And then the taliban uses their favorite tactic : place the jammers in a kindergarten with journalists in the next building, camera's ready. Obviously the cameras won't flash when the journalists help the muslims kick a few more children directly into the weaponized zone, but they will flash after a rocket strikes.
So avoiding the issue altogether, if you can, is probably a better idea.
No one claims the planet is dying. It may become quite uncomfortable for humans, though.
Actually, since the average temperature of the earth is 15 degrees celcius, and the optimum for humans (and animal life in general) is 21 degrees celcius, it will be more comfortable. Also, if history of civilization, specifically the period immediately preceding the little ice age, is considered, there will be a LOT more arable and livable land accessible to humans (Greenland, Siberia, Canada*, for one) with a 6 degree rise in temperature.
Even if, yes, a rise like this will mean moving a number of large cities. Also, the change will have winners and losers (generally the winners will be more northern or more southern, and the losers more situated around the equator, but that's at best a very inaccurate rule of thumb).
* yes, global warming will mean Canada will become a livable place, even when you're more than 10 km from the US border.
Also, we may not understand exactly what effect was responsible for creating the sahara, it appears to have been a global cooling. Perhaps (we don't know) global warming will reverse this.
Since when do we know that ? Sure we know what we see on a few coastlines (quite a few, granted). We do not, however, have anywhere near accurate 3d heatmaps of the ocean, so we have no clue at all what is causing the variations, since to say the least, the ocean is an interesting place when it comes to temperature variations (and not just temperature variations, there's acidity, salinity, and a dozen other things that all influence eachother).
Actually it just means that once again the new prediction for sea level rise falls outside of the 95% confidence interval reported in the IPCC reports. Again. Imagine the chances. They've made 3 predictions, all with 95% confidence intervals, and the new prediction falls out of all 3 of them (just like their next prediction fell outside the 95% range for their previous prediction, both for sea level rise and temperature, so actually we should square the 5%). So if their chances are accurately calculated, that they're this wrong should happen once in 10y * 1 / ( 5% * 5% * 5% ) = 80 000 years.
I'm not a global warming denialist, mind you... this obviously means that for the next 80 000 years the IPCC will not make a single wrong prediction !
Actually this is really smart of those scientists. You see, once every 80 000 years they will make 3 sequential predictions, each wrong. It's like, really smart of them to do it right away, then they can be right for the next few dozen millenia ! Brilliant !
Now let's all just watch the commission ignore the requests of the parliament. Unless it's really not important at all, of course.
Power in the EU is not with the parliament, but with the commission. Even after the treaty both executive and legislative power remains with the commission, and they threw in a part of the judiciary to match.
And about 2 religions being equal : let's just say that there is one religion whose founder is a rapist paedophilic slaver, thief and warmonger. Of course, we are to ignore that such little details are part of islam.
After all, assuming that someone who say that this rapist paedophilic slaver is the example for mankind for all eternity might... be saying that rape, thievery, paedophilia, slavery and worse is A-okay...
But what else could such a statement possibly mean ? Nothing...
Personally I cannot possibly fathom why a muslim is better than, say a KKK member, or a fascist (an actual, statist, racist, fascist), or a communist (a real, let's kill everyone who disagrees and steal everything communist), or even an unrepentant murderer. I mean whatever Hitler, Stalin, and the various far east and latin american communist dictators did, none of them were openly kidnapping people and selling people for sex, which was common practice for the founder of islam. And 'the prophet', on his side, did steal ("raid"), rape, kidnapped people into slavery, lied, caused wars, and has committed dozens of genocides. The rest of muslim history is no less bloody and despicable than the start of islam, including today's muslim countries.
First, this is a stupid example. The real advantage to society that marriage brings is the stability and peaceful people who have a large vested interest in that society continuing. That said, STD's are one relevant example. Let's suppose we have some 100% infected with AIDS society. Then Jesus comes along, and everyone is 100% monogamous. Infection rate of newborns is 25%. (this is simplified in that I assume generations are perfectly separated with no overlap, but it isn't that different with mixed generations, and it assumes everyone has the same amount of babies).
Gen 1 : 100% infection Gen 2 : 100% - (75% * 75%) = 56% Gen 3 : 28% Gen 4 : 12% Gen 5: 5%
If one, for example, assumes the average number of sexual partners is 2 (instead of 1, as a society pushing catholic marriage would exhibit), no society will ever recover from a 12% infection rate in AIDS (if the infection rate reaches 12%, nothing -short of monogamy- can stop it attaining 100%). The more partners, the lower this number.
Note that, obviously, this better resistance to STD's is a property that only catholic marriage would fully bring. Other denominations would have weaker resistance, and things like muslim marriage would make things worse than just fucking around randomly (ie. if you're not going to be lifelong monogamous, at least stick to 1 partner at a time. Otherwise, you're pretty much guaranteeing that a group of people will all get infected, and then spread around. And a minimum marriage age is also a good idea, because it increases the chances women will at least live until they see their first child. Forced marriage at 7 (like the 'prophet' did), combined with aids could literally exterminate a society). Although, one has to admit that Hindu or Sikh marriage would be about as resistant as catholic marriage (women gets burned alive if her man dies, if she doesn't kill herself within a week or so).
In the US ? Or, for that matter, in any mostly Christian country ? No they don't.
And let's not forget that the islamic punishment (for the woman only of course) of "providing nookie" is slowly getting stoned to death by a jeering crowd. There's a bit of a moral difference between the 2 religions here. But muslims get passes on just about everything, from slavery (just about all black slaves were exterminated in the middle east, this is just peachy, but in the US... they were emancipated, horror of horrors. Which of these 2 deserves countless repetitions of the immorality - right... the US. Lesson - never emancipate slaves, if they get uppity, massacre them. Hell, even that is islamic "holy" law (technical term is sharia "the right path"), but of course it is racist to point out that slave massacres are a repeating part of muslim history, and that they are part of the religion, not of any particular muslim government (hell, the slaves even won once or twice)).
How can you possibly compare these 2 religions as if they're somehow equal ? It's like stating the differences between a modern democracy and the third reich, or china, or venezuela are trivial.
first, this should be configurable (as a general rule) second, open(
4) conditions when module/script dies
assert...
All of these could simply be part of the code, instead of mere comments. And really, who will check your assumptions, unless he's spent days looking for a bug without success ?
Using nothing but logic, one can build two kinds of mathematics which are strong enough (i.e. being of second order) to express arithmetics: 1) consistent (but incomplete) ones, 2) inconsistent ones - you say that all mathematics is inconsistent, but that is just plain wrong. Unless if one uses a paraconsistent logic [stanford.edu] to prevent the ex falso sequitur quodlibet [wikipedia.org], inconsistent mathematics is trivially complete, because all well-formed formulas would be true. 3) Gödel proves that the third kind, mathematics which are complete AND consistent do not exist. 3') One could consider mathematical theories of which we do not know if they are consistent or not as a third kind of mathematics, I don't know if anybody has ever constructed a mathematical system of which it can be proven that it is undecidable wether it is consistent or not (sounds like a nice project actually.)
a) there is no proof that classes 1) and 2) are different (as long as we're talking about second order theories).
The problem that started with the choice axiom disaster is still unsolved.
One might even say that the concept of infinity is the problem. You can have a theory that allows a set to have infinite elements if and only if you present it as an axiom.
Having a bit of trouble with math, isn't you? What are you proposing to construct the real numbers of?
Well given that no-one's ever proven that the power operation generates consistent results when applied to infinite sets, I would actually prefer that you'd find something else to construct them of.
Besides, generally real numbers are constructed of the whole numbers. Something like R = Z x Z10, for example. And rational numbers are something like Q = (x, y), for x elem Z and y elem N0, with x and y having no divisors in common.
(incidentally you forgot the assumptions Godel made for 2), showing that for example, there are consistent maths, we just don't use them, as they're not infinite, and not "generally useful" whatever that means)
Additionally you forget the followup proofs, there are no consistent theories that can prove the consistency of "meaningful" mathematics (ie. +, -, *,/, n -> n + 1,...). It's not just that the consistency of Peano arithmetic cannot be proved inside Peano arithmetic, it can't be proved, at all (in any meaningfull way : the only way to "prove" it is to accept it's correctness as axiom).
So really math is not consistent (if something cannot be proved, even if not actually disproved, you cannot reasonably say that it *is*, because it isn't). You can NOT say that math (arithmetic) is consistent, that's WRONG. You *can* say it's inconsistent (if you've proven, correctly, that a plane can never be observed flying, is it really such a stretch to say that it's going to crash when it's haning up in the air and time is frozen ?).
This is also not the sole problem with numbers. There are all sorts of unsolved paradoxes with even the natural number "infinite". (more general there are paradoxes that apply to any collection with infinite elements)
And this is talking about *just* natural numbers. rational numbers and, God help us, real numbers have much, much worse problems than mere doubts. It is known that rational numbers are inconsistent, and real numbers cannot be proven to even exist. There are no known ways to construct real numbers that are not simple extensions of rational numbers.
People will change their mind about it ? Oh right... string theory already failed every test that was ever thrown at it... and they didn't drop it (probably for lack of an alternative, and prior investment, but still... scientists are supposed to be above that sort of thing).
The one real test String theory was subjected to was the long-term evolution of the universe. All (10^55) possible string theores seemed to predict a slowing expansion of the universe. Then it was measured, and as we all know we observed an accelerated expansion of the universe. Whoops.
So with a lot of "probably" correct hocus pocus (and we're talking some serious trickery here) a few (billion) string theories were shown to allow for (mostly temporary) accelerated expansion... with a *lot* of side conditions. And all sorts of unobservable conditions, like other branes taking up specific positions compared to our own... etc. As I said, lots of magic values needed to make these things work.
Believing in String theory is a bit like searching for the Aether in 1900, or assuming the correctness of math before Godel (who proved math is not consistent, whoops)
Okay. It is impossible to deduce something from nothing (one of the first rules of logic).
Ergo the step nothing -> something is an impossibility, in theoretical mathematics.
Ergo our universe never made the step nothing -> something, as it obeys those mathematics (if it doesn't we might as well shut down science and call it a day).
Ergo there is something eternal in the background. (I don't mean God, or at least, not *necessarily*)
You know, explaining any creation *always* involves a "turtles all the way down" argument. Ironically, the presupposition of an eternal all-mighty does not, in fact, constitute a turtles all the way down argument.
What created the earth ? Gravity of material from the last supernova in our vicinity.
What created that supernova ? A previous supernova.
What created that supernova ? The initial big-bang hydrogen cloud collapsing.
What created the big bang ? (String theory) a collision between 2 branes.
What created the branes ? (String theory) another big bang
What cause the string theory big bang then ? Technically there's no answer to this, however consensus is that some sort of big bang some more fundamental component of the universe.
What caused this more fundamental big bang then ? (guess where this is going...)
And, quite frankly, in the end *something* must be eternal... (like in the metaphorical turtles all the way down, there must be eternal things, due to something outside of the universe, like gravity for the turtles for example)
Versus the biblical :
God created earth. Who created God ?
No-one. God is eternal, he exists independent from what we call the universe.
Strictly speaking, the argument are not even really exclusionary.
Well it's like cheese. What ends up on the bottom of the barrel can be re-used as yeast for the next batch, which is what most beers used to do before they could cultivate specific strains manually.
If you've ever been to Africa, you'll know this. The reason you drink only beer, no matter your objections and thoughts on the matter is that you're relatively sure it won't infect you with an illness. Drinking water from a pond in the jungle is Russian roulette. Drinking water offered by inhabitants of a village is asking for poison.
Even today, in remote parts of Africa you drink either bottled water (which you check before you drink it), or beer. Nothing else. You just can't trust it.
2D : anything that only has connections in 2 directions. The fact that it's stacked does not change it's 2Dness, if the layers don't interact in a significant way (a book would not be considered 3d, nor even 2.5D, nor would a chip structured like a book). 2.5D : anything that has connections in 3 directions, but one of the directions is severely limited in what it can connect, and which way the wires can run (e.g. you can only have wires straight up with no further structure) 3D : true 3D means you can etch any 3d structure at all (meaning e.g. you can implement a transistor at a 30 degree angle from another)
The most advanced tech in silicon chips we have now is 2.5D, and these chips are still not fully 3D.
So it's basically totally different from "network neutrality" as proposed in the US ? In the US network neutrality is not about blocking, but about QOS applied on a "discriminatory" basis*.
Not that I usually expect more from slashdot articles.
* note that applying QOS in a non-discriminatory way will still cause an ISP's own destinations to be better handled, for obvious reasons.
for what reason would these people restrict their wars to those regions ? Especially with the "progressive" view on immigration prevalent these days. (funny how progressives evolved from 'kill all foreignors' to the exact opposite in about 40 years, yet claim that there has never been a change in their position and that their past consists of people totally alien to them that deserve to get shot on sight)
Other than outlawing freedom of religion, and directly attack and destroy any ideology causing "too serious" problems, I have no clue how you could get a solution to this.
"Non-state" actors using remote-controlled bombs to attack states and to get them to comply. The attack is simply against individuals (with the flimsy rationale that in a democracy "everyone" is guilty of the "crimes" of the state (such as not stoning women, or not killing gays, not giving up territory,... whatever tickles your fancy)). The obvious advantage being that you can start up this warfare directly... well anywhere. You could do it in New York, or even Washington.
Besides, what we're seeing now as terror is just the beginning. New technology will always favor the terrorists. Firstly because attacking is so much simpler than defending, not to mention that the area that needs to be defended by the average state is ridiculously huge. Secondly because the populations of most western states doesn't even accept the presence of cameras (obviously necessary if you want to have any hope of covering large territories without millions of police officers or soldiers), and what might be called "due process" (making nearly all pre-emptive interventions by the state illegal).
Okay, you got me. But palestinian protests are also always in English. The last few Iranian "protests" were in English. Same goes for Iraqi and even (partly) Turkish ones.
And unless I'm very, very wrong your remark doesn't fly for all off these.
The subject of this thread is still a lie. There's a grain of truth to the accusation : obviously politicians pay for good press.
To get elected, Obama paid : $244 million to broadcast media $133 million to "miscellaneous media" $26 million to internet media $20 million to print media $3 million to media consultants
How much of that went to bloggers. I don't know, but I'm betting at least a million or two.
I seem to recall a little of that money going to a blogger in trade for not publishing a video of a certain extremely racist pastor. Seems stupid now, as it turns out no democrats care about "black" people being racist.
only the iranian people can change anything about that
You might want to read up a bit on Iran's governing system. You see, apparently it's every muslim's duty to violently attack any democracy.
Dictatorships are A-okay though.
Of course there will be some idiotic moral equivalence response to this post, but that little tidbit about every muslim's duty (actually the fatwa in question talks about executing every muslim who doesn't do this) is not my idea, but the idea of the (child-rapist, like "the prophet") ayatollah khomeini.
That is, incidentally, not the worst by far this man has done. I would say that would be this.
Slashdot Mirror
Both Europe and America were filled with swamps before humans fixed it (in the late middle ages).
So what is the problem ? First, swamps won't recreate unless we screw up water management badly, and even then we can simply close them up again.
And then the taliban uses their favorite tactic : place the jammers in a kindergarten with journalists in the next building, camera's ready. Obviously the cameras won't flash when the journalists help the muslims kick a few more children directly into the weaponized zone, but they will flash after a rocket strikes.
So avoiding the issue altogether, if you can, is probably a better idea.
No one claims the planet is dying. It may become quite uncomfortable for humans, though.
Actually, since the average temperature of the earth is 15 degrees celcius, and the optimum for humans (and animal life in general) is 21 degrees celcius, it will be more comfortable. Also, if history of civilization, specifically the period immediately preceding the little ice age, is considered, there will be a LOT more arable and livable land accessible to humans (Greenland, Siberia, Canada*, for one) with a 6 degree rise in temperature.
Even if, yes, a rise like this will mean moving a number of large cities. Also, the change will have winners and losers (generally the winners will be more northern or more southern, and the losers more situated around the equator, but that's at best a very inaccurate rule of thumb).
* yes, global warming will mean Canada will become a livable place, even when you're more than 10 km from the US border.
Also, we may not understand exactly what effect was responsible for creating the sahara, it appears to have been a global cooling. Perhaps (we don't know) global warming will reverse this.
Since when do we know that ? Sure we know what we see on a few coastlines (quite a few, granted). We do not, however, have anywhere near accurate 3d heatmaps of the ocean, so we have no clue at all what is causing the variations, since to say the least, the ocean is an interesting place when it comes to temperature variations (and not just temperature variations, there's acidity, salinity, and a dozen other things that all influence eachother).
Actually it just means that once again the new prediction for sea level rise falls outside of the 95% confidence interval reported in the IPCC reports. Again. Imagine the chances. They've made 3 predictions, all with 95% confidence intervals, and the new prediction falls out of all 3 of them (just like their next prediction fell outside the 95% range for their previous prediction, both for sea level rise and temperature, so actually we should square the 5%). So if their chances are accurately calculated, that they're this wrong should happen once in 10y * 1 / ( 5% * 5% * 5% ) = 80 000 years.
I'm not a global warming denialist, mind you ... this obviously means that for the next 80 000 years the IPCC will not make a single wrong prediction !
Actually this is really smart of those scientists. You see, once every 80 000 years they will make 3 sequential predictions, each wrong. It's like, really smart of them to do it right away, then they can be right for the next few dozen millenia ! Brilliant !
Now let's all just watch the commission ignore the requests of the parliament. Unless it's really not important at all, of course.
Power in the EU is not with the parliament, but with the commission. Even after the treaty both executive and legislative power remains with the commission, and they threw in a part of the judiciary to match.
No I'm not.
And about 2 religions being equal : let's just say that there is one religion whose founder is a rapist paedophilic slaver, thief and warmonger. Of course, we are to ignore that such little details are part of islam.
After all, assuming that someone who say that this rapist paedophilic slaver is the example for mankind for all eternity might ... be saying that rape, thievery, paedophilia, slavery and worse is A-okay ...
But what else could such a statement possibly mean ? Nothing ...
Personally I cannot possibly fathom why a muslim is better than, say a KKK member, or a fascist (an actual, statist, racist, fascist), or a communist (a real, let's kill everyone who disagrees and steal everything communist), or even an unrepentant murderer. I mean whatever Hitler, Stalin, and the various far east and latin american communist dictators did, none of them were openly kidnapping people and selling people for sex, which was common practice for the founder of islam. And 'the prophet', on his side, did steal ("raid"), rape, kidnapped people into slavery, lied, caused wars, and has committed dozens of genocides. The rest of muslim history is no less bloody and despicable than the start of islam, including today's muslim countries.
First, this is a stupid example. The real advantage to society that marriage brings is the stability and peaceful people who have a large vested interest in that society continuing. That said, STD's are one relevant example. Let's suppose we have some 100% infected with AIDS society. Then Jesus comes along, and everyone is 100% monogamous. Infection rate of newborns is 25%. (this is simplified in that I assume generations are perfectly separated with no overlap, but it isn't that different with mixed generations, and it assumes everyone has the same amount of babies).
Gen 1 : 100% infection
Gen 2 : 100% - (75% * 75%) = 56%
Gen 3 : 28%
Gen 4 : 12%
Gen 5: 5%
If one, for example, assumes the average number of sexual partners is 2 (instead of 1, as a society pushing catholic marriage would exhibit), no society will ever recover from a 12% infection rate in AIDS (if the infection rate reaches 12%, nothing -short of monogamy- can stop it attaining 100%). The more partners, the lower this number.
Note that, obviously, this better resistance to STD's is a property that only catholic marriage would fully bring. Other denominations would have weaker resistance, and things like muslim marriage would make things worse than just fucking around randomly (ie. if you're not going to be lifelong monogamous, at least stick to 1 partner at a time. Otherwise, you're pretty much guaranteeing that a group of people will all get infected, and then spread around. And a minimum marriage age is also a good idea, because it increases the chances women will at least live until they see their first child. Forced marriage at 7 (like the 'prophet' did), combined with aids could literally exterminate a society). Although, one has to admit that Hindu or Sikh marriage would be about as resistant as catholic marriage (women gets burned alive if her man dies, if she doesn't kill herself within a week or so).
In the US ? Or, for that matter, in any mostly Christian country ? No they don't.
And let's not forget that the islamic punishment (for the woman only of course) of "providing nookie" is slowly getting stoned to death by a jeering crowd. There's a bit of a moral difference between the 2 religions here. But muslims get passes on just about everything, from slavery (just about all black slaves were exterminated in the middle east, this is just peachy, but in the US ... they were emancipated, horror of horrors. Which of these 2 deserves countless repetitions of the immorality - right ... the US. Lesson - never emancipate slaves, if they get uppity, massacre them. Hell, even that is islamic "holy" law (technical term is sharia "the right path"), but of course it is racist to point out that slave massacres are a repeating part of muslim history, and that they are part of the religion, not of any particular muslim government (hell, the slaves even won once or twice)).
How can you possibly compare these 2 religions as if they're somehow equal ? It's like stating the differences between a modern democracy and the third reich, or china, or venezuela are trivial.
1) commenting assumptions
assert
2) give usage examples
"integration test"
3) files that are used
first, this should be configurable (as a general rule)
second, open(
4) conditions when module/script dies
assert ...
All of these could simply be part of the code, instead of mere comments. And really, who will check your assumptions, unless he's spent days looking for a bug without success ?
Using nothing but logic, one can build two kinds of mathematics which are strong enough (i.e. being of second order) to express arithmetics:
1) consistent (but incomplete) ones,
2) inconsistent ones - you say that all mathematics is inconsistent, but that is just plain wrong. Unless if one uses a paraconsistent logic [stanford.edu] to prevent the ex falso sequitur quodlibet [wikipedia.org], inconsistent mathematics is trivially complete, because all well-formed formulas would be true.
3) Gödel proves that the third kind, mathematics which are complete AND consistent do not exist.
3') One could consider mathematical theories of which we do not know if they are consistent or not as a third kind of mathematics, I don't know if anybody has ever constructed a mathematical system of which it can be proven that it is undecidable wether it is consistent or not (sounds like a nice project actually.)
a) there is no proof that classes 1) and 2) are different (as long as we're talking about second order theories).
The problem that started with the choice axiom disaster is still unsolved.
One might even say that the concept of infinity is the problem. You can have a theory that allows a set to have infinite elements if and only if you present it as an axiom.
No I'm not. You are confusing the first and second incompleteness theorems.
Having a bit of trouble with math, isn't you? What are you proposing to construct the real numbers of?
Well given that no-one's ever proven that the power operation generates consistent results when applied to infinite sets, I would actually prefer that you'd find something else to construct them of.
Besides, generally real numbers are constructed of the whole numbers. Something like R = Z x Z10, for example. And rational numbers are something like Q = (x, y), for x elem Z and y elem N0, with x and y having no divisors in common.
(incidentally you forgot the assumptions Godel made for 2), showing that for example, there are consistent maths, we just don't use them, as they're not infinite, and not "generally useful" whatever that means)
Additionally you forget the followup proofs, there are no consistent theories that can prove the consistency of "meaningful" mathematics (ie. +, -, *, /, n -> n + 1, ...). It's not just that the consistency of Peano arithmetic cannot be proved inside Peano arithmetic, it can't be proved, at all (in any meaningfull way : the only way to "prove" it is to accept it's correctness as axiom).
So really math is not consistent (if something cannot be proved, even if not actually disproved, you cannot reasonably say that it *is*, because it isn't). You can NOT say that math (arithmetic) is consistent, that's WRONG. You *can* say it's inconsistent (if you've proven, correctly, that a plane can never be observed flying, is it really such a stretch to say that it's going to crash when it's haning up in the air and time is frozen ?).
This is also not the sole problem with numbers. There are all sorts of unsolved paradoxes with even the natural number "infinite". (more general there are paradoxes that apply to any collection with infinite elements)
And this is talking about *just* natural numbers. rational numbers and, God help us, real numbers have much, much worse problems than mere doubts. It is known that rational numbers are inconsistent, and real numbers cannot be proven to even exist. There are no known ways to construct real numbers that are not simple extensions of rational numbers.
People will change their mind about it ? Oh right ... string theory already failed every test that was ever thrown at it ... and they didn't drop it (probably for lack of an alternative, and prior investment, but still ... scientists are supposed to be above that sort of thing).
The one real test String theory was subjected to was the long-term evolution of the universe. All (10^55) possible string theores seemed to predict a slowing expansion of the universe. Then it was measured, and as we all know we observed an accelerated expansion of the universe. Whoops.
So with a lot of "probably" correct hocus pocus (and we're talking some serious trickery here) a few (billion) string theories were shown to allow for (mostly temporary) accelerated expansion ... with a *lot* of side conditions. And all sorts of unobservable conditions, like other branes taking up specific positions compared to our own ... etc. As I said, lots of magic values needed to make these things work.
Believing in String theory is a bit like searching for the Aether in 1900, or assuming the correctness of math before Godel (who proved math is not consistent, whoops)
Okay. It is impossible to deduce something from nothing (one of the first rules of logic).
Ergo the step nothing -> something is an impossibility, in theoretical mathematics.
Ergo our universe never made the step nothing -> something, as it obeys those mathematics (if it doesn't we might as well shut down science and call it a day).
Ergo there is something eternal in the background. (I don't mean God, or at least, not *necessarily*)
You know, explaining any creation *always* involves a "turtles all the way down" argument. Ironically, the presupposition of an eternal all-mighty does not, in fact, constitute a turtles all the way down argument.
What created the earth ? Gravity of material from the last supernova in our vicinity.
What created that supernova ? A previous supernova.
What created that supernova ? The initial big-bang hydrogen cloud collapsing.
What created the big bang ? (String theory) a collision between 2 branes.
What created the branes ? (String theory) another big bang
What cause the string theory big bang then ? Technically there's no answer to this, however consensus is that some sort of big bang some more fundamental component of the universe.
What caused this more fundamental big bang then ? (guess where this is going ...)
And, quite frankly, in the end *something* must be eternal ... (like in the metaphorical turtles all the way down, there must be eternal things, due to something outside of the universe, like gravity for the turtles for example)
Versus the biblical :
God created earth. Who created God ?
No-one. God is eternal, he exists independent from what we call the universe.
Strictly speaking, the argument are not even really exclusionary.
Well it's like cheese. What ends up on the bottom of the barrel can be re-used as yeast for the next batch, which is what most beers used to do before they could cultivate specific strains manually.
Some beers still do it this way.
If you've ever been to Africa, you'll know this. The reason you drink only beer, no matter your objections and thoughts on the matter is that you're relatively sure it won't infect you with an illness. Drinking water from a pond in the jungle is Russian roulette. Drinking water offered by inhabitants of a village is asking for poison.
Even today, in remote parts of Africa you drink either bottled water (which you check before you drink it), or beer. Nothing else. You just can't trust it.
And let's not talk about the food.
2D : anything that only has connections in 2 directions. The fact that it's stacked does not change it's 2Dness, if the layers don't interact in a significant way (a book would not be considered 3d, nor even 2.5D, nor would a chip structured like a book).
2.5D : anything that has connections in 3 directions, but one of the directions is severely limited in what it can connect, and which way the wires can run (e.g. you can only have wires straight up with no further structure)
3D : true 3D means you can etch any 3d structure at all (meaning e.g. you can implement a transistor at a 30 degree angle from another)
The most advanced tech in silicon chips we have now is 2.5D, and these chips are still not fully 3D.
So it's basically totally different from "network neutrality" as proposed in the US ? In the US network neutrality is not about blocking, but about QOS applied on a "discriminatory" basis*.
Not that I usually expect more from slashdot articles.
* note that applying QOS in a non-discriminatory way will still cause an ISP's own destinations to be better handled, for obvious reasons.
for what reason would these people restrict their wars to those regions ? Especially with the "progressive" view on immigration prevalent these days. (funny how progressives evolved from 'kill all foreignors' to the exact opposite in about 40 years, yet claim that there has never been a change in their position and that their past consists of people totally alien to them that deserve to get shot on sight)
For example
Other than outlawing freedom of religion, and directly attack and destroy any ideology causing "too serious" problems, I have no clue how you could get a solution to this.
"Non-state" actors using remote-controlled bombs to attack states and to get them to comply. The attack is simply against individuals (with the flimsy rationale that in a democracy "everyone" is guilty of the "crimes" of the state (such as not stoning women, or not killing gays, not giving up territory, ... whatever tickles your fancy)). The obvious advantage being that you can start up this warfare directly ... well anywhere. You could do it in New York, or even Washington.
Besides, what we're seeing now as terror is just the beginning. New technology will always favor the terrorists. Firstly because attacking is so much simpler than defending, not to mention that the area that needs to be defended by the average state is ridiculously huge. Secondly because the populations of most western states doesn't even accept the presence of cameras (obviously necessary if you want to have any hope of covering large territories without millions of police officers or soldiers), and what might be called "due process" (making nearly all pre-emptive interventions by the state illegal).
This is the future. No doubt about it.
Okay, you got me. But palestinian protests are also always in English. The last few Iranian "protests" were in English. Same goes for Iraqi and even (partly) Turkish ones.
And unless I'm very, very wrong your remark doesn't fly for all off these.
The subject of this thread is still a lie. There's a grain of truth to the accusation : obviously politicians pay for good press.
To get elected, Obama paid :
$244 million to broadcast media
$133 million to "miscellaneous media"
$26 million to internet media
$20 million to print media
$3 million to media consultants
How much of that went to bloggers. I don't know, but I'm betting at least a million or two.
source
I seem to recall a little of that money going to a blogger in trade for not publishing a video of a certain extremely racist pastor. Seems stupid now, as it turns out no democrats care about "black" people being racist.
only the iranian people can change anything about that
You might want to read up a bit on Iran's governing system. You see, apparently it's every muslim's duty to violently attack any democracy.
Dictatorships are A-okay though.
Of course there will be some idiotic moral equivalence response to this post, but that little tidbit about every muslim's duty (actually the fatwa in question talks about executing every muslim who doesn't do this) is not my idea, but the idea of the (child-rapist, like "the prophet") ayatollah khomeini.
That is, incidentally, not the worst by far this man has done. I would say that would be this.