In reality, you're giving it a lot more thought than most people writing "alien" names do--they just randomly throw in apostrophes to make a name look weird.
There's a pretty big difference between being an asshole and being evil. You can be unsociable but do good things; people might not want to hang around you, but that's no reason to consider you a bad person in a meaningful sense.
If they use apostrophes, ignore them - they're not serious. Some aliens will try to tell you that "'" stands for an obscure vowel (F'lar, T'pau, Sp'thra), or a silent consonant (Dra'Azon, Ka'a Orto'o), but in reality it's purely decorative. It's not clear why they choose to use apostrophes rather than, say, umlauts (à la Mötley Crüe) - or peculiar alien squiggles, come to that. Maybe they just want to keep things convenient for ASCII.
Yet it's not arrogant for an AC to proclaim that an entire operating system which is the result of a great amount of labor should be merged with another OS which has different goals? What next, are you going to say that the GPL is pretty arrogant, and maybe Torvalds should get off his high horse and merge with BSD?
This is more like not going to a restaurant with good food and good service because the manager (whom you never see at the restaurant) is an asshole. Yes, it is vindictive.
I'm sure you reward intolerable behavior quite often with your hard-earned money, simply unbeknownst to yourself. Products aren't services--you're paying for the quality of the product rather than choosing to reward the person who made it. Do you fly over to China often to make sure that the factory workers manufacturing your consumer goods are nice people?
What I mean is that we shouldn't discuss the implications of something as though the implications have any impact on the truth. Saying something like, "We shouldn't worry about pollution because the costs of reducing it outweigh the impact of global warming," or, "Rapid climate changes in the past have led to mass extinctions," has nothing to do with the empirical evidence for climate change.
It sure would be nice if people could discuss science and not politics, especially for something so important. But I'm not holding my breath. Not as bad as evolution debates, I suppose.
Shooting them on the battlefield, holding them as prisoners of war, or trying them for treason (which they didn't even do for Lindh!) would all be acceptable courses of action. Arbitrarily detaining people abroad and at home suspected of terrorism is not. Aside from Padilla, hundreds of resident non-citizens were held for indefinite periods of time without charges, though I believe most of them have been released or deported by now.
I think we differ in view is what to think when "best" is roughly equivalent to "wild speculation with a small number of highly questionable supporting facts."
I think you don't know much about science. The Big Bang theory is highly speculative, but to call it "wild speculation" is simply untrue--it is the most logically consistent explanation of phenomena we observe in the universe.
My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.
Your opinion is flat-out wrong. You should give as much credence to theories as they deserve based on their merit. Science does not purport to explain what caused the Big Bang, only to describe how it happened.
Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.
There are other hypotheses, such as the cosmological constant. However, the evidence points toward the Big Bang.
When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.
You mean that you choose not to think at all instead of biasing yourself in favor of the evidence. Guess what? I don't know either, and I never claimed to.
I don't know if your post was a troll, or if you really are so willfully ignorant. You missed my original point entirely; while we do not know for sure that the Big Bang occurred, it is the best explanation we have today, and the only reason it ignore it is in favor of faith.
There is no logical reason to believe this; it's merely how we think the world works.
We believe this because everything we observe follows this pattern. Even if this isn't sufficient proof to overcome hyperbolic doubt, even Hume accepted that it is the best thing we have. Besides, science isn't based on finding what's "True," but rather getting the closest to the truth we can, as I posted originally.
Trying to figure out as best we can what the age of the universe is based on our observations and the best theories we can extrapolate from these observations isn't faith; it's science. Just because we don't know everything, it doesn't mean that we should stick our heads in the ground and pretend to know nothing.
I suppose if all you watch are David Lean movies and The Matrix, then The Matrix would be one of the worst movies you've ever seen. But trust me, there are plenty of movies out there that are much, much worse.
During much of the Middle Ages, however, the circumstances weren't identical; until the Renaissance, the Christian world was far more antagonistic toward science than the Muslim world. Einstein wouldn't have contributed much to society if he were burned at the stake.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not very, but they're certainly a lot more influential than the EFF, for example, so I would say this is a good thing.
Wait, so now the Department of Defense is a member of the group? Or was Rumsfeld commenting on it for other reasons?
In reality, you're giving it a lot more thought than most people writing "alien" names do--they just randomly throw in apostrophes to make a name look weird.
There's a pretty big difference between being an asshole and being evil. You can be unsociable but do good things; people might not want to hang around you, but that's no reason to consider you a bad person in a meaningful sense.
Star Wars: Episode LHOOQ
Really, in the last episode of Enterprise they should have sorted the whole mess out by going back in time and killing Berman.
If they use apostrophes, ignore them - they're not serious. Some aliens will try to tell you that "'" stands for an obscure vowel (F'lar, T'pau, Sp'thra), or a silent consonant (Dra'Azon, Ka'a Orto'o), but in reality it's purely decorative. It's not clear why they choose to use apostrophes rather than, say, umlauts (à la Mötley Crüe) - or peculiar alien squiggles, come to that. Maybe they just want to keep things convenient for ASCII.
Yet it's not arrogant for an AC to proclaim that an entire operating system which is the result of a great amount of labor should be merged with another OS which has different goals? What next, are you going to say that the GPL is pretty arrogant, and maybe Torvalds should get off his high horse and merge with BSD?
This is more like not going to a restaurant with good food and good service because the manager (whom you never see at the restaurant) is an asshole. Yes, it is vindictive.
I'm sure you reward intolerable behavior quite often with your hard-earned money, simply unbeknownst to yourself. Products aren't services--you're paying for the quality of the product rather than choosing to reward the person who made it. Do you fly over to China often to make sure that the factory workers manufacturing your consumer goods are nice people?
Triple encryption! That's three times as much as single encryption. I bet Phil Zimmerman is going to feel stupid that he didn't come up with it.
If this lawsuit fails, they plan to sue everyone who isn't one of their customers for depriving them of revenue.
What I mean is that we shouldn't discuss the implications of something as though the implications have any impact on the truth. Saying something like, "We shouldn't worry about pollution because the costs of reducing it outweigh the impact of global warming," or, "Rapid climate changes in the past have led to mass extinctions," has nothing to do with the empirical evidence for climate change.
It sure would be nice if people could discuss science and not politics, especially for something so important. But I'm not holding my breath. Not as bad as evolution debates, I suppose.
Shooting them on the battlefield, holding them as prisoners of war, or trying them for treason (which they didn't even do for Lindh!) would all be acceptable courses of action. Arbitrarily detaining people abroad and at home suspected of terrorism is not. Aside from Padilla, hundreds of resident non-citizens were held for indefinite periods of time without charges, though I believe most of them have been released or deported by now.
I think you don't know much about science. The Big Bang theory is highly speculative, but to call it "wild speculation" is simply untrue--it is the most logically consistent explanation of phenomena we observe in the universe.
My opinion there is that you should go ahead and assume that any theory that has been put forth is equally valid. I don't see why "God made it at a specific time" or "its always been there," or "it happened at a specific time all by itself" are all equally valid hypotheses in absence of real testability.
Your opinion is flat-out wrong. You should give as much credence to theories as they deserve based on their merit. Science does not purport to explain what caused the Big Bang, only to describe how it happened.
Its interesting that you mention putting your head in the sand. I would consider holding one hypothesis as more valid than others in the absence of acceptable supporting evidence to be exactly that.
There are other hypotheses, such as the cosmological constant. However, the evidence points toward the Big Bang.
When I don't know what to think, I don't bias myself by picking something just because I don't know. I'm willing to not know.
You mean that you choose not to think at all instead of biasing yourself in favor of the evidence. Guess what? I don't know either, and I never claimed to.
I don't know if your post was a troll, or if you really are so willfully ignorant. You missed my original point entirely; while we do not know for sure that the Big Bang occurred, it is the best explanation we have today, and the only reason it ignore it is in favor of faith.
We believe this because everything we observe follows this pattern. Even if this isn't sufficient proof to overcome hyperbolic doubt, even Hume accepted that it is the best thing we have. Besides, science isn't based on finding what's "True," but rather getting the closest to the truth we can, as I posted originally.
In Soviet Russia, there are no articles.
Trying to figure out as best we can what the age of the universe is based on our observations and the best theories we can extrapolate from these observations isn't faith; it's science. Just because we don't know everything, it doesn't mean that we should stick our heads in the ground and pretend to know nothing.
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/?q=xul
These same people tend to harbor a seething hatred toward Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I suppose if all you watch are David Lean movies and The Matrix, then The Matrix would be one of the worst movies you've ever seen. But trust me, there are plenty of movies out there that are much, much worse.
You're just upset because having a Democrat governor in power means that Daley can run the whole state :)
I think he means unary XORing each bit.
During much of the Middle Ages, however, the circumstances weren't identical; until the Renaissance, the Christian world was far more antagonistic toward science than the Muslim world. Einstein wouldn't have contributed much to society if he were burned at the stake.