Not to nitpick, but I fail to see a factor that logically differentiates the notions of a God that "just is" and a universe that "just is." Of course I realize you're simplifying here. But absent other considerations, I see those two statements as possessing entirely equivalent justification (or lack thereof, depending on your inclination =).
if i read the GPP correctly, his attitude (with which i have a certain amount of sympathy) is that you are right. the two statements have an equivalent (lack of) justification. therefore he feels able to choose to accept the existence of the universe, and not the existence of God, based on other factors, than that of being able to decide whether or not one or the other exists..
we are not able to fully determine the existence or otherwise of God etc. since we can't derive everything absolutely from first principles, at some point we simply have to choose what to believe. therefore it's better to make this step consciously, which is what the OP did. these are kind of the basis of (atheistic or otherwise) existentialism.
It seems like everyone has made this point to me (using trees for data organization in the real world), so I'll try and reply to it here.
A few points concerning the validity of this comparison: Firstly, one or two levels of nesting are normal in the real world. 3 levels are rare. Secondly, the 'tree' in this case is just an abstraction - you don't need to understand a hierarchical structure to find your file in the filing cabinet, you just need to understand the mechanics of everyday objects, and see that the piece of paper stays where you put it. There is no way of understanding where your electronic file is, w/o navigating the hierarchy. Thirdly, the metaphor breaks down in many ways for books and filing cabinets. You can't take the third drawer of the filing cabinet and place it inside the second folder of the top drawer. Nor can one usually take all the 'meat' chapters of various cookery books and bind them into a new book.
A book does not have a treelike structure. A book has a linear structure. Adding a list of contents and an index does not alter or hide this linear organization.
I would venture that no cookery book has four levels of section nesting, and very few have three levels. Most in fact have one level.
But the linearity is still there. Why do you think that anecdotal mom wrote everything as part of one long document? Because it was a form of organization she was intuitively familiar with, a linear list of pages, with coherent sections being made up of one or more pages in a row.
This is from a story in the Guardian by a computer salesman complaining about his customers
One evening, I sent away a smiling lady with a new PC, assuring her that it would work with her existing monitor. It did. Later in the week she returned red-faced, her ears spouting steam. She'd lost all her files.
"I thought they stayed in the screen!" she screamed
>People have been using hierarchical paper files for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Paper files are not kept within folders within folders within folders. One or two levels of hierarchy are normal, more is rare, if you discount 'organizational' separation, such as 'A-G', 'H-S' and 'T-Z', which are dealt with separately in computer based filing systems. I'm talking here about the files the average person has in their own office at work or at home, not what you might deal with if you work (as a specialist) in a data archive or similar, of a large organization.
>There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program.
>They do not enjoy figuring things out.
These two lines give away what I dislike and disagree with in the attitude of you and many people like you, including a lot of the people I would blame for bad interface and software organization.
>There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program.
Yes, good for them. These people are more interested in getting on with whatever their job actually is, then in 'exploring' their computers to find out where everything is. Stop trying to make everyone think like you, and instead focus your skills on making it easier for people to do what they do want to do.
>Last, and most important UNDERSTAND THE FILESYSTEM. I've gotten my parents quite good at day-to-day use of the computer. It has taken YEARS.
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
It's great that files exist, and in *nix-likes are the basis for everything, sure. But the user doesn't need to see these pesky files anymore, they are just confusing him. He should know be one level of abstraction up - working with something we could call a 'document', for want of a better term. He doesn't need to know if his webpage consists of multiple files. It's just a document. If he has the same piece of content in multiple formats, he doesn't need to know that either. It's just a document. He should be able to preserve multiple versions restore points of his document, w/o worrying about having different files with different names. It's just a document.
Fact: most techies understand treelike structures well, and did even before hierarchical filesystems became common currency. For obvious reasons.
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
MS realized as far back as W95 that the filesystem hierarchy wasn't particularly intuitive to the average member of the W95 target market. Rather than do something revolutionary and innovative which would have made everyone's lives easier the last 10 years, they mucked around with it a little bit, made some cosmetic changes, tried to please both the new people and the experienced people, and ended up fixing not much, and breaking things which were at least consistent in DOS.
My dad figured out that since he had 2 versions of the folder 'My Documents', one contained in My Computer, and one not (on the desktop), one was storing his files locally, and the other was storing them somewhere else, not on his computer. He even renamed the folder in the C: drive "My documents here" so he could tell them apart. (on winME btw)
This isn't an obligatory MS-bash. IMHO, it's a lot more shocking that no linux distro/desktop manager, has tried to sort this out. They are the ones that have the opportunity to make fairly sweeping changes. Linux users would catch on fast, appreciate an elegant solution, and still be competent to see 'behind the scenes' to the actual filesystem if desired. The same goes for Apple to some extent, and for some slightly different reasons. MS themselves have their hands much more tied as to what they could change, now that everyone has 10 yrs experience of Windows doing it the dumb way.
In a previous slashdot story about similar stuff, someone said that their mom used a single word document to type everything, and printed out the relevant pages each time.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
* to all the older slashdot users, computer able seniors, and slashdotters with techie parents, sorry to make generalizations but they are broadly true..
well i pointed out the two are different because i think there is an important ethical difference between pretending you wrote something, and just not bothering to credit the person who did write it. i don;t see that much real plagiarism on the blogosphere - but a lot of people endlessly requoting and resampling the same traditional media / high-profile website article taken from each other's blogs.
not giving you a proper source makes it impossible for you to judge the validity of the text. it's really just a bad intellectual practise.
passing work off as your own i would consider as much more unethical.
obviously if you present smth as your own work, you don't credit the real author, but you could make it clear something is a quotation, eg using quote marks, blockquote tags or other formatting, w/o giving the original author due credit. this includes bothering to find out who the actual author is, not just referencing the source you cribbed it from.
hmm. my suggestion is very simple: don't buy any hardware which isn't linux compatible. ever. check the status of linux drivers on every piece of hardware you buy, and don't buy unless drivers are stable and manufacturers are friedly. oh but you reelly, reelly need that pda? no. people need food and water, noone needs a smartphone or a digital camera. only buying from linux friendly companies would allow the people who do develop linux drivers to focus their efforts on those products they actually have a hope in hell's chance of making working drivers for. (yes, i know that for some people the thrill is in reverse engineering chipsets that manufacturers won;t release details of. but my feeling is these people are exactly the ones who don't offer very user-friendly support) donate to the projects developing drivers you use. if every linux user factored a $5 donation into the cost of each $100-200 gadget, a lot of developers would have considerably more time and freedom to build and support drivers. contact manufacturers and explain exactly why you won;t buy their hardware. 'early adopters' and technical people are disproportionately important to hardware manufacturers for lots of reasons. to lots of companies the goodwill of the geek community means word-of-mouth publicity money can't buy. they need to know that not releasing specs/GPL drivers is the deal-breaker for some of these people.
Every single person to totally ignore the parameters of the question, and recommend switching to Linux, has recommended Ubuntu. This suggests to me that Ubuntu users are exactly the bunch of deluded self-righteous World-domination freaks I have always assumed them to be.
1. If this guy wanted to hear about how Linux was less susceptible to virii than XP, he needn't of posted his own askslashdot question, he could have just read any frontpage story about Windows, Linux, or malware in general.
2. What you freaks fail to understand is that the goals of the free software movement won't be met by everyone using Linux as their desktop OS. They will be met by every computer user having a genuine choice as to the software he runs.
3. It seems to me most Linux users' desire to 'liberate' the Windows machines of all the Joe Users out there, is actually motivated by nothing else than the selfish desire to have workable drivers for all the shiny new gadgets you buy each month. Why don't you do something about the driver issues yourselves and stop trolling the world?
Making multiple DNS requests is not a violent act. It's the electronic equivalent of following you around in the street repeatedly asking "What's the frequency, Kenneth?". I could be done for harassment, but not for assault.
The kernel source may have open; OP is referring to the fact that the whole PS2 Linux setup basically ran on an emulation layer between the OS and the 'bare metal'. Using closed drivers.
He is absolutely right to say that it was crippled and didn't allow access to the hardware.
>I know that this type of polynomial has certain properties such as a real root and smoothness... >"Let f' be the derivative of f.", and f' will be another polynomial (of even degree) and it exists because f is smooth.
Good luck finding a polynomial that isn't smooth. Or did you know there's a theorem out there that allows you to differentiate an arbitrary(!) polynomial?
>That's why the UK is extraditing him -- they have a reciprocal extradition treaty.
No, they have an almost unprecedented asymmetric extradition treaty.
The Extradition Act 2003 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom. Among its provisions, it removes the requirement on the US to provide prima facie evidence when requesting the extradition of people from the UK, but maintains the requirement on the UK to provide such evidence to the US in the reverse situation.
This is the reason for the opposition to Gary's extradition, and that of the NatWest Three, and so on. The UK basically handed a huge chunk of sovereignty right over to the Americans, basically saying "If you want a British citizen, you can have him bound hand and foot."
there is a crime of trespass in England. You might be thinking of Scotland, a country to the north of England, where there is no law of trespass, only crimes of breaking and entering, criminal damage, etc..
he denounced similar iniatives, early precursors of the internet, that the soviet union put into place after 1917, in his post-humously published 'der Grundrisse' [wikipedia.org].
my guess is you do have a teensy little chip on your shoulder about the extreme left, prolly because you used to be one of them..
Slashdot Mirror
it is the theory that intelligence and consciousness are nothing more than an instance of a algorithm, which is or could be hardware-independent.
but thanks for your input. it's good that ignorant people get to have their say too.
if i read the GPP correctly, his attitude (with which i have a certain amount of sympathy) is that you are right. the two statements have an equivalent (lack of) justification. therefore he feels able to choose to accept the existence of the universe, and not the existence of God, based on other factors, than that of being able to decide whether or not one or the other exists..
we are not able to fully determine the existence or otherwise of God etc. since we can't derive everything absolutely from first principles, at some point we simply have to choose what to believe. therefore it's better to make this step consciously, which is what the OP did. these are kind of the basis of (atheistic or otherwise) existentialism.
you forgot "rigerous".
you sound like a highly obsessive spelling nazi, so don't ruin it by only jumping on the first and most obvious misspelling.
Yes, and there couldn't be any explanation of why the average ping of one team is slightly lower than that of the other team, could there?
Like say, you are on a team with other guys from your high school and one of you is hosting, and the other team are from further away?
It seems like everyone has made this point to me (using trees for data organization in the real world), so I'll try and reply to it here.
A few points concerning the validity of this comparison: Firstly, one or two levels of nesting are normal in the real world. 3 levels are rare. Secondly, the 'tree' in this case is just an abstraction - you don't need to understand a hierarchical structure to find your file in the filing cabinet, you just need to understand the mechanics of everyday objects, and see that the piece of paper stays where you put it. There is no way of understanding where your electronic file is, w/o navigating the hierarchy. Thirdly, the metaphor breaks down in many ways for books and filing cabinets. You can't take the third drawer of the filing cabinet and place it inside the second folder of the top drawer. Nor can one usually take all the 'meat' chapters of various cookery books and bind them into a new book.
A book does not have a treelike structure. A book has a linear structure. Adding a list of contents and an index does not alter or hide this linear organization.
I would venture that no cookery book has four levels of section nesting, and very few have three levels. Most in fact have one level.
But the linearity is still there. Why do you think that anecdotal mom wrote everything as part of one long document? Because it was a form of organization she was intuitively familiar with, a linear list of pages, with coherent sections being made up of one or more pages in a row.
This is from a story in the Guardian by a computer salesman complaining about his customers
http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/computers/story/0,
>People have been using hierarchical paper files for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Paper files are not kept within folders within folders within folders. One or two levels of hierarchy are normal, more is rare, if you discount 'organizational' separation, such as 'A-G', 'H-S' and 'T-Z', which are dealt with separately in computer based filing systems. I'm talking here about the files the average person has in their own office at work or at home, not what you might deal with if you work (as a specialist) in a data archive or similar, of a large organization.
>There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program.
>They do not enjoy figuring things out.
These two lines give away what I dislike and disagree with in the attitude of you and many people like you, including a lot of the people I would blame for bad interface and software organization.
>There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program.
Yes, good for them. These people are more interested in getting on with whatever their job actually is, then in 'exploring' their computers to find out where everything is. Stop trying to make everyone think like you, and instead focus your skills on making it easier for people to do what they do want to do.
>Last, and most important UNDERSTAND THE FILESYSTEM. I've gotten my parents quite good at day-to-day use of the computer. It has taken YEARS.
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing
THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN
Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
It's great that files exist, and in *nix-likes are the basis for everything, sure. But the user doesn't need to see these pesky files anymore, they are just confusing him. He should know be one level of abstraction up - working with something we could call a 'document', for want of a better term. He doesn't need to know if his webpage consists of multiple files. It's just a document. If he has the same piece of content in multiple formats, he doesn't need to know that either. It's just a document. He should be able to preserve multiple versions restore points of his document, w/o worrying about having different files with different names. It's just a document.
Fact: most techies understand treelike structures well, and did even before hierarchical filesystems became common currency. For obvious reasons.
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
MS realized as far back as W95 that the filesystem hierarchy wasn't particularly intuitive to the average member of the W95 target market. Rather than do something revolutionary and innovative which would have made everyone's lives easier the last 10 years, they mucked around with it a little bit, made some cosmetic changes, tried to please both the new people and the experienced people, and ended up fixing not much, and breaking things which were at least consistent in DOS.
My dad figured out that since he had 2 versions of the folder 'My Documents', one contained in My Computer, and one not (on the desktop), one was storing his files locally, and the other was storing them somewhere else, not on his computer. He even renamed the folder in the C: drive "My documents here" so he could tell them apart. (on winME btw)
This isn't an obligatory MS-bash. IMHO, it's a lot more shocking that no linux distro/desktop manager, has tried to sort this out. They are the ones that have the opportunity to make fairly sweeping changes. Linux users would catch on fast, appreciate an elegant solution, and still be competent to see 'behind the scenes' to the actual filesystem if desired. The same goes for Apple to some extent, and for some slightly different reasons. MS themselves have their hands much more tied as to what they could change, now that everyone has 10 yrs experience of Windows doing it the dumb way.
In a previous slashdot story about similar stuff, someone said that their mom used a single word document to type everything, and printed out the relevant pages each time.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
* to all the older slashdot users, computer able seniors, and slashdotters with techie parents, sorry to make generalizations but they are broadly true..
well i pointed out the two are different because i think there is an important ethical difference between pretending you wrote something, and just not bothering to credit the person who did write it. i don;t see that much real plagiarism on the blogosphere - but a lot of people endlessly requoting and resampling the same traditional media / high-profile website article taken from each other's blogs.
not giving you a proper source makes it impossible for you to judge the validity of the text. it's really just a bad intellectual practise.
passing work off as your own i would consider as much more unethical.
these two are not the same thing
obviously if you present smth as your own work, you don't credit the real author, but you could make it clear something is a quotation, eg using quote marks, blockquote tags or other formatting, w/o giving the original author due credit. this includes bothering to find out who the actual author is, not just referencing the source you cribbed it from.
what link?
hmm. my suggestion is very simple:
don't buy any hardware which isn't linux compatible. ever. check the status of linux drivers on every piece of hardware you buy, and don't buy unless drivers are stable and manufacturers are friedly. oh but you reelly, reelly need that pda? no. people need food and water, noone needs a smartphone or a digital camera.
only buying from linux friendly companies would allow the people who do develop linux drivers to focus their efforts on those products they actually have a hope in hell's chance of making working drivers for. (yes, i know that for some people the thrill is in reverse engineering chipsets that manufacturers won;t release details of. but my feeling is these people are exactly the ones who don't offer very user-friendly support)
donate to the projects developing drivers you use. if every linux user factored a $5 donation into the cost of each $100-200 gadget, a lot of developers would have considerably more time and freedom to build and support drivers.
contact manufacturers and explain exactly why you won;t buy their hardware. 'early adopters' and technical people are disproportionately important to hardware manufacturers for lots of reasons. to lots of companies the goodwill of the geek community means word-of-mouth publicity money can't buy. they need to know that not releasing specs/GPL drivers is the deal-breaker for some of these people.
man, google and irc.
Every single person to totally ignore the parameters of the question, and recommend switching to Linux, has recommended Ubuntu. This suggests to me that Ubuntu users are exactly the bunch of deluded self-righteous World-domination freaks I have always assumed them to be.
1. If this guy wanted to hear about how Linux was less susceptible to virii than XP, he needn't of posted his own askslashdot question, he could have just read any frontpage story about Windows, Linux, or malware in general.
2. What you freaks fail to understand is that the goals of the free software movement won't be met by everyone using Linux as their desktop OS. They will be met by every computer user having a genuine choice as to the software he runs.
3. It seems to me most Linux users' desire to 'liberate' the Windows machines of all the Joe Users out there, is actually motivated by nothing else than the selfish desire to have workable drivers for all the shiny new gadgets you buy each month. Why don't you do something about the driver issues yourselves and stop trolling the world?
Making multiple DNS requests is not a violent act. It's the electronic equivalent of following you around in the street repeatedly asking "What's the frequency, Kenneth?". I could be done for harassment, but not for assault.
The kernel source may have open; OP is referring to the fact that the whole PS2 Linux setup basically ran on an emulation layer between the OS and the 'bare metal'. Using closed drivers.
He is absolutely right to say that it was crippled and didn't allow access to the hardware.
>Whether one country has to spin in circles, and the other dance up and down, the extradition treaties are reciprocal.
I support your use of magic mushrooms as part of your 'alternative lifestyle', but you're not actually supposed to smoke them.
>I know that this type of polynomial has certain properties such as a real root and smoothness ...
>"Let f' be the derivative of f.", and f' will be another polynomial (of even degree) and it exists because f is smooth.
Good luck finding a polynomial that isn't smooth. Or did you know there's a theorem out there that allows you to differentiate an arbitrary(!) polynomial?
No, they have an almost unprecedented asymmetric extradition treaty.
(Wikipedia)
This is the reason for the opposition to Gary's extradition, and that of the NatWest Three, and so on. The UK basically handed a huge chunk of sovereignty right over to the Americans, basically saying "If you want a British citizen, you can have him bound hand and foot."
there is a crime of trespass in England. You might be thinking of Scotland, a country to the north of England, where there is no law of trespass, only crimes of breaking and entering, criminal damage, etc..
and an E to 'changable'..
you should get a medal.
> Get back to me when there's more, many more, data points.
There you go
my guess is you do have a teensy little chip on your shoulder about the extreme left, prolly because you used to be one of them..
have a nice day.