The general idea should still apply though. Some googling suggests the fastest bullets are about 1/3 of that speed. It's probably hard to get much faster than that, as wherever you are, the third Newton's Law still applies and it's rather crucial not to break your own arm when shooting the gun.
First, it doesn't work like that. Even without an atmosphere gravity would still make the bullet fall to the ground. To make it actually go in orbit like that, the bullet would have to reach escape velocity, which is 5 km/s on Mars. That's the heck of a gun.
Second, Mars does have an atmosphere, which would introduce extra difficulties.
Third, assuming they're on the ground, Mars isn't entirely flat and it'd almost certainly hit elevated terrain before it could make a whole loop.
And from a practical standpoint, I don't think a planet where shooting from a gun resulted in the bullet orbiting the planet until it hits something would remain habitable for very long.
It seems to mean "everything but games" at the moment.
What kind of things are art?
Well, the Mona Lisa is definitely art. But so is a big, black square. Geometric shapes also work. Scribbling a beard and moustache on the Mona Lisa is also art, if you're famous enough at least.
Of course it doesn't have to be a painting. It can be pretty much anything. An urinal, a room with a light that goes on and off, the artist's shit, wrapping the Reichstag in cloth, or apparently even a dog starving to death in an art gallery. Movies initially weren't art, but now they are.
It doesn't need to have an intention behind it, even. If you make up any random bullshit and manage to convince enough people that is art by inventing some convoluted explanation, then after you admit it's all made up nonsense everybody else will just say that you can make art without intending to.
I think Duchamp really nailed it by proving that whatever you can get an art gallery to exhibit becomes art. So there's an easy way of solving this: somebody just needs to figure a way of getting Tetris exhibited in a gallery, and problem solved.
I'm not saying that everything should run on solar either, just that its shortcomings don't make it automatically useless. People do manage to live off-grid with roof mounted solar panels, after all.
You're talking of kilowatt hours, I imagine. In that case, it'd take about 12 hours to generate that much. The amount you say you use sounds very small, and could be quite easily generated by a solar panel if you have a roof for it.
That said, I have no clue where's he's getting his number from, as that'd be one big roof.
The problem of solar or wind not being on all the time is easy to solve: during the day you use some of the water to pump water uphill, and during the night you let it flow down to generate power. Another way is molten salt storage.
The real problem with it is that it's too expensive.
My wife is telling me I shouldn't be engaging in this kind of conversation with people I don't really know on a Sunday morning.
Why?
The short version is that, if you admit that death may not be the end of the soul, a lot of assumptions about the behaviour of an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, etc., deity change. He can save the eternal souls of people who leave or are removed from this world. Which doesn't answer a lot of your questions, I'm sure.
I think an afterlife introduces more problems than it solves.
For one, I don't think it does anything to the morality of what I said in the previous post. If you watch your child cross on a red light and get hit by a car without doing anything, it still won't be considered good parenting even if you take him to Disneyland afterwards.
Also, at least in the conceptions of heaven I've heard of, whoever gets there can't possibly be you. This is because it's described as being a place of no suffering and eternal happiness.
But think of what that means. It means that every single thing that used to drive you is gone. So you like golf? In heaven you won't need it, because playing it can't possibly make you happier than you already are. If in life you strived to help people that will be gone as well, because eternal happiness can't be compatible with awareness of people's suffering. If you had family or friends remaining when you died you can't possibly care about them anymore, because worrying about them isn't being happy. If you created works of any kind, there's no point anymore. There's no way you can get a feeling of accomplishment because you're already as happy as you can be at all times.
So the way I see it, even if heaven existed, as described there's nothing to look forward to in it.
The other problem is that there is plenty evidence for personality being linked to the brain, so if you no longer have one you can hardly be yourself. For that matter, which version of you would go to heaven? As you can see from the linked article, brain tumors and damage can change people to the point of making them entirely incapable of religion.
In my way of thinking, a world that "works the way it works" is a good world. (Thinking about the first several verses of Genesis.) I don't think we disagree in substance there.
We disagree in that I think creation entails responsibility. A created world isn't automatically "good".
How so?
You make it, you're responsible for it.
Well, there is theory and there are ideals and then there is practical reality. You can be fully diligent and children can still find ways to make the world you let them live in dangerous. Even if you have enough money to remove every last danger you can recognize.
You claim the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent diety. I'm sure it shouldn't have any problem with that.
Plus not like earthquakes are a tiny thing. It's one of the biggest things that can possibly happen. And it comes with the planet, due to plate tectonics.
So, if I invite you over for a game of golf, I'm malicious or negligent?
Now, before you go getting mad at me for that, let me tell you what happened to a friend of mine. This wasn't the holes, it was the balls. He and his fiancee enjoyed playing golf. Just before their wedding date, they were playing a round at the local course and a stray ball hit her in the head. (They had to postpone the date until she recovered from the surgery. But she did survive, they did get married, and neither she nor her family held it against him.)
No, I think things like that are largely unfortunate coincidence. Though having not ever played golf I can't know for sure. For all I know there might be some sort of scheduling to try to avoid things like that.
No golf courses, either, I suppose?
No schools where the kids can get drugs from friends who make bad decisions?
Asking God to remove all dangers is really asking a lot.
No, those are human solutions. Remember you claim there is an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity. What trouble would it be for something like that to tweak the trajectory of balls in the air to ensure nobody's head is ever hit?
I think it's one of the problems of the claims of omniscience and omnipotence: any obstacles automatically become inexistent. Tracking the trajectory of every object on the planet? No problem. Tweaking what's needed to prevent freak accidents? No problem either.
With great power comes great responsibility. So with absolute power comes absolute responsibility. Your god then is either directly responsible for a ball hitting your friend's wife head, or at least negligent for having allowed it.
Very easy, that one comment is modded 0 and I completely failed to notice it existence. That in turn makes your comment look very odd. So I figured I'd say something, and see what happens.
A world in my understanding is neither good nor evil. It's neutral, because there are no deities, no creation and no intention in it. It just works the way it works, in the same way that gravity sometimes works to my advantage and sometimes may harm me.
However, if you claim that the world is created by something for you to inhabit, then it's different. The creator then is responsible for the way the world works. Just like you "create" the world your children inhabit, and it's generally considered bad parenting to leave dangerous things around.
So let's say we meet somewhere in a field. If I trip on some hole that just formed naturally there, then that's not good nor bad, it's just the way it was.
If you however go around digging holes, then invite people into the same place, then you're either being actively malicious, or at least negligent, neither of which IMO can be called good.
So I think that if the world has a creator, in order to be called good, he should have made a world devoid of tsunamis and earthquakes. Since they exist, it indicates that the creator if any is not good, but either malicious or negligent.
print "Hi, I'm $name, I'm weird. Here's a bunch of geeky stuff to prove it\n";
It's just a way of writing the sentence without hardcoding a name in it. Perfectly normal code. In this case the value is intentionally omitted, because I don't feel like providing it.
Which is why these days I pretty much introduce myself with "Hi, I'm $name, I'm weird. Here's a bunch of geeky stuff to prove it".
Some people get weirded out, which is exactly the intention. It stops things early and removes the need to worry later. Life's short, I don't need to spend a part worrying about this nonsense.
She very quickly showed great concern and assured me that I wasn't a geek and I shouldn't say that about myself. In her mind, a "geek" was an insult.
Yep, ran into somebody with that kind of opinion. We don't talk anymore. No regrets about that.
I can only see this working in LAN settings though.
The problem isn't with the video, it's the enormous CPU power required. Several very high end machines allocated to a single customer easily for hours, with all customers wanting to use it at about the same time, and at the price of a gaming service? I don't think it would work out at all.
This would be more useful for some sort of corporate/scientific visualization purpose maybe. For home usage I imagine video cards will get there fairly soon, especially if they make ones with acceleration for raytracing.
All you need is a 10Gbps LAN. It's expensive, but it can be had today. It's most likely doable over plain gigabit with compression or a reduced framerate.
Gigabit is already can be had cheaply enough for home usage. 10G will get there eventually, certainly in a lot less than my remaining lifetime.
A tyrant in control of a country is going to be horrible no matter their religion or lack of it. The problem with religion isn't one single guy gaining leadership. One crazy guy is one crazy guy. Most people living in a country can recognize they're living under a tyrant. They also understand that if the tyrant enforces some crazy rule, that rule is of the tyrant's own making, and that one the tyrant is gone the rule can be ignored.
The problem of religion is different, it's that it can convince the population that a bunch of entirely arbitrary rules are sacred and inviolable, ruler or not. Getting rid of a Stalin will eventually make things get better. Getting rid of the ruler in a fundamentalist state won't change so much, because the crazy set of rules that says things like that women are inferior and a kind of property doesn't go away with the ruler. In fact people keep on enforcing that all by themselves, and will probably demand their next ruler to be of the same persuasion.
If I walked up to a guy and said "Nice shoes, wanna fuck?" -- there's a chance he'll say yes, despite this being one of the worst ways to go about it
Were somebody to try that on me, I'd start looking for the first convenient excuse to get away as quickly as possible, or just plain run like hell.
That's because I'd start wondering, why would somebody do that?
One reason I can imagine is "look at me, I'm shameless enough to go and ask that to a random guy", which is done for the sake of amusing or impressing somebody else, and so almost certainly not a serious offer.
The other is that the one asking is crazy, high or drunk. Which very likely leads to problems later, because that would be statutory rape.
A much less likely one is some kind of drama, like "I'm angry at my boyfriend, so I'm going to screw with the first guy I come across". I highly suspect that this is inexistent in reality and only exists in bad movies.
Either way I can't imagine a single reason for asking such a question that wouldn't lead to complications later. And IMO, if you ever ask it and somebody replies affirmatively, run like hell, because you just found somebody without the slightest bit of common sense.
Not even that. If you look at the "facts" section you can see it's a 60W bulb that's currently working at 4W. Which would explain why it's lasting so long and why it looks more like a space heater than a light bulb.
To make a lightbulb that actually produces an useful amount of light you have to get the filament get white hot. And when you do that it starts evaporating, which is why eventually it burns out.
If you tone things down until it glows a dull red and barely produces more light than a candle, then yeah, it'll last forever. But it won't be very useful.
But those few thousands are precisely those that get asked by their friends and families to recommend them a laptop, what console to buy for their kids and so on. I must have done that kind of thing for at least 20 people, and I generally try to avoid it if possible.
But piss me off and I get a lot more dedicated. I recently went shopping with somebody to make sure that their new TV wouldn't be a Sony one.
Actually, in United Airlines Flight 232 the conclusion was that the pilots managing to control the plane like that was highly exceptional, and that "landing under these conditions was stated to be 'a highly random event'". And after that the autopilot has been taught how to do it.
I've tried the British Airways flight sim, and the switch between autopilot and human is highly noticeable. The way the autopilot flies is silky smooth. I seemed like a drunken monkey in comparison.
Now, the autopilot can only do what it's programmed for. But when it's programmed for it, it can do it way better than a human can. It reacts much faster, senses more things and more precisely than the pilot, and can do everything at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, you're right.
The general idea should still apply though. Some googling suggests the fastest bullets are about 1/3 of that speed. It's probably hard to get much faster than that, as wherever you are, the third Newton's Law still applies and it's rather crucial not to break your own arm when shooting the gun.
No clue, but it can't work as described.
First, it doesn't work like that. Even without an atmosphere gravity would still make the bullet fall to the ground. To make it actually go in orbit like that, the bullet would have to reach escape velocity, which is 5 km/s on Mars. That's the heck of a gun.
Second, Mars does have an atmosphere, which would introduce extra difficulties.
Third, assuming they're on the ground, Mars isn't entirely flat and it'd almost certainly hit elevated terrain before it could make a whole loop.
And from a practical standpoint, I don't think a planet where shooting from a gun resulted in the bullet orbiting the planet until it hits something would remain habitable for very long.
It seems to mean "everything but games" at the moment.
What kind of things are art?
Well, the Mona Lisa is definitely art. But so is a big, black square. Geometric shapes also work. Scribbling a beard and moustache on the Mona Lisa is also art, if you're famous enough at least.
Of course it doesn't have to be a painting. It can be pretty much anything. An urinal, a room with a light that goes on and off, the artist's shit, wrapping the Reichstag in cloth, or apparently even a dog starving to death in an art gallery. Movies initially weren't art, but now they are.
It doesn't need to have an intention behind it, even. If you make up any random bullshit and manage to convince enough people that is art by inventing some convoluted explanation, then after you admit it's all made up nonsense everybody else will just say that you can make art without intending to.
I think Duchamp really nailed it by proving that whatever you can get an art gallery to exhibit becomes art. So there's an easy way of solving this: somebody just needs to figure a way of getting Tetris exhibited in a gallery, and problem solved.
I'm not saying that everything should run on solar either, just that its shortcomings don't make it automatically useless. People do manage to live off-grid with roof mounted solar panels, after all.
You're talking of kilowatt hours, I imagine. In that case, it'd take about 12 hours to generate that much. The amount you say you use sounds very small, and could be quite easily generated by a solar panel if you have a roof for it.
That said, I have no clue where's he's getting his number from, as that'd be one big roof.
The problem of solar or wind not being on all the time is easy to solve: during the day you use some of the water to pump water uphill, and during the night you let it flow down to generate power. Another way is molten salt storage.
The real problem with it is that it's too expensive.
It worked just fine. But even when scrammed it keeps producing some heat, and still needs coolant.
Why?
I think an afterlife introduces more problems than it solves.
For one, I don't think it does anything to the morality of what I said in the previous post. If you watch your child cross on a red light and get hit by a car without doing anything, it still won't be considered good parenting even if you take him to Disneyland afterwards.
Also, at least in the conceptions of heaven I've heard of, whoever gets there can't possibly be you. This is because it's described as being a place of no suffering and eternal happiness.
But think of what that means. It means that every single thing that used to drive you is gone. So you like golf? In heaven you won't need it, because playing it can't possibly make you happier than you already are. If in life you strived to help people that will be gone as well, because eternal happiness can't be compatible with awareness of people's suffering. If you had family or friends remaining when you died you can't possibly care about them anymore, because worrying about them isn't being happy. If you created works of any kind, there's no point anymore. There's no way you can get a feeling of accomplishment because you're already as happy as you can be at all times.
So the way I see it, even if heaven existed, as described there's nothing to look forward to in it.
The other problem is that there is plenty evidence for personality being linked to the brain, so if you no longer have one you can hardly be yourself. For that matter, which version of you would go to heaven? As you can see from the linked article, brain tumors and damage can change people to the point of making them entirely incapable of religion.
We disagree in that I think creation entails responsibility. A created world isn't automatically "good".
You make it, you're responsible for it.
You claim the existence of an omniscient and omnipotent diety. I'm sure it shouldn't have any problem with that.
Plus not like earthquakes are a tiny thing. It's one of the biggest things that can possibly happen. And it comes with the planet, due to plate tectonics.
No, I think things like that are largely unfortunate coincidence. Though having not ever played golf I can't know for sure. For all I know there might be some sort of scheduling to try to avoid things like that.
No, those are human solutions. Remember you claim there is an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity. What trouble would it be for something like that to tweak the trajectory of balls in the air to ensure nobody's head is ever hit?
I think it's one of the problems of the claims of omniscience and omnipotence: any obstacles automatically become inexistent. Tracking the trajectory of every object on the planet? No problem. Tweaking what's needed to prevent freak accidents? No problem either.
With great power comes great responsibility. So with absolute power comes absolute responsibility. Your god then is either directly responsible for a ball hitting your friend's wife head, or at least negligent for having allowed it.
Very easy, that one comment is modded 0 and I completely failed to notice it existence. That in turn makes your comment look very odd. So I figured I'd say something, and see what happens.
A world in my understanding is neither good nor evil. It's neutral, because there are no deities, no creation and no intention in it. It just works the way it works, in the same way that gravity sometimes works to my advantage and sometimes may harm me.
However, if you claim that the world is created by something for you to inhabit, then it's different. The creator then is responsible for the way the world works. Just like you "create" the world your children inhabit, and it's generally considered bad parenting to leave dangerous things around.
So let's say we meet somewhere in a field. If I trip on some hole that just formed naturally there, then that's not good nor bad, it's just the way it was.
If you however go around digging holes, then invite people into the same place, then you're either being actively malicious, or at least negligent, neither of which IMO can be called good.
So I think that if the world has a creator, in order to be called good, he should have made a world devoid of tsunamis and earthquakes. Since they exist, it indicates that the creator if any is not good, but either malicious or negligent.
Well, and whose fault is that? I thought you had elections
What do you mean "what"?
It's just a way of writing the sentence without hardcoding a name in it. Perfectly normal code. In this case the value is intentionally omitted, because I don't feel like providing it.
I do intend to mean a variable. It's perfectly normal to do something like this in say, Perl, even if the variable won't change during execution.
Which is why these days I pretty much introduce myself with "Hi, I'm $name, I'm weird. Here's a bunch of geeky stuff to prove it".
Some people get weirded out, which is exactly the intention. It stops things early and removes the need to worry later. Life's short, I don't need to spend a part worrying about this nonsense.
Yep, ran into somebody with that kind of opinion. We don't talk anymore. No regrets about that.
Yes
Yes, if you want to make the claim that your deity is a good one.
Here's an useful suggestion instead:
Take that time you'd spend praying and work overtime. Donate the extra money to whoever needs it.
I can only see this working in LAN settings though.
The problem isn't with the video, it's the enormous CPU power required. Several very high end machines allocated to a single customer easily for hours, with all customers wanting to use it at about the same time, and at the price of a gaming service? I don't think it would work out at all.
This would be more useful for some sort of corporate/scientific visualization purpose maybe. For home usage I imagine video cards will get there fairly soon, especially if they make ones with acceleration for raytracing.
You're joking, right?
All you need is a 10Gbps LAN. It's expensive, but it can be had today. It's most likely doable over plain gigabit with compression or a reduced framerate.
Gigabit is already can be had cheaply enough for home usage. 10G will get there eventually, certainly in a lot less than my remaining lifetime.
You're looking at the wrong thing, IMO.
A tyrant in control of a country is going to be horrible no matter their religion or lack of it. The problem with religion isn't one single guy gaining leadership. One crazy guy is one crazy guy. Most people living in a country can recognize they're living under a tyrant. They also understand that if the tyrant enforces some crazy rule, that rule is of the tyrant's own making, and that one the tyrant is gone the rule can be ignored.
The problem of religion is different, it's that it can convince the population that a bunch of entirely arbitrary rules are sacred and inviolable, ruler or not. Getting rid of a Stalin will eventually make things get better. Getting rid of the ruler in a fundamentalist state won't change so much, because the crazy set of rules that says things like that women are inferior and a kind of property doesn't go away with the ruler. In fact people keep on enforcing that all by themselves, and will probably demand their next ruler to be of the same persuasion.
Were somebody to try that on me, I'd start looking for the first convenient excuse to get away as quickly as possible, or just plain run like hell.
That's because I'd start wondering, why would somebody do that?
One reason I can imagine is "look at me, I'm shameless enough to go and ask that to a random guy", which is done for the sake of amusing or impressing somebody else, and so almost certainly not a serious offer.
The other is that the one asking is crazy, high or drunk. Which very likely leads to problems later, because that would be statutory rape.
A much less likely one is some kind of drama, like "I'm angry at my boyfriend, so I'm going to screw with the first guy I come across". I highly suspect that this is inexistent in reality and only exists in bad movies.
Either way I can't imagine a single reason for asking such a question that wouldn't lead to complications later. And IMO, if you ever ask it and somebody replies affirmatively, run like hell, because you just found somebody without the slightest bit of common sense.
Not even that. If you look at the "facts" section you can see it's a 60W bulb that's currently working at 4W. Which would explain why it's lasting so long and why it looks more like a space heater than a light bulb.
Yeah, but it barely glows.
To make a lightbulb that actually produces an useful amount of light you have to get the filament get white hot. And when you do that it starts evaporating, which is why eventually it burns out.
If you tone things down until it glows a dull red and barely produces more light than a candle, then yeah, it'll last forever. But it won't be very useful.
But those few thousands are precisely those that get asked by their friends and families to recommend them a laptop, what console to buy for their kids and so on. I must have done that kind of thing for at least 20 people, and I generally try to avoid it if possible.
But piss me off and I get a lot more dedicated. I recently went shopping with somebody to make sure that their new TV wouldn't be a Sony one.
That's a very exceptional case.
Actually, in United Airlines Flight 232 the conclusion was that the pilots managing to control the plane like that was highly exceptional, and that "landing under these conditions was stated to be 'a highly random event'". And after that the autopilot has been taught how to do it.
I've tried the British Airways flight sim, and the switch between autopilot and human is highly noticeable. The way the autopilot flies is silky smooth. I seemed like a drunken monkey in comparison.
Now, the autopilot can only do what it's programmed for. But when it's programmed for it, it can do it way better than a human can. It reacts much faster, senses more things and more precisely than the pilot, and can do everything at once.