Nice, that's cool, too bad I don't trust browser extensions to not steal my personal banking information or whatever else I go to online and I can't be bothered to audit every single extension I use. Third party audits are pointless in a world where these things autoupdate.
You think that may be paranoid, but I visit seriously important sites in my browser and I'm not going to always do that in an incognito window.
Like the WSJ and the NYT, just open an incognito window and do a google search for the title. In order to have their content indexed by Google they have to allow that to work. With the NYT you don't even have to Google, just right click the link to open an incognito window.
Pretty sure Sun was doing Ask Toolbars with Java installs [1]. And Ask Toolbars are not malware, they're not even adware. They don't compromise your computer. The shady thing it does is change your default search engine to an Ask.com search result that has more, and less noticeable ads. That's a pretty shitty thing, not user friendly, but it's not "malware" and it's not "adware." I worked on the Ask Toolbar and there was no tracking information other than your general non-personally identifiable stats gathering like one would use on a website with Google Analytics.
You're getting downvoted, but I agree that we shouldn't be praising this kind of behavior out of context. The guy was unquestionably brave, had good intentions, but probably terrible judgement.
I'm not trying to do anything malicious but intentions are irrelevant when it comes to truth. It's either right or wrong. If someone really had a good reason for believing in God I'd like to know about it. I am also interested in atheists who later turn to God because I don't comprehend how such a thing is possible unless they were never rigorous in their scepticism or had some kind of terrible psychological trauma. The latter is known to ruin minds. For example starvation makes people irrational about eating, war, giving birth, etc all have psychological effects that can't be reasoned away.
Anyway thanks for answering my questions. Enjoy your weekend.
The explanation given there is sound when it is applied the veracity of historical written records that don't attempt to support the supernatural. It's just about measuring what the more reliable evidence is. Did so and so say such and such to this person and so 500 years ago? Best written records say so, and there are different pieces of records from different people who say so and so we deem it good enough to say it's accurate. That's a totally different ball game than trying to discredit contemporary physical evidence.
Why don't you provide a short summary. My opinion right now is that if the book claims that things we can physically verify ourselves about the world are wrong because of a handful of dead people it doesn't sound like a very good book.
When it comes to claims that attempt to discount an insurmountable mountain of physical evidence you yourself can verify, there is no such thing as reliable eyewitness accounts, especially not from people who died eons ago. It's obvious you are not applying sound reasoning. Would you say it's sound reasoning to convict a man cleared by DNA tests for murder when there are witness accounts from living people? Think about this maybe. You're applying a wholly uneven standard of importance to one kind of evidence because of faith. And you resort to faith because the evidence is not good enough. You resort to faith because you want to. Given all that we know about the universe, you are clearly making the wrong choice.
I may not convince you, but again, you are exactly what I thought you were, a person who relies on faith to believe in God. Faith is a bad way to come to believe in things. For example Muslims believe Muhammad was the last prophet, Mormons believe Joseph Smith was a prophet. Both rely on faith, but clearly both can not be right. You would not use faith to answer questions in everyday life, because you would not do well.
Try to the phrase the X with very specific verifiable empirical evidence.
It's a bit ridiculous to make a claim of truth for an entire volume of information. Scientists, for example, don't do this. There are always going to be errors that creep into work. Einstein's has a paper called "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory." Scientists don't say "I would not believe in relativity if Einstein's paper were not true." They give specific evidence. For example, they would say they don't believe in relativity if light from stars didn't bend around the sun. Try something like that.
I have found out in life that women can also be dependable, fun to hang out with, and not "complicate things."
Using "bro" is offensive because it excludes others by their gender. It's an awful exclusionary term and you shouldn't think it funny or ironic. You're not taking this serious. I'm guessing because you haven't any idea of how soul crushing it can be to see this kind of behavior in the workplace when you're at the other end. It fucking sucks.
Indeed, man is short for manual. It has nothing to do with men, or beards or bros crushing code. The term "bro" when it comes to programming really needs to go away.
In this case that's not me using faith, that's using a heuristic. A heuristic is a decent substitute for empirical research, but it is not foolproof. We use heuristics to save time. If we had to do empirical research for everything in our lives we would never have time to do anything.
A heuristic is a way to ascertain information quickly. In the case of my birth, there's all kind of evidence to back up my parent's stories including photos, the investment and time spent in raising me. None of this is foolproof evidence, but it's enough to pass my heuristic for this situation. And there are measures I can take to get physical empirical evidence, like a DNA test.
The question of who my parents have can be phrased in this way and have an answer "the people who claim to be my parents are not actually my parents if a DNA test disputes their claims."
Please I encourage you to phrase a question as I have for your belief in God. Something like "I would not believe in God if X were true." Fill in the X.
These are all witness accounts from superstitious people who died long ago. Nothing listed is verifiable. This is not good evidence. Witness accounts from dead people should not be enough to discount the mountains of empirical evidence that imply that resurrection after having been dead for three days is not possible.
DI isn't scary sounding, it's just unnecessary most of the time I've seen it, especially in public facing APIs that third party developers use. Most classes don't have so many varied amounts of diverse dependencies where you have to resort to convoluting the constructors for the sake of testing. You could just use inheritance.
Dependency injection takes a thing that should be one line of code and makes it twenty lines. It requires third party developers to have know all kinds of unnecessary implementation details. DI is a piece of shit that should be a measure of last resort and if you find yourself resorting to it often maybe question your entire architecture.
I have yet to meet one person to convince me that DI is not unnecessary in most cases. It always boils down to making writing tests easier. Well you should not shit all over your public APIs for the sake of testing.
I can't reply to you directly. Why is your faith not blind or unreasoning? Can you give me just one specific example of empirical evidence for God's existence? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm guessing you're going to give me some unverifiable testimony from people who died long ago and expect that to have a person question heaps of contrary empirical evidence. I don't think that works.
And you are resorting to faith because the evidence isn't good enough. The evidence that explain the things that I believe in, like the existence of this computer in front of me, don't require any faith at all.
How do you "experiment" with atheism? Just saying to yourself "I'm now an atheist" and seeing how that feels? It doesn't sound like you ever had solid rational and empirical reasons for choosing atheism, and indeed that is the only kind of atheist that I've ever heard of turning to the supernatural.
Atheists like me are atheists not because the quality of life it provides, but because there's no empirical evidence that there's any truth to any of the supernatural claims ever made. We understand that faith is a choice of last resort when no other evidence is available, and that faith is a really bad way to come to conclusions. Atheists like me understand our inherent biases, we seek to ask questions in a way that there can be a negative answer. There is no such negating answer to "what would convince me there is no god" and that alone, in the absence of any kind of empirical evidence for the existence of a supernatural entity, should be enough to not be a believer.
The truth is whatever the truth is, and I want to believe reality no matter how it makes me feel. If it feels good to believe in magical things that care about us but those magical things aren't real then I don't want to believe in them.
The litany of Tarski is useful:
If the box contains a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box contains a diamond;
If the box does not contain a diamond,
I desire to believe that the box does not contain a diamond;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
All the cnet author needed was to add a gif or a super short video showing the effect. They did not need to have some long video with voice over with stock footage of people typing for half the video.