Personally I was always wondering whether
those "iANAL, but..." disclaimers on Slashdot
were legally binding. I consider it highly doubtful.
But going back to email diclaimers,
I always cannot help but laugh furiously when I read this on
Perl 6 mailing lists:
"The information contained in this e-mail message is privileged and/or
confidential and is intended only for the use of the individual or entity
named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient,
or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended
recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or
copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received
this communication in error, please immediately notify us by telephone
(330-668-5000), and destroy the original message. Thank you."
I think some day I will call them indeed...
Oops! I have just
copied the above "communication" which is strictly prohibited!
But that is not a problem, since I hereby inform that by
reading this paragraph you agree
that prosecuting me on the grounds
of copying the strictly prohibited communication
is even strictlier prohibited!
Also, here's quite an Interesting link:
Stupid Email Disclaimers by Jeffrey Goldberg. It's very Informative.
In fact, it might be even better than the linked article.
This Cube of Doom is exactly what I need to make my
security response work seem exciting for my peers.
This Cube of Doom is sexy.
An xterm with Snort logs is not.
Saying that hardware should be free
is the most stupid thing Sun could possibly do.
Seriously, I cannot imagine anything stupider,
nor can I imagine any other company in which case it
would sound any stupider.
No, I'd say this is just another sign that the dinosaurs of the computer age (Sun and Microsoft) just don't understand modern consumers or the trends that have plagued every other high tech industry as they gained popularity among the general public.
There is an important difference between Sun and Microsoft, though.
Understanding the needs of modern consumers notwithstanding,
it would be the best thing for Microsoft profits since sliced bread
if hardware was free of charge, paid by license fees for proprietary software, while at the same time, it would be absolutely the worst thing for Sun, which unlike Microsoft is a hardware company, and a damn good at that, even if somewhat expensive.
Furthermore, Sun does not make commodity hardware
and no one makes good clones of Sun hardware.
What Sun should do is push their hardware
with free software and make damn sure it is the best
hardware running said software. Sun could do it.
They should send patches to kernel.org and gcc.gnu.org
to make absolutely sure that GNU/Linux out of the box
is running on their hardware faster and better than anywhere else.
They should start selling cheaper boxes
using their older technology but of very high quality
in more quantities for people to run free software
who would otherwise use standard PCs.
Switching hardware from PC to Sun when you use Microsoft Windows
is impossible. Switching hardware from PC to Sun
when you run Debian is unnoticeable from the user standpoint.
Saying that hardware should be free is a suicide for Sun.
The only software they ever made which sells today is OpenOffice.org
which is sold by community distributors.
Sun just showed us that they are a bunch stupid morons.
They seem to not understand that being friends with Microsoft
will inevitably kill them and sadly render irrelevant.
I give them five years. Mark my words.
I find it annoying when
all of the Slashdotters suddenly start bitching about
Latin spelling only to increase their karmata
like it was proportional to their IQen or
the length of their phallii.
"The company is writing complex encryption and decryption functionality directly into the product so customers don't have to procure security features from a third party, or roll their own when the product becomes generally available next year."
Does that really mean thay had no crypto?
Hard to believe.
Could someone please confirm it?
I have never used MS SQL Server before.
There is no way in hell that would ever happen. Ever.
But it already exists. Lisp programs are stored as sexpr's, which are just a less-verbose way to do the same thing XML does. And Lisp programs can treat Lisp programs as data, just like XSLT programs, except in a natural and easy-to-program way!
S-expression
is a natural way to represent programs in
languages like Lisp and Scheme
due to the very nature of their syntaxen or the lack thereof.
Writing Lisp code is basically writing
S-expressions in the first place.
XML is a bastardized S-expression with some
additional redundancy,
so unsurprisingly enough Lisp programs could be
stored as XML without any problems,
even with also without any reason.
Good luck storing a Perl 6 program as XML, though,
in any useful way.
Keep in mind that for it to be useful it would have
to expose the original source code every
time I want to edit it or otherwise it is completely
useless, and now it has to have some additional advantages
over simply storing the source code in a text file.
Well...
You are technically correct.
I am only wondering whether
talking about "syntax" in the context of
Lisp isn't a little exaggeration.
The true power of Lisp seems to be the
apparent lack of syntax as we usually understand it
and writing parsed trees by hand,
to make writing bad code impossible.
and programs will be stored as XML documents so that programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.
There is no way in hell that would ever happen. Ever.
I agree. What people forget is that you can not win against entropy. By redefining problem in a different way you are not necessarily solving it.
Very true.
Let us not forget the
Conservation of Cruft Principle.
An interesting article written by a professor at the University of Toronto argues that next-generation programming systems will combine compilers, linkers, debuggers, and that other tools will be plugin frameworks, rather than monolithic applications.
This is not the next generation of programming systems
but rather the present one
for pretty much everyone except for those using Microsoft tools.
Programmers will be able to extend the syntax of programming languages,
You might not acknowledge the power of belief,
but billions of people throughout history disagree with you.
If they are so smart, how come most of them are dead?
I have found your account on my fans list
and have read quite a few comments and journal entries of yours,
where I have even found a link to
one of my older texts--you
might also find
this
one interesting--and
as much as I usually like your reasoning,
this one is sadly based on not a particularly strong argument,
I am afraid.
Nevertheless,
I find your comparison
of organized religion to a bus terminal
quite intresting.
Also, I generally like your
masturbation analogy
(no pun intended)
however its strength might be
questionable.
Despite many interesting similarities,
I usually take offense
when someone tells me about either of those
activities in somewhat different situations
and for quite different reasons.
More precisely,
the question whether I want to hear
about someone thinking of me while praying
depands almost entirely on the subject, reason
and purpose of said prayer,
while with the masturbation
it is almost entirely dependent on
the person doing it,
the reason and purpose is usually the same,
the subject notwithstanding.
For example, when someone tells me she is going
to pray for my health, I will take offense
(and in fact I will get terrified)
if that is my doctor and I might get irritated
if that is someone who prefers praying instead
of physically helping me.
If someone tells me she is going to pray for my soul,
implying that I am evil, I will always take offense.
If someone just tells me she prays for me
because she likes me, I might be very happy with it,
like if one would say she thinks a lot about me.
It might be a manifestation of feelings and
emotions, or even some dependence or submission.
Of course it all depands on whether one indeed
is going to literally pray or is just using it
as a rhetorical figure,
for the strenght of my reaction,
positive or negative,
will be usually proportional
to the time and energy
one actually devotes.
My reaction to someone thinking
about me during the prayer is rarely
dependent exclusively on the person in question
without considering its subject.
Quite to the contrary with masturbation.
The subject itself seems usually irrelevant
or at least secondary to my opinion regarding the very
person who tells me about it
and the sexuality thereof,
subjectively perceived.
It is also interesting to note that
people tell me about their prayers at least
twice as often as about masturbation.
But the most important is not the frequency
but the very reason of my reaction.
(Of course
I might be committing a genetic fallacy
mixing
argumentum ad hominem and
argumentum ad verecundiam
depanding on the subject of my
ipse dixit reasoning,
but I believe one might consider it
perfectly justified in the subjective matter
of sexuality,
or at the very least I do really hope so.)
For that reason I wonder whether your analogy,
while certainly interesting and
intellectually entertaining,
might indeed need some better
introduction and further explanation,
for it might seem weak for some people
with similar experience as mine.
It is very interesting nonetheless
and undoubtedly deserves some serious analysis.
I will think about it more thoroughly.
This is a very bad precedent: the OSS community now has to follow processes that in the past, only large corporations could afford: audit trail, overkill documentation, etc.
This might be a precedent in the
Open Source community,
but certainly not for the Free Software community.
Don't you know how has The GNU Project
been working for years?
...therefore, god, who did this to me and made my life a personal hell...
The poster sounds like he is convinced that God caused the affliction, therefore I would say he believes that God exists and is not a true athiest. He is just angry with the god he does believe in. Also, as you say, many religious folks are not good at understanding logic, but I find that many non-religious people are quick to dismiss things that are hard to take:
...its easier to believe in nothing than to believe in a sadistic god...
This is just theodicy and the problem of evil.
The original poster despite declaring atheism indeed seems
to have chosen maltheism.
In any event, even possibly being a theist,
he/she is most definitely not a theophile.
Atheism is the only religion
I know of that's based around NOT believing something.
Atheists believe in reason.
I have to strongly protest here.
First of all, I do not believe anyone here,
theist or otherwise, would say she does not believe in reason.
For that reason alone, such an assertion is completely meaningless,
leading to a pointless argument like the
pro-life versus pro-choice one
with interestingly enough no one being anti-life or anti-choice,
fighting about semantics while confusing the meaning of words.
But that is not what is most important here.
Much more importantly than being merely meaningless,
the implications of
the assertion "atheists believe in reason"
are simply false.
Believing in reason (whatever that is supposed to mean,
whether believing in the existence of reason or
in the power and possibly superiority thereof,
if so then over what, etc.)
is by no means a necessary condition of being an atheist,
nor is it a sufficient one.
I can very easily imagine a complete moron
who is an atheist because
the poor simpleton is just too stupid to understand
the very idea of theism, which clearly shows
how the stupidity itself can directly lead to atheism.
This is very important:
atheist is not someone who believes in reason.
Atheist is someone who is godless (from Greek atheos),
i.e. someone who does not believe in the existence of any deity,
no more, no less.
Reason does not necessarily have anything to do with faith.
As a matter of fact, I know quite a few
atheistic cretins and
Mensa membership card holding theophiles,
as well as godless geniuses and God-loving idiots
(not even counting fundamentalists, mind you).
Now, the atheism having been slightly clarified,
we now have to define God which is
hardly an easy task...
Choosing pantheistic definition,
we can define God as meaning the universe
and the universe being God.
This is a perfectly valid definition.
Assuming that the universe itself exists,
which is in my opinion quite a reasonable assumption,
it means that therefore God must exist. Period.
So, is the question answered?
Of course not, because a pantheistic God
(i.e. the universe) does not have to contain
any supernatural, omnipotent
supreme being, which we usually mean by God,
possibly being even consistent with
materialism, secularism, and indeed atheism.
We could choose panentheism
(in the form of pan-entheism or panen-theism)
which is a little bit less extreme in that it does not
define God as a synonym of universe,
but as the material universe plus
something or someone supernatural and transcendental.
It is, however, still not very helpful, as we
are reasoning about that very transcendent
which is hard enough without the inclusion
of the rest of the universe,
upon the existence of which I hope we all can agree.
Let us find a better definition, like
the deistic definition of God,
for it is remarkably clear and consistent.
God is an absolutely transcendent creator of the universe
who made it a perfect self-regulating mechanism
which he does not intervene with since then.
Of course, it inevitably leads not only to
apathetic agnosticism and in fact even strict, closed agnosticism,
but it also means that
all prayers are unanswered and
there are no miracles and revelations whatsoever.
For that reason I doubt such a definition would satisfy
many theists, or even many atheists for that matter,
as the hypothesis of the existence of such a deity is
absolutely unprovable and unfalsifiable, rendering it thus
quite meaningless and irrelevant from the scientific standpoint.
But if it is not the case and there is a deity who is
even remotely less transcendent
than a deistic Divine Watchmaker,
being somewhat immanent,
then by definition there have to
Slashdot Mirror
The story headline is incomplete:
Obviously, it should be:
It must've been mistakenly truncated.
Linux, while arguably lacking in the ease of use area, is most certainly not for--
Oh, now I get it...
It would be kind of ironic, for we all know that the only intuitive interface is clitoris After that it's all learned.
What I am personally more concerned about is the very fact that Microsoft seems to have infringed on Amazon patent--twice.
Personally I was always wondering whether those "iANAL, but..." disclaimers on Slashdot were legally binding. I consider it highly doubtful. But going back to email diclaimers, I always cannot help but laugh furiously when I read this on Perl 6 mailing lists:
I think some day I will call them indeed... Oops! I have just copied the above "communication" which is strictly prohibited! But that is not a problem, since I hereby inform that by reading this paragraph you agree that prosecuting me on the grounds of copying the strictly prohibited communication is even strictlier prohibited!
Also, here's quite an Interesting link: Stupid Email Disclaimers by Jeffrey Goldberg. It's very Informative. In fact, it might be even better than the linked article.
Finally I will be able to afford quite a decent server with open source Solaris running on my new free Sun hardware. I can hardly wait.
is not one time pad, unless those "passwords" are totally random string of bits, as long as the cleartext itself.
This Cube of Doom is exactly what I need to make my security response work seem exciting for my peers. This Cube of Doom is sexy. An xterm with Snort logs is not.
Saying that hardware should be free is the most stupid thing Sun could possibly do. Seriously, I cannot imagine anything stupider, nor can I imagine any other company in which case it would sound any stupider.
There is an important difference between Sun and Microsoft, though. Understanding the needs of modern consumers notwithstanding, it would be the best thing for Microsoft profits since sliced bread if hardware was free of charge, paid by license fees for proprietary software, while at the same time, it would be absolutely the worst thing for Sun, which unlike Microsoft is a hardware company, and a damn good at that, even if somewhat expensive. Furthermore, Sun does not make commodity hardware and no one makes good clones of Sun hardware.
What Sun should do is push their hardware with free software and make damn sure it is the best hardware running said software. Sun could do it. They should send patches to kernel.org and gcc.gnu.org to make absolutely sure that GNU/Linux out of the box is running on their hardware faster and better than anywhere else. They should start selling cheaper boxes using their older technology but of very high quality in more quantities for people to run free software who would otherwise use standard PCs.
Switching hardware from PC to Sun when you use Microsoft Windows is impossible. Switching hardware from PC to Sun when you run Debian is unnoticeable from the user standpoint.
Saying that hardware should be free is a suicide for Sun. The only software they ever made which sells today is OpenOffice.org which is sold by community distributors. Sun just showed us that they are a bunch stupid morons. They seem to not understand that being friends with Microsoft will inevitably kill them and sadly render irrelevant. I give them five years. Mark my words.
Looks like Macromedia has finally made good on their word and provided Linux with a current version of Flash player.
Damn you Macromedia!
I find it annoying when all of the Slashdotters suddenly start bitching about Latin spelling only to increase their karmata like it was proportional to their IQen or the length of their phallii.
Actually it is:
Et cetera.
Oh my God, I'll better watch out for my server, I don't want it to suddenly boom! I'll better check the water cooling system...
Interestingly enough, "</perl>" is valid Perl. You would have to find another delimiter. Good luck.
This is an interesting idea. I always thought that the shebang line was not enough.
Seriously though...
"The company is writing complex encryption and decryption functionality directly into the product so customers don't have to procure security features from a third party, or roll their own when the product becomes generally available next year."
Does that really mean thay had no crypto? Hard to believe. Could someone please confirm it? I have never used MS SQL Server before.
How true...
(Note to self: remove encryption ASAP!)
Finally!
S-expression is a natural way to represent programs in languages like Lisp and Scheme due to the very nature of their syntaxen or the lack thereof. Writing Lisp code is basically writing S-expressions in the first place. XML is a bastardized S-expression with some additional redundancy, so unsurprisingly enough Lisp programs could be stored as XML without any problems, even with also without any reason. Good luck storing a Perl 6 program as XML, though, in any useful way. Keep in mind that for it to be useful it would have to expose the original source code every time I want to edit it or otherwise it is completely useless, and now it has to have some additional advantages over simply storing the source code in a text file.
And also here.
Well... You are technically correct. I am only wondering whether talking about "syntax" in the context of Lisp isn't a little exaggeration. The true power of Lisp seems to be the apparent lack of syntax as we usually understand it and writing parsed trees by hand, to make writing bad code impossible.
I agree. What people forget is that you can not win against entropy. By redefining problem in a different way you are not necessarily solving it.
Very true. Let us not forget the Conservation of Cruft Principle.
I don't think we've met.
You must be new here...
From the article:
Editor MACroS? My favorite editor is vi, you insensitive clod!
This is not the next generation of programming systems but rather the present one for pretty much everyone except for those using Microsoft tools.
Again, nothing new.
There is no way in hell that would ever happen. Ever.
No.
Now, I will read the entire article, but somehow, I am not holding my breath...
I have found your account on my fans list and have read quite a few comments and journal entries of yours, where I have even found a link to one of my older texts--you might also find this one interesting--and as much as I usually like your reasoning, this one is sadly based on not a particularly strong argument, I am afraid.
Nevertheless, I find your comparison of organized religion to a bus terminal quite intresting. Also, I generally like your masturbation analogy (no pun intended) however its strength might be questionable.
Despite many interesting similarities, I usually take offense when someone tells me about either of those activities in somewhat different situations and for quite different reasons. More precisely, the question whether I want to hear about someone thinking of me while praying depands almost entirely on the subject, reason and purpose of said prayer, while with the masturbation it is almost entirely dependent on the person doing it, the reason and purpose is usually the same, the subject notwithstanding.
For example, when someone tells me she is going to pray for my health, I will take offense (and in fact I will get terrified) if that is my doctor and I might get irritated if that is someone who prefers praying instead of physically helping me. If someone tells me she is going to pray for my soul, implying that I am evil, I will always take offense. If someone just tells me she prays for me because she likes me, I might be very happy with it, like if one would say she thinks a lot about me. It might be a manifestation of feelings and emotions, or even some dependence or submission. Of course it all depands on whether one indeed is going to literally pray or is just using it as a rhetorical figure, for the strenght of my reaction, positive or negative, will be usually proportional to the time and energy one actually devotes.
My reaction to someone thinking about me during the prayer is rarely dependent exclusively on the person in question without considering its subject. Quite to the contrary with masturbation. The subject itself seems usually irrelevant or at least secondary to my opinion regarding the very person who tells me about it and the sexuality thereof, subjectively perceived. It is also interesting to note that people tell me about their prayers at least twice as often as about masturbation. But the most important is not the frequency but the very reason of my reaction.
(Of course I might be committing a genetic fallacy mixing argumentum ad hominem and argumentum ad verecundiam depanding on the subject of my ipse dixit reasoning, but I believe one might consider it perfectly justified in the subjective matter of sexuality, or at the very least I do really hope so.)
For that reason I wonder whether your analogy, while certainly interesting and intellectually entertaining, might indeed need some better introduction and further explanation, for it might seem weak for some people with similar experience as mine.
It is very interesting nonetheless and undoubtedly deserves some serious analysis. I will think about it more thoroughly.
This might be a precedent in the Open Source community, but certainly not for the Free Software community. Don't you know how has The GNU Project been working for years?
This is just theodicy and the problem of evil. The original poster despite declaring atheism indeed seems to have chosen maltheism. In any event, even possibly being a theist, he/she is most definitely not a theophile.
See also my other post in this thread.
I have to strongly protest here.
First of all, I do not believe anyone here, theist or otherwise, would say she does not believe in reason. For that reason alone, such an assertion is completely meaningless, leading to a pointless argument like the pro-life versus pro-choice one with interestingly enough no one being anti-life or anti-choice, fighting about semantics while confusing the meaning of words.
But that is not what is most important here. Much more importantly than being merely meaningless, the implications of the assertion "atheists believe in reason" are simply false.
Believing in reason (whatever that is supposed to mean, whether believing in the existence of reason or in the power and possibly superiority thereof, if so then over what, etc.) is by no means a necessary condition of being an atheist, nor is it a sufficient one.
I can very easily imagine a complete moron who is an atheist because the poor simpleton is just too stupid to understand the very idea of theism, which clearly shows how the stupidity itself can directly lead to atheism.
This is very important: atheist is not someone who believes in reason.
Atheist is someone who is godless (from Greek atheos), i.e. someone who does not believe in the existence of any deity, no more, no less. Reason does not necessarily have anything to do with faith. As a matter of fact, I know quite a few atheistic cretins and Mensa membership card holding theophiles, as well as godless geniuses and God-loving idiots (not even counting fundamentalists, mind you).
Now, the atheism having been slightly clarified, we now have to define God which is hardly an easy task...
Choosing pantheistic definition, we can define God as meaning the universe and the universe being God. This is a perfectly valid definition. Assuming that the universe itself exists, which is in my opinion quite a reasonable assumption, it means that therefore God must exist. Period.
So, is the question answered? Of course not, because a pantheistic God (i.e. the universe) does not have to contain any supernatural, omnipotent supreme being, which we usually mean by God, possibly being even consistent with materialism, secularism, and indeed atheism.
We could choose panentheism (in the form of pan-entheism or panen-theism) which is a little bit less extreme in that it does not define God as a synonym of universe, but as the material universe plus something or someone supernatural and transcendental. It is, however, still not very helpful, as we are reasoning about that very transcendent which is hard enough without the inclusion of the rest of the universe, upon the existence of which I hope we all can agree.
Let us find a better definition, like the deistic definition of God, for it is remarkably clear and consistent. God is an absolutely transcendent creator of the universe who made it a perfect self-regulating mechanism which he does not intervene with since then. Of course, it inevitably leads not only to apathetic agnosticism and in fact even strict, closed agnosticism, but it also means that all prayers are unanswered and there are no miracles and revelations whatsoever.
For that reason I doubt such a definition would satisfy many theists, or even many atheists for that matter, as the hypothesis of the existence of such a deity is absolutely unprovable and unfalsifiable, rendering it thus quite meaningless and irrelevant from the scientific standpoint.
But if it is not the case and there is a deity who is even remotely less transcendent than a deistic Divine Watchmaker, being somewhat immanent, then by definition there have to