Actually he just gave the hungry people a way to eat and share the food they had brought with them, but hidden, and without exposure of what they had with them to those around them.
Right. And he did not really resurrect, he simply went into the deep coma on the cross,
and then woke up in the tomb, scared away the guards by covering his head with a white sheet with holes for eyes,
and went to hang out with the Apostles. And in the end he did not rise up to heaven,
but rather collapsed from excessive blood loss, which is sort of a vertical movement too, so the holy
author is not stretching the (scientific) truth by much...
Who cares what "really happened"? From the religious side, is that even remotely important
for the statement of Christian faith, which boils down to accepting the message of peace and
love from the Jewish god? From the historical side, what sources are you using? Not one of the primary
sources gives us an indication that these short parables were fairy tail versions of actual events.
Not one. The holy authors themselves considered them to be accurate. From the modern, scientific point
of view, we cannot even be sure that these are not mere stories with Jesus cast as the main character.
Whenever you come up with a rationalistic explanation of a myth, you just make up history. It is certainly
possible that Jesus got off the boat and stood on the shallow place, which was perceived as walking on water.
Who cares? We cannot even be sure that he was on a boat that night.
Actually, suppose that you live in a swing state like Florida,
with 15000000 people and may be n=5000000 registered voters.
Approximate the vote count by a binomial distribution with p=1/2.
Then P(Dems=Reps or Dems=Reps +- 1) is of the order of 1/n
(in fact, significantly bigger than 1/n if the model is good).
That's 1/5000000 chance. Comparable to winning just one state
lottery. But sure, this is the lottery where only 1 ticket is
sold every 4 years, so I cannot blame you for not holding your
breath.
I would argue that there is no "evolution" that we can make as a species that will cause this problem to go away...It's a problem of software, not hardware.
I completely agree. And it seems to me that humans are not under pressure here.
Let computers worry about the security. Unlike us, computers are perfectly evolved
to perceive, understand and manage the risks of the net. And when they learn
to emote, they will also care about their security to the extend we never will.
I agree, and I want to add: if you can block the ads, do it. Don't listen
to the shills who say that "ads pay for the service". If they do, it is
accidental. The primary goal of advertising is always to educate the
consumer, never to offset the costs. If you are as much as enjoying
the service, block the ads and don't think twice about it. It is not your
fault that the seller has decided to bet on advertising, nor is it your
obligation to keep him afloat.
Bitching about ads is silly, since many modern consumer products
wouldn't even exist without a powerful marketing effort. If you really
must play games that cost $100M to make--if you believe that
only a vast amount of money can make a great game--then please, suck
it up and watch the ads. This may seem to contradict what
I have said before, but it doesn't. I, for one, could not
care less if the game is cheap, as long as it is fun to play,
nor do I believe that the cost makes things better when it comes
to art or entertainment. So I block the ads. By blocking
the ads (or refusing to buy the service) a consumer expresses the
preference for an economy in which marketing plays but a minor role.
It would be a vastly different economy, for sure, with very different
products. For example, all music downloads would be like BT, news
would be like Usenet, online shopping like craigslist, cartoons
like HSR, TV like
youtube. I do not know what the games would be like; I am doubtful
that they would have development costs in millions of dollars, but
I am pretty damn sure that they would be just as entertaining as
the best, most expensive games of today.
Re:I don't care how good it is
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 4, Funny
X-COM is one game I would dearly love to see remade. I almost lost hope, seeing
how everyone keeps failing, but I finally figured out why. They keep fixing what
was never broken: the Geoscape. If someone was to remake it by improving graphics
all around and AI (very important) in the Battlescape, and leaving the Geoscape the way
it used to be--perfect--that would make an ass-kicking game.
How do I know that? Because every other game starts sucking as soon as Geoscape
gets more complicated than it used to be. It works as long as it provides a
believable progression of technology and resource acquisition. It stops working
the moment when someone decides that it should be a challenge to manage. No one
ever wanted that. I, at least, was perfectly happy with setting scientists and
engineers on autopilot and jumping back into the action, now with better weapons.
Because early Christians were Jews, and Jews of that period were as anti-abortion
as it gets. The short answer is: tradition. Some say, as a tradition, it used to make
sense. Obviously doesn't anymore, since we are overpopulated.
because some believe that proprietary software is impractical to progress. That doesn't necessarily translate into morality, especially when seen from a purely objective standpoint.
That progress is good, i.e. that we ought to make choices which favor
continuing progress, is a moral statement by definition. No ought from is.
In fact, math is nothing more than a branch of logic.
Such was indeed the hope of logical positivists. No great number
of actual mathematicians was ever swayed by their arguments though.
To many of us who are concerned with this matter at all (a very small
number), the opposite seems to be true: that logic is but a
branch of mathematics.
Sure, there a lots of testimonials about people who have witnessed the power of god in their lives...I don't know of any that lend themselves to experimentation or replication.
Here's one: pick a god, any god; well, any god you are familiar with
(with your background you should have a nice selection) and start observing
the ritual. For this particular experiment, concentrate on the prayer.
Make it voiced and do it several times a day, in good faith (i.e. sincerely).
I'll give it 3 months tops for your mind to start playing tricks on you, but you know what is funny? They won't
feel like tricks to you at the moment, oh no, it's going to be a real thing. This phenomenon is excessively
documented, it yields to experiment and allows replication. Depending on a choice of god,
it is also relatively harmless.
First, the GP is not making a purely taxonomic distinction, as far as I can tell.
Words "animal" and "human" certainly have different meanings in everyday speech,
and in some contexts they are describing mutually exclusive categories -- when the
spiritual considerations are involved.
Second, a taxonomic distinction is not hard to draw, and some biologists
are already doing it. Granted, we are grafted on the primate branch, which
makes us as animal as we could be by descent, but this is not the only
factor in taxonomy, and in case with humans it can be argued that other
factors are more important. The population growth laws, for example, are
all broken for us. All animal populations have a ceiling which is possible
to estimate. If bunnies keep multiplying in Australia, sooner or later they
will run out of grass or catch a disease. When humans run into this wall, they just
develop farms and build indoor plumbing. Our perceived strength is the infinite
adaptability, infinite in a sense that it is virtually impossible to predict
with certainty what environment we can or cannot eventually inhabit. With
animals, even primates, adaptations happen primarily by the way of
the genetic shuffle, but humans adapt on the fly because something
funny is going on in our brains. It would probably take hundreds of thousands
of years for chimps to get comfortable at 32F. You can accomplish this
feat in 5 minutes by throwing on some furs. So why insist on us being
"animals" if our populations are so vastly different in how they fit into
the ecology? It kind of makes sense already to make us into a separate kingdom
and focus on studying the distinctions.
Mod this up, please. I work in a University and writing a post like this one
was my first thought too.
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know is
just cracking me up... People who wrote this probably think that
scientific research is a process most resembling folding a stack of
envelopes.
You are making a common mistake, assuming people are 'poor' because they don't have much money. More often than not they don't have any money because they are poor. 'Poor' is a state of mind.
I don't think that this word means what you think it means. "Poor" is definitely not a state of one's
mind, but rather that of one's wallet. If you transferred 1M dollars into my account today, I would sure
as hell become rich, even though I like a variety of drugs and enjoy playing low stakes poker. And with
1B dollars I (or anyone) would be one of the richest people on Earth, my mindset notwithstanding. You
strike closer to home when you list certain personality traits as reasons for being poor. I agree that
valuing things like "fun", "happiness", or "not being a gear in the industrial machine" may well
prevent one from ever reaching financial prosperity. In my mind, however, that leads to the conclusion
that the Darwinian market which you seem to cherish is bad, because I cannot see any fault in people
(I know them personally) who dislike the system and find it more human to live in a circle of friends,
where "success" is the measure of the achievement of their own personal goals. If your own personal
goals include stages like buying into the capitalist myth and achieving success which can be measured
by a single number -- the amount of what functionally are slave wages -- then all the more power to
you. I do not understand how you arrive to the notion that people are poor through the fault
of their own, because they are unwilling to play hardball with the rest of the world. It is clear to
me that we are poor simply because some people are hell-bent on being rich, famous, and powerful,
and free market capitalism is the name of the game where it happens to a few, at a great expense
to the wellbeing of the majority.
As a side note, I am not a fan or hater of either capitalism or communism or any other -isms.
It just that I cannot see any good way to control a community which is much larger than, say,
a Greek polis. There is just no way (not yet) to do it without violence, lies, and humiliating
subjugation of many to the will of the few.
If you took a hundred people from all social strata and tossed them on an island with exactly equal resources, within a year the existing pecking order would re-emerge virtually unchanged. A couple of frat boy trust funders would be unable to reattain their old position and a couple of the less well off might react well to the stress and rise. But overall the majority would stay unchanged.
Instead of accusing (unjustly, IMHO) the GP of economic illiteracy, you should have taken your time to
examine the very basics of Anthropology. The social order of a 100 strong community on an island
would not resemble in any shape or form that of a polis with 40K people, let alone a country with
a population of 300M. There would be no money, and while some kind of devision of labor would certainly
emerge after a few generations, everyone would be doing more or less the same task of making food and
eating it. The politics and leadership would be vastly different from anything you have ever experienced,
having a unique feature which now is almost unheard of: everyone would be governed by a person,
not merely by an image of a giant head. The leader would have to take a full share in the life of
the community (which must revolve around making food and babies), on pain of being seen as antisocial.
And not a single person there would be poor.
The AP system isn't what made fallout Fallout. The witty dialog, the gripping environmental immersion [...]
Hmmm, I am not so sure about that. The same combination of an AP-based combat and
superb storytelling (art and all) was seen in another kick-ass game: the original UFO.
If you think about it, the combat systems are nearly identical. What they are doing is certainly
a big loss, if not for the Fallout, then for me personally. I never liked
real-time tactics; Gears Of War is the only exception so far, but I doubt that
the Oblivion team will make anything that would hold a candle to that excellent game.
And the story... When I want to load up on vanilla, I'll get it much cheaper at a local Safeway.
It's worse. I cannot even RTFA, for the fear that some useless crap
will be stashed in my attic, as the detective would put it. Just reading
the summary makes me feel stupid-er. The guy is either a well-meaning
fool or a marketing shill. Making enemies is harder than making friends?
Give me a break. And the OSS being a religion is untrue as well. The
biggest problem with OSS (I agree with Stallman here) is that it styles
to be a movement, but is really nothing but business practices related
to the workflow. Its biggest advocates are not concerned with
ethical issues at hand; they just borrow the development process from
the free software movement and argue that it is cheaper. The whole
discussion is uninteresting to someone who prefers the free software
on moral grounds.
PS: Mozilla Public License is a free license, inspired by GPL.
You are on the right track, but it's not even about making more money
(for tha cable companies, etc.).
It's about "educating the consumer". Selling eyeballs is much more lucrative
and therefore also important than selling the content. Look at the earnings of
the entertainment industry. Moglen mentioned somewhere that Hollywood
makes 1/10 of what the computer hardware manufacturers make. Throw in
cars, real estate, various services, and you'll easily have other things
outstripping the entertainment by a couple of orders of magnitude in earnings.
Ads are not there so that we can watch TV. It's the other way around.
I think it would still be better if we had just the public domain and
a free software copyright law (limited to a sane number of years)
-- that is, "GPL or nothing" kind of deal.
This would be one law I could live with. I am quite enjoying the fact that
MS cannot just appropriate GNU+Linux+Wine and release it as Vista SP2
for gazillion dollars per copy. Without copyright, they wouldn't have
to share source, and they could have made the system really crippled
(a la Steam) without being authenticated.
Slashdot Mirror
And various loose fruits and flakes.
Actually he just gave the hungry people a way to eat and share the food they had brought with them, but hidden, and without exposure of what they had with them to those around them.
Right. And he did not really resurrect, he simply went into the deep coma on the cross, and then woke up in the tomb, scared away the guards by covering his head with a white sheet with holes for eyes, and went to hang out with the Apostles. And in the end he did not rise up to heaven, but rather collapsed from excessive blood loss, which is sort of a vertical movement too, so the holy author is not stretching the (scientific) truth by much...
Who cares what "really happened"? From the religious side, is that even remotely important for the statement of Christian faith, which boils down to accepting the message of peace and love from the Jewish god? From the historical side, what sources are you using? Not one of the primary sources gives us an indication that these short parables were fairy tail versions of actual events. Not one. The holy authors themselves considered them to be accurate. From the modern, scientific point of view, we cannot even be sure that these are not mere stories with Jesus cast as the main character. Whenever you come up with a rationalistic explanation of a myth, you just make up history. It is certainly possible that Jesus got off the boat and stood on the shallow place, which was perceived as walking on water. Who cares? We cannot even be sure that he was on a boat that night.
Actually, suppose that you live in a swing state like Florida, with 15000000 people and may be n=5000000 registered voters. Approximate the vote count by a binomial distribution with p=1/2. Then P(Dems=Reps or Dems=Reps +- 1) is of the order of 1/n (in fact, significantly bigger than 1/n if the model is good). That's 1/5000000 chance. Comparable to winning just one state lottery. But sure, this is the lottery where only 1 ticket is sold every 4 years, so I cannot blame you for not holding your breath.
I would argue that there is no "evolution" that we can make as a species that will cause this problem to go away...It's a problem of software, not hardware.
I completely agree. And it seems to me that humans are not under pressure here. Let computers worry about the security. Unlike us, computers are perfectly evolved to perceive, understand and manage the risks of the net. And when they learn to emote, they will also care about their security to the extend we never will.
I agree, and I want to add: if you can block the ads, do it. Don't listen to the shills who say that "ads pay for the service". If they do, it is accidental. The primary goal of advertising is always to educate the consumer, never to offset the costs. If you are as much as enjoying the service, block the ads and don't think twice about it. It is not your fault that the seller has decided to bet on advertising, nor is it your obligation to keep him afloat.
Bitching about ads is silly, since many modern consumer products wouldn't even exist without a powerful marketing effort. If you really must play games that cost $100M to make--if you believe that only a vast amount of money can make a great game--then please, suck it up and watch the ads. This may seem to contradict what I have said before, but it doesn't. I, for one, could not care less if the game is cheap, as long as it is fun to play, nor do I believe that the cost makes things better when it comes to art or entertainment. So I block the ads. By blocking the ads (or refusing to buy the service) a consumer expresses the preference for an economy in which marketing plays but a minor role. It would be a vastly different economy, for sure, with very different products. For example, all music downloads would be like BT, news would be like Usenet, online shopping like craigslist, cartoons like HSR, TV like youtube. I do not know what the games would be like; I am doubtful that they would have development costs in millions of dollars, but I am pretty damn sure that they would be just as entertaining as the best, most expensive games of today.
hypocrite
X-COM is one game I would dearly love to see remade. I almost lost hope, seeing how everyone keeps failing, but I finally figured out why. They keep fixing what was never broken: the Geoscape. If someone was to remake it by improving graphics all around and AI (very important) in the Battlescape, and leaving the Geoscape the way it used to be--perfect--that would make an ass-kicking game.
How do I know that? Because every other game starts sucking as soon as Geoscape gets more complicated than it used to be. It works as long as it provides a believable progression of technology and resource acquisition. It stops working the moment when someone decides that it should be a challenge to manage. No one ever wanted that. I, at least, was perfectly happy with setting scientists and engineers on autopilot and jumping back into the action, now with better weapons.
but not abortion. Why?
Because early Christians were Jews, and Jews of that period were as anti-abortion as it gets. The short answer is: tradition. Some say, as a tradition, it used to make sense. Obviously doesn't anymore, since we are overpopulated.
+1 sarcastic?
because some believe that proprietary software is impractical to progress. That doesn't necessarily translate into morality, especially when seen from a purely objective standpoint.
That progress is good, i.e. that we ought to make choices which favor continuing progress, is a moral statement by definition. No ought from is.
In fact, math is nothing more than a branch of logic.
Such was indeed the hope of logical positivists. No great number of actual mathematicians was ever swayed by their arguments though. To many of us who are concerned with this matter at all (a very small number), the opposite seems to be true: that logic is but a branch of mathematics.
If I understand it correctly, there was no time before the Big Bang, and so nothing "led up to it" in a temporal sense.
Sure, there a lots of testimonials about people who have witnessed the power of god in their lives...I don't know of any that lend themselves to experimentation or replication.
Here's one: pick a god, any god; well, any god you are familiar with (with your background you should have a nice selection) and start observing the ritual. For this particular experiment, concentrate on the prayer. Make it voiced and do it several times a day, in good faith (i.e. sincerely). I'll give it 3 months tops for your mind to start playing tricks on you, but you know what is funny? They won't feel like tricks to you at the moment, oh no, it's going to be a real thing. This phenomenon is excessively documented, it yields to experiment and allows replication. Depending on a choice of god, it is also relatively harmless.
First, the GP is not making a purely taxonomic distinction, as far as I can tell. Words "animal" and "human" certainly have different meanings in everyday speech, and in some contexts they are describing mutually exclusive categories -- when the spiritual considerations are involved.
Second, a taxonomic distinction is not hard to draw, and some biologists are already doing it. Granted, we are grafted on the primate branch, which makes us as animal as we could be by descent, but this is not the only factor in taxonomy, and in case with humans it can be argued that other factors are more important. The population growth laws, for example, are all broken for us. All animal populations have a ceiling which is possible to estimate. If bunnies keep multiplying in Australia, sooner or later they will run out of grass or catch a disease. When humans run into this wall, they just develop farms and build indoor plumbing. Our perceived strength is the infinite adaptability, infinite in a sense that it is virtually impossible to predict with certainty what environment we can or cannot eventually inhabit. With animals, even primates, adaptations happen primarily by the way of the genetic shuffle, but humans adapt on the fly because something funny is going on in our brains. It would probably take hundreds of thousands of years for chimps to get comfortable at 32F. You can accomplish this feat in 5 minutes by throwing on some furs. So why insist on us being "animals" if our populations are so vastly different in how they fit into the ecology? It kind of makes sense already to make us into a separate kingdom and focus on studying the distinctions.
Mod this up, please. I work in a University and writing a post like this one was my first thought too.
attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know is just cracking me up... People who wrote this probably think that scientific research is a process most resembling folding a stack of envelopes.
OK, let's just cut the bullshit and declare
War On WOW
where WOW, of course, stands for War On WOW.
I don't think that this word means what you think it means. "Poor" is definitely not a state of one's mind, but rather that of one's wallet. If you transferred 1M dollars into my account today, I would sure as hell become rich, even though I like a variety of drugs and enjoy playing low stakes poker. And with 1B dollars I (or anyone) would be one of the richest people on Earth, my mindset notwithstanding. You strike closer to home when you list certain personality traits as reasons for being poor. I agree that valuing things like "fun", "happiness", or "not being a gear in the industrial machine" may well prevent one from ever reaching financial prosperity. In my mind, however, that leads to the conclusion that the Darwinian market which you seem to cherish is bad, because I cannot see any fault in people (I know them personally) who dislike the system and find it more human to live in a circle of friends, where "success" is the measure of the achievement of their own personal goals. If your own personal goals include stages like buying into the capitalist myth and achieving success which can be measured by a single number -- the amount of what functionally are slave wages -- then all the more power to you. I do not understand how you arrive to the notion that people are poor through the fault of their own, because they are unwilling to play hardball with the rest of the world. It is clear to me that we are poor simply because some people are hell-bent on being rich, famous, and powerful, and free market capitalism is the name of the game where it happens to a few, at a great expense to the wellbeing of the majority.
As a side note, I am not a fan or hater of either capitalism or communism or any other -isms. It just that I cannot see any good way to control a community which is much larger than, say, a Greek polis. There is just no way (not yet) to do it without violence, lies, and humiliating subjugation of many to the will of the few.
Instead of accusing (unjustly, IMHO) the GP of economic illiteracy, you should have taken your time to examine the very basics of Anthropology. The social order of a 100 strong community on an island would not resemble in any shape or form that of a polis with 40K people, let alone a country with a population of 300M. There would be no money, and while some kind of devision of labor would certainly emerge after a few generations, everyone would be doing more or less the same task of making food and eating it. The politics and leadership would be vastly different from anything you have ever experienced, having a unique feature which now is almost unheard of: everyone would be governed by a person, not merely by an image of a giant head. The leader would have to take a full share in the life of the community (which must revolve around making food and babies), on pain of being seen as antisocial. And not a single person there would be poor.
It's too bad that these fruit-picking robots will soon be displaced by cheap, illegally smuggled Mexican knock-offs.
You had me at "bovine scatological constructs".
If you think that this is somehow related to the planet-wide climate change, you gonna like this movie.
Hmmm, I am not so sure about that. The same combination of an AP-based combat and superb storytelling (art and all) was seen in another kick-ass game: the original UFO. If you think about it, the combat systems are nearly identical. What they are doing is certainly a big loss, if not for the Fallout, then for me personally. I never liked real-time tactics; Gears Of War is the only exception so far, but I doubt that the Oblivion team will make anything that would hold a candle to that excellent game. And the story... When I want to load up on vanilla, I'll get it much cheaper at a local Safeway.
It's worse. I cannot even RTFA, for the fear that some useless crap will be stashed in my attic, as the detective would put it. Just reading the summary makes me feel stupid-er. The guy is either a well-meaning fool or a marketing shill. Making enemies is harder than making friends? Give me a break. And the OSS being a religion is untrue as well. The biggest problem with OSS (I agree with Stallman here) is that it styles to be a movement, but is really nothing but business practices related to the workflow. Its biggest advocates are not concerned with ethical issues at hand; they just borrow the development process from the free software movement and argue that it is cheaper. The whole discussion is uninteresting to someone who prefers the free software on moral grounds.
PS: Mozilla Public License is a free license, inspired by GPL.
You are on the right track, but it's not even about making more money (for tha cable companies, etc.). It's about "educating the consumer". Selling eyeballs is much more lucrative and therefore also important than selling the content. Look at the earnings of the entertainment industry. Moglen mentioned somewhere that Hollywood makes 1/10 of what the computer hardware manufacturers make. Throw in cars, real estate, various services, and you'll easily have other things outstripping the entertainment by a couple of orders of magnitude in earnings. Ads are not there so that we can watch TV. It's the other way around.
I think it would still be better if we had just the public domain and a free software copyright law (limited to a sane number of years) -- that is, "GPL or nothing" kind of deal. This would be one law I could live with. I am quite enjoying the fact that MS cannot just appropriate GNU+Linux+Wine and release it as Vista SP2 for gazillion dollars per copy. Without copyright, they wouldn't have to share source, and they could have made the system really crippled (a la Steam) without being authenticated.