What you appear to be saying is that if some hypothetical being knew the rules and all of the pre-existing conditions, they could predict my actions with 100% accuracy in advance. That means that my actions are pre determined. In my opinion if the above stated condition is not true, then I have free will.
"The Catholic Church uses the Jerusalem Bible,"
I am not discussing the whole Bible just the New Testament.
"there is the Apochryphal New Testament"
This is universally rejected as authenticate writings by all Christian Churches. While these writings often claim to be first century writings, they were rejected by the Early Church because they were not in fact written in the first century. When someone is referring to "The New Testament", they are never referring to any part of the Apocrypha unless they don't have a clue. To reiterate, the apocryphal new testament books are not part of the New Testament because they were not written in the first century AD.
"there are also various versions of the New Testament used in protestant Churches (Anything from the King James Version, to the Good News Version and various others in between)"
This demonstrates that you don't have any understanding of the subject, these are all varied translations into English. The original New Testament documents were written in Ancient Greek.
Your reply indicates that you have no understanding of the subject. You are merely parroting excuses to ignore the New Testament. You have demonstrated little knowledge and less understanding of the topic we are discussing.
That is an interesting philosophical point of view. I, however. disagree. Either I take action because of choices I have made, which is free will, or I take action because of some set of predetermined rules. These really are the only options, it is one or the other. Just because I do not have an unlimited number of choices, does not mean that I do not have freedom to choose. When I go to buy a new car, just because the manufacturer doesn't offer the car in, say, green, doesn't mean that I didn't get to choose the color of the car I buy. As long as I have more than one color to choose from, I am free to choose the color I wish from the options available.
"that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice. "
There is a fatal philisophical flaw in your reasoning. If there is no free choice, then all of the actions of the neurologists and psychologists was a product of their "programming". If the actions they chose are a product of their "programming" there is no reason to believe that their analysis of the data they collected is anything but the "pre-programmed" conculsion that thye came to. Without free choice, science is meaningless. If all of our actions are a product of a deterministic system, the nour "thoughts" are merely a tool that deterministic system uses to guide us to take the pre-determined action. I am not quite wording this correctly, but free choice is a critical part of the philosophical system that is required for any type of science to be a meaningful activity.
Juanita Broderick? As for only consensual sex with a White House intern, that came out because he was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones. There were, in addition, 5 or 6 other women who made similar accusations. Several of the claims of sexual harassment were supported by secondary witnesses. Juanita Broderick claimed that he raped her while he was governor of Arkansas. Her story had enough in common with the stories of the other women who claimed that Bill Clinton took inappropriate sexual advances with them to be credible. To the best of my knowledge, the accusations made by Juanita Broderick were never officially investigated.
Ever heard of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The original colonists tried a communistic (pre-Marx) system, they almost starved to death, what saved them was changing to a free market system. Read your history, not all attempts at communism were defeated by outside forces. My question is, why have all attempts at communism failed? Why have the overwhelming majority of economies based on free market theory succeeded?
I will agree with your analysis except for one thing. Free market economics does the best job of providing the most good to the most people because it at least takes into account that people are selfish and greedy and attempts to harness that fact. People are not basically good, so there will be injustice and inequities in any system devised by man.
"There are many presidents who had worse character in that area (including several of the sainted Kennedys)"
I don't know, what other rapists did we have in the White House? Although considering the things that Teddy helped his nephews cover up I guess it isn't a far stretch to suspect that JFK was a rapist too.
I am sorry, if you want to blame this on a President then you have to go back at least to Clinton. "Character doesn't matter." People of good character have good ethics. People of bad character have bad ethics. When Bill Clinton was President, everyone agreed that he had bad character, but many people said that was ok, because they liked his policies. Now that there is a President whose policies they don't like, they want to make an issue of character.
First, I am referring to the Greek version of the generally accepted New Testament. I am unaware of any major religious group which considers the New Testament to consist of a different set of books. There are multiple copies of these documents, more than of any other document from the same time period. Check with a major University near you for information on where you can access a copy (although if you don't read Greek they won't do you much good). If you don't believe that the copies of the New Testament books give us an accurate view of the original documents, then you cannot believe that we have an accurate view of any major document from that era. Someone earlier mentioned documents that refer to Julius Caesar, Augustus, etc. No one has the originals of those either. There are more copies of New Testament documents than any other document of the period, by a factor of over 100.
Capitalism and free market economy are not quite the same thing, although they are close. You should stop just "thinking" about the comparison and look in the real world. In almost every case where there has been an attempt to implement communism the result has been misery.
Oh so thats why we have no records of the "Gospel of Thomas" or the "Gospel OF Mary". (Except of course that we do.) We, also, have writings of numerous people who disagreed with the doctrines laid down in those Councils. What we don't have is writings saying "John BarJohn, who was there, says that Jesus actually said this in contradiction to what the Council says." (Actually it would be in contradiction to what some person who was used as an authority by the Councils). You really should do a little study of the early Church disputes and disagreements before you make such a claim.
I believe that you will find that there is actually very little information about any of them. There are one or two sources the oldest copies of the information about them is from manuscripts copied in around 12th century AD. The earliest copies of the New Testament manuscripts that we have are from the 3rd Century AD. I could be mistaken on this because I do not have access to my source material at the moment. I am pretty sure that there is almost no documents referring to Herod outside of Josephus and New Testament texts. There is some archaeological (buildings, etc) information on Herod, but then he was the political ruler of an area.
Now that you refer to him, I seem to remember coming across something about Von Hayek on this topic. It has been a long time and I never found time to read any of his writings.
No, I am saying they can be traced back to the teachings of Jesus. This is an important distinction. Not everything that Jesus taught was written down as a quote. The writings of the New Testament were all available while the people who heard Jesus teach were still alive. If the people who heard Jesus preach thought, in significant numbers, that what was written did not agree with what he taught, we would have a record of such disagreement.
All of the documents used in the New Testament were written by the end of the 1st Century AD. Most of them were written within 30 years of his death. All of the supposedly "suppressed" documents were written significantly later. We have more reliable information about Jesus than we do about any other figure of ancient history. The source material for Alexander the Great was written 400 years after his death.
Yeah, you must be one of those people who believe that Christianity is simply the "stuff that Jesus said".
As a matter of fact I am. To be more precise, the stuff that Jesus taught.
What unbending regulation? The ants in the article respond to stimuli according to their own individual "programming". What external regulation is mentioned in the article? In free market economics, people respond to external stimuli according to their own individual "programming".
Now, do I think there are reasons to impose some external regulations? Yes. But there is something to be learned about human economies from the efficiency of an ant economy.
Where does Marx discuss luxuries? or is this your personal addition to the theory? Of course since we are discussing a purely theoretical economic system (that is one that cannot exist in the real world) we can make any postulates we want as to what it consists of.
By that definition, there is no real difference between an ideal free market economy and communism. Except that in an ideal free market economy people have access to luxuries and in an ideal communist economy no one has any luxuries, since by definition a luxury is something you don't need. In an ideal free market economy, everyone's needs are met by the efficiencies of the economy.
Of course, since this is not an ideal world, neither of these will ever happen. The question is which theory does a better job of meeting people's needs in the real world.
Actually it is the opposite of communism. In every real world application of communism you had central planners who told people what to produce. In swarm theory, there is no central planning, each individual reacts to stimuli that they receive from other individuals to make decisions on what to do.
"oil companies are making profits that would make 19th century robber-barons feel guilty"
If 19th Century robber barons had made the same return on investment that oil companies are, they would have disappeared without a trace. Yes, the oil companies are making huge amounts of money, but they are investing huge amounts of money as well. I don't know of any industry where the return, dollar of profit for dollar of investment is not higher than the oil industry. Of course, it is next to impossible to lose money in the oil industry, which is why people still invest in it.
The fact that someone made a Wikipedia entry to the gist of "Chris Benoit missed a match, because of his wife's death" 12 hours before the bodies were found makes this story potentially interesting to/..
That being said, at this point I have not heard antyhing that moves it into the "Why isn't it on/.?" category yet.
"While we are at it here is another simple power tip. Turn your rows of racks back to back. When they all face the same direction, hot air blows from the back of one machine to the frunt of another, forcing the AC to work overtime. In my design, I would have extraction fans betwean my back to back racks, pumping the hot air outside (or into the office during winter."
Pumping the hot air outside might help depending on outside temperatures. But, if the air you are pumping outside is 80 degrees F and it is 90 degrees outside, you would make your AC work harder (the air you are replacing the 80 degree air with is 90 degrees). Placing the units back to back rather than front to back will have negligible impact (it will only make a difference if the hotter air entering the second unit causes the second unit to use more power, which would then in turn generate more heat, causing the AC to use more power).
Slashdot Mirror
What you appear to be saying is that if some hypothetical being knew the rules and all of the pre-existing conditions, they could predict my actions with 100% accuracy in advance. That means that my actions are pre determined. In my opinion if the above stated condition is not true, then I have free will.
"The Catholic Church uses the Jerusalem Bible," I am not discussing the whole Bible just the New Testament. "there is the Apochryphal New Testament" This is universally rejected as authenticate writings by all Christian Churches. While these writings often claim to be first century writings, they were rejected by the Early Church because they were not in fact written in the first century. When someone is referring to "The New Testament", they are never referring to any part of the Apocrypha unless they don't have a clue. To reiterate, the apocryphal new testament books are not part of the New Testament because they were not written in the first century AD. "there are also various versions of the New Testament used in protestant Churches (Anything from the King James Version, to the Good News Version and various others in between)" This demonstrates that you don't have any understanding of the subject, these are all varied translations into English. The original New Testament documents were written in Ancient Greek. Your reply indicates that you have no understanding of the subject. You are merely parroting excuses to ignore the New Testament. You have demonstrated little knowledge and less understanding of the topic we are discussing.
That is an interesting philosophical point of view. I, however. disagree. Either I take action because of choices I have made, which is free will, or I take action because of some set of predetermined rules. These really are the only options, it is one or the other. Just because I do not have an unlimited number of choices, does not mean that I do not have freedom to choose. When I go to buy a new car, just because the manufacturer doesn't offer the car in, say, green, doesn't mean that I didn't get to choose the color of the car I buy. As long as I have more than one color to choose from, I am free to choose the color I wish from the options available.
"that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice. " There is a fatal philisophical flaw in your reasoning. If there is no free choice, then all of the actions of the neurologists and psychologists was a product of their "programming". If the actions they chose are a product of their "programming" there is no reason to believe that their analysis of the data they collected is anything but the "pre-programmed" conculsion that thye came to. Without free choice, science is meaningless. If all of our actions are a product of a deterministic system, the nour "thoughts" are merely a tool that deterministic system uses to guide us to take the pre-determined action. I am not quite wording this correctly, but free choice is a critical part of the philosophical system that is required for any type of science to be a meaningful activity.
Juanita Broderick? As for only consensual sex with a White House intern, that came out because he was being sued for sexual harassment by Paula Jones. There were, in addition, 5 or 6 other women who made similar accusations. Several of the claims of sexual harassment were supported by secondary witnesses. Juanita Broderick claimed that he raped her while he was governor of Arkansas. Her story had enough in common with the stories of the other women who claimed that Bill Clinton took inappropriate sexual advances with them to be credible. To the best of my knowledge, the accusations made by Juanita Broderick were never officially investigated.
Ever heard of Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. The original colonists tried a communistic (pre-Marx) system, they almost starved to death, what saved them was changing to a free market system. Read your history, not all attempts at communism were defeated by outside forces. My question is, why have all attempts at communism failed? Why have the overwhelming majority of economies based on free market theory succeeded?
I will agree with your analysis except for one thing. Free market economics does the best job of providing the most good to the most people because it at least takes into account that people are selfish and greedy and attempts to harness that fact. People are not basically good, so there will be injustice and inequities in any system devised by man.
"There are many presidents who had worse character in that area (including several of the sainted Kennedys)" I don't know, what other rapists did we have in the White House? Although considering the things that Teddy helped his nephews cover up I guess it isn't a far stretch to suspect that JFK was a rapist too.
I am sorry, if you want to blame this on a President then you have to go back at least to Clinton. "Character doesn't matter." People of good character have good ethics. People of bad character have bad ethics. When Bill Clinton was President, everyone agreed that he had bad character, but many people said that was ok, because they liked his policies. Now that there is a President whose policies they don't like, they want to make an issue of character.
First, I am referring to the Greek version of the generally accepted New Testament. I am unaware of any major religious group which considers the New Testament to consist of a different set of books. There are multiple copies of these documents, more than of any other document from the same time period. Check with a major University near you for information on where you can access a copy (although if you don't read Greek they won't do you much good). If you don't believe that the copies of the New Testament books give us an accurate view of the original documents, then you cannot believe that we have an accurate view of any major document from that era. Someone earlier mentioned documents that refer to Julius Caesar, Augustus, etc. No one has the originals of those either. There are more copies of New Testament documents than any other document of the period, by a factor of over 100.
Capitalism and free market economy are not quite the same thing, although they are close. You should stop just "thinking" about the comparison and look in the real world. In almost every case where there has been an attempt to implement communism the result has been misery.
Oh so thats why we have no records of the "Gospel of Thomas" or the "Gospel OF Mary". (Except of course that we do.) We, also, have writings of numerous people who disagreed with the doctrines laid down in those Councils. What we don't have is writings saying "John BarJohn, who was there, says that Jesus actually said this in contradiction to what the Council says." (Actually it would be in contradiction to what some person who was used as an authority by the Councils). You really should do a little study of the early Church disputes and disagreements before you make such a claim.
I believe that you will find that there is actually very little information about any of them. There are one or two sources the oldest copies of the information about them is from manuscripts copied in around 12th century AD. The earliest copies of the New Testament manuscripts that we have are from the 3rd Century AD. I could be mistaken on this because I do not have access to my source material at the moment. I am pretty sure that there is almost no documents referring to Herod outside of Josephus and New Testament texts. There is some archaeological (buildings, etc) information on Herod, but then he was the political ruler of an area.
Now that you refer to him, I seem to remember coming across something about Von Hayek on this topic. It has been a long time and I never found time to read any of his writings.
No, I am saying they can be traced back to the teachings of Jesus. This is an important distinction. Not everything that Jesus taught was written down as a quote. The writings of the New Testament were all available while the people who heard Jesus teach were still alive. If the people who heard Jesus preach thought, in significant numbers, that what was written did not agree with what he taught, we would have a record of such disagreement.
All of the documents used in the New Testament were written by the end of the 1st Century AD. Most of them were written within 30 years of his death. All of the supposedly "suppressed" documents were written significantly later. We have more reliable information about Jesus than we do about any other figure of ancient history. The source material for Alexander the Great was written 400 years after his death.
Yeah, you must be one of those people who believe that Christianity is simply the "stuff that Jesus said". As a matter of fact I am. To be more precise, the stuff that Jesus taught.
What unbending regulation? The ants in the article respond to stimuli according to their own individual "programming". What external regulation is mentioned in the article? In free market economics, people respond to external stimuli according to their own individual "programming". Now, do I think there are reasons to impose some external regulations? Yes. But there is something to be learned about human economies from the efficiency of an ant economy.
Where does Marx discuss luxuries? or is this your personal addition to the theory? Of course since we are discussing a purely theoretical economic system (that is one that cannot exist in the real world) we can make any postulates we want as to what it consists of.
By that definition, there is no real difference between an ideal free market economy and communism. Except that in an ideal free market economy people have access to luxuries and in an ideal communist economy no one has any luxuries, since by definition a luxury is something you don't need. In an ideal free market economy, everyone's needs are met by the efficiencies of the economy. Of course, since this is not an ideal world, neither of these will ever happen. The question is which theory does a better job of meeting people's needs in the real world.
Actually it is the opposite of communism. In every real world application of communism you had central planners who told people what to produce. In swarm theory, there is no central planning, each individual reacts to stimuli that they receive from other individuals to make decisions on what to do.
My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.
"oil companies are making profits that would make 19th century robber-barons feel guilty" If 19th Century robber barons had made the same return on investment that oil companies are, they would have disappeared without a trace. Yes, the oil companies are making huge amounts of money, but they are investing huge amounts of money as well. I don't know of any industry where the return, dollar of profit for dollar of investment is not higher than the oil industry. Of course, it is next to impossible to lose money in the oil industry, which is why people still invest in it.
The fact that someone made a Wikipedia entry to the gist of "Chris Benoit missed a match, because of his wife's death" 12 hours before the bodies were found makes this story potentially interesting to /..
That being said, at this point I have not heard antyhing that moves it into the "Why isn't it on /.?" category yet.
"While we are at it here is another simple power tip. Turn your rows of racks back to back. When they all face the same direction, hot air blows from the back of one machine to the frunt of another, forcing the AC to work overtime. In my design, I would have extraction fans betwean my back to back racks, pumping the hot air outside (or into the office during winter." Pumping the hot air outside might help depending on outside temperatures. But, if the air you are pumping outside is 80 degrees F and it is 90 degrees outside, you would make your AC work harder (the air you are replacing the 80 degree air with is 90 degrees). Placing the units back to back rather than front to back will have negligible impact (it will only make a difference if the hotter air entering the second unit causes the second unit to use more power, which would then in turn generate more heat, causing the AC to use more power).