there is no notion or need of 'faith' to NOT engage in a practice. right now, I'm NOT swimming (for example). am I of a group called non-swimmers? I also don't believe in unicorns. I'm of the non-unicornists (local 707, in fact). uhuh.
Apples and oranges, all in the same sentence.
Swimming is something tangible. Unicorns aren't. So you are relying on some innate sense of knowing (i.e., faith) to assert that unicorns don't exist.
its not 'faith' to not_believe
Sure it is, because you can't prove the "absence of the thing" exists.
What if the real god is Allah, Shiva, Zeus or Odin?
The premise remains. Sure, Pascal was speaking from a Christian POV, but the logic is still valid.
What if the real god is judging us on how rationally we behave in a godless, toy universe he created?
A silly assertion. What if we really aren't having this conversation of our free will, but it's being predicated by a supreme being? I could come up with any number of alternative universes in which we might be having said conversation.
Pascal presents the options that Christianity is right, or atheism is right.
Looking at the bigger picture: He presents us with the idea that one option has an outcome favorable over the other. Of course, you can blind yourself with pedantic chicanery and conclude whatever you want to conclude.
This is what I love about religious debates: No one can prove their position, so it all boils down to faith. Yes, even atheists profess a faith that there is no Supreme Being.
The whole "be nice to people" is a small part of Christianity. Furthermore, it is not in any way necessary to have Christianity (or any religion at all) to want to "be nice to people".
Really? So believing the Gospels is a "small part" of Christianity? Or perhaps you missed the memo:
"And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. " (Mt 22:39)
Please...if you're going to bash Christianity, at least act like you know what you are talking about, rather than posting inane drivel. And you who modded the parent up should be ashamed of yourselves for being duped into doing so.
Christianity is a festering sore on our moral development, the sooner we can be rid of it, the better.
And we are to believe you based upon your alleged "knowledge" of Christianity?
I mean, if he really isn't an 'amateur,' then maybe he should have been referred to as a 'professional' astronomer (sans quotes)?
Oh wait...the Bad Astronomer makes an error that's common to the rest of the population: He believes 'amateur' means "one lacking in experience and competence in an art or science." In fact, in this context 'amateur' means "not compensated," "not for hire," or "one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession."
Perhaps the/. editors could help fight this common misunderstanding by dropping the superfluous quotes. It's too bad the grandeur of Rolf's contribution to science is sullied by other's ignorance. How many of you all thought to yourselves "Why the hell is 'amateur' in quotes?" C'mon...I know you did.
Really, it baffles my mind why people keep calling for an "open" DNS structure when there is already one in place, has been in fact for over a decade. With enough public nameservers in place mirroring the root zone, it would literally be impossible for any government to shut down OpenNIC.
It's already here, my friend...all you need to do is pitch in and help.
And it boasts the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside of Moscow, along with a WWII display of Germany rockets and jets that is one of the best I've ever seen. Oh, and when you're done, definitely check out the Kansas Underground Salt Museum just down the road. 650 ft. down in a salt formation used to store items of value (many old celluloid film masters are stored here), worth checking out.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
Preach on brother (or sister)! Often it's not for lack of trying:
--I run the robotics program (US FIRST) for our school. I have to beg, borrow, and put up my own money for robotics. Know why? The school district I work for won't give us a dime.
--I write online curriculum for our school. We use Moodle. A step forward...except that we don't have classrooms equipped with workstations/thin clients. All dressed up and nowhere to go...
--The state education agency recently approved several game and mobile apps programs. I'd love to do that. I pointed out to my administrators that we'd need some Macs to do iPhone development. They said no. I told them we could do Android development, but we'd need to reimage our computers with the necessary tools and emulators. They said no.
--I offered to write curriculum for a digital forensics class. I asked if we could get some old servers that were sitting in the warehouse to be auctioned off to use for the course. All off-network, of course. They said no, they couldn't give me the servers. I pointed out they had depreciated to nothing, and they would get pennies on the dollar for them. They told me too bad.
The list goes on and on. Please don't blame the teachers. There are a lot of us out there who are trying to get our students involved with STEM activities, but get no support from our administrators. Instead of trying to crucify teachers, string up a few administrators.
I seem to recall him predicting the end of the Internet as we know it with the advent of alternate DNS roots in response to the ICANN hegemony. Still waiting for that sky to fall, Vint. Now we see he makes the front page of/. because he finds current technology "disconcerting."
I would appear Dr. Cerf's boat sailed a long time ago, and he's still standing on the pier waiting to board.
...talks to me, and I can talk back to it. While its vocabulary is limited, I'm amazed at how accurate its speech recognition software is, even with very low S/N ratios (windows down, road noise, etc.).
I know of an author (Bulletproof Unix, among other books) who dictates all of his books using Dragon. He tells me it's incredibly accurate, and requires only minimal formatting and error correction.
I'll be the first to admit I've not actually tried Siri yet, but it seems to me speech recognition has been vastly improved over the years, and would hardly call Apple an "innovator" in this area.
...to welcome Telecomix to the alt-root scene. OpenNIC has been doing this for about a decade now. Let me let you guys in on a little secret: The less the "bad guys" know about you, the better. Meaning you shouldn't advertise yourselves as a solution to censorship, because you'll just get blocked at the IP level. Offer your services, and the censored masses will find you.
The bad guys read/. too, you know. Just the summaries, like all good/.ers.
...the administrator is an adult with short arms or other seemingly childlike proportions? Would this call for an administrator's adminstrator's password?
We are lucky we live in a world where the vast majority of patents never see the light of day. Thank (deity of your choice) this is one of them.
Jesus fulfilled the law of the OT. Don't forget the Israelites were the intended audience of the OT. Christians don't believe the OT is null and void, but that Jesus fulfilled the old law through his teachings and authority as the Son of God. Observant Jews still follow the OT laws because they don't view Christ as do Christians. Jesus, a Jew himself, was clear on the point of fulfillment:
Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath." He said to them, "Have you not read what David did, when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, âI desire mercy, and not sacrifice,â(TM) you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is lord of the Sabbath." (Matt. 12:1-8)
You express a thought that is lost on so many here: It's the spirit of F/OSS that is being violated here. You nailed it on the head calling Oracle a "freerider," because that is exactly what they are doing, leeching off the work of others for their own gain (whether present or future).
If any post sums up this what Oracle is doing wrong, the parent is it.
That says it. I'm likely to be dropping streaming once this hits. Netflix DVD was really the only thing that mattered. I like having a one-stop place to look for all the rarer discs (or even popular movies that are never in-stock at Redbox).
Just the opposite with me: Netflix has some hard-to-find foreign films that are made available via streaming rather quickly (apparently, foreign studios see the value of a streaming audience much more so than American studios). At any rate, my DVD service was the first to go. I'll hang on to streaming as long as its affordable, but for the DVD side of things I'll just rent locally from Blockbuster, Redbox, or Premier Video.
Just what we need, more sites spewing out poorly-designed client-side script badly rendered by any number of JS browser implementations. Like many others, I do everything possible to block JS...why does anyone think the future lies in more client-side code?
...because in one breath, story submitter says he/she is ready to host his/her own email server, then the very next breath he/she is talking about hosted solutions.
My recommendation? If you can't figure out what it means to "host my own email servers" as opposed to "outsource my mail servers," you should probably just stick with Gmail or another hosted provider.
That said, I'll play: I've been hosting my own e-mail servers for 15 years now. That's 15 years of SpamAssassin tweaking, 15 years of qmail vs. postfix vs. exim, 15 years of weathering DDOS and joejob attacks. I'm currently running an exim server on my DMZ that simply accepts inbound/outbound e-mail, and I use ODMR and fetchmail to get my mail on intervals from behind my firewall.
Running an e-mail server is not for the faint of heart (especially for self-proclaimed "hobbyists"). If I were starting at this new without benefit of hindsight, I'd definitely consider a hosted e-mail solution.
Slashdot Mirror
there is no notion or need of 'faith' to NOT engage in a practice. right now, I'm NOT swimming (for example). am I of a group called non-swimmers? I also don't believe in unicorns. I'm of the non-unicornists (local 707, in fact). uhuh.
Apples and oranges, all in the same sentence.
Swimming is something tangible. Unicorns aren't. So you are relying on some innate sense of knowing (i.e., faith) to assert that unicorns don't exist.
its not 'faith' to not_believe
Sure it is, because you can't prove the "absence of the thing" exists.
Logic...such a two-edged sword.
No, looking at the bigger picture, why bother living your life based on a silly wager?
I don't. I was just offering it up as yet another data point in this endless debate...
And psalms 110:
Ah...a selective quotation from the OT in which the authors believed in a vengeful and wrathful God. Talk about pots and kettles...
What if the real god is Allah, Shiva, Zeus or Odin?
The premise remains. Sure, Pascal was speaking from a Christian POV, but the logic is still valid.
What if the real god is judging us on how rationally we behave in a godless, toy universe he created?
A silly assertion. What if we really aren't having this conversation of our free will, but it's being predicated by a supreme being? I could come up with any number of alternative universes in which we might be having said conversation.
Pascal presents the options that Christianity is right, or atheism is right.
Looking at the bigger picture: He presents us with the idea that one option has an outcome favorable over the other. Of course, you can blind yourself with pedantic chicanery and conclude whatever you want to conclude.
This is what I love about religious debates: No one can prove their position, so it all boils down to faith. Yes, even atheists profess a faith that there is no Supreme Being.
I remember a reviewer observing that Christopher Hitchens writes books faster than most people read. I suspect that was true.
Which makes you wonder if it was about quantity and not quality...
That said, I think I'll enlighten myself and read some of what he's written, based upon the comments being made here.
The whole "be nice to people" is a small part of Christianity. Furthermore, it is not in any way necessary to have Christianity (or any religion at all) to want to "be nice to people".
Really? So believing the Gospels is a "small part" of Christianity? Or perhaps you missed the memo:
"And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. " (Mt 22:39)
Please...if you're going to bash Christianity, at least act like you know what you are talking about, rather than posting inane drivel. And you who modded the parent up should be ashamed of yourselves for being duped into doing so.
Christianity is a festering sore on our moral development, the sooner we can be rid of it, the better.
And we are to believe you based upon your alleged "knowledge" of Christianity?
Any religion that promotes supernaturalism or offers mythology as a substitute for reality is bad.
Let me interject something geek-worthy at this point:
"It is better to believe in God and be wrong in your belief than to not believe in God and be wrong in your unbelief."
--Blaise Pascal (paraphrased)
I mean, if he really isn't an 'amateur,' then maybe he should have been referred to as a 'professional' astronomer (sans quotes)?
Oh wait...the Bad Astronomer makes an error that's common to the rest of the population: He believes 'amateur' means "one lacking in experience and competence in an art or science ." In fact, in this context 'amateur' means "not compensated," "not for hire," or "one who engages in a pursuit, study, science, or sport as a pastime rather than as a profession."
Perhaps the /. editors could help fight this common misunderstanding by dropping the superfluous quotes. It's too bad the grandeur of Rolf's contribution to science is sullied by other's ignorance. How many of you all thought to yourselves "Why the hell is 'amateur' in quotes?" C'mon...I know you did.
Already here.
Really, it baffles my mind why people keep calling for an "open" DNS structure when there is already one in place, has been in fact for over a decade. With enough public nameservers in place mirroring the root zone, it would literally be impossible for any government to shut down OpenNIC.
It's already here, my friend...all you need to do is pitch in and help.
And it boasts the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside of Moscow, along with a WWII display of Germany rockets and jets that is one of the best I've ever seen. Oh, and when you're done, definitely check out the Kansas Underground Salt Museum just down the road. 650 ft. down in a salt formation used to store items of value (many old celluloid film masters are stored here), worth checking out.
Maybe if we made public education more about actually teaching and challenging students, rather than a game to see how you can bend the rules to pass the most students, then the first year of college wouldn't be such a difficult experience.
Preach on brother (or sister)! Often it's not for lack of trying:
--I run the robotics program (US FIRST) for our school. I have to beg, borrow, and put up my own money for robotics. Know why? The school district I work for won't give us a dime.
--I write online curriculum for our school. We use Moodle. A step forward...except that we don't have classrooms equipped with workstations/thin clients. All dressed up and nowhere to go...
--The state education agency recently approved several game and mobile apps programs. I'd love to do that. I pointed out to my administrators that we'd need some Macs to do iPhone development. They said no. I told them we could do Android development, but we'd need to reimage our computers with the necessary tools and emulators. They said no.
--I offered to write curriculum for a digital forensics class. I asked if we could get some old servers that were sitting in the warehouse to be auctioned off to use for the course. All off-network, of course. They said no, they couldn't give me the servers. I pointed out they had depreciated to nothing, and they would get pennies on the dollar for them. They told me too bad.
The list goes on and on. Please don't blame the teachers. There are a lot of us out there who are trying to get our students involved with STEM activities, but get no support from our administrators. Instead of trying to crucify teachers, string up a few administrators.
I use this programmer for all my EEPROM programming. It supports something like 625 devices (including PICs).
FTFA:
The program is opt-out so if the targeting is troubling you'll have to change your privacy settings.
Opt out and move on with your life, instead of whining about it here.
I seem to recall him predicting the end of the Internet as we know it with the advent of alternate DNS roots in response to the ICANN hegemony. Still waiting for that sky to fall, Vint. Now we see he makes the front page of /. because he finds current technology "disconcerting."
I would appear Dr. Cerf's boat sailed a long time ago, and he's still standing on the pier waiting to board.
...talks to me, and I can talk back to it. While its vocabulary is limited, I'm amazed at how accurate its speech recognition software is, even with very low S/N ratios (windows down, road noise, etc.).
I know of an author (Bulletproof Unix, among other books) who dictates all of his books using Dragon. He tells me it's incredibly accurate, and requires only minimal formatting and error correction.
I'll be the first to admit I've not actually tried Siri yet, but it seems to me speech recognition has been vastly improved over the years, and would hardly call Apple an "innovator" in this area.
...to welcome Telecomix to the alt-root scene. OpenNIC has been doing this for about a decade now. Let me let you guys in on a little secret: The less the "bad guys" know about you, the better. Meaning you shouldn't advertise yourselves as a solution to censorship, because you'll just get blocked at the IP level. Offer your services, and the censored masses will find you.
The bad guys read /. too, you know. Just the summaries, like all good /.ers.
...the second poster he hung up is better than the first. Much better.
...the administrator is an adult with short arms or other seemingly childlike proportions? Would this call for an administrator's adminstrator's password?
We are lucky we live in a world where the vast majority of patents never see the light of day. Thank (deity of your choice) this is one of them.
Jesus fulfilled the law of the OT. Don't forget the Israelites were the intended audience of the OT. Christians don't believe the OT is null and void, but that Jesus fulfilled the old law through his teachings and authority as the Son of God. Observant Jews still follow the OT laws because they don't view Christ as do Christians. Jesus, a Jew himself, was clear on the point of fulfillment:
Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, "Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath." He said to them, "Have you not read what David did, when he was hungry, and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath, and are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. And if you had known what this means, âI desire mercy, and not sacrifice,â(TM) you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of man is lord of the Sabbath." (Matt. 12:1-8)
If only I had mod points...
You express a thought that is lost on so many here: It's the spirit of F/OSS that is being violated here. You nailed it on the head calling Oracle a "freerider," because that is exactly what they are doing, leeching off the work of others for their own gain (whether present or future).
If any post sums up this what Oracle is doing wrong, the parent is it.
That says it. I'm likely to be dropping streaming once this hits. Netflix DVD was really the only thing that mattered. I like having a one-stop place to look for all the rarer discs (or even popular movies that are never in-stock at Redbox).
Just the opposite with me: Netflix has some hard-to-find foreign films that are made available via streaming rather quickly (apparently, foreign studios see the value of a streaming audience much more so than American studios). At any rate, my DVD service was the first to go. I'll hang on to streaming as long as its affordable, but for the DVD side of things I'll just rent locally from Blockbuster, Redbox, or Premier Video.
Name one single must-have feature that HTML+CSS can't provide, and the browsing public can't live without.
Opa automatically generates client-side JavaScript
Just what we need, more sites spewing out poorly-designed client-side script badly rendered by any number of JS browser implementations. Like many others, I do everything possible to block JS...why does anyone think the future lies in more client-side code?
I don't know about BART, but if you ride DART (Dallas Area Rapid Transit), that little button isn't worth a shit.
Proof:
"People were hitting the little button to talk to the conductor," Walker said. No information was coming back whatsoever. Nobody was talking to us."
(Funny thing for those too lazy to RTFA: DART had actually planned on charging the passengers who left the train with a crime.)
...because in one breath, story submitter says he/she is ready to host his/her own email server, then the very next breath he/she is talking about hosted solutions.
My recommendation? If you can't figure out what it means to "host my own email servers" as opposed to "outsource my mail servers," you should probably just stick with Gmail or another hosted provider.
That said, I'll play: I've been hosting my own e-mail servers for 15 years now. That's 15 years of SpamAssassin tweaking, 15 years of qmail vs. postfix vs. exim, 15 years of weathering DDOS and joejob attacks. I'm currently running an exim server on my DMZ that simply accepts inbound/outbound e-mail, and I use ODMR and fetchmail to get my mail on intervals from behind my firewall.
Running an e-mail server is not for the faint of heart (especially for self-proclaimed "hobbyists"). If I were starting at this new without benefit of hindsight, I'd definitely consider a hosted e-mail solution.