So in other words, the Indian woman was right? "Turtles, all the way down..."
In a sense, yes. The two questions are perfectly analogous; it's just the answers that differ.
If you take the premises that everything (solids at least) must rest upon something or else it will fall, and that we are not falling right now, then you must conclude that as we rest upon the Earth, the Earth must rest upon something else, and that upon something else, and so on forever. Likewise, if everything must come from something or else nothing would exist, and something does exist, then everything must have come from something else, which came from something else, and so on forever.
The disanalogy here is that we now consider one of the two premises in the "turtles all the way down" argument false. It is not true that the Earth is not falling right now. The Earth IS falling. We just understand the nature of free fall (and motion in general) differently than people of Aristotelian times did. So yeah, if everything must rest on something else in order to not fall, and we are not falling, then everything we're resting on (the Earth) must rest upon something else; but the Earth IS falling, so you don't have to draw that conclusion. Alternatively, if you wanted to say that we are not falling, but still reject the conclusion, then you'd have to say that some things can just magically defy gravity.
Likewise, if you want to say either (1) that something can come from nothing (analogous to "things can magically defy gravity"), or (2) that nothing presently exists (analogous to "we are in fact falling right now"), then you're welcome to conclude that there was a point in time in which nothing existed. Unlike in the turtle example, we're very unlikely to reject the second premise (that is, to say that nothing exists now), so we've either got to reject the first one (and say that things can magically pop into existence for no reason), or accept the conclusion (that there is an infinite series of things going back forever).
Actually, I reject that notion scientifically, because by definition "infinity" in our context cannot be measured, it cannot be observed, it cannot be tested. An infinity of nothingness is one thing I might be willing to believe, but an infinity of "something"? IMO, that's when you abandon the scientific path and enter religion.
In that regard: "infinity" is just as magical as God is i.e. it makes no sense. Even IF it's our only "logical" alternative left, that still doesn't mean it has to make sense. But in that case, I'd like to go straight for the most illogical explanation, which for me is then the most logical explanation given the extreme absurdity of the "origin" concept: God.
Sure I can't prove it, just like the infinity concept could never be scientifically measured, and Occam's Razor would then logically reason that God would be the ultimate complex entity and thus would never come first before nearly any other theory. Despite that, if we're in the realm of "can't explain any of this" anyhow, I'd like to argue that our somewhat "proven logic" e.g. Occam's Razor, doesn't (have to) apply.
"Infinity" is not a thing to be observed; it's not a "thing" at all. Infinity is not even a number (at least according to most mathematicians), so even if you grant numbers some sort of ontological status like we do tables and chairs and rocks and trees (which makes no sense to me, but apparently a lot of people claim such a thing), "infinity" is still not being considered as an object at all; thus you don't need to prove or disprove that it "exists", because nobody is claiming that it exists. The question is not whether "infinity exists", but whether a "first thing" (first moment/event/being/cause) exists; and while, if a first thing does exist, we would not be able to observe it (being in the past and all), that doesn't mean that a logical disproof of it is possible. I can state with absolute certainty that there are no square circles anywhere in the universe (or in any possible universe), because such a thing is a logical absurdity. I'm sure someone who knows more math than I could give you an equally definitive proof that there is no largest (or smallest) number, i.e. that the set of real numbers is infinite, though that seems intuitive enough you probably won't ask for one.
Now I can't say with quite that level of certainty that there was no first thing, because while "something exists" is evidently true, "something cannot come from nothing" is just a very reasonable and widely-held assumption which, it is conceivable, might not be true. But if you're willing to grant that those two things are both true, you cannot believe, without contradicting yourself, that there was a first thing before which there was nothing. Even your preferred belief, that God created everything, agrees with that conclusion, unless you hold that God spontaneously sprang out of nothingness instead of having always existed for eternity. And you'll note that I specifically said that this line of reasoning doesn't *rule out* God (as an eternal being); it just doesn't prove God's existence, as some have tried to use it to.
Hehe, I never thought of it as a "proven infinity" before, but I guess this would be a nice example of such. Food for thought, that's for sure. Still, in the math example, we're talking about infinitely shrinking and/or infinitely increasing. AFAIK that's not the case with the current theory of energy, correct? So that still makes our original infinity concept unmeasurable in any form or shape.
The series' in question are just sets defined by an asymmetric relation of some sort. With numbers, the relation is "is bigger than"/"is less than", and the question about whether the set of numbers is infinite is a question of whether there is any number which does not bear the relation of "is greater than" to some other number (i.e., a number less than which is no other number). With moments (or objects/events/etc) in time, the relation is "exists before"/"exists after", and the question
Also, if you accept that something can't come from nothing, then the notion that there's an infinite series of previous universes is also absurd. If they can't be created out of nothing, then they couldn't have existed.
See the rather long post I just made elsewhere in this thread, First Causes and Infinite Serieses. To sum it up: given that something exists now, either (A) Something can come from nothing, and thus there was a first thing that just popped into being, or (B) Something can't come from nothing, and everything which exists came from something else, which came from something else, and so on back forever. Asking "but where did that series come from" is a poorly formed question, like asking "what number is smaller than the number line?" The number line doesn't have a numerical value, it's just a way of thinking about numbers in general, so it makes no sense to ask what's smaller than it; and likewise, the time line doesn't exist at any point in time, it's just a way of thinking about time in general, so it makes no sense to ask what came before it. But for anything on the time line, it makes sense to ask what came before it, and for everything there is an answer to that question, meaning there is no first thing; just as for every number on the number line, it makes sense to ask what number is smaller than it, and for every number there is an answer to that question, meaning there is no smallest number.
Either something can come from nothing (good luck with proving that) or something comes from something (good luck proving that too). And in the latter case, if something is only possible from something then something can't exist; it's a paradox.
You're right that we can't prove either way whether it's possible for something to come from nothing - it's just a generally accepted premise. I'm not aware of anyone who has seriously doubted it. The closest I can think of is theists who believe the world was created "ex nihlo" - literally, "from nothing" - but even they usually say that it didn't *really* come from nothing; it came from God. "Something cannot come from nothing" is actually a premise in one of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God, the "first cause" version of the cosmological argument.
But your second sentence there is incorrect. If it is true that something cannot come from nothing (which seems correct), then either something has always existed, or nothing ever has or ever will exist; and since it is evidently true now that something exists, you must conclude that something has always existed. The first cause argument tries to twist this into "there is some [particular] thing which has always existed", i.e. an eternal being, a.k.a. God, but that's not equivalent to the conclusion of this line of reasoning, which is simply that at any given point in time, the statement "something exists" has been true, or equivalently, if you were to ask about any given thing "was there something before that?", the answer will be "yes". (This is not to rule out the logical possibility of there having been a single eternal being preceding everything else; it merely shows that that's not a necessary conclusion of the premises "something can't come from nothing" and "something now exists").
Your supposed paradox arises because you're trying to ask a question that doesn't really make sense. Suppose you told me that for every real number, there was a smaller number; that is to say, that there is no "smallest number" (which is true). And then I asked you "ah, but what number is smaller than the whole number line?" That's not a well-formed question... the number line itself has no numerical value, so there is no "smaller than" it. Likewise, while it's true (given something can't come from nothing) that there is always something preceding any other thing, it makes no sense to ask "ah, but what preceded all of it?". There is no "before" the timeline, any more than there is a "less than" the number line.
I like to pose a similar line of reasoning to science-minded people who reject theistic first-cause argument, but still like to claim that there was literally no such thing as time before the big bang. The physics equivalent of "something cannot come from nothing" is the law of conservation of mass-energy; which says that it (mass-energy) can never be created or destroyed. This is taken to be a law of physics, i.e. inviolable. Given that, and the fact that mass-energy presently exists, it's then just as quick and easy to deduce that mass-energy has always existed, as something is here now, but it could not have been created, so it must have always been. The only alternative to this is either that the conservation of mass-energy isn't really a law of physics, and that in certain (perhaps very unlikely, but theoretically reproducible) circumstances it can be violated, and something can really come from nothing - which not many physicists will want to accept - or that it is an "inviolable" law of nature which on one single occasion was actually violated - in other words, to call the Big Bang a miracle, which is just to give up on science entirely and say "I don't know what happened and I'm not going to try to find out".
Of course, this isn't to rule out that the Big Bang happened; all empirical evidence points to the known cosmos originating from an explosion of some sort in the distant past. This is just to rule out that ther
Heh, I know, I totally agree. That's why I enjoy reversing those types of arguments, so that people who make them can see how similar they appear in structure regardless of which position you take on the issue at hand. Then, thankfully, some rare individuals on the very brink of intellectual worthiness can be catalysed into an epiphany where they realise that... wow, truth is relative, after all. Naturally this either leads to a chain effect of realising that everything is relative, including everything they ever believed, and/or a mental meltdown. Mental darwinism, maybe?:) Heheheh. I guess my own personal brand of sarcasm didn't make it through my first post. Tee hee.
Yeah, I missed your sarcasm too. I guess I just couldn't take a joke yesterday.
Though on this off-topic topic... I wouldn't go so far as to say that the truth is relative, just that nobody knows the absolute truth. Relativism is to deny objectivity, i.e. to do that there are real facts out there to be known, independent of what anybody believes. Absolutism is to deny subjectivity, i.e. to deny that one cannot have direct knowledge of the truth, or absolute certainty in one's beliefs. I'd say that the truth is objective (non-relative), but that all knowledge is subjective (i.e. non-absolute). There is a right answer; you can just never be sure that your answer is the right one. (About anything besides trivial truths of logic and mathematics, at least).
This may be a dumb question, but when an EULA says that you may not do so-and-so... what goes in the "or else" part after that? "Or else we won't offer you tech support?" If that's all, who cares (besides businesses, etc etc; people hacking around with their own computers running things in VMs can do their own tech support). Or is it more like "or else we'll sick the FBI on you?" If that's the case, what exactly is the crime being committed?
If I've purchased a copy of some software from an authorized distributor, it is a legal copy full stop, so I've not violated any copyright law (if downloading pirated music isn't a violation of copyright law - which it isn't, only uploading is - then running a legally purchased copy of software from an authorized distributed certainly isn't). And patents and trademarks are nowhere near applicable in this case (unless I'm reverse-engineering their software to make use of their patented techniques, or making use of their brands in advertising somewhere or some such), so it seems I'm not violating intellectual property right laws at all.
If I'm running it on my own computer, I'm not doing anything to anyone else's physical property, so it doesn't seem like any sort of physical property laws apply either; I can do whatever the hell I want to my own property. And unless I'm using it to control an evil robot of doom and terrorize downtown Los Angeles, I'm not committing a crime directly against another person (e.g. murder, assault) either.
Is it contract law? So just because the software says "by installing this software, you agree not to use this software in these ways", I'm suddenly bound in what I'm allowed to do with my own property? Would that hold up in court for any other kind of product? If I buy a new bicycle chain, can they put a licence agreement inside the box it came in that says by installing this bike chain, I'm agreeing not to use it to ride anywhere outside of the lower 48 states? Or rather, would any such licence be at all valid? What if they put it outside the box?
It may sound immature, but I feel like saying to these EULA lawyers, "Oh yeah? Or else what?"
The real security is telling the user what is being installed where, which the system determines. The justification string is just for less-knowledgeable users who may not be familiar with that thing by name; and it should be phrased in such a way as to be clear "this is what this program SAYS this thing is for". It's still not foolproof, but then nothing is; and it's a lot nicer for somewhat knowledgeable users to see this sort of thing, rather than just giving blanket permission for an app to do whatever the hell it needs your admin password for.
Most importantly, it would encourage developers to make installers that don't spew unnecessary crap everywhere - or better yet, make programs that don't need "installing" in the first place - since users would see every bit of crap spewed, and be annoyed by a message about it. It also makes a nice feature checkmark for the side of the box or the website: "Easy drag-and-drop installation!"
Also, as you mention toolbars, that reminds me of something I forgot to note: it would also be great if the system could detect when some sort of executable code was being put somewhere that it would run automatically, and warn the user (in a second dialog box) like Safari does with downloads, that this is not just a document, but a little program that could do all sorts of mean nasty things behind your back, are you really sure you want that there?
Yes, but it's arguments like yours that make evolutionists think fundamentalist Christianity is a mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots. And even if that's not true, that kind of thikning certainly doesn't help the Christians' public image.
I really don't want to sidetrack this thread into a religious debate (I was more harping on the pseudo-social-darwinism of the OP than on Christians, but with a humorously over-the-top jab at the other extreme thrown in for good measure), but what the hell, I've been riding high on the Slashdot karma scales for my entire history here.
Fundamentalist Christianity is a "mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots". That's not meant to harp on Christians in general and say they're all fundamentalists, nor to say that ONLY Christians are fundamentalists; they're just the predominant religion in this culture and so a handy example. But fundamentalism of ANY sort is meant to stifle critical thought processes. That's what makes it fundamentalism: the belief they you somehow hold the absolute truth, that you are above close, critical inspection and reasoned examination of your beliefs, that there is no way in hell that you could possibly be wrong, because you say so, or your church/temple/mosque says so, or your holy book says so, and anyone who disagrees is obviously a heretic/infidel and must be converted or else destroyed by any means feasible.
If someone just reads some "holy book" and happens to agree with most of what it says, fine, more power too them. I'm not going to disagree with them just because they got the idea from religion; but I'm not going to agree just because of the source either. I happen to agree to varying degrees with significant parts of most religions' teachings. I also happen to agree to varying degrees with significant parts of most secular philosophies out there too, even the ones which position themselves as opposed to each other. Of course I don't agree with the entirety of any of them; I agree with what parts accurately describe the world as it seems to me, or those parts which reason well from things which do seem so obviously true to me. So I wind up believing what I find to be true of my own independent thoughts, which overlaps with a lot of other people's thoughts in places; but never do I just blatantly concede "I believe in X-ism", for any complex value of "X" (i.e. any religious or philosophical system). Nor do I insist that I of my own accord have arrived at the absolute truth; I'm constantly refining my own beliefs, rethinking things, learning from experience, reading new things and getting new ideas, talking with people and testing my own ideas, and so forth. And not just because I'm easily persuaded or haven't got any strong beliefs myself - I've got some very strong, well-thought-out beliefs that I'm not willing to let go of easily, but I am willing to let go of them given good reason to do so, and I have done so repeatedly over the years.
It's when you stop doing that sort of thing and say "Ok, I know the absolute truth now; end of discussion" that you become a fundamentalist, and how is a social culture promoting that sort of thing NOT "a mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots"?
That is interesting and useful, but only for installers which use the built-in Installer. I suppose rationally I ought to be just as concerned about what those pkgs are doing (I guess the official veneer of having the OS do the installation makes it seem safer somehow), but the main focus of my concern are things which ship with their own installer programs (e.g. a VISE installer) which ask for an admin password and then do who the hell knows what.
Just to clarify, since apparently someone thinks my previous post was trolling...
(1) Yes, apparently I missed a joke. The poster sounded serious to me. Guess I are dumb today.
(2) No, I don't approve of such nanny-state legislation. But arguing that stupid people ought to die for the benefit of the gene pool is different from just arguing that people ought not to be prohibited from being stupid.
(3) My over-the-top rib on fundamentalist Christians was supposed to be funny itself. My apologies to the tamer Christians out there if you were offended by that remark.
But this is natural selection at work. If you're too stupid to pause your music/chat/game while you're crossing through traffic, you should be removed from the gene pool, and a city bus going 30+ mph is a capable tool for that extraction.
It's just like the government to try to make laws to keep stupid people from killing themselves. How else are we going to evolve as a species if the government tries to legislate out of existence those activities that get people into the Darwin Awards?
It's arguments like this that make fundamentalist Christians think the theory of evolution is a satanic plot to corrupt our children and turn them into terrorists.
And even if that's not really why, this kind of thinking certainly doesn't help the theory's public image.
Wouldn't it be nice of the Operating System helped you protect it from intrusive applications? No, you don't get to silently spam half baked crap into/etc/rc.d/init.d just because the you actually need sufficient privilege to do some other thing on install. No, my registry is NOT a free-for-all; you get to put just what you need in there and not go on a fishing expedition or 'fix' stuff you're not compatible with. No, the BIOS isn't for you because you're just a VOIP app and have no business whatsoever mucking around with the nonvolatile CMOS I need to boot. No, I don't need a fourth JVM crammed into my PATH, thanks.
Right on!
Coming from the Mac world, where I know there's most often no technical reason why an app couldn't just be drag-and-drop "installed" (i.e. just copy the app bundle to wherever the hell you want it and run it from there), I raise a suspicious eyebrow every time I download some program which should be entirely a userland thing (a game, a document or media editor or player of some sort, etc) which insists that I run an installer program that asks me for an admin password. I feel like asking the devs, "Why exactly do you need write access to anything outside your app bundle? Give me a damn good reason why I should entrust my system to you."
I want my OS to serve me like I want my government to serve me: stay out of my way unless I ask it for something (and have useful services available for the asking), except to keep people from doing bad things to me and my property, in which case I want it to proactively defend me. This means that no programs are running that I don't want running or don't know are running; nothing can *get* running without my telling it to or at least granting it permission to; and no files get written anywhere, perhaps outside of a few sandbox areas like the user's Preferences folder, without my permission.
OSX does most of this right already. The only more-stringent thing I would really ask for is that installers/etc which ask for an admin password not just get blanket permission to do whatever they want; I'd prefer it if the system instead told me, for each item the app wanted to install, that:
"The application FooBar wants permission to create the folder "Beezelbub" in System/Library/YourMom/. The justification it provides for this is: Beezelbub is a video codec needed to play cutscenes in FooBar: The Quest For Metasyntax. Do you wish to allow FooBar to create this item? [Yes] [Yes To All] [No] [No To All]."
And if you click one of the "Yes" buttons, THEN it prompts you for an admin password.
Of course, the app would be allowed to write whatever the hell it wants into folders it creates, so you don't have to get this prompt for every one of the thousand little files that some library or codec might include, unless those files are scattered to the winds and not in one nice neat package like they should be. Currently existing apps of course would not have such justification strings built into them, but even still, this would be a more secure way that would allow users who care to selectively allow the installation of crap on their system. And of course, users who don't care can always say "Yes To All" and be no worse off than they are today.
But users like me would feel much less suspicious, no longer wondering "what the heck does this installer want with my admin password? Why does this program need an installer in the first place?"
A related thing I might like would be if the system notified me any time any program tried to open up a network connection of any sort; to which I could say "allow", "always allow" (for trusted things), "disallow", or "always disallow" (for things you think are spyware). Include similar justification strings as the above dialogue does. This would work well to combat any sort of trojan spyware you might have gotten (that is, programs you downloaded and installed yourself, which are sending data to someone that you don't want it to send; since the way O
This is just a blanket reply to most of the other replies here... I'd rather not respond to all these messages individually.
My complaints about smoke are mostly in public places. Particularly, I would like to see smoking banned in the usual sense of "in public", as in, out on the street. I'm sick of walking through clouds of other people's smoke just by walking through a crowded public place (a busy street, a university campus, etc). Smoking on the street is just like urinating on the sidewalk; no, it's not going to kill you, but it's mildly unhealthy and rather disgusting and people shouldn't be allowed to pollute our public spaces like that.
As to smoking in private establishments, I think the urine example segues there nicely to a quote I saw here on Slashdot somewhere. It was something like "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a pool." Would you (presuming "you" are generally opposed to state intervention) be OK with someone operating a privately-owned but open-to-the-public swimming pool in which people were freely allowed to urinate, even so far as having a "peeing section" so as to minimize offense to the non-pissers? I imagine most of you would say "no", and I know the health department sure would. The same sort of reasoning seems applicable to smoking in public restaurants. I guess I'm theoretically OK with a "smoking establishment", i.e. a place where people go primarily to smoke, inasmuch as I'd be OK with a golden-shower-fetish porn studio or brothel (that is to say, I think both are gross, but if everyone there is OK with it, and it's not spilling out into public, go right ahead).
Continuing the analogy further, I'd say the same line of reasoning applies to smoking in the home too, if you have children or other such dependents. If you own your own home and you want to piss on the carpet in the living room, then you do that, have fun. But if you've got kids, who are dependent on you and stuck in that environment - or say, if you rent a room in your house to someone - then I think most people would agree that creating that sort of unhealthy squalor is grounds for having your kids taken out of that environment, or grounds for your tenants to file legal complaints against you. Same thing for smoking.
Now I know a bunch of smokers are going to say, "but that leaves practically nowhere left to smoke!" Tough. Smoking is not something you biologically need to do, and it's not a right (in the sense of a claim right; it's within your right to liberty rights to smoke, provided you're not doing anything else wrong by it). Have "smoke rooms" like bathrooms, with ventilation systems like a bathroom's plumbing (bars might be good candidates for conversion into places like this); or smoke when you're out in the middle of nowhere and nobody is going to be offended by it, like pissing behind a bush in the country. Yeah, I know these rules would make it hard for you to find a place to smoke with the way things are set up now. But that's not the intention (I honestly don't care what you do with your own body), it's just a side-effect of keeping you from polluting other peoples' air space. If that makes it a little harder for you to support your addiction, tough shit, if you'll pardon my french.
Also, as a sidenote: the bit about second hand smoke being worse than first hand smoke is just something I recall hearing. Whether or not it's true is not relevant to my point.
And, once again back on topic... if the government wants to regulate energy usage, it should do so by REGULATING ENERGY USAGE. Rather, it should impose fines for causing the negative side-effects of producing energy, which would raise the price of energy, and reduce it's usage. But banning a class of products is the wrong way to go about it. I'm not advocating a tobacco tax or a ban on cigarettes - just making it illegal to smoke in certain circumstances, like it's illegal to piss in some circumstances. Outright banning of products is usually a bass-ackwards way to go about achieving your real goals.
But we have empowered these idiots with our votes in the past. They passed smoking bans and we all applauded. They told us we had to buckle up and wear helmets and we gave them a pat on the back. Lately they have been trying to protect us by banning the very same tranfats that they forced upon restaurants several years ago to get rid to saturated fats. So why shouldn't they further save the world by banning the light bulb. Next stop... who knows.
This is just a pet peeve of mine, but I get sick of seeing smoking bans rolled in with a bunch of nanny laws which only protect you from yourself and your own stupidity.
SMOKING AFFECTS OTHER PEOPLE. There's this little thing called second-hand smoke. I seem to recall it being actually worse than first-hand smoke, since the first-hand smoker at least has a filter.
I'm all for repealing drug laws and such in general - it's none of anybody else's business what you put in your body. But what you put in our, collective air is our, collective business, and as such it is the legitimate domain of state regulation.
And back on topic again... yeah, banning incandescent light bulbs is stupid.
How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?
They've got a right to teach they kids what they think is right and wrong. To say otherwise is to say that the State gets to determine what the truth is and what everyone ought to believe, and there goes freedom of thought right out the window.
Of couse, none of that is to say that society (e.g. through public schools) couldn't or shouldn't teach kids otherwise, and parents who bitch that public schools are teaching falsehoods ought simply to tell their kids that - though the question then becomes, who will the kids believe, when the schools say the same thing about the parents?
Let the parents teach whatever they want and let the schools teach what we-the-people want. Let everyone speak what they feel to be the truth, and everyone decide for themselves who is really telling the truth. That's what freedom of speech is all about.
> > Can you name one law that has never been broken?
> The second law of thermodynamics.
The second law is a statistical phenomenon and can be broken - and statistically speaking, most likely has been on small scales for very short periods of time throughout history.
Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.
That sounds in accordance with what I was saying. Apple didn't buy some sort of rights to produce a GUI (they already had the IIgs), or the rights to use the GUI Xerox had already made (they wanted to build their own new one). What they paid for was a look (or several, by the phrasing of that Wiki article) at the GUI research that PARC had been doing, with the understanding that Apple was trying to build a similar product and may use any ideas they got from PARC without fear of litigation. I think the sheer differences between the Smalltalk interface of those early PARC machines and the first Mac and Lisa interfaces should be clear enough sign that Apple didn't just buy Xerox's GUI - and the preexistence of the IIgs is enough sign that they didn't need to buy the rights to the GUI concept in general. So there were no "rights" to be bought - Apple just paid to talk to their research team and see what they were doing.
Then Apple bought the rights to the GUI from Xerox.
Ugh, no! I get so sick of hearing this.
Apple wanted to make a new, entirely GUI-based computer. (They already had a primitive GUI machine, the IIgs). They heard Xerox's Palo Alto research center had been researching such things. They paid Xerox for a tour of the facility and a look at their research, and then went home and started work on the Lisa and Macintosh.
Apple didn't buy any sort of rights to anything from anyone. They did a significant amount of R&D (including lots of usability studies) to refine the concepts that they had seen demonstrated at Xerox. The way people like you make it out, Xerox developed "the GUI" (the one and only original) from scratch and Apple just bought it off of them. That's nothing like how it went down.
Kinda late in the game here to put in my two cents, but here is my take on the issue. For any given crime...
Figure out (estimate if necessary) what kind costs were incurred by others because of the perpetrator's actions, including court costs, lost interest, and so forth as applicable. Call this Figure A.
Figure out (estimate if necessary) what kind profits perpetrator's made (monetary or otherwise) because of his actions, including interest or any other way he could have used his profits from this to make further profit. Call this Figure B.
Fine him the greater of these two figures, and allow him to pay it off with cash if he can (see below for why this won't let the rich just buy their way out of punishment), or if not - say if it turns out A is larger than B and the whole deal was a net loss for everyone, and trying to pay off this debt bankrupts him - send him to prison and let him work off his debt with a community service job (a useful one, like clearing fire access roads in the mountains, paving streets, or picking up garbage) while in there. His prison sentence is then determined by how well, how hard and how much he works to repay his debt to society and/or the victims (if those be different parties).
As for what to actually do with the money... In cases of private crime (i.e. crime against specific individuals), I'd say give the amount of Figure A to the victims (to cover their losses, lost opportunities/interest, and court costs), and the difference between A and B (if B is larger) to the public (as in tax credits or some such). But in such case like this, of general public harm rather than specific cases of private harm, I'd say give all the money to the public. But, as we presently have no mechanism in place for doing such things (though I understand some northern European countries do, and I'd say we ought to), I'd just put the money toward paying off our national debt.
This way, the victims are compensated for their losses, and the perp is fined any gains beyond that, such that:
(1) If figure A is larger than figure B, such that the perp gained less than the victim lost and the whole deal was a net loss for everyone all around, then cost of that loss is put on the perp, deterring such actions in the future; or
(2) if figure B is larger than figure A, such that more was gained by the perp than lost by the victim and the crime somehow generated profits overall, then the perp is denied that profit, leaving no motivation to commit such acts in the future, or
(3) If the two figures are equal, things are set about as they would have been had the crime never been committed, and again the perp is left with no gain from his actions and no motivation to try them again.
I got jumped in Seattle and had my left eye sliced in half. It was hard, but I've forgiven the people that did it. I'm not trying to come across all holier-than-thou, I'm just saying, holding on to your anger is only punishing yourself. If the person who did that to you knew how you felt, do you think they'd feel bad or would they just laugh?
Until you forgive, you are letting the people who wronged you continue to have power over your life. Forgivness: It's not for them, it's for you.
That is a very good lesson; one that I know in my head, but that doesn't seem to sit well in my heart. Oftentimes, when someone angers me, a large part of the anger is not "how dare you do that!" but "how dare you do something that pissed me off!" The anger is largely just that they managed to get a reaction out of me, even if that reaction is only in my head and they can't see it - I still imagine them getting a laugh out of it, cause people are just fucking dicks like that sometimes.
Strange and paradoxical I know - being pissed off that someone pissed me off, more so than about whatever they did that that pissed me off in the first place - but that's how my mind seems to work, unfortunately.
Bear in mind though that you are defining what you mean by "God" by giving this description of how things would differ, so if you say for example merely "if God didn't exist, nothing would exist", you're just saying "God" is the universe.
I don't follow you're logic... "if you didn't write your post, then your post would not exist"... so I'm saying you are your post? You're going to have to clear that one up for me...
Not that it matters at this late hour, but I just remembered that I forgot to address this point.
Say I'm calling up my doctor in a panic one morning and I tell him that I am unable to move my legs to get out of bed. He has an idea what might be the problem: maybe I have shpikelvipes on my knees, which would do that. So he asks me if I have shpiklevipes on my knees. I have no idea what shpiklevipes are, so I tell him I don't know - what's a shpikelvipe? Now, in a real world situation he's probably going to tell me one or two of the usual symptoms of shpikelvipes, and if I have shpikelvipes I'll probably have those symptoms, and if I don't have those symptoms he'll move on to other possible causes. But maybe I have a weird case with no visible symptoms (besides the inability to move my legs, if that is really being caused by shpikelvipes). So they come to get me and run a bunch of tests to see if I have shpikelvipes, including tissue samples and so on. Long story short, there is a long list of detailed descriptions of observations that would allow you to determine whether or not someone has shpikelvipes, and to understand all of those possible observations of shpikelvipes - that they look like, how they interact with other things, etc - is to understand what shpikelvipes are. To say that you have shpikelvipes is to say that some set of particular phenomena will be observed under some particular circumstances.
So if someone were to come up to me and say "Ingolfke is awesome", and I were to ask them "what's Ingolfke?", they might just say "he's some guy who posts on Slashdot." Now here, he's not just saying that you are nothing but the cause of some posts on Slashdot, he's also saying you're a guy - which from context I can presume a human, probably male, and thus know a lot of incidental things about what sort of thing that you, Ingolfke, are. Your post's existence is not the only implication of your existence; if it were, you would be your post, and not a person, and I wouldn't be talking to you.
So say someone tells me "God exists" And I ask, What's that mean? What's God? And that person replies "God is the one who created the universe, he loves us all", etc etc. So, God is a person? "Yes." What's he look like? He's male, I take it? I.e. He has a penis? "Well, he's not a physical being... he's a being of pure spirit." Ok, what's a spirit? "A spirit is a thinking thing, a mind, the animating principle or spark of life... you and I are both spirits." I seem to be a physical thing. So do you. "You HAVE a physical body, but the intelligent movements of that body are caused by your spirit, and proof that it exists" Alright then, what's God's body, and what movements does he cause in it? "Well, God doesn't have his own distinct body - as I said, he's non-physical - but he causes things in the world to occur." Like what? If God is non-physical and I cannot observe him directly, only certain things that he mysteriously causes to occur, then what are those things?
This is the point where your description of what God does - the observable implications of his existence - is your definition of what God is. If you say, like the Deists, that the only implication of God's existence is the existence of the universe (because "it all had to come from somewhere"), then you're just saying that God is the universe, because the two facts (of God's existence and the universe's existence) are indistinguishable from each other and thus equivalent in meaning.
If, on the other hand, you say that the implications of God's existence a
No an atheist, as the propositions state, believes that no such events can occour, ever. Miracles, gods, spirits, souls, all of that they say cannot ever actually occur (a pretty bold statement). The look at the reports and say, that cannot happen we've never seen it so it mustn't have happened, water doesn't turn into wine so anyone who claims that they turned it into wine could not have.
An atheist just believes that no gods exist. An atheist can believe whatever he wants about whether or not certain supposedly "supernatural" events occurred in the past, and still be an atheist either way - though since most people today have never seen anything of the sort, and most atheists aren't the kind of people to take the word of some "authoritative" source as truth when it goes contrary to what all their experience and reason alone would lead them to believe, they're likely not going to believe that those particular events did occur, or are the sort of thing that ever does occur. That does not mean that they would deny that it was occurring if they ever saw such a thing - they've just never seen such a thing, so they don't believe that such things happen, any more than they believe in fairies, leprechauns or the Loch Ness Monster, which they likewise have never observed. That doesn't mean they *couldn't* happen - they just apparently don't. If it turns out that such things do happen, we'll look for an explanation for then then.
As for the rest - gods, spirits and souls are usually described in ways that fall into my original sense of "supernatural", i.e. nonsense. What would be different if they did not exist? How could you tell (say if you had a magic observe-o-scope that would let you make any observation possible anywhere in the universe) whether or not they existed? If you can't give an answer to these things, then you're just using words which signify nothing at all. If you can give an answer, then lets do the observations necessary and see whether these things exist or not.
Miracles, likewise, if you mean "something with no (sensible) explanation", would fall into that category. If instead you mean "something not explained by current theories", then "miracles" happen all the time. Science is incomplete, and always has been - there are plenty of things we don't yet understand. That doesn't make them fundamentally incomprehensible and "miraculous". And if by "miracles" you mean "the set of phenomena including turning water into wine, wine into blood, etc", then those are things which are perfectly natural (in the sense of observable and explainable *in principle*) for which we have no existing explanation, because we (modern people doing scientific investigation) have never seen them happen, so we don't consider them in need of explanation.
"Matter" is not just "that stuff posited by science". Science has posited a bunch of different conceptions of what the world is made out of, from continuous substances (i.e. ideal gasses), to clumps of discrete atoms, to dense clouds of infinitesimal point-particles and force-fields, to many-dimensional "strings"... what "matter" is considered keeps changing. The only constant is "it's that stuff we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or otherwise detect via the intermediate use of instruments enhancing those senses." And in that sense, everything we could possibly conceive of is "material"... unless you think you can give me some sort of meaningful description of something without referring to any such sensible qualities.
Your statement about people believing what they believe because their "mommy and daddy" told them is a pathetic straw man argument. I could say athiests choose to be athiests because they're picked on in school or weren't picked to be an acholite... there are many many many very intelligent people who are also Christians. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project for example.
I'll admit that that was harshly worded and I'm sorry for that, but the point of it was that most people who believe in God didn't
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words, the Indian woman was right? "Turtles, all the way down..."
In a sense, yes. The two questions are perfectly analogous; it's just the answers that differ.
If you take the premises that everything (solids at least) must rest upon something or else it will fall, and that we are not falling right now, then you must conclude that as we rest upon the Earth, the Earth must rest upon something else, and that upon something else, and so on forever. Likewise, if everything must come from something or else nothing would exist, and something does exist, then everything must have come from something else, which came from something else, and so on forever.
The disanalogy here is that we now consider one of the two premises in the "turtles all the way down" argument false. It is not true that the Earth is not falling right now. The Earth IS falling. We just understand the nature of free fall (and motion in general) differently than people of Aristotelian times did. So yeah, if everything must rest on something else in order to not fall, and we are not falling, then everything we're resting on (the Earth) must rest upon something else; but the Earth IS falling, so you don't have to draw that conclusion. Alternatively, if you wanted to say that we are not falling, but still reject the conclusion, then you'd have to say that some things can just magically defy gravity.
Likewise, if you want to say either (1) that something can come from nothing (analogous to "things can magically defy gravity"), or (2) that nothing presently exists (analogous to "we are in fact falling right now"), then you're welcome to conclude that there was a point in time in which nothing existed. Unlike in the turtle example, we're very unlikely to reject the second premise (that is, to say that nothing exists now), so we've either got to reject the first one (and say that things can magically pop into existence for no reason), or accept the conclusion (that there is an infinite series of things going back forever).
Actually, I reject that notion scientifically, because by definition "infinity" in our context cannot be measured, it cannot be observed, it cannot be tested. An infinity of nothingness is one thing I might be willing to believe, but an infinity of "something"? IMO, that's when you abandon the scientific path and enter religion.
In that regard: "infinity" is just as magical as God is i.e. it makes no sense. Even IF it's our only "logical" alternative left, that still doesn't mean it has to make sense. But in that case, I'd like to go straight for the most illogical explanation, which for me is then the most logical explanation given the extreme absurdity of the "origin" concept: God.
Sure I can't prove it, just like the infinity concept could never be scientifically measured, and Occam's Razor would then logically reason that God would be the ultimate complex entity and thus would never come first before nearly any other theory. Despite that, if we're in the realm of "can't explain any of this" anyhow, I'd like to argue that our somewhat "proven logic" e.g. Occam's Razor, doesn't (have to) apply.
"Infinity" is not a thing to be observed; it's not a "thing" at all. Infinity is not even a number (at least according to most mathematicians), so even if you grant numbers some sort of ontological status like we do tables and chairs and rocks and trees (which makes no sense to me, but apparently a lot of people claim such a thing), "infinity" is still not being considered as an object at all; thus you don't need to prove or disprove that it "exists", because nobody is claiming that it exists. The question is not whether "infinity exists", but whether a "first thing" (first moment/event/being/cause) exists; and while, if a first thing does exist, we would not be able to observe it (being in the past and all), that doesn't mean that a logical disproof of it is possible. I can state with absolute certainty that there are no square circles anywhere in the universe (or in any possible universe), because such a thing is a logical absurdity. I'm sure someone who knows more math than I could give you an equally definitive proof that there is no largest (or smallest) number, i.e. that the set of real numbers is infinite, though that seems intuitive enough you probably won't ask for one.
Now I can't say with quite that level of certainty that there was no first thing, because while "something exists" is evidently true, "something cannot come from nothing" is just a very reasonable and widely-held assumption which, it is conceivable, might not be true. But if you're willing to grant that those two things are both true, you cannot believe, without contradicting yourself, that there was a first thing before which there was nothing. Even your preferred belief, that God created everything, agrees with that conclusion, unless you hold that God spontaneously sprang out of nothingness instead of having always existed for eternity. And you'll note that I specifically said that this line of reasoning doesn't *rule out* God (as an eternal being); it just doesn't prove God's existence, as some have tried to use it to.
Hehe, I never thought of it as a "proven infinity" before, but I guess this would be a nice example of such. Food for thought, that's for sure. Still, in the math example, we're talking about infinitely shrinking and/or infinitely increasing. AFAIK that's not the case with the current theory of energy, correct? So that still makes our original infinity concept unmeasurable in any form or shape.
The series' in question are just sets defined by an asymmetric relation of some sort. With numbers, the relation is "is bigger than"/"is less than", and the question about whether the set of numbers is infinite is a question of whether there is any number which does not bear the relation of "is greater than" to some other number (i.e., a number less than which is no other number). With moments (or objects/events/etc) in time, the relation is "exists before"/"exists after", and the question
Also, if you accept that something can't come from nothing, then the notion that there's an infinite series of previous universes is also absurd. If they can't be created out of nothing, then they couldn't have existed.
See the rather long post I just made elsewhere in this thread, First Causes and Infinite Serieses. To sum it up: given that something exists now, either (A) Something can come from nothing, and thus there was a first thing that just popped into being, or (B) Something can't come from nothing, and everything which exists came from something else, which came from something else, and so on back forever. Asking "but where did that series come from" is a poorly formed question, like asking "what number is smaller than the number line?" The number line doesn't have a numerical value, it's just a way of thinking about numbers in general, so it makes no sense to ask what's smaller than it; and likewise, the time line doesn't exist at any point in time, it's just a way of thinking about time in general, so it makes no sense to ask what came before it. But for anything on the time line, it makes sense to ask what came before it, and for everything there is an answer to that question, meaning there is no first thing; just as for every number on the number line, it makes sense to ask what number is smaller than it, and for every number there is an answer to that question, meaning there is no smallest number.
Ehm yeh, but there are only 2 ways to go:
Either something can come from nothing (good luck with proving that) or something comes from something (good luck proving that too). And in the latter case, if something is only possible from something then something can't exist; it's a paradox.
You're right that we can't prove either way whether it's possible for something to come from nothing - it's just a generally accepted premise. I'm not aware of anyone who has seriously doubted it. The closest I can think of is theists who believe the world was created "ex nihlo" - literally, "from nothing" - but even they usually say that it didn't *really* come from nothing; it came from God. "Something cannot come from nothing" is actually a premise in one of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God, the "first cause" version of the cosmological argument.
But your second sentence there is incorrect. If it is true that something cannot come from nothing (which seems correct), then either something has always existed, or nothing ever has or ever will exist; and since it is evidently true now that something exists, you must conclude that something has always existed. The first cause argument tries to twist this into "there is some [particular] thing which has always existed", i.e. an eternal being, a.k.a. God, but that's not equivalent to the conclusion of this line of reasoning, which is simply that at any given point in time, the statement "something exists" has been true, or equivalently, if you were to ask about any given thing "was there something before that?", the answer will be "yes". (This is not to rule out the logical possibility of there having been a single eternal being preceding everything else; it merely shows that that's not a necessary conclusion of the premises "something can't come from nothing" and "something now exists").
Your supposed paradox arises because you're trying to ask a question that doesn't really make sense. Suppose you told me that for every real number, there was a smaller number; that is to say, that there is no "smallest number" (which is true). And then I asked you "ah, but what number is smaller than the whole number line?" That's not a well-formed question... the number line itself has no numerical value, so there is no "smaller than" it. Likewise, while it's true (given something can't come from nothing) that there is always something preceding any other thing, it makes no sense to ask "ah, but what preceded all of it?". There is no "before" the timeline, any more than there is a "less than" the number line.
I like to pose a similar line of reasoning to science-minded people who reject theistic first-cause argument, but still like to claim that there was literally no such thing as time before the big bang. The physics equivalent of "something cannot come from nothing" is the law of conservation of mass-energy; which says that it (mass-energy) can never be created or destroyed. This is taken to be a law of physics, i.e. inviolable. Given that, and the fact that mass-energy presently exists, it's then just as quick and easy to deduce that mass-energy has always existed, as something is here now, but it could not have been created, so it must have always been. The only alternative to this is either that the conservation of mass-energy isn't really a law of physics, and that in certain (perhaps very unlikely, but theoretically reproducible) circumstances it can be violated, and something can really come from nothing - which not many physicists will want to accept - or that it is an "inviolable" law of nature which on one single occasion was actually violated - in other words, to call the Big Bang a miracle, which is just to give up on science entirely and say "I don't know what happened and I'm not going to try to find out".
Of course, this isn't to rule out that the Big Bang happened; all empirical evidence points to the known cosmos originating from an explosion of some sort in the distant past. This is just to rule out that ther
I was told that story by a friend. Quite interesting. It was the shortened version (as in a 5 minute telling), but I think I got everything.
I do wonder though: How did the very first one occur? If this universe is from the last one, then there must have been a first one somewhere.
No, there doesn't have to be a first one. It's perfectly possible for there to have been an infinite series of previous ones.
In fact, if you accept that something can't come from nothing, then the very notion of a first one at all is absurd. Where did THAT come from?
Heh, I know, I totally agree. That's why I enjoy reversing those types of arguments, so that people who make them can see how similar they appear in structure regardless of which position you take on the issue at hand. Then, thankfully, some rare individuals on the very brink of intellectual worthiness can be catalysed into an epiphany where they realise that... wow, truth is relative, after all. Naturally this either leads to a chain effect of realising that everything is relative, including everything they ever believed, and/or a mental meltdown. Mental darwinism, maybe? :) Heheheh. I guess my own personal brand of sarcasm didn't make it through my first post. Tee hee.
Yeah, I missed your sarcasm too. I guess I just couldn't take a joke yesterday.
Though on this off-topic topic... I wouldn't go so far as to say that the truth is relative, just that nobody knows the absolute truth. Relativism is to deny objectivity, i.e. to do that there are real facts out there to be known, independent of what anybody believes. Absolutism is to deny subjectivity, i.e. to deny that one cannot have direct knowledge of the truth, or absolute certainty in one's beliefs. I'd say that the truth is objective (non-relative), but that all knowledge is subjective (i.e. non-absolute). There is a right answer; you can just never be sure that your answer is the right one. (About anything besides trivial truths of logic and mathematics, at least).
This may be a dumb question, but when an EULA says that you may not do so-and-so... what goes in the "or else" part after that? "Or else we won't offer you tech support?" If that's all, who cares (besides businesses, etc etc; people hacking around with their own computers running things in VMs can do their own tech support). Or is it more like "or else we'll sick the FBI on you?" If that's the case, what exactly is the crime being committed?
If I've purchased a copy of some software from an authorized distributor, it is a legal copy full stop, so I've not violated any copyright law (if downloading pirated music isn't a violation of copyright law - which it isn't, only uploading is - then running a legally purchased copy of software from an authorized distributed certainly isn't). And patents and trademarks are nowhere near applicable in this case (unless I'm reverse-engineering their software to make use of their patented techniques, or making use of their brands in advertising somewhere or some such), so it seems I'm not violating intellectual property right laws at all.
If I'm running it on my own computer, I'm not doing anything to anyone else's physical property, so it doesn't seem like any sort of physical property laws apply either; I can do whatever the hell I want to my own property. And unless I'm using it to control an evil robot of doom and terrorize downtown Los Angeles, I'm not committing a crime directly against another person (e.g. murder, assault) either.
Is it contract law? So just because the software says "by installing this software, you agree not to use this software in these ways", I'm suddenly bound in what I'm allowed to do with my own property? Would that hold up in court for any other kind of product? If I buy a new bicycle chain, can they put a licence agreement inside the box it came in that says by installing this bike chain, I'm agreeing not to use it to ride anywhere outside of the lower 48 states? Or rather, would any such licence be at all valid? What if they put it outside the box?
It may sound immature, but I feel like saying to these EULA lawyers, "Oh yeah? Or else what?"
Does anybody know what their response would be?
The real security is telling the user what is being installed where, which the system determines. The justification string is just for less-knowledgeable users who may not be familiar with that thing by name; and it should be phrased in such a way as to be clear "this is what this program SAYS this thing is for". It's still not foolproof, but then nothing is; and it's a lot nicer for somewhat knowledgeable users to see this sort of thing, rather than just giving blanket permission for an app to do whatever the hell it needs your admin password for.
Most importantly, it would encourage developers to make installers that don't spew unnecessary crap everywhere - or better yet, make programs that don't need "installing" in the first place - since users would see every bit of crap spewed, and be annoyed by a message about it. It also makes a nice feature checkmark for the side of the box or the website: "Easy drag-and-drop installation!"
Also, as you mention toolbars, that reminds me of something I forgot to note: it would also be great if the system could detect when some sort of executable code was being put somewhere that it would run automatically, and warn the user (in a second dialog box) like Safari does with downloads, that this is not just a document, but a little program that could do all sorts of mean nasty things behind your back, are you really sure you want that there?
Yes, but it's arguments like yours that make evolutionists think fundamentalist Christianity is a mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots. And even if that's not true, that kind of thikning certainly doesn't help the Christians' public image.
I really don't want to sidetrack this thread into a religious debate (I was more harping on the pseudo-social-darwinism of the OP than on Christians, but with a humorously over-the-top jab at the other extreme thrown in for good measure), but what the hell, I've been riding high on the Slashdot karma scales for my entire history here.
Fundamentalist Christianity is a "mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots". That's not meant to harp on Christians in general and say they're all fundamentalists, nor to say that ONLY Christians are fundamentalists; they're just the predominant religion in this culture and so a handy example. But fundamentalism of ANY sort is meant to stifle critical thought processes. That's what makes it fundamentalism: the belief they you somehow hold the absolute truth, that you are above close, critical inspection and reasoned examination of your beliefs, that there is no way in hell that you could possibly be wrong, because you say so, or your church/temple/mosque says so, or your holy book says so, and anyone who disagrees is obviously a heretic/infidel and must be converted or else destroyed by any means feasible.
If someone just reads some "holy book" and happens to agree with most of what it says, fine, more power too them. I'm not going to disagree with them just because they got the idea from religion; but I'm not going to agree just because of the source either. I happen to agree to varying degrees with significant parts of most religions' teachings. I also happen to agree to varying degrees with significant parts of most secular philosophies out there too, even the ones which position themselves as opposed to each other. Of course I don't agree with the entirety of any of them; I agree with what parts accurately describe the world as it seems to me, or those parts which reason well from things which do seem so obviously true to me. So I wind up believing what I find to be true of my own independent thoughts, which overlaps with a lot of other people's thoughts in places; but never do I just blatantly concede "I believe in X-ism", for any complex value of "X" (i.e. any religious or philosophical system). Nor do I insist that I of my own accord have arrived at the absolute truth; I'm constantly refining my own beliefs, rethinking things, learning from experience, reading new things and getting new ideas, talking with people and testing my own ideas, and so forth. And not just because I'm easily persuaded or haven't got any strong beliefs myself - I've got some very strong, well-thought-out beliefs that I'm not willing to let go of easily, but I am willing to let go of them given good reason to do so, and I have done so repeatedly over the years.
It's when you stop doing that sort of thing and say "Ok, I know the absolute truth now; end of discussion" that you become a fundamentalist, and how is a social culture promoting that sort of thing NOT "a mass ineptitude movement designed to corrupt logical thought processes and turn people into non-thinking idiots"?
That is interesting and useful, but only for installers which use the built-in Installer. I suppose rationally I ought to be just as concerned about what those pkgs are doing (I guess the official veneer of having the OS do the installation makes it seem safer somehow), but the main focus of my concern are things which ship with their own installer programs (e.g. a VISE installer) which ask for an admin password and then do who the hell knows what.
Thanks anyway though.
Just to clarify, since apparently someone thinks my previous post was trolling...
(1) Yes, apparently I missed a joke. The poster sounded serious to me. Guess I are dumb today.
(2) No, I don't approve of such nanny-state legislation. But arguing that stupid people ought to die for the benefit of the gene pool is different from just arguing that people ought not to be prohibited from being stupid.
(3) My over-the-top rib on fundamentalist Christians was supposed to be funny itself. My apologies to the tamer Christians out there if you were offended by that remark.
But this is natural selection at work. If you're too stupid to pause your music/chat/game while you're crossing through traffic, you should be removed from the gene pool, and a city bus going 30+ mph is a capable tool for that extraction.
It's just like the government to try to make laws to keep stupid people from killing themselves. How else are we going to evolve as a species if the government tries to legislate out of existence those activities that get people into the Darwin Awards?
It's arguments like this that make fundamentalist Christians think the theory of evolution is a satanic plot to corrupt our children and turn them into terrorists.
And even if that's not really why, this kind of thinking certainly doesn't help the theory's public image.
Wouldn't it be nice of the Operating System helped you protect it from intrusive applications? No, you don't get to silently spam half baked crap into /etc/rc.d/init.d just because the you actually need sufficient privilege to do some other thing on install. No, my registry is NOT a free-for-all; you get to put just what you need in there and not go on a fishing expedition or 'fix' stuff you're not compatible with. No, the BIOS isn't for you because you're just a VOIP app and have no business whatsoever mucking around with the nonvolatile CMOS I need to boot. No, I don't need a fourth JVM crammed into my PATH, thanks.
Right on!
Coming from the Mac world, where I know there's most often no technical reason why an app couldn't just be drag-and-drop "installed" (i.e. just copy the app bundle to wherever the hell you want it and run it from there), I raise a suspicious eyebrow every time I download some program which should be entirely a userland thing (a game, a document or media editor or player of some sort, etc) which insists that I run an installer program that asks me for an admin password. I feel like asking the devs, "Why exactly do you need write access to anything outside your app bundle? Give me a damn good reason why I should entrust my system to you."
I want my OS to serve me like I want my government to serve me: stay out of my way unless I ask it for something (and have useful services available for the asking), except to keep people from doing bad things to me and my property, in which case I want it to proactively defend me. This means that no programs are running that I don't want running or don't know are running; nothing can *get* running without my telling it to or at least granting it permission to; and no files get written anywhere, perhaps outside of a few sandbox areas like the user's Preferences folder, without my permission.
OSX does most of this right already. The only more-stringent thing I would really ask for is that installers/etc which ask for an admin password not just get blanket permission to do whatever they want; I'd prefer it if the system instead told me, for each item the app wanted to install, that:
"The application FooBar wants permission to create the folder "Beezelbub" in System/Library/YourMom/. The justification it provides for this is:
Beezelbub is a video codec needed to play cutscenes in FooBar: The Quest For Metasyntax.
Do you wish to allow FooBar to create this item? [Yes] [Yes To All] [No] [No To All]."
And if you click one of the "Yes" buttons, THEN it prompts you for an admin password.
Of course, the app would be allowed to write whatever the hell it wants into folders it creates, so you don't have to get this prompt for every one of the thousand little files that some library or codec might include, unless those files are scattered to the winds and not in one nice neat package like they should be. Currently existing apps of course would not have such justification strings built into them, but even still, this would be a more secure way that would allow users who care to selectively allow the installation of crap on their system. And of course, users who don't care can always say "Yes To All" and be no worse off than they are today.
But users like me would feel much less suspicious, no longer wondering "what the heck does this installer want with my admin password? Why does this program need an installer in the first place?"
A related thing I might like would be if the system notified me any time any program tried to open up a network connection of any sort; to which I could say "allow", "always allow" (for trusted things), "disallow", or "always disallow" (for things you think are spyware). Include similar justification strings as the above dialogue does. This would work well to combat any sort of trojan spyware you might have gotten (that is, programs you downloaded and installed yourself, which are sending data to someone that you don't want it to send; since the way O
This is just a blanket reply to most of the other replies here... I'd rather not respond to all these messages individually.
My complaints about smoke are mostly in public places. Particularly, I would like to see smoking banned in the usual sense of "in public", as in, out on the street. I'm sick of walking through clouds of other people's smoke just by walking through a crowded public place (a busy street, a university campus, etc). Smoking on the street is just like urinating on the sidewalk; no, it's not going to kill you, but it's mildly unhealthy and rather disgusting and people shouldn't be allowed to pollute our public spaces like that.
As to smoking in private establishments, I think the urine example segues there nicely to a quote I saw here on Slashdot somewhere. It was something like "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a pool." Would you (presuming "you" are generally opposed to state intervention) be OK with someone operating a privately-owned but open-to-the-public swimming pool in which people were freely allowed to urinate, even so far as having a "peeing section" so as to minimize offense to the non-pissers? I imagine most of you would say "no", and I know the health department sure would. The same sort of reasoning seems applicable to smoking in public restaurants. I guess I'm theoretically OK with a "smoking establishment", i.e. a place where people go primarily to smoke, inasmuch as I'd be OK with a golden-shower-fetish porn studio or brothel (that is to say, I think both are gross, but if everyone there is OK with it, and it's not spilling out into public, go right ahead).
Continuing the analogy further, I'd say the same line of reasoning applies to smoking in the home too, if you have children or other such dependents. If you own your own home and you want to piss on the carpet in the living room, then you do that, have fun. But if you've got kids, who are dependent on you and stuck in that environment - or say, if you rent a room in your house to someone - then I think most people would agree that creating that sort of unhealthy squalor is grounds for having your kids taken out of that environment, or grounds for your tenants to file legal complaints against you. Same thing for smoking.
Now I know a bunch of smokers are going to say, "but that leaves practically nowhere left to smoke!" Tough. Smoking is not something you biologically need to do, and it's not a right (in the sense of a claim right; it's within your right to liberty rights to smoke, provided you're not doing anything else wrong by it). Have "smoke rooms" like bathrooms, with ventilation systems like a bathroom's plumbing (bars might be good candidates for conversion into places like this); or smoke when you're out in the middle of nowhere and nobody is going to be offended by it, like pissing behind a bush in the country. Yeah, I know these rules would make it hard for you to find a place to smoke with the way things are set up now. But that's not the intention (I honestly don't care what you do with your own body), it's just a side-effect of keeping you from polluting other peoples' air space. If that makes it a little harder for you to support your addiction, tough shit, if you'll pardon my french.
Also, as a sidenote: the bit about second hand smoke being worse than first hand smoke is just something I recall hearing. Whether or not it's true is not relevant to my point.
And, once again back on topic... if the government wants to regulate energy usage, it should do so by REGULATING ENERGY USAGE. Rather, it should impose fines for causing the negative side-effects of producing energy, which would raise the price of energy, and reduce it's usage. But banning a class of products is the wrong way to go about it. I'm not advocating a tobacco tax or a ban on cigarettes - just making it illegal to smoke in certain circumstances, like it's illegal to piss in some circumstances. Outright banning of products is usually a bass-ackwards way to go about achieving your real goals.
But we have empowered these idiots with our votes in the past. They passed smoking bans and we all applauded. They told us we had to buckle up and wear helmets and we gave them a pat on the back. Lately they have been trying to protect us by banning the very same tranfats that they forced upon restaurants several years ago to get rid to saturated fats. So why shouldn't they further save the world by banning the light bulb. Next stop... who knows.
This is just a pet peeve of mine, but I get sick of seeing smoking bans rolled in with a bunch of nanny laws which only protect you from yourself and your own stupidity.
SMOKING AFFECTS OTHER PEOPLE. There's this little thing called second-hand smoke. I seem to recall it being actually worse than first-hand smoke, since the first-hand smoker at least has a filter.
I'm all for repealing drug laws and such in general - it's none of anybody else's business what you put in your body. But what you put in our, collective air is our, collective business, and as such it is the legitimate domain of state regulation.
And back on topic again... yeah, banning incandescent light bulbs is stupid.
How about parents who want to teach their childred from birth that religion X is th eonly true way and that everyone else is a sinner and needs to be converted? What about parents who teach their children to be sexist? racist?
They've got a right to teach they kids what they think is right and wrong. To say otherwise is to say that the State gets to determine what the truth is and what everyone ought to believe, and there goes freedom of thought right out the window.
Of couse, none of that is to say that society (e.g. through public schools) couldn't or shouldn't teach kids otherwise, and parents who bitch that public schools are teaching falsehoods ought simply to tell their kids that - though the question then becomes, who will the kids believe, when the schools say the same thing about the parents?
Let the parents teach whatever they want and let the schools teach what we-the-people want. Let everyone speak what they feel to be the truth, and everyone decide for themselves who is really telling the truth. That's what freedom of speech is all about.
> > Can you name one law that has never been broken?
> The second law of thermodynamics.
The second law is a statistical phenomenon and can be broken - and statistically speaking, most likely has been on small scales for very short periods of time throughout history.
No, not How, When. When Jiabao is gonna purify humanity while Who Jintao does the same for the internet :-)
Ah, the internet... where men are men... women are, too... and little girls are FBI agents...
Xerox was given Apple stock in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product.
That sounds in accordance with what I was saying. Apple didn't buy some sort of rights to produce a GUI (they already had the IIgs), or the rights to use the GUI Xerox had already made (they wanted to build their own new one). What they paid for was a look (or several, by the phrasing of that Wiki article) at the GUI research that PARC had been doing, with the understanding that Apple was trying to build a similar product and may use any ideas they got from PARC without fear of litigation. I think the sheer differences between the Smalltalk interface of those early PARC machines and the first Mac and Lisa interfaces should be clear enough sign that Apple didn't just buy Xerox's GUI - and the preexistence of the IIgs is enough sign that they didn't need to buy the rights to the GUI concept in general. So there were no "rights" to be bought - Apple just paid to talk to their research team and see what they were doing.
Then Apple bought the rights to the GUI from Xerox.
Ugh, no! I get so sick of hearing this.
Apple wanted to make a new, entirely GUI-based computer. (They already had a primitive GUI machine, the IIgs). They heard Xerox's Palo Alto research center had been researching such things. They paid Xerox for a tour of the facility and a look at their research, and then went home and started work on the Lisa and Macintosh.
Apple didn't buy any sort of rights to anything from anyone. They did a significant amount of R&D (including lots of usability studies) to refine the concepts that they had seen demonstrated at Xerox. The way people like you make it out, Xerox developed "the GUI" (the one and only original) from scratch and Apple just bought it off of them. That's nothing like how it went down.
Kinda late in the game here to put in my two cents, but here is my take on the issue. For any given crime...
Figure out (estimate if necessary) what kind costs were incurred by others because of the perpetrator's actions, including court costs, lost interest, and so forth as applicable. Call this Figure A.
Figure out (estimate if necessary) what kind profits perpetrator's made (monetary or otherwise) because of his actions, including interest or any other way he could have used his profits from this to make further profit. Call this Figure B.
Fine him the greater of these two figures, and allow him to pay it off with cash if he can (see below for why this won't let the rich just buy their way out of punishment), or if not - say if it turns out A is larger than B and the whole deal was a net loss for everyone, and trying to pay off this debt bankrupts him - send him to prison and let him work off his debt with a community service job (a useful one, like clearing fire access roads in the mountains, paving streets, or picking up garbage) while in there. His prison sentence is then determined by how well, how hard and how much he works to repay his debt to society and/or the victims (if those be different parties).
As for what to actually do with the money... In cases of private crime (i.e. crime against specific individuals), I'd say give the amount of Figure A to the victims (to cover their losses, lost opportunities/interest, and court costs), and the difference between A and B (if B is larger) to the public (as in tax credits or some such). But in such case like this, of general public harm rather than specific cases of private harm, I'd say give all the money to the public. But, as we presently have no mechanism in place for doing such things (though I understand some northern European countries do, and I'd say we ought to), I'd just put the money toward paying off our national debt.
This way, the victims are compensated for their losses, and the perp is fined any gains beyond that, such that:
(1) If figure A is larger than figure B, such that the perp gained less than the victim lost and the whole deal was a net loss for everyone all around, then cost of that loss is put on the perp, deterring such actions in the future; or
(2) if figure B is larger than figure A, such that more was gained by the perp than lost by the victim and the crime somehow generated profits overall, then the perp is denied that profit, leaving no motivation to commit such acts in the future, or
(3) If the two figures are equal, things are set about as they would have been had the crime never been committed, and again the perp is left with no gain from his actions and no motivation to try them again.
I got jumped in Seattle and had my left eye sliced in half. It was hard, but I've forgiven the people that did it. I'm not trying to come across all holier-than-thou, I'm just saying, holding on to your anger is only punishing yourself. If the person who did that to you knew how you felt, do you think they'd feel bad or would they just laugh?
Until you forgive, you are letting the people who wronged you continue to have power over your life. Forgivness: It's not for them, it's for you.
That is a very good lesson; one that I know in my head, but that doesn't seem to sit well in my heart. Oftentimes, when someone angers me, a large part of the anger is not "how dare you do that!" but "how dare you do something that pissed me off!" The anger is largely just that they managed to get a reaction out of me, even if that reaction is only in my head and they can't see it - I still imagine them getting a laugh out of it, cause people are just fucking dicks like that sometimes.
Strange and paradoxical I know - being pissed off that someone pissed me off, more so than about whatever they did that that pissed me off in the first place - but that's how my mind seems to work, unfortunately.
Bear in mind though that you are defining what you mean by "God" by giving this description of how things would differ, so if you say for example merely "if God didn't exist, nothing would exist", you're just saying "God" is the universe.
I don't follow you're logic... "if you didn't write your post, then your post would not exist"... so I'm saying you are your post? You're going to have to clear that one up for me...
Not that it matters at this late hour, but I just remembered that I forgot to address this point.
Say I'm calling up my doctor in a panic one morning and I tell him that I am unable to move my legs to get out of bed. He has an idea what might be the problem: maybe I have shpikelvipes on my knees, which would do that. So he asks me if I have shpiklevipes on my knees. I have no idea what shpiklevipes are, so I tell him I don't know - what's a shpikelvipe? Now, in a real world situation he's probably going to tell me one or two of the usual symptoms of shpikelvipes, and if I have shpikelvipes I'll probably have those symptoms, and if I don't have those symptoms he'll move on to other possible causes. But maybe I have a weird case with no visible symptoms (besides the inability to move my legs, if that is really being caused by shpikelvipes). So they come to get me and run a bunch of tests to see if I have shpikelvipes, including tissue samples and so on. Long story short, there is a long list of detailed descriptions of observations that would allow you to determine whether or not someone has shpikelvipes, and to understand all of those possible observations of shpikelvipes - that they look like, how they interact with other things, etc - is to understand what shpikelvipes are. To say that you have shpikelvipes is to say that some set of particular phenomena will be observed under some particular circumstances.
So if someone were to come up to me and say "Ingolfke is awesome", and I were to ask them "what's Ingolfke?", they might just say "he's some guy who posts on Slashdot." Now here, he's not just saying that you are nothing but the cause of some posts on Slashdot, he's also saying you're a guy - which from context I can presume a human, probably male, and thus know a lot of incidental things about what sort of thing that you, Ingolfke, are. Your post's existence is not the only implication of your existence; if it were, you would be your post, and not a person, and I wouldn't be talking to you.
So say someone tells me "God exists"
And I ask, What's that mean? What's God?
And that person replies "God is the one who created the universe, he loves us all", etc etc.
So, God is a person?
"Yes."
What's he look like? He's male, I take it? I.e. He has a penis?
"Well, he's not a physical being... he's a being of pure spirit."
Ok, what's a spirit?
"A spirit is a thinking thing, a mind, the animating principle or spark of life... you and I are both spirits."
I seem to be a physical thing. So do you.
"You HAVE a physical body, but the intelligent movements of that body are caused by your spirit, and proof that it exists"
Alright then, what's God's body, and what movements does he cause in it?
"Well, God doesn't have his own distinct body - as I said, he's non-physical - but he causes things in the world to occur."
Like what? If God is non-physical and I cannot observe him directly, only certain things that he mysteriously causes to occur, then what are those things?
This is the point where your description of what God does - the observable implications of his existence - is your definition of what God is. If you say, like the Deists, that the only implication of God's existence is the existence of the universe (because "it all had to come from somewhere"), then you're just saying that God is the universe, because the two facts (of God's existence and the universe's existence) are indistinguishable from each other and thus equivalent in meaning.
If, on the other hand, you say that the implications of God's existence a
No an atheist, as the propositions state, believes that no such events can occour, ever. Miracles, gods, spirits, souls, all of that they say cannot ever actually occur (a pretty bold statement). The look at the reports and say, that cannot happen we've never seen it so it mustn't have happened, water doesn't turn into wine so anyone who claims that they turned it into wine could not have.
An atheist just believes that no gods exist. An atheist can believe whatever he wants about whether or not certain supposedly "supernatural" events occurred in the past, and still be an atheist either way - though since most people today have never seen anything of the sort, and most atheists aren't the kind of people to take the word of some "authoritative" source as truth when it goes contrary to what all their experience and reason alone would lead them to believe, they're likely not going to believe that those particular events did occur, or are the sort of thing that ever does occur. That does not mean that they would deny that it was occurring if they ever saw such a thing - they've just never seen such a thing, so they don't believe that such things happen, any more than they believe in fairies, leprechauns or the Loch Ness Monster, which they likewise have never observed. That doesn't mean they *couldn't* happen - they just apparently don't. If it turns out that such things do happen, we'll look for an explanation for then then.
As for the rest - gods, spirits and souls are usually described in ways that fall into my original sense of "supernatural", i.e. nonsense. What would be different if they did not exist? How could you tell (say if you had a magic observe-o-scope that would let you make any observation possible anywhere in the universe) whether or not they existed? If you can't give an answer to these things, then you're just using words which signify nothing at all. If you can give an answer, then lets do the observations necessary and see whether these things exist or not.
Miracles, likewise, if you mean "something with no (sensible) explanation", would fall into that category. If instead you mean "something not explained by current theories", then "miracles" happen all the time. Science is incomplete, and always has been - there are plenty of things we don't yet understand. That doesn't make them fundamentally incomprehensible and "miraculous". And if by "miracles" you mean "the set of phenomena including turning water into wine, wine into blood, etc", then those are things which are perfectly natural (in the sense of observable and explainable *in principle*) for which we have no existing explanation, because we (modern people doing scientific investigation) have never seen them happen, so we don't consider them in need of explanation.
"Matter" is not just "that stuff posited by science". Science has posited a bunch of different conceptions of what the world is made out of, from continuous substances (i.e. ideal gasses), to clumps of discrete atoms, to dense clouds of infinitesimal point-particles and force-fields, to many-dimensional "strings"... what "matter" is considered keeps changing. The only constant is "it's that stuff we can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, or otherwise detect via the intermediate use of instruments enhancing those senses." And in that sense, everything we could possibly conceive of is "material"... unless you think you can give me some sort of meaningful description of something without referring to any such sensible qualities.
Your statement about people believing what they believe because their "mommy and daddy" told them is a pathetic straw man argument. I could say athiests choose to be athiests because they're picked on in school or weren't picked to be an acholite... there are many many many very intelligent people who are also Christians. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project for example.
I'll admit that that was harshly worded and I'm sorry for that, but the point of it was that most people who believe in God didn't