I'm not sure I understand why you classify science as a subset of religion. If you want to put them in a classification tree, then another label as the root would seem better: one branch leads into naturalistic, rational and quantifiable knowledge, the other goes into supernatural and philosophical ones.
I agree with you that absence of proof is not in itself proof, but can one really prove a false negative? I consider an explanation posed in rational and naturalistic terms more usable than one based on the supernatural: even if a supernatural entitiy exists, we can observe that it has a great deal of respect for consistency and hardly ever breaks the known laws of physics. If something happens that cannot be explained by science, we can indeed call it a miracle.
As for science... in my view, science is a "mere" tool that provides excellent methods and tools for building great complicated things, but it's not ever going to answer a simple answer like "why am I here?" -- I don't think the answer lies within anything that can be explained rationally.
Some call science a form of religion in itself. That doesn't make sense to me: not only would it be a very poor and depressing religion, but many religious scientists (and I've known a few pretty smart ones) would be following two different religions at the same time.
Personally, I do hope that there is an afterlife and all that, but if there is one then I'd like to think that it's something entirely understanding and accepting of all people. But of course a hell-less religion for which you don't have to actually do anything is not going to be popular:-) On the other hand, a question I like to ask is: "why are we humans better than the other animals? Aren't we being a bit to full of ourselves?" -- it is entirely plausible to me that there is simply nothing after we die. I can understand why people don't like to believe that, though. I certainly don't.
To continue a bit on your trend: isn't religion a subset of atheism? After all, a religious person rejects at least 99% of all gods that have ever been worshipped. An atheist that rejects 100% of all gods would only be slightly more atheistic.
Well, okay.. it doesn't come as a big surprise that an organization that engages in a variety of criminal acts doesn't care about copyright laws either. Maybe they steal candy too. There's no point in making already illegal activities even more illegal. If they cared, they wouldn't do it anyway.
The article itself points out that they benefit from a range of different criminal activities. Further limiting domestic rights to fight foreign troublemakers doesn't seem to work.
A classic example is how many soldiers "became religious" when they were at the Hanoi Hilton.
Okay, so those soldiers would be able to thank their (your?) god for any of these situations: 1) they didn't get sent to Vietman 2) they didn't die or get injured 3) they got injured but at least didn't die 4) they got captured and mistreated but didn't die 5) they got killed but at least didn't get tortured
The flaw in your thinking is that practically no single situation can escape being "explained" by the existence of your god.
Unfortunately, there is a history of people who are witnesses to spiritual events, even miracles, who openly dismiss them for one reason or another.
If there's anything history teaches us, then that's that people explain things as miracles too often when they simply don't understand what they're seeing. Do you believe in UFO's? Many people do. Many people have witnessed the Loch Ness Monster. Is that proof for you?
If atheism is a form of religion, then isn't religion a form of atheism? After all, even the most religious person fearful of their own god is entirely atheistic towards the gods of other religions.
In my own (limited) experience, a christian person was surprised why I didn't fear his god. Then I told him that to understand why I didn't fear his god, he should understand why he didn't fear Allah. That was easy, he said, because it was nonsense and Allah doesn't exist.
Thus... you are an atheist. I'm an atheist too, just a bit more than you. You reject 99% of all gods and I reject 100%:-)
Religion and science are fundamentally different at their base assumptions. The concept of falsifiability, which is part of the Scientific Method is not present in religion. Religion "explains" everything, because every argument comes down to "god did it". Yet, while it explains, it cannot predict since all possible outcomes are covered with essentially the same explanation.
You seem to be using the argument "but not being religious is also a form of being religious!"... but doesn't that just muddle everything and essentially call pretty much everything religious, including believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny? The throwing-it-on-one-heap is an attempt at giving a shaky belief system a form of credibility it does not deserve.
I'm sorry, but what is the improvement in paying just 1 bill? Personally, I prefer having my service providers separate so it's easier to have higher granularity in choice. I'd rather have the infrastructure independent of the actual providers.
Business skill at work
on
Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Now that is what differentiates the true entrepreneur from the ordinary folk: market the feature on which you're actually saving money and sell the item for 3-4 times comparable items.
Interesting point. I have come to a similar realization of evolutionary mechanisms in the formation of successful religions. To go further, I would say that a successful religion in fact depends on its central god to NOT exist.
Any point other than passing an exam?
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What I'm not getting exactly is: is this book useful mainly to people trying to pass a particular exam or is it useful to those interested in actually learning something and getting knowledge? This is a sort of common problem in academics where students study for the exam, rather than for the actual knowledge. I'm not sure I like a book promoting that (if it does).
Too bad there aren't any details, only an announcement for... tomorrow. I'd like to know how inherent this issue is in the CPU and to which extent the OS can be made to protect against it. Also, assuming he contacted Intel about it.. are they working on it?
I do have to say it's commendable that he spent 3 months on this for free. Now that's commitment:-)
How inclusive is the book?
on
GPU Gems 2
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The book seems like a must-have. One question though: to which extent does it apply to other manufacturer's GPUs too? I'm not entirely comfortable with it being written by one specific manufacturer if I'm looking for information applicable to all/most potential users.
I have a 15.4" widescreen (dell) laptop. That's more or less the ideal size if you're going to carry it around all day. I found the 17" version too big to use. The nice thing about their screens, though, is that they offer high resolution screens (like 1680x1050), while many other manufacturers are stuck in the 1024x768 range.
I have one (uneducated) question though: they mention a number of security fixes. How long does it generally take for a fix/patch to come out on freebsd compared to linux (or the other bsd variants)? I'm considering experimenting with it, but the relative comfort of packaging systems I'm familiar with makes it sort of hard.
Well, if you design them to use less power overall and make use of the fact that they're on the same chip then it'll roughly be about the same power level. Also keep in mind that a slower-running (or idle) CPU will consume less too. In actual use, both processors probably won't be running at their full speed anyway. Such techniques are already common for mobile chips so they can improve battery life.
I think it's a good move, but only if there is no significant downgrade in terms of quality. Making such a move solely based on monetary or semi-political motivation wouldn't be good. With the current state of OSS software (e.g. OpenOffice), we might be seeing this condition met.
If you read the article, you will find this paragraph about halfway:
It is in this lab that Microsoft does a lot of its internal benchmarking, comparing Windows Server to Linux; ASP.Net to PHP; and Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. But a lot of the lab's testing involves interoperability, too, Hilf said.
What I'm missing here is if they use e.g. PHP Accelerator for their benchmarking. That's known to speed up PHP scripts a lot. Also, I wonder if interoperability here means backing away from the broken-protocols strategy?
That's a matter of taste, I suppose. Some people have commented that they like the design. Personally, I am not that fond of it either... but then again, I'm not in the market for a game console.
I remember a project called Harmony that had the purpose of being an API-compatible clone of QT but without the license issues: www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php. It never got off the ground though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I understand why you classify science as a subset of religion. If you want to put them in a classification tree, then another label as the root would seem better: one branch leads into naturalistic, rational and quantifiable knowledge, the other goes into supernatural and philosophical ones.
:-) On the other hand, a question I like to ask is: "why are we humans better than the other animals? Aren't we being a bit to full of ourselves?" -- it is entirely plausible to me that there is simply nothing after we die. I can understand why people don't like to believe that, though. I certainly don't.
I agree with you that absence of proof is not in itself proof, but can one really prove a false negative? I consider an explanation posed in rational and naturalistic terms more usable than one based on the supernatural: even if a supernatural entitiy exists, we can observe that it has a great deal of respect for consistency and hardly ever breaks the known laws of physics. If something happens that cannot be explained by science, we can indeed call it a miracle.
As for science... in my view, science is a "mere" tool that provides excellent methods and tools for building great complicated things, but it's not ever going to answer a simple answer like "why am I here?" -- I don't think the answer lies within anything that can be explained rationally.
Some call science a form of religion in itself. That doesn't make sense to me: not only would it be a very poor and depressing religion, but many religious scientists (and I've known a few pretty smart ones) would be following two different religions at the same time.
Personally, I do hope that there is an afterlife and all that, but if there is one then I'd like to think that it's something entirely understanding and accepting of all people. But of course a hell-less religion for which you don't have to actually do anything is not going to be popular
To continue a bit on your trend: isn't religion a subset of atheism? After all, a religious person rejects at least 99% of all gods that have ever been worshipped. An atheist that rejects 100% of all gods would only be slightly more atheistic.
Well, okay.. it doesn't come as a big surprise that an organization that engages in a variety of criminal acts doesn't care about copyright laws either. Maybe they steal candy too. There's no point in making already illegal activities even more illegal. If they cared, they wouldn't do it anyway.
The article itself points out that they benefit from a range of different criminal activities. Further limiting domestic rights to fight foreign troublemakers doesn't seem to work.
A classic example is how many soldiers "became religious" when they were at the Hanoi Hilton.
Okay, so those soldiers would be able to thank their (your?) god for any of these situations:
1) they didn't get sent to Vietman
2) they didn't die or get injured
3) they got injured but at least didn't die
4) they got captured and mistreated but didn't die
5) they got killed but at least didn't get tortured
The flaw in your thinking is that practically no single situation can escape being "explained" by the existence of your god.
Unfortunately, there is a history of people who are witnesses to spiritual events, even miracles, who openly dismiss them for one reason or another.
If there's anything history teaches us, then that's that people explain things as miracles too often when they simply don't understand what they're seeing. Do you believe in UFO's? Many people do. Many people have witnessed the Loch Ness Monster. Is that proof for you?
If atheism is a form of religion, then isn't religion a form of atheism? After all, even the most religious person fearful of their own god is entirely atheistic towards the gods of other religions.
:-)
In my own (limited) experience, a christian person was surprised why I didn't fear his god. Then I told him that to understand why I didn't fear his god, he should understand why he didn't fear Allah. That was easy, he said, because it was nonsense and Allah doesn't exist.
Thus... you are an atheist. I'm an atheist too, just a bit more than you. You reject 99% of all gods and I reject 100%
Religion and science are fundamentally different at their base assumptions. The concept of falsifiability, which is part of the Scientific Method is not present in religion. Religion "explains" everything, because every argument comes down to "god did it". Yet, while it explains, it cannot predict since all possible outcomes are covered with essentially the same explanation.
... but doesn't that just muddle everything and essentially call pretty much everything religious, including believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny? The throwing-it-on-one-heap is an attempt at giving a shaky belief system a form of credibility it does not deserve.
You seem to be using the argument "but not being religious is also a form of being religious!"
I'm sorry, but what is the improvement in paying just 1 bill? Personally, I prefer having my service providers separate so it's easier to have higher granularity in choice. I'd rather have the infrastructure independent of the actual providers.
Now that is what differentiates the true entrepreneur from the ordinary folk: market the feature on which you're actually saving money and sell the item for 3-4 times comparable items.
Interesting point. I have come to a similar realization of evolutionary mechanisms in the formation of successful religions. To go further, I would say that a successful religion in fact depends on its central god to NOT exist.
What I'm not getting exactly is: is this book useful mainly to people trying to pass a particular exam or is it useful to those interested in actually learning something and getting knowledge? This is a sort of common problem in academics where students study for the exam, rather than for the actual knowledge. I'm not sure I like a book promoting that (if it does).
Too bad there aren't any details, only an announcement for... tomorrow. I'd like to know how inherent this issue is in the CPU and to which extent the OS can be made to protect against it. Also, assuming he contacted Intel about it.. are they working on it?
:-)
I do have to say it's commendable that he spent 3 months on this for free. Now that's commitment
The book seems like a must-have. One question though: to which extent does it apply to other manufacturer's GPUs too? I'm not entirely comfortable with it being written by one specific manufacturer if I'm looking for information applicable to all/most potential users.
Cool, mine is the Inspiron 8600 too. You have the WUXGA variant apparently. I took WSXGA. I'm pretty content with the screen.
I have a 15.4" widescreen (dell) laptop. That's more or less the ideal size if you're going to carry it around all day. I found the 17" version too big to use. The nice thing about their screens, though, is that they offer high resolution screens (like 1680x1050), while many other manufacturers are stuck in the 1024x768 range.
The germans dominate at normal soccer (with humans) too. It's annoying.
Interesting, but I would be slightly more interested in a real-time actual plot. Do they have that available as well?
Even the mirrordot mirror is very slow now.
Congrats to the freebsd team.
I have one (uneducated) question though: they mention a number of security fixes. How long does it generally take for a fix/patch to come out on freebsd compared to linux (or the other bsd variants)? I'm considering experimenting with it, but the relative comfort of packaging systems I'm familiar with makes it sort of hard.
Well, if you design them to use less power overall and make use of the fact that they're on the same chip then it'll roughly be about the same power level. Also keep in mind that a slower-running (or idle) CPU will consume less too. In actual use, both processors probably won't be running at their full speed anyway. Such techniques are already common for mobile chips so they can improve battery life.
I think it's a good move, but only if there is no significant downgrade in terms of quality. Making such a move solely based on monetary or semi-political motivation wouldn't be good. With the current state of OSS software (e.g. OpenOffice), we might be seeing this condition met.
If you read the article, you will find this paragraph about halfway:
It is in this lab that Microsoft does a lot of its internal benchmarking, comparing Windows Server to Linux; ASP.Net to PHP; and Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. But a lot of the lab's testing involves interoperability, too, Hilf said.
What I'm missing here is if they use e.g. PHP Accelerator for their benchmarking. That's known to speed up PHP scripts a lot. Also, I wonder if interoperability here means backing away from the broken-protocols strategy?
That's a matter of taste, I suppose. Some people have commented that they like the design. Personally, I am not that fond of it either... but then again, I'm not in the market for a game console.
I meant the license issues at the time. There are no such issues with it now for non-commercial software.
I remember a project called Harmony that had the purpose of being an API-compatible clone of QT but without the license issues: www.kde.org/whatiskde/qt.php. It never got off the ground though.
I've also seen some creative use for these notes that probably were not part of the original ideas either :-)