Just remember what Pascal said: If you believe and you are wrong, you've at least led a good life; if you believe and you're right, heaven is on your way. If you don't believe and you're right, you've lived your life the way you wanted to; but if you're wrong....which outcomes pan out the best?
Pascal's Wager is a classic example of a false dilema -- it assumes that either the Christian God exists, or there is no God. He completely ignores the existence of other religions whose deities might not appreciate you worshipping the wrong godhead.
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox is still pre-1.0. I'd bet lots of software goes through similar name changes during development; it's just that since this is open-source we're privy to it.
Before we can change the net, and make it more able to reflect the real public interest, taking it under democratic control, we must remove it from the hands of these groups, whose time, like that of the elves in Middle-Earth, is over.
So what's more democratic than a system that allows anyone to create content that anyone else on Earth can read?
The places where that doesn't hold true -- China, frex -- just happen to be the same places where the government controls the Internet. I don't think that's a coincidence.
ouch, I think someone has been brainwashed by his government.
Yes, all Americans who disagree with you on the UN must've been brainwashed, because the UN is so obviously good that no person could ever formulate a negative view of it under their own free will.
A race car driver is facing far more risks than an astronaut - he drives his car every day (in training or during the race) only slightly below the threshold of instant death.
The question isn't whether it's dangerous but whether it's more dangerous than it should be -- and the shuttles are. Given what we were promised when they were built, there's no reason why one of them should've experienced a catastrophic failure yet, let alone two. And in both cases, the problem should've been caught before hand.
This isn't like a race car driver; it's like a race car driver whose pit crew lets him go out with a leaking brake line.
Myself, I would rather die in a fiery explosion than from a burglar's gun.
Except there's no evidence any shuttle astronaut ever died in an explosion.
I refues to pay for an entire album (10-16 tracks?) when only 3 are listenable. Maybe if the record industry quit pushing out garbage people would buy, oh and lowered the price of cd's a little, they've been nearly the same price for 10 years now (at least where i live, new cd's sell for around $15 CAN).
Broaden your horizons and stop listening to the mass-market pap. There are plenty of indy labels that (A) put out better music than anything available from the major labels, and (B) price their products reasonably.
Then you are stuck ripping all your old, scratched up CDs to imperfect digital copies - a major hassle to say the least.
Scratched CDs? What are you doing, playing frisbee with them? I have five hundred CDs, some of them fifteen years old, and the only one that's damaged is one I dropped on the floor in its case.
And since CDs are a digital media, there's nothing being lost unless you compress them too much -- which most people do, which is why MP3s sound awful on a good sound system.
Why would I pay that much when I could pay so much less at Wal-mart?
Okay, I agree with your point on the price of CDs... but Wal-Mart? If you're musical taste is wider than the Top 40, there's nothing worth your money there.
Y'know... Registration. Like the nag-screen at the New York Times,
But the WaPo doesn't require registration. There's no name required, no email address, no user ID, no password. It just asks for a year of birth, sex, and zip-code -- in other words, it's a demographic survey to show advertizers, who pay money so the Post doesn't have to charge online readers.
As long as they know the risks and they're not wasting an extra assload of money by killing too many of them, it's fine by me.
The problem is, NASA is killing too many of them. Each shuttle was supposed to have an operational life of about 100 missions; the Challenger blew up on its 10th, and the Columbia crashed after its 28th. On the whole, the fleet has a failure rate of almost 2%. Excuse me if I find that unacceptably high.
NASA will probably be extra-vigilant for the next few years as they were after the Challenger, but then they'll slack off and we'll have another disaster. Hopefully by the time that happens, someone will've claimed the X-Prize and we won't have to rely on this bloated bureaucracy and its flying death-traps.
Actually, two major hypothesis exist to explain this fine tuning of the universe, one is the design theory and the other one is the multiverse theory where it is assumed, that the there are many universes, and we just happen to life in one that permits live.
You don't have to assume the existence of other universes, only that they're possible. The question is whether the combination of laws that exist in this universe are fine-tuned to give rise to life and intelligence, or whether they'd be emergent properties in many/most/all other possible universes -- in other words, whether something that qualifies as life would exist if the Plank Constant or charge of an electron were different.
At the Great Pyramid of Giza, the ratio of the length of one side of the base to the perpendicular height of the pyramid is about 2/phi, making the slant height of the pyramid side proportionately equal to phi. The result is that each side of the pyramid is a Golden Triangle.
Here's a neat trick. Make a list of important numbers -- ratios like Pi and Phi, scientific constants, the circumfrence of the Earth, distance from the Earth to the moon, etc. Then measure a random household object -- your TV, radio, a CD -- and copy down all the dimensions. Now multiply and divide each of the measurements with each of important numbers. When you look at the results, pick out anything that looks interesting -- like the width of your television in centimeters divided by Pi equals ten times Phi, or your door is 1/1,000,000 the circumference of the moon.
If you have enough measurements and enough important numbers, you'll eventually find some combination that gives you a result of [cue thermian] ~cosmic significance~.
And it really is a great book, and the point of the "research" and the "tired old conspiracy theories" is the fact that he uses his research as "FACT" to prove/disprove some of those conspiracy theories, which is definitely not "tired" nor "old".
Just because you've never encountered it before it appeared in a best-seller doesn't mean it's not old. Robert Anton Wilson and Tom Robbins were playing with the same ideas back when Nixon was President -- and doing a much better job at it.
because 1 of the hundreds of processes was probably hung and had a grace period to get its stuff together before it got killed.
And when a woman refuses to talk to you because you didn't notice her new haircut, it's because of one of the million processes in her brain. Both cases qualify as "moody" in my book.
computers do EXACTLY what you tell it to do. you just don't know what you're telling it to do (with the software).
So why is it some nights my computer shuts down within two seconds of me telling it to do so, while on others the "Please wait while the system shuts down" message is still there when I get up in the morning?
Computers are moody, especially Windows machines. Surely everyone's had the experience of a program that won't install properly the first time, but works perfectly when you retry without doing anything else, or the Blue Screen of Death that appears when all you did was touch the mouse, or an error message that pops up 1% of the time when you start a program.
The problem is that computers are designed by geeks for geeks. They need to be designed by skilled industrial designers for complete morons.
And for us gearheads there should be the option to buy complex and tempramental computers/OSes, just like people can still buy cars with manual transmissions.
So basically you think most people should own a WebTV and game-console instead of a full-fledged computer? And what would that do to the cost of the real computers?
and in a new twist, the latest version of the google toolbar returns results with the page one results being filled with nothing but ads related to the search. you have to go to page 2 for the standard results.
The solution's simple -- switch to Mozilla and install the Googlebar -- it contains even more functionality than Google's official toolbar for IE and returns results as though you'd searched from Google's main page.
Or, if you don't want to switch browsers, you can install the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search even without a browser window.
It's a monopoly racket, it always has been and it's going to take something dramatic to break it up.
It's not a monopoly -- even though most colleges have their own bookstores, there's nothing forcing you to shop there. If you don't like the prices, just order from Britain.
My campus (the University of Delaware) had this really huge fucking bilding. I think thay called it a library.In it it had a special section where you could go and check out a text book for a few hours.
Check it out for a few hours? Yeah, that's going to do a lot of good if you need the book in class. Or do they have enough copies for more than a couple students?
No, actually, it's both. Without dictionaries, spelling was entirely phonetic and varied based upon regional accents -- and often you'll find words spelled five different ways within a single manuscript.
Even Spenser and Shakespeare, who wrote in modern English, used some pretty funky spellings which are usually cleaned up in modern editions.
Chaucer was one of the forefathers of the English language, and considered by many scholars to be one of the first major poets to write not in French or Latin (as was popular in the day), but in the language of the common people -- English.
No, actually, Chaucer is pretty late in the corpus of Middle English literature.
English disappeared as a literary language for about a century after Hastings, but it re-emerged a good 200 years before Chaucer was born, and was used for numerous popular and important works. Chaucer may be the greatest Middle English author (and thus the one taught in high school), but he is by no means the first.
Why do companies feel the need to squeeze an entire application onto one sheet of paper? If a company's interviewing so many people that an extra page will have a more than negligible cost, there's something wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember what Pascal said: If you believe and you are wrong, you've at least led a good life; if you believe and you're right, heaven is on your way. If you don't believe and you're right, you've lived your life the way you wanted to; but if you're wrong....which outcomes pan out the best?
Pascal's Wager is a classic example of a false dilema -- it assumes that either the Christian God exists, or there is no God. He completely ignores the existence of other religions whose deities might not appreciate you worshipping the wrong godhead.
Well you could use the plain old vanilla Mozilla package.
Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox is still pre-1.0. I'd bet lots of software goes through similar name changes during development; it's just that since this is open-source we're privy to it.
Before we can change the net, and make it more able to reflect the real public interest, taking it under democratic control, we must remove it from the hands of these groups, whose time, like that of the elves in Middle-Earth, is over.
So what's more democratic than a system that allows anyone to create content that anyone else on Earth can read?
The places where that doesn't hold true -- China, frex -- just happen to be the same places where the government controls the Internet. I don't think that's a coincidence.
ouch, I think someone has been brainwashed by his government.
Yes, all Americans who disagree with you on the UN must've been brainwashed, because the UN is so obviously good that no person could ever formulate a negative view of it under their own free will.
Wow, debate in your house must be fun.
A race car driver is facing far more risks than an astronaut - he drives his car every day (in training or during the race) only slightly below the threshold of instant death.
The question isn't whether it's dangerous but whether it's more dangerous than it should be -- and the shuttles are. Given what we were promised when they were built, there's no reason why one of them should've experienced a catastrophic failure yet, let alone two. And in both cases, the problem should've been caught before hand.
This isn't like a race car driver; it's like a race car driver whose pit crew lets him go out with a leaking brake line.
Myself, I would rather die in a fiery explosion than from a burglar's gun.
Except there's no evidence any shuttle astronaut ever died in an explosion.
I refues to pay for an entire album (10-16 tracks?) when only 3 are listenable. Maybe if the record industry quit pushing out garbage people would buy, oh and lowered the price of cd's a little, they've been nearly the same price for 10 years now (at least where i live, new cd's sell for around $15 CAN).
Broaden your horizons and stop listening to the mass-market pap. There are plenty of indy labels that (A) put out better music than anything available from the major labels, and (B) price their products reasonably.
Then you are stuck ripping all your old, scratched up CDs to imperfect digital copies - a major hassle to say the least.
Scratched CDs? What are you doing, playing frisbee with them? I have five hundred CDs, some of them fifteen years old, and the only one that's damaged is one I dropped on the floor in its case.
And since CDs are a digital media, there's nothing being lost unless you compress them too much -- which most people do, which is why MP3s sound awful on a good sound system.
Why would I pay that much when I could pay so much less at Wal-mart?
... but Wal-Mart? If you're musical taste is wider than the Top 40, there's nothing worth your money there.
Okay, I agree with your point on the price of CDs
Y'know... Registration. Like the nag-screen at the New York Times,
But the WaPo doesn't require registration. There's no name required, no email address, no user ID, no password. It just asks for a year of birth, sex, and zip-code -- in other words, it's a demographic survey to show advertizers, who pay money so the Post doesn't have to charge online readers.
As long as they know the risks and they're not wasting an extra assload of money by killing too many of them, it's fine by me.
The problem is, NASA is killing too many of them. Each shuttle was supposed to have an operational life of about 100 missions; the Challenger blew up on its 10th, and the Columbia crashed after its 28th. On the whole, the fleet has a failure rate of almost 2%. Excuse me if I find that unacceptably high.
NASA will probably be extra-vigilant for the next few years as they were after the Challenger, but then they'll slack off and we'll have another disaster. Hopefully by the time that happens, someone will've claimed the X-Prize and we won't have to rely on this bloated bureaucracy and its flying death-traps.
Actually, two major hypothesis exist to explain this fine tuning of the universe, one is the design theory and the other one is the multiverse theory where it is assumed, that the there are many universes, and we just happen to life in one that permits live.
You don't have to assume the existence of other universes, only that they're possible. The question is whether the combination of laws that exist in this universe are fine-tuned to give rise to life and intelligence, or whether they'd be emergent properties in many/most/all other possible universes -- in other words, whether something that qualifies as life would exist if the Plank Constant or charge of an electron were different.
At the Great Pyramid of Giza, the ratio of the length of one side of the base to the perpendicular height of the pyramid is about 2/phi, making the slant height of the pyramid side proportionately equal to phi. The result is that each side of the pyramid is a Golden Triangle.
Here's a neat trick. Make a list of important numbers -- ratios like Pi and Phi, scientific constants, the circumfrence of the Earth, distance from the Earth to the moon, etc. Then measure a random household object -- your TV, radio, a CD -- and copy down all the dimensions. Now multiply and divide each of the measurements with each of important numbers. When you look at the results, pick out anything that looks interesting -- like the width of your television in centimeters divided by Pi equals ten times Phi, or your door is 1/1,000,000 the circumference of the moon.
If you have enough measurements and enough important numbers, you'll eventually find some combination that gives you a result of [cue thermian] ~cosmic significance~.
And it really is a great book, and the point of the "research" and the "tired old conspiracy theories" is the fact that he uses his research as "FACT" to prove/disprove some of those conspiracy theories, which is definitely not "tired" nor "old".
Just because you've never encountered it before it appeared in a best-seller doesn't mean it's not old. Robert Anton Wilson and Tom Robbins were playing with the same ideas back when Nixon was President -- and doing a much better job at it.
The Da Vinci Code? A Robert Ludlum book with a bunch of ideas cribbed from Foucault's Pendulum
because 1 of the hundreds of processes was probably hung and had a grace period to get its stuff together before it got killed.
And when a woman refuses to talk to you because you didn't notice her new haircut, it's because of one of the million processes in her brain. Both cases qualify as "moody" in my book.
computers do EXACTLY what you tell it to do. you just don't know what you're telling it to do (with the software).
So why is it some nights my computer shuts down within two seconds of me telling it to do so, while on others the "Please wait while the system shuts down" message is still there when I get up in the morning?
Computers are moody, especially Windows machines. Surely everyone's had the experience of a program that won't install properly the first time, but works perfectly when you retry without doing anything else, or the Blue Screen of Death that appears when all you did was touch the mouse, or an error message that pops up 1% of the time when you start a program.
The problem is that computers are designed by geeks for geeks. They need to be designed by skilled industrial designers for complete morons. And for us gearheads there should be the option to buy complex and tempramental computers/OSes, just like people can still buy cars with manual transmissions.
So basically you think most people should own a WebTV and game-console instead of a full-fledged computer? And what would that do to the cost of the real computers?
and in a new twist, the latest version of the google toolbar returns results with the page one results being filled with nothing but ads related to the search. you have to go to page 2 for the standard results.
The solution's simple -- switch to Mozilla and install the Googlebar -- it contains even more functionality than Google's official toolbar for IE and returns results as though you'd searched from Google's main page.
Or, if you don't want to switch browsers, you can install the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search even without a browser window.
It's a monopoly racket, it always has been and it's going to take something dramatic to break it up.
It's not a monopoly -- even though most colleges have their own bookstores, there's nothing forcing you to shop there. If you don't like the prices, just order from Britain.
My campus (the University of Delaware) had this really huge fucking bilding. I think thay called it a library.In it it had a special section where you could go and check out a text book for a few hours.
Check it out for a few hours? Yeah, that's going to do a lot of good if you need the book in class. Or do they have enough copies for more than a couple students?
It's middle English, not "rough spelling".
No, actually, it's both. Without dictionaries, spelling was entirely phonetic and varied based upon regional accents -- and often you'll find words spelled five different ways within a single manuscript.
Even Spenser and Shakespeare, who wrote in modern English, used some pretty funky spellings which are usually cleaned up in modern editions.
Chaucer was one of the forefathers of the English language, and considered by many scholars to be one of the first major poets to write not in French or Latin (as was popular in the day), but in the language of the common people -- English.
No, actually, Chaucer is pretty late in the corpus of Middle English literature.
English disappeared as a literary language for about a century after Hastings, but it re-emerged a good 200 years before Chaucer was born, and was used for numerous popular and important works. Chaucer may be the greatest Middle English author (and thus the one taught in high school), but he is by no means the first.
Why do companies feel the need to squeeze an entire application onto one sheet of paper? If a company's interviewing so many people that an extra page will have a more than negligible cost, there's something wrong.
Take a page from Keith on The Office.
Brent: Now where it asks for your strengths, you put "accounts".
Keith: Yeah.
Brent: But accounts is your job. And here, you're asked about your weaknesses and you put "Exema"!
Sorry, couldn't resist.