...but I can't find the list archive entries any more; the second part was a highly informed personal opinion expressed to me by a couple of gentlemen who really, really ought to know and are prized by many for their honesty and insight but would prefer to not be named.
Then you're not talking about Microsoft's so-called XML. Unless you're referring to their brain-dead stripped-down version which sits somewhere between text/plan and text/html in terms of "richness".
Why don't MS just make an OASIS ioslave for MS-Office? (-:
but don't some of you remember when nothing talked to anything else?
Yes.
We remember Microsoft's TCP stack being a little bit different, which sped things up - if you were talking MS-to-MS. Sometimes. And sometimes it broke stuff badly.
We remember Windows explicitly not talking to DR-DOS, and the solitary little bit of encrypted code in the installer to achieve that.
We remember CIFS back when it was called LANMAN, and please pass me that bucket.
We remember last week when a customer's WinME machine refused to tune into the same wavelengths as XP SP2. We remember another customer who has to run one CAD machine on Win98SE and the other on WinME otherwise for no discernable reason they can't talk to the big plotter.
We remember MS-DOS being deliberately built to not run Lotus 1-2-3.
We remember M80 being different to every other Z80 assembler on the planet.
We remember Bill choosing \ for a path separator when everything else bar a few (VMS comes to mind) used/
We remember not being able to authenticate against MS-Exchange because it only trusted Outlook's proprietary and secret authentication protocols.
We remember unilateral extensions to Kerberos that broke practically everything else using standard Kereberos.
We remember a company which knew so little about its own network protocols that it went to the Samba team for information - and today is working pretty much as hard as it can (without getting obviously unclean hands) to slow down development of that same Samba.
When good games are released for Linux, then I'm onboard man... until then, I'm with Bill.
Odd. That's what most of the larger game developers said.
The spikes are a little more subdued, but they've got a big solid shell instead of Captain Crimson here's dinky little pretend shell, and honking great strong claws. I watched one can-opener the side of a twenty-litre milk can one day at Hearson's Cove near Dampier.
The PC at the remote location is already "full blown", perhaps modulo a hard disk. Run rdesktop on Linux (does RDP5 including sound if you want) full-screen for your TS session(s), then overlay it with a purpose-built SANE client to do the actual scanning and ship the required data home to Mama.
Amortising the pain of writing the client across 500 stations should be snap, and once you've done it you can publish the code for extra fame and employability.
Positive advantages include easily sharing scanners between adjacent workstations and hardware flexibility (you can use all manner of workstations and scanners, no worries, as long as the WS can boot into Linux).
If the WS can boot from flash, you don't even have net-boot overhead to worry about. If you're getting to specify the WS hardware yourself, specify a dual-head video chipset plus 6 USB ports (lots of the fanless baby Vias come like this) and you can halve the number of network connections, reduce the required power points by 33% and reduce your maintenance as well.
Evolution is a fact in that we know it occurs and it has been seen occur[r]ing.
Like Darwin'sfinches? Or can we have some real references, please? I'd like to pass them on to Antony Flew.
Are you going to announce that Charlie's pangenes have finally been discovered, or are we going to see "ignoramy recapitulates talkoriginy" replayed for the thousandth time?
We wait with 'bated breath. (-:
Other than that massive and unsupported axiomatic assumption, the reasoning in your post was sound. Sadly, real life doesn't work that way. Neither biological evolution as a mechanism for improvement of any species, nor chemical evolution as a mechanism for starting one or more first species, has yet been proven, and nor will they.
There is much trumpeting about making these open standards but very little actually happening, yet with wide acceptance it would save an immense amount of storage and bandwidth everywhere. It's almost a poster child illustrating the case for damage done to society by short-sightedly nailing ideas to the floor.
Every single one of the definitions is related to God. All of them. The relationship is a rejection of God in every case - which is a religious position. Even if your position was as decoupled as "I don't care whether there is a God or not" it would still be a religious position because the position is always based on (is always in relation to) God.
In order to state that you do not believe in the supernatural, you first have to define the supernatural. Even if you wish to state only that you believe in natural, or more accurately material, events you still have to define those in terms of what they are not: nature is (badly) defined using words that amount to "not supernatural"; material implies an immaterial; the very act of drawing a line implies that there's something on the other side of it.
As for applying worth to innovation and deciding what is trivial improvement, and what is genuine - because that is a purely subjective a opinion it would be hard to pass.
It's already being done. The US Patent and Trademark Office needs to learn to say "No!" more often.
...the rich man has more to lose. However, since what we gain is infinitely wonderful, the entire collected fortunes of Bill Gates, King Saud and Solomon all rolled into one would be chump change.
So theism is the belief, not the god or gods. I definit[e]ly lack such a belief, but I don't see how the lack of belief makes it a religion.
It's almost painfully simple, you have these three basic choices, and each of them is a religious decision:
Some form of supernatural personality does exist, however vague. You are a Theist.
Some form of supernatural personality may exist. You are an Agnostic. Well, strictly an Agnostic's position is that it is impossible to be sure whether a diety exists or not, but that's not common useage.
Some form of supernatural personality cannot exist. You are an Atheist.
You have a point which cannot be discounted out of hand, methinks.
Mind you, some of Kerry's little pork pies would also disqualify him too if he were seriously religious. If I'd been a Yank, I'd have to have taken the Brewster's Millions approach.
Arose, your post appears to be content-free. Can you please correct that appearance by pointing out what part of the subject I appear to have not got straight?
No God != No Religion
A-theism == "the definite absence of theism". This is a religious position, a definite religious assertion. It is a religious statement which says that there is no God.
I would also bundle what you might call "imaginary" of "phantom" gods who exist but have no measurable effect on the universe into "Practical Atheism", but that's optional.
You need to do a bit more research before putting up straw-men. If objections seem too easy to knock down, perhaps it's because they're not real targets, did you think of that?
Do you have kids? If so, has there ever been a time when they simply Will Not Be Told? When you have to go ahead and let them hurt themselves in some degree, in order to prevent them from totalling themselves and/or hurting others? What you're looking at here is in part a scenario like that.
Have you ever run across a military situation in which a few troops had to go through absolute hell in order to spare many troops and/or civilians a bad experience? You're also looking at a situation like that.
If God had created a set of automata, completely incapable of doing anything wrong, we would not have these problems, or anything like them. We would also be essentially unaware of ourselves in any way that mattered. Why does God need self-aware creatures? I haven't been told. Certainly not to - you should pardon the phrase - lord it over them. But stop and imagine for a while, would you rather have responsive children or a house full of machinery? If your SO doesn't always do what you want, do you destroy them on the spot? Would you want to?
RT.org, BTW, are reknowned more for their flexibility than for any attachment to logical rigour.
But we digress. If Atheism exists, and it does, it must see Theism as an abberation. Agreed? You're certainly reacting like that so far.
Given a responsible Atheism ("since I am essentially the ultimate authority I am also ultimately responsible for what happens around me and after me") - call it Altrusitic Atheism even though that's not really correct - such an Atheist is duty-bound to promote their position in order that the people around him react in a way which (s)he sees as most responsible. Which is a long-winded way of saying that a responsible Atheist would work to most completely undermine the assertion "only Theists operate charities" where the opportunity existed, by operating or contributing an Atheist-bannered charity. Any problems with that so far?
The other, sadly popular pole of Atheism could be typified by the assertion "since there is no afterlife, no accounting, I should grab for as much as I can get out of this life, and damn anyone else" (or possibly, "apres moi, le deluge") - call it Selfish Atheism - couldn't care less about charity unless it needed some itself, and therefore has no rational motivation to operate or contribute to charities. Yes? No?
The vast majority of real-life Atheists exist somewhere along that spectrum. This picture is muddied by labelling issues: the practical observation that many who think of themselves as Christian (this applies to members of other religions, but I address Western society) are for all practical purposes Atheist, and many who call themselves Atheist are really Agnostic.
However, the vast majority of Atheists, effective or declared, hew to the Selfish Atheism end of the spectrum. What you are living amongst is a society driven by Selfish Atheists with some echoes of what might be called "habitual Protestantism" and a sprinkling of Altruistic Atheists and others to give it a veneer of responsibility.
Take away that echo and the dilution by others and what you're left with looks very much like the French Revolution. Babies being passed from pike-head to pike-head and the kind of stuff you read about in the Jesuit Oath (plough through all of the Black Masses to the core of the Black Pope's army and what you'll find is - surprise - more Selfish Atheism and might-makes-right).
Now we pass again from observation to speculation, but it bears upon one of many possible existential options beyond the two you posited.
If you want the whole planet to look like that, just wait, it's scheduled to happen. When it does happen, remember this conversation. This tsunami is but an apertif of disasters to follow, and an faint echo of disasters which have already been.
...is where they think they've proven something, but haven't even come close. At that point, their mind is closed, the emperor's new clothes are not going to be retailored, thank you very much, and all of similarly similarly blind mates agree and reinforce the problem.
Actually, there's another thing I hate and that's seldom having enough time to corner the buggers and beat them down with sheer weight of evidence. I have to make do with cornering the occasional one and quickly glancing off the obvious errors and it's very unsatisfying. By the time I get back to my/. queue, the whole conversation's often hit the archives. )-:
...and engineering lab at the University of Queensland, making the number (international) +61-7-3346-9705 or in Oz (07)3346-9705. I'm sure they'll get a blast from your call. (-:
Slashdot Mirror
...on Samba in a serious way in about late 2002. So you should probably be hunting for evidence of the request to use docs in around 2000-2001.
...but seriously, see a post or two previous to this.
...but I can't find the list archive entries any more; the second part was a highly informed personal opinion expressed to me by a couple of gentlemen who really, really ought to know and are prized by many for their honesty and insight but would prefer to not be named.
Not to mention "dark" matter and energy, superstrings and other stuff which is still kinda dodgy but not often presented that way?
Then you're not talking about Microsoft's so-called XML. Unless you're referring to their brain-dead stripped-down version which sits somewhere between text/plan and text/html in terms of "richness".
Why don't MS just make an OASIS ioslave for MS-Office? (-:
We remember Microsoft's TCP stack being a little bit different, which sped things up - if you were talking MS-to-MS. Sometimes. And sometimes it broke stuff badly.
We remember Windows explicitly not talking to DR-DOS, and the solitary little bit of encrypted code in the installer to achieve that.
We remember CIFS back when it was called LANMAN, and please pass me that bucket.
We remember last week when a customer's WinME machine refused to tune into the same wavelengths as XP SP2. We remember another customer who has to run one CAD machine on Win98SE and the other on WinME otherwise for no discernable reason they can't talk to the big plotter.
We remember MS-DOS being deliberately built to not run Lotus 1-2-3.
We remember M80 being different to every other Z80 assembler on the planet.
We remember Bill choosing \ for a path separator when everything else bar a few (VMS comes to mind) used
We remember not being able to authenticate against MS-Exchange because it only trusted Outlook's proprietary and secret authentication protocols.
We remember unilateral extensions to Kerberos that broke practically everything else using standard Kereberos.
We remember a company which knew so little about its own network protocols that it went to the Samba team for information - and today is working pretty much as hard as it can (without getting obviously unclean hands) to slow down development of that same Samba.
Odd. That's what most of the larger game developers said.
Hey, did the penny drop for you yet?
The spikes are a little more subdued, but they've got a big solid shell instead of Captain Crimson here's dinky little pretend shell, and honking great strong claws. I watched one can-opener the side of a twenty-litre milk can one day at Hearson's Cove near Dampier.
Despite all of these intimidating features, some maniacs mud-wrestle the damn things for fun.
The PC at the remote location is already "full blown", perhaps modulo a hard disk. Run rdesktop on Linux (does RDP5 including sound if you want) full-screen for your TS session(s), then overlay it with a purpose-built SANE client to do the actual scanning and ship the required data home to Mama.
Amortising the pain of writing the client across 500 stations should be snap, and once you've done it you can publish the code for extra fame and employability.
Positive advantages include easily sharing scanners between adjacent workstations and hardware flexibility (you can use all manner of workstations and scanners, no worries, as long as the WS can boot into Linux).
If the WS can boot from flash, you don't even have net-boot overhead to worry about. If you're getting to specify the WS hardware yourself, specify a dual-head video chipset plus 6 USB ports (lots of the fanless baby Vias come like this) and you can halve the number of network connections, reduce the required power points by 33% and reduce your maintenance as well.
Are you going to announce that Charlie's pangenes have finally been discovered, or are we going to see "ignoramy recapitulates talkoriginy" replayed for the thousandth time?
We wait with 'bated breath. (-:
Other than that massive and unsupported axiomatic assumption, the reasoning in your post was sound. Sadly, real life doesn't work that way. Neither biological evolution as a mechanism for improvement of any species, nor chemical evolution as a mechanism for starting one or more first species, has yet been proven, and nor will they.
Maybe it's what the school board was really after. Has anyone explored that option yet?
Looks like it became Deja View (DjVu) and a bunch of other niche products. But at USD$130 for a mere compressor plugin (and that's discounted), they're not going to sell many.
There is much trumpeting about making these open standards but very little actually happening, yet with wide acceptance it would save an immense amount of storage and bandwidth everywhere. It's almost a poster child illustrating the case for damage done to society by short-sightedly nailing ideas to the floor.
Every single one of the definitions is related to God. All of them. The relationship is a rejection of God in every case - which is a religious position. Even if your position was as decoupled as "I don't care whether there is a God or not" it would still be a religious position because the position is always based on (is always in relation to) God.
In order to state that you do not believe in the supernatural, you first have to define the supernatural. Even if you wish to state only that you believe in natural, or more accurately material, events you still have to define those in terms of what they are not: nature is (badly) defined using words that amount to "not supernatural"; material implies an immaterial; the very act of drawing a line implies that there's something on the other side of it.
- One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.
a.the.ism, n-
- Disbelief in or denial of the existence of God or gods.
- The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
- Godlessness; immorality.
What word appears in every single definition?Go argue with the dictionary authors, turkey. Your problem is with them, not with me. Well, really, your problem is with you.
it's this fabulous thing which appears to be a great mystery to you: plain English.
Atheism is a religious choice. Same as any other.
...the rich man has more to lose. However, since what we gain is infinitely wonderful, the entire collected fortunes of Bill Gates, King Saud and Solomon all rolled into one would be chump change.
- Some form of supernatural personality does exist, however vague. You are a Theist.
- Some form of supernatural personality may exist. You are an Agnostic. Well, strictly an Agnostic's position is that it is impossible to be sure whether a diety exists or not, but that's not common useage.
- Some form of supernatural personality cannot exist. You are an Atheist.
You do not need robes, mantras or stained-glass windows to be religious. The fact that The Church of Humanism or The Spiritual Humanism movement exist tells you all you need to know.You're not ESL at all? Your literary style seems unusually opaque.
You have a point which cannot be discounted out of hand, methinks.
Mind you, some of Kerry's little pork pies would also disqualify him too if he were seriously religious. If I'd been a Yank, I'd have to have taken the Brewster's Millions approach.
Arose, your post appears to be content-free. Can you please correct that appearance by pointing out what part of the subject I appear to have not got straight?
No God != No Religion
A-theism == "the definite absence of theism". This is a religious position, a definite religious assertion. It is a religious statement which says that there is no God.
I would also bundle what you might call "imaginary" of "phantom" gods who exist but have no measurable effect on the universe into "Practical Atheism", but that's optional.
You need to do a bit more research before putting up straw-men. If objections seem too easy to knock down, perhaps it's because they're not real targets, did you think of that?
Do you have kids? If so, has there ever been a time when they simply Will Not Be Told? When you have to go ahead and let them hurt themselves in some degree, in order to prevent them from totalling themselves and/or hurting others? What you're looking at here is in part a scenario like that.
Have you ever run across a military situation in which a few troops had to go through absolute hell in order to spare many troops and/or civilians a bad experience? You're also looking at a situation like that.
If God had created a set of automata, completely incapable of doing anything wrong, we would not have these problems, or anything like them. We would also be essentially unaware of ourselves in any way that mattered. Why does God need self-aware creatures? I haven't been told. Certainly not to - you should pardon the phrase - lord it over them. But stop and imagine for a while, would you rather have responsive children or a house full of machinery? If your SO doesn't always do what you want, do you destroy them on the spot? Would you want to?
RT.org, BTW, are reknowned more for their flexibility than for any attachment to logical rigour.
But we digress. If Atheism exists, and it does, it must see Theism as an abberation. Agreed? You're certainly reacting like that so far.
Given a responsible Atheism ("since I am essentially the ultimate authority I am also ultimately responsible for what happens around me and after me") - call it Altrusitic Atheism even though that's not really correct - such an Atheist is duty-bound to promote their position in order that the people around him react in a way which (s)he sees as most responsible. Which is a long-winded way of saying that a responsible Atheist would work to most completely undermine the assertion "only Theists operate charities" where the opportunity existed, by operating or contributing an Atheist-bannered charity. Any problems with that so far?
The other, sadly popular pole of Atheism could be typified by the assertion "since there is no afterlife, no accounting, I should grab for as much as I can get out of this life, and damn anyone else" (or possibly, "apres moi, le deluge") - call it Selfish Atheism - couldn't care less about charity unless it needed some itself, and therefore has no rational motivation to operate or contribute to charities. Yes? No?
The vast majority of real-life Atheists exist somewhere along that spectrum. This picture is muddied by labelling issues: the practical observation that many who think of themselves as Christian (this applies to members of other religions, but I address Western society) are for all practical purposes Atheist, and many who call themselves Atheist are really Agnostic.
However, the vast majority of Atheists, effective or declared, hew to the Selfish Atheism end of the spectrum. What you are living amongst is a society driven by Selfish Atheists with some echoes of what might be called "habitual Protestantism" and a sprinkling of Altruistic Atheists and others to give it a veneer of responsibility.
Take away that echo and the dilution by others and what you're left with looks very much like the French Revolution. Babies being passed from pike-head to pike-head and the kind of stuff you read about in the Jesuit Oath (plough through all of the Black Masses to the core of the Black Pope's army and what you'll find is - surprise - more Selfish Atheism and might-makes-right).
Now we pass again from observation to speculation, but it bears upon one of many possible existential options beyond the two you posited.
If you want the whole planet to look like that, just wait, it's scheduled to happen. When it does happen, remember this conversation. This tsunami is but an apertif of disasters to follow, and an faint echo of disasters which have already been.
...is where they think they've proven something, but haven't even come close. At that point, their mind is closed, the emperor's new clothes are not going to be retailored, thank you very much, and all of similarly similarly blind mates agree and reinforce the problem.
/. queue, the whole conversation's often hit the archives. )-:
Actually, there's another thing I hate and that's seldom having enough time to corner the buggers and beat them down with sheer weight of evidence. I have to make do with cornering the occasional one and quickly glancing off the obvious errors and it's very unsatisfying. By the time I get back to my
Read the UID, kiddy, and think about it for a minute.
...and engineering lab at the University of Queensland, making the number (international) +61-7-3346-9705 or in Oz (07)3346-9705. I'm sure they'll get a blast from your call. (-: