Please - history is replete with people 'meeting' deities of all various kinds. It is not unique to Christianity and all you can say is that they are wrong and you are right... because you're are sure that you have really met your deity and they are just delusional. Hmm...
As to the millions specifically, if you take a scientific eye to the staggeringly impossible longshot this planet is, you'll see for yourself. Something like 80-90%% of the stars out there have no planets, gas giants only, or other "other life out there" denying conclusion.
Again, this is all rather based on the presumption that the universe desires our existence rather than our existence being tangential to reality. The implication does not work - if we are the only life in the universe and our existence seems to be statistically unlikely it does not mean that we have in fact been purposely placed here. It is a very weak argument based on an abuse of probability theory.
Well, that's best, isn't it? God doesn't want you to be forced to him, devoid of free will- or love wouldn't mean anything at all.
Again this is a weak argument. You claim your god doesn't want me to believe in him whilst at the same time telling me that if I don't then Bad Things Will Happen TM. It also seems rather amusing to me since the specific deity you said doesn't want to show us proof of his existence did it all the bloody time in your book! He sent his son to die as proof of his love! Even Thomas got his doubt rescinded by proof. And yet modern Christians tell me that somehow that if I come to believe in god without similar proof then this is good because I got to exercise my free-will... er, so free-will wasn't so important to your god in the past?
But in your lifetime...a lifetime where all your knowledge starts with a blank slate...you have a good chance to actually make contact. If you do, you can stay with him in a new reality. If you never do, He's not going to force you to be with Him.
*Sigh* - all the same old, same old.
I, too, was a skeptical scientific kinda guy. I worked for years trying to understand how "ghosts" could scientifically exsit: everyone dies. Everyone. So why, when a good _story_ is associated, do ghosts happen?
Um, because it's a good story and people like stories? You are making this all too easy...
I now know this to my satisfaction, but I'm not sharing it with you because it'd rip your sensabilities off.
What satisfies you is irrelevant to me. I see no reason to believe in ghosts either.
(Really, you're just not open enough.)
But you are - right? I bet you're not open to the possibility for one second that your belief that you have been in direct contact with your deity may be a cognitive failure on your part of which you have no control over? Didn't think so. You must be right - you're sure about it. That's always been reliable in the past right? Nobody in the history of mankind has ever been sure about wrong things have they? No, I guess not. As long as you're sure I guess you must be right then... screw anyone else who says they're sure you're wrong!
Ah, yes. And relying (on faith, by the way) that the scientist that deny God are right.
It's got nothing to do with your chosen deity. This is where the facts you say you accept lead us - there is no sense in which it can be said that this planet was specifically constructed for our use when our use of it has been for an absolutely minuscule period of time. And faith is belief for no particular reason - I don't need to rely on faith what can be demonstrated - you don't. As far as you're concerned your god has demonstrated itself to you. Screw free-will! Screw faith! You have been given confirmation!
"Um... because it doesn't have to be the same flood?" You are indeed correct. There could have been multiple floods. However, can you sit there and honestly not even think that it is possible that perhaps there was one giant flood?
I can honestly sit here and after having investigated the possibility of one giant flood I find such a possibility is not supported by all the available facts - and I'm not about to get on board with explanations that require the intervention of all powerful deities making it so because assuming there is a god in order to show there is a god is clearly not a sensible way to go.
Can you, or anyone else on here, at least admit that there is a chance that there was one giant flood?
Can you admit to the chance that you are being manipulated by the gods on Mt Olympus for their own pleasure and that your chosen religion is a fabrication that they created in order to jerk you around?
Why or why not?
If not, and I'm not saying that your answer will be no, but if not, that is very closed minded for someone who is into science.
It's about as simple as this: when somebody presents something new that points to a global flood I will consider it. As of yet there has been no compelling reason to believe there was a global flood and many good reasons to believe that such an event is not even possible. There is also the fact to consider that those advocating global floods do so not out of a desire to serve scientific inquiry but merely want to use scientific inquiry in order to justify conclusions they already accept as true.
In short who is the closed minded one here? The one who ceaselessly seeks to justify what they already consider true or the one who ceaselessly asks those to justify what they conclude is true?
This saying can be said for a LOT of people, and not just Christians.
I never said it isn't - that is why I am going to continually repeat the rather simple fact that the truth owes us no comfort. We do not have to like what is true for it to be true. You are clearly in a set of people who hold things to be true because they like these things to be true.
People will sit there and criticize all Christians because of something like this museum, or criticize all Christians simple because we are Christian.
Sure they will but that is not my problem if you cannot detach your beliefs from your identity. You don't say you believe in Christianity - you say you are a Christian. And then it all gets personal when someone criticises the dogma.
Hell some 'Christians' will even criticize other Christians.
That's been a favourite pass-time for Christians since Jesus (allegedly) got nailed to a cross.
I hope and pray that more people will start to share them.
Why? Tacitly you imply the inferiority of all other beliefs.
Thats what gets me about mankind, is that by nature, mankind is so cruel towards each other. Why does it have to be that way?
You won't like the answer but simply put: cruelty works.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that social co-operation is not the only way to succeed in life. Parasitic tactics are effective - did you know that the vast majority of species are parasites?
God based explanations fail to capture this nature of conflict - life is most assuredly a battle because once you realise that those lifeforms that choose to fight others are going to win those that choose not to that the ones that fight are the only ones that are going to be left. If you are dead you get no say in future.
Why can't we just accept each other for who we all are and what we believe?
Because, like I said above, if people will insist on making their identity tied to what they believe they are going to be loathe to deal with those who believe differently and hence threaten their own identity.
Yeah, see? There's that, too: if a person has decided as a core of their being *not* to believe, he can come up with millions of reasons not to.
What are your millions of reasons for rejecting the insanely large body of superstitious beliefs?
My guess is that there are no reasons - you only believe in your particular ancient set of stories because you have been told that they are really true and the others really aren't. I didn't need to make any hard decision not to believe; all I had to do is observe the rather obvious fact that humans are very good at making shit up that just isn't true. Not believing is very easy when the reasons people give you to believe are so very weak.
You give me better reasons than the ones I've seen currently - and no, tacit threats about the fate of an eternal essence I have no reason to believe exists is not going to cut it.
Yeah, the Earth was designed differently in previous incarnations- like the dinosaurs. And they were wiped out, multiple times. But for the last 100,000 years or so, our time, it's built for us. We have domain, sure- but it also means we need to take care of it, like the animals.
Your choice of language shows you do not really comprehend the idea.
The world was not built for us. We evolved to use the world as is - no warranties, no lifetime guarantees. Our existence on the Earth today is entirely irrelevant to the universe as a whole.
The rain does not stop when we go outside - we use umbrellas. The hole was not designed for the puddle - the water fits the hole. And so on. You are all back-to-front here.
I'm just not going to waste my time trying to give you the serenity I've found.
Serenity is irrelevant to truth.
You have serenity? Good for you. Doesn't mean your god exists. It's that simple really.
You didn't visit the site before replying; that's a good sign you've already decided to be lost.
More emotional blackmail. Comprehend this: I will not be joining your fold because you decide to try and manipulate my emotions into me reasoning that Bad Things Will Happen TM if I don't. Either you put up or shut up - and I'm afraid your site is about as deeply impressive as all the other one's I have seen that can make no more substantial argument for their deity being a real entity other than they would really rather like it if it was. But sure if you think there's a particular killer argument there I should see that may even be vaguely original point me to it.
It is interesting to me that those who protest the loudest about their opponents being closed minded seem to be the most closed minded themselves. After all, you have serenity - pretty powerful emotion. Now what's a little truth compared to feeling good eh? Better close that mind off to ideas that might interfere with that.
I've seen crap from "militant evolutionists" on the evowiki. They tried to downplay the suddeness of the cambrian explosion (among other problems) and had a fit when I tried to correct them or suggest milder wording to some of the claims. I didn't imagine it. This is the face of evo that the public sees.
I've never been to evowiki. Ever.
The "good" evolutionists probably keep quiet. It is those hellbent and debunking and bashing creationists who seem to exaggerate the evidence the most.
So again I ask: who is going to correct these people? What house is there to sort out? It doesn't really matter to me if there's a bunch of people on some random wiki engaging in all too human behaviour. Science transcends this ego because either you can or you cannot demonstrate your claim. I don't know why you think this is particularly noteworthy here except because there's a large body of people who deny evolution for similarly illogical reasons.
Creationists being sloppy is not license for Evo proponents to also be sloppy.
Way to miss the point but then why should I be surprised? Tu quoque is just one of the long list of logical fallacies people like to trot out to avoid the inconvenient facts of the matter: ancient superstitions not supported by science! Film at Eleven! People need to stop being surprised that this is the case and either grow out of the need for superstition or stop pretending they give a crap about science.
Fix thy own house first.
There's nothing to fix. That's the whole point. It's you who needs to get on board with the reality of the situation here - that reality being that your whole, "Evo proponents need to stop being sloppy," is completely and utterly destroyed by those who simply do science and don't give a [arbitrary phonetic sequence you will decide you need adjust due to arbitrary social conditioning] as to what you do or don't think is wrong with what any particular advocate of it is saying.
It sure as fuck ain't the Creationists who like to trot out long debunked ideas as the current understanding of evolution and then beat that strawman - like the Piltdown Man incident, long shown to be a fabrication by SCIENTISTS, continually trotted out by the dishonest Creationists.
It is unfortunate that you are swallowing this propaganda and cannot recognise that this tactic is used to continually used to shift away the focus from the rather inconvenient fact that the Creationists have fuck all to show for themselves.
Just don't be so quick to judge because it has a 'religious' source.
It doesn't work that way - one MUST judge that any source that is unable to show the process by which it gets to its claims as producing fundamentally unreliable ones. Even those who abide by these religious claims understand this simple idea which is why they are so desperate to make it legitimate by tacking 'science' onto everything they do - and that's because science has proven itself as a methodology by which reliable claims can be shown.
It is, in fact, guaranteed to be wrong most of the time. The difference is that it is less wrong than the alternatives.
For example: Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but believing that heavier objects fall faster is more wrong.
The difference between science and dogma is that science gets to embrace the fact that it is going to be wrong and correct itself. Dogma has to deny its wrong about anything ever for eternity.
How do you explain there being no great flood when nearly every ancient civilization, if not all of them, has a great flood recorded?
Um... because it doesn't have to be the same flood?
Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees.
But, my opinion is that IF I am wrong for being a Christian, then I'll be rotting right next to y'all. However, if Christians are right, then it will be a whole different picture painted when we all die.
Promise rewards for compliance. Threaten punishment for disobedience. As old as the hills and changes not one singular thing about reality whatsoever - but a powerful way of getting people to hold onto beliefs associated with it.
The truth really is quite irrelevant to you but you do not think this is so.
One one side we have the "scientists" who claim all the trillions of happy circumstances just *happened* to organized into the perfectly-balanced biosphere complete with plants, animals, and energy sources.
No, that's the lie the 'good' Christians like to spread about what science says.
And of course it starts with the anthropocentric assumption that somehow all this 'perfectly-balanced biosphere' is put here for us - not that we are what we are in order to take advantage of the environment we happen to live in.
We make ourselves fit the environment - the environment does not make itself fit us. How you can on the one hand accept an ancient Earth of changing circumstances and on the other hand argue it's all perfectly balanced for us - a creature that has been around for a tiny proportion of its existence - is a mangled conclusion for sure.
Why is it so hard to believe that apes once played a part in the development of man?
Because once you have come to the conclusion that knowledge can fall out of the sky fully formed anything goes.
Why is it so hard for scientist to look at the "big bang" and reason that everything that _starts_ has a reason?
Umm... it isn't? It's just not a reason you like - namely it does not necessarily include deities with omni-max properties.
But while the Bible doesn't give a play-by-play on each of the 16+M animal's development, it *does* summarize the development of plants, and that matches the fossil record.
Who gives a crap? When one is looking hard enough to find truth in one's given ancient text one can find it.
The process of science is more important than the conclusions derived from it. Appealing to mysterious oracles with poor hit rates is something we really should think about abandoning being as unreliable as it is.
When we act in ways that aren't part of the intended "scope" of this human animal, misery is the result. Cocaine, hurtful, betraying sex outide of marriage, ignoring the plight of widows, taking the virginity of young people.
You really need to read your Bible more carefully - I would draw your attention perhaps to the number of - *ahem* - "incidents" where you chosen deity sanctioned the wholesale 'taking' of the virginity of conquered nations - and perhaps consider reading other books from time to time and actually observing human nature as it occurs rather than making it fit your prior assumptions that the Bible is correct because that is what you have been raised to believe. Or hell, just point me to the parts of the Bible that deal with not snorting white powder.
Hey, it's a nice thing to believe that somehow there's a good reason why things happen and it's not just the result of a universe for which our existence is entirely irrelevant but since when did the truth owe us any favours?
So why do people deny evolution you ask? Because it attacks the nice warm and fuzzy feelings people get from feeling the universe cares about them. It's why people denied heliocentric solar systems, the true scope of the size of the universe and origins of man that preclude us as an inevitable creation.
I've always felt this too - really because of the Javascript based architecture that forms the browser front end really instead of having a load of default scripts they should be moved into the Extensions API. For example Firefox 2.0 added dictionary capabilities that existed previously in extesions - what I couldn't figure out is why they decided that this should not be a pluggable component rather than integrating it into the core. It seems rather silly to me - reduce coupling, don't increase it. It also means that the updating cycle can be more efficiently streamlined for the various browser components.
Microsoft made some epically bad architectural decisions when they designed Windows that will always mean windows is realtively wide-open compared to Linux.
Indeed - you have to run in an administrator account for the most part otherwise a lot of software breaks. Linux viruses exist aplenty: they just have a much harder time actually doing any damage on a *nix system because the security model is actually being used. All the potential security in the world doesn't make a difference if in the end you are forced to run in the least secure mode in order to do anything.
Examples of two fatally terrible decisions are the existence of the registry, and that installing apps under windows usually puts DLLs in the windows directory, thus extending/modifying the operating system itself.
DLLs - nice idea in theory but horribly, horribly broken. Most apps seem to just have local copies of DLLs they use making the whole idea of shared libraries pointless on Windows for the most part.
'Tis the nature of the game. If you can win by playing it that way then it really doesn't matter to the player. Take comfort in the fact that it is not a strategy conducive to long term success; lament that short term success is always attractive enough so that tis doesn't matter.
Experiments with the rear ends of horses failed, women were deemed too silly for space.
The answer is to find, "Sleeping beauty," the stupidest man in America to be trained to display his posterior to a small hole when the crew require sexual relief
The GPL is great for some things, but if you are giving your code to paying customers, let them do what they want with it.
Hmm... do you take the same stance with the binaries?
I don't know what magic the source code has that means that if you are selling source rather than a binary that you would have to let your customers do whatever they like with it. Would you please explain?
This "defend our freedom" sounds like a bunch of bullshit. Viewing sourcode isn't a freedom.
Ugh. It's not about viewing the source code, it's about controlling what you can do with it. The GPL defends the freedom of the source code by requiring that derivatives are also free in the same manner. It's that simple.
Actually if there's anything to fear it's that mature product genres inevitably have lower value over time.
That is to say that now that OS technology is mature it just doesn't increase in value as much any more. So MS has a problem shifting its new OSes because the old OSes have enough value as they are. Same with Office products. Unfortunately for MS its business model requires that the value of its products does not lower over time - hence they are inevitably required to find ways of artificially increasing the value of their products by forcing upgrades, removing support and so forth.
Indeed, one has got to presume that in such an eventuality the lack of experience in the UNIX space would place MS at a disadvantage. (Although I have got to presume also that MS are not stupid enough not to have plenty of engineers who do not know UNIX so that they can 1) understand the enemy 2) help to get customers to migrate from UNIX).
Also people seem to underestimate the problems of corporate inertia, as if MS could just one day decide to change everything and it would happen: just like that. It doesn't work like that.
It doesn't work like that - if MS is forced to use a UNIX based OS derivative in order to survive they may not go out of business but it is endgame as far as dominance is concerned. That is a lose situation for MS, not a win.
Most keyboards are QWERTY, this is certainly the case for a good portion of the English speaking world. Of course not all the world speaks English. Either way it is only really a 'necessity' that all keyboards have the same layout if one intends for the users to be interchangeable between keyboards. If a user can happily switch keyboard layouts (this certainly being the case as keyboard mapping is very 'cheap' to change) or the user is only going to use one keyboard then it becomes moot.
The point here is that whilst you may say some form of English will replace all others the history of the development of language shows otherwise. The first thing to realise about human language is that because it is a set reciprocally defined conventions that evolve with usage and individual understanding there is no strongly defined standard. There have certainly been attempts to do so but such attempts to achieve this with human language have failed because the users of language seem so very determined to recombine, reuse, break and invent new grammatical constructs, words and concepts in an ad hoc manner that a formally parametrised language cannot cope with. As such we get pedants bemoaning nounification of verbs, verbification of nouns, split infinitives (despite being an artificial grammatical limitation of Latin that cannot be said to strictly apply to English), txt spk and so on. The simple fact is that, in a way, all human language is pidgin and as such the only quality a language really needs to be adopted is that it facilitates the exchange of information between its users within a certain degree of accuracy.
As such the reason why English has been successful is not because it is a standardising language, on the contrary, it is successful because it is promiscuous and tends to absorbs useful constructs and ideas that its users like with great aplomb. If we were still living in a world where communication between users of the various dialects of English was limited the end result would be a radiation of new language forms branching from English. However due to the high volume of cross-conceptualisation between various groups of English users this effect is being reduced and instead the lexicon of the language seems likely to continue to grow and diversify.
Now, what has this got to do with Linux? Well in the computing world we have not yet begun to deal with language systems that work like natural languages. Attempts to create, say, a formalised computer conceptualisation of English are frustrated by the nature of the way humans tend to find new and novel ways to morph the language. Simply put any static system is doomed to fail in an attempt to model English - as AI researchers have certainly been finding out.
Of course we don't need a communication protocol that is dynamic like natural languages in order for computer subsystems to communicate with each other, in fact, so far, we have only been able to really deal with ones that are clearly defined and have static instances.
So finally we get to my major point: when you have protocols, libraries, interfaces and so on that are all clearly defined and parametrised not only do we get the benefit of the fact that within these protocols we can be clear about meaning but intra-protocol communication is also vastly simplified. Translating English to French gives us the dual headaches of dealing with two dynamic languages with different conceptualisations of communication. Writing a windowing system that can understand how to deal with widgets from GTK, Swing, Aqua, Windows, etc... is a problem of a significantly reduced order of complexity.
So whilst it is certainly more straightforward to simply speak English in the computing world you at least have the chance of being able to translate to French if necessary and in the Linux world you can get a precise idea of what English and French formally say.
As such convergence really is not as important as intra-protocol communication. Therefore I think it would be most useful for developers to bear in mind how their systems will play with OTHER systems that are not their own.
But just as people like to construct their own family trees, rather than those of complete strangers, people like to see the history by which they came about, rather than a bunch of branches that went elsewhere or didn't go anwhere at all.
I guess you do not see the irony in arguing for the validity of the straight line progression using a family tree as an analogy eh?
You seem to be presuming that people are incredibly stupid.
You've got a reason for me to presume otherwise?
Given that it is common knowledge that there are things like bacteria, mice, earthworms and mosquitoes in existence, it should be fairly clear to anyone that nobody is proposing a theory in which bigger brains are an inevitable outcome.
And yet people ask questions like, "why are monkeys still around if we evolved from them?"
Simple fact: people misunderstand evolution constantly.
And of course there is a sense in which brain size increase is inevitable. After all, any intelligent organism, anywhere in the universe, that is a product of evolution by natural selection, investigating its own history, is going to see an average upward trend, even if at some points in their ancestry brain sizes decreased.
You do realise, of course, that there are creatures in existence that have far larger brains than us? Why, even some of the other homonids had bigger brains than homo sapiens.
If you set out with a predetermined conclusion you can find ways to make the data fit. Evolution cares not one whit about making creatures with bigger brains, bigger brains do not necessarially give a survival benefit, bigger brains do not necessarially donate significant intelligence.
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Please - history is replete with people 'meeting' deities of all various kinds. It is not unique to Christianity and all you can say is that they are wrong and you are right... because you're are sure that you have really met your deity and they are just delusional. Hmm...
Again, this is all rather based on the presumption that the universe desires our existence rather than our existence being tangential to reality. The implication does not work - if we are the only life in the universe and our existence seems to be statistically unlikely it does not mean that we have in fact been purposely placed here. It is a very weak argument based on an abuse of probability theory.
Again this is a weak argument. You claim your god doesn't want me to believe in him whilst at the same time telling me that if I don't then Bad Things Will Happen TM. It also seems rather amusing to me since the specific deity you said doesn't want to show us proof of his existence did it all the bloody time in your book! He sent his son to die as proof of his love! Even Thomas got his doubt rescinded by proof. And yet modern Christians tell me that somehow that if I come to believe in god without similar proof then this is good because I got to exercise my free-will... er, so free-will wasn't so important to your god in the past?
*Sigh* - all the same old, same old.
Um, because it's a good story and people like stories? You are making this all too easy...
What satisfies you is irrelevant to me. I see no reason to believe in ghosts either.
But you are - right? I bet you're not open to the possibility for one second that your belief that you have been in direct contact with your deity may be a cognitive failure on your part of which you have no control over? Didn't think so. You must be right - you're sure about it. That's always been reliable in the past right? Nobody in the history of mankind has ever been sure about wrong things have they? No, I guess not. As long as you're sure I guess you must be right then... screw anyone else who says they're sure you're wrong!
It's got nothing to do with your chosen deity. This is where the facts you say you accept lead us - there is no sense in which it can be said that this planet was specifically constructed for our use when our use of it has been for an absolutely minuscule period of time. And faith is belief for no particular reason - I don't need to rely on faith what can be demonstrated - you don't. As far as you're concerned your god has demonstrated itself to you. Screw free-will! Screw faith! You have been given confirmation!
Why or why not? It's about as simple as this: when somebody presents something new that points to a global flood I will consider it. As of yet there has been no compelling reason to believe there was a global flood and many good reasons to believe that such an event is not even possible. There is also the fact to consider that those advocating global floods do so not out of a desire to serve scientific inquiry but merely want to use scientific inquiry in order to justify conclusions they already accept as true.
In short who is the closed minded one here? The one who ceaselessly seeks to justify what they already consider true or the one who ceaselessly asks those to justify what they conclude is true? I never said it isn't - that is why I am going to continually repeat the rather simple fact that the truth owes us no comfort. We do not have to like what is true for it to be true. You are clearly in a set of people who hold things to be true because they like these things to be true. Sure they will but that is not my problem if you cannot detach your beliefs from your identity. You don't say you believe in Christianity - you say you are a Christian. And then it all gets personal when someone criticises the dogma. That's been a favourite pass-time for Christians since Jesus (allegedly) got nailed to a cross. Why? Tacitly you imply the inferiority of all other beliefs. You won't like the answer but simply put: cruelty works.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that social co-operation is not the only way to succeed in life. Parasitic tactics are effective - did you know that the vast majority of species are parasites?
God based explanations fail to capture this nature of conflict - life is most assuredly a battle because once you realise that those lifeforms that choose to fight others are going to win those that choose not to that the ones that fight are the only ones that are going to be left. If you are dead you get no say in future. Because, like I said above, if people will insist on making their identity tied to what they believe they are going to be loathe to deal with those who believe differently and hence threaten their own identity.
My guess is that there are no reasons - you only believe in your particular ancient set of stories because you have been told that they are really true and the others really aren't. I didn't need to make any hard decision not to believe; all I had to do is observe the rather obvious fact that humans are very good at making shit up that just isn't true. Not believing is very easy when the reasons people give you to believe are so very weak.
You give me better reasons than the ones I've seen currently - and no, tacit threats about the fate of an eternal essence I have no reason to believe exists is not going to cut it. Your choice of language shows you do not really comprehend the idea.
The world was not built for us. We evolved to use the world as is - no warranties, no lifetime guarantees. Our existence on the Earth today is entirely irrelevant to the universe as a whole.
The rain does not stop when we go outside - we use umbrellas. The hole was not designed for the puddle - the water fits the hole. And so on. You are all back-to-front here. Serenity is irrelevant to truth.
You have serenity? Good for you. Doesn't mean your god exists. It's that simple really. More emotional blackmail. Comprehend this: I will not be joining your fold because you decide to try and manipulate my emotions into me reasoning that Bad Things Will Happen TM if I don't. Either you put up or shut up - and I'm afraid your site is about as deeply impressive as all the other one's I have seen that can make no more substantial argument for their deity being a real entity other than they would really rather like it if it was. But sure if you think there's a particular killer argument there I should see that may even be vaguely original point me to it.
It is interesting to me that those who protest the loudest about their opponents being closed minded seem to be the most closed minded themselves. After all, you have serenity - pretty powerful emotion. Now what's a little truth compared to feeling good eh? Better close that mind off to ideas that might interfere with that.
Who corrects the mistakes of science?
It sure as fuck ain't the Creationists who like to trot out long debunked ideas as the current understanding of evolution and then beat that strawman - like the Piltdown Man incident, long shown to be a fabrication by SCIENTISTS, continually trotted out by the dishonest Creationists.
It is unfortunate that you are swallowing this propaganda and cannot recognise that this tactic is used to continually used to shift away the focus from the rather inconvenient fact that the Creationists have fuck all to show for themselves.
Process. Process. Process.
For example: Newtonian mechanics is wrong, but believing that heavier objects fall faster is more wrong.
The difference between science and dogma is that science gets to embrace the fact that it is going to be wrong and correct itself. Dogma has to deny its wrong about anything ever for eternity. Um... because it doesn't have to be the same flood?
Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees. Promise rewards for compliance. Threaten punishment for disobedience. As old as the hills and changes not one singular thing about reality whatsoever - but a powerful way of getting people to hold onto beliefs associated with it.
The truth really is quite irrelevant to you but you do not think this is so.
I've always felt this too - really because of the Javascript based architecture that forms the browser front end really instead of having a load of default scripts they should be moved into the Extensions API. For example Firefox 2.0 added dictionary capabilities that existed previously in extesions - what I couldn't figure out is why they decided that this should not be a pluggable component rather than integrating it into the core. It seems rather silly to me - reduce coupling, don't increase it. It also means that the updating cycle can be more efficiently streamlined for the various browser components.
'Tis the nature of the game. If you can win by playing it that way then it really doesn't matter to the player. Take comfort in the fact that it is not a strategy conducive to long term success; lament that short term success is always attractive enough so that tis doesn't matter.
Knows NASA has already been looking into this.
Experiments with the rear ends of horses failed, women were deemed too silly for space.
The answer is to find, "Sleeping beauty," the stupidest man in America to be trained to display his posterior to a small hole when the crew require sexual relief
Done for hilarity.
Your retrospective goggles seem to be compressing time. I suggest you try fixing them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Theroux's_Weird _Weekends
The man's style is great - just let them say all kinds of crazy, no need to be aggressive back, they'll do all the work.
I don't know what magic the source code has that means that if you are selling source rather than a binary that you would have to let your customers do whatever they like with it. Would you please explain? Ugh. It's not about viewing the source code, it's about controlling what you can do with it. The GPL defends the freedom of the source code by requiring that derivatives are also free in the same manner. It's that simple.
Yes that was fairly borked.
Actually if there's anything to fear it's that mature product genres inevitably have lower value over time.
That is to say that now that OS technology is mature it just doesn't increase in value as much any more. So MS has a problem shifting its new OSes because the old OSes have enough value as they are. Same with Office products. Unfortunately for MS its business model requires that the value of its products does not lower over time - hence they are inevitably required to find ways of artificially increasing the value of their products by forcing upgrades, removing support and so forth.
Indeed, one has got to presume that in such an eventuality the lack of experience in the UNIX space would place MS at a disadvantage. (Although I have got to presume also that MS are not stupid enough not to have plenty of engineers who do not know UNIX so that they can 1) understand the enemy 2) help to get customers to migrate from UNIX).
Also people seem to underestimate the problems of corporate inertia, as if MS could just one day decide to change everything and it would happen: just like that. It doesn't work like that.
It doesn't work like that - if MS is forced to use a UNIX based OS derivative in order to survive they may not go out of business but it is endgame as far as dominance is concerned. That is a lose situation for MS, not a win.
There are some practical differences though.
Most keyboards are QWERTY, this is certainly the case for a good portion of the English speaking world. Of course not all the world speaks English. Either way it is only really a 'necessity' that all keyboards have the same layout if one intends for the users to be interchangeable between keyboards. If a user can happily switch keyboard layouts (this certainly being the case as keyboard mapping is very 'cheap' to change) or the user is only going to use one keyboard then it becomes moot.
The point here is that whilst you may say some form of English will replace all others the history of the development of language shows otherwise. The first thing to realise about human language is that because it is a set reciprocally defined conventions that evolve with usage and individual understanding there is no strongly defined standard. There have certainly been attempts to do so but such attempts to achieve this with human language have failed because the users of language seem so very determined to recombine, reuse, break and invent new grammatical constructs, words and concepts in an ad hoc manner that a formally parametrised language cannot cope with. As such we get pedants bemoaning nounification of verbs, verbification of nouns, split infinitives (despite being an artificial grammatical limitation of Latin that cannot be said to strictly apply to English), txt spk and so on. The simple fact is that, in a way, all human language is pidgin and as such the only quality a language really needs to be adopted is that it facilitates the exchange of information between its users within a certain degree of accuracy.
As such the reason why English has been successful is not because it is a standardising language, on the contrary, it is successful because it is promiscuous and tends to absorbs useful constructs and ideas that its users like with great aplomb. If we were still living in a world where communication between users of the various dialects of English was limited the end result would be a radiation of new language forms branching from English. However due to the high volume of cross-conceptualisation between various groups of English users this effect is being reduced and instead the lexicon of the language seems likely to continue to grow and diversify.
Now, what has this got to do with Linux? Well in the computing world we have not yet begun to deal with language systems that work like natural languages. Attempts to create, say, a formalised computer conceptualisation of English are frustrated by the nature of the way humans tend to find new and novel ways to morph the language. Simply put any static system is doomed to fail in an attempt to model English - as AI researchers have certainly been finding out.
Of course we don't need a communication protocol that is dynamic like natural languages in order for computer subsystems to communicate with each other, in fact, so far, we have only been able to really deal with ones that are clearly defined and have static instances.
So finally we get to my major point: when you have protocols, libraries, interfaces and so on that are all clearly defined and parametrised not only do we get the benefit of the fact that within these protocols we can be clear about meaning but intra-protocol communication is also vastly simplified. Translating English to French gives us the dual headaches of dealing with two dynamic languages with different conceptualisations of communication. Writing a windowing system that can understand how to deal with widgets from GTK, Swing, Aqua, Windows, etc... is a problem of a significantly reduced order of complexity.
So whilst it is certainly more straightforward to simply speak English in the computing world you at least have the chance of being able to translate to French if necessary and in the Linux world you can get a precise idea of what English and French formally say.
As such convergence really is not as important as intra-protocol communication. Therefore I think it would be most useful for developers to bear in mind how their systems will play with OTHER systems that are not their own.
Simple fact: people misunderstand evolution constantly. You do realise, of course, that there are creatures in existence that have far larger brains than us? Why, even some of the other homonids had bigger brains than homo sapiens.
If you set out with a predetermined conclusion you can find ways to make the data fit. Evolution cares not one whit about making creatures with bigger brains, bigger brains do not necessarially give a survival benefit, bigger brains do not necessarially donate significant intelligence.