I am an atheist and argue that it does not take any more "leap of faith" to state "There is no God" than to state "There are no unicorns in California".
I find that when someone is arguing that "There is a God", they are actually arguing that their own God exists. They are imagining some human-centric interfering omniscient being who controls matter at the microscopic level, is telepathic, and predicts accurately the outcomes of complex chaotic processes. When I argue back, I'm arguing that "There is no God as you describe."
The typical American Christian professes belief that "There is an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, who interferes in modern politics, finance, and sporting events, is biased on behalf of "western countries", who created the malaria parasite and the corresponding Sickle-cell mutation, who designed the mammalian retina backwards, who created both heaven and hell to act as eternal sorting bins for 0-100 years worth of individual behavior and thought regardless of environmental circumstances, who listens to the prayers of his believers, who sent his only son to be slain by the Romans to bypass his own rules & regulations, who destroyed the first born sons of an entire nation out of spite (he did harden the Pharaoh's heart), who insists that all love him or suffer eternally..." Well, that is a testable statement, and is provably false.
If you're the rare sort that wants to argue that "There is an uncaring, unmeddling, uninvolved, undetectable, and limited extra-universal entity", to you I say, "Meh. So what."
HP spun off all the cool engineering stuff into a separate company because it was like "too hard to compete with IBM and Dell when the CEO has to spend precious time on 'worthless stuff'" like cesium clocks, heart defibrillators (though maybe sold off by now), inkjet-printed DNA Micro-array scanning chips*, satellite testing equipment, optical "bubble" network switches, and way, way, more, all of which went to make Agilent in 1999. I've always been a little disappointed that the calculator division stayed with HP.
HP may have kept the name, but little else of value.
* The DNA micro-arrays probably didn't exist then, but they are at Agilent now.
In the example, it was simply non-printable characters. In other cases, repairing client's data files has required more.. creativity. Like handling non-escaped commas in a comma-delimited file.
Re:What do people use Perl for?
on
Perl 5.11.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I use Perl for one-time jobs... Repairing badly-formatted 80GB data files. Splitting flat files into multiple output files. Testing uniqueness of various fields. Finding the line(s) in a 250GB file that is crashing the sqlload program, and fixing it, because you have two hours or we'll lose the project. (nevermind it's the client's data). Editing several files to purge or excise fields or characters before doing serious work with them. Most of these I do via the command line. I'll write actual Perl scripts to crawl throughout our network and gather statistics on files and projects, to test patch status, to download files, process them, and email the results.
Quick! The boss is standing over you demanding that you convert a flat file into csv, add a header, prepend a unique id, and spit any lines with weird characters into a separate file. Here's the printout of the layout. You have ten minutes. There's a million lines in the file and they've got to build a marketing model before the client meeting in one hour.
MLK assassination wasn't that long ago, just 40 years. Rosa Parks.. 53 years ago. MLK could still be alive to watch this if he weren't killed for his message. Whether or not you think race should be a factor, you have to acknowledge the progress made in so short a time.
Bush was on vacation clearing brush 1/2 of his presidency until 9/11, and as we found out later, he'd been gunning for invading Iraq since he became President. Plus, Bush flatly ignored the report that Bin Laden was going to attack the US.
There's no fucking way that Al Gore would have sent our military to invade Iraq, pushed for torture, greatly expanded the secret prisons. That war drained our military, drained our economy, and filled our hospitals with vetrans who will be on healthcare for the rest of their lives.
Al Gore's big thing was fighting climate change, which would have resulted in a new technology and research boom in America, NO NEW WARS, and he would not have pissed away the goodwill of the foreign nations, if he'd been unable to prevent 9/11. Plus, fighting climate change has the side-effect of reducing our foreign energy dependence. I have no doubt that Al Gore would have had a better pick for FEMA head, and a better response for Katrina. He wouldn't have been the second coming of Christ, but at least he wouldn't have been indifferent and snarky and intentionally destroying government effectiveness.
Bush and his team were fucking awful for the US.
Obama's pretty fucking decent. He can actually write his own speeches, and he reads the newspapers, and he can effectively lead and organize. That'll be a shit-load better than Bush. If people are treating Obama like the second-coming, it's only because we've survived eight-years of Bush.
ARGH! Deux ex machina! After reading the thoughtful foreword in Hunters of Dune (describing the lost manuscript found in the bank vault) I looked forward to a wonderful and considerate continuation of one of my favorite series...
At the end I felt like I'd watched Santa Claus get raped by R. Daneel Olivaw, and then Tinkerbell waved her fairy dust and suddenly everyone was all right and laughing together even while the smell of roasted reindeer giblets filled the air.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
Similar here.. I only found out his personal values after greatly enjoying several of his books. Interestingly, OSC's Postwatch was one of the books that pushed me over the edge from Agnosticism into outright Atheism... I have an autographed copy now.
DST affects the summer, get it? The winter daylight hours will still be short, and the times at which the sun rises and sets, in winter, won't change with or without DST.
There's a huge part of your brain dedicated to recognizing and reading other human faces and expressions. I'd guess that a component of the "uncanny valley" is due to that part of your brain stepping in and saying.. there's another of my species! pay attention! wait, something's wrong!!!
It wouldn't care about dead stuffed sheep, no matter how realistic. And maybe not paintings, though from the number of "Jesus' sightings" in the wild, it's clear that the face recognition brain bit is overstimulated in many people.
I read a lot of short stories as a young adult. I could read them during lunches or breaks, in the car, or whatever. There was a lot of variety, and I could skip around and pick stories based on my current mood. I wouldn't worry much about mature themes; although it may have been one of the reasons I liked Piers Anthony so much, it did keep me avidly reading. I didn't _only_ read the titillating books, by any stretch..
Here's the (mostly) SciFi/Fantasy books I remember loving in my 8-13 years. I'm trying to keep them in order, youngest to oldest.
..Early grade school..
Cricket magazine - lots of the short stories had lasting effects on me. A story about the origins of the Easter story, read as a kid, helped me put aside my Christian beliefs in my twenties.. A girl, betrayed by her friend, imprisoned her in a magic circle for a hundred years, the memory of which still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
all Greek mythology
The Rainbow Fairy Tales books by Andrew Lang (Red, Yellow, Blue.. there's about a dozen of them)
The Phoenix and the Carpet series by E. Nesbitt
The Princess and Curdie series
The Whispering Mountain by Joan Aiken.
Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. Not SF/Fantasy, but it is about a group of fearless young explorers, and is one of the few YA books I repurchased as an adult.
The Day the Sea Rolled Back and the sequel by Mickey Spillane
Wizard of Oz and many, many sequels by Frank Baum
Choose your own adventure series. Basic, Lone Wolf, D&D, but the best were the Grailquest series.
The Three Investigators series and Hardy Boys series. Though I never read more than a dozen of each.
Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I read these over and over.
..late grade school..
D & D Manuals. I read these over and over, designing detailed monsters and dungeons until the early hours of the morning. My mom threw them out twice (yes, twice) into the garbage.
The Dragon King Trilogy by Stephen R. Lawhead (Christian themes)
The Search for Fierra and the Seige of Dome by Stephen R. Lawhead (Christian themes). My dad read this to me whenever I visited him, a chapter a night. I think it was to make reading a family activity, to get my nose out of my books. It took nearly a year to finish, but I was enthralled. And the memories are priceless.
Various short story anthologies, including those edited by Isaac Azimov with short one-word theme titles, like "Robots" or "Time"
Xanth series by Piers Anthony, but I only liked the first seven.
Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey
Dragonriders of Pern series, in particular the Harper Hall trilogy, by Anne McCaffrey
To Ride a Pegasus by Anne McCaffrey
Wrinkle in Time trilogy by Madeline L. Engle
The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
I, Robot series by Isaac Azimov
Pip and Flinx series by Alan Dean Foster, stars a young boy (I wouldn't recommend much else of his.)
The Myth series by Robert Aspirin, are very light and funny fantasy stories, starring a young boy in way over his head. Only the first six though.. Aspirin lost his way.
The Ebenezum series by Craig Shaw Gardner. Like Aspirin on Speed, but very funny.
Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D. Simak
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson. I read this early, but it's probably more appropriate for mid-teens. However, the world is very rich.
..Junior High..
Foundation series by Isaac Asimov, but not all at once.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. Still my all-time favorite. My mom gave me this when I was stuck in bed sick for several days. Do not get the abridged version. If it's less than 800 pages, it's abridged.
Magic Castle for Sale, Sold! by Terry Brooks. (I have
I also enjoyed Piers Anthony. Stay away from Xanth unless you want to stunt their minds with endless puns and what is practically porn. Instead, look for... the Phaze/Proton books (Out of Phaze, etc).
Funny you should recommend Phaze/Proton.. I grabbed that from the library as a teenager because of the nearly naked chick on the cover of the second book. Then went back to read the first book, which takes place in a fully nude society, begins with the protagonist having sex with a stranger, and includes the same protagonist having loving sex with a unicorn. As I recall, he casts a spell on himself to last through her "heat". I'm not saying it's bad. But in addition to the wonderful puzzles, games, and magic, there is a fair bit of "porn".:)
Scoop, fling, repeat. Chase leavings with hose or bucket. For even a smallish 24'x36' house, this is tedium with the added risk of a broken arm.
You're adding a lot of work for nothing. Wait until it rains to clean the gutters, then you won't need to waste the water or the effort to chase the leavings.;)
If it's gay porn, and he wasn't out, that is certainly relevant. Suicide rates among the young and in-the-closet are unfortunately high. My condolences.
I suppose the normal router you'd pick up at Best Buy wouldn't reach that far, but specialty devices might be able to breach the walls and reach a publicly available spot. Remember the bluetooth hacking experiments last year? They were able to hack into a bluetooth phone from a range of 1 mile. With custom transmitter on the inside and a custom receiver on the outside, cement walls probably won't be an insurmountable problem.
By default, Windows will auto-run programs on CDs. This "feature" was exploited by Sony to automatically install rootkits on your system when you inserted one of their pop artist music CDs. Of course, it can be exploited by hackers as well.
There is a registry entry you can change to disable autorun, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, it breaks auto-detection of inserted CDs, which means that if you enable it for the normal employee systems, you'll have some extra training / help desk calls to explain why File Explorer or iTunes are not showing the CDs they just inserted.
I find it weird that most of your environments can't get or send email. That probably isn't typical for most businesses. If your important data is on the network, it can be accessed from some internal systems, at least. If they hack a workstation or two, that'll give them leverage to infiltrate the rest of the network.
In the server room they might find backup tapes or media which could be stolen, or replaced with blank media with the labels switched.
If they put a wireless repeater on a network router or somewhere on the network, it will NOT be firewalled. They could attach keylogging hardware in a few seconds with physical access. If the desktop is unlocked, or they got the password previously, or if Windows hasn't been crippled, they could install software to relay whatever they want to/from the wireless gateway they've connected somewhere else on the network.
I'm just saying, there are other ways to hack systems besides rebooting servers during working hours.
Or maybe it's because... I don't like commercials. I don't want to wait for the DVD. I hate the flashy, look-at-me, overlaid advertisements on a network show during climatic moments. I really, really, hate those.
iTunes gets the shows to me quickly and without ads. Netflix gets them to me in a year, without ads. That's it.
My 9-button wireless laser mouse works just fine with OS X. I use all 9 buttons, every day.
I dislike not having two physical mouse buttons on my MBP, but I get along just fine with SideTrack, which maps right- and middle-clicks to two of the corners of the trackpad, Exposé functions to the other two corners, and scrolling to the sides. Doesn't work that well with a FPS, but a trackpad never does.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes men" .. people (of any gender) who say "Yes" to higher-ups. A brown-noser.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yes_man
Something about "not burning bridges".
I am an atheist and argue that it does not take any more "leap of faith" to state "There is no God" than to state "There are no unicorns in California".
I find that when someone is arguing that "There is a God", they are actually arguing that their own God exists. They are imagining some human-centric interfering omniscient being who controls matter at the microscopic level, is telepathic, and predicts accurately the outcomes of complex chaotic processes. When I argue back, I'm arguing that "There is no God as you describe."
The typical American Christian professes belief that "There is an omnipotent, omniscient, loving God, who interferes in modern politics, finance, and sporting events, is biased on behalf of "western countries", who created the malaria parasite and the corresponding Sickle-cell mutation, who designed the mammalian retina backwards, who created both heaven and hell to act as eternal sorting bins for 0-100 years worth of individual behavior and thought regardless of environmental circumstances, who listens to the prayers of his believers, who sent his only son to be slain by the Romans to bypass his own rules & regulations, who destroyed the first born sons of an entire nation out of spite (he did harden the Pharaoh's heart), who insists that all love him or suffer eternally..." Well, that is a testable statement, and is provably false.
If you're the rare sort that wants to argue that "There is an uncaring, unmeddling, uninvolved, undetectable, and limited extra-universal entity", to you I say, "Meh. So what."
You're thinking of Agilent.
HP spun off all the cool engineering stuff into a separate company because it was like "too hard to compete with IBM and Dell when the CEO has to spend precious time on 'worthless stuff'" like cesium clocks, heart defibrillators (though maybe sold off by now), inkjet-printed DNA Micro-array scanning chips*, satellite testing equipment, optical "bubble" network switches, and way, way, more, all of which went to make Agilent in 1999. I've always been a little disappointed that the calculator division stayed with HP.
HP may have kept the name, but little else of value.
* The DNA micro-arrays probably didn't exist then, but they are at Agilent now.
In the example, it was simply non-printable characters. In other cases, repairing client's data files has required more.. creativity. Like handling non-escaped commas in a comma-delimited file.
I use Perl for one-time jobs... Repairing badly-formatted 80GB data files. Splitting flat files into multiple output files. Testing uniqueness of various fields. Finding the line(s) in a 250GB file that is crashing the sqlload program, and fixing it, because you have two hours or we'll lose the project. (nevermind it's the client's data). Editing several files to purge or excise fields or characters before doing serious work with them. Most of these I do via the command line. I'll write actual Perl scripts to crawl throughout our network and gather statistics on files and projects, to test patch status, to download files, process them, and email the results.
Quick! The boss is standing over you demanding that you convert a flat file into csv, add a header, prepend a unique id, and spit any lines with weird characters into a separate file. Here's the printout of the layout. You have ten minutes. There's a million lines in the file and they've got to build a marketing model before the client meeting in one hour.
MLK assassination wasn't that long ago, just 40 years. Rosa Parks.. 53 years ago. MLK could still be alive to watch this if he weren't killed for his message. Whether or not you think race should be a factor, you have to acknowledge the progress made in so short a time.
Bush was on vacation clearing brush 1/2 of his presidency until 9/11, and as we found out later, he'd been gunning for invading Iraq since he became President. Plus, Bush flatly ignored the report that Bin Laden was going to attack the US.
There's no fucking way that Al Gore would have sent our military to invade Iraq, pushed for torture, greatly expanded the secret prisons. That war drained our military, drained our economy, and filled our hospitals with vetrans who will be on healthcare for the rest of their lives.
Al Gore's big thing was fighting climate change, which would have resulted in a new technology and research boom in America, NO NEW WARS, and he would not have pissed away the goodwill of the foreign nations, if he'd been unable to prevent 9/11. Plus, fighting climate change has the side-effect of reducing our foreign energy dependence. I have no doubt that Al Gore would have had a better pick for FEMA head, and a better response for Katrina. He wouldn't have been the second coming of Christ, but at least he wouldn't have been indifferent and snarky and intentionally destroying government effectiveness.
Bush and his team were fucking awful for the US.
Obama's pretty fucking decent. He can actually write his own speeches, and he reads the newspapers, and he can effectively lead and organize. That'll be a shit-load better than Bush. If people are treating Obama like the second-coming, it's only because we've survived eight-years of Bush.
ARGH! Deux ex machina! After reading the thoughtful foreword in Hunters of Dune (describing the lost manuscript found in the bank vault) I looked forward to a wonderful and considerate continuation of one of my favorite series...
At the end I felt like I'd watched Santa Claus get raped by R. Daneel Olivaw, and then Tinkerbell waved her fairy dust and suddenly everyone was all right and laughing together even while the smell of roasted reindeer giblets filled the air.
Similar here.. I only found out his personal values after greatly enjoying several of his books. Interestingly, OSC's Postwatch was one of the books that pushed me over the edge from Agnosticism into outright Atheism... I have an autographed copy now.
DST affects the summer, get it? The winter daylight hours will still be short, and the times at which the sun rises and sets, in winter, won't change with or without DST.
There's a huge part of your brain dedicated to recognizing and reading other human faces and expressions. I'd guess that a component of the "uncanny valley" is due to that part of your brain stepping in and saying.. there's another of my species! pay attention! wait, something's wrong!!!
It wouldn't care about dead stuffed sheep, no matter how realistic. And maybe not paintings, though from the number of "Jesus' sightings" in the wild, it's clear that the face recognition brain bit is overstimulated in many people.
I read a lot of short stories as a young adult. I could read them during lunches or breaks, in the car, or whatever. There was a lot of variety, and I could skip around and pick stories based on my current mood. I wouldn't worry much about mature themes; although it may have been one of the reasons I liked Piers Anthony so much, it did keep me avidly reading. I didn't _only_ read the titillating books, by any stretch..
Here's the (mostly) SciFi/Fantasy books I remember loving in my 8-13 years. I'm trying to keep them in order, youngest to oldest.
I also enjoyed Piers Anthony. Stay away from Xanth unless you want to stunt their minds with endless puns and what is practically porn. Instead, look for ... the Phaze/Proton books (Out of Phaze, etc).
Funny you should recommend Phaze/Proton.. I grabbed that from the library as a teenager because of the nearly naked chick on the cover of the second book. Then went back to read the first book, which takes place in a fully nude society, begins with the protagonist having sex with a stranger, and includes the same protagonist having loving sex with a unicorn. As I recall, he casts a spell on himself to last through her "heat". I'm not saying it's bad. But in addition to the wonderful puzzles, games, and magic, there is a fair bit of "porn". :)
I _loved_ "Decision at Doona" as a young kid, and still read it from time to time (nostalga). Good themes, and generally upbeat.
Scoop, fling, repeat. Chase leavings with hose or bucket. For even a smallish 24'x36' house, this is tedium with the added risk of a broken arm.
You're adding a lot of work for nothing. Wait until it rains to clean the gutters, then you won't need to waste the water or the effort to chase the leavings. ;)
If it's gay porn, and he wasn't out, that is certainly relevant. Suicide rates among the young and in-the-closet are unfortunately high. My condolences.
And some are bisexual.
It's not "ineptitude", it's humor. He's trying to be like Dave Barry. I lol'd.
There's a flash game called Airline Security that simulates to incredible detail the capricious rules of the TSA..
Just wanted to share the love.
I suppose the normal router you'd pick up at Best Buy wouldn't reach that far, but specialty devices might be able to breach the walls and reach a publicly available spot. Remember the bluetooth hacking experiments last year? They were able to hack into a bluetooth phone from a range of 1 mile. With custom transmitter on the inside and a custom receiver on the outside, cement walls probably won't be an insurmountable problem.
By default, Windows will auto-run programs on CDs. This "feature" was exploited by Sony to automatically install rootkits on your system when you inserted one of their pop artist music CDs. Of course, it can be exploited by hackers as well.
There is a registry entry you can change to disable autorun, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, it breaks auto-detection of inserted CDs, which means that if you enable it for the normal employee systems, you'll have some extra training / help desk calls to explain why File Explorer or iTunes are not showing the CDs they just inserted.
I find it weird that most of your environments can't get or send email. That probably isn't typical for most businesses. If your important data is on the network, it can be accessed from some internal systems, at least. If they hack a workstation or two, that'll give them leverage to infiltrate the rest of the network.
In the server room they might find backup tapes or media which could be stolen, or replaced with blank media with the labels switched.
If they put a wireless repeater on a network router or somewhere on the network, it will NOT be firewalled. They could attach keylogging hardware in a few seconds with physical access. If the desktop is unlocked, or they got the password previously, or if Windows hasn't been crippled, they could install software to relay whatever they want to/from the wireless gateway they've connected somewhere else on the network.
I'm just saying, there are other ways to hack systems besides rebooting servers during working hours.
Jenna Elfman being on this list makes me cry. (Just a little.)
Or maybe it's because...
I don't like commercials.
I don't want to wait for the DVD.
I hate the flashy, look-at-me, overlaid advertisements on a network show during climatic moments.
I really, really, hate those.
iTunes gets the shows to me quickly and without ads. Netflix gets them to me in a year, without ads. That's it.
My 9-button wireless laser mouse works just fine with OS X. I use all 9 buttons, every day.
I dislike not having two physical mouse buttons on my MBP, but I get along just fine with SideTrack, which maps right- and middle-clicks to two of the corners of the trackpad, Exposé functions to the other two corners, and scrolling to the sides. Doesn't work that well with a FPS, but a trackpad never does.