It's a 3d chat system that opens web pages in Internet Explorer when you click on the doors of buildings with names like "Fox News". And it's not even really a 3d chat system. The chat is a conventional-looking instant messenger window in the corner of the screen (in a separate top level window) and doesn't seem to have any relationship to where you are in the 3d view... which is probably a good thing: while I was in there I saw precisely one other person, until they started to move, whereupon they disappeared.
No user created content, or any hint of user-created content.
They were hinting that they were willing to pay for playtesters while I was testing it.
The end result of Sarbanes-Oxley, on top of the increasing amount of encryption and the use of high-density short-lived storage, is going to be a frustrating gap in the historical record for future generations.
Holy mother of Perry Mason, how can the RIAA complain about "vexatious litigation" without every man jack of them being blasted by lightning where they stand? That's like St Nick complaining about sunburn!
In Soviet Russia, sales of Soviet goods were good, they had great market share, they were the only product on the shelf. You think the "Mac Tax" is bad, what if you had to buy Macs with black market dollars?
Heck, you pretty much have to buy XP with black market dollars. You can't buy it on anything but a mini-notebook, officially, you have to buy Vista and use downgrade rights.
And yet... that's what people are doing. Not only that, but enough people are specifically demanding XP that companies are STILL offering it as an option through various licensing tricks.
Vista selling well? With XP still shipping despite everything Microsoft's done to prevent it, months after XP has been discontinued? You gotta be kidding.
These ads remind me of the "slice of life" ads from the '80s where this guy wearing nothing but a towel (or a pair of boxers... it was a while back) walks by the breakfast table. I don't even remember what they were advertising, cigarettes or something. That was "avant garde" 20 years ago, but now it's just tired.
Though I do find absurd the implicit belief that the interests of CEOs and the public are intrinsically opposed
In certain areas, they are. That's also true of union leaders and the public, journalists and the public, system administrators and the public, SUV owners and the public, slashdot readers and the public, bicyclists and the public, and even the pope and the public.
Word definitions are observed, not fixed by some central body (in English, at least).
That's true, but not necessarily relevant. Word meaning also depends on context. The word "cylinder" means different things depending on whether you're talking about disk storage, automobile engines, or mathematics. If we were talking about brands of table-saws, "agnostic" could just mean you don't care if it's a Craftsman or not. Without context, words could mean anything. Even "atheist" could have multiple meanings. In the context of a technical discussion of science and religion, "agnostic" is technical jargon, and has a specific meaning, just as "cylinder" does in automotive technology (even when a cylinder has an elliptical cross section). And *that* is what I mean by "using it correctly".
If you insist on a single word that defines your position, you're not going to find one. The best you can do is find a term that people are going to see as encompassing your position, and then qualify it.
You're never going to unbind "atheist" from the hard-core "there is no god" position. You're fighting a battle that was already lost. I've been in that battle, over other words, and it's a heart-breaker.
Another way to look at it -- if you ask me "does Santa Claus exist?", I say "no". If you ask me the same question about god, I say "no" as well.
What if your kids ask you?
If you ask me "does god exist?", I'm going to ask you "what do you mean by god?", or I'm going to say "nobody can answer that question". That's what I've told my kids, in fact.
I'm not going to say "no".
If you really think "no" is a meaningful answer, then you've internalized a positive disbelief in god, you've taken the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, and that's as much a religious position as if you answered "yes".
Many many years ago I thought I was an atheist, too, but I've met far too many atheists since then. There is no room for doubt in a true atheist. And without doubt, there is no room for science.
Agnosticism (in the sense you use it) is far too general to be of any use.
But the sense I'm using it is the first one you quoted:
Agnosticism is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims -- particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of God, gods, deities, or even ultimate reality -- is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently impossible to prove or disprove.
Any claim stronger than that is atheism:
Atheism, as an explicit position, can be either the affirmation of the nonexistence of gods, or the rejection of theism.
There are a lot of people using these words incorrectly. The secondary definitions you quote are examples of such confusion. For example, many people claim to be agnostic but mean "I believe that there's some supreme power, but it's unknowable". That's not agnosticism, and if it's not deism it's damn close:
Deism is the theistic belief that a supreme God exists and created the physical universe, but shall not intervene in its normal operation.
Theism is an overarching term that encompasses any belief in god (creator, supreme being). I don't know any theistic belief more abstract and refined than Deism, which is why I picked it.
Agnosticism doesn't reject theism, it makes no stronger statement than "we can't, at this point, know".
Atheism makes an affirmative statement. The atheist generalizes from "there is no evidence of god" to "there is no god". Not even the undetectable "Nature's God" of the Deists.
Dunno where you're getting "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" from anything I said.
See above.
It's frustrating that there's no word which properly sums up my viewpoint (and yours as well, I think)
Agnosticism. Militant agnosticism, perhaps, if you're afraid of being mistaken for a deist, unitarian, or other need-to-believe-er. "I do not know if there is a god, and I believe that you don't know either, no matter what you believe".
Read a little closer. They say the graphene sheets are conductive
So is the granulated carbon in an ultracapacitor... it's not structural. There's a thin sheet between two layers of grains, and the grains serve to massively increase the surface area between the two plates. The idea is to replace that with a graphene-based filling with an even larger surface area per volume.
Corporations benefit from an economy that has certain characteristics. For example, consider unemployment.
If the unemployment rate is too low, corporations have to pay too high a cost for labor, and profits are reduced. If the unemployment rate is too high, corporations don't see enough demand for their goods and services, and profits are reduced. There is a certain level of unemployment that benefits corporations.
Similarly, there is a certain level of unemployment that optimally benefits people who work for corporations... too low, and the company makes less profits, and wages stagnate. Too high, and there's more competition for jobs, and wages stagnate.
These two levels are not necessarily the same. In fact it would be unlikely in the extreme for them to be the same. The optimal level of unemployment, as seen by perfectly honest and omniscient CEOs, is not the same as the optimal level of unemployment, as seen by professional workers, and that in turn is likely to be different from the optimal level as seen by factory workers.
And none of these would levels imply a "bad economy".
Just about any other economic statistic can vary over quite a wide band, without being necessarily a sign of a "bad economy". Ask different people for economic advice, and they are likely to give you answers that leads to an economy that benefits them. If you ask people whose interests are not representative of the average voter the answers they give you are not going to help the average voter decide who to vote for.
Now, given that there is a fairly popular meme that the interests of corporations are best matched by an economy with a lot of low paid workers with high unemployment and a smaller consumer class buying stuff from corporations making the owning class richer, well... the Dilbertian position that "Asking CEOs what should be done about the economy is like asking criminals for legal advice." is only to be expected from Dilbert's creator.
an agnostic is unsure about whether there's a god or not.
If you're sticking to the scientific method, then that's the most you should be willing to claim. To take it further than "there is no evidence for anything that can be described as a deity" is not a scientific position. But "there is no evidence for anything that can be described as a deity" is the position of an agnostic.
What you seem to be thinking of as the agnostic position sounds more like a Deist to me.
I've seen utterly no reason to believe in a god, so I don't,
That is the agnostic position. You don't believe in a god. I don't, either. Not even the universe-as-a-computer-simulation one that's become so popular in recent decades. On the other hand... if there was as much incontrovertible evidence for a god as for my writing desk, well... I believe in my writing desk.
But going the extra step and claiming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence? That's religion, not science.
So what if the kinds of things that OpenGL and DirectX have implemented can now be done "efficiently enough" in high level code instead of dedicated hardware (albeit by making the whole system more expensive and power hungry... and that matters), that doesn't mean there isn't room for dedicated hardware, it just means the dedicated hardware needs to be doing something more sophisticated.
The raytracing acceleration in Slusallek's RPU was able to get 2008 CPU performance out of a low density FPGA implementation in 2005... with about the same hardware budget as a late '90s Rage II GPU, using an API called OpenRT - Open Ray Tracing.
Google Update can be used to download and install an application without any user intervention at all, by request of the webpage being viewed, using the undocumented "_GU_*()" calls in both IE and Firefox. The security model is not documented anywhere. And Google has declined to respond to questions about it.
That's the slogan of Fox News. Truth, perhaps, as far as it goes.
And "as far as it goes" is not all that far.
Controversial sites aren't going to get meaningful truth ratings, all you'll be able to do is figure out what the site's bias is. And if you can't do that already, you're not going to benefit from "truth ratings".
One comment dropped almost at random in the middle: "if it consumes far less power when you're running old DirectX applications".
Or if it consumes less power, period. And power is money. These guys are looking at the $600+ PC market. When they made the prediction about the death of the GPU in 2006 they were making games that took $2000 PCs to run well... and I'm sure a $2000 PC in 2006 would have been happy without a GPU. Now they're making games that take $600 PCs to run well, and those are high end. You can get a laptop for what, $400 now? You're not going to get a CPU or a GPGPU getting that kind of performance in a $200 PC or a $400 laptop for a few years, and by that time what's the low end going to be?
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever you call it, if you answer "no" when asked, without qualification, if there is a god... that's a religious position.
I guess the art of critical analysis is a closed book for you.
Try a barrel roll!
It's a 3d chat system that opens web pages in Internet Explorer when you click on the doors of buildings with names like "Fox News". And it's not even really a 3d chat system. The chat is a conventional-looking instant messenger window in the corner of the screen (in a separate top level window) and doesn't seem to have any relationship to where you are in the 3d view... which is probably a good thing: while I was in there I saw precisely one other person, until they started to move, whereupon they disappeared.
No user created content, or any hint of user-created content.
They were hinting that they were willing to pay for playtesters while I was testing it.
The end result of Sarbanes-Oxley, on top of the increasing amount of encryption and the use of high-density short-lived storage, is going to be a frustrating gap in the historical record for future generations.
Holy mother of Perry Mason, how can the RIAA complain about "vexatious litigation" without every man jack of them being blasted by lightning where they stand? That's like St Nick complaining about sunburn!
What about the rumors that the replacement are going to be a "PC Guy" lookalike kvetching about how Windows is so misunderstood?
Sales of Vista are supposedly strong.
In Soviet Russia, sales of Soviet goods were good, they had great market share, they were the only product on the shelf. You think the "Mac Tax" is bad, what if you had to buy Macs with black market dollars?
Heck, you pretty much have to buy XP with black market dollars. You can't buy it on anything but a mini-notebook, officially, you have to buy Vista and use downgrade rights.
And yet... that's what people are doing. Not only that, but enough people are specifically demanding XP that companies are STILL offering it as an option through various licensing tricks.
Vista selling well? With XP still shipping despite everything Microsoft's done to prevent it, months after XP has been discontinued? You gotta be kidding.
These ads remind me of the "slice of life" ads from the '80s where this guy wearing nothing but a towel (or a pair of boxers... it was a while back) walks by the breakfast table. I don't even remember what they were advertising, cigarettes or something. That was "avant garde" 20 years ago, but now it's just tired.
Or maybe it's related to this "Halo" easter egg?
I bet if you performed a self-selected survey on any group you'd get slightly better than average results.
Though I do find absurd the implicit belief that the interests of CEOs and the public are intrinsically opposed
In certain areas, they are. That's also true of union leaders and the public, journalists and the public, system administrators and the public, SUV owners and the public, slashdot readers and the public, bicyclists and the public, and even the pope and the public.
Hail Eris.
Word definitions are observed, not fixed by some central body (in English, at least).
That's true, but not necessarily relevant. Word meaning also depends on context. The word "cylinder" means different things depending on whether you're talking about disk storage, automobile engines, or mathematics. If we were talking about brands of table-saws, "agnostic" could just mean you don't care if it's a Craftsman or not. Without context, words could mean anything. Even "atheist" could have multiple meanings. In the context of a technical discussion of science and religion, "agnostic" is technical jargon, and has a specific meaning, just as "cylinder" does in automotive technology (even when a cylinder has an elliptical cross section). And *that* is what I mean by "using it correctly".
If you insist on a single word that defines your position, you're not going to find one. The best you can do is find a term that people are going to see as encompassing your position, and then qualify it.
You're never going to unbind "atheist" from the hard-core "there is no god" position. You're fighting a battle that was already lost. I've been in that battle, over other words, and it's a heart-breaker.
Another way to look at it -- if you ask me "does Santa Claus exist?", I say "no". If you ask me the same question about god, I say "no" as well.
What if your kids ask you?
If you ask me "does god exist?", I'm going to ask you "what do you mean by god?", or I'm going to say "nobody can answer that question". That's what I've told my kids, in fact.
I'm not going to say "no".
If you really think "no" is a meaningful answer, then you've internalized a positive disbelief in god, you've taken the absence of evidence as evidence of absence, and that's as much a religious position as if you answered "yes".
They're about to hit 65536 articles.
Damn, book reviews in Slashdot are getting completely incomprehensible.
Hint: a review isn't a summary.
Many many years ago I thought I was an atheist, too, but I've met far too many atheists since then. There is no room for doubt in a true atheist. And without doubt, there is no room for science.
Agnosticism (in the sense you use it) is far too general to be of any use.
But the sense I'm using it is the first one you quoted:
Agnosticism is the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims -- particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of God, gods, deities, or even ultimate reality -- is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently impossible to prove or disprove.
Any claim stronger than that is atheism:
Atheism, as an explicit position, can be either the affirmation of the nonexistence of gods, or the rejection of theism.
There are a lot of people using these words incorrectly. The secondary definitions you quote are examples of such confusion. For example, many people claim to be agnostic but mean "I believe that there's some supreme power, but it's unknowable". That's not agnosticism, and if it's not deism it's damn close:
Deism is the theistic belief that a supreme God exists and created the physical universe, but shall not intervene in its normal operation.
Theism is an overarching term that encompasses any belief in god (creator, supreme being). I don't know any theistic belief more abstract and refined than Deism, which is why I picked it.
Agnosticism doesn't reject theism, it makes no stronger statement than "we can't, at this point, know".
Atheism makes an affirmative statement. The atheist generalizes from "there is no evidence of god" to "there is no god". Not even the undetectable "Nature's God" of the Deists.
Dunno where you're getting "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" from anything I said.
See above.
It's frustrating that there's no word which properly sums up my viewpoint (and yours as well, I think)
Agnosticism. Militant agnosticism, perhaps, if you're afraid of being mistaken for a deist, unitarian, or other need-to-believe-er. "I do not know if there is a god, and I believe that you don't know either, no matter what you believe".
Read a little closer. They say the graphene sheets are conductive
So is the granulated carbon in an ultracapacitor... it's not structural. There's a thin sheet between two layers of grains, and the grains serve to massively increase the surface area between the two plates. The idea is to replace that with a graphene-based filling with an even larger surface area per volume.
Right, they should have named it "Hurtling Llama" or "Stoned Hyena".
Read the fine wikipedia entry. It's not replacing the plate, it's replacing the granular activated charcoal in existing ultracapacitors.
Do CEOs benefit from a bad economy?
Corporations benefit from an economy that has certain characteristics. For example, consider unemployment.
If the unemployment rate is too low, corporations have to pay too high a cost for labor, and profits are reduced. If the unemployment rate is too high, corporations don't see enough demand for their goods and services, and profits are reduced. There is a certain level of unemployment that benefits corporations.
Similarly, there is a certain level of unemployment that optimally benefits people who work for corporations... too low, and the company makes less profits, and wages stagnate. Too high, and there's more competition for jobs, and wages stagnate.
These two levels are not necessarily the same. In fact it would be unlikely in the extreme for them to be the same. The optimal level of unemployment, as seen by perfectly honest and omniscient CEOs, is not the same as the optimal level of unemployment, as seen by professional workers, and that in turn is likely to be different from the optimal level as seen by factory workers.
And none of these would levels imply a "bad economy".
Just about any other economic statistic can vary over quite a wide band, without being necessarily a sign of a "bad economy". Ask different people for economic advice, and they are likely to give you answers that leads to an economy that benefits them. If you ask people whose interests are not representative of the average voter the answers they give you are not going to help the average voter decide who to vote for.
Now, given that there is a fairly popular meme that the interests of corporations are best matched by an economy with a lot of low paid workers with high unemployment and a smaller consumer class buying stuff from corporations making the owning class richer, well... the Dilbertian position that "Asking CEOs what should be done about the economy is like asking criminals for legal advice." is only to be expected from Dilbert's creator.
an agnostic is unsure about whether there's a god or not.
If you're sticking to the scientific method, then that's the most you should be willing to claim. To take it further than "there is no evidence for anything that can be described as a deity" is not a scientific position. But "there is no evidence for anything that can be described as a deity" is the position of an agnostic.
What you seem to be thinking of as the agnostic position sounds more like a Deist to me.
I've seen utterly no reason to believe in a god, so I don't,
That is the agnostic position. You don't believe in a god. I don't, either. Not even the universe-as-a-computer-simulation one that's become so popular in recent decades. On the other hand... if there was as much incontrovertible evidence for a god as for my writing desk, well... I believe in my writing desk.
But going the extra step and claiming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence? That's religion, not science.
So what if the kinds of things that OpenGL and DirectX have implemented can now be done "efficiently enough" in high level code instead of dedicated hardware (albeit by making the whole system more expensive and power hungry... and that matters), that doesn't mean there isn't room for dedicated hardware, it just means the dedicated hardware needs to be doing something more sophisticated.
The raytracing acceleration in Slusallek's RPU was able to get 2008 CPU performance out of a low density FPGA implementation in 2005... with about the same hardware budget as a late '90s Rage II GPU, using an API called OpenRT - Open Ray Tracing.
How is this different, other than in hand-waving verbiage, than the comments you could add/embed in a GIF?
It's not. It's just a user interface to a comment field. A user interface that's got prior art in Croquet and Project Looking Glass.
Google Update can be used to download and install an application without any user intervention at all, by request of the webpage being viewed, using the undocumented "_GU_*()" calls in both IE and Firefox. The security model is not documented anywhere. And Google has declined to respond to questions about it.
That's the slogan of Fox News. Truth, perhaps, as far as it goes.
And "as far as it goes" is not all that far.
Controversial sites aren't going to get meaningful truth ratings, all you'll be able to do is figure out what the site's bias is. And if you can't do that already, you're not going to benefit from "truth ratings".
One comment dropped almost at random in the middle: "if it consumes far less power when you're running old DirectX applications".
Or if it consumes less power, period. And power is money. These guys are looking at the $600+ PC market. When they made the prediction about the death of the GPU in 2006 they were making games that took $2000 PCs to run well... and I'm sure a $2000 PC in 2006 would have been happy without a GPU. Now they're making games that take $600 PCs to run well, and those are high end. You can get a laptop for what, $400 now? You're not going to get a CPU or a GPGPU getting that kind of performance in a $200 PC or a $400 laptop for a few years, and by that time what's the low end going to be?