Therefore, we must presume that these men simply did not ever talk to a god...
The most recent of the biblical authors still wrote nearly 1000 years before the Age of Reason. It's foolish to presume that they did not totally believe in what they wrote; "never atribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" and all that.
China's trying to do something that has never succeeded in the long term: to build a non-democratic capitalist society. In democratic societies, the inevitable disparities in economic power are offset by political freedoms and the ability of the masses to revolt -- in the ballot box.
Define "long term."
Europe was captialist for centuries before democracy took hold--and they largely propspered through the 1800s and early 1900s as a bunch of non-democratic capitalist states.
Democracy just perpetuates because it's a more efficient means of revolution.
Yep. Though it might be better to call them "biological drives" than "instincts."
God lied to Eve about the apple, too. Read your Bible - God says she'll die if she eats it, the snake says she'll merely gain knowledge.
Eve did die, and God never said that she'd not gain knowledge. And, according to the biblical accounts, Eve's descendants all died sucessuvley quicker than Adam or Eve did.
So, if God is so powerful, omniscient, omnipresent etc. why does he always get disproved in tests like this one?
Because He wants to.
Honestly, the Almighty has said on many occasions that He doesn't like being tested, and that He'll take action to falsify tests as best suits His plan.
Science has long proven that, if God exists, He doesn't want to be found by science. He does still reveal himself in personal ways, but not in such a way that He can become part of science's cold dogma.
Wizards of the Coast really best known for the Magic card game?
Yep. D&D is a small-margin game--us RPGers are cheap bastards who balk at $30 books.
Oh, and WotC got bought by a little company you might have heard of, called Hasbro, not too long ago.
In the meantime, if you want to roleplay the world's best fantasy RPG without aiding the corporate takeover of it (or encouraging the very very significant strings attached to their Open Gaming attempt), check out the Free Gaming Association : www.theFGA.com
Say you've spent a little time formatting a paragraph the wat you want with the various idents, tabs, font, size, etc... now you want to apply the same formatting to a paragraph later in the document.
The "right" way to do this, even in Word, is to make a new paragraph style. (The proper method of doing this--which isn't "automatically define formatting"--is left as an excercise for the reader.)
Still a format painter in OO would be nice--I'll add it to my "wish list."
There [are] decades, almost a century[,] of real-world evidence that Socialist economics do not work.
Correct. I mean, look at the US highway system. It works so well with privatized---oops.
There ARE things, like infrastructure, where the goverment can do a better job than private industry. And there are ways to harness the benefits of capitalism without selling stock--tying the salaries of regional managers directly to customer satisfaction, or giving the grid to the state executives, for example.
You're right about CA, though. They should try real de-regulation before they try re-regulation; if nothing else, it'll keep a bunch of moot-point arguments from happening.
Because there are human statements that go back that far.
While it is certainly concievable that the Almighty created existance only very recently, nearly all statements about how we came to be* state that we have been around for a good deal of time.
Essentially, the basis of human knowledge is human statements--and there are essentially no human statements that say we came into being less than 6,000 years ago.
(*: There are some religions that claim that we were created at all, but instead state that we have always existed.)
It's space, nothing, a huge empty. If it's shaped like anything than what the hell is outside?
Nothingness, nonexistance, chaos--take your pick. Even the best science is limited to the observable universe and the remnants of sub-real (read that as "quantum") reactions. There's very likely more out there, but we've no way of learning about it.
Also, christian fundamentalists are damaging to our society.
Actually, non-violent fundamentalists are an essential part of our society--esepecially ones who aren't in sync with the most popular view out there.
The only thing damaging to our society, or our serach for knowledge and understanding and enlightenment and all that good stuff, are those who want to silence people who are doing nothing more than speaking their minds.
I fail to see how it is in principle impossible for a theory about origins to have observational or falsifiable consequences.
That's just because there's a fine line between principle and fact.
Science is at its best when its in search of principles--throw a rock into the air, and it comes down so. Stab a man so, and he dies thusly. Have a planet with certain conditions, and X happens. Change the environment, and the results will be as such.
Conversely, science is at its worst when attempting to state past events--especially those with no solid record. And the worse the record is, the worse the science that comes of it.
Honestly, I don't know how old the universe is--I just know that it's at least 6,000 years old, and probably a fair bit older. I'll readilly admit that, if all that there is is what we see, the scientist's numbers are more than likely spot-on.
But Columbus's contemporaries said that he'd keep on sailing to his doom (of starvation, not falling off), and through blind luck he proved them wrong.
Before you dismiss entire branches of science out of hand, you might want to try to understand what science is.
Science is not a search for ideas. It is a method of verifying or disproving ideas, that is far too often taken as a font of absolute truth.
Yep. Married 5 1/2 years, to a woman who winds up counseling all of her friends (male and female) on relationships. And I've seen quite a lot of headache and heartache come from sex, as well as a bunch of good things.
To say that all on screen sex is pornography
I didn't say that it was pornography; I said that it bordered on it. And there's a heck of a difference between "sex" and "nudity."
What do you base that on? My grandmother...
Your grandmother very likely grew up in a world where video games were nonexistant and television was very rare. Whenever she saw violence, she saw the result.
If what you said was true, then why are video game companies being blamed for violence?
Because politicians need a scapegoat. You know as well as I that violent video games don't make kids into killers. On the other hand, you can probably agree that ertotic films do make viewers wish to emulate their acts.
I dare you to define "better".
Sure thing.
Better(in art): more conducive to the direction in which society wishes to proceed.
This is a culturally subjective definition, which matches the culturally variable nature of art.
I answered your dare, so here's one of mine.
I think it's really sad that on TV you can kill someone, spatter blood all over the place and have less people object than if you say some naughty words and show some breasts.
Why is graphic sexuality better than graphic violence?
The sad thing is that (in the USA at least) graphic violence is apparently more acceptable than graphic sexuality. This appears to be exactly backwards.
Nope.
Sex is a private, personal, individual thing without any conflict at all. Story-wise, it's an extremly graphic kiss, and on-screen sex borders on pornography. (Simple supportive arugment: mainstream movies have been cut & pasted together to porn-like streams of only their "love" scenes.)
Violence, on the other hand, is the most basic form of conflict. Graphic dipictions of violence are actually better than black-bared violence--people who know what the gruesome result will be are less likely to comit acts of unnecessary violence than people who have no solid grasp on the consequences.
To put it another way: when distilling stories down to the spoken word, a discriptivly violent tale is a war story or a cautionary tale; a discriptuvly sexual tale is just a dirty story.
(The inverse is true for static art, like a painting--it's a heck of a lot better to have a masterwork nude than a masterwork corpse--but video games, movies, and television aren't static.)
As a programmer, why on earth would I want to look at a bunch of silly boxes when I could look at the source code instead, complete with comments and algorithms??
Let me count the ways...
You have a huge, complex system you want to summarize
You need to work with a bunch of programmers, and you don't want everyone spending time to grep each new change
You need to explain how your software works to a non-programmer, like the PHB who signs your paycheck
You are plopped in front of a new system that some other programmer created that has to work in an arbitrary way, and you need to learn it as quickly as possible.
I'm sure that these reasons don't outweigh more important ones like "the tools don't work" or "it doesn't save as much time as it should". But you should still be able to come up with them (or better ones.)
Being able to see the benefits of a position you don't agree with is one of the signs of intelligence--but you knew that, and were just being lazy in a/. post, you uber-intelligent programmer, you.;)
Prose, news, music, poety, pictures, movies -- it is really just o's and 1's.
No, it isn't. It can be _represented_ by 1s and 0s, but it eventually breaks out into a human-perceptive form.
Now, there is some overlap between the catagories you gave, they are still clearly distinct mediums that anyone who knows the language can identify very easily. Even the most out-of-tune "alternative art" is distinct from the disharmonious screeching of a compressed audio file.
OTOH, if you could find a way to make an acousticly pleaing soundwave render an image, you'd have yourself a new art form, and could do all sorts of things with it. Something like the old line-art graphics would probably be a good place to start--two instruments for the graphics/melody, and a sepearte line for rhythm...
Does anyone with one of these devices know if traditional Graffiti is supplied, is compatible or is possible to emulate?
According to PalmInfocenter's review, it is.
I'm getting a Zire 71 later this week (in transit), and I'll let you know how hard it is to make the shift.
Two nice alterations that comes with G2 are a better way to write capitals, and the posibility to use graffitti anywhere on the screen--which is quite a nice advancement, IMO.
As with phones, PDAs, and other portable devices it always worries me that all the latest bells and whistles come with about 2 days battery life
There is a reason why just about every new PDA has a built-in battery. Carry a power cable with you if you're going to not be home at night, and recharge it at least once a day.
I love having a PDA, but I couldn't concieve of working on it for fourty-eight hours straight.
(As for lost data--get a memory card. The darn thing's designed to not lose data when it's away from power, so you've got a simple backup right there.)
Laptops are there to help kids work. Handhelds exist as portable PIMs and carriers of data, but no one in their right might would try to do serious work on one exclusively.
Get a keyboard for them. PDA + Full size folding keyboard = $300 "kid computer."
That's more than enough for just about every general-purpose school assignmet. If they need to do more--coding, office skills, et cetera--they can have a lab.
(And, really, it's not like getting the stili-strokes is all that hard, or lacking an easy reference...)
Remember that the Earth rotates--right now, you're moving at, what, about 2,000 mph? As you go straight up, relative to a point on the surface, your speed increases because you're still completing one rotation / day. Once you get up to geostationary orbit, you've got (at least) the necessary escape velocity. (I also suspect that e.v. goes down as altitude increases, but I'm not certain.)
As for the black hole--if you managed to place a cable of a material that the black hole wouldn't shred in the right location and homehow managed to survive both your passage through the event horizon and whatever the black hole does to you after that, you could, theoretically, raise yourself out of a black hole.
The energy that it would take to ascend the indistructable space elevator would be rather high, of course. And they'd be worse the deeper into the hole you were.
And that means they suddenly become disinterested in money why?
A politician can accept gifts as "campaign contributions." Legislators, and executives, frequently allow themselves to be swayed by the opinions of those that give them money so they can be re-elected. It often comes very close to the line of "bribery."
Judges, on the other hand, don't have campaign funds. Their only way of advancement, unless they run for an elected office*, is to sway the legislature, not the wealthy donors. And that's politics, not money.
Why did the 3-judge panel ignore law and create such a ruling in the first place?
Because the issue hadn't been raised in California, and they wanted a binding statewide precedent?
Because the defendants failed to give a good enough argument on law at the trial, but succeeded on appeal?
Because the judges simply thought that the punch-card ballots, as a matter of law, were illegal now because of Bush v. Gore?
I really like your "don't even have to be bought" remark. The whole system does, believe it or not, work without bribes or donations. An influx of capital just makes it work for the small guys (er, I mean, "non-majorities") a bit more.
(Compared to everyone, even Microsoft is a small guy.)
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Wait, god said this?
According to the biblical authors, yes.
Therefore, we must presume that these men simply did not ever talk to a god...
The most recent of the biblical authors still wrote nearly 1000 years before the Age of Reason. It's foolish to presume that they did not totally believe in what they wrote; "never atribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance" and all that.
Apples can eventually become dog crap. Granted, it's not all that likely.
Sure it is.
Horses eat apples, and dogs eat dead proceessed horses.
China's trying to do something that has never succeeded in the long term: to build a non-democratic capitalist society. In democratic societies, the inevitable disparities in economic power are offset by political freedoms and the ability of the masses to revolt -- in the ballot box.
Define "long term."
Europe was captialist for centuries before democracy took hold--and they largely propspered through the 1800s and early 1900s as a bunch of non-democratic capitalist states.
Democracy just perpetuates because it's a more efficient means of revolution.
Um, humans have instincts too.
Yep. Though it might be better to call them "biological drives" than "instincts."
God lied to Eve about the apple, too. Read your Bible - God says she'll die if she eats it, the snake says she'll merely gain knowledge.
Eve did die, and God never said that she'd not gain knowledge. And, according to the biblical accounts, Eve's descendants all died sucessuvley quicker than Adam or Eve did.
So, if God is so powerful, omniscient, omnipresent etc. why does he always get disproved in tests like this one?
Because He wants to.
Honestly, the Almighty has said on many occasions that He doesn't like being tested, and that He'll take action to falsify tests as best suits His plan.
Science has long proven that, if God exists, He doesn't want to be found by science. He does still reveal himself in personal ways, but not in such a way that He can become part of science's cold dogma.
Wizards of the Coast really best known for the Magic card game?
Yep. D&D is a small-margin game--us RPGers are cheap bastards who balk at $30 books.
Oh, and WotC got bought by a little company you might have heard of, called Hasbro, not too long ago.
In the meantime, if you want to roleplay the world's best fantasy RPG without aiding the corporate takeover of it (or encouraging the very very significant strings attached to their Open Gaming attempt), check out the Free Gaming Association : www.theFGA.com
Say you've spent a little time formatting a paragraph the wat you want with the various idents, tabs, font, size, etc... now you want to apply the same formatting to a paragraph later in the document.
The "right" way to do this, even in Word, is to make a new paragraph style. (The proper method of doing this--which isn't "automatically define formatting"--is left as an excercise for the reader.)
Still a format painter in OO would be nice--I'll add it to my "wish list."
There [are] decades, almost a century[,] of real-world evidence that Socialist economics do not work.
Correct. I mean, look at the US highway system. It works so well with privatized---oops.
There ARE things, like infrastructure, where the goverment can do a better job than private industry. And there are ways to harness the benefits of capitalism without selling stock--tying the salaries of regional managers directly to customer satisfaction, or giving the grid to the state executives, for example.
You're right about CA, though. They should try real de-regulation before they try re-regulation; if nothing else, it'll keep a bunch of moot-point arguments from happening.
How do you know it's at least 6000 years old?
Because there are human statements that go back that far.
While it is certainly concievable that the Almighty created existance only very recently, nearly all statements about how we came to be* state that we have been around for a good deal of time.
Essentially, the basis of human knowledge is human statements--and there are essentially no human statements that say we came into being less than 6,000 years ago.
(*: There are some religions that claim that we were created at all, but instead state that we have always existed.)
It's space, nothing, a huge empty. If it's shaped like anything than what the hell is outside?
Nothingness, nonexistance, chaos--take your pick. Even the best science is limited to the observable universe and the remnants of sub-real (read that as "quantum") reactions. There's very likely more out there, but we've no way of learning about it.
Also, christian fundamentalists are damaging to our society.
Actually, non-violent fundamentalists are an essential part of our society--esepecially ones who aren't in sync with the most popular view out there.
The only thing damaging to our society, or our serach for knowledge and understanding and enlightenment and all that good stuff, are those who want to silence people who are doing nothing more than speaking their minds.
I fail to see how it is in principle impossible for a theory about origins to have observational or falsifiable consequences.
That's just because there's a fine line between principle and fact.
Science is at its best when its in search of principles--throw a rock into the air, and it comes down so. Stab a man so, and he dies thusly. Have a planet with certain conditions, and X happens. Change the environment, and the results will be as such.
Conversely, science is at its worst when attempting to state past events--especially those with no solid record. And the worse the record is, the worse the science that comes of it.
Honestly, I don't know how old the universe is--I just know that it's at least 6,000 years old, and probably a fair bit older. I'll readilly admit that, if all that there is is what we see, the scientist's numbers are more than likely spot-on.
But Columbus's contemporaries said that he'd keep on sailing to his doom (of starvation, not falling off), and through blind luck he proved them wrong.
Before you dismiss entire branches of science out of hand, you might want to try to understand what science is.
Science is not a search for ideas. It is a method of verifying or disproving ideas, that is far too often taken as a font of absolute truth.
Have you ever been in a relationship?
Yep. Married 5 1/2 years, to a woman who winds up counseling all of her friends (male and female) on relationships. And I've seen quite a lot of headache and heartache come from sex, as well as a bunch of good things.
To say that all on screen sex is pornography
I didn't say that it was pornography; I said that it bordered on it. And there's a heck of a difference between "sex" and "nudity."
What do you base that on? My grandmother...
Your grandmother very likely grew up in a world where video games were nonexistant and television was very rare. Whenever she saw violence, she saw the result.
If what you said was true, then why are video game companies being blamed for violence?
Because politicians need a scapegoat. You know as well as I that violent video games don't make kids into killers. On the other hand, you can probably agree that ertotic films do make viewers wish to emulate their acts.
I dare you to define "better".
Sure thing.
Better (in art): more conducive to the direction in which society wishes to proceed.
This is a culturally subjective definition, which matches the culturally variable nature of art.
I answered your dare, so here's one of mine.
I think it's really sad that on TV you can kill someone, spatter blood all over the place and have less people object than if you say some naughty words and show some breasts.
Why is graphic sexuality better than graphic violence?
let me quote myself:
Sex is a private, personal, individual thing
Sex isn't dirty; sex-scenes are. They almost never add anything more than semi-pornographic thrills to a TV/Movie/video game.
I love sex. Sex is great. But it's not something I want to watch other people doing.
Again, to be obvious: It's supposed to be a private thing, and it's dirty to take something so private and sacred and parade it out in public.
The sad thing is that (in the USA at least) graphic violence is apparently more acceptable than graphic sexuality. This appears to be exactly backwards.
Nope.
Sex is a private, personal, individual thing without any conflict at all. Story-wise, it's an extremly graphic kiss, and on-screen sex borders on pornography. (Simple supportive arugment: mainstream movies have been cut & pasted together to porn-like streams of only their "love" scenes.)
Violence, on the other hand, is the most basic form of conflict. Graphic dipictions of violence are actually better than black-bared violence--people who know what the gruesome result will be are less likely to comit acts of unnecessary violence than people who have no solid grasp on the consequences.
To put it another way: when distilling stories down to the spoken word, a discriptivly violent tale is a war story or a cautionary tale; a discriptuvly sexual tale is just a dirty story.
(The inverse is true for static art, like a painting--it's a heck of a lot better to have a masterwork nude than a masterwork corpse--but video games, movies, and television aren't static.)
Let me count the ways...
I'm sure that these reasons don't outweigh more important ones like "the tools don't work" or "it doesn't save as much time as it should". But you should still be able to come up with them (or better ones.)
Being able to see the benefits of a position you don't agree with is one of the signs of intelligence--but you knew that, and were just being lazy in a
Prose, news, music, poety, pictures, movies -- it is really just o's and 1's.
No, it isn't. It can be _represented_ by 1s and 0s, but it eventually breaks out into a human-perceptive form.
Now, there is some overlap between the catagories you gave, they are still clearly distinct mediums that anyone who knows the language can identify very easily. Even the most out-of-tune "alternative art" is distinct from the disharmonious screeching of a compressed audio file.
OTOH, if you could find a way to make an acousticly pleaing soundwave render an image, you'd have yourself a new art form, and could do all sorts of things with it. Something like the old line-art graphics would probably be a good place to start--two instruments for the graphics/melody, and a sepearte line for rhythm...
Does anyone with one of these devices know if traditional Graffiti is supplied, is compatible or is possible to emulate?
According to PalmInfocenter's review, it is.
I'm getting a Zire 71 later this week (in transit), and I'll let you know how hard it is to make the shift.
Two nice alterations that comes with G2 are a better way to write capitals, and the posibility to use graffitti anywhere on the screen--which is quite a nice advancement, IMO.
As with phones, PDAs, and other portable devices it always worries me that all the latest bells and whistles come with about 2 days battery life
There is a reason why just about every new PDA has a built-in battery. Carry a power cable with you if you're going to not be home at night, and recharge it at least once a day.
I love having a PDA, but I couldn't concieve of working on it for fourty-eight hours straight.
(As for lost data--get a memory card. The darn thing's designed to not lose data when it's away from power, so you've got a simple backup right there.)
Laptops are there to help kids work. Handhelds exist as portable PIMs and carriers of data, but no one in their right might would try to do serious work on one exclusively.
Get a keyboard for them. PDA + Full size folding keyboard = $300 "kid computer."
That's more than enough for just about every general-purpose school assignmet. If they need to do more--coding, office skills, et cetera--they can have a lab.
(And, really, it's not like getting the stili-strokes is all that hard, or lacking an easy reference...)
Ah. So geo. orbit isn't escape velocity, it's just about exactly shy of escape velocity. Gotcha.
There is no way you could build a space elevator out of a black hole
Given everything we know, yes. But "it's impossible" has never stopped hypothetical science fiction before
So how does escape velocity play into this?
At a very basic level.
Remember that the Earth rotates--right now, you're moving at, what, about 2,000 mph? As you go straight up, relative to a point on the surface, your speed increases because you're still completing one rotation / day. Once you get up to geostationary orbit, you've got (at least) the necessary escape velocity. (I also suspect that e.v. goes down as altitude increases, but I'm not certain.)
As for the black hole--if you managed to place a cable of a material that the black hole wouldn't shred in the right location and homehow managed to survive both your passage through the event horizon and whatever the black hole does to you after that, you could, theoretically, raise yourself out of a black hole.
The energy that it would take to ascend the indistructable space elevator would be rather high, of course. And they'd be worse the deeper into the hole you were.
And that means they suddenly become disinterested in money why?
A politician can accept gifts as "campaign contributions." Legislators, and executives, frequently allow themselves to be swayed by the opinions of those that give them money so they can be re-elected. It often comes very close to the line of "bribery."
Judges, on the other hand, don't have campaign funds. Their only way of advancement, unless they run for an elected office*, is to sway the legislature, not the wealthy donors. And that's politics, not money.
. But there IS a standards body. It's called the publishers and researchers of the Oxford English Dictionary, the canonical English reference.
Yes. If you want a "canonical" reference, you can only go to Oxford.
But they don't set the standard--they merely report it.
I really like your "don't even have to be bought" remark. The whole system does, believe it or not, work without bribes or donations. An influx of capital just makes it work for the small guys (er, I mean, "non-majorities") a bit more.
(Compared to everyone, even Microsoft is a small guy.)