Nobody sane wants to develop large applications in fucking native JS and HTML5, and Microsoft knows that.
Why not? Most "large applications" simply have lots and lots and lots of features. They are not processor-intensive; the code paths aren't long, but there are a lot of them. You'd think that a high-level managed language coupled with a layout engine would be exactly the right tool for writing them.
And according to Barbara Coloroso, disgust leads to contempt; contempt leads to a view of inferiority and objetification; bullying follows, and at some point any inhumanity can be justified, because after all, they're less than human. She claims this to be the path that has led up to every major genocide of this century.
The implication is that they intend Windows Phone apps will be the same apps you use on Windows 8 which will be the same apps you can access on XBox. The famous "three screens". And if you're not coding specifically for Windows, well standard HTML5 and Javascript apps will run just dandy on Windows 8 and the future version of Windows Phone too. I don't see there being a problem with getting apps, or with getting customers for your apps.
Unless Windows Phone is going to have gigabytes of memory and a multi-cored processor, then no, they're not going to be. If you code for a PC, you take advantages of the resources there, or your competitors will. If your app is so simple it doesn't need much resources, the chances are that people can get better alternatives for free, so why would they pay for yours? And XBox "apps" are games, which tend to be designed for the XBox controller.
This is simply a stupid move, and the market knows it too. The lesson here is to never put anyone who's worked at Microsoft to any position where they could possibly make any decisions where anything Microsoft makes might be an option.
If you stick with the version you currently have and all the add-ons that work with that version, why do you care how often they are releasing new versions, if you are not planning on updating anyway? Just turn off the prompt to update and pretend like they only release a version every year or two. You state you only use FF for Firebug so if FF and Firebug will keep working if you do not update, what is the problem?
Security. Firefox 4 is end-of-lifed, which means it won't get any of its security holes patched - and there will be holes, just as there always is when there's major changes.
It would be nice if you could stay with a particular version forever, but you can't. Not unless you run it in a virtual machine and roll back all changes to a known good checkpoint every time you fire it up, or something. And even then your VM will likely get pwned and used in a DDOS or something every now and then.
Also I really hate how distros mark software deemed stable by upstream as totally experimental and dangerous (applies to pretty much everyone).
It often is. Even if we leave out the obvious bias people might have about software they wrote, there's the simple fact that there are more users than developers, so the former will almost certainly run into bugs the latter didn't. And of course, any project with proper testing will continue finding new bugs all the time, so the developers have to decide which ones will be fixed (and which ones won't) before the release is declared "stable". All of which means that newly released "stable" software is usually anything but.
It would be totally irresponsible for distro maintainers to simply take the developers word that something is stable.
Bloody heavy handed of the FBI though, this is the sort of thing expect of a third world police force looking for bribe money, not a respected first world law enforcement agency.
It should be noted, they were actually told exactly which server they wanted based on the IP address they gave DigitalOne. They just chose to take the entire enclosure instead - I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is because they don't actually have anyone with domain knowledge and thus have no idea what they're actually doing.
"Nice servers you have here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to them, right? Better not do business with anyone we don't approve of, then!"
Never attribute anything to incompetence that can be adequately explained by malice.
As far as avoiding this sort of thing it's no different than any other major disaster you need backup servers with a different provider a good physical distance away.
And by "a good physical distance away", you mean "in another country who's government doesn't like the US, and who's military can fight them off", right?
So what was your counter-argument for considering atheists a group again? Or do you agree with me now?
The question is, does Dawkins consider himself and his fanclub a group. The answer seems to be yes.
Exactly Dawkin's point. In order for someone to do more than wave a flag and parrot a few communist memes they would have to have an understanding of what communism is, politics, economics, competing ideas... Things that most children are simply not capable of because, well, they are children. Generally speaking most people would not take such a child very seriously because communism is a political idea, but for some reason when it comes to religious ideas they are heartfelt beliefs and deserve the utmost respect. His point is that both concepts are too complex and require an adult level of comprehension and reasoning that a child is not capable of.
So as you say, when someone says "Christian Child" what they really mean is that the child knows the Christian memes and habits, probably some of the core beliefs, stories and dogma too, but without an understanding of true belief in them.
Yes. And Dawkins seems to think that this is awful, because it perpetrates these memes and frustrates Dawkins's campaign to stamp them out. This, then, leads to my original conclusion: that Dawkins simply can't take somebody not caring about what he cares about.
Okay, just look at the world around you for a moment. There are good parents and bad parents. Some of them lock their kids in secret dungeons and then abuse them for decades. I don't think it is hard to argue that society should prevent such things. If you accept that then the general principal follows that sometimes society has a duty to protect children, and although religion is accepted as an excuse those exceptions are slowly being removed.
You seem to be suggesting either that teaching religious memes to a child is equivalent to locking them up in secret dungeons and abusing them, or that locking kids up in secret dungeons and abusing them is common amongst religious parents. Both suggestions seem batshit insane to me. But they're exactly the kind of ridiculous bullshit Richard "Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds." Dawkins keeps on spouting.
Yes. Probably not many, admittedly. I think you are forgetting a very large group, probably the majority in the UK: agnostics. I know a few people who went from being undecided to atheists after watching his TV programmes and in once instance reading The God Delusion. I lent another a book called "Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy" by Simon Blackburn which has an excellent chapter on God and they gave up any doubts as to his non-existence too.
And did this make any difference whatsoever, to either them or anyone else? Do they now think more rationally? Have their lives improved? Or was the only effect that they now agree with you on the matter?
You are amazing good at missing the point and then arguing at length over the exact meaning of words. I tip my hat to you sir.
No reason to. After all, I was tremendously helped by you declining to define your point, despite me outright asking you to. No, really, I couldn't have done it without you.
When I say that atheism does not represent a group what I mean is that although there are large numbers of people who are atheists they are not organised as a collective. There are organised groups that atheists belong to, but atheism itself simply means not believing in any theological concept, i.e. a lack of religion.
That's nice. Guess what? Theists aren't organizes as a collective either. They, too, are organized as groups some theists belong to.
Neither am I. What I was trying to point out is that it seems like the Christian God does not seem to live up to the hype. He apparently loves me and has the power to make things better, but instead he at best ignores me and at worst keeps sending shit my way. That does not sound like love to me.
Oh, I quite agree with you. The Christian God is a monster with truly horrible track record. On the other hand, there's beer (I'm drunk right now, for the record). So it evens out;).
He doesn't care what you personally think, he just cares that religions keep fucking things up for the world at large. The Pope not allowing the proper use of birth control, the Bible preaching stuff that I certainly wouldn't want my kids to read, the use of religious freedom as justification for discrimination.
And do you think that someone who cares about what he Pope thinks about condoms (fuck birth control - think of AIDS) cares about The God Delusion?
So you can see that religion causes all sorts of problems, and not just for their members. For example Dawkins argues that a child cannot be a "Christian child" or "Jewish
child" because they are not old enough to have evaluated the Christian faith and chosen it willingly. It would be a bit like calling them a "Communist Child" or "Social democrat child" - it makes no sense.
Yes, Dawkins argues all kinds of things. Dawkins also refutes himself with his very own work on memetics: a Christian child is one who has had Christian memes imprinted, a Jewish child is one with Jewish memes imprinted, and a communist or social democrat child is one with communist or social democratic memes imprinted.
Now you can argue that about the rights of parents to bring their children up as they see fit etc, but there are very real problems that stem from it. Circumcision, for example, is basically ritual child abuse since there is no way a baby can consent to that. It is also a problem for society in general if hate and prejudice are being taught, for example in relation to homosexuality or the status of women (both particular issues for Islam).
You can argue anything. However, there really is no alternative - if you can't trust the parents, you sure as Hell can't trust anyone else.
There are only two ways the rest of us can deal with this. The first is to pass laws preventing it, which in some cases we have done. Gender discrimination is outlawed, for example, although the Church is partially except. The other is to convince people holding these beliefs that they are wrong, and that is part of what Dawkins tries to do in his books.
Again: do you honestly think that anyone who disagrees with Dawkins will buy his books?
I'm not going to argue semantics with you. Answer my point directly.
What point?
You seem to think that "atheism" is some kind of group or philosophy. It isn't, it is merely non-belief in theism, i.e. God. It does not represent any group, any philosophy, merely a lack of faith in a higher power. So either you are saying that people who don't believe in God are not persuasive about anything, or you hold this mistaken belief.
"Atheism", for people who self-identify as atheists (as opposed to "weak atheism": just not believing in a god and not making a big deal about it), most certainly is a philosophy. That group certainly includes Dawkins, who is the only person who I have said anything about. Also, you conradict yourself here: you say "It (atheism) does not present any group" yet refer to "people who don't believe in God", wich certainly sounds like a group definition to me.
I am an Atheist because I do not follow any religion or believe in God, but that says almost nothing about me. Philosophically I am a Humanist and find Humanist arguments compelling, so feel free to attack those if you like.
I don't know you, and don't give a shit about what you do or do not believe in. I'm arguing for the joy of arguing. And because I'm getting really tired of people who mangle both science and theology for ideological reasons.
Er, okay, well just because you only talk to idiots doesn't change anything. Personally I have never heard a compelling argument from any religion but I am at least open to the possibility that someone might be able to make one. You seem to think all non-believers are morons, but I can assure you I don't have the same prejudices against Christians. Some of them are clearly quite intelligent, they just don't convince me of their beliefs.
Actually, yes, it (only talking to idiots) does change a lot. As far as I can tell, Dawkins is every bit as stupid as the people he argues. No, I take it back: not stupid, just idiotic. Those are not the same thing: stupid means you lack intellect, idiotic means you don't use it.
Or do you think that Dawkins honestly believes that his books are going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced? Because otherwise he's just wasting his time (or, more cynically, raking in the dollars by preaching to the choir).
So what are you saying, that God has forsaken me by not sharing the only persuasive experience I can have to save my soul from damnation? Or that I need to try harder to believe, in which case I humbly suggest that if you try hard enough you may come to see the light and welcome the tooth fairy into your life?
No, I'm saying it's impossible to prove the existence or nonexistence of God(s) one way or another. Or the tooth fairy, for that matter.
For the record, I don't think that any God worth worshipping would "forsake" anyone. I wouldn't, and I'm just a man - and, for that matter, just a brother rather than father to all my fellow men.
In the Old Testament God seems to deal out direct punishment regularly, even going so far as to exterminate almost all life on earth with a big flood at one stage. Actually that is a good example of how modern secular societies have developed stronger moral values than God - we don't kill innocent animals by drowning if it can be helped.
Yes... And also promising it won't happen again. Also, the Old Testament should be understood as a product of its time - for Bronze Age barbarians, it's actually damn good. Of course we have moved beyond that since then, as we should have.
Now, I'm not saying all Christians believe that, of course. Many for whatever reason don't. The problem is that the Bible presents that as the kind of thing God does some times, and as a justifiable action on his part. It is very
As long as you obese fucks are sitting fat and happy in front of your TV's watching the world crumble around you while your own politicians and news organisations lie to you about it, nothing is going to change.
Don't worry, it won't take long anymore. US is heading down - and once it hits the bottom, it'll start heading back to the top again, because while the corporate raiders have looted the success, the basic ideas which allowed success in the first place haven't disappearead. In fact, I'd say there could well be an American Renaissance coming, once the worst crud - like quarter-capitalism and the multitude of law firms - gets kicked off the cart.
There can't be rebirth unless there's death first. That's something to remember and tender cynicism with, as one looks at the world.
And you elected him. Not that your votes matter any more, but hey, maybe it's time to start pointing the finger at the asshole that you put in the Oval Office and start taking a hard look in the mirror, at your own values.
To be fair, what other choices were there? Name a single non-asshole presidential candidate. Or, to make it somewhat easier: name a single presidential candidate in the last election who wasn't a murderous lunatic?
Politics nowadays isn't about choosing the best, it's about choosing the lesser evil. But even then people sometimes get enough, and huge shifts happen; just look at how True Finns (actually "basic finns") did in the last election in Finland.
Can you think of another country just before WW1 and WW2 that was addicted to war? Look what happened to them.
Arguably, the problem before WW1 was that there had been peace in Europe for so long that everyone had forgotten what war is really like: people hold their guts in their hands and die. They tought it was an adventure camp of some sort, where you rough it up a few weeks and come back fine. And arguably, that's the problem with the US nowadays: the wars it fights are so one-sided that it's easy to forget what is actually happening down on the ground.
Now, a one-sided war is obviously a huge success for the military; it's a sign that they're doing their job very well. However, it requires a very high moral standard from the political leaders, because otherwise it's so very easy to degenerate into monsters. Sadly, the political leaders are, in the end, only humans, and can't provide the saintlike restraint that's required for safe control of godlike power. That leaves strict legalism as another possible check. Because of this, it's extremely dangerous that the rulers of the US keep on ignoring its laws to do what they wish. They might think they're doing what they think is right - even Bush probably thought so - and they might even be right; but the power to kill people from afar is inherently unsafe for the user, and should have safety checks attached.
Damn, I hope that was meant to be sarcastic. I can't even join a union (none exists for my industry or job, and no, I'm not a manager).
It wasn't, it was spot-on. The weakening of unions is directly linked to the increasing income gap, which is hurting the vast majority of people.
Plus, I would say the teacher's unions are probably hurting the country quite a bit more than all of the programmers and knowledge workers in the country.
You would be wrong then. Constantly worrying about your job doesn't make you perform 110% all the time; it makes you burn out and give into fatalism very fast. Unless, of course, you're a born strategist, in which case you decide grades based on who's dad knows who.
While unions can cause a few people to keep their jobs who shouldn't, it also means job security and reasonable income to lots more - and wanting to do your job well is a basic human drive, so once those are taken care of, that becomes an end to itself as well. The current trend of changing employers every couple years is horribly inefficient; it would be much better for everyone if people could stay with a single employer their whole life and rise within the organization. That way, the employees would get financial security necessary for long-term planning and debt-free living, and employers would get people who know every last obscure detail of their job, and who have reason to care about the continued success of their employer.
Just looking at the next quarter is the mentality of a raider. But even Tsingis-khan realized it's better to leave conquered areas intact to produce steadily, than to burn them down for short-term profit. But I guess there's a reason why Tsingis build an empire while modern CEOs run them down.
Corruption appears to be an intrinsic part of any government beyond a certain size.
Corruption is an intrinsic part of any organization or system anyone has any interest in corrupting. Conservatists are entirely right in considering the government such an organization. They are entirely wrong in excluding corporations or free-market capitalism in general.
What a bizarre argument. There is obviously a difference. Atheists not believing in something does not lead directly to immoral behaviour and the persecution of others. Christians discriminate against women and homosexuals, and they seek to impose their dogma on others.
I truly can't say if you honestly believe in this absurd oversimplification, or if this is supposed to a parody.
The typical response at this point is that atheism is as much dogma and seeks to impose its will on other too, but that is incorrect.
Of course it is. A dogma is an abstract concept and quite unable to impose its will on anyone, since it doesn't have any. People holding to a dogma are a different matter entirely. And at that point it doesn't really matter what the dogma is; it has become a flag, a symbol to divide the world to us and them and justify oppressing or outright killing the latter.
Most people aren't obsessive-compulsive enough to impose their dogmas on others, but some are, and at that point it's up to the rest of the society whether they'll kill all opponents or write propaganda books.
Since there is no God to hand down morality and punish you for disagreeing everything is up for debate and only a persuasive argument will work.
Go to any forum where atheists and theists debate each other and watch the arguments used. Are they persuasive? Or are they just a pack of chimps flinging feces at each other? Because I've rarely seen the former - in fact, the only times I have has been when the people haven't tried to persuade each other, but have simply debated for fun.
Then again, I guess this doesn't really disagree with you: only a persuasive argument will work, and short of a personal appearance of God(s) there simply aren't any persuasive arguments about their existence.
It should also be noted that the whole concept of "God hands down morality and punishes you for disagreeing" is pretty much confined to monotheistic religions; and even for them, it's an oversimplification (and sometimes downright incorrect - even with basic Christianity, there's a view that sin creates its own punishment without any interference from God) - exactly the kind of oversimplification people engage in to make other people and their beliefs seem ridiculous, so they can be dismissed without bothering to actually argue them. This is also know as the "strawman argument".
Obviously your argument is simplistic. Now, we all know that it doesn't cost much (if anything) more to run a network running at 50% capacity than one running at 10%, so the straight up "utility" model like electricity or water billing doesn't exactly translate. However, it DOES cost more when you have to split out areas that are currently on one cable loop into two or more cable loops (as an example). So there absolutely is a cost to allowing usage to climb with no limit and no increased price. What the real solution has to be is some form of tiered service.
Well, no. The real solution is to charge different price for different connection speeds. It's up to the seller to ensure he can deliver what the customer paid for. Nor is it acceptable to try to weasel out of it by lots and lots of small print; in fact, in much of the world, such attempts are a basis of being hold to be dealing in bad faith by the court - which, of course, it is.
Of course having to invest some of your income into updating the infrastructure eats into profits, but somehow, the telecomms in most of the world still manage to stay profitable. Perhaps you Americans are simply bad at business?
I think Dawkins has come close to punching a few of them.
You'd think Dawkins would get along fine with religious leaders, seeing how they have the most dominant personality trait in common: neither can stand people not caring about what they care about.
We lose less than 5% of all of our power in transmission. When people start spewing figures about transmission loss they are including conversion.
We lose less than 5% of power now, when power plants pretty much immediately convert to high voltage. You can't do this with windmills, because a high-voltage line is far more expensive to erect than a low-voltage one, and most wind farms aren't going to be anywhere near the size of a normal power plant, which means you need far more of them.
You don't have storage systems to work around the psuedorandom power output on the same site as the wind farm. That's what the grid is for.
Putting them elsewhere still takes up the same amount of land, and increases the transmit losses even more, since you're basically sending wind power to the UPS and then sending the power from there to the consumer.
Also, putting storage somewhere else than the windmills will make connecting the latter into the grid more complicated - you need variable frequency switches and voltage convertors to compensate for varying generator speeds. If we are going to get serious about this renewable energy thing, we need a DC smartgrid - our current AC grid is designed around the assumption that power stations are reliable and constant, and only load varies.
Wrong about *nix, I'm not in a position to comment on Microsoft. But feel free to weasel your way out of incorrect sweeping statements. If I have to point you at the solutions it's because you've gone to considerable trouble to ignore them.
I'm sorry, did I hit a nerve?
for you maybe - the rest of us have no problems. Be fucking hard to debug if we couldn't.
Squashfs is read-only and thus has no relevance to the topic of rolling back changes, since none can be made. Unionfs is actually pretty close to what I described, but still lacks the ability to show different versions to different execution contexts. And of course it requires specialized knowledge to set up, making it irrelevant to the average user.
Also, you keep using that word "weaselly". I do not think it means what you think it means.
More bullshit and gibberish. File system changes in a virtual machine are identical to those in the host. Doesn't matter whether either of them have access to a block device as a file system, or a file. And chroot?
Chroot is nice, if you are willing to make a copy from the whole filesystem for a suspected rogue program to play around in. Unionfs is closer, but still lacks the ability to define a different union for different execution contexts.
Wait, stop. Windmills require almost no land. They take up little postage-sized pieces of dirt in the middle of vast tracts of land that is usually being used to graze cattle if it's being used for anything at all.
A windmill takes up a little postage-sized piece of dirt. It also produces almost no power, and even that only randomly. Windmills in sufficient qualities to produce a significant portion of an industrial society's power needs, their grid connections, and the storage systems to work around the random power output require huge amounts of land - and if that land is located in the middle of nowhere, you need even more windmills to cover the transmit losses.
E-mail is fine for passive data, but it's too easy for executables. Users should have to jump through some hoops when handling executables, just like chemists have to take extra precautions when handling unknown or potentially hazardous substances. Handling protocol requires you to slow down and treat the material differently. Sounds good to me.
Like the infamous UAC messages of Windows Vista, which popped up whenever any application tried to do anything, and did nothing but annoyed people and conditioned them to click allow on any message that pops up?
Modern computers don't have any security. Yes, this includes Linux, which isolates users from each other (to some extent) but doesn't give a single user any way of isolating his processes from each other and data. It's difficult to figure out what's happening in your system, and it's impossible to roll back any changes, besides reformatting and restoring from a backup. Even such basic functionality as letting a program change what it will, but only applying the changes only to said program's context - pretend-admin, in other words - is missing; you need to run a full virtual machine to get that.
Why can't you just create a context, and run programs in that context, letting them do what they will while preventing any effect outside the context? We do that with memory, and everyone agrees that memory protection is a good thing - yet when it comes to the filesystem, it's no can do?
The fact that computers operated by professionals for pay keep on getting pwned is irrefutable evidence for these facts.
If your users can't handle FTP, or any of the myriad web file transfer systems, perhaps the answer isn't leaving hydrochloric acid in a Pepsi can on their desk. Don't dumb down the process... smart up the users.
Since a Pepsi can is made of aluminium, it would simply dissolve in HCl (and blow up if it was closed due to the build-up of hydrogen). And the rest of your statement is just as nonsensical - what, transferring files through FTP is somehow more dangerous than through HTTP?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? Most "large applications" simply have lots and lots and lots of features. They are not processor-intensive; the code paths aren't long, but there are a lot of them. You'd think that a high-level managed language coupled with a layout engine would be exactly the right tool for writing them.
How many major genocides has this century had?
Unless Windows Phone is going to have gigabytes of memory and a multi-cored processor, then no, they're not going to be. If you code for a PC, you take advantages of the resources there, or your competitors will. If your app is so simple it doesn't need much resources, the chances are that people can get better alternatives for free, so why would they pay for yours? And XBox "apps" are games, which tend to be designed for the XBox controller.
This is simply a stupid move, and the market knows it too. The lesson here is to never put anyone who's worked at Microsoft to any position where they could possibly make any decisions where anything Microsoft makes might be an option.
Security. Firefox 4 is end-of-lifed, which means it won't get any of its security holes patched - and there will be holes, just as there always is when there's major changes.
It would be nice if you could stay with a particular version forever, but you can't. Not unless you run it in a virtual machine and roll back all changes to a known good checkpoint every time you fire it up, or something. And even then your VM will likely get pwned and used in a DDOS or something every now and then.
Well, since the main feature of new Firefox releases seems to be removing features, I'd imagine there's no way of doing that.
It often is. Even if we leave out the obvious bias people might have about software they wrote, there's the simple fact that there are more users than developers, so the former will almost certainly run into bugs the latter didn't. And of course, any project with proper testing will continue finding new bugs all the time, so the developers have to decide which ones will be fixed (and which ones won't) before the release is declared "stable". All of which means that newly released "stable" software is usually anything but.
It would be totally irresponsible for distro maintainers to simply take the developers word that something is stable.
Draw from that what conclusions you will.
"Nice servers you have here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to them, right? Better not do business with anyone we don't approve of, then!"
Never attribute anything to incompetence that can be adequately explained by malice.
And by "a good physical distance away", you mean "in another country who's government doesn't like the US, and who's military can fight them off", right?
The question is, does Dawkins consider himself and his fanclub a group. The answer seems to be yes.
Yes. And Dawkins seems to think that this is awful, because it perpetrates these memes and frustrates Dawkins's campaign to stamp them out. This, then, leads to my original conclusion: that Dawkins simply can't take somebody not caring about what he cares about.
You seem to be suggesting either that teaching religious memes to a child is equivalent to locking them up in secret dungeons and abusing them, or that locking kids up in secret dungeons and abusing them is common amongst religious parents. Both suggestions seem batshit insane to me. But they're exactly the kind of ridiculous bullshit Richard "Priestly groping of child bodies is disgusting. But it may be less harmful in the long run than priestly subversion of child minds." Dawkins keeps on spouting.
And did this make any difference whatsoever, to either them or anyone else? Do they now think more rationally? Have their lives improved? Or was the only effect that they now agree with you on the matter?
Bit every engineer employed a by quarterly-profit driven corporations most certainly would. That's what they get bonuses for, after all.
No reason to. After all, I was tremendously helped by you declining to define your point, despite me outright asking you to. No, really, I couldn't have done it without you.
That's nice. Guess what? Theists aren't organizes as a collective either. They, too, are organized as groups some theists belong to.
Oh, I quite agree with you. The Christian God is a monster with truly horrible track record. On the other hand, there's beer (I'm drunk right now, for the record). So it evens out ;).
And do you think that someone who cares about what he Pope thinks about condoms (fuck birth control - think of AIDS) cares about The God Delusion?
Yes, Dawkins argues all kinds of things. Dawkins also refutes himself with his very own work on memetics: a Christian child is one who has had Christian memes imprinted, a Jewish child is one with Jewish memes imprinted, and a communist or social democrat child is one with communist or social democratic memes imprinted.
You can argue anything. However, there really is no alternative - if you can't trust the parents, you sure as Hell can't trust anyone else.
Again: do you honestly think that anyone who disagrees with Dawkins will buy his books?
What point?
"Atheism", for people who self-identify as atheists (as opposed to "weak atheism": just not believing in a god and not making a big deal about it), most certainly is a philosophy. That group certainly includes Dawkins, who is the only person who I have said anything about. Also, you conradict yourself here: you say "It (atheism) does not present any group" yet refer to "people who don't believe in God", wich certainly sounds like a group definition to me.
I don't know you, and don't give a shit about what you do or do not believe in. I'm arguing for the joy of arguing. And because I'm getting really tired of people who mangle both science and theology for ideological reasons.
Actually, yes, it (only talking to idiots) does change a lot. As far as I can tell, Dawkins is every bit as stupid as the people he argues. No, I take it back: not stupid, just idiotic. Those are not the same thing: stupid means you lack intellect, idiotic means you don't use it.
Or do you think that Dawkins honestly believes that his books are going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced? Because otherwise he's just wasting his time (or, more cynically, raking in the dollars by preaching to the choir).
No, I'm saying it's impossible to prove the existence or nonexistence of God(s) one way or another. Or the tooth fairy, for that matter.
For the record, I don't think that any God worth worshipping would "forsake" anyone. I wouldn't, and I'm just a man - and, for that matter, just a brother rather than father to all my fellow men.
Yes... And also promising it won't happen again. Also, the Old Testament should be understood as a product of its time - for Bronze Age barbarians, it's actually damn good. Of course we have moved beyond that since then, as we should have.
Don't worry, it won't take long anymore. US is heading down - and once it hits the bottom, it'll start heading back to the top again, because while the corporate raiders have looted the success, the basic ideas which allowed success in the first place haven't disappearead. In fact, I'd say there could well be an American Renaissance coming, once the worst crud - like quarter-capitalism and the multitude of law firms - gets kicked off the cart.
There can't be rebirth unless there's death first. That's something to remember and tender cynicism with, as one looks at the world.
To be fair, what other choices were there? Name a single non-asshole presidential candidate. Or, to make it somewhat easier: name a single presidential candidate in the last election who wasn't a murderous lunatic?
Politics nowadays isn't about choosing the best, it's about choosing the lesser evil. But even then people sometimes get enough, and huge shifts happen; just look at how True Finns (actually "basic finns") did in the last election in Finland.
Arguably, the problem before WW1 was that there had been peace in Europe for so long that everyone had forgotten what war is really like: people hold their guts in their hands and die. They tought it was an adventure camp of some sort, where you rough it up a few weeks and come back fine. And arguably, that's the problem with the US nowadays: the wars it fights are so one-sided that it's easy to forget what is actually happening down on the ground.
Now, a one-sided war is obviously a huge success for the military; it's a sign that they're doing their job very well. However, it requires a very high moral standard from the political leaders, because otherwise it's so very easy to degenerate into monsters. Sadly, the political leaders are, in the end, only humans, and can't provide the saintlike restraint that's required for safe control of godlike power. That leaves strict legalism as another possible check. Because of this, it's extremely dangerous that the rulers of the US keep on ignoring its laws to do what they wish. They might think they're doing what they think is right - even Bush probably thought so - and they might even be right; but the power to kill people from afar is inherently unsafe for the user, and should have safety checks attached.
It wasn't, it was spot-on. The weakening of unions is directly linked to the increasing income gap, which is hurting the vast majority of people.
You would be wrong then. Constantly worrying about your job doesn't make you perform 110% all the time; it makes you burn out and give into fatalism very fast. Unless, of course, you're a born strategist, in which case you decide grades based on who's dad knows who.
While unions can cause a few people to keep their jobs who shouldn't, it also means job security and reasonable income to lots more - and wanting to do your job well is a basic human drive, so once those are taken care of, that becomes an end to itself as well. The current trend of changing employers every couple years is horribly inefficient; it would be much better for everyone if people could stay with a single employer their whole life and rise within the organization. That way, the employees would get financial security necessary for long-term planning and debt-free living, and employers would get people who know every last obscure detail of their job, and who have reason to care about the continued success of their employer.
Just looking at the next quarter is the mentality of a raider. But even Tsingis-khan realized it's better to leave conquered areas intact to produce steadily, than to burn them down for short-term profit. But I guess there's a reason why Tsingis build an empire while modern CEOs run them down.
Corruption is an intrinsic part of any organization or system anyone has any interest in corrupting. Conservatists are entirely right in considering the government such an organization. They are entirely wrong in excluding corporations or free-market capitalism in general.
I truly can't say if you honestly believe in this absurd oversimplification, or if this is supposed to a parody.
Of course it is. A dogma is an abstract concept and quite unable to impose its will on anyone, since it doesn't have any. People holding to a dogma are a different matter entirely. And at that point it doesn't really matter what the dogma is; it has become a flag, a symbol to divide the world to us and them and justify oppressing or outright killing the latter.
Most people aren't obsessive-compulsive enough to impose their dogmas on others, but some are, and at that point it's up to the rest of the society whether they'll kill all opponents or write propaganda books.
Go to any forum where atheists and theists debate each other and watch the arguments used. Are they persuasive? Or are they just a pack of chimps flinging feces at each other? Because I've rarely seen the former - in fact, the only times I have has been when the people haven't tried to persuade each other, but have simply debated for fun.
Then again, I guess this doesn't really disagree with you: only a persuasive argument will work, and short of a personal appearance of God(s) there simply aren't any persuasive arguments about their existence.
It should also be noted that the whole concept of "God hands down morality and punishes you for disagreeing" is pretty much confined to monotheistic religions; and even for them, it's an oversimplification (and sometimes downright incorrect - even with basic Christianity, there's a view that sin creates its own punishment without any interference from God) - exactly the kind of oversimplification people engage in to make other people and their beliefs seem ridiculous, so they can be dismissed without bothering to actually argue them. This is also know as the "strawman argument".
Well, no. The real solution is to charge different price for different connection speeds. It's up to the seller to ensure he can deliver what the customer paid for. Nor is it acceptable to try to weasel out of it by lots and lots of small print; in fact, in much of the world, such attempts are a basis of being hold to be dealing in bad faith by the court - which, of course, it is.
Of course having to invest some of your income into updating the infrastructure eats into profits, but somehow, the telecomms in most of the world still manage to stay profitable. Perhaps you Americans are simply bad at business?
Enjoy your continued slide to third world status.
You'd think Dawkins would get along fine with religious leaders, seeing how they have the most dominant personality trait in common: neither can stand people not caring about what they care about.
We lose less than 5% of power now, when power plants pretty much immediately convert to high voltage. You can't do this with windmills, because a high-voltage line is far more expensive to erect than a low-voltage one, and most wind farms aren't going to be anywhere near the size of a normal power plant, which means you need far more of them.
Putting them elsewhere still takes up the same amount of land, and increases the transmit losses even more, since you're basically sending wind power to the UPS and then sending the power from there to the consumer.
Also, putting storage somewhere else than the windmills will make connecting the latter into the grid more complicated - you need variable frequency switches and voltage convertors to compensate for varying generator speeds. If we are going to get serious about this renewable energy thing, we need a DC smartgrid - our current AC grid is designed around the assumption that power stations are reliable and constant, and only load varies.
I'm sorry, did I hit a nerve?
for you maybe - the rest of us have no problems. Be fucking hard to debug if we couldn't.
For most people.
Squashfs is read-only and thus has no relevance to the topic of rolling back changes, since none can be made. Unionfs is actually pretty close to what I described, but still lacks the ability to show different versions to different execution contexts. And of course it requires specialized knowledge to set up, making it irrelevant to the average user.
Also, you keep using that word "weaselly". I do not think it means what you think it means.
Chroot is nice, if you are willing to make a copy from the whole filesystem for a suspected rogue program to play around in. Unionfs is closer, but still lacks the ability to define a different union for different execution contexts.
A windmill takes up a little postage-sized piece of dirt. It also produces almost no power, and even that only randomly. Windmills in sufficient qualities to produce a significant portion of an industrial society's power needs, their grid connections, and the storage systems to work around the random power output require huge amounts of land - and if that land is located in the middle of nowhere, you need even more windmills to cover the transmit losses.
Like the infamous UAC messages of Windows Vista, which popped up whenever any application tried to do anything, and did nothing but annoyed people and conditioned them to click allow on any message that pops up?
Modern computers don't have any security. Yes, this includes Linux, which isolates users from each other (to some extent) but doesn't give a single user any way of isolating his processes from each other and data. It's difficult to figure out what's happening in your system, and it's impossible to roll back any changes, besides reformatting and restoring from a backup. Even such basic functionality as letting a program change what it will, but only applying the changes only to said program's context - pretend-admin, in other words - is missing; you need to run a full virtual machine to get that.
Why can't you just create a context, and run programs in that context, letting them do what they will while preventing any effect outside the context? We do that with memory, and everyone agrees that memory protection is a good thing - yet when it comes to the filesystem, it's no can do?
The fact that computers operated by professionals for pay keep on getting pwned is irrefutable evidence for these facts.
Since a Pepsi can is made of aluminium, it would simply dissolve in HCl (and blow up if it was closed due to the build-up of hydrogen). And the rest of your statement is just as nonsensical - what, transferring files through FTP is somehow more dangerous than through HTTP?