The harsh reality is that "Inalienable Rights" truly do not exist.
that is your opinion. others would argue that they do exist regardless of who recognizes them. Wasn't that the justification for the american revolution? the british government did not recognize the rights of the people, and rather than saying 'oh well, i guess we don't have rights after all' the people rejected that government and formed their own. they did so because they believed that people really do have these rights, not because a governing body decided to let them live in a certain way.
These games are just ones that are popular now. A proper list would have to include the following at minimum:
Elite - Procedural generation, 3D graphics, open ended game play - in 1984 on a computer with only a few kilobytes of memory. Genius.
Starcraft - The game that became a sport. Still being played to this day by masses of people despite its ludicrously dated graphics
Doom - Wolfenstein came first, but it was Doom that made Id into software Gods and replaced the term 'first person shooter' with 'doom clone' for about 5 years
Counterstrike - A turning point for fps, made the 'tactical shooter' popular in addition to multi-player teamwork
Everquest - World of Warcraft is more popular now, but Everquest set the standard for 3D online fantasy worlds that are as immersive and addictive as being dunked in liquid heroin.
But of course, nobody cares about history, because people have the attention span of goldfish.
So really, you don't have a good standard either? It seems that if your standard for 3 were applied to 5 then WoW would be on the list, not Everquest.
Real scientists *do* say "I could be wrong" all the time, and try to estimate the odds of being wrong. We're happy with greater certainty, but we know that 100% guarantees don't exist.
There are good scientists and poor scientists, but they are still people practicing science. Their good or bad science is part of the general discourse but hopefully only the good science results in induction.
The hebrew bible gets the order of Persian kings wrong. Josephus quotes list of Persian kings found in hebrew manuscript. Tada, the list of persian kings is independently verified!
Do you have some references? A quick google search didn't turn up anything on it
No. The government has to make sure everyone gets a converter box because that's how they keep the circuses going for the sheeple. As long as the Bread and Circuses are in place the shysters running things are fine. Take either one away, and people might wake up and kick the bastards out.
You may be right, but having just experienced a snow storm that left many roads impassible, another reason comes to mind. It could also be that the government realizes that this is a good medium to convey information to the masses. That is to say, in the event that something monumental or catastrophic happens, they will be able to communicate with the vast majority of the populace.
That's what you get for pissing off Jesse "the future Governor of Minnesota" Ventura.
Cloaking device or not.
Actually, predator wasn't injured until after he killed Ventura. That one bald dude then picked up his gun and shot randomly into the forest and injured the predator.
Science does not prove anything, it provides the best explaination for observations. The observable expansion of the visable universe is EVIDENCE to support the big bang. Science does not claim that god didn't light the fuse, it claims there is no EVIDENCE of a fuse. There are lots of things you can believe in without evidence, such unicorns and fairies, why is a belief in fairies any more or less rational than a belief in "a higher power"?
What is interesting about cosmology is that it uniquely deals with the issue of origin as compared to other areas of science. So while some theists think that the big bang is an attack on the notion that God exists, there are other thinkers that believe that the big bang model helps the theist case. For example, the standard big bang model points to a time in the finite past where not only matter and energy, but also space and time came into existence out of nothing. Here's an interesting article regarding this from a theist perspective.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
A theist can stick their fingers in their ears and chant litanies, and is indeed, far more likely to, because their doctrine includes inbuilt mechanisms that tell them to resist all questions and doubts. They might even obey the instructions in their doctrine that tell them to destroy those with world views that conflict with theirs.
Your average secular Joe is doing the same thing as the ignorant theist, only your language is clearly favoring the secular Joe... and why? Because he's secular Joe! That is exactly the problem. It has nothing to do with theism or atheism and everything to do with MY group vs. YOUR group.
A scientist would examine and attempt to verify the other fellows position - and if he was right, may actually thank him for the enlightenment.
This is just not true. No one is that objective. And when the conclusion to the question might require a radical change in behavior, it's even more certain that no one will be that objective.
I think the main problem with the logic, and the reason people who believe in an after life would not agree with you is that you're applying the scientific method to something that is not physical. So, yeah, other than that you're cool.
Not to burst your bubble, but have you ever considered your BFF might be tortured to have your passwords extracted from him?
I love that this got modded Insightful. Is that you Dwight Schrute? What are the odds that someone with a "BFF" is going to have information sensitive enought to require torture?!
Personally I find the idea of an oscillating universe (Big bang -> expansion -> contraction -> Big crunch) to be appealing. At least that's a theory that might be proven given enough time.
You might want to consider giving up on that model by now...
"... almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang" (Hawking and Penrose 1996: 20).
Question: Why is the universe the way it is?
Answer: Because if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe it and pose the question.
This idea gets thrown around by a lot of people, and it just doesn't seem to make any sense. At a superficial level it kind of helps to push the question away from the forefront of the mind, maybe convince yourself that it's dealt with, but consider this:
Suppose a man were to be executed by a firing squad, all of whom were armed with live ammunition, standing relatively close, etc. Suppose that upon firing their weapons, not a single person shot the man -- all had missed. Do you think it would be reasonable for the man to say some varant of, "Well of course they all missed, I wouldn't be here to observe it were it not for their missing!"
That being said, this model is clearly an attempt to avoid that problem by positing a large number of possible universes, such that all of them are equally likely, whereas if there were only one universe then the one that exists for us to live in would seem to be quite unlikely. I expect this idea will get a lot of backing in the non-theist community.
As others have said though, the multiverse concept doesn't remove the need for an explaination for 'why is there something rather than nothing' unless the universe is cyclic, or rather, there is no start to space and time.
What I don't get is how Xenu and his nukes is treated as bunk, but the invisible man in the sky who can hear a billion people whisper to him at the same time is treated like a celebrity who dare not be questioned by anyone who wants to run for elected office in America.
Maybe because that statement is misrepresenting theistic belief to make it sound silly? Theism is not "an invisible man in the sky." I am taking the statement literally here, that there is a human that lives in the upper atmosphere that cannot be detected by any known means, but does have the ability to open a one way communication channel with any of the earth's occupants.
When you say "invisible man in the sky" it makes theism sound absurd because if that's what theism was, it IS absurd.
But Xenu's nukes are not a misrepresentation of Scientology. They sound silly all on their own.
That's not a really good answer to your question, but that's where I see the difference.
Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.
I think an approach that would work better would be to phrase it in terms so that it will benefit the hardware vendors if they do this. Engaging them with the technical challenge is ok, but to really get the other company behind it they would have to make sure that it is something that would actually really benefit the other company. The hardware vendors need to answer to shareholders too.
If the war were putting most US lives into ruin then yeah, I'd agree. It's bad, but I think that for the most part our day to day lives have been unaffected. Maybe a little higher taxes down the line. But if we pull out then a lot of people will die.
So I guess I'm looking at the pros and cons and thinking that I'm ok with putting up with some relatively minor suffering if it will alleviate some major suffering from someone else.
At this point, the cost of "winning" seems to be a lot higher.
The cost of winning is billions, maybe trillions in debt, which is really bad. The cost of losing is millions of lives lost in the ensuing chaos. You've got to be a real cold SOB to calculate that an iraqi life is worth less than say $1000 - $10,000.
What I meant to ask really is I would love to know what the world would be like if everyone decided to do away with their sticks.
Would a lack of big sticks effectively breed out the smaller sticks? Would there be a need for someone to go make a medium stick if there wasn't anyone with a bigger stick to start with?
To make a less vague example: If the US spent the money it has on the War in Iraq/Afghanistan on humanitarian efforts in those exact same countries would there still be such a level of insurgency and resentment or would the common people whose lives would have been vastly improved weeded out the problems themselves? I mean, why are those people turning to extremism? If I didn't have water to drink, food to eat, a hospital for when I was sick I could easily be turned to go "fight the enemy". If I had those things given to me (or access to them in the first place) I can't imagine myself able to be stirred up to that level of rage at all. I sometimes think different to others, but rather than focusing so much on putting out the fire, why can't people spent more focus on finding out why the fire started in the first place?
Ok, here's why it wouldn't work and why no contry tries to acomplish its goals in that way.
If we donated humanitarian aid to Iraq/Afghanistan there would still be people in positions of power in those countries that would eiter 1) not let us give aid in the first place or 2) take the aid for themselves and the poor still end up poor.
It might not seem so obvious here because already have the 'infrastructure of compassion' that would generally allow for such aid. When powerful people with 'big sticks' can do whatever they want, they will manipulate the circumstances to their own benefit every time. If you still want to give aid to those without power (who actually need aid), you have to stop the people with the sticks. The only realistic way of doing so seems (as far as I can tell) to use bigger sticks. Sucks, but it's the way people work.
Taken well salted considering the source, but an interesting read nontheless: here.
Summary is this: if the universe is not past-infinite, what are the philosophical and religious inferences we can make regarding the big bang.
The best part about a democracy is you get your opinion and I get mine. We'll see who wins on the 4th. Best of luck to your viewpoint, but I think there are far more people who are tired of getting fucked then those who make 11 bucks an hour and prefer your view of things.
You know, it doesn't suprise me that the majority of people are going to be happy with receiving money from the government at the expense of others. What bothers me is how similar it ends up sounding to just straight out buying the vote from someone.
"I'll give you $100 to vote for me."
"I'll give you a tax break if you vote for me."
Not to mention that it penalizes people for success... well, I'll stop at that.
Slashdot Mirror
The harsh reality is that "Inalienable Rights" truly do not exist.
that is your opinion. others would argue that they do exist regardless of who recognizes them. Wasn't that the justification for the american revolution? the british government did not recognize the rights of the people, and rather than saying 'oh well, i guess we don't have rights after all' the people rejected that government and formed their own. they did so because they believed that people really do have these rights, not because a governing body decided to let them live in a certain way.
These games are just ones that are popular now. A proper list would have to include the following at minimum:
But of course, nobody cares about history, because people have the attention span of goldfish.
So really, you don't have a good standard either? It seems that if your standard for 3 were applied to 5 then WoW would be on the list, not Everquest.
Real scientists *do* say "I could be wrong" all the time, and try to estimate the odds of being wrong. We're happy with greater certainty, but we know that 100% guarantees don't exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
There are good scientists and poor scientists, but they are still people practicing science. Their good or bad science is part of the general discourse but hopefully only the good science results in induction.
The hebrew bible gets the order of Persian kings wrong. Josephus quotes list of Persian kings found in hebrew manuscript. Tada, the list of persian kings is independently verified!
Do you have some references? A quick google search didn't turn up anything on it
No. The government has to make sure everyone gets a converter box because that's how they keep the circuses going for the sheeple. As long as the Bread and Circuses are in place the shysters running things are fine. Take either one away, and people might wake up and kick the bastards out.
You may be right, but having just experienced a snow storm that left many roads impassible, another reason comes to mind. It could also be that the government realizes that this is a good medium to convey information to the masses. That is to say, in the event that something monumental or catastrophic happens, they will be able to communicate with the vast majority of the populace.
That's what you get for pissing off Jesse "the future Governor of Minnesota" Ventura. Cloaking device or not.
Actually, predator wasn't injured until after he killed Ventura. That one bald dude then picked up his gun and shot randomly into the forest and injured the predator.
Science does not prove anything, it provides the best explaination for observations. The observable expansion of the visable universe is EVIDENCE to support the big bang. Science does not claim that god didn't light the fuse, it claims there is no EVIDENCE of a fuse. There are lots of things you can believe in without evidence, such unicorns and fairies, why is a belief in fairies any more or less rational than a belief in "a higher power"?
What is interesting about cosmology is that it uniquely deals with the issue of origin as compared to other areas of science. So while some theists think that the big bang is an attack on the notion that God exists, there are other thinkers that believe that the big bang model helps the theist case. For example, the standard big bang model points to a time in the finite past where not only matter and energy, but also space and time came into existence out of nothing. Here's an interesting article regarding this from a theist perspective.
Use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. No wires. Do Time Machine backups to Time Capsule. No wires. Actual, physical wires are so... '80s.
Wireless is also inherently insecure. It makes key logging a breeze.
Look at your two examples.
Your average secular Joe might think about it and concede that they were wrong, and something might actually change for the better. Or they might just say "that sounds very nice, but I like my old opinion better".
A theist can stick their fingers in their ears and chant litanies, and is indeed, far more likely to, because their doctrine includes inbuilt mechanisms that tell them to resist all questions and doubts. They might even obey the instructions in their doctrine that tell them to destroy those with world views that conflict with theirs.
Your average secular Joe is doing the same thing as the ignorant theist, only your language is clearly favoring the secular Joe ... and why? Because he's secular Joe! That is exactly the problem. It has nothing to do with theism or atheism and everything to do with MY group vs. YOUR group.
A scientist would examine and attempt to verify the other fellows position - and if he was right, may actually thank him for the enlightenment.
This is just not true. No one is that objective. And when the conclusion to the question might require a radical change in behavior, it's even more certain that no one will be that objective.
- the 500 years of the dark ages when Christianity ruled over science and anyone questioning the authority of the church was killed (murder/massacre)
Actually Francis Bacon didn't develop the scientific method until the 1500s
I think the main problem with the logic, and the reason people who believe in an after life would not agree with you is that you're applying the scientific method to something that is not physical. So, yeah, other than that you're cool.
Not to burst your bubble, but have you ever considered your BFF might be tortured to have your passwords extracted from him?
I love that this got modded Insightful. Is that you Dwight Schrute? What are the odds that someone with a "BFF" is going to have information sensitive enought to require torture?!
Haha, ok, carry on.
Personally I find the idea of an oscillating universe (Big bang -> expansion -> contraction -> Big crunch) to be appealing. At least that's a theory that might be proven given enough time.
You might want to consider giving up on that model by now ...
"... almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang" (Hawking and Penrose 1996: 20).
Question: Why is the universe the way it is? Answer: Because if it were any other way, we wouldn't be here to observe it and pose the question.
This idea gets thrown around by a lot of people, and it just doesn't seem to make any sense. At a superficial level it kind of helps to push the question away from the forefront of the mind, maybe convince yourself that it's dealt with, but consider this:
Suppose a man were to be executed by a firing squad, all of whom were armed with live ammunition, standing relatively close, etc. Suppose that upon firing their weapons, not a single person shot the man -- all had missed. Do you think it would be reasonable for the man to say some varant of, "Well of course they all missed, I wouldn't be here to observe it were it not for their missing!"
That being said, this model is clearly an attempt to avoid that problem by positing a large number of possible universes, such that all of them are equally likely, whereas if there were only one universe then the one that exists for us to live in would seem to be quite unlikely. I expect this idea will get a lot of backing in the non-theist community.
As others have said though, the multiverse concept doesn't remove the need for an explaination for 'why is there something rather than nothing' unless the universe is cyclic, or rather, there is no start to space and time.
What I don't get is how Xenu and his nukes is treated as bunk, but the invisible man in the sky who can hear a billion people whisper to him at the same time is treated like a celebrity who dare not be questioned by anyone who wants to run for elected office in America.
Maybe because that statement is misrepresenting theistic belief to make it sound silly? Theism is not "an invisible man in the sky." I am taking the statement literally here, that there is a human that lives in the upper atmosphere that cannot be detected by any known means, but does have the ability to open a one way communication channel with any of the earth's occupants.
When you say "invisible man in the sky" it makes theism sound absurd because if that's what theism was, it IS absurd.
But Xenu's nukes are not a misrepresentation of Scientology. They sound silly all on their own.
That's not a really good answer to your question, but that's where I see the difference.
I challenge you to demonstrate to me that there is a QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE between the thermostat, the ameoba, and you.
Well, for one, the ameoba and the thermostat can't make slashdot posts arguing that they are the same as humans.
Windows 7 is being released, and soon. Yeah, we screwed the pooch with Vista. But we'd like to fix things, and we'd like your help. Towards that end we are making a pre-release version of Windows 7 beta available to developers so we can make something that has the promise of Vista, but actually delivers. And we'll be holding several WinHEC sessions, to help you, our valued partners make this next Windows the best product it can be.
I think an approach that would work better would be to phrase it in terms so that it will benefit the hardware vendors if they do this. Engaging them with the technical challenge is ok, but to really get the other company behind it they would have to make sure that it is something that would actually really benefit the other company. The hardware vendors need to answer to shareholders too.
If the war were putting most US lives into ruin then yeah, I'd agree. It's bad, but I think that for the most part our day to day lives have been unaffected. Maybe a little higher taxes down the line. But if we pull out then a lot of people will die.
So I guess I'm looking at the pros and cons and thinking that I'm ok with putting up with some relatively minor suffering if it will alleviate some major suffering from someone else.
At this point, the cost of "winning" seems to be a lot higher.
The cost of winning is billions, maybe trillions in debt, which is really bad. The cost of losing is millions of lives lost in the ensuing chaos. You've got to be a real cold SOB to calculate that an iraqi life is worth less than say $1000 - $10,000.
What I meant to ask really is I would love to know what the world would be like if everyone decided to do away with their sticks. Would a lack of big sticks effectively breed out the smaller sticks? Would there be a need for someone to go make a medium stick if there wasn't anyone with a bigger stick to start with? To make a less vague example: If the US spent the money it has on the War in Iraq/Afghanistan on humanitarian efforts in those exact same countries would there still be such a level of insurgency and resentment or would the common people whose lives would have been vastly improved weeded out the problems themselves? I mean, why are those people turning to extremism? If I didn't have water to drink, food to eat, a hospital for when I was sick I could easily be turned to go "fight the enemy". If I had those things given to me (or access to them in the first place) I can't imagine myself able to be stirred up to that level of rage at all. I sometimes think different to others, but rather than focusing so much on putting out the fire, why can't people spent more focus on finding out why the fire started in the first place?
Ok, here's why it wouldn't work and why no contry tries to acomplish its goals in that way.
If we donated humanitarian aid to Iraq/Afghanistan there would still be people in positions of power in those countries that would eiter 1) not let us give aid in the first place or 2) take the aid for themselves and the poor still end up poor.
It might not seem so obvious here because already have the 'infrastructure of compassion' that would generally allow for such aid. When powerful people with 'big sticks' can do whatever they want, they will manipulate the circumstances to their own benefit every time. If you still want to give aid to those without power (who actually need aid), you have to stop the people with the sticks. The only realistic way of doing so seems (as far as I can tell) to use bigger sticks. Sucks, but it's the way people work.
Taken well salted considering the source, but an interesting read nontheless: here. Summary is this: if the universe is not past-infinite, what are the philosophical and religious inferences we can make regarding the big bang.
What's corrupt about that? These people are performing a valid service to the public and are being persecuted by the government for it.
However, the government gets to decide which services are valid and invalid, that is, which are legal and illegal.
The best part about a democracy is you get your opinion and I get mine. We'll see who wins on the 4th. Best of luck to your viewpoint, but I think there are far more people who are tired of getting fucked then those who make 11 bucks an hour and prefer your view of things.
You know, it doesn't suprise me that the majority of people are going to be happy with receiving money from the government at the expense of others. What bothers me is how similar it ends up sounding to just straight out buying the vote from someone.
... well, I'll stop at that.
"I'll give you $100 to vote for me."
"I'll give you a tax break if you vote for me."
Not to mention that it penalizes people for success