“I can answer with an andecote.
During my undergraduate years I was in an honors program at a certain college in the middle of Arkansas. This honors program, by its very design, was intended to challenge the fundamental belief system of its students. It exposed students to a variety of new religious philosophies, explored the abortion debate, and took on a variety of other issues that most of the students had never been exposed to before.
The results where.. shocking. About 80% of the incoming freshman in my class had some attachment to religion (more often than not 'fundamentalist' in nature). I remember my first week there we tore into the evolution debate. I had spent the first 18 years of my life assuming that everyone had simply moved past creationism, and to my shock a large group of honors students where arguing for the 'science' of creationism. I came to realize just how blind I had been to the problem.
Over the next two years the fundamentalists went in one two directions. Some simply refused to accept what they heard, and went into a sort of isolationist denial. For the most part these kids didn't finish the program.
For the rest (most?) the classes challenged their belief system. They began to realize that the reality of the world they live in was far different from the one their preacher had laid out for them. While very few turned on their religion completely, they did begin to abandon the literal bible ideas that they had began with. Most became some sort of 'liberal' christians.
The most interesting part was the backlash from the parents of these newly enlightened students. As the change really took effect the parents literally paraded in and yelled and screamed at the programs director. For these people, simply exposing new ideas to their kids (and thus challenging their belief systems) was more or less the same as turning their kids into satanists.
I finally came to realize that these parents FEARED knowledge. Religion, to them, is a form of security. Having a convienent belief system that takes all of the complexity out of the world is so comforting and so comfortable that operating outside of that scares the living hell out of them. When you have something like that, you become almost irrational in defending it. That means that secular ideas must be avoided at all costs.. because it is those IDEAS that break down their religous beliefs. That's why there are so many Christian book stores, music stores, craft stores, restuarants, and everything else. These people NEED to be immersed in a mono-culture because without it they may find out that life isn't as convienently explained as they NEED to beleive it is.
Ignorance is truly bliss. “
enjo13 on Slashdot.org
"Many people today only understand these nebulous dual concepts of negative and positive. You can imagine a little scorechart in their heads, and them tallying whatever people say to them, whatever they read, into either one of those lists.
If you were to say to an American nationalist example of one of these people that "America is a great nation!" their positive side lights up. If you were to say "America" has issues with their large prison population. Their negative side lights up and a tick goes into the negative column for you.
Depending on how strongly they feel, going above a threshold ratio of negative ticks to positive ticks will make them hate you. And depending on how energetic they are, they will lash out with just whatever negative comments come to mind. Doesn't matter what, because, hey, who cares what people are actually saying, it just matters that you give negativity back to counter "negativity." All that matters are these general concepts of negative and positive. Love and hate. Good and evil if you will. Always easy symbolism, always the most banal ideas. Thought of anything in between these two concepts is just "self-defeating," "moral relativism," "nihilism," whatever word they latched onto that some "really smart and witty" Coulter-type character said. Criticism is always interpreted as hate, and so emotionally abusive attacks are always returned. Support is always interpreted as love, and so the most fellatio-like praises are always given back.
This almost definitely scores me a negative tick on their scorechart. And if this is all they know of me, they now hate me."
Some person from McGill University
Ever wonder what the difference between varchar and nvarchar was? Well I'm still not sure what it is but one thing I discovered today was that to add japanese characters in a database, you have to use the nxxx version datatype.
For example, I have to develop a japanese version of a website I created at work and ended up with a bunch of ??????? instead of the japanese characters in the table I store the content.
To my surprise, the only thing I was missing was the letter 'N'. I changed the datatype of the column containing the content from text to ntext and did something similar to the following:
insert into CMS_MYTABLE (LOCATION, LANGID, REGION, CONTENT)
values ('About', 4, 'Main', N'??????????????????????????????');
Now, when ever I need to add some japanese characters, I just use the 'N' prefix in the string I am inserting.
Simple as 'N'.