Officially OT -> Re:My fiscal responcibility...

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:
> >>On Sat, 22 May 2004, Lloyd Budd wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>On 22-May-04, at 22:55, James Knott wrote:
> >>>
> >>>You say God it is just fiction .  Prove it ;-)
> >>
> >>     Why should one believe in god any more than the monster under the
> >>     bed? Or the tooth fairy? ......
> > 
> > 
> > Well, we _know_ those were characters fabricated to entertain children,
> > just like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed
> > Reindeer.
> > 
> > The only places where those get taken seriously is in terms of box
> > office sales at the movies.
> > 
> > In contrast, serious people have taken quite seriously the notions of
> > "supreme beings."
> 
> George W. Bush being one of them.
> 
> Mnay people have such beliefs, simply because they've been brainwashed 
> all their lives with such things.  At one time, serious people believed 
> that the world was flat.  Just believing something doesn't make it so.

Rather than picking people for how readily they may be chosen as
"punching bags" for ridicule, how about we instead go for prominent
individuals in actually relevant subject areas?

This is a list on discussion of matters related to computing, so we
might therefore look to prominent authorities in Computer Science.
Perhaps, say, the Professor Emiterius of the Art of Computer
Programming.  <http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/>

Furthermore, he has long been a consistent supporter of free software,
between:
  a) Having written TeX, an extremely conspicuous piece of high
     quality free software;
  b) Being a regular, substantial financial supporter of the FSF.

Donald Knuth is, by all accounts, a relatively thoughtful individual.
Despite this, he has apparently been inspired to find experts in font
design and typography to generate something so "unthoughtfully
superstitious" as his book 3:16.
<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html>
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