No, religion is your relationship with the higher power.
But atheism is having no relationship with any higher power.
What's more, I can't help feeling that your statement of "the higher power" almost implies that it is true that there exists a higher power, and atheists are merely denying this.
IMO atheism is a religion because atheists have faith that there is no god.
No they don't. Some might, but many (myself included) don't. All you can say is that they don't believe in any god.
Even for those that do have faith that there is no god, I'm not sure that makes atheism a religion. Do people say that their religion is "theism"?
I would say that only agnostics are truly without religion.
Depends on your definition of agnostism. Agnostic theists wouldn't be without religion. And what would you say about agnostic atheists?
I haven't had to do a census (I never received a form, for whatever reason), but my answer to what my religion is is generally one of "none", "n/a" or "my own set of beliefs - I haven't given it a name".
If the music industry becomes obsolete, you will have no new music to download. Most musicians can not market themselves as successfully as record companies can. Sure, anyone can put up a web page for marketing or distibution, but people still need to know that the web site exists.
But there are other ways of doing that. Whilst I've never randomly stumbled onto some musician's homepage and then immediately bought his CD, in the last 6 years or so I've never bought a CD because I saw an advert for it, or heard it on the radio. Instead I find out about music from seeing bands play live, downloading samples of music, hearing music at nightclubs, or what my friends play.
Even if I did occasionally buy music from seeing an advert or hearing it on the radio, it's no big deal if the record companies disappear. Whilst I might not be buying those albums, I'd buy others instead. I suspect what would happen in general is that there'd be fewer highly successful bands. Is this such a bad thing?
Under this model, we will end up with an increased supply, but the product won't be nearly as good. This why we have professional organisations for doctors and engineers. We know we are getting a competent person if they are a professional.
How does being marketed by a big record company make someone a professional? Or if you're saying we need them to sift the good from the crap, as I say, there are other ways of doing that. And I'd rather have more choice over it myself, instead of letting some company executive deciding what I should listen to.
a legacy-free PC wouldn't be legacy free if (a) it ran a DOS-type OS (including Win9x, OS/2, NT, XP,...)... Legacy-free? You'd be more likely to find an LF MAC than an LF PC.
That would be a Mac which runs MacOS X, which has to run all earlier Mac software through various compatibility layers? I don't see that as being a lesser legacy problem than Windows XP having to run DOS programs.
How can you justify making people read this:
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html
or this
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/images/wb_35_2.gif
The first one is from 1992, and imo a lot better than other systems of the time. The second one has a crappy font in the Shell window, but that can be changed. I'm not sure what's so wrong with it - can you be more specific with its faults?
And the flicker was when you viewed certain resolutions through a TV - certainly nothing to do with the OS. With a Mac or PC, you got nothing on a TV.
I do not think your analogy holds. There are certain guns which are obivously offensive weapons or can be changed into offensive weapons with simple changes. Knives, in general, are used for cutting things.
Yes, but guns and knives are both legal, so I think the analogy holds in that it's stupid to sue the gun or knife manufacturers. Your argument applies to whether or not guns should be legal, but in a country where they are legal, it seems odd to sue those doing nothing illegal based on what someone else does.
And similarly, there is no DMCA in Norway, so again this seems like suing the producer of a what should be legal tool, based on what others might use it for.
However, for some reason (I'm not about to conjecutre; I'm too biased) we teach the principle of evolution and the historical conjecture of evolution as if they were the same concept. This is why it's still a theory--because it's impossible to verify historical evolution, and thus historical evolution will never become a "law."
But we also still talk about Quantum Theory and Theories of Relativity even though they can be considered highly successful in describing the Universe. A theory is something which has been tested with evidence, but at the same time it may not be 100% correct. My understanding is that a law and theory are really the same thing, but it's just that "theory" has been used instead of "law" in more recent times to reflect the idea that they are models of how nature works, rather than suggesting that nature must obey the laws. Today's "theories" will never become "laws" (or if they do, it will be due to a change in terminology, rather than finding more evidence to support it).
Of course as was said, "theory" has the new problem in that the common usage of the word means something different to the scientific meaning, ie, more of a conjecture or hypothesis, rather than something that has been tested with evidence.
I mean, what the original poster suggested was still an example of a system of Justice; he seemed to be suggesting that "Justice" ought to be removed completely.
No, there are really three components: "paying" for the crime, preventing you from doing it again, and deterring others from doing the same. The original post is arguing that the payback component should be removed from our thinking.
True, but the post also seemed to be suggesting that the current justice systems were concerned only with "paying" for the crime, when I would say that that (at least in the US and UK) is a minority reason.
If you take away this idea that a government can and should punish the bad guys, for 'Justice' and replace it with the idea that we should apprehend bad guys to keep them from doing harm to society
But this is what Justice *is*. Preventing criminals from doing further harm is one of the aims of punishment (others being things like to deter others). It's true that some people seem to think punishment and justice is more about punishment or revenge for the sake of it, but I don't think the systems in most (Western, at least) countries operate on this idea.
What is wrong with the government being involved in preventing criminals from doing harm from society? Who else would do it?
Our government should not be making such judgments about right and wrong, they should be making judgments on how to protect and serve the populace.
Except you've just made a judgement on what is right and wrong (ie, defined in terms of its harm to society). And thankfully, the majority of laws these days do seem to be based on things which are harmful on society (although people may disagree on whether or not they are harmful to others, or there may be inconsistency; eg, drugs vs alcohol) - though unfortunately this doesn't apply to all laws yet (eg, laws regarding same-sex sex which seem to exist from a viewpoint of it being wrong for some other reason than it doing harm to others).
Acutally, "gods and pixies did it" is far simpler than the various scientific explanations. If our only judge were Occam's Razor, we'd all beleieve in neo-pagan religions.
Except Occam's Razor is about considering the simplest explanation out of those that fit the evidence. "gods and pixies did it" might be an explanation for what did it, but the only evidence that fits is that "it" exists; it fits nothing about how whatever it is that you are considering behaves. One might as well say "xikbaar did it".
Consider a theory which tells us that two particles with mass attract each other, and tells us the force with which they attract. "gods and pixies cause it" isn't even comparable, because it doesn't explain as much. OTOH, a theory telling us that they attract, and with how much force, and additionally that it's "gods and pixies" which are doing it would be the theory that should be discounted in preference to the former theory, according to Occam's Razor.
Let's say I steal a $500 stereo. The government might spend $10,000 investigating my crime and imprisoning me. By your argument, "the authorities and lawmakers" would be better off leaving me alone.
Will the Government compensate the ISPs for lost business, data and so on? If so, fine, but otherwise this analogy is invalid.
Before getting a warrant, police don't think "I wonder what the negative consequences of this warrant will be?" They think "Someone is breaking the law. I should stop them."
And I'd hope that they also wouldn't leave a trail of destruction to other people's property and businesses that was on a scale comparable to or greater than the original crime being committed.
My guess is that a copyright only protects that particular set of pixels.
But surely copyright isn't restricted to an exact duplication. For example, if I did a cover of some song and distributed it without permission, I'd be violating copyright even though the digital representation could look very different. The words and music (in the sense of the pattern of notes) can be copyrighted. So I don't see that being able to scale the image or otherwise perform simple processing functions means that copyright wouldn't protect their image.
So I'm confused as to what benefit there is in having Design Patents. It can't be to encourage Apple to share a novel idea with the rest of the world (since using a picture of a trashcan to represent a trachcan is neither unobvious, or original). It can't be to protect the consumer from being confused that an alternative OS might be OS X (since that would surely be a trademark issue). It can't be to encourage them to release a particular work (since OS X is already protected by copyright). So why do we have them? What is the great problem if someone else releases an OS with trashcan icons, and happens to use a similar looking trashcan?
Well, at the very least atheism is a belief structure. If someone doesn't give religion a second thought, you call them agnostic.
Who says agnostism and atheism are mutually exclusive terms? If someone doesn't believe in any sort of "god", then he's an atheist in most senses of the word, however much or little thought he's given it. Atheism is a single statement about a lack of one belief - maybe you could still consider that a "belief structure", but the term says no more than that.
It takes faith to be an atheist.
Not true, at least probably for most people who call themselves atheists (myself included). This page explains fairly well the confusion and misconceptions over the term "atheism".
And the guy who actually wrote it would have no piece of the pie, forever.
But he got his piece of the pie in the first 14/28/however-long years after he created his work.
Sure, he won't get to make money from it when he's 70, but as others have said, few of us get to still have an income 50 years after we did a single piece of work. The rest of us have to choose between *shock* doing more work, or investing money for the future.
Ask a septuagenarian author who is about to "die penniless" if it's okay that J. Random Publisher is allowed to profit from mass-market paperback copies of his work because it's gone "public domain" already.
But if it's gone public domain, then a random publisher wouldn't be able to make a profit from his work, unless they added value in some way. Everyone would be free to obtain it.
Is a clone a child of the donor, or the donor's parents (as it is basically a time-delayed twin)?
I can see this one being an issue - similar to surrogacy, where the surrogate mother suddenly claims she has rights over the child for example.
But as for the other points, I don't see why they should pose legal problems. If cloning was a process whereby a fully grown person suddenly got made in a machine, then there might be problems. But a clone in this context still has to be born using natural methods. Conception may be artifical, but things like artifical insemination already occur, and people don't generally suggest that those born as a result of that should not be a legal citizen in any way.
In short, a clone would be no different to any other child in these respects.
This would only give you pseudo immortality. Consider: You have the original and make a copy of it, then place the copy into the new body. For a brief period there are now two copies of you. Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
I think this is an interesting idea, and I think the answers depend a lot on the nature of consciousness, and whether there is any such thing as a "soul".
The point is that to everyone else, the backup would seem identical to you. Moreover, the backup would claim that he was you - as far he is concerned, he has been brought back to life. The "original" you will never know having died (assuming one doesn't believe in an afterlife). Things are a little more confusing after duplication but before one has died; you'll have two people both insisting they are the 'original' (and in some sense, they are both right). From that instant on, they'll diverge and be different people, of course.
Consider - it could be that every night I go to sleep, "I" die, and it's a different "me" that wakes up the next morning. But unless anyone (the "me" today, the "me" tomorrow, or anyone else) could have any way tell any difference, to me it seems meaningless to say that something has died. It could be that "I" die every nanosecond - it could be that the only way to define continuity of consciousness is in terms of memories and brain activity.
If one doesn't believe in some continuous entity like a soul (as I don't), then the "me" as used in this context is meaningless.
You say that transferring could work - but how is transferring different to a copy-and-delete? (I guess, again, it depends on whether one believes in some unique un-copyable property of physical particles).
It's a similar idea with teleporting Star-trek style. If any such technologies ever appear, I agree that people would be wary (I mean, *I* would be too, despite what I believe). But after a few people have tried it, people would gradually see that it "works" (rightly or wrongly), and it could well be that it becomes commonplace, apart from a few who resist.
It's 9 years since they've been promising to move away from the 680x0 series
Well, Amiga Inc (ie, the company) have only been around since 2000. OS4 is still somewhat vapourware (it was original planned for release in 2001, IIRC, now it's sometime this year), but you can't blame them for the fact that the two PC companies that owned the rights to the Amiga during previous years did bugger all (and indeed, Gateway's attempt at a new Amiga came number 2 in Wired's '99 Vaporware List).
Pi is represented usually by a fraction or relatively simple equation, it's just the division that makes the number go on for ever. I don't understand why we must break pi down into a decimal when it can already be represented by a simple fraction.
This is a bit misleading - since Pi is irrational, representing it as a fraction (eg, 22/7) is only an approximation. Representing these divisions usually produce an infinite expansion in decimal (if that's what you mean by "it's just the division that makes the number go on for ever"), but that number is recurring, and thus easy to work out any arbitrary digit since it repeats. This article is about working out the true value of Pi, whose decimal expansion is infinite and non-recurring, and this has nothing to do with divisions.
Taking the equation two divided by three I have found the 100000 trillionth digit... it's "3"
Yes.. working out digits of rational numbers is slightly easy than irrational ones. Irrational numbers, by definition, can't be represented as the ratio of two integers.
This "story" is horribly misleading, it's almost as if somebody made a cut-n-paste from the Eyetech marketing... No, there are no "new Amigas." No, nobody will make any "new Amigas."
We could do the "What counts as an 'Amiga'" debate endlessly, but I'm curious - on the one hand you would accept a machine that is manufactured by the official company, but not when the official company partners with other companies to produce it. It is Amiga branded hardware, and it will be shipped with AmigaOS 4[1], so I don't see at all how the article summary is misleading. I don't think details of who-made-what-exactly should necessarily go there.
As for the licensing details - fair enough if you disagree with them, but I am even less able to see how this is relevant to the idea that the article is misleading. Indeed, surely the fact that you can only buy Amiga OS and hardware together makes the combination more of an "Amiga" than if it was separate?
[1] Of course, currently AmigaOS 4 is not available, so on *that* note I would agree that the article is misleading in that at the moment all you have is PPC Linux boxes. But if and when OS4 is available, I'll happily refer to such machines as "new PPC Amigas", without having to repeat a few minutes of blurb about how different companies are making the different bits and you can't by the OS separately, therefore they aren't really Amigas.
IMHO the work they're doing would be better spent creating methods for Amiga users to continue using Amiga hardware and software on modern machines (Read: make me an amiga FDC pci card, port AmigaOS to native x86 and let me run my win32/ELF binaries in a modernised 32bit workbench GUI).
I'm comparing it to my Mac in 1992 and 1994, or my NeXT, whose GUI was designed in the late 1980s. It was ass-ugly then, and it's ass- ugly now. Windows 3.1 was awful (probably worse) but I'm comparing it to NEXTSTEP and System 7, which were contemporaries, and were a lot more pleasant to use and pleasant to look at.
I think which looks best just comes down to a matter of opinion, especially if you're not mentioning specifics about what you find ugly. Whilst I never used NEXTSTEP, I personally found the System 7 GUI to be ugly (mainly due to its predominantly black/white colour scheme), and a pain to use. But I figure that some people like it, so I don't go posting about this to every Apple article that appears on Slashdot..
This might be difficult since the new Amigas have special Firmware, very closely related to the classic Amiga's "KICKSTART" roms.
My understanding is that the Firmware in the AmigaOne is not analagous to the "Kickstart" ROMs. The firmware is more like a BIOS and doesn't contain any of AmigaOS (see http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?item _id=1085 for more details) but the "Kickstart" ROMs were part of the OS, which will now be entirely on disk/CD.
Though, I do believe that it is planned that AmigaOS 4 will only run on authorised hardware which may make it harder to get it to get it to run on other hardware..
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No, religion is your relationship with the higher power.
But atheism is having no relationship with any higher power.
What's more, I can't help feeling that your statement of "the higher power" almost implies that it is true that there exists a higher power, and atheists are merely denying this.
IMO atheism is a religion because atheists have faith that there is no god.
No they don't. Some might, but many (myself included) don't. All you can say is that they don't believe in any god.
Even for those that do have faith that there is no god, I'm not sure that makes atheism a religion. Do people say that their religion is "theism"?
I would say that only agnostics are truly without religion.
Depends on your definition of agnostism. Agnostic theists wouldn't be without religion. And what would you say about agnostic atheists?
I haven't had to do a census (I never received a form, for whatever reason), but my answer to what my religion is is generally one of "none", "n/a" or "my own set of beliefs - I haven't given it a name".
If the music industry becomes obsolete, you will have no new music to download. Most musicians can not market themselves as successfully as record companies can. Sure, anyone can put up a web page for marketing or distibution, but people still need to know that the web site exists.
But there are other ways of doing that. Whilst I've never randomly stumbled onto some musician's homepage and then immediately bought his CD, in the last 6 years or so I've never bought a CD because I saw an advert for it, or heard it on the radio. Instead I find out about music from seeing bands play live, downloading samples of music, hearing music at nightclubs, or what my friends play.
Even if I did occasionally buy music from seeing an advert or hearing it on the radio, it's no big deal if the record companies disappear. Whilst I might not be buying those albums, I'd buy others instead. I suspect what would happen in general is that there'd be fewer highly successful bands. Is this such a bad thing?
Under this model, we will end up with an increased supply, but the product won't be nearly as good. This why we have professional organisations for doctors and engineers. We know we are getting a competent person if they are a professional.
How does being marketed by a big record company make someone a professional? Or if you're saying we need them to sift the good from the crap, as I say, there are other ways of doing that. And I'd rather have more choice over it myself, instead of letting some company executive deciding what I should listen to.
we MUST NOT seize works until such time as doing so would not inflict harm on the creators.
So how about having copyright expire when the author dies? That would at least be a shorter length than the terms we currently have.
a legacy-free PC wouldn't be legacy free if (a) it ran a DOS-type OS (including Win9x, OS/2, NT, XP, ...) ... Legacy-free? You'd be more likely to find an LF MAC than an LF PC.
That would be a Mac which runs MacOS X, which has to run all earlier Mac software through various compatibility layers? I don't see that as being a lesser legacy problem than Windows XP having to run DOS programs.
How can you justify making people read this: http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html or this http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/images/wb_35_2 .gif
The first one is from 1992, and imo a lot better than other systems of the time. The second one has a crappy font in the Shell window, but that can be changed. I'm not sure what's so wrong with it - can you be more specific with its faults?
And the flicker was when you viewed certain resolutions through a TV - certainly nothing to do with the OS. With a Mac or PC, you got nothing on a TV.
I do not think your analogy holds. There are certain guns which are obivously offensive weapons or can be changed into offensive weapons with simple changes. Knives, in general, are used for cutting things.
Yes, but guns and knives are both legal, so I think the analogy holds in that it's stupid to sue the gun or knife manufacturers. Your argument applies to whether or not guns should be legal, but in a country where they are legal, it seems odd to sue those doing nothing illegal based on what someone else does.
And similarly, there is no DMCA in Norway, so again this seems like suing the producer of a what should be legal tool, based on what others might use it for.
However, for some reason (I'm not about to conjecutre; I'm too biased) we teach the principle of evolution and the historical conjecture of evolution as if they were the same concept. This is why it's still a theory--because it's impossible to verify historical evolution, and thus historical evolution will never become a "law."
But we also still talk about Quantum Theory and Theories of Relativity even though they can be considered highly successful in describing the Universe. A theory is something which has been tested with evidence, but at the same time it may not be 100% correct. My understanding is that a law and theory are really the same thing, but it's just that "theory" has been used instead of "law" in more recent times to reflect the idea that they are models of how nature works, rather than suggesting that nature must obey the laws. Today's "theories" will never become "laws" (or if they do, it will be due to a change in terminology, rather than finding more evidence to support it).
Of course as was said, "theory" has the new problem in that the common usage of the word means something different to the scientific meaning, ie, more of a conjecture or hypothesis, rather than something that has been tested with evidence.
No, justice is a moral and abstract concept.
I mean, what the original poster suggested was still an example of a system of Justice; he seemed to be suggesting that "Justice" ought to be removed completely.
No, there are really three components: "paying" for the crime, preventing you from doing it again, and deterring others from doing the same. The original post is arguing that the payback component should be removed from our thinking.
True, but the post also seemed to be suggesting that the current justice systems were concerned only with "paying" for the crime, when I would say that that (at least in the US and UK) is a minority reason.
If you take away this idea that a government can and should punish the bad guys, for 'Justice' and replace it with the idea that we should apprehend bad guys to keep them from doing harm to society
But this is what Justice *is*. Preventing criminals from doing further harm is one of the aims of punishment (others being things like to deter others). It's true that some people seem to think punishment and justice is more about punishment or revenge for the sake of it, but I don't think the systems in most (Western, at least) countries operate on this idea.
What is wrong with the government being involved in preventing criminals from doing harm from society? Who else would do it?
Our government should not be making such judgments about right and wrong, they should be making judgments on how to protect and serve the populace.
Except you've just made a judgement on what is right and wrong (ie, defined in terms of its harm to society). And thankfully, the majority of laws these days do seem to be based on things which are harmful on society (although people may disagree on whether or not they are harmful to others, or there may be inconsistency; eg, drugs vs alcohol) - though unfortunately this doesn't apply to all laws yet (eg, laws regarding same-sex sex which seem to exist from a viewpoint of it being wrong for some other reason than it doing harm to others).
Acutally, "gods and pixies did it" is far simpler than the various scientific explanations. If our only judge were Occam's Razor, we'd all beleieve in neo-pagan religions.
Except Occam's Razor is about considering the simplest explanation out of those that fit the evidence. "gods and pixies did it" might be an explanation for what did it, but the only evidence that fits is that "it" exists; it fits nothing about how whatever it is that you are considering behaves. One might as well say "xikbaar did it".
Consider a theory which tells us that two particles with mass attract each other, and tells us the force with which they attract. "gods and pixies cause it" isn't even comparable, because it doesn't explain as much. OTOH, a theory telling us that they attract, and with how much force, and additionally that it's "gods and pixies" which are doing it would be the theory that should be discounted in preference to the former theory, according to Occam's Razor.
Let's say I steal a $500 stereo. The government might spend $10,000 investigating my crime and imprisoning me. By your argument, "the authorities and lawmakers" would be better off leaving me alone.
Will the Government compensate the ISPs for lost business, data and so on? If so, fine, but otherwise this analogy is invalid.
Before getting a warrant, police don't think "I wonder what the negative consequences of this warrant will be?" They think "Someone is breaking the law. I should stop them."
And I'd hope that they also wouldn't leave a trail of destruction to other people's property and businesses that was on a scale comparable to or greater than the original crime being committed.
My guess is that a copyright only protects that particular set of pixels.
But surely copyright isn't restricted to an exact duplication. For example, if I did a cover of some song and distributed it without permission, I'd be violating copyright even though the digital representation could look very different. The words and music (in the sense of the pattern of notes) can be copyrighted. So I don't see that being able to scale the image or otherwise perform simple processing functions means that copyright wouldn't protect their image.
So I'm confused as to what benefit there is in having Design Patents. It can't be to encourage Apple to share a novel idea with the rest of the world (since using a picture of a trashcan to represent a trachcan is neither unobvious, or original). It can't be to protect the consumer from being confused that an alternative OS might be OS X (since that would surely be a trademark issue). It can't be to encourage them to release a particular work (since OS X is already protected by copyright). So why do we have them? What is the great problem if someone else releases an OS with trashcan icons, and happens to use a similar looking trashcan?
Well, at the very least atheism is a belief structure. If someone doesn't give religion a second thought, you call them agnostic.
Who says agnostism and atheism are mutually exclusive terms? If someone doesn't believe in any sort of "god", then he's an atheist in most senses of the word, however much or little thought he's given it. Atheism is a single statement about a lack of one belief - maybe you could still consider that a "belief structure", but the term says no more than that.It takes faith to be an atheist.
Not true, at least probably for most people who call themselves atheists (myself included). This page explains fairly well the confusion and misconceptions over the term "atheism".
And the guy who actually wrote it would have no piece of the pie, forever.
But he got his piece of the pie in the first 14/28/however-long years after he created his work.
Sure, he won't get to make money from it when he's 70, but as others have said, few of us get to still have an income 50 years after we did a single piece of work. The rest of us have to choose between *shock* doing more work, or investing money for the future.
Ask a septuagenarian author who is about to "die penniless" if it's okay that J. Random Publisher is allowed to profit from mass-market paperback copies of his work because it's gone "public domain" already.
But if it's gone public domain, then a random publisher wouldn't be able to make a profit from his work, unless they added value in some way. Everyone would be free to obtain it.
Is a clone a child of the donor, or the donor's parents (as it is basically a time-delayed twin)?
I can see this one being an issue - similar to surrogacy, where the surrogate mother suddenly claims she has rights over the child for example.
But as for the other points, I don't see why they should pose legal problems. If cloning was a process whereby a fully grown person suddenly got made in a machine, then there might be problems. But a clone in this context still has to be born using natural methods. Conception may be artifical, but things like artifical insemination already occur, and people don't generally suggest that those born as a result of that should not be a legal citizen in any way.
In short, a clone would be no different to any other child in these respects.
This would only give you pseudo immortality. Consider: You have the original and make a copy of it, then place the copy into the new body. For a brief period there are now two copies of you. Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on.
I think this is an interesting idea, and I think the answers depend a lot on the nature of consciousness, and whether there is any such thing as a "soul".
The point is that to everyone else, the backup would seem identical to you. Moreover, the backup would claim that he was you - as far he is concerned, he has been brought back to life. The "original" you will never know having died (assuming one doesn't believe in an afterlife). Things are a little more confusing after duplication but before one has died; you'll have two people both insisting they are the 'original' (and in some sense, they are both right). From that instant on, they'll diverge and be different people, of course.
Consider - it could be that every night I go to sleep, "I" die, and it's a different "me" that wakes up the next morning. But unless anyone (the "me" today, the "me" tomorrow, or anyone else) could have any way tell any difference, to me it seems meaningless to say that something has died. It could be that "I" die every nanosecond - it could be that the only way to define continuity of consciousness is in terms of memories and brain activity.
If one doesn't believe in some continuous entity like a soul (as I don't), then the "me" as used in this context is meaningless.
You say that transferring could work - but how is transferring different to a copy-and-delete? (I guess, again, it depends on whether one believes in some unique un-copyable property of physical particles).
It's a similar idea with teleporting Star-trek style. If any such technologies ever appear, I agree that people would be wary (I mean, *I* would be too, despite what I believe). But after a few people have tried it, people would gradually see that it "works" (rightly or wrongly), and it could well be that it becomes commonplace, apart from a few who resist.
A slightly different classification I read went:
- Type I - Harnesses the energy of an entire planet (eg, weather control).
- Type II - Harnesses the energy of an entire solar system (eg, Dyson Sphere).
- Type III - Harnesses the energy of an entire galaxy.
A quick websearch shows this idea was from an astronomer named Kardashev.It's 9 years since they've been promising to move away from the 680x0 series
Well, Amiga Inc (ie, the company) have only been around since 2000. OS4 is still somewhat vapourware (it was original planned for release in 2001, IIRC, now it's sometime this year), but you can't blame them for the fact that the two PC companies that owned the rights to the Amiga during previous years did bugger all (and indeed, Gateway's attempt at a new Amiga came number 2 in Wired's '99 Vaporware List).
Pi is represented usually by a fraction or relatively simple equation, it's just the division that makes the number go on for ever. I don't understand why we must break pi down into a decimal when it can already be represented by a simple fraction.
This is a bit misleading - since Pi is irrational, representing it as a fraction (eg, 22/7) is only an approximation. Representing these divisions usually produce an infinite expansion in decimal (if that's what you mean by "it's just the division that makes the number go on for ever"), but that number is recurring, and thus easy to work out any arbitrary digit since it repeats. This article is about working out the true value of Pi, whose decimal expansion is infinite and non-recurring, and this has nothing to do with divisions.
Taking the equation two divided by three I have found the 100000 trillionth digit ... it's "3"
Yes.. working out digits of rational numbers is slightly easy than irrational ones. Irrational numbers, by definition, can't be represented as the ratio of two integers.
This "story" is horribly misleading, it's almost as if somebody made a cut-n-paste from the Eyetech marketing... No, there are no "new Amigas." No, nobody will make any "new Amigas."
We could do the "What counts as an 'Amiga'" debate endlessly, but I'm curious - on the one hand you would accept a machine that is manufactured by the official company, but not when the official company partners with other companies to produce it. It is Amiga branded hardware, and it will be shipped with AmigaOS 4[1], so I don't see at all how the article summary is misleading. I don't think details of who-made-what-exactly should necessarily go there.
As for the licensing details - fair enough if you disagree with them, but I am even less able to see how this is relevant to the idea that the article is misleading. Indeed, surely the fact that you can only buy Amiga OS and hardware together makes the combination more of an "Amiga" than if it was separate?
[1] Of course, currently AmigaOS 4 is not available, so on *that* note I would agree that the article is misleading in that at the moment all you have is PPC Linux boxes. But if and when OS4 is available, I'll happily refer to such machines as "new PPC Amigas", without having to repeat a few minutes of blurb about how different companies are making the different bits and you can't by the OS separately, therefore they aren't really Amigas.
IMHO the work they're doing would be better spent creating methods for Amiga users to continue using Amiga hardware and software on modern machines (Read: make me an amiga FDC pci card, port AmigaOS to native x86 and let me run my win32/ELF binaries in a modernised 32bit workbench GUI).
They may not be doing this work, but others are:
Also I believe AmigaOS currently works fine on 32bit screens.. I can do it okay on WinUAE here.
I'm comparing it to my Mac in 1992 and 1994, or my NeXT, whose GUI was designed in the late 1980s. It was ass-ugly then, and it's ass- ugly now. Windows 3.1 was awful (probably worse) but I'm comparing it to NEXTSTEP and System 7, which were contemporaries, and were a lot more pleasant to use and pleasant to look at.
I think which looks best just comes down to a matter of opinion, especially if you're not mentioning specifics about what you find ugly. Whilst I never used NEXTSTEP, I personally found the System 7 GUI to be ugly (mainly due to its predominantly black/white colour scheme), and a pain to use. But I figure that some people like it, so I don't go posting about this to every Apple article that appears on Slashdot..
This might be difficult since the new Amigas have special Firmware, very closely related to the classic Amiga's "KICKSTART" roms.
My understanding is that the Firmware in the AmigaOne is not analagous to the "Kickstart" ROMs. The firmware is more like a BIOS and doesn't contain any of AmigaOS (see http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?item _id=1085 for more details) but the "Kickstart" ROMs were part of the OS, which will now be entirely on disk/CD.
Though, I do believe that it is planned that AmigaOS 4 will only run on authorised hardware which may make it harder to get it to get it to run on other hardware..