Do you believe there are giant purple space bunnies who live in caves on the far side of the moon?
Sure, technically speaking there might be, but there is nothing in our experience of the real world that would give us any reason to give such an absurd proposition a moment's thought.
When most atheists assert a lack of belief in "God", this is what they mean -- that the probability of a "God" existing is infinitesimal, and it's best to go about life not worrying about "God" any more than one would worry about gigantic purple space bunnies.
So why do atheists spend so much time talking about something they don't believe in? Because the influence of religion in our society (particularly Christianity in the U.S.) is so pervasive that it seems normal. In spite of the alleged benefit of religions, they have caused a lot of evil in the world, so why should we accept the massive brainwashing of children to believe in these ancient myths as something "normal"? So atheists must be the ones who appear to make noise, but they're up against the deafening silence of a monolithic status quo which is horribly broken and must be fixed.
The only conclusion I could reach after banging my head against a wall a lot about that browser is that if to do serous Javascript programming, you just have to forget about Safari.
One day they'll catch up, I'm sure... but there need to be apps out there which people want to use before Apple realizes that their precious browser is broken. Let's go ahead and put them out there.
It doesn't download songs yet; it uses your existing iRATE playlist. I wrote it because the algorithm iRATE uses (or at least used to use) to decide which track to play next sucks. There was a problem where popular songs got "stuck" and you woudn't hear them for ages... that one may have been fixed, but the other problem, that old lower-rated tracks which you would expect to hear every once in a while you will never hear again. The main author of iRATE has declared that to be a non-problem, so I don't think it will ever be fixed.
AlterniRATE uses xmms to play tunes, and needs a couple of CPAN modules, but has no java dependency.
I'm not actively working on AlterniRATE anymore, but if anyone's interested in helping make it a full-fledged client, I'd probably get back on it.
I have my exim configured to redirect any address that starts with fc_ to me, but ditch the rest.
That way I can make up addresses at my leisure, but don't have to let through all the crap to random addresses (which I was getting tons of, to the weirdest names!)
Just filled in the e-mail form to the Honorable Martin Olav Sabo, my House Representative:
Please oppose H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act.
It seems to me there is a massive land-grab going on in the world of ideas; that vested interests are trying to make every possible communication or bit of data into "intellectual property" they can own and charge for. This bill is a part of that trend, and does the general public no good.
I agree with Mark Erickson, the director of NetCoaltion, who says this bill will "inevitably lead to the growing monopolization of the marketplace of ideas". It's hard for me to see how it could have any other purpose, since the important things that would be protected by this bill are already protected by current law.
I think the parent's point is that Wikipedia is covered under current law and doesn't need the protection of this bill.
Re:Christianity (What's Larry's interpretation?)
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
I am curious what, exactly, "Christianity" means to Larry.
I am not a Christian, and this is because of what "Christianity" has come to mean to me.
To keep it simple, let's just take one concept: the afterlife. To me, the belief that the concious narrative experience of one's own being continues after death in one or the other of the pseudo-material locations known as "Heaven" and "Hell" is part and parcel of Christianity.
If you don't accept that (and it's just one of the metaphysical teachings of Christianity which is difficult for me to accept) then, like me, you're not a Christian by my definition.
I know that other people consider themselves "Christian", and go about life being basically good people, but don't concern themselves at all with Christian metaphysics. They're cool people, but I don't understand their definition of "Christianity".
Larry, what do you think about the afterlife, "Heaven", and "Hell"? What do these things mean to you?
Ok, I thought I'd submit my really patentable item here -- even though I doubt it will be seen. I don't have time to write this up in legalese:
(If someone else wants to take a stab at that, you can have the $50 certificate if you do a good job)
When you go into a used-CD store to sell your CD, the clerk pops your used audio CD into his CD-ROM drive.
The program (patent pending) attempts to read from various places on the CD, statistically trying to cover the entire disk, and keeps a count of read errors. It spits out a number which represents the quality of the CD.
When you go to the login screen at either of those to bank sites, you will see that the secure server is really hosted at https://www.secure-site.com/, instead of the bank's site.
So, there you go, an easy way to tell.
BTW, Netcraft shows this site as running
Stronghold/3.0 Apache/1.3.12 C2NetEU/3012 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a mo
So, so much for Microsoft-bashing.
God, Slashdot has deteriorated. Whining and whining at the whiners. Does real information hurt or something?
The basic idea of Christianity is to try to be like Christ [... ] treating people like human beings
There are many ideas in Christianity. What you have chosen to emphasize makes you essentially no different from a good Buddhist, Pagan or Athiest. It seems you have found an aspect of your tradional religion you can focus on and be a good person. That's good, but what about the other parts of Christianity?
The Afterlife: Religion deals with what happens after you die. The Christian teaching is that there are two places, called Heaven and Hell, where one lives eternally after this brief mortal existence. Heaven is a good place, and Hell is full of torments. If you're not a Christian, you will go to Hell.
Original Sin: Christianity teaches that everyone is born evil. This is the way they get children to pray, they teach them they are bad for no concrete reason, and that they must beg God for forgiveness. (To me, it appears the intent is to demolish any innate sense of goodness a child might have, and replace that with total shame, so that the child will need Christianity to feel good about him/herself. One probably has to look at the phenomenon from the outside to see that.)
So, are these elements not bad, or are they not Christianity? Hell and Original Sin are certainly a large part of the teaching of the Bible. How do you deal with them?
when I suggested a defensive patent for Ogg Vorbis, my idea was shot down, on two counts:
That would destroy the whole "free" nature of the project, which would suck.
There's a helluva lot of prior art, so it couldn't possibly be patented.
The first point I agree with, in fact I felt a bit nauseous suggesting it in the first place.
The second point? Someone can patent "date windowing" and no one will be able to patent the algorithms in Ogg Vorbis? Sure, prior art can be proven after an expensive court battle.
But that point could be moot if the community can't foot the bill. Companies with deep pockets know this, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if their patent's not valid, as long as they can make you go broke on the way to court.
Antipatent would really seem to be the way to go with the key Ogg Vorbis algorithms.
Given the record of the Patent Office, and the deep pockets of the people who will want to squish Ogg, won't these algorithms need defensive patents to protect them?
I've heard about that car-door test, but I think that it's flawed, and I'll tell you why:
If you unlock her door for her, you're sending the message that you're looking for a chivalrous-model relationship, rather than an equitable, friends relationship. In not opening the door for you, the woman is simply going along with what you seem to indicate that you want.
I can hardly fault her for that.
Me, I act like I expect her to open her own damn door, because that's the time of woman I hope to find in the long run.
You need to communicate clearly and sincerly in all of your actions if you want someone else to do the same for you.
I think that much of the problem lies in the mechanics of our elections. The main reason I know that anyone votes not because the candidate they're voting for is particularly great, it's to keep the other, really bad guy from getting elected.
It's a depresssing thing, to keep voting for the lesser of two evils; it can really wear you down. Under the current system, I can hardly blame people who don't vote.
I gave up voting that way some years ago, and now always vote for a candidate whose views I actually like. Such candidates are lucky to get 1% of the votes. I do it because I like to "participate", but in terms of the outcome, it obviously makes no difference whether I go to the polls or not.
I have heard a proposal called instant runoff which would change all that. The way it works is this:
You get to vote for a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice... excactly how many doesn't affect the general scheme. Everybody's 1st choice is tabulated. If one candidate has a majority at this point, he's the winnner. If not, though... The candidate with the fewest votes is taken off the roster, and the people who voted for him have their votes re-cast to be their 2nd choice. This process is repeated until their is a majority.
With this scheme, there is suddenly no penalty for voting for the candidate you actully most favor, because you can cast the "lesser of 2 evils" as your second choice!
I suspect if it were ever implimented, minority parties that get typically 1% of the votes or less would suddenly find themselves getting 10%.
This is not the only such scheme, but it's a good one, and considering it makes it really clear how lame our current voting process is.
How is something like the mechanics of the voting process changed within the current system of government?
My understanding of "begging the question" has always been when a statement gives rise to an obvious (but unstated) question. A five-year gap on your résumé can be said to "beg the question"... so much so that you can state just that and everyone knows what the question is. This is the only usage I'm familar with, and it makes a lot of sense to me, whereas "conclusion stated in your premises" seems more of a semantic stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you believe there are giant purple space bunnies who live in caves on the far side of the moon?
Sure, technically speaking there might be, but there is nothing in our experience of the real world that would give us any reason to give such an absurd proposition a moment's thought.
When most atheists assert a lack of belief in "God", this is what they mean -- that the probability of a "God" existing is infinitesimal, and it's best to go about life not worrying about "God" any more than one would worry about gigantic purple space bunnies.
So why do atheists spend so much time talking about something they don't believe in? Because the influence of religion in our society (particularly Christianity in the U.S.) is so pervasive that it seems normal. In spite of the alleged benefit of religions, they have caused a lot of evil in the world, so why should we accept the massive brainwashing of children to believe in these ancient myths as something "normal"? So atheists must be the ones who appear to make noise, but they're up against the deafening silence of a monolithic status quo which is horribly broken and must be fixed.
Here, listen to a real atheist, and find out what they're actually talking about, instead of just trying to imagine what they must think.
http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm
It's possible the latest version has caught up by now, but I found quite recently that I couldn't use a function as the replacement in String.replace() (like perl's s///e).
The only conclusion I could reach after banging my head against a wall a lot about that browser is that if to do serous Javascript programming, you just have to forget about Safari.
One day they'll catch up, I'm sure ... but there need to be apps out there which people want to use before Apple realizes that their precious browser is broken. Let's go ahead and put them out there.
It doesn't download songs yet; it uses your existing iRATE playlist. I wrote it because the algorithm iRATE uses (or at least used to use) to decide which track to play next sucks. There was a problem where popular songs got "stuck" and you woudn't hear them for ages ... that one may have been fixed, but the other problem, that old lower-rated tracks which you would expect to hear every once in a while you will never hear again. The main author of iRATE has declared that to be a non-problem, so I don't think it will ever be fixed.
AlterniRATE uses xmms to play tunes, and needs a couple of CPAN modules, but has no java dependency.
I'm not actively working on AlterniRATE anymore, but if anyone's interested in helping make it a full-fledged client, I'd probably get back on it.
I have my exim configured to redirect any address that starts with fc_ to me, but ditch the rest.
That way I can make up addresses at my leisure, but don't have to let through all the crap to random addresses (which I was getting tons of, to the weirdest names!)
Just filled in the e-mail form to the Honorable Martin Olav Sabo, my House Representative:
Please oppose H.R. 3261, the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act.
It seems to me there is a massive land-grab going on in the world of ideas; that vested interests are trying to make every possible communication or bit of data into "intellectual property" they can own and charge for. This bill is a part of that trend, and does the general public no good.
I agree with Mark Erickson, the director of NetCoaltion, who says this bill will "inevitably lead to the growing monopolization of the marketplace of ideas". It's hard for me to see how it could have any other purpose, since the important things that would be protected by this bill are already protected by current law.
I think the parent's point is that Wikipedia is covered under current law and doesn't need the protection of this bill.
I am not a Christian, and this is because of what "Christianity" has come to mean to me.
To keep it simple, let's just take one concept: the afterlife. To me, the belief that the concious narrative experience of one's own being continues after death in one or the other of the pseudo-material locations known as "Heaven" and "Hell" is part and parcel of Christianity.
If you don't accept that (and it's just one of the metaphysical teachings of Christianity which is difficult for me to accept) then, like me, you're not a Christian by my definition.
I know that other people consider themselves "Christian", and go about life being basically good people, but don't concern themselves at all with Christian metaphysics. They're cool people, but I don't understand their definition of "Christianity".
Larry, what do you think about the afterlife, "Heaven", and "Hell"? What do these things mean to you?
When you go into a used-CD store to sell your CD, the clerk pops your used audio CD into his CD-ROM drive.
The program (patent pending) attempts to read from various places on the CD, statistically trying to cover the entire disk, and keeps a count of read errors. It spits out a number which represents the quality of the CD.
Obvious, but probably patentable.
Maybe they're trying to obtain security by running their Winshit software under WINE
scary thought, isn't it?
Oops.
I did a little research, and found out there is an easy way to tell.
I couldn't find The Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, but I did find http://www.bankofoklahoma.com/ and http://www.sovereignbank.com/.
When you go to the login screen at either of those to bank sites, you will see that the secure server is really hosted at https://www.secure-site.com/, instead of the bank's site.
So, there you go, an easy way to tell.
BTW, Netcraft shows this site as running Stronghold/3.0 Apache/1.3.12 C2NetEU/3012 (Unix) PHP/3.0.16 mod_ssl/2.6.4 OpenSSL/0.9.5a mo So, so much for Microsoft-bashing.
God, Slashdot has deteriorated. Whining and whining at the whiners. Does real information hurt or something?
There are many ideas in Christianity. What you have chosen to emphasize makes you essentially no different from a good Buddhist, Pagan or Athiest. It seems you have found an aspect of your tradional religion you can focus on and be a good person. That's good, but what about the other parts of Christianity?
So, are these elements not bad, or are they not Christianity? Hell and Original Sin are certainly a large part of the teaching of the Bible. How do you deal with them?
- That would destroy the whole "free" nature of the project, which would suck.
- There's a helluva lot of prior art, so it couldn't possibly be patented.
The first point I agree with, in fact I felt a bit nauseous suggesting it in the first place.The second point? Someone can patent "date windowing" and no one will be able to patent the algorithms in Ogg Vorbis? Sure, prior art can be proven after an expensive court battle. But that point could be moot if the community can't foot the bill. Companies with deep pockets know this, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference if their patent's not valid, as long as they can make you go broke on the way to court.
Antipatent would really seem to be the way to go with the key Ogg Vorbis algorithms.
Like, now?
Not "indentation as syntax" everywhere! That's scary.
Unless you do it right and outlaw tabs completely. That'd be okay.
http://linuxberg.digsys.bg/files/console/media/
Looks like 0.91 is the latest binary available -- there is source for 0.92.0 and 0.93.4 at the same site, but no binaries of those.
f
If you unlock her door for her, you're sending the message that you're looking for a chivalrous-model relationship, rather than an equitable, friends relationship. In not opening the door for you, the woman is simply going along with what you seem to indicate that you want.
I can hardly fault her for that.
Me, I act like I expect her to open her own damn door, because that's the time of woman I hope to find in the long run.
You need to communicate clearly and sincerly in all of your actions if you want someone else to do the same for you.
It's a depresssing thing, to keep voting for the lesser of two evils; it can really wear you down. Under the current system, I can hardly blame people who don't vote.
I gave up voting that way some years ago, and now always vote for a candidate whose views I actually like. Such candidates are lucky to get 1% of the votes. I do it because I like to "participate", but in terms of the outcome, it obviously makes no difference whether I go to the polls or not.
I have heard a proposal called instant runoff which would change all that. The way it works is this:
You get to vote for a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice ... excactly how many doesn't affect the general scheme. ...
Everybody's 1st choice is tabulated. If one candidate has a majority at this point, he's the winnner. If not, though
The candidate with the fewest votes is taken off the roster, and the people who voted for him have their votes re-cast to be their 2nd choice.
This process is repeated until their is a majority.
With this scheme, there is suddenly no penalty for voting for the candidate you actully most favor, because you can cast the "lesser of 2 evils" as your second choice!
I suspect if it were ever implimented, minority parties that get typically 1% of the votes or less would suddenly find themselves getting 10%.
This is not the only such scheme, but it's a good one, and considering it makes it really clear how lame our current voting process is.
How is something like the mechanics of the voting process changed within the current system of government?
Look a little ways down the page, at the section starting with "Ext3 support is getting closer".
My understanding of "begging the question" has always been when a statement gives rise to an obvious (but unstated) question. A five-year gap on your résumé can be said to "beg the question" ... so much so that you can state just that and everyone knows what the question is. This is the only usage I'm familar with, and it makes a lot of sense to me, whereas "conclusion stated in your premises" seems more of a semantic stretch.