You make the assumption that the only valid evidence is scientific evidence... why?
I have evidence for God from many people I've met in my life, as well as people I've read about. Just because I can't represent my evidence with data is no grounds for me not to believe it.
While Dawkins certainly loves picking the low hanging fruit (the right-wing religious wackos), he is more than happy to address what he views as the hypocritical moderates. In fact, he has said numerous times that he almost has more respect for people who are steadfast in their religious beliefs than those who are willing to blend modern life with religious dogma.
Dawkins makes some assumptions about religion and faith that I don't agree with. One, is that the religious fundamentalists/fanatics have more faith than those termed "moderates" by outsiders' comparisons.
One of the ironies of the Bible is that it's usually the dogmatic types that are reprimanded by God. Just look at Jesus's assessment of the dogmatic religious leaders of his day.
I believe strongly in God and the Bible, but don't have a problem with science. However, I also don't think I'm separate my rational mind from my faithful mind into compartments. Instead, I have a rational faith, born not out of preacher sermons, but from reading the Bible on my own and believing in its truth independently.
Approaching the Bible independently, I have come to some different conclusions than the popular "fundamentalists", but feel that my fundamentals are as good as theirs.
For instance, I believe in evolution because of the scientific evidence and because in Genesis chapter one God doesn't create life directly, but indirectly by saying, "Let the EARTH produce living creatures." In fact, he begins by creating the "fliers" and the "swimmers" (atmospheric and oceanic life, which is also in line with evolution).
But the Bible isn't a science book anyways, and just as I don't believe Satan is a literal snake as presented in the Garden of Eden story, I think that many of the historical events as recorded in the Bible have been boiled down to their essentials, which means that a lot of details have been abstracted out into parable and other types of metaphor. This would parallel the fact that Hebrew is a very imprecise language, bad for counting numbers or identifying abstract concepts, but great for poetry in a loose language that uses a very primal vocabulary (for example in Hebrew, the same word for "soul" also means "neck" and "spirit" can mean "wind".)
And for all that jazz, I do think the Bible is more than a moral lesson, because quite frankly, the Bible has little to say about how to live your day-to-day life other than just to rely on God. The point of the Bible is that it's a collection of stories that show you the power of a real, living God, who takes action and initiative in our lives. The point is that not all the facts are completely straight, but that the events as told did happen, such as Christ rising from death.
I agree completely. Further, there's no scientific evidence that giant flying spaghetti monsters don't exist. Nor is there evidence that underpants gnomes don't exist (in fact, given the rate of underpants disappearances, I would argue *for* their existance!).
The only difference between God and underpants gnomes or FSM is that the question of God is a central question in philosophy, including discussion of what "God" even means to different people from different real living cultures around the world.
Underpants gnomes and FSM are just artificial creations that mock thousands of years of human insight, intuition, art, and culture.
Upgrade for IE7 is due in the coming months... me and some other developers have pushed for Firefox or an SWT Java Webstart implementation of the UI, but so far our suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. The development is driven from the top-down by bureaucrats, unfortunately. But all the same, given their conflicting, contradictory requirement, we developers I think do a decent job.
$24 billion better?
Umm... yes? No?
I think that in the long run, having an electronic medical record system will save trillions of dollars for your government.
I actually work on this project, an application called Choose and Book. We've had a lot of success: little downtime, significant uptake, and physicians seem pleased with the user interface. If you want to know, it allows people at their general practitioner to book appointments with a specialist at a hospital. It actually does a lot more, but I don't want to burden you with details. It's a J2EE application.
This project is far from being a "disaster" as the British newspapers (little better than tabloids) like to tout it as. And the project has very little to do with Microsoft or Bill Gates. Most of the software my company is delivering is C/C++/Java running on IBM AIX.
If you want the opinion of a software developer on the inside of this thing, take my word for it: this article is trash. Like any huge project, it's just moving along slower than anyone first anticipated.
In the end, the British healthcare system is going to be faster and cheaper because of Connecting for Health.
If this continues, it's only a matter of time before Ubuntu is thought of as "downstream" and Debian is the "offshoot". I mean, isn't that what would happen if Ubuntu starts getting more actual work done, and developers in Debian are porting the "upstream" Ubuntu stuff to Debian more and more? And look at what MEPIS has done!
Of course, this would only be from the perspective of a few architectures. Debian is still a big deal for embedded and niche archs. But who knows... Ubuntu Embedded might be on the way... maybe they'll call it Bubuntu or something hot like that.
Without Debian, where would we have the amazing, huge codebase for every Ubuntu, Jibbajabba, or Lilixinidros distribution out there? Debian is the closest thing to a "standard Linux" if there ever was one. Slackware is a good candidate, too.
Whenever a patent claim gets settled, then well, that same claim can't be made again by another company -- unless they take it up with the company that won the first claim.
So this is a smart defensive legal maneuver. And if it's a small company suing, it's even better, because Apple can settle for even less, and then have that company they settled with act as their shield from larger suits there on out!
I personally think China's EVD standard will become dominant -- not because consumer's will flock to it, though, but manufacturers. There is no copyright or other licensing to use it, and it's a freely published standard for high-def. No royalities, and it's codecs can even be implemented in Linux without legal issues.
HD makes no visible difference for me. I don't keep my glasses clean enough of spots for HD to matter. And I like big tapestries on my walls more than big screens. Watching DVDs on my 19" PC monitor is enough screen for me for the rest of my life.
It seems the development of this "office" suite goes hand in hand with new enhancements being made to Firefox -- especially a more robust Javascript (2.0) and the ability to have an offline mode for your apps as well as an open API to the local SQLLite storage engine.
Maybe Microsoft didn't like the "Hasta la vista, Vista" banners at the Mac show yesterday? Or especially "Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat." Perhaps they feel like they're being threatened?
So years from now, if most IT infrastructure is open source, but just not necessarily at the OS level, what's to keep companies from switching out the underlying OS once there is an adequate amount of Linux know-how out there for them to hire? I don't think Microsoft likes this very much at all, since there is no lock-in with open source. Companies with existing investment in Windows will use WAMP, but new companies will likely go with LAMP or J2EE from the start.
If anything, I would say that with WAMP, open source software is embracing, extending, and extinguishing Microsoft, not the other way around.
Wow, if this guy is right, then I'd say to buy some SUNW stock, because this power-consumption problem is exactly what their latest line of server offerings directly address.
Oh, and I don't have any Sun stock myself, heheh... yet:)
If we want to get users to enter in metadata, we need to do three main things:
- create editors that automate the syntactical complexities of RDF/OWL, like what blogs have done for HTML. - make entering metadata entertaining somehow. - make some killer apps that show to regular users the usefulness of the semantic web.
Then we'll have a semantic web. Problems like spam can just be addressed as we come to them, but Web of Trust is probably a good start.
Slashdot Mirror
You make the assumption that the only valid evidence is scientific evidence ... why?
I have evidence for God from many people I've met in my life, as well as people I've read about. Just because I can't represent my evidence with data is no grounds for me not to believe it.
I agree the God question is not central to philosophy, but as I said above, it is *A* central question in philosophy, unlike FSM.
Scientific evidence is only material evidence, but I don't believe it's the only valid form of evidence.
While Dawkins certainly loves picking the low hanging fruit (the right-wing religious wackos), he is more than happy to address what he views as the hypocritical moderates. In fact, he has said numerous times that he almost has more respect for people who are steadfast in their religious beliefs than those who are willing to blend modern life with religious dogma.
Dawkins makes some assumptions about religion and faith that I don't agree with. One, is that the religious fundamentalists/fanatics have more faith than those termed "moderates" by outsiders' comparisons.
One of the ironies of the Bible is that it's usually the dogmatic types that are reprimanded by God. Just look at Jesus's assessment of the dogmatic religious leaders of his day.
I believe strongly in God and the Bible, but don't have a problem with science. However, I also don't think I'm separate my rational mind from my faithful mind into compartments. Instead, I have a rational faith, born not out of preacher sermons, but from reading the Bible on my own and believing in its truth independently.
Approaching the Bible independently, I have come to some different conclusions than the popular "fundamentalists", but feel that my fundamentals are as good as theirs.
For instance, I believe in evolution because of the scientific evidence and because in Genesis chapter one God doesn't create life directly, but indirectly by saying, "Let the EARTH produce living creatures." In fact, he begins by creating the "fliers" and the "swimmers" (atmospheric and oceanic life, which is also in line with evolution).
But the Bible isn't a science book anyways, and just as I don't believe Satan is a literal snake as presented in the Garden of Eden story, I think that many of the historical events as recorded in the Bible have been boiled down to their essentials, which means that a lot of details have been abstracted out into parable and other types of metaphor. This would parallel the fact that Hebrew is a very imprecise language, bad for counting numbers or identifying abstract concepts, but great for poetry in a loose language that uses a very primal vocabulary (for example in Hebrew, the same word for "soul" also means "neck" and "spirit" can mean "wind".)
And for all that jazz, I do think the Bible is more than a moral lesson, because quite frankly, the Bible has little to say about how to live your day-to-day life other than just to rely on God. The point of the Bible is that it's a collection of stories that show you the power of a real, living God, who takes action and initiative in our lives. The point is that not all the facts are completely straight, but that the events as told did happen, such as Christ rising from death.
But it does mean that you have faith in skepticism as the correct philosophy to live by.
I agree completely. Further, there's no scientific evidence that giant flying spaghetti monsters don't exist. Nor is there evidence that underpants gnomes don't exist (in fact, given the rate of underpants disappearances, I would argue *for* their existance!). The only difference between God and underpants gnomes or FSM is that the question of God is a central question in philosophy, including discussion of what "God" even means to different people from different real living cultures around the world. Underpants gnomes and FSM are just artificial creations that mock thousands of years of human insight, intuition, art, and culture.
Upgrade for IE7 is due in the coming months ... me and some other developers have pushed for Firefox or an SWT Java Webstart implementation of the UI, but so far our suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. The development is driven from the top-down by bureaucrats, unfortunately. But all the same, given their conflicting, contradictory requirement, we developers I think do a decent job.
$24 billion better? Umm ... yes? No?
I think that in the long run, having an electronic medical record system will save trillions of dollars for your government.
I actually work on this project, an application called Choose and Book. We've had a lot of success: little downtime, significant uptake, and physicians seem pleased with the user interface. If you want to know, it allows people at their general practitioner to book appointments with a specialist at a hospital. It actually does a lot more, but I don't want to burden you with details. It's a J2EE application.
This project is far from being a "disaster" as the British newspapers (little better than tabloids) like to tout it as. And the project has very little to do with Microsoft or Bill Gates. Most of the software my company is delivering is C/C++/Java running on IBM AIX.
If you want the opinion of a software developer on the inside of this thing, take my word for it: this article is trash. Like any huge project, it's just moving along slower than anyone first anticipated.
In the end, the British healthcare system is going to be faster and cheaper because of Connecting for Health.
for that post to make sense. I'm conceptually dislexic at times :)
If this continues, it's only a matter of time before Ubuntu is thought of as "downstream" and Debian is the "offshoot". I mean, isn't that what would happen if Ubuntu starts getting more actual work done, and developers in Debian are porting the "upstream" Ubuntu stuff to Debian more and more? And look at what MEPIS has done!
... Ubuntu Embedded might be on the way ... maybe they'll call it Bubuntu or something hot like that.
Of course, this would only be from the perspective of a few architectures. Debian is still a big deal for embedded and niche archs. But who knows
Without Debian, where would we have the amazing, huge codebase for every Ubuntu, Jibbajabba, or Lilixinidros distribution out there? Debian is the closest thing to a "standard Linux" if there ever was one. Slackware is a good candidate, too.
But NOT Fedora. That's a commie plot, I tells ye.
Netcraft confirms it, Garrett is whining.
Whenever a patent claim gets settled, then well, that same claim can't be made again by another company -- unless they take it up with the company that won the first claim.
So this is a smart defensive legal maneuver. And if it's a small company suing, it's even better, because Apple can settle for even less, and then have that company they settled with act as their shield from larger suits there on out!
I personally think China's EVD standard will become dominant -- not because consumer's will flock to it, though, but manufacturers. There is no copyright or other licensing to use it, and it's a freely published standard for high-def. No royalities, and it's codecs can even be implemented in Linux without legal issues.
HD makes no visible difference for me. I don't keep my glasses clean enough of spots for HD to matter. And I like big tapestries on my walls more than big screens. Watching DVDs on my 19" PC monitor is enough screen for me for the rest of my life.
Firefox 3 will support an offline mode for web apps.
It seems the development of this "office" suite goes hand in hand with new enhancements being made to Firefox -- especially a more robust Javascript (2.0) and the ability to have an offline mode for your apps as well as an open API to the local SQLLite storage engine.
Maybe Microsoft didn't like the "Hasta la vista, Vista" banners at the Mac show yesterday? Or especially "Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat." Perhaps they feel like they're being threatened?
So years from now, if most IT infrastructure is open source, but just not necessarily at the OS level, what's to keep companies from switching out the underlying OS once there is an adequate amount of Linux know-how out there for them to hire? I don't think Microsoft likes this very much at all, since there is no lock-in with open source. Companies with existing investment in Windows will use WAMP, but new companies will likely go with LAMP or J2EE from the start.
If anything, I would say that with WAMP, open source software is embracing, extending, and extinguishing Microsoft, not the other way around.
Just who's extending who, though? I'd say OSS is giving MS a taste of its own medicine.
Wow, if this guy is right, then I'd say to buy some SUNW stock, because this power-consumption problem is exactly what their latest line of server offerings directly address.
... yet :)
Oh, and I don't have any Sun stock myself, heheh
If we want to get users to enter in metadata, we need to do three main things:
- create editors that automate the syntactical complexities of RDF/OWL, like what blogs have done for HTML.
- make entering metadata entertaining somehow.
- make some killer apps that show to regular users the usefulness of the semantic web.
Then we'll have a semantic web. Problems like spam can just be addressed as we come to them, but Web of Trust is probably a good start.
Yeah, I'm pretty excited about 1.5. We were actually on 1.3.
How dare you!
*Adds Reservoir Penguin to hitlist*
Heheh, just kidding man.