Most people who "don't believe" in something aren't saying that they believe 100% without any reservation that the idea is not possible.
It's the difference between saying "I don's believe god exists" and saying "I believe god does not exist." The first is a statement of skepticism(because it's in the negative sense); the second is an affirmation of belief. Agnostics do the former while atheists do the latter.
Is it legal to operate a private (as opposed to public, i.e. government-run) library? I know the first libraries in America were private, but I don't think any exist nowadays...
He was using the phrase "those bastions of christendom" ironically.
Yes, that's why I began my post with "I imagine you know this already" -- I was agreeing with him, and making a more explicit statement for clarification.
Is it? Then please explain branches of science such as theoretical physics, cosmology, life origins, xenobiology, and various others that are by their nature largely or even totally speculative -- string theory for example is isn't backed up by any experimental data, so those who support it are currently doing so entirely as a matter of faith.
That's why string theory is called a theory, rather than a law. Presumably they plan to test it eventually (since we might not have the necessary technology now). But it is (theoretically) testable, because it can be used to make predictions.
Similarly, evolution is a valid scientific theory while "intelligent design" is not, because even though it may not be fully proven (if it were, it would be called "the law of evolution" instead), it does make predictions that can be tested experimentally. For example, one could subject colonies of bacteria to different environmental factors and then see if their genetic code changes over time.
In contrast, "intelligent design" is not and cannot ever be a valid theory because it makes no predictions and is not testable. For all we know, it could even be true -- but it doesn't matter, because we can't test it experimentally!
If you want to guess about "Truth," go look at philosophy (which encompasses both religion and science). If you want a self-consistent framework with which to make predictions about reality, go look at science.
That is because they need to believe that religious == mad fundamentalist to justify their atheism. This is Slashdot, you are not talking about people who are atheists because of of deep philosophical analysis (the average Slashdotter is not exactly Hume). They are atheists because that is what they WANT to believe - remarkably like the fundamentalists in fact.
Indeed, atheism is a religion. Why? Because, just as a traditional religion can't prove the existence of god and so must believe it on faith, atheists cannot disprove the existence of god and so must believe it on faith.
The only thing that's truly the opposite of religion is agnosticism, because it acknowledges that there's insufficient (scientific) data to draw a conclusion.
Funny how electricity was discovered by Ben Franklin while he was British and proud of his Englishness and his English heratige (rumour has it he was a spy too).
Are you sure you aren't thinking of his son instead?
Funny how the Founding Fathers, those bastions of christendom that the American Taliban likes to claim, overlooked putting those words on currency when they had the opportunity to do so, no?
I imagine you know this already, but I feel I ought to post it for the benefit of everyone else:
The Founding Fathers were DEIST, not Christian! Get it straight!
well I think that we have to balance between advertising just another car against the concerns of some parents who are worried about their kids safety.
See, I think just the opposite: that we should explicitly reject these parents' concerns as the overprotective nonsense that they are. They aren't even worth seriously considering, and the parents should be ignored or maybe even penalized for suggesting such an absurd thing. In fact, another post even suggested using it as evidence that the parents were incompetent and unfit and taking their children away. Of course, this is rather extreme, but it's in the right direction. After all, how can you be fit to raise a kid if you're too stupid to turn off the TV?
These people should at least simply be ignored, just like all the other nutjobs (e.g. people that think "intelligent design" is scientific, people that think the government is putting mind-control serum in the drinking water, etc.).
Although I think they've got a few grad students around doing research into writing finite-element solvers for Beowulf-style clusters and such, I think everybody except me that actually works on the program is 50+ years old. It probably doesn't help that this is actually for the civil engineering department and most of the CEE majors would be completely lost trying to decipher the mix of Fortran and K&R C the thing's written in... heck, I'm a double-major and I still haven't figured a lot of it out!
To be honest, I didn't -- I paid for it with a student loan. However, I justified it on the basis that
I use my computer basically all day, every day, so it's worth it to me to have something nice.
Since it's a TabletPC, I can use it to take notes (including diagrams) in class
The program I work on is (at the moment) Windows-only, and my old laptop is an iBook
I'll eventually earn back the cost by using it for work.
(Of course, we all know that those are just excuses for getting a new toy.) : )
Seriously, though, research assistants are crucial to science and severely underappreciated. Thanks for doing the dirty work.
Although my title is "research assistant" (I think...) the thing I work on is actually a piece of commercial software sold by the school, not "real" research. My "real" research is getting me course credit at the moment, not cash.
Not me; I'm a college student. At my wage (as a research assistant), I could screw with drivers for about thirty hours before breaking even (after taxes).
Since at first I wasn't sure whether you were correct or not, I looked it up. Although I couldn't find any rules on that page specifically about using both "if" and "then" in the same sentence, I did find sentences where the writer himself used them, such as the one here:
If you answer yes to these questions, then the adjectives are coordinate and should be separated by a comma.
As you can see, he included a comma. Since the sentence came from a web page about grammar, one could reasonably expect it to be grammatically correct itself. Therefore, my usage was correct as well.
Sorry to disappoint you, but you're going to have to find yourself a new pet peeve.
And my biggest quibble is that they're freakin' expensive for what I wanted -- I ordered my new X60 tablet directly from Lenovo for about $2100 (without any discounts). I couldn't even get the same configuration at EmperorLinux (as the 1400x1050 screen is only available on the $3500 completely-maxed-out model), but even if I could it still would probably have cost several hundred dollars more. I'm sorry -- I'm a big fan of Linux, but I can't afford to pay a $300 (or more!) premium for it!
No, Wal-Mart didn't sell "Linux laptops." Wal-Mart sold cheap pieces of crap that happened to run a stupid Linux distro that nobody uses. If Wal-Mart had sold real "Linux laptops" (i.e. decent hardware running a decent distro), perhaps they'd have succeeded!
It could be made to be by having some kind of standard dependencies resolver
This exists already; it's called the GNU Autotoolset (which includes Autoconf, Automake and Libtool). Writers of Free Software use it to generate the Makefiles and scripts that come with the software when you get a source archive. Figuring out which libraries to link to and whatnot is what that "./configure" step does.
Forking a distro would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, even for a big company like Dell. Better just to make the hardware conform to the distro, rather than the other way around.
2. You're only in it for the money and could care less about what we're doing.
Okay, pet peeve rant time:
Saying that you "could care less" is a good thing, because it means that you do care! If what you really meant to say is that he didn't care, then the correct phrase to use is "couldn't care less," not "could."
I decided I would do her a favor and start the car for her. Lucky for me, the car had a manual transmission and happened to be in gear. So as soon as I started the car, it slowly began to drive down the street.
I think you mean "automatic" transmission; a manual would have lurched and stalled.
"Responding to the concerns of its citizens" also got us the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, "blue laws," Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of other stupidity over the course of history. Hell, the Roman Empire destroyed itself by "responding to the concerns of its citizens" by giving them too much bread and circuses!
In other words, the fact that some citizens are concerned about an issue does not mean those concerns are valid! (I shouldn't have to point out that distinguishing between valid and invalid concerns is (ideally) also one of the basic functions of government.)
You realize another ad is only going to take its place, don't you? Considering that, I think the censorship and encouragement of people who have no common sense are pretty fucking big downsides!
To me it seems like common sense, given that a) children have poor judgement, and don't always do what they're told and b) parents can't watch them 24/7.
To me your "common sense" seems completely asinine, because a) kids may have poor judgment, but any that are that stupid deserve any Darwin awards they might win by doing such a thing, and b) parents should be expected to have at least a minimum level of competence, and preventing their toddler from stealing their SUV falls well within that!
You know, back in my day people just weren't this fucking stupid! Seriously, when I was a kid commercials like this wouldn't have even been given a second thought, by us kids or our parents. For that matter, some of us even had those electric toy Bigfoot trucks you could sit in and drive around. If that wouldn't give the kid the idea to try out the real thing, what would? Now, consider the fact that I'm only 22 (meaning "back in my day" refers to only a decade or so ago) and you really have to wonder how people got this stupid, this quick!
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between saying "I don's believe god exists" and saying "I believe god does not exist." The first is a statement of skepticism(because it's in the negative sense); the second is an affirmation of belief. Agnostics do the former while atheists do the latter.
I was under the impression that the people who made Vorbis specifically designed it to avoid infringing on any patents.
Is it legal to operate a private (as opposed to public, i.e. government-run) library? I know the first libraries in America were private, but I don't think any exist nowadays...
Core Image, no, but it does run Quartz Extreme. Even my three year old iBook (800MHz) does that!
Yes, that's why I began my post with "I imagine you know this already" -- I was agreeing with him, and making a more explicit statement for clarification.
True; thanks for clarifying my clarification.
It'd be nice if you could run either chip with OpenFirmware (although I fear it'd end up being EFI instead).
I'll bet a mobo with an AMD CPU and an ATI GPU (both on Hypertransport) is even more likely than that.
That's why string theory is called a theory, rather than a law. Presumably they plan to test it eventually (since we might not have the necessary technology now). But it is (theoretically) testable, because it can be used to make predictions.
Similarly, evolution is a valid scientific theory while "intelligent design" is not, because even though it may not be fully proven (if it were, it would be called "the law of evolution" instead), it does make predictions that can be tested experimentally. For example, one could subject colonies of bacteria to different environmental factors and then see if their genetic code changes over time.
In contrast, "intelligent design" is not and cannot ever be a valid theory because it makes no predictions and is not testable. For all we know, it could even be true -- but it doesn't matter, because we can't test it experimentally!
If you want to guess about "Truth," go look at philosophy (which encompasses both religion and science). If you want a self-consistent framework with which to make predictions about reality, go look at science.
Indeed, atheism is a religion. Why? Because, just as a traditional religion can't prove the existence of god and so must believe it on faith, atheists cannot disprove the existence of god and so must believe it on faith.
The only thing that's truly the opposite of religion is agnosticism, because it acknowledges that there's insufficient (scientific) data to draw a conclusion.
Are you sure you aren't thinking of his son instead?
I imagine you know this already, but I feel I ought to post it for the benefit of everyone else:
The Founding Fathers were DEIST, not Christian! Get it straight!
See, I think just the opposite: that we should explicitly reject these parents' concerns as the overprotective nonsense that they are. They aren't even worth seriously considering, and the parents should be ignored or maybe even penalized for suggesting such an absurd thing. In fact, another post even suggested using it as evidence that the parents were incompetent and unfit and taking their children away. Of course, this is rather extreme, but it's in the right direction. After all, how can you be fit to raise a kid if you're too stupid to turn off the TV?
These people should at least simply be ignored, just like all the other nutjobs (e.g. people that think "intelligent design" is scientific, people that think the government is putting mind-control serum in the drinking water, etc.).
Although I think they've got a few grad students around doing research into writing finite-element solvers for Beowulf-style clusters and such, I think everybody except me that actually works on the program is 50+ years old. It probably doesn't help that this is actually for the civil engineering department and most of the CEE majors would be completely lost trying to decipher the mix of Fortran and K&R C the thing's written in... heck, I'm a double-major and I still haven't figured a lot of it out!
To be honest, I didn't -- I paid for it with a student loan. However, I justified it on the basis that
- I use my computer basically all day, every day, so it's worth it to me to have something nice.
- Since it's a TabletPC, I can use it to take notes (including diagrams) in class
- The program I work on is (at the moment) Windows-only, and my old laptop is an iBook
- I'll eventually earn back the cost by using it for work.
(Of course, we all know that those are just excuses for getting a new toy.) : )Although my title is "research assistant" (I think...) the thing I work on is actually a piece of commercial software sold by the school, not "real" research. My "real" research is getting me course credit at the moment, not cash.
This is why everyone reads Slashdot for the discussion, not the articles -- I've actually learned a few things from reading other posts today.
Not me; I'm a college student. At my wage (as a research assistant), I could screw with drivers for about thirty hours before breaking even (after taxes).
Since at first I wasn't sure whether you were correct or not, I looked it up. Although I couldn't find any rules on that page specifically about using both "if" and "then" in the same sentence, I did find sentences where the writer himself used them, such as the one here:
As you can see, he included a comma. Since the sentence came from a web page about grammar, one could reasonably expect it to be grammatically correct itself. Therefore, my usage was correct as well.
Sorry to disappoint you, but you're going to have to find yourself a new pet peeve.
And my biggest quibble is that they're freakin' expensive for what I wanted -- I ordered my new X60 tablet directly from Lenovo for about $2100 (without any discounts). I couldn't even get the same configuration at EmperorLinux (as the 1400x1050 screen is only available on the $3500 completely-maxed-out model), but even if I could it still would probably have cost several hundred dollars more. I'm sorry -- I'm a big fan of Linux, but I can't afford to pay a $300 (or more!) premium for it!
No, Wal-Mart didn't sell "Linux laptops." Wal-Mart sold cheap pieces of crap that happened to run a stupid Linux distro that nobody uses. If Wal-Mart had sold real "Linux laptops" (i.e. decent hardware running a decent distro), perhaps they'd have succeeded!
This exists already; it's called the GNU Autotoolset (which includes Autoconf, Automake and Libtool). Writers of Free Software use it to generate the Makefiles and scripts that come with the software when you get a source archive. Figuring out which libraries to link to and whatnot is what that "./configure" step does.
Forking a distro would be an incredibly stupid thing to do, even for a big company like Dell. Better just to make the hardware conform to the distro, rather than the other way around.
Okay, pet peeve rant time:
Saying that you "could care less" is a good thing, because it means that you do care! If what you really meant to say is that he didn't care, then the correct phrase to use is "couldn't care less," not "could."
I think you mean "automatic" transmission; a manual would have lurched and stalled.
"Responding to the concerns of its citizens" also got us the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, "blue laws," Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of other stupidity over the course of history. Hell, the Roman Empire destroyed itself by "responding to the concerns of its citizens" by giving them too much bread and circuses!
In other words, the fact that some citizens are concerned about an issue does not mean those concerns are valid! (I shouldn't have to point out that distinguishing between valid and invalid concerns is (ideally) also one of the basic functions of government.)
You realize another ad is only going to take its place, don't you? Considering that, I think the censorship and encouragement of people who have no common sense are pretty fucking big downsides!
To me your "common sense" seems completely asinine, because a) kids may have poor judgment, but any that are that stupid deserve any Darwin awards they might win by doing such a thing, and b) parents should be expected to have at least a minimum level of competence, and preventing their toddler from stealing their SUV falls well within that!
You know, back in my day people just weren't this fucking stupid! Seriously, when I was a kid commercials like this wouldn't have even been given a second thought, by us kids or our parents. For that matter, some of us even had those electric toy Bigfoot trucks you could sit in and drive around. If that wouldn't give the kid the idea to try out the real thing, what would? Now, consider the fact that I'm only 22 (meaning "back in my day" refers to only a decade or so ago) and you really have to wonder how people got this stupid, this quick!