Probably the best security method would be to give everyone on the plane some type of very-close-range weapon that was easy to use, so that a possible terrorist would have as little advantage as possible over the rest of the passengers.
Oh I can just see that one in action: 10-year old kids with Tazers vs. drunk businessmen with Tazers vs. the Moms of the 10-year-olds with Tazers vs Sado-Masochists with Tazers vs... everyone else. The last one standing wins!
I have worked on both terminal and tiered systems, terminal based services are far easier on every level.
In short, I am firmly convinced that IT made a huge mistake investing in PCs and tiered architecture. I see Linux as slowly changing this balance. I long for the day when at work I have a fully fault tolerant server and thousands of terminals. Where control of the data is the hands of IT and access to the data is wide open to any employee.
I fully concur. I have been making a good living by specializing, as a consultant, in reversing this trend in Windows environments via either Windows Terminal Services or Citrix, combined with linux-based thin clients for many years now (ever since WinFrame came out back in NT 3.51 days - although back then we tended to "convert" full-blown PCs to terminals).
What I find truly amusing is the lack of education and the resulting degree of difficulty of comprehension by various MSCE "IT professionals" and also various hardware/software vendors which becomes immediately obvious when they are faced with a company who does not have "a computer" on every desk. Those people are truly, pathetically lost.
This professional ineptitude, promoted so effectively by Bill Gates and crew, is, in my view, the main reason why most companies are stuck in the most inefficient and difficult to manage for them scenarios, which "coincidentally" are also the most profitable from the point of view of PC and software makers.
Since the start, Microsoft's marketing was implicitely aiming at non-technical managment of companies with a promise of getting rid of those "snotty", highly-paid experts and replacing them with dime-a-dozen, pliant, obedient products of "Technology Schools". And it is a little surprise that those who bought into that claptrap, got what they paid for.
If you really wanted to compare apples to oranges, NYC has a population density of 10,300+, and Seoul has a density of 17,100+.
You mean to say that 10000+ population density is insufficient to warrant sane internet service?! Just moments ago the GP poster was trying to pretend that the poor, downtrotten ISPs are stuck with population density of 31! Now 10000+ is not good enough! And of course there is another apple to apple comparison: Stockholm in Sweden, that other place where 100mb (going on 1000mb these days) service is standard. Their density is... 4160/km2 !!!
I think you neglect the effect that tax (which is deeply affected by population density) has on this issue. NY State gets 5-8% income tax, and NYC only gets less than 3.7%. Most of that goes to municipal services, construction, and other such costs. The rest of the 20-35% income tax goes straight to the federal government which has little interest in helping roll out new infrastructure. With South Korea, on the other hand, most of the 20-34% tax goes to economic and technological areas of spending. This allows the South Korean government to spend more cash on helping telecom corporations roll out new
infrastructure.
Wait, wait, wait there a second! Weren't we told, over and over again, that any governmental interference and taxation are communist, socialist plots and that the best service and the best deal for consumers will be achieved only, and only if the de-regulated mega-neo-feudal-klaptocratic-corporations are allowed to run amok, unchecked, guided only by their sole instinct: boundless greed?! Isn't this the whole economic platform of the Republicans and in the large part the practical platform of the Democrats?!
And now you are here telling us these revelations that those lazy socialist Swedes are way ahead because of their "government helping in rolling out infrastructure" all funded by, oh gasp!, taxes?! Are you some kind of free market heretic or something?! Pining for the return of the Soviet Union?!
Also speaking of cash handouts, the US telecommunications corporations DID get MULTI BILLION handouts from the Feds during the dot-com boom. Which promptly went... no one knows where, although the mega-luxury yacht builders and corporate jet manufacturers did report a sharp increase in sales at that time. It could be just me, but there could be some kind of corelation.
In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available.
This is an old, tired and worn-out and patently absurd canard, which is being spread by apologists of the US telecommunication oligopolies since the beginning of the Internet. The truth is that in much of the US the population density in major metropolitan centres is as great or greater then the average Korean, Swedish or Japanese ones and yet, in those same very areas, which in your reasoning shoud be extremely suitable for deployment of 100mb Internet connections comparable to those being deployed en-masse in those other countries, you get.... 1.5 mb DSL. If you are lucky that is.
In short, the problem is the ever expanding culture of corporate avarice, corruption, attempts to make a quick buck and wholesale deterioration of marketplace ethic in the USA, which then spreads via USA-based multinationals to other nations where those same multinationals and their CEOs have influence. Get rich quick at any cost to everybody else is the new "motto" of Corporate America. "Work hard and make a good product" is sooo early 20th century!
Large businesses need to fear their customers, but because they essentially run and control the US government -- the only force capable of opposing and controlling them -- they are in a position to longer care about the supposed "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Now they can do whatever they want, and the "consumers" (the most derogatory term for a "person" ever invented) have to just take it.
And that is the truth of the matter, in affairs ranging from the Internet service to cell phone service to motor vehicle fuel consumption and so on.
Nice bit of hype. Privatized jail has not been accused of increasing profits by increasing the number of prisoners, the Justice systems hand out the sentences not the jails, but by treating prisoners...well you know...like prisoners.
No cable tv, shitty food, bare minimum health and mental care, no Internet access, etc, etc.
You forget one, but rather crucial, element: the jail operators thus make sure that the only thing the inmates can do is to join gangs and/or learn more about their "trade" from other fellons. That way they are far more likely to re-offend and thus generate more revenue for the operator.
Oh the horror, those poor people, what did they ever do to be treated that way, oh wait a tic, yeah that's right they're scumbag criminals.
In a sane society, instead of being subjected to an idiotic, sadistic and wholly counter-productive "revenge", they would be required to make full restitution to their victims and an effort would be made in that process to try to readjust them to the society, so that they do not become a permanent danger/expense to it. This serves the victims, the society and the offenders.
Some crimes are of course not easily directly repaired and so a number of alternative schemes would have to be put in place, all however with the same goal in mind.
And yes, some, very small minority, of offenders are incurably sociopathic and those would have to be locked up for life.
Some neanderthal "law and order" types however are under an impression that torturing, killing and maiming anyone who they suspect of being a "bad guy", usually completely out of proportion to his/her crime, based on some sort of warped set of religious delusions (start a war, kill tens of thousands, steal billions in a war profiteering scheme and do no time, get a blowjob by a teenage classmate and do 20 years), is going to improve the situation. They do forget that in the medieval times the "criminals" used to be hang maimed in cages until they died and rotted on street corners, they were publicly quartered, skinned, burned on stake, impaled and what not... and the "crimes" kept reocurring. That is why we call that insane, useless system... well.. medieval.
I say we haven't had a good penal colony is some time, look how well Australia turned out. Anyone have a good idea on where we can send the cream of our societal crop?
To demonstrate the utter stupidity of this argument, one has only to realize that pregnant mothers were being sent to that penal colony for "high crimes" of the day, such as belonging to the wrong religious sect. Employing a similar system now would of course mean that the offspring of fellons would also be sentenced to life in the penal colony, presumably for the crime of being born to the wrong, unlike yours, parents. Never you mind that by the very nature of it, the deportation to that colony must also be a one-size-fits-all penalty, for crimes ranging from pickpocketing to mass murder.
So in effect you are suggesting that we sentence unborn children to starvation, lack of medical care and other unspeakable hardships (until many generations later when the colony becomes a functional society) because you would so very much like to see their parents suffer, since they are, in your view, a group of "undesirables" which should not offend your delicate sensibilities with their presence in the same country as you.
The words "elitist" or "supremacist" do not even begin to describe your attitude. I am afraid that the only "cure" for your and your peers world-view would be to get subjected to the vagaries of this wonderful, privatized "justice" system you have over there, in its full glory, presumably for some really "serious", "terrible" and heavily punishable offense, such as, say, having child pornography of unknown, magical origin discovered on your computer.
I believe they call your kind "the twenty eight percenter", after that portion of the US population having a propensity to unquestioningly believe whatever fantastic yarn the FOX "news" and the Bush Administration spins at the moment, irrespective of any objective reality around you.
These are defensive missiles. There are no "crazy dangeous games" you CAN play with defensive missiles.
As many people already pointed out, there is no such thing as a "defensive" weapon. Every new defense upsets the balance of offense, and thus at best initiates an arms race, and at worst enables one side to overpower the other since a shield is in essence a way to decrease the power of the other guy's weapons, preferrably, from the point of view of the party with the shield, to zero. And thus allowing the shield-wielder to strike first, with impunity.
If the USA was going to ever nuke anyone first, it wouldn't Russia.
There is no way to predict the future course of history. Not so long ago a majority of Americans would be very offended if you had postulated that the USA will be engaged in invasion and occupation of whole countries based on fabricated evidence and questionable pet theories of deranged ideologues combined with avarice of certain corporate elites. They would be very outraged and incredulous if you had suggested that the USA would be running what essentially amounts to a Gulag network and that its top justice officials would be engaged in "what is the meaning of is" type of parsing of the Geneva Conventions in order to justify torturing the denisens of those Gulags. I could go on.
It's like the Cuban missile chrisis all over again, except this time it's the Americans playing crazy dangerous games with missiles
FYI: the Cuban missile crisis was also caused by "the Americans playing crazy dangerous games with missiles". The placement of USSR's missiles in Cuba was a response to the US placing missiles in Turkey (with a comparable range to USSR's border to that of Cuba to USA's). Of course the US follows a different set of rules from everyone else and so while it claimed to be putting up missiles essentially on USSR's border for "defense", the USSR was not entitled to the same "defensive" distance for theirs. And the rest is history. Note that despite of all the posturing, the US missiles were eventually removed from Turkey (semi-secretly).
What's scary, exactly, about a system which has as its sole function the reduction in effectiveness of the use of unmanned offensive weapons of mass destruction? The only Russian "right" threatened by missile defenses is the "right" to engage in nuclear blackmail.
You are incorrect. If the defense shield proves effective on a large scale, then it essentially removes the Russian portion of the nuclear "detterent" from the equation. In essence it would negate all of the Russian ICBMs while at the same time leaving all of the US ones fully functional. The Russians see this as a two step strategy: move #1 by the US is the negation of Russian ICBMs via the defense shield and move #2 would be an all-out first-strike with no possibility of retaliation by the Russians and thus the final ascention of the 1000 year USian Reich to rule unchallenged. Or something along these lines.
The Chinese have similiar feelings about the defense shield and consider themselves to be the next target, right after the Russians.
Note that an actual attack is not really necessary, the defense shield is essentially equivalent to US putting a loaded pistol to the Russian or Chinese heads and thus permanently enslaving them without actually having to resort to firing the nukes.
This of course assumes that the shield is very effective on a large sacle (which is not likely to occur soon) but this is an actual stated goal of the companies making it and the wet dream of the generals.
That is why you hear all that chest-beating about new "missile-shield proof" ICBMs the Russians are frantically developing.
So in the long term the missile shield is anything but a purely "defensive" weapon, it has a very significant strategic, offensive connotations.
I am not aware of any laws being broken when a customer and theater engage in a contract whereby the customer agrees to be frisked in exchange for admittance into a movie. If the customer doesn't want to be searched he is free to leave, at which point a forceful search against his will would be the only conceivable way this policy would deny him or her any of his "Rights and Freedoms". In fact, "freedom" is allowing businesses and customers to make consentual agreements with each other depending on each one's circumstances.
The potential trouble comes from two directions: 1) the owner of the private property must give the option of simply leaving as an alternative to any of his "contractual rules" because the only privilege which that ownership grants him is to control access to his property, and 2) some rights are not voidable, even with your own consent, and that is so to stop people from being manipulated into, essentially, slavery.
So as soon as you are being forced to be searched without the option to abort and leave at any time in this process your rights are being violated.
This is precisely why they are pushing for this law, because it creates a crime which is independent of your presence on their property and acts in a similar way as the laws dealing with shoplifing do, the owner of the theatre can then threaten you with him performing a "citizen arrest" on you on the suspicion of your breaking that other law.
If you refuse, you are then detained until the real police arrives under the suspicion of "camcordering" or some such nonsense.
According to some of you, a search policy would be a make-or-break issue for an average prospective movie seer. As somebody who flies a lot and typically has to wait 15 minutes to get through security, I'm thinking people really won't care very much.
I personally haven't been to a movie theatre in good 7 years or so, partially because there is nothing there I found worth seeing and partially because the idiots running the places are far more concerned with selling overpriced crap food then with making sure that the experience is better then a DVD at home. I can't stand people talking, getting up to go to the can in front of me, chewing and grinding loudly cracking stuff with their jaws, slurping drinks, rustling massive amounts of aluminium foil and other noisy wrappers, passing gas, yapping to each other, cell phones ringing, kids with laser pointers and all of that other lovely crap that combines to give me an experience wholly different from the movie theatres of old where you would get kicked out swiftly for any of that.
So by all means, add metal scanners, bag and body cavity searches and anal probes into the mix. I positively can't wait to miss that experience.
What does concern me however is that the new generation of movie-goers is being raised up by being brain-washed into accepting all those infringements on their rights and persons as "normal". This is how an Orwellian distopia can be brought into being, by slowly, step by step, eradicating our freedoms, always in the name of "protecting" someone or something from Bogeymen ranging from "Rag-headed Terrorists" to "Camcordering Villain Thieves".
You have no right to be on private property. You *agree* to either leave or abide by their laws. Being searched by the public isn't actually illegal btw, only by the government [without due process]. For example, if you leave your bag on a bus, I can rifle through it all I want. That's perfectly legal.
Yes, the only privilege that ownership of private property gets you is the ability to deny access to it. In this respect you are correct, that the owner's only legal option is to ask you to leave, otherwise the law provides for the remedy of charge of tresspassing. But if he does not give you that option at any time as an alternative to any of his "rules", all his subsequent actions are brute-force coertion and thus very illegal. Furthermore, some rights are not voidable, even with your consent. This is purposefully so, to aviod people being manipulated by clever tricksters into, essentially, slavery.
The case of the legality of the search of the bag is not tied into this because at the point when the bag is found, there is no easy way of determining the owner and thus his instructions as to its use. Furthermore, it is usually necessary to search the thing in order to try to determine the owner and return it to him. Again, this is predicated on the absence of the owner and the implied desire of his for his property to be returned to him.
Similarly, if you walk into my store I have the right to ask to search your bag. You have the right to refuse, and I have the right to have you removed from the premises. See how that works?
Again, this is predicated on your giving me the option of leaving without the search. If you do not, then you better be sure of some other crime (which is also a crime outside of your property, say shoplifting) with which to charge me because otherwise you are engaging in brute force assault on my person, irrespective of my being on your premises or not.
So in the case of the movie theaters searching the bags, I have a right to refuse at any time and the only option of the owner is to ask me to leave. That is precisely why these assholes are trying to pass additional laws, to give them a "probable cause" (akin to what suspected shoplifting does in a store) to try to charge you with, because such a law would be then enforceable irrespective of your presence on their property.
Being asked to be searched on private property IS NOT THE SAME as random searches in public.
How so?
Does the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Canadian version of the Bill of Rights) no longer apply? Does that piece of land fall then into some kind of a different, foreign jurisdiction? Does the fact that someone owns that piece of land make him a king or an emperor then, one with an ability to enact arbitrary laws in his feudal fiefdom? What then if he passes a law that it is all-right for his hired goons to beat people in his "kingdom"? Torture them? Detain them for any arbitrary period of time? Kill them? All because they crossed the "border" into his "private property empire", no?
Yes I am engaging in hyperbole but this type of over-the top argument is actually a rather sane method of debunking claims which appear common sense on the surface but which lead to trully ludicrous ends if followed logically to their conclusions. This is called reductio ad absurdum.
Ownership of some piece of private property does not grant the owner magical privileges, far above the laws of the land applicable outside of it. Neither do those who cross into such property magically become serfs of the landowner, nor their rights vanish into thin air.
No lets not speak of God, after all my point in this regard was that this concept was culturally privileged over all other possible, but unsubstantiable, entities. Let's speak instead about the possible influx of undetectable flying fish into your room. What could they possibly eat? Is it true that they always bear down on any floating objects in the room pushing them towards the floor? Do they have colour, even though we can't see them? Why we could go on for hours talking about stuff that possibly exists, but for which we have no evidence. Unless it happens to be your pet concept (say 'extra dimentional entanglement), it can be quite tedious. And it certainly lacks any scientific validity. So maybe we should talk about that priviledge possible entity God, after all we can have fun with that.
While it can be amusing to do that, I would like to point out that by your very definition those flying fish, and the forms of "God" you mentioned, are undetectable. Thus completely beyond the reach of science. This is of course rather amusing coming from someone who then proceeds to try to lecture me on my "lack of grasp of science".
Existence usually denotes corporeality, so what could 'exist' mean when applied to an entity which by definition has no corporeal form?
Non necessarily. One definition of "God" postulates that the Universe itself is in some way sentient and it is he/she/it i.e. "God". That is the most "corporal" form imaginable for any entity.
Sufficient for what? This isn't a criminal trial, the burden of proof isn't "beyond all reasonable doubt," we're working with the "the balanceof probabilities" here. Doubt is not the unqualified virtue you apparently believe it to be.
Insufficient for you, of course, to be making absolute pronouncements of any sort and thus removing any pretense of your actually believing in the concept of "the balanced probabilities" you claim so dear to you.
Sure it's possible, so what? Mere possibility isn't all that interesting.
Quantum level indeterministic interference is not only possible, but plausible, given the nature and scale of the cellular processes. And that by itself makes it interesting.
Evidence of a lack of any particular possibility?! Affirmanti non neganti incumbit probatio is more than a merely arbitrary rule of logical discourse! At first I though this was just a slip on your part, but on reflection this putting of the horse before the logical cart may lie at the root of your misthinking.
Again, your error lies in these, increasingly desparate it seems, attempts at trying to pin on me some sort of ulterior desire to "prove" that quantum entanglements I mentioned exist with certainty. At no point did I claim that I posses sufficient evidence to be attempting such proof, only that such a theory is scientifically (at this point) plausible and that it cannot be discarded out of hand based simply on your gut feelings about it, which you keep attempting, desipte professing to believe in the tenets of science. The possiblity I keep mentioning is both plausible and testable and thus firmly within the realm of science.
What I said was that theories lacking any evidence are unsubstantiated conjecture and should not be preferred to theories for which at least some evidence exists.
Then I presume you are going to rail against astronomers next, who had precisely zero empirical evidence for the so called "dark matter", only unexplained gaps in their incomplete models. Yet that was sufficient to postulate a wide range of plausible explanations all the way from the so-called "MACHO" objects to the so-called "dark matter". Following which they attempted to gather evidence to discern which of these wildly different possibilities is in fact the case. Do, by all means, go lecture them on their errant, unscientific ways as th
Every scientific theory is incomplete, and no scientific theory is capable of explaining every phenomenon. That's the nature of scientific theories. Incompleteness doesn't prevent scientific theories from making valid predictions
Not in the areas in which they are incomplete though. The Newtonian model falls apart completely at the quantum level, or at speeds near the speed of light.
For example, a Pentium is composed of transistors that operate based on quantum mechanical effects, but the Pentium as a whole behaves like a classical system.
What is true of a Pentium computer, which uses essentially a statistical average of a large number of quantum effects in each semiconductor juncture is not true of the cellular mechanisms. Each cell in our brain is roughly equivalent in complexity to a rather sophisticated microcontroller, one whole orders of magnitude smaller then the smallest equivalent integrated circuit we can manufacture, and subsequently the scale of the processes involved is orders of magnitude smaller. Where in a Pentium chip tens of billions of electrons flow in torrents in each junction and their effects are cumulative, in cellular processes it is possible that a single protein pays a pivotal trigger role and thus a single set of atomic interactions does. At that scale quantum effects become quite pronounced. You are desperately trying to compare phenomena on vastly different scales, akin to pretending that because large-scale, macroscopic properties cause water to flow in rivers then the same mechanism governs individual molecules of the said water in interaction with other molecules of other materials. The behaviours are so different that completely different areas of science have been constructed to investigate them, one being fluid dynamics and the other physical chemistry.
What is relevant is what I stated: none of the areas in which physics is incomplete have ever been shown experimentally to have any effect on consciousness.
And I keep telling you that because of the nature of the cellular processes, there exists a very plausible theoretical possibility of non-deterministic, quantum-level properties of matter and energy playing a pivotal role in operation of neurons. The fact that we at this point lack the apparatus to conduct appropriate experiments on that scale in that context does not automatically, out of hand, warrant an exclusion of these possibilites in absence of our understanding of processes involved. To do so smacks of ideological prejudice.
Just because we cannot directly detect the "dark matter" it does not prevent astronomers from speculating about its existence based solely on certain unexplained gaps in their models of the expansion of the Universe, yet in the case of cellular processes our models are far less complete than those of the astronomers and thus allow a far wider range of untested possibilites. You are on the other hand in a position of claiming, with absolute certainty, that no such thing as "dark matter" exists, because you do not like its implications and your gut feeling tells you that it "must" be some "other" explanation, more to your liking, even though the astronomical model is clearly incomplete and does not warrant such claims. While you are entitled to an opinion in an unexplored area, you are not entitled to make absolute pronouncements about it, as you are in no position to invalidate other theories, until more evidence comes in.
Shannon did.
No he did not. He merely developed a model to account for some of the more easily understood properties of information. At no point in time he attempted to comprehensicely explain what information is and how it relates to consciousness, or how its transmission to an "observer" is purported to explain the outcomes of some experiments involving quantum phenomena. His theory simply makes some axiomatic definitions and m
My friend, be very careful of buying into this (currently popular) meme that science has become "like religion", and thus has no basis in fact
That is not the problem. Science itself is not at fault here, but those who claim to adhere to scientific principles only to turn around and start making "scientific", absolute pronouncements based on flimsy or non-existant evidence are. Science is a system of gathering and processing knowledge and as such is, ultimately, immune to vagaries of politics and ideology, although it sometimes takes an inordinate amount of time for it get itself sorted out. That does not stop some people however from going beyond what science describes in its models based on empirical evidence and simply jump to wild conclusions based on their gut feelings, following which they become very combative if someone points out to them that their absolute assertions are unsubstantiated.
This process has been repeated in the scientific community many times, at times halting completely the progress of some discipline for a very long time.
But science is very resiliant and I have no doubt that no matter how many of these ideologues get involved in this, eventually even the most dogmatic and popular at the time but incorrect worldviews must fall under the assault of incontrovertible evidence and be replaced by updated ones.
In other words, please do not confuse science itself with those who demand unquestioning respect for their wild assertions by claiming them to be based on some famous (but in fact only remotely connected) scientific model of some aspect of the Universe. I keep bringing Newton and the "clockwork Universe cosmology" as an example because it demonstrates such folly quite admirably.
The models of quantum physics and string theory aren't anywhere near mature enough to even suggest that it might be worth considering.
My point is that this statement cuts both ways. Given our miniscule knowledge of the quantum theory, the nature of consciousness and the nature of information, we are not in a position to discard out of hand any theory which is plausible in some way within the wide field of possibilities open at this point. If new experimental evidence comes in, or our understanding improves, the range of possibilities will narrow considerably, and it might as well be that it will be conclusively demonstrated that no entanglements of any kind are possible. But it is very dishonest and at the sime time suspiciously stinking of religious zeal to be making absoulute pronouncements in such poorly understood field of inquiry, so early in the game.
That's not to say further developments couldn't come along that could point in that direction, but we're not anywhere close to that yet.
And that is the whole point. But the original poster and some of my sparring partners in this thread would like to short-circuit this process and simply jump to a conclusion they believe foregone, based simply on their feelings about the matter.
To say that since our knowledge of consciousness is incomplete, we can't make any pronouncements about the world we inhabit is nonsensical.
This is a strawan. The pronouncements you are making are not about "the world we inhabit" but specifically about the very nature of consciousness, knowledge of which even you admit is very incomplete. Or more precisely: "miniscule".
We have exactly zero evidence that consciousness continues after death (and plenty of evidence that it doesn't) and yet you cling to the barest thread of possibility that everyone is wrong and that more research will prove you're immortal.
We actually have exactly no evidence that consciousness (or parts of thereof, or some other consciousness related phenomena) cease after death, because we have no method, apparatus or theoretical foundations to determine if it is so, as we do not understand the nature of consciousness and thus have no means of constructing them. Never you mind "plenty" evidence. This is of course a classic example of jumping to unwarranted conculsions based on ones deep-felt opinion... the colloquial term for which is: "faith".
At this point no evidence exists either for or against, a state of affairs which can only invite exactly one scientifically honest opinion: "We do not know, further reasearch is necessary". For example, construct truly sentient machinery and conduct a number of carefuly designed experiments with it and then you will be one step closer to disproving such possibility of extra-dimentional entanglements. Until then, stop making absolute claims based on your gut feelings, a.k.a. faith.
When Newtonian physics was challenged, people accepted the new theory fairly quickly once there were experiments to support it.
This situation is not equivalent. I am not proposing that one particular alternative theory is correct, only that the present model is incomplete and thus not capable of explaining the phenomena in question. In the Newtonian model scenario I would be simply pointing out that there are some experiments which are unexplained by the model (as are many quantum effects at present in our current models), and some which contradict it, and I would be postulating some possible explanations and you would be going "No, there are no such "possibilities" in known physics.", with the implication that you already know everything there is to know about the matter.
None of the areas in which physics is incomplete have ever been shown experimentally to have any effect on consciousness. Simply put, a whack on the head or a crack pipe have been shown to affect your consciousness, quantum entanglement and extra dimensions have not.
You must be kidding. Many of the cellular processes are occuring in quantum level and our brains are composed of those very cells.
No, there are no such "possibilities" in known physics. Even completely wacky theories of consciousness involving quantum effects still tie consciousness to the physical substrate of the brain and have no mechanism by which it could survive destruction of the brain. If you want to challenge current mainstream theory of brain function, you need a plausible hypothesis plus actual experiments.
That is not true. Given our state of knowledge, you are not in any position to even begin determining which theories of consciounsess are "wacky" and which are not, and yet you do, because your immutable opinion has already substituted any reason in this area, even though our undestanding of the nature of consciousness (and infromation in general) is laughable, to say the least.
And no, there is no "mainstream" theory of brain function, only a very crude view of some neuronal functions. And then we have attempts at explaining, at a much higher level, of some fragmentary, peripheral aspects of information processing in some parts of the brain. That's it for the "mainstream theory".
Even if quantum entanglements do not exist with any other dimentions, then we are still left with our lack of understanding of the nature and essence of information. What if information itself is that kind of entanglement? Or could you comprehensively explain the nature of information? I, and I am sure the Nobel committee too, would like to hear that one.
The problem with this is that it privileges the concept 'God' over 'Zorsdix' or any other of the inifite possible postulated ideas, whose corporeal existence lacks any supporting evidence. In fact the honest scientific position is simply to recognise that the concept of 'God' makes no more sense than the idea that the room you are sitting in is filled with undetectable flying fish (ie both are logically possible, but lack empirical foundation). Since there is zero evidence for either proposition, from a scientific position neither warrants more than infinitesimal attention.
As I indicated to another poster, you are latching on to the aspect of the word "Agnostic" which is focused on by Theists, that is existence of an entity which can be termed "God", while there are many other aspects of existence which lack any plausible scientific explanation so far, one of which is the topic of conversation. Speaking of "God" however, the first step is to try to define what that means, and this alone is problematic. Some, for example, would consider the Universe itself to be such an entity. Some religions do not require a concept of "God" at all. Yet we do not even know if the question itself is valid, and asking "Is there a God (or gods)" might be akin to asking "is integer number 7 rich?". Gramatically correct but devoid of logical meaning.
So in this sense you are correct, these questions are more phillosphical then scientific as we do not have any means of conducting an investigation into the matter.
What we do recognise is that evidence of (on-going) human consciousness has never been found absent a living human body. We also note from personal experience, that when our brain is switched off (as under general anasthetic -- a state most closely resembling the brain's position post mortem), we simply experience no consciousness at all, not even a sense of time having passed. Nor do sane people report any ante-natal memories.
This alone is insufficient. If some sort of entanglement exists, it is possible that whatever the extra dimentional particles or what not are entangled would only be de-coupled upon some drastic changes of quantum state of the proteins in the neurons they are coupled with, i.e. their decomposition. And that is only one of the possibilities, other dealing with questions about the properties of information itself which is stored in those synapses and which we have a very poor grasp of. We for example do not know if the information in which we swim with such abandon is not in itself a representation of some additional dimentions of the Universe. Or would you care to explain, comprehensively, the nature of information itself?
In other words, we have good evidence (both from introspection and by observation of other people), that human consciousness does exist in alive and alert humans, no evidence at all that it exists outside of alive and alert humans, and some evidence that it ceases to occur when the brain no longer functions. The evidence points towards the conclusion that mind ends with the death of the brain that gives rise to said mind. All else is merely unsubstantiated conjecture.
You have commited a logical error here, out of ideological bias, by claiming "some evidence" (which we actually have exactly none of) and coupling it with "All else is merely unsubstantiated conjecture". Our evidence of lack (or existence) of any such possible entanglements with extra-dimentional states is, to say the least, miniscule as is our understanding of quantum physics and the nature of information. We are very much like biology researchers before the invention of the microsocpe and thus unaware of existence of cellular structures. And yet here you are, making bold pronouncements about the nature of heredity and disease, snickering about all those who go about our lack of understanding of affairs as being prone to "unsubstantiated conjecture".
I think what you are doing, IgnoramusMaximus, is devising a hope for a theory based on the emotional rejection of the notion that you will cease to exist upon your death. It's not even a theory, it's the seed of a hope for a possibility that there might be some loophole that will allow you to continue to exist after you turn to dust.
I can understand the motivation, but we can't throw out our observations based upon a wish.
No, I simply insist on following the tenets of empirical science to their logical conclusions, wherever they might lead.
What annoys me in particular is that some people latch onto whatever current models are being offered by science and go "Thats it! This time, for SURE, there is nothing more to it!". Which inevietably leads to creation of dogma, in no way different from that created by religious zealots. Particular examples of this can be seen in various "definitive" cosmologies, based upon Newtonian model, which claimed that the Universe is strictly deterministic, akin to a clockwork mechanism. I have a strong feeling that you would be a subscriber to that (quite popular at the time) worldview should you be living at that stage if scientific history.
I also sense that some have a vested ideological interest in not following the experimental evidence in some directions as it grates with their pre-determined opinions. I on the other hand simply refuse to jump to absolutist conclusions where the evidence is far from sufficient to warrant so.
Another "possibility" is that we'll all get whooshed up to the clouds upon our death and meet St. Peter and angels with harps and if we are judged to have not broken too many of the rules, we'll be allowed to live in a "paradise" that will consist of us gazing upon the face of our Creator (no Xbox 360?). Either that or we'll be sent to suffer eternally in torturous fire (but He loves us!).
That "possiblity" is a) scientifically untestable and thus outside of the realm of science and b) the "theory" involving a dude named St. Peter is so internally inconsistent as to guarantee its falsity.
Despite our fears of death, I suspect that most of us, down deep, can recognize a fairy tale, when we hear one.
There are many possible implications of sentience. One is that indeed there is no extra-dimentional quantum level entanglement present of any sort and what you claim is true. Some other involve existence of some sort of informational state outside of our three dimentional space time, ranging anywhere from a few bits to a complete mirror of the state of one's mind. What could happen to such a cluster of information is unknown and by no means implies Pearly Gates... or Allah and 72 virgins... or Hindu re-incarnation. What I am pointing out that we simply do not have anything approaching sufficient information to say, with any certainty (never you mind an absolute one), that no extra-dimentional state entanglements of any sort exist and given our miniscule knowledge of the quantum phenomena, the properties of space-time continuum and the very nature of information (and thus consciousness), making absolute pronouncements represents the essence of hubris and is the very anathema to science.
In this area, science simply does not have sufficient (yet) reach, a state of affairs similar to that of the cosmology before the invention of a telescope. A significant breakthrough, either experimental or theoretical, can change all that and either close the possibility of such extra-dimentional entanglements or reinforce it.
But I don't really see how you can get to a point where, no matter how sophisticated the model, you can't say, "but God might still exist."
The problem I see is with my using the word "Agnostic". The definition of which is forced upon us by Theists, rather then flowing from the logical conlusions of science. By saying "Agnostic" I do not mean "in respect to exsitence of God" exclusively, but also in respect to other aspects of our existence which the Theists have appropriated. In this particular case we are discussing some possible aspects of the nature of consciousness and a possibility that it might, in some form, be independent from the our three dimentional view of space-time. This by no means implies the existence of God or.. lack of thereof.
I see the very definitions of "God" by Theists to be rather problematic. What does the term "God" stand for, really? A bearded dude in sandals? Or perhaps the Universe itself can be classified as "God"? Or perheaps the question itself is invalid and asking "Does God exist?" is an equivalent to asking "How cruel is colour blue?". Gramatically correct, but devoid of logical meaning.
And the reason that I classify myself as "Agnostic" is because we do not have an answer to some of these questions yet. We know for example that information and computations on that information are somehow related to consciousness. But what is information, really? We do not even grasp that completely!
What I find however to be rather exceedingly unlikely is the Bearded Dude scenario, as it contains so many laughable internal inconsistencies that... it can only serve deluded zealots as an excuse to mass murder other deluded zealots over the colour of those sandals.
Are we not talking about belief in the supernatural here? How would such models help with that question? They might predict the natural universe with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't touch the supernatural universe (if any).
Not at all. If it can be tested and models can be constructed, it by definition ceases to be "supernatural". What it could be called is "extra-dimentional" as in taking place in dimentions outside of the "three plus time" vectors of space-time we are so familiar with. The same is applicable for example to the string theory, some froms of which require 10 dimentions to function. There are many cosmological theories which also involve weakly interacting (through gravity for example) multiple dimentions.
The key is the word "interaction". If there is interaction, then it can be tested for. If there is none, or by definition it is claimed to be untestable, then the point is moot and the thing indeed falls into the realm of "supernatural" and faith.
Well, anything is possible, I suppose, but I don't think it's being dishonest to suggest that it's worth zero time whatsoever investigating, say, perpetual engines or time machines. There's nothing unscientific about being an atheist, as opposed to a mere agnostic, regarding those subjects.
I see the "strong" Atheists as those believers in absolute certainty of 100% accuracy of Newtonian physics, before Einstein came along. The situation is very analogous. Even though unexplainable by the Newtonian model experimental evidence abounds, they are merrily going about talking about 100% deterministic Universe and impossiblity of "free will" since everything is pre-determined by the clockwork-like deterministic operation of the world, and they are sure of it because of this nice, complete and unchallengable model Mr. Newton created. That unexplainable evidence? Phht, its on the fringe of the model, dealing with itsy-bitsy small things, and thus of no great import, certainly!
I think I understand now. You lump every Iraqi and Afghani into a huge bucket and say they all hate us or want to kill us or are otherwise hostile to us, which ironically is the same mentality that keeps all these problems going.
I think I understand now that you keep reading in my messages what you want to read instead of what I am writing. I even mentioned that 61% percent of Iraqis consider US troops "a valid target of attacks".
Let me go slowly here because I have a feeling that you are not good with concepts such as "a half" or "two thirds" or "all" or "whole" or "nothing". They all seem to merge into "all" or "nothing" in your mind.
So: 61% is NOT equivalent to ALL. Got it? Let me try this again: if you take 10 apples and six of them have a worm in them, then there are still four without a worm! See?! Easy.
No one wants to be bothered to sit down and figure out all the various little groups motivations and how to actually solve this problem beyond blowing it up.
That is a nice sentiment but you are dealing with a gigantic knot of 1000 year old ethnic hatreds, wacko religions (just last week the oh-so enlightened Kurds stoned a 17 year old girl for daring to abandon their wacko religion for the the equally wacko Islamic one and took video of it on their... cell phones... talk about apes with laser pistols) add to it the politics of the last 50 years, the Palestine/Israel fiasco, the US support for Saddam, before that the Colonial powers, mix in warlords and tribes and chieftains and... well... I wish you luck. You will need it.
Sadly and ironically, Saddam was a secular thug who probably was the only one capable of maintaining Iraq as an entity with secular government. Now its pretty much a foregone conclusion that all of Iraq will fall into hands of neanderthal religious thugs. Nice job there, "liberators".
In short, this problem is not solvable by means other then slow evolution of Iraqi society out of the dark ages they are in, and definitely unsolvable by the US forces, presence of which simply has the opposite effect to the desired one. Institutions of democracy have to be constructed from within the societies and cultures, and cannot be simply imposed from outside. Iraq's society is simply not ready and any attempt to do so will result in chaos and bloodshed.
And before you claim that this a "racist" sentiment, I would like to point out that a very similar thing occured in France in 1789, where the democratic revolution took hold, only to self-destruct in an orgy of chaos and bloodletting.
That and you are convinced that no good deed counts and that its all naivety, that and you have no awareness of what kind of good deeds happen, you just latch on to the candy thing and the disgusting reconstruction contractors.
Dude, I keep pointing out what the Iraqis think (according to polls). What I think about the reconstruction efforts is even less meaningful then what the "media" thinks of them. It is the Iraqis who count and they are definitely not impressed.
You accuse me of ignoring reality and being naive but insist that every single living Arab wants us dead
Again, your little problem with "all" and "half" and "one third" and the like is showing. See the lesson with apples above.
I would suggest you actually read about their culture and the actual history there. There are more than a few groups that are still very friendly.
But of course. Example: Ahmed Chelabi and his pals.
There are communities in northern Iraq where its actually quite safe for US soldiers to be walking around town because the locals have announced they will kill 100 jihadists for every 1 American killed in their areas.
Even then, you can never prove (as far as I can see) that your fake brain has 'true' sentience. Humans could have 'souls' which are undetectable with our senses, and cannot be created artificially. COULD.
Again, unless someone constructs a theoretical framework and a set of tests to run to determine if that is so, then such a claim would no longer be sicence but faith. What I described can be tested and we do know that our knowledge of quantum phenomena is woefully incomplete. It is simply too early in this game to be making such bold assertions, such as the GP did. He simply treated this area of inquiry as if it were falling in the realm of deterministic, Newtonian, large scale physics. But it does not.
What other sort is there?
At some point in time enough evidence is gathered to construct models, which, even if limited in scope, can be used to explain and predict phenomena under investigation. At that point the evidence becomes "sufficient" because these models are capable of extrapolating and predicting any future evidence within their reach.
So you would be an "insufficient data" sort of agnostic if I were to propose that an invisible 1000ft intelligent purple dinosaur visited people after they died and transported them to a world of sappy children's songs?
Not at all. Unless you provide a method of verifying that supposition then it is simply a statement of faith.
What I am describing are possibilities of experimentally verifiable phenomena, within the framework of quantum physics models.
In general, scientists view any extraordinary claim that has absolutely no supporting evidence with a great deal of skepticism.
Again, I am not insisting on any particular theory, and I am acknowledging the possibility of any of the ones I mentioned being all wrong. We are simply, at this point, are not in a position to make an absolute claim about something which we do not have sufficient theoretical and experimental data for. That is science: if we do not have a model and we do not have sufficient data we do not make bold assertions about things being one way or another.
The GP on the other hand is making an absolute statement for which he cannot provide evidence even though tests (one of which I demonstrated) are yet to be performed to determine the validity of his assertion. That is not science but a stetement of faith, very much as your 1000ft pink dinosaur.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I can just see that one in action: 10-year old kids with Tazers vs. drunk businessmen with Tazers vs. the Moms of the 10-year-olds with Tazers vs Sado-Masochists with Tazers vs ... everyone else. The last one standing wins!
I fully concur. I have been making a good living by specializing, as a consultant, in reversing this trend in Windows environments via either Windows Terminal Services or Citrix, combined with linux-based thin clients for many years now (ever since WinFrame came out back in NT 3.51 days - although back then we tended to "convert" full-blown PCs to terminals).
What I find truly amusing is the lack of education and the resulting degree of difficulty of comprehension by various MSCE "IT professionals" and also various hardware/software vendors which becomes immediately obvious when they are faced with a company who does not have "a computer" on every desk. Those people are truly, pathetically lost.
This professional ineptitude, promoted so effectively by Bill Gates and crew, is, in my view, the main reason why most companies are stuck in the most inefficient and difficult to manage for them scenarios, which "coincidentally" are also the most profitable from the point of view of PC and software makers.
Since the start, Microsoft's marketing was implicitely aiming at non-technical managment of companies with a promise of getting rid of those "snotty", highly-paid experts and replacing them with dime-a-dozen, pliant, obedient products of "Technology Schools". And it is a little surprise that those who bought into that claptrap, got what they paid for.
You mean to say that 10000+ population density is insufficient to warrant sane internet service?! Just moments ago the GP poster was trying to pretend that the poor, downtrotten ISPs are stuck with population density of 31! Now 10000+ is not good enough! And of course there is another apple to apple comparison: Stockholm in Sweden, that other place where 100mb (going on 1000mb these days) service is standard. Their density is ... 4160/km2 !!!
Wait, wait, wait there a second! Weren't we told, over and over again, that any governmental interference and taxation are communist, socialist plots and that the best service and the best deal for consumers will be achieved only, and only if the de-regulated mega-neo-feudal-klaptocratic-corporations are allowed to run amok, unchecked, guided only by their sole instinct: boundless greed?! Isn't this the whole economic platform of the Republicans and in the large part the practical platform of the Democrats?!
And now you are here telling us these revelations that those lazy socialist Swedes are way ahead because of their "government helping in rolling out infrastructure" all funded by, oh gasp!, taxes?! Are you some kind of free market heretic or something?! Pining for the return of the Soviet Union?!
Also speaking of cash handouts, the US telecommunications corporations DID get MULTI BILLION handouts from the Feds during the dot-com boom. Which promptly went ... no one knows where, although the mega-luxury yacht builders and corporate jet manufacturers did report a sharp increase in sales at that time. It could be just me, but there could be some kind of corelation.
This is an old, tired and worn-out and patently absurd canard, which is being spread by apologists of the US telecommunication oligopolies since the beginning of the Internet. The truth is that in much of the US the population density in major metropolitan centres is as great or greater then the average Korean, Swedish or Japanese ones and yet, in those same very areas, which in your reasoning shoud be extremely suitable for deployment of 100mb Internet connections comparable to those being deployed en-masse in those other countries, you get .... 1.5 mb DSL. If you are lucky that is.
In short, the problem is the ever expanding culture of corporate avarice, corruption, attempts to make a quick buck and wholesale deterioration of marketplace ethic in the USA, which then spreads via USA-based multinationals to other nations where those same multinationals and their CEOs have influence. Get rich quick at any cost to everybody else is the new "motto" of Corporate America. "Work hard and make a good product" is sooo early 20th century!
Large businesses need to fear their customers, but because they essentially run and control the US government -- the only force capable of opposing and controlling them -- they are in a position to longer care about the supposed "invisible hand" of the marketplace. Now they can do whatever they want, and the "consumers" (the most derogatory term for a "person" ever invented) have to just take it.
And that is the truth of the matter, in affairs ranging from the Internet service to cell phone service to motor vehicle fuel consumption and so on.
You forget one, but rather crucial, element: the jail operators thus make sure that the only thing the inmates can do is to join gangs and/or learn more about their "trade" from other fellons. That way they are far more likely to re-offend and thus generate more revenue for the operator.
In a sane society, instead of being subjected to an idiotic, sadistic and wholly counter-productive "revenge", they would be required to make full restitution to their victims and an effort would be made in that process to try to readjust them to the society, so that they do not become a permanent danger/expense to it. This serves the victims, the society and the offenders.
Some crimes are of course not easily directly repaired and so a number of alternative schemes would have to be put in place, all however with the same goal in mind.
And yes, some, very small minority, of offenders are incurably sociopathic and those would have to be locked up for life.
Some neanderthal "law and order" types however are under an impression that torturing, killing and maiming anyone who they suspect of being a "bad guy", usually completely out of proportion to his/her crime, based on some sort of warped set of religious delusions (start a war, kill tens of thousands, steal billions in a war profiteering scheme and do no time, get a blowjob by a teenage classmate and do 20 years), is going to improve the situation. They do forget that in the medieval times the "criminals" used to be hang maimed in cages until they died and rotted on street corners, they were publicly quartered, skinned, burned on stake, impaled and what not ... and the "crimes" kept reocurring. That is why we call that insane, useless system ... well .. medieval.
To demonstrate the utter stupidity of this argument, one has only to realize that pregnant mothers were being sent to that penal colony for "high crimes" of the day, such as belonging to the wrong religious sect. Employing a similar system now would of course mean that the offspring of fellons would also be sentenced to life in the penal colony, presumably for the crime of being born to the wrong, unlike yours, parents. Never you mind that by the very nature of it, the deportation to that colony must also be a one-size-fits-all penalty, for crimes ranging from pickpocketing to mass murder.
So in effect you are suggesting that we sentence unborn children to starvation, lack of medical care and other unspeakable hardships (until many generations later when the colony becomes a functional society) because you would so very much like to see their parents suffer, since they are, in your view, a group of "undesirables" which should not offend your delicate sensibilities with their presence in the same country as you.
The words "elitist" or "supremacist" do not even begin to describe your attitude. I am afraid that the only "cure" for your and your peers world-view would be to get subjected to the vagaries of this wonderful, privatized "justice" system you have over there, in its full glory, presumably for some really "serious", "terrible" and heavily punishable offense, such as, say, having child pornography of unknown, magical origin discovered on your computer.
I believe they call your kind "the twenty eight percenter", after that portion of the US population having a propensity to unquestioningly believe whatever fantastic yarn the FOX "news" and the Bush Administration spins at the moment, irrespective of any objective reality around you.
As many people already pointed out, there is no such thing as a "defensive" weapon. Every new defense upsets the balance of offense, and thus at best initiates an arms race, and at worst enables one side to overpower the other since a shield is in essence a way to decrease the power of the other guy's weapons, preferrably, from the point of view of the party with the shield, to zero. And thus allowing the shield-wielder to strike first, with impunity.
There is no way to predict the future course of history. Not so long ago a majority of Americans would be very offended if you had postulated that the USA will be engaged in invasion and occupation of whole countries based on fabricated evidence and questionable pet theories of deranged ideologues combined with avarice of certain corporate elites. They would be very outraged and incredulous if you had suggested that the USA would be running what essentially amounts to a Gulag network and that its top justice officials would be engaged in "what is the meaning of is" type of parsing of the Geneva Conventions in order to justify torturing the denisens of those Gulags. I could go on.
FYI: the Cuban missile crisis was also caused by "the Americans playing crazy dangerous games with missiles". The placement of USSR's missiles in Cuba was a response to the US placing missiles in Turkey (with a comparable range to USSR's border to that of Cuba to USA's). Of course the US follows a different set of rules from everyone else and so while it claimed to be putting up missiles essentially on USSR's border for "defense", the USSR was not entitled to the same "defensive" distance for theirs. And the rest is history. Note that despite of all the posturing, the US missiles were eventually removed from Turkey (semi-secretly).
You are incorrect. If the defense shield proves effective on a large scale, then it essentially removes the Russian portion of the nuclear "detterent" from the equation. In essence it would negate all of the Russian ICBMs while at the same time leaving all of the US ones fully functional. The Russians see this as a two step strategy: move #1 by the US is the negation of Russian ICBMs via the defense shield and move #2 would be an all-out first-strike with no possibility of retaliation by the Russians and thus the final ascention of the 1000 year USian Reich to rule unchallenged. Or something along these lines.
The Chinese have similiar feelings about the defense shield and consider themselves to be the next target, right after the Russians.
Note that an actual attack is not really necessary, the defense shield is essentially equivalent to US putting a loaded pistol to the Russian or Chinese heads and thus permanently enslaving them without actually having to resort to firing the nukes.
This of course assumes that the shield is very effective on a large sacle (which is not likely to occur soon) but this is an actual stated goal of the companies making it and the wet dream of the generals.
That is why you hear all that chest-beating about new "missile-shield proof" ICBMs the Russians are frantically developing.
So in the long term the missile shield is anything but a purely "defensive" weapon, it has a very significant strategic, offensive connotations.
The potential trouble comes from two directions: 1) the owner of the private property must give the option of simply leaving as an alternative to any of his "contractual rules" because the only privilege which that ownership grants him is to control access to his property, and 2) some rights are not voidable, even with your own consent, and that is so to stop people from being manipulated into, essentially, slavery.
So as soon as you are being forced to be searched without the option to abort and leave at any time in this process your rights are being violated.
This is precisely why they are pushing for this law, because it creates a crime which is independent of your presence on their property and acts in a similar way as the laws dealing with shoplifing do, the owner of the theatre can then threaten you with him performing a "citizen arrest" on you on the suspicion of your breaking that other law.
If you refuse, you are then detained until the real police arrives under the suspicion of "camcordering" or some such nonsense.
I personally haven't been to a movie theatre in good 7 years or so, partially because there is nothing there I found worth seeing and partially because the idiots running the places are far more concerned with selling overpriced crap food then with making sure that the experience is better then a DVD at home. I can't stand people talking, getting up to go to the can in front of me, chewing and grinding loudly cracking stuff with their jaws, slurping drinks, rustling massive amounts of aluminium foil and other noisy wrappers, passing gas, yapping to each other, cell phones ringing, kids with laser pointers and all of that other lovely crap that combines to give me an experience wholly different from the movie theatres of old where you would get kicked out swiftly for any of that.
So by all means, add metal scanners, bag and body cavity searches and anal probes into the mix. I positively can't wait to miss that experience.
What does concern me however is that the new generation of movie-goers is being raised up by being brain-washed into accepting all those infringements on their rights and persons as "normal". This is how an Orwellian distopia can be brought into being, by slowly, step by step, eradicating our freedoms, always in the name of "protecting" someone or something from Bogeymen ranging from "Rag-headed Terrorists" to "Camcordering Villain Thieves".
Yes, the only privilege that ownership of private property gets you is the ability to deny access to it. In this respect you are correct, that the owner's only legal option is to ask you to leave, otherwise the law provides for the remedy of charge of tresspassing. But if he does not give you that option at any time as an alternative to any of his "rules", all his subsequent actions are brute-force coertion and thus very illegal. Furthermore, some rights are not voidable, even with your consent. This is purposefully so, to aviod people being manipulated by clever tricksters into, essentially, slavery.
The case of the legality of the search of the bag is not tied into this because at the point when the bag is found, there is no easy way of determining the owner and thus his instructions as to its use. Furthermore, it is usually necessary to search the thing in order to try to determine the owner and return it to him. Again, this is predicated on the absence of the owner and the implied desire of his for his property to be returned to him.
Again, this is predicated on your giving me the option of leaving without the search. If you do not, then you better be sure of some other crime (which is also a crime outside of your property, say shoplifting) with which to charge me because otherwise you are engaging in brute force assault on my person, irrespective of my being on your premises or not.
So in the case of the movie theaters searching the bags, I have a right to refuse at any time and the only option of the owner is to ask me to leave. That is precisely why these assholes are trying to pass additional laws, to give them a "probable cause" (akin to what suspected shoplifting does in a store) to try to charge you with, because such a law would be then enforceable irrespective of your presence on their property.
How so?
Does the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Canadian version of the Bill of Rights) no longer apply? Does that piece of land fall then into some kind of a different, foreign jurisdiction? Does the fact that someone owns that piece of land make him a king or an emperor then, one with an ability to enact arbitrary laws in his feudal fiefdom? What then if he passes a law that it is all-right for his hired goons to beat people in his "kingdom"? Torture them? Detain them for any arbitrary period of time? Kill them? All because they crossed the "border" into his "private property empire", no?
Yes I am engaging in hyperbole but this type of over-the top argument is actually a rather sane method of debunking claims which appear common sense on the surface but which lead to trully ludicrous ends if followed logically to their conclusions. This is called reductio ad absurdum.
Ownership of some piece of private property does not grant the owner magical privileges, far above the laws of the land applicable outside of it. Neither do those who cross into such property magically become serfs of the landowner, nor their rights vanish into thin air.
While it can be amusing to do that, I would like to point out that by your very definition those flying fish, and the forms of "God" you mentioned, are undetectable. Thus completely beyond the reach of science. This is of course rather amusing coming from someone who then proceeds to try to lecture me on my "lack of grasp of science".
Non necessarily. One definition of "God" postulates that the Universe itself is in some way sentient and it is he/she/it i.e. "God". That is the most "corporal" form imaginable for any entity.
Insufficient for you, of course, to be making absolute pronouncements of any sort and thus removing any pretense of your actually believing in the concept of "the balanced probabilities" you claim so dear to you.
Quantum level indeterministic interference is not only possible, but plausible, given the nature and scale of the cellular processes. And that by itself makes it interesting.
Again, your error lies in these, increasingly desparate it seems, attempts at trying to pin on me some sort of ulterior desire to "prove" that quantum entanglements I mentioned exist with certainty. At no point did I claim that I posses sufficient evidence to be attempting such proof, only that such a theory is scientifically (at this point) plausible and that it cannot be discarded out of hand based simply on your gut feelings about it, which you keep attempting, desipte professing to believe in the tenets of science. The possiblity I keep mentioning is both plausible and testable and thus firmly within the realm of science.
Then I presume you are going to rail against astronomers next, who had precisely zero empirical evidence for the so called "dark matter", only unexplained gaps in their incomplete models. Yet that was sufficient to postulate a wide range of plausible explanations all the way from the so-called "MACHO" objects to the so-called "dark matter". Following which they attempted to gather evidence to discern which of these wildly different possibilities is in fact the case. Do, by all means, go lecture them on their errant, unscientific ways as th
Not in the areas in which they are incomplete though. The Newtonian model falls apart completely at the quantum level, or at speeds near the speed of light.
What is true of a Pentium computer, which uses essentially a statistical average of a large number of quantum effects in each semiconductor juncture is not true of the cellular mechanisms. Each cell in our brain is roughly equivalent in complexity to a rather sophisticated microcontroller, one whole orders of magnitude smaller then the smallest equivalent integrated circuit we can manufacture, and subsequently the scale of the processes involved is orders of magnitude smaller. Where in a Pentium chip tens of billions of electrons flow in torrents in each junction and their effects are cumulative, in cellular processes it is possible that a single protein pays a pivotal trigger role and thus a single set of atomic interactions does. At that scale quantum effects become quite pronounced. You are desperately trying to compare phenomena on vastly different scales, akin to pretending that because large-scale, macroscopic properties cause water to flow in rivers then the same mechanism governs individual molecules of the said water in interaction with other molecules of other materials. The behaviours are so different that completely different areas of science have been constructed to investigate them, one being fluid dynamics and the other physical chemistry.
And I keep telling you that because of the nature of the cellular processes, there exists a very plausible theoretical possibility of non-deterministic, quantum-level properties of matter and energy playing a pivotal role in operation of neurons. The fact that we at this point lack the apparatus to conduct appropriate experiments on that scale in that context does not automatically, out of hand, warrant an exclusion of these possibilites in absence of our understanding of processes involved. To do so smacks of ideological prejudice.
Just because we cannot directly detect the "dark matter" it does not prevent astronomers from speculating about its existence based solely on certain unexplained gaps in their models of the expansion of the Universe, yet in the case of cellular processes our models are far less complete than those of the astronomers and thus allow a far wider range of untested possibilites. You are on the other hand in a position of claiming, with absolute certainty, that no such thing as "dark matter" exists, because you do not like its implications and your gut feeling tells you that it "must" be some "other" explanation, more to your liking, even though the astronomical model is clearly incomplete and does not warrant such claims. While you are entitled to an opinion in an unexplored area, you are not entitled to make absolute pronouncements about it, as you are in no position to invalidate other theories, until more evidence comes in.
No he did not. He merely developed a model to account for some of the more easily understood properties of information. At no point in time he attempted to comprehensicely explain what information is and how it relates to consciousness, or how its transmission to an "observer" is purported to explain the outcomes of some experiments involving quantum phenomena. His theory simply makes some axiomatic definitions and m
That is not the problem. Science itself is not at fault here, but those who claim to adhere to scientific principles only to turn around and start making "scientific", absolute pronouncements based on flimsy or non-existant evidence are. Science is a system of gathering and processing knowledge and as such is, ultimately, immune to vagaries of politics and ideology, although it sometimes takes an inordinate amount of time for it get itself sorted out. That does not stop some people however from going beyond what science describes in its models based on empirical evidence and simply jump to wild conclusions based on their gut feelings, following which they become very combative if someone points out to them that their absolute assertions are unsubstantiated.
This process has been repeated in the scientific community many times, at times halting completely the progress of some discipline for a very long time.
But science is very resiliant and I have no doubt that no matter how many of these ideologues get involved in this, eventually even the most dogmatic and popular at the time but incorrect worldviews must fall under the assault of incontrovertible evidence and be replaced by updated ones.
In other words, please do not confuse science itself with those who demand unquestioning respect for their wild assertions by claiming them to be based on some famous (but in fact only remotely connected) scientific model of some aspect of the Universe. I keep bringing Newton and the "clockwork Universe cosmology" as an example because it demonstrates such folly quite admirably.
My point is that this statement cuts both ways. Given our miniscule knowledge of the quantum theory, the nature of consciousness and the nature of information, we are not in a position to discard out of hand any theory which is plausible in some way within the wide field of possibilities open at this point. If new experimental evidence comes in, or our understanding improves, the range of possibilities will narrow considerably, and it might as well be that it will be conclusively demonstrated that no entanglements of any kind are possible. But it is very dishonest and at the sime time suspiciously stinking of religious zeal to be making absoulute pronouncements in such poorly understood field of inquiry, so early in the game.
And that is the whole point. But the original poster and some of my sparring partners in this thread would like to short-circuit this process and simply jump to a conclusion they believe foregone, based simply on their feelings about the matter.
This is a strawan. The pronouncements you are making are not about "the world we inhabit" but specifically about the very nature of consciousness, knowledge of which even you admit is very incomplete. Or more precisely: "miniscule".
We actually have exactly no evidence that consciousness (or parts of thereof, or some other consciousness related phenomena) cease after death, because we have no method, apparatus or theoretical foundations to determine if it is so, as we do not understand the nature of consciousness and thus have no means of constructing them. Never you mind "plenty" evidence. This is of course a classic example of jumping to unwarranted conculsions based on ones deep-felt opinion ... the colloquial term for which is: "faith".
At this point no evidence exists either for or against, a state of affairs which can only invite exactly one scientifically honest opinion: "We do not know, further reasearch is necessary". For example, construct truly sentient machinery and conduct a number of carefuly designed experiments with it and then you will be one step closer to disproving such possibility of extra-dimentional entanglements. Until then, stop making absolute claims based on your gut feelings, a.k.a. faith.
This situation is not equivalent. I am not proposing that one particular alternative theory is correct, only that the present model is incomplete and thus not capable of explaining the phenomena in question. In the Newtonian model scenario I would be simply pointing out that there are some experiments which are unexplained by the model (as are many quantum effects at present in our current models), and some which contradict it, and I would be postulating some possible explanations and you would be going "No, there are no such "possibilities" in known physics.", with the implication that you already know everything there is to know about the matter.
You must be kidding. Many of the cellular processes are occuring in quantum level and our brains are composed of those very cells.
That is not true. Given our state of knowledge, you are not in any position to even begin determining which theories of consciounsess are "wacky" and which are not, and yet you do, because your immutable opinion has already substituted any reason in this area, even though our undestanding of the nature of consciousness (and infromation in general) is laughable, to say the least.
And no, there is no "mainstream" theory of brain function, only a very crude view of some neuronal functions. And then we have attempts at explaining, at a much higher level, of some fragmentary, peripheral aspects of information processing in some parts of the brain. That's it for the "mainstream theory".
Even if quantum entanglements do not exist with any other dimentions, then we are still left with our lack of understanding of the nature and essence of information. What if information itself is that kind of entanglement? Or could you comprehensively explain the nature of information? I, and I am sure the Nobel committee too, would like to hear that one.
As I indicated to another poster, you are latching on to the aspect of the word "Agnostic" which is focused on by Theists, that is existence of an entity which can be termed "God", while there are many other aspects of existence which lack any plausible scientific explanation so far, one of which is the topic of conversation. Speaking of "God" however, the first step is to try to define what that means, and this alone is problematic. Some, for example, would consider the Universe itself to be such an entity. Some religions do not require a concept of "God" at all. Yet we do not even know if the question itself is valid, and asking "Is there a God (or gods)" might be akin to asking "is integer number 7 rich?". Gramatically correct but devoid of logical meaning.
So in this sense you are correct, these questions are more phillosphical then scientific as we do not have any means of conducting an investigation into the matter.
This alone is insufficient. If some sort of entanglement exists, it is possible that whatever the extra dimentional particles or what not are entangled would only be de-coupled upon some drastic changes of quantum state of the proteins in the neurons they are coupled with, i.e. their decomposition. And that is only one of the possibilities, other dealing with questions about the properties of information itself which is stored in those synapses and which we have a very poor grasp of. We for example do not know if the information in which we swim with such abandon is not in itself a representation of some additional dimentions of the Universe. Or would you care to explain, comprehensively, the nature of information itself?
You have commited a logical error here, out of ideological bias, by claiming "some evidence" (which we actually have exactly none of) and coupling it with "All else is merely unsubstantiated conjecture". Our evidence of lack (or existence) of any such possible entanglements with extra-dimentional states is, to say the least, miniscule as is our understanding of quantum physics and the nature of information. We are very much like biology researchers before the invention of the microsocpe and thus unaware of existence of cellular structures. And yet here you are, making bold pronouncements about the nature of heredity and disease, snickering about all those who go about our lack of understanding of affairs as being prone to "unsubstantiated conjecture".
D
No, I simply insist on following the tenets of empirical science to their logical conclusions, wherever they might lead.
What annoys me in particular is that some people latch onto whatever current models are being offered by science and go "Thats it! This time, for SURE, there is nothing more to it!". Which inevietably leads to creation of dogma, in no way different from that created by religious zealots. Particular examples of this can be seen in various "definitive" cosmologies, based upon Newtonian model, which claimed that the Universe is strictly deterministic, akin to a clockwork mechanism. I have a strong feeling that you would be a subscriber to that (quite popular at the time) worldview should you be living at that stage if scientific history.
I also sense that some have a vested ideological interest in not following the experimental evidence in some directions as it grates with their pre-determined opinions. I on the other hand simply refuse to jump to absolutist conclusions where the evidence is far from sufficient to warrant so.
That "possiblity" is a) scientifically untestable and thus outside of the realm of science and b) the "theory" involving a dude named St. Peter is so internally inconsistent as to guarantee its falsity.
There are many possible implications of sentience. One is that indeed there is no extra-dimentional quantum level entanglement present of any sort and what you claim is true. Some other involve existence of some sort of informational state outside of our three dimentional space time, ranging anywhere from a few bits to a complete mirror of the state of one's mind. What could happen to such a cluster of information is unknown and by no means implies Pearly Gates ... or Allah and 72 virgins ... or Hindu re-incarnation. What I am pointing out that we simply do not have anything approaching sufficient information to say, with any certainty (never you mind an absolute one), that no extra-dimentional state entanglements of any sort exist and given our miniscule knowledge of the quantum phenomena, the properties of space-time continuum and the very nature of information (and thus consciousness), making absolute pronouncements represents the essence of hubris and is the very anathema to science.
In this area, science simply does not have sufficient (yet) reach, a state of affairs similar to that of the cosmology before the invention of a telescope. A significant breakthrough, either experimental or theoretical, can change all that and either close the possibility of such extra-dimentional entanglements or reinforce it.
The problem I see is with my using the word "Agnostic". The definition of which is forced upon us by Theists, rather then flowing from the logical conlusions of science. By saying "Agnostic" I do not mean "in respect to exsitence of God" exclusively, but also in respect to other aspects of our existence which the Theists have appropriated. In this particular case we are discussing some possible aspects of the nature of consciousness and a possibility that it might, in some form, be independent from the our three dimentional view of space-time. This by no means implies the existence of God or .. lack of thereof.
I see the very definitions of "God" by Theists to be rather problematic. What does the term "God" stand for, really? A bearded dude in sandals? Or perhaps the Universe itself can be classified as "God"? Or perheaps the question itself is invalid and asking "Does God exist?" is an equivalent to asking "How cruel is colour blue?". Gramatically correct, but devoid of logical meaning.
And the reason that I classify myself as "Agnostic" is because we do not have an answer to some of these questions yet. We know for example that information and computations on that information are somehow related to consciousness. But what is information, really? We do not even grasp that completely!
What I find however to be rather exceedingly unlikely is the Bearded Dude scenario, as it contains so many laughable internal inconsistencies that ... it can only serve deluded zealots as an excuse to mass murder other deluded zealots over the colour of those sandals.
Not at all. If it can be tested and models can be constructed, it by definition ceases to be "supernatural". What it could be called is "extra-dimentional" as in taking place in dimentions outside of the "three plus time" vectors of space-time we are so familiar with. The same is applicable for example to the string theory, some froms of which require 10 dimentions to function. There are many cosmological theories which also involve weakly interacting (through gravity for example) multiple dimentions.
The key is the word "interaction". If there is interaction, then it can be tested for. If there is none, or by definition it is claimed to be untestable, then the point is moot and the thing indeed falls into the realm of "supernatural" and faith.
I see the "strong" Atheists as those believers in absolute certainty of 100% accuracy of Newtonian physics, before Einstein came along. The situation is very analogous. Even though unexplainable by the Newtonian model experimental evidence abounds, they are merrily going about talking about 100% deterministic Universe and impossiblity of "free will" since everything is pre-determined by the clockwork-like deterministic operation of the world, and they are sure of it because of this nice, complete and unchallengable model Mr. Newton created. That unexplainable evidence? Phht, its on the fringe of the model, dealing with itsy-bitsy small things, and thus of no great import, certainly!
I think I understand now that you keep reading in my messages what you want to read instead of what I am writing. I even mentioned that 61% percent of Iraqis consider US troops "a valid target of attacks".
Let me go slowly here because I have a feeling that you are not good with concepts such as "a half" or "two thirds" or "all" or "whole" or "nothing". They all seem to merge into "all" or "nothing" in your mind.
So: 61% is NOT equivalent to ALL. Got it? Let me try this again: if you take 10 apples and six of them have a worm in them, then there are still four without a worm! See?! Easy.
That is a nice sentiment but you are dealing with a gigantic knot of 1000 year old ethnic hatreds, wacko religions (just last week the oh-so enlightened Kurds stoned a 17 year old girl for daring to abandon their wacko religion for the the equally wacko Islamic one and took video of it on their ... cell phones ... talk about apes with laser pistols) add to it the politics of the last 50 years, the Palestine/Israel fiasco, the US support for Saddam, before that the Colonial powers, mix in warlords and tribes and chieftains and ... well ... I wish you luck. You will need it.
Sadly and ironically, Saddam was a secular thug who probably was the only one capable of maintaining Iraq as an entity with secular government. Now its pretty much a foregone conclusion that all of Iraq will fall into hands of neanderthal religious thugs. Nice job there, "liberators".
In short, this problem is not solvable by means other then slow evolution of Iraqi society out of the dark ages they are in, and definitely unsolvable by the US forces, presence of which simply has the opposite effect to the desired one. Institutions of democracy have to be constructed from within the societies and cultures, and cannot be simply imposed from outside. Iraq's society is simply not ready and any attempt to do so will result in chaos and bloodshed.
And before you claim that this a "racist" sentiment, I would like to point out that a very similar thing occured in France in 1789, where the democratic revolution took hold, only to self-destruct in an orgy of chaos and bloodletting.
Dude, I keep pointing out what the Iraqis think (according to polls). What I think about the reconstruction efforts is even less meaningful then what the "media" thinks of them. It is the Iraqis who count and they are definitely not impressed.
Again, your little problem with "all" and "half" and "one third" and the like is showing. See the lesson with apples above.
But of course. Example: Ahmed Chelabi and his pals.
Again, unless someone constructs a theoretical framework and a set of tests to run to determine if that is so, then such a claim would no longer be sicence but faith. What I described can be tested and we do know that our knowledge of quantum phenomena is woefully incomplete. It is simply too early in this game to be making such bold assertions, such as the GP did. He simply treated this area of inquiry as if it were falling in the realm of deterministic, Newtonian, large scale physics. But it does not.
At some point in time enough evidence is gathered to construct models, which, even if limited in scope, can be used to explain and predict phenomena under investigation. At that point the evidence becomes "sufficient" because these models are capable of extrapolating and predicting any future evidence within their reach.
Not at all. Unless you provide a method of verifying that supposition then it is simply a statement of faith.
What I am describing are possibilities of experimentally verifiable phenomena, within the framework of quantum physics models.
Again, I am not insisting on any particular theory, and I am acknowledging the possibility of any of the ones I mentioned being all wrong. We are simply, at this point, are not in a position to make an absolute claim about something which we do not have sufficient theoretical and experimental data for. That is science: if we do not have a model and we do not have sufficient data we do not make bold assertions about things being one way or another.
The GP on the other hand is making an absolute statement for which he cannot provide evidence even though tests (one of which I demonstrated) are yet to be performed to determine the validity of his assertion. That is not science but a stetement of faith, very much as your 1000ft pink dinosaur.