Religions, reward after death religions, have to be like this. Else you get mass suicides.
I think it's mostly the other way around. People have survival instinct. Therefore they need to rationalize why they must keep on living, even if death would lead to a paradise of some sort. And this survival instinct reflects on religions.
But you're right otherwise of course, with clarification of any religion that lasts any significant amount of time has to be like that. A religion can certainly endorse mass suicide, it just won't last very long then.
Yup, me....and when it comes to paying taxes, I'm all for it. Of course I'm a left leaning person who believes that civic and social responsibility are important features of a functioning democracy.
Of course, there is nothing preventing you from stroking an extra check to the govt. Asking/requiring/demanding your neighbors do the same...not so good.
If he paid a bit extra, would that tiny amount of money help him get what he wants to get for that money? If everybody else paid too, yes. If not, then no. So if not enough other people paid, why would he want to give something for no gain?
A society is about taking responsibility of the state of things together. How to achieve that, and what things should be taken care of together, now that's debatable, but the basic premise of your statement, that things should be taken care of only voluntarily, and "freeloading" should be allowed, or it's "... not so good", that's fundamentally broken (human nature and all that).
Anyone else having problems viewing the EPOXi webpage? It brings my Firefox to a halt and almost crashes my laptop. Nice way to design your website, embedding more than 70 big images that are just scaled. It shouldn't exactly be rocket-science to make some thumbnails!:)
Indeed. It brought my firefox on an 8 years old laptop with original XP installation and 512MB of memory to a screeching halt. I had to close at least 10 tabs to get things back to normal. Unacceptable! Won't anybody think of the children?
Most of the world shifted from being hunter-gatherers (with some exceptions) to agrarian systems an awful long time ago. For most civilized countries, hunting became a sport, not a means of survival. For the most part, we survive on domesticated animals and farm raised plants, which are purchased in local stores. There are exceptions, but those are few and far between, and even then, you probably wouldn't be posting to Slashdot if you were there.
Don't try to fool yourself, only a very small percentage of those living in modern society could live without our modern infrastructure. Ask your average city dweller to catch a pigeon.
If that average city dweller could gain a lot (relative to his situation, for example $50 per bird or something in New York) by catching pigeons, you'd see pigeon population plummet, hunted by those very city dwellers. It'd be matter of weeks before those city dwellers would be very proficient pigeon hunters (provided the pigeons would not run out before then).
Not to mention, this was about India. With what... 800 million poor, many of who would gladly hunt owls if they got any money from it. Now let's say only 1% of them have potential to be good hunters, which leaves us with only 8 million good owl hunters. Still not very many owls per hunter...
And exactly how are they catching wild owls? Have you ever tried to catch a wild bird?
How far from our noble genocidal hunter-gatherer origins we humans can fall? Catching something like birds is pretty trivial with a bit of experience and some kind of a trap or a net (the original kind, not the computer kind...). As soon as there are enough people with motivation, anything can and will be casually hunted to extinction, unless it's good at literally going underground.
Symbian can hardly be called dead as more phones ship with Symbian than with any other phone OS... But if you're right and it really is dead, then that's bad news, because then Symbian phones are zombies. And there are a lot of them. And people are holding them against their head. Braaaains....
If you're right, then we'd better start stocking up various phone zombie eradication tools, such as full glasses of beer (demise of many a mobile phone).
2010 is already looking like year of linux on the mobile phone. Android has made huge market gains.
It won't be year of Linux on mobiles until many more mobiles run Linux software (for practical purposes, Android does not).
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 2, Insightful
C doesn't care at all about indentation. You can remove all the lefthand space from a C program without affecting it in any way. Pythons meaningful whitespace is a terrible idea, absolutely horrific really.
Well, C cares about indentation in the way, that indentation has to be spaces or tabs, if there's any. Worst of all worlds, which is discovered by anybody who has worked with mixed up tab-space settings in files in version control. Worst case is having different amount of space per tab been used in different parts of the code, and tabs not used consistently. Result is, no matter how you configure the editor, some part of the code gets indented unevenly, and you can't fix it without messing up version control diffs.
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 2, Informative
Python does precisely that. It mixes presentation (what code looks like) with content (what code does).
To some extent, every language does that. What I meant is that the TAB character introduces an arbitrary visual configuration that's not part of the language itself, which can confuse things when tabs and spaces are mixed in the same source file.
I think better solution to not having tabs would have been if C would only have accepted tabs as indentation. And if python had "one tab is one level of nesting", I think that'd have been better too.
Problems only arise when mixing tabs and spaces, and when not agreeing how many spaces indentation is, or how many spaces tab is. I'm sure most of us have encountered source files which have had all three of these, after being edited with many people with different editors and settings. "One TAB equals one level of indentation" would fix all that. Any programmer could use any amount of spaces for displaying tabs in editor, and it would not affect the source file.
However, this does not mean that the presentation of the code is unimportant. For instance, a reason why I once programmed in Pascal but switched to C was that I found braces easier to read than "begin... end" pairs. Curly braces are clean and small symbols, looking at the source code at a glance they are easier to identify than multi-character keywords.
When you are writing and reading code by the hundreds of thousands of lines, every detail becomes significant. That's something language theorists often fail to understand, but Dennis Ritchie and Guido van Rossum got perfectly right.
Indeed. However, these days code presentation, including automatic indentation, is largely taken care of by the editor (and if it isn't, maybe it's time to either learn to configure it, or switch to a more capable one). Except this is rather hard for Python, for the obvious reason. IMHO this is a serious and unique shortcoming of Python.
Re:computers come with accessible languages
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
> Sure, but they don't give you the visual feedback programming did "back then".
Don't they? Explain visual feedback programming differences between running python on today's macs with running basic on, say, the Apple II of old.
Consider this GW Basic one-liner (draws a "rainbow hour glass" that fills the screen):
screen 7:for x=0 to 320:color x/4 mod 15+1:line (x,0)-(320-x,200):next
I think that's the kind of visual feedback that was meant.
Oh, and I'd be very interested in seeing how long Python program is needed. Can't be very many lines with something like pygame, can it?
(Google for gwbasic if you want to find an interpreter which can run that, for Windows. I'm almost certain "aptitude search gwbasic" or equal would give suitable package in Linux.)
Re:computers come with accessible languages
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
The premise that modern computers don't provide a language as accessible as BASIC seems questionable.
Modern languages don't have IO interface comparable to decent line-number BASIC. I'm talking about commands and functions like these in gwbasic: screen, locate, print, p(re)set, line, input, inkey$, sound, timer.
And no complex concepts like functions (introducing identifier scopes and things like that).
And goto! Let's not forget goto, the ultimate tool for adjusting the complexity of the program approximately by a factor of (number of gotos/10)^10, as compared to an equal structured program.
That translates to really trivial simple demo programs and games. No setup needed, no worrying about screen resolutions or character encodings or locales or libraries or... anything.
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 4, Insightful
What Lisp promised then is what Python promises now. With one difference, in that Python respects the visual limitations of humans.
Different from parentheses, it's very easy to undo a bunch of indentations, just put the left margin where you want it.
Well, if only the TAB character had never been invented... TAB is a kludge to make a typewriter behave sort of like a spreadsheet but, unfortunately, it fucks up the excellent "Don't mix content with presentation" principle.
Saying "Don't mix content with presentation" is pretty rich from a Python advocate, when Python does precisely that. It mixes presentation (what code looks like) with content (what code does).
Besides, don't you know that in Lisp, parentheses are indentation symbols? They tell how the code should be indented, and changing indentation is just a matter of changing parentheses. If anything, adjusting indentation of Lisp code is easier than adjusting indentation of Python code.
We represent Nokia and we're going to sue Apple too.
Oops, we already are.
Fine, we're going to sue Motorola
I think they already did? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, point is, it's not time, not yet. Give it half a decade or so, and if both companies are still afloat, it may be time for another round...
Second, I don't care what the experts say, a kilogram is equal to the mass of one litre of water, which is equal to 1000 cubic centimetres of water, or a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm box full of water.
Does it have to be pure water, or can it have some impurities in it? What temperature is the water? What pressure? When you're trying to do especially delicate measurements, these details matter!
Triple point of water is awfully convenient for things like that. And obviously it'd have to be pure water of fixed hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. Just measure it quickly, before some stray cosmic ray or a neutron from a nearby nuclear decay changes something!
As an American and a physicist, I would like you to define "regulated conditions" without using mass (The primitive units for pressure are kg / s^2 / m. ), but I would like it more if you were just modded troll.
"Regulated conditions" could be "triple point of water". That's already used for example for Kelvin scale.
So one kilogram would be X cubic centimeters of pure liquid water at triple point of water. X would fall very close to 1000, but I don't know how close. Also other phases of water could be used I guess, but liquid phase would be the best for practical purposes, I believe.
Just consider that it won't be easy to replace 4 billions years of evolution.
Nah, not 4 billion years. More like, at most, 60 million years of evolution, or less if you count the lesser mass extinctions that have happened after that.
60 million years, not a big deal really, for nature, just something like 1,5% of the history of Life. Sort of like a human getting kicked back half a year in their education/career/family life (comparing human life span to expected life span of habitable Earth).
I guess the dictionary definition does. I was actually referring to more general concept, which would include things like frictionless gears (which would still transmit power to connected gears) or maglev train propulsion (I think it's generally called propulsion and not traction), and (since we're talking about a spherical runner moving in a vacuum) even Star Trek tractor beams.
A browser plugin designed to play embedded HTML5 video HTML5 video, whose selling point is to provide video without the need for a browser plugin
I think this just about tops MS and their opaque-binary embedded XML
I think as of yet, there's no video format that works on every browser natively. So plugins are needed. Might as well go for a universal plugin. I'm sure a cross-platform plugin would rule that kind of a niche, even if it sucked in oh so many ways. I wonder why such a thing doesn't already exist... oh wait.
If I'm understanding this right, the deal is that ion engines don't put out much thrust, but use less fuel (and more energy) doing so. So theoretically, if you could cram a large enough fuel supply into the vessel, you could, using constant acceleration until the fuel supply was exhausted, accelerate to a higher speed? Maybe mcg meant that you could accelerate for a longer period?
More fuel = more mass = lower acceleration with same thrust. Adding bigger engine (spending more fuel) = More fuel = see above.
Ion engines only put out little thrust, because we don't know how to make an ion engine that could put out more thrust, which means using up same amount of energy takes longer time. It's not any kind of advantage, it'd be better if we could use the energy faster (reach top speed faster).
I get the impression that you use word "sugar" to mean carbohydrates in general, and not just what is usually meant by sugars: sweet mono- and disaccharides. I don't see a lot of those behind that link, it ceratinly is not "primarily sugar diet".
I mean, earlier you talked about food that takes long to digest. Long-chained carbohydrates are just that, their rate of digestion is just about right for the common interval between meals.
Sorry, dude, but we're debating it. Most users these days buy laptops, and most laptops are single display. What's more, with handheld devices, things are trending even more strongly in that direction.
Sorry to cut in, so you admit that Mac OS menu at the top of the screen is not ideal for serious desktop use with large screen, and rather a horrible concept with multiple screen setups?
I mean seriously, does Mac really put the menu bar of an application to a different display than the application itself on multi-monitor setup, like somebody above said? Seriously? What was Steve smoking when he approved that?
People leave the table while stuffed thinking of snacks because they just ate what people like you call "healthy" food. Food that is all sugar.
Uh huh. Show me one sane source that says sugar is healthy. I don't remember anybody ever thinking sugar is healthy. Even those who think stuff like aspartame should be avoided, only think sugar is healthier than those substances, not healthy in itself.
Re:Conclusion: Firefox 3.6 scales best across core
on
How Do Browsers Scale?
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· Score: 1
-and- Chrome v. Firefox Browser fanboys today are as silly as Atari v. Commodore fanboys back-in-the-day.
No, not as silly. With ST vs Amiga, they at least run different software, so there's some sense in trying to advocate the chosen platform. With Chrome vs. Firefox, not so much...
Uh...actually, if anything, the bible proves free will doesn't exist either. god's supposed omnipotence makes free will an impossibility.
Omnipotence? But if an omnipotent being can't allow free will, it's not omnipotent, because there's this thing it can't do.
You probably meant omniscience though. When you remove direction from time (as you would have to do if you're talking about a godlike being that is independent of our time), then "knowledge" of a free-will decision can be thought to "propagate" to all time directions, and there's no knowing it "before" because there's no "before". Of course this is not an argument for free will, it's just an argument against claim that an omniscient god would rule out free will.
A somewhat similar concept might be quantum mechanical "spooky action at distance", which is about a truly random (as far as we know) result propagating instantly, which due to relativity is effectively same as propagating backwards in time (as "instantly" implies simultaneity, which doesn't really exist). If you can wrap your head around that, then the previous paragraph shouldn't be much of a problem either.
Slashdot Mirror
Religions, reward after death religions, have to be like this. Else you get mass suicides.
I think it's mostly the other way around. People have survival instinct. Therefore they need to rationalize why they must keep on living, even if death would lead to a paradise of some sort. And this survival instinct reflects on religions.
But you're right otherwise of course, with clarification of any religion that lasts any significant amount of time has to be like that. A religion can certainly endorse mass suicide, it just won't last very long then.
Yup, me. ...and when it comes to paying taxes, I'm all for it. Of course I'm a left leaning person who believes that civic and social responsibility are important features of a functioning democracy.
Of course, there is nothing preventing you from stroking an extra check to the govt. Asking/requiring/demanding your neighbors do the same...not so good.
If he paid a bit extra, would that tiny amount of money help him get what he wants to get for that money? If everybody else paid too, yes. If not, then no. So if not enough other people paid, why would he want to give something for no gain?
A society is about taking responsibility of the state of things together. How to achieve that, and what things should be taken care of together, now that's debatable, but the basic premise of your statement, that things should be taken care of only voluntarily, and "freeloading" should be allowed, or it's "... not so good", that's fundamentally broken (human nature and all that).
Anyone else having problems viewing the EPOXi webpage? It brings my Firefox to a halt and almost crashes my laptop. Nice way to design your website, embedding more than 70 big images that are just scaled. It shouldn't exactly be rocket-science to make some thumbnails! :)
Indeed. It brought my firefox on an 8 years old laptop with original XP installation and 512MB of memory to a screeching halt. I had to close at least 10 tabs to get things back to normal. Unacceptable! Won't anybody think of the children?
Most of the world shifted from being hunter-gatherers (with some exceptions) to agrarian systems an awful long time ago. For most civilized countries, hunting became a sport, not a means of survival. For the most part, we survive on domesticated animals and farm raised plants, which are purchased in local stores. There are exceptions, but those are few and far between, and even then, you probably wouldn't be posting to Slashdot if you were there.
Don't try to fool yourself, only a very small percentage of those living in modern society could live without our modern infrastructure. Ask your average city dweller to catch a pigeon.
If that average city dweller could gain a lot (relative to his situation, for example $50 per bird or something in New York) by catching pigeons, you'd see pigeon population plummet, hunted by those very city dwellers. It'd be matter of weeks before those city dwellers would be very proficient pigeon hunters (provided the pigeons would not run out before then).
Not to mention, this was about India. With what... 800 million poor, many of who would gladly hunt owls if they got any money from it. Now let's say only 1% of them have potential to be good hunters, which leaves us with only 8 million good owl hunters. Still not very many owls per hunter...
And exactly how are they catching wild owls? Have you ever tried to catch a wild bird?
How far from our noble genocidal hunter-gatherer origins we humans can fall? Catching something like birds is pretty trivial with a bit of experience and some kind of a trap or a net (the original kind, not the computer kind...). As soon as there are enough people with motivation, anything can and will be casually hunted to extinction, unless it's good at literally going underground.
Symbian is dying if not dead
Symbian can hardly be called dead as more phones ship with Symbian than with any other phone OS... But if you're right and it really is dead, then that's bad news, because then Symbian phones are zombies. And there are a lot of them. And people are holding them against their head. Braaaains....
If you're right, then we'd better start stocking up various phone zombie eradication tools, such as full glasses of beer (demise of many a mobile phone).
2010 is already looking like year of linux on the mobile phone. Android has made huge market gains.
It won't be year of Linux on mobiles until many more mobiles run Linux software (for practical purposes, Android does not).
C doesn't care at all about indentation. You can remove all the lefthand space from a C program without affecting it in any way. Pythons meaningful whitespace is a terrible idea, absolutely horrific really.
Well, C cares about indentation in the way, that indentation has to be spaces or tabs, if there's any. Worst of all worlds, which is discovered by anybody who has worked with mixed up tab-space settings in files in version control. Worst case is having different amount of space per tab been used in different parts of the code, and tabs not used consistently. Result is, no matter how you configure the editor, some part of the code gets indented unevenly, and you can't fix it without messing up version control diffs.
Python does precisely that. It mixes presentation (what code looks like) with content (what code does).
To some extent, every language does that. What I meant is that the TAB character introduces an arbitrary visual configuration that's not part of the language itself, which can confuse things when tabs and spaces are mixed in the same source file.
I think better solution to not having tabs would have been if C would only have accepted tabs as indentation. And if python had "one tab is one level of nesting", I think that'd have been better too.
Problems only arise when mixing tabs and spaces, and when not agreeing how many spaces indentation is, or how many spaces tab is. I'm sure most of us have encountered source files which have had all three of these, after being edited with many people with different editors and settings. "One TAB equals one level of indentation" would fix all that. Any programmer could use any amount of spaces for displaying tabs in editor, and it would not affect the source file.
However, this does not mean that the presentation of the code is unimportant. For instance, a reason why I once programmed in Pascal but switched to C was that I found braces easier to read than "begin ... end" pairs. Curly braces are clean and small symbols, looking at the source code at a glance they are easier to identify than multi-character keywords.
When you are writing and reading code by the hundreds of thousands of lines, every detail becomes significant. That's something language theorists often fail to understand, but Dennis Ritchie and Guido van Rossum got perfectly right.
Indeed. However, these days code presentation, including automatic indentation, is largely taken care of by the editor (and if it isn't, maybe it's time to either learn to configure it, or switch to a more capable one). Except this is rather hard for Python, for the obvious reason. IMHO this is a serious and unique shortcoming of Python.
> Sure, but they don't give you the visual feedback programming did "back then".
Don't they? Explain visual feedback programming differences between running python on today's macs with running basic on, say, the Apple II of old.
Consider this GW Basic one-liner (draws a "rainbow hour glass" that fills the screen):
screen 7:for x=0 to 320:color x/4 mod 15+1:line (x,0)-(320-x,200):next
I think that's the kind of visual feedback that was meant.
Oh, and I'd be very interested in seeing how long Python program is needed. Can't be very many lines with something like pygame, can it?
(Google for gwbasic if you want to find an interpreter which can run that, for Windows. I'm almost certain "aptitude search gwbasic" or equal would give suitable package in Linux.)
The premise that modern computers don't provide a language as accessible as BASIC seems questionable.
Modern languages don't have IO interface comparable to decent line-number BASIC. I'm talking about commands and functions like these in gwbasic: screen, locate, print, p(re)set, line, input, inkey$, sound, timer.
And no complex concepts like functions (introducing identifier scopes and things like that).
And goto! Let's not forget goto, the ultimate tool for adjusting the complexity of the program approximately by a factor of (number of gotos/10)^10, as compared to an equal structured program.
That translates to really trivial simple demo programs and games. No setup needed, no worrying about screen resolutions or character encodings or locales or libraries or... anything.
What Lisp promised then is what Python promises now. With one difference, in that Python respects the visual limitations of humans.
Different from parentheses, it's very easy to undo a bunch of indentations, just put the left margin where you want it.
Well, if only the TAB character had never been invented... TAB is a kludge to make a typewriter behave sort of like a spreadsheet but, unfortunately, it fucks up the excellent "Don't mix content with presentation" principle.
Saying "Don't mix content with presentation" is pretty rich from a Python advocate, when Python does precisely that. It mixes presentation (what code looks like) with content (what code does).
Besides, don't you know that in Lisp, parentheses are indentation symbols? They tell how the code should be indented, and changing indentation is just a matter of changing parentheses. If anything, adjusting indentation of Lisp code is easier than adjusting indentation of Python code.
We represent Nokia and we're going to sue Apple too.
Oops, we already are.
Fine, we're going to sue Motorola
I think they already did? Or was it the other way around? Anyway, point is, it's not time, not yet. Give it half a decade or so, and if both companies are still afloat, it may be time for another round...
Second, I don't care what the experts say, a kilogram is equal to the mass of one litre of water, which is equal to 1000 cubic centimetres of water, or a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm box full of water.
Does it have to be pure water, or can it have some impurities in it? What temperature is the water? What pressure? When you're trying to do especially delicate measurements, these details matter!
Triple point of water is awfully convenient for things like that. And obviously it'd have to be pure water of fixed hydrogen and oxygen isotopes. Just measure it quickly, before some stray cosmic ray or a neutron from a nearby nuclear decay changes something!
As an American and a physicist, I would like you to define "regulated conditions" without using mass (The primitive units for pressure are kg / s^2 / m. ), but I would like it more if you were just modded troll.
"Regulated conditions" could be "triple point of water". That's already used for example for Kelvin scale.
So one kilogram would be X cubic centimeters of pure liquid water at triple point of water. X would fall very close to 1000, but I don't know how close. Also other phases of water could be used I guess, but liquid phase would be the best for practical purposes, I believe.
Just consider that it won't be easy to replace 4 billions years of evolution.
Nah, not 4 billion years. More like, at most, 60 million years of evolution, or less if you count the lesser mass extinctions that have happened after that.
60 million years, not a big deal really, for nature, just something like 1,5% of the history of Life. Sort of like a human getting kicked back half a year in their education/career/family life (comparing human life span to expected life span of habitable Earth).
Traction relies on friction.
I guess the dictionary definition does. I was actually referring to more general concept, which would include things like frictionless gears (which would still transmit power to connected gears) or maglev train propulsion (I think it's generally called propulsion and not traction), and (since we're talking about a spherical runner moving in a vacuum) even Star Trek tractor beams.
A browser plugin designed to play embedded HTML5 video
HTML5 video, whose selling point is to provide video without the need for a browser plugin
I think this just about tops MS and their opaque-binary embedded XML
I think as of yet, there's no video format that works on every browser natively. So plugins are needed. Might as well go for a universal plugin. I'm sure a cross-platform plugin would rule that kind of a niche, even if it sucked in oh so many ways. I wonder why such a thing doesn't already exist... oh wait.
I'll be interested to see how they make turns in a frictionless vacuum. Maybe with an RCS?
It didn't say it was tractionless vacuum. Frictionless just implies that no energy (as heat, sound etc) is lost to friction.
If I'm understanding this right, the deal is that ion engines don't put out much thrust, but use less fuel (and more energy) doing so. So theoretically, if you could cram a large enough fuel supply into the vessel, you could, using constant acceleration until the fuel supply was exhausted, accelerate to a higher speed? Maybe mcg meant that you could accelerate for a longer period?
More fuel = more mass = lower acceleration with same thrust.
Adding bigger engine (spending more fuel) = More fuel = see above.
When you work the maths out, it boils down to a single number called "specific impulse or I_sp.
Ion engines only put out little thrust, because we don't know how to make an ion engine that could put out more thrust, which means using up same amount of energy takes longer time. It's not any kind of advantage, it'd be better if we could use the energy faster (reach top speed faster).
.
I get the impression that you use word "sugar" to mean carbohydrates in general, and not just what is usually meant by sugars: sweet mono- and disaccharides. I don't see a lot of those behind that link, it ceratinly is not "primarily sugar diet".
I mean, earlier you talked about food that takes long to digest. Long-chained carbohydrates are just that, their rate of digestion is just about right for the common interval between meals.
Sorry, dude, but we're debating it. Most users these days buy laptops, and most laptops are single display. What's more, with handheld devices, things are trending even more strongly in that direction.
Sorry to cut in, so you admit that Mac OS menu at the top of the screen is not ideal for serious desktop use with large screen, and rather a horrible concept with multiple screen setups?
I mean seriously, does Mac really put the menu bar of an application to a different display than the application itself on multi-monitor setup, like somebody above said? Seriously? What was Steve smoking when he approved that?
People leave the table while stuffed thinking of snacks because they just ate what people like you call "healthy" food. Food that is all sugar.
Uh huh. Show me one sane source that says sugar is healthy. I don't remember anybody ever thinking sugar is healthy. Even those who think stuff like aspartame should be avoided, only think sugar is healthier than those substances, not healthy in itself.
-and- Chrome v. Firefox Browser fanboys today are as silly as Atari v. Commodore fanboys back-in-the-day.
No, not as silly. With ST vs Amiga, they at least run different software, so there's some sense in trying to advocate the chosen platform. With Chrome vs. Firefox, not so much...
Uh...actually, if anything, the bible proves free will doesn't exist either. god's supposed omnipotence makes free will an impossibility.
Omnipotence? But if an omnipotent being can't allow free will, it's not omnipotent, because there's this thing it can't do.
You probably meant omniscience though. When you remove direction from time (as you would have to do if you're talking about a godlike being that is independent of our time), then "knowledge" of a free-will decision can be thought to "propagate" to all time directions, and there's no knowing it "before" because there's no "before". Of course this is not an argument for free will, it's just an argument against claim that an omniscient god would rule out free will.
A somewhat similar concept might be quantum mechanical "spooky action at distance", which is about a truly random (as far as we know) result propagating instantly, which due to relativity is effectively same as propagating backwards in time (as "instantly" implies simultaneity, which doesn't really exist). If you can wrap your head around that, then the previous paragraph shouldn't be much of a problem either.