Careful, you'll summon ...him

Lousy Smarch weather...

I find spreadsheets are useful as a data entry UI.

I have to use Sage for my company accounts, and I find that the UI for Sage is so clunky and restrictive that it's easier to collate all the relevant data in LibreOffice, then run some Python scripts I wrote to process the .odt file to convert the information into CSVs full of payment data and balanced journal data that Sage can import

It's way easier to scrutinise all the figures in LibreOffice Calc and make sure it all reconciles and balances then import to Sage than the teeth-pulling agony of trying to get Sage to be at all helpful.

The same goes for any situation where i need to compile a long list of things that is handy to reorder / sum values. It's easier to use a spreadsheet as a data entry UI and run a simple script to validate/dump into a database than build a GUI myself for each task.

Why on earth do government let the manufacturers report their own consumption figures? That's like letting me write my own MOT certificate every year.

Do they come with Lotus Notes and a machine gun?

John McClane on the Death Star - that would be awesome

It's not obscure to this audience.

I don't understand - USB has power and data on the same cable and a minimal pin configuration.

What the hell is a Gigafactory?

When Hitler does it, it's intended as a compliment.

Ignoring the childish trolling, the implied sentiment is correct - the entire world as a whole needs to take collective responsibility for the entire human race.

You're talking about the god ideas currently in circulation. All of which are no less arbitrary than the gods not yet postulated.

No he didn't, you deleted it to fit yours. He wasn't arguing with your generalised concept of what a "theist" does and doesn't think (Enjoy it, it's yours), he was arguing specifically with the OP, who said:

Accepting that you don't understand something isn't the same as ignoring it. In fact making up myths about what might have happened is ignoring the reality that we don't know.

This presupposes a long list of arbitrary ideas about the nature of a being that might have conciously created the universe:

• When you die you continue to live in some other form
• The creator of the universe cares what you do
• After you die the creator of the universe will personally assess your behaviour
• It matters if you look stupid, or there's some other implied consequence
• The creator of the universe won't reward you for thinking critically and not mindlessly subscribing to any comforting or manipulative fantasy tossed at you
• ...thousands of other completely arbitrary assumptions that amount to an almost infinite array of possible mutually contradictory creators that you couldn't hope to appease by guessing what the criteria are for non-punishment.

There's absolutely no reason to believe any of these arbitrary assumptions to be the case, even if for some reason, apropos of no evidence whatsoever, you do decide to presume the universe is the consequence of a concious act.

Although evolution isn't an explanation of how life began, it does introduce some constrictions on what that explanation can include. For instance, all life on earth today is descended from a single common ancestor. Plants, animals and humans were not created apart from each other, one at a time. Humans are descended from Apes. Without explaining how that process began, the evolutionary evidence about this constraint is emphatic and undeniable. This flies in the face of one obvious prominent creation myth.