This is cognitive dissonance. Regardless of whether copyright terms should be shorter (they should, IMO), TPB is making money off of very recent works -- XBox360 and Wii games, for instance. And again, I must point out that even in cases where you *are* able to get things for free (like video game FAQs) the wholesale use of others' recent works for ad money is not considered acceptable. Why is it that when some new site spiders GameFAQs and copies documents without the authors' permission it's a crime, but when music is involved it's something that you just ought to be able to do?
Congratulations, you've seen through the illusion and discovered that Slashdot's anti-RIAA campaign is really about getting free stuff after all. Note that The Pirate Bay is both:
A) Declining to pay artists for the use of their copyrighted material, and B) Making money off of it by hosting ad banners.
Complete hypocrisy, but of course nobody here seems to care. And you know that if a web site were doing something similar in another medium (say, video game FAQs or Slashdot posts) without permission there would be a huge outcry. Didn't Jon Katz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" book spark just such a controvery? The guiding principle here seems to be "It's okay to use people's stuff for free unless it's my stuff."
Interaction is the key - "I saw the ghost of my dead brother" is one thing, "my brother just appeared to me and said that he was just killed and then four hours later I got a phone call confirming the information" is something entirely different.
It's only different if you ignore the huge numbers of premonitions and prophesies that don't work out. If enough people have such feelings and experiences, a few of them are bound to be right through sheer random chance. In a world with six billion people, bizarre coincidences are going to happen all the time. And what is it that separates "spiritual" coincidences from any other kind? Seems like it's just tradition.
Since we already have the theoretical models of how to create alternate universes
Given that we don't yet have a model of where our universe came from I have to doubt that. If you're talking about quantum mechanics, be careful -- the many-worlds interpretation is fun, but has zero evidence to back it up. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, and for all I know what you're talking about is possible, but it's still a huge leap to go from current QM to infinitely long "life"spans.
Are you talking about things like near-death and out of body experiences? If so, then that's pretty shoddy evidence. OoBEs can be produced in a variety of ways -- one guy did it with a camera, a dummy, a pair of VR goggles, and a stick. Near-death experiences are (among other things) an artifact of oxygen deprivation. If you want to postulate mind-body dualism, you'll have to explain what makes some of those experiences real and others not, and how a non-physical mind could interact with a physical body. If the idea of a consciousness behind the universe is valid and special, what's different about people talking to their computers like they're alive? Again, there's a whole spectrum of thought-patterns similar to religious beliefs, but nobody claims those are some sort of universal truth.
Also, you're assuming that the universe has existed for an infinite amount of time. That's a pretty big assumption. You're also assuming that a human (or other limited) consciousness could grow beyond its limits to become the sort of entity referred to as a god. That's an even bigger assumption, especially since we aren't even capable of talking about what that would mean. And you're making the tacit assumption that there's only one god -- that's a huge cultural bias, you know.
I think you're mischaracterizing an atheist argument. Nobody's saying that nothing is going on! Obviously something is -- we exist! Obviously consciousness is strange and defies explanation, at least right now. But that doesn't mean that we should immediately turn to a (monotheistic, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc.) god to look for answers, especially since most religions aren't in the answer business anyway. How do you know all that stuff about God? You said you were taught? How did your teachers know? And their teachers? Where does this information come from? How can we know whether it's true? We're not supposed to ask those questions, because when you look closely, you find that the answers that come from history and psychology sound a lot better than those that come from theology.
The nature of consciousness may be the most important question we have to answer, but right now we're still stuck on the very first explanations that anyone ever came up with! Why is it that we can move past ancient ideas about science, art, humanity, and the cosmos in general, but religions have to be kept for all time?
Here's a question that I would love to see answered to any degree of my satisfaction: why is all religion immediately discarded as a logical impossibility because some religious beliefs are illogical and inconsistent?
Because once you're willing to discard some religious beliefs you don't have much reason for keeping gods around. Only your first teaching above might require God to be there, and even that's questionable -- rearrange the sentences a bit and you have an entirely secular philosophy. Why add a god? You're right that there's nothing logically impossible about what you're saying, but I don't think most people go that far. It's just pretty obvious to a lot of us that when people argue for the existence of God they're doing so because they want a god to be there, not because they found God out of honest inquiry. I'm not picking on you specifically; many great philosophers do this. Look at the leap you need to get from something like the ontological argument to Christianity and you'll see what I mean.
Check out the web sites at MIT and UC-Berkeley, which are the #1 private institution and the #1 public institution, respectively, in the USA. There is a good chance that they offer on-line videos of the lectures.
Buy the same textbooks that the students at those universities use. For the pre-calculus mathematics, UC-Berkeley would be your best bet. MIT caters to only students who have already taken calculus in high school.
Why would that make them good resources for someone who wants a remedial education? If you want to catch up on barely-remembered stuff from high school in your spare time you don't go for a course that expects the best and brightest and will try to weed a quarter of them out early on. I'd be wary of the textbook choices, too. Professors don't always pick the textbooks that are easiest to learn from. This goes double if the professor writes their own textbook -- I have a signal analysis book by an MIT prof that's written in a deliberately dense and formal style. Amazon.com reviews are much more helpful for textbook selection, IMHO. Going to a local library and checking out a couple is also a good idea.
Automotive products that don't go in the cabin are tested at much higher temperatures than that. I work on microncontrollers for antilock brakes, and we test at 125C and -40C.
The health issuses are almost exclusively about dosage control and dosage methods and don't even get into the issue of whether a person has a right to control their own perception of euphoria.
People don't control their perception of euphoria, their perception of euphoria controls them.
1. Germany and Japan were already wealthy, powerful, industrialized nations prior to World War 2. Their post-war recover was just that -- a recovery. Also, during that recovery we poured massive amounts of aid into both countries to prevent them from turning communist and joining the Soviet bloc. It's doubtful that total war would leave Iraq any better off, especially since our current (idiotic) view of terrorism would probably prevent Americans from supporting a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort.
2. The war again Japan ended when the Emperor surrendered after the atomic bombings. There was no civilian revolt. Likewise, we (and the Soviets!) had to storm Berlin to finish off Nazi Germany. We wouldn't give up if attacked; why should they? See also: Vietnam, which is a much better point of comparison for our current war.
The only tags I like are my own. The real use of other people's tags is to show how they organize information, not to help me find something. The problems the article brings up are only the beginning -- the natural tendency of a global tagging system is for the number of tags applied to an object to increase without bound. If I'm doing a master's thesis on, say, web design, I might tag any number of sites "thesis". Is that useful to anyone else? Probably not. But it will interfere with someone who's searching for sites about writing theses.
Yeah, I know that social networking is an actual field. I was objecting to your use of it as a verb. "Social networking" is a high-level description that ignores the fact that two services which feature it may not be interchangeable at all. Case in point -- many modern video games, as part of their multiplayer feature, allow you to label other users as friends, see when they're online, and send messages. Can I replace Facebook with Half-Life 2? Of course not. Nor can I replace Facebook with del.icio.us, or Livejournal with Facebook.
Again, I don't want a blog because blogging software is primarily designed to help you (and others) display content to the net at large. LJ is designed to display information to a small group, and includes features like a friends page, which shows your friends' most recent posts, and per-user security levels. I took a brief look at the WordPress site and didn't see anything about a friends page, and the only post security feature seems to be password protection. For other people that might be fine, but in my particular case it's just not good enough.
I guess my friends and I could all set up our own blogs and then have RSS feeds and the like, but it's much, much simpler to use one site where everything's nicely integrated. And since almost everyone I know has an LJ, there's really no other choice.
LJ and Facebook are completely different sites. I don't use LJ to "social network", I use it as a diary that my friends can read. For that matter, I don't use Facebook to "social network", I use it to see what people from high school and college are up to now -- in other words, I'm on it for the profiles. I have no interest in blogging, or saying anything to the internet at large. I wish people would stop assuming that the only use for web services is whatever trendy marketing buzzword is being shoved down our throats this week.
Do you not use any software? I keep installation files for most of my software on my harddrive and I have broadband, but I've still never gotten a full reinstall done in less than three hours. Even after SP2, Windows Update alone takes forever. And then there's copying all my music and movies over from wherever I backed them up...
The reason cigarettes are worse than alcohol (for me) is that when I leave a place where people are smoking I end up smelling like an ashtray, whereas when I leave a place where people are drinking I can actually fall asleep that night without having to take a shower first. Smoking is pollution -- it only takes one or two people to make a whole room reek.
Also, it's not quite true that smoking only hurts the smoker. Like many other things, it's a self-propagating behavior. Why do so many teenagers start smoking? Because their friends do. Why did their friends start smoking? Because *their* friends did it, and so forth. Whether or not you want to include that in your ethical calculations is up to you, but I think it's worth considering.
Why are there so few adult games? I don't mean porn, I mean games that you have to be older than 14 to really appreciate. One of the reasons I liked Silent Hill 2 so much better than the other games in the series was that the motivations of the characters were so different from the standard "Escape! Revenge! Make things go boom!". How many kids are going to empathize with a suicidal guy who's running around a ghost town because the only thing he has to live for is a chance of seeing his dead wife again? I want more stuff like that. There are way too many perpetually cheerful adventurers and ruggedly determined squad leaders for my taste.
As for the Randi foundation, I have zero confidence in their ability to make an unbiased report on anything they might find. Why? Because if they do find real, actual psychic powers, thats a million they owe.
First off, the million dollars is mostly from donations. Randi himself put up a mere $1000 out of his own pocket. Secondly, the million dollars can't be used for anything else, so there's no point in holding onto it. But really, forgot money and merchandising, the thrill and prestige of being the first person to scientifically verify the reality of telepathy, dowsing, talking to the dead, or any other paranormal stuff would be well worth admitting that he was wrong. It would open up whole new fields of study and pretty much guarantee that Randi's name would be in all the history books. Think about it -- if you were going (back) to college, wouldn't *you* want to major in telepathy?
Some people are motivated by things other than money.
Fact: most techies understand treelike structures well, and did even before hierarchical filesystems became common currency. For obvious reasons.
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
Fact: Most people are perfectly capable of dealing with the concept of a nested container. If I tell someone that some dinner plates are on the bottom shelf in a cabinet in a house, or that a calculator is in a backpack in a locker at school, they don't need to call tech support to understand what I mean.
The prohibition against forward slashes dates back to the days of DOS, when forward slashes were used (instead of hyphens) for passing options to programs on the command line. Since no spaces were required before or between options, a forward slash in the middle of a filename would cause the latter part of the name to be interpreted as a switch. I gather that this is so you can do things like:
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the support! I'm glad I'm not the only one who's tired of hearing that freedom = free stuff.
This is cognitive dissonance. Regardless of whether copyright terms should be shorter (they should, IMO), TPB is making money off of very recent works -- XBox360 and Wii games, for instance. And again, I must point out that even in cases where you *are* able to get things for free (like video game FAQs) the wholesale use of others' recent works for ad money is not considered acceptable. Why is it that when some new site spiders GameFAQs and copies documents without the authors' permission it's a crime, but when music is involved it's something that you just ought to be able to do?
Congratulations, you've seen through the illusion and discovered that Slashdot's anti-RIAA campaign is really about getting free stuff after all. Note that The Pirate Bay is both:
A) Declining to pay artists for the use of their copyrighted material, and
B) Making money off of it by hosting ad banners.
Complete hypocrisy, but of course nobody here seems to care. And you know that if a web site were doing something similar in another medium (say, video game FAQs or Slashdot posts) without permission there would be a huge outcry. Didn't Jon Katz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" book spark just such a controvery? The guiding principle here seems to be "It's okay to use people's stuff for free unless it's my stuff."
Interaction is the key - "I saw the ghost of my dead brother" is one thing, "my brother just appeared to me and said that he was just killed and then four hours later I got a phone call confirming the information" is something entirely different.
It's only different if you ignore the huge numbers of premonitions and prophesies that don't work out. If enough people have such feelings and experiences, a few of them are bound to be right through sheer random chance. In a world with six billion people, bizarre coincidences are going to happen all the time. And what is it that separates "spiritual" coincidences from any other kind? Seems like it's just tradition.
Since we already have the theoretical models of how to create alternate universes
Given that we don't yet have a model of where our universe came from I have to doubt that. If you're talking about quantum mechanics, be careful -- the many-worlds interpretation is fun, but has zero evidence to back it up. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, and for all I know what you're talking about is possible, but it's still a huge leap to go from current QM to infinitely long "life"spans.
tests to know whether or not it is true.
Such as?
Are you talking about things like near-death and out of body experiences? If so, then that's pretty shoddy evidence. OoBEs can be produced in a variety of ways -- one guy did it with a camera, a dummy, a pair of VR goggles, and a stick. Near-death experiences are (among other things) an artifact of oxygen deprivation. If you want to postulate mind-body dualism, you'll have to explain what makes some of those experiences real and others not, and how a non-physical mind could interact with a physical body. If the idea of a consciousness behind the universe is valid and special, what's different about people talking to their computers like they're alive? Again, there's a whole spectrum of thought-patterns similar to religious beliefs, but nobody claims those are some sort of universal truth.
Also, you're assuming that the universe has existed for an infinite amount of time. That's a pretty big assumption. You're also assuming that a human (or other limited) consciousness could grow beyond its limits to become the sort of entity referred to as a god. That's an even bigger assumption, especially since we aren't even capable of talking about what that would mean. And you're making the tacit assumption that there's only one god -- that's a huge cultural bias, you know.
I think you're mischaracterizing an atheist argument. Nobody's saying that nothing is going on! Obviously something is -- we exist! Obviously consciousness is strange and defies explanation, at least right now. But that doesn't mean that we should immediately turn to a (monotheistic, all-knowing, all-powerful, etc.) god to look for answers, especially since most religions aren't in the answer business anyway. How do you know all that stuff about God? You said you were taught? How did your teachers know? And their teachers? Where does this information come from? How can we know whether it's true? We're not supposed to ask those questions, because when you look closely, you find that the answers that come from history and psychology sound a lot better than those that come from theology.
The nature of consciousness may be the most important question we have to answer, but right now we're still stuck on the very first explanations that anyone ever came up with! Why is it that we can move past ancient ideas about science, art, humanity, and the cosmos in general, but religions have to be kept for all time?
Here's a question that I would love to see answered to any degree of my satisfaction: why is all religion immediately discarded as a logical impossibility because some religious beliefs are illogical and inconsistent?
Because once you're willing to discard some religious beliefs you don't have much reason for keeping gods around. Only your first teaching above might require God to be there, and even that's questionable -- rearrange the sentences a bit and you have an entirely secular philosophy. Why add a god? You're right that there's nothing logically impossible about what you're saying, but I don't think most people go that far. It's just pretty obvious to a lot of us that when people argue for the existence of God they're doing so because they want a god to be there, not because they found God out of honest inquiry. I'm not picking on you specifically; many great philosophers do this. Look at the leap you need to get from something like the ontological argument to Christianity and you'll see what I mean.
Check out the web sites at MIT and UC-Berkeley, which are the #1 private institution and the #1 public institution, respectively, in the USA. There is a good chance that they offer on-line videos of the lectures.
Buy the same textbooks that the students at those universities use. For the pre-calculus mathematics, UC-Berkeley would be your best bet. MIT caters to only students who have already taken calculus in high school.
Why would that make them good resources for someone who wants a remedial education? If you want to catch up on barely-remembered stuff from high school in your spare time you don't go for a course that expects the best and brightest and will try to weed a quarter of them out early on. I'd be wary of the textbook choices, too. Professors don't always pick the textbooks that are easiest to learn from. This goes double if the professor writes their own textbook -- I have a signal analysis book by an MIT prof that's written in a deliberately dense and formal style. Amazon.com reviews are much more helpful for textbook selection, IMHO. Going to a local library and checking out a couple is also a good idea.
Automotive products that don't go in the cabin are tested at much higher temperatures than that. I work on microncontrollers for antilock brakes, and we test at 125C and -40C.
The health issuses are almost exclusively about dosage control and dosage methods and don't even get into the issue of whether a person has a right to control their own perception of euphoria.
People don't control their perception of euphoria, their perception of euphoria controls them.
Two problems with that:
1. Germany and Japan were already wealthy, powerful, industrialized nations prior to World War 2. Their post-war recover was just that -- a recovery. Also, during that recovery we poured massive amounts of aid into both countries to prevent them from turning communist and joining the Soviet bloc. It's doubtful that total war would leave Iraq any better off, especially since our current (idiotic) view of terrorism would probably prevent Americans from supporting a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort.
2. The war again Japan ended when the Emperor surrendered after the atomic bombings. There was no civilian revolt. Likewise, we (and the Soviets!) had to storm Berlin to finish off Nazi Germany. We wouldn't give up if attacked; why should they? See also: Vietnam, which is a much better point of comparison for our current war.
All of this is true for plays, and playwrights have no problem getting recognition.
The only tags I like are my own. The real use of other people's tags is to show how they organize information, not to help me find something. The problems the article brings up are only the beginning -- the natural tendency of a global tagging system is for the number of tags applied to an object to increase without bound. If I'm doing a master's thesis on, say, web design, I might tag any number of sites "thesis". Is that useful to anyone else? Probably not. But it will interfere with someone who's searching for sites about writing theses.
Yeah, cause uncontrolled urban sprawl has nothing to do with the crime rate in Baltimore...
Yeah, I know that social networking is an actual field. I was objecting to your use of it as a verb. "Social networking" is a high-level description that ignores the fact that two services which feature it may not be interchangeable at all. Case in point -- many modern video games, as part of their multiplayer feature, allow you to label other users as friends, see when they're online, and send messages. Can I replace Facebook with Half-Life 2? Of course not. Nor can I replace Facebook with del.icio.us, or Livejournal with Facebook.
Again, I don't want a blog because blogging software is primarily designed to help you (and others) display content to the net at large. LJ is designed to display information to a small group, and includes features like a friends page, which shows your friends' most recent posts, and per-user security levels. I took a brief look at the WordPress site and didn't see anything about a friends page, and the only post security feature seems to be password protection. For other people that might be fine, but in my particular case it's just not good enough.
I guess my friends and I could all set up our own blogs and then have RSS feeds and the like, but it's much, much simpler to use one site where everything's nicely integrated. And since almost everyone I know has an LJ, there's really no other choice.
1) Use facebook to social network
LJ and Facebook are completely different sites. I don't use LJ to "social network", I use it as a diary that my friends can read. For that matter, I don't use Facebook to "social network", I use it to see what people from high school and college are up to now -- in other words, I'm on it for the profiles. I have no interest in blogging, or saying anything to the internet at large. I wish people would stop assuming that the only use for web services is whatever trendy marketing buzzword is being shoved down our throats this week.
Do you not use any software? I keep installation files for most of my software on my harddrive and I have broadband, but I've still never gotten a full reinstall done in less than three hours. Even after SP2, Windows Update alone takes forever. And then there's copying all my music and movies over from wherever I backed them up...
The reason cigarettes are worse than alcohol (for me) is that when I leave a place where people are smoking I end up smelling like an ashtray, whereas when I leave a place where people are drinking I can actually fall asleep that night without having to take a shower first. Smoking is pollution -- it only takes one or two people to make a whole room reek.
Also, it's not quite true that smoking only hurts the smoker. Like many other things, it's a self-propagating behavior. Why do so many teenagers start smoking? Because their friends do. Why did their friends start smoking? Because *their* friends did it, and so forth. Whether or not you want to include that in your ethical calculations is up to you, but I think it's worth considering.
Why are there so few adult games? I don't mean porn, I mean games that you have to be older than 14 to really appreciate. One of the reasons I liked Silent Hill 2 so much better than the other games in the series was that the motivations of the characters were so different from the standard "Escape! Revenge! Make things go boom!". How many kids are going to empathize with a suicidal guy who's running around a ghost town because the only thing he has to live for is a chance of seeing his dead wife again? I want more stuff like that. There are way too many perpetually cheerful adventurers and ruggedly determined squad leaders for my taste.
Also check out:
_ again_the_theory_behi.php
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/07/pear_yet
As for the Randi foundation, I have zero confidence in their ability to make an unbiased report on anything they might find. Why? Because if they do find real, actual psychic powers, thats a million they owe.
First off, the million dollars is mostly from donations. Randi himself put up a mere $1000 out of his own pocket. Secondly, the million dollars can't be used for anything else, so there's no point in holding onto it. But really, forgot money and merchandising, the thrill and prestige of being the first person to scientifically verify the reality of telepathy, dowsing, talking to the dead, or any other paranormal stuff would be well worth admitting that he was wrong. It would open up whole new fields of study and pretty much guarantee that Randi's name would be in all the history books. Think about it -- if you were going (back) to college, wouldn't *you* want to major in telepathy?
Some people are motivated by things other than money.
They're asking for 2155-2175 MHz.
Fact: most techies understand treelike structures well, and did even before hierarchical filesystems became common currency. For obvious reasons.
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
Fact: Most people are perfectly capable of dealing with the concept of a nested container. If I tell someone that some dinner plates are on the bottom shelf in a cabinet in a house, or that a calculator is in a backpack in a locker at school, they don't need to call tech support to understand what I mean.
The prohibition against forward slashes dates back to the days of DOS, when forward slashes were used (instead of hyphens) for passing options to programs on the command line. Since no spaces were required before or between options, a forward slash in the middle of a filename would cause the latter part of the name to be interpreted as a switch. I gather that this is so you can do things like:
/W /P
DIR/W/P
instead of:
DIR
A bit silly, but it's consistent with | and >.
I don't know, I think the new theme fits the general intellectual climate of Slashdot perfectly.
Worst. Idea. Ever