Is it anything like the looks you get when you pick up an orange and immediately pass out from the agony? You misunderstood. He's not talking about no SKIN on his fingertips, just no PRINTS. Those ridges don't go all the way down, and it's possible to remove them (albeit not permanently) with no blood involved. My prints on my left hand fade out at the tips and in the middle of one finger just from playing guitar (and building up callouses which have replaced the standard-issue fingerprint skin there).
There are also certain occupations -- cutting up pineapple was one, I think -- where the workers fingertips are in contact with solvents that gradually burn away the prints.
Of course, the top few layers of skin are gradually *replaced* by your body, so if you quit with the sander you'll get your same prints back after awhile.
Chances are, the guy won't be losing power on the freeway, because he's still sitting in the parking lot at the bar, cursing and pounding the steering wheel.
But it's certainly possible to imagine rare situations where this could cause trouble. There are places where a car losing power UNRELATED to this system is dangerous, though these things happen, and this is why breakdown lanes exist on the vast majority of high speed roads in the first place.
But your example needs to compare options, if that driver is already drunk. Is he safe on the side of a highway? No, he might stumble into traffic. But if he's that drunk, would he be *safer* back in the car, still uncoordinated but now controlling thousands of pounds of metal and plastic at 70 miles per hour?
The point is to get the car out of the equation as early as possible. Some drunks are going to do stupid things, and hurt themselves and others. But if we can keep the car out of it, we get small disasters instead of catastrophic ones.
And it's not like he's slamming on his brakes. He's just losing power bit by bit until he coasts to a stop.
If you're going to crash into the back of the car in front of you because he's decelerating to a gentle stop, maybe you need to worry more about what's in *your* bloodstream.
You are *assuming* that future versions of the GPL uphold the rights you currently support and avoids overly restrictive requirements you do not support. If I release something as GPLv2 or later, the FSF CANNOT release a later version of the GPL that will further restrict people using my code.
Everyone who wants to can just continue using it as GPLv2 (it's their choice). We aren't talking about a license that says "under the most recent version of the GPL only" -- I don't think that's even possible.
On the other hand, a newer version could be *less* restrictive, so people might choose to use my code under GPLv6 if that specifically permits ESP redistribution, or whatever. So there's an element of trust here... but the FSF certainly can't use later licenses to grab more control over already-released code.
The problem with so many spam "solutions" is that they're all predicated on the vast majority of server admins in the world all magically agreeing on the solution and implementing it, all at once.
The whitelist solution is useless when 99.9999% of valid email servers are not yet on the whitelist, right? Because if you turned on whitelist filtering you'd just be blocking all mail. So no one will install and activate the filter until the vast majority of valid email senders *are* registered.
Now consider all of those busy admins of the outgoing mail servers. If they don't register to your whitelist, what happens? Nothing, because no one is filtering yet. So if they have to choose between sorting out this registration process (if they even happen to hear about it...) vs. replacing the flaky memory in server "vulcan22", which will they choose?
But we just need one of the big guys to get behind the plan, right? Well, Hotmail or Yahoo can't just turn on filtering either, because even if they saturate the globe with hugely expensive advertising explaining to email admins that they'd better register their servers before filter rollout in 2008, it simply won't happen for many, many servers until something actively *breaks*. And anyone using the podunk.com ISP suddenly finds their emails are rejected by Hotmail (but nowhere else)... so Hotmail customer support gets a flood of help requests, threats, angry emails, etc. etc.
Are you still sure the whitelist idea is good?
Think of online systems in terms of evolution. Every step has to have a good reason, or no matter how attractively you propose it, it cannot survive.
The Blue Security concept actually *worked* partly because it DID involve the end user. People pissed off by spam actually had legal recourse that they *knew* made the spammer's lives a little more difficult. "Sure, you can bulk-advertise with spam, but every spam you send us is going to result in one more complaint clogging up your order forms."
So even when there were only a handful of users (before the spam started dropping), there was a small benefit.
As soon as the userbase grew to 1/2 million or so (a drop in the bucket in terms of internet users, mind you) the benefit became large. My spam dropped to about 4 or 5 a day.
Of course, BlueSecurity's business model was an huge Achilles' heel. They were fairly decisively taken out of the game because of it. They were on the right path, though: counter automated contacts with automated responses. Keep it legal FTW. A small userbase can know they're at least a small thorn in the spammer's side, and a large userbase is a force to be reckoned with.
Work on a distributed system much like the BlueFrog approach started at Okopipi.org, but has lost steam. Anyone who wants to stir things up again should stop by and see what they can do.
Well there are sections dealing with the supernatural, which I have experienced first hand, and found them to be true... Can you describe the best example you have?
Of course you could always turn a skeptical eye to everything, but at some point you have to make a decision for yourself if you are going to believe your senses or dismiss everything you experience, can everything be coincedence? At what point does it become something more? I certainly don't turn a skeptical eye to everything. Somehow this particular conversation seems to be one I have regularly, with religious people who share your belief that God has proven himself to them somehow. When I was a teenager I read a lot about the paranormal, reports of seemingly supernatural human abilities like ESP and so on. It's fascinating, though disappointing when you actually start digging for truth.
As for taking a coincidence as proof for God -- well, coincidences actually happen all the time. Our brains are particularly good at noticing them, and attaching a lot of significance to them (and we tend to assume "agency" is behind every random event... meaning some intelligent cause). This is a well-researched field.
Fortunately, we have things like the scientific method, and means of testing to tell the difference between those seemingly important coincidences and the scientifically important ones.
Like I said, I have found everything to be true.. I know Jesus WAS God in the form of man, and is there everyday for me, if he wasn't then he wouldn't have been able to do the things he has for me. Like I said above, I've discussed this all before -- here's a recent one on Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208114&cid=169 83556
I talk about coincidences in there as well. Read through that conversation and respond if you still have reasonable arguments to offer.
Minor correction to the above -- of course prayer can have a positive effect, because it's like meditation in a way, and also gives you a sense that you're doing something. If the person you're praying for *knows* you're praying for them and they also believe in prayer, they might be cheered up (which can have positive health effects).
But there certainly aren't any supernatural effects (i.e., except for the obvious ways mentioned above, prayer has no effect whatsoever, and if you've conducted some kind of tests that show otherwise, the reason-based world is ready and waiting to hear about it, because you'd be the first).
I'm not sure you got my point. I'm asking if you'd accept the Flying Spaghetti Monster part, simply because the *rest* of it was testable and seemed true. You can't actually test the Flying Spaghetti Monster part, because he's invisible and only influences your life indirectly.
I used that example because you are accepting the superstition part of the Bible based on the practical advice.
You aren't testing whether Jesus was God, whether he had supernatural powers and performed miracles, whether God exists, whether Mary was a virgin, whether any supernatural being exists, whether anything is listening to your prayers (or wants you to pray or worship it), whether prayer can have any positive effect, whether you have a soul, whether heaven or hell exists, whether anything in this world was created by an intelligent supernatural being or not, etc.. None of that is testable, and there's no reason to believe it UNLESS you are just reading Proverbs, saying "yeah, that's pretty smart" and just swallowing all the rest of it without evaluation.
Advice on how to live your life is fine; you can test that and see how happy you are with the results. But is has no bearing on whether the rest of the bible has any factual basis.
If you think you're somehow testing the rest of it... how?
There is a load of stuff in the bible that is testable, either neither of you have read it and thus are spousing intolerance based on nothing, or you have read it and were blinded to any critical thinking because of bias?
Proverbs is full of advice that is provable, the new testament is full of advice which is spritual and physical, both of which are testable. Just because something seems to be mythical doesn't mean it is... Have you ever thought about this? If I wrote a book based on a sociology textbook and also include some invented stuff about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you'd "test" it the same way, and find lots of valid observations, and conclude that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was true?
That's crazy. That's not testing at all. It's not a choice you make between "all true" or "all nonsense". You're reading a book with lots of moral philosophy (a few thousand years old, but humans are not completely different) with a lot of superstition included.
It's like one of those emails conservatives were sending around a few years ago with "actual" quotes from John Kerry and so forth explaining how they mostly want to massage Osama's feet, and maybe buy him a pony.
I was hoping at least for something funny... but arguments including "Atheist cries until theist goes away" aren't doing it.
or: ARGUMENT FROM CROCKERY 1. Pots can give orders to the potter as long as the pots think they are morally superior somehow. 2. Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Hmm, yeah.
If you want to evangelize, what's wrong with doing it honestly? If you want to make arguments for God's existence, why not do that, and address the *actual* counter-arguments, instead of hoping to trick confused people into thinking this is the best the non-believers have to offer?
I have no idea if you wrote any of these; you're supporting it either way.
My real point here is that nailing a guy for discussing sex and then actually arranging (and following through) on a meeting is very clear-cut. It's pretty damned obvious at that point that he wasn't just screwing around on the internet and role-playing, etc. etc..
There's a reason why the police *set* these kinds of traps (arranging for an actual meeting) -- because it's very hard to pin down something really illegal from chat logs. And frankly, it should be difficult.
People talk about sex and all kinds of things online. They don't always pretend to be *themselves*. That's not illegal, nor should it be. The illegal part comes in when someone is trying to actively do something wrong (arrange sex w/ minor, or just harassing 12-year-olds, etc.).
I understand why all of these new laws are popping up, preventing past offenders from doing legal things (like living near a school or daycare center, or talking about sex with someone online without verifying their age) out of fear that they will enable illegal things (like the school neighbor luring passing schoolchildren into his house and molesting them, or the online IM'er getting personal details from underage kids and going to their houses, etc.).
I also think these measures are generally misguided, not supported by any research, and often cruel and unusual punishment for many of the people affected (the 18-year-old who got caught sleeping with his 17-year-old girlfriend gets all this same treatment, you know). YES, I want changes in the system if a high percentage of child molesters are re-offending. But I want changes that work, not changes that reassure the populace but have no positive effect on recidivism (and seriously fuck up the lives of anyone stupid or dumb enough to be labeled "sex offender"... and fucking up lives tend to result in more crime).
I'm willing to pay more taxes to support better parole supervision, more mental health treatment and/or counseling, all that stuff (because I have a feeling we'll get more results out of that kind of thing...). I want people back in society and operating normally, with a "safety net" of supervision if they start to fall back into old habits.
So when you got caught, it would be pretty clear by examining the IP logs and dates when/where you were or were not accessing those accounts, right? Or at least, enough to create some room for reasonable doubt? If you think a jury and judge are going to understand all of the details involved... like, yes, if your account was removed from the site, someone else might have signed up with your old name, and someone else might have the same screenname but on a different site/different IM network, and your IP address is from a shared pool but the ISP provided logs mapping you to this usage, etc. etc.. How many people are just going to be screwed over because the data is complex? It's just hard to imagine this all being a positive thing.
When we talk about predators, I'm talking about someone over the age of 18 messing with someone under the age of 12, by and large. Ah, perhaps there's the difference. The other people in this thread are talking about the proposed law in Virginia. You're talking about something else.
Seems simple, so why do these guys make it so complex? Because it is complex?
I should say: I agree this is an idiotic bill. All it accomplishes is reminding the sex offenders who *are* at risk of recidivism that chatrooms and social networking sites are monitored, and if they want to be "smart" they'd better research ways to troll truly anonymously. So the people who are *not* going to re-offend mostly just lose some privacy, and the ones who *are* going to re-offend sure as hell aren't going to do it using the registered email, and probably will find a way to do it as untraceably as possible.
But it's certainly not an issue of "stay in jail until you're 100% normal". Contrary to apparent popular belief, people do not spend their time in jail learning how to live nicely and normally in society. Because they are in jail, not amongst nice and normal people.
No; people with mental illnesses need treatment more than jail. People with drug addictions need treatment more than jail. People who have no possible source of income need training and a job more than jail.
Most of these people do something stupid or desperate and end up in jail. For a lot of them, it just *increases* the forces that pushed them to screw up in the first place. I'm not saying jail has no purpose -- for a lot of people, a spell in jail is like a bucket of cold water in the face, and they rethink their lives. But if you have a problem that won't be helped by a bucket of cold water or time to think, more buckets and more time is not the answer.
There are certainly specific cases where the likelihood of recidivism is high even with supervision, treatment, etc. (so for the protection of society, the person can't be freed). But that's not the case with most of these people.
A guy who sets up a rendezvous with a kid for sex and shows up at the kid's house is *not* the same thing as someone typing messages to an underage person that might be construed as shady.
What else? They can't nail him for disguising his identity, because that's ridiculous. Have you never forgotten a password and set up a new account anywhere? By now I have dozens if not hundreds of disparate accounts on various sites. Sometimes I want to comment on a "registered users only" site and find my email is already in use. Yes, by me. I have various email addresses at hotmail, yahoo, etc. that I registered at some point to see if I could get the name, or to sign up on questionable sites (go ahead, spam me at circfile@hotmail.com), etc.. If I were a convicted sex offender, it would be impossible for me to: 1) figure out and register all online identities 2) keep track of those (and keep the authorities up to date) whenever I created a new one
This law would allow two things: 1) kid friendly sites would be able to screen known pedos based on a database Only if the sex offender uses an ID they documented, which is unlikely and easy to avoid simply accidentally.
and 2) pedos trying to circumvent that could be arrested for the circumvention alone even AFTER their parole is up. Again, think about this in real-life terms if you have spent more than a few months on the internet.
500M is a small amount of funding for medical research. It was far too small for this particular military project, for that matter. Just read the rest of the summary (never mind RTFA):
recent estimates have ballooned to $300 billion total cost (yes that's billion with a B) Bad estimates are bad estimates, no matter what sector you're in. It's still hard to imagine how the R&D effort required would be smaller if: * the research could be targeted directly to generally applicable medical breakthroughs, as opposed to warfare-relevant-only research that may "trickle down". * there's more of an interaction for some projects with the commercial sector (based on your figures, the private sector spent more than $54 billion in 2003. That's serious money that would get involved as quickly as it could when a project showed a chance of good commercialization.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about how the content is generated during the game development process (no matter how it's put together, if it's "pre-made" it's pre-made). Even if that tree and that walk animation were generated with a lot of computer assistance, they are not procedurally generated on-the-fly as the game runs, based on a complex history of each organism's evolution.
Is "groupthink" what you say when anyone disagrees with you here? I gotta try that one.
I'm still learning the traffic laws (so I don't know if this is compulsory), but there's also a standard practice of leaving your left blinker on as long as you're in the passing lane.
I love that -- what a perfect reminder that you're *passing*, not just driving in a different lane.
They also use the white line on the side of most highways to point out "safe distance" -- it's long stripes instead of an unbroken line, and there are frequent signs saying "3 stripes distant: safe. 1 stripe distant: unsafe".
Of course, there are still some tailgaters; the occasional moron who sits right on my ass even when I'm just tooling along behind the car in front of me... sometimes even the moron who'll do that when there's a passing lane open. But you find those anywhere... I would sure love to see them ticketed!
Any pirate site that wants a revenue stream, word-of-mouth advertising, etc. won't bundle anything too nasty -- it's still business, after all, and many of the usual rules apply.
As for the rest of them... well, it's certainly not a *loss* for Microsoft if more people installing pirated versions sabotage their own computers in the process. Microsoft is longing to do exactly that anyway, they just can't for legal reasons... so if they just make it easier for various unsavory types to do their dirty work for them -- and punish users of pirated copies -- they get their revenge without getting their hands dirty.
And when the news spreads of the dangers of pirated copies, voila -- more people buy licenses from MS!
I'm finding it interesting as well (though I have to disappear occasionally as my work/personal schedule demands). When Slashdot closes comments, if you're interested in continuing the conversation, you can email me at slashdot @ my URL.
Believe me, I understand the "rational" perspective. However, i do not believe the perspective is, in fact, rational because no amount of evidence would convince this "rational" person otherwise. Rational is defined as "agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible." If a rational person can not be convinced of something by a reasonable amount of sensible evidence, we have clearly either misdefined rational or are applying it incorrectly.
That's not true -- there's definitely evidence that would convince me to, at a minimum, chalk these things up to "need to reevaluate". There is also a ton of anecdotal evidence for communication with the dead, ESP, telekinesis, precognition, etc. floating around. But there has also been significant scientific inquiry into these phenomenon (some even funded by the CIA in the interest of using these people in reconnaissance, etc.), and so far no one has been able to actually demonstrate these powers. I'm not just talking about the hoaxes (though of course those exist... often getting money from the credulous). Some people believe 100% that they *have* these powers, but when they are actually tested it never pans out. ESP or "messages from the dead" are often just well-honed observational skills -- people give lots of non-verbal signals that most of us don't fully interpret, but people who have that skill can seem to be mind-reading (and may think they are). But when they are actually put in a testing situation where those signals are removed, they do no better than random guessing.
If one of these people eventually turns out to *actually* have the ability they think they do -- something that cannot be explained easily by chance, natural explanations, etc. -- and the tests can be reproduced reliably -- I would definitely accept that and put more time into thinking about the agency of that power (whether that would be yet-unknown powers of the human mind, or whatever). To tell the truth, I was very disappointed when I started researching these phenomena a bit when I was a teenager... though there is a lot of incredible stuff that exists in the known natural world (and many corners of that world that are still little explored) that's equally fascinating.
Nowhere in that post did I ever say I had previously woken my wife in the middle of the night, having had a dream that did not come true. You assumed this. In fact, that was the first time I've ever woken her up. Before then, I never remembered a single dream.
Assume that I'm telling you the truth about that, okay?
That's fine. I don't think you're making things up to try to convince me; I just believe you are drawing unsupported conclusions based on these experiences. You don't seem to recognize that coincidences, even thousand-to-one coincidences, even million-to-one coincidences, happen all the time. I'm also going to mention again that our minds naturally seek meaning, and discard the meaningless. If you had a startling dream in which your wife was deathly ill, then opened your eyes and saw her sleeping soundly next to you, you likely wouldn't have even remembered the dream in the morning.
My great-grandmother had a story... as a teenager, she went with her family on vacation to a beach (where they went yearly, I think), and lost a favorite and valuable ring in the sand. Years later, as an adult, she was back at the same beach, and while telling the story of the lost ring, pushed her hand down into the sand. And came back up with the exact lost ring. Amazing, isn't it? But it was a coincidence. I'm sure you would agree that it was a coincidence, because it was just a ring; her life wasn't guided in any way, no one else was helped or harmed, she wasn't in need of the ring, there was no "message" this would convey from any deity.
But take something with a higher likelihood -- you have a striking, unusual dream in which an elderly relative dies, after which the man actually does become seriously ill with the same illness you dreamed of, but
It is exactly as externally verifiable as any other proof. Working through any proof requires an individual given the proof to work through the process and verify the conclusions. Have a person willingly work through the same process, and he or she will verify the same conclusion every single time. This is exactly the case as a proof for God, only with the added wrinkle that you need to be unsure of what the result will be.
You use the word "proof" very differently from how I do. It seems fairly obvious that you are not at all "unsure of what the result will be" -- or at any rate, you feel the question is "God?" with a Yes/No answer. More details below.
Are you looking for specific examples in my life of God moving? I'd be happy to share them, but how much are they going to mean to you?
A lot -- for one thing, I can discuss what conclusions you can reasonably draw from these experiences if you *don't* pre-assume the existence of God.
For instance, you used an example of "I was praying for that last month." Exactly how short does the time period need to be, and how specific the "coincidence," and how often?
To give one really specific example, a few months ago I had a specific dream where my grandfather died. I stayed in the dream just long enough to find out exactly how, though I didn't have to in order to help him. I woke and woke my wife, and she verified he was still alive. I described the dream to her.
Now, the bible says we're given authority over life and death, so we agreed he would live through whatever was coming. (That's all the bible says you need to do.) I went back to sleep completely at peace with the situation. Less than twelve hours later, my grandfather was in the hospital with exactly the condition I described to my wife. They didn't know what was wrong and sent him home. Two hours after that, he was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. They figured it out this time and, though they were sure he'd die from his infection (which by this point was very advanced) successfully treated him.
I found this out about 36 hours after God told me. Nobody thought to let me know my grandfather was that close to death.
This is not a one-time occurrence. This is something that now happens whenever my extended family is in any kind of jeopardy. It isn't just health & safety issues, either; God's told me a few specific things that I shared with my wife that happened exactly as I described them. Again, how many, how specific, and how quickly?
This is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post... you and your wife remember the specific things that seem to match up with later events, and you rationalize away the mismatches. Because of the way our minds work, it's quite possible that your memory of the original "message" also is slightly warped to match subsequent events. So this story isn't terribly surprising. You knew of the existence of this particular kind of infection -- when had you last heard/read of it? Is it fairly common? If you had sat down the previous day and listed out all the things you might imagine your grandfather dying of, how many could you list? Was your grandfather's health already somewhat poor (making *some* illness more likely, hence perhaps triggering a dream)? What about the rest of your dream? Did you imagine him in a hospital bed or at home? Time of day? Etc.....of course, you can't answer many of these now, but I can point out that there was no *new* information planted in your head (like medical terminology you had no way of knowing); just a rearrangement of things you already knew, as dreams tend to be. The actual probability of you dreaming events that were similar (though not identical... and perhaps the only common link was your grandfather and the particular dangerous infection) to real events is not very low, but impossible to calculate, because there are so many variables impossible to control.
I still don't know what that means, "provable on a person-by-person basis". Provable in ways that cannot be externally verified? I'm not sure what the word "proof" even means if this is something that operates only within your own head. How do you even verify it to yourself?
If you have completed this proof personally, have you documented it at all? What kinds of things did you learn that you couldn't have otherwise known (and did you write down the details first, then seek confirmation)? I.e., it's certainly possible to do some actual testing to see if your messages from God are actually accurately predicting reality, or no better than a random sample of anyone's subconscious would - which is actually not too shabby.
If you write down every single message, verbatim, as soon as possible, and follow up reliably on *all* of them, I'll feel like you're at least going through the motions. If you're just going through life like normal, noticing an event and saying "holy moly -- that's just like what God told me would happen, when I was praying last month!" then... no. That's just the mind's trick of attaching significance to all coincidences, and it's important to how we think, but it's also the basis for almost all superstition. And it falls apart when tested in any way.
About your general approach: sure, with a receptive mind, you can undergo a process to remove all doubt of God's existence, and to experience "conversations" with God -- even conversations in which you learn knowledge you feel you otherwise would not have known. This isn't a practice new to Christianity, or even monotheism -- that's what the Greek oracles did, or any medicine man... they talked with the spirit world or the gods and returned with a message that was usually a little cryptic, but with a wee bit of interpretation subsequent events would often match up (or if not, no one remembered those particular consultations). Remember, that's how our brains work -- we fix on the coincidences and ignore the mismatches.
I read on the screen unless I want to scribble all over it. Then I print it out and make notes, draw arrows, underline, scratch things out, etc. etc. -- it's just faster than doing the same with a mouse.
OR I print things out if I'm taking a flight in an economy seat and don't want to struggle with the laptop in limited space....either way, not much use for this paper.
On the other hand, when I was still working in a corporate environment, we'd have lots of meetings where there'd be a printout to refer to during the discussion (and everyone would get a copy). Then after the meeting they'd all get tossed. That seems like a valid application of this technology.
I'm talking about proof using logic, the scientific method, repeatable observations, etc. etc.. You're just talking about how a person might convince *themself* of God's existence. I believe you, though I don't agree it would "work" on everyone... but people who really *want* to believe, absolutely. Does this have anything to do with the reality of God? No.
Your proof can be an interesting exploration of the operation of the human mind, but we know something about that already. That's why the strict rules of the scientific method exists -- because if scientific conclusions were based on a bunch of scientists saying "sounds good to me!" as opposed to "your methods were valid and we successfully reproduced your results!" we'd still be back in the middle ages.
Stockholm syndrome is one obvious example of people learning to believe unexpected things -- not the same thing, of course, but hopefully it makes the point that saying "X process will make person Y believe Z" is very, very far from proving that Z exists.
That God exists, in comparison, is *not* such a big thing to prove to yourself. There are lots of things that happen in the world that most people don't understand (even if they are explained in a library somewhere!), and supernatural causes are an easy answer. Far less an easy answer than 2000 years ago, when people had no reason to *disbelieve* supernatural explanations, but still easy.
Acts was what changed my life; I realized that if it were true, it would apply to the current era. And if it applied to the current era, it ought to be testable. And so I set out to test it.Sure; the holy books of various religions actually *do* have content other than "worship this God(s) in this way at these times". They generally have plenty of advice on more everyday things, like how to interact with other people, how to deal with conflict and difficulty. Humankind hasn't advanced greatly in our moral sense over the past few thousand years, so some of this is still quite relevant. These religious texts also try to answer the questions that people ask in difficult times, like seeking comfort when a loved one has died, or when chance happenings in the world seem particularly unfair and cruel, or when seeking direction in life.
Does any of this support God's existence? No, of course not -- it shows that *people* were grappling with these same questions when they wrote the texts in the first place. The same issues (and many of the same conclusions) are also in far earlier philosophic works in Greece, China, etc.. Just because you can follow some of Confucius's precepts and find that they still apply to people today doesn't mean Confucius was God.
I'm not sure why some people seem to think the Bible is either all factually true or it's just gibberish. Both of those options seem pretty ridiculous to me. It's an interesting collection of historical documents, documenting beliefs of the time as well as a considerable amount of moral philosophy.
If you read some of the ancient Chinese philosophy you can find plenty of cryptic alchemical formulas for turning various things into gold, creating a potion of eternal life, etc.. You also find some really incisive insights into human nature. Would the testable quality of those insights convince you that the alchemy part was true?
Slashdot Mirror
There are also certain occupations -- cutting up pineapple was one, I think -- where the workers fingertips are in contact with solvents that gradually burn away the prints.
Of course, the top few layers of skin are gradually *replaced* by your body, so if you quit with the sander you'll get your same prints back after awhile.
Chances are, the guy won't be losing power on the freeway, because he's still sitting in the parking lot at the bar, cursing and pounding the steering wheel.
But it's certainly possible to imagine rare situations where this could cause trouble. There are places where a car losing power UNRELATED to this system is dangerous, though these things happen, and this is why breakdown lanes exist on the vast majority of high speed roads in the first place.
But your example needs to compare options, if that driver is already drunk. Is he safe on the side of a highway? No, he might stumble into traffic. But if he's that drunk, would he be *safer* back in the car, still uncoordinated but now controlling thousands of pounds of metal and plastic at 70 miles per hour?
The point is to get the car out of the equation as early as possible. Some drunks are going to do stupid things, and hurt themselves and others. But if we can keep the car out of it, we get small disasters instead of catastrophic ones.
And it's not like he's slamming on his brakes. He's just losing power bit by bit until he coasts to a stop.
If you're going to crash into the back of the car in front of you because he's decelerating to a gentle stop, maybe you need to worry more about what's in *your* bloodstream.
Everyone who wants to can just continue using it as GPLv2 (it's their choice). We aren't talking about a license that says "under the most recent version of the GPL only" -- I don't think that's even possible.
On the other hand, a newer version could be *less* restrictive, so people might choose to use my code under GPLv6 if that specifically permits ESP redistribution, or whatever. So there's an element of trust here... but the FSF certainly can't use later licenses to grab more control over already-released code.
The problem with so many spam "solutions" is that they're all predicated on the vast majority of server admins in the world all magically agreeing on the solution and implementing it, all at once.
The whitelist solution is useless when 99.9999% of valid email servers are not yet on the whitelist, right? Because if you turned on whitelist filtering you'd just be blocking all mail. So no one will install and activate the filter until the vast majority of valid email senders *are* registered.
Now consider all of those busy admins of the outgoing mail servers. If they don't register to your whitelist, what happens? Nothing, because no one is filtering yet. So if they have to choose between sorting out this registration process (if they even happen to hear about it...) vs. replacing the flaky memory in server "vulcan22", which will they choose?
But we just need one of the big guys to get behind the plan, right? Well, Hotmail or Yahoo can't just turn on filtering either, because even if they saturate the globe with hugely expensive advertising explaining to email admins that they'd better register their servers before filter rollout in 2008, it simply won't happen for many, many servers until something actively *breaks*. And anyone using the podunk.com ISP suddenly finds their emails are rejected by Hotmail (but nowhere else)... so Hotmail customer support gets a flood of help requests, threats, angry emails, etc. etc.
Are you still sure the whitelist idea is good?
Think of online systems in terms of evolution. Every step has to have a good reason, or no matter how attractively you propose it, it cannot survive.
The Blue Security concept actually *worked* partly because it DID involve the end user. People pissed off by spam actually had legal recourse that they *knew* made the spammer's lives a little more difficult. "Sure, you can bulk-advertise with spam, but every spam you send us is going to result in one more complaint clogging up your order forms."
So even when there were only a handful of users (before the spam started dropping), there was a small benefit.
As soon as the userbase grew to 1/2 million or so (a drop in the bucket in terms of internet users, mind you) the benefit became large. My spam dropped to about 4 or 5 a day.
Of course, BlueSecurity's business model was an huge Achilles' heel. They were fairly decisively taken out of the game because of it. They were on the right path, though: counter automated contacts with automated responses. Keep it legal FTW. A small userbase can know they're at least a small thorn in the spammer's side, and a large userbase is a force to be reckoned with.
Work on a distributed system much like the BlueFrog approach started at Okopipi.org, but has lost steam. Anyone who wants to stir things up again should stop by and see what they can do.
As for taking a coincidence as proof for God -- well, coincidences actually happen all the time. Our brains are particularly good at noticing them, and attaching a lot of significance to them (and we tend to assume "agency" is behind every random event... meaning some intelligent cause). This is a well-researched field.
Fortunately, we have things like the scientific method, and means of testing to tell the difference between those seemingly important coincidences and the scientifically important ones. Like I said, I have found everything to be true.. I know Jesus WAS God in the form of man, and is there everyday for me, if he wasn't then he wouldn't have been able to do the things he has for me. Like I said above, I've discussed this all before -- here's a recent one on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=208114&cid=16
I talk about coincidences in there as well. Read through that conversation and respond if you still have reasonable arguments to offer.
Minor correction to the above -- of course prayer can have a positive effect, because it's like meditation in a way, and also gives you a sense that you're doing something. If the person you're praying for *knows* you're praying for them and they also believe in prayer, they might be cheered up (which can have positive health effects).
But there certainly aren't any supernatural effects (i.e., except for the obvious ways mentioned above, prayer has no effect whatsoever, and if you've conducted some kind of tests that show otherwise, the reason-based world is ready and waiting to hear about it, because you'd be the first).
I'm not sure you got my point. I'm asking if you'd accept the Flying Spaghetti Monster part, simply because the *rest* of it was testable and seemed true. You can't actually test the Flying Spaghetti Monster part, because he's invisible and only influences your life indirectly.
I used that example because you are accepting the superstition part of the Bible based on the practical advice.
You aren't testing whether Jesus was God, whether he had supernatural powers and performed miracles, whether God exists, whether Mary was a virgin, whether any supernatural being exists, whether anything is listening to your prayers (or wants you to pray or worship it), whether prayer can have any positive effect, whether you have a soul, whether heaven or hell exists, whether anything in this world was created by an intelligent supernatural being or not, etc.. None of that is testable, and there's no reason to believe it UNLESS you are just reading Proverbs, saying "yeah, that's pretty smart" and just swallowing all the rest of it without evaluation.
Advice on how to live your life is fine; you can test that and see how happy you are with the results. But is has no bearing on whether the rest of the bible has any factual basis.
If you think you're somehow testing the rest of it... how?
Proverbs is full of advice that is provable, the new testament is full of advice which is spritual and physical, both of which are testable. Just because something seems to be mythical doesn't mean it is... Have you ever thought about this? If I wrote a book based on a sociology textbook and also include some invented stuff about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you'd "test" it the same way, and find lots of valid observations, and conclude that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was true?
That's crazy. That's not testing at all. It's not a choice you make between "all true" or "all nonsense". You're reading a book with lots of moral philosophy (a few thousand years old, but humans are not completely different) with a lot of superstition included.
Why is that so complicated?
It's like one of those emails conservatives were sending around a few years ago with "actual" quotes from John Kerry and so forth explaining how they mostly want to massage Osama's feet, and maybe buy him a pony.
I was hoping at least for something funny... but arguments including "Atheist cries until theist goes away" aren't doing it.
or:
ARGUMENT FROM CROCKERY
1. Pots can give orders to the potter as long as the pots think they are morally superior somehow.
2. Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Hmm, yeah.
If you want to evangelize, what's wrong with doing it honestly?
If you want to make arguments for God's existence, why not do that, and address the *actual* counter-arguments, instead of hoping to trick confused people into thinking this is the best the non-believers have to offer?
I have no idea if you wrote any of these; you're supporting it either way.
There's a reason why the police *set* these kinds of traps (arranging for an actual meeting) -- because it's very hard to pin down something really illegal from chat logs. And frankly, it should be difficult.
People talk about sex and all kinds of things online. They don't always pretend to be *themselves*. That's not illegal, nor should it be. The illegal part comes in when someone is trying to actively do something wrong (arrange sex w/ minor, or just harassing 12-year-olds, etc.).
I understand why all of these new laws are popping up, preventing past offenders from doing legal things (like living near a school or daycare center, or talking about sex with someone online without verifying their age) out of fear that they will enable illegal things (like the school neighbor luring passing schoolchildren into his house and molesting them, or the online IM'er getting personal details from underage kids and going to their houses, etc.).
I also think these measures are generally misguided, not supported by any research, and often cruel and unusual punishment for many of the people affected (the 18-year-old who got caught sleeping with his 17-year-old girlfriend gets all this same treatment, you know). YES, I want changes in the system if a high percentage of child molesters are re-offending. But I want changes that work, not changes that reassure the populace but have no positive effect on recidivism (and seriously fuck up the lives of anyone stupid or dumb enough to be labeled "sex offender"... and fucking up lives tend to result in more crime).
I'm willing to pay more taxes to support better parole supervision, more mental health treatment and/or counseling, all that stuff (because I have a feeling we'll get more results out of that kind of thing...). I want people back in society and operating normally, with a "safety net" of supervision if they start to fall back into old habits. So when you got caught, it would be pretty clear by examining the IP logs and dates when/where you were or were not accessing those accounts, right? Or at least, enough to create some room for reasonable doubt? If you think a jury and judge are going to understand all of the details involved... like, yes, if your account was removed from the site, someone else might have signed up with your old name, and someone else might have the same screenname but on a different site/different IM network, and your IP address is from a shared pool but the ISP provided logs mapping you to this usage, etc. etc.. How many people are just going to be screwed over because the data is complex? It's just hard to imagine this all being a positive thing.
I should say: I agree this is an idiotic bill. All it accomplishes is reminding the sex offenders who *are* at risk of recidivism that chatrooms and social networking sites are monitored, and if they want to be "smart" they'd better research ways to troll truly anonymously. So the people who are *not* going to re-offend mostly just lose some privacy, and the ones who *are* going to re-offend sure as hell aren't going to do it using the registered email, and probably will find a way to do it as untraceably as possible.
But it's certainly not an issue of "stay in jail until you're 100% normal". Contrary to apparent popular belief, people do not spend their time in jail learning how to live nicely and normally in society. Because they are in jail, not amongst nice and normal people.
No; people with mental illnesses need treatment more than jail. People with drug addictions need treatment more than jail. People who have no possible source of income need training and a job more than jail.
Most of these people do something stupid or desperate and end up in jail. For a lot of them, it just *increases* the forces that pushed them to screw up in the first place. I'm not saying jail has no purpose -- for a lot of people, a spell in jail is like a bucket of cold water in the face, and they rethink their lives. But if you have a problem that won't be helped by a bucket of cold water or time to think, more buckets and more time is not the answer.
There are certainly specific cases where the likelihood of recidivism is high even with supervision, treatment, etc. (so for the protection of society, the person can't be freed). But that's not the case with most of these people.
What else? They can't nail him for disguising his identity, because that's ridiculous. Have you never forgotten a password and set up a new account anywhere? By now I have dozens if not hundreds of disparate accounts on various sites. Sometimes I want to comment on a "registered users only" site and find my email is already in use. Yes, by me. I have various email addresses at hotmail, yahoo, etc. that I registered at some point to see if I could get the name, or to sign up on questionable sites (go ahead, spam me at circfile@hotmail.com), etc.. If I were a convicted sex offender, it would be impossible for me to:
1) figure out and register all online identities
2) keep track of those (and keep the authorities up to date) whenever I created a new one This law would allow two things: 1) kid friendly sites would be able to screen known pedos based on a database Only if the sex offender uses an ID they documented, which is unlikely and easy to avoid simply accidentally. and 2) pedos trying to circumvent that could be arrested for the circumvention alone even AFTER their parole is up. Again, think about this in real-life terms if you have spent more than a few months on the internet.
* the research could be targeted directly to generally applicable medical breakthroughs, as opposed to warfare-relevant-only research that may "trickle down".
* there's more of an interaction for some projects with the commercial sector (based on your figures, the private sector spent more than $54 billion in 2003. That's serious money that would get involved as quickly as it could when a project showed a chance of good commercialization.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about how the content is generated during the game development process (no matter how it's put together, if it's "pre-made" it's pre-made). Even if that tree and that walk animation were generated with a lot of computer assistance, they are not procedurally generated on-the-fly as the game runs, based on a complex history of each organism's evolution.
Is "groupthink" what you say when anyone disagrees with you here? I gotta try that one.
I see that a lot too; I'm in southern France.
I'm still learning the traffic laws (so I don't know if this is compulsory), but there's also a standard practice of leaving your left blinker on as long as you're in the passing lane.
I love that -- what a perfect reminder that you're *passing*, not just driving in a different lane.
They also use the white line on the side of most highways to point out "safe distance" -- it's long stripes instead of an unbroken line, and there are frequent signs saying "3 stripes distant: safe. 1 stripe distant: unsafe".
Of course, there are still some tailgaters; the occasional moron who sits right on my ass even when I'm just tooling along behind the car in front of me... sometimes even the moron who'll do that when there's a passing lane open. But you find those anywhere... I would sure love to see them ticketed!
Any pirate site that wants a revenue stream, word-of-mouth advertising, etc. won't bundle anything too nasty -- it's still business, after all, and many of the usual rules apply.
As for the rest of them... well, it's certainly not a *loss* for Microsoft if more people installing pirated versions sabotage their own computers in the process. Microsoft is longing to do exactly that anyway, they just can't for legal reasons... so if they just make it easier for various unsavory types to do their dirty work for them -- and punish users of pirated copies -- they get their revenge without getting their hands dirty.
And when the news spreads of the dangers of pirated copies, voila -- more people buy licenses from MS!
I'm finding it interesting as well (though I have to disappear occasionally as my work/personal schedule demands). When Slashdot closes comments, if you're interested in continuing the conversation, you can email me at slashdot @ my URL.
Believe me, I understand the "rational" perspective. However, i do not believe the perspective is, in fact, rational because no amount of evidence would convince this "rational" person otherwise. Rational is defined as "agreeable to reason; reasonable; sensible." If a rational person can not be convinced of something by a reasonable amount of sensible evidence, we have clearly either misdefined rational or are applying it incorrectly.
That's not true -- there's definitely evidence that would convince me to, at a minimum, chalk these things up to "need to reevaluate". There is also a ton of anecdotal evidence for communication with the dead, ESP, telekinesis, precognition, etc. floating around. But there has also been significant scientific inquiry into these phenomenon (some even funded by the CIA in the interest of using these people in reconnaissance, etc.), and so far no one has been able to actually demonstrate these powers. I'm not just talking about the hoaxes (though of course those exist... often getting money from the credulous). Some people believe 100% that they *have* these powers, but when they are actually tested it never pans out. ESP or "messages from the dead" are often just well-honed observational skills -- people give lots of non-verbal signals that most of us don't fully interpret, but people who have that skill can seem to be mind-reading (and may think they are). But when they are actually put in a testing situation where those signals are removed, they do no better than random guessing.
If one of these people eventually turns out to *actually* have the ability they think they do -- something that cannot be explained easily by chance, natural explanations, etc. -- and the tests can be reproduced reliably -- I would definitely accept that and put more time into thinking about the agency of that power (whether that would be yet-unknown powers of the human mind, or whatever). To tell the truth, I was very disappointed when I started researching these phenomena a bit when I was a teenager... though there is a lot of incredible stuff that exists in the known natural world (and many corners of that world that are still little explored) that's equally fascinating.
Nowhere in that post did I ever say I had previously woken my wife in the middle of the night, having had a dream that did not come true. You assumed this. In fact, that was the first time I've ever woken her up. Before then, I never remembered a single dream.
Assume that I'm telling you the truth about that, okay?
That's fine. I don't think you're making things up to try to convince me; I just believe you are drawing unsupported conclusions based on these experiences. You don't seem to recognize that coincidences, even thousand-to-one coincidences, even million-to-one coincidences, happen all the time. I'm also going to mention again that our minds naturally seek meaning, and discard the meaningless. If you had a startling dream in which your wife was deathly ill, then opened your eyes and saw her sleeping soundly next to you, you likely wouldn't have even remembered the dream in the morning.
My great-grandmother had a story... as a teenager, she went with her family on vacation to a beach (where they went yearly, I think), and lost a favorite and valuable ring in the sand. Years later, as an adult, she was back at the same beach, and while telling the story of the lost ring, pushed her hand down into the sand. And came back up with the exact lost ring. Amazing, isn't it? But it was a coincidence. I'm sure you would agree that it was a coincidence, because it was just a ring; her life wasn't guided in any way, no one else was helped or harmed, she wasn't in need of the ring, there was no "message" this would convey from any deity.
But take something with a higher likelihood -- you have a striking, unusual dream in which an elderly relative dies, after which the man actually does become seriously ill with the same illness you dreamed of, but
It is exactly as externally verifiable as any other proof. Working through any proof requires an individual given the proof to work through the process and verify the conclusions. Have a person willingly work through the same process, and he or she will verify the same conclusion every single time. This is exactly the case as a proof for God, only with the added wrinkle that you need to be unsure of what the result will be.
You use the word "proof" very differently from how I do. It seems fairly obvious that you are not at all "unsure of what the result will be" -- or at any rate, you feel the question is "God?" with a Yes/No answer. More details below.
Are you looking for specific examples in my life of God moving? I'd be happy to share them, but how much are they going to mean to you?
A lot -- for one thing, I can discuss what conclusions you can reasonably draw from these experiences if you *don't* pre-assume the existence of God.
For instance, you used an example of "I was praying for that last month." Exactly how short does the time period need to be, and how specific the "coincidence," and how often?
To give one really specific example, a few months ago I had a specific dream where my grandfather died. I stayed in the dream just long enough to find out exactly how, though I didn't have to in order to help him. I woke and woke my wife, and she verified he was still alive. I described the dream to her.
Now, the bible says we're given authority over life and death, so we agreed he would live through whatever was coming. (That's all the bible says you need to do.) I went back to sleep completely at peace with the situation. Less than twelve hours later, my grandfather was in the hospital with exactly the condition I described to my wife. They didn't know what was wrong and sent him home. Two hours after that, he was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. They figured it out this time and, though they were sure he'd die from his infection (which by this point was very advanced) successfully treated him.
I found this out about 36 hours after God told me. Nobody thought to let me know my grandfather was that close to death.
This is not a one-time occurrence. This is something that now happens whenever my extended family is in any kind of jeopardy. It isn't just health & safety issues, either; God's told me a few specific things that I shared with my wife that happened exactly as I described them. Again, how many, how specific, and how quickly?
This is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post... you and your wife remember the specific things that seem to match up with later events, and you rationalize away the mismatches. Because of the way our minds work, it's quite possible that your memory of the original "message" also is slightly warped to match subsequent events. So this story isn't terribly surprising. You knew of the existence of this particular kind of infection -- when had you last heard/read of it? Is it fairly common? If you had sat down the previous day and listed out all the things you might imagine your grandfather dying of, how many could you list? Was your grandfather's health already somewhat poor (making *some* illness more likely, hence perhaps triggering a dream)? What about the rest of your dream? Did you imagine him in a hospital bed or at home? Time of day? Etc.. ...of course, you can't answer many of these now, but I can point out that there was no *new* information planted in your head (like medical terminology you had no way of knowing); just a rearrangement of things you already knew, as dreams tend to be. The actual probability of you dreaming events that were similar (though not identical... and perhaps the only common link was your grandfather and the particular dangerous infection) to real events is not very low, but impossible to calculate, because there are so many variables impossible to control.
But let'
I still don't know what that means, "provable on a person-by-person basis". Provable in ways that cannot be externally verified? I'm not sure what the word "proof" even means if this is something that operates only within your own head. How do you even verify it to yourself?
If you have completed this proof personally, have you documented it at all? What kinds of things did you learn that you couldn't have otherwise known (and did you write down the details first, then seek confirmation)? I.e., it's certainly possible to do some actual testing to see if your messages from God are actually accurately predicting reality, or no better than a random sample of anyone's subconscious would - which is actually not too shabby.
If you write down every single message, verbatim, as soon as possible, and follow up reliably on *all* of them, I'll feel like you're at least going through the motions. If you're just going through life like normal, noticing an event and saying "holy moly -- that's just like what God told me would happen, when I was praying last month!" then... no. That's just the mind's trick of attaching significance to all coincidences, and it's important to how we think, but it's also the basis for almost all superstition. And it falls apart when tested in any way.
About your general approach: sure, with a receptive mind, you can undergo a process to remove all doubt of God's existence, and to experience "conversations" with God -- even conversations in which you learn knowledge you feel you otherwise would not have known. This isn't a practice new to Christianity, or even monotheism -- that's what the Greek oracles did, or any medicine man... they talked with the spirit world or the gods and returned with a message that was usually a little cryptic, but with a wee bit of interpretation subsequent events would often match up (or if not, no one remembered those particular consultations). Remember, that's how our brains work -- we fix on the coincidences and ignore the mismatches.
I read on the screen unless I want to scribble all over it.
...either way, not much use for this paper.
Then I print it out and make notes, draw arrows, underline, scratch things out, etc. etc. -- it's just faster than doing the same with a mouse.
OR I print things out if I'm taking a flight in an economy seat and don't want to struggle with the laptop in limited space.
On the other hand, when I was still working in a corporate environment, we'd have lots of meetings where there'd be a printout to refer to during the discussion (and everyone would get a copy). Then after the meeting they'd all get tossed. That seems like a valid application of this technology.
I'm talking about proof using logic, the scientific method, repeatable observations, etc. etc.. You're just talking about how a person might convince *themself* of God's existence. I believe you, though I don't agree it would "work" on everyone... but people who really *want* to believe, absolutely. Does this have anything to do with the reality of God? No.
Your proof can be an interesting exploration of the operation of the human mind, but we know something about that already. That's why the strict rules of the scientific method exists -- because if scientific conclusions were based on a bunch of scientists saying "sounds good to me!" as opposed to "your methods were valid and we successfully reproduced your results!" we'd still be back in the middle ages.
Stockholm syndrome is one obvious example of people learning to believe unexpected things -- not the same thing, of course, but hopefully it makes the point that saying "X process will make person Y believe Z" is very, very far from proving that Z exists.
That God exists, in comparison, is *not* such a big thing to prove to yourself. There are lots of things that happen in the world that most people don't understand (even if they are explained in a library somewhere!), and supernatural causes are an easy answer. Far less an easy answer than 2000 years ago, when people had no reason to *disbelieve* supernatural explanations, but still easy. Acts was what changed my life; I realized that if it were true, it would apply to the current era. And if it applied to the current era, it ought to be testable. And so I set out to test it.Sure; the holy books of various religions actually *do* have content other than "worship this God(s) in this way at these times". They generally have plenty of advice on more everyday things, like how to interact with other people, how to deal with conflict and difficulty. Humankind hasn't advanced greatly in our moral sense over the past few thousand years, so some of this is still quite relevant. These religious texts also try to answer the questions that people ask in difficult times, like seeking comfort when a loved one has died, or when chance happenings in the world seem particularly unfair and cruel, or when seeking direction in life.
Does any of this support God's existence? No, of course not -- it shows that *people* were grappling with these same questions when they wrote the texts in the first place. The same issues (and many of the same conclusions) are also in far earlier philosophic works in Greece, China, etc.. Just because you can follow some of Confucius's precepts and find that they still apply to people today doesn't mean Confucius was God.
I'm not sure why some people seem to think the Bible is either all factually true or it's just gibberish. Both of those options seem pretty ridiculous to me. It's an interesting collection of historical documents, documenting beliefs of the time as well as a considerable amount of moral philosophy.
If you read some of the ancient Chinese philosophy you can find plenty of cryptic alchemical formulas for turning various things into gold, creating a potion of eternal life, etc.. You also find some really incisive insights into human nature. Would the testable quality of those insights convince you that the alchemy part was true?