On the other hand, there is always the value of goodwill on the part of your customers - if the company is generally viewed positively then more people may be willing to give you money for other games.
But, it's hard to quantify and dependent on someone with sufficient clout in the company deciding to go about things in a non-normal way... so yeah, it's not probable
He's modded funny, but finding ways to turn the stuff you need to remember into a story or a song helps cement it in your memory by using more parts of your memory to remember it.
It worked for oral histories and various other epics - recorded for generations without being written down. Likely not with a lot of precision, but that's more due to the number of different peoples' memories it went through, for purposes of storytelling you would have things change each time it's retold. Still works for one person just trying to remember some info for a while.
my point is that "soul" is the latter, rather than the former. Specifically, I suggest that "soul" describes a certain quality/property in some information-handling systems, such as human brain.
In that case you would agree that it requires the continued existence of the brain in question (or other information handling system of your choice) in order to continue to sustain the soul, no? If it's a property/quality of the brain and the brain becomes defunct, then surely the soul would go with it
Ideas are to reality like computer programs are to impure silicon wafers:).
That's the kind of thing I'm saying - software isn't something you could find "inside" your hardware, and yet it seems to be a distinct thing. In fact it exists in terms of what the hardware does (whether that be storing a long sequence of bits, or running those bits through a processor) and not as a spooky non-physical 'ghost in the machine'.
There are, in fact, theologies where soul doesn't continue living after death, but is eventually resurrected along with the rest of you by a supernatural power, and supported from thereon by the same power. Eternal soul by no means implies a soul that can function without a body; it simply means a soul which can't be permanently destroyed.
Different theologies say a lot of things, to be honest I'm unimpressed until I see some evidence supporting their claims.
If you define the soul as being a property of an information system like a brain (as you did earlier) then I have no problems here, but soul has a fairly well established "normal" meaning, which is what I was thinking of in my post.
One thing though, if the soul is a property of a physical system, how can it survive in the absence of that body and later be resurrected? Re-reading your post, "resurrected with the rest of you"... well I suppose if the body were to be some how recreated after death, and all the attendant properties restored, that this soul (as a property of the physical system) would also return, but I would question the plausibility of the body being recreated.
I meant in the case of shit-bacteria (if we don't notice it on stuff and it has no ill effects, what's the fuss), not the world at large. You know that.
Besides, a better example would have been air - can't see it or taste it, but we'd sure as hell notice if it went away.
There's a difference between a thing and an idea. You can measure things, things definitely exist. Most of the time you can touch them, or throw them at people (although sometimes they're really big or really small or incredibly hot, so that would be a bad idea).
Ideas are different, they don't seem to have a specific location in space or follow the normal rules with regard to existing. It's almost tempting to say that ideas are a separate type of non-physical thing, but that creates more problems than it's worth. It's far easier to say that these abstract concepts are another way of looking at certain types of thing.
Any idea in your head will correspond to some pattern of activity in your brain, neuroscience can't tell us precisely what that pattern is yet, and it's likely to be different for every person and every time you have that idea, but there's some kind of relation there. The idea isn't a separate thing of its own accord, you won't ever be able to find it or touch it or measure it, but the brain pattern creating it... maybe.
I guess what I'm saying is that ideas, dreams, abstract concepts etc do exist in a sense, but not in a "shadowy realm of dreams" but as another aspect of the physical things that lie beneath them. Brain pattern X and Idea Y are the same basic thing in the world, but considered as two separate things purely because we mean different things when we talk about brains and when we talk about ideas (doesn't mean there actually are 2 different things, just means our language has some weird quirks to it).
Anyway, to bring an overlong and slightly rambling post to some kind of conclusion, the soul doesn't get this kind of get-out clause - unlike other concepts and ideas it doesn't have any known material basis, and looking at the idea of what a soul is (eternal, spiritual etc) matter isn't ever going to be a good thing to base a soul on. Unlike ideas which can be based on brains, souls are supposed to have properties that matter just can't provide.
I suppose you could take that as proof that materialism is wrong, but you'd have to assume that souls exist to do so, in which case I'd like to see the evidence you're basing that on. (Unless of course you also intend to abandon rationality and just go on blind faith, in which case I commend your consistency and commitment, but question your sanity)
If it's so ubiquitous, why is anyone worried about it? Clearly our immune systems are perfectly capable of dealing with it, and if we can't see it or taste it, who cares if it's there? Sterilising everything would fairly plainly be a stupid move, we know we're constantly exposed to countless bugs and bacteria, but hey, we're designed for that, it's what white blood cells are for.
I have to wonder whether asthma and allergies and other autoimmune problems are (at least in part) the result of everything being so much cleaner now than the past - our immune systems get bored, then freak out over a bag of peanuts, some cat hair or a few specks of pollen, just for something to do.
I think we've all seen the numbers crunched that suggest that every glass of water we ever drink contains a couple of molecules of water that once passed through the bladder of .
The harder task would probably be finding any water that hasn't been in someone's urine at some point in the past.
There's never going to be as many calories in a cow as in the food that it's eaten over its lifespan - it has to use a lot of calories on things like movement, or body heat, and it isn't getting 100% of the energy out of its food in the first place.
Putting the "cow" link in the food-chain between "grain" and "human" means we lose a lot of energy from the grain... if memory serves, each layer on a food-chain is about 10% of the one below, so running plants through a cow (or any other animal) to make meat isn't an efficient process by any stretch of the imagination.
everyone who gets infected gets cured and HIV will run out of hosts and die out.
Not necessarily - you can only easily eradicate illnesses that only humans can catch (smallpox being the prime example) Other illnesses can continue to exist in an animal reservoir and re-infect the human population even if you cure every human.
If I remember rightly, HIV came to us from some variety of monkey or ape. If it did that once, it can do so again in the future, so we'd also have to do bone marrow transplants on all the HIV+ apes to actually remove the disease from the planet.
Plus, they may not be able to look at everything but this kind of thing allows them to look at anything.
Receive any negative attention of those with access to the data later on and maybe you'll find some little piece of your internet history brought out as evidence that you're clearly an evil-doer.
1984 already made the same point - even if they can't possibly watch everything, you can never know whether or not they're actually watching you at any given moment. Since they could be, you have to act under the assumption that they're always watching.
Still... the part I've always stalled at is the malevolent/shadowy conspiracy group. The government is just a bunch of people, not a movie-villain-esque secret society or cult. Until there's clear evidence that they intend to do evil with their ill-gotten power I'm less worried than I would otherwise be.
Not to say we should just let them carry on of course, invasion of privacy like this always caries a very real risk of abuse, even if it's in more of a "spying on people to check they're actually living in a school catchment area" way instead of an "evil government suppressing the rebels" way.
Yeah... I know why it is, and that it's supposed to work that way. Just pisses me off when I find myself on what is essentially a page of ads when I was just trying to save myself some time on typing the URL.
Far as I can tell, the Firefox thing is the first point of reference to find a page - I can dodge my ISP's shit (or re-direct from a valid URL) by associating an abbreviation with the bookmark. "ZP" now takes me to Zero Punctuation for example
Can also add a shortcut to a search plugin and use the address bar as a search box (G foo = google for foo, as you said)
The hosts file will indeed take priority - if memory serves it goes DNS cache then hosts then an actual DNS lookup.
Oh, then my ISP's bullshit search page in case all else failed... and I'm not sure where Firefox's bookmark keywords thing fits in, but the search/find from a partial URL definitely (unfortunately) comes after the bullshit search page.
You appear to have been convinced by the negative side of both parties' campaigning, and hence come away hating both sides... interesting
Seriously though, don't you know you're only supposed to listen to one party? It makes it so much easier to decide who to love and who to hate, plus you end up voting for someone with a half-decent chance of winning, so you can pat yourself on the back if they do win, or have plenty of people to commiserate with if they don't
The list of bad programs changes constantly. They have how many million virus definitions now?
Just have them shift gears and work on issuing signatures for known good programs, if they can put them out at anything like the rate that they can come up with signatures for malware then they should have a complete list by next week
I'm almost loathe to say that there should be a way to allow programs for yourself... that just opens the door to stupidity, but if you make it a multiple step procedure requiring deliberate user action, with warnings all along the way (as opposed to constant "program X wants to run, cancel or allow" messages) then hopefully it'll make it hard for the idiots to get themselves infected, which is at least an improvement.
If it can be viewed it can be recorded. DRM defeated.
Ultimately, unless they install a DRM-enabled chip inside our optic nerve to keep it encrypted and authenticated all the way to the visual centre of the brain, it will have to be decoded at some point in the process.
Works for music and video, not for games. But in real terms, there will always be hardware that doesn't obey their rules. It may not be good hardware, but someone somewhere will always be able to put together a device that doesn't co-operate with the DRM.
In the more realistic case... I would hope there would be at least a little resistance to the kind of total control you're suggesting, coming from the general populace and the politicians that aren't corrupt money-whores (you can be as cynical as you want, but politicians are just people - taking office doesn't turn them into soulless minions)
Someone has to break it out into a DRM-free format to start with, free media doesn't just magically appear on the internet...
Granted, a lot of stuff is leaked in the pre-DRM stage by someone in the industry, but failing that, someone will need to take protected stuff and set it free for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
-1, Lazy
On the other hand, there is always the value of goodwill on the part of your customers - if the company is generally viewed positively then more people may be willing to give you money for other games.
But, it's hard to quantify and dependent on someone with sufficient clout in the company deciding to go about things in a non-normal way... so yeah, it's not probable
He's modded funny, but finding ways to turn the stuff you need to remember into a story or a song helps cement it in your memory by using more parts of your memory to remember it.
It worked for oral histories and various other epics - recorded for generations without being written down. Likely not with a lot of precision, but that's more due to the number of different peoples' memories it went through, for purposes of storytelling you would have things change each time it's retold. Still works for one person just trying to remember some info for a while.
The lesson here is that everyone likes Garfield 2
Don't try to deny it people, you know that it's true.
They could always release their code (or "get hacked") and let some enthusiast figure it out.
Still unlikely though.
my point is that "soul" is the latter, rather than the former. Specifically, I suggest that "soul" describes a certain quality/property in some information-handling systems, such as human brain.
In that case you would agree that it requires the continued existence of the brain in question (or other information handling system of your choice) in order to continue to sustain the soul, no? If it's a property/quality of the brain and the brain becomes defunct, then surely the soul would go with it
Ideas are to reality like computer programs are to impure silicon wafers :).
That's the kind of thing I'm saying - software isn't something you could find "inside" your hardware, and yet it seems to be a distinct thing. In fact it exists in terms of what the hardware does (whether that be storing a long sequence of bits, or running those bits through a processor) and not as a spooky non-physical 'ghost in the machine'.
There are, in fact, theologies where soul doesn't continue living after death, but is eventually resurrected along with the rest of you by a supernatural power, and supported from thereon by the same power. Eternal soul by no means implies a soul that can function without a body; it simply means a soul which can't be permanently destroyed.
Different theologies say a lot of things, to be honest I'm unimpressed until I see some evidence supporting their claims.
If you define the soul as being a property of an information system like a brain (as you did earlier) then I have no problems here, but soul has a fairly well established "normal" meaning, which is what I was thinking of in my post.
One thing though, if the soul is a property of a physical system, how can it survive in the absence of that body and later be resurrected? Re-reading your post, "resurrected with the rest of you"... well I suppose if the body were to be some how recreated after death, and all the attendant properties restored, that this soul (as a property of the physical system) would also return, but I would question the plausibility of the body being recreated.
I meant in the case of shit-bacteria (if we don't notice it on stuff and it has no ill effects, what's the fuss), not the world at large. You know that.
Besides, a better example would have been air - can't see it or taste it, but we'd sure as hell notice if it went away.
I think you just won this discussion.
There's a difference between a thing and an idea. You can measure things, things definitely exist. Most of the time you can touch them, or throw them at people (although sometimes they're really big or really small or incredibly hot, so that would be a bad idea).
Ideas are different, they don't seem to have a specific location in space or follow the normal rules with regard to existing. It's almost tempting to say that ideas are a separate type of non-physical thing, but that creates more problems than it's worth. It's far easier to say that these abstract concepts are another way of looking at certain types of thing.
Any idea in your head will correspond to some pattern of activity in your brain, neuroscience can't tell us precisely what that pattern is yet, and it's likely to be different for every person and every time you have that idea, but there's some kind of relation there. The idea isn't a separate thing of its own accord, you won't ever be able to find it or touch it or measure it, but the brain pattern creating it... maybe.
I guess what I'm saying is that ideas, dreams, abstract concepts etc do exist in a sense, but not in a "shadowy realm of dreams" but as another aspect of the physical things that lie beneath them. Brain pattern X and Idea Y are the same basic thing in the world, but considered as two separate things purely because we mean different things when we talk about brains and when we talk about ideas (doesn't mean there actually are 2 different things, just means our language has some weird quirks to it).
Anyway, to bring an overlong and slightly rambling post to some kind of conclusion, the soul doesn't get this kind of get-out clause - unlike other concepts and ideas it doesn't have any known material basis, and looking at the idea of what a soul is (eternal, spiritual etc) matter isn't ever going to be a good thing to base a soul on. Unlike ideas which can be based on brains, souls are supposed to have properties that matter just can't provide.
I suppose you could take that as proof that materialism is wrong, but you'd have to assume that souls exist to do so, in which case I'd like to see the evidence you're basing that on. (Unless of course you also intend to abandon rationality and just go on blind faith, in which case I commend your consistency and commitment, but question your sanity)
If it's so ubiquitous, why is anyone worried about it? Clearly our immune systems are perfectly capable of dealing with it, and if we can't see it or taste it, who cares if it's there? Sterilising everything would fairly plainly be a stupid move, we know we're constantly exposed to countless bugs and bacteria, but hey, we're designed for that, it's what white blood cells are for.
I have to wonder whether asthma and allergies and other autoimmune problems are (at least in part) the result of everything being so much cleaner now than the past - our immune systems get bored, then freak out over a bag of peanuts, some cat hair or a few specks of pollen, just for something to do.
I think we've all seen the numbers crunched that suggest that every glass of water we ever drink contains a couple of molecules of water that once passed through the bladder of .
The harder task would probably be finding any water that hasn't been in someone's urine at some point in the past.
Compared to Europe, American politics doesn't even have a left wing - just a right wing and an ever right-er wing.
It comes from (if memory serves) a Chinese phrase for "cleansing the mind".
In other words, driving out all those dirty capitalist thoughts and learning to love the communist party
More info here
There's never going to be as many calories in a cow as in the food that it's eaten over its lifespan - it has to use a lot of calories on things like movement, or body heat, and it isn't getting 100% of the energy out of its food in the first place.
Putting the "cow" link in the food-chain between "grain" and "human" means we lose a lot of energy from the grain... if memory serves, each layer on a food-chain is about 10% of the one below, so running plants through a cow (or any other animal) to make meat isn't an efficient process by any stretch of the imagination.
Sure is a delicious process though.
everyone who gets infected gets cured and HIV will run out of hosts and die out.
Not necessarily - you can only easily eradicate illnesses that only humans can catch (smallpox being the prime example) Other illnesses can continue to exist in an animal reservoir and re-infect the human population even if you cure every human.
If I remember rightly, HIV came to us from some variety of monkey or ape. If it did that once, it can do so again in the future, so we'd also have to do bone marrow transplants on all the HIV+ apes to actually remove the disease from the planet.
Receive any negative attention of those with access to the data later on and maybe you'll find some little piece of your internet history brought out as evidence that you're clearly an evil-doer.
1984 already made the same point - even if they can't possibly watch everything, you can never know whether or not they're actually watching you at any given moment. Since they could be, you have to act under the assumption that they're always watching.
Still... the part I've always stalled at is the malevolent/shadowy conspiracy group. The government is just a bunch of people, not a movie-villain-esque secret society or cult. Until there's clear evidence that they intend to do evil with their ill-gotten power I'm less worried than I would otherwise be.
Not to say we should just let them carry on of course, invasion of privacy like this always caries a very real risk of abuse, even if it's in more of a "spying on people to check they're actually living in a school catchment area" way instead of an "evil government suppressing the rebels" way.
Get Firefox Portable and you can add whatever add-ons you want to it.
Yeah... I know why it is, and that it's supposed to work that way. Just pisses me off when I find myself on what is essentially a page of ads when I was just trying to save myself some time on typing the URL.
Far as I can tell, the Firefox thing is the first point of reference to find a page - I can dodge my ISP's shit (or re-direct from a valid URL) by associating an abbreviation with the bookmark. "ZP" now takes me to Zero Punctuation for example
Can also add a shortcut to a search plugin and use the address bar as a search box (G foo = google for foo, as you said)
Of course they do, they just elected him.
The hosts file will indeed take priority - if memory serves it goes DNS cache then hosts then an actual DNS lookup.
Oh, then my ISP's bullshit search page in case all else failed... and I'm not sure where Firefox's bookmark keywords thing fits in, but the search/find from a partial URL definitely (unfortunately) comes after the bullshit search page.
You appear to have been convinced by the negative side of both parties' campaigning, and hence come away hating both sides... interesting
Seriously though, don't you know you're only supposed to listen to one party? It makes it so much easier to decide who to love and who to hate, plus you end up voting for someone with a half-decent chance of winning, so you can pat yourself on the back if they do win, or have plenty of people to commiserate with if they don't
That's the magic of P2P - no need for massive bandwidth on the part of the original source.
The list of bad programs changes constantly. They have how many million virus definitions now?
Just have them shift gears and work on issuing signatures for known good programs, if they can put them out at anything like the rate that they can come up with signatures for malware then they should have a complete list by next week
I'm almost loathe to say that there should be a way to allow programs for yourself... that just opens the door to stupidity, but if you make it a multiple step procedure requiring deliberate user action, with warnings all along the way (as opposed to constant "program X wants to run, cancel or allow" messages) then hopefully it'll make it hard for the idiots to get themselves infected, which is at least an improvement.
If it can be viewed it can be recorded. DRM defeated.
Ultimately, unless they install a DRM-enabled chip inside our optic nerve to keep it encrypted and authenticated all the way to the visual centre of the brain, it will have to be decoded at some point in the process.
Works for music and video, not for games. But in real terms, there will always be hardware that doesn't obey their rules. It may not be good hardware, but someone somewhere will always be able to put together a device that doesn't co-operate with the DRM.
In the more realistic case... I would hope there would be at least a little resistance to the kind of total control you're suggesting, coming from the general populace and the politicians that aren't corrupt money-whores (you can be as cynical as you want, but politicians are just people - taking office doesn't turn them into soulless minions)
Someone has to break it out into a DRM-free format to start with, free media doesn't just magically appear on the internet...
Granted, a lot of stuff is leaked in the pre-DRM stage by someone in the industry, but failing that, someone will need to take protected stuff and set it free for the rest of us.