Yeah, she told the tenth Doctor (Tennant) that he was "as young as I've ever seen you" (or something like that). But then later she meets him as the eleventh Doctor (Smith) who appears much younger.
The River he met in the library was at the end of her life (unless he goes back and re-downloads her into a body at some point). The River in Time of Angels is a younger River (she chides the Doctor for giving out spoilers when he introduces her as a professor, which she isn't yet). Actually, if I remember correctly, the River in the library actually asks him if they've "done" the crash of the Byzantium yet when she's trying to figure out how far back in his timeline she is.
The River in The Pandorica Opens is even younger than that, and if the pattern holds the next time we see her she'll be younger yet again.
I'll start off by saying I don't think you should have been down-modded. I speak other languages too and I think I understand what it is you think is missing from English, in terms of precision. But as much as I love languages with sane and consistent rules for making up new words, I have to disagree with the assertion that English is imprecise. English itself is ridiculously precise, by virtue of it's ridiculously large vocabulary (which is a natural consequence of constantly borrowing in everybody else's words). The main issue I have with the language, in terms of precision, is that most English speakers simply can't be bothered to learn all the words, which renders them less useful when addressing a general audience. So the vocabulary is tedious to learn, yes, but the grammar is absurdly easy and less fraught with ambiguities than the others that I know.
yet when someone suggests a possible solution via actually forcing the telcos to stop raping the consumer the response is 'no regulation'? WTF?!
Well, if I had a ton of (say, retirement) money invested in a big company, I'd want that company raping you as hard as possible, too! After all, if they rape you hard enough, I might get rich!~
For those that didn't see the "sarcasm mark" at the end of that, I don't actually think that way, but the world is full of short-sighted people that can't think far enough ahead to realize how destructive that attitude is towards the social systems that support their self-centered little lives, and how they are, in aggregate, costing by far the vast majority of us far more than we ever get back...
Well, it depends on your compiler options and what subset of C++ you're talking about. Enable exceptions and you automatically get a slowdown in any function that declares a class with non-trivial destructor on the stack and does anything that can't absolutely be proven to never throw (such as an indirect function call, virtual call, or even [on certain platforms where hardware exceptions are magically turned into C++ exceptions] execute a single instruction). Yes, I know there are platforms with "zero-cost" exception handling, the problem is there are many many others without it.
Then there's the debate about how best to expose (better yet: prevent) sloppy coding. Yes, in the hands of an expert, C++ offers no disadvantage, but it's often very difficult to find fifty experts (all without excessive egos) to work together on a project. And when you're on a platform where cache misses are *horribly expensive*, making a loop slow is as simple as typing "virtual" somewhere in a base class of some type who's methods you're calling (this besides bugging out the method that was meant to hide the inherited definition). That sort of shit can take *ages* to track down because it's utterly nonobvious when you open up the loop that's being slow. Overloaded operators and, to an extent, function overloading are also commonly culprits in this sort of situation - though I'd say the benefits pay for the cost in these cases.
"Correct" C++, especially template code, besides taking ages to compile, also tends to run like shit in debug mode. Have you taken a look at the implementations of various std::algorithm methods? Layer after layer of overload selecting based on type traits. Do that in a loop and your debug build ends up orders of magnitude slower than a release because inlining is disabled. If your program's definition of correctness includes run time and you heavily use Boost or the STL, you can kiss your debug build goodbye and jump straight to printf debugging, because whereas you might have a 10% faster machine to counter the 10% cost of a debug build, chances are you're not going to have one 1000% faster just lying around somewhere.
And then you have scenarios where OO in general can encourage bad habits, so a language like C where it's possible but ugly helps keep people on the straight-and-narrow. In my experience, there's a lot of merit to that way of thinking, but a lot of the specific cases where it comes up are subtle I really don't have the time to convincingly back up the general rule with a thousand little seemingly unconnected examples.
Of course, I do use C++ a fair amount, limiting myself to whatever subset seems right for the job. It's entirely possible to do anything at all in C++, but that knowhow is resource that's rarer than you might expect and almost impossible to detect in an interview. If I had a project where I needed to hire a dozen other coders I would very strongly consider avoiding C (or, if I expect to have the time, be an utter Nazi about which subset of C++ I'm going to permit into the codebase).
What do you call the dreams where you're simultaneously experiencing multiple viewpoints, none of which you might call fully lucid but the sum total of which may well exceed ordinary levels of consciousness?
For instance, if I'm dreaming about wandering through a maze, I'll very often be simultaneously aware of an I-RTS-cursor PoV building out the maze and an I-lost PoV walking through it. And while both I-RTS-cursor and I-lost are in themselves aware that it's a dream and even that the other unit of consciousness is there, they have no access to the other's inner state, so I-lost doesn't know the layout (though he intrinsically recognizes the maze as a work of "self") and I-RTS-cursor has no idea what turn I-lost will take next. Both are intrinsically recognizable as "self", but they operate within a restricted subspace of possible thoughts (and are often, within their own subjective PoV, aware of this fact in that they'll consciously put big error bars on their thoughts to maintain coherence).
It's difficult to explain the sensation clearly, but what I can state with absolute clarity is that it's exactly like the mind is playing a game with itself, where it spawns off a "shard" of consciousness for every element of that game. So the gaming comparison is, in my experience, extremely apt. Bah, I'm rambling, I'll stop...
No, it's not. The internet routes around damage. If internet prices skyrocket (and the U.S.A. is already paying more and getting less than many other countries - go figure), people will just create their own network; either mesh networking, or simply wireless routers configured to bridge with other wireless routers - shouldn't be too hard to bounce the signal up the branch until you find a trunk.
And the instant that sort of thing reaches any sort of critical mass, laws will be passed, and the authorities will step on it hard. At best it would turn into the mire that is the current state of anti-"piracy" enforcement, where people get sued into ridiculous settlements for decades while the available hardware is locked down ever more and more... If anything it'd be a sneakernet since shutting that down is a little more involved than driving around scanning for the mesh signals.
If anything is to change, then the powers responsible for the status quo must be broken, along with the culture of acquiescing because it's "their" infrastructure (built on all that public land with all those lovely subsidies, tax breaks, and government-granted monopolies). Given that the vast majority either stands behind the status quo or doesn't give a shit either way, I'm not gonna hold my breath.
People won't stand for yet another bootheel on the head of the commoners.
Yup. We need new curse words, we've worn the old ones out to the point where they mean nothing, even when spoken by those that don't often swear. If this keeps up, in fifty years, "fuck" will be commonly used as an article to indicate emphasis and have no other meaning whatsoever.
Ah but here were are now there is not enough boom to do "proper fucking booming" so what exactly should they do?
They are legally and ethically obligated to ensure that such a thing can never happen. If there's not enough fucking booming, they can fucking have more made ahead of time. It's not even prohibitively expensive given that the cost can realistically be split across all operations in the region (it's not like each platform, or even each company, needs its own full set of booming).
Use the boom they do have to cover as much area as possible and hopefully do a little bit of good? Should they do "proper fucking booming" over a small area, and leave the rest to chance?
As opposed to what? Improper booming does nothing. It is exactly as good as zero booming. Worse, even, since it wastes time and resources that could be put to better use than providing photo-ops for idiots with titles.
So yes. Yes they should have done as much proper fucking booming as possible and removed some oil from the water. That would be better than wasting time and boom and neither removing nor meaningfully slowing the progression of any oil whatsoever.
which area?
Some combination of which area most of the oil is heading for and which area would be the most catastrophic to lose.
She comes off like she is saying "look they screwed up again" when its more like the screwed up a long time ago and now don't have the means to fix it, not that it is any better but why can't we portray thing accurately?
They screwed up a long time ago, the screwed up a little while ago, they're screwing up right now, and they show no sign of changing that trend in the near future. Accurate enough for you?
If BP were making my industry look as bad as it is hers, I'd be pretty fucking hard-pressed to remain civil while giving that monologue. And BP isn't just making her industry look bad. They've managed to endanger the future of a lot of off-shore drilling for the next decade, at least. If I were her I'd be swearing just to keep my mind off of all the other even-less-civilized things I'd want to say.
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
Obviously. That's why BP has billions of dollars to hire as many of the world's best engineers as they need.
Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
You know what you can do when the bottom valve partially fails? You can stop whatever you're doing and wait for the engineers to figure something out. Maybe you add another safety system that makes up for what the BOP can no longer do. Maybe you abandon the well and make a not to not fuck up the BOP next time.
What you can't do is rush the remaining work, increasing the odds of something catastrophic happening even further. Partly damaged BOP, fine, install some other safeguard or find a way to be more careful. Partly damaged BOP, and a botched cement job, and a smaller plug than the engineers originally specified? Whoever signed off on that should be in fucking jail.
The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this.
Or they could see to it that BP pays for every bit of damage and cleans up everything that's humanly possible to clean up. You could force them to immediately release all pertinent data on the spill so that other experts can make informed suggestions and so that containment and cleanup efforts can be properly directed. You could fine the shit out of them for being negligent in the first place. You could put the people that signed off on the various rush jobs in prison. You know, you could be reasonable but firm.
Hell, you could do all that and BP would probably still turn a profit this year.
I got to listen to quite a few friends (at several universities) bitch about the ridiculous shit their legally-mandated "Social Justice" class taught, so I think I know what it is you're railing against. I honestly don't blame you, it disgusts me too, and I say that as a fairly left-leaning Canadian (Communist scum, I know, I know). What amazes me even more is how utterly convinced you and a good half of your fellow citizens are that academics, having seen how wonderfully communism turned out for the USSR, are now, for some reason, hellbent on turning America into another communist state.
As far as I can tell, you're painting them all with a brush best reserved for the most extremely fundamentalist remnants of the old Feminist movement mixed with I couldn't even guess which other influences. The whole "we should hold back smart people so that idiots have a chance" crap my friends had to sit through in their SJ lectures was not at all typical of Soviet thought or culture (a culture which, if you recall, built entire cities so that the smartest of the smart wouldn't be held back by every day idiocy).
...in pursuit of the secular humanist agenda that has been pushed on them by profs who claim it is the only "intelligent" way to think.
Secular humanism has its roots in the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. In practice, that is. The core ideas are much much older, many of them traceable to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Your religion now entails of some mysterious Gov't entity that will make your problems go away through promises of safety nets, re-distribution of wealth
That's not a religion. That's someone that studied what actually happened during the French Revolution thinking that not ending up with another Paris Mob is a really keen idea. See, I'd rather have the government redistribute my wealth a little at a time in a controlled manner that I can vote on than paying no taxes up to the day when a mass of starving poor people overrun what little police my no-taxes provide and take everything (including my life). For all but the most ludicrously rich, safety nets are cheaper and safer than their equivalent in armed guards.
and a general distaste for anyone with Ambition.
Distaste for ambition? You mean like when you work your ass off to make the company a lot of extra money and your boss laughs at you as he pockets all the gains without so much as giving you a pittance of a bonus? Like how your colleagues treat you when the boss says that there's gonna be a 15% downsizing soon and nobody knows whether they've still got a job or not? The sort where your manager gets you fired when you stay late every day for a month and pull off the efficiency gain he couldn't manage in five years of running the department? Yeah, that's common to all peoples of all times, regardless of ideological, political, or intellectual affiliation.
How is this different than what your Right wing parents believe? Good job on switching brands of Koolaid there, you must be so proud to be enlightened now.
One involves a Great Sky Fairy returning to solve everything for the low low price of sitting on your ass and having faith. The other involves people working their asses off to achieve the best society that mere humans can construct. Historically speaking, people working their asses off has, despite all of the spectacular failures, yielded better results than ass-sitting faith ever did.
I'm not talking about technical limitations. I'm talking about the fact that if I write a compiler for some non-sanctioned language which generates valid iPhone apps (which only call into approved public APIs and conform to all technical recommendations), Apple can use that fact alone as grounds for rejection. That is, they will reject the app, not because it does something bad which might compromise the device or hurt user experience, but because I didn't use XCode.
Microsoft, on the other hand, won't reject my game just because I decide to not use their development environment and build system. If I can make a valid verifiable type-safe assembly which targets the public API and conforms to technical requirements, I can ship it.
no procedural audio
Annoying that they didn't bother to expose that API. Not usually a show-stopper. Not particularly relevant to my point, either.
no conlangs
No unapproved languages and no documented conlangs. If you want an alien language you need to set it up such that either nobody or everybody can read it. You can't use Russian or Klingon because they don't have reviewers that can tick off the "no profanity except as noted in the rating" box on the review checklist.
That, to me, is a lot more reasonable than, say, refusing a satirist's cartoons because they make fun of politicians.
and no ports
There's as much a barrier porting C++ games to XNA as there is porting Flash games to the iPhone. More, actually, since Flash functions as a DCC tool and a build pipeline as well as engine. And, where Microsoft has legal issues that keep them from giving away full devkits, the only thing keeping Flash off of the iPhone is Steve's word.
You haven't taught anything but how to point and click.
Except for introducing the concepts of components, objects, properties, events, syntax, variables, assignment statements, and build cycles, that is.
At the beginner level, what they did is exactly as much real programming as the traditional, "Don't worry about this boilerplate int main stuff, or the odd acronyms you're typing at the prompt, I'll explain it later," is in C-based classes.
At the advanced level, it is just as much real programming as parser-generators are.
Microsoft didn't allow indie games at all on the original Xbox console. Is that evil?
Indie games weren't allowed on the original XBOX because there's no way to practically get expensive dev kits out to thousands of small developers at prices that they can afford while holding them all to their NDAs (NDAs which they can't just be waived as they're required to guard the licensed IP of other companies who make XBOX components). They also lacked the means to effectively distribute indie games (pressing $5 games onto DVDs and putting them on trucks isn't a great business plan when you need to run things through QA teams that aren't geared for that kind load). As soon as they got a limited-but-non-NDA'd-to-hell SDK together (XNA, which is nearly on version 4), they allowed indie games on the XBOX (360). They even built out the XBLA store with them in mind.
Apple already has a SDK that's been approved by all the lawyers. They have a developer program that's available at a reasonable price. They already have a QA department that's set up for high volumes of small products. They already have a store. They're just being dicks.
Thing is this: if Adobe were to make a flash "compiler" that spat out 100% Objective-C projects that directly used Apple's APIs (and they offered to do just that, if I recall correctly), Apple's SDK agreement still prohibits its use. If I make a tool that takes my game written in whatever language and spits out C# that targets the XNA APIs, Microsoft has no problem with it. Actually, I can even skip the C# step and go straight to "native".NET binaries and Microsoft still won't care. Apple, not so much. About the only logical reason I can see for that restriction is to fuck over anyone that prefers to develop on tools or platforms that don't come from Apple.
Voyager also teaches us that aliens are basically humans with a good costume department.
I'd be more worried about space-based asteroid-eating critters deciding they should nibble on the hull. Those would at least be in an environment that's vaguely similar to the one they evolved in.
Alien cheese culture finding our particular chemistry tasty, our particular temperature and pH range livable, and having means to evade our immune responses is pretty damn unlikely...
What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
He and the perfectly rational consumer that most of our economic theory is predicated on get together for drinks every Friday to reminisce about the humble scholar who seeks only truth...
Well, Cyrillic lowercase tends to look more like scaled-down uppercase than the completely different glyphs Latin uses. They'd have to use italic/handwritten lowercase T to get a "m" to render, and I don't think that's actually a separate code point. But I'm just nitpicking, your point still stands.
A decent solution should start with disallow mixing languages in the TLDs - you can spell a lot less with the Cyrillic characters that look like Latin characters than you can by swapping out or two letters here and there. Plus, if all of the characters in the TLD are unambiguously not in my own alphabet, my browser can throw up a nice little "foreign site - Russian" icon next to it.
I'm in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one. That is, I cannot tell you why my failure to plan ahead should become someone else's emergency.
Social security benefits (or is supposed to benefit - this can be argued) the old by providing a guarantied minimum pension which isn't subject to your employer or your investment manager fucking up or outright defrauding you. It benefits the middle-aged in that they don't have to worry about (or prepare for) being stuck with feeding their now dead-weight parents (sapping them of otherwise productive energies). It benefits the young in that it fosters a culture that encourages old folks to retire younger than they otherwise might, opening positions and opportunities which would otherwise be closed for many years.
It's supposed to be a cost with a greater benefit. Whether it turns out that way in the end is anybody's guess. It seems that an apathetic electorate may have enabled in SS what corporate opacity enables a whole lot of in Wall Street.
It's likewise with health insurance. I pay a monthly premium for my health insurance. I see it this way: I pay an insurance premium so that I am prepared in the event of a medical disaster, or I risk bankruptcy. I chose to pay the insurance premium. Other people will have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis as they see fit. So long as they don't dip into my wallet to make up for their shortcomings, I have no problem with this.
Socialized healthcare is exactly about personal responsibility in the face of disaster. It amazes me that this isn't more obvious:
Treating a patient is an expense to the hospital.
By law, anyone who comes to an ER must be treated.
Many who are treated fail to pay.
Expenses must be covered by revenues.
Revenue comes from paying customers and charities.
Charities aren't coping with the volume of unpaid bills - there wouldn't be an issue if they were.
Therefore, paying customers must pick up the tab.
There are four ways to stop making you pay for other people's healthcare:
Make the hospitals eat the cost.
This turns into a disaster as hospitals get bankrupted. This hits the whole population quite badly in two ways. First, the loss of such a large portion of the medical infrastructure does terrible things to a population's ability to deal with epidemics or even more mundane accidents that threaten key productive members. Second, all the problem people who were relying on the ER are left to suffer or die on their own. Misery of that sort engenders criminality as desperate family members might decide to steal gramma's drugs for her.
Change the law, forcing hospitals to deny any treatment that the recipient cannot afford.
While this is about as responsible as you can make people be for their choices, it completely fucks over those who planned for common illnesses and then get run over by a drunk driver (or even those with the misfortune of having their insurance paperwork misfiled). It also transforms Sicko from exaggeration and sensationalism into undisputed truth. Not too surprising that nobody really advocates this.
Find a way to bring the excess cost in line with what charities can handle.
If this could be done, I think it would already be done. The major issues are that hospital-grade medicine is inherently expensive, since hospitals rely on pricey high tech and specialists to carry out their work. Charities are also easily overwhelmed in economic downturns as people both have less to give and as many of the poorer members of society will be increasing their risk of illness through the stress of finding additional work or by switching to cheaper foods (among oth
The reason why is that the programming is just terrible. The things that they put on television simply aren't the things that entertain me and mine. It doesn't matter where you get your programming if watching it makes you feel like you're wasting your time.
Yup. When Bell's idiotic phone droid tried to bullshit me into changing my mind about cancelling my service, I told them, "There are about three hours worth of enjoyable programming in a week. A third of that time is taken by commercials. Either tell me how paying you $65/month and wasting four hours watching commercials for eight hours of actual entertainment isn't completely retarded or stop stalling and cancel the account. Keep in mind that $65 could easily buy me a season of my favorite show on DVD or a AAA video game each month." To his credit, said phone droid knew better than to keep arguing.
We do still have the Internet if something comes up we need to know about, and it's likely to be both more timely, and available on demand, news in particular. News networks - CNN, FOX, etc. - are just pitiful. FOX is like a work of (bad) fiction, and CNN is a reach-around fest for the clueless. Half a country can be in ruins and the top story on CNN will be that some Hollywood marriage is breaking up.
It really is amazing, isn't it, how every time you think you've seen the dumbest thing ever they manage to surprise you with something new? Almost as though they're not actually in the business of selling you the news... Regardless what they do they aren't worth paying money for when you can find the stories more clearly stated and in greater detail online.
As far as what we continue to use the television for, there's still plenty without broadcast: XBox 360/HDDVD (yeah, we have a few), PS3/Bluray, Wii, DVD, and our media Mac.
[snip]
And in the end, you can get all the shows on a DVD or Bluray (if you're lucky), and watch them without commercials, in very good quality, as many times as you like, and furthermore, you can legitimately loan 'em to your friends.
Yes! Exactly! And it's cheaper! My old satellite TV budget (still based on what it cost several years ago, mind you) has since paid for a Wii, an XBOX 360, XBLA membership, XNA membership, a PS3, a bunch of video games, spare controllers for when friends drop by, my WoW subscription, and the DVD box set of every series I really like (many of which were temporarily traded with friends getting me access to even more shows). Shows I like a bit but not enough to own and the few series that deal with current events (Daily Show, to an extent South Park) I watch on watch.$NETWORK.com (which has commercials, but that's fine given that they aren't demanding I pay them for the right to watch even those).
For the same reason my Lego car is a Lego car and not a hat - because the laws of physics have caused the the energy in my body to assume the form called "n dot l" on Slashdot and not into the one called ShakaUVM.
Not at all. It seems pretty reasonable that the brain and mind are strongly connected, though precisely how might never be determined.
Gonna repeat myself since this point is more relevant here: mind is a function of brain, in the same way that ability-to-drive-in-circles is a function of my Lego car. There is no need to postulate an extra-physical realm from which mind comes or to which it goes any more than there is a need to believe in a realm of ability-to-drive-in-circles.
No, I'm not talking about why you are seeing out of your eyes, but why you are seeing out of your eyes, and not me.
Put the emphasis anywhere you like, he answered your question. My eyes affect my brain because they are connected to it. My eyes do not affect your brain because there is no means or reason for them to do so.
Explain to me why "you" are looking out of your eyes and "I" am looking out of mine. There's no real reason, it seems completely arbitrary, and yet there it is - unarguably so.
What the hell are you smoking? You may as well ask me to explain why the sky is blue or why water runs downhill. I "look out of" (a more accurate phrase would be "am affected by the light that happens to enter") my eyes and not yours because those are the only eyes my brain is attached to.
As I said, you can black box the entire bit.
As I argued, you cannot. If you want to be understood, then stop hiding what you mean behind other words (saying "consciousness" instead of "soul") and stop repeating the same thing over and over again. Make an actual argument.
You don't need to understand it, or even define it.
What I don't need are unfounded assumptions like the one you just made. Why don't I need to understand it? Why is it a black box? And if it is, indeed, a black box then why can you not accept that the black box is interchangeable with a biochemical computer that happens to affect the universe in precisely the same way as your mystery force - that it cannot simply be that biochemical computer? What's the piece of evidence that precludes such a conclusion which you aren't communicating here?
What is this thing which is not mere matter but which bends to the might of simple alcohol?
The simple fact of the matter was that before you were born, you didn't exist, and now you do.
My Lego car didn't exist before I built it. The pieces did, but the car did not. My Lego car now exists. And as far as "oh, but you're conscious and there was no consciousness in your atoms before you were made from them" well neither did the Lego bricks have ability-to-drive-around before I assembled the car and hooked up the motor. Ability-to-drive-around was built out of ordinary matter, and consciousness is also, as far as I can tell, just a thing which is built from ordinary matter.
I still don't understand why this idea is so threatening to you - why you insist on asserting that being made of "just atoms" is somehow an inferior state of being when you can at any given time look up and see the stars themselves, which are made of the same stuff. I really don't understand why religious folk (and I'm generalizing here) insist on elevating themselves to an existence above that of the very cosmos - it seems ridiculously arrogant for an age where we no longer believe in geocentricism.
Atheism has a very hard time dealing with this issue, along with related issues of why there is anything at all.
No it doesn't. There is no issue. You made it up when you asserted that consciousness is something somehow "above" force and energy, and then went on to assert that it must be immortal and come from some other realm without any backing argument.
As for explaining where the universe came from, Science has a convincing argument based on evidence where religion has a story in a book and appeals to authority to demand faith.
Unless you mean "why" in the sense of "why do bad things happen to good people" or "what is the meaning of these events". Yeah. I concept-invented-by-humans (peer) out of my eyes and not yours concept-invented-by-humans (because, in the sense of purpose or higher meaning)... how do you even finish that sentence? It's like asking the "meaning" of my Lego car driving around in circles.
Souls? Whatever it is that's peering out of your eyes. You don't need to define it, since you are experiencing it right now.
So my concept-invented-by-humans (soul) is the thing that concept-invented-by-humans (peers) out of my eyes. I concept-invented-by-humans (experience) it right now. Yes! It all makes sense now! Of course it will concept-invented-by-humans (have) a concept-invented-by-humans (afterlife) when I die!
Honestly, you do need to define what it is, because I'm not sitting here acting baffled out of some odd desire to spite you or whatever gods you may believe in. Nor, do I believe, does anyone else who would argue as I do. Everything I "experience" behind my eyes is easily (and, within the limits of my own subjective experience, obviously) one or another form of mental machinery. Especially the part that handles language and the bit that lags (despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise) a few seconds behind all the others recording memories of "consciousness" which are pathetically inaccurate descriptions of my mental state (I single them out since they seem to be the best candidates for what is commonly called "consciousness").
When you talk about the thing peering through my eyes the only thing I come up with is the confused understanding of myself that I vaguely recall having as a small child, back when my mind was too small to encompass a useful model of itself. Give me some objective description of what you're describing here.
Anyway, I have an experiment (thought or otherwise) to illustrate my point: go get drunk. I mean really drunk. Completely wrecked. Explain how your consciousness is both "more" than "mere" atoms and yet so utterly (and predictably, in an almost mechanical way) disrupted by mere molecules of alcohol. And, if you make the "oh the brain is an antenna for the soul, which exists apart from energy and force, and the signals are getting garbled in the brain" argument, be sure to explain how drunks are still capable of purposeful (if odd) action and why a drunk often experiences conviction that whatever idiotic thing he's doing is a good idea rather than confusion as to why his limbs won't move as he intends.
And no calling the drunk's experience erroneous or illusory - not after you just defined "self"/"soul"/"consciousness" in terms of experience. If the thought even crosses your mind, remember that your mental state is strongly impacted (though in more regular ways) by everything in your environment (are you hungry? tired? buzzing on caffeine? made irritable by the incessant flicker of the office light? suddenly gladdened by something beautiful?) and that no form of experience is exempt from suspicion of the tamperings of "mere" physics.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, she told the tenth Doctor (Tennant) that he was "as young as I've ever seen you" (or something like that). But then later she meets him as the eleventh Doctor (Smith) who appears much younger.
The River he met in the library was at the end of her life (unless he goes back and re-downloads her into a body at some point). The River in Time of Angels is a younger River (she chides the Doctor for giving out spoilers when he introduces her as a professor, which she isn't yet). Actually, if I remember correctly, the River in the library actually asks him if they've "done" the crash of the Byzantium yet when she's trying to figure out how far back in his timeline she is.
The River in The Pandorica Opens is even younger than that, and if the pattern holds the next time we see her she'll be younger yet again.
I'll start off by saying I don't think you should have been down-modded. I speak other languages too and I think I understand what it is you think is missing from English, in terms of precision. But as much as I love languages with sane and consistent rules for making up new words, I have to disagree with the assertion that English is imprecise. English itself is ridiculously precise, by virtue of it's ridiculously large vocabulary (which is a natural consequence of constantly borrowing in everybody else's words). The main issue I have with the language, in terms of precision, is that most English speakers simply can't be bothered to learn all the words, which renders them less useful when addressing a general audience. So the vocabulary is tedious to learn, yes, but the grammar is absurdly easy and less fraught with ambiguities than the others that I know.
yet when someone suggests a possible solution via actually forcing the telcos to stop raping the consumer the response is 'no regulation'? WTF?!
Well, if I had a ton of (say, retirement) money invested in a big company, I'd want that company raping you as hard as possible, too! After all, if they rape you hard enough, I might get rich!~
For those that didn't see the "sarcasm mark" at the end of that, I don't actually think that way, but the world is full of short-sighted people that can't think far enough ahead to realize how destructive that attitude is towards the social systems that support their self-centered little lives, and how they are, in aggregate, costing by far the vast majority of us far more than we ever get back...
For purposes of this exercise, assume a perfectly spherical politician.
Does it really matter what shape the politician is? I mean, can't we just skip to the bit with the frictionless vacuum?
Well, it depends on your compiler options and what subset of C++ you're talking about. Enable exceptions and you automatically get a slowdown in any function that declares a class with non-trivial destructor on the stack and does anything that can't absolutely be proven to never throw (such as an indirect function call, virtual call, or even [on certain platforms where hardware exceptions are magically turned into C++ exceptions] execute a single instruction). Yes, I know there are platforms with "zero-cost" exception handling, the problem is there are many many others without it.
Then there's the debate about how best to expose (better yet: prevent) sloppy coding. Yes, in the hands of an expert, C++ offers no disadvantage, but it's often very difficult to find fifty experts (all without excessive egos) to work together on a project. And when you're on a platform where cache misses are *horribly expensive*, making a loop slow is as simple as typing "virtual" somewhere in a base class of some type who's methods you're calling (this besides bugging out the method that was meant to hide the inherited definition). That sort of shit can take *ages* to track down because it's utterly nonobvious when you open up the loop that's being slow. Overloaded operators and, to an extent, function overloading are also commonly culprits in this sort of situation - though I'd say the benefits pay for the cost in these cases.
"Correct" C++, especially template code, besides taking ages to compile, also tends to run like shit in debug mode. Have you taken a look at the implementations of various std::algorithm methods? Layer after layer of overload selecting based on type traits. Do that in a loop and your debug build ends up orders of magnitude slower than a release because inlining is disabled. If your program's definition of correctness includes run time and you heavily use Boost or the STL, you can kiss your debug build goodbye and jump straight to printf debugging, because whereas you might have a 10% faster machine to counter the 10% cost of a debug build, chances are you're not going to have one 1000% faster just lying around somewhere.
And then you have scenarios where OO in general can encourage bad habits, so a language like C where it's possible but ugly helps keep people on the straight-and-narrow. In my experience, there's a lot of merit to that way of thinking, but a lot of the specific cases where it comes up are subtle I really don't have the time to convincingly back up the general rule with a thousand little seemingly unconnected examples.
Of course, I do use C++ a fair amount, limiting myself to whatever subset seems right for the job. It's entirely possible to do anything at all in C++, but that knowhow is resource that's rarer than you might expect and almost impossible to detect in an interview. If I had a project where I needed to hire a dozen other coders I would very strongly consider avoiding C (or, if I expect to have the time, be an utter Nazi about which subset of C++ I'm going to permit into the codebase).
What do you call the dreams where you're simultaneously experiencing multiple viewpoints, none of which you might call fully lucid but the sum total of which may well exceed ordinary levels of consciousness?
For instance, if I'm dreaming about wandering through a maze, I'll very often be simultaneously aware of an I-RTS-cursor PoV building out the maze and an I-lost PoV walking through it. And while both I-RTS-cursor and I-lost are in themselves aware that it's a dream and even that the other unit of consciousness is there, they have no access to the other's inner state, so I-lost doesn't know the layout (though he intrinsically recognizes the maze as a work of "self") and I-RTS-cursor has no idea what turn I-lost will take next. Both are intrinsically recognizable as "self", but they operate within a restricted subspace of possible thoughts (and are often, within their own subjective PoV, aware of this fact in that they'll consciously put big error bars on their thoughts to maintain coherence).
It's difficult to explain the sensation clearly, but what I can state with absolute clarity is that it's exactly like the mind is playing a game with itself, where it spawns off a "shard" of consciousness for every element of that game. So the gaming comparison is, in my experience, extremely apt. Bah, I'm rambling, I'll stop...
No, it's not. The internet routes around damage. If internet prices skyrocket (and the U.S.A. is already paying more and getting less than many other countries - go figure), people will just create their own network; either mesh networking, or simply wireless routers configured to bridge with other wireless routers - shouldn't be too hard to bounce the signal up the branch until you find a trunk.
And the instant that sort of thing reaches any sort of critical mass, laws will be passed, and the authorities will step on it hard. At best it would turn into the mire that is the current state of anti-"piracy" enforcement, where people get sued into ridiculous settlements for decades while the available hardware is locked down ever more and more... If anything it'd be a sneakernet since shutting that down is a little more involved than driving around scanning for the mesh signals.
If anything is to change, then the powers responsible for the status quo must be broken, along with the culture of acquiescing because it's "their" infrastructure (built on all that public land with all those lovely subsidies, tax breaks, and government-granted monopolies). Given that the vast majority either stands behind the status quo or doesn't give a shit either way, I'm not gonna hold my breath.
People won't stand for yet another bootheel on the head of the commoners.
Hahahahahahahahaha! Hahaha! Hoo. Hah. Heh... Whew... Oh man, that's funny. Tell another one...
Today it is abused.
Yup. We need new curse words, we've worn the old ones out to the point where they mean nothing, even when spoken by those that don't often swear. If this keeps up, in fifty years, "fuck" will be commonly used as an article to indicate emphasis and have no other meaning whatsoever.
Ah but here were are now there is not enough boom to do "proper fucking booming" so what exactly should they do?
They are legally and ethically obligated to ensure that such a thing can never happen. If there's not enough fucking booming, they can fucking have more made ahead of time. It's not even prohibitively expensive given that the cost can realistically be split across all operations in the region (it's not like each platform, or even each company, needs its own full set of booming).
Use the boom they do have to cover as much area as possible and hopefully do a little bit of good? Should they do "proper fucking booming" over a small area, and leave the rest to chance?
As opposed to what? Improper booming does nothing. It is exactly as good as zero booming. Worse, even, since it wastes time and resources that could be put to better use than providing photo-ops for idiots with titles.
So yes. Yes they should have done as much proper fucking booming as possible and removed some oil from the water. That would be better than wasting time and boom and neither removing nor meaningfully slowing the progression of any oil whatsoever.
which area?
Some combination of which area most of the oil is heading for and which area would be the most catastrophic to lose.
She comes off like she is saying "look they screwed up again" when its more like the screwed up a long time ago and now don't have the means to fix it, not that it is any better but why can't we portray thing accurately?
They screwed up a long time ago, the screwed up a little while ago, they're screwing up right now, and they show no sign of changing that trend in the near future. Accurate enough for you?
If BP were making my industry look as bad as it is hers, I'd be pretty fucking hard-pressed to remain civil while giving that monologue. And BP isn't just making her industry look bad. They've managed to endanger the future of a lot of off-shore drilling for the next decade, at least. If I were her I'd be swearing just to keep my mind off of all the other even-less-civilized things I'd want to say.
With the pressures and temperatures involved this is actually a very difficult problem to solve.
Obviously. That's why BP has billions of dollars to hire as many of the world's best engineers as they need.
Also, you can't just turn a valve under the blowout preventer - it is pretty much the bottom valve. So replacing this isn't an option - you are pretty much stuck with it unless you are prepared to do something drastic.
You know what you can do when the bottom valve partially fails? You can stop whatever you're doing and wait for the engineers to figure something out. Maybe you add another safety system that makes up for what the BOP can no longer do. Maybe you abandon the well and make a not to not fuck up the BOP next time.
What you can't do is rush the remaining work, increasing the odds of something catastrophic happening even further. Partly damaged BOP, fine, install some other safeguard or find a way to be more careful. Partly damaged BOP, and a botched cement job, and a smaller plug than the engineers originally specified? Whoever signed off on that should be in fucking jail.
The US could, I suppose, nationalize BP because of this.
Or they could see to it that BP pays for every bit of damage and cleans up everything that's humanly possible to clean up. You could force them to immediately release all pertinent data on the spill so that other experts can make informed suggestions and so that containment and cleanup efforts can be properly directed. You could fine the shit out of them for being negligent in the first place. You could put the people that signed off on the various rush jobs in prison. You know, you could be reasonable but firm.
Hell, you could do all that and BP would probably still turn a profit this year.
Considering the prevalence of Marxism in colleges
I got to listen to quite a few friends (at several universities) bitch about the ridiculous shit their legally-mandated "Social Justice" class taught, so I think I know what it is you're railing against. I honestly don't blame you, it disgusts me too, and I say that as a fairly left-leaning Canadian (Communist scum, I know, I know). What amazes me even more is how utterly convinced you and a good half of your fellow citizens are that academics, having seen how wonderfully communism turned out for the USSR, are now, for some reason, hellbent on turning America into another communist state.
As far as I can tell, you're painting them all with a brush best reserved for the most extremely fundamentalist remnants of the old Feminist movement mixed with I couldn't even guess which other influences. The whole "we should hold back smart people so that idiots have a chance" crap my friends had to sit through in their SJ lectures was not at all typical of Soviet thought or culture (a culture which, if you recall, built entire cities so that the smartest of the smart wouldn't be held back by every day idiocy).
...in pursuit of the secular humanist agenda that has been pushed on them by profs who claim it is the only "intelligent" way to think.
Secular humanism has its roots in the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. In practice, that is. The core ideas are much much older, many of them traceable to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Your religion now entails of some mysterious Gov't entity that will make your problems go away through promises of safety nets, re-distribution of wealth
That's not a religion. That's someone that studied what actually happened during the French Revolution thinking that not ending up with another Paris Mob is a really keen idea. See, I'd rather have the government redistribute my wealth a little at a time in a controlled manner that I can vote on than paying no taxes up to the day when a mass of starving poor people overrun what little police my no-taxes provide and take everything (including my life). For all but the most ludicrously rich, safety nets are cheaper and safer than their equivalent in armed guards.
and a general distaste for anyone with Ambition.
Distaste for ambition? You mean like when you work your ass off to make the company a lot of extra money and your boss laughs at you as he pockets all the gains without so much as giving you a pittance of a bonus? Like how your colleagues treat you when the boss says that there's gonna be a 15% downsizing soon and nobody knows whether they've still got a job or not? The sort where your manager gets you fired when you stay late every day for a month and pull off the efficiency gain he couldn't manage in five years of running the department? Yeah, that's common to all peoples of all times, regardless of ideological, political, or intellectual affiliation.
How is this different than what your Right wing parents believe? Good job on switching brands of Koolaid there, you must be so proud to be enlightened now.
One involves a Great Sky Fairy returning to solve everything for the low low price of sitting on your ass and having faith. The other involves people working their asses off to achieve the best society that mere humans can construct. Historically speaking, people working their asses off has, despite all of the spectacular failures, yielded better results than ass-sitting faith ever did.
Did you read what I wrote?
I'm not talking about technical limitations. I'm talking about the fact that if I write a compiler for some non-sanctioned language which generates valid iPhone apps (which only call into approved public APIs and conform to all technical recommendations), Apple can use that fact alone as grounds for rejection. That is, they will reject the app, not because it does something bad which might compromise the device or hurt user experience, but because I didn't use XCode.
Microsoft, on the other hand, won't reject my game just because I decide to not use their development environment and build system. If I can make a valid verifiable type-safe assembly which targets the public API and conforms to technical requirements, I can ship it.
no procedural audio
Annoying that they didn't bother to expose that API. Not usually a show-stopper. Not particularly relevant to my point, either.
no conlangs
No unapproved languages and no documented conlangs. If you want an alien language you need to set it up such that either nobody or everybody can read it. You can't use Russian or Klingon because they don't have reviewers that can tick off the "no profanity except as noted in the rating" box on the review checklist.
That, to me, is a lot more reasonable than, say, refusing a satirist's cartoons because they make fun of politicians.
and no ports
There's as much a barrier porting C++ games to XNA as there is porting Flash games to the iPhone. More, actually, since Flash functions as a DCC tool and a build pipeline as well as engine. And, where Microsoft has legal issues that keep them from giving away full devkits, the only thing keeping Flash off of the iPhone is Steve's word.
You haven't taught anything but how to point and click.
Except for introducing the concepts of components, objects, properties, events, syntax, variables, assignment statements, and build cycles, that is.
At the beginner level, what they did is exactly as much real programming as the traditional, "Don't worry about this boilerplate int main stuff, or the odd acronyms you're typing at the prompt, I'll explain it later," is in C-based classes.
At the advanced level, it is just as much real programming as parser-generators are.
Microsoft didn't allow indie games at all on the original Xbox console. Is that evil?
Indie games weren't allowed on the original XBOX because there's no way to practically get expensive dev kits out to thousands of small developers at prices that they can afford while holding them all to their NDAs (NDAs which they can't just be waived as they're required to guard the licensed IP of other companies who make XBOX components). They also lacked the means to effectively distribute indie games (pressing $5 games onto DVDs and putting them on trucks isn't a great business plan when you need to run things through QA teams that aren't geared for that kind load). As soon as they got a limited-but-non-NDA'd-to-hell SDK together (XNA, which is nearly on version 4), they allowed indie games on the XBOX (360). They even built out the XBLA store with them in mind.
Apple already has a SDK that's been approved by all the lawyers. They have a developer program that's available at a reasonable price. They already have a QA department that's set up for high volumes of small products. They already have a store. They're just being dicks.
Thing is this: if Adobe were to make a flash "compiler" that spat out 100% Objective-C projects that directly used Apple's APIs (and they offered to do just that, if I recall correctly), Apple's SDK agreement still prohibits its use. If I make a tool that takes my game written in whatever language and spits out C# that targets the XNA APIs, Microsoft has no problem with it. Actually, I can even skip the C# step and go straight to "native" .NET binaries and Microsoft still won't care. Apple, not so much. About the only logical reason I can see for that restriction is to fuck over anyone that prefers to develop on tools or platforms that don't come from Apple.
Voyager also teaches us that aliens are basically humans with a good costume department.
I'd be more worried about space-based asteroid-eating critters deciding they should nibble on the hull. Those would at least be in an environment that's vaguely similar to the one they evolved in.
Alien cheese culture finding our particular chemistry tasty, our particular temperature and pH range livable, and having means to evade our immune responses is pretty damn unlikely...
What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
He and the perfectly rational consumer that most of our economic theory is predicated on get together for drinks every Friday to reminisce about the humble scholar who seeks only truth...
Well, Cyrillic lowercase tends to look more like scaled-down uppercase than the completely different glyphs Latin uses. They'd have to use italic/handwritten lowercase T to get a "m" to render, and I don't think that's actually a separate code point. But I'm just nitpicking, your point still stands.
A decent solution should start with disallow mixing languages in the TLDs - you can spell a lot less with the Cyrillic characters that look like Latin characters than you can by swapping out or two letters here and there. Plus, if all of the characters in the TLD are unambiguously not in my own alphabet, my browser can throw up a nice little "foreign site - Russian" icon next to it.
I'm in my mid-20s. If I cannot figure out on my own, without assistance, that I will one day grow old and wish to retire, and that the time to start saving up and preparing for that is right now, why should somebody else be forced to pay for my lack of foresight? Morally speaking, I don't know how to justify that one. That is, I cannot tell you why my failure to plan ahead should become someone else's emergency.
Social security benefits (or is supposed to benefit - this can be argued) the old by providing a guarantied minimum pension which isn't subject to your employer or your investment manager fucking up or outright defrauding you. It benefits the middle-aged in that they don't have to worry about (or prepare for) being stuck with feeding their now dead-weight parents (sapping them of otherwise productive energies). It benefits the young in that it fosters a culture that encourages old folks to retire younger than they otherwise might, opening positions and opportunities which would otherwise be closed for many years.
It's supposed to be a cost with a greater benefit. Whether it turns out that way in the end is anybody's guess. It seems that an apathetic electorate may have enabled in SS what corporate opacity enables a whole lot of in Wall Street.
It's likewise with health insurance. I pay a monthly premium for my health insurance. I see it this way: I pay an insurance premium so that I am prepared in the event of a medical disaster, or I risk bankruptcy. I chose to pay the insurance premium. Other people will have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis as they see fit. So long as they don't dip into my wallet to make up for their shortcomings, I have no problem with this.
Socialized healthcare is exactly about personal responsibility in the face of disaster. It amazes me that this isn't more obvious:
There are four ways to stop making you pay for other people's healthcare:
This turns into a disaster as hospitals get bankrupted. This hits the whole population quite badly in two ways. First, the loss of such a large portion of the medical infrastructure does terrible things to a population's ability to deal with epidemics or even more mundane accidents that threaten key productive members. Second, all the problem people who were relying on the ER are left to suffer or die on their own. Misery of that sort engenders criminality as desperate family members might decide to steal gramma's drugs for her.
While this is about as responsible as you can make people be for their choices, it completely fucks over those who planned for common illnesses and then get run over by a drunk driver (or even those with the misfortune of having their insurance paperwork misfiled). It also transforms Sicko from exaggeration and sensationalism into undisputed truth. Not too surprising that nobody really advocates this.
If this could be done, I think it would already be done. The major issues are that hospital-grade medicine is inherently expensive, since hospitals rely on pricey high tech and specialists to carry out their work. Charities are also easily overwhelmed in economic downturns as people both have less to give and as many of the poorer members of society will be increasing their risk of illness through the stress of finding additional work or by switching to cheaper foods (among oth
The reason why is that the programming is just terrible. The things that they put on television simply aren't the things that entertain me and mine. It doesn't matter where you get your programming if watching it makes you feel like you're wasting your time.
Yup. When Bell's idiotic phone droid tried to bullshit me into changing my mind about cancelling my service, I told them, "There are about three hours worth of enjoyable programming in a week. A third of that time is taken by commercials. Either tell me how paying you $65/month and wasting four hours watching commercials for eight hours of actual entertainment isn't completely retarded or stop stalling and cancel the account. Keep in mind that $65 could easily buy me a season of my favorite show on DVD or a AAA video game each month." To his credit, said phone droid knew better than to keep arguing.
We do still have the Internet if something comes up we need to know about, and it's likely to be both more timely, and available on demand, news in particular. News networks - CNN, FOX, etc. - are just pitiful. FOX is like a work of (bad) fiction, and CNN is a reach-around fest for the clueless. Half a country can be in ruins and the top story on CNN will be that some Hollywood marriage is breaking up.
It really is amazing, isn't it, how every time you think you've seen the dumbest thing ever they manage to surprise you with something new? Almost as though they're not actually in the business of selling you the news... Regardless what they do they aren't worth paying money for when you can find the stories more clearly stated and in greater detail online.
As far as what we continue to use the television for, there's still plenty without broadcast: XBox 360/HDDVD (yeah, we have a few), PS3/Bluray, Wii, DVD, and our media Mac.
[snip]
And in the end, you can get all the shows on a DVD or Bluray (if you're lucky), and watch them without commercials, in very good quality, as many times as you like, and furthermore, you can legitimately loan 'em to your friends.
Yes! Exactly! And it's cheaper! My old satellite TV budget (still based on what it cost several years ago, mind you) has since paid for a Wii, an XBOX 360, XBLA membership, XNA membership, a PS3, a bunch of video games, spare controllers for when friends drop by, my WoW subscription, and the DVD box set of every series I really like (many of which were temporarily traded with friends getting me access to even more shows). Shows I like a bit but not enough to own and the few series that deal with current events (Daily Show, to an extent South Park) I watch on watch.$NETWORK.com (which has commercials, but that's fine given that they aren't demanding I pay them for the right to watch even those).
Why did you end up being you, instead of me?
For the same reason my Lego car is a Lego car and not a hat - because the laws of physics have caused the the energy in my body to assume the form called "n dot l" on Slashdot and not into the one called ShakaUVM.
Not at all. It seems pretty reasonable that the brain and mind are strongly connected, though precisely how might never be determined.
Gonna repeat myself since this point is more relevant here: mind is a function of brain, in the same way that ability-to-drive-in-circles is a function of my Lego car. There is no need to postulate an extra-physical realm from which mind comes or to which it goes any more than there is a need to believe in a realm of ability-to-drive-in-circles.
No, I'm not talking about why you are seeing out of your eyes, but why you are seeing out of your eyes, and not me.
Put the emphasis anywhere you like, he answered your question. My eyes affect my brain because they are connected to it. My eyes do not affect your brain because there is no means or reason for them to do so.
Explain to me why "you" are looking out of your eyes and "I" am looking out of mine. There's no real reason, it seems completely arbitrary, and yet there it is - unarguably so.
What the hell are you smoking? You may as well ask me to explain why the sky is blue or why water runs downhill. I "look out of" (a more accurate phrase would be "am affected by the light that happens to enter") my eyes and not yours because those are the only eyes my brain is attached to.
As I said, you can black box the entire bit.
As I argued, you cannot. If you want to be understood, then stop hiding what you mean behind other words (saying "consciousness" instead of "soul") and stop repeating the same thing over and over again. Make an actual argument.
You don't need to understand it, or even define it.
What I don't need are unfounded assumptions like the one you just made. Why don't I need to understand it? Why is it a black box? And if it is, indeed, a black box then why can you not accept that the black box is interchangeable with a biochemical computer that happens to affect the universe in precisely the same way as your mystery force - that it cannot simply be that biochemical computer? What's the piece of evidence that precludes such a conclusion which you aren't communicating here?
What is this thing which is not mere matter but which bends to the might of simple alcohol?
The simple fact of the matter was that before you were born, you didn't exist, and now you do.
My Lego car didn't exist before I built it. The pieces did, but the car did not. My Lego car now exists. And as far as "oh, but you're conscious and there was no consciousness in your atoms before you were made from them" well neither did the Lego bricks have ability-to-drive-around before I assembled the car and hooked up the motor. Ability-to-drive-around was built out of ordinary matter, and consciousness is also, as far as I can tell, just a thing which is built from ordinary matter.
I still don't understand why this idea is so threatening to you - why you insist on asserting that being made of "just atoms" is somehow an inferior state of being when you can at any given time look up and see the stars themselves, which are made of the same stuff. I really don't understand why religious folk (and I'm generalizing here) insist on elevating themselves to an existence above that of the very cosmos - it seems ridiculously arrogant for an age where we no longer believe in geocentricism.
Atheism has a very hard time dealing with this issue, along with related issues of why there is anything at all.
No it doesn't. There is no issue. You made it up when you asserted that consciousness is something somehow "above" force and energy, and then went on to assert that it must be immortal and come from some other realm without any backing argument.
As for explaining where the universe came from, Science has a convincing argument based on evidence where religion has a story in a book and appeals to authority to demand faith.
Unless you mean "why" in the sense of "why do bad things happen to good people" or "what is the meaning of these events". Yeah. I concept-invented-by-humans (peer) out of my eyes and not yours concept-invented-by-humans (because, in the sense of purpose or higher meaning)... how do you even finish that sentence? It's like asking the "meaning" of my Lego car driving around in circles.
Souls? Whatever it is that's peering out of your eyes. You don't need to define it, since you are experiencing it right now.
So my concept-invented-by-humans (soul) is the thing that concept-invented-by-humans (peers) out of my eyes. I concept-invented-by-humans (experience) it right now. Yes! It all makes sense now! Of course it will concept-invented-by-humans (have) a concept-invented-by-humans (afterlife) when I die!
Honestly, you do need to define what it is, because I'm not sitting here acting baffled out of some odd desire to spite you or whatever gods you may believe in. Nor, do I believe, does anyone else who would argue as I do. Everything I "experience" behind my eyes is easily (and, within the limits of my own subjective experience, obviously) one or another form of mental machinery. Especially the part that handles language and the bit that lags (despite its best efforts to pretend otherwise) a few seconds behind all the others recording memories of "consciousness" which are pathetically inaccurate descriptions of my mental state (I single them out since they seem to be the best candidates for what is commonly called "consciousness").
When you talk about the thing peering through my eyes the only thing I come up with is the confused understanding of myself that I vaguely recall having as a small child, back when my mind was too small to encompass a useful model of itself. Give me some objective description of what you're describing here.
Anyway, I have an experiment (thought or otherwise) to illustrate my point: go get drunk. I mean really drunk. Completely wrecked. Explain how your consciousness is both "more" than "mere" atoms and yet so utterly (and predictably, in an almost mechanical way) disrupted by mere molecules of alcohol. And, if you make the "oh the brain is an antenna for the soul, which exists apart from energy and force, and the signals are getting garbled in the brain" argument, be sure to explain how drunks are still capable of purposeful (if odd) action and why a drunk often experiences conviction that whatever idiotic thing he's doing is a good idea rather than confusion as to why his limbs won't move as he intends.
And no calling the drunk's experience erroneous or illusory - not after you just defined "self"/"soul"/"consciousness" in terms of experience. If the thought even crosses your mind, remember that your mental state is strongly impacted (though in more regular ways) by everything in your environment (are you hungry? tired? buzzing on caffeine? made irritable by the incessant flicker of the office light? suddenly gladdened by something beautiful?) and that no form of experience is exempt from suspicion of the tamperings of "mere" physics.
Ah. So we're back to souls now.