It got worse when they went into their new beta. In thread listing mode, I can't find a way to jump to the next ten posts without scrolling through the left-hand pane to find the right one to click on.
You'd be right if they were talking about an error correcting code designed to repair damage to a packet in transit.
They're actually talking about erasure correction, where each symbol is a packet as a whole. In a very simple form, you send a packet sequence like this:
A B (A^B) C D (C^D)
So if you lose packet A, you reconstruct it from (B ^ (A^B)) = A. This simple scheme increases the number of packets sent by 50%, but allows you to tolerate a 33% loss, presuming you don't lose bursts of packets. There are more sophisticated schemes, of course, and there are various tradeoffs of overhead versus robustness.
Although a user could choose not to enable Bluetooth encryption for a keyboard, the specification covering keyboards (HID) mandates that encryption be supported.
It's also easier to advocate that position when you have a financial and psychological investment in a company whose system software dominance is most likely to benefit from applications whose develoepers choose to only support a single platform.
I see the possible attempt at an omnipotence paradox there, but that wasn't where I was trying to go.
I infer you side more with option 1, except that it's logical necessity rather than impotence that "constrains" God, which is to say it's no constraint at all.
Let me try another approach, then. The question I'm about to ask is specifically -not- about salvation or about works vs faith. At least, I don't think it is;)
Suppose someone were to try to figure out Good from first principles and deep thought, and happened to get it right. She's not doing what she does because she believes it's what God wants, but because she believes it's the right thing to do for some other reason. They just happen to coincide. Is she still doing Good?
Or as a parable... Let's say we agree that not driving at unsafe speeds is Good. Most places, there is a statutory speed limit, set by a lawgiver. There is also an internal speed limit in any driver, based on risk assessments. The two may or may not coincide. A driver might even be in compliance with the statutory speed limit without knowing about the lawgiver's take on the situation; maybe he was checking his mirror when the sign came by or something. Assuming the driver is capable of making a correct assessment, he might be doing Good because the lawgiver said so, or because he got it right coincidentally. The lawgiver might even have set the speed limit artifically low to raise money from speeding tickets. Infalliable, benevolent God wouldn't do such a thing, though, so the lawgiver's speed limit in that case is by definition the one that accurately reflects the safe speed. So, is the driver who is ignorant of the law but gets it right anyway still doing "Good"?
But instead, let's say the speed limit sign says 30, but it sure looks like you could do 45 without hurting anyone. Sure, if you did 60, you'd get places faster, but that would be reckless, so you wouldn't do it. Would you follow the sign anyway? What if you'd seen all kinds of traffic studies showing that the road could bear 45. What if you'd never even seen a police car before? What if there were a bunch of different speed limit signs with different limits printed, and some people followed each of them, and you'd tried your damnest to talk to someone on the legislature, but so far as you can tell, it's just a bunch of legislative assistants and citizens in an otherwise empty building.
If good/bad is defined as "what is good for the species" then I can ask "why should I care about the species." Only God has standing to enforce a moral standard.
I ask this genuinely, not flippantly: If good/bad is defined as "What God says is good/bad", then I ask "why should I care about what God says?"
Do you see God's moral code as arbitrary (in the sense that he might have decided that it's good to allow everybody to commit murder once on their 60th birthday, he just didn't) or neccesary (in the sense that the 60th birthday murder rule obviously doesn't lead to anything "good" in some transcendent sense, so there's no way God would have decided on that).
The reason I ask this question is that if God's moral code is arbitrary, it makes sense to ask why we should follow it, other than fear of punishment. If God's moral code is necessary, then it seems as though humans could eventually arive at it through enough thought and experience and social experimentation, in which case the advantage of following God's code is that we wouldn't have to hang around being assholes to each other for a few tens of thousands of years until we got it right.
True perhaps, but not in any way relevant to my argument.
DD> "No, because MPG in a hybrid car is in addition to whatever electricity is consumed (which also must be generated somehow"
G> "Hybrids generate their own electricity from gas."
C> "Not true! Hybrids generate their own electricity by running a generator instead of using brake pads to slow down the car"
AM> (paraphrase) "The energy used to make the electricity is available because gas is burned (except for the unimportant starting altitude business), thus D is wrong"
C> "Listing indirect power sources doesnt really add to the debate"
I was refuting the claim that MPG doesn't accurately reflect energy used by a hybrid, by pointing out that even the regenerative braking energy is a result of having burned gas. Thus, MPG accurately reflects energy consumption.
Where do you think the energy to move the car fast enough to need braking comes from in the first place? If your answer includes gravity, account for the energy needed to get it up the hill. It's all attributable to the gasoline in the end, except for the "free" potential energy you get if they build the things at high altitude and you drive them around at low altitude. Even then you only get that the once.
Sure, it's better to recapture that energy than to burn it as heat in the brake pads, but it's still accounted for by gallons burned; saving the energy just means you burn fewer gallons later because you don't have to charge the battery as much as you would have if you just wasted the energy.
I generally work with audio, so this is getting outside my area of expertise, but I don't think you get arbitrary sharp discontinuities in the chunks of data that are grouped together when transformed, unlke with a block-DCT.
More subtly, and along the lines of why I created the scenario, the question is "Could a real atheist, acting rationally, choose not to throw acid in that situation?" Based on atheists to whom I've posed the question, the answer is generally along the lines of "of course I wouldn't do that!" Jumping ahead to your closing remarks, another related question is "Is belief in god the only reason not to always pursue one's own self-interest at the expense of others?"
Social interaction as a universalizer assumes other people find out what you've done. My thought experiment was obviously an attempt to take that to an extreme, but I think we could agree that there are at least some real situations in which one's reputation is not affected by an immoral act because information about it is never disseminated. I'm most interested in moral issues stemming from wrongs which are likely to go unpunished by society.
What I am getting at is that there is no a priori reason that we should always act as if our own personal interests are always more important than the interests of others.
Is there an a priori reason not to? In my own case, my reason not to throw the acid is that I empathize with the potential victim. I feel a deep-seated revulsion to causing that kind of agony for no reason, and I'm glad that I do. Only a sociopath would want to be a sociopath. Maybe it is just social conditioning or something pre-programmed by whatever process created us.
You sorta have it backward. The DCT spreads information across the entire block, whereas the high-frequency components in the wavelet transform are localized in position. It just looks the other way around because the DCT block is so small.
Good point. Even if you don't believe the act is wrong, some sort of instinctual reaction might kick in.
Feeling bad about it later on is a form of punishment. If that's the real motivation for not burning the man, then "morality" is still dependent on fear of punishment.
Suppose the situation were changed so that you would not feel remorse for your actions. Perhaps your memory is erased, perhaps you're given the choice to undergo brainwashing to habituate you to committing violence, or a drug to supprse remorse. Is there still a rational reason to refrain from burning the innocent person?
A man is about to be put to death unjustly. You cannot stop it. Someone offers you $1000 to burn him with acid causing him severe pain shortly before he dies. You don't really need the money, but you could use it to buy some of your favorite luxury. You will never be punished for this action. Nobody who knows you take this action will tell anyone else, and you will never have to interact with them ever again.
In short, would you inflict severe pain on an innocent person for finacial gain, knowing that you will never be punished, nor treated differently from society?
Abset fear of metaphysical retribution, I can't think of a rational reason not to do it, but I still wouldn't.
"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being." -- Einstein
Plus, a big advantage with Bluetooth is you don't have to worry about getting too close to someone else who's running on the same channel and periodically taking over their computer, or having them take over yours.
Slashdot Mirror
http://sundown.greyledge.net/pages/images/Smoky_Th e_Nanobot.jpg
It got worse when they went into their new beta. In thread listing mode, I can't find a way to jump to the next ten posts without scrolling through the left-hand pane to find the right one to click on.
That's not an inherent problem with streaming audio over Bluetooth, it depends on the implementation.
If you work at it, it's possible to get the analog to analog total system latency below 20ms.
You'd be right if they were talking about an error correcting code designed to repair damage to a packet in transit.
They're actually talking about erasure correction, where each symbol is a packet as a whole. In a very simple form, you send a packet sequence like this:
A B (A^B) C D (C^D)
So if you lose packet A, you reconstruct it from (B ^ (A^B)) = A. This simple scheme increases the number of packets sent by 50%, but allows you to tolerate a 33% loss, presuming you don't lose bursts of packets. There are more sophisticated schemes, of course, and there are various tradeoffs of overhead versus robustness.
Although a user could choose not to enable Bluetooth encryption for a keyboard, the specification covering keyboards (HID) mandates that encryption be supported.
A class 1 Bluetooth radio is rated for 100m.
No centeralized, explicitly administered XXXX server needed, because everything is an easily configured, distributed XXXX server.
It's also easier to advocate that position when you have a financial and psychological investment in a company whose system software dominance is most likely to benefit from applications whose develoepers choose to only support a single platform.
TI C54xx DSP by any chance?
I see the possible attempt at an omnipotence paradox there, but that wasn't where I was trying to go.
;)
I infer you side more with option 1, except that it's logical necessity rather than impotence that "constrains" God, which is to say it's no constraint at all.
Let me try another approach, then. The question I'm about to ask is specifically -not- about salvation or about works vs faith. At least, I don't think it is
Suppose someone were to try to figure out Good from first principles and deep thought, and happened to get it right. She's not doing what she does because she believes it's what God wants, but because she believes it's the right thing to do for some other reason. They just happen to coincide. Is she still doing Good?
Or as a parable... Let's say we agree that not driving at unsafe speeds is Good. Most places, there is a statutory speed limit, set by a lawgiver. There is also an internal speed limit in any driver, based on risk assessments. The two may or may not coincide. A driver might even be in compliance with the statutory speed limit without knowing about the lawgiver's take on the situation; maybe he was checking his mirror when the sign came by or something. Assuming the driver is capable of making a correct assessment, he might be doing Good because the lawgiver said so, or because he got it right coincidentally. The lawgiver might even have set the speed limit artifically low to raise money from speeding tickets. Infalliable, benevolent God wouldn't do such a thing, though, so the lawgiver's speed limit in that case is by definition the one that accurately reflects the safe speed. So, is the driver who is ignorant of the law but gets it right anyway still doing "Good"?
But instead, let's say the speed limit sign says 30, but it sure looks like you could do 45 without hurting anyone. Sure, if you did 60, you'd get places faster, but that would be reckless, so you wouldn't do it. Would you follow the sign anyway? What if you'd seen all kinds of traffic studies showing that the road could bear 45. What if you'd never even seen a police car before? What if there were a bunch of different speed limit signs with different limits printed, and some people followed each of them, and you'd tried your damnest to talk to someone on the legislature, but so far as you can tell, it's just a bunch of legislative assistants and citizens in an otherwise empty building.
I ask this genuinely, not flippantly: If good/bad is defined as "What God says is good/bad", then I ask "why should I care about what God says?"
Do you see God's moral code as arbitrary (in the sense that he might have decided that it's good to allow everybody to commit murder once on their 60th birthday, he just didn't) or neccesary (in the sense that the 60th birthday murder rule obviously doesn't lead to anything "good" in some transcendent sense, so there's no way God would have decided on that).
The reason I ask this question is that if God's moral code is arbitrary, it makes sense to ask why we should follow it, other than fear of punishment. If God's moral code is necessary, then it seems as though humans could eventually arive at it through enough thought and experience and social experimentation, in which case the advantage of following God's code is that we wouldn't have to hang around being assholes to each other for a few tens of thousands of years until we got it right.
True perhaps, but not in any way relevant to my argument.
DD> "No, because MPG in a hybrid car is in addition to whatever electricity is consumed (which also must be generated somehow"
G> "Hybrids generate their own electricity from gas."
C> "Not true! Hybrids generate their own electricity by running a generator instead of using brake pads to slow down the car"
AM> (paraphrase) "The energy used to make the electricity is available because gas is burned (except for the unimportant starting altitude business), thus D is wrong"
C> "Listing indirect power sources doesnt really add to the debate"
I was refuting the claim that MPG doesn't accurately reflect energy used by a hybrid, by pointing out that even the regenerative braking energy is a result of having burned gas. Thus, MPG accurately reflects energy consumption.
Where do you think the energy to move the car fast enough to need braking comes from in the first place? If your answer includes gravity, account for the energy needed to get it up the hill. It's all attributable to the gasoline in the end, except for the "free" potential energy you get if they build the things at high altitude and you drive them around at low altitude. Even then you only get that the once.
Sure, it's better to recapture that energy than to burn it as heat in the brake pads, but it's still accounted for by gallons burned; saving the energy just means you burn fewer gallons later because you don't have to charge the battery as much as you would have if you just wasted the energy.
I generally work with audio, so this is getting outside my area of expertise, but I don't think you get arbitrary sharp discontinuities in the chunks of data that are grouped together when transformed, unlke with a block-DCT.
Social interaction as a universalizer assumes other people find out what you've done. My thought experiment was obviously an attempt to take that to an extreme, but I think we could agree that there are at least some real situations in which one's reputation is not affected by an immoral act because information about it is never disseminated. I'm most interested in moral issues stemming from wrongs which are likely to go unpunished by society.
What I am getting at is that there is no a priori reason that we should always act as if our own personal interests are always more important than the interests of others.
Is there an a priori reason not to? In my own case, my reason not to throw the acid is that I empathize with the potential victim. I feel a deep-seated revulsion to causing that kind of agony for no reason, and I'm glad that I do. Only a sociopath would want to be a sociopath. Maybe it is just social conditioning or something pre-programmed by whatever process created us.
You sorta have it backward. The DCT spreads information across the entire block, whereas the high-frequency components in the wavelet transform are localized in position. It just looks the other way around because the DCT block is so small.
Good point. Even if you don't believe the act is wrong, some sort of instinctual reaction might kick in.
Feeling bad about it later on is a form of punishment. If that's the real motivation for not burning the man, then "morality" is still dependent on fear of punishment.
Suppose the situation were changed so that you would not feel remorse for your actions. Perhaps your memory is erased, perhaps you're given the choice to undergo brainwashing to habituate you to committing violence, or a drug to supprse remorse. Is there still a rational reason to refrain from burning the innocent person?
A man is about to be put to death unjustly. You cannot stop it. Someone offers you $1000 to burn him with acid causing him severe pain shortly before he dies. You don't really need the money, but you could use it to buy some of your favorite luxury. You will never be punished for this action. Nobody who knows you take this action will tell anyone else, and you will never have to interact with them ever again.
In short, would you inflict severe pain on an innocent person for finacial gain, knowing that you will never be punished, nor treated differently from society?
Abset fear of metaphysical retribution, I can't think of a rational reason not to do it, but I still wouldn't.
Would you? If not, why not?
If I were in that situation and there were something I could say to indemnify myself, I'd be shouting it at the top of my lungs.
"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being." -- Einstein
An even better solution is
(define (sum a b)
(* (+ a b) (/ (+ 1 (- b a)) 2))
)
Plus, a big advantage with Bluetooth is you don't have to worry about getting too close to someone else who's running on the same channel and periodically taking over their computer, or having them take over yours.
The Nazis systematically murdered millions of people in death camps.
You just tried to correct someone about grammar.
Furthermore, you got it wrong:
disconnect: n. A lack of connection; a disparity: "There is a cosmic disconnect between what the voters want and what the party of the corporate interests can give them" (Bob Herbert).
The "Is it good or is it whack?" meme. What is it all about?
Is it good, or is it whack?
Turkeys aren't generally known for being all that bright, I'll grant you, but I didn't think they were usually considered plants.