You can't prove a negative. So you can't prove that an Intelligent Designer is "intrinsically impossible to... prove."
Look, it was long-accepted in natural philosophy ("science," if you will) that if anything could be proved, God certainly could. The advance of science has now removed many of the "proofs" claimed for God's existence. That leads to those who want to preserve the concept of God retreating into claims about the "fundamentally unprovable" and "faith."
Let's be clear. For centuries it was held that God requires faith in just the same way science does: we should have faith in what can clearly be proved. Now that it turns out that the "proofs" of God are largely, perhaps entirely, bogus a special dispensation is attempted, removing the requirement of proof in the case of God. No natural philosopher -- up to and beyond Descartes (as doubting a man as ever lived) -- thought God was or should be in any way beyond proof and disproof.
Re:Many smaller cafe's are removing WiFi
on
The Case for Free WiFi?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
They found that people would order a coffee and then work all day long, decreasing their per customer revenue dramatically.
Other cafes are cutting access only at high-traffic times. When you can fill your seats without it - say, Saturdays, why not? But when you can fill otherwise empty seats with it, why not? People partly come to see other people - the hard core coffee drinkers have espresso machines at home after all. So if wifi gets people there to be watched, even if there's no direct profit from them there's profit from maintaining a space where the people watchers - and those who just like the background of humanity for their own reveries - can be fulfilled. And they are your profit center.
robots.txt does not block requests. It merely asks the robot to politely cease. No site using a robots.txt file can be responsible for robots who fully or partially ignore it.
Don't diesels still have about fifty times the particulate emission of gas rigs -- and that being a mess of particularly dangerous (to human lungs) particles at that? The diesel exhaust from buses and trucks in cities is already thought a major contributor to the asthma epidemic. Might be better to ban diesels from cities altogether. Make the merchandise ride in on (electric) trains and distribute it by electric trucks. Most of the car and truck traffic in NYC is doing nothing but irritate the real New Yorkers, who are generally walking, or on the subway.
Paracelsus' grave is in a small courtyard in Salzburg, Austria. The inscription emphasizes that he was a great physician who healed many people. The old churches in Salzburg are beautifully Baroque and mainly decorated with the eye-in-pyramid motif.
A later prince-bishop had a hydraulic-robotic aviary which could reportedly produce a great many bird calls accurately.
Fascinating people there, upon a time. Wonder if any of Newton's successful "science" was also derived from Paracelsus?
To be fair, the Japanese were quite hospitable in providing women for the pleasure of our troops during our occupation of Japan. So in this regard they only expect of the lands they occupy the same amenities they willingly provided their own occupiers.
As for the wanton killing of Chinese by the Japanese, to be fair that continues (although it rarely makes the news) under the current Chinese government today. Battles with farmers and factory workers on one side, and police and paramilitaries on the other occur frequently with many lives lost. Plus the Chinese execute thousands of people yearly on often minor or trumped-up charges. It's far, far worse than Texas!
Do you stock your home with Chinese-made goods? If so, you're helping finance the same sort of treatment of common Chinese people as the Japanese visited upon them.
The amount of fuel required to get from here to anywhere interesting would mass more than... well, than the Earth for a reasonable interstellar flight even on a generation ship. So without really radical breakthroughs in physics - not just engineering - SF must limit itself to the solar system.
The important 60s rock musicians nearly all had very slanted foreheads -- way out of proportion to the occurrence in the general population. Was that because the slant corresponds with an excess of musical intelligence, or because it allowed the required long hair to fall back from the face?
Science has become both too specialized and too skeptical. There is little in the way of grand overview coming from scientists, and far too much by way of dismissal of normal human concerns, such as what to do with our freedom.
Many, perhaps most scientists these days are complete determinists who believe that freedom is only an illusion. Compare this to the religious leaders who believe that freedom is real, but that we owe it to "God" to renounce it. Well, these scientists are renouncing it without even a nod to "God." This is progress??
Okay, I haven't seen the latest Star Wars, or cared for the series much after the wonderful first movie. That first movie perfectly framed the freedom preserved by the few as the salvation of the enslaved many. Science was best represented by the Death Star. And that's about where it's going: to the mechanized service of empire, whether through robotics or cloning, and denial of the romance of the individual, or of the importance of the individual's struggle with character, with the difficulty of finding the truly good courses in life, with not being suckered into the bad merely because of the power and satisfaction available there.
"Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood" by Hans Asperger was published in 1944 in German and was translated into English in 1991 (Asperger, 1944/1991).
Asperger was defining deviance in the context of the Third Reich! So what is "impairment in social interaction" in a context where normal social interaction includes enthusiastic participation in Hitler Youth and running death camps for Jews? And what are "impairments in communication" in a society of Nazis?
It's fascinating and disturbing that Asperger's has become a diagnostic flavor-of-the-month in contempory America. Diagnoses and syndromes - such as the "hysteria" prevalent a century back in Austria - are often linked to certain cultures and periods. What in current American culture could so closely resemble the Third Reich as to account for the re-emergence of this particular syndrome here, now?
Also, another major "symptom" is reticence to make eye contact. A neighbor of mine was a child in occupied Holland. When the Gestapo knocked on the door demanding to search the house, her mother - six feet tall and blonde - stared them down, shouting "I am your damn ideal! How dare you demand to come into my home." It worked, that once. But how many willing to make eye contact during the Reich ended up in the camps?
Since you are reading this on a computer, you are a slave to MS and you should care."
What's most annoys the rest of the world about Americans? We talk down to them. What does this diatribe do in almost every paragraph? Talk down.
Whether or not the writer's American, he wrote this in a way that almost guarantees most readers in the world will be annoyed by it rather than persuaded. It's so much more exaggeratedly worse than anything Microsoft says that we should wonder if Microsoft somehow is behind this, since it makes them, by comparison, look so good.
Sirius in my car is pretty good - but perhaps limited by the final FM leg. Sirius via Dish in the house is very close to CD quality. Don't know if it's the same compression scheme as through Sirius's satellites, but it sounds much better than 128-bit mp3 (which I can't take - the harmonics are too hollowed out). Sirius DJs, for the increasing number of channels they have them on, are the best in the business. They've hired all the stars without jobs after Clear Channel, and are recruiting among musicians too (such as the Dictator's Richard Manitoba, who I used to know as a bartender who had exquisit taste in what he put on the bar's sound system).
The Sirius-Dish partnership is real and working well, apparently. Why not Sirius-Apple?
Domestic cats kill millions of birds annually. Windows kill many thousands of birds who fly into them. Animal-loving environmentalists often keep cats, and live in dwellings with windows, so they can gaze out at their beloved nature. Homes without windows would be more energy-efficient. Perhaps we can harness cats for energy, but they sleep 16 hours a day.
One key to tort reform is removing those laws that lead to productivity-draining lawsuits. Far more effective than capping the awards available would be removing any special basis in law for civil action.
Patent law is currently about enabling lawyers to enrich themselves while stifling innovation.
Let's say I have a small shop that wants to keep four of these babies running constantly - various Net-facing servers - and I'd like to mount just enough solar cells outside to keep this going. What are the options for installing about 150 or 200 watts of constant solar power? We're considering putting in a backup generator anyway, so could this be done competitively?
There's an interview out there with the guy who finished the screenplay (think it was linked of/. about a year ago). Adams had left major fragments of a script, but there were large gaps to fill in, and the whole thing had to be put in order. So the new writer referenced the existing iternations of the story and did his best to be faithful to storyline and spirit, he said, while incorporating most of the script fragments Adams had left.
Why does Dvorak toss in the totally off-topic slam at Starship Troopers? Anyone else noticed how close the portrayal of the pilots in Battlestar Galactica - indeed the whole feel of the thing - to Paul Verhoeven's movie (which was overall a fairly faithful adapatation of Heinlein's book)? So if Dvorak's right and games are in similar style to a successful current TV series, and a decently entertaining, if not overwhelmingly wonderful B movie, isn't he like someone around 1960 assuring the world that the rock and roll business would soon collapse, as kids demanded again the rich and wonderful experience of the big bands and tired of trivial and repetitive art?
This is mostly because their robot has been abusive in the past, but the idea of rendering their searches a bit less useful for folks who could benefit from the information posted (the sites are mostly informative, not sales pitches) only makes me happy.
You're right that there's no reason to package this stuff. And you yourself have an apparent package, which you consider "capitalist, globalist." What you miss is that energy inefficiency is bad capitalism. Germany is the #1 exporter of goods in the world right now. That's largely enabled because, despite the higher cost of labor there, they are twice as energy efficient as we are. Similarly, as other comments here note, most SUV's are inefficient at doing useful work, and thus bad capital investments for the families that own them. Capitalism does not have to take the form of our present irrational consumerism. Capitalism is the economic system which depends on rational behavior for its success.
Wal-Mart is another story, largely one of a firm employing strong-arm tactics to build towards a monopoly. Once they have driven out competitors in any particular market, they raise prices. Their "guaranteed lowest prices" are market-relative, and set store-by-store. Capitalist economic theory frowns on monopolies, generally.
As for "globalism," it's not whether we're global, but how that makes all the difference. Do we globalize environmental standards and worker protections too, or just capital flows? Why should the laws protecting capital (e.g. investors) be more universal than those protecting workers? Prudent capitalists are concerned with the well-being of workers (see "Ford, Henry").
Can someone help me with the home addresses of the people who were against providing home addresses on blogs please? I'd like to mail them a followup question on how they feel about phone books.
Jump Domain went to the dark side about two years ago. I had a similar experience with one domain - but it was an.org which was still with Tucows while they were transitioning, and Tucows' own DomainDirect.com was able to slip me the secret code required to confirm the transfer. Subsequently with a couple of other domains I did manage to get eNom to help. So you might want to try again to get through to the right people there by phone. Also, although ICANN tries to say they will not help, if you get an e-mail through to the right place, they did in the latter case send their own query to eNom letting them know that they were looking over their shoulder on this.
I've had no problem with a couple dozens domains at DomainDirect so far. In past experience Network Solutions, Dotster, Register.com all suck, although none as badly as JumpDomain does now. Scott at JumpDomain used to be responsive, but I don't even know if it's his operation any more.
Does your firm to processing for Sirius Satellite Radio? I just got a letter denying a rebate on a radio and year's subscription bought as a Xmas gift for the girlfriend. It was a form letter saying that I had not met at least one of a list of six specified conditions - without saying which. Thing is, I'd met every one. I'd even called Sirius before buying the radio and subscription to double check that the particular radio model was included, and that buying a whole year's service met the requirement to buy at least a month's service.
When I called Sirius, I got a totally friendly guy who'd been answering calls from people who'd gotten these letters all day. He expects that Sirius will pay every single rebate, and said the letters were obviously sent out "in error." He didn't tell me which firm Sirius had hired to send out the many "in error" denial letters, but I sure hope Sirius has learned its lesson a about hiring that particular rebate-processing firm. Was it yours?
Meanwhile, no word at all from NewEgg about the rebate on the flat-screen monitor I also bought her for Xmas. Which is too bad - the last time I buy from that firm of formerly good repute. The previous purchase from them was two memory cards with a rebate that was "limit two," and got a card back saying they'd only give the rebate on one of them. They backed down when I got irate, but this repeat experience suggests they're just a bit crooked about rebates, probably as policy.
Yeah, I had to fight with Staples recently for a rebate where the rebate form had been printed out by the cash register in the store. They claimed the form had lacked the date. When I pointed out that their cash register had printed the date on the form, they claimed they'd sent the letter denying the claim by accident, and finally paid it.
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You can't prove a negative. So you can't prove that an Intelligent Designer is "intrinsically impossible to ... prove."
Look, it was long-accepted in natural philosophy ("science," if you will) that if anything could be proved, God certainly could. The advance of science has now removed many of the "proofs" claimed for God's existence. That leads to those who want to preserve the concept of God retreating into claims about the "fundamentally unprovable" and "faith."
Let's be clear. For centuries it was held that God requires faith in just the same way science does: we should have faith in what can clearly be proved. Now that it turns out that the "proofs" of God are largely, perhaps entirely, bogus a special dispensation is attempted, removing the requirement of proof in the case of God. No natural philosopher -- up to and beyond Descartes (as doubting a man as ever lived) -- thought God was or should be in any way beyond proof and disproof.
They found that people would order a coffee and then work all day long, decreasing their per customer revenue dramatically.
Other cafes are cutting access only at high-traffic times. When you can fill your seats without it - say, Saturdays, why not? But when you can fill otherwise empty seats with it, why not? People partly come to see other people - the hard core coffee drinkers have espresso machines at home after all. So if wifi gets people there to be watched, even if there's no direct profit from them there's profit from maintaining a space where the people watchers - and those who just like the background of humanity for their own reveries - can be fulfilled. And they are your profit center.
robots.txt does not block requests. It merely asks the robot to politely cease. No site using a robots.txt file can be responsible for robots who fully or partially ignore it.
Don't diesels still have about fifty times the particulate emission of gas rigs -- and that being a mess of particularly dangerous (to human lungs) particles at that? The diesel exhaust from buses and trucks in cities is already thought a major contributor to the asthma epidemic. Might be better to ban diesels from cities altogether. Make the merchandise ride in on (electric) trains and distribute it by electric trucks. Most of the car and truck traffic in NYC is doing nothing but irritate the real New Yorkers, who are generally walking, or on the subway.
But the hidden secret modus is Clissus Paracelsi
Paracelsus' grave is in a small courtyard in Salzburg, Austria. The inscription emphasizes that he was a great physician who healed many people. The old churches in Salzburg are beautifully Baroque and mainly decorated with the eye-in-pyramid motif.
A later prince-bishop had a hydraulic-robotic aviary which could reportedly produce a great many bird calls accurately.
Fascinating people there, upon a time. Wonder if any of Newton's successful "science" was also derived from Paracelsus?
To be fair, the Japanese were quite hospitable in providing women for the pleasure of our troops during our occupation of Japan. So in this regard they only expect of the lands they occupy the same amenities they willingly provided their own occupiers.
As for the wanton killing of Chinese by the Japanese, to be fair that continues (although it rarely makes the news) under the current Chinese government today. Battles with farmers and factory workers on one side, and police and paramilitaries on the other occur frequently with many lives lost. Plus the Chinese execute thousands of people yearly on often minor or trumped-up charges. It's far, far worse than Texas!
Do you stock your home with Chinese-made goods? If so, you're helping finance the same sort of treatment of common Chinese people as the Japanese visited upon them.
The amount of fuel required to get from here to anywhere interesting would mass more than ... well, than the Earth for a reasonable interstellar flight even on a generation ship. So without really radical breakthroughs in physics - not just engineering - SF must limit itself to the solar system.
The important 60s rock musicians nearly all had very slanted foreheads -- way out of proportion to the occurrence in the general population. Was that because the slant corresponds with an excess of musical intelligence, or because it allowed the required long hair to fall back from the face?
Science has become both too specialized and too skeptical. There is little in the way of grand overview coming from scientists, and far too much by way of dismissal of normal human concerns, such as what to do with our freedom.
Many, perhaps most scientists these days are complete determinists who believe that freedom is only an illusion. Compare this to the religious leaders who believe that freedom is real, but that we owe it to "God" to renounce it. Well, these scientists are renouncing it without even a nod to "God." This is progress??
Okay, I haven't seen the latest Star Wars, or cared for the series much after the wonderful first movie. That first movie perfectly framed the freedom preserved by the few as the salvation of the enslaved many. Science was best represented by the Death Star. And that's about where it's going: to the mechanized service of empire, whether through robotics or cloning, and denial of the romance of the individual, or of the importance of the individual's struggle with character, with the difficulty of finding the truly good courses in life, with not being suckered into the bad merely because of the power and satisfaction available there.
Consider the source:
"Autistic Psychopathy in Childhood" by Hans Asperger was published in 1944 in German and was translated into English in 1991 (Asperger, 1944/1991).
Asperger was defining deviance in the context of the Third Reich! So what is "impairment in social interaction" in a context where normal social interaction includes enthusiastic participation in Hitler Youth and running death camps for Jews? And what are "impairments in communication" in a society of Nazis?
It's fascinating and disturbing that Asperger's has become a diagnostic flavor-of-the-month in contempory America. Diagnoses and syndromes - such as the "hysteria" prevalent a century back in Austria - are often linked to certain cultures and periods. What in current American culture could so closely resemble the Third Reich as to account for the re-emergence of this particular syndrome here, now?
Also, another major "symptom" is reticence to make eye contact. A neighbor of mine was a child in occupied Holland. When the Gestapo knocked on the door demanding to search the house, her mother - six feet tall and blonde - stared them down, shouting "I am your damn ideal! How dare you demand to come into my home." It worked, that once. But how many willing to make eye contact during the Reich ended up in the camps?
Since you are reading this on a computer, you are a slave to MS and you should care."
What's most annoys the rest of the world about Americans? We talk down to them. What does this diatribe do in almost every paragraph? Talk down.
Whether or not the writer's American, he wrote this in a way that almost guarantees most readers in the world will be annoyed by it rather than persuaded. It's so much more exaggeratedly worse than anything Microsoft says that we should wonder if Microsoft somehow is behind this, since it makes them, by comparison, look so good.
Sirius in my car is pretty good - but perhaps limited by the final FM leg. Sirius via Dish in the house is very close to CD quality. Don't know if it's the same compression scheme as through Sirius's satellites, but it sounds much better than 128-bit mp3 (which I can't take - the harmonics are too hollowed out). Sirius DJs, for the increasing number of channels they have them on, are the best in the business. They've hired all the stars without jobs after Clear Channel, and are recruiting among musicians too (such as the Dictator's Richard Manitoba, who I used to know as a bartender who had exquisit taste in what he put on the bar's sound system).
The Sirius-Dish partnership is real and working well, apparently. Why not Sirius-Apple?
Domestic cats kill millions of birds annually. Windows kill many thousands of birds who fly into them. Animal-loving environmentalists often keep cats, and live in dwellings with windows, so they can gaze out at their beloved nature. Homes without windows would be more energy-efficient. Perhaps we can harness cats for energy, but they sleep 16 hours a day.
remember that you catch more flies with sugar than with vinegar
... you are comparing the good people at Borland to ... flies??!
So
Don't forget the lawyers.
One key to tort reform is removing those laws that lead to productivity-draining lawsuits. Far more effective than capping the awards available would be removing any special basis in law for civil action.
Patent law is currently about enabling lawyers to enrich themselves while stifling innovation.
Let's say I have a small shop that wants to keep four of these babies running constantly - various Net-facing servers - and I'd like to mount just enough solar cells outside to keep this going. What are the options for installing about 150 or 200 watts of constant solar power? We're considering putting in a backup generator anyway, so could this be done competitively?
Done that.
There's an interview out there with the guy who finished the screenplay (think it was linked of /. about a year ago). Adams had left major fragments of a script, but there were large gaps to fill in, and the whole thing had to be put in order. So the new writer referenced the existing iternations of the story and did his best to be faithful to storyline and spirit, he said, while incorporating most of the script fragments Adams had left.
Why does Dvorak toss in the totally off-topic slam at Starship Troopers? Anyone else noticed how close the portrayal of the pilots in Battlestar Galactica - indeed the whole feel of the thing - to Paul Verhoeven's movie (which was overall a fairly faithful adapatation of Heinlein's book)? So if Dvorak's right and games are in similar style to a successful current TV series, and a decently entertaining, if not overwhelmingly wonderful B movie, isn't he like someone around 1960 assuring the world that the rock and roll business would soon collapse, as kids demanded again the rich and wonderful experience of the big bands and tired of trivial and repetitive art?
All my sites have this in robots.txt:
/
User-agent: msnbot
Disallow:
This is mostly because their robot has been abusive in the past, but the idea of rendering their searches a bit less useful for folks who could benefit from the information posted (the sites are mostly informative, not sales pitches) only makes me happy.
And no, this has nothing to do with Microsoft paying Ralph Reed $20,000 a month for advice on kissing the Religious Rights' ass. It's just a way of saying they can kiss mine for free.
You're right that there's no reason to package this stuff. And you yourself have an apparent package, which you consider "capitalist, globalist." What you miss is that energy inefficiency is bad capitalism. Germany is the #1 exporter of goods in the world right now. That's largely enabled because, despite the higher cost of labor there, they are twice as energy efficient as we are. Similarly, as other comments here note, most SUV's are inefficient at doing useful work, and thus bad capital investments for the families that own them. Capitalism does not have to take the form of our present irrational consumerism. Capitalism is the economic system which depends on rational behavior for its success.
Wal-Mart is another story, largely one of a firm employing strong-arm tactics to build towards a monopoly. Once they have driven out competitors in any particular market, they raise prices. Their "guaranteed lowest prices" are market-relative, and set store-by-store. Capitalist economic theory frowns on monopolies, generally.
As for "globalism," it's not whether we're global, but how that makes all the difference. Do we globalize environmental standards and worker protections too, or just capital flows? Why should the laws protecting capital (e.g. investors) be more universal than those protecting workers? Prudent capitalists are concerned with the well-being of workers (see "Ford, Henry").
Can someone help me with the home addresses of the people who were against providing home addresses on blogs please? I'd like to mail them a followup question on how they feel about phone books.
Jump Domain went to the dark side about two years ago. I had a similar experience with one domain - but it was an .org which was still with Tucows while they were transitioning, and Tucows' own DomainDirect.com was able to slip me the secret code required to confirm the transfer. Subsequently with a couple of other domains I did manage to get eNom to help. So you might want to try again to get through to the right people there by phone. Also, although ICANN tries to say they will not help, if you get an e-mail through to the right place, they did in the latter case send their own query to eNom letting them know that they were looking over their shoulder on this.
I've had no problem with a couple dozens domains at DomainDirect so far. In past experience Network Solutions, Dotster, Register.com all suck, although none as badly as JumpDomain does now. Scott at JumpDomain used to be responsive, but I don't even know if it's his operation any more.
Does your firm to processing for Sirius Satellite Radio? I just got a letter denying a rebate on a radio and year's subscription bought as a Xmas gift for the girlfriend. It was a form letter saying that I had not met at least one of a list of six specified conditions - without saying which. Thing is, I'd met every one. I'd even called Sirius before buying the radio and subscription to double check that the particular radio model was included, and that buying a whole year's service met the requirement to buy at least a month's service.
When I called Sirius, I got a totally friendly guy who'd been answering calls from people who'd gotten these letters all day. He expects that Sirius will pay every single rebate, and said the letters were obviously sent out "in error." He didn't tell me which firm Sirius had hired to send out the many "in error" denial letters, but I sure hope Sirius has learned its lesson a about hiring that particular rebate-processing firm. Was it yours?
Meanwhile, no word at all from NewEgg about the rebate on the flat-screen monitor I also bought her for Xmas. Which is too bad - the last time I buy from that firm of formerly good repute. The previous purchase from them was two memory cards with a rebate that was "limit two," and got a card back saying they'd only give the rebate on one of them. They backed down when I got irate, but this repeat experience suggests they're just a bit crooked about rebates, probably as policy.
Yeah, I had to fight with Staples recently for a rebate where the rebate form had been printed out by the cash register in the store. They claimed the form had lacked the date. When I pointed out that their cash register had printed the date on the form, they claimed they'd sent the letter denying the claim by accident, and finally paid it.