People were doing what you say 10 years ago, with computers less powerful than your smartphone/tablet is today.
Maybe, but they were also running the software of 10 years ago, which sucked down a lot less in the way of system resources than the software of today. Maybe the upward ramp there is all just an empty upgrade treadmill, maybe not, but for the foreseeable future "the big box in the corner" is going to be the cheapest/easiest way to get a respectable amount of computing power into a home. Hence also, the platform of choice for demanding software.
Doubt you'd be able to sell those shirts for more than you paid for them though, so if you were attempting to use cotton shirts as your store of value you'd do badly when it came time to trade for something else.
So that'd be thrifty spending (still worthwhile), rather than an investment. For storing value, better off with those other commodities you mentioned, the ones that aren't devalued by virtue of being second hand.
Half the time you don't actually need to, just seems to be a standard thing for an installer to ask for, because hell, you'll be rebooting the damn thing pretty soon, whatever you do.
What exactly do you want from free will? If it's for your brain to defy the laws of physics then you're going to be waiting a while, but if it's for your actions to make sense as a result of your past, your desires, and the things you know, then we don't require a spooky supernatural hand on the button to get that.
All of our knowledge, memory, wants, needs (and the rest) -every component of our "will"- is represented in some way in the connections and chemistry of physical brain, and that's the major influence on our actions. I contend that for any sensible meaning of free will, we have it.
Yes, our actions are causally linked to the past state of the universe, all the way back to the beginning, but that causality goes through an immensely complex, stateful, non-linear system (called a brain) before it gets to affect what we do. Would you prefer your actions had no causal relation to the rest of the universe? You'd be acting randomly, without regard to what you want or what the situation is...
Secondary point: the existence of an omniscient being denies the possibility of free will. Discuss. I guess you probably have an answer in mind to that if you've given this any thought, but I'd be interested to see it.
If I'm using Skype, I wouldn't mind if the ISP gave my packets priority over someone's email.
That would have been a better statement if you'd said you don't mind your ISP giving someone else's Skype call priority over your email. 'Cause I see no reason why you would mind your packets getting pushed up the queue (unless you disagreed with the principle of the thing).
Maybe if they allowed packets to set a flag to volunteer to be given lower priority, then there's no way to game the system into giving your higher priority than the default "everyone is equal" priority.
Except then if that caught on in a useful way, some ass would pop up and not follow the norm, so that their massive downloads seemed faster than everyone else because they were still asking for the same priority as VoIP, while everyone else was voluntarily taking the slow lane.
That there is the reason we can't have nice things like consumer-friendly QoS; someone, somewhere, will always be trying to abuse it.
Pretty sure their 'results' are already contradicted by the available facts, given the trend towards secularism that's been rolling since the Enlightenment. The numbers of Amish may be growing, but I'm pretty sure they're outstripped by the growing numbers of people with no religion.
Anyway, if religiosity were purely genetic, I think we've had enough millennia of near-universal religiosity to completely fixate that allele. If anything, arguments that assume religiosity is an evolved/genetic trait (and don't consider the real complexities of the beast) should conclude that secularism is a novel mutation that appeared in the gene pool fairly recently, has since been rather successful, and should be expected to come to dominate in the population.
I'm making a ridiculously pedantic point and you're missing it. Hence, a further post.
Any program, no matter what language you write it in, what art assets you include with it, what shiny bling-mapped bump effects you put on your button rollovers (whee, buzzwords), all of it ends up being a collection of binary data - some of it is machine code, some of it would be data files, all of it is just noughts and ones in the end.
Point is, you can write code in any Turing complete language to produce those exact same noughts and ones and achieve the same result; you could implement the same instructions in FORTRAN, on punched cards, or even in Brainfuck if you really felt masochistic.
A more recent programming language will make certain things monumentally easier, but there's nothing computable that you couldn't (theoretically) program with a magnetised needle and a steady hand, so to speak.
Does lightning happen before you see it? There's a delay there too, just much smaller.
Until the light reaches us from a massively distant event, it has no effect on us (fundamentally cannot have any effect on us, 'cause for us it hasn't happened yet). If the sun just plain vanished somehow, we'd still keep orbiting around it for the short period (8 seconds or so IIRC) until the information reached us. Orbiting for that period around what is, by the ordinary conception of time, a non-existent body.
That being because, from the perspective of us here on Earth, the sun hasn't vanished until after the light-speed propagation time.
It took me a couple of repeats of looking between your 2 posts, trying to see where the number differed at all, before I realised that the name also didn't differ and that you'd replied to yourself.
Thought you needed to know this crucial information.
It might not be possible while remaining sane, but in the mathematical sense of "data in, data out", isn't the GUI just another output that should be possible in any Turing complete language? (if we're going to talk about programming the thing with punch cards, I think "require" has taken on a meaning that doesn't include "for all practical purposes")
I remember that... they'd run one ad campaign about all their "hot new men", then a little later run a second one saying that the original campaign worked too well, and that they were now over-run with eligible ladies (then repeat the cycle after that, as if they were constantly swerving between excesses of alternating gender).
There was a one-off TV special by Matt Lucas and David Walliams a little while back that had piss-take versions (all acted by the pair of them) of most everyone in a British airport - the corner-cutting CEO, the lazyassed check-in desk girls, the whole lot. Included a security check guy who spent the whole time feeling people up.
Actually IIRC he turned out to not really work there - got confronted by the head of security and asked for ID, before being chased out of the building.
Whether we're too polite to mock low class foreigners or not, we mock our own pretty mercilessly...
That includes the idea of satan ruling in hell. By the original conception, he was just another of the damned, being tortured in the very deepest depths of the pit. There to be punished for his transgression, not as a ruler or a punisher of others.
I mean, why would the evil being who rebelled against god want to punish other sinners? The punishment has to come from god for it to make any sense, and there's no reason why satan would be doing his dirty work for him.
I've not read Paradise Lost... is he actually depicted as a ruler of hell there, or is that based on a misreading of the quote; that it would be better to reign in hell (even though he's not reigning anywhere)?
In any case, if I'm ever confronted with a burning lake of fire, and the prospect of being cast into it, I shall at the very least be somewhat surprised. When you think about it though, heaven wouldn't be a great option either; ruled over by an eternal despot who demands constant adoration, constant bliss without effort would get old (if I wanted that experience, I'd have OD'd by now), and there's only so many experiences it's possible to have - eternity is quite a long time, after a while it's going to be one long lazy afternoon of nothing.
That's assuming I'm the same sort of person in the hypothetical afterlife as I am now - if I was altered somehow, to find praising god eternally satisfying, to never get bored of being on bended knee, to never have another sinful/heretical desire or thought... well then I, and everything that makes me me would be dead. Same goes for the more abstract afterlifes where your soul merges into one-ness with an eternal spirit of some sort... my personality and awareness and all the things I value would be gone into oblivion anyway.
An unchanging eternity would be hellish. A loss of my individual self would be oblivion. The only heaven I can see working is immortality here on Terra Firma. I suppose some things could be a bit nicer, but as a privileged member of a wealthy western nation, I'm pretty far ahead of the average by any measure of life being good. If Kurzweil could pull his thumb out of his ass and make good on all his Singularity promises, that'd be cool I guess (with some reservations about preserving my 'self' though any sort of upload process).
Actually, the original point was that the guy said "it doesn't exist as a single file" (ie in English this means "one file"), and you said "yes it does!".
Of course there is also an alternate interpretation of the sentence; if you read "single" in the same sense as "not a single one".
So then "yes it does" would be an entirely sensible response - there are multiple registry files, so how could you say there aren't any of them.
Define the god you believe in sufficiently clearly, and I confidently predict it'll either include internal inconsistency or imply empirically demonstrable falsities.
That, or it'll be confined to not making any verifiable/falsifiable claim about this world, in which case the question is moot; why pay any attention to a god with zero effect on the world.
In short, I contend that any given definition of god is either provably false or entirely irrelevant. Ball's in your court, prove me wrong.
The only mangled part was "That our lineage turns out to be not contained strictly to Africa, since the emergence of first live on this planet?", which isn't hard to figure out if you swap "live" for "life (easy mistake)
"That our lineage may not be entirely contained within Africa all the way back to the emergence of first life on this planet" might be clearer, but don't be an ass about it; GP's probably not a native English speaker.
I thought he just meant the word "consistent" in the first place... but maybe there's some definition I've not seen before.
Still, I think "consequent" in the context of your definition is more from the terms of formal logic, where a consequent would follow logically (and consistently) from something already established.
Oh also, RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. I may have gotten slightly distracted by holy war in the comments, but that was only because I hadn't heard of you in any context but the name of the fractal until today, and didn't find the news all that interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
People were doing what you say 10 years ago, with computers less powerful than your smartphone/tablet is today.
Maybe, but they were also running the software of 10 years ago, which sucked down a lot less in the way of system resources than the software of today. Maybe the upward ramp there is all just an empty upgrade treadmill, maybe not, but for the foreseeable future "the big box in the corner" is going to be the cheapest/easiest way to get a respectable amount of computing power into a home. Hence also, the platform of choice for demanding software.
Doubt you'd be able to sell those shirts for more than you paid for them though, so if you were attempting to use cotton shirts as your store of value you'd do badly when it came time to trade for something else.
So that'd be thrifty spending (still worthwhile), rather than an investment. For storing value, better off with those other commodities you mentioned, the ones that aren't devalued by virtue of being second hand.
Half the time you don't actually need to, just seems to be a standard thing for an installer to ask for, because hell, you'll be rebooting the damn thing pretty soon, whatever you do.
You want to travel 200 miles. Fuel required for this is,
at 10mpg: 20 gallons
at 20mpg: 10 gallons
at 40mpg: 5 gallons
10 to 20 saves you 10 gallons, 20 to 40 only saves you 5.
Plus, if you do want to eat pig shit, you can wash it down quite happily with a mouthful of WINE.
Yes, well done, you've noticed the joke and rendered it into the most obvious format. Congratulations, really.
What exactly do you want from free will? If it's for your brain to defy the laws of physics then you're going to be waiting a while, but if it's for your actions to make sense as a result of your past, your desires, and the things you know, then we don't require a spooky supernatural hand on the button to get that.
All of our knowledge, memory, wants, needs (and the rest) -every component of our "will"- is represented in some way in the connections and chemistry of physical brain, and that's the major influence on our actions. I contend that for any sensible meaning of free will, we have it.
Yes, our actions are causally linked to the past state of the universe, all the way back to the beginning, but that causality goes through an immensely complex, stateful, non-linear system (called a brain) before it gets to affect what we do. Would you prefer your actions had no causal relation to the rest of the universe? You'd be acting randomly, without regard to what you want or what the situation is...
Secondary point: the existence of an omniscient being denies the possibility of free will. Discuss. I guess you probably have an answer in mind to that if you've given this any thought, but I'd be interested to see it.
Well, that certainly sounds necessary to encourage artists to create. Not redundant or counter-productive at all.
If I'm using Skype, I wouldn't mind if the ISP gave my packets priority over someone's email.
That would have been a better statement if you'd said you don't mind your ISP giving someone else's Skype call priority over your email. 'Cause I see no reason why you would mind your packets getting pushed up the queue (unless you disagreed with the principle of the thing).
Maybe if they allowed packets to set a flag to volunteer to be given lower priority, then there's no way to game the system into giving your higher priority than the default "everyone is equal" priority.
Except then if that caught on in a useful way, some ass would pop up and not follow the norm, so that their massive downloads seemed faster than everyone else because they were still asking for the same priority as VoIP, while everyone else was voluntarily taking the slow lane.
That there is the reason we can't have nice things like consumer-friendly QoS; someone, somewhere, will always be trying to abuse it.
Pretty sure their 'results' are already contradicted by the available facts, given the trend towards secularism that's been rolling since the Enlightenment. The numbers of Amish may be growing, but I'm pretty sure they're outstripped by the growing numbers of people with no religion.
Anyway, if religiosity were purely genetic, I think we've had enough millennia of near-universal religiosity to completely fixate that allele. If anything, arguments that assume religiosity is an evolved/genetic trait (and don't consider the real complexities of the beast) should conclude that secularism is a novel mutation that appeared in the gene pool fairly recently, has since been rather successful, and should be expected to come to dominate in the population.
I'm making a ridiculously pedantic point and you're missing it. Hence, a further post.
Any program, no matter what language you write it in, what art assets you include with it, what shiny bling-mapped bump effects you put on your button rollovers (whee, buzzwords), all of it ends up being a collection of binary data - some of it is machine code, some of it would be data files, all of it is just noughts and ones in the end.
Point is, you can write code in any Turing complete language to produce those exact same noughts and ones and achieve the same result; you could implement the same instructions in FORTRAN, on punched cards, or even in Brainfuck if you really felt masochistic.
A more recent programming language will make certain things monumentally easier, but there's nothing computable that you couldn't (theoretically) program with a magnetised needle and a steady hand, so to speak.
Does lightning happen before you see it? There's a delay there too, just much smaller.
Until the light reaches us from a massively distant event, it has no effect on us (fundamentally cannot have any effect on us, 'cause for us it hasn't happened yet). If the sun just plain vanished somehow, we'd still keep orbiting around it for the short period (8 seconds or so IIRC) until the information reached us. Orbiting for that period around what is, by the ordinary conception of time, a non-existent body.
That being because, from the perspective of us here on Earth, the sun hasn't vanished until after the light-speed propagation time.
Yes I know it's kinda weird.
It took me a couple of repeats of looking between your 2 posts, trying to see where the number differed at all, before I realised that the name also didn't differ and that you'd replied to yourself.
Thought you needed to know this crucial information.
Why would the GUI require another language?
It might not be possible while remaining sane, but in the mathematical sense of "data in, data out", isn't the GUI just another output that should be possible in any Turing complete language? (if we're going to talk about programming the thing with punch cards, I think "require" has taken on a meaning that doesn't include "for all practical purposes")
I remember that... they'd run one ad campaign about all their "hot new men", then a little later run a second one saying that the original campaign worked too well, and that they were now over-run with eligible ladies (then repeat the cycle after that, as if they were constantly swerving between excesses of alternating gender).
I think it was match.com, but I may be mistaken.
There was a one-off TV special by Matt Lucas and David Walliams a little while back that had piss-take versions (all acted by the pair of them) of most everyone in a British airport - the corner-cutting CEO, the lazyassed check-in desk girls, the whole lot. Included a security check guy who spent the whole time feeling people up.
Actually IIRC he turned out to not really work there - got confronted by the head of security and asked for ID, before being chased out of the building.
Whether we're too polite to mock low class foreigners or not, we mock our own pretty mercilessly...
That includes the idea of satan ruling in hell. By the original conception, he was just another of the damned, being tortured in the very deepest depths of the pit. There to be punished for his transgression, not as a ruler or a punisher of others.
I mean, why would the evil being who rebelled against god want to punish other sinners? The punishment has to come from god for it to make any sense, and there's no reason why satan would be doing his dirty work for him.
I've not read Paradise Lost... is he actually depicted as a ruler of hell there, or is that based on a misreading of the quote; that it would be better to reign in hell (even though he's not reigning anywhere)?
In any case, if I'm ever confronted with a burning lake of fire, and the prospect of being cast into it, I shall at the very least be somewhat surprised. When you think about it though, heaven wouldn't be a great option either; ruled over by an eternal despot who demands constant adoration, constant bliss without effort would get old (if I wanted that experience, I'd have OD'd by now), and there's only so many experiences it's possible to have - eternity is quite a long time, after a while it's going to be one long lazy afternoon of nothing.
That's assuming I'm the same sort of person in the hypothetical afterlife as I am now - if I was altered somehow, to find praising god eternally satisfying, to never get bored of being on bended knee, to never have another sinful/heretical desire or thought... well then I, and everything that makes me me would be dead. Same goes for the more abstract afterlifes where your soul merges into one-ness with an eternal spirit of some sort... my personality and awareness and all the things I value would be gone into oblivion anyway.
An unchanging eternity would be hellish. A loss of my individual self would be oblivion. The only heaven I can see working is immortality here on Terra Firma. I suppose some things could be a bit nicer, but as a privileged member of a wealthy western nation, I'm pretty far ahead of the average by any measure of life being good. If Kurzweil could pull his thumb out of his ass and make good on all his Singularity promises, that'd be cool I guess (with some reservations about preserving my 'self' though any sort of upload process).
Actually, the original point was that the guy said "it doesn't exist as a single file" (ie in English this means "one file"), and you said "yes it does!".
Of course there is also an alternate interpretation of the sentence; if you read "single" in the same sense as "not a single one".
So then "yes it does" would be an entirely sensible response - there are multiple registry files, so how could you say there aren't any of them.
Define the god you believe in sufficiently clearly, and I confidently predict it'll either include internal inconsistency or imply empirically demonstrable falsities.
That, or it'll be confined to not making any verifiable/falsifiable claim about this world, in which case the question is moot; why pay any attention to a god with zero effect on the world.
In short, I contend that any given definition of god is either provably false or entirely irrelevant. Ball's in your court, prove me wrong.
The only mangled part was "That our lineage turns out to be not contained strictly to Africa, since the emergence of first live on this planet?", which isn't hard to figure out if you swap "live" for "life (easy mistake)
"That our lineage may not be entirely contained within Africa all the way back to the emergence of first life on this planet" might be clearer, but don't be an ass about it; GP's probably not a native English speaker.
I thought he just meant the word "consistent" in the first place... but maybe there's some definition I've not seen before.
Still, I think "consequent" in the context of your definition is more from the terms of formal logic, where a consequent would follow logically (and consistently) from something already established.
he who dominates in space dominates the world
Missed opportunity for "He who controls the space controls the universe."
Not clever so much as ... marginally less stupid on a good day. Maybe.
That, or whoever wrote the script intended for it to quote the poster above, but failed.
Hate to say "I don't think it means what you think it means", but ... consequent?
Oh also, RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. I may have gotten slightly distracted by holy war in the comments, but that was only because I hadn't heard of you in any context but the name of the fractal until today, and didn't find the news all that interesting.