If the Creator you fathom is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent then there arises no question of his creation.
Well, then, what have you explained by its existence, then? Nothing!
Having set out on a journey motivated by the question of how could the universe just exist without any cause, you have settled on an explanation which is that something else exists without cause. So, if that's a good enough explanation for the Creator, why was it not good enough for the universe and the Big Bang? After all, you have added a great deal more mystery by making the explanation "omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent", only one of which was a characteristic of the universe. Now we have to ask where and how omniscience and omnipotence came from or were possible. This "explanation" actually makes things worse!
Well..why can't you think of God (or any supreme being) as the designer? Then there has to be no middle man.
No, I meant that any creator (whether God or some strange designer) is simply slotted in between the question of origin and the fact of existence without explaining the first, and if the first is not explained then neither is the second. The creator is the middle-man between us and an explanation of existence.
In other words: If one accepts that a creator exists then the question of our existence is answered, but only by being simply replaced by the question of how that creator came to exist. If one is happy to say "He/she/it has always existed" then why not accept that the universe has always existed and the big bang is therefore simply an event within that infinite history? If one thing can have no origin then why not the other?
Evoking a creator just slots a new mystery into the picture.
And, if we exist because of the will of a creator but we do not know why the creator exists then, actually, we don't really know why we exist. It's like the child who asks why water turns to ice and is told "because all molecular vibration has been reduced to the point where they are forced into a crystaline arrangement based on hydrogen bonding": they have probably not actually learnt anything at all.
where did existence come from and what is its purpose.
But if that is a valid question about existence, then it is a valid question about God/the designer/whatever. The other side of that coin is that if "It's always existed" is an acceptable answer to where God came from, then it is a valid answer for all existence too and we can cut out the middle-man and not complicate the picture with gods and designers.
It is an intelligent design of a conscious and intelligent will
Which came from....? Intelligent design actually fails to explain anything. Instead of the mystery of the Big Bang it has the mystery of the designer's origin, so you're no closer to an "ultimate" answer.
He is not an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield.
Just like the people in Guantanamo, more than 80% of whom were, according to the State Department, handed over by bounty hunters with no US-confirmed intelligence of what they were doing or where they were doing it. Of the other 15%, only one, the American, has been found to be "an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield". Some were teenagers who were released after a mere two and a half years of illegal imprisonment - which I'm SURE you would have fully supported if it had been you - and some of the others have turned out to have been rounded up because they happened to be standing near someone else who was being arrested. At least one prisoner was "captured" because the person who arrested him thought he had suspicious trousers.
They would not go through the normal legal system for civilians.
They probably would for someone living in the UK. To do otherwise would be to lose UK troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as causing the fall of the only European government which is stil prepared to ignore the will of its own people to support the US's oil-grab.
He is only trying to get people who dislike holding enemy combatants in Gitmo on his side for something completely unrelated.
Well, it's a simple fact that the US has thrown hundreds of people into jail in Guantanamo for no reason at all, so why exactly would we believe that they won't throw this guy in there too? The rule of law has been suspended in the US, the self-appointed military nut-cases and oil-barons that are running the country can basically do anything they like and are happily killing hundreds of people every week simply in order to support their share-prices. Do you really think they'd not lock this guy up for revealing that they're not even good at the job they're pretending to do?
The reviewed samples passed the specification my a mile, and the retail ones by only seven furlongs. Big deal. Now, if the RAM makers had made any claim to exceed the spec by some particular percentage then this would be news. But they didn't, so it's not.
Any time you start throwing regulations at something, you make it harder for everyone to compete.
Not true. In the short term, perhaps, but in the long term all free markets collapse to a singularity (called a monopoly, although a cartel like the RIAA or OPEC is fairly common too). Many of America's stock market regulations, for example, exist specifically because when the market was unregulated people manipulated it to prevent competition. Small investors got screwed over by rail barons and the like because there were no regulations to prevent it.
No company wants competition and in the absense of regulation there will always be a snowball effect which eventually leads to one company or small group of companies effectively taking control of the market. At which point all of society suffers as prices rise and service declines (see Enron). The market has to be regulated in order to remain free; that's the central paradox of capitalism.
There is such a thing as too much regulation, of course, but too many people use that as an excuse to ignore the fact that you can have too little as well.
Edison deserves just as much credit for the light bulb as does Einstein for the theory of relativity.
Einstien was not forced to go into partnership with a rival because the rival beat him to the theory. Edison did have to go into partnership with Swan because Swan got to the lightbulb first and Edison was unable to go to commercial production without involving him. When Swan's interest moved on to other things, and working with Edison became the tiresome battle it was for everyone who did not worship his ego, he sold out to Edison who's staff continued to work on the development of the bulb.
However, the existance of the Edison & Swan United Company is a simple historical fact and I think everyone knows that Edison was not the sort to go into partnership unless forced to.
If we had reclaimed all the money on the loans to other countries that we have already forgiven the debt, we wouldn't be so far in the hole either.. you just keep that thought in your smug little mind.
A drop in the ocean. The scale of the current US debt is titanic compared to what is owed to it by the rest of the world. The 781 Billion borrowed this year alone far outweighs the money owed to the US. The national debt now amounts to 30,000 dollars per person and rising. In many of the countries that owe America money, 30000 dollars would buy a town; 781 billion would buy the whole country with a lot of change.
I'm just ratty because I've had a week of Condescending Rice talking bare-faced lies on our TV and newspapers for a week while local politicians simper about how clever she is because she can play the piano instead of asking her why her words are in complete opposition to her actions.
Cry some more about it.. Simple solution.. you don't like it? Setup your own organization and have the local government point to it..
I have a better idea. Why don't we do what America does when someone has something it wants: just take it off them. What exactly would America do about it? The US economy has been royally fucked over by Bush; it would collapse if the rest of the world simply stopped propping it up with loans. It's not like America has done anything positive for the world in years, and it's done a lot of damage. Why the hell ARE we putting up with a rouge nation as a neighbour?
Same with ICANN - you join knowing that the US controls it.
Setting up an organisation and then refusing to change the rules when conditions change and the old rules are clearly no use anymore is stupid, but then that's exactly the attitude which sustains the Security Council veto system and the Second Amendment, I guess.
But if the US were to dismantle its back bone, Europe would suddenly lose a vast majority of its content and be crippled.
Hardly. I use maybe three US-based websites per day. No email I get (other than spam) comes from the US. The truth is that most Europeans that would be affected by the removal of the US network ar doing business with US companies who would also be hurt by that same loss of business.
"you're using/playing on our property so play by our rules."
A morally bankrupt statement if I ever saw one. America has one rule for everyone else and no rules for itself.
America has it's own railway and highway system, it didn't augment an existing system built by another party.
Actually, the original locos in America were imports, just as the Internet was originally imported in a slightly more virtual fashion. I think road designs were probably imported too in the early days. I doubt that the settlers had no engineering experience from the Old World.
Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who went before; you can't go around claiming the whole because you made a part. Well, you can, but that way lies stagnation and collapse.
Well, a lot of people think a guy in Menlo Park, NJ USA invented the light bulb,
Edison lost the race to Swan and they formed the Swan Edison Light Bulb company together (Edison had the cash, Swan had the invention). Once Swan moved on to other things, Edison airbrushed him out of his version of the story.
I don't see the problem here. Who has financed the internet into what it has become today. Who developed the technology and who operates the largest backbone?
Who gives a fuck? The Internet in my country was funded by my tax, and my country's backbone is the important one for me.
This "Oh, we did the initial research so we own everything that ever originates from that point" argument is pathetic. Did America invent roads? No!? Well then, I think the rest of the world should be able to tax American cars. What about railroads? Another non-American invention. Tax please!
The light bulb is another non-American invention. I think for that one the rest of the world should just refuse to licence it and people like you can go and live in the dark age you so surely deserve.
Most of the EB's claims were correct and Nature is trying to distract everyone from their shabby article by crowing about a couple of points where EB were wrong. That's the sort of balanced approach that would be right at home in...say...Wikipedia.
That's fair enough, but the reason they use a private format is to prevent people changing to a better product if it ever appears. Why else would a company avoid better formats which were already established?
Perhaps (1 in 8 Americans have been) but he had a million dollar trust fund at birth and was raised in the lower strata of the American aristocracy, so the requirement to work is not there. Gates has followed that particularly nasty path of those born into luxury and privilege whereby they spend much of their lives trying to prevent anyone else enjoying the same things.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then, what have you explained by its existence, then? Nothing!
Having set out on a journey motivated by the question of how could the universe just exist without any cause, you have settled on an explanation which is that something else exists without cause. So, if that's a good enough explanation for the Creator, why was it not good enough for the universe and the Big Bang? After all, you have added a great deal more mystery by making the explanation "omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent", only one of which was a characteristic of the universe. Now we have to ask where and how omniscience and omnipotence came from or were possible. This "explanation" actually makes things worse!
TWW
No, I meant that any creator (whether God or some strange designer) is simply slotted in between the question of origin and the fact of existence without explaining the first, and if the first is not explained then neither is the second. The creator is the middle-man between us and an explanation of existence.
In other words: If one accepts that a creator exists then the question of our existence is answered, but only by being simply replaced by the question of how that creator came to exist. If one is happy to say "He/she/it has always existed" then why not accept that the universe has always existed and the big bang is therefore simply an event within that infinite history? If one thing can have no origin then why not the other?
Evoking a creator just slots a new mystery into the picture.
And, if we exist because of the will of a creator but we do not know why the creator exists then, actually, we don't really know why we exist. It's like the child who asks why water turns to ice and is told "because all molecular vibration has been reduced to the point where they are forced into a crystaline arrangement based on hydrogen bonding": they have probably not actually learnt anything at all.
TWW
But if that is a valid question about existence, then it is a valid question about God/the designer/whatever. The other side of that coin is that if "It's always existed" is an acceptable answer to where God came from, then it is a valid answer for all existence too and we can cut out the middle-man and not complicate the picture with gods and designers.
TWW
Which came from....? Intelligent design actually fails to explain anything. Instead of the mystery of the Big Bang it has the mystery of the designer's origin, so you're no closer to an "ultimate" answer.
Plus, everything else about it is bullshit.
TWW
Just like the people in Guantanamo, more than 80% of whom were, according to the State Department, handed over by bounty hunters with no US-confirmed intelligence of what they were doing or where they were doing it. Of the other 15%, only one, the American, has been found to be "an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield". Some were teenagers who were released after a mere two and a half years of illegal imprisonment - which I'm SURE you would have fully supported if it had been you - and some of the others have turned out to have been rounded up because they happened to be standing near someone else who was being arrested. At least one prisoner was "captured" because the person who arrested him thought he had suspicious trousers.
They would not go through the normal legal system for civilians.
They probably would for someone living in the UK. To do otherwise would be to lose UK troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as causing the fall of the only European government which is stil prepared to ignore the will of its own people to support the US's oil-grab.
He is only trying to get people who dislike holding enemy combatants in Gitmo on his side for something completely unrelated.
Well, it's a simple fact that the US has thrown hundreds of people into jail in Guantanamo for no reason at all, so why exactly would we believe that they won't throw this guy in there too? The rule of law has been suspended in the US, the self-appointed military nut-cases and oil-barons that are running the country can basically do anything they like and are happily killing hundreds of people every week simply in order to support their share-prices. Do you really think they'd not lock this guy up for revealing that they're not even good at the job they're pretending to do?
TWW
TWW
Try that in a queue in Northern Ireland and you'll have one person holding twenty teeth in their hands, and rightly so.
TWW
Not true. In the short term, perhaps, but in the long term all free markets collapse to a singularity (called a monopoly, although a cartel like the RIAA or OPEC is fairly common too). Many of America's stock market regulations, for example, exist specifically because when the market was unregulated people manipulated it to prevent competition. Small investors got screwed over by rail barons and the like because there were no regulations to prevent it.
No company wants competition and in the absense of regulation there will always be a snowball effect which eventually leads to one company or small group of companies effectively taking control of the market. At which point all of society suffers as prices rise and service declines (see Enron). The market has to be regulated in order to remain free; that's the central paradox of capitalism.
There is such a thing as too much regulation, of course, but too many people use that as an excuse to ignore the fact that you can have too little as well.
TWW
Err... That's what a patent is, and is supposed to be.
TWW
Einstien was not forced to go into partnership with a rival because the rival beat him to the theory. Edison did have to go into partnership with Swan because Swan got to the lightbulb first and Edison was unable to go to commercial production without involving him. When Swan's interest moved on to other things, and working with Edison became the tiresome battle it was for everyone who did not worship his ego, he sold out to Edison who's staff continued to work on the development of the bulb.
However, the existance of the Edison & Swan United Company is a simple historical fact and I think everyone knows that Edison was not the sort to go into partnership unless forced to.
TWW
A drop in the ocean. The scale of the current US debt is titanic compared to what is owed to it by the rest of the world. The 781 Billion borrowed this year alone far outweighs the money owed to the US. The national debt now amounts to 30,000 dollars per person and rising. In many of the countries that owe America money, 30000 dollars would buy a town; 781 billion would buy the whole country with a lot of change.
I'm just ratty because I've had a week of Condescending Rice talking bare-faced lies on our TV and newspapers for a week while local politicians simper about how clever she is because she can play the piano instead of asking her why her words are in complete opposition to her actions.
TWW
I have a better idea. Why don't we do what America does when someone has something it wants: just take it off them. What exactly would America do about it? The US economy has been royally fucked over by Bush; it would collapse if the rest of the world simply stopped propping it up with loans. It's not like America has done anything positive for the world in years, and it's done a lot of damage. Why the hell ARE we putting up with a rouge nation as a neighbour?
TWW
Setting up an organisation and then refusing to change the rules when conditions change and the old rules are clearly no use anymore is stupid, but then that's exactly the attitude which sustains the Security Council veto system and the Second Amendment, I guess.
TWW
Hardly. I use maybe three US-based websites per day. No email I get (other than spam) comes from the US. The truth is that most Europeans that would be affected by the removal of the US network ar doing business with US companies who would also be hurt by that same loss of business.
"you're using/playing on our property so play by our rules."
A morally bankrupt statement if I ever saw one. America has one rule for everyone else and no rules for itself.
TWW
Actually, the original locos in America were imports, just as the Internet was originally imported in a slightly more virtual fashion. I think road designs were probably imported too in the early days. I doubt that the settlers had no engineering experience from the Old World.
Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who went before; you can't go around claiming the whole because you made a part. Well, you can, but that way lies stagnation and collapse.
TWW
Edison lost the race to Swan and they formed the Swan Edison Light Bulb company together (Edison had the cash, Swan had the invention). Once Swan moved on to other things, Edison airbrushed him out of his version of the story.
TWW
Who gives a fuck? The Internet in my country was funded by my tax, and my country's backbone is the important one for me.
This "Oh, we did the initial research so we own everything that ever originates from that point" argument is pathetic. Did America invent roads? No!? Well then, I think the rest of the world should be able to tax American cars. What about railroads? Another non-American invention. Tax please!
The light bulb is another non-American invention. I think for that one the rest of the world should just refuse to licence it and people like you can go and live in the dark age you so surely deserve.
TWW
TWW
Their news editors DO suck, but then I would never read Nature for the news section.
TWW
And the same wanker who made the error can put it back immediately.
To update the study: Britannica: 142 (most of which turned out not to be errors), Wikipedia: unknown but fluctuates by the second.
TWW
Somebody should tell that to Tony Blair; he's telling everyone he invaded Iraq because of humanitarian issues.
TWW
That's fair enough, but the reason they use a private format is to prevent people changing to a better product if it ever appears. Why else would a company avoid better formats which were already established?
TWW
Er... Isn't that exactly what Jobs is saying by having private file formats and DRM?
TWW
But without any way of knowing if it's true today.
TWW
Perhaps (1 in 8 Americans have been) but he had a million dollar trust fund at birth and was raised in the lower strata of the American aristocracy, so the requirement to work is not there. Gates has followed that particularly nasty path of those born into luxury and privilege whereby they spend much of their lives trying to prevent anyone else enjoying the same things.
TWW