You misunderstand me. I did not mean atheists don't fight theism, ignorance, and superstition (though some don't). But you cannot fight something that does not exist.
As an aside, I'd like to register my profoud relief that you are not a dictator.
Insightful my ass. The literalist Neds have been against evolution right from the off. They're the ones that equate evolution with atheism with some sort of anti-Christian movement. I have encountered few atheists that claim to be able to prove that gods don't exist, and those ones always do so by claiming the concept of most gods is self-contradictory and therefore impossible. (They provide long proofs, but they bore the hell out of me. It's like reading a proof of why Leprechauns can't exist: why waste the time?)
Everybody (except obviously the ignorant theists that only go by what their preacher told them) knows science says nothing about gods. It's the ridiculous stories in their magic book that it threatens. Evolution undermines their entire *religion*, not their god. If mankind evolved and there was no Adam and Eve, then there was no Fall, so there's no original sin, so there was nothing for Jesus to save us all from.
So you can understand why they fight tooth and nail.
Considering how many trolls we've had on this specific topic, it really shouldn't be surprising. That said, I thought the way it was worded made it seem rather sincere, so I'd think that's an unfair mod.
Evolutionary biology is not simply a guess at history. Evolution is an observable phenomenon, most notably in the realm of microorgnaisms, since we can track large numbers of generations in a relatively short amount of time.
The theory of evolution is what turned biology from stamp collecting into science. It is only in light of evolution that biology really makes sense. We have classified vast numbers of species of animals. Evolution explains the similarities and justifies the connections we've made. We now know the connection between genetic variation and DNA. Homologous structures in animals are no longer a mystery, nor are vestigial organs/appendages.
> I just don't see any Science-Engineering connection to Evolutionary Biology...
Genetic modification. Pharmaceuticals.
Hell, we make artificial sweeteners by injecting foreign genes into bacteria. I mean, that is just neat.
Fucking christ. Most of the posts are just smug tech elitists whining about how it caters to "emo teens" or saying something like "Just what we need, more bloggers". The web is fucking huge, and I'd be surprised if there are twenty Slashdotters that haven't developed excellent crapflood filters by now. You don't read the Xangas and LiveJournals and Bloggers, so why are you complaining?
Someone went and turned a browser from a window through which you can view the web to an application where you interact with parts of it (among the most popular parts these days) more intuitively. And you look beyond how neat that is because you want to look down your noses at the emo teens. Fucking class act.
The default theme is much prettier than any Firefox theme I've seen. Not a big deal, but it is nice to not have to search through a ton of themes to get one that's aesthetically pleasing.
At the right side of the bookmark toolbar is a drop down menu, where you select don't make me weak at the kneesthe folder to view, and that folder's contents show up in the bar. Sure not one of the great innovations of our time, but I love it. Already I use it more than I ever used the bookmark menu. I would be delighted if Mozilla merged this into Firefox.
Another thing that Firefox has been missing is searchbar history. It's one of those small things that can really make the difference in your user experience.
They also have the option to bring back the find as you type bit, and I've only had one instance where it tries to start searching when I'm typing in a textbox.
Things that I'm neutral towards or dislike:
I'm not a big blogger or del.icio.us user, so those features don't excite me overmuch.
That said, the built-in interface to Blogger simply doesn't work. You try to open an old post and supposedly all the text in it is "2005".
When playing with the blogging applet, at times I would get CPU usage of ~98%.
Beyond the bookmark toolbar, the rest of the favorites interface is cluttered and stuff that I would never use.
The CSS implementation is a bit sketchy (though still better than IE, in my opinion).
But hey, they gave fair warning that there are some major bugs. Hopefully most of these will be fixed up by 1.0.
If they maintain the current format, you could just use your one use to rip the ISO. So you could be getting what used to cost $15 for $6 ($5 for the first disk, $1 for the blank DVD-R(DL)'s).
And if they change the format, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before somebody cracks it. (Though it will cost them quite a bit, considering they can only test once per disc.)
So the whole one time use is easily circumvented, and if people are willing to pay the same amount for a indefinite use DVD as they are a one time use DVD, this will suddenly make it much cheaper to pirate movies. Or am I misunderstanding the point of the one time use? Is it simply a cheaper method of distribution?
You're thinking the moons of Yavin. Yavin 4 being the most well known of these.
"... the Death Star floated in stationary orbit above the green moon Endor--a moon whose mother planet had long since died of unknown cataclysm and disappeared into unknown realms." -Return of the Jedi by James Kahn
They have a "Product search results..." link, one for Google Scholar, and one for images. Wouldn't it make sense to knock off the known blog sites (Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc.) from the main search and have a "Blog search results..." link?
I think the only problem is that if you remove blogs from the main Google search, you lose the linkage that they use to determine pagerank, and blogs have become a significant part of web culture. Though I suppose they could still use the links, even if they index the pages somewhere else.
Do you really think the terrorists are trying to erode our freedoms?
First of all, it's usually the actions of the government, not the people, that they are trying to influence. Sure they may think Americans are debauched and stupid, but so does everyone else. That's not the reason you fly planes into buildings.
The point of inspiring terror in the average person is to get them to exercise their influence to get their government to do what the terrorists want. It's not at all playing into their hands to make the average citizen scared of their government and suspicious of their neighbor. Indeed, it's the terrorists that are playing into the hands of the fascists.
If it is an ISP they're making, they could really flesh out their cache. Say a user wants a site that has never been cached. All Google has to do is intercept the data as it heads off to the user. This way popular sites could get cached almost immediately.
Similarly, if they're watching browse patterns, they may be able to refine their pageranks.
I'm interested to see where they go with all this.
GIMPshop - It was an inconsequential patch job. I installed it and the GIMP and compared the interfaces. The only differences were changed labels on tools to be more comfortable to Photoshop users. Big fucking deal. It didn't fix any problems on a deeper level than that.
I understand making a point, and I'm not suggesting you go out of your way to accomodate IE's brain damages, but by making your site intentionally unreadable seems like you're being a server side troll.
Yes. Apparently it is. I'm sure most of us will never understand why people fail to read error messages or follow menus (let's face it, the Windows install tells you exactly what to do, but people get scared by the fact that it uses a curses-like interface), but we might as well accept it.
Yes, it seems Firefox is slower on Linux to me as well. I'm not sure why that might be. Perhaps Windows has a more consistent API? I really don't know, and though it usually doesn't take very long (i.e. most pages aren't so long as to require a lot of work) I do hope they fix that eventually.
I fairly distinctly remember hearing in my Ancient History class that there was a theory that there may have been a northward migration from South America long before the crossing of the Bering Strait. So was that just a hypothesis, and now we have evidence? Or am I inventing memories? (I wouldn't be surprised. My younger brother tells stories about when I was born.)
Deterministic doesn't necessarily mean predictable. You have to know the original state, and nothing new can be introduced, for it to be predictable (you also have to have the computational power to calculate up to beyond the present day, otherwise it's simply a confirmation, not prediction). So something can be deterministic without being predictable. (On the other hand, we can pick out patterns without knowing the original state. This would be the methodology of any type of fortune-telling that isn't a sham by design.)
Can something be predictable without being deterministic? I'd say so. People can behave predictably. For example, if I punch you in the nose, I predict you will get angry. Now whether or not every moment led us inexorably to that exchange where I 'decided' to punch you in the nose is a point for philosophers to argue about and the rest of us to say "Huh. That's a (neat|dumb) question." and carry on with our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand me. I did not mean atheists don't fight theism, ignorance, and superstition (though some don't). But you cannot fight something that does not exist.
As an aside, I'd like to register my profoud relief that you are not a dictator.
Atheists do not and never will fight against "God".
Insightful my ass. The literalist Neds have been against evolution right from the off. They're the ones that equate evolution with atheism with some sort of anti-Christian movement. I have encountered few atheists that claim to be able to prove that gods don't exist, and those ones always do so by claiming the concept of most gods is self-contradictory and therefore impossible. (They provide long proofs, but they bore the hell out of me. It's like reading a proof of why Leprechauns can't exist: why waste the time?)
Everybody (except obviously the ignorant theists that only go by what their preacher told them) knows science says nothing about gods. It's the ridiculous stories in their magic book that it threatens. Evolution undermines their entire *religion*, not their god. If mankind evolved and there was no Adam and Eve, then there was no Fall, so there's no original sin, so there was nothing for Jesus to save us all from.
So you can understand why they fight tooth and nail.
Considering how many trolls we've had on this specific topic, it really shouldn't be surprising. That said, I thought the way it was worded made it seem rather sincere, so I'd think that's an unfair mod.
Evolutionary biology is not simply a guess at history. Evolution is an observable phenomenon, most notably in the realm of microorgnaisms, since we can track large numbers of generations in a relatively short amount of time.
The theory of evolution is what turned biology from stamp collecting into science. It is only in light of evolution that biology really makes sense. We have classified vast numbers of species of animals. Evolution explains the similarities and justifies the connections we've made. We now know the connection between genetic variation and DNA. Homologous structures in animals are no longer a mystery, nor are vestigial organs/appendages.
> I just don't see any Science-Engineering connection to Evolutionary Biology...
Genetic modification. Pharmaceuticals.
Hell, we make artificial sweeteners by injecting foreign genes into bacteria. I mean, that is just neat.
Fucking christ. Most of the posts are just smug tech elitists whining about how it caters to "emo teens" or saying something like "Just what we need, more bloggers". The web is fucking huge, and I'd be surprised if there are twenty Slashdotters that haven't developed excellent crapflood filters by now. You don't read the Xangas and LiveJournals and Bloggers, so why are you complaining?
Someone went and turned a browser from a window through which you can view the web to an application where you interact with parts of it (among the most popular parts these days) more intuitively. And you look beyond how neat that is because you want to look down your noses at the emo teens. Fucking class act.
I got a copy of Flock, so here are my thoughts.
What I like:
The default theme is much prettier than any Firefox theme I've seen. Not a big deal, but it is nice to not have to search through a ton of themes to get one that's aesthetically pleasing.
At the right side of the bookmark toolbar is a drop down menu, where you select don't make me weak at the kneesthe folder to view, and that folder's contents show up in the bar. Sure not one of the great innovations of our time, but I love it. Already I use it more than I ever used the bookmark menu. I would be delighted if Mozilla merged this into Firefox.
Another thing that Firefox has been missing is searchbar history. It's one of those small things that can really make the difference in your user experience.
They also have the option to bring back the find as you type bit, and I've only had one instance where it tries to start searching when I'm typing in a textbox.
Things that I'm neutral towards or dislike:
I'm not a big blogger or del.icio.us user, so those features don't excite me overmuch.
That said, the built-in interface to Blogger simply doesn't work. You try to open an old post and supposedly all the text in it is "2005".
When playing with the blogging applet, at times I would get CPU usage of ~98%.
Beyond the bookmark toolbar, the rest of the favorites interface is cluttered and stuff that I would never use.
The CSS implementation is a bit sketchy (though still better than IE, in my opinion).
But hey, they gave fair warning that there are some major bugs. Hopefully most of these will be fixed up by 1.0.
I like my no-frills version of the game:
Multiply the first three digits of your SSN by 1,000,000
Multiply the middle two by 10,000
Add those to the last four digits
Holy shit, how did you do that!?
Hasn't somebody already done this?
If they maintain the current format, you could just use your one use to rip the ISO. So you could be getting what used to cost $15 for $6 ($5 for the first disk, $1 for the blank DVD-R(DL)'s).
And if they change the format, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before somebody cracks it. (Though it will cost them quite a bit, considering they can only test once per disc.)
So the whole one time use is easily circumvented, and if people are willing to pay the same amount for a indefinite use DVD as they are a one time use DVD, this will suddenly make it much cheaper to pirate movies. Or am I misunderstanding the point of the one time use? Is it simply a cheaper method of distribution?
You're thinking the moons of Yavin. Yavin 4 being the most well known of these.
"... the Death Star floated in stationary orbit above the green moon Endor--a moon whose mother planet had long since died of unknown cataclysm and disappeared into unknown realms." -Return of the Jedi by James Kahn
They have a "Product search results..." link, one for Google Scholar, and one for images. Wouldn't it make sense to knock off the known blog sites (Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc.) from the main search and have a "Blog search results..." link?
I think the only problem is that if you remove blogs from the main Google search, you lose the linkage that they use to determine pagerank, and blogs have become a significant part of web culture. Though I suppose they could still use the links, even if they index the pages somewhere else.
Do you really think the terrorists are trying to erode our freedoms?
First of all, it's usually the actions of the government, not the people, that they are trying to influence. Sure they may think Americans are debauched and stupid, but so does everyone else. That's not the reason you fly planes into buildings.
The point of inspiring terror in the average person is to get them to exercise their influence to get their government to do what the terrorists want. It's not at all playing into their hands to make the average citizen scared of their government and suspicious of their neighbor. Indeed, it's the terrorists that are playing into the hands of the fascists.
So what you're saying is that code signing as a concept sucks because a non-reference implementation of the concept is badly done?
That's quite a stretch - kinda like categorically stating Java sucks because... Are you sure you wanted to use that comparison?
If it is an ISP they're making, they could really flesh out their cache. Say a user wants a site that has never been cached. All Google has to do is intercept the data as it heads off to the user. This way popular sites could get cached almost immediately.
Similarly, if they're watching browse patterns, they may be able to refine their pageranks.
I'm interested to see where they go with all this.
I don't know. I use Linux w/ Enlightenment or Fluxbox (depending on the machine). I haven't had a taskbar in a year.
GIMPshop - It was an inconsequential patch job. I installed it and the GIMP and compared the interfaces. The only differences were changed labels on tools to be more comfortable to Photoshop users. Big fucking deal. It didn't fix any problems on a deeper level than that.
It's worst at what it does best...
I understand making a point, and I'm not suggesting you go out of your way to accomodate IE's brain damages, but by making your site intentionally unreadable seems like you're being a server side troll.
Yes. Apparently it is. I'm sure most of us will never understand why people fail to read error messages or follow menus (let's face it, the Windows install tells you exactly what to do, but people get scared by the fact that it uses a curses-like interface), but we might as well accept it.
Yes, it seems Firefox is slower on Linux to me as well. I'm not sure why that might be. Perhaps Windows has a more consistent API? I really don't know, and though it usually doesn't take very long (i.e. most pages aren't so long as to require a lot of work) I do hope they fix that eventually.
I fairly distinctly remember hearing in my Ancient History class that there was a theory that there may have been a northward migration from South America long before the crossing of the Bering Strait. So was that just a hypothesis, and now we have evidence? Or am I inventing memories? (I wouldn't be surprised. My younger brother tells stories about when I was born.)
I think a better (read: sensical) one would have been:
In Soviet Russia, comet probes you!
It wasn't the comet probe being deformed.
Deterministic doesn't necessarily mean predictable. You have to know the original state, and nothing new can be introduced, for it to be predictable (you also have to have the computational power to calculate up to beyond the present day, otherwise it's simply a confirmation, not prediction). So something can be deterministic without being predictable. (On the other hand, we can pick out patterns without knowing the original state. This would be the methodology of any type of fortune-telling that isn't a sham by design.)
Can something be predictable without being deterministic? I'd say so. People can behave predictably. For example, if I punch you in the nose, I predict you will get angry. Now whether or not every moment led us inexorably to that exchange where I 'decided' to punch you in the nose is a point for philosophers to argue about and the rest of us to say "Huh. That's a (neat|dumb) question." and carry on with our lives.
It will not be funny if all hell breaks loose. It affects the entire world if a country disintegrates.