Except that it cannot completely be an alternative to IE because IE supports something that FireFox doesn't.
Fine. But FireFox (and others, such as Mac's Safari) support something highly worthwhile that IE most definitely does not. Namely, a reasonably safe and secure browsing experience.
Some markets will opt for security and safety, using technologies that are (compared to active x) much (duh) safer and more secure.
Others will continue to endure spyware, viri, adware and various trojans and other invasive garbage. Those are "IE features" FireFox doesn't want to offer. Or let me put it this way -- they are "features" that this FF user doesn't want to be "given", because they are inevitably prefaced with the command "bend over."
I truly think that to impress ActiveX upon FireFox would be just about the worst thing the FF developers could do. FireFox provides a better experience. That's why it's doing so amazingly well. Put ActiveX in there, and that experience is going to begin to degrade. It may go as far as to be as risky to surf with FF as it is to surf with with IE.
Does anyone really want that, other than the companies who have embraced and extended Microsoft's Active-X? Is there anything truly significant you can do with Active-X that you cannot also do with Java?
Sure... you pick a technology that is proprietary to one browser, that browser starts to lose favor with the user community, and definitely, you will have work to do. Time to start studying Java. It's not time for the junk technology to be imported into FF to extend the EOL of some Active-X product.
Java was designed to be secure. It's been remarkably successful at it, too.
No. The only thing that is fair is when things are fair.
Any time there is a serious imbalance, there is a risk that the side holding the best cards will use that power in a manner that no one else is able to justify.
We see it at every level of human endeavor; children who bully non-conformists, husbands who beat their wives essentially because they can (and wives who bully, browbeat and otherwise abuse husbands because they're constitutionally unable to respond), churches who excommunicate or otherwise sanction members when those members don't toe the line (instead of counseling and advising and the reasonable things a social group with a particular outlook can do), cities that take property from landowners not to leverage a service to the public, but to enable a commercial enterprise, states that uniformly take children from fathers under the absurd presumption that mothers are superior human beings, countries that take resources from weaker countries or force them to adopt their way of life (for the former, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait serves as a good example, for the latter, our recent invasion of Iraq serves just about as well, IMHO.)
In contrast, the underlying ethics of a particular person or institution are what prevents abuses of power; as soon as a person or institution becomes bereft of ethics, or if they never had a solid ethical foundation, misuse of that power is almost inevitable. History shows us again and again that power has the same effect as a drug on some personalities, and often those personalities are the ones who seek and obtain power.
It doesn't do any good to hope, or wish, at least I don't think it does. If you don't raise your children carefully, if you allow your children to bully, if you stand for your church sanctioning those who aren't "normal", if you allow cities and states and governments to walk on you and walk on others... then you, and everyone else, reap what you sow.
One of the costs of war is the life you may lose and if that's too compared to what you may gain, then you cannot fight.
With regard to war -- politicians are typically willing for you to lose your life; the political will to go to war is entirely divorced from the fear of dying in war. They have the will; you have the fear. You need ethics and principles to control over-reaching governments.
I always thought that the politicians who declare war should be in the first year's mandatory front-line participants. Might calm them down a bit. Unfortunately, it's not that way. There are even covenants in place where politicians are immune from attack. I'm not talking about ambassadors, which of course is sensible, I'm talking about heads of state. Disgusting, in my view.
I launched this rant (sorry) because I feel that in the US, we've lost our way. 20 years ago, the idea of the US attacking another country without ourselves having been attacked was laughable. Today, it is the norm. I sympathize with your hope, but I must observe that it is not hope that will rein in the kind of people who run our government. If we sit around and let them continue to abuse us, and the people around us, all the hope in the world won't prevent a pariah status far more intense than the one we "enjoy" already.
It's not about (more) overwhelming power. Don't focus on power now. We're way too far along for that (go look up what a J-SOW does, for instance, or consider how a stealth fighter will fare against some third-world's 1960's-era surplus radar installation.) It's about ethics. Look at the US government. Decide if you like what you see. At the very least, vote against those who you feel are doing wrong. We have the power as a group to say "if you do this, you will not stay in office" and truly, right now, I think that's all most of these politicians understand.
Because it is fighters that are pushed to the edge (or designed to the edge) of the human performance envelope, but not pushed to, or designed to the potential of their own.
A human will black out during some types of maneuvers unless the aircraft is prevented from making them (from simple tricks like spring return to center for the stick after a blackout to computers that measure g force and won't let the flight envelope go that far in the first place.)
Pilots use "G-suits" to try and keep blood in their heads by controlling pressure on their legs (for instance) but you can only go so far with that type of thing. And, as it's low tech, the opposition can do it as well.
An AI won't have a problem with a very high G turn. A human is in deep trouble. Airframes can be designed for considerably more than a human can take, if there is no human pilot. If there is, there is little point in such a design -- the aircraft will become pilotless if it enters such a flight regime.
Now, put this up against the fact that most other countries can't afford to put an AI in the pilots seat, and the result is continuous overwhelming air superiority without risk to humans on our side. That's the combination of factors that drives the urge to go in this particular direction.
There's another advantage for me, not quite so obvious, that Python's indentation mechanism brings to the table.
I program a lot. In the course of my job, I have to review a lot of other people's code. I have a particular bracing style I use; and sure enough, I've not only become accustomed to it but also "tuned" to it to the point where it becomes difficult to read someone else's code if (for instance) they use the "K&R" style:
if (condition) { ....do_this_stuff(); }
Because at my company, code looks like this:
if (condition) { ....do_this_stuff(); }
Those two styles lead to a considerable difference in code density, and so affect readability and my "tuned" response to what I see. And there are so many other C/Java coding styles re bracing and indentation, or lack thereof.
In Python, there is one indentation style. Just one. Not bunches of them. So I get used to the way Python looks, the "tuning" goes into my backbrain or wherever the heck that stuff lives, and I can read anyone's code. This is a distinct benefit for me, and I suspect for others as well.
I would have loved a C compiler that didn't use braces, but used indentation instead. Man, that would have been glorious. Sigh.
Once you've fixed the gazillion-th bug caused by dangling pointers or out of bounds access you start to realize that...
...you're a really bad programmer and someone should teach you a few things, like how to manage resources.
I program in C every day and I haven't coded an error of the type you describe in over a year. I would know if I had -- our C memory manager catches all manner of pointer problems, accounts for all memory allocation and freeing, memory over- and under-runs, gives us stats on memory allocations and so on.
I'm definitely a Python fan, but your agument against C isn't valid. It's just an argument that crummy programmers write crummy C programs, which is not news.
Python is a perfectly reasonable language for coding certain types of applications, and it is also a good language for programmers that aren't that skilled because it puts a strong safety net in place for many types of errors with the exception system it uses. C is something else entirely.
I remember too. The first reasonable computer I actually owned (and built) had 2k of ram. I wrote tight code -- no other choice. In machine language, of course.
Something that small, tight, fast graphics applications can leverage is using ram for images, which I think you'll probably agree is a good use of ram. You'll probably also agree that such use is compromised by using that ram for a 10 megabyte implementation of a method which gathers in a whole bunch of unused or overcomplicated ancillary code when that same method could have been implemented in a few K of specialized code.
For a concrete example of this kind of mess, generate an empty sample application using MFC and Windows OO interface. It'll have a menu, a window and some sample text. It'll also run you many, many megabytes.
Then grab a copy of (Charles Petzold's) "programming windows" and write the same bare-bones menu/window/text demo it starts with using the win32 API. Observe the resulting 11k executable. You have what you need, no more, no less, and to the enduser, the functionality is exactly the same. Or, you can write it in assembler, if you have the skills, and you can probably get it down to 1k if you're careful about how you link it. Linux is really good at "tricky linking" to get tiny apps, I've never actually tried that in Windows, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised if you could do something similar there. Funny stuff, these leaps of technology. Size bloat isn't really about features; it is about abstraction, but man, oh man do you ever pay for it. Abstraction does make some things easier, and hence, it can certainly engender more features... but again, the price is high. Personally, I don't want to get any more abstract that I have to for production software I intend for people to use to improve their productivity.
Hypothetical: If an application (any kind) "improves" from 90 features, 50 megs and 50 seconds to 100 features, 100 megs, and 100 seconds; then a competing application comes to your attention which takes 5 megs, gives you 200 features (which include the above 100 features) and takes only 20 seconds to run... then it is clear that the reason that things have changed in the former application is not what you are assuming it is.:-)
These ratios aren't exactly hypothetical, as I'm sure you have gathered.:-)
What I am saying, or at least trying to say, is that the much-lauded OO technology that is so prevalant in modern apps and modern OS's is carrying a very heavy, and unnecessary, penalty for the end user. I've seen it argued that it doesn't have to, and I accept that argument, but I've yet to see an example of a big application that proves the point. It appears to me that when OO apps reach middle size and larger, they get (sometimes considerably) slower and they get very, very large. And in the case of an OS, I don't have to generalize -- this has been an almost 100% uniform result.
Ah, well, I'd give them credit for jamming a GUI inside the application and so excuse the fact that they are many times our executable size, despite offering less functionality -- if we hadn't done pretty much the same thing. Our own toolbar API, our own button API, our own list API, our own dialog API, our own drawing API, our own selection API, our own memory API (which lives on top the most basic allocation functions in all the OS's, of course.) Our GUI stuff is a little more flexible in that it generally looks and acts more like (at least some version) of the host OS. I have some Photoshop versions where the mac-origin of the menus is pretty obvious. You can also tell our GUI code was based on older windows versions, if you look; we've got a distinctly "win95" look to the app, that's because we're using our own APIs for a lot of GUI things and no one has bothered to make them look "XP-ish" because, frankly, we don't really care much how it looks, we're focused on how well it works. But what you won't see is our Windows version looking like our Amiga version and so on. I'm not saying that's better, it's just a side-effect of how we did our internal GUI layers.
And, as it turns out, our software presently runs on Amiga, looking like Amigaware (naturally, as it started there), RH9 and Fedora Linux, where it looks "Gnomey", Windows (many versions) and we expect to release a Mac version in about 90 days. The Mac version has some new tricks in it, but I won't talk about those yet. I'll be mentioning it in the Apple section here, though, no doubt, when the time comes. The Mac version looks like the current Mac OS, since this is our first foray into it. It'll look older shortly, when they release the newest version of their OS.
There is another benefit of writing tight, smart C code instead of jumping on the object-ornamented / ornery / obituary bandwagon: With every generation of machines, our software consistently goes faster. In comparison, with every generation of object oriented OS-bloatware, there is tons more to do (often for little apparent benefit at the application to user level) and the applications run slower, and slower, and sloooower... Photoshop isn't the only self-mutilator here, all you have to do is use Google and Google Groups to check out the complaints of other graphics applications getting quite a bit slower as they version-up and people being told to "buy a modern machine" so they can just get back to the speed they had before. And, of course, you can see the OS itself requiring more and more horsepower to run the same apparent speed as it versions-up.
In my opinion, Photoshop isn't a 900 pound competitor. Adobe's marketing is the 900 pound competitor. A distinction with a difference. We don't market very hard; we just make a product that does a lot more. On the other hand, we don't have to market anywhere near as hard; we're a lot smaller and we don't have the infrastructure to support that Adobe does. For which I am quite grateful, as I own the company outright and it would be very annoying, to say the least.
Now, I really haven't done much talking-up here, other than to handwave about feature count and be moderately specific about executable size and speed (because it was relevant to the topic.) I could; I could talk about offering 70-odd layer blend modes as compared to PS's 20-odd (which our 70-odd include, of course); I could talk about a faster area selection paradigm (and a PS compatibility/go-slow mode) and then go on in that vein for many paragraphs instead of a couple of throwaway sentences without backup -- but I was really only talking about OS issues originally, and I'd just as soon not wander any further off that course. If you're really curious, there is more on speed issues here, and the site is very, very deep in program docs and higher level marketing material. About 100 megs worth, not counting animations. Please pursue any further interest you might have on the site, and any pr
You really sound like you have an axe to grind against Microsoft.
I hope that didn't take too much effort to uncover.:-) I'm no fan -- not an axe grinder, but not a fan. I've got a redhat six system that's still serving web pages after 4 years, no reboots, no nothing but log maintainance and it's still up, courtesy of a 100% online UPS. The Win98 testbed next to it from approximately the same era, plugged into the same UPS bank has to be rebooted every five days or so. You (we) can report bugs to MS until we're blue in the face and they still don't fix them. Explorer crashes with precise steps to cause them, bugs like file dialogs, memory leaks in word, printer failures in Access... I don't give a rats hindquarters how many developers there are or aren't, the fact is, they're not very good at fixing the stuff that's broken in the OS or their major apps even when they've got a fabulous roadmap to the problem. I compare that to other OS's and frankly, they come up lacking. I don't hate them for this; I just wish they did a better job. I do think they leave a great deal to be desired when it comes to how I would like to see an OS company operate, but it's not my business and so that's not a big deal.
As for Phil, it's a poor comparison. We've shipped versions that worked 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, NT Intel, PowerPC NT, Alpha NT and MIPS NT. We're one of the very few companies in the world who can say that about a major application (our stuff offers a significant superset of Photoshop's capabilites... this isn't a small undertaking.)
Just because they screw up doesn't mean we're going to abandon them. but when they do screw up, we've learned, definitely the hard way, not to wait for them to fix the problem. We just go around them. Font API's that rotate backwards and otherwise broken across versions of the OS? Write your own. File dialog broken? Write your own. Treeview broken? Write your own. There are three advantages. First, your version is maintainable and will live across many releases of the OS; MS's isn't. Secondly, you can add custom features easily. Third, MS, for reasons of its own, has taken to creating major bloatware (as have many Windows developers.) This can be avoided by simply staying away from MS's object oriented API. Again, using our own app as an example, it is about 4 megs in size. It is considerably more powerful and featureful than Photoshop is. And it is just a fraction of the executable size, much, much faster running, and endures far fewer software failures than does Photoshop. This is in no small part due to a whole raft of stuff from the OS that we re-wrote and internalized into the application. We'd be even smaller if we used the OS API's, but then again, we'd crash a whole lot more (and suffer from other problems, like the aforementioned font rotation issue.)
These are significant and worthwhile benefits. So there is no need to conjure up "axe grinding" to justify them. We just write better software than MS does. That's the boat that Phil missed against WinZip too, if you pay attention. WinZip is an awesome program.:-)
Think of it as frontier territory with no newspapers, running water, or phone lines."
I prefer to think of it as frontier territory without resource and memory leaks, buggy system calls, and insanely bloated, sourcecode-free "objects" that are larger than most applications used to be but provide unique and special capabilities like "buttons" and "checkmarks."
But that's just me.:-) When I encounter something from Microsoft that is broken (like a file dialog ot the treeview control) then I write my own, make sure it works, fix it ASAP if and when anyone finds anything I missed... so memory where MS's OS fears to tread smells like freedom and clean air. There may not be any toilets, but then again, I don't have to have Microsoft's sewage running all over my applications.
Real conversation from about 2002:
CUSTOMER: Why, when I select more than 100 image files in the "load file" dialog, do the files come in in reverse order and missing any that were past about the 105th selected file?
US: Yeah. Those are problems in Microsoft's file dialog. According to MS, the 100 file limit problem has been in there since Windows 95. The files in reverse order happens because you selected the first file first, and shift-selected the last file, last. You can select the last file first and the first file last, and they'll come out they way you want them. As long as there are under 100 or so names. But you can just download the latest revision of our application and that problem is gone. Along with Microsoft's file dialog.
I thought I smelt an attempt at humor. I mean, generally I don't mine this kind of thing, but something more refined than all these digs is what shows your metal, don't you think? You're just giving people the shaft when you alloy yourself with earthy humor of this type. Crystalize your thoughts, you'll just lava the results. Puns are too mercurial to keep you golden; I suggest you forge something more lasting and fold in some edgy commentary, that'll cut a swath through the readership. Dig?
No, absolutely wrong. Again. Are you sure you ever worked for a congresscritter? I'm smelling a rat here... or a troll. Are you trolling? If so, shame on you, and fie on me for being gullible enough to take the hook. Again.:-)
One of the primary reasons we are a republic is so that our legislators can vote their consciences; they do not have to "answer" to their constituents, except at the intervals when they come up for re-election -- and at that point, they can get a job in the private sector if the public wants to try someone new. If they perform only with the idea of being re-elected, then they're going to be very poor legislators. What legislators are obligated to do is listen to their constituents; not answer to them. Certainly, they can choose to answer to them, but that is entirely another matter. If getting re-elected is more important than doing the right thing, then you're going to have a lot of bad law made.
This has nothing to do with my opinion (and I never said it did), but it has everything to do with the way that our republic is designed to function.
You should go take a few civics classes. Read the founding documents. Think a bit. The USA is not a democracy. That's a fact. So the question naturally follows, why was that the design? The answers are out there -- you should go find them so you become more informed.
I don't know where you got the idea that I thought that lawmakers should answer to my opinion alone; I just gave my opinion, that's all. I'm entitled to it just as you are entitled to yours. Even if you are demonstrably wrong and uninformed, as you have shown you are here.:-)
Well, then I must say that you are a fool.
Well, just keep in mind I'm an informed fool who knows a lot more about the process than you do, a wealthy fool who contributes large sums each year into the political system, and a public-minded fool who has served his country in politics, on the battlefield, and in the courtroom. Finally, keep in mind that if my opinions are so disagreeable to you, you'd be better off coming up with a rational counter-argument than you would in calling me names. You don't have to worry about oberservers, I shouldn't think; the nature of slashdot makes stale stories like this one virtual ghost towns.
You also have to look at his district demographic.
No. Really, I don't.
My expectations are based on the fact that when someone is elected to a federal lawmaking office, they carry on their shoulders the potential to screw up hundreds of millions of people's lives if they do the wrong thing.
For that reason, they are expected by me to do the right thing even if it results in the loss of their job. For that matter, even if it gets them killed.
Anyone who can't meet that standard isn't fit for political office, in my opinion. By accepting less, the public is allowing lawmakers to crap all over their rights and their lives and their families. That's bad enough, and I feel really bad for the public because they're being self-destructive. But they're also allowing lawmakers to crap all over my rights and my life and my family -- and that's completely, totally, utterly unacceptable to me.
A good legislator (at least on the national level) has decent staffers who know a great deal about the issue areas they are assigned
The evidence overwhelmingly shows this is either not generally so, or that it doesn't make enough difference to stop the legislators from doing the wrong thing. National legislators as a group are poster children for people who make bad law a great deal of the time. By bad, I mean: overcomplicated, innapropriate, actually illegal and/or unconstitutional. These are facts, and there is no way around them.
I could go on for chapters, literally write a book, just barely touching on the extraordinary level of bad law that has come (and continues to come) out of Washington. I don't think I have to, though; in a huge number of cases, the laws are so bad they speak against themselves.
The fact that you worked for a legislator and as a consequence of that experience think that the staff is effective leaves me unmoved, I'm afraid. At least in a positive direction. A (quick) look at Hoekstra's voting record shows reasonable votes in some areas I have deep enough knowledge to make an informed evaluation. That's very nice to see.
One has to observe, however, that Hoekstra's presence in congress (regardless of the quality of his staff) didn't prevent the PATRIOT act from becoming law, rescind or water down any of the most egregious mommy laws, or prevent us from invading a foreign country that had not attacked us - Iraq. Nor, since (unfortunately) the president can initially make war without congress' approval, did we see congress stop it shortly thereafter, which congress could do. Even if we accept the premise that Hoekstra's staff is fabulous, and by extension, Hoekstra himself is a sensible person, that doesn't change the fact that the mass of legislators as a body are doing the wrong thing quite consistantly.
But is Hoekstra a sensible person? We observe Hoekstra voting YES on truly idiotic laws, such as HR 2028, which was a bill "to forbid federal courts and the Supreme Court from hearing cases questioning or interpreting the Pledge of Allegiance and its constitutionality." He also voted YES on HR 3717, a bill "to increase the penalties (to half a million dollars!) for violations by television and radio broadcasters of the prohibitions against transmissions of obscene, indecent, and profane material, and for other purposes." Gee, thanks, Mom. On HR 2143, we see him again joining the ranks of mommy-lawmakers, as he voted YES for a bill "to prevent the use of certain bank instruments for unlawful Internet gambling, and for other purposes." Where does this guy get off thinking he has any right to tell me whether I can, or cannot, gamble with my money, regardless of what bank instrument I use or what mechanism I employ to wager, or what I wager on? The fact is, he doesn't; it is my money, not his, my life, not his, not society's. This is terrible law, as are all almost the laws surrounding it.
Clearly, having a good staff isn't enough. He walks right into congress and does stupid, stupid things, right along with the rest of the sheep. Those stupid things screw the citizens. You, me, everyone.
The bottom line is that bad law, a lot of bad law, comes out of Washington, and as I've shown with the facts, your man helps make it happen. Assuming you're correct and that it is broadly the case that the staffs are competent -- then we can definitely draw the conclusion that the staffs aren't having the right effect. And we're right back to the observed fact that the system is broken.
I didn't forget any of that. The fact that some states (like California, which I mentioned) allow you to put a proposition up if you can get X signatures is a good thing. But it in no way ameliorates the problem that the legislators can come up with something and you don't get to vote on it. The difference is a direct hand in controlling your destiny, or not.
I'm also not saying that straight democracy is the optimum answer. For the record, I don't think it is... one of the things that hasn't changed since the founding documents were created is that a lot of the population isn't well informed, and a lot of it isn't very bright, either. I don't know about you, but I don't want people voting on things they don't understand well. That leaves "the people" out of the process; that much is a given. The problem right now is that it also leaves the legislators out. We have an amazing crop of pure idiots seated, and that's been the case for a while now. As an intelligent and thoughtful look at any significant legislation (like the tax code, or the patriot act, or the drug laws) will show.
But none of that changes the fact that we don't live in a democracy in the US (all my remarks are US-centric, I live here.)
Regular credit card processing companies don't do that.
No. You're 100% wrong. Regular credit card processing companies will freeze your account. I've seen it happen first hand.
One company that my company makes e-commerce, inventory management and meat point of sale software for had over $50,000 in already processed charges for a week withheld without warning. The reason given (after the fact) was that too much of the company's business was coming from the Internet, and the CC processor was "nervous" (the exact word used.) This wasn't a sudden influx, in fact it wasn't more than a few percent different from the previous four weeks or so at the time. No unusual / atypical number of chargebacks was being encountered, nothing out of the ordinary was going on at all, other than the business was slowly and steadily becoming more successful for various reasons.
So what happened? The money was held for six months before they grudgingly gave it over, admitting there was no problem. By that time, they were no longer processing this place's charges, but that didn't make them move any faster.
A new credit card processor was found, one of the local banks covered the week's gap in income with a 90-day note based on the company's history with the bank, and the day was saved - no thanks to the cc processor. The business still had to come up with 50 grand out of the blue to pay off the note to the local bank, but they were healthy and they pulled it off.
Consider, if this particular business wasn't a pretty darned good operation, that might have killed them. As it was, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as you well might imagine -- no one needs a week's cash flow knocked into limbo without warning.
The CC processors can do it, they will do it, they have done it.
When you sign up with a credit card processor, you need to read the terms, line by line and with careful attention paid as to how any particular situation described or alluded to will affect your business if the processor exercises the option described. Then you need to plan what you will do in each of those situations. If you're not prepared, you'll have to take your pleasure in complaining to your friends and family, because that's all the recourse you have.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that credit card processing and sourcing companies hold all the cards, no pun intended.
They agressively advertise to consumers that they (the consumer) will never be liable for fraudulent use of their card. Which is true. Then they turn around, every time, and dump the fiscal damage on the merchant.
That's right. If you sell something via CC, even if you validate the address and ship to that address, you can still have a chargeback, you are in no way protected. You get lines like "my boyfriend used my card without my permission" and you're flat out of your merchandise, the funds are taken directly from your account, and that's the end of it. The cops in some remote city or podunk town won't lift a finger to do anything about it, and for 99% of the merchandise involved, the merchant can't afford to pursue it.
Who isn't hurt by this? (1) The consumer, (2) the thief (who may be the consumer!) (3) the credit card company and (4) the credit card processor. The merchant takes the hit, each and every time. You can't opt out or you can't process cards, which probably means you and everyone who works for you need to get a McJob.
So don't underestimate what a "normal" cc company can do to you. Paypal is no better or worse. Behave yourself, co-operate with any investigation and don't hesitate to refund when asked, and you will probably not have to deal with a frozen or closed account. Try not to grit your teeth when you have to pay for a blatent rip-off; it's part of the landscape, and these companies have rigged it so you cannot fix the problem. Complain in any major way, and you could have all your
Ok, 24 hours are up and if there's to be an answer, it'll have to be to another question. One more nudge for objective reality, one less for Christianity. Oh well.
So... you had a chunk of it. Sort of. My siamese cat is named after Asia Carerra (just "Asia"); at the time the cat arrived, Asia's likeness had just been put on our website in a morphing example. So I have this cat named Asia.
At the time I was cobbling up something to ask the Mormon Who Speaks With God, Asia (the cat) walked across my keyboard, as cats do, and also, as cats do, turned her fanny towards me so I could be sure it was her. The word was "bunghole", and it was Asia's bunghole, only you had the wrong Asia, and the wrong side of her, though you did have her namesake and at least the right end of the torso.;-)
We'll give the original poster a full 24 hours from the time my inquiry was posted before I divulge the answer.
By all means, if anyone thinks they know, including our surfer of the lusty Ms. Carrera's site, by all means, please feel free to post ahead of time.
I'd be most impressed if anyone got it who wasn't a member of my immediate family circle (my sweetheart, Deb, was sitting beside me when the inquiry was formulated, and so she knows already.) Some of my black belt students who are also my members of my family could guess, but none of them are in town.:-)
I will say that the reason that the question seems so unlikely to be answered to me is that it involves several levels of indirection, a certain degree of random chance, and a few other factors, only a few of which are publicly acessable. I'll explain them all by tomorrow morning. It's funny, in a way. Depending on your sense of humor. The full set of connections is not intuitive by any means.
you're saying that I would be irrational for believing that only things with a falsifiable basis in reality are rationally held?
Yes. Why would you believe something that has no basis in reality? I'm not saying you shouldn't consider it, look it over, test it, use the mental model to leverage other thoughts, all manner of useful things... but why believe it? What is the point? What is the benefit? If you accept things that are without a falsifiable basis in reality, how do you draw a line between mental noise and objective reality?
Personally, I try to avoid belief altogether. Instead, I rely on the principle of confidence, a matter of degree rather than "I do" or "I don't."
Science can be viewed as a confidence building mechanism. I have high confidence in those suppositions that we have been able to devise falsification mechanisms for, when those suppositions do not fail those tests. Further, confidence is increased when one supposition backs up another from a different angle.
At all times, however, as in Newton's "laws", we must be prepared for someone to come along and topple that which has withstood a considerable number of tests. Einstein, case in point.
Quantum physics in turn generated quite an upset in Einstein's confidence, and I would not be the least bit surprised to see another wave or tsunami come along to reshape the landscape yet again. Along those lines, string theory is making all manner of interesting claims at present; and some things may become testable soon. Fascinating.:-)
I'm very, very comfortable with this approach. I'm also very comfortable with the idea of God showing up suddenly -- if it happens, it'll be because that's the reality of things, and I have no problem dealing with reality. I simply choose not to deal with things claimed to be real by others that inspire very little confidence because there is no corroborating data, and the Christian stories are definitely in that class of things at this time. Solidly. Yet they can be moved, and it would be absolutely fascinating to me if they were.
It's a damn useful principle, yes, but it's too limiting to be a strict bound on what we consider knowledge.
I don't think so. It is more useful to class something as unconfirmed supposition, or partially verified supposition, than it is to lump it in with things I have enough confidence in to class as knowledge.
Also, as far as "knowledge" goes, that which some, including me, consider to be pretty much written in stone often turns out to be quite mutable. My confidence approach accomodates that without fouling my wordview with personality upset; likewise, it accomodates transfer from supposition to knowledge cleanly.
In my mind, there is no fear of lack of knowledge; only a joy in learning. There is no fear of what comes after death, primarily because I have never found any reason to think anything comes after death at all. I do have concerns for those I leave behind, and I've done the right things for those people, within the limitations that my income, savings, and position allow. It appears to me -- meaning, I have reasonable confidence -- that most people cleave to religion out of fear, fear of the unknown and flat out fear of death. I'm missing both of those and that could explain why religion has, as yet, no hold on my mind.
How is it a good test if you ask for a sign, which is generally specifically condemned.
The history of Chrisitanity (and other religions, for that matter) is replete with stories of signs and reports of signs, large and small. I'm not asking for anything that hasn't got a significant precedent. For example, just sticking with Christianity:
water into wine
tears from statues
toast, walls, fruit with the virgin mary patterned on through various "natural" causes
parting of the red sea
walking on water
burning bushes
autocarved stone tablets
floods of mythic and non-geologically possible proportions, not to mention fitting two of every species on a relatively tiny vessel
Raising the dead
Indefinite pouring from a single jug of wine
Indefinite bread from a one loaf source
Giving sight to the blind
Lifespans of 900 years
Creation of one life from another's rib
Turning ladies into pillars of salt
... etc., etc.
All I want is a word. I don't think that's unreasonable. In my view, Christianity would be well off to have me convinced; I'm intelligent, wealthy, charitable, literate and an experienced and polished speaker. I don't drink, drug, smoke, cheat, or lie. I honor my parents and respect my elders in general. I profoundly regret every mistake I've ever made that affected others, and I'm not all that proud of the ones that just affected me, either. Honestly, I think I'm a better Christian than most Christians already, if one can put aside the simple fact that I am not convinced that there is any reason to believe there is a God or Gods. I'm open to such an event; and I always have been. I do not disbelieve, I simply lack belief.
You ask for 'proof' which can only be had if you hold the prerequisite faith.
I'll take my absolute limitations from God, not from you. Sorry. You don't get to define this. It's put up or shut up, here.
God has relationships on an individual level, requiring someone to obtain an answer for you as proof is nonsense if God is selective in giving responses.
Oh. (grits teeth) You mean, he's busy listening to your prayers while he lets a large fraction of the Indian population die in a Tsunami? Selective like that? Or do you mean he just won't answer because you associate with him the traits of a petulant child? Selective like that? Personally, if I were your god, you'd have a lightning bolt toasting your colon right now for even implying that you can predict what He will, or will not, do. The Christian God, by all reports, is described as Ineffable, Omnipotent, Omnipresent. Don't even try to tell me what such a God will or won't do. You have no idea; you can have no idea.
Do you answer every question presented before you with out any regard to it's(sic) context, the person's intent, or other factors?
No. Your point is?
Not all information is at our disposal, but certainly some is. A claim that an answer is recieved is not refuted by what is not recieved.
You might want to go over that again. Using more words, perhaps; it doesn't parse. Perhaps it is me -- I've had a long day. I'd very much appreciate a "light" version of whatever you were trying to get across there.
Sorry, I wasn't asking for a test result to satisfy you, I was asking for one to satisfy me. So it doesn't concern me if you and/or others here, are convinced, or not, by any results that might be forthcoming from this particular test. I will know if he was right or wrong, and that is the goal I was pursuing.
Having said that, good science requires repeatability and reproducability; there is nothing is stopping you from asking the original poster for the same kind of "you can't know this, only God can know this" data point that you can verify. It is a unique opportunity -- the poster claims that his God answers him when he prays. Step up to the plate and see what you can find out for yourself.
There's no benefit whatsoever to be had from the test I concocted other than to discern for me if the voices this person hears are his internal babblings or an insightful speaking of truths obtained by means outside of nature as I understand it. I suspect that is an important point, if a God or Gods is involved.
You're mistaken. The post I responded to claimed bluntly that God spoke to the poster in response to prayer. I laid out a very effective test for that situation. Positive results to that test will not come from noise or a lucky spike; they will come from knowledge, knowledge the poster could not have prior to the test.
The claim that an interventionist God's existance cannot be tested for has always been a nonsense claim. That was such a test, a very good one in fact, and we will see if it can return positive results.
If it can, that will be fascinating and I will accept it as evidence for a God; if it's not God, it's telepathy or dipping data from the future, and I'd be willing to mistake either of those for God -- any of them is such an exciting discovery as to be life-changing. Further tests can determine what the actual case is.
If it can't, it's just one more negative result in a whole slew of them -- results that lead towards a "this is a made-up story" conclusion.
Tests are easy. What is apparently not easy is getting positive results. The poster claimed an interventionist God. Which is super. It's the non-interventionist God you can't test for, not an interventionist one. Christians don't generally believe in a non-interventionist God, though.
I didn't misunderstand "You have to take my word for it". I took it literally, as was demanded by context. People don't get a free ride from me because they state they believe in God. They can believe anything they like, certainly. I will, in turn, maintain any opinion I think is appropriate of those beliefs.
As for the rest, my examples were very religion-like. At present, voodoo and nonsense physics share almost every characteristic with belief in God.
You misunderstood what I meant about scientific rigor.
No, I didn't. I just don't share your frame of reference. The frame of reference that applies to religionists is not the frame of reference that applies to me.
I can pray to God, and get an answer.
That is a claim that can be tested. Fine. I'll provisionally accept it. Let's test. Now, pray to your God and retrieve the answer as to exactly what object I am thinking of as I write this. Post that answer here. I'll give you and your God a hint: "Asia's..." what? One word, two syllables. Language unspecified; I'm a martial artist and speak two Asian languages. Let's see you and your God solve that one with prayer. You won't come up with it by guessing, I can tell you that.
Now: unless you can meet that very simple standard of testability, I will continue to accept that all the evidence -- and there is tons of it -- indicates that what you are doing is inventing and/or accepting a made-up story to explain things that have yet to be explained, and may in fact not be explainable. For instance, I am not inclined to make up an untestable story about how the universe started in order to explain the fact that I don't understand how it started. That's not productive behaviour in my frame of reference.
Back to our test. Now, since in all human history, no prayer of record has ever returned useful, previously unknown results, I'll not be holding my breath for your ability to get your prayer answered. So let me be clear: Until you can bring objective proof of the existance of supernatural processes into the natural world, there is no reason that I should accept that what you are saying is anything other than a further manifestation of your own inner story-telling processes.
You have to take my word on it.
No. I don't. You're confused to think so -- that's actually politically correct nonsense. In fact, I don't take your word for it, and unless you come up with some proof, there is no reason whatsoever I should take you at your your word.
Without proof, your word on this matter is precisely of the same value as the word of a voodoo practitioner fresh from his chicken sacrifice, or the word of someone who thinks keeping his vegetables underneath a crystal pyramid will improve them as compared to, say, refrigeration. These things are interesting as a metric of human behaviour, but they are not objective fact and therefore not worthy of accepting at face value. As it turns out, all the evidence so far indicates that belief in God (more generally, any God or Gods) is simply irrational behaviour. No more, but sometimes less.
Plus, not getting an answer does not prove the non-existance of God, he simply did not want to reply. This means that you have no reliable way to test my results. This breaks the scientific method.
No. It doesn't break the scientific method. It simply puts religion in the same boat with phrenology and astrology and many, many other beliefs without rational foundation.
The fact is, belief does not in any way presage or validate its subject; no matter how deep the rationalizations go, no matter how many like-minded believers there are, and no matter how profound the the depth of the belief. That power is beyond religion; and yet science is a functional implementation of that power -- we can actually validate what is, as opposed to what is simply believed.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. But FireFox (and others, such as Mac's Safari) support something highly worthwhile that IE most definitely does not. Namely, a reasonably safe and secure browsing experience.
Some markets will opt for security and safety, using technologies that are (compared to active x) much (duh) safer and more secure.
Others will continue to endure spyware, viri, adware and various trojans and other invasive garbage. Those are "IE features" FireFox doesn't want to offer. Or let me put it this way -- they are "features" that this FF user doesn't want to be "given", because they are inevitably prefaced with the command "bend over."
I truly think that to impress ActiveX upon FireFox would be just about the worst thing the FF developers could do. FireFox provides a better experience. That's why it's doing so amazingly well. Put ActiveX in there, and that experience is going to begin to degrade. It may go as far as to be as risky to surf with FF as it is to surf with with IE.
Does anyone really want that, other than the companies who have embraced and extended Microsoft's Active-X? Is there anything truly significant you can do with Active-X that you cannot also do with Java?
Sure... you pick a technology that is proprietary to one browser, that browser starts to lose favor with the user community, and definitely, you will have work to do. Time to start studying Java. It's not time for the junk technology to be imported into FF to extend the EOL of some Active-X product.
Java was designed to be secure. It's been remarkably successful at it, too.
Whoops. Whatever your reasons were, they're irrelevant now.
No. The only thing that is fair is when things are fair.
Any time there is a serious imbalance, there is a risk that the side holding the best cards will use that power in a manner that no one else is able to justify.
We see it at every level of human endeavor; children who bully non-conformists, husbands who beat their wives essentially because they can (and wives who bully, browbeat and otherwise abuse husbands because they're constitutionally unable to respond), churches who excommunicate or otherwise sanction members when those members don't toe the line (instead of counseling and advising and the reasonable things a social group with a particular outlook can do), cities that take property from landowners not to leverage a service to the public, but to enable a commercial enterprise, states that uniformly take children from fathers under the absurd presumption that mothers are superior human beings, countries that take resources from weaker countries or force them to adopt their way of life (for the former, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait serves as a good example, for the latter, our recent invasion of Iraq serves just about as well, IMHO.)
In contrast, the underlying ethics of a particular person or institution are what prevents abuses of power; as soon as a person or institution becomes bereft of ethics, or if they never had a solid ethical foundation, misuse of that power is almost inevitable. History shows us again and again that power has the same effect as a drug on some personalities, and often those personalities are the ones who seek and obtain power.
It doesn't do any good to hope, or wish, at least I don't think it does. If you don't raise your children carefully, if you allow your children to bully, if you stand for your church sanctioning those who aren't "normal", if you allow cities and states and governments to walk on you and walk on others... then you, and everyone else, reap what you sow.
With regard to war -- politicians are typically willing for you to lose your life; the political will to go to war is entirely divorced from the fear of dying in war. They have the will; you have the fear. You need ethics and principles to control over-reaching governments. I always thought that the politicians who declare war should be in the first year's mandatory front-line participants. Might calm them down a bit. Unfortunately, it's not that way. There are even covenants in place where politicians are immune from attack. I'm not talking about ambassadors, which of course is sensible, I'm talking about heads of state. Disgusting, in my view.
I launched this rant (sorry) because I feel that in the US, we've lost our way. 20 years ago, the idea of the US attacking another country without ourselves having been attacked was laughable. Today, it is the norm. I sympathize with your hope, but I must observe that it is not hope that will rein in the kind of people who run our government. If we sit around and let them continue to abuse us, and the people around us, all the hope in the world won't prevent a pariah status far more intense than the one we "enjoy" already.
It's not about (more) overwhelming power. Don't focus on power now. We're way too far along for that (go look up what a J-SOW does, for instance, or consider how a stealth fighter will fare against some third-world's 1960's-era surplus radar installation.) It's about ethics. Look at the US government. Decide if you like what you see. At the very least, vote against those who you feel are doing wrong. We have the power as a group to say "if you do this, you will not stay in office" and truly, right now, I think that's all most of these politicians understand.
A human will black out during some types of maneuvers unless the aircraft is prevented from making them (from simple tricks like spring return to center for the stick after a blackout to computers that measure g force and won't let the flight envelope go that far in the first place.)
Pilots use "G-suits" to try and keep blood in their heads by controlling pressure on their legs (for instance) but you can only go so far with that type of thing. And, as it's low tech, the opposition can do it as well.
An AI won't have a problem with a very high G turn. A human is in deep trouble. Airframes can be designed for considerably more than a human can take, if there is no human pilot. If there is, there is little point in such a design -- the aircraft will become pilotless if it enters such a flight regime.
Now, put this up against the fact that most other countries can't afford to put an AI in the pilots seat, and the result is continuous overwhelming air superiority without risk to humans on our side. That's the combination of factors that drives the urge to go in this particular direction.
I program a lot. In the course of my job, I have to review a lot of other people's code. I have a particular bracing style I use; and sure enough, I've not only become accustomed to it but also "tuned" to it to the point where it becomes difficult to read someone else's code if (for instance) they use the "K&R" style:
Because at my company, code looks like this:
Those two styles lead to a considerable difference in code density, and so affect readability and my "tuned" response to what I see. And there are so many other C/Java coding styles re bracing and indentation, or lack thereof.
In Python, there is one indentation style. Just one. Not bunches of them. So I get used to the way Python looks, the "tuning" goes into my backbrain or wherever the heck that stuff lives, and I can read anyone's code. This is a distinct benefit for me, and I suspect for others as well.
I would have loved a C compiler that didn't use braces, but used indentation instead. Man, that would have been glorious. Sigh.
I program in C every day and I haven't coded an error of the type you describe in over a year. I would know if I had -- our C memory manager catches all manner of pointer problems, accounts for all memory allocation and freeing, memory over- and under-runs, gives us stats on memory allocations and so on.
I'm definitely a Python fan, but your agument against C isn't valid. It's just an argument that crummy programmers write crummy C programs, which is not news.
Python is a perfectly reasonable language for coding certain types of applications, and it is also a good language for programmers that aren't that skilled because it puts a strong safety net in place for many types of errors with the exception system it uses. C is something else entirely.
Something that small, tight, fast graphics applications can leverage is using ram for images, which I think you'll probably agree is a good use of ram. You'll probably also agree that such use is compromised by using that ram for a 10 megabyte implementation of a method which gathers in a whole bunch of unused or overcomplicated ancillary code when that same method could have been implemented in a few K of specialized code.
For a concrete example of this kind of mess, generate an empty sample application using MFC and Windows OO interface. It'll have a menu, a window and some sample text. It'll also run you many, many megabytes.
Then grab a copy of (Charles Petzold's) "programming windows" and write the same bare-bones menu/window/text demo it starts with using the win32 API. Observe the resulting 11k executable. You have what you need, no more, no less, and to the enduser, the functionality is exactly the same. Or, you can write it in assembler, if you have the skills, and you can probably get it down to 1k if you're careful about how you link it. Linux is really good at "tricky linking" to get tiny apps, I've never actually tried that in Windows, but I wouldn't be in the least surprised if you could do something similar there. Funny stuff, these leaps of technology. Size bloat isn't really about features; it is about abstraction, but man, oh man do you ever pay for it. Abstraction does make some things easier, and hence, it can certainly engender more features... but again, the price is high. Personally, I don't want to get any more abstract that I have to for production software I intend for people to use to improve their productivity.
Hypothetical: If an application (any kind) "improves" from 90 features, 50 megs and 50 seconds to 100 features, 100 megs, and 100 seconds; then a competing application comes to your attention which takes 5 megs, gives you 200 features (which include the above 100 features) and takes only 20 seconds to run... then it is clear that the reason that things have changed in the former application is not what you are assuming it is. :-)
These ratios aren't exactly hypothetical, as I'm sure you have gathered. :-)
What I am saying, or at least trying to say, is that the much-lauded OO technology that is so prevalant in modern apps and modern OS's is carrying a very heavy, and unnecessary, penalty for the end user. I've seen it argued that it doesn't have to, and I accept that argument, but I've yet to see an example of a big application that proves the point. It appears to me that when OO apps reach middle size and larger, they get (sometimes considerably) slower and they get very, very large. And in the case of an OS, I don't have to generalize -- this has been an almost 100% uniform result.
And, as it turns out, our software presently runs on Amiga, looking like Amigaware (naturally, as it started there), RH9 and Fedora Linux, where it looks "Gnomey", Windows (many versions) and we expect to release a Mac version in about 90 days. The Mac version has some new tricks in it, but I won't talk about those yet. I'll be mentioning it in the Apple section here, though, no doubt, when the time comes. The Mac version looks like the current Mac OS, since this is our first foray into it. It'll look older shortly, when they release the newest version of their OS.
There is another benefit of writing tight, smart C code instead of jumping on the object-ornamented / ornery / obituary bandwagon: With every generation of machines, our software consistently goes faster. In comparison, with every generation of object oriented OS-bloatware, there is tons more to do (often for little apparent benefit at the application to user level) and the applications run slower, and slower, and sloooower... Photoshop isn't the only self-mutilator here, all you have to do is use Google and Google Groups to check out the complaints of other graphics applications getting quite a bit slower as they version-up and people being told to "buy a modern machine" so they can just get back to the speed they had before. And, of course, you can see the OS itself requiring more and more horsepower to run the same apparent speed as it versions-up.
In my opinion, Photoshop isn't a 900 pound competitor. Adobe's marketing is the 900 pound competitor. A distinction with a difference. We don't market very hard; we just make a product that does a lot more. On the other hand, we don't have to market anywhere near as hard; we're a lot smaller and we don't have the infrastructure to support that Adobe does. For which I am quite grateful, as I own the company outright and it would be very annoying, to say the least.
Now, I really haven't done much talking-up here, other than to handwave about feature count and be moderately specific about executable size and speed (because it was relevant to the topic.) I could; I could talk about offering 70-odd layer blend modes as compared to PS's 20-odd (which our 70-odd include, of course); I could talk about a faster area selection paradigm (and a PS compatibility/go-slow mode) and then go on in that vein for many paragraphs instead of a couple of throwaway sentences without backup -- but I was really only talking about OS issues originally, and I'd just as soon not wander any further off that course. If you're really curious, there is more on speed issues here, and the site is very, very deep in program docs and higher level marketing material. About 100 megs worth, not counting animations. Please pursue any further interest you might have on the site, and any pr
I hope that didn't take too much effort to uncover. :-) I'm no fan -- not an axe grinder, but not a fan. I've got a redhat six system that's still serving web pages after 4 years, no reboots, no nothing but log maintainance and it's still up, courtesy of a 100% online UPS. The Win98 testbed next to it from approximately the same era, plugged into the same UPS bank has to be rebooted every five days or so. You (we) can report bugs to MS until we're blue in the face and they still don't fix them. Explorer crashes with precise steps to cause them, bugs like file dialogs, memory leaks in word, printer failures in Access... I don't give a rats hindquarters how many developers there are or aren't, the fact is, they're not very good at fixing the stuff that's broken in the OS or their major apps even when they've got a fabulous roadmap to the problem. I compare that to other OS's and frankly, they come up lacking. I don't hate them for this; I just wish they did a better job. I do think they leave a great deal to be desired when it comes to how I would like to see an OS company operate, but it's not my business and so that's not a big deal.
As for Phil, it's a poor comparison. We've shipped versions that worked 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, NT Intel, PowerPC NT, Alpha NT and MIPS NT. We're one of the very few companies in the world who can say that about a major application (our stuff offers a significant superset of Photoshop's capabilites... this isn't a small undertaking.)
Just because they screw up doesn't mean we're going to abandon them. but when they do screw up, we've learned, definitely the hard way, not to wait for them to fix the problem. We just go around them. Font API's that rotate backwards and otherwise broken across versions of the OS? Write your own. File dialog broken? Write your own. Treeview broken? Write your own. There are three advantages. First, your version is maintainable and will live across many releases of the OS; MS's isn't. Secondly, you can add custom features easily. Third, MS, for reasons of its own, has taken to creating major bloatware (as have many Windows developers.) This can be avoided by simply staying away from MS's object oriented API. Again, using our own app as an example, it is about 4 megs in size. It is considerably more powerful and featureful than Photoshop is. And it is just a fraction of the executable size, much, much faster running, and endures far fewer software failures than does Photoshop. This is in no small part due to a whole raft of stuff from the OS that we re-wrote and internalized into the application. We'd be even smaller if we used the OS API's, but then again, we'd crash a whole lot more (and suffer from other problems, like the aforementioned font rotation issue.)
These are significant and worthwhile benefits. So there is no need to conjure up "axe grinding" to justify them. We just write better software than MS does. That's the boat that Phil missed against WinZip too, if you pay attention. WinZip is an awesome program. :-)
I prefer to think of it as frontier territory without resource and memory leaks, buggy system calls, and insanely bloated, sourcecode-free "objects" that are larger than most applications used to be but provide unique and special capabilities like "buttons" and "checkmarks."
But that's just me. :-) When I encounter something from Microsoft that is broken (like a file dialog ot the treeview control) then I write my own, make sure it works, fix it ASAP if and when anyone finds anything I missed... so memory where MS's OS fears to tread smells like freedom and clean air. There may not be any toilets, but then again, I don't have to have Microsoft's sewage running all over my applications.
Real conversation from about 2002:
We gave them this, instead.Thanks, I'll be here all week.
One of the primary reasons we are a republic is so that our legislators can vote their consciences; they do not have to "answer" to their constituents, except at the intervals when they come up for re-election -- and at that point, they can get a job in the private sector if the public wants to try someone new. If they perform only with the idea of being re-elected, then they're going to be very poor legislators. What legislators are obligated to do is listen to their constituents; not answer to them. Certainly, they can choose to answer to them, but that is entirely another matter. If getting re-elected is more important than doing the right thing, then you're going to have a lot of bad law made.
This has nothing to do with my opinion (and I never said it did), but it has everything to do with the way that our republic is designed to function.
You should go take a few civics classes. Read the founding documents. Think a bit. The USA is not a democracy. That's a fact. So the question naturally follows, why was that the design? The answers are out there -- you should go find them so you become more informed.
I don't know where you got the idea that I thought that lawmakers should answer to my opinion alone; I just gave my opinion, that's all. I'm entitled to it just as you are entitled to yours. Even if you are demonstrably wrong and uninformed, as you have shown you are here. :-)
Well, just keep in mind I'm an informed fool who knows a lot more about the process than you do, a wealthy fool who contributes large sums each year into the political system, and a public-minded fool who has served his country in politics, on the battlefield, and in the courtroom. Finally, keep in mind that if my opinions are so disagreeable to you, you'd be better off coming up with a rational counter-argument than you would in calling me names. You don't have to worry about oberservers, I shouldn't think; the nature of slashdot makes stale stories like this one virtual ghost towns.
No. Really, I don't.
My expectations are based on the fact that when someone is elected to a federal lawmaking office, they carry on their shoulders the potential to screw up hundreds of millions of people's lives if they do the wrong thing.
For that reason, they are expected by me to do the right thing even if it results in the loss of their job. For that matter, even if it gets them killed.
Anyone who can't meet that standard isn't fit for political office, in my opinion. By accepting less, the public is allowing lawmakers to crap all over their rights and their lives and their families. That's bad enough, and I feel really bad for the public because they're being self-destructive. But they're also allowing lawmakers to crap all over my rights and my life and my family -- and that's completely, totally, utterly unacceptable to me.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows this is either not generally so, or that it doesn't make enough difference to stop the legislators from doing the wrong thing. National legislators as a group are poster children for people who make bad law a great deal of the time. By bad, I mean: overcomplicated, innapropriate, actually illegal and/or unconstitutional. These are facts, and there is no way around them.
I could go on for chapters, literally write a book, just barely touching on the extraordinary level of bad law that has come (and continues to come) out of Washington. I don't think I have to, though; in a huge number of cases, the laws are so bad they speak against themselves.
The fact that you worked for a legislator and as a consequence of that experience think that the staff is effective leaves me unmoved, I'm afraid. At least in a positive direction. A (quick) look at Hoekstra's voting record shows reasonable votes in some areas I have deep enough knowledge to make an informed evaluation. That's very nice to see.
One has to observe, however, that Hoekstra's presence in congress (regardless of the quality of his staff) didn't prevent the PATRIOT act from becoming law, rescind or water down any of the most egregious mommy laws, or prevent us from invading a foreign country that had not attacked us - Iraq. Nor, since (unfortunately) the president can initially make war without congress' approval, did we see congress stop it shortly thereafter, which congress could do. Even if we accept the premise that Hoekstra's staff is fabulous, and by extension, Hoekstra himself is a sensible person, that doesn't change the fact that the mass of legislators as a body are doing the wrong thing quite consistantly.
But is Hoekstra a sensible person? We observe Hoekstra voting YES on truly idiotic laws, such as HR 2028, which was a bill "to forbid federal courts and the Supreme Court from hearing cases questioning or interpreting the Pledge of Allegiance and its constitutionality." He also voted YES on HR 3717, a bill "to increase the penalties (to half a million dollars!) for violations by television and radio broadcasters of the prohibitions against transmissions of obscene, indecent, and profane material, and for other purposes." Gee, thanks, Mom. On HR 2143, we see him again joining the ranks of mommy-lawmakers, as he voted YES for a bill "to prevent the use of certain bank instruments for unlawful Internet gambling, and for other purposes." Where does this guy get off thinking he has any right to tell me whether I can, or cannot, gamble with my money, regardless of what bank instrument I use or what mechanism I employ to wager, or what I wager on? The fact is, he doesn't; it is my money, not his, my life, not his, not society's. This is terrible law, as are all almost the laws surrounding it.
Clearly, having a good staff isn't enough. He walks right into congress and does stupid, stupid things, right along with the rest of the sheep. Those stupid things screw the citizens. You, me, everyone.
The bottom line is that bad law, a lot of bad law, comes out of Washington, and as I've shown with the facts, your man helps make it happen. Assuming you're correct and that it is broadly the case that the staffs are competent -- then we can definitely draw the conclusion that the staffs aren't having the right effect. And we're right back to the observed fact that the system is broken.
I'm also not saying that straight democracy is the optimum answer. For the record, I don't think it is... one of the things that hasn't changed since the founding documents were created is that a lot of the population isn't well informed, and a lot of it isn't very bright, either. I don't know about you, but I don't want people voting on things they don't understand well. That leaves "the people" out of the process; that much is a given. The problem right now is that it also leaves the legislators out. We have an amazing crop of pure idiots seated, and that's been the case for a while now. As an intelligent and thoughtful look at any significant legislation (like the tax code, or the patriot act, or the drug laws) will show.
But none of that changes the fact that we don't live in a democracy in the US (all my remarks are US-centric, I live here.)
No. You're 100% wrong. Regular credit card processing companies will freeze your account. I've seen it happen first hand.
One company that my company makes e-commerce, inventory management and meat point of sale software for had over $50,000 in already processed charges for a week withheld without warning. The reason given (after the fact) was that too much of the company's business was coming from the Internet, and the CC processor was "nervous" (the exact word used.) This wasn't a sudden influx, in fact it wasn't more than a few percent different from the previous four weeks or so at the time. No unusual / atypical number of chargebacks was being encountered, nothing out of the ordinary was going on at all, other than the business was slowly and steadily becoming more successful for various reasons.
So what happened? The money was held for six months before they grudgingly gave it over, admitting there was no problem. By that time, they were no longer processing this place's charges, but that didn't make them move any faster.
A new credit card processor was found, one of the local banks covered the week's gap in income with a 90-day note based on the company's history with the bank, and the day was saved - no thanks to the cc processor. The business still had to come up with 50 grand out of the blue to pay off the note to the local bank, but they were healthy and they pulled it off.
Consider, if this particular business wasn't a pretty darned good operation, that might have killed them. As it was, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, as you well might imagine -- no one needs a week's cash flow knocked into limbo without warning.
The CC processors can do it, they will do it, they have done it.
When you sign up with a credit card processor, you need to read the terms, line by line and with careful attention paid as to how any particular situation described or alluded to will affect your business if the processor exercises the option described. Then you need to plan what you will do in each of those situations. If you're not prepared, you'll have to take your pleasure in complaining to your friends and family, because that's all the recourse you have.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that credit card processing and sourcing companies hold all the cards, no pun intended.
They agressively advertise to consumers that they (the consumer) will never be liable for fraudulent use of their card. Which is true. Then they turn around, every time, and dump the fiscal damage on the merchant.
That's right. If you sell something via CC, even if you validate the address and ship to that address, you can still have a chargeback, you are in no way protected. You get lines like "my boyfriend used my card without my permission" and you're flat out of your merchandise, the funds are taken directly from your account, and that's the end of it. The cops in some remote city or podunk town won't lift a finger to do anything about it, and for 99% of the merchandise involved, the merchant can't afford to pursue it.
Who isn't hurt by this? (1) The consumer, (2) the thief (who may be the consumer!) (3) the credit card company and (4) the credit card processor. The merchant takes the hit, each and every time. You can't opt out or you can't process cards, which probably means you and everyone who works for you need to get a McJob.
So don't underestimate what a "normal" cc company can do to you. Paypal is no better or worse. Behave yourself, co-operate with any investigation and don't hesitate to refund when asked, and you will probably not have to deal with a frozen or closed account. Try not to grit your teeth when you have to pay for a blatent rip-off; it's part of the landscape, and these companies have rigged it so you cannot fix the problem. Complain in any major way, and you could have all your
So... you had a chunk of it. Sort of. My siamese cat is named after Asia Carerra (just "Asia"); at the time the cat arrived, Asia's likeness had just been put on our website in a morphing example. So I have this cat named Asia.
At the time I was cobbling up something to ask the Mormon Who Speaks With God, Asia (the cat) walked across my keyboard, as cats do, and also, as cats do, turned her fanny towards me so I could be sure it was her. The word was "bunghole", and it was Asia's bunghole, only you had the wrong Asia, and the wrong side of her, though you did have her namesake and at least the right end of the torso. ;-)
See my reply to the AC below, please. Thanks for the guess. :-)
By all means, if anyone thinks they know, including our surfer of the lusty Ms. Carrera's site, by all means, please feel free to post ahead of time.
I'd be most impressed if anyone got it who wasn't a member of my immediate family circle (my sweetheart, Deb, was sitting beside me when the inquiry was formulated, and so she knows already.) Some of my black belt students who are also my members of my family could guess, but none of them are in town. :-)
I will say that the reason that the question seems so unlikely to be answered to me is that it involves several levels of indirection, a certain degree of random chance, and a few other factors, only a few of which are publicly acessable. I'll explain them all by tomorrow morning. It's funny, in a way. Depending on your sense of humor. The full set of connections is not intuitive by any means.
Yes. Why would you believe something that has no basis in reality? I'm not saying you shouldn't consider it, look it over, test it, use the mental model to leverage other thoughts, all manner of useful things... but why believe it? What is the point? What is the benefit? If you accept things that are without a falsifiable basis in reality, how do you draw a line between mental noise and objective reality?
Personally, I try to avoid belief altogether. Instead, I rely on the principle of confidence, a matter of degree rather than "I do" or "I don't."
Science can be viewed as a confidence building mechanism. I have high confidence in those suppositions that we have been able to devise falsification mechanisms for, when those suppositions do not fail those tests. Further, confidence is increased when one supposition backs up another from a different angle.
At all times, however, as in Newton's "laws", we must be prepared for someone to come along and topple that which has withstood a considerable number of tests. Einstein, case in point.
Quantum physics in turn generated quite an upset in Einstein's confidence, and I would not be the least bit surprised to see another wave or tsunami come along to reshape the landscape yet again. Along those lines, string theory is making all manner of interesting claims at present; and some things may become testable soon. Fascinating. :-)
I'm very, very comfortable with this approach. I'm also very comfortable with the idea of God showing up suddenly -- if it happens, it'll be because that's the reality of things, and I have no problem dealing with reality. I simply choose not to deal with things claimed to be real by others that inspire very little confidence because there is no corroborating data, and the Christian stories are definitely in that class of things at this time. Solidly. Yet they can be moved, and it would be absolutely fascinating to me if they were.
I don't think so. It is more useful to class something as unconfirmed supposition, or partially verified supposition, than it is to lump it in with things I have enough confidence in to class as knowledge.
Also, as far as "knowledge" goes, that which some, including me, consider to be pretty much written in stone often turns out to be quite mutable. My confidence approach accomodates that without fouling my wordview with personality upset; likewise, it accomodates transfer from supposition to knowledge cleanly.
In my mind, there is no fear of lack of knowledge; only a joy in learning. There is no fear of what comes after death, primarily because I have never found any reason to think anything comes after death at all. I do have concerns for those I leave behind, and I've done the right things for those people, within the limitations that my income, savings, and position allow. It appears to me -- meaning, I have reasonable confidence -- that most people cleave to religion out of fear, fear of the unknown and flat out fear of death. I'm missing both of those and that could explain why religion has, as yet, no hold on my mind.
The history of Chrisitanity (and other religions, for that matter) is replete with stories of signs and reports of signs, large and small. I'm not asking for anything that hasn't got a significant precedent. For example, just sticking with Christianity:
All I want is a word. I don't think that's unreasonable. In my view, Christianity would be well off to have me convinced; I'm intelligent, wealthy, charitable, literate and an experienced and polished speaker. I don't drink, drug, smoke, cheat, or lie. I honor my parents and respect my elders in general. I profoundly regret every mistake I've ever made that affected others, and I'm not all that proud of the ones that just affected me, either. Honestly, I think I'm a better Christian than most Christians already, if one can put aside the simple fact that I am not convinced that there is any reason to believe there is a God or Gods. I'm open to such an event; and I always have been. I do not disbelieve, I simply lack belief.
I'll take my absolute limitations from God, not from you. Sorry. You don't get to define this. It's put up or shut up, here.
Oh. (grits teeth) You mean, he's busy listening to your prayers while he lets a large fraction of the Indian population die in a Tsunami? Selective like that? Or do you mean he just won't answer because you associate with him the traits of a petulant child? Selective like that? Personally, if I were your god, you'd have a lightning bolt toasting your colon right now for even implying that you can predict what He will, or will not, do. The Christian God, by all reports, is described as Ineffable, Omnipotent, Omnipresent. Don't even try to tell me what such a God will or won't do. You have no idea; you can have no idea.
No. Your point is?
You might want to go over that again. Using more words, perhaps; it doesn't parse. Perhaps it is me -- I've had a long day. I'd very much appreciate a "light" version of whatever you were trying to get across there.
Having said that, good science requires repeatability and reproducability; there is nothing is stopping you from asking the original poster for the same kind of "you can't know this, only God can know this" data point that you can verify. It is a unique opportunity -- the poster claims that his God answers him when he prays. Step up to the plate and see what you can find out for yourself.
There's no benefit whatsoever to be had from the test I concocted other than to discern for me if the voices this person hears are his internal babblings or an insightful speaking of truths obtained by means outside of nature as I understand it. I suspect that is an important point, if a God or Gods is involved.
The claim that an interventionist God's existance cannot be tested for has always been a nonsense claim. That was such a test, a very good one in fact, and we will see if it can return positive results.
If it can, that will be fascinating and I will accept it as evidence for a God; if it's not God, it's telepathy or dipping data from the future, and I'd be willing to mistake either of those for God -- any of them is such an exciting discovery as to be life-changing. Further tests can determine what the actual case is.
If it can't, it's just one more negative result in a whole slew of them -- results that lead towards a "this is a made-up story" conclusion.
Tests are easy. What is apparently not easy is getting positive results. The poster claimed an interventionist God. Which is super. It's the non-interventionist God you can't test for, not an interventionist one. Christians don't generally believe in a non-interventionist God, though.
I didn't misunderstand "You have to take my word for it". I took it literally, as was demanded by context. People don't get a free ride from me because they state they believe in God. They can believe anything they like, certainly. I will, in turn, maintain any opinion I think is appropriate of those beliefs.
As for the rest, my examples were very religion-like. At present, voodoo and nonsense physics share almost every characteristic with belief in God.
No, I didn't. I just don't share your frame of reference. The frame of reference that applies to religionists is not the frame of reference that applies to me.
That is a claim that can be tested. Fine. I'll provisionally accept it. Let's test. Now, pray to your God and retrieve the answer as to exactly what object I am thinking of as I write this. Post that answer here. I'll give you and your God a hint: "Asia's..." what? One word, two syllables. Language unspecified; I'm a martial artist and speak two Asian languages. Let's see you and your God solve that one with prayer. You won't come up with it by guessing, I can tell you that.
Now: unless you can meet that very simple standard of testability, I will continue to accept that all the evidence -- and there is tons of it -- indicates that what you are doing is inventing and/or accepting a made-up story to explain things that have yet to be explained, and may in fact not be explainable. For instance, I am not inclined to make up an untestable story about how the universe started in order to explain the fact that I don't understand how it started. That's not productive behaviour in my frame of reference.
Back to our test. Now, since in all human history, no prayer of record has ever returned useful, previously unknown results, I'll not be holding my breath for your ability to get your prayer answered. So let me be clear: Until you can bring objective proof of the existance of supernatural processes into the natural world, there is no reason that I should accept that what you are saying is anything other than a further manifestation of your own inner story-telling processes.
No. I don't. You're confused to think so -- that's actually politically correct nonsense. In fact, I don't take your word for it, and unless you come up with some proof, there is no reason whatsoever I should take you at your your word.
Without proof, your word on this matter is precisely of the same value as the word of a voodoo practitioner fresh from his chicken sacrifice, or the word of someone who thinks keeping his vegetables underneath a crystal pyramid will improve them as compared to, say, refrigeration. These things are interesting as a metric of human behaviour, but they are not objective fact and therefore not worthy of accepting at face value. As it turns out, all the evidence so far indicates that belief in God (more generally, any God or Gods) is simply irrational behaviour. No more, but sometimes less.
No. It doesn't break the scientific method. It simply puts religion in the same boat with phrenology and astrology and many, many other beliefs without rational foundation.
The fact is, belief does not in any way presage or validate its subject; no matter how deep the rationalizations go, no matter how many like-minded believers there are, and no matter how profound the the depth of the belief. That power is beyond religion; and yet science is a functional implementation of that power -- we can actually validate what is, as opposed to what is simply believed.