Who Were the Sea Peoples?

People who are ignorant of classical theology often picture God as a creature among creatures. Thus, they feel that the possible existence of God would be an affront to their freedom: "How dare some very great creature order me about, and insist that this and that is forbidden to me! He wants that for Himself, I guess!" This is the picture of God as a "tyrant." (This sort of ignorance of elementary theology may be found, for instance, in the works of Phillip Pullman.) That view is all wrong, and here's a metaphor that may help you understand why: Consider your computer. In it, programs vie for memory, disk, and CPU time. The programs are like creatures occupying the physical universe. If one program gets more CPU time, another program has less. In the common misunderstanding of what is meant by "God" I described above, "God" is the name for an especially powerful program, maybe one with root privileges, that can boss the other programs aro...

you are by definition not doing continuous integration.

"How do I add a strong onion flavor to my biryani?" Um... add lots of onions?

Sometimes people say moral action is justified by the outcome. But this is no more sensible than saying that a player's chess blunder is good because he wound up winning the game!

Trying to login with my iPhone ssh app this morning, I get the message "Invalid argument." I would like to wring a neck right now. Since the programmer who generated that message was processing that very "invalid argument" at the moment he generated the message, what about, say: "282.98.76.1 is not a valid IP address: 282 > 255." Or something like that? So I don't have to guess which of the 20 or so fields I get to fill in is invalid, and guess why?

Today I learned that office workers in interior offices have a “human right” to have sunshine in their rooms. 

Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World is online at The British Journal for the History of Philosophy .