No, it's that her prose paints such a vivid visual it's like watching movies. A good book is way better than a movie, because a book has the time to explore the details instead of being cut to fit a two hour window.:)
And I'd respond that as your very existence and life are a thought-train of God, you are the meaning of your existence. Your purpose is to experience life to the fullest, to think freely, to interact with other thoughts, to grow, to learn, to survive and to thrive. Not to simply be, but to do more than merely exist and collect things as you work your way through life.
There is no distinction between man and God in my world view. We are God's very thoughts as it studies itself and the existence it spawned when it screamed "I AM" during the big bang.
Why would the universe expect it's cells to worship it? Do we expect our skin cells to worship us?
Sure we're all part of existence, our souls the very thoughts of God itself, all children of God, and all miracles in that sense, but the existence of God doesn't determine our fate. We have will and intelligence to choose what we believe and how we think, and therein lies the randomness of existence: our own nature.
Personally I doubt the universe gives a rats ass about us as individuals. We're just random thoughts in a massively parallel system, born to experience life and to someday die and be no more than a memory in God's great universal fabric. If there is a heaven, it is to have lived a thought-life that is worth remembering. If there is a hell, it is to have lived a thought life of depravity and disgust that is best forgotten.
Some thoughts bear repeating. This is the only parallel I see to reincarnation. Some thoughts may take multiple thoughts chained together to work through an idea -- the evolution of society.
Even things like genetic engineering may well be just God deciding that it needs to break the rules of evolution and quantum influence it is bound to by it's own nature. It has to rely on human beings to develop the electron microscopes, laser scalpels, and gene splicing techniques to break those rules. Who knows?
But as surely as you know God does not exist, I know that it does. Don't you just love philosophizing about that which is truly unknowable? In a perverse case of quantum physics, both of us are right and will have an observational answer when we open the box of death and see the Schroedinger's Cat of God for ourselves -- either nothing, or a wonder beyond wonders.
But like most I've had this discussion with, you try to pigeon hole me with the concepts of religious texts that I don't believe in. I don't think we're pets -- I think we're part of the intelligence of God itself. It's thoughts. Remember that I don't consider the intelligence of the universe to be anything akin to a human intelligence, so restricting yourself to the concept that God could only have one train of thought at a time is foolishness. After all, God is busy being and thinking about the whole of existence all at once.
While I'm on the subject of religious texts, those who spout off on "The Bible Says" and such really amuse me to no end. A bunch of shepherds who knew virtually nothing sat around campfires telling tall tales and getting drunk, and some of those tales were written down. And modern day people consider those tales to be "the word of God"? Never mind all the translation errors and exagerrations as the tales were told through the generations, too many of the tales we just know flat out could not have been.
I don't believe in burning bushes, moving mountains, feeding the thousands, or parting seas. I just believe the universe is alive and aware, curious and bored, and thinks about the nature of it's own existence by spawning life-thoughts to experience it's own existence. Where those individual thoughts lead, no one knows.
And just because God has set the rules of CHON life down for earth doesn't mean a different set of rules aren't being followed on some other planet in the universe, perhaps based on silica. Or sulphur. Or something else. But once the rules are set for a given planet, they have to be followed as God itself is evolving and growing perpetually. There are no "stroke of lightning" moments where "all things change." Just the slow and gradual evolution of life and society on countless worlds, in countless forms, and in countless number.
Yet if, as I suggest, God works by tweaking genetics at the evolutionary level, you would not expect cross-speciation, because the rules of genetics says they can't interbreed.
As soon as God screamed "I AM" during the big bang that created all existence, rules were laid down about existence. Physics. Biology. Genetics. Quantum Physics. Everything that defines the physical world of the universe.
And thus God chained itself to a set of rules, and has to work within the framework of those rules. So God the universe is not omnipotent, cannot bring about most of the miracles attributed to it in doggerel like most of the Bible, and most certainly cannot create your cat-dog creature.
Instead, it tweaks genetics. Will this cat have green eyes or blue? Will that be a dominant or recessive trait? Will it inherit the long fur of the mother or the short fur of the father?
Little things. Infinitesmally small decisions made over millenia. Not sudden illogical leaps as you suggest should exist if evolution is not true. Rather, the lack of those illogical leaps is what supports evolution.
That's the fundamental point of the whole debate about the existence of "God". It depends on your definition of what God *is*, and it depends on what you *choose* to believe about the nature of existence. It can't be proven either way. It's an article of faith.
Just because a bible-thumping Christian would call me a heretic doesn't mean I'm wrong. It simply means I don't buy into the "man in the sky" model of the nature of God or existence.
My definition of the nature of God is perfectly in line with known science. The question is whether you think "intelligence" has to be similar to human intelligence. I don't believe that to be the case.
My definition even absorbs evolution. Just consider that "God" acts at the quantum level, influencing genetics over millenia instead of in some mythical seven days, and the two viewpoints fall together naturally.
I'd rather see the universe as a wonder unknoweable with the eyes of a child than as a jaded atheist who thinks life has no purpose other than to be. That's not to say I believe in miracles or anyone's religious texts. Just that the universe is a vast unknoweable wonder beyond the grasp of anything so small as a human mind as anything but symbols and approximations.
Computers are not deterministic. Interrupts are raised at any time by interface hardware. Users generate keystrokes and mouse events at random. Internet packets arrive at random times. Pre-emptive multi-tasking operating systems suspend and resume processes according to the load at the moment, not according to a fixed schedule of n clock cycles.
If you want to go back to something like a TRS-80 where you were programming the hardware, not an OS, then yes, they approached deterministic, but with random user inputs, they have never been truly predictable.
You people are using some perverse definitions of "deterministic" if you think otherwise.
And I have an Android emulator installed. They've been available for a long time for developing software for the platform. It's even reasonably speedy on a fast Core i7.
The reason the business market is "dying" is that the hardware itself has been more than capable of dealing with business tasks for years. With central OS updates by the business, they're all running Windows 7, regardless of what was running on them when purchased. So those "old" machines are perfectly serviceable for the business, and the businesses are not upgrading and replacing them nearly as often as they used to.
The same issue is hitting the home consumer market. Just how much raw CPU do you think it requires to run Word, email, a browser, and watch a video? That's all most home users do. Very, very few of the machines sold are gaming machines, and even fewer are used for CPU intensive tasks like video processing or encoding.
Bottom line: People don't need new machines. So instead of buying a new PC, they're buying toys like tablets and the latest whizz-bang cell phones. If the old PC ever dies, then they'll replace it. And join the crowd in bitching about Windows 8.
That is the ugliest chunk of milled aluminum I have ever seen. I'd have been ashamed to admit creating it. They should have skipped the statue and just laid a larger plaque instead.
Most of the websites make it very clear in their sales process that placing the order is not a sale, and that the sale isn't legally completed until they verify the order. If a website doesn't do that, then yes, they should be required to honour the price they charged your credit card or bank account.
Being sloppy with your website is bad enough; being sloppy with your legalese is unforgiveable. If you don't have the good sense to have your terms and conditions vetted by a lawyer, you should pay for your stupidity, not the customer.
I'm not at all surprised The Brick refuses to honour the prices they post. Every single time I've thought about purchasing something from them, they started tacking on extra fees and charges during the process, and I ended up telling them to go fuck themselves and walked out the door. They are beyond doubt the greediest scam and con artists in the furniture industry I've ever had the fortune of not dealing with to completion of a deal.
The worst is a scam they were charged with and spanked for by the courts in Canada -- the "no money down" deals where you were expected to pay service and financing fees up front. To their twisted minds, because those weren't the actual charges for the furniture itself, they were free and clear to screw you over before you even took shipment. Thank God the courts stopped that nonsense -- you notice they haven't run a "0 money down" "sale" in Canada for a couple of years now that they've been spanked.
Slashdot Mirror
Now with blind glassholes! :P
Didn't your mommy call you upstairs for supper half an hour ago?
No, it's that her prose paints such a vivid visual it's like watching movies. A good book is way better than a movie, because a book has the time to explore the details instead of being cut to fit a two hour window. :)
Best author of all time, hands down. Reading her books is like watching a movie.
Funny. I had a nightmare recently about being suckered into a contract to do some VMS work.
DCL always gave me the willies.
And I'd respond that as your very existence and life are a thought-train of God, you are the meaning of your existence. Your purpose is to experience life to the fullest, to think freely, to interact with other thoughts, to grow, to learn, to survive and to thrive. Not to simply be, but to do more than merely exist and collect things as you work your way through life.
There is no distinction between man and God in my world view. We are God's very thoughts as it studies itself and the existence it spawned when it screamed "I AM" during the big bang.
Well written.
Why would the universe expect it's cells to worship it? Do we expect our skin cells to worship us?
Sure we're all part of existence, our souls the very thoughts of God itself, all children of God, and all miracles in that sense, but the existence of God doesn't determine our fate. We have will and intelligence to choose what we believe and how we think, and therein lies the randomness of existence: our own nature.
Personally I doubt the universe gives a rats ass about us as individuals. We're just random thoughts in a massively parallel system, born to experience life and to someday die and be no more than a memory in God's great universal fabric. If there is a heaven, it is to have lived a thought-life that is worth remembering. If there is a hell, it is to have lived a thought life of depravity and disgust that is best forgotten.
Some thoughts bear repeating. This is the only parallel I see to reincarnation. Some thoughts may take multiple thoughts chained together to work through an idea -- the evolution of society.
Even things like genetic engineering may well be just God deciding that it needs to break the rules of evolution and quantum influence it is bound to by it's own nature. It has to rely on human beings to develop the electron microscopes, laser scalpels, and gene splicing techniques to break those rules. Who knows?
But as surely as you know God does not exist, I know that it does. Don't you just love philosophizing about that which is truly unknowable? In a perverse case of quantum physics, both of us are right and will have an observational answer when we open the box of death and see the Schroedinger's Cat of God for ourselves -- either nothing, or a wonder beyond wonders.
But like most I've had this discussion with, you try to pigeon hole me with the concepts of religious texts that I don't believe in. I don't think we're pets -- I think we're part of the intelligence of God itself. It's thoughts. Remember that I don't consider the intelligence of the universe to be anything akin to a human intelligence, so restricting yourself to the concept that God could only have one train of thought at a time is foolishness. After all, God is busy being and thinking about the whole of existence all at once.
While I'm on the subject of religious texts, those who spout off on "The Bible Says" and such really amuse me to no end. A bunch of shepherds who knew virtually nothing sat around campfires telling tall tales and getting drunk, and some of those tales were written down. And modern day people consider those tales to be "the word of God"? Never mind all the translation errors and exagerrations as the tales were told through the generations, too many of the tales we just know flat out could not have been.
I don't believe in burning bushes, moving mountains, feeding the thousands, or parting seas. I just believe the universe is alive and aware, curious and bored, and thinks about the nature of it's own existence by spawning life-thoughts to experience it's own existence. Where those individual thoughts lead, no one knows.
And just because God has set the rules of CHON life down for earth doesn't mean a different set of rules aren't being followed on some other planet in the universe, perhaps based on silica. Or sulphur. Or something else. But once the rules are set for a given planet, they have to be followed as God itself is evolving and growing perpetually. There are no "stroke of lightning" moments where "all things change." Just the slow and gradual evolution of life and society on countless worlds, in countless forms, and in countless number.
Fascinating, isn't it?
Yet if, as I suggest, God works by tweaking genetics at the evolutionary level, you would not expect cross-speciation, because the rules of genetics says they can't interbreed.
As soon as God screamed "I AM" during the big bang that created all existence, rules were laid down about existence. Physics. Biology. Genetics. Quantum Physics. Everything that defines the physical world of the universe.
And thus God chained itself to a set of rules, and has to work within the framework of those rules. So God the universe is not omnipotent, cannot bring about most of the miracles attributed to it in doggerel like most of the Bible, and most certainly cannot create your cat-dog creature.
Instead, it tweaks genetics. Will this cat have green eyes or blue? Will that be a dominant or recessive trait? Will it inherit the long fur of the mother or the short fur of the father?
Little things. Infinitesmally small decisions made over millenia. Not sudden illogical leaps as you suggest should exist if evolution is not true. Rather, the lack of those illogical leaps is what supports evolution.
I can't tell you who said it, but it's what my AI prof claimed was an axiom back in the 80s.
As a corollary, any system you say isn't intelligent, I can just say "It's not complex enough." :P
That's the fundamental point of the whole debate about the existence of "God". It depends on your definition of what God *is*, and it depends on what you *choose* to believe about the nature of existence. It can't be proven either way. It's an article of faith.
Just because a bible-thumping Christian would call me a heretic doesn't mean I'm wrong. It simply means I don't buy into the "man in the sky" model of the nature of God or existence.
My definition of the nature of God is perfectly in line with known science. The question is whether you think "intelligence" has to be similar to human intelligence. I don't believe that to be the case.
My definition even absorbs evolution. Just consider that "God" acts at the quantum level, influencing genetics over millenia instead of in some mythical seven days, and the two viewpoints fall together naturally.
I'd rather see the universe as a wonder unknoweable with the eyes of a child than as a jaded atheist who thinks life has no purpose other than to be. That's not to say I believe in miracles or anyone's religious texts. Just that the universe is a vast unknoweable wonder beyond the grasp of anything so small as a human mind as anything but symbols and approximations.
What could be more wondrous than that?
So you say.
And that statement about "sufficiently complex" is an axiom of AI.
Trivially true.
God is the intelligent universe itself. Any sufficiently complex system is, by definition, intelligent. What is more complex than the universe?
Don't you believe the universe exists?
Computers are not deterministic. Interrupts are raised at any time by interface hardware. Users generate keystrokes and mouse events at random. Internet packets arrive at random times. Pre-emptive multi-tasking operating systems suspend and resume processes according to the load at the moment, not according to a fixed schedule of n clock cycles.
If you want to go back to something like a TRS-80 where you were programming the hardware, not an OS, then yes, they approached deterministic, but with random user inputs, they have never been truly predictable.
You people are using some perverse definitions of "deterministic" if you think otherwise.
Are you in high school? You have to write like you're a junior in high school to get published by Slashdot... :P
Bingo.
And I have an Android emulator installed. They've been available for a long time for developing software for the platform. It's even reasonably speedy on a fast Core i7.
It's the sad state of spelling in the texting age. Either that, or more of that "Ebonics" crap.
The reason the business market is "dying" is that the hardware itself has been more than capable of dealing with business tasks for years. With central OS updates by the business, they're all running Windows 7, regardless of what was running on them when purchased. So those "old" machines are perfectly serviceable for the business, and the businesses are not upgrading and replacing them nearly as often as they used to.
The same issue is hitting the home consumer market. Just how much raw CPU do you think it requires to run Word, email, a browser, and watch a video? That's all most home users do. Very, very few of the machines sold are gaming machines, and even fewer are used for CPU intensive tasks like video processing or encoding.
Bottom line: People don't need new machines. So instead of buying a new PC, they're buying toys like tablets and the latest whizz-bang cell phones. If the old PC ever dies, then they'll replace it. And join the crowd in bitching about Windows 8.
No, the arsehats are all on your side. :P
Oh.
Excuse me.
"Stochastically Variable".
Let's see you force one to happen in the debugger, then.
Apparently you've never dealt with race conditions and multi-threaded code.
You're more likely to hear "What's testing?" from a lot of programmers nowadays.
Testing was never even mentioned in my university courses, much less formalized.
Having an opinion about so-called "art" is "flamebait?"
Mods: Flamebait is not a "Disagree" option
That is the ugliest chunk of milled aluminum I have ever seen. I'd have been ashamed to admit creating it. They should have skipped the statue and just laid a larger plaque instead.
Most of the websites make it very clear in their sales process that placing the order is not a sale, and that the sale isn't legally completed until they verify the order. If a website doesn't do that, then yes, they should be required to honour the price they charged your credit card or bank account.
Being sloppy with your website is bad enough; being sloppy with your legalese is unforgiveable. If you don't have the good sense to have your terms and conditions vetted by a lawyer, you should pay for your stupidity, not the customer.
I'm not at all surprised The Brick refuses to honour the prices they post. Every single time I've thought about purchasing something from them, they started tacking on extra fees and charges during the process, and I ended up telling them to go fuck themselves and walked out the door. They are beyond doubt the greediest scam and con artists in the furniture industry I've ever had the fortune of not dealing with to completion of a deal.
The worst is a scam they were charged with and spanked for by the courts in Canada -- the "no money down" deals where you were expected to pay service and financing fees up front. To their twisted minds, because those weren't the actual charges for the furniture itself, they were free and clear to screw you over before you even took shipment. Thank God the courts stopped that nonsense -- you notice they haven't run a "0 money down" "sale" in Canada for a couple of years now that they've been spanked.