Posts by J 3

Er...

"Or did radioactivity start at -10000 with varying degrees?"

I think some people DO say that, crazy as it sounds to anyone not insane...

Because...

Maybe because it is made up crap, fairy tales for (allegedly) grown-ups? OK, other religions are too, but they are not the point of the particular article, so the "nutty Christian" (most Christians are barely nutty, actually) bashing will have to be the one for now...

@What is scary

Look up "Last Thursdayism"...

@Denarius

"do some reading"

Which one is the irony icon again?

Since I am paid to teach these things, and I don't work for free here, I will just say this: keep quiet and stop embarrassing yourself. It is self-evident that you have no clue about the things you are talking about.

@Having met

"if you are a theistic scientist, then you are either a very bad scientist or a very bad theist"

Well, maybe the second part more than the first, depending... I actually am a scientist, so of course a lot of the people I know are scientists. Quite devout ones seem to be rare in my experience, but they do exist. Most are of the "spiritual" kind, sort of deists in practice even if not explicitly in name. But besides the small handful of examples I know personally, you can take Francis Collins as the typical public example. No one can question his scientific credentials in his field. But I watched a talk of his here just after he published his "Language of God" book, and all of a sudden he's committing fallacies left, right, and center, and ignoring other areas of science that are not his in order to make the stupid "moral law" argument. The great thinker of the lab is a different person from the lousy one trying to save his god from (even more) irrelevance. Anyway...

So that's how the devout ones manage. They divide their brain in two parts that are completely separate in time, so to speak. When they are doing science, they are rigorous thinkers, relying on logic, previous knowledge, the data, etc. etc. as one would expect. When they are being religious, all that modus operandi is switched off and suddenly talking inside of your head to an imaginary being to ask for stuff you want is supposed to work. Contrary to reality, of course.

Now the good, but devout, scientists of course can't be of the fundamentalist kind, because no matter how much they partition their brain, there is no avoiding considering the most ridiculously unreal parts of their religion as "allegorical" -- because, you know, those parts are ridiculous and therefore must be "just a nice story to teach us something".

For the average science-ignorant person (e.g. a few fellow commentards here I could mention), things are much easier. Since they don't know much to begin with, cognitive dissonance is much less likely to strike, and they can even say with a straight face that science got it really wrong and your favorite priest got it right. In spite of... everything.

I wonder what Paris thinks of this issue...

@Dear*

Nah, people will just say "those so-called scientists don't know no nothing, who pays for this crap" yadda yadda, and move on with business as usual...

Your lack of faith...

Ah, but you forget the highly esteemed opinion of that expert in American Congress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5yNZ1U37sE

That settles it, doesn't it?

@Fresh installs all the way

Well, I had never had such a huge problem with "in place" Linux upgrading, so I guess I got spoiled. Sure, sometimes in the past I had small issues that required a bit of googling and manual intervention, but never a show stopper like this. And yes, I do have my /home in a separate partition, which of course made life much easier in the recovery of the 11.04 disaster.

The thing I *should* have tried first was to make a USB stick and try it first. If there is some inherent problem with the combination of 11.04 and my hardware, it would show there. If the problem was the interaction of 11.04 and my previous, 10.10 install, then the USB stick would not show a problem.

As the poster above mentions, it could be a video thing (I do have an integrated ATI), although every time I had a video problem before (and it were many in my old machine that had too old a video card to have updated drivers) at least get the system to go the command line login, where I could do something. The start with recovery mode hung after some cryptic-looking kernel message (more reason to think it was some driver, I guess), but I was in no mood for extreme googling, so I gave up.

Either way, I won't find out, because I already reinstalled 10.10 (and all the apps) and will be saying feck thee every time I see the Upgrade Manager suggesting a distro upgrade 11.04.

@ @Loyal Commentator

Yup, fish feel pain. They have the nerves and pathways we do, so no surprise. Of course we'll never know if their *subjective feeling* of pain is like ours, but then again I can't prove that *yours* is like mine, so there we go... I actually entertain the idea that the irrational animal's pain could in a way be felt *worse* than ours -- maybe, since we are able to understand the pain and its causes and better endure it, it would be less of a mental suffering than for creatures -- babies included -- who don't know what's going on and just want it to stop, but don't know if it will ever stop.

I suspect this idea that fish don't feel pain is there partly so people who like fishing can rationalize and not feel guilty (well, the ones who actually care). Second possible reason is our old chauvinism, considering ourselves the pinnacle of the imaginary chain of beings -- fish are very different from us, so they can't have mental states, that's what people might subconsciously think -- could be true, but not necessarily, and it's just a conclusion based on prejudices (speciesism if you will) instead of data. I myself don't like fishing, boring as hell (at least the modalities I'd afford to do). I love eating a good fish, though.

Exactly

That is the question indeed. I have a large screen, and usually have the browser open in one half and something else (spreadsheet, terminal, text editor, whatever) in the other half. I also like to have each half of the screen (in another workspace) containing two terminal windows. Now, will these things still be possible with GNOME 3? That was the OP's question, I believe, and it's also mine. If it is possible, great. I'll try GNOME 3 as soon as I can. If it's not possible, then forget about it. Pressing keys is not as fast or as good as moving my eyes left and right...