'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.'
Not if you do it right.
I went to a private university in Germany, which - contrary to almost all other universities here - intentionally uses the first semester to weed out its students. Not by attrition, the way the article suggests, but by way of a test that you have to pass in order to continue.
The vital differences were that a) everyone knew up front this was coming, the entire process is transparent b) actual knowledge was tested, not the ability to withstand the horrors of crowded lectures
Should cloud services focused at businesses provide clear warnings if they are not compliant with key regulatory requirements, or should business customers just assume they are not?"
Neither. With all of those compliance regulations, it is the job of the company to ascertain compliance. You don't assume anything - if you do, you're not compliant. You not only need to know, you need to document your knowledge.
So really, it's a non-issue except that it means Dropbox won't be used in environments that require this kind of compliance.
Disclaimer: I used to be SOX compliance manager. I know what I'm talking about./. would be a much better place if people submitting stories would, too.
And yes, I know quite a few OS who don't do complex operations like that in kernel space, but push it into user land and reserve the kernel space part to simple operations that are more likely to be done with less bugs.
Yes, you need to do stuff with data, and sometimes that data comes from the outside. But name me one reason why font rendering - instead of the pixel result that the graphics card needs to know - has to happen in kernel space.
Why do you decide what's necessary? How about either asking her, or leaving it in and if it isn't used then it isn't used.
It's not like tablets without Internet would be much cheaper. And when you think tablets already, I think the iPad is what you want. You can pick up a 1st gen device fairly cheaply these days. It's easy to use, you can use parental controls to make sure she doesn't mess anything up that would require you coming over to fix it, and there's lots and lots of apps available.
"keep on making" and "dumb idea of the month" imply a level of immediacy and concurrency that is absolutely unwarranted.
Ah, I see the misunderstanding.
No concurrency was intended. "keep on making" was intended to cover basically the entire existence of MS, who have been doing stupid mistakes like this for as long as I can remember. And the "dumb idea of the month" is a figure of speech not referring to any specific month, neither present nor past.
I'll bet you anything that this code was in the kernel before you signed up here at slashdot. What does that say about your pretense that this was recently thought up?
I didn't say anywhere this was recent. Adding something like that to kernel code was an obviously stupid idea even at that time.
And yes, it is probably about two years older than my/. membership.
The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4
No, it wasn't. NT4 was released in 1996. By that time, many people here on/. had been exploiting bugs like that for 10 or 20 years already. Granted, mostly for fun or to cheat in (single-player) games, but still...
NT4 already had a security architecture. There was a different place available (basically anywhere outside ring0) and it should have been put there, and it definitely should have been obvious to anyone with three grams of brains that stuff like this doesn't belong into ring0.
anyone who doesn't immediately realize this is a recipe for trouble? Parsing externally-supplied data in kernel mode. Yeah, like that never got anyone...
For all the really, really smart people that MS employes, why do they keep on making the dumbest mistakes one could come up with if it were a "dumb idea of the month" challenge?
Make sure this becomes their greatest failure - either slapped down by court with hefty fees, or driving away customers in droves, and nobody is buying it.
If this fails dramatically, chances that others will copy it are very much reduced.
Of course it's a simulation and thus there are differences to the real thing.
However, things like this tend to look differently from the inside than they do from the outside. The emotions of being trapped in a confined space for an extended time are not entirely rational, and if you are inside something for months you can lose track of where exactly you are, even if some part of your brain still "knows" that you are all safe.
It's as close as you can get with all the various other conditions (like the constant monitoring you couldn't do on a sub, the nearest real-life comparison) that needed to be met.
It's a valid experiment. Taking the things into consideration that would be different in a real mars mission is, of course, the job of the people doing the analysis.
When you are looking back that far into our history you can't assume anyone knew what they were talking about with any degree of scientific knowledge.
If you agree with me that it's all a collection of folk-tales, then that much is obvious. It is likewise obvious that whatever the authors had to say about the world may or may not have been appropriate to theirs, but listening to them for advice on our problems today - well, you could just as well read some old greek philosopher, or Indian tales, or chinese legends, or basically anything else. There is not reason whatsoever to attribute this specific book any special value.
Now, if you insist that it's the enlightened word of an almighty and omniscient being - well, in that case I can expect not just some, but a superior degree of knowledge.
Evolutionists don't have all of the answers either you know.
Oh, I know. Science is a limes function. It never reaches the whole truth, but it gets progressively closer. Dawkins actually has some very good illustrations of how "wrong" science is. Quantum physics, for example, is hotly debated and a whole lot of stuff is far from settled. But its predictions are so accurate that the typical quantum mechanical measurement is comparable to measuring the distance between New York and San Franzisco to the millimeter.
You should keep that in mind when you say "science doesn't have all the answers". No, it doesn't. But the margin of error or the amount of uncertainty is often on that scale.
And remember, with evolution; this is all completely random... It's like flipping a coin a million times and having it land heads up each time. One mistake and you're back to square one.
You've just proven that you don't understand the first thing about evolution. The very point about evolution is that it is not completely random. It's past midnight here, I'm too tired to explain it, go read a book. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story (Canto) has a good explanation of the evolution of the cellular system and in chapter 8 even an explicit debunking of your point.
You can believe what you want, but when two options are possible, it's usually the simpler one that's accurate.
No, it is the simpler one of those who fit the facts. Ockhams razor requires the theories to be comparable in their other qualities.
You cannot disprove God any more than I can prove Him.
No, but a world without a god is the simpler theory than a world with a god that made it look like a world without a god.;-)
Sure, as long as by nonsense you mean allegory, metaphors, morality and civil law.
Even as an allegory, it sucks. There are other ancient stories dramatically more valuable in literary and educational value.
As morality and civil law - yes, absolutely. Historically speaking, that was the purpose of the old testament. It was quite common to preserve knowledge and instructions in the form of stories. And the bible even contains a comparatively large number of direct commands - not just the ten commandments, but a long list of them.
But that's considering it as a historic document - as the morality and law of an ancient tribe of goat-herders in the palaestinian desert.
Applying that morality and law to modern society borders on the insane. And if it weren't for the religious aspect, but the mere facts, I doubt anyone would disagree with me.
Science and religion don't have to be opposing views.
Science is the end of religion, and the religious know it very well, which is why they oppose science. Every claim that religion makes that actually matters can be disproven by science, debunking the entire thing. Yes, religion can withdraw further and further into some "beyond the physics" realm, as it has been doing for a few centuries. But we all realize that at the current speed, very soon there won't be much left to withdraw from.
Claiming that science and religion are orthogonal is just another attempt at carving out a special area for religion, of finding a hole to hide in. God has already been pushed back into the non-physical realm, before the big bang, and into other areas currently inaccessible to science. Funny how every time science progresses into an area formerly unknowable, god retreats from there. He was in the heavens until we could look there and not see him. He was beyond the heavens until we could travel there and not meet him. He was in each of us until we could dissect the physical world down to the atom and more. Now he is purely in the spiritual.
Make no mistake. Science and religion are mortal enemies. If you don't want to take it from me, read The Golden Bough - on its surface the most complete collection of folk tales and rituals ever compiled, but if you really read it, you discover the history of magic, religion and science. And why they are three opposing forces.
The pyramids were built in ancient times, yet the modern scientific method was not developed back then.
And we rightfully admire them, knowing what a task it was with the means available.
I never said religion can not push men to do extraordinary things. We have much evidence not only in architecture (european cathedrals as well), but also in the arts.
The point was about progress.
The problem with the scientific method and other outdated theories
Sorry, I missed the memo about the scientific method becoming outdated. Where did that come from?
but they were still thought to be true at one point in time and there was evidence to think that way. And every generation believes these falsities to be true until they are proven false (only until someone proves again that what they currently thought is wrong in a continuous manner).
You phrase that in the usual way that misrepresents the whole thing. This is how non-science works - folk-lore, mythology, that kind of thinking. Every now and then, some other idea wins and everything is back to zero. In science, theories get replaced, but not by some random other theory, but by progressively better theories. In fact, that is the very condition for replacement: Your new theory has to match all the facts that the old one does, and provide some benefit in addition. This crucial point - again, progress - is missing from your rephrasing.
because there is no way for man of that age who created the bible to get scientific theories correct back in that age.
Which is exactly my point. The stories told in the bible where the best stories (or guesses, if you like, or theories if you insist) available at their time. You may have noticed that I never called their authors dumb or stupid or anything like that. With the methods and knowledge available to them, it was pretty much making something up that sounded reasonable. What else could they do?
My point is that we've since found out that it ain't so. Insisting on something different is ridiculous, barely worthy of debate. It's like my example of guessing at where Barack Obama is. Guessing he may be on a moon in the Betelgeuse system is ridiculous as it is. But insisting on this point of view after he emerges from his bedroom in his pyjamas - that's solidly in the mental disorder category.
there are things that we can't and will never be able to fully explained and religion/beliefs fill that role.
Science is proving this wrong again and again. Correct, at this point in time, we have many things to which we have no answers. But people thought before that science could never explain X - until it did.
So, I'd challenge you to name your top 10 questions that science will never be able to answer, and then meet again in 10 years to find out how many of them we can cross off that list. But I really don't care all that much. But you can do it for yourself, if you want a clash with reality.
I would never ever take any religious text at face value, but merely understand that it was how people thought thousands of years ago and at least from that aspect it's important to understand your past to be able to understand the future.
I agree with that. I do find religion a window into the past, as it preserves morals and thinking that we would otherwise have to reconstruct from very old sources. I find it fascinating how people explain their world - religion isn't the only approach there, as I've pointed out several times. To me, religion belongs into the same category as mysticism, magical thinking, old folk-tales, etc. - all attempts to make sense of the world.
I just can't understand why people still take it seriously, today.
And I don't understand why some people belief that unless we have 100% solid proof, every possible alternative is equally likely. Nowhere else in our lives do we think that way.
However, believers are people who intentionally leave their kernel unpatched and all the vulnerabilities open. Because they think it is divine work and shouldn't be touched.
Actually, I just realized you could call Jesus being Service Pack 1 for Judaism. It's a stretch (and the next update is long, long overdue), but you could.
Yes, the 50s, 60s, 70s had a number of strange ideas we know not to be true today. They also put a man on the moon. So even though they were "wrong", they were much closer to the truth, and had a lot more to show for it than all holy books combined.
The problem with the bible and other holy books is that they don't get updated. Sure, we don't enforce the rules about slavery or stoning homosexuals to death anymore in most places of the world, but they are still in the holy bible. And every fanatic of the present or future is free to take them at face value again. I'm not saying that every believer is a fanatic who believes in the literal truth of all the horrible rules their holy book contains (as well as the occasional good one). However, believers are people who intentionally leave their kernel unpatched and all the vulnerabilities open. Because they think it is divine work and shouldn't be touched.
And religion and science absolutely meet. All the time. You have have forgotten it because religion has been losing battles so often that they leave the battlefield the moment science enters these days, but religion also claimed to explain how the world works. It has a lot of rules that announce causality - do this, and that will follow. Many of them are unfalsifiable because the "that" is removed into some afterlife, paradise, whatever - but many are not. Religion also makes statements about the past, both relatively recent and distant. Very few of them check out. For example, we know that even if you read it as a metaphorical description, the events of Genesis can not have happened in this order. The placement of water and the differentiation between the sun and other stars is a good example of an account that makes absolutely no sense with the knowledge we have today, but is a fairly natural assumption for someone of the time period the story was made up. Finally, do not reduce science to the natural sciences alone. Social and cognitives sciences are rapidly putting religious claims to rest and provide better explanations and slowly also better guidelines. We have scientifically derived rules for negotiations, peace talks, etc. that are provably leaps and bounds beyond the simple rules of the bible, for example.
This is fantastic news for everyone who is worried the slightest bit about security. This has absolutely nothing to do with turning a Mac into an appliance, and nobody from within Apple has ever alleged that non-App-Store installations would be made difficult or impossible.
But what this is is a huge and desperately step needed in putting applications into their own corner. Imagine what would happen if random apps couldn't crap all over your system? The horror! Most of the spy- and malware would go away!
The OS X sandbox is actually a fairly nifty beast, but is has been under-used. This is a great step into pushing it out and making developers accept that just because I want to use their app I don't mean to give them full access to everything on my system - not even everything I can access with my user account.
I know several people who had never touched Linux before I met them, and one of them actually bought her first computer with my help. These people used Linux without bothering about the fine details of the FHS. For one, every distribution for the past 10 years has made it easier and easier to run Linux. Two, if you don't do arcane stuff, you seldom have to. Three, whenever they had to, they simply accepted things being as they were and worked with that. Human beings are great that way.
Note the "four, I helped them" is absent from that list. Because I didn't.
I don't know what kind of users you have in mind, but maybe Linux isn't the right OS for your grandmother.
I am an atheist, but calling the bible "a big pile of nonsence" is just as ignorant as literally believing in it.
It's using the unfriendly wording for the truth, but frankly, have you checked any of the non-religious secondary sources? Almost nothing in the bible really happened that way. The few things that we can trace back to historic events are grossly distorted.
From all we know, "300" is more historically accurate than "The Passion of Christ" (or any other Jesus movie aside from "The Life of Brian").
That's pretty much a given. I doubt even the most extreme fundamentalist would claim that the Bible records everything that ever happened.
I'm not talking about leaving out minor details like what Noah had for breakfast that day. Something like a second creation, though, that's not a minor detail you'd leave out, would you? Simple test: How many pages does it contain that describe less relevant and god-like events? Correct, hundreds.
I stand corrected. It's been years since I tried reading the bible (I put it down less than a third through. The writing is horrible and incoherent and the morals disgusting).
I do however believe science is more about finding out HOW God does what he does.
Nietzsche had a two-paragraph debunking of this god-concept, which I think emerged as a response to the enlightenment. I can't possibly duplicate his elegant logic and words, but I'll sum up the argument:
Basically, you are saying that god works not only in mysterious ways, but in ways that we can explain entirely, end-to-end without finding a single drop of evidence for him. Let's accept that he is capable of that and all. Thought to conclusion, it means god works in such ways that whether or not he exists makes no difference at all to the world, because everything is set up so that it would work just as well without - because we understand how it works and there's no need for him in any of it. In the words of Kant, god has become a thing-in-itself.
But things exist by their interaction with other things. Something that does not interact with other things can not be said to "exist" in any reasonable sense of the word.
Now, the thing about language is that yes, you can re-interpret them. Your Genesis example works. By the same method, I could re-interpret Romeo and Juliet into a story about genocide and betrayl, with the two main characters the evil overlords. But what matters is not our ability to put meaning into things, but our ability to correctly extract the meaning the author intended to.
God is God, He can/has the ability to do whatever he wants...even if it falls out of range of our reality.
You're trying to discuss about traits of god with me. But I don't accept your initial assumption that such a being exists at all. Not only that, I don't accept that he is even needed. God isn't dead because we killed him, he's dead because we found better explanations for everything that our ancestors couldn't figure out and thus said "must've been god, I can't explain it otherwise".
I fimly believe that Science is the persuit of finding out how God does what he does and not a tool to, in essence, kill God.
Science doesn't kill god. Killing something requires that it exists (and lives).
Not only have you failed to show any evidence for a god, you've failed to show necessity. For some reason, you want to cling to a belief in an unlikely being. I don't condemn you for that. Other people believe in fantasies, too. Like that their wife really loves them or anyone actually reads their blog. However, you go a step further and that step is what bothers me about believers: You judge other people on a codex that assumes your fantasy to be universally true. You critizise people for treating your illusionary friend in specific ways. You blame science for doing things wrong. You elevate yourself above hundreds of learned people by calling their debates misguided. All based on a single unproven assumption.
Slashdot Mirror
True. A lot has changed in the university system over the past years. It's been a while for me, so everything I have to say is about a decade old.
'Treating the freshman year as a "sink or swim" experience and accepting attrition as inevitable,' says a report by the National Academy of Engineering, 'is both unfair to students and wasteful of resources and faculty time.'
Not if you do it right.
I went to a private university in Germany, which - contrary to almost all other universities here - intentionally uses the first semester to weed out its students. Not by attrition, the way the article suggests, but by way of a test that you have to pass in order to continue.
The vital differences were that
a) everyone knew up front this was coming, the entire process is transparent
b) actual knowledge was tested, not the ability to withstand the horrors of crowded lectures
:-)
True.
Should cloud services focused at businesses provide clear warnings if they are not compliant with key regulatory requirements, or should business customers just assume they are not?"
Neither. With all of those compliance regulations, it is the job of the company to ascertain compliance. You don't assume anything - if you do, you're not compliant. You not only need to know, you need to document your knowledge.
So really, it's a non-issue except that it means Dropbox won't be used in environments that require this kind of compliance.
Disclaimer: I used to be SOX compliance manager. I know what I'm talking about. /. would be a much better place if people submitting stories would, too.
Just curious, can you name an OS that doesn't do it in one form or another?
I can name two that had a font-rendering kernel exploit in 2009. You'd have thought their manufacturer would check his other products for the same or similar problems...
And yes, I know quite a few OS who don't do complex operations like that in kernel space, but push it into user land and reserve the kernel space part to simple operations that are more likely to be done with less bugs.
Yes, you need to do stuff with data, and sometimes that data comes from the outside. But name me one reason why font rendering - instead of the pixel result that the graphics card needs to know - has to happen in kernel space.
Why do you decide what's necessary? How about either asking her, or leaving it in and if it isn't used then it isn't used.
It's not like tablets without Internet would be much cheaper. And when you think tablets already, I think the iPad is what you want. You can pick up a 1st gen device fairly cheaply these days. It's easy to use, you can use parental controls to make sure she doesn't mess anything up that would require you coming over to fix it, and there's lots and lots of apps available.
"keep on making" and "dumb idea of the month" imply a level of immediacy and concurrency that is absolutely unwarranted.
Ah, I see the misunderstanding.
No concurrency was intended. "keep on making" was intended to cover basically the entire existence of MS, who have been doing stupid mistakes like this for as long as I can remember. And the "dumb idea of the month" is a figure of speech not referring to any specific month, neither present nor past.
The guy is hiding behind a 3 digit ID
No, the ID is too short to hide behind. :-)
I'll bet you anything that this code was in the kernel before you signed up here at slashdot. What does that say about your pretense that this was recently thought up?
I didn't say anywhere this was recent. Adding something like that to kernel code was an obviously stupid idea even at that time.
And yes, it is probably about two years older than my /. membership.
The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4
No, it wasn't. NT4 was released in 1996. By that time, many people here on /. had been exploiting bugs like that for 10 or 20 years already. Granted, mostly for fun or to cheat in (single-player) games, but still...
NT4 already had a security architecture. There was a different place available (basically anywhere outside ring0) and it should have been put there, and it definitely should have been obvious to anyone with three grams of brains that stuff like this doesn't belong into ring0.
in NT4 and later fonts are parsed in kernel mode!
anyone who doesn't immediately realize this is a recipe for trouble? Parsing externally-supplied data in kernel mode. Yeah, like that never got anyone...
For all the really, really smart people that MS employes, why do they keep on making the dumbest mistakes one could come up with if it were a "dumb idea of the month" challenge?
Make sure this becomes their greatest failure - either slapped down by court with hefty fees, or driving away customers in droves, and nobody is buying it.
If this fails dramatically, chances that others will copy it are very much reduced.
Of course it's a simulation and thus there are differences to the real thing.
However, things like this tend to look differently from the inside than they do from the outside. The emotions of being trapped in a confined space for an extended time are not entirely rational, and if you are inside something for months you can lose track of where exactly you are, even if some part of your brain still "knows" that you are all safe.
It's as close as you can get with all the various other conditions (like the constant monitoring you couldn't do on a sub, the nearest real-life comparison) that needed to be met.
It's a valid experiment. Taking the things into consideration that would be different in a real mars mission is, of course, the job of the people doing the analysis.
I don't call it "micro" when it involves basically all the land-based plant life we know today.
When you are looking back that far into our history you can't assume anyone knew what they were talking about with any degree of scientific knowledge.
If you agree with me that it's all a collection of folk-tales, then that much is obvious. It is likewise obvious that whatever the authors had to say about the world may or may not have been appropriate to theirs, but listening to them for advice on our problems today - well, you could just as well read some old greek philosopher, or Indian tales, or chinese legends, or basically anything else. There is not reason whatsoever to attribute this specific book any special value.
Now, if you insist that it's the enlightened word of an almighty and omniscient being - well, in that case I can expect not just some, but a superior degree of knowledge.
Evolutionists don't have all of the answers either you know.
Oh, I know. Science is a limes function. It never reaches the whole truth, but it gets progressively closer. Dawkins actually has some very good illustrations of how "wrong" science is. Quantum physics, for example, is hotly debated and a whole lot of stuff is far from settled. But its predictions are so accurate that the typical quantum mechanical measurement is comparable to measuring the distance between New York and San Franzisco to the millimeter.
You should keep that in mind when you say "science doesn't have all the answers". No, it doesn't. But the margin of error or the amount of uncertainty is often on that scale.
And remember, with evolution; this is all completely random... It's like flipping a coin a million times and having it land heads up each time. One mistake and you're back to square one.
You've just proven that you don't understand the first thing about evolution. The very point about evolution is that it is not completely random. It's past midnight here, I'm too tired to explain it, go read a book. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story (Canto) has a good explanation of the evolution of the cellular system and in chapter 8 even an explicit debunking of your point.
You can believe what you want, but when two options are possible, it's usually the simpler one that's accurate.
No, it is the simpler one of those who fit the facts. Ockhams razor requires the theories to be comparable in their other qualities.
You cannot disprove God any more than I can prove Him.
No, but a world without a god is the simpler theory than a world with a god that made it look like a world without a god. ;-)
Sure, as long as by nonsense you mean allegory, metaphors, morality and civil law.
Even as an allegory, it sucks. There are other ancient stories dramatically more valuable in literary and educational value.
As morality and civil law - yes, absolutely. Historically speaking, that was the purpose of the old testament. It was quite common to preserve knowledge and instructions in the form of stories. And the bible even contains a comparatively large number of direct commands - not just the ten commandments, but a long list of them.
But that's considering it as a historic document - as the morality and law of an ancient tribe of goat-herders in the palaestinian desert.
Applying that morality and law to modern society borders on the insane. And if it weren't for the religious aspect, but the mere facts, I doubt anyone would disagree with me.
Science and religion don't have to be opposing views.
Science is the end of religion, and the religious know it very well, which is why they oppose science. Every claim that religion makes that actually matters can be disproven by science, debunking the entire thing. Yes, religion can withdraw further and further into some "beyond the physics" realm, as it has been doing for a few centuries. But we all realize that at the current speed, very soon there won't be much left to withdraw from.
Claiming that science and religion are orthogonal is just another attempt at carving out a special area for religion, of finding a hole to hide in. God has already been pushed back into the non-physical realm, before the big bang, and into other areas currently inaccessible to science. Funny how every time science progresses into an area formerly unknowable, god retreats from there. He was in the heavens until we could look there and not see him. He was beyond the heavens until we could travel there and not meet him. He was in each of us until we could dissect the physical world down to the atom and more. Now he is purely in the spiritual.
Make no mistake. Science and religion are mortal enemies. If you don't want to take it from me, read The Golden Bough - on its surface the most complete collection of folk tales and rituals ever compiled, but if you really read it, you discover the history of magic, religion and science. And why they are three opposing forces.
The pyramids were built in ancient times, yet the modern scientific method was not developed back then.
And we rightfully admire them, knowing what a task it was with the means available.
I never said religion can not push men to do extraordinary things. We have much evidence not only in architecture (european cathedrals as well), but also in the arts.
The point was about progress.
The problem with the scientific method and other outdated theories
Sorry, I missed the memo about the scientific method becoming outdated. Where did that come from?
but they were still thought to be true at one point in time and there was evidence to think that way. And every generation believes these falsities to be true until they are proven false (only until someone proves again that what they currently thought is wrong in a continuous manner).
You phrase that in the usual way that misrepresents the whole thing. This is how non-science works - folk-lore, mythology, that kind of thinking. Every now and then, some other idea wins and everything is back to zero. In science, theories get replaced, but not by some random other theory, but by progressively better theories. In fact, that is the very condition for replacement: Your new theory has to match all the facts that the old one does, and provide some benefit in addition. This crucial point - again, progress - is missing from your rephrasing.
because there is no way for man of that age who created the bible to get scientific theories correct back in that age.
Which is exactly my point. The stories told in the bible where the best stories (or guesses, if you like, or theories if you insist) available at their time. You may have noticed that I never called their authors dumb or stupid or anything like that. With the methods and knowledge available to them, it was pretty much making something up that sounded reasonable. What else could they do?
My point is that we've since found out that it ain't so. Insisting on something different is ridiculous, barely worthy of debate. It's like my example of guessing at where Barack Obama is. Guessing he may be on a moon in the Betelgeuse system is ridiculous as it is. But insisting on this point of view after he emerges from his bedroom in his pyjamas - that's solidly in the mental disorder category.
there are things that we can't and will never be able to fully explained and religion/beliefs fill that role.
Science is proving this wrong again and again. Correct, at this point in time, we have many things to which we have no answers. But people thought before that science could never explain X - until it did.
So, I'd challenge you to name your top 10 questions that science will never be able to answer, and then meet again in 10 years to find out how many of them we can cross off that list. But I really don't care all that much. But you can do it for yourself, if you want a clash with reality.
I would never ever take any religious text at face value, but merely understand that it was how people thought thousands of years ago and at least from that aspect it's important to understand your past to be able to understand the future.
I agree with that. I do find religion a window into the past, as it preserves morals and thinking that we would otherwise have to reconstruct from very old sources. I find it fascinating how people explain their world - religion isn't the only approach there, as I've pointed out several times. To me, religion belongs into the same category as mysticism, magical thinking, old folk-tales, etc. - all attempts to make sense of the world.
I just can't understand why people still take it seriously, today.
And I don't understand why some people belief that unless we have 100% solid proof, every possible alternative is equally likely. Nowhere else in our lives do we think that way.
However, believers are people who intentionally leave their kernel unpatched and all the vulnerabilities open. Because they think it is divine work and shouldn't be touched.
Actually, I just realized you could call Jesus being Service Pack 1 for Judaism. It's a stretch (and the next update is long, long overdue), but you could.
Yes, the 50s, 60s, 70s had a number of strange ideas we know not to be true today. They also put a man on the moon. So even though they were "wrong", they were much closer to the truth, and had a lot more to show for it than all holy books combined.
The problem with the bible and other holy books is that they don't get updated. Sure, we don't enforce the rules about slavery or stoning homosexuals to death anymore in most places of the world, but they are still in the holy bible. And every fanatic of the present or future is free to take them at face value again.
I'm not saying that every believer is a fanatic who believes in the literal truth of all the horrible rules their holy book contains (as well as the occasional good one). However, believers are people who intentionally leave their kernel unpatched and all the vulnerabilities open. Because they think it is divine work and shouldn't be touched.
And religion and science absolutely meet. All the time. You have have forgotten it because religion has been losing battles so often that they leave the battlefield the moment science enters these days, but religion also claimed to explain how the world works. It has a lot of rules that announce causality - do this, and that will follow. Many of them are unfalsifiable because the "that" is removed into some afterlife, paradise, whatever - but many are not. Religion also makes statements about the past, both relatively recent and distant. Very few of them check out. For example, we know that even if you read it as a metaphorical description, the events of Genesis can not have happened in this order. The placement of water and the differentiation between the sun and other stars is a good example of an account that makes absolutely no sense with the knowledge we have today, but is a fairly natural assumption for someone of the time period the story was made up.
Finally, do not reduce science to the natural sciences alone. Social and cognitives sciences are rapidly putting religious claims to rest and provide better explanations and slowly also better guidelines. We have scientifically derived rules for negotiations, peace talks, etc. that are provably leaps and bounds beyond the simple rules of the bible, for example.
ok, it really is nonsense-summary week on /.
This is fantastic news for everyone who is worried the slightest bit about security. This has absolutely nothing to do with turning a Mac into an appliance, and nobody from within Apple has ever alleged that non-App-Store installations would be made difficult or impossible.
But what this is is a huge and desperately step needed in putting applications into their own corner. Imagine what would happen if random apps couldn't crap all over your system? The horror! Most of the spy- and malware would go away!
The OS X sandbox is actually a fairly nifty beast, but is has been under-used. This is a great step into pushing it out and making developers accept that just because I want to use their app I don't mean to give them full access to everything on my system - not even everything I can access with my user account.
More nonsense.
I know several people who had never touched Linux before I met them, and one of them actually bought her first computer with my help. These people used Linux without bothering about the fine details of the FHS. For one, every distribution for the past 10 years has made it easier and easier to run Linux. Two, if you don't do arcane stuff, you seldom have to. Three, whenever they had to, they simply accepted things being as they were and worked with that. Human beings are great that way.
Note the "four, I helped them" is absent from that list. Because I didn't.
I don't know what kind of users you have in mind, but maybe Linux isn't the right OS for your grandmother.
I am an atheist, but calling the bible "a big pile of nonsence" is just as ignorant as literally believing in it.
It's using the unfriendly wording for the truth, but frankly, have you checked any of the non-religious secondary sources? Almost nothing in the bible really happened that way. The few things that we can trace back to historic events are grossly distorted.
From all we know, "300" is more historically accurate than "The Passion of Christ" (or any other Jesus movie aside from "The Life of Brian").
That's pretty much a given. I doubt even the most extreme fundamentalist would claim that the Bible records everything that ever happened.
I'm not talking about leaving out minor details like what Noah had for breakfast that day. Something like a second creation, though, that's not a minor detail you'd leave out, would you? Simple test: How many pages does it contain that describe less relevant and god-like events? Correct, hundreds.
I stand corrected. It's been years since I tried reading the bible (I put it down less than a third through. The writing is horrible and incoherent and the morals disgusting).
He didn't. The bible is specific on that part. And let's ignore the fresh/salt water issue.
I do however believe science is more about finding out HOW God does what he does.
Nietzsche had a two-paragraph debunking of this god-concept, which I think emerged as a response to the enlightenment. I can't possibly duplicate his elegant logic and words, but I'll sum up the argument:
Basically, you are saying that god works not only in mysterious ways, but in ways that we can explain entirely, end-to-end without finding a single drop of evidence for him. Let's accept that he is capable of that and all. Thought to conclusion, it means god works in such ways that whether or not he exists makes no difference at all to the world, because everything is set up so that it would work just as well without - because we understand how it works and there's no need for him in any of it. In the words of Kant, god has become a thing-in-itself.
But things exist by their interaction with other things. Something that does not interact with other things can not be said to "exist" in any reasonable sense of the word.
Now, the thing about language is that yes, you can re-interpret them. Your Genesis example works. By the same method, I could re-interpret Romeo and Juliet into a story about genocide and betrayl, with the two main characters the evil overlords. But what matters is not our ability to put meaning into things, but our ability to correctly extract the meaning the author intended to.
God is God, He can/has the ability to do whatever he wants...even if it falls out of range of our reality.
You're trying to discuss about traits of god with me. But I don't accept your initial assumption that such a being exists at all. Not only that, I don't accept that he is even needed. God isn't dead because we killed him, he's dead because we found better explanations for everything that our ancestors couldn't figure out and thus said "must've been god, I can't explain it otherwise".
I fimly believe that Science is the persuit of finding out how God does what he does and not a tool to, in essence, kill God.
Science doesn't kill god. Killing something requires that it exists (and lives).
Not only have you failed to show any evidence for a god, you've failed to show necessity. For some reason, you want to cling to a belief in an unlikely being. I don't condemn you for that. Other people believe in fantasies, too. Like that their wife really loves them or anyone actually reads their blog. However, you go a step further and that step is what bothers me about believers: You judge other people on a codex that assumes your fantasy to be universally true. You critizise people for treating your illusionary friend in specific ways. You blame science for doing things wrong. You elevate yourself above hundreds of learned people by calling their debates misguided. All based on a single unproven assumption.