As an aside, the Marxist-Feminist author Andrea Dworkin's angry, angry, angry book "Pornography" is a good read for anyone wishing to become thoroughly disgusted (or at least, morally and intellectually challenged) by the barrenness and degradation of the pornographic enterprise in general. There's more than one side to the freedom question here.
Ah, that's gold. You can also just put the phone down quietly and walk away if you get one of those "keep right on talking so the 'customer' doesn't have a chance to say no" calls.
I've considered the following option too, but since moving away from a nice water-front address, I get less calls of this kind. Oh, and because I don't have a landline now. That's a factor too. (Or home web access.) You just get so much *life* back...
Me: "You wish to profit from my time. My standard rate is $60.00 per 15 minutes (or part thereof). Can you match or better this offer?"... and so on.
Market force be with you!
You don't have to burn wood -- people will do.
on
Archimedes Death Ray
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Igniting sails, or burning/blinding people is much easier than setting fire to wood (especially a hull that could be wet). I've always thought that the victory was due to the psychological effects of the weapon on morale more than the outright destruction of vessels.
In a 'cold death' scenario, where gravity is too weak to pull the expanding universe back together (this seems to be the majority opinion, and people even talk about the expansion accelerating), I've heard the final distribution of matter estimated at: 9% black holes, 90% dead stars, and 1% dust and gas at 1030 years. I can't find a reference for that online now though; so obviously look it up if it interests you. Maybe some astrophysicist type can confirm or deny this?
This is a great example of an industry taking on the 'adapt' side of 'adapt or die' that we often chastise the RIAA and MPAA for trying to ignore.
Their approach looks much more like "adapt or kill" to me. "Adapt or die" supposes that the problem is here to stay. Those companies apparently believe the threat can be removed.
I've been taking Knoppix CDs to shops here in Sydney to see if Debian will run on the 10.6" laptops available there (I commute; I'm looking for something ultra-portable). I drew a small crowd in one place by merely putting Xaos on Auto-zoom; It's interesting to see people's responses. As to results, not much yet; the Fujutsu's seem OK; the Vaio's I haven't been able to check yet (staff who don't know what Knoppix is are justfiably wary of booting strange disks).
Diplomoacy is a game of negotiation, with up to seven players controlling the seven empires in Europe in 1870. None are powerful enough to survive if others turn against them, so alliances are necessary. The game rules are relatively simple, so the game is all about intrigue: it's about the deals you make with the other players, and whether they believe they can trust you. In each round, players go off into corners or other rooms, negotiate, refuse to negotiate, make public gestures, make agreements (verbal or written, open or secret), keep or betray confidences, gether information, sound out rivals, and perform joint military planning. Then they hand the written orders (for their troops) to the adjudicator. All players moves (including any betrayals) are all revealed simultanously, and the outcomes of all movements or conflicts are resolved. No dice are used. Easily the best group board game I've ever played, because of its cleverly psychological nature. It inspired a Chess variant I once designed along similar lines.
Definition by example is a good start in most fields of study: The Earth is a planet; the Sun is a star. Just because there are ambiguous boundary cases doesn't mean that these distinctions are only in language, "not reality".
Unique means there's only ONE. That's what the 'yoon-' bit on the front does. 'Very unique' only undermines the meaning of the word as used. There are no 'moderate' uniquenesses, say comprising of two, three or four things. There's only one kind of unique, the unary kind. Uniqueness is unique! "See Usage Note at absolute... See Usage Note at infinite." [1]
Once when he was addressing a science conference in the UK, he delightedly announced to all present, "My initials are DNA and I was born in Cambridge in 1952!" (as related in 'The Salmon of Doubt').
Of the two options you mention, Special Creation usually connotes the first (intervening), whereas Theistic Evolution connotes the second (fine-tuning in creation). Intelligent Design, in the strict use of the term, does not necessarily make any claims about origins, but rather studies intelligent action as the best explanation for different kinds of order.
Generally, Christians working in the natural sciences are mostly commonly Theistic Evolutionists, then IDers (long ages), and only very occassionally into Young-Earth Creation (YEC), in which case they will belong to an organization like Answers in Genesis. The first two perform meaningful research IMHO, whereas AIG spends most of its time promoting YEC in churches as the only possible option for Christians.
Something like the Anthropic Principle is consistent with either ID or Theistic Evolution, as is Antony Flew's recent adoption of some kind of Aristotelian Deism (not Theism but no longer strictly Atheism, even by Flew's usual agnostic definition) which appears to have been motivated by ID concerns (requiring intelligence as an information source for DNA). See the following interview:
Of particular interest is the bold claim at the end that Ayer and Russell would have agreed with him had they lived as long. As Richard Carrier summarizes at SecWeb:
...he is increasingly persuaded that some sort of Deity brought about this universe, though it does not intervene in human affairs, nor does it provide any postmortem salvation. He says he has in mind something like the God of Aristotle, a distant, impersonal "prime mover."
Flew is not, of course, a scientist, a point Carrier makes several times, and his views should be understood rather as those of a (respected) philosopher.
Presumably so I can remind the developers to get their act together and add slicing functionality, like Fireworks and, later, Photoshop have done.
That's the big feature that's holding up efficient web dev with the GIMP. For an image tool to be practical, you need to be able to run off 10 or twenty adjacent (but arbitrarily arranged) sub-images in one step, from the one master file. It was the feature that originally gave Fireworks the jump on Photoshop for a year or so, and it's now a sheer necessity for web work.
You can use Python and Perl guillotining scripts based on guidelines, but for real web design with arbitrary shapes, there's just no substitute for slicing by transparent rectangular overlays.
It would probably only require a specialized layer type to be created, one which only holds rectangular objects, which can remember their individual 'save' settings and filenames.
1. The evil witch Hagar creates a new "ro-beast" (tm). 2. Minor cute plot devices use up about 18 minutes of time in the script. 3. They get in their five robot lions and go out to fight the ro-beast. 4. The ro-beast slaps the lions around for a few minutes. 5. They think, "Hey, we could UNITE TO FORM VOLTRON, DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE, YES I SAID THE WHOLE UNIVERSE EVEN THE BITS THAT APPEAR VERY FAR AWAY!" 6. The robot lions join together into a big humanoid robot, who destroys the ro-beast more-or-less instantly. 7. Repeat indefinitely every afternoon after school.
#2- for a lot of projects, you can make good use of objects (boxes, etc) colors, and some good fonts. And if you want free fonts, I highly recommend larabiefonts.com [larabiefonts.com].
Don't pay for anything until you've spent an afternoon browsing through DaFont -- 4000 free fonts, many of which are worth having.
Also (and don't laugh!) get any old copy of CORELDRAW, even if the program is for another platform; it's ten years old and will be cheap as dirt. But, it has over a thousand perfectly usable typefaces in TrueType format.
I'm by no means a professional typographer, just someone with 8+ years of programming and, before that, 8+ years of graphic design, with a strong amateur interest in typography. So I appreciate real fonts, like you'd pay $400 apeice for from a professional font foundry, or the value of a whole spectrum of historically important type families. However, there is enough in these two font sources for almost anyone to get by on the cheap, as I presently do.
Taking some time (a few hours) to pick a nice sans-serif font (think Arial) for headlines and a complementary serif (think Times) for body text, can very quickly improve any project. By complementary I mean having similar letterforms. Look at the shape of the 'a', 'Q', and 'J' and especially the top of the 't', as well as the overall 'colour' (the density of the text) on the page.
One combination from the COREL CD that I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment is Context Condensed for headlines, together with Atlantix for body type. But experiemnt for yourself.
...it closes the door [to understanding] because there is nothing more to be understood beyond "God did it".
Actually, this is a over-generalisation, as if all Theists were a particular modern brand of obscuratist. Historically, the obvious next question, "So HOW did God do it?", is the reason that science arose in the first place, and arose in Europe rather than elsewhere. The idea of a single, omnipotent mind ordering the universe gave thinkers confidence that it was regular in its behaviour -- even musical as in Platonic thought -- rather than arbitrary. Reading early scientists themselves (esp. Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Pascal) shows this particular influence strongly, though always amongst others.
Please add the ability for a web author to link a textarea to an XML DTD, which the browser will then enforce (allowing right-click insertion of contextually permitted tags at any point), while applying a specified CSS to the display of the textarea as it is edited. And have it produce well-formatted XML output.
So much time and effort goes into generating HTML / XML through a web interface -- this would be far more efficient and intuitive if it were supported in the browser.
(Yes I've seen 10-15 of the other ways of attempting this, like Mozile, Xopus or the whole tribe of JavaScript hacks -- they've been 'getting there' for years, but still they're slow, or kludgy, or write truly awful (browser-dependent) HTML. I think it's time to finally concede that doing the job properly means putting them in the browser itself.)
While the RIAA would hardly like that either, the point in this case is to stop widespread distribution of a high quality print weeks or months before their official release date.
Even in these days of rottentomatoes.com, it could be worse if mere informed opinion about their latest US$150M stinker was to circulate for months before the official release date.
For example, I would have gone to see Kill Bill or LoTR on the big screen even if I'd had the DVD for months -- probably more so, in fact. The better the movie, the less it need fear from piracy.
While I think that piracy is petty more than anything -- but then I only see 4-5 films a year -- I'm probably not alone in seeing cinema now more as a special experience that maximises the impact of the films that deserve to be viewed immersively.
Slashdot Mirror
In a particularly eerie co-incidence... Catholic theologicans this week urged the Pope to agree that unbaptized children don't go to Limbo.
i can_Limbo.html
.xxx is there!
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Vat
Just in time, apparently, now that
As an aside, the Marxist-Feminist author Andrea Dworkin's angry, angry, angry book "Pornography" is a good read for anyone wishing to become thoroughly disgusted (or at least, morally and intellectually challenged) by the barrenness and degradation of the pornographic enterprise in general. There's more than one side to the freedom question here.
What if the mains were going geekstream? Chickens be damned, I say!
If you put a fearless mouse in the wild, it will die like anything else that lacks a healthy sense of which dangers are worth avoiding.
Ah, that's gold. You can also just put the phone down quietly and walk away if you get one of those "keep right on talking so the 'customer' doesn't have a chance to say no" calls.
... and so on.
I've considered the following option too, but since moving away from a nice water-front address, I get less calls of this kind. Oh, and because I don't have a landline now. That's a factor too. (Or home web access.) You just get so much *life* back...
Them: "HiI'mcallingonbehalfofcompanyx Wehaveafantasticopportunityforblabhblahblah--"
Me: "Let's start by discussing my rate!"
Them: "???"
Me: "You wish to profit from my time. My standard rate is $60.00 per 15 minutes (or part thereof). Can you match or better this offer?"
Market force be with you!
Igniting sails, or burning/blinding people is much easier than setting fire to wood (especially a hull that could be wet). I've always thought that the victory was due to the psychological effects of the weapon on morale more than the outright destruction of vessels.
I missed the SUP tags being deleted... :(
In a 'cold death' scenario, where gravity is too weak to pull the expanding universe back together (this seems to be the majority opinion, and people even talk about the expansion accelerating), I've heard the final distribution of matter estimated at: 9% black holes, 90% dead stars, and 1% dust and gas at 1030 years. I can't find a reference for that online now though; so obviously look it up if it interests you. Maybe some astrophysicist type can confirm or deny this?
Did anyone else catch that in the anouncement...
... integrates many popular Open Source technologies."
"SCO OpenServer 6
$ shame | less
Studies also show that cancer cures smoking... Maybe this works on mathematics too?
I said, c'mon... somebody mod that redundant.
Do I have to say it three consecutive times in a row?
Their approach looks much more like "adapt or kill" to me. "Adapt or die" supposes that the problem is here to stay. Those companies apparently believe the threat can be removed.
I've been taking Knoppix CDs to shops here in Sydney to see if Debian will run on the 10.6" laptops available there (I commute; I'm looking for something ultra-portable). I drew a small crowd in one place by merely putting Xaos on Auto-zoom; It's interesting to see people's responses. As to results, not much yet; the Fujutsu's seem OK; the Vaio's I haven't been able to check yet (staff who don't know what Knoppix is are justfiably wary of booting strange disks).
Diplomoacy is a game of negotiation, with up to seven players controlling the seven empires in Europe in 1870. None are powerful enough to survive if others turn against them, so alliances are necessary. The game rules are relatively simple, so the game is all about intrigue: it's about the deals you make with the other players, and whether they believe they can trust you. In each round, players go off into corners or other rooms, negotiate, refuse to negotiate, make public gestures, make agreements (verbal or written, open or secret), keep or betray confidences, gether information, sound out rivals, and perform joint military planning. Then they hand the written orders (for their troops) to the adjudicator. All players moves (including any betrayals) are all revealed simultanously, and the outcomes of all movements or conflicts are resolved. No dice are used. Easily the best group board game I've ever played, because of its cleverly psychological nature. It inspired a Chess variant I once designed along similar lines.
Definition by example is a good start in most fields of study: The Earth is a planet; the Sun is a star. Just because there are ambiguous boundary cases doesn't mean that these distinctions are only in language, "not reality".
Unique means there's only ONE. That's what the 'yoon-' bit on the front does. 'Very unique' only undermines the meaning of the word as used. There are no 'moderate' uniquenesses, say comprising of two, three or four things. There's only one kind of unique, the unary kind. Uniqueness is unique! "See Usage Note at absolute... See Usage Note at infinite." [1]
[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=unique
Once when he was addressing a science conference in the UK, he delightedly announced to all present, "My initials are DNA and I was born in Cambridge in 1952!" (as related in 'The Salmon of Doubt').
In other news, 80% of the population consider themselves "above average" drivers.
A hoax? -- Next you'll be telling me that Russia's NOT on the Indian Ocean after all!
Of the two options you mention, Special Creation usually connotes the first (intervening), whereas Theistic Evolution connotes the second (fine-tuning in creation). Intelligent Design, in the strict use of the term, does not necessarily make any claims about origins, but rather studies intelligent action as the best explanation for different kinds of order.
Generally, Christians working in the natural sciences are mostly commonly Theistic Evolutionists, then IDers (long ages), and only very occassionally into Young-Earth Creation (YEC), in which case they will belong to an organization like Answers in Genesis. The first two perform meaningful research IMHO, whereas AIG spends most of its time promoting YEC in churches as the only possible option for Christians.
Something like the Anthropic Principle is consistent with either ID or Theistic Evolution, as is Antony Flew's recent adoption of some kind of Aristotelian Deism (not Theism but no longer strictly Atheism, even by Flew's usual agnostic definition) which appears to have been motivated by ID concerns (requiring intelligence as an information source for DNA). See the following interview:
http://www.biola.edu/antonyflew/
Of particular interest is the bold claim at the end that Ayer and Russell would have agreed with him had they lived as long. As Richard Carrier summarizes at SecWeb:
Source: http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369
Flew is not, of course, a scientist, a point Carrier makes several times, and his views should be understood rather as those of a (respected) philosopher.
> Why is this in the 'developer' section?
:)
Presumably so I can remind the developers to get their act together and add slicing functionality, like Fireworks and, later, Photoshop have done.
That's the big feature that's holding up efficient web dev with the GIMP. For an image tool to be practical, you need to be able to run off 10 or twenty adjacent (but arbitrarily arranged) sub-images in one step, from the one master file. It was the feature that originally gave Fireworks the jump on Photoshop for a year or so, and it's now a sheer necessity for web work.
You can use Python and Perl guillotining scripts based on guidelines, but for real web design with arbitrary shapes, there's just no substitute for slicing by transparent rectangular overlays.
It would probably only require a specialized layer type to be created, one which only holds rectangular objects, which can remember their individual 'save' settings and filenames.
That's a hint for developers, while we're here.
Voltron, for those who missed it:
1. The evil witch Hagar creates a new "ro-beast" (tm).
2. Minor cute plot devices use up about 18 minutes of time in the script.
3. They get in their five robot lions and go out to fight the ro-beast.
4. The ro-beast slaps the lions around for a few minutes.
5. They think, "Hey, we could UNITE TO FORM VOLTRON, DEFENDER OF THE UNIVERSE, YES I SAID THE WHOLE UNIVERSE EVEN THE BITS THAT APPEAR VERY FAR AWAY!"
6. The robot lions join together into a big humanoid robot, who destroys the ro-beast more-or-less instantly.
7. Repeat indefinitely every afternoon after school.
G-Force was cool too.
Don't pay for anything until you've spent an afternoon browsing through DaFont -- 4000 free fonts, many of which are worth having.
Also (and don't laugh!) get any old copy of CORELDRAW, even if the program is for another platform; it's ten years old and will be cheap as dirt. But, it has over a thousand perfectly usable typefaces in TrueType format.
I'm by no means a professional typographer, just someone with 8+ years of programming and, before that, 8+ years of graphic design, with a strong amateur interest in typography. So I appreciate real fonts, like you'd pay $400 apeice for from a professional font foundry, or the value of a whole spectrum of historically important type families. However, there is enough in these two font sources for almost anyone to get by on the cheap, as I presently do.
Taking some time (a few hours) to pick a nice sans-serif font (think Arial) for headlines and a complementary serif (think Times) for body text, can very quickly improve any project. By complementary I mean having similar letterforms. Look at the shape of the 'a', 'Q', and 'J' and especially the top of the 't', as well as the overall 'colour' (the density of the text) on the page.
One combination from the COREL CD that I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment is Context Condensed for headlines, together with Atlantix for body type. But experiemnt for yourself.
Actually, this is a over-generalisation, as if all Theists were a particular modern brand of obscuratist. Historically, the obvious next question, "So HOW did God do it?", is the reason that science arose in the first place, and arose in Europe rather than elsewhere. The idea of a single, omnipotent mind ordering the universe gave thinkers confidence that it was regular in its behaviour -- even musical as in Platonic thought -- rather than arbitrary. Reading early scientists themselves (esp. Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Pascal) shows this particular influence strongly, though always amongst others.
Please add the ability for a web author to link a textarea to an XML DTD, which the browser will then enforce (allowing right-click insertion of contextually permitted tags at any point), while applying a specified CSS to the display of the textarea as it is edited. And have it produce well-formatted XML output.
So much time and effort goes into generating HTML / XML through a web interface -- this would be far more efficient and intuitive if it were supported in the browser.
(Yes I've seen 10-15 of the other ways of attempting this, like Mozile, Xopus or the whole tribe of JavaScript hacks -- they've been 'getting there' for years, but still they're slow, or kludgy, or write truly awful (browser-dependent) HTML. I think it's time to finally concede that doing the job properly means putting them in the browser itself.)
Even in these days of rottentomatoes.com, it could be worse if mere informed opinion about their latest US$150M stinker was to circulate for months before the official release date.
For example, I would have gone to see Kill Bill or LoTR on the big screen even if I'd had the DVD for months -- probably more so, in fact. The better the movie, the less it need fear from piracy.
While I think that piracy is petty more than anything -- but then I only see 4-5 films a year -- I'm probably not alone in seeing cinema now more as a special experience that maximises the impact of the films that deserve to be viewed immersively.