In the interests of completeness, I should point out that, no, removing a shortcut from your desktop does not trigger a UAC prompt -- in the RTM code at least.
Thanks for the tip. That is interesting, though I'll note that in the commments on that post a few other things are noted, one of which is removing a desktop shortcut that was installed as admin when you installed a program via UAC.:->
I'll be playing with a Vista Home Basic system on Monday or so, I'm really curious to get some hands-on time. Should be... educational.
Thanks for the text so I don't give him any hits. Let's see, just skimming...
Over the last two years the vast majority of them have lost their jobs due to outsourcing after their companies moved to Linux from UNIX.
Here, let me correct that:
Over the last two years the vast majority of [people that I claim that I've gotten emails from] have lost their jobs due to outsourcing after their companies moved to Linux from UNIX.
Linux exists in an environment where there is broad collaboration, but no effort to validate the collaborators so the opportunity for traditional, old style, data breach is immeasurable.
I could say that then, and I can say that now without any concern for my safety.... According to The Register, there is actually some kind of a strike team that comes after me every time I say something positive on Microsoft or negative on Linux...
Um, I can't find anything about that... is there a link in the original article? I certainly haven't heard anything that implies he has anything to worry about in terms of physical safety. Can anyone produce anything to back that up, as he implies?
If you think a Microsoft product sucks you can say that to great detail without having to be afraid of your job...
These days, with GUI-installed Linux distributions, Linux suffers from the same problem Windows used to be derided for: services are on by default.
Something I wrote for my website but haven't posted yet:
Linux is much more secure than any version of Windows, both in
design and in practice. There simply isn't any significant malware
(viruses, spyware, adware, trojans, worms, etc.) for Linux. There have
been no widespread viruses or spyware for Linux in all of its
history. There are several reasons for this.
Linux inherits from its Unix ancestors a robust, well-polished
security model that has weathered a large number of
attacks. One of the key elements of this model is notion of "normal"
vs. "privileged" users. Windows, which has grown slowly and painfully
out of DOS (a single-tasking, single-user system) has none of this
history and its security suffers greatly.
It's easiest to explain this by contrasting the schemes. Consider,
say, Windows 98. Anyone using the system can do whatever they
like to any part of the system including the fundamental
operating system software. If you delete the wrong file, your computer
is useless until you reinstall. More dangerous still, if any malicious
program gets onto your machine, by any means at all (email, visiting
the wrong website, downloading a program from the net), they can do
anything to your computer. (And they do.)
Windows 2000 and Windows XP are supposed to be better in this
regard. The operating system can support "regular" users with
limited privileges and "administrators" with more
capabilities. However, Microsoft had a problem with this - most of the
software developed for Windows requires more privileges than a regular
user has. In practice, most software simply won't install or work
properly for a regular user. So, in the real world, most people run
with full administrator rights, and the situation is exactly the same
as Windows 98 and its cousins.
One of the main problems with this is that malware is no longer
written primarily by adolescent pranksters. Malicious programs are now
big business. Once they have taken over your computer, there are many
ways to make a profit. First, they can use your computer to send spam
email. They can also use your computer to host a website selling
things advertised with spam. They can pop up advertisements on your
screen regularly, and redirect your web surfing to sites they want you
to visit. They can also use your computer as part of a Botnet, carrying out
extortion against other websites. And, since they usually modify the
fundamental operating system when they install themselves, they can be
impossible to remove without wiping the system clean and starting over.
Microsoft has recognized this problem and is trying to address it in Vista.
The main feature
intended to address this is called "UAC", or "User Account Control",
where users run without full permissions, but when a program needs to
do something that requires more permissions, Windows stops and asks
the user if they wish to allow it. However, because of the history of
Windows detailed above, almost anything you can think of - even just
removing a shortcut from your desktop - requires extra privileges. So
the warning popups arise constantly as you use the computer.
Don't just take my word for it. See what a Windows fan has
to say.
In Linux, normal user accounts do not have the ability to
change anything in the system willy-nilly. Even if a malicious program
were to get onto the machine, it couldn't alter the OS or
damage critical system files. Indeed, it would not even be able to
alter the files and data of other users on the system.
But this limitation, unlike Microsoft's attempts, is not
opressive. When one needs to do some
As I stated in my original post, Christianity traditionally has defined "free will" to mean the ability to do what is right.
Functioning thermostats have that ability, too.
In this sense we find a bounded will in Christianity in the way I think you'd like to find with chaos theory.
I don't "want" a bounded will, but I'm willing to face up to the implications of neurology and such. I find a discomfiting truth preferable to a comfortable falsehood.
They never said that man wasn't free in heaven--just that he couldn't sin.
Of course, one then wonders why angels and humans weren't created with the property 'free but couldn't sin' in the first place...
There has to be a willing suspension of disbelief, and frequently Hollywood (and television) assumes that the number of people in the viewership of a particular program is so low it quite happily removes all semblance of reality for that "minority" to the point, not really caring that the entire movie looks utterly ridiculous as a result for that group. What's bizarre to me is how rarely it's necessary for the plot or understandability of the end story for them to do that.
First, "classical free will" wasn't defined as "unpredictable even in principle."
Then help me out by maybe providing what your definition would be? Is it any of these? Apparently you're using some concept like "the decisions of a person with free will at instant 'X' are not fully determined by the state of the universe at time 'X minus epsilon'". Let's reformulate that a bit: "Even if you knew the state of the universe to infinite detail at time 'X-eps', you could not predict with 100% accuracy what Joe Freewill will do at time X."
Now, let's propose something almost logically equivalent, but not quite: "No matter how much information about the state of the universe you gather at time 'X-eps', you could not predict with 100% accuracy what Joe Freewill will do at time X, for epsilon greater than some value."
If epsilon is small enough, then in any concievable practice, there is no possible way to differentiate the two.
Second, the bar for good scientific theory isn't chaos.
The 'bar for good scientific theory' is if it makes accurate and testable predictions. Chaos theory does that. And yeah, there's plenty of research showing chaotic phenomena in the brain. Google for it.
If something is unpredictable, we expect mathematically that it will follow decision paths with equal probability (law of averages and all that). But this is exactly the same thing as saying that there's no will involved whatsoever!
Go read the link on chaos theory above. You really need to. Chaos is unpredictable but not random, and certainly doesn't involve all possibilities having 'equal probability'.
You can't find a definition of free will that makes you anything but an automaton in science...
So, yeah, you can't actually "propose any situation at all where the difference matters". How would you tell the difference between an 'automaton' that shows foresight, intelligence, and planning, but is not fully predictable... and someone with 'classical free will'?
Science has already deflated a lot of overinflated, egotistical posturing by the human race. Our place in the Cosmos has moved very far from the 'center of the universe'. I'm not particularly troubled by the theoretical notion that everything I do is, in some sense, 'determined'. In any practical sense, it's not - there's no way to make any use of that insight. In what way would my life be improved by the addition of "classical free will"?
And it might bother you the most that when Christianity talks about the will, it's logically more consistent...
Except that part about "God's foreknowledge" coexisting with "free will" being a "mystery". (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
If you're willing to pay what it takes then you (and your kids) shouldn't have any problems. There are plenty of private schools that have money to pay well and get the best teachers. Just cough up the tuition and send your kids to one of those schools.
Or you could move to a district with good public schools and supplement at home the areas you want to emphasize. Like my wife and have done. Sure, the taxes are higher, but I was sent to a private Catholic high school and I didn't feel it gave me any academic advantages over my friends who went to public high school. It sure did curtail my dating options, though.
If a god builds a universe, it can build in a particular moral code if it so chooses, or even a plethora of moral codes, each applying to different entities in different situations.
If you assume that moral codes are simply prescriptive mandates handed down from on high, then I suppose so. How, exactly, would the 'moralness' of such a 'moral code' be mediated? Could a God create a universe precisely like this one in all observable aspects, with the sole difference being that taking care of human infants was, in fact, evil, and the highest moral good was torturing babies to death instead? What is the specific feature that invests one rule or the other with 'moralness'?
Au contraire, what he pointed out is that there's really only two choices to pick from. Either something is 'good' purely because (the) God(s) will it so, or else some things just are good, and God perfectly recognizes those things that are good. My choice of language about Nazis was not 'biased', it pointed out the logical conclusion of picking the former. In that case, there really is no difference between "Speed Limit 55" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; it's just that the latter is backed up by the Biggest Beat Cop Around. It really is just the ultimate case of "Might Makes Right", as my 'torturing babies' case makes above.
The latter choice is, as I point out above, far more defensible. A 'God' could design a universe with various features, and moral codes would arise from the desires and intents of the sentient agents within it interacting with the features of that universe. But that would mean that you could not have a universe that was "identical in all respects except that baby-torturing is good", because the fact that torturing babies is evil is logically compulsory given what humans are and what kind of universe they live in.
It hasn't anything to do with prediction. Science by its nature doesn't allow free will, unless you want to invest rocks with as much free will as you have. So your assumption is grounded on an attribute you've invested yourself with that contradicts the facts, at least as far as you're willing to gather them. All you've really done here is to change the meaning of "free" to "(humanly) unpredictable."
There is no practical difference between "classical free will" and "unpredictable even in principle". (Note: chaos isn't just "(humanly) unpredictable". It means "nothing in this universe can hope to gather the kind of information necessary to predict it for any useful length of time".) A rock can be predicted in an enormously wide variety of situations (though not all of them - e.g. a rock in a chaotic orbit) to a very large degree of accuracy.
Can you explain why I should care if I only have 'an effectively perfect simulation of free will', and not the genuine article? Can you propose any situation at all where the difference matters? Come on, how can anyone differentiate between someone with "classical free will" and someone that's "unpredictable even in principle"?
Pay should be based on qualifications and performance, not experience.
And it should be related to the importance of the job, too. I don't mind if the more difficult subjects get a pay boost... so long as all teachers (that are doing a good job) are getting paid well. I want good teachers for my kids, and I'm willing to pay what it takes to attract good teachers.
It doesn't look like all school districts have the combination of money and interest to do that. Too bad, because education is most important in areas where people have a strong need to move up the economic ladder. But by that very fact, those areas don't tend to have the money needed to attract quality teachers.
The hypothesis is that reaction is an expression of knowing. Prove it wrong.
"I had no need of that hypothesis." - Pierre-Simon Laplace
If the proposition cannot be falsified - if anything that could possibly happen is perfectly consistent with it - then is of absolutely no utility whatsoever. It'd be irrelevant even if it were true.
The gist of it is this -- we all seem to have some innate sense of morality that transcends culture and societies. (The idea that actions can be right and wrong is pretty much ubiquitous, regardless of whether a particular act is socially acceptable.)
Let me show you an example of that moral sense. Take two tests for me. Here's the first one - a set of cards with letters on one side and numbers on the other. Which cards do you have to flip to determine if the following condition holds: "If there's a D on one side, then there's a 3 on the other.":
D / F / 3 / 7
Okay, now here's another test.
You have a set of cards before you. Each card has information about
patrons in a bar. On one side is what they are drinking, on another
side is their ages.
Drinking wine / Drinking soda / 25 years old / 16 years old
Now, let's say you're the bouncer at that bar. Your job is to make sure
that no one under the age of 21 is drinking alcohol. Which of the
above cards do you need to flip over to see if that condition is met?
Most people have a lot of trouble with the first test, but find the second test pretty easy. The answer's the same in both cases - the first and the last card. Note that the logical structure is exactly equivalent in both versions. A lot of research has been done on this stuff, and it seems pretty well demonstrated at this point that the reason why the second test is so easy is because it asks people to detect if a social contract is being violated - in other words, it asks people to spot cheating. And people seem to have "hardware accelerated modules" in their brains for doing just that.
Now, can you imagine why social animals, that live in groups, might do well to have such talents? Note that analogous skills have been observed in other relatively intelligent social animals like chimps and dolphins.
So, considering that humans have been around for roughly 100,000 years (and near-human ancestors for a few million years before that), living in pretty much the same environment (physical and social) and facing pretty much the same challenges (physical and social) for all that time... do you think it likely that a 'general moral sense' might develop via evolution?
So, yeah, I don't find that 'shared morality' argument to be terribly convincing for theism.
...then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions.
...choices are determined exclusively by the firing of synapses in the brain.
Even if that's true, that's a chaotic system, and not even in principle predictable in any kind of detail for any appreciable length of time. So, that has no practical impact whatsoever. People would be just as unpredictible in such a world as any other.
If I have free will, I don't have to worry about it. If I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. So, either way... I might as well assume I have free will and just get on with life.
I am not using "Might makes right", but "creator and controller makes right if it so chooses".
But that is, in itself, a moral principle. And on what foundation does that rest? What makes that moral? Could a god have defined morality in such a way that that principle didn't apply?
What you are suggesting boils down to the proposition that the people who knuckled under to the Nazis had the right idea, they just picked the wrong bully to submit to.
Unless you can show a logical inconsistency necessitated by the idea of a god defining morality (and I sincerely doubt you can do that)
So do these Laws work randomly? or constantly? Meaning if we fully understood Physical at all level: Marco, micro, Quantum, etc. Could we predict the actual "mutations" in the process of Evolution; because if we can it would be more accurate to call it Emergence as the Laws predestine all interaction.
"[W]here you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you
will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that
the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that
would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw
dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we
do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by
design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think
that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a
great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from
the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much
less impressive than it formerly was." - Bertrand Russell
It's like saying that there's "microwalking" which is what I do from the car park to the office every morning... that's "macrowalking" and it's impossible.
I had to dig through to comments in your "Jedi Code Formatter" program in order to find out your last name. I'll be quoting that as one of my email.sigs and I wanted to make sure I got a more formal attribution than "Strawberry Frog".:->
Keep in mind, broadcast TV won't give you good options for DVRs either (no electronic published chanel guide to use).
Um, actually, the ATSC standard does specify a format for guide information and such. And I've seen it when I was doing the OTA thing with my tuner (right now I'm back to getting the local HD channels off cable). Some stations were concientious about filling it in, some weren't. But it's there and I expect it to do better. I don't think it goes more than a few hours in advance, though.
I'd still love to be able to view a downconverted version of WGBH's HDTV signal, which should be pretty good (since our UHF reception is very good).
Not really a call for that yet. For example, I have a Samsung DTB-H260F for my LCD TV, and it works reasonably well (some problems with HDCP... sometimes it works, sometimes not). That can downconvert, but the problem is the menus and such aren't sent out the coaxial/S-video outputs, only the component and HDMI outputs. So you can see the actual program, but you can't see any on-screen displays.
To even set it up on a TV without component inputs, you have to plug the green component signal into the video jack on the TV; then you get a black-and-white signal where the menus are visible. After that, you use the coax or s-video hookups, and just try to remember what channel you're on. (Honest. See here.)
As I said, I have it hooked up to a more recent TV so I don't have to worry about this problem, but as you can see from that thread, people who want ATSC reception on an older TV are close to SOL. Though at our local grocery store, I saw 27-inch SDTVs with built-in ATSC tuners for sale...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the tip. That is interesting, though I'll note that in the commments on that post a few other things are noted, one of which is removing a desktop shortcut that was installed as admin when you installed a program via UAC. :->
I'll be playing with a Vista Home Basic system on Monday or so, I'm really curious to get some hands-on time. Should be... educational.
No, that's really what I think. See, e.g., here. It's not finished so it's not linked from anywhere. Anyone want to tell me what's trollish about it?
Here, let me correct that:
Over the last two years the vast majority of [people that I claim that I've gotten emails from] have lost their jobs due to outsourcing after their companies moved to Linux from UNIX.
Au contraire. GPL 3.0? Linus says he won't use it.Um, I can't find anything about that... is there a link in the original article? I certainly haven't heard anything that implies he has anything to worry about in terms of physical safety. Can anyone produce anything to back that up, as he implies?
No, you can't.
Yup, just a bunch of trolling to gather page hits.
He's just trying to stir up controversy to get page hits, like Dvorak admitted he did with Mac users.
Something I wrote for my website but haven't posted yet:
Linux is much more secure than any version of Windows, both in design and in practice. There simply isn't any significant malware (viruses, spyware, adware, trojans, worms, etc.) for Linux. There have been no widespread viruses or spyware for Linux in all of its history. There are several reasons for this.
Linux inherits from its Unix ancestors a robust, well-polished security model that has weathered a large number of attacks. One of the key elements of this model is notion of "normal" vs. "privileged" users. Windows, which has grown slowly and painfully out of DOS (a single-tasking, single-user system) has none of this history and its security suffers greatly.
It's easiest to explain this by contrasting the schemes. Consider, say, Windows 98. Anyone using the system can do whatever they like to any part of the system including the fundamental operating system software. If you delete the wrong file, your computer is useless until you reinstall. More dangerous still, if any malicious program gets onto your machine, by any means at all (email, visiting the wrong website, downloading a program from the net), they can do anything to your computer. (And they do.)
Windows 2000 and Windows XP are supposed to be better in this regard. The operating system can support "regular" users with limited privileges and "administrators" with more capabilities. However, Microsoft had a problem with this - most of the software developed for Windows requires more privileges than a regular user has. In practice, most software simply won't install or work properly for a regular user. So, in the real world, most people run with full administrator rights, and the situation is exactly the same as Windows 98 and its cousins.
One of the main problems with this is that malware is no longer written primarily by adolescent pranksters. Malicious programs are now big business. Once they have taken over your computer, there are many ways to make a profit. First, they can use your computer to send spam email. They can also use your computer to host a website selling things advertised with spam. They can pop up advertisements on your screen regularly, and redirect your web surfing to sites they want you to visit. They can also use your computer as part of a Botnet, carrying out extortion against other websites. And, since they usually modify the fundamental operating system when they install themselves, they can be impossible to remove without wiping the system clean and starting over.
Microsoft has recognized this problem and is trying to address it in Vista. The main feature intended to address this is called "UAC", or "User Account Control", where users run without full permissions, but when a program needs to do something that requires more permissions, Windows stops and asks the user if they wish to allow it. However, because of the history of Windows detailed above, almost anything you can think of - even just removing a shortcut from your desktop - requires extra privileges. So the warning popups arise constantly as you use the computer.
Don't just take my word for it. See what a Windows fan has to say.
In Linux, normal user accounts do not have the ability to change anything in the system willy-nilly. Even if a malicious program were to get onto the machine, it couldn't alter the OS or damage critical system files. Indeed, it would not even be able to alter the files and data of other users on the system.
But this limitation, unlike Microsoft's attempts, is not opressive. When one needs to do some
Functioning thermostats have that ability, too.
I don't "want" a bounded will, but I'm willing to face up to the implications of neurology and such. I find a discomfiting truth preferable to a comfortable falsehood.
Of course, one then wonders why angels and humans weren't created with the property 'free but couldn't sin' in the first place...
That's bothered me for a long time, too.
Then help me out by maybe providing what your definition would be? Is it any of these? Apparently you're using some concept like "the decisions of a person with free will at instant 'X' are not fully determined by the state of the universe at time 'X minus epsilon'". Let's reformulate that a bit: "Even if you knew the state of the universe to infinite detail at time 'X-eps', you could not predict with 100% accuracy what Joe Freewill will do at time X."
Now, let's propose something almost logically equivalent, but not quite: "No matter how much information about the state of the universe you gather at time 'X-eps', you could not predict with 100% accuracy what Joe Freewill will do at time X, for epsilon greater than some value."
If epsilon is small enough, then in any concievable practice, there is no possible way to differentiate the two.
The 'bar for good scientific theory' is if it makes accurate and testable predictions. Chaos theory does that. And yeah, there's plenty of research showing chaotic phenomena in the brain. Google for it.
Go read the link on chaos theory above. You really need to. Chaos is unpredictable but not random, and certainly doesn't involve all possibilities having 'equal probability'.
So, yeah, you can't actually "propose any situation at all where the difference matters". How would you tell the difference between an 'automaton' that shows foresight, intelligence, and planning, but is not fully predictable... and someone with 'classical free will'?
Science has already deflated a lot of overinflated, egotistical posturing by the human race. Our place in the Cosmos has moved very far from the 'center of the universe'. I'm not particularly troubled by the theoretical notion that everything I do is, in some sense, 'determined'. In any practical sense, it's not - there's no way to make any use of that insight. In what way would my life be improved by the addition of "classical free will"?
Except that part about "God's foreknowledge" coexisting with "free will" being a "mystery". (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Or you could move to a district with good public schools and supplement at home the areas you want to emphasize. Like my wife and have done. Sure, the taxes are higher, but I was sent to a private Catholic high school and I didn't feel it gave me any academic advantages over my friends who went to public high school. It sure did curtail my dating options, though.
If you assume that moral codes are simply prescriptive mandates handed down from on high, then I suppose so. How, exactly, would the 'moralness' of such a 'moral code' be mediated? Could a God create a universe precisely like this one in all observable aspects, with the sole difference being that taking care of human infants was, in fact, evil, and the highest moral good was torturing babies to death instead? What is the specific feature that invests one rule or the other with 'moralness'?
There are alternative, and to my mind far more defensible, ways of developing a 'moral code'.
Au contraire, what he pointed out is that there's really only two choices to pick from. Either something is 'good' purely because (the) God(s) will it so, or else some things just are good, and God perfectly recognizes those things that are good. My choice of language about Nazis was not 'biased', it pointed out the logical conclusion of picking the former. In that case, there really is no difference between "Speed Limit 55" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; it's just that the latter is backed up by the Biggest Beat Cop Around. It really is just the ultimate case of "Might Makes Right", as my 'torturing babies' case makes above.
The latter choice is, as I point out above, far more defensible. A 'God' could design a universe with various features, and moral codes would arise from the desires and intents of the sentient agents within it interacting with the features of that universe. But that would mean that you could not have a universe that was "identical in all respects except that baby-torturing is good", because the fact that torturing babies is evil is logically compulsory given what humans are and what kind of universe they live in.
There is no practical difference between "classical free will" and "unpredictable even in principle". (Note: chaos isn't just "(humanly) unpredictable". It means "nothing in this universe can hope to gather the kind of information necessary to predict it for any useful length of time".) A rock can be predicted in an enormously wide variety of situations (though not all of them - e.g. a rock in a chaotic orbit) to a very large degree of accuracy.
Can you explain why I should care if I only have 'an effectively perfect simulation of free will', and not the genuine article? Can you propose any situation at all where the difference matters? Come on, how can anyone differentiate between someone with "classical free will" and someone that's "unpredictable even in principle"?
And it should be related to the importance of the job, too. I don't mind if the more difficult subjects get a pay boost... so long as all teachers (that are doing a good job) are getting paid well. I want good teachers for my kids, and I'm willing to pay what it takes to attract good teachers.
It doesn't look like all school districts have the combination of money and interest to do that. Too bad, because education is most important in areas where people have a strong need to move up the economic ladder. But by that very fact, those areas don't tend to have the money needed to attract quality teachers.
"I had no need of that hypothesis." - Pierre-Simon Laplace
If the proposition cannot be falsified - if anything that could possibly happen is perfectly consistent with it - then is of absolutely no utility whatsoever. It'd be irrelevant even if it were true.
Let me show you an example of that moral sense. Take two tests for me. Here's the first one - a set of cards with letters on one side and numbers on the other. Which cards do you have to flip to determine if the following condition holds: "If there's a D on one side, then there's a 3 on the other.":
D / F / 3 / 7
Okay, now here's another test. You have a set of cards before you. Each card has information about patrons in a bar. On one side is what they are drinking, on another side is their ages.
Drinking wine / Drinking soda / 25 years old / 16 years old
Now, let's say you're the bouncer at that bar. Your job is to make sure that no one under the age of 21 is drinking alcohol. Which of the above cards do you need to flip over to see if that condition is met?
Most people have a lot of trouble with the first test, but find the second test pretty easy. The answer's the same in both cases - the first and the last card. Note that the logical structure is exactly equivalent in both versions. A lot of research has been done on this stuff, and it seems pretty well demonstrated at this point that the reason why the second test is so easy is because it asks people to detect if a social contract is being violated - in other words, it asks people to spot cheating. And people seem to have "hardware accelerated modules" in their brains for doing just that.
Now, can you imagine why social animals, that live in groups, might do well to have such talents? Note that analogous skills have been observed in other relatively intelligent social animals like chimps and dolphins.
So, considering that humans have been around for roughly 100,000 years (and near-human ancestors for a few million years before that), living in pretty much the same environment (physical and social) and facing pretty much the same challenges (physical and social) for all that time... do you think it likely that a 'general moral sense' might develop via evolution?
So, yeah, I don't find that 'shared morality' argument to be terribly convincing for theism.
Um, actually, there might be other alternatives.
Even if that's true, that's a chaotic system, and not even in principle predictable in any kind of detail for any appreciable length of time. So, that has no practical impact whatsoever. People would be just as unpredictible in such a world as any other.
If I have free will, I don't have to worry about it. If I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. So, either way... I might as well assume I have free will and just get on with life.
But that is, in itself, a moral principle. And on what foundation does that rest? What makes that moral? Could a god have defined morality in such a way that that principle didn't apply?
What you are suggesting boils down to the proposition that the people who knuckled under to the Nazis had the right idea, they just picked the wrong bully to submit to.
I just did. Or, rather, Socrates did a long time ago.
You have just smashed headlong into the Euthyphro Problem.
For a broader treatment, see here and here.
As well it should.
"[W]here you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was." - Bertrand Russell
Sadly, yes, we are in the middle ages.
I had to dig through to comments in your "Jedi Code Formatter" program in order to find out your last name. I'll be quoting that as one of my email .sigs and I wanted to make sure I got a more formal attribution than "Strawberry Frog". :->
And what is your evidence to back up this statement? I know a counterexample pretty intimately...
Um, actually, the ATSC standard does specify a format for guide information and such. And I've seen it when I was doing the OTA thing with my tuner (right now I'm back to getting the local HD channels off cable). Some stations were concientious about filling it in, some weren't. But it's there and I expect it to do better. I don't think it goes more than a few hours in advance, though.
Not really a call for that yet. For example, I have a Samsung DTB-H260F for my LCD TV, and it works reasonably well (some problems with HDCP... sometimes it works, sometimes not). That can downconvert, but the problem is the menus and such aren't sent out the coaxial/S-video outputs, only the component and HDMI outputs. So you can see the actual program, but you can't see any on-screen displays.
To even set it up on a TV without component inputs, you have to plug the green component signal into the video jack on the TV; then you get a black-and-white signal where the menus are visible. After that, you use the coax or s-video hookups, and just try to remember what channel you're on. (Honest. See here.)
As I said, I have it hooked up to a more recent TV so I don't have to worry about this problem, but as you can see from that thread, people who want ATSC reception on an older TV are close to SOL. Though at our local grocery store, I saw 27-inch SDTVs with built-in ATSC tuners for sale...
No, that's actually intended to point out how stupid the 'moral' arguments are. They don't sound nearly as convincing when the disease isn't an STD.
You didn't count the cost of treating the cancer when it's not caught by early detection. That doesn't tend to be cheap.