Palm reading is a great pick-up tool. I get a good reaction even if the girl doesn't believe in such things (I certainly don't believe, but then it's not why I learned it).
Quebec is not truly Canadian, so what goes on in there can't be taken on reflecting on Canada as a whole. Non-criminal law in Quebec is not based on common law but civil law and is completely different from any other jurisdiction in the country.
As for the HRCs attack on free speech, that's an old issue and the conservatives will undoubtedly get around to fixing it; they're just waiting for even more public outcry before they feel comfortable going after a deeply entrenched civil service beurocracy.
My cat catches small animals for "shits and giggles". I've many a time seen him play with a mouse killing it slowly, and never eats it afterwards, though clearly obtains great enjoyment.
It makes no sense to treat animals humanely since they're not human. It's ludicrous to try to treat them any better than nature does. 95% of all species that have existed have become extinct. Most animals never live but a fraction of their biological old-age-limited lifespan, and all but those at the top of food chains tend to die violent deaths in the grips of predators.
Fist, metaphysics is not a science. Second, since around the times after Newton, the sciences have become simply too large to be well understood in general by a single person. There's no such a thing as a psychologist, for example: there is a cognitive psychologist, a pathological psychologist, an experimental psychologist, etc. Fields like biology are even more extremely specialized, to the point where even sub-fields are fragmented: someone trained in one area of microbiology would have essentially zero comprehension when reading a paper from another area of microbiology. To imply that a physicist is somehow qualified to understand and have significant insight in another science in which s/he has no formal training, is either flippant or arrogant. Equally so to imply that non-physicists do use their brains. Mathematics very much plays a part in many sub-fields of psychology. (I'm neither a physicist nor a psychologist, if it matters.)
There are even suggestions by serious and respect theorists that in some sense it is consciousness all the way down
Yes, by physicists thinking they're qualified in metaphysics and psychology.
The more sensible view: consciousness has nothing to do with basic physics (other than reducing to it through the usual theoretical reductionism psychology->neurology->biology->chemistry->physics). http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182
I saw a couple of posts suggesting that people should be left to believe what they want. This is an incredibly dangerous proposition, and the reason that it must be rejected, even if said people don't try to push their false beliefs onto others, has been covered in depth in this classic piece that is, unfortunately, as much needed reading today as it was in the distant past when it was written: http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html
The problem is that as it becomes more widespread through decreasing costs and increasing acceptance, more and more people would be "optimized" along various parameters. You end up removing genetic diversity, since many of those parameters would be the same throughout the population. With genetic diversity gone, extinction of the human population increases by an enormous factor, for any circumstances that develop fit to kill one, are fit to kill all.
There is another issue more important than those you've listed: genetic diversity. Extinction is much more likely then, since when conditions develop that are fit to kill one, they are fit to kill all.
Your brain is finite in size, and due to the Bekenstein bound, can have only a finite number of thoughs. Therefore, if you live forever, you would be thinking the same things over and over again for infinity (though of course a quantum timing mechanism of life functions gets its probability of failing to approach 1 as time approaches infinity, so even if all practical problems could be resolved, you still couldn't live forever).
The article states that "we know quantum mechanics is wrong on some level". Oh really? That's news to me. Any serious proposed theories of everything have been quantum in nature. It's amusingly hypocritical that the Arstechnica article refers to the Wired author as unscientific, yet makes such a claim itself.
The only thing "wrong" with quantum theory is that doesn't fit human intuitions. But this is only because people ignore the psychology of perception and are not careful about interpretations; it's easy to create a very reasonable interpretation of QM that doesn't invoke weird stuff like saying QM must have something wrong with it, or strange consciousness stuff, etc. An example is Mohrhoff's http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182 (also check Marchildon's review of this class of interpretations, it's in the arxiv somewhere linked to this).
Slashdot Mirror
That's the first thing I thought when I saw this headline.
Palm reading is a great pick-up tool. I get a good reaction even if the girl doesn't believe in such things (I certainly don't believe, but then it's not why I learned it).
Perhaps it should be skin off your nose, you smug bastard--what about the innocent children that will get indoctrinated into this nonsense?
Quebec is not truly Canadian, so what goes on in there can't be taken on reflecting on Canada as a whole. Non-criminal law in Quebec is not based on common law but civil law and is completely different from any other jurisdiction in the country.
As for the HRCs attack on free speech, that's an old issue and the conservatives will undoubtedly get around to fixing it; they're just waiting for even more public outcry before they feel comfortable going after a deeply entrenched civil service beurocracy.
I think you're mixing up "socialist" with "progressive".
Antivir's detection rate is higher than Avast.
Antivir has a higher detection rate than Avast.
This was already answered in a post above: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=604653&cid=24067215
*rolls eyes*
My cat catches small animals for "shits and giggles". I've many a time seen him play with a mouse killing it slowly, and never eats it afterwards, though clearly obtains great enjoyment.
It makes no sense to treat animals humanely since they're not human. It's ludicrous to try to treat them any better than nature does. 95% of all species that have existed have become extinct. Most animals never live but a fraction of their biological old-age-limited lifespan, and all but those at the top of food chains tend to die violent deaths in the grips of predators.
Banks would make lots of money even if they loaned out at the same interest rate as they borrow, because they loan out the same money (in loose terms) multiple times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking#Money_creation
Don't waste your time. Get a lawyer and threaten to sue.
http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d38/Moniques3Monsters/more%20funnies%2010/ronery1.jpg
Not all products on infomercials are bad. Stainz-R-Out for example is one of the best things I have purchased, period.
"non-physicists do" should say "non-physicists don't"
Fist, metaphysics is not a science. Second, since around the times after Newton, the sciences have become simply too large to be well understood in general by a single person. There's no such a thing as a psychologist, for example: there is a cognitive psychologist, a pathological psychologist, an experimental psychologist, etc. Fields like biology are even more extremely specialized, to the point where even sub-fields are fragmented: someone trained in one area of microbiology would have essentially zero comprehension when reading a paper from another area of microbiology. To imply that a physicist is somehow qualified to understand and have significant insight in another science in which s/he has no formal training, is either flippant or arrogant. Equally so to imply that non-physicists do use their brains. Mathematics very much plays a part in many sub-fields of psychology. (I'm neither a physicist nor a psychologist, if it matters.)
There are even suggestions by serious and respect theorists that in some sense it is consciousness all the way down
Yes, by physicists thinking they're qualified in metaphysics and psychology.
The more sensible view: consciousness has nothing to do with basic physics (other than reducing to it through the usual theoretical reductionism psychology->neurology->biology->chemistry->physics). http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182
He can encode the choice to binary and use multiple coin flips.
I saw a couple of posts suggesting that people should be left to believe what they want. This is an incredibly dangerous proposition, and the reason that it must be rejected, even if said people don't try to push their false beliefs onto others, has been covered in depth in this classic piece that is, unfortunately, as much needed reading today as it was in the distant past when it was written: http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/w_k_clifford/ethics_of_belief.html
Oops, that should say "likelihood of extinction" rather than simply "extinction".
The problem is that as it becomes more widespread through decreasing costs and increasing acceptance, more and more people would be "optimized" along various parameters. You end up removing genetic diversity, since many of those parameters would be the same throughout the population. With genetic diversity gone, extinction of the human population increases by an enormous factor, for any circumstances that develop fit to kill one, are fit to kill all.
There is another issue more important than those you've listed: genetic diversity. Extinction is much more likely then, since when conditions develop that are fit to kill one, they are fit to kill all.
Your brain is finite in size, and due to the Bekenstein bound, can have only a finite number of thoughs. Therefore, if you live forever, you would be thinking the same things over and over again for infinity (though of course a quantum timing mechanism of life functions gets its probability of failing to approach 1 as time approaches infinity, so even if all practical problems could be resolved, you still couldn't live forever).
The article states that "we know quantum mechanics is wrong on some level". Oh really? That's news to me. Any serious proposed theories of everything have been quantum in nature. It's amusingly hypocritical that the Arstechnica article refers to the Wired author as unscientific, yet makes such a claim itself.
The only thing "wrong" with quantum theory is that doesn't fit human intuitions. But this is only because people ignore the psychology of perception and are not careful about interpretations; it's easy to create a very reasonable interpretation of QM that doesn't invoke weird stuff like saying QM must have something wrong with it, or strange consciousness stuff, etc. An example is Mohrhoff's http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412182 (also check Marchildon's review of this class of interpretations, it's in the arxiv somewhere linked to this).
it should be the job of every /.er to write to their local newspaper
You crudely assume that every slashdotter is located in the USA.
What are "snitty zingers"?