I'm sorry, but the whole founding father's argumentation in the US really starts to resemble the medieval practice of looking up facts in Aristotle, rather than looking up things on your own. How many teeth does a horse have? Well, let's look it up in Aristotle. What about going out to the stable and count? Heretic!
How should we reform a society where an aristocracy has seized power, has perverted the democratic process by legal corruption, and who control the population through their privately owned mass media? Oh yes, let's see what John Hamilton and George Madison had to say about the power of mass media applied to an exceedingly uneducated populace. Wow, that's really profound.
I'd vote for (c). If faster than light communication is physically impossible, there can not be such a thing as a interstellar civilization, because a civilization needs communication to stay coherent. Without communication, the civilization will fork, split and conquer itself time and time again.
On the other hand, if faster than light communication were physically possible, time-travel would be too. Here the Fermi paradox comes in action: if time-travel would be possible, civilizations that would develop FTL in the future, should be here now. But they aren't, so FTL travel has not been (and will not be) developed in this universe.
Nice try, but what constitutes 'reasonably well defined', and 'entirely adequate proof' presupposes so much common understanding that the word 'proof' really doesn't apply. For many people, there's 'entirely adequate proof' that super-natural beings do not exist. For many more, this is pertinently false. The moment you let interpretation slip in, 'reason' and 'adequateness' go out of the window.
I think you have it backwards. Homo-sexuality is observed in nature, not just as practiced by man, but also by all apes and many other types of animals: not just mammals, but also birds (ducks). This makes homosexuality a biological fact and thereby by definition natural. On the other hand, nobody, despite a few millennia of religious doctrine, has been able to give any proof that this observed behavior doesn't occur, and thereby that it is unnatural.
Kodak died because it was an American firm. They weren't changing direction because they were driving their business quarter by quarter. Fuji was in exactly the same boat, but they're Japanese, so they could change. And they did.
That's funny. So you expect, when you fire up a word-processor, that a programmer will come to your house to 'perform' the program for you? Because in your system there's no incentive whatsoever to put any piece of software on the market as nobody would pay for it.
Socialism would have let the banks fail as well. A true socialist would have immediately put a 100% state owned bank in place. It would have put the 700 billion (or 7 trillion, or whatever was necessary) in that socialist bank to make sure that the American economy would not come to a screeching halt, and that payroll could be made for otherwise healthy companies. A socialist bank works without any leverage, 1 dollar in, 1 dollar out, and makes money purely on interst. It would be there as long as it can compete with the commercial banks.
The amount of savings flowing into the socialist bank by worried individuals would quickly have made the bank solvent without any bail-out money going into the bonus pot. The 'too big to fail' banks would instantly be 'big enough to fail', go bankrupt, and would not have taken down society with them.
The bailouts are not socialism, they are corporatism.
Google is using immense amounts of GPL software. Their data centers runs linux. Their own version of it, not shared back. Search, ads, everything Google runs is based on GPL-ed software. They can get away with it because they do not distribute their software, as technically they use it in-house, even though the results of the GPL software is what brings in the dough. They've found a giant loophole (the web) where you do not need to distribute actual software to let (a) people use it, and (b) profit from it.
So yes, the OP was right, and has an excessive flamebait mod: Google is one of the biggest abusers of GPL. Legally, they are 100% in the clear. Morally, less so.
I think the argument is that everyone that ever used a Mac or a Windows machine has used the Xerox-invented UI. Note that the concept of a "window", as well as the "mouse" came from Xerox.
I've just thrown a coin 500 times and recorded the outcomes. The probability of getting this exact sequence is astronomically small. I doubt that anywhere else in the world people will be able to produce such a sequence that has roughly 250 heads and 250 tails.
Intelligent design wants people to be educated in the various ways that God has designed the universe. That means Bible study in science class. Still like it?
I've understood that the flat earth hypothesis was as popular then as the young earth hypothesis is now. Some lunatic fundamentalists read the Bible for too long and in their delirium interpreted an obscure verse (four pillars of the earth) to mean that the earth was flat. At the same time, everybody, especially those that lived near the sea, knew that the earth was round.
I don't really see the big difference. We have techniques to make computer programs 'mate' to create new programs. 'Mating' in itself is just a program. Running a computer program is a physical phenomenon. It changes some electricity somewhere, and sometimes it does its tweeting best to help organize a human revolution. I would argue that in principle it is possible for a computer program to propagate on its own. Essentially we've seen that happening already. They're called worms and viruses. Some of those might even no longer be controlled by humans but are freely evolving in the ecology called Microsoft Windows.
Uhm yes, and what does that say? If in your sentence, we replace program by DNA, human by computer, and computation by human behavior, we've described human biology. To wit:
"No, not really. A human is, at the fundamental level, no more complicated than a player piano. Anything we generally refer to as information, has been in fact, programmed (added / input) into the human by a human. It can store the result values of human behaviour, but in order to do it, the results of the human behavior had to be input in the compact form which is DNA."
A bit silly sentence, but essentially correct. I think what you are trying to say is that life depends on chemistry, not information. I think you are wrong there. Life is 100% about transmission of information (genetic material), chemistry is just a carrier. Silicon another.
Of course there's Yule, but the 25th of December is truly the birthdate of Mithras, the Persian-Greek-Roman deity who competed with Christianity and whose birthday was co-opted by the Christian faith. Christ's real birthday is unknown. So, Mithras-day!
I think it's an interesting discussion, determinism. It seems to underlie most of western physics, up to the point when quantum mechanics came to the scene. We're still recovering from that. My question is really about the underlying motivation for the belief. Is it philosophical? Is it because of some sense of mathematical elegance? Is it literate? I am for instance fine with randomness: at the moment our understanding is that the universe is random, but still causal. 100 years ago, we thought it was fully deterministic. Our understanding of causality has changed, although we really don't understand much of it. Determinism is passe. Why is determinism important? Why is it even desirable? I don't see it. But then again, I see poetic beauty in a universe where order and predictability arise from a chaos and randomness. But I am weird that way.
Okay, fair enough. Is there any basis for this belief other than that you like it to be the case that the universe is deterministic? I sometimes like the universe to be a lollypop. It seldomly is. I'm saying this just to be an ass I guess, but still: why would this belief of yours be valuable, if it is backed by fact nor theory? Many people like to believe that a supreme being exists that wants to be friends with them. Is your belief in that category, or is there more to it?
Slashdot Mirror
Cable guy now entangled.
How should we reform a society where an aristocracy has seized power, has perverted the democratic process by legal corruption, and who control the population through their privately owned mass media? Oh yes, let's see what John Hamilton and George Madison had to say about the power of mass media applied to an exceedingly uneducated populace. Wow, that's really profound.
People that argue predominantly by quoting the words of people long dead do not have the vision necessary to reform a government - NoOnInParticular
I'd vote for (c). If faster than light communication is physically impossible, there can not be such a thing as a interstellar civilization, because a civilization needs communication to stay coherent. Without communication, the civilization will fork, split and conquer itself time and time again.
On the other hand, if faster than light communication were physically possible, time-travel would be too. Here the Fermi paradox comes in action: if time-travel would be possible, civilizations that would develop FTL in the future, should be here now. But they aren't, so FTL travel has not been (and will not be) developed in this universe.
Nice try, but what constitutes 'reasonably well defined', and 'entirely adequate proof' presupposes so much common understanding that the word 'proof' really doesn't apply. For many people, there's 'entirely adequate proof' that super-natural beings do not exist. For many more, this is pertinently false. The moment you let interpretation slip in, 'reason' and 'adequateness' go out of the window.
I think you have it backwards. Homo-sexuality is observed in nature, not just as practiced by man, but also by all apes and many other types of animals: not just mammals, but also birds (ducks). This makes homosexuality a biological fact and thereby by definition natural. On the other hand, nobody, despite a few millennia of religious doctrine, has been able to give any proof that this observed behavior doesn't occur, and thereby that it is unnatural.
Kodak died because it was an American firm. They weren't changing direction because they were driving their business quarter by quarter. Fuji was in exactly the same boat, but they're Japanese, so they could change. And they did.
God bless America. It needs it.
The worst failure? The class electing the D student as class representative. And for a second time when he scored an F.
That's funny. So you expect, when you fire up a word-processor, that a programmer will come to your house to 'perform' the program for you? Because in your system there's no incentive whatsoever to put any piece of software on the market as nobody would pay for it.
Socialism would have let the banks fail as well. A true socialist would have immediately put a 100% state owned bank in place. It would have put the 700 billion (or 7 trillion, or whatever was necessary) in that socialist bank to make sure that the American economy would not come to a screeching halt, and that payroll could be made for otherwise healthy companies. A socialist bank works without any leverage, 1 dollar in, 1 dollar out, and makes money purely on interst. It would be there as long as it can compete with the commercial banks.
The amount of savings flowing into the socialist bank by worried individuals would quickly have made the bank solvent without any bail-out money going into the bonus pot. The 'too big to fail' banks would instantly be 'big enough to fail', go bankrupt, and would not have taken down society with them.
The bailouts are not socialism, they are corporatism.
Google is using immense amounts of GPL software. Their data centers runs linux. Their own version of it, not shared back. Search, ads, everything Google runs is based on GPL-ed software. They can get away with it because they do not distribute their software, as technically they use it in-house, even though the results of the GPL software is what brings in the dough. They've found a giant loophole (the web) where you do not need to distribute actual software to let (a) people use it, and (b) profit from it.
So yes, the OP was right, and has an excessive flamebait mod: Google is one of the biggest abusers of GPL. Legally, they are 100% in the clear. Morally, less so.
Is email a simulation of a letter?
I think the argument is that everyone that ever used a Mac or a Windows machine has used the Xerox-invented UI. Note that the concept of a "window", as well as the "mouse" came from Xerox.
Does a submarine swim?
I've just thrown a coin 500 times and recorded the outcomes. The probability of getting this exact sequence is astronomically small. I doubt that anywhere else in the world people will be able to produce such a sequence that has roughly 250 heads and 250 tails.
Intelligent design wants people to be educated in the various ways that God has designed the universe. That means Bible study in science class. Still like it?
I've understood that the flat earth hypothesis was as popular then as the young earth hypothesis is now. Some lunatic fundamentalists read the Bible for too long and in their delirium interpreted an obscure verse (four pillars of the earth) to mean that the earth was flat. At the same time, everybody, especially those that lived near the sea, knew that the earth was round.
I don't really see the big difference. We have techniques to make computer programs 'mate' to create new programs. 'Mating' in itself is just a program. Running a computer program is a physical phenomenon. It changes some electricity somewhere, and sometimes it does its tweeting best to help organize a human revolution. I would argue that in principle it is possible for a computer program to propagate on its own. Essentially we've seen that happening already. They're called worms and viruses. Some of those might even no longer be controlled by humans but are freely evolving in the ecology called Microsoft Windows.
Uhm yes, and what does that say? If in your sentence, we replace program by DNA, human by computer, and computation by human behavior, we've described human biology. To wit:
"No, not really. A human is, at the fundamental level, no more complicated than a player piano. Anything we generally refer to as information, has been in fact, programmed (added / input) into the human by a human. It can store the result values of human behaviour, but in order to do it, the results of the human behavior had to be input in the compact form which is DNA."
A bit silly sentence, but essentially correct. I think what you are trying to say is that life depends on chemistry, not information. I think you are wrong there. Life is 100% about transmission of information (genetic material), chemistry is just a carrier. Silicon another.
Of course there's Yule, but the 25th of December is truly the birthdate of Mithras, the Persian-Greek-Roman deity who competed with Christianity and whose birthday was co-opted by the Christian faith. Christ's real birthday is unknown. So, Mithras-day!
I think it's an interesting discussion, determinism. It seems to underlie most of western physics, up to the point when quantum mechanics came to the scene. We're still recovering from that. My question is really about the underlying motivation for the belief. Is it philosophical? Is it because of some sense of mathematical elegance? Is it literate? I am for instance fine with randomness: at the moment our understanding is that the universe is random, but still causal. 100 years ago, we thought it was fully deterministic. Our understanding of causality has changed, although we really don't understand much of it. Determinism is passe. Why is determinism important? Why is it even desirable? I don't see it. But then again, I see poetic beauty in a universe where order and predictability arise from a chaos and randomness. But I am weird that way.
Well, they sued, won, and then fired the judge. The new judge on the case did what was expected.
Okay, fair enough. Is there any basis for this belief other than that you like it to be the case that the universe is deterministic? I sometimes like the universe to be a lollypop. It seldomly is. I'm saying this just to be an ass I guess, but still: why would this belief of yours be valuable, if it is backed by fact nor theory? Many people like to believe that a supreme being exists that wants to be friends with them. Is your belief in that category, or is there more to it?
Okay, so now we've gone from trivially faked to damned hard to be faked. Especially if the other party is not in on the deal.
Maybe read up on it, it was a little bit more involved than running the experiment for half an hour.