>>quenda could point out the experiments where a decision is detected in the brains of the subject long before the subject becomes aware of the decision.
Actually, that study has nothing to say about free will. It's not that free will states that your mouth will magically move and say the word "five" when asked to guess a number between 1 and 10, but that it is not predetermined by the universe. The study merely talks about the lag between the brain deciding on a choice and consciousness being aware of it, which are two different issues entirely.
As I said in another thread John Conway believes in a third option (free) besides the determined/Newtonian and random/QM options. His lectures, which aren't very good, can be found on iTunesU.
John Conway has claimed to have (kinda) proved this.
You can find his free will theorem on iTunes U.
Basically, he says "Free" is different from both "Deterministic" (Newtonian) and "Random" (Quantum) physical processes, and that particles have it. Free being that their state is not predetermined by the state of the universe in the preceding time step.
No, I'm pretty sure I am human when I am happy to see someone who wishes to cause others harm kill themselves before they get the chance. Being enlightened before they decide to do it is a good choice too, but death works just as well.
People like you who try to empathize with evil people are no longer human. They are wrong. Period. They want to KILL people. KILL. OTHER. PEOPLE. Which one of those words don't you understand. I am HAPPY, THRILLED, ECSTATIC, that they did not get the chance. 10's, dozens, possibly hundreds of others get to live now. That brings me JOY. A tear to my eye. ELATION.
You can say what you want about the US government and its military, but we don't intentionally target civilians, we don't kill indiscriminately even people who may be on our side, etc. etc. There are accidents, friendly fire casualties, bad apples, and a lot of other bad shit that happens, but it is war and it is chaotic. We try our best not to harm the innocents or our own.
These monsters walk right into the biggest pile of innocent civilians they can find and detonate themselves.
So while people like you sit idly by and think of the children, there are some people who work hard to prevent it, and get a little joy when the enemy screws up. You're wrong, not them. Get off your pedestal.
Have you ever encountered XBL staff? I never have. Never had trouble with Sony's service being down or anything, either. Maybe Xbox has more of the infotainment videos or whatever, but I don't are them providing $50 worth of value.
The main area that XBL is better than PSN is the group party / chat system.
>>And since XBL is a subscription service they set their rules, but you agree to them by paying for the service.
Which is one of the areas that Sony is better than Microsoft. I'm frankly offended by having to pay $50/year to play Halo online with my friends. Or, more often, a small time duration subscription that covers the week or so I'll be playing Gears or whatever other Xbox-exclusive game I want to play with my peeps.
The Playstation Plus model is a lot less offensive: you can play the games you've bought, as well as paid your ISP for access, online, but if you want access to the DC Online beta, or free games or discounts each month, you can pay $50/month. I signed up for it to get Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves, which I felt was a great deal for the money (free, with Plus), and it also allowed me to avoid playing DC Online, which I played for about 20 hours and found to be total shit, especially from a storyline point of view. Maybe not as bad as WoW, but shit even still. ("Good is bad!" say the evil NPCs.)
>>Sony should have left the "Other OS" feature on and just "unsupported."
I guess. But Other OS provided limited access to the hardware (IIRC only a single stream processor), and so homebrew couldn't really run on it very well anyway. It might have been more of a coincidence, since the impetus to break into the lower access levels was always there in order to allow homebrew games to run.
So Phil Jones wrote "a badly phrased reply in an email that was probably written in frustrated haste", but I'm a bully for noting how he used legally questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests?
You post these things defending Jones, but those were from the point of view that Climategate was about scientists lying to the public, which I've emphatically said was not the case. If I wanted to put link diarrhea all over my posts, like you, this would be the perfect opportunity to do so, but given as how you've read everything I've written, you're probably well aware that I do not think Climategate was about fake scientific data or that Jones was being dishonest, scientificially, at all. The true scandal was all about him dodging FOIA requests, which (again, link diarrhea elided) he was correctly held accountable for by the boards of inquiry.
You make it sound like they found him completely innocent.
Thanks for reminding me about the combined data series, I'd forgotten about that. I wouldn't say it was fraud (it was combining best knowledge from two different time series), but it was a trick out of Lies, damned lies, and statistics. And yes, I "accused" RC.org of tricks from that book, because they used them.
Also, thanks for finding the response from me. When I'd gone back to check, back in the day, they hadn't responded.
>>It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes
Given that these sorts of issues are often hereditary (nature or nurture), I wouldn't be surprised if they came more often from single households or low income families as well.
>>The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it.
Sure, but self-control could be an irrelevant mechanism for what is going on, and simply correlated both with True Cause X (let's say Low Income) and Bad Outcome Y (growing up into a Low Income Household)
I've done sports, played instruments (the violin, which isn't especially easy), and done martial arts. While you might incidentally learn concentration and discipline from sports and music, in martial arts it is taught explicitly.
Well, your mileage will vary, of course, but my instructor in TKD would spend a significant amount of time with students cultivating their character and self-control.
>>I don't care how good you become (I was.very good, others will land hits on you.
>>As someone who had martial arts forced on him as a kid
Well, that's the problem. Kids that don't want to be in martial arts are often the worst students in the class, anyway, and can disrupt the entire atmosphere of a school.
You can't punish them by sitting out of a class, because, well, they don't want to be there, and their parents are just using martial arts as an afterschool babysitting program.
That said, for kids that do want to be there, but have behavioral or attention problems, martial arts is great. It's amazing how much hyperactivity vanishes when you make them duck walk around the mat a few times.
"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."
Well, that may very well be the problem right there. Ditto for the fact that kids with low self control probably came from low-income families, too.
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.
>>Somebody dropping two hundred and fifty big ones on a video card is mid-range?
High end cards hover around $500, and get 33% to 100% more performance than the mid-range cards at $250, who get the same performance edge over the low-end cards around $125, which blow the hell out of the performance of entry level or integrated graphics.
The new generation is no exception. The 580 is intriguing to me, but the 560 Ti (especially overclocked) looks like it has the best combination of price, performance, temperature and noise.
The system I am looking at uses the grid for storage. You feed excess power into the grid and get part of the value of the power back. But you don't get all of the value back and you have to pay for extra hardware to interface with the mains properly so I am also looking at cooking up my own system which will supply a little bit more than the power requirements of the house during the day and not bother with storage.
Yeah, systems with batteries are much more expensive, and you generally want to be on the grid, anyway, just in case you need more power one day. The connection gets installed for free by PG&E, but they also only credit you 8c/KWH for your power while charging you between 8c and 50c (depending on tier). But the way the math works out, you just push yourself down into the baseline tier, which is cheaper than solar anyway (which works out to 11c/KWH when levellized over 20 years, or 22c over 10).
>>Every automatic I've ever driven drops into a higher gear (usually top gear) immediately when you lift off the gas, the car doesn't slow down at all, it may actually accelerate a little bit.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing, except in my Altima hybrid with a CVT. It was strange getting used to the feel of it, since I was used to the car giving a bit more output with the foot off the accelerator. But if you take your foot off the pedal in my car, you can see that the engine is actually drawing energy out of the system and feeding it to the battery. It feels like the car has a lot more drag than it should, and took a while to get used to. If you want constant speed, you have to set the cruise control and it disables this (or just drive with a very light touch on the accelerator, which gets annoying after a while).
Slashdot Mirror
>>quenda could point out the experiments where a decision is detected in the brains of the subject long before the subject becomes aware of the decision.
Actually, that study has nothing to say about free will. It's not that free will states that your mouth will magically move and say the word "five" when asked to guess a number between 1 and 10, but that it is not predetermined by the universe. The study merely talks about the lag between the brain deciding on a choice and consciousness being aware of it, which are two different issues entirely.
Define free will? Easy - it's !Determinism.
Define Determinism? Given the state of the universe at time t, you can calculate the state at time t+1.
As I said in another thread John Conway believes in a third option (free) besides the determined/Newtonian and random/QM options. His lectures, which aren't very good, can be found on iTunesU.
>>"Free will" just means we cannot see the mechanism that produced it.
Out of curiosity, why are you so convinced that determinism is true?
>>(2) matter itself has free will.
John Conway has claimed to have (kinda) proved this.
You can find his free will theorem on iTunes U.
Basically, he says "Free" is different from both "Deterministic" (Newtonian) and "Random" (Quantum) physical processes, and that particles have it. Free being that their state is not predetermined by the state of the universe in the preceding time step.
>>BWA HA FUCKING HA. So not only are you a hate-filled hypocrite, you must be willfully ignorant.
I've got some marine friends that would love to talk with you, Mr. Coward.
As someone who lived in SF for four years, believe me when I say they soak the residents, too.
You, sir, just won the Internet.
Have you ever encountered XBL staff? I never have. Never had trouble with Sony's service being down or anything, either. Maybe Xbox has more of the infotainment videos or whatever, but I don't are them providing $50 worth of value.
The main area that XBL is better than PSN is the group party / chat system.
>>And since XBL is a subscription service they set their rules, but you agree to them by paying for the service.
Which is one of the areas that Sony is better than Microsoft. I'm frankly offended by having to pay $50/year to play Halo online with my friends. Or, more often, a small time duration subscription that covers the week or so I'll be playing Gears or whatever other Xbox-exclusive game I want to play with my peeps.
The Playstation Plus model is a lot less offensive: you can play the games you've bought, as well as paid your ISP for access, online, but if you want access to the DC Online beta, or free games or discounts each month, you can pay $50/month. I signed up for it to get Sackboy's Prehistoric Moves, which I felt was a great deal for the money (free, with Plus), and it also allowed me to avoid playing DC Online, which I played for about 20 hours and found to be total shit, especially from a storyline point of view. Maybe not as bad as WoW, but shit even still. ("Good is bad!" say the evil NPCs.)
>>Sony should have left the "Other OS" feature on and just "unsupported."
I guess. But Other OS provided limited access to the hardware (IIRC only a single stream processor), and so homebrew couldn't really run on it very well anyway. It might have been more of a coincidence, since the impetus to break into the lower access levels was always there in order to allow homebrew games to run.
So Phil Jones wrote "a badly phrased reply in an email that was probably written in frustrated haste", but I'm a bully for noting how he used legally questionable tactics to dodge FOIA requests?
You post these things defending Jones, but those were from the point of view that Climategate was about scientists lying to the public, which I've emphatically said was not the case. If I wanted to put link diarrhea all over my posts, like you, this would be the perfect opportunity to do so, but given as how you've read everything I've written, you're probably well aware that I do not think Climategate was about fake scientific data or that Jones was being dishonest, scientificially, at all. The true scandal was all about him dodging FOIA requests, which (again, link diarrhea elided) he was correctly held accountable for by the boards of inquiry.
You make it sound like they found him completely innocent.
Thanks for reminding me about the combined data series, I'd forgotten about that. I wouldn't say it was fraud (it was combining best knowledge from two different time series), but it was a trick out of Lies, damned lies, and statistics. And yes, I "accused" RC.org of tricks from that book, because they used them.
Also, thanks for finding the response from me. When I'd gone back to check, back in the day, they hadn't responded.
>>It's sensationalism, and personally I can't stand it. There's no need to exaggerate every attribute when describing a person or event.
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that he really did dress like a slob and smell bad.
Lord knows this describes enough nerds.
>>It's not saying that the kids with poor self-control had low income or single-parent homes growing up, it's saying that kids with poor self-control are likely to grow into adults with low income and broken homes
Given that these sorts of issues are often hereditary (nature or nurture), I wouldn't be surprised if they came more often from single households or low income families as well.
>>The article claims that self-control predicts success, not that it causes it.
Sure, but self-control could be an irrelevant mechanism for what is going on, and simply correlated both with True Cause X (let's say Low Income) and Bad Outcome Y (growing up into a Low Income Household)
I've done sports, played instruments (the violin, which isn't especially easy), and done martial arts. While you might incidentally learn concentration and discipline from sports and music, in martial arts it is taught explicitly.
Well, your mileage will vary, of course, but my instructor in TKD would spend a significant amount of time with students cultivating their character and self-control.
>>I don't care how good you become (I was .very good, others will land hits on you.
Learn to dodge. Pain is a great teacher. =)
>>As someone who had martial arts forced on him as a kid
Well, that's the problem. Kids that don't want to be in martial arts are often the worst students in the class, anyway, and can disrupt the entire atmosphere of a school.
You can't punish them by sitting out of a class, because, well, they don't want to be there, and their parents are just using martial arts as an afterschool babysitting program.
That said, for kids that do want to be there, but have behavioral or attention problems, martial arts is great. It's amazing how much hyperactivity vanishes when you make them duck walk around the mat a few times.
I disabled all my addons, and it still is tiny...
>>Hell, keep everybody's web history long enough and you'll likely find something you could use against them.
Yeah, especially if you post on Slashdot.
"Among the bottom fifth, 32% had an annual income below approximately $15,000, while only 10% of the top fifth fell into that low-income bracket. Just 26% of the top-fifth's offspring were raised in single-parent homes, compared with 58% of those in the bottom fifth."
Well, that may very well be the problem right there. Ditto for the fact that kids with low self control probably came from low-income families, too.
That said, doing martial arts as a kid is a wonderful way to learn self-control, among many other benefits. I'm half convinced it cures ADHD, too, from my personal experience.
XP with the classic interface look, FF 3.6.13
Here's what I see:
http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/4351/22025058.jpg
>>Somebody dropping two hundred and fifty big ones on a video card is mid-range?
High end cards hover around $500, and get 33% to 100% more performance than the mid-range cards at $250, who get the same performance edge over the low-end cards around $125, which blow the hell out of the performance of entry level or integrated graphics.
The new generation is no exception. The 580 is intriguing to me, but the 560 Ti (especially overclocked) looks like it has the best combination of price, performance, temperature and noise.
>>wayyyyy too much white space and low-contrast text on white.
And the comment reply boxes are a lot smaller... I'm drowning here in a sea of white.
At least they're not forcing us to use their shit ass new discussion system. By that I mean, not forcing us again.
Yeah, systems with batteries are much more expensive, and you generally want to be on the grid, anyway, just in case you need more power one day. The connection gets installed for free by PG&E, but they also only credit you 8c/KWH for your power while charging you between 8c and 50c (depending on tier). But the way the math works out, you just push yourself down into the baseline tier, which is cheaper than solar anyway (which works out to 11c/KWH when levellized over 20 years, or 22c over 10).
>>Every automatic I've ever driven drops into a higher gear (usually top gear) immediately when you lift off the gas, the car doesn't slow down at all, it may actually accelerate a little bit.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing, except in my Altima hybrid with a CVT. It was strange getting used to the feel of it, since I was used to the car giving a bit more output with the foot off the accelerator. But if you take your foot off the pedal in my car, you can see that the engine is actually drawing energy out of the system and feeding it to the battery. It feels like the car has a lot more drag than it should, and took a while to get used to. If you want constant speed, you have to set the cruise control and it disables this (or just drive with a very light touch on the accelerator, which gets annoying after a while).