If time travel is possible, it will probably never be discovered (or rather, will be discovered, then reversed by someone changing the time line). 'Time travel discovered' is a state of unstable equilibrium in that, so long as it is possible, people will go back in time to change some feature of their lives. Since there will always be some improvement you can make, people will keep going back until they inadvertently change things so that time travel is never discovered, at which point the timeline will enter a state of stable equilibrium, because people will have no way of changing it, except in the usual way.
It is impossible to prove a negative, such as God's non-existence (or Santa Claus's, for that matter.)
That's why the burden of proof rests on those who claim that God exists.
Indeed. That, in fact, was entirely the point of my post: that it is not sufficient to say that faith is believing in that which evidence indicates is untrue, because there are many things for which no such evidence exists, as you so redundantly pointed out.
religious apologists aside.* By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence.
I think it would be more accurate to say it is belief in something despite evidence to the contrary.
More to the point, if evidence exists that is contrary to your belief, then the evidence obviously must be flawed. From that perspective, I think that modern politics is essentially a religion as well.
I'd stick with the original definition if I were you. There's no evidence that an omniscient and all-powerful God doesn't exist, because the very definition precludes being disproved by scientific means. In particular, any observed phenomenon, or it's cause, can be ascribed to God, and his omniscient, and therefore inscrutable, motives
You can point out that a heating element burns my hand because of the Laws of Thermodynamics, but I could counter by saying those Laws only exist by God's will, and then if you come up with some cause for the Laws of Thermodynamics, I'd counter by saying that is by God's will, and so on. Of course that's all dreadfully unscientific, which is precisely why rational belief requires evidence, and everything else is faith.
So if the fact of regular citizens owning guns no longer has a bearing on the militia, does that mean the right to bear arms can be infringed? In other words, does the right to bear arms hinge on it being a requirement for a well-regulated militia, or not? It's complicated stuff.
This ridiculous comment should have been modded the flamebait it is. First of all, America is just one of many (if not all) nations which are addicted to oil. Singling out the US and americans for this is preposterous. Secondly, and more importantly, as much as we all want (or at least, need) oil, no one forced BP to cut corners and be sloppy. And I mean BP specifically. They have a farworse record than other companies.
Look, if you don't want Google Doing it, because they are "BIG CORP", then don't do it yourself. There is no difference between the idea of wardriving individually, and Google doing, except for scale.
I'm not sure about this particular instance, but a difference in scale can be much more significant that you imply. Consider someone who doesn't usually shred or burn his bills before throwing them out. He just tosses them in the trash. There is a small risk that someone could go through his trash, find these bills, and use the information on them to open a bank account in his name, or perform some other fraud. It's small though, because rooting through dumpsters is a lot of work for relatively few potential victims.
Change the scale, though, and suddenly this becomes profitable--if you get access to a database of millions of people's address, names, and account numbers, you can make decent money even if only 1% of those records pan out into a successful fraud.
If anyone was serious about reducing pollution, then something way more simple would be in place. This is how you know that global warming- the political aspect of it anyways, it more about revenue and control then the environment. You see, if they were serious about Co2 being a problem, then treaties like Kyoto would take all those scientists sent to convince the world they needed to tax and impoverish their populations through IPCC reports, and put them in a room with the purpose of finding practical sources of clean energy or ways to make existing sources cleaner.
You're brilliant! I wonder why no one else has thought of shrilly insisting that scientists provide us with a simple technological solution to this problem? Someone should get Steve Jobs on the phone so he can whip up some magical and revolutionary energy technology that will whisk away all our problems. Seriously, there are many ugly, complex problems that have ugly, complex solutions, and Global Warming is one of them.
In the sentence, fucking gives emphasis to the statement. It's like having an exclamation mark which means angry-emphasis instead of emphasis in general. Ass is a valid adjective with meaning. The fact that the thought appears banal after you remove the swear-words precisely disproves your point. They obviously add something, or else removing them wouldn't alter the sentence so much.
When exactly did this happen? Who is the last PM (or whatever your head of state is called) that you believe genuinely represented the people? Do you have any theories on why it is our elected representatives stopped representing us and started representing... the lobbyists, I assume?
To some, it's being a minute over a certain age. To others, it's a level of maturity.
This was not insightful. A moment's reflection would reveal that being a minute over a certain age is an approximation of your level of maturity. The approximation is used because it's obviously not feasible to spend months getting to know someone in order to determine if they really are mature enough to purchase alcohol. Nobody anywhere thinks that there's something magical about turning 18.
But please, don't let my crankiness get in the way of your knocking down of strawmen.
Yes... unless your lawyer finds out that there's some connection between the police and the third party who is hacking you, and then gets the evidence thrown out... And you'd be happy, but some other Slashdotter would take your place to rail against the rich using high-powered lawyers to buy their way out of trouble.:P
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who sat on his ass and got a degree in "video game design" from some no-name school? Or some guy that programmed and released for free an innovative game over the internet?
Well, when you put it that way, I think I'd hire the guy who published the internet game. But if we swap around your prejudices...
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who got a degree in video game design from an accredited and widely respected school? Or some guy that sat on his ass and programmed and released for free some crappy game that no one ever heard of, much less played, over the internet ?
All of a sudden I want to hire the guy who went to school! It's like magic!
The thing is, the Vatican is not particularly opposed to science and technology. You just think they are because you believe too much of what you read on the front page of Slashdot, and in the comments... You can blindly trust this comment, of course. It's all the others you have to watch out for.
There are better ways to kill off entire civilizations than by accelerating objects to 99% of the speed of light.
Aliens could just do this:
Introduce comparatively amazing new technology to comparatively primitive humans. Make it so the technology provides some new ability like the ability to travel more quickly or to feed more people.
Make it so when the technology is used, it releases gases which are toxic to humans and which terraform this planet into an environment more suitable for the aliens.
All the aliens would have to do would be to wait for the humans to kill *themselves* to use the technology.
What are you? A James-Bond-esque criminal master mind? Just dump some asteroids from the Main Belt into our gravity well and be done with it.
No. You're thinking that 'it' is a noun, so its possessive form should act like the possessive form of other nouns:
cat / cat's
Steve / Steve's
But 'it' isn't a noun, it's a pronoun, so its possessive form acts like those of other pronouns:
he / his
she / hers
my / mine
The pattern I'm trying to illustrate is that for nouns the possessive form is a morphological variant of the base word, whereas for pronouns there is a distinct word, the possessive pronoun, corresponding to each 'base' pronoun. That being said, I make the its/it's mistake all the time, because the two constructs are unfortunately similar.... And I'm sure I've made it at least once in this post.
The question of 'Can we do better?' refers to these two parts (of the summary, no less!):
the International Civil Aviation Organization has stipulated that skies must be closed as soon as ash concentration rises above zero (...) although it is certain that volcanic ash like that hanging over northern Europe can melt inside a jet engine and block airflow, nobody has the least idea about just how much is too much.
Maybe the skies over most of Europe were only actually dangerous for the first day, and after that the concentration of ash was so low, it wouldn't matter. Given that airlines were losing millions per day, it's certainly worth looking into.
Isn't that arguably fraud? You're claiming you didn't authorize a transaction that you actually did authorize. I'm not trying to be snarky, it's a serious question. On a few occasions I've considered filing to get my money back, but I decided it was probably illegal:P
That wasn't an ad hominen attack. NYCL didn't claim sysout's claims were wrong because he's a moron, he claimed the reverse: that sysout is a moron because his claims were wrong (alledgedly). More technically, it wasn't an ad hominen because NYCL did in fact address the substance of sysout's arguments. He just prefaced it with an insult.
Slashdot Mirror
If time travel is possible, it will probably never be discovered (or rather, will be discovered, then reversed by someone changing the time line). 'Time travel discovered' is a state of unstable equilibrium in that, so long as it is possible, people will go back in time to change some feature of their lives. Since there will always be some improvement you can make, people will keep going back until they inadvertently change things so that time travel is never discovered, at which point the timeline will enter a state of stable equilibrium, because people will have no way of changing it, except in the usual way.
It is impossible to prove a negative, such as God's non-existence (or Santa Claus's, for that matter.)
That's why the burden of proof rests on those who claim that God exists.
Indeed. That, in fact, was entirely the point of my post: that it is not sufficient to say that faith is believing in that which evidence indicates is untrue, because there are many things for which no such evidence exists, as you so redundantly pointed out.
religious apologists aside.* By definition, faith is belief in something without evidence.
I think it would be more accurate to say it is belief in something despite evidence to the contrary.
More to the point, if evidence exists that is contrary to your belief, then the evidence obviously must be flawed. From that perspective, I think that modern politics is essentially a religion as well.
I'd stick with the original definition if I were you. There's no evidence that an omniscient and all-powerful God doesn't exist, because the very definition precludes being disproved by scientific means. In particular, any observed phenomenon, or it's cause, can be ascribed to God, and his omniscient, and therefore inscrutable, motives
You can point out that a heating element burns my hand because of the Laws of Thermodynamics, but I could counter by saying those Laws only exist by God's will, and then if you come up with some cause for the Laws of Thermodynamics, I'd counter by saying that is by God's will, and so on. Of course that's all dreadfully unscientific, which is precisely why rational belief requires evidence, and everything else is faith.
So if the fact of regular citizens owning guns no longer has a bearing on the militia, does that mean the right to bear arms can be infringed? In other words, does the right to bear arms hinge on it being a requirement for a well-regulated militia, or not? It's complicated stuff.
Full disclosure: I'm not American.
Look, if you don't want Google Doing it, because they are "BIG CORP", then don't do it yourself. There is no difference between the idea of wardriving individually, and Google doing, except for scale.
I'm not sure about this particular instance, but a difference in scale can be much more significant that you imply. Consider someone who doesn't usually shred or burn his bills before throwing them out. He just tosses them in the trash. There is a small risk that someone could go through his trash, find these bills, and use the information on them to open a bank account in his name, or perform some other fraud. It's small though, because rooting through dumpsters is a lot of work for relatively few potential victims.
Change the scale, though, and suddenly this becomes profitable--if you get access to a database of millions of people's address, names, and account numbers, you can make decent money even if only 1% of those records pan out into a successful fraud.
If anyone was serious about reducing pollution, then something way more simple would be in place. This is how you know that global warming- the political aspect of it anyways, it more about revenue and control then the environment. You see, if they were serious about Co2 being a problem, then treaties like Kyoto would take all those scientists sent to convince the world they needed to tax and impoverish their populations through IPCC reports, and put them in a room with the purpose of finding practical sources of clean energy or ways to make existing sources cleaner.
You're brilliant! I wonder why no one else has thought of shrilly insisting that scientists provide us with a simple technological solution to this problem? Someone should get Steve Jobs on the phone so he can whip up some magical and revolutionary energy technology that will whisk away all our problems. Seriously, there are many ugly, complex problems that have ugly, complex solutions, and Global Warming is one of them.
In the sentence, fucking gives emphasis to the statement. It's like having an exclamation mark which means angry-emphasis instead of emphasis in general. Ass is a valid adjective with meaning. The fact that the thought appears banal after you remove the swear-words precisely disproves your point. They obviously add something, or else removing them wouldn't alter the sentence so much.
Governments stopped serving the people years ago.
When exactly did this happen? Who is the last PM (or whatever your head of state is called) that you believe genuinely represented the people? Do you have any theories on why it is our elected representatives stopped representing us and started representing... the lobbyists, I assume?
To some, it's being a minute over a certain age. To others, it's a level of maturity.
This was not insightful. A moment's reflection would reveal that being a minute over a certain age is an approximation of your level of maturity. The approximation is used because it's obviously not feasible to spend months getting to know someone in order to determine if they really are mature enough to purchase alcohol. Nobody anywhere thinks that there's something magical about turning 18.
But please, don't let my crankiness get in the way of your knocking down of strawmen.
Yes... unless your lawyer finds out that there's some connection between the police and the third party who is hacking you, and then gets the evidence thrown out... And you'd be happy, but some other Slashdotter would take your place to rail against the rich using high-powered lawyers to buy their way out of trouble. :P
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who sat on his ass and got a degree in "video game design" from some no-name school? Or some guy that programmed and released for free an innovative game over the internet?
Well, when you put it that way, I think I'd hire the guy who published the internet game. But if we swap around your prejudices...
If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who got a degree in video game design from an accredited and widely respected school? Or some guy that sat on his ass and programmed and released for free some crappy game that no one ever heard of, much less played, over the internet ?
All of a sudden I want to hire the guy who went to school! It's like magic!
The thing is, the Vatican is not particularly opposed to science and technology. You just think they are because you believe too much of what you read on the front page of Slashdot, and in the comments... You can blindly trust this comment, of course. It's all the others you have to watch out for.
What could possibly be sillier than not converting to metric?
There are better ways to kill off entire civilizations than by accelerating objects to 99% of the speed of light.
Aliens could just do this:
All the aliens would have to do would be to wait for the humans to kill *themselves* to use the technology.
What are you? A James-Bond-esque criminal master mind? Just dump some asteroids from the Main Belt into our gravity well and be done with it.
No mod points, but I agree. In fact, I'd be surprised if we encountered another sentient species that wasn't as war-like as us.
I study AI, Natural Language Processing, specifically. Run along now, and find some other way to make an ironically off-topic post.
I agree with the other reply to the parent. Normally I'm not a fan of 'obligatory' style posts, but it just fits too well. Get over yourself.
No. You're thinking that 'it' is a noun, so its possessive form should act like the possessive form of other nouns:
cat / cat's
Steve / Steve's
But 'it' isn't a noun, it's a pronoun, so its possessive form acts like those of other pronouns:
he / his
she / hers
my / mine
The pattern I'm trying to illustrate is that for nouns the possessive form is a morphological variant of the base word, whereas for pronouns there is a distinct word, the possessive pronoun, corresponding to each 'base' pronoun. That being said, I make the its/it's mistake all the time, because the two constructs are unfortunately similar.... And I'm sure I've made it at least once in this post.
Given that humans are doing all 5 of those things, I don't see why it has to be silly at all.
the International Civil Aviation Organization has stipulated that skies must be closed as soon as ash concentration rises above zero (...) although it is certain that volcanic ash like that hanging over northern Europe can melt inside a jet engine and block airflow, nobody has the least idea about just how much is too much.
Maybe the skies over most of Europe were only actually dangerous for the first day, and after that the concentration of ash was so low, it wouldn't matter. Given that airlines were losing millions per day, it's certainly worth looking into.
Isn't that arguably fraud? You're claiming you didn't authorize a transaction that you actually did authorize. I'm not trying to be snarky, it's a serious question. On a few occasions I've considered filing to get my money back, but I decided it was probably illegal :P
That wasn't an ad hominen attack. NYCL didn't claim sysout's claims were wrong because he's a moron, he claimed the reverse: that sysout is a moron because his claims were wrong (alledgedly). More technically, it wasn't an ad hominen because NYCL did in fact address the substance of sysout's arguments. He just prefaced it with an insult.
Presumably, the cheapness of drones will allow them (either now, or in the future) to be ubiquitous. I'm not saying I agree, but that's the reasoning.
Yeah. Like, just the other day I came across this ridiculous book. Let's throw that crap right out and get started on a proper OS.