Raving Atheists Christmas Thread 2011

[Kate]

[Michael]

[ghoulslime]

Christmas thread 2011 started in early November?!! The audacity! I know which one of Santa's lists you are going onto this year.

[Sternwallow]

Why complain about early recognition that the holiday season will soon inundate us, even non-believers, with completely synthesized cheer and good will?

The Church, itself, cared nothing for the DOB of Jesus for some 600 years after His death.

They only decided to try to figure it out, having forgotten to write it down anywhere while He lived.

It fell to a slightly goofy monk "Dennis the Short", to calculate it. He got it wrong by placing it in two non-overlapping time spans, like "during the late administration of Lincoln and the early part of Nixon's". The actual gap of some four years for Jesus invalidates astronomical date-based searches for the "Star of Bethlehem".

Dennis also failed to consider the year zero. Probably not his fault, but it made 2000CE the last year of the twentieth century and NOT the first year of the twenty-first.

This is not related to the infamous Y2K problem which was very real. Its impact on the public would certainly have been as destructive as the gloom-sayers warned except that it was discovered in time and a truly heroic effort by thousands of programmers modified code and stored data to forestall the processing interruptions that would have occurred.

Not to divert the main point of this post, but, to this day I hear that Y2K was due to lazy, stupid or sloppy programmers taking short-cuts and ignoring obvious dangers.

In fact the problem was strictly financial; storing a year value in 2 characters instead of 4 characters in every date field on each record in all of the databases.

At a time when it cost over ten thousand dollars a month to rent a hard disk drive the size of a KIA that would, at the time, hold a whopping 200MB, it would have been an intolerable waste to have entire drives containing nothing but the digit pair "19" repeated over and over, at $10,000.00+ per month.

And, yes, I do need some Egg Nog now.

[ILOVEJESUS]

I hope Santa kicks Jesus's arse !!!!

[Michael]

That was an interesting lesson in the blurred line between interesting facts and (even more interesting) pent-up rage.


Also: I used the word "interesting" too many times then.


Merry Christmas!

[Smellyoldgit]

[Kate]

I might actually consider going to a family xmas gathering, if only to show up with this:

[Kate]

Or a Baby Meat Jesus.


That would be worth it, to see the look on my krazi-in-law-fake-vegetarian's face.

[Kate]

I could be dangerous this year with access to an oven.

[Philboid Studge]

Sternwallow wrote

In fact the problem was strictly financial; storing a year value in 2 characters instead of 4 characters in every date field on each record in all of the databases.

Does this mean we'll have a Y10K problem ? (I picture Walt Disney's freezer going "ding!" like a toaster.)

[Kate]

[Kinich Ahau]

[Smellyoldgit]

[Smellyoldgit]

Thieving Bastards!

The switch-on of Derby's festive illuminations could be delayed after thieves stole more than £20,000 of Christmas lights and equipment.