I see what you're saying. Perhaps we could call it Schroedinger's camera?:-)
In fact, now that I think of it, this is more or less the issue that Schroedinger's Cat is meant to address. However, even if we outside the box see the cat in a mixed state, the cat itself surely knows whether or not it's dead. Um... maybe we should hook the Geiger counter up to a food bowl that opens if the atom decays. Then the cat knows whether or not it's fed.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that a system doesn't have to be conscious to make a quantum observation. It just has to render the results of the quantum "decision" in a form that is too big to be overridden by Heisenberg uncertainty, be that by an exposed silver atom, a cat food bowl, or a change in mental state of a human observer. This post probably says it better than I do.
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Re:you make the same mistake!
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The Mind of God
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My favorite counterexample to Pascal's Wager is Crom, who went to a lot of trouble to make the universe appear to be without a creator, and gets quite deeply offended if people start going around believing in Him.:-)
One unfortunate thing about that article is that it doesn't say where we can find documentation on George Carlo's findings. The article doesn't indicate what journal he's published his findings, and seems to suggest he hasn't published yet, rather that he's taken the issue directly the public. That tends to set off warning bells in my mind.
I can accept that Carlo may feel a need to raise the alarm immediately, but I would feel better if I thought his conclusions had been peer reviewed. I'd be even happier if they'd been corroborated in a separate study.
What exactly does being part of a well-regulated militia mean, anyway? None of the answers I've seen, from either side of the issue, strike me as being entirely satisfactory.
Allow me to applaud you for your brilliant troll. The $100-fine-for-profanity idea was truly inspired, as were the advocacy of "Horny4u" and "CoolDude3949291" as superiour usernames. And the notion that having to type "GNU Image Manipulation Program" is superior to "gimp" is masterful.
Yes, and in my insufficiently humble opinion that should not be the case without an amendment to the Constitution. So much the worse for the courts that some of 'em seem to disagree with me.:-)
The Supreme Court has, to my knowledge, ruled specifically on the Second Amendment only once, in US v. Miller. That was a long time ago, too, and there's considerable disagreement about what it says about the 2ndam. Various lower-level courts have ruled on the 2nd, some favoring the individual-rights interpretation, some the collective-rights. So... who knows.:-p
Yes, it is. Therefore the right to bear nuclear weapons "shall not be infringed". That said, I for one would wholeheartedly support an amendment to ban or heavily restrict anything from bazookas on up, or at least specify that they are not to be considered as "arms" under the Second Amendment. I don't think that private citizens should own weapons of mass destruction. But you don't ignore the Constitution, you change it, by the amendment process that was built in by the authors.
Like serving a printed restraining order to a blind person, I'm sure there are laws against it.
On an off-topic note, how do you serve a court order to a blind person, anyway? Does the process server have to read it aloud? Does it have to be delivered in Braille?
In addition to decrypting the blocking list, CPHACK.EXE also decrypts the account passwords on the software, allowing CyberPatrol to be disabled. It's an interesting but unanswered question whether Mattel would be so avid to abolish CPHACK if it didn't have that feature - I personally suspect they would, but I can't read the minds of Mattel's higher-ups, so I don't know.
The fact that the ACLU doesn't happen to value the right of individuals to possess the means of deadly force as much as you or I do, doesn't mean that they don't value the rest of the Constitution. I belong to the NRA to defend my 2nd Amendment rights, and the ACLU to defend the rest of my rights. I see no contradiction in this.
On a completely off-topic note, is it necessarily the case that you can't release a binary under the GPL? Or maybe a different license that says any decompilations of said binary would be under the GPL, with all the freedoms and restrictions it implies? After all, the only technical difference between binary and source is readability; so the difference between a GPL'd binary and one under a restrictive license is that the GPL'd binary can be freely redistributed and modified so long as the GPL stays attached...
We're sure you mean it. But if you're going to denounce anything as "uninformed rubbish" it is incumbent upon you to inform us differently. If you do not, then, as the moderators have wisely deemed, it is flamebait.
Um, in the scientists, you aren't supposed to trust any old paper that someone submits. That's what peer review is. If the editors of Social Text had a handle on sociology, they'd have recognized Sokal's submission as the pile of bovine manure it was. They didn't. In their defense, however it seems that they didn't consider themselves a "refereed journal"; but why did they publish something they clearly didn't understand?
The real problem with the post you're responding to, I think, is trying to extrapolate the notion that the editors of Social Text demonstrably didn't have a clue what Sokal was saying (but published it anyway), to other fields and journals. You can't even reasonably extend it to other sociology journals -- if Sokal had submitted his little stunt to some other journal, they may well have recognized it for the nonsense it was. And to extend the results of the Social Text stunt to the field of biology and evolution is, of course, ludicrous.
I do agree with your impression of the fellow you're responding to. He's a right-wing twit - "Absolute dictator power" my ass. But just because the poster doesn't know what he's talking about doesn't mean that Sokal's stunt is insignificant. (Though I also agree that it was a stunt, and doesn't really qualify as a full-fledged experiment - for that, he'd have to have submitted it to a wider range of victims, just for starters.)
As an aside, the poster really should have read the actual article about the Sokal hoax...
Though I agree with some of your points, I want to make one of my own...
It makes me laugh to think that a humanities journal would have reviewers. To do what? What makes for a good article? Once again, what does "good" mean for humanities papers? Yes, I said humanities not just postmodernism.
I don't see why a humanities journal shouldn't have reviewers, if only for the simple reason that it'd be silly to pull the top twelve papers off the incoming pile and call it a journal. Maybe the reviewers wouldn't necessarily play the same "objective" role that they do in a more technical journal, but no one that I know of (except the postmodernists, which was the point of Sokal's stunt) is making any such pretenses to "objectivity".
If we weighed the two on an even balance, I'd be inclined to agree; although I'd rather say that Ms. Broaddrick is (to me) an unknown who gets the default level of credibility, whereas Mr. Clinton has a history which drops his credibility below that level. When it comes to matters of law, though, the balance is put in favor of the accused; and I tend to follow that particular balance in my day-to-day judgments. That's all I'm saying - innocent until proven guilty.
With all due respect to Juanita Broaddrick, I can't just accept this as the gospel truth. Yes, Clinton may have a history of being lying scum, but he's still innocent until proven guilty. I can't see how anyone not immediately and personally involved in this alleged rape can ever expect to know what "really" happened.
I can only hope that the guilty party, whichever one it is, gets what's coming to them in the afterlife, because justice is unlikely to be served in this one.
I almost can't believe you honestly believe this. The notion that access to pornography has any correlation whatsoever with criminal activity is just so totally unsupported, to the best of my knowledge. If you disagree, educate me. Please.
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Actually, the Suck article itself specifically mentioned this point, saying that the inconsistency of web pages is also a bad thing.
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In fact, now that I think of it, this is more or less the issue that Schroedinger's Cat is meant to address. However, even if we outside the box see the cat in a mixed state, the cat itself surely knows whether or not it's dead. Um... maybe we should hook the Geiger counter up to a food bowl that opens if the atom decays. Then the cat knows whether or not it's fed.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that a system doesn't have to be conscious to make a quantum observation. It just has to render the results of the quantum "decision" in a form that is too big to be overridden by Heisenberg uncertainty, be that by an exposed silver atom, a cat food bowl, or a change in mental state of a human observer. This post probably says it better than I do.
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My favorite counterexample to Pascal's Wager is Crom, who went to a lot of trouble to make the universe appear to be without a creator, and gets quite deeply offended if people start going around believing in Him. :-)
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A piece of photographic film is an observer, in the sense required by quantum mechanics. It is not conscious.
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I can accept that Carlo may feel a need to raise the alarm immediately, but I would feel better if I thought his conclusions had been peer reviewed. I'd be even happier if they'd been corroborated in a separate study.
What exactly does being part of a well-regulated militia mean, anyway? None of the answers I've seen, from either side of the issue, strike me as being entirely satisfactory.
I award this five bowls of hot grits.
The Supreme Court has, to my knowledge, ruled specifically on the Second Amendment only once, in US v. Miller. That was a long time ago, too, and there's considerable disagreement about what it says about the 2ndam. Various lower-level courts have ruled on the 2nd, some favoring the individual-rights interpretation, some the collective-rights. So... who knows. :-p
Yes, it is. Therefore the right to bear nuclear weapons "shall not be infringed". That said, I for one would wholeheartedly support an amendment to ban or heavily restrict anything from bazookas on up, or at least specify that they are not to be considered as "arms" under the Second Amendment. I don't think that private citizens should own weapons of mass destruction. But you don't ignore the Constitution, you change it, by the amendment process that was built in by the authors.
On an off-topic note, could you please provide support for the notion that the National Rifle Association is a "hate group"?
In addition to decrypting the blocking list, CPHACK.EXE also decrypts the account passwords on the software, allowing CyberPatrol to be disabled. It's an interesting but unanswered question whether Mattel would be so avid to abolish CPHACK if it didn't have that feature - I personally suspect they would, but I can't read the minds of Mattel's higher-ups, so I don't know.
The fact that the ACLU doesn't happen to value the right of individuals to possess the means of deadly force as much as you or I do, doesn't mean that they don't value the rest of the Constitution. I belong to the NRA to defend my 2nd Amendment rights, and the ACLU to defend the rest of my rights. I see no contradiction in this.
Filtering software should have a separate category for sites that provide information on circumventing the filters.
Or am I totally on crack here?
We're sure you mean it. But if you're going to denounce anything as "uninformed rubbish" it is incumbent upon you to inform us differently. If you do not, then, as the moderators have wisely deemed, it is flamebait.
The real problem with the post you're responding to, I think, is trying to extrapolate the notion that the editors of Social Text demonstrably didn't have a clue what Sokal was saying (but published it anyway), to other fields and journals. You can't even reasonably extend it to other sociology journals -- if Sokal had submitted his little stunt to some other journal, they may well have recognized it for the nonsense it was. And to extend the results of the Social Text stunt to the field of biology and evolution is, of course, ludicrous.
I do agree with your impression of the fellow you're responding to. He's a right-wing twit - "Absolute dictator power" my ass. But just because the poster doesn't know what he's talking about doesn't mean that Sokal's stunt is insignificant. (Though I also agree that it was a stunt, and doesn't really qualify as a full-fledged experiment - for that, he'd have to have submitted it to a wider range of victims, just for starters.)
As an aside, the poster really should have read the actual article about the Sokal hoax...
All I can say is, just because people can blow a lot of smoke doesn't mean there's a fire.
If we weighed the two on an even balance, I'd be inclined to agree; although I'd rather say that Ms. Broaddrick is (to me) an unknown who gets the default level of credibility, whereas Mr. Clinton has a history which drops his credibility below that level. When it comes to matters of law, though, the balance is put in favor of the accused; and I tend to follow that particular balance in my day-to-day judgments. That's all I'm saying - innocent until proven guilty.
Shown by whom, may I ask, and why would I consider them (whoever they may be) any more credible than the ADL themselves?
I can only hope that the guilty party, whichever one it is, gets what's coming to them in the afterlife, because justice is unlikely to be served in this one.
I almost can't believe you honestly believe this. The notion that access to pornography has any correlation whatsoever with criminal activity is just so totally unsupported, to the best of my knowledge. If you disagree, educate me. Please.
SprintPCS web phones use the phone.com browser, which provides cookies by storing them on a gateway server.
I'd laugh, except that there are plenty of people who seriously believe both of those paragraphs. Though not usually both at once.