> The entity would then be permitting evil to occur despite having the power to prevent it.
Preventing it would lead to injustice./mode maxwell_smart on The old "let's change rules halfway the game as we're winning" trick./mode maxwell_smart off
An universe without a god is always fair: what happens is the result of some kind of rules the universe is stuck with (for whatever reason, it's irrelevant), evil and good being only rationalizations of some living species.
When the christian God idea enters the picture, it says justice will be made, but in one particular moment, the judgment.
Which adds to the inherent fairness of the universe, if such god exists (which is not the objective of my criticism)
Blaming god or consider the concept impossible for lack of intervention to stop evil makes two logical mistakes:
1) Continuous justice as the only form of justice, instead of the justice at the end which also settles things. See the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13).
2) Asking god for injustice: If you want continuous justice from a god you want an universe that is either inconceivable, or hasn't life in it, because life is not a continuously just process (heck natural selection or, in intelligent design wacky theories, the race for the faster sperm cell to the egg are deeply unjust, the other sperm cells didn't choose to be slower, poor 'em). Or it's asking a god to maintain a threshold by which it's ok for unjust events to lead to the creation of you, and it's not ok to see you suffer. Changing the rules halfway the game, as I said.
OT Another thing i don't usually get: "the christian god is omnipotent and fair" doesn't constitute proof of the existence of god. It's theology, that is, it assumes god has revealed itself and proceeds to try and rationalize things about it. What implication does trying to disprove the fair assertion have? You don't disprove god through it, you just assert you have a different opinion of the universe than a possibly existing god. Which is independent of the existence of him. Yet many atheists go to great lengths to build on such arguments.
> I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery.
YMMV, as a RAD tool running a vertical app with a mostly normalized postgresql db which was created for the task, it delivered a lot to me.
Of course the article submitter chooses mysql and website building as a task and the stupid comparison of a language vs. frameworks (no matter how powerful the library of the language, working with a framework is a different matter altogether, with pro and cons). So essentially I'm OT. But your generalization was wrong, so there.
I Spent almost more time playing with the admin interface out of fun than coding it: plugin used is this. PHP equivalents welcome for a comparison, I never looked for any.
To people complaining about performance: hey didn't you see the logs of your helloworld rails app? requests per second are there. Rails is slow but you discover it after 2 days, not a month. Give it up if rails features are useless to you or use a faster webserver (lighttpd, nginx all under *nix of course), make custom SQL queries instead of iterating with ruby over AR objects and relations (like you're likely to do when quickly prototyping), cache stuff if your app has lots of reads, experiment with ruby 1.9 which is going to boost performance.
> I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load.
Slow down to a crawl, yes, crash I honestly don't recall. I have great uptime on lighttpd and rails.
> I disagree. The machines used in designing CPUs have no intelligence whatsoever. They're just running programs...
What if our intelligence is a running program too? a genetic algorithm on organic hardware and massively parallel, but a program nonetheless:)
Anyway point taken, the machines used in designing CPUs are just tools under control of the engineers. The analogy would fit if the process of designing CPUs involved a completely automated process where optimizations are thought up by machines, simulated by machines, prototyped by machines and those prototypes used to compute better optimizations. What i said about assumptions next iteration can be achieved still holds, I guess.
If you subscribe to a mechanical view of the universe, emotions are simply interprocess communication. One part of the brain detect a situation that has been naturally selected as positive (i.e. an opportunity to procreate) and send the emotion 'lust' to another part of the brain that we might call conscience.
If you subscribe to a spiritual view of the universe, you need to have that intelligence coupled with a spiritual dimension somehow (who knows it might be automatic)
So saying a super intelligent machine will get emotions is an assumption. I may have misunderstood you and Kurzweil et al on this issue.
As for singularity, it kind of already happens now with machine helping human design CPUs, optimizing layout, encoding functions in circuits... That makes us achieve more powerful results. But there are physical limits and postulating that the intelligence achieved in previous steps is able to beat the limits that separate us from the next iteration is another assumption.
Anyway, nothing wrong in trying. Get rid of patents and corporate interests if you wanna succeed, maybe.
Ummmm "...for dust you are and to dust you will return" kinda says the experiment can succeed. We just need to know if the "breath of life" is built-in or requires a syscall by root.
Yep. IMHO the universe "smells of" implementation. That is, it's easier to think about it as an implementation of some ideas (which does not necessarily imply Intelligent Design). Those ideas could well cause the phenomenon that entangled electrons don't care about the speed of light. It has the same dignity of the phenomenon that light travels at c.
The "rules" of nature may lead to a perfect mechanical system (even with incomputable formulas behind it). Or they may lead to a meaningless crock of conflicting half-assed rules which we can examine only on a statistical basis, if ever. The problem is, scientists are used to the first idea as a solution, and won't be happy until they have rationalized the second one into the first, until the next problem send them back to square one with a deeper riddle to solve. But that's basically assuming that the model of the universe that has worked for them so far should continue to be used. It's a very reasonable assumption that gave us knowledge till now, with peculiar achievements like the simplicity of E=mc^2, but it's still an assumption.
And another no-conspiracies theorist whose only weapon is an ipse dixit applied unto himself.
Like WMDs were used by saddam, lotsa uranium from niger, eh? Conspiracy theorist were right that time, and it's the same administration who lied once. What are your guarantees that it couldn't happen again when it would involve massive head rolling at the pentagon and white house? Grow up and doubt the government, and the money, always.
LOL Integration? Apple has a far more integrated system than MS (third party apps unless they are a port show also a good degree of integration) and way less headaches. MS stuff doesn't even agree on keyboard shortcuts and widgets look (at least on XP with old-look windows appearing sometimes, which says a lot of the poor design that must be behind it) Why? because integration is relevant for the user only at UI level. So an integrated system can be modular nonetheless.
Well this is probably accurate except for military deployments, which will quietly advance in space, undersea, wherever. If USA has not enough funds somebody else probably will fill up the void.
So till now human leave junk arms and probes in space. I'm afraid quantities are in that same order.
>>My argument is that community-supported Free & Open Source Software solutions a superior IDE make.
>Thats not an argument, thats a statement. So far you've presented nothing to back it up.
There is eclipse for C#- where is visual studio for Java? Java, not "transitional-crippled-J#-which-will-cease-existin g-when-enough-C#-coders-are-around".
Why is this a good example and not a simple feature war? because it shows that no matter how many pounds the gorilla selling you proprietary dev tools, the feature set will always be modeled after what the seller wants. If I spend money for a dev environment that took time to support J# and doesn't do the small but useful step of supporting java, I'm sure going to feel crippled.
"Linux is theft" is a rationalization of a silly summary. Let's RTFB:
> Proponents of the GPL defend their license for enforcing that their code can always be shared.
True. Always be shared does not mean "shared under whatever condition", in particular BSD. It means the code can always be shared under the GPL.
> However in the current debate the GPL is being added to BSD-licensed code, thereby preventing it from being shared back with the original authors of the code.
True, except for the "however". GPL (trying to) guarantee that code can always be shared implies it can't be kept under BSD. If I make a trivial modification (adding an exception handler) on BSD code, and claim copyright or enforce apatent on that modification i prevent contributors to do the same on the free branch, don't I?
Nothing wrong with having accounts in a swiss bank, if you have your own state. Evade taxes becomes meaningless.
Of course this is just a technicality. They could evade taxes in the rest of the world so the money could be dirty nonetheless.
The upper church would be better off with little money. Like the lower church (that is, people). Do like a charitable enterprise. No profit, tax exemptions.
After the sex scandals what the Pope says always sounds funny. A big internal cleanup would be in order.
OTOH it's somewhat strange to hear Popes talk about big corporations. I am used to a Church speaking in the small and doing things in the large. Now it speaks in the large while probably hypocritically.
> Bush touts the media as having a liberal bias. In reality the media is strongly conservative.
Well if a system manages to divide itself in two or more factions opposing each other, whatever faction you choose the system can't lose. I guess there is powerful and intelligent enough people to have thought up this one long ago.
> If you were paying attention, you'd know that MS did follow the standards.
I don't need to be paying attention to the same old story. If it were linux fault and not a quirk I deduce that linux would be fixed and admins wouldn't lock people out the network without profound excuses. It's not the case and I don't need to RTFA on news like this.
Besides for what i gather from the thread that way of following standards is the same way of respecting the RFC directive grandparent cited.
And you think the spirit of that directive was allowing a big vendor to leverage his market share to have the last word over any standards?
I'd say that it has something to do with allowing the standard to be extended in the less painful way if it has to, *to better serve the purpose of the friggin' internet* which is NOT to make monopolists more money.
Do you think MS is not able to follow the standards? Do you think that this quirk will be the last, and that MS would never use the acceptance of a quirk to build upon it even more incompatible stuff so that their software is always first and all the others must chase? Do you think that there's no danger of a patent in every quirk?
I can only shudder if I think how much time and money and frustration the fragmentation of internet standards cost people. I hope it gets a thing of the past, which won't happen if people are content to play with RFC citations instead of looking at the big picture.
Slashdot Mirror
> The entity would then be permitting evil to occur despite having the power to prevent it.
/mode maxwell_smart on /mode maxwell_smart off
Preventing it would lead to injustice.
The old "let's change rules halfway the game as we're winning" trick.
An universe without a god is always fair: what happens is the result of some kind of rules the universe is stuck with (for whatever reason, it's irrelevant), evil and good being only rationalizations of some living species.
When the christian God idea enters the picture, it says justice will be made, but in one particular moment, the judgment.
Which adds to the inherent fairness of the universe, if such god exists (which is not the objective of my criticism)
Blaming god or consider the concept impossible for lack of intervention to stop evil makes two logical mistakes:
1) Continuous justice as the only form of justice, instead of the justice at the end which also settles things. See the parable of the weeds (Matthew 13).
2) Asking god for injustice: If you want continuous justice from a god you want an universe that is either inconceivable, or hasn't life in it, because life is not a continuously just process (heck natural selection or, in intelligent design wacky theories, the race for the faster sperm cell to the egg are deeply unjust, the other sperm cells didn't choose to be slower, poor 'em). Or it's asking a god to maintain a threshold by which it's ok for unjust events to lead to the creation of you, and it's not ok to see you suffer. Changing the rules halfway the game, as I said.
OT Another thing i don't usually get: "the christian god is omnipotent and fair" doesn't constitute proof of the existence of god. It's theology, that is, it assumes god has revealed itself and proceeds to try and rationalize things about it. What implication does trying to disprove the fair assertion have? You don't disprove god through it, you just assert you have a different opinion of the universe than a possibly existing god. Which is independent of the existence of him. Yet many atheists go to great lengths to build on such arguments.
Stupid submit button.
Correct link:
here
> I've never used Ruby or RoR, but my impression of it seems to be one of great expectations and not a lot of delivery.
YMMV, as a RAD tool running a vertical app with a mostly normalized postgresql db which was created for the task, it delivered a lot to me.
Of course the article submitter chooses mysql and website building as a task and the stupid comparison of a language vs. frameworks (no matter how powerful the library of the language, working with a framework is a different matter altogether, with pro and cons). So essentially I'm OT. But your generalization was wrong, so there.
I Spent almost more time playing with the admin interface out of fun than coding it: plugin used is this. PHP equivalents welcome for a comparison, I never looked for any.
To people complaining about performance: hey didn't you see the logs of your helloworld rails app? requests per second are there. Rails is slow but you discover it after 2 days, not a month. Give it up if rails features are useless to you or use a faster webserver (lighttpd, nginx all under *nix of course), make custom SQL queries instead of iterating with ruby over AR objects and relations (like you're likely to do when quickly prototyping), cache stuff if your app has lots of reads, experiment with ruby 1.9 which is going to boost performance.
> I've read way too many blogs by people who built web sites with RoR only to have them crash and burn under load.
Slow down to a crawl, yes, crash I honestly don't recall. I have great uptime on lighttpd and rails.
> Be tolerant of different-colored parrots, it's what Alex would have wanted.
Sad. I didn't know colors mattered, too.
I thought all the fuss was about african vs. european ones.
>He tried to mate with my arm...
This is slashdot. Everybody here uses own arm to try to "mate".
Nevermind, read TFA and TFcomments, some interesting story about nuts, really.
> I disagree. The machines used in designing CPUs have no intelligence whatsoever. They're just running programs...
:)
What if our intelligence is a running program too? a genetic algorithm on organic hardware and massively parallel, but a program nonetheless
Anyway point taken, the machines used in designing CPUs are just tools under control of the engineers. The analogy would fit if the process of designing CPUs involved a completely automated process where optimizations are thought up by machines, simulated by machines, prototyped by machines and those prototypes used to compute better optimizations. What i said about assumptions next iteration can be achieved still holds, I guess.
If you subscribe to a mechanical view of the universe, emotions are simply interprocess communication. One part of the brain detect a situation that has been naturally selected as positive (i.e. an opportunity to procreate) and send the emotion 'lust' to another part of the brain that we might call conscience.
If you subscribe to a spiritual view of the universe, you need to have that intelligence coupled with a spiritual dimension somehow (who knows it might be automatic)
So saying a super intelligent machine will get emotions is an assumption. I may have misunderstood you and Kurzweil et al on this issue.
As for singularity, it kind of already happens now with machine helping human design CPUs, optimizing layout, encoding functions in circuits... That makes us achieve more powerful results. But there are physical limits and postulating that the intelligence achieved in previous steps is able to beat the limits that separate us from the next iteration is another assumption.
Anyway, nothing wrong in trying. Get rid of patents and corporate interests if you wanna succeed, maybe.
> Or at least, are there any theories?
:P]
Ummmm "...for dust you are and to dust you will return" kinda says the experiment can succeed. We just need to know if the "breath of life" is built-in or requires a syscall by root.
[Hey you didn't specify SCIENTIFIC theories
Yep. IMHO the universe "smells of" implementation. That is, it's easier to think about it as an implementation of some ideas (which does not necessarily imply Intelligent Design). Those ideas could well cause the phenomenon that entangled electrons don't care about the speed of light. It has the same dignity of the phenomenon that light travels at c.
The "rules" of nature may lead to a perfect mechanical system (even with incomputable formulas behind it). Or they may lead to a meaningless crock of conflicting half-assed rules which we can examine only on a statistical basis, if ever. The problem is, scientists are used to the first idea as a solution, and won't be happy until they have rationalized the second one into the first, until the next problem send them back to square one with a deeper riddle to solve. But that's basically assuming that the model of the universe that has worked for them so far should continue to be used. It's a very reasonable assumption that gave us knowledge till now, with peculiar achievements like the simplicity of E=mc^2, but it's still an assumption.
What about a 3d desktop? Even if I've disabled most effects, some compiz features are actually useful, not to mention the cool factor.
And what about the casual gamer? I play some billards 3D every now and then, for instance.
Welcome back, ati. Sorry I already bought a laptop with intel graphics but i really hadn't got much choice, did I?
Still mad at me for the way I designed your little wee-wee, are you?
And another no-conspiracies theorist whose only weapon is an ipse dixit applied unto himself.
Like WMDs were used by saddam, lotsa uranium from niger, eh? Conspiracy theorist were right that time, and it's the same administration who lied once. What are your guarantees that it couldn't happen again when it would involve massive head rolling at the pentagon and white house? Grow up and doubt the government, and the money, always.
LOL Integration? Apple has a far more integrated system than MS (third party apps unless they are a port show also a good degree of integration) and way less headaches. MS stuff doesn't even agree on keyboard shortcuts and widgets look (at least on XP with old-look windows appearing sometimes, which says a lot of the poor design that must be behind it)
Why? because integration is relevant for the user only at UI level. So an integrated system can be modular nonetheless.
Historically, when it comes to Microsoft, FUD is not the right term.
I'd go for FMT:
Fear, Materialization, Told you so.
Thanks god the bomber in question did not do any test firing.
:D
Yep, it's too early to blame the explosion on Iran
> Nope, it's in engineering. We're taught to despise Marketing folk. :-D
Sigh engineering is a superior school. Poor Information Technology students learn to despise marketing folks all by themselves.
Well this is probably accurate except for military deployments, which will quietly advance in space, undersea, wherever. If USA has not enough funds somebody else probably will fill up the void.
So till now human leave junk arms and probes in space. I'm afraid quantities are in that same order.
>>My argument is that community-supported Free & Open Source Software solutions a superior IDE make.
n g-when-enough-C#-coders-are-around".
>Thats not an argument, thats a statement. So far you've presented nothing to back it up.
There is eclipse for C#- where is visual studio for Java? Java, not "transitional-crippled-J#-which-will-cease-existi
Why is this a good example and not a simple feature war? because it shows that no matter how many pounds the gorilla selling you proprietary dev tools, the feature set will always be modeled after what the seller wants. If I spend money for a dev environment that took time to support J# and doesn't do the small but useful step of supporting java, I'm sure going to feel crippled.
You mean the chair thrower has become chairman?
It figures.
Exit, sherds of broken WGA server cases under my feets, stage left.
"Linux is theft" is a rationalization of a silly summary. Let's RTFB:
> Proponents of the GPL defend their license for enforcing that their code can always be shared.
True. Always be shared does not mean "shared under whatever condition", in particular BSD. It means the code can always be shared under the GPL.
> However in the current debate the GPL is being added to BSD-licensed code, thereby preventing it from being shared back with the original authors of the code.
True, except for the "however". GPL (trying to) guarantee that code can always be shared implies it can't be kept under BSD. If I make a trivial modification (adding an exception handler) on BSD code, and claim copyright or enforce apatent on that modification i prevent contributors to do the same on the free branch, don't I?
Nothing wrong with having accounts in a swiss bank, if you have your own state. Evade taxes becomes meaningless.
Of course this is just a technicality. They could evade taxes in the rest of the world so the money could be dirty nonetheless.
The upper church would be better off with little money. Like the lower church (that is, people). Do like a charitable enterprise. No profit, tax exemptions.
After the sex scandals what the Pope says always sounds funny. A big internal cleanup would be in order.
OTOH it's somewhat strange to hear Popes talk about big corporations.
I am used to a Church speaking in the small and doing things in the large. Now it speaks in the large while probably hypocritically.
> Bush touts the media as having a liberal bias. In reality the media is strongly conservative.
Well if a system manages to divide itself in two or more factions opposing each other, whatever faction you choose the system can't lose. I guess there is powerful and intelligent enough people to have thought up this one long ago.
> If you were paying attention, you'd know that MS did follow the standards.
I don't need to be paying attention to the same old story. If it were linux fault and not a quirk I deduce that linux would be fixed and admins wouldn't lock people out the network without profound excuses. It's not the case and I don't need to RTFA on news like this.
Besides for what i gather from the thread that way of following standards is the same way of respecting the RFC directive grandparent cited.
"Penis envy? Well, if you can design a space probe with your penis..."
The penis probes space already.
And you think the spirit of that directive was allowing a big vendor to leverage his market share to have the last word over any standards?
I'd say that it has something to do with allowing the standard to be extended in the less painful way if it has to, *to better serve the purpose of the friggin' internet* which is NOT to make monopolists more money.
Do you think MS is not able to follow the standards? Do you think that this quirk will be the last, and that MS would never use the acceptance of a quirk to build upon it even more incompatible stuff so that their software is always first and all the others must chase? Do you think that there's no danger of a patent in every quirk?
I can only shudder if I think how much time and money and frustration the fragmentation of internet standards cost people. I hope it gets a thing of the past, which won't happen if people are content to play with RFC citations instead of looking at the big picture.