You know the hardware is old and broken when you can’t even get it install Linux. Yes, I have kernal boot floppies around but these old laptops either don’t have a floppy, the BIOS won’t support boot from CD or their floppy is broken. All I could do was swap the drives to my working laptop, DBAN them and install DOS. Now these old clunky laptops are off to RE-PC to be broken up for spare parts.
And my work laptop is getting long in the tooth too. It has plenty of RAM (512KiB) and a fast enough CPU (697MHz)to run XP but it’s DVD broken and its USB socket is loose. My current working laptop is assembled from two Dell Inspiron 3800s, one of which I dropped, the other I bought used. I guess I could get a docking station and a used DVD drive for it off eBay but is that just pouring good many after to bad?
And my two gaming machines are noisier than hell.
So why all this talk about hardware? Well, my small business has manage to show a profit for more than three months. Time to think about upgrades. I bought a new, network-ready, all-in-one device at the beginning of the month.
I got something to say about your claim to be an atheist. Oddly, enough you didn’t allow someone to drop science on that. How convenient the church lady says.
First of all, what is you definition of atheism?
How can you possibly put the words atheist and enlightenment in the same sentence?
I had the same complaint- I wanted to drop science on this topic but couldnt… to wit, while I dont deny anyone their beliefs I dont see what’s so ‘sophisticated’ about atheism. i could go on at length I suppose but I will leave it at that
Well, I didn’t turn comments on for that post because I wrote it in anger and really didn’t want to argue with anybody about it. As the church lady said, “How convenient.”
Logically and philosophically I think we are all forced into agnosticism because, logically, we really can’t prove or disprove godhood.
But you’ve both have known me for a very long time and have known that emotionally and pragmatically I am an atheist. I’ve remained such because the existence of random disasters and suffering in the world.
I don’t mean the evil that people do to one another. That’s obvious and really has nothing to do with god. There is no one to blame for that but ourselves.
The suffering I’m talking about is something like what happened with the tsunami 5 or 6 months ago. Just random horrors that kill a few zillion innocent people for no reason. An asteroid slams into the Earth and, wham, the dinosaurs are extinct. A supernova detonates and floods nearby solar systems with lethal radiation, possibly wiping out civilizations within those systems. Nature wastefully red in tooth and claw.
That’s the kind of stuff that makes me emotionally conclude that there is no purpose, that there is no god in the classical Western sense.
Now that I review that post, I see that I wrote it badly. I didn’t make clear the things I wanted to make clear.
Let me emphatically state that I don’t believe atheism is somehow superior to other belief systems. I think that’s one of the reasons why I was rather vehemently against the idea of regimenting everyone to think that way. To do so would reduce intellectual and cultural diversity. I think monocultures are always a bad thing for human survival in the long run.
Sigh. I really can’t defend my position. I don’t think I really wanted to. But, as I said, I wrote that post after being prompted by something else that irritated me. Probably not the best mood to write anything in.