Are you familiare with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment? He makes more or less the same argument as Ellerman. The point is that there really is something fundamentally different between semantics and syntax, some difference that syntax alone is unable to provide.
Do you really contend that semantics are no more than associations between symbols? That view is subject to all sorts of reductionist arguments that pretty quickly take the umph out of being human. If you really believe that, I won't begrudge it to you. But the premises that there is meaning in life and that my intentions mean something are so fundamental to my worldview that, like G.E. Moore and his proof of an external world, if a premise leads to the conclusion that there is not and they do not, then I must weigh that premise against the first and see which is the more plausible.
I haven't found one yet.
That's the point I was trying to make. Since no matter what theory one holds, it must be taken on faith, then what difference does it make which theory is taught?
It shouldn't be a matter of discussing the philosophy of ID. Rather, it should a matter of discussing the philosophy of science, and the logic of evolution, FSMism, or ID and how they should inform the study of science. The point is, you've got to believe in something, because you can't prove science all the way down any more than you can prove ID or FSMism all the way down. I think the real problem with teaching evolution as science, which many ID advocates fail to grasp, is that the theory of evolution is not falsifiable (just as FSMism and ID aren't, ultimately, either). If you're serious about science, you should require falsifiability to admit proof.
The theory of science, unfortunately, probably shouldn't be taught in the elementary school classroom. So how do you explain the origin of humankind? You shouldn't teach non-falsifiable conjecture as science, just as you should not teach religious beliefs as science (ID, while it may be true, does not qualify as science no matter what they say).
I do, fwiw, believe that, however we humans came about, God had a big hand in it. But I'm hardly ready to commit to either explanation. And how we got here isn't really the point, because it's clear to me that we are here, and what we're like. I don't really understand the big deal about this debate.
The number 44,100 is not the frequency range that a CD can produce. Rather, it's the rate, in samples per second, that it can measure audio. In other words, for every second of sound, it stores 44,100 unit of data, each a number representing an amplitude of the waveform being reproduced. If these numbers were mapped on a graph, it would show the waveform of the audio that was sampled.
What this means is that the highest frequency that can be reproduced by 44,100 samples per second is 22,050--in other words, one sample is the amplitude that produces the high of the wave, and the next is the low, repeat 22,050. Remember, you need both highs and lows to reproduce a wave, otherwise, there would be no vibrations, just the voltage holding the speaker cone at a constant displacement from the negative (that happened to correspond to the amplitude of the sound).
Make sense?
The problem with laser turntables is that in order to use an existing collection of records on such a turntable, to get the maximum possible quality from them (which is why you bought this new turntable, remember?), you must first prepare the records by cleaning them and removing the dust. This causes more damage (small and nearly imperceptible though it may be) to the records, and while it may be the last damage such records sustain, it may be more than the audiophile is willing to bear.
Well, sure, but even on a moderately fast connection, it's a drag to download loads of code that I know I will never compile. Further, I like to keep my code on the edge, so I update frequently. It's a drag to get the whole file every time. It would be nice to get incremental updates of some kind.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but apparently, OMF:2097 has been released as Freeware, and is available for download here: http://www.omf.com/faq/misc.html
This reminds me of one of my all time favorite fighting games, One Must Fall 2097. As the story goes, you'd have your brain connected to these huge (like, 90 meters) metal robots, which would duke it out in the arena.
A punch connects! Wham! Sparks, nuts and bolts fly!
Each different robot (there were about a dozen) had 'scrap' and 'destruction' moves, kinda-like fatalities. You could destroy your opponent in a shower of scrap metal.
There's a new version out, apparently, called OMF: Battlegrounds (though I haven't played it). You can see the site here: www.omf.com
I liked this game much more than Mortal combat or any of the other 2d side-by-side arena action fighters. I don't know if you can still buy it, but I'd still play it, if I could find disk 3 (of 5)...
For the most part, I agree with you, and I am fed up with those who balk at tax cuts for the reason they only benefit the fortunate (by income, the 60th percentile and up pay almost 100% of the federal income taxes). However:
We still live in a somewhat regressive tax system. And it is the things like gasoline tax, sales tax, etc., which all must pay, that become unfair to the less fortunate. They have to pay these taxes as well as the rich (though arguably somewhat less, since they cannot purchase as much as the rich), but these taxes end up taking a greater percentage of total income of the less fortunate than that of the rich. Example (I'm making these numbers up.) Say the gasoline taxes a person spends to drive 20 miles to work every day for a year come out totaling $3000. Consider: for someone who make $30,000 a year, that comes to about 10%. To someone who makes $300,000, that comes to 1%.
So you see, if we truly want to benefit everyone through tax cuts, we should take this regressive system into consideration and reduce other taxes, not just income taxes.
I'm all for tax cuts, I think that any citizen with a brain will support lower taxes in general. Those who also believe that government spending should be reduced and more carefully regulated, well, we tend to have more to say about it than most others.
Or the Romulans have an advanced new video codec that is incompatible with whatever the Federation (or whoever) are using. And, since it's proprietary, they can't just compile it themselves.
The problem is this: many spammers send out spam on behalf of other companies. So, you hurt the original companies by halting payments to them. But it would take a lot of that before the number of companies paying spammers dwindled enough to cut out spam altogether.
If one or two of a spammer's 'clients' disappeared, it wouldn't cut down much on the spammer's business. And that would shift an undue burden on credit card companies (though they can probably afford it).
Do you mean the percussion ensemble piece, Christopher Rouse? My high school percussion ensemble played that one. I'll second that emotion: it's great.
The thing is, the quality of the works improve tremendously as they order in which they are written. Whenever I read them in that order, I realize how much more awesome the final few books are (not that the first ones are non-awesome). When I read them in chronological order (narnia time), the first few that Lewis wrote really stand out as examples that he was not yet used to writing children's literature.
That said, 'A Horse and His Boy' and 'The Silver Chair' are, I think, my favorites.
I had a deal with my parents back in the day: no privacy. And it worked out alright, as long as we had that understanding. I was given freedom to do what I pleased, knowing they could check up on me as need be. It was a good system, being useful yet not tyrranical. I think part of the problem is that children have the expectation that they should have a measure of privacy.
It was a great deal. After all, I got food, a place to sleep and some allowance. In return, all I had to do was let them know what I was up to. Seriously, who wouldn't want a deal like that?
This happened at an institution of higher education where I work. We spent several weeks cleaning things up and making sure things were up to date. We have a very strict policy now, and require external laptops to connect through a separately firewalled and monitored subnet. Since every user is required to register their hardware address, we can keep track of whose machine are displaying virus-like activity and deal with them accordingly. It has saved us tremendous amounts of time already.
I almost wish another virus would come out, so we can demonstrate how better protected we are. Almost.
It's like that artificial intelligence they put in those sneakers. You know, Smart Shoes they call them. No matter how blind drunk you were, they'd always walk you home.
Problem is, one day they got tired of always getting kicked around. Wanted to see the world. But they kind of went nuts...stole my car and drove away right quick, stomping right on the pedal as they do. Problem is, they couldn't steer, what with no hands and all. So the car came to a bridge and went right over the side.
They fished them out of the river 2 days later. I was so distraught...I loved those shoes...all the good times, in the bar, going for walks along the beach. I was so depressed. What had happened to them now? I finally went to the priest, looking for help. He told me that I didn't have anything to worry about.
You see, as it turns out, shoes have souls.
Near where I live in St. Louis, MO, there is an enormous dual reservoir up in the mountains run by Ameren UE, our power company. During the night, when the demand is lower, they pump massive amounts of water from the lower reservoir to the upper. Then, during the day, when the load is high, they let the water flow down through turbines to generate more energy.
I always thought that was kind of a neat, if (probably) extremely inefficient, way to make a giant battery.
I just started with Gentoo a few weeks ago, and while the installation was somewhat tricky, it was not any more difficult than Debian.
It did take a while to get the ebuild thing figured out, and I had a few weird issues with my system, but one of the best parts about Gentoo is the immensely helpful set of user forums. I was able to find solutions for every single one of my problems there, as well as guides for installing trickier systems like mail-server combos, &c.
I really like Gentoo because it's not difficult to find out what I need to do. It does take a little bit of patience up front, though, and I admit, compiling KDE for two days is something I hope I don't have to repeat soon.
The article mentioned copyrighted material. Now, what happens if I record a song myself and place it on a peer-to-peer filesharing network for distribution. Does that qualify? What if I encourage my friends to share the file on their p2p networks? Are we all felons?
Or does this apply only to copyrighted material for which permission has not been granted?
Yes, live performance is a very important part of music, but consider also the value of music beyond the performer and the performance.
Listening to music over and over can be wonderful, though perhaps a different experience than a live performance.
Don't forget the study of music as well. A great piece of music can bring great intellectual enjoyment as well as emotional and other types...and intellectual enjoyment usually comes most when you are familiar with the song and have the opportunity to concentrate on the particulars.
Yes, live performance is important, but it's not all there is.
Funny, I've been running LegOS for a year now, and it works fine, though sometimes you have to root through a huge bin of source code bricks to find the libraries you need to compile a new program.
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Are you familiare with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment? He makes more or less the same argument as Ellerman. The point is that there really is something fundamentally different between semantics and syntax, some difference that syntax alone is unable to provide. Do you really contend that semantics are no more than associations between symbols? That view is subject to all sorts of reductionist arguments that pretty quickly take the umph out of being human. If you really believe that, I won't begrudge it to you. But the premises that there is meaning in life and that my intentions mean something are so fundamental to my worldview that, like G.E. Moore and his proof of an external world, if a premise leads to the conclusion that there is not and they do not, then I must weigh that premise against the first and see which is the more plausible. I haven't found one yet.
That's the point I was trying to make. Since no matter what theory one holds, it must be taken on faith, then what difference does it make which theory is taught?
It shouldn't be a matter of discussing the philosophy of ID. Rather, it should a matter of discussing the philosophy of science, and the logic of evolution, FSMism, or ID and how they should inform the study of science. The point is, you've got to believe in something, because you can't prove science all the way down any more than you can prove ID or FSMism all the way down. I think the real problem with teaching evolution as science, which many ID advocates fail to grasp, is that the theory of evolution is not falsifiable (just as FSMism and ID aren't, ultimately, either). If you're serious about science, you should require falsifiability to admit proof.
The theory of science, unfortunately, probably shouldn't be taught in the elementary school classroom. So how do you explain the origin of humankind? You shouldn't teach non-falsifiable conjecture as science, just as you should not teach religious beliefs as science (ID, while it may be true, does not qualify as science no matter what they say).
I do, fwiw, believe that, however we humans came about, God had a big hand in it. But I'm hardly ready to commit to either explanation. And how we got here isn't really the point, because it's clear to me that we are here, and what we're like. I don't really understand the big deal about this debate.
AMS
The number 44,100 is not the frequency range that a CD can produce. Rather, it's the rate, in samples per second, that it can measure audio. In other words, for every second of sound, it stores 44,100 unit of data, each a number representing an amplitude of the waveform being reproduced. If these numbers were mapped on a graph, it would show the waveform of the audio that was sampled. What this means is that the highest frequency that can be reproduced by 44,100 samples per second is 22,050--in other words, one sample is the amplitude that produces the high of the wave, and the next is the low, repeat 22,050. Remember, you need both highs and lows to reproduce a wave, otherwise, there would be no vibrations, just the voltage holding the speaker cone at a constant displacement from the negative (that happened to correspond to the amplitude of the sound). Make sense?
The problem with laser turntables is that in order to use an existing collection of records on such a turntable, to get the maximum possible quality from them (which is why you bought this new turntable, remember?), you must first prepare the records by cleaning them and removing the dust. This causes more damage (small and nearly imperceptible though it may be) to the records, and while it may be the last damage such records sustain, it may be more than the audiophile is willing to bear.
Well, sure, but even on a moderately fast connection, it's a drag to download loads of code that I know I will never compile. Further, I like to keep my code on the edge, so I update frequently. It's a drag to get the whole file every time. It would be nice to get incremental updates of some kind.
You have just downloaded a *LOT* of pr0n.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but apparently, OMF:2097 has been released as Freeware, and is available for download here: http://www.omf.com/faq/misc.html
This reminds me of one of my all time favorite fighting games, One Must Fall 2097. As the story goes, you'd have your brain connected to these huge (like, 90 meters) metal robots, which would duke it out in the arena.
A punch connects! Wham! Sparks, nuts and bolts fly!
Each different robot (there were about a dozen) had 'scrap' and 'destruction' moves, kinda-like fatalities. You could destroy your opponent in a shower of scrap metal.
There's a new version out, apparently, called OMF: Battlegrounds (though I haven't played it). You can see the site here: www.omf.com
I liked this game much more than Mortal combat or any of the other 2d side-by-side arena action fighters. I don't know if you can still buy it, but I'd still play it, if I could find disk 3 (of 5)...
For the most part, I agree with you, and I am fed up with those who balk at tax cuts for the reason they only benefit the fortunate (by income, the 60th percentile and up pay almost 100% of the federal income taxes). However:
We still live in a somewhat regressive tax system. And it is the things like gasoline tax, sales tax, etc., which all must pay, that become unfair to the less fortunate. They have to pay these taxes as well as the rich (though arguably somewhat less, since they cannot purchase as much as the rich), but these taxes end up taking a greater percentage of total income of the less fortunate than that of the rich. Example (I'm making these numbers up.) Say the gasoline taxes a person spends to drive 20 miles to work every day for a year come out totaling $3000. Consider: for someone who make $30,000 a year, that comes to about 10%. To someone who makes $300,000, that comes to 1%.
So you see, if we truly want to benefit everyone through tax cuts, we should take this regressive system into consideration and reduce other taxes, not just income taxes.
I'm all for tax cuts, I think that any citizen with a brain will support lower taxes in general. Those who also believe that government spending should be reduced and more carefully regulated, well, we tend to have more to say about it than most others.
Or the Romulans have an advanced new video codec that is incompatible with whatever the Federation (or whoever) are using. And, since it's proprietary, they can't just compile it themselves.
The problem is this: many spammers send out spam on behalf of other companies. So, you hurt the original companies by halting payments to them. But it would take a lot of that before the number of companies paying spammers dwindled enough to cut out spam altogether.
If one or two of a spammer's 'clients' disappeared, it wouldn't cut down much on the spammer's business. And that would shift an undue burden on credit card companies (though they can probably afford it).
Do you mean the percussion ensemble piece, Christopher Rouse? My high school percussion ensemble played that one. I'll second that emotion: it's great.
Time for me to be pedantic: mojira is an anagram of romaji. Bet you didn't see that one coming...
The thing is, the quality of the works improve tremendously as they order in which they are written. Whenever I read them in that order, I realize how much more awesome the final few books are (not that the first ones are non-awesome). When I read them in chronological order (narnia time), the first few that Lewis wrote really stand out as examples that he was not yet used to writing children's literature.
That said, 'A Horse and His Boy' and 'The Silver Chair' are, I think, my favorites.
I had a deal with my parents back in the day: no privacy. And it worked out alright, as long as we had that understanding. I was given freedom to do what I pleased, knowing they could check up on me as need be. It was a good system, being useful yet not tyrranical. I think part of the problem is that children have the expectation that they should have a measure of privacy.
It was a great deal. After all, I got food, a place to sleep and some allowance. In return, all I had to do was let them know what I was up to. Seriously, who wouldn't want a deal like that?
This happened at an institution of higher education where I work. We spent several weeks cleaning things up and making sure things were up to date. We have a very strict policy now, and require external laptops to connect through a separately firewalled and monitored subnet. Since every user is required to register their hardware address, we can keep track of whose machine are displaying virus-like activity and deal with them accordingly. It has saved us tremendous amounts of time already.
I almost wish another virus would come out, so we can demonstrate how better protected we are. Almost.
It's like that artificial intelligence they put in those sneakers. You know, Smart Shoes they call them. No matter how blind drunk you were, they'd always walk you home. Problem is, one day they got tired of always getting kicked around. Wanted to see the world. But they kind of went nuts...stole my car and drove away right quick, stomping right on the pedal as they do. Problem is, they couldn't steer, what with no hands and all. So the car came to a bridge and went right over the side. They fished them out of the river 2 days later. I was so distraught...I loved those shoes...all the good times, in the bar, going for walks along the beach. I was so depressed. What had happened to them now? I finally went to the priest, looking for help. He told me that I didn't have anything to worry about. You see, as it turns out, shoes have souls.
I thought he was from Pittsburgh...
Near where I live in St. Louis, MO, there is an enormous dual reservoir up in the mountains run by Ameren UE, our power company. During the night, when the demand is lower, they pump massive amounts of water from the lower reservoir to the upper. Then, during the day, when the load is high, they let the water flow down through turbines to generate more energy.
I always thought that was kind of a neat, if (probably) extremely inefficient, way to make a giant battery.
I just started with Gentoo a few weeks ago, and while the installation was somewhat tricky, it was not any more difficult than Debian.
It did take a while to get the ebuild thing figured out, and I had a few weird issues with my system, but one of the best parts about Gentoo is the immensely helpful set of user forums. I was able to find solutions for every single one of my problems there, as well as guides for installing trickier systems like mail-server combos, &c.
I really like Gentoo because it's not difficult to find out what I need to do. It does take a little bit of patience up front, though, and I admit, compiling KDE for two days is something I hope I don't have to repeat soon.
Isn't 'en' an archaic dual ending (when you have 2 of them, i.e., a yoke of oxen)? Doesn't it go to 'oxes' when there are more than two?
So, if you have 3 machines, a Win2k and a linux and a solaris, you have 2 *nix boxen, 3 boxes, and a box.
The article mentioned copyrighted material. Now, what happens if I record a song myself and place it on a peer-to-peer filesharing network for distribution. Does that qualify? What if I encourage my friends to share the file on their p2p networks? Are we all felons?
Or does this apply only to copyrighted material for which permission has not been granted?
Yes, live performance is a very important part of music, but consider also the value of music beyond the performer and the performance. Listening to music over and over can be wonderful, though perhaps a different experience than a live performance. Don't forget the study of music as well. A great piece of music can bring great intellectual enjoyment as well as emotional and other types...and intellectual enjoyment usually comes most when you are familiar with the song and have the opportunity to concentrate on the particulars. Yes, live performance is important, but it's not all there is.
Funny, I've been running LegOS for a year now, and it works fine, though sometimes you have to root through a huge bin of source code bricks to find the libraries you need to compile a new program.