Actually there's a very cheap and effective test. Just try dying. If you can't, there are an infinite number of universes, in some of which you become immortal.
I agree, it's about as good as a religious test (you'll know for sure once you die, honest!).
Also recorded in this library of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of over 1500 years, are accurate predictions that have already taken place, some that are happening right now before our eyes and some that are yet to come in the not too distant future.
And Leonardo Da Vinci predicted flying machines and tanks, worship him!!!
I BELIEVE that Jesus Christ was who he said he was and is, namely God. He demonstrated this by the unique powers over the forces of nature and more importantly over death. However, science cannot observe or demonstrate this and therefore it belongs into the realm of faith, in this case religious faith. Of course, everyone who has faith, believes it to be the truth. Faith can turn out to be true in the end, but it is still faith and will always remain faith, never science.
Just wondering why you chose Christianity over, say, Islam or Buddhism or Shamanism. Feel free to ignore my question if you want, but it always interests me to know why people choose a particular religion (which almost always originated or was historically propagated within their cultural group). Do you apply the concepts of rigorous hypothesis testing to Biblical claims, or do you just accept everything the Bible says (and do you read the original Greek and Aramaic, and why do you discount the apocryphal and gnostic works yet accept the concept of the Trinity, etc.)?
If the outcome of your decision-making process is pre-determined (as determinism requires) then you had no choice in your "decision". If you have no choice in what you are going to decide, then how can your "will" be "free"?
There are an infinite number of possible universes in which rational beings otherwise indistinguishable from ourselves make different choices than we will make in this universe. If an omniscient observer could look at all possible universes, they would not be able to determine the actions of any given rational being. They could make a probability distribution, but that's about as good as we can do within our own universe.
To be clear, I mean that our analogs in other possible universes are so close to us that we would not be able to tell whether we were in this universe or another one. Even if an omniscient observer knows everything about all possible universes, the set of rational beings who I would identify as me, writing this post on slashdot to you, have an infinite number of future possibilities. That is my free will. I do not know my future actions, and neither does anyone else. I freely choose out of any possible future, although I do not know from which possible universe my choice comes or into which possible universe I will travel with my decision.
If we limit ourselves to deterministic universes (since the idea is to show the existence of free will in a deterministic universe, that should be okay), then no omniscient being exists. There is always a larger possible deterministic universe containing any candidate being, making them non-omniscient. This guarantees that there is no being sitting around who is 100% sure that the deterministic universe it is examining with you in it will not go up in a puff of smoke due to some oddity of the universe containing the semi-omniscient being.
Alternatively, you can take a modal realist approach and consider that every possible universe actually exists, so every choice made through free will actually exists in a real alternative universe. This proves the existence of free will somewhat vacuously, but no less validly.
Free Will is only attainable by CHOOSING FREELY AND AFTER CONSIDERATION.
May I freely choose to become omnipotent? If not, what is it that restrains my free will? Am I not restrained by the physical nature of the world into making only the choices that are possible? What stretch of the imagination is it to consider that there is only *one* possibility to choose from at any given time, despite the apparent possibility of other choices? If many choices appear to be possible but only one of them happens (the one that was "chosen"), how can it be proven that the other choices were actually possible?
I'd say that feeling if you felt that it was necessary to philosophize about it, then that itself would suggest that you do have free will.
I'd say the fact that people can't stop arguing about it is disproof of free will. Why would free willed agents stand around arguing about something like that?
If there wasn't free will, why would an biological organism pursue goals that are detrimental to its cause? Free will allows the organism to make choices which are self-detrimental.
In an attempt to bring the World closer to the hardcore warmonger's taste, Lockheed Martin is preparing to release new cluster munitions, a violent 'hack and slash' type of bomblet loaded with shrapnel and high explosives. This has brought attention from family-conscious lobbies: 'The decision to release a violent weapon from a nation which has based its reputation on family fun has shocked anti-violence pressure groups. Mediawatch-UK, Britain's longest-running pressure group campaigning for decency in TV, films and warfare, said Lockheed Martin will "spoil" the World.' The weapon features drab steel casings, except for the bomblets which are in brilliant yellow. Cluster bombs are widely available, but new ones are announced to be released in early 2009.
Good example. Quoting is technically infringement, but covered by fair use and/or the exemptions for scholarly research or reviews. But try telling that to the RIAA if you play one of their songs while commenting on it and stick it on a P2P network.
Just as soon as you stop stealing letters (there's only 26 of them for god's sake!) and words. How will the rest of us communicate if you use up all the "of"'s, "the"'s, and "a"'s?
Since Mozilla plugins have a braindead interface for calling other programs (no way to directly work with file descriptors) it's impossible to securely pass the passphrase into the gpg executable without either sticking the passphrase on the command line (which shows up in process lists, etc.) or writing it to disk and redirecting the file to standard input when running gpg. FireGPG opts for the temporary file method. Look at./content/cgpgaccess.js for details.
The upshot is that it's stupid to use FireGPG on any untrusted computer, or any computer where you might at some point lose control of the disk, since it probably has both the encrypted private key and the passphrase on it somewhere. The temporary passphrase files aren't even wiped before they're deleted, at least as of revision 454.
Read the article. He was going to a shrink for years, and admitted to thoughts of suicide. He died from an overdose of prescription medication. I think 'obviously mentally ill' is a valid supposition.
He worked in a biological weapons lab. How could he *not* have mental/emotional problems at some point?
Of course, why not, especially if the cost is high, share it between users? Especially if it will support multiple desktops, won't every household maintain one OS for multiple users?
They can easily restrict concurrent sessions on the server side. Or just limit the number of documents you can have open during a given period of time.
Most of the "red" states receive more Federal money than they pay in taxes, versus most of the "blue" states that pay more in taxes than they get back.
Here's an interesting summary of Federal spending in Alaska from 2001. Also this has some analysis of how Federal spending is broken up.
Overall, a lot of Federal money is spent in Alaska, but not much (~20% at most) could be classified as "pork." There are several military bases, the missile defense project, a large native population, and then the typical things that the Federal government funds in other states.
I think the real issue is that Alaska doesn't have a large enough internal industry to match the Federal dollars that are available. Drilling in ANWAR or a natural gas pipeline would probably decrease the ratio of federal to state spending for at least a few years.
The proper test for determining whether a claim is unpatentable, the court said, is "whether the claimed subject matter as a whole is a disembodied mathematical concept
So, basically, up to the whim of the patent office. There is nothing (that government can recognize, at least) that is not the result of natural laws, or that is not a natural phenomenon. Humans obey the naturalistic laws of the universe, as do the tools we make. It merely falls to the patent office and courts to arbitrarily put these natural phenomena into two classes; those they wish to call inventions and those they wish to continue to call natural phenomena. I will accept any disproof of naturalism as evidence to the contrary, or a clear description of what the division between natural phenomena and human behavior is.
The definition of an abstract idea is similarly useless, since every patent application is an "abstraction" on paper, dealing with imaginary ideal components and not a real physical object. Again, the dividing line between abstraction and practicality is completely up to the whim of the patent office or a random court. I think every function from one set (the domain) to another (the range) is abstract, regardless of the fact that every possible algorithm can be expressed as such a function.
If anything, patents are granted for practical ways to realize the implementation of abstract functions in a physical medium. The function itself is merely an abstraction, and the machine that approximates it may be patentable, but any dissimilar machine to implement the same abstract function should not fall under the patent. In essence, patents should function as strictly as copyrights such that an independent derivation of a machine should not fall under an existing patent. A mere description of an abstract function should not cause an independently invented machine that implements the function to violate any patent claims. That leaves no room for software patents.
Sally has 6 slices of bread, 12 pieces of ham and 6 pieces of cheese. How many sammiches can sally make before the man of the house gets home from work?
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate. The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio. An average of salaries should show a slightly higher mean wage for women, since as a higher percentage of the population they have a slightly higher probability of being in very high paying positions. The distribution of salaries is not normal, instead it has a very high end that causes the mean to be significantly higher than the median. This distribution means that the mean salary for the more numerous sex should be slightly higher, assuming equal job opportunities.
A proof is different then from invention or process. A proof would verify that a compression would work, perhaps it could explain the outer bounds of limits to the proof. But it doesn't nessarly give the process.
A formal proof that an algorithm is correct is enough information to implement the algorithm, since each step of the algorithm must exist as part of the proof. There is no way to formally verify that an algorithm works without showing that each of its operations has a well defined action, and that the result of all the actions yields the correct output.
There are non-constructive proofs of theorems, but the proof itself can ultimately be treated as an algorithm for applying the axioms of a formal system in order to generate the proof. The problem remains that if it is possible to patent software algorithms, then it must be possible to patent mathematical proofs. See metamath for a good example of why and how it can work. Mathematical proofs can be reduced to a formal language which describes an algorithm for applying axioms to a sequence of well formed formulas.
So a voice encoding algorithm (speex and the like) would not be patentable per se. But if it were to be used in a mobile phone to save power then it might be patentable, see the UK Manual of Patent Practice at Section 1.17:
If I understand you right, mathematical inventions can't be patented but actually *using* a mathematical invention for a particular purpose is patentable? Shouldn't that just fall under copyright for a circuit design or particular piece of software? If someone can get a patent on "using a specific compression algorithm to save power", but they can't get a patent on the specific compression algorithm, then what use is their patent? Does it also prevent the use of other compression algorithms to save power?
Slashdot Mirror
So it's obviously a set of mathematicians, right?
Actually there's a very cheap and effective test. Just try dying. If you can't, there are an infinite number of universes, in some of which you become immortal.
I agree, it's about as good as a religious test (you'll know for sure once you die, honest!).
Also recorded in this library of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of over 1500 years, are accurate predictions that have already taken place, some that are happening right now before our eyes and some that are yet to come in the not too distant future.
And Leonardo Da Vinci predicted flying machines and tanks, worship him!!!
I BELIEVE that Jesus Christ was who he said he was and is, namely God. He demonstrated this by the unique powers over the forces of nature and more importantly over death. However, science cannot observe or demonstrate this and therefore it belongs into the realm of faith, in this case religious faith. Of course, everyone who has faith, believes it to be the truth. Faith can turn out to be true in the end, but it is still faith and will always remain faith, never science.
Just wondering why you chose Christianity over, say, Islam or Buddhism or Shamanism. Feel free to ignore my question if you want, but it always interests me to know why people choose a particular religion (which almost always originated or was historically propagated within their cultural group). Do you apply the concepts of rigorous hypothesis testing to Biblical claims, or do you just accept everything the Bible says (and do you read the original Greek and Aramaic, and why do you discount the apocryphal and gnostic works yet accept the concept of the Trinity, etc.)?
If the outcome of your decision-making process is pre-determined (as determinism requires) then you had no choice in your "decision". If you have no choice in what you are going to decide, then how can your "will" be "free"?
There are an infinite number of possible universes in which rational beings otherwise indistinguishable from ourselves make different choices than we will make in this universe. If an omniscient observer could look at all possible universes, they would not be able to determine the actions of any given rational being. They could make a probability distribution, but that's about as good as we can do within our own universe.
To be clear, I mean that our analogs in other possible universes are so close to us that we would not be able to tell whether we were in this universe or another one. Even if an omniscient observer knows everything about all possible universes, the set of rational beings who I would identify as me, writing this post on slashdot to you, have an infinite number of future possibilities. That is my free will. I do not know my future actions, and neither does anyone else. I freely choose out of any possible future, although I do not know from which possible universe my choice comes or into which possible universe I will travel with my decision.
If we limit ourselves to deterministic universes (since the idea is to show the existence of free will in a deterministic universe, that should be okay), then no omniscient being exists. There is always a larger possible deterministic universe containing any candidate being, making them non-omniscient. This guarantees that there is no being sitting around who is 100% sure that the deterministic universe it is examining with you in it will not go up in a puff of smoke due to some oddity of the universe containing the semi-omniscient being.
Alternatively, you can take a modal realist approach and consider that every possible universe actually exists, so every choice made through free will actually exists in a real alternative universe. This proves the existence of free will somewhat vacuously, but no less validly.
Free Will is only attainable by CHOOSING FREELY AND AFTER CONSIDERATION.
May I freely choose to become omnipotent? If not, what is it that restrains my free will? Am I not restrained by the physical nature of the world into making only the choices that are possible? What stretch of the imagination is it to consider that there is only *one* possibility to choose from at any given time, despite the apparent possibility of other choices? If many choices appear to be possible but only one of them happens (the one that was "chosen"), how can it be proven that the other choices were actually possible?
I'd say that feeling if you felt that it was necessary to philosophize about it, then that itself would suggest that you do have free will.
I'd say the fact that people can't stop arguing about it is disproof of free will. Why would free willed agents stand around arguing about something like that?
If there wasn't free will, why would an biological organism pursue goals that are detrimental to its cause? Free will allows the organism to make choices which are self-detrimental.
Because it's stupid?
NTSC is worse than you described; you have two 1/60th second exposures interlaced together. Utterly worthless for still frames.
Once progressive HD video cameras become cheap, then video will suck slightly less for the average family archive.
In an attempt to bring the World closer to the hardcore warmonger's taste, Lockheed Martin is preparing to release new cluster munitions, a violent 'hack and slash' type of bomblet loaded with shrapnel and high explosives. This has brought attention from family-conscious lobbies: 'The decision to release a violent weapon from a nation which has based its reputation on family fun has shocked anti-violence pressure groups. Mediawatch-UK, Britain's longest-running pressure group campaigning for decency in TV, films and warfare, said Lockheed Martin will "spoil" the World.' The weapon features drab steel casings, except for the bomblets which are in brilliant yellow. Cluster bombs are widely available, but new ones are announced to be released in early 2009.
link FTW.
"if this problem persists, please contact your Systems Administrator"
Restore from the 9th's tapes, please!
Good example. Quoting is technically infringement, but covered by fair use and/or the exemptions for scholarly research or reviews. But try telling that to the RIAA if you play one of their songs while commenting on it and stick it on a P2P network.
Stop stealing shit.
Just as soon as you stop stealing letters (there's only 26 of them for god's sake!) and words. How will the rest of us communicate if you use up all the "of"'s, "the"'s, and "a"'s?
Since Mozilla plugins have a braindead interface for calling other programs (no way to directly work with file descriptors) it's impossible to securely pass the passphrase into the gpg executable without either sticking the passphrase on the command line (which shows up in process lists, etc.) or writing it to disk and redirecting the file to standard input when running gpg. FireGPG opts for the temporary file method. Look at ./content/cgpgaccess.js for details.
The upshot is that it's stupid to use FireGPG on any untrusted computer, or any computer where you might at some point lose control of the disk, since it probably has both the encrypted private key and the passphrase on it somewhere. The temporary passphrase files aren't even wiped before they're deleted, at least as of revision 454.
Read the article. He was going to a shrink for years, and admitted to thoughts of suicide. He died from an overdose of prescription medication. I think 'obviously mentally ill' is a valid supposition.
He worked in a biological weapons lab. How could he *not* have mental/emotional problems at some point?
Making hateful statements against a particular identifiable group is illegal in Canada.
Does it depend on the group? Can I hate lawyers, politicians, and statisticians?
What about pirates, Real Pirates (the board-a-ship-and-kill-people kind), rapists, serial killers, or nazis?
All of those are pretty identifiable groups. Which ones can I explicitly say that I hate? I want to be sure I can get through customs next time...
Of course, why not, especially if the cost is high, share it between users? Especially if it will support multiple desktops, won't every household maintain one OS for multiple users?
They can easily restrict concurrent sessions on the server side. Or just limit the number of documents you can have open during a given period of time.
citation.
Most of the "red" states receive more Federal money than they pay in taxes, versus most of the "blue" states that pay more in taxes than they get back.
Here's an interesting summary of Federal spending in Alaska from 2001. Also this has some analysis of how Federal spending is broken up.
Overall, a lot of Federal money is spent in Alaska, but not much (~20% at most) could be classified as "pork." There are several military bases, the missile defense project, a large native population, and then the typical things that the Federal government funds in other states.
I think the real issue is that Alaska doesn't have a large enough internal industry to match the Federal dollars that are available. Drilling in ANWAR or a natural gas pipeline would probably decrease the ratio of federal to state spending for at least a few years.
The proper test for determining whether a claim is unpatentable, the court said, is "whether the claimed subject matter as a whole is a disembodied mathematical concept
So, basically, up to the whim of the patent office. There is nothing (that government can recognize, at least) that is not the result of natural laws, or that is not a natural phenomenon. Humans obey the naturalistic laws of the universe, as do the tools we make. It merely falls to the patent office and courts to arbitrarily put these natural phenomena into two classes; those they wish to call inventions and those they wish to continue to call natural phenomena. I will accept any disproof of naturalism as evidence to the contrary, or a clear description of what the division between natural phenomena and human behavior is.
The definition of an abstract idea is similarly useless, since every patent application is an "abstraction" on paper, dealing with imaginary ideal components and not a real physical object. Again, the dividing line between abstraction and practicality is completely up to the whim of the patent office or a random court. I think every function from one set (the domain) to another (the range) is abstract, regardless of the fact that every possible algorithm can be expressed as such a function.
If anything, patents are granted for practical ways to realize the implementation of abstract functions in a physical medium. The function itself is merely an abstraction, and the machine that approximates it may be patentable, but any dissimilar machine to implement the same abstract function should not fall under the patent. In essence, patents should function as strictly as copyrights such that an independent derivation of a machine should not fall under an existing patent. A mere description of an abstract function should not cause an independently invented machine that implements the function to violate any patent claims. That leaves no room for software patents.
Sally has 6 slices of bread, 12 pieces of ham and 6 pieces of cheese. How many sammiches can sally make before the man of the house gets home from work?
As many as she wants?
When you compare the same jobs, same qualifications, same experience, same competency and same working hours, there is no meaningful difference between male and female salaries.
So one woman CEO at one company in the U.S. solves the world's sex discrimination problems?
Note that most comparisons do *not* do this (eg: they frequently average salaries for men and women across the entire workforce), because they are trying to support an agenda.
Assuming men and women have equal opportunities, such an average is appropriate. The expected value for the sex of an employee should be roughly 51% female, because of the male/female ratio. An average of salaries should show a slightly higher mean wage for women, since as a higher percentage of the population they have a slightly higher probability of being in very high paying positions. The distribution of salaries is not normal, instead it has a very high end that causes the mean to be significantly higher than the median. This distribution means that the mean salary for the more numerous sex should be slightly higher, assuming equal job opportunities.
Natural selection works.
A proof is different then from invention or process. A proof would verify that a compression would work, perhaps it could explain the outer bounds of limits to the proof. But it doesn't nessarly give the process.
A formal proof that an algorithm is correct is enough information to implement the algorithm, since each step of the algorithm must exist as part of the proof. There is no way to formally verify that an algorithm works without showing that each of its operations has a well defined action, and that the result of all the actions yields the correct output.
There are non-constructive proofs of theorems, but the proof itself can ultimately be treated as an algorithm for applying the axioms of a formal system in order to generate the proof. The problem remains that if it is possible to patent software algorithms, then it must be possible to patent mathematical proofs. See metamath for a good example of why and how it can work. Mathematical proofs can be reduced to a formal language which describes an algorithm for applying axioms to a sequence of well formed formulas.
So a voice encoding algorithm (speex and the like) would not be patentable per se. But if it were to be used in a mobile phone to save power then it might be patentable, see the UK Manual of Patent Practice at Section 1.17:
If I understand you right, mathematical inventions can't be patented but actually *using* a mathematical invention for a particular purpose is patentable? Shouldn't that just fall under copyright for a circuit design or particular piece of software? If someone can get a patent on "using a specific compression algorithm to save power", but they can't get a patent on the specific compression algorithm, then what use is their patent? Does it also prevent the use of other compression algorithms to save power?