I am not a physics major, but maybe one can help me out.
I'm having a hard time picturing how the L2 point exists, or the L3 for that matter. It seems to me that at those two points the Earth's gravity and the moon's are pulling in the same direction. Where is the force working against the moon's gravity for the L2 point or the Earth's for the L3 coming from?
I think there's something to the fact that the iPhone's auto-correction is more suited to a touchscreen than the Blackberry's. I've found that while the Blackberry's spell-check is very good for people who sometimes make spelling errors, the iPhone's is much better about fixing fat-finger syndrome.
I would almost be tempted to say that the iPhone's spell-check puts more weight on where keys are located, while the Blackberry's is more of a straight dictionary search
And the OS have a propensity to leak memory so that as the day went on your usable memory level would continue to fall to the point where you had to pull the battery to reset the phone.
My Storm seems to have a feature that automatically resets the phone at random intervals. It handily solves that problem, but can be annoying when you're actually trying to do something with it.
Seriously, though, the sluggishness of the phone is a big drawback. If it could keep up with how fast I type and not randomly reset I would be very happy with it.
I'm a philosophy major, so my view may be a bit biased. I've found that it's much easier to answer the practical questions accurately if you've got a good grasp of the theoretical questions.
So, to use your example, asking whether or not all viewpoints are valid is asking more fundamentally whether or not all viewpoints are true. If truth is defined as being in conformity with reality, then it would really help to have at some point asked what reality is.
In my mind, Metaphysics is the fundamental question of philosophy, with Anthropology running a close second. Everything else flows naturally from a proper understanding of those two fields.
Not quite. I think the employee made called PointDev tech support, and PointDev got suspicious when they couldn't find Sony in their customer database. My impression is that it wasn't the intention of the employee to rat out Sony.
Pakistan Telcom does have an ASN number. Just for kicks, try this:
Head over to this site. It visualizes the BGP routes between different AS's.
Click 'Start BGPlay'. The prefix in which YouTube lives is 208.65.153.0/24. Set the start time for about 24 Feb 2008 10:00, and the end time for about 25 Feb 2008 03:00 (times are UTC). Start the simulation.
You'll see a bunch of ASNs. Two have red circles around them. You can get their name by clicking on the number. On the left is YouTube, and on the right is Pakistan Telcom. Click play and watch what happens.
For those too lazy to actually watch this: All the routes destined for YouTube head towards Pakistan Telcom instead. Then, midway through, you see PCCW get wise and shut down those routes, and everyone slowly starts finding the actual YouTube. It's pretty neat to watch.
Technically, at what point does the disparate sperm and egg become a human? Is fertilization instantaneous? It seems to be that there is always something there before, that undergoes a transformation to become human. Why is it philosophically problematic to say that happens later in the process (or for that matter earlier, is a sperm human?)?
My definition of the beginning of humanity is the point at which the embryo starts doing any single slightest action consistent with the development of life. The sperm and the egg in themselves are only human in potential, they don't contain within themselves everything necessary to become human. The fertilized embryo, however, does. Moreover, it is actively engaged in becoming fully human.
Specifically, it is life, because it is growing of its own power, just like any other life would. It is human life because it will become a fully (or near fully) realized human, not any other form of life.
I think the philosophically problematic part of saying that the embryo becomes human is that you are rather arbitrarily picking only one aspect of humanity, whether that be resembling human form or undertaking a human action (thought, for instance). I think conception is the point before which you could say that what we have here doesn't portray any of the characteristics definitive of life, and after which you must say that it does portray a characteristic consistent with life (namely, growth).
While I don't accept the idea that Faith has any part to play in the domain of Reason, I see your point. I don't agree with it but it is good to see there is real thinking there. I think the place where we part is that there seems to be a hidden idea in your description of "human" that seems to correlate to "having a soul" or inherently good/worthwhile. In my mind an human is just a particularly clever animal that has great potential capacity for good or ill. There isn't anything really special or sacred about it at all. I'm rather partial to humans, as they are my species and more intersting to talk with than say kangaroos, but I don't think it makes them any more special in a grand scale.
If you're really interested in the topic of Faith and Reason, take a look at John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio. I think you'll find it's not as outlandish as it first appears.
At least societally, we give more worth to being human than we do to any other animal. This is why it's alright to kill a cow, for instance, but not a human. In fact, this is the same logic the Church uses. If an embryo is a human, then killing it is wrong.
would also dispute that if there IS something special about being human, it can't be given up and that it exists from conception. I would suggest instead that that special "human" thing (lets call it a soul) never develops at all in some members of the homo sapient species. (Psychopaths, Sociopaths, those born in a vegetative state, etc.) One of the later Confucian philosophers actually suggested that no-one is BORN a person, but only became a real human after socializing/training/learning to understand that others are real as well as themselves. I would also think that it might be that those who act in a truly "inhumane" fashion might have waived their membership to the "club" by their actions. (Sponsors of Mass Murder, Republicans, Serial Rapists, torturers, etc). However that last part is a slippery slope to say the least.
The idea of that Confucian philosopher is exactly what I refute. In my view humanity is an ontological state, which means it is simply what you are. A human is a human in the same way that a kangaroo is a kangaroo... not by membership in some "club" but simply by virtue of what they are.
I don't think the concept of "soul" is strictly necessary, although I don't discount its existence. I think it's enough to say that an embryo is human because it is in actuality human. I don't know how philosophically minded you are, but I can't really get around explaining it in philosophical terms. A sperm and egg both have the potential to become human, but an embryo has both potentiality and actuality. It is doing at least some of the actions that would be required of any living thing (growing), and because by this growing it will develop in to a fully realized human being, it can be defined as a human embryo. I don't think it's necessary for an embryo to portray every element of humanity in actuality, just the slightest bit is enough to say that it is human, with potential to grow. Doesn't that kind of describe all of us...
I think that there's at least some truth to the view that we become human. But this becoming is only a continued realization of our potential. So, we are from conception human, but we are throughout our lives becoming more fully human.
Just some musings on my part as well. I like hanging around here because I get to test my view against a wide range of contrary views. It's nice to talk with someone who isn't so irrationally vehement.
Religious movements also have the advantage that they are not constrained by rational truth, observable evidence, or anything but some old books and some loudmouthed, pious windbags.
You need to cross at least 'rational truth' off of that list. The Catholic Church in the encyclical Fides et Ratio promulgated by Pope John Paul II calls for a profound unity between Faith and Reason. That which is known by Faith and that which is known by Reason should never be directly contrary to one another, because the same God is the author of both Revealed and Reasonable truths.
So, yes, despite popular opinion the Catholic church is bound to rational truth. Which isn't a problem, because God is truth.
The pope is considered to be the mouthpiece of God, and as such, when speaking officially can not speak incorrectly in regards to religious matters. So if he is guided by his God and officially declares that X, Y, or Z is not in contradiction of the Catholicism, then that is the "divine truth." - If you accept that line of reasoning, then there really isn't any difference between God defining it and the man currently holding the office of Pope defining it.
I would direct you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility, which discusses papal infallibility. The short version is that the pope is only infallible when he makes a statement ex cathedra on a matter of faith or morals. This has only happened twice in the history of Catholocism. This statement is not necessarily proclaimed infallibly. Nor must it be.
What is being said is a natural extension of the Thomistic concept of Natural Law and the dignity of the human person. It expresses not a domination of Reason by Faith, but a cooperation of Faith and Reason. What the church proclaim by faith should be reasonable, and I would claim that it is.
In my thinking (and I believe the Church's), humanity is an ontological state. That is, there is no way to become human, and there is no way to become unhuman, other than creation or destruction. Thus, a human person is indeed a human person from the moment of their creation, which is conception. To argue otherwise is to say that there is some matter (the fetus), which becomes human some time before it is born. I don't see how you can philosophically hold that argument. This is why the Church holds onto the concept that any abortion or embryonic stem cell research is wrong: not out of blind doctrine but because of a long history of philosophical and theological reasoning.
I happily run HL2 and CS:S under Cedega. I've never tried Civ 3, but the games database says it works. For me Cedega is worth it to just drop some dough, grab the binary, and never renew the subscription. You can even get the CVS builds for free, but my amd64 system doesn't like those.
Re:Should we look more at build/installation wizar
on
Xfce 4.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Insert your standard Gentoo troll here. Seriously, though, you seem to be describing Portage with a graphical frontend.
I once brought my laptop to the airport thinking it would be fun to see what I could connect to. Then I thought of the federal prison I would in all likelihood get sent to if I was caught, and decided that tetris was probably better.
GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, which currently contains front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...). Further frontends are available.
I installed debian on my laptop this weekend, and after the install, I couldn't even build menuconfig to upgrade the kernel.
I've found that most of the packages have really funky names. They don't call glibc glibc, they call it libc6. And even that isn't enough, to do anything you need libc6-dev. Same with libcurses, that wasn't enough, I needed libcurses-dev, just to compile against ncurses. Finally I catch on to this naming system, and try to install g++-dev (btw, why doesn't this install with gcc, the Gnu Compiler Collection?) and it can't find the package. After a while of searching around, I find it's g++. Took me a good day to compile a new kernel, just because I couldn't find anything.
Now, I can't get linux-wlan-ng to work with it, although I'm not going to hold that against debian because I am now running 2.6.1, however, when I had Gentoo on that same box it handled it without a glitch.
The up-side, however, far outweighs the downside of using debian over gentoo on that box, because you just can't compile everything from source on a Pentium MMX, you'll be there for weeks.
I'm in a contest for a local college every year in which we build a light-sensing robot out of the LEGO Mindstorms. The 'bot has to detect the brightest of two lights, and run towards it. There are two of them in a ring, and it is a timed event, whoever successfully finds and comes within a square foot of the brightest light wins. It's quite fun, and I'm still hoping we can do it even after the Mindstorms kits cease production.
On my P4 1.3 it's good enough, but I run Gentoo on my 266 laptop, and it's extremely slow. I'm considering just reformating and going with Debian, because emerging anything takes at least an entire night, more if it's halfway complex. My vote: Gentoo on the fast stuff, Debian for the slow.
You forgot that they re-wrote the warp speed tables between TOS and TNG. See here
for the comparison. According to the new chart, Warp 10 means that you exist in all places in the universe simultaneosly, at which point, you'd have more to worry about than the strength of the windows in Ten Forward.
I tend to use these a lot, and the only complaint I have is that they aren't very good if you have to write in very small spaces. They put out so much ink that writing in tiny little letters is almost impossible, unless you hold the pen at just the right angle. Other than that, they rock.
I don't know if it's just the combination of programs I'm using, but I've never had a problem copy/pasting. Highlight text, move cursor to wherever you want it to paste to, middle click, and text is copied. In fact, whenever I have to use Windows I constantly wish I could copy/paste with only the mouse like I can in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a physics major, but maybe one can help me out. I'm having a hard time picturing how the L2 point exists, or the L3 for that matter. It seems to me that at those two points the Earth's gravity and the moon's are pulling in the same direction. Where is the force working against the moon's gravity for the L2 point or the Earth's for the L3 coming from?
I think there's something to the fact that the iPhone's auto-correction is more suited to a touchscreen than the Blackberry's. I've found that while the Blackberry's spell-check is very good for people who sometimes make spelling errors, the iPhone's is much better about fixing fat-finger syndrome.
I would almost be tempted to say that the iPhone's spell-check puts more weight on where keys are located, while the Blackberry's is more of a straight dictionary search
And the OS have a propensity to leak memory so that as the day went on your usable memory level would continue to fall to the point where you had to pull the battery to reset the phone.
My Storm seems to have a feature that automatically resets the phone at random intervals. It handily solves that problem, but can be annoying when you're actually trying to do something with it.
Seriously, though, the sluggishness of the phone is a big drawback. If it could keep up with how fast I type and not randomly reset I would be very happy with it.
A politician with a sound concept of Metaphysics, Anthropology, and Ethics would be a valuable addition to society. We need more of your kind.
I'm a philosophy major, so my view may be a bit biased. I've found that it's much easier to answer the practical questions accurately if you've got a good grasp of the theoretical questions.
So, to use your example, asking whether or not all viewpoints are valid is asking more fundamentally whether or not all viewpoints are true. If truth is defined as being in conformity with reality, then it would really help to have at some point asked what reality is.
In my mind, Metaphysics is the fundamental question of philosophy, with Anthropology running a close second. Everything else flows naturally from a proper understanding of those two fields.
Not quite. I think the employee made called PointDev tech support, and PointDev got suspicious when they couldn't find Sony in their customer database. My impression is that it wasn't the intention of the employee to rat out Sony.
Pakistan Telcom does have an ASN number. Just for kicks, try this:
Head over to this site. It visualizes the BGP routes between different AS's. Click 'Start BGPlay'. The prefix in which YouTube lives is 208.65.153.0/24. Set the start time for about 24 Feb 2008 10:00, and the end time for about 25 Feb 2008 03:00 (times are UTC). Start the simulation.
You'll see a bunch of ASNs. Two have red circles around them. You can get their name by clicking on the number. On the left is YouTube, and on the right is Pakistan Telcom. Click play and watch what happens.
For those too lazy to actually watch this: All the routes destined for YouTube head towards Pakistan Telcom instead. Then, midway through, you see PCCW get wise and shut down those routes, and everyone slowly starts finding the actual YouTube. It's pretty neat to watch.
My definition of the beginning of humanity is the point at which the embryo starts doing any single slightest action consistent with the development of life. The sperm and the egg in themselves are only human in potential, they don't contain within themselves everything necessary to become human. The fertilized embryo, however, does. Moreover, it is actively engaged in becoming fully human.
Specifically, it is life, because it is growing of its own power, just like any other life would. It is human life because it will become a fully (or near fully) realized human, not any other form of life.
I think the philosophically problematic part of saying that the embryo becomes human is that you are rather arbitrarily picking only one aspect of humanity, whether that be resembling human form or undertaking a human action (thought, for instance). I think conception is the point before which you could say that what we have here doesn't portray any of the characteristics definitive of life, and after which you must say that it does portray a characteristic consistent with life (namely, growth).
If you're really interested in the topic of Faith and Reason, take a look at John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio. I think you'll find it's not as outlandish as it first appears.
At least societally, we give more worth to being human than we do to any other animal. This is why it's alright to kill a cow, for instance, but not a human. In fact, this is the same logic the Church uses. If an embryo is a human, then killing it is wrong.
The idea of that Confucian philosopher is exactly what I refute. In my view humanity is an ontological state, which means it is simply what you are. A human is a human in the same way that a kangaroo is a kangaroo... not by membership in some "club" but simply by virtue of what they are.
I don't think the concept of "soul" is strictly necessary, although I don't discount its existence. I think it's enough to say that an embryo is human because it is in actuality human. I don't know how philosophically minded you are, but I can't really get around explaining it in philosophical terms. A sperm and egg both have the potential to become human, but an embryo has both potentiality and actuality. It is doing at least some of the actions that would be required of any living thing (growing), and because by this growing it will develop in to a fully realized human being, it can be defined as a human embryo. I don't think it's necessary for an embryo to portray every element of humanity in actuality, just the slightest bit is enough to say that it is human, with potential to grow. Doesn't that kind of describe all of us...
I think that there's at least some truth to the view that we become human. But this becoming is only a continued realization of our potential. So, we are from conception human, but we are throughout our lives becoming more fully human.
Just some musings on my part as well. I like hanging around here because I get to test my view against a wide range of contrary views. It's nice to talk with someone who isn't so irrationally vehement.
You need to cross at least 'rational truth' off of that list. The Catholic Church in the encyclical Fides et Ratio promulgated by Pope John Paul II calls for a profound unity between Faith and Reason. That which is known by Faith and that which is known by Reason should never be directly contrary to one another, because the same God is the author of both Revealed and Reasonable truths.
So, yes, despite popular opinion the Catholic church is bound to rational truth. Which isn't a problem, because God is truth.
I would direct you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility, which discusses papal infallibility. The short version is that the pope is only infallible when he makes a statement ex cathedra on a matter of faith or morals. This has only happened twice in the history of Catholocism. This statement is not necessarily proclaimed infallibly. Nor must it be.
What is being said is a natural extension of the Thomistic concept of Natural Law and the dignity of the human person. It expresses not a domination of Reason by Faith, but a cooperation of Faith and Reason. What the church proclaim by faith should be reasonable, and I would claim that it is.
In my thinking (and I believe the Church's), humanity is an ontological state. That is, there is no way to become human, and there is no way to become unhuman, other than creation or destruction. Thus, a human person is indeed a human person from the moment of their creation, which is conception. To argue otherwise is to say that there is some matter (the fetus), which becomes human some time before it is born. I don't see how you can philosophically hold that argument. This is why the Church holds onto the concept that any abortion or embryonic stem cell research is wrong: not out of blind doctrine but because of a long history of philosophical and theological reasoning.
I happily run HL2 and CS:S under Cedega. I've never tried Civ 3, but the games database says it works. For me Cedega is worth it to just drop some dough, grab the binary, and never renew the subscription. You can even get the CVS builds for free, but my amd64 system doesn't like those.
Insert your standard Gentoo troll here. Seriously, though, you seem to be describing Portage with a graphical frontend.
I once brought my laptop to the airport thinking it would be fun to see what I could connect to. Then I thought of the federal prison I would in all likelihood get sent to if I was caught, and decided that tetris was probably better.
Give me an internet connection and I'll be fine. Do I get bonus points for FirstPost from Mars?
GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, which currently contains front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...). Further frontends are available.
...no searching for dependencies...
I installed debian on my laptop this weekend, and after the install, I couldn't even build menuconfig to upgrade the kernel.
I've found that most of the packages have really funky names. They don't call glibc glibc, they call it libc6. And even that isn't enough, to do anything you need libc6-dev. Same with libcurses, that wasn't enough, I needed libcurses-dev, just to compile against ncurses. Finally I catch on to this naming system, and try to install g++-dev (btw, why doesn't this install with gcc, the Gnu Compiler Collection?) and it can't find the package. After a while of searching around, I find it's g++. Took me a good day to compile a new kernel, just because I couldn't find anything.
Now, I can't get linux-wlan-ng to work with it, although I'm not going to hold that against debian because I am now running 2.6.1, however, when I had Gentoo on that same box it handled it without a glitch.
The up-side, however, far outweighs the downside of using debian over gentoo on that box, because you just can't compile everything from source on a Pentium MMX, you'll be there for weeks.
It's been a half hour since this joke was posted, and it hasn't been moderated up at all. I think we've seen the end of this one.
I've been getting a bunch that have no subject, which I though was strange, and I just got one that either had no author, or was written by -.
I'm in a contest for a local college every year in which we build a light-sensing robot out of the LEGO Mindstorms. The 'bot has to detect the brightest of two lights, and run towards it. There are two of them in a ring, and it is a timed event, whoever successfully finds and comes within a square foot of the brightest light wins. It's quite fun, and I'm still hoping we can do it even after the Mindstorms kits cease production.
On my P4 1.3 it's good enough, but I run Gentoo on my 266 laptop, and it's extremely slow. I'm considering just reformating and going with Debian, because emerging anything takes at least an entire night, more if it's halfway complex. My vote: Gentoo on the fast stuff, Debian for the slow.
You forgot that they re-wrote the warp speed tables between TOS and TNG. See here for the comparison. According to the new chart, Warp 10 means that you exist in all places in the universe simultaneosly, at which point, you'd have more to worry about than the strength of the windows in Ten Forward.
I tend to use these a lot, and the only complaint I have is that they aren't very good if you have to write in very small spaces. They put out so much ink that writing in tiny little letters is almost impossible, unless you hold the pen at just the right angle. Other than that, they rock.
I don't know if it's just the combination of programs I'm using, but I've never had a problem copy/pasting. Highlight text, move cursor to wherever you want it to paste to, middle click, and text is copied. In fact, whenever I have to use Windows I constantly wish I could copy/paste with only the mouse like I can in Linux.
According to analyst research firm IDC, C and C++ professionals will remain the largest class of developers through 20051.
Well, then, I guess my school shouldn't start favoring Java classes over C++ classes quite yet.
(I realize the 1 refers to a footnote, it just looked funny the first time I read it.)