1. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to build a robot that blows up something rather than build that something. 2. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to create and enormous chemical explosion rather than capture controllable energy. 3. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to destroy biological cells than to change them.
It is easier to kill people off than facilitate a peaceful co-existence with technological solutions.
Even if free will is an artifact of our perception of a deterministic universe, I still find it extremely interesting that people who do believe in free will tend to be less constrained by their environments. For example, a child who experienced terrible abuse in a deterministic universe would have a very hard time having hope for their future. It becomes very easy to blame circumstances if you know that those circumstances are indeed necessarily the basis for your every choice.
If this example occurs in a universe with free will, there is no way to logically link previous circumstances with current choices. In a sense, giving the child control of their destiny.
Now in both examples, the Truth with a capital T could be that everything is deterministic, yet the behavior of the individual changes depending on how they view the universe, deterministically or with free will. If one believes that they have free will, they will function differently than if one believes that they have none. In this example I feel that the free will/determinism dichotomy is blurred, and really makes me question either side of the debate. It is almost as if belief can become a mechanism of some sort of strange ability to choose.
Ok ok, so our beliefs could be predetermined, but what about those who claim to believe in nothing? Or those who choose to believe in something just to believe in something (because believing in nothing makes it a bit hard to relate to others)?
As an engineer, you are legally responsible for the answers you give, and ethically responsible for the lives you endanger by risky answers. So if you are forced to make assumptions about a problem, you make conservative ones! Even after conservative assumptions, if the appropriate data is not available, then factors of safety of 2 are common (meaning 50% of what you could have gotten away with if the assumptions were actually correct).
If this was a real life example, were there soil borings done to determine the soil types? Did the engineers even get to see the site, or were they given dimensions and just told to run the numbers? Engineers will only give you an answer they are comfortable standing behind if shit hits the fan.
You are right that an experienced excavator will be able to give a more accurate answer faster than an engineer, but there are always surprises. For example, there could be a lens of silt that undermines the structural integrity of the soil that no one would be aware of without a soil boring. As a civil engineer, I have seen contractors use there experience and just go at it. Sometimes it works fine...sometimes not so fine, and fingers start pointing. Contractors and engineers both have very important roles, and communication and respect needs to improve between the two in industry. It would be a bad idea to rely on an answer solely from an engineer or contractor.
Because it is a chance to work with other people and broaden the perspectives of wikipedians rather than just saying "fuck it", and doing your own thing.
Working with people who disagree with you is a pita, it's not something that most people are willing to do, and it can take a seemingly wasteful amount of time. Getting along with others is the real challenge, any yahoo can go make something and convince a few other yahoos that it's the best way.
Utilitarianism can't work because there is no way of knowing all the outcomes of a given action. If you don't know ALL the outcomes, how can you compute whether that action does more good than harm in the end? Even more, at what point do you define the end? Your lifetime? A lifetime? The end of the universe?
Ok. You can say that right and wrong is an opinion. But don't act like participating in voting is really a viable way to change society to be more in line with your opinions.
And it is not what society is, it is what the majority of the current, Western society is. Societies are temporal, diverse, and need to continue to change. It is not as simple as 'it is what it is'.
We are talking about relative pressures here. A 15psi pressure difference from an established datum exerts the same forces on a body no matter what environment you are in.
I work in the engineering department for a small city. We print stuff all the time because looking at a 24x36in site plan is no fun on a computer screen. You also can't comment and edit with complete freedom while viewing on the computer screen.
Wouldn't "some quantity" without any other information be a scalar? And a span of 5 minutes in a positive direction be a vector (a quantity plus direction information)?
...there's not much people won't do for the chance to make a difference for others. Except permanently changing their lifestyle in order to genuinely interact with the people they "serve". This is what really makes a difference, not just some check for some cause or a week in some developing country constructing a building (which takes work away from the locals). It is always the quick fix, the quick high, to get the satisfaction of "helping" someone.
I just recently switched to linux and have tried Gnome, KDE, and xfce.
What I want is a "Start Menu", "K" menu, "Applications" menu, or whatever, that I can customize with dragging and dropping. And in the case of KDE, actually implement the changes I make. Currently I am running KDE and I am at a loss as to how to fix the poorly categorized 100 or so programs in the menu.
I wonder if you could get around internet filters with this since it tunnels through google servers. This could be of use to college students who have to deal with unintelligent internet filters at school (like me). I would test it now but I'm on a public terminal.
The office I work at does. We are a non-profit organization working in adoption and foster care cases and have branches in every state in the U.S.A. Along with spybot, using firefox in the office elimantes numerous computer problems related to adware/spyware and exploits.
I have friends that work as janitors in an elementry school and they have 5 or 6 projectors. Every once in a while we organize Halo lan parties and get 16 player games goin while we are all in the same general area to talk smack and moon the opposing when we capture the flag:)
The best Halo matches are where you can be sitting right next to your team and yelling through the doorway at your enemy!
I've always thought the most fear inducing terrorist attack would be a bomb set off in a downtown of a smaller city, or the main street area in a town. If terrorists started attacking targets of little importance at random I would be scared shitless because I could be next.
Why would you want to look at a Starbucks? I think this project is far more interesting as you can look at pictures from all over the world that you normally would not see.
The per-student cost of public education went up significantly a couple decades ago due to a single cause. When you find out what that cause is you'll understand why Republicans don't like to talk about it when they're bashing public education.
Are you refering to the civil rights movement or am I missing something that happened in the 80s?
"We won't list the sites that are reported to be infected in order to prevent further abuse, but the list is long and includes businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched," the group stated on its Web site.
So does anyone know what sites are infected? I'm sure most of us would like to avoid them...
I was with out my iBook for 5 weeks. I went to CompUSA. they sent it to Apple, Apple sent it back. Same problem. So after the second time it was actually fixed. 5 weeks without your personal computer is a long long time. Can you do it?
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It is easier to destroy rather than create.
Meaning:
1. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to build a robot that blows up something rather than build that something.
2. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to create and enormous chemical explosion rather than capture controllable energy.
3. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to destroy biological cells than to change them.
It is easier to kill people off than facilitate a peaceful co-existence with technological solutions.
Even if free will is an artifact of our perception of a deterministic universe, I still find it extremely interesting that people who do believe in free will tend to be less constrained by their environments. For example, a child who experienced terrible abuse in a deterministic universe would have a very hard time having hope for their future. It becomes very easy to blame circumstances if you know that those circumstances are indeed necessarily the basis for your every choice.
If this example occurs in a universe with free will, there is no way to logically link previous circumstances with current choices. In a sense, giving the child control of their destiny.
Now in both examples, the Truth with a capital T could be that everything is deterministic, yet the behavior of the individual changes depending on how they view the universe, deterministically or with free will. If one believes that they have free will, they will function differently than if one believes that they have none. In this example I feel that the free will/determinism dichotomy is blurred, and really makes me question either side of the debate. It is almost as if belief can become a mechanism of some sort of strange ability to choose.
Ok ok, so our beliefs could be predetermined, but what about those who claim to believe in nothing? Or those who choose to believe in something just to believe in something (because believing in nothing makes it a bit hard to relate to others)?
Your example of the engineers makes me wary...
As an engineer, you are legally responsible for the answers you give, and ethically responsible for the lives you endanger by risky answers. So if you are forced to make assumptions about a problem, you make conservative ones! Even after conservative assumptions, if the appropriate data is not available, then factors of safety of 2 are common (meaning 50% of what you could have gotten away with if the assumptions were actually correct).
If this was a real life example, were there soil borings done to determine the soil types? Did the engineers even get to see the site, or were they given dimensions and just told to run the numbers? Engineers will only give you an answer they are comfortable standing behind if shit hits the fan.
You are right that an experienced excavator will be able to give a more accurate answer faster than an engineer, but there are always surprises. For example, there could be a lens of silt that undermines the structural integrity of the soil that no one would be aware of without a soil boring. As a civil engineer, I have seen contractors use there experience and just go at it. Sometimes it works fine...sometimes not so fine, and fingers start pointing. Contractors and engineers both have very important roles, and communication and respect needs to improve between the two in industry. It would be a bad idea to rely on an answer solely from an engineer or contractor.
Because it is a chance to work with other people and broaden the perspectives of wikipedians rather than just saying "fuck it", and doing your own thing.
Working with people who disagree with you is a pita, it's not something that most people are willing to do, and it can take a seemingly wasteful amount of time. Getting along with others is the real challenge, any yahoo can go make something and convince a few other yahoos that it's the best way.
Utilitarianism can't work because there is no way of knowing all the outcomes of a given action. If you don't know ALL the outcomes, how can you compute whether that action does more good than harm in the end? Even more, at what point do you define the end? Your lifetime? A lifetime? The end of the universe?
Ok. You can say that right and wrong is an opinion. But don't act like participating in voting is really a viable way to change society to be more in line with your opinions.
And it is not what society is, it is what the majority of the current, Western society is. Societies are temporal, diverse, and need to continue to change. It is not as simple as 'it is what it is'.
I have definitely bought a Pabst Blue Ribbon 30 pack because of their support of NPR podcasts.
[quote]Who would take a job where you could be held personally liable for any mistake your subordinates may do?[/quote]
Anybody with a P.E. (Professional Engineer) license, which happens to be most engineers.
We are talking about relative pressures here. A 15psi pressure difference from an established datum exerts the same forces on a body no matter what environment you are in.
I work in the engineering department for a small city. We print stuff all the time because looking at a 24x36in site plan is no fun on a computer screen. You also can't comment and edit with complete freedom while viewing on the computer screen.
So if I shot at your kids they wouldn't be afraid?
Wouldn't "some quantity" without any other information be a scalar? And a span of 5 minutes in a positive direction be a vector (a quantity plus direction information)?
...there's not much people won't do for the chance to make a difference for others. Except permanently changing their lifestyle in order to genuinely interact with the people they "serve". This is what really makes a difference, not just some check for some cause or a week in some developing country constructing a building (which takes work away from the locals). It is always the quick fix, the quick high, to get the satisfaction of "helping" someone.I just recently switched to linux and have tried Gnome, KDE, and xfce.
What I want is a "Start Menu", "K" menu, "Applications" menu, or whatever, that I can customize with dragging and dropping. And in the case of KDE, actually implement the changes I make. Currently I am running KDE and I am at a loss as to how to fix the poorly categorized 100 or so programs in the menu.
If you read the faq...
System Requirements
* Windows 2000, XP, or 2003
* 3D graphics card (see Video Card Compatibility)
* Internet connection
* Sorry, no support for Linux or Macintosh yet
I wonder if you could get around internet filters with this since it tunnels through google servers. This could be of use to college students who have to deal with unintelligent internet filters at school (like me). I would test it now but I'm on a public terminal.
The office I work at does. We are a non-profit organization working in adoption and foster care cases and have branches in every state in the U.S.A. Along with spybot, using firefox in the office elimantes numerous computer problems related to adware/spyware and exploits.
I have friends that work as janitors in an elementry school and they have 5 or 6 projectors. Every once in a while we organize Halo lan parties and get 16 player games goin while we are all in the same general area to talk smack and moon the opposing when we capture the flag :)
:)
The best Halo matches are where you can be sitting right next to your team and yelling through the doorway at your enemy!
Oh, and its all free
last time i used icq i got spam, dunno what its like now.
:/
anyways its complicated, and no one else uses it. imagine meeting a new person and asking what their sn is? oh its 83924525694
your witty comment is greatly appreciated
Yea but email is a pita b/c of spam, plus you have to know the persons email. Its easier just having to know one screenname.
I've always thought the most fear inducing terrorist attack would be a bomb set off in a downtown of a smaller city, or the main street area in a town. If terrorists started attacking targets of little importance at random I would be scared shitless because I could be next.
Why would you want to look at a Starbucks? I think this project is far more interesting as you can look at pictures from all over the world that you normally would not see.
The per-student cost of public education went up significantly a couple decades ago due to a single cause. When you find out what that cause is you'll understand why Republicans don't like to talk about it when they're bashing public education.
Are you refering to the civil rights movement or am I missing something that happened in the 80s?
"We won't list the sites that are reported to be infected in order to prevent further abuse, but the list is long and includes businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched," the group stated on its Web site.
So does anyone know what sites are infected? I'm sure most of us would like to avoid them...
I was with out my iBook for 5 weeks. I went to CompUSA. they sent it to Apple, Apple sent it back. Same problem. So after the second time it was actually fixed. 5 weeks without your personal computer is a long long time. Can you do it?