"Slashdotters" is not a political party. The editors just post what sounds interesting, and people who comment in the "Games" section tend to have different views from people who comment in "Your Rights Online". Get over it already.
My parents got a Mac Mini after years on the PC. They needed a new keyboard and mouse because they had PS/2 stuff, so I got them a Microsoft keyboard and a Microsoft optical mouse. The irony is delicious.
I don't think you've been trolled, it's just a really broken program. The problems with it have nothing to do with exceptions though. First, he used argv[0], which everyone knows is the command itself, so the script opens itself. Second, we need a comma after "print line" so that the print command doesn't print a newline after each line, which already contains a newline.
Here in Texas, where indeed the law does not allow for a sentence of "life without parole", our legislators considered such a bill last year.
It was rejected on the basis that it would weaken the death penalty. See, executions are quite popular around these parts.
The irony of it is that in light of the recent Supreme Court decision that you can't kill criminals who committed their crimes before they turned 18, a number of death row inmates here could now one day get parole, despite having been originally sentenced to death.
P.S. - I agree with the GP; however, I wasn't commenting on my personal views (which are, in fact, that the purpose of our judicial system is prevention, not retribution).
Yeah, I know. I didn't mean to suggest that you didn't. It's just that I'm a moral absolutist, and so I consider the prevention vs. retribution thing to BE a fact, pretty much. I think it's about as clearly shown as the phlogiston thing, or the abiogenesis thing, and I'm comfortable saying so. Hopefully one day everybody will agree with me, but I'm not holding my breath.
Alas, since the death penalty is irreversible, we are naturally forced to be really certain before we go through with it. So we have to pay a lawyer to represent the guy, and we have to pay judges to decide his fate over and over again, etc. Upshot is it ends up costing more than locking them in the cage for 40 years.
Since it doesn't prevent crime, remind me again who the winners are?
I didn't say that believing in retribution instead of/more than prevention is an invalid concept
You should; it's about time that people did. In any case, I will.
Retribution is completely irrational. Morally speaking, it serves only to degrade the victim as well as the perpetrator. The thirst for barbarism runs deep, and everyone is eager for an excuse, so they suggest that someone else's barbarism gives us the right to be barbaric ourselves.
It does not. Barbarism makes our souls smaller and our lives lesser. It's time to stop.
Re:Not a fan of Go, try Hex
on
Fun Tabletop Games?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Sometimes people who have played only a game or two think that ko is an exception, but this is a misconception; in advanced strategy it is a fundamental rule that is considered in almost every important move.
First we lost "alright" vs "all right", and then we lost "begs the question" vs "raises the question". We are NOT losing "it's" vs "its", and we are NOT losing "lose" vs "loose". That's just going too far.
You need to realize that my first paragraph does not say that space travel and skydiving have relevance to each other; if you read the rest of the post, you'll see that it simply sets up the next sentence (space travel is hard) and gives a statistical base for the discussion of space risks.
You should probably go back and read my previous post, where I said that what's being flown today isn't safe for passenger use. I'm not claiming that SS1 is safe. I haven't seen anyone claiming that. For all I know somebody is, in which case they are lying or ignorant.
My claim -- which you have chosen not to address, so perhaps you agree -- is that useful ideas, including useful ideas which are safe, may come out of this kind of reckless envelope pushing. My hope is that the private and government space experiments will fuel innovation in each other, and will make all this a Good Thing(tm). I am worried though that the government program is too far ahead for there to be very much meaningful cross-pollination, though. I hope in the long term the private space industry will catch up.
Incidentally, I'm not afraid of a high-profile accident in the private space industry, especially if it's a test pilot like the SS1 pilots or this crazy millionaire guy. I don't believe that it will kill the industry -- it didn't kill aviation back in the early airplane days. Also incidentally, I agree that the Shuttle's failure rate is the best among manned space systems that have been flown that many times, but how many manned space systems HAVE been flown that many times?
By the way, one of these days you should come over to the house for a period in which I will actually be around. It's always fun talking with you.
You are right by the way, in the sense that Namesys no longer considers it to be beta. I was not aware that the project had been officially released. I should have checked the site.
Since it is a completely different filesystem than Reiser3, I'm not surprised if there is a bit of a waiting period before it's integrated into the mainline kernel. As I recall XFS had a waiting period too, though I don't know how long it was.
Of course, the risk of death from skydiving is quite a lot less than 2%, which is the historical risk of death from riding on a Space Shuttle mission. So extensive testing hasn't been shown to be effective at lowering the risk to what would be acceptable levels for something like a passenger airliner.
It seems to me that you are right that spacecraft design is Just Hard(tm); however, I think part of the reason for our failures has been putting all our development efforts in a single direction. Which we did because it was very expensive, which was partly because we had high safety standards, which we didn't meet anyway.
For that reason I see the SS1 mindset as a positive advancement. Hopefully innovation with unproven, incompletely tested designs, with some number of accidents among those willing to take extreme risks, will lead to designs that are actually safe, reliable, and reasonably inexpensive. The alternate mentality seems to have resulted in a design which is unsafe and expensive. I will admit though that the Shuttle design effort was impaired by other constraints which explain its lack of obvious safety features like crew escape. Also the shuttle is an ancient design.
It will be interesting to compare the progress in the next government-funded spacecraft design to the upcoming private designs. Probably some people will die along both lines of development. Concern about passengers is warranted, but it might be a little premature, since nobody is claiming to have a design that is safe enough for passengers yet. When they start making that claim, there will be a lot of debating to do.
It's more like the early days of aviation than Soviet Union stuff. I think the mindset you are using, the "oh no what if somebody DIES?" kind of thinking, is potentially crippling to development. With experimental aircraft like this, the test pilots are aware of the risks, and it's up to the individuals to weigh those risks. Not everything people do ought to be completely safe. Historically some people have been willing to take risks to learn the limits of our technology and what can be reasonably accomplished. The Wright Flyer wasn't flight-tested before Kitty Hawk, you know!
I'm not saying whether this risk, or the SS1 risk, are worth what is perhaps a marginal increase in human knowledge. All I'm saying is that I don't think this flight poses much of a danger to the public, and the risk to a test pilot is up to the pilot. When people start selling tickets, I'll expect much more in safety.
Incorrect; three justices (Scalia, Renquist, and Thomas) stated that we should not consider foreign mores. The other dissenter, Justice O'Connor, believed that there was insufficient evidence of a moral consensus.
Since reiser4 is in beta, I doubt it will be in the mainstream kernel particularly soon. It's going to be tough to use experimental filesystems without using experimental patches. I don't think anyone sane is storing important data on reiser4 partitions without doing extensive backups.
Re:When will they update the firmware for old iPod
on
Apple Updates iPod
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· Score: 1
You're misunderstanding what people are asking for. Everybody knows that the old ipods can shuffle, it's just a pain to turn it on or off. If I'm playing my "Driving" playlist, I want it shuffled, but if I'm playing some random song I want it off. Most of the other settings I never change, but the shuffle setting I change repeatedly.
As far as I know the "Shuffle Songs" at the top level of the menu does not "shuffle the whole content of the ipod"; it merely turns the shuffle setting on or off without the annoyance of dipping into the options menu.
That's irrelevant of course, since the issue is not whether rootkits can be written, but how easy it is to get them installed on an unsuspecting machine.
This is veering rapidly offtopic, and I didn't really mean to go into this much depth or assert a general principle. The main thrust of my post was to reject the assertion that evolution is a random process; the rest was mostly an afterthought. I'll try to address your questions a little though.
Many religious people (not all) believe in some kind of dualism, where what we think of as the "physical world" is only part of reality, and supernatural entities exist. This creates a structure where events in the physical world have no moral relevance, but damage to these supernatural entities does.
Atheists in general believe that there are no supernatural entities. It's harder to figure out what morality should be this way, since there is no clear distinction when everything is made up of the same stuff.
As for the question of why you should care about an organism's pain if there is not a supernatural entity in pain, there are a large number of answers to that, so I'm not surprised you haven't found consistency. Some ignore the "should" aspect and tell you that you care because you evolved that way. Others will point out that it is generally profitable for you; society works better when people care.
Personally I don't see what the difference is between a supernatural soul and a natural one. In other words, we can all agree on the experience of consciousness, and we can call that a "soul" even if it exists only in the physical world.
Returning to the original discussion: we've barely started studying the brain in any serious way, but it seems clear that consciousness, if it is a physical phenomenon, is largely based there. We can be almost sure that it is not based in the DNA, and that consciousness, or a soul if you like, is not present in an embryo. From this perspective an embryo simply has no soul and can be treated as a mere physical object.
But most importantly -- evolution is not a random process!
Evolution is not a random process. Randomness is involved, but the foundation is natural selection. Natural selection is not a random process; the decision is made by the natural world. The natural world is an artifact of divinity almost by definition.
The other part of the question is harder to answer, but I'll give it a shot. The electric pulse of lightning has little meaning other than "something happened". Inside a CPU, it means something higher; it might be the right or wrong answer to a question. That comes from the complexity of a CPU. Inside a developed human brain, an electrical pulse has an even higher meaning like pain or pleasure.
That's a completely simplistic answer but there has been lots of thought about this. You will find relatively few atheists or agnostics who do not believe in right and wrong, though, so obviously people are able to come to terms with that.
Technically all he said was that you don't have to be religious to find it offensive. This is as obvious as it is meaningless -- I know people who find mushrooms offensive. The proper flamebait response is "you don't have to be religious, but you do have to be stupid."
Before we start a flamewar we should be sure to use good kindling, right?
It has to have aliens to be scifi? You haven't read a lot of Asimov, have you? Maybe some Heinlein? You're going on about stupid kids and your idea of classic science fiction is Star Trek?
A single 100 watt light bulb run for a year is 876 kilowatt-hours, or 3 Gigajoules. So while your numerical facts are correct, your suggestion that 36 Gigajoules is a lot of power to use in a year seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how much energy a joule is.
The lack of media coverage is just because nothing new is happening. The event has happened, and now the affected areas are entering a long rebuilding process. We're still helping them. It's just not a new story anymore. There's a reason it's called the news.
Slashdot Mirror
"Slashdotters" is not a political party. The editors just post what sounds interesting, and people who comment in the "Games" section tend to have different views from people who comment in "Your Rights Online". Get over it already.
My parents got a Mac Mini after years on the PC. They needed a new keyboard and mouse because they had PS/2 stuff, so I got them a Microsoft keyboard and a Microsoft optical mouse. The irony is delicious.
I don't think you've been trolled, it's just a really broken program. The problems with it have nothing to do with exceptions though. First, he used argv[0], which everyone knows is the command itself, so the script opens itself. Second, we need a comma after "print line" so that the print command doesn't print a newline after each line, which already contains a newline.
Here's a simpler program:
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
print open(sys.argv[1]).read()
Where exceptions come into play is what happens if the open(), read(), or print statements fail, since all that is possible.
Here in Texas, where indeed the law does not allow for a sentence of "life without parole", our legislators considered such a bill last year.
It was rejected on the basis that it would weaken the death penalty. See, executions are quite popular around these parts.
The irony of it is that in light of the recent Supreme Court decision that you can't kill criminals who committed their crimes before they turned 18, a number of death row inmates here could now one day get parole, despite having been originally sentenced to death.
We've got a GREAT legislature here in Texas.
P.S. - I agree with the GP; however, I wasn't commenting on my personal views (which are, in fact, that the purpose of our judicial system is prevention, not retribution).
Yeah, I know. I didn't mean to suggest that you didn't. It's just that I'm a moral absolutist, and so I consider the prevention vs. retribution thing to BE a fact, pretty much. I think it's about as clearly shown as the phlogiston thing, or the abiogenesis thing, and I'm comfortable saying so. Hopefully one day everybody will agree with me, but I'm not holding my breath.
Alas, since the death penalty is irreversible, we are naturally forced to be really certain before we go through with it. So we have to pay a lawyer to represent the guy, and we have to pay judges to decide his fate over and over again, etc. Upshot is it ends up costing more than locking them in the cage for 40 years.
Since it doesn't prevent crime, remind me again who the winners are?
I didn't say that believing in retribution instead of/more than prevention is an invalid concept
You should; it's about time that people did. In any case, I will.
Retribution is completely irrational. Morally speaking, it serves only to degrade the victim as well as the perpetrator. The thirst for barbarism runs deep, and everyone is eager for an excuse, so they suggest that someone else's barbarism gives us the right to be barbaric ourselves.
It does not. Barbarism makes our souls smaller and our lives lesser. It's time to stop.
The rules to go are very clean if stated cleanly; see http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/go.html
Sometimes people who have played only a game or two think that ko is an exception, but this is a misconception; in advanced strategy it is a fundamental rule that is considered in almost every important move.
Calling Pente a "Go variant" is like calling checkers a chess variant. The play equipment is sort of similar but that is as far as it, er, goes.
First we lost "alright" vs "all right", and then we lost "begs the question" vs "raises the question". We are NOT losing "it's" vs "its", and we are NOT losing "lose" vs "loose". That's just going too far.
You need to realize that my first paragraph does not say that space travel and skydiving have relevance to each other; if you read the rest of the post, you'll see that it simply sets up the next sentence (space travel is hard) and gives a statistical base for the discussion of space risks.
You should probably go back and read my previous post, where I said that what's being flown today isn't safe for passenger use. I'm not claiming that SS1 is safe. I haven't seen anyone claiming that. For all I know somebody is, in which case they are lying or ignorant.
My claim -- which you have chosen not to address, so perhaps you agree -- is that useful ideas, including useful ideas which are safe, may come out of this kind of reckless envelope pushing. My hope is that the private and government space experiments will fuel innovation in each other, and will make all this a Good Thing(tm). I am worried though that the government program is too far ahead for there to be very much meaningful cross-pollination, though. I hope in the long term the private space industry will catch up.
Incidentally, I'm not afraid of a high-profile accident in the private space industry, especially if it's a test pilot like the SS1 pilots or this crazy millionaire guy. I don't believe that it will kill the industry -- it didn't kill aviation back in the early airplane days. Also incidentally, I agree that the Shuttle's failure rate is the best among manned space systems that have been flown that many times, but how many manned space systems HAVE been flown that many times?
By the way, one of these days you should come over to the house for a period in which I will actually be around. It's always fun talking with you.
You are right by the way, in the sense that Namesys no longer considers it to be beta. I was not aware that the project had been officially released. I should have checked the site.
Since it is a completely different filesystem than Reiser3, I'm not surprised if there is a bit of a waiting period before it's integrated into the mainline kernel. As I recall XFS had a waiting period too, though I don't know how long it was.
Of course, the risk of death from skydiving is quite a lot less than 2%, which is the historical risk of death from riding on a Space Shuttle mission. So extensive testing hasn't been shown to be effective at lowering the risk to what would be acceptable levels for something like a passenger airliner.
It seems to me that you are right that spacecraft design is Just Hard(tm); however, I think part of the reason for our failures has been putting all our development efforts in a single direction. Which we did because it was very expensive, which was partly because we had high safety standards, which we didn't meet anyway.
For that reason I see the SS1 mindset as a positive advancement. Hopefully innovation with unproven, incompletely tested designs, with some number of accidents among those willing to take extreme risks, will lead to designs that are actually safe, reliable, and reasonably inexpensive. The alternate mentality seems to have resulted in a design which is unsafe and expensive. I will admit though that the Shuttle design effort was impaired by other constraints which explain its lack of obvious safety features like crew escape. Also the shuttle is an ancient design.
It will be interesting to compare the progress in the next government-funded spacecraft design to the upcoming private designs. Probably some people will die along both lines of development. Concern about passengers is warranted, but it might be a little premature, since nobody is claiming to have a design that is safe enough for passengers yet. When they start making that claim, there will be a lot of debating to do.
It's more like the early days of aviation than Soviet Union stuff. I think the mindset you are using, the "oh no what if somebody DIES?" kind of thinking, is potentially crippling to development. With experimental aircraft like this, the test pilots are aware of the risks, and it's up to the individuals to weigh those risks. Not everything people do ought to be completely safe. Historically some people have been willing to take risks to learn the limits of our technology and what can be reasonably accomplished. The Wright Flyer wasn't flight-tested before Kitty Hawk, you know!
I'm not saying whether this risk, or the SS1 risk, are worth what is perhaps a marginal increase in human knowledge. All I'm saying is that I don't think this flight poses much of a danger to the public, and the risk to a test pilot is up to the pilot. When people start selling tickets, I'll expect much more in safety.
Incorrect; three justices (Scalia, Renquist, and Thomas) stated that we should not consider foreign mores. The other dissenter, Justice O'Connor, believed that there was insufficient evidence of a moral consensus.
Since reiser4 is in beta, I doubt it will be in the mainstream kernel particularly soon. It's going to be tough to use experimental filesystems without using experimental patches. I don't think anyone sane is storing important data on reiser4 partitions without doing extensive backups.
You're misunderstanding what people are asking for. Everybody knows that the old ipods can shuffle, it's just a pain to turn it on or off. If I'm playing my "Driving" playlist, I want it shuffled, but if I'm playing some random song I want it off. Most of the other settings I never change, but the shuffle setting I change repeatedly.
As far as I know the "Shuffle Songs" at the top level of the menu does not "shuffle the whole content of the ipod"; it merely turns the shuffle setting on or off without the annoyance of dipping into the options menu.
I'll agree that music is software when you demonstrate to me that a record player is Turing-complete.
That's irrelevant of course, since the issue is not whether rootkits can be written, but how easy it is to get them installed on an unsuspecting machine.
This is veering rapidly offtopic, and I didn't really mean to go into this much depth or assert a general principle. The main thrust of my post was to reject the assertion that evolution is a random process; the rest was mostly an afterthought. I'll try to address your questions a little though.
Many religious people (not all) believe in some kind of dualism, where what we think of as the "physical world" is only part of reality, and supernatural entities exist. This creates a structure where events in the physical world have no moral relevance, but damage to these supernatural entities does.
Atheists in general believe that there are no supernatural entities. It's harder to figure out what morality should be this way, since there is no clear distinction when everything is made up of the same stuff.
As for the question of why you should care about an organism's pain if there is not a supernatural entity in pain, there are a large number of answers to that, so I'm not surprised you haven't found consistency. Some ignore the "should" aspect and tell you that you care because you evolved that way. Others will point out that it is generally profitable for you; society works better when people care.
Personally I don't see what the difference is between a supernatural soul and a natural one. In other words, we can all agree on the experience of consciousness, and we can call that a "soul" even if it exists only in the physical world.
Returning to the original discussion: we've barely started studying the brain in any serious way, but it seems clear that consciousness, if it is a physical phenomenon, is largely based there. We can be almost sure that it is not based in the DNA, and that consciousness, or a soul if you like, is not present in an embryo. From this perspective an embryo simply has no soul and can be treated as a mere physical object.
But most importantly -- evolution is not a random process!
Evolution is not a random process. Randomness is involved, but the foundation is natural selection. Natural selection is not a random process; the decision is made by the natural world. The natural world is an artifact of divinity almost by definition.
The other part of the question is harder to answer, but I'll give it a shot. The electric pulse of lightning has little meaning other than "something happened". Inside a CPU, it means something higher; it might be the right or wrong answer to a question. That comes from the complexity of a CPU. Inside a developed human brain, an electrical pulse has an even higher meaning like pain or pleasure.
That's a completely simplistic answer but there has been lots of thought about this. You will find relatively few atheists or agnostics who do not believe in right and wrong, though, so obviously people are able to come to terms with that.
Technically all he said was that you don't have to be religious to find it offensive. This is as obvious as it is meaningless -- I know people who find mushrooms offensive. The proper flamebait response is "you don't have to be religious, but you do have to be stupid."
Before we start a flamewar we should be sure to use good kindling, right?
It has to have aliens to be scifi? You haven't read a lot of Asimov, have you? Maybe some Heinlein? You're going on about stupid kids and your idea of classic science fiction is Star Trek?
A single 100 watt light bulb run for a year is 876 kilowatt-hours, or 3 Gigajoules. So while your numerical facts are correct, your suggestion that 36 Gigajoules is a lot of power to use in a year seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how much energy a joule is.
I'm sure the reduced media coverage is why President Bush asked Congress to approve $600 million in new money for tsunami relief. That was... Wednesday: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/09/tsunami.aid/index .html
The lack of media coverage is just because nothing new is happening. The event has happened, and now the affected areas are entering a long rebuilding process. We're still helping them. It's just not a new story anymore. There's a reason it's called the news.