That's silly. Statistics are just guesswork to begin with. If any of us could predict outcomes or the actions of others with unfailing accuracy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
99% certainty is still not certain. Prep a jail cell and get a lawyer on call, but you still have to wait and see if your prediction comes true.
Mathematics and logic can't prove free will, because the assumption of free will on a cosmic scale includes the assumption of true randomness. If things were truly random, 2 + 2 = 3.14, but only sometimes.
Then again, I'm not sure anything can actually prove free will; it's just something you have to believe in. Much like determinism, although determinism can technically be proven by omniscience.
Not a lot of rethinking, just the concept of punishing individuals, which, since I don't believe in free will, I find abhorrent.
Locking up a violent criminal because he's dangerous to the rest of us is still justified under determinism; giving someone a punitive sentence is not.
This is exactly why I don't support incarceration to any but violent offenders.
The idea behind the justice system under a deterministic viewpoint is either to isolate social aberrations (prisons) or to modify social behavior (fines, community service, rehabilitation, institutionalization).
Do you really walk around thinking you don't have free will?
Yes.
I find it very liberating.
When something I don't like happens, I can say "well, it couldn't have happened any other way".
When something I like happens, who cares? Something good just happened!
I don't get plagued by doubt, or the feeling that I've made the wrong choice or could have done things differently. The past is to learn from, not regret.
Moreover, I don't worry too much about the future, because the future will happen the way it already has, I'm just along for the ride. While it doesn't stop me from being curious or interested in the future, or from trying to plan for it, my motto is que sera, sera
What makes you think there was a first event? I never thought much of the big bang theory as anything more than a local occurrence within the universe. There's probably more "big bangs" happening out there somewhere right now, too far away for us to detect. I've always felt that an eternal universe made more sense than one with a definitive beginning and ending.
And don't go arguing entropy on me, either. The second law of thermodynamics is assumed true due to lack of evidence to the contrary. Considering our limitations and how short a time our understanding of physics has been around (or even how short a time we've been around), I don't consider that proof of anything.
A2. The law of cause-and-effect therefore controls all events.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes (I'll be the first to admit this is just an assumption, but it certainly seems to be true). Is it so improbable that given an insurmountable state of nothing, a super-vacuum if you will, that mass-energy cannot simply spring forth to fill the void? In this way, a lack of cause becomes the cause. Yes, yes, I know it violates the conservation of mass-energy, yet another human-created law that is assumed true due to lack of evidence to the contrary. Of course, that begs the question, if mass-energy cannot be spontaneously created, what's with all the stuff around us?
Alternately, just look at the randomness in Quantum Mechanics.
Quantum Mechanics is a useful mathematical model for us to use in physics given that we are not omniscient. It is no different than the Bohr model being a useful model for chemistry. I highly doubt that randomness actually exists.
Nope, I don't have a lick of irrefutable evidence to prove these beliefs. But neither do you have any to prove otherwise. It's all just conjecture and theory.
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it
Cool. Most things I hear about Australia make me never want to go there, but legally requiring citizens to vote is kind of neat. Sort of like fascist democracy.
Let me guess, you have to vote but you don't have the ability to write in your own candidate.
The site-owner has to explicitly enable Accelerators on his site through additional markup.
Ugh. I thought IE8 was supposed to be Microsoft's standards comliant web browser? While they're at it, why don't they add support for the old <layer> and <blink> tags back in? We all loved <blink>, didn't we?
Switching to FF3, I enjoyed none of the acclaimed new improvements in memory management once I added any extensions to the mix, and in fact, Firefox would crash constantly (every half-hour or so) under any conditions.
Seriously? Since I've moved up to F3, I no longer have to worry about the browser chewing up half my RAM if I leave it running for 12 hours or so the way it was under F2 (in fact, I was nearly ready to give up on Firefox because of this, I'm glad it's been fixed).
Also, F3 hasn't crashed on me once. Never. And I've been using it at least 2-4 hours daily since it came out.
Really? Can it block all ads? That's the most important aspect of my browsing experience.
The second most important would be the ability to selectively disable all or partial scripting for different sites. Can IE8 do that?
How easily does it download streaming video to the hard drive? I do this often.
Can I install custom scripts into it like I can with Greasemonkey? That's a really handy feature.
How about automatic translation, spellcheck? I don't know what I'd do without automatic spellcheck.
I don't care about speed - we're talking what, a couple of seconds (it couldn't be more, 'cause that's all it takes to load a page in Firefox from where I'm sitting)? Maybe not even, since I don't have to load ads or scripts on most of the pages I visit. Functionality is way more important.
A better address bar? WTF? It's a single line of text that you type an address into. How can you improve on that, or screw it up?
Better tab management? Really? Better than Tab Mix Plus, or better than Firefox standard? Because Tab Mix Plus is the first add-on that goes onto my installation of Firefox.
In short, without add-ons, IE8 could never compare to Firefox. While I've never used Chrome, I somehow doubt it has the kind of supported additional functionality that comes with Firefox. Plus, I don't trust Google.
I've no problem with parents that bring their children out with them. I do have a problem with parents who have uncontrollable children to begin with.
It's not an issue of learning social skills; it's an issue with overly permissive parents who are mortally afraid that they'll somehow warp their precious child if the use even the slightest bit of corporal punishment at home. If junior knows that he'll get smacked for disobeying in public, maybe he'd be a little quieter.
For what it's worth, I think it's a shame that parents are too self-conscious these days to smack their kids for misbehaving in public. And I think it's abominable that this is for some reason discouraged by so many. Corporal punishment works, especially on the young.
All I can say is when I see a frustrated mother smack her kid upside the head for being a nuisance, I applaud - literally.
I don't know about that. If the administration had taken a public stance that they weren't going to take down the link no matter what, I would've been motivated to donate to Wikipedia for the first time ever.
I think the internet should be free, but seriously, how much worse off would we be if we didn't have censorship groups and "think of the children" advocates?
Well that's a staw man argument if I've ever seen one.
Smiles and Murders have nothing in common. They aren't even mutually exclusive. On the other hand, 57% of DMCA notices vs. 47% of DMCA notices is an apples to apples comparison.
Maybe you could come up with a real example that uses an apples to apples comparison, where the abuse of the law is greater than the intended use, and yet it still has an overall positive effect.
I didn't think so.
Besides that, what's with the "please prove the law does more harm then good" philosophy, anyway? Any law that does harm at all needs to be seriously evaluated and probably revoked. What's the old saying? Ahh yes -
"It's better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted."
I would argue that the DMCA takedown notices are more harmful than beneficial if even 10% of them are found frivolous.
I'd like to point out as a final piece of evidence for my case, for the last two years I have had no accidents. Not even a near-miss, which was a twice-monthly occurrence previously.
I haven't changed my driving habits, or my location of residence, or the amount of time I spend on the road.
The only thing that has changed in the past two years is the size of the vehicle I drive. You see, always before I drove compact shitboxes or small sedans. For the last two years, it's been SUVs (I hate SUVs, but people keep giving them to me for free...).
The road is an inclusive term which includes other cars, pedestrians, cyclists (real danger here, I've had to avoid 3 so far that thought they could just cut across traffic. I had one cyclist hit me while I was stopped.), and wildlife. In fact, I have seen nearly every accident coming. Adrenaline spikes, and everything seems to be moving in slow-motion (I've gotten quite used to it). Seeing it ahead of time does not necessarily enable you to avoid it. Sometimes there's only one way it's going to go down. Believe it or not, but I avoid far more accidents than I get into.
How are you at shifting focus? I had a friend who could focus very well on a task (mild Asbergers) - but that didn't help when he was driving, since he would only focus on one vehicle and ignore others.
I change my focus about twice a second.
The speed limit is not a guaranteed safe speed - visibility, traffic, conditions, curves in the road, etc. all change the safe speed.
I know how to handle myself on the road, thank you. I imagine I'd be dead now if I didn't.
Do you often find yourself driving near other cars on the highway? Don't do that.
No. I leave a good wide stretch of road between me and the guy in front of me. I run on liability insurance - and I count on that insurance payback to buy my next car. I'm not about to lose out to something so stupid as rear-ending another driver.
Also, highway driving is a piece of cake. No intersections, and oncoming traffic is walled off. I've never had any problems on the highway.
Even for your friend's mom... lightning is often avoidable - when conditions are right, go inside, get in a car, etc.
On of the times she was hit, it came through a closed window and struck her while she was sitting in a rocking chair.
Yeah, that's the assumption most people make when I tell them these stories, so I'm not surprised that the other replies tell me to drive more defensively.
All I can say in my defense is that in every incident, I was going the speed limit (or slower), following all the rules of the road, and watching the road like a hawk (the sole exception being the accident that was completely my fault, which involved pulling out into the road blind). You don't get into 11 accidents without getting a little paranoid along the way.
The fact that I wasn't found at fault for 9 of them is also some mitigation I'd think.
Some people just have bad luck in certain ways. The mother of one of my friends was struck by lightning 3 times in her life (once when she was pregnant with my friend). She's still alive, so there remains to be seen whether there will be a 4th time.
Despite the thousands of dollars of wreckage generated from those incidents, no one on either side has ever been hurt, so I try to keep a good sense of humor about it.
I don't need evidence. I've witnessed first hand just how incredibly stupid and/or oblivious so many drivers are. I've been through 11 major collisions, 9 of them total losses on my part. Two of them were my fault (one of those was a technicality - I didn't have right of way but the van that hit me came speeding around a corner whilst I was already in the intersection - it was not visible when I entered said intersection).
I am an idiot driver magnet. One of my favorite ones was the 90 year old lady who though she could cross 5 lanes of high speed traffic from one parking lot to another without bothering to look first. After I managed to get what was left of my car off the road, I ran out to see if she was OK. She was, but the first thing she asked me was "Did you see who hit me?". Thankfully, I got more back from the insurance company then I'd payed for that car.
The one that pissed me off the most was a woman who, stopped at a stop sign that entered into a state road, managed to wait until all traffic passed by in front of her except for me. Once I was squarely in her sights (as in, directly in front of her), she slammed on the gas and managed to total the only nice vehicle I'd ever dared to buy. This was in broad daylight, and I had my headlights on just in case: I was highly visible.
It's not the speeders and assholes you have to watch out for; stay out of their way and they'll stay out of yours. It's the ones who can't pick a lane, brake when going down hills, and get confused at 4-way stops. Above all, it's the ones that just don't pay attention. Making the vehicles safer isn't any help in this regard. Making the driving tests stricter will go a long way, though.
The wonderful thing about the internet is that no matter what the U.S. might consider "national security", there's always bound to be a more civilized and transparent nation out there. The EU is bending, and will probably start releasing documentation as soon as there's a solid draft.
In the meantime, it's important to realize that this treaty is still a work in progress, and nowhere near finished. It will be months yet before there's even a complete document to leak, I think.
That notwithstanding, certain general provisions and a few specific passages have already made their way onto the net; you can find out more here, here, and here.
Explaining to your child why an adult game or movie or program isn't for him or her is surprisingly easy to. "Its not that these games will hurt you or control you or that your not smart enough to understand the material within these games. Its simply that they weren't designed for you. Like watching C-SPAN or the history channel or reading a book on Nietzche instead of a comic book. If you want to play these games, watch some adult television and read some of these books first. Your not missing out on anything."
But... I read Nietzsche as a child. I would've watched the history channel and C-SPAN if we had had cable. I read encyclopedias and the dictionary instead.
Slashdot Mirror
We do love our acronyms. Our military has its own special language comprised entirely of them.
That's silly. Statistics are just guesswork to begin with. If any of us could predict outcomes or the actions of others with unfailing accuracy, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
99% certainty is still not certain. Prep a jail cell and get a lawyer on call, but you still have to wait and see if your prediction comes true.
Very good.
Mathematics and logic can't prove free will, because the assumption of free will on a cosmic scale includes the assumption of true randomness. If things were truly random, 2 + 2 = 3.14, but only sometimes.
Then again, I'm not sure anything can actually prove free will; it's just something you have to believe in. Much like determinism, although determinism can technically be proven by omniscience.
Not a lot of rethinking, just the concept of punishing individuals, which, since I don't believe in free will, I find abhorrent.
Locking up a violent criminal because he's dangerous to the rest of us is still justified under determinism; giving someone a punitive sentence is not.
This is exactly why I don't support incarceration to any but violent offenders.
The idea behind the justice system under a deterministic viewpoint is either to isolate social aberrations (prisons) or to modify social behavior (fines, community service, rehabilitation, institutionalization).
Do you really walk around thinking you don't have free will?
Yes.
I find it very liberating.
When something I don't like happens, I can say "well, it couldn't have happened any other way".
When something I like happens, who cares? Something good just happened!
I don't get plagued by doubt, or the feeling that I've made the wrong choice or could have done things differently. The past is to learn from, not regret.
Moreover, I don't worry too much about the future, because the future will happen the way it already has, I'm just along for the ride. While it doesn't stop me from being curious or interested in the future, or from trying to plan for it, my motto is que sera, sera
Now you're getting it...
A4. What caused the FIRST event?
What makes you think there was a first event? I never thought much of the big bang theory as anything more than a local occurrence within the universe. There's probably more "big bangs" happening out there somewhere right now, too far away for us to detect. I've always felt that an eternal universe made more sense than one with a definitive beginning and ending.
And don't go arguing entropy on me, either. The second law of thermodynamics is assumed true due to lack of evidence to the contrary. Considering our limitations and how short a time our understanding of physics has been around (or even how short a time we've been around), I don't consider that proof of anything.
A2. The law of cause-and-effect therefore controls all events.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as the saying goes (I'll be the first to admit this is just an assumption, but it certainly seems to be true). Is it so improbable that given an insurmountable state of nothing, a super-vacuum if you will, that mass-energy cannot simply spring forth to fill the void? In this way, a lack of cause becomes the cause. Yes, yes, I know it violates the conservation of mass-energy, yet another human-created law that is assumed true due to lack of evidence to the contrary. Of course, that begs the question, if mass-energy cannot be spontaneously created, what's with all the stuff around us?
Alternately, just look at the randomness in Quantum Mechanics.
Quantum Mechanics is a useful mathematical model for us to use in physics given that we are not omniscient. It is no different than the Bohr model being a useful model for chemistry. I highly doubt that randomness actually exists.
Nope, I don't have a lick of irrefutable evidence to prove these beliefs. But neither do you have any to prove otherwise. It's all just conjecture and theory.
No party is going to steal for me :(
I vote in order to not vote for the guy I like the least.
If I don't vote (and I didn't, which in Australia is actually punishable, but so be it
Cool. Most things I hear about Australia make me never want to go there, but legally requiring citizens to vote is kind of neat. Sort of like fascist democracy.
Let me guess, you have to vote but you don't have the ability to write in your own candidate.
I know the browser keeps a bunch of stuff cached in memory for hitting the back button on any tab, but why isn't all that dumped when I close the tab?
In case you want to undo the closed tab, in which case you'll get the browsing history back with that tab. I think it's kind of a handy feature.
Usually if I find Firefox is chewing up too much memory, I just bookmark all tabs, kill and restart the browser, then re-open the tabs.
The site-owner has to explicitly enable Accelerators on his site through additional markup.
Ugh. I thought IE8 was supposed to be Microsoft's standards comliant web browser? While they're at it, why don't they add support for the old <layer> and <blink> tags back in? We all loved <blink>, didn't we?
Switching to FF3, I enjoyed none of the acclaimed new improvements in memory management once I added any extensions to the mix, and in fact, Firefox would crash constantly (every half-hour or so) under any conditions.
Seriously? Since I've moved up to F3, I no longer have to worry about the browser chewing up half my RAM if I leave it running for 12 hours or so the way it was under F2 (in fact, I was nearly ready to give up on Firefox because of this, I'm glad it's been fixed).
Also, F3 hasn't crashed on me once. Never. And I've been using it at least 2-4 hours daily since it came out.
I guess as it is with all things, YMMV
Really? Can it block all ads? That's the most important aspect of my browsing experience.
The second most important would be the ability to selectively disable all or partial scripting for different sites. Can IE8 do that?
How easily does it download streaming video to the hard drive? I do this often.
Can I install custom scripts into it like I can with Greasemonkey? That's a really handy feature.
How about automatic translation, spellcheck? I don't know what I'd do without automatic spellcheck.
I don't care about speed - we're talking what, a couple of seconds (it couldn't be more, 'cause that's all it takes to load a page in Firefox from where I'm sitting)? Maybe not even, since I don't have to load ads or scripts on most of the pages I visit. Functionality is way more important.
A better address bar? WTF? It's a single line of text that you type an address into. How can you improve on that, or screw it up?
Better tab management? Really? Better than Tab Mix Plus, or better than Firefox standard? Because Tab Mix Plus is the first add-on that goes onto my installation of Firefox.
In short, without add-ons, IE8 could never compare to Firefox. While I've never used Chrome, I somehow doubt it has the kind of supported additional functionality that comes with Firefox. Plus, I don't trust Google.
I've no problem with parents that bring their children out with them. I do have a problem with parents who have uncontrollable children to begin with.
It's not an issue of learning social skills; it's an issue with overly permissive parents who are mortally afraid that they'll somehow warp their precious child if the use even the slightest bit of corporal punishment at home. If junior knows that he'll get smacked for disobeying in public, maybe he'd be a little quieter.
For what it's worth, I think it's a shame that parents are too self-conscious these days to smack their kids for misbehaving in public. And I think it's abominable that this is for some reason discouraged by so many. Corporal punishment works, especially on the young.
All I can say is when I see a frustrated mother smack her kid upside the head for being a nuisance, I applaud - literally.
I don't know about that. If the administration had taken a public stance that they weren't going to take down the link no matter what, I would've been motivated to donate to Wikipedia for the first time ever.
I think the internet should be free, but seriously, how much worse off would we be if we didn't have censorship groups and "think of the children" advocates?
Well that's a staw man argument if I've ever seen one.
Smiles and Murders have nothing in common. They aren't even mutually exclusive. On the other hand, 57% of DMCA notices vs. 47% of DMCA notices is an apples to apples comparison.
Maybe you could come up with a real example that uses an apples to apples comparison, where the abuse of the law is greater than the intended use, and yet it still has an overall positive effect.
I didn't think so.
Besides that, what's with the "please prove the law does more harm then good" philosophy, anyway? Any law that does harm at all needs to be seriously evaluated and probably revoked. What's the old saying? Ahh yes - "It's better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted."
I would argue that the DMCA takedown notices are more harmful than beneficial if even 10% of them are found frivolous.
I'd like to point out as a final piece of evidence for my case, for the last two years I have had no accidents. Not even a near-miss, which was a twice-monthly occurrence previously.
I haven't changed my driving habits, or my location of residence, or the amount of time I spend on the road.
The only thing that has changed in the past two years is the size of the vehicle I drive. You see, always before I drove compact shitboxes or small sedans. For the last two years, it's been SUVs (I hate SUVs, but people keep giving them to me for free...).
Make of it what you will.
Watch the other cars like a hawk - not the road.
The road is an inclusive term which includes other cars, pedestrians, cyclists (real danger here, I've had to avoid 3 so far that thought they could just cut across traffic. I had one cyclist hit me while I was stopped.), and wildlife. In fact, I have seen nearly every accident coming. Adrenaline spikes, and everything seems to be moving in slow-motion (I've gotten quite used to it). Seeing it ahead of time does not necessarily enable you to avoid it. Sometimes there's only one way it's going to go down. Believe it or not, but I avoid far more accidents than I get into.
How are you at shifting focus? I had a friend who could focus very well on a task (mild Asbergers) - but that didn't help when he was driving, since he would only focus on one vehicle and ignore others.
I change my focus about twice a second.
The speed limit is not a guaranteed safe speed - visibility, traffic, conditions, curves in the road, etc. all change the safe speed.
I know how to handle myself on the road, thank you. I imagine I'd be dead now if I didn't.
Do you often find yourself driving near other cars on the highway? Don't do that.
No. I leave a good wide stretch of road between me and the guy in front of me. I run on liability insurance - and I count on that insurance payback to buy my next car. I'm not about to lose out to something so stupid as rear-ending another driver.
Also, highway driving is a piece of cake. No intersections, and oncoming traffic is walled off. I've never had any problems on the highway.
Even for your friend's mom ... lightning is often avoidable - when conditions are right, go inside, get in a car, etc.
On of the times she was hit, it came through a closed window and struck her while she was sitting in a rocking chair.
Yeah, that's the assumption most people make when I tell them these stories, so I'm not surprised that the other replies tell me to drive more defensively.
All I can say in my defense is that in every incident, I was going the speed limit (or slower), following all the rules of the road, and watching the road like a hawk (the sole exception being the accident that was completely my fault, which involved pulling out into the road blind). You don't get into 11 accidents without getting a little paranoid along the way.
The fact that I wasn't found at fault for 9 of them is also some mitigation I'd think.
Some people just have bad luck in certain ways. The mother of one of my friends was struck by lightning 3 times in her life (once when she was pregnant with my friend). She's still alive, so there remains to be seen whether there will be a 4th time.
Despite the thousands of dollars of wreckage generated from those incidents, no one on either side has ever been hurt, so I try to keep a good sense of humor about it.
I don't need evidence. I've witnessed first hand just how incredibly stupid and/or oblivious so many drivers are. I've been through 11 major collisions, 9 of them total losses on my part. Two of them were my fault (one of those was a technicality - I didn't have right of way but the van that hit me came speeding around a corner whilst I was already in the intersection - it was not visible when I entered said intersection).
I am an idiot driver magnet. One of my favorite ones was the 90 year old lady who though she could cross 5 lanes of high speed traffic from one parking lot to another without bothering to look first. After I managed to get what was left of my car off the road, I ran out to see if she was OK. She was, but the first thing she asked me was "Did you see who hit me?". Thankfully, I got more back from the insurance company then I'd payed for that car.
The one that pissed me off the most was a woman who, stopped at a stop sign that entered into a state road, managed to wait until all traffic passed by in front of her except for me. Once I was squarely in her sights (as in, directly in front of her), she slammed on the gas and managed to total the only nice vehicle I'd ever dared to buy. This was in broad daylight, and I had my headlights on just in case: I was highly visible.
It's not the speeders and assholes you have to watch out for; stay out of their way and they'll stay out of yours. It's the ones who can't pick a lane, brake when going down hills, and get confused at 4-way stops. Above all, it's the ones that just don't pay attention. Making the vehicles safer isn't any help in this regard. Making the driving tests stricter will go a long way, though.
The wonderful thing about the internet is that no matter what the U.S. might consider "national security", there's always bound to be a more civilized and transparent nation out there. The EU is bending, and will probably start releasing documentation as soon as there's a solid draft.
In the meantime, it's important to realize that this treaty is still a work in progress, and nowhere near finished. It will be months yet before there's even a complete document to leak, I think.
That notwithstanding, certain general provisions and a few specific passages have already made their way onto the net; you can find out more here, here, and here.
That was kinda my point :)
Granted, there's still the 3D medium. It's hard to digitally duplicate statues, for example. At least until 3D Printing becomes more common.
Explaining to your child why an adult game or movie or program isn't for him or her is surprisingly easy to. "Its not that these games will hurt you or control you or that your not smart enough to understand the material within these games. Its simply that they weren't designed for you. Like watching C-SPAN or the history channel or reading a book on Nietzche instead of a comic book. If you want to play these games, watch some adult television and read some of these books first. Your not missing out on anything."
But... I read Nietzsche as a child. I would've watched the history channel and C-SPAN if we had had cable. I read encyclopedias and the dictionary instead.
Yeah, I know, I was a strange kid
It doesn't cost the company anything for SMS messages. Literally, nothing. Everything they charge for it is pure profit.