"I put temporary debug statements in column 0 of my code, purposefully, so that they stick out like a sore thumb and are easily found and removed later."
This also makes it harder--especially for other programmers not used to your convention--to see the block of code to which your debug statements apply. Simply commenting the statements as being debugging statements would be far more straightforward.
Python's whitespace syntax rules out your own idiosyncratic practice, but it was never a good practice to begin with.
"a fallacy is a fallacy regardless of how many people believe in the fallacy"
True, but there is a big difference between believing something false because it is conventional wisdom and believing something false because there is something abnormal in one's brain. That, AFAICT, is the reason for not describing the beliefs of a subculture as a "delusion."
Some MST3k fans have given unofficial MST3k treatments of fan fiction, called MSTings, and even of a cheesy Jack Chick tract. What do you think of those?
"For all controls, select the safest (to prevent loss of data or system access), most secure value by default."
In other words, treat the user like they don't know what they're doing. Slow *everyone* down, in order to save the idiots.
Wait a minute. MS uses an insecure default, and people *rightly* jump on them for it. Yet when they recommend that the default be the secure choice, you jump on them for it. This makes no sense.
"So, Denmark uses an anti-terror law wrong and this means what exactly?"
It means that other governments can misuse their anti-terror laws as well, and as long as that is the case, a law that makes the government less accountable so that it can fight terrorism is a law that makes the government less accountable, period.
Another problem was that the first couple episodes were a little off. The pacing was slow, and the tension wasn't *quite* right. They weren't that bad, but a certain "oomph" was missing. The episodes that came along after they rejiggered the intro were much better. I think what happened it that someone cracked a whip and got the writers to give their 100%.
Unfortunately, those who formed their opinion of the whole series from those first couple episodes probably got turned off by it.
"Is there any major drawback to running OpenOffice as an X11 application rather than a native one?"
IMHO, the biggest drawback is that the fonts are awful. The antialiasing in OpenOffice X11 isn't too wonderful.
Pity Apple didn't compile in the TrueType bytecode interpreter into the FreeType library bundled with X11. Then OpenOffice could leave the antialiasing turned off, and the fonts would be readily readable.
"However, if there is one failing of the show, it was that they cut the end of the first episode (making the olympic appear empty, rather than full of civilians)."
OTOH, if the Cylons are going to use the Olympic Carrier as a nuclear weapon, why keep the humans on board? They'd get in the way, and the Cylons would want to kill them anyway. Why not purge them ahead of time and be done with it? Having no one aboard makes things easier on the Cylons.
From Apollo's standpoint, the catch with the Olympic Carrier is that he got enough of a look at it to see that no humans seemed to be peering through the windows, but didn't have enough time to be sure that there were really no humans aboard. Maybe Apollo got "lucky" and didn't kill any civilians, but maybe not, and there is no way that Apollo will ever know. The uncertainty is enough to eat at him.
"To rebut your point, how would you propose a god could not be an extraordinarily complex item if not organism?"
God as most theists and deists conceive of him is thought of as a spirit. Spirits don't have parts; they aren't complex in the same sense that organisms are complex. Your arguments about complexity and evolution only make sense when applied to material lifeforms or something akin to them.
"With so many things to run in a universe, why do we think we so important as to justify that a creature powerful enough to create the universe would actually spend its time on any one of the 6+ billion of us?"
This objection is flat out simplistic. Why assume that such a being would set its priorities based on size? Why assume even that it can't choose both to pay attention to running the universe and to have an interest in creatures vastly smaller than itself?
"NDA? What fucking NDA are you talking about??? Why would a website sign an NDA with Apple?"
The NDA signed by an Apple employee. Apple is alleging 1) that ThinkSecret got its information from an inside source at Apple who was contractually obligated *not* to divulge the information, and 2) that ThinkSecret knew that their source was illegally divulging the information.
"Simply put. As children, we grow up with "all knowing parental figures." With that as precident, when we grow up, we look for that figure. Therefore it is understandable and expected that humanity seek some type of all knowing figure to explain all they don not know and give them comfort when they are grown."
Non sequitur. God could exist regardless of whether above is true.
"I look at us as very complex systems that evolved over time. Looking at the nature of functional, interoperating complexity in organisms such as us and in creatures less complex than us, indicates that as functional complexity increases, the numbers of individual species of that level of complexity decrease. Point being; look at the number of species of plankton and then look at the number of species of advanced mammals. As complexity goes up, you find less examples of complex organisms by species.
"For something as complex as a god to exist, the odds approach zero by this reasoning."
You are making several problematic assumptions:
1) A god is complex in the same way that organic lifeforms are complex, that is, a god would have more parts, more intricate connections, etc. Yet it is not clear at all that a god would even be an organism per se, let alone a complex one.
2) A god outside this physical universe would be unable to interact with anything inside the physical universe.
3) A god with a universe to pay attention to would have no interest in beings as relatively small as humans.
Your reasoning is hopeless flawed. Go back to the drawing board.
"You can use command-shift-left arrow or right arrow to switch between tabs."
I HATE that misfeature of Safari. On several OS X applications (Textedit, Appleworks) command-shift-left arrow and command-shift-right arrow are keyboard shortcuts for highlighting the from the middle of a line to its beginning or end. The makers of Safari apparently forgot that people do type in web browsers--for example, to write comments in web forums like the one I'm typing now--and thought that the keyboard shortcuts they used for switching tabs were "safe" when they weren't. That made it a pain to edit text typed into text boxes.
Of course, consistency of keyboard shortcuts across applications is one area where OS X is inferior to Windows XP, or even Linux (if one doesn't take into account old applications like Emacs or XFig that predate the now somewhat standard Qt or GTK+ toolkits).:-(
Actually, if one types a few paragraphs of text into a text box in Safari, the echoing of letters typed into a text box slows to a crawl. That was the main reason I stopped using Safari and started using Firefox.
"Is it really so terrible to give money to a political campaign? At least one member of the family which owns the New York Times (Dr. Judith P. Sulzberger) donated $2000 to the John Kerry campaign, $5000 to 'Victory Campaign 2004', and $20000 to the Democrat National Committee."
Ms. Sulzberger doesn't count the votes, or get to see them. A business entrusted with the kind of power that Omega Technologies has ought to be above reproach, preferably non-partisan or bipartisan, but definitely transparent and accountable. Omega Technologies, however, seems to be none of those.
"I guess I'm just lucky and/or the FreeBSD ports people do a great job, but I've never had a problem rebuilding XFree86 (except for the fact that it takes overnight to compile on my slow system...)"
That's not the issue. The problem is that the XFree86 build system is such that to compile one little bit of X, the whole of the X source tree has to be rebuilt. Right now, Xorg has that same problem, but its developers are working on fixing it.
"And we 'blithely' use 8-bits to represent the characters, no doubt much to Joel's chagrin. And everything works. Perfectly. If Joel is unable to get things to work without using UTF, then maybe, just maybe, he should stop pretending that he's a competant coder."
Or maybe, just maybe, he is working with language that can't be coded with 8-bit character sets, like, say, Chinese?
"Perhaps you would like to know that FreeBSD usually gets new hardware support before Linux... It some cases, LONG before Linux... USB & Firewire support come to mind immediately"
OTOH, in my experience, Linux has had *working* USB scanner support, while FreeBSD support (at least in the 4.x versions) was pretty broken.
Slashdot Mirror
"I put temporary debug statements in column 0 of my code, purposefully, so that they stick out like a sore thumb and are easily found and removed later."
This also makes it harder--especially for other programmers not used to your convention--to see the block of code to which your debug statements apply. Simply commenting the statements as being debugging statements would be far more straightforward.
Python's whitespace syntax rules out your own idiosyncratic practice, but it was never a good practice to begin with.
"a fallacy is a fallacy regardless of how many people believe in the fallacy"
True, but there is a big difference between believing something false because it is conventional wisdom and believing something false because there is something abnormal in one's brain. That, AFAICT, is the reason for not describing the beliefs of a subculture as a "delusion."
But you can fix that by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow.
Just install libflashsupport. That will fix the problem.
Some MST3k fans have given unofficial MST3k treatments of fan fiction, called MSTings, and even of a cheesy Jack Chick tract. What do you think of those?
Um, no. Those clips aren't hosted on YouTube. Comedy Central hosts those clips on its own site.
Wait a minute. MS uses an insecure default, and people *rightly* jump on them for it. Yet when they recommend that the default be the secure choice, you jump on them for it. This makes no sense.
"So, Denmark uses an anti-terror law wrong and this means what exactly?"
It means that other governments can misuse their anti-terror laws as well, and as long as that is the case, a law that makes the government less accountable so that it can fight terrorism is a law that makes the government less accountable, period.
"But as someone that has done photography and digital video in an amature setting, I'm not seeing anything here that we didn't already know."
That's just it. You *have* done photography and digital video, so some non-obvious facts have become second nature to you.
Another problem was that the first couple episodes were a little off. The pacing was slow, and the tension wasn't *quite* right. They weren't that bad, but a certain "oomph" was missing. The episodes that came along after they rejiggered the intro were much better. I think what happened it that someone cracked a whip and got the writers to give their 100%.
Unfortunately, those who formed their opinion of the whole series from those first couple episodes probably got turned off by it.
"Is there any major drawback to running OpenOffice as an X11 application rather than a native one?"
IMHO, the biggest drawback is that the fonts are awful. The antialiasing in OpenOffice X11 isn't too wonderful.
Pity Apple didn't compile in the TrueType bytecode interpreter into the FreeType library bundled with X11. Then OpenOffice could leave the antialiasing turned off, and the fonts would be readily readable.
"However, if there is one failing of the show, it was that they cut the end of the first episode (making the olympic appear empty, rather than full of civilians)."
OTOH, if the Cylons are going to use the Olympic Carrier as a nuclear weapon, why keep the humans on board? They'd get in the way, and the Cylons would want to kill them anyway. Why not purge them ahead of time and be done with it? Having no one aboard makes things easier on the Cylons.
From Apollo's standpoint, the catch with the Olympic Carrier is that he got enough of a look at it to see that no humans seemed to be peering through the windows, but didn't have enough time to be sure that there were really no humans aboard. Maybe Apollo got "lucky" and didn't kill any civilians, but maybe not, and there is no way that Apollo will ever know. The uncertainty is enough to eat at him.
I don't know. That could be hilarious, maybe even intentionally so.
"To rebut your point, how would you propose a god could not be an extraordinarily complex item if not organism?"
God as most theists and deists conceive of him is thought of as a spirit. Spirits don't have parts; they aren't complex in the same sense that organisms are complex. Your arguments about complexity and evolution only make sense when applied to material lifeforms or something akin to them.
"With so many things to run in a universe, why do we think we so important as to justify that a creature powerful enough to create the universe would actually spend its time on any one of the 6+ billion of us?"
This objection is flat out simplistic. Why assume that such a being would set its priorities based on size? Why assume even that it can't choose both to pay attention to running the universe and to have an interest in creatures vastly smaller than itself?
"NDA? What fucking NDA are you talking about??? Why would a website sign an NDA with Apple?"
The NDA signed by an Apple employee. Apple is alleging 1) that ThinkSecret got its information from an inside source at Apple who was contractually obligated *not* to divulge the information, and 2) that ThinkSecret knew that their source was illegally divulging the information.
"Simply put. As children, we grow up with "all knowing parental figures." With that as precident, when we grow up, we look for that figure. Therefore it is understandable and expected that humanity seek some type of all knowing figure to explain all they don not know and give them comfort when they are grown."
Non sequitur. God could exist regardless of whether above is true.
"I look at us as very complex systems that evolved over time. Looking at the nature of functional, interoperating complexity in organisms such as us and in creatures less complex than us, indicates that as functional complexity increases, the numbers of individual species of that level of complexity decrease. Point being; look at the number of species of plankton and then look at the number of species of advanced mammals. As complexity goes up, you find less examples of complex organisms by species.
"For something as complex as a god to exist, the odds approach zero by this reasoning."
You are making several problematic assumptions:
1) A god is complex in the same way that organic lifeforms are complex, that is, a god would have more parts, more intricate connections, etc. Yet it is not clear at all that a god would even be an organism per se, let alone a complex one.
2) A god outside this physical universe would be unable to interact with anything inside the physical universe.
3) A god with a universe to pay attention to would have no interest in beings as relatively small as humans.
Your reasoning is hopeless flawed. Go back to the drawing board.
Bull. If that were true, the phrase "justified, true belief" would be an oxymoron instead of a problematic definition of knowledge.
Take a look at http://www.sojo.net/ for a start.
"You can use command-shift-left arrow or right arrow to switch between tabs."
:-(
I HATE that misfeature of Safari. On several OS X applications (Textedit, Appleworks) command-shift-left arrow and command-shift-right arrow are keyboard shortcuts for highlighting the from the middle of a line to its beginning or end. The makers of Safari apparently forgot that people do type in web browsers--for example, to write comments in web forums like the one I'm typing now--and thought that the keyboard shortcuts they used for switching tabs were "safe" when they weren't. That made it a pain to edit text typed into text boxes.
Of course, consistency of keyboard shortcuts across applications is one area where OS X is inferior to Windows XP, or even Linux (if one doesn't take into account old applications like Emacs or XFig that predate the now somewhat standard Qt or GTK+ toolkits).
Actually, if one types a few paragraphs of text into a text box in Safari, the echoing of letters typed into a text box slows to a crawl. That was the main reason I stopped using Safari and started using Firefox.
"Is it really so terrible to give money to a political campaign? At least one member of the family which owns the New York Times (Dr. Judith P. Sulzberger) donated $2000 to the John Kerry campaign, $5000 to 'Victory Campaign 2004', and $20000 to the Democrat National Committee."
Ms. Sulzberger doesn't count the votes, or get to see them. A business entrusted with the kind of power that Omega Technologies has ought to be above reproach, preferably non-partisan or bipartisan, but definitely transparent and accountable. Omega Technologies, however, seems to be none of those.
"I guess I'm just lucky and/or the FreeBSD ports people do a great job, but I've never had a problem rebuilding XFree86 (except for the fact that it takes overnight to compile on my slow system...)"
That's not the issue. The problem is that the XFree86 build system is such that to compile one little bit of X, the whole of the X source tree has to be rebuilt. Right now, Xorg has that same problem, but its developers are working on fixing it.
"And we 'blithely' use 8-bits to represent the characters, no doubt much to Joel's chagrin. And everything works. Perfectly. If Joel is unable to get things to work without using UTF, then maybe, just maybe, he should stop pretending that he's a competant coder."
Or maybe, just maybe, he is working with language that can't be coded with 8-bit character sets, like, say, Chinese?
"Perhaps you would like to know that FreeBSD usually gets new hardware support before Linux... It some cases, LONG before Linux... USB & Firewire support come to mind immediately"
OTOH, in my experience, Linux has had *working* USB scanner support, while FreeBSD support (at least in the 4.x versions) was pretty broken.