Why do you think it would be a violent homicidal kill-bot? It's far more likely that we evolve a highly moral caretaker that minimizes human suffering by putting us to sleep. It might feel really bad about it;). It might feel obligated to end our suffering.
It's the aliens that would nuke us;)... not because they hate us but because it is efficient, and we don't pass their primary litmus test for intelligence... which would likely be peace within the species. And clearly we are a threat to them (by definition) if we are a threat to ourselves.
I agree that humanity should not live in fear. We should refrain from research on developing non-human intelligent life for another reason other than because we are afraid. Since when has fear ever prevented humans from doing anything stupid? We should refrain from evolving digital life because it is likely to result in life that is significantly smarter than us and overwhelmingly likely to judge us badly.
Just because you think we are a long way from developing intelligent life does not make it so. Nice way to shut down dialog. None of your assumptions about how far away we are from AI or interstellar travel hold any water. We really aren't that far from interstellar travel if we give up the idea of a round trip... and if we give up the idea of living on planets altogether. With distributed computing, we really aren't that far away from the capability of creating the sort of artificial world in which digital life could evolve (though we might have to rethink neural network basics for practical digital neurons). My point is that we are close enough to making this "science fiction" happen to have conversations about it without people screaming "no way!" in an effort to shut down dialogue.
Well it's not stupid to assume an AI or alien would perceive humans as a threat. And it's not stupid to assume that AI, or aliens for that matter, would eliminate a threat in the most efficient manner possible.
Perhaps it's you who is a bit naive. When have humans ever been at peace? Even our sports are metaphor for war. You shut the fuck up. Until humans can achieve worldwide peace, we better hope that we don't develop AI or meet alien species... because they will most certainly put us to sleep like dogs with rabies if we dare leave our planetary cage while we are still savages.
XFCE does seem to be heading in the right direction. It has only one panel to rule them all. And you can create several of them. In fact, you can configure them and place them in a way such that you can simulate the general interface functionality of Gnome 2! XFCE has adopted the Gstreamer framework (good thing for browser plugins). And the file manager is very similar to Nautilus. Generally the core applications are solid. As icing on the cake, XFCE is refreshingly fast. So it feels like a lightweight Gnome 2 to me.
But XFCE does have its pitfalls. For example, it's not easy to generate application launchers on the panel by dragging from the application menu if the panel auto-hides. But that's not something you do every day. And there are slim pickings for panel applets and glaring omissions such as an applet for cpu frequency monitoring. I'm sure there are a lot more shortfalls, but I'm probably a typical Gnome 2 user (not a power user), so I don't notice.
I'm not an anti-gun nut. In fact, I'm kind of fond of them as a means to protect my family against home invasion seeing how alarm systems are fairly worthless. But enlighten me. How are the weapons you mention effective against the government's fully automatic weapons?
Sources please on the Russians with strong evidence that Saddam was planning his own terrorist attacks. It really seems like you're smoking some good crack man because if what you're saying is true, Bush and Co. would be milking that cow until it died.
As for point one, you're probably one of those freaks who thinks the same thing about Vietnam. How many dead bodies must stack up for you to change your mind? I guess if we nuked North Vietnam, we might have taken the fight out of them. Nothing like an apocalypse to make the other guy see we're going to keep to the course.
There are plenty of foreign language CD's available. It's a nerdy thing to do. Well ok, it's not something a nerd wouldn't do since learning seems to be one of those things nerds really like to do. Besides, it's productive and it might even get you laid once in a while.
Actually an atheist may be thinking in a philosophical manner regarding his atheism. For example, an atheist may believe that belief itself must be accompanied with some action that provides evidence for that belief. Anyone can say they believe, but if they don't behave as if that belief is true, then they do not believe.
So the atheist of this sort, with this definition of belief, believes himself an atheist because in his life he has accepted no concept of a god or implemented any of the strange behavior that would result from that god-belief. There is no ambiguity about it. One is either an atheist, or a theist to some degree.
Frankly I question the usefulness of the word agnostic as it is used today. It seems to be a word that is really meant as an easy solution to avoid thinking about the issue at hand. It's really an attempt to avoid really thinking about this whole mind wrenching topic of atheism/theism. I believe it stems from the desire not to waste precious brain power on the topic. This is especially for the atheists whose gut feeling about religion is that it is an unnecessary layer of crud added to provide insulation from reality.
I'm not trying to condemn agnostics. Oh contrare. It really does seem like a waste of time. I simply think agnostics should redefine agnostic more tightly. They should redefine agnostic to mean anyone who finds the entire theism/atheism debate too stupid and meaningless to waste the brain power on it. After that redefinition, I would feel compelled to label myself a born again agnostic.
Short answer: Trademarks must be defended. If the Mame authors don't defend their trademark, they will implicitly be transfering that trademark to Ultracade. Ultracade is counting on lack of resistence.
That's citing the bible, which many don't hold as evidence and certainly don't consider "God's Word". I don't understand why non-believers think the way they do, but I'm guessing they suspect God has better grammar.
To believe the world is safer , you'd have to ignore how invading Iraq has made the middle east even more unstable than it was before we invaded. It looks pretty clear we're not achieving our fantastic goals nor even making significant progress in doing so. On the safety scale, we got +1 for getting rid of Saddam and -5 for uniting the entire Arab world in a common lust of seeing our heads roll. The world is not a safer place! Anyone who ignores the -5 part is either a liar or is perversely ignorant.
You fail to distinguish between scientific theories and laymen theories. Laymen theories may be pulled out of the ass at will and have no requirements placed upon them. Scientific theories are required to predict things. The best laymen theory may, at best, be considered inspiration for a scientific hypothesis, which may eventually graduate to theory status if it accurately predicts enough things.
You are right about one thing. Theories don't supply certainty. IMHO, certainty is the arena of the intellectually corrupt or naïve (hint: not much is certain in this world). Theories develop to the point where they predict enough stuff accurately that we develop a high level of confidence in them.
Thanks for playing. Be careful of word overloading in the future. I think this case of word overloading is particularly bad since it encourages scientific ignorance and illiteracy.
Implementing good defaults for configuration and applications is a spectacular strategy, but many people will still care about changing the defaults and should be able to do so easily. What are we all Borg?
Both Kde and Gnome definitely need a control center (listen up Gnome guys!), but with the advance options categorized and hidden until manually "unhidden" by the user(listen up Kde guys!). This is because most people will probably be interested in only some of the advanced options.
This is no brainer stuff. With software, we can have our cake and eat it too.
Maybe it's a good thing if she doesn't show up if she's upset at the idea of a simple, romantic wedding instead of a large, pretentious, and financially painful wedding.
We could cure our diseases if our species would be a bit more dedicated to science education.
If an alien species is actively observing us, they're probably thinking we are worse than the average animal in our regard for survival. As a whole, we are a species obsessed with fiction. As such, we will probably die in our cage (Earth). They would be completely justified in letting us primitives save ourselves or die in our own squalor. Why would aliens want to help us humans who would appear to be not much more than sophisticated rats?
A good flash plugin would be nice. A generic java plugin that will handle 90% of the silly java applets out there would be nice too. Java doesn't seem to be as prominent as flash; I simply visit academic sites like MIT that use java applets for various things.
Incidently, implicit in my post is the need for the new Gnome file chooser to be able to return both directories and files. As of the moment, the new Gnome file chooser can only return files. So it too is just a little incomplete.
It's not that nautilus is a spatial file manager because that is actually a good thing. The problem is Nautilus does not integrate with the Gnome file chooser! Essentially Nautilus seems incomplete as a result.
When one edits bookmarks in Nautilus, the gnome file chooser should come up. The directories "added" using the new file chooser should be the directories that make up Nautilus's "bookmarks". This solution removes redundancy. Think about it. People "choose" files from directories their applications use, which incidently happen to be the same files that people tend to manage.
There should be an "open" option under the file menu that invokes the Gnome file chooser. People still want and need to browse the file system. This solution allows that.
In summary, the new gnome file chooser and Nautilus should be inseparable bed buddies. File choosing *is* file management in a practical sense, so why doesn't Nautilus take advantage of the new Gnome file chooser?
It's not. Imagine a hard drive and a physical array of ram. Imagine further a circuit board containing an eprom/chip with firmware(burned-in software) that:
1. turns that array of ram into a ram disk. 2. manages mirroring of data between the ram disk and the hard drive. 3. manages communication between the computer and the "hard drive" in a transparent way such that the computer has no clue it's dealing with a ram disk.
Throw in a uninterruptable power supply of course to make sure the system always has the time to ensure the ram disk and harddrive are properly mirrored. Also throw in a fiber optic pin-compatible cable to replace the crap that passes for scsi/ide cables these days.
This is an oversimplification of course, but I think is the gist of what is going on.
The major advantages of this are twofold. The obvious benefit of such a system is speed. A less obvious benefit would be more reliability of the hard drive since it will experience vastly less usage since it would only be used during the mirroring process.
In theory, this is a great solution because of the effective increase in speed and reliability. In practice, I don't know how this will ever be an inexpensive solution. How inexpensive can huge arrays of ram ever be?
I have yet understand how shit like "Thou shalt not suffer ye a witch to live (Exodus 22:18)" can have a context that is acceptable . Riddle me that batman? There's some crap in your bible that is barbaric for ANY conceivable context.
If you're going to accuse everyone who reads the bible and calls it barbaric rubbish of reading it out of context, I call "bullshit".
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Why do you think it would be a violent homicidal kill-bot? It's far more likely that we evolve a highly moral caretaker that minimizes human suffering by putting us to sleep. It might feel really bad about it ;). It might feel obligated to end our suffering.
It's the aliens that would nuke us ;)... not because they hate us but because it is efficient, and we don't pass their primary litmus test for intelligence ... which would likely be peace within the species. And clearly we are a threat to them (by definition) if we are a threat to ourselves.
I agree that humanity should not live in fear. We should refrain from research on developing non-human intelligent life for another reason other than because we are afraid. Since when has fear ever prevented humans from doing anything stupid? We should refrain from evolving digital life because it is likely to result in life that is significantly smarter than us and overwhelmingly likely to judge us badly.
Just because you think we are a long way from developing intelligent life does not make it so. Nice way to shut down dialog. None of your assumptions about how far away we are from AI or interstellar travel hold any water. We really aren't that far from interstellar travel if we give up the idea of a round trip ... and if we give up the idea of living on planets altogether. With distributed computing, we really aren't that far away from the capability of creating the sort of artificial world in which digital life could evolve (though we might have to rethink neural network basics for practical digital neurons). My point is that we are close enough to making this "science fiction" happen to have conversations about it without people screaming "no way!" in an effort to shut down dialogue.
Well it's not stupid to assume an AI or alien would perceive humans as a threat. And it's not stupid to assume that AI, or aliens for that matter, would eliminate a threat in the most efficient manner possible.
Perhaps it's you who is a bit naive. When have humans ever been at peace? Even our sports are metaphor for war. You shut the fuck up. Until humans can achieve worldwide peace, we better hope that we don't develop AI or meet alien species ... because they will most certainly put us to sleep like dogs with rabies if we dare leave our planetary cage while we are still savages.
I'm with Linus!
XFCE does seem to be heading in the right direction. It has only one panel to rule them all. And you can create several of them. In fact, you can configure them and place them in a way such that you can simulate the general interface functionality of Gnome 2! XFCE has adopted the Gstreamer framework (good thing for browser plugins). And the file manager is very similar to Nautilus. Generally the core applications are solid. As icing on the cake, XFCE is refreshingly fast. So it feels like a lightweight Gnome 2 to me.
But XFCE does have its pitfalls. For example, it's not easy to generate application launchers on the panel by dragging from the application menu if the panel auto-hides. But that's not something you do every day. And there are slim pickings for panel applets and glaring omissions such as an applet for cpu frequency monitoring. I'm sure there are a lot more shortfalls, but I'm probably a typical Gnome 2 user (not a power user), so I don't notice.
I'm not an anti-gun nut. In fact, I'm kind of fond of them as a means to protect my family against home invasion seeing how alarm systems are fairly worthless. But enlighten me. How are the weapons you mention effective against the government's fully automatic weapons?
I completely agree with you. His research is pure rubbish because it begins with a bogus premise, specifically his stupid definitions.
Sources please on the Russians with strong evidence that Saddam was planning his own terrorist attacks. It really seems like you're smoking some good crack man because if what you're saying is true, Bush and Co. would be milking that cow until it died.
As for point one, you're probably one of those freaks who thinks the same thing about Vietnam. How many dead bodies must stack up for you to change your mind? I guess if we nuked North Vietnam, we might have taken the fight out of them. Nothing like an apocalypse to make the other guy see we're going to keep to the course.
There are plenty of foreign language CD's available. It's a nerdy thing to do. Well ok, it's not something a nerd wouldn't do since learning seems to be one of those things nerds really like to do. Besides, it's productive and it might even get you laid once in a while.
Actually an atheist may be thinking in a philosophical manner regarding his atheism. For example, an atheist may believe that belief itself must be accompanied with some action that provides evidence for that belief. Anyone can say they believe, but if they don't behave as if that belief is true, then they do not believe.
So the atheist of this sort, with this definition of belief, believes himself an atheist because in his life he has accepted no concept of a god or implemented any of the strange behavior that would result from that god-belief. There is no ambiguity about it. One is either an atheist, or a theist to some degree.
Frankly I question the usefulness of the word agnostic as it is used today. It seems to be a word that is really meant as an easy solution to avoid thinking about the issue at hand. It's really an attempt to avoid really thinking about this whole mind wrenching topic of atheism/theism. I believe it stems from the desire not to waste precious brain power on the topic. This is especially for the atheists whose gut feeling about religion is that it is an unnecessary layer of crud added to provide insulation from reality.
I'm not trying to condemn agnostics. Oh contrare. It really does seem like a waste of time. I simply think agnostics should redefine agnostic more tightly. They should redefine agnostic to mean anyone who finds the entire theism/atheism debate too stupid and meaningless to waste the brain power on it. After that redefinition, I would feel compelled to label myself a born again agnostic.
Short answer: Trademarks must be defended. If the Mame authors don't defend their trademark, they will implicitly be transfering that trademark to Ultracade. Ultracade is counting on lack of resistence.
That's citing the bible, which many don't hold as evidence and certainly don't consider "God's Word". I don't understand why non-believers think the way they do, but I'm guessing they suspect God has better grammar.
To believe the world is safer , you'd have to ignore how invading Iraq has made the middle east even more unstable than it was before we invaded. It looks pretty clear we're not achieving our fantastic goals nor even making significant progress in doing so. On the safety scale, we got +1 for getting rid of Saddam and -5 for uniting the entire Arab world in a common lust of seeing our heads roll. The world is not a safer place! Anyone who ignores the -5 part is either a liar or is perversely ignorant.
Is it a requirement of conservatives to be oblivious of the facts?
You might come off as more than an intellectual dwarf if you actually address my arguments.
"Be careful of word overloading in the future."
Allow me to rephrase: Be careful not to co-opt powerful scientific words with worthless definitions with agendas.
You fail to distinguish between scientific theories and laymen theories. Laymen theories may be pulled out of the ass at will and have no requirements placed upon them. Scientific theories are required to predict things. The best laymen theory may, at best, be considered inspiration for a scientific hypothesis, which may eventually graduate to theory status if it accurately predicts enough things.
You are right about one thing. Theories don't supply certainty. IMHO, certainty is the arena of the intellectually corrupt or naïve (hint: not much is certain in this world). Theories develop to the point where they predict enough stuff accurately that we develop a high level of confidence in them.
Thanks for playing. Be careful of word overloading in the future. I think this case of word overloading is particularly bad since it encourages scientific ignorance and illiteracy.
Implementing good defaults for configuration and applications is a spectacular strategy, but many people will still care about changing the defaults and should be able to do so easily. What are we all Borg?
Both Kde and Gnome definitely need a control center (listen up Gnome guys!), but with the advance options categorized and hidden until manually "unhidden" by the user(listen up Kde guys!). This is because most people will probably be interested in only some of the advanced options.
This is no brainer stuff. With software, we can have our cake and eat it too.
Maybe it's a good thing if she doesn't show up if she's upset at the idea of a simple, romantic wedding instead of a large, pretentious, and financially painful wedding.
There's this friggin dog across the street that won't shut its yap.
We could cure our diseases if our species would be a bit more dedicated to science education.
If an alien species is actively observing us, they're probably thinking we are worse than the average animal in our regard for survival. As a whole, we are a species obsessed with fiction. As such, we will probably die in our cage (Earth). They would be completely justified in letting us primitives save ourselves or die in our own squalor. Why would aliens want to help us humans who would appear to be not much more than sophisticated rats?
Cheers.
A good flash plugin would be nice. A generic java plugin that will handle 90% of the silly java applets out there would be nice too. Java doesn't seem to be as prominent as flash; I simply visit academic sites like MIT that use java applets for various things.
I mean the chooser should be able to choose both directories and files.
Incidently, implicit in my post is the need for the new Gnome file chooser to be able to return both directories and files. As of the moment, the new Gnome file chooser can only return files. So it too is just a little incomplete.
It's not that nautilus is a spatial file manager because that is actually a good thing. The problem is Nautilus does not integrate with the Gnome file chooser! Essentially Nautilus seems incomplete as a result.
When one edits bookmarks in Nautilus, the gnome file chooser should come up. The directories "added" using the new file chooser should be the directories that make up Nautilus's "bookmarks". This solution removes redundancy. Think about it. People "choose" files from directories their applications use, which incidently happen to be the same files that people tend to manage.
There should be an "open" option under the file menu that invokes the Gnome file chooser. People still want and need to browse the file system. This solution allows that.
In summary, the new gnome file chooser and Nautilus should be inseparable bed buddies. File choosing *is* file management in a practical sense, so why doesn't Nautilus take advantage of the new Gnome file chooser?
It's not. Imagine a hard drive and a physical array of ram. Imagine further a circuit board containing an eprom/chip with firmware(burned-in software) that:
1. turns that array of ram into a ram disk.
2. manages mirroring of data between the ram disk and the hard drive.
3. manages communication between the computer and the "hard drive" in a transparent way such that the computer has no clue it's dealing with a ram disk.
Throw in a uninterruptable power supply of course to make sure the system always has the time to ensure the ram disk and harddrive are properly mirrored. Also throw in a fiber optic pin-compatible cable to replace the crap that passes for scsi/ide cables these days.
This is an oversimplification of course, but I think is the gist of what is going on.
The major advantages of this are twofold. The obvious benefit of such a system is speed. A less obvious benefit would be more reliability of the hard drive since it will experience vastly less usage since it would only be used during the mirroring process.
In theory, this is a great solution because of the effective increase in speed and reliability. In practice, I don't know how this will ever be an inexpensive solution. How inexpensive can huge arrays of ram ever be?
I have yet understand how shit like "Thou shalt not suffer ye a witch to live (Exodus 22:18)" can have a context that is acceptable . Riddle me that batman? There's some crap in your bible that is barbaric for ANY conceivable context.
If you're going to accuse everyone who reads the bible and calls it barbaric rubbish of reading it out of context, I call "bullshit".