Exactly. I just spent a weekend with my broke college friends. We went to the same restaurants, bought similar food, go to the same concerts, buy the same drinks.. etc.
For me it was a nice cheap weekend. For them it was a little bit of a stretch.
The world taxes the poor. Every time they spend money it's a far greater % of their income for the same goods and services.
Could have useful applications I guess also for space based solar power. Perhaps a space based laser and ground based exceedingly expensive photo-antenna.
âoeThe unfortunate thing is that they are reacting not to the real situation, [...] I just wish that we were dealing with the real task before us which is looking at the future of computer science and that we have a quality program that really, truly is meeting the (needs) of the state of Washington.â
The interview is mostly about how they're asking the CS department to better prepare graduates for a modern workforce.
If a CS department was still just teaching Fortran and not much theory then yeah I would consider shutting them down too. I'm not saying they are that behind the times, they might be cutting edge, but the need to ensure your degrees still deliver value is an important one.
Just because a program is a CS department doesn't necessarily mean it's actually preparing qualified CS graduates.
Two comment authors write untrue statements on the internet... in an effort to discredit the idea that the internet could benefit from resources debunking lies.
I agree. Comcast is an evil corporation that I'm sure is out to destroy the happy future I hope to see... but they're the best ISP I've ever had and by golly they always just worked.
I wish I could get comcast at my new residence.
I doubly wish I could get some city owned Fiber but it's still only in the planning stages. But I would settle for an evil corporation who is probably going to use all of their clout to destroy emerging IP delivered TV services.
You can get a nice laptop every 3 years for $1008. Hell, let's say it's a $700 laptop and I'll throw in an upgrade of Windows and Office Home in 18 months.
It's overpriced garbage. You could buy a new netbook every year for about the same price.
Yes. Because you're admitting defeat that they can't learn something because it's hard.
While most won't accept evolution because it was taught to them in Biology class (almost entirely because even well meaning biologists aren't very good philosophers and can't even debunk the easiest of logical fallacies) at least some will. It's a slow battle but inevitably it'll win out for a large portion of the population which is intellectually honest and curious but hasn't ever heard good science.
If the only thing you ever hear is that "lightning struck mud and a guy jumped out of it." you would think it was insane too. Most people reject strawman-evolution. They haven't ever been taught sound evolution.
"If we are _____ then logically one must conclude ____ is also true and we should therefore ____."
All philosophy makes a list of "If we are ____" assumptions. If you don't base those assumptions on empirical values then no philosophical statement has any authority--it's just wild speculation.
Philosophy and math are both based on proofs. Theorems are built on other theorems and those theorems built on other theorems. Ultimately though you can never have apriori mathematical theorems and you have to rely on postulates.
A theorem is only true of the postulates its uses to prove itself are themselves true. Since no theorem ultimately is based on a theorem you could say that every theorem is an "assumption". And every assumption is ultimately based on empirical study.
If you assume that addition works in such a away that A + A = 3A instead of A + A = 2A you would reach very different conclusions. Neither is intrinsically more correct than the other. You could have a universe in which addition isn't linear. It's ultimately thanks to empirical observation that we can say that A + A = 2A.
Philosophy is exactly the same. Like mathematics you can create arbitrary equations but ultimately it's empiricism which determines which equations actually represent the real world.
No. Because I used to think like that. And that's no better. You're just deferring the inevitable conclusion that God is responsible.
If you assume that God likes physics and deterministic processes to create life then he's still responsible.
If you design a universe in which Sin is the inevitable outcome then it doesn't matter if a somewhat autonomous agent ultimately pulled the trigger. It's like lighting the fuse of a Bomb and then blaming the TNT for the resulting explosion. "Your honor I gave the bomb the choice to explode, I simply lit the fuse."
Besides the fact that there is no evidence that we have any free will and that we aren't simply deterministic agents who aren't separate from the physics of the universe you have to look at the universe that we exist in. If for instance jealousy is a sin then why are we monogamous? It's completely arbitrary. If murder is a sin then why design us not respawn like any video game universe that we create? If gluttony is a sin then why design us to get fat? Can a bear be a glutton? No.
If God designed us and even if we do have free will he created a universe which is at best ambivalent but arguably hostile to morality. If lieing is bad then why not make us telepathic? If greed is bad then why create a universe whose fundamental laws are those of scarcity. If starving children are bad then why create a universe where we need new energy injections every few weeks? If you're designing the laws of a universe why even have food at all? Do World of Warcraft characters starve (actually do they I haven't ever played) I think not. The laws of our universe are arbitrary. The design of us is piss poor and responsible for about 99% of our suffering.
If the suffering though is unimportant then what's wrong with Hitler? Perhaps I should kick kittens and stab children. After all as long as my heart is pure and I believe the suffering of others doesn't really matter.
God is responsible for the suffering as soon as he's responsible for the design of the universe. And that suffering as a result of that poor design is orders of magnitude greater than any other "monster" that humanity has ever created.
So as soon as you push back creation to abiogenesis then you're concluding that this is God's plan. You're saying God is responsible since this universe was his plan for at least the last few billion years *BEFORE HUMANITY EVOLVED*.
It also says that God's plan for creating our bodies involved a horrendously inefficient and brutal process involving the suffering of billions of organisms. The only reason we see Evolution as this amazing thing is because it created us from just about nothing. If however an intelligent agent used evolution we would think they're perverse and disgusting.
"We created this drug by randomly administering chemicals to millions of people. The ones who survived and weren't killed by drug reactions have discovered a cure for the Flu!"
You read Slashdot. I assume you are engineering inclined. Would you design a squishy meat puppet like ourselves as your ultimate creature? Would you design a product which has to be recharged every couple of days and if you miss a day will permanently lose all of its data? Would you design it in such a way that none of its critical components have redundant backups? Would you design it to have a wireless communication range of about 100 feet and about 300bits per second bandwidth? Would you design it to have an environmental operating temperature range of about 32degrees to 120 degrees? Would you design it such that it would shut down and lose all data if you covered its air vents for 2 minutes?
We're horribly designed. "Sin" is largely the result of our shitty design. And if you say that we are the result of God's design physically then our "spiritual" death was the inevitable outcome since we're acting exactly as we were designed to be. If he wanted us to act any differently then he should have designed us differently. You can't blame the knife in a murder. It was designed and propelled with agency by its owner. We are that knife.
I assume the parent is referring to the assignments where the exact code needed was taught during the last week of class and everyone's code ends up being pretty much exactly the same since it was essentially rote memorization.
An independent study project isn't one "Done for Class". It's not part of the coursework.
Or it's nobody's fail and the photographer up-sold 300 new clients on $200 worth of prints.
We're in a similar industry and part of our pricing model assumes that we're not working 50% of the time or more. I know photographers who price their services for even higher rates of underutilization.
Since about half of groupons go unused he only has to do 150. If they do have 50% down time then that's one a day that would have been unpaid time anyway. If they could on average make $50 on additional prints later then they are bringing in $7500 for unproductive time.
Yes. We should DEFINITELY start doing this in the US. After all the EPA just concluded that the radiation levels are so low now that they can't even detect it. That sounds like the perfect time to redouble our measuring.
*The local university here just dramatically scaled back their measuring program as well since they can't really see anything anymore either.*
It's funny how in the same day Slashdot can be all up in arms about the "Anti-Science" Texan school board. And then act like even more paranoid anti-science conspiracy theorists within 4-5 hours.
Goes to show the problem runs far deeper than religious wackos.
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
Ummm, Sociology is the scientific study of societies. Sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative analysis like any other science to study societies.
But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge.
As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science. That's like saying "Fish can breath underwater therefore there is no reason to say that you shouldn't be able forbidden from holding your neighbor underwater for hours on end." If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
Whether or not ends justify means isn't really addressed by any religion either. I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
The closest is the Hippocratic Oath which was largely secular. Furthermore the basis of that is that all human life has value and that we cannot simply take life or injure others without their consent. That's a practical empirically verifiable position since without that basis we open ourselves to tyrannical societies with majority abuse. Our ideal society is not like that and any such society ultimately implodes under corruption and general malaise. You're reducing "science" to essentially saying that happiness is the only standard and if the murder of a hobo makes many happy we are net happier. But I didn't say that. I said maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC. Etc also includes freedom, independence and value of all sentient life.
I would demand a far less challenging test of omnipotence:
Can God create a universe that isn't hostile to life and morality?
Not from the evidence we have. The only reason there is Sin in this universe is because God saw fit to create a universe built on scarcity that was hostile to life in the very laws of its universe.
If we look to video games for comparison we'll see that intelligent agents design universes in which the laws of the universe are conducive to social and moral behavior even when the point of the game is to kill one another through dismemberment. At least in Counterstrike when you get shot in the head you respawn after a short period. Our universe has no such innate law. So evidently God wasn't even capable of creating a universe which meets the barest minimum of human friendly laws. Even doom which didn't really have physics at least bothered programming into the fundamental laws of its gameverse.
In short - once you get back to the amoeba most of the religious objections to evolution are there regardless. So a God which created an amoeba is as unChristian as a God which doesn't exist.
They aren't wrong on this point. Once you eliminate the Adam and Eve story you no longer can place the blame for our fall on humanity. And when humanity isn't at fault for our suffering then the only person who can be blamed is God.
Once God is responsible our imperfection and exact design (through evolution) then he's evil since he designed us to evidently suffer.
If you assume that he evolved (through death and suffering) the human body but it was then (unlike the rest of the species on this planet) perfect and then corrupted by a Satan figure then again it's Satan's fault and not our own and once again we're not responsible for our defects.
You need literalism to maintain the viewpoint that we're responsible for our own suffering and God really really would like to help us but can't since it's our own fault--not his.
Essentially Christianity says that Humanity voided its warranty when it ate the apple. If you say that God started Abiogenesis then he's still responsible and we're all still under warranty. That doesn't fit within the saved/condemned view of the Christian church.
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Worship is based on an expression again of what elicits the maximum spiritual experience in the believer within the historical/metaphystical claims of the religion. The historical claims are subject to historical sciences and the metaphysical claims are subject to the logical/philosophical fields. Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
At its core Religion is history. It's a claim about the history of the world. Without that history it has no special authority. The authority that religion derives is directly tied to its emperical claims about the world.
If Jesus didn't exist then the words of Christ might be valid but Christianity had to defend their code-of-ethics based on the same criteria everyone else does: empirical studies on the cultural and personal efficacies of those rules. The only reason Religion believes it can circumvent that regular oversight is because it's been ordained by God and God is perfect therefore his commandments require no double checking.
Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens. Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
Religion bases its belief on divine ordination. Science performs tests and determines that "God" is a sexist bigot.
Religion: The world should be perfect and some day God will fix it if you sign this metaphysical document here agreeing to agree with everything contained in this book. Science: The world should be perfect and here are some ways that have a good chance of making it better.
When atheists reduce Religion to God of the Gaps they're being generous. Because Religion not only tries to fill in Gaps, it also tries to fill in things that we're confident about--but are quite different from the religious claims. Atheists try to give the original authors the benefit of the doubt that knowing what we know now they wouldn't have written such foolish things and attributed it to God.
I would say the exact opposite. Nobody cares how clean your code is--but you do.
I've seen a lot of brilliant products die because as it grew it hit the limit of what people could do with it. The products I've seen last decades aren't the same code as when they started but they did share an ease of accessibility in implementing new things.
So don't create for the 5 people in the audience. Create for yourself. Do it because it makes your life easier or excites you. Then you'll probably find an entire audience beyond 5. The flautist wasn't performing poorly--he was performing on the wrong stage.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I just spent a weekend with my broke college friends. We went to the same restaurants, bought similar food, go to the same concerts, buy the same drinks.. etc.
For me it was a nice cheap weekend. For them it was a little bit of a stretch.
The world taxes the poor. Every time they spend money it's a far greater % of their income for the same goods and services.
Could have useful applications I guess also for space based solar power. Perhaps a space based laser and ground based exceedingly expensive photo-antenna.
For those who haven't RTFA:
âoeThe unfortunate thing is that they are reacting not to the real situation, [...] I just wish that we were dealing with the real task before us which is looking at the future of computer science and that we have a quality program that really, truly is meeting the (needs) of the state of Washington.â
The interview is mostly about how they're asking the CS department to better prepare graduates for a modern workforce.
If a CS department was still just teaching Fortran and not much theory then yeah I would consider shutting them down too. I'm not saying they are that behind the times, they might be cutting edge, but the need to ensure your degrees still deliver value is an important one.
Just because a program is a CS department doesn't necessarily mean it's actually preparing qualified CS graduates.
Two comment authors write untrue statements on the internet... in an effort to discredit the idea that the internet could benefit from resources debunking lies.
Speaking of Irony...
Or like many great satirists he has an act which extends beyond one post.
You know... you can usually say no to those reboots and then do them all at once as well right?
I agree. Comcast is an evil corporation that I'm sure is out to destroy the happy future I hope to see... but they're the best ISP I've ever had and by golly they always just worked.
I wish I could get comcast at my new residence.
I doubly wish I could get some city owned Fiber but it's still only in the planning stages. But I would settle for an evil corporation who is probably going to use all of their clout to destroy emerging IP delivered TV services.
That works great until a virus spoofs whatever system UAC would use to check the identify of the exe.
Anti-Microsoft article boggling the mind?
You must be...
Sure they autoupdate... until some package doesn't work and you have to figure out why one set of libraries is no longer compatible with...
The installation and maintanance of open source software on my computer is often several times more annoying than your standard .msi installer.
$28 a month
x 36 months (minimum lease)
= $1008
You can get a nice laptop every 3 years for $1008. Hell, let's say it's a $700 laptop and I'll throw in an upgrade of Windows and Office Home in 18 months.
It's overpriced garbage. You could buy a new netbook every year for about the same price.
Yes. Because you're admitting defeat that they can't learn something because it's hard.
While most won't accept evolution because it was taught to them in Biology class (almost entirely because even well meaning biologists aren't very good philosophers and can't even debunk the easiest of logical fallacies) at least some will. It's a slow battle but inevitably it'll win out for a large portion of the population which is intellectually honest and curious but hasn't ever heard good science.
If the only thing you ever hear is that "lightning struck mud and a guy jumped out of it." you would think it was insane too. Most people reject strawman-evolution. They haven't ever been taught sound evolution.
Philosophy and Logic are intertwined.
At its most basic philosophy says:
"If we are _____ then logically one must conclude ____ is also true and we should therefore ____."
All philosophy makes a list of "If we are ____" assumptions. If you don't base those assumptions on empirical values then no philosophical statement has any authority--it's just wild speculation.
Philosophy and math are both based on proofs. Theorems are built on other theorems and those theorems built on other theorems. Ultimately though you can never have apriori mathematical theorems and you have to rely on postulates.
A theorem is only true of the postulates its uses to prove itself are themselves true. Since no theorem ultimately is based on a theorem you could say that every theorem is an "assumption". And every assumption is ultimately based on empirical study.
If you assume that addition works in such a away that A + A = 3A instead of A + A = 2A you would reach very different conclusions. Neither is intrinsically more correct than the other. You could have a universe in which addition isn't linear. It's ultimately thanks to empirical observation that we can say that A + A = 2A.
Philosophy is exactly the same. Like mathematics you can create arbitrary equations but ultimately it's empiricism which determines which equations actually represent the real world.
No. Because I used to think like that. And that's no better. You're just deferring the inevitable conclusion that God is responsible.
If you assume that God likes physics and deterministic processes to create life then he's still responsible.
If you design a universe in which Sin is the inevitable outcome then it doesn't matter if a somewhat autonomous agent ultimately pulled the trigger. It's like lighting the fuse of a Bomb and then blaming the TNT for the resulting explosion. "Your honor I gave the bomb the choice to explode, I simply lit the fuse."
Besides the fact that there is no evidence that we have any free will and that we aren't simply deterministic agents who aren't separate from the physics of the universe you have to look at the universe that we exist in. If for instance jealousy is a sin then why are we monogamous? It's completely arbitrary. If murder is a sin then why design us not respawn like any video game universe that we create? If gluttony is a sin then why design us to get fat? Can a bear be a glutton? No.
If God designed us and even if we do have free will he created a universe which is at best ambivalent but arguably hostile to morality. If lieing is bad then why not make us telepathic? If greed is bad then why create a universe whose fundamental laws are those of scarcity. If starving children are bad then why create a universe where we need new energy injections every few weeks? If you're designing the laws of a universe why even have food at all? Do World of Warcraft characters starve (actually do they I haven't ever played) I think not. The laws of our universe are arbitrary. The design of us is piss poor and responsible for about 99% of our suffering.
If the suffering though is unimportant then what's wrong with Hitler? Perhaps I should kick kittens and stab children. After all as long as my heart is pure and I believe the suffering of others doesn't really matter.
God is responsible for the suffering as soon as he's responsible for the design of the universe. And that suffering as a result of that poor design is orders of magnitude greater than any other "monster" that humanity has ever created.
So as soon as you push back creation to abiogenesis then you're concluding that this is God's plan. You're saying God is responsible since this universe was his plan for at least the last few billion years *BEFORE HUMANITY EVOLVED*.
It also says that God's plan for creating our bodies involved a horrendously inefficient and brutal process involving the suffering of billions of organisms. The only reason we see Evolution as this amazing thing is because it created us from just about nothing. If however an intelligent agent used evolution we would think they're perverse and disgusting.
"We created this drug by randomly administering chemicals to millions of people. The ones who survived and weren't killed by drug reactions have discovered a cure for the Flu!"
You read Slashdot. I assume you are engineering inclined. Would you design a squishy meat puppet like ourselves as your ultimate creature? Would you design a product which has to be recharged every couple of days and if you miss a day will permanently lose all of its data? Would you design it in such a way that none of its critical components have redundant backups? Would you design it to have a wireless communication range of about 100 feet and about 300bits per second bandwidth? Would you design it to have an environmental operating temperature range of about 32degrees to 120 degrees? Would you design it such that it would shut down and lose all data if you covered its air vents for 2 minutes?
We're horribly designed. "Sin" is largely the result of our shitty design. And if you say that we are the result of God's design physically then our "spiritual" death was the inevitable outcome since we're acting exactly as we were designed to be. If he wanted us to act any differently then he should have designed us differently. You can't blame the knife in a murder. It was designed and propelled with agency by its owner. We are that knife.
I assume the parent is referring to the assignments where the exact code needed was taught during the last week of class and everyone's code ends up being pretty much exactly the same since it was essentially rote memorization.
An independent study project isn't one "Done for Class". It's not part of the coursework.
Or it's nobody's fail and the photographer up-sold 300 new clients on $200 worth of prints.
We're in a similar industry and part of our pricing model assumes that we're not working 50% of the time or more. I know photographers who price their services for even higher rates of underutilization.
Since about half of groupons go unused he only has to do 150. If they do have 50% down time then that's one a day that would have been unpaid time anyway. If they could on average make $50 on additional prints later then they are bringing in $7500 for unproductive time.
Yes. We should DEFINITELY start doing this in the US. After all the EPA just concluded that the radiation levels are so low now that they can't even detect it. That sounds like the perfect time to redouble our measuring.
*The local university here just dramatically scaled back their measuring program as well since they can't really see anything anymore either.*
It's funny how in the same day Slashdot can be all up in arms about the "Anti-Science" Texan school board. And then act like even more paranoid anti-science conspiracy theorists within 4-5 hours.
Goes to show the problem runs far deeper than religious wackos.
No. Science might run a bunch of tests and determine that women are equal to men in whatever category it is being studied. *That* is the extent of science. Applying it to normative questions is not science, but something else. Sociology, perhaps, in this example.
Ummm, Sociology is the scientific study of societies. Sociologists use both qualitative and quantitative analysis like any other science to study societies.
But when someone makes a normative claim like "most animals are not monogamous, therefore I need not be monogamous", it just sets my teeth on edge.
As it should since that's a strawman first off and secondly not very good science. That's like saying "Fish can breath underwater therefore there is no reason to say that you shouldn't be able forbidden from holding your neighbor underwater for hours on end." If however science found that *HUMANS* were actually happier in non-monogamous relationships (and many are) then it would stand to reason that monogamy is not an absolute rule.
When you use this as the basis for your code of ethics, you see nothing especially wrong in infecting twins with smallpox, as the lessons you learn from your horrible results will result in "maximum happiness" for the human population.
Whether or not ends justify means isn't really addressed by any religion either. I don't remember any religion covering "Thou shalt not perform experiments on humans which will harm your subjects."
The closest is the Hippocratic Oath which was largely secular. Furthermore the basis of that is that all human life has value and that we cannot simply take life or injure others without their consent. That's a practical empirically verifiable position since without that basis we open ourselves to tyrannical societies with majority abuse. Our ideal society is not like that and any such society ultimately implodes under corruption and general malaise. You're reducing "science" to essentially saying that happiness is the only standard and if the murder of a hobo makes many happy we are net happier. But I didn't say that. I said maximize Happiness/Success/Productivity/ETC. Etc also includes freedom, independence and value of all sentient life.
I would demand a far less challenging test of omnipotence:
Can God create a universe that isn't hostile to life and morality?
Not from the evidence we have. The only reason there is Sin in this universe is because God saw fit to create a universe built on scarcity that was hostile to life in the very laws of its universe.
If we look to video games for comparison we'll see that intelligent agents design universes in which the laws of the universe are conducive to social and moral behavior even when the point of the game is to kill one another through dismemberment. At least in Counterstrike when you get shot in the head you respawn after a short period. Our universe has no such innate law. So evidently God wasn't even capable of creating a universe which meets the barest minimum of human friendly laws. Even doom which didn't really have physics at least bothered programming into the fundamental laws of its gameverse.
In short - once you get back to the amoeba most of the religious objections to evolution are there regardless. So a God which created an amoeba is as unChristian as a God which doesn't exist.
They aren't wrong on this point. Once you eliminate the Adam and Eve story you no longer can place the blame for our fall on humanity. And when humanity isn't at fault for our suffering then the only person who can be blamed is God.
Once God is responsible our imperfection and exact design (through evolution) then he's evil since he designed us to evidently suffer.
If you assume that he evolved (through death and suffering) the human body but it was then (unlike the rest of the species on this planet) perfect and then corrupted by a Satan figure then again it's Satan's fault and not our own and once again we're not responsible for our defects.
You need literalism to maintain the viewpoint that we're responsible for our own suffering and God really really would like to help us but can't since it's our own fault--not his.
Essentially Christianity says that Humanity voided its warranty when it ate the apple. If you say that God started Abiogenesis then he's still responsible and we're all still under warranty. That doesn't fit within the saved/condemned view of the Christian church.
How the world *should be* should be based on the way it is.
Codes of Ethics are best based on psychology and empiricism. If you wish to create an ethical construct "You should be monogamous with a member of the opposite sex and faithful for your entire life." Then you should have evidence to support that the outcome of that rule results in the maximum happiness/success/productivity/etc.
Worship is based on an expression again of what elicits the maximum spiritual experience in the believer within the historical/metaphystical claims of the religion. The historical claims are subject to historical sciences and the metaphysical claims are subject to the logical/philosophical fields. Both the logical and philosophical fields also require empirical data to form their assumptions.
At its core Religion is history. It's a claim about the history of the world. Without that history it has no special authority. The authority that religion derives is directly tied to its emperical claims about the world.
If Jesus didn't exist then the words of Christ might be valid but Christianity had to defend their code-of-ethics based on the same criteria everyone else does: empirical studies on the cultural and personal efficacies of those rules. The only reason Religion believes it can circumvent that regular oversight is because it's been ordained by God and God is perfect therefore his commandments require no double checking.
Science is perfectly capable of saying how the world should be. In fact it's better than speculation by bronze age goat herders.
Religion: You should treat women like property and second class citizens.
Science: Women are usually equally capable of making as good of decisions as men and should be equals.
Religion bases its belief on divine ordination. Science performs tests and determines that "God" is a sexist bigot.
Religion: The world should be perfect and some day God will fix it if you sign this metaphysical document here agreeing to agree with everything contained in this book.
Science: The world should be perfect and here are some ways that have a good chance of making it better.
When atheists reduce Religion to God of the Gaps they're being generous. Because Religion not only tries to fill in Gaps, it also tries to fill in things that we're confident about--but are quite different from the religious claims. Atheists try to give the original authors the benefit of the doubt that knowing what we know now they wouldn't have written such foolish things and attributed it to God.
Haha, like you'll have a choice!
Whoosh. :(
It's so hard to tell the delusional from the sarcastic these days. Haha...
Intel would care to disagree.
No they don't. That's why my processor is called the Intel i7 920.
I don't even know what speed the i7 920 is... and I'm a huge nerd. I could look it up, but it's certainly not "advertised".
http://i598.photobucket.com/albums/tt66/plimjl/IMG_1055.jpg
I would say the exact opposite. Nobody cares how clean your code is--but you do.
I've seen a lot of brilliant products die because as it grew it hit the limit of what people could do with it. The products I've seen last decades aren't the same code as when they started but they did share an ease of accessibility in implementing new things.
So don't create for the 5 people in the audience. Create for yourself. Do it because it makes your life easier or excites you. Then you'll probably find an entire audience beyond 5. The flautist wasn't performing poorly--he was performing on the wrong stage.