Re:The prime cause (Score:5) by Kintanon (sleffer@hotmail.com) on 08:31 AM December 14th, 1999 PDT (#121) (User Info) And neither does religion. If you have such a problem with the universe existing by itself without a supreme will (AKA 'God') creating it, then, personally, I have a probleme with a supreme will existing by itself, therefore it has to have been created by something else, probably a metagod, which would need in turn a metametagod etc... This is one of the main fallacy of religion: the need for a first cause. Here we have a common misconception. There need not be anything before God, because there is no before God. Time is not something which governs a supreme entity. Time is of necessity a function of God. Hence Time only affects those things which God has decreed they affect.
Bah, you still get badly hosed by Occam's Razor. If it's possible that there can exist a creator entity which existed "before causation", there's no reason not to just slice out the middle-man (the creator entity), and all the incredibly improbable complexity that entails, and just say that the universe itself has existed since before causation. -- "HORSE."
I know it's not strictly on topic, but has anybody else noticed that the stories in the Slashdot Ars-Technica box haven't been updated in weeks?
Same with the segfault.org box...that's less important though, clearly, since the only reason to ever read segfault was for the weirdass trolls in the comments. -- "HORSE."
Re:The "mouse" keyboard
on
Interface Zen
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· Score: 1
One of my off-the-wall ideas is the idea of a "mouse" keyboard. Controllers like the spaceball work not by having the controller move (much), but by interpreting forces exterted on them as motion. Build a keyboard with a wristrest, with depressions in them where the heel of the hand goes. Then have mouse moves correspond to the user pushing with the heel of the hand(s), forwards or backwards for up and down, left and right for the mouse to move left or right.
It'd work really nice (at least, I suspect it would just from miming the motions you describe on my perfectly ordinary wristrest), but I've got a feeling it'd be killer on the wrists after a long amount of time -- UNLESS the wristpad mouse had oldskool IBM-keyboard style feedback. A membrane wristmouse pad would slaughter your hands after any amount of time.
That said, about three hours ago I went into full zen mode on the new Nethack release, and had no conception of time passing whatsoever until my 2 hour 45 minute mp3 playlist ran out. Amusing. Which is why I'm, hm, reading this/. post at this late date. Incidentally, I do use the roguelike keys for Nethack, rather than the keyboard. I think the main reason I prefer it is for repetetive commands...say I want to lock and unlock the door directly to the west several times, using a lockpick stored in slot 'o' (using lockpicks repetitively is a good way to raise your in-game dexterity). If I'm using the numberpad, I've got to type ao4y. Do you REALIZE how annoying that is? Your right hand pretty much has to stay on the numberpad to punch that 4, which means your left hand is wandering all over the place to find the y and (especially) the o. Using the roguelike (vi-like) keys, it's a simple aohy, which can be done very very fast.
Also, I've found it's conceptially easier to think of this action as the 'word' aohy (pronounced aye-oh-hoy, I guess), rather than the 'action' "apply lockpick, west, yes I want to unlock the door". Dunno if that has anything to do with the discussion at hand, except in a fairly tangential fashion.
(apologies if IE has mangled any of my quotemarks...) -- "HORSE."
Yes. An old military rule states that one must perform an action 500 for it to "stick" but 5,000 times for it to become second nature. I've used the MACS before to hone my marksmanship skills and it really is just a Super Nintendo with a plastic laser light gun in the mold of an M-16. Anybody who has played "gun games" at the arcades pretty much have begun to learn the basic fundamentals of marksmanship.
bahahhahahahaahahahaha, right, the fundamentals of marksmanship, simple things like "You reload by sticking your index finger over the barrel of the gun and shooting". -- "HORSE."
Bah, your essential problem is that you think that there exists an ethereal "substance" called "the breath of life". Life isn't a substance, it's a pattern. -- "HORSE."
You think things are bad now, wait until the namers start using gratuitous self-reference... I'm just waiting for someone to try to name a company "InterCaps"... -- "HORSE."
it's spelled epistemology, and if you had any real background in it you'd realise why saying that 'gravity' isn't a 'theory' is somewhat foolish. -- "HORSE."
Anyway, classically superpowers don't invade each other, but rather scrap it out for ownership of colonies (or the equivalent thereof). The thing we've got to be concerned about IRT China is them invading Taiwan...which would suck...oh well. You know, if I was China I'd invade Taiwan without a thought, just cause invading stuff seems like it'd be pretty fun. -- "HORSE."
We discussed the WTO in my political science class last week. If I got the jist of it straight, the WTO is basically supposed to give underdeveloped countries the chance to develope.
Suppose that you've got a few big industrial nations that import raw materials from smaller, poorer countries. They take those materials and turn them into much more expensive goods. This way, they get lots of profit. The poor countries are stuck selling their cheap raw materials and importing expensive manufactured goods (created with the same materials they sold.) Thus they don't make enough money to start industrializing themselves, and it becomes a cycle.
The WTO is supposed to let the poor countries impose high tariffs on the manufactured goods from foreign nations. This way demand will be created for domestic industry to produce cheaper goods. With demand comes capital, and with capital comes industry. With industry comes being able to compete in the global marketplace.
Well, your reasoning is um somewhat accurate, except for that the WTO endorses lower tariffs in practically every case... -- "HORSE."
I enjoyed your hidden agenda slam against creationists. They of course would say that you have to be careful of the textbooks that claim that any theory is proven unless it actually is. Just because the average humanist scientist believes in evolution doesn't mean it should be taught as fact, but rather as a plausible theory.
Not that everyone else hasn't already told you this, but if you refer to a theory as a thing which is "proved" or "disproved", you've got a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science itself. In science there is very little place for the sort of absolute certainty you seem to seek. Now, you can argue about whether or not the results of science are "true" till the cows come home, but I seriously doubt you can argue about whether or not they are useful. Certainly not over the Internet, you can't.
That said, philosophy of science aside, when you state that "They of course would say that you have to be careful of the textbooks that claim that any theory is proven unless it actually is. ", you're overlooking the fact that there are clearly degrees of wrongness. If two people were to come up to you, and if one were to state "The earth is flat!" and the other were to state "The earth is round!", you could with confidence say that both of them were wrong (since, after all, it's an oblate spheroid), but you could also truthfully state that the flat-earther was more wrong than the round-earther. As far as the origin of life goes, despite the fact that I can't exactly state exactly how everything happened (who can, about anything?), I can with confidence say that any theory that postulates, without experimental evidence, the existence of a Great Bugaboo which created everything whole-cloth 6000 years ago is almost certainly more wrong than a theory which postulates no extra entities and provides a reasonably workable mechanism by which things could be created, and what's more backs up this mechanism with experimental findings. I mean, the first theory leaves the origin of the Bugaboo itself unexplained! -- "HORSE."
Mathematics is fundamentally artificial. In addition, it's rule-based. Are you familiar with the Searle's "Chinese Box" argument? The logical conclusion of it is that rule-based symbol processing is perhaps not the best measurement of cognition...
You kinda shot yourself in the foot there by mentioning Searle's Chinese Box...that particular argument has been demolished in more ways by more people than I could possibly list. -- "HORSE."
Isn't it wonderful living in a Socialist country? Wanna change it? Start by electing more people like Jesse Ventura - someone who is not afriad to tell the little groups off, someone who doesn't believe that government is big brother - and shouldn't take a ton of taxes from you. He's a social liberal, so he has no hesitation doing what he believes good for the people.
Not that you're not going to get twenty million other posts telling you this, but socialism is an economic system, not a political system. It's also a damned good idea, as long as it's implemented at the same time as massive (civil) libertarian reforms. It is such a pity that the capital-L Libertarians in this country have tied civil libertarianism, which is really the only sane point of view, in my opinion, to laissez-faire economic policies, which just about everyone has realized are totally dain-bramaged. -- "HORSE."
Dude, it's not like that. The mainstream outlets haven't been saying/anything/ about her, which is a incredibly pity, since she/was/ hell of cool...feh.
A note to all hell of cool people out there, PLEASE don't kill yourselves, okay? There's like not enough cool people to go around as it is. -- "HORSE."
Hello, I'm Mark Twain's (Samuel Clemens) wife. My husband published "Huckleberry Finn" yesterday, and then was run over by a truck. Since he's dead and gone, you get to copy his book as much as you want now? How am I supposed to live?
I would be interested in reasonable arguments as to why if I take a piece of clay and make a pot, I have a natural right to the pot, but if I take a pen and write a story, I don't have a natural right to the story.
Bah! That's like saying if you take a piece of clay and make a pot you've got a natural right to all pots (or, to be fair, to all pots which resemble your pot). This is clearly not the case.
Of course, if you were a member of the PIAA (Potmaker's Industry Association of America) you'd try to argue that you not only have a right to all other similar pots, but you'd also lobby congress to put a tax (a portion of the proceeds of which would go to you) on all clay, since obviously the only thing people do with clay is "pirate" your pots. -- "HORSE."
>In theory, if Microsoft offers a "lite" version of Windows98 with a license that says you can't use it to connect to the Internet and disabled tcp/ip, you are not allowed to use it for that even if you get a third party winsock program....of course, if that license is a shrinkwrap license, feel free to ignore it completely, since those aren't legal anyway. -- "HORSE."
>Actually, though the comment doesn't add much, it's actually highly relelvant. However, what the heck would you call a cluster of these things as they're already Beowulfs? Megawulf?:)
Slashdot Mirror
This has got to be a troll. A damned funny one, though...you have to give it that.
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"HORSE."
Bah, you still get badly hosed by Occam's Razor. If it's possible that there can exist a creator entity which existed "before causation", there's no reason not to just slice out the middle-man (the creator entity), and all the incredibly improbable complexity that entails, and just say that the universe itself has existed since before causation.
--
"HORSE."
Same with the segfault.org box...that's less important though, clearly, since the only reason to ever read segfault was for the weirdass trolls in the comments.
--
"HORSE."
It'd work really nice (at least, I suspect it would just from miming the motions you describe on my perfectly ordinary wristrest), but I've got a feeling it'd be killer on the wrists after a long amount of time -- UNLESS the wristpad mouse had oldskool IBM-keyboard style feedback. A membrane wristmouse pad would slaughter your hands after any amount of time.
That said, about three hours ago I went into full zen mode on the new Nethack release, and had no conception of time passing whatsoever until my 2 hour 45 minute mp3 playlist ran out. Amusing. Which is why I'm, hm, reading this /. post at this late date. Incidentally, I do use the roguelike keys for Nethack, rather than the keyboard. I think the main reason I prefer it is for repetetive commands...say I want to lock and unlock the door directly to the west several times, using a lockpick stored in slot 'o' (using lockpicks repetitively is a good way to raise your in-game dexterity). If I'm using the numberpad, I've got to type ao4y. Do you REALIZE how annoying that is? Your right hand pretty much has to stay on the numberpad to punch that 4, which means your left hand is wandering all over the place to find the y and (especially) the o. Using the roguelike (vi-like) keys, it's a simple aohy, which can be done very very fast.
Also, I've found it's conceptially easier to think of this action as the 'word' aohy (pronounced aye-oh-hoy, I guess), rather than the 'action' "apply lockpick, west, yes I want to unlock the door". Dunno if that has anything to do with the discussion at hand, except in a fairly tangential fashion.
(apologies if IE has mangled any of my quotemarks...)
--
"HORSE."
bahahhahahahaahahahaha, right, the fundamentals of marksmanship, simple things like "You reload by sticking your index finger over the barrel of the gun and shooting".
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"HORSE."
The only thing that will tell us who was meant to survive is time. Your arguments have TAINTED the matrix, and are REJECTED.
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"HORSE."
Bah, your essential problem is that you think that there exists an ethereal "substance" called "the breath of life". Life isn't a substance, it's a pattern.
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"HORSE."
Dude, but it was like a really good scam. And the South Park citizens deserved it, so there you go. It's good to be evil sometimes!
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"HORSE."
...this post has been up how long? And we've yet to see a reference to Geordi LaForge?
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"HORSE."
You think things are bad now, wait until the namers start using gratuitous self-reference... I'm just waiting for someone to try to name a company "InterCaps"...
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"HORSE."
Oh come on, I can't be the only one who thinks this deserves to be moderated up, not down...
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"HORSE."
it's spelled epistemology, and if you had any real background in it you'd realise why saying that 'gravity' isn't a 'theory' is somewhat foolish.
--
"HORSE."
Anyway, classically superpowers don't invade each other, but rather scrap it out for ownership of colonies (or the equivalent thereof). The thing we've got to be concerned about IRT China is them invading Taiwan...which would suck...oh well. You know, if I was China I'd invade Taiwan without a thought, just cause invading stuff seems like it'd be pretty fun.
--
"HORSE."
Suppose that you've got a few big industrial nations that import raw materials from smaller, poorer countries. They take those materials and turn them into much more expensive goods. This way, they get lots of profit. The poor countries are stuck selling their cheap raw materials and importing expensive manufactured goods (created with the same materials they sold.) Thus they don't make enough money to start industrializing themselves, and it becomes a cycle.
The WTO is supposed to let the poor countries impose high tariffs on the manufactured goods from foreign nations. This way demand will be created for domestic industry to produce cheaper goods. With demand comes capital, and with capital comes industry. With industry comes being able to compete in the global marketplace.
Well, your reasoning is um somewhat accurate, except for that the WTO endorses lower tariffs in practically every case...
--
"HORSE."
Not that everyone else hasn't already told you this, but if you refer to a theory as a thing which is "proved" or "disproved", you've got a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science itself. In science there is very little place for the sort of absolute certainty you seem to seek. Now, you can argue about whether or not the results of science are "true" till the cows come home, but I seriously doubt you can argue about whether or not they are useful. Certainly not over the Internet, you can't.
That said, philosophy of science aside, when you state that "They of course would say that you have to be careful of the textbooks that claim that any theory is proven unless it actually is. ", you're overlooking the fact that there are clearly degrees of wrongness. If two people were to come up to you, and if one were to state "The earth is flat!" and the other were to state "The earth is round!", you could with confidence say that both of them were wrong (since, after all, it's an oblate spheroid), but you could also truthfully state that the flat-earther was more wrong than the round-earther. As far as the origin of life goes, despite the fact that I can't exactly state exactly how everything happened (who can, about anything?), I can with confidence say that any theory that postulates, without experimental evidence, the existence of a Great Bugaboo which created everything whole-cloth 6000 years ago is almost certainly more wrong than a theory which postulates no extra entities and provides a reasonably workable mechanism by which things could be created, and what's more backs up this mechanism with experimental findings. I mean, the first theory leaves the origin of the Bugaboo itself unexplained!
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"HORSE."
You kinda shot yourself in the foot there by mentioning Searle's Chinese Box...that particular argument has been demolished in more ways by more people than I could possibly list.
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"HORSE."
Not that you're not going to get twenty million other posts telling you this, but socialism is an economic system, not a political system. It's also a damned good idea, as long as it's implemented at the same time as massive (civil) libertarian reforms. It is such a pity that the capital-L Libertarians in this country have tied civil libertarianism, which is really the only sane point of view, in my opinion, to laissez-faire economic policies, which just about everyone has realized are totally dain-bramaged.
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"HORSE."
Ahem. Bite me. Math isn't supposed to be useful, it's supposed to be art.
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"HORSE."
A note to all hell of cool people out there, PLEASE don't kill yourselves, okay? There's like not enough cool people to go around as it is.
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"HORSE."
Get a job! (teehee)
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"HORSE."
Bah! That's like saying if you take a piece of clay and make a pot you've got a natural right to all pots (or, to be fair, to all pots which resemble your pot). This is clearly not the case.
Of course, if you were a member of the PIAA (Potmaker's Industry Association of America) you'd try to argue that you not only have a right to all other similar pots, but you'd also lobby congress to put a tax (a portion of the proceeds of which would go to you) on all clay, since obviously the only thing people do with clay is "pirate" your pots.
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"HORSE."
>In theory, if Microsoft offers a "lite" version of Windows98 with a license that says you can't use it to connect to the Internet and disabled tcp/ip, you are not allowed to use it for that even if you get a third party winsock program. ...of course, if that license is a shrinkwrap license, feel free to ignore it completely, since those aren't legal anyway.
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"HORSE."
>Actually, though the comment doesn't add much, it's actually highly relelvant. However, what the heck would you call a cluster of these things as they're already Beowulfs? Megawulf?:)
Metawulf, duh.
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"HORSE."
>I'll elaborate; it's spelled "silicon" unless you've attended the Dan Quale school of spelling.
Or if you're talking about breast-based computing...just imagine... a beowulf cluster...
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"HORSE."
>OT: I have just read they are selling Playstation here in Helsinki for 700 FIM (~145 US$) Do you think it's a fair price?
I don't know what the average price for a PSX is in Europe, but they've been going for 99 dollars here in the U.S. for just about all year.
Ob:
It's an operating system!
It's a cynical ploy to raise stock prices!
Stop! You're both right! It's Linux!
Seriously...what is it that Linux does that Irix can't do as well or better?
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"HORSE."