Not really. Anyone who could solve a cube would find the rotated corner in a minute or two. My group of friends were into rubiks cubes a few years ago, and that trick got old fast.
My point was that they are as human as you are. They are capable of comprehending the outside world. I'm sure it would be a shock, but it's not up to you to decide that it's all to complicated for them.
They are people, simple ones, with simple lives - let them be. That is sickeningly arrogant. These are adult humans, not children, not animals to be protected. They can make their own decisions.
They're not a fucking endangered species of rat or something. They're PEOPLE. Give THEM the choice whether they want to learn about the outside world or not. You want to keep them "innocent" for your entertainment? If you're so fucking keen on innocence, YOU go live in the jungle.
Oh well sure, I guess some people are actually agnostic.
You're right I guess. There's no reason you can't hold the position that it's impossible to know one way or another whether there's a god. Or perhaps you don't care enough either way. I shouldn't have implied that everyone must pick a side about everything.
My point was that you can never be completely certain about anything - so once you're sufficiently certain of something, you might as well just stop mentioning that you're not 100% certain of it.
In my case, I realised that I considered the existence of god so unlikely that I was actually an atheist for all intents and purposes.
I used to identify myself as agnostic. But later I realized, there always comes a point where you have to draw a line, and pick a side.
By your definition, you should be agnostic about EVERYTHING. Maybe we're all living in a simulation, matrix-style. Maybe you're the only truely conscious being in the universe, and everyone else just seems conscious. After all, you have no real evidence that anyone else is actually thinking, because you can only perceive your own thoughts.
But such things are not useful to believe. EVERY belief relies on assumptions that we make. These assumptions might be as basic as believing that our senses are portraying accurate representations of reality. Perhaps aliens abducted me and put a chip in my brain which subtly alters what I see or hear.. but it's so unlikely, it's not worth considering.
If someone asked me if I believe whether the earth is round, I can say "yes", and I don't qualify it with "but I accept the infinitesimal chance that all the evidence I've seen is somehow incorrect". Similarly, if someone asks me whether I believe in God, I now say "no", without saying "but it's technically possible because the existence of a supernatural creature is not a falsifiable claim".
Nothing is 100% certain. But if I can say that I believe that the Earth is round, and I don't believe in invisible pink unicorns, then I can say that I don't believe in god.
We wrote on paper, then were able to reuse it at a later date. Sure, it wasn't as fancy as a printer, but the pencil and eraser sure worked well enough for me... So you erased entire sheets of paper with your pencil erasor, and reused them each 100 times?
... I don't get it. So peoples' reaction time was 500 milliseconds. Fingers don't move at the speed of light. How fast can you hit a button when I flash a light at you?
And I don't think tennis players wait for the ball to be hit before they "react".
Just because my decisions are "predetermined", in that my body (including my brain) is a normal physical system subject to the laws of physics, does not mean that I do not possess a consciousness. I think, therefore I am. If I had no free will, I do not believe I would *be*.
If God is omniscient, then he knows what I am about to do and everything I will do in my life. If he knows that, than I can't truly have free will. (Even if you try to weasel out that God decides to blind himself to my future, if it is knowable then its pre-ordained.) So unless you are willing to say God isn't omniscient, then there is no free will, kids. Even assuming an omniscient god exists, how do we know that the future is knowable? We must assume that even "all-powerful" beings cannot break the laws of logic - if they can there's no point us talking about them. Therefore, I assume that an omniscient being would know only all knowable things. And the future may not be knowable.. for all we know.
In any case, whether the future is pre-ordained does not affect our free will (IMO). If we could analyse the human brain so closely that we could tell what was going on, and predict what decision you were going to make - does that actually mean you didn't make a decision? No-one else made it for you. You still feel as if you made a decision. You think, therefore you are.
What I want to know is how complex organic molecules were formed into self-organising, self-replicating structures. Bigfoot is not the missing link. How we got to elemental material spewed out from a supernova to DNA, *that's* the missing link. For the answer, I recommend you read "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins. It's a very well written and interesting book which answers that exact question. I just finished it a couple of months ago.
There is no such thing as true randomness. You can't measure something without effecting it. Non-sequiteur. And there are plenty of sources of true random data.
Consciousness can effect randomness, as this Princeton page proves. Rubbish. Anyone can see that the global consciousness project is a load of crap. Spikes occur in random data. This is normal. All they are doing is looking for spikes that occur near what they consider "important" world events, and pointing at them saying "significant!".
1. Sort by file extension, drag-select all gifs, control-drag-select all jpgs. Drag the whole lot to your other folder. Hardly a nightmare.
2. Any of the many gui versions of diff.
3. Ok, I'll give you that one. There are gui tools to do such things, but it's a lot quicker with the commandline.
4. Well, VNC or RDP or similar would work fine.
5. See 3.
6. Sure. Same as 3 again.
7. That's not 'using the command-line' - that's 'writing a program'. You can write 20 lines of perl in a gui, and you'll have a nice ide with intellisense and code folding and all the trimmings (if that's what you're into).
I do use the commandline - mostly ping, tracert, i[pf]config, and a bit of grepping. But it's probably things that the "typical" end user wouldn't need to do. You certainly don't need to drop to a shell to copy files, for instance.
Depends on whether it's a wormhole type teleport, or the type where it vapourizes you then recreates you somewhere else. I'd use the former, but I wouldn't go near the latter.
Raycasting is basically 3d-esque rendering of a 2d map - one ray is cast for every column on screen. Raytracing is the true 3d version - one ray per pixel (plus reflection rays, shadow rays, etc.).
The point is, Raytracing is far more computationally expensive, and visually impressive, than raycasting.
Now, if God does not exist, what the worst that can happen? People are nicer to each other? And that is a waste of time? Think of the benefits if everyone adopted this simple moral code - 'Do not intentional harm to others.' Beyond that, it just differences in rituals, rites and traditions. No one would waste their corporeal existence on earth by being nicer to each other. Speaking as a nice atheist, I take issue with that assertion. Some of us are nice to other people out of empathy, not because we read in some book that we should be.
Anyway, 'believing' in something because the numbers work out to give you a higher expected return is, as someone further down pointed out more eloquently than I can, not really believing.
Functionally equivalent to taxing the parents of kids who do badly. I doubt that would go down very well.. Consider the poor families who already can't afford expensive books/equipment.
I taught myself to code on an Amstrad CPC 6128 (128k of ram in two 64k banks, z80a processor - so not exactly "embedded".. but optimization was important), but since then it's been VB, Java, and Delphi.
I'd love to get my teeth into something embedded. But what? Can anyone recommend a fun device to play with?
What would the virus do when we were all wiped out? It wouldn't be a very good strategy to kill all your food (or resources, or whatever we are to viruses). Lions don't eat all the gazelles, because they need to leave some food for later. A lion-gene for gazelle-genocide would not spread, because its carriers would tend to starve.
Closer to the topic, the CLI-using meme was able to spread prolifically when conditions suited (because there were plenty of CLIs and few to no GUIs available). Individuals who carried the meme were able to 'survive' to pass on the meme to others. However, when GUIs became widely available (MacOS etc), conditions changed. GUI-using meme carriers were more fit for the new conditions, and therefore they were more able to pass on their memes. CLI-using memes were less able to spread in the new conditions, as there were fewer CLIs available.
There are still niches available where CLIs are in use, so the CLI-meme still survives there, where it is still fittest.. but most of the UI world is now GUI territory.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Anyone who could solve a cube would find the rotated corner in a minute or two. My group of friends were into rubiks cubes a few years ago, and that trick got old fast.
They're not a fucking endangered species of rat or something.
They're PEOPLE. Give THEM the choice whether they want to learn about the outside world or not. You want to keep them "innocent" for your entertainment? If you're so fucking keen on innocence, YOU go live in the jungle.
Oh well sure, I guess some people are actually agnostic.
You're right I guess. There's no reason you can't hold the position that it's impossible to know one way or another whether there's a god. Or perhaps you don't care enough either way. I shouldn't have implied that everyone must pick a side about everything.
My point was that you can never be completely certain about anything - so once you're sufficiently certain of something, you might as well just stop mentioning that you're not 100% certain of it.
In my case, I realised that I considered the existence of god so unlikely that I was actually an atheist for all intents and purposes.
I used to identify myself as agnostic. But later I realized, there always comes a point where you have to draw a line, and pick a side.
By your definition, you should be agnostic about EVERYTHING. Maybe we're all living in a simulation, matrix-style. Maybe you're the only truely conscious being in the universe, and everyone else just seems conscious. After all, you have no real evidence that anyone else is actually thinking, because you can only perceive your own thoughts.
But such things are not useful to believe. EVERY belief relies on assumptions that we make. These assumptions might be as basic as believing that our senses are portraying accurate representations of reality. Perhaps aliens abducted me and put a chip in my brain which subtly alters what I see or hear.. but it's so unlikely, it's not worth considering.
If someone asked me if I believe whether the earth is round, I can say "yes", and I don't qualify it with "but I accept the infinitesimal chance that all the evidence I've seen is somehow incorrect". Similarly, if someone asks me whether I believe in God, I now say "no", without saying "but it's technically possible because the existence of a supernatural creature is not a falsifiable claim".
Nothing is 100% certain. But if I can say that I believe that the Earth is round, and I don't believe in invisible pink unicorns, then I can say that I don't believe in god.
Heh. Remember hufu? :(
A pity the official site is no longer up
I did! I was disappointed though, because the link is certainly work-safe :(
... I don't get it. So peoples' reaction time was 500 milliseconds. Fingers don't move at the speed of light. How fast can you hit a button when I flash a light at you?
And I don't think tennis players wait for the ball to be hit before they "react".
Determinism is compatible with free will.
Just because my decisions are "predetermined", in that my body (including my brain) is a normal physical system subject to the laws of physics, does not mean that I do not possess a consciousness. I think, therefore I am. If I had no free will, I do not believe I would *be*.
In any case, whether the future is pre-ordained does not affect our free will (IMO). If we could analyse the human brain so closely that we could tell what was going on, and predict what decision you were going to make - does that actually mean you didn't make a decision? No-one else made it for you. You still feel as if you made a decision. You think, therefore you are.
Disclaimer: IANAPhilosopher
RTFS dude. He didn't solve a cube, he proved that a cube can be solved from any starting position in 25 moves or less.
A *human* can solve a cube in seconds - it's not impressive for a computer to do it.
Well, that's hardly new..
Have software clickwrap licences even been tested in court yet?
Are you *sure* google would be bound to an agreement clicked-through by one of its employees? Sounds unlikely to me, but of course IANAL.
1. Sort by file extension, drag-select all gifs, control-drag-select all jpgs. Drag the whole lot to your other folder. Hardly a nightmare.
2. Any of the many gui versions of diff.
3. Ok, I'll give you that one. There are gui tools to do such things, but it's a lot quicker with the commandline.
4. Well, VNC or RDP or similar would work fine.
5. See 3.
6. Sure. Same as 3 again.
7. That's not 'using the command-line' - that's 'writing a program'. You can write 20 lines of perl in a gui, and you'll have a nice ide with intellisense and code folding and all the trimmings (if that's what you're into).
I do use the commandline - mostly ping, tracert, i[pf]config, and a bit of grepping.
But it's probably things that the "typical" end user wouldn't need to do. You certainly don't need to drop to a shell to copy files, for instance.
Depends on whether it's a wormhole type teleport, or the type where it vapourizes you then recreates you somewhere else. I'd use the former, but I wouldn't go near the latter.
Actually I did RTFA, which talks a lot about raytracing - hence my confusion later when the TFS had scrolled up past my vision.
Anyway, mea culpa.
It should be noted that raytracing and raycasting are different things.
Raycasting is basically 3d-esque rendering of a 2d map - one ray is cast for every column on screen. Raytracing is the true 3d version - one ray per pixel (plus reflection rays, shadow rays, etc.).
The point is, Raytracing is far more computationally expensive, and visually impressive, than raycasting.
Anyway, 'believing' in something because the numbers work out to give you a higher expected return is, as someone further down pointed out more eloquently than I can, not really believing.
Functionally equivalent to taxing the parents of kids who do badly.
I doubt that would go down very well.. Consider the poor families who already can't afford expensive books/equipment.
I taught myself to code on an Amstrad CPC 6128 (128k of ram in two 64k banks, z80a processor - so not exactly "embedded" .. but optimization was important), but since then it's been VB, Java, and Delphi.
I'd love to get my teeth into something embedded. But what? Can anyone recommend a fun device to play with?
Put it on www.ratemypussy.com and find out!
What would the virus do when we were all wiped out? It wouldn't be a very good strategy to kill all your food (or resources, or whatever we are to viruses).
Lions don't eat all the gazelles, because they need to leave some food for later. A lion-gene for gazelle-genocide would not spread, because its carriers would tend to starve.
Closer to the topic, the CLI-using meme was able to spread prolifically when conditions suited (because there were plenty of CLIs and few to no GUIs available). Individuals who carried the meme were able to 'survive' to pass on the meme to others. However, when GUIs became widely available (MacOS etc), conditions changed. GUI-using meme carriers were more fit for the new conditions, and therefore they were more able to pass on their memes. CLI-using memes were less able to spread in the new conditions, as there were fewer CLIs available.
There are still niches available where CLIs are in use, so the CLI-meme still survives there, where it is still fittest.. but most of the UI world is now GUI territory.