> You should read Numbers. The nation of Israel did quite a bit of killing, raping, and enslaving shortly after receiving the 10 commandments. I'm sure that was all God's will though, so, yeah...
They were worshiping the golden calf as they were receiving them, so... not so sure about them following God's will just by reading them. There would have been no need to send the son later, too.
If chronicle is equal to law, if it doesn't matter what came as law directly from the supposed deity, it's all at the same level, then bible followers can kill at will once they receive an order provably from JHVH. That seems not a free pass for homicide to me anyway.
And personally I'd hesitate when some deity asks me directly to kill, since A) the return of the supposed messiah implies the final judgement after the beast, whatever it is, has become invincible, so any man fighting is irrelevant. B) The Isaac sacrifice lesson is already done, no need to reenact. C) A god doesn't NEED any man to do anything, if he is omnipotent. D) how do I prove it's the deity from the inside of the universe?
Such as a subjective metric can be made rigorous in the process of patent examination. How many silly patents would be tossed off once a couple guys had the chance of doing a clean room implementation given three days? That would reduce the number of patents, making the application a lil costlier. Bad for the applicant, good for the society. We don't need 2 million patents, we need 200 of them that are useful and that can be reimplemented once the terms expire. That does not happen now, because patents are just a way to make virtual markets similar to real market for the powers of real markets to rule over them too.
The guy who left two tablets with 10 fairly short phrases, one of which being "Thou shalt not kill"?
Well it takes a courageous religion leader to decide under which conditions that rule does not apply. In fact if you place yourself in higher authority than a God's you fork, not follow, one religion.
>I have a better idea, use one, with a browser that hasn't become a pile of blah blah
the better idea involves keeping the possibly faulty plug-in and make a program sandbox a plugin instead of letting an OS do the work with 2 applications? I have a better idea of better ideas...
> what annoys me is they let it go on for 7 whole years while all the industry did was whine about them, before finally getting the FBI to take action...
If the unknown site XYZ is taken down, nobody gives a fsck. If the world renowned site like megaupload is taken down, the event makes headlines, and the more controversy it causes in the details of the procedure, the better (e.g. the... ummm... terrorist way to compute damages). It fuels fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Back to topic: "Hey megaupload users who upped legal material, come out!" *crickets*
But: "Hey media corporation who ask material to take down because it hurts artists that you dutifully and accurately award the right amount of money for their worthy original and artistic contribution to society, come out!" *silence of deep space void at 0 deg. kelvin*
Big deal, all transcendent gods can't be found in reality by definition. That's not a matter of simply attaching a label to a god, usually the guy creating something can't be found inside its creation.
> It's when they try to make me follow those beliefs... Well then use the scripture against them, since they are out of it, if you don't follow the example set by Jesus and force others it's not a theological problem. About beer on sundays, ask adventists:)
You won't find much disagreement from the average slashdotters on the importance of programming. The devil is in the details, how will compulsory programming courses be handled by school systems. If a student has to wrestle with proprietary environments with poor support because eventually the school gets tired of paying for cosmetic updates, he/she will only learn the "bad part" of programming. It sure teaches a lesson but there's the whole life to get that kind of schooling, for free:)
How you define atheism compared to religion is irrelevant. It was a doctrine enforced in USSR just as the sharia law in an islamic theocracy, no? That's all the reasoning my post needs.
If you want to discuss it, I state that atheism is a religion, or both atheism and religions are assertions in the metaphysical domain, choose what fits better, I can't care less. Your definition of atheism is in fact agnosticism, a perfectly reasonable position BTW. In Italian, Greek and Latin, those words convey different meanings, I suspect they do in English too.
I don't subscribe to the relation between religion and answers, the answer "anything comes from a god" is a consequence of believing in the existence of an omnipotent one, so it's circular reasoning to use it to justify the belief itself. Some thinkers use such reasoning, but not the sacred books I happened to read till now.
As for unicorns and leprechauns that someone cites in the thread, if there were enough discussions about those, we'd take a position, so what's the problem? It happened with conspiracy theories about the 9/11.
Problem is, even if you had a time machine and caught on cam the guys inventing all the religious books, proving that they are all scams, even if science progresses enough to explain and track every single interaction in past present future for all eternity, you haven't concluded anything. I can fire up a cellular automata simulation, let it run without my intervention. The simulation is completely external to me (and to this universe, because its rules+its states are a hardware-independent abstraction), but the potential, complete auto-discovery of the simulated world by the simulated entities doesn't disprove me, does it? If we can create abstractions we can be something else's abstraction. (and so on, under some assumptions I discussed elsewhere on this page).
Meanwhile, the Jesus guy created by your "folks attempting to explain the world around them", doesn't reply after the "Quid est veritas?" of Pilate, and instead says "I am the truth" to Thomas. Kudos to the folks. Damn subtle, if you get it. But subtlety is just as irrelevant as far as proof is concerned. So, good luck with your assertion.
Ok but when a guy wearing his fave team's colors in the wrong place of the stadium gets killed, and it would happen every friggin sunday if it wasn't for the police, do you conclude that sport is a dangerous thing? When a financial collapse occurs, it's because of Math? Fraudsters can sure rob you without miscalculating a cent, but without Math, they could not pull any financial tricks on you at all, so?
And... is overpopulation a problem? Food scarcity might be a problem. Space scarcity, too. When somebody says overpopulation, the blame shifts on you, but it should be in the long term sustainability of agricultural techniques, of energy, of architecture etc. When we implemented the best policies in those fields, only then the number of persons will be something to consider. Laws are made for people, not the other way round.
That is true, but it happens even when atheism is the "religion" of state. Like good ol' about soviet russia, (where a god doesn't believe in YOU!!!). Or even agnosticism, you have problems with the law if you show religious symbols in France, right? So the problem is religion+atheism+agnosticism? You should not enforce any of them? That's ok for me. Your possibly implied "Religion=bad" is not satisfactory, not because it goes against some beliefs (esp. when "contra mundum" by default), but it is a non sequitur.
Logic is not definable outside reality, and all the conceptual systems we come up with. So, it has little to do with both atheism and religion. Religion is about revelations supposedly coming from god(s) and atheism is about not believing any of it. Now theology, pholosophy, those can use how much logic they want. But belief, or its absence, are requirements and not conclusions.
Of course, if you believe that logic (even its fundamental parts like the principle of non contradiction) is defined and valid in a hypothetical domain of a creator of "all that is", then you can make many atheist reasonings work. The price is introducing an assumption. And if it seems banal to you, check the meaning of the verbs you are using. Are you using Be, True, False? What do they even mean, outside reality? what does a function in a programming language do, outside the scope where I defined it? Raises an exception, unless by chance there is a function with the same name, defined elsewhere. If I can't look up its definition, it doesn't matter if it is called "count()" or "add()", I can't ever tell what it does and I use it at my own risk. Transcendent means "outside the scope of whatever we can directly or indirectly experience". The problem is a showstopper.
The worst part of atheists bringing logic to the table is that atheists don't need ANY arguments. As an atheist, I'd simply state: Nothing of what I can experience can be proven as necessarily caused by a "transcendent something", so I am free to not believe that such "something" is the domain of a God. Simple. (captcha, before i logged in: "wonders")
It is easy to implement, with your own provider if you want. It is not cross browser nor noscript friendly so the usual login methods will have to be kept, but that's not a big problem, one is offering a shortcut, just like openID or logins through FB, openID...
OTOH the browser acquires new functionality and an internet world ruled by a bunch of www browsers, instead of the multitude of clients of the internet 1.0, means that security issues will turn into catastrophes, like it happened with a windows monoculture.
That wreck has made headlines all over the place. If it is feasible to remove fuel and other dangerous stuff, stabilize it and prevent other boats to ram it at night, I'd just:
1) leave it there 2) wait for tourist season 3) no ??? 4) Profit!!!
Jurisdiction and law coming from the will of people and proportional punishment are Basilar concepts just as the presence of a police force enforcing those and other aspects of justice. In other words, you've been hypocrite too.
A decade passes and MS flagship OS still has serious vulnerabilities. Linux has them too, but it's changed a bit in functionality since, didn't it.
You asked for trolling. You got it.
If I were being serious I'd say they probably can fix their OS but then the magical sw-hw update circle would break, and neither them nor the hardware makers would rejoice.
As much as my comment history doesn't show much sympathy for the USA per se, We are not really persecuting Iran, We are provoking them and they are provoking us. Even if iran had nukes, it would be a long way before they can challenge the west with them and not be obliterated. And if they managed to become so powerful to start being a real problem they would become a problem for russia and china too, nobody likes one more big player at the table, so ultimately they should become more powerful than anybody to start making demands. Isn't it faster to revert to conventional arms, even develop new tech, and put the usa in the position of the aggressor?
The problem is that ahmadinejad went to power with the help of pro-west forces which apparently protested that way the moderates (a nice fairy tale), and leaders of both sides can be seen on youtube videos performing the same signs (the horns, for example). Does it mean anything? maybe not, but just in case, we should take anybody that decides or profit directly or indirectly from this crisis and put him in the first line of combat and say, well, sort it out yourselves, just in case you planned this war for your personal profits. Well make it so for every conflict. Nobody should gain any personal or political profit from war or terrorism, then war and terrorism become a hindrance nobody wants. Till then, an enemy will always be available.
> I, for one, like the idea that I can have desktop quality applications running independent of platform on my browser
I for one welcome your new OS overlord:D The advantage in running everything through the browser is ease of installation and compatibility with all platforms using that browser. The disadvantage is the security problem such freedom of installation poses, google browser becomes the os, and has to solve every problem the traditional os do. And until EVERYTHING you need has a native client version you'll be stuck with both an os for native apps and an os in the browser. Plus if you don't use chromium google has the same amount of control MS has on windows.
Now, the advantage might still be good in the windows platform but take debian model. You have apt, the mother of app stores, with cryptographically signed packages, very very few installation problems even when you get 10x the number of apps that make windows choke, network activity is under your control, you can analyze traffic by port if you use traditional internet apps. And you're multiplatform and scalable. Did I fscking mention you're FREE too? I sure hope the web 3.0 resembles the internet 1.0 and not this.
I think that USA and China are part of the same system, else the first would have retained control of its economy instead of basically helping out the second. Both morally bankrupt like ummm all the rest of the worldwide system (I'm not talking about the NWO I am talking about the de-facto situation, in morally sound systems trials elections patents and thousands other things would be less dependent on how powerful the players are).
Anyway, it's true, in a lot of forums and discussions China is readily defended, while the USA defenders are more subtle or even absent. The puppeteers in USA know that it's irrelevant how much you speak about something, as long as actions do not hurt real interests.
Back to the poster defending China. You might be right but make better points than "you have no experience of X, how can you tell it's bad?", just substitute X for crack to see how hollow it is.
My implementation deals with a corner case. "Does the hardware maker's site loads some homepage elements apparently fine and then smacks a "javascript is required" DIV in front? Keep noscript and surf somewhere else."
Let's hope they handle this well (aka a de updater that lets people know what and why it happens). I am critical about ubuntu usually, and I can almost hear some bearded guy saying: "Told you so, next time learn to build upon Free Software instead". But I think this time they would have rather avoided this and they couldn't.
I dunno, the industry seems to be killing java and flash ahead of time.
You need training and retraining for windows, too, and less room for customization. And, dunno you but I am starting to get the first "win7 has gotten too slow" reports here.
Slashdot Mirror
> You should read Numbers. The nation of Israel did quite a bit of killing, raping, and enslaving shortly after receiving the 10 commandments. I'm sure that was all God's will though, so, yeah...
They were worshiping the golden calf as they were receiving them, so... not so sure about them following God's will just by reading them. There would have been no need to send the son later, too.
If chronicle is equal to law, if it doesn't matter what came as law directly from the supposed deity, it's all at the same level, then bible followers can kill at will once they receive an order provably from JHVH. That seems not a free pass for homicide to me anyway.
And personally I'd hesitate when some deity asks me directly to kill, since A) the return of the supposed messiah implies the final judgement after the beast, whatever it is, has become invincible, so any man fighting is irrelevant. B) The Isaac sacrifice lesson is already done, no need to reenact. C) A god doesn't NEED any man to do anything, if he is omnipotent. D) how do I prove it's the deity from the inside of the universe?
Such as a subjective metric can be made rigorous in the process of patent examination. How many silly patents would be tossed off once a couple guys had the chance of doing a clean room implementation given three days?
That would reduce the number of patents, making the application a lil costlier. Bad for the applicant, good for the society. We don't need 2 million patents, we need 200 of them that are useful and that can be reimplemented once the terms expire. That does not happen now, because patents are just a way to make virtual markets similar to real market for the powers of real markets to rule over them too.
The guy who left two tablets with 10 fairly short phrases, one of which being "Thou shalt not kill"?
Well it takes a courageous religion leader to decide under which conditions that rule does not apply. In fact if you place yourself in higher authority than a God's you fork, not follow, one religion.
> If the typing is optional how do you actually program it? Voice recognition?
no, copy/paste. Just like js/php, in fact.
>I have a better idea, use one, with a browser that hasn't become a pile of blah blah
the better idea involves keeping the possibly faulty plug-in and make a program sandbox a plugin instead of letting an OS do the work with 2 applications? I have a better idea of better ideas...
> what annoys me is they let it go on for 7 whole years while all the industry did was whine about them, before finally getting the FBI to take action...
If the unknown site XYZ is taken down, nobody gives a fsck.
If the world renowned site like megaupload is taken down, the event makes headlines, and the more controversy it causes in the details of the procedure, the better (e.g. the... ummm... terrorist way to compute damages). It fuels fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Back to topic:
"Hey megaupload users who upped legal material, come out!"
*crickets*
But:
"Hey media corporation who ask material to take down because it hurts artists that you dutifully and accurately award the right amount of money for their worthy original and artistic contribution to society, come out!"
*silence of deep space void at 0 deg. kelvin*
Can't tell if troll or usual MS tactic.
Big deal, all transcendent gods can't be found in reality by definition. That's not a matter of simply attaching a label to a god, usually the guy creating something can't be found inside its creation.
> It's when they try to make me follow those beliefs... :)
Well then use the scripture against them, since they are out of it, if you don't follow the example set by Jesus and force others it's not a theological problem.
About beer on sundays, ask adventists
You won't find much disagreement from the average slashdotters on the importance of programming. :)
The devil is in the details, how will compulsory programming courses be handled by school systems. If a student has to wrestle with proprietary environments with poor support because eventually the school gets tired of paying for cosmetic updates, he/she will only learn the "bad part" of programming. It sure teaches a lesson but there's the whole life to get that kind of schooling, for free
How you define atheism compared to religion is irrelevant. It was a doctrine enforced in USSR just as the sharia law in an islamic theocracy, no? That's all the reasoning my post needs.
If you want to discuss it, I state that atheism is a religion, or both atheism and religions are assertions in the metaphysical domain, choose what fits better, I can't care less. Your definition of atheism is in fact agnosticism, a perfectly reasonable position BTW. In Italian, Greek and Latin, those words convey different meanings, I suspect they do in English too.
I don't subscribe to the relation between religion and answers, the answer "anything comes from a god" is a consequence of believing in the existence of an omnipotent one, so it's circular reasoning to use it to justify the belief itself. Some thinkers use such reasoning, but not the sacred books I happened to read till now.
As for unicorns and leprechauns that someone cites in the thread, if there were enough discussions about those, we'd take a position, so what's the problem? It happened with conspiracy theories about the 9/11.
Problem is, even if you had a time machine and caught on cam the guys inventing all the religious books, proving that they are all scams, even if science progresses enough to explain and track every single interaction in past present future for all eternity, you haven't concluded anything. I can fire up a cellular automata simulation, let it run without my intervention. The simulation is completely external to me (and to this universe, because its rules+its states are a hardware-independent abstraction), but the potential, complete auto-discovery of the simulated world by the simulated entities doesn't disprove me, does it? If we can create abstractions we can be something else's abstraction. (and so on, under some assumptions I discussed elsewhere on this page).
Meanwhile, the Jesus guy created by your "folks attempting to explain the world around them", doesn't reply after the "Quid est veritas?" of Pilate, and instead says "I am the truth" to Thomas.
Kudos to the folks. Damn subtle, if you get it. But subtlety is just as irrelevant as far as proof is concerned. So, good luck with your assertion.
Ok but when a guy wearing his fave team's colors in the wrong place of the stadium gets killed, and it would happen every friggin sunday if it wasn't for the police, do you conclude that sport is a dangerous thing?
When a financial collapse occurs, it's because of Math? Fraudsters can sure rob you without miscalculating a cent, but without Math, they could not pull any financial tricks on you at all, so?
And... is overpopulation a problem? Food scarcity might be a problem. Space scarcity, too. When somebody says overpopulation, the blame shifts on you, but it should be in the long term sustainability of agricultural techniques, of energy, of architecture etc. When we implemented the best policies in those fields, only then the number of persons will be something to consider. Laws are made for people, not the other way round.
That is true, but it happens even when atheism is the "religion" of state. Like good ol' about soviet russia, (where a god doesn't believe in YOU!!!). Or even agnosticism, you have problems with the law if you show religious symbols in France, right?
So the problem is religion+atheism+agnosticism? You should not enforce any of them? That's ok for me. Your possibly implied "Religion=bad" is not satisfactory, not because it goes against some beliefs (esp. when "contra mundum" by default), but it is a non sequitur.
Logic is not definable outside reality, and all the conceptual systems we come up with.
So, it has little to do with both atheism and religion. Religion is about revelations supposedly coming from god(s) and atheism is about not believing any of it. Now theology, pholosophy, those can use how much logic they want. But belief, or its absence, are requirements and not conclusions.
Of course, if you believe that logic (even its fundamental parts like the principle of non contradiction) is defined and valid in a hypothetical domain of a creator of "all that is", then you can make many atheist reasonings work. The price is introducing an assumption. And if it seems banal to you, check the meaning of the verbs you are using. Are you using Be, True, False? What do they even mean, outside reality? what does a function in a programming language do, outside the scope where I defined it? Raises an exception, unless by chance there is a function with the same name, defined elsewhere. If I can't look up its definition, it doesn't matter if it is called "count()" or "add()", I can't ever tell what it does and I use it at my own risk. Transcendent means "outside the scope of whatever we can directly or indirectly experience". The problem is a showstopper.
The worst part of atheists bringing logic to the table is that atheists don't need ANY arguments. As an atheist, I'd simply state: Nothing of what I can experience can be proven as necessarily caused by a "transcendent something", so I am free to not believe that such "something" is the domain of a God. Simple. (captcha, before i logged in: "wonders")
It is easy to implement, with your own provider if you want.
It is not cross browser nor noscript friendly so the usual login methods will have to be kept, but that's not a big problem, one is offering a shortcut, just like openID or logins through FB, openID...
OTOH the browser acquires new functionality and an internet world ruled by a bunch of www browsers, instead of the multitude of clients of the internet 1.0, means that security issues will turn into catastrophes, like it happened with a windows monoculture.
That wreck has made headlines all over the place. If it is feasible to remove fuel and other dangerous stuff, stabilize it and prevent other boats to ram it at night, I'd just:
1) leave it there
2) wait for tourist season
3) no ???
4) Profit!!!
Compiler error: fake dichotomy at line 3.
Jurisdiction and law coming from the will of people and proportional punishment are Basilar concepts just as the presence of a police force enforcing those and other aspects of justice. In other words, you've been hypocrite too.
A decade passes and MS flagship OS still has serious vulnerabilities. Linux has them too, but it's changed a bit in functionality since, didn't it.
You asked for trolling. You got it.
If I were being serious I'd say they probably can fix their OS but then the magical sw-hw update circle would break, and neither them nor the hardware makers would rejoice.
As much as my comment history doesn't show much sympathy for the USA per se, We are not really persecuting Iran, We are provoking them and they are provoking us. Even if iran had nukes, it would be a long way before they can challenge the west with them and not be obliterated. And if they managed to become so powerful to start being a real problem they would become a problem for russia and china too, nobody likes one more big player at the table, so ultimately they should become more powerful than anybody to start making demands. Isn't it faster to revert to conventional arms, even develop new tech, and put the usa in the position of the aggressor?
The problem is that ahmadinejad went to power with the help of pro-west forces which apparently protested that way the moderates (a nice fairy tale), and leaders of both sides can be seen on youtube videos performing the same signs (the horns, for example). Does it mean anything? maybe not, but just in case, we should take anybody that decides or profit directly or indirectly from this crisis and put him in the first line of combat and say, well, sort it out yourselves, just in case you planned this war for your personal profits. Well make it so for every conflict. Nobody should gain any personal or political profit from war or terrorism, then war and terrorism become a hindrance nobody wants. Till then, an enemy will always be available.
> James Joyce's works are now freely available to everyone
So even the expiring of copyrighted works has its drawbacks. Interesting.
> I, for one, like the idea that I can have desktop quality applications running independent of platform on my browser
I for one welcome your new OS overlord :D
The advantage in running everything through the browser is ease of installation and compatibility with all platforms using that browser.
The disadvantage is the security problem such freedom of installation poses, google browser becomes the os, and has to solve every problem the traditional os do. And until EVERYTHING you need has a native client version you'll be stuck with both an os for native apps and an os in the browser. Plus if you don't use chromium google has the same amount of control MS has on windows.
Now, the advantage might still be good in the windows platform but take debian model. You have apt, the mother of app stores, with cryptographically signed packages, very very few installation problems even when you get 10x the number of apps that make windows choke, network activity is under your control, you can analyze traffic by port if you use traditional internet apps. And you're multiplatform and scalable. Did I fscking mention you're FREE too? I sure hope the web 3.0 resembles the internet 1.0 and not this.
I think that USA and China are part of the same system, else the first would have retained control of its economy instead of basically helping out the second. Both morally bankrupt like ummm all the rest of the worldwide system (I'm not talking about the NWO I am talking about the de-facto situation, in morally sound systems trials elections patents and thousands other things would be less dependent on how powerful the players are).
Anyway, it's true, in a lot of forums and discussions China is readily defended, while the USA defenders are more subtle or even absent. The puppeteers in USA know that it's irrelevant how much you speak about something, as long as actions do not hurt real interests.
Back to the poster defending China. You might be right but make better points than "you have no experience of X, how can you tell it's bad?", just substitute X for crack to see how hollow it is.
My implementation deals with a corner case.
"Does the hardware maker's site loads some homepage elements apparently fine and then smacks a "javascript is required" DIV in front?
Keep noscript and surf somewhere else."
Let's hope they handle this well (aka a de updater that lets people know what and why it happens).
I am critical about ubuntu usually, and I can almost hear some bearded guy saying: "Told you so, next time learn to build upon Free Software instead". But I think this time they would have rather avoided this and they couldn't.
I dunno, the industry seems to be killing java and flash ahead of time.
You need training and retraining for windows, too, and less room for customization.
And, dunno you but I am starting to get the first "win7 has gotten too slow" reports here.