Unfortunately, reality is hostile and unpredictable. Science attempts to make things more predictable and less hostile, but it's still as cold and unforgiving as it was since the dawn of time.
The difference between science and religion in this aspect is that science actually makes things actually better (look at how comfortable we are today), while religion makes people only feel better. It is a big reason why I don't have any religious convictions and I don't incorporate any feel-good superstition into my reasoning process.
The universe is a cold place. That's just how things are. If there's anything I believe in, I believe it's up to us, fellow human beings, to make it a little less so for each other.
I call bullshit. You are no better than the assholes who come up to me and tell me I'm going to hell and will suffer eternal damnation because I don't believe in their particular diety. Besides it being a holier-than-thou position, the idea of judging a person without actually knowing the person itself is an irrational act, which makes you no better than the people you decry as unable to make "objective assertions about reality without adequate justification."
While I agree that I tend to regard atheists as more rational than theists (or deists), that's a stereotype, and I recognize it as such. I judge individuals on their own basis, not on a stereotype. There are perfectly rational people who are, other than when it comes to defending their personal beliefs, perfectly capable of making rational decisions. These are people who, even when somebody is crying that their religion is being attacked, will stop to actually think about whether such an assertion is true in the first place before responding. That's just anecdotal evidence.
Fact of the matter is, people's ideologies, whether they be religious, social, or political are hardly your business, unless they make it your business. What people think and how people feel typically won't affect you in any way, and until it does affect you, you are in no position to complain. If you take a proactive stance on the issue, then you are no better than them, because to them, you're also a potentially corrupting influence and the proactive stance is what they are taking.
The world would be a better place if people stopped interfering in other people's business. Problems arise when one person thinks their ideology is better than someone else's. And sometimes, it might be. But just because it is better is no excuse for insisting however strongly that other people follow the same ideology. And if somebody tries to stuff anything down my throat, you better believe I'm going to react.
The key is that you're wiping them with all 0's and all 1's repeatedly. If you wipe a drive with random data followed by patterned data followed by random data, you're pretty safe. And if you hold a magnet to the exposed platters themselves, you're almost guaranteed to get a decent wipe, though you'll also get an unusable drive afterwards. I know the military mandates a wipe of every classified drive with a high-powered magnet, but that might be with the platters still inside the casing.
It's more like, "I can't believe you said that. If you don't retract it immediately, don't bother showing up tomorrow." In this case, they probably threatened not to renew the contract fir another season of Mythbusters, or outright cancel the contract here and now and pay whatever for violating it. I'm sure a lot of networks would love to pick Mythbusters up.
That having been said, considering all this supposedly took place in a room full of hostile lawyers, he might have been forced to retract the statement or face slander charges, whether his statements were truth or not.
The scary thing will be when the antarctic melts. That's many cubic miles of ice above land. If that starts going, let's just say that CO2 emissions won't be a problem anymore.
It isn't the only ice shelf that's broken off in the past few years. I'm simplifying a lot, but this warmign trend isn't just localized to the arctic circle.
This is true that memory is meant to be used. But maybe you want to run some other things in the background? Or maybe you want to run the browser in the background, and some other things in the foreground? Or even within the same browser, if your tabs take up an average of 30MB each, and you have 20 tabs open and want to open up 10 more.
See, programs who hog memory won't give it back just because you started up a second program that's by nature more demanding. Programs that hog memory are going to keep hogging it until you stop doing whatever you're doing, or outright close the program if there's a memory leak. Memory efficiency is important in a multi-tasking environment. That is where we're headed, right?
SMS is no more private than webmail, and in some cases, even less so. There are anonymous webmail providers out there. There is no equivalent for SMS.
Besides, China doesn't have to monitor and censor every message, only the ones from the outspoken people. China's "free speech" is only a little worse than in the US; you can say all you want about the government, but just not too loudly. The only difference is that you can't get jailed for that infraction alone in the US, though you can get harassed and even arrested.
More than likely, it's a matter of not being economical, or the inability to draw a contract.
The web back then was effectively just a bunch of pages linked together. The browser was nothing more than a document viewer. You save memory and other resources by not duplicating what you don't need to use by the other tabs.
What if your only use for the browser now is for viewing documents and document-like HTML? What if you weren't interested in running applications with your browser? Even if certain pages had application-type processing, they'd be the exception and not the norm. And, it's easy to disable the complicated scripts you don't want running with extensions like NoScript.
Ok, so today, we have embedded multimedia that gets offloaded to another process. The browser just has to make sure that external process doesn't disappear, which may be a bit problematic. But not every page has embedded multimedia. You don't see flash movies on Wikipedia. So perhaps there should be improvements to this end, instead of completely doing away with tabs.
The paradigm might no longer fit for you, but I can assure you tabbed browsing still fits for the majority of the people online, whether they might generally prefer to use it or not.
Disclaimer: I like tabs. I also like frames, which I think isn't done correctly 90% of the time. I think it's awesome to have a browser window in the middle, one frame on the side with RSS feeds, one frame on the other side with Meebo, one on the top with search/commonly used links, etc., one on the bottom with reference material, and have the middle one for browsing. But that's just me.
How could this be possible? when we (humanity) realize that we are all the same deep down and we all want peace and prosperity, regardless or politics and religious beliefs.
Yup.
Nope. Every individual is capable of both great good and great evil, sometimes at the same time. The kindest person you know could at the same time also be the most sadistic, if given the opportunity. And that's the magic word. It's all about opportunity. Society itself is an attempt to protect everyone from the latter group by denying everyone such opportunities. Most modern societies apply this equally. And if you look at history, most historical societies do not.
The idea that people fall in either the "good" or "bad" camp is naieve. The assumption that everyone at heard falls in the "good" camp is foolish.
European scientific tradition began with the ancient Greeks and then the Romans, long, long before Christianity. When Christianity took over, scientific progress halted, almost completely. So did the arts, culture, and accurate record keeping, to name a few other things that stopped progressing. They don't call it the dark ages because of a super-volcanic eruption. It wasn't until the renaissance, when religion began playing a lesser and lesser role in the lives of people, that science and consequently technology really began to progress. And the less religion interfered in Europe, the more progress was made. You'll find most great people who advanced the arts and sciences in and after the renaissance about as "religious" as Einstein. Einstein is a self-described agnostic, and if you bother to read his wikipedia page, he doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian "God". There are a relatively small number of scientists today who belong to the "I want to discover the facets of the thing God has created for us" camp, and fewer still believe in the same Judeo-Christian god of the Judeo-Christian theists. At the end of the day, blind faith just doesn't work for the educated.
So no, your utilitarian argument for the teaching of Christianity in the science classroom, as ridiculous as it is in the first place, has no wings. And no amount of prayer or faith is going to make it fly.
That's a problem. Education is the antithesis to blind faith. If these believers even bothered read the thousand-year-old book they profess to believe in in its entirety, they might not be such ready followers of their "church" anymore. The only way such inconsistent teachings could have ever propagated so widely in the past was due to the poor literacy rate. In places that traditionally have had a high literacy rate, or a cultural emphasis on literacy, religion is a very personal thing and plays a very minor role in the daily interactions between people.
To be fair, Hanlon applies. It may be that she's never been presented with any arguments other than the ones spoon-fed her by her constituents and her party. Things change when you enter the national and international stage. She may become a great VP and potentially president for all we know.
But to vote for her is a risk, considering her current stance on these matters, and the fact that she has no exposure to national and international politics. No matter how much I might like her because she's a woman, it's not a risk I'm prepard to take, considering the seriousness of the consequences. I figure, my time in this world isn't really long (I don't expect to live for more than a few short decades more), I might as well do the best I can to help ensure a future for my children and my children's children. And if that means voting against the ideal of a woman president, then that's what I'm going to do.
I'm not saying I'm a supporter of McCain or Palin, but if Palin's nomination is the only reason I'd vote for them, that's what I'd be thinking right now.
It's typical of Americans to not be able to see past their own noses. I mean, the fact that people from the US call themselves American and differenciate it from Canadian, Mexican, Costa Rican, Brazilian, Peruvian, etc. says volumes.
The usual disclaimer that stereotypes is not reflective of every individual in a group applies, but leave out the major cities, and surveys show most people haven't left the country even once, even to Mexico or Canada. It's hard to have a broad view of the world without a broad horizon.
The mentality of police in such cases has always been to shoot first, ask questions later. In this case, they arrest first, then get the courts to either throw out the case or sue the municipality. Since they're not directly punished, they don't really care. And, even if the guy in charge is punished, Rove and friends will have a "position" ready in some dummy company and nice fat check in the guy's mailbox every month. It's the same with the shooting, just that the guys who pull the trigger tend to be able to get off scott free, and if not, they'll go into the bodyguarding or mercenary business afterwards anyway.
It's a sad day when Soviet Russia has better protections against civil rights than the USA.
You'd expect a story like this to come out of China. Then again, cops in the US are pretty stupid... If only the official law enforcement departments could start attracting people with a little more intelligence and leave the dredges of society currently in law enforcement to stick with being rentals.
This is a poor analogy. I advice you read up on diseases caused by salmonella before bringing something as completely unrelated as this.
First off, salmonella is only deadly to people with weak or weakened immune systems, effectively, infants, the elderly, and people with HIV or take immunosuppressents. Hogging up the bathroom and leaving a nasty stink is otherwise the worst symptom salmonella will cause in the average, healthy individual.
Second, salmonella dies when you cook the meat it's in. Since you might not have ever had to do any cooking, let me inform you that chicken and pork should both be thoroughly cooked before consumption. And it is generally discouraged to eat raw eggs. Steak is considered safe because it goes through pasteurization.
Third, most healthy people need to consume a certain amount of salmonella bacteria to even feel the symptoms. That's why it's still safe for children to eat raw cake batter. And it's also why it's ok for most adults to consume chicken and pork that's not completely cooked on the inside. Again, you might not know this, but how much of the bacteria you can consume before you feel the effects is tied to the amount of exercise an adult gets in a day.
Finally, salmonella has to be injested. Which means as long as you wash your hands before eating (you do do that, don't you?), there's very little chance of you getting sick from you having touched unclean things. And despite what television ads say, salmonella can't just live off dry, clean surfaces. It needs organic matter to continue to survive, or it will die within an hour or so.
Yes, GPU's failing won't kill anyone while salmonella has had fatalities (and it varies by strain). But please stop spreading FUD about things you know little to nothing about.
Besides, it is much easier to say "I didn't vote because there was no candidate that was running on [insert favorite cause here]"
You have no idea how many people I've spoken to have given this excuse. Usually, the conversation proceeds as thus:
Me: If you don't want to vote for one of the two major candidates, vote third party.
Other: But that's like throwing away my vote.
Me: No it's not; not voting at all is throwing away your vote. Voting for a third party is making other people know the kind of candidate you want to represent you. At the very least, the next guy who runs will know why you voted the third party for and try to get your vote.
And that pretty much ends the conversation.
We live in a democracy. We the people have ultimate say over the government. Part of our power as citizens of this democracy is to vote for our leaders. It is our responsibility to do so. If we fail to participate in the system, then it is our fault that the system itself fails us.
When was the last time you went to see a movie? Ate at a restaurant? Walked the dog?
In the not-so-distant past, these were pastimes of the wealthy, luxuries that most normal people couldn't afford. I'm not talking about the 70's, but more like the turn of the 20th century.
But people are able to afford more luxuries today than they did in the 50's and 60's. Cellphones, cars, television, computer? Just because we choose to spend time sitting in front of a moving-picture screen instead of by a pool doesn't mean we're not living that life now.
I don't know about you, but if I have an e-mail address listed on my resume that can be linked back to a fair amount of my internet doings.
On the other hand, they cannot be linked to my/. account. Why? Because it wouldn't be a great idea if they could read all of my/. posts. Discriminatory hiring practices is illegal, but you need proof of that.
That's my main reason for separating my profiles and keeping them separate. I'm sure law enforcement could, with the appropriate warrants, link everything back together again. But most people won't be able to, and that's good enough for me for now.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, reality is hostile and unpredictable. Science attempts to make things more predictable and less hostile, but it's still as cold and unforgiving as it was since the dawn of time.
The difference between science and religion in this aspect is that science actually makes things actually better (look at how comfortable we are today), while religion makes people only feel better. It is a big reason why I don't have any religious convictions and I don't incorporate any feel-good superstition into my reasoning process.
The universe is a cold place. That's just how things are. If there's anything I believe in, I believe it's up to us, fellow human beings, to make it a little less so for each other.
I call bullshit. You are no better than the assholes who come up to me and tell me I'm going to hell and will suffer eternal damnation because I don't believe in their particular diety. Besides it being a holier-than-thou position, the idea of judging a person without actually knowing the person itself is an irrational act, which makes you no better than the people you decry as unable to make "objective assertions about reality without adequate justification."
While I agree that I tend to regard atheists as more rational than theists (or deists), that's a stereotype, and I recognize it as such. I judge individuals on their own basis, not on a stereotype. There are perfectly rational people who are, other than when it comes to defending their personal beliefs, perfectly capable of making rational decisions. These are people who, even when somebody is crying that their religion is being attacked, will stop to actually think about whether such an assertion is true in the first place before responding. That's just anecdotal evidence.
Fact of the matter is, people's ideologies, whether they be religious, social, or political are hardly your business, unless they make it your business. What people think and how people feel typically won't affect you in any way, and until it does affect you, you are in no position to complain. If you take a proactive stance on the issue, then you are no better than them, because to them, you're also a potentially corrupting influence and the proactive stance is what they are taking.
The world would be a better place if people stopped interfering in other people's business. Problems arise when one person thinks their ideology is better than someone else's. And sometimes, it might be. But just because it is better is no excuse for insisting however strongly that other people follow the same ideology. And if somebody tries to stuff anything down my throat, you better believe I'm going to react.
The key is that you're wiping them with all 0's and all 1's repeatedly. If you wipe a drive with random data followed by patterned data followed by random data, you're pretty safe. And if you hold a magnet to the exposed platters themselves, you're almost guaranteed to get a decent wipe, though you'll also get an unusable drive afterwards. I know the military mandates a wipe of every classified drive with a high-powered magnet, but that might be with the platters still inside the casing.
It's more like, "I can't believe you said that. If you don't retract it immediately, don't bother showing up tomorrow." In this case, they probably threatened not to renew the contract fir another season of Mythbusters, or outright cancel the contract here and now and pay whatever for violating it. I'm sure a lot of networks would love to pick Mythbusters up.
That having been said, considering all this supposedly took place in a room full of hostile lawyers, he might have been forced to retract the statement or face slander charges, whether his statements were truth or not.
The scary thing will be when the antarctic melts. That's many cubic miles of ice above land. If that starts going, let's just say that CO2 emissions won't be a problem anymore.
It isn't the only ice shelf that's broken off in the past few years. I'm simplifying a lot, but this warmign trend isn't just localized to the arctic circle.
This is true that memory is meant to be used. But maybe you want to run some other things in the background? Or maybe you want to run the browser in the background, and some other things in the foreground? Or even within the same browser, if your tabs take up an average of 30MB each, and you have 20 tabs open and want to open up 10 more.
See, programs who hog memory won't give it back just because you started up a second program that's by nature more demanding. Programs that hog memory are going to keep hogging it until you stop doing whatever you're doing, or outright close the program if there's a memory leak. Memory efficiency is important in a multi-tasking environment. That is where we're headed, right?
The correct term would probably be unconstitutional. Constitutionality applies to laws. Legality applies to actions.
I call BS on the second argument.
SMS is no more private than webmail, and in some cases, even less so. There are anonymous webmail providers out there. There is no equivalent for SMS.
Besides, China doesn't have to monitor and censor every message, only the ones from the outspoken people. China's "free speech" is only a little worse than in the US; you can say all you want about the government, but just not too loudly. The only difference is that you can't get jailed for that infraction alone in the US, though you can get harassed and even arrested.
More than likely, it's a matter of not being economical, or the inability to draw a contract.
They probably got used to vista.
The web back then was effectively just a bunch of pages linked together. The browser was nothing more than a document viewer. You save memory and other resources by not duplicating what you don't need to use by the other tabs.
What if your only use for the browser now is for viewing documents and document-like HTML? What if you weren't interested in running applications with your browser? Even if certain pages had application-type processing, they'd be the exception and not the norm. And, it's easy to disable the complicated scripts you don't want running with extensions like NoScript.
Ok, so today, we have embedded multimedia that gets offloaded to another process. The browser just has to make sure that external process doesn't disappear, which may be a bit problematic. But not every page has embedded multimedia. You don't see flash movies on Wikipedia. So perhaps there should be improvements to this end, instead of completely doing away with tabs.
The paradigm might no longer fit for you, but I can assure you tabbed browsing still fits for the majority of the people online, whether they might generally prefer to use it or not.
Disclaimer: I like tabs. I also like frames, which I think isn't done correctly 90% of the time. I think it's awesome to have a browser window in the middle, one frame on the side with RSS feeds, one frame on the other side with Meebo, one on the top with search/commonly used links, etc., one on the bottom with reference material, and have the middle one for browsing. But that's just me.
How could this be possible? when we (humanity) realize that we are all the same deep down and we all want peace and prosperity, regardless or politics and religious beliefs.
Yup.
Nope. Every individual is capable of both great good and great evil, sometimes at the same time. The kindest person you know could at the same time also be the most sadistic, if given the opportunity. And that's the magic word. It's all about opportunity. Society itself is an attempt to protect everyone from the latter group by denying everyone such opportunities. Most modern societies apply this equally. And if you look at history, most historical societies do not.
The idea that people fall in either the "good" or "bad" camp is naieve. The assumption that everyone at heard falls in the "good" camp is foolish.
To be fair, it is informative.
That's not true. At all. Really.
Here's a little history lesson:
European scientific tradition began with the ancient Greeks and then the Romans, long, long before Christianity. When Christianity took over, scientific progress halted, almost completely. So did the arts, culture, and accurate record keeping, to name a few other things that stopped progressing. They don't call it the dark ages because of a super-volcanic eruption. It wasn't until the renaissance, when religion began playing a lesser and lesser role in the lives of people, that science and consequently technology really began to progress. And the less religion interfered in Europe, the more progress was made. You'll find most great people who advanced the arts and sciences in and after the renaissance about as "religious" as Einstein. Einstein is a self-described agnostic, and if you bother to read his wikipedia page, he doesn't believe in the Judeo-Christian "God". There are a relatively small number of scientists today who belong to the "I want to discover the facets of the thing God has created for us" camp, and fewer still believe in the same Judeo-Christian god of the Judeo-Christian theists. At the end of the day, blind faith just doesn't work for the educated.
So no, your utilitarian argument for the teaching of Christianity in the science classroom, as ridiculous as it is in the first place, has no wings. And no amount of prayer or faith is going to make it fly.
That's a problem. Education is the antithesis to blind faith. If these believers even bothered read the thousand-year-old book they profess to believe in in its entirety, they might not be such ready followers of their "church" anymore. The only way such inconsistent teachings could have ever propagated so widely in the past was due to the poor literacy rate. In places that traditionally have had a high literacy rate, or a cultural emphasis on literacy, religion is a very personal thing and plays a very minor role in the daily interactions between people.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
To be fair, Hanlon applies. It may be that she's never been presented with any arguments other than the ones spoon-fed her by her constituents and her party. Things change when you enter the national and international stage. She may become a great VP and potentially president for all we know.
But to vote for her is a risk, considering her current stance on these matters, and the fact that she has no exposure to national and international politics. No matter how much I might like her because she's a woman, it's not a risk I'm prepard to take, considering the seriousness of the consequences. I figure, my time in this world isn't really long (I don't expect to live for more than a few short decades more), I might as well do the best I can to help ensure a future for my children and my children's children. And if that means voting against the ideal of a woman president, then that's what I'm going to do.
I'm not saying I'm a supporter of McCain or Palin, but if Palin's nomination is the only reason I'd vote for them, that's what I'd be thinking right now.
It's typical of Americans to not be able to see past their own noses. I mean, the fact that people from the US call themselves American and differenciate it from Canadian, Mexican, Costa Rican, Brazilian, Peruvian, etc. says volumes.
The usual disclaimer that stereotypes is not reflective of every individual in a group applies, but leave out the major cities, and surveys show most people haven't left the country even once, even to Mexico or Canada. It's hard to have a broad view of the world without a broad horizon.
As our current president so eloquently put it
...fool me once, shame on--shame on you. It fool me, you can't get fooled again.
I doubt they even know what the law says...
The mentality of police in such cases has always been to shoot first, ask questions later. In this case, they arrest first, then get the courts to either throw out the case or sue the municipality. Since they're not directly punished, they don't really care. And, even if the guy in charge is punished, Rove and friends will have a "position" ready in some dummy company and nice fat check in the guy's mailbox every month. It's the same with the shooting, just that the guys who pull the trigger tend to be able to get off scott free, and if not, they'll go into the bodyguarding or mercenary business afterwards anyway.
It's a sad day when Soviet Russia has better protections against civil rights than the USA.
You'd expect a story like this to come out of China. Then again, cops in the US are pretty stupid... If only the official law enforcement departments could start attracting people with a little more intelligence and leave the dredges of society currently in law enforcement to stick with being rentals.
This is a poor analogy. I advice you read up on diseases caused by salmonella before bringing something as completely unrelated as this.
First off, salmonella is only deadly to people with weak or weakened immune systems, effectively, infants, the elderly, and people with HIV or take immunosuppressents. Hogging up the bathroom and leaving a nasty stink is otherwise the worst symptom salmonella will cause in the average, healthy individual.
Second, salmonella dies when you cook the meat it's in. Since you might not have ever had to do any cooking, let me inform you that chicken and pork should both be thoroughly cooked before consumption. And it is generally discouraged to eat raw eggs. Steak is considered safe because it goes through pasteurization.
Third, most healthy people need to consume a certain amount of salmonella bacteria to even feel the symptoms. That's why it's still safe for children to eat raw cake batter. And it's also why it's ok for most adults to consume chicken and pork that's not completely cooked on the inside. Again, you might not know this, but how much of the bacteria you can consume before you feel the effects is tied to the amount of exercise an adult gets in a day.
Finally, salmonella has to be injested. Which means as long as you wash your hands before eating (you do do that, don't you?), there's very little chance of you getting sick from you having touched unclean things. And despite what television ads say, salmonella can't just live off dry, clean surfaces. It needs organic matter to continue to survive, or it will die within an hour or so.
Yes, GPU's failing won't kill anyone while salmonella has had fatalities (and it varies by strain). But please stop spreading FUD about things you know little to nothing about.
Besides, it is much easier to say "I didn't vote because there was no candidate that was running on [insert favorite cause here]"
You have no idea how many people I've spoken to have given this excuse. Usually, the conversation proceeds as thus:
Me: If you don't want to vote for one of the two major candidates, vote third party.
Other: But that's like throwing away my vote.
Me: No it's not; not voting at all is throwing away your vote. Voting for a third party is making other people know the kind of candidate you want to represent you. At the very least, the next guy who runs will know why you voted the third party for and try to get your vote.
And that pretty much ends the conversation.
We live in a democracy. We the people have ultimate say over the government. Part of our power as citizens of this democracy is to vote for our leaders. It is our responsibility to do so. If we fail to participate in the system, then it is our fault that the system itself fails us.
if you want to really fix electronic voting, there's one sure-fire way of doing it.
Just ask Diebold's CEO. He's been fixing electronic voting since 2000.
We do anyway.
When was the last time you went to see a movie? Ate at a restaurant? Walked the dog?
In the not-so-distant past, these were pastimes of the wealthy, luxuries that most normal people couldn't afford. I'm not talking about the 70's, but more like the turn of the 20th century.
But people are able to afford more luxuries today than they did in the 50's and 60's. Cellphones, cars, television, computer? Just because we choose to spend time sitting in front of a moving-picture screen instead of by a pool doesn't mean we're not living that life now.
I don't know about you, but if I have an e-mail address listed on my resume that can be linked back to a fair amount of my internet doings.
On the other hand, they cannot be linked to my /. account. Why? Because it wouldn't be a great idea if they could read all of my /. posts. Discriminatory hiring practices is illegal, but you need proof of that.
That's my main reason for separating my profiles and keeping them separate. I'm sure law enforcement could, with the appropriate warrants, link everything back together again. But most people won't be able to, and that's good enough for me for now.