Human beings are good at putting up mental walls, in order to ignore necessary contradictions in their thinking.
That's why it's possible to have geologists doing mainstream work, while simultaneously believing in creationism. They just put up a barrier in their heads, and don't think about both things at once.
I do genuinely wonder how many religious people, at some level, know that their "belief" isn't true, but behave as if it is, because they feel the world is a better place if everyone acts as if it's true.
You don't need to believe in abiogenesis in order to believe in evolution. When people say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, they're not talking about abiogenesis. They're talking about the evidence for there having been periods billions of years ago when there were only single-celled organisms, and the evolution of those organisms into the complex life we have today.
If you like, you can imagine that a deity put life into those primitive origins.
Nonetheless abiogenesis seems plausible to me, and there have been experiments that demonstrate the processes that may have set things off. Look for the Miller-Urey Experiment, for a classic. Bear in mind that to go from primordial soup to single-cells, we're talking about a handful of freak occurrences, each one some 40 million years apart.
To foreigners the USA presidential election is an enigma. It seems the system isn't interested in the population's inclination being represented proportionally.
Hey, I wouldn't worry about it. Here in the UK, we were given a referendum on introducing a fairer voting system. 67.9% of the votes were for keeping the old, broken, first-past-the-post system.
The question about "ignoring dire real world consequences" is a gross oversimplification.
I think if you talked to most of those who support drone strikes they probably see this as an alternative to sending flesh and blood troops to try and deal with the situation. Even sending a traditional plane puts a soldier in potential harm's way. To most people "Use drones instead, they are expendable" is an easy answer.
Speaking of oversimplification... Is it the case that the potential danger to "our" people is something that puts the brakes on our instinct to blow up more of "them"?
OSCE. But even if it was the UN, it has many non-European member states, including the US, and currently has a Korean secretary general.
But on to the point.
Except the UN Thugs won't be there to "observe." They will be there to intimidate and to attempt to alter the outcome of the election in favor of Obama, since that's who the rest of the socialist commie pinko leftist world wants to win.
The OSCE staff will be there to observe, as unobtrusively as possible. If any of them were to start imposing themselves on voters, that would be the moment to throw them out of the polling station.
The sole act of excluding an observer should never be sufficient cause for suspicion.
We're not talking about personal activities where you have an expectation of privacy. We're talking about a public function of great importance, where inviting independent observers is the norm. So in this case, excluding an observer is indeed grounds for suspicion.
That, and from what I've been able to tell, the "observers" appear to be wanting to "observe" voter issues (intimidation, discrimination, disenfranchisement) for only one of the two parties, the other party they have no interest in "observing."
I don't understand why you (and others) keep putting "observe" in quotes. It suggests that you think they do something other than observe.
The things I think election observers do at polling stations, are not things that could benefit one party over the other -- unless one party plans to rig the votes.
Then the UN should be sending their observers to Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, or Colorado. Texas is not going to determine the outcome of this race.
They should be sending their observers everywhere. Or a random sample, if they lack resources. Are they not doing that?
Go on http://music.stackexchange.com/ and you'll find the advice "look, I know it's expensive, but get a good teacher" over and over again.
There are lots of self-taught musicians, but (apart from edge cases) they're mediocre, or they've taken longer to get where they are than if they'd had a teacher.
Bear in mind that some universities (including - from memory - MIT?) use Nand2Tetris as their CS101 course.
I thoroughly recommend working through Nand2Tetris anyway, whether you persevere with formal education or not. It really is tremendously good.
I graduated in CS in the 1990s, but just in the last month I worked through the early chapters of Nand2Tetris. Of course I knew the theory, but my degree started at a higher level of abstraction than Nand2Tetris, or glossed over the details -- we learned what a logic gate was, a flip-flop, an ALU, a CPU, a register, but didn't cover how one could be assembled into the next.
I don't blame them too much - Nand2Tetris relies on a set of tools that would have taxed the hardware we had at the time.
Teletext is slow by its nature. It simply broadcasts every page, in a loop, over and over again.
With early receivers, you just had to wait.
Later on, when RAM got a bit cheaper, receivers would detect the four page numbers linked to the coloured buttons, and cache the content of those next time they were broadcast.
Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
[Digital teletext] also doesn't work with recorded content since most PVRs strip out the data stream unlike Ceefax which would survive.
If you recorded onto Series 1 Tivo, Ceefax didn't survive.
*Some* VCRs would preserve enough of the frame for Ceefax to work when you played back a recording. I think it was more through accident than design though. More usually, it would be recorded in distorted form, which meant amusingly garbled subtitles, and some education in how a digital system might handle corrupt input data.
Thermodynamics says that's going to be some very, very expensive fuel.
What law of thermodynamics is it that says this particular way of converting energy is especially expensive compared to other ways?
Presumably it's cheaper than the "traditional" method (use light to grow plants, leave plants material in a pressurised anaerobic atmosphere for millennia).
You'll have to explain to me how you define "the problem of human suffering", and how you think religion addresses it. I can think of a couple of ways, but I don't know which you're referring to:
Potential "problems":
- "I as a human, am suffering. I don't like it."
- "I notice that other people in the world are suffering. I don't like it."
Potential religion oriented solutions:
- "My religion tells me to help the needy, so that is what I will do" (i.e. religion inspiring people to do charitable things to alleviate suffering)
- "My religion tells me that my suffering in this life will be compensated for in the afterlife, I am comforted."
- "My religion tells me that others' suffering in this life will be compensated for in the afterlife, I am comforted."
- "My religion tells me that others' suffering in this life is punishment for their sins in a previous life. That makes it OK."
As a non-religious person, I do not find the false comfort "solutions" appealing. I don't think religious people have a monopoly on compassion, and in a hypothetical world without religion, I would still expect to see people motivated to do charitable works.
Slashdot Mirror
Human beings are good at putting up mental walls, in order to ignore necessary contradictions in their thinking.
That's why it's possible to have geologists doing mainstream work, while simultaneously believing in creationism. They just put up a barrier in their heads, and don't think about both things at once.
I do genuinely wonder how many religious people, at some level, know that their "belief" isn't true, but behave as if it is, because they feel the world is a better place if everyone acts as if it's true.
To most people ...
That depends where you live.
You don't need to believe in abiogenesis in order to believe in evolution. When people say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, they're not talking about abiogenesis. They're talking about the evidence for there having been periods billions of years ago when there were only single-celled organisms, and the evolution of those organisms into the complex life we have today.
If you like, you can imagine that a deity put life into those primitive origins.
Nonetheless abiogenesis seems plausible to me, and there have been experiments that demonstrate the processes that may have set things off. Look for the Miller-Urey Experiment, for a classic. Bear in mind that to go from primordial soup to single-cells, we're talking about a handful of freak occurrences, each one some 40 million years apart.
To foreigners the USA presidential election is an enigma. It seems the system isn't interested in the population's inclination being represented proportionally.
Hey, I wouldn't worry about it. Here in the UK, we were given a referendum on introducing a fairer voting system. 67.9% of the votes were for keeping the old, broken, first-past-the-post system.
The question about "ignoring dire real world consequences" is a gross oversimplification.
I think if you talked to most of those who support drone strikes they probably see this as an alternative to sending flesh and blood troops to try and deal with the situation. Even sending a traditional plane puts a soldier in potential harm's way. To most people "Use drones instead, they are expendable" is an easy answer.
Speaking of oversimplification... Is it the case that the potential danger to "our" people is something that puts the brakes on our instinct to blow up more of "them"?
I checked. It's Harvard.
Some others might too, without the "nand2tetris" name.
Eurotrash scumbags.
OSCE. But even if it was the UN, it has many non-European member states, including the US, and currently has a Korean secretary general.
But on to the point.
Except the UN Thugs won't be there to "observe." They will be there to intimidate and to attempt to alter the outcome of the election in favor of Obama, since that's who the rest of the socialist commie pinko leftist world wants to win.
The OSCE staff will be there to observe, as unobtrusively as possible. If any of them were to start imposing themselves on voters, that would be the moment to throw them out of the polling station.
The sole act of excluding an observer should never be sufficient cause for suspicion.
We're not talking about personal activities where you have an expectation of privacy. We're talking about a public function of great importance, where inviting independent observers is the norm. So in this case, excluding an observer is indeed grounds for suspicion.
I know I tried to register to vote there as a Democrat and never got my voter registration information.
How did they know?
That, and from what I've been able to tell, the "observers" appear to be wanting to "observe" voter issues (intimidation, discrimination, disenfranchisement) for only one of the two parties, the other party they have no interest in "observing."
I don't understand why you (and others) keep putting "observe" in quotes. It suggests that you think they do something other than observe.
The things I think election observers do at polling stations, are not things that could benefit one party over the other -- unless one party plans to rig the votes.
Then the UN should be sending their observers to Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, or Colorado. Texas is not going to determine the outcome of this race.
They should be sending their observers everywhere. Or a random sample, if they lack resources. Are they not doing that?
Music performance is hard to teach yourself?
Go on http://music.stackexchange.com/ and you'll find the advice "look, I know it's expensive, but get a good teacher" over and over again.
There are lots of self-taught musicians, but (apart from edge cases) they're mediocre, or they've taken longer to get where they are than if they'd had a teacher.
Bear in mind that some universities (including - from memory - MIT?) use Nand2Tetris as their CS101 course.
I thoroughly recommend working through Nand2Tetris anyway, whether you persevere with formal education or not. It really is tremendously good.
I graduated in CS in the 1990s, but just in the last month I worked through the early chapters of Nand2Tetris. Of course I knew the theory, but my degree started at a higher level of abstraction than Nand2Tetris, or glossed over the details -- we learned what a logic gate was, a flip-flop, an ALU, a CPU, a register, but didn't cover how one could be assembled into the next.
I don't blame them too much - Nand2Tetris relies on a set of tools that would have taxed the hardware we had at the time.
The firmware is still a binary blob. My guess is that the codec support is controlled at that level.
What technology do you use to watch BBC wherever you are?
The BBC certainly provides subtitles for all their DVB streams. It would surprise me if a legitimate carrier didn't retain them.
In many countries, there are legal reasons why broadcasters are obliged to provide subtitles for the deaf.
Ceefax news came from the BBC and could be believed. The brainless mind wank that comprises most of twitter is just digital wallpaper.
https://twitter.com/BBCNews
... and yet on another /. story, people are complaining about the price and availability of mobile internet.
There is only so much spectrum. Analogue TV was not an efficient use of it.
Teletext is slow by its nature. It simply broadcasts every page, in a loop, over and over again.
With early receivers, you just had to wait.
Later on, when RAM got a bit cheaper, receivers would detect the four page numbers linked to the coloured buttons, and cache the content of those next time they were broadcast.
Eventually RAM got cheap enough that receivers would just cache the full set of pages.
[Digital teletext] also doesn't work with recorded content since most PVRs strip out the data stream unlike Ceefax which would survive.
If you recorded onto Series 1 Tivo, Ceefax didn't survive.
*Some* VCRs would preserve enough of the frame for Ceefax to work when you played back a recording. I think it was more through accident than design though. More usually, it would be recorded in distorted form, which meant amusingly garbled subtitles, and some education in how a digital system might handle corrupt input data.
It is still alive in Norway (and I guess a lot of countries) as well.
In what form? According to Wikipedia analogue TV was turned off in Norway in 2009.
I still rely very much on the Teletext service of German stations
I'm confused. Wikipedia tells me that German analogue TV broadcasts were switched off in Germany in 2009.
Yeah, don't sign up for internet. Great idea, we'll get right on it.
He means, don't sign up for this particular 4G plan.
You could, for example, pay £12.50/mo and get 3GB of 3G from another network.
When people talk about electrolysis plants for converting electricity into hydrogen, they generally envisage siting them on the coast.
Thermodynamics says that's going to be some very, very expensive fuel.
What law of thermodynamics is it that says this particular way of converting energy is especially expensive compared to other ways?
Presumably it's cheaper than the "traditional" method (use light to grow plants, leave plants material in a pressurised anaerobic atmosphere for millennia).
You'll have to explain to me how you define "the problem of human suffering", and how you think religion addresses it. I can think of a couple of ways, but I don't know which you're referring to:
Potential "problems":
- "I as a human, am suffering. I don't like it."
- "I notice that other people in the world are suffering. I don't like it."
Potential religion oriented solutions:
- "My religion tells me to help the needy, so that is what I will do" (i.e. religion inspiring people to do charitable things to alleviate suffering)
- "My religion tells me that my suffering in this life will be compensated for in the afterlife, I am comforted."
- "My religion tells me that others' suffering in this life will be compensated for in the afterlife, I am comforted."
- "My religion tells me that others' suffering in this life is punishment for their sins in a previous life. That makes it OK."
As a non-religious person, I do not find the false comfort "solutions" appealing. I don't think religious people have a monopoly on compassion, and in a hypothetical world without religion, I would still expect to see people motivated to do charitable works.