I was referring to "God" in the traditional "all-powerful (or extremely powerful) supernatural intelligent being who may have created the universe and may take an active role in its events." Duh.
Well, it's not a "duh" thing at all. Philosophers spend a lot of time discussing such things. In casual discussions of "religion vs. science", yes, you have a default idea, but some ideas of god(s) are much more subtle.
As for Taoist ideas, well, you can
say, "I define God as the total sum of the universe," and I'll say, "Okay, so, you're just going to call it God instead of The Universe. I'm pretty sure the universe exists, so, okay."
There is just a little bit more to it than that. It's like the difference between "yes, that is a pattern of sonic vibrations of such-and-such frequencies and overtones" and "that's Beethoven's `Ode to Joy'". The physical observations are the same, but the subjective meaning, the use, the psychological/spiritual resonance, is completely different.
My thoughts are simply electrochemical and neurochemical processes; entirely physical, and
therefore they exist. So is my mind. Your mind, well, I don't know about that... (just kidding, you were asking for it:)
You can (at least in principle) observe and understand the electrochemical events in my brain, but that's not the same as understanding my thoughts. No objective observation will let you know what it's like to see through my eyes.
Yes, I have seen Penn & Teller in person. Just because they can fool my senses does not mean that I have reason to believe that anything I have not sensed (or SOMEONE has not sensed) does not exist. If this is an incorrect statement, please demonstrate how.
I didn't say you did. I said that you have reason to question that things you have sensed exist.
You also have reason to question reports of what others have sensed, because 1) they are subject to the same sensory limitations, and 2) they sometimes lie. And you have reason to question inferences made from sense data, since we all are subject to error.
Just a reminder that we don't have a strong dichotomy of TRUTH vs. bullshit, that we must question everything.
There is no God. There are no gods... There is no such thing as chi.
One must define one's terms before making such a statement. What is God? If you mean some supernatural being outside the physical universe, I'll agree with you. But what about a more Taoist formulation? What about God taken as the entire universe considered as a single entity? What about gods considered as archetypical psychelogical manifestations? ESR's opinion is that All the Gods are alive. They are not supernatural; rather, they are our inmost natures; it's hard to make a statement that "our inmost natures" do not exist.
"Chi" literally just means "breath", which clearly exists; if you mean the semi-supernatural "life energy" extolled by some I'll agree that it doesn't have physical existence, yet concepts of chi can be useful in martial arts and in healing practices.
Atheism is not incompatable with Paganism. I label myself a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian; it all fits together.
My point is, there is no reason to think that anything exists aside from what we can detect with our senses (and devices that enhance our senses, like radio telescopes).
The following questions are left as an exercise for the reader:
Does the number 3 exist? Does truth? Beauty? The note Bb? The color red? The property redness? Your thoughts? Your mind? My mind?
Who is more real: Mr. Spock, or John Smith, Esq. of Crofton, Maryland? One is fictional, one is (according to the phonebook) a real person; but Mr. Spock exists in many more minds than Mr. Smith. Which is the more durable existence?
Every see Penn & Teller in action? Your senses are limited and can be fooled; what reason do you have to think that what you can detect with them means anything? What assumptions are you making when you integrate sense data? What other sets of assumptions are possible? Can these other sets of assumption led to useful results?
The Paganism I practice has more to do with questions like this than with "How do I cast a love spell?"
I find it difficult to beleive that anyone who would encorporate entropy into
their everyday life would have much success using any types of electronic systems.
I don't have to incorporate entropy into my everyday life, it finds its own way in! I can either despair, or yell "Hail Eris!"
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the
ERISTIC ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth,
metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears
disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
...
To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to
choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only
accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to
destructive disorder.--Principia Discordia
We don't "have faith" that it works. We KNOW FOR A FACT IT WORKS. How? I may not have any idea how gcc works, but I can actually use it to compile a program.
And that's exactly the difference between religion (such as mainstream Judeo-Christian traditions) and mysticism (such as neoPaganism, Zen, even traditions like Sufism): religions you believe in, mystic practices you use. I don't "have faith" that dancing and drumming around a fire in the moonlight calling praise to the Goddess puts me in tune with It All, I have firsthand personal experience in the matter.
it's unlikely that there's much of a direct link between hacking and getting interested in mysticism, or being a mystic and getting interested in hacking.
You should come to a Pagan festival like Starwood or the Free Spirit Gathering and see just how many hackers are there. It's remarkable, and leaves little doubt that there is some connection.
IMHO, Zen and Paganism appeal to hackers because they are centered on experience, rather than dogma ("Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proven it correct, not tested it"), and because they allow for heterodoxy ("There's more than one way to do it.").
How do you tax a company's profits when a company's profits will eventually be nothing but encrypted bits stored in a virtual bank?
Because the company will be required to disclose those bits to the government, or forfeit its priviledge of existance. Corporations and partnerships are legal entities created by government fiat, and the state will certainly revoke charters of anyone who tries to evade taxes. It would be very difficult for a large group to pool resources and work together without such a legal framework.
Food, cars, whisky - this stuff is trivial compared to what information will be worth...Companies like Sony sell games consoles at a loss because they make a profit on the less tangible things like the games
The only thing that lets Sony make big profits on their games is the artificial scarcity created by government copyright - so with no taxes, and no state to create and enforce copyright, Sony would be SOL.
The trend - as we see with Napster, et. al. - is for information to become less valuable, as duplication becomes easier. (Fortunately for creators, creation and distribution will also become easier, allowing them to cut out the middlemen and still make an income.)
Software, email spam lists, money in virtual bank accounts - these are all forms of information that are worth something and can't be taxed easily.
Yes, but all that information is eventually traded for physical goods. I can't eat software, I can't live in an spammer's email list. Knowing how to write a better program than my competitors may be neat in an abstract sense of excellence, but I want it to bring me more tangible pleasures like fine single malt Irish whisky. Money - physical bills or in virtual bank accounts - exists to be spent on goods and services that make life enjoyable, and technology doesn't affect the taxability of those.
It's
interesting to note a company like Nothing Real (their product is the digital compositing system Shake) who are avoiding taxes by failing to deliver any tangible goods.If a bunch of companies decide to trade with each other in this manner how can they possibly be taxed.
Simple - tax their profits. Corporations exist at the government's whim - the state need only say "Tell us your profits, and send us x% of them, and give us a list of your who traded your stock so we can impose capital gains taxes, or we will revoke your corporate charter."
Right now, it might be practical for a corporation to go offshore - but if a significant amount of wealth starts to accumulate there, you can be that those government will eventually start taxing just as heavy as anyone else.
Like the residents of the march regions, residents and businesspeople in these new cyber-zones will go largely untaxed, because taxes will be almost impossible to tabulate and collect.
We've seen this fantasy of the net ending taxation for years now, and it's just as bogus now as it ever was.
No encryption technology will prevent the county sherrif from showing up at my door demanding payment of my property taxes. No digital cash scheme will prevent the cashier at the local supermarket from adding on sales tax when I buy a chocolate bar, or prevent the imposition of income taxes on that cashier's paycheck - the supermarket, as a fixed physical entity, is easily subject to state regulation. SSL won't keep the state from knowing who a corporation's stockholders are and imposing capital gains taxes - since corporations are state-chartered entities, there's no way they can avoid regulation. (As lax as that regulation tends to be today, don't doubt that if the tax money stops flowing that will change.)
The only taxes that might be avoided by new technology are income taxes for independant contractors who work via the net; and if that truly comes to pass, you'll just see a shift away from the income taxes toward other forms of taxes. Which might not be a bad thing, but it's hardly the destruction of taxation.
But I am not so sure if GPL is what I want. It curtails my freedom to use open source code in commercial code.
No, it doesn't. You can use my GPLed code in a commercial product that you sell - free as is speech, not necessarily as in beer. But, you have to allow others the same freedom to use your code that you enjoyed with my code. You don't get to be more free than your customers.
The reason some of us find the BSD style licence inadequate is because it doesn't preserve free choice - I write software and release the source, you use the freedom thus provided to make changes, and you sell the software (fine) but don't give your customer the source or the option to copy and redistribute (not fine) - you take away their free choice.
You guys are idiots. 5 years was for the whole product - business plan, funding, hardware development, code. Get
a clue.
The statement 'over 5 years of hard work by a
group of "geeks, hackers and techno-whizzes" like each of you!' would imply that business plans and fundings aren't included in that figure. Real Geeks don't do business plans, that's why there are suits.
They are defending their right not to have their intellectual Property reverse engineered and openly distributed.
There is no such right.
You don't pull a microwave apart and put it back together then complain when you get radiation poisoning do you? Why should this be any different?
Because no one's complaining about anything? Your analogy is a complete non sequitor. You have every right to disassemble your uwave and tinker with it, and to share your blueprints with the rest of the world.
Maybe the developers should have tried to contact the company to develop the product, instead ofjumping the gun an assuming the company wouldn't agree.
Why should they? I don't have to get Toyota's permission to develop, and share plans for, a new type of tire iron for my Tercel. I don't have to get the permission of Intel or AMD when I'm writing software that runs on my servers here.
I'd also like to say something to the readers: don't get angry and attack these
guys. They're just a group of guys trying to feed their dogs by coming up with ideas to make a buck. Yelling and screaming doesn't help anyone.
No, they shouldn't be yelled and screamed at. They should be flayed and boiled alive in oil.
They don't get to trample on our rights to explore technical problems and discuss our solutions, in order to feed their dogs. Their threatening legal tactics are no different than those of the MPAA in the DeCSS case. The fact that they're a small company is no excuse - indeed, it means that every person there holds more responsibility for the actions of the company, not less.
Note the vauge references to "intellectual property". What do they mean? Was copyright violated? Was a patent broken? Was a trademark violated? Taking something apart to see how it works, and describing your findings to others, is not a violation of any legitimate law. (The DMCA is illegitmate and unconstitutional, and its architects and supporters need to be cleansed via the flaying and boiling ritual described above.)
Oh, and to my knowledge (IANAL) only trademarks need to be defended with vigor to be recognized; patent and copyright holders can be more lenient and still retain their legal rights.
We probably don't need to be too worried about a complete extinction, Armageddon like, asteroid - the chances
are very small. There have been a significant number of smaller asteroid strikes though.
It's perhaps less likely now than it was 15-20 years ago at the height of "Cold War" paranoia,, but it's still possible that someone might mistake a "small" asteroid/comet impact for a nuclear first strike and launch a retaliatory strike.
I remember a segment on Space (Canada's Scifi network) where they put two balls on a field and started hitting
tenis balls between them, with a baseball bat. Chunks of rocks, even HUGE chunks of rocks are very small in comparison to even the distance between the earth and moon.
Yes, but balls don't have significant gravitational fields, pulling tennis balls closer and closer on each orbit.
I threw up a 50 cent donation link on the AOLiza site a few days ago and I've already gotten a good response. A few people decided to 'buy' multiple donations, upping the donation.
From the blatant self-promotion department: Might I also suggest checking out the sponsorpool project that I'm developing? In return for their contribution (processed with PayPal), donors get to place sponsored links on your page, a nice extra incentive.
IANAB (I am not a biologist), but isn't one of the reasons why animals reproduce the fact that it feels good
That's kind of backwards. The reason sex feels good is because it's reproductive; when one of our distant ancestors accidently got wired to enjoy shooting semen he went around fscking every female he could, thus passing on that wiring.
Critters who don't enjoy reproduction don't reproduce, so there's heavy selective pressure for good sex.
You see, given I and you and everybody else is going to be dead before we come up with computers that could
come even close to the amount of power needed to take over the world, we don't have a problem.
Speak for yourself. Barring accidents or violence, I intend to still be here in 100 years, plenty of time for the emergence of intelligent machines.
In the last century, we may have had unfocused EM signals spraying all over the place, but for how long? It appears that our communication
channels are starting to become more focused and efficent through the use of cables and focused, line-of-site EM.
And don't forget encryption and compression, which can turn signal into something indistiguishable from noise.
As technology increases, efficiency and integrity of communication channels makes them harder to intercept, or indeed even recognize. The only way we're going to find anyone out there is if they're deliberately sending signals. And how many deliberate interstellar messages have we sent? I can only recall one, beamed at the Great
Cluster in Hercules by the Arecibo radio telescope.
I fear that maybe everybody's waiting for the other guy to start the conversation.
...they would likely have been around for millions of years already, and in that time their engineering projects could easily have reached a scale where we could see them from Earth. But we only see natural pheomena.
How do we know that we're not seeing such engineering projects? How would we recognize artifacts of megaengineering - we'd be likely to take them for natural phenomena and adjust our physical theories accordingly. Wouldn't it be a hoot if pulsars, or gamma ray bursts, turned out to be artifical creations?
We're puzzled as to how some of the planetary systems we've seen recently have gas giants close to the primary, contradicting our ideas about the formation of planetary systems. What if they were moved? I'm not saying that I'd bet they were, but we're more likely to alter our theories about stellar formation than to say "Ah! The work of ET engineers!"
Studying modern economics to understand the realities of ownership, resources, labor, and trade is like studying alchemy to understand chemical reactions - the theories are completely disconnected from reality. If a man gets skin cancer because of the industry-create hole in the ozone layer and runs up thousands of dollars in medical bills, that's counted as a positive contribution to the GDP! Economists actually suggest that the fact that fossil fuel prices haven't gone up (in constant dollars) proves that we aren't running out! (Free clue: poke more holes into a bottle of water and the water will come out faster. This might make it look like you've got a plentiful supply - until it's gone.)
Without free markets, it isn't capitalism.
Generally a free market accompanies capitalism, yes (though a capitalistic command economy is possible, the US during WWII would be a good example); but one does not have to have capitalism to have a free market.
But professor, this book contains material that supports my arguements. However, you'll need to pay $399.95 in order to read it.
I could let you read it, but then I'd have to have you arrested.
Yow! Excellent point. Guess that means that students will only be allowed to refer to the assigned textbooks when writing papers. But then, we don't want to confuse students by having more than one source of information. As Vitalviewer says,
Among the obstacles:
Students receive information from myriad sources,
many coming from within the university, many more
from beyond the boundaries of campus. Materials in
this model are inconsistent in terms of quality,
unpredictable in structure and organization, and are completely isolated from one another.
It's certainly much easier to get all information from one source. Don't confuse me with different points of view, sorting them out makes my brain hurt. Just give me the official party line and I'll regurgitate it on command.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's not a "duh" thing at all. Philosophers spend a lot of time discussing such things. In casual discussions of "religion vs. science", yes, you have a default idea, but some ideas of god(s) are much more subtle.
There is just a little bit more to it than that. It's like the difference between "yes, that is a pattern of sonic vibrations of such-and-such frequencies and overtones" and "that's Beethoven's `Ode to Joy'". The physical observations are the same, but the subjective meaning, the use, the psychological/spiritual resonance, is completely different. You can (at least in principle) observe and understand the electrochemical events in my brain, but that's not the same as understanding my thoughts. No objective observation will let you know what it's like to see through my eyes. I didn't say you did. I said that you have reason to question that things you have sensed exist.You also have reason to question reports of what others have sensed, because 1) they are subject to the same sensory limitations, and 2) they sometimes lie. And you have reason to question inferences made from sense data, since we all are subject to error.
Just a reminder that we don't have a strong dichotomy of TRUTH vs. bullshit, that we must question everything.
"Chi" literally just means "breath", which clearly exists; if you mean the semi-supernatural "life energy" extolled by some I'll agree that it doesn't have physical existence, yet concepts of chi can be useful in martial arts and in healing practices.
Atheism is not incompatable with Paganism. I label myself a Zen Pagan Taoist Atheist Discordian; it all fits together.
The following questions are left as an exercise for the reader:Does the number 3 exist? Does truth? Beauty? The note Bb? The color red? The property redness? Your thoughts? Your mind? My mind?
Who is more real: Mr. Spock, or John Smith, Esq. of Crofton, Maryland? One is fictional, one is (according to the phonebook) a real person; but Mr. Spock exists in many more minds than Mr. Smith. Which is the more durable existence?
Every see Penn & Teller in action? Your senses are limited and can be fooled; what reason do you have to think that what you can detect with them means anything? What assumptions are you making when you integrate sense data? What other sets of assumptions are possible? Can these other sets of assumption led to useful results?
The Paganism I practice has more to do with questions like this than with "How do I cast a love spell?"
You should come to a Pagan festival like Starwood or the Free Spirit Gathering and see just how many hackers are there. It's remarkable, and leaves little doubt that there is some connection.
IMHO, Zen and Paganism appeal to hackers because they are centered on experience, rather than dogma ("Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proven it correct, not tested it"), and because they allow for heterodoxy ("There's more than one way to do it.").
Suggested reading: my own introduction to the Laughing Thunder Circle and ESR's Frequently Asked Questions about Neopaganism
The trend - as we see with Napster, et. al. - is for information to become less valuable, as duplication becomes easier. (Fortunately for creators, creation and distribution will also become easier, allowing them to cut out the middlemen and still make an income.)
Right now, it might be practical for a corporation to go offshore - but if a significant amount of wealth starts to accumulate there, you can be that those government will eventually start taxing just as heavy as anyone else.
No encryption technology will prevent the county sherrif from showing up at my door demanding payment of my property taxes. No digital cash scheme will prevent the cashier at the local supermarket from adding on sales tax when I buy a chocolate bar, or prevent the imposition of income taxes on that cashier's paycheck - the supermarket, as a fixed physical entity, is easily subject to state regulation. SSL won't keep the state from knowing who a corporation's stockholders are and imposing capital gains taxes - since corporations are state-chartered entities, there's no way they can avoid regulation. (As lax as that regulation tends to be today, don't doubt that if the tax money stops flowing that will change.)
The only taxes that might be avoided by new technology are income taxes for independant contractors who work via the net; and if that truly comes to pass, you'll just see a shift away from the income taxes toward other forms of taxes. Which might not be a bad thing, but it's hardly the destruction of taxation.
The reason some of us find the BSD style licence inadequate is because it doesn't preserve free choice - I write software and release the source, you use the freedom thus provided to make changes, and you sell the software (fine) but don't give your customer the source or the option to copy and redistribute (not fine) - you take away their free choice.
They don't get to trample on our rights to explore technical problems and discuss our solutions, in order to feed their dogs. Their threatening legal tactics are no different than those of the MPAA in the DeCSS case. The fact that they're a small company is no excuse - indeed, it means that every person there holds more responsibility for the actions of the company, not less.
Note the vauge references to "intellectual property". What do they mean? Was copyright violated? Was a patent broken? Was a trademark violated? Taking something apart to see how it works, and describing your findings to others, is not a violation of any legitimate law. (The DMCA is illegitmate and unconstitutional, and its architects and supporters need to be cleansed via the flaying and boiling ritual described above.) Oh, and to my knowledge (IANAL) only trademarks need to be defended with vigor to be recognized; patent and copyright holders can be more lenient and still retain their legal rights.
So: fsck 'em if they can't take a hack.
Yes, and copying is copying, and copying is not theft, since it does not deprive anyone the use of the object.
And layout and look-and-feel is neither copyrightable nor patentable, so this isn't even unauthorized copying.
Is is tacky and rude? Perhaps.
BTW, AOLiza is great!
Critters who don't enjoy reproduction don't reproduce, so there's heavy selective pressure for good sex.
As technology increases, efficiency and integrity of communication channels makes them harder to intercept, or indeed even recognize. The only way we're going to find anyone out there is if they're deliberately sending signals. And how many deliberate interstellar messages have we sent? I can only recall one, beamed at the Great Cluster in Hercules by the Arecibo radio telescope.
I fear that maybe everybody's waiting for the other guy to start the conversation.
We're puzzled as to how some of the planetary systems we've seen recently have gas giants close to the primary, contradicting our ideas about the formation of planetary systems. What if they were moved? I'm not saying that I'd bet they were, but we're more likely to alter our theories about stellar formation than to say "Ah! The work of ET engineers!"