What I mean is that for some people, the Gospel toggle some previously unknown bits in the brain that activates and transforms them. And, worship just becomes what they do. It's the freedom of it - they become unshackled. I really don't know how to describe it in a way that my previous atheist self would understand.
Yes, these are the central mysteries of Christianity. We have to reckon with imperfect people writing about a perfect person. And there is never any absolute proof or disproof. We make the justification by faith alone.
If an atheist has a weak explanation of religiosity, perhaps that atheist gets infected with religion.
It shouldn't come as great revelation, to an atheist, that to those infected with a mind virus it "feels cringe" when anything attacks the virus. That's its whole mechanism of action, its fangs. Besides, there's things like faith healing, and gospel churches, and the phrase "religious ecstacy", and all these other signs of the religious getting off on religion, so it should be obvious that they're defending something that feels precious, and are not merely terrorized.
However, if the atheist instead made a shallow assumption that religiosity is simple fear of a smiting bogeyman god, then it would come as a revelation that the religious are in fact having euphoric feelings, and this might be mistaken by the now ex-atheist for divine revelation of the way and the truth and the light, as the fangs sink in.
I believe it would not be quite uſeleſs, to allow young ladies, according to their leiſure, and their capacity, the reading of ſome ſelect profane authors, that have nothing dangerous in them for the paſſions. This likewiſe is the means to give them a diſtaſte of moſt plays and romances: give them therefore into their hands Greek and Roman hiſtories, in the beſt tranſlations ...
In general people who demonise Thatcher largely agree with her on many policies. They are generally pro EU (she campaigned to remain in the referendum on EEC membership in 1975), they are usually opposed to reopening coal mines, or nationalising BP (or BA or JLR) or making telecommunications a state owned monopoly. To be fair they might favour nationalising utilities and train operating companies, but that is about it. They rarely disagree with her that climate change risks "irretrievable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to earth itself", and are unlikely to want to bring back the use of CFCs.
If we're talking Thatcher's policies some bangers that people for some reason never bring up, she is also responsible for:
* Countless (they literally didn't bother to count) deaths caused because she refused to release accurate guidance during the height of the HIV epidemic, she didn't want the public knowing about sexual acts she disapproved of.
* Countless (again) STDs, rape, child abuse and suicide cases because she made it illegal for teachers to inform nor support students about LGBTQ issues. The average LGBTQ teenager who finished school before 2003 received ZERO sexual education catered to their actual needs, and ZERO support for the bullying they would be receiving.
I think in general people demonise her rightly, because in 2026 she would be seen as a vicious monster of a person. It is not enough to just be really great for free trade in the current era, we are beyond the point that we have to settle for unhinged backwards politics just for that.
It seems to me that no person who makes any tough choices for the society could possibly be remembered well unless they live into the period of prosperity that follows.
For example, it is popular to talk about how bad the US debt servicing (15% of the federal budget) is, or the looming social security crisis, or the pension crisis and so on. But if someone raised the social security eligibility age or changed many pensions from defined benefit to defined contribution they would be villainized. Proposition 13 is often pointed to as a source of bad Californian incentives, but anyone who runs on repealing it will ruin their political career.
To say nothing of anyone who could possibly dare to oppose FARS rules, advocate for single-stair buildings, or allow insurance companies to charge sufficiently that they can operate in California.
Thatcher closed the mines and Trump wants to open the mines, so at least one of them must be loved for it. But predictably, neither are.
The SI should just have set kilobyte to 1024 in acquiescence to the established standard, instead of being defensive about keeping a strict meaning of the prefix.
I'm not seeing evidence for a 1970s 1000-byte kilobyte. Wikipedia's floppy disk page mentions the IBM Diskette 1 at 242944 bytes (a multiple of 256), and then 5¼-inch disks at 368640 bytes and 1228800 bytes, both multiples of 1024. These are sector sizes. Nobody had a 1000-byte sector, I'll assert.
The wiki page agrees with parent, "The double-sided, high-density 1.44 MB (actually 1440 KiB = 1.41 MiB or 1.47 MB) disk drive, which would become the most popular, first shipped in 1986"
Firstly, I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I wasn't the one who mentioned the early diskettes point, I was just quoting it.
But that said, we aren't talking about sector sizes. Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two. What's being talked about here is the confusion in how to refer to the storage medium's total capacity.
> Of course storage mediums are always going to use sector sizes of powers of two.
Actually, that's not true.
As far as I know, IBM floppy disks always used power-of-2 sizes. The first read-write IBM floppy drives to ship to customers were part of the IBM 3740 Data Entry System (released 1973), designed as a replacement for punched cards. IBM's standard punched card format stored 80 bytes per a card, although some of their systems used a 96 byte format instead. 128 byte sectors was enough to fit either, plus some room for expansion. In their original use case, files were stored with one record/line/card per a disk sector.
However, unlike floppies, (most) IBM mainframe hard disks didn't use power-of-2 sectors. Instead, they supported variable sector sizes ("CKD" format) – when you created a file, it would be assigned one or more hard disk tracks, which then would be formatted with whatever sector size you wanted. In early systems, it was common to use 80 byte sectors, so you could store one punched card per a sector. You could even use variable length sectors, so successive sectors on the same track could be of different sizes.
There was a limit on how many bytes you could fit in a track - for an IBM 3390 mainframe hard disk (released 1989), the maximum track size is 56,664 bytes – not a power of two.
IBM mainframes historically used physical hard disks with special firmware that supported all these unusual features. Nowadays, however, they use industry standard SSDs and hard disks, with power of two sector sizes, but running special software on the SAN which makes it look like a busload of those legacy physical hard disks to the mainframe. And newer mainframe applications use a type of file (VSAM) which uses power-of-two sector sizes (512 bytes through 32KB, but 4KB is most common). So weird sector sizes is really only a thing for legacy apps (BSAM, BDAM, BPAM-sans-PDSE), and certain core system files which are stuck on that format due to backward compatibility requirements. But go back to the 1960s/1970s, non-power-of-2 sector sizes were totally mainstream on IBM mainframe hard disks.
And in that environment, 1000 bytes rather than 1024 bytes makes complete sense. However, file sizes were commonly given in allocation units of tracks/cylinders instead of bytes.
I hate that. “Bug fixes and improvements” every time. And then there are the ones who think they’re being cute with “our bird Fernando has been hard ar work eating those nasty bugs and flying over the rainbow to bring you an ever delightful experience”. Just, no. I don’t mind you flexing some creative writing muscles in your release notes if you provide actual clear information, but if you’re going to say nothing like everyone else, might as well use the same standard useless message so I can dismiss it quick.
> YouTuber Eric Parker demonstrated in a recent video how dangerous it is to connect classic Windows operating systems
The video referenced in that article explicitly connects directly to the internet, using a VPN to bypass any ISP and router protections and most importantly disables any protections WinXP itself has.
So yeah, if you really go out of your way to disable all security protections, you may have a problem.
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
> statements about how people conceptualize math in terms of "is" and "are"
What do you mean? I searched the page for "are", it doesn't appear much at all, I'm ruling that one out. So do you mean for instance this statement - ?
"This zealous quest for universal problem-solving algorithms is precisely what made the synthetics uneasy."
Political context. Rationalism was associated with atheism, which, for the first time in European history, started making visible inroads into the intellectual class. If you can solve all your problems using your reason, do you really need a God? And plenty of French philosophers hinted that the answer could be "no".
It wasn't just a religious question. Atheism or suspicion of thereof was seen as politically subversive, in the age when most ruling feudal dynasties still relied on God's grace as the ultimate fount of their power - at least in their eyes of the subjects. (But it wasn't always that cynical, plenty of the rulers themselves were quite pious.)
Very good reminder when it comes to thinking about that period of time. The famous apocryphal conversation between Napoleon and Laplace comes to mind here.
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