On 4/6/2013 12:13 PM, Reuben Thomas wrote:
On 6 April 2013 18:09, Eugen Leitl <eu...@leitl.org
<mailto:eu...@leitl.org>> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 12:08:35PM -0500, John Carlson wrote:
> The Lord will return like a thief in the night:
> http://bible.cc/1_thessalonians/5-2.htm
> Is this predictable? Is there more than one return? Jews
believe in one
> Messiah. Christians believe in 2 Messiahs (Jesus and his
return). Anyone
> for 3 or 4 or more?
Can the list moderator please terminate this thread?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Indeed, this is a list about the Foundations of New Computing; please
stay on-topic.
yeah...
it is possibly a notable property that most topics on the internet tend
to diverge into a debate about religion and/or politics (regardless of
the original topic in question).
but, elsewhere, one can then find people into getting into inflamed
debates about other things as well, including in computing:
UTF-16 vs UTF-32;
RGBA vs DXT;
little-endian vs big-endian in file-formats;
x86 vs ARM;
choice of programming language;
...
so, in a way, people arguing about stuff like this may be inevitable.
one assertion that can be made here is that people seem to be
overzealous in their choice and application of universals, often without
a lot of evidence to support their choices.
so, one thing ends up being true to one person and false to another, if
for no other reason than differences in terms of basic assumptions, and
a tendency to regard these assumptions as absolute (rather than, say, as
probabilities).
well, along with an excess of people making value judgements, say,
rather than things being more in terms of cost/benefit or similar, ...
but, sometimes it seems that regardless of ones' choice of basic
assumptions, someone somewhere will still take issue with it.
expecting everyone to agree on much of anything is probably unrealistic...
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