I can see you do not have an answer to my question. Just more "but look at this !" statements. "The others are just as bad !". "Hypocrites exist !". All are very true statements, and completely beside the point.
My theory : you do not have an answer, and you cannot find any reason why an atheist, not believing in an afterlife, would refrain from genocide, if it were convenient.
Why not make the other argument : the only reason I find genocide unacceptable is religious in nature, and that's obviously so very unoriginal of me... Maybe I should think for myself and see that genocide might be good...
At least that'd be a honest argument.
I cannot fathom how can you get from, I don't believe in god (and afterlife), to genocide is good. You are just asserting that a person who thinks he will have only one life would nessessarily live it in selfish manner or would optimize for comfort. My morals say that genocide is always unacceptable and I hope that Christians would share this moral even though Bible advocates genocide.
The examples you give are almost all non-atheists (except perhaps humanism, which is indeed a moral abomination once you look past the thin upper layer). All of the examples you give (including humanism) base their standards of behavior upon unchallengeable higher authority, which would seem a very non-atheistic stance to me. Most of your examples include very supernatural things like an afterlife.
All of those examples are atheist, you cannot just go and redefine atheist as person who doesn't believe in afterlife and optimizes for personal comfort. I just listed some other philosophies that are required to build your morals, just saying you are atheist does not give you (almost) any information on what kind of morals the person might actually have. Other sources one could use to come up with morals includes parents, society, friends, Categorical Imperative, the Golden Rule, Empathy, Matt Dillahunty, IRC, etc.
Humanism in mathematics, incidentally, has failed. Why ? Simple, because there are known mathematical truths that cannot be tested or proven (they're not just unproven, they are provably both true and independent of any set of axioms, look up Godel-sentences for an algorithm that will create an infinite (at least aleph-1) number of them). In humanism, such a thing cannot exist. And then the proof came down that the set of true knowledge is infinitely larger than the set of provable knowledge. If all we can prove about mathematics would be a small grain of sand, mathematics itself would be bigger than the universe. Needless to say, humanist standards for knowledge were thrown out the door, replaced by a still-running project to find the most useful unfounded beliefs to include in our axiom sets (this search turned out to be a minefield).
Humanism has not been much more succesfull in other disciplines and has been universally replaced for various reasons.
What has humanism in maths have to do with morals? Even if it is nor perfect, it still can be used as rule of thumb in order to form ones morals.
A baby that is born is an atheist and could be thought morals he/she would live by easily without any theism.
I have a doctorate in AI, and unless babies work totally different from all known AI neural network algorithms this is not true (and it does seem unlikely that we've done everything wrong). A baby would not even survive without interaction with adults, his brain would lose entropy and he/she would die because the brain would (eventually) stop the heart and the breathing when this happened. It would not matter if that brain's body were afforded all the tools for survival and even very comfortable living (obviously this has never been tried with human babies, but it does happen with mice).
Noh, the whole point of atheism is simply a lack of belief in gods. You need to apply some other things, such as secular humanism, Buddhism, Raëlianism, in order to get your morals.
Even if I believed in God, it wouldn't mean I would automatically accept her moral code. I might play along if I was forced at gun point, but would that really mean I shared those morals.
I am more moral than those characters depicted in the Bible. I would never support slavery and I do believe that people should be treated equally and fairly. I like to do positive things, like helping people, because that might make those people help others and maybe when I need help, there is someone who shares this wish of helping people. I have heard the term 'Enlightened self-interest' use for this.
Again, atheism simply is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. A baby that is born is an atheist and could be thought morals he/she would live by easily without any theism. One could even take the moral code from the Bible and teach those (just leave out the God part and threat of Hell) and the child would live by them, and would still be an atheist. And I wouldn't be suprised that there was a group of people who believe the teachings of Jesus and live by them but don't believe in Gods.
First-gen atheist, hmm, my dad was an atheist and my mom was lets-go-and-see-the-xmas-mass Finnish Evangelical Lutheran and now is an atheist too. So maybe that makes me 1.5th gen atheist, though one should note that Finnish Lutherans are probably just about the mildest form of Christians, majority are dilluted to homeopathic levels of faith:)
I cannot see how I am off the mark on "atheist morality". Oh, and on a side note, some atheist do believe in an afterlife and other supernatural woowoo. But in any case, I know many atheists, some are Nth generation atheists and we all have different morals. I know atheists with bizarr morals, maybe even sick morals. I also know atheists with morals that could make them saints. And they also do live by their morals, though ofcourse not all people do.
There is history and future beside my life. Why shouldn't I care how I might be remembered, if my code will continue to exists in the world even after I am gone. Or maybe I can create something that brings joy to peoples' life for eons.
Why should comfort supercede everything? What if one can achieve comfort by loving and living in harmony with others? Again, we are social species and some of us can feel pleasure by making other beings feel good.
Doesn't your two option morality also apply to Christians? The only reason you dont kill is that it isn't usefull or the risk of getting caught (by police or by God) is too high (though the God part does have a loophole).
I thought that majority of nazis were Christians or other variety of theists. And communists were not so much atheists as anti-church as they saw them as a threat to their power.
But I am so happy that I finally lost my Godwin's Law virginity, and on a post about atheism and nazis!!! Big win:)
Just to repeat my point, atheism is just a shared belief , eh, non-belief on one single issue. We get our morals from our parents, society, our own preferences, empathy or make up some. And if you look how Christians act rather what they profess, they most likely get their morals the same way, plus they pick and choose morals from the bible that they like and ignore those that are obviously disgusting and immoral. Like stoning your unruly child and similar things.
An answer by atheist to those questions could be just about anything. Atheist only agree on one single point, they don't believe in any gods. Everything else is up for grabs.
I actually see the life of people I love more precious than mine. And I see no problem in having your morals be more precious than your life. A life as such isn't the ultimate thing, to me it matters more how you live it. If you live in a society, you need (or it is advantageous) to align your morals with other peoples' morals.
On those icky ones, no I wouldn't exterminate even partially countries to increase my luxury, nor would I steal organs (or even buy them, donated would be ok). Even though I am not very empathic person, I still prefer not to hurt other beings, people or animal.
I was just wondering about Christianity, what about the part in the Bible where they say genocide and infanticide is just and moral? An on atheistic morality, this is the only life I know I will have, thus it is very precious. I don't want to be killed, so it might be a good idea to agree that morally it is not the best idea to go on killing people (cause then someone might kill me).
Unfortunately, if the author didn't register copyright for those pics, he can only ask for actual damages which will be some hundreds of USD or maybe even thousand or two if he can show a business of selling those photos.
My general feeling is that wordpress plugins/themes should follow the spirit for the license, GPL, and therefore be free or cost money. The developer just need to remember that even if he charges the user for the theme, the user can then distribute the theme for free to other people.
You can add PHP optimizers as plugins to the PHP server and then you can execute PHP files that are "precompiled" and in bytecode form, making them more difficult to modify or turn in to source form again.
But if WordPress calls ("links") to the themes, isn't WordPress then derivative of the themes, and therefore possibly violates the license of the theme?:)
Yeah, as long as people remember that piracy = commercial illegal copying, eg. selling bootleg Windows DVDs. In the past, atleast here, copying a music CD for you friend, as long as you didn't get any money from it, was complitely legal.
Yeah, I remember playing one game on MSDOS and VGA which had fractal based terrain and smart level of detail system. You set the target fps in the configuration and it would just tesselate more polygons if it had time and when something massive happened, instead of getting huge drop in framerate, the terrain just temporarely got simpler. But I guess doing something like that today cannot be justified in the development budget.
But 15fps is still very playable, especially if it is constant 15fps. What makes games unplayable (or atleast annoying) is having 30fps, then 15fps, then 60fps and then 1fps. I usually can enjoy games as long as they get to the 15-20fps range, anything slower than that and aiming becomes difficult.
I've been using Debian on my SBC's that have 64MB RAM and 200MHz Cyrix (Pentium compatible) CPU. As long as you don't use bloatware like Firefox, it runs just fine. You could probably run it with 32MB RAM if you manage to enable swap during installation, otherwise the installer causes OOM and kills itself. And then there are the various BSD variants, I am sure some of them still run on 486.
This is something I do often when editing images. Take the source image, scale it up 5x or 7x (without any pixel interpolation, so nearest neighbour scaling). Then I can work on the image, draw on it and don't have to worry about antialising etc. In the end I just flatten all the layers and scale the image down to original size, but this time using some nice filter and all the alterations I did blend nicely to the image. Sometimes I wish the image editing app would just allow me to create a layer on top of part of the image and allow me to directly do editing at higher DPI and automagically resample and blend them to the original DPI.
True, I wish the article would have displayed the dBm values for each of the phone model and test so it would be easier to compare. But it seems the iPhone4 antenna does suffer from the unique design. In TWiT one of the hosts touched the two antennas with a gold ring and the iPhone4 went from 5 bars to 1 bar.
Anandtech did some testing by enabling the now disabled fieldtest mode in IOS4 that allows you to see the actual signal strength in dBm and they managed to get -25dBm signal drops when gripping the phone. iPhone 3GS only suffered -15dBm drop and generally had much less signal attenuation when holding the phone optimally.
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This all assuming ofcourse that a) those patents are valid and b) you live in a country which allows software patents.
And patents for Java that may or may not be enforcable.
Yup
Yes but my mobo actually has vacuum tubes in the intergrated audiochip amplifier giving me that nice warm sound.
I can see you do not have an answer to my question. Just more "but look at this !" statements. "The others are just as bad !". "Hypocrites exist !". All are very true statements, and completely beside the point.
My theory : you do not have an answer, and you cannot find any reason why an atheist, not believing in an afterlife, would refrain from genocide, if it were convenient.
Why not make the other argument : the only reason I find genocide unacceptable is religious in nature, and that's obviously so very unoriginal of me ... Maybe I should think for myself and see that genocide might be good ...
At least that'd be a honest argument.
I cannot fathom how can you get from, I don't believe in god (and afterlife), to genocide is good. You are just asserting that a person who thinks he will have only one life would nessessarily live it in selfish manner or would optimize for comfort. My morals say that genocide is always unacceptable and I hope that Christians would share this moral even though Bible advocates genocide.
The examples you give are almost all non-atheists (except perhaps humanism, which is indeed a moral abomination once you look past the thin upper layer). All of the examples you give (including humanism) base their standards of behavior upon unchallengeable higher authority, which would seem a very non-atheistic stance to me. Most of your examples include very supernatural things like an afterlife.
All of those examples are atheist, you cannot just go and redefine atheist as person who doesn't believe in afterlife and optimizes for personal comfort. I just listed some other philosophies that are required to build your morals, just saying you are atheist does not give you (almost) any information on what kind of morals the person might actually have. Other sources one could use to come up with morals includes parents, society, friends, Categorical Imperative, the Golden Rule, Empathy, Matt Dillahunty, IRC, etc.
Humanism in mathematics, incidentally, has failed. Why ? Simple, because there are known mathematical truths that cannot be tested or proven (they're not just unproven, they are provably both true and independent of any set of axioms, look up Godel-sentences for an algorithm that will create an infinite (at least aleph-1) number of them). In humanism, such a thing cannot exist. And then the proof came down that the set of true knowledge is infinitely larger than the set of provable knowledge. If all we can prove about mathematics would be a small grain of sand, mathematics itself would be bigger than the universe. Needless to say, humanist standards for knowledge were thrown out the door, replaced by a still-running project to find the most useful unfounded beliefs to include in our axiom sets (this search turned out to be a minefield).
Humanism has not been much more succesfull in other disciplines and has been universally replaced for various reasons.
What has humanism in maths have to do with morals? Even if it is nor perfect, it still can be used as rule of thumb in order to form ones morals.
I have a doctorate in AI, and unless babies work totally different from all known AI neural network algorithms this is not true (and it does seem unlikely that we've done everything wrong). A baby would not even survive without interaction with adults, his brain would lose entropy and he/she would die because the brain would (eventually) stop the heart and the breathing when this happened. It would not matter if that brain's body were afforded all the tools for survival and even very comfortable living (obviously this has never been tried with human babies, but it does happen with mice).
Noh, the whole point of atheism is simply a lack of belief in gods. You need to apply some other things, such as secular humanism, Buddhism, Raëlianism, in order to get your morals.
Even if I believed in God, it wouldn't mean I would automatically accept her moral code. I might play along if I was forced at gun point, but would that really mean I shared those morals.
I am more moral than those characters depicted in the Bible. I would never support slavery and I do believe that people should be treated equally and fairly. I like to do positive things, like helping people, because that might make those people help others and maybe when I need help, there is someone who shares this wish of helping people. I have heard the term 'Enlightened self-interest' use for this.
Again, atheism simply is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. A baby that is born is an atheist and could be thought morals he/she would live by easily without any theism. One could even take the moral code from the Bible and teach those (just leave out the God part and threat of Hell) and the child would live by them, and would still be an atheist. And I wouldn't be suprised that there was a group of people who believe the teachings of Jesus and live by them but don't believe in Gods.
First-gen atheist, hmm, my dad was an atheist and my mom was lets-go-and-see-the-xmas-mass Finnish Evangelical Lutheran and now is an atheist too. So maybe that makes me 1.5th gen atheist, though one should note that Finnish Lutherans are probably just about the mildest form of Christians, majority are dilluted to homeopathic levels of faith :)
I cannot see how I am off the mark on "atheist morality". Oh, and on a side note, some atheist do believe in an afterlife and other supernatural woowoo. But in any case, I know many atheists, some are Nth generation atheists and we all have different morals. I know atheists with bizarr morals, maybe even sick morals. I also know atheists with morals that could make them saints. And they also do live by their morals, though ofcourse not all people do.
There is history and future beside my life. Why shouldn't I care how I might be remembered, if my code will continue to exists in the world even after I am gone. Or maybe I can create something that brings joy to peoples' life for eons.
Why should comfort supercede everything? What if one can achieve comfort by loving and living in harmony with others? Again, we are social species and some of us can feel pleasure by making other beings feel good.
Doesn't your two option morality also apply to Christians? The only reason you dont kill is that it isn't usefull or the risk of getting caught (by police or by God) is too high (though the God part does have a loophole).
I thought that majority of nazis were Christians or other variety of theists. And communists were not so much atheists as anti-church as they saw them as a threat to their power.
But I am so happy that I finally lost my Godwin's Law virginity, and on a post about atheism and nazis!!! Big win :)
Just to repeat my point, atheism is just a shared belief , eh, non-belief on one single issue. We get our morals from our parents, society, our own preferences, empathy or make up some. And if you look how Christians act rather what they profess, they most likely get their morals the same way, plus they pick and choose morals from the bible that they like and ignore those that are obviously disgusting and immoral. Like stoning your unruly child and similar things.
An answer by atheist to those questions could be just about anything. Atheist only agree on one single point, they don't believe in any gods. Everything else is up for grabs.
I actually see the life of people I love more precious than mine. And I see no problem in having your morals be more precious than your life. A life as such isn't the ultimate thing, to me it matters more how you live it. If you live in a society, you need (or it is advantageous) to align your morals with other peoples' morals.
On those icky ones, no I wouldn't exterminate even partially countries to increase my luxury, nor would I steal organs (or even buy them, donated would be ok). Even though I am not very empathic person, I still prefer not to hurt other beings, people or animal.
I was just wondering about Christianity, what about the part in the Bible where they say genocide and infanticide is just and moral? An on atheistic morality, this is the only life I know I will have, thus it is very precious. I don't want to be killed, so it might be a good idea to agree that morally it is not the best idea to go on killing people (cause then someone might kill me).
Yeah, the problem with the image in that story was not as much CC but that the ad agency forgot to get model release for that picture.
Unfortunately, if the author didn't register copyright for those pics, he can only ask for actual damages which will be some hundreds of USD or maybe even thousand or two if he can show a business of selling those photos.
Could he have open carried a gun then?
My general feeling is that wordpress plugins/themes should follow the spirit for the license, GPL, and therefore be free or cost money. The developer just need to remember that even if he charges the user for the theme, the user can then distribute the theme for free to other people.
You can add PHP optimizers as plugins to the PHP server and then you can execute PHP files that are "precompiled" and in bytecode form, making them more difficult to modify or turn in to source form again.
But if WordPress calls ("links") to the themes, isn't WordPress then derivative of the themes, and therefore possibly violates the license of the theme? :)
Yeah, as long as people remember that piracy = commercial illegal copying, eg. selling bootleg Windows DVDs. In the past, atleast here, copying a music CD for you friend, as long as you didn't get any money from it, was complitely legal.
See the Anandtech article which has dBm measurements between iPhone 4 / 3GS and some non-Apple smartphone.
If you cover the external antenna with thin layer of non-antenna material, would it still technically be external antenna?
Yeah, I remember playing one game on MSDOS and VGA which had fractal based terrain and smart level of detail system. You set the target fps in the configuration and it would just tesselate more polygons if it had time and when something massive happened, instead of getting huge drop in framerate, the terrain just temporarely got simpler. But I guess doing something like that today cannot be justified in the development budget.
But 15fps is still very playable, especially if it is constant 15fps. What makes games unplayable (or atleast annoying) is having 30fps, then 15fps, then 60fps and then 1fps. I usually can enjoy games as long as they get to the 15-20fps range, anything slower than that and aiming becomes difficult.
I've been using Debian on my SBC's that have 64MB RAM and 200MHz Cyrix (Pentium compatible) CPU. As long as you don't use bloatware like Firefox, it runs just fine. You could probably run it with 32MB RAM if you manage to enable swap during installation, otherwise the installer causes OOM and kills itself. And then there are the various BSD variants, I am sure some of them still run on 486.
Shouldn't we nowadays blast it toward Oracle instead?
This is something I do often when editing images. Take the source image, scale it up 5x or 7x (without any pixel interpolation, so nearest neighbour scaling). Then I can work on the image, draw on it and don't have to worry about antialising etc. In the end I just flatten all the layers and scale the image down to original size, but this time using some nice filter and all the alterations I did blend nicely to the image. Sometimes I wish the image editing app would just allow me to create a layer on top of part of the image and allow me to directly do editing at higher DPI and automagically resample and blend them to the original DPI.
True, I wish the article would have displayed the dBm values for each of the phone model and test so it would be easier to compare. But it seems the iPhone4 antenna does suffer from the unique design. In TWiT one of the hosts touched the two antennas with a gold ring and the iPhone4 went from 5 bars to 1 bar.
Anandtech did some testing by enabling the now disabled fieldtest mode in IOS4 that allows you to see the actual signal strength in dBm and they managed to get -25dBm signal drops when gripping the phone. iPhone 3GS only suffered -15dBm drop and generally had much less signal attenuation when holding the phone optimally.