"Yet, Dawkins continues to treat religion as a philosophy, and attempts to tackle it philosophically. As many philosophers have pointed out, this is not Dawkins' strong point and he comes off sounding like an extremely misinformed amateur at best, and an inflammatory pundit at worst."
I've heard this before but I don't know much about religion or philosophy so to me Dawkins usually seems to make sense. Can you explain why you think he comes off as an amateur?
yeah, well does "attractiveness" of a 2d picture of a face that looks like it was computer generated (the second male picture) as compared to an actual person's face actually correlate to physical attraction in the real world? I don't think you're being overly pedantic.
maybe I'm just feeling negative today, but this sounds like some bullshit to me. it sounds like the kind of thing that would be appealing to managers: having "not exceptionally intelligent or talented" employees who become completely obsessed with doing their jobs. great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company. the story and the events themselves are fine, but I feel like the reason this story (and some of these details seem pretty apocryphal to me, like programmers crying because of bug reports) is so popular is that management types are taking the wrong lesson from it: that it would be desirable if employees were unhealthily obsessed with doing their jobs. then they try and manipulate their own people into doing the same thing.
"great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company"
The point is that they become loyal to each other, the company reaping a reward is just a side benefit of people working towards a common goal.
I was on a similar 'elite' skunkworks dev team in a company of ~ 35,000 that had executive support, and the results were insanely good. You can't manipulate people to do this; You can however give them the freedom to make it happen.
I've had the opportunity to work on much smaller 'elite' teams before (7-10 people), and if I didn't have to eat and pay rent I'd do it for free.
The amount of productivity, support, and "you grok me"-ness is so extreme that it's really a wonder to behold. As a regular dev now I really do look back on those days and wish I can do it all over again.
vaksel, you already admitted you don't understand why somebody would want to commit suicide. if you have to get all uppity about free speech and civil liberties on an internet forum right now (as if you are really saying anything novel), at least you could respect that you don't seem to have any knowledge of the topic. your post is accusatory and pointless at best.
Misleading advertising is considered unfair competition in the state of California [1]. If you are advertising that it can withstand a certain amount of force, and it can't, then you are certainly owed that $200.
Well OK, but speaking as somebody who got a quick free replacement when my kindle had a problem that actually was Amazon's fault, I still think it's sort of lame. In my opinion Amazon was demonstrating that the kindle is relatively durable, which I think is true after owning one for a long time. This guy dropped a bag with a kindle and a macbook in it. Like somebody in the comments there pointed out, that's not really what was in Amazon's video. For all we know, he dropped a macbook on a kindle, got $200 and a replacement, and that's 'epic'.
I agree with you. When I read the thing, my first thought was: "oh great, we're applauding somebody who is pushing this lawsuit-happy society?".
He dropped it, too bad for him, be a big man and buy a new one. I wouldn't be surprised if his credit card company could have even swallowed the costs as part of the CC benefits.
Additionally, I feel like Amazon is "one of the good ones" in terms of customer satisfaction and customer support. Going the legal way on them is doing a disservice to everyone else.
yeah, it's convenient but I get eye strain pretty easily. if you happen to have a kindle, hatchet does the same thing for it. it's a much better platform for reading text. it costs $0.15 per use via Amazon's conversion charge though.
I agree, I have been using it for years at my company and it consistently performs very poorly when you have a large mailbox (and it's unusable if you try to have it save messages for offline use). filters randomly miss messages, only to work when you run them manually, opening an email sometimes just hangs forever, it feels sluggish all the time...
I don't like the interface either, you can't tell when it's doing something CPU-intensive in the background like compacting unless you notice that it says something in the status bar, and the status bar changes when you do something, leaving you wondering what the hell it's doing.
I installed the new beta a few hours ago and it seems just as bad, just now it was sitting in the background and it made my brand new macbook slow to a crawl for some reason. so I tried telling it to do the new archive feature on my inbox, and it gave me a folder for the years 2005-2009 with an extra folder for 2000 with nothing in it, and the 2005 folder ended up with a bunch of messages from 2005-2009. awesome. it's still hanging for long periods of time just trying to open single messages. I'd say it's my fault for using a beta but the release isn't really any better.
ah, and it just crashed when I tried to delete a bunch of messages. it was trying to index them, using 60% of my cpu, despite the setting telling it to automatically delete them because they were more than 30 days old. which has been set for a long time, leaving me wondering why they are still on the server in the first place. I'm not sure I would recommend Thunderbird for professional use. I haven't seen it lose messages or corrupt my mailbox, but it sure is flaky for me.
I've heard this before but I don't know much about religion or philosophy so to me Dawkins usually seems to make sense. Can you explain why you think he comes off as an amateur?