Your sig: I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Wait. Me decides A is reason for action B. You have problems with A. If I decide religion is reason to deprive others of the truth, shouldn't you have problems with me instead of my religion?
Fear that maniacs will get a hold of destructive power will keep this power in the hands of self appointed cabals which will act in the name of national security. Many of those actors will be in good faith, too. It won't stop evil people in the long run.
We are in a society who already tested nuclear device on their own people, which experiments on animals and does medical research without making every result publicly available (which means either unneeded additional research and cruelty or death as consequence of keeping industrial secrets). All of this in the open. Fearing maniacs seems like concentrating on a particular case, to me.
IMHO Life is the expression of time and interactions. Stable things prevail over unstable things. Stable things which grow prevail over stable things that don't grow. Stable things which grow when split... which grow under broader conditions... which die (making space for new generation)... which use the sun's energy... which move... which are self conscious... which communicate... etc...do prevail.
I'm afraid the empire has simply switched horses. Some decades of (fake) communism and the mirage of the west have had some effect. Who sells his kidney for an ipad, after all?
and if you don't happen to have the generic windows installed, you'll also have to maintain the dozen of entirely different preinstalled crapware utilities for each pc brand. Compare that to having the same environment and compatible config files with linux no matter which the architecture is. Old but perfectly useful Powerpc macs come to mind.
I bluescreened a win7 packard bell netbook by trying to do something esoteric as... tethering an android phone (an ideos). I had to try with a linux machine to understand what was going on, that is tethering worked - got the ip - but the phone wasn't on the network. Just an episode of course, but not very promising given the little time i spend on win.
Anyway... I'd take a linux desktop that crashes twice a day instead of reverting to the old days of windows in my workplace - type the license key, download the 100+mb printer drivers from the producer site, no "app store from heaven" package repositories.
But crappy performance is actually a selling point for more performing hardware, I guess some guys are already rubbing their hands and waiting for this tech to be a lil more feasible, so that they can have it mandated by law in some sectors that suddenly will require much more computing power to do the same old things.
I agree for a different reason, examining.NET from a technological point of view... that's pointless. A java killer was already a not so good idea, a java killer without proper software freedom and platform independence is a joke, if I stick to one platform there's no point in doing stuff through a VM.
It has been a success because it kept people under MS umbrella.
And all it takes for MS to silence speculation is a new release with some cosmetic changes, I expect something like that, it is a good marketing move.
It is not a bad thing for those developers who are used to sell the same stuff to clients all over again when a new incompatible release comes out.
It is not a bad thing because forced java to be fully open source, poor java devs if oracle bought the only possible implementation.
It's bad for the users: but hey, "MS strategy hurts users" isn't news.
if china wanted to eat up android and iphone they would simply need tosell powerful hardware at no profit and a free / as in freedom variant of android plus the i/o options we've seen on the nokia n900. Users would say "hey i can do anything with this new phone!". After three years the market is theirs. Something like this worked for them before, as you can see every time you read "made in china".
Profit is not the objective, control is. Since the trend in recent centuries is a decrease of freedom for the average citizen (don't think about the ballots, or the miniskirt: think about being able to feed yourself, to build a house, to get clean water from a well....) the chinese have simply skipped a couple generations of too "independent" phone models.
We should import it, calling it "mark of the beast".
You remind me of some interpretations of the "tree of life" in Christian tradition. Something enabling man to "escape" from time and thus become eternal.
And the LORD God said, âoeThe man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.â So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
As one can see, it is properly firewalled. That LORD does not trust lusers... well, not until they get some NT certification (New Testament:) )
If you think about it, it is difficult to believe any manager with enough power to make this kind of choices is a somewhat retarded guy which can't see even immediate consequences for his decisions.
IMHO the objective is to make people accept the always connected slav... er.. lifestyle. A company gets damages because of that policy? well, what's a company? a name on some assets owned by the same banks that own the competitors' ones. Under control of the same class of PHBs which went to the same schools, got the same degrees, and switch from one name to another.
Then the only reason to replace a working phone will be A. when switching network protocols (e.g. AMPS to TDMA to GSM to UMTS to LTE) or B. when a non-user-replaceable battery dies.
c. the carrier or the vendor will stop updating the os, those unable to install an aftermarket os are screwed.
> It's quite possible that time is in fact variable outside the Universe...
I know what you mean, if our universe were the product of a simulation computed by a 1mhz machine (with a damn lot of ram), from inside the simulation nobody could notice if the machine were upgraded to a 1ghz.
But, to reason like this we are assuming that the concept of time is definable outside the universe, and that is an insanely big assumption.
If you get to the "Christianity" part, supporting Israel is strange. First, the promised land has already been given, the diaspora comes with the Roman destruction of the Temple but, by that time, Jesus had already spread the faith to the whole world. Some of the guys choose not to recognize Christ, to think they still have to get the promised land and await the Messiah? They are entitled to their opinion, but supporting this vision is not compatible with Christianity.
Yet nobody notices - or I am reading a different Bible, who knows.
Back to the topic, a guy who play games to practice is Not a gamer, end of discussion.
The truth: bad people have no faith, race, or nation (those are concepts they use to control their victims), instead of supporting or attacking this flag or that race, watch out for them.
> I just pointed out a simple misconception you were working with there.
If i say "A" and you say "not(A) under some circumstances" we are disagreeing, since my assertion is implicitly "A under all circumstances". I assert it's enough to say "I don't believe" for atheists, anti theists, believers of different creeds. AND that should be sufficient for them to be left with no harm or repercussion. Because a Christian has to consider the explicit teaching: "If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet...". Note that it focuses on those that don't even listen, NOT even on those who listen and then say "BS". It follows that forcing conversions is against the teaching, against the example of Jesus and the first Christians.
> How is explaining ones stand/belief on the subject a strawman? Explaining is not the strawman, the stand is the strawman.
If I am talking about math, you point out that a guy doesn't believe in math because his bank stole money from him, i call strawman and if you reply anything but "yes, indeed", then we disagree; you pointed out something we don't agree upon, if we keep discussing it then we are arguing. If you say "I was simply reporting what that gut thinks", I surely don't blame the strawman on you (did I?) yet it stays as a triumph of logic.
Also, THAT what you did there - that is a straw man argument.
the circular reasoning: No god/s exist, therefore worship is "a decision" by early men.
For someone who apparently can't tell a strawman from explanation of a misconception you are quite adept at using them.
If anything, your "definition" should say something like:
There is no PROOF that god(s), by any definition of god(s) that does not also define superheroes, exist.
There cannot ever be one, for any transcendent god, by definition of "transcendent".
BUT the abundance of various gods in human cultures who could be influenced by prayer/sacrifice indicates instinctive human tendency towards worship in order to secure favors from supernatural beings...
Or that they might be effective, only as a placebo, or for some undiscovered aspects of the way the universe behaves, or for the presence of... crazy supernatural beings who appreciate such gestures.
... while at the same time huge discrepancies and differences among AND WITHIN religions, gods and their associated myths proves...
Proves that I'd fail logic consistency. "A thousand self-proclaimed witnesses report a fact in a thousand entirely different ways, therefore the fact is made up" is not logically acceptable.
The far bigger problem is the failure of applying logic outside its scope.
A total inconsistency, "A and not(A)", is impossible in our [macroscopic] universe, that's all. You can't derive inconsistencies in a possibly present transcendent plane, where our logic is not necessarily defined the same way or definable at all, using the logic in our universe. If your world is 2-dimensional, a triangle and a circle will always be two different entities, but if you go "outside the plato's cave", in 3D, they could represent projections of the same cone.
By our logic the attribute "exists" cannot be safely applied to the concept of a trascendent god. So, "God exists/does not exist" is ALREADY a statement out of logic, how can it be true or false?
... that every single one is simply made up by humans. Therefore there are strong indications that worshiping is an instinctive reaction by the more primitive parts of the human logic/mind, as an attempt to answer to uncertainties of existence and life and provide some protection from them - by trying to gamble and haggle with the universe for favorable results. Kinda like five stages of grief - only stopping at "bargaining". Ergo, every religion and every god humans ever worshiped was inve
I basically agree, guerrilla tactics are not terror acts when they are against an army, I was not referring to those. And yes I think "we" are perpetrating acts of terror against arabs, that we can afford as long as "we" are the stronger side (it appears to me these wars are a way to prepare new global hegemonies, instead). Those acts are justifiable under some circumstances? well that's another topic.
While it's true that enemies tend to get labeled terrorists, I'd rather define a terrorist as a fighter who makes the other side win.
Historically, terror acts have been perpetrated with advantage if you have enough diplomatic or raw force to justify it, but if your side is the weaker and oppressed one, just don't bother.
> I wasn't arguing against any points you made. Read again: me:...Especially when it's sufficient to say "I don't believe". you: "I don't believe" is not enough when you actually want to take an active stand...
The strawman: "anti-theism" because of crimes committed in the name of religion (are you "anti-math" because of financial frauds?), the circular reasoning: No god/s exist, therefore worship is "a decision" by early men.
Hm, almost. You'd need to peek at the original book to pirate it, You cannot steal somebody's book by reading the title. On the other hand, banal patents can be implemented, and consequentially infringed upon, by morons who read a short version of their description.
Protecting a process is tricky because on one end a simple refactoring or as you say a different language could be declared different enough, on the other end you have a patent troll asking money for whatever banal solution of a problem.
I'll repeat myself, but invalidating a patent should be as easy as getting three student to work on a clean room implementation for one month. If they come up with a solution everybody should be able to use that without repercussion. So, if somebody has patented a more efficient process he can monetize it, without stifling innovation.
There are thousands of similar solutions, no big deal. The problem is that big interests entangle society for a thirst of control, and that rationally explains the apparent irrationality of politicians or social dynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
if you don't like upgrades breaking things up, debian stable has firefox 3.5.xx :)
Quickly getting to the absurd conclusion that a Christian legislative body endorses war in opposition to the one commandment and the 5th old one.
Your sig:
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Wait. Me decides A is reason for action B. You have problems with A.
If I decide religion is reason to deprive others of the truth, shouldn't you have problems with me instead of my religion?
Of course, you probably never seen it before.
Fear that maniacs will get a hold of destructive power will keep this power in the hands of self appointed cabals which will act in the name of national security. Many of those actors will be in good faith, too. It won't stop evil people in the long run.
We are in a society who already tested nuclear device on their own people, which experiments on animals and does medical research without making every result publicly available (which means either unneeded additional research and cruelty or death as consequence of keeping industrial secrets). All of this in the open. Fearing maniacs seems like concentrating on a particular case, to me.
IMHO Life is the expression of time and interactions.
Stable things prevail over unstable things.
Stable things which grow prevail over stable things that don't grow.
Stable things which grow when split... which grow under broader conditions... which die (making space for new generation)... which use the sun's energy... which move... which are self conscious... which communicate... etc...do prevail.
Sometimes they prevail too much.
I'm afraid the empire has simply switched horses. Some decades of (fake) communism and the mirage of the west have had some effect. Who sells his kidney for an ipad, after all?
and if you don't happen to have the generic windows installed, you'll also have to maintain the dozen of entirely different preinstalled crapware utilities for each pc brand. Compare that to having the same environment and compatible config files with linux no matter which the architecture is. Old but perfectly useful Powerpc macs come to mind.
I bluescreened a win7 packard bell netbook by trying to do something esoteric as... tethering an android phone (an ideos).
I had to try with a linux machine to understand what was going on, that is tethering worked - got the ip - but the phone wasn't on the network. Just an episode of course, but not very promising given the little time i spend on win.
Anyway... I'd take a linux desktop that crashes twice a day instead of reverting to the old days of windows in my workplace - type the license key, download the 100+mb printer drivers from the producer site, no "app store from heaven" package repositories.
But crappy performance is actually a selling point for more performing hardware, I guess some guys are already rubbing their hands and waiting for this tech to be a lil more feasible, so that they can have it mandated by law in some sectors that suddenly will require much more computing power to do the same old things.
I agree for a different reason, examining .NET from a technological point of view... that's pointless. A java killer was already a not so good idea, a java killer without proper software freedom and platform independence is a joke, if I stick to one platform there's no point in doing stuff through a VM.
It has been a success because it kept people under MS umbrella.
And all it takes for MS to silence speculation is a new release with some cosmetic changes, I expect something like that, it is a good marketing move.
It is not a bad thing for those developers who are used to sell the same stuff to clients all over again when a new incompatible release comes out.
It is not a bad thing because forced java to be fully open source, poor java devs if oracle bought the only possible implementation.
It's bad for the users: but hey, "MS strategy hurts users" isn't news.
Cleaner water... compare this to 200 yrs ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AtrazineUSAMap.png
if china wanted to eat up android and iphone they would simply need tosell powerful hardware at no profit and a free / as in freedom variant of android plus the i/o options we've seen on the nokia n900. Users would say "hey i can do anything with this new phone!". After three years the market is theirs. Something like this worked for them before, as you can see every time you read "made in china".
Profit is not the objective, control is.
Since the trend in recent centuries is a decrease of freedom for the average citizen (don't think about the ballots, or the miniskirt: think about being able to feed yourself, to build a house, to get clean water from a well....) the chinese have simply skipped a couple generations of too "independent" phone models.
We should import it, calling it "mark of the beast".
You remind me of some interpretations of the "tree of life" in Christian tradition. Something enabling man to "escape" from time and thus become eternal.
And the LORD God said, âoeThe man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.â So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
As one can see, it is properly firewalled. That LORD does not trust lusers... well, not until they get some NT certification (New Testament :) )
luv your fine sarcasm
If you think about it, it is difficult to believe any manager with enough power to make this kind of choices is a somewhat retarded guy which can't see even immediate consequences for his decisions.
IMHO the objective is to make people accept the always connected slav... er.. lifestyle. A company gets damages because of that policy? well, what's a company? a name on some assets owned by the same banks that own the competitors' ones. Under control of the same class of PHBs which went to the same schools, got the same degrees, and switch from one name to another.
Then the only reason to replace a working phone will be A. when switching network protocols (e.g. AMPS to TDMA to GSM to UMTS to LTE) or B. when a non-user-replaceable battery dies.
c. the carrier or the vendor will stop updating the os, those unable to install an aftermarket os are screwed.
A lesson has been learned with the PC desktop.
> It's quite possible that time is in fact variable outside the Universe...
I know what you mean, if our universe were the product of a simulation computed by a 1mhz machine (with a damn lot of ram), from inside the simulation nobody could notice if the machine were upgraded to a 1ghz.
But, to reason like this we are assuming that the concept of time is definable outside the universe, and that is an insanely big assumption.
If you get to the "Christianity" part, supporting Israel is strange. First, the promised land has already been given, the diaspora comes with the Roman destruction of the Temple but, by that time, Jesus had already spread the faith to the whole world. Some of the guys choose not to recognize Christ, to think they still have to get the promised land and await the Messiah? They are entitled to their opinion, but supporting this vision is not compatible with Christianity.
Yet nobody notices - or I am reading a different Bible, who knows.
Back to the topic, a guy who play games to practice is Not a gamer, end of discussion.
The truth: bad people have no faith, race, or nation (those are concepts they use to control their victims), instead of supporting or attacking this flag or that race, watch out for them.
> I just pointed out a simple misconception you were working with there.
If i say "A" and you say "not(A) under some circumstances" we are disagreeing, since my assertion is implicitly "A under all circumstances". I assert it's enough to say "I don't believe" for atheists, anti theists, believers of different creeds. AND that should be sufficient for them to be left with no harm or repercussion.
Because a Christian has to consider the explicit teaching: "If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet...". Note that it focuses on those that don't even listen, NOT even on those who listen and then say "BS". It follows that forcing conversions is against the teaching, against the example of Jesus and the first Christians.
> How is explaining ones stand/belief on the subject a strawman?
Explaining is not the strawman, the stand is the strawman.
If I am talking about math, you point out that a guy doesn't believe in math because his bank stole money from him, i call strawman and if you reply anything but "yes, indeed", then we disagree; you pointed out something we don't agree upon, if we keep discussing it then we are arguing.
If you say "I was simply reporting what that gut thinks", I surely don't blame the strawman on you (did I?) yet it stays as a triumph of logic.
There cannot ever be one, for any transcendent god, by definition of "transcendent".
Or that they might be effective, only as a placebo, or for some undiscovered aspects of the way the universe behaves, or for the presence of... crazy supernatural beings who appreciate such gestures.
Proves that I'd fail logic consistency. "A thousand self-proclaimed witnesses report a fact in a thousand entirely different ways, therefore the fact is made up" is not logically acceptable.
The far bigger problem is the failure of applying logic outside its scope.
A total inconsistency, "A and not(A)", is impossible in our [macroscopic] universe, that's all. You can't derive inconsistencies in a possibly present transcendent plane, where our logic is not necessarily defined the same way or definable at all, using the logic in our universe.
If your world is 2-dimensional, a triangle and a circle will always be two different entities, but if you go "outside the plato's cave", in 3D, they could represent projections of the same cone.
By our logic the attribute "exists" cannot be safely applied to the concept of a trascendent god. So, "God exists/does not exist" is ALREADY a statement out of logic, how can it be true or false?
I basically agree, guerrilla tactics are not terror acts when they are against an army, I was not referring to those. And yes I think "we" are perpetrating acts of terror against arabs, that we can afford as long as "we" are the stronger side (it appears to me these wars are a way to prepare new global hegemonies, instead). Those acts are justifiable under some circumstances? well that's another topic.
While it's true that enemies tend to get labeled terrorists, I'd rather define a terrorist as a fighter who makes the other side win.
Historically, terror acts have been perpetrated with advantage if you have enough diplomatic or raw force to justify it, but if your side is the weaker and oppressed one, just don't bother.
> I wasn't arguing against any points you made. ...Especially when it's sufficient to say "I don't believe".
Read again:
me:
you: "I don't believe" is not enough when you actually want to take an active stand...
The strawman: "anti-theism" because of crimes committed in the name of religion (are you "anti-math" because of financial frauds?), the circular reasoning: No god/s exist, therefore worship is "a decision" by early men.
Hm, almost. You'd need to peek at the original book to pirate it, You cannot steal somebody's book by reading the title.
On the other hand, banal patents can be implemented, and consequentially infringed upon, by morons who read a short version of their description.
Protecting a process is tricky because on one end a simple refactoring or as you say a different language could be declared different enough, on the other end you have a patent troll asking money for whatever banal solution of a problem.
I'll repeat myself, but invalidating a patent should be as easy as getting three student to work on a clean room implementation for one month. If they come up with a solution everybody should be able to use that without repercussion.
So, if somebody has patented a more efficient process he can monetize it, without stifling innovation.
There are thousands of similar solutions, no big deal. The problem is that big interests entangle society for a thirst of control, and that rationally explains the apparent irrationality of politicians or social dynamics.
Circular reasoning + strawman. The triumph of logic that is slashdot atheism.