>>Sorry Mr. Lacy, we require a license to complain about non-compliance to ignorant bureaucratic rules.
That's awesome - limit complaints to the two or three people in the region that are licensed, and which are likely working for you already.
Fortunately my area isn't as retarded. I've filed a couple notices where I noticed bugs in the red lights at some intersections, and they went and dug up the street, and found the shorted-out sensors right where I said they'd be. Kind of cool to get a thank you from the local roads department, and even cooler to be driving to Denny's at 2AM and seeing people replacing wiring that I'd guessed were broken based on the way the signals were misbehaving.
>>Those agree buttons that you have to select twice and the veritable ton of text above it means nothing. You're completely correct and not at all just going on what you think about it.
EULAs don't let companies do things that are illegal. This is a very key principle that for some reason the normally libertarian/. groupthink seems to want to defend.
EULAs aside, there's a long body of case law that you can't just sneak into a contract: "oh, and we get to kill you if we want".
Oh, they get subsidies, especially for "clean coal" and so forth. And as you say, oil gets tax credits for exploration.
This is not what we were talking about.
The numbers listed were *direct subsidies* for building power plants. The CEC surveyed all power plants in California to get their numbers. Green technologies get your "MASSIVE SUBSIDIES", whereas dirty coal/NG get none, and nuclear gets a fraction. And fractions are all that matter here, not absolute numbers.
Talk about looking foolish. Nuclear is *not* green by any stretch. It may not pollute the 'air' or release CO2, but it does produce hazardous waste. Nuclear does not work without MASSIVE gov't subsidies. It's not a panacea and has its own fuel reserve issues. Thorium reactors are better on these issues but still produce waste.
One of the biggest problems with environmentalists and hippies is that they're as allergic to numbers as they are to hygiene. What do you think the subsidy rate is on nuclear power, compared with MSW or solar or wind? Higher? If they're MASSIVE SUBSIDIES, it sounds like you think they're higher.
Checking the actual numbers from the CEC, we can make more concrete statements without resorting to using all caps and waving our hands in the air. Here's the results: Nuclear: up to 14.1% subsidy Biomass: up to 94% subsidy Fuel cell: up to 57% subsidy Geothermal: up to 46% subsidy Hydro: up to 38.5% subsidy Tidal: up to 14.1% subsidy Solar: up to 108% subsidy Wind: up to 41% subsidy Coal and NG: 0%
Don't you feel slightly stupid now? I doubt you'll suddenly start ranting about the MASSIVE SUBSIDIES for the technologies that, you know, actually benefit from them.
>>This clearly dictates there is a 'cost' associated with NG/oil/coal that is not currently being assessed; a subsidy if you will.
If you're talking about external costs or social costs, then sure. The above numbers are direct subsidies from the gov't.
However, the indirect social costs for dealing with nuclear is much lower than coal and NG as well. Again, quantifying the numbers, it's about 3-6x less (7c/KWH for coal versus 3c for NG versus 1.2c for nuclear in external and social costs).
Nuclear is certainly green from the point of view of CO2 production. It's so cheap and effective at producing CO2-free energy, that the UNFCCC had to ban it from qualifying for carbon credits, as it would destroy all other green sources.
>>If you're paying $.50 per KWH for electricity, you're in the range where it could be cheaper to run a gas/propane/diesel generator instead of hooking up to the grid.
Would you actually want to live next to a noisy and smelly generator all day long?
I'm actually getting solar put on my house next month. It'll pay itself back in about 2-3 years, and after that keep my power bills down in the lower tier levels (11c instead of 50c).
>>Second of all, oil has nothing to do with nuclear? They're both energy sources
In completely different sectors. You could replace all of coal with nuclear, and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on prices at the gas pump, unless people finally start gassification of coal.
No. Have you actually read why power companies stopped building nuclear plants? I have, at least for California. It was a combination of concern about nuclear safety (TMI in particular, as well as the China Syndrome) combined with interminable lawsuits which ended up delaying Diablo Canyon by a decade and costing billions of dollars more as a result. Not worth the hassle to deal with environmentalists, so they just focused on natural gas thereafter.
>>First of all, this is Slashdot, please don't dilute the term "hack" any further than it already has been.
If you're going to be pedantic, you should make sure you're correct. Sony installing a backdoor that can do all sorts of neat (from their perspective) things is a hack, in both senses of the word. Furthermore, only pedants think that calling people "crackers" (which brings to mind redneck hicks living in the swamp) is a great adjective. The rejection of it has everything to do with how silly the word sounds.
>>Second, I don't see how this violates my privacy in any way, shape or form.
An entity snooping around in all of your files, installed secretly and without your knowledge or consent? That's pretty much the definition of invasion of privacy. While I suppose people like you think that corporations should get free passes on these sorts of issues, whereas individual hackers who did the same would get tossed in jail, that's a pretty hypocritical way to operate.
>>All of that makes me wonder though... what exactly did I agree to when I bought the thing?
A game playing device that handles both single player and multiplayer games without consenting to allowing Sony to look through all of my private files.
>>the kind of incorrect and inflammatory comments you're making do nothing to help the cause.
Kettleblack.
>>But if you had actually read the "agreement" that you had in your box when you bought the PS3 you would know that they told you - at purchase - you are required to keep it up to date to take it online.
Keeping it up to date is a completely different matter than allowing them to violate my privacy rights.
>>Electricity *can* be produced greenly. Show me how gas and coal does that hmm? >>You simply can't clean the emissions of 100 million ICE cars and coal power plants.
Where did I say NG and coal are green? I was talking about nuclear, which is.
That said, you can run NG and coal both with CC systems, which roughly double the cost of generation. If you have never even heard of CC systems, I'm not sure you're qualified to make statements on the issue.
>>The 'nuts' are trying to save your ass from yourself...but don't let that get in the way of your rants
Study the issue before you post. You'll look less foolish.
Seriously, just how paranoid do you have to be to believe in an environmental lobby that can prevail against any industry that sees big, quick bucks to be made?
The environmental lobby has been tremendously successful at interfering with or shutting down projects in America in the last 30 years. They're the real "Party of No".
How out of touch with what environmentalists actually think do you have to be to believe they *don't* know coal is involved in generating electricity?
Oh, they know it, but they'll find something to complain about with every other power plant being proposed, leading them to being de facto supporters of coal/NG power production. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal - it doesn't matter. The Sierra Club will be there blocking it. The amount of sheer hyprocisy in the environmental movement is so high, I'm baffled how you could possibly support them. They've done more harm to our environment than any other group in America.
Excelsior!
Renewable energy sources are where we'll be in the long run anyhow, because sustainability is, well, *unsustainable*. Unsustainability per se is not a long term problem, because it is a self-correcting problem. The problems with non-sustainable practices are all the things we end up doing to keep the status quo running just a little bit longer; the external costs we dump on the society and the planet because we are facing problems we don't know how to fix in a decade, much less overnight. Deepwater Horizon was an example of that. We pushed our capability to the limit, and because the margins at the limit aren't as generous as we'd like we cut corners.
This entire paragraph is so badly reasoned, I don't even know where to begin.
"Sustainability is unsustainable"? What does that even mean? How is that not a contradiction?
You also have to define what you mean by the long term. We have enough coal and fissionable materials for a *really* long time. Long enough that it doesn't really matter there's a finite limit on it - it's like arguing that solar is nonrenewable because it comes from the sun, that will burn out in a few billion years.
Deepwater Horizon was not an example of pushing external costs on society, because BP is paying for the damages they caused. It is also Oil, which is a totally different ballgame from nuclear.
People equate thinking ahead with doom and gloom.
As a child of the 80s, I am constantly surprised (well, not really) when I still get safe drinking water from the tap (we were supposed to run out), that we've had only one or two species go extinct (it was supposed to be the biggest dieoff in history), that we aren't covered in a layer of trash like in Wall-E, and that the climate is not a hundred degrees hotter or colder than it was in the 80s.
All of these were predictions by the environmental lobby, and all of them were braindead doom and gloom predictions. That's the environmentalist's stock-in-trade.
Well, having low prices for petroleum, coal and natural gas after the 1970s *might* have had something to do with the collapse of the US nuclear industry.... Nonetheless, I think we *should* increase our use of nuclear power. We'll probably need to increase our use of natural gas and (ugh) coal. There will be millions spent lobbying to choose one of these technologies and treat it as a silver bullet (which none of them will be). We just have to accept that's a fight we'll have to have, because having failed to convince people to look ahead forty years ago, we can't just wag our finger at them and say, "See? This is what we said was going to happen, even if in the short term oil prices went down." You don't win people over by rubbing their nose in their being wrong.
You do know that Oil has nothing to do with nuclear, NG and coal, right? One is for cars, one is for electricity generation. (Oil is a percent or so of our total energy production, and mainly used as a backstop.)
Well, I *do* want to replace Oil with Coal, but you don't sound like you're really knowledgeable enough to be making an argument along those lines.
>>If it weren't for the enviro-nuts and not-in-my-backyarders who think electricity magically comes from the socket and not instead from coal plants and the like.
Yeah, saw a nut on the roads here (in California) advertising his plug-in conversion company. When you're paying 50c/kWH, electric cars are more expensive than gas.:p
"But they're pollution free!" Yeah, except the magic electricity fairy farts natural gas, don't you see?
"We can't have nuclear power in California until we can deal with the waste!" (This is the actual law in California.) But... this a burner reactor, that will actually help dispose of nuclear waste.
"The California High Speed Rail network will run on 100% green power! But not nuclear." Aren't you drawing power from the grid?
And so on and so forth. Environmentalists and our state government are completely batshit crazy when it comes to this issue.
>>All that Sony is saying is that if you connect to their network that you have to abide by their rules
That still doesn't give them permission to hack your machine and violate your constitutional Right to Privacy**.
Well, hey, you don't *have* to use it online, right? No. Like a car being forced to sit in the garage, an offline PS3 is useless, and not what you agreed to when you bought the damn thing.
Or to put it another way, people like you will be very unhappy when their new Murder TOS comes out.
>>That was easy - less than 15 minutes into the first lecture he defines very precisely what he means by "free will". In his words, an object has free will if it's future is not determined by its past. Thus he is using free will as synonymous with random. Unless he changes his mind later into the lectures, you didn't understand his lectures - they are about free will in name only. Does he change his mind?
Read my other responses in this thread. =)
Essentially, he puts actions into three categories: determined, random, and "free". So he'd disagree with your claim that non-determined means random, necessarily.
Well, even though breathless science journalists report that the Higgs Field is "source of mass", it's not the only one. As you pointed out, E=MC^2, so any energetic entity has a gravitational mass under relativity. Nuclei of atoms get a significant fraction of their apparent mass from the nuclear binding energy from the strong force.
I think the Higgs Field is better described as the "source of inertia", as opposed to the source of mass, as the mechanism by which it operates is basically what we think of as the Newtonian definition of inertia at normal scales - particles that interact with it are resistant to changes in their velocity. Since photons do not interact with it at all, that's why I was saying that you could argue that photons do not have inertia (on top of the fact that you cannot apply a force to them to change their velocity).
No, no, no. Occam's Razor doesn't say anything about a simple hypothesis being correct, or even a simpler one being preferred. It's a principle that you should not make things more complicated than necessary. So many people like you have misunderstood the principle that I once wrote a long article on it.
It's one of the few fallacies that are very common in scientifically minded folk. (And those that watched Contact.)
He doesn't speak as if he has The Answer. Listen to his NPR interview or read his books. He's very clear on differentiating between scientific consensus and speculation. The fact that you're accusing him of this and lumping him in with the idiot crowd of science journalists means that you're guilty of the same thing.
He also suggests ways that his theories might show up in experiments in the LHC - for example a collision in which there appears to be a conservation of energy loss might indicate the existence of other dimensions.
I don't have The Hidden Reality, but in his NPR interview he was very very clear that it was theoretical and speculative.
His previous books, that I have read, are actually very good. They too talk about what is scientific consensus versus more speculative physics - AND why the math leads him to believe why he thinks a certain speculation might be true.
He also talks about different ways string theory might be empirically tested, which is also A Good Thing.
In other words, I don't see any reason for all the hate. He's a million times better than pop science journalists, who rightly deserve the hate the GP mislays at Brian Green's feet.
Well, first argument is fine and all, but it doesn't really fit the debate between determinism and free will. Free will is the stance that "I" determined my course of action, instead of the prior state of the universe. It doesn't have anything to do with spontaneity, because a spontaneous universe would be worse that a deterministic one, in which you might want to go eat ice cream, but your body starts shoveling green beans down your throat instead.
Your second article assumes determinism via "The past determines the present". That's precisely what you're being asked to prove.
I am not the parent, but I'd have to say, "because there has never been a coherent argument to the contrary".
You don't think so? I'd be interested to hear.
In the last megathread on this, I posted my own thoughts on this, which basically went (this is the short form): 1) Determinism implies predictability (being able to calculate the state of the future universe in advance) 2) Predictability is impossible (via an argument similar to the Halting Thesis) 3) Therefore Determinism is impossible
Conway actually took your statement and flipped it around and said that he's never heard a convincing argument for determinism, since the arguments for it are generally based on outdated physics. The only one he found coherent was the Second Time Around hypothesis, which is that we're living in the second (or later) universe, with everything happening exactly the same the second time around. But coherent, he said, doesn't mean correct, necessarily.
>>Then again, if the decision emerges from the brain, by definition it's not a free decision
People supporting free will don't say that all causality isn't determined (wow, triple negative), but rather that most things are deterministic, with decision-making being free. Descartes relied on the soul for this source of freedom, I'd say there could be other sources.
>>they are fundamentally predetermined by this universe.
You're assuming your conclusion, which is that the universe predetermines everything.
>>What would our world look like if it wasn't predictable? What does that mean?
Philosophers often talk about the difference between: determined actions, random actions, and agent causation. As I said in other threads, Conway's talk on Free Will (on iTunesU) talks about possible support in physics for the third.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Sorry Mr. Lacy, we require a license to complain about non-compliance to ignorant bureaucratic rules.
That's awesome - limit complaints to the two or three people in the region that are licensed, and which are likely working for you already.
Fortunately my area isn't as retarded. I've filed a couple notices where I noticed bugs in the red lights at some intersections, and they went and dug up the street, and found the shorted-out sensors right where I said they'd be. Kind of cool to get a thank you from the local roads department, and even cooler to be driving to Denny's at 2AM and seeing people replacing wiring that I'd guessed were broken based on the way the signals were misbehaving.
>>Those agree buttons that you have to select twice and the veritable ton of text above it means nothing. You're completely correct and not at all just going on what you think about it.
EULAs don't let companies do things that are illegal. This is a very key principle that for some reason the normally libertarian /. groupthink seems to want to defend.
EULAs aside, there's a long body of case law that you can't just sneak into a contract: "oh, and we get to kill you if we want".
Oh, they get subsidies, especially for "clean coal" and so forth. And as you say, oil gets tax credits for exploration.
This is not what we were talking about.
The numbers listed were *direct subsidies* for building power plants. The CEC surveyed all power plants in California to get their numbers. Green technologies get your "MASSIVE SUBSIDIES", whereas dirty coal/NG get none, and nuclear gets a fraction. And fractions are all that matter here, not absolute numbers.
As I said, you seem to be allergic to numbers.
One of the biggest problems with environmentalists and hippies is that they're as allergic to numbers as they are to hygiene. What do you think the subsidy rate is on nuclear power, compared with MSW or solar or wind? Higher? If they're MASSIVE SUBSIDIES, it sounds like you think they're higher.
Checking the actual numbers from the CEC, we can make more concrete statements without resorting to using all caps and waving our hands in the air. Here's the results:
Nuclear: up to 14.1% subsidy
Biomass: up to 94% subsidy
Fuel cell: up to 57% subsidy
Geothermal: up to 46% subsidy
Hydro: up to 38.5% subsidy
Tidal: up to 14.1% subsidy
Solar: up to 108% subsidy
Wind: up to 41% subsidy
Coal and NG: 0%
Don't you feel slightly stupid now? I doubt you'll suddenly start ranting about the MASSIVE SUBSIDIES for the technologies that, you know, actually benefit from them.
>>This clearly dictates there is a 'cost' associated with NG/oil/coal that is not currently being assessed; a subsidy if you will.
If you're talking about external costs or social costs, then sure. The above numbers are direct subsidies from the gov't.
However, the indirect social costs for dealing with nuclear is much lower than coal and NG as well. Again, quantifying the numbers, it's about 3-6x less (7c/KWH for coal versus 3c for NG versus 1.2c for nuclear in external and social costs).
Nuclear is certainly green from the point of view of CO2 production. It's so cheap and effective at producing CO2-free energy, that the UNFCCC had to ban it from qualifying for carbon credits, as it would destroy all other green sources.
Wikipedia says it refers to poor people in rural Florida and Georgia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(pejorative)
>>If you're paying $.50 per KWH for electricity, you're in the range where it could be cheaper to run a gas/propane/diesel generator instead of hooking up to the grid.
Would you actually want to live next to a noisy and smelly generator all day long?
I'm actually getting solar put on my house next month. It'll pay itself back in about 2-3 years, and after that keep my power bills down in the lower tier levels (11c instead of 50c).
>>Second of all, oil has nothing to do with nuclear? They're both energy sources
In completely different sectors. You could replace all of coal with nuclear, and it wouldn't have the slightest effect on prices at the gas pump, unless people finally start gassification of coal.
>>And cheap fossil fuels killed nuclear power. Period.
No. Have you actually read why power companies stopped building nuclear plants? I have, at least for California. It was a combination of concern about nuclear safety (TMI in particular, as well as the China Syndrome) combined with interminable lawsuits which ended up delaying Diablo Canyon by a decade and costing billions of dollars more as a result. Not worth the hassle to deal with environmentalists, so they just focused on natural gas thereafter.
Yay, go Greens.
>>First of all, this is Slashdot, please don't dilute the term "hack" any further than it already has been.
If you're going to be pedantic, you should make sure you're correct. Sony installing a backdoor that can do all sorts of neat (from their perspective) things is a hack, in both senses of the word. Furthermore, only pedants think that calling people "crackers" (which brings to mind redneck hicks living in the swamp) is a great adjective. The rejection of it has everything to do with how silly the word sounds.
>>Second, I don't see how this violates my privacy in any way, shape or form.
An entity snooping around in all of your files, installed secretly and without your knowledge or consent? That's pretty much the definition of invasion of privacy. While I suppose people like you think that corporations should get free passes on these sorts of issues, whereas individual hackers who did the same would get tossed in jail, that's a pretty hypocritical way to operate.
>>All of that makes me wonder though... what exactly did I agree to when I bought the thing?
A game playing device that handles both single player and multiplayer games without consenting to allowing Sony to look through all of my private files.
>>the kind of incorrect and inflammatory comments you're making do nothing to help the cause.
Kettleblack.
>>But if you had actually read the "agreement" that you had in your box when you bought the PS3 you would know that they told you - at purchase - you are required to keep it up to date to take it online.
Keeping it up to date is a completely different matter than allowing them to violate my privacy rights.
>>Electricity *can* be produced greenly. Show me how gas and coal does that hmm?
>>You simply can't clean the emissions of 100 million ICE cars and coal power plants.
Where did I say NG and coal are green? I was talking about nuclear, which is.
That said, you can run NG and coal both with CC systems, which roughly double the cost of generation. If you have never even heard of CC systems, I'm not sure you're qualified to make statements on the issue.
>>The 'nuts' are trying to save your ass from yourself...but don't let that get in the way of your rants
Study the issue before you post. You'll look less foolish.
The environmental lobby has been tremendously successful at interfering with or shutting down projects in America in the last 30 years. They're the real "Party of No".
Oh, they know it, but they'll find something to complain about with every other power plant being proposed, leading them to being de facto supporters of coal/NG power production. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal - it doesn't matter. The Sierra Club will be there blocking it. The amount of sheer hyprocisy in the environmental movement is so high, I'm baffled how you could possibly support them. They've done more harm to our environment than any other group in America.
Excelsior!
This entire paragraph is so badly reasoned, I don't even know where to begin.
"Sustainability is unsustainable"? What does that even mean? How is that not a contradiction?
You also have to define what you mean by the long term. We have enough coal and fissionable materials for a *really* long time. Long enough that it doesn't really matter there's a finite limit on it - it's like arguing that solar is nonrenewable because it comes from the sun, that will burn out in a few billion years.
Deepwater Horizon was not an example of pushing external costs on society, because BP is paying for the damages they caused. It is also Oil, which is a totally different ballgame from nuclear.
As a child of the 80s, I am constantly surprised (well, not really) when I still get safe drinking water from the tap (we were supposed to run out), that we've had only one or two species go extinct (it was supposed to be the biggest dieoff in history), that we aren't covered in a layer of trash like in Wall-E, and that the climate is not a hundred degrees hotter or colder than it was in the 80s.
All of these were predictions by the environmental lobby, and all of them were braindead doom and gloom predictions. That's the environmentalist's stock-in-trade.
You do know that Oil has nothing to do with nuclear, NG and coal, right? One is for cars, one is for electricity generation. (Oil is a percent or so of our total energy production, and mainly used as a backstop.)
Well, I *do* want to replace Oil with Coal, but you don't sound like you're really knowledgeable enough to be making an argument along those lines.
>>If it weren't for the enviro-nuts and not-in-my-backyarders who think electricity magically comes from the socket and not instead from coal plants and the like.
Yeah, saw a nut on the roads here (in California) advertising his plug-in conversion company. When you're paying 50c/kWH, electric cars are more expensive than gas. :p
"But they're pollution free!" Yeah, except the magic electricity fairy farts natural gas, don't you see?
"We can't have nuclear power in California until we can deal with the waste!" (This is the actual law in California.) But... this a burner reactor, that will actually help dispose of nuclear waste.
"The California High Speed Rail network will run on 100% green power! But not nuclear." Aren't you drawing power from the grid?
And so on and so forth. Environmentalists and our state government are completely batshit crazy when it comes to this issue.
>>All that Sony is saying is that if you connect to their network that you have to abide by their rules
That still doesn't give them permission to hack your machine and violate your constitutional Right to Privacy**.
Well, hey, you don't *have* to use it online, right? No. Like a car being forced to sit in the garage, an offline PS3 is useless, and not what you agreed to when you bought the damn thing.
Or to put it another way, people like you will be very unhappy when their new Murder TOS comes out.
>>That was easy - less than 15 minutes into the first lecture he defines very precisely what he means by "free will". In his words, an object has free will if it's future is not determined by its past. Thus he is using free will as synonymous with random. Unless he changes his mind later into the lectures, you didn't understand his lectures - they are about free will in name only. Does he change his mind?
Read my other responses in this thread. =)
Essentially, he puts actions into three categories: determined, random, and "free". So he'd disagree with your claim that non-determined means random, necessarily.
Well, even though breathless science journalists report that the Higgs Field is "source of mass", it's not the only one. As you pointed out, E=MC^2, so any energetic entity has a gravitational mass under relativity. Nuclei of atoms get a significant fraction of their apparent mass from the nuclear binding energy from the strong force.
I think the Higgs Field is better described as the "source of inertia", as opposed to the source of mass, as the mechanism by which it operates is basically what we think of as the Newtonian definition of inertia at normal scales - particles that interact with it are resistant to changes in their velocity. Since photons do not interact with it at all, that's why I was saying that you could argue that photons do not have inertia (on top of the fact that you cannot apply a force to them to change their velocity).
It's really just a semantic argument, though.
No, no, no. Occam's Razor doesn't say anything about a simple hypothesis being correct, or even a simpler one being preferred. It's a principle that you should not make things more complicated than necessary. So many people like you have misunderstood the principle that I once wrote a long article on it.
It's one of the few fallacies that are very common in scientifically minded folk. (And those that watched Contact.)
He doesn't speak as if he has The Answer. Listen to his NPR interview or read his books. He's very clear on differentiating between scientific consensus and speculation. The fact that you're accusing him of this and lumping him in with the idiot crowd of science journalists means that you're guilty of the same thing.
He also suggests ways that his theories might show up in experiments in the LHC - for example a collision in which there appears to be a conservation of energy loss might indicate the existence of other dimensions.
It sounds to me like you've watched his less-good TV show and not read his more-good books.
I don't have The Hidden Reality, but in his NPR interview he was very very clear that it was theoretical and speculative.
His previous books, that I have read, are actually very good. They too talk about what is scientific consensus versus more speculative physics - AND why the math leads him to believe why he thinks a certain speculation might be true.
He also talks about different ways string theory might be empirically tested, which is also A Good Thing.
In other words, I don't see any reason for all the hate. He's a million times better than pop science journalists, who rightly deserve the hate the GP mislays at Brian Green's feet.
>>However, contrary to the summary, it doesn't eliminate the need for strategic voting.
No system ever does. I once proved that the only systems immune to gaming (strategic voting) are those with = 2 candidates.
Well, first argument is fine and all, but it doesn't really fit the debate between determinism and free will. Free will is the stance that "I" determined my course of action, instead of the prior state of the universe. It doesn't have anything to do with spontaneity, because a spontaneous universe would be worse that a deterministic one, in which you might want to go eat ice cream, but your body starts shoveling green beans down your throat instead.
Your second article assumes determinism via "The past determines the present". That's precisely what you're being asked to prove.
In the last megathread on this, I posted my own thoughts on this, which basically went (this is the short form):
1) Determinism implies predictability (being able to calculate the state of the future universe in advance)
2) Predictability is impossible (via an argument similar to the Halting Thesis)
3) Therefore Determinism is impossible
Conway actually took your statement and flipped it around and said that he's never heard a convincing argument for determinism, since the arguments for it are generally based on outdated physics. The only one he found coherent was the Second Time Around hypothesis, which is that we're living in the second (or later) universe, with everything happening exactly the same the second time around. But coherent, he said, doesn't mean correct, necessarily.
As I said, it's on iTunesU (search for Conway), or you can read about it by searching for John Conway's Free Will Theorem.
It's based on the Kochen-Specker Theorem, which states kinda-sorta that the dice for QM measurements are not rolled beforehand (i.e. predetermined).
>>Then again, if the decision emerges from the brain, by definition it's not a free decision
People supporting free will don't say that all causality isn't determined (wow, triple negative), but rather that most things are deterministic, with decision-making being free. Descartes relied on the soul for this source of freedom, I'd say there could be other sources.
>>they are fundamentally predetermined by this universe.
You're assuming your conclusion, which is that the universe predetermines everything.
>>What would our world look like if it wasn't predictable? What does that mean?
Philosophers often talk about the difference between: determined actions, random actions, and agent causation. As I said in other threads, Conway's talk on Free Will (on iTunesU) talks about possible support in physics for the third.
>>Don't need it. Can't really imagine anyone who does, really.
Dude, think about how many simultaneous Quakeworld clients you could run at once!