floomp's comments

> - After installing Apache, change the following in httpd.conf: ServerToken -> Prod, ServerSignature -> Off, KeepAlive -> Off > > - After installing PHP, edit php.ini to make it shut up: expose_php -> Off

What is the purpose of this? Security by obscurity? Or being really frugal about header length?

I'm confused - was the sarcasm in my post not clear?

> A unique individual with one of the most brilliant, funny, audacious and original voices on the Internet

It's always good when one extreme viewpoint is countered with another extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction.

The scroll bar's size is still proportional to the document length, so I don't see why you couldn't.

> I've used the same level of scrutiny on religion as on science -- an extremely evidential approach, I might add -- and yet I have become more religious rather than less.

What evidence did you find to make you more religious? I ask out of genuine curiosity - one or two examples would be great.

> Given your assumption that the Bible would normally be interpreted literally

You've misread. I assumed that a Bible thumper would interpret the Bible literally (since you were using it as an example of a logical extreme). Perhaps I am in error in that case. But, no, I don't assume that the Bible is interpreted literally normally.

> You would do well to expand your horizons to a broader cross-section of the religious community before making such sweeping generalizations about "the processes to be religious".

I admit that is a generalization but I'm not sure if it's sweeping. You say that it's possible to use evidence to support religion, but I hold that this can only happen if someone erroneously interprets the evidence, as humans (all humans, religious or not) have a tendency to do. That's why we have the scientific method to keep our ideas in check. Religion bypasses the scientific method and it's not an accurate description of the universe because of this reason.

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I searched for your username and "falsifiable":

The first area of concern is that you seem to believe that god can communicate with people, including you (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2963530). I would be curious to know what mechanism is used to do this, and why you think it's more plausible than your own brain communicating with yourself.

The second concern is this:

> Now, if one person who I trust is His follower says "God told me X", and then X is wrong, the theory would be disproved -- so the theory is falsifiable.

Based on this quote, I severely doubt that you apply the same level of scrutiny to religion as you do to science, as you claim. There are several problems with this statement:

1. How to validate that someone is a "follower" of god.

2. How to validate that the person is telling the truth about what they were told.

3. How to validate that the person received a metaphysical message from god (whatever what means) rather than a hallucination. This is one point where falsifiability breaks down because I'm fairly certain that metaphysical events are unfalsifiable (since we can't analyze them "outside" the universe).

4. Even if these validations were made, I guarantee that most religious people would try to claim that god was just testing their faith, or something similar. People do this all the time when errors in the Bible are pointed out, or if a prayer isn't answered, and so on. In that sense, it still isn't falsifiable.

This is why we don't build our understanding of the world based solely on human intuition. It just isn't accurate because the universe is not a human. It's just reality. It doesn't share any of our assumptions or ideals or desires, and projecting them onto the universe to try to divine some cosmic purpose is a mistake.

I contend that nothing you've brought up is sufficient evidence to justify religion as a correct belief to hold. In fact, I'd argue that the amount of assumptions and intuitions that religion presents as truth is good reason to shed it as it seems to make it very hard to analyze it objectively.

> What makes you certain you have identified the process required to be religious? "Required" is a strong word, implying that it is impossible to become religious through any other process than the one you assume.

I was probably ambiguous, but I didn't mean to imply that there was only one process to be religious. Only that the processes to be religious aren't compatible with the processes that one uses to accept science. If you used the same level of scrutiny on religion as you do with evolution or gravity (or luminiferous aether), you'd reject religion.

> Some may begin from premises that are not falsifiable, but it's quite a stretch to say that's required.

Are there any falsifiable assertions that can convince someone to rationally become religious, and which address religion itself rather than the social and mental effects of being religious?

> You don't need to think that even if you're a total Bible-thumper. As long as your Bible-thumping includes an appropriate understanding of history, such that you recognize the creation story as a response to the Egyptian creation account [0], rather than as a response to Darwin.

Assuming said Bible-thumper doesn't interpret the Bible literally, I suppose so. But there's still the problem that they started with a religious belief and were able to mold it to fit evolution in - they didn't apply the same base standards to both ideas. I don't believe that's rationally consistent.

> If that were true, no intellectuals would ever convert to Christianity.

That doesn't follow. Intellectuals are also susceptible to cognitive dissonance and compartmentalization, especially when there is social pressure to change your beliefs, and doubly so if you hadn't explored the rationality behind being an atheist (speaking in general, not necessarily about Strobel).

I glanced briefly at the Wikipedia article and some of its references but couldn't find anything particularly noteworthy (perhaps you could point out some examples). My first impression is that there's no reason to think he used a rational process over a process motivated by some other reasons.

Atheists converting to religion is mostly support for religion's incredible strength as a meme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology_of_reli...).

> Atheism is just as unprovable as theism.

Perhaps, but what matters is that it asserts less than theism. When you start from no evidence, you need to believe in as little as possible until enough evidence presents itself that you can change your mind.

This is especially true given that religion has a highly plausible explanation as man-made, a creation of human imagination. When you have a collection of assertions, with no evidence, and the only physical source is the human mind itself, why would you believe it has any correspondence with reality?

> And it's fairly easy to reconcile a belief that evolution is true with a belief in a complex force that influences things in the background

I never disputed this.

> To believe that this is impossible and that we're capable of observing/measuring every part of reality is hubris.

I feel like you have created a strawman, because I never used any of these arguments.

Yes, of course we don't know every happening in the universe. Yes, our senses and reasoning skills are limited. That doesn't make religion true. How could it? Religious people have the same senses, the same access to knowledge as everyone else. I don't believe that religious people have any insight into the workings of the universe that no one else does, especially given that there are so many religions that can't agree with each other about even basic tenets. It's a very human creation - not a truth of the universe.

But I'll never assert that theism is impossible. That wouldn't be defensible, because we don't have all the information in the universe (or outside it!). Of course it's possible, but that doesn't matter, because we have no evidence whatsoever to believe it.

How is that dangerous or offensive? You don't have to agree with his hardfast approach on all Free Software, all the time, but I think software freedom in general is incredibly important to society and I'm glad we have someone like RMS who believes so strongly in it. Being uncompromising can be both a vice and a virtue.

> It certainly doesn't mean you have to become an atheist.

Technically, you're correct, but believing in a deity similar to the Abrahamic god and also accepting evolution is usually a sign of compartmentalization. You reach an acceptance of evolution by examining the evidence, and you reach a belief of god by starting from an unfalsifiable conclusion.

The processes required to be both religious and accepting of evolution are so diametrically opposed that, while technically possible to reconcile the two, it's rationally inconsistent to do so.

Beliefs like deism are much more understandable, although I don't personally subscribe to them. But if you're a deist, you wouldn't need to think that evolution isn't the sole source of biological diversity on Earth, either.

The text is probably still copyrighted. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine creative paraphrasing of the original work with small excerpts is much preferable, legally, to wholesale copying.

Assuming you're serious, please, please research how evolution works. Evolution doesn't predict that a species will spontaneously give birth to another similar species - really the opposite, in fact. Almost all people who "deny" evolution do so because they've been misled about what it means.

> There's a reason that compared to native platforms, the Web has way fewer problems with proprietary standards, walled gardens, dependency and upgrade hell.

Compared to proprietary platforms like Windows or OS X, sure, but free platforms like Linux and *BSD avoid all of that except maybe upgrades, and that's only a minor inconvenience since package managers are pretty good. Plus, you have the advantage of not being beholden to the web app provider's upgrade schedule, where you can almost never revert to a previous version.

And while web apps (at least in their state today) are necessarily open in the front-end, they're usually very closed on the server-side, which is definitely a step backwards from Linux/BSD.

> It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.

There's a lot of trust in Google with that statement. If this changes, how would you know? That's what's Orwellian about it.

It's not hard to imagine the results being silently tweaked by Google - not to say that they will do this, but it's a real danger, because it'd be very bad and hard to detect if they did do this at some point in the future, after we'd all gotten complacent and learned to implicitly trust the results.

If you lack write permission on the directory, you can't delete any files in it, but you can still modify them if you have write permission on the files themselves. It's an unusual configuration, but it's possible with standard Unix permissions.

I don't believe it's the same argument. A lot has changed in 15 years for Linux. It still has a tiny market share, yeah, but it's more accessible and approachable than ever. I think it comes down to making sure Linux delivers the same amount of polish as Windows and OS X instead of any fundamental change that's required.

Not to say I buy into the year of the Linux desktop stuff - I'm expecting it to be a gradual change as Linux gets better and more people start to use it. OEMs preinstalling Linux on PCs definitely helps, too, which they've already been starting to do.

> you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS

Why not? The main issues for Linux in this field are QA of releases, and support from third-party application vendors for a small subset of programs. Those aren't unsolvable problems. Even today Linux may be a superior solution to both OS X and Windows for certain people, especially people who lack attachment to a specific OS (i.e., newbies rather than power users).

I have ABP and could view the article for a few times, then I tried again and I got the registration page. Disabling ABP didn't change that. I have a feeling it's based on how many times you've viewed their site rather than ad blockers.