Anyone still lurking around this place? I see several people are still active here.... quite a huge pile of names I have not seen in a long long time.

It seems to be begging the question to demand acceptance of the prerequisites of the requirement to agree not to disagree. These prerequisites form a model of what it means to be rational. I'm not sure if they are the best possible model, or even if they work. This includes the hypothesis that a system is only efficient if and only if it has a model of itself, and the semenatic, syntactic forms, and (trustable) media that are acceptable to each of us. So, in short - it is reasonable to expect come to agreement with rational agents except about rationality itself. There it isn't necessarily a question of whether you agree or not, but a matter of how rationality can even work. A matter of tweaking the model to allow greater truths to be perceived between multiple agents. So, the #1 way to get out of any disagreement is to look at this model, or the idea of a model in general.

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:
 
You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.
 
But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, nonstop, from the time you die for the first 1,391,880 years you are in paradise. You're going to need eternity from then on just to rest up from that.

Look, I have an iPhone 5. I've owned iMacs, Mac SE, and my first software I paid for was for the Apple II+.

But I'm not that impressed today.

A watch? Why? Who wears those things? Just look at your phone.

Pay by phone? That was around in the 1980s in Japan and South Korea.

Seriously, what's next, Apple VCRs and Shoulderpads?

If your genetilia has been turned into a fine red mist by the dynamite vest you just blew up to kill 30 infidels in a coffee shop?

So this is a thing. It inspired me to write this:

Day 1: A "git clone git@github.com:thegreatoldone/offerings.git", "make -f makefile/unix" and I'm off generating Cthulhu Offerings cryptocoins!

Day 2: I managed to find a couple optimizations. It's almost as if the code is speaking to me! Also, switched to clang 5.1 and got an extra 8% performance boost with the LLVM toolchain. Awesome!

Day 4: My cryptocurrency generation is going quite well! I'm hoping to have enough to pay my tuition at Miskatonic University by the fall term.

Day 9: A quiet scraping noise seems to be coming from one of my hard drives. I should maybe have sprung for SSDs to save my coins.

Day 12: I awoke with a fever in the night, and the scraping noise has transformed into a frightful howling. Though the console monitor is off, strange non-Euclidean symbols reveal themselves from time to time on the screen. What it means I cannot say.

Day 17: My fever has broken, but I can no longer tolerate the sound from my compute cluster. I have pried the cover off to diagnose the problem, and the drive array is not in there. There is only a horrific eldritch non-emptiness that sears my very soul.

Day 22: Turning, turning, falling falling, Oh! How you speak! It is so...

Day 26: vvvvvvvvvvvmggggngl;l;;m122222

NO CARRIER

The Catholic Church considers the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to fit with our theology. But it also occurs to me that it fits with the problems I've run into converting analog to digital measurement. And THAT points to the theological idea that many people worship not the Creator of the Universe, but an image of God that is a model of the actual God.

I have a Table Valued Function that returns a simple parameterized view. I want to turn that view into a string.

Can anybody tell me why the first query works and the second one doesn't?

DECLARE @JobID INT
DECLARE @strOut VARCHAR(MAX)

SET @JobID=2861

SELECT @strOut =Coalesce(@strOut +',','')+ ISNULL('[' +
MP.ModelPointName + '] int', 'ErrorInFactoryModel int')
FROM (SELECT TOP 800 ModelPointName, Sequence
      FROM dbo.GetReferencedModelPointsByJobID(@JobID)
      ORDER BY Sequence) MP
WHERE NOT (MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Ship%'
        OR MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Scrap%')

PRINT @strOut

SET @strOut=NULL

SELECT @strOut =Coalesce(@strOut +',','')+ ISNULL('[' +
MP.ModelPointName + '] int', 'ErrorInFactoryModel int')
FROM dbo.GetReferencedModelPointsByJobID(@JobID) MP
WHERE NOT (MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Ship%'
        OR MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Scrap%')
      ORDER BY Sequence

PRINT @strOut

The 2nd one returns a single field name, the first, returns all the field names.

Back in the early 1990s, when CD Roms were first invented, on major use of them was for the conspiracy dial up bulletin board system. With a CD Rom online on your bulletin board, you could "host" a CD full of downloadable text files on everything from government cover-ups to UFOs.

I was into such things at the time, and read many of these files.

Fast forward to today- and Pope Francis gives us a conspiracy theory: that rich first world nations are promoting war in the third world as a prop to economics. All over the first world Catholic blogosphere, there is outrage- how dare the Pope tell us capitalism is supported by warfare?

Of course, Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving the U.S. Presidency said the same thing,- warned us about the military industrial complex.

But I seem to remember a "secret" document passed around those old BBSs from the Vietnam Era that basically said the same thing, only actually recommending it as a policy. Does anybody else remember this document? Can you remember something I can google on? I'm coming up empty.

It means, in the end that corporations, at least until they are sold out to the stock market, have to actually be ethical and live by the ethics of the entrepreneurs who created them.

Right across the canal

Yup

I knew the metro interface was going to suck on Windows 8 machines, but I hadn't realized that you can't effectively turn it off and use the computer as though it were not a cell phone or table.
Today I got a new laptop for a contracting project and the laptop is Windows 8. I have discovered that it is absolutely unusable. While trying to navigate to something on the desktop, other applications will just randomly come up and take over the screen. There is some stupid widget that comes up and says "slide to switch apps", which will not go away and hides items behind it. If you try to reboot the computer, it just says "Getting Windows ready Don't turn off your computer" and doesn't actually restart for about 20 minutes.
It is pretty obvious to me that this OS is completely unusable except as a tablet or phone OS and probably not even then.

Any data used in a flame war can be broken down, eventually, to an appeal to authority. Including, of course, the fallacy of appeal to authority itself, which is just an appeal to the authority of logical fallacies.

Enough talk. The FCC has decided to end Net Neutrality.

I declare an Internet Fatwa on DC.

As a survivor of the First Use*Net Wars and part of the ARPA*NET 110 baud club, I declare an Internet Fatwa against all of DC.

Let them eat 14.4k!