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Comment Re:Wait, what? (Score 1) 217

As far as evolution goes, I think a God that doesn't take into account changing environmental conditions isn't a very smart God. So evolution and creationism can coexist, at least in my view.

If you redefine the creationist "theory" then yes, you probably can accommodate both. However this is not what creationists claim.

For the record, most christians are not creationists. Even the catholic church accepts evolution as a fact.

I mean, think about it, everything had to originate from something, right?

You cannot postulate that and immediately create an exceptional clause for your god. Either everything had to come from something, therefore time is infinite and the fundamentals of matter and energy have always existed, or you accept that something can arise out of nothing, in which case it's either one or more creator gods or (you can cut out the middle man here) the whole universe.

If you cannot see the problem here, then don't worry. This should not concern your everyday life. But also take this into account: if you were to prove by logic alone that at least one god has to exist (which you did not prove, trust me), that does not say anything about the nature of that god, let alone that it's your god and not one of the hindu gods, greek gods, etc. Also doesn't prove anything about it's morality, it's intent (or even capacity for intent), it's concern with everyday life of humans.

In the everlasting words of Mr. Hitchens, you still got all your work ahead of you.

But then again, why should anyone be concerned with proving a god's existence in a rational, logical matter, when they've got faith to replace that?

Imagining there's some power higher than us just seems obvious.

Imagining the sun goes round the earth just seemed obvious to the pope too. Do you take your obviousness over scientific evidence with all your everyday experiences? Sometimes common sense is not as trustworthy as people take it to be.

Comment Re:"Acknowledges" ... (Score -1, Troll) 175

Pentagon: Hey there Mahmoud, how's it going? Dude, look over there, see that nuclear plant? We totally infiltrated that.
Tehran: No you did not! We have strict security protocols, no spy would ever get access to that facility?
Pentagon: Oh yeah? Are you sure about that? Coz my boys over here beg to differ. See, we have all these documents...
Tehran: Let me take a look...
Pentagon: Here.
Tehran: Oh... you know what? These things are real... we'd better execute the chief of security. Oh, by the way. Barack, thanks for disclosing this. We wouldn't have spotted it without your help.
Pentagon: Don't mention it dude.

Comment Re:Obviously (Score 2, Informative) 175

It's the believe horoscope predictions become true that is fake. Why you'd think otherwise confuses me.

You're all wrong. Nothing is fake. The belief is real as well. Unfounded by all means, most probably false, but not fake. Very few people fake their belief in horoscopes, most likely the authors (as long as they get their paycheck). But the target audience does genuinely believe there's some truth to the predictions in their horoscopes.

Comment Re:Haha (Score 2, Informative) 344

Ok GP offered a valid technical criticism of a database (one component in a bigger project) and your solution, typical for MySQL users and developers I might add, is to change the other components of the project. Cool. Glad to see you give constructive feedback.

Comment Re:"Great leap forward" (Score 3, Interesting) 344

I will second that. I remember a discussion with a mysql dev where I was trying to raise the point that the db should not accept 30 feb as a valid date. A quite senior dev, backed up by numerous voices on the mailing list, was trying to convince me that it wasn't the db's job to check for that, quoting performance concerns. This was at least 10 years ago. But nonetheless, it's not a good start for a DB to have core developers like that. I don't like MySQL primarily because it cares about standard SQL just about as much as Microsoft does. I find the documentation to be abhorring. DDL is cumbersome. Working in commandline mysql is pure torture compared to psql (on linux! psql for windows is rubbish; not surprising considering the mess that windows commandline terminal is).

Comment Re:Cool (Score 1) 344

What is the difference between you checking with an IF 'OLD.column1 != NEW.column1' THEN (pseudo code... so don't flame me) or the database engine checks to see if a column was updated?

Well for batch updates it can be a huge thing. The expression can be fed in the query planner, the optimizer can use indexes where available to determine which rows require the trigger and which don't. I'm not saying this happens now (I would doubt it) but the devels have the option to play around with trigger condition expressions whereas procedural code is opaque as far as the query planner's concerned.

Comment Re:Europe... (Score 1) 199

pro-Russian != russian ethnics (of which Moldova has quite a few). Transnistria is an ethnic conflict, the current crisis is not.

I was responding to gp's claim that Romania didn't favour the unification. It's Moldova that firmly opposed it, and it was their choice and Romania wouldn't dare to ignore Moldovan people's choice.

No one would even dream of a unification of Romania and Moldova unless the vast majority of Moldovans would ask for it. The unification movement in Moldova (this is what I meant by pro-Romanian) is small. Most people want close ties to Moscow (this is what I labelled pro-Russian).

Technically, Romanian is _not_ the official language in Moldova, Moldovan is. Yes, it's the same language but geopolitics says otherwise :)

In recent news, Romania is accused of organizing the attempted coup in Chisinau, the Romanian ambassador has been declared persona non grata. The communists are not happy with Romania, not one bit.

Comment Re:The riots of 2005 in France we're powered by bl (Score 1) 199

The communist govt of Moldova can't afford to do that. If they do that they're doomed. The govt may be communist but the times have changed, the country is not a closed-borders police state. There are almost 24/7 live broadcasts from Chisinau in Romania and the govt cannot shut down internet access completely (lots of ISPs don't cave in).

The world would know. A military response from the govt would be plenty of justification for NATO to intervene.

At the moment there hasn't been any military intervention, despite lots of rumours. Police special forces have used blank ammo to scare the people. There have been lots of arrests, over 200. There are riots in at least 2 other major cities.

Today since 10 AM local time Chisinau is back in the streets. The govt doesn't like that, does its best to prevent it, but can't really use the army. The odds are a hell of a lot better for Moldavian revolutionaries now than they were for Romanian revolutionaries in 1989.

Comment Re:Europe... (Score 1) 199

Sorry that's actually not true; Romania offered Moldova a free step-in right after 1989 but it became obvious that the Moldavian pro-Romanian movement was vastly outnumbered by the pro-Russians. If they wanted to unite with Romania right now, Europe and NATO would have a problem -- they don't want conflict zones within their borders, and the Transdniester Republic is one. Plus, we would really be stepping on Russian toes. Penalty for that is usually invasion, sometimes annexation and, in some rare cases, world war 3.

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