Normally people calling themselves athiest aren't so sompassionate towards other religions.
As an atheist who hangs out with a lot of other atheists, let me say that this is a strongly filtered perception. It is filtered by the fact that most of the time, an atheist isn't going to really say or do anything that would clue you in to the fact that he's an atheist. It's not a religion - it's not a belief. It's a lack thereof. So it rarely comes up in conversation unless in response to something someone has said that is highly insulting to an atheist (for example the 700 club quote in this thread). So you never realize someone is an atheist until they've been riled up by such a statement and are (justifiably) argumentative about it. This gives the false impression that atheists aren't compassionate toward other religions. It's not that we aren't compassionate. It's just that we don't tend to say much about it when we are in that mood. Consider today's prayers across the country, and the "moment of silence" that is typically used for personal prayers. Think about whichever crowd you were in at the time, or were watching on TV. During that moment of silence, if everyone in the crowd was an atheist - would you have even noticed the difference? Not really. It was a moment to respect the dead, not to start arguments.
I suspect you are committing the statistical error of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. My compassion for a religious person dissapears when he tells me I am incapable of being a good person because I'm an atheist. But until then, I view him as a person just like any other.
Over the years I've noticed that religions are so varied and complex that they don't *really* dictate what morals people believe in, like they claim to do. Rather, what happens is the other way around: that the morals a person holds dear determines which religion, and which subsect of that religion he migrates toward, and this is mostly subconsious. You can twist a lot of religious teachings into whatever you like by selectively picking which parts to take literally vs which parts to take as "metaphor". Thus when someone tells me he's a Christian, or he's a Muslim, or he's a Jew - I try as hard as I can to *not* draw any predjudiced conclusions about what that really means. I wait to observe his actions and his words first. Or at least I *try* to. I will admit to not always succeeding at being gracious and polite as I should be - especially if I've just recently heard some hateful rhetoric such as that of today's 700 club (which has been floating around the net all day).
As a child I was brought up as a Ba'hii (Not sure where the apostrophe is supposed to go there - it's one of those Arabic words that just isn't easy to spell in English letters.) They are a modern offshoot from Islam, in much the same way that Christianity started as an offshoot of Judaism. (But the Ba'hii offshoot is much more recent - from the 1800's). Anyway, one of the core tenets of the Ba'hii faith is that one must spend time studying the other religions of the world as well as one's own, because they all came from the same god, and all have useful things to say. Given enough time studying, one is supposed to realize that the relgions all teach the same message, and that the similarities between them must be the "pure" message from God and the differences are supposed to be the minor points that don't matter as much, perhaps are even manglings of the original message a bit. It's a nice idea, and Ba'hiis tend to be *extremely* tolerant of other religions because of this. It is common to mix up different words from different relgions in a 'reading'. (The televised event today from the National Cathedral, with the list of different leaders from different faiths speaking is very reminiscent of what I remember from Ba'hii services I used to go to.) Anyway, where am I going with this? I don't really know.
I guess just one day I started toying idly with the idea that maybe the reason the religions overlap so much in what they say isn't because they all come from the same god, but because they don't come from a god at all, and instead come from people's own hearts and desires. Perhaps their similarities merely reflect the similarities cultures have because we're all human, and at some basic level we all think similarly when confronted with the taks of explaining the unknown. Over the years that little seed of doubt grew until finally I started thinking it the more plausable explanation to the one offered by the Bah'ii faith. When I turned 15 (the age at which one can officially make the declaration to become a Bahii for real), that doubt was so strong that I didn't feel comfortable doing it, and so I didn't. And I never have since, and what was once a small doubt is now what I see as the most plausable explanation. I called myself "agnostic" and decried atheists until much later when I realized they don't actually *have* a belief like I thought they did. I was applying the atheist label to a strawman that doesn't often exist. That's when I started calling myself one too.
But enough rambling. On this day, we shouldn't argue. Comfort yourself with the things you hold dear. I often think of religion as just a crutch, a teddy bear to make people feel better. But today is the last day to be taking people's teddy bears away. They need them now more than ever.
My hope here is that "sustained" implies ground action as opposed to nukes. Nuking a country is not something I would describe as a "sustained" action. "sustained" implies something that's going to take a lot of time, a description which does not fit for a nuclear attack.
And I deeply hope that I'm right in this. If I'm wrong...I don't even want to think about what it means for the world if I'm wrong.
He only apologised because it was necessary from a PR standpoint to do so. I have no confidence whatsoever in the sincerity of that apology.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
The article to which you are responding was written in 1973 - before the advent of Airbus planes.
Granted, that wasn't made clear. The spam of this broadcast, while it might seem timely today, should have been accompanied by the explicit mention that it was NOT written recently.
-It makes easier to disable a whole country with little effort (who can argue about this now).
I can.
The fact that a lot of business was conducted in that part of New York is NOT why the country is paralyzed right now. It's because of the shutdown of all air traffic. Air frieght isn't being delivered. People aren't returning from business meetings. Stuff came to a halt when the only means of fast transport in this country was pinched off.
I think you are operating under the assumption that the passengers knew what the hijackers were planning on doing. It wouldn't surprise me if the hijakers managed to keep the passengers ignorant of what they were really planning.
Sure, you'd be willing to rush the hijakers if you *knew* they were going to ram the plan into a building. But if you just thought they were going to land at a different airport and begin negotiations, would you still be willing to give it a try then? I think at that point you'd still be in the "nice doggy" stage of diplomacy ("Diplomacy means saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a stick.") If you thought you were going to be landing, you'd probably want to wait for the landing before trying anything drastic.
What really pisses me off is sites that have information that I want (in HTML) but won't give it unless I pass through their flash corridor.
Or, similarly, the ones that piss me off (and when you think on it, these cases are all related):
The site that insists I have Javascript turned on even though they don't actually do anything with it and the bare HTML is actually all I need, if the server would just let me have it.
The site that, if I have Javascript turned off, makes the false assumption that my browser is incapable of doing Javascript and so it redirects me to a place to download an "upgrade", instead of telling me to please enable javascript.
The site that, when it looks at my user agent string, makes the false assumption that my browser is incapable of viewing the site, and refuses to send me the page. Dammit, *I* get to determine if the partially working page is good enough for my needs, not the server. Plus, the page might actully work 100% but the site writer just hadn't heard of my browser before and didn't know this. This monopoly-encouraging tactic really pisses me off. Sure, I can configure the browser to lie in the user-agent string, but when it does that it's not properly representing itself in the usage logs of the server. The myth that nobody ever uses third-party browsers will never go away as long as users of third-party browsers have to lie and pretend to be a more popular browser just to get predjudiced sites to send them the same exact bytes they send to everyone else.
And, NO, I'm not asking site writers to work hard to accomodate all browsers with special code for each. I'm asking them NOT to go out of their way with special code that refuses browsers. Maybe the site won't work on my browser, maybe it will. But at least let me try it and see!
You should download the site and look at it in private,
this way you don't interact with the site the same way you would interact in the store.
That's how HTTP is *supposed* to work already. The connection only lives long enough to download the page. After that you *are* reading a downloaded copy on your own machine.
The original poster, who said that this sort of thing is going on already, is only half right. Yes, in meatspace you have surveilence in stores, but that surveilence ends when you leave the doors of the store. This technology is like making the boundries of the store vague, so you don't know when you are back in your own "private" space again.
Railroad Tycoon II, and any of the similar genre of make-money-on-trade-routes games might be good.
About the only 'violent' stuff in that game is that sometimes trains crash, and that's not directly under player control anyway. (You can't click a "make the train crash now" button, while in Sim City, there's the "make disaster happen now" menu.)
One good thing about RRT2 is that it has a scenario editor, so if you need to make an easier game for younger kids, or promote a specific style of play, you can set up scenarios for that, and
edit the map as you see fit.
Re:The correct name for these bricks is LEGOS
on
When Lego Meet Rubik
·
· Score: 2
Ah yes, but nouns can be verbed, and adjectives can be nouned. Language mutates over time. Deal with it.
Actually Yes - still use MS if it's the best choice. But it's been a long time since the last time I saw a product made by MS that was the best choice. If he has a legitimate complaint with the GPL (and there are several) then THAT should be the reason for not using it, and ONLY that.
If you pick your license based on what you think ifs advocates (and not even the majority of its advocates, just the vocal minority of them), INSTEAD of the features of the license itself, then you yourself are being a licensing zealot.
There are valid reasons to pick other licenses instead of the GPL. The (percieved) attitude of its adovcates isn't one of them.
The irony is that the attitude you exhibit itself is also an example of zealotry. If you make your choice of license based not on the features of the license itself but on the behaviour of the vocal fringe of its promoters, then you yourself are being a zealot. There can be plenty of well thought out reasons not to use GPL for a project, but "I don't like the attitude of its advocates" isn't one of them.
The same trained teacher can produce students 10-20 percentile points up the ladder if they turn to home schooling.
This tells you that the system as implemented is broken
The average untrained home-schooling parent produces students 30 or more percentile points better than the State average (ie 20+-10 percentile points better than the
homeschooling trained teacher).
This tells you that the training to suit you for the system is also broken.
It tells you no such thing. Parents of public school kids run the gamut from "cares a lot about the child's education" to "doesn't care about the child's education." The set of all parents who homeschool their kids filters out the "doesn't care" end of that scale. The filter that selects your "experiment group" (homeschool families) out of the general population also selects for other factors that tend to influence a child's rate of learning. You are comparing apples to oranges.
I remember the "what if Everybody..." test from way back in one of my old ethics classes in college (I don't remember now who's name was attached it.) It struck me then as being really naive, and my opinion hasn't changed since. The problem is that there are a *lot* of things that are good if some people do them and bad if everybody does them. Is it bad to drive a bus? No? But what if EVERYBODY did it, and we had nothing but big busses everywhere, what a mess. Is it bad to plant a patch of raspberry bushes? Of course not, but what if *everybody* did it, and we had prickly raspberry bushes everywhere, so you couldn't even walk one block without getting all scratched up from the thorns? If everybody flew their own big jet plane, then we'd have tons of air collisions and we'd be wasting gigantic amounts of fuel. It would be terrible. But does that mean there shouldn't be any airline pilots because what they do would be bad if EVERYBODY did it?
It's a really simplistic test that ignores the fact that the strain on the world of everyone doing the same uniform thing in and of itself is often a bad thing, and can add "badness" to an otherwise benign activity.
You misunderstood him, I think. He's saying if FUTURE versions of the letter writing astroturfer will try all those other avenues, then will they try to cover the 'in person' technique too?
Let the user choose to toggle line-at-a-time mode
with a hotkey on the ssh client side. Just say in
the manual - your password will be more secure if you type ctrl-meta-dingbat-thwirble-whoops-wheres-my-thribb le before your password, and then again afterward.
If you want to get that pendantic, then no client is good enough because you could always record the sound in an old fashioned analog way - through the air to a handheld tape recorder, or you could feed the output audio jack through some home stereo system and record it.
Bull. Other oil companies existed. Other steel companies existed. They were very small marketshare, and not easy to find, but someone who went through a lot of effort could make use of them. EXACTLY....LIKE.....THE.....SITUATION....TODAY.
One does not need 100% share to be a monopoly.
By that definition a monopoly would cease to be a monopoly the instant even a mon&pop operation got started in the middle of nowhere with only 2 customers.
Yeah, one of the things a good developer should do is read the docs so he knows which routines are standard and which are not. But because of what MS did, those documented rules were no longer correct. Are you implying that ESP should be a
standard ability of all programmers?
If I write a broken hello world, program, with a crash-causing line like so in it: fprintf(NULL,"%s",NULL);
then that will never cause the OS itself to crash,
nor will it cause the shell that launched it to crash.
If *quicktime* itself is crashing, but the browser is chugging alone fine, then it's not the browser's fault. But if a quicktime error brings the browser down, then the browser is at fault for even letting it happen. But maybe I'm just spoiled by preferring the "run on the side" approach to trying to embed a foriegn app inside the page.
(Ideally, the plug-in shouldn't be occupying the same process space as the browser, such that it can crash without crashing the browser. If that's not how the design of plugins work (I really don't know how they are implemented), then that's a faulty design.)
Slashdot Mirror
As an atheist who hangs out with a lot of other atheists, let me say that this is a strongly filtered perception. It is filtered by the fact that most of the time, an atheist isn't going to really say or do anything that would clue you in to the fact that he's an atheist. It's not a religion - it's not a belief. It's a lack thereof. So it rarely comes up in conversation unless in response to something someone has said that is highly insulting to an atheist (for example the 700 club quote in this thread). So you never realize someone is an atheist until they've been riled up by such a statement and are (justifiably) argumentative about it. This gives the false impression that atheists aren't compassionate toward other religions. It's not that we aren't compassionate. It's just that we don't tend to say much about it when we are in that mood. Consider today's prayers across the country, and the "moment of silence" that is typically used for personal prayers. Think about whichever crowd you were in at the time, or were watching on TV. During that moment of silence, if everyone in the crowd was an atheist - would you have even noticed the difference? Not really. It was a moment to respect the dead, not to start arguments.
I suspect you are committing the statistical error of counting the hits and ignoring the misses. My compassion for a religious person dissapears when he tells me I am incapable of being a good person because I'm an atheist. But until then, I view him as a person just like any other.
Over the years I've noticed that religions are so varied and complex that they don't *really* dictate what morals people believe in, like they claim to do. Rather, what happens is the other way around: that the morals a person holds dear determines which religion, and which subsect of that religion he migrates toward, and this is mostly subconsious. You can twist a lot of religious teachings into whatever you like by selectively picking which parts to take literally vs which parts to take as "metaphor". Thus when someone tells me he's a Christian, or he's a Muslim, or he's a Jew - I try as hard as I can to *not* draw any predjudiced conclusions about what that really means. I wait to observe his actions and his words first. Or at least I *try* to. I will admit to not always succeeding at being gracious and polite as I should be - especially if I've just recently heard some hateful rhetoric such as that of today's 700 club (which has been floating around the net all day).
As a child I was brought up as a Ba'hii (Not sure where the apostrophe is supposed to go there - it's one of those Arabic words that just isn't easy to spell in English letters.) They are a modern offshoot from Islam, in much the same way that Christianity started as an offshoot of Judaism. (But the Ba'hii offshoot is much more recent - from the 1800's). Anyway, one of the core tenets of the Ba'hii faith is that one must spend time studying the other religions of the world as well as one's own, because they all came from the same god, and all have useful things to say. Given enough time studying, one is supposed to realize that the relgions all teach the same message, and that the similarities between them must be the "pure" message from God and the differences are supposed to be the minor points that don't matter as much, perhaps are even manglings of the original message a bit. It's a nice idea, and Ba'hiis tend to be *extremely* tolerant of other religions because of this. It is common to mix up different words from different relgions in a 'reading'. (The televised event today from the National Cathedral, with the list of different leaders from different faiths speaking is very reminiscent of what I remember from Ba'hii services I used to go to.) Anyway, where am I going with this? I don't really know.
I guess just one day I started toying idly with the idea that maybe the reason the religions overlap so much in what they say isn't because they all come from the same god, but because they don't come from a god at all, and instead come from people's own hearts and desires. Perhaps their similarities merely reflect the similarities cultures have because we're all human, and at some basic level we all think similarly when confronted with the taks of explaining the unknown. Over the years that little seed of doubt grew until finally I started thinking it the more plausable explanation to the one offered by the Bah'ii faith. When I turned 15 (the age at which one can officially make the declaration to become a Bahii for real), that doubt was so strong that I didn't feel comfortable doing it, and so I didn't. And I never have since, and what was once a small doubt is now what I see as the most plausable explanation. I called myself "agnostic" and decried atheists until much later when I realized they don't actually *have* a belief like I thought they did. I was applying the atheist label to a strawman that doesn't often exist. That's when I started calling myself one too.
But enough rambling. On this day, we shouldn't argue. Comfort yourself with the things you hold dear. I often think of religion as just a crutch, a teddy bear to make people feel better. But today is the last day to be taking people's teddy bears away. They need them now more than ever.
And I deeply hope that I'm right in this. If I'm wrong...I don't even want to think about what it means for the world if I'm wrong.
He only apologised because it was necessary from a PR standpoint to do so. I have no confidence whatsoever in the sincerity of that apology.
Granted, that wasn't made clear. The spam of this broadcast, while it might seem timely today, should have been accompanied by the explicit mention that it was NOT written recently.
I can.
The fact that a lot of business was conducted in that part of New York is NOT why the country is paralyzed right now. It's because of the shutdown of all air traffic. Air frieght isn't being delivered. People aren't returning from business meetings. Stuff came to a halt when the only means of fast transport in this country was pinched off.
Sure, you'd be willing to rush the hijakers if you *knew* they were going to ram the plan into a building. But if you just thought they were going to land at a different airport and begin negotiations, would you still be willing to give it a try then? I think at that point you'd still be in the "nice doggy" stage of diplomacy ("Diplomacy means saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a stick.") If you thought you were going to be landing, you'd probably want to wait for the landing before trying anything drastic.
What color is the sky on your planet? The Japaneese carriers were not submersable. (Well, not more than once anyway.)
Or, similarly, the ones that piss me off (and when you think on it, these cases are all related):
That's how HTTP is *supposed* to work already. The connection only lives long enough to download the page. After that you *are* reading a downloaded copy on your own machine.
The original poster, who said that this sort of thing is going on already, is only half right. Yes, in meatspace you have surveilence in stores, but that surveilence ends when you leave the doors of the store. This technology is like making the boundries of the store vague, so you don't know when you are back in your own "private" space again.
One good thing about RRT2 is that it has a scenario editor, so if you need to make an easier game for younger kids, or promote a specific style of play, you can set up scenarios for that, and edit the map as you see fit.
Ah yes, but nouns can be verbed, and adjectives can be nouned. Language mutates over time. Deal with it.
Actually Yes - still use MS if it's the best choice. But it's been a long time since the last time I saw a product made by MS that was the best choice. If he has a legitimate complaint with the GPL (and there are several) then THAT should be the reason for not using it, and ONLY that.
If you pick your license based on what you think ifs advocates (and not even the majority of its advocates, just the vocal minority of them), INSTEAD of the features of the license itself, then you yourself are being a licensing zealot.
There are valid reasons to pick other licenses instead of the GPL. The (percieved) attitude of its adovcates isn't one of them.
The irony is that the attitude you exhibit itself is also an example of zealotry. If you make your choice of license based not on the features of the license itself but on the behaviour of the vocal fringe of its promoters, then you yourself are being a zealot. There can be plenty of well thought out reasons not to use GPL for a project, but "I don't like the attitude of its advocates" isn't one of them.
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it does have an X11 interface
It tells you no such thing. Parents of public school kids run the gamut from "cares a lot about the child's education" to "doesn't care about the child's education." The set of all parents who homeschool their kids filters out the "doesn't care" end of that scale. The filter that selects your "experiment group" (homeschool families) out of the general population also selects for other factors that tend to influence a child's rate of learning. You are comparing apples to oranges.
It's a really simplistic test that ignores the fact that the strain on the world of everyone doing the same uniform thing in and of itself is often a bad thing, and can add "badness" to an otherwise benign activity.
You misunderstood him, I think. He's saying if FUTURE versions of the letter writing astroturfer will try all those other avenues, then will they try to cover the 'in person' technique too?
Let the user choose to toggle line-at-a-time modeb le before your password, and then again afterward.
with a hotkey on the ssh client side. Just say in
the manual - your password will be more secure if you type ctrl-meta-dingbat-thwirble-whoops-wheres-my-thrib
If you want to get that pendantic, then no client is good enough because you could always record the sound in an old fashioned analog way - through the air to a handheld tape recorder, or you could feed the output audio jack through some home stereo system and record it.
He stated that part of the requirements is to ensure the user can only hear the clip twice. That requires some sort of software on the client end.
Bull. Other oil companies existed. Other steel companies existed. They were very small marketshare, and not easy to find, but someone who went through a lot of effort could make use of them. EXACTLY....LIKE.....THE.....SITUATION....TODAY.
One does not need 100% share to be a monopoly.
By that definition a monopoly would cease to be a monopoly the instant even a mon&pop operation got started in the middle of nowhere with only 2 customers.
Yeah, one of the things a good developer should do is read the docs so he knows which routines are standard and which are not. But because of what MS did, those documented rules were no longer correct. Are you implying that ESP should be a
standard ability of all programmers?
then that will never cause the OS itself to crash,
nor will it cause the shell that launched it to crash.
If *quicktime* itself is crashing, but the browser is chugging alone fine, then it's not the browser's fault. But if a quicktime error brings the browser down, then the browser is at fault for even letting it happen. But maybe I'm just spoiled by preferring the "run on the side" approach to trying to embed a foriegn app inside the page.
(Ideally, the plug-in shouldn't be occupying the same process space as the browser, such that it can crash without crashing the browser. If that's not how the design of plugins work (I really don't know how they are implemented), then that's a faulty design.)