have a PhD in astrophysics and your own observatory to really check up on NASA; would you rather believe a bunch of assholes with telescopes in their back yards, who say it's really just Sputnik 14?
It's the same situation with the IPCC and global climate change.
The Doctorow account quotes Watts saying that he got out of his car when questioned (mistake #1), then refused the order to get back in (mistake #2). No, of course that doesn't justify a beating. It just suggests we don't have the whole story.
Sorry, absolutely nothing justifies a beating. The only two options are either A. Arrest the man or B. Let him go. "Beat him" is not acceptable under any circumstances whatsoever.
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Explore their neighborhood? Have you ever been to suburbia? There's literally nothing but other people's houses for miles around. And God forbid you take the bus or other public transit anywhere - that's just gross.
And 1400 years ago, the Muslim world was a shining beacon of science and philosophy. For example, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Kwarizmi, one of the founders of algebra, was a Persian who lived circa AD 800. In the 1200s, Latin translations of his book "Kitab al-Jabr wa-l-Muqabala" introduced the foundations of math as we know it to the Europeans. Up until that point, they were still using Roman numerals, with no concept of zero or decimals.
So basically, I would love it if the Muslim world went back to living the Qur'an like they did 1400 years ago - they'd probably be even more civilized than we are.
As it is, they stand as a stark example of what happens when fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism control a nation for extended periods of time. Sure, Obama isn't the greatest - but electing Palin as VP would have led us even further down that road.
In fact, back when lasers were first invented, people referred to them as "a solution looking for a problem". They were so cool, but for a while nobody could think of anything useful to do with them.
I know, we need more of them. It was traumatic when it happened, but seriously - it's been nearly a decade at this point. It's no longer too soon.
You know what Aunt Myrtle can do though? She can plug that nice blinky box the telephone company gave her between her computer(s) and the wall. She doesn't care if it's a DSL modem with a built-in NAT router, or a DSL modem with a built in firewall. And either one will work exactly the same, from her perspective.
That is not an accurate example. You are assuming that the people are describing the table from memory, which is not the case; if you give ten people all the tools they want and all the time they want to use, all of their descriptions of the table will be both mutually consistent and internally self-consistent, assuming sanity and good will on the part of the participants.
The same is not true for God. The descriptions of God will be either internally inconsistent, inconsistent with the rest of reality, or simply make no concrete statements when examined in enough detail.
Please, feel free to provide examples. I frequently see statements like this, but there's rarely any actual substance to them.
A further subtlety: the golem exists on the Discworld, where gods do exist. Earthling atheism is a completely irrational position in a universe where one can go out and have a drink with the God of Booze, and end up in a gutter with the Oh God of Hangovers. However, the kind of religious atheism the golem is explaining makes perfect sense in such a universe - after all, if it takes faith to believe in a god when there is no evidence for it, it must also take faith to disbelieve in any god when there is plenty of evidence for them.
Note that this does not apply to our universe.
Given that God has no measurable presence in reality, this is actually everyone's position whether they realize it or not.
When Alice tells Bob, "I really like that table", Bob can know exactly which table Alice is referring to, because that table is a well-defined real entity. When Alice tells Bob "I really like God", it is impossible for Bob to know what Alice means, because "God" refers to a poorly defined, potentially imaginary entity.
This applies even if both Alice and Bob follow the same religion; ask ten Roman Catholics to describe God in enough detail, and you will get ten mutually exclusive entities.
Honestly, that list is ten times better than the one in the actual article. Xbox 360 defined the decade? Seriously? OSX and Win XP are gadgets? What the hell is wrong with you guys?
We've been building bridges for what, four, five thousand years? And some still fall, and we still learn from them.
Yet somehow, people expect that their software will be as stable as a bridge - despite the fact that behind each and every bridge there are more than ten thousand years of collective human experience, while software has maybe a scant thousand.
Seriously guys, take it in perspective: software is a ridiculously new field compared to basically every other field of human endeavor. Don't expect rock-solid software to be common for at least a couple hundred years.
A real life example: someone at work asked me to get a list of all the files in a certain directory whose names contained the word "change". That was just "find -iname "change" ./". How would you do that in Windows?
Boot Knoppix, sudo apt-get install clamav, clamscan -R /mount/*
Granted, I don't know how good clamscan is, but at least it will have up-to-date heuristics.
.... why are his arms like five feet away from his body? I would imagine that that is a far more pressing concern than whatever's whooshing overhead.
If you can feel the shape of a dark statue in a dark room with your hands, does it stop being dark?
No? Then no.
I love the idea of Powershell, but the implementation is crap. The best thing about the Unix shell is that you can rely on it being there; you can sit down at any Unix computer and be confident that at least some subset of your usual commands will work in similar ways. Further, Powershell is stupidly verbose - it's like they expect the command line to have Intellisense. I don't want to type a bajillion characters when I want to do something in the command line; just use mnemonics.
You are entirely correct sir.
I bought Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl from the Steam store when it was on sale for $5 (that's really the "why not?" price point). It would run, but I'd only get sound and a cryptic error from my monitor. I spent about ten minutes figuring out what was going wrong, and an hour hunting down a program to fix it that would work on 64 bit Windows 7 (most of them were written for Windows 2000 or XP SP 1).
I then played the game for about twenty minutes before getting bored. It was still totally worth it - that was a fun hour and ten minutes.
A mortuary science student looking forward to her class on Monday is reason enough to be concerned?
People like you, who slash holes in the support network whenever they can. If he ventures out alone, there is basically nothing to catch him if he fails. When that's weighed against the less efficient (for him) but safer alternative of sticking with this current crappy job, it's really a no-brainer. Certain monotony vs the chance to lose everything? What kind of fool would choose the latter?
I know you're being facetious, but honestly I don't see what's wrong with any of those. If we as a society have the excess resources to provide a good house, good food, good transportation and good health care (which may even include things like gender reassignment surgery) to everyone, why not? I mean, think about it. Right now, a lot of our excess resources are going towards making maybe ten thousand people filthy rich. This is simply inefficient; the marginal value of that fourth or fifth million is much smaller than the marginal value of the first million. That million dollar bonus Joe CEO got last year could pay for about fifty sex change operations, fifty college educations, fifty buses, or fifty houses (in some parts of the country, where they would need it the most anyway). Do you think that million dollars held a marginal value for Joe CEO that was greater than a sex change operation for even one of the transsexuals? Capitalism is a great system for efficiently allocating scarce resources. The problem is that it fundamentally breaks down as you move towards infinite resources; it's built entirely around competition, which is a waste of effort when there is no longer any need to compete. Just consider the plight of the entertainment cartels - their system is based on the fundamental assumption that the resource they sell (movies and music) is finite; there are only a finite number of CDs, only a finite number of DVDs. It has broken down because computers make this resource verge on the infinite; anyone who is willing to torrent can get as much of this resource as they want, for almost no cost. Competition and adversarial systems are simply not the future. Any government capable of giving you everything you want is capable of taking everything you have, yes - but it can also give you everything you want. You just have to trust that the people in the government won't be interested in taking everything you have, because they already have everything they want.
This has been true historically, but it seems like things are levelling off. I bet that if you built a $500 computer when the PS3 was released, it would still be able to play games at higher quality than the PS3 today. Modern chips are going more towards parallelism than pure power - after all, CPUS hit 3.0 Ghz, and haven't gone much higher than that. Instead, they're going outwards to dual and quad and oct cores. It'll take a long time for game developers to start leveraging that, and even more time for it to get to the point where it's necessary.
Uh... we've already paid that cost. The telcos just haven't delivered yet, because they don't have to. There was a site explaining how much we've subsidized them through extra charges and exactly what we (haven't) gotten, but I can't find it at the moment.
So NASA says "Hey guys, we've found an asteroid that has a 90% chance of hitting the Earth in a hundred years. We don't really know what'll happen, but we're pretty sure it'll be bad."
Would you say that the people who believe them and start taking steps to minimize the damage the asteroid can cause are blind-faith followers? You'd need to have a PhD in astrophysics and your own observatory to really check up on NASA; would you rather believe a bunch of assholes with telescopes in their back yards, who say it's really just Sputnik 14?
It's the same situation with the IPCC and global climate change.
Sorry, absolutely nothing justifies a beating. The only two options are either A. Arrest the man or B. Let him go. "Beat him" is not acceptable under any circumstances whatsoever.