You are jumping to a very specific sub-set of omnific beings by only diffusing the possibility of a theistic being with anecdotal evidence.
You need to re-read my comment. I did not rely on any anecdotal evidence whatsoever, in fact I pointed out that in the absence of evidence (anectdotal or otherwise) the question was not an empirical, but a logical one. Secondly my argument did not even deal with 'omnific beings,' but with putatively existent objects, the actual existence of which has not been empirically established. Finally, rather than dealing with 'a specific sub-set,' my whole argument is that there is an infinite number of objects, the existence of which can be claimed, but for which there is no good reason to believe they do exist. This means that the only workable hypothesis of putatively non-existent beings is that they must be assumed not to exist until otherwise proven (logically or empirically). Or more accurately, the onus of proof lies upon those arguing for their existence.
The point I'm making is that this does not allow us to definitively say they don't exist: to re-iterate, it is not possible to prove the non-existence of a non-existing object. Hence I said that I was an agnositic (knowledge of the non-existence of god is logically impossible) as well as an atheist (not living ones life upon the assumption that god exists).
As a finite being, you have no way of gathering enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge to even comment on the possibilities available to all the kinds of infinite beings.
If you think any knowledge is required to be able to comment on anything at all, then you clearly haven't been hanging around \. for long enough!;P
OK, the loose language aside, this is one way of putting the agnostic argument. More ususally it is put in terms of the inability of material creatures to have knowledge of a putative non-material world. My particular form of the argument, however, was ontological. So your while I would agree with your statement (if it said 'comment accurately'), it is, in this context, simply irrelevant.
If a worm in my backyard refuses to believe in the existance (sic) of the space shuttle, that doesn't mean the space shuttle doesn't exist.
On re-reading my original post you might notice that this is exactly what I was arguing. Moreover, the worm has no good reason the believe in the Space Shuttle, just as it has no good reason to believe in god, grmph, zwyglx, and the infinite number of other things which might possibly exist, but for which the worm lacks either evidence or some logically necessary inference. Note, however, the worm is in no possition positively to state, 'Zwyglx does not exist.'
If this leaves you shaking your head
What leaves me shaking my head is how far your response misses the mark, failing to engage with anything I wrote. One might suspect that you intended to respond to some other post.
which is why I'm agnostic--sitt'n on a very comfortable fence
it is a popular misconception that agnostics sit on the fence. in point of fact agnosticims is the postition that the existence or non-existence of god is necessarily unknowable (a {negation} - gnosis {knowledge}). many atheists, myself included, are agnostic.
i am agnostic insofar as i accept that the non-existence of a non-existing thing cannot be logically proven. this being the case i cannot prove the that god does not exist. (it being, in the absence of any empirical evidence whatsoever, entirely a matter for logic). note however, that i don't think that god is in any way unique in this regard among the possible set of non-existing objects, which leads me to the next point.
i am an atheist insofar as i believe that the onus of proof lies with the party that wishes to prove the existence of the putatively non-existent thing. given no-one has proven, to my satisfaction the existence of god, i do not believe god exists. it is a misrepresentation of my position as an atheist to say that i believe there is 'zero possibility of any higher power.' Rather non-existence is the null hypothesis, and god, just like the undetectible air-breathing flying fish which possibly fill the room you are in, is held not to exist until it be proven otherwise.
Okay, but there are some caveats with using only ground based reporting stations...
Agreed, further as time goes by we might (will) discover problems with the intepretation of satellite data. As with ground stations, we might expect that the sampling points will increase in number, etc.
Actually I owe you an apology. I totally misread your original post! I thought you were saying there was no evidence for global warming, but only evidence against it. Reading your post again I now realise you are saying we should study the possibility of climatic change because there is evidence for it, but that we must also take into consideration the satellite data which would seem to argue against the warming trend.
This is clearly a position with which it is impossible to disagree (unless one suffers from the ideological blindness which too often is brought to bear upon this subject). Maybe I need a larger font setting.
My employer doesn't own the kitchen addition I made for my mother.
Have you read the fine print of your employment contract? Maybe you have and maybe your employer doesn't own your mother's kitchen, but I have seen employment contracts in which the employer claimed rights to all creative work of the employee, whether or not directly related to the employment task... so be careful not to write the Great American Novel whilst under the term of such employ
Sattelite measurements which are considered more reliable show that global temps have decreased in the past 20 years.
Yes but we've only have satellite records for the past 23 years, it's not going to be easy to measure a significant change for the last 20 years from that is it. Measurement from groundstations date back over a century, allowing us to make some slightly more useful observations about the past 10 years.
What you are saying is, using 23 years of measurements, we were not able to say that the last 20 years showed significant increases in global temperatures. Don't you think that is a little disingenuous?
I think it is ridiculous to buy into any hype whether for or against Global Warming. Since there is "evidence" for Global Warming we should study it. However there is "evidence" against it...
I would have thought the fact that global temperatures have risen by a statistically significant amount would be evidence for Global Warming, but hey I guess it must be evidence against it if you say so.
Whilst it is true that MUDs do not use a great deal of bandwidth, the student who is MUDing is denying the use of that computer to someone who wants to do actual WORK.
At which point they should be able to tell them (with appropriate enforement by university authorities) to get off the machine because they have some actual work to do. It's not that hard. You should in fact be encouraging students to find out how to use bandwidth friendly communication technologies such as MUDs and MOOs, because I doubt without instruction they would even explore them in these days of M$ messenger and Java applet chat rooms.
a select few being able to easily access all of everyone else's information
And that is the problem with privacy. I would rather have my own information (excluding passwords and the like) openly available, on the condition that the same information was openly available for all others. A kind of information democracy based on the radical absence of privacy. But then again, I don't suffer from some congenital disease which would cause employers to refuse to hire me, or insurance companies to jack up their premiums. If I did, I would maybe see things differently.
On the contrary, it is now clear that they were very serious and it was most unlikely that they would have been in the war for any longer than 2-3 weeks. Whether the bombs were droppped to hurry them along, to do a live test, or to demonstrate to the Russians the power of the new arsenal (prior to the divisions of the spoils in both the pacific and european theatres), is a matter for debate.
1. Make it compatible with any browser, standard html
That's a nice sentiment, but unfortunately its is also contradictory. The reason, standard (w3C) html, does not work on all browsers. This leaves web designers with the loose-loose decision of whether to write standard html (or xhtml), or whether to write something that can be viewed on all browsers.
As a practical example, Netscape 4.X is seriously broken when it comes to reading CSS stylesheets. In one incarnation, it would add space on top of a table if you set the value for 'border-below'. Also it simply did not understand what 'cascading' was supposed to meant. Try using table with CSS on Netscape 4, you'll see what I mean.
One of the primary imperatives of the Website at which I work is accesibility. While we place great store on adherence to standards, this is a little lower on the hierarchy. Conseqently we have designed our site to be viewable by all browers from lynx on up. IMHO any web designer, should try to navigate eir website using lynx (or other text browser) before declaring it ready for publication!
There is, however, a good argument for adhering to standards and letting the browsers that don't be damned. Again with Netscape 4.x's inability to read CSS properly. This is probably the single greatest factor that led to the overuse of tables for layout and to the proliferation of really BAD web design. If CSS had of been (properly) supported by all browsers when it was made a recommendation, designers could have, with some confidence, applied it to solve layout problems, with the result that we would have consistent web design, following the principle of separation of content from design. I'm no fan of M$, but damn Netscape for that!
But the Spock in the alterative universe wasn't really evil (unlike the evil Kirk et. al.). That was the whole point of that episode, in both universes he was neither good nor evil, but logical.
I am defining Leech Computing as 'a program running on a client computer without user knowledge that can process data and report back the results, but otherwise does not effect the usability of the client computer and makes no changes to the client'.
I wonder if you have ever been bitten by a leech! You'll know about it alright, just maybe not straight away. GF & I got into a bit of bush and got half a dozen bites each about a fortnight ago. Took a week for the itching to stop for me, gf is just recovering now.
Maybe the effects of leech computing would be the same, you don't notice it when it's happening, but you pay for someone's piracy later.
Actually I was under the impression that time appeared to pass faster the older you grew. It's related to the fact you heart gradually slows down, and it's effect on your body clock..
More prosaically it's related to the fact that any unit of time is shorter (goes faster) in proportion to the time you have already experienced.
Ie. Remember how when you were 5, you had to wait a whole year (another 20% of your life, ok so you don't remember everything from birth, but lets gloss over that) till you turned 6? Ever find yourself thinking, wow those last 3 months went by quickly? By the time you're 80 (luck permitting), the whole damn shebang will be literally racing past, and other folks will wonder why you seem to exist in slowmo
And please, don't try that b-s line on me that "global warming makes the extremes greater", because that's not global warming.
Sorry but the chances are that is exactly what it is. The term 'global warming' is perhaps a bit unfortunate, because people tend to assume that this translates simply into 'local warming.' It would perhaps be better to think of the situation as a 'higher-energy climate.'
How this manifests at a local level is cannot accurately be predicted. It might result in local increases of temperature, but lower local temperatures do not contradict the findings of global warming. Then again, it might result in greater extremes.
In 1991, I was visiting a number of atmospheric scientists at the CSIRO's Climate Research Centre in Mordialoc (sp?? I'm not from Victoria). They made the point back then, that rather than looking for higher temperatures, we might instead observe an increase in the frequency and intensity of 'extreme weather events' as the first effects of global warming. This had been the most noticable (and reproducable) finding of their computer model studies. Certainly the intervening decade (and especially the latter part thereof), have done little to put my mind at rest with regard to extreme weather events.
Now I am highly skeptical of climatic computer models, chaos being what it is (and array processors being what they are). As I said I don't think the effects can be accurately predicted. However, you cannot discount the idea that global warming is manifested as an increased frequency and intesity of extereme weather events (or "global warming makes the extremes greater" as you so quaintly put it), with the simple statement "that's not global warming." Too much intelligent effort, too much (expensive) computer time, has been devoted to discover that global warming is precisely that. It might wrong, of course, but you'll have to do better than merely stating that it is.
I find amazing is that this judge means business. She has shown no favourites on either side and is following the law.... Ok if this backfires and MS wins maybe I will change my mind. But thus far she is following the law.
What are you saying, (even before all the all the evidence has been considered and all the arguments heard) that the law can only have been followed if M$ looses?! Like, if a decision comes out the way I would like, the law was followed, if not, the judge was bought off by the corporate mafia.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to re-read my comment. I did not rely on any anecdotal evidence whatsoever, in fact I pointed out that in the absence of evidence (anectdotal or otherwise) the question was not an empirical, but a logical one. Secondly my argument did not even deal with 'omnific beings,' but with putatively existent objects, the actual existence of which has not been empirically established. Finally, rather than dealing with 'a specific sub-set,' my whole argument is that there is an infinite number of objects, the existence of which can be claimed, but for which there is no good reason to believe they do exist. This means that the only workable hypothesis of putatively non-existent beings is that they must be assumed not to exist until otherwise proven (logically or empirically). Or more accurately, the onus of proof lies upon those arguing for their existence.
The point I'm making is that this does not allow us to definitively say they don't exist: to re-iterate, it is not possible to prove the non-existence of a non-existing object. Hence I said that I was an agnositic (knowledge of the non-existence of god is logically impossible) as well as an atheist (not living ones life upon the assumption that god exists).
As a finite being, you have no way of gathering enough knowledge and understanding of that knowledge to even comment on the possibilities available to all the kinds of infinite beings.If you think any knowledge is required to be able to comment on anything at all, then you clearly haven't been hanging around \. for long enough! ;P
OK, the loose language aside, this is one way of putting the agnostic argument. More ususally it is put in terms of the inability of material creatures to have knowledge of a putative non-material world. My particular form of the argument, however, was ontological. So your while I would agree with your statement (if it said 'comment accurately'), it is, in this context, simply irrelevant.
If a worm in my backyard refuses to believe in the existance ( sic ) of the space shuttle, that doesn't mean the space shuttle doesn't exist.On re-reading my original post you might notice that this is exactly what I was arguing. Moreover, the worm has no good reason the believe in the Space Shuttle, just as it has no good reason to believe in god, grmph, zwyglx, and the infinite number of other things which might possibly exist, but for which the worm lacks either evidence or some logically necessary inference. Note, however, the worm is in no possition positively to state, 'Zwyglx does not exist.'
If this leaves you shaking your headWhat leaves me shaking my head is how far your response misses the mark, failing to engage with anything I wrote. One might suspect that you intended to respond to some other post.
it is a popular misconception that agnostics sit on the fence. in point of fact agnosticims is the postition that the existence or non-existence of god is necessarily unknowable (a {negation} - gnosis {knowledge}). many atheists, myself included, are agnostic.
i am agnostic insofar as i accept that the non-existence of a non-existing thing cannot be logically proven. this being the case i cannot prove the that god does not exist. (it being, in the absence of any empirical evidence whatsoever, entirely a matter for logic). note however, that i don't think that god is in any way unique in this regard among the possible set of non-existing objects, which leads me to the next point.
i am an atheist insofar as i believe that the onus of proof lies with the party that wishes to prove the existence of the putatively non-existent thing. given no-one has proven, to my satisfaction the existence of god, i do not believe god exists. it is a misrepresentation of my position as an atheist to say that i believe there is 'zero possibility of any higher power.' Rather non-existence is the null hypothesis, and god, just like the undetectible air-breathing flying fish which possibly fill the room you are in, is held not to exist until it be proven otherwise.
Ownership of works does not entail any duty of publication. At least not where I am.
Agreed, further as time goes by we might (will) discover problems with the intepretation of satellite data. As with ground stations, we might expect that the sampling points will increase in number, etc.
Actually I owe you an apology. I totally misread your original post! I thought you were saying there was no evidence for global warming, but only evidence against it. Reading your post again I now realise you are saying we should study the possibility of climatic change because there is evidence for it, but that we must also take into consideration the satellite data which would seem to argue against the warming trend.
This is clearly a position with which it is impossible to disagree (unless one suffers from the ideological blindness which too often is brought to bear upon this subject). Maybe I need a larger font setting.
Have you read the fine print of your employment contract? Maybe you have and maybe your employer doesn't own your mother's kitchen, but I have seen employment contracts in which the employer claimed rights to all creative work of the employee, whether or not directly related to the employment task ... so be careful not to write the Great American Novel whilst under the term of such employ
No, but it just possibly has something to do with the equitable doctrine of aquiescence
Yes but we've only have satellite records for the past 23 years, it's not going to be easy to measure a significant change for the last 20 years from that is it. Measurement from groundstations date back over a century, allowing us to make some slightly more useful observations about the past 10 years.
What you are saying is, using 23 years of measurements, we were not able to say that the last 20 years showed significant increases in global temperatures. Don't you think that is a little disingenuous?
I would have thought the fact that global temperatures have risen by a statistically significant amount would be evidence for Global Warming, but hey I guess it must be evidence against it if you say so.
At which point they should be able to tell them (with appropriate enforement by university authorities) to get off the machine because they have some actual work to do. It's not that hard. You should in fact be encouraging students to find out how to use bandwidth friendly communication technologies such as MUDs and MOOs, because I doubt without instruction they would even explore them in these days of M$ messenger and Java applet chat rooms.
Goodness, we are talking about a smartcard here. I don't think anyone is suggesting branding!
And that is the problem with privacy. I would rather have my own information (excluding passwords and the like) openly available, on the condition that the same information was openly available for all others. A kind of information democracy based on the radical absence of privacy. But then again, I don't suffer from some congenital disease which would cause employers to refuse to hire me, or insurance companies to jack up their premiums. If I did, I would maybe see things differently.
On the contrary, it is now clear that they were very serious and it was most unlikely that they would have been in the war for any longer than 2-3 weeks. Whether the bombs were droppped to hurry them along, to do a live test, or to demonstrate to the Russians the power of the new arsenal (prior to the divisions of the spoils in both the pacific and european theatres), is a matter for debate.
Yeah, same thing with the road! umm...
That's a nice sentiment, but unfortunately its is also contradictory. The reason, standard (w3C) html, does not work on all browsers. This leaves web designers with the loose-loose decision of whether to write standard html (or xhtml), or whether to write something that can be viewed on all browsers.
As a practical example, Netscape 4.X is seriously broken when it comes to reading CSS stylesheets. In one incarnation, it would add space on top of a table if you set the value for 'border-below'. Also it simply did not understand what 'cascading' was supposed to meant. Try using table with CSS on Netscape 4, you'll see what I mean.
One of the primary imperatives of the Website at which I work is accesibility. While we place great store on adherence to standards, this is a little lower on the hierarchy. Conseqently we have designed our site to be viewable by all browers from lynx on up. IMHO any web designer, should try to navigate eir website using lynx (or other text browser) before declaring it ready for publication!
There is, however, a good argument for adhering to standards and letting the browsers that don't be damned. Again with Netscape 4.x's inability to read CSS properly. This is probably the single greatest factor that led to the overuse of tables for layout and to the proliferation of really BAD web design. If CSS had of been (properly) supported by all browsers when it was made a recommendation, designers could have, with some confidence, applied it to solve layout problems, with the result that we would have consistent web design, following the principle of separation of content from design. I'm no fan of M$, but damn Netscape for that!
Nope, you would need an 'asportation' for larceny to run
No way man! You're bumming me out, and all this time I thought it was cinema verité.
But the Spock in the alterative universe wasn't really evil (unlike the evil Kirk et. al.). That was the whole point of that episode, in both universes he was neither good nor evil, but logical.
I wonder if you have ever been bitten by a leech! You'll know about it alright, just maybe not straight away. GF & I got into a bit of bush and got half a dozen bites each about a fortnight ago. Took a week for the itching to stop for me, gf is just recovering now.
Maybe the effects of leech computing would be the same, you don't notice it when it's happening, but you pay for someone's piracy later.
More prosaically it's related to the fact that any unit of time is shorter (goes faster) in proportion to the time you have already experienced.
Ie. Remember how when you were 5, you had to wait a whole year (another 20% of your life, ok so you don't remember everything from birth, but lets gloss over that) till you turned 6? Ever find yourself thinking, wow those last 3 months went by quickly? By the time you're 80 (luck permitting), the whole damn shebang will be literally racing past, and other folks will wonder why you seem to exist in slowmo
You didn't mention him, you were just channeling him!
Sorry but the chances are that is exactly what it is. The term 'global warming' is perhaps a bit unfortunate, because people tend to assume that this translates simply into 'local warming.' It would perhaps be better to think of the situation as a 'higher-energy climate.'
How this manifests at a local level is cannot accurately be predicted. It might result in local increases of temperature, but lower local temperatures do not contradict the findings of global warming. Then again, it might result in greater extremes.
In 1991, I was visiting a number of atmospheric scientists at the CSIRO's Climate Research Centre in Mordialoc (sp?? I'm not from Victoria). They made the point back then, that rather than looking for higher temperatures, we might instead observe an increase in the frequency and intensity of 'extreme weather events' as the first effects of global warming. This had been the most noticable (and reproducable) finding of their computer model studies. Certainly the intervening decade (and especially the latter part thereof), have done little to put my mind at rest with regard to extreme weather events.
Now I am highly skeptical of climatic computer models, chaos being what it is (and array processors being what they are). As I said I don't think the effects can be accurately predicted. However, you cannot discount the idea that global warming is manifested as an increased frequency and intesity of extereme weather events (or "global warming makes the extremes greater" as you so quaintly put it), with the simple statement "that's not global warming." Too much intelligent effort, too much (expensive) computer time, has been devoted to discover that global warming is precisely that. It might wrong, of course, but you'll have to do better than merely stating that it is.
maybe not, but it was funnier than about 2/3rd's of the stuff that gets marked up as funny 'round here.
No, but if the night lasts 1/10,000 of a second longer, we loose out on 6.39e12 W (using your calculation.)
What are you saying, (even before all the all the evidence has been considered and all the arguments heard) that the law can only have been followed if M$ looses?! Like, if a decision comes out the way I would like, the law was followed, if not, the judge was bought off by the corporate mafia.
HIV