It's more like deciding to not buy a particular new-fangled hammer because the electricity sometimes goes out.
Because, you see.... a hammer doesn't actually need electricity to perform its function... and designing one that does simply for its own sake is more than just slightly... uhmmm... stupid.
I thought professors were hired to... you know... teach stuff.
If a professor isn't actually giving feedback to the students about their performance, then a person might as well just try to learn everything from books and not bother with classes at all.
I think I was misremembering lines 40 and 50, actually... I remember that things were set up so that it looked like it was scrolling horizontally, and I was just thinking that it always just continued to print from where it left off, which is where I got the value of '4' in line 50.
What those two lines may have been, however, was this:
40 PRINT CHR$(13) + MID$(M$,PS,39);
50 PS = PS + 1: IF PS > LEN(A$) THEN PS = PS - LEN(A$)
If I remember correctly, that will produce an illusion of the text scrolling from right to left, even though it is actually just scrolling up.
Where is it written that iMessage is using the user's key that is shared with Apple? What's preventing the iMessage app from generating its own key pairs and using them?
And it doesn't even ever have to transmit either of them as long as the encryption keys exhibit a property of commutativity, even when further encrypted with other such keys. Only encrypted data would ever be on the channel and the only way to decrypt it would be to act as a MitM for the entire communication.
Which the carrier could technically do... but the carrier doesn't eavesdrop.
When who you are trying to eavesdrop on doesn't ever transmit or share any of their encryption keys used for exchanging the data on *ANY* channels, and those keys can be changed, on the fly, and without any warning whatsoever, unless you are actually acting as a MitM for the communication, you can't possibly decrypt the data in anything that can come close to real time.
Speaking of rude... typed from memory... hopefully no typos.
10 A$ = "DON'T TOUCH ME! "
20 M$ = A$ + A$ + A$ + A$
30 POS = 1
40 PRINT MID$(M$,POS,39);
50 POS = POS + 4: IF POS > LEN(A$) THEN POS = POS - LEN(A$)
60 IF PEEK(-16384) < 128 THEN GOTO 40
70 HOME
80 FOR I = 1 TO 1000:NEXT
90 HTAB 10:VTAB 12
100 PRINT "I SAID ";
110 FOR I = 1 TO 1000:NEXT
120 PRINT "DON'T ";
130 FOR I = 1 TO 2000:NEXT
140 PRINT "TOUCH ";
150 FOR I = 1 TO 2000:NEXT
160 PRINT "ME!"
170 FOR I = 1 TO 3000:NEXT
180 HOME
190 POKE -16368,0
200 GOTO 30
Pretty much my point... although it does have me wondering, whether or not it's possible, within the confines of a book, for an author to write up any sort of rational proof that they existed that could reasonably prove the existence of the author to a hypothetically free-willed character who the author intended to be initially skeptical to the notion, and could only be convinced of the existence of such an author by the judicious application of flawless reasoning? Or is the limitation of having to only communicate with such a character strictly through fictional writing necessarily so limiting that no proof that the character could ever hope to comprehend would actually be effective?
If these god-concepts have some kind of existence that humans cannot comprehend then why are they able to speak coherently about them? If these god-concepts are not part of the comprehensible universe, then for all intents and purposes, they do not exist and again, it's incoherent for believers to make truth-claims about them.
People who believe in these god concepts tend to assume that there is some real effect upon us, albeit not necessarily one that we can communicate about, since the most significant effects supposedly happen to a person some time after death, and where these effects can somehow distinguish between people who die and do not come back to life and those who do.
An omnipotent being is indistinguishable from a really powerful alien
If said really powerful alien at one point imagined the universe to exist, and everything actually did exist, but only as a direct result of that alien imagining it... sure.
The assumption you are making, however, is that anything which we can't establish any proof for is real somehow constitutes a greater likelihood that it is made up.
I'm not suggesting that a thousand years from now or even a trillion years from now there will suddenly be some sort of objective evidence to support the notion that god exists, I'm suggesting that the mere fact that the universe doesn't contain enough information to establish with any certainty either way about the notion doesn't prove the non-existence of god unless you constrain the notion of god to be something that is actually *PART* of the universe in the first place... if you want to simply state that it should somehow be considered an axiom fact that anything which is not part of the comprehensible universe does not actually exist, then that's fine, but then the credibility of the likelihood that a god who transcends such concepts doesn't exist is limited by the credibility of that assumption.
When you don't assume anything, in the end you just have to say "I don't know, nor can I begin to know... at least from where I am right now", and that's okay. Trying to convince yourself that you have even a smidgen of a chance greater likelihood of being right that there isn't a god just because we haven't been able to ascertain objective evidence of one I'm afraid... is only self delusion. The universe doesn't care if you are right or wrong about it, and the sooner you get over spending time worrying about it, thinking that anybody might ever have somehow a better chance of being right about something that may very well be so transcendent that we can't begin to fathom it anyways by trying to apply our own feeble little brains to the task, or believing that somehow the concepts that we call logic can actually adequately encapsulate the entirety of existence, the more time you'll have to actually enjoy this brief instant in time that we call life.
There is no evidence of the existence of these god-concepts -- either coherent or incoherent -- outside of imagination.
What evidence was there a thousand years ago that we would have this conversation today? There was certainly none, at all... should the fact that there was absolutely no evidence that we were to have this conversation somehow be taken as even circumstantial evidence that, within the framework of what could have ever been possibly known at the turn of the 11th century, that this conversation today most probably would not have occurred? Nope. You can't even assign a probability to it at all. let alone measure which outcome is even slightly more probable.
Now multiply that thousand years by 14 million.
That's what trying to argue about which is the more probable situation when it comes to the existence of God is like. Zero basis... either way.
Well, it's an analogy... of course it falls apart at some point. But if the characters do nothing because the writer stops writing, the characters don't know about it either.
My point being that the very concept of being just a book, there is no possible way that any kind of rational proof can be established within it that things exist outside of it, even though that may very well be true because the author is outside of the book, but all of reality for the characters only contains what is in the book.
God, if such a being exists... I think would have simply imagined creation, in a not entirely dissimilar way to how an author writes a story... the biggest difference that I would see is that as characters in this imaginary tale of his, living organisms with what we would classify as a mind (or at least one of sufficient complexity) would have somehow been imbued with an independent free will so that they can supposedly be accountable for their own choices. And even if this notion were entirely true, the information density in the entirety of creation, from the big bang until the universe burns out could still not contain sufficient data to prove, or even establish any degree of likelihood, of the existence of such a being.
What difference would that possibly make? While I have no desire to slip out of existence, if that were to actually happen, I would not ever know it anyways, so relative to my own well-being, it is a moot point.
It therefore makes more sense to make sure such a god likes you... so that at least you have the possibility of incurring favor.
What possible tests could characters in a book use to prove, not necessarily absolutely, but even just beyond all reasonable doubt, that they are just characters in a book (and in turn, that an author actually exists)? I can't think of any.
It could be an interesting literary challenge, I think, for an author to try to write a fictional conversation which somehow logically proved the existence of the author to the fictional characters.
No... under any objective burden of legal proof, even under the notion of "beyond a reasonable doubt", there is no assessment made about whether or not god exists one way or the other, any more than under a notion of legal proof, you could somehow come to any conclusion about whether or not the events of today either would or would not ever actually happen.
Actually, I suppose so... since the author might write conditions within the book which could appear to them such that any book they might be a part of may conceivably have written itself.
If there were a god, I would imagine that all of what we consider real existence to be little but an imaginary tale to such a being. We "believe" we have existence, but the only actual existence we would actually have is by virtue of being sustained by the ongoing imaginary events that are happening in the mind of god. If god forgot about us, we would wink out of existence and we would never even know it.
... is not altogether unlike one character in a book asking another one to prove they are characters in a book.
Kind of pointless, since the events that happen in the book are taken for granted as "natural", and so anything which the author writes about would not be seen as anything other than normal to those characters, even though the author still actually wrote it.
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It's more like deciding to not buy a particular new-fangled hammer because the electricity sometimes goes out.
Because, you see.... a hammer doesn't actually need electricity to perform its function... and designing one that does simply for its own sake is more than just slightly ... uhmmm... stupid.
I thought professors were hired to... you know... teach stuff.
If a professor isn't actually giving feedback to the students about their performance, then a person might as well just try to learn everything from books and not bother with classes at all.
I think I was misremembering lines 40 and 50, actually... I remember that things were set up so that it looked like it was scrolling horizontally, and I was just thinking that it always just continued to print from where it left off, which is where I got the value of '4' in line 50.
What those two lines may have been, however, was this:
40 PRINT CHR$(13) + MID$(M$,PS,39);
50 PS = PS + 1: IF PS > LEN(A$) THEN PS = PS - LEN(A$)
If I remember correctly, that will produce an illusion of the text scrolling from right to left, even though it is actually just scrolling up.
There's nothing saying that Apple has the information necessary to decrypt the messages either.
Where is it written that iMessage is using the user's key that is shared with Apple? What's preventing the iMessage app from generating its own key pairs and using them?
And it doesn't even ever have to transmit either of them as long as the encryption keys exhibit a property of commutativity, even when further encrypted with other such keys. Only encrypted data would ever be on the channel and the only way to decrypt it would be to act as a MitM for the entire communication.
Which the carrier could technically do... but the carrier doesn't eavesdrop.
When who you are trying to eavesdrop on doesn't ever transmit or share any of their encryption keys used for exchanging the data on *ANY* channels, and those keys can be changed, on the fly, and without any warning whatsoever, unless you are actually acting as a MitM for the communication, you can't possibly decrypt the data in anything that can come close to real time.
10 A$ = "DON'T TOUCH ME! "
20 M$ = A$ + A$ + A$ + A$
30 POS = 1
40 PRINT MID$(M$,POS,39);
50 POS = POS + 4: IF POS > LEN(A$) THEN POS = POS - LEN(A$)
60 IF PEEK(-16384) < 128 THEN GOTO 40
70 HOME
80 FOR I = 1 TO 1000:NEXT
90 HTAB 10:VTAB 12
100 PRINT "I SAID ";
110 FOR I = 1 TO 1000:NEXT
120 PRINT "DON'T ";
130 FOR I = 1 TO 2000:NEXT
140 PRINT "TOUCH ";
150 FOR I = 1 TO 2000:NEXT
160 PRINT "ME!"
170 FOR I = 1 TO 3000:NEXT
180 HOME
190 POKE -16368,0
200 GOTO 30
Right, except that your manager, being at a meeting, would have a pretty good alibi for what they were doing at the time that the message was posted.
And in particular, how do they know you aren't lying if that's what you tell them?
More merit than evolution????
Uhmmm, you realize that's basically just Intelligent Design, don't you?
We cannot detect the future, but can still be highly unwise to act as if the future does not exist, because it will eventually affect us.
Pretty much my point... although it does have me wondering, whether or not it's possible, within the confines of a book, for an author to write up any sort of rational proof that they existed that could reasonably prove the existence of the author to a hypothetically free-willed character who the author intended to be initially skeptical to the notion, and could only be convinced of the existence of such an author by the judicious application of flawless reasoning? Or is the limitation of having to only communicate with such a character strictly through fictional writing necessarily so limiting that no proof that the character could ever hope to comprehend would actually be effective?
People who believe in these god concepts tend to assume that there is some real effect upon us, albeit not necessarily one that we can communicate about, since the most significant effects supposedly happen to a person some time after death, and where these effects can somehow distinguish between people who die and do not come back to life and those who do.
... give or take a year.
If said really powerful alien at one point imagined the universe to exist, and everything actually did exist, but only as a direct result of that alien imagining it... sure.
The assumption you are making, however, is that anything which we can't establish any proof for is real somehow constitutes a greater likelihood that it is made up.
I'm not suggesting that a thousand years from now or even a trillion years from now there will suddenly be some sort of objective evidence to support the notion that god exists, I'm suggesting that the mere fact that the universe doesn't contain enough information to establish with any certainty either way about the notion doesn't prove the non-existence of god unless you constrain the notion of god to be something that is actually *PART* of the universe in the first place... if you want to simply state that it should somehow be considered an axiom fact that anything which is not part of the comprehensible universe does not actually exist, then that's fine, but then the credibility of the likelihood that a god who transcends such concepts doesn't exist is limited by the credibility of that assumption.
When you don't assume anything, in the end you just have to say "I don't know, nor can I begin to know... at least from where I am right now", and that's okay. Trying to convince yourself that you have even a smidgen of a chance greater likelihood of being right that there isn't a god just because we haven't been able to ascertain objective evidence of one I'm afraid... is only self delusion. The universe doesn't care if you are right or wrong about it, and the sooner you get over spending time worrying about it, thinking that anybody might ever have somehow a better chance of being right about something that may very well be so transcendent that we can't begin to fathom it anyways by trying to apply our own feeble little brains to the task, or believing that somehow the concepts that we call logic can actually adequately encapsulate the entirety of existence, the more time you'll have to actually enjoy this brief instant in time that we call life.
What evidence was there a thousand years ago that we would have this conversation today? There was certainly none, at all... should the fact that there was absolutely no evidence that we were to have this conversation somehow be taken as even circumstantial evidence that, within the framework of what could have ever been possibly known at the turn of the 11th century, that this conversation today most probably would not have occurred? Nope. You can't even assign a probability to it at all. let alone measure which outcome is even slightly more probable.
Now multiply that thousand years by 14 million.
That's what trying to argue about which is the more probable situation when it comes to the existence of God is like. Zero basis... either way.
Well, it's an analogy... of course it falls apart at some point. But if the characters do nothing because the writer stops writing, the characters don't know about it either.
My point being that the very concept of being just a book, there is no possible way that any kind of rational proof can be established within it that things exist outside of it, even though that may very well be true because the author is outside of the book, but all of reality for the characters only contains what is in the book.
God, if such a being exists... I think would have simply imagined creation, in a not entirely dissimilar way to how an author writes a story... the biggest difference that I would see is that as characters in this imaginary tale of his, living organisms with what we would classify as a mind (or at least one of sufficient complexity) would have somehow been imbued with an independent free will so that they can supposedly be accountable for their own choices. And even if this notion were entirely true, the information density in the entirety of creation, from the big bang until the universe burns out could still not contain sufficient data to prove, or even establish any degree of likelihood, of the existence of such a being.
What difference would that possibly make? While I have no desire to slip out of existence, if that were to actually happen, I would not ever know it anyways, so relative to my own well-being, it is a moot point.
It therefore makes more sense to make sure such a god likes you... so that at least you have the possibility of incurring favor.
It could be an interesting literary challenge, I think, for an author to try to write a fictional conversation which somehow logically proved the existence of the author to the fictional characters.
There simply is no data... either way.
Good point
Actually, I suppose so... since the author might write conditions within the book which could appear to them such that any book they might be a part of may conceivably have written itself.
If there were a god, I would imagine that all of what we consider real existence to be little but an imaginary tale to such a being. We "believe" we have existence, but the only actual existence we would actually have is by virtue of being sustained by the ongoing imaginary events that are happening in the mind of god. If god forgot about us, we would wink out of existence and we would never even know it.
Kind of pointless, since the events that happen in the book are taken for granted as "natural", and so anything which the author writes about would not be seen as anything other than normal to those characters, even though the author still actually wrote it.
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