There seems to be a fair amount of hatred for CapsLock. I use it quite a bit for #define constants and macros in C. Do Perl programmers not use ALL_CAPS for much?
Re:Fun with Procedural Memory
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Interface Zen
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* You can maintain procedural memories without equivalent declarative representations (with your hands at your sides try describing how to tie your shoe)
You take the piece of velcro, slide it through the hole, fold it over onto itself and press firmly. What's so hard to remember about that?:-)
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Re:I really don't believe in this whole Zen concep
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Interface Zen
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So, these altered states DO happen. Mystical? Bullshit! A combination of a severe addrenalin high and other neurological factors that I for one do not know or understand (and I suspect that applies for everyone else at the moment). You don't believe in unexplained but natural, if wierd, effects?
Some would be inclined to say that's the very definition of "mystical" (compare to linguistically similar word "mysterious"). Webster's comfirms this use of the word. So, in fact, unless you believe all possible knowledge is already known, you do believe in the existence of mystical things.
I think the word you're looking for to ridicule as bullshit is "supernatural". I believe in mystical states, but I have no belief in the supernatural...
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Re:Dosn't this fall in the realm of dome form of..
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Interface Zen
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f you were to do things without concious thought that can be a sign of some form of mental disorder.
Don't forget to breath, dude!:-)
But seriously, an inability to do things without conscious deliberation is a symptom of many mental disorders. A lot of the observable behavior of many of these individuals is due to them trying to do things so-called normal people do without thinking.
According to the article, if normal-time matter collides with reverse-time matter, you get no-time matter.
Incidently, the article talks about reverse time and normal time as being the way matter behaves. I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about a "zone" being normal or reverse time. The way time is flowing is essentially defined by the behavior of the matter. So there's normal-time matter and reverse-time matter, not normal-time regions of space or reverse-time, except in so far as all the matter in a particular region happens to exhibit a certain behavior. If you enter a reverse-time "zone", you just happen to be normal-time matter in an area predominantly populated by reverse-time matter. Nothing happens to your own arrow of time unless you interact with the reverse-time matter somehow.
then you would bitch at them for annoying you with such a message
Highly unlikely. A get asked lots of questions by software when I first install it. One more isn't going to bug me. It would bug me if it asked each time I ran the game, but I assume ID's not that stupid.
This would also make the results less accurate because certain types of users (i.e. linux users) might answer no more than others.
Certain types of users might run the game on LANs (or even WANs) without direct connection to the Internet more often than others. If they need the kind of accuracy adding this question would upset, they're already not getting it.
It isn't attaching a name, an address, or anything - it's simply telling them the % of their users use a certain OS, video card, etc.. chill out man..
If someone enters your apartment without your permission, they've broken the law, even if they don't steal anything. And rightly so. Your point that they don't attach a name or address or anything to the information is true but completely irrelevant.
But all of that aside, none of Red Hat, Netscape, Apple, IBM, ATT, etc. felt the need for that restriction. Corel just has this way of pissing the developers of their own system off every chance they get. They need to work on that.
Would it kill them to post such licenses on debian-legal for discussion before using them?
Well, I never did find much commentary about BBSing in the 612 area code, but I have to point out that there is more local activity today on the Star Tribune's "Talk" service than ever existed in the combined user bases of all the 612-area BBSes in the days of the Computer User list.
Unfortunately, that's the problem. I ran a local (612) BBS from 1985 into the early 90's (started as Irongate, went down for a time, came back as Artificial Reality). I noticed a real decline in the quality of BBSing as the quantity of people engaged in the activity increased. It was great in the early to mid 80's, but as the 80's drew to a close, I became increasingly disgusted with the influx of "ruggies" and the like. Being a sysop went from a fun hobby to a frustrating chore. Logging into other BBS's, I could usually tell instantly if a BBS was any good or not by checking the userlist. If it had between 50-200 people in it, it had a chance. Any more than a couple hundred people and it was almost certainly a pointless waste of time to try to wade through the message boards. There would be a lot of posts but generally less actual interesting content than on BBS's with around 100 users.
A forum with the combined user base of all the Twin Cities BBS's combined sounds like a complete waste of time. The Internet didn't kill BBSing, the BBS scene became a parody of its former self half a decade before Internet access became common. Cheap, plentiful modems killed BBSing as I knew and loved it.
Has any one looked for planets in the Centari (sp?) system? I haven't been able to find any info either way. To me it makes sence that you'd look for planets closer to the Sol system then 50 light years away.
Our stellar next door neighbor, the Centauri system, is actually a trinary star system. Alpha Centauri A and B circle fairly close, and the C component (sometimes called Proxima since it happens to be closer to us at the moment than any other star save our own) circles fairly far out. Now, my understanding is that they're less hopeful of finding planets in binary or trinary star systems than orbiting a single star. I don't doubt that they've checked, and I'm not surprised that nothing has been found. There may be planets there anyways, but not the big wonkin gas giants we can spot today.
Are we really sure this thing is a planet ? I always thought that when something got to about the size of Jupiter it stood a chance of being a starof sorts itself.....anyone care to fill us in?
Err, no. Jupiter is only about 1/80th of the mass required to achieve become a star. This object is four times bigger than Jupiter, but that still puts it well below the minimum mass required to achieve fusion.
Microsoft/AOL created the internet therefore they are king of it.
Excuse me? I've been using the Internet since long before AOL existed.
If you don't like it then get your god damned head out of your ass, and kneel to King Microsoft.
Don't like it? It's not even true.
They have done everything for you and you spit in their face.
They have done nothing for me. I had the misfortune of having to use Windows on my primary computer from early 1997 to mid 1998. Those were the unhappiest months of my computing life. I just thank the gods I never used Windows at all before then and haven't needed to use it too much since. I pity those of you who've had to use Windows for years...
Microsoft is the reason you're here.
Hardly. I started using the Internet in 1987, 10 years before the first time I started using a Microsoft OS...
but, saying things like "Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light." doesn't really help our credibility. I mean, the greatest fear of the MPAA is that bandwidth will get to the point where entire DVDs can easily be pirated from computer to computer...
Maybe it's time they woke up and smelled the digital age. If they sold the movies for reasonable rates, it'd be easier to pay for them than pirate them. If bandwidth becomes that cheap and easy to use, I'd happily log into MGM's website, give them my credit card number, and download some movie for $1.99. They'd probably make more money selling them this way than by going through the expensive of pressing DVD discs and shipping them to Best Buy. Frankly, I don't think I'd spend any less on movies than I do now, I'd just have a larger collection. (Actually, with the "just another $2 for another title" going, I'd probably spend more on movies than I do now.) They'd make more money, I'd have more movies, everyone would be happy! Except video rental stores...
do you *enjoy* taunting lawyers?
Of course, but only if I know they can't bite me...
This came up much earlier, in one of the cloning articles. So I can confidently predict this weiner will come back with some tosh about how JEE-zus invalidates the Word of God in Leviticus about dietary laws and mixing fabrics and earlocks.
Just out of curiousity, doesn't anyone know where in the New Testament Jesus says you can ignore all the old dietary laws? I've been wondering about that one for a while...
Of course, there's a lot of value in modern Christian thought, but Sturgeon's Law inexorably applies there as elsewhere. You have to pick through a lot of crap to get to some really admirable and noble sentiments about getting along with your fellow earth-bound critters.
That's what I love about Unitarian Universalists: they pick through the crap and take just the best parts. And what's even better, they do it for religious texts other than Christian ones as well. Grab the best from all religious thought anywhere, that's the ticket!
If the system really is set up that you can Accept Jee-zus, be a total asshole, and go to Heaven, and not Accept Jee-zus, be a self-sacrificing loving person, and go to Hell, then the system sucks and I want no part of it, and the God pushing that system can go fuck himself up the ass with a fire hydrant.
It'd be more amusing to see the people pushing this idiocy off as Christianity suffer that fate. Oh, and thanks for the mental picture. Yikes!
Hell, the Creationist Troll is even on better logical ground, since proving a positive ("there is a God," where 'God' is suitably defined) is at least logically possible, whereas proving a negative ("There is no God,") isn't even theoretically possible.
This is not necessarily true. Again, it depends on the definition, but given suitable definitions, one can prove the non-existence of things. For example, proving the non-existence of square circles or triangles whose angles add up to 150 degrees is trivially easy (again, I'm talking about given suitable definitions -- given different definitions, proving the existence of 150 degree triangles is easy, you just need to switch out of planar geometry). A lot of people define God in such a way that it implies a contradiction, which yields an easy proof of non-existence. Which of course doesn't prove that there are no gods, just that there are none matching that description. The reverse is also true -- proving a positive may be logically impossible, given appropriate definitions. So really, without carefully examining the definitions and other axioms both posters are operating under, one cannot conclude that either is on better logical ground.
I'd rather ascribe the universe's elegant design to intent rather than randomness
This is invoking a logical falacy known as a false dilema. You're mistakenly (or at least baselessly) asserting that the universe's design is due to either intent or randomness, whereas there's nothing in your post to back up the notion that these are the only two options. It could be due to neither of those but instead due to some other option. Thus, even if you prove it's not due to randomness, this does not prove it's due to intent, or vice versa.
and that there's no evidence whatsoever one way or the other.
This depends on what you consider to be evidence. Although there is no proof, there are plenty of things out there that many would consider at least to be evidence for one position or the other.
Absolutely believing in God and absolutely denying the existence of God in the absence of evidence one way or the other are equally acts of faith -- the atheist is committing just as much to his dogma as the Creationist Troll is to his.
The only people with no faith are Pyrrhonists, and I'm not sure about them, either.:-)
or at least, would the other branes have black holes at the same spot because the gravity from ours would attract enough matter from the others to form another black hole?
It wouldn't need to. If gravity works across branes, then whereever any brane forms a black hole, there will be a black hole in the same location in all branes. The odd thing would be, for universes where no matter has passed the event horizon, they would be empty black holes. The gravitation effects would be there, but there would be no matter in in hole. No infinitely dense singularity at the center.
Here's an odd thought. Suppose in another brane where an "empty" black hole exists, a virtual particle/antiparticle pair comes into existense along the event horizon and one drops in. The other is "emitted" as Hawkings radiation. Does this mean the original black hole in the original universe gets a little smaller? In which case, aren't we transfering matter between branes this way?
Except for the experimentalists since you can't verify this theory yet...
Some people would call them scientists.:-) A scientist who is not an experimentalist is not a scientist; he or she is a philosopher, or mathemetician...
The fact is, in all of our history of astronomy, we have not seen this happen.
We have seen numerous cases of stars apparently orbitting another object where no object was visible. We've calculated the mass of the other object (based on orbital period and mass of the visible star) to be star-like, but again, the companion is invisible. The typical explanation is a neutron star or black hole, but a perfectly normal star in a parallel universe would be another possible explanation.
I agree, though, that if there were countless universes with which we interacted gravitationally, this should be ridiculously more common than it appears to be. Lower density universes wouldn't remain lower density long, would they? Wouldn't the gravitational pull of objects in our universe pull in matter in the others, increasing the density where our universe has matter and decreasing it where ours doesn't? The net effect would be that, given sufficient time, all the universes would have high density and low density areas in the same places ours does.
Are you smoking crack? We have not concluded anything other than our known 3-Dimensions, and that Space and Time are actually Space-Time.
Actually, it's fairly well accepted that gravity distorts spacetime, stretching it in a different spatial dimension than the common three. A quest for cosmology for the last few decades has been to determine the overall shape of the universe, open (hyperbolic curvature) or closed (shaped as a big hypersphere - a 4 dimensional sphere). Granted, that doesn't mean it's true, but it is fairly widely accepted to be true.
This is pretty much another one of those baseless thoeries that have no physical proof, which is fine because thats why we have theories.
The theory is not baseless. It was suggested by General Relativity and made predictions that were later observed to be true. That's not proof, mind you, but proof in that sense never exists for any scientific theory.
However, entertaining this as anything but a theory that someone conjured up is simply not scientific, and you shouldn't consider yourself such if you do.
That goes without saying. I consider all scientific theories to be theories that someone conjured up. A good example would be the as yet unproven theory that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. This is just a theory someone conjured up. So far, it has accorded with the evidence well, but it is, as yet, unproven.
Mathematics can show many things, like objects with N dimensions, that doesn't mean that they actually exist or that there is even a universe that exists with such. Just because someone has an explanation that talks about folds and an excuse for gravity does not overall prove a damn thing about the Universe, simply because there's no *proof*.
There never will be proof. Proofs are things you find in mathematics. Science has theories. Science is incapable of proving anything. I'm not sure where you're going with this line of argument...
Neat view on the Universe. Thats all this is. Considering it to be anything but that is baseless.
This is true of all scientific theories, such as the theory that the Sun is hot. What's your point?
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Re:Wow My B-Day is actually Special
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Happy Odd Day!
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also.. is it odd I feel old at 19?
Wait until you're 29. I've been 29 for a few years now, and it keeps getting more odd every year!
You mean "451 - The temperature in the title of a famous book." I'm not sure you can say more than that. IIRC, Bradbury had no actual idea at what temperature a book would combust, he just made up a plausible sounding number.
In fact, it's not even fair to call zero a "number" at all.. it's the absence of a number or a value.
And I suppose an unformatted disk isn't a disk, either. Disks hold information, and an unformatted disk holds no information, so an unformatted disk not a disk. And the brain of someone who thinks zero is not even is not a brain.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a C programmer, and I don't use caps lock. In fact, I modify my keymap on all my non-Sun computers so that it acts like a control key for consistency with my Sun. I leave the left control key also mapped to control, since I've used Intel keyboards with the misplaced control key often enough that I sometimes reach for it there. The right control key which I have never once used to my knowledge I remap to the multi-key compose so I can easily type accented or special symbols like ©, etc.
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You take the piece of velcro, slide it through the hole, fold it over onto itself and press firmly. What's so hard to remember about that?
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Some would be inclined to say that's the very definition of "mystical" (compare to linguistically similar word "mysterious"). Webster's comfirms this use of the word. So, in fact, unless you believe all possible knowledge is already known, you do believe in the existence of mystical things.
I think the word you're looking for to ridicule as bullshit is "supernatural". I believe in mystical states, but I have no belief in the supernatural...
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Don't forget to breath, dude!
But seriously, an inability to do things without conscious deliberation is a symptom of many mental disorders. A lot of the observable behavior of many of these individuals is due to them trying to do things so-called normal people do without thinking.
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Incidently, the article talks about reverse time and normal time as being the way matter behaves. I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about a "zone" being normal or reverse time. The way time is flowing is essentially defined by the behavior of the matter. So there's normal-time matter and reverse-time matter, not normal-time regions of space or reverse-time, except in so far as all the matter in a particular region happens to exhibit a certain behavior. If you enter a reverse-time "zone", you just happen to be normal-time matter in an area predominantly populated by reverse-time matter. Nothing happens to your own arrow of time unless you interact with the reverse-time matter somehow.
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Highly unlikely. A get asked lots of questions by software when I first install it. One more isn't going to bug me. It would bug me if it asked each time I ran the game, but I assume ID's not that stupid.
This would also make the results less accurate because certain types of users (i.e. linux users) might answer no more than others.
Certain types of users might run the game on LANs (or even WANs) without direct connection to the Internet more often than others. If they need the kind of accuracy adding this question would upset, they're already not getting it.
It isn't attaching a name, an address, or anything - it's simply telling them the % of their users use a certain OS, video card, etc.. chill out man..
If someone enters your apartment without your permission, they've broken the law, even if they don't steal anything. And rightly so. Your point that they don't attach a name or address or anything to the information is true but completely irrelevant.
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For the record, it's "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle".
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Would it kill them to post such licenses on debian-legal for discussion before using them?
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Unfortunately, that's the problem. I ran a local (612) BBS from 1985 into the early 90's (started as Irongate, went down for a time, came back as Artificial Reality). I noticed a real decline in the quality of BBSing as the quantity of people engaged in the activity increased. It was great in the early to mid 80's, but as the 80's drew to a close, I became increasingly disgusted with the influx of "ruggies" and the like. Being a sysop went from a fun hobby to a frustrating chore. Logging into other BBS's, I could usually tell instantly if a BBS was any good or not by checking the userlist. If it had between 50-200 people in it, it had a chance. Any more than a couple hundred people and it was almost certainly a pointless waste of time to try to wade through the message boards. There would be a lot of posts but generally less actual interesting content than on BBS's with around 100 users.
A forum with the combined user base of all the Twin Cities BBS's combined sounds like a complete waste of time. The Internet didn't kill BBSing, the BBS scene became a parody of its former self half a decade before Internet access became common. Cheap, plentiful modems killed BBSing as I knew and loved it.
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Our stellar next door neighbor, the Centauri system, is actually a trinary star system. Alpha Centauri A and B circle fairly close, and the C component (sometimes called Proxima since it happens to be closer to us at the moment than any other star save our own) circles fairly far out. Now, my understanding is that they're less hopeful of finding planets in binary or trinary star systems than orbiting a single star. I don't doubt that they've checked, and I'm not surprised that nothing has been found. There may be planets there anyways, but not the big wonkin gas giants we can spot today.
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Err, no. Jupiter is only about 1/80th of the mass required to achieve become a star. This object is four times bigger than Jupiter, but that still puts it well below the minimum mass required to achieve fusion.
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Excuse me? I've been using the Internet since long before AOL existed.
If you don't like it then get your god damned head out of your ass, and kneel to King Microsoft.
Don't like it? It's not even true.
They have done everything for you and you spit in their face.
They have done nothing for me. I had the misfortune of having to use Windows on my primary computer from early 1997 to mid 1998. Those were the unhappiest months of my computing life. I just thank the gods I never used Windows at all before then and haven't needed to use it too much since. I pity those of you who've had to use Windows for years...
Microsoft is the reason you're here.
Hardly. I started using the Internet in 1987, 10 years before the first time I started using a Microsoft OS...
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Maybe it's time they woke up and smelled the digital age. If they sold the movies for reasonable rates, it'd be easier to pay for them than pirate them. If bandwidth becomes that cheap and easy to use, I'd happily log into MGM's website, give them my credit card number, and download some movie for $1.99. They'd probably make more money selling them this way than by going through the expensive of pressing DVD discs and shipping them to Best Buy. Frankly, I don't think I'd spend any less on movies than I do now, I'd just have a larger collection. (Actually, with the "just another $2 for another title" going, I'd probably spend more on movies than I do now.) They'd make more money, I'd have more movies, everyone would be happy! Except video rental stores...
do you *enjoy* taunting lawyers?
Of course, but only if I know they can't bite me...
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Waa! Why do they get the cool toys first? Slashdot.org or cdrom.com would be the logical first place to install this...
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Just out of curiousity, doesn't anyone know where in the New Testament Jesus says you can ignore all the old dietary laws? I've been wondering about that one for a while...
Of course, there's a lot of value in modern Christian thought, but Sturgeon's Law inexorably applies there as elsewhere. You have to pick through a lot of crap to get to some really admirable and noble sentiments about getting along with your fellow earth-bound critters.
That's what I love about Unitarian Universalists: they pick through the crap and take just the best parts. And what's even better, they do it for religious texts other than Christian ones as well. Grab the best from all religious thought anywhere, that's the ticket!
If the system really is set up that you can Accept Jee-zus, be a total asshole, and go to Heaven, and not Accept Jee-zus, be a self-sacrificing loving person, and go to Hell, then the system sucks and I want no part of it, and the God pushing that system can go fuck himself up the ass with a fire hydrant.
It'd be more amusing to see the people pushing this idiocy off as Christianity suffer that fate. Oh, and thanks for the mental picture. Yikes!
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This is not necessarily true. Again, it depends on the definition, but given suitable definitions, one can prove the non-existence of things. For example, proving the non-existence of square circles or triangles whose angles add up to 150 degrees is trivially easy (again, I'm talking about given suitable definitions -- given different definitions, proving the existence of 150 degree triangles is easy, you just need to switch out of planar geometry). A lot of people define God in such a way that it implies a contradiction, which yields an easy proof of non-existence. Which of course doesn't prove that there are no gods, just that there are none matching that description. The reverse is also true -- proving a positive may be logically impossible, given appropriate definitions. So really, without carefully examining the definitions and other axioms both posters are operating under, one cannot conclude that either is on better logical ground.
I'd rather ascribe the universe's elegant design to intent rather than randomness
This is invoking a logical falacy known as a false dilema. You're mistakenly (or at least baselessly) asserting that the universe's design is due to either intent or randomness, whereas there's nothing in your post to back up the notion that these are the only two options. It could be due to neither of those but instead due to some other option. Thus, even if you prove it's not due to randomness, this does not prove it's due to intent, or vice versa.
and that there's no evidence whatsoever one way or the other.
This depends on what you consider to be evidence. Although there is no proof, there are plenty of things out there that many would consider at least to be evidence for one position or the other.
Absolutely believing in God and absolutely denying the existence of God in the absence of evidence one way or the other are equally acts of faith -- the atheist is committing just as much to his dogma as the Creationist Troll is to his.
The only people with no faith are Pyrrhonists, and I'm not sure about them, either.
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It wouldn't need to. If gravity works across branes, then whereever any brane forms a black hole, there will be a black hole in the same location in all branes. The odd thing would be, for universes where no matter has passed the event horizon, they would be empty black holes. The gravitation effects would be there, but there would be no matter in in hole. No infinitely dense singularity at the center.
Here's an odd thought. Suppose in another brane where an "empty" black hole exists, a virtual particle/antiparticle pair comes into existense along the event horizon and one drops in. The other is "emitted" as Hawkings radiation. Does this mean the original black hole in the original universe gets a little smaller? In which case, aren't we transfering matter between branes this way?
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Some people would call them scientists.
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We have seen numerous cases of stars apparently orbitting another object where no object was visible. We've calculated the mass of the other object (based on orbital period and mass of the visible star) to be star-like, but again, the companion is invisible. The typical explanation is a neutron star or black hole, but a perfectly normal star in a parallel universe would be another possible explanation.
I agree, though, that if there were countless universes with which we interacted gravitationally, this should be ridiculously more common than it appears to be. Lower density universes wouldn't remain lower density long, would they? Wouldn't the gravitational pull of objects in our universe pull in matter in the others, increasing the density where our universe has matter and decreasing it where ours doesn't? The net effect would be that, given sufficient time, all the universes would have high density and low density areas in the same places ours does.
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Actually, it's fairly well accepted that gravity distorts spacetime, stretching it in a different spatial dimension than the common three. A quest for cosmology for the last few decades has been to determine the overall shape of the universe, open (hyperbolic curvature) or closed (shaped as a big hypersphere - a 4 dimensional sphere). Granted, that doesn't mean it's true, but it is fairly widely accepted to be true.
This is pretty much another one of those baseless thoeries that have no physical proof, which is fine because thats why we have theories.
The theory is not baseless. It was suggested by General Relativity and made predictions that were later observed to be true. That's not proof, mind you, but proof in that sense never exists for any scientific theory.
However, entertaining this as anything but a theory that someone conjured up is simply not scientific, and you shouldn't consider yourself such if you do.
That goes without saying. I consider all scientific theories to be theories that someone conjured up. A good example would be the as yet unproven theory that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around. This is just a theory someone conjured up. So far, it has accorded with the evidence well, but it is, as yet, unproven.
Mathematics can show many things, like objects with N dimensions, that doesn't mean that they actually exist or that there is even a universe that exists with such. Just because someone has an explanation that talks about folds and an excuse for gravity does not overall prove a damn thing about the Universe, simply because there's no *proof*.
There never will be proof. Proofs are things you find in mathematics. Science has theories. Science is incapable of proving anything. I'm not sure where you're going with this line of argument...
Neat view on the Universe. Thats all this is. Considering it to be anything but that is baseless.
This is true of all scientific theories, such as the theory that the Sun is hot. What's your point?
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Wait until you're 29. I've been 29 for a few years now, and it keeps getting more odd every year!
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No fair, you can use this one for any number from 000 to 777 containing no 8 or 9. Although if you did, 644 and 755 are probably more common.
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And I suppose an unformatted disk isn't a disk, either. Disks hold information, and an unformatted disk holds no information, so an unformatted disk not a disk. And the brain of someone who thinks zero is not even is not a brain.
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