But whatever alien life that could possibly be out there, will be made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And therefore, obey the same laws of chemistry as we observe here. Which limits the possibilities considerably.
If we're being fanciful, it could be made up of antiparticles, or photons, or gravitons for that matter if they even exist. Not to mention dark matter. "Mr President, the president of the Dark Matter Dominion is requesting a meeting":-)
Shuffle a deck of cards and lay it out. Then think wow, what are the odds of this exact order? Well, the odds are 1/(52!)
Actually, the probability is exactly 1. I call this the deck-of-cardic principle: Once you have laid out a deck of cards, the odds of it having been laid out in exactly the way that you did are now 1:1.
This also answers the question "wow, what are the odds of the universe being just the way that it is?". Well, 1:1, by observation.
Even if a person not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, an open minded person certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. In spite of this, it bears hallmarks of centrally planned continuity.
Congratulations. You have successfully proven the existence of the Vatican:-)
The Bible opens with this majestic declaration: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Are we, even today, in a position to unequivocally declare that this statement is untrue?
"Unequivocally declaring that it is untrue" and "Not blindly accepting that it is true" are two radically different positions. The former is scientifically unsound while the latter is an altogether reasonable standpoint.
Likewise, I'm terrified of a person who thinks Bin Fucking Laden should be allowed to continue to live. It means you don't believe in justice for the murdered. You don't believe in protecting the "right to life".
Heh. "I believe in protecting the right to life so I must kill this man." Congratulations. You win this week's logic award.
You have all backed yourself into the corner where you're basically not allowed to express an idea about how the world works, unless you can prove it (...) (...) (...) I believe that if our understanding of science was ever to become good enough that we actually could prove/disprove Gods existance (...)
Science never proves anything. It is not the job nor the purpose of science to deliver proofs. Indeed, outside of the field of mathematics (which may or may not be science as such) science is completely incapable of producing proofs. Science only produces scientific theories.
If you are waiting for science to deliver the tools necessary to prove the existence of a god, you are waiting in vain. At best, science might deliver a falsifiable theory concerning gods but you would be unlikely to find such a theory particularly satisfying in the proof-of-God department.
This is important because we then need to ask, "Can we create a machine that is conscious" We'll first need to define consciousness, and I think there are definitions out there for that. That is less important than the result which will be, "Can we create a machine that works like, or is comparable to, a human brain?" If you accept the idea that the brain is merely a very complex set of cells that interact in a particular way, I think it's likely that we can eventually create a machine to replicate that.
I expect that this question will only every be answered by science in retrospect and only after the much more important question has been answered by society as a whole: "will we ever create a machine that human beings will accept as their equal?"
Once we have done that, we will update our definitions of "conscious" and "self-aware" accordingly and the question answers itself. 50 years later, a machine will be elected president of the US on the slogan "Change we can compute":-)
Even setting that aside, most people who believe in souls attribute some sort of metaphysical and/or supernatural aspect to them - that is, it has aspects that extend beyond the purely physical universe.
If the soul is supernatural then it does not exist by definition: the supernatural is that which exists only beyond nature and nature encompasses everything that exists. Ergo, the supernatural does not exist. Which doesn't mean we can't construct abstract thoughts about it but that's all it's ever going to be - abstract thoughts.
The question "can machines have souls" would then boil down to "are we ever going to pretend that machines have souls, like we pretend that humans do?". This would not be a technical question.
I promise you RMS is capable of installing Linux. I imagine the conversation went something like this: "This thing doesn't have a CD-ROM. I have three speeches in the next two days - could you figure out how to get Linux onto it while I'm packing?"
I would rather assume that RMS' problem was of a more idealist nature (or he probably wouldn't have announced it) and went something like this: "I have received this nifty new PC that I'd like to install GNU/Linux on but in order to do so I must first power it up and delete what's already there and before this can happen I need to agree to an EULA that I simply cannot accept. I will therefore never be able to get to the point where I am able to install GNU/Linux. I have a friend, however, who is less picky about EULAs than I am so I will ask him to help me out."
Yeah, it's quaint that he'd actually respect the EULA enough not to use the equipment when he disagrees with it but that's what you get when you're an idealist I suppose.
Science can't prove that god exists, or that it doesn't exist. So it's a perfectly safe bet- it can never be won.
Uh... what?
They certainly CAN prove that God exists... if he really does.
Science cannot prove anything at all. Science is not about providing proofs (this would essentially be an impossible task in anything but purely mathematical fields) but about formulating increasingly useful theories that cover our observations and predict future events with some accuracy.
Science cannot even prove that a lead weight dropped somewhere on Earth will fall towards the center of the planet - science can only/observe/ that this tends to happen. Indeed, science cannot even prove that Earth itself exists but it can provide a lot of excellent theories about how things would work there in the case that it/does/ exist.
Even in the best case scenario, there were 60M taxpayers in the UK before this catastrophe struck - with only 48M taxpayers left it is difficult to see how the UK is ever going to pull out of the current credit crisis. And how do you go about losing 12M people "with USB stick" anyway - is this a special brand of USB stick that has been planted by aliens to beam people up to the mothership, a locator device of some sort? Oh my god it's Flash Voyager isn't it? I am so screwed when they finally work down the list to my own country . . .
Right, so I suppose that if this law manages to pass largely intact through the remaining legislative hurdles, the French govt, French businesses and, in particular, French banks will have to contend with the fact that at any given time a significant proportion of the populace will be legally barred from being online. And we were looking at a situation where 10-20 years down the line, near 100% of the population would otherwise have been accessible over the net.
I guess we shouldn't be expecting France to be much of a pioneer(*) in building the society of tomorrow then. Instead, 20 years from now we may all be using a French word for the term "brick-and-mortar":-)
(*) - obBush: The French don't even have a word for "pioneer". (**) (**) - obDisclaimer: snopes.com says that Bush never made the infamous entrepeneur statement.
Also can anyone actually explain why we should be bailing out these banks in the first place?
Oooh, car analogy time: Let's say you are driving through the scorching desert and your car breaks down far far away from nearest civilization. A tow truck happens to drive by and the driver agrees to tow you to the nearest garage in return for some consideration. Halfway there, it turns out the tow truck driver is an idiot who has failed to fuel up his car sufficiently and it coasts to a halt. Also, in your conversation with him you have found him to be a complete and total asshole with very few redeeming qualities.
With all this in mind, can you think of any reason why you might want to bail him out by transferring some gas from your tank to his?
Why this isn't being reflected in the market currently is quite confusing actually. You can't dump two trillion dollars into an economy and see the value of the dollar go -up-. Someone is screwing with the system right now, and I would bet we'll see a heavy reset in the next 12 months.
The dollar is going up mostly because investors are pulling their money out of Russia, Asia, Europe, etc., and putting it in safe US treasury bonds. To do this they need to sell foreign currencies and buy US dollars. This increases the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. If you are correct that the bailout should act to noticeably depreciate the dollar then at present the huge dollar purchases are outweighing that effect.
What's wrong with socialist, I keep seeing Americans throw it around like it's an insult. The cold war is over.
The US is fanatically capitalistic (or at least likes to think that it is). This is a good thing since it means that the US can experiment with all sorts of extremely efficient but highly risky financial solutions and take the brunt of the damage when they blow up (true, these things do prove to have a non-trivial blast radius). Those of us in the rest of the world can then learn from their mistakes and incorporate the most useful/least volatile techniques they come up with into our own social democratic systems.
The US benefits by being the recognized world leader in financial matters and the rest of us benefit by getting a number of highly useful financial techniques out of the giant economy lab that is the US. Just don't do like Iceland and try to ride both horses at the same time.
Has there been any evidence shown that either guy running for president has any idea how the economy works? All I've seen is platitudes and empty stateents from both of them.
Like most politicians, the leading contenders don't have personal expertise in the field of finance so, no, they don't know a whole lot about how the economy works.
Nor should they need to. It is not necessary that the president has personal expertise in all areas relating to the running of the state. What/is/ important is that he surrounds himself with competent advisors.
What you need to watch out for is a candidate who/presumes/ to know/exactly/ how to resolve the situation and who justifies this with a reference to some ideology or other. Chances are such a candidate is much more interested in carrying through his ideology rather than in actually solving any problems. Candidates that devolve into generalities, however, are much more likely to enlist actual competent aid when it comes down to actually getting something useful done.
In this case, then, the question generally boils down to "does my candidate accept that there is a problem and that action is necessary?" and both top candidates seem to fit the bill.
Shouldn't there be some law to protect the American people from legislators who commit felonies relating to their position?
No. This would make it too easy for the administration (whichever one it may be) to get rid of the political opposition by having them convicted on trumped-up charges.
Let the People decide if they want to vote for a convicted man or not.
(For a slightly similar reason, it is also wrong to disenfranchise convicted felons.)
(...) but what I am saying is that we, the humanity as a whole, seem to have lost our focus on what is really important (...)
We cannot actually have lost something if we never had it in the first place. People have been overly litigious bastards ever since courts were invented and before this they routinely bashed each other's heads in over the same grievances. This is just the human condition(*), it's been with us since forever and it's not going away any time soon.
(*) - I might be a bit unfair on us humans here - more likely this is the general condition of evolved intelligent social beings anywhere but we really only have a single sample to draw upon at this point.
Why is censorship of illegal material bad? If the material is illegal, why shouldn't it be censored?
The very idea that there can exist information that is in itself illegal is preposterous. If such information were to exist, and you happened to be exposed to this information, then effectively your brain would be illegal because it contains illegal information. What do you suggest we do with your illegal brain in this case? Brainwash it? Put it in jail? Destroy it?
The most sensible thing to do was to tweak the system while Adcock was playing the banjo to optimize the effect for the thing that's most important to him.
So . . . they calibrated his brain?
Where can I go to get a brain tuning optimized for programming computers and playing games? I see huge potential in this. Scary potential, true, but huge all the same.
A couple generations of this and "specialist" and "idiot savant" will be synonyms:-)
OMG the dollar sign is static... it's the end of the world!!!!
You're right. After the upcoming total economic collapse, we'll need the clock to be able to display the debt in terms of Chinese yuan or Euros. The current design does not allow for that.
Given that the dollar sign was an LCD display, the obvious solution to the overflow problem would simply be to switch it from $ to £.
Slashdot Mirror
But whatever alien life that could possibly be out there, will be made of protons and neutrons and electrons. And therefore, obey the same laws of chemistry as we observe here. Which limits the possibilities considerably.
If we're being fanciful, it could be made up of antiparticles, or photons, or gravitons for that matter if they even exist. Not to mention dark matter. "Mr President, the president of the Dark Matter Dominion is requesting a meeting" :-)
Shuffle a deck of cards and lay it out. Then think wow, what are the odds of this exact order? Well, the odds are 1/(52!)
Actually, the probability is exactly 1. I call this the deck-of-cardic principle: Once you have laid out a deck of cards, the odds of it having been laid out in exactly the way that you did are now 1:1.
This also answers the question "wow, what are the odds of the universe being just the way that it is?". Well, 1:1, by observation.
Even if a person not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, an open minded person certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. In spite of this, it bears hallmarks of centrally planned continuity.
Congratulations. You have successfully proven the existence of the Vatican :-)
The Bible opens with this majestic declaration: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth". Are we, even today, in a position to unequivocally declare that this statement is untrue?
"Unequivocally declaring that it is untrue" and "Not blindly accepting that it is true" are two radically different positions. The former is scientifically unsound while the latter is an altogether reasonable standpoint.
Likewise, I'm terrified of a person who thinks Bin Fucking Laden should be allowed to continue to live. It means you don't believe in justice for the murdered. You don't believe in protecting the "right to life".
Heh. "I believe in protecting the right to life so I must kill this man." Congratulations. You win this week's logic award.
You have all backed yourself into the corner where you're basically not allowed to express an idea about how the world works, unless you can prove it (...)
(...)
(...) I believe that if our understanding of science was ever to become good enough that we actually could prove/disprove Gods existance (...)
Science never proves anything. It is not the job nor the purpose of science to deliver proofs. Indeed, outside of the field of mathematics (which may or may not be science as such) science is completely incapable of producing proofs. Science only produces scientific theories.
If you are waiting for science to deliver the tools necessary to prove the existence of a god, you are waiting in vain. At best, science might deliver a falsifiable theory concerning gods but you would be unlikely to find such a theory particularly satisfying in the proof-of-God department.
This is important because we then need to ask, "Can we create a machine that is conscious" We'll first need to define consciousness, and I think there are definitions out there for that. That is less important than the result which will be, "Can we create a machine that works like, or is comparable to, a human brain?" If you accept the idea that the brain is merely a very complex set of cells that interact in a particular way, I think it's likely that we can eventually create a machine to replicate that.
I expect that this question will only every be answered by science in retrospect and only after the much more important question has been answered by society as a whole: "will we ever create a machine that human beings will accept as their equal?"
Once we have done that, we will update our definitions of "conscious" and "self-aware" accordingly and the question answers itself. 50 years later, a machine will be elected president of the US on the slogan "Change we can compute" :-)
Hmm. is the number 1 an idea or a thing? It can't really be placed, but we can for sure measure it. It's exactly 1.
The number 1 is 1 by definition, not by measurement.
Even setting that aside, most people who believe in souls attribute some sort of metaphysical and/or supernatural aspect to them - that is, it has aspects that extend beyond the purely physical universe.
If the soul is supernatural then it does not exist by definition: the supernatural is that which exists only beyond nature and nature encompasses everything that exists. Ergo, the supernatural does not exist. Which doesn't mean we can't construct abstract thoughts about it but that's all it's ever going to be - abstract thoughts.
The question "can machines have souls" would then boil down to "are we ever going to pretend that machines have souls, like we pretend that humans do?". This would not be a technical question.
I promise you RMS is capable of installing Linux. I imagine the conversation went something like this: "This thing doesn't have a CD-ROM. I have three speeches in the next two days - could you figure out how to get Linux onto it while I'm packing?"
I would rather assume that RMS' problem was of a more idealist nature (or he probably wouldn't have announced it) and went something like this:
"I have received this nifty new PC that I'd like to install GNU/Linux on but in order to do so I must first power it up and delete what's already there and before this can happen I need to agree to an EULA that I simply cannot accept. I will therefore never be able to get to the point where I am able to install GNU/Linux. I have a friend, however, who is less picky about EULAs than I am so I will ask him to help me out."
Yeah, it's quaint that he'd actually respect the EULA enough not to use the equipment when he disagrees with it but that's what you get when you're an idealist I suppose.
Science can't prove that god exists, or that it doesn't exist. So it's a perfectly safe bet- it can never be won.
Uh ... what?
They certainly CAN prove that God exists ... if he really does.
Science cannot prove anything at all. Science is not about providing proofs (this would essentially be an impossible task in anything but purely mathematical fields) but about formulating increasingly useful theories that cover our observations and predict future events with some accuracy.
Science cannot even prove that a lead weight dropped somewhere on Earth will fall towards the center of the planet - science can only /observe/ that this tends to happen. Indeed, science cannot even prove that Earth itself exists but it can provide a lot of excellent theories about how things would work there in the case that it /does/ exist.
"In UK, 12M Taxpayers Lost With USB Stick"
Even in the best case scenario, there were 60M taxpayers in the UK before this catastrophe struck - with only 48M taxpayers left it is difficult to see how the UK is ever going to pull out of the current credit crisis. And how do you go about losing 12M people "with USB stick" anyway - is this a special brand of USB stick that has been planted by aliens to beam people up to the mothership, a locator device of some sort? Oh my god it's Flash Voyager isn't it? I am so screwed when they finally work down the list to my own country . . .
Right, so I suppose that if this law manages to pass largely intact through the remaining legislative hurdles, the French govt, French businesses and, in particular, French banks will have to contend with the fact that at any given time a significant proportion of the populace will be legally barred from being online. And we were looking at a situation where 10-20 years down the line, near 100% of the population would otherwise have been accessible over the net.
I guess we shouldn't be expecting France to be much of a pioneer(*) in building the society of tomorrow then. Instead, 20 years from now we may all be using a French word for the term "brick-and-mortar" :-)
(*) - obBush: The French don't even have a word for "pioneer". (**)
(**) - obDisclaimer: snopes.com says that Bush never made the infamous entrepeneur statement.
So, IMHO, I think this is probably part of a general policy to not allow product placement in song lyrics.
More likely it's part of the general policy to not allow trademarks to be shown or spoken unless the trademark owner has paid his protection money.
Actually, the real money is in .corn
Obviously the /real/ money is, as always, in .porn
Would you like to download the new google.corn toolbar?
The google.porn toolbar is a killer app any way you look at it :-)
Get your updates from microsoft.corn?
. . . microsoft.porn on the other hand - not so much.
Also can anyone actually explain why we should be bailing out these banks in the first place?
Oooh, car analogy time:
Let's say you are driving through the scorching desert and your car breaks down far far away from nearest civilization. A tow truck happens to drive by and the driver agrees to tow you to the nearest garage in return for some consideration. Halfway there, it turns out the tow truck driver is an idiot who has failed to fuel up his car sufficiently and it coasts to a halt. Also, in your conversation with him you have found him to be a complete and total asshole with very few redeeming qualities.
With all this in mind, can you think of any reason why you might want to bail him out by transferring some gas from your tank to his?
Why this isn't being reflected in the market currently is quite confusing actually. You can't dump two trillion dollars into an economy and see the value of the dollar go -up-. Someone is screwing with the system right now, and I would bet we'll see a heavy reset in the next 12 months.
The dollar is going up mostly because investors are pulling their money out of Russia, Asia, Europe, etc., and putting it in safe US treasury bonds. To do this they need to sell foreign currencies and buy US dollars. This increases the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. If you are correct that the bailout should act to noticeably depreciate the dollar then at present the huge dollar purchases are outweighing that effect.
What's wrong with socialist, I keep seeing Americans throw it around like it's an insult. The cold war is over.
The US is fanatically capitalistic (or at least likes to think that it is). This is a good thing since it means that the US can experiment with all sorts of extremely efficient but highly risky financial solutions and take the brunt of the damage when they blow up (true, these things do prove to have a non-trivial blast radius). Those of us in the rest of the world can then learn from their mistakes and incorporate the most useful/least volatile techniques they come up with into our own social democratic systems.
The US benefits by being the recognized world leader in financial matters and the rest of us benefit by getting a number of highly useful financial techniques out of the giant economy lab that is the US. Just don't do like Iceland and try to ride both horses at the same time.
Has there been any evidence shown that either guy running for president has any idea how the economy works? All I've seen is platitudes and empty stateents from both of them.
Like most politicians, the leading contenders don't have personal expertise in the field of finance so, no, they don't know a whole lot about how the economy works.
Nor should they need to. It is not necessary that the president has personal expertise in all areas relating to the running of the state. What /is/ important is that he surrounds himself with competent advisors.
What you need to watch out for is a candidate who /presumes/ to know /exactly/ how to resolve the situation and who justifies this with a reference to some ideology or other. Chances are such a candidate is much more interested in carrying through his ideology rather than in actually solving any problems. Candidates that devolve into generalities, however, are much more likely to enlist actual competent aid when it comes down to actually getting something useful done.
In this case, then, the question generally boils down to "does my candidate accept that there is a problem and that action is necessary?" and both top candidates seem to fit the bill.
Shouldn't there be some law to protect the American people from legislators who commit felonies relating to their position?
No. This would make it too easy for the administration (whichever one it may be) to get rid of the political opposition by having them convicted on trumped-up charges.
Let the People decide if they want to vote for a convicted man or not.
(For a slightly similar reason, it is also wrong to disenfranchise convicted felons.)
(...) but what I am saying is that we, the humanity as a whole, seem to have lost our focus on what is really important (...)
We cannot actually have lost something if we never had it in the first place. People have been overly litigious bastards ever since courts were invented and before this they routinely bashed each other's heads in over the same grievances. This is just the human condition(*), it's been with us since forever and it's not going away any time soon.
(*) - I might be a bit unfair on us humans here - more likely this is the general condition of evolved intelligent social beings anywhere but we really only have a single sample to draw upon at this point.
Why is censorship of illegal material bad? If the material is illegal, why shouldn't it be censored?
The very idea that there can exist information that is in itself illegal is preposterous. If such information were to exist, and you happened to be exposed to this information, then effectively your brain would be illegal because it contains illegal information. What do you suggest we do with your illegal brain in this case? Brainwash it? Put it in jail? Destroy it?
If they tacked on a year to the product name, they'd be bound to that date and would never hear the end of it when it's late.
But, they did! And what do you know, Windows 7 is a year late already :-)
The most sensible thing to do was to tweak the system while Adcock was playing the banjo to optimize the effect for the thing that's most important to him.
So . . . they calibrated his brain?
Where can I go to get a brain tuning optimized for programming computers and playing games? I see huge potential in this. Scary potential, true, but huge all the same.
A couple generations of this and "specialist" and "idiot savant" will be synonyms :-)
OMG the dollar sign is static... it's the end of the world!!!!
You're right. After the upcoming total economic collapse, we'll need the clock to be able to display the debt in terms of Chinese yuan or Euros. The current design does not allow for that.
Given that the dollar sign was an LCD display, the obvious solution to the overflow problem would simply be to switch it from $ to £.
So what do you call that side when you're in a spaceship that's orbiting the Moon?
The terraproximate side and the terradistant side? Inventing words is fun :-)