Since it was on the nVidia stand, obviously it would be an XGI or ATI chipset, no?
On a more serious note, I wonder how hard it would be to file off the non-standard BIOS and replace it with a real one? USD$200 sounds fairly reasonable for the hardware.
...yes, SlashDot's handling of HTML does suck. There should be a "2." before "the Christian Right" but for lack of a it has been secretly raptured away.
Why couldn't they have their Rapture before the election and let the rest of us get on with our lives?
Two reasons:
Readupon this. The so-called Rapture is not scheduled to be secret, nor will there be a human left alive on Earth immediately after it, which would immediately cast a pall of gloom (or at least silence) over the election - vigorous debate ensues as to whether or not this is actually a bad thing
the Christian Right is more about earthly power and forcing people to do what they see as correct than it is about defending the rights of Christians, even particular sects of Christianity.
These shows are generally hell for them. There is very little going on around them that they can relate to, so they're copping the worst of both worlds in terms of both sensory overload and sensory deprivation. They're also constantly being ogled, occasionally pawed, and with very rare exceptions are getting no feedback to tell them that what they're doing is worthwhile or constructive. And they usually have to be on their feet all day for several days in a row.
Try it yourself some day before moaning about insufficient scant.
I suspect that once you get that distinction straight in your head, you'll be right.
Belief in the nonexistence of any or all deities is still a belief, and an existential one at that. It is by definition a religious position.
If by "religion" you mean the organised religion iconified in Gothic cathedrals and Papal processions, then you need to make that distinction, else any debate you engage in is going to be constantly cross-threaded.
And if you do make that distinction, you also have to confess that Communist regimes such as Mao's and Stalin's are examples of organised Atheism.
there are people that use the guise of religion as a reason for violence. But there are those also that use atheism for exact same purpose and reason.
Your statement implies that Atheism is not a religion. By definition, a-theism is a religion. There are even sects! America (where else?) has a registered Church of Humanism.
However, the grandparent has a problem: (s)he's 100% flat wrong about the statistics. Communism alone has killed more people than the upper-range estimates for religion's biggest killer, the Roman Catholic Church. Stalin alone killed over 40 million people, two thirds of the lower serious estimates for the RCC (the most extreme go to 100M).
If you factor in random assholes like Idi Amin, the picture gets even worse. "It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone - one communist country - well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it." And I think that this author has the key; see if any of this sounds familiar:
Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world. Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle
People were tortured and killed by the Inquisition because of their religious beliefs, while people were tortured and killed by Mao and Stalin because they were perc[ei]ved as possible threats to their power.
You need to read some more history. The two cases are identical.
On the one hand, the Inquisition was busy wiping out political threats to the Church (which at times included itself!). Typical of this would be the Ti Ping Revolution, where they incited the Chinese government to attack the Ti Ping as political enemies, resulting in the destruction of a 70-million-strong Christian cult.
On the other hand, Mao and Stalin (and others) were busy wiping out political threats to their power bases, and Christianity as she is written is by definition a political threat to any despot, exhortations to avoid politics (e.g. "render unto Caesar...") notwithstanding. They were essentially treating God as a political enemy and murdering his sympathisers. The absence of a designer was necessary for their political ends. This means that Atheism was necessary for their political ends so they set about murdering non-Atheists.
Whether that's really a religious attack as well or not, I can't really judge. But I think so.
Given that the Goan Inquisition, a branch of the Portugese Inquisition was responsible for the deaths of at least one million people, but that nobody today (least of all the Goans) is really aware of their existence (or for that matter, even of the Portugese branch), I have to wonder how much else has been swept under the carpet over the centuries.
Since Cardinal Ratzinger, its current head, is one of the next in line for Pope, who knows, we could be in for some interesting times.
If it's any consolation, the disappearance of the Goan Inquisition is more or less typical. Although the natives can be trained even as far as crying out thanks to Mary for their light punishment while they're being whipped for their sins, that training dissolves within a very short time after the authority inflicting it is removed.
So if I spend millions of dollars producing a non-tangeable product I should not be entitled to the same protection of a company spending millions of dollars producing a tangeable product?
If the non-tangible product is simply a monopoly on an idea or a trivial improvement, then I would most decidedly not want that to be protected.
If the result of your genius was a genuine innovation able to measurably benefit the population of the world (or any large non-exclusive area) as a whole, I would be torn between giving society the full, immediate and unfettered benefit of the idea, and rewarding you for presenting it. If there was a way of making space for you to exclusively develop a tangible product from the idea and so profit from the intangible "product" without discouraging further development of the idea by others, then I'd go for it full tilt.
Under no circumstances would I allow your idea to be nailed down for more than ten years, and I'd want to see a good reason before nailing it down any longer than five. Five years is more than enough of a head-start in almost any market.
The purpose of research is not to exterminate your competition, but to make your own products better. I would not be happy about a rival "templating" your tangibles and simply duplicating them, but I would be happy about them designing their own products based on the same principles. And next time they make a breakthrough, remember that you're going to be able to benefit from that as well, even if they get it to market first.
And if after ten years someone else can make Coke better and cheaper than CocaCola-Amatil, then I say good on 'em. Time CCA got off their butts and genuinely improved their product again.
The image is too simple to be worth stealing anyway, but if you want a copy of the XCF and my blessing to use and abuse it, drop me an email to my nick (above) within the cyberknights.com.au domain and it shall be done.
...Telnet from a CMD.EXE prompt, since even HyperTerminal has vulnerabilities and most of the alternative products are communists (although maybe that's just how Bill pronounces "communities").
If you want to poke fun at the whole idea, buy one of these (buttons coming when I can figure out what to fit in a 2.25" circle).
You fools, there are only 10 to the 260th power combinations if you presume that there are no mechanisms that reduce the problem space and make 10 to the 250 power possibilities disappear.
Er, hate to be the bearer of bad tidings and all, but the ridiculous numbers you see bandied about are generally highly conservative, often overlooking factors like (feel the stiffening irony of your ball-in-space example here) the distance between atoms and molecules and stars and such.
Each omitted factor make the situation mathematically harder on the case for materialism when it's eventually included, sometimes by hundreds or thousands of orders of magnitude.
It's kind of difficult to even guesstimate how bad including spatial effects makes the numbers, but it's got to be at least thousands of orders of magnitude, more likely hundreds of thousands or millions of orders.
ID assumes that there was a mysterious unspecified entity which through mysterious and unspecified means caused a whole chain of complex events to happen over a period of time. That may or may not be true, but such a theory comes off much the worse from Occam's razor.
That sounds more like a fair explanation of evolution (either cosmological or biological). Lots of very unlikely things need to come to pass to get from cosmic detonation to an iPod or Phoebe Cates (random enough examples for you?). Saying that they happened accidentally doesn't help you get past the razor.
You misrepresent ID if you uphold "a period of time" as being a long time, since some ID proponents argue that many of the macro changes are only possible in an instant, in which case what's the big difference between a macro change and an in-toto design?
I still remember that incident when a Microsoft Windows NT system aboard a U.S. Navy vessel was responsible for accidentally firing off a missile back in the 90's.
OK, I'll bite. Who did NT fire the missile at? Digital Research?
Go read Goerge Orwell's Animal Farm. All you really need to know about politics. High-falutin' principles that don't survive when the rubber meets the road are dangerous.
Put a greenie's house in the path of a devastating bushfire, then hand him/her a fuelled and sharpened chainsaw and stand back. Presently, you'll see whether (s)he's bright enough to understand that some principles don't scale.
I don't mean to imply that morality is entirely relative - that's another assertion doomed to fail under load - but you've got to pick your absolutes carefully, and stick by them. If you're a Liberal geek living in the USA, either change the country you're in, or change the country you're in, or change your beliefs. You are incompatible with your location.
Compared with the Commonwealth forces, they generally suck on a man-for-man basis and only ever win on total firepower rather than skill or good tactics. There are specific exceptions to this, but in general the US wins by being the biggest gorilla on the field, not by being the smartest, fastest or most skilled.
There are also other forces (some isolated Europeans, forex) who rate at least as well as Commonwealth troops, and specials like the Ghurkas who on a man-for-man basis just ace any conventional military.
Forex, it would be personally installed, and the chix assisting the installer would cause any of the males around to blunder into things. The dongle would have coloured status LEDs on it, and would also play Oggs, a selection of which would be included.
I see it can't export to pro/e so thats not very good.
It probably doesn't have a.nyet connector either, so why not trash one of the world's most competent modelling packages based on that?
Here's why:
In keeping with the UNIX philosophy of developing independent tools to perform single, specific tasks and then linking the tools together in a package, BRL-CAD is basically a collection of libraries, tools, and utilities that work together to create, raytrace, and interrogate geometry and manipulate files and data.
For the hard-of-thinking, it means that import-export to things like Pro/E is easy to add, even without source. With source, it becomes very easy (you can probably modify a nearby IO module rather than starting from scratch).
Adding I/O to SolidWorks for some of the many other formats BRL-CAD deals with may not be so easy. And BRL-CAD does a bunch of modelling which is beyond SolidWorks' scope, even with COSMOS bolted on.
As is running on Linux or a Mac or a 64-bit machine (you get a choice of Win2k-Pro/x86 or WinXP-Pro/x86 with the latest version; older versions will run on WinNT and Win98SE but they're bright enough to mark WinME as "not suitable for production use"). If they'd chosen a Unix ecosystem as a base, doing Win32 and Carbon/Aqua as derivatives would have been easy. Back-porting from Win32 is going to be such a pig that I can't see them ever doing it.
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Was the sig intended to be related to the post?
Since it was on the nVidia stand, obviously it would be an XGI or ATI chipset, no?
On a more serious note, I wonder how hard it would be to file off the non-standard BIOS and replace it with a real one? USD$200 sounds fairly reasonable for the hardware.
...just move here to Australia. (-:
...yes, SlashDot's handling of HTML does suck. There should be a "2." before "the Christian Right" but for lack of a it has been secretly raptured away.
These shows are generally hell for them. There is very little going on around them that they can relate to, so they're copping the worst of both worlds in terms of both sensory overload and sensory deprivation. They're also constantly being ogled, occasionally pawed, and with very rare exceptions are getting no feedback to tell them that what they're doing is worthwhile or constructive. And they usually have to be on their feet all day for several days in a row.
Try it yourself some day before moaning about insufficient scant.
I suspect that once you get that distinction straight in your head, you'll be right.
Belief in the nonexistence of any or all deities is still a belief, and an existential one at that. It is by definition a religious position.
If by "religion" you mean the organised religion iconified in Gothic cathedrals and Papal processions, then you need to make that distinction, else any debate you engage in is going to be constantly cross-threaded.
And if you do make that distinction, you also have to confess that Communist regimes such as Mao's and Stalin's are examples of organised Atheism.
However, the grandparent has a problem: (s)he's 100% flat wrong about the statistics. Communism alone has killed more people than the upper-range estimates for religion's biggest killer, the Roman Catholic Church. Stalin alone killed over 40 million people, two thirds of the lower serious estimates for the RCC (the most extreme go to 100M).
If you factor in random assholes like Idi Amin, the picture gets even worse. "It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone - one communist country - well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist China almost equal it." And I think that this author has the key; see if any of this sounds familiar:
On the one hand, the Inquisition was busy wiping out political threats to the Church (which at times included itself!). Typical of this would be the Ti Ping Revolution, where they incited the Chinese government to attack the Ti Ping as political enemies, resulting in the destruction of a 70-million-strong Christian cult.
On the other hand, Mao and Stalin (and others) were busy wiping out political threats to their power bases, and Christianity as she is written is by definition a political threat to any despot, exhortations to avoid politics (e.g. "render unto Caesar...") notwithstanding. They were essentially treating God as a political enemy and murdering his sympathisers. The absence of a designer was necessary for their political ends. This means that Atheism was necessary for their political ends so they set about murdering non-Atheists.
Whether that's really a religious attack as well or not, I can't really judge. But I think so.
Given that the Goan Inquisition, a branch of the Portugese Inquisition was responsible for the deaths of at least one million people, but that nobody today (least of all the Goans) is really aware of their existence (or for that matter, even of the Portugese branch), I have to wonder how much else has been swept under the carpet over the centuries.
Since Cardinal Ratzinger, its current head, is one of the next in line for Pope, who knows, we could be in for some interesting times.
If it's any consolation, the disappearance of the Goan Inquisition is more or less typical. Although the natives can be trained even as far as crying out thanks to Mary for their light punishment while they're being whipped for their sins, that training dissolves within a very short time after the authority inflicting it is removed.
If the result of your genius was a genuine innovation able to measurably benefit the population of the world (or any large non-exclusive area) as a whole, I would be torn between giving society the full, immediate and unfettered benefit of the idea, and rewarding you for presenting it. If there was a way of making space for you to exclusively develop a tangible product from the idea and so profit from the intangible "product" without discouraging further development of the idea by others, then I'd go for it full tilt.
Under no circumstances would I allow your idea to be nailed down for more than ten years, and I'd want to see a good reason before nailing it down any longer than five. Five years is more than enough of a head-start in almost any market.
The purpose of research is not to exterminate your competition, but to make your own products better. I would not be happy about a rival "templating" your tangibles and simply duplicating them, but I would be happy about them designing their own products based on the same principles. And next time they make a breakthrough, remember that you're going to be able to benefit from that as well, even if they get it to market first.
And if after ten years someone else can make Coke better and cheaper than CocaCola-Amatil, then I say good on 'em. Time CCA got off their butts and genuinely improved their product again.
CafePress makes it trivial.
The image is too simple to be worth stealing anyway, but if you want a copy of the XCF and my blessing to use and abuse it, drop me an email to my nick (above) within the cyberknights.com.au domain and it shall be done.
...Telnet from a CMD.EXE prompt, since even HyperTerminal has vulnerabilities and most of the alternative products are communists (although maybe that's just how Bill pronounces "communities").
If you want to poke fun at the whole idea, buy one of these (buttons coming when I can figure out what to fit in a 2.25" circle).
Each omitted factor make the situation mathematically harder on the case for materialism when it's eventually included, sometimes by hundreds or thousands of orders of magnitude.
It's kind of difficult to even guesstimate how bad including spatial effects makes the numbers, but it's got to be at least thousands of orders of magnitude, more likely hundreds of thousands or millions of orders.
...and the wheels come off the anthropic principle in spectacular fashion.
You misrepresent ID if you uphold "a period of time" as being a long time, since some ID proponents argue that many of the macro changes are only possible in an instant, in which case what's the big difference between a macro change and an in-toto design?
...so technically, you're correct.
Speaking to your point rather than your words, the known alternative is much worse.
Go read Goerge Orwell's Animal Farm. All you really need to know about politics. High-falutin' principles that don't survive when the rubber meets the road are dangerous.
Put a greenie's house in the path of a devastating bushfire, then hand him/her a fuelled and sharpened chainsaw and stand back. Presently, you'll see whether (s)he's bright enough to understand that some principles don't scale.
I don't mean to imply that morality is entirely relative - that's another assertion doomed to fail under load - but you've got to pick your absolutes carefully, and stick by them. If you're a Liberal geek living in the USA, either change the country you're in, or change the country you're in, or change your beliefs. You are incompatible with your location.
Compared with the Commonwealth forces, they generally suck on a man-for-man basis and only ever win on total firepower rather than skill or good tactics. There are specific exceptions to this, but in general the US wins by being the biggest gorilla on the field, not by being the smartest, fastest or most skilled.
There are also other forces (some isolated Europeans, forex) who rate at least as well as Commonwealth troops, and specials like the Ghurkas who on a man-for-man basis just ace any conventional military.
"We're here about our Intellectual Property rights" (-:
Forex, it would be personally installed, and the chix assisting the installer would cause any of the males around to blunder into things. The dongle would have coloured status LEDs on it, and would also play Oggs, a selection of which would be included.
Here's why:For the hard-of-thinking, it means that import-export to things like Pro/E is easy to add, even without source. With source, it becomes very easy (you can probably modify a nearby IO module rather than starting from scratch).
Adding I/O to SolidWorks for some of the many other formats BRL-CAD deals with may not be so easy. And BRL-CAD does a bunch of modelling which is beyond SolidWorks' scope, even with COSMOS bolted on.
As is running on Linux or a Mac or a 64-bit machine (you get a choice of Win2k-Pro/x86 or WinXP-Pro/x86 with the latest version; older versions will run on WinNT and Win98SE but they're bright enough to mark WinME as "not suitable for production use"). If they'd chosen a Unix ecosystem as a base, doing Win32 and Carbon/Aqua as derivatives would have been easy. Back-porting from Win32 is going to be such a pig that I can't see them ever doing it.
...then they might start taking you seriously.
Better not ship the blighters a Berserker, then!